The New Historians

Unidentified Maratha princess in 1930s India. More about her sari and footwear at vintageindianclothing.com 

The Internet has long been the bane of parents and teachers observing middle school kids learn to write papers. You can probably imagine how many times I’ve told my offspring to go to the library, because Googling something does not always get you an academically vetted answer. Teachers hate Wikipedia and its spawn.

Those of us who write about faraway places are often zealous travelers to foreign libraries. The British Library and National Library of India are my Holy Grail of Libraries—although the Ames Library of South Asia in Minneapolis and the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. are excellent. The problem is, it's insanely expensive to travel to libraries in this fashion. And I find that although my city library, the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, has lovely old books about Britain and India dating from the early 20th century, I can't stroll the archives and come upon serendipitous findings.

The one place you can meander--most call it "surfing," which seems out of context for me--is the Internet.
Don't tell my kids'  teachers, but I'm discovering theres a vast world of specialized history in digital treasure chests. They don't usually come up on the first page of search results--but they exist and offer more than I ever hoped to find.

Let's start off with transportation, which has got to be accurate if you're setting a fast-paced adventure in a real city like Bombay. So let's embark on our internet history voyage at Bombayrailway.blogspot.com. Journalist Rajendra Alkekar became fascinated with trains while commuting to high school. As he matured, he never lost interest, and Rajendra discovered significant relics lying near tracks. Rajendra studied conservation and museology, wrote newspaper columns about rail history, and created a website that glows with his own great photographs of historic stations. When I wondered about a particular train route from central Bombay to Bandra during the year 1920, I emailed Rajendra and was relieved to learn that it existed.

 I became fascinated enough with Bombay's history of rail travel to buy his bookHalt Station India  but the website is where I visit weekly to gaze at old train stations.

I’ve also needed to learn a lot about the practice of law in India during the late 19^th and early 20^th century. That’s a tall order for someone who doesn’t have access to a law library inside India! But one of the foremost scholars of South Asian law created South Indian Legal History Resources--a website by Mira Sharafi, which has been a boon to graduate students, other professors, and the occasional mystery writer. She's also written the definitive book on colonial law and Parsi culture.

Prince of Wales Seaman's Club in Bombay, 1921, Bombaywalla.org

Mitra shepherded me a little farther on my web history journey to an amazing site, Bombaywalla,  created by "Miss Bombaywalla," aka Simin Patel, a young Oxford PhD who hails from Bombay and is devoted to chronicling the history of the Parsi (Zoroastrian community), which is synonymous with Bombay. At Miss Bombaywalla's site, one can uncover Bombay's original street and place names, see close-up color photos of historic buildings, and build a reading list of antiquarian novels and travel accounts of Bombay. She fills it out with wonderful color pictures of old Bombay structures that make you want to get over there, right now.

And what of the history of beauty and fashion in India? It’s so much more than the sari. Vintage Indian Clothing sounds like a shopping site, but it’s actually collection of short but very thorough essays on the charming evolution of fashion and beauty in India. From the site creator known rather mysteriously as Anu M., I've learned about the different kinds of bindis (“dots”) that women have used as ornamentation over the years—and the meaning of similar markings on men. I could gaze at glamorous Indian film stars from years gone by for hours.

Does this exist in libraries? Not a chance. In fact, it's rather ironic that I've written this post sitting at a desk in the Quiet Study Room of the Cockeysville Library, which does have books, but provides me just the right setting to pursue online history.  

Paris is a Gruyere

With metro tunnels, sewers, old quarries and catacombs crisscrossing under its streets, Paris is a city of layers. And Charles Axel Guillaumot is often credited with saving the city from collapsing into them. Traces of him – and key moments in history such as the French revolution – can still be found underground today. If you want to know anything about what’s underneath Paris, you could try to find some cataphiles, people who spend time exploring the catacombs with flashlights and waders. But for the history, the man to talk to is Gilles Thomas, my friend. A wiry, moustached man, Thomas works for the city of Paris, but he is passionate about what’s underneath it, both physically and historically. The authorities, he says, are only interested in the structural soundness of what’s above ground - he's interested in preserving the history underneath. The buildings of Paris were built out of the limestone and gypsum – or plaster of Paris – dug out of its belly. The Romans, who founded the city on the Ile de la Cité, found limestone along the riverbanks. “Then the city grew,” explains Thomas. “Around the 12th and 13th century, there was a big demand for stone, because there was a spike in the population of Paris and of religiosity.” The Notre Dame cathedral was built around this time, along with several other churches, all of them needing stone, which meant digging further underground. Initially, the quarries were far outside the city, beneath fields. But then the city expanded and those fields became city streets. “Paris, as it grew, was built over the old quarries,” says Thomas. And over the years, people forgot about the quarries and continued to build on top of them - until they started collapsing.That’s where Guillaumot comes in. An architect for King Louis XVI, he was appointed 334 years ago on 4 April 1777 as the city’s first Inspecteur des Carrières, Quarries Inspector. He was given three tasks, explains Thomas, “to look for all the empty spaces under Paris; to make a map of them; and to reinforce anything under public streets and buildings belonging to the king.” “Before the year 1777, the temples, palaces, houses and the public streets of several parts of Paris and its surrounding areas, were about to sink into giant pits,” Guillaumot wrote in a 1797 memoir. He quickly realised that reinforcing the quarries was a long-term project, so he needed to put a system in place. “Neither I nor my collaborators will see the end of it,” he wrote. “Others will have this opportunity, but I have reason to believe that we have paved the road for them, and they will not have any fundamental changes to make on the system that I implemented.” The system involved building walls - underground – along the perimeters of buildings, which still exist today. A limestone quarry under the Cochin hospital in the 14th arrondisement still exists today, maintained by an association that has an agreement with the city to renovate and maintain it. Gilles Thomas works with the association, and insisted on giving a tour, saying that the only way to truly appreciate the history of the quarries is to see it for yourself. The Cochin quarry is not far from the official catacombs, which are open to the public, but it is certainly not as easy to find. Navigating through the hospital’s emergency room entrance, winding through the hospital grounds, Thomas heads into an underground parking area where there is a non-descript door. Behind the door is a room with old photos and maps of what’s underneath the streets: blue for the empty spaces, brown for the masses left to hold up the quarry ceilings, all laid out in a rough grid.Another door leads to a long concrete stairway that was built in the 1930s when the city turned underground spaces under administrative buildings into bunkers. And about 20 metres down is the entrance to the quarry.Unlike the public catacombs, which are mainly hallways packed with human bones, this quarry has open spaces with columns. The walls are limestone, the ground is packed dust. Street signs are engraved on columns and walls. "When you are above ground, you can ask people for directions,” Thomas points out but in the 18th century Guillaumot and his workers had to wander in the dark, holding candles to light their way.

Traces of the first quarry inspector are everywhere, as each reinforcement wall and pillar has a code engraved on it, like 1G1786, which indicates the first column built by Guillaumot in 1786. Every engraving had a date, but Thomas says you will be hard-pressed to find 1789, the year of the French revolution. “You’ll see 1777, and years during the revolution, but there are very few from 1789, because it was year when there were other things to think about,” he says. Guillaumot was imprisoned during the revolution, and removed from his position because he had been appointed by the king. Later, in 1795, he was given his job back. He reappears on inscriptions with dates referencing the republican calendar, which was introduced between 1792 and 1806. The inscription 22.G.12R indicates the 22nd column built by Guillaumot during the 12th year of the French republic. Thomas says the work of the Quarries Inspector continued through all of the upheavals of French history. “Whatever the troubled history in Paris and in France, there was always being work done the quarries - during the revolution, during the terreur,” he says. And traces of this remain: street signs with scratched-out fleur de lys, the royal symbol, because in 1793, anything having to do with royalty was systematically destroyed. Or not quite everything. Ten signs with fleur de lys remain underground. “There are so few, that there is an explanation for each one,” he says. The one above the number 270, for example, survived because it was in a pool of water. Another one was on the back of a sign that had been recarved. In 1794, all references to religion were destroyed. Signs for streets named after saints, like Rue Saint Jacques or Rue Saint Paul were changed, above and below ground. “The plaques made during the revolution just say Rue Jacques,” says Thomas. “And during the restoration, as there is no room between Rue and Jacques, some just carved a little “St” over it.”Vestiges of this still exist above ground. Look closely at the stone carved street signs on the corner of Rue du Faubourg Saint Jacques and Rue Fossés Saint Jacques, you can see that the Saint was scratched out and put back. The same exists on Rue Saint Paul in the Marais. Nearing the end of the tour, we come across members of the association setting up an underground lunch, taking a break from their renovation work.And then it was time to walk back through the ages: through the 19th-century tunnels, up the 20th-century stairwell and into the air of the 21st century. Cara - Tuesday

Time is of the Essence

Annamaria on Monday

First Watch this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xp4EUryS6ac

What you have just seen is a clip from Christian Marclay’s masterpiece “The Clock,” the pinnacle of art video.

I am inspired to post it here today for two reasons.  First of all, my mind is on the clock.  I arrived home after an eight-week absence on Friday evening.  I am leaving on Tuesday morning for Phoenix for the Left Coast Crime convention.  That means I have three days at home to accomplish a bunch of things and not a moment to spare.

I have also been thinking about the video because I have only recent spent time with my friends Jean-Claude and Francoise, who introduced me to the work of art in question at the Venice Biennale in 2011, where it won the Golden Lion—the highest award for a work exhibited at the vast art fair.

Christian Marclay is an American-Swiss artist whose mediums are film and music.  He was trained in Geneva, Boston, and New York.  His “The Clock” is beyond brilliant: a twenty-four-hour montage of film and television clips in which the clocks within the video are EXACTLY timed to follow the actual time in the place where the video is being shown.  When the audience in the museum watches the film, the time on the clocks synchronizes with their current time of day. 

For the forty-five minutes of “The Clock” that I saw in Venice five years ago, I was completely mesmerized!  I wanted to stay in the theater and watch the whole thing.  I still hope to do that one day.

Marclay worked with six assistants to collect the film and TV clips—over 12,000 in all.  He then spent three years editing the images and the audio.  Marclay then made six editions and two artist’s proofs.  Five were sold to museums.  The final one is in a private collection.

I am not the only fan to gush over “The Clock.”  Zadie Smith, writing in The New York Review of Books said it “is neither bad nor good, but sublime, maybe the greatest film you have ever seen.”

Here is a longer clip for you to enjoy, while I go back to racing with the real clock.

 https://youtu.be/6cOhWtyXGXQ

If you want to see the whole thing, you will have to find a museum that is showing it.  If you hear of one, please tell me.  I will take a plane to see it wherever it is.    

Ninja Codes and Colored Rice - the History of Goshikimai

Susan - every other Sunday

During the medieval age, ninjas—(also called shinobi)—were known and feared throughout Japan for their skills as spies and assassins. 

Sneaky, sneaky.

Most people know ninjas only from Hollywood movies, where men in black pajamas appear out of nowhere, throw a shuriken or two, and disappear in a cloud of smoke. In reality, ninjas did far more than assassinate unsuspecting victims (though they did their share of that as well) and they developed a remarkable arsenal of tools to aid them with every aspect of medieval espionage.

All ninjas trained in combat skills, but many were not primarily assassins. Far more often, the shinobi acted as spies and undercover agents, gathering information for their clans or for samurai who hired them to spy on rival warlords. 

No one suspects the man with a basket on his head.

Note: in medieval Japan, a group of itinerant monks (called komuso) who followed the Fuke school of Zen Buddhism did, in fact, wander the roads with baskets on their heads.  The baskets were intended to help them separate themselves from the world--and also made convenient disguises for ninjas hoping to pass on the roads unnoticed.

In order to pass information to other agents, the shinobi developed several systems of passing secret information, known as “dentatsu-jutsu.”

One of these secret methods of communication, known as goshikimai, involved an elaborate code and grains of dyed or colored rice. 

Colored rice in bamboo tubes. Text messaging, medieval style.

Shinobi (or their female counterparts, called kunoichi) dyed or painted grains of rice in five different colors: purple, black, red, yellow, and blue. 

Different combinations of colored grains represented the various phonetic sounds of the Japanese language. When combined, the sounds formed words and messages which other ninja spies could understand.

Memorize this and you're ready to go.

The colored rice was left by roadsides or in other pre-arranged locations--generally outside, where colored rice was less likely to draw attention (though, between you and me, I'm not sure bright red rice would ever fail to draw a glance). 

Birds and animals left the rice alone because the dye, which was also water-resistant, was designed to taste unpleasant. Even so, rice breaks down quickly in Japan's humid climate, making goshikimai an effective short-term method of secret communication. Once received, the messages were normally scattered and left to decompose naturally, under a bush or in a river, leaving no trace of the message and no evidence for the recipient to carry away from the scene.

I haven’t yet had the chance to use goshikimai in my novels, but it has a scheduled appearance in an upcoming story. Frankly, it's just too cool to leave out. 

So tell me...what's the coolest ancient or medieval spy tool in your arsenal of knowledge?

For Whom the Bell Tolls

As appeared in Ekathimerini

Jeff–Saturday

I planned to write a piece on the evolving attitude of Europe toward the migrant/refugee crisis, pivoting on the recently announced determination by the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia (aka the Visegrad Four) to tighten border controls, Austria announcing it will limit asylum applications to 80 per day, Germany—with Merkel’s party facing March elections—vowing not to take anywhere near the numbers it did last year, and France just saying no. 

Of course, all of that assumes Greece can somehow keep the frightened masses fleeing extermination securely penned up and conveniently away from the rest of Europe’s doors.  Such a solution would avoid the messy need for the EU to develop a coherent plan for addressing the root causes of this first true human catastrophe of the 21^st Century, and with threats being the political currency of our time, that is how Europe seeks to inspire Greece to act, or rather come up with a magic wand.

It ain’t going to work, folks.  Not because of Greece, but geopolitical reality: The EU better wake up and smell the Turkey basting.

Over 800,000 streamed into Greece (a nation of eleven million) last year, mainly via Turkey (a nation of 80 million), fleeing wars raging within Turkey’s Iraq and Syria neighbors to the south (as well as Afghanistan).  Then, of course, there is the Kurdish element, an ethnic minority comprising between 15 to 25 million of Turkey’s population, depending on whose figures one accepts.  

Turkey’s government blamed this past week’s terror attack on Turkish military in Turkey’s capital of Ankara on Syrian Kurds—allied with Turkish Kurds—and a splinter group has claimed responsibility as retribution for the military's killing of Kurds.  There is deep historical antipathy between the Turkish government and its Kurdish population—with Turkey publicly avowing never to allow an independent Kurdish region at its borders.  All of which is made far more complicated by both the US and Russia separately relying upon alliances with Syrian Kurds in their separate wars; the US in battling ISIS, and the Russians in fighting anti-Syrian-regime forces.

This isn’t going to get any better any time soon.

So, I’ll get to my point. In reading current news articles on the state of this mess, I came across a Reuters story by Karolina Tagaris.  It reduced the sense dulling numbers we hear of the people fleeing and dying to a simpler concept tied into a tiny plot of land on one of the Greek islands bearing the brunt of the crisis.  I realized there was no reason for me to rage on about the political implications of it all, for no one seems to care.  Instead I decided to repost this piece so that we can appreciate the only possible ending of this crisis for so many: in tears.

Here is Ms. Tagaris’s article titled, “Unknown Dead Fill Lesbos Cemetery for Refugees Drowned at Sea.”

She drowned trying to reach Europe, but her headless body was never identified. Her tombstone will bear no name.

Like others buried beside her in an olive grove on the Greek island of Lesbos, the marble plaque on her unmarked grave will proclaim the victim “Unknown”. Her epitaph an identification number, the date she washed ashore, and her presumed age: one.

Sixty-four earthen graves have been dug in this land plot for refugees and migrants who drowned crossing the Aegean Sea trying to reach Europe. Just 27 of those are named.

The others state plainly: “Unknown Man, Aged 35, No 221, 19/11/2015;” “Unknown Boy, Aged 7, No 40, 19/11/2015;” “Unknown Boy, Aged 12, No 171, 19/11/2015.”

More than half a million people fleeing Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries plagued by war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa have arrived on Lesvos since last year hoping to continue to northern Europe.

In 2015, the deadliest year for migrants and refugees crossing the Mediterranean, more than 3,700 people are known to have drowned or gone missing, the International Organization for Migration says. The actual number is believed to be higher.

Hundreds have drowned in Greece since arrivals surged last summer. So many, in fact, that the section of one Lesvos cemetery designated for refugees and migrants has long run out of space.

Locals conclude that entire families have drowned in the same shipwreck, leaving no survivors to identify the victims.

They recall bodies found severely decomposed after days at sea, or dismembered from crashing against the rocks of the island's long coastline.

“It doesn't feel right, seeing a child of unknown identity, an unknown child, a child of 'roughly this age',” said Alekos Karagiorgis, a caretaker who has transported hundreds of corpses from beaches across the island to the morgue since summer.

“It doesn't matter if it's your job. It breaks your heart.”

Remote beaches on the island still bear the traces of arrivals: flimsy, discarded life jackets are strewn across the rocks as well as the odd shoe, a jacket, milk formula and nappies.

Though fewer than 10 nautical miles separate the Aegean island of Lesvos from Turkey, hundreds have drowned trying to make it across on overcrowded rubber or wooden boats.

In October, following a nighttime shipwreck from which more than 200 were rescued but dozens died, the St. Panteleimon cemetery ran out of space to bury the dead and the island's morgue had to bring in a container to keep the bodies.

That prompted local authorities to set aside a plot of land in one village for burials.  Dozens buried

There Mustafa Dawa, a boyish-looking 30-year-old from Egypt in Greece since his 20s, has taken on the unofficial role of washing, shrouding and burying the dead, their heads faced towards Mecca.

“I did 57 funerals in seven days. In one day I did 11,” he said, recalling spending a few minutes crouched in the grave of the headless child, weighed down by emotion.

Dawa says it's the least he can do. “I can't stop the war there, I can't make them cross (to Europe) legally. All I can do is bury them.”

Since the October shipwreck, Theodoros Nousias, a coroner, has photographed and taken DNA samples of more than 200 victims who drowned off Lesvos and the island of Samos, keeping an archive in case relatives seek them out.

One body washed ashore this week, but it's anyone's guess when or where the person died, he said. Whenever the wind blows, those who drowned in Turkey are washed ashore on Lesvos.

While some victims have been identified through photographs, others are simply unidentifiable, he said, except through DNA.

Only one of hundreds has been traced this way so far, Nousias said.

Like Nousias, Karagiorgis, the caretaker, and others on Lesvos faced daily with the reality of death, hope for the day the victims will be identified.

“I hope they trace them through DNA so that these people can rest,” Karagiorgis said.

”So that their souls can rest in peace, the mother or father searching for this person finds peace and says, 'you know what, they chose to do this and they drowned this way'.”

May God have mercy on their souls…and plague the consciences of those who do nothing.

—Jeff

The truth about the polygraph

Would I be lying if I said that Wonder Woman's lasso of truth was based on the polygraph test? Would you know if I was lying?

Would you be lying if you said that you knew I was lying?

                                               

Last week I attended a lecture by the Professor Emeritus of Forensic Psychology from the University of Newcastle. The subject of the lecture was polygraph testing in the forensic setting, the slightly more interesting aspect of the lecture was that it was given by an American who is very pro polygraph testing when used correctly and in appropriate circumstances while being rather bemused that the British don’t get it simply because there is something rather unBritish about the lie detector.

He explained that in America lie detectors are used for all kinds of job interviews especially when there is a degree of security involved, banks some law enforcement applications etc. In Britain we just take your word for it as there would be something rather unseemly in giving someone a polygraph.

So on this side of the pond we are a bit far behind and even articles in respected newspapers are always fundamentally flawed in their facts and this reinforces the fallacies that the British public have about lie detectors.

The three big lies are;

 1) It didn’t work in the 1950's and it doesn’t work now 

2) It is a bogus pipeline to the truth 

3) The test can be easily beaten. 

None of these are true.

                                

If you are not familiar with it the polygraph is now a small box about the size of a box of man sized tissues. It has a chest strap, a belly strap and a blood pressure cuff with the clamp electrode on one finger. This measures chest and abdominal breathing, cardiovascular activity and sweating. These changes are not specific to lying, they are simply of arousal. It is not a narrow defined stress response it is more an arousal to threat which psychologists call the 'orientating response'.

I  would explain that  as this not being the stress response you have when someone points a gun at you. This is the response you have when walking through a dark forest and you hear a noise that may or may not be a threat. All your senses then pinpoint where that noise came from, focussing on where the threat actually is,  and that is the method of the lie detector. The brain is scanning the situation waiting for the question that is going to cause the threat.
                            

The Brits still believe that the polygraph measures the stress of trying to lie convincingly and therefore it can be beaten if  you have very good relaxation/biofeedback techniques or are a psychopath. But as the orientating response is a much more primal response, much deeper in the brain and is therefore hard wired so the relaxation biofeedback the psychopath has the same response on a polygraph as everyone else.

Here is Ramsay's version of an interesting experiment they did;

Let's  take the Europeans and South Africans of the MIA blogsite and put them in one room (I’m taking Cara as a French person in this). So we have the combined loveliness of Cara, Caro, Zoe, Jorn, Michael and Stanley in one room. In the other room we have the 'Donald Trump non appreciation society' of Annamaria, Jeffrey etc. Just to make Annamaria’s life difficult we’ll put Evka in that room as well.
                                       

The person conducting this experiment knows that the European team will not cheat under any circumstances as they are honourable Europeans. So, the researcher takes one of the American team to the side and charges him $20 for the answers to the exam paper. Both classrooms then sit the same exam and at the end of the exam in the US classroom the cheater stands up and reveals he had all the answers all along and cheated. He asks his fellow US students not to say a word. The Europeans have now become the control group. The  Americans become the subject of  the experiment. All the students are then told that they are going to be polygraph tested and will be asked if they knew of any cheating going on. No matter how many times this experiment is done the results are consistent.

If the students are told the polygraph is 40% accurate, the Americans will lie to protect their friend. If they are told it is 70% accurate they will still (tend to ) lie to protect their friend. However if they are told that the polygraph accuracy is getting towards 75% then people begin to disclose even before the polygraph is switched on. And as polygraphs are between 85 and 92% accurate there is a tendency toward full disclosure and it is the disclosure aspect of the polygraph that is of most use in focusing the resources of a criminal investigation.

Dr Don Grubin has been using this technology in a very worthwhile way but stresses again and again that the polygraph has no place in court. It is this ability of it to force people to disclose activity that is important.

                             

In the South of England he has conducted many interventions  and I am using the example of 60 men who have been shown to have child pornography on their computers. These 60 men were told that they were going to be given a polygraph test and that the polygraph test is between 85 and 92% accurate and of the 4 indicator questions allowed one of them was 'have you ever tried to make contact with a child for sexual purposes?' 7 of those men then disclosed immediately even before being given the test and that group then became subject to further investigation. All the men were polygraphed and the results of the indicator questions tended to replicate the disclosure result.

The lecturer explained that there is always a tendency for there to be more false failures than false positives so its not a case that dangerous people will slip through the net but more that slightly less dangerous people are going to be caught up.

                                            

Even after this very eminent Prof explaining how the polygraph can be used accurately and ethically the very esteemed prosecutors and defence lawyers in the audience immediately started to argue with him that it was in some ways a downright dastardly thing to do. I am glad to say that the Prof defended the polygraph robustly.

There was  a bit of lovely humour when he showed a clip from the TV series the Wire to which the audience murmured uniformly we didn’t watch it that as we could not understand the accents. And the American replied the Baltimore accent is nothing compared to the Glaswegian accent. 

And of course, William Moulton Marsden created Wonder  Woman and the lie detector!  So there!

Caro Ramsay 19th Feb 2016

Thuli Madonsela said No

Thulisile Madonsela

It's been a year of depressing news on all sorts of fronts – in fact make that twelve months since the year is still pretty young. Nevertheless, this month has witnessed what I believe to be a major turnaround in South Africa’s fortunes. I’m not talking about the economy or a change in direction of the government or any other sudden positive development. I’m talking about one woman who stood up and said no, and kept saying no despite being denigrated and threatened. And who kept on doing it until she won.

Thuli Madonsela started life as the daughter of immigrants from Swaziland to apartheid South Africa. They were ‘informal traders’ – people who sell things at street markets and make a small profit by buying in bulk from suppliers and splitting up the goods into packages that people can afford. She went to school in Soweto in the years of violence and friction with the South African police, and then studied at the University of Swaziland. She obtained a law degree from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 1990. After obtaining her degree, she worked with the trade union movement and the United Democratic Front – essentially the internal wing of the ANC in the last years of apartheid - and she is a long term member of the ANC. In 1996, she was part of the team that drafted the South African Constitution.

In 2014 she made Time magazine's list of the world's 100 most influential people in the Leadership category, and last year she was awarded two honorary doctorates by two of the country’s leading universities.  She carries a heavy workload and is a single mother of two; her husband died very young.

Before the first democratic elections, she was offered nomination for an ANC seat as a member of parliament.  She declined because she felt that she could contribute more actively. She has certainly done so.

In October 2009, President Jacob Zuma appointed her as Public Protector, a position established by the Constitution to strengthen constitutional democracy and good governance. It’s independent from the state and has the power to investigate and make recommendations on improper dealings within government, which hamper service-delivery, abuse taxpayers’ money and perpetuate poverty and inequality. No doubt Zuma expected her to be grateful, and restrict her activities to the day to day matters that came to her office.  Big mistake.

Nkandla upgraded

As he signed off on her appointment, Zuma’s mind was elsewhere. He was in the process of a major upgrade to his country home known as Nkandla. I mean a major upgrade – around $25 million at the time. And he didn’t have – or certainly didn’t mean to spend – the money. That was no problem. He was going to make the state pay for it i.e. the taxpayers.

Pretty soon Madonsela was involved in some pretty high profile matters.  She pointed out the corruption of the ANC Youth League leader – Julius Malema – and the fallout from that eventually drove him from the ANC to form his own radical party.  People in high places started to feel uncomfortable with their supposedly tame ANC-appointed Public Protector.

Inevitably, journalists discovered what was going on at Nkandla. Zuma shrugged it off, but questions started to be asked in parliament. Eventually the president explained that what had taken place was a “security upgrade.”  Because of his role as president, he needed additional security and areas for safe assembly and public gatherings. These included an arena as an “evacuation area” and a “fire pool” to store water in case of fire in the thatch-roofed complex.  Hmm.

'Fire' Pool

The 'safety arena'. Looks a lot like a retaining wall. Coincidence, surely!

The case was referred to Madonsela who took her time to do a fair and thorough investigation. Her findings in 2014 were that Zuma and his family had enriched themselves at the taxpayers’ expense and that he should pay back much of the money.  She was immediately vilified as having exceeded her authority, produced inaccurate conclusions, and she was even accused of being an agent for the CIA! (The last was withdrawn after she threatened to sue.) She was also told she had acted outside the constitution. Strange – after all she helped write it.

The president ignored her recommendations and provided his own report which cleared him of all wrong-doing. He has survived many scandals; this one too would pass.

But it didn’t. In a government and civil service fraught with corruption and inefficiency, few things stick in the public’s attention, but this was one of them. The opposition parties wouldn’t let it go away. And eventually, when they were blocked by the ANC majority in parliament, they – and Madonsela - took the matter to the Constitutional Court (South Africa’s equivalent to the Supreme Court).

The Constitutional Court - without Fire Pool

The Court heard the case last week. Judgment is reserved, but it’s all over. Zuma’s council admitted that he was wrong, that the Public Protector did have the authority she had claimed under the constitution, that the Zuma report had no status. 

Will this mark the end of corruption in South Africa? Certainly not. It does mark the end of a culture that the highest in the land are above the law. And it has shaken the government, still reeling from Zuma’s arbitrary firing of the finance minister at the start of the year.  It’s not the end of corruption, but it just may be the end of President Jacob Zuma.

Michael - Thursday