The Economist 29Feb2020

68 Books & arts The EconomistFebruary 29th 2020

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series that first aired in 1999 and revolved

around the personal and political dilem-

mas of a glamorous, wisecracking coterie

of presidential aides.

The Iraq war made such arrangements

seem less congenial. The “sofa govern-

ment” practised by Tony Blair was criti-

cised by the subsequent Butler inquiry into

pre-war intelligence. The public grew fas-

cinated, and sometimes repelled, by the

power of unelected figures such as Karl

Rove and Alastair Campbell. The current

administrations on both sides of the Atlan-

tic have only made the 21st-century court

more salient. President Donald Trump’s

White House is a family affair; his im-

peachment was in part the result of cronies

and freelancers bypassing formal chan-

nels. Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s

eminence grise, flaunts his informality on

the sleeve of his hoodie.

Ms Mantel’s Cromwell is much more

decorous than Mr Cummings. Over the

course of “The Mirror & the Light” he be-

comes a baron and then an earl; always

conscious of his humble roots, he is fastid-

ious about being addressed correctly. But

the basic conditions of his employment are

those of the modern courtier. He serves at

the pleasure of the ruler, albeit in an age

when the ruler’s displeasure could be con-

siderably more bruising than a golden

handshake. Yet at the same time he is an av-

atar for a contrasting type that is now ro-

manticised by many anxious voters: the di-

ligent technocrat.

This counter-trend can be traced to the

financial crisis, when central bankers

came to the fore in stabilising the global

economy—a period that coincided with the

writing and publication of “Wolf Hall”

(2009), the first novel in the trilogy. More

recently, assiduous public servants such as

James Mattis, Mr Trump’s former defence

secretary, and Dominic Grieve, doomed

leader of the anti-Brexit Conservatives,

have been lionised across ideological di-

vides for their moderating roles and atten-

tion to detail.

He, Cromwell

In fact, much of the fictional Cromwell’s

outlook chimes with that of defenders of

the liberal order today. He is an interna-

tionalist who is comfortable in a number of

languages; a believer in diplomacy rather

than war, in sound finances and a proto-

welfare state; a champion of rationality

against the exploitative superstitions of

the Catholic church. In the latest book—the

longest of the three, bloated by somewhat

belaboured dialogue in the first 300

pages—anger at his reforms sparks the Pil-

grimage of Grace, an uprising that took

place in the north of England in 1536. In Ms

Mantel’s version of events, the rebels are

nostalgic for an unchanging past of mythi-

cal fecundity, a sentiment that comes lad-

en with the anti-metropolitan rhetoric of

the Brexit campaign:

There was a former age, it seems, when

wives were chaste and pedlars honest, when

roses bloomed at Christmas and every pot

bubbled with fat self-renewing capons. If

these times were not those times, who is to

blame? Londoners probably. Members of

Parliament.

One of the author’s achievements is to

show competence as a heroic virtue, and

good administration to be as worthy of glo-

ry as feats of arms (across the trilogy, busi-

ness meetings are by far the most common

type of scene). Early in “Wolf Hall”, she af-

fords Cromwell a blazon—a catalogue of

flattering attributes of a sort that, in his

own time, would have been used to extol a

great beauty or flower of chivalry: “He is at

home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop’s

palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract,

train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street

fight, furnish a house and fix a jury...He

works all hours, first up and last to bed.”

What marks Ms Mantel’s hero out—and

makes his story something of a wish-fulfil-

ment fantasy for modern readers who ad-

mire his ends if not his means—is his sheer

effectiveness. Almost until the last, he gets

things done, whether that is making or

breaking royal marriages according to the

king’s whim, or replenishing the country’s

coffers by expropriating the assets of the

church. Ms Mantel’s genius is to make his

16th-century instincts, such as a willing-

ness to decapitate anyone standing in his

path, seem as plausible as his more famil-

iar qualities. A courtier, a bureaucrat and a

politician, her Cromwell synthesises con-

trasting approaches to government nearly

500 years after his demise. No wonder he

has found a place in the sun. 7

W

hen sarah bananuka’sfather and

three of her brothers were killed, she

was advised not to mourn. These were the

early days of Idi Amin’s military dictator-

ship in the 1970s. Her father had been a lo-

cal politician under the previous Ugandan

regime; soldiers hunted him down like “a

loose lion”, she says. To weep publicly

would make her a target, too. “There was

anarchy in the country,” she recalls.

Little of that terror is visible in “The Un-

seen Archive of Idi Amin”, a photographic

exhibition mounted last year in the Uganda

Museum in Kampala and now touring the

country. The images, unearthed in an old

filing cabinet at the state broadcaster, cap-

ture Amin as he hobnobs with dignitaries

and dances with crowds. The sense of vio-

lence lurking just out of shot is shared in

“Rebel Lives”, a very different exhibition re-

cently on view in Antwerp and New York,

which gathers pictures taken by members

of the insurgent Lord’s Resistance Army

(lra). Both projects shed light on traumatic

episodes in Ugandan history; both are

haunted by what they do not show.

Photographing Amin was dangerous

work. A caption could anger him, even if

the image was innocuous. State photogra-

phers became “fearful, paranoid, nervous

men”, write Derek Peterson of the Universi-

ty of Michigan and Richard Vokes of the

University of Western Australia, two of the

co-curators of the exhibition, in a forth-

coming book. The risks intensified after

1976, when Israeli commandos stormed the

national airport at Entebbe and rescued

hostages from a hijacked plane. Pictures of

the raid were reprinted in a South African

magazine; the man who sold them was

killed by Amin’s thugs. From then on, neg-

atives were locked away. The cameras still

followed him, like theatrical props, but few

of the pictures were ever printed.

Unflattering photos were destroyed, as

were most scenes of violence. So the cura-

ARUA

Two exhibitions explore dark moments in Uganda’s past

Photography and memory

Out of shot

Amin’s victims