- Hardcover: 281 pages
- Publisher: Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd; illustrated edition edition (6 April 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0436275058
- ISBN-13: 978-0436275050
- Product Dimensions: 21.4 x 14.2 x 2.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 800,613 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Lost White Tribes: Journeys Amongst the Forgotten
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Amazon.co.uk Review
History, with its loose ends, rough edges, strange anomalies and surreal quirks, is rarely neat. The quirky and anomalous leftover colonial communities described in Lost White Tribes are a case in point. As Milanese journalist Riccardo Orizio puts it in the introduction, the European emigrants left stranded by the retreating tides of imperialism are among today's "forgotten people".
One such tribe is the Burghers of Sri Lanka, an enclave of Netherlanders who stayed East after the Dutch Empire was overrun by the British around 1800. As Orizio wanders among the Burghers' crumbling bungalows and pre-war ballrooms, he finds a half-assimilated people fond of operatic melancholy and short-wave radio, prone to singing a national anthem that sums up their linguistic and ethnic confusion: "We subjects of great England's King, From Ceylon's distant strand, To thee our loving tribute bring, Het Lieve Vaterland". Other tribes Orizio encounters are equally obscure. In Brazil he meets Confederate Americans. In Guadaloupe he uncovers incestuous Normans. In Haiti, he holes up with Poles.
But perhaps most remarkable is the last community he encounters: the Basters of Namibia. A miraculous hybrid of Bushman and Afrikaaner, these green-eyed, pale-faced, somehow "Oriental-looking" people, fled the British imperialists of the Cape Colony to settle in the deserts of South West Africa. There they survived, and even thrived: they became known for their devout ways, as well as the beauty of their uniquely petite women. Orizio's eloquent descriptions of the offbeat Basters--their tenacity, integrity, and bravery--stand comparison with some of the best travel writing of recent years, and are a fitting end to a profoundly intriguing book. --Sean Thomas
Review
"Like Chatwin, Orizio has a knack of following hunches and finding good people to talk to. He also does his research and provides a history, as well as a social anthropology, of those he visits...sensitively observed, vividly told and irresistibly exotic." -"Sunday Times
"From the Trade Paperback edition.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Lost Corners of History,
By
This review is from: Lost White Tribes: Journeys Among the Forgotten (Paperback)
The misleading subtitle of this book is a bit of a shame, and it's hard to imagine Italian journalist Orizio being very pleased with it. By positioning the contents in relation to colonialism, the subtitle overlooks the fact that at least three (more depending on interpretation) of the "lost white tribes" visited in the book have nothing to do with colonialism as the word is commonly used—in the imperial context. Unlike the bulk of books about colonialism, which tend to focus on history, politics, and economics, Orizio's six chapters are largely unrelated essays that merge travelogue with anthropology. His style—as in his previous book of essays on ex-dictators, Talk of the Devil—is to start the story by detailing his search for his subject matter. This may put off those looking for straight history, but the stories of traveling down dusty backroads to reach these "lost white tribes" set exactly the right context for their stories. And once he finds his subjects, their stories are fascinating. Americans will probably find the chapter on Confederates in Brazil the most interesting. This tells of the thousands who fled the South after the Civil War, rejecting Reconstruction in favor of a new life in Brazil. Their stubborn "rebel" identity and annual carnival in full Confederate costume is rather bizarre. My own favorite chapter is about small pockets of Polish genes in Haiti. These are the descendants of soldiers sent by Napoleon to assist in quelling the rebellion of 1803. When the rebels led by Toussaint Louverture won, the remaining French were systematically killed but the Poles were spared, as their country was also under Napoleon's boot. Orizio also tracks down pockets of inbred French in Guadeloupe whose reasons for settling in remote parts of the island in the late 1700s are lost to history, the remnants of indentured German laborers imported to Jamaica in the 1830s, Boers who left South Africa and mixed with a local Namibian tribe to become the Basters in the late 1860s, and the remnants of Dutch colonial rule over Sri Lanka/Ceylon. The communities share some characteristics: most are, if not desperately poor, living on an economic razor's edge. Almost all retain some disturbing notions about race and the superiority of their own genes compared to others in their country. The past is clung to in bizarre and fantastic ways, such as the French on Guadeloupe insisting on their connection to French royal blood, and the Haitian Poles waiting in vain for their Polish Pope to help them. They're pathetic figures in many cases, as they seem unable to break free of their tight communities in order to assimilate to any degree that may bring a better life. Of course, Orizio's journeys are to find those stuck in their ways, and it emerges in many cases that the best and brightest youths often don't stick around. His style is fairly conversational and choppy, and each chapter stands alone as its own essay since Orizio never attempts to make connections between any of the groups' experiences. This may be off-putting to some, but it never bothered me—just think of it as a series of related long magazine essays. An excellent glimpse into some of history's lost corners, and sure to be of interest to amateur anthropologists (a bibliography on each "tribe" would have been nice or those of us interested in further reading).
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sometimes sad, but never boring,
By
This review is from: Lost White Tribes (Hardcover)
In this fascinating book, author and journalist Riccardo Irizio looks at the "tribes" of white natives living in far off corners of the globe. In the six chapters of this book, he looks at the Dutch burghers who never left Ceylon, the German inhabitants whose ancestors had been tricked into emigrating to Jamaica, the colony of Confederate exiles who fled the United States after the Civil War, the descendents of the Polish soldiers who stayed in Haiti after that countries defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte, the Dutch Basters of Namibia whose ancestors had trod a different path than the Boers, and the Guadeloupe descendents of the Frenchmen who went native. Overall, I found this to be a wonderfully interesting book to read. The author does an excellent job of weaving together the tales of his search for these "lost white tribes" with the story of how they came to be there. Some of the stories are quite sad, with Haitians that consider themselves exiles and are waiting for someone to come take them home after 200 years, people who look down on the countrymen around them because they are not white, people who look down on these people for being white, and so much more. I found their stories to be quite enthralling, sometimes sad, but never boring. If you want to see the tales of white people who went native during the colonial era, then this book is for you. I highly enjoyed it, and think that you will as well!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
meandering,
By
This review is from: Lost White Tribes: Journeys Among the Forgotten (Paperback)
The author provides an overview of six little known groups, all either partially or entirely descended from Europeans but now marginalised minorities far from Europe and in danger of dying off or being assimilated up by the surrounding societies. An approximately equal weight is given to each:
- Dutch Burghers of Ceylon - Germans in Jamaica - Confederates (from the US South) in Brazil - Poles in Haiti (descendants of Polish soldiers and African wives) - Basters in Namibia - Blancs Matignon in Guadeloupe The book is part travel log, part history, part anthropology. It's pleasant enough and easy to read but I found it disorganised, meandering and at times a bit vacuous.
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