Malawi

Thursday

Lynn Barber

Nothing satisfies Madonna for very long

From our UK edition

In 1994, Norman Mailer called Madonna ‘our greatest living female artist’. She was huge in those days. I remember teenagers like my daughters constantly asking ‘What would Madonna do?’ But my grandchildren haven’t even heard of her. She seems to have faded faster than most. Why? Perhaps it’s because, as often claimed, she’s the ‘queen of reinvention’. But people who reinvent themselves every few months, as Madonna always did, tend to leave other people behind. Her ‘rebel life’, as told here by Mary Gabriel, is a frenzied churn of friends, lovers, mentors and collaborators who were vital to her for a year or two and then discarded.

Thursday

Alexander Chula

The uncomfortable lessons of the new Fourth Plinth statues

From our UK edition

The Revd John Chilembwe – whose statue now adorns Trafalgar Square – is notorious for the church service he conducted beneath the severed head of William Jervis Livingstone, a Scottish plantation manager with a reputation for mistreating his workers. The night before, Chilembwe’s followers had broken into his house and chased him from room to room as he tried to fend them off with an unloaded rifle. Eventually, they pinned him down and decapitated him in front of his wife and children. It was the most significant action in the 1915 Chilembwe rebellion, a small, short-lived affair in an obscure corner of the British Empire today known as Malawi. It says a lot about our times that a figure with Chilembwe’s record should be vaunted with a public statue.

Tuesday

Nathan Edmondson

The hidden victims of the South African shutdown

I sit in a National Park in South Africa, looking at an empty restaurant in which a robust staff, hired on for the peak international travel season, stand idle and bored. Many will likely be let go next week as the tourism declines yet again. Many were out of work for a year and only just hired back. The ripple effect of the latest travel shutdown is felt immediately here. Many parks in Southern Africa lost 80 percent of funding through the last shutdown, which in South Africa was one of the most severe. We work here with the Rangers, tasked with protecting the last great population of rhino and elephant, and they cannot afford boots, let alone salaries to pay the staff who work without pause.

south africa shutdown