Sheep in the road 9

9

SHEEP

IN THE ROAD APRIL 2016

STILL LEVELLING!

b

Editor looks for word to describe this issue’s contents ...

SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER 9

The

CONTENTS –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Opening 03 Edit & Design: Alan Rutherford Published online by www.handoverfistpress.com Cover: Alan Rutherford Photographs, words and artwork sourced from ‘found in the scrapbook of life’, no intentional copyright infringement intended, credited whenever possible, so, for treading on any toes ... apologies all round!

The Cage

04

Diggers 07 Royal Cafe

10

Nils Burwitz

12

1

Constructivism 16 Hope trumped?

18

Borders Folly

21

Nothing is Normal

33

Crossroads 41 Deadline for submitting articles to be included in the next issue, will be the 15th day of the next month, in your dreams!

Articles and all correspondence to: alanrutherford1@mac.com

Lower High Street

45

Duffer 61 Irish Women

65

Letters

69

APRIL FOOL 2016

OPENING Blah-blahblah-blahblah––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Hello, Welcome to magazine number 9.

Articles and artwork by way of other sources, words borrowed ... some odd pieces catch my eye and are adopted to illustrate an angle. Its a visual necessity if I am to produce this ‘rag’ ... contributors are a fucking scarce breed.

3 Otherwise its nuggets of the eclectic ... flourish again!

Artwork: print by Letterproeftuin, Rotterdam

Until next time, get active, stay alive ...

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... at its core, the cylinder too is poised between rotations ...

transfixed upon its waste, within the monotony of its wall ...

THE CAGE: Mart

... only one object still commands attention ...

tin Vaughn-James

... rooted firmly in the centre of the plain ...

Photograph: Alan Rutherford

DIGGERS

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THE TRUE LEVELLERS Wikipedia

The year 1649 was a time of great social unrest in England. The Parliamentarians had won the First English Civil War but failed to negotiate a constitutional settlement with the defeated King Charles I. When members of Parliament and the Grandees in the New Model Army were faced with Charles’ perceived duplicity, they tried and executed him.

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Government through the King’s Privy Council was replaced with a new body called the Council of State, which due to fundamental disagreements within a weakened Parliament was dominated by the Army.

Many people became active in politics, suggesting alternative forms of government to replace the old order. Royalists wished to place King Charles II on the throne; men like Oliver Cromwell wished to govern with a plutocratic Parliament voted in by an electorate based on property, similar to that which was enfranchised before the civil war; agitators called Levellers, influenced by the writings of John Lilburne, wanted parliamentary government based on an electorate of every male head of a household; Fifth Monarchy Men advocated a theocracy; and the Diggers, led by Gerrard Winstanley, advocated a more radical solution.

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In 1649 Gerrard Winstanley and 14 others published a pamphlet in which they called themselves the “True Levellers” to distinguish their ideas from those of the Levellers. Once they put their idea into practice and started to cultivate common land, both opponents and supporters began to call them “Diggers”. The Diggers’ beliefs were informed by Winstanley’s writings which envisioned an ecological interrelationship between humans and nature, acknowledging the inherent connections between people and their surroundings.

Winstanley declared that “true freedom lies where a man receives his nourishment and preservation, and that is in the use of the earth”.

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An undercurrent of political thought which has run through English society for many generations and resurfaced from time to time (for example, in the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381) was present in some of the political factions of the 17th century, including those who formed the Diggers. It involved the common belief that England had become subjugated by the “Norman Yoke”. This legend offered an explanation that at one time a golden Era had existed in England before the Norman Conquest in 1066. From the Conquest on, the Diggers argued, the “common people of England” had been robbed of their birthrights and exploited by a foreign ruling-class.

Action is the Life of All and if thou Dost not Act, Thou dost NOTHING Gerrard Winstanley

St George’s Hill, Weybridge, Surrey The Council of State received a letter in April 1649 reporting that several individuals had begun to plant vegetables in common land on St George’s Hill, Weybridge near Cobham, Surrey at a time when food prices reached an all-time high. Sanders reported that they had invited “all to come in and help them, and promise them meat, drink, and clothes.” They intended to pull down all enclosures and cause the local populace to come and work with them. They claimed that their number would be several thousand within ten days. “It is feared they have some design in hand.” In the same month, the Diggers issued their most famous pamphlet and manifesto, called “The True Levellers Standard Advanced”.

At the behest of the local landowners, the commander of the New Model Army, Sir Thomas Fairfax, duly arrived with his troops and interviewed Winstanley and another prominent member of the Diggers, William Everard.

Everard suspected that the Diggers were in serious trouble and soon left the group. Fairfax, meanwhile, having concluded that Diggers were doing no harm, advised the local landowners to use the courts.

Winstanley remained and continued to write about the treatment they received. The harassment from the Lord of the Manor, Francis Drake (not the famous Francis Drake, who had died more than 50 years before), was both deliberate and systematic: he organised gangs in an attack on the Diggers, including numerous beatings and an arson attack on one of the communal houses. Following a court case, in which the Diggers were forbidden to speak in their own defence, they were found guilty of being Ranters, a radical sect associated with liberal sexuality (though in fact Winstanley had reprimanded Ranter Laurence Clarkson for his sexual practices). Having lost the court case, if they had not left the land, then the army could have been used to enforce the law and evict them; so they abandoned Saint George’s Hill in August 1649, much to the relief of the local freeholders.

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Little Heath near Cobham Some of the evicted Diggers moved a short distance to Little Heath in Surrey. 11 acres (4.5 ha) were cultivated, six houses built, winter crops harvested, and several pamphlets published. After initially expressing some sympathy for them, the local lord of the manor of Cobham, Parson John Platt, became their chief enemy. He used his power to stop local people helping them and he organised attacks on the Diggers and their property. By April 1650, Platt and other local landowners succeeded in driving the Diggers from Little Heath.

On April 15, 1650, the Council of State ordered Mr Pentlow, a justice of the peace for Northamptonshire to proceed against ‘the Levellers in those parts’ and to have them tried at the next Quarter Session. The Iver Diggers recorded that, nine of the Wellingborough Diggers were arrested and imprisoned in Northampton jail and although no charges could be proved against them the justice refused to release them.

Captain William Thompson, the leader of the failed “Banbury mutiny,” was killed in a skirmish close to the community by soldiers loyal to Oliver Cromwell in May 1649.

Wellingborough, Northamptonshire There was another community of Diggers close to Wellingborough in Northamptonshire. In 1650, the community published a declaration which started: A Declaration of the Grounds and Reasons why we the Poor Inhabitants of the Town of Wellingborrow, in the County of Northampton, have begun and give consent to dig up, manure and sow Corn upon the Common, and waste ground, called Bareshanke belonging to the Inhabitants of Wellinborrow, by those that have Subscribed and hundreds more that give Consent....

Iver, Buckinghamshire Another colony of Diggers connected to the Surrey and Wellingborough colony was set up in Iver, Buckinghamshire about 14 miles (23 km) from the Surrey Diggers colony at St George’s Hill (see Keith Thomas, ‘Another Digger Broadside’ Past and Present No.42, (1969) pp. 57–68). The Iver Diggers “Declaration of the grounds and Reasons, why we the poor Inhabitants of the Parrish of Iver in Buckinghamshire ...” revealed that there were further Digger colonies in Barnet in Hertfordshire, Enfield in Middlesex, Dunstable in Bedfordshire, Bosworth in Gloucestershire and a further colony in Nottinghamshire. It also revealed that after the failure of the Surrey colony, the Diggers had left their children to be cared for by parish funds.

This colony was probably founded as a result of contact with the Surrey Diggers. In late March 1650, four emissaries from the Surrey colony were arrested in Buckinghamshire bearing a letter signed by the Surrey Diggers including Gerrard Winstanley and Robert Coster inciting people to start Digger colonies and to provide money for the Surrey Diggers.

According to the newspaper A Perfect Diurnall the emissaries had travelled a circuit through the counties of Surrey, Middlesex, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Huntingdonshire and Northamptonshire before being apprehended.

Royal is a new imprint within Café Royal Books.

Royal is a return to the reason Craig started Café Royal Books ten years ago; to exhibit drawing and other things, in multiple, quickly, affordably, globally, in a way that isn’t reliant on the gallery.

Lao Tzu Two Ian Pollock

£5

11 CafĂŠ Royal Books shop & archive www.caferoyalbooks.com facebook.com/crbooks @caferoyalbooks Publisher & Editor Craig Atkinson craig@caferoyalbooks.com Weekly limited edition photographic publications focussing broadly on aspects of change, usually within the UK.

Nils Burwitz Namibia: Heads or Tails?, 1979 A number of his prints are graphic responses to apartheid in South Africa,; the inhumanity of bureaucratic language and the inherent discrimination embedded in the terminology is as chilling as any more graphic abuse of human rights.

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‘Heads or Tails?’ draws its power from replicating and recontextualizing the signs that policed the racial divisions in society in every respect, in life and death, labour and leisure. This is perhaps his most famous image – made in fact after he had left South Africa for Mallorca. A double-sided print, it reproduces both sides of a sign: one side warns the spectator that he/she is about to enter a prohibited area (the Diamond Zone in Namibia); the other is blank; both are riddled with bullet holes. Burwitz simulated the peeling layers of enamel surrounding the bullet holes in the original sign by repeated applications of thickened inks forced through the silk screens.

SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER 9

Nils Burwitz Namibia: Heads or Tails?, 1979 A number of his prints are graphic responses to apartheid in South Africa,; the inhumanity of bureaucratic language and the inherent discrimination embedded in the terminology is as chilling as any more graphic abuse of human rights.

‘Heads or Tails?’ draws its power from replicating and recontextualizing the signs that policed the racial divisions in society in every respect, in life and death, labour and leisure. This is perhaps his most famous image – made in fact after he had left South Africa for Mallorca. A double-sided print, it reproduces both sides of a sign: one side warns the spectator that he/she is about to enter a prohibited area (the Diamond Zone in Namibia); the other is blank; both are riddled with bullet holes. Burwitz simulated the peeling layers of enamel surrounding the bullet holes in the original sign by repeated applications of thickened inks forced through the silk screens.

‘Hey man, it looks like black skin ...’

CONSTRUCT-IVISM El Lissitzky was one of the most inspired proponents of this ideologically driven Russian movement, which became known as Constructivism. His famous red, black and sepia poster, featuring the hand of an architect holding a compass, epitomised the basic principles of this early Modernist aesthetic. Onto this simple and bold layout, Lissitzky superimposed typographical and pictorial elements at 90- and 45-degree angles. He triangulated the heavy lines of type, the fingers of the hand and the arms of the compass the same way an architect would have triangulated girders, timbers and beams to strengthen a tall structure. The use of capital letters, sans serif type and industrial-looking colours reinforced the impression of stability that this composition strove to achieve.

Perfected in Russia by Lissitzky and also Alexander Rodchenko in the 1920s, triangulated layouts went on to capture the imagination of designers worldwide. Imbued with revolutionary thoughts and new ideas about art, artists and their place in society; hatched in a country embroiled in a Socialist revolution – countless artists adopted and further developed the Constructivist style. First in the Netherlands, where Theo van Doesburg and Piet Zwart borrowed some of its tropes to spearhead the De Stijl movement; and later, in the 1930s, in Germany, where the likes of László Moholy-Nagy and Jan Tschichold combined diagonals and angles with Bauhaus typography to create their own distinctive signature look.

Edited from an article by Steven Heller and Véronique Vienne

Artwork: El Lissitzky

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Artwork: Shepard Fairey

IS THE LONG GONE HOPE IN THE USA FINALLY TRUMPED? OK ... who trumped?

UTTER FOLLY –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

BORDERS:

THE SCARS OF HISTORY Jack Shenker

from The Guardian, under heading ...

Welcome to the land that no country wants

BIR TAWIL is the last truly unclaimed land on earth:

a tiny sliver of Africa ruled by no state, inhabited by no permanent residents and governed by no laws. To get there, you have two choices.

The first is to fly to the Sudanese capital Khartoum, charter a jeep, and follow the Shendi road hundreds of miles up to Abu Hamed, a settlement that dates back to the ancient kingdom of Kush. Today it serves as the region’s final permanent human outpost before the vast Nubian desert, twice the size of mainland Britain and almost completely barren, begins unfolding to the north.

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There are some artisanal gold miners in the desert, conjuring specks of hope out of the ground, a few armed gangs, which often prey upon the prospectors, and a small number of military units who carry out patrols in the area and attempt, with limited success, to keep the peace. You need to drive past all of them, out to the point where the occasional scattered shrub or palm tree has long since disappeared and given way to a seemingly endless, flat horizon of sand and rock – out to the point where there are no longer any landmarks by which to measure the passing of your journey.

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Out here, dry winds often blow in from the Arabian peninsula, whipping up sheets of dust that plunge visibility down to near-zero. After a day like this, then a night, and then another day, you will finally cross into Bir Tawil, an 800-square-mile cartographical oddity nestled within the border that separates Egypt and Sudan. Both nations have renounced any claim to it, and no other government has any jurisdiction over it.

The second option is to approach from Egypt, setting off from the country’s southernmost city of Aswan, down through the arid expanse that lies between Lake Nasser to the west and the Red Sea to the east.

Much of it has been declared a restricted zone by the Egyptian army, and no one can get near the border without first obtaining their permission.

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In June 2014, a 38-year-old farmer from Virginia named Jeremiah Heaton did exactly that. After obtaining the necessary paperwork from the Egyptian military authorities, he started out on a treacherous 14-hour expedition through remote canyons and jagged mountains, eventually wending his way into the no man’s land of Bir Tawil and triumphantly planting a flag.

Heaton’s six-year-old daughter, Emily, had once asked her father if she could ever be a real princess; after discovering the existence of Bir Tawil on the internet, his birthday present to her that year was to trek there and turn her wish into a reality. “So be it proclaimed,” Heaton wrote on his Facebook page, “that Bir Tawil shall be forever known as the Kingdom of North Sudan. The Kingdom is established as a sovereign monarchy with myself as the head of state; with Emily becoming an actual princess.”

Heaton’s social media posts were picked up by a local paper in Virginia, the Bristol Herald-Courier, and quickly became the stuff of feel-good clickbait around the world. CNN, Time, Newsweek and

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hundreds of other global media outlets pounced on the story. Heaton responded by launching a global crowdfunding appeal aimed at securing $250,000 in an effort at getting his new “state” up and running.

Heaton knew his actions would provoke awe, mirth and confusion, and that many would question his sanity. But what he was not prepared for was an angry backlash by observers who regarded him not as a devoted father or a heroic pioneer but rather as a 21st-century imperialist. After all, the portrayal of land as “unclaimed” or “undeveloped” was central to centuries of ruthless conquest. “The same callous, dehumanising logic that has been used to legitimise European colonialism not just in Africa but in the Americas, Australia, and elsewhere is on full display here,” noted one commentator. “Are white people still allowed to do this kind of stuff?” asked another.

“Any new idea that’s this big and bold always meets with some sort of ridicule, or is questioned in terms of its legitimacy,” Heaton told me last year over the telephone. In his version of the story, Heaton’s “conquest” of Bir Tawil was not about colonialism, but rather familial love and ambitious dreams: apart from making Emily royalty, he hopes to turn his newly founded nation – which lies within one of the most inhospitable regions on the planet and contains no fixed population, no coastline, no surface water and no arable soil – into a cutting-edge agriculture and technology research hub that will ultimately benefit all humanity.

After all, Heaton reasoned, no country wanted this forgotten corner of the world, and no individual before him had ever laid claim to it. What harm was to be caused by some well‑intentioned, starry-eyed eccentric completing such a challenge, and why should it not be him?

There were two problems with Heaton’s argument.

First, territories and borders can be delicate and

volatile things, and tampering with them is rarely without unforeseen consequences. As Heaton learned from the public response to his self-declared kingdom, there is no neutral or harmless way to “claim” a state, no matter how far away from anywhere else it appears to be. Second, Heaton was not the first wellintentioned, starry-eyed eccentric to travel all the way to Bir Tawil and plant a flag. Someone else got there first, and that someone was me.

Like all great adventure stories, this one began with lukewarm beer and the internet. It was the summer of 2010, and the days in Cairo – where I was living and working as a journalist – were long and hot. My friend Omar’s balcony provided a shaded refuge filled with wicker chairs and reliably stable wireless broadband. It was up there, midway through a muggy evening’s web pottering, that we first encountered Bir Tawil.

Omar was an Egyptian-British filmmaker armed with a battery of finely tuned Werner Herzog impressions and a crisp black beard that I was secretly quite jealous of. The pair of us knew nothing beyond a single fact, gleaned from a blog devoted to arcane maps: barely 500 miles away from where we sat, there apparently existed a patch of land over which no country on earth asserted any sovereignty. Within five minutes I had booked the flights. Omar opened two more beers.

Places beyond the scope of everyday authority have always fired the imagination. They appear to offer us an escape – when all you can see of somewhere is its outlines, it is easy to start fantasising about the void within. “No man’s lands are our El Dorados,” says Noam Leshem, a Durham University geographer who recently travelled 6,000 miles through a series of so-called “dead spaces”, from the former frontlines of the Balkans war to the UN buffer zone in Cyprus, along with his colleague Alasdair Pinkerton of Royal Holloway. The pair intended to conclude their journey at Bir Tawil, but never made it. “There is something

alluring about a place beyond the control of the state,” Leshem adds, “and also something highly deceptive.”

In reality, nowhere is unplugged from the complex political and historical dynamics of the world around it, and – as Omar and I were to discover – no visitors can hope to short-circuit them.

Six months later, in January 2011, we touched down at Khartoum International airport with a pair of sleeping bags, five energy bars, and an embarrassingly small stock of knowledge about our final destination. To an extent, the ignorance was deliberate. For one thing, we planned to shoot a film about our travels, and Omar had persuaded me the secret to good film-making was to begin work utterly unprepared. Omar – according to Omar – was a cinematic auteur; the kind of maverick who could breeze into a desolate wasteland with no vehicle, no route, and no contacts and produce an award-winning documentary from the mayhem. One does not lumber an auteur, he explained, with printed itineraries, booked accommodation or emergency phone numbers. Mindful of my own aspirations to auteurism, this reasoning struck me as convincing.

There was something else, too, that made us refrain from proper planning. As the date of our departure for Sudan drew closer, Omar and I had taken to discussing our “plans” for Bir Tawil in increasingly grandiose terms. Deep down, I think, we both knew that the notion of “claiming” the territory and harnessing it for some grand ideological cause was preposterous. But what if it wasn’t? What if our own little tabula rasa could be the start of something bigger, transforming a forgotten relic of colonial mapmaking into a progressive force that would defeat contemporary injustices across the world?

The mechanics of how this might actually work remained a little hazy. Yet just occasionally, at more contemplative junctures, it did occur to us that in the process of planting a flag in Bir Tawil as part of some

ill-defined critique of arbitrary borders and imperial violence, there was a risk we could appear – to the untrained eye – very similar to the imperialists who had perpetrated such violence in the first place. It was a resemblance we were keen to avoid. Undertaking this journey in a state of deep ignorance, we told ourselves, would help mitigate pomposity. Without any basic knowledge, we would be forced to travel as humble innocents, relying solely on guidance from the communities we passed through.

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As the two of us cleared customs, we broke into smiles and congratulated each other. The auteurs had landed, and what is more they had Important Things To Say about borders and states and sovereignty and empires. We set off in search of some local currency, and warmed to our theme. By the time we found an ATM, we were referring to Bir Tawil as so much more than a conceptual exposition. Under our benevolent stewardship, we assured each other, it could surely become some sort of launchpad for radical new ideas, a haven for subversives all over the planet.

It was at that point that the auteurs realised their bank cards did not work in Sudan, and that there were no international money transfer services they could use to wire themselves some cash.

This setback represented the first consequence of our failure to do any preparatory research. The nagging sense that our maverick approach to reaching Bir Tawil may not have been the wisest way forward gained momentum with consequence number two, which was that to solve the money problem we had to persuade a friend of a friend of a friend of an Egyptian business acquaintance to do an illicit currency trade for us on the outskirts of Khartoum. Consequence number three – namely that, given our lack of knowledge about where we could and could not legally film in the capital, after a few days we inadvertently attracted the attention of an undercover state security agent

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while carrying around $2,000 worth of used Sudanese banknotes in an old rucksack, and were arrested – transformed suspicion into certainty.

On the date Omar and I were incarcerated, millions of citizens in South Sudan were heading to the polls to decide between continued unity with the north or secession and a new, independent state of their own. We sat silently in a nondescript office block just off Gama’a Avenue – the city’s main diplomatic thoroughfare – while a group of men in black suits and dark sunglasses scrolled through files on Omar’s video camera. Armed soldiers, unsmiling, stood guard at the door. Through the room’s single window, open but barred, the sound of nearby traffic could be heard.

The images on the screen depicted me and Omar gadding about town on the days following our arrival; me and Omar unfurling huge rolls of yellowing paper at the government’s survey department; me and Omar scrawling indecipherable patterns on sheets of paper in an effort to design the new Bir Tawili flag; me and Omar squabbling over fabric colours at the Omdurman market where we had gone to stitch together the aforementioned flag. With each new picture, a man who appeared to be the senior officer raised his eyes to meet ours, shook his head, and sighed.

In an attempt to lighten the mood, I pointed out to Omar how apposite it was that at the very moment in which votes were being cast in the south, possibly redrawing the region’s borders for ever, we had been placed under lock and key in a military intelligence unit almost a thousand miles to the north for attempting to do the same. Omar, concerned about the fate of both his camera and the contents of the rucksack, declined to respond. I predicted that in the not too distant future, when we had made it to Bir Tawil, we would look back on this moment and laugh.

Omar glared.

In the end, our captivity lasted under an hour. The senior officer concluded, perceptively, that, whatever we were attempting to do, we were far too incompetent to do it properly, or to cause too much trouble along the way. Upon our release, we set about obtaining a jeep that could take us to Bir Tawil. Every reputable travel agent we approached turned us down point-blank, citing the prevalence of bandit attacks in the desert.

Thankfully, we were able to locate a disreputable travel agent, a large man with a taste for loud polo shirts who went by the name of Obai. Obai was actually not a travel agent at all, but rather a big-game hunter with a lucrative sideline in ambiguously licensed pick-up trucks. In exchange for most of our used banknotes, he offered to provide us with a jeep, a satellite phone, two tanks of water, and his nephew Gedo, who happened to be looking for work as a driver. In the absence of any alternative offers, we gratefully accepted.

Bir Tawil’s unusual status – wedged between the borders of two countries and yet claimed by neither – is a byproduct of colonial machinations in north-east Africa, during an era of British control over Egypt and Egyptian influence on Sudan.

Unlike Obai, who was a font of swashbuckling anecdotes and improbable tales of derring-do, Gedo turned out to be a more taciturn soul. He was a civil engineer who had previously done construction work on the colossal Merowe dam in northern Sudan, Africa’s largest hydropower project. On the day of our departure, he turned up wearing a baseball cap with “Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics” emblazoned across the front, and carrying a loaded gun. As we waved goodbye to Obai and began weaving our way through the capital’s rush hour traffic, Omar and I set about explaining to Gedo the intricacies of our plan to transform Bir Tawil into an “open-source state” that would disrupt existing patterns of global power and privilege – no mean feat, given that we didn’t understand any of the intricacies ourselves. Gedo responded to this as he responded to everything: with a sage nod and a deliberate stroke of his stubble.

“I’m here to protect you,” he told us solemnly, as we swung north on to the highway and left Khartoum behind us. “Also, I’ve never been on a holiday before, and this one sounds fun.”

Three years later, however, another document was drawn up by the British. This one noted that a mountain named Bartazuga, just south of the 22nd parallel, was home to the nomadic Ababda tribe, which was considered to have stronger links with Egypt than Sudan. The document stipulated that henceforth this area should be administered by Egypt. Meanwhile, a much-larger triangle of land north of the 22nd parallel, named Hala’ib, abutting the Red Sea, was assigned to other tribes from the Beja people – who are largely based in Sudan – for grazing, and thus now came under Sudan’s jurisdiction. And that was that, for the next few decades at least. World wars came and went, regimes rose and fell, and those imaginary lines in the sand gathered dust in bureaucratic archives, of little concern to anyone on the ground.

In 1899, government representatives from London and Cairo – the latter nominally independent, but in reality the servants of a British protectorate – put pen to paper on an agreement which established the shared dominion of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. The treaty specified that, following 18 years of intense fighting between Egyptian and British forces on the one side and Mahdist rebels in Sudan on the other, Sudan would now become a British colony in all but name. Its northern border with Egypt was to run along the 22nd parallel, cutting a straight line through the Nubian desert right out to the ocean.

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Disputes only started in earnest when Sudan finally achieved independence in 1956. The new postcolonial government in Khartoum immediately declared that its national borders matched the tweaked boundaries stipulated in the second proclamation, making the

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Hala’ib triangle Sudanese. Egypt demurred, insisting that the latter document was concerned only with areas of temporary administrative jurisdiction and that sovereignty had been established in the earlier treaty.

Under this logic, the real border stayed straight and the Hala’ib triangle remained Egyptian.

By the early 1990s, when a Canadian oil firm signalled its intention to begin exploration in Hala’ib and the prospect of substantial mineral wealth being found in the region gained momentum, the disagreement was no longer academic. Egypt sent military forces to “reclaim” Hala’ib from Sudan, and despite fierce protests from Khartoum – which still considers Hala’ib to be Sudanese and even tried to organise voting there during the 2010 Sudanese general election – it has remained under Cairo’s control ever since.

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Our world is littered with contested borders. The geographers Alexander Diener and Joshua Hagen refer to the dashed lines on atlases as the scars of history. Compared with other divisions between countries that seem so solid and timeless when scored on a map, these squiggles – enclaves, misshapen lumps and odd protrusions – are a reminder of how messy and malleable the process of drawing up borders has always been.

What makes this particular border conflict unique, though, is not the tussle over the Hala’ib triangle itself, but rather the impact it has had on the smaller patch of land just south of the 22nd parallel around Bartazuga mountain, the area known as Bir Tawil.

Egypt and Sudan’s rival claims on Hala’ib both rest on documents that appear to assign responsibility for Bir Tawil to the other country. As a result, neither wants to assert any sovereignty over Bir Tawil, for to do so would be to renounce their rights to the larger and more lucrative territory. On Egyptian maps, Bir Tawil is shown as belonging to Sudan. On Sudanese maps,

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it appears as part of Egypt. In practice, Bir Tawil is widely believed to have the legal status of terra nullius – “nobody’s land” – and there is nothing else quite like it on the planet.

Omar and I were not, it must be acknowledged, the first to discover this anomaly. If the internet is to be believed, Bir Tawil has in fact been “claimed” many times over by keyboard emperors whose virtual principalities and warring microstates exist only online. The Kingdom of the State of Bir Tawil’ boasts a national anthem by the late British jazz musician Acker Bilk. The Emirate of Bir Tawil traces its claim over the territory to, among other sources, the Qur’an, the British monarchy, the 1933 Montevideo Convention and the 1856 US Guano Islands Act. There is a Grand Dukedom of Bir Tawil, an Empire of Bir Tawil, a United Arab Republic of Bir Tawil and a United Lunar Emirate of Bir Tawil. The last of these has a homepage featuring a citizen application form, several self-help mantras, and stock photos of people doing yoga in a park.

From our rarefied vantage point at the back of Obai’s Toyota Hilux, it was easy to look down with disdain upon these cyber-squatting chancers. None of them had ever actually set foot in Bir Tawil, rendering their claims to sovereignty worthless. Few had truly grappled with Bir Tawil’s complex backstory, or of the bloodshed it was built upon (tens of thousands of Sudanese fighters and civilians died as a result of the Egyptian and British military assaults that ended in the establishment of Sudan’s northern borders and thus, ultimately, the creation of Bir Tawil). Granted, Omar and I knew little of the backstory either, but at least we had actually got to Sudan and were making, by our own estimation, a decent fist of finding out. We ate our energy bars, listened attentively to tales of Gedo’s love life, and scanned the road for clues. The first arrived nearly 200 miles north-east of Khartoum, about a third of the way up towards Bir Tawil, when we came across

a city of iron and fire oozing kerosene into the desert.

This was Atbara: home of Sudan’s railway system, and the engine room of its modern-day creation story.

Until very recently, the long history of Sudan has not been one of a single country or people: many different tribes, religions and political factions have competed for power and resources, across territories and borders that bear no relation to those marking out the state’s limits today. A lack of rigid, “recognisable” boundaries was used to help justify Europe’s violent scramble to occupy and annex land throughout Africa in the 19th century. Often, the first step taken by western colonisers was to map and border the territory they were seizing. Charting of land was usually a prelude to military invasion and resource extraction; during the British conquest of Sudan, Atbara was crucial to both.

Sudan’s contemporary railway system began life as a battering ram for the British to attack Khartoum. Trains carried not only weapons and troops but everyday provisions too, specified by Winston Churchill as “the letters, newspapers, sausages, jam, whisky, soda water, and cigarettes which enable the Briton to conquer the world without discomfort”. Atbara was the site where key rail lines intersected, and its importance grew rapidly after London’s grip on Sudan had been formalised in the 1899 Anglo-Egyptian treaty.

“Everything that mattered, from cotton to gum, came through here, as did all the rolling stock needed to move and export it,” Mohamed Ederes, a local railway storekeeper, told us. He walked us through his warehouse, down corridors stacked high with box after box of metal train parts and past giant leatherbound catalogues stuffed with handwritten notes.

“From here,” he declared proudly, “you reached the world.”

Atbara’s colonial origins are still etched into its modern-day layout. One half of the town, originally the preserve of expatriates, is low-rise and leafy; on

the other side of the tracks, where native workers were made to live, accommodation is denser and taller. But just as Atbara was a vehicle for colonialism, so too was it the place in which a distinct sense of Sudanese nationhood began to develop.

As Sudan’s economy grew in the early 20th century, so did the railway industry, bringing thousands of migrant workers from disparate social and ethnic groups to the city. By the second world war, Atbara was famous not only for its carriage depots and loading sidings, but also for the nationalist literature and labour militancy of those who worked within them. Poets as well as workers’ leaders emerged out of the nascent trade union movement in the late 1940s, which held devastating strikes and helped shake the foundations of British rule. The same train lines that had once borne Churchill’s sausages and soda water were now deployed to deliver workers’ solidarity packages all over the country, during industrial action that ultimately brought the colonial economy to a halt. Within a decade, Sudan secured independence.

The next morning, as we drove on, Gedo grew quieter and the signs of human habitation became sparser.

At Karima, a small town 150 miles further north, we came across a fleet of abandoned Nile steamers stranded on the river bank; below stairs there were metal plaques bearing the name of shipwrights from Portsmouth, Southampton and Glasgow, each company’s handiwork now succumbing slowly to the elements. We clambered through cobwebbed cabins and across rotting sun decks, and then decided to scale the nearby Jebel Barkal – Holy Mountain in Arabic – where eagles tracked us warily from the sky.

Omar maintained a running commentary on our progress, delivered as a flawless Herzog parody, and it proved so painful for all in earshot that the eagles began to dive-bomb us. We set off running, taking refuge among the mountain’s scattered ruins.

Photograph: Omar Robert Hamilton

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Jebel Barkal was once believed to be the home of Amun, king of gods and god of wind. Fragments of Amun’s temple are still visible at the base of the cliffs.

Over the past few millennia, Jebel Barkal has been the outermost limit of Egypt’s Pharaonic kingdoms, the centre of an autonomous Nubian region, and a vassal province of an empire headquartered thousands of miles away in Constantinople. In the modern era of defined borders and seemingly stable nation states, Bir Tawil seems an impossible anomaly. But standing over the jagged crevices of Jebel Barkal, looking out across a region that had been passed between so many different rulers, and formed part of so many different arrangements of power over land, our endpoint started to feel more familiar.

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The following evening we camped at Abu Hamed, on the very edge of the desert. Beyond the ramshackle cafeterias that have sprung up to serve the artisanal gold-mining community – sending shisha smoke and the noise of Egyptian soap operas spiralling up into the night – Omar and I saw the outlines of large agricultural reclamation projects, silhouetted in the distance against a starry sky. Since 2008, when global food prices spiked, there has been a boom in what critics call “land-grabbing”: international investors and sovereign wealth funds snapping up leases on massive tracts of African territory in order to intensify the production of crops for export, and bringing such territory under the control of European, Asian and Gulf nations in the process. Arable land was the first

to be targeted, but increasingly desert areas are also being fenced off and sold. Near Abu Hamed, Saudi Arabian companies have been “greening” the sand – blanketing it in soil and water in an effort to make it fertile – with worrying consequences for both the environment and local communities, some of whom have long asserted customary rights over the area.

It was not so long ago that the prophets of globalisation proclaimed the impending decline of the nation-state and the rise of a borderless world – one modelled on the frictionless transactions of international finance, which pay no heed to state boundaries.

A resurgent populist nationalism – and the refugee crisis that has stoked its flames – has exposed such claims as premature, and investors depend more than ever on national governments to open up new terrains for speculation and accumulation, and to discipline citizens who dare to stand in the way. But there is no doubt that we now live in a world where the power of capital has profoundly disrupted old ideas about political authority inside national boundaries. All over the planet, the institutions that impact our lives most directly – banks, buses, hospitals, schools, farms – can now be sold off to the highest bidder and governed by the whims of a transnational financial elite. Where national borders once enclosed populations capable of practising collective sovereignty over their own resources, in the 21st century they look more and more like containers for an inventory of private assets, each waiting to be spliced, diced and traded around the world.

It was at Abu Hamed, while lying awake at night in a sleeping bag, nestled into a shallow depression in the sand, that I realised the closer we were getting to our destination, the more I understood what was so beguiling about it. Now that Bir Tawil was in sight, it had started to appear less like an aberration and more

like a question: is there anything natural about how borders and power function in the world today?

In the end, there was no fanfare. On a hazy Tuesday afternoon, 40 hours since we left the road at Abu Hamed, 13 days since we touched down in Khartoum, and six months since the dotted lines of Bir Tawil first appeared before our eyes, Omar gave a shout from the back of the jeep. I checked our GPS coordinates on the satellite phone, and cross-referenced them with the map. Gedo, on being informed that we were now in Bir Tawil and outside of any country’s dominion, promptly took out his gun and fired off a volley of shots. We traipsed up a small hillock and wedged our somewhat forlorn flag into the rocks – a yellow desert fox, set against a black circle and bordered by triangles of green and red – then sat and gazed out at the horizon, tracing the rise and fall of distant mountains and following the curves of sunken valleys as they criss-crossed each other like veins through the sand. The sky and the ground both looked massive, and unending, and the warm stones around us crumbled in our hands. After a couple of hours, Gedo said that it was getting late, so we climbed back into the jeep and began the long journey home.

Well before our journey had ever begun, we had hoped – albeit not particularly fervently – that we could do something with it, something that mattered; that by striking out for a place this nebulous we could find a shortcut to social justice, two days’ drive from the nearest tap or telephone. In 800 square miles of desert, we thought that we could exploit the outlines of the bordered world in order to subvert it.

Jeremiah Heaton, beyond the “kingdom for a princess” schmaltz and the forthcoming Disney adaptation (he has sold film rights to his story for an undisclosed fee) seems – albeit from an almost diametrically opposite philosophical outlook – to be convinced of something similar. For him, the fantasy

is a libertarian one, offering freedom not from the iniquities of capitalism but from the government interference that inhibits it. Just as we did, he wants to take advantage of a quirk in the system to defy it.

When I spoke to Heaton, he told me with genuine enthusiasm that his country (not yet recognised by any other state or international body) would offer the world’s great innovators a place to develop their products unencumbered by taxes and regulation, a place where private enterprise faces no socially prescribed borders of its own. Big companies, he assured me, were scrambling to join his vision.

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“You would be surprised at the outreach that has occurred from the corporate level to me directly,” Heaton insisted during our conversation. “It’s not been an issue of me having to go out and sell myself on this idea. A lot of these large corporations, they see market opportunities in what I’m doing.” He painted a picture of Bir Tawil one day playing host to daring scientific research, ground-breaking food-production facilities and alternative banking systems that work for the benefit of customers rather than CEOs. I asked him if he understood why some people found his plans, and the assumptions they rested on, highly dubious.

“There’s that saying: if you were king for a day, what would you do differently?” he replied. “Think about that question yourself and apply it to your own country.

That’s what I’m doing, but on a much bigger scale.

This is not colonialism; I’m an individual, not a country, I haven’t taken land that belongs to any other country, and I’m not extracting resources other than sunshine and sand. I am just one human being, trying to improve the condition of other human beings. I have the purest intentions in the world to make this planet a better place, and to try and criticise that just because I’m a white person sitting on land in the middle of the Nubian desert …” He trailed off, and was silent for a moment. “Well,” he concluded, “it’s really juvenile.”

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But if, by some miracle, Heaton ever did gain global recognition as the legitimate leader of an independent Bir Tawili state, would his pitch to corporations – base yourself here to avoid paying taxes and escape the manacles of democratic oversight – actually do anything to “improve the condition of other human beings”? Part of the allure of unclaimed spaces is their radical potential to offer a blank canvas – but as Omar and I belatedly realised, nothing, and nowhere, starts from scratch. Any utopia founded on the basis of a concept – terra nullius – that has wreaked immense historical destruction, is built on rotten foundations.

In truth, no place is a “dead zone”, stopped in time and ripe for private capture – least of all Bir Tawil, which translates as “long well” in Arabic and was clearly the site of considerable human activity in the past. Although it lacks any permanent dwellings today, this section of desert is still used by members of the Ababda and Bisharin tribes who carry goods, graze crops and make camp within the sands. (Not the least of our failures was that we did not manage to speak to any of the peoples who had passed through Bir Tawil before we arrived.) Their ties to the area may be based on traditional rather than written claims – but Bir Tawil is not any more a “no man’s land” than the territory once known as British East Africa, where terra nullius was repeatedly invoked in the early 20th century by both chartered companies and the British government that supported them to justify the appropriation of territory from indigenous people. “I cannot admit that wandering tribes have a right to keep other and superior races out of large tracts,” exclaimed the British commissioner, Sir Charles Eliot, at the time, “merely because they have acquired the habit of straggling over far more land than they can utilise.”

Bir Tawil is no terra nullius. But “no man’s lands” – or at least ambiguous spaces, where boundaries take odd turns and sovereignty gets scrambled – are real and exist among us every day. Some endure at airports, and inside immigration detention centres, and

in the pockets of economic deprivation where states have abandoned any responsibility for their citizens.

Other no man’s lands are carried around by refugees who are yet to be granted asylum, regardless of where they may be – having fled failed states or countries which would deny them the rights of citizenship, they occupy a world of legal confusion at best, and outright exclusion at worst.

Perhaps that is why, as we switched off the camera and left Bir Tawil behind us, Omar and I felt a little let down. Or perhaps we shared a sense of anticlimax because we were faintly aware of something rumbling back home in Cairo, where millions of people were about to launch an epic fight against political and economic exclusion – not by withdrawing to a no man’s land but by confronting state authority headon, in the streets. A week after our return to Egypt, the country erupted in revolution.

Borders are fluid things; they help define our identities, and yet so often we use our identities to push up against borders and redraw them. For now the boundaries that divide nation states remain, but their purpose is changing and the relationship they have to our own lives, and our own rights, is growing increasingly unstable. If Bir Tawil – the preeminent ambiguous space – is anything to those who live far from it, it is perhaps a reminder that no particular configuration of power and governance is immutable.

As we drove silently, and semi-contentedly, back past the gold-foragers, and the ramshackle cafeteria, and the heavy machinery of the Saudi farm installations – Gedo at the wheel, Omar asleep and me staring out at nothing– I grasped what I had failed to grasp on that lazy night of beer drinking on Omar’s balcony.

The last truly “unclaimed” land on earth is really an injunction: not for us to seek out the mythical territory where we can hide from the things that anger us, but to channel that anger instead towards reclaiming territory we already call our own.

NO BORDERS!

CUT THE RED TAPE open your mind & open the borders!

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by Edmund at nevercomedowncomix.wordpress.com

APRIL FOOL 2016

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SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER 9

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The images and the comic as a whole were from observations in Presevo between 7-23 October 2015 Loads of help is still needed with this crisis all over Europe To volunteer visit www.refugeemap.com Edmund

nevercomedowncomix.wordpress.com

APRIL FOOL 2016

Linocut: The Music Lesson by Tunde Odunlade

INTERVIEW ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

DOWN TO THE CROSSROADS

Film: The United States of Hoodoo taken from Sensitive Skin

Part of a discussion on the film ‘The United States of Hoodoo’, between Ghazi Barakat and Darius James, who is in the film …

G. When I was living in New York, I was always thinking, this is not America. Let’s move down south and look for the real America where the blues and rock & roll come from. But the fact that they’re backwards gives it some wholesomeness – no change is reassuring, its not torn by modern technology. When Robert Johnson comes up in the movie, he seems to be very much alive in people’s heads, although there is barely anyone still alive who knew him.

D. There was one person who apparently knew Robert Johnson, but he unfortunately didn’t make it to the blues fest in Greenwoods Park.

G. But you found out how he actually died?

D. I was expecting to go to the actual crossroads where Robert Johnson made his so-called deal with the devil.

That didn’t happen. What did happen was that I found myself on the highway where Emmett Till was picked up and murdered.

G. Who’s Emmett Till?

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D. Emmett Till was a black teenager from Chicago who was visiting relatives in Mississippi. He went into a shop and he whistled at a white girl. She was offended and complained, and some people in town got pissed and lynched him [he was horrifically beaten-up, shot and dumped in the river]. He was, like 14 years old.

It’s the first incident where white people involved in a lynching were actually prosecuted. They were taken to trial. I mean, they got off. That was sort of an early trauma for me.

D. I discovered, as a result of all the activities around the centennial, that the story that Robert Johnson told about himself, as far as selling his soul to the devil, was like early heavy-metal PR.

G. So you didn’t expect it, because you thought you were far away from all this?

G. But he did sing, “If I had possession over Judgement Day, Lord, that little woman I’m loving wouldn’t have no right to pray.” Let’s say he was against organised religion.

D. Yeah. One would think that the country had evolved, and then you realise it gets more and more retarded every day.

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G. Well, that’s idiocracy. so, did you learn how Robert Johnson died?

D. We were there during the Robert Johnson centenary which seemed pretty ridiculous, because the centennial and this exhibition were in a cotton museum, and Robert Johnson apparently spent his entire life avoiding the cotton fields. So you have all these weird white people celebrating Robert Johnson. the same people who would have shot him if they caught him outside of the cotton field. There were all these weird contradictions, like how far they had gotten. I got into some stupid discussion about who owns Robert Johnson. I kept wanting to make these nasty comments about the rolling Stones, which I’m glad I didn’t, as a result of reading Keith Richards’s autobiography. What he says is true: that the Stones were probably singlehandedly responsible for reintroducing the blues back to America.

G. So what’s the story of his demise?

G. He was a blasphemer.

D. It wasn’t that he was a blasphemer. His audience were sharecroppersand cotton-field workers. They were basically superstitious Christians.

D. Okay, that’s fair, but I’m just saying that his rebellion against black Christian conservatism, which seemed to be prominent in his family – that’s the thing I wasn’t expecting! His great-great-grandson was there speaking at this church, which is also the graveyard where Robert Johnson is buried. He comes to speak, at the last minute – it was supposed to be a day to celebrate the life of Robert Johnson because it’s his birthday, which also happened to fall on Mother’s Day. So what we get is this fat, greasy preacher who comes out and tells us that he is Robert Johnson’s great-grandson, and he proceeds to spew the most repellent homophobic right-wing garbage I’ve ever heard in my life. What I found particularly offensive was when he went into the whole Robert Johnson thing of selling his soul to the devil. (mimics Richard Pryor) “How can my black uncle, grandfather or whatever the fuck he was, sell his soul to the devil? His soul does not belong to him, it belongs to god! How can you trade with the devil something that belongs to God?” That was particularly repellent, to see how the church of the poor had been taken over by corrupt right-wing Christian fundamentalists.

G. So, did Robert Johnson get poisoned?

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D. You know, these are great stories, great myths that add to the legend. I was sitting with a bunch of Robert Johnson scholars at a blues bar early in the morning.

One of the things that seemed to be repeating itself was that Robert Johnson died as a result of drinking poisoned moonshine. The entire batch that had come into the honky-tonk for that weekend was bad, and the reason he died is because the audience he was playing to – again, sharecroppers, people who work in the cotton fields – had to get up and go to work on Monday. He started on Saturday, played his gig, they went home, they were sick on Sunday, but apparently were well enough to go to work on Monday. Robert Johnson, who didn’t spend a lot of time picking cotton in the cotton field, stayed at the honky-tonk and continued to drink this bad moonshine, got sick, and died.

G. At one point in the film, there is a discussion about how much Afro-Americans are willing to identify with their cultural and religious African roots. On a recent trip to Burkina Faso, I noticed that Africans are still mainly animistic, and that Wahhabite Muslim and Christian Baptist missionaries have a hard time persuading people to convert to monotheism. They usually resort to materialistic means, since poverty is the major issue on that continent. Many AfroAmericans, on the other hand, have embraced monotheism, be it through organisations like the Nation of Islam or traditional Christianity. Can you elaborate a bit on this?

D. In New York, and in other urban centres, you’ll find African Americans – or black Americans, which I prefer – who will identify with genuine animistic, Afro-esoterics, but those numbers are smaller than the great, unwashed majority, who are largely concerned with the details of survival, not necessarily breaking taboos. There was a large majority of blacks in California who were opposed to gay marriage, which revealed this really mean right-wing reactionary streak

in the black church now, which wasn’t always true – Martin Luther King came from liberation theology.

G. A key moment in the movie is when you talk about how the Africans and the Native Americans were able to assimilate one another, since there were so many cultural similarities between the two. This fusion happened in places like New Orleans, and an island like Haiti, and in South America, where slaves and natives were outcasts and in large numbers. Vodoun has survived and actually evolved into a gumbo of cultural misfits. This is most obvious in the carnival parades of all these places, but then, in the film there is a voodoo ceremony where most people involved are white women.

D. Well, Sally’s temple has always occupied a rather controversial place because of that. There are vodoun cults in the United States who recognise voodoo as a way of getting back to roots and see Sally as polluting the religion, that is not something that belongs to her, which, clearly – it’s God we’re talking about here. God belongs to everybody, the devine belongs to everybody.

The invisible is invisible for a reason.

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G. So her cult is progressive and some are regressive, although most non-African voodoo cults evolved or became mutations as a political necessity.

D. It becomes an identity, but the whole point of voodoo is to lose your identity in the face of the devine.

G. Besides the spiritual aspect, is there a political aspect to voodoo?

D. Absolutely. The reason why voodoo has a bad reputation is because a bunch of black people kicked some white people off an island, you know, threw off the shackles of slavery, and they’re still pissed.

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WANDERING CHELTENHAM LOWER HIGH STREET 2016 ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

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Photographs: Alan Rutherford, March 2016

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This building once housed Cheltenham’s Dole Office: I remember visiting to ‘sign on’ on a number of occasions in the 1960s. It was also from where I was sent out to take up jobs like; labourer at Cheltenham Caravans, Leckhampton; press operator at Cotswold Babycarriages, off Bath Road; porter at Cavendish House, the Promenade; assembly line at Dowty Mining, Ashchurch; stockroom keeper at County Clothes, the Promenade ... none lasted very long, needless to say, I had a rather thick file in that office.

BLUSTERING

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DUFFER BLUSTERS

John Crace from The Guardian, under heading ...

‘All very interesting, Boris.

Except none of it is really true, is it?’

Johnson gives ‘evidence’ to the Treasury select committee (For ‘evidence’ read any shit you like)

“This is going on longer than a European fisheries meeting,” grumbled Boris Johnson as the Treasury select committee drifted well into its third hour.

“That’s because you keep making lengthy interruptions,” the committee chairman, Andrew Tyrie, observed.

This only provoked yet another crowd-pleasing interruption. Boris just couldn’t help himself. His grasp of detail is minimal, his attention span shorter than the average five-year-old’s and when boredom sets in his default setting is to carry on talking until he gets round to saying something that amuses him.

All of which may explain why he is a charismatic, populist politician but is less than an ideal when a little gravitas is required. To treat a select committee as the fall guy in your own personal TV gameshow is the ultimate in lese-majesty; especially when you are auditioning for David Cameron’s job.

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“I talk to loads of bankers,” Boris had said at the start of the hearing, “and I can tell you their support for the EU is a great deal more shallow than commonly believed.”

“What you’re hearing in anecdotal meetings seems at odds with the evidence I’m hearing,” Tyrie replied.

“Can we go back to the speech you made in Dartford on 11 March? Have you checked the methodology of the statistics you quoted?”

No chance. Boris can barely remember what he said the day before, let alone some numbers he may have trotted out a couple of weeks ago. Besides

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what he really wanted to talk about was European bureaucracy gone mad. Legislation that prevented children under the age of eight from blowing up balloons; directives that meant councils were unable to recycle teabags; one-size-fits-all Euro coffins (how were we meant to squeeze our fatties into them?); French lorry manufacturers deliberately setting out to murder cyclists.

On and on he went despite several pleas from Tyrie begging him to stop. Eventually Boris paused for breath and Tyrie managed to make himself heard.

“This is all very interesting, Boris,” he said. “Except none of it is really true, is it?” Boris looked put out.

So what if it wasn’t exactly true? It got a few laughs so it ought to have been true even it it wasn’t. “If I may say so you’re guilty of exaggerating to the point of misrepresentation.”

Boris looked mildly hurt by this. “Well,” he went on, “I’ve got this new piece of research hot off the press, published today by the House of Commons library saying that 59% of British legislation is imposed by the EU.” “Actually that was published in 2014,” Tyrie pointed out, “and the figures were between 15% and 59%, depending on whether individual decisions were put into the calculations.”

Time for some top banter. “Well I’ve just found this piece written by one Andrew Tyrie in 1991 which says the single market can only be complete with a single currency,” said Boris, “What do you say to that?”

“Oh dear,” replied Tyrie a touch acidly. “That merely proves my point. If you had read the entire article you would have realised I was saying the exact opposite.”

Labour’s Helen Goodman and Wes Streeting tried to pin Boris down on whether he thought Britain should be negotiating a Swiss or Canadian trade deal with the EU post-Brexit. “One day you say one thing, the next day you say another,” they said. “You seem to change your mind a lot.”

“Not at all,” fought back Boris. “I’m entirely consistent.” As in entirely consistent in his inconsistency. “What I want is a British trade deal. It will be a complete doddle. EU countries will be falling over themselves to do a deal with themselves.”

“You’re the only person who seems to think that.”

“Everyone else is far too defeatist. As I’ve always said. Britain will be massively better off outside the EU,” said the man who had apparently been anguishing which camp to join over a game of tennis the day before he joined the leave campaign.

Enter an even angrier than usual John Mann, who had woken that morning furious to find he had been listed only as “core negative” on the leaked Corbyn list of Labour MPs. Why not a hostile? He was hostile enough to his own reflection, let alone others in his party.

“This so-called EU animal byproducts tea bag directive,” he snarled. “Can you remember which country asked the EU to issue it?” Could pigs fly?

“Well let me tell you that it was Britain after the foot and mouth epidemic.”

“Then I’m sure the French have never obeyed it,” Boris ad-libbed, desperately searching for one last laugh. None came. Boris was beaten, if unbowed.

Please consign this fluff to the rubbish bin

Photograph: Delia McDevitt

INEQUALITY

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WOMEN

OF IRELAND FECKED BY CHURCH Olivia O’Leary from The Guardian, under the heading ...

It was never just England. It was always Pagan England. When I was a small child at school in Ireland, that was the difference between us.

England was pagan, and Ireland was holy. And Holy Ireland had no place for liberated women.

So what happened to the promise of equality in the Proclamation of the Irish Republic read out on Easter Monday 1916 by the poet and rebel leader Patrick Pearse, and addressed to “Irishmen and Irishwomen”? The proclamation declared an end to British rule but it also guaranteed religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities for all citizens. It made a commitment to universal suffrage, extraordinary for the time, and two years before women in Britain won the vote.

So how did the document’s message become stifled by a conservative culture obsessed with female chastity and purity, and so terrified of glimpsing the outlines of a woman’s body that in the 1950s we were still condemned to conceal ourselves in voluminous cardigans?

How did that dream of a radical, free Ireland give way in the succeeding years to Holy Ireland, where generations of women felt they had to hide themselves away?

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Why, 100 years after the Easter Rising Historians now tell us that there was a tussle are Irish women still fighting? to have women included so pointedly in the proclamation. It was a struggle won by James Gender equality was the radical Connolly – socialist, trade union leader and head promise of the 1916 rebellion. of the Irish Citizen Army – and by Constance Markievicz, the prominent feminist and socialist.

The reality was very different. But even two years later in the general election of 1918, when Sinn Féin swept the boards, it was clear that socialists and feminists had been pushed aside. Most of the dreamers APRIL FOOL 2016

and visionaries had been shot in 1916, and a more pragmatic and conservative leadership concentrated totally on the nationalist goal of separation from the UK. The Irish Labour movement decided to stand aside in 1918 so as not to split the nationalist vote, and the only woman elected was Markievicz.

However, the real change that occurred between 1916 and 1918 was that the Roman Catholic church had finally come on board to back the rebel cause. The church didn’t like radical movements, and individual senior church men actually condemned the 1916 Easter Rising. But anger at the execution of the rising’s leaders swung public opinion firmly behind the rebels, and the Catholic church, ever pragmatic, quietly changed its stance.

The church was by far the largest and most powerful institution in the new Irish state that would emerge six years after the rebellion, and was determined to shape it. The first Free State government tried in its first constitution to reflect a pluralist state, but in Eamon de Valera’s 1937 constitution the church was given a special position, and its social teachings were enshrined.

Contraception and divorce were expressly banned – and women were told to stay at home.

Article 41 of the constitution declared that the state shall “endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home”. This was used not to give state support to women who stayed at home, but to

discriminate against women who went out to work. Women public servants – doctors, nurses, teachers, television producers – had to resign because of their positions on marriage. They might be re-employed in a temporary capacity but at a reduced salary. There were always lower rates of pay for women in the public and the private sector.

This continued right up into the 70s, and a maledominated establishment – including the trade union movement – went along with it. I remember arguing about women’s right to equal pay with a prominent Irish union leader. “When men with families get a decent wage,” he said, “I’ll start to worry about equal pay for women.”

Women always had to wait. Even when the then EEC insisted on equal pay in 1975, a government that included the Irish Labour party put off implementing it. It was only when the civil rights lawyer Mary Robinson, who would much later be elected Ireland’s president, told us all to write to the European commission – and we did – that the government was shamed into implementing equal pay.

So as long as Ireland was isolated and inward-looking, women did badly. As soon as membership of the European Union opened Ireland up to a wider world, the lot of women improved. But what if Ireland had never achieved independence, had remained part of the British empire, had not become the confessional state it became after independence – would life have been better for Irish women?

All I know is that Pagan England certainly spelled freedom for my two O’Leary aunts. They were nurses who joined Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Nursing Service during the second world war. One served in field hospitals in France after the D-day landings; the other survived when the boat taking her to serve in India was torpedoed.

They both went on to settle in England and lead lives that might well have been forbidden to them as Catholics in Ireland. One married an Anglican and converted to Anglicanism; the other married a divorcee. Their families in Ireland may have been shocked, but the aunts were able to lead the lives they wanted to.

England was where pregnant unmarried Irish girls could go and have their babies and not be judged; where women who had been enslaved in the Magdalene Laundries could start new lives and not be judged; where Irish women can have abortions today and not be judged. Pagan England has often offered Irish women a more Christian welcome than they would ever have got at home.

So did living in an independent Ireland make me as a woman less free? No. What it did mean was that we had a lot of battles to fight in order to feel like full citizens of the Irish republic. And I was reminded of this a few weeks ago, at a special event in Dublin to commemorate – for perhaps the first time – the Irish women who took part in the Easter Rising, and to honour the involvement of Irish women in the life of the state ever since.

This weekend marks the high point of the 1916 centenary commemorations in Dublin, but I’m deeply ambivalent about the Easter Rising. I admire the bravery of people like my own grandfather who was involved in both that rebellion and the war of independence. I also have to ask if 1916 created a precedent for armed republican violence in Northern Ireland during the troubles.

So looking down at that audience of brilliant Irish women, I preferred to be inspired by the living, rather than the dead. We have a female chief justice, a female attorney general, a female director of public prosecutions, a female head of the Garda Síochána (police), a female minister for justice, a female deputy prime minister, and a whole new crop of members of parliament to swell women’s numbers in the Dail. They all represent battles hard won. But there are more to be tackled, including a woman’s right to abortion.

The fight for Irish freedom goes on.

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SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER 9

WAFFLE LETTERS

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Dear Editor ...

Further damaged but still awake, I say again, well again, because the letters page is so much a hopeless failure ... Words fail me, what is the use of words when the person you are saying them to is unable to grasp your, and their, meaning?

Worryingly, we are heading down that irrational road again, the one where stupidity reigns, where basic facts and knowledge acquired over time are being replaced by entrenched banal myths, hearsay and superstition. The probability that this age-old fudge of complacency and mad spouters will be defended to the death before reason can be accepted again (if ever) is terrifying. For evidence of this I direct your (giggling now) attention to Donald Trump and his campaign to become US President.

As Britain’s government is a happy satellite of US mischief in the world ... and a blindly loyal follower of US foreign policy, what will our government do if Trump suceeds and begins his Term of Ignorance?

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Whilst I remain optimistic about the future I am absolute in my scepticism about whether the Euro (pro and sceptic)-business-arses and their sycophantic political stooges, or the US presidential circus and their flunkies will come up with anything remotely of benefit to anyone other than a rampantly corrupt ruling class intent on fucking us all.

APRIL FOOL 2016

HAND OVER FIST PRESS

BOOKS • DESIGN at www.handoverfistpress.com

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SHEEP IN THE ROAD Vol. 2 Alan Rutherford 2015

SHEEP IN THE ROAD Vol. 1 Alan Rutherford 2014

IRISH GRAFFITI some murals in the North, 1986 Alan Rutherford 2014

NICETO DE LARRINAGA a voyage, 1966 Alan Rutherford 2014

To read/view a book, please go to BOOK page on website and click on their cover and follow the links ...

KAPUTALA The Diary of Arthur Beagle & The East Africa Campaign, 1916-1918 Alan Rutherford Updated 2nd edn: 2014

SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER 9

MAGAZINE

â–ź

SHEEP IN THE ROAD Issue 8

SHEEP IN THE ROAD issue 7

March 2016

February: 2016

SHEEP IN THE ROAD issue 6

SHEEP IN THE ROAD issue 5

SHEEP IN THE ROAD issue 4

SHEEP IN THE ROAD issue 3

January: 2016

Xmas: 2015

December: 2015

October: 2015

Sheep in the Road as a magazine has writing, photography, cartoons and odd assemblages of ideas, rants and reviews ... eminating from a socialist and thoughtful core.

Contributors included: Brian Rutherford, Rudi Thoemmes, Joe Jenkins, Robert Arnott, Cam Rutherford, Steve Ashley, Lizzie Boyle, Chris Dillow, Chris Hoare, Joanna Rutherford, West Midland Hunt Saboteurs, Chris Bessant, Craig Atkinson, Martin Taylor A pleasure to produce ... thank you

Available to view/read at www.handoverfistpress.com

HAND OVER FIST PRESS

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