So we are in a condition where everybody suspects but not everybody says. That still gives Mr Mugabe room to believe that the time has not yet arrived when he must deport himself to somewhere else in the world and end his life in poverty. For indeed there are people abroad who think that Mr Mugabe never stole anything and that it is racism to say that he did. According to them, Mr Smith’s white government stole everything, and then the white farmers who stayed on in Zimbabwe stole everything again, and all that Mr Mugabe ever did was take it back, stealing from the rich to give to the poor. They are rather stuck, though, with the question of how he contrived to make the poor even poorer.
Still, even while waiting for the world to unite on this issue, Mr Brown comes out looking determined. It hasn’t been an easy fortnight for him, because the best minds on his staff decided that it would be a wise move for him to visit America at the same time as the Pope. The Pope arrived in a large aircraft supplied by Alitalia and Britain’s Prime Minister should have arrived in a large aircraft supplied by BA. But BA had no spare aircraft, only a mountain of spare luggage left over from the Terminal 5 triumph. So Mr Brown arrived in America in a charter aircraft and cut the kind of figure the British press strangely most likes to report on: the British leader being outshone by any other leader.
It’s true that Tony Blair used to be harder to outshine. But Mr Brown also faced the problem that the Americans not only agreed with him about Zimbabwe, they had already spoken out even more roundly. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had called Mugabe’s regime a disgrace, and even Mr Bush, putting two and two together and getting the right result for once, had concluded that his chosen honest broker, Mr Mbeki, had not done enough brokering. From that, you would think that Mr Mugabe would have had the tactical sense to identify the US as the No. 1 enemy of his regime. After all, everybody else blames America for everything. But Mr Mugabe – and this is almost a source of pride – continues to blame Britain. The awkward thing, however, about Britain being placed first on the dictator’s list of villains is that it also places on Britain the onus of action.
What should the action be? I wish I knew. This week my website got a letter from a citizen of Zimbabwe who no longer lives there but would clearly like to live there again. He said some nice things about an article I had written in favour of the Palestinians’ desire for their own state, and how a policy of indiscriminate suicide-bombing could only ensure that they would never get it. On the strength of my analysis, which he agreed with although he had never been to the Middle East, he asked me to write something about Zimbabwe before it was too late. Well, I’ve never been to Zimbabwe, and even if I had, I doubt I could write anything that would affect the course of events to even the smallest degree. But I feel obliged to have an opinion, as we all do. Just imagine the kind of courage that it would take to vote against Mr Mugabe all over again, and try not having an opinion about that.
My opinion about Zimbabwe, far from being original, is pretty much the same as Mr Brown’s opinion. I have been following Mr Brown’s statements of policy with care, not as if my life depended on them, but as if the life of my desperate correspondent from Zimbabwe would depend on them if he were still there. I think I can see what Mr Brown is after. He is trying to send a message to anyone in the political class in Zimbabwe who is fearless enough to realize that there is a better chance of the aid money being sent in if Mr Mugabe is sent out.
In the absence of a united world, which can only mean the armed force that the UN has conspicuously not yet mentioned, there is no other kind of intervention available except a promise of hard currency to supplant a currency which inflation has turned to liquid mud. To promise that, and to promise that Zimbabwe can’t have the aid money until Mr Mugabe takes off.
Where he goes to is a separate question, and less important. Where do we go, we deported ones who have been stripped of our citizenship for capital crimes, eco-negligence in my case, the wilful destruction of his own nation in the case of Mr Mugabe? There’s always somewhere. Idi Amin, now a mere memory, never faced justice in Uganda. He faced it in a hospital in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, not far from the Sands Hotel, where he had spent the last years of his life finding out that no matter how much money you steal from your people, it can’t buy you immortality. Omnipotence, yes, but only for a time, and Robert Mugabe’s time has come. All we have to do is get him to agree. Hence my message to my correspondent from Zimbabwe, whose friends are still there to face whatever happens next: good luck to them, and I only wish that they could depend on us.
Postscript
For Westerners to dismiss Africa’s problems as insoluble is a bit glib, when you consider the extent to which the West caused the problems. Even today, with Western liberal sensitivity at its height – the sensitivity and the knowledge tend to be inversely related, but let that pass – few among even the most appalled foreign commentators on Africa’s colonial history are fully aware of what Belgian colonialism was like in the Congo at the time of Leopold II. If they were, they would have a much less condemnatory attitude towards British colonialism. But when all the allowances are made, we are left with the depressing fact that few of the sub-Saharan countries have done well since their exploiters went away. The new leaders, the wabenzi, have often done well out of exploiting their own populations, but that’s a different thing, and a very different kind of wealth. An economy whose fruits are embezzled by the government and exported to Western banks will very soon be no economy at all, and the same might be said for any African country whose finances depend on aid. But no matter how blatant the present corruption, the departed oppressor still gets the blame. Honour among thieves makes it mandatory to support the perpetrator and accuse the phantom. At the time of writing, Robert Mugabe still bulks large in Zimbabwe. There is a tacit worldwide conspiracy among the bien pensant to suppose that his wings have been clipped, but it might be wiser to suppose that, if he has retained only some of his power, the power that he has retained is the power to wreck the lives of his people. He has a taste for doing so, and always has had. In his quest for unchallenged power, white people were not the first people he murdered.
What to do about Africa’s disaster? The first answer, surely, is that there might be nothing we can do. The assumption that one’s emotional concern might be valuable in itself was the assumption that drove Mrs Jellyby to her charitable absurdities. With that first answer firmly given, the second answer can be better understood: we can give money. But we need to be certain about where the money is going. Michael Moore, at one point, was loudly giving forth the opinion that Africa could have clean water overnight if only the criminally negligent West willed the means. The truth was that even for something as apparently simple as clean water the means must begin with double-entry book-keeping, otherwise all the money will be stolen. In many of the stricken nations, the government is the last organization you should give money to, and you have a better chance with some faith-based outfit whose prayers you would rather not hear but whose immediate pastoral aims you approve. My own course of action – the reader has a right to ask – was to give a few pounds for the education of women in Ethiopia. The project was in the hands of Catholic missionaries whose sense of dedication seemed to chime with my own conviction that Africa would get nowhere until its women were treated justly. I was assured that girls, and girls only, would be going to the school I backed. Then it turned out that boys were going there too: yet another illustration of the abiding truth that Africa isn’t there to fulfil your dreams. It just sometimes looks as if it is.
Australia, on the other hand, really is dreamland: a democracy with proper elections. But the properly elected Kevin Rudd was already showing signs of a Hugo Chavez-like belief in his own supreme mental powers. Marking the start of his reign, like a jamboree for egos on the rampage, his personally convened Summit was one of the signs. It wasn’t so much that most of the proposals advanced by the thousand delegates were fatuous where they were not insane. It was the fact that Rudd, joining in th
e discussion, sat on the floor, so that the press could catch him looking involved. For the discerning, here was clear evidence that Australia had elected, for its Prime Minister, an incorrigible poseur. Well before the end of his one and only term, everybody knew. But to know it early on, you had to be able to assess what was before your eyes. Remarkably few could. Even more disturbing than what the journalists couldn’t see was what they couldn’t hear. Rudd’s use of language, hyperbolic from the jump, should have tipped them off that he didn’t really mean what he was saying. He spent three years saying that man-made global warming was the biggest moral threat to face mankind. Speaking like that, he could have been the Guardian’s science correspondent. Everything depended, said Rudd, on an agreement being reached in Copenhagen in October 2009. When it wasn’t, he came back to Australia and never mentioned the matter again. The electorate caught on and his support in the polls dropped into the basement. Finally even the media realized what his silence signified: he had never really meant any of that stuff. It was an unsolicited oratorical display, from a man devoid of reticence or judgement.
SNOOP AND AMY
Dates of show: 2 and 4 May 2008
When the American rap star Snoop Dogg gets into trouble, he goes from strength to strength. When the British singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse gets into trouble, she goes from weakness to weakness. This is especially sad because, whereas you might think that Snoop Dogg has a talent from hell, Amy Winehouse clearly has a talent from heaven. Already it has earned her millions of pounds, so you might say that her worries are working in her favour. But even the press is by now realizing that it’s callous to say so.
Last weekend a voluntary visit to the police turned into an overnight stay and the story was instantly in all the papers, but there was a new note detectable, as of a farce finally being recognized as an incipient tragedy. If there was ever any fun to be had from reading about her troubles, the point has been reached where there is no fun left even in writing about them. Probably the best we can all do for her is not to mention her name except when buying one of her albums, so perhaps I am making a bad start. But I remember too well the first time I heard her sing and was so moved that my heart hurt.
And I also remember the first time that I saw her in real life. It was last year, in downtown New York. We happened to be staying in the same hotel, and I passed her in the foyer. She looked so frail that my heart hurt again, but in a different way. When that young woman sings, it’s the revelation of a divine gift. But when she behaves as if the gift were hers to destroy if she feels like it, you can’t help thinking of divine wrath. Can’t the same force that made her so brilliant give her strength?
Which brings us to the aforementioned Snoop Dogg, who has all the strength in the world. Whether he is brilliant is another question, which I don’t presume to answer. As a lyricist who has made no more than a few hundred pounds over the course of a whole career, I try not to speak ill of any lyricist who makes thousands of pounds a week, even when I can’t understand what he is talking about. In Snoop Dogg’s case I’m not sure that I’m meant to. At about the same time that Amy Winehouse was emerging from a police station again to be greeted by demands from her own father that she be sectioned as soon as possible, Snoop Dogg was being cleared by a British judge from a no-visa order imposed on him in 2006 when there was a dust-up at Heathrow, that venue where so many memorable performances take place.
You will notice that I continue to refer to him as Snoop Dogg. It’s easier than calling him by his real name, Cordozar Calvin Broadus. I hope I have pronounced it correctly. I’m not one to point the finger, because I myself found it convenient to abandon my unpronounceable original name, Balthazar Wickerwork Bruce-Barrymore. Nor do I hold against him his self-confessed earlier career as a pimp. As any female sex worker will tell you when she has a knife to her throat, pimps perform a useful function.
Anyway, he grew out of it, and became famous as a rap star. You can see, however, that the rapper’s reputation might have been against him when he and his entourage were told that they were to be demoted from the Heathrow VIP lounge to life among the ordinary people, whereupon a fracas ensued and Snoop Dogg found himself face down on the carpet, an audience unresponsive to his charm. Subsequently he was denied a visa, despite his assurances that his purpose in this country would be to warn against private firearms, and not to glorify them. The rapper took the rap.
But recently a senior immigration judge overturned the decision, after viewing a tape of the incident. Those of us who don’t like to be videotaped wherever we go might reflect that in this case a videotape served justice. Upon close inspection, the tape revealed, according to the court, that some of the staff involved might have been at fault. One can’t help feeling that a rapper’s reputation for condoning violence might recently have been overtaken, on the scale of notoriety, by the reputation of Heathrow staff for doing the wrong thing on a massive scale at every opportunity.
Nevertheless, Snoop Dogg deserved a hearing for his contention that one of his reasons for wanting to be free to enter Britain would be to counsel this country’s disaffected youth against guns. Snoop Dogg’s argument is that he has seen a lot of people blown away and that the use of guns by ordinary citizens should therefore be discouraged. There is no reason for thinking that he does not feel this now just because some of his lyrics previously seemed to say the opposite. When I listen carefully to one of his songs – a lot more carefully than I would like to, if the truth be told – I seem to hear him say that he’s from the streets and he hangs with killers, by which I think that he means that he hangs out with killers, not that he suffers capital punishment in their company.
In the next line he seems to be saying that if he and his killer friends got problems then they’re gon’ bust them triggers. I think that means that they are going to fire so many shots that they wear their guns out, but it could just mean that they intend to voluntarily decommission their weapons. Or it could mean anything, it’s hard to tell. I’d be surprised if it meant anything conspicuously non-violent, but we must remember the artist’s right to invent a character. It might be just the narrator talking, while the man who invented the narrator is a philanthropist. Charles Dickens, after all, invented Bill Sykes. Dickens wasn’t himself a psychopath, and Snoop Dogg could easily argue that he is fundamentally a businessman.
He’s certainly got the money to prove it, and if people are going to be shut out of this country for once having seemed to condone violence, I can think of a long list of candidates that I would put ahead of Snoop Dogg. Whatever his street-smart origins, he has become a prosperous taxpayer manufacturing a legitimate product people want. It isn’t a product I want. Watching someone making gang-signs at me with his fingers while his snarling mouth confuses loquacity with eloquence was tough enough when Ice T did it. But Ice T turned into one of the best actors on television, and Snoop Dogg, if he manages to dodge all the drive-by shooters who were stupid enough to take his lyrics literally, will probably end up with his face on Mount Rushmore.
And then there’s Amy Winehouse, whose best songs really are works of art, no question. And she can actually sing them to you, in a way you would rather remember than forget. And yet she looks as if she can’t wait until it’s all over. Billie Holiday, by the end, had reasons to feel like that. But at the start, she guarded her gift. And Ella Fitzgerald sang on into old age as if her gift belonged to the world, which indeed it did. Amy Winehouse, if she wished, might build up an achievement that could be mentioned in the same breath as those two: perhaps not as varied, perhaps not as abundant, but just as unmistakably individual, and even more so because some of the songs would be composed by her, and not just handed to her on a piece of paper.
It could be that she does wish to fulfil her vast potential, but she has another wish that conflicts: the wish for oblivion. It’s hard to speak against that wish without sounding like an advertisement for a package holiday. As this world goes, there are ample reasons for wanting to b
e out of it even if your personal history is a comfort, and I imagine hers has been the opposite. But she knows all this. The proof is in some of her songs. The proof is in her voice. You don’t get to sing like that unless you can give a shape to grief.
Not long before he died last week, Humphrey Lyttelton said that he admired the way Amy Winehouse sang and would have liked to meet her. Some commentators have wondered what he would have said. There’s no telling. He was the prince of joy, and he might have told her that he was glad to have lived out a long life in music. The Old Etonian would surely have admitted that he had begun his career in conditions of privilege, as she had not, and that he had always had the gift of happiness, which she plainly hasn’t, or anyway does not have yet.
But he could have added that he only had to listen to a few bars of her singing to realize that she had been given the greatest gift a musician of any kind can have, and that a gift on that scale is not possessed by its owner, but does all the possessing. Maybe that’s what she’s afraid of. When people say that you have a duty to your talent, they all too often mean that you have a duty to them. But they’re misstating the case. The duty of the greatly talented is to life itself, because what they do is the consecration of life. I could end with something that Pavarotti once told me in his dressing room before I interviewed him. He wouldn’t say it on air, for fear of sounding immodest. He said he knew his gift was from God. But perhaps a better ending would be what Philip Larkin said to the ghost of Sidney Bechet. ‘On me your voice falls as they say love should, like an enormous yes.’ Come on, kiddo. Give us a song.