‘Savage times come again’ : Morel, Wells, and the African Soldier, c.1885-1920

The African soldier trained in western combat was a figure of fear and revulsion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My article examines representations of African soldiers in nonfictional writings by E.D. Morel about the Congo Free State (1885-1908), the same author’s reportage on African troops in post-First World War Germany, and H.G. Wells’s speculative fiction When the Sleeper Wakes (1899, 1910). In each text racist and anti-colonialist discourses converge in representing the African soldier as the henchman of corrupt imperialism. His alleged propensity for taboo crimes of cannibalism and rape are conceived as threats to white safety and indeed supremacy. By tracing Wells’s connections to the Congo reform campaign and situating his novel between two phases of Morel’s writing career, I interpret When the Sleeper Wakes as neither simply a reflection of past events in Africa or as a prediction of future ones in Europe. It is rather a transcultural text which reveals the impact of European culture upon the ‘Congo atrocities’, and the inscription of this controversy upon European popular cultural forms and social debates

Chersonesus: public archaeology on the Black Sea coast

The ancient city of Chersonesus on the Crimean peninsula was founded by Greek colonists in the fifth century BC. Today it is part of an enormous multi-period archaeological site where Greek, Roman and Byzantine ruins mingle with mortar shells and soldiers' skeletons of the Crimean and Second World wars. Aspiring to become a UNESCO World Heritage site, it is now the focus of intense local, national and international interest in its future, as the editor of Public Archaeology explains

Black sea.

Donated by Klaus KreiserReprinted from : [The Times Literary Supplement ?] TLS. July 28, 1995