Whose land is it anyway

WHOSE LAND IS IT ANYWAY?

One notable advantage of Barbadian history is that when the island was first settled it was inhabited only by a few pigs. We will never know whether the previous tenants were Caribs or Arawaks. So an irredentist movement of Caribs or  Arawaks cannot ever arise. And as for pigs....

Contrast our good luck  with the ill fortune of Israel, a country which has "belonged" to all sorts of people. Maybe first of all to the Chaldeans or Sumerians, whose ancient capital city of Ur, around five or six thousand B.C, was one of the first cities in the world.  Since then the Hittires, Amalekites, Jebusites, Canaanites etc. occupied most of the area until, under General Joshua, that lot from Egypt took over very rudely and roughly, calling themselves Israelites even though they came from Egypt.

 The Isaelites became Hebrews and then Jews. Some people even forget that J. Christ was a very orthodox Jew until the centuries gradually turned Him into an honorary gentile or non-Jew. An odd word, gentile, don't you think? Are there many other races or religions which have a generic and pejorative word for being just not a member of it? Of course there are. The Romans, for instance, whose word barbari derives from the amazing languages non-Romans speak and which sound like bar-bar-bar-bar.

Since those Old Testament times Israel has been dominated by the Persians, the Romans, and the Islamic Arabs, whose Semitic racial characteristics are indistinguisable from those of the Jews, and whose religion is not very dissimilar. The Ottoman Empire, also Islamic,  took over for a few centuries, but made a strategic error in supporting the Germans in WWI. So when that side lost the war the British took over and called the place Palestine.

Not until 1948, and after a great deal of fussation, was the country divided between Israel, Jordan and the United Arab Republic of that date (now and previously known better as Egypt). A division which has, sadly, not led to a long-lasting peace. So whose land is it really?

If we look at our own ancestral continent of Africa similar doubts occur in many African countries. Many of them are pretty new constructions, dating only from this century, and possibly better described as fabrications. Look, for example at Eritrea, once a part of the Italian Empire, then of Ethiopia, only just now independent after a long war of liberation.

Dan Jacobson, whose racial origins are obvious, is Professor of English at University College, London, and the author of several well-written books, including The Rape of Tamar and The Godfearers. He was brought up in the South African diamond-mining city of Kimberley, and recently returned to Kimberley and to points north of it as far as  Zambia, once known as Northern Rhodesia. The resulting book has the flippant title, The Electronic Elephant. As an unimportant result of this book I will never bother to go to that part of Africa.

Mostly a near-desert, flat, dusty, featureless, poverty-stricken, garbage-strewn near the roads, its several countries escaped from British domination only into their own versions of domestic tyranny. Some countries had rather long-lasting affairs with Soviet Communism but, unlike Cuba, have escaped from that as well. A fair bit of massacre has been a feature of that part of the world for centuries.

Three  places might be worth  your attention as a tourist: The Okavango RiverDelta, full of animals and birds, where the river ends in lakes and pools and  swamps before losing itself in the Kalahari desert. The magnificent Victoria  Falls, far greater than Niagara. But these are only natural wonders.

Historically more interesting are the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, lying at the foot of a notable cliff, as does Athens. Jacobson tells us that it was first mentioned in 1600 by a writer with the improbable name of  John Leo, whose works were collected by one John Pory, lately of Gonevill and Caius College, Cambridge. A great building is mentioned, "with a mightie wall of five and twenty spans thicke, which the people ascribe to the workmanship of the divvel." This building lay in the kingdom of Monomatapa. Other travellers' tales describe the gold, so easily found near this palace of the Emperor, and which is used for enhancing the splendour of its chambers. Ivory candlesticks, cotton hangings and silver chains are also mentioned, but the greatest wealth of the country is given, very reasonably, as in cows and oxen.

Jacobson found two major ruins at the foot of the cliff , with walls 15 feet thick at the base and rising to 30  feet high. An elliptical Enclosure has walls several hundred feet in circumference. The stone is a slatey-blue granite brick, built without mortar. A conical tower is the highest structure. On top of the cliff are more ruins.

In the old legends the Queen of Sheba and the land of Ophir have been associated with Monomatapa. Who knows? A romantic story.

Historians seem to agree that from 1100 onwards there was a preliterate monarchical society,  which built these structures, mined gold, and traded over long distances. They were thought to have spoken Shona and their descendants form the largest local tribe. Near the end of the nineteenth century the Shona were dispossessed by the British, led or driven by Cecil Rhodes, and subsequently despised.

For the Shona, when the Brits moved in, didn't really dominate their own country. Some of them were vassals of a warlike tribe, the Matabele, fairly recent interlopers. Whose land was Zimbabwe, then, just before it became part of the British Empire for a while?

As Jacobson crossed more and more African borders they became to him more and more absurd. The best part of his book was his protest about land ownership. He wished that tablets of bronze could be placed at every border and at every crossroad in countries where different races lived together. They would be inscribed:

NO GROUP'S CLAIM TO THE TERRITORY IT INHABITS IS MORALLY SUPERIOR TO ANY OTHER'S

EVERY GROUP ON EARTH WILL BELIEVE ITSELF TO BE AN EXCEPTION TO THIS RULE

NO GROUP THAT HAS LOST A PIECE OF TERRITORY IT ONCE HELD, AND IS STILL CONSCIOUS OF ITSELF AS A GROUP, WILL EVER GIVE UP ITS CLAIM TO WHAT HAS BEEN LOST.

HOW DO YOU MAKE SENSE OF THIS?

DON'T TRY

So we are really pretty lucky in Barbados.We know which tribe is here the more numerous. Anybody complaining? Yes, the more numerous, the rulers.

Let me hear your comments: e-mail me at jackleacock@jackleacock.itgo.com

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