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The River of Lost Footsteps: Histories of Burma - By Thant Myint-U
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 361 Pages
It would come as a great surprise to most multicultural-loving Canadians that a little-known Asian country, governed for the past 45 years by a brutal dictatorship, was once an excellent prototype for the plural society, where people of different religions, cultures and languages mixed and co-existed peacefully. In pre-colonial and colonial Burma (Myanmar), multiculturalism was a dynamic fact of life, wrought by ancient invasions, colonial takeovers and much more benign migrations and conversions. In 1927, Rangoon exceeded New York as the greatest immigrant port in the world. The country was home not only to its majority of Burman Buddhists, but also to animist and Christian ethnicities, Chettyar, Bengali, Sikh, Tamil and other Indian groups, both Hindu and Muslim, Chinese labourers, Scots merchants, English colonists and a population of Jewish traders, part of which had been on Burmese soil for several generations. Rangoon's second synagogue was built in 1932; for a time, the city even had a Jewish mayor. How this vibrant kaleidoscope of people and culture shattered into the mess of present-day Burma, ruled by a xenophobic military dictatorship, is one of the key themes in Thant Myint-U's engaging history, The River of Lost Footsteps. Beginning in the misty past with the grand Burmese court of Ava, the footsteps of the title really begin to pick up pace when the British make their (in)famous appearance in the late 1800s and King Thibaw loses his kingdom, the centre of which was Mandalay. The Crown had already occupied Lower Burma in 1824, which meant that Burma was now annexed to India, becoming the colony of a colony. In his preface, Myint-U states that part of the reason he has written this book is to right a basic wrong: So many accounts of Burma, and so many attempts through activism and dissident politics to change the present ills of the country, are ahistorical. It's the old, reasonable adage: To understand the present, we must look to the past. And the author does that, though not in a very surprising way. There is no overarching theory of history here (as in Theodore Zeldin's idiosyncratic and delightful histories of France) and several opportunities to draw relationships between past events and future ones are left unexplored. The country's more recent and vitally important student movement is also not fully discussed. The activist student movement in much of Southeast and South Asia is tied to the area's modern political awakening in the 1920s and '30s, when energetic young people governed by colonialist powers were becoming educated, looking abroad for inspiration (Sinn Fein and Michael Collins were heroes to the young Burmese), and getting sick and tired of being second-class citizens in their own countries. Thant Myint-U recounts beautifully, with great feeling and insight, how this happened in Burma, and who some of the key players were. They included his grandfather U Thant, a schoolmaster in a provincial town who went on to become the United Nations' secretary-general throughout the 1960s, helping to end both the Cuban missile crisis and the war in the Congo. Back in his youth, he was friends with many of Burma's early politically minded students, including some of those who later formed the Thirty Comrades, a group of intelligent, impassioned young men determined to free their country from colonial rule. By the time Second World War began, the charismatic Aung San, a.k.a. Teza, was this group's leader. Aung San conspired with the invading Japanese to get help building an anti-colonial army. He and his fellows -- among them Ne Win, who years later would become Burma's long-ruling dictator -- received rigorous training from the Japanese. Then, at just the right moment, Aung San made a calculated turn back to the British, double-crossed the Japanese and helped drive the Imperial Army forces down the Sittang Valley, out of Burma. He was just 31 when he travelled to London as the major general of his own army, met with members of the British government, and reached an agreement regarding his country's imminent independence. It's a bit of history repeating itself within the history book when Thant Myint-U writes of British attitudes toward Aung San and his friends' early years: "They were schoolboys playing politics, marching up and down the street, conspiring in smoky tea shops over a tasty Indian snack, and arguing [socialism] in someone's dingy dorm room," Though not so blatantly, and perhaps not even consciously, the author does the same thing by never giving the modern student movement its due. Not a single one of Burma's heroic young activists is mentioned by name -- not even Min Ko Naing, recently released from a long prison sentence in solitary confinement, or Moe Thi Zon, who, along with Min Ko Naing and other university students, organized the extraordinary 1988 protests against the military government. These demonstrations spawned a nationwide strike that was taken up by millions of people across the country and very nearly led to the dictatorship's downfall. But all this is tidily dealt with in a couple of paragraphs that place Aung San Suu Kyi at the centre of dissident protest. Leader of the National League for Democracy, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, she certainly is Burma's most famous person in the wider world. Much like her father Aung San, the independence hero, she is revered by ordinary Burmese, though powerless in any real political sense, having been under house arrest for many of the past 15 years. A crippling parallel isolation has marked Burma's history for almost half a century, since General Ne Win staged a coup in 1962, kicked out foreign banks, businesses and universities, then led his people backward in every discernible way. A country that should be as prosperous as neighbouring Thailand is instead caught in a time warp, its civil institutions in shambles and its people still desperate to gain entrance to the modern world. Thant Myint-U makes a very strong case for a re-evaluation of dissident tactics against Burma's regime. Instead of further isolating, through economic sanctions and boycotts, one of the most fiercely and happily isolated dictatorships in the world, he makes a call for engagement, both economic and otherwise, in order to soften up the generals and let the so-called trickle-down effect bring more money and, eventually, more civil liberties and political change to the Burmese people. His day job -- as head of policy planning for the UN's political affairs department -- is clearly in evidence here. But what is missing from this extensive, complex, sometimes brilliant history and its important polemical conclusions is precisely what eludes many of the people engaged in the struggle to bring political change to Burma. That is a real, on-the-ground way to get the generals to sit down at the table and talk about how to move forward. It's not as though a lot of people haven't tried -- UN representatives fail every year -- and there are many businesses and NGOs inside the country, more now than in the past 20 years, trying to work with the generals. Sometimes, interestingly, they succeed: For good or bad, some foreign businesses turn a profit, employ Burmese workers and, in the case of the NGOs, establish reasonably successful programs, particularly in the areas of HIV-AIDS education. There are also more intellectuals and dissidents in the country and just outside it, in Thailand and India -- many of whom were students in 1988 -- who recognize that political change must come through dialogue and compromise with the generals. Thant Myint-U is not alone in realizing that the current state of polarization between the democracy movement and the military has not helped Burma to change, grow or truly prosper. But the ruling generals are very slow to reach the same conclusion. Until they do, the question of how to effect lasting change in Burma will remain, as it is in Thant Myint-U's book, tragically unanswered. Reviewed by Karen Connelly, who's recent novel, The Lizard Cage, long-listed for the IMPAC-Dublin Award, is a study in Burmese isolation, taking place as it does in a prison near Rangoon.
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