THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Tuesday, April 7, 2020 |A
Sojourns
In a Battleground
Something of Themselves
By Sarah LeFanu
(Oxford, 381 pages, $29.95)BOOKSHELF| By Benjamin Shull
W
hen Rudyard Kipling visited South Africa with his
family in early 1898, the 32-year-old writer
lunched immediately with Cecil Rhodes, the
financial and mining magnate who, until recently, had also
been prime minister of Britain’s “Cape Colony.” After a
month of long talks, Kipling reported to a correspondent:
“Rhodes alone was worth the voyage.”
Both men were notorious colonial boosters, but Kipling
saw Rhodes as the man doing the empire-building work
that he advocated. Kipling, author of the Jungle Books and
perhaps the most popular writer in English at the time,
had begun to form his ideas about empire as a young man
living on the Indian subcontinent. Running with Rhodes
helped shape his belief in South Africa as a key piece of a
powerful British Empire. He thought it was worth fighting for.
In October 1899, Britain went to war with the Transvaal
and the Orange Free State—the Boer republics—and Kipling
set out from England for
South Africa once more. As
Sarah LeFanu writes in “Some-
thing of Themselves,” Kipling’s
“jingoistic views would
harden” during the Boer War,
and what he saw in wartime
South Africa would soon be
reflected in his work. In his
1902 story “The Captive,” set
in a barbed-wire-enclosed
camp in Cape Colony, he refers
to the war as a “first-class
dress-parade for Armageddon”
—a taste of the carnage that,
as it turned out, was to come in
World War I. In a newspaper dispatch,
“The Sin of Witchcraft,” he excoriated the pro-
Boer Dutch in Cape Colony, accusing some of passing
military intelligence to the Boer republics. Kipling would
view the 1902 Treaty of Vereeniging, which brought the
Boer republics under British rule but allowed for eventual
self-government, as a “betrayal of the ideals of Empire.”
In “Something of Themselves,” Ms. LeFanu places Kipling
alongside Arthur Conan Doyle and Mary Kingsley at the
center of a fascinating study recounting their experiences
in the Boer War, a conflict that all three witnessed at close
hand. The author, whose works include a life of the novelist
Rose Macaulay, styles her book as a group biography, one
that culminates with her subjects’ sojourns in South Africa.
Conan Doyle, then as now, was best known as the
creator of Sherlock Holmes, whom he had invented while
still practicing as a doctor in the south of England. In 1893,
he “killed off” his famous character, wishing to write about
more serious topics. In fact, one reason for his journey to
South Africa (he arrived in March 1900) was that he was
writing a history of the war. In Ms. LeFanu’s telling, he
was particularly concerned about voting rights for the
Uitlanders, foreigners (that is, Britons and other non-
Boers) who had been drawn to the Transvaal by gold.
Conan Doyle worked as a doctor in Langman’s Field
Hospital in Bloemfontein (the capital of the Orange Free
State) and contributed to a local paper that Kipling briefly
worked for. He traveled to Pretoria, the capital of the Trans-
vaal, after it fell to the British in June. His belief that the
British cause in South Africa was righteous never wavered,
though he was less bombastic than Kipling, ultimately dub-
bingthe conflict a “fair square fight.” His history, “The Great
Boer War,” waspublished soon after he left South Africa for
Britain in July; he published a second book on the war in 1902.Kingsley’s worldview was markedly different from
Kipling’s or Conan Doyle’s. Born in London in 1862, she had
been a voracious reader of travel and exploration books,
and after the death of her parents in 1892, the inheritance
allowed her to travel herself—first to the Canary Islands,
and then on two separate voyages to West Africa. The
journeys took her from Sierra Leone to as far as Angola,
and they led to a pair of travel accounts. In “West African
Studies” (1899), she attacked the “malign influence” of
British colonial policy, accusing it of “sowing debt and
difficulties all over West Africa.”
Like her male contemporaries, Kingsley was drawn to the
war in South Africa. Arriving in Cape Town in March 1900,
she promptly ventured to nearby Simon’s Town, where she
worked as a nurse for Boer prisoners of war. Her first-hand
accounts of life among the prisoners, which Ms. LeFanu
quotes extensively, evoke the horrible conditions she was
witness to. She caught typhoid and died in June 1900, mere
months after her arrival. Upon her death, Kingsley was
remembered by a doctor in Simon’s Town as a “brilliant
victim... whom this world can ill spare.”
Ms. LeFanu takes her time recounting the early lives of
her subjects; her book is at its best once her trio is situated
on stage in South Africa. Because Kingsley is much less
known than Kipling or Conan Doyle, bringing her to greater
attention is one of the strengths of “Something of Them-
selves.” The author sees Kingsley’s ideas as an inspiration
behind the Congo Reform Association, founded in 1904 to
bring attention to the horrific deeds being committed in
the Congo Free State. “The ideology of the Congo Reform
Association,” Ms. LeFanu writes, “was rooted in her
understanding of and support for the principle of African
ownership of land and natural resources.”
One prominent figure who became involved with the
Congo Reform Association was Conan Doyle, the Boer War
apologist. Unlike Kipling, Conan Doyle had come to see
the peace terms ending the Boer War as a “desired and
appropriate outcome,” and in 1909 he published “The
Crime of the Congo,” a book that, as Ms. LeFanu notes,
brought the reign of terror in the Congo “to the notice of
his hundred of thousands of readers” in Britain and around
the world. “Never before,” he wrote in the book’s preface,
“has there been such a mixture of wholesale expropriation
and wholesale massacre all done under an odious guise of
philanthropy and with the lowest commercial motives as a
reason.” It would be wrong to claim that Conan Doyle fully
repudiated his feelings about empire—he is writing, of
course, against Belgium’s Leopold II, not Britain—but Ms.
LeFanu’s focus on his time in South Africa certainly helps
us understand a political cause that would become one of
the greatest of his career.Mr. Shull is an assistant books editor at the Journal.How the Boer War loomed in the lives
and literary reputations of three British
writers who experienced it at close hand.New York’s Kings of Clean
Brooklyn, N.Y.‘I
’m a garbageman,”
wrote a Californian
who calls himself
Jester D on March 14. “I can’t
work from home and my job
is an essential city service
that must get done.” As
Americans began to feel the
effects of the Wuhan corona-
virus, his series of tweets en-
thralled tens of thousands of
people.
Jester D described the
onerous nature of his job in
San Francisco, “from getting
up pre-dawn to the physical
toll it takes on my body.” Ad-
dressing the city’s growing
panic, with scared people
“peeking out their windows
at me,” he emphasized pro-
fessionalism. “Doctors and
nurses are gonna keep doc-
toring and nurse-ering,” he
said. His own promise: “Us
garbagemen are gonna keep
collecting the garbage.”
Tweets of appreciation fol-
lowed: “God bless you!” “Love
ya!” “You are on my hero
list!” People thanked him for
his service in a tone that
Americans usually reserve for
soldiers, sailors, airmen and
Marines.
This civic communion
struck a chord with me. One
of my rituals is to get up
early on Wednesdays to
watch from my window as
workers from the New York
City Department of Sanitationhaul away the garbage on my
street. There is robust beauty
to the removal, and a cathar-
sis. One moment the sidewalk
teems with refuse; the next, it
is reborn. Black bundles of
household waste, stacks of
cardboard and newspapers,
transparent bags full of bot-
tles and cans—all are heaved
into the maws of a growlingtruck. Trash bags pop like
balloons as they are mashed.
Then, with a sweet hydraulic
hiss, the truck moves on.
This happened right on
schedule last Wednesday, with
New York locked down. Burly
workers wearing big gloves
and fluorescent vests dis-
patched our garbage with the
usual nonchalance. This time
no cars lined up behind, wait-
ing for the garbage truck to
inch forward. The street was
empty but for the collection
truck and a middle-aged man
named Mike, who is hearing-
and speech-impaired. He lives
on our street, and the gar-
bagemen have adopted him as
one of their own. He wears a
NYC Sanitation uniform and
helps the men as they gather
up the trash. They treat him
as a fellow worker, and he
earns his street cred in the
company of these brusque but
kindly men.
Perhaps because I grew up
in India, a land that falls
some way short of the high-
est standards of public hy-giene, I’m fascinated by the
mechanics of American clean-
liness: the garbage trucks, the
snowplows in winter and the
whirring broom-trucks that
sweep the roadsides, their
brushes kissing the edge
where road and sidewalk
meet (and, it is said, imperil-
ing any small dogs who might
be nearby).
The sights and sounds of
cleaning, the whooshes, the
crunching, the suction, the
sound of steel crushing
glass—I love it all. To watch
New York’s garbagemen swing
into action, and to see them
duly thanked at a time like
this, fills my heart with hope.
The refuse collectors of my
Indian youth were pariahs at
the bottom of the caste heap,
treated badly by the people
they served. New York’s gar-
bagemen, by contrast, are
rightful kings of the city
streets.Mr. Varadarajan is execu-
tive editor at Stanford Uni-
versity’s Hoover Institution.By Tunku Varadarajan
Garbagemen are
finally getting the
respect they deserve.OPINION
New York Gov.
Andrew
Cuomo spoke
for many
when he took
a moment
during one of
his recent
news confer-
ences to go
beyond the
Covid-19 num-
bers and speak to how dispir-
iting it’s been for Americans to
have their lives and livelihoods
turned upside down with so
little to show for it.
“The anxiety is what is the
most oppressive here,” Mr.
Cuomo said. “Not knowing.
Not knowing I’m positive, if
my friend is positive, if my
loved one is positive. Not
knowing when this is going to
end. The anxiety of dealing
with the isolation day after
day after day. It’s like a bad
‘Groundhog [Day]’ movie.”
Epidemiologists say coro-
navirus won’t be defeated un-
til either a vaccine is devel-
oped or it peters out when
enough Americans are in-
fected that the virus has diffi-
culty finding vulnerable peo-
ple to infect. Many rightly
worry how long that could
take and whether the econ-
omy can remain shut that long
without, as the president says,
making the cure worse than
the disease.
But what if there were a
middle way, in which we would
get 90% of our lives (and econ-
omy) back? It’s not perfect. But
it would be a giant step for-
ward over what we have now.
How We Get Our Lives Back
“It’s difficult,” says Ashish
K. Jha, director of the Harvard
Global Health Institute. “But
it’s not more difficult than
what America has done in the
past.”
Dr. Jha says he understands
the frustration of Americans
cooped up at home. He attri-
butes this mostly to the lag—
about three weeks—between
when substantial social dis-
tancing is imposed and when
it starts showing results.
“This is a virus that tests
our patience because anything
we do we don’t see the bene-
fits for a while,” says Dr. Jha.
Yet welcome signs may
come sooner than we think.
New York and New Jersey are
the epicenter for coronavirus.
According to the University of
Washington’s Institute for
Health Metrics and Evalua-
tion, in New York state the de-
mand for resources such as
hospital beds and ventilators
is expected to peak on
Wednesday, and the day after
for daily deaths. For New Jer-
sey, the respective dates are
April 15 and 16.
If true, it means that within
two weeks or so Americans
could see the first evidence
we’ve reached the downside
of these curves in the worst-
hit parts of the country. The
situation would still be ugly—
the number of daily deaths,
for example, would remain
high, and with more testing so
would the number of new
cases.
Even so, it would be an un-
deniably positive indicator.
This in turn would likely boostpublic confidence in what our
medical professionals have
been recommending. It also
suggests a path not just to re-
opening the economy, but to
keepingit open.
“Seeing that a peak has
been reached and that the
number of daily deaths start
declining could be indeed a
psychological moment that
could be a turning point,” saysJohn Ioannidis, a Stanford ep-
idemiologist who is also co-di-
rector of the university’s
Meta-Research Innovation
Center. “I think we have al-
ready reached that turning
point in the curves for several
European countries and we
will see it very soon also for
the USA.”
Even after New York hits
its peak, things will continue
to get worse in states that
haven’t. Which is why it
makes more sense to begin
looking at reopening some
parts of the country before
others—and the conditions
required.
Taiwan’s example offers
some ideas. Though it may yet
end up imposing stricter mea-
sures if a big second wave of
Covid-19 infections material-
izes, thus far Taiwan has man-
aged to keep most of its econ-omy running. It has done this,
moreover, while keeping its
count of total cases at only
373 and total deaths to five.
This despite its proximity to
the belly of the Covid-
beast, China.
Taiwan has done this with
aggressive testing and trac-
ing—along with quarantines
for those arriving from out-
side and enforced isolation for
potential carriers. The econ-
omy doesn’t go on quite as
normal, but it does go on.
As for the U.S., Dr. Jha says
that, at least for this year, we
probably won’t be going to
any Red Sox games. But he
can imagine offices and
schools reopening, and even
bars and restaurants as long
as they limit capacity and seat
diners unusually far apart.
To achieve this, he says,
America’s top priorities must
be “testing, testing and test-
ing”—to identify who’s in-
fected, who’s not, who’s im-
mune and who needs to be
isolated so they don’t infect
anyone else.
“My sense is that we can
get 90% of our lives back if we
have a really well-deployed
testing infrastructure de-
ployed and we’re testing peo-
ple and are identifying people
who are sick and pulling them
out,” Dr. Jha says.
This isn’t perfect either.
But it beats the two likeliest
alternatives: keeping the
economy shut down for many
more months, or spending the
next 18 months in a cycle of
reopenings and reclosures.
Write to [email protected].Partial reopening of
the economy wouldn’t
be perfect. But it’d be
a huge step forward.MAIN
STREET
By William
McGurn
The Covid-
pandemic has
yet to strike
Latin America
and the Carib-
bean at full
force, but the
region’s fragile
societies are
already groan-
ing under the
stress. In
Guayaquil, Ecuador, with hospi-
tals and morgues overwhelmed,
relatives have been storing the
bodies of the deceased in their
homes; some bodies lay unat-
tended in the streets. That
could be a sign of things to
come; Latin America is almost
completely unprepared for the
multifaceted catastrophe now
headed its way.
After decades of underin-
vestment in health systems,
most of Latin America and the
Caribbean are nowhere near
ready for a pandemic. The re-
gion’s average annual health-
care spending per capita is
$949: less than one-fourth of
average spending across the
Organization for Economic Co-
operation and Development,
and only two-thirds of the
level in the Middle East and
North Africa. The region’s
health systems are already
stretched beyond capacity to
meet the needs of a “normal”
year; going into the crisis,
Mexico had fewer than 6,
ventilators for a population of
almost 130 million, and even
relatively well-developed
Costa Rica has less than half as
many hospital beds per 1,
people as the U.S.
While conditions vary both
among countries and within
The Coronavirus Threat South of the Border
them, “social distancing” of the
type employed in Asia, Europe
and North America faces stark
limits in Latin America. Across
the region, 50% or more of the
population work in the “infor-
mal sector,” performing domes-
tic labor, casual construction,
working in markets or other
undocumented jobs. If they
don’t go to work in the morn-
ing, many will have nothing to
eat. Even workers with formal
jobs often live in sprawling, un-
derserved urban slums. Mil-
lions suffer from malnutrition
and untreated health condi-
tions that are risk factors for
severe coronavirus complica-
tions. Guayaquil may not be the
only city where a surge of in-
fection and mortality swamps
local services; much of South
and Central America lies virtu-
ally helpless before the advanc-
ing disease.
It isn’t just the disease. The
region is experiencing the
greatest economic shock of
modern times. Capital flight,
along with the simultaneous
collapse of commodity prices,
tourism and export markets,
has knocked the supports out
from under the region’s al-
ways fragile economies. Re-
mittances from workers
abroad (up to 20% of gross do-
mestic product in the North-
ern Triangle countries of Hon-
duras, Guatemala and El
Salvador) will fall sharply as
unemployment grows in the
U.S. Even the region’s prob-
lematic economic success
story of recent decades—the
boom that has made its drug
cartels the richest and most
powerful in the world—has
come under threat. The impactof the pandemic both reduced
production of raw materials
for drugs like crystal meth in
China and disrupted the trans-
port chain, leaving drug car-
tels short of critical supplies.
The closure of frontiers and
the abrupt decline of civilian
air and maritime transport has
crippled the traffickers’ distri-
bution networks. These vio-
lent cartels and their private
armies, which in many places
exercise more power than na-
tional governments, may now
fall into anarchic and murder-
ous competition over dwin-
dling resources.The potential for economic
and humanitarian disasters to
create social unrest in Mexico
is something no American
president can afford to ignore.
The Trump administration’s
achievements in managing mi-
grant flows with cooperation
from Mexico and its Central
American neighbors are un-
likely to survive these trou-
bles. Waves of refugees in a
chaotic region pose grave hu-
manitarian and political chal-
lenges. U.S. voters won’t easily
welcome large numbers of pos-
sibly infectious refugees pour-
ing across the border. Yet the
American conscience also
won’t tolerate the suffering
that, absent a decent provision
for desperate people, will ac-company the closing of fron-
tiers throughout the region,
including our own.
Venezuela is in no shape to
withstand even a relatively
limited Covid-19 outbreak. The
collapse in world oil prices
means that Venezuela can’t
sell oil for more than its cost
of production. Its hospitals—
understaffed, underequipped,
often without power or clean
water, to say nothing of medi-
cations—are inadequate even
for everyday needs. Much of
the population is malnourished
and stressed. Millions have al-
ready fled the collapse, and
millions more will seek to fol-
low them. In the next few
months, if it accepts America’s
offer to drop sanctions in ex-
change for a move to free pres-
idential elections, Venezuela
may begin to return to some
kind of civilized order—or de-
scend to depths of misery on a
scale rarely seen.
Even if the worst-case sce-
narios prove overstated, the
pandemic has already dis-
rupted U.S.-China relations,
opened up a colossal rift in the
European Union, thrown global
energy markets into disarray,
and set both America and the
world on course for a greater
economic disaster than the
2007-09 financial crisis.
Tempted as they may be to
overlook the Western Hemi-
sphere in the face of dramatic
events elsewhere, Washington
policy makers need to remem-
ber that the security and pros-
perity of our home region re-
mains a core national interest.
Geography matters; this is a
time when the U.S. must stand
with its neighbors.Latin America isn’t
ready for Covid-19.
Infected migrants
could flee to the U.S.GLOBAL
VIEW
By Walter
Russell Mead