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From Our Own Correspondent
The Black Cowboy
00:28:00
How did Herb Jeffries become a black cowboy film star when he wasn't even black? to in...
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This is a download from the BBC.
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It's the latest edition of From Our
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Own correspondent, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and introduced by Kate Ady.
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Today, growing religious intolerance in Pakistan and not much sign of the politicians tackling it. A tale of secret police, comic book spies and wobbling octopus from Western Sahara. The Australians tried to cash in on China's thirst for fine wine and were off to Kansas to meet the first black cowboy film. But things we find are not what they seem. The government in Pakistan completes its full five year term this week and the country is heading towards elections in May. Already, a landmark has been reached. It's the first time since the creation of Pakistan in 1947 that any elected government has completed a full term. Mike Wooldridge in Lahore says the next set of rulers will inherit many challenges. One of them is the increase in sectarian violence and what many in Pakistan are calling an alarm rise in intolerance.
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Lahore is a city of great renown and with good reason. In the bustling streets around its imposing fort, there are ornate balconied houses, palaces and shops, some dating back centuries. The city has a buzz about it and it's long been famous for its poets, writers and intellectual life. But I felt I was leaving that Lahore behind when we turned off a busy thoroughfare and into the much narrower streets of a more rundown and industrial area. A side turn had been closed to traffic with coiled barbed wire and watchful police. From this barrier, there were tents on either side of the road full of families. Relief workers were handing out food. And just beyond that, there were the first heavily damaged and gutted homes and small businesses of the Christians of Joseph Colony and the piles of rubble. More than a hundred homes had been ransacked and burnt by Muslims. A few days before, after a local Christian man had been accused of blasphemy, he was alleged to have made derogatory remarks about the Prophet Muhammad when he and a Muslim friend got into an argument. The police took the Christian man into custody, but it seems that everyone could see more trouble coming. The police apparently advised the people of Joseph Colony that their best protection was to flee. They did so, and there were no casualties. But their properties were left at the mercy of the mob, largely unchallenged. According to eyewitnesses, controversy over the policing strategy erupted. Now it seemed as if the local administration was rushing to make amends. Out of the narrow alleyways came donkeys hauling loads of charred debris. They returned laden with bricks. There was hammering everywhere. Walls were being plastered. Twenty contractors had been brought in to repair and rebuild the Christians homes to a tight schedule. People alleged to have taken part in the rioting were being arrested. But it was obvious that the frenetic relief and reconstruction operation would do little to ease the fears in this Christian community. In Sheila Bernard's home, which doubled up as a shop, the attackers stole or burnt all that the family owned. Her means of livelihood had been destroyed. Her daughters said the school where they teach was ransacked and closed. I spoke to a father who told me that the dowry for his daughter's wedding had been lost in the attack. Then a crowd arrived from the town of Godra where there was anti Christian violence in 2009 and eight people were burnt alive. They wanted to demonstrate their support for this latest community to be targeted. Then for me, a journey across Lahore to an upmarket district and to the house that a leading Pakistani eye specialist, Dr. Said Ali Haider, set off from. One morning in mid February, he was in the car with his 11 year old son taking him to school. They were both shot and killed. Two more victims of targeted killings of Shia Muslims. The Shias make up around 20% of Pakistan's population of 180 million. There's been a wave of such killing. Extremist Sunni Muslim groups have admitted carrying out some of this violence. The rest is generally assumed to be their work. There are suggestions that it's an attempt to encourage Shias to migrate. I've come to the Haidar home to meet the eye surgeon's father, Syed Zafar Haider, now in his 80s. From his bearing and his manner, you have a sense of a family of high ambition and achievement. Both father and son did their postgraduate medical studies in Britain. Zafar Hayde is still grieving bitterly for his son and grandson and for the loss to Pakistan of his son's specialist skills in retina surgery. Zafar Haida says Shias are now living in fear through no fault of their own. There are clear differences between the nature of the attack on Dr. Haydar and his son and the one against Christians. Some speculate that behind the latter could have been an attempt by local business interests to get their hands on the land used by the Christians. But the link between this and other similar violence is surely intolerance. The coming election campaign will in all probability be dominated by economic matters and there are plenty of challenges there for the politicians to argue over. But the protection of Pakistan's minorities of all kinds, supposedly guaranteed at the founding of Pakistan in 1947, now seems hardly less pressing. An issue once again in this many feel Pakistan's very identity is under troubling scrutiny.
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Mike Wooldridge in Lahore There aren't many international territory disputes which have been rumbling on at the United nations for 50 years without any resolution, and you might think a land that's been fought over for that long would at least be well known. But Western Sahara just isn't. This huge swathe of northwestern Africa was occupied by Morocco after the former colonial power Spain pulled out. Years of conflict followed in which the native Sahrawi people, led by the Polisario Resistance Movement, have fought unsuccessfully for independence. It's a territory rich in natural resources, and opinions differ on whether these should be exploited with While the exact status of Western Sahara remains unclear, and as you might imagine, after decades of tension, it's hard to work out what's going on, as Celeste Hicks has been discovering on a recent visit in a party of female journalists.
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Each person has to make their own choice, says Mohammed, a supervisor at Laon's giant fishing port. He had approached from nowhere in a huge, echoing market hall where buyers were haggling loudly over the day's catch. He had tapped me gently on the shoulder, saying proudly yet confidentially, I'm a Sahrawi. An urbane man of about 40, he wore a crisp white apron while his bright aftershave battled the overwhelming stench of fish. I decided to stay here and help my country, he went on. My brother decided to leave, and he became a refugee. His story was tragic yet familiar. His family is divided across three countries Algeria, Western Sahara and Germany. They've never been reunited, not even for his father's funeral last year. I felt uncomfortable discussing such a heartbreaking tale while being asked to step aside as giant crates of still wobbling octopus scraped past. But he seemed undeterred. I felt touched that someone should want to share the story and how he seemed to have worked his way up to help his country. You can't contribute to economic development from a refugee camp in eastern Algeria, he'd said. Meeting this man didn't fit with what we'd been told to expect that Morocco would try to control everyone we spoke to and that we would never get the real story. But our apparent luck didn't last long. That night I noticed we were being followed. Trundling along in an old white and red taxi in poorly lit streets, I saw two motorbikes trailing us without any headlights on. At first I thought I was imagining it. But wait, there they were again, dressed as comic book Spies in 1970s style sunglasses and thick leather jackets. They flitted in and out of the traffic and rows of parked cars as we passed the town's brightly lit fruit and vegetable market. I was expecting a tiny, neglected desert town, but Laiyon is actually a smart and modern capital, with fast food joints on many corners. One evening we stopped to grab a pizza and the mysterious riders glided silently past, pulled up behind a wall and spoke surreptitiously into their sleeves. We waved a few times, but they didn't respond. In the end, I started to feel sorry for them camped outside our hotel all through the chilly Sahara night. It's a sad state of affairs when the government seems only to create jobs which involve following a bunch of women around even while they buy sanitary towels. We already had a government minder, the unctuous Mr. L. Bore, whose sole job seemed to be organizing back to back meetings to fill up our time with his hair carved into thick strips with excess hair gel and a grey suit so starch it barely creased at the knee. He was a consummate wheedler, especially when trying to get us to travel to Casablanca to meet his boss, the Minister of Communications. Oh, we'd be delighted, we said, but unfortunately there are no flights from Lyon to Casablanca. Not a problem, said Mr. Elbore with a dazzling smile as his nicotine stained fingers fiddled with his phone. Let me call Royal Air Maroc to rearrange the schedule to get a plane here for you. We refused on the grounds of journalistic ethics. I couldn't help but feel a bit sorry for him as I watched him phone his boss, shoulders crumpled and the hollows in his cheeks deepened in defeat. By the last day, the extent of Morocco's attempts at manipulation was becoming clear. At the town hall, a splendid white building with a mosaic floor and exquisite stained glass windows, we sat through a two hour presentation in Arabic with no English subtitles about how much money had been spent by Morocco on swimming pools, plazas, train stations and a badly needed university. Suddenly a woman stood up, said that she had been tortured by anti Moroccan fighters, and began to tearfully recount her experiences. It was a shock, given that minutes before we'd felt as though the biggest risk around here seemed to be dying of boredom. Was she genuine? I looked around the room to see other people's reactions. One man was sitting in a corner, laughing behind his hand and chatting to his neighbors. And then I saw Mohammed again, sitting comfortably flanked by government officials, casually flicking the screen on his smartphone. But what was a fishmonger doing at this event? Had he got the job because he supported the government Just as he'd told me, each person really has made their own choice.
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And that was Celeste Hicks. Widows in India no longer throw themselves on the funeral piles of their husbands, but life for them can still be hard. Considered inauspicious, many soon find they've lost their income and are ostracized in their home villages. Some are sent away by their husbands families who want to prevent them inheriting money or property. Anthony Denslow's been finding out how thousands of widows, faced with living the rest of their lives in poverty and isolation, have been making their way to one particular city in the north of the country.
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India is jam packed with holy sites and pilgrimage destinations. But few places are as closely associated with the deity Krishna as is Vindravan on the banks of the Yamuna, a few hours drive southeast of Delhi. Here, in this temple cram town, the name of Krishna is on everyone's lips and the name of his childhood sweetheart, Radha. For Krishna, according to the great epic the Mahabharata, was born in the nearby forest. And it was around here that the young flute playing trickster flirted with the goat herders, the gopis, and enjoyed that now infamous love affair known to every Hindu with the beautiful divine Radha. Radha, Krishna. The two names bound together forever and in the minds of every pilgrim who arrives in town to walk the ritual circuit of temples and bathing guts. But Vindravan has its darker, less loving side. It's known as the city of widows. Spend a little while observing the pilgrims coming in and out of the temples and you will see these widows, usually quite elderly women dressed in simple white and often begging for alms. Nobody can explain why this particular town attracts widows from all around India, and especially, it seems, from Bengal. There are as many as 6,000 of them in this place alone, and more in the surrounding countryside. Some come as genuine pilgrims to devote their remaining years to the service of Radhakrishna, but many others come here to escape from brutal family homes or have been flung out by their sons and daughters in law as unwanted baggage. This is one unusual aspect of Indian society that the government might prefer the outside world not to see. Despite all their genuine efforts to solve the problem. I meet up with the Delhi based NGO Maitri, which helps provide food and shelter for some of the widows. We visit a small temple where some of them are sitting cross legged on the courtyard floor while young volunteers slosh out piles of rice and dal. And then we sit inside as a smaller group tell their stories. Most had traveled here from West Bengal for some a journey of over a thousand Miles, often by themselves and many leaving behind friends and grandchildren. Saif alidas is just 60 years old and but she looks much older and her walk is lopsided. Her husband was a drunk, she tells me, who died 12 years ago after a fall. She had a daughter who died in hospital and a son who was murdered over a land dispute. After his death she was left entirely alone and fled to this place that she had heard was safe. Sondi is a tough 80 year old whose husband died young. She had to bring up her four children by herself. It's her daughter in law who effectively threw her out, saying it was her own husband who kept the family going. And as you have not got a husband, you will have to look after yourself. And so the stories keep coming. For many of these Bengalis, surrounded by Hindi speakers, it's as if they're living in a foreign land. Some are feisty and resentful, others broken and afraid. The authorities run four ashrams where some of the women are housed. But many need to beg to pay for rented accommodation. Some claim that the locals treat them quite roughly and it's only the pilgrims who are happy to win spiritual merit by giving them money. Gauri Dasi left the Bengal border with Bangladesh because of tensions in the area. In 1971, she arrived in Vindravan with her husband with whom she had three daughters. He then deserted them and all her daughters were married off when they reached the age of 10. So Gauri Dasi has been living alone in Vndravan for the past 15 years and feels pushed into dedicating her life to the devotion of Radha. She gets paid a few coins for singing devotional songs in the temples. She has become one of India's millions who have renounced the world to follow a spiritual path. But she is one of the reluctant ones. And many of these servants of God appear to live tragic lives on the streets of this romance drenched town. The government and pilgrims can help keep these refugees from family life away from starvation. But they are less able to quell injustices and age old superstitions in Bengal. Here, for some to even cast an eye on a widow is considered deeply unlucky.
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Anthony Denslow In Uttar Pradesh, there was a wine sale with a difference in China at the weekend when the former Hong Kong politician Henry Tang sold off part of his rare wine collection for some 4 million pounds. Although few Chinese possess a cellar to rival that of Mr. Tang, it's certainly true that in recent years they've developed a taste for the grape. This, of course, has not gone unnoticed by winemakers around the world keen to exploit a huge new market. Jim KE says that Australians are among those keen for a slice of the action.
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I spent longer than expected in the Gents toilet of the Innocent Bystander winery in Yarra Valley in southern Australia, because there, on rotation, the speakers play out Monty Python's 1970s sketch about Australian wine. Not having heard it before, I lingered to listen to Michael Palin lampoon Aussie wine as Chateau Chunda. As everyone in the industry knows all too keenly, the global wine trade floats on a sea of hyperbole and reputation decides whether a wine region sinks or sails. When I subsequently relay my toilet experience to Scott Howard, the Australian viticulturalist, he reacts with a smile and a familiar oh yeah, everyone in Oz knows about the Monty Python sketch. Now they can laugh at it. The fact that a reputable winery in southern Australia is playing Monty Python in its bathrooms is a sure sign of how confident the Australians now are that their global reputation has vastly improved since the days of Kangaroo and Chateau Chunda. And for one quite particular reason, global reputation is doubly important. For the Aussies, it's still a matter of giddy scale that as many people live in London, say, or New York, as in the entire continent, continental landmass of Australia, their capacity for wine production is extensive, but their domestic market severely limited. Fact is, Aussie wine producers need foreign markets, and so Australia flooded the world with mass produced reasonable wine at very reasonable prices and became very popular for it. But with Europe and the United States stumbling through recessions and financial crises, the strong market for Australian wine in these countries has weakened considerably. So now Aussie winemakers are turning their attentions elsewhere, to a country just discovering its taste for wine and very importantly, a country with a growing moneyed class keen on buying the good stuff. The country is China. Initially, China's sudden dramatic appetite for wine over the last few years was more a peacock display of status feathers, a desire to don the apparel of Western sophistication. The more expensive the better. A few years back, stories circulated of rich Chinese businessmen buying up top quality Bordeaux and mixing it with Coca Cola. These days, the appetite for wine in China grows ever greater, with discerning palates now joining the show offs to create a very lucrative market. The French have been quick off the mark, trading on their global reputation for sophisticated winemaking, and other regions are keen to follow suit. But the Aussies have a problem. Having sold a lot of reasonable mass produced wines to the world, Australia's reputation for producing Premium wines has been somewhat lost in the flood. And yet, of course, it is premium wines that China desires. It is no small irony that Michael Palin and Prince Charles were both in Australia in the same week recently. Palin, evidently now forgiven for his Chateau Chunda Monty Python sketch, was giving a sold out theater talk in Melbourne. Meanwhile, in front of the world's press, the Penfolds Winery welcome Prince Charles by opening a 1962 Kunawara Cabernet Calymna Shiraz, which normally sells for over US$4,000 a bottle, telling the world in no uncertain terms we make the premium stuff too. In fact, there are lots of premium fine wines coming out of Australian wineries. Shipments to China of Australian wine above the ten dollar a bottle mark rose 37% last year, exceeding for the first time Aussie exports to the United States. Chinese businessmen are even buying up vineyards here, whilst Aussie wineries are now looking into the possibility of growing grapes and making wine on mainland China. After all, they say, it's a big country with several regions and climates suitable for grape growing and looks destined to be the new upstart in the world of wine, a position once occupied by Australia itself. China is the once sleeping giant, kevin Lee, a wine expert working at Bimbajan Wines in the Hunter Valley, tells me, and as she awakes, the wine world will be shaken as much as a grapevine is by a mechanical harvester at picking time.
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That's Jim Carey. Now, Westerns aren't as popular as they once were in television. The glory days were the late 50s, when hardly an evening passed without cowboys and Indians, goodies and baddies, and the cavalry riding to the rescue. Subsequent years saw the imagination of the movie makers run riot. After spaghetti Westerns came the comedy, the science fiction and the space versions. They were making them in the communist Eastern European countries. They were the Austens, so called meat pie westerns too, these set in the Australian outback. But in most of these productions the cast was predominantly white, hardly a black cowboy to be seen. And this, as Safra's Mansoor now tells us, is not exactly a fair representation of what went on in the real life Wild west back in the later years of the 19th century.
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I'm standing outside a pale green clapboard house in Wichita, Kansas. I've driven six hours and I'm a little nervous because I'm about to meet one of the last great characters from the golden age of the movies. His name is Herb Jeffreys, or that, as we'll soon see, is at least one of his names. I'D first come across Jeffreys while researching the history of black cowboys. One in four cowboys in the Old west had been black, but the cowboy on the silver screen was invariably white. Which made the career of Herb Jeffries so unusual because he was known as the first black western screen star. In the 1930s, a time when black people were forced into segregated cinemas and their role in the Old west was being ignored by Westerns, Jeffreys did something remarkable. He decided he would give young black kids their own western hero. Jeffries, who had been a jazz singer, starred in films with titles like Harlem on the Prairie and Harlem on the Range. The films featured all black casts and Jeffries was their singing star. Once the cinemas became desegregated, Jeffries star waned. Today he's largely forgotten, but he's not dead. He's just moved to Kansas. The front door open and there to greet me was Jeffrey's wife, Savannah, along with a yapping one eyed poodle. Let me get her, said Savannah. She returned moments later and there he was, dressed in black shiny trousers, denim jacket and cream Stetson, with a red silk scarf wrapped around his neck. He looked exactly like what he was an aging matinee idol. He rolled his wheelchair towards me, clasped my hands and smiled broadly. Let me fix up breakfast, said Savannah as she placed mugs of coffee with raw milk and sausages on sticks on a plate. I looked around the living room. The place resembled a Herb Jefferies museum. There was a horse's saddle in one corner, awards on the mantelpiece and a statue of a pink flamingo, a reference to one of Jeffrey's most famous songs. On the walls were dusty film posters and stills from his old movies. If Herb Jeffries had just been a singer with Duke Ellington, that would have been remarkable enough. If he'd just been the first black western screen star, that would have been reason enough to travel six hours to meet him. But the reason I'd come to Kansas was because Herb Jeffries had become a black western star despite not being black. Yes, you heard that right. Jeffries was born Umberto Ballantino to an Irish mother and an Italian father. So you were the first black western film star, I said to Herb. I was, he said, looking surprised. It was then I realized just how much Jeffrey's mental powers had faded. His memory was a fog. Herb wasn't going to be able to answer my questions. He chewed on the sausages methodically and from some deep muscle memory of civility managed to ask if I wanted some more coffee. For reasons lost in time and Myth. Ballantino changed his name to Jeffreys after his stepfather and embraced a black identity. He did it partly to avoid anti Italian prejudice in Capone era Chicago, partly because he wanted to play jazz, and also he saw a niche and a chance for money and fame. He used Max Factor makeup to darken his skin and his commitment was so deep that everyone, including Savannah, and seemed to believe he actually was black. There'll be times when Herb and I go out and we get looks, prejudiced looks, Savannah told me. What kind of prejudice? I asked. Black. White, she replied. But you're both white, I said. Savannah looked hurt. Herb doesn't see skin colour, she said finally. Savannah is Herb's sixth wife, a former lifeguard turned plumber who married him when she was in her 40s and he was 90. She listed his past wives, one of whom went by the name of Tempest Storm. She was a stripper when they met and he turned her into an exotic dancer. She said. That's quite a journey, I agreed. In the background, a young Herb was singing, his rich bass spilling out of the speakers. You remember that, darling? Said Savannah. That's you singing. Herb said nothing. Herb Jeffries will be 100 this September and Savannah is planning a return to California to mark his centenary. My time was almost up. I asked Herb to sign a poster for Haarlem on the Range. He took a pen and slowly began to write his name. He paused and stared hard at the man on the poster. He looked deep in thought and for a second it seemed as if the
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fog had lifted Safra's Mansoor. And he'll have more on this in the Forgotten Black Cowboys. That's here on BBC Radio 4 tomorrow morning at 11 o'. Clock. There'll be more from me and more from our own correspondent, sir, on Saturday morning. Why don't you join us? Goodbye.