Archive for the ‘Culture’ Category

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Art as argument

Published by peter on 2009-07-01 in Anthropology, Argumentation, Art and Culture. 0 Comments

Can a work of visual art be an argument?  I believe the answer to this question is yes.  In this and in some future posts, I will give examples, drawn from Australian Aboriginal art and from pure mathematics.
In August 1963, the Yolgnu people of Yirrkala  (eastern Arnhem Land in Australia’s Northern Territory) petitioned the Australian Government for legal rights to traditional land.  The petition was in the form of two painted bark panels.  The argument for land rights was made in three ways — in English text, in Gumatj text, and in the surrounding art, which depicted the traditional relations between the Yolgnu people and their land.   It is important to note that the visual images are not mere decoration of the text, but a presentation of the same argument in a different language, a visual language.
Yirrkala Bark Petitions 1963-1
Yirrkala Bark Petition 1963-2
 
 
 
 
 
 
The artwork of the Yolngu Bark Petition (copied above) is a form of argument, for a claim asserting traditional rights to particular land.  The reason that the artwork is an argument derives from the general nature of traditional Australian Aboriginal art, which presents a diagrammatic or iconic description of a particular geographic region, identifying the landscape features of that region (eg, rivers, hills, etc) along with the dreamtime entities (animals, trees, spirits) who are believed to have created the region and may still inhabit it. (The “dreamtime” is the period of the earth’s creation.)    The art derives from stories of creation for the region, which are believed to have been handed down (orally and via artwork) to the current inhabitants from the original dreamtime spirits through all the intermediate generations of inhabitants.
Accordingly, the only people who have the necessary knowledge, and the necessary moral right, to create an artistic depiction of a region are those who have been the recipients of that region’s creation story.   In other words, the fact that the Yolngu people were able to draw this depiction of their region is itself evidence of their long-standing relationship to the specific land in question.   The existence of the art-work depicting the local landscape is thus an argument for their claim to ownership rights to that land.  (Note that the art work’s role as argument arises primarily from the special nature of the claim it supports;  the art is not, and could not easily be, an argument for any other kind of claim.)
In support of this position, I present some quotations, the first several as explanation for people unfamiliar with Australian aboriginal mythology and art.
Judith Ryan (1993, p. 50):

 The term “Dreaming” is difficult for us to comprehend because of its use as noun and adjective in imprecise and ungrammatical ways to refer to the creation period, conception site, totem, Ancestral being, ground of existence, and the notions of supernatural, eternal or uncreated.”

Jean-Hubert Martin (1993, p. 32):

One can more or less imagine what “Dreaming” is:  that link between the individual and his land, between the clan and its territory.   The paintings [of Aboriginal artists] show figured spaces representing spaces both physical and mental, but it is difficult to go much further than that.
Following Aboriginal explanations one can recognise and name the various elements in these paintings.  The thought structure, the references and the signifance of these words and fragments of speech – which reach us distorted by translation – still remain an enigma despite the valiant attempt to explain them in the ensuing texts.  A not inconsiderable difficulty is posed by the mystery surrounding certain rituals and their formal depiction.  And, one has to remember that what we see today of Aboriginal art is only that which we have been allowed to see.”

Ulrich Krempel (1993, p. 38) quotes  C. Anderson/F. Dussart (1988, p. 18), as follows:

When asked about their paintings, [Australian Aboriginal] artists usually respond that the painting “means” or is “my country”, that is, it is a depiction of the painter’s territory.  When queried further about the “Dreaming” story, the artist will often identify the main Ancestor depicted and perhaps the primary site at which the Ancestor undertook the actions portrayed in the painting.   It is possible for an outsider, especially if working in the local language, to gain further insight into the narrative of events described in the painting, but even then access to the different levels of meaning may be restricted.”

Three quotations from Horward Morphy [1991]:

From a Yolngu perspective, paintings are not so much a means of representing the ancestral past as one dimension of the ancestral past . . .” (page 292)
Yolngu art also provides a framework for ordering the relations between people, ancestors, and land.” (page 293)
Paintings [in Yolngu society] gain value and power through their incorporation in such a process [of cultural definition], through being integral to the way a system (of clan-based gerontocracy) is reproduced, and through being part of its ideological support.  Paintings gain power because they are controlled by powerful individuals, because they are used to discriminate between different areas of owned land, because they are used to mark status, to separate the initiated from the uninitiated and men from women.  Their use in sociopolitical contexts creates part of their value. However, their value is also conceptualized in other terms, in terms of their intrinsic properties.” (page 293)

Janien Schwarz (1999, pp. 56-57):

In the first section, I argue that an understanding of the Bark Petitions is inseparable from an understanding of Yolngu relations to land.  In Yolngu culture, the painting of designs is regarded as constructing an interface between the ground, its spiritual essence, and specific groups of people.  The designs on the Petition are inseparable from these associations, in particular from the geographic locations at which they originated during Creation or wangarr.  Putting the Petitions’ clan designs in a Yolngu cultural context reveals their strong artistic and political links to the Yolngu people and their land.  With mounting pressures on land use from outsiders, Yolngu people have disclosed their designs (and inferred connections to land) through the context of art and art exhibitions as a political means of laying claim to their country which is under threat by bauxite mining.  I present the Petitions as part of a larger history of Aboriginal people negotiating for land rights and cultural recognition through the production and presentation of painted barks and other objects of spiritual significance.  . . .  I contend that the painted motifs on the Bark Petitions merit interpretation as land claims and that, by extension, the paintings are a form of petition.”

References:
C. Anderson/F. Dussart: “Dreamings in Acrylic: Western Desert Art”.  Catalog for Exhibition:  Dreamings:  The Art of Aboriginal Australia. P. Sutton, Editor. Ringwood, Melbourne, 1988. p. 118.
Ulrich Krempel [1993]: “How does one read “Different” Pictures?  Our encounter with the aesthetic product of other cultures”, in Luthi and Lee, pp. 37-40.
Bernhard Luthi and Gary Lee (Editors) [1993]:   Aratjara:  Art of the First Australians. Exhibition Catalog. Dusseldorf, Germany: Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen.
Jean-Hubert Martin [1993]:  “A Delayed Communication”, in Luthi and Lee, pp. 32-35.
Horward Morphy [1991]:  Ancestral Connections:  Art and an Aboriginal System of Knowledge.  Chicago, IL, USA: University of Chicago Press.
Judith Ryan [1993]:  “Australian Aboriginal Art:  Otherness or Affinity?”, in Luthi and Lee, pp. 49-63.
Janien Schwarz [1999]: Beyond Familiar Territory: Dissertation: Decentering the Centre. An analysis of visual strategies in the art of Robert Smithson, Alfredo Jaar and the Bark Petitions of Yirrkala; and Studio Report: A Sculptural Response to Mapping, Mining, and Consumption.  PhD Thesis, Canberra School of Art, Australian National University, Canberra,  Australia.    Available from here.

Language and thought

Published by peter on 2009-06-27 in Anthropology, Culture and Human intelligence. 0 Comments

A very interesting essay by Lera Boroditsky on the relationship between language and thought.  Comparing languages and cognitive styles in different cultures, she concludes that the structure of a language may influence what we most attend to, and thus our modes of thinking.  (HT: AS)

Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like “right,” “left,” “forward,” and “back,” which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space. This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like “There’s an ant on your southeast leg” or “Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit.” One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is “Where are you going?” and the answer should be something like ” Southsoutheast, in the middle distance.” If you don’t know which way you’re facing, you can’t even get past “Hello.”
The result is a profound difference in navigational ability and spatial knowledge between speakers of languages that rely primarily on absolute reference frames (like Kuuk Thaayorre) and languages that rely on relative reference frames (like English). Simply put, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings. What enables them — in fact, forces them — to do this is their language. Having their attention trained in this way equips them to perform navigational feats once thought beyond human capabilities. Because space is such a fundamental domain of thought, differences in how people think about space don’t end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build other, more complex, more abstract representations. Representations of such things as time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality, and emotions have been shown to depend on how we think about space. So if the Kuuk Thaayorre think differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time? This is what my collaborator Alice Gaby and I came to Pormpuraaw to find out.
To test this idea, we gave people sets of pictures that showed some kind of temporal progression (e.g., pictures of a man aging, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. If you ask English speakers to do this, they’ll arrange the cards so that time proceeds from left to right. Hebrew speakers will tend to lay out the cards from right to left, showing that writing direction in a language plays a role. So what about folks like the Kuuk Thaayorre, who don’t use words like “left” and “right”? What will they do?
The Kuuk Thaayorre did not arrange the cards more often from left to right than from right to left, nor more toward or away from the body. But their arrangements were not random: there was a pattern, just a different one from that of English speakers. Instead of arranging time from left to right, they arranged it from east to west. That is, when they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body and so on. This was true even though we never told any of our subjects which direction they faced. The Kuuk Thaayorre not only knew that already (usually much better than I did), but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time.
People’s ideas of time differ across languages in other ways. For example, English speakers tend to talk about time using horizontal spatial metaphors (e.g., “The best is ahead of us,” “The worst is behind us”), whereas Mandarin speakers have a vertical metaphor for time (e.g., the next month is the “down month” and the last month is the “up month”). Mandarin speakers talk about time vertically more often than English speakers do, so do Mandarin speakers think about time vertically more often than English speakers do? Imagine this simple experiment. I stand next to you, point to a spot in space directly in front of you, and tell you, “This spot, here, is today. Where would you put yesterday? And where would you put tomorrow?” When English speakers are asked to do this, they nearly always point horizontally. But Mandarin speakers often point vertically, about seven or eight times more often than do English speakers.

POSTSCRIPT (ADDED 2010-08-29):  An article by Guy Desutscher in the NYT covering similar ground is here.

In defence of speaking PC

Published by peter on 2009-06-06 in Culture, History, Politics and Rhetoric. 0 Comments

Atlantic blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates has a profound post on “politically correct” speech, occasioned by the racist attacks from the right on Supreme Court nominee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor.  Excerpts:

This is a post about Sonia Sotomayor, and an extension of my defense of political correctness. Last week, I got away from my main point, which was that liberal political correctness is not so much an inability to see real facts, but a collective phase in the long process of learning how to talk to, and talk about, people who you don’t know. I am still stumbling through that phase (hence, “Well I’m not gay, but…”) It’s easy for people who aren’t interested in that process, to deride it. The [sic: They] get to stand on the sidelines and laugh, while ignoring the weight of history, and how it presses on us all.

. . .
This [Lindsay Graham’s remarks about Sotomayor, saying that if he made her comments he would be accused of racism] is the sort of logic that leads people to complain that there is no white history month. It’s my great nightmare that I, or my son, ever sound like that–smug, self-satisfied, unreflective,  whiny and narcissistic. It’s the sort of comment that betrays a man bereft of any deep interest in this country’s history. But if you’ve never had to grapple with who you are in relation to other people, if you’ve never had to worry much about courting people who aren’t like you, if you’ve never struggled with being politically correct, it’s exactly the sort of thing you’d say.
It is, in a word, ignorance.
 . . .
I’m a liberal, not so much because I doubt the free market, not so much because I believe in universal health care, not so much because of the environment, but  because of political correctness. As awkward as it may be, it at least demonstrates an attempt to see the world through another lense. This is a daunting task, and failing at it is so much more honorable than not even trying. Maybe you never quite get there, but it holds out a hope for your children, that unreflective, false symmetry does not. Conservatives got away with this game for years. The luxury of being the majority in a democracy is the right to act like other people don’t exist. But the world is changing around them and Birnam Wood is on the march.”

Ol' 57 Varieties

Published by peter on 2009-04-22 in Culture, Politics and Post-Industrial Nomads. 0 Comments

Yesterday, in a ceremony awarding prizes to a successful US Navy football team at the White House, President Obama greeted a fellow Hawaiian with a “hang loose” sign (aka the Shaka gesture), which was of course returned.

On the day before his Inauguration in January, an amateur video showed then-President-elect Barack Obama with his wife, greeting VIP guests at a concert held in his honour on the Mall, in Washington DC; many of these guests were black Americans, and Young Bazza spoke to them in a different accent, different tone of voice, and with different body language to his normal public persona. As a state congressman in Illinois, he once remarked to an aide that the folks he met upstate were just like his Kansan relatives.  As is well-known, he was a big-city urban politician from Chicago, of a type that can be found throughout the North-East and in some cities elsewhere – think The Wire (Baltimore), or think larger-than-life city politicians from TR, Fiorello La Guardia, Richard Daley, John Lindsay, Ed Koch, Tip O’Neill, through to Rudy Giuliani and Cory Booker.  He was also Editor of the Harvard Law Review, putting him into the intellectual A-league alongside people like Adlai Stevenson, Henry Kissenger, Sam Nunn and both Clintons.

Perhaps the key reason for Obama’s sudden rise to national prominence in the US is his ability to identify with people from all over the map, to make people feel that he is “one of us” in lots of different communities. In this he takes after “Ol’ 57 Varieties” himself, Teddy Roosevelt. Obama, of course, takes this to a new global level, with his family connections to Kenya and to Indonesia.

Two thoughts come to mind.  The first is that several successful politicians have had backgrounds or career experiences that enable them to connect with many different communities in their home countries:  Harold Wilson for example, who traveled the length and breadth of Britain in his 20s as a researcher for William Beveridge and for the Beveridge Commision; Eddison Zvobgo, another Harvard Law School graduate and Minister for Local Government in Robert Mugabe’s newly-independent Zimbabwe, who used the role to build a nationwide constituency; and Bob Hawke, Australian PM, who spent the main part of his career as first a researcher with and then President of the Australian Council of Trades Unions (the ACTU), a position which enabled him to travel widely, to meet people across the social spectrum, and to make connections internationally (eg, he negotiated with the USSR to allow greater Jewish emigration to Israel).

My second thought is that this provides us with another way to classify the various US Presidents.  Some Presidents, like Obama, are post-industrial nomads, either not from one specific place or from several: TR, Hoover, Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and Bush 41. Other Presidents are firmly perceived as being from one specific place: Lincoln, Taft, Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, FDR, Truman, JFK, LBJ, Carter, Clinton and Bush 43. It is interesting that the only nomads before Obama were Republicans.

In these times

Published by peter on 2009-04-17 in Consumer Behaviour, Culture and Economics. 0 Comments

You are a man of leisure, a sleepwalker, a mollusc.  The definitions vary according to the hour of the day, or the day or the week, but the meaning remains clear enough: you do not really feel cut out for living, for doing, for making; you want only to go on, to go on waiting; and to forget.
Such an outlook on life is generally not much appreciated in modern times:  all around you, all your life, you have seen the esteem in which action is held, and grand designs, and enthusiam:  man straining forward, man with his gaze fixed on the horizon, man looking straight ahead.  A clear gaze, a powerful chin, a confident swagger, stomach held in.  Staying power, initiative, strokes of brilliance, success:  all of these things map out the too transparent part of a too examplary existence, constitute the sacrosanct images of the struggle for life.  The white lies, the comforting illusions of all those who are running on the spot, sinking deeper into the mire, the lost illusions of the thousands left on society’s scrap heap, those who arrived too late, those who put their suitcase down on the pavement and sat on it to wipe their brow.  But you no longer need excuses, regrets, nostalgia.  You reject nothing, you refuse nothing. You have ceased going forward, but that is because you weren’t going forward anyway, you’re not setting off again, you have arrived, you can see no reason to go any further” (pages 142-143)

Reference:
Georges Perec [1967]:  A Man Asleep.  (Translation by Andrew Leak published 1990 in London, UK by The Harvill Press.)

Bach in Manchester

Published by peter on 2009-04-08 in Concerts, Culture, Music, Religion and Reviews. 0 Comments

js-bach
Last night I heard a thrilling performance in Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, performed by Manchester Camerata, the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge, and the choristers of Manchester Cathedral, under Nicholas Kraemer.   The two orchestras and choirs were arranged on the left and right sides of the stage, with the children’s chorus in between.  I have seen this work staged in many different ways, including with the choirs seated side-by-side, and even enmeshed together (overlayed is what a computer scientist would say; gemuddled might be the appropriate German word).   I think last night’s staging was probably the best I have heard, since the various parts were much more distinguishable than they are normally, and the stereophonic effects quite powerful.
The evangelist was James Gilchrist, whom I have heard in this part before, and he gave an intense and very dramatic performance, as close to a theatrical performance as a singer can get.   The other soloists – Matthew Hargreaves (as Christ), Elizabeth Weisberg, Clare Wilkinson, Mark Le Brocq and Stephen Loges – all gave solid, hall-filling and hall-stopping performances.
The continuo part was played on two small organs, a cello and a lute.   This is the first time I have heard a lute in this Passion – I guess finding a viola da gamba player is normally hard enough, let alone a lutist.  I was sitting close enough to hear the lute, played by Lynda Sayce, and it added a nice, somewhat bitter-sweet, edge to the overall sound.   I doubt this could be heard further back, though.   The lute, the cello, played by Jonathan Price, and one organ, played by Ashok Gupta, were physically located around the Evangelist, which had the effect of making the singer and continuo more of a single unit in the recitatives than is usual.  Often, the recitatives in the music of Bach seem a little out of place to me – neither quite speech nor quite song – and so putting the singer with the continuo created a mini-ensemble which had its own coherent logic.   I was sitting quite close to this group, and thus could see their playing and their co-ordination with one another, as well as hear each part well.   I was particularly impressed by Gupta’s confident playing.
The other organ, played by Christopher Stokes, was at the far rear of the stage, and I could hear it less well.  I suppose it was placed there to be near the walk-on soloists.   In the main, the voices of these soloists did not project so well last night, at least not to my position in the left front stalls, diagonally opposite and down stage from them.    (I expect the hall’s acoustics were not designed for projection in that way – most concert hall projection is designed to be up and out from the stage, rather than across and down stage).  Perhaps because of his strong voice, the only singer who stood out in this regard was Adam Drew (as Judas), who sang confidently and dramatically.
With a work of such great spiritual depth, I always feel that immediate applause is not appropriate.  We should sit, still and silent, for a few moments upon completion, to meditate on the meaning of what we have just heard. I’ve never met an audience that agrees with me, however, and last night was no exception.
Of the dozen or so times I have heard this Passion, across three continents, last night’s superb performance was one of the best two or three.

Earlier posts on music are here.

Protagonist vs. Antagonist

Published by peter on 2009-04-02 in Argumentation, Culture and Rhetoric. 0 Comments

A letter in the latest London Review of Books describes the continuation in modern Italy of an old Roman tradition of protagonist and antagonist choruses:

Reading that in the ancient Roman play Octavia, ‘unusually, there are two chorus groups, one pro-Octavia and the other pro-Poppaea,’ I was immediately reminded of a remarkable broadcast I saw recently on Italian television (LRB, 26 February). I was in a hotel in Venice at the time, trawling through the 57 channels in search of some coverage of the Milan soccer derby. It transpired that Italian football, just like its English counterpart, has been sold down the river to Sky; since my hotel did not subscribe, live coverage was unavailable.
I did, however, stumble across a channel that was attempting to give the best possible live coverage without actually showing any of the action. They had a camera at the stadium, but it was trained away from the pitch, on two commentators who were describing the play. The point of it was that one man was an Inter fan, and the other supported AC; as each team gained possession of the ball, their man picked up the commentary (and the other was supposed to stop, though he rarely did). My first thought was that this had to be the lamest and most desperate attempt to cover the game imaginable. I was about to turn the thing off and head out into the night, but something stayed my finger. It turned out to be the best piece of entertainment I’ve seen for years. I realised later that it was drawing on an ancient Italian dramatic tradition. If the two choruses in Octavia came even close to the hilarious interplay the two commentators produced when AC Milan scored, only for the goal to be disallowed, then I think the play is definitely worth reviving.” (Letter from Robert Heath)

Minority politics

Published by peter on 2009-03-31 in Africa, Culture, History and Politics. 0 Comments

The death this weekend of Janet Jagan (1920-2009), former President of Guyana (1997-1999), is a reminder that the election of President Barack Obama in the USA last November was not the first time that a democracy has elected a national leader who was a member of an ethnic minority.  Born Janet Rosenberg, Janet Jagan was a ruthless Chicago pol, although far to the left of Young Bazza.  Indeed, since no ethnic group in Guyana has a majority, one could argue that every leader which that country has elected democratically (which, sadly, is not all of Guyana’s leaders) has been an example of a majority electing a leader from a minority.  Elsewhere in South America, Alberto Fujimori, a Peruvian of Japanese descent, was three times elected President of Peru from 1990-2000.

And there are other examples, if one widens the definition of ethnicity:  Britain currently has a Scottish-born Prime Minister, its second Scottish-educated PM in succession, and disproportionately many Scots Cabinet Ministers.   Both Britain and Australia have in the past elected as leaders people whose first language was not English, and both did so around the same time:  Lloyd George in Britain (PM 1916-1922), and Billy Hughes in Australia (PM 1915-1923), were second-language speakers of English, both having Welsh as their mother-tongue.  Australia’s current Deputy Prime Minister (and this week again Acting PM), Julia Gillard, is also Welsh-born.   One of Australia’s most influential politicians in its first two decades, and founder of Canberra as the national capitol, was King O’Malley (1858-1953), who was almost certainly born in the USA.  Both Australia and New Zealand had several Cabinet Ministers in their first decades born in the other country.  And the Australian state of New South Wales has had a Premier born in Hungary (Nick Greiner, Premier 1988-1992), one born in the USA (Kristina Keneally, Premier 2009-2011), and one whose first language was Armenian (Gladys Berejiklian, Premier 2017- ).  Sydney has had a Lord Mayor born in Poland (Leo Port, 1975-1978).  Australia currently has a Federal Minister for Finance born in Belgium (Mathias Cormann).

And Britain, as perhaps befits a former colonial power, has had a succession of Cabinet ministers from abroad (although not all of these have been elected).  Lloyd George offered a position in his cabinet during WW I to American businessman, Herbert Hoover (who declined the post).  In both world wars, the British PM established an Imperial War Cabinet, in which the dominions were invited to be represented, although not all took up the invitation.  In recent years, Britons have seen Ministers who were born or raised in Australia (Patricia Hewitt), Dominica (Baroness Patricia Scotland), Ghana (Paul Boateng), Guyana (Baroness Valerie Amos), Iraq (Ara Darzi, although of Armenian descent), Kenya & South Africa (Peter Hain), and Yemen (Keith Vaz).   Malcolm Rifkind, Defence Minister and Foreign Minister under John Major (1992-1997), spent part of his early adult life in Africa (in Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia), as Major himself did also (in Nigeria).

“Only in America!”, as Yogi Berra might say.

POSTSCRIPT:  Writing this, I forgot Bill Skate, Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea from 1997-1999; Julius Chan, Prime Minister 1980-1982 and 1994-1997; and Peter O’Neill, Primer Minister since 2011.  All three men are of mixed race ancestry.   And there was also Paul Berenger, Prime Minister of Mauritius from 2003-2005, a Christian leader in a majority Hindu nation, and Guy Scott, briefly President of Zambia (2014-2015).  These have been the only Caucasian leaders of African nations post Independence or majority rule.

POSTSCRIPT 2 [2012-03-14]:  And one could also mention the leaders of various places who were members of religious minorities, and whose elections sometimes excited controversy:  JFK in the USA is the most famous.  Before him, we had various Jewish premiers in predominantly Christian or gentile dominions:  Julius Vogel (PM of New Zealand, 1873-1875), Vaiben Solomon (Premier, South Australia, 1899), Francis Bell (PM, New Zealand, 1925), David Marshall (Initial Chief Minister, Singapore, 1954-1956), Roy Welensky (PM, Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland,  1956-1963), and John Key (PM, New Zealand, 2008-2016).

POSTSCRIPT 3 [2024-07-31]: Perhaps this is the place to mention Mr Stuart Comberbach, a white Zimbabwean diplomat, who has been a senior diplomat with the governments of successively Rhodesia, Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, and Zimbabwe since 1974. He has previously been the Zimbabwean ambassador to Italy and to Japan, and is currently the country’s ambassador to various UN agencies in Geneva. His first overseas posting, under the rebel Rhodesian Government of Ian Smith, was as leader of a representative trade office in Gabon from 1974 to 1979. Who knew Rhodesia had enough trade with Gabon to justify a permanent trade mission there?

And here is a list of people who served in more than one Parliament or Assembly.