The Source of the Nile
This story takes place in the middle of the 19th century, early enough into the new queen’s reign that the century isn’t even being described as the Victorian Era yet. The British Empire is about to hit its peak and take its place alongside the Romans and the Egyptians as the unqualified dominant culture on the planet. Non-Africans had been searching in vain for the source of the Nile for millennia and for the British to be the guys who finally cracked the nut would be the icing on the PR cake. The discovery was a thing more than what had been discovered; it would symbolize Britain’s position of dominance in the world and history.
The Rosetta Stone
The Rosetta Stone had been discovered by the French operating under the aegis of Napoleon in 1799. By 1802 it was firmly in possession of the British Empire and on display in the British Museum. The seizure of what was considered at the time the single most significant archaeological discovery served to stimulate what might be termed Eygptmania in England. Almost overnight, plundering the buried ancient relics of North Africa had become a national obsession. The Rosetta Stone itself is a symbol of communication and understanding, but the display inside the British Museum transformed it into a symbol of unregulated and unstoppable British imperialism that viewed the rest of the planet as little more than a big shopping store.
Black Beetles
One night in Africa, John Hanning Speke is inside his tent when he lights a candle so he can see how to put the damage caused by a furious wind. Within a matter of seconds, he is suddenly overcome by a horde of black beetles which exhausts him nearly to sleep in the vain attempt to brush them away. One crawls into his ear, burrowing deeper and deeper and driving him to such a state of panic that he eventually drives a penknife into his ear canal. He succeeds in killing the bug, but it will remain lodged in his ear for another six months as he meanwhile suffers partial deafness. The scene is not just horrific, but symbolically telling: a man out of his element driven to attempt something that stands to bring him no direct gain other than short-lived glory. The deafness to the hubris of the entire undertaking becomes a painful reminder that nevertheless continues to ignore.
African Enslavement in India
The darkness of British imperialism is given brutal symbolic linkage in the story of the essential guide without whom many British explorers would likely have died and never been seen again. Sidi Bombay was abducted from his homeland in Africa and sold into slavery. But the surprising thing here is that he was not sold to a plantation owner in the American south, but an Indian. Since the caste system of India already ensured that any person with the means to own a slave already had built-in cheap labor, almost the entire rationale of the African slave trade in India was symbolic: to own an African was an assertion of status. What duties they were forced to perform was virtually beside the point.
