Aa Gill Is Away - Hardcover

Gill, A. A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0304362158 ISBN 13: 9780304362158

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd, 2003

Synopsis

Whether describing the horror of famine in the Sudan, the tragic forgotten city of Kaliningrad or the anthropology of a motorway service station on the M1, this is A. A. Gill at his best: controversial, funny, full of compassion for those who deserve it; full of scorn for those who don't.

About this title

About the Author

A. A. Gill is the TV and restaurant critic for the Sunday Times and is a contributing editor to GQ magazine.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One: The End of the Road

Sudan, May 1998

"There is no famine." Marc Hermant, the lugubrious Belgian head of mission for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), south Sudan program, wipes his tired eyes and repeats himself like a patient schoolteacher explaining basic grammar to a thick nine-year-old. I am sorry, no famine? There must be a famine. "Not a Famine in Africa" isn't exactly news. I've seen the footage, it looks like a famine to me, Bob Geldof said it was a famine. "Bob Geldof said that?" Hermant gingerly sips his bright yellow mulligatawny soup. "No, what we have is a potential famine. If something isn't done now there will be famine next year." Ah, so it is the foothills of famine? The preview of famine? A promise of famine? "Yes, now is the hunger gap."

Don't you just love the hunger gap, such a great phrase? It sounds like an advertising slogan: "Mind the hunger gap," "Fill that hunger gap." One hundred years ago the hunger gap would have been familiar all over the earth. It is that lean time when the store food runs out before the harvest has ripened. In Britain, late spring was the time when it was dangerous to be young or old or alone. In Sudan, they plant with the rains, in normal years about now, and harvest in October. The hunger gap should be a month or so -- nature's organic cull of the feeble and the halt and the sick and the unlucky on a species that has no natural predator but itself. This year the hunger gap has come early and the rains haven't come at all -- yet. In the lexicon of professional aid, famine is a technical term. It squats darkly over the horizon, collating its misery, biding its time.

We're sitting in the terrace bar of the Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi, 500 miles from the Sudan. It is spitting rain emetically, and has been for a month. El Niño, this year's pan-global excuse for everything, suits the Norfolk, which looks like a down-at-heel Hampshire golf club, suburba-bethan: black beans and steak-and-kidney pudding, faded framed caricatures of long-dead expats with smug grins and neat facial hair. In the lobby the souvenir carry-on of carved giraffes and smiley rhinos graze among the silver boxes of film crews, neatly encapsulating Africa's two great exports: anthropomorphism and bad news. The bellboy hurries back and forth, piling up the delicate technical kit and telescopic legs of investigation and concern. There are a lot of film crews here: the BBC has three; ITN has one, with another on the way. CNN and ABC and a host of others are passing through. Famine always draws a crowd.

Here's how a promise of famine works: people start to die. Charities on the ground blow the whistle, Khartoum wants to show international goodwill, so, despite a civil war, it allows strictly limited food drops. Thirty-six charities and the UN form an umbrella group called Operational Lifeline Sudan and make a deal with the guerrillas, who need to feed their soldiers, and then turn to the world media to provide the advertising. Khartoum says no one is allowed on a charity flight without its visa, which takes months, so forget it. The rebels won't allow anyone into their areas without a pass from them and they won't give it to anyone who has got a stamp from Khartoum, so the film crews have to charter their own aircraft and it is a very expensive operation. Bad news is the province of the rich. Charter prices have gone through the roof: the BBC has leased a Dakota; back home, editors are screaming about vanishing budgets, but like two bluffing poker players, ITN and the BBC won't back down. They need a story and so do the charities. Charities may work as a selfless consciousness of the world at the sharp end, but at the tin-rattling end, they exist in a deeply competitive capitalist market: an appearance by a logo and spokesman on the News at Ten means donations. An American religious charity went to an MSF feeding center and put their T-shirts on the hungry kids to film them -- cash in the tin back home. Someone sent a plane load of anti-hypothermia suits made for Bosnia; ah, well, beggars can't be choosers. Brenda Barton made the front pages and the Nine O'Clock News in her logo T-shirt by feeding two malnourished children with her own breasts. It was a great picture. The fact that she had presumably taken up ten stone of food space on an aid plane to transport a pair of pint-sized breasts to the starving wasn't mentioned. Nor was the horrible symbolism of a fecund European dribbling largesse over black babies, or the sensational tastelessness of flashing gravid teats in front of mothers whose own milk has dried up. "I didn't do it as a publicity stunt," she said. Barton is the press officer of the World Food Programme (WFP) and just happened upon a BBC camera crew in the biggest, emptiest country in Africa.

The journalists at the bar consider starting a charity called Lactaid and holding a red nipple day. Over the cold beers they talk about there not being enough "skellis": skeletal people. ITN coaxed an old woman into a tree to pick leaves. The humor is callous and black but it is forgivable, it is the flak jacket of people who have only their own hard-bitten cynicism to protect their dreams.

The press and charities have a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship: hacks need the charities to find the eyebite-worthy starving; the charities need the publicity. Apart from the familiar charities there are some very weird organizations out here raising money while the sun shines. They have alarming names like Safe Harbour, A-Cross and Victims of the Martyrs. Because, at least in part, the civil war is religious: Christian and animistic south rejecting the imposition of northern Muslim law. There is an absolute prohibition on Bibles. It is a stipulation for continuing aid, but an air traffic controller at Wilson airport in Nairobi tells me she has seen American religious charities smuggling them in anyway. Now explain to me what sort of missionary zeal fills a plane with books when children are dying for milk?

Others smuggle guns, butter and psalms across the Ugandan border with the connivance of a bunch of bona fide foaming dingbats called the Lord's Resistance Army, who kidnap children, and give them Kalashnikovs and the belief that bullets can't touch them. There are rumors of CIA involvement and of links with the Tutsis. Saddam and Gadhafi have their fingers in this pie. Fifteen years of civil war, dislocation, drought, double-dealing, burnt crops and regular bouts of world amnesia have made southern Sudan a rich petri dish for all the fungus and corruption of every conceivable form of apocalyptic, man-made misery.

Paul, the photographer, and I cadge a lift north with an ITN crew. From the air, northern Kenya could be the Scottish borders. This is White Mischief country, Isak Dinesen -- I had a farm in Africa, the landscape of lachrymose colonial bathos and excess. But it exhausts the romance and the bedside literature to peter out into rough khaki scrub that stretches like mouldy pebbledash across the horizon. We are flying in a caravan, a squat, slow, single-engined workhorse, with a pilot who has aviator engraved on his shades. It's no comfort to be flown by someone who has to have their job description etched on their spectacles.

Bahr al Ghazal is a state twice the size of France with a population of perhaps less than a million, but no one's counting. This is where the worst of the proto-famine is. Six hours from Nairobi, it is like flying to Washington in a Morris Minor without a toilet. Tim Ewart, the ITN reporter, slowly does the Telegraph crossword, then gives up to read Mario Puzo (he's on page twenty). Paul and I haven't got passes from the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA) guerrillas -- the office in Nairobi was closed -- but we are assured we can get them at the refueling stop in Lokichokio. It's a formality, no problem. Lokichokio: crazy name, crazy place, a border town dropped in a fold in the hills between nowhere and nothing. The line that separates Kenya from Sudan is purely notional. A year ago this was a collection of huts baking in the wilderness, with a landing strip. Now it is a frontier town, a burgeoning collection of tents and hastily built breeze-block cantonments with bars and swimming pools and rooms with showers. It is a boom town, growing to service five Hercules aircraft, tied to the outside world by a thin, potholed, crumbling, rain-washed, bandit-harassed road that winds 1,000 miles to the coast at Mombasa. Everything -- fuel, food, loo paper, Coca-Cola -- has to be driven into Loki. This is Charityville.

In the West, we don't get to see the UN at work. We probably think it is a good idea, a bit wasteful, a bit blunt and slow. But we never get to see where all that money and effort actually goes. It goes here, into these ranks of Toyota Land Cruisers and bubbling tarmac; and guards with walkie-talkies and gangs of black laborers, humping white sacks in the midday sun, and the pilots hanging out with a cold Coke in the Trailfinders bar. And the long lines of dusty tents, each the size of a football pitch, with the letters UN like a twenty-foot-high expletive painted on the sides. When this much neat charity lands on your doorstep, it changes everything: the economy, the social structure, the landscape. UN, the Ultimate Niño. Looking at Loki, it is impossible not to draw the trite conclusion that Africa has simply swapped colonialism for charity and there is very little difference. Both are buttressed with fine words, both in practice are paternalistic and divisive. It is still the white folk in the shade and the black folk humping the sacks.

There is a problem. A big problem. They won't give us a pass. The SPLA has changed the rules: it says it doesn't have authority, we've got to go back to Nairobi. "What do you want to do?" Stick here in Charityville, cadge a lift back tomorrow or the next day, then rent a plane sometime next week, or go on? "You're welcome to wing it," says Tim Ewart. "Basically, if we don't go now, there's no story." Someone says we'll ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0304362158
• ISBN 13: 9780304362158
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256