Sunday, 23rd February 1901
Today, in a room I was not interested enough to identify, British and German diplomats signed an agreement on the border between German East Africa and the British colony of Nyasaland. A line on a map. A pencil mark through a continent that neither the pencil-holder nor the map-drawer has ever walked across, drawn between two territories named after the European powers that claimed them rather than the millions of people who live in them. The line passes through villages whose inhabitants will learn of its existence only when they discover they need permission to visit relatives on the other side.
This is what empires do on quiet days. They draw lines.
I have been watching Europeans draw lines on Africa since the Berlin Conference of 1884, when fourteen nations sat around a table and carved a continent like a Sunday roast — politely, with good napkins, and without inviting a single African to the meal. They drew borders through kingdoms and languages and kinship systems that had existed for centuries, because the borders were not drawn for the people who lived there. They were drawn for the people who intended to profit from there.
Today’s agreement is a footnote in that larger project. Britain gets Nyasaland. Germany gets what it will call Deutsch-Ostafrika. Both names will be temporary. The borders will not. When, in thirteen years, Britain and Germany stop being polite and start killing each other’s young men in the mud of France, they will also fight over these African territories — a forgotten theatre of a world war, where African soldiers will die for European quarrels on African soil, and the borders will change names again, and the lines will remain, and the people on either side will continue to need permission to visit their relatives, and the empire that drew the line will be long gone but the line itself will endure, because lines on maps outlive the hands that drew them. They always do.
Five days ago, on Monday evening, the young man I told you about stood up in the House of Commons.
It was half past ten at night. The chamber was not full — maiden speeches rarely draw a crowd — but it was attentive. His mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, was in the Ladies’ Gallery. So were four of his aunts. He had been sitting through a debate about the war in South Africa, listening to David Lloyd George — a Welsh radical, a fierce opponent of the war, a man whose bitterness on the subject is so intense it has become a kind of performance art — tear into the government’s conduct of the campaign.
Then Churchill rose. He was twenty-six. He had a lisp. He had rehearsed the speech so thoroughly that every pause was a decision and every digression was planned. He knew exactly what he was doing, and what he was doing was introducing himself — not as his father’s son, though he would invoke that ghost before sitting down — but as something new: a man who had seen the war from the inside, who had been captured and had escaped, and who therefore claimed the right to speak about it with an authority the armchair generals could not match.
He was clever. Perhaps too clever. He acknowledged Lloyd George’s passion while dismantling his argument, remarking that it might perhaps have been better, upon the whole, if the hon. Member, instead of making his speech without moving his Amendment, had moved his Amendment without making his speech. The chamber laughed. It is a good line. It is the kind of line that makes a career, and Churchill will spend sixty years producing lines like it, each one polished until it gleams, each one designed to do exactly what this one did: make the speaker seem effortless while demonstrating that effortlessness requires immense effort.
And then he said the thing that nobody expected. Speaking about the Boers — the enemy, the people he had fought, the people who had captured him — he said: If I were a Boer fighting in the field — and if I were a Boer I hope I should be fighting in the field…
The Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, muttered from the front bench: That’s the way to throw away seats.
Chamberlain was right, politically. You don’t win elections by sympathising with the enemy. But Churchill was right in a different way — a way that Chamberlain, who was the architect of the war and the concentration camps and the scorched-earth policy, could not afford to understand. Churchill was saying: I can see the other side. I can imagine being them. And imagining being them does not make me a traitor — it makes me honest. It is the most dangerous quality a politician can possess, this capacity for imaginative sympathy, because it leads to both greatness and catastrophe. Churchill will possess it his entire life, and he will apply it selectively, and the places where he applies it will be the places where he is magnificent, and the places where he withholds it — India, Bengal, the colonies — will be the places where he is monstrous, and the inconsistency will not trouble him because he will never quite see it as inconsistency. He will see it as judgement.
He closed with a reference to his father. I cannot sit down without saying how very grateful I am for the kindness and patience with which the House has heard me, and which have been extended to me, I well know, not on my own account, but because of a splendid memory which many hon. Members still preserve. Lord Randolph Churchill — dead six years, syphilitic, brilliant, ruined — invoked in the final sentence, his ghost standing behind his son’s living body the way all ghosts stand behind the living: invisible, shaping, inescapable.
The House received the speech well. The newspapers praised his composure. His career had begun.
Two days from now, on Tuesday, J. P. Morgan will incorporate the United States Steel Corporation. The first billion-dollar company in history. I mentioned this before and I will not belabour it, except to say that the act of incorporation is itself a kind of line on a map — a legal fiction that creates a border around wealth, declaring that this mass of furnaces and railways and ore mines and human labour is a thing, a single entity with rights and permanence, and that thing is now larger than most countries.
The century is drawing its lines. On maps. In speeches. In ledgers. On the veldt, where the British are building wire fences and blockhouses to divide the open country into sectors they can control, penning in the Boer commandos the way you pen cattle — another kind of line, drawn in barbed wire instead of ink, but the principle is identical: this side is ours, that side is yours, and crossing without permission is a crime.
In Beijing, the foreign powers are drawing their own lines — spheres of influence, zones of control, terms of surrender that will determine how much China must pay for the crime of attempting to expel the foreigners from its own land. The execution of Boxer leaders continues. Two were beheaded this week. I will not describe it. I have seen enough beheadings across enough centuries to know that the act is always the same — quick, brutal, administrative — and that the only thing that changes is who holds the sword and who kneels.
I think about lines constantly. I am, after all, something that passes through all of them. I cannot be stopped at a border. I cannot be contained by a fence. I have no passport, no nationality, no allegiance to any of the powers that are currently dividing the world among themselves with the calm assurance of children dividing sweets. I drift through their lines as though they do not exist, because for me they do not.
But for the living — for the farmer on the wrong side of a new border in East Africa, for the Boer woman behind the wire, for the Chinese official kneeling in a courtyard, for the steelworker in Pittsburgh who is now an employee of an entity so large it has its own gravity — the lines are real. The lines are the most real thing in the world. The lines determine who eats and who starves, who is free and who is penned, who is a citizen and who is a subject, who is a person and who is a resource.
The century is eight weeks old and it is already a century of lines. It will remain one. The lines will shift and multiply and occasionally dissolve, but they will never disappear entirely, because drawing lines is the thing the species does instead of thinking, and thinking is hard, and lines are easy, and easy always wins.
Next week, the lines continue.
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