Isis Magazine HT12

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ISIS is

RECRUITING Staff Writers Sub-Editors Website Editors Creatives / Designers Photographers / Illustrators Business Team

Deadline:

Friday of 7th week (2nd March) Get applying!

For more details or to get an application form email editor@isismagazine.org.uk

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A Leap Of Faith……….………4 Mais, C’est Pas Possible…..…..…….5 Not All Fire & Brimstone…………..6 The Future of Cinema?………………..7 Elvis Isn’t Dead………………………..10 Two Revolutions……………...…14

Good Vibrations………………………18 Living In Thin Air…………………21 Reverse Realism………………….....24 The Weaver of People………..…..28 Falling For God………….…...32 A Rose By Any Other Name……..34

The Lonely Human Voice…….……38 China’s Empty Metropolis……………41 Free West Papua….............……..46 The Pearl of Africa?…………………..50 AK-47.................…………………54

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EDITORIAL I’d like to dedicate this issue of ISIS to a man named Mostyn Turtle Piggott. It was 120 years ago this year that this nubile young chap founded ISIS magazine. Mostyn Turtle was a man of many talents and many seasons. He was at once a poet, a hard man, a dandy and a peddler of erotic literature. The tedium of a dull evening would often be interrupted when old “Moist Turtle” (as he was known to his chums) would burst through the door with a bottle of scotch, a bundle of scandalous etchings and the faint smell of erotic adventure. As old Mostyn would often say “I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance, I chill men to their marrows”. Who could forget his epic cautionary tale, The Boy on One Roller Skate, or his immortal lines “O the punt, O the punt, O the sticky, tricky punt. O the punt, O the punt, O the gloomy, roomy punt”. The mastery of Mostyn’s verse can never fail to send a shiver up the spine of every true-born Englishman, and it is to the Mostyn that I humbly prostrate myself in adoration.

We must think of our noble founder when we consider the current economic troubles of ISIS. We are besieged by a nefarious consortium of gentleman thieves under the clever moniker of ‘Oxford Student Publications Limited’. Villainy! Hast thou no bounds? Mostyn Turtle Piggott would have had no truck with these fools, with a quick rap of his cane he would boom in thunderous tones “back to your hovels, you fetid gnomes”. The gentleman thieves would quiver, and scuttle back to their lairs.

Mostyn Turtle Piggott was a moron. I didn’t just make up the previous two paragraphs as a joke, the ISIS founder really was an author and salesman of soft pornography, The Boy on One Roller Skate and that shite about the punt are amongst the most inane pieces of drivel I’ve ever read. We hope that some of the articles inside are a little different, such as Paulina Ivanova’s piece on the murdered Russian human rights activist Natalya Estemirova, show that you don’t have to be a sleazy smut-merchant to produce articles that are insightful, touching, harrowing, and above all, interesting. Enjoy this issue, if Mostyn still had his way it’d be a little different.

EDITOR ALEX HACILLO DEPUTY EDITORS SEAN WYER DOUGLAS SLOAN ELLEN JONES SUB EDITORS TOM GARDNER JOE NICHOLSON HARRIET BAKER ROSIE BALL WEBSITE EDITORS LAURIE BLAIR ALISON CIES CREATIVE DIRECTOR INEZ JANUSZCZAK DEPUTY CREATIVE DIRECTOR WHITNEY CONTI CREATIVES JAMES MISSON JEEHYUN CHOI GRACE WARDE - ALDAM STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER ALICE BULLOUGH STAFF ILLUSTRATORS DAVID WATSON INEZ JANUSZCZAK GRACE WARDE - ALDAM COVER AND DIVIDERS INEZ JANUSZCZAK PR TEAM ZOYA ROUS NATALIE MULDOON

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A LEAP OF FAITH:

DON JUSTO’S SELF MADE CATHEDRAL

Illustration: David Watson

G

usto Gallego Martínez rarely sits. A former monk at Trappist order Santa María de Huerta, the eighty-six year old Don Justo, as he is known, has spent his life building, virtually unaided, the unfinished Catedral de la Fe – the Cathedral of Faith – which looms brilliantly and bizarrely over the sprawling Castilian town of Mejorada del Campo.

Don Justo has worked on this intensely personal project from nine to five every day, excepting Sunday, for fifty-two years. The cathedral, named as such by Don Justo rather than by the Catholic Church, is an eclectic, beautiful building made from foraged broken bricks, reused metal and glass. When asked if volunteers require building experience or training he laughs: “No tengo nada,” I have none. He is guided only by his untutored instincts and, he says, the Virgin Mary, to whom he dedicates the cathedral.

Watching him hop over perilous drops, and climbing out along flimsy planks of wood you hope that this is true. His fearlessness and devotion is reflected in the building itself, especially in its distinctive building methods: stained glass windows made from three-tone crushed glass stuck between two panes, pillars formed from old water drums, and window frames bound with wire.

Justo left his vocation as a monk after eight years when he contracted tuberculosis, and started building after his remarkable recovery. His main helper is Ángel López Sánchez, but his six nephews also aid him, one of whom is training to become an architect and has recently made formal plans of the cathedral.

The story behind the building is inspiring, but has masked problems that were perhaps not as evident in the Franco era when construction began. The chapel has no planning permission, and, although the local council are apparently on side, it is technically illegal.

Perhaps even more worrying is the very real chance that the build-

ing will fall down. On entering you are met with a slightly unnerving sign: “You enter at your own risk.”

Times have changed since building began. Franco’s staunchly Catholic regime was dissolved in 1979, and although the pro-Catholic Popular Party is now in government, today’s Spain is not as sympathetic towards a dangerous, if magnificent, place of worship.

The dream-like cathedral is Justo’s life, and the locus of his religious faith. La Catedral de la Fe, which he calls “a shrine to the Virgin Mary”, acts as a symbol of selflessness in a country feeling the backlash of fiscal greed. While nearby, thousands of pop-up houses from more prosperous times are pulled down because there is nobody willing to buy them, this exhibition of faith survives against all odds.

Whether madman or saint, Justo shows a refreshing lack of interest in monetary gain or even recognition.

But at the age of eighty-six, he recognises his dream is still far from being realised. He admits, with a sad smile, “I can’t finish it. I don’t have the money or the time.”

PHILIP BELL

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MAIS, C’EST PAS POSSIBLE “An Englishman’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him. The moment he talks he makes some other Englishman despise him”. We may have moved on in the last century with regards to social mobility and the rigidity of the class system, but in England there is no doubt that social distinctions are perceived as being evident purely from someone’s manner of speaking. Yet, on the other side of the channel this linguistic reflection of social class simply does not appear. If you ask a Frenchman how to tell someone’s class from his accent, he will look at you with a kind of confused bemusement, replying “mais, c’est pas possible”, taking evident pride in this element of linguistic égalité. Whether one says “bonng” for “bon” or produces a Hispanic rolled ‘r’ instead of its typically Gallic uvular cousin seems to be no indicator of class background.

Over the centuries, France has given rise to a blossoming array of dialects, largely caused by language contact between so-called standard French, which spread out from the Ile-de-France and the autochthonous languages of Occitan, Alsatian and Breton, amongst others. However, France has been notoriously keen to impose a sense of national unity through language. As free education became mandatory across France, it was used as a tool to advance the adoption of standard French, including the accent, throughout the country. As a result, today much of the variation in accent and dialect has been removed, leaving northern French as the dominant breed. Despite Parisian French’s title as ‘standard’, intolerance towards regional variation appears to be subsiding. A second major variety – the Southern norm – now stands as a generally accepted alternative to its Northern relative.

Yet, neatly encapsulating so much of the French mind-set, the defining feature of the speech of the ‘classe ouvrière’ is not the accent, but the ‘style’.

In England, the very sounds that we produce mark us out as either ‘posh’, or ‘common’ – take David Cameron and Alan Sugar, both born Londoners, both horrendously rich, and both with accents that betray their respective social backgrounds. In France, it is grammatical mastery and stylistic flair that brands its speakers. Two fellow Parisians reading from a sheet may sound indistinguishable, but the moment one mangles an expression or utters an ungrammatical “si je serais” in place of “si j’étais”, he brings a wave of class scrutiny down upon himself.

Yet the Gallic love of style and elegance goes further; beyond language. One reliable indicator of class background is found simply in a person’s behaviour, which can span anything from the volume of their speaking voice to the quality of their manners. Whether or not you can conduct yourself in public apparently reveals information to a trained eye, unintentionally displaying your level of education, the quality of your upbringing and your likely income expectations. This love of elegance and appearance may carry some faint perfume of French charm, but it all becomes a touch ridiculous when taken to its logical conclusions. One middle aged southern lady, when asked what the biggest defining feature of social class was, responded with an entirely straight face: “the quality of his teeth”. She explained, “I met a man recently, who I was told was very rich, but as soon as he opened his mouth, I saw his teeth, and I knew he was not raised well”.

ANDREW IRWIN

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L L A T NO

D N E A R I F

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E N O T S RIM

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alk of conservative religious backlash might in the past have conjured up images of martyrs, book burnings and iconoclasm. More recently, Islamists have made their influence felt in the Middle East and, somewhat closer to home, American pastors have threatened to engage in Koran burning. Religious conservatism isn’t all fire and brimstone, however.

When that most contentious of objects – the fork – made its way to across Europe it was not met with universal approval. Having originated in the Middle East, the fork was adopted as a form of cutlery at the Byzantine, and then the Italian, courts by the eleventh century AD. When Catherine de’ Medici entered the French royal household, the fork came with her. Not to be outdone, the court of English King James II got in on the act in the late seventeenth century.

Not everyone was best pleased by the appearance of this pronged instrument on the tables of England, however. The Catholic Church did not take well to the fork and, despite only a very small proportion of the population actually making use of it, launched into a vituperative attack. To use a fork was “unnecessary”, they argued: “God in his wisdom has provided man with natural forks — his fingers. Therefore it is an insult to Him to substitute artificial metallic forks for them when eating.”

The standard practice amongst the aristocracy of the time was to skewer one’s food with one knife, whilst cutting it with another. To substitute a fork for one of the knives was therefore deemed effeminate by the Church, presumably because any man worth his salt would relish the presence of as many sharp objects as possible in the vicinity of his face. This, rather inevitably, proved not to be the case and the humble fork triumphed against gastronomic religious oppression.

Attempts to stem the tide of cultural change were not limited to the Catholic Church, nor to the Middle Ages, however. As modern governments wrestle with the problem of youth culture some have turned to religious conservatives for the answer.

In December last year, the Indonesian government raided a punk festival in Aceh province, rounded up as many partying teenagers as they could lay hands on, and entered them into a programme of ‘re-education’.

The semi-autonomous government of Aceh plays host to strong right-wing Islamic influences and the powersthat-be were decidedly anti-punk. First, the offending hair-styles had to go and, once many a brightly coloured Mohawk was lying in the grass, the teenagers’ piercings were removed too.

What followed was somewhat more sobering. The punks were detained in a camp and forced to engage in military-style marches, given lessons in Indonesian cultural history and prevented from seeing their families for ten days. Activity of this type provides an insight into the darker side of religious conservatism. For all they can appear amusing in hindsight, irrational attempts to stem the tide of progress, when justified by religious fervour, don’t need fire and brimstone to be menacing.

DOUGLAS SLOAN

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WAGING WAR AGAINST THE MULTIPLEX

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t the beginning of the century, traditional cinema looked ready to step aside to make way for its ugly grandchildren: the weedy laptop screen and its brutish brother the multiplex cinema. The future, as often, looked super-convenient but inevitably duller and less exciting. There are few twenty-somethings who haven’t at some point tried to immerse themselves in Lord of the Rings’ magnificent Middle Earth, for example, only to become fed up with screensavers, low battery warnings and virus-checkers; not to mention the screen being 1/100th of its intended size. Likewise, even after the most sensational of modern movie experiences – the 3D blockbuster – we leave the pic-

ture house lamenting the state of the sterile, megalithic structure that is today’s cinema. ‘Traditional’ cinemas, once bastions of glamour and star treatment, have largely become neglected or converted into yuppie apartment blocks: true signs of our times.

The belief that going to the flicks should be an experience, a ‘real night out’, isn’t giving up without a fight. It has not found its comrades in arms in those pining for backward-looking restorations of a past that, for better or for worse, has essentially died out. Instead, the saviours of cinema are the intensely ambitious young creative community, founders of the tellingly named Future Cinema. Dedicated to “creating living,

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“We were given a 1940s dress code, a meeting point, a password, and not much else.”

breathing experiences of the cinema”, their by far most lauded brainchild is Secret Cinema, an event that pairs infectious nostalgia with creative flair, whose screenings are incorporated into spectacular setting re-creations of the night’s secret film, complete with hints, for the more discerning attendant, as to what the movie might actually be.

December 2011 and January 2012 saw their most daring project yet. We were given a 1940s dress code, a meeting point, a password, and not much else. The journey to our location, the ‘international zone’, was equally mysterious, involving interrogations in dark alleyways by Russian and German soldiers, shady introductions to the etiquette of black-market trading in post-war Vienna, and entry, via the sewers, to London’s most spectacular theatre set. Having already been impressed by the actors’ dedication to realism (when I responded positively to sprechen Sie Deutsch? during interrogation, my unfazed border guard continued to grill me in German, complete with heavy Russian accent) the attention to detail in their interpretation of 1940s Vienna was astounding. A buzzing Russian restaurant provided authentic wining and dining, as did two floors of austerity-chic bars with live jazz. While there, you have free rein to explore as intrepidly as you dare. Each room contained an audience-participation heavy drama installation: Russian bureaucrats taught us a communist song, we gambled away our Schillings (exchanged for our British ‘foreign currency’) in the club casino, and the young lady in the post office even begged us to help her track down her cheating lover.

The audience was later led to the ‘British Cultural Institute’, the only cinema-sized building on the complex, by sirens, an impromptu funeral, and an exchange between two men on the roof, ending with the famous line: “in Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long Holly.” With this, the secret film, The Third Man, had all but been announced.

The result of this ‘multi-sensory’ experience, as it has been branded, is a sense of realism taken to its natural conclusion. Having played a role in keeping with the film’s setting for a good three hours, the feeling of being fully immersed in the movie is almost instantaneous, though this didn’t stop the audience from smiling when they saw scenes in the film strikingly similar to those they had just been experiencing in Secret Cin-

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ema’s take on ‘40s Vienna.

Secret Cinema alone cannot, however, rescue cinema from the clutches of the multiplex. It is necessarily ‘underground’ by its very nature, and is spread mainly by word-of-mouth, its audience remains urban, young and artistic. Though it has quite rightly taken these communities by storm, you get the feeling wider exposure would not suit the venture, nor is it Future Cinema’s intention. Secret Cinema is the ultimate trip to the movies for film enthusiasts, the adventurous, and anybody who just wants to dress up and party like it’s 1949. But its infrequency (a few films a year) and the fact that the films on show tend towards the universally acclaimed 20th century classic (the film is kept secret until the night, after all) mean that your standard weekly cinema visit will never look like this.

Future Cinema, its creator, knows this, and embraces the uniqueness of its protégé. True to its name, however, it does have a few more tricks up its sleeve, tricks that look more likely to influence the future of the big screen on a larger scale. Its most recent global venture, the Future Shorts Festival, is the self-proclaimed ‘world’s biggest pop-up film festival’, taking place in over 40 cities worldwide. Future Shorts stems from its director Fabien Riggall’s observation that there was a “massive opportunity” in the sphere of short films which wasn’t being taken advantage of, and seeks to democratise the film industry: “it’s the 100,000 people that are on our network, they decide… because essentially they are the audience”. The idea of a vibrant cinema community is clearly central to their ethos, as shown by their imminent start-up project, The Other Cinema. The scope of this event is broad, with audiences all over the world meeting monthly on the same night. Their opening screening this February is Brief Encounter in East London’s art deco Troxy, with partner events across the country. With this, they hope to “bring back a sense of community, passion and social experience to cinema-going”. How serious a challenge to the multiplex monopoly this will prove remains to be seen, but the very existence of alternatives such as those offered by Future Cinema, and the rise of numerous other innovative pop-up cinemas following its lead, give lovers of the big screen reason to be hopeful.

“Secret Cinema is the ultimate trip to the movies for film enthusiasts, the adventurous, and anybody who just wants to dress up and party like it’s 1949.”

SEAN WYER

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ELVIS ISN’T DEAD I

t’s the 8th of January, what would have been Elvis Presley’s 76th birthday, and over 80 Elvis Tribute Acts are gathered the Hilton Metropole Hotel in Birmingham for the fourth and final day of the European Elvis Contest. The winner of the contest will go to Memphis to take part in the world championships to decide who shall be crowned the King of Kings. The first rule of the contest’s terms and conditions is that performers “must respect Elvis before, during and after the performance.” This is something more than just fancy dress and karaoke.

We ask Julie Mundy, a judge of the contest and author of two books about Elvis’s fashion, why most contestants avoid calling themselves ‘impersonators’, opting instead for ‘Elvis Tribute Acts’, or ‘ETAs’. “People now avoid that term because it’s associated with the bloke in a club who puts a jumpsuit on. But if you put on a suit that’s homemade and looks nothing like the real thing, are you really paying tribute to Elvis? It’s almost an insult, because real jumpsuits are absolutely beautiful things. It can look like a total joke if you get it wrong. People want to make sure what they’re doing is a real tribute not just a bad impersonation.”

ETAs can get a maximum score of 50. The first 20 marks are for vocals, and then ten each for stage presence, style and professionalism. Attention to detail is the key to scoring well, and these Elvis connoisseurs have rigorous standards. “You can’t just get up and sing a song from 1974 in a gold lame suit” Julie says. “If you want to be taken seriously you’ll need a jumpsuit of ‘74, the right voice, and the hair’s got to be right.

You’ve got to get the whole look right - no daft wigs it’s got to look fantastic. The people who have got it all right have got it to perfection.”

Trevor, Julie’s husband, has gained a reputation as “the Elvis geezer from the bathroom showroom” after installing cardboard cut-outs of Elvis in his bathrooms.

The couple had booked the front lawn of Graceland, Elvis’ Mansion in Memphis, for their wedding, but so many friends from the Elvis world asked for invites (including strangers who offered to walk Julie down the aisle) that they cancelled at the last minute and eloped to Italy. They have since driven a campervan through Germany, following Elvis’ footsteps during his time in the American army.

So what it is about Elvis that makes so many people want to pay tribute to him in this way? Sioned Yeardye, one of the event’s organisers, says, “he was so poor. He

grew up in a one-bedroom shack and his family drove to Memphis to build a better life. It was absolutely the American dream. And he became the first. All of the modern artists were inspired him - Michael Jackson’s dance moves, P. Diddy’s bling. He wore leather trousers to on stage. I mean, please, Mick Jagger.”

Trevor believes there is something about the end of Presley’s life, his public decline that strikes people. “We both lean towards his ‘70s music,” says Trevor, “and I think you’ll find a lot of fans do, because you see that this man is giving everything - in some respects he’s dying on stage. They do let you feel closer to Elvis, those last few performances, as you realise how human he was. Those late ‘70s songs, the ballads, like How The Web was Woven and Pieces of my life. Lyrics like ‘took all the worst parts and threw the best parts away’. It’s so sad isn’t it, it’s absolutely about his life.”

The sheer number of Elvis lookalikes, tribute acts and fans at the contest suggests a spiritual reanimation of Elvis, but it seems, at times, that this is a hopeless dream. “It is upsetting,” Julie says, “when we stop for a minute and think, we realise ‘this is someone we’re never going to see, never going to touch, never going to meet.’ It is sad, isn’t it? It’s really sad.”

It’s Jared’s birthday too. At 19, he is the youngest ETA in the competition. If evidence of the ineluctable force of Elvis was needed, Jared provides it: none of his family or friends are Elvis fans, nor did he have a musical background before first hearing Elvis by chance on an advert three years ago. His first outing as an ETA was in a care home for the elderly, wearing a £30 jump suit. “Well,” he shrugs, “you’ve got to start somewhere”. Shy and unassuming, we struggled to imagine Jared, who usually works at his mum’s café in Burnley, singing and moving like the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll in front of hundreds of people. Yet the person on stage that evening may as well have been Elvis Presley himself.

ROSIE BALL

JAMES MISSON

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“My wife’s boss went to Vegas and got married and didn’t tell her family. So when she came back they were upset so she had to do it again, and they wanted an Elvis, and nobody would do it, so I did it, and it just started from there really.”

“The most romantic song for me is Always On My Mind. I’ve gotta sing that to my wife when she’s in the room, all the time, it’s a great song. My overall favourite is Suspicious Minds.”

- Gary Foley Poole, Dorset

are di in a se in a ju start w

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“I work in a hotel but spend 80% of my time doing Elvis jobs.

My first performance was at a wedding, I wore a gold Lame jacket and I started to sing Love Me Tender. I was still quite nervous but the audience loved it. So then I thought about it for one or two weeks, and I became an Elvis Tribute Act. For my hair I use only grease and a little bit of hairspray. I thought about buying a wig, because I love all eras of Elvis; ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s. You can’t do it all with the same hairstyle you know.

Elvis grows up in the ‘70s.”

- Rami, Germany

“Lyrics like ‘we must go our separate ways’ are difficult to relate to, because I’ve never been in a serious relationship. Everyone’s yet to see me in a jumpsuit, but in a couple of years time I could start wearing ‘68 comeback leather.”

- Jared Warned, Burnley, UK

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mild Friday evening in March. Five men, with £153 in savings and borrowed money, rent a recording studio in desolate, decaying Dalston for three hours. They say they’re a band, but they haven’t rehearsed and they only own one instrument and an amplifier between them. The studio lends them some equipment, and three hours later they leave with two mono tracks on tape.

Five months later they’re walking into every small record shop in London with five hundred copies of a cheap-looking 7” record: ‘Smokescreen/Handlebars’

by The Desperate Bicycles. Nobody has heard of them – or of Refill Records, the record label that’s apparently put out this peculiar little disc – but a couple of record store owners take pity and clear some space. A few interested customers shell out 70 pence or so and take it home. Word spreads.

By the end of the year all five hundred copies are gone, and a second pressing of one thousand copies sells out in two weeks.

Smokescreen triggered a revolution. Picture a prehistoric landscape ruled by a few mighty beasts, and you’ve got a fairly accurate image of the UK music industry in the early 1970s. The dominance of major labels was threatened only by a few opportunistic smaller labels (Stiff, Virgin, Island), but even these were still decidedly businesses, run for profit by men in suits (albeit pot-smoking men in suits with a soft spot for krautrock). A new band looking for a way into the ‘biz’ had to chase a contract with one of the existing labels: there was no other way to get your tracks heard.

The Desperate Bicycles weren’t the first to challenge this status quo. Buzzcocks had self-funded and selfreleased their ‘Spiral Scratch EP’, the first British DIY record, at the beginning of 1977; but, just as the first copies of Smokescreen were being cautiously picked up off record store shelves, Buzzcocks signed to United Artists, and the sweethearts of self-sufficiency became labelmates with Chris Rea and Electric Light Orchestra. It looked very much like Spiral Scratch had been a calculated (and successful) manoeuvre to get picked up by a major label.

Not so for The DBs, as they soon became known.

Smokescreen was a two-finger salute to the musical establishment, and A&R men who sneaked into the group’s few shambolic live performances were soon repelled. “I don’t want to sign. It’s just become a way of life doing it this way,” said vocalist Danny Wigley in an interview for Common Knowledge magazine. There was no thought of a career in music at all, in fact, beyond the first single: “The aim,” Wigley told another magazine called V-Sign, ‘was to see if it was possible to make a single, cheaply and without record company backing – and that we have achieved.”

Nevertheless, there followed a career (of sorts). The profits from Smokescreen went into a second single, The Medium Was Tedium, which proclaimed the DIY gospel even more strongly: the sleeve detailed the recording process, adding that the band would “really like to know why you haven’t made your single yet”, and the potent slogan which had closed Smokescreen became a chorus: “It was easy, it was cheap – go and do it!”.

DIY had an anthem, and further releases extended the manifesto: “cut it, press it, distribute it - Xerox music’s here at last!”

This was inhibited iconoclasm: “You don’t need skill, just the interest – you don’t need skill, just the desire – the interest and desire to do what you believe in.”

This meeting of scratchy guitars with radical politics – one group seizing control of the means of production – was inspirational, and soon young bands across the country were saving up their money to make their own ‘Xerox music’. Dan Miller, founder of Mute Records and an early DIYsciple, read an early interview and put out a record without having even listened to The DBs’ music. A wave of bands followed suit, with Scritti Politti going one step further by itemising the cost of production on the sleeve for their debut single (‘Recording £98, Mastering £40, Pressing £369.36…’).

The paradigms of music production had been shaken.

The cult of DIY was born.

We’re almost exactly thirty-five years on from the first Desperate Bicycles session, and nowadays if

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you’re starting a band the first thing you need is a laptop. Facebook, Soundcloud, YouTube, Bandcamp, MySpace – there’s a brave new world of spondaically-named internet services linking music producers to music consumers, and offering the potential to cut out the record label middleman altogether. There’s no need to press records or even to burn CDs; tracks can be recorded, uploaded, and sold from home without a record company ever coming near them. In fact, we’re living through another revolution in music distribution. The DIY business model has set bands like Arctic Monkeys on a course from the local dive to Wembley, and has allowed Radiohead to strike out on their own by self-releasing their last two albums after the end of their major-label contract. There’s a new generation of DIYsciples.

What would the DIY originators of the 1970s think of this new order? Simon Reynolds, author of the definitive postpunk history book Rip It Up And Start Again, is unsure. “In some ways it is the extension of the original spirit, to the ultimate degree. But then again, with some of the exertion and effort removed, I think that something is lost, maybe. It certainly leads to an overload of music.” Reynolds calls this phenomenon ‘DIYstopia’ – “something that was utopian in its original vision has gone out of control and is vaguely menacing”. Today, thanks to what Reynolds calls “the enablers” – software instruments, production programmes, free web services – it’s become so easy to introduce the world to your music that the world has stopped listening. e-DIY has led to a strange state of affairs, something like a festival with a thousand bands on stage and ten people in the audience.

Not that this hasn’t happened before. In the late 1970s and 1980s DIY culture started approaching a critical mass: “with cassettes and small run mail order vinyl,” Reynolds explains, “the quality control went out of the window.” For every pioneer there was an imitator; for every Desperate Bicycles, a Some Of My Best Friends Are Canadians. Nonetheless the sheer physical and logistical difficulty (not to mention the financial risk) of saving up or borrowing the money, recording the tracks painstakingly onto tape, pressing the discs or making

the cassettes, and getting them into shops – let alone making sure people bought them – imposed some limitations. Now that computers have minimised those difficulties, the music market has become saturated. Welcome to DIYstopia.

Curiously, in this overcrowded musical landscape, record companies have become vital once more. e-DIY means a band can easily make its music available, but to make it widely desirable – to have one band stand out from the millions of other groups pulling the same moves – often takes the resources of a record label. And the mainstream approach has its advantages, Reynolds says: “When you have a whole team of specialist professionals – recording engineer, producer, sometimes session musicians, sometimes arrangers – then you can get some wonderfully recorded and well thought out records. DIY musicians can still get great results but it is much harder I think, even with today’s technology… there’s a lot of totally indulgent, unfocused experimental music being made today.”

Sifting through the digital stream can turn up gems, of course, and if you don’t fancy braving it out there alone there are hundreds of blogs and websites to guide you through DIYstopia; although the problem, again, is choosing who to trust.

Attracting the attention of bloggers has become crucial to any band looking for the resources that a label (whether major or independent) can offer. “If you can get the attention of a blog that has a reputation, then you have a chance of getting an audience,” advises Reynolds. “But in that sense things aren’t really any different from the days of print fanzines, or unknown bands sending their tape to journalists at music papers.

You hope to snag their attention with the cover letter, or your artwork, or your manifesto.” Like most upheavals, it appears, the DIY revolution has come full circle.

JAMES MANNING

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GOOD VIBRATIONS

ISIS speaks to Ronald Ligtenberg, creator of Sencity, the world’s first club night for the deaf.

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usic is blaring and rhythmic drumbeats pulsate through what is, to most young adults, a familiar darkened room. Strobe lighting flashes, illuminating dancing bodies with red, white, and blue light. People are laughing, moving through mazes of strangers, ordering drinks, waving at friends, or trying to spot the person they had been chatting to earlier. The crowd bob their heads in time, grinding, dancing badly and with varying degrees of confidence. Some are a little drunk, others sober and smiling; all are having fun. It is hot and slightly smoky, with a buzz of energy humming around the bar, the dance floor, and the stage of performers.

But there is something different about this club night. The floor, for one thing, is vibrating along with the music, but not just because of the resounding volume; it is physically pulsating in time to the beat. It is a revolutionary invention called a ‘sense floor’, allowing clubbers to literally feel the music flowing through them as soon as they step onto its surface. Night-club workers called ‘aroma jockeys’ are mixing different scents to reflect the mood of the songs - the smells of lavender, frozen nitrogen and sandalwood float over the raving crowd. ‘Video jockeys’ are creating live visual effects, and energetic ‘sign dancers’ move to the music, helping to translate the lyrics into a kind of emotive, and upbeat sign language.

This is Sencity: an eclectic club night aiming to be inclusive of the deaf and hard of hearing. It allows people to experience music by appealing to all of the five senses and is also open to those with perfect hearing. This is a night quite unlike anything else you will have ever attended - a banquet of visual, musical and aromatic surprises.

It even boasts a ‘Chill Out Area’ complete with masseuses, hair stylists, and make-up artists ready to be of service with no extra charge.

Sencity nights were set up in the Netherlands in 2003, sponsored by The Skyway Foundation, and soon spread across Europe and the rest of the world. Their club nights have been a huge success in South Africa, Australia, Brazil, Copenhagen, Finland and Jamaica, to name just a few. The event made its debut in London’s O2 Arena

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last October and saw deaf Finnish rapper Signmark perform alongside hip-hop artist Brandon, who provided the lyrics. The first deaf person ever to be signed to a major record label, Signmark helped promote Sencity’s aim of changing attitudes towards deaf people. They want to prove that the deaf are a linguistic minority with a variety of talents; talents that can be used to break down the barriers between the hearing and non-hearing communities.

Ronald Ligtenberg, the creative director of the Skyway Foundation, tells me why he set up such a project. “In 2002 I was working at a night club but I was always trying to fit in and wanting to be popular,” he recalls with candid sincerity. “My sister was the one that told me I had to change my view of the world and so I did. I noticed that I was concentrating on the wrong things in life. She motivated me to do something ‘impossible’. That’s why I started the Skyway Foundation, with the mission to make the impossible possible, and I came up with the idea of a music event for deaf people.”

I ask him if he himself has hearing problems, wondering whether this may have contributed to his idea, but he only jokes that he has selective hearing. “Music is very close to my heart, which is why I chose the challenge,” he explains reasonably. I ask him to describe in his own words how a Sencity night differs from a normal club night and he answers with enthusiasm: “club nights only focus on the music and we do so much more than that.

All the five senses are stimulated during Sencity. It’s not only what you hear, but what you feel, taste and smell.

The aroma jockey sends out different smells related to the song, the food jockey makes snacks that are unique tasting, the visual jockey creates images on different screens and the sign dancer translates the song into dance”.

It is clearly a dynamic sensation, and the formula is one that works. Sencity nights are still expanding and their crowds easily match those of gigs and mainstream club nights despite being specifically geared towards those with hearing difficulties.

“Of course it’s important to give the deaf and hard of hearing an opportunity to go to a club night,” Ronald insists. “It gives them the opportunity to party and to meet other people.” When I ask if anyone can attend the event he answers me firmly, emphasising that Sencity nights are very different from “deaf raves”, which are constructed purely for those belonging to the deaf community. “Sencity isn’t only for the deaf or hard of hearing, but also for people who can hear perfectly. Its goal isn’t to integrate the deaf with the hearing, but to allow them to have fun with each other,” he explains. “People become more aware that you need not feel sorry for deaf people – you can be perfectly happy being deaf. Hearing people have told me that Sencity has changed their vision about deaf people,” Ronald goes on to say. It is becoming clear that Sencity aims to be particularly inclusive with its use of

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technology and that the cause is particularly close to Ronald’s heart – “when I look in a room where two thousand young people, both deaf and hearing, are partying together, it makes me feel proud that we have come so far”.

Most deaf people can still perceive at least some sound but even those who hear absolutely nothing can experience the tactile qualities of the music in the sensual Sencity environment. I do struggle, however, to see the relevance of the free hairdressers and complimentary massages as part of a club night, and tell Ronald this with some scepticism. “It is to increase the experience!” he responds defiantly. “People want to be special and to be treated well. The make-up artists, masseurs, and hairdressers all enhance the ambience of the entire night.”

Doesn’t this make the Sencity event more of a festival than a club night? Whichever way you look at it, the Skyway Foundation has definitely succeeded in creating an event that both deaf and hearing people can simultaneously enjoy. It is a night that incorporates more tricks and entertainment than any evening I have ever been to.

Other people seem to think so too, as Sencity has won numerous awards for its efforts. In 2011, the UK subsidiary of the Foundation, the Skyway CIC Program, won the Kidcounts Award and Sencity has previously won the Swift Award for £50,000, awarded to an organisation that brings cultural minorities together.

“The Skway Foundation will continue to expand,” Ronald declares when I ask him about his future plans. “We are always improving our working methods so that it will be easier to organise the next one. We would not say ourselves that awareness needs to be raised, but it can of course always be improved.” He goes on to tell me that the Skyway Foundation also sponsors projects for those with and without mental disabilities, events called Senself.

Following the same structure as the Sencity events, they aim to develop talents within groups of young people, and encourage them to cultivate their own abilities.

I ask him what is most exciting about working for the Skyway Foundation, and he decides promptly that it is the way people grow when they are a part of Sencity. “We change the way they think. They stop thinking in impossibilities and start to think in possibilities. Deaf people, and people with mental disabilities, they learn more about their own skills and opportunities. Our employees in the Skyway team also grow because of the vision we all share.”

Sencity nights bring strangers into contact with deaf people in a way most of us will never experience. It takes a passionate and dedicated team to make such a unique project spread across the world, breaking down divisions within local and international communities, and making room for equality and enjoyment in one and the same room. It is a big undertaking, but one that has only continued to succeed wherever it travels.

“The next Sencity is in Eindhoeven, in the Netherlands,” Ronald unveils as our interview draws to a close.

“You are welcome to come and see Sencity for yourself !”

CLAIRE DAVIS

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LIVING IN THIN A

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The someday legendary Alan Hinkes on life, death, and having a sense of humour

He is Britain’s highest achiever, one of an elite group

of death-defying, oxygen-starved individuals. These keepers of mountaineering’s Holy Grail number only fifteen. Many more have tried to reach it, but most challengers don’t survive. These madmen are the only humans to have ascended all fourteen of the world’s highest mountains, known to climbers as ‘eight thousanders’. In 2005, a former Geography teacher quietly returned home to Yorkshire as the first Briton to have completed this suicidal mission.

So why haven’t we heard of Alan Hinkes? Whilst conquerors of the fourteen 8,000 metre giants have been lauded as heroes in other nations, Alan’s celebrity is restricted to climbing circles. Even in his home territory of North Yorkshire, he’s more a hillside than a household name, despite receiving honorary doctorates, an honorary fellowship and an OBE; not to mention twice being named Yorkshireman of the Year. But

then again, fame and fortune were never motivations for Hinkes. He’s not a showy kind of bloke, frequently referring to the courage shown by troops in Afghanistan to put his own bravery into perspective.

As a mountaineer, he’s had quite a career. Brought up by his grandmother in Northallerton, North Yorkshire, Hinkes progressed from hill walking to rock climbing while attending the local grammar school.

He later exchanged his local moors and dales for the Alps, taking on Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn. But the Himalayas called, and his quest to bag the eightthousanders began.

It cannot be overstressed how difficult it is to climb one 8,000 metre high mountain, let alone fourteen.

Things get increasingly hairy as the air pressure decreases and oxygen molecules become few and far between. Then there’s the cold, and the attendant risk of death by avalanche or unexpected crevasse. “No mountain’s worth a digit,” jokes Alan, on the subject

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of frostbite. “I’ve got all my sticky out bits. I’ve got 10 fingers and 10 toes, which makes 21.” He grins. “Including me nose.”

But ascending these mountains is far from a joke.

“You’ve got to be able to suffer on an eight-thousander, have a sense of humour because there’s a lot of pain and suffering.” Hinkes is frank about what you put yourself through on this high altitude quest. Injury and illness have led to him being airlifted off mountains on two occasions; a chapati flour induced sneeze led to a slipped disc in 1997, causing him to miss out on Nanga Parbat; and in 2003, a bronchial infection saw off an attempt on Kangchenjunga. Hinkes broke his arm during his previous attempt on the mountain in 2000, when he fell through a snow bridge and into a crevasse.

In total, it has taken Hinkes twenty-eight attempts to summit all fourteen eight-thousanders. Despite being dubbed ‘the Calamity Climber’ after the chapati incident, Hinkes got back on the hill, demonstrating a finely tuned sense of irony when he returned to Nanga Parbat with sponsorship from a chapati manufacturer.

“No mountain’s worth a digit” As for his motivation, Hinkes says, “more and more I am trying to come to terms with it psychologically… and philosophically”. However, he believes he does not take unnecessary risks, returning several times to the idea that what he does is within his “skill level”, and therefore within his “comfort zone”.

Perhaps, but accidents do happen. He was in the company of Alison Hargreaves just before she died on K2 in 1995, and also climbed with Ginette Harrison, killed by an avalanche in 2000. The day Hinkes summited K2, the second highest peak in the world but the most technically demanding, “the first prize, the gold medal” of climbing, four other people made it to the top. Eight died in the attempt.

Hinkes is almost morbidly upfront about death.

When asked if losing people on the way up had ever made him reassess, he snaps back, “I never lost anyone.

Do you mean dying, people dying?” Ever the straighttalking Yorkshireman, Hinkes has no time for the euphemisms we use to avoid calling death by its proper name.

He’s had to develop a certain toughness to cope with the human cost of climbing. This comes out as a boyish fascination with corpses, gleefully identifying one on a promotional poster, recalling stories of the bodies he’s passed on hillsides, and joking about how hard it would

be to commit suicide on a hill-walk (“You’d have to, I don’t know, force yourself to roll down the hill or something.”) This isn’t callousness, more a robust attitude to life and mortality. “[I]f I have a little twitch or a rock snaps off [when climbing] I’d be dead, but you can be walking down a pavement and a bus driver could have a heart attack and mount the pavement and kill you so, that’s life,” he says, and laughs. Nonetheless, as he’s careful to point out, “I never had a death wish”.

And this is key to an important and unexpected attribute of the mountaineer. He’s just as happy on his local hill, Roseberry Topping, as he is in the Himalayas. “I just like a hill walk now… It doesn’t have to be dangerous. I feel alive when I’m in the hills hill-walking or on an easy climb where it’s safe.” Hinkes is not seeking an adrenaline rush. “I can’t really say you get adrenaline if you’re in the big Himalayas because it goes on for so long,” he chuckles, refusing to conform to the stereotype of the kamikaze climber.

Maybe this level-headedness is what makes it so difficult to comprehend what drove Hinkes to climb these mountains, to pursue the sky at the cost of his personal life (he is divorced). “[W]ell it’s what I wanted to do… I was away from home a lot, but so are a lot of people,” he says, defensively. “I missed certain points of me daughter growing up, but...” Hinkes pauses. “I had to do it, no regrets, it was what I wanted to do, I had to do it.” “It’s what I wanted to do,” is a kind of mantra Hinkes repeats, unable or unwilling to pinpoint his exact motivation. It’s the drive of a true maverick, unwavering and unstoppable.

Aged 57, Hinkes is now a proud grandfather and takes work as a motivational speaker. However, he shows few other signs of slowing down. In 2010, he managed to climb England’s thirty-nine highest peaks in just one week, in aid of Mountain Rescue. Although they may not be the Himalayas, English mountains are not without their perils: “[T]wo winters ago I was avalanched in the Lake District and nearly killed,” he discloses. “You should never get complacent. You should always be aware… the danger is always there.”

CHLOE CORNISH

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R E V E R S E R E A L I S M

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rompe l’œil: to deceive the eye. This is the artistic technique that makes 2D appear 3D. As a technical term it may be more commonly associated with fusty art critics, but as a concept it is surprisingly open to reinvention.

Young artist Alexa Meade has turned this technique on its head. Instead of bringing the inanimate to life, she reduces her sitters to still life, painting the models themselves, rather than canvases, before photographing them.

An unsuspecting viewer would never guess that her photos are not simply images of paintings. “What’s interesting about my work is that it’s a combination of performance, installation, photography and painting,” claims Meade. “It’s dependent upon the personality of this person sitting several inches away from my face, whereas if I were just painting a picture of them on canvas it would be a very different dynamic.”

Liu Bolin also has a unique take on this technique. The Chinese artist paints himself to blend in with his background, earning him the nickname of the “Invisible Man.” Bolin works on a single photograph for up to ten hours at a time. He poses in front of rubble, flags, cannons, models, telephone boxes, and supermarket shelves, unnoticed by passers-by until he moves. As with Meade’s work, his photographs are admired for the skill and originality of the central idea. There is, however, a deeper political message. “Some people call me the invisible man,” Bolin says, “but for me it’s what is not seen in a picture which really tells the story.” Standing peacefully and passively, merged into an everyday scene, his silent message is a protest against a society from which he feels rejected, and against a government that persecutes artists. In 2005, his Beijing art studio was closed by the government. It was this act which was, he explains, “my direct inspiration for this series of photographs, Hiding In The City.” Yet, despite problems with the Chinese authorities, his work has gained international acclaim.

Artists such as Meade and Bolin have created a ‘reverse realism’ trend, in which humans physically become art. Some may see this simply as entertaining gimmickry, arguing that whilst initially intriguing, Meade’s paintings eventually seem no more original than street performers painting themselves as statues. Few, however, would doubt the considerable skill involved, or suggest that the underlying message they convey can be ignored.

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TESS LITTLE

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THE WEAVER OF PEOPLE

I

n the six months after the first British fleet made landing in Botany Bay, two thirds of the population of Sydney were entirely wiped out. Cholera, venereal disease, alcohol, sugar – the gifts the colonisers brought with them from the old world left much to be desired. Today, white Australians celebrate the anniversary of the 1788 landing on ‘Australia Day’ with concerts, festivals and citizenship ceremonies. To many Australians, however, January 26th is not a day for festivities. Known amongst indigenous communities as ‘Invasion Day’, this national holiday represents the advent of prolonged British maltreatment of aboriginal Australians, maltreatment that was only formally acknowledged as recently as 2008.

I asked John Morse about common misconceptions regarding this ancient multicultural population, and the progress being made in their relationship with white communities since Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s official apology.

“There is a perception that aboriginal people are a bit dumb,” John Morse explains. “In fact they are very smart. No culture in the desert would survive for 60,000 years if the people were dumb.”

In 1788 when the British first arrived, it is estimated there were between 350 and 750 distinct communities and cultures, each with their own spoken language – all but 20 of which have since disappeared from daily use.

“Very few people who are white speak any aboriginal languages, it’s very rare,” John tells me. “You’re probably talking 0.01%.” However, amongst aboriginal people multilingualism is the norm, and the vast majority speak English. In the northern region of Arnhem Land, an incredibly sophisticated system of sign language is in use alongside verbal communication, developed, it is thought, out of a complex set of taboos to do with family and death. The concept of a pan-Australian identity did not exist before the British

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arrived - the aboriginal population is multicultural in its truest sense, which makes generalised assumptions about their way of life even more insulting.

The sad reality is that many people living in Sydney today have never even met an aboriginal person, let alone understand all their ancient, multicultural complexities, despite the largest population of integrated, urbanised aborigines living in New South Wales. They are stereotyped as smelly, lazy, drunk, stupid – the list goes on.

“They have been treated as second class citizens for the last 250 years,” I am told. “Only in 1967 they were allowed to be charted on the census.” But John is not here to talk about historical mistreatment of aboriginal peoples; rather, the difficulties that still prevail today, and the changes that can be made to combat them.

When asked about their widespread reputation for alcoholism, John admits, “it is a problem, I’m not denying that.” But, he argues, the alcohol problem is arguably no greater than in white communities, it’s just more focussed because their communities are small and tight-knit, and gets more publicity. Smaller areas and tighter communities make this perfectly possible.

“It also doesn’t help that Western civilisation has been drinking alcohol for over 2000 years, whereas it only came to aboriginal communities 200 years ago. Their bodies are much less attuned to it.”

Aboriginal people’s systems do not cope well with sugar either, and there is a very high incidence of diabetes and kidney failure amongst the population. There are no dialysis machines in remote communities, John points out. When asked about the general state of their health, he admits, “it’s bad, it’s bad. There has been a move to try and introduce healthier, more traditional diets including foods like kangaroo meat and yams”.

However the prevalence of cheap, fast food in supermarkets makes this a daunting task.

In 2008 then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd read an apology directed to indigenous Australians for the policies of successive governments with regards to aboriginal peoples. Rudd pledged the government to bridging the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous Australian health, education and living conditions, and in a way that respects their rights to self-determination.

Since then, the winds have begun to change.

One of the most important gauges of this is that the aboriginal population is the fastest growing sector of the country’s population. There are now around 500,000 aboriginal people, making up 5% of the 22 million Australian population. This is, in part, because those who have denied their aboriginal roots in the past for fear of being shunned by white society are now be-

ginning to be proud of that heritage and to admit it.

The official population is rising accordingly. “There are now aboriginal doctors, lawyers, radio announcers, actors, people doing all the things that white people do,” John explains.

The future lies most clearly in two places, he tells me: tourism and art.

In an increasingly globalised world there is a current trend in tourism for ‘real’ cultural experiences – holidays where you can discover different peoples’ food, language and traditions, instead of just looking at things. John suggests there is a rising desire to connect not just to aboriginal people, but also to their culture and their spirituality.

Every country has great restaurants, great cities, great beaches, great forests… For Australia, aboriginal culture is our point of difference, it’s what separates us from the rest of the world.”

Although a holiday with a small aboriginal tourism company might be expensive, there is increasing demand from Australians and foreigners alike. It creates employment, independent economic development and helps retain local culture, involving both children and the elderly. “More importantly it’s a pathway to reconciliation,” John says.

And what about art?

“It’s not art,” I am told. “It’s an impression of culture.” The term ‘art’ to refer to aboriginal painting is often acknowledged to be an act of cultural colonialism, as although it consists of creative, intentional signs, it was never part of an art market in a commercial sense. The process was meant to record a community’s stories.

Archaeologists have carbon dated cave paintings in Australia to 40,000 years old. This, along with sand paintings, bark paintings, and body painting as part of traditional ceremonies, was the beginning of what we now know as aboriginal ‘art’.

Only since the 1970s when white visitors began providing pieces of board and wood for aborigines to paint on have those paintings been transformed into what has been called the greatest art movement of the 20th century.

In their eyes it’s never art,” John explains. “Of course, it has become highly valuable commercially, which is fine if the people who are doing it actually benefit… sometimes deals have been made over a couple of cans of beer or a few ounces of marijuana, in exchange for paintings sold on for AU$4-500,000 at Sotheby’s. The painters themselves are still living in poverty.” The highest recorded price for an aboriginal painting is 1.3 million dollars.

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Fortunately, things are looking up. John tells me that “now it’s a lot more controlled. Every time an aboriginal painting is resold, 5% goes back to the artist.” Aborigines are gradually realising the value of their work, and beginning to auction their own paintings through an agent. Many communities also now have art centres funded by the government that provide materials such as brushes, paints and pre-prepared canvases.

“They still always paint on the ground, though, never with easels,’ John says. “Dogs walk over them, kids play around them. They don’t care.

Although John suppresses evident frustration with the way many people still view aborigines, he is reluctantly positive about the future, and stresses their

“They have been treated as second class citizens for the last 250 years... Only in 1967 they were allowed to be charted on the census.” innate generosity as a fundamental factor in the development of a constructive relationship with the white community. He suggests that for aboriginal people “hardship and deprivation and despair [have] actually created a generosity of spirit that doesn’t exist in our culture. They should really hate us all, but they don’t.”

“I didn’t understand what Australia was as a country before I saw it through aboriginal eyes. There are actually two worlds in this country... The connection between the two has never been a good or a healthy or a strong one. I think that’s starting to change, because there is so much we can learn from each other.”

Finally, John tells me about his friends amongst the Yolngu people in Arnhem Land. “I have a skin name”, he says - a traditional name in an indigenous language and a great honour to be bestowed on a white person.

“My skin name is Mangirr Gondarra. Gondarra is the family name. When I asked them what Mangirr meant, they said ‘it means you’re a weaver’. And I asked ‘why am I a weaver? That’s women’s business’ - which it is, to them. They all started laughing. They said ‘no, you don’t understand. You’re a weaver of people. You weave aboriginal people and white people together, and there’s nothing more important to our future than that.’”

ELLEN JONES

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+ FALLING FOR GOD + The high price of salvation at a Tanzanian church

Illustration: Grace Warde - Aldam

“

YES, YES, YES,” a woman shouts huskily, muscled arms thrashing. A teenage girl with a shaven head shakes and starts to scream.

Suddenly the girl goes crashing to the floor, knocking over her plastic chair, shrieking. A sturdy senior lady lays her down but within seconds another has lost control, wind-milling wildly down the aisle. A sobbing figure holds quivering arms outstretched and collapses.

A yellow satin dress hurtles past before being brought to the ground, from where she cries out as her muscles spasm. She tries to stagger back up; it takes several ladies to hold her.

Welcome to Sunday service at Victorious Church, Moshi, Tanzania. “When you see them fall, it is God letting out the devil,” explains Oswald Tesha, a local preacher. ‘Falling’ is the Tanzanian euphemism for the alarming phenomenon of loud, highly theatrical exorcisms. And every Sunday, the process is followed by demands for donations to the Church.

The Lutheran ‘Crossworld Vision Church’, an exwarehouse, fills with a 600-strong congregation every Sunday, dressed to the nines. “Every person shiny on Sunday,” enthuses regular church-goer and local resident Mama Anna. Due to higher demand than space, an awning erected before the door seats a further

hundred people outside. Instead of an altar there is a clear plastic pulpit, painted with a blue cross. Adorning the roof are clots of wrapping paper ribbon and strings of twinkling blue lights.

Giant stacks of amplifiers stand ominously in each corner.

“When I want to talk with my God, I go to Victorious Church,” says Mama Anna. It is famed for felling heaven with noise alone.

The service opens with two earsplitting songs by the choir, accompanied by clapping and dancing from the audience. It feels like a rock concert.

Bishop Sixbert Paul, the pastor, is short and well padded, his bulk clad in a smart grey suit. He has a square head and a wide smile. “I like him,” says Mama Anna’s daughter, Little Anna, but she’s not sure why.

A slimmer, younger shadow falls behind him - a junior minister is translating the Bishop’s speech into English. However, the ferocious pace of the preaching interrupts the translation so often it’s impossible to understand him. The second minister creates a doubling effect, an echo amplifying the sound and impressiveness of the pastor’s performance. The message that filtered through this collision of voices was that the congregation should be satisfied with their divinely appointed place in life.

The pastor’s sentences are rhetorical, short and delivered at speed. He starts quietly, increasing volume and accelerating to reach a fevered crescendo. The sermon is received enthusiastically. When his words strike a chord there’s a blast of whooping and cheering; arms shoot up, waving frantically and there are regular shouts of “Amen!” and “Hallelujah!” The pastor whips up a frenzy of praise, holding the crowd in the palm of his pudgy hand.

“It is famed for felling heaven with noise alone.”

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A call and response prayer follows. All eyes in the vast hall squeeze shut, isolating each person with their own personal hopes and fears. It goes quiet. An eerie hissing fills the church, the sound of weeping and moaning. The party atmosphere from the beginning of the service is replaced by a frightening melancholy. A girl sobs her prayer, the shoulders of a teenager heave.

Mama Anna’s face is upturned, her eyes wet, mouthing tafadhali Mungu (please God). One man’s face screws up in concentration, tears washing his cheeks. A statuesque woman rocks on her toes and an elderly lady, wrapped in red and orange folds, clutches at the air.

Each person is retreating into inner turmoil, unleashing raw desperation in a wave of mass catharsis.

The pastor’s words become more audible. He promises “green pastures” coming soon. That God will save “every person”. That He will take away your problems if you meet the challenges he puts before you. But you must confess your sins and “take the spirit”.

This is when the ‘falling’ begins. “I don’t believe in it,” says Mukami Rimberia,” who works for Mildmay, a NGO in Moshi, “but many, many people do.” In the midst of the chaos strides the pastor. “Take it! Take it!” he cries; God is taking ‘it’, the spirit or ‘devil’, out of each person’s body.

The dramatic, unhinged outbursts are violently physical and alarming to watch as bodies hit the concrete floor with the full force of their weight. A team of veteran female churchgoers act as security, grabbing the spinning girls pelting down the aisle.

To an outsider, these episodes appear the result of Bishop Sixbert’s skilful psychological manipulation. He conjures mass hysteria, stirring his congregation into a frenzy. Many live below the poverty line, struggling to pay state-imposed school fees and support ageing parents or feckless siblings. Meditating upon such worries would be enough to bring anyone to tears. But this type of praying can transport people to the most emotional extremes. And once their vulnerabilities have been laid bare, the offerings begin.

Nothing could be more incongruous than what follows the ‘falling’. The service morphs into a variety show, featuring a bizarre series of performers: several singers, a comic mime act, and a karate-break dancer.

During these diversions, large ladies in tight dresses march up and press Tanzanian shilling notes into the performers’ palms or pockets. It’s a self-conscious flaunting of wealth: the donors sit right at the back, gaining maximum exposure on their walk to the stage.

The pastor deftly manipulates the audience’s mood, boosting their spirits with entertainment to foster a sense of hopeful optimism. Financial exploitation is

part of the fun.

Mama Anna gave 5,000 Tanzanian Shillings that Sunday. Her income comes from selling barbecued maize at the side of the road. This donation is equivalent to the net profit from a full day’s work. Including transport there, plus her daughter’s offering, Mama Anna spent about one sixth of what she earns. Yet she has no electricity and cannot afford to send Little Anna to school nor get the potentially life-saving cancer treatment that she needs.

It is obvious that the pastor is not a poor man. Girth is a good indicator of income in Tanzania, and he looks better fed than most. Funds are apparently needed for a recruitment procession through Moshi. In addition, the pastor wants to travel to Israel. He convinces the audience that the first thirty contributors of 100,000 Tsh (about £40) will be favoured by God. There’s a rush to the front. “Jesus has chosen you for this task,” he cajoles the rest of the congregation, “I know someone feels the spirit move in them.” Thanks to God’s persuasion, the necessary sum is quickly reached.

“You are too Western. Not everyone is a bad person,” Mama Anna accuses when I ask if she thinks the pastor is corrupt. “He is a good man. So funny!” But others are less convinced. Mukami Rimberia is sure the corruption that is so rife in Tanzanian society could easily have spread into that church. “It’s everywhere,” she exclaims, exasperated.

Bishop Sixbert is building an empire. ‘Victorious Church International Ministries’ comprises seven churches across Tanzania and one in Mombasa, totalling 2,500 members (1,000 of whom are in Moshi). And he’s on a recruitment drive: cars blasting the Victorious message are regularly heard circling Moshi town.

His church fulfils a need for entertainment, gives its congregation a chance to socialise, and whatever you think about religion, faith does provide hope of a better life. But Victorious receives a lot in return, much of which goes straight into the pockets of those in charge.

Little Anna said the pastor was happy to see me, a conspicuous newcomer. When I asked why, she chuckled and rubbed her fingers together: at the age of twelve, she knew he was more interested in my sterling than my soul.

CHLOE CORNISH

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A ROSE

BY ANY OTHER NAME The Continuing Plight of Children in U.K. Border Agency Detention Centres

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W

hen he was 15 years old, Omaid found himself alone, face down in the boot of a car, and at the mercy of human smugglers. All he knew was that they promised freedom in exchange for money; all he could think about was leaving the violence of Afghanistan behind. After a long and dangerous journey he arrived at Heathrow, but his ordeal was far from over.

Unable to prove his age and with only limited English, Omaid was arrested. For 16 hours he was kept in a room the size of a box whilst adults debated his future. “The Home Office told me I had to go back, but it wasn’t safe for me in Kabul. That’s why I left”, he tells me flatly. “They called me a liar. It was bullshit.”

Eventually the police released him to the care of a foster family. Omaid’s voice cracks a little. His only crime was daring to hope for a better life.

Three years later, Omaid’s future is still not certain, but he counts himself as one of the lucky ones. In 2009, the year he arrived in the UK, 1,118 other children were detained by the Border Agency.

Most were released within a month after detention in centres which detainees have described as “worse than prison”, but a wretched few were held for more than six. According to a report published by The Children’s Society, many children held in UK facilities have witnessed traumatic events such as hunger strikes and suicide attempts, have not had adequate access to healthcare and schooling, and have experienced high levels of emotional distress. Many children had already been through harrowing experiences which led them or their families to seek refuge in the UK in the first place.

Such treatment doesn’t just steal childhoods – it takes away futures, too. In 2009, ten year old Adeoti Ogunsola tried to strangle herself with electric cord after being forcibly detained for the second time.

Expert advice had warned that she was suffering from complex post-traumatic stress disorder.

According to the coalition, these stories of unnecessary cruelty are now a thing of the past. Nick Clegg pledged to end the practice of detaining children by 11th May 2011; Immigration Minister Damien Green promised last Christmas that if any children were still in detention on Christmas Day, he’d dress up as Santa.

When it was brought to his attention that in fact, a little girl was being held, Green did not don any festive garb; after all, he left himself a loophole by not specifying which Christmas. Unfortunately Green’s renege appears to be indicative of the attitude taken by the government as a whole.

Omaid is sceptical of new government policy, and he’s not the only one. Had he arrived in Britain more recently he may well have ended up at shiny new Cedars House, which opened near Gatwick airport in August. Cedars House is not a detention centre by name; the Home Office term for it is a ‘pre-departure accommodation facility’ for families and minors.

‘Cedars’ stands for the principles its staff are supposed to uphold: compassion, empathy, dignity, approachability, respect and support. It is now the only place children are forcibly detained in the country.

While it has play areas and a prayer room, Cedars also has a 2.5 metre high perimeter fence. Guards have access to all areas at all times and every detainee, of every age, is searched on arrival. Roll call is taken twice a day. Permission to leave the facility is subject to risk assessment, is only allowed for ‘short periods’, and must be supervised at all times. Private security firm G4S – the company in charge at the time of Adeoti Ogunsola’s suicide attempt, and responsible for the death of Jimmy Mubenga during deportation in 2010 – is responsible for providing this ‘family-friendly environment.’

Cedars is lent the veneer of respectability by children’s charity Barnardo’s. In accepting a contract to provide play activities at Cedars, the charity is answerable to the Border Agency and a collaborator with G4S – a company whose escorts were found by the Chief Inspector of Prisons to show “a shamefully unprofessional and derogatory attitude”, use unnecessary force and racist language. As one professional working with asylum-seeking families puts it, “whatever things are, whatever colour the walls are, it is still a prison. If it was a five star hotel and people were locked in it, it would still be a prison.”

Cedars’ defendants say it’s just a short term solution – children can only be detained there for a maximum of seven days before they are sent back to countries which many felt the need to flee from originally. What is glossed over is that there is nothing stopping the UKBA from re-arresting and detaining families as many times as it wants to. What looks like seven days on paper could in fact be an indefinite stay.

In clapping itself on the back for “ending child detention as we know it”, the government has also neglected to mention the fact that another centre will continue to detain the children of ex-offender parents, as well as ‘border turn around’ cases and any families deemed too disruptive to be housed at Cedars. All repatriation cases of minors are decided by the Independent Family Returns Panel, newspeak for a board

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responsible for determining which families are ‘noncompliant’ and warrant detention and removal. Its entire membership is appointed by the Home Office.

The number of children held in detention centres is falling – from approximately 2,000 a year for the last decade to 437 in 2010 and then 60 for the first six months of 2011. But these figures do not take the new ‘pre-departure accommodation’, police cells, holding cells at the UK’s borders, or the children of anyone detained under criminal powers into consideration.

A Freedom of Information request has found that, in the summer of 2011, 697 children were detained at airports and ports in the South-East of England, and 198 of these children, just like Omaid, were travelling alone. These children are not part of the official total; terrifyingly, the Home Office does not even centrally collect information such as age or length of detention of children who are arrested at the border. With the London Olympics on the horizon, there is an increased risk that children arriving in the UK could be victims of trafficking. And yet these children are slipping through the net of a system which is supposedly designed to protect them.

Omaid knows first-hand that the UK’s asylum system does not safeguard the needs of children. In the last three years he has proven he can take care of himself; at the age of 18 he’s managed to settle into a new life in the UK. He’s recently married and in his last year of school. Yet he’s no longer a child in the eyes of the law, and since his last birthday, Omaid’s asylum case has re-attracted the attention of the authorities.

Now he’s 18, the goal posts have moved again.

In December Omaid was summoned to his local Border Agency office for a meeting. On entering the room he found two UKBA guards waiting to take him to a detention centre.

“My wife was outside and they wouldn’t let me see her, not even to give her my set of house keys. I wasn’t allowed to see my solicitor, I wasn’t allowed to make any phone calls, nothing. I was stunned because my asylum case was still under review… when I told them that they said that it was definitely going to be refused anyway so I had no choice but to go with them.

“My wife was crying. They lied to her: they said I’d be back in two days.”

Omaid was detained for 25 days. The reason why was not explained; he had to beg guards for food and to be allowed to make phone calls. He was taken to Brook House, which has the security level of a category B prison, and then to Campsfield in Oxfordshire, where riots and hunger strikes are common. In 2005, a 19-year-old Campsfield detainee committed suicide after three unsuccessful bail applications.

“Detention was like prison. Don’t listen to whatever they call it, it’s prison. They treat you like an animal; they don’t listen, they don’t care. The people who work there don’t understand that you’re a real person.

They look through you.”

Omaid was released last month after tireless effort on the part of his wife and friends. While detained he missed exams and he says he is still coming to terms with the experience. The future of his asylum application is still uncertain and the UKBA could come back for him at any time. Yet he insists he is fortunate.

“There are so many people like me in there. People with no voice. I’m so lucky to have left those places.”

Despite everything, Omaid still has hope. He is determined to finish school and study electronic engineering at university. But for every Omaid there are countless others – children at the border who will not be recognised as being in danger, children at Cedars whose detention will be justified. Renaming a problem doesn’t make it go away. Nick Clegg said that there has been a “complete, humane, liberal revolution” in the UK’s asylum policy. He’s either blind or lying.

BETHAN MCKERNAN

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THE LONELY HUMAN VOICE In 2009, Chechen human rights activist Natalya Estemirova’s corpse was found by the side of a road in Russia’s south. She is just one of thousands of victims of the Chechen wars.

“I returned to post-war Grozny in 2002. In the first year we didn’t have electricity, and I did my homework by candlelight. You could often hear shooting in the night, and my mum and I would wait it out in the hall.” Lana Estemirova recalls that in each class at her school, there would be students who’d lost their parents or their homes - an entire generation of war-torn childhoods. The Chechen War affected almost every family living in this small, federal subject of Russia nestled in the Northern Caucasus.

Lana’s mother, Natalya Estemirova, was kidnapped and murdered on July 15th 2009. Her body was found by the side of a motorway in neighbouring Ingushetia.

She had been a prominent figure in Memorial, a human rights organisation working with the European Court of Human Rights to oppose the abuses of the Russian government and state apparatus. The ongoing investigation into her death is a confused blur of accusations that the government interfered by falsifying evidence. Ramzan Kadyrov, the Kremlin-backed President of Chechnya, was accused in court of threatening Estemirova, stating that his “hands [were] up to the elbows in blood”, that he had killed, “and [would] continue to kill bad people”. The President responded to the accusations by pointing out that his hands were white, his manicure done only yesterday.

The conflict between the pro-Russian Chechen military and rebel Islamist militias fighting for independence has lasted for decades. Tensions culminated in the brutal Second Chechen War in 1999, and since then the region has been left deeply scarred by violence. Abductions, torture and corruption are endemic in Chechnya, which, due to the Kremlin’s uncompromising support for President Kadyrov, has become a warlord’s personal fiefdom.

Chechnya has been a Russian republic since the Second Chechen War, which began in 1999. Its politics are not completely autonomous - the Kremlin sets the tone,

and has recently been pouring money into the isolated region. The Chechen capital, Grozny, once named as the most destroyed city on earth by the UN, now has a new skyline of polished high-rise buildings, along with the largest mosque in Europe. The construction boom is an asset for pro-Kremlin institutions in the republic and in Russia. It is an attempt to outwit memory and to convince the world of Chechnya’s progress and prosperity under Russian rule.

It was in this war-torn but superficially affluent Chechnya that Estemirova was murdered. Hers was a unique voice in the region. A school history teacher by profession, she was a natural figure for people to turn to when in trouble. She began by monitoring state ‘filtration’ camps, following up cases of torture and forced confessions, and was soon to dedicate her life to the struggle against injustice, and against the helplessness of the victims of the Kremlin-Kadyrov political dyad.

Her work consisted of documenting and investigating crimes, from enforced disappearances to extrajudicial executions. “In the villages and cities, federals regularly conducted zachistki [‘cleansing raids’] during which innocent young men would be beaten, tortured and killed,” her daughter Lana recalls. “Afterwards their desperate parents would come to Memorial.”

Chechnya’s president soon declared Estemirova and her colleagues “enemies of the people”. Numerous individuals have now qualified for this title, including the human rights activists who advised Shakira not to attend Kadyrov’s birthday celebrations.

Chechnya’s climate of impunity and the cult of personality surrounding Kadyrov make his threats, though often farcical, a very real danger. Speaking in court after Estemirova’s murder, Kadyrov announced that in his republic “anyone who violates the public order will be detained. If they resist, they will be destroyed. We are given this right by law.”

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Traditional local law, the adat (from the Arabic meaning ‘habit’), contributes to Chechnya’s anarchy. A preIslamic legal system, criticised in the Qur’an, it is based on blood feuds, retribution and the imposition of an austere patriarchal code. Take, for example, Kadyrov’s public endorsement of honour killings, declaring in 2009 that women are the property of their husbands and may be murdered if they disobey or shame the family. The next level of practised authority in Chechnya is sharia, followed eventually by the forsaken Russian legal system. It is this potent and often contradictory mixture that informs Kadyrov’s method of governance.

Estemirova’s murder falls well within the parameters of this system. It also forms part of the virtually institutionalised practice of murdering Russian activists, lawyers and journalists. Many are found dead in unexplained circumstances, and investigations conveniently melt away. Anna Politkovskaya, killed in 2006, reported on human rights abuses in Chechnya from Natalya Estemirova’s apartment in Grozny. Together they chronicled a society broken by terror and torture, where the frustration of powerlessness drives young men to choose a life of partisan warfare in the mountains. When a son leaves his village for those mountains, it is state policy for the family home to burned to the ground. Collective punishment is seen as an effective method of dissuasion.

Luke Harding, journalist for the Guardian and the first man to be banned from Russia since the fall of the Berlin wall, has experienced the aggression of the Russian state first hand. He documented three taboos in the Russian press after the death of Politkovskaya: state corruption, the FSB (the Russian Federal Security Service) and the crimes of Ramzan Kadyrov. In Russia, there are unspoken rules of self-censorship which, as a foreign journalist, Harding was at liberty to disregard.

He explained just how crucial Estemirova’s role was in a chapter of his new book, Mafia State devoted entirely to her. “One of the bravest and most extraordinary people” he’d ever met, “of superhuman integrity,” Natalya Estemirova was part of a small group of fearless lawyers and journalists who continue to resist the abuses of power and corruption of the state, to which the majority of Russians have simply become resigned.

Driving through Oxfordshire a few months before her death, I asked Natalya if she was scared. “Terrified,” she said, so much so that she had moved her daughter out of Grozny to live with family in central Russia. I asked her if she wouldn’t just prefer to stay and work from here, and leave the ruthless Chechen mountains for the neat and ordered English hills. But

she explained that she couldn’t: though she knew it was dangerous, if she wasn’t in Chechnya the people would have nobody. Since her death, Memorial has closed its Grozny branch, most activists have left, and all that is broadcast on Russian television are images of Kadyrov dancing at his 35th birthday.

“I am convinced that my mother’s work needs to be continued,” says Lana, “because then hundreds of people still have a hope for justice.” And perhaps a glimmer of it can be seen in the work of a new project, the Joint Mobile Group, which brings a different group of expert lawyers and activists to Chechnya every month, to collect evidence on human rights abuses.

The Joint Mobile Group has recently overcome violent threats and freed an innocent man from a state prison.

However, theirs is an uneasy existence. They surround themselves with CCTV cameras, voice recorders and radio equipment, scant protection against the Kremlin mafia.

Please sign the Amnesty International petition for a fair and just investigation: www.amnesty.org/en/appeals-foraction/estemirova-investigation PAULINA IVANOVA

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CHINA’S EMPTY METROPOLIS I

n 1962, with the words “It doesn’t matter if it’s a white cat or a black cat, it’s a good cat if it catches mice”, Deng Xiaoping proclaimed China’s new approach to improving its feeble economy. Forty years later it is a dictum which strikes at the very heart of the Chinese property bubble, for all its economy is now one of the most powerful on the planet.

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This year, Miss World competitors will flock to the city with the second highest per capita income in China. Unfortunately, there will be barely any residents to greet them. Such incongruities have come to characterize Ordos, the infamous ‘ghost town’ of Inner Mongolia. The city built for one million residents has only 30,000 inhabitants; despite almost every house being sold, only 3% are occupied.

Overcrowded and slightly dilapidated, the original old town of Ordos lies fifteen miles from the new city and is a world away from the vast squares and colossal equine statues to be found in the new city centre. New Ordos is spookily uninhabited with its silent rows of deserted middle-class homes, colossal state buildings, and enormous supermarkets filled with colourfully packaged foodstuffs. Walking through the city evokes a strange, post-apocalyptic atmosphere. Somehow ominous, the empty buildings seem to capture fears of a bleak future – a future brought into being by the economic folly of such projects and the policies they represent.

Ordos is symptomatic of the current state of the Chinese property market. Speculators, seeking financial gain rather than new housing, have been pouring money into property. At the same time, the government has been trying desperately to comply with CCP policy, which demands an annual rise of 8% in GDP. The potent mix of speculative investment and government spending has resulted in ‘ghost towns’ like Ordos springing up across China. Scattered from Inner Mongolia in the North-West to Jiangsu on the SouthEastern coast, they encapsulate much what is wrong with the Chinese economy.

Property investment of this type has fundamentally failed to address China’s problems. Housing has been built to satisfy speculative investors looking to diversify their wealth, not to meet the needs of the 700 million

poor in China. Neither is it built with local residents in mind; the only plausible buyers of such property are the wealthy middle-class looking to settle in a second or third home. Built on a barren desert, Ordos lacks this kind of demand. High levels of speculative demand, however, have priced locals out of the market.

There is a prevailing impression that the current situation has arisen thanks to buccaneer private investors and their unwarranted speculating, a stance not dissimilar to the demonisation of bankers in the West.

However, unlike the condemnation bankers from the City and Wall Street received, criticism directed to-

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wards Chinese property investors perhaps seems less justifiable. One prominent Chinese property developer, who would rather remain anonymous, points towards the falling property prices of recent years and the combatant government policies restricting private investment. While he sees a punishing “five or six years” ahead, his stoic attitude is somewhat unexpected, particularly his affirmation that this “policy will work, it is good that prices will drop so everyone in China can afford a house”.

The ghost towns were a result of economic stimulus and attempts at urbanisation which temporarily

provoked an artificial sense of prosperity. Once funds for development were exhausted, however, the Government spending, which had been bolstering GDP in the area, was not replaced by business generated income and local industry. The key to China’s economic future lies in the creation of such industry. The question is, will the cat get its cream?

REBECCA CHOONG WILKINS

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FREE WEST PAPUA

Last December, ISIS spoke to Benny Wenda, leader of a tribal assembly in the western half of the island of Papua and head of the Free West Papua Campaign. Having fled Indonesia in 2003 after a lifetime of persecution at the hands of both the Indonesian military and legal system, Benny Wenda now lives in Oxford, and has spoken about his anger, his determination to achieve change in his homeland and his gratitude towards the British people.

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B

enny Wenda lived among the Lani tribe as a child, growing produce with his mother in their family garden and learning traditional crafts. Speaking of his sheltered childhood, Wenda describes believing that there were “no other people on this earth” until the Indonesian military arrived at his village, following the country’s decision to seize the island in an attempt to unite former Dutch colonies.

Persecution and appalling violence followed the army’s presence in West Papua, and Wenda related having to watch as his mother and aunt were raped in front of his eyes when stopped by soldiers one morning. His reaction at the time, Wenda explained, was simply to ask himself “why?”

As violence increased, he and his family members went into hiding in the jungle for five years, facing hunger, exhaustion and repeated bombings, with many of the elderly alongside them perishing. Integration into Indonesian culture followed by necessity, as the strains of living in hiding became too much. Wenda, however, still feels the aftermath of these years physically - a leg that was broken in the jungle never properly healed - but also in his urge to liberate his people from racism and oppression.

Arriving in England in 2003, and shortly afterwards settling in Marston, Oxfordshire, Wenda’s life has not been straightforward.

He experienced appalling racism alongside his kinsmen whilst at school under an Indonesian government, rose to become leader of the Demmak tribal assembly representing indigenous residents of West Papua in the 1990s, and was tried for violent acts of retaliation against police before fleeing to the UK. At present, however, Wenda is grateful for his life in Britain. The healthcare system, in particular, is

an aspect of the country Wenda praises: for him, the fact that his leg could be treated by the NHS is “part of the justice” that he has found since his emigration from Indonesia.

The most striking difference between life in Britain and West Papua, however, is the freedom from prejudice. Wenda describes an incident at an Indonesian school after his time in the jungle, in which a Javan girl whom he sat next to in class received his friendship by spitting in his face. Wenda recounts how he washed three times before school the next day, only to be greeted with the same insult. “This kind of thing you never find here”, he remarked, observing how remarkable it is that “people respect each other” in Britain. He marvelled at the comparative safety of the individual in the country, no matter what race: “I’ve never seen the British military holding a gun in the Covered Market, or in the train station. In my country, if you have a dread-locked head, or a long beard, they’d beat you up.” West Papuans in Indonesia, he explained, are treated as “second-class citizens”, continually at risk of such abuses.

When asked about his settlement in Oxford and how he has felt supported in his international actions here, Wenda declared that it felt like “my spirit was already here”. He noted how he felt at home in the city, a “really multicultural place”, and was reassured that journalist and human rights campaigner George Monbiot, based in Oxford until 2007, took an interest in West Papua and published a report on the situation there in his book Poisoned Arrows. Last year, Wenda raised the flag of West Papua on Carfax tower together with the Mayor of Oxford. Wenda described his gratitude, and how he feels that “local people are supportive”. He remarked gratefully, “I am not alone, it gives me confidence that what I’m doing will achieve my dream”.

It is the British freedom to campaign that allows Wenda to continue his work towards the liberation of his people. He spoke of the inequality of West Papuans’ legal treatment in Indonesia, explaining how “policemen criminalise political campaigners”, and how there is a marked discrepancy in their treatment compared to Indonesian nationals: long prison sentences are routinely awarded to vocal activists, whether or not they

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are guilty of violence. Wenda explained, with regret, that “you can buy the law” in Indonesia; “you can buy lawyers, you can buy judges”.

Between 1999 and 2000, after President Suharto of Indonesia died, Jakarta held talks with West Papuans, after which Wenda became leader of the Demmak tribal assembly. The assembly, together with the Papuan Council, pushed for autonomy, recognition and protection for the culture and beliefs of the 800,000 inhabitants of the island. However, when Megawati became President in 2001, the so-called “Papuan Spring” was finished: leader of the Papuan Council Theys Eluay was assassinated, and Wenda put on trial, imprisoned and tortured. After experiencing immense hardship in prison following the trial, Wenda escaped: he was smuggled across the border and to England by a European NGO, where he was granted political asylum.

Undaunted, Wenda continues his campaign work today through extensively petitioning and lobbying political leaders. Wenda himself orchestrated the formation of International Parliamentarians for West Papua, a cross-party group of politicians whose aims are to support the country’s democratic rights, and which works with human rights lawyer Melinda Janki to rally lawyers to the cause worldwide. He is unfazed by the news last November that the Indonesian government issued a red notice for him through Interpol, which will make attempts to cross any country’s borders ex-

tremely difficult. Wenda dismissed the move, claiming that it was “only done because I’m successful, because I’m travelling... I’m a political leader, that’s why they’re trying to stop me”. He voiced his determination to act, shaking off accusations by asking “what is really criminal? Indonesia is criminal. I’ll never stop my campaign while people are crying for help and food... Indonesia can’t stop me”.

Fuelled by his own experiences at the hands of the Indonesian military and government, Wenda asserts his motivation to “try and help my people. I don’t want the next generation to suffer”, he affirmed, “I want them to enjoy freedom”. Wenda is clear about his future ambitions: his priority is to increase awareness of the injustices happening in West Papua, and he wants to “mobilise people to put pressure on the British government to persuade the Indonesian government to let the media in.” The world media, the International Peace Brigade and Amnesty International are all currently banned from entering his home country, but Wenda is confident that news of his people’s plight is spreading, and that his work will continue to bring him closer to his ultimate aims: freedom, and the creation of a democratic and independent West Papuan state.

JOE NICHOLSON

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THE PEARL OF AFRICA?

I

n 1997, Kasiisi Project was founded in order to aid education in the area around Kibale National Park, in rural western Uganda. Under the charity’s guidance, five primary schools in the Fort Portal area now receive the benefits of new buildings, new latrines, the provision of porridge for the children over lunch and ever-expanding library facilities. Founder Elizabeth Ross has also initiated the girls’ sexual health programme, in response to high levels of female absenteeism from school, teenage pregnancy and the spreading of HIV/AIDS. Kasiisi Project now runs girls’ peer support programs, newly initiated sexual health education and supplies the schools with underwear, sanitary pads and soap for the girls. Although these changes take immediate effect, they seem small in the face of culturally embedded attitudes towards sex and traditional gender roles in Ugandan society.

The issues surrounding menstruation were the first to be targeted by Kasiisi Project. Sanitary pads are not widely available in Uganda, and most girls cannot afford them. Traditionally, strips of cloth are used, and the issue of washing the cloths, of keeping them hygienic, odourless and free from infection, raises serious problems concerning girls’ education. If a girl is seen at school with a leak on her skirt, or is known to have her period, it is a state of public humiliation. Girls regularly remain at home throughout the duration of their period, meaning they miss 25% of their education.

Subsequently, end-of-year exam results show that girls’ success rates are consistently lower than boys’. The result is obvious to the eye; older, more developed girls

sit embarrassed at the back of the classroom, whilst the boys appear younger and brighter at the front.

In 2006, Kasiisi Project launched a survey, providing sanitary pads and underwear to Kanyawara Primary School, the school closest to the border of Kibale National Park. The average of girls’ daily absenteeism fell by 28%. Currently in Africa, 8.6% of girls who begin primary school drop out before completion, whilst in Uganda, only 11% of girls attend secondary school.

Simple solutions, such as the provision of sanitary pads, underwear and soap in girls-only latrines on the school grounds have an enormous effect on female attendance.

Ugandan girls are faced with sexual pressure from a very young age. At primary school, they are asked to ‘play sex’ with boys, offered gifts in return for their bodies and fed a plethora of myths regarding sex, pregnancy and HIV/AIDS. In the schools where sexual education does exist, it is limited, and talking about sex is veiled by language. It becomes a game, something to be discussed indirectly with code words and expressions. At the centre of all this pressure, is the issue of trust. Many of the girls come from homes without mothers, unable to talk about puberty or sex at home and too afraid of doing so to anyone at school, in case ‘rumours’ get around.

“Over 50% of girls believed in ‘the virgin cure’”

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From its initial workshops run through the Jane Goodall Institute, Kasiisi Project discovered the alarming ignorance and misinformation concerning sex.

Twenty girls were taken from the oldest year group at each school, and asked a series of questions. Over 50% of the girls believed that babies born to mothers of over 19 years of age will be less healthy than those born to younger mothers. Similarly, over 50% of girls believed in ‘the virgin cure’: older men propositioning girls for sex in order to cure them of HIV/AIDS. Yet there are older, more obscure myths that carry frightening statistics: 64% of girls believed that if they did not lose their virginity by the age of 16, they would grow a bone in their vagina.

Girls as young as eleven and twelve lose their virginity to older boys.

Although Kasiisi Project does not have an exact statistic for this figure, the girls of one class were asked to raise their hands if they were still virgins, and frighteningly few did so. Some of them had not yet received their first period.

Obtaining information from the girls was not an easy task; at first they were reluctant to talk, and their body language exhibited embarrassment, heads bent low over desks and faces buried into the crooks of elbows, all behavioural indications of submission. Questions had to be translated into Rutooro, the local dialect, for the younger girls to understand. Such behaviour

reflects the female place in society; it is not unusual for girls to kneel if their male teacher enters the room, or to shy away when asked a question. Through informal discussion the project managed to glean information from the girls. When asked to demonstrate through role-play how boys ask for sex, the girls immediately re-enacted a series of evidently familiar situations. It also becomes apparent that the source of this misinformation is not only a culturally embedded ignorance, but fed by men desiring sex.

In an informal class at Ndali Primary School, in the nearby crater lakes region in the foothills of the Rwenzori Mountains, the use of condoms is advocated for safe sex, yet this is met by a chorus of dismay. The head girl proffers, “condoms give you cancer.” When asked who has told her this, she answered, “the head teacher.”

Kasiisi Project trains peer educators, girls selected by the senior female teacher of each school for showing themselves to be “confident, out-going, empathetic and smart.” They are trained at a residential two-day course held locally, the funding for which initially came from the Nike Foundation and the Jane Goodall Institude (Uganda), though Kasiisi Project now fully funds the initiative. The aim of training the girls is to provide within the schools, as Elizabeth Ross has said, “a resource for their peers and link between the staff and the girls.” Peer educators are

“Girls regularly remain at home throughout the duration of their period, meaning they miss 25% of their education.”

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approached with problems and questions, demonstrating the success of the initiative. They provide a trustworthy outlet, a mediator between the girls and the authorities. This aspect of trustworthiness is essential for the discussion of sexual health in schools. As a schoolgirl told the project, “the peer counsellor can help the girl because all the girls know that the peer educators are trained to be confidential and not to spread any rumours”.

It will take a long time for sex to become a comfortable topic of conversation in rural Uganda, but Kasiisi Project is effectively working towards being able to approach these issues in the right environment. The promotion of sexual health in schools is vital to girls’ attendance rates and subsequently to their place in society.

Emblazoned on the outer walls of the primary schools, colourful slogans and designs advocate virginity and abstinence, with messages such as ‘virginity is healthy’,

and ‘Do not receive gifts you don’t understand.’ Female sexual health is intimately linked to personal aspiration and education, providing the girls with a different set of options for their future. Elizabeth Ross has dedicated fifteen years to the educating and informing Ugandan girls of their sexual health: “the goal of the Kasiisi Project Girls’ Programme is to ensure that the girls in our school have the knowledge and skills they need to delay first sexual experiences, and to protect them from the sexually transmitted diseases, early marriage, unwanted pregnancies and abusive relationships which prevent them from completing their education and becoming happy healthy productive women.”

HARRIET BAKER

www.kasiisiproject.org

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soldier, born to a poor peasant family just after the October Revolution, was a dab-hand at invention as a child – legend has it that his first arms design project saw the creation of a toy gun that fired matches.

In recovery after the war, he overheard fellow soldiers complaining about the inferiority of Soviet weaponry.

Kalashnikov set to work designing a submachine gun.

His design would become the father of a family of imitations, knock-offs and black-market replicas worldwide. It is estimated that over fifty million AK-47s and derivatives have been produced or used in over fiftyfive countries since its inception in 1949. If small arms are responsible for one death every second worldwide, the AK is culpable for the majority of them. In 2002 Kalashnikov famously confessed to journalists that he would rather have invented “a machine that people could use and that would help farmers with their work – for example a lawnmower”.

What made the AK-47 unique and seminal was its sheer simplicity. It incorporates fewer moving parts than its rivals, and is hence easier to use, cheaper to produce, and more reliable in difficult conditions. It can be assembled and disassembled intuitively. It is capable of 600 rounds of continuous fire. Furthermore, the weapon is notorious for its lethality: the bullet ‘tumbles’ out of the muzzle, meaning its victim is not hit cleanly by the point, but bludgeoned by a spinning chunk of hot metal. The thing is virtually indestructible – it can be buried in bogs, hidden in damp rice paddies, stored in extreme heat and cold – and yet will fire every time without fail, requiring only minimal maintenance and cleaning. It makes shooting people easy. Point-and-click: a child could use it. In fact, 800,000 worldwide did so in 1988, according to a recent American independent arms survey.

Once the cat was let out of Kalashnikov’s bag, the AK bolted eastwards. During the cold war Russia and China subscribed to a military assistance program which demanded the mutual disclosure of technical knowledge, as well as the distribution of hardware to like-minded nations. Over the course of the next decades, AKs were handed out like candy to members of socialist, communist and anti-capitalist bodies, from the Sandinistas in Nicaragua to the Vietcong in Vietnam.

Yet such is the global influence of the gun that it becomes ideologically as well as literally loaded with new associations with each new regime, faction, guerrilla movement and criminal that appropriates it. If

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hen Cara Buono arrived at the Emmy Awards in September 2011, nominated as best guest actress in a drama series for her role as Dr Faye Miller in Mad Men, she wore a $150,000 political statement in her earlobes. “These earrings,” she said, “are made from AK-47 gun metal.” You may not believe her to look at them (Philip Crangi’s design is more gold and diamonds than scrap metal and ironwood), except that each earring bears a reminder of its dark provenance: the serial number of the former firearm. Ms Buono’s husband, humanitarian Peter Thum, is the founder of the non-profit organisation Fonderie 47, which converts recovered weapons into high-end jewellery to raise money towards the mass decommissioning of arms in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mr Thum was inspired by a visit to Kenya in 2008, where he was struck by the prevalence of the rifle. “We saw the AK-47 as an opportunity because it’s such a successful design,” he told the New York Times. “It’s something that’s globally recognisable. What better way to turn things around than with this object, which represents so many things ugly, and turn it into something beautiful?”

The lethal weapon has been deemed a design classic, pronounced worthy in December 2011 of inclusion in London’s Design Museum. In the British Museum you can see an astonishing sculpture of the ‘Throne of Weapons’, made by Mozambican artist Cristaovao Canhavato from decommissioned firearms collected since the end of the civil war in 1992, in which the AK takes the crowning spot. Two of its distinctive curved magazines form the headrest. The throne is a product of the ‘Transforming Arms into Tools’ project, launched by the Christian Council of Mozambique, whereby weapons are voluntarily exchanged for agricultural, domestic and construction tools. Like Thum’s organisation, it looks to change guns into something better. Yet whether chair or charm, each carries a reminder of the thing it was before. Aestheticised or not, the AK-47 remains fundamentally a weapon. The AK, then, is a confusing thing, a shape-shifter. As a cultural icon, it carries such a range of associations, from status symbol to arcane fashion accessory (to murder). Every now and then, it even finds itself associated with peace.

The original design of the Avtomat Kalashnikova was conceived by Mikhail Kalashnikov, former senior sergeant of the Red Army, as he lay in a hospital in Bryansk in 1941 recovering from war-wounds. The

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one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, neither can be distinguished from the other by the weaponry they use. Recent Middle Eastern conflicts are cases-in-point. In March, bizarre footage emerged of a pro-Gaddafi newscaster delivering the evening news while waving an AK-47 in the air. “I’m ready at any time to defend the country. This is our weapon” he announces. If the AK-47 is the weapon of the Gaddafi regime, it is also the weapon of its most vitriolic opponents. The AK-47 is the gun that won Bani Walid and Sirte. It is the symbol of the resistance. To Western observers it is also a chilling reminder of the repetition of conflict. It was revealed last year that the Gaddafi regime was arming Libyan civilians aged as young as seventeen with the firearm in order to build a ‘home front’ against NATO military intervention and rebel insurgency. Child warfare has been a staple of civil strife in the last twenty years; Kalashnikov’s ingenious design of course makes this all possible.

The AK has imprinted itself so indelibly onto the identity of some countries that some have even chosen it as a symbol of their troubled nation. In 1983, the current Mozambique flag was adopted which includes the image of an AK. In the Nuevo Laredo region of Mexico, the Kalashnikov is such a fixture in ongoing cartel warfare that the weapon has been christened the cuerno de chivo, or goat’s horn.

The AK is so treasured that in parts of India and Africa, parents are accustomed to naming their children in its honour.

‘Kalash’ is a reasonably com-

mon boy’s name, chosen as a symbol of bravery and masculinity. ‘Kalashnikov Culture’ has gripped the world, and nowhere more so than in the US, where there are more licensed gun-dealers than there are McDonald’s outlets. And there are a lot of McDonald’s outlets.

Famous for its banana-shaped clip, its distinctive ‘popping’ sound when fired, and its trademark silhouette, the AK has achieved metonymic status in Western culture. It is now more than just a gun. In chess, the Kalashnikov move is an aggressive opening gambit.

‘Kalashnikov’ is also a brand of vodka. The launch campaign saw a team of sparsely-clad ‘Nikita Girls’ invade London bars armed with military-issue crates of the spirit, to be taken from shot glasses fixed to ammunition belts. If that sounds tasteless, that’s probably appropriate, because so is the vodka.

The AK is also a pop-culture icon. In 2004, the self-declared ‘art terrorist’ going by the name of ‘AK-47’ was responsible for the theft of a number of well-known pieces of modern art, pilfering work by, amongst others, Tracey Emin and Banksy. His name exploits the iconoclastic, anti-institutional connotations of the rifle, and well as acting as an acronym for ‘Art Kaida’, a reference to Al Qaeda. Da Lench Mob reached seventh in the charts in 1992 with the single ‘Freedom Got An A.K.’ and Jamaican-English rapper Darren Kandler chose the stage name ‘Ricochet Klashnekoff ’. The gun features in the controversy surrounding the glamorisation of violence in rap music. All of this shows how guns are a part of the way we see the world, and the AK is the biggest of them all.

Kalashnikov once spoke of his brainchild in this way: “I made it to protect the motherland. And then they spread the weapon. Not because I wanted them to.

Not at my choice.” It found its own feet and “began to walk all on its own and in directions I did not want”. The globe-trotting Frankenstein’s monster of the AK47, the defecting progeny of Russian nationalism, is a composite creature, a mishmash of elements. It is a weapon, a national symbol, a tool of suppression, a liberator, a piece of art, a sex object, a goat’s horn, a chair, a pair of earrings. It is this protean quality that makes the AK-47 so powerful, baffling and dangerous.

as h e’ , r u lt rld u C wo e v r han e o e h k ni d t owh so t US h las ippe d n ore the a ‘K gr an m in re e e wh e ar sed r cen han e h t e li s t nr ler Do o m dea Mc n- are u g e ts. r le the out ’s d l a

JOHN WARRINER

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» EVELYN WAUGH 1924

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“The Proctors have been peculiarly aggressive this term… The other day I was walking home with a pickaxe which I borrowed to complete the costume of ‘the Conservative Working Man’ for a fancy dress party, when I was stopped by a bowler hatted servant and brought to the proctors, who told me that it was not seemly to carry workmen’s tools about. I wonder if it was just snobbery.”

» JOHN BETJEMAN1926

“For now, at least, we are stimulated by the horror of what we see. We are not slowly and insidiously having our mentalities gutted by the atrocious abortions of feeble-minded young ladies working in community schools… YOU DELEGATES OF LODGINGS – STIR YOURSELVES”. – complaining about the décor in student housing.

» MICHAEL FOOT 1934

“The real menace to democracy comes from the possibility of a dearth in its stock of great men.

Hero-worship is a well-nigh universal instinct, and in politics it has a vital part to play”

» “Men SYLVIA PLATH1956 here [in Oxford] are inclined

to treat women in one of two ways: either (1) as pretty beagling frivolous things (or devastating bohemian things) worthy of May balls and suggestive looks over bottles of Chablis by candlelight, or, more rarely, (2) as esoteric opponents on an intellectual tennis court where the man, by law of kind, always wins.”

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