Military Anthropology by McFate Montgomery;

Author:McFate, Montgomery;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2018-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Fantasy ideology of empire

In March 1952, His Excellency Sir Philip Mitchell, the colonial Governor of Kenya, took a fishing trip. On his visit to the central province, he saw “smiling faces and happy cheerful people delighted to see one and to pass the time of day.”24 Meanwhile, the Mau Mau—apparently unbeknownst to Sir Philip—were expanding their control over the Kikuyu population through an accelerated campaign of oathing and murder. Despite settler demands to declare a state of emergency, Sir Philip dismissed all reports concerning political unrest as alarmist, stating that the government had determined that the “Kikuyu were an unwarlike tribe and could be crushed in a matter of a few weeks if they really started violence in earnest.”25 In March 1952, Sir Philip instructed his private secretary to notify the district commissioners that he would no longer read intelligence reports and requested that they should please desist from sending them. In Sir Philip’s mind there was nothing to be concerned about; the Mau Mau were just another local prophetic sect, the product of a culture of “a forest and mountain dwelling people” who are “particularly given to black and foul mysteries, to ritual murder, to ordeals by oath and poison and cults of terror, in which murder is the central feature.”26 Blinded by a fantasy of Kenya and the Kikuyu, the government did little as the security situation spiraled out of control.

As observed throughout this book, many barriers exist to the military execution of foreign policy, including complexity, limits to human knowledge, and time. During the Mau Mau Emergency in Kenya, both the settler community and the British colonial government suffered from a particular conceptual barrier, what Lee Harris—in the context of Al Qaeda—has identified as a “fantasy ideology.”27 In a 2002 essay, Harris argues that human beings, when confronted with something strange and seemingly inexplicable, will impose their own inadequate categories to explain it. Americans interpreted the 9–11 attacks, Harris writes, on the basis of deep unquestioned assumptions: “An act of violence on the magnitude of 9–11 can only have been intended to further some kind of political objective.”28 On the contrary, argues Harris, the 9–11 attacks lacked a rational, instrumental Clausewitzian political objective. They were not designed to force the U.S. to alter its policy in the Arab world, nor were the targets chosen for their military importance. Rather, the twin towers of the World Trade Center were “gigantic props in a grandiose spectacle in which the collective fantasy of radical Islam was brought vividly to life: a mere handful of Muslims, men whose will was absolutely pure, as proven by their martyrdom, brought down the haughty towers erected by the Great Satan.”29

The British colonial government in Kenya held a fantasy ideology of the colonial enterprise in which Africans were merely “smiling faces” delighted to receive the benefits of civilization. Similarly, the white settlers had a collective fantasy of Africa,30 “beautiful, open, sun-drenched—a golden land that preserves ways of life now but a memory in Britain—a nostalgic fantasy that, born of a distaste for the present, glorifies the past.

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