Constantia revisted

Michael - Thursday

If you notice some similarity between this post and an earlier one, then all I can say is that you have a very good memory. It overlaps the first blog I posted in 2009. Partly because not many memories are that good, partly because it leads into next weeks post (about Bonaparte, but not the one mentioned here), and partly because tomorrow is the absolute deadline for the fifth rewrite of our book, I thought it was worth resurrecting.

In 1652 Jan van Riebeeck landed at what became the Cape of Good Hope with the aim of providing fresh produce for ships of the Dutch East India Company on the way to and from the Indies.  Ostensibly because wine was supposed to help scurvy but perhaps for a quiet tipple on the side, he planted the first vineyard three years later.  And on the 2^nd of February 1659, he was able to proclaim: “Today, praise be to God, wine was pressed from Cape grapes for the first time”.  By all accounts the wine was pretty foul - not too surprising given the level of expertise around. The Netherlands is not renowned for her wine.

But van Riebeeck was succeeded twenty years later by Simon van der Stel, an interesting if contentious character, who did know about wine and saw the opportunity for a guilder or two to come his way also.  He was the son of Adriaan van der Stel and Maria Lievens, the daughter of a freed Indian slave woman, which made him “coloured” in the racial parlance of the apartheid government.  (Needless to say this was not a feature emphasized in the school history text books of the day.)

The Cape peninsular has a climate not too different from that of southern Europe with winter rainfall and moderate temperatures.  It's the area of South Africa which most reminds people of the Continent with gnarled oak lined streets and the genteel plants that thrive in the “old country”. Van der Stel carefully selected a wine farm for himself along the southern slopes of the Cape peninsular, actually testing the soils and choosing a cool microclimate with winds from the sea.  He called the estate Constantia and did very well.

But the wines that made Constantia famous came later when Hendrik Cloete moved from
Stellenbosch (named after van der Stel) and bought a portion of the Constantia estate.  He planted new vines and specialised in a wine made from grapes ripened almost to raisins on the vine, matured in vats, and fortified.  The wine was called simply Constantia and it held its own with all the choice sweet wines with the rich and famous of the day.  All this came to an end late in the nineteenth century when phylloxera devastated the vineyards.  Still, a few bottles survive to this day.  A wine-writer friend of mine was fortunate to taste one some years ago and pronounced it still luscious after two hundred years.

A famous story about Constantia is that it was one of Napoleon's favourite wines and he received a regular supply to cheer him up on Saint Helena - an island off the west coast of Africa to which he was exiled the second time after Elba couldn't hold him. A juicy twist was that the British used the wine to kill him with small doses of arsenic poisoning, but if arsenic was involved, it was more likely to have been from the glue in the wall paper. The modern consensus seems to be that he died of stomach cancer and that spoils the tale altogether.

In 1980 a new estate named Klein Constantia (part of the original van der Stel estate) decided to try to recreate the wine.  It was to be a sweet desert wine in the late harvest style – not botrytis – with the berries hand-selected.  The venture was a stunning success and celebrated in the name – Vin de Constance – and in copies of the old Constantia hand-made bottles which the estate uses for the modern wine.  It's available outside South Africa – a friend in Australia has a good selection of vintages, and I've had a bottle in a restaurant in New York.  If you like dessert wines, this one is worth trying if you have the chance.  

You can imagine you're sharing the bottle with Bismark or Napoleon or King George... It will set you back more than a few dollars though. The wine has become something of a collectors item.

A Car for Emusoi

Annamaria on Monday

 

HELP ME BUY THESE GIRLS A CAR!

The beautiful young women with me in the photo above are from pastoralist tribes in Tanzania, Africa.  In their culture, girls their age—between twelve and fourteen—can expect to undergo female circumcision and shortly thereafter be sold into marriage by their fathers or male guardians.  The men who take them in marriage are ordinarily around four times their age.  The bride price is typically in cows, but I have heard one story where the girl was twelve, the prospective husband fifty-seven, and the price a truckload of beer.

These girls come from remote villages that don’t have secondary schools.  Ordinarily, they would have no place in society, no way of surviving unless they accepted their traditional fate.  The Tanzanian Ministry of Education places pastoralist girls as one of the most disadvantaged groups in the country.  The marriages they are forced into often make them a third or fourth wife—at the mercy, not only of their husbands, but also of his older wives.

This is happening now.  Not in the Middle Ages.  Not a hundred years ago.  NOW!

What do you think?  Shall we do whatever we can to give these girls an alternative?  To help them finish their education and actualize their potential as human beings?  Shouldn’t we?

Thank you!  I thought you would say yes.

Let’s talk about how:

For the past twenty years, the Emusoi Centre in Arusha Tanzania has given pastoralist girls a new lease on life.  Through Emusoi, over fourteen hundred just such girls have finished their education.  They are now doctors, lawyers, accountants, teachers, and nurses.  Many have returned to their villages with their new capabilities.  Now, they provide medical care, education, and advocacy for their people.  But even more important—they are role models for the girls growing up around them.  And examples to all of what women can become.

Some of the girls in the picture ran away from their villages to Emusoi for the chance to go to school.  Some were taken there by mothers who risked beatings in order to give their daughters a better life than they have had.

So why do they need a car?

Emusoi is not a secondary school.  It is a refuge.  Once they take in the girls, the staff of Emusoi gives them remedial training to prepare them to succeed once they are admitted to further education.  The girls need the car so the staff can transport them to apply to schools, to take entrance examinations, and to move in once they are admitted.  Emusoi’s staff also uses the Centre’s car for rescue missions:  Sometimes, when a student goes home to her village for a visit, her father spirits her off in order to trade her away for some cows or for a wife for one of his sons.  The Emusoi staff then has to chase through the wilderness to find her so they can bring her back to school.  I am not making this up!

The car that provides for all these activities is now twenty years old, nearing the end of its useful life.

Girls needing rescue have to have a car that will get to them without breaking down.  Otherwise, they may be lost for good.  But also keep in mind that the Centre’s car transports them to medical appointments, brings in grocery shopping, all the things a family needs a car to do.

Before the old buggy becomes totally unreliable, help me replace it with a brand new one.

Emusoi is a big family. The car the girls need holds twelve, including the driver.  For $50,000, we can get them a 2018 Toyota Long Body Land Cruiser, built for Tanzania—to stand up to the bad roads (or no roads) one finds in wilderness areas.  

I am hoping to raise the entire amount and will match whatever donation you make by fifty percent. So your donation of $30 will become $45. Your $100 will become $150.  Your $1000 will become $1500.

Then, we will be able to buy them this!

 

This is your chance to improve the lives of girls and help them become the women of the future.  Please don’t pass it up.

Here is the link to a special fund set up on the Maryknoll Missionary website:

The link: https://www.maryknollsisters.org/featured-stories/emusoi-centre/

Note: In the "Prayer intentions/notes"  field, write "Emusoi Centre-vehicle/Sr. Mary Vertucci"*

To make your donations in the form of a check or money order, send to:

Maryknoll Sisters
Box 317
Maryknoll, NY 10545-0311
U.S.A

Please make checks payable to Maryknoll Sisters, New York with “Emusoi Center-vehicle” on the memo line. *

*Be sure to write in this notation, so that I can identify your donation and contribute another 50% in your name.



Every dollar you donate will go towards a car that will help transport these girls into the future they deserve.

THANK YOU!

A Mountain, A Lesson, And a Wish

-- Susan, Every Other Sunday

If all goes well, by the time this post goes live, I will have stood atop two of the Nihon hyakumeizan (100 famous mountains of Japan) - the start of my quest to climb the hyakumeizan in a single year.

I originally conceived of this journey as a way to face my fears (little knowing I would have to face and conquer one of the greatest--cancer--before I even set foot on the mountains). I'd grown tired of living "safe" and doing what everyone else expected. I'd spent decades reading books about mountain climbing, living vicariously through others, and dreaming of mountains I knew I would never climb.

Like my dreams - except that this one, I did climb.

Even after I decided to pursue my hyakumeizan quest, it still felt more like "something other people do" than something I would live. Even so, I planned my climbs through chemo. I trained through the pain. (And for the pain, as it turns out. These aren't bunny hills.)

Ten days ago, I got on a plane with my husband and my cat, and flew to Tokyo.

And a week ago, I stood atop the first of the hundred summits: Mount Akagi (Akagiyama) in Gunma Prefecture.

On the summit of Akagi-yama. 99 more to go.

More accurately, I stood atop three summits, since Akagi is a stratovolcano with several peaks, and I traversed across two of the lower ones to reach the mountain's highest point.

The view from the saddle, traversing between the peaks.

Several times on the ascent (and more than that while coming down again) I wondered whether my legs would give out before I achieved my goal.

My legs cry just remembering this.

But they didn't.

I worried I'd move too slowly, and miss the final bus back to the train.

That didn't happen either.

I worried about slipping on the steep, rocky slopes, and falling (doubtless to my death) on the boulder-strewn chaos of the descending path.

Guess what . . . those worries never came to pass.

And the other worries? The ones that plagued me daily during my life "before" the mountains? The fear of failure, of loss, of hardship? The fear that I'm not good enough, successful enough, worthwhile enough?

On the mountain, those fears were nowhere to be found.

Last Sunday on Akagi I re-learned a vital lesson I'd half forgotten. Mountains have a way of forcing you to focus on the truly important things in life.

Like the beauty of a crater lake:

The smaller of the two crater lakes in the Mount Akagi volcano

The size of the task in front of you:

There's a path in there. Somewhere.

The breathtaking scope of the world as it appears from a mountaintop.

Onuma, the larger of Akagi's crater lakes.

This focus is one of the things I love the most about climbing mountains. Climbing's not easy, but the things you see, the time you get to spend with yourself, and the sense of true achievement that comes from standing on top (and then safely back at the bottom) aren't things it's easy to find in the daily nine-to-five that filled my life until this quest began.

The terror of descending this isn't easily found in office environments either...

When asked why he climbed Mount Everest, Sir George Mallory is famously quoted as saying "Because it's there."

My personal answer is somewhat different. I've known for decades that these mountains exist, but that alone was not enough to make me endure the pain of standing on their summits (or climbing back down again).

I climb because in the mountains I feel alive, at peace, and "enough" in a way I've never experienced elsewhere.

I climb because, in the mountains, I am there.

Wild azaleas in bloom on Mount Akagi, with Onuma in the background.

And my wish - for everyone reading this and everyone else in the world -- is that you find your mountain, your dream, and your peaceful place, and that you go there just as often as you can.

Guest Blogger: Brian Stoddart--Asian Postcolonial Echoes

Jeff--Saturday

 I arrived on Mykonos late Sunday, after an awe-inspiring, wonderful week in Bristol at CrimeFest--and immediately found myself confronting bureaucratic challenges and sharing in friends' personal tragedies. It's been a rough week. But it's ended on a high note, because out of the blue came a request from my long-time friend, Dr. Brian Stoddart, offering to post this primer on what's actually going on in the mysterious venues of Hong Kong and Malaysia. Believe me, it's well worth your while to read this post, for Brian knows of what he speaks.

Professor Stoddart is now a full time writer, after a storied university career culminating in service as Vice-Chancellor/President at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.  He's subsequently served as a consultant on higher education reform for the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the European Union in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. 

Now based in Queenstown, New Zealand, Brian writes the Superintendent Chris Le Fanu historical crime series set in 1920s  Madras, British India. The most recent, "A Straits Settlement," was long-listed for New Zealand’s 2017 Ngaio Marsh Award and the first, "A Madras Miasma," was among CrimeFictionLover’s 2014 Top Ten debut books, a list that included Sarah Hilary, Clare Donoghue and Eva Dolan. His "A House in Damascus" won a gold medal award for best creative non-fiction and was a No 1 on Amazon Middle East travel.

 He is also a serious photographer and delivers history and culture lectures on board cruise ships--an avocation of which I'm intensely jealous.:)

Welcome, Brian Stoddart!

ASIAN POSTCOLONIAL ECHOES

Serendipitously, I recently found myself back in the Asian present but reflecting on its past.

I was in Hong Kong for a very modern reason, the stock exchange launch of an Australian private college for which I chair the council and sit on the board. Like most of Asia (used here as a shorthand only), Hong Kong is much changed two decades after its return to China by the United Kingdom which had run the place since the Opium Wars.

It has is increasingly hard now to find the quirky, the unusual or even the genuine Hong Kong. The Hollywood Road antique shops have been raided by wealthy Chinese now scouring the world in search of treasures to take home to where they belong, and for whom money is no object. This new Hong Kong is epitomised by its efficient airport that replaces the old Kai Tak one where flights in past laundry fluttering on apartment balconies was always an adventure. The main view on the way into this new one is of the about to be opened Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge that is really an elevated road and a tribute to engineering and vision.

But in the streets of Mong Kok and elsewhere, it is still possible to find all the elements that made the Shaw Brothers action films and Bruce Lee so famous, and that were captured so brilliantly by photographers like Fan Ho.

And some of those elements are found in the novels of Chan Ho-kei who deserves a wide reading in the West. http://asianreviewofbooks.com/content/the-borrowed-by-chan-ho-kei/ Kwan Chun-dok, his Hong Kong police force protagonist, experiences the city both before and after 1997 and charts the behavioural, political and social shifts that have occurred there.

At the heart of all that, of course, lies Hong Kong’s transition from the veneer of a British order to one that many still regard as a veneer of a Chinese one. That included the rise of the triads that had connections into China via groups like the Green Gang that aided Chiang Kai-shek’s struggle against the rise of Mao. Those gangs dominated the rampant drugs and sex industries and, like Shanghai, Hong Kong became a global centre. Throughout that colonial period Hong Kong experienced a strong British commercial, financial, legal, police and military fraternity that floated above the real Hong Kong.

Inevitably, cross-cultural clashes arose, like the 1952 murder case that saw British soldiers convicted for killing a Chinese woman. http://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/2124276/hong-kong-murder-files-british-soldiers-sentenced

Towards the end of that colonial period the crime range widened. In the 1970s, for example, Chief Superintendent Peter Godber of the Royal Hong Kong Police Force was returned to the colony from Britain to face corruption charges on which he was convicted. East had definitely met West.

The triads continued in the form of characters like “Broken Tooth” Koi who ran Macau and once made a film to memorialise his life. And more recently Carson Yeung, once owner of Birmingham City Football Club, was imprisoned for money laundering over $700 million. 

The coincidence was that while I was contemplating all this in Hong Kong, in came news that Malaysia’s dominant political party for over sixty years had been defeated by a coalition led by 92 years old Dr Mahathir Mohamad and assisted by Anwar Ibrahim.

Now here was a real colonial and postcolonial story.

Britain took over the region during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and ruled through three agencies: the Federated Malay States, the Unfederated Malay States, and the Straits Settlements. The last of those became the best known, perhaps, involving Singapore, Malacca and Penang.

My most recent novel, A Straits Settlement, has Superintendent Chris Le Fanu of the Indian Police Service come to Penang, ostensibly pursuing a case but really escaping a tyrant boss back in India. While there, he encounters the distinctive cultural patterns of the Malayan peninsula, mainly in the form of Jenlin Koh, a Straits Chinese woman.

Like the rest of the British Empire, Malaya (the Malayan Union was formed in 1946) had specific cultural forms that led directly to this most recent political upheaval. From the beginning, the British ruled over a mixture of autochthonous Malays, immigrant Indians (mainly Tamils and Punjabis) and immigrant Chinese. The latter came mainly from southern China with a myriad of languages and cultures. Some married into the Malay community, producing the distinctive Straits Chinese or Peranakan community of Jenlin Koh.

Given that heady brew, writers like Somerset Maugham, Anthony Burgess, Joseph Conrad, Noel Barber and Lesley Thomas understandably all set novels there. Maugham was notorious for enjoying the hospitality provided by his many hosts then casting them unattractively in his books. Those writers traced the British presence through early colonial times into the World War II Japanese occupation and subsequent Communist “emergency” then, eventually, independence in 1957 before the 1963 separation from Singapore that formed Malaysia.

Among Malaya’s colonial sensations, few rivalled the 1951 assassination of Sir Henry Lovell Goldsworthy Gurney, the High Commissioner, by Communist insurgents led by Chin Peng. Gurney was born in north Devon, went to Winchester then served during World War I before going to Kenya and the colonial service in 1921. Then came Jamaica in 1934, back to East Africa. and Colonial Secretary in the Gold Coast. In 1948 he was became Colonial Secretary in Palestine, overseeing the creation of Israel. From there he was appointed to Malaya.

Chin Peng was born Perak, Malaya. A Chinese, he believed that Malays received undue consideration. Through World War II, however, he was active against the Japanese, working closely with British forces that moved back in during 1943. He received an OBE for his services. After the war, Chin Peng climbed through the Communist Party of Malaya ranks, resenting what he thought was Britain’s undemocratic creation of the Malayan Union. That led to the armed rebellion remembered as the Malayan Emergency.

Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer led the British military campaign and was appointed High Commissioner following Gurney’s death. Templer later became a key British government adviser during the Suez crisis.

Today, Gurney Drive in Penang and Gurney Road in Singapore remember Templer’s assassinated predecessor.

Chin Peng struggled on until the final days of the Communist Party was finished, holed up in the jungle on the Malaysian side of the Thai border. The University Utara Malaysia is carved into that jungle, and I visited it many times while running one of Australia’s first offshore campuses in Penang. It was strange to be there then because Chin Peng was still alive – he died in exile in Bangkok during 2013.

Like Chan Ho-kei’s cop, Mahathir Mohamad traversed this colonial and post-colonial journey. He became a medical doctor then joined the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) in 1946. It was 1964 before he entered Parliament but he was already a leading advocate of special treatment for Malays as outlined in his influential book, The Malay Dilemma. He fell out with Lee Kuan Yew and Singapore, suggesting too much Chinese influence was at play there. Mahathir fell out with his own leader, Tunku Abdul Rahman, too, and left parliament but returned later to become Prime Minister from 1981 until 2003.

His re-emergence is remarkable, if only for the rapprochement with Anwar Ibrahim. The pair were Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister for much of Mahathir’s ascendancy and up until the Asian financial crisis of 1997 when they began to disagree. While working there through that period, an Indian friend told me a story. It had Mahathir suggesting he was the better politician because he bribed everybody whereas Anwar bribed only Malays. True or not, it captured the political order where Malays held power, Chinese provided capital while Indians dominated business and labour. What is known in the West as “corruption” certainly existed then, as a cost of doing business.

Anwar suffered after the rift. He was jailed for corruption and then for sodomy. Freed, he was later tried again and served more time for sodomy right up until this new election. In all that period he was heralded in the West as a friend of democracy and a martyr to Mahathir. It is forgotten that he was central to the Mahathir regime for a long time and part of all the deals. His story is testament to how Asian complexity is often overlooked or even ignored.

So why is Mahathir back, allegedly to hand power over to Anwar within a couple of years? The short answer involves the decline of UMNO under Najib Razak who became Prime Minister in 2009. He comes from political royalty. His father, Abdul Razak, was the second Prime Minister, his uncle Hussein Onn the third. Najib himself was educated in the United Kingdom then entered parliament at twenty three to begin a storied career in senior positions.

But his Prime Ministership has been marked by scandal and corruption. One problem involved continuing rumours about the 2006 murder of a Mongolian woman being associated with people close to Najib. In 2009 two policemen were convicted then later acquitted of the murder, but in 2015 another court again found them guilty. One fled to Australia which would not extradite him back to a country carrying the death penalty. Now with the change of government, Mongolian officials want the case reopened.

Meanwhile, up popped the 1MDB story. This was a Malaysian government development company fund created in 2009 to enhance foreign direct investment projects. Its total holdings are effectively unknown, but a United States Department of Justice indictment suggests at least $US3.5 billion have disappeared into private hands. Anwar has long been a critic, identifying Najib as a key figure suggested as a major beneficiary. Some accounts have Najib him receiving $US800 million. 

Much of the story line swings around characters like Jho Low. A classic “flash Harry” who attended Harrow then the Wharton School and later befriended Najib’s stepson, Jho Low runs a Hong Kong-based finance company behind or associated with major global purchases. Those include the Park Lane Hotel in New York, EMI’s music publishing arm, and Reebok. He and Najib’s stepson also ran Red Granite pictures that financed The Wolf of Wall Street.

That movie connection has him associated with women like Paris Hilton and recently, Australian Miranda Kerr who has returned a substantial amount of jewellery following indications it was purchased with pilfered 1MDB funds,

Now the new Finance Minister, Lim Guan Eng who was a successful Chief Minister in Penang, has ordered a full 1MDB audit. Mahathir had already placed a travel ban on Najib and his family. Now, police raided Najib’s home and offices to confiscate seventy-two bags of jewellery, two hundred and eighty four boxes of luxury handbags, several luxury watches and substantial amounts of cash.

The war of words continues.

We can only imagine what Somerset Maugham might have made of it all, but one thing is clear – crime writers have plenty of material in all these colonial into postcolonial conditions even if, as the old saying has it, “you couldn’t make up this stuff.” Reality continues to be stranger than fiction.

Perhaps it will be a new case for Shamini Flint’s Inspector Singh.

--Brian in for Jeff

Bristol; Sun and Snowflakes

 The replica wooden boat in the harbour at Bristol

Me in the sun. First time this year. 

 Quiet, early morning along the harbour wall.

Nobody about, Not even Jeff photobombing.

The swing bridge opened to let the fireboat pass. 

Opps, need to get back for a panel 

                                 This panel was dotted with the F word, the B word and the C word.

 Not from either of the two pictured here.

Or any Glaswegians.

As far as I know nobody complained.

 

 On another panel Ruth Dudley Edwards said something that a lot of people complained about.
I wasn't there so I don't know what the complaint  was, but the word 'trannies' was used.
Yet, I will type the Trannie word but not the C word.
I don't know I what context the T word was used.
Maybe I don't know why it is so offensive in itself so forgive me if it is.
And we do have a transgender in the family, she doesn't object to it. Maybe  transvestites do, but it's never come up in conversation.
But nobody died, so we should all move on.

 We were quite happily wearing masks of the royal family - note that I am married to Felix Francis!
This is probably treason.

Then I found out that there was a movement on social media which mentioned banning Ruth from moderating at Crimefest.

And facebook has been very busy with it all, largely supportive of the complainers. I don't want to use the word snowflake but people did find the comments Ruth made highly offensive and said so on facebook.

Yet, when I have asked folk to their face what they think, they say 'Some folk are too easily offended.'

So speak out then!

Nope. Too many of the PC brigade out there.

Respecting that they don't want their thoughts being made public, I won't mention them here by name. 

But it's interesting that perception of power.

Like I said, nobody died.

My panel were lovely, no swearing, nobody being offensive.

 Well,  not that they told me but Felix was chatting about his sexual technique at one point.

You had to be there to hear it. 

A good titter had by all,

 No censorship here.

That is a dirty word indeed.

a very dirty word to me. 

A busy hall. One lady sneaked in late and fell over the cable.

No panellists or audience members were harmed during the panel. 

Me, Felix and the very talented Emma Elgar.

Who I always wanted to call Edgar.

Steve Mosby and Robert Thorogood, no sweary words here 

The globe on bright sunshine.

 And back to the boat!

Caro Ramsay  25 05 2018