Book review: As an African, Daouda is scandalised by white Western man’s claim she is a victim

Not Your Victim: How Our Obsession with Race Entraps and Divides Us by Marie Kawthar Daouda

This is one of the best books of its kind yet published.

Marie Kawthar Daouda urges us to love Britain and its rich, messy history, and to spurn claims to victimhood based on race.

She tells white Western man to stop “infantilising” himself by proclaiming all the evil in the world to be the result of his own original sin in subjecting the rest of the globe to his imperial designs.

When white Western man imposes this view, surreptitiously boasting all the while of his own humility, he not only lodges a paradoxical claim to continued moral authority, even one might say to moral empire, but also infantilises Africans, and other once subject peoples, by depriving them of moral responsibility.

Africans are victims: this is one of the pernicious consequences of the dogma promoted by what Daouda calls the Authoritarian Left. Africans are not allowed to take credit for their achievements, or blame for their failures.

Daouda is an African. She was born in Morocco, once known, she reminds us, as the Cherifian Empire. From the first, one may guess from her book (I have never met her), she possessed a certain independence of mind, and a love of learning.

When she was 17, she moved to France, “another former empire”, to continue her education. She writes with gallic lucidity, the exactitude of a French scholar who will not be fobbed off with the blurry evasions to which an English man of letters might out of charity or feeble-mindedness resort.

Twelve years later she moved again, from Paris to Oxford, where she is now a Lecturer in French at Oriel College. Sometimes an outsider can see more clearly what is good about a society than do those born into it.

Here is what Daouda writes on the last of her 162 pages:

“I lay down these few lines for all the friends I have made, living and dead, in Britain. I think of John Keats, who opened my eyes to love and beauty…I think of Frances Hodgson Burnett, whose Little Princess and Secret Garden told me of hope and grace when I was a rather lonely child…I think of Saint John Henry Newman, who left Oriel when he became a Catholic and came back when he became a cardinal, whose Callista threw me from dreams to prayer. I think of Saint Thomas More, of his steady, slightly frightened but so brave gaze in that Holbein painting of which a clumsy copy adorns the Oriel Hall. I think of the green hills beyond the ghost gates of Oxford, of the hills’ deep soil full of stories, and of the blue sky behind the hazy clouds, full of the dreams that rise with the chiming bells. I think of all the people who have seen the land, the stones, the sky that I can see, and who stood alone, on tiptoe on the edge of eternity, with their desire for what is beautiful and true, against the indifference of the wise and the raging yells of the crowds. To each of them, I owe something of who I am, and I shall be eternally grateful.”

When she arrived in Britain she admired “a certain freedom of thought”. Then “2020 happened”: lockdown in March, George Floyd killed in May, and a “wave of irrationality” sweeping across Britain, Black Lives Matter in the ascendant, Colston’s statue thrown into the river at Bristol and ethnic minorities treated as indistinguishable from each other, “eternal props in your indulgent theatre of cultural self-harm”.

Daouda was profoundly shocked:

“To loathe one’s land is to cover it with salt and water it with poison, then curse it for not bearing good fruit.”

Having previously assumed that crazy intellectual fashions come and go, she now took the view that this appallingly destructive mentality might not be got rid of for several generations.

Here I hope she is wrong. Sanity has already started to reassert itself. We shall doubtless discover new forms of insanity, but no more statues have been thrown in the river, Churchill’s plinth is at the time of writing undefaced, and the statue of Cecil Rhodes still stands high above the High Street in Oxford, on a building erected after his death by Oriel, using part of his bequest to the college where he himself had studied.

Daouda remarks that as an African, she is certainly not scandalised by the statue of Rhodes. She is instead scandalised by the monstrous presumption that some people, because of their skin colour, “should feel threatened by the visual traces of England’s history”.

Catholics, she points out, are fine with statues of Henry VIII and Cromwell, and Muslims visit the Alhambra every day.

She touches on earlier periods of iconoclasm, including the Dissolution of the Monasteries in England and the Revolution in France. Here was destruction on a vastly greater scale than our countries have witnessed in the last few years.

Among university students she has seen “unprecedented levels of anxiety on questions of social justice and belonging”.

She notes the inability of secular thought “to address the problem of evil without reverting to pre-Christian mechanisms of scapegoating”: let us smash a statue or deface a picture: outbursts of puritanism in which the religious have also engaged.

We strive to make ourselves feel better by imposing, in the name of diversity, a deadening uniformity of opinion.

And yet opinion has not become entirely uniform. We may at first, for fear of being unkind or intolerant, or being thought racist, greet some monstrous, newly fashionable doctrine with excessive respect, or at least without open derision.

But then come books like the one under review, and several others recently discussed here, which explode the modish claims which have been made. Daouda would be appalled “to see Christianity used as a sub-category of conservatism”, but avows that only “the truth of divine, sacrificial love” can satisfy the human heart.

A ray of light appears, a hope of salvation.

Yet as Richard Ingrams remarks, in the introduction to his England, An Anthology, published in 1990 and still available in all good second-hand bookshops, running through the whole of our literature, especially that of the Romantic era and beyond, “is a deeply held conviction on the part of the nobler spirits that the country is irrevocably doomed”.

At the start of that book stand some words of John Ruskin, “Blind, tormented, unwearied, marvellous England,” after which Ingrams quotes, among much else, the penetrating observations of various brilliant Frenchmen about the English: Berlioz, La Rochefoucauld, Maurois, Taine, Tocqueville, Verlaine and Voltaire.

Daouda is a brilliant visitor from Morocco via France who appears to have decided to stay.

As long as she’s here perhaps there’s hope.