A Short Tale of Aboriginal Haunting:: Colonial War, Peace and Super-Nature in Wells’ Pollock and the Porroh Man

Millette, Holly-Gale (2018) A Short Tale of Aboriginal Haunting:: Colonial War, Peace and Super-Nature in Wells’ Pollock and the Porroh Man. Victorian Popular Fiction Association: War and Peace, University of London, London, United Kingdom. 05 - 07 Jul 2018. (Submitted)

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

First published in May of 1895, H.G. Wells’ Pollock and the Porroh Man considers the colonial condition of Us versus Them, using one man’s inner turmoil and conflict as it’s narrative force. In other words, in this tale, the protagonist is at War with – and seeking to make Peace with – himself.

The text sees a rather unattractive white middle-class male empire builder made abject by the disembodied head of the African Aboriginal he has harmed. Although Voodoo is never mentioned, the Porroh Man of the title is drawn as a ‘medicine man’ who the reader is never dissuaded from reading as a warring spirit meting out judgment upon an oppressor.

This paper considers Wells’ social commentary on reparation, entitlement and Black lives that matter. Writing about Dahomey (now the present day African Republic of Benin) at a time when the Pan-African repatriation movement was crystallising and just as DuBois was receiving his PhD, Wells narrates the retreat of the doomed colonial from Africa, exacts judgement on him and achieves reparation via a humorous supernatural morality tale. Like much of Wells’ work, he offers the reader a cautionary tale of every polarising worlds which, if not heeded, will haunt our future generations and our furture histories as certainly as Pollock is haunted by his Porroh Man.

Wells was a populist utopian whose journalism appealed to common readers and dreamers. This was a man who received fan letters from the front in WWI from men who confessed that the discovery of his writings ‘marked a complete revolution in their thinking; made them new men’ . Common readers who preferred enlightenment to dismal news.

To say Wells was not political would be to ignore a large part of his mode of being. Partington, in particular, wrote about his political world view in 2003. This view is notable for its socialism, hatred of colonialism, aspiration for Transnationalism, insistence on Human Rights and Public Accountability in the Functional World State to come and compelled by the belief that the only future the world emerged from with any dignity would be one in which a League of Nations untied us all. His first declaration for Human Rights began “(1) That every man without distinction of race or colour is entitled to nourishment, housing, covering, medical care and attention sufficient to realise his full possibilities of physical and mental development and to keep him in a state of health from birth do to death.” In a letter to Lord Esher in 1935, he confirmed the he ‘demurs to any arbitrary distinctions between human beings on the score of race or colour.’ The proviso’s made in his declarations guaranteed protection of minority or disadvantaged groups of all kinds, be they non-white, colonial or immigrant populations struggling to compete alongside wealthier or better-educated imperial peoples’ . Whether he was asked directly, or not, he would speak his mind both on the subject of colonialism and the race issue. In a letter to Lance Corporal Hlope, a Zulu soldier fighting for the Allied cause in World War II, Wells writes “I don’t think you get a fair deal down there in South Africa. There are some fine coloured people down there, not only the Zulus, but the Basuto and others, and there can be no peace in any part of the world until white men and coloured men learn to live and mingle on terms of equality.”

H. G. Wells ‘was not interested in being a literary artist, though he had in fat great literary gifts. He was, he insisted, a journalist, someone who wrote for the day and who “delivered the goods.” He would’ not have liked to have been remembered as a novelist ‘He would want to know what had happened to his ideas. Had men listed to his message?’ Many would call him a prophet, yet he was merely a thinker. He made inspired guesses about the future, but at heart he was an optimist who wanted a glowing future. Wells condemned the contemporary world in everything he ever wrote, but eh future was still speculative and it was there that men might work miracles. He seemed to have expected men would change; could change, and that evolution would bring us closer to a more socialist (communist, even) outlook. ‘The socialist world-state has now become a tomorrow as real as today, he said ‘Thither we go!’ He believed that humans could be heroic of opinion and of purpose. He imagined his epitaph to be: “God damn you all. I told you so.”

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