Pray, what have I to do with lovers? I saw the Queen rising from the waves, and Helen and Maeve and Joan in her beautiful mob. Begone, O Aphrodite! Nicotina alone I serve—can your caresses drive her image from my heart? … My heart weeps …I cast aside my Nicotina. Shall I ever for one instant feel the divine joy of this one-time vilest of men, who loves and is beloved?11
Griffith shared in the British travellers’ bemusement at the ostentatious aspects of Portuguese culture. A Portuguese port town appeared to him to be full of diminutive soldiers, ‘black-moustached and yellow-faced’, who were inappropriately ‘carrying enormous sabres’. Life in the town appeared to Griffith as carnivalesque, bordering on the grotesque:
Every third day is a great saint’s day … The troops fire off their guns, the band plays at the kiosk, and the governor illuminates his residence. We go to the church and stare at the red-white-and-blue saints, dressed in tinsel-paper with cardboard crowns stuck on their heads …‘These Portuguese’, said a Saxon to me as we lay on deck that night, blowing our tobacco-clouds up in the face of divine Astarte, ‘are useless in the world … If England or America had magnificent Delagoa the trade and commerce of South Africa would be doubled in five years; but these little pride-inflated, lazy nincompoops, with their big swords and ten thousand saints, are ruining the country.’ 12
Such manifestations of British cultural prejudice against less industrialised Mediterranean nations were not alien to the Dubliner Griffith. His strong sense of identification with his English companions would disappear, however, whenever they boasted of the political achievements of the British Empire. At Zanzibar, for instance, several English travellers asked Griffith for his opinion of Britain’s performance in the recent Anglo-Zanzibar War. This had ended in just forty-five minutes after a British gunboat blew up the palace of the Sultan who had declared war. Griffith replied by expressing disapproval of the Empire, after which the English, who had hitherto been ‘very pleasant fellows as travel-companions’, turned on him with seething hatred, prompting Griffith to conclude that ‘each had a tiger sleeping in his heart’ that was born of a militant British nationalism.13
The nature of African town life led Griffith to the conclusion that Christian missionary work often went hand-in-hand with colonial exploitation. In one particular town, he found that the six richest men were Christian missionaries. Each man, it seemed to him, treated the natives simply as slaves:
He came to enlighten the heathen and in the process of enlightenment acquired wealth sufficient to enable him to live comfortably … He had converted six heathens who hewed wood and drew water for him, while he smoked his pipe and said it was good. As money is the root of all evil he gave them none but he occasionally hired them out at so much per day to do work for other people.14
Griffith’s sense of outrage at the colonists’ treatment of the native Africans as children prompted him to typify the Negro as ‘an old, old man’:
Once upon a time when your father and mine—my white brother— were lusty barbarians, the Ethiop was a mighty man, a warrior, a sailor, a poet, an artist, a cunning artificer, and a philosopher.15
Contemporary imperialist propaganda, issued by each of the European powers, invariably justified their financial exploits in Africa by portraying their adversaries as ‘robbers and murderers with a penchant for harpooning pious Christians’. Griffith, however, typified this as a denial of ‘the solemn truth the Japanese has grasped, that the Art of Destruction must be learned from the Christian nations’.16 He even suggested that life in Africa had probably been ‘comparatively godly’ before the Europeans had built their Christian churches there, in the halcyon days when ‘there were no crawling capitalist conspirators infesting the country’.17 Griffith’s cynicism regarding organised religion at this time included the Irish Jesuits, whom he accused of having substituted ‘the Gospel of Khaki’ (the British Army) for ‘the Gospel of the Prince of Peace’ (Christ) through their desire to benefit financially from British imperial colonialism.18
In Pretoria, Griffith discovered that the Dutch ‘Boer’ colony had become very militarised as a result of recent British raids into the territory. Here he met John James Lavery, a British businessman of Irish descent who had purchased a small newspaper in the town of Middelburg. Lavery was looking for some editorial assistance and Griffith seized this opportunity. Some local historians have dated the beginning of his editorial work to May 1897, although Griffith recollected that ‘it was a pleasant autumn evening when I struck the town’.19 The Courant was a badly printed country paper with a circulation of only 300 copies, some of which reached larger towns such as Johannesburg and Pretoria, and it was designed for the British citizens living within the Dutch colony.20 The newspaper office was tiny and grubby and ‘when I found the office I felt sorry I had come, but the die was cast … . We were sometimes short of type and often short of paper in the Courant offices, but our subscribers accepted this as inevitable.’ Griffith typified his work for this paper as provocative, prompting readers to ‘complain when I started writing in its columns’:
It had been the policy of the Courant to please all parties—the English for preference. I explained to its owner that if he wanted me to edit his paper, its policy must be one that would please myself. He agreed, and I pleased myself by arguing that the Boer and no one but the Boer owned the Transvaal, that the Queen’s writ didn’t run there and shouldn’t run there, and the God Almighty had not made the earth for the sole use of the Anglo-Saxon race. This offended the Englishmen and they sent word they would drop round one evening, burn down the office and finish the editor off. But they didn’t.21
In fact, Griffith’s job consisted mostly of reporting on local business matters, although he also drew attention to the formation of Maud Gonne’s L’Irlande Libre (Paris).22 Life in the town itself was dull as it contained only ‘two hotels, a Dutch church, an English church, and a jail’:
It was the centre of the coal-mining district … The young English managers of the mines played billiards all the month round in the town and ‘let things rip’, as they elegantly termed it. The shareholders in England paid for their fun.23
The most colourful episode to occur for Griffith in Middelburg was to meet Olive Schreiner, a daughter of Dutch and English Protestant missionaries who had the reputation in London, which she occasionally visited, of being the leading literary figure in South Africa. Prior to their meeting, Griffith had dismissed her literary reputation by arguing that ‘she has not grasped, or mayhap “disdained”, the fact that the literature of a people must be of and from the people’. He suggested that not unless someone ‘arises who can understand and sympathise with the ideals and aspirations of the people of this portion of the world, black as well as white, there can be no African literature’. Such a writer, he noted, would need to have ‘powers of expression and genius’ but such qualities were ‘as scarce in Africa as millionaires are plentiful’.24 When he actually met Schreiner, however, Griffith found that she was ‘a charming woman’. Later, he was delighted to find that she became a critic of British imperialism in South Africa,25 as indeed many contemporaries did.26
Griffith’s time with the Courant was cut short after he responded to the horsewhipping of an English townsman by a Dutch Boer landowner by writing that the former had received just what he deserved. The offended English party not only won a court case against the landowner but also pressed libel charges against the Courant, demanding five thousand pounds compensation from a paper that had a grand capital of thirty pounds. As a result, Lavery was arrested, receiving a sentence of either six months hard labour or a fine of one hundred pounds. Fortunately for Lavery, the population of Middelburg paid the fine but considerable ill feeling had developed and so the paper was disbanded.27 Griffith left the town in October 1897 with neither regrets nor, it seems, any sense of shared responsibility for Lavery’s misfortune. It was an example of which Griffith’s hero, John Mitchel, probably would have been proud. Noting how ‘I eventually managed to kill the paper’, Griffith recalled that while ‘there were some drawbacks to journalism in Middelburg
