Tyrants: Christopher Hope's Brothers Under the Skin, which might at first seem nothing more than a collection of journalism, is actually superb, telling us more about the anthropology of power than a thousand academic monographs, writes Giles Foden
Christopher Hope was about five years old when he met his first tyrant. "His name was Hendrik Verwoerd. He was my neighbour and we lived close to each other in one of those green Johannesburg suburbs that named its streets after Irish counties: Kerry, Wexford, Donegal. So much in South Africa conspired to remind one of somewhere else."
This unusual spin on swardy memories of Erin provides the formative moment of Brothers Under the Skin, in which Hope explores dictatorial regimes he has encountered at various periods. As well as Verwoerd, architect of the apartheid system from which the author spent much of his life in exile, the book covers Milosevic, Bokassa, East Germany, North Vietnam and, in the background, Stalin, Lenin, Mao and Pol Pot. But the star, the leading role in this powerful journey into the mind of the power-mad, is Robert Mugabe.
The Zimbabwean president's pathology is ascribed by one who knows him well to physical damage to the genitals. Hope himself says that much more important was his harsh schooling at the hands of Irish Jesuits, whose education was "delivered with a particular stamp". But neither of these is enough to explain the particular propensity to violence currently shown by the former pupil of Katuma Mission, and one can point to similar factors in the background of many dictators.
The aim of Hope's book, as he travels back and forth in time and space (mainly South Africa in the 1950s and Zimbabwe in the 1990s), is to show lines of connection. All of his subjects are "brothers under the skin", all of the same "tyrannical kidney" (a nice phrase given Bokassa's taste for eating the internal organs of schoolgirls), as shown by a brilliant passage about the image of the leader:
It is as if at some point in the steady accumulation of power, the body of the despot begins to swell, the skin stretches to accommodate the internal expansion and signs of it appear in the face, which grows smoother, shinier, brighter. If you look at portraits of Stalin you see the phenomenon: it is as if someone not content with the face of the man as it was in life has painted it up, made it rosier and more artificial, rather like a face painted on a balloon.
The ailing Idi Amin, about whom I wrote a novel, had this quality in life as well as in reproduction. But the tyrant doesn't have to be fat to acquire a certain physical grotesquerie. "Tyrants are pneumatic, they puff up like beach balls, like giant dirigibles, they inflate and grow bigger until they loom over the land like horrible Hindenburgs . . . Eventually they pop, but it is always too late,and the mess is terrible." Hope learned this, he says, by watching Verwoerd and others, of whom "none so closely resembled my old neighbour than Robert Mugabe".
Another link between Verwoerd and Mugabe is a common belief that their countries are subject to a worldwide conspiracy directed by Britain. In Zimbabwe today all enemies are white; "even black enemies", says Hope, "undergo this skin transplant and become pale-faced messengers of foreign forces, Caucasian teaboys, imitation Englishmen".
I suppose in Ireland one has seen something of this in the phenomenon of the West Brit and his earlier incarnations, but this is something of a different order. What's ironic is that, in African cases at least, the repressive instruments of the regime are almost always modelled on those of the former colonial oppressor.
Hope is very good on the appearance of the "Leader", as he calls Mugabe: "He is a modest exterior over a deep well of malevolence: green army fatigues and curious pinky glasses, Ozymandias in rose-tinted specs." Mugabe is in this get-up at a rally attended by Hope, who is right to point out a connection between fashion and tyranny; the narcissism of "booted, upholstered authority". But the leather is fake. At the rally, this ersatz quality of the tyrant is shown in plain view: "There was something immensely rigged about the cheers, the flags, the crowd; even the Leader seemed to be hamming it up, as if this had been done too often. And of course it had."
Yet the tyrant's own view of himself is anything but fake: "Nothing more distinguished the tyranny of Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd than . . . his sincere conviction that apartheid was not merely desirable, it was morally right and divinely ordained." It is charisma which keeps the tyrant going, but also his nearness to the people, which is comprehended in his charisma: being "the monster next door" enables the tyrant's peculiar seduction. The voice is also part of it, in Mugabe's case: "His rhetorical gifts were considerable: he played to his listeners, he soaked them in his venom, blowing on the hate, keeping it warm." This was true of Idi Amin, too, although his rhetoric was that of the vaudeville comic, and only partially controlled at that.
Amin destroyed the connection between language and real life through farcical hyperbole; the cleverer tyrant destroys it by a kind of enclosure, fencing off words until they express nothing but the brute power of the state. "Dr Verwoerd had annexed them all; culture, western civilisation, justice, honour, fairness, and devalued them."
As Hope says, "power is terrifying yet absurd", paralysing onlookers with fear, yet baffling them because they know, everyone knows, "when they see the posturing creature on the podium, that they are being duped".
Is it because of these contradictions that the dictator can be "dangerously funny", like Emperor Bokassa, who moved into Hope's hotel in France. In his exiled state, Bokassa provided plenty of good research material for the writer's novel, My Chocolate Redeemer, in which a deposed African leader takes a keen interest in Bella, a teenage chocolate addict.
Brothers Under the Skin, which might at first seem nothing more than a collection of journalism, is actually superb, telling us more about the anthropology of power than a thousand academic monographs. It also contains some very good reportage (particularly on the genocide in Matabeleland in the 1980s by Mugabe's notorious Five Brigade). It should be required reading for all those now involved in bringing former dictators to justice.
Giles Foden's most recent novel, Zanzibar, is published by Faber and Faber
Brothers Under the Skin: Travels in Tyranny. By Christopher Hope, Macmillan, 280pp, £17.99