Colonial visions of Africa can bleed into public life and culture – so these things really do matter.
The Arab revolutions draw on a fundamentally anti-colonial vision, which is also about breaking with existing models of power and privilege.
The vision of the island of Bali Hai, similar to the magical land of Shangri-La in the British colonial imagination, possesses everything the westerner feels he is missing in our rationalistic, scientific culture: spirituality, sensuality, intuition, warmth, and caring.
Like the Babar tales (which also grew out of the milieu of 1930s Paris) they have an almost colonial-era vision of the uncultivated naïf at large in the imperial world.
I got easily lost in the Escherlike succession of vaulted rooms filled with candelabra and fireplaces, masks, bone-inlaid sideboards, weavings, wall paintings of a colonial-era vision of jungle, fruit, volcano, the life of a ranch; thick studded doors and mirrors of the period; a gilded chapel; the sense of one intimate space after another.
Between the floggings and decapitations, it is a very brutal vision of colonial life.
While this novel goes partway to being a disturbing, intelligent vision of colonial tectonics, it remains an unrealised piece of fiction.
A History of Cao Dai In 1919, Ngo Van Chieu, a lowly Vietnamese civil servant working for the French colonial administration, received a vision of God and, following the heavenly message, began preaching a credo based on the unity of world religions.
Inevitably, a British vision of those colonial years is tinged with nostalgia.
