• End of Boris bandwagon 24 • Surgery’s robot future 30 • Climate chaos and the far right 48

A week in the life of the world | Global edition

23 JUNE 2023 | VOL .208 No.25 | £4.95 | €7.99

Why can’t the Mediterranean migrant deaths be stopped? 12

Eyewitness  Seeing red
Colombia People hurl fruit at each other during the annual Tomato Fight Festival,
known as Tomatina, in Sutamarchán. The event – which uses surplus
PHOTOGRAPH:
harvest unfit for eating – began in 2004, and this year’s festival is the
JUAN BARRETO/AFP/GETTY first held since the lifting of Covid pandemic restrictions.

Guardian Weekly is an edited selection of some of the best journalism found in the Guardian and
Observer newspapers in the UK and the Guardian’s digital editions in the UK, US and Australia.
The Guardian Weekly The weekly magazine has an international focus and three editions: global, Australia and North
Founded in Manchester, America. The Guardian was founded in 1821, and Guardian Weekly in 1919. We exist to hold power
England to account in the name of the public interest, to uphold liberal and progressive values, to fight for
4 July 1919 the common good, and to build hope. Our values, as laid out by editor CP Scott in 1921, are honesty,
integrity, courage, fairness, and a sense of duty to the reader and the community. The Guardian
is wholly owned by the Scott Trust, a body whose purpose is “to secure the financial and editorial
independence of the Guardian in perpetuity”. We have no proprietor or shareholders, and any profit
Vol 208 | Issue № 25 made is re-invested in journalism.
 A week in the life of the world Inside
23 June 2023

Mediterranean tragedy,
Biden powers up and
Kenya’s literary great
A shipwreck in the Mediterranean last week claimed 6-16 GLOBAL REPORT
the lives of around 500 people, another grim chapter in Headlines from the last
a wider story of human despair and people smuggling seven days
that politicians and authorities seem powerless to tackle. 12 Greece Sorrow turns to
Helena Smith reports from the Greek town of Kalamata, anger over tragedy at sea
where grief turned quickly to anger, while Jon Henley
analyses Europe’s long-term policy failures on irregular 17-33 SPOTLIGHT
migration and Patrick Wintour considers the problems in In-depth reporting
divided Libya, from where the ill-fated vessel set sail. and analysis
The big story Page 12  17 US Can Joe Biden do it
again in 2024?
US president Joe Biden has launched his campaign to 20 Ukraine On the frontline
run again in 2024, but can the 80-year-old last the pace 24 UK Johnson’s ignominy
of what is likely to be a bruising re-match against Donald 27 Spain The rise of Vox
Trump? David Smith analyses Biden’s chances, while 28 New Zealand The chilling
Hugo Lowell asks whether Trump’s federal indictment for impact of warming seas
allegedly concealing classified documents may kill off the 30 Science The robotic future
Republican contest – in his favour. of surgery
Spotlight Page 17  33  Canada Exposed to
threat of wildfires
A real highlight in our features pages this week is Carey
Baraka’s remarkable interview at home with the 85-year- 34-44 F E AT U R E S
old Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, whose life has Long reads, interviews
intersected with many of the past century’s biggest events. and essays
Grand old man of letters Page 34  34 Three days with a giant of
African literature
In the Culture section we find out why Hito Steyerl is By Carey Baraka
considered one of the world’s most influential artists, pay 40 Living with chronic pain
tribute to the late American novelist Cormac McCarthy By Oliver Franklin-Wallis
and catch up with the cellist Yo-Yo Ma as he ended a world
tour by busking on the streets of Nairobi. 45-50 OPINION
Culture From page 51  45 Rebecca Solnit
Truth, lies and classified
documents
47 Lorenzo Marsili
What architecture says
about globalisation
48 George Monbiot
Climate chaos and the
hard right

51-59 C U LT U R E
TV, film, music, theatre,
art, architecture & more
51 Visual arts
Hito Steyerl’s questions
Join the community On the cover Since the International Organization about the world
Twitter: @guardianweekly for Migration launched its missing migrants 54 Music
facebook.com/guardianweekly
Instagram: @guardian project in 2014, an estimated 27,000 people Cellist Yo-Yo Ma on
trying to reach Europe have been recorded as a mission from Bach
dead or disappeared while trying to cross the 56 Books
Mediterranean. More than 21,000 of those deaths Remembering Cormac
have occurred on the route from Libya or Tunisia McCarthy
north to Greece or Italy. Photo: Hugh Peterswald/
SPOT ILLUSTRATIONS:
Pacific Press/LightRocket/Getty; Guardian Design 60-61 LIFESTYLE
MATT BLEASE 60 Ask Annalisa
Tackling intrusive thoughts
6

Global
2 U N I T E D S TAT E S 4 S E R B I A / KO S O VO

EU summons leaders in

report effort to de-escalate crisis

The EU called Serbian and
Kosovan leaders to Brussels for
crisis talks after raised tensions
sparked fears of violence between
Headlines from the the two countries. EU leaders have
last seven days intervened several times in recent
weeks to try to de-escalate the
situation but, after the arrest of
1 UKRAINE Race against time to find
Kosovan police officers by Serbia
Titanic tourist sub last week, want face-to-face talks.
Toll on both sides as Kyiv
Search and rescue teams were “In the light of ongoing
retakes villages in south racing against time on Tuesday to escalation and the lack of
Copyright © 2023 Heavy casualties are being find a tourist sub that went missing meaningful steps towards this
GNM Ltd. All rights endured by Ukrainian and Russian in the north Atlantic while on a coalition, we invited both leaders
reserved forces, British military intelligence dive to the wreck of the Titanic. from Serbia, from Kosovo to come
said, as Kyiv on Monday The US Coast Guard said “a to Brussels next week for a crisis
Published weekly by celebrated the liberation of an small submarine with five persons meeting,” said a spokesperson
Guardian News & eighth settlement in the south onboard” had gone missing and for Josep Borrell, the European
Media Ltd, of the country, two weeks into that the vessel had the capacity Commission’s high representative
Kings Place, its offensive. to be submerged for 96 hours, but for foreign policy.
90 York Way,
Losses among Russian troops it was unclear whether it was still The invitation was issued to
London, N1 9GU, UK
were said by British officials to underwater or had surfaced and the Kosovan prime minister, Albin
Printed in the UK, be at their highest since the peak was unable to communicate. Kurti, and the Serbian president,
Poland, the US, of March during the battle for The submersible was reported Aleksandar Vučić, he added.
Australia and Bakhmut in the Donetsk region, overdue on Monday but contact Tensions mounted last month
New Zealand with Ukraine claiming to have was lost 1 hour 45 minutes into between the countries after
killed or injured 4,600 soldiers. its dive on Sunday afternoon, the Pristina’s decision to install ethnic
ISSN 0958-9996 The progress of Ukraine’s forces in coast guard said. A British explorer Albanian mayors in four Serb-
the east and south has been slow, and a French military veteran and majority municipalities. They
To advertise contact with much of the heavy western submarine expert were believed were allowed to take office despite
advertising.
weaponry and new brigades yet to to be among those onboard the a turnout of lower than 3.5% in
enquiries@
be committed to battle. Titan, operated by underwater elections that were boycotted by
theguardian.com
Ukraine’s deputy defence tourism company OceanGate. the Serbian majority in the region.
To subscribe, visit minister, Hanna Maliar,
theguardian.com/ announced that, with the capture
gw-subscribe of the village of Piatykhatky, in
3 U N I T E D S TAT E S 5 U N I T E D S TAT E S
the southern part of Zaporizhzhia,
Manage your about 113sq km of territory was
subscription at
Arizona plea deal leads to Pentagon leaks suspect
said to have been seized from the
subscribe. occupying forces. release from death row indicted by federal jury
theguardian.com/ Russia was reported to have A man who spent nearly three Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old
manage
moved troops to the Donetsk front decades on death row before the US airman accused of leaking
from the Kherson region, where reversal of his conviction over the confidential intelligence and
USA and Canada
gwsubsus
the destruction of the Kakhovka death of a four-year-old girl has defence documents online, was
@theguardian.com dam has reduced the potential been freed from prison. indicted by a federal grand jury,
Toll Free: of Ukrainian forces to cross the Barry Jones’s release, the Department of Justice said.
+1-844-632-2010 Dnipro river. ordered on 15 June, came after Teixeira, of North Dighton,
Spotlight Page 20  a Tuscon-area state court judge Massachusetts, has been
Australia and approved a deal which involved charged with six counts of wilful
New Zealand the prisoner pleading guilty to retention and transmission of
apac.help a lesser murder charge. According classified information relating
@theguardian.com to prosecutors, a medical review to national defence, the justice
Toll Free:
of the case failed to conclude department said. Teixeira, who is
1 800 773 766
that Jones caused the girl’s fatal in federal custody, was arrested
UK, Europe and injury, and his pleading guilty to by armed FBI agents in April. He
Rest of World second-degree murder involves enlisted in the US Air National
gwsubs@ failure to adequately seek Guard in 2019 and had top secret
theguardian.com emergency care for the victim. security clearance since 2021.
+44 (0) 330 333 6767

The Guardian Weekly 23 June 2023

UK headlines p11
6 CANADA
Police working to identify
15 people killed in bus crash
Police in the province of Manitoba
were trying to identify the
15 people killed when a truck
and a bus carrying mostly
elderly people collided in one
of the country’s worst recent
road crashes.
Last Thursday’s collision
near the town of Carberry in
south-western Manitoba, 170km
west of Winnipeg, left the bus,
which had been carrying 25 mostly
elderly people heading to a casino,
burnt to a shell. Ten people were
taken to hospital. Six were listed
in critical condition. The victims
were from Dauphin, which is
about 175km north of Carberry.
The mayor, David Bosiak, said
it was “tremendously difficult”
given that no one knew who had
been on the bus.
7 ECUADOR
Woman in coffin case dies
after hospital stay
A 76-year-old woman who had
been declared dead and surprised
her relatives by knocking on her
coffin during her wake earlier this
month died after seven days in
intensive care. Ecuador’s health
ministry confirmed in a statement
that Bella Montoya died from an
ischaemic stroke. It added that
Montoya had remained under
“permanent surveillance” but
didn’t provide further information
on the medical investigation
surrounding the case.
Gilberto Barbera Montoya,
her son, said that he hadn’t
yet received any report from
the authorities on the medical
explanation of what had
happened in the original event.
9 FINLAND
Rightwing coalition to take
power after months of talks
Spending will be cut, immigration
reduced and citizenship rules
made tighter under a four-party
coalition government including
the far-right Finns party and
headed by the conservative leader
Petteri Orpo.
Orpo’s National Coalition
party, the Finns, the Swedish 1
People’s party and the Christian
5
Democrats hold 108 MPs in the 4
200-seat parliament between
them. The deal was unveiled last
Friday after 11 weeks of sometimes
stormy negotiations. A radical
austerity programme has been
promised, and the Finns party
is taking a hard line on aid, the 10 GERMANY
climate crisis and immigration.
Analysts have described the
four-party coalition as arguably
the most rightwing administration
in Finland’s history.
Excavations reveal ‘rare’
sword from 14th century BC
A bronze sword more than
3,000 years old, which is so well
preserved that it “almost still
shines”, has been unearthed in
8 BRAZIL southern Germany, officials say.
The Bavarian state office for
the preservation of historical
monuments (BLfD) said the
sword, which is believed to date
to the end of the 14th century BC
– the middle of the bronze age –
was found during excavations
last week in Nördlingen, between
Nuremberg and Stuttgart.
The sword, with an octagonal
Cyclone kills 11 as search hilt, came from a grave where
a man, a woman and a boy were
goes on for missing people
buried with bronze objects, the
At least 11 people died in the BLfD said, adding: “A find like this
southern state of Rio Grande do is very rare.”
Sul after an extra-tropical cyclone
struck the region, according to the
state’s authorities.
The storm last Friday caused
torrential rains and helicopter
searches were under way in
flooded neighbourhoods to find
20 missing people, Rio Grande do
Sul authorities said.
The town of Caraa, with
a population of more than 8,000
people, was one of the worst hit.
Official warnings were issued
to alert people to the risk of
landslides in several areas.
23 June 2023 The Guardian Weekly
 13 INDIA

Court halts documentary

on Muslim minority

11 SUDAN A court blocked the screening

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

17

12 UGANDA
14 AUSTRALIA

Senate approves wording

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

The Guardian Weekly 23 June 2023


Global report
15 INDIA
Dozens die in two states
after blistering heatwave
At least 96 people are reported to
have died from heat-aggravated
conditions during a blistering
heatwave across two of India’s
most populous states, although
questions have been raised after
more than half of the deaths were
reported in a single district.
The deaths happened in the
northern state of Uttar Pradesh
and Bihar in the east, where 45C
temperatures were recorded,
coupled with humidity.
Heatwaves are common in
June, before the monsoon hits.
Many Indians go out to earn
a living with only a wet cloth
wrapped around their heads.
The deaths in Uttar Pradesh
almost all occurred in one district,
Ballia. Brajesh Pathak, the state’s
health minister, said it had opened
an investigation.
16 I S R A E L / PA L E S T I N E
Five Palestinians killed in
helicopter raid on Jenin
The Israeli military used combat
helicopters in the occupied West
Bank for the first time in years,
as an arrest operation in Jenin
encountered unexpectedly fierce
Palestinian resistance.
Five Palestinians were killed,
including a 15-year-old boy, and 91
injured, including 23 severely or
critically, according to Palestinian
health officials. One of those was
a 15-year-old girl who, Palestinian
witnesses quoted by Israel’s
Haaretz website said, was shot
inside her house. The fighting
intensified calls by settler leaders
to call for a broader military
campaign in the West Bank.
The big story p12 
9
17 K E N YA 19 CHINA D E AT H S
More than 300 deaths Graduate snaps take aim at
connected to Christian cult lack of prospects for work
The death toll linked to a pastor As millions of young people in
accused of ordering his followers China graduate from university
to starve themselves to death to this month, the traditional Glenda Jackson
meet Jesus has passed 300, with pictures of joyful students Stage and screen
the figure expected to increase as throwing their hats and gowns actor who turned
more exhumations are planned. into the air have been replaced to politics as a
Authorities say the dead were by photos of them lying on the Labour MP. She
members of the Good News ground or throwing their degree died on 15 June,
international church, led by Paul certificates into the bin. aged 87.
Mackenzie, who is accused of Some photos show students
ordering his followers to starve draping themselves over bridges Cormac
themselves and their children to or park benches in poses of McCarthy
death so they could go to heaven dejection. In others, students Novelist who told
before the end of the world. lie face down on stairs or in grim, violent tales
The toll reached 303 after grassy fields. of life stripped to
19 more bodies were exhumed The pictures, which have the fundamentals.
from mass graves in Shakahola been going viral on social media, He died on 13
forest, in south-east Kenya, where allude to the fact that 11.6 million June, aged 89.
the self-styled pastor and his students are about to enter Culture, page 56
followers lived. a difficult jobs market for young
More than 600 people have people. Youth unemployment has Daniel Ellsberg
been reported missing, a regional hit a record high for the second US government
official, Rhoda Onyancha, said. consecutive month. analyst who
Investigators have expanded their leaked the
search for victims. Pentagon Papers.
About 65 rescued followers He died on 16
were charged with attempted June, aged 92.
suicide last week after refusing Opinion, page 45
to eat between 6 and 10 June.
Mackenzie handed himself to Gordon McQueen
police in April and was denied bail Scotland,
last month. He has not yet been Manchester
required to enter a plea. United and Leeds
footballer. He died
on 15 June,
aged 70.
18 H O N G KO N G 20 JA PA N
John Hollins
Pro-democracy song drops Age of consent raised to 16
Chelsea football
off online music platforms in reform of sex crimes law player and
Versions of Glory to Hong Kong, Tokyo has raised the age of manager. He died
the unofficial anthem of the consent from 13, among the on 14 June,
city’s pro-democracy movement world’s lowest, to 16 years old as aged 76.
in 2019, have disappeared from lawmakers passed reforms to sex
several streaming platforms, amid crime legislation. Roger Squires
a government bid to ban online A new bill, which also clarifies Guardian
distribution of the song. rape prosecution requirements crossword setter,
Variations of the song and criminalises voyeurism, known as Rufus.
distributed by DGX Music, the cleared parliament’s upper house He died on 1 June,
team of creators who own the in a unanimous vote. aged 91.
rights to the title, were no longer Japan’s age of consent had
available on Spotify, Apple’s been unchanged since 1907, Roger Payne
iTunes, Facebook and KKBOX with children aged 13 and above Biologist who
worldwide, though a rendition deemed capable of consent. In researched and
performed by a Taiwanese band practice, regional ordinances recorded whale
still remained. Several music banning “lewd” acts with minors song. He died on
videos also remained accessible are sometimes deemed as, in 10 June, aged 88.
on the YouTube video platform. effect, raising the age to 18.
23 June 2023 The Guardian Weekly
10
SCIENCE A N D EN V IRON M EN T
A RCH A EOLOGY
‘Astonishing’ Roman tomb
remains unearthed in London
The remains of a Roman mausoleum
“with an astonishing level of
preservation” have been unearthed
in London.
The excavation of the tomb
follows the discovery in February
last year of some of the largest
Roman mosaics found in London in
more than 50 years on the same site.
This the most intact Roman
mausoleum ever to be discovered in
Britain, according to the Museum of
London Archaeology, which led the
archeological investigations.
C L I M AT E C R I SI S
Fossil fuel and farming
subsidies ‘causing havoc’
Trillions of dollars of subsidies for
fossil fuels, farming and fishing
are causing “environmental
havoc”, according to the World
Bank, severely harming people
and the planet.
Many countries spend more on
the harmful subsidies than they
do on health, education or poverty
reduction, the bank says, and the
subsidies are entrenched and hard to
reform as the greatest beneficiaries
tend to be rich and powerful.
Reforming subsidies would
provide vital funding to fight the
climate and nature crises at a time
when public coffers are severely
stretched, the bank said.
The “toxic” subsidies total at
The Guardian Weekly 23 June 2023
least $7.25tn a year, according to a
major new report from the bank. The
explicit subsidies – money spent by
governments – account for about
$1.25tn a year. Most of these are
harmful, the bank said.
There are also implicit subsidies,
totalling $6tn a year, such as waived
taxes and the cost of the damage
caused by worsening global heating
and air pollution.
BIOLOGY
Synthetic embryos created
in groundbreaking advance
Scientists have created synthetic
human embryos using stem cells,
in a groundbreaking advance that
sidesteps the need for eggs or sperm.
Scientists say these model
embryos, which resemble those
in the earliest stages of human
development, could provide a
crucial window on the impact of
genetic disorders and the biological
causes of recurrent miscarriage.
However, the work also raises
serious ethical and legal issues.
Prof Magdalena Żernicka-Goetz,
of the University of Cambridge
and the California Institute of
Technology, described the work at
the International Society for Stem
Cell Research’s annual meeting in
Boston last week.
MEDICA L R ESE A RCH
Alcohol in moderation may
lower risk of heart disease
Light to moderate alcohol
consumption may lower the risk
of heart disease because it leads
to reductions in stress signalling
in the brain, new research claims.
But cardiologists warn the cardiac
benefits do not mean we should
ignore other dangers of alcohol.
“We are not advocating the use
of alcohol to reduce the risk of heart
attacks or strokes because of other
concerning effects of alcohol on
health,” said cardiologist Ahmed
Tawakol, lead author of the study by
a team from Massachusetts general
hospital, published in the Journal of
the American College of Cardiology.
Global report
United Kingdom
C O N S E RVA T I V E S
Commons votes to approve
damning privileges report
Conservative infighting over Boris
Johnson misleading the House
of Commons about Partygate
reached bitter new heights on
 The Roman Monday night, with his supporters
find in London being told to hang their heads
includes the walls in shame. Johnson faced being
and interior floors blocked from obtaining special
of a mausoleum, access to parliament after being
and a mosaic, rounded on by furious Tory MPs
surrounded by a in an attempt to “restore faith”
raised platform on in democracy.
which the burials An overwhelming majority
were placed backed the privileges committee’s
ANDY CHOPPING/MOLA conclusion that Johnson
committed five contempts of
parliament, including misleading
the Commons and the cross-
party group investigating him.
Only seven MPs voted against
the report, dwarfed by the 354
who voted for it.
Rishi Sunak was absent for the
debate along with other senior
Cabinet ministers, and was
accused by Labour MPs of having
“run away”. Downing Street said
he was busy hosting the Swedish
prime minister.
Despite Sunak’s attempt to
dampen the internal Tory row over
the report – by avoiding taking
sides in the vote on whether his
predecessor lied to MPs – the Tory
bloodletting over the damning
report into Johnson’s continued
misleading of parliament ran late
into the evening.
Given Johnson quit the
Commons last week, the
recommended 90-day suspension
could not be enforced. Instead, a
motion was passed that said he
should be blocked from receiving
a pass given to most ex-MPs,
14
which allows unfiltered access to
the parliamentary estate.
Spotlight Page 24 
The age of
Kairan Quazi,
the youngest
graduate in
the history of
Santa Clara
University,
California, who
is due to start a
job at SpaceX
next month

Eyewitness
 On the fringe
Highland cattle take
a dip in Loch Etive
near the village of
Connel, on Scotland’s
west coast. A spell
of warm summer
weather last week saw
daily temperatures of
around 25C, well above
the seasonal average
for the region.
CARL RECINE/REUTERS
U K N E WS
Suspect charged over
Nottingham knife attacks
A man was remanded in custody
by magistrates after two students
and a school caretaker were killed
in knife attacks in Nottingham.
The former University of
Nottingham student named by
police as Valdo Calocane, 31, who
gave his name in court as Adam
Mendes, is accused of murdering
first-year students Grace
O’Malley-Kumar and Barnaby
Webber, both 19, and school
caretaker Ian Coates, 65, in the
early hours of 13 June. Calocane is
also alleged to have attempted to
murder three pedestrians: Wayne
Birkett, Marcin Gawronski and
Sharon Miller, after Coates’s van
was used to drive at people in the
city centre.
The defendant spoke only to
give his name, his date of birth and
to say he was of no fixed abode.
He was not required to enter any
pleas to the charges. Magistrates
heard Calocane has also been
charged with assaulting a police
constable after an incident in
Nottingham in September 2021.
COST OF LIVING
Vicars poorer than church
mice as they ask for pay rise
Church of England vicars have
become the latest group of
workers to demand a pay rise
in the face of the cost of living
crisis, as Unite’s general secretary,
Sharon Graham, claimed they
were among the “working poor”.
More than 2,000 clergy and lay
staff represented by the union
have submitted their first ever
official pay claim, asking for a 9.5%
rise in the annual stipend, which
stands at £26,794 ($34,000).
The C of E’s remuneration and
conditions of service committee
has invited Unite to make a
submission about its members’
pay and conditions for the first
time, after lobbying by the union.
11
C I V I L S E RV I C E
Home secretary disbands
Windrush reform team
The Home Office unit responsible
for reforming the department
after the Windrush crisis has
been quietly disbanded, after
the UK home secretary, Suella
Braverman, let it be known that
she believes it is time to “move
on”, the Guardian has learned.
Staff working in the unit
handling changes meant to
prevent a repeat of the scandal,
were told in an online meeting
that it would be closing. Civil
servants in two London-based
teams were told their work would
be terminated on 1 July, sources
82m
said. Employees in a third team
were offered the chance to work
with a Sheffield-based unit.
In the five years since the The value in
government first apologised pounds ($105m)
for misclassifying thousands of of Beatlemania
Commonwealth-born people to the Liverpool
living legally in the UK as illegal economy. The
immigrants, successive home city estimates
secretaries have promised that hosting this
“comprehensive reform” of the year’s Eurovision
Home Office to ensure a similar song contest
scandal could never be repeated. could bring in a
further £40m
23 June 2023 The Guardian Weekly
12 The big story
Migration

As families mourned the hundreds of people lost in last

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

A deadly trade

The Guardian Weekly 23 June 2023


GR EECE
By Helena Smith KALAMATA
little after 8am
last Friday, Fadi,
a Palestinian,
freshly arrived
from Amster-
dam, joined
the throng of
aid workers,
activists and journalists gathered
around a warehouse in Kalamata’s port.
The 29-year-old was on a mission.
“I thought I had spotted my little
brother Mohammed among pictures
of the [shipwreck’s] survivors,” said
the Syrian-born chef, who has lived
in the Dutch city for the past decade.
“I knew he had gone to Libya to board
the boat, so, praying to Allah he was
still alive, I decided to get on a flight.”
Within hours of arriving in this port
town, Fadi’s wish would come true in
an electrifying moment caught on
camera. “He had a photograph of
his brother and wanted to talk,” said
Themis Kanellopoulos, a Greek MEGA
TV reporter who was interviewing
him at the time. “As the camera was
rolling, as he was relating the terrible
circumstances that had brought him
here, he saw Mohammed through
the metal fence near the warehouse
where the survivors were being kept.
 An image The euphoria of witnessing the two
of the of them come together, right at that
overcrowded moment, was just incredible.”
boat before The reunion of the two brothers was
it sank in among many heartbreaking scenes
international that have played out in Kalamata
waters off the since a fishing trawler, bound for Italy
western Greek with perhaps as many as 800 people
coast last on board, capsized off the southern
Wednesday Peloponnese, a disaster of such mag-
HELLENIC nitude that its effects are being felt well
COASTGUARD/
AFP/GETTY beyond the confines of Greece.
▼ Syrian survivor Mohammed, 18, is
reunited with his brother Fadi, who
travelled to Kalamata STELIOS MISINAS/REUTERS
The tragedy, among the worst in
living memory in the Mediterranean,
has officially left 78 dead, all men bar
one. But as hopes of finding survivors
evaporated last Friday, the third and
final day of an extensive search and
rescue operation, Greek officials had
become resigned to the death toll
being closer to 500. Hopes of recov-
ering the vessel, which sank in some
of the deepest waters in the Mediterra-
nean, have been ruled out altogether.
Mohammed, who grew up in
war-torn Aleppo with his brother, is
among the 104 passengers – mostly
from Syria, Afghanistan, Egypt and
Pakistan – who, having paid more than
$4,000 each for the doomed journey,
made it out alive. “He wanted to live
the dream,” said Fadi, who travelled
to Europe – via Greece – as part of an
earlier wave of asylum seekers 10 years
ago. “They all wanted to. I can’t believe
that I found him. I am so happy.”
For relief workers, who have pieced
together the trajectory of a tragedy
that many believe could have been
averted – if migrants denied safe
passageways weren’t forced to rely on
people smugglers using increasingly
dangerous routes to reach the west – it
is a miracle that any survived at all.
On a vessel that was visibly over-
loaded, hundreds of women and chil-
dren, according to migrant testimony
given to the Greek coastguard, were
“locked” below deck in the boat’s hold.
‘One man described
how he swam through
waters filled with the
bodies of dead kids’
13
Piloted by its Egyptian crew – nine of
whom were charged on Monday with
offences ranging from provoking a
shipwreck to negligent mass murder
– the ship is believed to have sailed the
high seas for three days before it sank.
All the defendants pleaded not guilty.
“The accounts of what happened
have been shocking,” said Areti Glezou
of the support group Thalpos, which
has been helping survivors. “Survivors
told of how they began to drink from
the sea and even their own urine when
they ran out of water and food. One
man described how he swam through
waters filled with the bodies of dead
kids as the ship went down. I don’t
think I will ever forget that.”
The trawler was spotted initially by
the EU border agency, Frontex, more
than 12 hours before its engine failed,
and the Greek coastguard was com-
municating with its captain before it
capsized late on Tuesday, 13 June. By
late afternoon, coastguard officials
claim, the vessel was observed sail-
ing on a “steady course”.
“They refused our offer of help,
saying, ‘We go to Italy,’” said Greece’s
acting civil protection minister,
Vangelis Tournas. “The ship was in
international waters. Had we done
anything more, it would have been
considered intervention.”
By the end of last week, shock had
gradually turned to anger, with pro-
testers taking to the streets across
Greece to deplore the authorities’ han-
dling of the incident, and European
policies that have “turned the Medi-
terranean into a watery cemetery”.
After it emerged that dozens of
Pakistanis were among those 
onboard the trawler, Pakistan’s
23 June 2023 The Guardian Weekly
 14 The big story
Migration
 Protesters in
Piraeus condemn
the EU and Greek
authorities
LOUISA GOULIAMAKI/AFP/GETTY
prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, ordered
an immediate crackdown on agents
engaged in people smuggling, saying
they would be severely punished.
Monday was designated a day of
mourning in Pakistan. There was no
official information on exactly how
many Pakistanis were onboard the
vessel, how many survived and how
many died. An initial police investi-
gation in Pakistan found 750 to 800
people had been on the vessel.
“I lost 45 relatives on that boat, a
whole village, including my brother
Yousaf,” said Mohammed Yunis, a
Pakistani taxi driver who has lived
for more than four decades in the UK.
“I want answers,” he said, standing
outside the Greek coastguard’s
harbour side headquarters with
other relatives who had travelled to
Kalamata. “The authorities here are
fucking lying. They knew the ship was
there. They knew it was in trouble.
They did nothing to save it. They
wanted the people on board to die.”
Ministers from France and Germany
travelled to Tunisia last Sunday for
talks on regulating migration and
Deadly crossing The vessel sank in the Mediterranean’s deepest waters
Rome
Italy
Greece
Athens
Pylos Kalamata
The vessel sank
about 80km off
the southern
town of Pylos
Tripoli
400 km Libya
400 miles
The Guardian Weekly 23 June 2023
▼ Bodies of some of those lost at sea are
recovered after the wreck off Kalamata
COSTAS BALTAS/ANADOLU/GETTY
measures to try to prevent deaths
on dangerous Mediterranean routes.
Tunisia, which is neighbour to Libya,
from where the sunken trawler set sail,
is a major stepping stone for people
trying to reach Europe. In the first
three months of this year, Tunisian
authorities intercepted 13,000 people
on boats off the eastern port of Sfax, a
main route to Europe.
In Athens, anger has mounted as
questions have been raised over the
Hellenic coastguard’s reluctance to
intervene despite the vessel being
in international waters, with Greek
authorities having been accused of
deliberately holding back to avoid so
many people coming ashore.
A Guardian analysis of ship
movements supplied by the Mari-
Trace service indicated two vessels
– the Lucky Sailor and the Faithful
Warrior – stood by or circled round
the stationary trawler for at least four
hours. The coastguard has said it was
in contact with the boat throughout
that period – from about 3pm to 7pm
last Tuesday – by radio, satphone and
helicopter and that the vessel was not
in difficulty, but moving “at a steady
course and speed” towards Italy.
The trawler began rocking, then
listed and sank shortly after 2am on
Wednesday. Greek officials admitted
a rope had been thrown to the stricken
vessel late at night, fuelling specula-
tion that the trawler may have been
tugged before it sank.
Greece will hold general elections
on 25 June. Its centre-right New
Democracy party, in power for the past
four years and tipped to win the poll,
has taken a tough stand on migration,
‘I lost 45 with border officials frequently
accused of engaging in pushbacks, or
relatives forcible expulsions, under its watch.
on that Adding to a sense among some that
the truth is yet to emerge are questions
boat. The over why no video footage taken from
authorities a coastguard vessel had been released.
Turkey did nothing “In all incidents like this a video is
taken. The big question is where is this
to save it’ video?” said Christos Spirtzis, an MP
with the leftwing Syriza party.
The president of Kala mata’s
lawyers’ association said answers were
The overcrowded needed. “There are a lot of questions
fishing boat sailed ▲ Migrants
for Italy from rescued from over the way this was handled,” Kostas
Tobruk the sinking boat Margelis said. “And we need to start by
rest in a shelter asking whether, at the critical moment,
in Kalamata the coastguard did the right thing.”
Egypt Cairo
STELIOS MISINAS/ HELENA SMITH IS THE GUARDIAN’S
REUTERS ATHENS CORRESPONDENT

EU ROPE A N U N ION
Europe’s
response
New pact, but
underlying
causes have
not gone away
By Jon Henley
T
he deaths of as many as 500
people feared drowned in the
sinking of an overcrowded
fishing boat off southern
Greece have once more thrown a
spotlight on the world’s deadliest
migratory route – and Europe’s failure
to tackle one of its greatest challenges.
Since the International Organization
for Migration (IoM) launched its
missing migrants project in 2014, an
estimated 27,000 people trying to
reach Europe have been recorded as
dead or disappeared while trying to
cross the Mediterranean.
More than 21,000 of those deaths
have occurred on the so-called central
Mediterranean route from Libya or
Tunisia north to Greece or Italy, a
crossing that can take several days and
is often made in unseaworthy, danger-
ously overloaded boats.
Most migrants to Greece now cross
from Turkey, either reaching the east-
ern Greek islands by boat or crossing
the Evros River along the land border
– and their number has fallen sharply
since Athens stepped up sea patrols
and built a border fence.
Because the trek up to western or
Migrants northern Europe from Greece also
travel across the involves an often arduous crossing of
Mediterranean the Balkans, many migrants now seek
in flimsy wooden to bypass Greece. Instead, the vast
boats like the one majority now head for Italy, which has
pictured, which in recorded 55,160 “irregular” arrivals
2021 was assisted in Europe so far this year – more than
by the Spanish double the number in 2022.
NGO Open Arms The central Mediterranean route
about 175km is, meanwhile, becoming deadlier.
north of Libya According to an IoM report in April, at
JEAN MATEU/AP least 441 people drowned making the
The Guardian view p49
crossing between January and March
this year, the deadliest three-month
period since 2017.
A further 600 who attempted the
crossing in April and May are known to
be dead or missing, bringing the total
this year to at least 1,039 before last
Wednesday’s deaths. The real figure,
given that many sinkings are never
recorded, is believed to be far higher.
The IoM has pointed the finger –
although without naming names – at
some Mediterranean governments,
where state-led search and rescue
operations have been delayed and
NGO-operated vessels obstructed.
Italy has imposed severe restrictions
and even impounded humanitarian
vessels, while Greece faces multiple
allegations that it pushes people back
to Turkey, illegally preventing them
from claiming asylum, something Ath-
ens has consistently denied.
Overall, the number of people
trying to reach Europe remains well
down on its 2015-16 peak, thanks in
part to a 2016 EU deal with Turkey and
a much-criticised 2017 arrangement
with Libya that in effect outsources
rescues to the Libyan coastguard.
But the number is climbing – and
with anti-immigration sentiment and
political pressure on the rise across
the continent, the question remains
one of the EU’s biggest problems, with
member states profoundly divided.
€20,000 €1bn
Charge per head for EU member states
that refuse to host refugees under a
new migration and asylum pact
15
After years of bickering, EU leaders
earlier this month announced a break-
through in negotiations for a new
migration and asylum pact, including
charges of €20,000 ($21,900) a head for
member countries that refuse to host
refugees. The bloc agreed that member
states, rather than the EU as a whole,
would determine which countries
were considered “safe” for migrants
turned away because they were ineli-
gible for asylum, giving member states
greater individual flexibility.
The president of the European
Commission, Ursula von der Leyen,
has also said the bloc was considering
providing more than €1bn in aid for
Tunisia to rescue state finances and
help deal with its migration crisis.
Many critics, however, argue that
little real progress has been made
on creating safe and legal routes for
asylum seekers to Europe. Gianluca
Rocco, the IoM’s head of mission in
Greece, said it was “urgent to have
concrete and coordinated action from
states to save lives at sea, and to reduce
dangerous journeys by increasing safe
and regular migration routes”.
The underlying causes pushing so
many to come to Europe – war, natural
disasters, the climate crisis, poverty,
inequality and food insecurity – will
not be going away anytime soon.
JON HENLEY IS THE GUARDIAN’S
EUROPE CORRESPONDENT
Value of proposed European aid for
Tunisia to rescue state finances and
help deal with its migration crisis
23 June 2023 The Guardian Weekly
16 The big story
Migration
A N A LY S I S
L I BYA
Rival governments
Power vacuum makes
it hard to effectively
tackle people smugglers
By Patrick Wintour
The mass drowning of refugees heading
from Libya for Italy as their large boat
capsized off the coast of Greece underlines
Libya’s continuing power vacuum and
the inability of its divided leaders to deliver on their
promises to stem the profitable people-smuggling trade.
It is striking that the ship sailed from the eastern port
of Tobruk, a city where local leaders have mounted
a campaign against illegal migration.
On 4 May, the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni,
granted Libya’s strongman in the east, Khalifa Haftar,
a meeting in Rome at which she offered to invest
in Libya’s east – the country has been divided into
a rival east and west since 2015 – in return for action
on the smugglers.
Haftar appeared to try to deliver on his deal. On
4 June, his allies imposed a temporary night curfew to
stop the smugglers. Security forces conducted raids in
towns bordering Egypt. They claimed to have found
1,000 people in farms and houses waiting to be taken
across the Mediterranean. Boats and a harbour used by
the smugglers were destroyed.
The deputy interior minister, Faraj Egaim, one of
Libya’s power brokers, urged the population to report
the smugglers, and called on tribes controlling the
borders into Libya to help.
Some of those rounded up at the beginning of the
month – as many as 4,000 – were forcibly marched on
foot to the Egyptian border towards Musaid, on the basis
that they were there illegally. The violence involved,
including the death of a young boy, led to an outcry.
The Guardian Weekly 23 June 2023
On Monday 12 June, the United Nations Support
Mission in Libya, without identifying the culprits,
expressed concerns about the mass “arbitrary arrests
and deportations” of thousands of migrants and asylum
seekers, including pregnant women and children,
who it said were being detained in overcrowded and
unsanitary conditions. The statement said the campaign
was “accompanied by a disturbing rise in hate speech
and racist discourse against foreigners online and
in the media”.
But the tragic boat journey from Tobruk shows Haftar
and his sons did not stop the smuggling trade. Many say
the better way to stop the flow is to monitor the inbound
Syrian civilian airline flights containing Syrians,
Bangladeshis and Pakistanis. The Egyptian press has
claimed that Haftar’s difficulty is that his brutal writ
does not run to the district of Butnan, where Tobruk
port is located, reflecting that the Libyan National Army
that he leads is in reality an ideologically flexible and
loose coalition of militias. Butnan is largely the home of A fresh
the Obeidat tribe, past supporters of Haftar. Although
skilled at dealing with Libya’s many tribes, Haftar and attempt to
his sons met fierce resistance over the crackdown on agree the
the smuggling and border posts. basis for
The UN estimates there are 680,000 migrants
in Libya, some looking to travel by boat to Europe elections
and others working full-time in Libya. The UN’s looks likely
International Organization for Migration said nearly
3,800 people had died on migration routes within
to founder
and from the Middle East and north Africa region last
year, the highest number since 2017. About 105,000
migrants and asylum seekers had reached Italy by sea
in 2022. From the start of this year to June, just over
54, 000 arrived, double the number in the same period
of the previous year. A growing proportion are coming
from the east of Libya.
The chances of Europeans finding effective Libyan
allies to control the flow is reduced by the continued
absence of a unified national government with
authority. The two rival governments in east and
west have existed since 2015. The last UN-brokered
attempt to strongarm the two sides into holding unified
presidential and parliamentary elections fell apart just
before the December 2021 election date.
The writing had been on the wall long before, since
there had been no process of national reconciliation,
empowerment of civil society, finalised constitution or
agreement about the distribution of Libya’s considerable
resources. Neither the House of Representatives, ▲ Khalifa Haftar
the Libyan parliament in the east headed by the leads one of two
veteran Aguila Saleh, nor its broad counterpart in the rival governments
west, the High Council of State, were able to make
required compromises about sequencing or candidate  Crosses on
eligibility, especially since elections risked them losing the Italian shore
power and patronage. commemorate
A fresh attempt to agree the basis for elections this people who
December, just brokered in Morocco, also looks likely to drowned after a
founder, leaving the latest UN envoy, Abdoulaye Bathily, boat sank in the
under pressure to come up with a plan to break the Mediterranean
impasse. But ultimately he needs a collective European in February
leadership once again to engage with Libya rather than ALFONSO DI VINCENZO/
KONTROLAB/
rely on bad-faith actors and schemes to criminalise LIGHTROCKET/GETTY
those trying to claim their right to asylum.
PATRICK WINTOUR IS THE GUARDIAN’S DIPLOMATIC EDITOR
 17
In-depth reporting and analysis

GEORGIA
As leaders court
Russia, voters
dream of EU
Page 20 Q

U N I T E D S TAT E S

Biden hits
I
t became known as the “base-
ment strategy”. As the corona-
virus pandemic raged outside,
election bid in Philadelphia, in the cru- ▲ Joe Biden
cial swing state of Pennsylvania. Biden opens his
addressed trade union supporters, a re-election

the 2024 presidential candidate Joe Biden

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

can he last Three years on, with the US mostly

back to a new version of normal, Biden
knows speeches on glitchy Zoom calls
the crowd.
As his campaign gathers momen-
tum, he can also make the case that he

the pace? or in empty auditoriums will not be

enough. The president, who at 80 is
the oldest in US history, is facing his
most gruelling campaign.
By David Smith WASHINGTON Last Saturday he kicked off his re-
has been a human bulwark against the
extremism of Trump’s Make America
Great Again (Maga) movement while
finding ways to do business with
Continued 
Republicans in Congress.
18 Spotlight
North America
 Younger voters,
in particular, want
the president to
lead on climate
ANGELA WEISS/
AFP/GETTY
But after the sheltered campaign of
2020, he will have to prove his fitness
for office all over again. “The principal
stumbling block to a second term for
Joe Biden is the widespread percep-
tion that he is simply too old to serve
effectively for a second term,” said
Bill Galston, a former policy adviser
to President Bill Clinton. “He has to
run a vigorous campaign.”
Biden will have plenty of opportu-
nity, and obligation, to meet voters on
the campaign trail, generating spon-
taneous moments that can be both a
blessing and a curse given his history
of verbal blunders.
Galston, a senior fellow at the
Brookings Institution thinktank in
Washington, added: “It’s a risk that
the campaign has to take. Because if
they keep him as guarded as they have
up to now then he has no chance of
rebutting the presumption that he’s
Joe Biden’s
too old. And that could prove fatal.”
appointment of
Ketanji Brown Biden was also at his weakest dur-
Jackson, right, ing in-person campaigning early in
to the supreme 2020. Despite joining the race as the
court bench
made history
but he has not
realised pledges
to protect voting
rights and this
may be felt at
the ballot box if
it means fewer
Black voters
support him
‘There are reasons to
believe this campaign
is on a collision
course with disaster’
perceived frontrunner, he lost the first
three Democratic primary contests, in
Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada,
and only clinched his party’s nomi-
nation after the pandemic took hold.
As president, he has travelled
far and wide, delivered countless
speeches and answered doubters
with a pugnacious State of the Union
address. But he has given no national
newspaper interviews and far fewer
solo press conferences than his pre-
decessors – fuelling a perception that
his inner circle is trying to shield him.
His campaign will start to address
one confounding disconnect. Biden
has presided over the strongest post-
pandemic recovery of any major
economy, including the creation of
13m jobs – more than any president
has created in an entire four-year term
– and the lowest unemployment for
half a century.
Yet an Associated Press-Norc Center
for Public Affairs Research poll last
month found that only 33% of Ameri-
can adults say they approve of his han-
dling of the economy and only 24% say
national economic conditions are in
good shape. One explanation might
be stubbornly high inflation pushing
up prices for consumers.
Biden’s re-election campaign, led by
Julie Chávez Rodríguez is convinced
that it has a good story to tell. He has
spent his presidency combating Covid,
rallying western allies against Russia
and pushing through bills such as a
bipartisan infrastructure package and
legislation to promote hi-tech manu-
facturing and climate measures. When
he formally announced his re-election
campaign in an April video, he asked
voters for time to “finish this job”.
Despite Trump facing federal crimi-
nal charges over his mishandling of
classified documents, no one in the
Biden campaign is taking victory for
granted and there are signs that Biden
will find 2024 tougher going than 2020.
The Associated Press-Norc Center
for Public Affairs Research poll found
that only 26% of Americans – and only
about half of Democrats – said they
wanted to see Biden run again. Among
Black adults, 41% said they want him
to run and 55% said they were likely
to support him in the general election.
Biden has struggled to fulfil key
promises to Black voters, perhaps
the most loyal group in his political
base. While he tapped Ketanji Brown
Jackson to become the first Black
woman on the supreme court, he
has been unable to follow through
on pledges to protect voting rights
against a wave of Republican-backed
restrictions or enact policing reform.
Although the Inflation Reduction
Act made historic climate invest-
ments, critics point to backsliding: this
year, Biden approved Willow, an $8bn
oil drilling project on pristine federal
land in Alaska, and agreed to fast-track
the $6.6bn Mountain Valley pipeline
in West Virginia.
Pushing climate to the margins
could damage Biden’s re-election
chances, warned Michele Weindling,
the electoral director of the Sunrise
Movement, a youth climate advocacy
group. “There’s a risk of it making our
jobs a lot harder in terms of mobilising
young people.”
Meanwhile, Biden’s toughest critics
are calling for him to drop out of the
race and make way for another Demo-
crat. Norman Solomon, the national
director of RootsAction.org, the spon-
sor of the Step Aside Joe! campaign,
argues that, whereas Trump was on
the defensive in 2020, this time Biden
will represent the status quo.
“There are many reasons to believe
that this Biden campaign is on a
collision course with disaster,” he said.
If there is one hallmark of the Biden
presidency, however, it is that he is
constantly underestimated.
DAVID SMITH IS THE GUARDIAN’S
WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF

A N A LY S I S
U N I T E D S TAT E S
A careful dance
Trump rivals
struggle for
attention after
indictment
By Hugo Lowell WASHINGTON
Donald Trump is
contending with criminal
charges for violating
the Espionage Act
and obstruction of justice but the
immediate political damage has
been felt most acutely not by the
defendant but his other rivals for the
Republican presidential nomination.
Maddeningly for Trump’s rivals,
the biggest winner politically – so
far at least – of the indictment
against Trump in the Mar-a-Lago
documents case appears to be
Trump himself, who has been the
singular focus of news coverage and
embraced as a martyr by much of
the wider Republican party.
Advisers for other campaigns
have privately complained that
Trump has sucked up so much
oxygen that their candidates cannot
get attention unless they agree to
discuss Trump and his chances of
beating them as though they were
any other political commentator.
But what has been even more
perilous for Trump’s rivals has been
that when they have been booked
to appear on cable news shows,
according to their advisers, they
have to remember to be careful to
give answers that they are certain
will not alienate Trump’s base.
The careful dance was on clear
display after the former president
was arraigned last Tuesday in the
Mar-a-Lago classified documents
case in Florida.
The rightwing Florida governor
Ron DeSantis criticised the ex-
president but only subtly, and his
wider comments on the case seemed
to be a general condemnation of a
perceived “weaponisation” of the
justice department.
Trump’s former vice-president,
Mike Pence, called Trump’s actions
over hoarding national defence
information – including US nuclear
secrets – indefensible but went no
further in his criticism.
The South Carolina senator
The fallout has boosted
Trump and his advisers
think it can carry him
to the nomination
Opinion p45
19
Tim Scott and Trump’s former
ambassador to the United Nations
Nikki Haley gave mixed answers,
initially condemning the justice
department for charging Trump
before later acknowledging that
the evidence in the indictment was
deeply problematic.
The lukewarm and uncertain
responses opened the path for
Vivek Ramaswamy, the wealthy
entrepreneur also in the Republican
race, to get some attention by asking
whether Trump should be pardoned
if he were to be convicted.
His tweet about potentially
pardoning Trump summed up
the moment: none of the other
candidates could give a definitive
answer to that, either.
The fallout from the first and
second indictments has so boosted
Trump that his advisers believe Riding high
it could help carry him to the Poll boost for
Republican nomination.
ex-president
Before the indictment in the
documents case arrived, Trump’s
advisers were hoping Republican
primary voters might dismiss it
as a partisan effort, as Trump has
59%
Level of support
repeatedly claimed, giving him for Trump
a polling and fundraising boost, among GOP
people close to the campaign said. primary voters
The boost for Trump turned out
to be larger than they expected. In
a poll of Republican primary voters 19%
conducted by Morning Consult, Support for
Trump increased his lead over Florida governor
DeSantis by 4% after the indictment. Ron DeSantis
Trump polled at 59% compared
with DeSantis at 19%. The Trump
campaign also said that it had raised $7m
more than $7m in donations since Donations the
the indictment, though the figure Trump campaign
has not been verified. claims to have
The indictment news cycle raised since the
may carry Trump all the way indictment
to the nomination given the
high probability of further
charges stemming from criminal
investigations over his efforts to
overturn the 2020 election.
The Mar-a-Lago documents
case was his second indictment in
two months, and Trump could be  Trump
indicted for a third time in Georgia supporters gather
by the Fulton county district in Palm Beach,
attorney, Fani Willis, who has Florida, ahead of
been scrutinising Trump’s election his appearance in
interference in the state. court in Miami
HUGO LOWELL IS A REPORTER IN THE GARY I ROTHSTEIN/UPI/
GUARDIAN’S WASHINGTON BUREAU SHUTTERSTOCK
23 June 2023 The Guardian Weekly
20 Spotlight
Europe
UKRAINE
Frontline
forces hope
patience will
pay dividends
By Dan Sabbagh
NEAR ZAPORIZHZHIA FRONTLINE
G
ennadiy may be wounded in
hospital, but he is still par-
ticipating in Ukraine’s long-
awaited counteroffensive. In
a crowded ward at a medical facility in
Dnipro, the commander pulls out his
mobile phone to reveal live footage of
green fields and tree lines in a newly
contested part of the front.
Although he was hurt in an artillery
strike overnight between 2 and 3 June,
as Ukraine’s attacks on the south-
ern Zaporizhzhia front stepped up,
Gennadiy, 51, says that when required
he watches the phone screen to help
soldiers on the ground. “I’m still work-
ing, still correcting artillery fire,” he
said. “This is not just so I can watch.”
It is extraordinarily strange to be
staring at live warfare, handheld. The
images are deceptively undramatic: a
camera restlessly scanning, focusing
in and out of trees and bushes, waiting
for unexpected movement or targets.
A series of attacks at multiple points
on the southern front on 5 June is con-
sidered to have been the starting point
of Ukraine’s long-awaited counter-
offensive: a critical moment in the
near 16-month war, when Kyiv needs
to show it has a pathway to victory
The Guardian Weekly 23 June 2023
GEORGIA
On the wire
– rolling back the Russian invaders –
using its western-supplied weapons.
Gennadiy (Ukraine’s military allows
only first names or call signs to be used)
and other soldiers the Guardian spoke
to paint a slightly different picture of
As leaders
a gradual buildup. “A month ago we
started to increase the intensity of our
attacks,” he said, describing opera-
move closer
tions where he was based with the
114th brigade around Novodarivka, a
village on the southern front declared
to Putin, EU
liberated by Ukraine on 4 June.
Progress has been measured, hopes fade
acknowledges the wounded veteran,
saying it took 10 days for Ukrainian
soldiers to capture Russian trenches By Julian Ruling party in Tbilisi claims
in the next tree line. “Why did it take Borger
it is pursuing a future within
so long to take that one position? We KHURVALETI
Europe yet rails against
wanted to minimise our losses,” he
said, showing me the location in ques-
tion by switching to the Deep State
Brussels, Ukraine and Nato
A
mapping app, used to track develop- round the Georgian village
ments in the frontline. of Khurvaleti, Russia’s occu-
His comments may help explain
some of the wider reality. In recent
pation can creep forward a
few yards at night. It often
weeks, Ukrainian units and leaders starts with a line ploughed across a
have announced the capture of a hand-
ful of largely deserted villages, with
field. Then a green sign will material-
ise, warning people not to cross. Then
the gains amounting to 6.5km at the the concertina wire appears.
furthest point, south of Velyka Novo- Khurvaleti is at the southern edge
silka. The open fields of Novodarivka of South Ossetia, a breakaway region
are nearby, about 13 to 16km to the
west, while a small bulge of Russian
forces is positioned in between.
The hospital in Dnipro is one of
many places deep behind the lines
where the wounded, once stabilised,
come for further surgery if needed
and rehabilitation. Local sources say
the facility has been filling up with
wounded soldiers.
Firm data about casualty numbers
is not provided by the Ukrainians,
however, although the grim reality is
that attackers expect to suffer more
losses in war. Morale nevertheless
remains relatively high even among
the wounded.
Back in Novodarivka, the soldiers
will not say if they have so far been
involved in the counteroffensive,
though the impression formed is that
they are waiting for an order to go in
with the brigade’s tanks. All leave
has been cancelled. The group argue
the counteroffensive is going better
than the slow rate of village capture
might suggest. “I have no doubt we
will defeat them,” said a solider nick-
named Spielberg ,“but I don’t know if
I can survive until that time.”
DAN SABBAGH IS THE GUARDIAN’S
DEFENCE AND SECURITY EDITOR

occupied by Russian troops since
a five-day war with Georgia in 2008,
in what proved to be a dress rehearsal
for Ukraine.
There are few soldiers to be seen in
the two military bases in the hills either
side of Khurvaleti. But Georgians
fear that if Russia were to prevail in
Ukraine, Putin’s forces would be back.
For now, the line marking the extent
of Russian occupation is watched by
EU monitors looking for new signs of
“borderisation”.
“Usually it starts with soft borderi-
sation – ditches, ribbons on trees that
show demarcation between the two
sites,” said Klaas Maes, a spokesper-
son for the monitoring mission. “The
ditches become fences, the fences
become barbed wire, then the wire
is fortified with extra watchtowers.”
Five years ago, villagers woke to
find Khurvaleti had been cut in two
by a wire fence; later, a watchtower
was built to guard the barrier. Vil-
lagers were separated from family,
friends and their land. A dividing line
demarcated by a fence is enforced by
fines and sometimes lengthy jail sen-
tences. The nearest crossing point is
50km away and open 10 days a month.
If the Russians did strike from South
Valia Vanishvili
lives in the
occupied
territory. Russian
border guards
have been using
barbed wire
fences since their
invasion in 2008
of the Caucasus
region of South
Ossetia, which
is recognised as
a de facto state.
Ossetia, they could cut Georgia’s main
east-west highway in a few minutes,
and be in Tbilisi within hours. With
Moscow’s troops bogged down in
Ukraine, however, Russian tanks in the
capital is not an immediate threat. But
many Georgians fear Russia is taking
over by stealth, under the noses of an
overwhelmingly pro-western popu-
lation. Opposition parties and civil
society activists say the ruling party,
Georgian Dream, while ostensibly
pursuing EU membership, is turning
further towards Moscow.
T
his month direct flights
have resumed between the
two countries, after a four-
year break, just as the US
and Europe seek to isolate Moscow
for its invasion of Ukraine. One of
the first flights brought Yekaterina
Vinokurova, the daughter of the Rus-
sian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov.
Vinokurova and her husband came
for a wedding, but protesters pick-
eted their hotel and the couple were
forced to leave, though not before they
had highlighted the rift between the
government and the people over rela-
tions with Russia.
An independent advocacy group
for press freedom, Open Caucasus
Media, analysed the rhetoric of the
Georgian Dream chair, Irakli Kobakh-
idze, over the first five months of the
full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine,
and found 57 negative remarks about
the west, 26 about Ukraine, and only
nine comments critical of Russia. Offi-
cially, the ruling party is pursuing a
Euro-Atlantic future; it is an aspirant
Nato member that is also working to
respond to 12 reform recommenda-
tions from the European Commis-
sion before a decision in December
on whether Georgia should get EU
candidate status.
At the same time, party leaders have
adopted rhetoric certain to alienate
the alliance and Brussels. In April, the
prime minister, Irakli Garibashvili, met
Nato’s secretary general, Jens Stolten-
berg, in Brussels, declaring: “Georgia’s
Euro-Atlantic aspiration remains our
top foreign policy priority.” Just over
a month later he shocked a security
‘Ditches become
fences, fences become
barbed wire, then the
wire is fortified’
21
conference in Bratislava by blaming
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Kyiv’s
aspirations for Nato membership.
“One of the reasons was Ukraine’s
will and determination to become a
member of Nato. Therefore, we see
the consequences,” Garibashvili said.
Tinatin Bokuchava, an MP from
the opposition United National Move-
ment, said: “It is not just a rhetorical
semblance between the Kremlin
messaging and Georgian Dream mes-
saging, it’s also actions that … further
Kremlin’s goals in Georgia. Along with
the erosion of pro-western sentiments
is the erosion of Georgia’s democratic
institutions, and that is a direct guar-
antee of preventing Georgia from ever
becoming a member of the EU or Nato.”
The former president Mikheil
Saakashvili has been hospitalised
while serving a six-year sentence for
abuse of power while in office. His
aides say his condition is due to torture
and poisoning.
The European parliament called for
his release, terming his jailing a “per-
sonal vendetta”, but the government
ignored the appeals.
There is still a government-run Nato
and EU information centre in Tbilisi’s
Liberty Square flying the blue flags of
both organisations, but it has stopped
putting on public advocacy events. Its
front door is permanently closed.
The restoration of flights has
annoyed the US and the EU, espe-
cially as Georgian Airways went on
to announce plans for transit flights
through Tbilisi for Russians travelling
to five European destinations, further
blunting the impact of sanctions.
An EU spokesperson pointed out
that the rate of alignment between EU
and Georgian decisions and declara-
tions had gone from an already low
44% in 2022 to 31% so far this year.
“This step raises concerns in terms of
Georgia’s EU path and its commitment
to align with the EU in the foreign pol-
icy as per the EU-Georgia association
agreement,” the spokesperson said.
However, European diplomats
NICOLO VINCENZO MALVESTUTO/SOPA/ZUMA
in Tbilisi are conscious they face a
dilemma. Granting candidate status
in December would reward the gov-
erning party for democratic backslid-
ing. Yet denying Georgia that prospect
could rob its citizens of hope and turn
Georgian Dream’s embrace of Moscow
from tentative to enthusiastic, trigger-
ing more street conflict.
JULIAN BORGER IS THE GUARDIAN’S
WORLD AFFAIRS EDITOR
23 June 2023 The Guardian Weekly
22

Eyewitness
Pakistan

 Throwin’ shade
Schoolchildren wearing umbrella
hats to shelter from the sun make
their way home in Peshawar.
Daytime temperatures in the
north-western city have exceeded
40C this month with the dry, hot
conditions forecast to continue

ABDUL MAJEED/AFP/GETTY
23
24 Spotlight
Europe
A N A LY S I S
UNITED KINGDOM
Leader to loser
How Tory
MPs turned
their backs
on Boris
Johnson
By Rowena Mason and Ben Quinn
“It’s all extremely
depressing, all this tearing
each other apart,” said
one Tory MP and former
minister whose career thrived under
Boris Johnson but who now holds no
candle for his former boss.
“Most of us just want a period of
silence from him so we can get on
with saving what we can before the
next election. But there’s not very
much chance of that happening.”
This is the prevalent view among
Tory MPs, many of whom backed
Johnson for leader despite knowing
his flaws and history of lying.
They have fallen out of love with
Johnson more comprehensively
than grassroots party members,
having had ringside seats at the
circus of his premiership.
Fewer than 10 of 350 Conservative
MPs came out publicly in support of
The Guardian Weekly 23 June 2023
Johnson on the day the privileges
committee report found he had
misled parliament over Partygate.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former
business secretary who was
knighted in the ex-PM’s honours
list, described it as a “vindictive”
overreaction. Some allies were
privately threatening punitive
deselection campaigns towards Tory
MPs who backed Monday’s motion
in favour of censuring Johnson.
However, the sound and fury did
not last long.
Johnson, as he has done several
times before, appeared to fire up
outrage in his supporters before
reining them in. There were reports
that he would continue the fight
against Rishi Sunak, conveying a
message to his successor that Eton
always beats Winchester, while his
former communications director
Guto Harri said Johnson would “go
out in a flurry of bullets”.
Johnson told his parliamentary
backers to ignore Monday’s motion
– a move that avoided a concrete
measurement of how many MPs
really would have turned out to
support him. In the event, only
seven MPs voted against the report,
dwarfed by the 354 who voted for
it. Sunak was absent for the debate
and vote, along with other senior
Cabinet ministers.
Johnson also promised his
“unexpurgated” thoughts in a new
column for the Daily Mail, which
will allow him to continue to be
a thorn in his successor’s side.
But last Friday’s leader column
in the newspaper urged him not to
destroy the party’s chances at the
next election. It started with a tirade
about the “kangaroo court” that
wanted to give Johnson a 90-day
suspension, but ended: “However said he thought Johnson would
aggrieved many may feel, they must become “increasingly out of touch
look forward.” Most of us and irrelevant to the political
Other right-of-centre media scene”, while Nadine Dorries, a keen
outlets were also sceptical about just want supporter who is due to resign told
Johnson’s hopes for a comeback, a period the Financial Times that she could
with the Times declaring in of silence not see the former prime minister
a pointed headline “the end of making a comeback.
the road”. Meanwhile, his former from him … Conservative MPs, though,
employer, the Telegraph, said but there’s however angry with Johnson, are
nobody had come out of the affair still not fully enamoured with Sunak
well, suggesting that MPs would
not much and his failure to make much of an
do better to focus on the economic chance impact. He is almost certain to lead
crisis than on internal party drama. of that the party into next year’s election,
One Tory MP, Tim Loughton, but the three impending byelections

are likely to show the Tories losing
ground in their home counties
heartlands, the north of England
and Johnson’s outer London seat of
Uxbridge and South Ruislip.
One of the biggest battles that
No 10 and Conservative party
headquarters will have to fight
against is a growing lack of belief
among MPs and party activists
that he is capable of turning things
around in the polls.
One senior Tory MP who will
not stand again said the reason
principally was “complete
disillusion” with the party and the
government, on top of the likelihood
that he will lose his seat.
Another Conservative MP,
Lucy Allan, a Johnson supporter,
announced last Friday that she was
standing down in her Shropshire
seat, and claimed that today’s
Conservative party was “just not
interested in seats like Telford
any more”.
She told the Guardian the
Conservatives could have held on
to the West Midlands seat if she was
not standing down, but said it would
be “nigh on impossible for a new
Conservative candidate to win in
Telford in 2024” with a candidate
who will be “starting from scratch”
and relying “entirely on a small core
of Conservative vote”.
“Telford is an aspirational town.
People work hard and want to get
on; it is small-c conservative,”
Allan said. “It wants to see hard
work rewarded and better prospects
for the next generation. It wants
its public services to work and
its trains to run on time. Get that
right and people could be won over
once again.”
No doubt the prime minister
is relieved to see the back of
Johnson and many of his acolytes
from parliament – but an end
to the Partygate-era drama
means a renewed focus on his
own performance. With Labour
▲ Boris Johnson solidly ahead, and determined
running near not to make missteps, Sunak has
his home last a job on his hands to deal with an
week. The former impending economic crisis and
prime minister’s to improve morale among his
political power battered rank and file.
base appears to
ROWENA MASON IS WHITEHALL EDITOR
have collapsed FOR THE GUARDIAN; BEN QUINN IS AN
LEON NEAL/GETTY ACTING POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT
UNITED KINGDOM
In a true blue
idyll, rumours
abound of
a revolution
By Robyn Vinter
T
he wealthy village of Bolton
Percy is a tiny North York-
shire idyll with one bus and
where the post office is open
only once a week, during a four-hour
window on Wednesdays. It is a place
where residents have neat gardens
and fancy cars, and the friendly local
church, which will celebrate its 600th
birthday next year, is the social hub.
In other words, it is exactly the kind of
place the Tories could normally rely on
for an abundance of support.
With the Selby and Ainsty MP,
Nigel Adams – a Boris Johnson ally –
having resigned this month after being
snubbed for a peerage, a byelection has
been triggered.
It should be cut and dried. Since the
constituency was created in 2010, it
has been solidly Conservative. Adams
had 60% of the vote in 2019, a propor-
tion that had increased with every gen-
eral election.
But on a sunny day last week, it was
clear that something had changed.
Residents spoke in hushed tones
about abandoning the Tories, keen
to air their views but unwilling to be
named or pictured for fear of those
views being exposed to neighbours.
“I’ve been a Conservative voter
but not over the last few years,” said
a retired man outside his cottage,
with a garden of pink roses welcom-
ing buzzing bumblebees. “I’m fright-
ened at the state of the country. The
cabinet have no principles – it’s a com-
plete clown show and that’s before you
get into questions of integrity. They’re
squabbling like rats in a sack.”
Johnson (“a nasty piece of work”)
had caused damage to the country that
“will take a lifetime to undo, if it can
ever be undone”. Adams was impli-
cated as “one of Boris’s bag carriers”.
“A lot of people might vote Labour
25
as a protest vote at how disgusted they
are at the moment,” he said.
A neighbour, who lived in a grand
stone house down a winding country
lane, said what people wanted was
“caring conservatism”, which they
were not seeing much of under the
“amateurish” Tory cabinet.
“There’s a cancer in there that’s
working against good government,”
he said. “They are utterly obsessed
with celebrity, rather than the issues.
The economy is in a bad way, we’re
hanging on by our fingernails, and I’d
like to see politicians dealing with it.”
He thought Keir Starmer’s Labour
looks like a government in waiting,
adding: “They’re bright people, not
stupid. They bring a degree of seri-
ous thought, they’re more thoughtful
and measured.”
So how would he be voting? “Having
voted Tory all my life, anyone but Tory,”
he said. “It’s amazing how you can shift
from being true blue. But I don’t think
I’ve changed. It’s this immature gov-
ernment with populist leaders.”
Labour campaigners in Selby were
joined by Wes Streeting, the shadow
health secretary, who focused on ris-
ing mortgage rates when he spoke to
voters, a good call in a place where
nearly three-quarters of people own
their own home. More than a quarter of
people in the Selby council district are
retired and the age profile is creeping
up as youngsters increasingly desert
the town for nearby York or Leeds.
A boundary review will see it split
at next year’s general election, with
the posh villages such as Bolton Percy
annexed, making the seat consider-
ably more winnable for Labour. It was
clear their eyes were on that bigger
goal. “It’s all to play for,” Streeting said.
ROBYN VINTER IS THE GUARDIAN’S
NORTH OF ENGLAND CORRESPONDENT
▲ Bolton Percy’s picturesque but rarely
open post office CHRISTOPHER THOMOND
23 June 2023 The Guardian Weekly
26 Spotlight
Europe
UNITED KINGDOM
Are times
catching up
with London
gentlemen’s
club culture?
By Amelia Gentleman
M
ild signs of a potential
willingness to modernise
have been observed in
some of central London’s
establishment clubs in recent weeks,
led by the announcement that, after
166 years, women will be allowed to
become members of Pratt’s.
The decision has been met mostly
with resigned acceptance by the
club’s membership, which includes
at least a dozen MPs, and has triggered
renewed discussion of possible reform
at the hardcore handful of gentlemen’s
clubs that refuse to admit women.
Members of the Beefsteak, another
men-only dining club populated with
MPs, actors and judges, believe it is
likely it will be obliged to change its
rules. A renewed drive by female cam-
paigners was launched this month to
persuade members of the Garrick,
including Michael Gove and the actors
The Guardian Weekly 23 June 2023
Benedict Cumberbatch and Hugh
Bonneville, to allow women to join.
Meanwhile, at the Athenaeum
(which has allowed women as mem-
bers since 2002) a movement by about
70 members to block further modern-
ising changes was rejected at its annual
general meeting, with an interven-
tion from the former prime minister
Theresa May, who shut down discus-
sion of motions aimed at preserving
the club’s “traditional ethos”.
Changes at Pratt’s were made “with
immediate effect” by the club’s owner,
the Earl of Burlington, William Cav-
endish, without consultation in May.
However, there will probably not be
any perceptible change to membership
in the near future, because the process
of proposing and seconding new mem-
bers takes considerable time, requiring
25 people to support a nomination by
writing their names in a book in the
club and later committee approval.
“There has been chuntering,
people saying, hmm we don’t like
this, complaining that they weren’t
consulted,” a Pratt’s member said, but
he added that younger members were
beginning to feel the status quo was
indefensible. “There’s a feeling that
the legal grounds for these places to
be all male is quite shaky.”
Emily Bendell, the founder of
a clothes business who has been
campaigning for the Garrick to change
its rules to admit women, wrote this
month to a handful of the club’s most
prominent members, noting that eight
years had passed since 50.5% of the
membership voted in favour of female
members, short of the two-thirds
majority needed for rule change.
“A second vote is long overdue,”
she wrote. “I’m sure you would not
be a member of a club that excluded
members on the basis of race, religion
or sexuality, so we urge you to call for
a new vote to allow female members.”
Her campaign has been met with
bemusement by some (mostly male)
commentators who question the need
to fight for equality at a tiny group of
elite institutions, but she argues that
the existence of men-only clubs that
have senior male lawyers and politi-
cians as members “negatively impacts
 The Athenaeum women’s professional advancement”.
club, where The failed attempt by a splinter
Theresa May is faction of Athenaeum members to
a member, has resist modernising changes centred
allowed women on a desire to “restore quiet harmony”.
since 2002 Its failure suggested most members
GRANT ROONEY/ALAMY recognised that reform was necessary.
A faction, named the 1824 group (the
year the club was founded), sent a
letter to fellow members: “We sense
that the traditional ethos of our club
is step by step being eroded and mov-
ing towards something which appears
more like a corporate run facilities-
based hotel/restaurant.”
Theresa May, who like her husband,
Philip May, is an Athenaeum member,
intervened with a procedural motion,
blocking discussion of all motions pro-
posed by the 1824 group, according
to the historian Felipe Fernández-
Armesto, one of the 1824’s organisers.
“I was literally shouted down,” he said.
“We were trying to enshrine the per-
ception of the club not as a business,
but as a meeting place of intellectuals.
A lot of us have become very dissatis-
fied very recently because the club is
being driven at a furious pace towards
incorporation as a business. There’s a
commercialisation happening across
clubland,” Fernández-Armesto added.
The Travellers Club (which has dip-
lomats among its members), White’s
(which has never allowed women
inside the building, with the occa-
sional exception of the late Queen
Elizabeth II), Brooks’s and Boodle’s all
25
remain resistant to admitting women.
Even at clubs that chose to let
women in decades ago, the propor-
The number of tion of female members remains
members who low. Although the Athenaeum began
must sign, on admitting women 21 years ago, its
club premises, membership remains overwhelmingly
in support of male; only 28% of the club’s 147 new
a potential members were women in 2022-23, only
member in one 7% were under 40 and only two new
stage of Pratt’s members were under 30.
admission AMELIA GENTLEMAN IS A GUARDIAN
process REPORTER
 27

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

Far-right largest party in Spain’s 350-seat con-

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

hopes to felt the conservatives had become too

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

nationalism Spanish flag on the rock of Gibraltar

By Sam Jones RASCAFRÍA
did little to dispel that impression, nor
has been the normalisation of views
that would, until very recently, have
be enacted. In
January, Vox
announced
did the tweets from the party’s then- jarred in a country that has long prided
proposals that
leader in Andalucía about women who itself on being tolerant, progressive
would oblige
were too ugly to be gang-raped. and immune to nationalism.
doctors to offer
But all that started to change six “Vox is an ultra-nationalist party,”
women seeking

T
he man all but certain to be
the next mayor of Rascafría,
a small town in the green and
mist-hugged mountains an
hour north of Madrid, gives few clues
about his political leanings as he lists
his priorities for the coming years.
As well as helping the hospitality
and livestock sectors on which the
local economy depends, Óscar Robles
wants to improve leisure and culture
for Rascafría’s ill-served young people
and to reopen a social club for its older
residents that has been closed since
before the Covid pandemic.
“This campaign has been very hon-
est, very on the ground and very calm,”
said the 59-year-old print business
owner. “We haven’t got into ideological
arguments with anyone. I don’t care
what colour you are; if you’re a neigh-
bour, I’m here to help you.”
The only unmistakable evidence
of his party af filiation is to be found
on the double-headed placards that
still loom over Rascafría’s cold, rainy
streets and which show his smiling
years ago when the failed push for said González. “Within Vox, you
terminations
Catalan independence pitched Spain have sectors that came from the fas- a series of new
into a political and territorial crisis. cist Falange party and ultra-Catholic services, including
Miguel González , an El País sectors that are … absolutely against a psychological
journalist, said the explosion of long- abortion and gay marriage.” consultation.
running tensions between Catalonia’s For José Luis García, who has had a Castilla y León’s
pro-independence regional govern- house in Rascafría for almost 40 years, PP president,
ment and the Spanish state awakened much of Vox’s appeal lies in the pros- Alfonso Fernández
a long-dormant strain of nationalism. pect it offers them of a break from Mañueco, insisted
The Andalucían elections of the socialist and PP duopoly that has his government
December 2018, six months after Mari- governed Spain for the past five dec- would not
ano Rajoy’s PP government had been ades. “There’s nothing for the kids to introduce Vox’s
kicked out of office via a Socialist-led do here. They’re out on the streets all proposals.
no-confidence vote, saw Vox take 12 bloody day,” he said. “I’m a Vox voter
seats in the regional parliament. and I’ll vote for them until they give me
Four months later – in the first of a reason not to. The country is screwed
2019’s two general elections – Vox and they’re the only hope.” Observer
gained a foothold in the parliament SAM JONES IS THE GUARDIAN AND
after winning 24 seats. That first OBSERVER’S MADRID CORRESPONDENT
 Vox supporters
celebrate winning
52 seats in the
November 2019
election
OSCAR DEL POZO/
AFP/GETTY

face alongside that of Rocío Monaste-

rio, Vox’s leader in the Madrid region.
The pair, and their far-right party,
have much to smile about in the wake
of last month’s municipal and regional
polls in Spain and in the run-up to
July’s snap general election. Robles’s
quiet, hyper-local campaign – in
stark contrast to the vituperative and
sometimes xenophobic electoral tone
in which Vox has come to specialise –
looks set to deliver the party its first
mayoralty in the region.
Vox is poised to enter more regional
governments and could even form
part of the national government if, as
 Spotlight
Environment
NEW ZEALAND
Māori tribes with
ocean ties pledge to
‘protect what is left’
Warming waters push species away and erode cultural
practices … and it’s happening faster than anyone imagined
By Tess McClure ŌPŌTIKI
D
anny Paruru crouches at the
water’s edge, letting it wash
over his hand. Behind him,
sharp peaks mark where
the lands of his tribe, Te Whakatōhea,
once stretched before they were for-
cibly taken by the crown. In front of
him the surface of the estuary ripples.
“Thirty-odd years ago our kaumā–
tua [elders] were realising that we were
deemed to be landless people – that
we didn’t have a lot of land left, after
the lands were confiscated. So they
turned their eyes to the ocean,” he
said. “Places around this area provided
our sustenance and our survival, over
many generations.”
That ocean, too, is changing. On this
shoreline, the tribe still digs for pipi,
a native clam. But other food sources,
such as cockles and mussels, have
been shrinking or disappearing. The
estuaries and mudflats are shifting,
reshaped by shifts in currents, rising
sea levels and the runoff of farms.
Even the scent of the pipi beds is
changing. “That smell isn’t there any
more, that I remember as a child,” Par-
uru said – something of the rich, briny
smell of mud has gone, replaced by a
lighter, sandier wash of salt.
As the climate heats waters
The Guardian Weekly 23 June 2023
around New Zealand, Māori people
are recording changes – subtle and
dramatic – with some experiencing
the losses of food-gathering prac-
tices. With the speed and severity of
changes ramping up, tribes are racing
to find solutions to preserve ocean
environments and carry treasured
species into the future.
A rise in ocean temperature is
accompanied by increasing acidifica-
tion from carbon dioxide in the water.
Te Whakatōhea’s ancestral lands lie
in the Bay of Plenty region, where the
ocean recently remained in heatwave
conditions for over a year.
“Every Māori community around
the country that still maintains a
relationship with the moana [ocean]
would notice the changes,” said Mere
Takoko, the Aotearoa country leader
for Conservation International. “In
Kaikoura, they’re going through
months now where the whales aren’t
coming. That has never happened
before … That’s a signal.”
At the slow-running bends of the
Arahura River, generations of Ngāi
Tahu fishers have carried their nets
into the water. They come for the
whitebait, or īnanga: tiny native fish
that travel up the river to spawn;
▲ Danny Paruru, fried whole in fritters, the fish are
a development considered a delicacy in New Zealand.
projects manager “My dad talked about when he was a
at Whakatōhea child, they were putting it back into the
Māori Trust Board river, they were just catching bucket-
TESS MCCLURE loads,” said Lisa Tumahai, Kaiwhaka-
haere [chairperson] of Te Rūnanga o
Ngāi Tahu.
Ngāi Tahu still fish for whitebait,
but the numbers have sunk dramati-
cally. According to assessments by
Niwa – New Zealand’s national climate
researcher – whitebait are among the
most vulnerable species to the effects
of the climate crisis.
“We’re still a very active hunter and
gatherer tribe,” Tumahai said. “If you
can’t harvest māhinga kai, you can’t
sustain yourself. You can’t bring food
‘The whales to the table.”
aren’t For Māori, māhinga kai, the
gathering of traditional foods, is
coming. regarded as crucial culturally as well as
That has practically and economically – integral
to welcoming visitors, and to maintain-
never ing connections to the environment,
happened ancestors and traditional knowledge.
before’ “Kai [food] is a central part of life,
our wellbeing, everything,” Paruru
Mere Takoko said. “So it’s our responsibility then
Conservation to make sure that we protect what we
International have left for the future generations.”

Current chaos Ngāi Tahu has an expansive
New Zealand has corporate arm of the tribe, involved in
borne a series of fisheries, tourism, farming and trans-
record-breaking port. The tribe has launched a plan to
marine heatwaves reach net zero carbon emissions: replac-
over the past five ing its jet boat fleet with electric, chang-
years, with the ing its long-haul trucks to hydrogen,
mean temperature and piloting regenerative agriculture.
in some regions “We have a whakataukī, a proverb
pushed up by that gives direction for our decision
more than four making, and that’s mō tātou, ā, mō kā
degrees over the uri, ā muri ake nei: our decisions are
past 12 months. for the generation today, the genera-
The higher tion tomorrow and those out into the
temperatures have
future not yet born yet,” Tumahai said.
redistributed ocean
For Whakatōhea, a central focus
species – sending
for is kuku – the green-lipped mussel.
warm-water fish
They have proven highly vulnerable
increasingly far
to heatwaves. In 2020, hundreds of
south, changing
the travel patterns
of whales – and,
thousands of mussels cooked to death
on a beach.
The changes brought by climate
in some cases,
contributed to
mass die-offs
breakdown “have that risk of reduc-
ing our connection to our mussels by
including of sea
sponges, shellfish,
not being able to go out and have it
readily”, said Dr Kimberley Maxwell, a
Whakatōhea scientist with the Moana
penguins, salmon
and other fish
species.
Project, a series of studies funded by
the New Zealand government that
examine sea temperature changes
and their effects.
The tribe has invested heavily in
a mussel farm in deeper waters less
subject to temperature leaps. Over
time, the tribe hopes to expand it into
thousands of hectares of open ocean.
The mussels also play a crucial envi-
ronmental role, says Maxwell: they
filter the water and their shells help
sequester carbon.
Takoko says Māori ties with the seas
are part of the cultural fabric. “A lot of
▼ Food gathering our cultural knowledge is contained
practices that around these species – so in losing
have sustained them, we lose part of our culture.”
generations are
TESS MCCLURE IS AOTEAROA
under threat NEW ZEALAND CORRESPONDENT
TESS MCCLURE FOR THE GUARDIAN
C L I M AT E C R I SI S
Temperatures
spike amid
signs of record
hottest year
By Oliver Milman
G
lobal temperatures had
accelerated to record-set-
ting levels by mid-June, an
ominous sign in the climate
crisis ahead of a gathering El Niño
that could potentially propel 2023 to
become the hottest year ever recorded.
Preliminary global average temper-
atures taken up to 14 June were nearly
1C above levels previously recorded for
the same month, going back to 1979.
Climate scientists said it followed a
pattern of strengthening global heat-
ing that could see this year named the
hottest ever recorded, topping 2016.
The first half of June saw “remarkable
global warmth”, confirmed Coperni-
cus, the European Union’s Earth obser-
vation arm, which said that the first few
days of the month even breached a 1.5C
increase compared with pre-industrial
times. This is probably the first time
this has happened since industrialisa-
tion, the agency said.
The long-term warming conditions
caused by the burning of fossil fuels
will probably receive a further pulse
of heat via El Niño, a naturally recur-
ring phenomenon where sections
of the Pacific Ocean heat up, typi-
cally causing temperatures to spike
across the world.
 Wildfire smoke 29
shrouds New York
XINHUA/SHUTTERSTOCK
Earlier this month, the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminis-
tration (Noaa) said El Niño conditions
are now present and will “gradually
strengthen” into early next year.
Michael Mann, a climate scientist at
the University of Pennsylvania, said
human-caused warming will be exac-
erbated by an event that typically adds
between 0.1C to 0.2C to the overall
global temperature.
“The global surface temperature
anomaly is at or near record levels right
now, and 2023 will almost certainly
be the warmest year on record,” said
Mann. “That is likely to be true for just
about every El Niño year in the future
as well, as long we continue to warm
the planet with fossil fuel burning and
carbon pollution.”
This year has already seen severe,
record heatwaves cause problems in
places from Puerto Rico to Siberia to
Spain, while blistering heat in Canada
helped spur huge wildfires that blot-
ted the skies above New York City and
Washington with toxic smoke.
According to an update issued by
Noaa last week, the world had its
third-warmest May in a 174-year tem-
perature record last month, with North
America and South America both hav-
ing their hottest May ever recorded.
Noaa is more circumspect about the
prospects of an annual heat record in
2023, placing the odds at about 12%,
but has said it is almost certain the year
will rank in the top 10 warmest and is
very likely to be in the top five.
In May, the World Meteorological
Organization warned that global tem-
peratures will probably soar over the
next five years, fuelled by El Niño as
well as emissions, with a new record
hot year almost guaranteed.
There is also a good chance the
average temperature will exceed 1.5C
beyond pre-industrial times, a key
threshold agreed by governments at
which point heatwaves, droughts,
flooding and other climate impacts
become significantly worse.
An even more remarkable burst of
warmth is occurring in the seas, with
Noaa confirming a second consecutive
month of record high ocean surface
temperatures in May. Excess heat in
the oceans, which cover 70% of the
globe’s surface, influence overall
global temperatures, as well as warp
fish populations, bleach coral reefs and
drive coastal sea level rise.
OLIVER MILMAN IS AN ENVIRONMENT
REPORTER FOR GUARDIAN US
23 June 2023 The Guardian Weekly
30 Spotlight
Technology
MEDICA L R ESE A RCH By Charlie Metcalfe

N
eil Thomas wished he could

The robot have been awake during the

operation to remove a 6cm
cancerous tumour from his

surgeon will
colon. He was one of the first people to
go under the scalpel of University hos-
pital of Wales’s new robotic systems
in June 2022. And, as the founder of

see you now...

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

recover by operating through smaller,

keyhole-like incisions. This reduces the
chance that patients catch infections,
and so accelerates their recoveries.
Without robots, keyhole surgery
requires a very high level of skill. Sur-
geons need to operate at awkward
angles, moving their hands in the oppo-
site direction to that which they want
their instruments to move inside the
body. With robots, they can perform

more complex operations that might
otherwise demand open surgery, they
suffer less physical strain, and they
require less training time. Surgeons
are becoming better at using them, too.
“Some of those patients who have
ultra-advanced diseases involving
blood vessels at the back of the pelvis
might still get an open operation,” said
Deena Harji, a colorectal surgeon in
Manchester, “but we’re starting to see
some very early case studies coming
out where they’re starting to have
robotic approaches applied to them, at
least in part. When robotics started 20
years ago, that group would not have
been eligible for robotic operation. But
as we have developed experience and
knowledge, we can offer really com-
plex patients robotic surgery.”
Surgeons are physically limited by
their bodies. Their minds are limited
in their capacity to learn and improve.
That’s why engineers are hoping
robotic systems combined with AI
might be able to surpass the skills of
human surgeons to produce more
consistent results – with fewer errors.
Last year, engineers at Johns Hop-
kins University in the US came one step
closer to realising that goal. In what
they described as one of the most
delicate procedures in the practice of
surgery, their Smart Tissue Autono-
mous Robot (Star) sutured the ends
of a severed intestine together in four
pigs – while they were under anaes-
thetic. According to the engineers, it
performed better than a human sur-
geon would have.
“Our findings show that we can
automate one of the most intricate and
delicate tasks in surgery,” Axel Krieger,
an assistant professor of mechanical
engineering, and the project’s director,
said at the time.
The Star’s procedure was not the first
time a robot had performed with a level
of autonomy in surgery. The TSolution-
One device (formerly called RoboDoc),
for example, is approved by the US Food
and Drug Administration to prepare
human limbs for joint replacements
according to a surgeon’s plan. What
makes the Star’s procedure special was
that it performed its task using keyhole
surgery – a world first.
Surgical robotics presents a good
opportunity for engineers to introduce
autonomy because of the vast volume
of data that devices can collect. An
intelligent system, once developed, can
use this data to teach itself. In theory,
it could even become better with each
operation that it performs as it gathers
more and more data. This could help
healthcare organisations “standardise”
the results of operations.
Mark Slack, the chief medical officer
at CMR Surgical, which manufactures
another surgical robot, Versius, says
manufacturers have failed to exploit
this data until now. That’s why they
and researchers such as those involved
in the Star project are scrambling
to collect and process as much as
possible. “Data, data, data,” Slack
said. “This data has had significant
untapped potential.”
Despite the Star team’s success, it’s
still too early to forecast autonomous
surgery in hospitals any time soon. Engi-
neers talk about “levels of autonomy”.
For a robotic device, the question is not
whether it is autonomous or not; the
question is how autonomous it can be.
And the Star system performed only
a small section of a complete surgery
without human help. In fact, it even
needed humans to apply a fluorescent
marker to guide its movements.
“You’re not supposed to call it
autonomous surgery,” said Tamás
Haidegger, an associate professor of
intelligent robotics at Óbuda Univer-
sity in Budapest. “This is automating
one particular surgical subtask.”
H
aidegger makes what he
believes is another impor-
tant distinction – between
the kind of complexity
required for a system like the Star and
the devices used in hospitals. Standard
laboratory best practice in research
environments often falls short of the
safety and design standards of clinical
settings, he says.
For use in clinical environments,
manufacturers need to be able to
explain exactly how their devices
work, which continues to prove a
challenge for people who develop
AI. There’s also the impending intro-
duction of AI-specific regulation that
governments across the world, includ-
ing the UK and EU, are developing.
Autonomous surgical robots will need
to comply with those too.
According to Haidegger, this all
amounts to a very expensive pro-
cess for manufacturers to prove that
their devices meet the regulatory
requirements. Each device needs
to gain approval for each new field
of surgery, one at a time, which has
already decelerated the adoption
of the human-operated robots used
CMR Surgical’s Versius
robot. The technology
takes much of the
physical strain out
of an operation for
the surgeon, and is
particularly useful in
keyhole surgery
‘Surgeons’ today. It will take a lot more work for
a commercial manufacturer to decide
minds are that the potential profit justifies the
limited cost of research and development. “It’s
in their not going to radically change medical
devices overnight,” Haidegger said.
capacity to For health organisations with strict
learn and budgets, the cost of surgical robots has
remained a prohibitive factor. The Da
improve’ Vinci costs about $2m (the company
would not confirm a specific price,
stating that it depends on the buyer’s
individual requirements). CMR Sur-
gical’s Versius costs between $1.5m
and $1.9m. This does not include the
added cost of training and mainte-
nance, which can be 10% of the initial
investment every year.
1.5m
Whether they prove cost-effective
or not, surgeons agree that robotic sys-
tems have made it easier for them to
The number of perform more complex procedures,
operations the while minimising scarring for their
manufacturer of patients. Neil Thomas, the former tech
the most prolific entrepreneur with a tumour that was
surgical robot, removed from his colon in June 2022,
the Da Vinci, was able to leave hospital only two
says it is used days after his operation.
in each year Thomas had been training for an
Ironman triathlon at the time of the
$2m
diagnosis. Three months after the
operation (on doctor’s orders), he
was able to return to training. First a
Approximate 1.5km run, and then a few more three
cost of the Da days later. The robot used in his opera-
Vinci (the firm tion had left only a small collection
would not quote of almost imperceptible scars across
a specific price, his abdomen. “You can’t see a thing,”
saying it depends he said. “And recovery, I thought, was
on buyers’ excellent.” Observer
requirements) CHARLIE METCALFE WRITES ABOUT
SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
23 June 2023 The Guardian Weekly
32 Spotlight
Asia Pacific
U N I T E D S TAT E S/C H I NA
‘Candid’ talks
but Blinken’s
Beijing visit
could rein
in tensions
By Rachel Cheung HONG KONG
and Patrick Wintour
T
he US secretary of state,
Antony Blinken, wrapped up
a rare trip to Beijing where
he met President Xi Jinping,
concluding a high-stakes visit aimed at
stabilising spiralling relations.
Speaking at a press briefing in
Beijing before his departure on Mon-
day, Blinken said he had “an important
conversation” with Xi during the
35-minute encounter and stressed
it was the responsibility of both
countries to find a path forward.
“In every meeting, I stressed that
direct engagement and sustained
communication at senior levels is the
best way to responsibly manage our
differences and ensure competition
does not veer into conflict,” Blinken
said. “I heard the same from my
Chinese counterparts.”
“The two sides have had candid and
The Guardian Weekly 23 June 2023
in-depth discussions,” Xi said at the
start of the meeting at the Great Hall of
the People, in comments broadcast on
Chinese state television. “I hope that
through this visit, Mr Secretary, you
will make more positive contributions
to stabilising China-US relations,” Xi
added, addressing Blinken.
The rest of the discussion was held
behind closed doors. The Chinese read-
out said the two sides “made progress”
and reached agreement on specific
issues, without offering further details.
Despite signs of positivity, Blinken
acknowledged there were issues on
which the two countries disagreed
profoundly and even vehemently.
China rejected a proposal to set up
communication between the Chinese
and US militaries. “I want to empha-
sise that none of this gets resolved in
one visit, one trip, one conversation.
It’s a process,” Blinken said.
Blinken’s visit was the first by a US
secretary of state in five years. Ten-
sions between the world’s two largest
economies have soared in recent years
over issues including trade, techno-
logy and Taiwan, with Joe Biden and
his predecessor, Donald Trump, call-
ing Beijing the most serious threat to
long-term US global primacy.
Earlier on Monday, Blinken held
extensive discussions with China’s top
diplomat, Wang Yi, at the Diaoyutai
state guest house. On Sunday, he held
talks with China’s foreign minister, Qin
Gang, for more than seven hours.
According to a Chinese readout,
Wang said China-US relations were
at “a critical juncture” and called on
the US to make a choice “between
dialogue or confrontation, coopera-
tion or conflict”.
 Chinese news Wang stressed the need to reverse
reports Antony the downward spiral in bilateral ties,
Blinken’s meeting but also blamed the current low point
with Xi Jinping on Washington’s “erroneous percep-
GREG BAKER/AFP/GETTY tion of China”.
Moritz Rudolf, a fellow at Yale Law
School’s Paul Tsai China Center, said
Wang’s confrontational tone showed
“the great level of mistrust of Beijing
vis-a-vis the US”. However, given the
bleak state of US-China relations, the
mere fact that the visit had taken place
was a positive sign, he said.
Blinken’s trip to China was initially
planned for February but was post-
poned when a balloon, allegedly a
Chinese spy balloon, flew over the US,
sparking a controversy. China insisted
it was a weather balloon that had been
blown off course.
Given the fraught relations, expec-
tations of the meetings were gener-
ally low. Both countries hold hardened
positions on a range of issues including
trade, Xinjiang and Taiwan. But both
sides showed a willingness to talk,
with Qin and Blinken agreeing to main-
tain high-level exchanges and expand
cultural and educational exchanges.
The US, despite adopting a hardline
bipartisan stance on China domesti-
cally, believes it needs to draw its Euro-
pean allies towards a consensus posi-
tion built around the proposition that
the west must de-risk its relations with
China rather than seek to decouple the
Chinese and western economies.
Many European countries are join-
ing the US in seeking to screen Chi-
nese investments in sensitive areas,
while insisting it is acceptable to
cooperate with China on issues such as
health, climate change, global macro-
economic stability and trade – issues
that are not regarded as essential to
national security.
Blinken spoke to his South Korean
and Japanese counterparts before the
trip to reassure them of his intentions
‘I want to and the parameters of the discussions.
The meetings could herald more
emphasise diplomatic engagement between the
that none US and China, laying the ground for a
of this gets Xi-Biden meeting, for instance, at the
Apec summit that will take place in San
resolved Francisco in November, Rudolf said.
in one visit “The reopening of bilateral com-
munication channels, including on
… it’s a security-related matters, would be a
process’ step in the right direction,” he said.
RACHEL CHEUNG IS A JOURNALIST
Antony Blinken BASED IN HONG KONG; PATRICK
US secretary WINTOUR IS THE GUARDIAN’S
of state DIPLOMATIC EDITOR
 Spotlight
North America
C A NA DA
Fire alarm
Questions
grow over
disaster
response
By Leyland Cecco TORONTO
M
ona Crowston had only
minutes to gather her
belongings before the
wildfire that had been
burning for days at the edge of her
town swept down towards her house.
The 84-year-old already had a suitcase
packed, just in case.
“I made sure to tidy up what I
could before we left. The last thing I
wanted was to return home and have
a messy room,” she said. She and her
husband left on 30 June 2021. Months
later, when they finally returned to the
site of their home of 47 years, all they
found was charred and crumbled foun-
dations. Most of the Canadian town of
Lytton had also been destroyed.
This year’s spring wildfire sea-
son has been the worst on record in
Canada, with more than 5m hectares
of land burned – a figure higher than
the entire 2016, 2019, 2020 and 2022
seasons combined.
In the days leading up to the Lytton
fire, the surrounding region of British
Columbia had broken heat records – at
one point nearly reaching 50C.
When winds whipped the fire into
Lytton, it only took 30 minutes for
most of it to be destroyed. When resi-
dents returned briefly to tour the dam-
age, they found the main commercial
strip had been turned to dust. Homes
and vehicles had seemingly vaporised.
Nearly two years after the fire,
similar conditions have set in across
Canada, with typically damp regions
left bone-dry. Unseasonably hot
weather has shattered records in
dozens of communities. And areas
that typically don’t experience roaring
blazes have been left charred.
JR Adams, a member of the Lytton
First Nation, bore witness to the
destruction of his own community.
And when he saw the recent news
coverage of wildfires in Nova Scotia,
painful memories came flooding back.
“My heart dropped. I knew there
was nothing I could do at that moment,
except just feel for the people who lost
their homes,” he said.
Crowston, Adams and scores of
others were homeless for months.
Earlier this year, the Fraser Valley
Current reported on the slow efforts to
rebuild Lytton. The village “remains a
flattened heap of dirt and concrete”, it
reported, and residents complained of
bureaucratic delays. Work crews have
found Indigenous artefacts at excava-
tion sites, further slowing the process,
and next to nothing has been rebuilt.
With hotter and larger fires projected
to sweep across Canada in the coming
years, the collective failure to rebuild
in Lytton raises questions about the
preparedness of governments to
respond to large crises.
“I spent 62 years in Lytton. And I
was hoping to rebuild. I just wanted
to get home and get on with my life. I
miss it terribly,” said Crowston.
But as the months dragged on,
Crowston came to the sad conclusion
there was no going back.
In November, she and her husband
bought a home in the town of Ashcroft,
an hour north of Lytton in a region still
within the range of wildfires.
Canada’s climate means that the
country’s construction season is
33
Emergency call relatively short, and reconstruction
More than 200 is often complicated by the logistical
homes have challenges of bringing large crews to
been destroyed isolated communities. Wildfires also
already this year.
pose unique challenges, such as the
And with warmer way vinyl siding and plastics melt into
and drier months the ground, turning the soil toxic.
still to come, the
experiences of
those who saw their
In Halifax, where 200 buildings
were recently destroyed by wildfires,
contractors warn it could take three
lives destroyed in
previous wildfires
years to rebuild.
“We just cannot keep this up. We’re
raise larger
questions about
both Canada’s
hitting a point where we’re going to
spend more on recovery than we
are on building new construction in
ability to rebuild
after disaster, and
its commitment
Canada,” said Glenn McGillivray, the
managing director of the Institute for
Catastrophic Loss Reduction.
to victims once
While the community of Lytton is
the flames are
under the jurisdiction of the province,
extinguished.
the Lytton First Nation reserve is
under federal oversight, speeding up
elements of the rebuilding process.
In September, Adams got word that
the modular homes on the Lytton First
Nations reserve were ready.
“We’re finally all together, back on
our reserves,” said Adams. “It’s like
we’re taking our land back.”
But widespread news coverage of
fires blazing across the country means
the looming threat of future wildfires
▼ Charred is never far from Adams’ mind.
buildings after “I think a lot of people don’t realise
a wildfire swept how quickly things can change and how
through Lytton,
it can change your life,” said Adams.
British Columbia “People need to understand how fast
in 2021 Mother Nature can take control.”
JENNIFER GAUTHIER/ LEYLAND CECCO COVERS CANADA FOR
REUTERS THE GUARDIAN
 35

The life and work of Kenyan novelist

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

PORTRAIT BY MICHAEL TYRONE DELANEY

36 Grand old man of letters
Approach
In October, I flew to Irvine, California, to meet
the novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. He is a giant of
African writing, and to a Kenyan writer like me he
looms especially large. Alongside writers such as
Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, he was part of a literary scene that
flourished in the 1950s and 60s, during the last years of colonialism on
the continent. If Achebe was the prime mover who captured the deep
feeling of displacement that colonisation had wreaked, and Soyinka
the witty, guileful intellectual who tried to make sense of the collision
between African tradition and western ideas of freedom, then Ngũgĩ
was the unabashed militant. His writing was direct and cutting, his
books a weapon – first against the colonial state, and later against the
failures and corruption of Kenya’s post-independence ruling elite.
I was six or seven the first time I read Ngũgĩ, borrowing a children’s
book he’d written from my primary school’s library. When I was 10,
I came across a worn copy of The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, a play he
co-wrote with Micere Githae Mugo, on my grandfather’s bookshelf.
I read it again and again, captivated by the story of this
leader of Kenya’s independence struggle challenging
the right of a colonial court to try him. (Kimathi, who led
the armed rebellion against the British, was executed in
1957.) I studied Ngũgĩ all through high school, as have
He has
generations of Kenyan students. My uncle, an academic, become
wrote a book about him, which I read as a teenager with-
out properly understanding it. It was about a revolution known not
Ngũgĩ had led at the University of Nairobi in the late 60s,
which had resulted in the university dropping English just as a
literature as a course of study, and replacing it with one
that positioned African literatures, oral and written, at the
novelist but
centre. A decade later, Ngũgĩ famously ceased writing his
novels in English, instead doing all his creative work in
as a major
the language he grew up speaking, Gĩkũyũ. I fell in love postcolonial
with the idea of Ngũgĩ as a fighter for African literature,
and decided to go to the University of Nairobi and majored theorist
in the very degree he had fought for. There, in the early
2010s, there were even more Ngũgĩ novels and plays to
write papers and sit exams on.
So much of the 20th century seems contained within Ngũgĩ’s life.
He was born just before the second world war, when Kenya was still
a British colony. He grew up under the shadow of a violent war for
independence. He went to university in Uganda, at a time of political
and literary ferment across Africa, and he came of age as first Uganda
(in 1962), then Kenya (1963), gained their independence. Over the years
that followed, he saw with horror how people’s pre-independence
hopes were dashed. He was thrown in jail by the Kenyan government
for his writing. After his release, he continued his writing and political
activism, first in Kenya, then in exile in London, then, finally, in the
US, where he has been a professor of literature for the past 30 years.
He has become known not just as a novelist but as a major postcolonial
theorist, whose 1986 essay collection, Decolonising the Mind – an
attack on the hold of colonial languages, such as French and English,
over former colonies – has become a set text for university students
around the world. It is now an annual tradition to predict that Ngũgĩ
will finally receive this year’s Nobel prize for literature, and then to
lament that it hasn’t happened.
Approaching Ngũgĩ’s house in California, I felt nervous. He had
suggested that I stay with him during my time in Irvine. His health
was poor and he would be having surgery, he said. If I stayed, it would
be easier to speak. It was a strange arrangement. But I wanted as
much time with him as possible. And now here I was, pulling into
his driveway, walking up to his redbrick bungalow at the end of a
cul-de-sac and ringing the bell.
The Guardian Weekly 23 June 2023
Getting the napkins
I had never met Ngũgĩ before. I had seen him only once, at the launch
of a translation project in Nairobi in 2017. Today he was lounging in a
shirt, trousers, slippers and a bathrobe. He bade me join him at the din-
ing table, where he was doing some work. Before we talked, he said, he
needed to know more about me, to know what my motivations were.
He asked me to tell him about my writing. I talked about some articles
I’d written, and mentioned the novel I had been working on for a few
years. He asked if I was making enough from my writing to earn a living.
I told him I was. “That’s good,” he said. “I was never able to do that.”
We were interrupted by the doorbell. Two people came in: they
were there to do his cleaning, cooking and shopping. In a few hours,
he told me, a health aide would come to check his vitals. In 1995, he
was diagnosed with prostate cancer, which he survived, despite a
grim medical forecast that gave him three months to live. In December
2019, he underwent triple bypass heart surgery. Around the same
period he began to suffer from kidney failure, the same condition
that killed one of his brothers. By the time I visited, he wasn’t able
to leave the house much, apart from his
three dialysis appointments each week.
Violence has loomed over much of
Ngũgĩ’s past, yet now he lives a relatively
genteel existence in American suburbia.
Since 2002, he has been a professor of
comparative literature at the University of
California, Irvine, where his wife, Njeeri,
also works. He has nine children – six from
his first marriage – and many grandchil-
dren, and he talks to his family every day.
His phone rang, his assistant on the
line. Ngũgĩ was supposed to be doing
a video call with a group of South Afri-
can academics who wanted to discuss
decolonisation. Ngũgĩ told her he had
been unable to log in. “But I have a young
person here with me,” he said. “Baraka.
He’ll be able to help me.” He handed
me the phone.
Normalised abnormality
After the call, I played Ngũgĩ a song that had become a hit in Kenya in
the months after the 2022 Kenyan general elections. The song, Vaida,
is in Lunyore, a language neither Ngũgĩ nor I speak. Yet pretty soon
he was dancing to it, bopping his head, shifting his shoulders on his
chair. In his day, he said, a song in an African language would not have
become a national hit. “During my time, if you heard an African song
on the radio, you switched it off. What you were waiting for was Jimmie
Rodgers,” he said. This was part of what he called the “normalised
abnormality” of the postcolonial condition. The colonised had their
language taken from them, and a foreign language put in its space.
“But what of Kenyan English or Nigerian English?” I asked him.
“Aren’t these now local languages?” He looked at me, aghast. “It’s like
the enslaved being happy that theirs is a local version of enslavement,”
he said. “English is not an African language. French is not. Spanish is
not. Kenyan or Nigerian English is nonsense. That’s an example of
normalised abnormality. The colonised trying to claim the coloniser’s
language is a sign of the success of enslavement. It’s very embarrassing.
I read someone saying he is writing in French so that he can subvert it.
I thought, wait a minute. He is the one being subverted.”
As he spoke, I cringed. I wondered what Ngũgĩ made of the fact that
I wrote in English, or that I, a Kenyan writer, was here to profile him on
assignment from a British newspaper. Was I also one of the enslaved?
 37

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

James and Ngũgĩ

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

23 June 2023 The Guardian Weekly

38 Grand old man of letters
to his bedroom. Ngũgĩ, who has lost height he could barely afford
to lose to a stoop, walks haltingly in shuffling steps, with his hands
folded behind his back. Sometimes, he uses a walking stick, and on
even rarer occasions a walker. He seems to dress entirely in a collec-
tion of never-ending kitenge shirts with embroidered collars, which
are easy to move or remove when he needs to change his dressing for
the catheter in his belly.
Ngũgĩ has a slow, slightly croaky voice. He talks in a Gĩkũyũ accent
mixed with traces of the English one he picked up while living in
England. He peppers his sentences with “Oh my God”, which he
uses to register incredulity at opinions he takes to be absurd. He has
a way of being dismissive without being rude, taking a strong stance
without quite silencing you. He is quick to laugh, and when he laughs
at something he finds ridiculous, he buries his face in his hands,
while shaking his head and saying: “Oh my God”. When he laughs at
something he finds funny, he lifts his hand to the top of his head, but
then winces, for that movement can be painful for him. Sometimes,
the laugh can descend into a hacking cough, which exacerbates the
pain of the incisions he has in his belly from multiple surgeries.
Ngũgĩ, ever the professor, shared his thoughts on his favourite
topics: language and class. “I don’t see the world through ethnic-
ity or race,” he told me at one point. “Race can come into it, but as
a consequence of class.” He gave the example of the US supreme
court justice Clarence Thomas. “He’s as black as me, but every law
he passes is against black people – but not the black middle class.
The black working class.”
Outside, it turned dark, the harsh California sun fading into dusk.
Ngũgĩ tapped the table. “In Gĩkũyũ, this is metha,” he said. “Where
is this word from?”
“Kiswahili,” I said.
“And where do the Swahili borrow it from?”
I didn’t know.
“From the Portuguese,” he said. “This is how languages work; they
borrow from each other.”
“Is it possible to have multiple first languages?” I asked. “I’ve been
thinking of English, Kiswahili, Sheng’ and Dholuo as all being my first
languages, since I speak all of them with native fluency.”
“I think,” said Ngũgĩ, “you are lying to yourself.”
The conference Steady gaze
Ngũgĩ as a
In 1959, Ngũgĩ arrived in Uganda’s capital, Kampala, to begin student in Leeds
his studies in English at east Africa’s most prestigious uni- circa 1966
versity, Makerere. To him, Kampala was a revelation. This LILLY LIBRARY,
UNIVERSITY OF
was, as he puts it, his “first encounter with a modern city INDIANA
dominated by black presence”. At the time, it was the literary
capital of east Africa, partly thanks to the university, which
produced a generation of extraordinary writers. Alongside
Ngũgĩ were the distinguished critic Peter Nazareth, the Kenyan poet
Jonathan Kariara, the Ugandan writer John Nagenda, and Pio and
Elvania Zirimu, who met at Makerere and later married.
In June 1962, the university hosted an event that would prove
formative not just for Ngũgĩ personally but for the future of African
literature. The African Writers’ Conference was the first organised
gathering of writers from across the continent. Ngũgĩ was thrilled to
hang out with authors he admired – Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka,
John Pepper Clark, Ezekiel Mphahlele (later Es’kia) – and to guide
the American poet Langston Hughes, who had also been invited,
through Kampala. Discussions revolved around the great issue of the
moment, decolonisation, and the place of African literature within this
new paradigm. Could the writer address political questions without
compromising their artistic impulses? Was there even such a thing as
African writing, or was there only Ugandan writing, Ghanaian writing,
South African writing, and so on?
The Guardian Weekly 23 June 2023
From the start, the conference was controversial. This was an
attempt to define African literature, yet novelists and poets who had
long been working in African languages such as Swahili, Igbo, Zulu
and Amharic were left out. The fiercest criticism of the conference
came from the Nigerian critic Obi Wali.
Writing in 1963, Wali declared that true African literature could only
be written in African languages. In his view, any African literature
that was written in colonial languages could only be, at best, a minor
branch of European literature. “The student of Yoruba for instance,
has no play available to him in that language, for Wole Soyinka, the
most gifted Nigerian playwright at the moment, does not consider
Yoruba suitable,” Wali wrote.
Ngũgĩ struggled with Wali’s criticism. He had begun working on his
third novel, A Grain of Wheat, and would shortly after go to Leeds Uni-
versity, on a British Council scholarship, to do postgraduate research
on the Barbadian writer George Lamming. Wali’s argument “kept on
pursuing me through Leeds and after”, wrote Ngũgĩ in Decolonising
the Mind. “I underwent a crisis. I knew whom I was writing about,
but whom was I writing for?”
The question of English continues to haunt Ngũgĩ. “I can never
think of my first novels without thinking of the language issue,” he
told me. “How could I have these African characters and have them
all speaking perfect English? When I wrote my first book, I wrote it in
a language my mother couldn’t access. I rewarded her for taking me to
school by writing in a language she can’t read or write.” His voice went
soft. “Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m just wrong about the language
issue.” He paused. “No, I don’t think I’m wrong.”
K6,77
The next morning, when I came out from my bedroom, Ngũgĩ was up
already. He was seated at the dining table, sheaves of papers around
him, his laptop open, on the phone with one of his kids. He asked me
what else we should discuss for my story. I asked him about Jomo
Kenyatta, the first president of independent Kenya.
As a boy, Kenyatta had been a hero to Ngũgĩ because of his fight
for Gĩkũyũ land rights. After he became president, Kenyatta reneged
on his promises. Rather than restoring stolen land
to its rightful owners, he and his cronies acquired
more for themselves. Kenyatta, Ngũgĩ told me, had
merely wanted to replace the colonialists at the
top, rather than doing away with the entire colonial
structure.

“To Kenyatta,” he said, “having black landowners, black police
officers, a black government – that was freedom.”
In 1977, Ngũgĩ published the furious novel Petals of Blood, a clear
attack on Kenyatta’s government. But it was a different work, the same
year, that led to his arrest. The play Ngaahika Ndenda (I Will Marry
When I Want), which Ngũgĩ had co-written, was no more obviously
critical of the ruling classes in Kenya than the novel, but there was
one crucial difference: as Abdulrazak Gurnah writes, because the play
was written in Gĩkũyũ, it “was comprehensible to ordinary citizens,
and was therefore ‘subversive’”.
In Kamĩtĩ maximum-security prison, Ngũgĩ was held in a detention
block with 18 other political prisoners. In his prison memoir, he writes:
“Here I have no name. I am just a number in a file: K6,77.” There, on
rolls of toilet paper, he began to write his first novel in Gĩkũyũ, Caitaani
mũtharaba-Inĩ (Devil on the Cross). The process was extremely diffi-
cult “because I was breaking away from my dependence on English”,
Ngũgĩ told the Paris Review in 2022. “The main problem I faced in
prison was that there was this little devil who used to come to me – a
devil dressed in English robes. There is almost no written tradition
in Gĩkũyũ, so I’d be struggling away with the vocabulary
– some word like imperialism, say – and this little devil
would come to me and say, ‘Oh, why struggle so hard? I’m
right here …’ There’s a slipperiness to the Gĩkũyũ language.
I’d write a sentence, read it the following morning, and
‘I rewarded
find that it could mean something else. There was always my mother
the temptation to give up. But another voice would talk
to me, in Gĩkũyũ, telling me to struggle.” for taking me
Underground
to school by
Early in the morning on my fourth day staying with Ngũgĩ,
writing in a
his surgery went ahead as planned, and there was no need
to stay at hospital after it was done. At 11am, his grandson
language that
Miringu wheeled him back into his home. Ngũgĩ wanted she is unable
to go outside so that he could sit on the patio and feel the
sun on his face, but Miringu overruled him. “You should to read’
lie down and rest,” he said. Ngũgĩ agreed to go to his room,
but called me in. “We need to talk some more,” he said.
He was in pain. Lying in bed, he called one of his
daughters-in-law, who is a doctor. When he put the phone down,
his breathing was heavy, and his right hand was on his belly, resting
on top of the surgical incision. He asked me to remind him where we’d
left the conversation the previous day, then he began to talk about
an underground movement he had been part of in Kenya in the 70s.
The December Twelve Movement (DTM) had been formed at a
conference of Marxist-Leninists held in Nairobi in 1974. There were
strict requirements for joining, with the members instructed to be
disciplined. For instance, not being punctual was enough to get you
rejected. “Because it was life and death,” Ngũgĩ explained. A key
part of the DTM remit was intellectual warfare against the state,
publishing openly critical literature and distributing anti-government
leaflets across the country. Ngũgĩ told me that the play that led to his
imprisonment was a DTM project. Both Ngũgĩ and his co-writer were
members of a cell based in Limuru.
In 1978, when Kenyatta died, he was succeeded by his vice-
president, Daniel arap Moi. Desperate to win popular approval, the
new president released Ngũgĩ and other political prisoners, but soon
his government became as autocratic as Kenyatta’s. In 1982, there was
an attempted coup against the government. I asked Ngũgĩ if the DTM
was involved. “No,” he said. “DTM believed that politics led the gun,
not the gun leading politics.” To them, the only valid way of initiating
political change was by popular action, not by military action.
In the wake of the failed coup, DTM members were nonetheless
arrested en masse, while others fled the country. At the time, Ngũgĩ
39
was in London for the launch of Devil on the Cross. He was warned
that he would be killed if he returned, and so, for the next few years,
London became his home. In 1986, he published Matigari, the only
novel he would write during this time in England. In the book, an
eponymous protagonist organises against a president who has
betrayed the country’s dreams, a barely disguised stand-in for Moi.
Moi, believing the novel’s protagonist to be a real person, ordered
the arrest of Matigari. When the president learned the character was
fictional, the novel was banned.
In 1989, Ngũgĩ moved to the US for a professorship at Yale, marking
the start of a stay in American universities that eventually led to him
to California, where he joined UC Irvine in 2002. That same year,
Moi’s rule ended, and in 2004 Ngũgĩ visited Kenya for the first time
since 1982 to launch his new novel Mũrogi wa Kagogo (Wizard of
the Crow). Two weeks into his visit, he and his wife were attacked
by an armed gang, and his wife was raped. “It wasn’t a simple
robbery,” Ngũgĩ has said. “It was political – whether by remnants of
the old regime or part of the new state outside the main current […]
the whole thing was meant to humiliate, if not eliminate, us.” Yet
he continued to return to Kenya in the
years that followed. He steadfastly holds
on to his citizenship, and pays attention
to Kenyan politics.
The language question,
continued
In the months after I left Ngũgĩ’s house,
having scrubbed from my memory as
much of the medical stuff as I can, I’ve been
thinking about his legacy, and wondering
what it means that, despite the success of
Decolonising the Mind, its central exhor-
tation – to write creatively in African lan-
guages – has remained largely unheeded.
Even Ngũgĩ’s own children’s literary
careers exist largely in English. Four of
his children – Tee Ngũgĩ, Nducu wa Ngũgĩ,
Wanjiku wa Ngũgĩ and Mũkoma – are
novelists, with Tee living in Kenya, and the rest in the US.
I asked Ngũgĩ if the message of Decolonising the Mind had failed.
“No,” he said. “The problem has always been the negative govern-
ment policies towards African languages and lack of publishers in
African languages.”
Now I’m thinking back to Ngũgĩ’s books. Across many of his novels
and his plays, the action revolves around a saviour-protagonist –
whether the educated hero in his early books who wants to unite
society, or the radical who wants revolution. What unites these pro-
tagonists is the failure of their efforts. They are rejected by the people
they seek to save, and most of them are killed. For a writer whose
radical politics are so evident in his books, he has always seemed
pessimistic about the success of his characters’ quests.
The morning I left his house, I had found Ngũgĩ up already, at his
table, his laptop open in front of him. He asked me if my cab was here
yet. I told him that I’d just ordered it, and it was a few minutes away.
“Do you have everything you need?” “Yes,” I said. “Don’t forget to
write in Dholuo,” he said. “I know it’s hard at first, but you have to try.”
My phone beeped. My cab was here. I went to my room, wheeled
out my suitcase, and put my heavy coat, unused these last three days,
on my shoulder. I opened the door, shook his hand, and walked out
of the grand old Kenyan man of letters’ house ••
CAREY BARAKA IS A WRITER FROM KISUMU, KENYA
Reporting for this project was supported by a Silvers Grant for
Work in Progress from the Robert B Silvers Foundation
23 June 2023 The Guardian Weekly
40

The Guardian Weekly 23 June 2023

 41

This is going to hurt (for ever)

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

ILLUSTRATIONS BY TIMO LENZEN

23 June 2023 The Guardian Weekly

42 This is going to hurt (for ever)

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

The Guardian Weekly 23 June 2023


about what causes some pain to become chronic. Certain
risk factors make one more susceptible: biological sex
(women are more likely to report chronic pain), genetics,
smoking, depression, poverty. But the exact chemical
and neurological conditions that cause pain to linger are
still the matter of intense study. What seems certain is
that something causes the pain circuitry in the body to
become oversensitised, inferring pain even if no damage
has occurred. In some cases, even the lightest touch can
trigger a pain response; for patients with this condition,
allodynia, it can be agony just to get dressed.
In my case, one of the most confounding aspects of
my new situation was how unpredictable and nonsen-
sical my symptoms would appear. Pain flare-ups would
happen seemingly at random, and last days or weeks at a
time. The pain would move around: one day it would be
in my forearm, then my armpit, then the back of my hand,
before settling in my ulnar nerve. I felt as if my bones were
being haunted by an unseen foe. Meanwhile, I was burning
through my book advance by paying for physiotherapy, and
buying a new posture-correct office setup. I started wearing
a wrist brace, then an elbow brace; my cupboard filled with
various physiotherapy tools. FlexBars, resistance bands,
knobbly massage wands – from her curious glances, I think
the delivery woman thought I was buying up a dungeon’s
worth of sex toys. None of them worked.
I tried alternative therapies. I started an expensive CBD
habit, adding to a growing cupboardful of supplements.
And I read every book and paper I could find on RSI and
chronic pain, hoping to find a cure. The list of potential
suspects grew to include trigger points (knots in the myo-
fascia, sheath-like material that surrounds muscles), poor
diet, blocked chi and, according to one bestselling book,
by the late Dr John Sarno, subconscious narcissistic rage.
THEN THERE WAS THE MEDICATION. Having addiction
in the family, I refused to even consider opioids, so was
instead prescribed anti-inflammatories and put on to the
NHS’s pathway of neurological pain drugs: amitriptyline,
an antidepressant often also used to treat nerve pain; pre-
gabalin; and later, gabapentin, an epilepsy medication that
The thing I later discovered is popular in British prisons because it can
enhance the high from other substances. Getting prescribed
about pain the correct drugs was a painful process too. For example,
is that it is amitriptyline made me so drowsy I would fall asleep dur-
ing the day; when I asked to change medication, the GP
invisible. practice explained that, because the effect of these drugs
For most, can be slow, I was expected to endure them for at least
pain is several weeks before being prescribed something new. I
eventually persuaded the doctors to skip that step – crying
temporary, down the phone will do that – but, even then, the stronger
so everyone medication didn’t dull the pain, either.
In May 2023, a comprehensive review by researchers at
forgets after the University of Southampton found there is little evidence
a while that most of the antidepressant-class drugs used to treat
chronic pain have any effect beyond that of a placebo. (They
found one exception: duloxetine.) The lack of evidence
for antidepressants, and the deadly epidemic of opioid
addiction, are among the reasons that National Institute
for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) recently amended its
recommendations for chronic pain to focus on psychologi-
cal treatments. In my early 30s, I had suddenly become a
person who owned a pillbox and a medication schedule;
and, even after all that, I was still in pain.
43
Just over a year in, my doctors had apparently exhausted
every diagnostic possibility. Short of sending a surgeon in
to dig around in my nerve canals – risky if they’d even try
– there was nothing they could do, and so I was referred
to the specialist pain clinic at my local hospital. At my first
appointment, a nice, well-meaning doctor told me upfront:
“We’re not here to provide a cure, but we are going to try
to help you manage the pain as well as possible.” I was put
on a new course of physiotherapy, and given a dedicated
pain psychotherapist. I started a pain diary, tracking hurt
the way we had tracked my wife’s pregnancies. Rather
than feeling seen, I felt abandoned. The message seemed
simple: if I wanted a cure, it was now up to me.
T SOME POINT IN MY PAIN JOURNEY –
I forget where now – I was introduced
to the distinction between “pain” and
“suffering”. Pain is acute sensation,
dictated by nociceptors and nerve
pathways. Pain is verbs: stabbing,
burning, aching. Suffering denotes
everything else caused by that pain:
avoidance, anxiety, loneliness, depression. If pain is what
our nerves tell us, suffering is how our minds react.
When other people asked about my pain, I tended to
respond in a typically British fashion. “It’s fine,” I’d say. Or:
“You know, good days and bad days.” The truth is, I was
suffering. I could barely work. Hobbies – piano, guitar, video
games, baking – were all casualties. They were replaced
with research: books, scientific papers, YouTube videos.
My pathological search for a cure was only making me more
and more desperate. At home, I had to cut back on using
my hands. That meant doing less housework; for a while I
could barely do the dishes without a flare-up, which meant
my wife, Hannah, taking on most of the jobs while heavily
pregnant. Our relationship suffered. I, meanwhile, became
insular, angry and increasingly depressed.
About six months after my pain started, Hannah gave
birth to our youngest daughter, Edith. She was perfect:
fiery-haired and beautiful. But, to my utter devastation, I
found that I couldn’t hold her for longer than a few minutes
without the pain in my arms becoming unbearable. The
medication knocked me out, so I would sleep – dreamless,
catatonic – through the nightly wake-ups, leaving Hannah
exhausted. I later realised I was associating the baby with
the pain. It hurt me to hold my baby.
Other people were sympathetic – at least, at first. The
thing about chronic pain is that it is invisible. For most
people, pain is temporary, so after a while everyone forgets.
“Oh, the arm thing? Is that still going on?” my colleagues
would say, half-heartedly. The receptionist at the GP surgery
started to seem irritated at the sound of my voice: “Is it
about your hand again?” Others were well-meaning, if ill-
judged. One doctor, after listening to me worry aloud about
never being able to work again, suggested earnestly: “Well,
is there a job you can do that doesn’t involve your hands?”
To be in chronic pain is to live in phases. I would have
a good week followed by a bad month. Progress is never
linear, the doctors would say. I worried endlessly that I
would never work again, never again be able to pick up my
kids. A year became two years. My symptoms changed – the
locus of the pain slithering around my arm and up
into my neck, like some kind of parasite – but my 
mood didn’t. I grew used to living in this new body,
23 June 2023 The Guardian Weekly
44 This is going to hurt (for ever)
always hurting, always tired, always angry. The anger made
me ashamed; the shame led me further into the spiral.
One of the strangest things I’ve learned about pain is how
bound it is to attention. Soldiers in the heat of battle ignore
fatal injuries; nurses distract babies before administering
shots because scientists have proved it will hurt less. Dis-
tract the brain from pain with another sensation, and the
original pain is reduced. Perversely, this is true even with
chronic pain: one of the only times my arms wouldn’t hurt
was when I had a headache.
AND SO, I STARTED RESPONDING to some flare-ups by
hurting myself. Not in a life-threatening way – I never drew
blood – but enough to distract me from my everyday hurt
with a newer, more visceral one. I’ll be clear: I was stupid.
I was expressing the anger I felt at my body for betraying
me; it was some way of controlling the uncontrollable. I
Long suffering didn’t tell anyone else what I was doing, and took care not
Oliver Franklin- to make it obvious – until one evening my wife noticed that
Wallis: ‘In August, I had large bruises covering my thighs. We argued. I told
I will have been her I would stop. I didn’t.
in pain for The urge to hurt myself became darker. Ultimately, the
three years’ only way to not live with pain, I figured, was to not live
MARTIN POPE at all. The idea was like an earworm. Once it caught on
inside my head, I couldn’t seem to rid myself it. “What if?”
quickly turned into “How?” The only thing stopping me was
the thought of leaving my girls fatherless. (In this, too, it
turns out I am not alone: as many as half of all chronic pain
patients may report suicidal thoughts. In the US, nearly one
in 10 suicides is a chronic pain sufferer.)
One night that summer, in the midst of my darkest
period, my wife and I argued for what felt like the mil-
lionth time. Overcome, I told her the truth about how I was
feeling. I don’t recall exactly what I said, but I don’t think it
was particularly eloquent. I can’t do it. I can’t hurt any more.
It was then that she gave me an ultimatum: seek help, or
I would lose them anyway. It was only then that I realised
how much I needed help, and how the pain had poisoned
my thinking. “Chronic pain isn’t just pain that doesn’t stop,”
writes Julia Buckley in her memoir Heal Me, “it puts your
entire body in a chrysalis and morphs you into a monster.”
I found a better therapist, privately. If I had waited for
an NHS appointment, I might not be here now – and, well,
a year or so later, here I am, writing this story.
The medical professionals who have most helped me
through this journey have been the unexpected ones: the
osteopath who took me and my curiosity seriously, even if
the treatment did nothing; the pain nurse who helped me
navigate medication withdrawal; the physiotherapist who
taught me more about getting some joy back into my life,
and in so doing saved me more than any exercise.
N AUGUST, I WILL HAVE BEEN HURTING FOR
THREE YEARS. For most of that time, I have
held on to hope: the hope that I was just the
right scan, the right referral, away from the per-
son who would diagnose the thing. The person
who would fix it – fix me – and make my life the
way it was before.
That was until a few months ago, when I
went for a routine checkup with the consultant at my pain
clinic (neither of which I will name here). The appointment
did not start well. The consultant, a surly man, seemed to
take an issue with my blunt tone, and how unhappy I was
The Guardian Weekly 23 June 2023
about my treatment. He asked me what I wanted from them.
To get better, I thought. Instead, I explained that among
my ever-changing symptoms was a strange anomaly: when
I bend my head down to change my daughter’s nappy, I
get an uncomfortable, prickly heat sensation through my
abdomen and down my arms. Surely, I thought, there must
be a physical reason behind it. Something in the spine, a
pinching somewhere. That, I thought, couldn’t be just in
my head.
I don’t recall the exact details of the rest of the
conversation because of my emotional response to what
happened next. At some point, after condescendingly
explaining that “all pain is psychological”, the consult-
ant made a joke: “If you really want the pain to go away,
I could give you a hammer, and you could take it to your
big toe.” I think he was making a point about attention. All
I heard was a medical professional, inside a pain clinic,
making a self-harm joke towards someone who had been
recently suicidal. Incensed, I confronted him about it and
complained formally to the hospital. He later apologised,
but the damage was done.
It’s funny: a few months earlier, that interaction might
have sent me into another spiral. But, to my surprise, in
the weeks after the appointment, something inside me
lifted. I finally accepted that, as well-meaning as the
medical professionals might be, they were no longer
really trying to make me better. Not better in the way that
I intended. To them, I was a lost cause. The sensation was
not of failure, but of closure.
Antony Chuter, an ambassador for the charity Pain UK,
describes this realisation as passing through the “first stage”
of living with chronic pain. The processes that pain patients
go through – anger, denial, depression – he told me, are
akin to grief. Rather than another person, I was grieving
my former self. The next step, as Chuter put it, is about
self-actualisation: the realisation that, long-term, the only
person who is going to make me better is me.
A few months ago, at the urging of my excellent new
physiotherapist, I started reintroducing the hobbies I had
neglected. I bought myself a new guitar; I threw myself back
into playing with my kids; I started to make an effort to go
out more with friends, and even play sport occasionally.
I anticipated that most of those things would lead to ago-
nising flare-ups. Instead, my life, and my mood, improved
measurably. And, because pain intensity is so clearly linked
to emotion, as my mood has lifted, so has the pain.
Pain researchers now understand that the key to recovery
from chronic pain is neuroplasticity: finding a way to retrain
the brain through a combination of cognitive behavioural
therapy and other methods, to try to desensitise the nerv-
ous system. To convince my body that it is no longer under
attack, and close the gate for good. Pacing, as pain therapists
call it – short bursts, here and there – is crucial. But so, too, it
turns out, is joy. So now whenever Edith (these days a viva-
cious two-year-old) needs me, I hold her as tightly as I can.
The pain isn’t gone – it may never be gone; I know that.
But, for now, it doesn’t have control. I still have so many
questions that remain unanswered. But I’ve learned
that even if I can’t rid myself of pain, I can at least ease
the suffering •
OLIVER FRANKLIN-WALLIS WRITES ABOUT SCIENCE, HEALTH
AND ENTERTAINMENT
International support helplines can be found at
befrienders.org
 45
Comment is free, facts are sacred CP Scott 1918

GEORGE MONBIOT
The far-right
warms to
climate chaos
Page 48 Q

U N I T E D S TAT E S
The different reasons why Ellsberg
and Trump took classified material
Rebecca Solnit

 Daniel
Ellsberg at a
1970s press
conference
HULTON ARCHIVE/
GETTY

23 June 2023 The Guardian Weekly

46 Opinion
ast Friday, a man who leaked
classified national security
documents to the press died at the
age of 92 at his home in the San
Francisco Bay Area. Last Tuesday, a
man who took classified documents
to his Miami home that was also a
resort frequented by a wide array of
characters, refused to surrender them, and unleashed
a flock of lies about the whole business, was arraigned
on 37 felony charges.
We know that Daniel Ellsberg leaked documents
in the hopes of stopping a war, preventing deaths,
and exposing a government that had through five
presidencies lied about that war in Vietnam to
justify and perpetuate it. We don’t know exactly
why Donald J Trump absconded from the White
House with top secret material. But there are no
good explanations for those boxes stacked on the
stage, in the bathroom and spilling on to the floor of
a storeroom, and dragged back to another insecure
location at Trump’s country club in New Jersey, or
for his refusal to surrender the material when the
government demanded it.
The reasons to protect national security
are pretty much built into the term itself. The
reasons to violate national security vary widely.
Whistleblowers such as Ellsberg are often high-
profi le figures acting on principle, not as enemies
of the regime but as opponents of policies and as
champions of justice or the right of the public to
know. They seek to hold government accountable,
often out of a patriotic loyalty trying to make the
government what it should be.
Ellsberg was a strong defender of Edward
Snowden, who in 2013 exposed the US government’s
post-9/11 violation of privacy laws to spy on US
citizens. Snowden was akin to Ellsberg as an insider,
an expert and a man who made a careful and
considered decision about both what to leak and
how. There has, of course, also been a steady trickle
of spies on all sides who sold intelligence to foreign
nations for money or occasionally because they were
seduced by an agent of a foreign regime.
Donald Trump was never a spy so far as we know,
but he was a sieve when it came to state secrets
and a beneficiary of leaks that seemed intended to
serve exactly that purpose. In June and October
Donald Trump was
never a spy so far as
we know, but he was
a sieve when it came
to state secrets and a
beneficiary of leaks
The Guardian Weekly 23 June 2023
of 2016, WikiLeaks dumped information hacked
from Democrats with the apparent intent of aiding
Trump’s election. In 2020, a lawyer for the WikiLeaks
head, Julian Assange, told a British court: “US
president Donald Trump offered to pardon WikiLeaks
founder Julian Assange if he said that Russia had
nothing to do with WikiLeaks’ publication of
Democratic party emails in 2016.” In May of 2017,
Trump spilled high-level intelligence to the Russian
foreign secretary and ambassador; in the memorable
picture of the meeting he looks baffled, and they look
like the cats that just ate the canary.
Ellsberg, who at the time of his momentous act
was himself in the business of national security and
held a high-security clearance, handed over the
Pentagon Papers to newspapers who themselves
took huge risks to publish them. As the New York
Times summarised it, the documents Ellsberg and
his close allies so painstakingly and surreptitiously
photocopied, were “7,000 government pages
of damning revelations about deceptions by
successive presidents who exceeded their authority,
bypassed Congress and misled the American
people” in order to fight an unwinnable war against
a remote and impoverished country that posed no
military threat to the US.
In an email in which he disclosed that he had only
months to live, Ellsberg reiterated: “When I copied
the Pentagon Papers in 1969, I had every reason to
think I would be spending the rest of my life behind
bars. It was a fate I would gladly have accepted if
it meant hastening the end of the Vietnam war,
unlikely as that seemed.” Later in life he admitted
that his action didn’t end the war, but it helped end
the Nixon presidency, making an end to the war
possible. He infuriated and terrified Richard Nixon,
who used illegal methods to try to undermine
Ellsberg. Those acts by a sitting president instead
undermined the case against Ellsberg, whose
criminal charges were dismissed.
Ellsberg devoted the rest of his long life
to speaking up about the dangers of nuclear
weapons and war, human
Rebecca rights, the overreaches of the
Solnit is a federal government and further
Guardian US wars including George W Bush’s
columnist 2003 invasion of Iraq. He was a
beloved figure in the San Francisco
Bay Area, often seen at anti-nuclear demonstrations,
arrested dozens of times in protest.
Ellsberg’s death and Trump’s indictment, so close
together last week, remind us that national security is
regularly violated, sometimes by idealists committed
to the public good, sometimes by opportunists
serving themselves. Ellsberg’s life is also remarkable
as an example of someone who changed his mind, his
life and his values – he was a cog in the machinery of
war, and then he risked his future to stand against that
war and the government perpetrating it.
A great truth teller has left us. A liar whose
mendacity has no equal remains for us to deal with •

C U LT U R E
Architecture’s push for
traditional forms is a
critique of globalisation
his year’s Venice Architecture
Biennale, titled Laboratory for the
Future, was inaugurated on the same
day that the leaders of the G7 nations
met in Hiroshima. Both signalled
the end of globalisation, and both
displayed the promise and perils of
a fragmenting world.
Of all the arts, architecture is the most globally
homogenising. Erecting copycats of Paris and London
was a staple of European colonial policy. Today, the
same glass-and-steel tower blocks dot interchangeable
financial capitals the world over.
But the 2023 Biennale’s curator, the Ghanaian-Scottish
architect Lesley Lokko, is using the event to critically
reassess that one-world narrative. “The dominant
voice,” Lokko writes in the exhibition introduction, “has
historically been a singular, exclusive voice, whose reach
and power ignores huge swathes of humanity.”
Brazil’s show centres on unearthing the architectural
and living practices concealed by the establishment of
the country’s modernist capital, Brasília. Modernism,
▲ The installation the architectural style that spread after the second world
Kwaee by Adjaye war, we are told, represented a “colonial invasion” of
Associates at “the Indigenous nations of central Brazil”.
this year’s Venice And yet, modernism was a universal language
Architecture shaped by non-western architects. Tropical Modernism,
Biennale a contribution to the Biennale by London’s V&A,
VINCENZO PINTO/AFP/ shows that precolonial building practices were
GETTY
highly influential in its development. But modernism
47
originated in the colonial centre and from it developed
one language fit for the planet as a whole.
As an alternative to it, the Nigerian architect Tosin
Oshinowo claims only tradition can provide a “nuanced
understanding of the environment, culture, and
context”. And tradition is everywhere in this Biennale.
Many contributions to the main exhibition dig into
their own particular, civilisational past, with a focus
on materials, ways of building, of being, and modes of
sociability firmly anchored in their place of origin.
Many of the works in this show go a step further,
where pride in the rediscovery of one’s own traditions
takes centre stage and the west fades into irrelevance.
China offers the main cautionary tale. If modernity
imposed a universal conversation anchored in colonial
bias, it also spread the claim to the universality of
democracy, the rule of law and human rights. Does
denouncing all universal aspiration as a homogenising
and colonial imposition run the risk of becoming an
enabling factor for nationalism and authoritarianism?
The Chinese ambassador to Italy cancelled his
participation at the opening of the Biennale in protest at
the inclusion of an installation by the British architect
Alison Killing, which used satellite images to document
and visualise Chinese internment camps for Uyghurs.
China’s political tradition never
Lorenzo included human rights or democracy.
Marsili is a Should we respect that tradition,
philosopher too? The Chinese government argues
and activist that we should. It is a shame that the
Biennale features almost no Chinese
contributions to the main exhibition. It is responsible
for much of Africa’s infrastructure boom, and exploring
its claims to civilisational uniqueness may have helped
shed light on the darker side of this return to tradition.
As the Biennale opened in Venice, the authoritarian
Indian prime minister Narendra Modi was inaugurating
the controversial Central Vista redevelopment in Delhi, a
megastructure celebrating Indian architectural tradition
and Hindu nationalism. Meanwhile, Turkey’s president,
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was busy winning re-election;
his own authoritarian regime proudly builds tradition-
inspired Turkish nationalism.
Authoritarians often portray universalism as the
product of European gunboats to justify their trampling
of allegedly imported western democratic values.
Let there be no mistake: we should celebrate our
collective departure from fake western universalism. A
world built on multiplicity and interaction among equals
is a world where people will be freer and happier.
How does multiplicity not slide into relativism? Is
tradition and identity and the slippery slope towards
nationalism all we have left, or can we imagine a new
universalism binding together a common humanity?
Lokko’s Laboratory for the Future offers a glimpse
into our present moment. It is the joyous, hopeful face of
a fragmenting world. This makes it a resonant, powerful
exhibition. Yet this also means some urgent questions
for the future are left hanging. As globalisation continues
to unravel, we will need a laboratory for a new planetary
universalism to try to answer them •
23 June 2023 The Guardian Weekly
48 Opinion
GLOBAL
H E AT I NG Why the chaos of the
climate catastrophe
suits the extreme right
George Monbiot
ound the cycle turns. As millions
are driven from their homes by
climate disasters, the extreme right
exploits their misery to extend its
reach. As the extreme right gains
power, climate programmes are
shut down, heating accelerates and
more people are driven from their
homes. If we don’t break this cycle soon, it will become
the dominant story of our times.
A recent paper in the scientific journal Nature
identifies the “human climate niche”: the range of
temperatures and rainfall within which human societies
thrive. We have clustered in the parts of the world with
The Guardian Weekly 23 June 2023
a climate that supports our flourishing, but in many
of these places the niche is shrinking. Already, around
600 million people have been stranded in inhospitable
conditions by global heating. Current global policies are
likely to result in about 2.7C of heating by 2100. On this
trajectory, some 2 billion people may be left outside the
niche by 2030, and 3.7 billion by 2090. If governments
limited heating to their agreed goal of 1.5C, the numbers
exposed to extreme heat would be reduced fivefold. But
if they abandon their climate policies, this would lead
to around 4.4C of heating. In this case, by the end of the
century around 5.3 billion people would face conditions
that ranged from dangerous to impossible.
Already, India, Nigeria, Indonesia, the Philippines,
Pakistan, Afghanistan, Papua New Guinea, Sudan,
Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali and Central America face
extreme risk. Weather events such as massive floods and
intensified cyclones and hurricanes will keep hammering
countries . Many people will have to move or die.
In the rich world we can greatly limit the damage
caused by environmental breakdown, for which our
nations and citizens are primarily responsible. But these
choices are being systematically shut down. Culture
war entrepreneurs, often funded by billionaires and
commercial enterprises, cast even the most innocent
attempts to reduce our impacts as a conspiracy to
Illustration Danielle Rhoda
 Founded 1821 Independently owned by the Scott Trust

curtail our freedoms. Everything becomes contested:

low-traffic neighbourhoods, 15-minute cities, heat
pumps. It’s becoming ever harder to discuss crucial
The west must admit
issues such as SUVs, meat-eating and aviation calmly
and rationally. Climate science denial, which had almost
vanished a few years ago, has now returned with a
responsibility for the latest
vengeance. Environmental scientists and campaigners
are bombarded with claims that they are stooges, shills,
communists, murderers and paedophiles.
migrant boat tragedy

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

23 June 2023 The Guardian Weekly

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

A WEEK
IN VENN
DI AGR A MS
Edith Pritchett

The Guardian Weekly 23 June 2023

 51
Film, music, art, books & more

MUSIC
Suite sounds:
on the road with
cellist Yo-Yo Ma
Page 54 Q

One of the world’s most

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

Out of the shadows

23 June 2023 The Guardian Weekly
52 Culture
Visual arts
INTERVIEW WANTED TO SEE IF THE PLANTS COULD
By Philip CONTRIBUTE SOMETHING,” says Hito
Oltermann Steyerl, sitting in the office of her Berlin
COVER gallery. “I feel it’s a good idea to take
PHOTOGRAPH humans out of the equation a bit.”
Christian Described as a post-internet artist –
Jungeblodt someone who uses the tools of digital
technology to tackle broader social issues
beyond web culture – Steyerl is credited as the creator of
one of the works in Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of
Crisis, a group show at London’s Hayward Gallery. But in a
way the true creative force behind the piece, called Green
Screen, isn’t her at all. It’s not even human.
On the back of a giant LED screen, Steyerl has arranged
a vertical garden with ferns and hops. The plants gener-
ate bioelectrical signals, which are translated into sounds
that have been paired with a rudimentary drum track. The
results, which come warbling out of a pair of speakers, are
fed into an AI engine that turns them into heavily pixelated
animations of budding flowers.
Taking humans out of the equation, making art that is
a sort of disappearing act, harks back to what is probably
Steyerl’s best-known work, the 2013 film How Not to Be
Seen, in which she hides behind placards, covers her head
The Guardian Weekly 23 June 2023
▼ Deconstructed
Hito Steyerl’s work employs
technology, in humorous
and handmade ways, to pose
questions about society
ANDREW KREPS GALLERY;
HAYWARD GALLERY
with cardboard boxes, and smears herself with face paint,
allowing her to blend into a green screen. Meanwhile, a
rasping robo-voice offers satirical advice, including “living
in a gated community”, “being fitted with an invisibility
cloak” and “being female and over 50”.
It’s fair to say this strategy isn’t working for the now
57-year-old artist: the more Steyerl tries to disappear, the
more visible she becomes. Four years after she finished
How Not to Be Seen, she became the first woman to top
ArtReview magazine’s Power 100 list, for her “political
statement-making and formal experimentation” (last year’s
list has her at fourth place). Her renown on the international
stage led her to be courted in political circles in her native
Germany. In 2021, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the president,
offered her its highest honour, the Federal Cross of Merit.
Steyerl declined in protest against how Germany handled
Covid, calling its partial lockdown “half-baked and endless”.
Her shows – or the comments she makes around them
– start debates that reverberate beyond gallery spaces.
Last year, she pulled work from the Documenta show in
Kassel over a scandal about another work condemned for
its antisemitic imagery – a decision that contributed to the
exhibition director’s resignation and catapulted Steyerl
from the arts sections to the front pages.

The main reason it is hard to stay invisible, she says,
is that her idea of art relies on saying out loud things that
others may keep quiet about. “I think my approach is best
summarised with the colloquial elephant in the room. These
elephants are everywhere, but people pretend they aren’t.”
For her 2019 solo show at London’s Serpentine Gallery,
Steyerl made videos of activists wandering through
surrounding Kensington, the richest borough of a city
that, according to Forbes, is home to more billionaires
than any other in Europe. The activists talk about disability
rights, the exploitations of the gig economy and welfare
cuts. An augmented reality app for visitors removed the
Sackler name from the gallery’s facade. The family’s
record of donating to the Serpentine and other institu-
tions has been overshadowed by its role in the US opioid
addiction crisis. The Serpentine physically removed the
name three years later.
The instinct to drag taboos out of the shadows has been
with Steyerl since she was a teenager. Born in Munich in
1966, to a physicist German father and a biochemist Jap-
anese mother, she grew up in the “democratorship” of
Bavaria under Franz Josef Strauss, the strongman state pre-
mier. “I was surrounded by elephants: the Nazi past of poli-
ticians, corruption, incredible police violence, repression
against outsiders.” She was expelled from school aged 15,
after squatting a building and throwing stones at a Deutsche
Bank, and didn’t finish her secondary education.
Does she see art as a way to point a finger at social
injustices, to educate people? “No,” she says instantly. “It
would be pointless if art worked like that. If you want to
make a difference with art, which is a motive I perceive as
questionable, then the single most stupid approach would
be to tell people off. It would be a surefire way not to get
through to people. And it would be the opposite of think-
ing.” She pauses and adds: “I don’t like being lectured – and
I expect my viewers don’t either.”
The full title of Steyerl’s disappearance film was How Not
to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, but
whatever didacticism her work contains is never taken too
seriously. Sometimes confusingly so. During our interview,
choppy industrial metal chords echo from the room next
door. This is Contemporary Cave Art, a site-specific version
of the film installation she withdrew from Documenta.
The work bubbles with ideas drawing connections
between Keynesian economic theory and battle royale
video games, not to mention the “Disney ecology” and a
satirical cryptocurrency called Cheesecoin. It’s dizzying:
serious yet ironic. I had to watch it twice before I thought
I could trace her lines of thought. In the third viewing, I
got distracted by the dancing wolves again. It wasn’t the
opposite of thinking, but it wasn’t quite thinking either.
WHAT SETS STEYERL APART FROM OTHER ACTIVIST ARTISTS
is that she puts her money where her mouth is. Last year,
she bought back one of her works from Julia Stoschek, a
collector of video art and an heir to the car parts company
Brose. Steyerl made her decision after an interview in
Der Spiegel in which Stoschek defended her company,
which was accused of not doing enough to investigate how
her great-grandfather Max Brose, a Nazi party member,
had profited from Jewish expropriations and slave labour
in the Third Reich.
Declining the Federal Cross in 2021, Steyerl criticised
the German government for not offering equal support for
53
artists across the board during the pandemic’s lockdown
months. Two years on, she says she would do the same,
while accepting that government support in Germany was
comparatively generous. “My gallery was open,” she says,
“but music schools for children remained closed. That
wasn’t fair. I’m aware that there was a lot of state aid for
commercial culture. But non-commercial culture was left
by the side. I am aware artists and institutions in the UK
had a much rougher time. But is this a sufficient reason for
accepting a German decoration?”
Green Screen, which sits alongside works by Cornelia
Parker, Richard Mosse and Otobong Nkanga, is meant
to make us think about the materials used to make the
screens we all spend so much of our lives looking at. The
LED monitor that shows the flower animations generated by
the plants on its flipside was almost entirely built by Steyerl
herself, based on a prototype originally developed by a
Berlin hacker collective called C-base. It features a wall of
beer crates turned on their sides, with the lit-up bottoms of
recyclable bottles serving as rudimentary pixels. The LEDs
inside the bottles were made in China, Steyerl concedes, but
points out that her self-built screen uses about 1,000 lights
compared to the 8.3m found in a regular screen.
“It’s an experiment and a prototype,” she says, “a
visualisation of a question, not a solution. I tried to think
about how we could extricate our-
selves from our dependency on the
large tech cartels.”
I don’t like These cartels, she argues, “steal
our data and use it for their personal
being ends. They polarise and poison our
lectured public discourse. In the context of
the show, one of the big questions is
– and I around the ecological footprint, the
question of what kind of materials
expect my are used in TV or LED screens.” ▼ Influencer
viewers Given that Steyerl makes Steyerl was
electricity-hungry video installa- dubbed the most
don’t either tions in the middle of an energy powerful working
crisis that has left households artist in 2017
across Europe facing saving targets, it’s a question that CHRISTIAN JUNGEBLODT
could also be directed at her. When I email a follow-up
question about the carbon footprint of Contemporary Cave
Art, she responds within three hours – with a calculation
of the greenhouse gases generated by computers, screens
and projectors, which comes to about 200kg of CO2. She
also lists the steps she took to reduce this, by forsaking a
flight, for example, or recycling elements from other shows.
One way to explain Steyerl’s rise to prominence is that
few other socially conscious artists are so energetically
engaged in an argument to justify their own existence. In my
followup, I also ask whether holding herself accountable,
applying the same standards to herself that she applies to
others, is sustainable in the long run. Does it spur her on?
Is there not a point where it will get too exhausting?
“As a dialectical materialist,” she writes back, “I do not
believe that social contradictions can be solved individu-
ally. On the other hand, if you give up on trying to articulate
them altogether, you end up depressed and cynical. So you
navigate between different impossibilities and keep failing
in all directions, obviously. But what’s the alternative?” •
PHILIP OLTERMANN IS THE GUARDIAN’S BERLIN BUREAU CHIEF
Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis is at the
Hayward Gallery, London, to 3 September
54 Culture
Music
covered buses that millions in the city rely on
to get around.
Mutua said such symbolism bridges perceived
gaps: “Classical music has a class – no pun
intended. It is seen to belong to a type of people.”
With Ma’s unassuming manner, there is little to
let on that he is a 19-time Grammy award-winning
internationally-renowned musician who has
played on the world’s largest stages.
Nairobi was the last stop of Ma’s Bach Project
– a five-year, six-continent global tour. With its
rising cultural and artistic scene, organisers said
the city was near the top of the cellist’s list.
The project marked Ma’s ambition to connect
cultures and people across the world, perform-
ing Johann Sebastian Bach’s cello suites in 36
countries – a nod to the much celebrated six cello
suites (which he has called his “constant musical
companions”), each of which has six sections.
Ma has recorded interpretations of the
suites three times, with more than a decade
between each.
They are wrapped up with his life’s memories,
he has said, citing his first encounter with Bach’s
music when he was four: his father, Dr Hiao-
Tsiun Ma, taught him the first suite in small,
incremental steps with exceptional dedication.
Ma Sr, who lived in both China and France, had
turned to Bach’s music for refuge during the

Bach on the
second world war, memorising the sonatas and
partitas over the long days, to play them to him-
self at night. “For almost six decades, they have
given me sustenance, comfort, and joy during

road again
times of stress, celebration and loss,” Ma wrote
at the start of the Bach Project in 2018. “What
power does this music possess that even today,
after 300 years, it continues to help us navigate
through troubled times?”
Beyond busking, Ma took to a more
conventional stage with a concert at the Kenya
national theatre. His audience there was a classi-

N
airobi’s bustling Kenyatta market is an
Cellist Yo-Yo Ma has been unlikely place to hear classical music.
on a five-year tour to bring Yet playing earlier this month in front
joy to the world through of stalls where butchers roast meat and
hairdressers compete over heads to braid was a
classical music. On the final very surprising busker: the distinguished cellist
stop in Kenya, he took that Yo-Yo Ma. Playing Over the Rainbow alongside
Kenyan percussionist Kasiva Mutua, he matched
mission to the streets his cello to her beats in a truly eclectic mix.
Ma’s broad artistic sensibilities mad e
By Caroline Kimeu weaving together the diverse musical tradi-
tions of drum and cello seem like a natural fit.
“It was symbolic to introduce [classical] music
to the crowd through something they know and
understand,” said Mutua. “Africans understand
rhythm to their core.”
▲ End note  Overture Ma’s pop-up market performance typified
Yo-Yo Ma’s final Kenyan classical much of his visit to the city – a daring, head-
performance, in musicians give a first dive into the realities of Kenyan artists.
Nairobi, on his performance on He bashfully made occasional use of Sheng – a
six-continent the day of Ma’s Nairobi slang that mixes and plays on words
Bach Project tour concert from English and Swahili, and he arrived at the
EDWIN NDEKE EDWIN NDEKE market in a matatu – the music-blaring, graffiti-
cal crowd – the $145 auditorium tickets sold out
in 24 hours – with prominent members including
the arts minister, Ababu Namwamba, and the US
ambassador, Meg Whitman.
Ma played as though he was the only person in
the room. Only the loud applause broke through
to him, earning his bow and embrace of the audi-
ence, arms flung wide. The solemn, lonely fifth
cello suite – his penultimate performance – made
the auditorium fall silent.
From a viewing room on the upper balcony,
Brian Kivuti, a 34-year-old Kenyan jeweller, lis-
tened with closed eyes. “For me, it was a practice
in presence,” he said. “There are no lyrics telling
you how to feel. It’s just the music and you, feel-
ing your way through, so you pay more attention
to how the notes make you feel.”
At the theatre’s Wasanii restaurant, work-
ers perched on rooftop balcony seats to watch
a screening of the performance. For Margaret
Wanjiru, a 22-year-old waitress, Ma’s music was
a far cry from what she knows, such as her tribe’s
Mugiithi. “It may not be the music I grew up with,

The Guardian Weekly 23 June 2023


but it slows you down, however much you’re
busy, and allows you to get lost in your thoughts.”
The Nairobi Orchestra, one of the oldest in
Africa, performed ahead of Ma’s set, and its musi-
cians were thrilled to have him in the auditorium.
Violinist Bernadette Muthoni said: “For me,
it was very huge to think that Ma was going to
play just a few metres from where we were. He’s
what a lot of us aspire to.”
Ma’s evening performance was followed by a
“day of action” where he engaged directly with
communities. He explored the Kenyan capi-
tal accompanied by local artists, taking to the
streets with Dennis Muraguri, a Kenyan visual
artist who documents matatu culture through
camera and prints.
At the Kaloleni Social Hall, a place of great
postcolonial symbolism, Ma walked in on a
performance by the Ghetto Classics, a music
programme for children from disadvantaged
backgrounds.
“He couldn’t keep his eyes off them,” said
Sharon Machira, a Kenyan creator, who accom-
panied the cellist on the tour.
Watching Ma, who started his musical journey
early and became a child prodigy, she thought he
may have seen his younger self through them.
“I think he really identifies with ‘the other’,
because everything he does is about breaking
down barriers.”
Later, he visited the Kakuma refugee camp,
home to more than 200,000 people, for a music
collaboration with artists from South Sudan,
Burundi, the DRC and Ethiopia.
Ma is increasingly interested in using his work
for social impact. He played outside the Russian
Embassy in Washington DC last year to protest
against its war in Ukraine, and dedicated his
Songs of Comfort to providing solace for people
during the difficult days of the pandemic. The
Bach Project and its conclusion in Nairobi are
further milestones on that journey.
CAROLINE KIMEU IS THE GUARDIAN’S EAST AFRICA
GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT CORRESPONDENT
Reviews
MUSIC
The Weeknd
Etihad Stadium, Manchester
★★★★☆
The Weeknd’s 2023 stadium tour –
postponed so many times that its
title features the name of his most
recent album, Dawn FM, and its
2020 predecessor, After Hours – is
nothing if not spectacular.
The set is a vast metallic
cityscape, filled with ruined
landmarks – St Paul’s Cathedral,
Toronto’s CN Tower and the Empire
State Building among them – which
belch fire or shoot violet-coloured
lasers. Most of the action takes
place on a runway that stretches
nearly the full length of the pitch.
The walkway is decorated with an
immense moon and an even more
immense model of the Hajime
Sorayama-designed robot featured
in the video for 2011’s Echoes of
Silence. The song doesn’t feature in
the setlist, but no matter: the model
provides a focal point for dancers,
clad in white robes and veils. All this
is intended to represent “a journey
through a cosmic cataclysm”.
Coupled with the speed at which
the numbers are dispatched – they
are truncated and segue into each
other, which enables the Weeknd to
cram 33 songs into just under two
hours – it’s a lot to take in.
On stage, Abel Tesfaye is
a noticeably sweeter but less
charismatic figure than you might
expect. The air of mystery projected
by his videos is punctured slightly
by the sight of him playing air
guitar. Tesfaye has been making
noises about this being his final
tour, at least as the Weeknd. If this is
a kind of retirement party, then it’s
a euphorically celebratory one.
Alexis Petridis
Touring Europe until August, and
Mexico and South America in
September and October
Podcast of the week Objeks & Tings
This celebratory podcast from Catherine Ross and Lynda Burrell,
founders of Museumand, the UK’s National Caribbean Heritage
Museum, brings generations together to discuss their heritage. In
the first episode, author Riaz Phillips talks about the magic of his
mum’s dutchie and the merits of “the burnt bit”. Hannah Verdier
55
FILM
Asteroid City
Dir: Wes Anderson
★★★★☆
To say that he’s done it again is
going to mean something different
to fans and non-fans. But I have
to say the first category is the
only place to be for what is simply
a terrifically entertaining and
lightly sophisticated comedy from
Wes Anderson, in his signature
rectilinear, deadpan style and with
his all-star ensemble cast. Regulars
including Jason Schwartzman and
Tilda Swinton are joined by Scarlett
Johansson and Tom Hanks, above.
Asteroid City’s eccentricity,
elegance, gaiety, and profusion of
detail make it a pleasure. With every
new shot, your eyes dart around the
screen, grabbing at all the painterly
little jokes and embellishments.
It is sometime in the mid-1950s
in a town called Asteroid City, the
location for an annual convention
honouring teen inventors. As the
kids and their parents assemble,
a staggering event happens.
As ever, there is little or no
emotional content, despite the
ostensible subject of grief. It is
tempting to consider this savant
blankness as some kind of symptom,
but it is the expression of style. And
what style it is. Peter Bradshaw
On general release
23 June 2023 The Guardian Weekly
56 Culture
Books
Cormac McCarthy showed us
America’s violent heart as he
wove a tapestry of anger, humour,
decency and bad behaviour
By Martin Pengelly
C
ormac McCarthy, who died on 13 June
aged 89, achieved fame relatively
late. He was nearly 60 when, in 1992,
his sixth novel, All the Pretty Horses,
brought him mainstream attention. The book
was a bestselling award-winner and it was
followed by The Crossing (1994) and Cities of
the Plain (1998), to form The Border Trilogy.
No Country for Old Men (2005) and
The Road (2006) sold well and won awards
too, the latter landing a Pulitzer. Both became
hit films, made by the Coen brothers and John
Hillcoat respectively. Then, after a 16-year long
silence, McCarthy’s final books arrived in 2022:
The Passenger and Stella Maris.
The paired novels met with mixed
reactions, particularly the austere Stella
Maris, a conversation between a suicidal
mathematical prodigy and her therapist.
Reviewers wondered at McCarthy’s attempt
to write a female lead; he wrote about men,
mostly. But in Stella Maris there were flashes
of his classic style too.
The Passenger also echoed his previous
works. Parts seemed to recall No Country
for Old Men, not least the opening scene of
a diver in the Gulf of Mexico discovering a
sunken plane, “the faces of the dead inches
away. Everything that could float was against
the ceiling. Pencils, cushions, styrofoam
coffeecups. Sheets of paper with the ink
draining off into hieroglyphic smears.” Other
parts read like a return to Suttree, McCarthy’s
epic of drifters in Knoxville, afloat on the
Tennessee River.
Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect
Storm, told me Suttree was McCarthy’s “most
brilliant novel, because it’s just his most
mundane”. It didn’t show the reader the
1840s Texas of Blood Meridian, McCarthy’s
“stunning” 1985 western, Junger said. Nor
was Suttree like The Road, “apocalyptic and
whatever, all big dramatic stuff. Suttree takes
place in Knoxville in fucking nothingness,
and it’s the most brilliant writing. It’s insane.
He’s so good.”
I confessed: I had not read Suttree.
“Are you fucking kidding?” Junger said.
“You have to read Suttree.”
I took his advice, went to the Strand on my
way to the subway. He was right.
McCarthy’s breakthrough novel, All
the Pretty Horses, was perhaps his most
conventional. The sense of an ancient
wilderness from which the Americas were
BEOWULF SHEEHAN/PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE/PA
The Guardian Weekly 23 June 2023
carved and to which they will return is palpable
on each page. In the second and third books of
the trilogy, McCarthy’s vision darkens, his style
fragments, the reader must work ever harder.
The Road, the story of a father and son’s
fight for survival in a blasted landscape after
an environmental catastrophe, is grim and
often hard to stomach. A plausible picture of
a society destroyed
by its own appetite,
its antecedents are
there in previous
Reviewers books, from the
deranged hillbilly in
wondered at Child of God to the
his attempt to harsh terrain of The
write a female Border Trilogy and
the seething horror of
lead; he wrote Blood Meridian. The
about men, Road ends on a note
mostly of hope – a faint one,
though.
No Country for
Old Men came next.
The Coen brothers’ film may have superseded
the book in the popular imagination, but
readers are unlikely to be disappointed. The
Coens took most of it straight from McCarthy’s
pages. Anton Chigurh, the hitman ultimately
played by Javier Bardem, is a descendant of
Judge Holden in Blood Meridian: implacable,
terrifying, Death on his white horse assuming
outlandish human form. Like the west Texas
landscape in which the drug deal gone awry
plays out, the book has terrible beauty. It helps
that it also rips along like a thriller.
So does Blood Meridian, for my money
McCarthy’s greatest novel, but more than that
– the greatest modern novel, the true successor
to Moby-Dick, a book in which McCarthy
pursues themes that Herman Melville
wrestled with but places his tale in the open
west, rather than at sea.
Cormac In Blood Meridian, McCarthy reaches
the peak of his style: spare and ornate,
McCarthy repetitious but endlessly readable. The
violence is appalling, as violence is. Through
1933
the maniacally eloquent Judge, McCarthy
contends a stark truth: that violence is what
–2023 men will always pursue. That violence is
what America was born from and will not
escape. Every time there is a school shooting,
I think of McCarthy’s tree, hung with the
bodies of dead infants.
In the end, McCarthy’s elemental brilliance
lies in perhaps the most famous lines in Blood
Meridian: “It makes no difference what men
think of war, said the judge. War endures.
As well ask men what they think of stone.
War was always here. Before man was, war
waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its
ultimate practitioner.”
MARTIN PENGELLY IS BREAKING NEWS EDITOR
FOR GUARDIAN US
 Culture 57
Books
stopping to nap, died last October, just two weeks
shy of her 94th birthday. In finishing the book
without her, Kraft has done her proud.
It begins with the Goslar family’s flight from
Berlin in 1934 after the Nazis came to power; Pick-
Goslar’s father, Hans, had spoken out against the
Nazis and feared for his safety. Arriving in Amster-
dam, Pick-Goslar met Frank, who was not only
the same age but another German Jew finding her
feet in a new country. She recalls her as small and
fragile-looking – “But her slightness belied her big
personality … I knew right away after meeting
Anne that she loved being the centre of attention.”
Their two families became close: Hans Goslar
used to play a prank on the Franks, standing on
their doorstep and ringing their doorbell dressed
as Hitler. But their carefree lives took a dark turn
when the Nazis invaded in May 1940. It took five
days for the Netherlands to surrender. Many Jews
in their neighbourhood took their own lives rather
than submit to what was to come.
It’s through a child’s eyes that she depicts their
shrinking existence under Nazi occupation as

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

23 June 2023 The Guardian Weekly

58 Culture
Books

T
FICTION he stakes in Brandon Taylor’s fiction are The Late Americans is a more ambitious,
always high – strikingly so, given these nimbly diffuse novel, moving between a large
are campus novels. Lovers and gods cast of characters, mainly gay graduate students
are cruel; life’s beauty is dangerously of dance or creative writing. The campus setting
Doll parts close to being unbearable. Early on in The Late enables the creation of basically similar people
Americans, graduate student poet Seamus pic- who define themselves by difference: who eats
A large cast of graduate tures his cohort as living in a dollhouse: “It was meat and who loathes the killing of animals; who
so easy to imagine the hands of some enormous applauds the death penalty and who loathes the
students on a midwest and indifferent God prying the house open and killing of humans; who has money and who has
campus grapple with squinting at them as they went about their lives to earn it by making low-key pornography.
… in an exhibit called The Late Americans.” Are There is an accomplished reticence about race
the details of their lives our lives spectacles? And how can we continue here: it’s revealed stealthily, usually at moments
that make up their to live when pain is ubiquitous and when characters encounter racism.
mundane? The answer is bodily con- This connects to the novel’s intrepidly
common experience nection, but physical encounters may questioning vision of identity poli-
result merely in the transfer of pain. tics. It opens with Seamus, the white
By Lara Feigel Taylor emerged aged 30 with his working-class gay poet whose vision
Booker-shortlisted 2020 debut Real of the “Late Americans” provides the
Life. This was a painful, often funny, book’s title, angry because his class-
always dazzling autobiographical The Late mates reduce a poem to “its increas-
novel, with the narrator closely inside Americans ing cultural salience re: women, re:
the head and body of its lonely Black, By Brandon trauma, re: bodies, re: life at the end
gay graduate student protagonist. Taylor of the world”. He hates these poetry
Taylor revealed himself as brilliant at workshops because he believes that
intense, awkward social comedy and revelatory, trauma has nothing to do with poetry; that a true
unerotic sex scenes. The skill was in the delinea- poem takes in the world, but bears no sign of the
tion of moment-by-moment bodily life, charting personal material that forges it.
tiny shifts between tenderness and violence and It is a daring move to start the book with this
the hourly exhaustion of being in a disordered provocation. I wonder if it’s less daring to have
body. Unusually, Taylor was prepared to tell as it come from a white man. This is a novel that
well as to show, using his characters to think hard believes in the possibility of great art and of poli-
about his world. tics and that wants both to be about more than
These were the strengths and preoccupations, identity. So are Seamus’s pronouncements the
too, of his 2021 short story collection, Filthy thoughts of the novel? It’s never quite clear.
Animals, featuring a series of complicatedly The time span is larger here than in Taylor’s
entangled characters. Again, there was the previous books. As with his realist heroes – Tol-
precise attention to bodily experience, the stoy, Austen, DH Lawrence – weeks or even
restrained but revelatory lyricism that could months pass in a single sentence. Likewise, we
illuminate the darkest material: “What he wants are entering new heads right up to the final chap-
is not to maim himself but rather to pry open the ter, and there’s a lonely swimming instructor
world, bone it, remove the ugly hardness of it all, called Bea who gets just a single section, looking
the way one might take the spine from a deer or out of her window at some of the other charac-
a fish or some other animal snared.” ters. Together, these elements give the novel
RYAN J LANE/GETTY

T
BIOGR APHY his book contains no new interviews praise tends to be tempered: “It’s the Bee Gees
about the “insanely productive” group … but it’s really good.”
who sold more than 220m records: we The brothers were born in the Isle of Man,
are simply given Bob Stanley’s opin- Barry in 1946, the twins, Robin and Maurice,
They win again ions about the Bee Gees’ music. But there are in 1949. Their father, a band leader, moved the
few people whose opinions I would rather have. family to Manchester, where in 1957 the three
A personal appraisal Stanley is an articulate proponent of pop rather sang Wake Up Little Susie at the Gaumont picture
than rock (his previous book was Let’s house in Chorlton. The next year, the
by a musician-fan of Do It: The Birth of Pop) and a practi- Gibbs moved to Australia, where the
the hugely successful, tioner, with his group, Saint Etienne. brothers became child stars and Barry
Pop has come in out of the cold. started writing. It seems Manchester
yet much maligned, Blondie is as likely to be pontificated rain, rather than Australian sun, per-
band of brothers about as Led Zeppelin, but the Bee sisted in their hits of the late 60s. Their
Gees – who were certainly “pop”, songs were “melancholic”, “death-
despite evolving through quasi- Bee Gees: haunted”. New York Mining Disaster
By Andrew Martin psychedelia into R&B and disco – Children of 1941 is about being buried alive. I’ve
remain, as Stanley writes, “othered”, the World Gotta Get a Message to You from the
rarely accorded the respect they By Bob Stanley perspective of a condemned prisoner.
deserve. And he suggests that any Their late 1970s shift towards R&B

The Guardian Weekly 23 June 2023

 59

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

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

23 June 2023 The Guardian Weekly

60 Lifestyle
ASK
Annalisa Barbieri
My persistent,
intrusive
thoughts are
hard to shift
I am a 76-year-old widower. I lost
my wife eight years ago and my
daughter moved out two years ago,
so I live alone. I have a reasonable
social life and a number of interests.
For about two years, I have been
plagued by intrusive thoughts that
I would cause harm to someone. I
am not sure why they persist. I am
not an aggressive person.
Thankfully, I have always been in
total control, but if you could give
me some advice as to how to lessen
the impact of these thoughts on my
life I would be most grateful.
I
am glad you wrote in, and
I’m very sorry to hear about
your wife. Eight years may
seem a long time, but in
emotional terms it’s not long at all.
It’s interesting that your intrusive
thoughts seem to have coincided
with your daughter leaving home.
Intrusive thoughts, that is to say
thoughts that are unwanted, are
fairly normal. They can vary from
imagining things we don’t want
(bad things happening to those
STEPHEN COLLINS
The Guardian Weekly 23 June 2023
we love or ourselves) to thoughts
of “what if ”: what if I did this to
myself or to someone else? I have
them sometimes – I first got them
when I became a mother and the
responsibility of it all overwhelmed
me. I still get them.
What we think, and what we
do, are very different things. Of
course, intrusive thoughts can be
a symptom of other mental health
disorders, and some people act on
them, but I don’t think that’s what’s
happening here.
I consulted two specialists
this week. UKCP-registered
psychotherapist Joanna Willow
and BPS-registered psychologist Dr
Harriet Garrod both have experience
in this field. Neither thought that,
on the evidence of what you’ve
said, there was anything untoward
for you to worry about. I hope
that makes you feel a little better.
However, obviously you’d rather not
have them. What we thought might
be happening is that, as a result of
living on your own, your thoughts
and feelings, instead of having an
outlet, are being turned inwards.
I asked why we might get these
thoughts. Willow said: “Intrusive
feelings tend to be fear-based, often
when we’re stressed.” According to
Garrod: “Sometimes they can come
from a place of unprocessed distress,
or trauma.”
We thought your wife dying and
then your daughter leaving may
have caused these feelings. You may
feel sad, angry, lonely or any manner
of other emotions.
What to do? Both my specialists
thought you could note down when
you have these thoughts. Garrod
suggested “writing down the trigger
and what it means, and then using
that to help you process. Then try to
look at what positive memories you
could create from that.”
For example, if you imagine
wanting to hurt someone, think:
“Why do I want to hurt someone?
What emotion do I feel?” Let’s say
it’s anger. Could you then think of
a happy memory that you had with
your wife to almost try to rewire the
process? “I’m angry because I really
love my wife and now I miss her.” It
sounds simplistic but it can work.
You’d benefit from talking
to someone. Although I’ve put
some links below, it could also be
to a friend or your daughter. I’m
guessing you might not want to
because you find these thoughts
frightening. But as Willow says:
“These thoughts don’t say anything
about who you are – but if you could
find a way to alleviate the stress and
anxiety … it might stop the cycle.”
I asked both my specialists when
to worry about intrusive thoughts
If you would and the answer is when things
like advice become impulsive instead of being
on a family just a thought, ie you have a real
matter, email compulsion to do something and
ask.annalisa@ your “wise/rational brain” can’t
theguardian. interject and/or when you start
com. See planning to do something.
theguardian. I think it might also be helpful to
com/letters- talk to your GP about counselling.
terms for terms Useful links include psychotherapy.
and conditions org.uk, bps.org.uk and mind.org.uk

Embrace the daily grind to unleash
a blast of flavour at mealtimes
We all have those trusty spices that
we reach for time and again to bring
flavour – Heat! Sweetness! Sourness!
– to a dish, but there are also those
that lurk at the back, unused
and unloved. To prevent Grace’s
cupboard from becoming a Schwartz
history museum (other brands are
available), she’s right to ask how
best to store them.
While supermarkets sell spices in
jars, it’s best not to keep them this
way. “They’ll lose their potency,
which is really the singular point
of a spice,” says Rachel Walker,
the founder of Rooted Spices and
co-author, alongside Esther Clark,
of The Modern Spice Rack. Instead,
store them in an opaque container
out of direct sunlight and away from
heat. This strategy is also endorsed
by Cynthia Shanmugalingam,
the chef/founder of Rambutan in
Borough Market, London. Her top
tip is to buy whole spices. Toasting
and grinding your spices fresh
makes a “huge” difference, she says.
Plus, they’ll keep longer.
One of the great joys of spices,
Clark says, is that they allow you
to be a more thrifty cook: “They
inject so much flavour.” Coriander
seeds, for example, could be
toasted and used to top dips and
salads, or crushed and whisked into
dressings, while Shanmugalingam
PHIVE2015/GETTY
even rice as it boils. Fish cooked
with coconut milk, tomatoes,
turmeric, fenugreek, black pepper
and curry leaves is a breakfast
Shanmugalingam “could eat every
day”, while surplus cardamom
might go into a buttermilk brine for
chicken. Another option, Clark adds,
is to combine paprika and butter to
rub under chicken skin.
Don’t be afraid to experiment:
“Spices you bought for something
savoury might also apply well to
sweet things,” Clark says. She often
toasts fennel seeds in butter to
drizzle over a tahini-yoghurt dip,
but you could also crush them to
macerate strawberries in with lemon
and sugar – those berries will then
work like a dream whizzed up for
a cocktail or churned into ice-cream.
And remember, you don’t
always have to finish a dish with
salt and pepper. “Taste and smell
your spices, get to know them, and
use them as a seasoning,” Clark
suggests. “Have a za’atar pinch
pot on your table and put some on
your scrambled eggs.” Walker,, for
f tl and let them cook for
example, deploys shichimi togarashi
on cheese on toast and gratedt
nutmeg on buttered crumpets (a tip
from her grower). “Just play with
flavours,” she says.
ANNA BERRILL IS A FOOD WRITER
a?
Got a culinary dilemma?
an.c
Email feast@theguardian.com
T H E W E E K LY R E C I P E
By N
Nigel Slater
№ 223
Panko prawns
Pa
with pea and
wi
coriander
co chutney
Serves
S er v
er 4 I like getting messy in the kitchen,
•D
DAIRY
AIR
A I FREE in particular crumbing something
that is to be fried. Dipping whole,
peeled prawns or rings of squid
first into seasoned flour, then
beaten egg and breadcrumbs to
give a crisp, savoury coat, leaves
your hands as stickily egged and
crumbed as the prawns. The
chutney can be made in seconds
IIngredients in a blender or food processor, but
panko breadcrumbs I like to pound the leaves, garlic
6 tbsp and oil with a pestle and mortar. It’s
2 eggs, lightly beaten a fragrant job, but it is harder work
plain flour, 4 tbsp
than the processor version.
400g large peeled
prawns, defrosted if
frozen Method
150ml groundnut or To make the chutney, chop the
vegetable oil coriander leaves and stems and put
them in a blender or food processor.
For the chutney Pour in the vegetable oil. Reduce the
75g coriander (leaves ginger to a puree with a fine grater,
and stems) then add to the blender with the
25ml vegetable oil
garlic, chillies, lime juice, water and
50g ginger, peeled
2 cloves garlic,
a pinch of sugar. Process to a thick
peeled paste. Add the peas and continue
2 large green chillies blending until you have a green,
60ml lime juice nubbly chutney.
3 tbsp water Put the breadcrumbs on a plate,
pinch of sugar the eggs into a shallow bowl and the
100g peas (podded flour in another. Season the flour
weight), raw with a little salt and black pepper.
One at a time, roll the prawns first in
the flour, then the egg, turning them
over to thoroughly coat, then in the
breadcrumbs, pressing them down
so the crumbs stick.
Warm the oil in a sauté pan or
similar high-sided frying pan.
When it starts to bubble, lower in
the prawns, without packing them
too tightly,
a couple of minutes. When the
underside of the prawns is pale gold,
turn them over with kitchen tongs
and colour the other side. Remove
and keep warm while you cook the
rest, then eat them with the chutney.
23 June 2023 The Guardian Weekly

62 Diversions
QUIZ
Thomas Eaton
1 Which three current
national capitals have
hosted the Winter
Olympics?
2 Eliza Davis protested
to Dickens that which
character was a negative
stereotype?
3 What is the world’s
heaviest snake?
4 Hitler, Mussolini and
FDR all died in which
month?
5 What type of mechanical
device is a paternoster?
6 In US medicine, DSM-5 is
the list of what?
7 The Grand Banks lie off
which Atlantic island?
PUZZLES
Chris Maslanka
1 Wordpool
Find the correct definition:
UGUISU
a) goat stew
b) mountain pass
c) bush warbler
d) Zulu shield
2 Bran tub
Make a name for yourself
out of: A LINEN HAT
CHESS
Leonard Barden
The Tech Mahindra
Global Chess League,
the first franchise-based
chess event, is being
played in Dubai to 2 July.
Six teams of six each
include an icon, two elite
GMs, two women GMs and
an under-21 junior.
Magnus Carlsen is
taking part, in what is
an opportunity for the
world No 1 to recover from
his failure at Stavanger,
where he drew eight
classical games and lost
one. It was the first time
since Dortmund 2007
that the Norwegian had
been winless in a classical
The Guardian Weekly 23 June 2023
8 Where were three Carlist
wars fought in the 19th
century?
What links:
9 Middle; archbishop or
urban; 360 degrees; 25th
anniversary; acceded 1837?
10 Arcesius; Laertes;
Odysseus; Telemachus?
11 All-seeing eye; square
and compasses; sheaf of
corn; acacia tree?
12 Argentina; Australian
Aboriginal; Bangladesh;
Japan; North Macedonia?
13 Rod Steiger; Robert De
Niro; Tom Hardy; Stephen
Graham?
14 Bual; malmsey; sercial;
verdelho?
15 Mecca (4th); Shanghai
(3rd) Kuala Lumpur (2nd);
Dubai (1st)?
3 Dropouts
Replace each asterisk by a
letter to make a word:
P*A*I*R*S*
4 Elementary
Rearrange the letters of the
phrase EDIBLE APRICOT
to make something of
chemical significance.
5 Cryptic
Distant objects were once
more than two a penny (9)
© CMM2023
round robin, and his worst
rating loss since Stavanger
2015. His ambition of
achieving a record 2900
rating now looks a dream.
Carlsen had already
bounced back in last
week’s preliminaries
for the online Aimchess
Rapid, where he overcame
an early loss to qualify for
the top division of eight.
He has also been
announced as the top
seed for the 206-player
knockout World Cup, the
only major competition
he has never won, which
will be staged in Baku,
Azerbaijan, starting on
30 July. The prize fund,
including for the parallel
103-player Women’s World
Cup, is a record €2.5m
CINEM A CONNECT
Killian Fox
Name the films and the person who
connects them.
by Kathryn Bigelow.
and The Hurt Locker (2008) – all directed
Dark Thirty (2012), Point Break (1991)
5 FARTHINGS. Cinema Connect Zero
3 PLAGIARISM. 4 PERIODIC TABLE.
Khalifa. Maslanka 1 c). 2 NATHANIEL.
Shanghai Tower; Merdeka 118; Burj
skyscrapers: Abraj Al-Bait Clock Tower;
wine. 15 Locations of world’s tallest
screen. 14 Grapes/main types of Madeira
featuring suns. 13 Played Al Capone on
son. 11 Masonic symbols. 12 Flags
Odysseus: grandfather; father; himself;
Victoria. 10 Family line of Greek hero
Central; Metropolitan; Circle; Jubilee;
8 Spain. 9 London Underground lines:
Mental Disorders). 7 Newfoundland.
(Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
revolving lift. 6 Mental disorders
anaconda. 4 April 1945. 5 Continuously
2 Fagin in Oliver Twist. 3 Green
Answers Quiz 1 Oslo, Sarajevo, Beijing.
($2.7m), including awards
for first-round losers.
John Nunn, the multi-
talented chess author,
grandmaster, publisher,
problem solver and
mathematician, added
another chapter to his
career when he won
the European over-65
championship at Acqui
Terme, Italy, scoring
7/9 and having the best
tiebreak. In 2022, Nunn
took the world over-65
crown, while in winning
both the over-50 and
over-65 world team titles
as well as the European
over-50, England
confirmed its status as
No 1 in senior chess.
The chess puzzle will return
next week
Notes and Queries
The long-running series that invites
readers to send in questions and
answers on anything and everything
COU N T RY DI A RY
L E Z AY R E
Isle of Man
I
t is hard to escape the noise
of the TT festival. On a small,
quiet island, the sudden arrival
of tens of thousands of visitors
on their motorbikes is a shock to
the system. Many residents look
forward to June when the island
bursts into life. The pubs probably
make more in a fortnight than the
rest of the year. But many islanders
loathe the chaos and inconvenience.
Having no interest in the bikes
myself, the TT means something
altogether different, for it coincides
with one of the greatest wildlife
phenomena to be found in the
British Isles: the flowering of our
traditional hay meadows.
Haymaking is among the most
ancient forms of agriculture.
Dry grass cut in late summer will
preserve itself and get a flock or herd
through the winter. Crucially, this
late cut, compared with spring-cut
silage, which is preserved in plastic
wrap, also allows birds to raise their
chicks and plants to flower and set
seed – resulting in wildlife bliss.
My refuge is a most wondrous
meadow. Among a sea of thousands
of flowers are five species of orchid,
including the rare greater butterfly
orchid, which can only truly be
appreciated by lying down on your
belly. It is among the most striking
of all the 500 or so plant species that
call our island home.
Upliftingly, I’m not on a nature
reserve. This is an ordinary farm
with an extraordinary farmer. Long
ago, we didn’t need nature reserves
when so much farmland looked like
this. My refuge is interrupted by the
monotonous throb of a helicopter,
signifying that the race leader is
approaching. The din subsides,
yet the meadow is still alive with
a frenzy of butterflies, hoverflies,
bees. A hay meadow in June is
a microcosm of the island during TT;
beautiful yet chaotic. David Bellamy
ILLUSTRATION: CLIFFORD HARPER
 Guardian Puzzles & Crosswords
Access over 15,000 puzzles on our app. 63
Download from the App Store or Google Play.
Read more: theguardian.com/puzzles-app

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Quick crossword
8 No 16,568
9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

11 12 9

10

13 14 15 11 12 13 14

All solutions published next week

15 16

16 17 18 19

20 17 18 19

21 22 23 20

21 22 23

24 25 24

25

26 27 26

The Weekly cryptic By Pangakupu Across 7 Gin-reared (anag) – British

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

23 June 2023 The Guardian Weekly