Arrivals

When I walked out of Dakar airport carrying the camera (the successor to the PD150, whatever that was) in its big padded bag, there was a police line to the right of the entrance holding back a large and very animated crowd.   Someone was drumming, vigorously.   It was 2 o’clock in the morning.   People had come to greet the football team that boarded our flight from London when we’d landed in Casablanca a few hours previously.   We’d been electrified by the arrival of these joyful young men, all still in their kit, who’d trod on each other’s boots in the narrow aisle of the plane and waved a big silver trophy above our jaded heads.   

The team was about to walk out to mass jubilation, but another passenger, older, rather less fit, and in the middle of a heaving throng outside the terminal, was registering the absence of anything that looked like the hotel transport.   Don’t worry, Ms Morgan, the emails had said; we’ll be there.   Maybe the hotel driver had joined the celebrations.

As I walked through the crowd towards the taxi rank on the other side of the road, someone stepped up and took hold of the camera bag.   I must have shouted, because the young man looked me in the eye and said, somewhat wryly, ‘C’est l’Afrique, madame’.   And since it was l’Afrique, he helped me carry everything to a taxi, and the camera went into the boot – which was a mistake.

Fee is agreed; driver inches forward, headlights illuminating people crossing in front of his car from 45 different directions all at once.   Twenty seconds later, still in the hurly-burly, driver stops the car and gets out.   There’s a structure that looks like a large cage to our right; driver bashes the mesh; young man who’d been asleep on the floor leaps up, instantly ready to do what’s required.   Turns out that this empire of tyres, standing around in piles in the darkness, is where you can get air put in your own tyres, and we do. 

Inch away again, and eventually we join a highway that’s empty of other traffic.   I remember seeing it curve out ahead of us, beige-coloured under tall and intermittent sodium lights, appearing to be suspended in darkness.   I notice this at the very moment the driver says he’s been reconsidering the fee he proposed sixteen minutes or so previously, and he’s decided it isn’t enough for the job in hand.   Which hasn’t changed in those sixteen minutes.   

I have no idea who this driver is; we’re skating along on possibly dodgy tyres; it’s 3am; and to left and right of the highway nothing is visible, but for some reason I’m making a vigorous argument about the morality of tearing up a contract you yourself have only just proposed, and then I hear something banging.   It’s the lid of the boot, which is bouncing up and down.   Did I mention that the camera was in the boot?

I’m shouting for the second time that night, but we don’t stop; instead we’re taking a right turn off the highway, onto a sand road, into the darkness.   Okay, I’m thinking (in my madness), maybe the driver is planning to take the camera in lieu of an extra fee.   But I’m also thinking (in a rather incoherent way), can there really be much of a market in Dakar for big old tape cameras?   People mostly want whizzy new digital cameras (which is what the production company had intended for this shoot, by the way; only their first choice as director, a young man who was going to shoot, download, and I don’t know, maybe edit in his hotel room at night, had got another offer, and pulled out.   Maybe it had dawned on him that shooting in Wolof without actually speaking Wolof might make editing on the run a bit tricky, however fly he was with the data wrangling.   Am I sounding jaundiced?   Like a member of what I see is being called the Digitally Left Behind Community….?   Anyway, I was able to edit, in a Dorset fastness, with maestro Duncan Harris: in two weeks we produced a number of little jewels, all impeccably sub-titled…but I’d guess we did some damage to the production fee…).

3.15am; we’re turning left onto a road that runs parallel to the highway, and there’s a row of low-rise buildings coming up, none of which is lit.   One of these buildings, however, five storeys, narrow and stone-fronted, is the hotel, and someone opens the door.  The camera bag and I are gratefully shown up to a room on the top floor.   Except that it’s not a room – it’s the VIP suite, so there’s a diwan with sofas and small palm trees, what appears to be a fully functional kitchen, and several bedrooms with sheikh-sized beds.   Every surface seems to be made of marble, and the spots — close relatives of the lighting on the highway — bounce glare round every room.   There are no tea-bags in the kitchen.   ‘But but but’, I want to say, ungrateful soul that I’ve so rapidly become; but it’s 4am, and the people one could say ‘but but’ to have gone back to bed.

Open the iPad.   Google tells me someone in Dakar is trying to access my account.   To protect my security, which it knows matters more to me than anything in the world, it will prevent this person opening my Gmail, and over and over again, that’s what it does.   Bully for Google.    How does that Blake poem end?   ‘Bound and weary, I thought best/To slump upon my mother’s breast.’   No mother – just a sheikhly bed in the dawn light…

Apologies for making such a song and dance about one little arrival.   Was I trying to find a safe space in a war zone?   I was not.   Was I about to shoot something that might change the world?   I was not.   The job was to shoot a large number of short films on family planning matters for the new comms director of a large NGO.    The shoot, translate and edit schedule was tight.    A production company had to be found in Dakar that would transfer every day’s tapes onto DVD so a translator could work with me at the end of the shoot to transcribe and time-code the Wolof translations. 

When I think now how much was involved in that shoot, I’m amazed.   But it all got done, and of course I loved it.   The morning after The Arrival, I got myself moved down to a comfortable room on the first floor that looked out on the row of villas behind the hotel.  When I got up early each morning, I’d see the 12- or 13-year old maid of one of the households darting around the narrow sandy street, already busy with errands, or maybe connecting with friends before her household woke up.   A few years previously I’d co-written, for Plan West Africa, a report called Silent Suffering that included accounts of young girls being trafficked to work in West African cities (sometimes, in fact, by their parents – if things went well, a girl would earn enough to buy some of the large dowry her future husband’s family would expect) – so of course, as you can see, I assumed I knew everything about this particular young girl.   I loved walking in the area behind the hotel in the early evening, when people sat out in the pearly light or strolled around in the cooler air.   Plus, when I’d stopped feeling sorry for myself, I’d remembered that Google could send a code to my phone – or maybe one of the smart young people in the hotel reception had reminded me that this was how it worked – so I was back on-line.

The hotel turned out to have been built by a former mayor of Dakar (all that marble had to have been paid for somehow….).   He’d stand behind reception in the early morning, in his red braces, and collect the laundry for the day; after I’d learned who he was, it felt surreal to be handing one’s sweaty shirts to the former mayor of Dakar.   Why was I laundering shirts anyway?   I imagine I’d packed very lightly, since I’d have had to take the batteries, the tapes, the sound-gear, the lap-top for the translations….  Those translations….  The laptop turned out to have a sound problem.   The poor translator had to hold her head right down close to the speakers, and sometimes even lip-read, as she – heroically, I think — made sense of a tremendous sequence of women discussing birth control and sexual health on a veranda in a village outside Dakar.   Did one woman really use a plastic penis to show the others how a condom went on?   I think she did.   It was a riotous morning, and it was both exhausting and thrilling to move amongst these vocal, laughing, occasionally embarrassed women, stumbling over shoes and feet and children and bags to get the shots and the sound.   Afterwards we sat on a mat in a village house, and ate a wonderful chicken and rice dish from a big platter – Chicken Yassa, it was called, and when I got back to London I made it, but it just didn’t have the pzazz.

On my last day in Dakar the translator and I finished around 2pm – probably having failed yet again to prise a sandwich out of the hotel kitchen, which had always just closed – so I was able to hail a cab and ask the driver to take me around the city.   Okay, it had been impossible to miss the African Renaissance Monument  (this piece gives a sense of its scale; this is a more nuanced discussion of its origins).   But I hadn’t really seen the city, apart from noticing as we rushed through (this was in 2013) that the streets and pavements were peculiarly empty, as if they’d been shorn of people.   This piece  describes why: Mayor Khalifa Sall was busy driving street vendors and market stalls off the pavements and out of the city (as you all know, there’s a whole academic literature about these periodic attempts in cities around the world to force informal traders to pay rent and taxes.   When I tried to find out what’s happening in Dakar now, I stumbled on this piece of video that to my eyes shows an awful lot of new buildings and smart cars and not many informal traders.   However, the only comment beneath it (maybe from an avatar of ex-mayor Khalifa Sall) is enraged: ‘What is the mayor doing?   The capital is still being invaded – it’s total anarchy!   Disgusting!’)   

The taxi driver took me out towards the coast; for an unbelievable four centuries (four centuries!), Africans had been forced off its shores into slave ships (there’s a really interesting reflection on this by Dalla Malé Fofana here). We drove past big villas behind high walls; when I asked the driver who owned them, he said, ‘Thieves’.   He stopped the taxi in a car-park with a view of the sea, and as we sat there, a big black Merc screeched in – doing wheelies, really.   It came to a halt, and we could hear loud thumping music; but almost immediately a group of young men appeared, in robes and beads and locks, looking as if they’d been walking and chanting for ever; I know nothing, but I think they must have been Sufi Mourides.   They didn’t hesitate; they went right up to the Merc and carried on singing or reciting prayers into its windows; within seconds, the Merc screeched off again.   I asked the driver if he knew who had been in the car, and he said it was the son of the former mayor whose hotel I was staying in.   Maybe I’m misrepresenting that mayor, but it all seemed to add up: marble and Mercs.

Departure the next day was utterly peaceful: early Sunday morning, in the hotel vehicle.   The last currency I had was enough for weak black tea and a bun at a small sit-up bar in the terminal; my upset stomach was infinitely grateful (though you may not want to know this).   All those years of working with crews, when I didn’t really understand how important it was to board early so you could get a decent space in the overhead locker for the camera and guard against anyone hurling a skate-board on top of it – that need compounded by the exigencies of an upset stomach (though you may really not want to know about this).   I owe those crews an apology.

Above the Cloudline

We’re sitting on the front veranda of a small house in the mountains, maybe 90 minutes’ drive from the Colombian city of Bucaramanga, whose beauty queen has just been crowned Miss Colombia.   I know this because at around 2 one morning we’d been woken by explosions, and I’d thought the war had come to Bucaramanga – but it was just fireworks, celebrating her victory. 

I’ve lost the copy of the current affairs magazine I bought in Bogotá airport on the way in, which turned out to have a pull-out special on the Miss Colombia competition.   If I’d had the time, I could have joined other readers in a detailed evaluation of the busto of Miss Atlántico versus the posterior of Miss Chocó.   Quite a feature for a political magazine.   How the journalists rated Miss Santander from Bucaramanga, I’ll never know.

But sitting above the cloudline that morning, with a tame squirrel hopping about around our feet, we’re in a different jurisdiction.   A different Colombia.   Through the front door, I can see a woman criss-crossing the corridor as she cooks, and beyond her, the two young guerrillas who’d been on the veranda when we arrived washing themselves in the back garden.   Steam rises from a tin bath; they’re stripped to the waist in the morning chill, joking around with the water.   Later, one of the young men – they’re maybe 17, 18 years old – settles down at a wooden table with a young woman from the house.   They’re opening a notebook, and laughing; it seems he’s teaching her to read.   

We’re a film crew – do we film any of this household activity we’re privileged to glimpse?   We do not.   We don’t want to have material on us that might compromise the women – and we don’t want to do anything that might compromise the next stage of our shoot.

Which is in the hands of two sets of people: Christoph Kleber, from the International Committee of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, whose mission to free a hostage we’re following; and the leadership of the ELN, the National Liberation Army of Colombia, whose local branch is holding the hostage.   Is this hostage a big landowner, an army general, a police chief?   He is not.   He is a hairdresser from Bucaramanga.   But Kleber isn’t here to judge (and neither are we).   He’s here to press for the liberation of the hostage on humanitarian grounds, without payment of a ransom.

As I write this, I’m reading that a very early combatant in the ELN was the Catholic priest Camilo Torres, author of Revolution: A Christian Imperative.   As you all undoubtedly know, Torres is, like Che, a saint of armed revolutionary struggle, particularly since he was killed by the Colombian army in 1966.   Was I aware of the Camilo Torres connection at the time?   I was not.   I’d come onto the shoot late in the process – there’d been another, very famous, documentary director on this BBC series, who’d filmed in the Democratic Republic of Congo; but he’d fallen out with the producers, or vice versa, and they’d got a very un-famous director to replace him.   Lucky me.   Coming in after a long process of negotiation between the producers and the ICRC meant I didn’t have to shape the shoot from scratch.   Don’t think I even knew we’d be dealing with the ELN.   (I see, by the way, that the possible beatification of Torres – making him an actual saint – is roiling the Catholic Church.)

So we’re milling about, hoping Christoph’s connection will materialise out of the mist, and our reporter, John Simpson, is tapping away at a small hand-held device.   What are you writing, John?   He’s writing a chapter of his new book, and it turns out to be about interviewing Margaret Thatcher.   I’m impressed by his ability to cut off from our surroundings and cast his mind back to London.   When I look up what the book might have been, I’m even more impressed – if it was Strange Places, Questionable People, it was published 1 January 1998.   We’re on the veranda in October 1997.   His publishers must have been desperate..   

I don’t remember what happened that meant we were back in the vehicle and suddenly at our destination, standing around with a small crowd of fighters on the mountainside.   You mean this is it?   But but…we don’t have any shots of Christoph arriving.   Could the fighters perhaps set up a road-block, so we can film Christoph entering guerrilla territory (though the ELN actually controlled much of the countryside we’d driven through).   Christoph is a former journalist, and it seems the ELN have watched a lot of movies too, because in a matter of moments they’ve pulled a small tree across the road and are standing by to flag down the vehicle.   And thus do documentaries capture reality…

We also film Christoph meeting members of one of the anti-communist paramilitary organisations.   These paramilitary units, dressed up as civil defence, were set up, armed and trained by the Colombian military, and staffed by landowners, ranchers, off-duty policemen, etc.   We meet at a command post, a bungalow with a large expanse of scrubby lawn between it and the fence, and a radio transmitter in the back room that’s constantly busy.   This will be the first time this unit in Christoph’s patch has agreed to meet with the ICRC. The two men put their pistols on the table in front of them, and listen as Christoph talks about the need to protect civilians – but civilians are by definition who the paramilitaries are killing…   

I can’t begin to give an adequate account of Colombia and its politics from our brief experience (particularly since everything was supposed to change when the Colombian government and the largest guerrilla organisation, FARC, signed what appeared to be a comprehensive peace accord in 2016).   But it was impossible not to notice how thoroughly absent the state was outside the cities.   Young people in the countryside clearly had very few options; joining the guerrillas, with the thought you could overturn historic injustice and exploitation, probably offered a sense of purpose along with adventure and comradeship – for women as well; this striking piece in Foreign Policy says as many as 40 per cent of FARC’s forces were women (it also describes what’s happening to some of these women since FARC demobilised: a powerful, and disheartening, story).   

The realities of the armed struggle were murky, however.   And even if you started out as a principled revolutionary, you might still find yourself on a mountainside a few years down the line – as the ELN commander we talked with did – struggling to justify your movement’s use of kidnapping and extortion to the likes of John Simpson.   

Was our hairdresser released?   Towards the end of our edit, he was.   While I’ve been writing this, I’ve found research by a US academic, Danielle Gilbert, that argues that protection rackets were (maybe still are) a primary source of funding for the guerrilla movements, and that kidnapping for ransom was a way of enforcing payment; kidnapping ‘punished tax evasion’, she says.    Maybe the hairdresser had been refusing to pay.   The ICRC’s intervention meant he was released without payment of a ransom – though we don’t know what happened subsequently.   We heard that ELN supporters working in the banks would notify the movement who had what in their accounts.           

Our film, A World without Rules, was meant to explore how the ICRC could conduct its core mission of protecting the ‘lives and dignity’ of victims of armed conflict when conflicts were increasingly being fought, not between states that had signed up to the Geneva Conventions and international humanitarian law (and could therefore be pressed to honour their obligations), but between armed groups whose chain of command may be chaotic and for whom the Geneva Conventions were an unknown.      

The material my predecessor had shot in the Democratic Republic of Congo followed agonised ICRC debates about whether to withdraw their mission from the country because some of their volunteers had been killed by an armed group, despite being clearly badged as humanitarian workers in their Red Cross jerkins.   With editor Robyn Wright, we interwove the DRC and Colombia stories – and it seems this worked, because to my amazement our film was shortlisted for a One World Media award.   The Simpson stardust probably helped.  (But we didn’t win.)  

Twenty-five years after our shoot, some Colombian civilians continue to be hemmed in by the army, the paramilitaries, and the ELN – this piece from November 2021 gives a shocking account of the effects of that.    Colombia has a new president, Gustavo Petro, who joined a guerrilla organisation when he was 17, and moved with them into democratic politics; in August 2022 he lifted arrest warrants against ELN leaders and made it possible for talks towards a settlement to resume in Havana.    Meanwhile the ICRC continues to negotiate for the release of hostages in Colombia, and sometimes succeeds, as this report from September 2022 demonstrates.   ‘The constant dialogue that we maintain with all the armed actors enables the success of these humanitarian operations’, the head of the local ICRC office is quoted as saying.   ‘We work confidentially with strict principles of neutrality and impartiality.’

There’s a lot to say about the ICRC’s ‘neutrality and impartiality’, and I am not the person to say it with any authority.   But let me tell you what I’ve gleaned as I’ve started to think more about this.   The Ukrainian government was furious that ICRC president Peter Maurer met Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov in Moscow in March this year; now again, on the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Twitter feed, there’s a picture of Maurer smiling and shaking Lavrov’s hand at the UN General Assembly in September.   Practising neutrality and impartiality in order to gain access to victims, or giving legitimacy to an aggressor?   The Russians are also key to humanitarian assistance in Syria. In 2019 the Syrian Justice and Accountability Centre argued that the Syrian regime had taken de facto control of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent; I can’t find a direct ICRC response to this, but in its 2021 Syria report, the ICRC says: ‘Despite security challenges and political blockages, we are finding ways to repair critical infrastructure and make sure people have access to basic services such as clean water, electricity, and functioning health services.’   I suppose the question is who those ‘people’ are, since the Syrian regime blocks aid to displaced civilians in rebel-held areas.   The families of Palestinian prisoners think the ICRC ought to be trying to secure their release, since they consider the thousands held in Israeli jails as political prisoners; this piece by the deputy protection coordinator for the ICRC in the Occupied Territories and Israel reflects fairly openly on these frustrations. 

Let me stop pretending I can be definitive about any of this.   In our film, there’s an epic wide-shot by cameraman Lawrence Gardner (who has unfortunately died).   We’re high up on a mountain on one side of a valley as Christoph’s jeep makes its way along a narrow road cut into the mountain lower down on the other side.   Lawrence pans across, following the small solitary vehicle as its Red Cross flag flutters against the vastness of the mountain.   It’s a terrific shot, that could be emblematic of a lonely, dogged struggle against huge odds – which of course is how we used it.   Does this romanticise the work of an ICRC delegate like Christoph?   I don’t think so.

Waiting for the train to go

We’re sitting on the veranda of the hotel in the pearly evening light, waiting for the train to blow its whistle in the valley below. We’re in Tabora, a small town in western Tanzania. Our socks are pulled up; our shirt-sleeves are pulled down; clouds of Mosi-guard envelop us (other repellents are of course available); we’ve given our orders for supper; and we’re waiting. Some of us are drumming our fingers. The cameraman is restraining himself from putting his head round the kitchen door to rally the cooks, because we’ve finally understood that the cooks aren’t there. They’re down at the station, serving dinner to the passengers on the cross-country train that stops at Tabora precisely for this purpose. Until the train goes, there’ll be no supper for us. So we’re listening for the whistle to come up the valley, because it means the cooks will be on their way back to the hotel.

When I started to think about this scenario – about what a struggle it was to get a few suppers on the table after a day’s filming; how I wasn’t really bothered, but I knew the cameraman was – I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t bundling the crew into a cab every night, and taking them off into town to eat. But it’s coming back to me.

We were on a shoot for an Open University film, which meant, in this case, that the logistics and most of the schedule were in the hands of the non-governmental organisation the OU academic had a relationship with. We didn’t have our own vehicle. The hotel was out of town, and the night we arrived, the NGO warned us to be careful; robberies were happening in town, they said; a lot of refugees from Burundi; etc etc.

It seems I dismissed this warning (maybe I was preoccupied with trying to make the film’s proposition less flaky, or maybe I was just scornful of the warning – a tendency which hasn’t served me well over the years), because early on in the shoot, when no filming was scheduled for the afternoon, I took the crew into town, and left them alone to shoot street scenes while I took a walk around. Not the right thing to do. They were indeed attacked by robbers, the cameraman told me, and only saw them off with the help of townspeople. After this, there wasn’t much appetite for going into town. So we had to wait for the train to go.

The hotel was a former German colonial hunting-lodge, built on top of a hill for defensive purposes, I imagine. We were there before the gold rush in the region really took off; so although there was an Australian prospector with an earring, and local officials came by, the main people with us on the veranda in the evening were a crowd of young men – quite possibly Burundians, it occurs to me now – who filtered in silently to sit on white plastic chairs and watch tenth-generation videos of violent action films on a monitor high up on the wall. The light thickened, and so did the clouds around us – of mosquitoes; distorted sound-tracks of gunshots and screaming; the cameraman’s impatience…

This particular cameraman bailed me out in umpteen situations, and on this shoot he was doing it again, because on the first morning we discovered we were due to film a community theatre group dressed as giant flies performing for a crowd of school-children under a tree. Bright sunlight beyond – you all know what this means – expose for the performers and the children, and the background burns out; expose for the sunlight, and everyone under the tree is way too under-exposed. Plus – one camera to capture everything. Can we perhaps pause the performance from time to time, and repeat a few actions, so the camera can get different angles, and some audience responses? We cannot (though if we’d been able to meet the theatre group beforehand, we’d have worked something out).

In spite of all this, the cameraman filmed a totally cuttable sequence. He looked at me meaningfully from time to time as he did so – meaning bloody hell – but he did it. He deserved his supper. And supper didn’t come.

Other failures on the food front with him: we were in a small hotel in Occupied East Jerusalem, and the toaster didn’t work properly. It was one of those production-line toasters that hotels bought in expectation of tourists (or maybe western camera crews) wanting mountains of toast for breakfast; they never really worked, I thought (and often the tourists didn’t materialise either). This machine was especially inefficient, if toast mattered to you, and it seems it did. Much tinkering and swearing every morning produced no change; pale beige limpness prevailed.

In its glory days, the BBC camera department had assistants – camera assistants, sound assistants, sparks and sparks’ assistants, production assistants – who not only carried the equipment but could be relied on to get various bits of discomfort sorted out. After the BBC forced most of its talented, experienced crews to go freelance, they found themselves on shoots with rackety solitary directors who didn’t understand the importance of toast (but did carry the equipment, and appreciated every lesson the crews passed on – if that doesn’t sound too toadying: as one of the rackety directors, I was grateful).

For instance – that Jerusalem hotel trip happened in the very early days after the Oslo Accords, a surreal time: if the Israeli army has withdrawn, how come there are so many Israeli soldiers everywhere, drones overhead, etc etc? Our subject was reproductive health, but we couldn’t resist cruising around to see what was happening. In Jericho one afternoon, we suddenly noticed that the Israeli soldiers in a guard-post had been replaced by Palestinians. Our Palestinian fixer was surprisingly cautious; ‘Don’t go there’, she said (possibly because the Palestinians were likely to be returnees from exile, not local people she would know); minutes later, however, the cameraman was cradling an automatic rifle, a Palestinian soldier was cradling the Betacam, and the sound recordist was taking their pix on a Polaroid camera. Our cameraman knew how to disarm people, and he did it splendidly. He just needed someone on these shoots who could sort out supper and toast.

Tabora is near what had been a major Omani trading-stop for the caravans that took slaves and ivory to the east coast. I see Wikipedia says the mango trees in the area were planted as avenues by the Omani traders, but I prefer our translator’s version of this story – he pointed out that the mango trees were in clumps, and said this was because the slave-trains would rest at particular spots, and the captives would be given mangoes to eat. The clumps of trees grew from the seeds they left behind. From the moment he said this, the landscape was haunted.

The afternoon I walked around town and talked to people, I discovered that most of the business owners of Indian origin had gone (though things could have changed since; this was twenty years ago). There were temples, gurdwaras and mosques, but very few people of Indian origin around, and those I talked to seemed pretty dispirited (they were maybe just being careful with a stranger who wandered in and showed no signs of being a shopper – silly me. The Africanisation policies that brought Tanzanian Indians, along with other ‘East African Asians’, to the UK – to the huge benefit of the UK – get a mention in this interesting piece).

On our last night in town, the NGO took us out – to the Tabora country club, a bungalow where it was possible to play fierce table tennis against descendants of the Omani traders. The matches might have gone on all night – it was, after all, Saturday night – if our NGO colleagues hadn’t got news that the five-year old daughter of the Tanzanian doctor who’d worked with us had died suddenly. Terrible news to haunt us again as we flew from Tabora to Dar es Salaam next day, and were served sandwiches made that very morning in Johannesburg, 3000km to the south. No waiting for train whistles there.

The exterior of the hotel appears to have had a makeover since our visit, and here there’s even a pic of the veranda. I’ve been doing some research on the cross-country railway, and it seems the train didn’t stop at Tabora every night. The hotel kitchen just behaved as if it did. A Turkish company is now apparently constructing more lines.

Looked up the film on the Open University site, and neither I nor the camera crew get a mention. Every vox pop is named, but not me as director, nor the cameraman, nor the sound recordist. A producer who appeared on the scene at the last minute, and whose sole contribution was to suggest the narrator, gets the only production credit. Almost as bad as losing your land to an Australian mining company. But not quite. And that wasn’t our story anyway.

A glimpse of Nablus

I probably won’t live long enough to bring into being a film I’ve thought about making in Nablus, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, from the time the Women’s Press sent me a preview copy of Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan’s memoir, A Mountainous Journey (and that was a long time ago). But I do hope to live long enough to see a Palestinian director tackling this rich subject.

Fadwa Tuqan was born in Nablus in 1917, the year the British army defeated the Ottomans and the British government promised Palestine to the Zionist movement (though it wasn’t theirs to give away). Tuqan spent her entire life, first under British Mandate rule, then in a West Bank flooded with refugees driven out of their towns and villages by the Israelis in 1948, then in a West Bank conquered and occupied by Israel in 1967.

One of the things that’s stunning about her memoir is her emotional honesty. ‘I emerged from the darkness of the womb’, she says, ‘into a world unprepared to accept me. My mother had tried to get rid of me during the first months of her pregnancy. Despite repeated attempts, she failed. I have listened to her relating this from my earliest childhood.’

She came from a family of Nablus notables that lived in a vast eighteenth-century mansion (it’s still standing, though very dilapidated): ‘One of the most ancient of the old Nablus houses’, she says, ‘with wide courtyards, gardens, water fountains, upper chambers and spiral staircases.’ But after a boy in the street gave her a sprig of jasmine when she was twelve years old, her oldest brother ordered her confined in the house ’till the day of my death’ – a confinement that nearly destroyed her: ‘In this house, within its high walls that shut off the harem society from the outside world, where it was buried alive, my oppressed childhood, girlhood and a great part of my youth were spent.’

Last few details from her memoir (though I could go on): her brother Ibrahim, who became a celebrated nationalist poet (as did she), brought lots of books into her stifled world, and taught her how to turn her feelings into language that scans: ‘Poetry’, she says, ‘became the sole preoccupation, awake or asleep, of my spirit and mind.’

Into this stern household Ibrahim also brought a phonograph, and records – ‘tango, foxtrot and Charleston dance music’. Among the vaults and arches of the Tuqan palace, Fadwa and the Kurdish girl from next door cranked up the phonograph and practised the Charleston. Can’t you see this sequence in a film?

Fadwa also writes about Hind and Sareena, professional singers and dancers in Nablus, whom Fadwa longed to join because ‘these women enjoyed a freedom unknown in the world in which I lived’. And she writes spectacularly about visiting the public bath-house as a child with her mother: the steam, the noise, the overwhelming presence of naked bodies created, she says, ‘an atmosphere that overpowered my eyes, my soul, and my senses’. The film writes itself on the page. But I never managed to make it.

In 2009, however, I did get a chance to make a very short film in Nablus. It’s the film pasted in below here, Nablus: Naseer Arafat’s City. It didn’t get near the Fadwa Tuqan memoir, other than that its aim was to give a glimpse of the Palestinian world that existed before the State of Israel tried to extinguish it (and its history).

The British Empire & Commonwealth Museum in Bristol planned an exhibition about Mandate Palestine, for which curator Anne Lineen wanted a number of short films. But the Museum pulled its plans; Anne carried on as a freelance with a much smaller budget; and only one film got made, for an exhibition that went up in SOAS as ‘Britain in Palestine’. I was grateful to architect Naseer Arafat for agreeing to do this film with me.

It’s less than five minutes long. ‘No politics’, said Anne, though the situation is of course drenched in politics anyway. People were pretty exhausted, I thought – an economy throttled by the Occupation; a ‘peace process’ that is no such thing; the Israeli army in the hills surrounding the city, raiding at night (there’s a sequence in David Osit’s wonderful documentary Mayor, about the mayor of Ramallah, that conveys what this is like) – decades of this would exhaust anyone.

I shot the film on tape with an ancient VX1000, and did the whole shoot, I’m astonished to see from my invoice, for thruppence. This version still has the Museum’s name at the front: contending parties, don’t sue me! Prizes to come for identifying the music on the track. The sound here runs out before the end, which it wasn’t doing when the film left editor Duncan Harris and me.

There’s so much more to say, of course. We filmed in an olive grove just outside the city; Israeli colonists (usually called ‘settlers’, but that can suggest something cuddly and benign, which these people are not) have been attacking fiercely since last year’s harvest, as this piece describes. I don’t know if our village is active in the very determined resistance people are putting up (and getting killed for); Palestinian-Dutch photographer and film-maker Sakir Khader has been documenting this strikingly; for instance these young men against a background of burning tyres, and this pic he calls ‘the mourning mothers of Beita’.

Naseer has a book, Nablus: City of Civilizations.

I can only find copies of Fadwa Tuqan’s memoir shipping expensively outside the USA from Abe Books.

This ambitious project for renovating the Tuqan Palace by (then student) architect Rashdi Mabroukeh doesn’t convey the scale of its dilapidation; the Tuqan family are quoted somewhere I now can’t find saying they can’t begin to afford to repair and renovate it.

But honestly – tango in the Tuqan Palace. Who could resist? Maybe Spielberg can rebuild the mansion, and the streets, shops, schools, mosques and churches around it, in that studio in Brooklyn where he so lovingly re-created the Manhattan that Robert Moses pulled down…

Cycling in Italy

…and other struggles on the holiday front

We’d been exchanging emails for several weeks. ‘God, I haven’t been so unfit for years’; ‘Forgotten how to ride a bike…’; ‘If I manage 10km a day, it’ll be a miracle’. Turns out only one of us was telling the truth.

We’re standing in the early May sunshine outside the bike rental shop somewhere in Italy – maybe it was Pisa – and I’m texting my friend Antonia to say I feel apprehensive. Her avatar Granny Yang sends back some remark about spring chickens that keeps me going until about six minutes after we hit the pedals, when I look up to discover I’m on my own. In the far distance, three silhouettes on bikes are about to go over the horizon. These silhouettes are cheerful, chatty, gesticulating, because even though they’re propelling themselves forward at the speed of light, they still have spare breath in their lungs.

Ten minutes later I find them waiting for me, with the air of people who’ve been waiting for some time. We take off again, but it’s no good; I’m pedalling like hell, but I’m way behind. We seem to be on some industrial bypass road, exposed and characterless. The sun’s beating down. I start to feel like a character in a Samuel Beckett play. Or maybe a stripped-down version of Sartre’s Huis Clos – no other people, but no way out.

Is this a holiday? I grew up in a household where holidays away from home were something you read about in Enid Blyton novels and Queen magazine but never thought you might do yourself. We were in Durban, South Africa; for my mother and father, who’d grown up in smoggy brown Cardiff, it must have been like living in a perpetual travel brochure: blazing skies, eye-blasting vegetation, ocean, monkeys. Except we didn’t really live in the holiday location. I have a memory of walking beside my mother on one of Durban’s beaches – she’s crunching over the burning sand in nylons and beige sandals, her pleated crimplene skirt blowing around her. Were we having a good time? I don’t think so.

The closest my father got to holidays in those early years was writing a jocular piece for the mass-circulation Afrikaans magazine Huisgenoot (‘your household companion’). He complained, wrily I’m sure, that our nice quiet seaside town was spoiled every Christmas and July by the up-country Afrikaners who rolled in, sixteen to a vehicle, their households roped to the roof, and colonised our beaches but failed to patronise our fine English settler hotels (‘settler’ is my word): the King Edward, the Royal, the Balmoral, and so on. He’d dashed this piece off in the usual way, sitting at the dining-room table, at the portable typewriter my mother had given him, laughing to himself He probably got the idea from some jokey session in a bar, and rushed home to get it down.

For this he got death threats – I may be exaggerating slightly, because the abuse was in Afrikaans, which he didn’t speak or read; but Huisgenoot translated enough of it for my mother to get worried. I remember him looking sheepish: he’d thought everyone would get the joke. I realise now that there was always the feeling we were strangers in a strange land, and needed to tread lightly. He’d inadvertently poked Afrikaner paranoia, and it lashed out. It didn’t matter that he was a slight, charming, disarming Welshman; for Huisgenoot readers, he was part of the great plot, die Engelse gevaar (the English threat). The Nationalist government was building the mightiest army on the African continent because Afrikaners were beset by dangers – die swart gevaar, of course (the Blacks), die rooi gevaar (the Reds), die joodse gevaar (the Jews). The Catholics were in there too – I thought I’d forgotten the Afrikaans for ‘Papist’, but it’s come back to me – die Roomse gevaar – the threat from Rome.

So, a cycling holiday in Italy – great idea. Who wouldn’t want to do that, with people you’re fond of, whom you haven’t seen in a while? No households roped to a car roof; no cars; just pedalling freely in the spring countryside. Our first overnight was in Arezzo. I’d been in Arezzo a year or so previously, so I knew how to find newspapers, and where to get aloe vera gel to soothe our burning northern hemisphere skins. But that was the end of my usefulness. After a few days pushing the bike up mountains, I started to take the train. Even that wasn’t straightforward. Italian trains have very steep steps, and the rented bike was heavy – but Italians are kind to struggling old ladies.

Do you have any idea, by the way, how seriously Italians take the Tour de France? We’d pant in to the next night’s albergo – well, I’d pant in from the nearest station – to find the staff glued to stage 597 of the torture-fest. They’d tear themselves away to check us in and show us where to tie up the bikes; I’d think the least I could do to show solidarity with the culture, since I didn’t have the lycra, was to keep my bike from falling, and knocking over the others; but the effort usually failed.

When I was about 14 or so, my mother persuaded my father to take us away. Really what she needed was three weeks in a comfortable hotel in London, with an infinite supply of book tokens and a seat for every show in town; but what he booked for us was a week in a hotel in Richmond, a rural town a hundred kilometres or so west of Durban, near the foothills of the Drakensberg Mountains. He showed us the flyer for the hotel – horse-riding (none of us had ever been on a horse), swimming, abseiling (actually I don’t think abseiling was a thing yet, but you get the idea).

We set off in the car he was driving at the time, the car the French police used to use (which I see is called the Citroën Traction Avant). About 45 minutes out of Durban, in the foothills of the foothills, the engine boiled over. We were on the side of a highway in the middle of nowhere, but my father did what a man’s gotta do, and strode off into the nothingness in search of water. Hours went by. It got hotter. We had no supplies because we weren’t that kind of traveller. We weren’t any kind of traveller. After some ocean of time had passed, my father came back with enough water to get the car to Richmond, where we discovered our holiday-extravaganza hotel was actually the hotel used by commercial travellers. There was a municipal swimming-bath down the road; horses in the mountains; etc etc.

On the first night, to escape the mournful atmosphere cast by my mother, and because for once I felt sorry for him, I accompanied my father on a walk into town. It was deserted – black people were permanently subject to a night-time curfew, and the white farmers went to bed early. The only things moving were the large armoured cockroaches in the display window of the Farmers’ Weekly editorial office, which hadn’t changed its display since circa 1935. Even my father was a bit daunted.

We kids were enthralled to be in the hotel – it was all new to us; we were thrilled to join the commercial travellers ordering novelties like roast beef and horse-radish in the dining-room – but my mother wasn’t happy, for reasons I can only guess at – maybe she was the only woman guest; maybe the commercial travellers leered; maybe there was a heavy drinking atmosphere, and she had no-one to talk to; maybe all of the above. We left before the week was up. No horses were ridden.

On the second and last holiday I had with the family, my father drove us up to Johannesburg. About an hour outside the city, on the major north-south highway, a vast thunderstorm broke over us and torrents of rain swept the windscreen wipers into the hissing mass of water and passing vehicles. I don’t remember if he pulled in to the side of the highway until the storm passed, or if he drove on, assuring us he could see fine. But I know we ended up in the hotel directly above the main railway station, where most rooms were let by the hour.

I think he found these hotels through contacts in bars, and I entirely understand this in my father – the personal recommendation, even if it came from someone you would know was likely to have directly opposite tastes and inclinations to my mother, for instance, would be what mattered. I checked in to a hotel-room in Ramallah whose walls were thick with mosquitoes because of just such a recommendation. I liked having the scrap of paper with a name and a haphazard address scrawled on it, and I always have. I suppose the difference is that in Ramallah I went out immediately and found a hotel that was comfortable and affordable and had no mosquitoes (this hotel had just put itself back together after the Israeli army smashed it up, and it was being harassed by the Israeli settlement across the valley – but that’s another story). Whereas in Johannesburg, we stayed put.

When I started to work, I travelled a lot, and I’ve never lost the thrill of checking in to a hotel. But holidays remain tricky. The person I liked travelling with was my friend Clem Maharaj (see A Small Slice of Private Life). We would pick a place we were curious about; fly off into the more-or-less unknown; possibly still be walking round as night fell, looking for the most authentic – the echt – place to stay (this sometimes became a search for any place to stay); and we moved on a lot. I won’t deny it could be uncomfortable, but it was a whole heap better for restless souls than a week on the patio with a book.

When I read Sea and Sardinia, I was happy to discover we travelled in the same spirit as D.H. Lawrence (something to do, maybe, with being tubercular and short-tempered). ‘So we stroll and look at the shops, at the filigree gold jewelling of the peasants, at a good bookshop’, he says about his and Frieda’s first – and only – morning in Cagliari. ‘But there is little to see, and therefore the question is, shall we go on? Shall we go forward?’ Of course they go forward, to vivid effect. ‘There is nothing to see in Nuoro’, he says, many villages and bus-trips and bad inns later, but this time it doesn’t matter: ‘which, to tell the truth, is always a relief. Sights are an irritating bore. Thank heaven there isn’t a bit of Perugino in the place. One could saunter along the rather inert, narrow, Monday-morning street, and see the women having a bit of a gossip, and an old, grey-bearded peasant in his earthy white drawers and his black waist-frill, just crooking along beside his little ox-wagon.’

I miss travelling for work (I miss working, dammit), and I miss the business of picking up and going somewhere you’re curious about. This is how Lawrence starts Sea and Sardinia: ‘Comes over one an absolutely necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction… Spain or Sardinia. Spain or Sardinia. Sardinia, which is like nowhere. They say neither Romans, nor Phoenicians, Greeks nor Arabs ever subdued Sardinia… It lies within the net of this European civilisation, but it isn’t landed yet. Sardinia then. Let it be Sardinia.’

For someone who dislikes ‘the net of this European civilisation’, he spends an awful lot of the book complaining about surly service, dirty sheets, and atrocious cooking. But curiosity drives him on. And the need to turn it all into words. May we have that chance again soon.

On the TB ward

A few stories of lungs

When I was being treated for TB in the old St Mary’s Hospital on Harrow Road in London – this was in 1972, a long time ago – the nurses used to give the patients a bottle of Guinness every day, to aid our recovery. The trolley would come round at about 4pm, and we’d be handed our daily dose. Most of my fellow sufferers on the women’s ward didn’t drink, so as time went on I accumulated a lot of Guinness in my bedside cabinet. When some people from my university in Durban came to visit, I was able to swing open the door of the cabinet and offer them a drink.

The act of swinging open that door is connected in my memory with evenings in Durban, South Africa, when things were calm enough for my father to open the sideboard in the dining-room, fetch out his bottle of gin and my mother’s sherry, and pour them both a drink. I can see him now, in his white Bri-nylon shirt (in Durban’s humidity!), his back stiff and stooped from the rheumatic fever he suffered in Egypt during WW2, swinging open the left-hand door of the sideboard and reaching down for the bottles.

Usually my father drank outside the house, in the bars of downtown Durban. Quite often, by the time he came home, his supper would be drying out under a saucepan lid in the oven, and my mother would have retired to lie on her bed and read the latest Iris Murdoch or Muriel Spark from the municipal library (if ever serious contemporary literature sustained a person, it sustained my mother). I’d be cloistered among the dark furniture of my bedroom, learning the apartheid syllabus by heart. But sometimes when my father was home, and my mother wasn’t cross or disappointed or weary, she’d remember that she used to enjoy his company, and have a drink with him. I have a clear image of them sitting at close right angles to each other in the armchairs in the living room, my mother lighting a Du Maurier, my father almost airborne with animation, and them telling us vivid, funny stories about the Cardiff they grew up in, their courtship before the war, and how they ended up in Durban (where he was afloat, and she was beached).

My beautiful mother in Durban, with her timorous scrap of a daughter.

I’m not sure why opening my bedside cabinet full of Guinness and offering people a drink reminded me of those peaceful evenings. Maybe it’s that the drinking was open, allowable, pleasurable – on doctor’s orders, even; not the occasion for extensive snot en trane (a graphic Afrikaans expression that means – well, ‘trane’ are tears, so you can’t go far wrong with ‘snot’). On the ward, I’d even managed to get hold of a bottle-opener – maybe the nurses handed them out as well. Guinness is Good for You.

We patients were mostly migrants who’d done that usual migrant thing of bringing disease into the country. At the time we were rather cavalier about our outsiderness (or maybe that was just me, since in those early years I often felt like a wild dog running round the streets, alarming the English householders). It’s only reading about TB now that I realise how lucky we were – the combination of antibiotics that killed the bacteria in our lungs was only perfected in the 1950s.

My best friend on the ward was Mrs Ayah, from Kenya; our beds faced each other across the aisle, and we laughed a lot because, I think, much of what happened on the ward seemed surreal to us (or maybe we were just delirious with relief). The nurses were pretty martial. Every morning they gave us an injection in the tissue at the top of the buttocks from a large syringe full of viscous liquid. They’d hold it high up at the start of the plunge because the needle was thick and they had to be sure to get it through the skin and muscle. I don’t know if it hurt. I don’t think it did.

The treatment involved a hundred of these injections. Now I know the viscous liquid is streptomycin, and that on its own it doesn’t work well enough to kill the bacillus in pulmonary TB (George Orwell, I’m reading here, imported streptomycin privately from the US in 1948 because the NHS wouldn’t pay for it. It caused bleeding ulcers in his throat and mouth and a rash all over his body, and he stopped taking it. We were lucky).

The other antibiotics came in a very large tablet that was encased in rice paper, because the only way you could get it down your throat was to float it in a glass of water until the rice paper achieved the right degree of saturation. If you didn’t pay attention, your precious medication dissolved at the bottom of the glass. We took, I think, six of these tablets a day for eighteen months, long after we’d come out of hospital. And the treatment worked. I see now that the bacteria started to become resistant to at least two of the drugs as early as the 1980s, and it’s not as if TB has gone away. The excellent Partners in Health says someone falls ill with TB every three seconds, and every day roughly 4000 sufferers die. We were so bloody lucky.

I think I caught TB in South Africa (where it was, and still is, extensive). The year before I left the country, I was living in an old tin house near the university and losing my bearings in an unhappy love affair (though love was never really part of the affair. I went from being an earnest scholar, immune to alcohol because of the unhappiness it caused, to swilling whisky, teaching erratically, and not eating). On the nights I made it back to the tin house, I’d lie in bed and hear someone coughing cavernously in the servants’ quarters next to my room. In my feeble state, it’s likely to have been that person who infected me. Did news that I was sick get back to the tin house? I know I didn’t write that letter.

Being diagnosed with TB seemed a heavy punishment for what had been a year of heavy drinking. But it appalled me also because we’d grown up in Durban with a family connection to killer TB. My mother’s mother – the faraway, unknown grandmother – died from TB in Cardiff in the early 1950s. This grandmother was a spectral being to me – the one tiny snapshot we had showed a thin, long-faced, shy-looking woman in a dark dress with a white collar. She was probably already not well when the picture was taken, and she was definitely not well when my mother left Cardiff in 1946. She’d had a hard life, and not just because of her own lungs. The man she married – the grandfather of whom we had no photographs – was a McCarthy from Cork, a large man whose lungs were damaged by poison gas when he was in the British army in World War 1. After the war he ran a Brains pub in Cardiff (we inherited a bottle-opener with the legend ‘It’s Brains You Want’), drank heavily, and beat his children (my mother told me this sotto voce, as if he might hear). There was never much money – my mother said her misshapen toes and painful feet came from always wearing hand-me-down shoes (in consequence of which my feet were repeatedly x-rayed in the shoe shop in West Street, to get the sizes right). But some time in the mid-1930s, the grandfather’s damaged lungs stopped working, leaving my grandmother with seven children. Her family of origin, the Jenkins, had disowned her when she married an Irish Catholic. She was on her own.

Maybe the children felt relieved their frightening, ailing father was gone; they certainly rallied round their mother who, my mother said, started making and selling sandwiches. But the scramble to survive meant that my mother, a clever girl of 15 or 16 who wanted to be a teacher, was pulled out of school and apprenticed to a tailor – a blow to her ambitions so profound that even decades later she could scarcely bring herself to sew on a button. (One of the more gormless things my father did for her birthday one year was to give her a wooden sewing-box packed with little trays of needles and buttons and thread.) The war saved her from tailoring – she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Services, became a sergeant in a munitions plant, and emerged even more capable, eloquent, well-organised and literate; but South Africa in the 1950s didn’t welcome those qualities in a woman.

Was there ever a possibility of my mother getting back on the mailboat for the three-week trip to Cardiff to see her mother again? I don’t know, but I do remember the day she got the news of her mother’s death. My father was home in his suit in the middle of the day; my mother was hunched over, pressing her hankie into her eyes, speechless and sobbing. I was probably frightened; now I think it must have hit her very hard how alone she was, cut off from her old life and from anyone who could grieve with her. My father was the only one who knew who she was and what she’d come from, and my father was off living a new life in the world of newspapers.

I fear that when my mother learned I was in hospital in London with TB, her painful history with bad lungs and their consequences was re-awakened. I fear she might have felt that all her efforts to prevent her children suffering what she’d suffered, give them what she hadn’t had, had been in vain. I don’t know how she knew – did I phone her (from a public call-box) in the hours between the final X-ray and going into hospital? I doubt it, but she did know, because in a matter of days her brother, my Uncle Bill, appeared on the ward with an enormous basket of fruit tied up in a yellow ribbon. Was I grateful? Probably not. But he wanted to reassure my mother about me, and I think he did.

In the front room of Sybilla and Barry Higgs’ flat in Belsize Park, that they were renting to me, months before the diagnosis.   A pic taken to assure my mother I’d bought a winter coat.   I haven’t cropped the pic, because in the bottom right-hand corner you can see the top of the paraffin heater, that was all we had.

I’d gone to see a GP towards the end of my first summer in London because I’d been cold all the time, there was a cough I couldn’t shake off, and I was permanently irritable (with no-one to take it out on, since I hardly knew anyone). Pretty much all I was eating were Ryvita with Boursin cheese, so I was wafer-thin; a few weeks on the ward fixed that. In those far-off days, hospitals had proper kitchens, and we ate three freshly-cooked meals a day – the full English breakfast, lunch, and supper. I resisted initially – I wanted to stay ‘healthy’; I was mad – but I became as addicted to steamed puddings as the next person. It was heaven.

After about seven or eight weeks – surprisingly quickly, I thought – they said I wasn’t infectious any more, and encouraged me to walk around outside the hospital during the day, I suppose to get used to ordinary life. I started to scour the Harrow Road for Boursin. It may be hard to remember quite what a food dystopia much of London was, in spite of Elizabeth David (and the Caribbean and Indian presence). Day after day I stumbled into dark, uninviting premises where shopkeepers (did they really have fags between their lips?) gestured at shelves of baked beans and Omo and shook their heads at the foreign-sounding syllables. Now you’d be hard-pressed to stagger away from the Harrow Road without Egyptian strawberries, Turkish bread, eight kinds of olive, Ras el Hanout, Palestinian dates, Bulgarian sheep’s cheese, Lebanese tahina, Syrian baklava, coarse burghul (am I just showing off here?)…but in those days – forget it. Sorry, love.

My ten weeks in hospital ended a year of failure to make any headway with the Masters on Shakespeare’s Sonnets I’d been given a scholarship to write (through the agency, now I think about it, of the unhappy love affair. I was going to produce the essential Leavisite textual analysis of the poems – none of this ‘Who was the Dark Lady?’ tosh). I didn’t write a word. It was a blessed relief to walk away from it, and with a cast-iron excuse (‘TB? My god…’). Of course I needed to figure out how to earn a living, but the albatross wasn’t around my neck any more. I was alive, and in London.

On the road in Angola

Two dead ends, and you still got to choose
Tom Waits

It’s tricky to know where to start. Upside down in the 4×4 after it spiralled through the air, all of us screaming that the vehicle was going to explode, the camera assistant kneeling on my ribs to smash open a window (this is what’ll kill me, I thought) – pretty flashy place to start, no?

But what does this tell you about Angola in 1987? Okay, we were using a vehicle whose brakes didn’t work, hadn’t been fixed, and were unlikely ever to be fixed, but this was a country only thirteen years away from Portuguese colonial rule, and for most of those thirteen years it had been under military attack and occupation by apartheid South Africa and its proxies. A country most definitely at war. So, the fact we’d come off the road at high speed, and the television camera we’d been using was badly damaged, and the crate of beer our minder had taken us a hundred kilometres in the wrong direction to collect had splintered and ripped her legs – well, by the side of the war, so what?

I can’t remember how we got out of there. I have a clear memory of the road, the bend, the 4×4 flying through the air, my ribs being crushed, and, once we got out of the vehicle, finding my pink notebook concertinaed among the smashed glass, but I can’t remember who picked us up and took us back to the capital, Luanda.

The road was raised above the fields, and it turned out we were the umpteenth vehicle sailing off it at that particular bend. ‘Oh, didn’t anybody die?’, the villagers crowding around us said, disappointed. I don’t know how many of the other vehicles had no functioning brakes, but I think it’s likely we weren’t the only ones taking that bend while drunk. Being drunk kept us alive. So, the driver hadn’t spotted the bend soon enough to control his speed, but we were relaxed as we flew through the air and landed on the roof.

We were drunk because once I realised the minder had brought us a hundred kilometres in the wrong direction so she could collect rice and beer, I’d thought okay, this isn’t the first time we’re losing a sequence – lean back against this pillar and accept a beer. We all had a few beers. But after an hour or so on that veranda, the beer whispered to us that we could get to the location we’d wanted (now 200km in the opposite direction), film, and still get back to Luanda before nightfall. The beer was lying. But off we hurtled.

Or maybe I could start this piece with that moment in army headquarters in Lubango when we were all set up to interview the commander of the southern region, where the fighting against South Africa and its proxy, UNITA, was at its most intense, and our sound recordist, Carlos Figueiredo dos Santos, collapsed. We’d flown in a few hours earlier from Luanda, where food was scarce, and been treated to a three-course lunch in the foreign visitors’ compound. Carlos said he had an ulcer, and the strawberries had caused it to flare up; but we’d felt awkward anyway about that three-course lunch, on the edge of the war-zone.

While featherweight Carlos was carried off by two strapping soldiers from the commander’s staff, cameraman José Pedro put a microphone on the commander and plugged it into the camera. The wall of observers in the commander’s office, some military, some civilian, settled into their chairs again and straightened their backs. All set. Turn over. Zé Pedro pressed ‘record’ on the mighty Betacam. Nothing happened. Fiddled a bit, and pressed ‘record’ again. The camera wouldn’t turn over. Dust in the mechanism somewhere.

This camera, one of only two functioning cameras deployed by TPA, the Angolan broadcaster (with whom this was a co-production; had I foreseen this problem, or even asked if there might be such a problem? I had not), travelled without a protective case. Its own protective case had disappeared long ago, and there was no replacement. To get to Lubango, we’d been at Luanda airport the day before, from around 6am, standing on the tarmac outside the protocol lounge, waiting to board a flight. The camera stood on the tarmac while planes landed and took off at vertiginous angles, to avoid being shot down. The air was filled with dust, and particles from the fumes. We watched excited (well, some of us) as Joe Slovo, commander of the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, landed, and was escorted through the lounge. At midday, we were told a soccer team had taken our seats; come back tomorrow at 6am. We came back tomorrow at 6am, and boarded a flight around 11. Hours and hours and hours’ worth of dust and particles in that camera.

Even though the commander got on his field telephone and ordered TPA to send a replacement record mechanism – for Umatic tapes, since you ask; resourceful Zé Pedro said he could bolt it onto the Betacam, and when it arrived, he did – there was a problem. Friday afternoon may have meant nothing for the war, but in Luanda it was the start of the weekend. We spent five days on the veranda of the foreign visitors’ lodge, monitoring the arrival of the flights from Luanda, and listening to children from the surrounding village tell us they were hungry.

I’d been mesmerised by the chance of making a film for British television that covered the Angolan government’s struggle against apartheid South Africa. It’s maybe difficult to remember the savagery of the apartheid regime, and its chutzpah – to protect white supremacy, it wanted to control the whole of Southern Africa. In 1975, after Portugal withdrew from Angola, South African armoured columns rolled up from Namibia (which South Africa also occupied), crushing the lightly-armed guerrilla forces of the MPLA, the only liberation movement that aimed, or claimed, to be non-tribal. When the MPLA declared independence, on 11 November 1975, it was only because Cuba sent troops that the government survived..

By the time we got to Angola, twelve years later, the South Africans still occupied a whole swathe of the south; they, the Americans and the French armed and funded the anti-MPLA movement, UNITA, and there was killing and destruction right across the country.

When Marga Holness, press secretary in the Angolan embassy in London, translator into English of the poetry of first Angolan president Agostinho Neto, proposed a co-production with TPA and the women’s organisation, OMA, I leapt at the chance. The Channel 4 programme Bandung File, edited by Tariq Ali, Darcus Howe and Greg Lanning, leapt at the chance. Darcus wanted a critique of the MPLA, and sent the poet Linton Kwesi Johnson with us to report it (this would always have been tricky to do, given the nature of the co-production, the fact they had no relevant contacts, and that I didn’t want to). In any case, by the time Linton had to leave, we’d barely managed to film anything. We were competing for camera use with the whole of TPA, and it also took several weeks to rustle up some transport. A 4×4 whose brakes weren’t working? Fine, I said. (Two dead ends and you still got to choose.)

Somehow or other we put together two half-hour films for Bandung File. We were helped by Carlos Henriques, a documentary film-maker at TPA, who took pity on us. The Henriques brothers had their own equipment, and their excellent contacts in the army meant they could get around the country in military planes and helicopters. Carlos allowed me to duplicate rushes they’d shot in the immediate aftermath of two massacres by UNITA: heartrending material of villagers, men, women and children, hacked or shot to pieces, survivors desperately trying to find words to describe what had happened.

The first broadcast on Channel 4 shook a UK support group for UNITA out of the woodwork. They complained about all this screen time being given to Marxists and Soviet pawns (who of course deserve to be chopped to pieces); Channel 4’s Right to Reply programme invited them on; and Tariq Ali, live in the studio, relished taking them and their apartheid connections apart. In the war against the propaganda might of apartheid South Africa and its allies (Exhibit A: the Reagan government; Exhibit B: the Thatcher government), this felt like a victory, of sorts.

From our material I also put together a longer film, Angola é a Nossa Terra, that’s still being distributed by Women Make Movies in the US. I just had a look at a VHS of this film, and it’s better than I thought it would be, thank god. Okay, a stodgy opening, but not as much rhetoric as I feared, and more human texture than I remember. An apologetic woman in a literacy class early on says it’s hard to focus on the difference between ‘a’ and ‘e’ when you’re worrying whether you can get something for the children’s supper. Women in a textile factory say their male colleagues never stand up for pregnant women in the jam-packed factory buses – the men just stay sitting – and the fact there isn’t a crêche means women have to bring their babies into the factory, carrying them on their backs in amongst the vast whirling machinery. There are babies on women’s backs in just about every shot, in the streets of Luanda and in the camp for internally displaced people where we filmed (whatever else OMA was or wasn’t doing, it clearly wasn’t managing to get contraceptives to women).

I can see I’m not asking hard questions, in front of the camera or behind it – like, would this woman in the displaced people’s camp, standing tall and straight in her red dress, who’s just told us a powerful story about being kidnapped by UNITA, tell her story differently if we weren’t there with OMA? (But we couldn’t have been there, except with OMA. And at least we have a direct testimony from someone in the camp – though people in the crowd behind her are obviously saying things to her while she speaks, because she looks round a couple of times.)

And where is all this fresh fruit and veg and fish on display in the vast informal market called Roque Santeiro coming from, when distribution of foodstuffs is meant to be controlled by the state? Have these raucous market women (with babies on their backs) ever attended a party meeting? What is this about? (I’ve discovered writing this that Roque Santeiro was bulldozed in 2010, all 50 hectares of it in central Luanda facing the bay, and the market moved to purpose-built premises north of the city that nobody can afford to get to. Louise Redvers’ report for the BBC commented: ‘Cynics say the motive was to reclaim this prime real estate for the development of luxury homes with Atlantic views.’ I also found this fascinating 1989 account by Allister Sparks of how Roque Santeiro worked.)

When people in the streets told us they’d been better off under the Portuguese, I wrote this off as false consciousness, and didn’t use those vox pops. It’s only later I understood my own consciousness had a few blind spots. Lara Pawson’s remarkable book, In the Name of the People, documents her attempts to unearth the facts about a series of massacres carried out by the MPLA government itself in May 1977, after an attempted uprising, or maybe an attempted coup, led by Nito Alves and Zé van Dúnem, both former members of the MPLA Central Committee.

When Pawson, a former BBC correspondent in Angola, first stumbled on the story, she struggled to understand there was anything here to investigate: ‘This story contrasted sharply with my understanding of the ruling party, certainly in its incarnation under the leadership of the so-called father of the nation, Agostinho Neto. I believed it to have been a socialist movement that epitomised the heroism of African liberation.’

And so did I. I still feel outraged – who could not? – that the thugs in Pretoria thought they had the right to cause so much death and destruction, for so many people, for so long. It’s unspeakable that what independence delivered for Angolans was decades of war and suffering; that a country whose huge oil and diamond resources ought, within a generation or two, to have produced a well-educated, well-housed, well-fed citizenry became instead a nation of orphans, amputees, the displaced, the traumatised and the corrupt.

But these days I’m also outraged that the person who’d been president for eight years when we were there, José Eduardo dos Santos, remained president for another thirty years. Thirty-eight years in power! How did it happen? Lara Pawson’s interviewees argue that the nationwide massacres in May 1977 and afterwards created a culture of fear that froze public opposition. Critical journalists like Rafael Marques de Morais were seriously harassed. ‘In early 1999,’ Rebecca Regan-Sachs reported for AllAfrica.com, ‘Marques wrote an impassioned opinion piece entitled “Cannon Fodder”, decrying how Angolan mothers had become, as he summarises today, “breeders for the greed of generals and the president and the rebel leader”.’ A few months later Marques published The Lipstick of the Dictatorship, and was thrown into prison (it’s worth reading the account of this in the AllAfrica.com piece). Subsequently his book, Blood Diamonds: Corruption and Torture in Angola, was suppressed for a time.

Dos Santos went in 2017. The epic scale of the dos Santos self-enrichment, father and daughter Isabel, trailed in this fascinating 2013 Forbes piece by Marques and Kerry A. Dolan, was nailed earlier this year with the publication of the Luanda Leaks. If only it was fun to read them.

I came back from Angola in mid-1987 with a suitcase full of Umatic tapes and a sprained ankle. The night of the car crash was actually my last night in Angola, and someone was very insistent about taking me to meet the Polisario rep before I left. I really didn’t want to go – we were all slightly delirious about having survived the crash – but I’m a polite person, and when else was I going to meet the Polisario rep in Angola, so we went. The rep turned out to live on the thirteenth floor of a building down near the seafront. The lift wasn’t working, so we walked up thirteen flights to find he wasn’t at home. As we turned to come back down, a power cut took out the lights, and in the dark stairwell, I slipped. Who knew a sprained ankle could cause such pain? I saw a doctor the next morning, in the medical clinic for cadres that we were taken to (the night of the crash, we’d been in a public hospital, a nightmare place), but what is there to do for a sprained ankle? I limped through most of my edit.

Moments of grace we didn’t capture – an early morning, somewhere in the south. We’d spent the night in a small inn and were waiting for our OMA connection to arrive. Soft light everywhere, in the trees and on people’s faces. Carlos laced a reel of Angolan music into his Uher – maybe something like this song by Bonga – and suddenly, magically, there were soldiers in their fatigues and women in their wraps and aprons dancing on the veranda in the beautiful morning light, boots and rubber sandals picking out delicate steps while the inn served beer and peanuts – all it had. Further down the dirt road a truckload of Cuban soldiers hurtled out of the bush, paused for a second, then disappeared again.

I don’t know why I didn’t say, let’s just stay here today and film with these people, if they’ll let us. Well, I know why I didn’t – in the grip of High Seriousness. I was probably hoping that day was the day they’d finally take us further south, closer to the war. They didn’t, ever. It’s okay.

Tana Holness, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Jenny Morgan at the visitors’ hostel in Lubango, waiting for the sound of the 2pm flight from Luanda that may — or may not — bring us a replacement for the camera recorder.
Pic by Akwe Amosu.

Puerto Rico, my heart’s devotion…

As you all know, that’s a line from West Side Story, sung by the young men from the Sharks.  With comic sourness, the young women respond: Let it sink back in the ocean… The demonstrations that have recently dislodged governor Ricardo Rosselló show that Puerto Ricans are far from sinking.

I made a film about Puerto Rico in 1989, round about the time the Chinese government crushed the Tiananmen Square uprising.  I remember standing in my friend Margaret’s kitchen the Sunday before I flew to San Juan – it must have been Sunday 4 June – watching the news from Beijing in disbelief.  I was from apartheid South Africa, Margaret from the US; we had plenty of police and soldiers who killed their fellow citizens; but this was the People’s Republic, for god’s sake.

At that point – the point before historian Frank Dikötter shredded any illusions I may have had about China with books like Mao’s Great Famine and The Tragedy of Liberation – the prevailing winds were uniformly anti-imperialist, which meant anti the imperialism of the west, which meant specifically anti the US colonisation of Puerto Rico, in process since 1898.

On my ancient VHS player I’ve just watched the film we made: Puerto Rico: Hidden Colony, Hidden Struggle (30 mins for Channel 4 in the UK).  It’s really not bad.  Quite stirring, in fact.

But it isn’t exactly the film I’d pitched to Tariq Ali at Bandung File.  Somewhere in the great churn of London I’d met Puerto Rican PhD law student and writer Daniel Nina, who told me the story of an audacious robbery a few years previously in Hartford, Connecticut.  Around $7 million had been taken from a Wells Fargo depot by an employee of Wells Fargo who turned out to be a supporter of the Puerto Rican independence organisation, Los Macheteros.  We conveyed to Tariq that the who, how and why of this robbery would play a big part in our film.

If we’d seriously intended to do this, we’d have needed many more months of research than Bandung File could have afforded – time to tread delicately through clandestine networks, ideally out of sight of the FBI.  Bandung File was a magazine show with radical aspirations and modest budgets; by the time I took off from London for San Juan, not much treading had occurred.

There was one afternoon we did maybe start to get near the robbery, and that was during a recce in Hartford, late in the shoot, when we told the owner of a particular bar that we had some delicate questions we wanted to ask.  Curtains were drawn; the ‘closed’ sign put up; the door locked.  It seemed we were in the right place.  Then we asked something anodyne – I don’t know how it happened that way, but it did, and within minutes, the door was unlocked, the curtains flung open again.  Maybe by that stage we were too far gone in the shoot to be able to engage seriously with the robbery.

We arrived in San Juan in June 1989 around the same time as US Senator Bennett Johnston and his entourage.  They were running – live on television – a consultation for a referendum that would nominally give Puerto Ricans choices on the island’s future. These ‘choices’ were the same as they’d been in an earlier referendum – independence; statehood (so Puerto Rico would become like Arizona or Kentucky; the preference, apparently, of then president George H.W. Bush); or a continuation of the ‘commonwealth’ that gave Puerto Ricans local government, US passports, and some federal benefits, but denied them much say in US politics.  Thirty years later, these positions are still broadly in play – recently-deposed governor Ricardo Rosselló, for instance, belongs to a party that supports statehood.  (For a dry, but useful, account of the pushes and pulls in 1989, including the internal revenue provision that allowed US corporations operating in Puerto Rico to repatriate profits tax-free, have a look at ‘Decolonizing’ Puerto Rico, U.S. Style, by Pedro Caban, here.  The tax breaks were ended in 1996; corporations withdrew; unemployment snowballed; the local tax base shrank; a ‘debt crisis’ mushroomed.)

Our film swung firmly behind the argument of people like Carlos Zenón, leader of the Fishermen’s Association on Vieques island, that the consultation, and any referendum that followed, were a ‘pantomime’.  At that time, nearly 80 per cent of Vieques was occupied by a US naval station, Roosevelt Roads, the principal US base for surveillance and operations in the Caribbean and South Atlantic (the US invasion of sovereign Grenada, for instance, was rehearsed at, and mounted from, Roosevelt Roads).  The Department of Defence and the State Department told Johnston’s hearings that they saw independence for Puerto Rico as ‘directly at odds with US global military interests’; Senator Johnston himself was quoted as saying, ‘We must ensure in an independence situation…that Puerto Rico would not become a Soviet base or a Cuban base’.

We filmed with several residents of Vieques who had occupied navy land — their land — and were building wooden houses for their families while navy jeeps cruised by.  In the delicate light of dawn, we filmed with Carlos Zenón’s members, fishermen and women who’d been defying the navy’s orders to stay on shore while it conducted almost continuous manoeuvres, usually with live ammunition. ‘This is the only place on earth where World War II never ended’, Zenón told us.

(Roosevelt Roads is now mostly decommissioned.  Rosselló’s government was reportedly engaged in moves to establish a ‘commercial spaceport’ there — whatever that may be. But this recent article, a fascinating piece about a ‘tsunami of gentrification’ on Vieques, says, ‘Much of Vieques still [has] unexploded ordnance scattered across thousands of acres on both land and the seafloor’, and documents reports of widespread contamination by ‘depleted uranium, napalm and Agent Orange’.   Nonetheless, it says, ‘the best-paying jobs remain in munitions clean-up’.)

Our interviewees in 1989, who included US attorneys Michael Deutsch and Linda Backiel — definitely the kind of Americans Trump would like to send back somewhere — told us the FBI had successfully criminalised the independence movement, and made people afraid to voice support for independence.  At least 100,000 Puerto Ricans were under FBI surveillance, a law professor said.  But we coincided with a big pro-independence march stimulated by the presence of Senator Johnston and his cohort.  With cameraman Emilio Rodríguez and sound recordist Juan Antonio Torres, we filmed people chanting, ‘Senator Johnston, we’re like cockroaches — we’re everywhere’ (okay, in English it sounds a bit lame, but in Spanish it has pzazz).  The Macheteros leader, Filberto Ojeda Ríos, was being held by the FBI in the federal courthouse in downtown San Juan; on the same day as the march, we filmed a night-time vigil for him, and got shots of him flicking a flashlight on and off in a top-floor cell window to show he knew the demonstrators were there, and had heard.  (Afterwards, Juan Torres reversed our crew car over my foot; but my foot shouldn’t have been there in the first place.)

The real obstacle to any serious mass support for independence was, our interviewees argued, the economic dependency of Puerto Ricans.  Forty per cent unemployment made people see the loss of foodstamps, or being able to go to the US, as akin to falling into an abyss, and our vox pops bore them out. ‘We’d be like Guatemala’, one man in the streets told us; another said, ‘Independence is a beautiful dream, but how could we ever negotiate our own trade deals?’  ‘We’d have to work in the fields and cut cane’, a young woman said, ‘and then what would happen to my nails?’

It’s really not a bad film.  And it’s woven together with music from Puerto Rican musicians, including this beautiful song by Roy Brown (this acoustic version is close to the one we used in the film), and a wonderful song by Andrés Jiménez, El Jíbaro (I can’t find the song we used on-line, but this is a glimpse of El Jíbaro’s power).

Who can forget Donald Trump in Puerto Rico in 2017, two weeks after Hurricane María, when 90 per cent of the population was still without power and water, throwing paper towels into a crowd?  But the very interesting thing is that US indifference to Puerto Rico since María has very possibly broken Puerto Ricans’ crippling dependence on the US. This is what Daniel Nina, whose apartment in San Juan was destroyed by Hurricane María, told me in early 2018 (when he characteristically talked his way out of a transit lounge at Heathrow so we could meet).  What he said is supported by this very effective film about people mobilising collective assistance; and New York artist and writer Molly Crabapple reported the same thing in a beautiful and moving article for the New York Review of Books that savvily weaves together older agitation for independence with post-María organising.  Crabapple links to this solidarity map put up at the time by San Juan art collective AgitArte, and it’s no coincidence that artists have been the prime movers in the huge demonstrations against Rosselló and his corrupt government during July 2019 (here’s one of those artists, mobilising for Thursday 24 July.  Apparently this stirring rap – not my usual genre – has also been key: Sharpening Knives, with shades of the Macheteros; there’s a rough translation into English accessible via here that suggests its intentions are not wholly sanguinary…).

In West Side Story, the young women sing I like the isle of Manhattan…; but here they are on 22 July, proud Puerto Ricans taking over the concourse at Grand Central Station – very stirring, and very hopeful.  As Crabapple says in her piece, independence has never been strongly supported by votes in Puerto Rico – Rosselló organised yet another referendum in 2017, and independence gained only 1.5 per cent of the vote (but only 23 per cent of the electorate turned out).  Now some very senior officials have been arrested on charges of corruption, and Rosselló has resigned; but this can’t be the end of the story.  The first interviewee in this Democracy Now report from 30 July says, ‘I think that really what we’re talking about here is beginning a process of decolonisation for Puerto Rico’.  The second interviewee makes clear how much collective action will be needed to achieve real change.  But still – as Filiberto so politely and conversationally said to the camera crew who filmed him being marched out of a lift by FBI agents (a piece of archive we used in our film)
– ‘Viva Puerto Rico libre, señores’.  Y señoras.

Dreaming of Algeria

I keep thinking about a story I read about Maria Callas, who stopped singing and performing when she was only 40. Callas went from commanding stages around the world to living on her own in a flat in Paris; what sticks in my mind is a friend of hers saying sadly that whenever he went to see her, there wouldn’t be much conversation; instead, Callas would put on recording after recording of her own performances, and demand a response.

I’m pretty sure I know where Callas was coming from. I’ve recently unearthed a copy of a film I made in 1992 for the BBC, Dreaming of Democracy, about Algeria. The ruling party – this same ruling party that Bouteflika represents, the FLN – had just lost the first round of elections to an Islamist party, had annulled the second round, imposed a state of emergency, and was busy arresting hundreds, maybe thousands, of people. I think our film gives a pretty coherent account of why this was happening, and I’d love to swing the needle over the start and sit you down to watch it, because the conditions that were upsetting Algerians in 1992 haven’t changed much.

I could also press you to admire Steve Saunderson’s beautiful camerawork, the tremendous Algerian musicians who fill the soundtrack (to the horror of the BBC’s music clearances department, who didn’t want the schlepp of tracking down Algerian producers), and the clarity, eloquence and emotion with which our vox pops and interviewees responded to researcher and fixer Fatima Belhadi (you could also admire her impressive range of contacts, without which there’d have been very little on-screen). But alas, the copyright belongs to the BBC, and the film isn’t online; in reality, apart from my copies, and the master that (maybe) still sits in the BBC Film Library, it’s more dead and buried than Callas’s LPs.

I’d been to Algiers once before, for a rather haphazard attempt to cover a historic meeting of the Palestine National Council in 1988. I remember standing on the terrace of the monumental brown concrete Hotel el Aurassi the first night, looking out over the bay and burbling to the grim-faced man who was standing nearby how wonderful it was to be in the place that had won the struggle against French colonialism. His face didn’t change, and he said nothing; it dawned on me afterwards he was probably a policeman.

At that time I’d not long been freelance; I had a small commission to organise a television interview with someone from the Palestinian leadership who could shed light on why the PLO was about to adopt a two-state strategy; and I made a complete mess-up of getting the person I asked to the television studio. He’d already been blown up once by the Israelis; and instead of ushering him into the taxi I thought I’d fixed, we had to get into a local bus, where we rattled along for an hour or more with women farmers in their white robes transportinging baskets of eggs and artichokes and chickens tied together by their feet. Nothing bad happened, other than my mortification; the interview in fact went quite well, give or take a few other logistical hiccups; but the mortification needed many doses of Algerian rosé later in the hotel (and none of them cured it).

From that trip I also remembered shops downtown with nothing in them, and the cavalcade of buses we travelled in to the conference centre sweeping past those same women farmers on the road, covering them in our dust; I imagine it was in part their taxes that were paying.

The 1992 trip was different. No more Algerian rosé, or any other wine, whisky, arak, beer – nada. I was still in the grip of The Battle of Algiers; still in love with the success of the Algerian liberation struggle; but there was this obvious problem that the population of Algeria – some huge percentage of whom were under 25 – clearly didn’t have the same romantic attachment to it, and were fed up with the struggle being invoked to mask corruption and bad government.

I’d watched, several times, Mark Kidel’s beautiful film about Rai music for the BBC’s Under African Skies (he doesn’t have it on his site either), and admired how profoundly he’d tuned in to Rai as the expression of young Algerians’ longing for a different life (some young Algerians; others were finding answers in the Islamic Salvation Front, FIS). I arrived in February 1992 in an Algiers whose soundtrack was police sirens, calls to prayer, and a tense shuffle in the streets; but in Oran, where we also filmed, you couldn’t set foot outside without hearing the city’s young Rai star, Cheb Hasni – his songs about love, sex, and drinking blasted out everywhere, in spite of the fact it was Ramadan. (Two years after we filmed, Cheb Hasni was shot dead outside his parents’ home; even in the dangerous conditions of the civil war that had developed, 10,000 women and men are reported to have followed his cortège.)

I’d thought the main complication for our shoot would be that we were going in Ramadan, but I was just being stupid; the main complication was how tense the situation was, and how likely we were to be monitored by the security police. Our problems began, I thought, when the producer rang me up and asked if we were making any progress getting near the detention camps in the desert – we weren’t, and I don’t know what possessed him to talk about it on the phone from the UK – but in fact we were monitored right from the start. Ten minutes after I got to my room in the old colonial hotel on the seafront, formerly the Aletti (it had a vast dining room with immaculate white table cloths, a huge chandelier covered in dust on the floor of the disused ballroom, no light fitting with more than a 30W bulb, etc etc), the phone rang, and a man said he was the passport official from the airport, ringing to check I’d arrived safely. Odd, I thought – but I didn’t read the message properly;

A Small Slice of Private Life

For a few years in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I had the good fortune to be in a relationship with Clem Maharaj, a former jazz drummer from Trinidad whose mother had taken the precaution of sending him to Europe in a suit made of flame-resistant fabric. This fireproof suit occupied a large space in our imaginations, because it hadn’t really protected him from what came next.

By the time I met Clem, he’d already had a pretty full adult life. Being a professional musician had nudged him into drug use; he’d been through a treatment programme and recovered; become active, with his partner Bernadette, in the radical Caribbean and feminist networks around C. L. R. and Selma James; joined the political grouping Big Flame; become A Worker and got a packing job in a cigarette factory; had three children; had a breakdown; lost the job, the marriage and the sons (or maybe the breakdown followed the end of his marriage; I realise I don’t know).