The Australian Department of Defence has been accused of ignoring the religious beliefs of Australian soldiers killed in World War I currently being re-buried, by assuming they were all Christians. This assumption is a very odd one for the DoD to make, given that the first Australian-born commander of Australian troops, General Sir John Monash, in command of all Australian forces by the end of that war, promoted to General in the field, and knighted on the battlefield (the first such elevation by a British monarch in 200 years), was Jewish. I think the DoD needs to make a change in its burial policy and officially apologize to the affected families.
Archive for the ‘History’ Category
Page 11 of 16
Memories of underdevelopment
Here is news from The Times about Robert Mugabe’s physiology. Apparently, he nods off to sleep every few minutes, even when meeting foreign visitors. (HT: Normblog)
The Times article mentions the two main contenders for the leadership of ZANU (PF) following Bob’s always-imminently-predicted-but-never-quite-arriving retirement: Emmerson Mnangagwa and Solomon Mujuru. One would think that the Zimbabwean Vice-President, Joice Mujuru, who is likewise a ZANU (PF) nomenklatura, would perhaps also be a contender, but she is married to Solomon, so he takes precedence. She is more famous in Zimbabwe under her chimurenga name, Teurai Ropa (or Spill-Blood) Nhongo, and for leading a team of guerrilla fighters into battle while pregnant. Because she joined the struggle (for Independence) in her teens, she did not finish high-school; to her great personal credit, she completed her O-levels after Independence and while a Cabinet Minister. In the year she did O-level English, a novel by George Orwell was on the syllabus, leading to her infamous stage whisper at the official opening by then Prime Minister Robert Mugabe of the Zimbabwe Institute for Development Studies; when the VIPs were led to a different (and much better) buffet than that provided for the other people present, she was heard by all to exclaim, “But this is just like Animal Farm!”
Her husband also had a loud voice. When I first met him, he was calling himself Rex Nhongo, and I did not then know what he looked like. A mutual friend introduced us using only first names as we happened upon each other buying groceries one evening after work in Twelve Gods, a foodstore and delicatessen in the low-density (ie, formerly whites-only) suburbs of Salisbury (as it then was). Making conversation while we stood in the queue, I asked, “And what do you do for a living, Rex?” In a booming voice which scared the living daylights out of the white customers in the shop, he replied, “Oh, I’m Commander-in-Chief of the Army, son!” Whether intended or not, this statement got the three of us to the front of the queue immediately. The mutual friend who introduced us is now himself a Cabinet Minister, one of the MDC contingent in Zimbabwe’s Cohabitation Government.
UPDATE [2011-09-12]: In August 2011, Rex Nhongo’s body was found after a fire destroyed his farmhouse. He was 62, and may have been killed or prevented from moving prior to the fire. The Guardian obituary is here.
FOOTNOTE:
Note that in maShona custom, a person may be given or may adopt different names over their life, and may prefer different names at different times or for different purposes. In addition, for reasons of security during the liberation struggle many people adopted noms de guerre, so-called chimurenga names.
Copy me, I'm on my way out
Cosma Shalizi at Three-Toed Sloth cannot understand why people desire original works of visual art rather than printed reproductions, especially when we’ve been buying printed books rather than manuscript codexes for centuries now. He presents – and demolishes too quickly, I believe – some potential reasons for this. I am very surprised by his view, but perhaps its the sheltered life I lead.
First, let me say as a computer scientist, that a map is not the territory. It is easy to confuse a representation of some object with that object itself, and the people now singing the praises for e-books seem to be doing just that. Au contraire, I believe that hard, physical books will continue to be purchased and kept yet for hundreds of years, and possibly many more years, because books are souvenirs of our experience of reading them. The same is true of works of visual art. If you have had some hand in the commissioning, the creation (for example, as subject of the artwork or as patron of the artist), or the selection and purchase of a work of art, you want the work of art itself, not a copy, to remind yourself of that experience.
Second, let me say as a former mathematician, that printed reproductions of artworks are projections onto 2 dimensions of 3-dimensional objects. By definition, such projections will lose something. If you think that what is lost thereby in visual art is unimportant, as Cosma seems to, then you’ve not been looking very closely at real paintings or drawings. There are too many examples to recount, so let me just point to: the brush-strokes in JMW Turner’s seascapes, which manifest and convey the torment of the scenes (and that of the painter); or the drip effects in Jackson Pollock’s action paintings, which likewise manifest and convey the energy of the creation process; or the careful, visible brushwork of the leaves and blades of grass in Pre-Raphaelite art or in the art of the Yangzhou painters of the early Qing Dynasty; or the brush-strokes in Chinese and Japanese calligraphy. These effects are either invisible or can barely be seen in printed reproductions. It is also worth noting that Chinese art has, for hundreds of years, supported “factory production” of 3-D paintings, using lesser-skilled artists to make approved copies of paintings by famous artists, usually under the direct, personal supervision of the famous artist him or herself; that these copies are purchased rather than printed reproductions indicates that the 3-D object has qualities perceived to be lacking in any 2-D print.
Third, let me say as a former statistician, that it seems to be easy for people familiar with Andrei Kolmogorov’s theory of complexity to imagine they have represented faithfully some object, when all they have captured is its surface form (its syntax). As I have argued before, the canonical example used in discussions of algorithmic complexity is Kazimir Malevich’s painting Black Square, which is alleged to be easy to reproduce with an algorithm such as:
Paint a pixel of black in each pixel throughout the square.
At best what this algorithm generates is a copy not of the 3-dimensional painting itself, but of a 2-dimensional projection of it. But even were it to recreate the 3-D object, such an algorithm ignores the meaning of the painting and the historical context of its creation – in linguistic terms, its semantics (or its use-context-independent meaning) and its pragmatics (its use-context-dependent meaning). Both these aspects are immensely important to understanding and appreciating the work, and for explaining why it appeared when it did and not before, and understanding its reception and influence. As I noted before, one can just about imagine the 18th-century Welsh landscape painter Thomas Jones eventually creating something similar to Black Square, since he painted contemplative, Zen-like depictions of seemingly-featureless Neapolitan walls (such as A Wall in Naples, pictured above), but no other artist before Malevich.
How is this relevant? Well, once you’ve seen and admired Malevich’s painting, no printed reproduction would satisfy you for an instant.
Finally, paintings – even when traditional, representational art – are best understood, not as representations of objects or scenes or feelings or indeed of anything at all, but as attempts at solutions to problems in painting. Most solutions fail, so the artist abandons that attempt, and tries again. In the meantime, the abandoned partial solution may provide pleasure and joy (or other responses) to those who view it, and to those who seek to emulate the methods of its painting which a careful study of it may disclose. (The thoughts of Marion Milner are relevant here, especially regarding the quaint idea that artists make art to express some pre-existing emotion.)
FOOTNOTE: The post title is a reference to an Ambitious Lovers song.
The second time as farce
Rory Stewart, in his book about walking across Afghanistan, has this to say about the post-colonial cadres working for the UN and other international agencies in developing countries:
Critics have accused this new breed of administrators of neo-colonialism. But in fact their approach is not that of a nineteenth-century colonial officer. Colonial administrations may have been racist and exploitative but they did at least work seriously at the business of understanding the people they were governing. They recruited people prepared to spend their entire careers in dangerous provinces of a single alien nation. They invested in teaching administrators and military officers the local language. They established effective departments of state, trained a local elite and continued the countless academic studies of their subjects through institutes and museums, royal geographical societies and royal botanical gardens. They balanced the local budget and generated fiscal revenue because if they didn’t their home government would rarely bail them out. If they failed to govern fairly, the population would mutiny.
Post-conflict experts have got the prestige without the effort or stigma of imperialism. Their implicit denial of the difference between cultures is the new mass brand of international intervention. Their policy fails but no one notices. There are no credible monitoring bodies and there is no one to take formal responsibility. Individual offices are never in any one place and rarely in one organization long enough to be adequately assessed. The colonial enterprise could be judged by the security or revenue it delivered, but neo-colonialists have no such performance criteria. In fact their very uselessness benefits them. By avoiding any serious action or judgement they, unlike their colonial predecessors, are able to escape accusations of racism, exploitation or oppression.
Reference:
Rory Stewart [2004]: The Places in Between. London, UK: Picador, p.272, footnote #59.
Film: The New World
I am a great fan of the films of Terence Malick, and so I was delighted to read John Patterson’s recent article proclaiming Malick’s The New World as the single film masterpiece of the decade just ending.
It may seem like an exaggeration, but with The New World cinema has reached its culmination, its apotheosis. It is both ancient and modern, cinema at its purest and most organic, its simplest and most refined, made with much the same tools as were available in the infancy of the form a century ago to the Lumières, to Griffith and Murnau. Barring a few adjustments for modernity – colour, sound, developments in editing, a hyper-cine-literate audience – it could conceivably have been made 80 years ago (like Murnau and Flaherty’s Tabu). This is why, I believe, when all the middlebrow Oscar-dross of our time has eroded away to its constituent molecules of celluloid, The New World will stand tall, isolated and magnificent, like Kubrick’s black monolith. Anything else that survives from now till then will by comparison probably resemble 2001’s grunting apes. To quote, simultaneously, Godard’s Pierrot le Fou and primitivist auteur Sam Fuller – whose 1957 western Run of the Arrow is a sort of thematic inbred bastard cousin of The New World – Malick is seeking “in a word: emotion!”
Continue reading ‘Film: The New World’
Political activists of renown
Recently, I have listed the teachers and writers who have influenced me, along with the managers whom I admire. I now list the politicians and political activists whom I admire. Some of these led conventional political careers, others were community organizers or single-issue advocates, and yet others were spies, or were accused of being such.
Edmund Campion, Robert Persons, Robert Southwell, Thomas Aikenhead, Tom Paine, Abe Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Solomon Plaatje, Franklin Roosevelt, Ted Theodore, John Curtin, Doc Evatt, Richard Sorge, Imre Nagy, Zhou Enlai, Milada Horakova, Bram Fischer, Salvador Allende Gossens, Lyndon Johnson, Donal Lamont, Rudolf Margolius, Gough Whitlam, Helen Suzman, Andrei Sakharov, Alexander Dubcek, Nelson Mandela, Zhao Ziyang, Martin Luther King Jr, Zdenek Mlynar, Mikhail Gorbachev, Vaclav Havel, Michael Schneider, Bella Subbotovskaya, Paul Keating, Vadim Delone, Jes Albert Möller, Barack Obama and Rory Stewart.
Australia (5), Czechoslovakia (5), and South Africa (5) have produced more than their per capita share of political heroes, it would seem, but the distribution no doubt reflects my reading and interests. Of course, it hardly needs to be said that I do not necessarily agree with any or all the views these people have expressed or hold, nor necessarily support all their actions.
Heroes: the underground railroad in Rhodesia
Talking about Zimbabwean history reminded me that there are some unsung heroes of Zimbabwe’s struggle for majority rule whom I wish to salute. These are the people who, rejecting the racist policies of the Rhodesian Front government, organized an illegal underground railroad to secretly transport black and white resisters across the border, mostly to Botswana and Zambia. The whites transported were usually resisting military conscription to fight in a war they disagreed with, a war in support of a cause they believed immoral.
I knew a couple of these railwaymen: AP (“Knotty”) Knottenbelt, who had been headmaster of Fletcher High School, a state boarding school for black boys, from where he resigned in 1969 rather than raise a Rhodesian flag; he is said to have tied the flag to the back of his car and driven it through the dust of the schoolyard in front of the assembled students before hoisting it. He later taught at the University of Zimbabwe, and the Mugabe Government appointed him to the board of the Posts and Telecommunications Corporation after Independence. Another railwayman was his bridge partner, Nick Holman (1919-2002), father of the (now former) Financial Times Africa Editor, Michael Holman. These men and their collaborators deserve praise and admiration for their great personal courage in support of a non-racial society.
One of those transported by this railroad was the late Christopher Lewis, son, grandson, and great-grandson of Rhodes Scholars. His father, Charles Patrick Jameson (“Pat”) Lewis (d. 1975) was a lawyer in partnership with Hardwicke Holderness MP (1915-2007), and Chairman from 1961-1969 of the Constitutional Council established under the 1961 Rhodesian constitution; Christopher Lewis’s paternal great-grandfather Vernon Lewis CMG (d. 1950), was a Rhodes Scholar later appointed in 1950 Chief Justice of Southern Rhodesia (being succeeded on his death the same year by Sir Robert Tredgold); Vernon Lewis was married to Ethel Amy Jameson, daughter of Leander Starr Jameson (1853-1917), Prime Minister of the Cape Colony between 1904-1908, who had led a failed attack against the Transvaal in 1895-1896 (later called the Jameson Raid). Another son of Vernon Lewis, John Vernon Radcliffe Lewis (1917-?), was also a Rhodesian and Zimbabwean judge.
Christopher Lewis’s maternal grandfather Leonard Ray Morgan (1894-1967), also a Rhodes Scholar, was a lifelong friend of Robert Graves whom he met at Oxford, and was Permanent Secretary for Education in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland; and Christopher’s uncle by marriage was the chiShona linguist, George Fortune (1915-2012). Ian Hancock’s interesting history of liberal white opposition to the racist policies of the Rhodesia Front is dedicated to the memory of Pat Lewis. Christopher’s sister Annette was married to lawyer Anthony Eastwood (1940-2015), whose first wife Ruth Fischer (later Ruth Fischer-Rice) (b. 1939) was the daughter of Bram Fischer (1908-1975), lead defence counsel at the Rivonia Trial of Nelson Mandela and others. Bram Fischer was the son of a Judge-President of the Orange Free State and grandson of the only Prime Minister of the Orange River Colony, Abraham Fischer (Prime Minister 1907-1910); his wife Molly was a niece of Jan Smuts.
Well before the fall of communism, Anthony Eastwood once told me of visiting the USSR as an honoured guest and asking, as a lawyer, if he could meet a fellow lawyer. The next day he was ushered into a meeting with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the USSR.
A wonderfully well-written but very sad memoir by Hayden Eastwood, son of Anthony and Annette Eastwood, of his upbringing was published in 2018.
References:
Hayden Eastwood [2018]: Like Sodium in Water: A Memoir of Home and Heartache. Cape Town, RSA: Jonathan Ball.
Ian Hancock [1984]: White Liberals, Moderates and Radicals in Rhodesia 1953-1980. New York, USA: St Martin’s Press.
Lancaster bombing
This week marks the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Lancaster House Agreement between the British Government and the major political forces in Zimbabwe, an agreement which led to Zimbabwe momentarily becoming – for the first time in its history – a British colony.
Before 1979, Rhodesia had initially been governed from the first European settlement in 1890 as a concession of the British South African Company* (advised from 1898 to 1923 by a semi-elected council), and then from 1923 as a self-governing British territory with dominion-like status. From 1898 onwards the franchise, as in other British-controlled territories in Southern Africa starting in 1836, was a conditional one – in order to vote one had to satisfy certain conditions: age, gender, literacy, education, income, and property-ownership. These conditions were biased against non-whites, but did not exclude them completely, as I explained here. Because the franchise was not race-based, white Rhodesians like Ian Smith could delude sympathetic foreigners, and themselves, that they were running a democratic and non-racial government.
Next, the Literature Nobel
Robert Draper has an interesting essay in GQ on Barack Obama the writer. As I noted before, Obama shares this characteristic with Teddy Roosevelt (and with no other US President). And like TR and JFK, Bam is also a cosmopolitan urbanite.
“I think he sees the world through a writer’s eye,” says senior White House adviser and former Chicago journalist David Axelrod. “I’ve always appreciated about him his ability to participate in a scene and also reflect on it. I mean, I remember when we were meeting clandestinely with the guys who were vetting the vice presidential candidates. There was this courtly southern gentleman who was doing the vetting. The president said to me, ‘This whole scene’s right out of a Grisham novel.’
“I also have to say, one of the great thrills is to watch him work on a speech. It’s not just the content—he’s very focused on that—but more than anyone I’ve ever worked with, he’s focused on the rhythm of the words. Like, he’ll invert words. He’ll say, ‘I need a one-beat word here.’ There’s no question who the best writer in the [speech-writing] group is.”
Winston Churchill won the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1953, after writing — or perhaps supervising the writing of — his History of the English Speaking Peoples), so there’s hope yet for Bam’s next Nobel.
Two Nations
Ian Jack, writing in the UK Guardian today, describes the southern bias of the British Conservative Party leadership, particularly when contrasted with the present British Labour Party Cabinet:
To historians, the interesting thing may be that for 13 years spanning the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries Britain was ruled by a party born inside and chiefly supported by the Northern Metaphor, whose second prime minister wore so many of its qualities. Look at the constituency names attached to the members of its cabinet: South Shields, Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, Blackburn, Normanton, Leigh, Pontefract, Edinburgh South West. Out of its 20 members elected to parliament, 13 have seats north of the Trent.
The shadow cabinet tells a different story: Arundel and South Downs, Chesham and Amersham, Surrey Heath, Beaconsfield, South Cambridgeshire, Chipping Barnet, Havant. Twenty of 28 members have seats in southern England. England north of Birmingham is represented by George Osborne (Hatton in Cheshire) and William Hague (Richmond, North Yorkshire).
Jack also quotes Australian journalist Donald Horne (Disclosure: whom I once shared an evening in a bar with), writing in 1969 about Britain’s competing metaphors:
In the Northern Metaphor, Britain is “pragmatic, empirical, calculating, Puritan, bourgeois, enterprising, adventurous, scientific, serious, and believes in struggle”. In the Southern Metaphor, Britain is “romantic, illogical, muddled, divinely lucky, Anglican, aristocratic, traditional, frivolous, and believes in order and tradition”. The winner in this contest was decided at least a century ago when, in Horne’s words, Britons decided it wasn’t “for what they did but for what they were that destiny had rewarded them so lavishly”.