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From Our Own Correspondent
Oct 29, 2011
00:28:11
The appointment of a white vice president in Zambia indicates, according to Fergal for...
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Narrator/Presenter
Hello, this is from our own correspondent,
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BBC Correspondent
a download from the BBC.
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Narrator/Presenter
For a sneak preview of our programme,
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Reporter on Italy/European affairs
you can join our feed on Twitter
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Steve Evans
and there's a daily airing of from
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Narrator/Presenter
our own correspondent on the BBC World Service.
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BBC Correspondent
But now the latest edition as broadcast
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Narrator/Presenter
on BBC Radio 4.
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BBC Correspondent
And it's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Various Correspondents (Fergal Keen, Horatio Clare, John Pilkington, David Willey)
A white farmer sits in the Vice President's chair in Zambia. Does it signal a new future for Africa's white population? For 46 metres above the South China Sea, we find out how economic hard times are affecting life on the ocean wave. There's an incident in Afghanistan's High Pamir as our man is dragged feet first into a freezing river. And why lovers of soft boiled eggs should steer well clear of a certain police canteen in Berlin. Another page in South Africa's eventful modern history was written this week as the country's main opposition party made a decisive break with the its past. The Democratic alliance, which grew out of the white liberal opposition to apartheid, elected a black woman, Lindiwe Mazibuko, as its leader in parliament. Her elections being seen as an indication of the extent to which the opposition has shaken off its white image. Seventeen years after the arrival of black majority rule. And yet to the north in Zambia, there has been contrasting news. The country recently chose a white vice president, the first white man to rise to such a position in post colonial Africa. These developments have prompted our former Africa correspondent Fergal Keen, who's just back from Zambia, to reflect on the future of the white Africans.
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Narrator/Presenter
In isolated farmhouses, on big plantations, in small towns, sleeping in fan cooled rooms or in the swelter of thatched huts, the planters and their workers didn't hear the end. Creeping towards them through the elephant grass and coffee bushes. There had, it's true, been trouble that might have forewarned them. But that was two months before, in January, when workers rose on the cotton plantations. The air force and the vigilante squads had put an end to that problem. Yes, in the early hours of March 15, 1961, the oldest white regime in Africa slept at ease. So when the first screaming faces appeared in the open windows or standing at the end of beds, there was incredulity and horror. Across a 400 mile front, peasants armed mainly with axes, machetes and hoes, descended on the dwellings of their colonial masters. The attackers clubbed and hacked the Portuguese and their black and mixed race servants. There were beheadings and mutilations, countless rapes. In the town of Luvo, a sawmill owner and his family were reported to have been cut to pieces in their own machinery. I traveled widely in Angola towards the end of its civil war, but I knew nothing of this story until I picked up an old colonial era book in the guest house where I was staying about three hours north of the Zambian capital, Lusaka. The book was a long, lurid warning about the perils of white men losing their grip in Africa. Not in his wildest imaginings could the writer have foreseen the present an Africa in which this week the old white Liberal party of South Africa would elect a black parliamentary leader in a country ruled by a black government, or the appointment of a white farmer as vice president of overwhelmingly black Zambia. In Zambia, the arrival of Dr. Guy Scott in the vice president's chair suggests to nervous whites elsewhere, further south in Zimbabwe and South Africa, the possibility of a political future that they can be part of. It would be very foolish to draw from these two developments any evidence of a new post racial trend in the politics of Africa. But I think there's a potentially useful lesson in the story of Dr. Scott. When I met him in his office in Lusaka, his first comment was to instruct one of his assistants to get rid of two ivory tusks sitting at the top of the room. I campaigned against ivory trading. I don't want to see it in here, he said. The accent is unmistakably that of a white southern African farmer, though not nearly as clipped as those further south. Dr. Scott's father emigrated from Glasgow to what was then Northern Rhodesia in 1927 and worked as a doctor on the railways. Unusually among his peers, he spent much of his life advocating better conditions for Africans. When his son Guy went into politics, it was to campaign against the corrupt and inefficient regime of Kenneth Kaunda, post colonial Zambia's founding father. We're now very postcolonial, Guy Scott said to me when I told him how strange it was to see a white man standing sitting in the vice president's chair. What put him there was the overwhelming support of thousands of black Africans for whom he transcended any question of race. I thought of other white Africans, Joe Slovo, Ruth first, and Helen Suzman in apartheid South Africa, who in their very different ways chose to step outside the privilege of skin. The days of race, massacre and terrible wars of counterinsurgency vanished forever on that day when I watched Nelson Mandela sworn in as president of a new South Africa at the Union buildings in Pretoria. But for Africa's whites, the long journey toward acceptance, to feeling that they have a future as of right on the continent is only really beginning. Guy Scott's example suggests that the way forward is through a political involvement that recognizes a constituency beyond white interests. In Zimbabwe, that led some white farmers to be targeted by the state, but it won them unprecedented respect among black fellow citizens who were similarly persecuted more than 50 years after the Sharpville massacre, when police killed 69 demonstrators, 50 years after the terrible massacres which launched Angola's war for independence, and 50 years after the horrific killing which accompanied Algeria's break with France France and the mass exodus of white settlers there. The whites who have remained in Africa are a comparatively small group, and I have met many who feel there is no future for them on the continent. But there are others who offer another view. In Zambia, I met Stuart Kearns, a farmer who'd been driven off his land in Zimbabwe. His father had been killed during the bush war in what was then Rhodesia. Now here he was working new fields in another African country. Why did he keep going? I asked. It's the passion, he said. The passion for the land that is something any African, black or white, can understand.
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Various Correspondents (Fergal Keen, Horatio Clare, John Pilkington, David Willey)
And that's Fergal Keen. A book of dreams that was the verdict of one of Italy's major newspapers about the austerity plans put forward by Prime Minister Silvia Berlusconi to the Brussels summit this week. European leaders announced on Thursday morning they'd reached a deal which would avert crisis in the eurozone. The markets responded positively to the news, but David Willey in Rome says there's considerable doubt in Italy over the prime Minister's ability to deliver on his promises.
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Reporter on Italy/European affairs
How does a populist leader like Silvio Berlusconi carry out unpopular but necessary reforms like raising the pension age or making it easier for failing businesses to sack staff? The answer is that he doesn't. And therein lies the current dilemma of the beleaguered leader of Italy, currently the new sick man of Europe, financially speaking. Mr. Berlusconi went to Brussels with a hastily scratched together list of promises of how he plans to turn the Italian economy around during the present eurozone crisis. His last minute letter, which was being redrafted and refined until the very last moment before he boarded his plane, was warily welcomed by other EU as a useful sign of intent. But it carried little conviction that he'll ever be able to convert it into legislative reality. Mr. Berlusconi is lumbered with a parliament where he can barely muster a majority. The Italian media is arguing that Italy has surrendered its sovereignty to Brussels over the latest financial crisis. The complaints sound just like those of Britain's Eurosceptics, and Mr. Berlusconi's response to a perceived slight by Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merke at a recent Brussels news conference was decidedly jingoistic. He doesn't intend to be dictated to by Italy's European partners, he said. It's all a very far cry from one of my earliest memories of my life in Rome over 50 years ago. I was working as a trainee for Reuters when I witnessed the signing of the Rome Treaty at Rome's beautiful city hall in March of 1957. The Founding Fathers of a united Europe had a dream and a prayer. They wanted to bury the ghosts of the destructive European wars of the 20th and earlier centuries. And this very small group of mainly Catholic believers went round to the Vatican afterwards for a papal audience and a blessing. I remember Italy's First Republic, born from the ashes of the Second World War, terminated in the dissolution of the old Christian Democrat and Socialist and Communist political parties following the collapse of the Berlin Wall and then the Italian meltdown of corruption scandal in the early 90s, its leaders were only too happy to shift over to Brussels some of the responsibilities for what used to be called Rome's revolving door governments. With the arrival of Silvio Bellusconi on the political scene here in what's now commonly called the Second Republic, governments have lasted longer, particularly under the leadership of the now 75 year old media magnate, one of Europe's longest serving and wealthiest leaders. Italians seem to be becoming more resentful at what they regard as undue interference by Brussels in their affairs, whether it may be in deciding such details as what defines real Parmesan cheese, or in more macroeconomic mode, telling Rome how to prevent the cost of servicing Italian government debt going through the roof. We've had disastrous storms in northern Italy this week which have caused many casualties and heavy damage along a particularly picturesque and mountainous stretch of Mediterranean Mediterranean coast near Genoa. Talking with a local Genoese, I was surprised to hear Brussels being blamed. Farmers cultivating most crops other than the prized local wine along the steep terraces held up by dry stone walls have been undercut, he said, by cheaper agricultural produce from other EU countries. So the terraces are crumbling and the soil slides down the mountainside when it rains, with predictable results. But this sense of resentment against interference from Brussels is offset by the government's gleeful announcement, simultaneously with the grumbles against Europe, that the EU is contributing over 100 million euros towards shoring up the ruins of the walls of Pompeii, which this week also crumbled just a little further because of the weather.
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Various Correspondents (Fergal Keen, Horatio Clare, John Pilkington, David Willey)
The slump in global growth and trade has badly dented the fortunes of the international transport industry. David Willey there ment Genoa. And surely old sea dogs in that ancient maritime city, as in others around the world, will tell you that they get an early indication when the cold winds of recession start to blow. The port goes quiet. The cranes which swing the cargoes ashore lie idle. The queues of merchant ships waiting to berth dwindle. Horatio Clare's been seeing how these times of economic uncertainty affect daily life aboard a slowboat.
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BBC Correspondent
To China, we're just bus drivers, says Chris. Chris is a bulked up young Dane, shaven headed and unsentimental. He regards the thick darkness of the South China Sea as unimpressive. Quite impressive is his highest praise. You do not hear it much. Still, it's some bus he's driving. Almost 400 meters long, 115,000 tons plus 40,000 tonnes of cargo. 2. Towering 46 metres above the waves and 10 deep below them, the GERD Maersk is a gigantic container ship. Between midnight and 4am, Chris is in charge of her. From my cabin below the bridge, I can sometimes hear him pacing up and down. Chris has a lookout mike for company. Mike is one of the Filipino crew. His attention never wavers from the gloom ahead. The radar and the displays are all set to low light. It can take your eyes half an hour to adjust to the dark, he says. With the GERD easily capable of 20 knots or 30 miles an hour, a lot can go wrong in a fraction of that time. Coming through the Singapore Strait, I was scared for half an hour as ships, like inexorable elephants surged through the darkness towards us. Not so much lit, as adorned by tiny pins of light. It can be quite confusing, Chris says. Your first time. Even far from land, we are rarely alone. The oceans are striped with traffic. When you hear that the markets have fallen or global trade has slowed down, Chris feels it physically, because this bus carries the world's wares in its belly. Until 2008, we went everywhere at 20 knots. Then when the economic crisis came, we all slowed to 16, he says. A harbour pilot at Felixstowe told me he knows the state of the UK economy from the lengths of the ladders he climbs up the sides of ships. A long climb means the ship is high in the water and exports correspondingly low. The seafarers say we take air to the east in bare containers before loading up in China with goods for the us. We're not completely empty, though. We have stinking cattle heads in brine loaded in Le Havre in France bound for China. In our refrigerated containers, we have meat, chocolate and fruit. Our dangerous cargo includes perfume and paint, detergent chemicals, a consignment of German sporting ammunition, and fireworks. We fantasized about putting the cowheads and the fireworks together. We have no alcohol and are more likely to see dolphins than women, so we discuss food and tell bad jokes. The crew talk to their families over the Internet and shyly show me pictures of wives, partners and children. I am aboard because I wanted to explore this unseen world and find out what became of the men Joseph Conrad and Herman Melville wrote about. Technology has transformed their equipment, but many perils endure. Just now I ran up to the bridge. What was the small blue boat doing all the way out here and approaching? Chris also has the noon to 4pm watch. Every fishing boat looks like a pirate, he says laconically. It spooked the tanker that just passed us, though they veered off course. There have been pirates in these waters since long before the Somali problem. And there are frequent storms. The forecast says we will arrive in Hong Kong on the tail of a typhoon in 10 meter waves. You cannot sleep. Cooking becomes dangerous, and you don't even want to imagine the conditions in the engine room. Potentially lethal even in a flat calm where temperatures reach 50 degrees Celsius. They still take traditional, even superstitious measures to ward off danger. No one would harm the gulls, egrets, migrating swallows and wagtails that settle on the Gerd. The mate tells a story told to him by a Turkish boatswain of a crewman who lost an arm within a week of killing a bird. We don't turn our backs on the sea when on the bridge, and we never ever whistle. It brings storms. Despite these touchstones, Chris doctor said the job could shorten his life by up to seven years through stress, sedentary routine and diet, assuming he is not injured. But despite his rigorous unsentimentality, Chris has romantic feelings for his ancient trade. He has a tattoo of a sailing ship on one calf with the legend Sailor's Grave. You could read an old sailor's whole life in his tattoos, he says. A red dragon meant a stop in a Chinese port. A sailing ship, you'd cross the Atlantic, a leatherback turtle, the equator. Chris is considering adding a major piece of work when we reach Los Angeles. My mother won't mind, he says, but dad won't be too impressed. He's proud to have a sailor for a son, but not necessarily a tattooed one.
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Various Correspondents (Fergal Keen, Horatio Clare, John Pilkington, David Willey)
Horatio Clare. Now, it may not make the news as much as it used to, but the violence in Afghanistan hasn't gone away. And in this climate, it's brave indeed of people to talk about boosting tourism there. And yet they do. Recently, tour operators got together with investors and media people to see what could be done to attract more visitors to the relatively peaceful north east of the country. There was much talk of the majestic beauty of the Hindu Kush and Pamir mountains. John Pilkington's been finding out that a corner of that part of the country, known as the Wakan Corridor also offers opportunities. The Taliban never gained a footing there and there's already a trickle of foreign visitors to a place John describes as a little Shangri La.
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John Pilkington
High in the Pamir Mountains, Afghanistan meets its northern neighbour Tajikistan on the banks of the thundering Panj River. For most of the last century this marked the southern limit of Soviet Central Asia. And there's still an outpost in the form of a Russian speaking village where with a single narrow bridge across the river, I crossed that bridge and stepped back a hundred years. On the Tajik side were cars, electric lights, piped water and central heating. On the Afghan side, donkeys, candles, water buckets and smoky yak dung fires. From here a finger of Afghanistan goes east for 200 miles separating Tajikistan from from Pakistan. This is the so called Wakhan Corridor, a relic of the 19th century Great Game between Britain and Russia. It leads to the High Pamir where four separate mountain ranges come together in a tangle of peaks and glaciers. These are the lands of the Wahi and the Kyrgyz. The Wachi live in rough stone houses. The Kyrgyz are semi nomadic and prefer big round tents which they call yurts. In the lower valleys I found the Waki busy harvesting the all important barley crop. Higher up, the Kyrgyz were leading sheep and yaks across endless mountainsides, making the most of the summer pasture. Apart from these shepherds with their animals, the only creatures you see in the high valleys are marmots, vultures and if you're really lucky, a faraway glimpse of a snow leopard. I can't speak either Wahi or Kyrgyz, so I found myself an interpreter called Yar Muhammad and he in turn came up with two splendid horsemen, Shogun and Amin Bek. I had brought a tent and was intending to be self sufficient, but in all the villages people instantly came out to greet us with rounds of bread and bowl after bowl of freshly made Yak's milk yoghurt. I was aiming for a place called Bozai Goombas and an appointment with a famous British character from the days of the Raj. In 1891, Captain Francis Younghusband was arrested by Cossacks here and frog marched out of what they said was now part of Russia. In London, this seemed horribly like the prelude to an invasion of British India. In the end, there was no invasion and no war. But this so called Pamir incident led directly to the peculiar boundaries that we see today, with the Wachan corridor made part of Afghanistan to prevent British and Russian forces from ever again having to meet. I wanted to mark the 120th anniversary of the incident by giving a nod and a wink to the officers involved, who actually behaved with impeccable courtesy all round. The Cossacks even gave young husband a haunch of venison. But crossing the river to Bosai Gumbaz, I somehow managed to fall off my horse. One moment it was wading happily across, the next, it was on its knees and I was tumbling over its head. Luckily, my foot caught in one of the stirrups. So instead of being swept away, I was dragged foot first through the freezing water and dumped on the far bank. Back in Ishkashim, the tiny town at the corridor's entrance, I recovered in a little guest house with the razzmatazz of the bazaar nearby. Ishkashim is no Kathmandu, but its people are working hard to make things easier for visitors and they'd like to welcome more of us. ADAB Shah, who has just started up a travel company, told me the main problem is getting people up into the corridor. It's expensive and very uncomfort because the road is so bad. Well, I'd bounced and jolted up that road myself and I'd say his assessment is spot on. But roadworks apart, what are the chances that this unlikely experiment will succeed against all the odds? It'll depend, of course, like so much in Afghanistan, on what happens after most of the NATO forces depart, probably in 2014. So if you, if you enjoy mountains and if you've got a taste for yak's milk yogurt, I'd say go while you can.
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Various Correspondents (Fergal Keen, Horatio Clare, John Pilkington, David Willey)
And that's John Pilkington. You are what you eat, they say. And certainly there's a whole collection of slang words which refer to people by stereotypes of their diet, either past or present. The French call us Rosbeef, the Americans say we're Limeys, and some Britons refer to Germans as Krauts. Our man in Berlin Steve Evans has had time to give this some thought while visiting the city's extensive range of works canteens. Yet uppermost in his mind, it seems, is the origin of that word most associated with Liverpool, Scouse.
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Steve Evans
I think I now know why a scouser is called a scouser, and I think I learnt it in a works canteen in Berlin. Let me explain. I already knew that there was a dish in North Wales called in Welsh lobscouse. It's a North Walian word for a type of stew. We South Wales never use it, we say stew. The common view is that the word lobscouse came to North Wales via Liverpool, the capital of North Wales, in some ways certainly the commercial centre. It's the place to which North Wales migrated for work and shopping. And so the theory now goes, scouser, the affectionate word for a liverpudlian, had something to do with lobscouse. But where did lobscous come from? From the Baltic, of course, which has had trading links with Liverpool since at least the 18th century. Lobscous, it turns out, is a North German dish. I know this because it was served as such to me recently in the canteen of the Berliner Ensemble. It just goes to show what you learn when you eat in a works canteen. You get a flavor, literally of local life. You find out what the natives eat, go to a restaurant and it gets all fancy, arugula, etc. Go to a canteen and you get solid cooking at reasonable prices and a taste of the place. So that's what I usually do. And fortunately Berlin, because of a democratic tendency, has lots of canteens which are open to the public. More than a hundred by my calculation. By open to the public, I mean that they're primarily there for employees, but anybody can just walk in from the streets, grab a tray and tuck in. In the Berliner Ensemble, the food is pretty well what it might have been in the days of the theatre's founder, Bertolt Brecht. Quite a lot of boiled potato, quite a lot of sausage, plus the daily specials featuring pork, veal, deer, even red cabbage, boiled potatoes and lobscouse. Though it is not what a Northwalian or a Scouser would recognize as lobscous. The Berliner Ensemble version, authentically German, is a mush of mashed corned beef, potatoes, beetroot, beetroot and onion, but topped with a roll, mop of herring and two fried eggs. Not for the faint hearted or the faint stomached. To get to this delight at the theatre's canteen, you have to negotiate your way past the box office and then across the yard between the props and the trucks and the smokers. In this theatre of the left, there is a bit of a class divide. Some tables are reserved for technical staff and some for the ensemble, the actors who sometimes come in to eat dressed for the part, the Brechtian part, that is, whether it be a capitalist gangster or a spiv, complete with bowler hat and green waistcoat. Occasionally there is a dog there which barks. When I showed some surprise at this, I was told in a theatrical drawl, oh, that's George Tabori's dog, referring to the Hungarian playwright who died in Berlin four years ago at the age of 93. Poor George died, of course, but his dog still comes in, perhaps to eat the lobscouse, if he's got any sense. I think the Berliner Ensemble canteen is the best of the bunch. I go there most days of the week. The others offer different delights. Warner Music has food fit for a music maestro or a media mogul, as indeed it should. The police canteen at Tempelhof does very hard boiled eggs. At the council offices at Moabit you can eat lamb and boiled potatoes and beans in cream sauce, boiled mushy beans, not those crisp, raw, effete ones favoured by the fancier restaurants. In all the canteens you queue for food at a counter. Your meal may then be eaten still on the tray, which I think is slovenly or removed from it to give more of a sense of occasion. Trays and dishes must be returned, in the case of the Defence Ministry, to a kind of revolving contraption. It is all, I think, a lovely way of seeing a city of smelling and tasting. A city from the fresh fish encrusted in crushed cornflakes at the canteen of the Scandinavian embassies, to the Berliner Ensembles lobscous, minced meat and beetroot mashed together, graced with herring and fried eggs. What could be better?
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Various Correspondents (Fergal Keen, Horatio Clare, John Pilkington, David Willey)
Steve Evans in the German capital. Not, I think, a place where one goes to lose weight. That's it. More from our own correspondence, and probably their lunch tables too, on Thursday and Saturday of next week. Do join us. Goodbye.