On the Social Contract
Jean Jacques Rousseau's essay on what constitutes legitimate political authority is a key milestone in the history of Western political philosophy, and an essential one for me on my grand quest to understand the world around me and how it got this way. Volumes have been composed about the influence this book has had in history - both in the abstract history of ideas and in the more tangible one of human lives and nations - so I have nothing to add to them. I will merely comment on my reaction to this 18th century book as a reader in the 21st century, a citizen of one democracy and a resident of another.
Rousseau's main concern is to find "a form of association" whereby each associate is protected and by means of which "each one, while uniting with all, nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before.”
This is complicated by a conundrum surrounding the legitimacy of the majority vote. "The vote of the majority always obligates all the others," says Rousseau. "How can a man be both free and forced to conform to wills that are not his own?" And elsewhere, "Unless the vote were unanimous," he asks, "What would become of the minority’s obligation to submit to the majority’s choice? Where do one hundred who want a master get the right to vote for ten who do not?" And biggest paradox of all: how can all men be equal if they can be clearly seen to have varying physical abilities?
Rousseau waltzes his way around these philosophical pitfalls with nimble surefootedness. His partner in this dance is the Social Contract, unwritten pact, abstract concept, but essential construct in the circumvention of his paradoxes.
Rousseau's Social Contract binds ALL the people of the political entity together, substituting a moral and legitimate equality to compensate for physical inequality imposed on by nature. Each person places himself under the "supreme direction of the general will" and "receives each member as an indivisible part of the whole". The discovery of the general will is by majority vote - but crucially for the validity of the vote is the notion that when a law is proposed, what is asked is "not whether the voters approve or reject, but whether or not it conforms to the general will." In other words, each voter is merely asked to state his opinion on what the majority of voters would want - not on what he himself would prefer. By this simple strategem, Rousseau resolves the thorny issue of freedom of the minority: "When therefore the opinion contrary to mine prevails, this proves merely that I was in error, and that what I took to be the general will was not so."
The questions that Rousseau examines in detail are most striking in that they seldom preoccupy people of our times. Not that they have lost relevance - quite the contrary - but it is almost as if they have tacit answers that have passed into our culture as shared beliefs and conventional 'truths', and so to question them now may almost be a subversive act.
By meditating on the fundamental realities of the model, Rousseau is able to arrive at surprisingly perceptive and prescient conclusions about the system. He is able to observe, for instance, that the moral and legal equality that covers all citizens, is only as good as the government itself.
"Under bad governments this equality is only apparent and illusory," he warns. "It serves merely to maintain the poor man in his misery and the rich man in his usurpation. In actuality, laws are always useful to those who have possessions and harmful to those who have nothing. Whence it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only insofar as they all have something and none of them has too much."
In saying this, he is echoed by Adam Smith, barely a decade later, who says, in the Wealth of Nations: "Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all."
But what the government gets away with depends on the people themselves. "Where right and liberty are everything," Rousseau warns, "inconveniences are nothing." More pertinently, where the people value convenience above all else and are most intent on avoiding misery, rights and liberty are usually at peril. He seems to be describing modern democratic society when he talks of a strange and eerie social harmony that is caused "when the citizens, having fallen into servitude, no longer have either liberty or will. Then fear and flattery turn voting into acclamations. People no longer deliberate; either they adore or they curse."
Little wonder, perhaps, that governments around the world would rather not have its citizens meditate too much on Rousseau's fundamental questions. It reminded me of Marshall McLuhan's narration of the following anecdote in his collection of essays, Understanding Media.
After the Second World War, an ad-conscious American army officer in Italy noted with misgiving that Italians could tell you the names of cabinet ministers, but not the names of commodities preferred by Italian celebrities. Furthermore, he said, the wall space of Italian cities was given over to political, rather than commercial slogans. He predicted that there was small hope that Italians would ever achieve any sort of domestic prosperity or calm until they began to worry about the rival claims of cornflakes and cigarettes, rather than the capacities of public men. In fact, he went so far as to say that democratic freedom very largely consists in ignoring politics and worrying, instead, about the threat of scaly scalp, hairy legs, sluggish bowels, saggy breasts, receding gums, excess weight and tired blood.
Emperors of the Peacock Throne (Eraly, Abraham)
Emperors of the Peacock Throne is not the kind of history that modern academics write.
In sharp contrast to the last book I reviewed (Europe and the People without History), Abraham Eraly does not seek to explain the past as a complex totality of economic, political and social factors - far from it. Instead, he merely seeks to "portray life and tell a story" - and not just an ordinary tale, but an epic saga, that, in parts, resembles a soap opera - an account of the meteoric rise and precipitous decline of a dynasty over six generations. The setting is no less sweeping than the windswept plains of Hindustan itself, from Tuesday 9 June 1494 ("In the month of Ramadan of the year 899"), when a 11-year old Zahiruddin Babur came to the throne of Ferghana, to Friday 3 March 1707, when an octagenarian Aurangzeb breathed his weary last in an army camp in Ahmednagar.
In between, Eraly introduces us to his dramatis personae of ten men and one woman in loving detail. Seven of the men hail from the same family - six Emperors, and one heir apparent to the throne who never makes it (Dara Shukoh). Two of the remaining men are Hindu - Hemu and Shivaji. The only woman profiled in detail is an Empress (Nurjahan). The only Afghan with a meaty speaking role, albeit in an interlude, is Sher Shah Suri. These eleven people, aided by a large support cast of nobles, nautch girls, war elephants, European merchants, Rajputs, Marathas and holy men of all denominations, whirl around each other vertiginously, spilling copious quantities of blood, intriguing darkly, living in lavishness and lasciviousness and occasionally spouting poetry of devastating profundity. They build breathtaking palaces and mausoleums, betray one another without compunctions, cavort in drunken orgy, suffer unbearable torments and love their women with tempestuous ferocity.
While every episode is dramatic, Eraly is at his very best as a raconteur while narrating the fratricidal struggle for the throne in the 1660's: Shah Jahan, weighed down as much by old age as by the guilt of having murdered his own brother and cousins at the time of his own coronation, lives to see his own third son, Aurangzeb, swim through a pool of his brothers' blood to usurp the throne.
Was the fate of a billion Indians determined by minor personality quirks and accidents that altered the course of decisive battles and hence of history itself? What if Dara had not climbed down from his elephant at Samogarh? What if Sher Shah had stood at a safe distance from the exploding grenades during the siege of Kalinjar? What if Mahabat Khan had murdered Jahangir on the banks of Jhelum? Did Aurangzeb really hold a lifelong grudge against Dara Shukoh "for appropriating all their father's love", as we are authoritatively assured? And did he actually say, prophetically, and eerily reminiscent of another king in another country, in the not too distant future, “Az ma-st hamah fasad-i-baaqi” (After me, chaos)? Did all these things happen exactly as Eraly depicts?
In fact, right at the outset, before launching with gusto into the narrative, Eraly slips in a quick disclaimer: that he believes it is "in fact, impossible, for man to know the final truth even about any particular event in history, however trivial it might be, for he himself, swirling in time, does not have the perspective to see all its relevant consequences intersecting with the consequences of a myriad other events..."
So no - it is probably not all true, just a mishmash of rumor, legend, conjecture, imagination, propaganda, lies and a smattering of what actually happened . But isn't that what all history, shorn of pretense, actually is? Eraly thinks so. No matter - it's one heck of a story.
Europe and the People Without History (Wolf, Eric)
The aim of historians is to narrate, to describe, and sometimes, to judge; but above all, it is to interpret and explain the past in a coherent framework. Historical explanation is broadly of two kinds: reductionist and holistic. A rather extreme example of reductionist explanation is the following tongue-in-cheek piece, by Bertrand Russell, in Freedom and Organisation:
"...if Henry VIII had not fallen in love with Anne Boleyn, the United States would not now exist. For it was owing to this event that England broke with the Papacy, and therefore it did not acknowledge the Pope's gift of the Americas to Spain and Portugal. If England had remained Catholic, it is probable that what is now the United States would have been part of Spanish America."
In short, reductionists believe in simple, linear cause-effect chains, which, while being easy to understand and therefore popular, could be incomplete at best and grossly inaccurate at worst. Textbooks often describe the Greco-Persian wars as pitting brave Greeks defending democracy against tyrannical Persian invaders. But then we will have no explanation for the fact that "there were more Greeks fighting in the ranks of the Persian kings than in those of the Hellenistic Alliance." Nowhere, as Wolf points out despairingly, is this myth-making scheme more apparent than in schoolbook versions of the history of the United States. This of course, is dangerous. Schoolbook history is a powerful weapon of propaganda. On the one hand it polarizes political opinion, and on the other, it encourages analytical laziness.
Europe and the People Without History, on the other hand, is a tour de force of holistic thinking. Eric Wolf has synthesized a lifetime's worth of multi-disciplinary erudition into this formidable magnum opus - the bibliographical notes at the end of the book alone occupy 80 pages. Synthesis, indeed, is the operative word, as Wolf's fundamental argument is a categorical rejection of studies in isolation.
History has traditionally been written (and taught) as a sequential torrent of battles, treaties, coronations and assassinations, all from the perspective of the fortunes of a single nation or people. We are taught that great men - and women, but mostly men - bestrode the narrow world like colossuses, drawing and re-drawing political maps to suit their whims.
Economics, on the other hand, restricts its focus to a dry study of demand and supply, capital and labor, currencies and commodities. It is fundamentally anhistoric - it doesn't ask how things got the way they did - and apolitical, remaining silent on the question of how economics influences, or is influenced by, political events. In fact, in its obsession with equilibrium and central tendency, it tends to ignore "events" altogether.
Anthropology and sociology, meanwhile, ignore both history and economics, and attempt to portray societies and cultures, not as responses to political and economic stimuli, but as standalone static phenomena.
Wolf's world, on the contrary, is a web of intricate political, cultural and trade networks connecting peoples and nations around the world since pre-history, a "totality of interconnected processes", the examination of each link of which is necessary in order to obtain a clear understanding of any of the parts. In a similar vein, he argues for the rigorous examination of causal chains connecting economics, sociology, politics, history and anthropology, no single one of which disciplines adequately explains reality.
For instance, just to cite one of an interminable set of threads he reels off: thanks to technological advances, clippers were replaced by the faster and more capacious steamships of the Blue Funnel line (launched in 1865) as preferred modes of freight transport. Meanwhile Mehmet Ali, the Albanian-born Ottoman Viceroy of Egypt, buoyed by a sudden huge demand for Egyptian cotton by the temporary world shortage caused by the American Civil War, had put his country on an aggressive path of modernization. Egypt used French technological assistance and British (and Rothschild) capital to build the Suez Canal. (Later, civil war ended in the US and the price of cotton plummeted, Egypt defaulted on its loans and Britain seized control, but that's a different thread). With the Suez open, clipper-borne trade in Chinese tea came under threat - steamships could get more tea into London via the Suez and much faster, from plantations in Ceylon and India. Huge areas of land were cleared for new plantations in North Ceylon, unilaterally declared 'royal lands' by the enterprising colonial masters, displacing Sinhala farmers from their land and livelihood. Cheap labor for the plantation was provided by a wave of indentured workers imported from Tamil Nadu in India.
Surely this background, combining technology, political history, labor mobility and commodity trade linking Britain, USA, Egypt, Ceylon, India and China helps us understand better the 150-year tension between the predominantly Hindu Tamils, speaking a Dravidian tongue, and the predominantly Buddhist Indo-European language speaking Sinhalas they displaced from their land? Note, however, that it is easier (and lazier) to label the parties into aggressors and defenders, heroes and villains, freedom fighters and oppressors, or terrorists and victims.
Wolf himself steers scrupulously clear of value judgments throughout the book, describing in dispassionate detail, and from every angle, major world events like the slave trade, the genocide of American tribes and the vast number of cultures and lives turned upside down by the advent of Western capitalism. His principal lesson is that comprehensive understanding takes away from the simplistic satisfaction of finger-pointing. This isn't an easy lesson. When you eschew value judgments, you risk being labeled insensitive and politically incorrect. For example, Wolf points out that it was African tribes like the Ashante that ran the slave trade - raiding villages, kidnapping prospective slaves, transporting them to the coast, and selling them to traders in exchange for wealth and social prestige. Or that fratricidal wars between Native American tribes of North America had a huge hand in wiping out several tribes (the Huronia, the Erie, the Illinois). He explains these actions, not as those of monsters, but as local responses to changes in the prevalent social equations and modes of production, brought about by the sudden advent of European trade, arms and money.
In short, if you are the sort that prefers simple answers to all questions, especially simple answers that conveniently advance your pet political agenda, if you instinctively separate the world into 'good guys' and 'bad guys', regardless of whether you call yourself a conservative or a liberal: do not bother reading this book. I recommend it strongly to the rest of you.
Europe and the People Without History, on the other hand, is a tour de force of holistic thinking. Eric Wolf has synthesized a lifetime's worth of multi-disciplinary erudition into this formidable magnum opus - the bibliographical notes at the end of the book alone occupy 80 pages. Synthesis, indeed, is the operative word, as Wolf's fundamental argument is a categorical rejection of studies in isolation.
History has traditionally been written (and taught) as a sequential torrent of battles, treaties, coronations and assassinations, all from the perspective of the fortunes of a single nation or people. We are taught that great men - and women, but mostly men - bestrode the narrow world like colossuses, drawing and re-drawing political maps to suit their whims.
Economics, on the other hand, restricts its focus to a dry study of demand and supply, capital and labor, currencies and commodities. It is fundamentally anhistoric - it doesn't ask how things got the way they did - and apolitical, remaining silent on the question of how economics influences, or is influenced by, political events. In fact, in its obsession with equilibrium and central tendency, it tends to ignore "events" altogether.
Anthropology and sociology, meanwhile, ignore both history and economics, and attempt to portray societies and cultures, not as responses to political and economic stimuli, but as standalone static phenomena.
Wolf's world, on the contrary, is a web of intricate political, cultural and trade networks connecting peoples and nations around the world since pre-history, a "totality of interconnected processes", the examination of each link of which is necessary in order to obtain a clear understanding of any of the parts. In a similar vein, he argues for the rigorous examination of causal chains connecting economics, sociology, politics, history and anthropology, no single one of which disciplines adequately explains reality.
For instance, just to cite one of an interminable set of threads he reels off: thanks to technological advances, clippers were replaced by the faster and more capacious steamships of the Blue Funnel line (launched in 1865) as preferred modes of freight transport. Meanwhile Mehmet Ali, the Albanian-born Ottoman Viceroy of Egypt, buoyed by a sudden huge demand for Egyptian cotton by the temporary world shortage caused by the American Civil War, had put his country on an aggressive path of modernization. Egypt used French technological assistance and British (and Rothschild) capital to build the Suez Canal. (Later, civil war ended in the US and the price of cotton plummeted, Egypt defaulted on its loans and Britain seized control, but that's a different thread). With the Suez open, clipper-borne trade in Chinese tea came under threat - steamships could get more tea into London via the Suez and much faster, from plantations in Ceylon and India. Huge areas of land were cleared for new plantations in North Ceylon, unilaterally declared 'royal lands' by the enterprising colonial masters, displacing Sinhala farmers from their land and livelihood. Cheap labor for the plantation was provided by a wave of indentured workers imported from Tamil Nadu in India.
Surely this background, combining technology, political history, labor mobility and commodity trade linking Britain, USA, Egypt, Ceylon, India and China helps us understand better the 150-year tension between the predominantly Hindu Tamils, speaking a Dravidian tongue, and the predominantly Buddhist Indo-European language speaking Sinhalas they displaced from their land? Note, however, that it is easier (and lazier) to label the parties into aggressors and defenders, heroes and villains, freedom fighters and oppressors, or terrorists and victims.
Wolf himself steers scrupulously clear of value judgments throughout the book, describing in dispassionate detail, and from every angle, major world events like the slave trade, the genocide of American tribes and the vast number of cultures and lives turned upside down by the advent of Western capitalism. His principal lesson is that comprehensive understanding takes away from the simplistic satisfaction of finger-pointing. This isn't an easy lesson. When you eschew value judgments, you risk being labeled insensitive and politically incorrect. For example, Wolf points out that it was African tribes like the Ashante that ran the slave trade - raiding villages, kidnapping prospective slaves, transporting them to the coast, and selling them to traders in exchange for wealth and social prestige. Or that fratricidal wars between Native American tribes of North America had a huge hand in wiping out several tribes (the Huronia, the Erie, the Illinois). He explains these actions, not as those of monsters, but as local responses to changes in the prevalent social equations and modes of production, brought about by the sudden advent of European trade, arms and money.
In short, if you are the sort that prefers simple answers to all questions, especially simple answers that conveniently advance your pet political agenda, if you instinctively separate the world into 'good guys' and 'bad guys', regardless of whether you call yourself a conservative or a liberal: do not bother reading this book. I recommend it strongly to the rest of you.
The Principal Upanishads (Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan)
Let me preface this piece by testifying that one has to stretch the meaning of the word 'religious' a mile in order to fit me with that description. Furthermore, it took me over four months to plough through this book - and so it is with some trepidation that I begin to write about my reactions to it.
On the other hand, it is entirely possible that my distance from the material makes me a more appropriate commentator than someone more devout - my objectivity is not obscured by blind faith, though admittedly it is somewhat clouded by a certain love of tradition, a tendency, from early childhood, to develop goosebumps in response to the strangely familiar singsong cadence of Vedic chants.
The Upanishads are Hindu scriptures, possibly as many as 170 in number (though opinions vary), and composed over two millennia by several anonymous authors. Typical of a religion with three hundred and thirty million Gods, the authors of the Upanishads say many different things, and to a modern reader brought up to worship Logic, often appear to contradict each other. However, the chorus is never a cacophony, the voices merge and diverge, patterns emerge and disappear, and the over-arching themes never change. Strict non-contradiction is clearly not something that mattered a whole lot back then.
And while on the subject: for a religion of three hundred and thirty million Gods, the scriptures are surprisingly monotheistic.
In this volume, Radhakrishnan, scholar extraordinaire and the 2nd President of India, has translated and commented on 15 of the Upanishads, in over a thousand pages of smallish print. The format is simple: he lays out a few lines of the original Sanskrit, translates it into English, and if he finds them interesting enough, spends a paragraph commenting - expanding on the origins of certain words, or comparing the thought with Sufi, Catholic or other Hindu philosophical works.
In my opinion, the Upanishads can be conceptually broken down into three parts (a) the mystical and theological bits; (b) some breath-taking speculative philosophy, and (c) pure poetry.
Given the somewhat unfairly modern vantage point from which I judge the book, I found myself profoundly unimpressed with the mystical, theological, ritualistic and unscientific bits - but I must hasten to add that I was more than sufficiently compensated by the frequent nuggets of pure poetry and fascinating flashes of a speculative philosophy as incisive and insightful, arguably, as any in the history of human thought. Why, some of the philosophy was almost subversive. Already, in the first (and possibly oldest) Upanishad covered (Brhad-aranyaka), I stumble across this.
This is the highest creation of Brahma, namely that he created the Gods who are superior to him. He although mortal himself, created the immortals...
Or this one:
Whoever knows thus, "I am Brahman", becomes [God].Even the Gods cannot prevent his becoming thus...Therefore it is not pleasing to those Gods that men should know this.
And while I could go on and on, let me stop with this quaint story:
Then Vidagdha sakalya asked him: "How many Gods are there, Yajnavalkya?"He answered... "As many as are mentioned in the nivid of the hymn of praise to the Viswe-devas, namely, three hundred and three and three thousand and three.""Yes," he said, "but how many Gods are there, Yajnavalkya?""Thirty-three.""Yes," he said, "but how many Gods are there, Yajnavalkya?""Six.""Yes," he said, "but how many Gods are there, Yajnavalkya?""Three.""Yes," he said, "but how many Gods are there, Yajnavalkya?""One and a half.""Yes," he said, "but how many Gods are there, Yajnavalkya?""One."“Yes, said he, “but which are those three hundred and three and three thousand and three?”
Finally: beyond all measure, the joy of reading the Upanishads is the joy of reading pure poetry, metaphors that reached out across 2,500 years and left me gasping, drowning out the drone of Manhattan traffic and making me utterly oblivious to the ambient wails of a Wall Street sinking steadily under the weight of its woes, a momentary oblivion that only literature manages to create in its readers, like magic, with effortless ease, whenever it wants to. "Time is a horse with seven reins," said the authors of the Atharva Veda, "Him the knowing poets ride...all the world are his wheels." With consummate mastery over the poet's art of transcending time, the authors of the Upanishads grab the reader's attention from the depths of time ("Time the Invisible, who eats all beings as his food", Maitree Upanishad). And then this one, presumably also about Time or Death, though it could also (tantalizingly) be referring to Speech:
I am food! I am food! I am food!I am the eater of food! I am the eater of food! I am the eater of food!I am the poet! I am the poet! I am the poet!I am the first born of the cosmic order,Earlier than the gods, in the center of immortality!...I, who am food, eat the eater of food!
I wasn't sure, when I started the book, whether I would progress beyond the first few pages. I am happy to note that I finished it and live to tell the tale. I am no more religious than I was when I started off - but I suspect the authors of the Upanishads wouldn't have minded that. I can't even pretend that I understood all that I read - and I am very certain the authors of the Upanishads wouldn't have minded that. For here it is, right here, in the Kausitaki-Brahmana Upanishad:
na vaacam vijignasita, vaktaaram vidyaat.
Speech is not what one should desire to understand. Try to know the Speaker.
Where we have Hope: A Memoir of Zimbabwe (Meldrum, Andrew)
Where we have Hope: A Memoir of Zimbabwe is the powerful first person account of an American journalist, Andrew Meldrum, who came to the newborn and newly christened nation of Zimbabwe in 1980, and stayed on until he was forcibly deported by the Mugabe government in 2003.
The landscape he paints is so familiar to western eyes that it is now a cliche. An African nation throws off minority white rule, crowns the leader of the freedom-fighters President, and watches him morph steadily into an autocrat for life, intent on self-aggrandizing, preoccupied with fighting off other rebel forces and dedicating state machinery to the sole purpose of crushing all opposition to himself. The West reacts with sanctions and sanctimony, and the dictator responds with indignation and contempt, his defiant bombast making him even more of a ridiculous caricature than before. The relationship between the African despot and the Western press is particularly fascinating - the dictator hates what they print about him, never fails to point out their hypocrisy ("where was all this outrage when the white men were treating us like dogs?") but he needs them, too: his megalomania makes him crave the attention of the world and the admiration of all Africa. The story he is painting is uncomplicated as well: "White Men ruined our continent and made beggars and slaves of us. Having sucked out our life-blood, they left us to fend for ourselves, and now mock us from afar as savages unfit to rule ourselves. By treating them like trash, I am setting an example to all Africans to get over their inferiority complexes and rise to meet their destiny."
The press, on their part, hang on to his every word, while finding him repulsive. 'Corrupt African Dictator On Rabid Rant While Millions Die' sells more copies than any attempt to analyze the problems of the country in depth, including those caused by the West, and suggest real solutions even at the expense of Western commercial interests. Surely readers of the article, even as they tut-tut to themselves and turn the page to something else, feel unconsciously relieved and reassured to hear that Other People have worse governments than their own.
In a way, the African dictator and the Western press need each other to perpetuate their own myths about themselves and each other. They circle around, locked in a dans macabre, while AIDS, malnutrition and malaria pick off, at leisure, the very people they pretend to care for.
Having never lived in Zimbabwe (unlike the author), and not even having followed the fortunes of its people too closely, I have no intention of questioning any of the facts Meldrum brings to light, nor of condoning any of the murders, police beatings or state terrorism unleashed by the Mugabe administration. But it just occurs to me that placing the entire blame on a single man - Robert Mugabe - is a bit too smooth and convenient. Could macro-economic factors not have contributed as well?
Please humour me as I hypothesise the following, based purely on snippets of information available from the book. Remember that a large part of the land was owned by white Rhodesians - for generations. They had dispossessed native Africans from the land and pushed them into the hills ages ago (where was all the outrage then?!). These families continued to own the best land, with the most capital and the best farm equipment at their disposal. On the other hand, a generation of African young men, having spent a dozen years of their early adulthood in the jungles fighting a guerrilla war against the colonial masters, came out blinking into the sunlight at independence and needed a new livelihood, with little training or tradition in modern farming methods, and no land to call their own. These men could have drifted into crime, or rebelling yet again - as a politician, Mugabe had to ride the tiger, feed it, or be eaten by it. Either way, the cycle repeats with the next set of rebels and leaders (who sells them guns?!). The Mugabe's and Idi Amins didn't create the cycle. It is too big for them to create. They could have, at grave personal risk, attempted to break it - but then it is not easy to be Nelson Mandela. The tragedy of Africa is that those of its leaders who fail at being angels are doomed to be demons.
Now, having only read the one, rather slim, book on Zimbabwe, I will not pretend that I have understood a continent and reduced its plight to a 300-word post - but I do make a convincing case, I hope, for attempting to understand both sides of any argument. Simple explanations (including my own) are likely to be, at best, partially true, and at worst, completely off the mark. Meldrum deserves a great deal of credit for living in Zimbabwe for 23 years and he clearly called it as he saw it in the face of hostility and personal danger. He is a more courageous man than I. But could he have missed the forest of macro-economic factors for the trees of individual atrocity?
Meldrum plays prosecutor, judge, court reporter and star witness in this book, as he builds up a damning case against the president. I thought it was pity that he didn't put up a witness for the defence on the stand. The verdict may possibly have remained the same, but the judicial process would have been fairer.
Short Note on the Title of the Blog
When I started this blog, I didn't give too much thought to the title - "Diary of a Bibliophile" seemed to do a reasonable job in describing the broad intent behind the effort. I have always assumed that 'bibliophile' meant 'book-lover', going purely by the Latin roots of the two halves of the word.
Unfortunately, to my consternation, I have just discovered that according to the Wikipedia entry, a Bibliophile is a lover of books, "but especially for qualities of format". "Also", the article continues, "a bibliophile may be a book collector." Essentially, the bibliophile values form over content - first editions, unusual bindings and autographs are what a bibliophile lives and dies for.
Oops.
This is not what I meant at all. I love books for their content, and my most treasured books are cheap paperback editions. The bindings, where they exist at all, are more likely to be cardboard than leather. All autographs adorning the title-pages are those of previous owners.
However, I am going to stick with the current title, for want of a satisfactory alternative word that conveys what I mean: a word that signifies "Lover of Reading". I am amazed to find out that despite the plethora of '-mania', '-phrenia' and '-philia' suffixed words, there isn't one to describe my, um, condition. Surely I can't be unique?
Oh, and I am considering "bookworm", but it makes me feel all furry and multi-legged.
Perhaps what I wish to convey in this blog about my love of books can't be reduced to one word. Albert Goldbarth needed 172 lines, but in my opinion, he came closest in a poem called "Library".
Unfortunately, to my consternation, I have just discovered that according to the Wikipedia entry, a Bibliophile is a lover of books, "but especially for qualities of format". "Also", the article continues, "a bibliophile may be a book collector." Essentially, the bibliophile values form over content - first editions, unusual bindings and autographs are what a bibliophile lives and dies for.
Oops.
This is not what I meant at all. I love books for their content, and my most treasured books are cheap paperback editions. The bindings, where they exist at all, are more likely to be cardboard than leather. All autographs adorning the title-pages are those of previous owners.
However, I am going to stick with the current title, for want of a satisfactory alternative word that conveys what I mean: a word that signifies "Lover of Reading". I am amazed to find out that despite the plethora of '-mania', '-phrenia' and '-philia' suffixed words, there isn't one to describe my, um, condition. Surely I can't be unique?
Oh, and I am considering "bookworm", but it makes me feel all furry and multi-legged.
Perhaps what I wish to convey in this blog about my love of books can't be reduced to one word. Albert Goldbarth needed 172 lines, but in my opinion, he came closest in a poem called "Library".
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