The Economist Europe – July 22-28, 2017

66 Books and arts The EconomistJuly 22nd 2017

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EAR the village of Affile, on a pictur-

esque hillside east of Rome, stands a

monument, unveiled in 2012 and built

with public funds, to Rodolfo Graziani, one

of Mussolini’s most brilliant generals. He

was a key figure in Italy’s brutal campaigns

in Africa in the decade before the second

world war.

Inside a roundabout in Addis Ababa

lies another monument. This giant obelisk,

perhaps the Ethiopian capital’s finest piece

of public art, was donated by Josip Tito,

then president of Yugoslavia, in 1955. Six

bronze reliefs depict a massacre, the worst

in Ethiopian history, carried out by Italian

forces during the occupation of 1936-41

while Graziani was viceroy of Italy’s new

colony. According to the Ethiopian govern-

ment, some 30,000 Ethiopiansdied during

the campaign of terror in February 1937.

Official Italian estimates usually num-

ber between 600 and 2,000, but they are

certainly much too low. The most plausible

figure, argues Ian Campbell in the first

comprehensive account ofthe massacre,

may be 20,000. In Italy Graziani’sgreat

crime is seen as little more than a typical

European colonial atrocity—no worse than

the British at Amritsar, for instance, where

1,000 people (according to India’s count)

were slaughtered in 1919.

But, as Mr Campbell’s meticulous work

makes plain, this was no typical colonial

Colonial atrocities

Hearing their cries

The Addis Ababa Massacre: Italy’s National

Shame.By Ian Campbell. Hurst; 478 pages;

£30. To be published in America by Oxford

University Press in August

Italy would rather not talk about it

of the human and the humane in people

was crucial to surviving Soviet life.

Having defeated fascism in Germany,

the Soviet Union imported some of its

ideas and practices, which bore fruits de-

cades later. Waving the banners of the sec-

ond world war and holding the photo-

graphs of those who perished in it

defeating fascism, today’sKremlin has re-

stored Soviet symbols, declared the su-

premacy of the state over the individual

and annexed Crimea. Unleashing a war

against Ukraine, Kremlin propaganda de-

scribed Ukrainians who demanded digni-

ty as “fascists” and Russian soldiers as

“anti-fascist liberators”. The exploitation

of the memory of the war has been the

central element ofmodern Russian ideolo-

gy. It is what makes Ms Alexievich’s work

so relevant today. 7

I

N JANUARY 1488, BartolomeuDias, a

Portuguese explorer, rounded Africa’s

southern cape and put to shore to take on

food and water. There he found a group,

smaller and lighter-skinned than the other

Africans he had encountered, who, mysti-

fied by the odd men appearing out of the

infinity of the sea, chased them back to

their boat under a hail of arrows.

The exchange, notes JamesSuzman in

his new book “Affluence Without Abun-

dance”, was a meeting of two distant

branches of the human family tree: Euro-

peans descended from ancient tribes that

migrated out of Africa, and people com-

monly known as the San, who had called

southern Africa home for at least 150,000

years. Just as important, the meeting repre-

sented the collision of humanity’s most

ancient and durable form of economic or-

ganisation with its most powerful. The lat-

ter, wielded by Europeans, hasdominated

the half millennium since that scrape on

the beach. But modern capitalist societies

may have something to learn from the

ways of their ancient forebears.

Mr Suzman isan anthropologist who

has spent years studying the Bushmen of

the Kalahari Desert: a San people related to

those who greeted Diason the beach,

some of whom maintain the hunting and

gathering lifestyle that sustained them for

150 millennia. But “Affluence Without

Abundance” is not simply a description of

Bushman life. Mr Suzman deftly weaves

his experiences and observations with les-

sons on human evolution, the history of

human migration and the fate of African

communities since the arrival of Euro-

peans. The overarching aim of the book is

more ambitious still: to challenge the read-

er’s ideas about both hunter-gatherer life

and human nature.

Life spent hunting and gathering, while

occasionally trying, was not a tale of con-

stant toil and privation. Food could run

short during droughts or annual lean peri-

ods, but reliance on a broad range of food

sources typically afforded such tribes a re-

liable, well-balanced diet. Even around the

arid Kalahari food is plentiful (at least

when the tribes are not forced to share the

land with farmers and ranchers)—so much

so that the typical adult need work less

than 20 hours per week.

The contrast with farming societies,

which dominated history after the domes-

tication of plants and animals about

10,000 years ago, is stark. Farmed land is

more productive, which allowed the more

populous farmers to push hunter-gather-

ers off all but the mostremote orinhospita-

ble land. But farming societies depend

heavily on a few staples, leaving them

poorly nourished and vulnerable to crop

failure. That high productivity also took

endless, mind-numbing work: to prepare

and tend the fields, keep up the homestead

and defend the surpluses needed to feed

everyone from one harvest to the next.

Mr Suzman argues that the dramatic

cultural shift resulting from the adoption

of agriculture gave rise to impulses that

people in modern rich countries, the heirs

of farming societies, regard as naturally hu-

man—especially the insatiable desire to ac-

cumulate. Farming teaches people to ac-

cept inequality and to valorise work. But

for the vast majorityof human history

there was little point in accumulating,

since most of what was needed could easi-

ly be got from the surrounding environ-

ment. Nor was there anything heroic about

work; spending time getting more food

than one could eat wasa foolish waste.

Modern San struggle to cope in a mar-

ket economy, thanks to this heritage (and to

anti-San bigotry). Employersstruggle to

keep them on the job: offered higher wages

they work fewer hours rather than more.

Yet Mr Suzman also reckons, after years of

studying the Bushmen, that a world in

which people work and worry less is pos-

sible. Humanity spent many more thou-

sands of years living that way than work-

ing its fingers to the bone, after all.

It is a nice idea. But Mr Suzman’s re-

counting of recent history makes clear that

modern life is like riding a bicycle, in which

stopping means toppling over. Having

created countless problems by turning to

agriculture, rich societies have little choice

but to press on: working, striving and in-

venting, even as this progress creates more

problems in need of solving. 7

Hunter-gatherer economics

Living off the land

Affluence Without Abundance: The

Disappearing World of the Bushmen. By

James Suzman. Bloomsbury; 297 pages; $29