Uncle Tom Adlam and Thomas Thistlewood

My grandfather’s younger brother was called Tom Adlam. As far as we know, he is by some distance the most famous Adlam, having been awarded the Victoria Cross (Britain’s highest military honour) in the First World War. His citation reads as follows.

“On 27 September 1916 at Thiepval, France, a portion of a village which had defied capture had to be taken at all costs and Second Lieutenant Adlam rushed from shell-hole to shell-hole under very heavy fire collecting men for a sudden rush. At this stage he was wounded in the leg but in spite of his wound he led the rush, captured the position and killed the occupants. Throughout the day he continued to lead his men and on the following day, although wounded again he still led and encouraged them. His magnificent example and behaviour produced far-reaching results.”

In later life, he was content to be headmaster of a small school in Hampshire and led a modest, quiet life until his death in 1975. Despite the fact that we lived less than 20 miles away, we seldom visited. Indeed, I can only remember meeting Uncle Tom on one occasion when I was 10.

A few years ago, my own father was contacted by another Adlam who was trying hard to assemble a genealogy of the Adlam family. My father was amused by this approach, in particular by his correspondent’s statement that the Adlams appeared to have “emerged from a hole in the ground somewhere near Salisbury about 150 years ago.” He was, I think, quite helpful but appeared to have little interest in family history. For two principal reasons, however, I have recently developed much more interest in the subject.

First, earlier this year I was contacted by Sheneika Adlam, a young Jamaican lady, through Facebook. I had previously known of Adlams in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Australia and Canada, but I was unaware of Adlams in Jamaica. Second, I have just finished reading "Bury the Chains" by Adam Hochschild. This brilliant book tells the story of the campaign in Britain to abolish slavery. Much of the book describes slavery in the Caribbean, including Jamaica. Among many interesting themes, Hochschild examines the sexual abuse suffered by slave women at the hands of white overseers. He quotes extensively from the journal of one Thomas Thistlewood, whose catalogue of callous abuse is recorded in hideously banal detail. Hochschild speculates that Thistelwood's mission appears to have been aimed at lightening the colour of the entire plantation, such was the quantum of his sexual appetite.

The sad fact is that many slaves - in particular their children - were given (or took) their owner's name. Does the fact that there are Adlams in Jamaica today mean that there were Adlams who were - in one way or another - involved in slavery in the Caribbean? Do the horrors of this worst of trades form part of my own family history? It wouldn't really be surprising: I daresay most people in Britain have some distant family connection with the slave trade, but we all prefer to think of the Uncle Toms rather than the Thomas Thistlewoods of the past.

They may have little interest until they reach the tipping point in their lives when the past becomes more interesting than the future, but, for the sake of my sons and daughter, I want to find out more.

'Twas ever thus

This wonderful cartoon satirises French society just before the French Revolution – more than 200 years ago. The clergy and the nobility are riding on the back of the peasant. Words alone will never communicate as effectively as this simple picture, though Rousseau’s claim that “Man was born free, but everywhere he is in chains” comes close.

I was reminded of this cartoon when I read a very interesting article by Lucy Oriang' in Kenya’s Daily Nation. I quote: “There are only two tribes in this country [Kenya] – the rich and the poor. The difference lies in who pays taxes and who doesn’t, and who gets shot in the back by a policeman and who gets a security detail at public expense. It has nothing to do with your mother tongue.” (Her reference to taxes is, I presume, aimed at Kenyan parliamentarians who have opposed a proposal that MPs’ allowances (which are very substantial) should be taxed).

Of course, this analogy of the two tribes is not unique to Kenya: it persists, to this day, all over the world. In fact, it is now much worse than it was: there are many more people who live in bondage and slavery now than at the height of the Atlantic slave trade. What does seem to be missing, however, are campaigns, movements, politics and leaders who propose alternatives to our way of life. Even the recent financial turmoil, which has provided us all with a graphic demonstration of the impact of unalloyed greed, consumption and inequality at both a household and an institutional level, has not yet thrown up alternatives to the ways in which we are organized and governed as societies. Why is this? Was Francis Fukuyama right when, in his book The End of History, he presented the thesis that Western Liberal Democracy is the final form of societal organization to which all societies will ultimately conform?

In East Africa, the overwhelming majority of the population is poor: smallholders eking out a living on small plots of land given over to subsistence cultivation; the urban poor living in low quality housing with poor sanitation, struggling to make ends meet through petty trade or casual employment, or worse. The contrast between rich and poor is more stark than in wealthier European and North American economies. But there are other forms of injustice, inequality and dispossession which have developed and which contribute towards impoverishment of the majority. I am thinking here of the fragmentation of family life, the burden of personal debt, the de-skilling of populations who purchase ready-prepared dinners, who rely on mass media for their entertainment, who dispose rather than mend and recycle, and who are now coming to a slow but steady realization that their way of life is unsustainable….

This cartoon is just as accurate now as it was then. Sadly, it’s hard to believe that we will ever change.

Sir Roger and the Congo

Once again, the Congo is in the forefront of the media for all the wrong reasons. Civil war, displacement, rape, murder, ethnic cleansing, corruption.... a more talented writer than I described it as "Pandora's box without the hope" and it's hard to escape this conclusion.

I don't know Congo at all well: I have only made one visit, yet it is strangely fascinating. My first memory was of the Rumble in the Jungle, when Muhammed Ali defeated George Foreman in heavyweight boxing. My second was reading Conrad's Heart of Darkness. In the light of what has come afterwards, who can forget the following quote "The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much." Certainly Leopold's conquest of the Congo was, even by the standards of imperialism as a whole, not a pretty thing. The supposed Congo Free State in which Leopold and his mercenaries established a centralised government solely for the purpose of looting the country of its rubber, its ivory and its minerals. Adam Hochschild's wonderful book, King Leopold's Ghost, describes the numerous atrocities inflicted on the Congolese people - and first alerted me to the role played by Sir Roger Casement in exposing these atrocities to the outside world.

Sir Roger Casement (pictured above) is an intriguing character. Knighted for his humanitarian services first to the people of the Congo and then for carrying out a similar expose on the abuses and cruelty inflicted on Putumayo indians in the Amazon basin, he fell spectacularly from grace due to his support for the Irish nationalist party, Sinn Fein. Latterly tried, convicted and executed for treason - following his bungled attempt to further the Irish rebellion with German support during the first World War - his life story presents a mystery to biographers and historians. This mystery is not only in his public life, but also in his private life - publicised by his English accusers in the form of the infamous black diaries - which describe in some detail his homosexual escapades. But perhaps it is not so difficult: he was undoubtedly a sensitive and kind man, and the horrors of imperial exploitation first in Congo and then in the Amazon - must have led him to think about the English occupation of Ireland....

Sir Roger's other tragedy is that despite his intervention, and that of his friend and tireless human rights campaigner E D Morel, the legacy of Leopold's Congo has proved so strong. From the Belgian abandonment in 1960, to Patrice Lumumba's assassination, to the long and disastrous rule of Mobutu Sese Seko, to the accession (and assassination) of the brutal Laurent Kabila, to the "democratic" elections two years ago which presented Congolese with a choice between the inept Joseph Kabila and war criminal Jean-Pierre Bemba, to Laurent Nkunda's latest incursion ostensibly to protect Tutsi minorities in the East, so little has changed.

For me, Congo exemplifies three things. First, the wicked and enduring scar left by colonialism on Africa. Second, the curse of abundant natural resources in an environment where the biggest fists are all that matter. Third, the hideous impact of systematic corruption on justice and the rule of law. What next for the people of the Congo?