Genocide: a Norman Lewis excerpt

Genocide appears in Eland’s new collection of Norman Lewis’ travel writing

In 1968 Lewis approached The Sunday Times after he learnt that the Indian Protection Service in Brazil had been complicit in the murderous destruction of Indian communities. The paper agreed to send him and, after spending several weeks in Brazil, he returned to England to write a 12,000-word article. This was the longest article that The Sunday Times magazine had ever printed.

As soon as the piece was published, the tremendous interest obliged the paper to hire extra staff to handle the copious correspondence and telephone calls. One of those who contacted the paper was Robin Hanbury-Tennison, who promptly founded Survival International, which campaigns with indigenous peoples worldwide.

On this trip, Lewis travelled without a photographer. After returning, he made a list of places for a photographer to visit. The Sunday Times sent out a young photographer, Don McCullin, who had made his name in Vietnam and Biafra. Lewis was so impressed by McCullin’s photographs that he asked to meet him, and thus began a long and fruitful friendship.

A useful summary of the current predicament for Brazilian’s indigenous population can be found by googling ‘Brazilian Indigenous people survival international pdf’. The article is illustrated with some of McCullin’s remarkable photographs, and lists valuable links for further information, including about the ever-continuing assaults on indigenous communities.

Lewis considered this article the most important of his lifetime.

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First published in The Sunday Times, February 23, 1969

If you happened to be one of those who felt affection for the gentle, backward civilisations – Nagas, Papuans, Mois of Vietnam, Polynesian and Melanesian remnants – the shy primitive peoples, daunted and overshadowed by the juggernaut advance of our ruthless age, then 1968 was a bad year for you.By the descriptions of all who had seen them, there were no more inoffensive and charming human beings on the planet than the forest Indians of Brazil, and brusquely we were told they had been rushed to the verge of extinction. The tragedy of the Indian in the United States in the last century was being repeated, but it was being compressed into a shorter time. Where a decade ago there had been hundreds of Indians, there were now tens. An American magazine reported with nostalgia on a tribe of which only 135 members had survived. “They lived as naked as Adam and Eve in the nightfall of an innocent history, catching a few fish, collecting groundnuts, playing their flutes, making love ... waiting for death. We learned that it was due only to the paternal solicitude of the Brazilian Government’s Indian Protection Service that they had survived until this day”.

In all such monitory accounts – and there had been many of them – there was a blind spot, a lack of candour, a defect in social responsibility, an evident aversion to pointing to the direction from which doom approached. It seemed that we were expected to suppose that the Indians were simply fading away, killed off by the harsh climate of the times, and we were invited to inquire no further. It was left to the Brazilian Government itself to resolve the mystery, and in March 1968 it did so, with brutal frankness, and with almost no attempt at self-defence. The tribes had been virtually exterminated, not despite all the efforts of the Indian Protection Service, but with its connivance – often its ardent co-operation.

General Albuquerque Lima, the Brazilian Minister of the Interior, admitted that the Service had been converted into an instrument for the Indians’ oppression, and had therefore been dissolved. There was to be a judicial inquiry into the conduct of 134 functionaries. A full newspaper page in small print was required to list the crimes with which these men were charged. Speaking informally, the Attorney General, Senhor Jader Figueiredo, doubted whether ten of the Service’s employees out of a total of over a thousand would be fully cleared of guilt.

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Norman Lewis’ Voices of the Old Sea was recently featured on the Backlisted podcast, with a guest appearance from Boundless Editor Patrick Galbraith, and contributor Katrina Porteous