Somehow that book survived my 2011 flood, and ten years later I re-bought and re-read Waugh's first novel Decline and Fall, but Waugh Abroad stayed on one shelf or another for about twenty years. I've taken it down now and then - as you do to books on your unread shelves - and finally read the second book in it, Remote People, now that it's 2025.
(The omnibus has five further books. Unless I expect to live until 2120 - which would be nice, but not to be expected - I may have to pick up the pace.)
Remote People was Waugh's second travel book, and somewhat less random than Labels. It was 1930, Haile Selassie was about to be crowned Emperor of Abyssinia, and Waugh thought it might be interesting to witness that - so he got a newspaper to sponsor him as correspondent and set off to witness history. Once he got down to East Africa, he also spent some time in various British colonial outposts in the region - Aden in Arabia, Kenya and Uganda, and traveled through other administrative areas (British or other colonial powers) but didn't spend as much time in those other regions.
Waugh is a colonialist, but not horribly so for his era. I found him somewhat less racist than I expected, remembering how misanthropic he generally is - but this is still fairly early Waugh, when he hated society and his own people mostly, and not as deeply, before the loathing for everyone and everything set in after the war. He definitely is racist: he was an aristocratic British man in 1930, so he considered himself superior to not just everyone with darker skin than his own, but most of the residents of the UK and similar nations as well. And he has that arch British reserve; there's a woman he just calls "Irene" who he spends a bunch of time with in Addis Ababa, and I couldn't figure out if she was supposed to be someone the general 1930 audience would already know, or possibly a cousin or something like that, or if it was just someone he was having an affair with and he was flaunting it as much as possible given the mores of the era.
This is the kind of travel book that is largely about difficulties: getting to places through bad roads and railways and promised airplanes that never appear, heat and mosquitos and dust, food that Waugh detests, physical hardship, the laziness of natives and the random vagueness and lies of colonials, and so on. Waugh has a bunch of interesting set-pieces, though the biggest and most quirky one - Selassie's coronation - is right up front, so the rest of the book is a slight let-down, turning into the usual "this foreign country is a mess and a pain to get around" material after the wacky high comedy of the vast array of global envoys toasting this new self-proclaimed Emperor in in his half-built capital.
The best thing about Waugh is always his voice and viewpoint: he's crisp and mostly clear, but somewhat jaundiced, never expecting anything to completely work correctly or be what it promises. There is some political thought here, though not in any great depth, and fairly mild for its era. (Waugh seems to believe that Africans, or at least Ethiopians, can rule themselves just about as well as anyone else could, and his concerns about colonialism are mostly that it's expensive and not terribly useful for the colonizer.)
This is a world that's been gone for nearly a century now - swept away in the wave of nation-building that followed WWII - and I wouldn't want to claim Waugh was an unbiased or transparent guide to that world in the first place. But this is a fine book of Waugh insights and views of a weird, unusual part of the world at an interesting time, not long before everything got upended.
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