Nowherelands: Lost Countries of the 19th and 20th Century
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- Bu səhifədəki naviqasiya:
- BIAFRA
- Famine and Proxy War
- Chinua Achebe (1966): Things Fall Apart Carl Gustaf von Rosen (1969): Biafra. Som jeg ser det Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2007)
- UPPER YAFA
- Mud Houses and Gaudy Stamps
- Steven W. Day (2012): Regionalism and Rebellion in Yemen: A Troubled Nation Salma Samar Damluji (2007)
Winn Manuhutu (1991): Moluccans in the Netherlands: A Political Minority? There were three adjutants, Sopacua, Tahapary and Siwabessy. under another, each of them thought they were better J.A. MANUSAMA OF THE STATE ADMINISTRATION
Famine and Proxy War The health workers find the child emaciated, huge-eyed and swollen-bellied. Swarms of grey flies jostle for position around her mouth and eyes. The little creature uses the last of her strength to fight off these white ghosts who are grabbing her – she bites and scratches, but soon she can’t take any more. The needle is inserted and the sugar solution flows into her feeble blood stream. In the first few days, calories are added in the form of finely ground cereal products and protein in the form of bean paste. The treatment takes four to eight weeks – if it’s successful. This is a Biafran baby, a term from times past is embedded permanently in our language. Everybody knows what a Biafran baby is: it is a child suffering from kwashiorkor, an illness caused by a prolonged lack of protein. The sickness had long gone hand in hand with wars on the African continent by the time French doctors made the West aware of Biafran babies in 1968. Soon after the civil war in Nigeria got under way, the area was hit by famine, and the French doctors’ efforts to get the Red Cross involved were all in vain. So they formed the organization Médecins Sans Frontières, and followed up with shocking pictures of sick children in an intensive PR campaign in Europe and North America. Millions of us choked on our morning coffee. Nigeria gained independence from the colonial power of Great Britain in 1960. There had long been tension between the different ethnic groups in the country. These stemmed from conflicts not only over resources but also over religion. While the tribal areas in the north had a clear Muslim majority, the populations along the coast were Christian or animist. It all culminated in a coup d’etat by the Christian Igbo people in the southeast, rapidly followed by a counter-coup in the north where several thousand Igbos were killed. In a radio broadcast at 6am on 30 May 1967, the military governor of the Eastern Region of Nigeria, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, announced the establishment of Biafra as an independent and sovereign state for the Igbo people. It takes its name from the Bay of Biafra just off the coast, and stretches from the River Niger in the west to the mountain chain that today serves as the border between Nigeria and Cameroon in the east. It is stipulated that the territory will also include the continental shelf in the sea off the coastline. The background to this is that British companies have found oil in the area. Extraction has already been under way for several years, and has rapidly become Nigeria’s main source of revenue. Biafra lay in an area with heavy rainy seasons in the summer months and drought throughout the winter. The country was the size of Ireland and had 13.5 million inhabitants at its peak. The majority were farmers, who had traditionally lived in low, square mud huts thatched with palm leaves. The society had previously been organized into small villages, whose system of government followed democratic principles, with an assembly of representatives from the different families taking joint decisions. This had changed after colonization in the 1800s, when the British introduced a feudal model headed by warrant chiefs, de facto local rulers, a move that also hastened the growth of larger towns in the area. Biafra quickly produced its own national anthem. It was in English and was called ‘Land of the Rising Sun’: Land of rising sun, we love and cherish, Beloved homeland of our brave heroes; We must defend our lives or we shall perish, We shall protect our hearts from all our foes; But if the price is death for all we hold dear, Then let us die without a shred of fear.240 Japan had also long called itself the Land of the Rising Sun, and with more reason, seeing as Biafra was clearly on the sunset side of the African continent. But perhaps we have to accept that the symbolic aspect was what mattered here. That said, the decision to set the anthem to a high-flown section of Sibelius’s Finlandia Suite makes it difficult to ignore that the newly established state must have been in a serious hurry to get things done. The stamps took a bit longer. The first set came out in April 1968: Nigerian stamps overprinted with ‘Sovereign Biafra’. Eventually, the country got its very own stamps, printed with the help of the Portuguese. My stamp was issued on the first anniversary of independence. It is difficult to make out the postmark, but based on three other stamps that appear to have been placed on the same envelope, I can work out that it is Umuahia, Biafra’s second capital after Enugu. The motif is reminiscent of the chaotic kid’s room in Calvin and Hobbes.241 And the overprint ‘Help Biafran Children’ does nothing to lessen the absurdity of the message. But of course this is no laughing matter. The civil war was inevitable, because the rest of Nigeria could not let Biafra walk off with the oil wealth. And after the front had moved back and forth for a while, things started going downhill for the breakaway state. After two-and-a-half months, Biafra had to ask the Nigerian government for a ceasefire. Ojukwu fled to The Ivory Coast and on 15 January 1970, Biafra was incorporated into Nigeria again. By then more than a million people had died, most of starvation and sickness.
It also became acceptable for European military officers to offer their expertise to the fairly modest army, which initially consisted of only three thousand men with little weapons training. One of these was Gustav von Rosen, a Swede who started up his own little air force, ‘Biafra Babies’. It consisted of Swedish training planes flown in via France, where they were given a coat of camouflage paint and armed with anti-armour rockets. At worst, all this assistance simply helped prolong the war, which ended without having resolved any problems. On the other hand, the whole business had exposed the old colonial powers’ enduring interest in the area. And one may hope that it taught the Africans yet another lesson about what can be expected from that quarter, good and bad – and generally the latter.
Only for self-defence: no aircraft bombs or more sophisticated weapons HAROLD WILSON, BRITISH PRIME MINISTER ON ARMS DELIVERIES TO THE NIGERIAN SIDE
Mud Houses and Gaudy Stamps One hundred and twenty kilometres inland from the coast of the Gulf of Aden in a narrow mountain gorge 2,000 m above sea level lies the village of Mahjaba. Only rarely is it mentioned on modern maps and in statistics, and it’s a matter of pure guesswork how many people live here – perhaps a few hundred. From the early 1800s, it was the capital of the Upper Yafa Sultanate, which united the northern Yafa tribes. Mahjaba consists of a couple of dozen tower-like buildings, tightly packed together and up to seven storeys high, like a miniature Manhattan. It is built on stone foundations topped by walls of compressed mud bricks that are 80cm thick at the bottom and 15cm by the roof ridge. The whole thing is built and then rendered with local clay mortar, making the buildings look like a natural part of their scorched surroundings. Concrete has never found its way here. And that’s a good thing, because, with its high thermal capacity and good moisture-regulating properties, no other material can compete with mud when it comes to cooling and stabilizing the room temperature during hot summers when daytime temperatures can climb as high as fifty degrees. The women are the ones who build the houses in Mahjaba, and the interior staircase is known as an Arus or bride.243 The window frames are decorated in bright manganese blue, while the divisions between the floors are indicated on the façade with chalk-white horizontal stripes. In the shadow-filled, hilly landscape between the buildings, paths run amid terraces of acacia trees and tamarind bushes, and here and there a tilled patch of millet. Upper Yafa covered 1,600 km2 – about the same area as Hertfordshire – and had between thirty and forty thousand inhabitants. Although they were all orthodox Muslims, they had a surprising penchant for old superstitions and mysticism, from magic drums to rain dances. After colonizing Aden at the beginning of the 1800s under the pretence of combating piracy in the area, the English helped themselves to the adjacent sultanates further into the interior, too. The Sultan of Upper Yafa, Qahtan ibn ’Umar ibn al-Husayn Al Harhara, signed a mutual defence treaty in 1903, and the tribal area thereby became part of the British Protectorate of Aden, on paper at least. Up until 1960, the district was only visited by a handful of Europeans. They told of hostile inhabitants and roads passable only by donkey and camel. And they complained about constant harassment from the Sultan’s soldiers. Within the tribal area, there were also clashes. In the 1950s, a series of feuds broke out and, ultimately, a stormy rebellion against the sultan himself, Muhammad ibn Salih ibn ’Umar Al Harhara, who had taken over the Harhara dynasty in 1948. In the end, he asked the British for help, and they sent in their Hawker Hunter bombers to make repeated raids on the rebels. Many villages were reduced to dust. A British officer who helped coordinate the attacks summed up the outcome: ‘[The territory] remained unconquered and hostile, its valleys alive with vigorous, arrogant Yafais.’244 When the British merged the sultanates in the area to form the South Arabian Federation in 1963, the Sultan of Upper Yafa opted to become part of the less binding Protectorate of South Arabia, along with some small states further east. Although this still meant being merged under British authority, the country now felt it was almost sovereign. And on 30 September 1967, it celebrated its independence by issuing ten stamps bearing fluttering national flags in red and green, decorated with a crescent moon and scimitar. The initiative appears slightly odd, considering that actual mail delivery, both internally and in and out of the realm, was almost non-existent. Upper Yafa had absolutely no functioning postal system, and there has never, before or since, been so much as a single post-box to be seen in Mahjaba. In fact, the whole thing was instigated by the British stamp firm, Harrison & Sons. They had tempted the Sultan with the prospect of huge sales to the stamp collectors of the world, and money straight into the state coffers. He’d taken the bait. The absurdity reaches its height some weeks later when the flag series is followed up with some larger formats bearing images of world-famous artworks. One of the motifs marks the fifth anniversary of the death of America’s President Kennedy, while another shows a Dutch windmill. My specimen is the famous painting of dancers by the French Impressionist Edgar Degas, in which the women’s dress code is anything but Islamic. The Sultan should be pleased it never made its way to Upper Yafa. The closest it got was probably an office shelf in Aden, where Upper Yafa eventually had its own stamp office. The brutal behaviour of the British in the region had gradually bolstered the anticolonial and nationalistic currents that were spreading throughout the Middle East at that time. The hero was Gamal Abdel Nasser. After coming to power in Egypt, he had repelled an attempted invasion by an alliance of Israel, England and France in 1956. Nothing like this had ever happened before. The atmosphere eventually spread throughout the Aden region. It didn’t help much that the British responded by systematically liquidating their opponents. When the once-loyal colonial army mutinied in November 1967, that was the end of that. The British withdrew overnight. All the British-friendly monarchs in the area were overthrown and the Sultan of Upper Yafa was assassinated on 29 November 1967. After that, the mini-state was quickly dissolved and brought under the authority of the newly established People’s Republic of South Yemen, renamed the Democratic People’s Republic of Yemen a couple of years later. With solid backing from the Soviets, it became the Middle East’s first and last Marxist state. Its ideological power gradually waned towards 1990, when the people’s republic was merged with North Yemen to form Yemen. Since that time, the area has been continuously ravaged by internal conflicts and civil war. The Yafa tribe has also been involved. And as American drones have buzzed across the skies, control has constantly shifted between sporadic emirates established by different Islamist groupings. Time after time, there has been enormous material destruction, to the great frustration of the local population. But at least they have been able to console themselves with the thought that mud houses are relatively easy to repair and rebuild. A pile of earth is a pile of earth. Its quality is the same whether it has been bombed into dust or produced through a thousand-year process of natural erosion. [1967: Stamp with motif from Edgar Degas’s painting ‘The Ballet Dancers’, 1874] Steven W. Day (2012): Regionalism and Rebellion in Yemen: A Troubled Nation Salma Samar Damluji (2007): The Architecture of Yemen: From Yafi to Hadramut ‘[The territory] remained unconquered and hostile, its valleys alive with vigorous, arrogant Yafais DONALD S. FOSTER, BRITISH SOLDIER 1FOREWORD Jared Diamond (2012): Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. 2 Terje Bongard & Eivin Røskaft (2010): Det biologiske mennesket. 3 Steven Pinker quoted by Harald Høiback (2014): Krigskunstens historie fra 1500 til i dag. 1840–1860 4 Susan Sontag (1992): Volcano Lover: A Romance. 5 Julia Kavanagh (1858): A Summer and Winter in the Two Sicilies. 6 Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa (2007): The Leopard (tr. Archibald Colquhoun). 7 Ibid. 8 Cornelius Tacitus (98): Germania (tr. Trygve With) 9 M. L’Estrange and Anna Maria Wells (1850): Heligoland Or Reminiscences of Childhood: A Genuine Narrative of Facts. 10 Ibid. 11 From a poem on a postcard from L. Von Sacher-Masoch: ‘Grün ist das Land. Roth ist die Kant. Weiss ist der Sand. Das sind die Farben von Heligoland.’ 12 John Gribbin, ‘Uncertainty that settled many a doubt’, New Scientist 6, 1985 13 Stuart Cameron and Bruce Biddulph (2015): SS Hungarian. 14 M. H. Perley (1857): A Hand-Book of Information for Emigrants to New-Brunswick. 15 Ibid. 16 Alexander Monro (1855): New Brunswick: With a Brief Outline of Nova Scotia. Their History, Civil Divisions, Geography and Production. 17 Ibid. 18 Øvre Richter Frich (1912): Kondoren: en Landflygtigs roman. 19 Georg Wedel-Jarlsberg (1913): Da jeg var cowboy. 20 Jack Child (2008): Miniature Messages: The Semiotics and Politics of Latin American Postage Stamps. 21 Patricia Fernández-Kelly and Jon Shefner (2006): Out of the Shadows: Political Action and the Informal Economy in Latin America. 22 Captain Keppel, cited in St John, Spenser, The Life of Sir James Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak, 1879. 24 Ibid. 25 Emilio Salgari (1900): Sandokan: Le Tigri de Mompracem, as translated by Anna Cancogni in Umberto Eco’s Open Work (1989). 26 Umberto Eco (1989): Open Work (tr. Anna Cancogni). 27 Section from Verse Four. 28 Arne Lochen (1900): J. S. Welhaven: liv og skrifter. 29 Christopher Bruun (1964): Soldat for sanning og rett. Brev frå den dansk-tyske krigen 1864. 30 Joachim Toeche-Mittler (1971): Die Armeemarschsammlung. 31 Christopher Bruun (1964): Soldat for sanning og rett. Brev frå den dansk-tyske krigen 1864. 32 Thorkild Hansen (1969): Slavenes skip. 33 Anonymous (1792): Om livet på plantagerne. 34 Thorkild Hansen (1970): Slavenes øyer. 35 Ibid. 36 Jonathan Swift (1726): Gulliver’s Travels. 37 Sidsel Wold (1999): Warra! Warra! Da de hvite kom til Australia. 38 Ibid. 39 Basset Hull (1890): The Stamps of Tasmania. 40 James Boyce (2010): Van Diemen’s Land. 41 Mary Henrietta Kingsley (1897): Travels in West Africa. Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons. 42 Per Arne Aasen (1954): Alfred Saker: Bantu-Afrikas Apostel. 43 Mary Henrietta Kingsley (1897): Travels in West Africa. Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons. 44 Ibid. 45 Benita Sampedro Vizcaya, ‘Routes to Ruin’, Article in LL Journal, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2012. 46 Ibid. 47 Der Spiegel, 28 August 2006. 48 Charles Edward Barrett-Lennard (1862): Travels in British Columbia: with a narrative of a yacht voyage round Vancouver’s Island. 49 Ibid. 50 Robin Fisher (1992): Contact and Conflict: Indian-European Relations in British Columbia. 51 Ibid. 52 Edwin Ernest Rich (1959): The History of the Hudson’s Bay Company. 53 Robin Fisher (1992): Contact and Conflict: Indian-European Relations in British Columbia. 54 1860–1890 Equivalent to 230 kg of silver at that time. 55 Danikil is the name of the desert region. 56 Wyatt Alexander Mason (2007): I promise to be Good: the Letters of Arthur Rimbaud. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Per Buvik, Dekadanse (2001). 60 Luisa María Mora, cited in Juan Salamanca Uribe (2007): La Gruta Simbólica: Una anécdota en sí misma. Yüklə 463,42 Kb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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