Despite the recognized virtues of democratic rule, both for protection of personal rights and liberties and for economic progress, the current list of world governments still classifies 46 of all countries, or 25%, as dictatorships. Rulers in these existing dictatorial regimes resist the transition to democracy, often at a high cost each year in lives and resources. One would hope that the potentially sizeable benefits of democracy could be shared to the mutual advantage of the once ruling elite and the poor majority. The gains are there, why can’t they do a deal? The answer turns on the inability of a new democracy’s poor majority to credibly promise the elite that they will not be exploited once democracy becomes the new order.

Yet, in one of the most important political events of the 20th century, South Africa solved this problem. In April 1994, Nelson Mandela was elected President of the new Republic of South Africa, and on 11 October 1996, a democratic constitution was approved unanimously by the National Parliament with the full support of the once autocratic National Party. In President Mandela’s words the new constitution offered the citizens of South Africa “a democratic government… that (has) an inbuilt mechanism which makes it impossible for one group to suppress the other” (speech by President Mandela, Stellenbosch University, May 1991). That built-in mechanism was federal governance, of a particular kind.

How can federal governance using both democratically-elected national and state or provincial governments provide the essential protections for the elite needed for a peaceful transition from autocracy to democracy? Three elements are necessary. First, having given up political and military control, the old ruling elite will need to find its future influence in another way — through the economy, perhaps. Since land and machines can always be expropriated, it will have to come from the labor skills of the elite that the majority will need but cannot import or master quickly on their own. In South Africa these elite skills were found in the provision of public services, and in particular, in health care, education, and efficient public administration.

Second, the elite must be able to withhold these needed skills if the majority threatens to expropriate elite-owned land, nationalize elite-owned firms, or to set tax rates on income at excessive rates. It is often thought that the elite’s ability to migrate would be a sufficient deterrent to expropriation or excessive taxation. In South Africa, migration from the country has been modest. You cannot take land and machines with you when you leave, and for all but the most talented, comparable jobs in a new homeland may not be readily available.

What then is an alternative way to withhold needed talents? Perhaps a “strike” or a “work slowdown” organized through elite control over the provision of essential government services? But since the elite is now a political minority, it cannot be a country-wide slowdown. However, it can be a slowdown in one important part of the country where middle and upper income households might constitute a political majority. Local political control could be assured by a constitution that creates provincial governments and draws the provincial borders so that first, there are enough new (lower income) majority residents in the province so that the majority-run national government cares what happens to these constituents, but second, not so many that the middle and upper income households lose political control over the province. We call this requirement the Border Constraint and it must hold so that the elite controls at least one or two important provinces in the new democracy. In South Africa, that important province has become the Western Cape, home of Capetown and South Africa’s wine country. Further, so that this local control can be used as a credible deterrent to excessive national taxation, the provinces must be assigned responsibility for providing important public services. We call this requirement the Assignment Constraint. In South Africa, these constitutionally assigned services are primary health care, K-12 education, and the administration of social security payments.

President Bill Clinton with Nelson Mandela, 4 July 1993.
Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Third and finally, the elite-run provinces cannot become economic islands unto themselves, as indeed the National Party had originally proposed during constitutional negotiations. President Mandela and the ANC rejected this approach to federalism by insisting that all important taxing powers remain in the hands of the national government. But without significant taxing powers, how can provincial governments provide important public services? The answer is the last element in the design of the federal constitution: a clearly specified formula for sharing national tax revenues with the provincial governments. In South Africa’s constitution, this formula is called the “Equitable Share” and is recommended each year by a constitutionally protected commission called the Financial and Fiscal Commission composed of representatives from each of the nine provinces.

The elite’s expertise in the provision of important public services, empowered through an appropriately designed federal constitution, gave Nelson Mandela the “inbuilt mechanism” he needed to assure F.W. de Klerk and the National Party that their economic interests could be protected in the new democracy. Having fashioned a federal constitution for South Africa’s democratic transition, and it is holding so far, who has benefitted?

Crime and unemployment remain serious problems, but crime rates are no higher than those in many of the largest US cities and there is a thriving black market for those who are formally unemployed. Taxes on middle and upper income households have increased to finance expanded public services to lower income households, and there remains an important significant inequity in the distribution of education, health care, and infrastructures. All said, while pressures on education and other public services have continued to grow, tax rates are still below our estimates of maximal taxation and there have been no exploitive land transfers or wholesale nationalization of private capital. Adult disability and child mortality rates continue to fall, new lower income housing is being built, school enrollment is up, class sizes are shrinking, and literacy has increased. When we compare what lifetime earnings would have been for the majority of South Africans had apartheid continued (with negative growth!) to earnings today and into the foreseeable future, the typical poor majority resident has become 160,000 Rand ($20,000) richer and the typical elite resident about 350,000 Rand ($45,000) richer over their lifetimes.

To be sure, South Africa continues to face important challenges to its economic and political futures, but there is little doubt that by almost any measure of personal welfare, the average elite and majority resident are better off today than they might have been under the continuation of apartheid. Our argument here is that federal governance, appropriately constructed, made this possible. Perhaps South Africa’s experience holds lessons for others seeking a peaceful transition to a stable democracy.

Robert P. Inman and Daniel L. Rubinfeld are the authors of “Understanding the Democratic Transition in South Africa” in the American Law and Economics Review, which is available to read for free for a limited time. Robert Inman is the Richard K. Mellon Professor of Finance, Economics, and Public Policy at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Daniel Rubinfeld is the Robert Bridges Professor of Law and Professor of Economics, Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley and Professor of Law, New York University School of Law. Professors Inman and Rubinfeld served as economic advisors to the Financial and Fiscal Commission and to the national government’s Departments of Finance, of Education, and of Welfare on matters of fiscal policy for the period 1994-2000.

The American Law and Economics Review is a refereed journal which maintains the highest scholarly standards and that is accessible to the full range of membership of the American Law and Economics Association, which includes practising lawyers, consultants, and academic lawyers and economists.

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On Saturday 30 March 2013, Kenya’s Supreme Court unanimously decided that Kenya’s presidential election — which had been held on 4 March — was conducted in a free, fair, transparent and credible manner, and that Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto of the Jubilee Alliance were validly elected. Raila Odinga of the Coalition for Reform and Democracy (CORD) publicly disagreed with the court’s findings, but emphasised the supremacy of the constitution and wished Kenyatta and Ruto luck in implementing the 2010 constitution. Raila’s decision to seek legal redress for alleged electoral manipulation, rather than to call for mass action, and his respect for the court’s ruling stands in stark contrast to 2007 when a disputed election triggered unprecedented violence. The 2013 election and its aftermath were generally peaceful with the notable exceptions of attacks on state security personnel at the Coast the night before the election and a harsh state security response to violent demonstrations in parts of Nyanza Province and Nairobi following the reading of the Supreme Court’s verdict.

The 2013 election reveals a strong commitment to peace amongst Kenyans, which is fuelled by people’s experiences of the 2007/8 post-election crisis that — at least for a time — seemed to threaten to throw the country into civil war, and by a strong “peace narrative,” which has been fostered by church leaders, civil society organisations, and politicians. However, it also reflects a profound sense of disillusionment and impotence amongst many Kenyans. Demonstrations were banned on the basis that they “inevitably” lead to violence. Strategically located state security personnel rendered public protest an incredibly dangerous option. Meanwhile the emphasis on “peace” made people cautious of highlighting problems lest they be labelled as warmongers.

But as well as differences, there are also strong continuities between 2007 and 2013. One is the ongoing political salience of ethnic identities and narratives of difference, competition, marginalisation, and particular suffering, which pose significant challenges for the Jubilee Alliance moving forward.

The prominence of ethnic identities was reflected in pronounced ethnic voting patterns (the vast majority of Kikuyu and Kalenjin voted for the Jubilee Alliance, and the majority of Luo voted for CORD), but also in vicious debates on social media sites following the announcement of the results and public responses to the Supreme Court’s decision. Thus, while Uhuru announced that his government would work with and serve all Kenyans, the perception on the ground is clearly different. Many Jubilee supporters in Kalenjin and Kikuyu-dominated areas, for example, celebrated the Supreme Court’s decision by holding up loaves of bread and declaring that while in the coalition government they had had to share a loaf, they now had the whole thing!

The challenge of communal narratives and perceptions includes the difficulty of working with those ethnic groups who predominately supported Raila and CORD, such as the Luo and coastal communities. First, these communities have strong narratives of marginalisation and past suffering at the hands of previous ethnically-biased (and Kikuyu and Kalenjin-headed) regimes. Second, there is a strong perception within these communities that the Kikuyu and Kalenjin have benefited from the “fruits of Uhuru [independence]” more than other Kenyans and are unable to allow others to govern. Finally, many people from these communities firmly believe that the 2013 election was marked by gross irregularities, that the election should have gone to a run-off, and that their vote has once again been stolen. This poses a challenge to the new government as people tend to focus in on evidence that reinforces existing narratives. Many CORD supporters are already talking about boycotting the next presidential election, and such narratives and perceptions can further fuel a sense of ethnic difference and competition — and perhaps future conflict.

However, inter-ethnic tension and violence is not inevitable and people will be closely watching how the new Jubilee government includes members of all communities and how devolution plays out in practice: whether it serves to bring government closer to the people and a fairer distribution of resources, or whether it is marked by conflicts between the centre and the counties, different power brokers at the county level, and self-perceived “locals” and “outsiders” in cosmopolitan counties.

Second, while the Kalenjin and Kikuyu came together behind the Jubilee Alliance, it is clear that ethnic stereotypes, narratives of difference, competition, and mistrust continue to be a feature of day-to-day relations at the local level. In turn, there is a fear among many members of the Kalenjin community that their support for Uhuru’s presidency may be “betrayed” with potential “evidence” including a failure to fully share government positions and resources, and possible scenarios at the International Criminal Court (ICC) where both Uhuru and Ruto face charges of crimes against humanity. However, there is nothing inevitable about the collapse of the Jubilee Alliance, especially since Uhuru’s TNA party needs Raila’s URP party if it is to continue to enjoy a majority in the National Assembly and Senate.

In short, the new Jubilee government lacks legitimacy in many parts of the country and faces the possibility of internal divisions — two challenges that are both characterised by (among other things) strong ethnic narratives of difference, competition, marginalisation, betrayal, and particular suffering. Other challenges include Uhuru and Ruto’s cases at the ICC, the delivery of campaign promises, the government’s relations with civil society organisations who opposed Uhuru and Ruto’s candidacy and petitioned their victory, and government relations with the international community. Many countries having congratulated Uhuru on his victory, while simultaneously emphasising the need for Kenya to continue to comply with its international obligations, such as the ICC.

Gabrielle Lynch is an Associate Professor of Comparative Politics, Department of Politics and International Studies at University of Warwick. Her article “Becoming indigenous in the pursuit of justice: The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the Endorois” was recently included in a virtual issue on Kenya from African Affairs.

African Affairs is published on behalf of the Royal African Society and is the top ranked journal in African Studies. It is an inter-disciplinary journal, with a focus on the politics and international relations of sub-Saharan Africa. It also includes sociology, anthropology, economics, and to the extent that articles inform debates on contemporary Africa, history, literature, art, music and more.

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A conversation with Chinua Achebe was a deep, slow and gracious matter. He was exceedingly courteous and always listened and reflected before answering. In his later years he talked even more slowly and softly, savouring the paradoxes of life and history. He spoke in long, clear, simple sentences which often ended in a profound and sad paradox. Then those extraordinary eyes twinkled, his usually very solemn face would break into a huge smile and he would chuckle.

He had a look of Nelson Mandela about him. Both have that ability to look very stern and solemn and then break into a huge smile. It happened when they met each other in South Africa, his daughter, Nwando, told me. At first the two men just looked at each other and then burst out laughing as if recognizing their brotherhood. Both romantic about Africa’s traditions, they talked and talked. Mandela had read Things Fall Apart when he was in prison on Robben Island and he said of Achebe: “The writer in whose company the prison walls fell down.”

He also shared Mandela’s care for ordinary people. I noticed how cleaners and nurses and others who cared for him were treated as friends.

His life was itself a paradox. He was of that first generation of ordinary Africans to receive western education. Until then only the sons of chiefs were sent to school. He loved and gloried in the education he had been lucky enough to receive – a typical British public school routine and curriculum. Nor had he any complaints about the benefits that modern technology had brought to Africa. But he was also a fierce defender of African traditions and the right – duty even – of all Africans to live by them and respect them. He wanted the two cultures to meet as equals. It was not about civilization replacing barbarism.

This was not merely philosophical. It was personal. His father, a Christian missionary who laboured tirelessly as a church worker and builder of churches, encouraged his son to read – especially the Bible. His father’s uncle however kept the traditions and when his nephew tried to convert him, the uncle showed him the insignia of his traditional Igbo titles – which he would have had to renounce if he became Christian. “What shall I do to these?” he asked. Achebe interpreted these words as: What do I do to who I am? What do I do to history?

The dilemma which separated his father from his great uncle haunted Achebe all his life. His books are set in the time when the old world was being destroyed, lost or abandoned and a new world of modernity, mediated by the West, was being imposed on Africa. His five novels trace the story from the coming of the white man, through to Nigeria’s independence and self government and its failure to deliver on its promises. His books were prescient about Nigeria’s failures. In A Man of the People, published in 1966, he describes a coup – which promptly happened in reality.

Whichever way he looked at it, the British seizure and creation of what is now Nigeria was a catastrophe. In Things Fall Apart the impetuous and uncompromising traditionalist, Okonkwo, tries to resist the British by force and ends committing suicide in the forest. In the next novel Arrow of God, the old keeper of the shrine, a modest open-minded man and based on Achebe’s great uncle, tries to engage with the white invaders, showing what might have been a coming together of different cultures. Instead the result is the same – they are not interested and humiliate him and destroy the shrine.

Achebe celebrated Nigerian independence with great excitement, believing, as most of his generation did, that a liberated Africa would soar. His disillusionment was swift and, long before the rest of the world foresaw the political failures of the new African states; Achebe pinpointed them. In A Man of the People he described the African states as a house abandoned by the colonial powers, taken over by “the smart and the lucky and hardly ever the best”, leaving the vast majority of the people out in the rain.

Soon after came the second agonizing dilemma of his life. In 1967 his Igbo people, feeling persecuted and excluded by the alliance of the northern Muslims and the Yoruba in the west, declared independence from Nigeria. Led by Colonel Ojukwu, the Igbo called their new country Biafra and Achebe was its chief proponent and propagandist. The war lasted three years and left more than a million dead. His last book, There was a Country, is an account of that war and shows Achebe to still be a staunch supporter of Biafran independence.

A car accident in Nigeria in 1990 left him in a wheelchair and dependent on others. He had to move to America for treatment. But his devoted wife Christie looked after him fiercely and made very sure he did not get mobbed by visitors or used by people who might exploit his easy going nature.

In my book, Africa Altered States Ordinary Miracles I used Achebe’s image of the house left behind by the imperial powers as a theme. I then had the cheek to contact him and ask him to write a forward. I was astounded and thrilled when he readily agreed and we got to meet each other.

In 2009 I accompanied him on his last visit to Nigeria to make a film for the BBC. We went to see the home that he had built for his family, complete with its own power and water supply and a lift that would take his wheelchair. It was close to completion and he wanted to live out his final years there but the medical services he needed were not available and his family persuaded him to stay in the US. Sadly that was his first and last visit to that house.

Everywhere he went he was mobbed. We drove at frantic speed from Abuja to Owerri accompanied by a police escort which forced everyone off the road. The lead police Land Rover roared up the middle of the road, lights full on, sirens wailing and police with whips lashing out at cyclists, bikers and pedestrians as they passed. At one stage the convoy took a wrong turning but doubled back, travelling the wrong way along a busy motorway at night. This was the sort of behavior that Achebe had denounced in his 1983 tirade The Trouble with Nigeria. I pointed this out to him. He gave me a rueful smile and shook his head sadly. His son Chide, a distinguished doctor in America, tried unsuccessfully to persuade them to go a little more slowly and be less violent.

Achebe delivered his lecture at Owerri in Igbo heartland and reminded his audience of their history, their culture, their language. This was their heritage, he said, and if they kept faithful to it, they would be strong. After the speech I asked audience members randomly what they thought of the speech. One of those I spoke to said he agreed: “If we know our Igbo language and culture we will be strong – and then we can rule Nigeria!” This sentiment was repeated by two others I interviewed. When I related this to the old man he was appalled. “That is not what I meant at all,” he said. But I wondered if, after his long absence from Nigeria, a new more cynical generation had lost touch with his noble, old-fashioned idealism.

I hope this and the scores of other tributes to one of the greatest Africans of his generation, whose work and memory will last as long as Africa itself, will be some consolation for Christie Achebe and all the family. I condole you.

Listen to Chinua Achebe: A Hero Returns, BBC Radio 4, 23:00, 22 March 2013 presented by Richard Dowden, Director of the Royal African Society and author of Africa; altered states, ordinary miracles.

This article originally appeared on African Arguments, hosted by the Royal African Society and World Peace Foundation, part of the Guardian Africa Network.

Richard Dowden is director of the Royal African Society.

African Affairs is published on behalf of the Royal African Society and is the top ranked journal in African Studies. It is an inter-disciplinary journal, with a focus on the politics and international relations of sub-Saharan Africa. It also includes sociology, anthropology, economics, and to the extent that articles inform debates on contemporary Africa, history, literature, art, music and more.

The post Achebe appeared first on OUPblog.

Oxford University Press is sad to hear of the passing of Chinua Achebe. The following is an excerpt from The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, edited by John Gross.

In 1957 Achebe spent several months in London. He had already completed a draft of his first novel, Things Fall Apart, but felt that it needed further work; he took the manuscript back to Lagos, where he worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting Service, and finished revising it there:

When I was in England, I had seen advertisements about typing agencies; I had learned that if you really want to make a good impression, you should have your manuscript  well typed. So, foolishly, from Nigeria, I parceled my manuscript –– handwritten, by the way, and the only copy in the whole world –– wrapped it up and posted it to this typing agency that advertised in the Spectator. They wrote back and said, ‘Thank you for your manuscript. We’ll charge thirty-two pounds.’ That was what they wanted for two copies, and which they had to receive before they started. So I sent thirty-two pounds in British postal order to these people, and then I heard no more. Weeks passed, and months. I wrote and wrote and wrote. No answer. Not a word. I was getting thinner and thinner and thinner. Finally, I was very lucky. My boss at the broadcasting house was going home to London on leave. A very stubborn Englishwoman. I told her about this. She said. ‘Give me their name and address.’ When she got to London she went there! She said, ‘What’s this nonsense?’ They must have been shocked, because I think their notion was that a manuscript sent from Africa –– well, there’s really nobody to follow it up. The British don’t normally behave like that. It’s not done, you see. But something from Africa was treated differently. So when this woman, Mrs Beattie, turned up in their office, and said, ‘What’s going on?’ they were confused. They said, ‘The manuscript was sent but customs returned it.’ Mrs. Beattie said, ‘Can I see your dispatch book?’ They had no dispatch book. So she said, ‘Well, send this thing, typed up, back to him in the next week, or otherwise you’ll hear about it.’ So soon after that, I received the typed manuscript of Things Fall Apart. One copy, not two. No letter at all to say what happened.

Interview in Paris Review, 1994

In his biography of Achebe, Ezenwa-Ohaeto  quotes the novelist’s response to a friend who asked what his reaction would have been if the manuscript had been stolen: ‘he said that he would have died’.

In The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, master anthologist John Gross brings together a delectable smorgasbord of literary tales, offering striking new insight into some of the most important writers in history. John Gross is the editor of The Oxford Book of Aphorisms, The Oxford Book of Essays, After Shakespeare, and many other publications. He was editor of the Times Literary Supplement from 1974 to 1981, and is currently theatre critic of the Sunday Telegraph.

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• The Great Temple of Abu Simbel at Sunrise

   

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  The façade of the Great Temple built by Ramesses II at Abu Simbel and dedicated to his deified self as well as the god Amun and the sun god Re-Harakhte. The four colossal figures that dominate the facade depict the king, with smaller figures of female family members beside him. Above the doorway, between the pairs of figures stands a statue of a hawk headed deity crowned with a sun disk and holding a plant; this is a rebus writing of Ramesses II’s name and is one of the first parts of the temple to be illuminated by the rising sun. © Photographs by Chester Higgins Jr.

• The Interior of the Great Temple Of Abu Simbel

   

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  The interior of the Great Temple of Abu Simbel with figures of the king wearing his royal kilt and holding the crook and the flail, symbols of his royal office, in his crossed hands. On the right side the figures wear the double crown symbolic of the king’s dominion over Upper and Lower Egypt, and perhaps also over both Egypt and Nubia, while on the left side he wears the white crown, indicative of his rule over Upper Egypt. The ceiling of the chamber is decorated with vultures with outspread wings, protecting the sacred space, and in the distant holy-of-holies the statues of the king and the gods can be seen. © Photographs by Chester Higgins Jr.

• Pyramids of Meroe

   

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  The pyramids at Meroe were constructed to house the bodies of the kings and queens of the Kingdom of Meroe. The pyramids combine a temple-like pylon entrance with a chapel set within the pyramids. These chapels are carved in sunk relief with images of the deceased royalty together with divinities. The famous gold treasure discovered by Ferlini and belonging to a Meroitic Queen was found buried with their owner in the burial chambers of one of these pyramids. © Photographs by Chester Higgins Jr.

• Relief from the Tomb of Pennout

   

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  The tomb of Pennout, deputy of Wawat and chief of the quarries, dating to the reign of Ramesses VI (1141-113 BC) was originally located at Aniba, but moved to save it from the rising waters of Lake Nasser after the building of the Aswan High Dam. Images of the deceased’s family wearing white robes and holding lotus and papyri, symbols of resurrection, and praising the deceased, as well as images of deities are found in this charming rock cut tomb. © Photographs by Chester Higgins Jr.

• Soleb Temple

   

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  The papyrus-bundle pillars of Soleb temple still dominate the sacred landscape at the site. The temple was built by Amenhotep III and dedicated to the god Amun-Re as well as the deified king himself. © Photographs by Chester Higgins Jr.

• Interior of the Temple of Beit al-Wali

   

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  The temple of Beit al-Wali, originally situated 40 miles south of Aswan, was constructed during the reign of Seti I and decorated and completed during the early part of the reign of Ramesses II. The entire temple is unique in form when compared to other Egyptian temples in Nubia, and entirely cut into the rock face. The entrance hall leads into the vestibule, which shows scenes of the king and the gods worshiping. On either side, fluted columns are visible situated in the center of the room, through which is a view of the sanctuary with a recess cut into the back of the chamber for statues that would sit upon the bench-like structure in the back. This is the most sacred area of the temple, where the divine world of the gods existed. This temple was later moved during the 1960s to its current location south of the Aswan Dam. © Photographs by Chester Higgins Jr.

• Relief of Satet, Horus, and Isis from the Lion Temple at Musawwarat al-Sufra

   

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  The Lion Temple at Musawwarat al-Sufra is located 180 kilometers northeast of Khartoum. This site was important during the Meroitic Period as a major religious cult center. Shown on the side of this temple is a relief of the goddess Satet wearing a crown with horns, behind whom stands the hawk-headed god Horus and his mother, Isis. © Photographs by Chester Higgins Jr.

Ancient Nubia: African Kingdoms on the Nile attempts to document some of what has recently been discovered about ancient Nubia, with its remarkable history, architecture, and culture, and thereby to give us a picture of this rich, but unfamiliar, African legacy. It is edited by Marjorie Fisher, Peter Lacovara, Sue D’Auria and Salima Ikram, photographs are by Chester Higgins Jr., and the foreword by Zahi Hawass. It is published by the American University in Cairo Press.

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Image credit: © Photographs by Chester Higgins Jr. Used with permission of the American University in Cairo Press. All rights reserved.

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This October 25th marks the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of Nelson Mandela’s twenty-seven years in South African prisons. He was initially sentenced in October, 1962 to five years imprisonment for inciting African workers to strike and for leaving the country without valid travel documents. Immediately after sentencing, he was sent to the Robben Island prison, lying off Cape Town harbor, where he was held in solitary confinement. He was brought back to Pretoria, the South African administrative capital, less than a year later to face even more serious charges under the Sabotage Act — charges that could have resulted in a death sentence. Those subsequent charges culminated in the Rivonia trial — a trial that was to last from October, 1963 until June, 1964 and constitute one of the most dramatic political trials in world history. The Rivonia trial resulted in a life sentence.

Although perhaps historically dwarfed by Rivonia, the 1962 trial was itself a significant moment in South African history and in the formation of the man, Nelson Mandela, and his legend. The trial was held in a building that had been converted from an old synagogue to a court. Mandela, although he had been advised by two skilled and experienced criminal defense lawyers, Harold Wolpe and Joe Slovo, elected to represent himself. He was an experienced lawyer and his initial act was to seek to recuse the magistrate who was to try the case. In his application for recusal, Mandela respectfully stated that there was nothing personal in his motion. Rather, he objected that he would not be given a fair and proper trial by a white judicial officer, “however high his esteem and however strong his sense of fairness and justice.” Whites had denied black Africans the right of representation in Parliament. He added, “it is improper and against the elementary principles of justice to entrust whites with cases involving the denial by them of basic human rights to the African people.”

The magistrate summarily denied Mandela’s application for recusal. Mandela pled not guilty and the State presented its case. Mandela was an active cross-examiner but offered no evidence in his own defense. Not surprisingly, he was found guilty. He was permitted to make a statement in mitigation of sentence. The statement outlined the history of the struggle of African people and his own involvement in that struggle. He concluded:

Whatever sentence Your Worship sees fit to impose upon me for the crime for which I have been convicted before this court, may it rest assured that when my sentence has been completed, I will still be moved, as men are always moved, by their consciences. I will still be moved by my dislike of the race discrimination against my people when I come out from serving my sentence to take up again, as best I can the struggle for the removal of those injustices until they are finally abolished once and for all.

Almost two years later, when facing the possibility of a death sentence at the Rivonia trial, he concluded with a similar statement, although under the circumstances, in a more dramatic tone:

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society… It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if need be it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

Mandela’s words from the Rivonia trial are now enshrined on the wall of the Constitutional Court building in Johannesburg.

Nelson Mandela did not die either by hanging or in a South African prison. He survived the full legal onslaught of the apartheid State. He was convicted both in 1962 and at the Rivonia trial in 1964. But on both occasions he maintained his dignity and resisted, as best he could under the circumstances, the legal cases against him. And in both trials, he successfully made his case for the struggle against an oppressive regime and against racism all over the world.

Nelson Mandela’s brilliance at these two trials would have been historically important even if he had not survived to lead his country to a new constitutional democracy. His articulation of the case for his cause would serve as inspiration for his people and for all people fighting oppression. But just as importantly, his contribution to his own survival insured that this great man would be alive to provide the leadership necessary for South Africa to go beyond its oppressive past.

His imprisonment, which began 50 years ago, would last for twenty-seven years. The leadership that he gave his people, in the courtroom, in prison and after his release, will last for the ages.

Kenneth S. Broun is the Henry Brandis Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina Law School. Since 1986, he has traveled regularly to South Africa to conduct programs in trial advocacy training through the Black Lawyers Association of South Africa. He is the author of Saving Nelson Mandela: The Rivonia Trial and the Fate of South Africa. Read his previous blog post: “Nelson Mandela, 22 years after his release from prison.”

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Image credit: 6th April 2000 Visit of Nelson Mandela to give a lecture at LSE on ‘Africa and Its Position in the World.’ Held at the Peacock Theatre. London School of Economics.

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What does the extraordinary story of Tutankhamun tells us about the mummy’s curse?

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To what extent did the story of Tutankhamun become a media event?

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What does the curse of a Victorian gentleman have to do with Arthur Conan-Doyle’s ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles?

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Roger Luckhurst explains why he explored the mummy’s curse and why we are still so interested in the myths of Tutankhamun.

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Roger Luckhurst has written and broadcast widely on popular culture, specialising in science fiction and the Gothic. He is interested in the odd spaces between science and popular supernatural beliefs. He has previously written a history of how the notion of ‘telepathy’ emerged in the late Victorian period, and has published editions of Jekyll and Hyde and Dracula. He is also a regular radio reviewer of terrible science fiction films. He teaches horror and the occasional respectable novel by Henry James at Birkbeck College, University of London. The Mummy’s Curse: The true history of a dark fantasy  publishes in late 2012. Read his article on Downton Abbey and the Curse of King Tut.

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The polymath Thomas Young (1773-1829) — physicist, physiologist, physician and polyglot, among several other things — became hooked on the scripts and languages of ancient Egypt in 1814, the year he began to decipher the Rosetta Stone. He continued to study the hieroglyphic and demotic scripts with variable intensity for the rest of his life, literally until his dying day. The challenge of being the first modern to read the writing of what appeared then to be the oldest civilization in the world — far older than the classical civilization of Young’s beloved Greeks — was irresistible to a man who was as equally gifted in languages, ancient and contemporary, as he was in science. He himself described his Egyptian obsession as being driven by “an attempt to unveil the mystery, in which Egyptian literature has been involved for nearly twenty centuries.” His epitaph in London’s Westminster Abbey states, accurately enough, that Young was the man who “first penetrated the obscurity which had veiled for ages the hieroglyphics of Egypt” — even if it was the linguist and archaeologist Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832) who in the end would enjoy the glory of being the first actually to read the hieroglyphs in 1822-23.

From 1814 until the publication of his important Encyclopaedia Britannica article (‘Egypt’ in 1819), Young had had the field of hieroglyphic decipherment largely to himself. Champollion, though actively interested in the Rosetta Stone from 1808, did not tackle its decipherment in earnest until 1821. He quickly overtook Young and became the founder of Egyptology as a science.

During the 1820s, the two men sometimes cooperated with each other, but mostly they competed as rivals. Their relationship could never have been a harmonious one. Young claimed that Champollion had built his system of reading hieroglyphics on Young’s own discoveries and his tentative hieroglyphic ‘alphabet’, published in 1819. While paying generous and frequent tribute to Champollion’s unrivalled progress since then, Young wanted his early steps recognized. This Champollion was adamantly unwilling to concede, claiming that he had worked independently; and in his vehemence he determined to give all of Young’s work the minimum possible public recognition. Just weeks before Young’s death in May 1829, Champollion, writing in the midst of his 1828-29 expedition to ancient Egypt — he was then at Thebes in the Valley of the Kings — exulted privately to his brother in Paris: “So the poor Dr Young is incorrigible? Why stir up old matter that is already mummified? Thank M. Arago for the cudgels he has so valiantly taken up for the honour of the Franco-Pharaonic alphabet. The Briton can do as he pleases — it shall be ours: and all of old England will learn from young France to spell hieroglyphs by a totally different method.”

Such defiantly nationalistic overtones — at times evident in Young’s writings, too — have to some extent bedevilled honest discussion of Young and Champollion ever since those Napoleonic days of intense Franco-British political rivalry. Even Young’s loyal friend and admirer, the physicist Dominique Arago, turned against his work on hieroglyphics, at least partly because Champollion was an honoured fellow Frenchman.

Alongside this, Egyptologists, who are the people best placed to understand the intellectual nitty-gritty of the dispute, are naturally drawn to Champollion more than Young because he founded their subject. No scholar of ancient Egypt would wish to think ill of such a pioneer. Even John Ray, the Cambridge University Egyptologist who has done most in recent years to give Young his proper due, admits: “the suspicion may easily arise, and often has done, that any eulogy of Thomas Young must be intended as a denigration of Champollion. This would be shameful coming from an Egyptologist.”

Demotic script on a replica of the rosetta stone on display in Magdeburg. Photo by Chris 73. Creative Commons License. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Then there is the cult of genius to consider; many of us prefer to believe in the primacy of unaccountable moments of inspiration over the less glamorous virtues of step-by-step, rational teamwork. Champollion maintained that his breakthroughs in 1822-23 came almost exclusively out of his own mind, arising from his indubitably passionate devotion to ancient Egypt and his unrivalled knowledge of the Coptic language descended from ancient Egyptian. He pictured himself for the public in his writings as a ‘lone genius’ who solved the riddle of ancient Egypt’s writing single-handedly. The fact that Young was known primarily for his work in fields other than Egyptian studies, and that he published his studies on Egypt anonymously up to 1823, made Champollion’s solitary self-image easily believable for most people.

Lastly, in trying to assess the differing styles of Young and Champollion, there is no avoiding the fact that they were highly contrasting personalities and that this contrast sometimes influenced their research on the hieroglyphs. Champollion had tunnel vision (“fortunately for our subject,” says Ray); was prone to fits of euphoria and despair; and had personally led an uprising against the French king in Grenoble in 1821, for which he was put on trial. Young, apart from his polymathy and a total lack of engagement with party politics, was a man who “could not bear, in the most common conversation, the slightest degree of exaggeration, or even of colouring” (wrote his closest friend after Young’s death). Young and Champollion were poles apart intellectually, emotionally and politically.

Consider their respective attitudes to ancient Egypt. Young never went to Egypt and never wanted to go. In founding an Egyptian Society in London in 1817, to publish as many ancient inscriptions and manuscripts as possible so as to aid the decipherment, Young remarked that funds were needed “for employing some poor Italian or Maltese to scramble over Egypt in search of more.” Champollion, by contrast, had long dreamt of visiting Egypt and doing exactly what Young had depreciated, ever since he saw the hieroglyphs as a boy, and when he finally got there, he was able to pass for a native, given his swarthy complexion and his excellent command of Arabic. “I am Egypt’s captive — she is my be-all,” he thrilled from beside the Nile in 1828. Later he described entering the temple of Ramses the Great at Abu Simbel, which was blocked by millennia of sand: “I undressed almost completely, down to my Arab shirt and long linen underpants, and pushed myself flat on my stomach through the small opening in the doorway that, if cleared of sand, would be at least 25 feet in height. I thought I was entering the mouth of a furnace, and, when I had slid entirely into the temple, I found myself in an atmosphere heated to 52 degrees: we went through this astonishing excavation, Rosellini, Ricci, I and one of the Arabs holding a candle in his hand.”

Such a perilous adventure would probably not have appealed to Young, even in his careless youth as an accomplished horseman roughing it in the Highlands of Scotland. Unlike Champollion, Young’s motive for ‘cracking’ the Egyptian scripts was fundamentally philological and scientific, not aesthetic and cultural — in contrast with his attitude to the classical literature of Greece and Rome. Many Egyptologists, and humanities scholars in general, tend not to sympathize with this motive. They also know little about Young’s work in science and his renown as someone who initiated many new areas of enquiry (such as a theory of colour vision) and left others to develop them. As a result, some of them seriously misjudge Young. Not knowing of his fairness in recognizing other scientists’ contributions and his fanatical truthfulness in his own scientific work, they jump to the obvious conclusion that Young’s attitude to Champollion was chiefly one of envy. But not only would such an emotion have been out of character for Young, it would also not have made much sense, given his major scientific achievements and the fact that these were increasingly recognized from 1816 onwards — starting with French scientists, who awarded Young their highest honours.

For Champollion, the success of his decipherment was a matter of make or break as a scholar and as a man. For Young, his Egyptian research was essentially yet one more fascinating avenue of knowledge to explore for his own amusement. Both men were geniuses, though of exceptionally different kinds, and both deserve to be remembered in the story of the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphs: Young for taking some difficult but crucial initial steps in 1814-19; and Champollion for discovering a coherent system in 1822-23, and thereafter demonstrating its validity with a vast array of virgin inscriptions.

Andrew Robinson is the author of the biographies Cracking the Egyptian Code: The Revolutionary Life of Jean-François Champollion, and The Last Man Who Knew Everything: Thomas Young. . He has also written two Very Short Introductions for OUP: Writing and Script, published in 2009, and Genius, published in 2011.

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On 5 July 1962, Algeria achieved independence from France after an eight-year-long war — one of the longest and bloodiest episodes in the whole decolonisation process. An undeclared war in the sense there was no formal beginning of hostilities, the intensity of this violence is partly explained by the fact that Algeria (invaded in 1830) was an integral part of France, but also by the presence of European settlers who in 1954, numbered one million as against the nine million Arabo-Berber population. Drawn from Italy, Malta and Spain, as well as France, these white colonials were for the most part very poor and this poverty lay at the root of their virulent racism. Feeling socially insecure, they found solace in prejudices that became the basis of a collective ‘we’ and ‘they.’ Bigotry towards the indigenous populations, whether they be Arab, Berber or Jew, peppered the daily conversation of Europeans. Even more crucially, it became the basis of a system that treated the Arabo-Berber population as second class citizens who had to be permanently shut out of colonial Algeria.

This racial inequality was the basic cause of the Algerian War, which began on 1 November 1954 when the Front de Libération National (FLN) launched a series of attacks throughout the country. The ensuing conflict produced enormous tensions that brought down four governments, ended the Fourth Republic in 1958, and mired the French Army in accusations of torture and mass summary executions. However, successive French governments could not countenance withdrawal because Algeria was seen to be the lynch-pin of the French-ruled bloc that stretched from Paris down to Brazzaville in the French Congo. Internationally this bloc — claimed by left-centre politicians like François Mitterrand and Guy Mollet — would allow France to stand up to the Soviet Union as well as British and US imperialisms.

Unable to win in Algeria, the Fourth Republic imploded in May 1958 and led to the return of the World War Two Resistance leader, Charles de Gaulle. Initially de Gaulle continued with the policy of repression and reform. Yet, by 1961 he had come to the conclusion that independence was inevitable. For him the depth of Algerian nationalism was too strong, but his decision was also a cold economic calculation. Simply speaking, Algeria was a drain of French resources. As he told a press conference on 11 April 1961 in Paris: “Algeria is costing us, this is the least one can say, much more than it brings into us.”

Thereafter the French government entered into a series of tortuous negotiations, further complicated by rebellions by dissident French army officers, who felt betrayed by de Gaulle. However, a peace agreement was brokered in March 1962 and on 1 July 1962 Algeria went to the polls with 91.5% saying ‘yes’ to independence. By this point most of the Europeans had left for France (one of the biggest population transfers of the twentieth century). On Tuesday 3 July at 10:30 a.m., de Gaulle officially recognised Algerian independence, and during the hours that followed other countries followed suit, including the USA and Great Britain. The Algerian nation state was a diplomatic reality and the Algerian Provisional Government proclaimed Thursday 5 July to be Algeria’s national Independence Day, exactly 132 years after the original French invasion.

Internationally, the end of the Algerian War was a major moment in global affairs. This significance was signalled by countless editorials across the globe marking the event, ranging from The Times and the Daily Telegraph in Britain, and The New York Times in the USA, to Il Popolo in Italy and Die Welt in West Germany. Algerian independence was history with a capital ‘H’ at the time, but it has remained so because the Algeria crisis was a pivotal event in the formal ending of European Empires.

Martin Evans is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Portsmouth. He is the author of Algeria: France’s Undeclared War, Memory of Resistance: French Opposition to the Algerian War (1997), co-author (with Emmanuel Godin) of France 1815 to 2003 (2004), and co-author (with John Phillips) of Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed (2007). In 2008 Memory of Resistance was translated into French and serialised in the Algerian press. He has written for the Independent, the Times Higher Education Supplement, BBC History Magazine and the Guardian, and is a regular contributor to History Today. In 2007-08 he was a Leverhulme Senior Research Fellow at the British Academy.

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Martin Evans is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Portsmouth and author of Algeria: France’s Undeclared War. You can read more by Professor Evans here and here.

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You must surely have been tempted on occasion to curse Julian Fellowes, if not for the script of Young Victoria, then for the creation of Downton Abbey, that death star of good old-fashioned aristocratic virtue and due deference. For a little while, all public debate seemed to be sucked through the funnel of Downton discourse, coinciding as it did with the election of all those shiny Eton boys to government in 2010. Fellowes has even had enough self-belief and ambition to become an aristocrat himself. He is now Baron Fellowes of West Stafford and sits on the Tory benches.

But don’t worry, he may already be cursed. It’s not just his obsession with the Titanic –- the sinking creates the opening crisis in Downton Abbey and this year he scripted ITV’s centenary mini-series. It turns out that there is another famous curse, ninety years old this year, which haunts Downton. The stately home that stands in for the Abbey is Highclere Castle, the family seat of the Carnarvons. And it was the fifth Earl of Carnarvon who sponsored the search for the tomb of Tutankhamun, found by Howard Carter in 1922. The Earl was present at the formal opening of the long-lost tomb in the Valley of the Kings in February 1923. Six weeks later he was dead, from pneumonia and blood poisoning, launching a frenzy of rumours and a host of mysterious deaths — allegedly. At Highclere, it was said the Earl’s three-legged dog Susie howled in misery and died at the precise moment of her master’s death. The sixth Earl, the surviving son, recalled all sorts of spooky events in the castle around his doomed father’s Egyptian adventure. There were séances and premonitions by fortune-tellers and Spiritualist mediums.

The Curse of King Tut was a monster bolted together by the tabloid press in the 1920s. It has often been called the first global media sensation, although it surely was not. But because rumours can never be denied, only ever more elaborated upon, the curse has proved remarkably persistent, evolving over the decades, claiming more and more victims. And now, it seems it has reached down to the set of Downton Abbey. The Daily Express and the Daily Mail reported recently that the set had been spooked by a series of uncanny events, associated with the museum display of artefacts from the tomb in the basement of Highclere Castle. The authoritative source for these stories, it transpires, is Shirley MacLaine, who will appear in a cameo role. MacLaine has been rather more famous for her occult and New Age beliefs than her acting in recent years. She reads auras and believes in reincarnation. She is one of many psychic sensitives who claim that they can see menacing presences swirling around Egyptian artefacts claimed from the graves of kings.

Thomas Douglas Murray. Courtesy of the London College of Psychic Science.

All of this is but the latest addition to a century of mummy curse stories associated with English collectors of Egyptian artefacts. In my book, The Mummy’s Curse, due out this autumn, I try to peel back the weird accumulation of stories to find the origin of these stories. The Curse of Tutankhamun flew off the presses in 1923, it turns out, because the way was prepared by two prior stories of Victorian gentlemen who had purchased mummy materials in the grey market of antiquities traders and suffered the consequences. The first, Thomas Douglas Murray, was a socialite well known for his parties with painters, actors, and African adventurers in his London town house in the 1870s. As a young man, he had bought a mummy case in Luxor in the 1860s, only to go hunting shortly afterwards, slip, and shoot his own arm off. He survived bearing this awesome wound of his colonial folly. The Priestess of Amen-Ra, as she was known, did all sorts of devilish things to Londoners until the case was presented to the British Museum in 1889. It resides in the Egyptian Rooms and is still known as the ‘Unlucky Mummy’, although much of the folk history attached to it has been shed along the way.

Walter Ingram. From the family collection of Anne Bricknell.

The second adventurer was the soldier Walter Herbert Ingram, who fought in the Zulu Wars and was a great hero of battles against Islamic rebels in Egypt and Sudan in the 1880s. Ingram bought a mummy case as a souvenir, only to be killed by an elephant on his next visit to Africa, prompting rumours that he had been cursed. Ingram was the youngest son of the founder of the Illustrated London News. His death, understandably, was a news sensation. The record of the lives of these extraordinary gentlemen has rested, largely untouched, in London’s eccentric archives and in family memorabilia, the fable of their curses wrapped around the true details of their lives.

Unravelling these histories tells us a lot about how Victorians and Edwardians used the supernatural to negotiate unease with colonial occupation and the traffic in ancient artefacts to the museums and private collections of the imperial metropolis. They tell us more, I’d like to think, than the clumsy way in which Downton Abbey’s Earl of Grantham and his sniffy butler are always bumping into world historical events.

Roger Luckhurst has written and broadcast widely on popular culture, specialising in science fiction and the Gothic. He is interested in the odd spaces between science and popular supernatural beliefs. He has previously written a history of how the notion of ‘telepathy’ emerged in the late Victorian period, and has published editions of Jekyll and Hyde and Dracula. He is also a regular radio reviewer of terrible science fiction films. He teaches horror and the occasional respectable novel by Henry James at Birkbeck College, University of London. The Mummy’s Curse: The true history of a dark fantasy is due to be published in late 2012.

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May 27, 1963

Kenyatta elected Kenya’s First Prime Minister

Jomo Kenyatta, 22 February 1966. Source: German Federal Archive.

Kenyatta, speaking to all Kenyans, promised peace and goodwill toward Britain and white settlers in the African nation. “We are not to look to the past — racial bitterness, the denial of fundamental rights, the suppression of our culture,” he said. “Let there be forgiveness.”

The historic vote came while Britain still controlled Kenya as a colony but marked a step in the move toward full Kenyan independence. That independence was recognized by Britain in December of 1963. The following year, the Republic of Kenya was declared and, in new elections, Kenyatta became its first president.

Kenyatta’s rule was not without problems. Unrest in the armed forced later in 1964 forced Kenyatta to call on British military aid to maintain stability. Members of other ethnic groups charged that he unfairly favored his own Kikuyu people, the nation’s majority group. His vice president, Oginga Odinga of the Luo people, formed an opposition party, but it and other parties were banned as Kenyatta built a one-party state. Odinga and others also argued that the capitalist economy Kenyatta built abandoned the socialist principles he had claimed to support and left too many people poor. A military coup was attempted in 1971, but failed.

Despite these problems, Kenyatta remained in power until his death in 1978. The major role he played in spearheading Kenya’s independence movement was widely recognized at his passing.

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April 26, 1994

South Africa holds first multiracial election

April 26, 1994 marked the beginning of the end of a period of monumental change in South Africa. On that day, for the first time in the nation’s history, more than 17 million black South Africans began casting their votes for government officials. When the election ended four days later, the vote made Nelson Mandela South Africa’s first black president.

For decades, the white minority had ruled South Africa. Since the 1940s, those whites had consolidated their power by creating a system of strict racial segregation called apartheid. Later developments that forced black South Africans to live only in certain parts of cities or in rural regions called “homelands” reinforced that system.

As a result of these policies and others — favoring whites and putting black South Africans at a disadvantage — the two groups were sharply different in socioeconomic status. Denied voting rights, black South Africans could do nothing to change the laws within the system.

Equal rights activists — among them Mandela — tried various forms of protest to push the government to change. Nations around the world joined in the effort, imposing sanctions on certain economic transactions with South Africa and banning South African cultural figures and athletes from international events.

Not until 1990 though, did this pressure have an effect. Then, South African President F. W. de Klerk began dismantling the laws that supported apartheid. He also negotiated with Mandela — who had been in prison for decades — to arrange his release from prison and cooperation with the creation of a temporary government to lead the country for five years while a new multiracial constitution was written.

Prior to the historic election, some analysts feared that violence would mar the voting process. Nothing of the kind took place. Instead, millions of South Africans went to the polls, some standing in lines that stretched a mile or more, thrilled to take part in an historic vote.

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Ahmed Ben Bella was born in Marnia, near the Algerian-Moroccan border, although some doubt remains about whether the year of his birth was 1916 or 1918. One of five brothers of a farmer; in sociological terms Ben Bella’s family was part of the countryside elite that had been impoverished by French colonialism. From these rural roots Ben Bella rose to become the first post-Independence President of Algeria in 1963 and, until his overthrow in June 1965, one of the most famous leaders of the third world revolutionary movement that took off across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Unlike the mass of Algerians under the colonial system, Ben Bella attended primary school and secondary school. However, when he dropped out of the education system, he, like many other compatriots, saw the French Army as one of the only avenues out of grinding poverty, joining up in 1936. Enlistment gave him the opportunity to hone his considerable football skills and while stationed in Marseille he briefly played as a midfielder for Olympique de Marseille in 1939-40. During World War Two Ben Bella proved himself to be an outstanding soldier twice. In the 1940 campaign he was awarded the Croix de Guerre. Then, during the Italian campaign from September 1943 to May 1945, he was promoted to the rank of warrant officer, receiving the Médaille militaire from de Gaulle himself for bravery at Monte Cassino.

But, as Ben Bella fought to liberate Europe from Nazism, violence gripped Algeria. On 8 May 1945 at Sétif in the east of the country, a nationalist demonstration turned nasty, leading to the death of twenty-one European settlers. As the surrounding countryside witnessed further anti-European violence, the French response was brutal. The Foreign Legion, back up by air and sea power, combed the area for nationalists and the death toll was anywhere between 7,000 and 20,000. Ben Bella was horrified. Sétif was a politicising moment that made him into a militant anti-colonialist.

Within the Algerian nationalist movement, Ben Bella joined the paramilitary wing — the Organisation Spéciale — which was committed to the armed struggle. In 1949 he led a raid on the Oran Post Office before being arrested in 1951 and sentenced to an eight-year prison sentence. Shortly after, he escaped to Cairo, where, at the hub of the plans for armed insurrection, he became one of the ‘historic leaders’ of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). It was the FLN that launched a liberation war against French rule on 1 November 1954.

On 22 October 1956, he and other FLN leaders, flying from Morocco to Tunisia, were captured when their plane was forced to land in Algeria by the French Air Force: the first ever aeroplane hijack in history. Imprisoned until independence in July 1962, upon his release Ben Bella still saw himself as the custodian of the revolution. Accusing the Provisional Government of selling out to the French in the peace negotiations, he sided with army of the frontiers led by Houari Boumediène; an alliance that brought him to power in September 1962.

Ben Bella had ambitious plans for the Algeria. He wanted the country to become the leader of the third world. Yet, in practice, the country slid into chaos and in June 1965 he was overthrown by Boumediène. Ben Bella spent fifteen years in an Algerian jail before being released in 1980, shortly after Boumediène’s death.

Once free, Ben Bella veered in different political directions. An enthusiast for the Iranian revolution, he also became an outspoken supporter of Saddam Hussein, even calling in 1991 for Algerian volunteers to defend Iraq against Western Imperialism. In 1990 he returned to Algeria in the hope of igniting a new generation disaffected by the failures of post-independence. But a political comeback never materialised. For this new generation he was seen as a distant figure, too far removed from their harsh day-to-day realities to have a meaningful political message.

Martin Evans is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Portsmouth. He is the author of Algeria: France’s Undeclared War, Memory of Resistance: French Opposition to the Algerian War (1997), co-author (with Emmanuel Godin) of France 1815 to 2003 (2004), and co-author (with John Phillips) of Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed (2007). In 2008 Memory of Resistance was translated into French and serialised in the Algerian press. He has written for the Independent, the Times Higher Education Supplement, BBC History Magazine and the Guardian, and is a regular contributor to History Today. In 2007-08 he was a Leverhulme Senior Research Fellow at the British Academy.

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April 8, 1953

Kenyatta sentenced to seven years hard labor

Jomo Kenyatta, 22 February 1966. Source: German Federal Archive.

Mau Mau was a movement among Kenya’s Kikuyu people that was dedicated to evicting European whites who had seized land for themselves. The movement grew violent in the early 1950s, and the British declared it illegal and began a massive military offensive against known and suspected members. They killed more than 11,000 suspected members and rounded up and detained more than 20,000 Kikuyu.

Kenyatta — a Kikuyu — became a political leader of black Kenyans in the late 1920s. He campaigned for more rights for black Kenyans and redistribution of land. In the 1940s, he took charge of the Kenya African Union, a political movement.

The British were convinced that Kenyatta’s group was behind Mau Mau and had him arrested late in 1952. During the two-month trial, he maintained his innocence, insisting that his movement was political and nonviolent. He had little hope of convincing the court, however.

“You (Kenyatta) have successfully plunged many Africans back to a state which shows little humanity,” judge Ransley Thacker lectured Kenyatta at the sentencing. “Make no mistake about it,” he said, “Mau Mau will be defeated.” The rebellion did indeed peter out some years later, but Kenyatta’s political goals never did. In fact, they took the form of seeking independence and self-rule.

That dream was finally realized on December 12, 1963, when Britain formally withdrew. By that time, Kenyans had elected a new government and Jomo Kenyatta, the spearhead of the independence movement, was the first prime minister.

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The Trojan War. The history of piracy. The great naval battles between Carthage and Rome. The Jewish Diaspora into Hellenistic worlds. The rise of Islam. The Grand Tours of the 19th century. The mass tourism of the 20th. We may have missed World Maritime Day on March 17th, but we can still admire the watery wonder of the sea and its peoples. As brilliant and sweeping as the Mediterranean itself, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean interweaves major political and naval developments with the ebb and flow of trade. Author David Abulafia stresses the remarkable ability of Mediterranean cultures to uphold the civilizing ideal of convivencia, “living together,” exemplified in medieval Spain, where Christian theologians studied Arabic texts with the help of Jewish and Muslim scholars, and traceable throughout the history of the region. And now a quick quiz on the history of the Mediterranean…

What are the oldest large-scale buildings of the Mediterranean?
(1) The Acropolis in Athens
(2) Mnajdra temple complex in Malta
(3) Leptis Magna in modern day Khoms, Libya
(4) The necropolis of Orvieto, Italy

What do the famous Cycladic figurines depict?
(1) Kings with a distinctive left foot stepped forward
(2) Female companions of the dead
(3) The bull-leapers, ancient athletes who performed acrobatics using bulls
(4) Fertility goddesses with distinctly long hair

What destroyed the Akrotiri on Thera in 1500 BC?
(1) A succession of difficult weather and poor growing seasons led to them abandoning the island
(2) A series of raids from nearby Minoan Crete devastated their population and economy
(3) A mysterious illness
(4) A massive volcanic eruption

The Battle of Actium played what decisive role in Mediterranean history?
(1) Lord Nelson of the British Navy defeated Napoleon and the French fleet — the first in a series of victories ensuring the British naval dominance of the Mediterranean during the Napoleonic Wars
(2) Cleopatra and Mark Antony’s forces were defeated — the last resistance to Octavian’s power grab — which eventually allowed him to transform the Roman Republic into the Empire
(3) Roman forces, so weakened by the cost of their victory at Actium, could no longer defend against invading Germanic tribes on the Italian peninsula
(4) The Venetian fleet led by Andrea Dandolo defeated the Genoese fleet, allowing Venice to dominate the glass trade in Renaissance Europe

What did the Venetians steal from fellow Christian city Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade and erect in front of St Mark’s Basilica?
(1) The throne of Constantine
(2) The gold and jewel encrusted reliquary of Saint Mark’s head
(3) Four magnificient horses of ancient Greek workmanship
(4) A Persian statue, symbol of Constantinople’s reach across trade routes

In the Battle of Lepanto, an alliance of Mediterranean Christian states defeated the Ottoman fleet. Which famous writer was known as “the cripple of Lepanto”?
(1) Ben Jonson, English playwright and notorious fighter
(2) Petrarch, Italian poet and father of Humanism
(3) Cervantes, Spanish author of Don Quixote
(4) Michel de Montaigne, French essayist and aristocrat

To which war does the Marine’s hymn refer with the verse “The shores of Tripoli”?
(1) The Revolutionary War (the British navy routinely press-ganged American citizens across the seas into becoming British sailors)
(2) First Barbary War (American involvement to end piracy and enslavement along the coast of North Africa)
(3) The Mexican-American War (American forces couldn’t pronounce Tapachula correctly)
(4) Second World War (a decisive victory outside Tripoli allowed an American invasion of Sicily)

What was the role of the attack at Mers-el-Kébir in northwestern Algeria during the Second World War?
(1) The American forces destoyed the small portion of the Italian fleet in the western Mediterranean (most of it was concentrated in the eastern half around Greece at the time), which gave Allied forces a crucial amount of time to smuggle people, arms, and information in to the resistance fighters in Europe
(2) French newspapers were forced by Nazi occupiers to attack images and reports French colonial forces (“les indigènes”) in Mers-el-Kébir, leading to widespread public outrage in occupied and Vichy France who claimed them as Frenchmen and soldiers of France
(3) German forces destroyed the French fleet, which was moving to join the British fleet as Charles de Gaulle gathered forces in the French Colonial Empire to mount an attack to reclaim France
(4) The British destroyed the French fleet, which had refused to withdraw to neutral waters, leading to resentment and poor relations throughout the war.

What plagues many of the smaller islands of the Mediterranean today?
(1) Migrants from Africa and elsewhere attempt to reach Europe via the sea, often becoming ill and then stranded on the island by the government, while the small fishing communities are unable to support them
(2) While they are officially part of large nations such as Italy or Spain, they receive less investment and infrastructure than the mainland
(3) Wealthy individuals and hotels buy up property and don’t allow the small communities to use areas to which they once had access
(4) Increasing economic turmoil and budget cuts are leading to less regular transport between the mainland and the islands, resulting in even greater economic difficulties for the islands

AND NOW THE ANSWERS…

What are the oldest large-scale buildings of the Mediterranean?
Mnajdra temple complex in Malta

What do the famous Cycladic figurines depict?
Female companions of the dead

What destroyed the Akrotiri on Thera in 1500 BC?
A massive volcanic eruption

The Battle of Actium played what decisive role in Mediterranean history?
Cleopatra and Mark Antony’s forces were defeated — the last resistance to Octavian’s power grab – which eventually allowed him to transform the Roman Republic into the Empire

What did the Venetians steal from fellow Christian city Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade and erect in front of St Mark’s Basilica?
Four magnificient horses of ancient Greek workmanship

In the Battle of Lepanto, an alliance of Mediterranean Christian states defeated the Ottoman fleet. Which famous writer was known as “the cripple of Lepanto”?
Cervantes, Spanish author of Don Quixote

To which war does the Marine’s hymn refer with the verse “The shores of Tripoli”?
First Barbary War (American involvement to end piracy and enslavement along the coast of North Africa)

What was the role of the attack at Mers-el-Kébir in northwestern Algeria during the Second World War?
The British destroyed the French fleet, which had refused to withdraw to neutral waters, leading to resentment and poor relations throughout the war.

What plagues many of the smaller islands of the Mediterranean today?
Migrants from Africa and elsewhere attempt to reach Europe via the sea, often becoming ill and then stranded on the island by the government, while the small fishing communities are unable to support them.

Situated at the intersection of Europe, Asia, and Africa, the Mediterranean Sea has been for millenia the place where religions, economies, and political systems met, clashed, influenced and absorbed one another. Author David Abulafia offers a fresh perspective by focusing on the sea itself: its practical importance for transport and sustenance; its dynamic role in the rise and fall of empires; and the remarkable cast of characters — sailors, merchants, migrants, pirates, pilgrims — who have crossed and recrossed it. Ranging from prehistory to the 21st century, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean is above all the history of human interaction across a region that has brought together many of the great civilizations of antiquity as well as the rival empires of medieval and modern times. David Abulafia is Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge University and the author of The Mediterranean in History.

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These grand hotels provided far more than just accommodation. In what way were these hotels products of colonialist need and conduct?

The first hotels appeared in Egypt long before the concept of tourism existed. They were there to facilitate the workings of the British Empire, to provide way stations for officials shuttling between England and its domains in India. Later they were bases for explorers and adventurers fanning out into Africa, indulging in the imperial obsession of mapping, collecting, categorizing and ‘civilizing’.

Where did you gather information on these glamorous hotels, such as Cataract in Aswan, the Winter Palace in Luxor, the Cecil in Alexandria and Cairo’s Windsor Hotel?

For the facts, The Egyptian Gazette. The British Library in London has an almost complete run from about 1882 onwards. I worked my way through year by year, piecing together what was built when and by who. The Winter Palace, for example, has always maintained that it was built in 1886 and it has a restaurant named for that date. But as I discovered, it was in fact inaugurated in January 1907. A correspondent from the Gazette attended the party and described the occasion in detail. For the color in the book, I’ve included plenty of extracts from accounts written by travelers to Egypt from the 1840s onwards. Later on, particularly in the first decades of the twentieth century, there were a bunch of useful memoirs written by foreign residents who typically worked in the civil service — despite living here they were frequent visitors to the hotels, which all held weekly dances and balls, and pretty much provided a social life for many foreigners resident in Egypt.

How did you find all the period photographs and images?

The difficulty with the image selection was one of imbalance. We could have filled a whole book with images of Shepheard’s, which seems to have been a very popular subject for photographers in the early 20th century, but for somewhere like the Windsor Hotel in Cairo there’s nothing. Well, not quite nothing — there is one beautiful vintage photo, which hangs on the wall in the hotel’s lounge. We had to ask the hotel owners for permission to borrow it for a few hours to get it scanned so it could appear in the book. Many of the other images we found at auctions and antiquarian stores, plus a number of collectors were kind enough to allow us reproduce some of the things they had. Very few of the images in the book have ever been published before.

Was it travelers or occupying (British, French) forces that had more of an impact on the way these grand historic hotels in Egypt back then were run and how they catered to foreigners?

It was both. The hotels were where the two groups met. The tourists valued the company of the local residents because they hoped to hobnob with the grandees of Cairo society; the residents viewed the annual influx of tourists as a welcome change from the same old faces. The tourists filled the bedrooms but it was local custom that kept the restaurants, bars and ballrooms busy (which, incidentally, was where the money was made).


• Shepheard’s

   

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  Entrance to Shepheard’s Hotel, around 1900.

• Tourist Poster

   

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  A poster from 1937, printed in London, tempting the British to exchange rain-sodden skies for the warmth of Egypt.

• Postcard

   

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  From The Light Side of Egypt (1908) by British comic postcards illustrator Lance Thackeray.

• Tourist Poster

   

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  A poster designed by H. Hashim and printed by the Institut Graphique Egyptien, probably in the mid-1930s

• Tourist Poster

   

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  Another poster advocating spending the season in Egypt. This one was painted by Roger Bréval, a European artist who kept a studio in Cairo during the 1920s.

• Hotel Cecil

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/38edit.jpg

  The fact that it was designed by an architect of Italian heritage perhaps accounts for the vaguely Venetian stylings of the Cecil’s attractive façade.

• The Egyptian Porter

   

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  The aim of the Egyptian porter, according to author Evelyn Waugh, was always to carry away the smallest piece of luggage possible. Several would throw themselves on a guest’s assembled baggage with the strongest emerging with a bundle of newspapers, an air cushion, or a small attaché case; the slowest or weakest would end up carrying the trunks.

• Semiramis Hotel

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/150edit.jpg

  An item in The Egyptian Gazette of 9 October 1907 recorded the arrival in Cairo of two large motor omnibuses by Cuegier of Paris for the Semiramis Hotel. They were built, it noted, to carry 12 passengers, exclusive of luggage and servants, and would cover the distance between the hotel and the railway station in 8 minutes.

• Winter Palace

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/178edit.jpg

  A party of Edwardian-era tourists pose on the grand front steps of what The Egyptian Gazette called “the finest and most elaborately-schemed hotel within the land of Egypt”

• Thomas Cook in Egypt.

   

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  From offices in Ludgate Circus, London, Thomas Cook set about the conquest of Egypt in 1869. The work was continued by his son John Mason Cook, who, within a decade, became one of the most influential men in the country. Source: Thomas Cook Archives.

• San Stefano

   

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  In the early years of the twentieth century San Stefano was the fashionable place for Alexandria’s elite to promenade. Source: Mohammed El Mekabbaty.

• Mena House

   

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  Taking tea on the terrace at the Mena House—the scene painted by the artist Ihap Hulvsi for the poster that adorns the front cover of the book. Source: Oberoi Mena House Archive.

• Shepheard’s

   

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  A wholly new Shepheard’s was inaugurated in 1891. Originally, the hotel had just two stories, but demand for rooms was such that in summer 1906 a third floor was added providing beds for a further 90 guests. Source: Library of Congress.

• Shepheard’s

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/184edit.jpg

  The décor at Shepheard’s was so over the top its halls and salons resembled theatrical sets for a production of Salomé or perhaps Aida. Pillars copied from Karnak mixed with Moorish arches and stained glass with Persian rugs. One writer said it put him in mind of Chartres Cathedral converted into a harem. Source: Library of Congress.

• The Pyramids

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/102edit.jpg

  The Pyramids were never meant to be climbed. When built they were sealed with an outer casing of polished stone fitted so admirably it was difficult to see the joints. Denuded of this casing over time, the monuments became playthings for early tourists, to be clambered over, raced up, and picnicked upon. Credit: Corbis Images.

• The Pyramids

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/103edit.jpg

  The Pyramids were never meant to be climbed. When built they were sealed with an outer casing of polished stone fitted so admirably it was difficult to see the joints. Denuded of this casing over time, the monuments became playthings for early tourists, to be clambered over, raced up, and picnicked upon. Credit: Thomas Cook Archives.

• Afternoon at the hotel.

   

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  Guests enjoying an afternoon refresher on the hotel’s front terrace, some time in the 1940s. Credit: Library of Congress.

• Grand Continental

   

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  Caleches waiting for custom outside the Grand Continental in the first decade of the twentieth century. Source: Library of Congress.

• SS Sudan

   

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  Passengers disembark from the SS Sudan, which came into service, sailing between Cairo and Aswan, in 1921. The ship still operates on the river today and was used in the 1978 film version of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile. Source: Thomas Cook Archives.

Do you have a favorite grand hotel, whether the Cecil, Shepheard’s Mena House, Gezira Palace, Semiramis, Winter Palace, or Cataract?

By far the most significant was Shepheard’s, nothing to do with the Shepheard’s that now stands on the Corniche. This is the Shepheard’s that once stood on what’s now Gomhurriya Street overlooking the Ezbekiyya Gardens until it was burnt down in January 1952. It was in existence for 101 years exactly and at its height it was one of the most famous hotels in the world, on a par with the Paris Ritz and London Savoy. Internationally it was as emblematic of Egypt as the Pyramids. But what I particularly love is that it was a hotel known for its vitality. Royalty and heads of state kept away – they favored the more exclusive Savoy, Semiramis and Mena House. Instead, Shepheard’s attracted movie stars and writers, raffish aristocrats and fortune hunters (of the male and female kind). It was, by all accounts, a fun place to stay. The fact that the hotel has so completely vanished with nothing on the site to mark that it ever existed only adds to the mystique.

A number of illustrious people stayed in these grand hotels, from Amelia Edwards, Lucie Duff Gordon and Florence Nightingale to Agatha Christie, Conan Doyle, Winston Churchill, and T.E. Lawrence. Whom would you have liked to meet in the lobby?

The person I would really have liked to have met wasn’t a guest but an employee. From 1937 Joe Scialom presided over the Long Bar at Shepheard’s. He worked in white jacket and black bowtie, spoke eight languages, and acted as banker, adviser, umpire and father confessor to his clients. During his tenure the Long Bar was known as St Joe’s Parish and he ministered according to a philosophy of “Mix well, but shake politics”. He invented the Suffering Bastard, a potent mix that continues to be included in all good cocktail manuals. He served throughout World War II and the stories he could tell would really have made my book worth reading. Joe was tending the bar on that Saturday in 1952 when the hotel was burned down. He escaped the inferno “slightly ruffled and really annoyed” (his words to a reporter). He left Egypt in 1956 and continued working as a barman. His final job was at Windows on the World in the World Trade Center before he finally retired to Florida. He passed away as recently as 2004, but I only came to know of Joe in the last couple of years and so never got to meet him.

You argue that the prestige of these hotels rested not only on the people who frequented them but the men like Samuel Shepheard and Albert Metzger who founded them. How does this differ with the new hotels that are built in Egypt today?

When Shepheard’s was burned down in 1952 it was the end of an era. When Egypt began to rebuild its tourism industry in the wake of the Revolution the new generation of big hotels were state-owned structures that were leased to foreign multinational corporations to manage. The flagship was the Nile Hilton in 1959, and since then it has been all Sheratons, Ramadas, Marriotts and their ilk. Fine if what you expect from a hotel is a room that exactly resembles the one you stayed in in Seattle or Frankfurt or Seoul, but I can’t imagine anyone being sufficiently excited in 50 years time to write a history of Egypt’s hotels in the second half of the twentieth century.

What is it about the hotel life of Egypt’s golden age of travel that fascinates so?

We’re all suckers for nostalgia and the stories of these hotels represent something we’ve lost. They embody the notion of travel as adventure, intrepidly going places other people haven’t been, and witnessing things seen by few others. We imagine travel back then was like one big, freewheeling Indiana Jones movie. Perhaps for some it even was. But what we forget is that travel 100 years ago was also something only the wealthy could afford to indulge in. These old hotels looked like palaces because the people they were built for tended to live in pretty palatial residences back home. So when we read stories of the golden age of travel we’re not only indulging in nostalgia but also in a bit of wish fulfillment, imaging ourselves living out the lives of the historically rich and sometimes famous.

Andrew Humphreys is the author of The Grand Hotels of Egypt: In the Golden Age of Travel. He first traveled to Egypt from England in 1988 and liked it so much he decided not to go home. He found the city’s hotels an appealing mix of the practical and the peculiar. An appreciation of contemporary hotel life led to a fascination with the hotel life of the past, and to this book. Andrew, a journalist and editor, now lives in London but remains a frequent visitor to Egypt and an avid frequenter of its grand (and not so grand) hotels. He is the author of National Geographic Traveler, as well as guidebooks to both Egypt and Cairo for Lonely Planet and Dorling Kindersley. He has worked for a variety of publications including The Wall Street Journal and National Geographic, and his journalism has also appeared in The Sunday Times, The Telegraph, Time Out, Canvas, and Conde Nast Traveller. In 1997 he co-founded The Cairo Times, a leading English-language Cairo newspaper.

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Twenty-two years ago, on the 11th of February 1990, Nelson Mandela walked out of a South African prison, a free man for the first time in twenty-seven years. He immediately assumed the leadership role that would move South Africa from a system of apartheid to a struggling but viable democracy. No one person, not even Nelson Mandela, was solely responsible for this miracle. But no one can doubt the crucial role that he played in the process that brought a new era to South Africa, or that his intellect, sturdy leadership, and political savvy made this process far more peaceful than anyone had predicted would be the case.

That Mandela was alive to assume this leadership is a remarkable story. When the trial that led to his conviction began in 1963, most in South Africa and abroad predicted that he and his codefendants would be hanged. Mandela and his codefendants faced charges brought under the recently enacted Sabotage Act, the violation of which carried the death penalty. The South African government proudly announced that it had brought to justice men who had planned and begun to carry out a campaign for its violent overthrow. The country’s press celebrated the success of the police in catching the violent criminals who represented a very real threat to the way of life of white South Africa. Foreign representatives were told by informed sources that the maximum sentence for the top leadership was possible, indeed likely.

The 1963–64 trial of Mandela and his co-defendants is known as the Rivonia trial, named for the Johannesburg suburb in which most of the defendants were arrested. Other defendants included ANC leaders Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, the father of future South African president Thabo Mbeki, and the South African Indian leader, Ahmed Kathrada.

A team composed of lawyers of great intellect, legal ability and integrity defended the accused. They applied their considerable skill to a cause in which they deeply believed. The accused, through both their statements to the court and their testimony, demonstrated strength of character and devotion to a cause that even a hostile judge could not, in the end, ignore. The conduct of the judge before whom the case was tried illustrates both the strength and weaknesses of the South African judicial system. The judge may well have been independent of the government and its prosecutor, but his own prejudices guided him through much of the proceedings. The prosecutor, who was described by a visiting British barrister as a “nasty piece of work” may have hurt, rather than helped his case by engaging in a political dialogue with the defendants who took the witness stand.

White South African opinion was clearly in favor of the prosecution and harsh sentences for the accused. But international opinion was almost unanimous in its support for them, particularly in the newly independent African states and the Communist bloc. There was also considerable attention to the trial on the part of the major Western powers, or at least concern that death sentences would sour relations with African and other Third World people. The question was how the West, and in particular the United States and United Kingdom, might attempt to influence the trial’s outcome.

Perhaps the key point in the trial was Nelson Mandela’s statement from the dock, a statement made in lieu of testimony. He ended the statement with these words:

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to the struggle of the African People. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for, and see realized. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

His words now adorn the wall of the Constitutional Court building in Johannesburg. When asked many years later why the judge did not sentence him to death at the Rivonia trial, Mandela said: “because I dared him to do so.”

Kenneth S. Broun is the author of Saving Nelson Mandela: The Rivonia Trial and the Fate of South Africa and the Henry Brandis Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina Law School. Since 1986, he has traveled regularly to South Africa to conduct programs in trial advocacy training through the Black Lawyers Association of South Africa. Saving Nelson Mandela describes the trial and explores the factors that changed the outcome from a likely death penalty to a sentence of life imprisonment — a sentence that may have saved the nation from either a continuation of an oppressive regime or a bloody civil war.

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January 25, 1971

Idi Amin Takes Power in Uganda

Source: Library of Congress

Obote had led Uganda’s independence movement in 1962 and had served as its first prime minster. In 1966, though, he deposed Uganda’s king and had a new constitution written that created a republic with himself as president. Amin was an ally whom Obote named as head of the army and air force at that time.

Amin decided to move against Obote when he was under investigation for his leadership of a gang of thugs. His brutality emerged quickly. Prominent Ugandans — including the police official who had been investigating him — were killed, some by armed toughs and others in mysterious circumstances. Several thousand soldiers were killed on Amin’s orders, decimating the armed forces but putting it firmly under his control.

Amin formed four different security organizations, which he used to carry out his harsh rule. Estimates suggest that as many as 300,000 people were killed in his violent rule.

Amin’s leadership was also marked by actions based on fleeting moods. Late in 1972, he ordered all Asians expelled from Uganda. The departure of some 35,000 people, many of whom owned businesses, crippled Uganda’s economy. A Muslim, Amin was extreme in his condemnation of Israel and once praised Adolf Hitler’s execution of millions of Jews.

Fear drove several different assassination attempts between his coup and 1979. That year, Amin sent troops into neighboring Tanzania to harass some villagers. In response Tanzania’s leader, Julius Nyerere, ordered a counterattack that was joined by thousands of Ugandans. Within weeks, the rebels had seized power and Amin had fled to Libya. He died in Saudi Arabia in 2003.

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On 11 January 1992 the Algerian President, the white-haired sixty-one year old Chadli Bendjedid, announced live on television that he was standing down as head of state with immediate effect. Nervous and ill at ease, the president read out a brief prepared statement. In it he explained his decision as a necessary one. Why? Because the democratic process which he had put in place two years earlier could no longer guarantee law and order on the streets.

Most ordinary Algerians were stunned. The country was in the middle of two round multi-party elections, the first of their kind since independence from the French in July 1962. Within this process the first round on 26 December 1991 had delivered a massive victory to the Islamist Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) which had gained 188 of the 231 seats outright as against 15 for the National Liberation Front (FLN) and 25 for Socialist Forces Front (FFS). With the second round elections planned for 16 January 1992, the FIS leadership leader, Abdelkader Hachani, was ecstatic. With only 199 seats to be decided in the second round, few doubted that the FIS was poised for power, especially since President Chadli was seemingly ready to arrive at some sort of pact.

This long march to power had begun in the wake of the fall-out from the riots of 1988: the most significant single event in post-independence Algeria. Then, on 5 October, thousands of young people, fed up by economic hardship and widespread corruption, had ransacked central Algiers. Chanting ‘Rise up, Youth’ the rioters targeted symbols of authority and wealth in a relentless fashion. Monuments were pulled down. Cars set alight. In one run down neighbourhood local policemen were forced to parade along the streets shouting ‘I am a braggart, I am a betrayer’. The violence lasted several days and quickly spread to the rest of the country. In response the army declared a state of siege and used tear gas and tanks to restore law and order. By 10 October some 500 people, mostly young men, had been killed.

In the months after ‘Black October’ President Chadli, in power since 1979, ushered in a multi-party system which, in theory, limited the army to a purely military role. He hoped that this experiment would give fresh impetus to the ruling FLN, but in practice the main beneficiary was the FIS, formed in March 1989. Led by Abbasi Madani, a veteran of the 1954-62 war against the French, and the firebrand cleric, Ali Belhadj, the FIS offered an alternative interpretation of the long struggle against colonial rule which began after the French invasion of 1830. They argued that the original Islamic principles of anti-colonialism had been betrayed at independence, when pro-French Algerians, such as French-trained officers like Khaled Nezzar who led the repression of ‘Black October’, had infiltrated the FLN and imposed a Francophone system on the Arab-speaking masses. What was needed, the FIS leaders claimed, was a new jihad that would finally cleanse the country of this poisonous legacy, whether it is secular ideologies, the French language or Western-style fashions and music.

The FIS’s emergence as the main opposition party was emphatically confirmed by the local elections in June 1990. Open air mass meetings saw the FIS use lasers to project religious slogans in the sky, while in the election itself the FIS took overall control of over half of the country’s local councils. Frightened by these events, the government tried to block the FIS’s rise by postponing national elections set for 27 June 1991, arresting Madani and Belhadj and changing the system into single member constituencies whereby only the two parties with the most votes in the first round would go through to the second ballot. Through this strategy the government wished to confront the country with a stark choice – either the FLN or the FIS – in the hope that enough Algerians would vote against the spectre of an Islamist regime.

After the first round it was clear that this scare strategy had failed, although talk of a FIS landslide needed to be qualified. In reality only 59 per cent of the electorate voted meaning that imminent FIS victory was based upon 24.5 per cent of those eligible to vote. By this token the largest vote was an abstention, even if it was difficult to gauge whether this non-participation was out of indifference or an explicit rejection of the political choices on offer.

The question now was whether the government would let the second round go ahead. Everywhere ordinary Algerians debated the arguments for and against. On 3 January 1992 the FFS brought three hundred thousand supporters on to the streets of Algiers with the chant ‘neither police state, nor Islamic state, but a democratic state’. Addressing the crowd, the FFS leader, Hocine Aït Ahmed was absolutely clear that the electoral process must continue and called for opposition to any military coup.

Given this feverish atmosphere, this is why so many Algerians could not understand Chadli’s action. As the head of state he was seen by many as the one figure of authority who bring about some sort of compromise. Yet, in the days that followed it became clear that this had been a ‘televised coup d’état’. With Chadli jettisoned the Supreme Court now stepped in, arguing that, since this was an unprecedented situation, power had to be handed over to the High Security Council, a hastily convened body whose core was made up of three senior military officers: Khaled Nezzar, Larbi Belkheir and Abdelmalek Guenaizia. Unsurprisingly the High Security Council immediately used Chadli’s resignation as the pretext for the cancellation of the second round of elections.

On 14 January presidential power was transferred to a newly created institution, the State High Committee. This was to act a provisional government until new presidential and parliamentary elections could be held at a later, unspecified date. At its head was Mohammed Boudiaf, one of the historic leaders of the anti-colonial struggle who returned from exile in Morocco, determined, he claimed, to save the country from implosion.

Amongst FIS supporters there was immediate anger. They felt cheated of victory and on 8 February there were violent clashes with the army around mosques in the major towns and cities across the county. On the following day the State High Committee deployed tanks on the streets and declared a ‘state of emergency’ across the country. Eight thousand FIS members or suspected members were imprisoned in detention centres in the Sahara desert. The on 4 March the FIS was officially banned as a political party. By this point clashes between Islamists and the army had left 103 dead and several hundred wounded.

In neighbouring Arab countries President Ben Ali in Tunisia, President Mubarak in Egypt and Colonel Qaddafi in Libya immediately expressed support for the new regime. Fearful of an Islamist victory in Algeria which could have become a beacon for similar movements throughout North Africa and the Middle East, they welcomed the anti-FIS crackdown. While in Britain, France and the USA the response was muted. There governments talked of being ‘concerned’ but hung back from any condemnation of the coup, a line which led Time magazine to ask whether the West was tacitly condoning an anti-democratic act for its own selfish interests.

Throughout the first six months of 1992 a violent atmosphere was all pervasive in Algeria; a mood which deepened when Boudiaf was assassinated on 29 June, almost certainly on orders from someone within the military who felt threatened by his promise to root out high-level corruption. The country was on the edge of a precipice and finally tipped over into it in spring 1993, when armed Islamist groups unleashed a wave of violence which met with full-scale repression by the army. Over the next decade some 200,000 people would die in this horrific undeclared civil war.

Martin Evans is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Portsmouth and author of Algeria: France’s Undeclared War. You can read more by Professor Evans here and here.

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Frantz Fanon died of leukaemia on 6 December 1961 at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, USA where he had sought treatment for his cancer.  At Fanon’s request, his body was returned to Algeria and buried with full military honours by the Algerian National Army of Liberation, shortly after the publication of his most influential work, The Wretched of the Earth. As a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), which had been engaged in a war against French colonial rule in Algeria since November 1954, Fanon had made his mark as a journalist for the FLN newspaper El-Moudjahid.  Writing in an angry and confrontational style, Fanon justified FLN violence as mirror violence: a liberational act against the inherent violence of colonial rule.  This in turn became the core of his argument in The Wretched of the Earth.  Expanding outwards from Algeria to the rest of Africa and Asia, Fanon talked of violence in mystical terms – a necessary stage in the forward march of history that would purge Africans and Asians of any inferiority complex in regard to European colonial powers.

Born in 1925 in Fort-de-France on the French-ruled Caribbean island of Martinique, Frantz Fanon opposed the right-wing anti-Semitic Vichy Regime which was established in the wake of the Third Republic’s defeat by Nazi Germany in 1940.  Horrified by the widespread support for Vichy amongst the island’s colonial authorities, Fanon took flight in 1943 and made his way to French Algeria, which had passed into Free French hands after the USA and British landings in November 1942.  There he joined the Free French forces, fighting in Italy and then Germany where he was wounded in the back during the Alsace campaign.  Decorated for bravery, Fanon stayed on in France to study psychiatry and medicine at Lyon University.

Living in France confronted Fanon with the racial contradictions of French republican ideology.  It made him realise that for all the talk of liberty, equality, fraternity espoused by the Fourth Republic, a French Caribbean man like himself would never be seen as a true citizen.  The Republic might claim to be universal but in reality his presence was unnerving for a French society where whiteness was the norm and blackness was equated with evil.  It was a painful experience that led him to write his first book, Black Skins, White Masks, in 1952.  Published by Seuil, this was a pioneering study of racism as a psychological system where, Fanon argued, black people were forced to adopt white masks to survive in a white society.

In October 1953 Fanon began working as psychiatrist in a hospital in Blida just south of Algiers.  At this point French Algeria was fraught with racial tension.  Nine million Algerians co-existed uneasily with one million European settlers.  France had invaded Algeria in 1830 and annexed the country not as a colony but an integral part of France. On 8 May 1945, just as Nazi Germany was defeated, mass nationalist demonstrations across Algeria had called for the establishment of an independent Algerian state.  In the town of Sétif in the east of the country, these demonstrations produced violent clashes that led to the death of twenty-one Europeans and ignited an Algerian uprising. However, the French response was brutal and throughout May eastern Algerian was subjected to systematic repression. Yet, although French order was restored, fear and mistrust was everywhere. More than ever the settlers  were determined to thwart any concessions to the Algerian majority and the result was a blocked society. Frustrated at their lack of political rights, a small number of Algerians formed the FLN in October 1954 which, through a series of coordinated attacks across Algeria on 1 November, sought to overthrow colonialism through violence.

As Algeria slid into war, Fanon saw the psychological impact of French rule at first hand.  Struck by the number of Algerian patients suffering from mental-health problems, Fanon came to interpret these as symptoms of colonial domination.   If Algerians felt morbid and depressed, he concluded, this was because colonialism had made them so by continually denigrating them as racially inferior.  In this sense, Fanon concluded, colonialism was a subtle web of oppression that was economic, political and psychological.

During his tenure in Blida Fanon was also horrified by the stories of torture his patients — both French torturers and Algerian torture victims — told him.  This reinforced his view on the inherent violence of the colonial system, initiating a process of separation that led Fanon to formally resign his post in 1956.  In his resignation letter to Robert Lacoste, a French Socialist Party deputy and Minister-Resident for Algeria in the left of centre Republican Front government, Fanon vented his anger on the ethics of French medical practice.  Outlining his theory of the psychology of colonial domination, Fanon pronounced the colonial mission to be incompatible with proper psychiatric practice:

If psychiatry is the medical technique that aims to enable man no longer to be a stranger to his environment, I owe it to myself to affirm that the Arab, permanently an alien in his own country, lives in a state of absolute depersonalization. . . . The events in Algeria are the logical consequence of an abortive attempt to decerebralize a people.

Thereafter Fanon escaped to join the FLN in Tunis where he became a journalist. Charting the contours of the FLN struggle, his 1959 book, L’An Cinq de la Révolution Algérienne (subsequently published in English as A Dying Colonialism), presented this as a revolutionary one. The FLN, Fanon claimed, was not trying to turn society backwards to a pre-1830 conservative ideal. The needs of the revolutionary struggle were creating the seeds of a different, forward thinking society. So, by carrying weapons and planting bombs, Algerian women were breaking away from the confines of tradition.  They were inventing new roles for themselves that would lead to a completely new female identity

His most militant and far-reaching work was The Wretched of the Earth, published like A Dying Colonialism by the French radical publisher François Maspero.  In it Fanon saw Algeria as the microcosm of a general Third World Revolutionary movement in Africa and Asia. Controversially, Fanon claimed that at the core of this movement was violence which was a purifying act: a necessary response to colonial power through which Africans and Asians would free themselves of racial humiliation.  Thus liberated, Fanon continued, Africa and Asia could now turn away from Europe and start a new type of revolutionary society.

The Wretched of the Earth contained a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre that embraced Fanon’s vision. Within it Sartre warned that Europeans that they would find the book disturbing.  Why? Because Fanon shows that, having thrown off colonialism, Asians and Africans no longer need Europe:

Europeans, you must open this book and enter into it. After a few steps in the darkness you will see strangers gathered around a fire; come close, and listen, for they are talking of the destiny they will mete out to your trading-centres and to the hired soldiers who defend them. They will see you, perhaps, but they will go on talking among themselves, without even lowering their voices. This indifference strikes home: their fathers, shadowy creatures, your creatures, were but dead souls… Their sons ignore you; a fire warms them and sheds light around them, and you have not lit it. Now, at a respectful distance, it is you who will feel furtive, nightbound and perished with cold. Turn and turn about; in these shadows from whence a new dawn will break, it is you who are the zombies.

This was why, Sartre underlined, Fanon was so significant. With The Wretched of the Earth he showed how the location of the revolutionary change had shifted in the mid-twentieth century.  It was no longer to be found in the industrial proletariat of Lille or Manchester, whose revolutionary impulses had been dulled by the booming economic miracle in Western Europe, but amongst the dispossessed peasantry of the Third World.

During the 1960s The Wretched of the Earth became an iconic text of the new 1960s radical movement.  It was the classic vindication of the Algerian cause and a permanent indictment of colonialism which had a global resonance. This influence was explicit in the other international icon to emerge from independent Algeria, the 1966 film The Battle of Algiers. Directed by the Italian Gillo Pontecorvo and winner of the prestigious Venice film prize, the film’s depiction of the role of Algerian women, either using the veil for hiding weapons, or discarding it to pass themselves off in a decoy fashion, drew heavily upon Fanon’s interpretations.  Moreover, the film’s unflinching portrayal of the FLN’s attacks on civilian targets distilled into celluloid form Fanon’s theory of revolutionary violence, namely that terrorism is justified and wins.

Fanon’s message had an enduring message throughout the 1960s and 1970s.  In France he inspired revolutionaries such as Georges Mattéi, Gérard Chaliand and François Maspero who founded the journal Partisans in November 1961.  Convinced that the European working class was now inherently reformist, all three looked to the dispossessed peasantry in Africa, Asia and Latin America. For this reason the February 1962 issue was dedicated to the recently deceased Fanon who had given;

A new direction to their thinking, their decisions, their political acts and their very lives.

In the USA Fanon became a starting point for the Black Panther Party, formed in 1966 in San Francisco by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, which espoused a revolutionary, far-left politics that underlined black self-determination and pride.  While from Cape Verde to through to Angola and Mozambique, Fanon inspired other Africans fighting colonialism, not least Nelson Mandela in South Africa who visited FLN training camps in Morocco in early 1962 and saw in the Algeria ‘the closest model to our own in that the rebels faced a large white settler community that ruled the indigenous majority’.

Yet, even if the Third World Revolutionary moment is now over, Fanon still exerts a crucial intellectual influence, not just in our understanding of racism but also as a key reference point in post-colonialism, one of the major theoretical debates of the last thirty years.  Thus both Edward Said and Homi Bhabha look back to Fanon.  For them Fanon’s legacy raises unresolved questions about power, race and cultural representation which continue to be pivotal as the post-colonial world grapples with the aftermath of Western colonialism.

Martin Evans is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Portsmouth and author of Algeria: France’s Undeclared War. You can read more by Professor Evans here.

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I had learned from Kholoud that Aly would be in Cairo this week. So, as soon as I arrived on Monday night I called while walking through Tahrir Square. He picked up but the reception wasn’t good. He said he was also in the Square, that he was headed to drop off his bags, and would call later. I didn’t hear back from him.

Several calls and SMSs went unanswered. I figured that he was simply busy and that we would eventually meet this week for the next in our series of interviews that we’ve held since I first met him in early March this year.

Aly, tall and burly with a handsome face, has shared passionately in these interviews his commitment to the revolution. He, along with Kholoud and so many others in Alexandria were direct participants in the events of January 25th and beyond. (The coverage of Alexandria’s role in the revolution has been pitifully inadequate). When I first met him, Aly had just been injured in his hand and shoulder in a battle with security forces as they attempted to destroy incriminating documents.

Over the months, he, like all other activists, expressed increasing disappointment with the lack of substantive change. Aly’s narrative was unique among those I’ve talked intensively with, however, in his growing conviction that real change would require an escalation in violence on the part of the protesters. In July, he labored heavily with his own growing awareness that the regime’s corruption extended far beyond its recently deposed leader. But, rather, the violence, exploitation, and abuses of power are endemic throughout all sectors of society. He articulated that one grave implication of that for him might be that he would end up having to fight those he knows and is close to, perhaps even his family members.

Just a few weeks ago he wrote in an email, “The situation is getting more complicated and I am not optimistic at all with the coming elections. . . I am wondering . . . how could we break this system, what else is needed? I am believing that we need more violence against these structures and those leading it.”

Then, two days ago here in Cairo, in classic revolutionary form he posted on Facebook: “It is by all means the time of revolution, emancipation(s), and …love. SO For God Sake Revolt or die in Shame. It is the correction of the Egyptian Revolution Path; from War/revolution to politics and Again in the correct road from politics of the coward elites to the WAR/REVOLUTION of brave young generation who fights in the first lines, behind the enemy lines and in front and against the heavy machines of war and suppression. They shoot by their heavy equipment and we shoot by faith, believe and anger. Tomorrow we will not die, tomorrow we will be emancipation from who we had been, a new life is going to born from the heart and mud of the battle field of our revolution.

I had an immediate sense that Aly would be acting out this admonition himself, and even wrote to a colleague that I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he would soon be a casualty of this newly reenergized revolution.

Last night at about 10pm I thought to try one more time to reach him. A voice picked up and identified himself as Aly’s friend. I could hear Aly in the background overruling his friend’s decision to turn me away and he took the phone. He was excited to talk, as was I to hear his voice. It wasn’t a surprise, but no less difficult, to hear from him that he lay in the hospital with bullet wounds to his head and body. He said that he “would love so much” a visit and, getting directions from Ayman, I hastened to see him.

While his face is severely bruised and swollen, the buckshot, otherwise embedded in his head and torso, missed his eyes or other vitals. He is in good spirits and is eager to leave the hospital when permitted in a few days.

He had lead a group of protesters on the main Tahrir artery where virtually all of the Cairo clashes have taken place (Mohamed Mahmoud Street) in an effort to help instruct them how to confront the police head on and push them away from the Square. Then the shots came.

The swelling in his eyes and mouth clouded neither his pride nor the clarity of his vision on the current phase of the revolution. “They thought that we were just some kids who were playing around . . . but I think we proved that we are more than fighters.” He expressed amazement at how peaceful Egyptians have conducted the revolution, bristling against the criticism expressed by some that throwing stones or an occasional Molotov cocktail is violence. “What else should we do?”, he protested. He warned that if the security forces continue their real violence – like betraying today’s ceasefire and firing on the protesters as they prayed – then the masses will become “very aggressive . . . they won’t stay peaceful . . . and the [security forces] will lose a lot . . . This time it won’t be just our blood . . .”

After all, “revolutions are about drastic change, not some silly reforms.”

Brian K. Barber is the founding director of the Center for the Study of Youth and Political Conflict, professor of child and family studies, and adjunct professor of psychology, all at the University of Tennessee (USA). He is the author of Adolescents and War: How Youth Deal with Political Violence. This post first appeared on Brian’s own blog How the Hell Did They Do It?.

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December 3, 1967

Barnard performs first heart transplant

For five hours, the thirty-person surgical team worked in an operating room in Cape Town, South Africa. The head surgeon, Dr. Christiaan Barnard, was leading the team into uncharted territory, transplanting the heart of a young woman killed in a car accident into the chest of 55-year-old Louis Washkansky.  As the operation neared to a close, Barnard used electrodes to stimulate the heart. It began pumping, and the team knew they had succeeded. The operation was not the first organ transplant—kidney transplants had been performed for more than ten years. In transplanting the heart, though, Barnard pushed medicine into a new phase.

“On Saturday,” Barnard remembered later, “I was a surgeon in South Africa, very little known. On Monday I was world-renowned.” The recipient, 55-year-old Louis Washkansky, lived only eighteen days after the surgery before dying of pneumonia. Nevertheless, Barnard had revolutionized cardiac care. The surgeon improved his heart transplant techniques over the years such that some patients lived for several years after surgery. He also experimented with new techniques, including using artificial heart valves and using hearts from monkeys as a stopgap measure for some patients.

Along with his medical breakthroughs, Barnard challenged social conventions. His second heart transplant roused controversy in his native land because the recipient was white and the donor was “coloured”—the term under South Africa’s apartheid system for a person of mixed white and black ancestry. Over the years, Barnard became more outspoken about the rights of black South Africans, putting his reputation behind the end of apartheid. He also became somewhat controversial for his obvious enjoyment of his celebrity status and for, late in life, trying to find ways to reverse aging.

Barnard will be most remembered, though, as a bold surgeon looking to expand the boundaries of medicine.

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November 4, 1922

Carter finds King Tut’s tomb

Howard Carter

For years, archeologist Howard Carter had poked and probed in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, hoping to repeat the success he had enjoyed in 1902, when he discovered the tombs of the pharaohs Hapshetsut and Thutmose IV. On November 4, 1922, he discovered his first sign of his greatest success. His crews had been digging among a cluster of ancient stone huts that had housed Egyptian workers thousands of years before. In the morning of Saturday, November 4, Carter found an ancient step. Further investigation revealed it was part of downward stairway similar to that used in other tombs of the XVIII Dynasty of ancient Egypt. By the next day, enough stone rubble had been cleared for Carter to descend that stairway. There, when he reached the first door, he found a thrilling sight—the doorway of a sealed tomb, meaning its contents would be untouched, and with marks indicating it was a royal tomb.

Golden bust of King Tut

While Carter was energized by the find, it took nearly three weeks for his sponsor, Lord Carnarvon, to arrive on the scene so that work could resume. On November 26, the archeologist finally reached is goal, the inner door that opened into the royal tomb. Drilling a hole in the doorway and using a candle for light, Carter beheld a “strange and wonderful medley of extraordinary and beautiful objects heaped upon one another”—the intact royal treasures of King Tutankhamen, who had died at nineteen in 1323 BCE.

Carter spent several years completing the work on the tomb, one of the most famous archaeological finds in history. The treasures from the tomb of King Tutankhamen are now permanently on display in the Cairo Museum in Egypt, though they have been sent at various times on exhibitions around the world.

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Andrew S. Natsios served as Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development from 2001 to 2005, where he was appointed as Special Humanitarian Coordinator for Sudan. He also served as Special Envoy to Sudan from October 2006 to December 2007. He is author of the forthcoming volume Sudan, South Sudan, and Darfur: What Everyone Needs to Know.

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