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| Uruguay President Jose Mujica |
By Simon Romero
Some world leaders live in
palaces. Some enjoy perks like having a discreet butler, a fleet of yachts or a wine cellar with vintage Champagnes. Then there is José Mujica, the former guerrilla who is Uruguay’s president. He lives
in a run-down house on Montevideo’s outskirts with no servants at all. His
security detail: two plainclothes officers parked on a dirt road.
In
a deliberate statement to this cattle-exporting nation of 3.3 million people,
Mr. Mujica, 77, shunned the opulent Suárez y Reyes presidential mansion, with
its staff of 42, remaining instead in the home where he and his wife have lived
for years, on a plot of land where they grow chrysanthemums for sale in local
markets.
Visitors
reach Mr. Mujica’s austere dwelling after driving down O’Higgins Road, past
groves of lemon trees. His net worth upon taking office in 2010 amounted to
about $1,800 — the value of the 1987 Volkswagen Beetle parked in his garage. He
never wears a tie and donates about 90 percent of his salary, largely to a
program for expanding housing for the poor.
His
current brand of low-key radicalism — a marked shift from his days wielding
weapons in an effort to overthrow the government — exemplifies Uruguay’s
emergence as arguably Latin America’s most socially liberal country.
Under
Mr. Mujica, who took office in 2010, Uruguay has drawn attention for seeking
to legalize marijuana andsame-sex marriage, while also enacting one of
the region’s most sweeping abortion rights laws and
sharply boosting the use of renewable energy sources like wind and
biomass.
As
illness drives President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela from the political stage,
suddenly leaving the continent without the larger-than-life figure who has held
such sway on the left, Mr. Mujica’s practiced asceticism is a study in
contrasts. For democracy to function properly, he argues, elected leaders
should be taken down a notch.
“We
have done everything possible to make the presidency less venerated,” Mr.
Mujica said in an interview one recent morning, after preparing a serving in
his kitchen of mate, the herbal drink offered in a hollowed calabash gourd and
commonly shared in dozens of sips through the same metal straw.
Passing
around the gourd, he acknowledged that his laid-back presidential lifestyle
might seem unusual. Still, he said it amounted to a conscious choice to forgo
the trappings of power and wealth. Quoting the Roman court-philosopher Seneca,
Mr. Mujica said, “It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves
more, who is poor.”
THE
leader at the helm of Uruguay’s changes, known to his many detractors and
supporters alike as Pepe, is someone few thought could ever rise to such a
position. Before Mr. Mujica became a gardener of chrysanthemums, he was a
leader of the Tupamaros, the urban guerrilla group that drew inspiration from
the Cuban revolution, carrying out armed bank robberies and kidnappings on
Montevideo’s streets.
In
their war against the Uruguayan state, the Tupamaros gained notoriety through
violence. The filmmaker Constantin Costa-Gavras drew inspiration for his 1972
movie, “State of Siege,” from their abduction and execution in 1970 of Daniel
Mitrione, an American adviser to Uruguay’s security forces. Mr. Mujica has said
that the group “tried by all means to avoid killings,” but he has also
euphemistically acknowledged its “military deviations.”
A
brutal counterinsurgency subdued the Tupamaros, and the police captured Mr.
Mujica in 1972. He spent 14 years in prison, including more than a decade in
solitary confinement, often in a hole in the ground. During that time, he would
go more than a year without bathing, and his companions, he said, were a tiny
frog and rats with whom he shared crumbs of bread.
Some
of the other Tupamaros who were placed for years in solitary confinement failed
to grasp the benefits of befriending rodents. One of them, Henry Engler, a
medical student, underwent a severe mental breakdown before his release in
1985.
Mr.
Mujica rarely speaks about his time in prison. Seated at a table in his garden,
sipping his mate, he said it gave him time to reflect. “I learned that one can
always start again,” he said.
He
chose to start again by entering politics. Elected as a legislator, he shocked
the parking attendants at Parliament by arriving on a Vespa. After the rise to
power in 2004 of the Broad Front, a coalition of leftist parties and more centrist
social democrats, he was named minister of Livestock, Agriculture and
Fisheries.
Before
Mr. Mujica won the 2009 election by a wide margin, his opponent, Luis Alberto
Lacalle, disparaged his small house here as a “cave.” After that, Mr. Mujica
also upset some in Uruguay’s political establishment by selling off a
presidential residence in a seaside resort city, calling the property “useless.”
His
donations leave him with roughly $800 a month of his salary. He said he and his
wife, Lucía Topolansky, a former guerrilla who was also imprisoned and is now a
senator, do not need much to live on. In a new declaration in 2012, Mr. Mujica
said he was sharing ownership of assets previously in his wife’s name,
including their home and farm equipment, which lifted his net worth.
He
pointed out that his Broad Front predecessor as president, Tabaré Vázquez, also
stayed in his own home (though Mr. Vázquez, an oncologist, lives in the
well-heeled district of El Prado), and that José Batlle y Ordóñez, a president
in the early 20th century who created Uruguay’s welfare state, helped forge a
tradition in which there is “no distance between the president and any
neighbor.”
INDEED,
if there is any country in South America where a president can drive a Beetle
and get by without a large entourage of bodyguards, it might be Uruguay, which
consistently ranks among the region’s least corrupt and least unequal nations.
While crime is emerging as more of a concern, Uruguay remains a contender for
the region’s safest country.
Still,
Mr. Mujica’s governing style does not sit well with everyone. The proposal to
legalize marijuana, in particular, has incited a fierce debate, with polls
showing most Uruguayans opposed to the measure. In December, Mr. Mujica asked
legislators to postpone voting to regulate the marijuana market, though he is
pushing for the bill to be discussed again soon.
“It’s
a shame to have a president like this man,” said Luz Díaz, 78, a retired maid
who lives near Mr. Mujica and voted for him in 2009. She said she would not do
so again if given the choice. “This marijuana thing, it’s absurd,” she added.
“Pepe should return to selling flowers.”
Polls
show that his approval ratings have been declining, but “I don’t give a damn,”
insisted Mr. Mujica, emphasizing that he considered re-election to consecutive
terms, already prohibited by Uruguay’s Constitution, as “monarchic.” “If I
worried about pollsters, I wouldn’t be president,” he said.
With
two years remaining in his term, Mr. Mujica seems to cherish the freedom to
speak his mind. About his religious beliefs, he said he was still searching for
God.
He
laments that so many societies considered economic growth a priority, calling
this “a problem for our civilization” because of the demands on the planet’s
resources. (Interestingly enough, Uruguay’s economy is still expanding comfortably at an estimated annual rate of 3.6 percent.)
When
the gourd of mate was empty, Mr. Mujica disappeared into his kitchen and
returned with an impish grin and a bottle of Espinillar, a Uruguayan tipple
distilled from sugarcane. It was not yet noon, but glasses were filled and
toasts were pronounced.
After
that, the president jumped around subjects, from anthropology and cycling to
Uruguayans’ love for beef. He said he could not dream of retiring, but looked
forward to his post-presidency, when he hopes to farm full time again.
Finally,
Mr. Mujica’s eyes lit up as he remembered a passage from “Don Quixote,” in
which the knight-errant imbibes wine from a horn and dines on salted goat with
his goatherd hosts, delivering a harangue against the “pestilence of
gallantry.”
“The
goatherds were the poorest people of Spain,” said Mr. Mujica. “Probably,” he
added, “they were the richest.”
TUDU LORRY STATION
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| Tudu Lorry Station |
By Ekow Mensah
The
Tudu Lorry Station in Accra and its environs has become the hub of criminal
activities.
Only
last week all manner of crimes and were committed there to the horror of
passengers, traders and transport operators.
The significant
thing is that the central Police Station is located in the same vicinity.
A
student who was returning to school in the Volta Region had her school fees of
GHȻ300.00 snatched from her.
A
trader who was attacked host GhȻ1,000.00 in the process to
well organised gang of day-time robbers.
The criminals at the station are organised to
gangs with clear leadership and the operate in regimental fashion.
In a
typical case, a bag snatcher, approached a woman traveler and pulled her bag
from her hands and started running.
Gang
members pretended to be giving the bad snatcher a chase when what they were
doing in reality was obstructing a chase.
The
criminal activities in the area include the open sale and consumption of
narcotic drugs, rape robbery and sometimes gang warfare.
The question with such impunity when the Accra
Central Police Station stands in the middle of this den of criminals?
Ghanaians Must Pray For Sir John!
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| NPP General Secretary Sir John |
By MargareteThe
English Standard Version of the Bible, clearly states in 1 Corinthians 10:23
that; “All things are lawful,” but not all things are helpful. “All things are
lawful,” but not all things build up.This statement which was made by the Apostle
Paul some thousands of years ago still holds true today.
There
are some people in positions of trust who simply do not care whatever comes out
of their mouths. They say anything that builds up in their stomachs and damn
those who try to point out those mistakes. They do not weigh whatever they say
but glow in the controversies their foolish utterances generate.
One guy
who easily fit this mould is no other person than Kwadwo Owusu Afriyie.Even
school kids of 12 years are too familiar with the General Secretary of the NPP,
Kwadwo Owusu Afriyie, who has the penchant of making wild but unfounded
allegations just to keep him afloat in the media headlines.
Kwadwo
Owusu Afriyie's latest boo-boo landed at the doorstep of President John Mahama
and the National Security when he falsely accused them of planning to
assassinate Dr Mahamadu Bawumia, the twice defeated NPP vice presidential
candidate in the 2008 and 2012 elections. Dr. Bawumia was involved in an
accident in the north over the weekend when two of tyres on the vehicle he was
traveling burst leading the vehicle to summersault. He was later flown to Accra
for treatment.
According
to the bigoted thinking of Afriyie, since Bawumia was returning from a funeral
in the President's backyard and the NPP Chairman, Jake Obetsebi Lamptey also
had a tyre on the vehicle he was traveling burst around the same area; it means
that Bawumia's accident was a planned assassination attempt by the President
and National Security.
But
wait to hear some more trash talk from Afriyie who calls himself Sir John.
Without any shred of shame, Afriyie went on to say that the NDC is out to
assassinate Bawumia in order to end the pending Supreme Court case on the 2012
elections. Until Monday March 18, 2013, I never knew that the Supreme Court
case filed by the three NPP Musketeers was all about Bawumia and that if
Bawumia dies today, Obetsebi Lamptey and Akufo-Addo who stands to gain hugely
if the case is won will not have the guts or propensity to pursue the case.
When
you hear people like Afriyie talking on the platform of the NPP you can
understand why the NPP has lost two elections in a row and how they are finding
it extremely difficult to hold together. Afriyie is one of the NPP folks who
are on record for saying that if the NPP had not gone to the Supreme Court to
contest the results of the 2012 elections the NPP as a party would have
collapsed. So you can understand the thinking of such folks.
The
Constitution of the 4th Republic gives every Ghanaian the right to free speech
and the freedom of expression, which also include freedom of the press. As a
result, the NPP have made accusations their number bedrock. They think simply
accusing the NDC on every single issue is what will make they look better in
the eyes of Ghanaians and eventually win them elections. They seem to have
never learnt anything from the past two electoral defeats.
Kwadwo
Owusu Afriyieis hiding under the cloth of press freedom and accusing the
President of an assassination attempt, a serious allegation that no government
in our modern time will tolerate. This general secretary is even on record as
saying that he has towed away Bawumia's vehicle which was involved in the
accident to conduct his own investigations because he does not trust the
police. Meanwhile the police are watching whilst Afriyie walks over them with
impunity. What kind of society are we building?
Ghanaians
need to pray for characters like Kwadwo Owusu Afriyie. These are the people
roaming our airwaves and saying things that can cause mayhem in the country. Do
not only feel sorry for Afriyie but also pray for him. The 2012 electoral loss
may have affected Kwadwo Owusu Afriyie big time, hence his decision to become
an accuser-in-chief.
The NPP
is being blown apart by the irresponsible attitude of Kwadwo Owusu Afriyie, a
lawyer, who has suddenly become a law unto himself and towing accident vehicles
to conduct his own investigations. Another person who needs our prayer is Kofi
Jumah a former MP whose current job responsibility is simply dabbling in controversies.
It
seems the only job left for the NPP these days is the making of mountains out
of anthills in order to make the NDC look terrible. I think Kwadwo Owusu
Afriyie has to look deep inside himself, and purge himself from such
controversies. Even though most of the things he says are lawful, it is simply
not helpful and does not help in building up the country. Its rather making
people redefine the NPP in ways that we have not seen before.
magjackson80@yahoo.com
Chinua Achebe's Legacy, in His Own
Words
His best-known work, the 1958 novel Things Fall Apart, portrays a Nigerian village at the crossways between adhering to tradition and joining in on the ways of the white, Christian colonists newly arrived from Britain. It's now a modern classic for many reasons: It's a striking, austerely crafted Greek tragedy set against a realistic backdrop of 19th-century world affairs, and it subtly, poignantly questions the role of gender in society.
But Things Fall Apart and its author will likely be remembered chiefly for giving a voice to the many generations of African people whose narrative power had been reduced to mere broken sentences of dialogue within the literary traditions of the West—even a single broken sentence, as in the case of Joseph Conrad's famous book about African colonization, Heart of Darkness.
In his interview with Bacon in 2000, Achebe himself succinctly and beautifully captured what his most indelible contribution to literature would be.
It was really a straightforward case of setting us up, as it were. The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery. The cruelties of this trade gradually began to trouble many people in Europe. Some people began to question it. But it was a profitable business, and so those who were engaged in it began to defend it—a lobby of people supporting it, justifying it, and excusing it. It was difficult to excuse and justify, and so the steps that were taken to justify it were rather extreme. You had people saying, for instance, that these people weren't really human, they're not like us. Or, that the slave trade was in fact a good thing for them, because the alternative to it was more brutal by far.
And therefore, describing this fate that the Africans would have had back home became the motive for the literature that was created about Africa. Even after the slave trade was abolished, in the nineteenth century, something like this literature continued, to serve the new imperialistic needs of Europe in relation to Africa. This continued until the Africans themselves, in the middle of the twentieth century, took into their own hands the telling of their story.
You write in Home and Exile, "After a short period of dormancy and a little self-doubt about its erstwhile imperial mission, the West may be ready to resume its old domineering monologue in the world." Are some Western writers backpedaling and trying to tell their own version of African stories again?
This tradition that I'm talking about has been in force for hundreds of years, and many generations have been brought up on it. What was preached in the churches by the missionaries and their agents at home all supported a certain view of Africa. When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don't just turn it off one day. When the African response began, I think there was an immediate pause on the European side, as if they were saying, Okay, we'll stop telling this story, because we see there's another story. But after a while there's a certain beginning again, not quite a return but something like a reaction to the African story that cannot, of course, ever go as far as the original tradition that the Africans are responding to. There's a reaction to a reaction, and there will be a further reaction to that. And I think that's the way it will go, until what I call a balance of stories is secured. And this is really what I personally wish this century to see—a balance of stories where every people will be able to contribute to a definition of themselves, where we are not victims of other people's accounts. This is not to say that nobody should write about anybody else—I think they should, but those that have been written about should also participate in the making of these stories.
And this is really what I personally wish this
century to see—a balance of stories where every people will be able to contribute
to a definition of themselves, where we are not victims of other people's
accounts.
And that's what started with Things Fall Apart and other books written by Africans around the 1950s.
Yes, that's what it turned out to be. It was not actually clear to us at the time what we were doing. We were simply writing our story. But the bigger story of how these various accounts tie in, one with the other, is only now becoming clear. We realize and recognize that it's not just colonized people whose stories have been suppressed, but a whole range of people across the globe who have not spoken. It's not because they don't have something to say, it simply has to do with the division of power, because storytelling has to do with power. Those who win tell the story; those who are defeated are not heard. But that has to change. It's in the interest of everybody, including the winners, to know that there's another story. If you only hear one side of the story, you have no understanding at all.
You're talking about a shift in power, so there would be more of a balance of power between cultures than there is now?
Well, not a shift in the structure of power. I'm not thinking simply of political power. The shift in power will create stories, but also stories will create a shift in power. So one feeds the other. And the world will be a richer place for that.
An
African Voice
In 1958, Achebe responded with his own novel about Nigeria, Things Fall Apart, which was one of the first books to tell the story of European colonization from an African perspective. (It has since become a classic, published in fifty languages around the world.) Things Fall Apart marked a turning point for African authors, who in the fifties and sixties began to take back the narrative of the so-called "dark continent."
Home and Exile, which grew out of three lectures Achebe gave at Harvard in 1998, describes this transition to a new era in literature. The book is both a kind of autobiography and a rumination on the power stories have to create a sense of dispossession or to confer strength, depending on who is wielding the pen. Achebe depicts his gradual realization that Mister Johnson was just one in a long line of books written by Westerners that presented Africans to the world in a way that Africans didn't agree with or recognize, and he examines the "process of 're-storying' peoples who had been knocked silent by all kinds of dispossession." He ends with a hope for the twenty-first century—that this "re-storying" will continue and will eventually result in a "balance of stories among the world's peoples."
Achebe encourages writers from the Third World to stay where they are and write about their own countries, as a way to help achieve this balance. Yet he himself has lived in the United States for the past ten years— a reluctant exile. In 1990, Achebe was in a car accident in Nigeria, and was paralyzed from the waist down. While recuperating in a London hospital, he received a call from Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, offering him a teaching job and a house built for his needs. Achebe thought he would be at Bard, a small school in a quiet corner of the Hudson River Valley, for only a year or two, but the political situation in Nigeria kept worsening. During the military dictatorship of General Sani Abacha, who ruled from 1993 to 1998, much of Nigeria's wealth—the country has extensive oil fields—went into the pocket of its leader, and public infrastructure that had been quite good, like hospitals and roads, withered. In 1999, Olusegan Obasanjo became Nigeria's first democratically elected President since 1983, and the situation in Nigeria is improving, albeit slowly and shakily. Achebe is watching from afar, waiting for his country to rebuild itself enough for him to return.
Achebe, who is sixty-nine, has written five novels, including Arrow of God (1964) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987), five books of nonfiction, and several collections of short stories and poems. Achebe spoke recently with me at his home in Annandale-on-Hudson, in New York.
—Katie
Bacon
Chinua
Achebe
|
Was I surprised? Yes, at the beginning. There was no African literature as we know it today. And so I had no idea when I was writing Things Fall Apart whether it would even be accepted or published. All of this was new—there was nothing by which I could gauge how it was going to be received.
But, of course, something doesn't continue to surprise you every day. After a while I began to understand why the book had resonance. I began to understand my history even better. It wasn't as if when I wrote it I was an expert in the history of the world. I was a very young man. I knew I had a story, but how it fit into the story of the world—I really had no sense of that. Its meaning for my Igbo people was clear to me, but I didn't know how other people elsewhere would respond to it. Did it have any meaning or resonance for them? I realized that it did when, to give you just one example, the whole class of a girls' college in South Korea wrote to me, and each one expressed an opinion about the book. And then I learned something, which was that they had a history that was similar to the story of Things Fall Apart—the history of colonization. This I didn't know before. Their colonizer was Japan. So these people across the waters were able to relate to the story of dispossession in Africa. People from different parts of the world can respond to the same story, if it says something to them about their own history and their own experience.
It seems that people from places that haven't experienced colonization in the same way have also responded to the story.
There are different forms of dispossession, many, many ways in which people are deprived or subjected to all kinds of victimization—it doesn't have to be colonization. Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do —it can make us identify with situations and people far away. If it does that, it's a miracle. I tell my students, it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see, who's very far away, who's a different color, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.
What I was referring to there, or what the speaker in the novel was thinking about, was the upsetting of a society, the disturbing of a social order. The society of Umuofia, the village in Things Fall Apart, was totally disrupted by the coming of the European government, missionary Christianity, and so on. That was not a temporary disturbance; it was a once and for all alteration of their society.To give you the example of Nigeria, where the novel is set, the Igbo people had organized themselves in small units, in small towns and villages, each self-governed. With the coming of the British, Igbo land as a whole was incorporated into a totally different polity, to be called Nigeria, with a whole lot of other people with whom the Igbo people had not had direct contact before. The result of that was not something from which you could recover, really. You had to learn a totally new reality, and accommodate yourself to the demands of this new reality, which is the state called Nigeria. Various nationalities, each of which had its own independent life, were forced by the British to live with people of different customs and habits and priorities and religions. And then at independence, fifty years later, they were suddenly on their own again. They began all over again to learn the rules of independence. The problems that Nigeria is having today could be seen as resulting from this effort that was initiated by colonial rule to create a new nation. There's nothing to indicate whether it will fail or succeed. It all depends.
One might hear someone say, How long will it take these people to get their act together? It's going to take a very, very long time, because it's really been a whole series of interruptions and disturbances, one step forward and two or three back. It has not been easy. One always wishes it had been easier. We've compounded things by our own mistakes, but it doesn't really help to pretend that we've had an easy task.
In Home and Exile, you talk about the negative ways in which British authors such as Joseph Conrad and Joyce Cary portrayed Africans over the centuries. What purpose did that portrayal serve?
It was really a straightforward case of setting us up, as it were. The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery. The cruelties of this trade gradually began to trouble many people in Europe. Some people began to question it. But it was a profitable business, and so those who were engaged in it began to defend it—a lobby of people supporting it, justifying it, and excusing it. It was difficult to excuse and justify, and so the steps that were taken to justify it were rather extreme. You had people saying, for instance, that these people weren't really human, they're not like us. Or, that the slave trade was in fact a good thing for them, because the alternative to it was more brutal by far.
And therefore, describing this fate that the Africans would have had back home became the motive for the literature that was created about Africa. Even after the slave trade was abolished, in the nineteenth century, something like this literature continued, to serve the new imperialistic needs of Europe in relation to Africa. This continued until the Africans themselves, in the middle of the twentieth century, took into their own hands the telling of their story.
You write in Home and Exile, "After a short period of dormancy and a little self-doubt about its erstwhile imperial mission, the West may be ready to resume its old domineering monologue in the world." Are some Western writers backpedaling and trying to tell their own version of African stories again?
This tradition that I'm talking about has been in force for hundreds of years, and many generations have been brought up on it. What was preached in the churches by the missionaries and their agents at home all supported a certain view of Africa.
When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don't just turn it off one day. When the African response began, I think there was an immediate pause on the European side, as if they were saying, Okay, we'll stop telling this story, because we see there's another story. But after a while there's a certain beginning again, not quite a return but something like a reaction to the African story that cannot, of course, ever go as far as the original tradition that the Africans are responding to.
There's a reaction to a reaction, and there will be a further reaction to that. And I think that's the way it will go, until what I call a balance of stories is secured. And this is really what I personally wish this century to see—a balance of stories where every people will be able to contribute to a definition of themselves, where we are not victims of other people's accounts. This is not to say that nobody should write about anybody else—I think they should, but those that have been written about should also participate in the making of these stories.
And that's what started with Things Fall Apart and other books written by Africans around the 1950s.
Yes, that's what it turned out to be. It was not actually clear to us at the time what we were doing. We were simply writing our story. But the bigger story of how these various accounts tie in, one with the other, is only now becoming clear. We realize and recognize that it's not just colonized people whose stories have been suppressed, but a whole range of people across the globe who have not spoken. It's not because they don't have something to say, it simply has to do with the division of power, because storytelling has to do with power. Those who win tell the story; those who are defeated are not heard. But that has to change. It's in the interest of everybody, including the winners, to know that there's another story. If you only hear one side of the story, you have no understanding at all.
You're talking about a shift in power, so there would be more of a balance of power between cultures than there is now?
Well, not a shift in the structure of power. I'm not thinking simply of political power. The shift in power will create stories, but also stories will create a shift in power. So one feeds the other. And the world will be a richer place for that.
Do you see this
balance of stories as likely to emerge in this era of globalization and the
exporting of American culture?
That's a real problem. The mindless
absorption of American ideas, culture, and behavior around the world is not
going to help this balance of stories, and it's not going to help the world,
either. People are limiting themselves to one view of the world that comes from
somewhere else. That's something that we have to battle with as we go along,
both as writers and as citizens, because it's not just in the literary or
artistic arena that this is going to show itself. I think one can say this
limiting isn't going to be very healthy for the societies that abandon
themselves.
In Anthills of
the Savannah the poet Ikem says, "The prime failure of our government
is the ... failure of our rulers to reestablish vital inner links with the poor
and dispossessed of this country, with the bruised heart that throbs painfully
at the core of the nation's being." Does this hold true for Nigeria today?
Yes, this is very much the Nigerian
situation. The British handed over the reins of government to a small group of
educated people who then became the new rulers. What Ikem is talking about is
the distance between this new class of rulers and the other Nigerian people.
What needs to be done is to link the two together again, so that those who
control power will see the direct relationship to the people in whose name this
power is wielded. This connection does not happen automatically, and has not
happened in many instances. In the case of Nigeria, the government of the
military dictator General Abacha is a good example. The story coming out of his
rule is of an enormous transfer of the country's wealth into private bank
accounts, a wholesale theft of the national resources needed for all kinds of
things—for health, for education, for roads. That's not the action of someone
who sees himself as the servant of the Nigerian people. The nation's
infrastructure was left to disintegrate, because of one man's selfish need to
have billions. Or take what is happening today, now that we have gotten rid of
this military dictator and are beginning to practice again the system of
democratic rule. You have leaders who see nothing wrong in inciting religious
conflict between Christians and Muslims. It's all simply to retain power. So
you find now a different kind of alienation. The leadership does not really
care for the welfare of the country and its people.
What's your
opinion about the new President, Olusegan Obasanjo? Are you less optimistic
about him now than you were when he was elected, in May of 1999?
When I talk about those who incite
religious conflict, I'm not talking about him, though there are things maybe
you could leave at his door. But I think he has a very difficult job to do.
What has happened to the country in the past twenty years or so is really
grave, and I'm reluctant to pass judgment on a leader only one year after he's
assumed this almost impossible task. So the jury is still out, as far as I'm
concerned. I think some of the steps he's taken are good; there are some steps
he still needs to take, perhaps with greater speed, but then it's easier to say
this from a distance than when you're actually doing it. Leading a very dynamic
country like Nigeria, which has a hundred million people, is not a picnic.
In an Atlantic
Unbound interview this past winter Nadine Gordimer said, "English is
used by my fellow writers, blacks, who have been the most extreme victims of colonialism.
They use it even though they have African languages to choose from. I think
that once you've mastered a language it's your own. It can be used against you,
but you can free yourself and use it as black writers do—you can claim it and
use it." Do you agree with her?
Yes, I definitely do. English is
something you spend your lifetime acquiring, so it would be foolish not to use
it. Also, in the logic of colonization and decolonization it is actually a very
powerful weapon in the fight to regain what was yours. English was the language
of colonization itself. It is not simply something you use because you have it
anyway; it is something which you can actively claim to use as an effective
weapon, as a counterargument to colonization.
You write that the
Ghanaian author Ama Ata Aidoo is on the "right side, on behalf of the poor
and afflicted, the kind of 'nothing people' V. S. Naipaul would love to hammer
into the ground with his well-crafted mallet of deadly prose." Do you think
a writer from a country like Nigeria has a moral obligation to write about his
homeland in a certain way?
No, there's no moral obligation to
write in any particular way. But there is a moral obligation, I think, not to
ally yourself with power against the powerless. I think an artist, in my
definition of that word, would not be someone who takes sides with the emperor
against his powerless subjects. That's different from prescribing a way in
which a writer should write. But I do think decency and civilization would
insist that you take sides with the powerless.
There are those
who say that media coverage of Africa is one-sided—that it focuses on the
famines, social unrest, and political violence, and leaves out coverage of the
organizations and countries that are working. Do you agree? If so, what effect
does this skewed coverage have? Is it a continuation of the anti-Africa British
literature you talk about in Home and Exile?
Yes, I do agree. I think the result
has been to create a fatigue, whether it's charity fatigue or fatigue toward
being good to people who are less fortunate. I think that's a pity. The reason
for this concentration on the failings of Africans is the same as what we've
been talking about—this tradition of bad news, or portraying Africa as a place
that is different from the rest of the world, a place where humanity is really
not recognizable. When people hear the word Africa, they have come to expect
certain images to follow.
If you see a good house in Lagos, Nigeria, it doesn't
quite fit the picture you have in your head, because you are looking for the
slum—that is what the world expects journalists covering a city in Africa to
come back with.
Now, if you are covering America,
you are not focusing on slums every day of your life. You see a slum once in a
while, maybe you talk about it, but the rest of the time you are talking about
other things. It is that ability to see the complexity of a place that the
world doesn't seem to be able to take to Africa, because of this baggage of
centuries of reporting about Africa. The result is the world doesn't really
know Africa.
If you are an African or you live in Africa, this stands out very
clearly to you, you are constantly being bombarded with bad news, and you know
that there is good news in many places. This doesn't mean that the bad news
doesn't exist, that's not what I'm saying. But it exists alongside other
things. Africa is not simple—people want to simplify it. Africa is very
complex. Very bad things go on— they should be covered— but there are also some
good things.
This is something that comes with
this imbalance of power that we've been talking about. The people who consume
the news that comes back from the rest of the world are probably not really
interested in hearing about something that is working. Those who have the
ability to send crews out to bring back the news are in a position to determine
what the image of the various places should be, because they have the resources
to do it. Now, an African country doesn't have a television crew coming to
America, for instance, and picking up the disastrous news. So America sends out
wonderful images of its success, power, energy, and politics, and the world is
bombarded in a very partial way by good news about the powerful and bad news
about the less powerful.
You mentioned that
literature was used to justify slavery and imperialism. What is this negative
coverage of Africa being used to justify now?
It's going to be used to justify
inaction, which is what this fatigue is all about. Why bother about Africa?
Nothing works there, or nothing ever will work. There is a small minority of
people who think that way, and they may be pushing this attitude. But even if
nobody was pushing it, it would simply happen by itself. This is a case of
sheer inertia, something that has been happening for a long time just goes on
happening, unless something stops it. It becomes a habit of mind.
You said in a New
York Times interview in 1988, "I would be very, very sad to have to
live in Europe or America. The relationship between me and the society I write
about is so close and so necessary." What was it like for you to write
this book outside of your own country?
Maybe I make it sound as if it's
impossible for me to write outside of Nigeria. That's really not true. I think
what I mean is that it is nourishing for me to be working from Nigeria, there's
a kind of nourishment you get there that you cannot get elsewhere. But it
doesn't mean you cannot work. You can work, you can always use what's available
to you, whether it's memory, hearsay, news items, or imagination. I intend to
write a novel in America. When I have done it, perhaps we can discuss the
effect of writing a novel from abroad. It's not impossible.
Now a related question, which is not
exactly the one you've asked, is, Why don't you write a novel about America?
The reason for that is not simply that I don't want to sing the Lord's song in
a foreign land, it's just the practical issue of this balance we've been
talking about. There's no lack of writers writing novels in America, about
America. Therefore, it seems to me it would be wasteful for me to add to that
huge number of people writing here when there are so few people writing about
somewhere else. So that's really my reason, it's nothing mystical. I have no intention
of trying to write about America because it would be using up rare energy that
should be used to produce something that has no chance of being produced
otherwise.
Has living here
changed the way you think about Nigeria?
It must have, but this is not
something you can weigh and measure. I've been struck, for instance, by the
impressive way that political transition is managed in America. Nobody living
here can miss that if you come from a place like Nigeria which is unable so far
to manage political transitions in peace. I wish Nigeria would learn to do
this. There are other things, of course, where you wish Americans would learn
from Nigerians: the value of people as people, the almost complete absence of
race as a factor in thought, in government. That's something that I really wish
for America, because no day passes here without some racial factor coming up
somewhere, which is a major burden on this country.
Could you talk
about your visit to Nigeria this past summer? What was it like for you to go
back there?
It was a very powerful and emotional
experience. Emotional mostly because I had not been there in many years, but
the circumstances of my leaving Nigeria were very sad, and many people who were
responding to my return had that in their mind, and so it was more than simply
someone who had not been home in quite a few years. And then you add to that
all the travails that Nigeria had gone through in the rule of General Abacha,
the severe hardship and punishment that the country had suffered in those
years. And the new experiment in democratic rule was also just a few months old
when I went home, so it was a very powerful experience.
Do you hope to be
able to go back there to live at some point?
Yes, I do indeed. Things would have
to be better than they are now for me to be able to do that. Things like
hospitals that used to be quite good before have been devastated. The roads you
have to take to get to a hospital if the need arises, not to talk about the
security of life—both of those would have to improve. But we are constantly
watching the situation. It's not just me, but my family. My wife and
children—many of them would be happier functioning at home, because you tend to
have your work cut out for you at home. Here there are so many things to do,
but they are not necessarily the things you'd rather be doing. Whereas at home
it's different—it's clear what needs to be done, what's calling for your
special skills or special attachment.
What hopes do you
have for Nigeria's future?
I keep hoping, and that hope really
is simply a sense of what Nigeria could be or could do, given the immense
resources it has—natural resources, but even more so human resources. There's a
great diversity of vibrant peoples who are not always on the best of terms, but
when they are, they can really make things happen. And one hopes that we will
someday be able to realize that potential.
Could you talk
about your dream, expressed in Home and Exile, of a "universal
civilization"—a civilization that some believe we've achieved and others
think we haven't?
What the universal civilization I
dream about would be, I really don't know, but I know what it is not. It is not
what is being presented today, which is clearly just European and American. A
universal civilization is something that we will create. If we accept the
thesis that it is desirable to do, then we will go and work on it and talk
about it. We have not really talked about it. All those who are saying it's
there are really suggesting that it's there by default—they are saying to us,
let's stop at this point and call what we have a universal civilization. I
don't think we want to swindle ourselves in that way; I think if we want a
universal civilization, we should work to bring it about. And when it appears,
I think we will know, because it will be different from anything we have now.
There may be cultures that may sadly
have to go, because no one is rooting for them, but we should make the effort
to prevent this. We have to hold this conversation, which is a conversation of
stories, a conversation of languages, and see what happens.
Katie Bacon is the executive editor of Atlantic
Unbound. Her most recent interview was with Jerome Groopman.
IBB’s Two Party Solution
By Chido Onumah
Ibrahim
Badamasi Babangida, also known as IBB, must be a deeply-troubled man; a retired
general haunted by his past. There is no other way to explain his constant
attempt to intrude into our national psyche after ruling the country for eight
inglorious years.
The former military president never misses an opportunity to
show how relevant he is even though history can’t support that delusion. The
recent merger of major opposition political parties to form the All
Progressives Congress (APC) provided a good opportunity for him.
“IBB
okays merger of political parties, insists on two party system”, was the
headline in one newspaper a few weeks ago. The report seemed to have gone
unnoticed by the horde of news junkies and commentators on Nigeria. It was
expected. I don’t know anyone out there who hasn’t grown weary of IBB and what
he has to say about the political and social trajectory of the country. For
IBB, the merger talk is a vindication of his two party philosophy which he
believes “is the best political option for Nigeria”.
“When
I introduced two party system, you people said I am a soldier, now you have
seen why I went for two party system. I am happy for the emergence of APC. It
is a welcome political development’’, IBB noted. The self-styled evil genius
has since gone ahead to expand on his two party theory. Though a founding member
of the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP), IBB said he had not made up his
mind on the political party to vote for in 2015, and that he was leaning toward
voting for the APC. “I have enough time to think and I am thinking and they
will be anxious to come and see me”, he boasted.
“I
am a firm believer of two party system and I also studied the emergence of
political parties in this country immediately after independence and it shows
that this country will be heading for a two party system”, IBB said in his
familiar fit of self adulation. “When we were doing it in 1989, some of you
wrote us in the media that, no it is going to be one Christian party, one
Muslim party, then you say it is going to be one northern and one southern
party and it did not work and everybody blended. The chairman of NRC was Chief
Tom Ikimi, the chairman of SDP was Kingibe and everybody was in one or the
other; you just have to have an accommodation”. If you have problems
comprehending this balderdash, you are in good company. Finally, IBB reminded
us that as a Nigerian he had “a right to vote any candidate of his choice,”
never mind the fact that he denied millions of Nigerians who voted on June 12,
1993, the benefit of their vote.
Asked
why he orchestrated the return of Obasanjo to rule Nigeria again in 1999, IBB
said “The need to save Nigeria from looming crisis gave rise to bringing back
Obasanjo”.
According to him: “We have to simplify a lot of things without going
back to what happened before; the emergence of Obasanjo came about as a result
of what happened in the country; the country was in a very serious crisis and
we had to find the solution to these problems and therefore we needed a leader
known in the country, we did not believe in foisting somebody who is not known;
so, we looked for a man who has been involved in the affairs of this country,
who held positions either in the military or in the cabinet and who has certain
beliefs about Nigeria. Now, all of us that were trained as armed forces, there
is one belief that you cannot take away from us; we believe in this country
because this is part of our training. We fought for this country, so when you
have a situation like that, you need a leader that has all these attributes and
quite frankly, he quickly came to mind”.
What
IBB failed to mention was his role in the crisis that led to foisting Obasanjo
on Nigerians. It is important we deconstruct IBB because we, as citizens, are
central in understanding his newfound penchant for democracy and the rule of
law. For those too young to remember and those who have conveniently forgotten,
IBB was military president of Nigeria from August 27, 1985, to August 27, 1993.
IBB claimed he overthrew the Buhari regime for its high handedness even though,
as Chief of Army Staff, he was very much a part of the regime.
IBB
immediately embarked on a charm offensive by abrogating Decree 4, the
anti-press law of the Buhari regime. He freed the two journalists that had been
imprisoned under the decree. He also released from prison Second Republic
politicians who had been jailed by his predecessor. He insisted on being called
president. His desire was granted. IBB launched a transition programme to
return the country to civil rule. By the time he was through with the media and
Nigerians in general eight years later, one editor, Dele Giwa had been
letter-bombed to smithereens, scores of military officers executed, hundreds of
anti-SAP and pro-democracy activists murdered, a presidential election annulled
and the country left prostrate and polarized as never before.
IBB
achieved notoriety for his transition, one of the longest, the most expensive
(gulping over N40bn at the time) and certainly the most convoluted political
transition the world has witnessed. As a prelude, he set up a Political Bureau made
up of some of the finest minds the country has produced. The bureau came up
with a document which IBB tossed into the waste bin. He then set out to do
things his own way, based on his fanciful study and knowledge of the two party
system.
He
set up two political parties, the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and the
National Republican Convention (NRC), the former “a little to the Left” and the
latter, “a little o the Right”; built two national secretariats for the
parties, two secretariats in each state and two secretariats in each local
government. After banning those he termed “old breed politicians”, he then
proceeded to assign politicians to each party based on his whims. It was a
grand vision, except that it was not meant to be. Today, those edifices, where
they have not been taken over by “smart” Nigerians, are home to rodents and
“area boys”.
I
have gone this far to show what IBB did when he had the golden opportunity to
set the country on the right path. The high point of IBB’s transition was the
June 12, 1993, presidential election won by Moshood Abiola who was later
murdered while in detention. On June 23, 1993, IBB, through his goons,
announced the annulment of the election. On August 27, 1993, exactly eight
years after he seized power, IBB “stepped aside”, leaving his evil alter ego,
Sani Abacha, in charge. The rest, as they say, is history. June 12 this year
marks the 20th anniversary of Babangida’s failed diabolical two party
experiment. The country has come full circle. The remnants of that perfidious
era, including David Mark, who now holds court as the Senate President of the
Federal Republic, call the shots in our so-called democratic order.
IBB’s
recent outburst is a sad reminder of the true character of the Nigerian state;
a state built on a feeling of entitlement. Two decades after he and his cohort
annulled the sovereign will of Nigerians, IBB unabashedly tells us that they
did it to save us from ourselves. This feeling of entitlement that makes IBB
and his ilk think they have a divine right to rule or determine who should rule
us is our greatest undoing as a nation. IBB, in his wisdom, handpicked Obasanjo
without caring what majority of Nigerians thought or felt. After eight ruinous
years, Obasanjo selected Umaru Yar’Adua to succeed him. Today, we are stuck
with an oddity we never bargained for.
IBB’s
sins are numerous. It may be uncharitable to hold one person responsible for
the problems of a nation; but more than anyone else, IBB ought to take the
biggest blame for the current crisis facing the country. Someone should please
tell him that the formation of the APC is not about Nigeria operating a two
party system. It is about a much greater need which IBB does not and would
probably never understand.
conumah@hotmail.com
Venezuela rejects US
interference
By Yusuf Fernande
 |
| Nicolas Maduro, Acting President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela |
Shortly after the death of the
Leader of the Bolivarian Revolution and President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez,
some US right-wing media outlets launched a campaign of slander describing him
as a “divisive” and “authoritarian” ruler. Some even openly showed their hope
that Chavez´s political project would soon fall apart.
However, as all the whole world could see, it is the US and Canadian governments, and not Chavez, who are isolated in the continent. Fellow presidents from throughout the Americas went to Caracas to attend the funeral and pay homage to Chavez. There, many of them reaffirmed their support for the ideals of social justice and regional development and independence that the Venezuelan leader supported during his whole life. Many messages of sympathy and solidarity arrived in Caracas from Mexico to Argentina.
Several Latin American leaders said that even in the absence of the Leader of the Boliviarian Revolution, they would keep on working together in order to develop Chavez ideals on Latin American independence and integration that have already been successfully implemented. Even José Manual Santos, the President of Colombia - a former enemy of Venezuela during the rule of the former President Alvaro Uribe - praised the commitment of President Hugo Chavez and the Venezuelan government to the peace process in his country.
In stark contrast to the warm tributes from the whole Latin America, statements by US President Barack Obama were seen as full of contempt for Chavez, which is certainly consistent with past attitudes of his government towards Venezuela and Latin America´s growing independence. Obama spoke of “a new chapter of the history of Venezuela” and, as if Venezuela was a dictatorial country, he added that the US “remains committed to policies that promote the democratic principles, the rule of law, and respect for human rights.” Obama did not offer his condolences for the death of Chavez either.
Actually, Obama should know best. Venezuelans, according to polls, give their own democracy a score of 7 out of 10 while the Latin American average is 5.8. While 81 percent voted in the last Venezuelan election, only 57.5 percent voted in the last US presidential election in 2012.
For her part, spokeswoman for the US State Department, Victoria Nuland, told the media that her government was waiting for a decision by the Venezuelan authorities about the “transition;” that is, she was telling the Venezuelans that Washington wants them to backtrack and basically eliminate their independence and social achievements. However, in a statement, the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry described Nuland´s insolent and disrespectful remarks as “a new, crude US interference in Venezuela's internal affairs.”
At the same time, all these [negative] remarks [about Chavez] by US top officials sparked profound outrage among Venezuelan people, who accompanied their president with affection and sorrow during the funeral. Obama´s vilification of Chavez offended the majority of Venezuelans, both those who voted to reelect their president on October 7 and those who did not.
It is not the first time, however, that Obama has found himself isolated. At the 2012 OAS Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, the US and Canada were harshly criticized, especially for their refusal to allow Cuba to attend. It was a stark contrast to the previous summit in 2009, where Latin American leaders - including Chavez - welcomed Obama warmly because they wrongly thought that he could open a new era in the history of the US-Latin American relations.
Maduro accuses
Shortly after Chavez passed away, the Venezuelan government expelled the air force attaché of the US Embassy in Caracas and his deputy, claiming that they had made “inappropriate contacts” with Venezuelan military officers in order to try to destabilize the country. The United States retaliated by expelling the second secretary at the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington and another diplomat. Finally, the Venezuelan government has ordered an investigation to know whether Chavez´s cancer was induced by the enemies of his Bolivarian revolution, especially the US administration.
For his part, Acting
President Nicolas Maduro has promised to follow Chavez path and to confront
“the Empire´s attempts to prevent Venezuela and Latin America´s independence
from consolidating.” He recently announced that “some people in the Pentagon
and the CIA” were conspiring as the election approaches in the South American
country. “I am telling the absolute truth,” Maduro said, “because we have the
testimonies and direct, firsthand information.”
He accused explicitly a group of former US officials -including Roger Noriega, Otto Reich and John Negroponte - of working to destabilize Venezuela. Shortly after, Maduro added that Venezuela had detected a plot from those same circles to kill his opponent in the election Henrique Capriles Randoski. The implication was that the attack on the right-wing candidate would be a provocation in order to create a chaos in the country. Maduro did not give more details.
Otto Reich was ambassador in Venezuela from 1986 to 1989 and Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs in the administration of George W. Bush. He was deeply involved in the 2002 anti-Chavez coup in Venezuela. He was a close friend to right-wing Venezuelan businessman and lawyer Robert Carmona-Borjas, who fled from the Latin American country shortly after the failure of the coup in which he was also heavily involved.
A second individual denounced by Maduro was Robert Noriega, US permanent representative to the Organization of American States, Noriega also supported the 2002 failed coup. After the Honduran military coup in 2009, Noriega became a lobbyist for the new regime. The third individual, John Negroponte, was Director of National Intelligence and was actively involved in the contra war against the Sandinist Nicaragua in the 1980s. It is worth pointing out that these three individuals have written numerous articles in which they called on the US administration to take a tough line against Venezuela.
All these events show that the Obama Administration continues to develop the same failed Cold War policies towards Latin America that George W. Bush put into practice. Washington keeps militarizing much of the continent and spending enormous amounts of cash in order to set up obedient governments, train armies and militias, deploy troops, and build new military bases in countries such as Guatemala, Panama, Belize, Honduras or the Dominican Republic.
Re-imposing the old order
It is worth pointing out that Obama and Nuland´s speeches are in line with the political discourse of Venezuelan corrupt and aggressive right wing, which again shows the links of subordination of the latter to US policies. The Venezuelan oligarchy helped the US push its neoliberal agenda on Venezuela through the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, as it did in the rest of Latin America. In 1989, then President Carlos Andres Perez was putting into practice the “Washington Consensus” of neoliberal policies - privatization and cuts to social services - and, consequently, ended subsidies for oil and the prices of gasoline and public transportation doubled.
Protests broke out in the suburbs surrounding Caracas and spread into the capital itself. Carlos Andrés Perez then revoked the constitutional right to protest and deployed military, who killed an estimated 3,000 people. On the whole, under President Perez, life standards continued to decline for all but the richest.
However, Chavez took
Venezuelan people out of poverty. He used the nation´s oil revenues to provide
funds for literacy programs and, in this way, more people were able to go to
university. The Venezuelan government extended access to dental and health care
and promoted a land and housing reform, subsidized supermarkets, and thousands
of work cooperatives. In Venezuela, where much of the population had been
living below the poverty line, these programs have had a huge impact. Nowadays,
Venezuela´s gap between rich and poor is half of what it is in the United
States. It has been rated “the fifth-happiest nation in the world” by Gallup.
In unity with his people, he was also able to free the country from the grips of the United States and was the promoter of a Latin American uprising against US domination. Chavez led the way to create to the Bank of the South in order to finance projects throughout Latin America and allow other nations to free themselves from the yoke of the IMF and the World Bank.
From local councils to factories, Venezuela has carried out one of the most successful experiments in direct democracy and worker control in the world, which makes it a much more democratic country than the US itself, where poor and ordinary people are excluded from politics and decision-making, and the very wealthy rule the country through a managed and formal democracy that ensures that they will benefit most from the economy.
In this sense, while Chavez was a key figure in the creation and development of these programs and initiatives, it is the Venezuelan people that brought them to life and will keep them alive after his death. The slogan, “Chavez somos todos’ - We are all Chavez - is not mere words, but expresses the consciousness of people, who want this process to go on.”
Recently a Venezuelan told a foreign media: “The Americans and the opposition believe that if Chavez as a person disappears, the revolution will be over and the old order will be re-imposed, but we have to show them that it will not be like that.
The
dark side of silence
Everybody wants to be able to have a
little bit of peace and quiet. But the battle to get other people to keep the
noise down can have unfortunate consequences, writes David Hendy.
Two months ago, I found myself
standing at a busy road junction in Ghana's capital, Accra.
Surrounded on all sides by cars,
taxis, lorries, and loudspeakers blasting out advertising slogans, I could
barely hear myself think. It's certainly hard to dispute that the world is
getting noisier.
More traffic, more machinery, more
people, more of everything - all producing a rising arc of cacophony.
The question is, what do we do about
it?
One response would be simply to flee
the din altogether. Another, to block it out with technology - or even silence
it at source.
In ancient Rome, a city of a million
people living cheek-by-jowl, delivery carts would trundle along the narrow
stone streets all night long. Gyms, bars, brothels - all stayed open into the
small hours. Inevitably, sleep was a rare commodity.
Rome's elite fled to calm oases such
as the Palatine Hill, where they'd only be disturbed by a few footsteps on
marble and the trickle of ornamental water. That did little for those stuck in
the teeming apartment blocks below.
In Elizabethan Oxford, there were
constant complaints about late-night revellers spilling out of alehouses and
disturbing the peace, which drove the better off to retreat to their stately
homes.
There, they muffled the surrounding
din by insulating themselves with the thickest walls they could afford and the
latest fashion in lush drapes or curtains. Back in the city, the revelling
carried on.
Two centuries later in Edinburgh,
where privacy and peace were entirely absent in the crowded tenements of the
Old Town, polite society decided the only hope was to create for itself a whole
"New Town" so that respectable families could retreat behind their
own impressively solid front doors.
That was fine for them. But in the
Old Town, of course, life simply got worse.
As for Victorian London, its cobbled
streets were in ceaseless uproar with the clatter from the iron-rimmed wheels
of carriages rushing about, and the thousands of tuneless street musicians who
tormented residents such as Charles Dickens.
"Brazen performers on brazen
instruments, beaters of drums, grinders of organs… and bellowers of
ballads" he called them. The most extreme response came from the writer
Thomas Carlyle, who, nearly driven out of his mind, spent a fortune building a
state-of-the-art "soundproof study" in his Chelsea attic.
Carlyle's new room was a disaster.
Set against the overall hush, the slightest sound now stood out.
Seeing him so "out of
sorts", his wife Jane declared it "the noisiest in the house".
It certainly showed no signs of ending Thomas's torment, for he continued for
years to rail against the street musicians, the neighbours' crowing cockerels,
or passing dust-carts.
The unpalatable truth, then as now,
is that while noise and frayed nerves go together it's often difficult to tell
which is cause and which is effect.
"You can imagine a motto
inscribed over the door," the American author Garret Keizer once wrote
after visiting Carlyle's house. "To be obsessed with quiet is never to be
possessed of it."
Today, those who live in a Brazilian
favela or who work in the market places of Istanbul claim they're indifferent
to the noise around them - indeed that they embrace it.
It's the vivid sound of human life,
of neighbourliness, a comforting backdrop that ceaselessly confirms one isn't
horribly alone. We should perhaps try a little harder to follow their example.
But what makes it bearable for them is that their soundscape is something
generated by - and so something owned by - everyone.
Usually these days noise is more
unequally distributed. And that's where the trouble starts.
Jet off to India, or certain American
states, and you can stay among monks who've taken a vow of silence. It's a
growing business. But of course to get there you'll have made your own small
contribution to shattering the quiet of anyone living below the flight path.
You'll merely have shifted noise out of your own life and into someone else's.
This, of course, is something those
living near airports know all too well. The residents who've been campaigning
in Britain against a third runway at Heathrow - like those who've objected to
the HS2 high-speed rail link - are understandably completely opposed to the
prospect of more noise disturbing their peace and quiet.
But their distress and anger is all
the more intense because they also sense their own lack of "voice" in
the decision-making process. In the face of some abstract commercial or
national "interest", they have been, well, silenced.
Not only have we become
hypersensitive to whatever sounds remain - we've also become estranged from the
people who make them. Certain kinds of music or ways of talking become steadily
less familiar - they become alien, even threatening.
Among 17th Century colonists in New
England it applied to the "savage" sounds of the Native Americans.
Today, many of us apply it to rap music.
What might have meaning or value
becomes, to our own impatient ears, just "noise". And that's when,
instead of struggling to find some means of co-existence, we try to silence it
or ignore it.
One reason night-time deliveries were
allowed to disturb the sleep of ordinary Roman citizens is simply that the
city's law-makers, safely cocooned in their Palatine palaces, had no experience
of living in such bleak circumstances themselves.
In the early years of the 20th
century, by way of contrast, New York had one of the most vigorous Noise
Abatement campaigns in the world. But even that didn't help.
In some parts of the city, hawkers,
newspaper delivery boys, roller-skaters, even those who carelessly kicked a tin
can down the street were targeted.
All of this meant the streets quickly
became arteries of fast-flowing traffic rather than places of sociable human
interaction.
It was the relentless drone of
motor-cars and lorries that came top of the list of complaints among ordinary
New Yorkers. But their voice hadn't been heard - it was the city's Great and
Good who'd led the noise abatement campaign.
Class prejudice has long had a nasty habit
of making us attack the wrong targets.
The lesson from history, it seems, is
this - when it comes to noise, be careful what you wish for.
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