“Do objects have souls?” wrote the writer and critic Anna Della Subin in a recent essay for Frieze magazine. The question emerged out of her decade-long investigation into the modern history of man-gods, those politicians, military officers, royals and explorers who found themselves unexpectedly deified – a piece of research that takes shape as a hefty work of literature spanning the globe and five centuries.
The issue of mundane objects such as scissors, clocks or agricultural implements being imbued with divinity forms only a small part of the book. However, Della Subin’s discussion of what Europeans from the late 15th century onwards dismissively referred to as “African” practices of worship is a key part of her argument, which is that colonialists used such practices as a “weapon against Africans”, as well as other populaces, to sanction their subjugation. Hegel, for example, pointed to “reports of fetishism and spirit possession to argue that the enslavement of Africans was part of the natural order of things”.
Such conclusions were arbitrary, says Subin.“What philosophers denigrated as error and unreason was actually a disagreement between certain Europeans and certain Africans about the proper worth, not of things, but of peoples. It revealed how correct knowledge about divinity is never a matter of the best doctrine, but of who possesses the more powerful army.”
Whether Krishna had any desire to inhabit the part of a messiah was a moot point... the child was to embody the spiritual union of India and England
With army in tow or not, there are a lot of Europeans crashing through the lives of those in other continents in this book.
In the second section, which focuses on the activities of the British Raj, the author writes about the British theosophist Annie Besant. Despite the searing loss of her two children after she was deemed an unfit mother by a misogynistic legal system, Besant apparently didn’t think twice about removing an 11-year-old Indian child from his family, once she turned her attention to what she termed her true “motherland” in 1893. That boy was Krishnamurti, and Besant, along with Charles Leadbeater – a lapsed Anglican priest, and likely paedophile – intended to turn him into a god.
Whether Krishna had any desire to inhabit the part of a messiah was a moot point. Under Besant’s theosophical instruction, the child was to embody the spiritual union of India and England, which Besant termed the “little Mother State”, and thus the place that still knew best.
That idea of knowing best applied even to Mohandas Gandhi, who, according to Subin, despised being called “Mahatma”, a term dreamt up by the London theosophists in reference to a committee of ancient, super-normal men said to exist on a different plane. Gandhi had no interest in being a god, and he said so over and again throughout his life. No matter. Besant is said to have been the first to christen him Mahatma, trapping him in his own holiness, a deity who was above the law and thus, argued his murderer in court, one who could only be brought down by gunshots.
Anna Della Subin calmly traces the origins of race, and white supremacy, back to the European colonialists
Before this, in the book’s first section, Subin finds the colonised turning the tables, elevating such figures as Prince Philip and General MacArthur to divinities, a counter-myth, as a way of grasping at some equality. For the island of Tanna, “discovered” by Captain Cook in 1774, Philip’s divinity brings international recognition, visitors and film crews, and interest in the kastom way of life. For members of the Rastafarian movement in Jamaica, the emperor Haile Selassie represented the “driving image of liberation, for all Africa and its diaspora”, Ethiopia being the only country on the African continent to escape Europe’s 19th-century “scramble for Africa”.
It is fascinating stuff, and Subin marshals her enormous arsenal of facts to compelling effect, even if the sometimes florid prose requires a fair amount of readerly heavy lifting. All the same, her contentions are thoughtful and subtle, and for this reviewer it was the final section of the publication that proved most impactful.
Here the author calmly traces the origins of race, and white supremacy, back to the European colonialists. Along with justifying their conquest of native peoples to those peoples’ worship of “false” gods (including the explorers themselves), they also reasoned, in a complicated exercise in hoop jumping, that the Bible actually revealed two distinct creation stories – with the descendants of Adam naturally coming out on top before, alas, becoming corrupted through hybridity and amalgamation.
So it was that, in 1860, on the eve of the American civil war, only one part of the Adamic race was thought to remain untarnished and godlike: the pure-blooded white man. A century and a half later, still we have so far to go. “Until race becomes a relic,” writes Subin, “white divinity a curiosity of a pagan past”.
