To avoid a confrontation and to head off a growing assault on his already tattered reputation—and possibly to cock a snook at the islanders once again—Schellenberg suddenly sold the island to an eccentric sun-worshipping German artist and soi-disant professor named Gotthilf Christian Eckhard Oesterle, whose chosen nom de plume, Maruma, he had seen reflected in a puddle of water in Abu Dhabi (or else Geneva—accounts vary). He seldom came to the island other than by helicopter, and in any case he had formidable financial problems of his own. When the islanders and their various supporters told him that they had formed the Isle of Eigg Heritage Trust some years before and had now raised enough money to buy the island from him, he agreed and, with a sigh of very evident relief, signed the relevant paperwork. Oesterle headed back home to deal with the publicity problems in Germany that developed when it turned out he had never been a professor of anything, and owed £300,000 to a German clothing exporter.

  Accordingly, the trust—the community, as it were, now it was wrapped up in legal form—became on June 12, 1997, and after the payment of £1.5 million to the creditors’ lawyers, the official owners of Eigg. The days of lairds—of which there had been ten, Clanranald to Maruma—were now formally and finally over. The island and its 8000 acres, dominated by a high ridge of obsidian visible from miles around and known as the Sgurr, was now owned principally by its inhabitants. Now at last, with the laird gone, the old Scottish system of feudal land tenure, so unfair to so many, so favored for a few—with some of the more impossibly micromanaging previous lairds specifying, for example, which if any of the island’s many varieties of seaweed could be eaten by their tenants—was to be ended forever.

  There was a blaze of publicity in the months and years immediately following the ownership change, not all of it good. The island population increased quite rapidly, from a low of forty people before Schellenberg, by way of seventy-odd during his tenure and then getting on for a hundred once he had gone. Eigg’s demographic mix changed profoundly too, from an originally Gaelic-speaking, Hebridean near monoculture to an omnium-gatherum of newcomers from well beyond, including a small number of progressively minded incomers from—quelle horreur!—the English Midlands. There was expected to be a consequent clash between Gael and Sassenach, between progressivism and conservatism, between youth and retiree. The press waited, hoping for news.

  A German magazine was among the first, writing an unkind essay on the theme of Haight-Ashbury meets the Hebrides. The incoming community members—dismissively caricatured as Green Party–supporting, bearded, ponytailed, unwashed, sandal-wearing, bohemian, and decidedly noncorporate types, people who fled the cities and its competitiveness for a more sustainable and cooperative life—were to the German readers members of a tribe of classically disaffected misfits, the kind of people who had once probably lived in Tibet—as if—and had crude signs hand-painted on their rusting minivans. Clashes were predicted, disaster widely anticipated, the notion of the community ownership of land—this being essentially the first such experiment—widely dismissed as an impertinence by admirers of the old ways, and with withering scorn.

  But in fact most visitors today find that the communities are getting on with one another tolerably well, all doing their best to make Eigg work without the burdensome presence of a lordly landowner. One hundred and ten people live on the island at the time of this writing, with some infants having been born on Eigg to newcomers. All manner of physical betterment is visible. There is homegrown electricity now, courtesy of a trio of wind generators by a farm just below the cliffs of the Sgurr, a small hydroturbine on a particularly turbulent stream, and a cluster of solar panels. There is telephone service and a modest amount of internet bandwidth. There is a small school, an even smaller brewery, a general store, a café, and a taxi driver. The twelve-bedroom Italianate mansion built by the Runcimans back in the thirties belongs now to a couple, Norah Barnes and Bob Wallace, who have set up a center for sustainability studies; and if there is a certain well-worn tick-all-the-boxes predictability about it—Iyengar yoga, meditation, wellness, eco-building, earthship construction—there can be little doubt that the lodge is being put to rather better use than when a giant swastika was employed as part of the decorations for extravagant weekend house parties. There are three children of the Barnes-Wallace family,* so they can feel secure in the knowledge that a doctor now visits the island from Skye each Tuesday if the weather allows. A veterinarian will call if needed, as will a dentist. Otherwise the islanders are left much to their own devices, initiative, and intestinal fortitude.

  Government subsidies have helped finance many of the island’s various recent improvements, and taxpayers from time to time complain. And not all like the newly made community nor its inhabitants—a delivery-truck driver complained that whenever he came to Eigg he found the islanders “lolling in the grass, drinking, doing drugs, generally being lazy” and never helping him load or unload his cargo. Moreover, he said, warming to his theme, the community members were “always disagreeing with one another, talking endlessly, doing nothing, spending taxpayers’ money, dreaming, wasting everyone’s time.”

  Far better, he continued, that islands were owned by individuals, men who had vision and competence—and then, just as he spoke, and entirely by chance, the CalMac ferry to Mallaig, for which we were waiting, swept up to the quayside, bearing as its sole passenger an island owner of the very kind the disgruntled driver favored. He was the laird of the tiny neighboring island of Muck, a craggy highlander named Lawrence McEwen, known the length of Scotland for his kindly eccentricity and for the abiding loveliness of the island that his family has owned since the Great War. He could scarcely cut more different a figure than Keith Schellenberg—modest, self-effacing, weather-beaten, as tough as old boots, dressed like a hobo and beloved by the forty-odd tenants who live on Muck in conditions of modest respectability, with no store, no postbox, electricity only very recently—and with no apparent wish for it to be otherwise. The mix of farming, fishing, timber harvesting, and sporting lets—deer hunting, partridge shooting, and the like—by which McEwen keeps the Isle of Muck afloat, just, leaves few islanders unhappy with the arrangement. In theory McEwen runs his domain just as he wishes; but since his wishes seem to be broadly in concert with those of his tenants, and since he seems little better off than any of them, most appear content to keep matters as they are.

  By all accounts, the social engineering of Scotland’s once feudal landownership system is gathering pace. Nearly six hundred pieces of territory are now community-owned, their previous owners flush with cash and many of them living far away, many happily dispossessed of the responsibility that rightly comes with ownership. More than half a million acres—2 percent of Scotland’s land surface—is now owned communally. The new arrangements have as expected brought withering criticism from established landowners. They insist that community members are poor managers—they talk without acting, have little experience of the realities of farming, neglect their animals, plant ill-suited crops, allow fences to break and buildings to rot, shoot animals and leave them lying dead in the heather, take and waste so much government money that they trigger waves of envy in their nonsubsidized neighbors, and describe islands like Eigg as becoming like “gone-wrong American communes from the 1960s.” Moreover, and to the wholesale dismay of one particular admirer of the old, traditional ways, newly imposed taxes on shooting have recently become a main source of revenue for the Scottish Land Fund—the very fund that is used to finance community buyouts. “We owners are thus being taxed to fund the means for buying ourselves out. We are asked, in other words, to become the agents of our own destruction.”

  Twenty years ago, this blasted mountain, the famous Sgurr of Eigg, was owned by just one person, as were all the island acres spread out beneath. Today a hundred islanders own it communally, reflecting a profound change that has come upon modern Scotland and may soon spread far beyond.

  The changes, he said despondently, were surely all political. That land reform around the world has a political component to it should come as no surprise. But that politics is the only true consideration in the reapportioning of land in Scotland—as seems to be the case on Eigg, on Ulva, and now in hundreds of other recently changed ownerships elsewhere—is being greeted by many with some dismay, insofar as it seems to them to challenge the very essence of what Scotland long has been all about. Whether the new and supposedly more equitably disposed Scotland prospers as a socially healthy and economically vibrant entity, with its land widely dispersed throughout its community, has still not been fully tested and is still not fully known.

  3

  Bringing Africa Home

  We fear Africa because, when we leave it alone, it works.

  PATRICK MARNHAM, Fantastic Invasion (1980)

  Oh god!” the countess remarks in tones of languid dismay. She is standing on the east terrace of her farm, gazing across the Great Rift Valley toward the rising African sun. “Oh god! Not another fucking beautiful day.”

  She is by birth an American, once Alice Silverthorne of Buffalo, more recently the Countess de Janzé. She is a dissolute, promiscuous murderess, a real person captured memorably on film by Sarah Miles in the 1987 British melodrama White Mischief. Her dawn moment says all too much about the languor and luxury of western colonial behavior, endured in much of the rest of the world, but perhaps most egregiously in the near limitless tracts of Africa.

  For a while at least, the archly hedonistic life of those who lived in the highlands of Kenya as members of the so-called Happy Valley Set was well-nigh unimaginable to most in the rest of the otherwise war-torn world of 1940. And if all was in the end just an illusion, then it was most grandly so. It was a time of manners that in many ways represented the apogee of European imperial rule in Africa: it was a period of rule soon to crumble away, to be replaced by other manners, other behaviors, with many of them in truth little more edifying than this.

  The time had begun at the close of the eighteenth century, in ways that all empires seem to begin—with what some might have supposed was full of promise, marked by episodes of heroism and honor, by science and investigation and serious and sympathetic interest. Periods in history that are marked by exploration and survey, by botanical and biological and anthropological inquiry, seem so often to be the precursors of conquest, of cruelty, and of mercantile greed. And this was as true in Africa as it already had been elsewhere. After the initial sub-Saharan explorations had been completed, once heroic figures like Mungo Park, like Sir Richard Burton and John Speke, and, of course, like Henry Stanley and his long sought prize, Doctor Livingstone, had all come home, written their books, colored their maps, given their lectures, and collected their medals, that madcap period which historians would call the scramble for Africa began, and it did so in particular earnest.

  As usual the missionaries went out first, eradicating as best they could what they saw as the spiritual impoverishment of animism and witch doctoring, and bringing as many natives as possible under the ecclesiastical authority of Rome or, better still, of Canterbury. In the missionaries’ wake, and once the more exotic indigenous passions—suspected cannibalism chief among them—had been subdued, the merchant venturers and their guardian soldiers set out, all of them in search of fortune.

  These figures—the lately reviled über-imperialist Cecil Rhodes most notably—had no interest in souls, but sported only a frenzied hunger for African land and, most particularly, for the treasures that they believed lay beneath. Their appetite for territory knew no bounds, quite literally. For sixty frantic years beginning in the last half of the nineteenth century, thousands of settlers and fortune hunters sailed from chilly northern seaports bent on carving out new countries, on establishing new cities, on displacing inconveniently sited peoples, and on establishing mechanisms of governance and administration that paid little heed to the settled customs of those who remained.

  Linley Sambourne’s 1892 Punch cartoon of Cecil Rhodes bestriding Africa from the Cape to Cairo has long offered an iconic representation of imperial adventuring across the continent and the wholesale seizing of its lands.

  An entire ancient continent, stretching from the placid Mediterranean waters off Cairo and Tangier down to the icy chill of the Southern Ocean beyond the Cape of Good Hope, was casually and ruthlessly partitioned. It was divided up, Nigeria to Natal, for the ultimate benefit, in all too many instances, of languid and louche inhabitants like those of the cool uplands of Kenya Colony, where the British came to rule, and to play.

  The British were far from being the only ones to blame, of course. European greed for African land was a universal ill, with the Belgians in the Congo every bit as rapacious as the Germans in Namibia and Tanganyika, with the Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique quite as distempered as the Dutch in the Transvaal, Spain’s west African conquistadores just as vengeful as those on the far side of the Atlantic, the French and the Italians perhaps saucing their conquering misdeeds with cuisines that long outlasted them (Abidjan’s creperies being legendary). Even the Swedes, the Norwegians, and the Danes, peoples customarily revered for reasonableness and quiet courtesy, did little of lasting good during their very much earlier and brief sojourns on the continent.

  But perhaps because English was to become the lingua franca of most of educated Africa, it is the British who remain most closely associated with the imperial phase of the continent’s long story. And so it is perhaps appropriate that it was a speech made by the British prime minister Harold Macmillan, to the South African Parliament in February 1960, that would mark, and for all of Europe’s other colonists as well, the beginning of the end of this imperial era.

  “The wind of change is blowing through this continent,” the patrician statesman declaimed, anticipating the headlines for London’s next morning newspapers. “And whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.

  “We must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it.”

  Africans were about to get their countries back. The anti-imperial rebellions had started decades before: the Mahdi’s precursive stand in Sudan long ago, the Ashanti rising in the Gold Coast at the turn of the century, the Matabele and Mashona troubles in Rhodesia, the insurrectionary habits of the Zulu in Natal, the Mau Mau insurgency in 1950s Kenya, the Ibo in Nigerian Biafra, the rising of Frelimo in Mozambique. Civil unrest and extreme violence and open warfare was so much the leitmotif of the previous hundred years of Africa’s history that it was widely accepted that only a wholesale European withdrawal could allow for a lasting peace. All the more so since, in theory at least, some of those who would now be getting their countries back were going to get their lands back as well. The Happy Valley Set and their like would—in many cases, but by no means all—be persuaded, obliged, or forced to hand back their estates and their farms to the peoples of Kenya from whom they had been taken years before—whether they liked it or not. And what would happen in Kenya would happen in Uganda too—and in Tanganyika, Bechuanaland, Nyasaland, Somaliland, the Belgian Congo, and South-West Africa and in myriad other corners of the continent that would now be cleansed of foreign influence and governance, and whose institutions and peoples would be remade such that foreign domination—by which, essentially, one meant white domination—would never be allowed to occur again.

  And so, one by one, the chartered jets flew south with important European personages aboard, and these personages, often dripping with diamonds and magnificence, hosted final formal dinners at Government Houses, made declamatory speeches full of flourish and earnest promise, signed parchment documents of retrocession and release, and presided the following morning over military march-pasts and many-gunned salutes and the lowering of the European flags and the raising of new and colorful African banners, and there were aerodrome handshakes filmed against the background whine of jet engines and then final farewell waves from outside the aircraft door and after takeoff maybe the dab of an eye with a handkerchief, as beneath the plane the panorama of the great green landscape of Africa—with her forests and her red murrum roads and her clouds of circling egrets—was at first made vague by wisps of cloud, and then vanished clear away as the plane gained altitude, after which it was time to make a course back north to the chilly airports of Europe, and to leave Africa to find her own way home.

  Such passing-out ceremonies punctuated the sixties, the seventies, the eighties, with an almost dizzying abundance. Once the drone of the last departing aircraft had faded, and the interlopers had all left, the maps they had drawn and the borders they had created—it is worth noting that there had never been any entity called Nigeria, for instance, until Sir Frederick Lugard had designed it,* no Rhodesia until Cecil Rhodes had struck a mining deal with Chief Lobengula of the local Matabele and had the resulting concessioned territory named after himself—were put to use, in most cases, as the geopolitical framework for the construction of the new Africa.

  Not a few country names were changed, however: the world saw the birth of locally run nations called Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Malawi, Zaire. And not a few periods of strife then had to be endured, and various tyrants opposed or deposed as time went by, and as new governments tried shakily to settle themselves into place.

  It would be idle to say that the nation-building efforts of new Africa have been everywhere a consummate success—except that the continent does now enjoy the knowledge, if such brings comfort, that those who run Africa today are no longer strangers from beyond Africa’s coasts, but are the African tribes of ancient times, admitted to full flourish once again. And so the continent is once again a place of Ashanti and Shona, of Herero and San, of Toro and Ndebele and Zulu and Swazi and Tuareg, of Hausa, Masai, Kikuyu, and Matabele, the poetry of their hundreds of names—and languages and dialects and appearances and traditions and customs and clothing and gods—adding to the barely believable complexity of the land in and on which they live.