Evelyn Waugh’s Incident in Azania and the China News of 1932

Evelyn Waugh’s 1932 short story Incident in Azania (which can be found as part of his collected short stories) is really a short follow on tale from his classic novel of the Empire in Africa, Black Mischief. We are back in the fictional East African state of Azania (a combination of Zanzibar and Abyssinia), among the rather daft British colonists and in their club in the dusty capital of Matodi (obviously modelled on the infamous Muthaiga Club in Nairobi where the Happy Valley Brits congregated, slept with each other and plotted murder in the 1920s and 1930s- see White Mischief). A rather pretty and interesting young woman arrives in the small colony with no available women and quite a few bachelors looking for wives. All court her until she is seemingly kidnapped and ransomed by local African bandits. It’s a rather amusing story and the letters from the kidnapped English girl request a gramophone, records, lipstick etc etc. She is eventually released but was she ever really kidnapped?

What I didn’t realise until recently is that, though set in Africa, Waugh’s imagination was sparked by the case of a young Englishwoman “Tinko” Pawley who was kidnapped in 1932 in China and held to ransom. She was genuinely kidnapped but did, with rather British pluckiness, write asking for soap and lipstick. I blogged about that kidnapping the other day here.

To my knowledge (and relying on Selina Hastings’s excellent bio of Waugh) he never visited China but did read the news and rushed the story out shortly after Mrs Pawley was released in The Windsor Magazine in December 1932. Reading the story now it could quite easily be from the pen of Somerset Maugham (who of course did visit China and wrote extensively about it) and the goings-on and obsessions of the class and nation-ridden British ex-pats could easily be transferred from Azania to China. In fact it’s hard not to read the story without thinking of those stuffy old clubs in China that so fascinated Maugham in On a Chinese Screen.