Nevertheless, until I was awarded a travelling grant from the university to go to French North Africa in 1938, I had not been to what was not yet known as the Third World since I left Egypt as a baby. I travelled in Tunisia and east-central Algeria, from sea to Sahara, but never got to western Algeria and Morocco, and I acquired a lifelong scepticism about rural statistics in such places from a lonely French administrator in the field, ready to talk to any educated visitor. (‘When the government asks me for a livestock census, I make very casual enquiries, because the flocks would vanish into the hills otherwise. Then I look up what we said last time round, and put in a figure that looks plausible.’) I also acquired respect for the mountains and people of Kabylia and for the intelligence and erudition of the French Maghrebists and Islamic experts, even though most of them, like British African anthropology in those days, served the relevant empire. I met the leader of the small Algerian Communist Party, exiled into the Sahara after 1939 and killed, but not the then most important revolutionary, Messali Hadj. I have sometimes wondered whether I would have become a better historian if, after the war, I had returned to the research theme of ‘The Agrarian Problem in French North Africa’ which I brought back from my travels. People I admire – the great historian Braudel, my friend Pierre Bourdieu and the late Ernest Gellner – have been inspired by working in the Maghreb, and I can understand why. However, if I had, few would have noticed. Except, curiously enough, in sub-Saharan Africa, the end of empires led to a generation of amnesia about their history. Besides, the bloody Algerian war of the 1950s and the bitterly disappointing record of independent Algeria since would have rather marginalized the field. I note in passing that, while the future of Tunisia under its eventual president Habib Bourguiba was already identifiable in 1938, absolutely nothing discoverable about Algeria in that year would have led anyone to predict, or even to envisage, the force that eventually liberated the country, the FLN (National Liberation Front).
II
Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1959 led to a sudden upsurge of interest in everything to do with Latin America, a region about which there was much rumour, but at that time little knowledge outside the Americas. With rare exceptions the locally resident Europeans, other than the Spanish war refugees and North Americans, lived in their own worlds like my non-intermarrying Chilean relatives, who still saw themselves as English expatriates or at least European refugees. (I think all my five cousins spent the Second World War serving their country in British uniforms.) Since the continent had been decolonized, it lacked the large, intelligent and documented literature provided by imperial administrators whose business it was to understand countries in order to rule them efficiently. Communities of expatriate businessmen, as the record shows, are almost completely useless as sources of information about the countries they operate in, although the British ones in their time founded the football clubs in which South American patriotism has found its most intense expression.
Latin America was then remoter from the Old World than any other part of the globe – though not, of course, from the imperial power in the north, overseeing its technically independent satellites. It experienced the two world wars only as bringers of prosperity. It passed through the most murderous of centuries without more than a single brief international war on its territory (the Chaco War of 1932–5 between Bolivia and Paraguay), though not, alas, without considerable domestic bloodshed. A continent of a single religion, it has so far escaped the world epidemic of linguistic, ethnic and confessional nationalism.
Latin America was not easy to come to grips with. When I first went there in 1962, the continent was in one of its periodic moods of expansive economic confidence, articulated by the Economic Commission for Latin America of the UN, an all-continental brains trust located in Santiago de Chile under an Argentine banker, which recommended a policy of planned, state-sponsored and largely state-owned industrialization and economic growth through import substitution. It seemed to work, at least for giant, inflation-plagued but booming Brazil. This was the time when Juscelino Kubitschek, a president of Czech origin, launched the conquest of Brazil’s vast interior by building a new capital in it, designed largely by the country’s most eminent architect, Oscar Niemeyer, a known member of the powerful but illegal Communist Party who, he told me, designed it with Engels in mind.
Its main countries were also in one of the continent’s occasional phases of constitutional civilian government which was soon to end. However, the
Nobody who discovers South America can resist the region, least of all if one’s first contact is with the Brazilians. Nevertheless, what was most immediately obvious about its countries was not so much its spectacular economic inequality, which has not ceased to increase since, as the enormous gap between its ruling and intellectual classes with which visiting academics had contact, and the common people. The intellectuals, mostly from comfortable or ‘good’ – overwhelmingly white – families, were sophisticated, widely travelled, and spoke English and (still) French. As so often in the Third World (to which the Argentines vociferously refused to belong), they formed the thinnest continent-wide social layer, for in their minds, unlike the artificial concept of ‘Europe’ in the minds of the old continent, Latin America was a constant reality. If they were in politics, they almost certainly had a spell as exiles in another Latin American country or a common trip to Castro’s Cuba; if academics, a spell as members of some multinational establishment in Santiago, Rio or Mexico City. Since they were thin on the ground, they knew each other or knew about each other. That is how in 1962, from the start, being passed from one contact to another, a visitor like myself could quickly find his bearings from people whose names meant nothing in Europe, but who turned out to be key intellectual or public figures. But the very fact that such people moved in a world equally familiar with Paris, New York and five or six Latin capitals separated them from the world in which most darker-skinned and less well-connected Latin Americans lived.
Outside the already urbanized ‘southern cone’ (Argentina, Uruguay and Chile) these people were flooding from the countryside into the shanty-towns of the exploding cities, bringing their rural ways with them. Sao Paulo had doubled in size in the ten years before I got there. They squatted on city hillsides as in the country they had dug up unoccupied corners of the big estates and built shelters and shacks, eventually to become proper houses, the way it was done in the village, by mutual help of neighbours and kin, rewarded with a party. On the street markets of Sao Paulo, overshadowed by the new high-rise buildings, the masses from the parched hinterlands of the northeast bought shirts and jeans on instalment payments and the cheap illustrated booklets of verse ballads about the great bandits of their region. I still have the copies I bought then. In Lima, Peru, there were already radio stations broadcasting in Quechua – in the early morning hours when the whites were still in bed – to the Indian immigrants from the mountains, now numerous enough to constitute a market, in spite of their poverty. The great writer, folklorist and Indianist Jose sMaria Arguedas took me to one of the music halls where, on Sunday mornings, the highland people came to listen to songs and jokes about ‘down home’. (‘Anyone here from Ancash? Let’s hear it for the lads and lasses from Huanuco!’) In 1962 it seemed almost unthinkable that thirty years later I would supervise the son of one of them for a doctorate at the New School in New York. It is an extraordinary experience to have lived with the first generation in recorded history in which a poor boy with an illiterate wife from a Quechua- speaking village in the high Andes could become a unionized hospital driver by picking up the skills of driving a truck and thus open the globe to his children. I have his long letter still, written in the deliberate handwriting and careful Castilian orthography of the autodidact. Though his life was hard by our standards, by those of the masses of day- labourers, street-sellers, casual and miscellaneous poor he was at the top.
The people who came to the city were at least visible on the streets. The people in the countryside were doubly remote from the middle classes, including their revolutionaries such as Che Guevara, by geographical and social distance. Even those with the greatest interest in having the closest contacts with them found the differences
