← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
BBC Radio 4
00:28:06
Who says the Germans don't have a sense of humour? Steve Evans is in the east of the...
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Hi there.
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You've downloaded the BBC Radio programme from our own correspondent.
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We make two versions and if you'd
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like to hear our World Service programme,
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you'll find it on the BBC iPlayer. This, though, is the edition broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
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It's presented by Kate Ady.
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Today, President Obama learns the hard way wielding power is not as easy as winning it. An influx of immigrants brings a new babble of languages to the streets of Johannesburg. A broken hearted cinema manager tells us why Iraqis have stopped going to the movies. And a song from our own correspondent breaks the ice at a party for Chinese workers in Angola. The President of the United States has embarked upon a coast to coast programme, trying to secure Democrat votes ahead of the midterm elections next month. Opinion polls suggest that the Republicans could win majorities in both the House of Representatives and Congress, damaging the President and his chances for re election in 2012. In the two years he's been in the White House, Barack Obama has notched up some notable achievements. And yet, as Kevin Connolly has been finding out, his opponents believe he hasn't done enough to cut unemployment or steer the country out of recession.
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President Barack Obama is back on the road at a series of huge rallies across the United States, doing what he does best rallying the troops, steadying the ship, cajoling the skeptical. I think I may have got that habit of writing in triplets from listening to his speeches, where he is fond of employing them to clarify, to explain and to persuade. At his best, he is an electrifying speaker. The voice is still an instrument of beauty and flexibility, even when it sounds a little tired. But somehow the folks he metaphors clunk these days, where once they soared. The American economy is a car, he tells us, and last time they were in power, the Republicans drove it into a ditch. He's just got it backed out and up on the road again. And now here they are, demanding the keys back. The crowds are still there, of course, but the magic and the momentum that swept Obama to power in 2008 are largely gone. He is not the first president to find that wielding power in this country is even harder than winning it. Of all the possibilities that seemed possible on that glitteringly cold January morning when he was inaugurated, the one that very few people seemed to remember was the simplest of all that the man whose election represented an extraordinary break with the racial divisions of the past might turn out nonetheless to be no more than an ordinary president. I used to live in countries where there clearly wasn't enough democracy. Communist Poland, for example, and the Soviet Union. Living in the United States is starting to make me wonder if it isn't possible to have too much democracy. The 2008 presidential election campaign, for example, lasted a whole year, even if you discount the schmoozing, skirmishing and spending that went on before that. Within months of Obama winning, there was talk of how his hands were tied on America's more intractable problems, like illegal immigration by the midterm elections, which were already on the horizon. Those elections haven't even happened yet, and already this week I've seen two stories about candidates who may or may not be running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. This country's election cycles are starting to interlock and overlap. Still, in the old days, once you were president, your contract with the people was simple. You were the architect of its future, the orchestrator of its mood, and a permanent presence in the national living room. It's never been easy, but Obama has the job. At a moment in history where it may be on the point of becoming impossible, 24 Hour News is a magnet, always tugging at the compass needle of the administration's energy and attention. The media is turning into a psychotic toddler that can't rest until the obsession at the moment has been assuaged and they can't remember it five minutes later. Every day, this bruising spin cycle picks up the issue of the moment like a tornado ripping a barn up off the prairie. It doesn't like to put it down again until it's drawn the president in for a comment. That's fine when the issue is important, like the BP oil spill. It's ludicrous when, for example, its a row over why a white police officer arrested a black professor of history in a frankly piddling incident that briefly obsessed the nation as the man who ran for office as no drama, Obama is supposed to have said, America wants a president who's calm in a crisis until there's a crisis. The rancorous way in which Washington works, too, makes government difficult. The Republican minority has been obstructive and begrudging, probably more so than Democratic minorities were in the past. Obscure procedural rules dating back to the days when senators used to arrive at Capitol Hill on horseback are used to block the appointments of relatively minor officials. Bipartisanship is a ghost from that vanished America where newspaper boys used to whistle show tunes and bartenders always knew your name. But it's more than that. The tide that swept Barack Obama to power has shifted, and his touch has deserted him. At least for now. It's likely that Come next month, he'll find himself working with a Republican majority, at least in the House of Representatives, and that will open questions about his own re electability in 2012. There you are. There I go now. Oddly enough, that form of ideologically uncomfortable cohabitation often works. Once you get over the built in bias towards spiteful inertia, it can provide a built in bias towards centrism and pragmatism. They will tell you that when Bill Clinton lost his Democratic majority in the house in 1994, it was the making of his presidency. Still, look out for Barack Obama. Working crowds, raising cash and denouncing opponents in those elegant triplets in the next few weeks. Enforced cohabitation may be good for the soul, but any politician worth his salt will do anything to avoid it.
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Kevin Connolly in Washington. October 3rd, 1990 was a day for the history books as the two halves of Germany became one. No longer would we refer to East Germany and West Germany. Yet 20 years on, there's still tension between the two sides and endless debate about how united or disunited the country is today. Steve Evans has been meeting some in the east who feel a certain nostalgia about the way things used to be.
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It's not often an old communist tells you point blank. Mrs. Thatcher was right. It happened when I was having a chat with a couple of former ambassadors, as you do. These were diplomats for the old German Democratic Republic, the gdr, the DDR in German East Germany. And they meet now and again in a club on Jerusalem Street, Jerusalemmerstrasse. When I say club, I should say that it's not what you might imagine. There are no soft leather chairs and silver trays with bottles of port. Rather there are plastic chairs with a tea trolley and even biscuits. Their club feels more like an old people's club. It's on the ground floor of a 20 storey block of flats designed in the workers East German style. And these former ambassadors, sacked exactly 20 years ago when the two Germanies merged, meet every now and then for old times sake. There they sit with a clutch of walking sticks and hearing aids, discussing policies over which they have no control. Which prompted the remark about Mrs. Thatcher from Dr. Arne Clemens Seifert, the East German ambassador to Kuwait in the early 80s. He suddenly said the words Mrs. Thatcher was right. So I asked him what he meant. He said that he thought her fears of a powerful resurgent Germany had had been realized. He thinks a strand of the German political class wants the country to be a powerful economic and military force. Contrary, he says, to the provisions of the German constitution, which prohibits fighting abroad. Mr. Seifert was one of the charmed elite in a repressive regime, and his fall has been hard. Two decades after he was dismissed, he. He told me that living in his apartment in East Berlin now costs him seven times more than it used to. I asked him if he regretted the demise of the old East Germany. He wouldn't say, confining himself to the remark history has spoken, but adding philosophically that there were many sorts of freedom, including the freedom not to be homeless, to which I thought, but was too polite or cowardly to say I. But a state of spying and gags on speech does not constitute a common definition of freedom. There is much regret among older people in the old East Germany. Altogether, a million and a half have moved westwards in the last 20 years, often the young and the bright. In the town of Schweit, right on the Polish border, as east in eastern Germany as you can get, I met a man who stayed and who's trying to do something to persuade the young to stay. Ibrahimo Alberto came to East Germany on a scholarship from its ally Mozambique in 1981. He may well be the only black man in the whole of this declining shrinking town. Does he sit and mope? No, he does not. Rather, he coaches the local kids in football and in boxing, at which he's pretty good. So he's not a man to be trifled with. In 2007, a gang of shaven headed youths shouted abuse at him as he passed a snack shack. He says he simply turned and faced them down. What do you want from me? He asked. Is something wrong? They were wise and backed down. Ibrahimo really does pack a punch. But. But even more powerful than that are his steely eyes and his straight back and his high chin and his soft but sure speech. He thinks the east is worse for racial abuse than the west, where there is more experience of outsiders. So might he move west? I don't fear anyone here, he said. I'm going to stay. So heading west is not universal. There are even those who head east. I went last week to a sparkling new business school in Berlin, paid for by BMW and Bosch and the pillars of West German capitalism. It's in the old palace of Erich Honecker, East Germany's leader. The Rose Garden is still there, much as it was when it was tended by Mrs. Honecker Margaret to her friends. There are still magnificent stained glass windows and murals depicting workers, labourers in the field and labourers in the lab. There's a scientist in white Overalls shaking hands with a steel worker in a leather apron. And all this alongside the current slogan of the establishment that's taken over a communist palace, the business school founded by business. Who says the Germans don't have a sense of humour?
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Steve Evans. The end of apartheid has meant a massive rise in migration into South Africa from all over the world. The city of Johannesburg may be seeing the greatest influx of immigrants since the discovery of gold there in the 1880s. Hamilton Wenday points out that South Africans have always been multilingual, but today, he says, the the streets of the city echo to the sound of more languages than ever before.
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Salma Abed runs a small shop in the suburbs. It's filled with spices and curries. She grew up speaking English, Afrikaans and her home language, Gujarati. My grandmother was born here and she spoke Gujarati and so did her parents. I can't write it because the script is different, she smiles. But I can read Arabic because of the Quran, but I can't speak it. While we chat, Cindy Madden comes in. She's one of Selma's suppliers. I was born in Holland, she tells me, so I speak Dutch, English and Afrikaans. Another customer, Yusuf, comes in. I was born here, but I spent time abroad, so I speak English, Afrikaans and German. It's a busy day in Selma's shop and Lizzie Maruping is waiting behind him to buy a bottle of cooking oil. She speaks Tswane, Zulu, English and Afrikaans. Next to Selma is a coffee shop owned by Turkish speakers. The waitresses there from Zimbabwe speak Sindebele. The butchery nearby is owned by Hamit Khan, who grew up with Urdu, Marathi and English. His family story is one of holding on to language and memory. My father and his brother came to South Africa's children in the 1930s, he says they came to work for other Muslim families and I was born in 1957. Hamid's life was disrupted by apartheid. His family was forced to move homes, often by the white government. Through it all, language was something to rely on. Our parents never spoke English or Afrikaans at home, he says. We kept up our languages. Next to Hamit's shop is George, who speaks Portuguese and has owned a vegetable shop here since 1981. Next to him is Walter from Italy, who runs a restaurant. Naim at the carpet shop came here from India about six years ago and speaks Gujarati. Kosta from Greece has lived in the neighborhood for 25 years. The newspaper vendor outside greets me in Zillu as I head for the Chinese restaurant where the women who own it are scolding a Baby in Mandarin. Beyond them is yet another Turkish family selling imported plastic goods. Trevor, from the paint shop, speaks Afrikaans and says how much he enjoys this area. Just down the road near the new mosque is Rado from Bulgaria. Immigration is an enormous force, changing the demographics of South Africa forever. In the sleepy, formerly whites only suburbs, the old barriers of white, black, coloured and Asian that defined the city and especially its living spaces for decades have no meaning anymore. On a street corner in Yeovil, near the centre of town, are predominantly African migrants. Haddon, at the entrance to a vegetable shop, speaks Chichewa, while his boss, who's taken an English name, Jason, speaks Hindi. The security guard, WHNU, speaks Zulu. the hairdresser nearby, owner Clement Mabika speaks Lingala, French, English, Kikongo. It was race that defined power in the story of Hamid the butcher's life. Today, language plays an equal role. If you don't speak English, it's very difficult, clement tells me, referring to life in South Africa. For him, identity and opportunity for his children are intertwined. Keeping the language of the old country alive is not essential. We speak English and some French at home, not Kikongo or Lingala, he tells me. On many corners of downtown Johannesburg are thriving street markets overflowing with people speaking Amharic, Tigrinya, Somali and a host of other languages. Felix Odemalam from Lagos tells me of his Johannesburg this is my promised land. I've been to 18 countries, but here I have thrived. He points to a somewhat rickety car parked on the street. I even bought this, he says. As a trader, he picked up French to add to his home languages of Igbo and English just after I arrived here, he says, lifting up his shirt to reveal a deep and ragged scar. They shot me and took my money and my cell phone. I was a bit discouraged then, but I stayed. My wife and kids are coming next year. At the marbled entrance of a once grand office building now filled with tiny stalls selling fake, bright branded clothing, I meet Abdi Ali from Somalia. He speaks Somali, Amharic, Swahili, Arabic and English. I came here in 2005 as a refugee. I went first to Cape Town and opened my small shop. But one day they came to me and said, we will burn your shop. So I packed up everything and I came here for a better life. English, perhaps predictably, has become the tawdry ganglord of these Johannesburg streets. It is the key to survival and to thriving. But underneath are deep currents of pain, joy and rage in a plethora of languages that are all too often forced into a silence that we can neither hear nor understand.
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Hamilton Wendy In Johannesburg, Baghdad used to be full of cinemas. Dozens of lavish picture houses would show the latest films and host glittering premieres. But a decade of sanctions under Saddam Hussein sent them into decline, and years of conflict following the invasions have all but killed them off. And Gabriel Gatehouse has been discovering that the few cinemas that still remain have a reputation as insalubrious and dangerous.
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I met a man the other day who runs a film institute teaching young filmmakers in Baghdad the art of making movies. He told me something shocking. Most of his students had never been to the cinema. Why not? I asked. There are no cinemas in Baghdad anymore. That's the answer you always get, but it's not actually true. There are cinemas, but they're not the kinds of places you'd want to bring a date, if you know what I mean. So we went to see for ourselves. A pair of steel shutters closed behind us with a metallic clang, and we found ourselves in a covered alleyway. The light was dim, the air still and clammy. A podgy man with grey hair and a moustache sat listlessly on a chair outside, sweating slightly as he played with a string of prayer beads. Behind his head were movie posters, some kung fu flicks, others with more racy themes. There was a poster for the Hollywood movie Striptease, starring Demi Moore. Somebody had tactfully blacked out her bare shoulders with a marker pencil. He gave his name as Abu Ahmed. Could we go inside and have a chat? I asked him. Under no circumstances. No, no and no again, I insisted, and in the end he relented. But no cameras or recording equipment. He led us through a corridor that stank of urine. The doors to the auditorium were still open. There are about 20 men, all men, in the 400 seater hall. The opening credits were just beginning to roll. It was impossible to tell just what kind of film it was from there, but the reaction of the audience was telling. They craned their necks around, staring at us with a mixture of hostility and embarrassment. Clearly this was pornography of some sort. The hall itself, dilapidated though it was, was a thing of beauty. Red velvet flip up seats stained, ripped, and covered in cigarette burns. The screen had clearly once been state of the art in it was convex and huge. Up above the stalls there was a balcony decorated with raised and painted plaster relief. Please, said the man who collected the tickets. Please leave or we'll lose all our customers. So we left. But I did want to see the auditorium properly. I asked if we could have a look round once the show was over and we were told to come back later. So we killed time by going to the thieves market nearby. There, stallholders were doing a brisk trade in illegal DVDs. All the latest Hollywood releases, plus some Arabic films and yet more porn. Business is good, said a baby faced boy in his teens, selling the things from a wooden crate on legs. $1 each, he said. So here was one of the reasons behind the slow death of the cinema in Baghdad. The rise and rise of the pirate DVD. It all started in the 1990s. Under economic sanctions, imports were difficult to come by, money was scarce. Then came the invasion and two things happened. First, Saddam's ban on non state TV was lifted. Satellite dishes sprouted across Baghdad like mushrooms. Then the country descended into violence, and so people preferred to enjoy what entertainment they could find in the relative safety of their own homes. Back at the cinema Oday, Rashid, the filmmaker, told me he used to come here in the 1970s and 80s to to see films by Fellini, Pasolini and Bergman. Walking round the empty auditorium today, he said he wanted to cry. The state of Baghdad's cinemas, he said, was a reflection of what had happened to his country. And he blames religion. Iraq's new pious rulers, he told me, have no need of culture. Indeed, he believes they see culture as a threat to their grip on power. And so the cinemas are left to crumble. I was about to leave, mulling over in my mind the thought that Iraq's religious politicians might unwittingly be responsible for filling the country's cinemas with porn, when something strange happened. The same men who'd been so keen to get rid of us earlier, the ticket collector and his friends suddenly wanted to show us around. An old projectionist called Ali, with few teeth and a grubby white vest, led the way upstairs. The room was full of old reels of film in tin canisters. He selected one and slotted it expertly into one of the machines. He flicked some switches, and as the light filtered through the dust in the hall, Gregory Peck and Gene Simmons flickered onto the screen. I asked the manager, Fadil Khalaf, why he kept all these old reels. After all, I couldn't imagine his current clientele wanting to watch some old Hollywood Western. It turns out Fadil has been working in the cinema for 30 years. This picture house, formerly known as Roxy's, has been in business since the 1930s. I love these films, he said, and so I keep them. But now the cinema is dead. Families don't come here anymore. Looking round at the empty auditorium, he added, it breaks my heart.
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Gabriel Gatehouse in Baghdad China's advance into Africa has been well documented as it hunts down the resources it needs to power a booming economy. Angola has become its biggest African trading partner. In return for access to the country's huge oil reserves, the Chinese have been rebuilding cities, roads and railways, which were devastated in Angola's long civil war. But what's life like for those Chinese so far from home? To try to find out, Justin Rolatt arranged a seaside evening out for a group of Chinese expatriates.
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We'd done our best to put our new friends at ease. We'd chosen a picturesque Chinese restaurant on the beachfront with dragon motifs and Chinese lanterns swinging in the breeze. We'd laid on a supply of chilled Qingdao beer, and the waiters were bringing out steaming plates of delicious Chinese food. Yet we still didn't seem to be able to get past a kind of anxious first date formality. Jet told me he'd set up an air conditioning business here five years ago. He laughed and chatted nervously about the trials of life in Africa and his ambitions for his firm. Betty, a 22 year old Chinese woman who's got various projects here, including the local Chinese language newspaper, buzzed among our 15 or so guests, gossiping and giggling. But even her charms failed to put our guests at ease. I was starting to think that we'd never be able to break the ice. Then our translator, Poppy, put on the karaoke machine just as she'd promised. The atmosphere was transformed. In a moment, even the shyest of our guests was up and competing to choose a song from the thousands on offer, everything from Chinese peasant anthems to Californian soft rock classics. To get things started, Betty and I sang an unlikely rendition of I Will Always love you. Betty sang beautifully. I did not. But no one seemed to mind. Chinese karaoke appears to be more about taking part than tunefulness, and our guests were now competing for the mic. At last, our little party was beginning to swing. Foreign travel is still rare for Chinese people, and Africa is considered a very exotic and dangerous destination. Many of my friends in China have never even heard of Angola, but, Wang admitted later as he picked at a plate of sweet roast duck with his chopsticks. Like Jet and Betty, he's an entrepreneur here to run the African arm of his uncle's aluminium window company. At first I found it frightening, he confessed. You hear lots of stories of Chinese people being robbed by the locals. So why did he stay? I wanted to know. There are great opportunities here, he replied without hesitation. You hear the same from Chinese entrepreneurs all over Angola. After 27 years of civil war, the Angolan economy, once one of the strongest in Africa, was in ruins. Everything had been destroyed, recalled Jet, remembering what it was like when he arrived here shortly after the civil war ended. There were no roads, railways, shops, nothing. Some Western companies were already here selling their products, but I knew I could import things cheaper from China. Betty nodded vigorously. She's only been here a couple of years, but also sees real potential in Angola. I'm doing much better here than if I'd stayed in China, she said. And it is not just small business men and women who've come to Angola. Some of China's biggest construction firms are here, building roads, railways, hospitals and vast housing complexes. Vera and Peng both work for state owned construction companies, but like our other guests, they reckoned they'd be able to get on quicker in Angola than back in China. I earn twice as much as I would at home, and I've got a better job, explained Peng. Chinese companies can be very traditional, and it can be hard to get promoted. Looking around, two facts stood out about the people at our table. How young they all were. The oldest was in his early 40s, and how well educated they were. Virtually all of them were graduates, and most spoke excellent English. You might imagine young graduates like these would have a bright future in China, well on their way to becoming the country's new elite. But our guests, and tens of thousands of others like them have decided to take the risk of traveling across the globe in search of opportunity. There are now an estimated hundred thousand Chinese people in Angola and around a million across Africa. Their presence reveals an essential truth about China, which which is often ignored in terms of per capita incomes. China is still a very poor country despite its dazzling economic growth. Indeed, it can still be hard for even the best educated Chinese to find a good job. The latest Education Ministry figures show more than a quarter of this year's 6.3 million Chinese university graduates are now unemployed. The west fears a Chinese invasion, but the fact is that most people in Western societies are simply too well off to do what the people around our table were doing, taking the risk of moving to a very alien society in search of a better life. By the end of the evening we were all a little worse for wear, and Jet was back at the mic singing a mournful Chinese ballad. He told me he'd like to return to China one day, but it was clear there'll be a few more karaoke nights here in Angola and before Jet returns home.
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And with Justin Rolatt in Angola contemplating more karaoke practice, we've reached the end of another edition. I'll be back again next week with more from our own correspondence. Why don't you join us? Goodbye.