The Guardian Weekly

• End of Boris bandwagon 24 • Surgery’s robot future 30 • Climate chaos and the far right 48
A week in the life of the world | Global edition

23 JUNE 2023 | VOL .208 No.25 | £4.95 | €7.99
Why can’t the Mediterranean migrant deaths be stopped? 12

Eyewitness Seeing red
Colombia People hurl fruit at each other during the annual Tomato Fight Festival,
known as Tomatina, in Sutamarchán. The event – which uses surplus
PHOTOGRAPH:
harvest unfit for eating – began in 2004, and this year’s festival is the
JUAN BARRETO/AFP/GETTY first held since the lifting of Covid pandemic restrictions.
Guardian Weekly is an edited selection of some of the best journalism found in the Guardian and
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Vol 208 | Issue № 25 made is re-invested in journalism.
A week in the life of the world Inside
23 June 2023
Mediterranean tragedy,
Biden powers up and
Kenya’s literary great
A shipwreck in the Mediterranean last week claimed 6-16 GLOBAL REPORT
the lives of around 500 people, another grim chapter in Headlines from the last
a wider story of human despair and people smuggling seven days
that politicians and authorities seem powerless to tackle. 12 Greece Sorrow turns to
Helena Smith reports from the Greek town of Kalamata, anger over tragedy at sea
where grief turned quickly to anger, while Jon Henley
analyses Europe’s long-term policy failures on irregular 17-33 SPOTLIGHT
migration and Patrick Wintour considers the problems in In-depth reporting
divided Libya, from where the ill-fated vessel set sail. and analysis
The big story Page 12 17 US Can Joe Biden do it
again in 2024?
US president Joe Biden has launched his campaign to 20 Ukraine On the frontline
run again in 2024, but can the 80-year-old last the pace 24 UK Johnson’s ignominy
of what is likely to be a bruising re-match against Donald 27 Spain The rise of Vox
Trump? David Smith analyses Biden’s chances, while 28 New Zealand The chilling
Hugo Lowell asks whether Trump’s federal indictment for impact of warming seas
allegedly concealing classified documents may kill off the 30 Science The robotic future
Republican contest – in his favour. of surgery
Spotlight Page 17 33 Canada Exposed to
threat of wildfires
A real highlight in our features pages this week is Carey
Baraka’s remarkable interview at home with the 85-year- 34-44 F E AT U R E S
old Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, whose life has Long reads, interviews
intersected with many of the past century’s biggest events. and essays
Grand old man of letters Page 34 34 Three days with a giant of
African literature
In the Culture section we find out why Hito Steyerl is By Carey Baraka
considered one of the world’s most influential artists, pay 40 Living with chronic pain
tribute to the late American novelist Cormac McCarthy By Oliver Franklin-Wallis
and catch up with the cellist Yo-Yo Ma as he ended a world
tour by busking on the streets of Nairobi. 45-50 OPINION
Culture From page 51 45 Rebecca Solnit
Truth, lies and classified
documents
47 Lorenzo Marsili
What architecture says
about globalisation
48 George Monbiot
Climate chaos and the
hard right
51-59 C U LT U R E
TV, film, music, theatre,
art, architecture & more
51 Visual arts
Hito Steyerl’s questions
Join the community On the cover Since the International Organization about the world
Twitter: @guardianweekly for Migration launched its missing migrants 54 Music
facebook.com/guardianweekly
Instagram: @guardian project in 2014, an estimated 27,000 people Cellist Yo-Yo Ma on
trying to reach Europe have been recorded as a mission from Bach
dead or disappeared while trying to cross the 56 Books
Mediterranean. More than 21,000 of those deaths Remembering Cormac
have occurred on the route from Libya or Tunisia McCarthy
north to Greece or Italy. Photo: Hugh Peterswald/
SPOT ILLUSTRATIONS:
Pacific Press/LightRocket/Getty; Guardian Design 60-61 LIFESTYLE
MATT BLEASE 60 Ask Annalisa
Tackling intrusive thoughts
6
Global
2 U N I T E D S TAT E S 4 S E R B I A / KO S O VO
EU summons leaders in
report effort to de-escalate crisis

The EU called Serbian and
Kosovan leaders to Brussels for
crisis talks after raised tensions
sparked fears of violence between
Headlines from the the two countries. EU leaders have
last seven days intervened several times in recent
weeks to try to de-escalate the
situation but, after the arrest of
1 UKRAINE Race against time to find
Kosovan police officers by Serbia
Titanic tourist sub last week, want face-to-face talks.
Toll on both sides as Kyiv
Search and rescue teams were “In the light of ongoing
retakes villages in south racing against time on Tuesday to escalation and the lack of
Copyright © 2023 Heavy casualties are being find a tourist sub that went missing meaningful steps towards this
GNM Ltd. All rights endured by Ukrainian and Russian in the north Atlantic while on a coalition, we invited both leaders
reserved forces, British military intelligence dive to the wreck of the Titanic. from Serbia, from Kosovo to come
said, as Kyiv on Monday The US Coast Guard said “a to Brussels next week for a crisis
Published weekly by celebrated the liberation of an small submarine with five persons meeting,” said a spokesperson
Guardian News & eighth settlement in the south onboard” had gone missing and for Josep Borrell, the European
Media Ltd, of the country, two weeks into that the vessel had the capacity Commission’s high representative
Kings Place, its offensive. to be submerged for 96 hours, but for foreign policy.
90 York Way,
Losses among Russian troops it was unclear whether it was still The invitation was issued to
London, N1 9GU, UK
were said by British officials to underwater or had surfaced and the Kosovan prime minister, Albin
Printed in the UK, be at their highest since the peak was unable to communicate. Kurti, and the Serbian president,
Poland, the US, of March during the battle for The submersible was reported Aleksandar Vučić, he added.
Australia and Bakhmut in the Donetsk region, overdue on Monday but contact Tensions mounted last month
New Zealand with Ukraine claiming to have was lost 1 hour 45 minutes into between the countries after
killed or injured 4,600 soldiers. its dive on Sunday afternoon, the Pristina’s decision to install ethnic
ISSN 0958-9996 The progress of Ukraine’s forces in coast guard said. A British explorer Albanian mayors in four Serb-
the east and south has been slow, and a French military veteran and majority municipalities. They
To advertise contact with much of the heavy western submarine expert were believed were allowed to take office despite
advertising.
weaponry and new brigades yet to to be among those onboard the a turnout of lower than 3.5% in
enquiries@
be committed to battle. Titan, operated by underwater elections that were boycotted by
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Ukraine’s deputy defence tourism company OceanGate. the Serbian majority in the region.
To subscribe, visit minister, Hanna Maliar,
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from the Kherson region, where reversal of his conviction over the confidential intelligence and
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@theguardian.com dam has reduced the potential been freed from prison. indicted by a federal grand jury,
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+1-844-632-2010 Dnipro river. ordered on 15 June, came after Teixeira, of North Dighton,
Spotlight Page 20 a Tuscon-area state court judge Massachusetts, has been
Australia and approved a deal which involved charged with six counts of wilful
New Zealand the prisoner pleading guilty to retention and transmission of
apac.help a lesser murder charge. According classified information relating
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The Guardian Weekly 23 June 2023

UK headlines p11
9 FINLAND
Rightwing coalition to take

power after months of talks
6 CANADA Spending will be cut, immigration
reduced and citizenship rules
Police working to identify
made tighter under a four-party
15 people killed in bus crash coalition government including
Police in the province of Manitoba the far-right Finns party and
were trying to identify the headed by the conservative leader
15 people killed when a truck Petteri Orpo.
and a bus carrying mostly Orpo’s National Coalition
elderly people collided in one party, the Finns, the Swedish 1
of the country’s worst recent People’s party and the Christian
road crashes. 5
Democrats hold 108 MPs in the 4
Last Thursday’s collision 200-seat parliament between
near the town of Carberry in them. The deal was unveiled last
south-western Manitoba, 170km Friday after 11 weeks of sometimes
west of Winnipeg, left the bus, stormy negotiations. A radical
which had been carrying 25 mostly austerity programme has been
elderly people heading to a casino, promised, and the Finns party
burnt to a shell. Ten people were is taking a hard line on aid, the 10 GERMANY
taken to hospital. Six were listed climate crisis and immigration.
in critical condition. The victims Analysts have described the
were from Dauphin, which is four-party coalition as arguably
about 175km north of Carberry. the most rightwing administration
The mayor, David Bosiak, said in Finland’s history.
it was “tremendously difficult”
given that no one knew who had
been on the bus.
Excavations reveal ‘rare’

sword from 14th century BC
A bronze sword more than
3,000 years old, which is so well
7 ECUADOR preserved that it “almost still
shines”, has been unearthed in
Woman in coffin case dies 8 BRAZIL southern Germany, officials say.
after hospital stay The Bavarian state office for
A 76-year-old woman who had the preservation of historical
been declared dead and surprised monuments (BLfD) said the
her relatives by knocking on her sword, which is believed to date
coffin during her wake earlier this to the end of the 14th century BC
month died after seven days in – the middle of the bronze age –
intensive care. Ecuador’s health was found during excavations
ministry confirmed in a statement last week in Nördlingen, between
that Bella Montoya died from an Nuremberg and Stuttgart.
ischaemic stroke. It added that The sword, with an octagonal
Montoya had remained under Cyclone kills 11 as search hilt, came from a grave where
“permanent surveillance” but a man, a woman and a boy were
goes on for missing people
didn’t provide further information buried with bronze objects, the
on the medical investigation At least 11 people died in the BLfD said, adding: “A find like this
surrounding the case. southern state of Rio Grande do is very rare.”
Gilberto Barbera Montoya, Sul after an extra-tropical cyclone
her son, said that he hadn’t struck the region, according to the
yet received any report from state’s authorities.
the authorities on the medical The storm last Friday caused
explanation of what had torrential rains and helicopter
happened in the original event. searches were under way in
flooded neighbourhoods to find
20 missing people, Rio Grande do
Sul authorities said.
The town of Caraa, with
a population of more than 8,000
people, was one of the worst hit.
Official warnings were issued
to alert people to the risk of
landslides in several areas.
23 June 2023 The Guardian Weekly
13 INDIA
Court halts documentary

on Muslim minority
11 SUDAN A court blocked the screening

of an Al Jazeera documentary
Hundreds held by RSF in bid about the country’s Muslim
minority, fuelling fears that the
to crush Islamist opponents
right to criticise the government
Hundreds of Islamist leaders is being eroded.
and activists in Sudan have been The Allahabad high court
detained by the Rapid Support was acting on a public interest
Forces in a wave of repression petition filed by Sudhir Kumar,
targeting the paramilitary group’s an activist. Kumar said he had
political opponents. learned from media reports that
The arrests began before the the documentary Who Lit the
outbreak of fighting in April Fuse? portrayed India’s 172 million
between the RSF and forces loyal Muslims as living in fear of the
20
to Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the Narendra Modi government. 19
de facto military leader, but have 16 The judges said the
intensified since. government should ensure the
The Islamists have fiercely documentary was not shown until
opposed the attempt to seize it had acquired the “requisite
power launched by Mohamed certification”. 18
Hamdan Dagalo, the RSF’s leader,
fearing he will thwart their 13 15
efforts to regain the political and
economic power they enjoyed for
decades in Khartoum.
17
12 UGANDA
14 AUSTRALIA
Senate approves wording

for Indigenous voice vote
A bill to alter the constitution
and enable the Indigenous
voice has passed the federal
parliament ahead of Australia’s
first referendum in 24 years,
which is to be held this year. The
IS-backed militia blamed Senate passed the bill on Monday
for deadly attack on school by 52 votes to 19, confirming the
wording for the referendum. The
Officials say at least 41 people, draft legislation passed the lower
mostly school pupils, were house last month.
massacred last Friday in the worst “I say to my fellow Australians:
attack of its kind in Uganda since parliaments pass laws, but it
2010. Victims were hacked, shot is people that make history,”
and burned in the late-night raid the prime minister, Anthony
on Lhubiriha secondary school in Albanese, said. “This is your time,
Mpondwe, near the border with your chance, your opportunity to
the Democratic Republic of Congo. be a part of making history.”
Ugandan authorities blamed
the Allied Democratic Forces
(ADF), an Islamic State-backed
militia based in DRC.
Seventeen victims were
burned beyond recognition
when the attackers set a locked
dormitory ablaze.

The big story p12
Global report 9
15 INDIA 17 K E N YA 19 CHINA D E AT H S
More than 300 deaths Graduate snaps take aim at

connected to Christian cult lack of prospects for work
The death toll linked to a pastor As millions of young people in
accused of ordering his followers China graduate from university
to starve themselves to death to this month, the traditional Glenda Jackson
meet Jesus has passed 300, with pictures of joyful students Stage and screen
the figure expected to increase as throwing their hats and gowns actor who turned
more exhumations are planned. into the air have been replaced to politics as a
Authorities say the dead were by photos of them lying on the Labour MP. She
members of the Good News ground or throwing their degree died on 15 June,
Dozens die in two states
international church, led by Paul certificates into the bin. aged 87.
after blistering heatwave Mackenzie, who is accused of Some photos show students
At least 96 people are reported to ordering his followers to starve draping themselves over bridges Cormac
have died from heat-aggravated themselves and their children to or park benches in poses of McCarthy
conditions during a blistering death so they could go to heaven dejection. In others, students Novelist who told
heatwave across two of India’s before the end of the world. lie face down on stairs or in grim, violent tales
most populous states, although The toll reached 303 after grassy fields. of life stripped to
questions have been raised after 19 more bodies were exhumed The pictures, which have the fundamentals.
more than half of the deaths were from mass graves in Shakahola been going viral on social media, He died on 13
reported in a single district. forest, in south-east Kenya, where allude to the fact that 11.6 million June, aged 89.
The deaths happened in the the self-styled pastor and his students are about to enter Culture, page 56
northern state of Uttar Pradesh followers lived. a difficult jobs market for young
and Bihar in the east, where 45C More than 600 people have people. Youth unemployment has Daniel Ellsberg
temperatures were recorded, been reported missing, a regional hit a record high for the second US government
coupled with humidity. official, Rhoda Onyancha, said. consecutive month. analyst who
Heatwaves are common in Investigators have expanded their leaked the
June, before the monsoon hits. search for victims. Pentagon Papers.
Many Indians go out to earn About 65 rescued followers He died on 16
a living with only a wet cloth were charged with attempted June, aged 92.
wrapped around their heads. suicide last week after refusing Opinion, page 45
The deaths in Uttar Pradesh to eat between 6 and 10 June.
almost all occurred in one district, Mackenzie handed himself to Gordon McQueen
Ballia. Brajesh Pathak, the state’s police in April and was denied bail Scotland,
health minister, said it had opened last month. He has not yet been Manchester
an investigation. required to enter a plea. United and Leeds
footballer. He died
on 15 June,
aged 70.
16 I S R A E L / PA L E S T I N E 18 H O N G KO N G 20 JA PA N
John Hollins
Five Palestinians killed in Pro-democracy song drops Age of consent raised to 16
Chelsea football
helicopter raid on Jenin off online music platforms in reform of sex crimes law player and
The Israeli military used combat Versions of Glory to Hong Kong, Tokyo has raised the age of manager. He died
helicopters in the occupied West the unofficial anthem of the consent from 13, among the on 14 June,
Bank for the first time in years, city’s pro-democracy movement world’s lowest, to 16 years old as aged 76.
as an arrest operation in Jenin in 2019, have disappeared from lawmakers passed reforms to sex
encountered unexpectedly fierce several streaming platforms, amid crime legislation. Roger Squires
Palestinian resistance. a government bid to ban online A new bill, which also clarifies Guardian
Five Palestinians were killed, distribution of the song. rape prosecution requirements crossword setter,
including a 15-year-old boy, and 91 Variations of the song and criminalises voyeurism, known as Rufus.
injured, including 23 severely or distributed by DGX Music, the cleared parliament’s upper house He died on 1 June,
critically, according to Palestinian team of creators who own the in a unanimous vote. aged 91.
health officials. One of those was rights to the title, were no longer Japan’s age of consent had
a 15-year-old girl who, Palestinian available on Spotify, Apple’s been unchanged since 1907, Roger Payne
witnesses quoted by Israel’s iTunes, Facebook and KKBOX with children aged 13 and above Biologist who
Haaretz website said, was shot worldwide, though a rendition deemed capable of consent. In researched and
inside her house. The fighting performed by a Taiwanese band practice, regional ordinances recorded whale
intensified calls by settler leaders still remained. Several music banning “lewd” acts with minors song. He died on
to call for a broader military videos also remained accessible are sometimes deemed as, in 10 June, aged 88.
campaign in the West Bank. on the YouTube video platform. effect, raising the age to 18.

10 Global report
United Kingdom
SCIENCE A N D EN V IRON M EN T
C O N S E RVA T I V E S
Commons votes to approve

least $7.25tn a year, according to a damning privileges report
major new report from the bank. The Conservative infighting over Boris
explicit subsidies – money spent by Johnson misleading the House
governments – account for about of Commons about Partygate
$1.25tn a year. Most of these are reached bitter new heights on
harmful, the bank said. The Roman Monday night, with his supporters
There are also implicit subsidies, find in London being told to hang their heads
totalling $6tn a year, such as waived includes the walls in shame. Johnson faced being
taxes and the cost of the damage and interior floors blocked from obtaining special
caused by worsening global heating of a mausoleum, access to parliament after being
and air pollution. and a mosaic, rounded on by furious Tory MPs
surrounded by a in an attempt to “restore faith”
raised platform on in democracy.
BIOLOGY
which the burials An overwhelming majority
were placed backed the privileges committee’s
Synthetic embryos created ANDY CHOPPING/MOLA conclusion that Johnson
in groundbreaking advance committed five contempts of
A RCH A EOLOGY
Scientists have created synthetic parliament, including misleading
human embryos using stem cells, the Commons and the cross-
‘Astonishing’ Roman tomb in a groundbreaking advance that party group investigating him.
remains unearthed in London sidesteps the need for eggs or sperm. Only seven MPs voted against
The remains of a Roman mausoleum Scientists say these model the report, dwarfed by the 354
“with an astonishing level of embryos, which resemble those who voted for it.
preservation” have been unearthed in the earliest stages of human Rishi Sunak was absent for the
in London. development, could provide a debate along with other senior
The excavation of the tomb crucial window on the impact of Cabinet ministers, and was
follows the discovery in February genetic disorders and the biological accused by Labour MPs of having
last year of some of the largest causes of recurrent miscarriage. “run away”. Downing Street said
Roman mosaics found in London in However, the work also raises he was busy hosting the Swedish
more than 50 years on the same site. serious ethical and legal issues. prime minister.
This the most intact Roman Prof Magdalena Żernicka-Goetz, Despite Sunak’s attempt to
mausoleum ever to be discovered in of the University of Cambridge dampen the internal Tory row over
Britain, according to the Museum of and the California Institute of the report – by avoiding taking
London Archaeology, which led the Technology, described the work at sides in the vote on whether his
archeological investigations. the International Society for Stem predecessor lied to MPs – the Tory
Cell Research’s annual meeting in bloodletting over the damning
Boston last week. report into Johnson’s continued
C L I M AT E C R I SI S
misleading of parliament ran late
into the evening.
Fossil fuel and farming MEDICA L R ESE A RCH
Given Johnson quit the
subsidies ‘causing havoc’ Commons last week, the
Trillions of dollars of subsidies for
Alcohol in moderation may recommended 90-day suspension
fossil fuels, farming and fishing lower risk of heart disease could not be enforced. Instead, a
are causing “environmental Light to moderate alcohol motion was passed that said he
havoc”, according to the World consumption may lower the risk should be blocked from receiving
Bank, severely harming people of heart disease because it leads a pass given to most ex-MPs,
14
and the planet. to reductions in stress signalling which allows unfiltered access to
Many countries spend more on in the brain, new research claims. the parliamentary estate.
the harmful subsidies than they But cardiologists warn the cardiac Spotlight Page 24
do on health, education or poverty benefits do not mean we should The age of
reduction, the bank says, and the ignore other dangers of alcohol. Kairan Quazi,
subsidies are entrenched and hard to “We are not advocating the use the youngest
reform as the greatest beneficiaries of alcohol to reduce the risk of heart graduate in
tend to be rich and powerful. attacks or strokes because of other the history of
Reforming subsidies would concerning effects of alcohol on Santa Clara
provide vital funding to fight the health,” said cardiologist Ahmed University,
climate and nature crises at a time Tawakol, lead author of the study by California, who
when public coffers are severely a team from Massachusetts general is due to start a
stretched, the bank said. hospital, published in the Journal of job at SpaceX
The “toxic” subsidies total at the American College of Cardiology. next month

11
Eyewitness
On the fringe
Highland cattle take
a dip in Loch Etive
near the village of
Connel, on Scotland’s
west coast. A spell
of warm summer
weather last week saw
daily temperatures of
around 25C, well above
the seasonal average
for the region.
CARL RECINE/REUTERS
U K N E WS COST OF LIVING C I V I L S E RV I C E
Suspect charged over Vicars poorer than church Home secretary disbands
Nottingham knife attacks mice as they ask for pay rise Windrush reform team
A man was remanded in custody Church of England vicars have The Home Office unit responsible
by magistrates after two students become the latest group of for reforming the department
and a school caretaker were killed workers to demand a pay rise after the Windrush crisis has
in knife attacks in Nottingham. in the face of the cost of living been quietly disbanded, after
The former University of crisis, as Unite’s general secretary, the UK home secretary, Suella
Nottingham student named by Sharon Graham, claimed they Braverman, let it be known that
police as Valdo Calocane, 31, who were among the “working poor”. she believes it is time to “move
gave his name in court as Adam More than 2,000 clergy and lay on”, the Guardian has learned.
Mendes, is accused of murdering staff represented by the union Staff working in the unit
first-year students Grace have submitted their first ever handling changes meant to
O’Malley-Kumar and Barnaby official pay claim, asking for a 9.5% prevent a repeat of the scandal,
Webber, both 19, and school rise in the annual stipend, which were told in an online meeting
caretaker Ian Coates, 65, in the stands at £26,794 ($34,000). that it would be closing. Civil
early hours of 13 June. Calocane is The C of E’s remuneration and servants in two London-based
also alleged to have attempted to conditions of service committee teams were told their work would
murder three pedestrians: Wayne has invited Unite to make a be terminated on 1 July, sources
82m
Birkett, Marcin Gawronski and submission about its members’ said. Employees in a third team
Sharon Miller, after Coates’s van pay and conditions for the first were offered the chance to work
was used to drive at people in the time, after lobbying by the union. with a Sheffield-based unit.
city centre. In the five years since the The value in
The defendant spoke only to government first apologised pounds ($105m)
give his name, his date of birth and for misclassifying thousands of of Beatlemania
to say he was of no fixed abode. Commonwealth-born people to the Liverpool
He was not required to enter any living legally in the UK as illegal economy. The
pleas to the charges. Magistrates immigrants, successive home city estimates
heard Calocane has also been secretaries have promised that hosting this
charged with assaulting a police “comprehensive reform” of the year’s Eurovision
constable after an incident in Home Office to ensure a similar song contest
Nottingham in September 2021. scandal could never be repeated. could bring in a
further £40m

12 The big story
Migration
As families mourned the hundreds of people lost in last

week’s Mediterranean shipwreck disaster, grief turned to
anger over the Greek authorities’ handling of the incident
and Europe’s failure to tackle one of its greatest challenges
A deadly trade

▼ Syrian survivor Mohammed, 18, is
reunited with his brother Fadi, who
13
travelled to Kalamata STELIOS MISINAS/REUTERS
GR EECE
By Helena Smith KALAMATA
little after 8am The tragedy, among the worst in Piloted by its Egyptian crew – nine of
last Friday, Fadi, living memory in the Mediterranean, whom were charged on Monday with
a Palestinian, has officially left 78 dead, all men bar offences ranging from provoking a
freshly arrived one. But as hopes of finding survivors shipwreck to negligent mass murder
from Amster- evaporated last Friday, the third and – the ship is believed to have sailed the
dam, joined final day of an extensive search and high seas for three days before it sank.
the throng of rescue operation, Greek officials had All the defendants pleaded not guilty.
aid workers, become resigned to the death toll “The accounts of what happened
activists and journalists gathered being closer to 500. Hopes of recov- have been shocking,” said Areti Glezou
around a warehouse in Kalamata’s port. ering the vessel, which sank in some of the support group Thalpos, which
The 29-year-old was on a mission. of the deepest waters in the Mediterra- has been helping survivors. “Survivors
“I thought I had spotted my little nean, have been ruled out altogether. told of how they began to drink from
brother Mohammed among pictures Mohammed, who grew up in the sea and even their own urine when
of the [shipwreck’s] survivors,” said war-torn Aleppo with his brother, is they ran out of water and food. One
the Syrian-born chef, who has lived among the 104 passengers – mostly man described how he swam through
in the Dutch city for the past decade. from Syria, Afghanistan, Egypt and waters filled with the bodies of dead
“I knew he had gone to Libya to board Pakistan – who, having paid more than kids as the ship went down. I don’t
the boat, so, praying to Allah he was $4,000 each for the doomed journey, think I will ever forget that.”
still alive, I decided to get on a flight.” made it out alive. “He wanted to live The trawler was spotted initially by
Within hours of arriving in this port the dream,” said Fadi, who travelled the EU border agency, Frontex, more
town, Fadi’s wish would come true in to Europe – via Greece – as part of an than 12 hours before its engine failed,
an electrifying moment caught on earlier wave of asylum seekers 10 years and the Greek coastguard was com-
camera. “He had a photograph of ago. “They all wanted to. I can’t believe municating with its captain before it
his brother and wanted to talk,” said that I found him. I am so happy.” capsized late on Tuesday, 13 June. By
Themis Kanellopoulos, a Greek MEGA For relief workers, who have pieced late afternoon, coastguard officials
TV reporter who was interviewing together the trajectory of a tragedy claim, the vessel was observed sail-
him at the time. “As the camera was that many believe could have been ing on a “steady course”.
rolling, as he was relating the terrible averted – if migrants denied safe “They refused our offer of help,
circumstances that had brought him passageways weren’t forced to rely on saying, ‘We go to Italy,’” said Greece’s
here, he saw Mohammed through people smugglers using increasingly acting civil protection minister,
the metal fence near the warehouse dangerous routes to reach the west – it Vangelis Tournas. “The ship was in
where the survivors were being kept. is a miracle that any survived at all. international waters. Had we done
An image The euphoria of witnessing the two On a vessel that was visibly over- anything more, it would have been
of the of them come together, right at that loaded, hundreds of women and chil- considered intervention.”
overcrowded moment, was just incredible.” dren, according to migrant testimony By the end of last week, shock had
boat before The reunion of the two brothers was given to the Greek coastguard, were gradually turned to anger, with pro-
it sank in among many heartbreaking scenes “locked” below deck in the boat’s hold. testers taking to the streets across
international that have played out in Kalamata Greece to deplore the authorities’ han-
waters off the since a fishing trawler, bound for Italy ‘One man described dling of the incident, and European
western Greek with perhaps as many as 800 people policies that have “turned the Medi-
coast last on board, capsized off the southern
how he swam through terranean into a watery cemetery”.
Wednesday Peloponnese, a disaster of such mag- waters filled with the After it emerged that dozens of
HELLENIC nitude that its effects are being felt well Pakistanis were among those
COASTGUARD/
AFP/GETTY beyond the confines of Greece. bodies of dead kids’ onboard the trawler, Pakistan’s

14 The big story ▼ Bodies of some of those lost at sea are
recovered after the wreck off Kalamata
Migration COSTAS BALTAS/ANADOLU/GETTY
Protesters in measures to try to prevent deaths

Piraeus condemn on dangerous Mediterranean routes.
the EU and Greek Tunisia, which is neighbour to Libya,
authorities from where the sunken trawler set sail,
is a major stepping stone for people
trying to reach Europe. In the first
LOUISA GOULIAMAKI/AFP/GETTY
three months of this year, Tunisian

authorities intercepted 13,000 people
on boats off the eastern port of Sfax, a
main route to Europe.
In Athens, anger has mounted as
questions have been raised over the
Hellenic coastguard’s reluctance to
intervene despite the vessel being
prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, ordered in international waters, with Greek
an immediate crackdown on agents authorities having been accused of
engaged in people smuggling, saying deliberately holding back to avoid so
they would be severely punished. many people coming ashore.
Monday was designated a day of A Guardian analysis of ship
mourning in Pakistan. There was no movements supplied by the Mari-
official information on exactly how Trace service indicated two vessels
many Pakistanis were onboard the – the Lucky Sailor and the Faithful
vessel, how many survived and how Warrior – stood by or circled round
many died. An initial police investi- the stationary trawler for at least four
gation in Pakistan found 750 to 800 hours. The coastguard has said it was
people had been on the vessel. in contact with the boat throughout
“I lost 45 relatives on that boat, a that period – from about 3pm to 7pm
whole village, including my brother last Tuesday – by radio, satphone and
Yousaf,” said Mohammed Yunis, a helicopter and that the vessel was not
Pakistani taxi driver who has lived in difficulty, but moving “at a steady
for more than four decades in the UK. course and speed” towards Italy.
“I want answers,” he said, standing The trawler began rocking, then
outside the Greek coastguard’s listed and sank shortly after 2am on
harbour side headquarters with Wednesday. Greek officials admitted
other relatives who had travelled to a rope had been thrown to the stricken
Kalamata. “The authorities here are vessel late at night, fuelling specula-
fucking lying. They knew the ship was tion that the trawler may have been
there. They knew it was in trouble. tugged before it sank.
They did nothing to save it. They Greece will hold general elections
wanted the people on board to die.” on 25 June. Its centre-right New
Ministers from France and Germany Democracy party, in power for the past
travelled to Tunisia last Sunday for four years and tipped to win the poll,
talks on regulating migration and has taken a tough stand on migration,
‘I lost 45 with border officials frequently

Deadly crossing The vessel sank in the Mediterranean’s deepest waters accused of engaging in pushbacks, or
relatives forcible expulsions, under its watch.
Rome
on that Adding to a sense among some that
the truth is yet to emerge are questions
Italy
boat. The over why no video footage taken from
authorities a coastguard vessel had been released.
Greece
Turkey did nothing “In all incidents like this a video is
Athens taken. The big question is where is this
to save it’ video?” said Christos Spirtzis, an MP
Pylos Kalamata
with the leftwing Syriza party.
The vessel sank The president of Kala mata’s
about 80km off lawyers’ association said answers were
the southern The overcrowded needed. “There are a lot of questions
town of Pylos fishing boat sailed ▲ Migrants
for Italy from rescued from over the way this was handled,” Kostas
Tripoli Tobruk the sinking boat Margelis said. “And we need to start by
rest in a shelter asking whether, at the critical moment,
in Kalamata the coastguard did the right thing.”
400 km Libya Egypt Cairo
400 miles STELIOS MISINAS/ HELENA SMITH IS THE GUARDIAN’S
REUTERS ATHENS CORRESPONDENT

The Guardian view p49
15
EU ROPE A N U N ION crossing between January and March After years of bickering, EU leaders
this year, the deadliest three-month earlier this month announced a break-
period since 2017. through in negotiations for a new
A further 600 who attempted the migration and asylum pact, including
Europe’s crossing in April and May are known to

be dead or missing, bringing the total
this year to at least 1,039 before last
charges of €20,000 ($21,900) a head for
member countries that refuse to host
refugees. The bloc agreed that member
response Wednesday’s deaths. The real figure,
given that many sinkings are never
states, rather than the EU as a whole,
would determine which countries
New pact, but recorded, is believed to be far higher.

The IoM has pointed the finger –
were considered “safe” for migrants
turned away because they were ineli-
although without naming names – at gible for asylum, giving member states
underlying some Mediterranean governments,
where state-led search and rescue
greater individual flexibility.
The president of the European
causes have operations have been delayed and

NGO-operated vessels obstructed.
Commission, Ursula von der Leyen,
has also said the bloc was considering
not gone away Italy has imposed severe restrictions

and even impounded humanitarian
vessels, while Greece faces multiple
providing more than €1bn in aid for
Tunisia to rescue state finances and
help deal with its migration crisis.
allegations that it pushes people back Many critics, however, argue that
By Jon Henley to Turkey, illegally preventing them little real progress has been made
from claiming asylum, something Ath- on creating safe and legal routes for
T
he deaths of as many as 500 ens has consistently denied. asylum seekers to Europe. Gianluca
people feared drowned in the Overall, the number of people Rocco, the IoM’s head of mission in
sinking of an overcrowded trying to reach Europe remains well Greece, said it was “urgent to have
fishing boat off southern down on its 2015-16 peak, thanks in concrete and coordinated action from
Greece have once more thrown a part to a 2016 EU deal with Turkey and states to save lives at sea, and to reduce
spotlight on the world’s deadliest a much-criticised 2017 arrangement dangerous journeys by increasing safe
migratory route – and Europe’s failure with Libya that in effect outsources and regular migration routes”.
to tackle one of its greatest challenges. rescues to the Libyan coastguard. The underlying causes pushing so
Since the International Organization But the number is climbing – and many to come to Europe – war, natural
for Migration (IoM) launched its with anti-immigration sentiment and disasters, the climate crisis, poverty,
missing migrants project in 2014, an political pressure on the rise across inequality and food insecurity – will
estimated 27,000 people trying to the continent, the question remains not be going away anytime soon.
reach Europe have been recorded as one of the EU’s biggest problems, with JON HENLEY IS THE GUARDIAN’S
dead or disappeared while trying to member states profoundly divided. EUROPE CORRESPONDENT
cross the Mediterranean.
€20,000 €1bn
More than 21,000 of those deaths
have occurred on the so-called central
Mediterranean route from Libya or
Tunisia north to Greece or Italy, a Charge per head for EU member states Value of proposed European aid for
crossing that can take several days and that refuse to host refugees under a Tunisia to rescue state finances and
is often made in unseaworthy, danger- new migration and asylum pact help deal with its migration crisis
ously overloaded boats.
Most migrants to Greece now cross
from Turkey, either reaching the east-
ern Greek islands by boat or crossing
the Evros River along the land border
– and their number has fallen sharply
since Athens stepped up sea patrols
and built a border fence.
Because the trek up to western or
Migrants northern Europe from Greece also
travel across the involves an often arduous crossing of
Mediterranean the Balkans, many migrants now seek
in flimsy wooden to bypass Greece. Instead, the vast
boats like the one majority now head for Italy, which has
pictured, which in recorded 55,160 “irregular” arrivals
2021 was assisted in Europe so far this year – more than
by the Spanish double the number in 2022.
NGO Open Arms The central Mediterranean route
about 175km is, meanwhile, becoming deadlier.
north of Libya According to an IoM report in April, at
JEAN MATEU/AP least 441 people drowned making the

16 The big story
Migration
A N A LY S I S On Monday 12 June, the United Nations Support

L I BYA Mission in Libya, without identifying the culprits,
expressed concerns about the mass “arbitrary arrests
and deportations” of thousands of migrants and asylum
Rival governments seekers, including pregnant women and children,

who it said were being detained in overcrowded and
unsanitary conditions. The statement said the campaign
Power vacuum makes was “accompanied by a disturbing rise in hate speech
and racist discourse against foreigners online and
it hard to effectively in the media”.
But the tragic boat journey from Tobruk shows Haftar
tackle people smugglers and his sons did not stop the smuggling trade. Many say
the better way to stop the flow is to monitor the inbound
Syrian civilian airline flights containing Syrians,
Bangladeshis and Pakistanis. The Egyptian press has
By Patrick Wintour claimed that Haftar’s difficulty is that his brutal writ
does not run to the district of Butnan, where Tobruk
The mass drowning of refugees heading port is located, reflecting that the Libyan National Army
from Libya for Italy as their large boat that he leads is in reality an ideologically flexible and
capsized off the coast of Greece underlines loose coalition of militias. Butnan is largely the home of A fresh
Libya’s continuing power vacuum and the Obeidat tribe, past supporters of Haftar. Although
the inability of its divided leaders to deliver on their skilled at dealing with Libya’s many tribes, Haftar and attempt to
promises to stem the profitable people-smuggling trade. his sons met fierce resistance over the crackdown on agree the
It is striking that the ship sailed from the eastern port the smuggling and border posts. basis for
of Tobruk, a city where local leaders have mounted The UN estimates there are 680,000 migrants
a campaign against illegal migration. in Libya, some looking to travel by boat to Europe elections
On 4 May, the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, and others working full-time in Libya. The UN’s looks likely
granted Libya’s strongman in the east, Khalifa Haftar, International Organization for Migration said nearly
a meeting in Rome at which she offered to invest 3,800 people had died on migration routes within
to founder
in Libya’s east – the country has been divided into and from the Middle East and north Africa region last
a rival east and west since 2015 – in return for action year, the highest number since 2017. About 105,000
on the smugglers. migrants and asylum seekers had reached Italy by sea
Haftar appeared to try to deliver on his deal. On in 2022. From the start of this year to June, just over
4 June, his allies imposed a temporary night curfew to 54, 000 arrived, double the number in the same period
stop the smugglers. Security forces conducted raids in of the previous year. A growing proportion are coming
towns bordering Egypt. They claimed to have found from the east of Libya.
1,000 people in farms and houses waiting to be taken The chances of Europeans finding effective Libyan
across the Mediterranean. Boats and a harbour used by allies to control the flow is reduced by the continued
the smugglers were destroyed. absence of a unified national government with
The deputy interior minister, Faraj Egaim, one of authority. The two rival governments in east and
Libya’s power brokers, urged the population to report west have existed since 2015. The last UN-brokered
the smugglers, and called on tribes controlling the attempt to strongarm the two sides into holding unified
borders into Libya to help. presidential and parliamentary elections fell apart just
Some of those rounded up at the beginning of the before the December 2021 election date.
month – as many as 4,000 – were forcibly marched on The writing had been on the wall long before, since
foot to the Egyptian border towards Musaid, on the basis there had been no process of national reconciliation,
that they were there illegally. The violence involved, empowerment of civil society, finalised constitution or
including the death of a young boy, led to an outcry. agreement about the distribution of Libya’s considerable
resources. Neither the House of Representatives, ▲ Khalifa Haftar
the Libyan parliament in the east headed by the leads one of two
veteran Aguila Saleh, nor its broad counterpart in the rival governments
west, the High Council of State, were able to make
required compromises about sequencing or candidate Crosses on
eligibility, especially since elections risked them losing the Italian shore
power and patronage. commemorate
A fresh attempt to agree the basis for elections this people who
December, just brokered in Morocco, also looks likely to drowned after a
founder, leaving the latest UN envoy, Abdoulaye Bathily, boat sank in the
under pressure to come up with a plan to break the Mediterranean
impasse. But ultimately he needs a collective European in February
leadership once again to engage with Libya rather than ALFONSO DI VINCENZO/
KONTROLAB/
rely on bad-faith actors and schemes to criminalise LIGHTROCKET/GETTY
those trying to claim their right to asylum.
PATRICK WINTOUR IS THE GUARDIAN’S DIPLOMATIC EDITOR

17
In-depth reporting and analysis
GEORGIA
As leaders court
Russia, voters
dream of EU
Page 20 Q
U N I T E D S TAT E S
Biden hits
I
t became known as the “base- election bid in Philadelphia, in the cru- ▲ Joe Biden
ment strategy”. As the corona- cial swing state of Pennsylvania. Biden opens his
virus pandemic raged outside, addressed trade union supporters, a re-election
the 2024 presidential candidate Joe Biden

addressed the nation from a makeshift
studio under his Delaware home,
vital part of his coalition, and touted
economic achievements, including
a manufacturing revival and record
campaign with
a speech to union
members in
trail … but avoiding off-the-cuff gaffes and allow-
ing rival Donald Trump to self-destruct.
jobs numbers. “Wall Street didn’t
build America – you did,” Biden told
Philadelphia
JIM LO SCALZO/EPA
can he last Three years on, with the US mostly

back to a new version of normal, Biden
knows speeches on glitchy Zoom calls
the crowd.
As his campaign gathers momen-
tum, he can also make the case that he
the pace? or in empty auditoriums will not be

enough. The president, who at 80 is
has been a human bulwark against the
extremism of Trump’s Make America
the oldest in US history, is facing his Great Again (Maga) movement while
most gruelling campaign. finding ways to do business with
Continued
By David Smith WASHINGTON Last Saturday he kicked off his re- Republicans in Congress.
18 Spotlight
North America
Younger voters, and pushing through bills such as a
in particular, want bipartisan infrastructure package and
the president to legislation to promote hi-tech manu-
lead on climate facturing and climate measures. When
ANGELA WEISS/ he formally announced his re-election
AFP/GETTY
campaign in an April video, he asked
voters for time to “finish this job”.
Despite Trump facing federal crimi-
nal charges over his mishandling of
classified documents, no one in the
Biden campaign is taking victory for
granted and there are signs that Biden
will find 2024 tougher going than 2020.
The Associated Press-Norc Center
for Public Affairs Research poll found
that only 26% of Americans – and only
about half of Democrats – said they
wanted to see Biden run again. Among
Black adults, 41% said they want him
to run and 55% said they were likely
But after the sheltered campaign of ‘There are reasons to to support him in the general election.
2020, he will have to prove his fitness Biden has struggled to fulfil key
for office all over again. “The principal believe this campaign promises to Black voters, perhaps
stumbling block to a second term for the most loyal group in his political
Joe Biden is the widespread percep-
is on a collision base. While he tapped Ketanji Brown
tion that he is simply too old to serve course with disaster’ Jackson to become the first Black
effectively for a second term,” said woman on the supreme court, he
Bill Galston, a former policy adviser perceived frontrunner, he lost the first has been unable to follow through
to President Bill Clinton. “He has to three Democratic primary contests, in on pledges to protect voting rights
run a vigorous campaign.” Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, against a wave of Republican-backed
Biden will have plenty of opportu- and only clinched his party’s nomi- restrictions or enact policing reform.
nity, and obligation, to meet voters on nation after the pandemic took hold. Although the Inflation Reduction
the campaign trail, generating spon- As president, he has travelled Act made historic climate invest-
taneous moments that can be both a far and wide, delivered countless ments, critics point to backsliding: this
blessing and a curse given his history speeches and answered doubters year, Biden approved Willow, an $8bn
of verbal blunders. with a pugnacious State of the Union oil drilling project on pristine federal
Galston, a senior fellow at the address. But he has given no national land in Alaska, and agreed to fast-track
Brookings Institution thinktank in newspaper interviews and far fewer the $6.6bn Mountain Valley pipeline
Washington, added: “It’s a risk that solo press conferences than his pre- in West Virginia.
the campaign has to take. Because if decessors – fuelling a perception that Pushing climate to the margins
they keep him as guarded as they have his inner circle is trying to shield him. could damage Biden’s re-election
up to now then he has no chance of His campaign will start to address chances, warned Michele Weindling,
rebutting the presumption that he’s one confounding disconnect. Biden the electoral director of the Sunrise
Joe Biden’s
too old. And that could prove fatal.” has presided over the strongest post- Movement, a youth climate advocacy
appointment of
Ketanji Brown Biden was also at his weakest dur- pandemic recovery of any major group. “There’s a risk of it making our
Jackson, right, ing in-person campaigning early in economy, including the creation of jobs a lot harder in terms of mobilising
to the supreme 2020. Despite joining the race as the 13m jobs – more than any president young people.”
court bench has created in an entire four-year term Meanwhile, Biden’s toughest critics
made history – and the lowest unemployment for are calling for him to drop out of the
but he has not half a century. race and make way for another Demo-
realised pledges Yet an Associated Press-Norc Center crat. Norman Solomon, the national
to protect voting
for Public Affairs Research poll last director of RootsAction.org, the spon-
rights and this
month found that only 33% of Ameri- sor of the Step Aside Joe! campaign,
may be felt at
the ballot box if can adults say they approve of his han- argues that, whereas Trump was on
it means fewer dling of the economy and only 24% say the defensive in 2020, this time Biden
Black voters national economic conditions are in will represent the status quo.
support him good shape. One explanation might “There are many reasons to believe
be stubbornly high inflation pushing that this Biden campaign is on a
up prices for consumers. collision course with disaster,” he said.
Biden’s re-election campaign, led by If there is one hallmark of the Biden
Julie Chávez Rodríguez is convinced presidency, however, it is that he is
that it has a good story to tell. He has constantly underestimated.
spent his presidency combating Covid, DAVID SMITH IS THE GUARDIAN’S
rallying western allies against Russia WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF
Opinion p45
19
A N A LY S I S oxygen that their candidates cannot Tim Scott and Trump’s former
U N I T E D S TAT E S get attention unless they agree to ambassador to the United Nations
discuss Trump and his chances of Nikki Haley gave mixed answers,
beating them as though they were initially condemning the justice
A careful dance any other political commentator.

But what has been even more
perilous for Trump’s rivals has been
department for charging Trump
before later acknowledging that
the evidence in the indictment was
Trump rivals that when they have been booked
to appear on cable news shows,
deeply problematic.
The lukewarm and uncertain
struggle for according to their advisers, they

have to remember to be careful to
responses opened the path for
Vivek Ramaswamy, the wealthy
give answers that they are certain entrepreneur also in the Republican
attention after will not alienate Trump’s base.
The careful dance was on clear
race, to get some attention by asking
whether Trump should be pardoned
indictment display after the former president

was arraigned last Tuesday in the
if he were to be convicted.
His tweet about potentially
Mar-a-Lago classified documents pardoning Trump summed up
case in Florida. the moment: none of the other
By Hugo Lowell WASHINGTON The rightwing Florida governor candidates could give a definitive
Ron DeSantis criticised the ex- answer to that, either.
Donald Trump is president but only subtly, and his The fallout from the first and
contending with criminal wider comments on the case seemed second indictments has so boosted
charges for violating to be a general condemnation of a Trump that his advisers believe Riding high
the Espionage Act perceived “weaponisation” of the it could help carry him to the Poll boost for
and obstruction of justice but the justice department. Republican nomination.
ex-president
immediate political damage has Trump’s former vice-president, Before the indictment in the
been felt most acutely not by the Mike Pence, called Trump’s actions documents case arrived, Trump’s
defendant but his other rivals for the
Republican presidential nomination.
Maddeningly for Trump’s rivals,
over hoarding national defence
information – including US nuclear
secrets – indefensible but went no
advisers were hoping Republican
primary voters might dismiss it
as a partisan effort, as Trump has
59%
Level of support
the biggest winner politically – so further in his criticism. repeatedly claimed, giving him for Trump
far at least – of the indictment The South Carolina senator a polling and fundraising boost, among GOP
against Trump in the Mar-a-Lago people close to the campaign said. primary voters
documents case appears to be The boost for Trump turned out
Trump himself, who has been the
singular focus of news coverage and The fallout has boosted
to be larger than they expected. In
a poll of Republican primary voters 19%
embraced as a martyr by much of conducted by Morning Consult, Support for
the wider Republican party. Trump and his advisers Trump increased his lead over Florida governor
Advisers for other campaigns DeSantis by 4% after the indictment. Ron DeSantis
have privately complained that
think it can carry him Trump polled at 59% compared
to the nomination
Trump has sucked up so much with DeSantis at 19%. The Trump
campaign also said that it had raised $7m
more than $7m in donations since Donations the
the indictment, though the figure Trump campaign
has not been verified. claims to have
The indictment news cycle raised since the
may carry Trump all the way indictment
to the nomination given the
high probability of further
charges stemming from criminal
investigations over his efforts to
overturn the 2020 election.
The Mar-a-Lago documents
case was his second indictment in
two months, and Trump could be Trump
indicted for a third time in Georgia supporters gather
by the Fulton county district in Palm Beach,
attorney, Fani Willis, who has Florida, ahead of
been scrutinising Trump’s election his appearance in
interference in the state. court in Miami
HUGO LOWELL IS A REPORTER IN THE GARY I ROTHSTEIN/UPI/
GUARDIAN’S WASHINGTON BUREAU SHUTTERSTOCK

20 Spotlight
Europe
GEORGIA
On the wire
– rolling back the Russian invaders –
using its western-supplied weapons.
Gennadiy (Ukraine’s military allows
only first names or call signs to be used)
and other soldiers the Guardian spoke
to paint a slightly different picture of
As leaders
a gradual buildup. “A month ago we
started to increase the intensity of our
attacks,” he said, describing opera-
move closer
tions where he was based with the
114th brigade around Novodarivka, a
village on the southern front declared
to Putin, EU
liberated by Ukraine on 4 June.
Progress has been measured, hopes fade
acknowledges the wounded veteran,
UKRAINE saying it took 10 days for Ukrainian
soldiers to capture Russian trenches By Julian Ruling party in Tbilisi claims
in the next tree line. “Why did it take Borger
it is pursuing a future within
so long to take that one position? We KHURVALETI
Europe yet rails against
Frontline wanted to minimise our losses,” he
said, showing me the location in ques-
tion by switching to the Deep State
Brussels, Ukraine and Nato
forces hope
A
mapping app, used to track develop- round the Georgian village
ments in the frontline. of Khurvaleti, Russia’s occu-
patience will His comments may help explain

some of the wider reality. In recent
pation can creep forward a
few yards at night. It often
weeks, Ukrainian units and leaders starts with a line ploughed across a
pay dividends have announced the capture of a hand-
ful of largely deserted villages, with
field. Then a green sign will material-
ise, warning people not to cross. Then
the gains amounting to 6.5km at the the concertina wire appears.
By Dan Sabbagh furthest point, south of Velyka Novo- Khurvaleti is at the southern edge
NEAR ZAPORIZHZHIA FRONTLINE silka. The open fields of Novodarivka of South Ossetia, a breakaway region
are nearby, about 13 to 16km to the
G
ennadiy may be wounded in west, while a small bulge of Russian
hospital, but he is still par- forces is positioned in between.
ticipating in Ukraine’s long- The hospital in Dnipro is one of
awaited counteroffensive. In many places deep behind the lines
a crowded ward at a medical facility in where the wounded, once stabilised,
Dnipro, the commander pulls out his come for further surgery if needed
mobile phone to reveal live footage of and rehabilitation. Local sources say
green fields and tree lines in a newly the facility has been filling up with
contested part of the front. wounded soldiers.
Although he was hurt in an artillery Firm data about casualty numbers
strike overnight between 2 and 3 June, is not provided by the Ukrainians,
as Ukraine’s attacks on the south- however, although the grim reality is
ern Zaporizhzhia front stepped up, that attackers expect to suffer more
Gennadiy, 51, says that when required losses in war. Morale nevertheless
he watches the phone screen to help remains relatively high even among
soldiers on the ground. “I’m still work- the wounded.
ing, still correcting artillery fire,” he Back in Novodarivka, the soldiers
said. “This is not just so I can watch.” will not say if they have so far been
It is extraordinarily strange to be involved in the counteroffensive,
staring at live warfare, handheld. The though the impression formed is that
images are deceptively undramatic: a they are waiting for an order to go in
camera restlessly scanning, focusing with the brigade’s tanks. All leave
in and out of trees and bushes, waiting has been cancelled. The group argue
for unexpected movement or targets. the counteroffensive is going better
A series of attacks at multiple points than the slow rate of village capture
on the southern front on 5 June is con- might suggest. “I have no doubt we
sidered to have been the starting point will defeat them,” said a solider nick-
of Ukraine’s long-awaited counter- named Spielberg ,“but I don’t know if
offensive: a critical moment in the I can survive until that time.”
near 16-month war, when Kyiv needs DAN SABBAGH IS THE GUARDIAN’S
to show it has a pathway to victory DEFENCE AND SECURITY EDITOR

21
occupied by Russian troops since Ossetia, they could cut Georgia’s main conference in Bratislava by blaming
a five-day war with Georgia in 2008, east-west highway in a few minutes, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Kyiv’s
in what proved to be a dress rehearsal and be in Tbilisi within hours. With aspirations for Nato membership.
for Ukraine. Moscow’s troops bogged down in “One of the reasons was Ukraine’s
There are few soldiers to be seen in Ukraine, however, Russian tanks in the will and determination to become a
the two military bases in the hills either capital is not an immediate threat. But member of Nato. Therefore, we see
side of Khurvaleti. But Georgians many Georgians fear Russia is taking the consequences,” Garibashvili said.
fear that if Russia were to prevail in over by stealth, under the noses of an Tinatin Bokuchava, an MP from
Ukraine, Putin’s forces would be back. overwhelmingly pro-western popu- the opposition United National Move-
For now, the line marking the extent lation. Opposition parties and civil ment, said: “It is not just a rhetorical
of Russian occupation is watched by society activists say the ruling party, semblance between the Kremlin
EU monitors looking for new signs of Georgian Dream, while ostensibly messaging and Georgian Dream mes-
“borderisation”. pursuing EU membership, is turning saging, it’s also actions that … further
“Usually it starts with soft borderi- further towards Moscow. Kremlin’s goals in Georgia. Along with
sation – ditches, ribbons on trees that the erosion of pro-western sentiments
T
show demarcation between the two his month direct flights is the erosion of Georgia’s democratic
sites,” said Klaas Maes, a spokesper- have resumed between the institutions, and that is a direct guar-
son for the monitoring mission. “The two countries, after a four- antee of preventing Georgia from ever
ditches become fences, the fences year break, just as the US becoming a member of the EU or Nato.”
become barbed wire, then the wire and Europe seek to isolate Moscow The former president Mikheil
is fortified with extra watchtowers.” for its invasion of Ukraine. One of Saakashvili has been hospitalised
Five years ago, villagers woke to the first flights brought Yekaterina while serving a six-year sentence for
find Khurvaleti had been cut in two Vinokurova, the daughter of the Rus- abuse of power while in office. His
by a wire fence; later, a watchtower sian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov. aides say his condition is due to torture
was built to guard the barrier. Vil- Vinokurova and her husband came and poisoning.
lagers were separated from family, for a wedding, but protesters pick- The European parliament called for
friends and their land. A dividing line eted their hotel and the couple were his release, terming his jailing a “per-
demarcated by a fence is enforced by forced to leave, though not before they sonal vendetta”, but the government
fines and sometimes lengthy jail sen- had highlighted the rift between the ignored the appeals.
tences. The nearest crossing point is government and the people over rela- There is still a government-run Nato
50km away and open 10 days a month. tions with Russia. and EU information centre in Tbilisi’s
If the Russians did strike from South An independent advocacy group Liberty Square flying the blue flags of
for press freedom, Open Caucasus both organisations, but it has stopped
Valia Vanishvili Media, analysed the rhetoric of the putting on public advocacy events. Its
lives in the Georgian Dream chair, Irakli Kobakh- front door is permanently closed.
occupied idze, over the first five months of the The restoration of flights has
territory. Russian
full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, annoyed the US and the EU, espe-
border guards
and found 57 negative remarks about cially as Georgian Airways went on
have been using
barbed wire the west, 26 about Ukraine, and only to announce plans for transit flights
fences since their nine comments critical of Russia. Offi- through Tbilisi for Russians travelling
invasion in 2008 cially, the ruling party is pursuing a to five European destinations, further
of the Caucasus Euro-Atlantic future; it is an aspirant blunting the impact of sanctions.
region of South Nato member that is also working to An EU spokesperson pointed out
Ossetia, which respond to 12 reform recommenda- that the rate of alignment between EU
is recognised as tions from the European Commis- and Georgian decisions and declara-
a de facto state.
sion before a decision in December tions had gone from an already low
on whether Georgia should get EU 44% in 2022 to 31% so far this year.
candidate status. “This step raises concerns in terms of
At the same time, party leaders have Georgia’s EU path and its commitment
adopted rhetoric certain to alienate to align with the EU in the foreign pol-
the alliance and Brussels. In April, the icy as per the EU-Georgia association
prime minister, Irakli Garibashvili, met agreement,” the spokesperson said.
Nato’s secretary general, Jens Stolten- However, European diplomats
NICOLO VINCENZO MALVESTUTO/SOPA/ZUMA
berg, in Brussels, declaring: “Georgia’s in Tbilisi are conscious they face a

Euro-Atlantic aspiration remains our dilemma. Granting candidate status
top foreign policy priority.” Just over in December would reward the gov-
a month later he shocked a security erning party for democratic backslid-
ing. Yet denying Georgia that prospect
‘Ditches become could rob its citizens of hope and turn
Georgian Dream’s embrace of Moscow
fences, fences become from tentative to enthusiastic, trigger-
ing more street conflict.
barbed wire, then the
JULIAN BORGER IS THE GUARDIAN’S
wire is fortified’ WORLD AFFAIRS EDITOR

22
Eyewitness
Pakistan
Throwin’ shade
Schoolchildren wearing umbrella
hats to shelter from the sun make
their way home in Peshawar.
Daytime temperatures in the
north-western city have exceeded
40C this month with the dry, hot
conditions forecast to continue
ABDUL MAJEED/AFP/GETTY
23
24 Spotlight
Europe
A N A LY S I S Johnson on the day the privileges
UNITED KINGDOM committee report found he had
misled parliament over Partygate.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former
Leader to loser
business secretary who was
knighted in the ex-PM’s honours
list, described it as a “vindictive”
How Tory overreaction. Some allies were

privately threatening punitive
deselection campaigns towards Tory
MPs turned MPs who backed Monday’s motion
in favour of censuring Johnson.
their backs However, the sound and fury did

not last long.
Johnson, as he has done several
on Boris times before, appeared to fire up

outrage in his supporters before
Johnson
reining them in. There were reports
that he would continue the fight
against Rishi Sunak, conveying a
message to his successor that Eton
always beats Winchester, while his
By Rowena Mason and Ben Quinn former communications director
Guto Harri said Johnson would “go
“It’s all extremely out in a flurry of bullets”.
depressing, all this tearing Johnson told his parliamentary
each other apart,” said backers to ignore Monday’s motion
one Tory MP and former – a move that avoided a concrete
minister whose career thrived under measurement of how many MPs
Boris Johnson but who now holds no really would have turned out to
candle for his former boss. support him. In the event, only
“Most of us just want a period of seven MPs voted against the report,
silence from him so we can get on dwarfed by the 354 who voted for
with saving what we can before the it. Sunak was absent for the debate
next election. But there’s not very and vote, along with other senior
much chance of that happening.” Cabinet ministers.
This is the prevalent view among Johnson also promised his
Tory MPs, many of whom backed “unexpurgated” thoughts in a new
Johnson for leader despite knowing column for the Daily Mail, which
his flaws and history of lying. will allow him to continue to be
They have fallen out of love with a thorn in his successor’s side.
Johnson more comprehensively But last Friday’s leader column
than grassroots party members, in the newspaper urged him not to
having had ringside seats at the destroy the party’s chances at the
circus of his premiership. next election. It started with a tirade
Fewer than 10 of 350 Conservative about the “kangaroo court” that
MPs came out publicly in support of wanted to give Johnson a 90-day
suspension, but ended: “However said he thought Johnson would
aggrieved many may feel, they must become “increasingly out of touch
look forward.” Most of us and irrelevant to the political
Other right-of-centre media scene”, while Nadine Dorries, a keen
outlets were also sceptical about just want supporter who is due to resign told
Johnson’s hopes for a comeback, a period the Financial Times that she could
with the Times declaring in of silence not see the former prime minister
a pointed headline “the end of making a comeback.
the road”. Meanwhile, his former from him … Conservative MPs, though,
employer, the Telegraph, said but there’s however angry with Johnson, are
nobody had come out of the affair still not fully enamoured with Sunak
well, suggesting that MPs would
not much and his failure to make much of an
do better to focus on the economic chance impact. He is almost certain to lead
crisis than on internal party drama. of that the party into next year’s election,
One Tory MP, Tim Loughton, but the three impending byelections

25
are likely to show the Tories losing UNITED KINGDOM as a protest vote at how disgusted they
ground in their home counties are at the moment,” he said.
heartlands, the north of England A neighbour, who lived in a grand
and Johnson’s outer London seat of stone house down a winding country
Uxbridge and South Ruislip.
One of the biggest battles that
No 10 and Conservative party
In a true blue lane, said what people wanted was
“caring conservatism”, which they
were not seeing much of under the
headquarters will have to fight
against is a growing lack of belief
idyll, rumours “amateurish” Tory cabinet.
“There’s a cancer in there that’s
among MPs and party activists
that he is capable of turning things abound of working against good government,”
he said. “They are utterly obsessed
around in the polls. with celebrity, rather than the issues.
One senior Tory MP who will
not stand again said the reason
a revolution The economy is in a bad way, we’re
hanging on by our fingernails, and I’d
principally was “complete like to see politicians dealing with it.”
disillusion” with the party and the By Robyn Vinter He thought Keir Starmer’s Labour
government, on top of the likelihood looks like a government in waiting,
T
that he will lose his seat. he wealthy village of Bolton adding: “They’re bright people, not
Another Conservative MP, Percy is a tiny North York- stupid. They bring a degree of seri-
Lucy Allan, a Johnson supporter, shire idyll with one bus and ous thought, they’re more thoughtful
announced last Friday that she was where the post office is open and measured.”
standing down in her Shropshire only once a week, during a four-hour So how would he be voting? “Having
seat, and claimed that today’s window on Wednesdays. It is a place voted Tory all my life, anyone but Tory,”
Conservative party was “just not where residents have neat gardens he said. “It’s amazing how you can shift
interested in seats like Telford and fancy cars, and the friendly local from being true blue. But I don’t think
any more”. church, which will celebrate its 600th I’ve changed. It’s this immature gov-
She told the Guardian the birthday next year, is the social hub. ernment with populist leaders.”
Conservatives could have held on In other words, it is exactly the kind of Labour campaigners in Selby were
to the West Midlands seat if she was place the Tories could normally rely on joined by Wes Streeting, the shadow
not standing down, but said it would for an abundance of support. health secretary, who focused on ris-
be “nigh on impossible for a new With the Selby and Ainsty MP, ing mortgage rates when he spoke to
Conservative candidate to win in Nigel Adams – a Boris Johnson ally – voters, a good call in a place where
Telford in 2024” with a candidate having resigned this month after being nearly three-quarters of people own
who will be “starting from scratch” snubbed for a peerage, a byelection has their own home. More than a quarter of
and relying “entirely on a small core been triggered. people in the Selby council district are
of Conservative vote”. It should be cut and dried. Since the retired and the age profile is creeping
“Telford is an aspirational town. constituency was created in 2010, it up as youngsters increasingly desert
People work hard and want to get has been solidly Conservative. Adams the town for nearby York or Leeds.
on; it is small-c conservative,” had 60% of the vote in 2019, a propor- A boundary review will see it split
Allan said. “It wants to see hard tion that had increased with every gen- at next year’s general election, with
work rewarded and better prospects eral election. the posh villages such as Bolton Percy
for the next generation. It wants But on a sunny day last week, it was annexed, making the seat consider-
its public services to work and clear that something had changed. ably more winnable for Labour. It was
its trains to run on time. Get that Residents spoke in hushed tones clear their eyes were on that bigger
right and people could be won over about abandoning the Tories, keen goal. “It’s all to play for,” Streeting said.
once again.” to air their views but unwilling to be ROBYN VINTER IS THE GUARDIAN’S
No doubt the prime minister named or pictured for fear of those NORTH OF ENGLAND CORRESPONDENT
is relieved to see the back of views being exposed to neighbours.
Johnson and many of his acolytes “I’ve been a Conservative voter
from parliament – but an end but not over the last few years,” said
to the Partygate-era drama a retired man outside his cottage,
means a renewed focus on his with a garden of pink roses welcom-
own performance. With Labour ing buzzing bumblebees. “I’m fright-
▲ Boris Johnson solidly ahead, and determined ened at the state of the country. The
running near not to make missteps, Sunak has cabinet have no principles – it’s a com-
his home last a job on his hands to deal with an plete clown show and that’s before you
week. The former impending economic crisis and get into questions of integrity. They’re
prime minister’s to improve morale among his squabbling like rats in a sack.”
political power battered rank and file. Johnson (“a nasty piece of work”)
base appears to had caused damage to the country that
ROWENA MASON IS WHITEHALL EDITOR
have collapsed FOR THE GUARDIAN; BEN QUINN IS AN “will take a lifetime to undo, if it can
LEON NEAL/GETTY ACTING POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT ever be undone”. Adams was impli-
cated as “one of Boris’s bag carriers”. ▲ Bolton Percy’s picturesque but rarely
“A lot of people might vote Labour open post office CHRISTOPHER THOMOND

26 Spotlight
Europe
she wrote. “I’m sure you would not
be a member of a club that excluded
members on the basis of race, religion
or sexuality, so we urge you to call for
a new vote to allow female members.”
Her campaign has been met with
bemusement by some (mostly male)
commentators who question the need
to fight for equality at a tiny group of
elite institutions, but she argues that
the existence of men-only clubs that
have senior male lawyers and politi-
cians as members “negatively impacts
The Athenaeum women’s professional advancement”.
club, where The failed attempt by a splinter
Theresa May is faction of Athenaeum members to
a member, has resist modernising changes centred
allowed women on a desire to “restore quiet harmony”.
since 2002 Its failure suggested most members
GRANT ROONEY/ALAMY recognised that reform was necessary.
UNITED KINGDOM Benedict Cumberbatch and Hugh A faction, named the 1824 group (the
Bonneville, to allow women to join. year the club was founded), sent a
Meanwhile, at the Athenaeum letter to fellow members: “We sense
(which has allowed women as mem- that the traditional ethos of our club
Are times
bers since 2002) a movement by about is step by step being eroded and mov-
70 members to block further modern- ing towards something which appears
ising changes was rejected at its annual more like a corporate run facilities-
catching up general meeting, with an interven-

tion from the former prime minister
Theresa May, who shut down discus-
based hotel/restaurant.”
Theresa May, who like her husband,
Philip May, is an Athenaeum member,
with London sion of motions aimed at preserving
the club’s “traditional ethos”.
intervened with a procedural motion,
blocking discussion of all motions pro-
gentlemen’s Changes at Pratt’s were made “with

immediate effect” by the club’s owner,
the Earl of Burlington, William Cav-
posed by the 1824 group, according
to the historian Felipe Fernández-
Armesto, one of the 1824’s organisers.
club culture? endish, without consultation in May.

However, there will probably not be
“I was literally shouted down,” he said.
“We were trying to enshrine the per-
any perceptible change to membership ception of the club not as a business,
in the near future, because the process but as a meeting place of intellectuals.
By Amelia Gentleman of proposing and seconding new mem- A lot of us have become very dissatis-
bers takes considerable time, requiring fied very recently because the club is
M
ild signs of a potential 25 people to support a nomination by being driven at a furious pace towards
willingness to modernise writing their names in a book in the incorporation as a business. There’s a
have been observed in club and later committee approval. commercialisation happening across
some of central London’s “There has been chuntering, clubland,” Fernández-Armesto added.
establishment clubs in recent weeks, people saying, hmm we don’t like The Travellers Club (which has dip-
led by the announcement that, after this, complaining that they weren’t lomats among its members), White’s
166 years, women will be allowed to consulted,” a Pratt’s member said, but (which has never allowed women
become members of Pratt’s. he added that younger members were inside the building, with the occa-
The decision has been met mostly beginning to feel the status quo was sional exception of the late Queen
with resigned acceptance by the indefensible. “There’s a feeling that Elizabeth II), Brooks’s and Boodle’s all
25
club’s membership, which includes the legal grounds for these places to remain resistant to admitting women.
at least a dozen MPs, and has triggered be all male is quite shaky.” Even at clubs that chose to let
renewed discussion of possible reform Emily Bendell, the founder of women in decades ago, the propor-
at the hardcore handful of gentlemen’s a clothes business who has been The number of tion of female members remains
clubs that refuse to admit women. campaigning for the Garrick to change members who low. Although the Athenaeum began
Members of the Beefsteak, another its rules to admit women, wrote this must sign, on admitting women 21 years ago, its
men-only dining club populated with month to a handful of the club’s most club premises, membership remains overwhelmingly
MPs, actors and judges, believe it is prominent members, noting that eight in support of male; only 28% of the club’s 147 new
likely it will be obliged to change its years had passed since 50.5% of the a potential members were women in 2022-23, only
rules. A renewed drive by female cam- membership voted in favour of female member in one 7% were under 40 and only two new
paigners was launched this month to members, short of the two-thirds stage of Pratt’s members were under 30.
persuade members of the Garrick, majority needed for rule change. admission AMELIA GENTLEMAN IS A GUARDIAN
including Michael Gove and the actors “A second vote is long overdue,” process REPORTER

27
S PA I N expected, the conservative People’s election coincided with the trial of Defiant move
party (PP) falls well short of an abso- 12 Catalan regional government and The conservative
lute majority on 23 July and has to rely civic leaders over their role in the push leader of Spain’s
on the party’s support to take office. to secede from Spain. The November Castilla y León
region has defied
Rise of Vox
Such a scenario would have been general election, in which Vox won 52
unthinkable even five years ago – as seats, was fought amid the unrest in his far-right
would the fact that Vox is now the third Catalonia that met the jailing of nine coalition partners
Far-right largest party in Spain’s 350-seat con-

gress. Founded almost a decade ago by
a disenchanted faction of the PP who
of the 12 independence leaders.
But the party’s greatest coup came
in March last year when the PP cut a
by insisting a series
of controversial
anti-abortion
hopes to felt the conservatives had become too

soft, the party was dismissed for a long
deal with Vox to govern the region of
Castilla y León as a coalition. Now,
protocols, that
prompted the
central government
ride wave of time as a bunch of nostalgic, anachro-
nistic and unelectable cranks.
Stunts such as unfurling a massive
Vox’s leader, Santiago Abascal, has
his eye firmly on national government.
One of Vox’s greatest achievements
to launch legal
action, will not
nationalism Spanish flag on the rock of Gibraltar

did little to dispel that impression, nor
has been the normalisation of views
that would, until very recently, have
be enacted. In
January, Vox
announced
did the tweets from the party’s then- jarred in a country that has long prided
proposals that
leader in Andalucía about women who itself on being tolerant, progressive
would oblige
By Sam Jones RASCAFRÍA were too ugly to be gang-raped. and immune to nationalism.
doctors to offer
But all that started to change six “Vox is an ultra-nationalist party,”
women seeking
T
he man all but certain to be years ago when the failed push for said González. “Within Vox, you
terminations
the next mayor of Rascafría, Catalan independence pitched Spain have sectors that came from the fas- a series of new
a small town in the green and into a political and territorial crisis. cist Falange party and ultra-Catholic services, including
mist-hugged mountains an Miguel González , an El País sectors that are … absolutely against a psychological
hour north of Madrid, gives few clues journalist, said the explosion of long- abortion and gay marriage.” consultation.
about his political leanings as he lists running tensions between Catalonia’s For José Luis García, who has had a Castilla y León’s
his priorities for the coming years. pro-independence regional govern- house in Rascafría for almost 40 years, PP president,
As well as helping the hospitality ment and the Spanish state awakened much of Vox’s appeal lies in the pros- Alfonso Fernández
and livestock sectors on which the a long-dormant strain of nationalism. pect it offers them of a break from Mañueco, insisted
local economy depends, Óscar Robles The Andalucían elections of the socialist and PP duopoly that has his government
wants to improve leisure and culture December 2018, six months after Mari- governed Spain for the past five dec- would not
for Rascafría’s ill-served young people ano Rajoy’s PP government had been ades. “There’s nothing for the kids to introduce Vox’s
and to reopen a social club for its older kicked out of office via a Socialist-led do here. They’re out on the streets all proposals.
residents that has been closed since no-confidence vote, saw Vox take 12 bloody day,” he said. “I’m a Vox voter
before the Covid pandemic. seats in the regional parliament. and I’ll vote for them until they give me
“This campaign has been very hon- Four months later – in the first of a reason not to. The country is screwed
est, very on the ground and very calm,” 2019’s two general elections – Vox and they’re the only hope.” Observer
said the 59-year-old print business gained a foothold in the parliament SAM JONES IS THE GUARDIAN AND
owner. “We haven’t got into ideological after winning 24 seats. That first OBSERVER’S MADRID CORRESPONDENT
arguments with anyone. I don’t care
what colour you are; if you’re a neigh- Vox supporters
bour, I’m here to help you.” celebrate winning
The only unmistakable evidence 52 seats in the
of his party af filiation is to be found November 2019
on the double-headed placards that election
still loom over Rascafría’s cold, rainy OSCAR DEL POZO/
streets and which show his smiling AFP/GETTY
face alongside that of Rocío Monaste-

rio, Vox’s leader in the Madrid region.
The pair, and their far-right party,
have much to smile about in the wake
of last month’s municipal and regional
polls in Spain and in the run-up to
July’s snap general election. Robles’s
quiet, hyper-local campaign – in
stark contrast to the vituperative and
sometimes xenophobic electoral tone
in which Vox has come to specialise –
looks set to deliver the party its first
mayoralty in the region.
Vox is poised to enter more regional
governments and could even form
part of the national government if, as
Spotlight
Environment
NEW ZEALAND
Māori tribes with

ocean ties pledge to
‘protect what is left’
Warming waters push species away and erode cultural
practices … and it’s happening faster than anyone imagined
By Tess McClure ŌPŌTIKI
D
anny Paruru crouches at the around New Zealand, Māori people ▲ Danny Paruru, fried whole in fritters, the fish are
water’s edge, letting it wash are recording changes – subtle and a development considered a delicacy in New Zealand.
over his hand. Behind him, dramatic – with some experiencing projects manager “My dad talked about when he was a
sharp peaks mark where the losses of food-gathering prac- at Whakatōhea child, they were putting it back into the
the lands of his tribe, Te Whakatōhea, tices. With the speed and severity of Māori Trust Board river, they were just catching bucket-
once stretched before they were for- changes ramping up, tribes are racing TESS MCCLURE loads,” said Lisa Tumahai, Kaiwhaka-
cibly taken by the crown. In front of to find solutions to preserve ocean haere [chairperson] of Te Rūnanga o
him the surface of the estuary ripples. environments and carry treasured Ngāi Tahu.
“Thirty-odd years ago our kaumā– species into the future. Ngāi Tahu still fish for whitebait,
tua [elders] were realising that we were A rise in ocean temperature is but the numbers have sunk dramati-
deemed to be landless people – that accompanied by increasing acidifica- cally. According to assessments by
we didn’t have a lot of land left, after tion from carbon dioxide in the water. Niwa – New Zealand’s national climate
the lands were confiscated. So they Te Whakatōhea’s ancestral lands lie researcher – whitebait are among the
turned their eyes to the ocean,” he in the Bay of Plenty region, where the most vulnerable species to the effects
said. “Places around this area provided ocean recently remained in heatwave of the climate crisis.
our sustenance and our survival, over conditions for over a year. “We’re still a very active hunter and
many generations.” “Every Māori community around gatherer tribe,” Tumahai said. “If you
That ocean, too, is changing. On this the country that still maintains a can’t harvest māhinga kai, you can’t
shoreline, the tribe still digs for pipi, relationship with the moana [ocean] sustain yourself. You can’t bring food
a native clam. But other food sources, would notice the changes,” said Mere ‘The whales to the table.”
such as cockles and mussels, have Takoko, the Aotearoa country leader aren’t For Māori, māhinga kai, the
been shrinking or disappearing. The for Conservation International. “In gathering of traditional foods, is
estuaries and mudflats are shifting, Kaikoura, they’re going through coming. regarded as crucial culturally as well as
reshaped by shifts in currents, rising months now where the whales aren’t That has practically and economically – integral
sea levels and the runoff of farms. coming. That has never happened to welcoming visitors, and to maintain-
Even the scent of the pipi beds is before … That’s a signal.”
never ing connections to the environment,
changing. “That smell isn’t there any At the slow-running bends of the happened ancestors and traditional knowledge.
more, that I remember as a child,” Par- Arahura River, generations of Ngāi before’ “Kai [food] is a central part of life,
uru said – something of the rich, briny Tahu fishers have carried their nets our wellbeing, everything,” Paruru
smell of mud has gone, replaced by a into the water. They come for the Mere Takoko said. “So it’s our responsibility then
lighter, sandier wash of salt. whitebait, or īnanga: tiny native fish Conservation to make sure that we protect what we
As the climate heats waters that travel up the river to spawn; International have left for the future generations.”

Wildfire smoke 29
shrouds New York
XINHUA/SHUTTERSTOCK
Current chaos Ngāi Tahu has an expansive Earlier this month, the National
New Zealand has corporate arm of the tribe, involved in Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminis-
borne a series of fisheries, tourism, farming and trans- tration (Noaa) said El Niño conditions
record-breaking port. The tribe has launched a plan to are now present and will “gradually
marine heatwaves reach net zero carbon emissions: replac- strengthen” into early next year.
over the past five ing its jet boat fleet with electric, chang- Michael Mann, a climate scientist at
years, with the ing its long-haul trucks to hydrogen, the University of Pennsylvania, said
mean temperature and piloting regenerative agriculture. human-caused warming will be exac-
in some regions “We have a whakataukī, a proverb erbated by an event that typically adds
pushed up by that gives direction for our decision between 0.1C to 0.2C to the overall
more than four making, and that’s mō tātou, ā, mō kā global temperature.
degrees over the uri, ā muri ake nei: our decisions are “The global surface temperature
past 12 months. for the generation today, the genera- anomaly is at or near record levels right
The higher tion tomorrow and those out into the now, and 2023 will almost certainly
temperatures have
future not yet born yet,” Tumahai said. be the warmest year on record,” said
redistributed ocean C L I M AT E C R I SI S
For Whakatōhea, a central focus Mann. “That is likely to be true for just
species – sending
for is kuku – the green-lipped mussel. about every El Niño year in the future
warm-water fish
They have proven highly vulnerable as well, as long we continue to warm
increasingly far
to heatwaves. In 2020, hundreds of the planet with fossil fuel burning and
south, changing
the travel patterns
of whales – and,
thousands of mussels cooked to death
on a beach.
The changes brought by climate
Temperatures carbon pollution.”
This year has already seen severe,
record heatwaves cause problems in
in some cases,
contributed to
mass die-offs
breakdown “have that risk of reduc-
ing our connection to our mussels by
spike amid places from Puerto Rico to Siberia to
Spain, while blistering heat in Canada
including of sea
sponges, shellfish,
not being able to go out and have it
readily”, said Dr Kimberley Maxwell, a signs of record helped spur huge wildfires that blot-
ted the skies above New York City and
Whakatōhea scientist with the Moana Washington with toxic smoke.
penguins, salmon
and other fish
species.
Project, a series of studies funded by
the New Zealand government that
hottest year According to an update issued by
Noaa last week, the world had its
examine sea temperature changes third-warmest May in a 174-year tem-
and their effects. By Oliver Milman perature record last month, with North
The tribe has invested heavily in America and South America both hav-
G
a mussel farm in deeper waters less lobal temperatures had ing their hottest May ever recorded.
subject to temperature leaps. Over accelerated to record-set- Noaa is more circumspect about the
time, the tribe hopes to expand it into ting levels by mid-June, an prospects of an annual heat record in
thousands of hectares of open ocean. ominous sign in the climate 2023, placing the odds at about 12%,
The mussels also play a crucial envi- crisis ahead of a gathering El Niño but has said it is almost certain the year
ronmental role, says Maxwell: they that could potentially propel 2023 to will rank in the top 10 warmest and is
filter the water and their shells help become the hottest year ever recorded. very likely to be in the top five.
sequester carbon. Preliminary global average temper- In May, the World Meteorological
Takoko says Māori ties with the seas atures taken up to 14 June were nearly Organization warned that global tem-
are part of the cultural fabric. “A lot of 1C above levels previously recorded for peratures will probably soar over the
▼ Food gathering our cultural knowledge is contained the same month, going back to 1979. next five years, fuelled by El Niño as
practices that around these species – so in losing Climate scientists said it followed a well as emissions, with a new record
have sustained them, we lose part of our culture.” pattern of strengthening global heat- hot year almost guaranteed.
generations are ing that could see this year named the There is also a good chance the
TESS MCCLURE IS AOTEAROA
under threat NEW ZEALAND CORRESPONDENT hottest ever recorded, topping 2016. average temperature will exceed 1.5C
TESS MCCLURE FOR THE GUARDIAN The first half of June saw “remarkable beyond pre-industrial times, a key
global warmth”, confirmed Coperni- threshold agreed by governments at
cus, the European Union’s Earth obser- which point heatwaves, droughts,
vation arm, which said that the first few flooding and other climate impacts
days of the month even breached a 1.5C become significantly worse.
increase compared with pre-industrial An even more remarkable burst of
times. This is probably the first time warmth is occurring in the seas, with
this has happened since industrialisa- Noaa confirming a second consecutive
tion, the agency said. month of record high ocean surface
The long-term warming conditions temperatures in May. Excess heat in
caused by the burning of fossil fuels the oceans, which cover 70% of the
will probably receive a further pulse globe’s surface, influence overall
of heat via El Niño, a naturally recur- global temperatures, as well as warp
ring phenomenon where sections fish populations, bleach coral reefs and
of the Pacific Ocean heat up, typi- drive coastal sea level rise.
cally causing temperatures to spike OLIVER MILMAN IS AN ENVIRONMENT
across the world. REPORTER FOR GUARDIAN US

30 Spotlight
Technology
MEDICA L R ESE A RCH By Charlie Metcalfe
N
eil Thomas wished he could
The robot have been awake during the

operation to remove a 6cm
cancerous tumour from his
surgeon will
colon. He was one of the first people to
go under the scalpel of University hos-
pital of Wales’s new robotic systems
in June 2022. And, as the founder of
see you now...

a software company, the technology
interested him.
Thomas’s surgeon, James Ansell,
would once have stooped over his
patient’s body to perform the opera-
Keyhole surgery using robotic arms has tion. Instead, he stood behind a con-
transformed medicine – and advanced devices sole on another side of the theatre
coupled with AI might surpass doctors’ skills wearing 3D glasses. His hands grasped
two joysticks, which controlled the
four robotic arms that huddled around
Thomas’s unconscious body.
“My colleague said to me the other
day that this feels like cheating,” Ansell
said. “We’ve done it for so many years:
stood at the bedside at an awkward
angle, sweating because it’s really
physically demanding surgery. [Now,]
sitting down, there’s no pressure on
the surgeon. It’s very straightforward.”
Robots have revolutionised the prac-
tice of surgery since their introduction
to operating theatres in 2001. They can
now be found in hospitals across the
world. The most prolific device, the Da
Vinci, is used in 1.5m operations every
year, according to its California-based
manufacturer, Intuitive Surgical.
Now, combined with AI and other
novel technologies, engineers are
developing advanced robotics to her-
ald another new era for surgery. This
time, the surgeon’s role in the operating
theatre may change altogether. Some
people are referring to it as Surgery 4.0.
Although robots are put to a variety
of tasks in surgery, their use as a tool
in performing laparoscopy – other-
wise known as keyhole surgery – has
attracted the most attention within
and outside medicine. Keyhole sur-
gery reduces the time patients need to
ILLUSTRATION: PHILIP LAY/OBSERVER DESIGN
recover by operating through smaller,

keyhole-like incisions. This reduces the
chance that patients catch infections,
and so accelerates their recoveries.
Without robots, keyhole surgery
requires a very high level of skill. Sur-
geons need to operate at awkward
angles, moving their hands in the oppo-
site direction to that which they want
their instruments to move inside the
body. With robots, they can perform
CMR Surgical’s Versius
robot. The technology
takes much of the
physical strain out
more complex operations that might operation that it performs as it gathers of an operation for
otherwise demand open surgery, they more and more data. This could help the surgeon, and is
particularly useful in
suffer less physical strain, and they healthcare organisations “standardise”
keyhole surgery
require less training time. Surgeons the results of operations.
are becoming better at using them, too. Mark Slack, the chief medical officer
“Some of those patients who have at CMR Surgical, which manufactures
ultra-advanced diseases involving another surgical robot, Versius, says
blood vessels at the back of the pelvis manufacturers have failed to exploit
might still get an open operation,” said this data until now. That’s why they
Deena Harji, a colorectal surgeon in and researchers such as those involved
Manchester, “but we’re starting to see in the Star project are scrambling
some very early case studies coming to collect and process as much as
out where they’re starting to have possible. “Data, data, data,” Slack
robotic approaches applied to them, at said. “This data has had significant
least in part. When robotics started 20 untapped potential.”
years ago, that group would not have Despite the Star team’s success, it’s
been eligible for robotic operation. But still too early to forecast autonomous
as we have developed experience and surgery in hospitals any time soon. Engi-
knowledge, we can offer really com- neers talk about “levels of autonomy”.
plex patients robotic surgery.” For a robotic device, the question is not
Surgeons are physically limited by whether it is autonomous or not; the
their bodies. Their minds are limited question is how autonomous it can be.
in their capacity to learn and improve. And the Star system performed only ‘Surgeons’ today. It will take a lot more work for
That’s why engineers are hoping a small section of a complete surgery a commercial manufacturer to decide
robotic systems combined with AI without human help. In fact, it even minds are that the potential profit justifies the
might be able to surpass the skills of needed humans to apply a fluorescent limited cost of research and development. “It’s
human surgeons to produce more marker to guide its movements. in their not going to radically change medical
consistent results – with fewer errors. “You’re not supposed to call it devices overnight,” Haidegger said.
Last year, engineers at Johns Hop- autonomous surgery,” said Tamás capacity to For health organisations with strict
kins University in the US came one step Haidegger, an associate professor of learn and budgets, the cost of surgical robots has
closer to realising that goal. In what intelligent robotics at Óbuda Univer- remained a prohibitive factor. The Da
they described as one of the most sity in Budapest. “This is automating
improve’ Vinci costs about $2m (the company
delicate procedures in the practice of one particular surgical subtask.” would not confirm a specific price,
surgery, their Smart Tissue Autono- stating that it depends on the buyer’s
H
mous Robot (Star) sutured the ends aidegger makes what he individual requirements). CMR Sur-
of a severed intestine together in four believes is another impor- gical’s Versius costs between $1.5m
pigs – while they were under anaes- tant distinction – between and $1.9m. This does not include the
thetic. According to the engineers, it the kind of complexity added cost of training and mainte-
performed better than a human sur- required for a system like the Star and nance, which can be 10% of the initial
geon would have. the devices used in hospitals. Standard investment every year.
1.5m
“Our findings show that we can laboratory best practice in research Whether they prove cost-effective
automate one of the most intricate and environments often falls short of the or not, surgeons agree that robotic sys-
delicate tasks in surgery,” Axel Krieger, safety and design standards of clinical tems have made it easier for them to
an assistant professor of mechanical settings, he says. The number of perform more complex procedures,
engineering, and the project’s director, For use in clinical environments, operations the while minimising scarring for their
said at the time. manufacturers need to be able to manufacturer of patients. Neil Thomas, the former tech
The Star’s procedure was not the first explain exactly how their devices the most prolific entrepreneur with a tumour that was
time a robot had performed with a level work, which continues to prove a surgical robot, removed from his colon in June 2022,
of autonomy in surgery. The TSolution- challenge for people who develop the Da Vinci, was able to leave hospital only two
One device (formerly called RoboDoc), AI. There’s also the impending intro- says it is used days after his operation.
for example, is approved by the US Food duction of AI-specific regulation that in each year Thomas had been training for an
and Drug Administration to prepare governments across the world, includ- Ironman triathlon at the time of the
$2m
human limbs for joint replacements ing the UK and EU, are developing. diagnosis. Three months after the
according to a surgeon’s plan. What Autonomous surgical robots will need operation (on doctor’s orders), he
makes the Star’s procedure special was to comply with those too. was able to return to training. First a
that it performed its task using keyhole According to Haidegger, this all Approximate 1.5km run, and then a few more three
surgery – a world first. amounts to a very expensive pro- cost of the Da days later. The robot used in his opera-
Surgical robotics presents a good cess for manufacturers to prove that Vinci (the firm tion had left only a small collection
opportunity for engineers to introduce their devices meet the regulatory would not quote of almost imperceptible scars across
autonomy because of the vast volume requirements. Each device needs a specific price, his abdomen. “You can’t see a thing,”
of data that devices can collect. An to gain approval for each new field saying it depends he said. “And recovery, I thought, was
intelligent system, once developed, can of surgery, one at a time, which has on buyers’ excellent.” Observer
use this data to teach itself. In theory, already decelerated the adoption requirements) CHARLIE METCALFE WRITES ABOUT
it could even become better with each of the human-operated robots used SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY

32 Spotlight
Asia Pacific
Chinese news Wang stressed the need to reverse
reports Antony the downward spiral in bilateral ties,
Blinken’s meeting but also blamed the current low point
with Xi Jinping on Washington’s “erroneous percep-
GREG BAKER/AFP/GETTY tion of China”.
Moritz Rudolf, a fellow at Yale Law
School’s Paul Tsai China Center, said
Wang’s confrontational tone showed
“the great level of mistrust of Beijing
vis-a-vis the US”. However, given the
bleak state of US-China relations, the
mere fact that the visit had taken place
was a positive sign, he said.
Blinken’s trip to China was initially
planned for February but was post-
poned when a balloon, allegedly a
Chinese spy balloon, flew over the US,
sparking a controversy. China insisted
it was a weather balloon that had been
blown off course.
U N I T E D S TAT E S/C H I NA in-depth discussions,” Xi said at the Given the fraught relations, expec-
start of the meeting at the Great Hall of tations of the meetings were gener-
the People, in comments broadcast on ally low. Both countries hold hardened
Chinese state television. “I hope that positions on a range of issues including
‘Candid’ talks
through this visit, Mr Secretary, you trade, Xinjiang and Taiwan. But both
will make more positive contributions sides showed a willingness to talk,
to stabilising China-US relations,” Xi with Qin and Blinken agreeing to main-
but Blinken’s added, addressing Blinken.

The rest of the discussion was held
tain high-level exchanges and expand
cultural and educational exchanges.
Beijing visit
behind closed doors. The Chinese read- The US, despite adopting a hardline
out said the two sides “made progress” bipartisan stance on China domesti-
and reached agreement on specific cally, believes it needs to draw its Euro-
could rein issues, without offering further details.

Despite signs of positivity, Blinken
pean allies towards a consensus posi-
tion built around the proposition that
in tensions
acknowledged there were issues on the west must de-risk its relations with
which the two countries disagreed China rather than seek to decouple the
profoundly and even vehemently. Chinese and western economies.
China rejected a proposal to set up Many European countries are join-
communication between the Chinese ing the US in seeking to screen Chi-
By Rachel Cheung HONG KONG and US militaries. “I want to empha- nese investments in sensitive areas,
and Patrick Wintour sise that none of this gets resolved in while insisting it is acceptable to
one visit, one trip, one conversation. cooperate with China on issues such as
T
he US secretary of state, It’s a process,” Blinken said. health, climate change, global macro-
Antony Blinken, wrapped up Blinken’s visit was the first by a US economic stability and trade – issues
a rare trip to Beijing where secretary of state in five years. Ten- that are not regarded as essential to
he met President Xi Jinping, sions between the world’s two largest national security.
concluding a high-stakes visit aimed at economies have soared in recent years Blinken spoke to his South Korean
stabilising spiralling relations. over issues including trade, techno- and Japanese counterparts before the
Speaking at a press briefing in logy and Taiwan, with Joe Biden and trip to reassure them of his intentions
Beijing before his departure on Mon- his predecessor, Donald Trump, call- ‘I want to and the parameters of the discussions.
day, Blinken said he had “an important ing Beijing the most serious threat to The meetings could herald more
conversation” with Xi during the long-term US global primacy. emphasise diplomatic engagement between the
35-minute encounter and stressed Earlier on Monday, Blinken held that none US and China, laying the ground for a
it was the responsibility of both extensive discussions with China’s top of this gets Xi-Biden meeting, for instance, at the
countries to find a path forward. diplomat, Wang Yi, at the Diaoyutai Apec summit that will take place in San
“In every meeting, I stressed that state guest house. On Sunday, he held resolved Francisco in November, Rudolf said.
direct engagement and sustained talks with China’s foreign minister, Qin in one visit “The reopening of bilateral com-
communication at senior levels is the Gang, for more than seven hours. munication channels, including on
best way to responsibly manage our According to a Chinese readout,
… it’s a security-related matters, would be a
differences and ensure competition Wang said China-US relations were process’ step in the right direction,” he said.
does not veer into conflict,” Blinken at “a critical juncture” and called on
RACHEL CHEUNG IS A JOURNALIST
said. “I heard the same from my the US to make a choice “between Antony Blinken BASED IN HONG KONG; PATRICK
Chinese counterparts.” dialogue or confrontation, coopera- US secretary WINTOUR IS THE GUARDIAN’S
“The two sides have had candid and tion or conflict”. of state DIPLOMATIC EDITOR

Spotlight 33
North America
C A NA DA JR Adams, a member of the Lytton Emergency call relatively short, and reconstruction
First Nation, bore witness to the More than 200 is often complicated by the logistical
destruction of his own community. homes have challenges of bringing large crews to
And when he saw the recent news been destroyed isolated communities. Wildfires also
already this year.
Fire alarm
coverage of wildfires in Nova Scotia, pose unique challenges, such as the
painful memories came flooding back. And with warmer way vinyl siding and plastics melt into
“My heart dropped. I knew there and drier months the ground, turning the soil toxic.
Questions was nothing I could do at that moment,

except just feel for the people who lost
their homes,” he said.
still to come, the
experiences of
those who saw their
In Halifax, where 200 buildings
were recently destroyed by wildfires,
contractors warn it could take three
grow over Crowston, Adams and scores of
others were homeless for months.
lives destroyed in
previous wildfires
years to rebuild.
“We just cannot keep this up. We’re
raise larger
disaster Earlier this year, the Fraser Valley
Current reported on the slow efforts to
rebuild Lytton. The village “remains a
questions about
both Canada’s
hitting a point where we’re going to
spend more on recovery than we
are on building new construction in
response flattened heap of dirt and concrete”, it

reported, and residents complained of
ability to rebuild
after disaster, and
its commitment
Canada,” said Glenn McGillivray, the
managing director of the Institute for
bureaucratic delays. Work crews have Catastrophic Loss Reduction.
to victims once
found Indigenous artefacts at excava- While the community of Lytton is
the flames are
By Leyland Cecco TORONTO tion sites, further slowing the process, under the jurisdiction of the province,
extinguished.
and next to nothing has been rebuilt. the Lytton First Nation reserve is
M
ona Crowston had only With hotter and larger fires projected under federal oversight, speeding up
minutes to gather her to sweep across Canada in the coming elements of the rebuilding process.
belongings before the years, the collective failure to rebuild In September, Adams got word that
wildfire that had been in Lytton raises questions about the the modular homes on the Lytton First
burning for days at the edge of her preparedness of governments to Nations reserve were ready.
town swept down towards her house. respond to large crises. “We’re finally all together, back on
The 84-year-old already had a suitcase “I spent 62 years in Lytton. And I our reserves,” said Adams. “It’s like
packed, just in case. was hoping to rebuild. I just wanted we’re taking our land back.”
“I made sure to tidy up what I to get home and get on with my life. I But widespread news coverage of
could before we left. The last thing I miss it terribly,” said Crowston. fires blazing across the country means
wanted was to return home and have But as the months dragged on, the looming threat of future wildfires
a messy room,” she said. She and her Crowston came to the sad conclusion ▼ Charred is never far from Adams’ mind.
husband left on 30 June 2021. Months there was no going back. buildings after “I think a lot of people don’t realise
later, when they finally returned to the In November, she and her husband a wildfire swept how quickly things can change and how
site of their home of 47 years, all they bought a home in the town of Ashcroft, through Lytton,
it can change your life,” said Adams.
found was charred and crumbled foun- an hour north of Lytton in a region still British Columbia “People need to understand how fast
dations. Most of the Canadian town of within the range of wildfires. in 2021 Mother Nature can take control.”
Lytton had also been destroyed. Canada’s climate means that the JENNIFER GAUTHIER/ LEYLAND CECCO COVERS CANADA FOR
This year’s spring wildfire sea- country’s construction season is REUTERS THE GUARDIAN
son has been the worst on record in
Canada, with more than 5m hectares
of land burned – a figure higher than
the entire 2016, 2019, 2020 and 2022
seasons combined.
In the days leading up to the Lytton
fire, the surrounding region of British
Columbia had broken heat records – at
one point nearly reaching 50C.
When winds whipped the fire into
Lytton, it only took 30 minutes for
most of it to be destroyed. When resi-
dents returned briefly to tour the dam-
age, they found the main commercial
strip had been turned to dust. Homes
and vehicles had seemingly vaporised.
Nearly two years after the fire,
similar conditions have set in across
Canada, with typically damp regions
left bone-dry. Unseasonably hot
weather has shattered records in
dozens of communities. And areas
that typically don’t experience roaring
blazes have been left charred.
35
The life and work of Kenyan novelist

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has intersected
with many of the past century’s biggest
events. At 85, he reflects on his long,
uncompromising life in writing
By Carey Baraka
PORTRAIT BY MICHAEL TYRONE DELANEY

36 Grand old man of letters
Approach Getting the napkins

In October, I flew to Irvine, California, to meet I had never met Ngũgĩ before. I had seen him only once, at the launch
the novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. He is a giant of of a translation project in Nairobi in 2017. Today he was lounging in a
African writing, and to a Kenyan writer like me he shirt, trousers, slippers and a bathrobe. He bade me join him at the din-
looms especially large. Alongside writers such as ing table, where he was doing some work. Before we talked, he said, he
Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, he was part of a literary scene that needed to know more about me, to know what my motivations were.
flourished in the 1950s and 60s, during the last years of colonialism on He asked me to tell him about my writing. I talked about some articles
the continent. If Achebe was the prime mover who captured the deep I’d written, and mentioned the novel I had been working on for a few
feeling of displacement that colonisation had wreaked, and Soyinka years. He asked if I was making enough from my writing to earn a living.
the witty, guileful intellectual who tried to make sense of the collision I told him I was. “That’s good,” he said. “I was never able to do that.”
between African tradition and western ideas of freedom, then Ngũgĩ We were interrupted by the doorbell. Two people came in: they
was the unabashed militant. His writing was direct and cutting, his were there to do his cleaning, cooking and shopping. In a few hours,
books a weapon – first against the colonial state, and later against the he told me, a health aide would come to check his vitals. In 1995, he
failures and corruption of Kenya’s post-independence ruling elite. was diagnosed with prostate cancer, which he survived, despite a
I was six or seven the first time I read Ngũgĩ, borrowing a children’s grim medical forecast that gave him three months to live. In December
book he’d written from my primary school’s library. When I was 10, 2019, he underwent triple bypass heart surgery. Around the same
I came across a worn copy of The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, a play he period he began to suffer from kidney failure, the same condition
co-wrote with Micere Githae Mugo, on my grandfather’s bookshelf. that killed one of his brothers. By the time I visited, he wasn’t able
I read it again and again, captivated by the story of this to leave the house much, apart from his
leader of Kenya’s independence struggle challenging three dialysis appointments each week.
the right of a colonial court to try him. (Kimathi, who led Violence has loomed over much of
the armed rebellion against the British, was executed in
1957.) I studied Ngũgĩ all through high school, as have
He has Ngũgĩ’s past, yet now he lives a relatively
genteel existence in American suburbia.
generations of Kenyan students. My uncle, an academic, become Since 2002, he has been a professor of
wrote a book about him, which I read as a teenager with- comparative literature at the University of
out properly understanding it. It was about a revolution known not California, Irvine, where his wife, Njeeri,
Ngũgĩ had led at the University of Nairobi in the late 60s,
which had resulted in the university dropping English just as a also works. He has nine children – six from
his first marriage – and many grandchil-
literature as a course of study, and replacing it with one
that positioned African literatures, oral and written, at the
novelist but dren, and he talks to his family every day.
His phone rang, his assistant on the
centre. A decade later, Ngũgĩ famously ceased writing his
novels in English, instead doing all his creative work in
as a major line. Ngũgĩ was supposed to be doing
a video call with a group of South Afri-
the language he grew up speaking, Gĩkũyũ. I fell in love postcolonial can academics who wanted to discuss
with the idea of Ngũgĩ as a fighter for African literature, decolonisation. Ngũgĩ told her he had
and decided to go to the University of Nairobi and majored theorist been unable to log in. “But I have a young
in the very degree he had fought for. There, in the early person here with me,” he said. “Baraka.
2010s, there were even more Ngũgĩ novels and plays to He’ll be able to help me.” He handed
write papers and sit exams on. me the phone.
So much of the 20th century seems contained within Ngũgĩ’s life.
He was born just before the second world war, when Kenya was still Normalised abnormality
a British colony. He grew up under the shadow of a violent war for
independence. He went to university in Uganda, at a time of political After the call, I played Ngũgĩ a song that had become a hit in Kenya in
and literary ferment across Africa, and he came of age as first Uganda the months after the 2022 Kenyan general elections. The song, Vaida,
(in 1962), then Kenya (1963), gained their independence. Over the years is in Lunyore, a language neither Ngũgĩ nor I speak. Yet pretty soon
that followed, he saw with horror how people’s pre-independence he was dancing to it, bopping his head, shifting his shoulders on his
hopes were dashed. He was thrown in jail by the Kenyan government chair. In his day, he said, a song in an African language would not have
for his writing. After his release, he continued his writing and political become a national hit. “During my time, if you heard an African song
activism, first in Kenya, then in exile in London, then, finally, in the on the radio, you switched it off. What you were waiting for was Jimmie
US, where he has been a professor of literature for the past 30 years. Rodgers,” he said. This was part of what he called the “normalised
He has become known not just as a novelist but as a major postcolonial abnormality” of the postcolonial condition. The colonised had their
theorist, whose 1986 essay collection, Decolonising the Mind – an language taken from them, and a foreign language put in its space.
attack on the hold of colonial languages, such as French and English, “But what of Kenyan English or Nigerian English?” I asked him.
over former colonies – has become a set text for university students “Aren’t these now local languages?” He looked at me, aghast. “It’s like
around the world. It is now an annual tradition to predict that Ngũgĩ the enslaved being happy that theirs is a local version of enslavement,”
will finally receive this year’s Nobel prize for literature, and then to he said. “English is not an African language. French is not. Spanish is
lament that it hasn’t happened. not. Kenyan or Nigerian English is nonsense. That’s an example of
Approaching Ngũgĩ’s house in California, I felt nervous. He had normalised abnormality. The colonised trying to claim the coloniser’s
suggested that I stay with him during my time in Irvine. His health language is a sign of the success of enslavement. It’s very embarrassing.
was poor and he would be having surgery, he said. If I stayed, it would I read someone saying he is writing in French so that he can subvert it.
be easier to speak. It was a strange arrangement. But I wanted as I thought, wait a minute. He is the one being subverted.”
much time with him as possible. And now here I was, pulling into As he spoke, I cringed. I wondered what Ngũgĩ made of the fact that
his driveway, walking up to his redbrick bungalow at the end of a I wrote in English, or that I, a Kenyan writer, was here to profile him on
cul-de-sac and ringing the bell. assignment from a British newspaper. Was I also one of the enslaved?

37
the entire village and moved its inhabitants to a fortified new site
where the activities of the inhabitants were closely monitored. It
wasn’t quite a prison camp, because the inhabitants could leave,
but as Ngũgĩ writes: “For all practical purposes, the line between the
prison, the concentration camp and the village had been erased.” At
night, soldiers would pull villagers from their homes, interrogating
and sometimes executing those who they believed supported the LFA.
James and Ngũgĩ

Ngũgĩ’s career is often divided neatly into two parts. There’s the first
Ngũgĩ, whose work as a published writer began at Makerere University
in Uganda in the late 50s and continued until the end of the 60s. This
Ngũgĩ was called James Ngugi (sometimes JT Ngugi) and he wrote in
English. His novels were political and critical of the colonial state, but
subtly so. His protagonists grappled with the effects of colonialism,
but saw western education as a tool that could be harnessed against
the colonists; they weren’t explicitly anti-Christian and dreamed
of uniting local traditions with the best western ideals. Ultimately,
though, they failed.
Limuru, where it all begins The second Ngũgĩ emerged in the 70s. Ngũgĩ dropped his English
name, and later rejected English as his primary literary language.
One morning a few years ago, I was hiking near the place where Ngũgĩ Influenced by his reading of Marx and Frantz Fanon, in these later
was born and grew up: Limuru, a town 30km from Nairobi, Kenya’s works he began to engage much more directly with the state, with
capital. My guide stopped. “Look at all this,” he said. “This used to class, with education, with every aspect of postcolonial life. Petals
be my grandfather’s land.” Around us were rows of neatly manicured of Blood, published in 1977, attacked the new political elite in inde-
tea plants, waiting to be picked. I asked him if the family had tried to pendent Kenya. It was the first of his works published as Ngũgĩ wa
recover their land. Yes, he said, but state power had been so firmly Thiong’o, and the last novel he wrote in English. In this novel, educa-
against them that there was little they could do. tion is no longer a tool of liberation; it is the educated elite who betray
Land has been the centre of politics in Kenya since the end of the the people. This was the first salvo from what the critic Nikil Saval
19th century, when Britain established a protectorate here. Kenya was has described as “the rageful midperiod Ngũgĩ, who excoriates the
envisioned as a settlers’ frontier, where wealthy Europeans would Kenyan bourgeoisie, with their golf clubs and other ersatz recreations
hunt, farm and live a gilded existence in “wild” Africa. In places such of the colonial world they once abjured”.
as Limuru, the land the British had grabbed from African communi- James Ngugi had been obsessed with the art of writing. He had
ties was used to grow tea and coffee, the cash crops that financed the deliberated over style, about where to place a word, where to place
administration of the colony. Ngũgĩ was born in 1938, to a peasant a sentence. His writing hero was Joseph Conrad. “The majesty and
family who belonged to Kenya’s largest ethnic group, the Agĩkũyũ, musicality of his well-structured sentences had so thrilled me as a
which today accounts for around 20% of the population. The young writer that I could cure a bout of writer’s
family had been rendered destitute by these landgrabs, and block simply by listening to the opening bars of
Ngũgĩ’s father descended into alcoholism and cruelty towards Straight talk Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or reading the open-
his wives and 24 children. It was Ngũgĩ’s mother, Wanjikũ wa Ngũgĩ wa ing pages of Conrad’s Nostromo,” he later wrote.
Ngũgĩ, who encouraged the children to go to school, even as Thiong’o at his For Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, style was secondary to his
the guerrilla war against the British raged around them from home in Irvine, politics. His work attacked western religion and
the 1940s onwards. California education, language and the betrayal of Kenya by
The story of the Land and Freedom Army is the foundation MICHAEL TYRONE the post-independence leadership.
DELANEY
of much of Ngũgĩ’s most important work. Some of his family The first Ngũgĩ wrote A Grain of Wheat; the sec-
were part of the LFA-led resistance in Limuru, while others ond Ngũgĩ revised it decades later. In one of the
collaborated with the British. most important scenes of the novel, a group of
One day, when Ngũgĩ was a teenager, he and a friend were caught LFA fighters attack and rape a British settler. This scene only exists
up in a police search. In the daytime, local informants, their heads cov- in the first edition. Later, when Ngũgĩ revised the text, the rape was
ered in white hoods with narrow eyeslits, would walk the street with removed and the LFA fighters came to seem purer in their actions.
British soldiers and squads comprised of Home Guards – a paramilitary When I asked Ngũgĩ why he had made this edit, he told me: “There
force drawn from loyalist members of the Agĩkũyũ community and led was never a single instance of any white person in Kenya being so
by junior colonial officers. This group would forcibly detain whoever raped. A historian pointed out this to me, and I did not want my novel
they met, regardless of age, and the hooded informants would identify to lie about Kenya’s history of struggle.”
LFA members and sympathisers by a nod of the head. Ngũgĩ and his
friend were interrogated by the British officers but eventually let go. The language question
As they walked away, not daring to look back, they heard gunshots
and screams: executions of people who had either been identified Ngũgĩ’s health aide came at around midday. After she had left, he and
by the informants or refused to answer questions. I ate lunch together, his food a mushy, saltless mix of chicken and
A few months later, in 1955, after his first term at the elite boarding vegetables. “This is what my body can handle now,” he said. As he
school Alliance – for which his family had scrimped to pay tuition, ate, we continued to talk, our conversation less the interview that I’d
before he was awarded a scholarship – Ngũgĩ returned to his home planned than a discourse on colonialism, art and language.
village and made a shocking discovery. The British had destroyed After the meal, he stood up from the dining table and walked

38 Grand old man of letters
to his bedroom. Ngũgĩ, who has lost height he could barely afford From the start, the conference was controversial. This was an
to lose to a stoop, walks haltingly in shuffling steps, with his hands attempt to define African literature, yet novelists and poets who had
folded behind his back. Sometimes, he uses a walking stick, and on long been working in African languages such as Swahili, Igbo, Zulu
even rarer occasions a walker. He seems to dress entirely in a collec- and Amharic were left out. The fiercest criticism of the conference
tion of never-ending kitenge shirts with embroidered collars, which came from the Nigerian critic Obi Wali.
are easy to move or remove when he needs to change his dressing for Writing in 1963, Wali declared that true African literature could only
the catheter in his belly. be written in African languages. In his view, any African literature
Ngũgĩ has a slow, slightly croaky voice. He talks in a Gĩkũyũ accent that was written in colonial languages could only be, at best, a minor
mixed with traces of the English one he picked up while living in branch of European literature. “The student of Yoruba for instance,
England. He peppers his sentences with “Oh my God”, which he has no play available to him in that language, for Wole Soyinka, the
uses to register incredulity at opinions he takes to be absurd. He has most gifted Nigerian playwright at the moment, does not consider
a way of being dismissive without being rude, taking a strong stance Yoruba suitable,” Wali wrote.
without quite silencing you. He is quick to laugh, and when he laughs Ngũgĩ struggled with Wali’s criticism. He had begun working on his
at something he finds ridiculous, he buries his face in his hands, third novel, A Grain of Wheat, and would shortly after go to Leeds Uni-
while shaking his head and saying: “Oh my God”. When he laughs at versity, on a British Council scholarship, to do postgraduate research
something he finds funny, he lifts his hand to the top of his head, but on the Barbadian writer George Lamming. Wali’s argument “kept on
then winces, for that movement can be painful for him. Sometimes, pursuing me through Leeds and after”, wrote Ngũgĩ in Decolonising
the laugh can descend into a hacking cough, which exacerbates the the Mind. “I underwent a crisis. I knew whom I was writing about,
pain of the incisions he has in his belly from multiple surgeries. but whom was I writing for?”
Ngũgĩ, ever the professor, shared his thoughts on his favourite The question of English continues to haunt Ngũgĩ. “I can never
topics: language and class. “I don’t see the world through ethnic- think of my first novels without thinking of the language issue,” he
ity or race,” he told me at one point. “Race can come into it, but as told me. “How could I have these African characters and have them
a consequence of class.” He gave the example of the US supreme all speaking perfect English? When I wrote my first book, I wrote it in
court justice Clarence Thomas. “He’s as black as me, but every law a language my mother couldn’t access. I rewarded her for taking me to
he passes is against black people – but not the black middle class. school by writing in a language she can’t read or write.” His voice went
The black working class.” soft. “Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m just wrong about the language
Outside, it turned dark, the harsh California sun fading into dusk. issue.” He paused. “No, I don’t think I’m wrong.”
Ngũgĩ tapped the table. “In Gĩkũyũ, this is metha,” he said. “Where
is this word from?” K6,77
“Kiswahili,” I said.
“And where do the Swahili borrow it from?” The next morning, when I came out from my bedroom, Ngũgĩ was up
I didn’t know. already. He was seated at the dining table, sheaves of papers around
“From the Portuguese,” he said. “This is how languages work; they him, his laptop open, on the phone with one of his kids. He asked me
borrow from each other.” what else we should discuss for my story. I asked him about Jomo
“Is it possible to have multiple first languages?” I asked. “I’ve been Kenyatta, the first president of independent Kenya.
thinking of English, Kiswahili, Sheng’ and Dholuo as all being my first As a boy, Kenyatta had been a hero to Ngũgĩ because of his fight
languages, since I speak all of them with native fluency.” for Gĩkũyũ land rights. After he became president, Kenyatta reneged
“I think,” said Ngũgĩ, “you are lying to yourself.” on his promises. Rather than restoring stolen land
to its rightful owners, he and his cronies acquired
The conference Steady gaze more for themselves. Kenyatta, Ngũgĩ told me, had
Ngũgĩ as a merely wanted to replace the colonialists at the
In 1959, Ngũgĩ arrived in Uganda’s capital, Kampala, to begin student in Leeds top, rather than doing away with the entire colonial
his studies in English at east Africa’s most prestigious uni- circa 1966 structure.
versity, Makerere. To him, Kampala was a revelation. This LILLY LIBRARY,
UNIVERSITY OF
was, as he puts it, his “first encounter with a modern city INDIANA
dominated by black presence”. At the time, it was the literary
capital of east Africa, partly thanks to the university, which
produced a generation of extraordinary writers. Alongside
Ngũgĩ were the distinguished critic Peter Nazareth, the Kenyan poet
Jonathan Kariara, the Ugandan writer John Nagenda, and Pio and
Elvania Zirimu, who met at Makerere and later married.
In June 1962, the university hosted an event that would prove
formative not just for Ngũgĩ personally but for the future of African
literature. The African Writers’ Conference was the first organised
gathering of writers from across the continent. Ngũgĩ was thrilled to
hang out with authors he admired – Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka,
John Pepper Clark, Ezekiel Mphahlele (later Es’kia) – and to guide
the American poet Langston Hughes, who had also been invited,
through Kampala. Discussions revolved around the great issue of the
moment, decolonisation, and the place of African literature within this
new paradigm. Could the writer address political questions without
compromising their artistic impulses? Was there even such a thing as
African writing, or was there only Ugandan writing, Ghanaian writing,
South African writing, and so on?

39
“To Kenyatta,” he said, “having black landowners, black police was in London for the launch of Devil on the Cross. He was warned
officers, a black government – that was freedom.” that he would be killed if he returned, and so, for the next few years,
In 1977, Ngũgĩ published the furious novel Petals of Blood, a clear London became his home. In 1986, he published Matigari, the only
attack on Kenyatta’s government. But it was a different work, the same novel he would write during this time in England. In the book, an
year, that led to his arrest. The play Ngaahika Ndenda (I Will Marry eponymous protagonist organises against a president who has
When I Want), which Ngũgĩ had co-written, was no more obviously betrayed the country’s dreams, a barely disguised stand-in for Moi.
critical of the ruling classes in Kenya than the novel, but there was Moi, believing the novel’s protagonist to be a real person, ordered
one crucial difference: as Abdulrazak Gurnah writes, because the play the arrest of Matigari. When the president learned the character was
was written in Gĩkũyũ, it “was comprehensible to ordinary citizens, fictional, the novel was banned.
and was therefore ‘subversive’”. In 1989, Ngũgĩ moved to the US for a professorship at Yale, marking
In Kamĩtĩ maximum-security prison, Ngũgĩ was held in a detention the start of a stay in American universities that eventually led to him
block with 18 other political prisoners. In his prison memoir, he writes: to California, where he joined UC Irvine in 2002. That same year,
“Here I have no name. I am just a number in a file: K6,77.” There, on Moi’s rule ended, and in 2004 Ngũgĩ visited Kenya for the first time
rolls of toilet paper, he began to write his first novel in Gĩkũyũ, Caitaani since 1982 to launch his new novel Mũrogi wa Kagogo (Wizard of
mũtharaba-Inĩ (Devil on the Cross). The process was extremely diffi- the Crow). Two weeks into his visit, he and his wife were attacked
cult “because I was breaking away from my dependence on English”, by an armed gang, and his wife was raped. “It wasn’t a simple
Ngũgĩ told the Paris Review in 2022. “The main problem I faced in robbery,” Ngũgĩ has said. “It was political – whether by remnants of
prison was that there was this little devil who used to come to me – a the old regime or part of the new state outside the main current […]
devil dressed in English robes. There is almost no written tradition the whole thing was meant to humiliate, if not eliminate, us.” Yet
in Gĩkũyũ, so I’d be struggling away with the vocabulary he continued to return to Kenya in the
– some word like imperialism, say – and this little devil years that followed. He steadfastly holds
would come to me and say, ‘Oh, why struggle so hard? I’m on to his citizenship, and pays attention
right here …’ There’s a slipperiness to the Gĩkũyũ language.
I’d write a sentence, read it the following morning, and
‘I rewarded to Kenyan politics.
find that it could mean something else. There was always my mother The language question,
the temptation to give up. But another voice would talk
to me, in Gĩkũyũ, telling me to struggle.” for taking me continued
Underground
to school by In the months after I left Ngũgĩ’s house,
having scrubbed from my memory as
Early in the morning on my fourth day staying with Ngũgĩ,

writing in a much of the medical stuff as I can, I’ve been
thinking about his legacy, and wondering
his surgery went ahead as planned, and there was no need
to stay at hospital after it was done. At 11am, his grandson
language that what it means that, despite the success of
Decolonising the Mind, its central exhor-
Miringu wheeled him back into his home. Ngũgĩ wanted she is unable tation – to write creatively in African lan-
to go outside so that he could sit on the patio and feel the guages – has remained largely unheeded.
sun on his face, but Miringu overruled him. “You should to read’ Even Ngũgĩ’s own children’s literary
lie down and rest,” he said. Ngũgĩ agreed to go to his room, careers exist largely in English. Four of
but called me in. “We need to talk some more,” he said. his children – Tee Ngũgĩ, Nducu wa Ngũgĩ,
He was in pain. Lying in bed, he called one of his Wanjiku wa Ngũgĩ and Mũkoma – are
daughters-in-law, who is a doctor. When he put the phone down, novelists, with Tee living in Kenya, and the rest in the US.
his breathing was heavy, and his right hand was on his belly, resting I asked Ngũgĩ if the message of Decolonising the Mind had failed.
on top of the surgical incision. He asked me to remind him where we’d “No,” he said. “The problem has always been the negative govern-
left the conversation the previous day, then he began to talk about ment policies towards African languages and lack of publishers in
an underground movement he had been part of in Kenya in the 70s. African languages.”
The December Twelve Movement (DTM) had been formed at a Now I’m thinking back to Ngũgĩ’s books. Across many of his novels
conference of Marxist-Leninists held in Nairobi in 1974. There were and his plays, the action revolves around a saviour-protagonist –
strict requirements for joining, with the members instructed to be whether the educated hero in his early books who wants to unite
disciplined. For instance, not being punctual was enough to get you society, or the radical who wants revolution. What unites these pro-
rejected. “Because it was life and death,” Ngũgĩ explained. A key tagonists is the failure of their efforts. They are rejected by the people
part of the DTM remit was intellectual warfare against the state, they seek to save, and most of them are killed. For a writer whose
publishing openly critical literature and distributing anti-government radical politics are so evident in his books, he has always seemed
leaflets across the country. Ngũgĩ told me that the play that led to his pessimistic about the success of his characters’ quests.
imprisonment was a DTM project. Both Ngũgĩ and his co-writer were The morning I left his house, I had found Ngũgĩ up already, at his
members of a cell based in Limuru. table, his laptop open in front of him. He asked me if my cab was here
In 1978, when Kenyatta died, he was succeeded by his vice- yet. I told him that I’d just ordered it, and it was a few minutes away.
president, Daniel arap Moi. Desperate to win popular approval, the “Do you have everything you need?” “Yes,” I said. “Don’t forget to
new president released Ngũgĩ and other political prisoners, but soon write in Dholuo,” he said. “I know it’s hard at first, but you have to try.”
his government became as autocratic as Kenyatta’s. In 1982, there was My phone beeped. My cab was here. I went to my room, wheeled
an attempted coup against the government. I asked Ngũgĩ if the DTM out my suitcase, and put my heavy coat, unused these last three days,
was involved. “No,” he said. “DTM believed that politics led the gun, on my shoulder. I opened the door, shook his hand, and walked out
not the gun leading politics.” To them, the only valid way of initiating of the grand old Kenyan man of letters’ house ••
political change was by popular action, not by military action. CAREY BARAKA IS A WRITER FROM KISUMU, KENYA
In the wake of the failed coup, DTM members were nonetheless Reporting for this project was supported by a Silvers Grant for
arrested en masse, while others fled the country. At the time, Ngũgĩ Work in Progress from the Robert B Silvers Foundation

40

41
This is going to hurt (for ever)

In 2020, Oliver Franklin-Wallis felt an ache in his arms.
Three years on, he is one of the millions of people who are
forced to live with chronic pain that may never go away
ILLUSTRATIONS BY TIMO LENZEN

42 This is going to hurt (for ever)
AIN IS LIKE A MEMORY, a path syndrome and cubital tunnel syndrome, both of which were
reinforced every time we walk down it. suspected at various points.) A year into my pain, I was still
As such, it’s quite possible that writing searching for a cure, pursuing every treatment, supplement
this is an act of self-harm. It’s not just and crank self-help book I could. But I was wasting my time. For those
that it hurts to write, although it does; By then, my pain had already become chronic.
it’s that when I started thinking about with this
this piece, reading around it, even jot- TO BE HUMAN IS TO HURT. Almost all of us experience condition,
ting down notes, I felt the pain in my pain every day; most of the time, we are better off for it.
forearms flare up again, and for a month or two I considered Pain is a defence mechanism, one that helps us to avoid
myself
calling it off. My physiotherapist would call that “avoid- harm. Without it, our lives would be much shorter and included,
ance”. I would call it “learning from experience”, given that considerably more gruesome. pain is no
it was writing that got me here in the first place. Although pain is frustratingly subjective, it is, at least for
It was late in the summer of 2020 when I started to develop the most part, relatively predictable. You spill a hot cup of longer a
an aching in my forearms: first the left, and a few days later, tea, and the moment the liquid scalds your skin, damaged symptom:
the right; a vague, untroubling pain, similar to the after- cells release chemicals that activate nociceptors – a body-
effects of a workout. I figured, like any reasonable person, that wide network of pain detectors – in the surrounding tissue.
it is the
my arms were just tired. I had been typing late into the eve- Those nociceptors transmit a signal through the nervous disease itself
nings finishing a book proposal, which, on top of everything system: an alert is fired to your spinal cord, triggering a
else – household jobs, phone usage, the cliched pandemic reflex reaction (removing your hand from the hot object).
sourdough baking habit – was taking its toll. (Honestly, have At the same time, another signal passes to your brain so it
you ever considered just how much you use your hands?) can work out how bad the damage is, and therefore how
At that time self-employed and unable to take days off, much it needs to hurt to discourage you from doing it again.
I made my first mistake: I kept going. I downed ibuprofen Pain researchers commonly compare that moment to a gate
and rested when I could. It was only as the pain worsened, being opened: the worse the injury, the wider the opening.
spreading from the backs of my hands then into the epicon- The problem arises when, in some cases, the gate stays
dyles, the bony protuberances on either side of the elbows, open. The pain becomes chronic.
that I started to worry. My GP, unfazed, diagnosed me with Chronic pain – any pain that persists for longer than three
lateral epicondylitis, or “tennis elbow”, which made me months – is a vast and growing public health problem. The
laugh – I haven’t played tennis in years. When the pain numbers are unclear (unlike cancer, there is no national
spread to the inside of the joint, the diagnosis expanded to register). By some estimates, between a quarter and a third
include its mirror image, “golfer’s elbow”. (Both are caused of the UK population live with ongoing pain; for those who
by tendon damage, but in the opposing muscle groups.) are 75 or over, that figure rises to more than half. About
Again, I thought: ha. 3 million people in the UK live with chronic “primary” pain
He prescribed cortisone, steroid injections at the site – that which has no identifiable physical cause. For those
of the pain. This, I would later learn, is considered an out- with this condition, myself included, pain is no longer a
moded treatment, as likely to delay recovery as hasten symptom: it is the disease itself.
it. Rather than fix the problem, the injections made my Despite its prevalence, we understand relatively little
elbows swell up like marshmallows. The pain, meanwhile,
only worsened.
By that Christmas, the pain had become constant and
excruciating. From my elbows and hands, it radiated into
my shoulder joint. My strength left me. Pretty soon I could
barely open doors; changing gears hurt, so I stopped driving.
One morning, when I tried to pour my three-year-old a glass
of apple juice, I found I could no longer unscrew the lid.
Looking back, those early months are a blur. Unable to
home in on a diagnosis, doctors ordered tests and scans –
X-rays, MRIs, ultrasound, nerve conduction studies – but
this being the UK’s NHS mid-pandemic, waiting lists were
months long. I ended up going for one scan privately, and
spent days watching YouTube videos on how to read MRIs
until the official verdict arrived: there may have been a slight
narrowing of the foramen in my spine (the bony arches on
the side of each vertebra, through which nerves pass). Bone
spurs, in other words. But the specialists couldn’t be sure,
and when my NHS MRI finally arrived months later, it came
up clear. No spurs, no narrowing. The mystery continued.
I don’t know which the professionals ran out of first:
options, or interest. But eventually there were no more
tests to be done. The best diagnosis any doctor could
settle on was “some kind of repetitive strain injury”. (RSI,
which experts now refer to as repetitive strain syndrome,
is a group of tendon and muscle disorders associated with
overworking. Tennis elbow is one. So, too, are carpal tunnel

43
about what causes some pain to become chronic. Certain Just over a year in, my doctors had apparently exhausted
risk factors make one more susceptible: biological sex every diagnostic possibility. Short of sending a surgeon in
(women are more likely to report chronic pain), genetics, to dig around in my nerve canals – risky if they’d even try
smoking, depression, poverty. But the exact chemical – there was nothing they could do, and so I was referred
and neurological conditions that cause pain to linger are to the specialist pain clinic at my local hospital. At my first
still the matter of intense study. What seems certain is appointment, a nice, well-meaning doctor told me upfront:
that something causes the pain circuitry in the body to “We’re not here to provide a cure, but we are going to try
become oversensitised, inferring pain even if no damage to help you manage the pain as well as possible.” I was put
has occurred. In some cases, even the lightest touch can on a new course of physiotherapy, and given a dedicated
trigger a pain response; for patients with this condition, pain psychotherapist. I started a pain diary, tracking hurt
allodynia, it can be agony just to get dressed. the way we had tracked my wife’s pregnancies. Rather
In my case, one of the most confounding aspects of than feeling seen, I felt abandoned. The message seemed
my new situation was how unpredictable and nonsen- simple: if I wanted a cure, it was now up to me.
sical my symptoms would appear. Pain flare-ups would
happen seemingly at random, and last days or weeks at a T SOME POINT IN MY PAIN JOURNEY –
time. The pain would move around: one day it would be I forget where now – I was introduced
in my forearm, then my armpit, then the back of my hand, to the distinction between “pain” and
before settling in my ulnar nerve. I felt as if my bones were “suffering”. Pain is acute sensation,
being haunted by an unseen foe. Meanwhile, I was burning dictated by nociceptors and nerve
through my book advance by paying for physiotherapy, and pathways. Pain is verbs: stabbing,
buying a new posture-correct office setup. I started wearing burning, aching. Suffering denotes
a wrist brace, then an elbow brace; my cupboard filled with everything else caused by that pain:
various physiotherapy tools. FlexBars, resistance bands, avoidance, anxiety, loneliness, depression. If pain is what
knobbly massage wands – from her curious glances, I think our nerves tell us, suffering is how our minds react.
the delivery woman thought I was buying up a dungeon’s When other people asked about my pain, I tended to
worth of sex toys. None of them worked. respond in a typically British fashion. “It’s fine,” I’d say. Or:
I tried alternative therapies. I started an expensive CBD “You know, good days and bad days.” The truth is, I was
habit, adding to a growing cupboardful of supplements. suffering. I could barely work. Hobbies – piano, guitar, video
And I read every book and paper I could find on RSI and games, baking – were all casualties. They were replaced
chronic pain, hoping to find a cure. The list of potential with research: books, scientific papers, YouTube videos.
suspects grew to include trigger points (knots in the myo- My pathological search for a cure was only making me more
fascia, sheath-like material that surrounds muscles), poor and more desperate. At home, I had to cut back on using
diet, blocked chi and, according to one bestselling book, my hands. That meant doing less housework; for a while I
by the late Dr John Sarno, subconscious narcissistic rage. could barely do the dishes without a flare-up, which meant
my wife, Hannah, taking on most of the jobs while heavily
THEN THERE WAS THE MEDICATION. Having addiction pregnant. Our relationship suffered. I, meanwhile, became
in the family, I refused to even consider opioids, so was insular, angry and increasingly depressed.
instead prescribed anti-inflammatories and put on to the About six months after my pain started, Hannah gave
NHS’s pathway of neurological pain drugs: amitriptyline, birth to our youngest daughter, Edith. She was perfect:
an antidepressant often also used to treat nerve pain; pre- fiery-haired and beautiful. But, to my utter devastation, I
gabalin; and later, gabapentin, an epilepsy medication that found that I couldn’t hold her for longer than a few minutes
The thing I later discovered is popular in British prisons because it can without the pain in my arms becoming unbearable. The
enhance the high from other substances. Getting prescribed medication knocked me out, so I would sleep – dreamless,
about pain the correct drugs was a painful process too. For example, catatonic – through the nightly wake-ups, leaving Hannah
is that it is amitriptyline made me so drowsy I would fall asleep dur- exhausted. I later realised I was associating the baby with
ing the day; when I asked to change medication, the GP the pain. It hurt me to hold my baby.
invisible. practice explained that, because the effect of these drugs Other people were sympathetic – at least, at first. The
For most, can be slow, I was expected to endure them for at least thing about chronic pain is that it is invisible. For most
pain is several weeks before being prescribed something new. I people, pain is temporary, so after a while everyone forgets.
eventually persuaded the doctors to skip that step – crying “Oh, the arm thing? Is that still going on?” my colleagues
temporary, down the phone will do that – but, even then, the stronger would say, half-heartedly. The receptionist at the GP surgery
so everyone medication didn’t dull the pain, either. started to seem irritated at the sound of my voice: “Is it
In May 2023, a comprehensive review by researchers at about your hand again?” Others were well-meaning, if ill-
forgets after the University of Southampton found there is little evidence judged. One doctor, after listening to me worry aloud about
a while that most of the antidepressant-class drugs used to treat never being able to work again, suggested earnestly: “Well,
chronic pain have any effect beyond that of a placebo. (They is there a job you can do that doesn’t involve your hands?”
found one exception: duloxetine.) The lack of evidence To be in chronic pain is to live in phases. I would have
for antidepressants, and the deadly epidemic of opioid a good week followed by a bad month. Progress is never
addiction, are among the reasons that National Institute linear, the doctors would say. I worried endlessly that I
for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) recently amended its would never work again, never again be able to pick up my
recommendations for chronic pain to focus on psychologi- kids. A year became two years. My symptoms changed – the
cal treatments. In my early 30s, I had suddenly become a locus of the pain slithering around my arm and up
person who owned a pillbox and a medication schedule; into my neck, like some kind of parasite – but my
and, even after all that, I was still in pain. mood didn’t. I grew used to living in this new body,

44 This is going to hurt (for ever)
always hurting, always tired, always angry. The anger made about my treatment. He asked me what I wanted from them.
me ashamed; the shame led me further into the spiral. To get better, I thought. Instead, I explained that among
One of the strangest things I’ve learned about pain is how my ever-changing symptoms was a strange anomaly: when
bound it is to attention. Soldiers in the heat of battle ignore I bend my head down to change my daughter’s nappy, I
fatal injuries; nurses distract babies before administering get an uncomfortable, prickly heat sensation through my
shots because scientists have proved it will hurt less. Dis- abdomen and down my arms. Surely, I thought, there must
tract the brain from pain with another sensation, and the be a physical reason behind it. Something in the spine, a
original pain is reduced. Perversely, this is true even with pinching somewhere. That, I thought, couldn’t be just in
chronic pain: one of the only times my arms wouldn’t hurt my head.
was when I had a headache. I don’t recall the exact details of the rest of the
conversation because of my emotional response to what
AND SO, I STARTED RESPONDING to some flare-ups by happened next. At some point, after condescendingly
hurting myself. Not in a life-threatening way – I never drew explaining that “all pain is psychological”, the consult-
blood – but enough to distract me from my everyday hurt ant made a joke: “If you really want the pain to go away,
with a newer, more visceral one. I’ll be clear: I was stupid. I could give you a hammer, and you could take it to your
I was expressing the anger I felt at my body for betraying big toe.” I think he was making a point about attention. All
me; it was some way of controlling the uncontrollable. I I heard was a medical professional, inside a pain clinic,
Long suffering didn’t tell anyone else what I was doing, and took care not making a self-harm joke towards someone who had been
Oliver Franklin- to make it obvious – until one evening my wife noticed that recently suicidal. Incensed, I confronted him about it and
Wallis: ‘In August, I had large bruises covering my thighs. We argued. I told complained formally to the hospital. He later apologised,
I will have been her I would stop. I didn’t. but the damage was done.
in pain for The urge to hurt myself became darker. Ultimately, the It’s funny: a few months earlier, that interaction might
three years’ only way to not live with pain, I figured, was to not live have sent me into another spiral. But, to my surprise, in
MARTIN POPE at all. The idea was like an earworm. Once it caught on the weeks after the appointment, something inside me
inside my head, I couldn’t seem to rid myself it. “What if?” lifted. I finally accepted that, as well-meaning as the
quickly turned into “How?” The only thing stopping me was medical professionals might be, they were no longer
the thought of leaving my girls fatherless. (In this, too, it really trying to make me better. Not better in the way that
turns out I am not alone: as many as half of all chronic pain I intended. To them, I was a lost cause. The sensation was
patients may report suicidal thoughts. In the US, nearly one not of failure, but of closure.
in 10 suicides is a chronic pain sufferer.) Antony Chuter, an ambassador for the charity Pain UK,
One night that summer, in the midst of my darkest describes this realisation as passing through the “first stage”
period, my wife and I argued for what felt like the mil- of living with chronic pain. The processes that pain patients
lionth time. Overcome, I told her the truth about how I was go through – anger, denial, depression – he told me, are
feeling. I don’t recall exactly what I said, but I don’t think it akin to grief. Rather than another person, I was grieving
was particularly eloquent. I can’t do it. I can’t hurt any more. my former self. The next step, as Chuter put it, is about
It was then that she gave me an ultimatum: seek help, or self-actualisation: the realisation that, long-term, the only
I would lose them anyway. It was only then that I realised person who is going to make me better is me.
how much I needed help, and how the pain had poisoned A few months ago, at the urging of my excellent new
my thinking. “Chronic pain isn’t just pain that doesn’t stop,” physiotherapist, I started reintroducing the hobbies I had
writes Julia Buckley in her memoir Heal Me, “it puts your neglected. I bought myself a new guitar; I threw myself back
entire body in a chrysalis and morphs you into a monster.” into playing with my kids; I started to make an effort to go
I found a better therapist, privately. If I had waited for out more with friends, and even play sport occasionally.
an NHS appointment, I might not be here now – and, well, I anticipated that most of those things would lead to ago-
a year or so later, here I am, writing this story. nising flare-ups. Instead, my life, and my mood, improved
The medical professionals who have most helped me measurably. And, because pain intensity is so clearly linked
through this journey have been the unexpected ones: the to emotion, as my mood has lifted, so has the pain.
osteopath who took me and my curiosity seriously, even if Pain researchers now understand that the key to recovery
the treatment did nothing; the pain nurse who helped me from chronic pain is neuroplasticity: finding a way to retrain
navigate medication withdrawal; the physiotherapist who the brain through a combination of cognitive behavioural
taught me more about getting some joy back into my life, therapy and other methods, to try to desensitise the nerv-
and in so doing saved me more than any exercise. ous system. To convince my body that it is no longer under
attack, and close the gate for good. Pacing, as pain therapists
N AUGUST, I WILL HAVE BEEN HURTING FOR call it – short bursts, here and there – is crucial. But so, too, it
THREE YEARS. For most of that time, I have turns out, is joy. So now whenever Edith (these days a viva-
held on to hope: the hope that I was just the cious two-year-old) needs me, I hold her as tightly as I can.
right scan, the right referral, away from the per- The pain isn’t gone – it may never be gone; I know that.
son who would diagnose the thing. The person But, for now, it doesn’t have control. I still have so many
who would fix it – fix me – and make my life the questions that remain unanswered. But I’ve learned
way it was before. that even if I can’t rid myself of pain, I can at least ease
That was until a few months ago, when I the suffering •
went for a routine checkup with the consultant at my pain OLIVER FRANKLIN-WALLIS WRITES ABOUT SCIENCE, HEALTH
clinic (neither of which I will name here). The appointment AND ENTERTAINMENT
did not start well. The consultant, a surly man, seemed to International support helplines can be found at
take an issue with my blunt tone, and how unhappy I was befrienders.org

45
Comment is free, facts are sacred CP Scott 1918
GEORGE MONBIOT
The far-right
warms to
climate chaos
Page 48 Q
U N I T E D S TAT E S
The different reasons why Ellsberg
and Trump took classified material
Rebecca Solnit
Daniel
Ellsberg at a
1970s press
conference
HULTON ARCHIVE/
GETTY

46 Opinion
ast Friday, a man who leaked of 2016, WikiLeaks dumped information hacked
classified national security from Democrats with the apparent intent of aiding
documents to the press died at the Trump’s election. In 2020, a lawyer for the WikiLeaks
age of 92 at his home in the San head, Julian Assange, told a British court: “US
Francisco Bay Area. Last Tuesday, a president Donald Trump offered to pardon WikiLeaks
man who took classified documents founder Julian Assange if he said that Russia had
to his Miami home that was also a nothing to do with WikiLeaks’ publication of
resort frequented by a wide array of Democratic party emails in 2016.” In May of 2017,
characters, refused to surrender them, and unleashed Trump spilled high-level intelligence to the Russian
a flock of lies about the whole business, was arraigned foreign secretary and ambassador; in the memorable
on 37 felony charges. picture of the meeting he looks baffled, and they look
We know that Daniel Ellsberg leaked documents like the cats that just ate the canary.
in the hopes of stopping a war, preventing deaths, Ellsberg, who at the time of his momentous act
and exposing a government that had through five was himself in the business of national security and
presidencies lied about that war in Vietnam to held a high-security clearance, handed over the
justify and perpetuate it. We don’t know exactly Pentagon Papers to newspapers who themselves
why Donald J Trump absconded from the White took huge risks to publish them. As the New York
House with top secret material. But there are no Times summarised it, the documents Ellsberg and
good explanations for those boxes stacked on the his close allies so painstakingly and surreptitiously
stage, in the bathroom and spilling on to the floor of photocopied, were “7,000 government pages
a storeroom, and dragged back to another insecure of damning revelations about deceptions by
location at Trump’s country club in New Jersey, or successive presidents who exceeded their authority,
for his refusal to surrender the material when the bypassed Congress and misled the American
government demanded it. people” in order to fight an unwinnable war against
The reasons to protect national security a remote and impoverished country that posed no
are pretty much built into the term itself. The military threat to the US.
reasons to violate national security vary widely.
Whistleblowers such as Ellsberg are often high- In an email in which he disclosed that he had only
profi le figures acting on principle, not as enemies months to live, Ellsberg reiterated: “When I copied
of the regime but as opponents of policies and as the Pentagon Papers in 1969, I had every reason to
champions of justice or the right of the public to think I would be spending the rest of my life behind
know. They seek to hold government accountable, bars. It was a fate I would gladly have accepted if
often out of a patriotic loyalty trying to make the it meant hastening the end of the Vietnam war,
government what it should be. unlikely as that seemed.” Later in life he admitted
Ellsberg was a strong defender of Edward that his action didn’t end the war, but it helped end
Snowden, who in 2013 exposed the US government’s the Nixon presidency, making an end to the war
post-9/11 violation of privacy laws to spy on US possible. He infuriated and terrified Richard Nixon,
citizens. Snowden was akin to Ellsberg as an insider, who used illegal methods to try to undermine
an expert and a man who made a careful and Ellsberg. Those acts by a sitting president instead
considered decision about both what to leak and undermined the case against Ellsberg, whose
how. There has, of course, also been a steady trickle criminal charges were dismissed.
of spies on all sides who sold intelligence to foreign Ellsberg devoted the rest of his long life
nations for money or occasionally because they were to speaking up about the dangers of nuclear
seduced by an agent of a foreign regime. weapons and war, human
Donald Trump was never a spy so far as we know, Rebecca rights, the overreaches of the
but he was a sieve when it came to state secrets Solnit is a federal government and further
and a beneficiary of leaks that seemed intended to Guardian US wars including George W Bush’s
serve exactly that purpose. In June and October columnist 2003 invasion of Iraq. He was a
beloved figure in the San Francisco
Bay Area, often seen at anti-nuclear demonstrations,
arrested dozens of times in protest.
Ellsberg’s death and Trump’s indictment, so close
Donald Trump was together last week, remind us that national security is
regularly violated, sometimes by idealists committed
never a spy so far as to the public good, sometimes by opportunists
serving themselves. Ellsberg’s life is also remarkable
we know, but he was as an example of someone who changed his mind, his
a sieve when it came life and his values – he was a cog in the machinery of
war, and then he risked his future to stand against that
to state secrets and a war and the government perpetrating it.
A great truth teller has left us. A liar whose
beneficiary of leaks mendacity has no equal remains for us to deal with •

47
C U LT U R E originated in the colonial centre and from it developed

Architecture’s push for one language fit for the planet as a whole.
As an alternative to it, the Nigerian architect Tosin
Oshinowo claims only tradition can provide a “nuanced
traditional forms is a understanding of the environment, culture, and
context”. And tradition is everywhere in this Biennale.
Many contributions to the main exhibition dig into
critique of globalisation their own particular, civilisational past, with a focus
on materials, ways of building, of being, and modes of
sociability firmly anchored in their place of origin.
Many of the works in this show go a step further,
where pride in the rediscovery of one’s own traditions
takes centre stage and the west fades into irrelevance.
China offers the main cautionary tale. If modernity

imposed a universal conversation anchored in colonial
bias, it also spread the claim to the universality of
democracy, the rule of law and human rights. Does
denouncing all universal aspiration as a homogenising
and colonial imposition run the risk of becoming an
enabling factor for nationalism and authoritarianism?
The Chinese ambassador to Italy cancelled his
participation at the opening of the Biennale in protest at
the inclusion of an installation by the British architect
Alison Killing, which used satellite images to document
and visualise Chinese internment camps for Uyghurs.
China’s political tradition never
Lorenzo included human rights or democracy.
Marsili is a Should we respect that tradition,
philosopher too? The Chinese government argues
and activist that we should. It is a shame that the
Biennale features almost no Chinese
his year’s Venice Architecture contributions to the main exhibition. It is responsible
Biennale, titled Laboratory for the for much of Africa’s infrastructure boom, and exploring
Future, was inaugurated on the same its claims to civilisational uniqueness may have helped
day that the leaders of the G7 nations shed light on the darker side of this return to tradition.
met in Hiroshima. Both signalled As the Biennale opened in Venice, the authoritarian
the end of globalisation, and both Indian prime minister Narendra Modi was inaugurating
displayed the promise and perils of the controversial Central Vista redevelopment in Delhi, a
a fragmenting world. megastructure celebrating Indian architectural tradition
Of all the arts, architecture is the most globally and Hindu nationalism. Meanwhile, Turkey’s president,
homogenising. Erecting copycats of Paris and London Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was busy winning re-election;
was a staple of European colonial policy. Today, the his own authoritarian regime proudly builds tradition-
same glass-and-steel tower blocks dot interchangeable inspired Turkish nationalism.
financial capitals the world over. Authoritarians often portray universalism as the
But the 2023 Biennale’s curator, the Ghanaian-Scottish product of European gunboats to justify their trampling
architect Lesley Lokko, is using the event to critically of allegedly imported western democratic values.
reassess that one-world narrative. “The dominant Let there be no mistake: we should celebrate our
voice,” Lokko writes in the exhibition introduction, “has collective departure from fake western universalism. A
historically been a singular, exclusive voice, whose reach world built on multiplicity and interaction among equals
and power ignores huge swathes of humanity.” is a world where people will be freer and happier.
Brazil’s show centres on unearthing the architectural How does multiplicity not slide into relativism? Is
and living practices concealed by the establishment of tradition and identity and the slippery slope towards
the country’s modernist capital, Brasília. Modernism, nationalism all we have left, or can we imagine a new
▲ The installation the architectural style that spread after the second world universalism binding together a common humanity?
Kwaee by Adjaye war, we are told, represented a “colonial invasion” of Lokko’s Laboratory for the Future offers a glimpse
Associates at “the Indigenous nations of central Brazil”. into our present moment. It is the joyous, hopeful face of
this year’s Venice And yet, modernism was a universal language a fragmenting world. This makes it a resonant, powerful
Architecture shaped by non-western architects. Tropical Modernism, exhibition. Yet this also means some urgent questions
Biennale a contribution to the Biennale by London’s V&A, for the future are left hanging. As globalisation continues
VINCENZO PINTO/AFP/ shows that precolonial building practices were to unravel, we will need a laboratory for a new planetary
GETTY
highly influential in its development. But modernism universalism to try to answer them •

48 Opinion
GLOBAL a climate that supports our flourishing, but in many

H E AT I NG Why the chaos of the of these places the niche is shrinking. Already, around
600 million people have been stranded in inhospitable
conditions by global heating. Current global policies are
climate catastrophe likely to result in about 2.7C of heating by 2100. On this
trajectory, some 2 billion people may be left outside the
niche by 2030, and 3.7 billion by 2090. If governments
suits the extreme right limited heating to their agreed goal of 1.5C, the numbers
exposed to extreme heat would be reduced fivefold. But
if they abandon their climate policies, this would lead
George Monbiot to around 4.4C of heating. In this case, by the end of the
century around 5.3 billion people would face conditions
ound the cycle turns. As millions that ranged from dangerous to impossible.
are driven from their homes by Already, India, Nigeria, Indonesia, the Philippines,
climate disasters, the extreme right Pakistan, Afghanistan, Papua New Guinea, Sudan,
exploits their misery to extend its Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali and Central America face
reach. As the extreme right gains extreme risk. Weather events such as massive floods and
power, climate programmes are intensified cyclones and hurricanes will keep hammering
shut down, heating accelerates and countries . Many people will have to move or die.
more people are driven from their In the rich world we can greatly limit the damage
homes. If we don’t break this cycle soon, it will become caused by environmental breakdown, for which our
the dominant story of our times. nations and citizens are primarily responsible. But these
A recent paper in the scientific journal Nature choices are being systematically shut down. Culture
identifies the “human climate niche”: the range of war entrepreneurs, often funded by billionaires and
temperatures and rainfall within which human societies commercial enterprises, cast even the most innocent
thrive. We have clustered in the parts of the world with attempts to reduce our impacts as a conspiracy to
Illustration Danielle Rhoda

Founded 1821 Independently owned by the Scott Trust
curtail our freedoms. Everything becomes contested:

low-traffic neighbourhoods, 15-minute cities, heat
pumps. It’s becoming ever harder to discuss crucial
The west must admit
issues such as SUVs, meat-eating and aviation calmly
and rationally. Climate science denial, which had almost
vanished a few years ago, has now returned with a
responsibility for the latest
vengeance. Environmental scientists and campaigners
are bombarded with claims that they are stooges, shills,
communists, murderers and paedophiles.
migrant boat tragedy
T
As the impacts of our consumption kick in thousands he nationalities of persistently failed to develop
of kilometres away, and people come to our borders for the several hundred a humane, coherent and
refuge from a crisis they played almost no role in causing, people assumed effective approach to the
the same political forces announce we are being “flooded” to have drowned challenges posed by irregular
by refugees, and millions rally to their call to seal our in the Mediterranean help migration. After the 2015-16
borders. Sometimes it seems the fascists can’t lose. explain why they attempted so influx, Germany’s Angela
perilous a journey. Pakistanis, Merkel cut a one-off deal with
As governments turn rightwards, they shut down Egyptians, Syrians, Afghans Turkey to curb refugee flows.
policies designed to limit climate breakdown. There’s no and Palestinians reportedly A subsequent agreement
mystery about why: far-right politics are the defensive comprised most of the with Libya did not halt
wall erected by oligarchs to protect their economic approximately 750 passengers abuses in detention camps
interests. On behalf of their funders, legislators in crammed on the unseaworthy or new sailings. Brussels is
Texas are waging war on renewable energy, while vessel that set off from Tobruk now discussing payments to
a proposed law in Ohio lists climate policies as a in Libya and sank 80km off the Tunisia. For its part, Britain cut
“controversial belief or policy” in which universities are coast of Greece last Wednesday. a deal with Rwanda, in breach
forbidden to “inculcate” their students. The list of countries of origin of international law.
Florida, for example, is one of the US states most prone is an index of pain, for which Yet overall, efforts to deter
to climate disaster, especially rising seas and hurricanes. the EU, Britain and their allies these dangerous voyages, in
But its governor, Ron DeSantis, is building his bid for the bear much responsibility. the Mediterranean and the
presidency on the back of climate denial. On Fox News, The west’s failure to stop Channel, are foundering, with
he denounced climate science as “politicisation of the the Syrian regime’s war on the numbers of crossings and
weather”. At home, he has passed a law its people led to the 2015-16 deaths increasing this year.
George forcing cities to continue using fossil migrant crisis, when hundreds Far too few safe and legal
Monbiot is fuels. He has slashed taxes, including of thousands of Syrians sought routes exist. And international
a Guardian the disaster preparedness sales tax, safety in Europe. Although coordination is lacking.
columnist undermining Florida’s capacity to fighting has subsided, many, Whether the new EU-wide
respond to environmental crises. But including Palestinians living migration and asylum pact
the hard right thrives on catastrophe. in desperate conditions in will make any difference is
If you want to know what one possible future – a future camps, still flee persecution, questionable. Anti-immigrant
in which this cycle is allowed to accelerate – looks like, or are quitting an increasingly governments in Poland and
think of the treatment of current refugees, amplified unaccommodating Turkey. Hungary remain averse to
by several orders of magnitude. Already, at Europe’s It can be no surprise that helping “frontline” states such
borders, displaced people are pushed back into the sea. Afghans were aboard the as Italy and Greece. Meanwhile,
They are imprisoned, assaulted and used as scapegoats boat. The decision by the UK migration is becoming a hot
by the far right, which widens its appeal by blaming and European Nato members political issue again as far-right
them for the ills that in reality are caused by austerity, to join the US in abandoning parties advance across Europe.
inequality and the rising power of money in politics. Afghanistan in 2021 triggered Short-term fixes and
European nations pay governments beyond their borders a predictable crisis. The United Rwanda-type wheezes will not
to stop the refugees who might be heading their way. Nations says 28.3 million prevent more tragedies. The
The manufactured hatred of refugees has helped the far people, two-thirds of the need to recognise fundamental
right to gain or share power in Italy, Sweden and Hungary, population, will need urgent causes and tackle migration
and has enhanced its prospects in Spain, Austria, France humanitarian assistance this challenges at source is urgent.
and Germany. We can expect success by this faction to year. Despotic Taliban rule That must mean expanded,
be followed by the curtailment of climate policies, with makes matters worse. systemic cooperation with
the result that more people will have no choice but to Last week’s tragedy countries of origin and
seek refuge in the diminishing zones in which the human has produced a torrent of transit. It means offering
climate niche remains open: often the very nations whose recriminations. Greece’s more (not less) development
policies have driven them from their homes. government is again under fire, aid and assistance. It means
It is easy to whip up fascism. It’s the default result given its anti-migrant stance. acknowledging food insecurity,
of political ignorance and its exploitation. Containing Yet there’s no mystery about inequality, conflict and climate
it is much harder, and never-ending. Preventing Earth the roots of the never-ending crisis – key drivers of irregular
systems’ collapse and preventing the rise of the far right migrant crisis. migration – are problems the
are not divisible. We must fight both forces at once European countries have west helped create • Observer

50 Opinion
Letters
WRITE The dangers we face from safety of the west, can be parties copying rightwing • Given the usual state of
TO US a Trump-Putin alliance removed from the vaults myths to get votes, and his hair, I am starting to
The article by Jonathan of the National Archives in honest candidates can question the value of my
Freedland (After the Washington. do no other than speak MBE, given for services to
Kakhovka dam blast, How was Mr Trump the truth to power, the NHS, after hearing that
Letters for another threat lies ahead: allowed to remove because the truth will Boris Johnson decided to
publication
Trump, Opinion, 16 June) multiple boxes without ultimately prevail. honour his hairdresser.
weekly.letters@
presages a turbulent and any apparent concern Martin Jewitt Pete Marsh
theguardian.com
— dangerous time for not for their safety and Folkestone, England, UK West Kirby, England, UK
Please include a only Ukraine, but much accountability?
full postal address of eastern Europe and As they say in Thick and impenetrable, Human stupidity is bigger
and a reference perhaps Nordic countries Washington: “Go figure!” grief is never far away threat to survival than AI
to the article. such as Finland. Dino Bressan I lost my partner and I find it hard to imagine
We may edit letters. If Donald Trump is Heidelberg, Victoria, soulmate of 50 years as that any machine will
Submission and elected for a second time Australia a result of Alzheimer’s evolve to have (or need
publication of all in 2024, and the Russian last August. Kat Lister is to have) emotions such
letters is subject president is still waging The powerful few control correct: grief does move, as love, lust, anger, fear
to our terms and
an illegal war on Ukraine, what constitutes truth but I find it more like and greed, which are
conditions, see:
THEGUARDIAN.COM/
a scared and clearly crazy Simon Tisdall (Europe’s a fog (Four years after the root of our greatest
LET TERS-TERMS Vladimir Putin could feel lurch to the right rolls my husband’s death, achievements and
compelled to expand his on, Opinion, 9 June) it is hard to locate my disasters (Technology,
Editorial deployment of tactical rightly points to fear in an grief, Opinion, 16 June). 16 June). The real danger
Editor: Graham nuclear weapons along the increasingly precarious Sometimes it’s thick and to our survival is not AI,
Snowdon Polish border to longer- world for the reasons why impenetrable, other times but human stupidity!
Guardian Weekly, range nuclear weapons of the populist right keeps it’s thin and swirling. But it Mike Kearney
Kings Place, mass destruction. winning elections. Too is never far away. I find the La Mouche, Basse-
90 York Way, Trump would be sorely many voters don’t like plaque that I placed on her Normandie, France
London N1 9GU, tempted to help his friend being told the unpalatable favourite swing seat in the
UK
Putin. Hopefully, there are truths of why desperate garden a daily source of Country comforts evoke
several layers of security people are arriving at comfort. Miss her? Every the sound of satisfaction
To contact the
editor directly:
that even the supreme national borders, or what waking minute. Elizabeth-Jane Burnett
editorial.feedback narcissist could not we all need to do to stop Peter West lowers herself in the
@theguardian.com “declassify” to reach the the planet from becoming Reading, England, UK Caithness and Sutherland
“red button”. uninhabitable. bogbean, and everything
Corrections Dr Douglas Mackenzie But there is more. Nothing like a dame: no changes (Country Diary,
Our policy is to Canberra, ACT, Australia The dwindling few who honour in Johnson’s titles 9 June). The squelches,
correct significant control most of the world’s It is time to update the gurgles, pops and
errors as soon as It was too easy to move wealth also control the Guardian’s style guide. yearning sounds of the
possible. Please boxes out of Washington media and are able to The title of anyone peatland fill the ear to
write to guardian.
Amid the brouhaha finance the parties that receiving one of Boris change perspective,
readers@
(Indictment of Trump look after them. They Johnson’s honours should understanding and
theguardian.com
or the readers’ is a stress test for US are also taking control of appear in quote marks: experience.
editor, Kings Place, democracy, Spotlight, what constitutes truth, “Sir” Jacob Rees-Mogg, An experience not
90 York Way, 16 June), one detail has and are able to divide “Dame” Priti Patel etc unlike turning the pages
London N1 9GU, escaped the attention of and rule by pointing to (Tory party runs out of the Guardian Weekly as
UK the commentariat: how some poor as enemies of of time for Johnson, I recline on the couch here
easily highly sensitive other groups of poor. He Spotlight, 16 June). in Adelaide.
materials, some of which is right in showing the Willy McCourt Stewart Sweeney
could compromise the futility of progressive London, England, UK Adelaide, South Australia
A WEEK
IN VENN
DI AGR A MS
Edith Pritchett

51
Film, music, art, books & more
MUSIC
Suite sounds:
on the road with
cellist Yo-Yo Ma
Page 54 Q
One of the world’s most

prominent living artists,
Hito Steyerl talks about her
persistent questioning of
humanity in the digital age
Out of the shadows

52 Culture
Visual arts
▼ Deconstructed
Hito Steyerl’s work employs
technology, in humorous
and handmade ways, to pose
questions about society
ANDREW KREPS GALLERY;
HAYWARD GALLERY
INTERVIEW WANTED TO SEE IF THE PLANTS COULD with cardboard boxes, and smears herself with face paint,
By Philip CONTRIBUTE SOMETHING,” says Hito allowing her to blend into a green screen. Meanwhile, a
Oltermann Steyerl, sitting in the office of her Berlin rasping robo-voice offers satirical advice, including “living
COVER gallery. “I feel it’s a good idea to take in a gated community”, “being fitted with an invisibility
PHOTOGRAPH humans out of the equation a bit.” cloak” and “being female and over 50”.
Christian Described as a post-internet artist – It’s fair to say this strategy isn’t working for the now
Jungeblodt someone who uses the tools of digital 57-year-old artist: the more Steyerl tries to disappear, the
technology to tackle broader social issues more visible she becomes. Four years after she finished
beyond web culture – Steyerl is credited as the creator of How Not to Be Seen, she became the first woman to top
one of the works in Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of ArtReview magazine’s Power 100 list, for her “political
Crisis, a group show at London’s Hayward Gallery. But in a statement-making and formal experimentation” (last year’s
way the true creative force behind the piece, called Green list has her at fourth place). Her renown on the international
Screen, isn’t her at all. It’s not even human. stage led her to be courted in political circles in her native
On the back of a giant LED screen, Steyerl has arranged Germany. In 2021, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the president,
a vertical garden with ferns and hops. The plants gener- offered her its highest honour, the Federal Cross of Merit.
ate bioelectrical signals, which are translated into sounds Steyerl declined in protest against how Germany handled
that have been paired with a rudimentary drum track. The Covid, calling its partial lockdown “half-baked and endless”.
results, which come warbling out of a pair of speakers, are Her shows – or the comments she makes around them
fed into an AI engine that turns them into heavily pixelated – start debates that reverberate beyond gallery spaces.
animations of budding flowers. Last year, she pulled work from the Documenta show in
Taking humans out of the equation, making art that is Kassel over a scandal about another work condemned for
a sort of disappearing act, harks back to what is probably its antisemitic imagery – a decision that contributed to the
Steyerl’s best-known work, the 2013 film How Not to Be exhibition director’s resignation and catapulted Steyerl
Seen, in which she hides behind placards, covers her head from the arts sections to the front pages.

53
The main reason it is hard to stay invisible, she says, artists across the board during the pandemic’s lockdown
is that her idea of art relies on saying out loud things that months. Two years on, she says she would do the same,
others may keep quiet about. “I think my approach is best while accepting that government support in Germany was
summarised with the colloquial elephant in the room. These comparatively generous. “My gallery was open,” she says,
elephants are everywhere, but people pretend they aren’t.” “but music schools for children remained closed. That
For her 2019 solo show at London’s Serpentine Gallery, wasn’t fair. I’m aware that there was a lot of state aid for
Steyerl made videos of activists wandering through commercial culture. But non-commercial culture was left
surrounding Kensington, the richest borough of a city by the side. I am aware artists and institutions in the UK
that, according to Forbes, is home to more billionaires had a much rougher time. But is this a sufficient reason for
than any other in Europe. The activists talk about disability accepting a German decoration?”
rights, the exploitations of the gig economy and welfare Green Screen, which sits alongside works by Cornelia
cuts. An augmented reality app for visitors removed the Parker, Richard Mosse and Otobong Nkanga, is meant
Sackler name from the gallery’s facade. The family’s to make us think about the materials used to make the
record of donating to the Serpentine and other institu- screens we all spend so much of our lives looking at. The
tions has been overshadowed by its role in the US opioid LED monitor that shows the flower animations generated by
addiction crisis. The Serpentine physically removed the the plants on its flipside was almost entirely built by Steyerl
name three years later. herself, based on a prototype originally developed by a
The instinct to drag taboos out of the shadows has been Berlin hacker collective called C-base. It features a wall of
with Steyerl since she was a teenager. Born in Munich in beer crates turned on their sides, with the lit-up bottoms of
1966, to a physicist German father and a biochemist Jap- recyclable bottles serving as rudimentary pixels. The LEDs
anese mother, she grew up in the “democratorship” of inside the bottles were made in China, Steyerl concedes, but
Bavaria under Franz Josef Strauss, the strongman state pre- points out that her self-built screen uses about 1,000 lights
mier. “I was surrounded by elephants: the Nazi past of poli- compared to the 8.3m found in a regular screen.
ticians, corruption, incredible police violence, repression “It’s an experiment and a prototype,” she says, “a
against outsiders.” She was expelled from school aged 15, visualisation of a question, not a solution. I tried to think
after squatting a building and throwing stones at a Deutsche about how we could extricate our-
Bank, and didn’t finish her secondary education. selves from our dependency on the
Does she see art as a way to point a finger at social large tech cartels.”
injustices, to educate people? “No,” she says instantly. “It I don’t like These cartels, she argues, “steal
would be pointless if art worked like that. If you want to our data and use it for their personal
make a difference with art, which is a motive I perceive as being ends. They polarise and poison our
questionable, then the single most stupid approach would lectured public discourse. In the context of
be to tell people off. It would be a surefire way not to get the show, one of the big questions is
through to people. And it would be the opposite of think- – and I around the ecological footprint, the
ing.” She pauses and adds: “I don’t like being lectured – and question of what kind of materials
I expect my viewers don’t either.”
expect my are used in TV or LED screens.” ▼ Influencer
The full title of Steyerl’s disappearance film was How Not viewers Given that Steyerl makes Steyerl was
to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, but electricity-hungry video installa- dubbed the most
whatever didacticism her work contains is never taken too
don’t either tions in the middle of an energy powerful working
seriously. Sometimes confusingly so. During our interview, crisis that has left households artist in 2017
choppy industrial metal chords echo from the room next across Europe facing saving targets, it’s a question that CHRISTIAN JUNGEBLODT
door. This is Contemporary Cave Art, a site-specific version could also be directed at her. When I email a follow-up
of the film installation she withdrew from Documenta. question about the carbon footprint of Contemporary Cave
The work bubbles with ideas drawing connections Art, she responds within three hours – with a calculation
between Keynesian economic theory and battle royale of the greenhouse gases generated by computers, screens
video games, not to mention the “Disney ecology” and a and projectors, which comes to about 200kg of CO2. She
satirical cryptocurrency called Cheesecoin. It’s dizzying: also lists the steps she took to reduce this, by forsaking a
serious yet ironic. I had to watch it twice before I thought flight, for example, or recycling elements from other shows.
I could trace her lines of thought. In the third viewing, I One way to explain Steyerl’s rise to prominence is that
got distracted by the dancing wolves again. It wasn’t the few other socially conscious artists are so energetically
opposite of thinking, but it wasn’t quite thinking either. engaged in an argument to justify their own existence. In my
followup, I also ask whether holding herself accountable,
WHAT SETS STEYERL APART FROM OTHER ACTIVIST ARTISTS applying the same standards to herself that she applies to
is that she puts her money where her mouth is. Last year, others, is sustainable in the long run. Does it spur her on?
she bought back one of her works from Julia Stoschek, a Is there not a point where it will get too exhausting?
collector of video art and an heir to the car parts company “As a dialectical materialist,” she writes back, “I do not
Brose. Steyerl made her decision after an interview in believe that social contradictions can be solved individu-
Der Spiegel in which Stoschek defended her company, ally. On the other hand, if you give up on trying to articulate
which was accused of not doing enough to investigate how them altogether, you end up depressed and cynical. So you
her great-grandfather Max Brose, a Nazi party member, navigate between different impossibilities and keep failing
had profited from Jewish expropriations and slave labour in all directions, obviously. But what’s the alternative?” •
in the Third Reich. PHILIP OLTERMANN IS THE GUARDIAN’S BERLIN BUREAU CHIEF
Declining the Federal Cross in 2021, Steyerl criticised Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis is at the
the German government for not offering equal support for Hayward Gallery, London, to 3 September
54 Culture
Music
covered buses that millions in the city rely on
to get around.
Mutua said such symbolism bridges perceived
gaps: “Classical music has a class – no pun
intended. It is seen to belong to a type of people.”
With Ma’s unassuming manner, there is little to
let on that he is a 19-time Grammy award-winning
internationally-renowned musician who has
played on the world’s largest stages.
Nairobi was the last stop of Ma’s Bach Project
– a five-year, six-continent global tour. With its
rising cultural and artistic scene, organisers said
the city was near the top of the cellist’s list.
The project marked Ma’s ambition to connect
cultures and people across the world, perform-
ing Johann Sebastian Bach’s cello suites in 36
countries – a nod to the much celebrated six cello
suites (which he has called his “constant musical
companions”), each of which has six sections.
Ma has recorded interpretations of the
suites three times, with more than a decade
between each.
They are wrapped up with his life’s memories,
he has said, citing his first encounter with Bach’s
music when he was four: his father, Dr Hiao-
Tsiun Ma, taught him the first suite in small,
incremental steps with exceptional dedication.
Ma Sr, who lived in both China and France, had
turned to Bach’s music for refuge during the
Bach on the
second world war, memorising the sonatas and
partitas over the long days, to play them to him-
self at night. “For almost six decades, they have
given me sustenance, comfort, and joy during
road again
times of stress, celebration and loss,” Ma wrote
at the start of the Bach Project in 2018. “What
power does this music possess that even today,
after 300 years, it continues to help us navigate
through troubled times?”
Beyond busking, Ma took to a more
conventional stage with a concert at the Kenya
national theatre. His audience there was a classi-
N
airobi’s bustling Kenyatta market is an cal crowd – the $145 auditorium tickets sold out
Cellist Yo-Yo Ma has been unlikely place to hear classical music. in 24 hours – with prominent members including
on a five-year tour to bring Yet playing earlier this month in front the arts minister, Ababu Namwamba, and the US
joy to the world through of stalls where butchers roast meat and ambassador, Meg Whitman.
hairdressers compete over heads to braid was a Ma played as though he was the only person in
classical music. On the final very surprising busker: the distinguished cellist the room. Only the loud applause broke through
stop in Kenya, he took that Yo-Yo Ma. Playing Over the Rainbow alongside to him, earning his bow and embrace of the audi-
Kenyan percussionist Kasiva Mutua, he matched ence, arms flung wide. The solemn, lonely fifth
mission to the streets his cello to her beats in a truly eclectic mix. cello suite – his penultimate performance – made
Ma’s broad artistic sensibilities mad e the auditorium fall silent.
By Caroline Kimeu weaving together the diverse musical tradi- From a viewing room on the upper balcony,
tions of drum and cello seem like a natural fit. Brian Kivuti, a 34-year-old Kenyan jeweller, lis-
“It was symbolic to introduce [classical] music tened with closed eyes. “For me, it was a practice
to the crowd through something they know and in presence,” he said. “There are no lyrics telling
understand,” said Mutua. “Africans understand you how to feel. It’s just the music and you, feel-
rhythm to their core.” ing your way through, so you pay more attention
▲ End note Overture Ma’s pop-up market performance typified to how the notes make you feel.”
Yo-Yo Ma’s final Kenyan classical much of his visit to the city – a daring, head- At the theatre’s Wasanii restaurant, work-
performance, in musicians give a first dive into the realities of Kenyan artists. ers perched on rooftop balcony seats to watch
Nairobi, on his performance on He bashfully made occasional use of Sheng – a a screening of the performance. For Margaret
six-continent the day of Ma’s Nairobi slang that mixes and plays on words Wanjiru, a 22-year-old waitress, Ma’s music was
Bach Project tour concert from English and Swahili, and he arrived at the a far cry from what she knows, such as her tribe’s
EDWIN NDEKE EDWIN NDEKE market in a matatu – the music-blaring, graffiti- Mugiithi. “It may not be the music I grew up with,

Reviews 55
but it slows you down, however much you’re MUSIC

busy, and allows you to get lost in your thoughts.”
The Nairobi Orchestra, one of the oldest in
Africa, performed ahead of Ma’s set, and its musi- The Weeknd
cians were thrilled to have him in the auditorium. Etihad Stadium, Manchester
Violinist Bernadette Muthoni said: “For me,
★★★★☆
it was very huge to think that Ma was going to
play just a few metres from where we were. He’s
what a lot of us aspire to.” The Weeknd’s 2023 stadium tour –
Ma’s evening performance was followed by a postponed so many times that its
“day of action” where he engaged directly with title features the name of his most
communities. He explored the Kenyan capi- recent album, Dawn FM, and its
tal accompanied by local artists, taking to the 2020 predecessor, After Hours – is
streets with Dennis Muraguri, a Kenyan visual nothing if not spectacular.
artist who documents matatu culture through The set is a vast metallic FILM
camera and prints. cityscape, filled with ruined
At the Kaloleni Social Hall, a place of great landmarks – St Paul’s Cathedral,
postcolonial symbolism, Ma walked in on a Toronto’s CN Tower and the Empire Asteroid City
performance by the Ghetto Classics, a music State Building among them – which Dir: Wes Anderson
programme for children from disadvantaged belch fire or shoot violet-coloured
★★★★☆
backgrounds. lasers. Most of the action takes
“He couldn’t keep his eyes off them,” said place on a runway that stretches
Sharon Machira, a Kenyan creator, who accom- nearly the full length of the pitch. To say that he’s done it again is
panied the cellist on the tour. The walkway is decorated with an going to mean something different
Watching Ma, who started his musical journey immense moon and an even more to fans and non-fans. But I have
early and became a child prodigy, she thought he immense model of the Hajime to say the first category is the
may have seen his younger self through them. Sorayama-designed robot featured only place to be for what is simply
“I think he really identifies with ‘the other’, in the video for 2011’s Echoes of a terrifically entertaining and
because everything he does is about breaking Silence. The song doesn’t feature in lightly sophisticated comedy from
down barriers.” the setlist, but no matter: the model Wes Anderson, in his signature
Later, he visited the Kakuma refugee camp, provides a focal point for dancers, rectilinear, deadpan style and with
home to more than 200,000 people, for a music clad in white robes and veils. All this his all-star ensemble cast. Regulars
collaboration with artists from South Sudan, is intended to represent “a journey including Jason Schwartzman and
Burundi, the DRC and Ethiopia. through a cosmic cataclysm”. Tilda Swinton are joined by Scarlett
Ma is increasingly interested in using his work Coupled with the speed at which Johansson and Tom Hanks, above.
for social impact. He played outside the Russian the numbers are dispatched – they Asteroid City’s eccentricity,
Embassy in Washington DC last year to protest are truncated and segue into each elegance, gaiety, and profusion of
against its war in Ukraine, and dedicated his other, which enables the Weeknd to detail make it a pleasure. With every
Songs of Comfort to providing solace for people cram 33 songs into just under two new shot, your eyes dart around the
during the difficult days of the pandemic. The hours – it’s a lot to take in. screen, grabbing at all the painterly
Bach Project and its conclusion in Nairobi are On stage, Abel Tesfaye is little jokes and embellishments.
further milestones on that journey. a noticeably sweeter but less It is sometime in the mid-1950s
CAROLINE KIMEU IS THE GUARDIAN’S EAST AFRICA charismatic figure than you might in a town called Asteroid City, the
GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT CORRESPONDENT expect. The air of mystery projected location for an annual convention
by his videos is punctured slightly honouring teen inventors. As the
by the sight of him playing air kids and their parents assemble,
guitar. Tesfaye has been making a staggering event happens.
noises about this being his final As ever, there is little or no
tour, at least as the Weeknd. If this is emotional content, despite the
a kind of retirement party, then it’s ostensible subject of grief. It is
a euphorically celebratory one. tempting to consider this savant
Alexis Petridis blankness as some kind of symptom,
Touring Europe until August, and but it is the expression of style. And
Mexico and South America in what style it is. Peter Bradshaw
September and October On general release
Podcast of the week Objeks & Tings

This celebratory podcast from Catherine Ross and Lynda Burrell,
founders of Museumand, the UK’s National Caribbean Heritage
Museum, brings generations together to discuss their heritage. In
the first episode, author Riaz Phillips talks about the magic of his
mum’s dutchie and the merits of “the burnt bit”. Hannah Verdier

56 Culture
Books
Cormac McCarthy showed us carved and to which they will return is palpable
on each page. In the second and third books of
America’s violent heart as he the trilogy, McCarthy’s vision darkens, his style
wove a tapestry of anger, humour, fragments, the reader must work ever harder.
decency and bad behaviour The Road, the story of a father and son’s
fight for survival in a blasted landscape after
an environmental catastrophe, is grim and
By Martin Pengelly often hard to stomach. A plausible picture of
a society destroyed
C
ormac McCarthy, who died on 13 June by its own appetite,
aged 89, achieved fame relatively its antecedents are
late. He was nearly 60 when, in 1992, there in previous
his sixth novel, All the Pretty Horses, Reviewers books, from the
brought him mainstream attention. The book deranged hillbilly in
was a bestselling award-winner and it was wondered at Child of God to the
followed by The Crossing (1994) and Cities of his attempt to harsh terrain of The
the Plain (1998), to form The Border Trilogy. write a female Border Trilogy and
No Country for Old Men (2005) and the seething horror of
The Road (2006) sold well and won awards lead; he wrote Blood Meridian. The
too, the latter landing a Pulitzer. Both became about men, Road ends on a note
hit films, made by the Coen brothers and John mostly of hope – a faint one,
Hillcoat respectively. Then, after a 16-year long though.
silence, McCarthy’s final books arrived in 2022: No Country for
The Passenger and Stella Maris. Old Men came next.
The paired novels met with mixed The Coen brothers’ film may have superseded
reactions, particularly the austere Stella the book in the popular imagination, but
Maris, a conversation between a suicidal readers are unlikely to be disappointed. The
mathematical prodigy and her therapist. Coens took most of it straight from McCarthy’s
Reviewers wondered at McCarthy’s attempt pages. Anton Chigurh, the hitman ultimately
to write a female lead; he wrote about men, played by Javier Bardem, is a descendant of
mostly. But in Stella Maris there were flashes Judge Holden in Blood Meridian: implacable,
of his classic style too. terrifying, Death on his white horse assuming
The Passenger also echoed his previous outlandish human form. Like the west Texas
works. Parts seemed to recall No Country landscape in which the drug deal gone awry
for Old Men, not least the opening scene of plays out, the book has terrible beauty. It helps
a diver in the Gulf of Mexico discovering a that it also rips along like a thriller.
sunken plane, “the faces of the dead inches So does Blood Meridian, for my money
away. Everything that could float was against McCarthy’s greatest novel, but more than that
the ceiling. Pencils, cushions, styrofoam – the greatest modern novel, the true successor
coffeecups. Sheets of paper with the ink to Moby-Dick, a book in which McCarthy
draining off into hieroglyphic smears.” Other pursues themes that Herman Melville
parts read like a return to Suttree, McCarthy’s wrestled with but places his tale in the open
epic of drifters in Knoxville, afloat on the west, rather than at sea.
Tennessee River.
Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Cormac In Blood Meridian, McCarthy reaches
the peak of his style: spare and ornate,
Storm, told me Suttree was McCarthy’s “most
brilliant novel, because it’s just his most McCarthy repetitious but endlessly readable. The
violence is appalling, as violence is. Through
1933
mundane”. It didn’t show the reader the the maniacally eloquent Judge, McCarthy
1840s Texas of Blood Meridian, McCarthy’s contends a stark truth: that violence is what
“stunning” 1985 western, Junger said. Nor
was Suttree like The Road, “apocalyptic and –2023 men will always pursue. That violence is
what America was born from and will not
whatever, all big dramatic stuff. Suttree takes escape. Every time there is a school shooting,
place in Knoxville in fucking nothingness, I think of McCarthy’s tree, hung with the
and it’s the most brilliant writing. It’s insane. bodies of dead infants.
He’s so good.” In the end, McCarthy’s elemental brilliance
I confessed: I had not read Suttree. lies in perhaps the most famous lines in Blood
“Are you fucking kidding?” Junger said. Meridian: “It makes no difference what men
“You have to read Suttree.” think of war, said the judge. War endures.
I took his advice, went to the Strand on my As well ask men what they think of stone.
way to the subway. He was right. War was always here. Before man was, war
McCarthy’s breakthrough novel, All waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its
the Pretty Horses, was perhaps his most ultimate practitioner.”
conventional. The sense of an ancient MARTIN PENGELLY IS BREAKING NEWS EDITOR
wilderness from which the Americas were FOR GUARDIAN US
BEOWULF SHEEHAN/PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE/PA

Culture 57
Books
stopping to nap, died last October, just two weeks
shy of her 94th birthday. In finishing the book
without her, Kraft has done her proud.
It begins with the Goslar family’s flight from
Berlin in 1934 after the Nazis came to power; Pick-
Goslar’s father, Hans, had spoken out against the
Nazis and feared for his safety. Arriving in Amster-
dam, Pick-Goslar met Frank, who was not only
the same age but another German Jew finding her
feet in a new country. She recalls her as small and
fragile-looking – “But her slightness belied her big
personality … I knew right away after meeting
Anne that she loved being the centre of attention.”
Their two families became close: Hans Goslar
used to play a prank on the Franks, standing on
their doorstep and ringing their doorbell dressed
as Hitler. But their carefree lives took a dark turn
when the Nazis invaded in May 1940. It took five
days for the Netherlands to surrender. Many Jews
in their neighbourhood took their own lives rather
than submit to what was to come.
It’s through a child’s eyes that she depicts their
shrinking existence under Nazi occupation as
W
MEMOIR hen Nazi officers arrived at the new antisemitic laws are passed and Jews are
home of 15-year-old Hannah Pick- banned from public spaces. One day in 1942,
Goslar, she had her suitcase ready. Pick-Goslar called round to see Frank, only to
They had sealed off her neighbour- be told by the lodger that the family had moved
Life during wartime hood, blocking roads and stationing soldiers on to Switzerland. We know now, from Frank’s
every bridge. Early in the morning, loudspeakers diary, that they were hiding in an annexe above
Anne Frank’s friend blared in the streets, telling Jewish residents to an Amsterdam warehouse until their discovery
prepare for departure. Then a member of the in 1944. But, at the time, their neighbours had no
recalls the grim green police, the wing of the German army tasked reason to doubt the Switzerland story.
horror of Nazi rule in with policing civilians, banged on the Goslars’ What happened to the Goslars next – their
door and told them: “You have 20 minutes to arrest and transportation to concentration camps
Amsterdam and how pack your things.” in overcrowded cattle trucks – is grimly familiar,
the girls were reunited The title of Pick-Goslar’s memoir, My Friend their fate echoing that of millions of Jews. As
Anne Frank, is misleading and – however unin- the Allies drew near at the end of the war, the
briefly in Bergen-Belsen tentionally – does it a disservice. This is not really Germans started to evacuate Bergen-Belsen;
the story of Frank, who achieved posthumous the sisters, alongside hundreds of other prison-
By Fiona Sturges fame through the diary she kept while in hiding, ers, were once again loaded on to trains, where
even though, as a neighbour and close friend of they travelled for 13 days without food or water.
the author, she is a significant presence in the Hundreds died in transit. Pick-Goslar, who by
first third of the book. It is, in fact, the vivid and now was sick with pleurisy, slipped in and out
extraordinary story of Pick-Goslar, a Holocaust of consciousness, eventually waking to find the
survivor who, following her arrest in Amsterdam, train had stopped and was empty, bar her sister
was imprisoned first at Westerbork, a Dutch hold- and those too weak to move. The German soldiers
ing camp near the German border, and later at had gone, replaced by Russians, one of whom
the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. told them in Yiddish: “People: you are free now.”
Many of her fellow survivors chose not to talk As for Frank, she and Pick-Goslar had been,
about what they had been through, but, from very briefly, reunited at Bergen-Belsen. On hear-
her first speaking tour of America in ing on the grapevine that Anne and
1957, Pick-Goslar kept telling her story her sister Margot had been brought
in order that the Holocaust would not from Auschwitz and put in sealed-
be forgotten. Following her retire- off barracks, Pick-Goslar was able to
ment from her career as a community track down her friend and speak to
nurse, she travelled around the world her through a fence. No longer the
▲ Dutch courage
delivering lectures. ebullient chatterbox of old, Frank
Last year, aged 93 – aware that she BOOK OF was sick with typhus, starving and,
Hannah Pick-
was among the last living eyewitnesses T H E W E E K wrongly believing her father to be
Goslar met
Anne Frank in
to the Nazi genocide – she began a My Friend dead, overwhelmed with grief. She
Amsterdam
series of interviews with the Tel Aviv Anne Frank died shortly after their meeting, as
in 1934
journalist Dina Kraft for a memoir. By Hannah did Margot. Just a few weeks later,
MARCEL ANTONISSE/ANP/
Pick-Goslar, who was frail and would Pick-Goslar the camp was liberated.
AFP/GETTY speak for two hours at a time before FIONA STURGES IS AN ARTS WRITER

58 Culture
Books
T
FICTION he stakes in Brandon Taylor’s fiction are The Late Americans is a more ambitious,
always high – strikingly so, given these nimbly diffuse novel, moving between a large
are campus novels. Lovers and gods cast of characters, mainly gay graduate students
are cruel; life’s beauty is dangerously of dance or creative writing. The campus setting
Doll parts close to being unbearable. Early on in The Late enables the creation of basically similar people
Americans, graduate student poet Seamus pic- who define themselves by difference: who eats
A large cast of graduate tures his cohort as living in a dollhouse: “It was meat and who loathes the killing of animals; who
so easy to imagine the hands of some enormous applauds the death penalty and who loathes the
students on a midwest and indifferent God prying the house open and killing of humans; who has money and who has
campus grapple with squinting at them as they went about their lives to earn it by making low-key pornography.
… in an exhibit called The Late Americans.” Are There is an accomplished reticence about race
the details of their lives our lives spectacles? And how can we continue here: it’s revealed stealthily, usually at moments
that make up their to live when pain is ubiquitous and when characters encounter racism.
mundane? The answer is bodily con- This connects to the novel’s intrepidly
common experience nection, but physical encounters may questioning vision of identity poli-
result merely in the transfer of pain. tics. It opens with Seamus, the white
By Lara Feigel Taylor emerged aged 30 with his working-class gay poet whose vision
Booker-shortlisted 2020 debut Real of the “Late Americans” provides the
Life. This was a painful, often funny, book’s title, angry because his class-
always dazzling autobiographical The Late mates reduce a poem to “its increas-
novel, with the narrator closely inside Americans ing cultural salience re: women, re:
the head and body of its lonely Black, By Brandon trauma, re: bodies, re: life at the end
gay graduate student protagonist. Taylor of the world”. He hates these poetry
Taylor revealed himself as brilliant at workshops because he believes that
intense, awkward social comedy and revelatory, trauma has nothing to do with poetry; that a true
unerotic sex scenes. The skill was in the delinea- poem takes in the world, but bears no sign of the
tion of moment-by-moment bodily life, charting personal material that forges it.
tiny shifts between tenderness and violence and It is a daring move to start the book with this
the hourly exhaustion of being in a disordered provocation. I wonder if it’s less daring to have
body. Unusually, Taylor was prepared to tell as it come from a white man. This is a novel that
well as to show, using his characters to think hard believes in the possibility of great art and of poli-
about his world. tics and that wants both to be about more than
These were the strengths and preoccupations, identity. So are Seamus’s pronouncements the
too, of his 2021 short story collection, Filthy thoughts of the novel? It’s never quite clear.
Animals, featuring a series of complicatedly The time span is larger here than in Taylor’s
entangled characters. Again, there was the previous books. As with his realist heroes – Tol-
precise attention to bodily experience, the stoy, Austen, DH Lawrence – weeks or even
restrained but revelatory lyricism that could months pass in a single sentence. Likewise, we
illuminate the darkest material: “What he wants are entering new heads right up to the final chap-
is not to maim himself but rather to pry open the ter, and there’s a lonely swimming instructor
world, bone it, remove the ugly hardness of it all, called Bea who gets just a single section, looking
the way one might take the spine from a deer or out of her window at some of the other charac-
a fish or some other animal snared.” ters. Together, these elements give the novel
RYAN J LANE/GETTY
T
BIOGR APHY his book contains no new interviews praise tends to be tempered: “It’s the Bee Gees
about the “insanely productive” group … but it’s really good.”
who sold more than 220m records: we The brothers were born in the Isle of Man,
are simply given Bob Stanley’s opin- Barry in 1946, the twins, Robin and Maurice,
They win again ions about the Bee Gees’ music. But there are in 1949. Their father, a band leader, moved the
few people whose opinions I would rather have. family to Manchester, where in 1957 the three
A personal appraisal Stanley is an articulate proponent of pop rather sang Wake Up Little Susie at the Gaumont picture
than rock (his previous book was Let’s house in Chorlton. The next year, the
by a musician-fan of Do It: The Birth of Pop) and a practi- Gibbs moved to Australia, where the
the hugely successful, tioner, with his group, Saint Etienne. brothers became child stars and Barry
Pop has come in out of the cold. started writing. It seems Manchester
yet much maligned, Blondie is as likely to be pontificated rain, rather than Australian sun, per-
band of brothers about as Led Zeppelin, but the Bee sisted in their hits of the late 60s. Their
Gees – who were certainly “pop”, songs were “melancholic”, “death-
despite evolving through quasi- Bee Gees: haunted”. New York Mining Disaster
By Andrew Martin psychedelia into R&B and disco – Children of 1941 is about being buried alive. I’ve
remain, as Stanley writes, “othered”, the World Gotta Get a Message to You from the
rarely accorded the respect they By Bob Stanley perspective of a condemned prisoner.
deserve. And he suggests that any Their late 1970s shift towards R&B

59
a sense of contingency: we could as easily be BOOKS OF THE MONTH

hearing about any other troubled graduate stu- The best recent picture books and novels for children and teens
dent, a few months earlier or a few months later.
Taylor writes an admirably serious blog on
Substack grappling with questions of what the By Imogen Russell Williams With its colourful pages Jodie
novel is for, where he’s set Rachel Cusk’s notion and accessible text, it By Hilary McKay,
that novelistic character is outdated against his should be a mainstay in illustrated by Keith
commitment to the realist novel. He believes that classroom libraries. Robinson
“a character with a body is a social creature” and Jodie didn’t want to go
that the “denuded and tranquilised autofiction A Dinosaur at the Bus Stop on the residential school
narrators of the 2010s” lack full bodily life. I could By Kate Wakeling, trip to the wildlife centre,
feel him grappling with these questions in The illustrated by Eilidh and she doesn’t want
Late Americans with volatile ambivalence. Muldoon to make friends there.
Scene by scene, these characters have the This collection for But when she heads into
bodily particularity, the specificity of the great 5+ readers wanders the marshes alone, and
realist novels. But through Taylor’s proliferat- The Frog’s Kiss addictively from the hears a dog whining,
ing characters, he seems to strive towards the By James Mayhew and Toto fastest poem in the world she realises she may not
kind of homogeneity we find in Cusk’s Outline Husbands Mayhew and to a “sensible” fart poem, survive alone. A pared-
trilogy, and not just because graduate students Toto’s first picture book from the “pudding space” down, deftly characterised
are already homogeneous. The dollhouse image collaboration is a stylish, in your stomach to the ghost story for 10+ by the
is a vision of graduate life but the fear is that it’s sweet retelling, where treasures you hold before Costa-winning author of
also a vision of America, because there is no great a lonely amphibian you sleep. Funny, sly, The Skylarks’ War.
world for these students to aspire to. Seamus discovers it’s the prince, welcoming and filled with
thinks at one point that they all suffer from iden- rather than the princesses, unassuming magic.
tical pain – “small, common things – hurt feelings, who makes his heart
cruel parents, strange and wearisome troubles”. “skip a beat”. City of Stolen Magic
This idea is challenged by the specificity with By Nazneen Ahmed Pathak
which violence and cruelty find their targets. My Bollywood Dream In India during the 1850s,
There’s a painful scene where a Black woman By Avani Dwivedi the ruling Britishers are
is shamed for her abortion and then assaulted Bold, bright and on a mission to stamp out
by a white man. Pain may not be equal after all, imaginative, Dwivedi’s “native” magic like the
but Seamus isn’t undermined – this is all part picture-book debut kind used by Chompa’s
of the book’s tension. conjures the excitement beloved mother. Some are Bite Risk
The Late Americans is baggier than Cusk’s of a Friday family trip to eager to exploit it in secret By SJ Wills
Outline and baggier than Real Life. It’s a less a Mumbai cinema: the – and when Chompa’s own Sel’s small town is quiet
entirely resolved read than either of them but, for smell of samosas, the magic attracts unwanted and dull – except on
me, this book assures and deepens Taylor’s posi- hero and heroine falling attention, she makes full-moon nights, when
tion as one of the most accomplished, important in love (“Ew!”), and the a dangerous journey the adults turn into
novelists of his generation. He is undoubtedly “roaring energy” of the overseas, desperate starving wolves, forcing
on to something expansively new in his sense of dance number that gets to save her mother. their children to lock them
what the contemporary novel can do. the audience on their feet, Exhilarating, thoughtful up and placate them with
LARA FEIGEL IS A WRITER AND PROFESSOR OF while a little girl dreams of and rich in detail, this raw meat. The town’s
ENGLISH AT KING’S COLLEGE LONDON making her own movies. wide-ranging debut for 9+ status quo is disrupted
is easily one of the year’s when the Turned begin
best books for children. escaping. A riotously
was encouraged by the producer Arif Mardin, absorbing horror-comedy
who suggested for one song that they “kick Stolen History: The Truth for readers of 12 and up.
it up an octave” – and so Barry’s falsetto was About the British Empire
unleashed. Their “slew of classics” for the film and How It Shaped Us Family of Liars
Saturday Night Fever marked their high point as By Sathnam Sanghera By E Lockhart
a band but as songwriters they hadn’t yet peaked. The bestselling author of On Beechwood
The “disco sucks” backlash involved the pub- Empireland investigates Island, where the
lic burning of Bee Gees records in the US; the the origins, relationships affluent Sinclairs
brothers (“confident” yet “insecure”) retreated, I Am, You Are and long-lasting impact spend their summers,
becoming songwriters for hire and producing By Ashley Harris Whaley, of the British empire for nothing disrupts the
work that, for Stanley, “places them among the illustrated by Ananya younger readers in this idyll – armoured in
greats”. Woman in Love, for Barbra Streisand, Rao-Middleton elegantly provocative privilege, they weather
begins: “Life is a moment in space”, and has This picture book for 4+ history book. Perfectly bereavement, betrayal and
production as “astral and gaseous” as the lyrics. readers is a child-friendly pitched for 9+, it invites bloodshed. Any 14+ fans of
Stanley’s description of sound is a constant look at disability and children to ask awkward Lockhart’s We Were Liars
pleasure. So here’s a project for pop fans: read discrimination, dealing questions about where will be delighted by this
this book, then listen to the music. Observer with visible and invisible museum artefacts and gripping prequel.
ANDREW MARTIN IS AN AUTHOR, WHO ALSO disabilities, ableism and ancestral fortunes may IMOGEN RUSSELL WILLIAMS
WRITES MUSIC AS BRUNSWICK GREEN avoiding assumptions. have been acquired. IS A CHILDREN’S BOOK CRITIC

60 Lifestyle
ASK we love or ourselves) to thoughts What to do? Both my specialists

Annalisa Barbieri of “what if ”: what if I did this to thought you could note down when
myself or to someone else? I have you have these thoughts. Garrod
them sometimes – I first got them suggested “writing down the trigger
My persistent, when I became a mother and the

responsibility of it all overwhelmed
and what it means, and then using
that to help you process. Then try to
intrusive me. I still get them.

What we think, and what we
look at what positive memories you
could create from that.”
thoughts are do, are very different things. Of

course, intrusive thoughts can be
For example, if you imagine
wanting to hurt someone, think:
hard to shift a symptom of other mental health

disorders, and some people act on
“Why do I want to hurt someone?
What emotion do I feel?” Let’s say
them, but I don’t think that’s what’s it’s anger. Could you then think of
I am a 76-year-old widower. I lost happening here. a happy memory that you had with
my wife eight years ago and my I consulted two specialists your wife to almost try to rewire the
daughter moved out two years ago, this week. UKCP-registered process? “I’m angry because I really
so I live alone. I have a reasonable psychotherapist Joanna Willow love my wife and now I miss her.” It
social life and a number of interests. and BPS-registered psychologist Dr sounds simplistic but it can work.
For about two years, I have been Harriet Garrod both have experience You’d benefit from talking
plagued by intrusive thoughts that in this field. Neither thought that, to someone. Although I’ve put
I would cause harm to someone. I on the evidence of what you’ve some links below, it could also be
am not sure why they persist. I am said, there was anything untoward to a friend or your daughter. I’m
not an aggressive person. for you to worry about. I hope guessing you might not want to
Thankfully, I have always been in that makes you feel a little better. because you find these thoughts
total control, but if you could give However, obviously you’d rather not frightening. But as Willow says:
me some advice as to how to lessen have them. What we thought might “These thoughts don’t say anything
the impact of these thoughts on my be happening is that, as a result of about who you are – but if you could
life I would be most grateful. living on your own, your thoughts find a way to alleviate the stress and
and feelings, instead of having an anxiety … it might stop the cycle.”
I
am glad you wrote in, and outlet, are being turned inwards. I asked both my specialists when
I’m very sorry to hear about I asked why we might get these to worry about intrusive thoughts
your wife. Eight years may thoughts. Willow said: “Intrusive If you would and the answer is when things
seem a long time, but in feelings tend to be fear-based, often like advice become impulsive instead of being
emotional terms it’s not long at all. when we’re stressed.” According to on a family just a thought, ie you have a real
It’s interesting that your intrusive Garrod: “Sometimes they can come matter, email compulsion to do something and
thoughts seem to have coincided from a place of unprocessed distress, ask.annalisa@ your “wise/rational brain” can’t
with your daughter leaving home. or trauma.” theguardian. interject and/or when you start
Intrusive thoughts, that is to say We thought your wife dying and com. See planning to do something.
thoughts that are unwanted, are then your daughter leaving may theguardian. I think it might also be helpful to
fairly normal. They can vary from have caused these feelings. You may com/letters- talk to your GP about counselling.
imagining things we don’t want feel sad, angry, lonely or any manner terms for terms Useful links include psychotherapy.
(bad things happening to those of other emotions. and conditions org.uk, bps.org.uk and mind.org.uk
STEPHEN COLLINS

T H E W E E K LY R E C I P E
By N
Nigel Slater
№ 223
Panko prawns
Pa
with pea and
wi
coriander
co chutney
Serves
S er v
er 4 I like getting messy in the kitchen,
•D
DAIRY
AIR
A I FREE in particular crumbing something
that is to be fried. Dipping whole,
peeled prawns or rings of squid
first into seasoned flour, then
Embrace the daily grind to unleash beaten egg and breadcrumbs to

give a crisp, savoury coat, leaves
a blast of flavour at mealtimes your hands as stickily egged and

crumbed as the prawns. The
chutney can be made in seconds
IIngredients in a blender or food processor, but
panko breadcrumbs I like to pound the leaves, garlic
6 tbsp and oil with a pestle and mortar. It’s
even rice as it boils. Fish cooked 2 eggs, lightly beaten a fragrant job, but it is harder work
plain flour, 4 tbsp
We all have those trusty spices that with coconut milk, tomatoes, than the processor version.
400g large peeled
we reach for time and again to bring turmeric, fenugreek, black pepper prawns, defrosted if
flavour – Heat! Sweetness! Sourness! and curry leaves is a breakfast frozen Method
– to a dish, but there are also those Shanmugalingam “could eat every 150ml groundnut or To make the chutney, chop the
that lurk at the back, unused day”, while surplus cardamom vegetable oil coriander leaves and stems and put
and unloved. To prevent Grace’s might go into a buttermilk brine for them in a blender or food processor.
cupboard from becoming a Schwartz chicken. Another option, Clark adds, For the chutney Pour in the vegetable oil. Reduce the
history museum (other brands are is to combine paprika and butter to 75g coriander (leaves ginger to a puree with a fine grater,
available), she’s right to ask how rub under chicken skin. and stems) then add to the blender with the
25ml vegetable oil
best to store them. Don’t be afraid to experiment: garlic, chillies, lime juice, water and
50g ginger, peeled
While supermarkets sell spices in “Spices you bought for something 2 cloves garlic,
a pinch of sugar. Process to a thick
jars, it’s best not to keep them this savoury might also apply well to peeled paste. Add the peas and continue
way. “They’ll lose their potency, sweet things,” Clark says. She often 2 large green chillies blending until you have a green,
which is really the singular point toasts fennel seeds in butter to 60ml lime juice nubbly chutney.
of a spice,” says Rachel Walker, drizzle over a tahini-yoghurt dip, 3 tbsp water Put the breadcrumbs on a plate,
the founder of Rooted Spices and but you could also crush them to pinch of sugar the eggs into a shallow bowl and the
co-author, alongside Esther Clark, macerate strawberries in with lemon 100g peas (podded flour in another. Season the flour
of The Modern Spice Rack. Instead, and sugar – those berries will then weight), raw with a little salt and black pepper.
store them in an opaque container work like a dream whizzed up for One at a time, roll the prawns first in
out of direct sunlight and away from a cocktail or churned into ice-cream. the flour, then the egg, turning them
heat. This strategy is also endorsed And remember, you don’t over to thoroughly coat, then in the
by Cynthia Shanmugalingam, always have to finish a dish with breadcrumbs, pressing them down
the chef/founder of Rambutan in salt and pepper. “Taste and smell so the crumbs stick.
Borough Market, London. Her top your spices, get to know them, and Warm the oil in a sauté pan or
tip is to buy whole spices. Toasting use them as a seasoning,” Clark similar high-sided frying pan.
and grinding your spices fresh suggests. “Have a za’atar pinch When it starts to bubble, lower in
makes a “huge” difference, she says. pot on your table and put some on the prawns, without packing them
Plus, they’ll keep longer. your scrambled eggs.” Walker,, for
f tl and let them cook for
too tightly,
One of the great joys of spices, example, deploys shichimi togarashi a couple of minutes. When the
Clark says, is that they allow you on cheese on toast and gratedt underside of the prawns is pale gold,
to be a more thrifty cook: “They nutmeg on buttered crumpets (a tip turn them over with kitchen tongs
inject so much flavour.” Coriander from her grower). “Just play with and colour the other side. Remove
seeds, for example, could be flavours,” she says. and keep warm while you cook the
toasted and used to top dips and ANNA BERRILL IS A FOOD WRITER rest, then eat them with the chutney.
salads, or crushed and whisked into a?
Got a culinary dilemma?
dressings, while Shanmugalingam an.c
Email feast@theguardian.com
PHIVE2015/GETTY

Notes and Queries
62 Diversions The long-running series that invites
readers to send in questions and
answers on anything and everything
QUIZ 8 Where were three Carlist CINEM A CONNECT COU N T RY DI A RY

Thomas Eaton wars fought in the 19th Killian Fox L E Z AY R E
century? Isle of Man
What links:
I
1 Which three current 9 Middle; archbishop or Name the films and the person who t is hard to escape the noise
national capitals have urban; 360 degrees; 25th connects them. of the TT festival. On a small,
hosted the Winter anniversary; acceded 1837? quiet island, the sudden arrival
Olympics? 10 Arcesius; Laertes; of tens of thousands of visitors
2 Eliza Davis protested Odysseus; Telemachus? on their motorbikes is a shock to
to Dickens that which 11 All-seeing eye; square the system. Many residents look
character was a negative and compasses; sheaf of forward to June when the island
stereotype? corn; acacia tree? bursts into life. The pubs probably
3 What is the world’s 12 Argentina; Australian make more in a fortnight than the
heaviest snake? Aboriginal; Bangladesh; rest of the year. But many islanders
4 Hitler, Mussolini and Japan; North Macedonia? loathe the chaos and inconvenience.
FDR all died in which 13 Rod Steiger; Robert De Having no interest in the bikes
month? Niro; Tom Hardy; Stephen myself, the TT means something
5 What type of mechanical Graham? altogether different, for it coincides
device is a paternoster? 14 Bual; malmsey; sercial; with one of the greatest wildlife
6 In US medicine, DSM-5 is verdelho? phenomena to be found in the
the list of what? 15 Mecca (4th); Shanghai British Isles: the flowering of our
7 The Grand Banks lie off (3rd) Kuala Lumpur (2nd); traditional hay meadows.
which Atlantic island? Dubai (1st)? Haymaking is among the most
by Kathryn Bigelow. ancient forms of agriculture.
PUZZLES 3 Dropouts and The Hurt Locker (2008) – all directed Dry grass cut in late summer will
Chris Maslanka Replace each asterisk by a preserve itself and get a flock or herd
Dark Thirty (2012), Point Break (1991)
5 FARTHINGS. Cinema Connect Zero
letter to make a word: 3 PLAGIARISM. 4 PERIODIC TABLE. through the winter. Crucially, this
P*A*I*R*S* late cut, compared with spring-cut
Khalifa. Maslanka 1 c). 2 NATHANIEL.
Shanghai Tower; Merdeka 118; Burj
1 Wordpool skyscrapers: Abraj Al-Bait Clock Tower; silage, which is preserved in plastic
Find the correct definition: 4 Elementary wine. 15 Locations of world’s tallest
screen. 14 Grapes/main types of Madeira
wrap, also allows birds to raise their
UGUISU Rearrange the letters of the featuring suns. 13 Played Al Capone on chicks and plants to flower and set
a) goat stew phrase EDIBLE APRICOT son. 11 Masonic symbols. 12 Flags seed – resulting in wildlife bliss.
b) mountain pass to make something of My refuge is a most wondrous
Odysseus: grandfather; father; himself;
Victoria. 10 Family line of Greek hero
c) bush warbler chemical significance. Central; Metropolitan; Circle; Jubilee; meadow. Among a sea of thousands
d) Zulu shield of flowers are five species of orchid,
8 Spain. 9 London Underground lines:
Mental Disorders). 7 Newfoundland.
5 Cryptic (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of including the rare greater butterfly
2 Bran tub Distant objects were once revolving lift. 6 Mental disorders
anaconda. 4 April 1945. 5 Continuously
orchid, which can only truly be
Make a name for yourself more than two a penny (9) 2 Fagin in Oliver Twist. 3 Green appreciated by lying down on your
out of: A LINEN HAT © CMM2023 Answers Quiz 1 Oslo, Sarajevo, Beijing. belly. It is among the most striking
of all the 500 or so plant species that
CHESS round robin, and his worst ($2.7m), including awards call our island home.
Leonard Barden rating loss since Stavanger for first-round losers. Upliftingly, I’m not on a nature
2015. His ambition of John Nunn, the multi- reserve. This is an ordinary farm
achieving a record 2900 talented chess author, with an extraordinary farmer. Long
The Tech Mahindra rating now looks a dream. grandmaster, publisher, ago, we didn’t need nature reserves
Global Chess League, Carlsen had already problem solver and when so much farmland looked like
the first franchise-based bounced back in last mathematician, added this. My refuge is interrupted by the
chess event, is being week’s preliminaries another chapter to his monotonous throb of a helicopter,
played in Dubai to 2 July. for the online Aimchess career when he won signifying that the race leader is
Six teams of six each Rapid, where he overcame the European over-65 approaching. The din subsides,
include an icon, two elite an early loss to qualify for championship at Acqui yet the meadow is still alive with
GMs, two women GMs and the top division of eight. Terme, Italy, scoring a frenzy of butterflies, hoverflies,
an under-21 junior. He has also been 7/9 and having the best bees. A hay meadow in June is
Magnus Carlsen is announced as the top tiebreak. In 2022, Nunn a microcosm of the island during TT;
taking part, in what is seed for the 206-player took the world over-65 beautiful yet chaotic. David Bellamy
an opportunity for the knockout World Cup, the crown, while in winning
world No 1 to recover from only major competition both the over-50 and
his failure at Stavanger, he has never won, which over-65 world team titles
where he drew eight will be staged in Baku, as well as the European
classical games and lost Azerbaijan, starting on over-50, England
one. It was the first time 30 July. The prize fund, confirmed its status as
since Dortmund 2007 including for the parallel No 1 in senior chess.
that the Norwegian had 103-player Women’s World The chess puzzle will return
been winless in a classical Cup, is a record €2.5m next week
ILLUSTRATION: CLIFFORD HARPER

Guardian Puzzles & Crosswords
Access over 15,000 puzzles on our app. 63
Download from the App Store or Google Play.
Read more: theguardian.com/puzzles-app
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Quick crossword
8 No 16,568
9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
11 12 9
10
13 14 15 11 12 13 14
All solutions published next week

15 16
16 17 18 19
20 17 18 19
21 22 23 20
21 22 23
24 25 24
25
26 27 26
The Weekly cryptic By Pangakupu Across 7 Gin-reared (anag) – British

1 Indication that something soldier (9)
No 29,095 should be taken away (5,4) 11 Somewhere to wait (9)
8 Expensive in France (4) 12 Gross (9)
9 Serious lapse – it’s normal 13 Parts (of a whole) (5)
Across 14 Electrical equipment linking birch and shrub (anag) (6,3) 14 Make a loose arrangement? (5)
1 Picture king amongst group of pieces leading (6,3) 10 Smile broadly (4) 18 Corkscrew (6)
to check (6) 16 Small support for hosting a composer (7) 13 Single (5) 19 Book or paper size (6)
4 Attractive woman’s detailed incantation (6) 18 Place for wild animals always keeping a lot of 15 Moving part on a vehicle? (6) 22 Low vibrating sound (4)
9 Strained sound of rebuke muffling answer (4) the other ones upset (7) 16 In the region of (6) 23 Ban (4)
10 American trips taking in crumbling hall on an 19 For one Guardian leader on top teacher, it’s 17 Occasional extravagances (6)
irregular basis (2,3,5) intellectual (7) 19 Contest (6) Solution No 16,562
20 Gap (5)
11 Reveal hesitation about nationalist question 20 Married Australian brought in character not R G E S
21 One gets caught after taking it (4)
(6) from Oz – the fruit of love? (6)
24 Financial controller (9) D I P L OM A C Y
12 Extinct bird mentioned in dreary lecture (5,3) 23 Fried potato dish – it’s golden when turned 25 Honour – Archbishop of T F I A A S
13 Power gap filled by party leader (9) over (5) Canterbury, beheaded 1645 (4) C U F F T A I L B A C K
15 Rumour I ignored – it’s not sweet (4) R R C L R
26 Scope (9)
S Q U A S H S U B L E T
16 Large organ broke? Not quite (4)
Down U F O W
17 Ministers not entirely caring about first one 2 Click on it to open a computer L O O F A H G R U B B Y
leaving wild party (9) program (4) I I O F A
21 Fine translation of ‘sucre’ to indicate this? (8) 3 Plotting (something) (2,2) I S O L A T E D F I L M
22 Children’s programme taking over core of 4 Salty – as Nile (anag) (6) E O M S A L
series (6) 5 Pig or fowl? (6) P A R A MO U N T
24 It’s used for lifting things without tipping? 6 Immediately after that point (9) N N N T
(4,6)
Solution No 29,089
25 Tack holding rear of carpet is a bother (4)
26 Cracker show held in last third of August (6)
Sudoku
27 Stop a party I backed (6) R D P S M R Medium
B O U R B O N S C O O P E R Fill in the grid so
Down S A T P O O D that every row,
1 Sign of injury, with nobody removing ring
B E A M E X I S T E N C E S every column
when entering hospital device (7)
B E R T S Y and every 3x3
2 Congress heading off cheers about
H U D S O N I R I S H M E N box contains the
Republican addition? (5)
S H T S I numbers 1 to 9.
3 College, stretched, failed (7)
H O O T C H C H I N U P
5 One suffers effects of sunburn, having rolled Last week’s solution
R A P E E
over in a doze (6)
O R A T O R I O M O R T A L
6 Tense before translation of Wooster comedy
finally displaying more elevated level? (3-6) A S E W I T
7 Bovine material in test mostly upheld as D I S T I L L E R S S W I G
source of ventilation (3,4) L O E R L O E
8 Remarkable gains least expected after C A I R N S S L A P D A S H
damage in these constituencies (8,5) T Y S Y A T

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