Heroic Imperialists in Africa: The Promotion of British and French Colonial Heroes

Berny Sèbe has written an excellent comparative account of the rise to prominence in Britain and France of male colonial figures in the late nineteenth century and their continued relevance into the interwar years. For Sèbe, as for a number of other scholars working on imperial heroes, what defined these men as heroes was not their deeds or careers but rather the construction of a reputation amongst their respective national publics. A heroic reputation was established through marketing, political manipulation and cultural appropriation; sometimes, a heroic figure was self-conscious and instrumental to the development of their own reputation, sometimes they were not. But for the historian of popular imperialism, what matters is why certain figures developed a heroic reputation, for what purposes were they used and what these heroes tell us about their own domestic societies’ values and relationship to the imperial project. Sèbe’s book is very good at explaining how the reputations of key imperial figures were established, and on providing the deep context to the creation of national reputations at this time. Indeed, the first third of the book is devoted to the convergence of technical, commercial, educational and political factors that facilitated hero-making. Although other forms of material culture (monuments, naming practices, visual media) are also examined, the bulk of the evidence and the crux of the argument lies in the commercial explosion of print culture in the late nineteenth century. Sèbe clearly outlines the rise of mass literacy and the desire of publishers to sell to mass audiences, the application of ‘second industrial revolution’ techniques to book production. That these economic, technical and cultural changes occurred at the moment of the ‘new imperialism’—most particularly in Africa—helps explains the prominence of the particular imperial heroes he focuses on in this period. In short, the profit motive drove both the British and, a little later, the French, culture industries to lionize imperial heroes.

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