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A Continent for the Taking

Africa first captivated New York Times journalist Howard W. French more than twenty-five years ago, but his knowledge of and passion for the continent has the depth of a lifetime association. His experiences there awakened him as nothing before to… read more

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A slim and stunning volume, available in a reprint that could hardly be more timely. Galbraith spends the first sections of the book recounting the events of 1929 in a hard bitten, semi-journalistic voice, and he sustains a terrific narrative. The final section explores the causes for the Great Depression, including but not limited to the crash. Very perceptive, and the echoes of our day - sharply rising inequality, unbridled greed, fraud and a government of the elite and for the elite - still ring very true.

“Speculation on a large scale requires a pervasive sense of confidence and optimism and conviction that ordinary people were meant to be rich. People must also have faith in the good intentions and even in the benevolence of others, for it is by the agency of others that they will get rich. In 1929 Professor Dice observed: The common folks believe in their leaders. We no longer. We no longer look upon the captains of industry as magnified crooks.Have we not heard their voices over the radio? Are we not familiar with their thoughts, ambitions, and ideals as they have expressed them to us almost as a man talks to his friend? Such a feeling of trust is essential for a boom. When people are cautious, questining, misanthropic, suspicious, or mean, they are immune to speculative enthusiasms.”

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Posted at 10:59 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

Published: April 24, 2009

“LISTEN, do I have time to feed my pig?” the photographer Danny Lyon asked, picking up the telephone one morning at his home in rural New Mexico. “It will only take about 10 minutes. I’ll call you back,” he said, adding: “That way I can start the day with a clean conscience.”

Among a group of revolutionaries whose work rose to prominence in the late 1960s and ’70s and transformed the nature of documentary photography — a group that includes friends and colleagues of Mr. Lyon’s like Mary Ellen Mark and Larry Clark — the idea of conscience has been imbedded more deeply in Mr. Lyon’s photographs than in those of all but a few of his contemporaries.

At a time when picture magazines were still a holy grail for young photographers, Mr. Lyon, self-taught, began his career as the first staff photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. A week after hitchhiking south in 1962 at the age of 20 he was in jail with other protesters in Albany, Ga., next to the cell of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And Mr. Lyon’s first book, the classic “Bikeriders,” made after spending more than two years as a member of the Outlaws motorcycle gang, was not just a pioneering example of New Journalism but, as he later described it, an attempt “to destroy Life magazine” and what he saw as its anodyne vision of American life.

His newest book, “Memories of Myself,” published this month by Phaidon Press, seems on its face to be the kind of comfortable, coffee-table retrospective that a revered 67-year-old artist receives at this point in his life. It is a selection of self-assigned — and largely unpublished — photo essays that he made while wandering from Chicago to Galveston, Tex., to Brooklyn to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, over almost four decades. But even this book is a product of political calculus, as Mr. Lyon described it. He has been traveling for many years to photograph a remote, impoverished region of China with a book in mind but with little idea of who would be interested in it.

“It’s not always easy to get these things published,” he said. “I’m pretty uncompromising and not very commercial.” So when Phaidon approached him a few years ago with the idea of a career survey, he offered a deal. “I basically said, ‘If you do the China book, you can do the retrospective.’ ” (Phaidon, which does not comment on its negotiations with authors, would say only that it plans to publish two books by Mr. Lyon, in addition to “Memories of Myself,” calling him a “great photographer.”)

It is the kind of bargain Mr. Lyon has been striking his whole life, especially during years when he was supporting a family of four while insisting on making the kind of work he wanted to make, a stubborn vision that has probably contributed to his photographs and independent films not being better known. Even now, with his work in important museum collections around the country, a survivor’s hustle remains and sometimes still comes in handy: a few weeks ago, at his dentist’s office in Albuquerque, he traded a nice print for a root canal. “The market has taken a body blow, and I needed the dental work,” he explained, adding, “I was so happy to do it.”

Like Mr. Clark, who blurred the line between observer and participant and wanted to confront middle-class viewers with the American underclass, Mr. Lyon has made a peripatetic attempt to photograph people who are generally unseen or unwanted, even hated, and he has never been able to approach it with a journalist’s distance. When he began his motorcycle work in the mid-1960s while at the University of Chicago, he writes in the new book, “I was a bike rider, a photographer and a history student, probably in that order.”

When he became involved in what many critics consider his most powerful work, “Conversations With the Dead,” based on more than a year photographing inside the Texas prison system in the late 1960s, he developed deep bonds with several inmates, including one who had been convicted of rape. Another, James Ray Renton, a talented escape artist who was later convicted of killing an Arkansas police officer, became an unlikely friend and devoted correspondent for more than 30 years. (In “Like a Thief’s Dream,” Mr. Lyon’s book about their relationship, he describes testifying as a character witness for Mr. Renton at his murder trial in 1979 and, in addition to his testimony, offering Mr. Renton some marijuana during a courtroom recess. Mr. Renton declined.)

“To some, he’s idealizing people who really are not good people at all — they’re just criminals,” said Larry McMurtry, who was teaching at Rice University in Houston in the 1960s and befriended Mr. Lyon while he was there working on the prison book. “But to Danny maybe they’re good people who just never had a chance.”

“He hasn’t really changed his principles any at all since he was young, when I first met him,” Mr. McMurtry added. “He’s an idealist, to a large extent.”

In a long, animated, tangent-filled telephone interview after he went to feed his pig (which turned out to be not his but a neighbor’s, borrowed to entertain Mr. Lyon’s visiting granddaughter), Mr. Lyon more or less agreed with Mr. McMurtry and asked: “Is there something wrong with me because of that? I don’t know.”

Raised in Kew Gardens, Queens, where his father, Ernst, an immigrant from Germany, was a doctor (one of his patients in New York was Alfred Stieglitz), Mr. Lyon ached to flee the conformity of an upper-middle-class life. He discovered “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” at a formative age and was fired by the intensity of James Agee’s prose even more than by Walker Evans’s pictures.

“Agee was a stone realist, and that had a huge impact on me,” he said. One of the new book’s more lyrical essays is a series of portraits Mr. Lyon took after driving to Knoxville, Tenn., in the late 1960s simply because he wanted to see Agee’s birthplace.

Click to read more and to see some of Danny’s work

Posted at 1:37 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

Books of The Times
China’s Other Minority, Seen by One of Its Own

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: April 22, 2009

Rebiya Kadeer:
DRAGON FIGHTER
One Woman’s Epic Struggle for Peace With China

It is the awkward fate of China, more than any other country, to be arriving late to any number of parties where most other revelers are either long gone or leaving, having declared the celebrations déclassé. Such is the case with China’s booming smokestack economy and with its ardent new fling with the automobile, with its desire for a deep-water navy built around aircraft carriers, and with its ambition for a space program that will land on the Moon.

China is also just beginning to grapple with the creation of what most in the developed world would recognize as a modern legal system and acceptable standards for human rights, and it is in much the same position with its cobbling efforts to reinvent the welfare state.

Most anachronistic of all, though, is the country’s treatment of its two largest minorities, the Tibetans and Uighurs, both old, non-Han indigenous civilizations that claim meaningful autonomy in China’s vast, resource-rich and sparsely populated west. Our Western legacy of land expropriation and slaughter of native peoples by European settlers and imperial armies may give us little to cluck about, but in today’s world the rights and interests of native peoples have rightly won greater recognition.

In this memoir, “Dragon Fighter,” part defiant political tell-all, part engrossing personal saga, Rebiya Kadeer paints a vivid picture of her life as a mother of 11 and a businesswoman who spent nearly six years in prison on her way to becoming the Uighur people’s most prominent dissident.

Since its Communist revolution of 1949 China has employed a brimming catalog of tactics to bring its western region to heel. These include invasion; disappearing of political leaders; gerrymandering to disperse minorities across new, eccentrically redrawn provinces, flooding the cities with subsidized Han immigration; limits on worship, government control of clergy, desecration of temples and harsh repression.

Even Westerners who pay relatively little attention to China will be at least vaguely familiar with the plight of Tibetans, whose religious leader, the Dalai Lama, has been lionized by the Nobel committee and received at the White House.

Such is not the case with the Uighur, a central Asian people who are distant relatives of the Turks and native to what China calls the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, or the New Frontier, an area three and half times as large as California, whose indigenous people look all but set to join the ranks of history’s great, overrun losers.

One thing the Uighur, spelled Uyghur in this book, have never had is a leader with great recognition outside China, like the Dalai Lama, who has contributed a brief introduction for this memoir of Ms. Kadeer. She writes: “Politicians and human rights organizations from all over the world were active on behalf of Tibet. The conditions in the Uyghur nation were much the same. But interest from abroad in the two, though literally we were next-door neighbors sharing a common border and both under Chinese occupation, could not have been more dissimilar.”

Nor, she might have added, scarcely could the plight of these two neighboring peoples, both of which have long maintained cultural and often political autonomy on the periphery of imperial China, be more fundamentally similar. That the Uighur have never enjoyed anything like the global sympathy extended to Tibetans stands out as a historical oddity that may have something to do with their predominantly Muslim culture, which evokes little of the warm feeling engendered by Tibet’s red-robed, incense-burning, sutra-chanting Buddhists.

In the end, though, even this may not matter. Ms. Kadeer writes perceptively about the many humiliations imposed by Beijing on the Uighurs, including routine business harassment and forced abortions, massacres and barriers to trade and contact with other central Asian neighbors. Beijing makes it hard for the Uighurs to believe in anything but ultimate submission to the grand, centrally conceived plans of a powerful China.

On one level Ms. Kadeer’s book is a routine account of recent Chinese history. Much more interesting is its core autobiographical story: the remarkable rise from modest roots to a life as, the author claims, the wealthiest woman in China and a politically prominent member of the National People’s Congress.

Here, though, the book is marred by language that betrays limited modesty and perhaps even limited self-knowledge. We are constantly reminded of the author’s qualities: she is chaste, smart, beautiful, clever, strong, indomitable, selfless, moral, wise and fearless — especially fearless.

By the end of the book, however, the last of these claims will leave few readers in doubt. Through sheer force of personality Ms. Kadeer overcomes a bad marriage to an abusive husband, then seeks out and marries a former political prisoner and poet, telling him flatly that “after our wedding, our first task will be to liberate the land.”

Years, several children and many arduous commercial voyages across China later, having built a fortune (and a big reputation) in department stores and real estate, while she and her second husband dreamed of liberating the land, Ms. Kadeer begins to attract the wooing calls of the party. Her big moment comes in a speech before the Congress in Beijing, in which she boldly switches the approved text to ask: “Is it our fault that the Chinese have occupied our land? That we live under such horrible conditions?”

If not the first time she had spoken truth to power, it was certainly the beginning of the end. Soon afterward Ms. Kadeer was arrested on her way to a meeting with a member of the United States Congress. She was tried, imprisoned for nearly six years and exiled to the United States.

This remarkable life is now added to the saga of the Uighur people, a people without leaders.

Click to read more

Posted at 1:14 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright Vanity Fair

See the link for the others.

#2. There aren’t that many readers up for grabs
There’s a limited market for what The Economist offers, and they’ve already claimed the vast majority of it. As media columnist Jon Friedman wrote last year, “there are only so many Americans smart enough to enjoy [The Economist’s] articles.” I disagree with Friedman slightly. Reading The Economist is not like reading Thomas Pynchon—the articles are short and straightforward, and they never use a 50-cent word when a five-cent word will do. The real problem isn’t intelligence but interest; there are only so many Americans who actually care about international news. Sure, we like to read about wars and disasters and scandals, but we don’t need a weekly update on Japan’s political malaise or the energy business in Brazil. And although The Economist’s U.S. audience has grown impressively, it started from an extremely low baseline (ten years ago its North American circulation was barely 300,000) and is still nowhere near Time in terms of circulation. As former Economist editor Bill Emmott told The Guardian in 2005, “We will never be a direct competitor to Time or Newsweek.”

Click to read more

Posted at 9:15 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright Reuters

14/04/2009

STILL GOT IT: Pornographic movie actor Shigeo Tokuda poses with actress Yuri Kuroda before the shooting of his latest film in Ichikawa, east of Tokyo.

He is a typical man of age - a few white hairs cover his round head and he wears dentures.

But 75-year-old Shigeo Tokuda sat on a movie set on Monday wearing just a silk kimono and loin cloth about to have sex on film with a woman who is younger than his daughter.

Tokuda is Japan’s oldest pornographic movie star and was shooting his latest film in which he portrayed a master of sex.

The director said the films showed people that their sex lives did not have to end with old age, and in 16 years of making such movies Tokuda has acted up with women ranging from their 20s to as old as himself.

“I debuted at 59, and have played in more than 200 porno movies since then,” he said, using his screen name, not his real one in an interview on the set.

“I wanted to challenge what ordinary people did not, so I decided to be a porno actor.”

In Monday’s film he used vibrators, whips and candle lights to show the master satisfying a 36-year-old actress. The film was not scripted.

Tokuda turned to the pornographic industry late. He lived a typical Japanese office worker’s life as a travel agent after graduating from one of Tokyo’s elite colleges.

The career sideline came about because he was unsatisfied with a lack of story lines in sex movies he’d seen, which led to a discussion with a film producer about whether he could do better.

It took a couple of years of thinking about it but Tokuda eventually took his pants off for the camera.

Since then, he has became a popular figure in porn movies for rent in Japan, with its rapidly aging population and long life expectancy. One in five Japanese is over 65 years old.

“Other old men think they can do it because he can. The elderly can feel secure and encouragement when they see his films,” said Gaichi Kono, the director of Tokuda’s latest film.

Japan’s elderly are rejecting the idea that growing old means slowing down, said Chineko Araki, a professor of social welfare from Den-en Chofu University.

“More than 50 percent of men over 65 are eager to have a sexual relationship with their partners,” she said in an email interview.

Tokuda’s films will soon be offered to Japanese retirement homes, exports beckon and they may be shown on the Internet.

Tokuda says his wife and daughter pretend not to know and his friends will never guess.

“But my job makes me keep alive,” he says, adding he plans to keep going at least till he hits 80 years old.

Posted at 10:28 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Times

April 7, 2009
Tonight a hush will fall over the national stadium in Kigali as, one by one, a sea of candles is lit to commemorate the 800,000 lives lost in the Rwandan genocide. A screen will fill with the faces of luminaries from the actress Sandra Bullock to David Cameron, the British Conservative leader, speaking of the candles they have lit for Rwanda’s victims and survivors.

Presiding over it all will be Paul Kagame, the Rwandan President, self-styled liberator and darling of Western aid donors who rushed billions to the tiny nation in the guilty aftermath of foreign inaction to stop the killing.

But 15 years on, Mr Kagame finds himself cast more as a perpetrator than victim, with the unveiling of Rwanda’s role in the plunder and killing in eastern Congo, a war that has claimed the lives of five times as many people as the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur combined. So why are British taxpayers still supporting him?

Since the genocide, Rwanda has relied on foreign aid for half its national budget. Britain is its single largest donor, committed to a disbursement of at least £46 million a year until 2015. The United States is close behind in direct contributions to Rwanda’s budget, a form of aid-giving reserved for what the European Union calls a “privileged” few who have proved their transparency and good governance.

In December Sweden and the Netherlands abruptly revoked aid to Rwanda after the revelations about its meddling in Congo - not just as punishment but also in response to the contention that without foreign aid Rwanda could not have financed its deadly but highly profitable operations over the border.

Rwanda originally invaded eastern Congo in 1996 in pursuit of the Hutu genocide perpetrators who fled there to evade justice. Uganda came too, in pursuit of its own rebels. Timothy Reid, a senior United Nations peacekeeping official in Rwanda and Congo, calculated that even factoring in the profits of the mineral wealth Rwanda pillaged from Congo, the war there would have put it $100 million (£70 million) into the red, had it not been for the cushion of foreign aid.

After Rwanda pulled out of Congo officially, it continued the war there by proxy, supporting Tutsi rebels led by General Laurent Nkunda. It always denied the support, until December, when the damning results of a UN inquiry proved the link beyond question. The Nkunda forces had marched to the gates of Goma, slaughtering hundreds, in the company of uniformed Rwandan soldiers with covering fire from Rwandan tanks over the border. Rwandan soldiers have forcibly recruited children on his behalf - a war crime that landed Thomas Lubanga, a Congolese warlord, in the dock at The Hague as the first defendant of the permanent International Criminal Court.

The investigation unearthed e-mails between General Nkunda’s men and a close associate of Mr Kagame, Tribert Rujugiro, detailing the transfer of funds to the general. Mr Rujugiro is a member of the same Rwandan presidential advisory panel as Tony Blair. Mr Rujugiro is in London awaiting extradition to South Africa on charges of tax evasion. He appeared in a previous UN report as a big profiteer from the illegal plunder of minerals by Rwandan forces in Congo. That same report details the highly systematic nature of the Rwandan military looting, compared with the much less structured Ugandan plunder.

Western diplomats described to The Times the electric effect of the UN report on the Kagame regime as realisation dawned that the flow of aid might be imperilled. Military commanders, in particular, were said to be alarmed at the prospect of losing their military ties with Britain by which scores of Rwandan officers have passed through Sandhurst. Their training has made them favourite for highly lucrative UN peacekeeping missions in places such as Darfur, where Western troops are loath to go.

“They knew the game was up and they had to distance themselves from Nkunda or risk losing Western aid and support,” a senior diplomat said.

The Netherlands and Sweden stopped their aid to Rwanda immediately. Kigali’s answer was to cut a deal with the Congolese Government: it would neutralise General Nkunda if Kinshasa allowed it to help to neutralise the Hutu genocidaires in Congo - as long as Nkunda could never spill his secrets. He was arrested, diplomats say, not as he fled Congo, as widely reported, but in a trap set for him by the Rwandan army chief of staff, who called him to an urgent meeting at a house in Rubavu, just over the border in Rwanda.

Two months later, he has not been handed over to Congo, as expected. The man who replaced him as rebel leader, Bosco Ntaganda, has already been indicted by the International Criminal Court and General Nkunda is also in its sights. Rwanda, extraordinarily, has never signed up to the ICC but Congo has. “The last thing Rwanda wants is Nkunda spilling the beans in The Hague,” another diplomat said.

Something close to that might still happen. Lubanga, on trial at The Hague, is expect to open a defence case claiming that he was taking orders from above, and outside Congo. Uganda, also a huge aid recipient from the Anglophone world, is more closely implicated, but Rwanda will feature too. Uganda has been taken to task in the International Court of Justice for its plunder in eastern Congo and has been charged the reparations for it. Rwanda, which has not signed up to the ICJ either, has not.

Did British pressure twist Mr Kagame’s arm to drop Nkunda? British officials privately admit not. The Rwandan leader, they concede, had reason for concernbut there was no explicit threat to end aid. Angry UN officials contrast Britain’s stand on development aid to Zimbabwe - refusing to give it until Robert Mugabe’s thugs are removed from economic office - to its generosity towards another regime so recently embroiled in the deaths of millions.

“It is a classic guilt syndrome,” one said. “The West’s neglect of Rwanda’s agony has morphed into a gross indulgence of its worst behaviour.”

But has that behaviour now ended? Many are sceptical. The proxy war in Congo has been enormously profitable - for individuals, not the national budget, well cushioned by foreign aid. Rwandan customs accounting regularly show it exporting tonnes of minerals that it does not even produce - but which are mined feverishly over the border in Congo.

The price of such minerals has dived in recent months, leaving many Congolese miners destitute. With aid at risk, the balance sheet may no longer look so appealing. Meanwhile, the proof that Rwanda has its own fair share of rapacious warlords has made even the most pro-Kagame allies look again at the French and Spanish indictments against his top leadership for the shooting down of the President’s plane that precipitated the genocide as something more than spiteful conjecture.

A respectful hush will descend on Kigali tonight. As well it should. Over the border in Congo the killing goes on. Since the Rwandan troops who went there to flush out Hutu rebels left, the rebels have hit back, massacring civilians in their hundreds. Suffering, in eastern Congo, is not a memory. And there will be no candles for its five million dead.

Click to read more

Posted at 8:55 AM · Comments (0)

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