ColdTypeTabloid 6 (2002)

ColdType THREE SECTIONS

W W W . C O L D T Y P E . N E T

WRITING WORTH READING FROM AROUND THE WORLD

N U M B E R

S I X

Why does By Robert Fisk John Malkovich Malkovich want to kill me? me?

PLUS: Rian Malan / Ian Jack / Denis Beckett / Lesley Riddoch / Michael I. Niman / Warren Gerard / L.E.Baskow

“WE MAKE GOOD THINGS BETTER” SPECIAL THEME

THE WORLD AFTER SEPTEMBER 11 – THROUGH THE EYES OF WOMEN ACROSS THE GLOBE F I N D U S O N T H E W E B AT : W W W . W O R L D W O M A N . N E T

Worldwoman INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S NEWSPAPER

■

WINTER 2001

MAURITIUS

ENGLAND

Battered woman ends nightmare

Peacebuilding minus women in Afghanistan

Never in the history of Mauritius has a suspected murderer received so much sympathy. The Minister of Women’s Rights and ministry officials not only visited Nazma Issah in her prison cell but promised her all legal, moral and logistic support.

The woman admitted killing her husband with a kitchen knife on 2 October 2001. Page 3

George Bush appears to have decided not to push for women to be involved in any coalition to succeed the Taleban regime in Afghanistan. “Right now we have other priorities,” a senior Administration official has said, “We have to be careful not to look like we are imposing our values on them.” Women’s groups have demanded the UN intervene after a security council resolution was adopted last year which requires women to be involved in peace negotiations. 50 Afghan women will meet in Brussels next month to decide their own agenda – the event is likely to see demands from UN human rights high commissioner Mary Robinson and MEP Glenys Kinnock for women to be brought in to all peace moves in Afghanistan.

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ICELAND

GHANA

Saucy campaign helps reduce AIDS

What’s in a name?

Not a lot, it seems

“If It’s Not On, It's Not In,” is the saucy strapline that has become one of the most effective family planing messages in Africa. It’s almost the first image that greets the traveller at Accra airport – now researchers say it has led to increased condom sales as part of the government’s “Stop AIDS Love Life” campaign. Using radio, television, music videos and testimonials from people living with HIV/AIDS, the campaign – is much bolder than ads used in other African countries – and it seems to be working.

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It’s one thing to marry a man and make a mistake – it’s another to be saddled with his name for the rest of your life.

With divorce now a fact of life across the world, women change their lives, addresses and appearance when they change partners. But millions stick with an acquired surname they might prefer to dump. Not in Iceland. Page 2

ZIMBABWE

No condom, no sex, says Rudo Talking about aids in public usually earns a social boycott.

Trying to force a husband to wear a condom usually earns divorce or violence or both.

One Zimbabwean woman has done both - now she helps run the country’s HIV/AIDS prevention campaign. It started – unlike most political campaigns – in a Harare hairdresser.

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MALAYSIA

Law a threat to mothers, babies A survey by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists places the caesarean rate in the UK at 21.5 per cent – much higher than the WHO recommendation of 10 to 15 per cent. But the lives of British women aren’t likely to be placed in danger by medical intervention. Not so in Malaysia where the industrialised attitude towards childbearing and childbirth has spread with devastating consequences.

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SCOTLAND

PLUS

Why Linn was banned from playing rugby with boys Scots rugby chiefs have blocked a top Swedish player from a Schools international because she might get hurt. 17 year old Linn Olforser was selected to play for the Enkoping team in Sweden but banned from taking to the filed when she arrived in Edinburgh last month. A Scottish official said, “The game is too physical. There’s no way a guy should have to hold himself back from a full-blooded tackle if a girl had the ball. It would change the nature of the game. It’s common sense.”

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LETTERS ON SEPTEMBER 12 .. 8 CHANGING FACE OF THE AFRICAN NEWSROOM ............. 9 WHY I STOPPED DRINKING ......10 THE SHAME OF FEMALE CIRCUMCISION ........................ 11

Worldwoman, Edinburgh, Scotland

Africawoman, Nairobi, Kenya

Sunday Times, Johannesburg, South Africa

Business Insurance, New York, USA

NDA

NEWS DESIGN ASSOCIATES I N C O R P O R A T E D

E D I TO R I A L A N D P U B L I C AT I O N D E S I G N C O N S U LTA N TS 10469 Sixth Line, RR#3, Georgetown, Ontario L7G 4S6, Canada Tel: (905) 702-8600 / Fax: (905) 702-8527 / E-mail: tonysutton@newsdesign.net Website: www.newsdesign.net

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Issue 6

From The Editor

Back again after a five-year break COLDTYPE was launched eight years ago to counteract a belief – which still continues – that the best way for newspapers to solve the problem of declining readership is to tinker with the design without too much thought to content.

The result of this shortsightedness, I pointed out in my first editor’s note, was the production of a “generation of newspapers that are often bland and lifeless … and that is not good journalism. An attractive package is desirable, but we should pay as much attention to the quality of the grey stuff as we do to its packaging.”

Things haven’t changed much in the past eight years; in fact the speed of redesigns has hotted up while circulations fall at a concurrent speed.

ColdType, resurrected after a hiatus of five years – it took nearly four years to persuade my former bosses at Thomson Newspapers to give me the title and another 15 months to decide what to do with it – will continue with its original mission: to reprint examples of excellent writing from around the world in a format that emphasises how a neat and unobtrusive design can enhance, without subsuming, the power of of The Word.

That’s the mission, but the point, as always is much simpler: Great writing is wonderful and should be available to as many people as possible – and preferably free of charge, hence our new pdf format and internet distribution. I hope you find this new issue interesting, informative and amusing. If you do (or if you don’t), let me know. Your feedback is important.

Tony Sutton Editor Special thanks to Ian Jack, Robert Fisk, Denis Beckett, Lesley Riddoch, Rian Malan, Michael I. Niman, Warren Gerard and Paul Duchene, writers of the stories in this issue; L.E. Baskow for his photo essay;and illustrators Rui Ramalheiro and Duˇsan Petricic.

PRINTING HINTS: ColdType is best read when printed to its full

Contents

Trekking through India … Page 10

● SECTION ONE

2. LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO EDINBURGH: As weather and broken railway lines brought Britain to a standstill at the end of 2000, Ian Jack boarded a train, gazed at the cows and wondered if the British had become thick 6. IT’S HER SHOUT: A new survey suggests alcohol consumption by British women is likely to soar by 30% by 2004. Does being a woman in the UK drive you to drink? asks Lesley Riddoch 8. WHY DOES JOHN MALKOVICH WANT TO KILL ME? British journalist Robert Fisk is used to receiving hate mail attacking his reporting of various conflicts in the Middle East. It’s getting worse, he says, as venomous letters have turned into calls for his death

10. SHIT, SPIT AND SQUALOR: Denis Beckett takes a camera crew from Johannesburg to India and winds up strangely relieved that he was not, after all, able to run out of it after the third day of his journey ●SECTION TWO

13. WRITE OF PASSAGE: Writing an obituary is a delicate art.

Warren Gerard leaves behind some words of advice

15. BRANDING CUBA: LA VIDA NIKE: The USA media is wondering what will happen to the communist enclave just a few miles off its coast after Castro’s reign ends. Too late, says Michael I. Niman – the revolution has already begun

11” by 14” proportions, but it can easily be read when reduced to 74% of its original on regular printers. Colour printing is best.

READERS’ COMMENTS: Tell us what you think of this issue of ColdType – content, size, ease of reading, etc. and give us your suggestions for future issues. We also welcome article submissions, although we don’t pay for them. Comments to: tonysutton@newsdesign.net.

NOTES ON THE TYPEFACES: This issue is the first publication to feature – heads and text – Goodchild, a new font designed by Toronto type designer Nick Shinn (www.shinntype.com).

The sans serif faces in ColdType are various weights of Brown, also designed by Shinn.

COLDTYPE: Edited, designed and produced by Tony Sutton, President, News Design Associates Inc., 10469 Sixth Line, RR#3, Georgetown, Ontario L7G 4S6, Canada.

WEB SITES: www.coldtype.net www.newsdesign.net

Issue 6 / 2002

18. HARD MEN, HARD COUNTRY: On the road in Angola … Page 28

South African writer Rian Malan goes on the road with some of the toughest truckers on the planet

● SECTION THREE

13. STILL LIFE: Living art. That’s the best phrase to describe what Wells Oviatt III does for a living. If you’re travelled through Portland recently, you’ve probably seen him – he’s the statue in the square. Photo essay by L.E. Baskow, words by Paul Duchene

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ColdType

Issue 6

ENGLAND

As weather and broken railway lines brought Britain to a standstill at the end of 2000, Ian Jack boarded a train, gazed at the cows and wondered if the British had become thick

Long day’s journey into Edinburgh S

omewhere in that mainly flat stretch of country between Doncaster and Grantham the train stopped again – unwontedly, as the Georgian poem has it. Through the carriage window, I could see fields of water and, on a higher stretch of green pasture that had become an island, a couple of cows bending into the grass and chewing blankly. The cows were pretty, black and brown and white, and there was a touch of blue in the sky; the water in the fields shone. No human beings and no houses could be seen. The train’s engine idled. As the poem also has it, no one left and no one came.

I imagined this scene as one of those mysterious Victorian story-paintings – The Scapegoat, or a new version of The Last of England – in which every superficially attractive feature suggests something ominous. Stopped train, flooded fields, a couple of marooned survivors from the recent bovine holocaust. I have travelled this way on the east coast main line many times – by my calculation (there being not much else to do at this point), hundreds of times – and this bit of England has always seemed unknowable to me. One part looks much like the next. I continue to confuse Retford and Newark and not be quite certain that the large river, brimming and rippling when we passed it a few minutes back, is the Trent. To the east lies Lincolnshire (Skegness, Cleethorpes), where I have never been; to the west, Nottingham, where I have almost never been. Perhaps this is the real Middle England. Never before had it seemed so fragile and undependable, or so threatened by the biblical punishments of plague and flood.

Eventually, the train moved on. We passed a few broken trees, straddled across the opposite line. There were workers in bright orange coats. One of them was furling a yellow flag: proceed with caution. This was a pioneer train – as far as I could tell, the first

Somehow, we made do without too many arguments, remarking to each other as passengers do in a country such as India that no public system can be relied on, nothing bloody works

sent south from Doncaster on that day, Monday, 30 October, 2000, although the time was after two in the afternoon. At Newark, the last stop, passengers for Grantham had been told to get off and on to a special bus. But then, strangely, the train pulled into Grantham and stopped. I remembered a remark of an older colleague on a newspaper 15 or 20 years ago. Didn’t I think that the people of Britain were becoming “thick”? He had noticed that they bumped into each other more, stupidly, like dodg’em cars. This seemed an odd and even offensive remark at the time, but in Grantham, I wondered if he hadn’t caught some Naipaulian splinter of the truth. I turned the page of my newspaper and read that the railways are so short of skill that a contracting firm in Scotland is recruiting 14 engineers from Romania.

A red signal light shone brightly at the platform’s end. When it turned green, we moved down the plain towards the capital.

We would get through.

L

ast weekend I spent, in all, 14 hours on trains. I do not want to describe this as “a nightmare;” that word, along with “cattle trucks,” properly belongs with troop trains and transports bound for destinations in central Europe 60 years ago. I travelled from London to Fife via Edinburgh late on Friday and back again early on Monday. Perhaps I was lucky, but the journey didn’t even reach the standards of a bad dream. I had no urgent business. I saw my mother. All that happened along the way was that I was stuck on trains or stood waiting for them far longer than I should have been.

So what did I feel? I suppose a kind of irritable melancholy. I am interested in railways.

It is a sad thing these days to be interested in railways. By this, I don’t mean that an interest in railways indicates a sad personality, repression, infantilism and so on (though it

may do), rather that to be interested in railways, to believe in them as an effective, reliable and environmentally necessary mode of transport, is to be made sad by the lethal muddle they have become. I used to be angry. How could politicians (Tory) have got away with such a crazy privatisation, such a careless and perverse scheme? How could politicians (Labour, and contrary to their pledges) have persevered, keeping the scheme intact?

But as I made my way to King’s Cross in London, I hoped I would be shielded by the iron of fatalism – adjustment to new conditions. There may be a train, or there may not.

If not, then I would try to behave with the dignity of a poor man on a platform in, say, Bihar. I would walk away with my bundle and try again another day.

I had booked a seat on the four o’clock to Edinburgh. I collected my standard saver return (£77) at the ticket office and then went to consult the departures board. The four o’clock was listed with a revised arrival time in Edinburgh of 21.19 rather than 20.20, the extra time to allow for a detour to avoid the Hatfield crash site and the consequent speed restrictions further up the line.

There were queues in the concourse, marked with small signs at their head: queues D and C and E for Newcastle, Edinburgh and Leeds. The 3.30 to Newcastle had been cancelled. Queue D joined queue C. No platform had been announced. At four o’clock, the train to take us out still hadn’t come in. The people queuing behaved admirably but also, in a survival-of-thefittest sense, foolishly. Less obedient people hang around the entrance to the likeliest platform and become the front of the queue, if they’ve guessed rightly. By the time platform number three was announced, the crowd around its end was so big that passengers leaving the train were blocked by those trying to get on.

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A voice over the Tannoy said we were not to run – it was dangerous, there would be room on other trains – but still we ran

Porters, if they are still called porters, came and cleared a way. Then we began to run down the platform. A voice over the Tannoy said we were not to run – it was dangerous, there would be room on other trains – but still we ran. Thick, as my old colleague might have said; after all, most of us had booked seats. Or perhaps not so thick, given the capricious booking arrangements. I had seat 38 in coach B, but the seats in coach B were ticketed for coach A. And, a thrilling double layer of confusion, the seat numbers on the tickets did not correspond to the numbers on the seats to which they were

midnight. She is 93. “I wonder,” she said, “why trains have to travel so fast. A hundred miles an hour! That’s surely dangerous.”

On my way back, I thought about her question. The little train from Fife was late and crowded, standing room only. On board the nine o’clock to London at Edinburgh, we were advised to get off unless our journey was “really necessary” – shades of 1940 – because the train might get no further than Doncaster. At Newcastle, we were told it would advance no further than York. “Deteriorating,” or sometimes just “adverse,” weather conditions had cut off southern England from the north. At York, we got off, only to be told that the train would in fact go to London.

Back on, we were told it would go only to Doncaster. At Doncaster, we waited on a windy platform where pleasant officials of the Great North Eastern Railway company (the best of the new railway operators, in my experience, although perhaps I’ve been seduced by the olde-worlde hokum of the name) told us that they were as much in the dark as we were, but with any luck we could expect a train from Leeds. After an hour, one came along, nearly empty.

We reached London at half past five, a journey of eight and a half hours from Edinburgh rather than the advertised four. My mother would have approved, and the truth is that I didn’t mind too much.

A warm and empty carriage, work to do, some compensatory free coffee, and time to look at the cows. In 1910 – according to the Bradshaw of that year – the journey time would have been thought satisfactory. Even in the 1960s, the fastest trains took six hours and there were far fewer of them: five a day, slow or fast, from Edinburgh to London, whereas now there are more than twenty. Or would be, were it not for broken rails.

But pace my mother’s question, we think we live in a modern European country. We expect trains to travel fast, motorways to be clear, schools to educate, hospitals to care and cure, food to be safe. This is not so much rising as risen expectations. It may be no more than a brief illusion: this country is brilliant at illusions – new uniforms for the Underground, escalators that crack, stations that close. All of us, even the thickest, now know that the underfunded ice we skate on is very, very thin. ◆

attached. Seat B40 had a ticket for A38, going only as far as York.

S

omehow, we made do without too many arguments, remarking to each other as passengers do in a country such as India that no public system can be relied on, nothing bloody works.

The train left late and got later, three hours later than its original time, two later than its revised time. There were many apologies – this country has become brilliant at apologising. I was at my mother’s home by

This article first appeared in New Statesman

Ian Jack is editor of Granta, the international literary magazine.

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ColdType

Issue 6

SCOTLAND

It’s her shout!

A new survey suggests that alcohol consumption by British women is likely to soar by 30% by 2004.

Does being a woman in the UK drive you to drink? asks Lesley Riddoch. Or is that just a lazy, outdated excuse for New Women aping Old Lads?

T

ime was when I could conceive of no greater reward for a job done than a large G&T. The sort you pour yourself – bigger than the pub measure with an extra little kick. No better way of getting out of the doldrums than a large dram – preferably an island malt, not cooking whisky.

No better way to spend an hour on the shuttle than to sample a wee bottle of wine – or two. Well, their little measures are so mean. No better way to enjoy the last episode of a favourite TV detective series than alone with a bottle of Chardonnay. No better way to explore intimacy than over wine. No possible way to bond deeply with fellow human beings than with a drink in hand. And another one waiting.

Then on August 1, 2000, something changed and now I don’t drink any more. In fact, with a year’s ban for drink-driving in 1998, the penny should have dropped much earlier. The shock certainly forced a separation of drinking and driving but if anything that just increased drinking opportunities.

In the country area where I live nobody gave me lectures on the error of my ways – or even the dirty looks I expected and felt I deserved. At first I wondered if they knew I was only just over the limit and had scaled their reaction down accordingly. But if I had

Whatever southern sophisticates say about less being more, the Celts firmly believe more is more.

We are out to have the ultimate experience

a dram for every person who said “it could have been me,” I’d be very ill.

Truth is, in Scotland 2002 you can drink or drive yourself to a virtual standstill without doing serious damage to your social standing or self esteem. In fact, in serious drinking quarters there is no upper limit.

Whatever southern sophisticates say about less being more, the Celts firmly believe more is more. We are out to have the ultimate experience. Scots, like the Irish, have an almost mystical belief in the possibility of self-discovery through drink. Any brave explorer is applauded – even if the journey occasionally ends at base camp. The real crime I’ve committed in the eyes of those big drinkers who have been and still are my best friends is to quit the quest and abandon the adventure by stopping drinking.

S

o what made me change? Well the aftermath of my turning 40 was probably a factor.

I celebrated my birthday with a valiant party of friends who crossed the choppiest Minch in (my) living memory for a night of bacchanalian excess on Eigg. I’ve spent most Hogmanays on the Hebridean island since becoming a trustee of their Heritage Trust seven years ago.

On June 12, 1997, when the community

finally bought the island I was drinking and dispensing drams to all and sundry until the last head hit the kitchen table at Kildonan at about 11am. By 4pm we were all up again for more. And so it went on for several days – that is the Hebridean way. And I was proud that my staying power meant I could witness the music, dancing and patter right till the bitter end.

Looking forward to more of the same on my birthday, I arrived at the Eigg tearoom to be solemnly handed a birthday card by a couple of friends – aged 10. On the front a mini-skirted stickwoman stood legs astride with a whip in one hand – spelt wipe but I got the drift – and a bottle in the other. The caption: Be a party animal!

I insisted they had got me all wrong. “But you only ever come here for parties,” said young Cailean. “You never just come to see us.” And I realised it did look that way. Other people came to drink tea, ponder the ways of the universe and chat to people without a ceilidh for accompaniment. I always waited for an alcohol-related opportunity. Why? It set me thinking. Would I even consider a night on the isle without a hospitable bottle of whisky to hand? How much were we all overlooking the downside of drink to keep the image of the incorrigible, dram-swilling but loveable highlander alive?

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I started thinking but I kept drinking. Not massively. I don’t think I was or am an alcoholic. I could lay off when I wanted. Sometimes I would have a rule not to drink on my own. For almost a year I didn’t drink during the week. For a while I made sure there were at least two booze-free days a week. But a big social occasion followed by a piece of serious work would mean trying to reschedule work or skipping the gig rather than going but not drinking. I would take two or three bottles of wine when visiting friends – just in case – and they were always finished.

I never bought the gadget that removes air from an opened bottle – wine didn’t stay around that long. I do now recall good friends having to make sure we met on Fridays – they always needed a day to recover.

I, on the other hand, felt no pain. When others had hangovers I felt only a great lifting of the logical barriers that keep ideas separated and compartmentalised. I often had my best lateral thinking programmes – I believed – after a night out. While others were unable to move at 7am, I was up and functioning. Friends kept marvelling at my capacity for drink, and I did too, instead of wondering what real marvels might be in store if I wasn’t wasting time, brain cells and emotional energy through alcohol.

Did I get my thirst from my parents? No way. I saw my dad under the influence once in 35 years – even though he was brought up in the shadow of a distillery in rural Banffshire. Mum has had four sherries to my certain knowledge, and maybe a few glasses of wine, in her life. Brought up in Wick, a temperance town, she has always taken a very dim view of her daughter’s “unnecessary” excesses.

But then thanks to her encouragement I had rather different opportunities and terrifying experiences to face in life. I am almost certainly the first female member of the family on either side to go to university. I was the first person from my school to go to Oxbridge and the first family member to leave home for England aged 18. I was the first female president of Oxford University Student Union – the first non-Conservative president at that. Thereafter, I was very often the only female at meetings, on boards, behind lecterns, on platforms and in the public eye. I thought I took it all in my stride, but as I moved further into the male public world I started dealing with the strain like the males around me – by relaxing in the pub afterwards.

Others took drugs. I was too wary and northern for that. Moreover, I regarded relaxing in pubs as an achievement – and in the late 1970s it was. Women like me were breaking down barriers in the classroom, at the ballot box and in the workplace, but were still standing outside pubs in the rain to meet pals. hoping they wouldn’t be late.

Pubs may have been “public houses” for men, but there was nothing public about them for most women. It was a challenge – a social challenge many talented women chose

A dietician pal working in schools tells me the No 1 question she gets asked is: Which alcoholic drink has the fewest calories?”

This article first appeared in Worldwoman

to ignore. I couldn’t resist. I had no penis envy, but I did have bar-stool lust.

The writer Kate Atkinson recently put her finger on the way that women drink now. In the 1980s, she said, women went beyond biology. Our use of the pill, growing physical strength and competition with men in almost every arena impacted on our drinking.We decided that what was sauce for the gander would now be sauce for the goose – even if it was addictive and destructive. And it is.

W

omen’s bodies, even robust 5ft 11in ones like mine, cannot handle alcohol as well as men’s. It may not be fair but it is true. For every drug-related death in Scotland there are 10 alcohol-related ones. Women damage their livers far more through drink than men and there’s an increased risk of breast cancer.

Drunk women put themselves more at risk of unprotected sex, as well as sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies, rape – and certainly badly damaged self-esteem.

But we’re soused in the culture of drinking. A dietician pal working in schools tells me the No 1 question she gets asked is: “Which alcoholic drink has the fewest calories?” Another friend toyed with writing a book about the reality of breast cancer treatment entitled “Can I Still Drink?” – the question most women are too embarrassed to ask when the doctor talks them through chemotherapy.

Booze unquestionably encourages the dramatists amongst us to make emotional mountains out of molehills. What we cannot face is failure. And boredom. We cannot bear to manage the day-to-day problems that afflict everyone. We want excitement but we don’t want to plan for it. Far simpler to abdicate responsibility, set no goals, drift along, have a drink and moan or dream along with all the other de-motivated creative people in the bar/ceilidh/kitchen/party.

So what’s happened since the demon drink has stayed in the bottle? I’ve had a joined-up life and more energy and focus.

And more late night trips as a chauffeur than I can recall. Now I’m relentless. I go to more social functions – no matter how awkward the time or location, I can drive home – though for the first few months I still found myself racing on a pre-abstinence autopilot for the last train home from Edinburgh.

Am I stuck in an endless and grimly earnest drive for self improvement? I’m enough of a realist to know I may never tame my own excessive tendencies sufficiently to have even one drink again. But now that feels more like a reprieve than a life sentence.

No single drink is worth more than the sense of purpose and genuine confidence I’ve gained. ◆ Being sober is habit-forming.

Lesley Riddoch has a radio program with BBC Scotland. She is founder and editor of international internet newspapers Worldwoman and Africawoman.

ALPHAVILLE

Aa

No one has lived in the past.

No one will live in the future.

The present is the only form of life. It is a state of existence which is indestructible. Time is like a circle, endlessly turning.

The arc that descends is the past. That which rises is the future. All has been said, unless words change their meanings and meanings their words.

The Philosophy of Alpha-60 Jean-Luc Godard, 1965 THIN

ABCdefghi01234 ABCdefghi01234 ABCdefghi01234 ABCdefghi01234 ABCdefghi01234 ABCdefghi01234 ABCdefghi01234 ABCdefghi01234 ABCdefghi01234 ABCdefghi01234 THIN OBLIQUE

LIGHT

LIGHT OBLIQUE

REGULAR

OBLIQUE

MEDIUM

MEDIUM OBLIQUE

BOLD

BOLD OBLIQUE

Strictly orthogonal, but not cyber-simple.

Alphaville’s 37° upstroke adds a scribal touch to the techno genre, and there are other graces—such as the modulation of stroke weight over the three major axes, and between caps and lower case; and the italic forms of a and f.

www.shinntype.com

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ColdType

Issue 6

ENGLAND

Why does John Malkovich want to kill me?

British journalist Robert Fisk is used to receiving hate mail attacking his reporting of various conflicts in the Middle East. It’s getting worse, he says, as venomous letters have turned into calls for his death

I

t used to be just a trickle, a steady dripdrip of hate mail which arrived once a week, castigating me for reporting on the killing of innocent Lebanese under Israeli air raids or for suggesting that Arabs – as well as Israelis – wanted peace in the Middle East.

It began to change in the late 1990s. Typical was the letter which arrived after I wrote my eyewitness account of the 1996 slaughter

by Israeli gunners of 108 refugees sheltering in the UN base in the Lebanese town of Qana. “I do not like or admire anti-Semites,” it began. “Hitler was one of the most famous in recent history.” Yet compared to the aval-

Much of this disgusting nonsense comes from men and women who say they are defending Israel …

anche of vicious, threatening letters and openly violent statements that we journalists receive today, this was comparatively mild.

For the internet seems to have turned those who do not like to hear the truth about the Middle East into a community of haters, sending venomous letters not only to myself but to any reporter who dares to criticise Israel – or American policy in the Middle East.

There was always, in the past, a limit to this hatred. Letters would be signed, with the writer’s address. Or if not, they would be so ill-written as to be illegible. Not any more. In 26 years in the Middle East, I have never read

so many vile and intimidating messages addressed to me. Many now demand my death. And at the beginning of May, the Hollywood actor John Malkovich did just that, telling the Cambridge Union that he would like to shoot me.

H

ow, I ask myself, did it come to this?

Slowly but surely, the hate has turned to incitement, the incitement into death threats, the walls of propriety and legality gradually pulled down so that a reporter can be abused, his family defamed, his beating at the hands of an angry crowd greeted with

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Issue 6

laughter and insults in the pages of an American newspaper, his life cheapened and made vulnerable by an actor who – without even saying why – says he wants to kill me.

Much of this disgusting nonsense comes from men and women who say they are defending Israel, although I have to say that I have never in my life received a rude or insulting letter from Israel itself. Israelis sometimes express their criticism of my reporting – and sometimes their praise – but they have never stooped to the filth and obscenities which I now receive.

“Your mother was Eichmann’s daughter,” was one of the most recent of these. My mother Peggy, who died after a long battle with Parkinson’s three-and-a-half years ago, was, in fact, an RAF radio repair operator on Spitfires at the height of the Battle of Britain in 1940.

The events of 11 September turned the hate mail white hot. That day, in an airliner high over the Atlantic that had just turned back from its routing to America, I wrote an article for The Independent, pointing out that there would be an attempt in the coming days to prevent anyone asking why the crimes against humanity in New York and Washington had occurred. Dictating my report from the aircraft’s satellite phone, I wrote about the history of deceit in the Middle East, the growing Arab anger at the deaths of thousands of Iraqi children under US-supported sanctions, and the continued occupation of Palestinian land in the West Bank and Gaza by America’s Israeli ally. I didn’t blame Israel. I suggested that Osama bin Laden was responsible.

But the e-mails that poured into The Independent over the next few days bordered on the inflammatory.

The attacks on America were caused by “hate itself, of precisely the obsessive and dehumanising kind that Fisk and Bin Laden have been spreading,” said a letter from a Professor Judea Pearl of UCLA. I was, he claimed, “drooling venom” and a professional “hate peddler.” Another missive, signed

Only days after Malkovich announced that he wanted to shoot me, a website claimed that the actor’s words were “a brazen attempt at queue-jumping”

Ellen Popper, announced that I was “in cahoots with the arch-terrorist” Bin Laden.

Mark Guon labeled me “a total nut-case.” I was “psychotic,” according to Lillie and Barry Weiss. Brandon Heller of San Diego informed me that “you are actually supporting evil itself.”

It got worse. On an Irish radio show, a Harvard professor – infuriated by my asking about the motives for the atrocities of 11 September – condemned me as a “liar” and a “dangerous man” and announced that “antiAmericanism” – whatever that is – was the same as anti-Semitism. Not only was it wicked to suggest that someone might have had reasons, however deranged, to commit the mass slaughter. It was even more appalling to suggest what these reasons might be. To criticise the United States was to be a Jew-hater, a racist, a Nazi.

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This article was first published in The Independent

nd so it went on. In early December, I was almost killed by a crowd of Afghan refugees who were enraged by the recent slaughter of their relatives in American B-52 air-raids. I wrote an account of my beating, adding that I could not blame my attackers, that if I had suffered their grief, I would have done the same. There was no end to the abuse that came then.

In The Wall Street Journal, Mark Steyn wrote an article under a headline saying that a “multiculturalist” – me – had “got his due.”

Cards arrived bearing the names of London “whipping” parlours. The Independent’s website received an e-mail suggesting that I was a paedophile. Among several vicious Christmas cards was one bearing the legend of the Twelve Days of Christmas and the following note inside: “Robert Fiske (sic) – aka Lord Haw Haw of the Middle East and a leading anti-semite & proto-fascist Islamophile propagandist. Here’s hoping 2002 finds you deep in Gehenna (Hell), Osama bin Laden on your right, Mullah Omar on your left. Yours, Ishmael Zetin.”

Since Ariel Sharon’s offensive in the West

If You Enjoy Reading ColdType, You’ll Love NineOnTen ● Denis Beckett on Cousin Sam; Norman Solomon on Noam Chomsky; Tom Nugent on Frank Sinatra; Del Stone on America’s New War; Robert Fisk on the Failings of Journalism Training; Tony Sutton on Wayward Printers and Missing Editors. ● For free downloads of this and back issues of this engaging tabloid, contact Tony Sutton at: tonysutton@newsdesign.net

WRITING WORTH READING ABOUT JOURNALISM AND JOURNALISTS

Bank, provoked by the Palestinians’ wicked suicide bombing, a new theme has emerged.

Reporters who criticise Israel are to blame for inciting anti-Semites to burn synagogues.

Thus it is not Israel’s brutality and occupation that provokes the sick and cruel people who attack Jewish institutions, synagogues and cemeteries. We journalists are to blame.

Almost anyone who criticises US or Israeli policy in the Middle East is now in this freefire zone. My own colleague in Jerusalem, Phil Reeves, is one of them. So are two of the BBC’s reporters in Israel, along with Suzanne Goldenberg of The Guardian. And take Jennifer Loewenstein, a human rights worker in Gaza – who is herself Jewish, and who wrote a condemnation of those who claim that Palestinians are deliberately sacrificing their children. She swiftly received the following email: “BITCH. I can smell you from afar. You are a bitch and you have Arab blood in you.

Your mother is a fucking Arab. At least, for God’s sake, change your fucking name. Ben Aviram.”

Does this kind of filth have an effect on others? I fear it does. Only days after Malkovich announced that he wanted to shoot me, a website claimed that the actor’s words were “a brazen attempt at queue-jumping.”

The site contained an animation of my own face being violently punched by a fist and a caption which said: “I understand why they’re beating the shit out of me.”

Thus a disgusting remark by an actor in the Cambridge Union led to a website suggesting that others were even more eager to kill me. Malkovich was not questioned by the police. He might, I suppose, be refused any further visas to Britain until he explains or apologises for his vile remarks. But the damage has been done. As journalists, our lives are now forfeit to the internet haters. If we want a quiet life, we will just have to toe the line, stop criticising Israel or America. Or just stop writing altogether. ◆ Robert Fisk is the award-winning Middle East correspondent for The Independent in London.

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Issue 6

INDIA

Television trekker Denis Beckett takes a camera crew from Johannesburg to India and winds up strangely relieved that he was not, after all, able to run away from it after Day Three

Shit, spit, squalor and lessons for all of us A The passing wheels keep you on your toes – and thank heaven for all those sober drivers – but there is no thought of attack, assault, guns, knives, boots, aggression in any guise whatever

fter three days in India I had three things in mind: shit, spit and squalor, each in the dictionary definition. That India has squalor, everyone knows. But knowing it is only knowing it. Being in it makes the worst we have in South Africa look cosy. In Mumbai we met the South African delegation to an International Homelessness Conference. The delegates, shack-dwellers, said repeatedly (a) “how is this possible? Our Indians are so organised,” and (b) “we never knew we were so lucky.”

The other two S-words, I was even less prepared for.

Spit: what got to me wasn’t so much the motion of a globule of gob scuttling into the dust; it was the sound effects. People hawk up gluey golfballs of phlegm with such energy that the uninitiated think they’re having seizures. Several times I was ready to catch a passer-by as he fell. But he’d regain equilibrium, calmly roll the wodge around his mouth, and expectorate. Mumbai newspapers debated a new rule against spitting on the buses. A letter-writer said it was the people’s birthright. Another, that if they couldn’t spit on the floor they’d spit out the window, which from the top deck meant spitting blind onto innocent pates below.

The faeces factor was more original. In many countries a degree of public spitting is common. The other thing, not so much. In South Africa the segment of the populace that contributes to the irrigation of concrete walls and tarred alleys draws the line at fullfrontal cacation. (Yep, real word, from the Latin cacare.) In India it’s routine to glance around a busy place and find half a dozen men squatting in quiet contemplation, penis and scrotum dangling imperturbably before the world like turkey-neck and gizzards, steaming pile rising on the ground below.

I know we children of the millennium are supposed to be sensitive to other people’s customs, but this can be difficult when a

squashed heap of human excrement has just flowed over your sandals and is squishing between your toes. As Musa Radebe the sound man said, if you don’t look for it all the time you step in it.

Mumbai has a nomenclature problem.

The visitor politely applies the new noncolonial name and is startled that half the locals fiercely correct him: “Bombay!” He adjusts and is startled that half the locals fiercely correct him right back: “Mumbai!”

He retreats to “the city,” but with his fingers crossed because he doesn’t truthfully see the city as a city, he sees it as a squatter camp with severe elephantiasis.

You can travel for hours through undifferentiated slumland. Pavements do not exist.

Where they once were, are now endless human pigeon-holes, with sides, back, and open front. Unlike the industrial packaging and bits of road-sign better known in Africa, these units are concrete, or they wash away in the monsoon. But they’re catacombs. Middle-class Africans are pained that a squatter African family can live in a space the size of their kitchen. Squatter Africans, like the Homeless ladies, here felt pain that two Mumbai families live in a space the size of their kitchen. A family unit might be twostorey. Downstairs a ten-year-old can stand up straight. Upstairs, only a baby can sit up.

Washing, weeing, cooking and life takes place in the potholes outside. To walk down a street – if the process of dodging scooters, bicycles, rickshaws and 1960ish Fiats may be

Given the sight and smell of the water, and the guide-book’s assertion that the e-coli count was 250,000 times the safe limit, I took it they were keen to hasten the route to heaven

called “walking” – is to feel perpetually embarrassed at invading somebody’s bathroom. Naked children scrub, brush teeth, dry, oblivious to the maelstrom and evading death by Fiat with unconscious deftness. The first day in India my heart stopped twenty times, at a hasty bumper bearing down upon a toddler with apparently inevitable results.

By the end I’d adjusted to Indian life: a miss by millimetres is still a miss. So? The same miss in Johannesburg, never mind Stockholm, would leave both parties shaking.

Respite is depressingly absent. All of Mumbai is the same, a long chaotic sprawl.

South or old Mumbai is supposedly classy Mumbai, but the class is back-handed – rundown colonial leftovers. Half a century of independence seems to have delivered the city nothing inspiring or impressive or even a momentary counterpoint to the morass; not as much as a shopping mall. Well, maybe the super-class district, Malaba Hill, is an exception. It’s a drab flatland, with pavements.

W

e left Mumbai without tears, for Varanasi – fierce correction “Benares!” – holiest of the holy cities of India. Varanasi is the place on the Ganges that people go to die, so as to short-cut the interim incarnations between this life and heaven. Its principal livelihood is waiting-to-die. Thousands of people are waiting to die, and vigorously importuning tourists to keep them alive until the wait is over. They are in competition with hawkers of anything batteries and cellphone kits to shrines and gods. Gods are available in every shape, size and material.

With ears echoing to “only 100 rupees” and “special price” it becomes awkward to tune to the mystical side of affairs, but once we got on a boat and the din subsided a sense of the spiritualism began to make itself felt.

Men were bathing in the river. Given the sight and smell of the water, and the guidebook’s assertion that the e-coli count was

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Issue 6

250,000 times the safe limit, I took it they were keen to hasten the route to heaven. In case they failed, their women did the laundry from the shores. On the banks dozens of sects engaged in prayers involving dramatic physical contortions.

The spiritual impact wore in gradually.

Everybody was high on the Ganges; bathers and laundry-women and all. Not only were these people getting something out of this river and its magical properties but there was a contentment here, a contentment of a kind that eludes we of more secular persuasion, a contentment not to be scoffed.

Our local host, a professor at the Hindu University of Benares, (its only and official name) explained the philosophy of contentment. You take things as they are, was the bottom line. You accept your lot, and swallow whatever indignities it entails, and bask in the knowledge that however lousy this life might be, if you handle it alright you’ll come back next time in a higher life. Much of what we were seeing began to make sense.

For example, if South African driving was half as wild as Indian driving, Road Rage would be our leading cause of death. In India temperatures weren’t raised. True, every driver spent 40 seconds per minute leaning on his hooter. If his hooter broke he’d be immo-

bilised (if his indicator broke he wouldn’t know), but he didn’t hoot in anger, he hooted to be manly, and nobody got cross.

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t Varanasi I began to see a plus side to India, though overlain by the Three S’s.

Moreover our Prof had placed us in the most off-putting hotel I have ever known (which, since I’d rather stay where locals stay than stay where tariffs are in dollars, is saying a lot). If I’d left India after two days of Mumbai and one of Varanasi, I’d have left feeling solely an almighty relief to be leaving.

That thing nearly happened. Next stop was Delhi, where our connection had checked us into a youth hostel (I imagined them expelling me for false pretences, but the manager laughed: “you can be young at 100 if you want to.”) I called home and found that two of my children had been hospitalised from two mishaps, one fairly dire. I was for instant return, but Superwife insisted that no-one was dying, I should run the course. (Next day her mother was under the surgeon’s knife too, and the day after, one of our dogs – more operations in half a week than in the preceding quarter century.)

Despite a suspicion that the cosmic order was sending me a message, I stuck it out and

learned that there’s more to India than the S’s. Delhi for a start was an antidote to Mumbai. New Delhi is spectacular, if not that new.

Its pride of place is Raj Path, with the old Viceregal – now Presidential – palace as its anchor. Under the last Viceroy the palace famously maintained a domestic staff of 1,000, of whom 60 chased crows off the lawns. Current employment figures were not available but are presumably not much different, given India’s employment habits.

Retrenchment mania hasn’t got here yet.

Factories look like refugees from DH Lawrence – teeming hordes of manual workers and giant black clouds spraying carpets of soot. Health & Safety regulations are science fiction. Status comes from how many people you employ, not how many you cut off the payroll. Everyone has an assistant or five – taxi drivers have assistants, porters have assistants, assistants have assistants.

Many jobs, pathetic pay. I accompany a girl to school, by rickshaw. A mile trip for five rupees, a US dime. In Durban, rickshawmen are protected from such exploitation. They make fifty times as much for giving a tourist a jaunt down the esplanade. But Durban’s rickshaws are down to twenty and its jobless is up to half a million. Delhi has half a million rickshaws. 500,000 x 10c = $50,000. 20 x

To walk down a street is to feel perpetually embarrassed at invading somebody’s bathroom

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Issue 6

$5 = $100. The girl’s rickshaw driver has a career. He provides a service, which to the girl’s father is satisfactory – you never wait more than a minute for a passing rickshaw; she does her homework as she rides; robbery or danger does not enter the equation.

T

he Taj Mahal is three hours from Delhi in a lusty 4x4 with a double-dose of 4x4 arrogance: if vehicle ahead failed to notice our hooter, we nudged him with our bumper.

Had we passengers been ECG-wired there would have been peaks on the graph.

Everybody had said that the Taj is indescribably bigger and better in real life than in reputation, and I was surprised to agree.

European tourist palaces tend to be tacky close up, with furniture glued up and chandelier bulbs missing. The Taj is nothing but marble. There are no accoutrements to wear out. In the pattern of grandeur it has a bloody history, with craftsmen press-ganged to build it and rewarded by having digits amputated to thwart rival tomb-builders.

It may not have been fun to live under Shah Jahan, who commissioned the Taj when his wife died giving birth to her 14th child, but he did subsequent generations a favour. Four centuries later they have an immense focus of Indian pride and prestige, as well as continuing income. If kinder and gentler contemporaries put effort into health and education and community uplift, they did not score total success. The average Indian peasant ploughs the same paddy fields standing on the same sled-like contraption drawn by the same oxen as his forebears have been using for a millennium.

Is that a lesson? I don’t mean slave labour and hacked limbs, but the principle of going for gold, as it were. If an impoverished society puts all its energy into filling bottomless pits, the pits stay bottomless. Creating things that inspire or ennoble – and are slammed as elitist or extravagant – may do more for the people than for the proprietor. (The Taj did not do much for Jahan’s career. He died in jail, imprisoned by his son.)

The Taj entrance fee was 5 rupees – for Indians. For foreigners, 505 rupees. Four of those knocked a hole in the wallet. Still, I persuaded myself, that was right. Tough on backpackers trying to see India as the Indians see it, and tough on South Africans translating their ravaged rands via dollars back to the as-ravaged rupee. But in principle there was something just.

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ext day we got into an airplane tangle.

The original cause was a monsoon, about which I, not being an American tourist, couldn’t complain. However the original cause became compounded by what eventually, 15 hours later, the captain cheerfully described over the intercom as “a lot of bungles and slip-ups.”

We sought an alternative flight. The first option was Indian Airlines, at whose hands

Everybody had said that the Taj is indescribably bigger and better in real life than in reputation, and I was surprised to agree.

European tourist palaces tend to be t acky close up, with furniture glued up and chandelier bulbs missing.

The Taj is nothing but marble.

100 people had been killed two days earlier.

[In a crash that bypassed the western media, which go ballistic about crashes in the west.]

The ground-staff person offered solace: “We only have a crash once a year so you’ll be fine.” Sublime logic but not wholly reassuring. Seat-belted and ready to go, the Indian Airlines flight was cancelled, surprising noone but us. Option two was Jet Airlines.

“Sure,” said the Jet lady, “three hundred dollars, please.” An Indian guy we’d befriended blew up. “What!? For four? It’s thirty dollars a seat!” She replied coldly, “for you it’s thirty dollars. These people are foreigners.” I re-mulled my formerly phlegmatic tolerance of discriminating against foreigners, particularly since “foreign” clearly meant “white.” She saw whites and slapped 150% onto the fare. Clearly, too, we weren’t meant to know. Our Indian ally bollocksed her for racism but she stood her ground – it was policy, that was that – and then broke into Hindi to bollocks him back for betraying trade secrets to us. I should have had soundman, Zulu Musa, buy the tickets.

In the end that flight also didn’t happen.

We arrived at Udaiphur on the original plane, a day out of time but worth it to hear the captain’s “bungles and slip-ups” candour.

Worth it, too, to have hung on in. By now Bombay memory was several days old and the nostrils were clear. I was becoming gripped by other sides of India. Like ingestion. The average Indian eating house offers neither meat nor liquor, so the average African adult male experiences blind panic upon arrival.

Thirty minutes later he’s apt to change his tune. An Indian veg-and-lassi dinner is as delicious and filling as anything that comes from butcher shop or bottle store, and much kinder on the liver. Plus there is a profound relief in a virtually drunk-free night-life.

To say nothing of violence-free. There is a solid quota of ethnic and religious barbari-

ties, along with India’s private speciality, caste barbarities, but walking the streets of an Indian city, Mumbai included, is peculiarly liberating. The passing wheels keep you on your toes – and thank heaven for all those sober drivers – but there is no thought of attack, assault, guns, knives, boots, aggression in any guise whatever.

In Udaiphur we took on a concentrated dose of another thing – majesty. A British immigrant put it nicely. “With respect,” he said, very correct, like a lawyer about to zap you, “with respect, as I ride my bicycle to work every day I pass a dozen castles, tombs and palaces, any one of which, if you had it in South Africa, would be your most famous national treasure. Here, they don’t even have names.”

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ack at Mumbai airport for the Jo’burg flight the departure hall was thick with South African businessmen, plugging in to the opening of India’s economy like they’re doing to Africa’s economies. In one lobe I was proud of them and the way they are making us as a hub of Third-World commerce. In another lobe I shuddered at all the dollar-aday spade-wielders who are heading for retrenchment under the onslaught of globalism. But the main lobe revolted at my compatriots (of diverse complexions) who ridiculed and derided everything Indian. A few days earlier I might have kept my lip zipped. Now I argued that it wasn’t one-way; we had to see beyond the easy three S’s to the subtler arenas where India gave us a model. They thought I’d been smoking ◆ something strange.

Denis Beckett was presenter of the South African TV series Beckett’s Trek for six years.

His latest book is Jetlag: SA Airways In The Andrews Era.

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Pages 13 to 20

Issue 6 2002

CANADA

Writing an obituary is a delicate artform.

Warren Gerard offers some carefully-chosen words of advice for new practitioners

Writes of passage P ierre Berton, the indefatigable 81year-old author, journalist and showman, perhaps contemplating his own inevitable demise, wrote a column in The Toronto Star on September 10, 1994, decrying the clichés of bad obituary writing.

“According to accepted newspaper clichés, we all go down fighting,” Berton wrote. “The other day I even read that an 18-month-old baby had died after a long battle with cancer.

“That has become the mandatory phrase for all who expire, disease-ridden. They battled valiantly; they lost. When I finally depart I hope somebody will write, instead, that I died after a long battle with life.”

Berton is quite right about clichés in obituary writing. They abound. And often, it seems, dead is a word to be avoided. It has been left to morticians rather than linguists to create euphemisms to soften the ultimate last word, including departed, went home, called away, passed away or passed on, sometimes when asleep, other times suddenly, peacefully, or unexpectedly.

At most newspapers, obits are written by the unfortunate, usually older reporters who have developed varicose minds or the cub reporter pressed into service.

Hugh Massingberd, the celebrated obituary writer for the Daily Telegraph, now retired, awaiting death, recalled that when he took the job his colleagues looked upon him with a mixture of pity and contempt.

“Evidently I had taken leave of a never notably firm grip on my senses,” he wrote in Book Of Obituaries: A Celebration Of Eccentric Lives. “Why was I masochistically immersing myself in the esoteric obscurity of such a dreary, stagnant backwater?” Massingberd was not to be deterred, however, and for several years his fortunate readers were

exposed to funny, charmingly deadpan obits of the eccentric English.

“A sympathetic acceptance of someone’s foibles is surely the object of the exercise,” he wrote. “I would far rather be remembered with guffaws of sorely exasperated affection concerning my bizarre shortcomings than with the customary crocodile tears of the po-faced mourner.”

In Massingberd’s obits, coded understatement became the golden rule. A notorious crook, for example, might be judged “not to have upheld the highest ethical standards of the City.”

And someone “not suffering fools gladly” was a curmudgeon. Convivial meant a drunk. A great raconteur was a crashing bore, and relishing physical contact described a sadist.

His writing was subtle, cool and distanced. This was taken from the obit on Liberace, who was unmarried: “Perhaps to lend himself an air of ruggedness with which nature had not chosen to endow him, he adopted the stage name of Walter Busterkeys when he embarked on his early career.” And later in the obit, Massingberd observed the pianist’s “private tastes were steeped in an absence of sobriety. His master bedroom was painted with a re-creation of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, his lawn was centrally heated, his swimming pool was piano-shaped and among his possessions — or happy-happies as he liked to call them — was a piano made out of 10,000 toothpicks.”

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or the most part, obituaries tend not to speak ill of the dead. A prime example is Lives Lived, a lovingly worded one-column obituary on a back page in Toronto’s Globe

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and Mail. They are written by a relative or friend and are forgiveably one-sided, seeing only the best side, not mentioning the other.

A trend, particularly south of the border, is the self-authored, self-important obit.

More people are writing their own obits and paying to have them published in the local paper.

The Second Great Obituary Writers’ Conference, held last year in Jefferson, Texas, came up with this self-authored masterpiece written by Robert Fiddes Alexander, a Dallas journalist.

“Well, it appears that the pipe finally nailed me. But I enjoyed every aromatic puff of it for over 50 years. My only regret is leaving my wife Shirley and our family some 20 years earlier than planned.”

And later in the obit he revealed: “People ask how I came to Texas. As I recall, it was in a 1948 Chevrolet. I’ve enjoyed it here. My first job was as a copy boy for the Morning News, then as a reporter on the business news desk. I well remember my first story. This will be my last.”

Issue 6

“You take a fellow who looks like a goat, travels around with goats, eats with goats, lies down among goats and smells like a goat and it won’t be long before people will be calling him the Goat Man”

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t’s no surprise that Alexander’s obit didn’t appear in the New York Times. “Our obituaries are not about writing eulogies. That’s for somebody else, or you can take out an ad,” says Charles Strum, obituary editor for the Times.

He has impressive resources, making his colleagues at other newspapers envious.

Strum spends most of his time assigning obituaries on personalities who are nearing the end of their lives, so that the paper isn’t caught off guard.

His deputy mainly looks after the daily obits, written on deadline. In all, the paper has six full-time obituary writers, as well as four writers on contract who are former foreign and national correspondents, and a number of freelancers as well.

A Times obit quite often includes a less than laudatory fact. One example can be found in the obituary on Anton Rosenberg, who merited attention because he was best known as the model for the character Julian Alexander in Jack Kerouac’s novel, The Subterraneans. The lead read:

This article was first published in The Toronto Sunday Star

“Anton Rosenberg, a storied sometime artist and occasional musician who embodied the Greenwich Village hipster ideal of 1950s cool to such a laid-back degree and with such determined detachment that he never amounted to much of anything, died on Feb.14 ...”

Rosenberg’s obituary is one of 52 in a book titled 52 McGs., a wonderful collection by Robert McGill Thomas Jr., a New York Times reporter, now dead.

Many of his obits were not about the famous. Rather, they were about unusual people, such as Charles McCartney, who was known for his travels with goats. He died at 97, and his obit started this way: “You take a fellow who looks like a goat, travels around with goats, eats with goats, lies down among goats and smells like a goat and it won’t be long before people will be calling him the Goat Man.” Or this one: “Francine Katzenbogen, a Brooklyn-born lottery millionaire who loved cats so much she worked tirelessly for animal adoption agencies, donated generously to their support and housed 20 beloved strays in luxury at her own suburban Los Angeles mansion, died on Oct.30 at her home in Studio City.

She was 51 and may have loved cats more than was good for her.”

On occasion, Thomas clashed with editors who tried to rein in his sentences. “Of course I go too far,” he was quoted in his own obituary.

“But unless you go too far, how are you ever going to find out how far you can go?”

Perhaps an even better known obit writer at the Times was the late Alden Whitman. In his tenure, Whitman initiated a new approach to the art by interviewing his subjects in advance of their deaths. He travelled around the world and interviewed leaders in all fields – politics, arts, science, sports and crime.

He admitted to another writer, Gay Talese, that preparing an advance obit causes occupational astigmatism. “Alden Whitman has discovered,” Talese wrote, “that in his brain have become embalmed several people who are alive, or were at last look, but whom

THE MAGAZINE OF NEW WRITING

he is constantly referring to in the past tense.”

Whitman, who wore a cloak, had a sepulchre laugh and possessed the look of the reaper, promised his subjects he would not reveal what they told him until after their deaths. His approach brought him a certain notoriety, but there were those who sought an interview with Whitman and others who would call him to update their lives.

He had one such interview with Harry S. Truman. The two quickly got to the point, and Whitman reported after Truman’s death that the former U.S. president said: “I know why you’re here, and I want to help you all I can.”

I

n some cases, interviewing someone before death has advantages – in setting the record straight, that is. “In the case of a political leader of any stripe,” Strum points out, “local, national or foreign, you run the risk of having revisionist history thrown in your lap.”

Nevertheless, whether the subject was interviewed or not, Whitman defined what was needed for an exemplary obit. It should be a “lively expression of personality and character as well as a conscientious exposition of the main facts of a person’s life,” he wrote. “A good obit has all the characteristics of a well-focused snapshot, the fuller the length the better. If the snapshot is clear, the viewer gets a quick fix on the subject, his attainments, his shortcomings and his time.”

Fitting that description, perhaps, is a paragraph from The Star’s obit on former prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who died Sept.28, 2000: “He was enigmatic, the least civil of our leaders, confrontational, a philosophical gunslinger with a rose in his lapel, an authoritarian prime minister whose cabinet members held him in high esteem and some measure of fear, a ladies man, a pennypinching millionaire who wasn’t at all miserly with the public purse, a princely performer who made the world his stage. He pirouetted behind the Queen’s back, slid down banisters, danced in Sheik Yamani’s desert tent, wore sandals in the House of Commons, gave the finger to protesters, told parliamentarians to fuddle duddle, and often expressed himself with an arrogant, dismissive shrug.”

Trudeau’s obit was prepared weeks in advance of his death, just as hundreds of others are stored in a computer file ready for updating, editing and publication.

One of those – as he well knows – is a lengthy obit on Pierre Berton. It starts: “The indefatigable writer, Pierre Berton, died yesterday “after a long battle with life.’” ◆

Subscribe at: www.granta.com

Warren Gerard wrote many high-profile obituaries in his career as a journalist at The Toronto Star. Article reprinted courtesy The Toronto Star Syndicate

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Issue 6

CUBA

Branding Cuba: La Vida Nike

The USA media is wondering what will happen to the communist enclave just a few miles off its coast after Castro’s reign ends. Too late, says Michael I. Niman – the revolution has already begun

F

ace it – America is obsessed with its communist island neighbor to the south. Since its revolution in 1959, Cuba periodically takes centre-stage in the American psyche.

Take May, for instance. In preparation for Jimmy Carter’s long-anticipated visit to the island, George W. Bush, with great media fanfare, inaugurated Cuba into his “Axis of Evil.” A week later, Carter made history as the first American president, sitting or former, to visit the island since Calvin Coolidge.

With Carter came the American press corps, agog with a freshly invigorated curiosity. Once again the land of Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and Elian Gonzalez is lighting up television screens across the American heartland and once again the American media is examining our relationship with our

Havana is one of the world's most vibrant cities, yet it didn't have a single commercial billboard

island neighbor – only now, a main focus is on when, not if, the United State will reestablish trade with Cuba.

My experience in Cuba tells me the media is behind the curve. American businesses have already established a beachhead and are impatiently waiting to break from the starting gate in a race to stake a claim in a new consumerist Cuba. The Cubans, for their part, won’t know what hit them.

My first trip to Cuba was in 1987; a university-sponsored sojourn to the forbidden island “behind the iron curtain.” My odyssey began in Toronto as I boarded a vintage Russian-made IL 62. The plane, prohibited from flying over the U.S., headed to the Atlantic Ocean and then made a sharp right turn, depositing us in Havana’s Jose Marti airport at about midnight. I looked out the window

at the dimly-lit terminal, expecting to see troops, perhaps statues of Lenin. What I did see was the biggest Visa card I had ever seen, above the words, “Welcome to Cuba.”

So much for communism.

Upon leaving the airport, however, we saw no more Visa billboards. Actually there were no billboards touting any product other than the official “revolutionary” ideology of the communist party. Cuba was still a rare advertising- and commercial-free zone. Its stores were filled with generic products. Its culture was yet to be branded.

At the time I didn’t appreciate how rare this ad-free experience would prove to be.

The following year, as a journalist based in Costa Rica, I hiked deep into the highlands of Guatemala, looking to escape American corporate culture. But alas, a half-day’s walk

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beyond the last electric wires, in “guerrilla” territory, beyond the reach of government, Coca-Cola and Pepsi were still slugging it out, with Coke reigning supreme. Malnourished campesinos would spend a day’s wages for a warm bottle of Coke, el sabor de la vida Norte Americano.

Cuba was different. Havana is one of the world’s most vibrant cities, yet it didn’t have a single commercial billboard. People began to travel to Cuba for the sole purpose of experiencing a landscape free of commercial clutter. Rebellious Cuban youths would scrawl the names of U.S. and British rock bands onto walls and into fresh concrete as symbols of resistance to state-controlled media. Next to them were peace and anarchist symbols and English words such as “punk” and “metal,” dangling devoid of context. That was 14 years ago.

Today, this graffiti of resistance seems to have morphed into one symbol, the omnipresent Nike swoosh. It’s not just on walls and in the cement, but embroidered by hand onto shirts and hats, stenciled onto car windows and on the backs of pedal-cab bicycle taxis. La Vida Nike has taken Cuba by storm.

American culture – in essence corporate consumer culture – has established a citadel in Cuba and seemingly is there to stay.

B

ut let’s back up. Cuba became commercial free when its government nationalized most foreign businesses in the early 1960s, establishing a so-called communist economy and earning the ire of eight successive U.S. presidents. The Havana Hilton was de-branded and re-christened the Habana Libre.

United Fruit and Meyer Lansky’s crime syndicate were both driven from the island. The U.S. State Department, ever quick to protect foreign investments, isolated Cuba with a comprehensive economic embargo that exists intact to this day. U.S. citizens cannot travel to Cuba, trade with Cuba or invest in Cuba. What was supposed to financially starve the Cubans into submission instead pushed them into the fold of the other economic force on the planet, the Soviet Bloc.

Being shunned by the global capitalist powers for a generation, however, really didn’t hurt Cuba. Instead the embargo allowed it to develop into something unique.

Without easy access to Western banks and development loans, for example, Cuba evaded the debt crisis that has been crippling the economic development of almost every other Third World country in the hemisphere.

The proverbial shit hit the fan, however, in 1989 with the breakup of the Soviet Union and the destruction of the Eastern European economic bloc, Cuba’s primary trading partner. Suddenly Cuba was without oil, spare parts for vehicles, and also without a market for its major exports such as sugar. Thus began the “special period.” Resourceful Cubans welded old Eastern European busses together into massive trailers, each holding 300 passengers and pulled by South Ameri-

Without easy access to Western banks and development loans, for example, Cuba evaded the debt crisis that has been crippling the economic development of almost every other Third World country in the hemisphere

can Ford truck tractors.

Today Cuba has adapted to the special period not only with mechanical ingenuity, but with economic compromise as well.

Cuba, once again, is open for business and courting capitalist investment – on its own terms. The government remains a 51 percent partner in most major enterprises on the island. Investors are happy since they are investing in an island-wide monopoly. Without the competition of a free marketplace Cuba offers firms such as Spain’s Sol Melia hotel chain, a company that controls a third of Cuba’s upscale hotel rooms, a safe business climate. Currently the European Union and Canada have replaced the Soviets as Cuba’s primary trading partners.

And with the capitalists back in town come the billboards as Cuba is once again adorned with multinational corporate “art” touting a consumerist message.

With 5.6 percent economic growth, Cuba’s economy is booming, to the benefit of Cuba’s leaders who are forever pleased to thumb their noses at their American tormentors, and also to the profit of international investors who are reaping big returns from Cuba’s mixed economy. Left out of this party are Cuba’s closest neighbors, American businesses still forbidden to trade with the “enemy.” But they're establishing their beachheads, preparing for the coming commercial invasion of the island. The lure is too strong. Compared to the advertising saturated developed capitalist world, Cuba is an advertising-ready environment – a blank canvas.

The ever-present Nike graffiti is all cultural spillover from the U.S. It’s not Nike that

Cuban rebels are celebrating; it’s a romanticized view of American capitalism, with the Nike swoosh as its most visible logo. It’s on the clothing their gusano relatives send from the States. It’s branded all over tourists. It’s on the clothes tourists give to Cubans at the end of their week-long sojourns.

Young Cuban rebels have adopted the swoosh just as late Cold War-era American youth adopted Mao caps and CCCP logo gear. It's similar to the use of the Nazi swastika by the 1970s punk movement in the UK – flirting with the enemy; upsetting the establishment. Unlike Mao caps, CCCP gear and swastikas, however, the swoosh is property.

It’s a brand. In Cuba it’s currently controlled by the Spanish corporation Cidesport S.A. In Cuba, where the average monthly wage is less than $21U.S., Cidesport sells Nike footwear for $30-70U.S. For the vast majority of Cubans, actual Nikes remain an elusive commodity. For a small minority, the nuevo riche, Cubans who receive money from abroad or who work in the tourist industry and receive tips in U.S. dollars, Cuba’s new preferred currency, Nike products are now available.

The products often come from so-called “communist” countries, China and Viet Nam. A Spanish company sells them to Cubans who pay considerably more than other comparable Chinese and Vietnamese products, with the markup being split between Cidesport and Nike. Nike produces nothing.

They simply own the swoosh.

C

uba, with a population of 11 million, presents both a market and virgin territory for branding. The lure is strong and multinational corporations are jockeying for a piece of culture. While the front door is closed, however, the back door is wide open. U.S. law prohibits small business from trading with Cuba, yet brand-name American products are omnipresent in Cuba. Tourists are chauffeured in Ford and Chrysler vans, restaurants serve Coke and Budweiser, stores sell Marlboro, Winston and Lucky Strikes.

The U.S. State Department, while rhetorically committed to its arcane embargo, also recognises the potential of the Cuban market.

Under pressure from U.S.-based corporations, it has been punching big-business friendly loopholes through its own regulations. Starting in 1995, for example, the Clinton Administration allowed U.S. corporations to register trademarks with an eye toward securing a foothold in Cuba. To date, brands such as Hard Rock Cafe, Nutrasweet, Heinz, Gillette, Sbarro, Clairol, Radisson, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Warner-Lambert, Calvin Klein, Playboy, DirecTV, Alamo-Rent-A-Car, Conagra, Zippo, MCI, Sara Lee, Monsanto, Pizza Hut, UPS and Wrigley’s gum have stepped up to the plate, registering Cuban trademarks.

The Cuban government has a keen sense of branding and has been taking advantage of its headstart in its own market by branding government-run businesses with corporate-style logos and names. By doing so it has

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created its own brands and staked out its own share of the developing Cuban market.

The government began branding in the 1980s by creating names and logos for the upscale state-run dollar stores and restaurants patronized by foreigners. Cubans, who were not allowed to possess dollars until the mid 1990s, were denied access to these businesses. The branding, however, still imprinted upon the population as they peered through the windows with envy, watching tourists buy luxury goods. The tourists themselves became billboards, living props branded by the logo emblazoned shopping bags they toted around Havana. When a tourist discarded a logo bag, Cubans would rush to retrieve it from the trash and then carry it around with pride as a status symbol.

Today these stores are now present throughout Havana, with Cubans being their primary market. Hip and branded, the stores compete effectively with black marketees, vacuuming dollars out of the Cuban economy and back into the hands of the government. Cubans I spoke with often recommended I eat at a Rumbos restaurant, part of a mock chain of grocery shops and fast-food outlets trusted by Cubans for providing the uniform quality they assume tourists would expect. “The chicken is good, it's Rumbos.”

Also popular are the government-run El Rapido and Burgui (based on the Burger King model) fast food chains. The Cuban government has also created its own brands of gasoline: Cupet, Cimex and Cubalse.

C

uban-run government businesses are also practicing co-branding with experienced foreign chains. One government-run enterprise, for example, recently entered into an agreement with Pizza Nova, a Toronto restaurant chain similar to the multinationally branded Pizza Hut, to operate a chain of outlets. Currently, with a Pizza Nova meal costing 10 to 20 times the price of a meal at other

Cuban pizzerias, Pizza Nova is in effect a forbidden fruit, with locations only in posh tourist zones. They are well positioned, however, to replace many cheaper pizzerias and to compete effectively with new entries from foreign multinationals. With a state-controlled media, Cubans will have Pizza Nova imprinted upon their culture years before seeing their first seductive Pizza Hut ad.

With proven successes at home, the Cuban government is taking its branding experiment abroad, in effect taking on the multinational branders in their own backyards with their own game. Cubanacan S.A., the Cuban government-owned operator of Cuba’s Pizza Novas, in conjunction with the government-owned Gran Caribe S.A. hotel chain, is currently planning to open Cuban cuisine restaurants in Brazil, China, France, Italy, Mexico and Spain, where a licensed branded Cuban Tropicana nightclub has existed since 1994.

Advertisements for embargoed Cuban goods have also started appearing in the U.S. press. The July 2000 issue of Forbes and the spring 2000 issue of Ritz Carleton magazine both featured ads for Cuban cigars that are currently illegal in the U.S. The July 2000 issue of Conde Nast Traveler and the June 2000 issue of Cigar Aficionado featured ads for travel to Cuban resorts.

Cuba’s overseas branding experiment, however, is miniscule compared to the interest multinationals have in branding Cuba.

Currently over 110 U.S.-based businesses, almost all of which are multinational corporations, are licensed by the U.S. State Department to do business in Cuba. The list includes Alcoa, AT&T, Corning and Owens Corning, Coleman, Champion Spark Plugs, Del Monte, Dow, Dupont, Lilly, Exxon, Ford, GE, Goodyear, GTE, Bridgestone Firestone, Honeywell, Johnson & Johnson, Litton, Monsanto, RCA, Raytheon and Upjohn. The government, still desperate for dollars, has thrown the door open to foreign investment,

With a statecontrolled media, Cubans will have Pizza Nova imprinted upon their culture years before seeing their first seductive Pizza Hut ad

inviting in some of the very corporations that have been vilified for decades in the Cuban media. Cuba is an original signatory to the GATT Treaty and is a member of the WTO. Both GATT and the WTO guarantee branding rights and protections to foreign investors.

U.S. businesspeople are flocking to Cuba.

In 1994, 500 U.S. business executives traveled to Cuba “on business.” That number increased three-fold to 1,500 in 1996, to 2,500 in 1998 and to 3,400 in the year 2000. Dollar stores in Cuba currently sell, among other brands, Campbell Soup, Heinz, Del Monte, Libby’s, Kraft, La Choy, Bumble Bee, Progresso, Planter’s, Hellman’s, Gerber, Uncle Ben’s, Motts, Ragu, Tabasco, A-1, Vlasic, Purina and Mars. The Pepsi and Coca-Cola brands had a monopoly on diet soft-drinks in Cuba until 2000 when Nestle entered the market.

AOL Time/Warner executives recently traveled to Cuba to discuss both the import and the export of TV programming and movies. Business leaders and politicians from Illinois and Georgia visited to explore business opportunities such as introducing the Churches and Popeye’s Fried Chicken and Cinnibons brands to the island. Executives from Daimler-Chrysler recently won a $200 million contract to provide busses to Cuba.

The year 2000 saw the “U.S. Healthcare Exhibition” in Havana. Companies marginally in the healthcare business promoted brands such as Eastman Kodak, KimberlyClark, Kendall, Monsanto and the Proctor & Gamble family of brands. Cubans lined up for free samples of Vicks lozenges.

Currently, Marlboro Cigarettes typifies Cuba’s branded future. New York-based Philip Morris Companies (newly re-named Altria), Marlboro’s parent corporation, is conducting Cuba’s most successful branding experiment. Using techniques ranging from a sophisticated display at Havana's Food and Beverages International Trade Fair, to the distribution of its omnipresent branded ashtrays in Cuban restaurants, Philip Morris has boosted Cuban Marlboro sales to between four and five million packs per year.

The U.S. Cuba Trade and Economic Council reports that Marlboro cigarettes are usually difficult to find in Cuba as they tend to sell out, even at premium prices where an average weekly salary buys two packs, as soon as they are displayed. Other brands, they note, are always available.

When it comes to branding Cuba, Nike and Marlboro are the clear champions. They have commodified American ideals of rebellion and individualism and packaged them for Cuban consumption.

What the Cubans get, however, is neither revolution nor individualism, just conformity and a return to pre-revolutionary corporate domination. ◆ Michael I. Niman will become a professor of journalism at Buffalo State College in the fall of 2002. He is the author of “People of the Rainbow: A Nomadic Utopia” (Univ. of Tennessee Press).

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ColdType

Issue 6

ANGOLA

Hard men, hard country South African writer Rian Malan goes on the road with some of the toughest truckers on the planet

E

ric Gagiano is a battler from way back, a tough guy from a frontier town where Saturday nights are for drinking and fighting and just looking at an oke the wrong way is enough to get your ribs kicked in.

In his wild youth, Eric was the terror of farm dances and sakkie-sakkie jols all across the old Suid-Wes, so widely dreaded that his enemies eventually jumped him in the alley behind the Otjiwarongo Hotel and beat him up with fence droppers, leaving him with a pulverised cheekbone and an eye that droops lazily, like the TV detective Colombo’s.

After that came a stint on the border, where he fought “terrorists,” and a spell on a cattle ranch near Etosha, where he fought marauding lions. These days, he fights bad roads, bandits and chaos in Angola, which is why he’s sitting in the cab of a 40-ton truck at Santa Clara border post, waiting.

You do a lot of waiting in Angola. You wait for cops, for customs officers and border guards, for bandits to be cleared off the road ahead. Right now, Eric (48) and his son Mannetjie (21) are waiting for the third vehicle in their convoy, a pickup stuck on the far side of the border on account of a flaw in its papers.

Santa Clara has the feel of a frontier town in the old Wild West. The bars and whore-

There are several crates of cheap whiskey on the trailer, to be dispensed as bribes to customs officials, difficult policemen and bazooka-toting teenagers

houses start pumping at ten in the morning.

Young hoods roam the dusty border plaza in dark glasses and Nike trainers, trying to flog diamonds and ivory.

On the far side of the fence, in Namibia, traders armed with suitcases of hard currency are buying truckloads of groceries and beer for shipment to Luanda, which has become something of a boomtown lately.

Drillers have struck oil offshore – five new fields in the last 18 months or so, with reserves in the region of six billion barrels. Oil production is set to double. Diamonds are pouring out of the eastern highlands. Fabulous mineral deposits await exploitation in the hinterland. Angola is Africa’s new El Dorado.

On the other hand, it’s also the site of “the worst war on the planet,” a ghastly conflict that seems to be hotting up again, if nearhysterical press reports are accurate. Angolans have been slaughtering each other since 1961, when locals took up arms against Portuguese colonists.

After 1974 came the Cold War phase, with South Africa and the CIA supporting the tribalistic rebels of UNITA while the Soviets backed the ruling MPLA, a movement led by assimilados and mestizos.

The foreigners pulled out in 1988, but the war continued like an old, bad habit, leaving

a once-thriving country devastated beyond comprehension. Now the latest truce between government and rebels is disintegrating, or so the newspapers say. There are reports of arms shipments, troops massing, attacks on outlying towns. Eric just shrugs.

“Ag, ek worrie nie,” he says. “Ek ry maar.”

So he revs up the engine and the giant 26wheelers lurch into motion, Mannetjie leading the way in his red International, his dad trailing bringing up the rear in an ancient Scania and the bakkie (pick-up) sandwiched between. We’ll be in Angola for at least three weeks, so Eric’s cab has all necessary comforts – orange fur on the dashboard, sakkiesakkie tapes, bunk screened off by a Confederate flag in Yankee rebel trucker style.

The freezer's full of cold Cokes and braai meat, and there are several crates of cheap whiskey on the trailer, to be dispensed as bribes to customs officials, difficult policemen and bazooka-toting teenagers.

Beyond such inconveniences, there’s malaria to contend with, and Angola’s stomach bugs are dreaded, especially since a dash into the roadside bush can be very dangerous in a country littered with landmines. Still, says Eric, these things are as nothing. “In Angola, dis die paaie wat jou werklik laat kak.”

Consider the one we’re travelling on. Once tarred, its surface has been cut into knife-like

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ridges by tank tracks and pitted with bomb craters. The verges are strewn with blitzed Russian troop carriers and tanks, relics of a great battle against the South Africans in the eighties. We’re moving at walking pace, the truck creaking and groaning over savage potholes.

“This is nothing,” says Eric.“There’s places north of Lubango where the potholes are so deep the truck in front of you vanishes inside them. There’s places where the mud’s so deep in rainy season that you can’t even open the door of your cab.”

He starts telling hair-raising stories about breakdowns in a country where there are no phones, no spares, and no hope of rescue.

“Who’s gonna help you, my man? You just make a fuckin’ plan.”

Trip before last, he says, the trailer jackknifed and bent the differential. He and his son hauled the twisted metal into the shade of a tree, found some rocks and sand and ground it back into shape with their bare hands. “That’s four months ago, and it’s still working.”

It seems foolhardy to be heading into a war in a truck with a dodgy differential and no weapons save a steel rod that Eric keeps handy in case someone soeks him at a truck stop. But where is the war? We can’t seem to find it.

U

nited Nations soldiers say that bandits are hitting at least one convoy daily on the road ahead, but truckers coming out of the badlands shrug as if to say, so what? There are always bandits on the road to Luanda.

At worst, the situation is “confusao.” One driver – a mestizo in a pirate bandana – responds to our questions by brandishing his own AK47 and yelling, “No problemsh.” He puts foot and vanishes in a cloud of dust. We pull into a town called Xangongo, where a nightmare of sorts awaits.

Xangongo (pronounced Shangongo) lies 200 km inside the border, but this is where customs are located, for reasons best known to the inscrutable Angolans.

Northbound trucks park in the ruins of an old prison and send emissaries to a Quonset hut on a bluff overlooking the crocodileinfested Kunene River. Exactly what goes on there is hard to say.

Some trucks go through almost immediately, trailing rumours of connections in high places. Others get stuck for a day or so while “informal taxes” are negotiated. We fall into a problematic third category: our consignment is owned by a upstanding company that has no intention of bribing anyone.

In fact, they’ve dispatched an executive from corporate headquarters to pay the necessary taxes. He comes out of the sky in a twin-engined Cessna and hobbles into town with 30,000 US dollars stuffed down the crotch of his trousers, only to be informed that there’s a problem with the papers.

It takes all day to sort it out, and we sleep in the dust under the trucks. Next morning,

Bored out of his skull, Mannetjie gets into an argument with a black man who threatens to stab him.

They chase each other around a rusting bulldozer until that gets boring too.

Come sunset, we’re still sitting

the Angolans decide that our bill has to be settled in local currency. Ten years ago, one dollar was 29 kwanza. After a decade of hyper inflation, the exchange rate is now 67,000 and rising. Thirty thousand US is 20 billion kwanza, enough to fill a small bakkie.

Where do you get a bakkieload of cash in a town with no banks, no credit system and no communications?

The executive leaps into the pickup and roars off to find out. We sit in the dust all day, sipping Eric’s bribe supplies and speculating that this is all a plot on the part of the authorities to wear us down so that we slip them something under the table. The wind kicks up and blows trash around.

Eric regales us with a few battle epics, including a rather good one about the night he came off his bike at 270 kph and his leathers tinkled like a glockenspiel when the medics peeled them off him on account of all the smashed half-jacks in his pockets.

Bored out of his skull, Mannetjie gets into an argument with a black man who threatens to stab him. They chase each other around a rusting bulldozer until that gets boring too. Come sunset, we’re still sitting.

We buy a goat, slag it and braai it on a fire.

Mannetjie throws open the door of his cab and cranks up his beloved Leon Shuster. A stray Baster named Oupa Sakkie gets lekker

getrek on Eric’s bribe supplies and dances the langarm all by himself under a full African moon.

Next day’s a repeat of the two previous.

All our papers are in order now save for a single stamp from the economic police, but their offices are deserted, today being Saturday, so it’s 4 p.m. before we roll across the river and out onto the open plains.

The road runs straight as a die across golden savannah dotted about with baobab trees. Barebreasted women wander footpaths with water vessels on their heads. A goatherd has an AK 47 slung over his shoulder. Every hour or so, we pass a cluster of pastel colonial mansions crumbling gracefully to dust under the equatorial sun. The road is worse than ever.

Why don’t they just send this stuff by sea, I ask, jerking a thumb at the eighty tons of construction material on our trailers. “Hey,” says Eric. “You try it.” As he tells it, Luanda's docks are a carnival of chaos and chicanery.

Bureaucrats seize incoming consignments pending payment of extortionate bribes.

It takes weeks of haggling to secure their release, by which time your containers are likely to have been looted anyway. So it’s simpler to send goods overland, and the truckers aren’t complaining because they’re making a fortune. You can double your money every two weeks running beer and Coca Cola to Luanda.

The margins in potatoes are even more intoxicating: a pocket of spuds costs about two quid at the border, and sells for five times that in the capital.

“It’s mad,” says Eric. “We haul food across some of the best farming country in Africa that’s just lying fallow because of all the fighting and all the landmines in the soil. We haul salt past buggered salt mines, beer past buggered breweries. It’s IFA, man - Independence Fucked Angola. Nothing works here any more.” On that note we pull over in a hamlet called Uia and crawl back under the trucks for the night.

Eric’s up at sunrise, checking his engine.

He says something doesn't feel right, and sure enough, the gearbox is dangling at an awkward angle, four key bolts having been shaken loose by yesterday’s vibrations. I want to turn back, discretion being the better part of valour, but the guys make a plan throw a sling under the gearbox, truss it up and push on.

An hour later, there’s an ominous knocking in the engine and the gears freeze.

“Whoa, vok,” says Eric. “Hier's groot kak.”

We open the engine again. There’s oil everywhere. Eric figures the bearings are about to smash through the block. We can’t go on, we can’t go back, and we can’t raise base on the radio. The only thing for it is to take the bakkie and hunt down a telephone.

Five hours later, we’re in Lubango, a sizeable town loomed over by a mountain topped by a giant statue of Jesus, Rio de Janiero style. The power has failed, but there’s a light on in the back of the central

[ 20 ]

ColdType

post office. A clerk informs us that the phones have been down for the past nine days, but we’re welcome to try again in a week or two.

We’re driving around in the dark, trying to make a plan, when the lights suddenly come on again. The whole town whoops and pours out onto the streets. It’s Saturday night, and Lubango is bent on partying.

We hit a restaurant, order chips and steak.

We ask about the war. Angola’s in a state of “meltdown,” we explain, quoting the world’s great newspapers. People look at us as though we’re mad. Sure, the generals are maneuvering for control of the diamond fields near the Congo border, but otherwise, there’s “no problemsh” aside from bandits, and they’re no problem, either, provided you stay in convoy and don’t travel at night.

Next morning, we cadge a call on the United Nations’ satellite phone system and head back for the convoy, pausing only to have two tyres fixed. We figure this will take ten minutes, but in Angola, it takes all day, so it’s sunset by the time we hit the road, whereupon both tyres blow in quick succes-

Right now, my head is saying that we are in serious danger – stuck in the dark in the bandit zone with few tools, no radio, and little hope of salvation

Issue 6

sion, leaving us stranded in the middle of nowhere with no spare.

The guys stand around, scratching their heads. I watch the moon rise over the thorn trees and think about Ryszard Kapuscinsci, the great Polish foreign correspondent who came to Angola in the seventies but could never quite find the frontline of the war he was supposed to be covering. “The front line is inside your head,” he eventually concluded. “It travels with you wherever you go.”

Right now, my head is saying that we are in serious danger – stuck in the dark in the bandit zone with few tools, no radio, and little hope of salvation. We’re making an enormous racket, trying to lever the tyre off the wheel with sticks and screwdrivers so that we can replace the tube and get going again.

Every bandit for miles around is surely zeroing in on us. In the end, we get so desperate that we claw one side of the tyre off the rim with our fingernails, stuff the tube inside, pump it up and send it, as Eric says.

Back in Namibia, the bosses are rustling up a new “horse” to replace the crippled Scania. Our instructions are to meet them back

at the border, bringing the broken truck with us. One problem: no towbar. Eric makes a plan. He hacks a branch off an ironwood tree, mashes it into an angle iron under the wheels of his son’s 40-tonner, and voila – an Angolan disselboom.

W

e leave at dawn, heading back whence we came. Our hair is matted with twigs and dust, and the reek of our bodies is unbearable. We’ve been in Angola for a week, and covered fewer than 300 kilometres. At this rate, it will be a month before Eric sees a cold beer and a hot shower again.

The truck bucks through potholes at walking pace. Clouds of powdery dust billow through the open windows. The battler low◆ ers his face into his hands and groans.

Rian Malan is the author of My Traitor's Heart, A South African Exile Returns To Face His Country, His Tribe, And His Conscience.

His Rolling Stone article, In The Jungle, was runner up in the 2001 U.S.National Magazine awards.

If you enjoyed this issue of ColdType, you’ll want to read more

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ColdType

Pages 21 to 24

Issue 6 2002

U N I T E D

S T A T E S

Still life PHOTOGRAPHS:

L. E. BASKOW

The strange world of Wells Oviatt III ■

WORDS: PAUL DUCHENE

[2 2 ]

ColdType

Issue 6

“I watch everybody; I’ve seen so many weird things …”

I

f you’ve spent any time downtown since Wells Oviatt III came to Portland, Oregon, in April 1999, you’ve seen him. And if you have, you can be certain he’s seen you. “I watch everybody,” says the softspoken 27-year-old, exuding a remarkable calm, as if sound takes a long time to reach him. And in four years of performing on the streets, he says, “I've seen so many weird things.”

For example, Oviatt recalls watching a street person who was imitating him while talking to himself. “He seemed to be working himself up to robbing a store or something. He finally said, ‘Why not? Why not?’ and took off.”

Oviatt can be found around the square from noon until 4 p.m. in all but the worst weather. He’ll be sitting on his folding chair,

Above: Oviatt pulls on his sneakers while Mowcee watches.

Left: He applies the green makeup that transforms him into a computer nerd.

Issue 6

ColdType [ 23 ] “I pay my bills, but then, I don’t drive a car …”

Oviatt’s closet is packed with silver, gold, blue, green and orange costumes.

ColdType [ 24 ]

Issue 6

“The buses are heated. Sometimes I get so hot I have a headache” perfectly still and brightly colored – orange, blue, green, gold, silver or copper. His copper-colored persona is a policeman, while his green man is a Bill Gates-ish computer nerd, complete with keyboard.

Raised in Estacada, Oviatt migrated to San Francisco, where he lived in a tiny studio apartment on Treasure Island with his pet rat and attended culinary school. “But all he learned to do was juggle,” his girlfriend, Elisha Silvey (known as Mowcee), says with a laugh as she bounces their 5-month-old baby, Faith, on her hip.

Oviatt’s juggling led him to a group of painted people in Union Square, and he was hooked.

“I moved in with them,” he says. When Union Square closed for six months, Oviatt came home to be near his parents and his brother, David, who had performed with him in San Francisco (“He'd be yellow and I'd be orange”).

Summer is his most lucrative time of year, “though rainy days with sun breaks are pretty good.” Christmas

shoppers can be generous, though much depends on the economy. “If spending’s down, I don’t do so well,” he says. How much does he make? “Well,” he says thoughtfully, “I pay my bills, but then, I don’t drive a car.” His girlfriend also works as a waitress.

Oviatt says he’s the only painted man in Portland, although he has groupies, including a 10-year-old named Henry “who’s modeling himself after me,” he says with a chuckle.

Sitting still for hours at a time can be cold work, so Oviatt dresses in layers, starting with long johns. That doesn’t work well for riding the bus from Gateway, where he lives. “The buses are heated,” he says, “and sometimes I get so hot I have a headache.”

Oviatt’s main complaints are rude children and the Brinks security truck that idles behind him for 10 minutes at a time, choking him with diesel fumes.

Is there a future in being the painted man? “Maybe if I go to Vegas,” Oviatt says. “I’d like to do that in five years, or get on with something else.” ◆

Wells Oviatt III contemplates life from the bus as he heads into Portland for another day as a piece of living art in Pioneer Courthouse Square.

This article was first published in THe Portland Tribune.