Africa

Friday

The Spectator

Happy birthday V.S. Naipaul

Given it’s V.S. Naipaul’s birthday today, we’ve dug out from the archives a 1979 Spectator review by Richard West of A Bend In The River. Don’t forget that the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize, named after his younger brother, is currently open for entries. One of the dark places The protagonist and narrator of this book is a young man named Salim from the east coast of Africa; a Muslim Indian by origin but not from one of the families of the men who came to build the railways. Like the Arabs of old Zanzibar and what is now Tanzania, Salim’s ancestors had once traded in ivory and slaves from the interior of

Friday

Steven Mcgregor

Interview: Nick Makoha’s shame

“My shame was my father wasn’t there,” says Nick Makoha, the London poet who represented Uganda at the recent Poetry Parnassus. This frank vulnerability is at the core of his first collection of poetry and his new theatre performance, ‘My Father and other Superheroes.’ Uganda is a source of tension for Makoha as both the place of his birth but also a place he fled, a place from which he feels distant. “Most people are from somewhere else,” he says. “So the story of the exile isn’t the minority, we’re the majority. Look at T.S. Eliot, by all rights and purposes he belongs to America. He liked French poets, Italian

Sunday

The Spectator

Science or starvation | 6 May 2012

Here, for CoffeeHousers, is an extended version of the leader column in this week’s magazine. It takes on the green fundamentalism which stupidly aims to put a stop to genetically modified foods: At the end of the month, a group of shrieking protestors are planning to descend upon a field in Hertfordshire and, in their words, ‘decontaminate’ (i.e. destroy) a field of genetically modified wheat. The activists, from an organisation called Take the Flour Back, claim to be saving Britain from a deadly environmental menace. But in reality, these self-appointed guardians of Gaia are threatening not only to undo hundreds of man-years of publicly-funded research but also helping to destroy

Saturday

John Preston

Africa’s excesses

There are an awful lot of prostitutes in Africa and most of them seem to pass through the pages of Richard Grant’s book at one time or another. All this puts him in a terrible lather — ‘I had been so long without a woman’, he moans at one point, this while weighing up the attractions of a woman called Felicia ‘with extraordinary skin’ in the Rwandan capital, Kigali. But Grant also has a girlfriend back home who he’s determined to remain faithful to, and a mind set on higher things. He wants to become the first person to navigate the second longest river in Tanzania, the Malagarasi. The reason

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

Sentamu for Canterbury!

John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, is our cover boy this week. It’s the Church of England Synod next week, word is that Rowan Williams will be standing down soon, and Rod Liddle is backing Sentamu as his successor. When planning the headline, I thought about calling him the ‘British Obama’. We didn’t use this, as it’s not a compliment — but if Britain is to have a figure who epitomises our country’s inherent tolerance and open-mindedness I’d pick Sentamu above anyone else in public life. If he was made Archbishop, I really don’t think there would be an uproar about the fact that he’s black, or even that he

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

The evil being perpetrated against Christians in Nigeria

The religious cleansing against Christians is intensifying in Nigeria, where Christians have been told they have until Friday to leave the country or face attacks by Islamic extremists. As I wrote recently in the Daily Telegraph, this is a trend sweeping the Middle East. Thousands are fleeing Iraq and Egypt, but Nigeria is the scene of the most ferocious attacks. Its government condemns the attacks, but seems unable to respond to the Boko Haram menace. This from the National Review: ‘Catholic archbishop John Onaiyekan, of Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city, appealed for help. “It’s a national tragedy. We are all unsecured. It’s not only Catholic. Today it’s us. Tomorrow we don’t

Monday

Alex Massie

The Difficult Matter of Praising George W Bush

Will Inboden is frustrated that Barack Obama so rarely has anything nice to say about President George W Bush even when his administration has benefitted from US policies Obama inherited from his predecessor or when he has found it convenient to adopt and sometimes even take further Bush-era views on a given subject (such as a wide swathe of civil liberties issues or medical marijuana). In part this frustration reflects a Beltway preference for civility (or, rather, the appearance of civility) and the time-honoured pleasures of bipartisanship. There remain plenty of people who regret the increasingly parliamentary style of Washington politics and many more who have yet to grasp its

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Campaign Adventures: Congo Edition

I’ve not been paying much attention to the elections in the Congo. Nor, I suspect, have you. But politicians everywhere can learn from Etienne Tshisekedi, the man hoping to knock President Laurent Kabila off his perch. His method seems admirably simple: declare victory three weeks before the polls open for business: Those who say that Kabila prevented my plane from landing do not understand the situation. Kabila no longer represents anyone but his wife. People like Boshab [president of the national assembly] and Mende [minister of information], who started elsewhere and talk with both sides of the mouth, say one thing during the day and another at night, have now

Saturday

Ian Thomson

Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller

There is always a special risk, says Alexandra Fuller, when putting real-life people into books. Not all those who recognised themselves in her terrific memoir of 1960s and 1970s white-ruled Africa, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, had appreciated their transformation. The author’s own mother, Nicola Fuller, was disquieted to find herself as a character in that ‘awful book’ (as she refers to it today). Was she really that flaky and drunk? Or was that how others perceived her? Most writers make life more interesting than it is; I suspect that Alexandra Fuller is among them. In Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness she returns to the Africa

Wednesday

Tim Montgomerie

Right to reply: Aid is one of the government’s greatest endeavours

Peter Kellner recently explained that the BBC licence fee becomes less popular if you describe it as an annual cost rather than as a daily cost. When people are told it costs £145.50 a year 27 per cent more people disapprove than approve. When they are told that’s only the equivalent of 40p a day there’s a striking turnaround: 8 per cent more people approve than disapprove. You see a similar thing with Britain’s development budget. When the aid budget is expressed in terms of billions of pounds, people object and they object strongly. When it’s presented in more human-sized ways it is much more popular. A recent ConservativeHome survey

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

Should most orphanages be shut down?

The Spectator’s deputy editor, Mary Wakefield, recently visited Rwanda to investigate the work a charity called Hope and Homes for Children. Her article on the subject appeared in last week’s issue of the magazine, but we thought we’d publish it here on Coffee House too, along with the short film that she recorded during her visit. It contains one or two lessons for DfID and our government: Kigali, Rwanda Madame B has dressed up for our visit. She’s sitting on a bench with her back to the orphanage wall, talking about just how much she loves each child, but it’s her get-up that’s most impressive: black silk dress, hair done,

Wednesday

Alex Massie

The Live Aid Tories

If one hype video was weird, the other shown to delegates in Manchester this afternoon (but designed to be seen on blogs and Facebook and so on) was good politics in the service of a good cause. Or, if you really must, vice versa. As Matt d’Ancona tweeted, the Cameroons aren’t just Maggie’s children, they’re  Live Aid kids as well…

Friday

David Blackburn

From the archives: Cowards colluding with terrorists

The Libyan National Transitional Council has obtained official recognition from numerous countries this week, but the African Union has refused to acknowledge it. Speaking earlier this afternoon, South African President Jacob Zuma said that ongoing fighting has created a “fluid” situation. The union also said that it wants “an all-inclusive transitional government” incorporating members of Colonel Gaddafi’s administration, which is a bizarre requirement given that so many of the NTC are former Gaddafi stooges: Chairman Jalil, for instance, was Libya’s Justice Minister between 2007 and 2011. There is some concern around Westminster that this doesn’t bode well for the ability of the African Union to play a serious part in the stabilisation of

Monday

David Blackburn

Through the gates of Tripoli

After a summer of discontent, David Cameron must be counting his blessings this morning. He has broken his holiday because Colonel Gaddafi is about to fall. Rebel forces swept into Tripoli’s Green Square overnight and members of the regime were captured as Gaddafi’s militia vanished into the night. Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam, who was being groomed as his successor, fell into rebel hands; the International Criminal Court is in touch with his captors. Another Gaddafi family is also understood to have been detained. Of the Colonel himself, though, there is no sign. Rebel forces are moving to encircle Tripoli, cutting off his line of retreat. Rebel spokesmen told the Today programme

Saturday

Sam Leith

Mutiny, mayhem and murder

Nothing more gladdens this reader’s heart than a book that opens up an interesting and underexplored historical byway. Well, perhaps one thing: a book that opens up a historical byway that turns out to be a complete catastrophe. On that count, A Merciless Place more than delivers. Here is one of the great colonial cock-ups. It all started with a question that resonates to this day. When your jails are overcrowded academies of crime, and the respectable public lives in fear of what it imagines to be a violent criminal underclass, what do you do with your surplus convicts? Ken Clarke not yet having been thought of, conventional opinion in

Friday

Daniel Korski

The revolution remains on track

The Egyptian revolution has pulled itself back from the brink in a quite an extraordinary way. Everyone feared a clash in Tahrir Square today but, so far, a deal struck between the Muslim Brotherhood, the Salafists, the pro-democracy activists and the military is holding. Tahrir Square is teeming with white-clad Hajis. But everything is calm. The military gave into to a number of key demands from the protesters, including making some changes in the newly-promulgated electoral law. The Muslim Brotherhood feared being blamed by the military for a confrontation and being seen as too close to the Salafists. And the Facebook liberals wanted to keep the revolution united for now.

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

The shifting sands of public opinion on Libya

All of the buccaneering rhetoric has been sucked from the Libyan conflict this week, replaced with words of concession, compromise and caution. A few days ago, it was the news that — contrary to what they might previously have said — the government is prepared to let Gaddafi remain in the country after all. Today, William Hague deploys the same line in an interview with the Times (£), in which he also warns that there are “a lot of problems and even convulsions” to come in northern Africa. As it happens, the depressed mood of our foreign-policymakers reflects the tide of public opinion. Here, for CoffeeHousers’ benefit, are a couple

Monday

David Blackburn

Phone hacking tempest forces Cameron to shorten trip again

David Cameron’s long-planned trip to Africa has been foreshortened again. He will now return on Tuesday evening, as opposed to Wednesday morning. This, we are led to believe, is so that he can finalise the terms and membership of the Leveson inquiry ahead of Wednesday’s emergency parliamentary session. The scramble for Africa has become the scramble from Africa.  As this crisis deepens, the forthcoming public inquiries grow ever more important for the Prime Minister. Lord Justice Leveson will examine the alleged misdoings between members of the police and the media; Leveson will not convene until the conclusion of the criminal investigation. Cameron is also preparing another inquiry to investigate media regulation, now that the

Saturday

David Blackburn

The man of the moment

Andrew Mitchell has announced that DfID will provide £52.25 million in emergency aid to ease suffering in East Africa, which has been wracked by drought. The supplies will be distributed to the Dadaab and Dolo Abo refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia, but the bulk of resources will be directed to Somalia, where an estimated 700,000 people are close to starvation. The state’s assistance is in addition to the £13m that Britons have given voluntarily. The International Development Secretary said that surveying these numbers made him “proud to be British”. Mitchell has been at the forefront of this aid effort and his star has risen accordingly. Jemima Khan was on

Saturday

Matthew Parris

Witness for the prosecution

This is a humdinger of a tale. You might have thought that journeys into the heart of the Dark Continent with David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley and the likes of Richard Burton had already inspired so vast and breathless a literature that there were few surprises left to report. But that’s the miracle of this story. Alastair Hazell’s genius has been to plough through the huge and well-documented archive, follow his nose, and tell a tale from an entirely new perspective: the life of Dr John Kirk, an early companion to Dr Livingstone, and afterwards a humble Scottish medical officer and Acting British Consul in Zanzibar. In doing so he