This
is an excerpt from my book The Best I Can Do (2016) available from the usual suspects and also
blackwells.co.uk.
Ostentation
Prince Charles is a
year younger than me. He has been heir to the throne for so long (since 1952 in
fact) that if and when he becomes King and I am still alive, I am sure I shall
continue to think of him as Prince Charles. Over the years I have watched his
face age and the number of medals on his full dress uniforms increase. One day
it occurred to me that most of his medals are birthday badges given to him by
his Mum. He is still pinning them on sixty years after most of us stopped. They
infantilise him.
In Africa during the
past sixty years, kleptocratic and psychopathic tyrants, backed by their old
colonial masters, have lorded it over impoverished peoples using a rhetoric of
visual ostentation taken unashamedly from those former colonial rulers – and not
just the British. But with no Mum to award them, they have simply had to award
medals to themselves, getting some lackey to pin them on until their chests attain
the full splendour of which Imperial kitsch is capable. The Emperor Bokassa -
every whim indulged by the governments of France (Bokassa had uranium) - is the
all-time outright winner for mirror-imaging the ostentation of the European
Imperial powers. His coronation in 1976 cost the dirt-poor Central African
Republic more than its entire annual state budget. The images are still worth
Googling. You can see a copy of Ruritania’s famous Coronation coach and surrounding
Bokassa, you can see haute couture-styled
flunkeys like those – all male - who still surround Imperial President Hollande.
Bokassa’s rivals have included General Idi Amin (with a taste for British military top-brass tassels), and Colonel Gadaffi (specialist in Italianate gold braid) and dozens of more forgettable bit players who have strutted and killed for a short while, all of them weighed down by this abject drive to outdo European levels of ostentation.
Added 4 September 2023: the tradition is still being upheld. Here is the leader of the recent coup in Gabon being sworn in to whatever office it is that he lays claim. Why would anyone want to dress like this and in a hot country too?
You would think it
would shame Prince Charles into dressing a bit more like Nelson Mandela or
maybe the Dalai Lama but, no, when it comes to keeping up appearances he is
still determined to provide a role model for the next dictator up. One day, he
hopes to live in a Palace where the Guards are dolled up in such a way that
they could not guard a goldfish bowl and on hot days, no bare skin visible, collapse
from heat exhaustion. It is both ostentation and irrationality. The tourists
love it; it’s much more fun than the Zoo.
Added 4 September 2023: He is of course now King and even more keen on ostentation:
British schools devote
a great deal of time and money to devising and enforcing their uniform rules. It
can be almost a full-time job for one Deputy Headteacher and they don’t come
cheap. Some parents grumble about the cost, forgetting that cost is partly what
it’s about – about showing that your child is in a different class to the
riff-raff child in that school (unfortunately) just down the road. It is
sometimes said that school uniform makes social distinctions less visible: you
will not so easily spot the poor child in the classroom. But if you work back
from the sharp-elbowed one-upmanship which characterises the uniforms of rival
schools, it is most unlikely that social distinctions are not still visible in one
school’s classrooms. Showing off as better than someone else does not stop at
the school gates.
British parents do not
really find it possible to believe that there are successful countries, not
plagued by juvenile delinquency or illiteracy, that manage to function without any school uniform at all. But dreadful as it may
seem, they do exist, and if you want
living proof of what can be done without the benefit of school uniform, check
out the Cusanus-Gymnasium, Erkelenz, a German High School in a fairly ordinary
town of just 45 000 people. It doesn’t have a fancy website but you can get
some idea there what the pupils look like. Normal is a word that comes to mind.
Go to YouTube and – though I should give you a trigger warning that you will have
to look at trai**rs - enjoy listening to the Erkelenz choir, the
Oberstufenchor. They do English, of course. And lots more. Time and money isn’t taken up with uniforms,
you see. It’s one reason German education gets better results.
Meanwhile, African dictators can still
look to Prince Charles as a role model. British parents will take their cues
from how the child known as Prince George is got up for school.
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