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Book
review: Small Wars Permitting
Patrick
French, Sunday Times (UK)
January 20, 2008
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article3201926.ece
A good foreign
correspondent needs luck. It is 2000, and Christina Lamb is in Lagos,
working against a deadline without any leads to locate the home
of the family of Damilola Taylor, a 10-year-old Nigerian boy who
has been stabbed to death in Peckham. (In those days, a child being
murdered by other children in London was news.) Lamb trips in a
car park, and seems to have broken her ankle. Outside a clinic,
by pure coincidence, she meets a pregnant woman who lives next door
to the Taylors. By now hopping, Lamb pursues the story and is back
in Britain the next morning to read the lesson at her best friend's
wedding, before going to A&E.
Not all journalism
deserves to be placed between the covers of a book. Small
Wars Permitting, a selection of 20 years of her writing plus
some diary entries, succeeds because it is so lively. Lamb does
not enjoy theorising. Her interest is the human story behind global
events. At its best, this approach is revealing; her early coverage
of the invasion of Iraq as a nonembedded reporter anticipates the
bungling that will follow. In Afghanistan, she shows the gulf in
understanding as British officials make old men in Helmand, hardened
by decades of war, watch the nature series The Blue Planet: "The
tribal leaders of Gereshk sat in utter bafflement, matched only
by my own, as images of whales and dolphins were projected on the
wall."
Changes in technology
have revolutionised the way that distant news is reported. Copy
can be filed over a satellite link in seconds; images of battle
can be on our screens as they happen; a blogger can claim to be
a "citizen journalist". These developments have been
accompanied by a drop in the quality of foreign-news reporting,
and the rise of opinionated journalism. Few writers, or politicians,
are willing to spend time in the places they seek to explain. Anyone
who doubts the value of the professional foreign correspondent should
read Small Wars Permitting. After years in Pakistan and Afghanistan,
Lamb makes none of the easy judgments about religious nationalism
or "the Muslim mind" that are made readily by commentators
who have never been there.
She treats most of her
subjects with a humane generosity. General Pinochet, interviewed
under house arrest in Surrey while awaiting extradition proceedings,
comes across as a rounded figure, although Lamb makes no attempt
to minimise his earlier crimes. (It comes as no surprise to learn
that she left hospital the previous day after having her baby.)
Even a Taliban torturer who has baked prisoners to death and beaten
a man to pulp with a wet stick becomes comprehensible, part of a
spiral of degradation that has turned Afghanistan into hell. The
only time that Lamb's munificence seems overdone is in her
depiction of Benazir Bhutto, the now murdered Pakistani leader,
who is thanked in the acknowledgments "for literally changing
my life". Like most British journalists, Lamb inclines to
the view that running a country in a violent, incompetent and corrupt
style is less reprehensible if you are female, attractive and have
been to Oxford.
Some chapters of the
book veer away from larger subjects to parts of the world where
life is lived on closed terms. In the "fattening rooms"
of southern Nigeria, young women are made obese before circumcision
and marriage. "The main component of the fattening room experience
seems to be total inactivity, combined with as much yam, plantain,
millet, and pepper soup as can be stuffed into one person in a day."
One of the strangest
stories is a meeting in 1992 with Fernando Collor de Mello, the
reforming Brazilian president, shortly before his resignation. His
brother has just revealed not only that de Mello is corrupt, but
also that he cuts the heads off chickens and drinks their blood
in a black-magic ritual. The president lectures Lamb about his theories
on mind control, the size of Einstein's brain and the trade
in tropical plants.
The central focus of
Small Wars Permitting is inevitably Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan
and the individuals who might help explain these countries. Yet
the shade of 9/11 is not the saddest thing here. As Lamb writes,
"Zimbabwe is the most heartbreaking story I have ever covered."
We meet activists who have been tortured or raped, children whose
parents have disappeared, and people whose homes have been bulldozed.
It is a disaster that has arisen not out of war or atavistic social
conflict, but from the whim of Robert Mugabe. "Zimbabwe once
had the best-educated population in Africa," Lamb observes.
"I remember on my first visit being impressed by all those
neat buildings and lines of children with freshly washed uniforms
and rucksacks of books." Now all that has gone.
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