There has been pressure to tear down statues of Rhodes, with the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign spreading from South Africa to Oxford, Rhodes’s alma mater, the target being Rhodes’s statue in Oriel College, where he studied in 1873. Today’s students attack Rhodes for his overt racism and colonial ventures. These arguments have some merit but we should be wary of attempts to rewrite history. It is certainly true that Rhodes’s conquest of gold-rich Matabeleland (in what is now Zimbabwe) was built on economic exploitation and massacres. At the battle of the Shangani river in 1893, more than 1,500 Matabele tribesmen were gunned down by his private mercenaries. As prime minister of Cape Colony, Rhodes introduced the Glen Grey Act of 1894, which adversely affected land held by blacks. He also disenfranchised thousands of blacks by increasing property qualifications. His language was peppered with the racist prejudices of his day.

However, it is historically inaccurate to portray Rhodes’s policies as a blueprint for apartheid, as some campaigners have done. Explicitly segregationist policies only came into existence in the decades after he died. Rhodes opposed the more extreme policies of the Boer Republic in the Transvaal; his will forbade applicants for his scholarships to Oxford being discriminated against on the basis of race or religion. As always, the truth is complex.

Current opportunities are more important than historic injustices. The Rhodes Trust’s generosity has allowed thousands of foreign students to attain an Oxford education through Rhodes scholarships. He left 2 per cent of his vast estate to Oriel. For better or worse, Rhodes’s funds have been used for progressive ends (Bill Clinton was one beneficiary). Not just at Oxford, but all over Britain, the foundations of many historical institutions were built on injustice. By the protesters’ logic, all of these buildings would need to be stripped o f their wealth or their decorative features.

We cannot simply undo the past; we can only hope to build a more compassionate society. Rhodes’s life needs to be historically contextualised. With the possible addition of an explanatory plaque, the statue at Oriel College should continue to stand precisely because it provokes these important debates. After all, is it not the ultimate justice that talented students from all over the world can now walk past his statue knowing that he is funding their higher education?

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She also quizzed me about my public rebuttal of the Labour party, which began in these very pages. A chance encounter with Ed Miliband had knocked at my funnybone, followed by his naïve decision (too soon and without defined borders) to back a back-bencher’s bill for a Palestinian state, and my response garnered me more unwanted PR than Russell Brand would get for leaving Katie Hopkins’s pad at dawn. I was viralled (take that and groan, my fellow pedants) into the online stratosphere with my article, based on  single issue, after a lifetime’s support for Labour. Thank you Rupert Murdoch.

What I didn’t tell the researcher was that when the postal vote form arrived, I stared at it dumbly for days, knowing the Lib-Dems and Greens are even more anti-Israel than Ed. Given the Bedroom Tax and the Mansion Tax, the growing economy and the burgeoning deficit, the choice seemed to be between the Tories, UKIP and the Cannabis Is Safer Than Alcohol Party. In my neck of the diocese the Tories need no help from me; I’d rather be trepanned than vote UKIP; and the other lot don’t hand out free samples. It pains me to admit that I voted the same way I’ve voted for the last 50 years.

Now, as I watched a Dimbleby from the lawn in Tel Aviv and wondered if my Labour vote would count, a version of the Baltimore riots was exploding in Jerusalem. A policeman beat up a young Ethiopian soldier who was in his IDF uniform and the result was the same old-same old: a peaceful demo turned violent. Predictably, it all ended in tear gas.

I have visited Ethiopia, seen its beautiful artefacts, and witnessed its poverty. The  rock churches of Lalibela are an unsung eighth wonder of the world. The Ethiopians were some of the gentlest, most hospitable people I have ever encountered. Our hosts were beautiful, with oval faces, soulful eyes and spotless white muslin clothes. The men greet each other by gracefully bumping alternate shoulders, left right left.

I was also aware of the lower echelons of their society. In the Semien Hills I was shocked at the endless lines of peasant women carrying branches the weight of a wardrobe on their doubled-over spines. Enchanting children crowded on to our bus, dazzling us with their smiles and calling in English not for pennies or food but stationery: “Pencil please, paper please?”

I was there to write a piece at the behest of my friend Irene Beard. On her own return from the country, Irene had set up a charity called Book-Link which for several years sent out half a million remaindered textbooks to Ethiopian schools from British publishing houses. I was accompanied by the distinguished photographer Fritz von der Schulenburg, and I still have a treasure trove of the most exceptional wine-gold photographs of a woman absorbing a country. The newspaper which commissioned my article used a single fuzzy black-and-white one, of me looking sheepish on a camel.

Irene invited me to the Ethiopian embassy in London to discuss boosting tourism in the country. A red carpet was laid. Twenty-five people sat around the table. Suddenly, silently, the powerful then-president, Meles Zenawi, materialised. Irene smiled beatifically as only a woman who’s about to drop you in it can, and said, “Welcome, everyone. My friend, the actress Maureen Lipman, will begin with an account of her trip to Ethiopia.”

Never has my brain emptied and my bladder filled so rapidly. “Handwoven carpet, swallow me up,” I murmured. “The country is so unspoiled — ” I began, and then stopped. The room waited. “Well, actually it could do with a bit more spoiling. There’s almost no indigenous art or available culture to be seen and what there is has zero presentation. Lucy, the oldest female skeleton ever discovered, is laid out unprotected on a plastic trestle table. The Ark of the Covenant is shielded from the eyes of tourists.” On and on I burbled. Mr Meles watched me as a cobra watches his next meal.

Back in the ’90s, though, he became prime minister when his citizens were under threat from the end of the Mengistu regime. Jewish life was repressed and only one tiny mud-hut synagogue remained. The Falashas, descended from the Biblical tribe of Dan, were declared Jewish by the rabbinate and therefore had the right of return to the Promised Land. Operation Solomon, the airlift of more than 14,000 Jews, took place on May 24 and 25, 1991. Five babies were born in mid-air. When they landed in Israel, the Falasha Jews kissed the ground.

Now, nearly 25 years later, it appears they’re not wanted in certain residential areas and barred from giving blood. This generation of black Jews feels they are treated as second-class citizens — although, ironically, the Israeli Ethiopians are accused of looking down on Sudanese asylum seekers. “Everyone’s a little bit racist,” as they sing in Avenue Q.

Oh, but how easily the word apartheid springs to curled global lips. It implies that apartheid is official government policy in Israel: I don’t believe that to be the case. It always takes several generations for immigrants to be wholly accepted; after all, “No Dogs, No Blacks, No Jews,” was a notice displayed in British hotels well into the 1950s. It’s not right, but it was ever thus. The first generation keeps their heads down, accepts institutionalised prejudice, lives in ghettos, cooks traditionally and disapproves of inter-marriage. The next generation, hopefully, begins to feel at home.

Meanwhile, Cameron’s in again despite my vote. Fifty-six seats in Scotland went to the SNP based on remorse for a lost referendum, a flurry of nationalism and stirred-up mistrust of the English. Nearly four million voted for UKIP based entirely on fear of Europe and prejudice about foreigners. Nigel Farage has just rejected his own resignation — deemed unaccepted by the unacceptable face of his party. So soon, and at our peril, we forget our history.

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Does this really matter so many decades later? Why can’t historians leave Mandela’s party membership alone? After all, he didn’t remain in the party for long. After his trip to several African countries in the early 1960s he argued that African nationalism, not Communism, was a better tool to further the goals of the anti-apartheid struggle. He did not go to study in Russia, nor did he even travel there until very much later when he went in his official capacity as South Africa’s president. In the early 1960s he did manage to secure a donation from Moscow, but it was only a token sum of $100. He was in prison from 1962 and for many years had no connection with the outside world, including the SACP. Ideological debates with his comrades behind prison walls may have affected the younger generations of fighters who arrived there in the 1970s and 80s, but they remained just that — debates. Now that Mandela has long been out of politics and his days are clearly coming to an end, why bother about his views in the distant late 1950s or early 1960s?

The interest that historians take in Mandela’s Communist past is, however, fully justified by the fact that he and his close Communist associates of that time left an indelible impact on the ideology and political instincts of their ally, the ANC, the party that has ruled South Africa since 1994. This influence is reflected, for example, in the ANC’s Freedom Charter, which was written by leading Communists and adopted by the ANC and its allies in 1955. Today, it still remains its foundational policy document. The Freedom Charter stresses non-racism but calls for the nationalisation of mines, banks and “monopoly industries”, for control of  “all other industries and trade” and for the redistribution of land. The young firebrand Julius Malema demands the full implementation of the Charter.

No wonder the SACP’s first programme as an underground organisation in 1962 hailed the Freedom Charter as a “suitable general statement” of the aims of the ANC’s “National Democratic Revolution” (NDR) and promised the party’s “unqualified support” for it. Both the SACP programme and the suitability of the Freedom Charter as the agenda for the NDR had been discussed with Moscow even before the programme was adopted. 

The NDR, with its “anti-imperialism” (read “anti-Westernism”), “anti-capitalism” and socialist aspirations and rhetoric, is the other cornerstone of the ANC’s ideology and policy today. It also came straight from the 1962 SACP programme: until then there was no talk of the two-stage revolution in South Africa — first the national, and then the socialist one. The NDR, as a description of an incremental, non-insurrectional transition to socialism, emerged in the Soviet political vocabulary of the late 1950s. According to one of its authors, it was first “put forward” by the Soviet Communist Party, then “widely accepted” by the international Communist movement, and then “extensively used at the 1969 International Meeting of Communist and Workers Parties”. It was in that year that the ANC adopted the NDR as part of its Strategy and Tactics programme in exile. In spirit and letter this document was almost a word-for-word copy of the resolutions of the International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties in Moscow.

This was the world of Mandela and his comrades, and this was the world that gave birth to today’s ANC. Few of Mandela’s admirers, who seem to think of him as a Martin Luther King or Gandhi of Africa, appear to appreciate this Communist background. The international context has since dramatically changed — but not the ANC’s Soviet vision of the world. The ANC in power is still trying to build socialism (nationalisation and redistribution) through its NDR. Many of its current leaders still believe that Communism is the best and quickest way to prosperity and general happiness. It is not by chance that the ANC invites Cuban doctors to treat South African patients and Cuban engineers to repair South African water pipes. There is no logic behind such decisions except political sympathy.

But this was just one aspect of Soviet influence on the ANC. When the SACP leaders decided to launch armed struggle Mandela was sent to seek assistance in Africa but his closest comrades went to the USSR. The Soviets agreed to help. For three decades, from the early 1960s until the early 1990s, thousands of ANC cadres, generation after generation, were trained in the Soviet Union or by Soviet military advisers and specialists in Angola. It is difficult to calculate how many of them received such training, as some returned several times, but Viacheslav Shiriaiev, the first Soviet main military adviser to the ANC in Angola, reckoned that in 1979-1983 alone about 6,000 cadres were trained. And a remarkable 95 per cent of the ANC leadership received some form of Soviet military training. 

This did not mean training in purely technical military skills. The most basic background course, taught to every ANC military cadre and practically to all the leadership of the organisation in exile — often more than once — was MCW, or Military Combat Work. The course included instructions in the organisation of the military underground and in the waging of an underground revolutionary war. Some researchers believe that the ANC leadership got the idea of the bloody “people’s war” which unfolded in South Africa’s townships in the late 1980s — replete with necklacings, targeted assassinations and terrifying “people’s courts” —from Vietnam. An ANC delegation visited Vietnam in the late 1970s to benefit from the wisdom of General Giap. But long before then MCW provided manuals on how the “people’s war” should be organised and waged. Ronnie Kasrils, one of the ANC’s top military commanders, described MCW as the “major influence” on the changes in ANC policy (ie, its adoption of the “people’s war”). 

But MCW was even more influential than that. The course contained as much political indoctrination as practical advice on the subversion of a state. It offered the same principles and ideas as the ANC’s political documents but without the veneer that the official and open status of such documents required. It described “Lenin’s principles of party leadership of MCW” and hailed the goals of the NDR which included not only democracy and self-determination, but also “the redistribution of wealth, of land and other means of production”, which, in the view of the authors, should “dramatically improve the living and working standards of the oppressed”, as well as the “implementation of the Freedom Charter with its programme of profound agrarian transformation and socialisation of those sectors of the economy in the grip of Monopoly Capitalism”. By the late 1980s the MCW had become the ideological, strategic and tactical foundation of the whole movement. According to Kasrils, long an SACP stalwart, the pamphlet, based on the course but written by South African disciples, became its “Bible”. 

Soviet military assistance to the ANC involved not only military training, but also the supply of arms, ammunition, uniforms and, in effect, every facility needed in the military camps. Umkhonto we Sizwe received an enormous boost in the late 1970s, when the youth of the Soweto generation fled the country in their thousands in order to fight the regime. There was nowhere for them to go but the ANC camps in Angola, which were built by the Soviets and maintained by Soviet supplies. 

Military assistance was crucial for the ANC, though not in a military sense. There was never any hope that the ANC could vanquish the Pretoria regime militarily, but its armed struggle was a powerful propaganda weapon that turned the ANC into a symbol of opposition to the regime. It helped to attract more cadres and win national and international support. But simultaneously it helped the ANC to spread its socialist message and its mentality of a besieged, conspiratorial but righteous organisation. 

The ANC enjoyed other forms of Soviet assistance: financial, logistical and educational, among others. Assistance to the international anti-apartheid movement and general support in the international arena were also important. But none had a greater impact both on the ANC itself and its place in South Africa’s history than Soviet military aid. 

Successive apartheid governments explained Soviet attention to the South African region by the idea of “total onslaught”: they believed that there was a worldwide Communist conspiracy, led by the USSR, to destroy South Africa, an outpost of European civilisation and Christianity in Africa, and grab its resources in order to weaken and destroy the West. This idea has been so thoroughly discredited that it is now mauvais ton even to mention it. Yet defeating the apartheid regime was a goal which the USSR openly proclaimed. It did everything in its power to achieve it, short of open military intervention — but the language it used was not that of the total onslaught but rather of a just struggle against racism, colonialism, imperialism and oppression. 

But, paradoxically, the Soviet Union’s greatest contribution to the fall of apartheid was not its military assistance to the ANC but its change of heart about this organisation and then its own collapse. Doubts about the support for the ANC surfaced among the Soviet elite much earlier than is usually thought, in the late 1970s and particularly in the early 1980s. They were prompted by the ANC’s lack of military success and by the USSR’s diminishing enthusiasm about the prospects of the so-called “countries of socialist orientation” — those that proclaimed themselves “socialist” but, from the Soviet point of view, did not quite fill the bill. For it was dawning on the Soviet elite — and the Russian public — that nowhere in the Third World had “socialist orientation” been a success.

A testimony to this — and perhaps this was our most dramatic discovery-was the fact that already in the early 1980s the KGB had established direct relations with South Africa’s National Intelligence Service. The Russians and Afrikaners got on well together, and sympathy with the embattled apartheid regime grew among some of the Soviet elite.

During the Gorbachev era in the late 1980s, debates about policy towards South Africa came to the fore in the Soviet Union. Not only the ANC’s ability to win but even the desirability of its victory were now openly questioned in the media. Many in the Soviet Union were completely disillusioned about their own country’s socialist experience, and some of those who were concerned with South Africa thought that discontinuing Soviet aid to the ANC would prevent it from coming to power, for they now assumed that the ANC, with its Soviet ideology, would destroy South Africa’s economy. It was even suggested, quite openly, that establishing diplomatic relations with the apartheid government would be beneficial for Soviet interests. 

Soviet support for the ANC did not cease until the collapse of the USSR. But these debates and the growing contacts with different circles of the South African public, as well as Soviet participation alongside the apartheid government, in the negotiations over Angola and Namibia, were noticed — painfully by the ANC and triumphantly by Pretoria. Pretoria was greatly reassured about Soviet goals in southern Africa, while the ANC feared it might lose its most powerful ally. These opposing reactions to the changes in the USSR definitely helped to bring both to the negotiating table. 

Mandela finally left prison in 1990. In his very first speech he advocated nationalisation. He was soon disabused by foreign bankers and for the rest of his presidency the word was not heard again. But the seeds of the decades of propaganda did not go away, and to a degree which most of the rest of the world does not appreciate, the struggle for the National Democratic Revolution — and a socialist South Africa — continues fiercely to this day. 

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Since April 2012, Islamic militants had been reducing listed monuments in the historic towns of Douentza, Goundam and Timbuktu to rubble. International observers and much of the local population looked on in dismay as radical fighters tore down shrines and tombs they considered idolatrous. “Not a single mausoleum will remain,” boasted Abou Dardar, leader of Ansar Dine, a group suspected of ties with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

In January, as French troops moved out of the capital Bamako to secure the northern reaches of a country largely beyond government control, reports emerged of even further damage: Timbuktu’s Ahmed Baba Institute was said to have been torched, along with some 20,000 documents. The town’s mayor declared the collection, a section of Mali’s rich literary tradition which included texts dating back as early as the 13th century, had been destroyed.

Such events are all too common. The past two decades have seen the wilful destruction of the Institut d’Egypte in Cairo; Iraq’s National Library and Archive; and the Kabul University Library. Hundreds of thousands of books have been lost, burnt and looted by angry mobs or falling governments.

Yet historically, such ill-minded acts have not always achieved the desired effect: in ancient Iraq and Turkey, those who set fire to libraries often unwittingly preserved the texts contained within. The documents, regularly written on clay rather than paper, would simply harden at high temperature. This is true, for instance, of the palace library of Ashurbanipal, near modern Mosul, ravaged by a great fire more than 2,500 years ago. Many of its documents have survived to this day.

The destruction of manuscripts in Mali may ultimately bring about a similar result. It has already heaped media attention on these artefacts and triggered a response to threats against cultural heritage. France has pledged to help restore the damaged documents and buildings. South Africa and others will no doubt follow suit. “The recent events in Mali have made our efforts in the country more urgent and indeed a top priority,” says Karalyn Monteil, programme specialist at the Africa Unit of Unesco’s World Heritage Centre. The agency, which has long been involved in Mali, has vowed to raise $11 million to save its archaeological riches.

It is not too late to act. Although Ahmed Baba was Timbuktu’s most modern repository, the majority of the town’s archives, which are family-owned, remain largely unharmed. At the Institute itself, the latest reports indicate around 2,000 texts were destroyed, much lower than initial estimates. Many manuscripts were smuggled to safety by local inhabitants, with the assistance of the German Foreign Ministry. But much still needs to be done to ensure the remaining documents do not come into harm’s way.

Timbuktu’s name has come to represent any remote or fantastical place. The events of the past year should at least serve to inject a sense of reality and urgency into this clouded view. One hopes the burning of libraries, as in ancient times, will have an unintended consequence: to raise public awareness and serve as an incentive to act.

The post ONLINE ONLY: The Jihad Against Culture appeared first on Standpoint.

The reason for this stance is that Kenyatta is to stand trial at the International Criminal Court on charges of crimes against humanity. He is accused of having planned the violence which followed Kenya’s disputed 2007 election. Dealing with an ICC indictee could be difficult, so foreign diplomats made it clear that Kenya risked being marginalised if it voted for Kenyatta.

It is a common policy for EU member states to keep contact with any ICC indictee to a minimum; diplomats repeatedly stressed the point in the months running up to the election on March 4. Kenyatta’s rivals began telling of the disastrous economic impact this could have on Kenya. Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan also weighed in, telling Kenyans that voting for an ICC suspect would complicate foreign relations.

But this tactic appears to have backfired. Instead of scaring people into voting for Odinga, Kenyans have begun to question why they should listen to the West. This played into Kenyatta’s hands: he portrayed Odinga as a puppet of the West and the ICC case as an example of Western countries bullying Africans.

The UK has been a particular focus for Kenyatta’s attention. Any comments made by the British High Commissioner, Christian Turner, were seized upon as an example of modern colonialism. Kenyatta told how he would defend Kenya from such interference if he were elected president. Whilst votes were being counted, Christian Turner was once again drawn into the discussion, when Kenyatta’s Jubilee Coalition accused him of “shadowy, suspicious and rather animated involvement” in the election.

The bad feeling Kenyatta has shown towards the UK may partly be due to personal history. Uhuru Kenyatta’s father and Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, was imprisoned during British rule. The current British government’s political and financial support of the ICC case involving Kenyatta does not help either, particularly now that the prosecution’s case is has weakened following the dropping of an unreliable key witness. But it is possible that much of it is down to simple opportunism. Kenyatta saw a way of using the ICC case to his advantage, turning Kenyans against foreigners who were “out to get Kenya”.

Clumsy diplomacy strengthened Kenyatta’s case against the UK. British diplomats failed to see how they were being used and allowed themselves to be drawn into a debate, which was helping Kenyatta win the election.

Now that Kenyatta has been elected, the UK has a problem. Carrying out the threat of marginalising Kenya and limiting contact with its government would work against British interests, but dealing with Kenyatta will be tricky, especially if the ICC case goes against him. Furthermore, even if the British government is prepared to continue to work closely with Kenya, it is no longer certain that Kenya wants to work with the UK.

This difficult situation could have been avoided, but instead our relationship with Kenya is now at risk, and it is a relationship that the UK cannot afford to lose. Kenya is a hub for business and political interests in sub-Saharan Africa and is a close ally in security and counter-terrorism operations.

The importance of these ties is likely to override any desire to avoid contact with Kenyatta. Already the UK has started to backtrack. In a statement released by the Minister for Africa, Mark Simmonds, the UK reaffirmed its commitment to the “deep and historic partnership with Kenya”, although the statement avoided any mention of Kenyatta. The pre-election threats of very limited contact seem to have been forgotten, as the UK now tries to find a way of working closely with Kenya, but without much public contact with its president. However, it will take more than talk of deep and historic partnerships to mend the damage the UK has done.

Convincing Kenyatta that he still has something to gain from working with the UK will be difficult. The failed attempt to warn people off voting for Kenyatta has changed the UK’s standing in Kenya, both with its leaders and its people. It is possible that bungled diplomacy may have ruined a crucial friendship in Africa.

The post Online Only: The Kenyatta Dilemma appeared first on Standpoint.

Their genealogy was almost guaranteed to cause affront to the narrow-minded: an asceticism influenced by Christian desert hermits and orders of wandering mendicant friars — the derivation of dervishes-and a mystical piety that Abraham, son of Maimonedes, transmitted into — Judaism. That their religious practices have a strong element of joy — dancing, drums, tambourines and hymn singing — is further powerful incitement to the puritanical killjoys of radical Islam.

In an ominous reprise of the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, Salafists in Mali have desecrated and destroyed several Sufi shrines in Timbuktu. These unique 15th-century structures were built from dried mud. Shortly after Unesco declared them world heritage sites, Islamist fighters from the Ansar Dine (Defenders of the Faith) al-Qaeda-affiliate surrounded them and hacked them apart with crowbars and pickaxes to cries of “Allahu akbar”. Whenever I hear that being shouted by men waving guns, my instincts tell me something is radically amiss. These acts of vandalism have been condemned by the UN Secretary General and declared war crimes by the International Criminal Court, whose Article 8 forbids deliberate attacks on undefended civilian buildings.

Sufis have also experienced lethal attacks in several Muslim countries. In April 2011, 41 people were slain by Islamist suicide bombers while attending a festival at the Sufi shrine of Sakhi Sarwar in Pakistan. The culprits were the Pakistani Taliban, aggrieved at an entirely unrelated government strike on their fighters elsewhere in the Punjab. In Egypt, hardline Salafists have targeted Sufi mosques in Alexandria, their intention being to destroy the ancient shrines these often contain. This is part and parcel of a campaign against “idolatry” which has led the Salafists to campaign for the covering of the ancient pyramids, though these were never objects of worship for a civilisation that flourished four or five thousand years ago. If this was a temporary measure, of the kind so brilliantly done by the Bulgarian artist Christo with Florida atolls, I’d welcome it, but you can be sure that in hoping to cover the pyramids in wax, the Salafists are not inspired by Christo or the late Joseph Beuys either. The new Western-backed government in Libya has turned a blind eye to Salafists burning Sufi libraries or bulldozing shrines of Sufi sages and scholars in Benghazi. Iran has also declared virtual war on its Sufis, with some devotees being shot dead by militiamen acting on the slogan “death to American dervishes”.

Western policy is increasingly reminiscent of Stan Laurel’s famous “nice mess” catchphrase. By overthrowing Gaddafi, the ill-thought-out Nato campaign in Libya dispersed thousands of heavily armed men into the Sahel states, where Islamist terrorists have piggybacked to power amidst military mutinies and separatist campaigns.

Northern Mali, an area the size of Spain, is controlled by two groups — Ansar Dine and Mujao (Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa) — which are grimly implementing sharia. In Gao, a suspected cattle thief’s hand was hacked off, to cries of “God is great”. In a desert town called Aguelhok, a young couple accused of having a child out of wedlock were buried up to their necks and stoned to death. It took about a quarter of an hour for them to die, watched by silent members of the public. 

This grim Islamist regimen has forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee within Mali, and other Sahel states such as Niger, upsetting a delicate economy that has already been badly hit by drought. Worse, the only real source of potential relief — the regional powerhouse of Nigeria — has been plagued by an equally lethal Islamist movement (Boko Haram, or “Western education is forbidden”) in precisely those northern provinces from which grain could be shipped to the multiplying number of starving refugees from radical Islamism in the Sahel states. 

So now, in addition to northern Mali becoming an Afghan-style safe haven for the world’s jihadist riff-raff, the entire Sahel belt of states is facing the prospect of starvation as well as the obliteration of the delicate religious eco-system that enabled Sufism to thrive for hundreds of years. Unfortunately, those mud shrines in Timbuktu are just the latest examples of this jihad, though their destruction is greatly to be regretted. It will be the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) and Nigeria that will have to clean up Nato’s mess. 

The post Nato’s Mess appeared first on Standpoint.

The essential premise of the book is that an increasing imbalance between world supply and demand in commodities (including land, water and energy) threatens the “double whammy” of increased demand from burgeoning populations for food and clean water on the one hand, and a relative scarcity of inputs (in particular water and arable land) on the other. 

While the underlying logic of Moyo’s argument is undeniable, her views are nonetheless undermined by an unquestioning acceptance of current demands and constraints as permanent. It is taken for granted for instance that China is on an inevitable path of continuous growth, an assumption that is even now being challenged: with copper stocks piling up, cement demand failing and energy usage flattening, China is cutting the cost of borrowing for the first time since December 2008 in an attempt to boost economic growth. With memories of the “threat of Japan” only a few decades old, one would do well to remember that current realities are not immutable.

Dambisa Moyo provides a good snapshot of China Inc’s strategies in Africa. In particular, she points to those factors that make China more competitive in Africa than its Western counterparts. She dismisses the notion that the Chinese are only out to exploit Africa, and instead makes an argument for China pursuing a largely beneficial and symbiotic relationship with the continent. She does share some widely-held concerns regarding China’s involvement (lack of transparency, poor labour laws, lack of concern for the environment), but generally argues that it is for each host country to ensure that environmental, social and other conditions are met. While this description of Chinese involvement in Africa contains no anti-Chinese bias, the same cannot be said of her discussion of Western institutions and governments, which she perhaps unfairly accuses of fiddling while Rome burns. 

While the acknowledgment of China’s comparative success at a local level is welcome, the book is nonetheless weak in its discussion of the differences between Western and Chinese strategies for development. A single paragraph is devoted to explaining that one is “largely state-led” and the other “private sector driven”, and that “both paradigms seem capable of engendering growth”. This is hardly groundbreaking, and at a most basic level fails even to recognise that a fundamental part of China’s incredible economic success over the last two decades has been a well-orchestrated merger of the two frameworks into a dynamic hybrid. 

Furthermore, while Moyo does refer to the 2008 financial crisis, the links between it and the current eurozone crisis — and China’s race for resources — are not made. China’s appetite for resources is not only a question of feeding its population and economy, its “shopping spree” is also inextricably linked to its creditor position with regard to the US Treasury, and the inherent risks of holding such vast cash reserves. So while it’s undoubtedly catchy to state that China’s race for resources is a “race from [internal] revolution”, this is to skip over the interdependence of domestic, macroeconomic and foreign policies in a world in which exchange rates, current account balances and national debts are inextricably tied to trade and investment decisions. So even a brief analysis of “Chimerica” and the new relationship of the big two fails to take the analysis to its logical conclusion, that the two countries enjoy equal status, and cannot do without each other. As such, the reader is bound to feel — at least from the point of view of grand economic geopolitics — slightly short-changed.

Dambisa Moyo does, quite rightly, question the relevance and effectiveness of existing international institutions in meeting the challenge. Sadly, the final pages of the book, which set out the “way forward”, fail to provide anything of the sort, rather falling back on a nebulous idealism: national preferences are said to be superseding communal interest, and state meddling in the form of protectionism and subsidies confusing the investment climate; what is needed is a global agency focusing solely on resource scarcity. Despite calls for cooperation, sanctions are the chosen tool to achieve a normalisation of resource availability, a tactic that, the writer suggests, might not meet with universal success. Perhaps most strangely, Dambisa chooses this moment to introduce new topics — such as a call for more GM crops and energy efficiency — and what might otherwise be a strategy descends into a brief list of bullet points.

China’s race for resources and global supply is a subject undoubtedly in need of academic treatment, and the aim of Dambisa Moyo’s book is clearly to make Western readers sit up and take notice of China’s activities, a worthwhile attempt in an increasingly interdependent world. Unfortunately however, Winner Take All fails adequately to tackle the subject. The book provides a grand sweep over the world of commodities, and the world’s most populous country’s effect on global demand and available resources.  However, it is equally sweeping in its treatment of China’s interrelationship with the West, and fails to come up with anything but a lacklustre vision for meeting the clear and present danger of resource scarcity in the coming years.

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But how to persuade Cubans to swap bases for stumps and catchers for wicketkeepers? For this the Foreign Office turned to Tom Rodwell, whose new book, Third Man in Havana (Corinthian, £14.99) — Rodwell apologises to Graham Greene, who hated cricket — documents his failed attempt to win the Cubans round as well as other unlikely adventures with bat and ball. His trips to Israel, Panama, New York, Sierra Leone and elsewhere make Rodwell a cricketing missionary, packing his pads wherever he goes to do good with cricket.

Rodwell was as ill-suited to his Cuban mission as Mr Wormold, the vacuum cleaner salesman-cum-spy of Greene’s Our Man in Havana. The Spanish translation of the MCC’s Laws of the Game, he soon discovered, was written by someone who knew plenty of Spanish but little about the sport. A game in Guantánamo (the town, not the nearby US naval base) ended prematurely when Stalin, a stubborn fast-bowler from Havana, had an lbw appeal turned down; and unsurprisingly Rodwell failed to persuade a baseball bat manufacturer that cricket bats would be a more lucrative trade.

Another cricketing adventurer is Oli Broom, who demonstrated his dedication to the game when he cycled around the world from Lord’s in London to the Gabba stadium in Brisbane in time for the start of the 2010 Ashes. In a 14-month trip he pedalled through 23 countries, playing cricket in all but three of them and raising money for the Lord’s Taverners, a cricket charity. 

Broom’s latest project is to raise the £400,000 needed to build a cricket ground in Rwanda. Despite increasing interest in the sport, the country has just one shabby pitch. When Rwanda joined the Commonwealth in 2009, it was the first country without any former British colonial links to do so. When Tony Blair backed their admission, he quipped, “Well, they play cricket, don’t they?”

The Rwandans will doubtless take heart from the rise of the Afghanistan cricket team, a story told by Tim Albone in his film and book Out of the Ashes (Virgin, £11.99). In 1987, the Afghan Cricket Club was founded in a refugee camp in Pakistan. This year, the national team will take part in the Twenty20 World Cup, competing against the best in the world. 

With corrupt Pakistani cricketers behind bars and the gaudy, money-soaked Indian Premier League on the rise, cricket needs good-news stories. Fortunately, there are still plenty to choose from. 

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Widespread anger at alleged Chinese neocolonial rapacity swung the election Sata’s way, despite all the Chinese-manufactured lollipops bearing Banda’s face distributed before polling day. There is a common Zambian view that “the whites were bad, the Indians were worse, but the Chinese are worst of all.” 

There was last year’s incident when two Chinese mine managers at the Collum Coal Mine used shotguns to quell a riot over low wages. Although they were charged with attempted murder of the 13 people who were wounded, all charges were mysteriously dropped. Zambians resent the way in which Chinese labourers have metamorphosed into the sharpest of Lusaka’s entrepreneurs, from taxis and textiles to undercutting local traders with cheaper chickens, cabbages and beansprouts.

Not being subject to the West’s stifling political correctness, the Chinese blame Britain’s influence for their problems. Explaining why he prefers imported Chinese labour, the head of Zambia’s largest construction company said: “Chinese people work until they finish and then rest. Here they are like the British. They have tea breaks and a lot of days off.”

Although Beijing threatened to pull out of Zambia when Sata spoke of recognising Taiwan, the Chinese have since invited him to visit soon, while some Zambian mine workers have benefited from an immediate 85 per cent pay rise — admittedly not much since many of them earn $4 a day.

There is a wider problem in Africa and it does not just involve China’s ferocious quest for raw materials to satisfy middle-class consumers’ craving for baths and door handles fashioned from African materials or mobile phones reliant on rare earth metals. The world’s largest producer of cut roses, the Bangalore-based Karuturi Global, has just acquired nearly a million acres of land in Tanzania, or one per cent of the country’s surface. The aim is to cultivate biofuels as well as gladioli and roses for the European flower market. This is part of a huge drive, by India, China, South Korea and Saudi Arabia, to buy up vast tracts of Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, Sudan and Tanzania in a manner that even some Indian economists consider neocolonialist or “piratical”. 

Apart from the fact that the land is cheap — at £38 a hectare in Tanzania — it circumvents complications major Indian food and flower producers face at home. Smallholdings and middlemen dominate Indian farming. An estimated £6 billion is lost as produce rots on its way to market. There are also government bans on the export of non-Basmati rice, so by growing it in Africa, Indian companies can sell it overseas. As in China, a more affluent Indian middle class is eating more meat, which means an urgent need for maize-based animal feed. 

Various African countries have begun to experience inter-ethnic tensions involving Asians. So far these have been focused on the Chinese, whose clannish hard-heartedness is deeply resented. In Maseru, the capital of tiny Lesotho, there were anti-Chinese riots in 2007, sparked not by Chinese domination of textile mills, but by the fact that every successful Chinese entrepreneur brings along 100 relatives who take over local stores. Africa has been down this path before. In the 1960s several African leaders, including Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta and Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, exploited anti-Asian sentiment for their own political ends. So did the grotesque Idi Amin of Uganda, who drove out tens of thousands of East African Asians in the following decade.

There is a further issue. One aspect of China’s soft power is to export its authoritarian capitalist model, based on a combination of rapid development and hearing and seeing no evils in the regimes it deals with. The dealings routinely include putting up to $500 million in the rulers’ Swiss bank accounts, lavish presidential palaces, hospitals and roads. But sometimes things do not pan out China’s way. The fact that Zambia has just had a peaceful election in which power passed smoothly from Banda to Sata is also part of Africa’s story, and it was not a win for Beijing’s Confucian capitalism. 

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“We’re here to show the world that the revolutionaries are not only capable of conquering Gaddafi and liberating our dear land, but also of protecting our institutions and of managing our own country,” says Tarhuni, the oil and finance minister. “It’s a great day to see the country getting back to normal-gradually but surely.” Volleys of “Allahu akbar!” (“God is great!”) greet every bullish pronouncement. After a lightning photoshoot and a quick round of pressing the flesh, he is whisked off in a Mercedes and the event is over.

Tarhuni is getting good at this sort of stuff. Only a few days earlier, at a post-Eid celebration in the prime minister’s office in Tripoli, he was kissing babies with the practised ease of a campaigning politician. Until the arrival of Mahmoud Jibril, the interim prime minister, in early September, he was the most senior representative of the NTC in the liberated capital. He was also the first political heavyweight, ahead of both Jibril and Mustapha Abdel Jalil, the NTC chairman, to address euphoric crowds in Tripoli’s renamed Martyrs Square, the focal point of the revolution. 

Two observations can be made about the event at Mellitah, a joint venture with the Italian energy giant ENI which is said to be the largest foreign investment in Libya. First, if it’s not quite business as usual — there’s still fighting to be done and the symbolically important task of capturing or killing Gaddafi — Libya is doing its damndest to show that the country has turned the revolutionary corner and is open for business. In Tarhuni’s words, “Our message to the world: your investments are safe in Libya.” Judging by the lobby of the Radisson Hotel, venture capitalists are already beating a path to Tripoli.

The second observation, whatever the protestations to the contrary, is that politics is starting in earnest. The last time I met Tarhuni, back in June, he was finance and oil minister. Today, he has added the position of deputy prime minister to his twin portfolios, an appointment that occasioned a certain raising of eyebrows. As one Tripoline puts it, “We never had finance and oil under one minister, let alone deputy prime minister too.” Earlier in the month, Tarhuni announced the formation of a new Supreme Security Committee for Tripoli and said he had been appointed its chairman, concentrating additional powers in his hands.

Jibril insists it’s still too early for politics. Speaking to journalists on September 8 after his long-awaited arrival in Tripoli, he rebuked “some colleagues” for starting “the political game”, reminding them that the war against Gaddafi had not yet finished and the country was not entirely liberated. If the politicking continued, he hinted, he would step down and withdraw from the fray altogether. He reiterated his pledge not to seek office beyond the transitional period of 20 months, by which time Libya should have a new constitution and be set for national elections. 

Perhaps the most interesting and telling point Jibril made, however, was not so much the no-politics-please-we’re-Libyan-revolutionaries as the emphasis on future challenges. Libyans had to dwell on future nation-building, he said, rather than be drawn into a destructive concentration on the past. “The most difficult battle is against ourselves. How can we achieve reconciliation, how can we achieve security and agree a constitution that dictates the boundaries of the political game?”

To get a first-hand understanding of the balance between reconciliation and reprisal in Libya, I travelled with a Libyan friend and his family to the southern oasis of Ghadames, home to a mixed Arab-Berber population that has, for many centuries, coexisted with the Touareg, an ancient desert people. The relationship has often been fraught. For the past six months, armed and funded by the Gaddafi regime, a youthful portion of the local Touareg, supplemented by fellow Touareg from Algeria and Mali, policed the small town of 12,000 with an iron rod — and electrical cables for beating suspected rebels.

In the end, after two flat tyres and a five-hour roadside wait sweltering beneath the desert sun, our journey to Ghadames was interrupted by 16 Touareg who burst on to the road armed with Kalashnikovs. In the space of a 24-hour kidnapping in the rolling sand seas where Libya, Algeria and Tunisia meet, our Touareg captors, vestiges of the Gaddafi loyalist militia, threatened to kill us unless their fellow Touareg prisoners in Ghadames were released. Their homes had been robbed and burnt to the ground, they said, their animals slaughtered.

When I finally made it to Ghadames — my friend remains hostage in the desert at the time of writing — much of the talk was of how the Touareg were no longer welcome in the town. While Jibril was sending out all the right messages in Tripoli, echoed four days later in Martyrs Square by Jalil (“We are Muslims, people of forgiveness”), reprisals were already under way in this remote desert oasis. The town council was almost alone in declaring that the Touareg, most of whom had not been involved in the brutal rule by Gaddafi’s Touareg militia, had a future in Ghadames.

If you are a black Libyan, chances are you are more likely to be fearing, or experiencing, reprisals than welcoming reconciliation at the moment. The prevalence of reports that Gaddafi was using sub-Saharan mercenaries to prop up his regime has resulted in attacks on innocent black Libyans who played no role in the conflict. In its report “The Battle for Libya: Killings, Disappearance and Torture”, Amnesty cites figures from the International Organisation for Migration showing that before the revolution Libya was home to between 1.5-2.5 million foreign nationals, mostly from sub-Saharan African countries, including Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia and Sudan. “Racist and xenophobic attacks, already frequent before the unrest, increased as a result of the breakdown of law and order and an escalation of xenophobic rhetoric by both sides of the conflict,” the report says, documenting numerous instances of reprisals and abuse. 

During a visit to Tripoli General Hospital, I saw four terrified black African prisoners under guard. Possibly fearing for their lives, they tried to escape, triggering a row between the hospital authorities and the rebel guard which resulted in pistol-pulling, gun-waving and only narrowly avoided a fatal shooting.

The number of armed men in Tripoli, many of them throwing up celebratory curtains of lead from Kalashnikovs and anti-aircraft guns, is a concern. For as long as the conflict continues, it is understandable that rebel forces will keep their weapons. Yet it is not clear when they will surrender them. Messages vary depending on which brigade you speak to. For Abdullah Abdullah, a commander in the muscle-flexing Misratah Brigade, currently holed up in the Al Widan Hotel in Tripoli, there is no immediate rush. “We’ll go back when we’ve got Abu Shafshufa [mop-head, a contemptuous nickname for Gaddafi] and a good president and when we have good security in 100 per cent of the country. We can stay in Tripoli. It’s our capital. We’re one family.”

With the city stabilising impressively by the day, from power and water returning to immaculately uniformed traffic policemen marshalling the flows of exuberant traffic, Tripolines may take a less relaxed view of their armed neighbours’ stay in the capital, particularly if it starts to look like a declaration of intent to grab a share of the political spoils rather than reinforce security.

While the mood music from the NTC remains encouraging, emphasising reconciliation, stabilisation and the need to see the fight against Gaddafi through, some fear a growing Islamist role in the new Libya. They point to the rise and rise of Abdel Hakim Belhaj, former leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which Washington declared a terrorist organisation and al-Qaeda ally, as the most powerful man in the capital, leader of the Tripoli Military Council. Then there is the Islamic scholar Ali Sallabi, his reputation burnished by a high-profile leadership role during the revolution, and the Islamist umbrella group Etilaf, which is said to have risen to prominence at the expense of more secular groups by dint of its organisational prowess. 

These are legitimate worries, though they should be understood in a context in which the overwhelming mood, both on the street and the corridors of transitional power, is for a democratic, moderate Muslim state. Such an aspiration will naturally face fierce challenges.

Dr Aref Nayed, an urbane religious scholar charged with managing the NTC’s stabilisation programme, says the transition will be a “formidable” task. “Natural friction and competition between various groups and parties in the country must be managed in a democratic and mutually respectful way as the raw materials for democracy rather than the cracks of division,” he says.

As Libyans look west to Tunisia, which kicked off the Arab Spring, and east to Egypt, which also ejected its dictator but is stagnating under septuagenarian military rule, they take heart from the progress of their revolution. “Tunisia and Egypt have more problems than us,” says Krekshi Mohyeddin, a legal translator. “They cut off the head of the regime but not the roots, which are still there. We’ve taken the whole system out.” 

This may tilt towards complacency, but notwithstanding the numerous challenges that lie ahead, Libya still appears best placed of all Arab countries to weather the revolutionary storm and build a more stable state with foundations that are more or less democratic. Ekram al Huni, a Libyan friend from Benghazi days earlier this summer, has just returned to Tripoli to take the pulse. She is reassured by the rumbustious debate she has encountered.

“It’s great to see it. Tripolines are saying to the NTC, ‘Who elected you?’ They’re questioning everything and it’s really healthy. Things that have been suppressed can rise to the surface and people can express their opinions. There’s more openness. It’s healthy for the NTC to know they’re being held accountable.”

One criticism she makes, repeated by other Libyans, is the government’s record on communicating plans and policies to the population. “The NTC is speaking effectively to international donors, humanitarian organisations and its international partners but not really to the people. Libyans aren’t going to be pleased with that.” 

As the revolutionary euphoria fades into quieter satisfaction at toppling one of the world’s least savoury dictators, Libyans are likely to take a closer, more questioning look at their political leaders. They will become impatient with high unemployment, wondering why a country that has the largest oil reserves in Africa is still mired in poverty. The NTC will need to guide a people hungry for rapid change every step of the way.

It is easy to forget, seven months after rebels in Benghazi first braved Gaddafi’s guns, that freedom is a new experience for the inhabitants of Tripoli. During the fortnight I was based in the Libyan capital, the celebrations in Martyrs Square grew from tentative hundreds to ebullient and joyful thousands. It took time for Tripolines finally to believe that it was safe to come out. When they did, they filled the square.

Amid the waving red, black and green tricolours, the rousing new-old national anthem, the booming reports of anti-aircraft guns and crowds shouting “Arfa rasuk fawg, Enta Leebee hour!” (“Hold your head high, you are a free Libyan!”), Yusra al Massoudi, a civil engineer is anxious to speak to a foreign journalist. 

“This is the real picture of Libya,” she says, “the best picture. This is fantastic. I feel great. We can’t believe this. All of my life I never felt this was my country. Libya was like Gaddafi’s farm. Now, only now, for the first time in my life, I feel proud to be Libyan. This is my country.”

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