How things are done and not done

 

 1

Dennis looked like an aging minor league footballer: six feet, dark-eyed, black moustache flecked with grey, a mop of hair to match, and a taste for whisky and women younger than himself. Gregarious, trusting, full of robust energy, he pounded life with a heavy stick and life paid him back with interest. Women loved him and left him, business deals fell through, money that flowed into his hands leaked like water through his fingers. His longed-for payload was ever just round the corner, the next contract, the next cheque, the next subsidy.
    Togo was the strangest payload of all.  He came to see me in Toronto, bringing with him an American friend whom he introduced as Roger Falsetta. Roger turned out to  be vice-president of a real estate development company with the improbable name of Hunter Raven Corporation.
    “We’re going to develop and build the first privately-operated free zone south of the Sahara,” Dennis announced.
    I asked who would be paying for the work.
    “USAID[1] is financing the up-front costs, preliniary studies and so on.” Dennis said, “Then it’s up to us. Or rather, up to Roger.”
    Roger nodded.
    “Hunter Raven is a big noise in the States,” Dennis said.
    My job was to put a team together to study alternative sites for an industrial park, to examine the human and physical infrastructure, and to estimate the start-up costs.
    I was sceptical. “USAID is going to pay us to so that?”
    “Hunter Raven is a US company,” said Roger.
    “Yeah. But Dennis and I are Canadian.”
    “They don’t care about that,” Dennis said.
    We flew to Washington for a meeting with William “call me Bill” Weinstein, a middle-ranking USAID official. His office, sequestered in the stoney labyrinth of the US State Department, was tiny. Folders, reports and loose papers were piled on the desk, wedged on shelves over books and file boxes, stacked on the floor. Dennis, Roger and I sat on upright chairs in a corridor between desk and twin filing cabinets, while Weinstein’s assistant, introduced simply as Melanie, occupied a stool in the doorway.   Weinstein apologised for the lack of space. He wore a permanent frown and spoke with clipped upstate authority. Melanie took notes.
    I guess you fellas need to know about the financial arrangments,” Weinstein said.
    “You bet,” Roger answered.
    I have always gaped - figuratively - at the unabashed pleasure Americans take at the propect of money. Roger, I figured,  wasn’t going to weep tears for the poor of Togo. Several hundred grand were on offer and he needed them for his company bonus. After a brief discussion, Weinstein assented to the release of fifty percent of the funds up front “so that you boys can get going”, then he left it to his assistant to deal with what he called the details..
    Melanie took up the reins. “We’re glad to have Canadian participants in this important project. But we think maybe the Canadian government could make a financial contribution. We’ve already invested upwars of a couple of million bucks on the Togo project.”
     “We thought USAID…” Dennis began, but I stopped him.
    “CIDA[2] will play ball, I promised.
    Before leaving Washington, we dropped in on the World Bank to ask if there was funding for Togo.  An official told us that several million dollars had been set aside for the country several years before, but had remained unspent. If we could come up with something, they would take a look at it.
    Back in Canada, Dennis and I did the rounds in Ottowa and Hull, the twin city hosts of the federal government. An expensive dinner with the Togolese ambassador yielded a letter of approval signed on behalf of General Eyadéma, the country’s president.
    “Do you know anything about him,” I asked Dennis afterwards.
    “He’s a bad boy.”
    “?”
    “Dicatator. He feeds enemies to his pet crocodiles.”
    “Sounds great.”

    CIDA’s officials were sceptical. They didn’t fund speculative projects, they didn’t have a program in Togo, it wasn’t a Canadian priority and so on. I wrote a proposal replete with maps, diagrams and imaginative certainties. Togo would benefit hugely from the project; thousands of jobs would be created, lives would be transformed, women would benefti more than men (a requirement of the time). CIDA remained obdurate. Weeks went by. I addresed each of CIDA’s concerns - or so I thought - one by one; to no effect. USAID expressed anxiety. Why wouldn’t Canada cooperate? Roger grumbled; Dennis reassured him. A CIDA official told me sotto voce that nothing could be done without the approval of the Department of Foreign Affairs. He arranged for us to meet with the Assistant Deputy Minister for Africa - a Monsieur Jean-Luc Lemiel.
    In M. Lemiel’s office, more spacious by far than Bill Weinstein’s in Washington, Dennis and I laid out our case. M. Lemiel listened in silence. When we had finished, he asked why no Quebecers were involved. “Togo belongs to La Francophonie[3].As far as we’re concerened it belongs to Quebec. If you put the project in the hands of a Quebec firm, there’ll be no problem with finance.”
    “What about our role,” Dennis asked.
    “You can be sub-contractors. Or maybe we’ll give you a commission for bringing in the business.”
    “That’s it?”
    “That’s it.”
    Dennis had a short fuse, but he granted me first charge. “You know what you can do with your Quebec company,”  I said. That was as far as I got before Dennis erupted.
    “You can go fuck,” he said. “We’ll do it without you.”

    Outside, in the icy gloom of an Ottawa late afternoon, our anger subsided giving way to awareness that we had drawn a blank. We shared a melancholy drink on the flight back to Toronto, parting on arrival in the certain knowledge that our Togo dream was over.
    Next day I telephoned Melanie with the news.
    “That’s too bad,”: she said.”Is there nothing we can do?”
    “I guess not.”
    “Well okay.” After a moment of silence she added, “Would it help if I contacted someone in the Canadian govenment?”
    I never claimed to know much about the workings of bureaucracy but experience had taught me that Canadian officials harbour a suspicion that their neighbours across the border might be their superiors in knowledge and expertise. They will seldom admit to this directly. Their prejudice lies buried in a feeling that Canada is a small place - small not in the geography of its landscape but in its timid sense of identity.
    Melanie, composed, articulate, the well-turned-out product of a confident nation, had no such doubts. Unlike Bill Weinstein, she didn’t have an office of her own, just a work station, boarded on three sides by accoustic panels, in a room shared with a dozen others. Next week, though, she could be Weinstein’s boss. In the US, where you started said little about where you would end up. She asked whom to call. I suggested the vice-president of CIDA’s Africa Division.
    Next day Melanie called me back. “I spoke to that vice-presient you told me about. He asked how much you needed. I told him around three hundred thousand to make a start.”
    “What did he say?|
    “He said that wouldn’t be a problem. He’d see to it.”
    “You sure?”
    “Sure I’m sure. He said it sounded like a real worth-while project. Only thing that puzzles me is why I had to call him in the first place.”
    “You mean why couldn’t we deal with it?”
    “Uh huh.”
    “They gave us the run-around.”
    “Beats me how you guys do things up there in Canada.”

2

    Blink as you pass over a map of Africa and you could miss the Republic of Togo. Wedged like a stub of pencil between Ghana and Benin, it occupies a sliver of the West African coast known in nineteenth-century Europe as the white man’s grave.  Armed with vaccinations and anti-malarial prophylactics, Europeans fare better now, though locals are not necessarily so lucky. A century ago nobody thought to inquire about the longevity of the native population. Darwinian principles were assumed to prevail: adaptation worked, the people of West Africa lasted as long as they should. By the last decade of the twentieth century[4], life expectancy among the Togolese hovered around fifty years which was twenty-five fewer than your average Australian, Canadian or Western European. Ten per cent of youngsters died before the age of five. In the capital, malarial moquitos bred in fetid lagoons. Suffocating heat sapped energy and stifled movement. Poverty provided the coup de grâce.
    General Gnassingbé Eyadéma seized power in a military coup in 1967 and ruled until his death in 2005 when his son Faure Gnassingbé took over. The General imported lions from southern Africa to patrol the grounds of his mansion around which he constructed a moat to guard against the creatures wandering into the family home in search of a meal. Elsewhere, those who patrolled in greatest numbers were the unemployed and impoverished, testimony to the great leader’s success in maintaining Togo as one of the world’s poorest countries.
    Lomé, the capital city, stands  hard by the Ghanaian border and looks out across sand and palm trees to the Atlantic. Several elegant hotels line the shore built originally in the 1970s to accommodate delegates to the international conference that produced the first Lomé Convention.[5] By 1992, they catered mainly to airline staff, diplomats and the occasional aid official. Most travellers to Lomé were from neighbouring countries, traders mainly in search of cheap imports or contraband. Lomé’s fine white sands and sparkling sunlight might have attracted vacationers from further afield were it not for the absence of plumbing in large parts of the capital, one effect of which was that the beaches served as a communal washroom where people defecated beneath the palms and washed in the sea. An excremental odour hovered over the shoreline.
    As soon as I stepped outside on my first morning in Lomé, I realised tthat I had forgotten to bring a hat. Exposure to aggressive equatorial sunlight may be a trivial matter to those blessed with a dark compexion and a protective mop of hair, but I had neither. For a bald Anglo-Saxon to go abroad hatless in such a climate would be to confirm Noel Coward’s assessment of English madness. It would also be dangerous, a guarantee of sunburn, dehydration and maybe something worse.
    Retreating back to the hotel lobby, I asked the receptionist where I could buy a hat. She looked at me as if I had already spent too long in the sun.
    “Well,” she said after a pause,”there won’t be a store.You could try the market. They sell everything there. It’s the biggest in West Africa.” She ordered a taxi and told the driver to take me to the Grand Marché.
    “You can get lost in the market,” she said. “It’s special.”
    On the way I asked the driver if he knew of a stall that sold hats.
    “We don’t wear hats in Lomé, sir,” he said. “But someone will be selling them. There’s nothing you can’t buy in the market.”
    “Any idea which way I should walk?”
    “Every way is good,”
    I paid him in US dollars at his request, shook his hand, and plunged into the fray.
    Stalls lined the streets in all directions. One stretch specialised in fruits and vegetables - mounds of ruby tomatoes, gnarled red peppers, dusty cassavas, earth-brown yams, purple aubergines, lychees and spotted bananas, bundles of green leaves, guavas, passion fruit, heap upon heap of other fruits I had never seen before with names in Evhé and Kabiyé that I elicited but - to the delight of the traders - couldn’t pronounce. There were sections for meat, for poultry, for fish, for dry goods. Along some tributaries importers were selling toothpaste and batteries from China, cameras from Russia, radios from Korea, leather sandals and bags from Bangladesh and India. How could a little country like Togo sustain a market of this immense size? Later I learned that every smuggler in West Africa traded in the Lomé market, and that goods acquired there supplied markets in Lagos, Accra and Abidjan.
    Through street after street I wandered, turning right and left at random until I no longer retained any sense of where I was. A near impenetrable thicket of shoppers flowed back and forth, making progress slow and location uncertain. From time to time I asked stall holders if they knew where I could buy a hat. Most shook their heads. A few gave me directions in a local dialect of French I found hard to understand. Heat from the sun bored into my head and made me dizzy, though I remained aware of the beauty of the people around me, the men lean and muscular, the women slim, fine-featured, arrayed in particoloured African robes like arrays of flowers.
    An hour of wondering brought me at last to a stall with headgear. On display were piles of greyish peaked caps, all of them sweat-stained and dirty. I picked up one and looked inside the rim. Still legible through an overlay of grime was a lable that read in German “Made in Germany”. I examined several others; all were in like condition. They must have been standard German army issue from the early twentieth century. Until the First World War, the Kingdom of Togoland had been a German colony.[6] More than seventy years had passed since the wearers had departed, perhaps to die in Europe on the Western Front.
    “Do you have any new hats,” I asked the merchant, a grizzled man with white hair and a face creased like old parchment.
    “Désolé monsieur. Mais peut-être…un moment…”
    From beneath the display table he produced a half-dozen, wide-brimmed straw hats woven from coarse reeds.
    “These are for farmers, monsieur. For the land. Not suitable for town.”
    I took one from him and placed in on my head. It felt rough and unyielding, but it fitted.
    “Mil francs,” the merchant said. I sensed by his tone that he expected me to bargain him down to maybe half that amount. Gratitude won out. I would have paid him several times that sum with pleasure.
    While I fished for a banknote, he held up a mirror - and I froze. The creature that stared back at me looked like the figment of a nightmare: blotchy, pale skin, bloodshot eyes, cheeks swollen by a Western diet of flour and fat; the irredeemable ugliness of a colonial factotum. It was the face of an alien, an unsavoury intruder among children of the gods. For an hour I had wandered alone, part of the throng, part of Africa, subconsciously assuming that I resembled those among whom I walked - lean, smooth-skinned, black.  Nothing in anyone’s reaction gave cause for supposing myself to be any different from them. Eyes that looked into mine reflected no more than awareness of our common heritage. Only the mirror told me who I was and what I might represent in the trampled history of a race that still occupied, in a sclerotic corner of Euro-American culture, an inferior place on the scale of human value. I turned away from the mirror, paid the merchant for the hat and moved on, grateful that no one was paying attention to the sweaty, pink stranger in their midst.
    While searching for a way out f the market, I emerged  onto a square occupied by a large warhouse. Its double doors were wide open, so I peered inside. The interior consisted of aisles lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves laden with roles of cloth. No one was in attendance. Entering the nearest aisle I pulled out one of the rolls - a cotton-polyester blend patterned in the intricate colours and design of West African batik. Printed along the edge were the words “Made in the Netherlands”. I withdrew a second roll; once again the colours and design were West African and the manufacture Dutch. Before climbing the stairs, I checked another half dozen rolls all with the same result. The second floor proved identical to the first and with similar merchandise. Dutch manufacturers seemed to have taken possession of the industry.
    On my way out, a man in dungarees stopped me. I apologised for intruding and asked if there were any cloths made in Togo or elsewhere in Africa.
    “In here everything comes from Netherlands,” he said.
    “How come?”
    “Cheaper to make over there.”
    I thought the warehouse overstocked for the needs of so small a nation.
    “We supply many countries - Ghana, Benin, Nigeria. Traders come form all over,”  the man told me. “Here the taxes are low and nobody asks how to pass things over the border.”
    “The Dutch own this warehouse,” I asked.
    “No monsieur. The Nana-Benz own the Togo cloth business.”
    “Nana-Benz?”
    “Rich ladies. We call them Nana-Benz because they go round in Mercedes-Benz cars. Very clever ladies the Nana-Benz. It’s we men who are not so smart. We do the work but the women are the bosses. We talk big monsieur, but in the end we have to do what the ladies say.”
    “What about the Dutch?”
    “Nana-Benz visit them every year and always come back smiling. Everybody knows the Nan-Benz don’t smile easy. But the Dutch make them smile.”
    “They’re clever.”
    “I think so monsieur.”
    He glanced at my hat. “May I ask you a question?”
    I nodded.
    “Your hat. Where…?”
    “In the market.”
    “It’s a Togolese hat. From the countryside. You seldom see them in town.”
    “Wasn’t easy to find. I had to search for it. At least it’s made in Togo.”
    “Yes monsieur. It’s almost a miracle to find something made here. We used to make many things. Not any more. Now we just make poverty.” 

3

    A middle-aged, bull-necked American - John Morgan - met us at our hotel. We had been told to expect him.
    Over a drink at the pool side, Morgan told us  how he came to be in Togo. He had been  running a steel plant in Panama when the Togolese authorities invited him to revive the country’s moribund steelworks. “I named my price and then doubled it when they blinked. That’s the way to deal with Africans.” He winked at Roger whom he had spotted as a fellow American, then glanced at each of the rest of us in turn. In addition to Dennis, Roger and myself, our team included Manuel, a doctor, who would examine the health situation in Togo, and Mark, an ecologist.
    None of us laughed.
    “You Canadians should lighten up a little,” Morgan said.
    Next morning, he had us chauffeur-driven to the US embassy where the ambassador informed us that our activities in Togo would enjoy his support so long as we made sure to pass everything through Mr Morgan. He was the most important business executive in the country.
    “Who is Morgan,” I wondered aloud afterwards.
    “CIA. That’s my take,” Roger said.

4

    Work began in earnest. There were meetings with governmetn officials, visits to potential sites for the free zone, interviews with owners of the few - the very few - companies with manufacturing capability. Most of the latter were cottage industries employing a handful of people in plants equipped with machinery old enough to pass elsewhere as antique. Best of these, a soap manufacturer, was in the hands of a businessman from India who confessed that he might with advantage have chosen a more dynamic country in which to spend his working life.
    Largest enterprise was the steeworks - John Mogan’s operation. A taxi dropped me outside the main gates. I had pictured it as humming with American-style energy and purpose, but what struck me at once was that nothing seemed to be going on. No trucks arrived or left, no noise came from the vast yard beyond the fence, no workers moved back and forth. I had visited steelworks before. They were noisy, bustling places. Not so here. Lomé’s version seemed encased in the tranquillity of a village library.
    I rang the bell at the sidegate and, after an interrogation from the guard, gained admission. Monsieur Alfonse Turbot, the company accountant, received me in his site office. I expressed disappointment that the boss was unavailable since I had taken care to make an appointment.
    “Mr Morgan seldom comes here,” my host said. “He has many other businesses.
    M. Turbot hailed from Belgium. I wondered how he had ended up in Togo. He told me he had answered a newspaper advertisement and the salary was more than satisfactory. I said the plant didn’t look very busy. M. Turbot agreed that this was so but that appearances were deceptive. Business was more than satisfactory.
    What did M. Turbot think of the proposed industrial free zone?
    He had no opinion on the subject. I would have to ask Mr Morgan.

5

        On Sunday, a day of rest in Lomé as in most places where Christians have ruled, Mark and I visited the fetish market about which we had heard enough to arouse our curiosity.[7] It stood on a patch of land in a nondescript suburb. About thirty stalls faced each other in an untidy elipse, each with its own collection of dried birds, reptiles and mammal. In one stall were serried ranks of bats; in another a jumble of chameleons; two held rows of monkey skulls; one specialized in animals from elsewhere in Africa: gorillas, antelopes, a solitary lion; several were stocked with lizards and snakeskins. There were collections of horns and jaw bones, mounds of small birds, mice and rats. Pelts arranged by size and species hung from poles on uprights like washing on a line. In one stall alone we counted 218 mammals, 204 birds, 21 reptiles, 79 amphibians and 77 snail shells. A neighbouring stall displayed heap upon heap of hides, crustaceans and dried fish.
    I wondered what it all meant.
    “Magic,” Mark said. “Pathways  to the spirit world. Animals have sacred properties. They cure sicknesses, protect from harm, bring luck upon oneself and evil on one’s enemy.”
    “You mean they work?”
     “Possibly. If you truly believe in them. The US president believes God fights on America’s side. It’s really no different.”
    The Gulf War of 1991 had erupted just before our departure from Canada. Flying over the Sahara we had crossed the flight paths of a B52 bomber on its way to Iraq. America seemed routinely to be at war somewhere, if not directly then through proxies, and always with God’s blessing.
    We had paused beside a row of skulls one of which Mark examined and identified as hyena. The stallholder approached anticipating a sale.“Pour vous dix mil. C’est bon marché.”
    “Merci mon ami. Pas aujourd’hui.” Mark returned the skull to its place.
    “People don’t understand each other,” he said as we moved on. “We can no longer imagine how anyone could have faith in a fetish. The Evhé and Kabiye people of Togo probably can’t imagine how anyone could live in a world like ours - so devoid of spirituality.”
    “Some in the West still believe in God.”
    “Yes; we shunt off the dimension of spirit to a single being. Here everything is spiritual, a fish, a chameleon, a tree. Africa lives and communes with the earth and everything in it. We, on the other hand, live outside the world and prey on it for what we need.”

    6

    Morgan gave a dinner party in the garden of a restaurant he had hired for the purpose. A single table stretched the length of an immaculate lawn. Servants in white livery attended with military precision. Flaming torches on poles bathed us in a warm flickering light. Morgan sat at the head, Julia his young English girlfrend on his left, Togo’s Minister of Industry on his right. Next came half a dozen Togolese trade officials with Roger, the lone Westerner among them, and then the Canadians. At the far end sat a group of clean-cut Americans to whom we weren’t introduced.
    Proceedings began stiffly. The Togolese were ill at ease, I sensed they didn’t much like Morgan and that he, in turn,  considered their presence tiresome but necessary. They spoke no English while Morgan made no attempt to speak French. Fueled with several glasses of wine, the host spoke volubly while his Togolese guests ate sparingly, drank iced water and said little. I was seated next to Madame Lenôtre, a trade official.  Her bright primrose dress, decolleté almost to the point of indiscretion, drew the eye to what it barely concealed, une gorge superbe as the the old French masters would have noted. The minister, seated obliquely on the other side of the table, would cast his eyes on her from time to time. She drew other glances too, snatched fleetingly like shoppers seized by an urge to steal what they lack means to possess. I tried to engage Madame Lenôtre in conversation but she responded solely with monosyllables. Mostly she remained silend, dignified, immune to the shiftly, prurient hommage of countrymen and strangers alike.
    Towards the end of the meal, Morgan proposed a toast to the future of what he decribed as “this great little country”. Dutifully we raised our glasses and murmured “Togo” while the Togolese sat unmoved and, I sensed, sceptical. Five minutes later, after the briefest of courtesies, the minister took his leave followed at once by his entourage.
    As she stood up, Madame Lenôte turned to me for the first time and shook my hand.
    “Mon mari m’attend.”
    “Ah oui, bien súr. Bon soir madame.”
    “Now we can relax,” Morgan told us when he returned to the table after seeing off his Togolese guests. He called for more wine. “We gotta enjoy life. That’s why I’m in this business. I’ll tell you all a secret. I’m making more money here than anyone else round this table. That’s not a boast. It’s a fact.” He stood up again, swaying slightly. “You’re all here because I want you here. don’t forget that.” He raised his wine glass and signaled to a a waiter who hurried to his side with a bottle.
    Unsteady on his feet, Morgan swayed as his glass was being replenished. Despite the waiter’s dexterity, several drops of the precious liquid dripped onto the tablecloth.
    “Idiot,” Morgan said
    The waiter darted out of Morgan’s visual range.
    “Nobody round here knows how to do anything. Biggest problem we have. Some folk can’t be trained.”
    Julia, smiling, put a hand on Morgan’s arm  and guided him back into his chair.
Pale with short blond hair, ice-blue eyes and the clipped accent of the English upper class, she seemed to have emerged intact from the previous century when English roses were shipped off to the colonies as prospective brides of colonial officers.
    “I think we’d do better to shoot them all, take over the place and run it ourselves,” she said.
    Her remark signaled the end of the meal. Taxis were summoned to take the Americans and most of our team away leaving Dennis and myself obliged by courtesy to accept Morgan’s offer of a lift to our hotel in his car. On the way, he changed his mind about our immediate destination and instead ordered his driver to take us for a nightcap. We came to a halt in front of a tw-storey wooden structure. Morgan led the way up a flight of stairs into a room furnished with a dozen tables and, at the far end, a bar behind which a bartender was polishing glasses. He greeted Morgan and Julia politely but without obvious pleasure.
    “Whisky all round,” Morgan ordered, adding as an afterthought, “that okay with you guys?”
    Julia wanted a gin and tonic.
    “What is it with English women,” Morgan said. He looked appreciatively at Julia who was wearing a white dress wih a dangerous slit along the length of one leg. He downed his whisky in one gulp and ordered another.
    “You know something?”
    He fixed Dennis and I with a stare of melodramatic malevolence.
    “You know something,” he repeated, slurring his worlds, “Your guys know nothing. Out here you’re just a couple of kids.
    Silence. Dennis and I exchanged glances. Julia stared at the floor.
    “If I wanted, I could take you two outside and waste you right now. You’d never be seen again. Nobody here gives a shit. You got that? So don’t mess with me.”
    “He gets like this when he’s had too much to drink,” Julia said.
    Morgan banged his fist on the bar. “You stay out of this goddamit.”
    Julia answered something but we didn’t stay to hear. Tumbling downstairs, we hurried past Morgan’s car where the driver sat waiting for his boss, and pressed on through the dark, tropical night.  We halted once to check for any sound or sign that Morgan might be in pursuit, He wasn’t. It took us more than an hour to thread our way through Lomé’s unlit streets to our hotel.
    “Who the hell is he,” I asked Dennis as we parted for the night.
    “The ugly American?”
    “Scenes like that only happen in moves, right?”
    Dennis grinned, “Also in Togo.”

7

    Morgan called to apologise for his behaviour of the previous evening and to invite the team to his home for what he described as a quiet drink. We sat in his living room on deep-piled sofas round a massive, rough-hewn mahogany table. An upright  piano stood against a wall at the far end of the room.
    “My profit doesn’t come only from steel, “Morgan informed us, “We run a shipping service along the coast - Liberia, Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast. Sometimes further down. Julia manages the operation.”
    “Not an easy job,” Julia said.  “The crews are all halfwits, Even the captains are hopelesss. Dishonest too. If you ask me Africa would be better off without Africans.”
    “Why don’t you play something, Honey,” Morgan suggested.
    Julia sat at the piano, opened some sheet music and launched into a piece I recognized - Mozart’s Sonata in C Major[7]. Her fingers ran smoothly over the keys and with flawless accuracy. We sat silent, mesmerised, the music flooding the room. I wondered at the contrast between Julia’s hard-bitten persona and her artistry. No one can fake mastery of a musical instrument. I knew she would not have been out of place in London’s Wigmore Hall. What was she doing in Togo? How had she fastened onto Morgan, a man twice her age, a bully and hard drinker with an edge of spite to his temperament. Was it his evident wealth that attracted her? Or adventure? Or love? How could contempt for the people of Togo and of Africa sit alongside Mozart in her mind? What - in the end - do we understand of human motivation, of corruption, of greed, of our need of art, or of our will to survive? The culture that produced Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms also conceived Hitler and Dr Mengele.
    Shortly after this tranquil scene, General Eyadéma provoked a dispute with his prime minister, and Togo’s brief experiment in parliamentary governance collaped. Troops fired a few rounds at the Congress bulding, the Minister of Industry - local champion of our project - fled to Ghana; we returned in haste to Canada and wrote a report. Before we left Togo, Morgan had handed me his card.
    “Look us up if you’re ever in London. I have a house there.”
    Printed on the card beneath his name was an address in Grosvenor Square.
    “He gave me one of those,” Dennis told me when I showed it to him. “That a good place to live?”
    “You have to be mega rich to own a house in Grosevenor Square,” I told him..
    “Ok.”
    “Makes me wonder what the hell he’s doing in Togo.”.
    “Same as us, I guess,” said Dennis, “Making a buck.”

[1] United States Agency for International Development - an arm of the US State Department.

[2] Canadian International Development Agency. In 2013, CIDA was folded into the Department of Foreign Affairs which was subsequently renamed as Global Affairs Canada.

[3] The French-speaking world.

[4] The period of this scene. Longevity has since improved but still lags behind much of the rest of the world.

[5] A trade and aid agreement signed in February 1975 between the European Economic Community and 71 African, Caribbean, and Pacific countries. .

[6] After a subsequent spell under the Leage of Nations, Togoland splintered into two, one portion emerging as a French colony - Togo, the other joining the Gold Coast (Ghana) under British rule. Togo achieved independence in 1960.

[7] See: The Nigerian Field (1992) Vol 57 3-4, pp. 119—125 (https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archiveDS/archiveDownload?t=arch-3436-1/dissemination/pdf/Vol_57/TNF_57_3-4_119-126_Fetish_Market.pdf)

Democratic Deficit - a Definition

 The degree to which a political or social system ignores or suppresses the will of its constituents. Usually applied to nations or unions of nations,  it serves equally for any collective established on principles of self-government.
    In his famous study of democracies published in 2041,[1] Dr Bambang Chamsyah of  Indonesia’s Biak Foundation identified a close correlation between “Democratic Deficit” and population size. According to Chamsyah’s findings, no country with a population of over 20 million is without serious democratic failings - and once a nation exceeds 70 million, the rate of democratic erosion tends to accelerate. Nor are politicians necessarily to blame for the deterioration. Administering democracy in heavily-populated countries presents problems of a different order to those facing governments of small nations. Despite the fact that the giants are invariably more heterogeneous, multi-ethnic and complex, they still have only one president or prime minister and one cabinet - in other words, the same number of senior political decision-makers. At around the 70 million mark, the complexities attendant upon size begin seriously to exceed the capacity of their leaders to understand still less to address them. Moreover, the value of each citizen’s vote decreases in proportion to the size of the electorate: so that in a country of 250 million voters, a ballot carries only one fiftieth of the weight of one where there are only 5 million voters. As populations grow, therefore, governments cease representing ever larger segments of their constituents.
    The most common result is increasing political disenchantment and abstentionism, culminating in some cases in attempts to change the system by non-democratic means. Once this process has begun, governments find means to respond with repressive legislation - hence the accelerated democratic erosion that Chamsyah observed.
    Drawing on the work of 20th Century anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, Chamsyah recognized the possibility of a variety of sociopolitical responses to excessive population such as the one developed in India where the caste system demands passive acceptance of inequality and disenfranchisement of one social group altogether - the Harijans.[2] Lévi-Strauss summarized the Indian solution - which he called a failure of human organization - as follows:
    “...a society that becomes too numerous, survives only by creating servitude. When men start feeling squeezed geographically, socially and mentally, a simple solution may occur to them, namely to refuse to recognize the humanity of a portion of the species.”[3]
    Nevertheless, Chamsyah claimed, by effectively setting India’s democratic deficit in concrete the caste system offered a clear demonstration of his central thesis.
    His conclusion? Forget world government, break up large countries into federations, disband the European Union, and make the United Nations a people’s forum from which political leaders are excluded.
    Dr Chamsyah was assassinated in 2048.

[1] Democracy and the End of Freedom, U. Bambang Chamsyah, Biak Foundation, 2041. 

[2] “Children of God”, Gandhi’s graceful term for the “Untouchables”. “Dalits”  (the “oppressed”) is now the more favoured term.

[3] “...en devenant trop nombreuse.....une société ne se perpétue qu’en sécrétant la servitude. Lorsque les hommes commencent à se sentir à l’étroit dans leurs espaces géographique, social et mental, une solution simple risque de les séduire: celle qui consiste à refuser la qualité humaine à une partie de l’espèce.” Tristes Tropiques, Librairie Plon, Paris 1955.

JULIAN ASSANGE - FOUNDER AND PUBLISHER OF WIKILEAKS - High Court Hearing February 20-21, 2024

The purpose of the hearing was to secure a ruling on the right of Julian Assange to appeal a government order for his extradition to the United States.
    Little doubt exists in the minds of Assange’s supporters that - through Wikileaks - he has performed a courageous and principled service in exposing criminal conduct by the United States and its allies in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and elsewhere.  That Wikileaks published classified information obtained from Chelsea Manning - a former US soldier - is not in dispute.  For her role in the affair, Ms Manning was court-martialed in 2013, found guilty of violating the Espionage Act (1917) and sentenced to thirty-five years in jail. Seven years later, President Obama commuted her sentence, but she was jailed for another year in 2019 for refusing to testify before a grand jury set up to investigate Assange and Wikileaks.
    Prior to the current hearing - the outcome of which will probably be announced in mid to late March - an order to extradite Assange had been approved by a previous British Home Secretary, Priti Patel, against which he has already lost an appeal in a district (lower) court. A victory now would achieve no more than afford him the opportunity to present a full appeal to a higher court. If he loses the hearing he will likely be extradited forthwith to the United States where he could face up to 175 years in jail - effectively a death sentence.
    In her opeing remarks, Victoria Sharp, the senior of the two judges presiding over the hearing, stated that Assange was not present in court either physically or online because he was ill. In reality - it is no secret - he is being kept in solitary confinement in a high security prison and allowed out for exercise solely for one hour in every twenty-four. It is a form of slow torture that has affected him physically and may also have temporarily impaired his mental alertness.
    Courtrooms in the Royal Courts of Justice have galleries open to the public, and where these are fully occupied, a side room with a screen is sometimes made available. Such was the case for Assange’s hearing which had been allocated one of the smallest courtrooms in the building despite widespread public concern for his fate and the many hundreds waiting in the street outside in the hope of gaining entry.. It was also possible to view the proceedings online. However, to attend in any of these ways involved negotiating obstacles designed to discourage all but the most distinguished or the most obstinate. I was one of the latter - granted online access along with eight others. Among those physically present were the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, more than a dozen EU parliamentarians, several members of foreign national parliaments, journalists from Reporter Without Borders, and members of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers. Assange’s wife, Stella, was also present.
    No matter how serious the issue, English courts operate to a ritual of dress and expressive courtesies derived from an earlier age.  Lawyers wear gowns and wigs in court, and barristers (advocates entitled to represent clients in the high court) address presiding judges as “my lady” or “my lord”,  while barristers refer to each other as “my learned friend”.  This veil of civility ensures that voices are seldom raised. Subtlety of argument supported by knowledge of precedent (previous judgements made on similar cases) and of prevailing statutes and treaties form the substance of what takes place. Submissions by the contending barristers are lengthy and weighted with textual references all of which are gathered in what is known as a”bundle” - the collection of evidential material assembled by opposing legal teams and available to both as well as to the judges

    During the hearing, the essence of the extradition case against Assange remained as it has always been. Lead counsel for the United States, Claire Dobbins, argued that he was neither a publisher nor a journalist - activities under which he might seek legitimate legal protection in England. Instead he had engaged in espionage of US state secrets of a kind that would be expected of an enemy agent. Wikileaks was, in fact “a non-state, hostile intelligence agency”. It had released the names of thousands of individuals, thereby endangering their lives, had conspired with Chelsea Manning to securer secret documents, and had hacked into CIA confidential files.  She spoke without pause - except to answer an  occasional query from the judges,  for the best part of two and a half hours.
Under the terms of the UK-US Extradition Treaty of 2003, no one could be extradited for expressing political opinions. Nevertheless, Ms Dobbins told the hearing, this was not an issue of political opinion but of spying. Moreover, as a foreigner, Assange could not enjoy the free-speech protection afforded by the First Amendment to the US Constitution. This last argument was also employed in Assange’s defence on the grounds that he was, in fact, a journalist and publisher and, if extradited, would not receive the protection available to a US citizen.
    The submission on behalf of the United States came sandwiched between opening submissions by Edward Fitzgerald  and Mark Summers - acting for Assange  - and the latters’ closing arguments in reply to the US case. Much of the argument revolved round the question of whether Assange’s activities via Wikileaks involved the expression of political opinion which is protected under both the Extradition Treaty and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) to which the UK is a signatory.
    Even if Assange had engaged in spying (which he had  not), his team argued that espionage is a purely political offence and recognised as such by all legal authorities. Publication of state secrets obtained from a state official - Chelsea Manning - therefore constitutes protected speech. Soliciting such material - a fundamental element of the US case against Assange - was routine journalistic practice. Prosecution of journalists or publishers under the US Espionage Act had never occurred before, despite a long history of US media publishing classified information. The Wikileaks revelations, moreover, had uncovered serious criminal activity by the US government and its agencies. It was not credible to argue that Julian Assange was neither a journalist nor a publisher and then to complain about his journalistic and publishing activities.
    According to Assange’s team, this effectively disposed of seventeen of the eighteen charges against him cited by the United States in its extradition request. The sole remaining charge concerned the attempted hacking of a CIA computer for which the maximum sentence had already been exceeded by Assange’s incarceration in the UK.
        Much discussion on both sides centred on the wording and interpretation of Articles 5 and 10 of the ECHR. Article 5 sets out the rights of persons who have been arrested - which the long incarceration of Assange may suggest have already been breached.  Article 10 addresses freedom of expression. The first paragraph reads as follows:
Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.
    It is possible that this article may prove to be the saviour - for now - not only of Julian Assange’s case - but of his life. Even if he wins this hearing, however, the organisation and scheduling of a subsequent appeal against extradition would certainly take months and probably more than a year. Meanwhile he will remain in solitary confinement in Belmarsh high security prison, bearing on his increasingly fragile shoulders the hopes of many that he will have the strength and health to sustain the ordeal, and that journalism will not effectively be muzzled from carrying out one of its most fundamental responsibilites - that of holding governments to account.

Shakespeare the Revolutionary

 Watching a performance of King Lear at London’s Barbican Theatre, I was struck not for the first time by Shakespeare’s awareness of poverty and inequality. Though his popularity and sheer brilliance during the his lifetime kept him safe from the Tower, he was something of a revolutionary, an egalitarian long before the word or any of its strident political equivalents had found their way into our vocabulary. Passages, not only in Lear but in other plays too, show evidence of a strong social conscience - at times stated quite bluntly and at others more subtly through the treatment and shaping of character.
    In Lear, part of the learning experience forced upon the eponymous hero, and also on the Earl of Gloucester, is recognition of economic injustice and of their own failures to address  it during their long careers as powerful members of the elite - one a monarch, the other an aristocrat. Thus Gloucester, intent on suicide, hands his purse to his son Edgar, whom he believes to be a beggar, with these words:
Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man
That slaves your ordinance, that will not see
Because he does not feel, feel your pow’r quickly;
So distribution should undo excess,
And each man have enough.
    It is a recipe for progressive taxation, for a generous benefit system, for a National Health Service, for what used to be called the Welfare State.
    King Lear on the heath in the midst of a violent storm goes further, as his sudden material impoverishment brings him awareness of the plight of others so afflicted:
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm.
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic pomp,
Expose yourself to feel what wretches feel,  
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.
    Lear’s reflection on his own lack of concern for the poor - “I have ta’en too little care of this…” could not be other than a contemporary reference. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the acceleration of land enclosures in Tudor England which left many people unemployed, the number of vagrants and vagabonds had mushroomed. In 1594, the Lord Mayor of London estimated the number of beggars in the city at 12,000,  while tens of thousands more roamed the countryside either as smart-assed rogues like Autolycus in A Winter’s Tale, or ragged vagabonds such as Edgar pretended to be in Lear. Both would have been familiar figures to an Elizabethan/Jacobean audience.  Altogether at least a third of the entire population of Shakespeare’s time was estimated to  be poor, including those who were nominally in work but badly paid.
    Today, with unnumbered refugees from Africa and the Middle East pressing at Europe’s gates, while homelessness, hunger and distress grow within the European citadel, Lear’s and Gloucester’s cry against inequality seems as shockingly relevant to our own time as it undoubtedly was to Shakespeare’s.
    How did Shakespeare come to write such lines? Whence the extraordinary range of his sympathies?
    We know that he had read Montaigne’s essay “On Cannibals” - from which he derived the name of Caliban in The Tempest. In the sixteenth century, the process of discovery and conquest of the New World was in full swing, and stories abounded of the strange creatures who lived there.  Though Shakespeare portrayed Caliban as a savage, he also understood native indignation at having their land and inheritance taken by a ‘colonial’ usurper:
 “This island’s mine by Sycorax my mother, Which thou tak’st from me”, Caliban tells Prospero.
    In the same essay Montaigne writes of an encounter with three natives of Brazil during which the visitors offered a stinging rebuke of the inequality they had observed in France:
“…They noticed how some men were replete with every imaginable commodity while others, impoverished and hungry, went begging at the doors of the rich. And they found it strange that the poor tolerated such injustice and wondered why they didn’t seize the wealthy by the throat or set fire to their houses.”
    It is a theme that Montaigne goes on to address at length in a subsequent essay - “On Inequality among us” in which he questions why we value people by their “wrapping and packaging …which merely hide the characteristics by which we can truly judge someone”. Here, in one of Hamlet’s exchanges with Claudius, is a Shakespearean dramatisation of the same issue:Hamlet:     A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.
King:     What dost thou mean by this?
Hamlet:     Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.
    And here is Lear echoing Montaigne:
    "There thou mightst behold the great image of authority: a dog’s obeyed in office…… Robes  and furred gowns hide all."
    Socio-political injustice was, therefore,  neither strange nor novel in 16th and 17th century European thought or literature.  However, our playwright did not write didactic dramas, nor build his plays as illustrations of good or evil, right or wrong behaviour, or - as one academic put it to me - to induce salutary reactions in the audience via catharsis or laughter. Had he done so he would have been following a long tradition in which dramatic characters had first and foremost a symbolic or illustrative function, that is they represented an idea, or a set of dispositions or feelings that audiences were expected to approve or reject. Such was the case with both Roman and Medieval drama - the major influences on Elizabethan playwrights. Not even Marlowe, among Shakespeare’s contemporaries, contravened this schematic framework. If we examine Marlowe’s treatment of character in Tamburlaine, or the Jew of Malta, or Faustus, we find that the symbolic role of the protagonists takes priority over their qualities as recognisable individuals - flesh and blood human beings.
    What Shakespeare did was to reverse the conventional procedure by building from character to meaning, from the individual to the universal. The philosophical equivalent would be inductive instead of deductive reasoning. This is why his characters work so powerfully on our imagination, why Marlowe’s Jew remains a stereotype while Shakespeare’s (despite the prejudices of the age) is a full of personality, while we love Falstaff despite and because of his all-too-human failings, why Hamlet  puzzles, angers and frustrates because like us he is insecure, by degrees passionate, cruel, witty, honest, dissembling - a thoroughly human mixture. We meet Shakespeare’s characters in the street, those of his predecessors in our minds. Stage figures of what we might call ‘human complexity’ are a Shakespearean innovation. Only in poetry do we find obvious precedents - for example in Chaucer’s wonderful gallery of portraits and François Villon’s  verse “Testaments” - and there are hints also perhaps in early Spanish picaresque fiction such as the anonymous “Lazarillo de Tormes”. But Chaucer and Villon were solely accessible to a select few - those who could both read and were able to acquire books, while Shakespeare worked in a universal medium of communication where only ears were needed.
    Why was this “inductive” technique revolutionary rather than merely innovative?
    I believe the answer lies in the fact that, for the first time, the individual became a focus of public and artistic attention. Shakespearean drama brought previously unattended elements of human nature and of political and social life to the forefront: the quixotic nature and psychology of motive (Cervantes belongs here, too, of course), the individual validity of the common man, human rights of the kind both Ariel and Caliban demand in the Tempest, and so on. Little of this is to be found in other playwrights of the period.
    In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Shakespeare’s plays were criticised for their ‘excesses’, and attempts were made to  improve them by pundits who thought they knew better. What were the objections? Low-life subject-matter (unfit for polite society), lack of taste, improper language - features we might recognise, nowadays, as coming from  ‘East-Enders’   rather than  ‘Yes Minister’. Editors and amenders tried to excise precisely those features that show the commonest citizen as the moral equal of the greatest monarch. They were uncomfortable features. Whoever witnesses the downfall of Angelo (Measure for Measure), or the rise of  Bolingbroke (Richard II) knows that the high and mighty are not necessarily to be trusted. Perhaps not to be trusted at all. And here we are not just speaking of a lust for and abuse of power (a familiar Elizabethan theme) but about corruption of a kind that brings to earth the moral authority of the powerful. Much more important, though, is that the Shakespearean common man is as full of humanity as a monarch.
    Shakespeare wasn’t a pamphleteer aiming to bring about political change. But his view of people was more revolutionary than anything a pamphleteer could achieve. Elizabethan stage convention unthinkingly accepted class values as fixed (as did French classical theatre). Shakespeare did not; though his originality in this respect may sometimes pass unnoticed because it seems so natural. Since the plays deal so powerfully with human emotions and states of consciousness, we can easily overlook the implicit socio-economic and political views that, like scenery, colour their background.
    My argument then is that Shakespeare was a revolutionary in the way he treated the individual - and that is precisely why he forces an attentive reader or playgoer to re-examine the basis of his or her beliefs, prejudices and social attitudes. Whatever Elizabethan England thought about Jews, for example, the import of Shylock’s words in The Merchant of Venice can’t be avoided:
“I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means, warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?”
     The speech was quietly and firmly revolutionary, and Shakespeare must have known as much.  Revolutionary not because the writer wanted to change contemporary attitudes towards Jews - that would be a crudely anachronistic fallacy - but because no one in Shakespeare is “merely” anything,  not a Jew, nor a peasant, nor a soldier, nor an inn-keeper nor a bawd, nor a king.
    This great idea - that of not being “merely”-  has been the basis of much of the political change that has taken place in Europe, North America and elsewhere since the seventeenth century. It lies at the heart of modern democracy, and forms a backcloth to political movements like marxism and socialism that are founded on ideals of equity and distributive justice. 

What Shakespeare helped to bring about was a fundamental change in European consciousness concerning the human condition in the social and political context. I don’t know if this was his intention; but it is a consequence of his work - of his quiet persistence in giving his characters their head and refusing to censor either them or his own pen.

 

A version of this piece was first published in Opendemocracy.

The next UK Prime Minister - Between Scylla and Charybdis?

     Sunak and Starmer share several qualities of which neither may be aware. One of these is their intellectual mediocrity manifest not least in the flatulent dreariness of their rhetoric by means of which they spout hard-line pabulum in the  hope that it will pass through the digestive tract of tabloid editors and discharge into print. In this respect Starmer’s efforts will always be in vain because the tabloids operate on the level of  the Trumpian-Tea-Party-Southern-Baptist-Mississippi-Burning US Republican Party. They cheer for the likes of Johnson, Rees-Mogg, Farage and Hannan - politicians who leave attentive voters unable to tell whether they are playboys  treating the country as a board game or defectives who should be committed to an asylum for the clinically insane.
    Another quality shared by Starmer and Sunak is that neither have much time for the truth. Of the two, Sunak is the more straightforward fabricator. Dependably mendacious, he trots out non-existent triumphs and fantasy commitments from a supermarket bag of bottled nonsense. Starmer by contrast leans less on transparent mendacity than on a faculty of forgetfulness in which previous assertions are set aside and promises broken with the casual nonchalance of a junk-bond spiv.
    In the absence of any discernible charisma, Sunak’s most salient attribute is his ubiquitous grin - on display regardless of whether he is captured on camera pulling a pint at his local  - even though he doesn’t drink - or taking the air in Kiev like a holidaymaker after a good lunch while his host,  President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, frowns from a distance. Though Sunak’s displays of contentment are for public consumption - to show that he is in control of events - he nonetheless parries the most innocuous questions from  journalists with falsity and fudge, revealing thereby that he has little of value to say either to his own country or to the world beyond. Without notes he is an ignoramus, a political nonentity who couldn’t even beat the appalling Liz Truss to the party leadership, which he secured in the end by default because no other Tory MP felt up to the job. Sunak differes from them solely in his lack of awareness of his own inadequacy.
    Starmer, for his part, rests his credentials for governing the country on his upbringing by a tool-maker and a nurse in a pebble-dash semi. One wonders about the kind of voter who would interpret  that banal collage as a reason to vote Labour. One of Starmer’s old student friends told me that he used to be “quite a radical”. As he inches ever closer to aping Tory policies on pretty-well everything:  putting asylum seekers in barges, making Brexit work, keeping us out of the single market, lambasting green campaigners, opposing electoral reform and so on, he appears to have undergone a Damascene conversion in reverse. His radicalism has been lobotomised along with the progressive ambitions of the previous leadership about renationalising public services, taxing income from capital and labour at the same rate and replacing the Lords with an elected chamber. If Sunak kindles disbelief Starmer evokes incredulity. Neither are to be taken at face value.  
    Lacking a written constitution, the Westminster parliament has depended for its integrity on the honourable conduct of its members and, above all, on the honesty of political leaders. Now we look back with nostalgia on the days when those values held sway.  Striding the stage of UK politics today, we no longer see the principled - if flawed - men and women of tradition, but instead a gaggle of dissemblers and cheats. For the forseeable future elections will be won by those most adept at presuading citizens to ignore the evidence of their eyes and ears; in other words by chancers with second-rate minds and questionable ethics.

Lesson from Luanda

Peace had come to Angola by the time I checked into the hotel in Luanda. Independent since 1975 when the Portuguese had abandoned the struggle to keep its grip on a country thirteen times Portugal's size, Angola had celebrated her liberation by plunging into a civil war: MPLA vs UNITA¹, the United States and apartheid South Africa vs the USSR and Cuba, with the great powers contending for a stake in Angola's fabulous store of natural resources.

Cuban forces played a seminal role in the eventual triumph of the revolutionary left, the critical moment being the strategic failure of the South African advance at the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1988. Military strength played its part in this war as in all others, but what mattered more was a yearning in the hearts of Angolans to shake off the foreign yoke and to breathe the air of freedom, a yearning their Cuban colleagues knew well because they bore in their hearts the Revolution of 1959 and the victory over US mercenaries at Playa Girón in 1961. The US embargo on Cuba was in place then as it is today.

I had walked the streets of Havana, chatted to students, shopkeepers, taxi drivers, bureaucrats, carpenters, and agricultural workers in the countryside. Long before then, I had imbibed with my mother's milk a sense of solidarity with the class from which I came, the working class. And so I arrived in Luanda with every good feeling towards the regime. Revolutionary by reputation and rhetoric, I expected it to stand for everything I believed in politically: justice, equality of opportunity, a sharing of resources and of power, public ownership of the things that mattered - education, health, transportation, energy, water...

On the other hand, I wasn't sure what I was doing there. A friend had invited me to work with him on a proposal to the Angolan government to privatise a state-owned bank. Gilberto and I met up in Paris and travelled together to the capital, Luanda, where we joined Gilberto's boss, Miguel Algarrabia Onetti, a Uruguayan who had lived in Angola for many years. Gilberto told me something of Miguel's story. Like Uruguay's former president, José Mujica, Miguel had been a Tupamaro, a left-wing guerrilla fighter in his home country. After the coup in 1973, and the junta's savage campaign to rid itself of opposition, the Uruguayan communist party had spirited some of the prominent Tupamaros out of the country to places where their revolutionary credentials would not be unwelcome. They sent Miguel to Angola and there he had remained.

Gilberto told me that Miguel was now a significant player in the Angolan business world and was also 'in' with the government. He had done well: a fine apartment in Luanda, a house in Geneva and another in Vienna. His children were studying at a private school in England. Nothing Gilberto told me of Miguel coincided with my image of a revolutionary so I filled in the lacunae myself, supposing that a man who had fled the fascist military of his own country must have credentials of which Fidel Castro himself would approve. Nor did I question (was it self-interest?) the purpose of our mission. Privatisation of state-owned enterprises seemed a bit too Thatcherite for a government that had fought for years against the highest representatives of neoliberal capitalism. Still I played down the implicit message. In short, I gave everyone and everything the benefit of the doubt. History couldn't deceive and the MPLA government couldn't betray its principles.

Miguel joined us for dinner on our second evening and I put the question to him. Short, energetic, voluble, he lacked the traditional beard of the guerrilla fighter but retained the casual manner, addressing me as compañero and greeting me with a fraternal embrace.

"We don't know how to run banks," he explained. " And internationally, who would trust an Angolan bank? Privatisation is our only recourse."

He left the next day on a business trip to Europe and I didn’t see him again for several years. But he placed his offices in Luanda at our disposal and gave us a car, a driver and a secretary. We wrote a proposal in clumsy Portuguese and presented it at a meeting with a government minister that Miguel had arranged for us.

The minister worked from a shiny government building patrolled by armed guards and decorated with young women in tight clothes. Small and dapper, he sat behind a polished wooden desk bare except for a telephone and a tortoise-shell ashtray. A large gold watch on his wrist matched thick gold rings on the third finger of each hand. There was no filing cabinet, and the bookcase behind his chair was empty. He showed no interest in anything we had to say and the meeting barely lasted half of its allotted fifteen minutes.

Afterwards, as we waited outside the building for our driver, we saw the minister on his way out. He was seated in the back of a limousine, a young woman close by his side.

With time on our hands, we asked our driver to show us the city. He told us there was nothing to see, but I insisted.

"There must be a bookstore. I'd like to buy a book on your country."

"There used to be bookstore, sir. Not sure it's still there."

We drove through the old downtown area. On the kerbsides, vendors sold clothing, plastic goods, vegetables, furniture, lamps, pots and pans that had seen better days and had doubtless been left behind by the departing Portuguese. Abandoned stores lined the streets, their entrances piled with garbage. Pedestrians strolled aimlessly. Old men with bloodshot eyes squatted on sidewalks.

The bookstore was open but the shelves were empty save for a scattering of magazines. A painfully thin attendant shrugged his shoulders when I asked him why the store had no books. He probably considered it a stupid question.

Outside, a gang of ragged teenagers had gathered round our vehicle. They begged us for money and our driver waved them away with angry words. Before we pulled away, one of the gang engaged me with his eyes. Something in them drew my sympathy. I wound down my window, and felt for my wallet.

"Don't give him anything," Gilberto warned. "It's bad for them. They get into the habit of begging from strangers."

I let the wallet fall back into my pocket. Seeing my gesture and change of mind, the youngster gave me a look that has haunted me to this day. It reflected pain, abandonment, hatred of the foreigner and of the rich who live well and know nothing of deprivation. It spoke of the cruelty of the world and its disregard for the weak and vulnerable; and above all it conveyed hunger, the relentless hunger that gnaws without hope in the heart of the innocent.

Angola is a land of oil and diamonds. Merchants, speculators and oilmen occupy the capital’s luxury hotels and take the first-class seats on flights to and from Europe and America. An old, familiar drama plays out there of a rich country filled with poverty and despair. Nothing can ever excuse my failure - which is also our failure - to give succour to a hungry child. No lesson should come at such cost.

Note: Two names in this piece have been changed for security reasons.

1 MPLA - People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola; UNITA - National Union for the Total Independence of Angola.

Inequality

  (From my book "The Cauldron")

 The systematic heart of capitalism.  Wealth creation in a capitalist world is a private business; and human progress is supposed to be dependent on everyone’s desire to get rich.
    If property and income were equally distributed, it would make no difference whether someone described themselves as well-off, of modest means, or poor because such terms would cease to have meaning. To pursue individual wealth, therefore, is to seek inequality.
    Other arrangements for distributing wealth are imaginable, like Marx’s classless  society (government-controlled distribution on the basis of need and entitlement) or Kropotkin’s mutual aid (we help each other and share as necessary); but after the collapse of the Soviet Union the first has been widely discredited while the second has been generally ignored.  Grimelstein thought “only coercion or superhuman powers of persuasion could steer humanity from its addiction to greed,” and dismissed other versions of economic life  as “..romantic illusions, superficially attractive but fundamentally unworkable”. Few would disagree.
    We’re not talking here about natural inequality. That we are born with unequal abilities is a truism too trivial to merit discussion. To complain  because Shakespeare or Tolstoy are better writers than - say -  me is to sit alone, like Anthony "...in the market place, whistling to the air...”
    More than half of humanity, however, lacks sufficient means to secure a healthy diet, let alone buy enough  paper and ink to produce a masterpiece. And since nobody’s managed to come up with a theory of natural economic inequality,  chances are it’s man-made.
    Theft has much to do with it.  Village communities in medieval Europe worked common land and made common wealth. In the sixteenth century, aristocrats decided they needed large estates for themselves and simply threw the peasants out before reemploying them as serfs. “...No longer content to lead lazy, comfortable lives which do no good to society, (the nobles and gentlemen) must actively do it harm by enclosing all the land they can for pasture and leaving none for cultivation,“ objected Thomas More’s hero Rafael Hythloday.  
    Later on, governments got in on the act. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they dispossessed common villagers of their best remaining acreage and awarded that also to the aristocracy. In England, between 1760 and 1844, almost four thousand Enclosure Acts were shoveled through parliament, each designed to legalize a land seizure. Louis the Fourteenth, the great Sun King and flower of French nobility, followed the pattern, allowing communal village property to be confiscated in payment of fabricated debts.  America North and South was likewise built on grand larceny of territory from the people who lived there before the arrival of the Europeans. Ditto Australia, New Zealand, South Africa.
    Sad stories, but the price of progress ... industrialization would never have occurred without enclosure at home, territorial seizure overseas... so run the excuses.
    Let’s pause here for a moment to ask how anyone ever had a legitimate claim to own land. Hugo Grotius, the 17th century Dutch jurist thought God bestowed it on the people for their common use and enjoyment, and that powerful individuals acquired ownership by mutual agreement with the poor. Mutual agreement?  A contemporary, Sir Robert Filmer, spotted the flaw:  why would anybody (including succeeding generations) freely agree to hand over a gift from God to someone else?
    “The first man to enclose a piece of land, claim ownership and find people simple enough to accept what he did was the true founder of civil society,” wrote Rousseau, and then added “How many crimes, wars, murders, miseries and horrors would have been avoided if someone had pulled up the fence posts or filled in the ditch and advised his companions to take no notice.”
    Kropotkin pointed out that the price of a house in Paris, which only a rich man could afford, lay not only in the bricks and mortar and the patch of earth on which it stood, but also in the city itself with its roads and sewers and theatres and museums and schools and hospitals all constructed - just like the house - with the sweat and toil of labourers too poor to rent the meanest of its dwellings. Why was it legitimate, therefore, for anyone to own such a property? .
    So much for real estate. Theft of labour, effort and intelligence probably outweighs even that of land in the development of inequality.  Attributing  to one person the work of many allows senior executives to earn salaries of mythic proportions. Yet the administration of even a modest company requires a knowledge of so much detail that one person could hardly begin to retain it. Business and political leaders alike depend on subordinates - preferably ones who are ideologically wedded to their boss’s prejudices.  If the president wants to rough up a competing country - or company - he will order up advice that justifies his wish in the same way that he orders a meal in a restaurant. Even information is served up to suit him. He orders whatever takes his fancy and seldom bothers with the menu. No legendary eastern potentate could command discourse as completely as a chief executive officer. But that’s all he does. The cooking is performed by others - the unremarked operatives who toil in the kitchen for a tenth maybe a hundredth of the CEO’s income.  If all goes well, the boss is applauded; if ill, a few heads roll; if very ill, he will probably sail off into the sunset with a shipload of pension rights, share options and golden handshakes.
    Do leaders deserve such inequality of reward? According to a study by the Chandigarh Institute, the higher the disparity between average company salaries and the pay of the Chief Executive and his cronies, the worse the company’s performance.  Executive compensation, , the study concludes, “possesses one universal characteristic: it advances only in an upward direction and at a faster rate than anyone else’s.”
    Moreover, despite the trumpeted advantages of market economies, “...inequality increases wherever capitalism takes root.” In the United States, the richest five percent control sixty percent of the  wealth - and their share is growing. Half the assets of Latin America are in the hands of one per cent of the people. At the same time, and despite official propaganda to the contrary, social mobility in both regions, and in Europe too, continues to decrease - which means that if you’re born poor chances are you’ll stay poor.
    What do the statistics mean for individuals? Take the film industry. A famous film star recently earned US$5 million for a four-minute advertising slot. Celebrity actors or directors can net tens of millions in a year. Oligarchs, oil barons, hedge-fund managers and hi-tec moghuls can go even higher - with earnings of $100 million and more. That’s more than the annual income of a quarter of a million Haitians, or Ethiopians, or Sudanese, or Nepalese or Madagascans or Bangladeshis; more than the lifetime earnings of 99.99% of the global population; more - 97% more - than  someone on an annual salary of $100,000 will earn in thirty years of work.
    How can individuals - even famous ones - garner such obscene sums? Because we worship at the altar of Mammon, billionaires and media stars are God’s messengers on earth, and their churches charge  inflated entrance fees. We - the flock - make them rich, buying their celebrity and smiling at their condescension, and in return we receive our regular fix of stupefying drivel, grovel at the sound of their name, and vote for them at the polling booth.
     How can we bear to live with such iniquitous nonsense? Might just as well ask how we can bear to live with ourselves.