My World: Niall Ferguson

In King Charles’ birthday honours list in June 2024, Niall Ferguson received a knighthood for his services to literature. A best-selling writer and historian, his 16 books include histories of the British and American empires, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World and, most recently, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe. He’s also a regular columnist in the (mainly right-wing) press. I was surprised to encounter him at a party playing in an amateur jazz band – A Night in Tunisia, named after an Art Blakey album. They first started busking at the Edinburgh Festival in 1983, with Ferguson playing a mean double bass.

“I love double basses. I could just keep buying them”, says the Glasgow-born, Oxford-educated Ferguson, when I talk to him a few days after the party. “The double bass is the nearest thing to a human being in the orchestra.” He admits that his first love was jazz guitar when he went to Oxford University. “I was listening to Charlie Parker and I realised jazz guitar was too difficult for me. But I could get my head around the bass. I purloined my double bass from a girl’s school in Ayr on the grounds that there was nobody likely to play it and it was lying in a state of disarray, so I gave it a better life!”

His band play original material. Ferguson wrote a song in honour of Miriam, who he says was “my nanny when I was a little boy in Nairobi.” He says they discovered early on that if they tried to play Charlie Parker, people would notice that they weren’t very good. But “if we played our own material, we weren’t so easily found out.”

Ferguson spent several years in Nairobi as a child when his father worked as a doctor in Kenya. He returned to Africa when he worked on the 2003 Channel 4 documentary series and book Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. The series includes a sequence of intensely devotional singing filmed at a church service in Kuruman, South Africa, where David Livingstone arrived as a missionary in 1841. “David Livingstone was the central character of that particular film”, Ferguson explains. “Livingstone had been a part of my life because growing up in Scotland, I’d been told about him many times by my parents and grandparents. The director Adrian Pennink came up with the idea to go to Kuruman, where Livingstone’s African career had begun. There was an extraordinary church at the old mission. But nothing prepared me for the emotional impact of the music as we arrived. The effect of the sound was so overwhelming I was emotionally incapacitated. I just wanted to cry. I’ve never had such a powerful sense of connection – partly religious and like a rebirth. I realised I’d been living this narrow, slightly buttoned-up life as an Oxford don and hadn’t been in any true relationship with my inner being. It unleashed parts of myself that I had locked up for a long time.”

Ferguson recalls hearing ‘Harambee Harambee’, a popular post-independence song, when he was a boy in Kenya. “It’s one of the first pieces of music I remember. So, hearing the Kuruman choirs reconnected me to the sound of African voices. We talked afterwards to the ministers and they found one of the most useful things the mission could do was provide really cheap coffins because the local communities were bankrupting themselves for the people dying of AIDS. The end of apartheid had coincided with the worst part of the AIDS epidemic. The fact they could sing these extraordinary songs made it extraordinarily moving.”

Ferguson’s book is good at laying out the pros and cons of the British Empire. He certainly considers Livingstone’s intentions as benign. “Livingstone went to Africa not at all in the spirit of exploitation, he went in a strongly altruistic state of mind. He wanted to bring medical science as well as Christianity and campaigned against slavery till his dying day. So, if that’s wicked imperialism, then I must be a banana. His exploration was motivated by the belief that economic development could be propelled. After all, Scotland had gone from being a completely impoverished failed state in the 17th century to be the most rapidly growing economy of the late 18th century largely by investing in waterways, ports and that kind of thing. So when Livingstone was thinking, ‘if we can do it in Scotland, we can do it anywhere’, it was not irrational. And Livingstone himself was hardly an example of white privilege since he’d been a child worker in a textile mill.”

Ferguson has little time for those who criticised Empire for being too pro-British Empire. “People who portrayed the book and series as pro-Empire simply hadn’t read the book. There was a complete refusal to engage with the arguments and the evidence. The book is far from an apologia – it’s full of damning accounts of the effects of British settlement overseas. But the critics weren’t interested in historical scholarship; they were engaged in some kind of political activism. For that, I have no time.”

As part of the Empire series, Ferguson also went to West Africa and filmed in Sierra Leone and, subsequently, Ghana and Senegal. He regrets not seeing Youssou N’Dour, who wasn’t going to be on stage until 2am, as they had to be up early to film. At the same time, he says he got turned on to Amadou & Mariam and Tinariwen. “But Africa’s such a vast continent you’ll never know all the music. [BBC] Radio 3 is often throwing things at me that I’m not expecting. Thank God the BBC is willing to play unusual and esoteric African music, and I’ve benefitted hugely from that eclectic programming.”

He is quick to mention Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars, who were formed by a group of Guinean refugees during the civil war in Sierra Leone. “Their song ‘Living Like a Refugee’ is an anthem for our times,” he says. “My wife [the author and women’s rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali] was a refugee once, who came to the Netherlands from Somalia. When I think of the tens of millions of displaced people in the world, that song captures the vulnerability of someone who’s lost their home. And that problem is only going to get worse. It’s an incredible song and it’s the kind of music that brings tears to the eyes.”

“I think part of the great debate about immigration stems from people’s unfamiliarity with the culture of people who come from Africa. My parents gave me a complete lack of inhibition about engaging with people from Africa. There was nothing more contemptible than racial prejudice – I am very grateful to them for that. It’s such a gift to listen to [the] music of Tinariwen or Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars and enjoy it and not think ‘I’m now listening to African music.’ It’s just as life-affirming as Mozart.”