Africa

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

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

From our UK edition

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 extent that the standard of living of the average African was already on a par with that of a BBC executive. Well, it was certainly improving for some, they said doubtfully.

Aidan Hartley

Wild life: Could I ever revive the Pinguaan Springs?

From our UK edition

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 alone and I was foolhardy. Our neighbours regularly had to save our lives when bandits came, charging over the hill in response to radio alarms.

Thursday

Lewis Jones

The Frontman, by Harry Browne – review

From our UK edition

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’ — is ineffably silly, and join Sinead O’Connor in preferring to call him Bozo.

Thursday

Anthony Sattin

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

From our UK edition

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 time he decided to even things out by travelling in the west, from South Africa to Namibia and Angola.

Thursday

Aidan Hartley

Wild life: Leopard on a hot tin roof

From our UK edition

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, out to feed a litter of cubs, I think, is disturbed, abandons the throat of her already killed prey in disgust and slinks off to hunt something wilder.

Monday

Rod Liddle

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

From our UK edition

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.

Thursday

Alan Judd

Hasty exit strategy

From our UK edition

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.

Tuesday

Martin Bright

There is nothing new about Islamism in Africa

From our UK edition

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 more than 20 years.

Thursday

Shiraz Maher

Mali could be the gamble that defines Hollande’s presidency

From our UK edition

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 public support both at home and abroad.

Sunday

David Blackburn

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

From our UK edition

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.

J P O'Malley

Wole Soyinka: Boko Haram must be destroyed

From our UK edition

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 nations: particularly in Somali, Mali, and Nigeria.

Monday

David Blackburn

Should literature be political?

From our UK edition

‘Should literature be political?’ Njabulo S Ndebele asked Open Book Cape Town the other day. Ndebele, a renowned academic in South Africa, has written a précis of his speech for the Guardian. He draws a distinction between political novels, which dramatise activism, and other forms of literature that ‘politicise’ by deepening awareness. His point is often sunk by his own loquacity (‘These two books [The African Child and God’s Bits of Wood] reveal the continuations between political literature and literary politics. Both achieve transcendence through art that politicises and depoliticises all at once.

Wednesday

Peter Guest

Africa’s growth spurt

From our UK edition

When South African police opened fire on striking miners at Lonmin’s Marikana platinum mine, it had all of the hallmarks of the bad old days of the continent - the tangled and violent business of pulling metal from the ground in the “Dark Continent”. The events at Marikana were symptomatic of the fractious politics of labour in South Africa, the uncomfortable alliances forged in the anti-apartheid struggle that have not resolved themselves in peacetime. However, at their root they have the simmering tension caused by the unequal distribution of economic opportunity that is not restricted to South Africa. The mining sector there, and elsewhere in the developing world, is nearly always a lightning rod for criticism and unrest.

Tuesday

Martin Plaut

South Africa: Mired in corruption?

From our UK edition

On the 5th of August Mary Robinson delivered the annual Nelson Mandela lecture in Cape Town. It should have been an occasion when the former Irish President and UN Human Rights Commissioner looked back on South Africa’s achievements since the end of apartheid. Yet her speech will probably be remembered for just one sentence: ‘…the ANC’s moral authority has been eroded, tainted by allegations of corruption; a temporary betrayal of its history.’ From an old friend of the ruling party this was damning indeed, but is she right to refer to corruption as a ‘temporary betrayal?’ The ANC’s history is more complex and more difficult than supporters like Mrs Robinson are prepared to acknowledge.

Friday

The Spectator

Happy birthday V.S. Naipaul

From our UK edition

Given it's V.S. Naipaul's birthday today, we've dug out from the archives a 1979 Spectator review by Richard West of A Bend In The River. Don't forget that the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize, named after his younger brother, is currently open for entries. One of the dark places The protagonist and narrator of this book is a young man named Salim from the east coast of Africa; a Muslim Indian by origin but not from one of the families of the men who came to build the railways. Like the Arabs of old Zanzibar and what is now Tanzania, Salim's ancestors had once traded in ivory and slaves from the interior of the continent: 'I remember hearing from my grandfather that he had once shipped a boatful of slaves as a cargo of rubber.

Friday

Steven Mcgregor

Interview: Nick Makoha’s shame

From our UK edition

“My shame was my father wasn’t there,” says Nick Makoha, the London poet who represented Uganda at the recent Poetry Parnassus. This frank vulnerability is at the core of his first collection of poetry and his new theatre performance, ‘My Father and other Superheroes.’ Uganda is a source of tension for Makoha as both the place of his birth but also a place he fled, a place from which he feels distant. “Most people are from somewhere else,” he says. “So the story of the exile isn’t the minority, we’re the majority. Look at T.S. Eliot, by all rights and purposes he belongs to America. He liked French poets, Italian poets.

Sunday

The Spectator

Science or starvation | 6 May 2012

From our UK edition

Here, for CoffeeHousers, is an extended version of the leader column in this week's magazine. It takes on the green fundamentalism which stupidly aims to put a stop to genetically modified foods: At the end of the month, a group of shrieking protestors are planning to descend upon a field in Hertfordshire and, in their words, ‘decontaminate’ (i.e. destroy) a field of genetically modified wheat. The activists, from an organisation called Take the Flour Back, claim to be saving Britain from a deadly environmental menace.

Saturday

John Preston

Africa’s excesses

From our UK edition

There are an awful lot of prostitutes in Africa and most of them seem to pass through the pages of Richard Grant’s book at one time or another. All this puts him in a terrible lather — ‘I had been so long without a woman’, he moans at one point, this while weighing up the attractions of a woman called Felicia ‘with extraordinary skin’ in the Rwandan capital, Kigali. But Grant also has a girlfriend back home who he’s determined to remain faithful to, and a mind set on higher things. He wants to become the first person to navigate the second longest river in Tanzania, the Malagarasi.

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

Sentamu for Canterbury!

From our UK edition

John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, is our cover boy this week. It's the Church of England Synod next week, word is that Rowan Williams will be standing down soon, and Rod Liddle is backing Sentamu as his successor. When planning the headline, I thought about calling him the 'British Obama'. We didn't use this, as it's not a compliment — but if Britain is to have a figure who epitomises our country's inherent tolerance and open-mindedness I'd pick Sentamu above anyone else in public life. If he was made Archbishop, I really don't think there would be an uproar about the fact that he's black, or even that he came here as an Ugandan asylum seeker and still speaks with an accent.

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

The evil being perpetrated against Christians in Nigeria

From our UK edition

The religious cleansing against Christians is intensifying in Nigeria, where Christians have been told they have until Friday to leave the country or face attacks by Islamic extremists. As I wrote recently in the Daily Telegraph, this is a trend sweeping the Middle East. Thousands are fleeing Iraq and Egypt, but Nigeria is the scene of the most ferocious attacks. Its government condemns the attacks, but seems unable to respond to the Boko Haram menace. This from the National Review: ‘Catholic archbishop John Onaiyekan, of Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city, appealed for help. “It’s a national tragedy. We are all unsecured. It’s not only Catholic. Today it’s us. Tomorrow we don’t know who it will be,” he said.