THE IMPLACABLE PARSON HAD NOT IN FACT GONE THERE TO SEE FOR himself, and there was little photography in those days to help the armchair traveller. But Dean Farrar was quite sure that he understood what manner of creatures these Africans were. Their features, he was able to report in 1865, were ‘invariable and expressionless’, their minds ‘characterised by a dead and blank uniformity’. They had ‘not originated a single discovery … not promulgated a single thought… not established a single institution … not hit upon a single invention’.

There might be something almost frantic about this piling up of negatives. But Dean Farrar had not written of the woes of little Eric for nothing. Give the Devil an inch, he knew, and the Devil would take a mile. He was not for giving the Devil even half an inch. Among the Africans, he declared at a time when the great majority of African peoples had not so much as been glimpsed by any European eye, 'generation hands on no torch to generation'. Left to themselves, they were beyond salvation.

This was to become the great theme song of colonialist paternalism. Taking material simplicity for proof of primitive savagery, the most commonplace of men, when raised to positions of dominion, became as suddenly convinced of their civilising mission. ‘We have in East Africa’, opined Sir Charles Eliot, Britain's first high commissioner there, ‘the rare experience of dealing with a tabula rasa, an almost untouched and sparsely inhabited country where we can do as we will.’ Elsewhere it was the same. When British pioneers in 1890 rode into the land which became Southern Rhodesia, they could not believe that ‘natives’ had raised the patterned walls of masonry they found there.

These ideas are among the mysteries of non-African belief that have somehow survived the colonial period. In the case of Southern Rhodesia, as it happens, more than half a century later an ethnologist began asking old men who lived in the rolling grasslands of the Mount Darwin district, north of modern Salisbury, whether they knew anything of the distant past. They hesitated and then they began telling him the history of their people and its kings.