← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Dementia Village
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Reporters worldwide provide context to the week's news. Today: South Africa's ANC at a...
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You're listening to a download from the BBC.
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This is from our own correspondent.
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You can hear the version of the programme we make for the BBC World Service by visiting our site at BBConline.
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But here's the latest edition broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and introduced by Kate Ady.
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Today, awkward questions for an African president accused of extravagance, corruption and repression. Old allegiances re emerge from the volatility of the new Europe. The Dutch village designed to show that dementia needn't be the of the world. And in eastern China, we wonder, can we possibly escape the revenge of the hairy crabs? But first, the leadership challenge for South Africa's President Zuma. It will be settled at his party's conference, which opens tomorrow. It comes from Deputy President Katlema Motlante, who is running for both the presidency and the leadership of the party, the African National Congress. Andrew Harding says, with the ANC's figurehead Nelson Mandela in fragile health and the country facing a series of difficulties, difficult problems, this is a critical period for South Africa.
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It was late afternoon and they were still cheering. Every few seconds another name was read out and the families, some overflowing into the lobby outside the hall, jumped up from their chairs with delight. It was graduation day at Johannesburg's grand, elegant Wits University this week. I sat on the steps outside the hall, soaking up the noisy waves of optimism that kept rushing past inside. Ahmed Kathrada seemed to be doing much the same. He's 83 years old now and a little frail, but still very much the same rigorous intellectual heavyweight who spent quarter of a century in prison with Nelson Mandela. Mr. Cathrada was at Wits to receive his own honorary doctorate. Afterwards, away from the well dressed crowd streaming out of the hall, he sat down carefully smiled and said, a day like this makes you feel good about this country. Of course, we then started talking about everything that was going wrong, about the prevailing sense of gloom, even crisis that has settled on South Africa. I just wish we could unite, he said solemnly, as we used to imprison to fight a common enemy. It's been a rough few months here. The killing of 34 workers at the Marikana mine, the corruption and chaos exposed almost daily within the ruling anc, the downgrading of South Africa's economic prospects by ratings agencies. Grim stuff. But it's worth remembering that crisis is something of a specialty here. If South Africa were a television show, it would probably be a Mexican soap opera, raucous, full of absurd, repetitive plots, with the promise of imminent disaster and salvation around every corner. It's as if the nation can't quite let go of its genuinely miraculous, dramatic past and accept the fact that it's become just another messy, complicated country. Of course, this week we've all been reminded of that past with the news that Nelson Mandela, now 94, is back in hospital. It used to be a few shrill, nervous whites who talked about how it was only Mandela, with his moral authority, who was preventing the black majority from throwing them out the country or worse. But now you hear black people worrying about what will happen too. I spent an hour recently arguing with a bright student who was convinced that civil war was inevitable. Such fears are, I'm sure, nonsense in political terms. South Africa has already been living in a post Mandela era for longer than it would like to admit. But the ruling party, the anc, still leans heavily on its liberation history and on Mandela in particular. And it does have a lot to lose. This weekend the ANC is gathering, as it does every five years, to decide who should lead the party and what policies it should champion. The run up has been quite a spectacle. You could argue that the furious power battles are a sign of healthy internal democracy, or you could look at the political murders and the greedy factionalism as proof that yet another African liberation movement has pressed the self destruct button. It's worth mentioning that the anc, for all its flaws, has plenty of good people and achievements under its belt. And it can adapt after the disastrous HIV AIDS denialism of the past. President Jacob Zuma's government has rolled out the right drugs and life expectancy for South Africans has jumped from 54 to 60 in five years, a spectacular leap over the course of the ANC's week long conference, there will be plenty of talk about President Zuma's alleged corruption and attempts to unseat him. There will be angry calls to nationalize South Africa's mines and seize all white owned farms and and there will be more sober, sensible debates about how to make this a less unequal society. It will all matter hugely and at the same time make little practical difference. The ANC has been noisily pondering these questions for years, but its leadership is now safely ensconced within South Africa's growing aspirational middle class, and it seems to have little appetite for revolution. And so a fractious nation will rumble on. For me, the most troubling thing today is not the messy politics or the inequality or the unemployment, which when you include the informal sector, is not as high as often claimed. The really shocking thing is when it comes to primary school education. This country ranks among the very worst in the world, below Bangladesh, below Nigeria. A generation is being forsaken, which makes the smiles of those graduating university students and their cheering families this week all the more moving and bittersweet.
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Andrew Harding in Johannesburg. The EU's 27 heads of state and government have been heading home for Christmas after a successful summit in Brussels. And you'd understand if they were reflecting not only on their achievements, but on the extent to which Europe itself has changed. For four decades, the communist countries of the east were cut off from the rest of the continent, a grey monolith of concrete uniformity imposed by Moscow. But now, mostly, they're part of the EU and are beginning to change the shape and character of Europe. As Alan Little's been finding out in the Polish city of Wroclaw, the centre of gravity in Europe has moved dramatically to the east.
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There's a street in the centre of the city where the paint is peeling off an apartment block. It reveals something essential to the character of Wroclaw, for the ground floor once housed a little shop. And beneath the peeling paint, you can see the faded shop signs advertising dairy products, milk, butter, cheese, yogurt. But the signs are not in Polish, they're in German. In the Polish city of Wroclaw, you catch glimpses of another identity. The German city of Breslau peeks through at you from beneath the peeling paint. In 1945, this part of Germany became Western Poland. Its people were expelled. To the empty city came half a million Poles who were themselves displaced from territories in the East. So much upheaval, so much loss, so much shifting of national identity and of history painted over. Mateusz Kornacki is a young Wroclaw. He loves every street, every brick and chiselled stone of this old city and runs a business that gives guided tours. He took me to a bridge on the Oder River. The Odra, in Polish, for everything here has two names at least. The Nazis turned Breslau into a garrison, he told me. Fortress Bresla was supposed to stop the Soviet Red army advance from the east. From the bridge, we looked down a busy six lane highway through the heart of the city. The buildings on either side of distinctly unlovely post war concrete and glass. When the Soviets seized the airport in 1945, Mateusz tells me the Nazi commander ordered the city center flattened to build a long Runway slap in the center of the city. That's what we're looking at now. That highway was it. Breslau's defenders held out against The Soviets. The city only fell four days after Berlin itself. The Runway made no difference. And for 40 years, Breslau Wroclaw disappeared behind the Iron Curtain, severed from the Germany of which it had been part for centuries. But today you see old allegiances, old identities reasserting themselves. Wroclaw is at the heart of something new in Europe. Since Poland's accession to the EU in 2004, old economic relationships have begun to re emerge. Wroclaw is again being drawn into the economic space of which Berlin, not Warsaw, is the center. There is German investment here, especially in the fast growing IT sector. Berlin is drawing what we used to call Eastern Europe around its shoulders like a shawl. In Berlin, I went to see a retired German diplomat called Dietrich von Kiev. The arc of his life traces the changing fortunes of his country. He grew up before the war not far from Breslau, believing Germans were the master race and the Wehrmacht invincible. His father, an army officer, was killed on the Eastern front somewhere in Poland. He remembers the shock of discovering at the age of 10 that Germany was in fact losing the war. With his mother and three siblings, he fled west to escape the Soviets. Their family estate was lost forever, annexed to post war Poland. He remembers the route marches, the hunger, the terror. He remembers the Germans who died by the roadside and whose bodies were tipped into ditches. You ask what the European Union means to a man like me, he told me. My father fought in Finland against the Reds before I was born in 1920 and I negotiated Finland's accession to the EU. My father died somewhere in Poland. I went to Warsaw after the fall of Communism to begin the process that would bring Poland back into the European fold. In the decades after 1945, the European project was driven by those who'd survived the war on the Western Front. It was a very Western European affair, centered on the relationship between Paris and the sleepy West German capital at Bonnie. Now the project is increasingly driven by those, including the Germans, with a folk memory of war on the much more brutal Eastern Front and who went on to survive 40 years of Soviet imposed tyranny. And now, for the first time in its history, Germany is at peace with all nine of the neighbors with whom it shares a border. That is where the center of gravity in Europe now lies. It has shifted dramatically to the east. On the bridge over the Odra, Mateusz echoes the sentiments of Dietrich von Kiev. But Mateusz is not a retired diplomat. He is 26 years old. I belong to the first generation of Poles, he says, who have not had to fight the first generation to have all the life opportunities that you take for granted in Western Europe. That's what being in Europe means to us. We don't want to mess it up this time.
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Alan Little in Poland, Equatorial guinea the tiny, oil rich West African nation rarely makes international headlines. It's perhaps best known here for a botched coup attempt some eight years ago, which saw accusations of involvement levelled at Mrs. Thatcher's son Mark, the president the plotters failed to overthrow. Teodoro Obiang is accused by his critics of wholesale corruption, repression and economic mismanagement. Stephen Sacher, who's just been visiting his country, has had a chance to chat to him about these claims when he was invited to the presidential palace.
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His Excellency Teodoro Obiang, President of Equatorial guinea, self proclaimed guarantor of peace and propeller of development, smiles benignly at me from a giant billboard in the middle of a deserted four lane highway. Beyond his towering portrait I can see row upon row of hacienda style villas with swimmin pools, landscaping and wraparound security. Down by the ocean there's a luxury hotel with private beach and golf course. Further inland, a vast convention center. This is Sipopo, a gated community purpose built for the delectation of 52 heads of state during a recent African summit. It cost a billion dollars to build, and now it's empty, a discarded plaything which serves as a monument to presidential vanity in a tiny country with a global reputation for extravagant misrule. I'm taken to Sipopo by Bernardo, my minder from Equatorial Guinea's Ministry of Information. His orders, he says, are to show me how President Obiang has transformed his country. If you understand his achievements, then you will ask him the right questions when the time comes for the interview, says Bernardo, his dark glasses glinting in the tropical sun. Equatorial guinea feels less like a nation state than a vast family estate. Teodoro Obiang seized the presidency from his own uncle in a clinically effective coup 33 years ago. Uncle Francisco, a notoriously brutal tyrant, was put before a firing squad in the early days of his rule, Teodoro Obiang promised reform and elections, and in the most literal sense, he kept his word. He's won a series of presidential elections with between 95 and 98% of the vote. He even tolerates an opposition presence in Parliament. One opposition MP confronts the 99 who support the ruling party. Presidential critics and human rights activists who become troublesome are invited to reflect on their disloyalty in Equatorial Guinea's notorious Black Beach Prison. Those who emerge are generally eager to avoid going back. Bernardo, my minder, is not one for idle political chat. And behind his dark glasses he's suffering from a bad case of conjunctivitis. So he takes an afternoon off, which allows me to divert from the official program. I meet a baker who shows me round his run down neighbourhood in Bata, Equatorial Guinea's second city. His one room tin roof house sits on a dirt track which is impassable when it rains. There's no piped water, no sanitation. This in a country which is the third biggest oil producer in Sub Saharan Africa. But the majority of Equatorial Ghanaians live on little more than a dollar a day. Life expectancy barely tops 50. A young man in his early 20s allows his anger to overcome his caution. The President and his family are nothing but thieves, he tells me. Yes, people are frightened, but one day there will be an explosion here. If there is an explosion, it may be President Obiang's eldest son, Teodorin, who lights the fuse. Thanks to legal action being taken against him in France and the United States, Teodorin's spending habits have become public knowledge. The Malibu mansion, the Parisian villa, the private jet, the fleet of luxury cars and $2 million worth of Michael Jackson memorabilia. All were allegedly bought with cash diverted from the state. Back in the minibus, Bernardo takes a call. The President is ready to receive us. We are summoned to his palace in Bata, one of eight official residences. Teodoro Obiang, dapper in his finely tailored suit, greets me graciously. But as our interview progresses, he appears to find my interest in his family's financial arrangements impertinent and malicious. When I ask him why he and his family need so many luxurious homes both inside and outside the country, he fixes me with a look of contempt. Having served as president for 33 years, should I live in a shack? The President declares he will remain in office as long as his people wish it. And at that he smiles not at me, but at the phalanx of ministers, advisers and security men seated to the side. They smile back when the people want something. The President. We should not disappoint them.
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Stephen Sacher and you can see a film of his meeting with Mr. Obiang that's on Hard Talk on the BBC News Channel on Monday. Health authority representatives from around the world have been arriving in the Netherlands. They're taking a look at a village which is pioneering a new approach towards the care of dementia victims. It's estimated there are 30 million dementia sufferers around the world. And with Western populations aging steadily, that number's rising. So health officials are more interested than ever in new ideas on how to manage the condition. Anna Holigan has been to visit the village near Amsterdam dedicated to dementia.
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We enter hove through a quiet courtyard. Burnt oranges and reds adorn the trees, though many are already losing their leaves. An oversized chessboard, pieces the size of small children abandoned mid game RUY Dag. This is Yvonne, a director at Hochoveh. We enter an apartment. Walls covered in hot pink rose prints. Two enormous chandeliers dazzle from the ceiling. Yvonne smiles. It's all shiny and beautiful. Hochweh is designed to create an impression of life free of fear, replaced with an abundance of comfort and serenity. The decor acts as reminiscence therapy, triggering memories and emotions. When families come to visit, Yvonne tells me, they say, ah, this is just like my mother's house. And that is what we want people to feel at home here and not like they're in a hospital. In a conventional care home, one might wake to see nurses in white coats. Here they see friends or neighbors. The idea is to always avoid two capital Cs, conflict and confusion. By a window, a woman in her 60s, waving slowly but deliberately to an imagined audience outside. She used to work here, yvonne explains as she catches me looking. Now she lives here, but she doesn't know. She doesn't remember. She used to be a nurse. When my great aunt, Auntie Ray, got dementia, her brain told her she was a child again. She was constantly calling her sister, begging to go home. She was frightened of a strange man in her house, but that strange man was her husband. She just didn't recognize him anymore. My Nana, her sister, played along much like they do at Hochoveh, but she was never quite sure if this was the right way to interact with her, her or not, if it was morally right to allow her sister to believe something that she knew to be untrue. Is it right to lie to someone to make them happy? Or should you tell them the truth, knowing it will make them sad? This, I feel, is the question which weaves itself through the consciousness of anyone who's lost someone to dementia. But at Hochoveh, at least, they think they found the answer. When I tell my Nana about how they treat dementia, he here, she feels validated, hearing that the Dutch medical experts believe in looking after their patients in much the same way that she cared for her sister. Inside the Hochenweh grocery store, you can find all the popular Dutch delicacies. Shelves stacked full of boxes of chocolate sprinkles, bags of honey flavour licorice glisten temptingly near the checkouts. I look on as a Mr. Pickerfit drops a bunch of not quite ripe bananas into his basket. He's accompanied by a health worker he believes is a friend. Mr. Picker Fitz isn't someone who likes to be in the house. I'm told stimulation is good for him. Mr. Picketfit smiles as he reaches for a bottle of red wine. The shop staff here are specially trained to deal with dementia. If a resident leaves the school store forgetting to pay, staff will just make a quick call through to the carers back at the apartment and the amount will be discreetly added to their bill. All designed to avoid those two C's conflict and confusion. So does this pioneering style of care cost millions to implement? Yvonne's eyebrows go up, a faint smile crosses her lips and she shakes her head no. She tells me it costs exactly the same as the normal nursing home. It just takes more time and imagination to give people interesting lives, and she bristles at suggestions that this is some kind of virtual village. It's quite real here, she insists. I even do my own shopping at that grocery store. The only thing that's not real here is that we make people who live here feel like life is okay. People can be happy here, even if they have this terrible condition. They see the world differently, so we have to help them in a different way. Yvonne isn't surprised that Hochoveh's methods have been attracting interest from intrigued healthcare policymakers all over the world, and she feels a responsibility. We have to tell them it's possible to treat dementia differently, she says. Populations are getting older and older and everyone is thinking, what will it be like? For me, this is a place where we can show that dementia doesn't have to be the end of the world. Outside, the communal hall has been hijacked and is erupting with a seasonal celebration. The staff are up, waltzing whooping residents around the room. I turn and glance out the window. Two men carrying a coffin. No one looks at it. They're all too distracted by the music.
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Anna Holigan in the Netherlands now, while you may be debating the virtues of turkey over goose for the festive table in China, recent menus have been dominated by the mitten, or hairy crab. It's a great seasonal delicacy, particularly in the east of the country, and an obsession for those who can afford to eat it. The female crabs ripen in the ninth lunar month, the males in the tenth. And from then until the end of the year, they are almost inescapable, as Fuchsia Dunlop has been finding out.
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A pair of crabs crouched on my plate, eyeballing each other like adversaries, their legs spiky with yellow hair. The male was big and beefy, the colour of a mandarin, with claws bedded in dark, mossy fur. The female was smaller, its shell a less flamboyant shade of orange. Steam drifted up from both of them. I took a deep breath and prepared for the attack. Eating hairy crabs is a wild and messy business. You must pull off the legs and claws, prise open the shells and scrape, pick, suck and crunch until you have extracted every last delicious morsel. The pale silken flesh of the crab legs is delectable enough, but their shells contain the real treasures. The gold and voluptuous semen of the males and the bright orange roe of the females sprawled lazily atop custardy mess of meat. Of course, for those who find eating whole crabs a hassle, restaurants offer seasonal menus of dishes made with meat that has been painstakingly excavated from the shells. You might try the legs stir fried with asparagus, the luscious shell meat and roe on a dishful of quivering tofu, or a hairy crab version of Shanghai's most famous steamed dumpling, the xiaolong bao. The crabs have long inspired passion in their devotees. The 17th century playwright Li Yu wrote that his heart lusted after them, and there wasn't a day in his life when he hadn't thought of them. I hadn't intended to eat hairy crab every day during my recent stay in Shanghai, but they seemed to greet me everywhere I went. And although I'd always considered myself to be a competent crab picker, I found myself taking what seemed to be an advanced course in the art of crab eating because everyone I met offered me a new piece of advice. My friend Jason's mother told me to leave two legs attached to each half of the body like a handle, so I could raise it to my lips and chomp out the strandy white flesh at the sides. The uncle of another friend, Rose, taught me how to stick parts of both claws together so they looked like a butterfly. And most intriguingly, he showed me how to turn the stomach inside out to reveal a tiny, knobbly appendage that resembled the head of an ancient monk, complete with wizened face and long, straggly beard. There was plenty of medical advice, too, because eating hairy crabs is a dangerous game. As any Shanghainese can tell you, according to Chinese medicine, their flesh is perilously cold and must be balanced with warming foods, which is why they are always served with vinegar and ginger and sometimes a flask of Shaoxing rice wine. And crabs should never be eaten with cold persimmon because it's thought to be a toxic combination. Then there are the parts of the crab that must be avoided. The pillowy finger like lungs and plasticky pyramid of the stomach should be discarded, said another friend, Hai Chen. And don't, whatever you do, eat the heart, she added. It's a sinister grey flap of rubbery flesh tucked away inside the body, which is even colder than the meat and should never be eaten. Smaller than a SIM card, it is easily overlooked after a couple of weeks of excessive crab eating. Despite my delight, I was becoming paranoid. Hai Chen had warned me that for women especially, crabs should be eaten in extreme moderation, but I couldn't seem to escape them. I was ambushed by crabs at what were supposed to be simple lunches at the homes of friends, surprised by crab dishes on every dinner table, even after a wine and food pairing event when I'd been tasting crab all day long. The piece de resistance at the judges banquet was crab meat on a bed of egg white custard. Despite my diligent consumption of ginger and wine, would I succumb to the symptoms of cold, stomach ache and vomiting? And just how soon after eating a crab was it safe to consume persimmons, which were also perfectly in season and quite irresistible? I recalled with a shudder that I must have eaten a few of the flabby grey hearts before I had learned to pick them out. For a few days I walked around in a state of unease, waiting for the crab's revenge. But I am pleased to report that I survived the experience in robust good health. And I can't wait to go to Shanghai next autumn for more.
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And with Fuchsia Dunlop already planning next autumn's menu, we've reached the end of another edition. I'll be back with more from our own correspondence next Saturday morning. Do join us. Goodbye.