African funeral or how to bear our troubles more lightly

Introducing his song The Pause of Mr Claus (you don’t know it? Listen to it, and its tribute to the FBI, on YouTube), Arlo Guthrie shares an insight with us:

During these hard days and hard weeks, everybody always has it bad once in a while. You know, you have a bad time of it, and you always have a friend who says "Hey man, you ain't got it that bad. Look at that guy." And you look at that guy, and he's got it worse than you. And it makes you feel better that there's somebody that's got it worse than you.

There’s a lot of truth in that. At least in the sense that it does you good to remember that there are people out there who are having a worse time than you are. That isn’t because you’re pleased by their suffering, but because it relativises your own.

Pierre with my father (sitting), and a friend
when they first met, during the UN mission
for the Congo emergency in 1960

This was brought home to me some decades ago by a family friend we spent a Christmas with, when my father was posted by the United Nations to what was then called Zaïre and is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, in equatorial Africa. His name was Pierre and he was from Belgium, the former colonial power out there – and if you want an example of people suffering a lot more than you’re likely to, just take a look at the Congo under Belgian rule. It was barbaric, with casual murders of the local population, or limbs cut off on a whim of a colonial overlord. Belgium must be a serious contender for the title of worst European colonial power, and the competition’s pretty hot for that coveted award.

At the time of that Christmas visit, Pierre was managing a small rubber plantation way out in the sticks, some 500 km east of the capital, Kinshasa. 

He told us this story.

Years before he’d been at school with a boy, Charles, a couple of years younger than him. Charles was slight, weak and not in particularly good health. Pierre remembered him as the kind of child who has trouble making friends, is often bullied and leaves little trace in the memory of the people around him.

After they left school, there had been the war and Nazi occupation, and after that Pierre had gone out to the Congo to build a career. He’d been through the horrors of the independence struggle followed by civil war. It had taken firmness of purpose and not a little strength, both physical and emotional, to stick it out.

Two or three years before he told us this story, soon after he’d been appointed to his plantation manager post, he’d been visited by a fellow Belgian from a neighbouring plantation. ‘Neighbouring’ in that context meant an hour or two’s drive away, given the dirt roads of the region, bad at the best of times, and almost impassable in wet weather. To Pierre’s surprise, his visitor was Charles who’d brought his new wife to meet Pierre.

“I’d pretty well forgotten him,” Pierre told us, “but he remembered me and soon enough my memories came back too.”

They traded reminiscences for a while, Pierre making sure he embellished his a little, so as not to offend Charles. Then they parted company, meeting only infrequently after that – communications were far too poor for regular visiting.

Then, a few weeks before our arrival, Pierre heard that Charles had been taken ill.

“Hardly surprising. When he came to see me, it was obvious his health was as delicate as ever, and this isn’t an easy place to live.”

Pierre visited him once in hospital and found him wasted and worsening.

“To me it didn’t look like he was going to last much longer. I decided I’d better go and see him again soon or I’d be too late.”

But other things intervened and he had to keep putting off his visit until, at midnight one evening, there was a knocking at his front door. His visitors were two nuns from the hospital, and he invited them in. After tea and some small talk, he felt it was time to turn to the business of so late a call.

“What can I do for you, sisters?” he asked.

It turned out it was about Charles. He’d taken a terrible turn for the worse that morning and, that evening, had died.

“Oh,” said Pierre, kicking himself for not having been to see him. “And, I suppose, you want me to break the news to his widow?”

“Oh, no,” said one of the nuns, “we can do that. We wanted to know what you thought we should do with the body.”

“The body?” he said. “Why, leave it in the mortuary.”

“That’s just it,” said the nun, “we’ve got it in the back of the jeep.”

It turned out that Charles had died while the nurse who was supposed to be supervising him had been away from the bedside. He, the nurse, had dumped the body into the back of a jeep and then bullied the two nuns to take it round to the new widow. I can’t picture to myself the scene, had she been presented with the body of her husband in the small hours of the morning.

With this auspicious start, Pierre found himself made responsible for the funeral arrangements. Bodies need to be buried fast in the tropics, and Pierre organised everything for three days later. 

Unfortunately, this was the time of year when the dry season was poised to give way to the wet. In the event, the weather broke on the day of the funeral itself.

The European men in the region tended to have just one suit each. They were making their way to church for the service when the torrential rain, as it falls in Africa, began to beat down on them, leaving them struggling through a morass of mud and even having to clear fallen trees from the road ahead of them. They turned up at the church with their best clothes mud-spattered and soaked.

A funeral service is never cheerful, but the atmosphere of wet clothing, bad tempers and mud made this one particularly painful. Things became worse still when the lightning started up and knocked out the electrical power. It then added a crowning touch, by sending balls of blue flame up and down the inside of the darkened church. So the service ended by the garish light of ball lightning, providing an entirely fitting background to the sobs of the grieving widow.

That was when the gravediggers announced that they could no longer find the grave.

The mourners stepped outside into the downpour. The whole of the bottom of the graveyard, where the new grave had been dug, was now flooded. In the new temporary lake, there was no way to identify where Charles’s final resting place had been prepared for him.

I don’t think of Pierre’s story often enough. I should. It would help me realise that there are people out there having a worse time than I am. In turn, that might teach me to take my own troubles less seriously.

That scrapbook reminder of an assassination

The other day I came across a scrapbook that I started at the start of the sixties. It was proudly marked ‘File = 1’. Number 1. Clearly, I’d resolved to make this the first in a series of documents that would track my passage through life. But, alas, my character is one that views resolutions, like rules, as made to be broken. File 1 remains to this day the only one created.

First step in a lifelong commitment to documentation
which never reached the second step

At that time, my father was in an administrative position with the United Nations. More specifically, he was in finance. Those were the days when you could still get jobs without a degree. In the years when many today would be studying, my father was helping to fight a war instead, and he never did go to university. He learned accounting on the job, working his way from position to position until he gravitated into the UN, first with UNESCO in Paris and later with the FAO, the Food and Agriculture Organisation, in Rome.

That was where my brother and I were born and eventually started our schooling. Which explains why when I started my first, and ultimately only, scrapbook it was inside an exercise book from the English school in Rome, St George’s.

It was an extraordinary place. It was run by a character who’d been a housemaster at Harrow School, one of the great British ‘public’ schools – i.e. hugely privileged, exclusive private schools. He brought with him all the wonderful sense of entitlement and snobbishness such an institution breeds. It was touch and go whether my brother and I would be admitted, because my father was a Professional grade 3 in the UN and, as a general rule, the school took only children whose parents were at grade 5 or above.

Certainly, being in the school was a wonderful lesson in reward being entirely unrelated to merit. I fell out pretty badly with the authorities there. I assign my lack of ability in football to having missed all sport sessions at a critical time, because I was on detention every single Wednesday afternoon for two years. Indeed, the school briefly made me a fan of corporal punishment: this was the day when the head called me in to his study to tell me I had achieved a unique distinction.

“Out of a school of 500 pupils, you are the only one on detention this week.”

Imagine my pride.

But he hadn’t finished.

“I have no intention of keeping a teacher back to supervise you, so instead I’m going to cane you.”

What relief! My heart sang for joy. I took six strokes of his cane and – at last – could join my class on the playing fields.

As for my father, he too had fallen out with those in authority. His boss loathed him and denied him promotion for fifteen years, a fate he put up with exasperation but stoically, in order to guarantee us a minimum of stability. He then transferred to the United Nations Development Programme, where he was promoted three times in little more than the same number of years, so he ended his career at pretty much the level he would have reached had he been granted some reasonable promotions over his time in Rome.

Sadly, however, while he was able to get into the finance and accounting world without either a degree or an appropriate qualification, he was never able to get out of it. Organisations always need people who’ll keep an eye on the money, and it was known that Leonard Beeson was good at it. Wherever he went, he was cheated of his ambition to move into the running of aid programmes, and found himself spending most of his times with the account books. In the Congo, then called the Zaïre, he did get a programme or two to run, but his main task was still looking after the money.

Talking about the Congo brings me back to my scrapbook.

The Congo was the scene of a major emergency in 1960. The UN sent troops to quell a civil war and large numbers of civilians to put in place a full programme of support and aid. Volunteers were called for and Leonard Beeson was one of just three from the FAO headquarters in Rome. As a married man, he was only required to serve nine months (it was eighteen for those without a family). My mother took it badly, but he felt that it was a duty to step forward when the organisation that paid him needed help dealing with an emergency.

My father's friend
As it turned out, a dead man walking

He took plenty of photos and some of them I included in my scrapbook. One that has always stuck in my memory was of a young man in a security guard’s uniform. My father liked him and took pleasure chatting with him. But then he was sent as a guard on a plane taking the UN Secretary General of the time, the Swede Dag Hammarskjöld, to Northern Rhodesia (today’s Zambia). The plane never made it and an outstanding Secretary General was killed, along with everyone else on the plane, including my father’s friend.

That event was back in the news a few weeks ago, when it was finally confirmed that, as had long been suspected, the plane had been deliberately shot down by a Belgian pilot working as a mercenary.

Dag Hammarskjöld
Iconic Secretary General assassinated in 1961.
Along with my father's friend

It was odd to read that story and remember my father’s time in the Congo. It sent me back to my scrapbook and to that photo. I’m glad I still have it and that, even if I couldn’t make it last, I stuck to my resolution long enough to produce one scrapbook at least.

Allowing me to write this post, as a bit of a tribute to my father, the UN security guard who became his friend, and of course to Hammarsköld, probably the best Secretary General the UN has had.

Obama Trumped

The Donald has torn up the Iran nuclear arms agreement. On the basis that it was a rotten deal and shamefully one-sided. He’s probably right on the second point: it has led to Iran dropping its military nuclear programme, but few of the promised economic benefits in the way of foreign investment into Iran have materialised.

But maybe Trump didn’t mean that the deal was one-sided against Iran.

The worry seems to be that Iran has never abandoned a policy of extending its influence throughout the region, by manipulating puppet governments and backing deeply unpleasant groups. In particular, Iran’s friend Hezbollah has shown itself perfectly ready to take terrorist action or use violence generally to advance its political agenda.

What’s curious, though, is that it’s the states of the region most inclined to use such violence who are leading the charge against the Iran deal.

Saudi Arabia, for instance, seems intent on pummelling Yemen back into the Stone Age, as it uses its military to starve the Yemeni people and leave it victim to disease as well as injuries without the means to fight them. It also regularly kills large numbers of civilians – for instance, at weddings or funerals – always it claims unintentionally, which means the Saudis are either lying and therefore committing war crimes, or telling the truth and therefore so utterly inept that they shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a weapon.

Saudi Arabia teaching Yemen to appreciate peace

Israel, too, has long established the principle of a hundred eyes for an eye, reacting to any attack on its people by one tens of times more powerful and more murderous. It also regularly intervenes militarily in Syria, in just the same way as Iran or Russia does, with the same callous indifference to the wellbeing – or even survival – of the citizens or the hopes for peace.

But these two nations proclaim their commitment to ending terrorism as their reason for wanting the nuclear deal with Iran ended.

Meanwhile, in the greatest irony of all, it is the United States itself that has done most to ensure the growing power of Iran across the Middle East. It was Dubya Bush, after all, slavishly supported by Tony Blair, then British Prime Minister, who invaded Iraq to bring down Saddam Hussein. Saddam was a deeply unpleasant character and no one deserved to overthrown more than he did, but he was also deeply hostile to Iran. Why, he even fought an eight-year war against his neighbour.

His overthrow left a power-vacuum in Iraq into which flowed the Shia groups who, precisely because they represented the majority of the people, he had always oppressed and prevented holding power. They were enthusiastic supporters of Iran, ruled by fellow Shiites. So in place of Saddam, we now have a puppet-government of Iran’s holding sway over Iraq and its oil.

The West itself set the trap in which it was then caught.

And it looks as though Trump wants to do exactly the same thing again. The Iran nuclear deal was by no means perfect, but it was the only deal we had. Whatever Benyamin Netanyahu of Israel may say, all the evidence points to a huge reduction in Iran’s nuclear programme. In addition, we now have observers from the International Atomic Energy Agency regularly checking Iran’s installations, which we didn’t have before. But just as the UN inspectors were disbelieved when they reported that Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, before the Iraq invasion whose declared goal was to deprive him of them, so Trump refuses to believe the IAEA inspectors today.

What is certain is that if the agreement fails, Iran will return to preparing and stockpiling nuclear weapons. The reformist government may well fall and be replaced by something far less accommodating. Iran may turn from an uncertain partner in peace into an enemy all the more dangerous for thinking itself threatened.

Like Dubya and Trump before him, but at far greater scale, Trump is creating precisely the monster he claims to be acting against.

An ignorant man turns his own weapons against himself. Sadly, he turns them against the rest of us too. Something for which we have to thank the equally deluded minority of US voters who thought they would somehow benefit from putting him in a position to do the damage.

Just as with Brexit, if your answer is Trump, you’re asking the wrong question.