Customer Reviews

Lost White Tribes : The End of Privilege and the Last Colonials in Sri Lanka, Jamaica, Brazil, Haiti, Namibia, and Guadeloupe

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

It really is rare to find an original take on colonialism but this book is brilliant! The stuff on the Confederates who fled to Brazil is beyond bizarre and fresh. I mean, who amongst us knew American descendants of the Confederates were living in Brazil? The lost white tribes the author finds are so varied and unique it begs the question, why has it taken so long for anthropologists to study these groups? Whatever the case may be, Orizio goes to the top of the list as an investigative writer in my books. If I could give it 10 stars, I would.

As a person who loves history and anthropology, the title of this book really got my attention and I eagerly anticipated the arrival of this book. I suppose anyone who wants to know more about the descendants of Europeans living in exotic and remote corners of the world would find this topic very interesting. The author tells of how (and under what circumstances) the ancestors of these peoples got there. He also decribes the lives of the members of these communities. These groups are quickly diminishing in numbers due to emigration, assimilation/intermarriage and inbreeding.

The title "Lost White Tribes" is rather misleading though, as only the Jamaican Germans, the Blanc Matignons and some of the Confederados are actually whites. The Dutch Burghers, the Rehoboth Basters, and many of the Confederados as well as the Haitian Poles are in fact mixed-race peoples (ie. Eurasians and Afro-European). From the author's decription, the Haitian Poles despite proudly claiming to be Polish are mainly of African descent with some white admixture.

Hence, I was quite suprised that notwithstanding the title and the fact that there are so many white groups and sub-groups in the New World, including some who live amongst a non-white majority, the author has chosen to include these communities. There are still French white creole communities in Mauritius and the Carribean islands, Mennonites in Belize as well as various distinct communities made up of descendants of Germans and other continental Europeans in Latin America. When I was in the Philippines, I found out that there were still many wealthy Spanish families descended from 16th century settlers.

I give this book 4 stars because the author wasted too much time describing in detail the place he stayed in, whom he met along the way to asks directions and what he and his companions did (eg. his encounter with a pimp in Sri Lanka, his misadventures with a Protestant minister in Haiti, the two kids he hung out with in Jamaica etc.) He should have used the space in the book to have included more communities.

This book sounded so fascinating that I made two shopping trips to find it in time for a long transatlantic flight. The premise--forgotten descendants of lost empires still clinging to shreds of their heritage in distant and remote lands--was enough to make any adventurous reader salivate. But the payoff was disappointing. Mr. Orizio's characters are two-dimensional and his style rambling. We learn very little about these real people; not enough to learn to care about them very much. This ought to be riveting stuff, but the literary equivalents of archeological relics glitter only rarely. Despite solid historical information, all of it news to me, I came away feeling I'd been on a tour bus that never stopped long enough to see much.

In this fascinating book, author and journalist Riccardo Irizio looks at the "tribes" of white natives living in far off corners of the globe. In the six chapters of this book, he looks at the Dutch burghers who never left Ceylon, the German inhabitants whose ancestors had been tricked into emigrating to Jamaica, the colony of Confederate exiles who fled the United States after the Civil War, the descendents of the Polish soldiers who stayed in Haiti after that countries defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte, the Dutch Basters of Namibia whose ancestors had trod a different path than the Boers, and the Guadeloupe descendents of the Frenchmen who went native.

Overall, I found this to be a wonderfully interesting book to read. The author does an excellent job of weaving together the tales of his search for these "lost white tribes" with the story of how they came to be there. Some of the stories are quite sad, with Haitians that consider themselves exiles and are waiting for someone to come take them home after 200 years, people who look down on the countrymen around them because they are not white, people who look down on these people for being white, and so much more. I found their stories to be quite enthralling, sometimes sad, but never boring.

If you want to see the tales of white people who went native during the colonial era, then this book is for you. I highly enjoyed it, and think that you will as well!

I am married to a Jamaican wife, and read any article or book that mentions the country. I came across this book on the CNN Internet several months ago by looking up Jamaica.

My anticipation of this book far outreached the actual reading. The author spends the majority of his time describing the country he is in at the time, and they all seem the same. In detail he tells of the hotels he stays in, where and what he eats, whom he meets along the way, and something about the countless people he asks directions from even though he has a guide. He tells of how the white foreigners arrived in the country, very little of where they fit into the current society, and nothing in between. I realize that time has eroded any written or oral link between the past and now, but in my opinion, this is what was promised. One can read the same few documents that were reprinted in the book on the Internet and glean as much real information as portrayed in the book.

In all I was disappointed with the book.

The misleading subtitle of this book is a bit of a shame, and it's hard to imagine Italian journalist Orizio being very pleased with it. By positioning the contents in relation to colonialism, the subtitle overlooks the fact that at least three (more depending on interpretation) of the "lost white tribes" visited in the book have nothing to do with colonialism as the word is commonly used-in the imperial context. Unlike the bulk of books about colonialism, which tend to focus on history, politics, and economics, Orizio's six chapters are largely unrelated essays that merge travelogue with anthropology. His style-as in his previous book of essays on ex-dictators, Talk of the Devil-is to start the story by detailing his search for his subject matter. This may put off those looking for straight history, but the stories of traveling down dusty backroads to reach these "lost white tribes" set exactly the right context for their stories.

And once he finds his subjects, their stories are fascinating. Americans will probably find the chapter on Confederates in Brazil the most interesting. This tells of the thousands who fled the South after the Civil War, rejecting Reconstruction in favor of a new life in Brazil. Their stubborn "rebel" identity and annual carnival in full Confederate costume is rather bizarre. My own favorite chapter is about small pockets of Polish genes in Haiti. These are the descendants of soldiers sent by Napoleon to assist in quelling the rebellion of 1803. When the rebels led by Toussaint Louverture won, the remaining French were systematically killed but the Poles were spared, as their country was also under Napoleon's boot. Orizio also tracks down pockets of inbred French in Guadeloupe whose reasons for settling in remote parts of the island in the late 1700s are lost to history, the remnants of indentured German laborers imported to Jamaica in the 1830s, Boers who left South Africa and mixed with a local Namibian tribe to become the Basters in the late 1860s, and the remnants of Dutch colonial rule over Sri Lanka/Ceylon.

The communities share some characteristics: most are, if not desperately poor, living on an economic razor's edge. Almost all retain some disturbing notions about race and the superiority of their own genes compared to others in their country. The past is clung to in bizarre and fantastic ways, such as the French on Guadeloupe insisting on their connection to French royal blood, and the Haitian Poles waiting in vain for their Polish Pope to help them. They're pathetic figures in many cases, as they seem unable to break free of their tight communities in order to assimilate to any degree that may bring a better life. Of course, Orizio's journeys are to find those stuck in their ways, and it emerges in many cases that the best and brightest youths often don't stick around. His style is fairly conversational and choppy, and each chapter stands alone as its own essay since Orizio never attempts to make connections between any of the groups' experiences. This may be off-putting to some, but it never bothered me-just think of it as a series of related long magazine essays. An excellent glimpse into some of history's lost corners, and sure to be of interest to amateur anthropologists (a bibliography on each "tribe" would have been nice or those of us interested in further reading).

When dreams of empires get displaced they leave behind buildings and monuments that become destroyed or just wither away. But they also leave behind a genetic trail: the descendends of conquerors and dreamers who the former mother country forgot or never acknowledged in the first place,

This excellent book visits six of those lost white tribes. Their history is sometimes bizarre (Confederates in Brazil), sad (Poles in Haiti) or just a tale out of a time gone by since centurys (Dutch in Sri Lanka). The six storys vary in their mixture of the author's account of his search for and visit with the lost tribes and the history of those people. The quality of the information is somewhat uneven. One sad impression is universal in all the six tales: the tribes discribed are not only forgotten, but will very soon cease to exist.

However this still is a very interesting, fascinatig to read book.

The author provides an overview of six little known groups, all either partially or entirely descended from Europeans but now marginalised minorities far from Europe and in danger of dying off or being assimilated up by the surrounding societies. An approximately equal weight is given to each:

- Dutch Burghers of Ceylon
- Germans in Jamaica
- Confederates (from the US South) in Brazil
- Poles in Haiti (descendants of Polish soldiers and African wives)
- Basters in Namibia
- Blancs Matignon in Guadeloupe

The book is part travel log, part history, part anthropology. It's pleasant enough and easy to read but I found it disorganised, meandering and at times a bit vacuous.

History is written by - and about - the winners. As European nations lost their overseas colonies, scholars focused on local populations that had freed themselves from European rule.

In Lost White Tribes, Italian journalist Riccardo Orizio looks at the other side of the coin - what happened to the white colonialists who stayed in the former colonies after independence. During the 1990s, Orizio traveled to six nations (Sri Lanka, Jamaica, Brazil, Haiti, Namibia, and Guadeloupe) to look for these "lost white tribes."

The book is both a travelogue and a discussion of the changing meaning of race. "...All of us... belong to a lost tribe. We can all become minorities. We are all potentially irrelevant" (p. 4).

The material is uneven. The Namibia and Guadeloupe chapters are fascinating, as they tell little-known stories. The Jamaica chapter is disappointing; I did not learn much. Moreover, the accounts of contemporary life in each nation are fascinating, but the book loses momentum when Orizio goes into digressions on history.

For the most part, Orizio avoids telling the reader what to think. But in the final chapter, his tone shifts and he editorializes. For instance, he calls Guadeloupe's whites "...four hundred pigheaded peasants" (p. 241).

In the end, Orizio asks "How does one distinguish between a slight story that never made any headlines and a great adventure that deserves the status of history?" (p. 228). While Lost White Tribes' story is slight, it is still interesting. Despite of the book's dead spots, readers interested in colonialism's legacy will want to read Lost White Tribes.

I thought the topic was facinating; bizzare little footnotes to history. The "lost tribes" are small, usually remote enclaves decended from white Europeans who were never assimilated into their host post-colonial societies.

I didn't think it was all that well written, however. If this book would have been written by a historian and not a journalist, it would have been handled quite differently. The narrative lacks direction or analysis. Still, I would recommend it just for the novelty of the topic.

Recommended.