The Works of WSC
A guide to the Churchill canon
The CanonIn January 1906, in the first general election since he had crossed the floor of the House of Commons, Churchill was elected as member for North-West Manchester. His reward from the new Prime Minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, was the post of Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies. While the post did not carry a place in the cabinet it was well suited to Churchill since his political chief, Lord Elgin, sat in the House of Lords and it was therefore left to Churchill to manage the passage of all colonial business within the Commons.
Surprisingly little has been written about this period in Churchill's career, the only full length treatment of the subject being Ronald Hyam's Elgin and Churchill at the Colonial Office: 1905-1908 (Macmillan 1968). There is, however, little doubt that Elgin found his junior's unrelenting energy to be quite exhausting and when, in the late summer of 1907, Churchill proposed making an extended tour of the East African possessions Elgin acquiesced with alacrity. "The last time we spoke of the subject of your plans for the autumn you expressed a wish that I should write you a few lines about your proposal to visit East Africa. I can only repeat that...it will I am sure be of the greatest advantage that you should have seen the country".
As he had done with his South African expeditions Churchill was quick to exploit the opportunity to profit from his journalistic talents. The Strand undertook to pay him £750 for a series of five articles to be written during the tour and Churchill had high hopes of adding a further £500 from publication in book form. In the event nine articles appeared in The Strand totalling some 35,000 words. For the book appearance a further 10,000 words was appended and the expanded text published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1908.
My African Journey may not be one of Churchill's best known works, and it is certainly not among the most widely available. It is, however, one of his better ones. First and foremost it gives another glimpse of Churchill at his best as a journalist, at a time when he was still writing his own books. Because it was written, or perhaps dictated, on the spot it echoes much of the freshness to be found in The Story of the Malakand Field Force and is a showcase for Churchill's powers of observation. With the exception of two speech volumes it was to be fifteen years before the publication of his next book and by then the emphasis had irrevocably shifted to extensive reliance on his 'research' committee.
The content of the volume also provides much food for debate on Churchill's attitudes. Read in the context of the time in which he was writing it is easy to see why he was viewed as an extreme radical, particularly as one encounters his suggestion that Uganda could be the ideal country for an experiment in State Socialism. However, for those who prefer to hold all things up to the light of current thinking - in my opinion a singularly useless pastime - there is also much to criticise, not least of which being the proud dispatch of a white rhino, whose fate is immortalised both in the illustrations and on the decorated cloth front cover of the English first edition.
First published in 1908, My African Journey was out of print for over 50 years until 1962. Since then a further eight English language editions have been produced, the last of which being the Easton Press edition of 1992. Until 2003 it had never been translated. However, that year finally saw the appearance of the Spanish Mi Viaje Por África.
