Come with me to the Kasbah

Tunis by night

Well, I’m back!

I came, I saw, I was captivated.  There really is so much to captivate one in Tunisia, a marvellous place with some marvellous sights and even more marvellous people.  It’s certainly true that the country has not quite recovered from the Jasmine Revolution which saw the overthrow last year of the Ben Ali dictatorship, but overall I thought the place more relaxed and less tense than Egypt. 

There was no evidence at all of the recent fuss over The Innocence of Muslims, apart from the fact that in the whole time I was there I came across not a single American, something quite unique in my experience. 

I did go to Carthage, virtually the first place we made for soon after settling in to Tunis.  I wasn’t completely disappointed, having been forewarned by others that it was all a bit of an anti-climax.  The sites are scattered and there is really not that much to see anymore of a city consumed by a city consumed by a city.  The best part, in the sense of being most complete, was the remains of baths dating to the reign of Antoninus Pius. 

But the most compelling part, for me anyway, was on Byrsa Hill, the heart of Punic Carthage.  Here it was possible to see the fragments left after the systematic destruction of 146BC, an act of vindictive savagery on the part of Rome.  I thought of Hannibal as I saw the scorch marks on walls from all those centuries ago.  Traces in time; I suppose in the end that’s what it all comes down to. 

Carthage is poignant enough but there are far better survivals from the past.  Later we visited the wonderful amphitheatre at El Jem, just as impressive as the Coliseum in Rome.  It’s a testament in stone to the vanished wealth, prestige and power of the Roman province of Africa. 

Equally impressive – much more so than Carthage – are the remains at Sbeitla, a town to the south-west of the city of Kairouan.  This was the ancient settlement of Sufetula, were history is layered upon history, from pagan Rome to Christian Byzantium.  The forum is a joy to behold, with temples side by side to Juno, Jupiter and Minerva, the trinity of the ancient world. 

As usual I’m rushing ahead, carried away by my enthusiasm, mindful that I cannot possibly include all I saw and did in a manageable blog.  It wasn’t all the past, believe me: there were plenty of excursions into the present for swimming and shopping and generally lazing about.  The seaside town of Hammamet on the Cape Bon Peninsula has a gorgeous beach.  Here we lunched on olives, cheese, dates and figs, all washed down with some delightful Tunisian rosé wine.  Rosé is not normally my wine of choice but it’s highly favoured among the locals, so we were assured by Kemel, our ever dependable guide.  Well, when in Tunisia do as the Tunisians do! 

Oh, I almost forgot to mention my encounter in the city of Sousse.  Here most of the people in my party went off to visit the souk in the heart of the old Medina.  Not in the mood for endless bargaining, I wandered off to have a look at the Kasbah, the early medieval fortress, from the outside.  It was really a measure of how safe I felt.  The men, although solicitous, were not quite as bothersome as those in Egypt.  However, as I was standing and staring, one came up and asked if I would like a tour of the Kasbah.  “Come with me to ze Kasbah” – now my life is complete! 

That same day Kemel took us not to the Kasbah but to the city of Monastir, the birthplace of Habib Bourguiba, the first president and founding father of modern Tunisia.  His memory continues to be revered; Kemel certainly revered a man he described as the George Washington or Mahatma Gandhi of Tunisia. 

It’s certainly true, up to a point, though I did not think it politic to challenge our guide’s enthusiasm or question Bourguiba’s more dubious legacy.  The simple fact is that he was a decent and modernising leader who created a bad system.  Presidents for life are just not a very good idea; for the Bourguibas of this Arab world have a tendency to turn into Ben Alis. 

Incidentally, the golden statue of the founding father as a schoolboy, located right in the centre of Monastir, is positively the tackiest memorial I think I have ever seen, all the more distasteful in that the school he attended was demolished to make way for its presence. 

Where to now?  Oh, yes, come with me to the oasis of Tozeur, from there to the great salt lake at Chott el Jerid, with mirages dancing on the horizon, and ever onwards to the Atlas mountains and the sweeping sand dunes of the Sahara.  We did it all, on journeys that took us within an inch of the Algerian border, well, several hundred meters anyway, as close to this dangerous outpost as I ever want to get. 

On the way south we also passed through the city of Kairouan, the first capital of Islamic Tunisia and the location of the historic Great Mosque.  The city, so I was told, is the third holiest place in the Islamic world, after Mecca and Medina. 

One of my more memorable excursions in the south was on the Red Lizard Train from Metlaoui and Redeyef, a journey over a section the Atlas Mountains through some breathtaking gorges.

But this trip was memorable for another reason altogether. In the ticket office I happened to see two men lying prostrate on thin mats, as if waiting in terminal boredom for the next train.  I really only glanced at them from the side of my eye, paying them no mind.  I only found out later from our guide that they were on hunger strike.

This was the beginning of the second week in October.  They had started their particular protest at the end of September, sustaining themselves with a mixture of water and sugar.  What was the reason for their action?  Simply that their fathers had worked for the railway company and this somehow bestowed on them a similar right.  They wanted jobs where no jobs exist.  Apparently their action was reported with some sympathy in the press, though it’s really no more than a kind of moral blackmail.  I can imagine how popular hunger strikes would become if somehow jobs were found. 

I have no wish to sound unsympathetic.  Unemployment is personal tragedy and a moral evil, all the more tragic in Tunisia where there is no system of public welfare.  But I see this as a kind of metaphor, a living example of the country’s dilemma, the reason why the Arab Revolution was always foredoomed to failure, at least in its wilder expectations.  Hopes, sad to say, have a tendency to fall faster than rain. 

I’m straying too far into politics in what I intended chiefly as a travel report.  So back to travel it is, back to one of the highlights of my whole safari – surfing on the dunes of the desert!  The whole thing was such fun, a convoy of 4x4s, driving sometimes at crazy angles or up and down the biggest sand hills I have ever seen. 

Have you ever seen Ice Cold in Alex, the old war film starring John Mills?  If so you may remember the scene where in the process of trying to get the ambulance up the side of the Qattara Depression in Egypt there was a moment when it slipped back down to the bottom.  The jeep just in front of ours made it almost to the top of a particularly large dune, only to reverse back down to take the whole thing again.  Ice Cold in Alex, I thought! 

We made it to the top alright but one of the people in our group went into a complete panic when she saw the descent before us.  She had to be walked down while I urged the driver on.  “We will do it”, I said, “We will get to the bottom, Inshallah.”  We did, well, obviously!  God willed it. 

For me the most romantic part of this adventure was the stop at Onk Jemal – the Camel Head Rock.  It was here, in a desert camp, that Count Almásy (Ralph Fiennes) met Katherine Clifton (Kirsten Scott Thomas) for the first time in the 1996 film The English Patient.  A depiction of doomed love, it really broke my heart when I was saw it in my teens.  It was super to stand there and dream.  For the boys another movie location, Star Wars, was not too far away! 

Romance and dreams and dates and deserts and wine and Kasbahs in the sun, this was my time in timeless Tunisia.  

To Carthage I go

I take the Golden Road

Dear readers, this will be the last article for a bit.  I leave for Tunisia this coming Sunday and will be away for just over three weeks.  I’m so looking forward to it, my third trip to North Africa, following Egypt last year and Morocco a few years before.

I simply love to travel; it’s in my blood.  We had some wonderful vacations when I was a child, visiting quite a few unusual places.  I’ve continued this family tradition. The more unusual the destination the better I like it.  I’m not a travel snob, though; I’m as capable as most other people of doing touristy things and visiting touristy places.  I like to be pampered and I’m most assuredly not into any form of asceticism or personal hardship.  I go for pleasure, not for penance! 

Having said that, I do sometimes feel that I was born too late, at a time when the world gets smaller by the day; a time when all the great adventures are past; when all the trails are blazed and all the paths found.  I would simply loved to have been alive in the great age of exploration, which for me is the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a time when the maps were being filled out. 

Have you heard of Gertrude Bell?  She is a particular heroine of mine: the first woman down from Oxford with a degree in Modern History; an independent scholar, an archaeologist, and expert in several Middle Eastern languages, a writer, a political specialist, a traveller; a friend of sheiks and kings - the female Lawrence of Arabia!

In 1900 she dressed herself as a Bedouin man, riding alone into the dangerous Hauran Plain, still under the control of the Ottomans, in search of the Druze, a militant Muslim sect, which had been fighting the Turks for two hundred years. She made contact with Yahya Beg, king of the Druze, and conversed with him in his own language. Some weeks after he was to ask another visitor to his domain 'Have you seen a queen travelling?'

I’m no queen; I’m just a footloose English girl, going where the fancy takes me, hoping to understand other people and other cultures just a little better; hoping at the same time to understand myself a little better, my mind deeper, my horizons broader.

Why Tunisia, you may wonder?  In part because I have a fascination with past cultures, with the history of a country that once contained Carthage, the realm of Queen Dido, more completely lost than mere time would suggest.  I will be there, among the fragments and those later left by Rome, fragments upon fragments, traces upon traces.  Perhaps I shall find Dido, with Aeneas by her side. (I saw Anna Karenina this afternoon.  My present mood is fey and romantic!)

But my African adventure is deeper.  It will take me from Tunis and Carthage in the north to the oasis of Tozeur in the far south-west.  From there I’m off into the Sahara and also to see the great salt lake of Chott el Jerid, with mirages dancing in the sun! 

OK, there is a slight concern going to a Muslim country at this time, a time when things are so unsettled, a time when Tunisia itself is unsettled.  But I was in Cairo last November, leaving just before the latest round of trouble started on Tahrir Square.  If one worried about danger one would never travel at all.  Besides life is all risk and I am a fatalist, a jolly one at that.  I shall, in my own way, spread as much peace and light as I can…and keep my golden locks well tucked under a headscarf.

So, that’s it.  My next piece shall be a postcard from Tunisia.  

The Witch Camps of Ghana

An article of mine on the scandal of witch refugee camps in the African country of Ghana has headed the most read list on BrooWaha for the past few days.  It was published there under the title No Country for Old Women.  I feel sure that it will also be of interest to my blog readers. 

Perhaps you’ve visited Salem in Massachusetts. If not, you may have been to Pendle in the English county of Lancashire, another northern community. Salem is well-known, Pendle less so, but both have a common link: they were the location of notorious seventeenth century witch hunts.

Now, of course, it’s all good fun, an opportunity for witch tourism. In Salem one can enjoy the Haunted Happenings; in Lancashire it’s possible to ride every Witch Way. Both places have recreated the trials of the accused for visitors, interesting, educational and diverting.

It’s all past; it’s all innocent fun. There are places, though, where witchcraft is neither new age nor diversion. There are places where accusations of malevolent magic can rise with shocking suddenness, often with fatal consequences. There are places where our past is their present.

In Ghana in West Africa up to a thousand women, most of them elderly, have been banished to remote camps in the north of the country. They include eighty-year-old Zeniebu Sugru, accused of being a witch after her nephew took ill and died. In fear of her life, she was obliged to take refuge in one of the six northern camps. Some of the women who live in these primitive places, without electricity or running water, have been there for thirty years or more.

BBC Radio recently highlighted the problem in a broadcast entitled No Country for Old Women. A number of people were interviewed, Zeniebu among them. Of the accusation against her she said “I knew it wasn’t true. I have never used witchcraft. But when I heard that they were planning to bury me alive in the boy’s grave, I knew I had to escape.” She did, eight years ago, leaving behind her grandchildren and all her possessions. There is little hope that she will ever be able to return to her former home in safety.

Samata Adulai is also in her eighties. She used to live in the village of Bulli in the south of the country, where she cared for her twin grandchildren while her daughter worked in the fields. One day her brother came to visit, telling her that her life was in danger: she had been accused of bewitching her niece after the girl died.

There was no possibility of facing down the charge: no, it was flight or death. “I was confused and filled with fear because I knew I was innocent. But I know that once people call you a witch your life is in danger and so without waiting to pick up any of my belongings, I just fled the village.”

Conditions in the witch camps are deplorable. Those who live in the settlement at Kukuo have to walk three miles each day to the River Oti for water, elderly people carrying heavy pots up and down hills. They survive by collecting firewood, selling bags of peanuts or working in local farms. “What is happening is an abuse of human rights”, said Adowa Kwateng-Kluvitse, the country director of ActionAidGhana. “The camps are effectively women’s prisons where the inmates are given a life sentence.”

These witch camps seem to be unique to Ghana but the accusations of witchcraft are not. And it isn’t just a problem for women; children are targeted too, across large parts of Africa: in Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola and the Central African Republic. Lynchings are commonplace. The problem has even made it to England. Two years ago in Newham in east London fifteen-year-old Kristy Bamu was tortured and drowned in a bath by his sister and her partner attempting to exorcise ‘demons.’

There are some comparisons with past persecutions in Europe and America. In Ghana most of the women in Kukuo are widows, accused and banished after their husbands had died. The suggestion is that an accusation of witchcraft is an easy way for other members of the family to take control of the property. “The camps are a dramatic manifestation of the status of women in Ghana”, said Professor Dzodi Tsikata of the University of Ghana, “Older women become a target because they are no longer useful to society.”

The government, which sees these places as a blot on the country’s reputation, is anxious to disband the camps. There is one thing preventing this: the safety of the women returning home cannot be guaranteed. One form of insurance is to undergo a ‘cleansing’ ritual. At Kukuo, Samata Adulai obtained the services of one of the local fetish priests, to determine her innocence or guilt. In a special ritual a chicken has its throat cut. As it flutters around people wait to see how it will fall. It lands on its back, beak in the air. Smiles all round: the woman is innocent.

So much depends on the chicken. If it had fallen in any other way the ritual then proceeds to a potentially fatal level. If Samata had been declared guilty she would had to have undergone a cleansing ceremony, drinking a concoction of chicken blood, monkey skulls and soil. The exorcism is only considered effective if the woman does not fall ill within seven days. If she does, and survives, she has to do the whole thing again.

But even after this there is no guarantee that they will be accepted. So great is the fear of witchcraft, or the love of property, that not all communities are prepared to accept the return of the exiles. Once a witch, always a witch, so the view sadly goes.

Remember the Maine! Remember Joseph Kony!

I wrote an article a few years ago, a comment on a ‘trending’ campaign on Twitter directed against an English journalist. I opened as follows;

I love old horror movies, really old ones, the old black and white flicks with people like Boris Karloff. I’m sure people will have seen some of the original Frankenstein movies. Quite often there are scenes of indignant mobs out with flaming torches, hunting down the monster. But that’s so old-fashioned, don’t you agree? The mob is still with us of course, but it has long since lost the torches. Now it expresses its righteous indignation on the internet, haunting down the creatures that have happened to offend, hunting in a mood of outrage; hunting like a pack.

It’s true; the mass expression of a two-minute hate (yes, the analogy is appropriate) against Joseph Kony, head of the so-called Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), is the latest example. Angelina Jolie has joined in, saying that she does not know anyone who does not hate Joseph Kony. All this flaming passion and outrage was sparked by Kony2012, a YouTube video broadcast last Thursday, one sponsored by a charity called Invisible Children.

The aim was to make Kony ‘famous’. This man carried out a war of terror in northern Uganda for decades, with an army made up in part of kidnapped children, an army responsible for the most nauseating atrocities. No need to make him famous, because he was already infamous. But ‘famous’ he has become in the lights of Kony2012, with over fifty million views of the video. People in the States were encouraged to put up posters in cities across the nation, thus making the fight against Kony and the LRA a matter of ‘national interest’ in Washington. That, so the film makers believe, will ensure that US military ‘advisors’ are sent to Africa to aid in the hunt for Kony.

I wonder if these people understand the potential damage they have done; I wonder if they understand anything at all about the present political situation in Uganda? Ugandan bloggers and journalists, outraged by this moral imperialism, are saying that the film may very well serve to resurrect Kony and the LRA from a long decline. Javie Ssozi, a leading Ugandan blogger, has said that suggesting that the answer is more military action is wrong.

Have they thought of the consequences? Making Kony ‘famous’ could make him stronger. Arguing for more US troops could make him scared, and make him abduct more children, or go on the offensive.

The other thing worth pointing out is that the picture painted of Kony and Uganda by the film is six or seven years out of date. Kony is no longer in the country but hiding away in the jungles of neighbouring states. Documentary filmmakers have a responsibility to tell the truth as honestly as they can; otherwise they risk sinking into the mire of propaganda. Kony2012, with its inaccuracies and patronising view of Ugandans and Uganda, has done nothing more than whip up mass hysteria, the sort of thing that would have been understood by the yellow press of old. Remember the Maine! Remember Joseph Kony! – what’s the difference?

Do not misunderstand me; I think Kony is a boil on the backside of humanity, but this campaign is all surface and no substance; it rose quickly and it will die just as quickly, when the mob turns to some other fashionable trend. There have been people highlighting the Kony problem for years, with a lot more sobriety and a lot more effect. Sending in US troops would be like setting an elephant off in pursuit of the ants, and we surely all know the outcome with that.

Who are these Invisible Children people; what’s their motivation? Is it altruism, a concern for suffering humanity? No, the organisation seems to be a money-spinning operation feeding off pure emotion. I read in the Telegraph that of over $9million it spent in 2001 less than half went on helping people on the ground. The rest apparently went on “awareness programmes and products”, as well as management and media; in other words, a lot of self-promotion.

A spokesman for the Ugandan government, also pointing out that the war is no longer in the country, said that Kony2012 (it really should be Kony2006) is creating a wholly misleading impression, allowing Invisible Children to garner increasing financial resources for their own agenda. It’s clearly been a great success, playing on emotions rather than reason. But it really is time for the hate fest to end.

The Children Are Dead

Commenting in the Times on the present famine in Somalia, Tristan McConnell said that that the situation is set to get worse – “There are no rains expected for months and there will be no harvests until the end of the year at the earliest.”

Wherever the rain falls it does not fall on Somalia. It’s a disaster, an act of God, a theme taken up by the various aid agencies last month, who were blaming it on the “worst drought in sixty years.” Yes, it’s the worst drought in sixty years apart, that is, from the heavy downpours that have been flooding refugee camps in Mogadishu, the capital of this state that is not a state, over the last few days.

The simple fact is that the whole thing is a lie: God is not responsible for the starvation, people are, and the people I have in mind are the Islamists of al-Shabaab, who, as Aidan Hartley reports in the Spectator, control large parts of the south, ruling “over the population in a style reminiscent of Pol Pot’s Cambodia crossed with the Taleban.” Somalia is suffering from a famine alright, but it has political rather than natural causes.

In the same issue of the Times McConnell gives a more exact picture, telling of the suffering induced by the brutal and puritanical rule of the fundamentalist al-Shabaab, an organisation with links to al-Qaeda. Aid agencies are banned from the territory it controls. Omar Abdirahman, a local farmer, said “We’ve had a lot of drought and still lived. But al-Shabaab have blocked humanitarian aid and they stole my goats and livelihood.”

The brutish stupidity of the Islamists of al-Shabaab, which has seen grain stores in the sorghum-growing areas looted and farmers so intimidated that they have given up sowing crops altogether, is compounded by a form of inter-tribal racism. The victims of the militants are members of weak, minority or less well-armed clans, particularly the Rahanwein. Not only has food been requisitioned, or farmers subject to extortionate ‘taxes,’ but there are also reports of sexual violence against refugees.

So, people in the West, being asked for donations, once again being presented by conscience-moving pictures of malnourished children, are being told half-truths at best. Uneven rainfall is certainly causing problems but not so bad that they could not be overcome in normal circumstances. But Somalia is a country that has long lived with the most abnormal circumstances imaginable. Even aid workers are moved to acknowledge that the problem is less lack of rain than the failure of the Somali state.

Send your donatioins by all means if it will salve your conscience but it’s as well to be aware that the aid it buys is likely to end up as part of the politics of food, with local militants using it to achieve their own particular ends, regardless of the perceived suffering. As Hartley says, the picture is likely to be no better than that of the last famine crisis of 1992: some will get rich, most will die, rivals will fight over the foreign bonanza, food will be looted, aid workers will be kidnapped and murdered. Food aid, in other words, will only make a bad situation worse.

As a result, all of those who donated so generously to the famine appeals will end up loathing the Somalis, who they will blame for being ungrateful savages. World governments will hold a conference, then wash their hands of Somalia yet again. But it won’t save those starving children.

The truth is by the time you saw those pictures, if you saw those pictures, the children were already dead.

Heia Safari!

Having mentioned Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck in passing I now feel obliged to say a little more about him, the last of the German cavaliers; to say why I find him so admirable as a soldier and as a man. There is really no secret: he was as courageous as he was resourceful, carrying on a single-handed war in East Africa against superior Allied forces, keeping his small army in the field throughout the First World War, almost completely cut off from the Fatherland and any possibility of resupply.

Hunted from place to place, he raided Kenya, Uganda, Rhodesia, the Belgian Congo and Portuguese East Africa, always avoiding capture and escaping pursuit. He made the most effective use of the country and of his Askari troops, who were devoted to him. In the end he was the last German commander to surrender because he only received news of the Armistice in Europe after it was signed, formally laying down arms, undefeated in the way that his European colleagues were not undefeated, at Mbal in what is now Zambia on 23 November, 1918.

With a small contingent of German officers and non-commissioned offices, the backbone of his army were the Askaris, only some 2,500 men to begin in fourteen schutzttrupe, though additional recruitment would take his strength up to some 14,000, still only a fraction of those available to Jan Smuts and other Allied commanders. Lettow-Vorbeck, who could speak fluent Swahili, treated his soldiers with considerable respect at a time when African soldiers were viewed in colonial armies with racist and snobbish condescension. He told them that there was no difference between his white and his black soldiers, that they were all Africans. True to his perception, he appointed black officers, so far as I can gather the first European commander to do so.

Clearly he was driven by necessity here, though there really is not very much doubt that he valued his men as men. In the end he had only 1600 Askaris left, but he had achieved his aim of pinning down as many enemy troops as possible in an African 'side show', far from the Western Front. It seems to me that his action in deploying and using inferior forces in the most effective way possible bears comparison with that of General Thomas 'Stonewall' Jackson, particularly during the Valley Campaign of 1862 - hit and run, hit again, and hit again; advance where the enemy is weak, retreat when he is strong.

In Guerrilla: Colonel von Lettow-Vorbeck and Germany's East African Empire Edwin Hoyt described his four year campaign as "the greatest single guerrilla operation in history, and the most successful." After a brief interment he returned to Germany with his European troops, only some 120 survivors, in March 1919. For a demoralised nation the return of the Africans was the occasion for a brief moment of celebratory pride, as the they paraded down Unter den Linden in their faded and tattered colonial uniforms, Lettow-Vorbeck at their head mounted on a black charger.

Lettow-Vorbeck was soon caught up in the political chaos Weimar Germany, induced by left-wing adventurism. As a serving soldier he performed valuable service in suppressing the communist Spartacus rising in Hamburg, but his career came to an end in 1920 after he became a leading figure in the right-wing Kapp Putsch, whose aim was to install a military dictatorship intended stop the country's political anarchy.

Although he later sat in the Reichstag as deputy for the conservative German National People's Party, he was immensely distrustful of the Nazis. He avoided all personal compromise, even refusing Hitler's offer of the ambassadorship in London despite his straightened financial circumstances. In the 1960s a former schutztruppe officer was asked about this in an interview with the historian Charles Siller. "I understand that Lettow told Hitler to go fuck himself?", the question was put. "That's right", came the reply, "except I don't think he put it that politely." After this he was kept under surveillance by a regime, though he was still too well-respected in the country to suffer any further inconvenience.

Lettow-Vorbeck earned the respect of his former enemies. In 1929 he was even invited to London as the guest of honour at a reunion banquet for veterans of the East African campaign. There he met Jan Smuts for the first time, the two men remaining close friends until the latter's death in 1950. In 1953 he returned to East Africa, now the protectorate of Tanganyika, where he was received with full military honours by the British. But surely the greater honour, the greater source of pride, is that the surviving Askaris all turned out to greet him, singing Heia Safari, their old marching song.

Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck died in 1964, now well into his nineties. He was buried with full military honours, two of his Askaris being flown to Germany to attend the ceremony. To mark the occasion the Bundestag agreed to pay back pay to all of the surviving African soldiers, a move he would have approved of, as he tried unsuccessfully to make this one of the conditions of his surrender in 1918.

Bliss was it in that dawn

Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa features on my list of all-time favourite non-fictions. Blixen, who originally wrote under the pen-name name of Isak Dinesen, was a Danish writer, a marvellous teller of stories, including some in the Gothic genre. But she is still best known for her memoir of her life on her farm in what was then British East Africa, now Kenya.

Published in 1937, it opens so evocatively- “I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills”, proceeding as a wonderful retrospective on her time as a coffee planter, both before, during and after the First World War. I was intrigued to discover that on the way out she voyaged on the same ship as Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, a soldier on his way to take command of the troops in German East Africa, now Tanzania.

Both, in their separate ways, were to become the stuff that legends are made on: Lettow-Vorbeck as one of the great German soldiers (he’s another of my heroes!), a field commander and guerrilla leader of genius: Blixen as an icon of single-minded female determination, a survivor against all odds. They had a common interest in horses, Lettow-Vorbeck later writing to her asking to send some of her best stock. Unfortunately by this time the war had intervened.

Blixen was to meet other remarkable people, the most remarkable of whom in my view was Denys Finch Hatton (if you’ve seen the movie based on the book he is played by Robert Redford). Finch Hatton in so many ways was the last of the adventures and buccaneers who built the British Empire. A scion of one of the best connected English families, he was educated at Eton and Oxford before he came out to Africa at the age of twenty-four, the same age I am now, and stayed for the rest of his life. He was a professional hunter, but he was so much more- an intellectual, a flyer and a lover, a man of highly refined feelings, the passion of Blixen’s life.

In the early 1930s he took her flying in his De Havilland Gypsy Moth, an experience she describes in the book as the “most transporting pleasure of my life on the farm.” Blixen wrote to her brother of Finch Hatton that “to love the ground he walks upon, to be happy beyond words when he is here, and to suffer worse than death many times when he leaves.” In May 1931 he left forever, killed when his Gypsy Moth crashed at Voi airport. He was buried in accordance with his wishes in the Ngong Hills, where his brother later erected a memorial with a line from Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner – “He prayeth well, who loveth well both man and bird and beast.”

In so many ways Out of Africa describes, in transporting prose, a vanished world, a better world, a more heroic world. It’s a time in which I could see myself, a time when there yet more worlds to conquer. Bliss it must have been in that dawn to be alive, but to be young would have been very heaven. By the time Blixen left it was over- the pioneers were gone, the game was gone, the land was gone. In came the awful Happy Valley crowd, as mediocrity and tedious bourgeois decadence walking hand in hand!

Congos and the Country People

When I discover a writer for the first time, someone I find impressive, I tend to work my way in a fever through everything they’ve written. So it was with Graham Greene, who came to me in my mid-teens. I read all of his novels, increasingly fascinated by the moral dilemmas he explores, his short stories and his non-fiction work, including Lord Rochester’s Monkey, an analysis of the poems and life of John Wilmot, second earl of Rochester, a notorious Restoration libertine, and Journey Without Maps, his account of a safari with his cousin Barbara through the West African state of Liberia in the 1930s.

I didn’t think too much about the latter: I saw it; I read it; I forgot it. But an article by Tim Butcher, formerly the Daily Telegraph’s Africa correspondent, in the October issue of History Today (Our Man in Liberia) has not just brought it back to mind but allowed me to focus more specifically on the context of the journey and the history of Liberia, a country, I confess, about which I know virtually nothing, beyond the fact that it was set up by freed slaves returning ‘home’ from the United States in the nineteenth century. The paradox is that Greene was sent to the place as an agent for the Anti-Slavery Society. The ancestors of slaves, in other words, were suspected of practicing slavery!

There are lots of paradoxes here. Liberia itself was a country created not on a principle of freedom but in part on specific forms of racism. The American Colonization Society, set up in the early nineteenth century, was run less by altruists than by those for whom free blacks in a slave-owning society were a problem. The ‘back to Africa’ project, in other words, was a way reinforcing slavery by removing an obvious anomaly.

The project was an early form, if you like, of ethnic cleansing, and was perceived to be such by many among the black population whose home was America, not an Africa of which they knew nothing. Those who did accept the offer of transportation were considered to be lackeys, people who betrayed the struggle against slavery in the United States. In the end only 11,000 agreed to take part in the Liberia venture.

These people were effectively dumped on the shores of what was to become Liberia in the 1820s, on lands bought from local tribal chiefs. Black these settlers may have been but African they most assuredly were not. As Butcher points out, a great many simply could not cope with the local conditions, killed off in large numbers by disease or by hostile tribes, much like the early white settlers in America.

By the late 1840s the population had reduced so much that questions were raised over the project’s viability. By this time the American Colonisation Society had lost all interest. The cords were cut and the few thousand survivors established Liberia as a sovereign nation, with a national motto of ‘The love of Liberty Brought Us Here.’

I used to believe that Liberia survived the late nineteenth century Scramble for Africa because it was under some kind of American protection. That’s the not the case: the simple fact is that it had nothing worth scrambling for. The first signs of any kind of national prosperity did not come until the 1920s, when the Firestone rubber company set up operations in the country.

It’s now that the real divisions began to appear between Americo-Liberians, known to the indigenous people as ‘Congos’, a reminder that it was from here that a huge number of Africans were taken into slavery in past times, and the ‘Country People’, the pejorative expression the settlers used for the native Liberians. It was the struggle between the Congos and the Country People that really defines modern Liberia, superficially called the ‘black republic’ by outsiders.

The greatest contradiction of all was over the issue of slavery, the issue that Greene came to explore. The founding charter of Liberia condemns the slave trade as “that curse of curses”, but by the late 1920s the government was selling its own people, the Country People, rather, into slavery. The Congos offered the bizarre defence that they had simply ‘acquired’ tribesmen disposed of by the village elders, thus preserving a longstanding tradition.

The problem kept coming and going, apparently solved at one moment only to appear at the next. In 1935 the Anti-Slavery and Aboriginal Protection Society described Liberia as “one of our most difficult and anxious problems.” Up to date information was needed and Greene, known from his work on The Times, was the man for the task.


Journey without Maps is far from being my favourite book by Greene; and it’s certainly far from being my favourite book about travel! This is not a trip into the exotic, something the author must have been expecting, but a monotonous sojourn through mile upon mile off elephant grass, punctuated by periodic meals with local villagers, eating something called ‘chop’, a lose term covering culinary horrors! Conditions were generally deplorable, particularly in health care. Greene himself took ill, so badly that he was not expected to live. But he did, thank goodness. No, Journey without Maps is not Conrad but it’s still a worthwhile reminder of past explorations and past times. Besides, the recent history of Liberia and Sierra Leone, through which the author also passed, show that when it comes to Africa darkness is never that far from the heart.

Glittering Prizes

This year the prize for excellence in African leadership goes to (cue background of rolling drums), goes to…actually, it goes to nobody. So sorry for the anti-climax when I’m sure you all expected one of the Continent’s great stars to emerge, like Omar al-Bashir, Robert Mugabe or maybe even Teodoro Oblang Nguema Mbanasgo. Perhaps some of you, perhaps all of you, have never heard of the latter. If not, he is the president of Equatorial Guinea, and if anything even more corrupt, brutal and thuggish than al-Bashir and Mugabe.

Anyway, let me return to the prize question. I’m not joking: there truly is a prize for excellence in African leadership, worth some £3.5 million ($5million). But the pot just grows and grows, because the Mo Ibrahim Foundation announced that for the second year running it was unable to find a candidate worthy of this singular honour.

More generally it’s not been a good year for African prizes. The Observer reported last weekend that the UN has failed to present its award for “improving the quality of human life” because human rights groups have objected to it being funded by a rather repellent dictator. Can you guess who? No? Well it’s funded by Teodoro Oblang Nguema Mbanasgo.

The prize money itself is clearly part of the loot acquired from the wholesale plunder of Equatorial Guinea’s oil wealth. Probably this would have gone unnoticed in a Continent where extortion seems to be a normal part of the economic process. Unfortunately for Teodoro Oblang Nguema Mbanasgo the kudos that he may have gained by his generosity has been spoiled by the arbitrary arrest and torture of political opponents, people whose “quality of human life” is somewhat on the low side.

So, a continent of 53 nations and one billion people does not seem to be able to produce a single political worthy, clearly a cause of some embarrassment. In Kenya The Daily Nation was even moved to observe that “The idea was always noble, but its implementation was not clearly thought out.” It most certainly was not.

The record of Africa post-empire has been fairly dismal to say the least, with so many people in so many nations merely there to be ruthlessly exploited by narrow and venal ruling political elites, people who import fleets of luxury cars in places that barely have serviceable roads. Now if there had been a prize for human rights abuses, for genocide, for brutality, for running economies into the ground, the worthy candidates, I feel sure, would fill several fleets of mercs. Oh, sorry, I’m not being fair. It’s the entire fault the wicked colonialists, of empires that disappeared over fifty years ago. In Africa some things never change.

Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness reflected a new awareness that all was not well with the European 'civilizing' mission in Africa; that imperial expansion had become a cover for a venture which increasingly subverted local life.

It was in consequence of this that the African Society was founded in 1900, in memory of the writer and ethnographer, Mary Kingsley, dedicated to building up respect for African customs and changing European understanding about Africa and the Africans. The West African Mail was launched in 1903 by E D Morel, with the aim of supplying 'reliable and impartial intelligence' on West African issues. More and more journalists and writers began to condemn what was happening in Africa, not just in the Congo, but elsewhere, particularly South-West Africa, where the Germans were carrying out the first genocide of the twentieth century. Another British journalist, H W Nevinson, investigated slavery in Portuguese West Africa, publishing his findings in 1906 as A Modern Slavery.

To add to Conrad's fictional treatment of the horrors of colonial exploitation, Mark Twain wrote King Leopold's Soliloquy, and Arthur Conan Doyle The Crime of the Congo. In Red Rubber, published in 1906, Morel made it clear that the worst of Leopold's atrocities had been a consequence of the rising world demand for rubber for the growing automobile industry. It is no coincidence, perhaps, that the first Model T came of the Ford assembly line in the same year. In 1909, in an attempt to strengthen the front against the abuses in Africa, the Anti-Slavery Society united with the Aborigines Protection Society to form a single Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society. This investigated abuses not just in Africa but all over the world, including the Putumayo atrocities in South America.

Heart of Darkness came at just the right moment in history. But in the end, when Marlow returns to Brussels to report Kurtz's death to his fiancé, he hides the truth under a comforting fiction. Some realities are just too hard to bear.

Mugabe and the Wasteland

Robert Mugabe recently celebrated his eighty-sixth birthday. This year he will also pass another milestone: he will have been in power for thirty years. Who would have imagined back in 1980 that he would have lasted so long; who would have thought that he would have taken a prosperous country and destroyed it; who would have thought that he would create a wasteland and call it peace.

Zimbabwe, the one-time Rhodesia, has indeed become a wasteland, ruled over by a third-rate Ozymandias, a place where the powerless can only behold his works and despair. The land grabs all but destroyed the economy, as so-called ‘war veterans’ took farms, farms that they had not the competence to manage themselves. And the chief victims of these seizures were not white farmers but black workers, who lost their livelihoods,

Unemployment is now reckoned to run at a truly astonishing 94% Yes, that’s 94%, which means that less than half a million of the country’s twelve million people now have a job. Now add to that an inflation rate of eye-wateringly astronomical proportions then one begins to understand just how desperate things have become.

Still Mugabe goes on, rigging election after election, surrounded by a coterie of vicious thugs, in a constant state of denial, blaming everyone but himself for the disaster of his rule, forever resting on the crutch of imperialism, of a legacy that slips further and further into the past.

Yes, there is so much to celebrate. What a bash he had on his birthday, a party that saw the consumption of eight thousand lobsters and five hundred bottles of whisky, all this as children go hungry, as ignorance and disease spread. But Mugabe goes on, the African Hitler. Oh, that’s not my comparison, it’s his;

This Hitler has only one objective: justice for his people, sovereignty for his people, recognition of the independence of his people and their rights over their resources. If that is Hitler, then let me be a Hitler tenfold.

OK, Mister Mugabe –you are Hitler, tenfold. And as your ignorance of European history is almost as great as your corruption, moral turpitude and political incompetence let me just say that Hitler did not bring his people justice, or sovereignty, or independence, or control over their resources. No; he brought them disaster; he took Germany to the nadir, the lowest point in its history. Altogether a pretty apt parallel, though I suspect Mugabe has not the intellect to understand just how apt.

And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you:
I will show you fear in a handful of dust

Hanging the Gardener

I’ve picked up some interesting, darkly humorous, snippets of information from an article by Stacey Hynd of Exeter University in the latest issue of the Journal of African History. Headed Killing the Condemned it deals with the administration of capital punishment in British colonial Africa.

Although public hanging was banned in Britain in 1868 colonial administrators retained the practice for as long as they could, holding to the principle that in Africa justice must be seen to be done. When they finally gave way to pressure from London predicted results followed. Local superstition meant that people did not believe the condemned to be dead, not having seen them die. Instead they were assumed to have been protected by magic or even turned into hyenas. These kinds of belief were so prevalent that the British had to co-opt people from the condemned man’s village to witness the hanging.

Surprisingly the regime of the condemned was remarkably relaxed. They were even allowed to mix with the general population. In one case a condemned man in Rhodesia in the 1930s was allowed to work as a gardener for some eighteen months prior to his execution. He was well-liked by his fellow prisoners, who had no idea that he was under sentence of death, though he was a very bad gardener. When he was finally hanged the prison authorities were surprised they could get no volunteers to fill the vacancy. On further investigation they discovered that it was believed that he had been executed because of his inferior abilities in the garden!

Thoughts on the White Tribe of Africa

The Second Boer War, which saw the conquest of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, left the Afrikaner community with a painful sense of victimhood, hardly surprising when one considers that some 28,000 of them died of disease and neglect in the concentration camps established by the British during the war. For a long time afterwards it was believed that this was part of a deliberate act of genocide.

The struggle itself, the heroism and sacrifice involved, took its place alongside the Great Trek and the Battle of Blood River as central myths in the Boer national epic. Having lost their political identity, the Boers placed ever greater emphasis on their culture, particularly on Afrikaans as a language distinct from Dutch, which finally achieved official recognition in 1925. It was in this, the language of the people, that Boer nationalism took its definitive shape, with more and more publications appearing on the subject of the war, particularly in the work of Gustav Preller.

By the 1930s it is possible to detect the emergence of a distinct, one might almost say tribal, identity amongst the Afrikaans-speaking peoples, transcending the divisions of class and status, comparable, perhaps, in a British context to the Unionist community in Northern Ireland. To an extent this mood was kept under a degree of control by respected leaders like Jan Smuts, who identified with the wider Imperial project, but it came to the fore with the victory of the National Party in the election of 1948, the beginning of the long rule of the white tribe of Africa

Anastasia in Africa

I was in Morocco over last New Year although that was not my first time in Africa , oh no. The New Year before that I went with my boyfriend of the time on a safari to East Africa, black Africa . We had hoped to spend some time in Kenya but the political situation was too tense just after the parliamentary elections, so we moved on to Uganda .

I had a really great time there, and met some fabulous people. What I always do is to get away as much as I can from the tourist ghettos, to met local people, people who can tell me what life is really like, to take me where no one else goes. It always works. I met some super friends, guys mostly, but also some girls. The prostitutes, yes, the prostitutes, in one of the bars I found myself in were just so sweet; I learned so much from them, and I still keep in touch with a few by email. Most of them are actually lesbian, which is, I suppose, no great surprise.

I think I was everywhere. I have great memories of eating fish and drinking beer by the banks of Lake Victoria . I was lucky enough also, after visiting the source of the Nile, to go and consult, well, I would have used the term ‘witch doctor’, but that is used only for the practitioners of the blacker arts; and when it comes to magic and witchcraft nowhere is blacker than Africa. Possibly shaman, though I do not think this term strictly accurate either. A wise elder, I suppose, an old man in ragged, traditional costume. It was right in the heart of the bush, in a village, a mud hut. We sat round a smoky fire, as I was told things about me and my future; not vague, in the usual way of these things, but specific…and accurate, mostly accurate, as it turned out.

On going back to Kampala we decided we wanted to fly on to Rwanda , to see the mountain gorillas, spending a few days in Kigali first. My Ugandan friends got really anxious, not assumed anxiety, but genuine apprehension. I should not go, they said. Why? I asked. Because there are too many witches there, they answered. I said nothing. :))

WaBenzi: Mugabe and the Destruction of Zimbabwe

Sub-Saharan Africa is a huge place, and there are indeed tragic examples where colonial history has had the direst of consequences, economically and politically: Mozambique and Angola spring to mind, countries all but destroyed by war and civil war. However, Africa is also a great continent, with a great and energetic people, badly served by its politicians. How long are we to forward the excuse of colonialism as a justification-and it has become a justification-for backwardness and the sheer failure of potential?

Take the example, if you will, of the Republic of Ireland, which had an experience of colonialism far older and of land expropriation far more severe than the least fortunate of the African colonies. Although free for almost a hundred years now it was dominated for decades after independence by a reactionary Church hierarchy. Despite this, its transformation over the past twenty years or so into one of the most dynamic of European economies and societies is especially worthy of note, particularly when the country possesses little in the way of natural resources. I wish I could see similar signs of renaissance and resurgence in Africa; but I can not.

There is a word in Swahili which explains the plight of Africa far better than outdated notions of imperialism: it is WaBenzi, meaning boss or, better still, big shot. The WaBenzi, the undeclared tribe which crosses all borders, is, in my estimation, by far the greatest of Africa's misfortunes.

Take the example of Malawi. In 2000, following the death of Hastings Banda, the former dictatorial president, the British government increased aid to the country by some £20 million. The WaBenzi promptly celebrated by spending almost £2 million, yes, £2 million, on a fleet of 39 S-class Mercedes, in a country where the roads are hardly fit for carts.

Take one more example. In 2002 Mwai Kibaki came to power in Kenya on an anti-corruption platform, announcing that Corruption will now cease as a way of life in Kenya. The very fist law passed by the new Parliament was to increase politicians' salaries by over 170%, to about £65,000pa ($125,000). Beyond this, each MP was awarded a package of allowances, including a grant of £23,600 to buy a duty free car, all in a country where the average per capita income is £210 ($406) per annum.

I could go on like this, but it's really too depressing. You will find all of the details of these examples and more in How African leaders spend our money, an article by Aidan Hartley, published in the London edition of The Spectator in June 2005.

I have visited several African countries, and I love the people and the place. But we have to stop making excuses for failure, to stop draping history around the necks of Africans as a catch-all explanation for their perceived shortcomings. If Africa is to move forward we need to understand the real causes of failure; and these are far closer to home.

Much too much is made of the deleterious effects of imperialism in explaining the failure of many modern African states. India, Malaysia, and Singapore were all under British control, but this has not hampered the development of modern economies and mature political structures. In Africa imperialism has become a crutch, intended to explain and excuse failure. In many countries corruption has become the dominant mode of political exchange. Imperialism did not destroy Zimbabwe: Robert Mugabe did