unstrung

‘No, don’t give me money,’ he said, ‘perhaps you have a book instead.’

He was cleaning up the broken bottles left by the 7th street revellers the night before. Smashed green glass, empty brown bottles, cans and fag butts littered the shaved yellow verges and tarmac slopes. So I went inside and rummaged through my books. There’s a whole pile of Coetzee I’ve been racing through during the last month, some stuff on film and camera work, Deleuze & Guattari’s anti-oedipus which I am still struggling to understand very very very slowly, Pepetela’s o quasi fim do mundo, a tome on tantra, and a brick of American short stories. And of course the book that follows me everywhere, The Wretched of the Earth. I wondered, Perhaps he’d like that? And started to run through all the possible interpretations of a white middle class English woman giving a black Johannesburg street cleaner a copy of Fanon. Interpretations of others, as well as his own. But I took it out to the street anyway, and handed him the book.

‘If you don’t like it, give it back, and I’ll pick you another. Or perhaps you’d like to come and choose your own?’

‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘let’s stick with your choice. I’d like to see.’

I saw him again, just now, dribble running from the left side of my mouth, and asked how the book was going.

‘I’m on page 12,’ he shouted, and smiled.

‘When you get half way through, let me know,’ I said, ‘and we can share our thoughts.’

He raised his right hand, giving me a thumbs up, and carried on swinging down the street.

I turned back to the group I was standing with, three African-American film makers, here for three weeks. One of them has been here many times before, she says she loves South Africa. I felt sad when she told me that, for I realised how my own experience has been shaped entirely by who I’ve met, as hers has by who she has met. And I wanted to tell her what I’d done, about the book I’d given the man with whom she just shook hands. But I somehow couldn’t summon the courage.

In less than one month, Angolans go to the ballot box for the first time in sixteen years, and only the second time since independence from Portuguese colonial rule in 1975. Last night I gave a talk here at WISER, an attempt to provide an introduction - including my own personal views in the second half - to Angola today. Justin Pearce (currently doing a PhD at Oxford - see his work here and here)also spoke about his research in the central highlands of Angola. Sadly, Rafael Marques who was due to speak had trouble with the er, airline. Anyway, here’s the talk. Read the rest of this entry »

This article about rich Brits has been widely linked to, and I spotted it yesterday thanks to Infinite Thought (see blogroll right) and also JR who sent me the link to Lenin’s Tomb (also see blogroll right). So I can’t really add a lot to the comments of those far finer brains… Other than to say that I think it underlines what I wrote in criticism of Mr Kampfner’s piece on GQ. I know, I know… I’ve gone on and on about that… But it’s important. Our rich - that is, my rich there on yonder small island up north - are just as revolting as the rich spotted in Luanda or Rio or anywhere else you might like to choose.

I particularly like the line, Tax consultants Grant Thornton estimated that in 2006 at least 32 of the UK’s 54 billionaires paid no income tax at all. And to think of all those people who ask me, in suitably sympathetic tones, whenever I return to the UK from this southern part of Africa, ‘Ooh, but isn’t it awfully corrupt down there?’

And I really liked this one too: the law partners earned between £500,000 and £1.5m per year, putting them in the top 0.1% of earners in the UK, while the merchant bankers ranged from £150,000 up to £10m. I actually quiver when I read that. It thrills me in a way I’m not entirely able to comprehend.

And this: How much, we asked our group, would it take to put someone in the top 10% of earners? They put the figure at £162,000. In fact, in 2007 it was around £39,825, the point at which the top tax band began. Our group found it hard to believe that nine-tenths of the UK’s 32m taxpayers earned less than that. As for the poverty threshold, our lawyers and bankers fixed it at £22,000. But that sum was just under median earnings, which meant they regarded ordinary wages as poverty pay.

And I was particularly struck by this bit, here: ‘

“Providing for children” was flourished as a trump card, as if spending on offspring were automatically moral and good, regardless of how other people’s children fare.

“I work hard, I’ve got two boys and I want to provide for them.”

Just recently an Englishman working here in Johannesburg was trying to justify to me why he is now involved in high-paid and what I might call spy-work in Africa. He told me he had “no choice” because he had to put his kids “through education”, meaning private boarding school in the UK. Of course, poor luv, loathes the work he does and would much rather be a nice teacher or nice nurse or something mmm, yes, nice, you know, but he can’t afford to. And of course, like these bankers and lawyers in this article, he told me he works much harder than the rest of us. Much harder than say, all those cleaners who do night shifts across London every day…

I can’t even write intelligibly about this. I get too cross.

This is a nice post written by a man with whom I had the mixed pleasure of doing night-shifts back in the dark days when we were both working for auntie. I think he now lives between London and Harare. And bits of his blog are very funny.

the piece on GQ was the best of the web… if you believe the Guardian, which I’m sure a lot of you don’t…

thanks SJ - you know who you are!

‘One day I began a relationship with a fellow being on the Border - a Southwest desert gecko. She was pure white, with scales on her body. Later I realised that she was pregnant - that’s how I knew she was female. She was my best friend on the Border. She was tiny when I found her amongst my tent bags on the ground, but she soon grew large. I tamed her by stroking her head and body. Anyone else would have found her hideous, so I kept her absolutely secret.

‘And then one evening, just before I turned to the States (that is South Africa), I came upon her dying in front of the Ops Room, where she lay pregnant and dying near my tent. It broke me more than all the death I had seen in the war. I will never forget it - it will never leave me. I kept her warm in my bed, and the next day I buried the ugly, swollen creature next to my tent. I think a bit of my soul went into her grave with her.’

I’m reading a secret burden: memories of the Border War by South African soldiers who fought in it. It was compiled and edited by Karen Batley who waited many years before she could find a publisher, such is the unease and discomfort felt when remembering those battles on Namibian and Angolan soil. The book makes you think about the individual young men who fought for the South African Defence Force as fodder for the National Party, and not simply ‘those bastard Afrikaners’ (just as those American soldiers sent to Iraq are largely, victims of the mad Republicans). The book’s making me rethink my responses to those South Africans I’ve met who have joked with me about their time on the border, and who repulsed me in that moment of conversation. How much choice do young men (and some women) have, really?

Keep returning to this obsession with (or keep obsessing and returning to) the unnoticeable, the passable, the unseen, the apparently blank mass of nobodies. The bag man, the glue-sniffer, the housewife, the goat-griller, the truck driver, the kandongueiro passenger humming to Maya Cool. The man on the motor, the government official asleep at his desk, the policeman walking up and walking down and walking up the road again. I think this is where there is a space to work, to eek out a way of expressing a particular place. I think this is why I am so blown away and over backwards by J M Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K and why I’ve always got a bit too over-excited about some of Samuel Beckett’s writing (though to mention him these days seems to be merely an attempt to join a wagon of, um, I want to say wankers but I know that’s unfair and lazy, but I notice that I avoid mentioning Beckett because it seems pretentious or even passé for a lot of you clever bastards out there…). Making fascinating this bottom bit, this overlooked world, is where I’m heading albeit with great pain and extraordinary difficulty. And perhaps this is why the piece blogged about below (the one in GQ) rubbed me up so badly. And perhaps this also is where I could really have fallen down here, in South Africa. For it strikes me I do the same thing here as Kampfner did in Angola: I only really look and observe and slag off the rich, and not just the rich but the whites. The people most like me. Serious limitations here in my vision. So I see how easy it was for Kampfner to fall and fail… because I recognise it. And it makes for damn dull writing. But there’s another bit in all of this, which I first got going with last year when I was back working in Luanda… I had this sort of epiphany, I suppose you might call it, that if I want to really challenge the world I seem to live in, I have to make beautiful and make magical the bits that appear to be dull and normal and unimportant. The great big forgotten bits. That’s when I became stuck on this idea that we give the powerful too much of ourselves by writing about them so much. We should write about something else. And then I saw this proverb today on this site here. It said, He who feels impelled to write against the regime all the time is allowing himself to be prevented by the regime from writing about anything else. Ludvik Vaculik said that. Exactly - I just didn’t manage to say it in a sentence! Ludvik, dear Ludvik, I’m with you all the way. All the way, oh yes.

Shit, he tells us, literally floats down the streets of Luanda. And helicopters taking oilmen from platform to airport whir over Café del Mar at the tip of the ilha, a yellow spit jutting out in front of Luanda’s marginale. He writes that Belas shopping - a giant mall - is the only place where you can shop safely, the place “the wealthy worship”. This is John Kampfner, former editor of the once-left-now-centre weekly British magazine, New Statesman. Here, he writes about Angola for the British men’s magazine, GQ. It was brought to my attention by the pretty prolific Africa is a Country, who blogged it here. Mr Kampfner is a seriously experienced journalist, and someone I’ve tended to enjoy reading when he’s writing about the UK. And I’m inclined to conclude that he should stick to our small wet island up north, there. For his piece on Angola seems to fall into all the traps that so many journalists fail to see, hear or care about when they are writing about their trips to tropics. It may well not really be his fault: it may be the structure of ‘foreign journalism’, particularly the kind that only looks at certain countries once in a blue moon. How do you explain, in a few hundred words, perhaps a little over a thousand, the complexity of a place? How do you avoid falling into cliché? I haven’t found the answers, which is why I’ve stepped away from journalism for the last year or so: I’m trying to find an answer whilst writing a book. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to examine those who persist.

What irritates me about Kampfner’s piece is this:

I’ve never seen shit floating down the streets of Luanda and I’ve been going to that country on and off for a decade. I’ve certainly never seen floating shit in the ‘tarmac city’, the bit of Luanda where it seems from his description, Kampfner was standing at the time. Luanda’s drainage system is bad, and in many places non-existent. This is true. And there are powerful acidic and pungent smells that waft into the nostrils as you wander about. And I’ve wandered a lot there. I’ve wandered miles and miles in fact. I know there’s shit about - isn’t there always everywhere? - but I’ve never seen brown logs floating by in the tarmac city. I have only seen it decomposing in dark black puddles in slum areas. I’m reminded of an ageing Angolan journalist who congratulated me in 2000, “You came, you smelt the shit, you liked it, and stayed. We welcome you.” Yes, Mr Kampfner, there is shit but it’s a nuanced subtle kind of shit that is brutally simplified in your piece.

He tells us too of the wealthy in Luanda, and writes: “I have seen conspicuous consumption in London, Moscow, New York and Paris, but never a contrast such as this.” He then goes on to tell us about some of the people he meets, people who own floor-to-ceiling fridges, architect-designed sitting rooms with Italian furniture, each room with a plasma-home entertainment screen. He quotes one man saying, “Come see the marble. It’s from Brazil.” The implication in all of this is a kind of ooh, how disgusting, look at these super-rich Africans boasting their material wealth. Maybe my eyes are different and I’ve been hanging out with the wrong wealthy people in Angola, but my own impression is somewhat different. There are very very rich people in Angola - Kampfner is right - but in general, I’ve not seen anything in Angola that I haven’t seen here in Johannesburg, where almost the entire white middle class of the Northern suburbs live what I would describe as extremely privileged lifestyles. And I’ve seen plenty of floor-to-ceiling fridges in north London and south London, and homes with Agas and imported furnishings of all sorts, even in the homes of, erm, liberal journalists and academics who slam Labour and thump their fist at the declining state of the Guardian. I’m not sure the wealthy of Angola are any worse than the wealthy elsewhere: except they live near the, er, shit Mr Kampfner.

I’m entering slippery ground here… but the way I see it is this. We live in a globalised world with a globalised economy which, for many many years, people in the North (West, if you like) were able to kind of keep their eyes closed and pretend the rest of the world did not exist. Many of our wealthy middle and upper classes still do that - occasionally weeping a tear for the poor black baby on their equally flat plasma screens when they appear with Bono or Bob or mad Madge. The rich in the South can’t do that: they are in the thick of it. Not that I want you to sympathise with them - far from it - I just don’t want the rich and wealthy I know in London, being let off the hook.

I’m reminded of an argument I had with a BBC team back in 1999 when I was still the BBC correspondent in Angola. Working for BBC TV, they had come by to do the usual starving-millions-contrasts-with-revoltingly-rich Angola story. During their stay there was the Miss Angola contest. So we all piled down to the ilha to watch beautiful women whirling about an aisle showing their bikini bodies to the great and the corrupt of Luanda. Afterwards, the BBC TV crew were all in a huff and a puff that these revolting Angolans could possibly enjoy a beauty contest whilst just a few hundred kilometres away, other Angolans were being blown to bits. What struck me as stranger was this: that a TV crew, based in Johannesburg, with their Beemers and bulletproof vests, their nice cushy homes in the Northern suburbs, their pensions and extra safety cash salaries, could pop into Angola and see it as so distant from their own world, as something ‘other’ that had nothing to do with them. They could go out and get pissed and travel the world and have a laugh, but their Angolan equals could not. And they were quite wrong to assume that Miss Angola was simply about the super rich. I knew one of the girls: she came from an average middle class home in the centre of town. There was absolutely nothing super rich about her. Her father - a journalist - was definitely much worse off than any of those visiting journos. Should his daughter not have some fun, simply because her country was at war? Should foreign journalists ban their kids from ballet classes and pony-trekking and mountain-biking because there’s a war we created in Iraq?

To return to Kampfner’s work. It is also wrong that helicopters whir over Café del Mar. Perhaps he did see one or two, but I’ve never seen helicopters whirring there: they whir further north and further south, a long way from Luanda. Perhaps, during his drop-in tour, he didn’t have time to leave the capital - so he wrote what he heard, not what he knew. Or perhaps I’m going deaf. Not at all unlikely, believe me. But he does what so many forrie corries do: they point fingers at those who frequent the beachside restaurants of Café del Mar as no doubt uncaring wealthy businessmen, as if Kampfner’s colleagues in London never go eat in nice restaurants in Islington, or Shoreditch, the South Bank, or Chelsea. Take it from me: apart from the beach (perhaps a hint of the exotic for we Brits) there is no difference between Luanda’s restaurants and London’s. It’s just that in London you don’t need to drive home and see homeless people (oh, hang on… scrap that…)… It’s just that in London, you don’t need to look at the places that make up the imbalanced, corrupt, deeply unequal world in which we live. You don’t need to think about the globe as a globe: you can just sit pretty and plump and pretend it’s all over there somewhere.

Does it sound like I’m defending the Angolan elite? I’m not. Believe me, I see nothing nice about an elite that only wishes to hang on to power as long as it can and get as rich as it can. The poverty in Angola is appalling et cetera et cetera. All I am asking is for a little less self-righteousness from the visiting reporter. A little more self-reflection. A little more attention to detail (e.g. that Isabel’s husband is half-Danish, when the really interesting side of him is the Congolese bit, and that she is half-Russian, but never mind; e.g. that the tourism minister is something “new” because it’s not - I interviewed a tourism minister in Angola in 1999; e.g. that Belas shopping is the only place you can safely shop: it’s not, there are loads of shops in Luanda and loads of markets… I’ve never been attacked once) and a little less resorting to cliché. It’s really bad in Angola - you don’t need to exaggerate.

Oh, and a final word. Why is it that this GQ report devotes so much time to the rich and the wealthy, and merely sweeps away the poor miserable masses in a few sentences? Why didn’t Kampfner give any personality to these millions for whom he has so much sympathy? Why doesn’t he give them a voice? Make them real? Give them the agency they possess? Why are they portrayed as non-people, non-existents who have no voice and nothing to say? Could he find no translator? Could he not spare the time to leave Luanda? Do they have no face? No personality? Perhaps he recognises the rich and wealthy more easily because they are more like him, closer to his own self. Perhaps I’m being unfair. Perhaps… though I somehow doubt it.

I think it’s great that GQ tried to put Angola on the proverbial map, even if the country was probably sandwiched between the pages of semi-nude women who might be masturbated over by excessively rich British lawyers who work in The City of London and Oxbridge-educated accountants who help the great and the corrupt pay as little tax on their millions as possible. What, GQ? Surely not! For that we must thank you.

Oh, and one more thing, if any of you want to read the piece and judge for yourselves, let me know at lara@larapawson.com and I will email it.

You are watching the television. It’s evening. You’ve finished dinner, and are sipping on tea, or a beer, perhaps a whisky. Your children might be asleep, your lover might have popped out. You are watching the news of your nation, alone, in your small front room. A peaceful hour to yourself, to sit and see what is happening in your country. There is music and a picture of the globe, spinning spinning spinning then stopping on the continent of Africa. There is your nation, in the bottom third on the left. And here’s the presenter, a large woman with golden skin and a huge smiling mouth, a deep strong voice, a woman you trust because you’ve seen her in a glossy magazine about local celebrities. She featured - a single mum - with her two kids. She’s strong and determined. She’s making it alone out there. She takes you through the stories of the day. She guides you around the country, dropping in on small towns all about the place where senior leaders have passed through. Her colleagues have done good film work. Here’s the Supreme Leader of the People’s Most Trusted Guide standing on a stage infront of a microphone perched on a tall metal pole just in front of his mouth. The Supreme Leader of the People’s Most Trusted Guide is wearing a baseball hat in the colours of the nation which are also the colours of the Supreme Leader of the People’s Party. Red, yellow, black. The Supreme Leader of the People’s Most Trusted Guide (SLPMTG) wears the baseball caps with pride, and he wears a thick T-shirt also richly coloured in red, yellow, and black, which stretches over his large, firm belly. In his hand, he holds a flag which is also in the colours of the Supreme Leader of the People’s Party: red, yellow and black. The SLPMTG is shouting to his Brothers! His Sisters! His Children! His People! His Party! The Liberators! of The Nation! As he shouts, he waves his flag and the colours of the flag ripple with the colours of his cap, and his shirt. The camera pans around to the cheering Brothers! Sisters! Children! and Liberators! of The Nation! They too are wearing baseball caps in the colours of the Supreme Leader of the People’s Party - red, yellow, and black; they too are wearing T-shirts in those colours; they too are waving flags in those colours - red, yellow and black. It is a beautiful sight, a colourful and exciting sight of excited people dressed in harmony with the colours of The Nation and The Party. The camera sweeps back to the stage, where the SLPMTG is now standing holding a large box. It must be heavy, for he is bending a little and has had to give his flag to an assistant. From the right of the frame, comes a Brother! from the People! As the Brother walks towards the SLPMTG, his Brothers! and Sisters! and Children of The Nation! cheer even louder. The camera swings back to them, to their cheering, and they have all raised their red, yellow and black flags and are waving them in a frenzy, shouting, cheering, smiling. The camera swings back to the stage, where the SLPMTG is now pushing the large box into the arms of the Brother! of The Nation! The camera zooms in on the box. A photograph on the side of the box shows a large desk-top computer and keyboard. The SLPMTG is giving this to the Brother! of The Nation! The crowd roars! Flags ripple and rattle in a frenzied shaking and applause. The camera pans out, showing a long line of Brothers! and Sisters! of the Nation! all queueing up to collect their desk top computer. The sound fades away, and we are back in the studio, our golden female presenter explaining, “These are the Youth of the Supreme Leader of the People’s Party. These are the Youth who liberated our Nation. They are being rewarded.” Our golden lady opens her face to a vaster smile than she has ever offered before. Her eyes twinkle, and for the first time, you notice a shining from her lips, a thick gloss that covers her beautiful pink lips. Your fingers are touching your own. Your drying lips. It crosses your mind to make sure you find some thick gloss in the morning on the way to work.

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