Africa

Thursday

Michela Wrong

Witnesses in the heart of darkness

When presented with a 639-page doorstopper which includes 82 pages of closely-written sources, notes and index, most of us feel a bit like a patient about to swallow a strong dose of antibiotics: ‘This isn’t going to be pleasant, but it’ll be good for me.’ First published in Dutch in 2010, translated into French and German, and only now coming out in English, Congo arrives trailing prizes and praise. And yet I quailed. What I hadn’t realised was that David Van Reybrouck, who spent a decade on this extraordinary work, is not primarily a historian. He is a playwright, poet and novelist and, if this translation by Sam Garrett is

Thursday

Matthew Parris

A secret from my African childhood has become a deeper mystery

About 55 years ago, when I was about ten, my younger brother Roger and I discovered a slave pit in Africa. Actually it probably wasn’t a slave pit and we probably didn’t discover it, but ‘Arab’ ‘slave pits’ were what Southern Rhodesian schools offered as an explanation for the circular, room-sized, stone-lined pits sunk about five feet below ground but open to the sky. And if Roger’s and mine were not the first modern eyes to behold this antiquity, then we were able at least to persuade ourselves of the claim, as there was no path trodden into the small patch of dark, dense primary forest in whose midst we

Thursday

Clarissa Tan

Britain has many major problems – racism isn’t one of them

I am a banana. In Singapore, where I used to live, this needs no explanation — it means I’m yellow on the outside but white on the inside, someone who looks ethnically Chinese but whose way of thinking is ‘western’. There are bananas all over Asia, and I daresay the world. We are better versed in Shakespeare than Confucius, our Mandarin is appalling, and we often have pretentious Anglo or American accents. Then there are people who are ‘ching-chong’, a reference to anyone who enjoys the kitschy bling of stereotypically Chinese things, sans irony — they like paving their entire garden with cement, for example, or driving a huge Mercedes,

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Will China kill all of Africa’s elephants?

In 2010, Aidan Hartley, our ‘Wild Life’ columnist and Unreported World presenter, asked in his feature below: ‘Will China kill all Africa’s elephants?’ And, as I type, politicians from over 50 countries are discussing this very issue at the London Conference on the Illegal Wildlife Trade. Meanwhile, David Beckham, Prince William, and the Chinese basketball player Yao Ming have made a video highlighting the plight of the rhino. William Hague – hosting the summit – said at a reception last night that ‘we are on the brink of a crucial global turning point in the struggle against wildlife trafficking’, adding that the British government ‘has a responsibility to push for an

Tuesday

Camilla Swift

Education is the only way to save the black rhino

Could legalising the trade in rhino horn – and allowing sport hunting – be the solution to Africa’s rhino poaching problem? Legalisation, it is argued, will make it easier to control the trade in animal products and negate the black market. It’s a similar argument to one often used about the legalisation of marijuana – as Hugo Rifkind wrote a couple of weeks ago: ‘This is an economic land grab. It is the process of taking a criminal industry away from criminals.’ Controlling a legal trade in animal products is easier said than done, however. Authorities have struggled to suppress the illegal trade, so there are doubts about whether they

Thursday

Aidan Hartley

I don’t love money, but I love the risks it makes me take

On the flight into Kinshasa, I sat next to an elderly Englishman who was pallid with fear. He revealed that he was a bankrupt who was determined to survive by smuggling gold dust out of the Congo. He was on the verge of tears at the prospect of returning to the African city where only a week before he had been robbed at gunpoint of his cash and gold. He cut a sad and lonely figure but flying over that ocean of unbroken forest I couldn’t help but envy him a little bit for his risk-taking. I have never been interested in money but I did enjoy Moscow in the

Thursday

Michael Hanlon

There’s a global morality gap — and it’s getting wider

First World, Third World, East, West, North and South; every few years economists come up with yet another supposedly more acceptable way of slicing humanity into manageable chunks. Mostly these great divides are riven by wealth; sometimes (RIP Second World) by ideology. But I think it’s time to name a new divide, a more fundamental, more puzzling one — a split between worlds that will define the 21st century much as the Iron Curtain defined the 20th. I am talking about the morality gap. It is now clear, though not much talked about, that humanity, all 7.1 billion of us, tends to fall into one of two distinct camps. On

Thursday

Alex Massie

Being a ‘National Treasure’ appears to be a license to talk rot

Take, for instance, the curious case of Sir David Attenborough. The poor booby is another neo-Malthusian. Which is another reminder that expertise in one area is no guarantee of good sense in another. As I wrote in The Scotsman this week: Attenborough is a supporter of Population Matters, a creepy outfit who have previously suggested Britain’s optimum population lies around the 20 million mark. Let’s rewind the clock to 1850 then. Like other Malthusians, Population Matters is coy about how it proposes to reduce Britain’s population to this “sustainable” level. Emulating China’s one-child policy may be tempting, but will not reverse the terrifying tide of prosperity and population growth now threatening our

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life: Brief encounter aboard the Mombasa to Nairobi ‘Lunatic Express’

Many years ago I met a woman in a train on the Mombasa to Nairobi ‘Lunatic Express’ line. She was seated opposite me in the compartment, next to her husband. The three of us had the compartment to ourselves. It was early in the morning. I’ve forgotten what the sleeping arrangements had been the night before. I think perhaps the husband and I had bedded down together and she’d rejoined him in the morning. Her husband had then left the compartment to go to the lavatory or dining car, and she and I had begun to talk. She’d met and married the husband after a whirlwind romance a year before,

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life: There’s no such thing as race — or is there?

The barbecue was a sawn-off 40-gallon oil drum with holes punched in the sides. It stood on a rock under the spreading boughs of an oak tree. For fuel we chucked in driftwood logs and clumps of seaweed. The Old Speckled Hen was going down a treat in the evening sunshine, and the barbecue smoke and I were circulating convivially. I was introduced to a young couple who were new to the area. They had recently moved to Britain from Uganda, where they had been farming. We talked about Africa. I said I’d recently seen a BBC news report claiming that the African economy has taken off, and to the

Aidan Hartley

Wild life: Could I ever revive the Pinguaan Springs?

Il Pinguaan Springs When I first saw the Pinguaan Springs they were small, fetid bogs set about with papyrus, the haunt of mercury-coloured frogs and dragonflies. I wondered why they were regarded as so important that you could find them on any half-decent map of Kenya. Without water, the farm we were building could never stir into life. In those days I did not know what to do. For two years we collected water in jerricans and loaded them on to donkeys to be trekked to the tent where we lived. Baboons defecated in the spring pools. We all came down with Giardia. On many of our adventures we were

Thursday

Lewis Jones

The Frontman, by Harry Browne – review

According to a story which Harry Browne accepts is surely apocryphal, but which he includes in his book anyway, at a U2 gig in Glasgow the band’s singer silenced the audience and started to clap his hands slowly, whispering as he did so: ‘Every time I clap my hands a child in Africa dies.’ Someone in the audience shouted: ‘Well fuckin’ stop doin’ it then!’ The story is worth repeating because it reflects the way many people, even charitably disposed rock fans, feel about Bono. They think his name — born Paul David Hewson, he appropriated the stage name from a Dublin hearing-aid shop that advertised devices called ‘Bono Vox’

Thursday

Anthony Sattin

The Last Train to Zona Verde, by Paul Theroux – review

Paul Theroux has produced some of the best travel books of the past 50 years, and some of the lamest. His latest work shrieks swansong, from its title — The Last Train — to the acknowledgement that he has reached ‘the end of this sort of travel, marinated in politics and urban wreckage’, to the closing words with which he ‘felt beckoned home’. So, if this is the last of Theroux as epic traveller, has he gone out with a bang, or another whimper? In his 2002 book, Dark Star Safari (not his best), Theroux travelled along the eastern side of the African continent from Cairo to Cape Town. This

Thursday

Aidan Hartley

Wild life: Leopard on a hot tin roof

A leopard has been on the rampage night after night. We know her because she often lurks in the woods behind the farmstead, between the beehives and the old long-drop hut. Very occasionally, at dusk, she’s spotted lying on the hot tin roof of the big water tank on the hill above the woods — but for weeks around midnight she’s been prowling up to the goats’ boma. She leaps over high thorns and razor wire and dry-stone walls, struts along the top of the enclosure and then pounces. Livestock erupt in panic, the night watchmen shake themselves from their deep slumber and roar and rush about. The she leopard,

Monday

Rod Liddle

I salute the Queen’s neo-colonial stance against the persecution of homosexuals in Africa.

Is her Majesty the Queen really at the forefront in the struggle for gay and lesbian equality? Or does she, deep down, harbour misgivings about poofs? I suppose we will never know for sure. In putting her name to the new Commonwealth Charter she will be supporting the following statement: ‘We are implacably opposed to all forms of discrimination, whether rooted in gender, race, colour, creed, political belief or other grounds.’ According to the press over the weekend, this meant she was implicitly signed up to fight for gay rights, despite the fact that she has never seemed terribly exercised about the issue before. The new charter is presumably a

Thursday

Alan Judd

Hasty exit strategy

For years after the rug was pulled from under it, the British Empire — with a quarter of the globe, the largest the world has known — seemed an unfashionable subject for historians. Did they fear political incorrectness, or was it simply that they had to wait for sufficient archival material to emerge? Whichever, there is now some very welcome sprouting in this part of the historical garden, already well-watered by the Cambridge historian Ronald Hyam, and few shoots could be more welcome than Calder Walton’s important contribution. Walton draws on recently released MI5 files to reveal the role of intelligence in the transitions from colony to independent state. Decolonisation

Tuesday

Martin Bright

There is nothing new about Islamism in Africa

The Algerian hostage crisis is over and the Prime Minister has warned that the focus of the al-Qaeda’s franchise has shifted westwards. In his statement on the situation, he was channelling Tony Blair, which at least makes a change from channelling the Foreign Office. But the initial reaction from Downing Street was deeply unimpressive. The BBC’s Nick Robinson quoted a nameless, sneering voice, apparently exasperated at the Algerian response to the crisis. It would be interesting to know whether this patronising individual had ever spent any time working outside SW1 or had any idea that the Algerian people have lived on the frontline of the struggle with violent Islamists for

Thursday

Shiraz Maher

Mali could be the gamble that defines Hollande’s presidency

The crisis in Mali is yet another unintended consequence of the Arab Spring. Specifically, they are a result of the revolution in Libya, where Tuareg rebels who supported Gaddafi were forced to flee after his downfall. Heavily armed and regrouping in Mali, they created the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) which effectively ended the government’s control over the north. Jihadist groups aligned with al-Qaeda then swooped in and established a semi-autonomous Islamic state in the north. As they pushed south it looked as if they might capture all of Mali, prompting interim President Dioncounda Traore to ask for French assistance. Francois Hollande responded by launching Operation Serval with overwhelming

Sunday

David Blackburn

Wole Soyinka: Boko Haram must be destroyed | 18 November 2012

The Books Blog has an interview with Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian author who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. Soyinka is worth listening to for his ambivalence towards nationalism, his tolerant secularism and his recollection of solitary confinement during Nigeria’s civil war in the 1960s. But his comments on Boko Haram, the radical Islamist group that is terrorising northern and central Nigeria, are worth quoting here on a weekend of bloodshed in the Middle East. ‘I look at Boko Haram not just as a terrorist group, but also as a criminal gang, and a bunch of psychopaths. You don’t enter into dialogue with drug lords and criminals. It

J P O'Malley

Wole Soyinka: Boko Haram must be destroyed

Born in 1934 in Nigeria, Wole Soyinka is the author of more than twenty plays, ten volumes of poetry, two novels, seven collections of essays and five autobiographical works. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. He was the first black African man to win the prestigious prize His latest book, Of Africa, is a 200-page polemic that attempts to understand the contradictory nature of African politics. Two important questions that arise from Soyinka’s book are: what is Africa? And what do we understand of its history? Soyinka expends considerable effort in his book discussing how the nihilist nature of fundamentalist Islam is destroying societies in certain African