The Gold Eaters by Ronald Wright
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Deadliest Infection

There’s a reason to read good historical fiction. The Gold Eaters is an example. Ronald Wright’s previous non-fiction historical summary of the European invasion of America, Stolen Continents, is a compelling revision of the standard myths of the civilising effects of white culture. But in this fictional account of the conquest of Peru and the Incan Empire, he is able to add an emotional and spiritual dimension which is not evident in the bare facts of a population, or a people, or a civilisation devastated by the invasion. The personal implications of historical trauma tend to go unnoticed in academic history. Only a fictional narrative can allow events of global import to become experiences of personal significance. Paradoxically when these narratives connect with each other through a readership, the personal tends toward the global.

Consider that it took only one generation from the Spanish landings in the Caribbean to the utter transformation of societies stretching from Bala California to Chile into slave encampments run by illiterate thugs supported by a religious ideology of submission to their authority. Nowhere on earth has experienced such rapid, profound and widespread disruption as what would come to be called Spanish America. Neither, until the 20th century and its Holocaust, would human beings commit such atrocities on one another with such casual conviction and in such numbers. And yet we speak today of the speed of change in modern society.

And the leaders of these bands of marauders are considered explorers, pioneers, and adventurers. These men were rapacious beasts who worked for other ignorant beasts and who employed psychotically violent beasts. Perhaps the real reason the names of men like Pizarro, Cortez, Balboa, De Soto, and Ponce de Leon have been considered heroic, enough to have innumerable cities, landmarks, cultural festivals, and even children named after them, is in part to dim the horrors of what they accomplished to our modern sensitivities, but also in larger part to act as an enduring precedent that justifies continuing domination today. Race was and is the central fact of the Conquest of America.

Race justified the subjugation of anyone who was not white. Race justified the massive dislocation of populations within the areas of Spanish conquest and between Africa and the Americas. Race justified the creation of a social hierarchy which ensured the permanence of white dominance by establishing racial distinctions and using racial antipathies to white advantage. Race justified the erasure of historical traditions, languages, and family lineages through the introduction of the ‘true religion’ of white Christianity. And today the effects of all these justifications - economic inequalities, educational deficits, large-scale immigration, international criminal enterprise - are being justified as unfortunate consequences of… well, of course, race.

It had to be expected, I suppose, that the still dominant white culture of the conquerors would object to the telling of history in a way that emphasises both the personal impact of historical wrongs, and the ongoing legacy of these wrongs. These narratives are, it is said, part of the new ‘cancel culture’, that is, an attempt to diminish the achievements of great white men. How obscene. How utterly ignorant. And how typical of the genetic beneficiaries of the horror these men have imposed on the world.

Reading The Gold Eaters is not an edifying experience. It clearly isn’t meant to be. Although sedate in tone, the tragedy of the events it describes is obvious. The book is one small recognition of the harm done in the name of racial and cultural superiority. What option is there but to spread that recognition and to indeed cancel the continuing tragedy of that purported superiority. It is, after all, an infection, worse than the viruses brought by the invaders, passed down largely through the technology of writing. How else then to kill it other than by writing the truth in fiction?

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