Читать книгу Shooting History: A Personal Journey - Jon Snow, Jon Snow - Страница 10
ОглавлениеAfrica, Revolution and Despair
TWO TUMBLEDOWN CORRUGATED HUTS at the side of the runway seemed to be the beginning and end of Entebbe Airport. The VC10 that had carried us via Rome and Tripoli appeared to be the only operational aircraft on the entire airfield. The terror that was to seize this place and inaugurate a new world of violence, in which the passenger became pawn, was still nearly a decade away.
It was September 1967. I had never been on an aircraft before, never been out of Europe, and only once out of England. I had felt compelled to shake my father’s hand upon leaving home in Yorkshire, for I feared he might be dead before I returned. It was the only physical contact with him I can remember. He was still the Bishop, my mother still his ever-faithful retainer. I knew he would be impressed if I won selection for VSO. I knew too that it would offer me an escape from his world. In the build-up to my departure, Africa had seemed an exotic and distant place, Uganda even more so. But had committing myself to a year of Voluntary Service Overseas been such a sensible idea? Aboard the claustrophobic plane, on balance I was beginning to think not.
As the door of the aircraft opened, the wet heat and the brown-green smell summoned me from my seat. The sound of the engines had roused the few customs and immigration officials from their slumbers. Father Grimes, chain-smoking in black, nervous, very white, with thinning hair, waited on the other side of the sheds. His greeting was unmistakably Yorkshire: ‘Welcome to Uganda! You’ve a long journey ahead of you, so let’s be going.’
There were two of us VSOs, David James and me. David was what I would call successful public school, strong in the areas where I was weak – sporty and academically bright. It was important that we didn’t fall out. Father Grimes was the head of the Catholic mission school where we were to teach for the year. The posting seemed more or less random, although we had been allowed to express a preference as to which continent we would be sent.
I had never known such soakingly wet heat. We got into Grimes’s Volkswagen and set off. Lake Victoria shimmered invitingly, but the Father told us we could never swim either in it or in the river Nile that flowed from it. ‘Not just the crocodiles,’ he said, ‘it’s the snails. Bilharzia, rots yer liver.’
People were everywhere. There was nothing a bicycle could not carry. A husband pedalling, his wife sitting sidesaddle behind with one small child in her arms and a baby on her back, lengths of timber, sacks of corn, even a small coffin. I was overwhelmed by both the heat and the sights. The men were in cotton shirts, the women in elaborate and voluminous brightly printed dresses. In Kampala, the capital, Asian shops spewed their wares out onto the pavements, mopeds roared, cars tooted, dogs, goats, even cows, wandered aimlessly. On the outskirts of the city the low urban sprawl gave way to tall tropical rainforests. Then suddenly as we rounded a bend, armed men scattered across the road ahead, flagging us down.
‘It’s nothing,’ hissed Grimes. ‘Just the state of emergency.’
‘State of emergency? No one said anything about that,’ I hissed back.
As one of the armed men peered into our stationary car, Grimes added, ‘It’s King Freddy, you know, the Kabaka. He wants a comeback role. Obote, the President, wants it for himself. Freddy’s gone off to the UK in a huff. Drinks a lot, you know.’
After only five years’ independence from British rule, things in Uganda were already sounding shaky. Yet after the military men had waved us through, as we headed out across the Owen Falls, source of the Nile, and then the great hydroelectric dam, Uganda still looked at peace with itself. The waters beneath the road churned ferociously. Crested cranes stooped on the river banks, terns sat on the backs of cows taking their ease at the calmer water’s edge. Once we were clear of the dam, jacaranda trees splashed unexpectedly potent blues along both sides of the road.
More than a hundred miles from Entebbe, and with the light fading, the tarmac gave way to the compressed red clay they called murum. In the dry season the road was hard as concrete, with a thick film of dust across it. In the wet season it became slithery mud. This night it was dry and spooky, the car’s headlights picking out tall, dark organic forms on either side. Small animals darted back and forth across the murum, their eyes glinting in the lights.
‘Only fifteen miles to Namasagali,’ said Grimes. Those fifteen miles took nearly an hour to negotiate. And with each passing mile my heart sank further. It felt so very far from anywhere. I thought of home, of people and places I loved; for once I envied my brothers, and even missed my mother and father. I was not enjoying my entry into Africa. But although I was unaware of it at the time, this journey, and so much of the ensuing year, was to prepare me for far more harrowing and taxing trips through Africa in years to come. Not just prepare me, but radicalise and change me more than I could possibly imagine.
Kamuli College, on the banks of the Nile, was set in an old railhead at Namasagali, which had once been a trans-shipment point for cotton heading north. The engine sheds were now the school hall and the bookless library. The cotton warehouses had been broken up into classrooms. There was little fight when we arrived at Grimes’s house, which was where the station manager had lived. Inside, the four other ‘muzungus’, or European teachers, were waiting. Tom and Anne Welsh were a radical, committed Scots couple. Gus was a don’t-care Scotsman on the wild side. The fourth was another priest, a warm and engaging Dutchman called Father Zonnerveldt. These, and the fourteen indigenous teachers I would meet in the morning, would be my isolated family for the next twelve months.
The house itself spoke volumes about what we were in for. A bare bulb dangled from the ceiling, the netted door frame opened onto a veranda where I could glimpse old boxes and cupboards scattered about. There was an ageing suitcase on a rickety table, with clothes tumbling out of it. Unrelated bits of furniture littered the living room, and through another door I could see the dining table, with ancient British consumer goods at one end: a discontinued line of Gale’s honey, a jar of Marmite, and a Bible sticking out from under a box of Corn Flakes. This was going to be a challenge. I went to bed in Grimes’s house that night feeling profoundly homesick and rather sorry for myself. I suspect David felt the same.
Feeling very white, the next morning we gathered around the flagpole for assembly. Grimes barked at the children. They were all crisply turned out, and seemed to know every word of the Ugandan national anthem, ‘Oh Uganda, the Land of Freedom’. ‘Our Father, which art in heaven …’ intoned Father Grimes. Suddenly the stark contrast with the dining room at Ardingly, General Tom, even Winchester Cathedral, sprang into my head. I was a world away, amongst the children of the still-poor elite in a country the General’s cohorts had tried to run for more than half a century.
That night David and I moved into our new ‘house’. It was more an outhouse, with a concrete floor, a living area, two bedrooms and a loo out at the back. There were beds but no sheets, mosquitoes but no nets. The night was a constant battle with insects and cockroaches seeking to share my bed.
We employed John Luwangula as our cook and houseboy. Dear John could not cook to save his life, and was well past being classified as any kind of a boy. But he was strong and confident, and a fast learner, and he attended to our every need for the equivalent of around £3 a week. My classes were large, one of forty souls, another of close on fifty. Many of the pupils were older than me, for as was often the case in Uganda, they had had to work for their school fees before they could take up a place. One morning while I had my back turned and was writing on the blackboard, someone made a rude noise. ‘Who was that?’ I asked.
‘That black boy at the back,’ answered Margaret from the front row.
‘But you’re all black,’ I said, somewhat mystified.
‘Ah, sir,’ said Margaret, ‘but some, sir, are much blacker than others. That boy comes from the north.’
The scales fell from my eyes. I, who had grown up in such charmed Anglo-Saxon circumstances, almost oblivious to black people, suddenly saw them as the rainbow coalition that they are: creamy cappuccino from the south-west of the country, blue-black Nilotic from the Upper West Nile region, nut-brown from the east. My new world was taking shape before my very eyes. The children at Kamuli College, precisely because they required money to attend the place, came from all over the country. The school reflected the tribal make-up of the entire nation, providing a living insight into the way the colonialists had arbitrarily decided the shape of the borders of Uganda.
Having at first wondered how on earth I could escape the place, within a few weeks I was trying to find out how I could stay longer. This was despite the remnants of empire and war that still percolated through every aspect of the teaching. The school followed the imperially imposed Oxford & Cambridge Examination Board’s ‘O’ level curriculum. Thus I was saddled with teaching George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
‘What is Communism, sir?’ asked one child.
‘What’s a carthorse, sir?’ chimed another.
The fact was that neither Orwell’s farm itself, nor the allegory it was intended to conjure, meant anything at all to my students. Trying both to teach the physical reality of an English farm to Africans and to interpret the book’s ideological subtext was a challenge indeed.
Presumably I can thank the anachronistic imperial backbone instilled in me at school for the speed with which homesickness gave way to an enthusiasm for the whole adventure. Namasagali was beginning to get into my soul. The short evenings would find me down at the little dock on the Nile, where I would sit on the base of the rusting old crane watching the water go by bearing great chunks of papyrus. But it was not of Empire that I mused, despite the ‘made in England’ sign on the arm of the crane. It was of the half-naked children playing between the tracks that led to the dock-side and their circumstances that I thought. They had no shoes or socks. These children from the village further up the river were too poor to attend school at all; some had distended bellies, some had evident eye diseases. Over the months I lived at Namasagali I became friendly with their families, taking John, our houseboy, with me to translate. It rapidly dawned on me that the students at Kamuli College, poor by my standards, were rich beyond the dreams of the villagers, whose lives ebbed and flowed with the seasons. There was poverty here that I’d never begun to imagine.
Two months into my stint at Namasagali I found myself at the wheel of the school minibus, slithering along the rain-soaked road heading out towards Kampala. I was taking six of the school’s best boxers to a nationwide tournament.
Big Daddy, when I first saw him, was vast – huge in body, face, and personality. ‘I’m the referee today,’ he boomed as we neared the ring. Major General Idi Amin Dada was already head of the Ugandan army. My first encounter with a man who was to become synonymous with summary execution, massacre and wholesale deportation was relatively benign. In truth he seemed nicer than the then President, Milton Apollo Obote, who had ruled the country since independence. Amin was a former heavyweight champion of the Ugandan army, and it was clear that he loved boxing. He would dash across the ring after a bout and demonstrate, fortunately in only shadow terms, how it would have ended had he been one of the boxers rather than just the referee. He seemed to have a huge sense of humour, beaming at all times. He noticed me because, as he told me, ‘I’m not used to meeting white men as tall as you. Your mother must have eaten much paw-paw.’ Yet on the long journey through the night back to Namasagali, we all confessed to a lurking fear of the man. Too big and boisterous for comfort, we thought.
Father Grimes, despite his bantam appearance, loved boxing too, and his having that in common with Amin was later to spare the lives of many in the school. ‘Amin was only a Sergeant Major in the First King’s East African Rifles, you know,’ Grimes told me. ‘The British sent him to Sandhurst for four months and he came back virtually a General.’
The British, seeing the writing on the colonial walls, realised by 1962 that Uganda would have to join the queue of their colonised neighbours to become independent. In common with so many African armies, Uganda’s had been left with few if any indigenous officers. A panicky last-minute course was put on in distant Surrey to convert Africans from the ranks straight to the higher echelons of the officer class. Almost overnight, one absurd, larger-than-life Sergeant Major was larded with ribbons and braid and elevated to a rank that no black man had enjoyed before him. Harmless enough in the boxing ring, perhaps, but what if such a man ever came to run the country? We would know the answer within three short years.
In the school holidays we met up with other British and American volunteers and set about seeing more of Uganda and the surrounding countries. We hitched or bussed to Nairobi, Mombasa and Dar es Salaam. We camped on beaches, wandered amongst the wildlife and watched the Masai tribespeople crossing mud roads ahead of us. They were intoxicating times in which it still felt utterly safe to be a foreigner in East Africa. It would have been inconceivable to imagine that within three decades this sweltering, peaceful place would become a battleground for al Qaida.
Among our group was Diana Villiers, whose father was running one of Harold Wilson’s new-fangled economic power levers – the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation. As so often with the British top drawer, my father had taught her father at Eton. Diana, like me, was headed in due course for an encounter with the new world disorder, but on another continent. Our next meeting would find us both in very different circumstances, with her married to the man running America’s Contra war against Nicaragua. But for now we were both at a point of transition, in Africa amid the passage to independence, and party to the massive afterburn of imperialism and colonisation. To me, surprisingly in 1968, it still felt comfortable.
‘Mr Jon,’ cried my houseboy, ‘I’m going to get married.’
‘My goodness, John,’ I replied, ‘I didn’t even know you had a girlfriend.’
‘Oh yes, sir, and I want you to be a best man at the ceremony.’
John’s wife-to-be, Elizabeth, came all the way from Kamuli town, at the other end of the murum road; she had a large family, and looked gorgeous on the day. Generations of the bride and groom’s families ran in and out of the open side walls of the church. Jesus wrestled with local tribal custom throughout the wedding ceremony. Long after I returned to England, I became a godfather to John and Elizabeth’s first child by mail. But their marriage, the villagers, the school itself, were all for me a part of coming to terms with a world that a few months earlier I had not even dreamt existed.
Father Grimes ruled by missionary example and rod of iron, or rather of bamboo, which he wielded with great ferocity and regularity. I had upwards of 150 workbooks to mark each week. Hired to teach English, I ended up with both biology and technology added to my workload. In both subjects I would have to swot the night before to keep one step ahead of my pupils. I was constantly outsmarted by some of the brighter kids. Whatever happened to Noah Omolo, who wrote so lyrically and who, had he been tutored, could have made it into any top-flight Western university?
‘I want to come with you when you go, sir,’ he said to me once. ‘I will be your servant, and look after you for the rest of your life, and your wife and children too.’ Noah was to prove one of the very few Ugandans I would meet again.
Or Margaret Nsubaga: ‘Dance with me when you leave, sir.’ Adding, ‘Come live with me in Uganda.’
Or Praxedes Namaganda, who came for a few weeks’ teaching practice from Makerere University. We kissed on the banks of the Nile, but she was a good Catholic, and anyway the relationship was not to survive the unpredictabilities of the postal service.
On Saturday nights I had to organise the enormous disco in one of the former engine sheds, where I would dance rather too enjoyably with the older girls. On Sunday mornings I would set sail in the battered school bus for the twenty-seven-mile run to collect the Protestant padre – despite the Catholic mission status of the school, more than half the children were Protestants. Sometimes I wouldn’t be able to find the man, who was frequently inebriated, and I’d return empty-handed to the engine shed, by now transformed from disco to matins, and have to take the service myself. ‘Our father, which art in heaven …’ ‘Thank you, God,’ I thought, ‘for those dining-room prayers at Ardingly. Thank you, Jane Austen, for lying undisturbed in the nave of Winchester Cathedral while I intoned the Te Deum.’ So ‘to the manor born’ was I that the kids asked me eventually not to bother with the padre, and to continue taking the services myself.
And so I became an inseparable part of this Nile-side community, talking liberation theology with the priests or Communism with Gus and the Welshes at night and working by day from 7.30 a.m. to 7.30 p.m., with an afternoon siesta. There were no newspapers. Early and late I would listen to the crackly BBC World Service fading in and out of the ether on our old valve-mains Marconi wireless. World events took on a new poignancy. I was beginning to set them in the context of my own new world. This was how, in April 1968, I heard the devastating news of the assassination of Martin Luther King, an event that was to impinge so forcibly on both my old and new worlds.
Fruit and flowers abounded naturally, as did sweet potatoes and every kind of banana. Wild dogs ran about, goats and chickens wandered aimlessly, and there was eternal talk of a leopard I never saw in the nearby forest. This was my isolated Utopia. My daily rations came from two identical Asian shops in Namasagali. Both were dusty and seemed to be collapsing under the weight of what they tried to sell – huge bags of rice and flour, small bags of smelly spices, batteries, spare bicycle tyres, elderly dry biscuits, cotton, and rusty tinned peas. Ugandan boys toiled for their Asian employers in the back of the shops. In earlier imperial days the British had brought many mainly Indian workers to East Africa to build the railways and staff the civil service; later they diversified into more entrepreneurial activities. The locals regarded Asian shopkeepers as exploitative. Even in remote Namasagali there was evidence of the low-level racial friction that Idi Amin would soon trade on for post-coup popularity.
Parting, when it came, was sore indeed. Each day towards the end of my time in Namasagali, as I walked from my little house to the classroom beneath the mango trees, looking out to the wide river beyond, I would think, ‘I shall never come here again. This is almost the last time I shall tread this path.’ On the final Sunday afternoon, putt-putting in the battered old school boat with its flat corrugated-iron roof along the Nile with a line draped over the stern – heaving in the massive Nile perch, enough for lunch tomorrow – I felt the tears of impending departure welling. No more tomorrows, I thought. On my final night I pledged to my students that I would return, little thinking I ever really could or would. In the event, I was indeed to be in Uganda again within a few years, although I wasn’t to make it back to Kamuli College for three more decades.
I wrote to my parents of my last day at Namasagali, having gathered with the school to sing ‘Oh Uganda’ one more time around the flagpole:
Transport at the best of times is virtually non-existent. One or two taxis from Kamuli had heard that it was the end of term. 320 students waiting for transport at 7 a.m. By 9 a.m. a ramshackle forty-eight-seater bus and three 195oish Peugeot estate car taxis deigned to appear. The bus managed to accommodate about ninety-five students with their boxes. With some of the other students heaving and shoving and with more than a little persuasion, it began to move. Needless to say, the starting mechanism had long since ceased to function, and it seems that it is an accepted part of one’s fare to get out and push. The taxis, boxes piled dangerously high on the roofs, had their doors finally forced shut by gangs of students. Inside there were at least fifteen visible bodies, with doubtless more underneath. The remaining students began to surge down the murum road, each trying to overtake the other in order to be the first to meet the returning bus or taxi. In this fashion several must have reached Kamuli on foot. My own departure was embarrassingly luxurious inside Grimes’s Volkswagen with all our bags, a Ugandan drum, a spear, and a mere seven people filling the five available seats.
I left Uganda determined that whatever path my career took would bring me back there. I had not yet concluded that it would be journalism that would provide the means.
Liverpool University in the autumn of 1968 was a strange disjunction of active, potentially angry students, and a deeply conservative institution. My unremarkable ‘A’ level results, a C, a D and an E, in English, law and economics, had not tempted any university to offer me a place, despite my having penned many flamboyant application letters postmarked ‘Uganda’. In the end, a chance meeting on a train between my father and the Dean of Liverpool’s law school clinched an underhand entry to do legal studies, and delivered me within a week to Merseyside. Maybe there is a God in heaven, I thought.
Liverpool was a stark and sudden contrast to the remote banks of the Nile. By the time it reached this northern industrial city, the Mersey was as wide as the Nile at Namasagali. However, even without the African blight of Bilharzia, it was far less inviting. The university was very much part of the city. It sat high on Brownlow Hill, nudging Paddy’s Wigwam, the Catholic cathedral, at one end of Hope Street and within sight of the vast Victorian Anglican pile at the other. Unusually for a British university, some two thirds of the students lived at home, and the place had something of a nine-to-five feel about it.
In October 1968 we were ‘seizing the time’. It was an era of revolution on the streets of Paris and London, and within more limited Liverpool confines I soon turned to revolt. There was a core of extremely active students. In my first few weeks I began to discover that my small pre-Uganda ambition to become a Conservative Member of Parliament had given way to a much larger one, to change the world altogether. It was a bit of a shock.
I won election to the Executive of the Students’ Union as First Year Representative. Politically, Liverpool was a sea of red that was well beyond the wilting rouge of Old Labour. There were almost as many acronyms as students – IMG (International Marxists), IS (International Socialists), SLL (Socialist Labour League) and more. There were anarchists, Trotskyites, Maoists, British Communists and International Communists. I had little idea what most of them really stood for, save that they were hard-line and inflexible, and sold papers like Big Flame and Socialist Worker. The university was awash with issues that fought daily pitched battles with the sheer fun of simply being there. Where else in a year could you see the Who, the Animals, Georgie Fame, George Harrison, the Supremes and the Stones live in concert? The enormous entertainment budget of the Students’ Union, combined with the very name ‘Liverpool’, home of the Beatles, had terrific pulling power. The raves were all staged in the capacious Mountford Hall. And there, amid the detritus of the Who’s guitars, smashed the night before, we would gather in political solidarity and protest – protest that ranged over a whole gamut of disparate causes.
One of the most energised campaigns was in support of Biafra in the Nigerian civil war – an attempt by the country’s most oil-rich region to break away from Nigeria altogether. We backed Biafra with a passion, even after we saw images of the Biafran leader Colonel Ojukwu’s ostentatious white grand piano being hoisted from the dockside onto the ship that was transporting his possessions to some safe haven out of the country. Idealism overcame everything. Vietnam was in the air, and our protests were generally more pro-North Vietnamese than hysterically anti-American, although large numbers of us marched on the US embassy in Grosvenor Square. To my shame, my own personal journey of revolt had not yet evolved far enough for me to make the effort to travel down to the London demonstration, although my brother Tom did. Indeed my cousin Peter, already working for ITN, held a shouted dialogue across the street with him on the evening news as he disappeared off with Tariq Ali’s breakaway group in a bid to storm the embassy itself.
It was around this time that I had my own first brush with broadcasting. BBC Radio Merseyside wanted a regular weekly half-hour of student news, and I was deputed by the Students’ Union to provide it. I would cycle off to a shabby office at the back of Lewis’s department store to talk about the week’s events. Somebody at the station had already written my scripts, and while I did tinker with them, to say anything very radical seemed unnecessarily risky, particularly as I knew no one who ever listened to my broadcasts. Thus they were epic in their dullness, and certainly left me with no sense of romance about the career I would one day pursue.
In amongst the politics I got on with my law course, thrilling to cases that defined negligence like Rylands v. Fletcher, over who was to blame when a reservoir flooded a neighbouring mine; or Donoghue v. Stevens, over what duty of care a drinks company owed an innocent drinker who found a snail in his ginger-beer bottle. I learned much of public international law and nothing at all of tort, or personal property. Every one of my fellow law students wanted to join the legal profession. I thought I didn’t, but that I might drift into becoming a barrister anyway.
I passed my first-year exams with flying colours in June 1969, and left the next day for the most extraordinary adventure by road to India. It was to take every day of the long vacation until the end of September. We who were to travel had to raise the money ourselves. One of my fund-raising stunts had been an attempt to break the world record for sitting on a lavatory. My bid was staged on a platform in the front hall of the Students’ Union. Twenty-five hours I sat on the thing, with my trousers round my ankles, only to discover that the prudes at the Guinness Book of Records would not accept it. In truth I was never able to establish that it was a record anyway, but certainly no one else seemed to be fool enough to claim it. I raised £1200 from sponsors including Armitage Shanks, who made the thing, revealing an unexpected sense of humour. In the final hour students were allowed to buy eggs for 20p each, and reduce me to a ripe old mess.
Our passage to India was courtesy of Comex – the Commonwealth Expedition. This was a mad escapade run by an eccentric who we knew simply as Colonel Gregory. Gregory’s dream was for every university in the land to send a busload of students on a cultural exchange to India, and for as many Indian universities as possible to do so in reverse. It was a brilliant and idealistic way of attempting to give new life to an institution – the British Commonwealth – that already had an elderly, even patronising air of imperial legacy and UK dominance.
I was to be one of our two drivers, so I had to train for and pass my bus driver’s licence in between demonstrations and exams. We twenty-five souls aboard had to decide what our cultural offering should amount to. We suspected that many in India, if they had heard of Liverpool at all, would have done so because of the Beatles, so we lit upon the idea of a four-part close-harmony Beatle band with guitar and drums. In addition to driving, I was to supply the bass harmonies. I was spared involvement in Sheridan’s eighteenth-century play The Rivals, which the rest of the crew proposed to stage.
Somehow the Colonel had cajoled the manufacturers Bedford to supply all the shortened single-decker buses on some kind of subsidised lease-lend basis. When we gathered in Ostend for the first leg of the overland dash for India there were more than two dozen cream Bedford Duples lined up, one each for twenty-five universities, sporting the green-and-gold Comex livery. They looked like an advertiser’s dream. But it was the last time they would. If they returned at all from their ten-thousand-mile odyssey they would have more than lost their sheen.
Once we were under way, countries I’d never expected to visit in my life fell before us like ninepins: Belgium and Luxembourg went without a stop. My whole sense of political geography was changing. Our first night, and first concert, was at a castle above Stuttgart. I found a Germany very far from the one I’d heard my parents talk about in childhood. It felt more prosperous than home, and more energised.
‘Hey Jude, don’t be afraid …’ The close harmony worked beautifully, and the castle walls rang to the applause of the locals who’d turned out to hear us. The Rivals went less well, its complicated plot lines hanging heavy on the German night air. We slept en masse in a gymnasium. I had never slept in the company of so many women. But for our hippy appearance, the expedition had all the hallmarks of a travelling British holiday camp.
Crossing into Yugoslavia from Austria, we tasted the only Communist regime of our journey. Tito was everywhere, or rather his bespectacled image was. The country felt surprisingly mellow, and beyond the somewhat monotone look of the traffic, gave little sign of being very different to the rest of Western Europe. On the wide road running south from Zagreb to Belgrade all twenty-five buses stopped on the hard shoulder to remember the members of an earlier Comex expedition whose bus had crashed at this spot. Seven or eight of them had died, and many more had been injured. It introduced a sombre note to our continuous fast driving and youthful overtaking.
That first glimpse of Yugoslavia was to stand me in good stead later in life, when the ethnic tensions beneath the surface burst into frenzied hatred and killing. In Belgrade, Tito himself turned out in the stadium for our concert. Tough, burly, beaming a warm welcome, he was clearly and massively in charge. I didn’t get near him, but I did catch sight of his foot tapping as I belted out the bass line to ‘All You Need is Love’.
It wasn’t until we reached eastern Turkey that the buses began to pay the price for their large expanses of glass and glinting chrome – too much of a temptation for the locals, who extracted stones from the decaying roadway and hurled them with great accuracy at our passing cavalcade. We lost our back two windows, Cambridge lost all their glass down one side, Aberdeen lost their windscreen and East Anglia most of their windows on both sides. Crossing into Iran, the convoy had taken on a billowing aspect, with curtains and possessions blowing out of assorted openings. Somehow, without the benefit of mobile phone or internet, Colonel Gregory had lined up replacement glass to await our arrival in Tehran.
With nine years to go until the Iranian revolution, this was the time of some of the Shah’s most ostentatious consumption. Persepolis was littered with the paraphernalia of his attempt to mark the supposed millennium of his phoney dynasty. Everywhere were the signs of Westernisation and Americana. The Shah’s Tehran was more than ready for the Beatles, even the somewhat inadequate line-up we had on offer, and we played to packed houses in the basketball stadium.
We left Iran along the coast of the Caspian Sea. Gazing up at the hills overlooking the water, I spotted the telltale giant white golf balls of the early-warning station that the US maintained here against Russian missile tests in the Urals. I knew what they were from having seen a similar installation at Fylingdales, in the heart of my father’s Yorkshire diocese. In a magical kind of way I was laying the superficial building blocks that would assist me later to track the evolving new world disharmony. Yet as we voyaged on towards Afghanistan I still had no idea of becoming a journalist, or of ever retracing my steps here.
The western Afghan town of Herat slumbered in the late-afternoon heat. Old men sat on their white-robed haunches, sipping tea at the roadside. Their hennaed beards and brown features stood out against the tea stalls beyond. Camels and mules fought for street space with ancient bicycles and the occasional highly decorated, heavily overladen truck. The main roads were the best we encountered east of the Bosphorus, for Afghanistan was the archetypal buffer state. They were so straight that they were only marred by frequent head-on collisions induced by sleep and mesmerisation. The international power play here was tense indeed. The United States had built the road from the Iranian border to Kandahar, the Russians had built the rest most of the way to the bottom of the Khyber Pass.
By now our caravan of suburban British buses had broken up into much smaller convoys, having become separated by punctures and breakdowns. Although our own bus was the nexus of our travelling lives, some of us had forged relations with people on other buses. By now the Aberdeen bus held a special attraction for me. I had fallen into easy conversation with one of their crew, Liz, but it was almost impossible to keep track of her; her wretched vehicle rarely coincided with ours. But trying to find her, and then unexpectedly encountering her, provided an extra frisson to an already incredible journey.
Kabul was the capital of the hippy kingdom. There were Western dropouts and druggies everywhere, some in an awful state. Others had simply merged into the scenery. The city was a mellow and tolerant place. What it lacked in tension, though, it made up for in mystery. Whatever the warlords were up to, it certainly didn’t seem to be war. Opium appeared to be present more in the consumption than in the trade. This was a buffer state that, while operating at a barely tolerable level of existence, seemed to work nevertheless. It was hard to see why anyone would want to change it. Yet we were less than a decade from the Russian invasion that would herald the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire, and would sow the seeds of the Taliban and eventually of al Qaida. Sitting round our campfire near the British embassy on our third night in town, smoking marijuana and most definitely inhaling, we thought all was well with the world.
The Khyber Pass, on the other hand, had a distinct presence of the old world disorder: bandits. ‘Passage only between dawn and dusk: military escort mandatory’ read the notice at the bottom of the pass. We decided to divide our buses into convoys of five, with military vehicles between each. It took so long for us to wind up through the Khyber that dusk had turned to absolute darkness for the last stretch. From time to time we would stop while scouts up on the escarpments looked out for bandits. We could hear the Pakistani army and the bandits calling to one another across the valley.
It had taken us five weeks to reach Pakistan, where we travelled past the bustling arms and drug dealers of Peshawar on to Rawalpindi and the seething streets of Lahore, ending up pony trekking for a day in the Murray Hills to the north of the country.
India arrived gradually, its approach reflected in the evolution of the bread through our journey – upright Hovis in Britain, giving way to lower, rounder breads in France, flatter still by Turkey and Iran, until we reached the chapatti and the nan in India. She was to prove an inspiring climax.
This was one of the last periods in the drift to disorder when such an overland trip could be undertaken relatively safely. Our first stop was the sumptuous, and in those days peaceful, Kashmir. Land of mountains, lakes and wildflowers, and to this day one of the most beautiful places to which I have ever been. Thence to Nanithal, an old British hill station possessed of the most spectacular views of the mountains leading to Everest. Sikh waiters served us tea and cucumber sandwiches on the lawn of the Nainital Rowing Club.
By the time we reached Delhi we were feted as if we were the Beatles. A hundred thousand people packed the main city arena that night to hear us in concert with local Indian musicians. We were mobbed, our hair pulled, our ears deafened by the screaming.
Our final destination, however, was not the Indian capital, but the University of Benares. Benares, the Hindu burial centre of the Ganges, was teeming with people. The funeral pyres burnt brightly on the banks, the mourners cascading into the water, boats bearing yet more pyres. Bodies were carried head-high for incineration. Unfortunately, by the time we reached it the University of Benares had been closed by the police after riots on the campus. It was an odd anticlimax to so spectacular an adventure. Three weeks later we had raced back across Asia and Europe to return to Liverpool for the first day of my second year.
In our absence, man had walked on the moon, Vietnam had suffered another massacre, and Nelson Mandela had passed his sixth year in jail on Robben Island. We were angry, stirred by injustice, shaken by other people’s wars. We could afford to be: there was full employment in Britain then, we didn’t lie awake at night wondering how we would earn a crust when we left university. However, our anger was but a bit-part player in the larger anger that still raged across campuses from the London School of Economics to the Sorbonne in Paris.
In some senses, in the autumn of 1969 we were actively in search of the issue with which to confront the authorities at Liverpool. Students at Warwick University had discovered secret files kept on the politically active; doubtless the same thing was happening at Liverpool. Nasty Nixon still had some years to go before his defenestration from the White House, and Vietnam simmered on, but that did not involve either the British or university authorities. Indeed Prime Minister Harold Wilson had wisely, and somewhat courageously, refused active British involvement on the American side.
It was Peter Hain, subsequently a Labour Cabinet Minister, who finally identified our cause. Nixon’s Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, had spent the previous months preaching ‘change through economic engagement’ with the South African apartheid regime. Wilson and others had gone soft on economic sanctions, and the apartheid state was consolidating its hold amid calls from Nelson Mandela’s beleaguered African National Congress (ANC) cohorts to black South Africans to burn their passbooks. British culpability and collusion with apartheid were clear, but what was Liverpool’s connection?
Even in those days, the presence of the great Tate & Lyle sugar empire on the Liverpool dockyards was unmissable. Liverpool was effectively Tate & Lyle’s British capital. The university had sizeable investments, and a goodly portion found its way to investments in South Africa, where Tate was still big. Hey presto! We had our cause. ‘Disinvest from South Africa’ became our clarion cry. The only bank on campus, Barclays, with its notorious presence in South Africa, became a target too. The sheer size of my overdraft rendered me embarrassingly unable to withdraw my funds to join the protest, but join I did, with my Barclays chequebook festering in my back pocket.
Liverpool at the time suffered from a kind of staff/student apartheid which meant there was no provision for resolving such issues through dialogue. The students had no representation on any of the university administrative or governing bodies, which meant that before we could demand disinvestment, we had to demand access to power and representation within the university itself.
These were heady days, when students of every political complexion and none would gather to plot and manoeuvre. One of the most active staff members was Robert Kilroy-Silk, a junior lecturer in the Politics Department, one day to become a Labour MP, later to host the BBC TV daytime sofa show Kilroy, later still to be sidelined from it for making allegedly racist comments about Arabs, and still later to rise again as an anti-Europe Member of the European Parliament. But in those days no one was more enthusiastic in his support of the students; no member of staff talked more earnestly of delivering revolution in their ranks. Kilroy was a rabid revolutionary.
In November 1969 Peter Hain, himself South African by birth, came north with his ‘Stop the Seventy Tour’ campaign. The South African Springboks rugby team were already in Britain, while a cricket tour was to take place in the summer. Hain’s ultimately hugely successful campaign recognised that sport was very close to the heart of the apartheid regime. It was the public, competitive and white face of South Africa. We might not be able to spring Mandela from Robben Island, but we could at least stop his jailers from playing sport in our green and pleasant land. Hain’s target was the Springboks’ match at Old Trafford in Manchester.
‘Come on, Jon, we need you over there today.’ The call came from Dave Robertson, the Prince of Darkness, eternally turned out in black. He was the most articulate student operative on the left, the leader of the university Socialist Society, well to the left of anything I could have subscribed to. Nevertheless, I was flattered that he wanted me along for the ride to Manchester. Dave is now Professor of Politics at John Moore’s University in Liverpool, but in those days he regarded me as ‘a bloody public-school pinko liberal’. Several hundred of us hit the East Lancs highway bound for Old Trafford. Our job was to try to prevent that afternoon’s match from taking place at all. I noticed some of our number carried less than discreet spades with them.
Old Trafford was set for war. There were police and demonstrators everywhere. Hain stood on a flatbed truck outside the ground together with other luminaries urging a peaceful protest. The men with the spades were already worming their way into the ground. It didn’t take long for things to turn nasty. The police started trying to corral us into sectors further away from the gates, so that spectators could get in. The idea that someone had taken the decision to come and watch the match delineated them for us as out-and-out racists and supporters of apartheid, which in a discreet kind of a way I guess they were. Fights broke out. The police charged, and I felt a knee thrust hard into my groin. I thrust back, and within seconds I was pinned to the ground by three Mancunian cops and carted off in a paddy wagon to Old Trafford police station. ‘Jonathan George Snow, you have been arrested and charged with assaulting a police officer.’
‘Damn me,’ I thought, ‘that’s my law career up the spout. No more barristering for me. Is this a criminal record I see before me?’
‘Have you anything to say?’
‘Not guilty, sir!’
It was six in the evening when I was taken down to the cells. The police wanted £100 bail for me, and I had no money to get back to Liverpool. I counted eleven others in my cell, and one bucket in the corner. There must have been ten cells, which meant maybe over a hundred arrested in this police station alone. Despite our numbers, I felt daunted by the charge hanging over me, and by the thought of what my father and the university authorities would say.
My turn for the solitary pay phone came at 4.30 a.m., by which time, having spent the night slumped on a concrete floor, I was in far from the best of spirits. In those days I lived in a flat on Liverpool’s Mount Street next door to the poet Adrian Henri, a sweet place opposite the old College of Art where John Lennon had studied. My flatmate Simon Polito was a charming but completely apolitical character. He proved utterly dependable in a storm, however. He leapt out of bed in response to my plaintive call, summoned legal assistance in the inebriated student form of John Aspinall, later a judge, and hurtled down the East Lancs in his VW to our assistance. Simon fixed the bail and was not in the least judgemental, and John set to with how we would run the defence. I was remanded to appear before a stipendiary magistrate in a week’s time.
The Liverpool law faculty had the decency to accept the basic tenet of English law, ‘innocent until proved guilty’. My father hadn’t found out. So for the moment I was in the clear, but it was a serious charge, and if found guilty I knew everything would change.
I decided to defend myself, and to go for the old chestnut of appealing to the magistrate’s sense of social justice. In other words, to leave him in no doubt that we were of the same social class. I appeared with my shoulder-length hair neatly kempt, and my body in a suit borrowed from Simon, who fortunately was as tall as me.
PC Wilson was a small man for a policeman, perhaps five foot eight. I was six foot four.
‘Officer, is it possible that your knee came into contact with my groin?’ I asked straight off.
I had thought he would deny it, but no. ‘Yes, sir, quite possible, in the act of perambulation, on the move, quite possible,’ he said.
‘Officer, could you please walk between the witness box and the dock?’
For a moment it looked as if the magistrate might refuse my request, but PC Wilson walked.
‘Officer,’ I asked, ‘I wonder if we could estimate the height to which your knee rises in this act of perambulation?’
‘Two foot I should say, sir.’
I addressed the magistrate. ‘I think the court should know that my inside leg measures thirty-six inches. For twenty-four inches to collide with thirty-six inches would require a deliberate upward thrust. I would submit that it was I who was assaulted.’
I felt a pang of remorse for PC Wilson as the magistrate intoned, ‘Case dismissed. You may leave the court.’ I knew that if I’d been a working-class lad he’d have got me – after all, I most certainly had booted PC Wilson back. My legal career survived another day, but not for many more.
The university had been carrying on regardless in the meantime, refusing to discuss anything with its revolting students. The authorities were more concerned with the opening of the new Senate Block, an administrative preserve reserved for themselves. Princess Alexandra had been tapped to come and do the opening. Fired with renewed zeal by the Hain campaign, we had turned our attention to this event and to the impending arrival of the university Chancellor to officiate.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, fifth Marquess of Salisbury, had been Chancellor of Liverpool University since 1951. He was no friend to South Africa’s black majority, and perhaps too much of a friend to Ian Smith’s illegal seizure of power on behalf of the white minority in neighbouring Rhodesia. His speeches in the House of Lords were positively inflammatory. As the date for the Senate Block opening approached, hundreds of students gathered on a daily basis in Mountford Hall. The campus was alive with debate. Several thousand students marched to protest against the Chancellor continuing in office, particularly given that there were now some forty students from southern Africa on the university roll. Still the university refused to entertain even a meeting with the elected student body. So it was proposed that one of us be deputed to go to Lord Salisbury and tell him that his presence on campus could cause serious trouble during Princess Alexandra’s visit. We also wrote to her to request a meeting when she came.
‘You’d be the best to do it, Jon,’ opined Richard Davies, who as President of the Students’ Union might have been expected to talk to Salisbury. ‘He’ll understand you better, with yer public-school accent. Anyway, yer dad’s a Bishop, that’ll appeal to him.’
So it was that on the afternoon before the opening I found myself standing on a platform at Lime Street station in the best clothes I could muster, awaiting the London train. The Marquess stumbled out of his first-class carriage with a straggling retinue.
‘My Lord,’ I said, ‘may I have a word?’
He was charm itself. ‘Now, young man, who are you?’
Where now the rabid racist? In his place I had found a stooped old aristocrat. Could I bring myself to do it? It all came blurting out in one run: ‘My Lord, my name is Jon Snow, and I’ve come to tell you on behalf of the Students’ Union that if you venture onto the campus, your presence could ignite a riot.’
‘Now,’ he said, ‘why don’t you come and take tea with me at my hotel, and we can talk about it.’ So the Marquess, his travelling staff and the long-haired boy from the Students’ Union made their way in a curious-looking crocodile to the neighbouring Adelphi Hotel. There amongst the marble pillars we were served Earl Grey tea and cucumber sandwiches. We talked for what seemed like an age. I was afraid one of the other members of the student executive might be lurking somewhere, and would spot me so conspicuously supping with the devil.
‘Very well,’ said Lord Salisbury at the end of it all. ‘I shall not come to the university. Indeed, I shall never come here again. I shall resign. I tell you frankly, Mr Snow, I’ve never much liked coming to Liverpool anyway. It’s an awfully long way from home. I am relieved to think that when I board the London train in a few minutes’ time, I shall never have to do it again.’ And with that he and his retinue paid the bill and departed.
I walked back up Brownlow Hill towards the university, both depressed and elated. Depressed that I’d abused my roots, and been rude to one of those I’d been brought up to believe were my elders and betters. Elated because I’d scored a hole in one. Not just sent him home, but persuaded the old rogue to resign altogether – although I couldn’t pretend it had been hard. Here writ large were the conflicting loyalties of my old and new worlds.
The university authorities were enraged. They only heard that the Chancellor had resigned through us. They knew it had been our doing. They had lost the one nob the place had been able to sport for all these years, and they felt reduced by his going. Thousands turned out to demonstrate when Princess Alexandra came the next day. She was grace incarnate, waving regally and smiling. We thought none the worse of her. We knew we had messed the entire event up already.
The Vice Chancellor continued to refuse to speak to us, the Registrar likewise. These days we’d probably discover that they were of the finest, but then they had fangs. ‘Loathsome apartheid supporters’, ‘anti-democrats’, ‘fascists’ – there was no limit to the abuse we were prepared to heap upon them. They in turn had marked us down. They would get their revenge soon enough. But now we were on a roll. Having got rid of the Chancellor, we prepared to force the rest of our demands upon the Vice Chancellor and his cohorts. ‘Representation on university bodies’, ‘no secret files’, ‘a say in who the next Chancellor will be’, and, more important than anything, ‘disinvestment of all the university’s holdings in South Africa’ – and of course ‘no victimisation of those who had pressed for these changes’.
The demands were carried over to the Vice Chancellor’s office in the new Senate Block the day after Princess Alexandra had opened the building. They were dispatched by a mass meeting attended by more than two thousand students. The emissary returned, having been refused entry. I got up on the stage and bellowed, ‘Occupy!’ We all streamed out across the quad and stormed into the Senate building. The staff within were terrified, and fled. Suddenly, against all expectation and with no planning, we found ourselves in possession of the seat of the university’s power. Fifteen hundred students had begun what in those days was termed a ‘sit-in’.
The sense outside was that dangerous revolutionaries had seized the place. This was only exacerbated by the action of some of the more committed leftists in raising a red flag on the pole on the roof of the building. The truth below was more complex. The vast majority of the students had never been involved in direct action before. The formally ideological represented less than a hundred of our number.
‘What the hell do we do now?’ I asked the President of the Union, Richard Davies.
‘Keep meeting, keep talking, and organise,’ he replied. So while he summoned the first of many mass meetings in the sumptuous new Senate meeting room, I set about organising the practicalities. The logistical problems were massive, from food to lavatories. Apart from anything else, we had to raise funds fast. Students came up with what cash they could, and the Liverpool Trades Union Council sent in more. Food runs were organised. Others started to devise an ‘alternative university’ that would run in parallel with our proper studies. The far left did their best to hijack the proceedings, but while Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn from the LSE came up to lecture, there were simply too many occupiers for any single sect to prevail.
The occupation lasted several weeks. The numbers gradually dwindled to under a thousand, still sizeable in a university which in those days held seven thousand students. Negotiations with the authorities were sparse and unproductive. In the end the approaching Easter holidays called a halt to our small revolution. I was determined that we should leave the building exactly as we had found it, as to do so would rob the authorities of a propaganda coup that we had in some way defiled the place. An epic clean-up lasting two days and a night preceded our exit. In the end, a single cracked lavatory window was all the damage the authorities could find. As we filed out, we were all filmed and photographed.
Three days later ten of us, mostly elected officers of the Students’ Union, were charged by the authorities with bringing the university into disrepute. Of Robert Kilroy-Silk, so voluble at the start, there was no sign. In the middle of the holidays a kangaroo court of seven professorial staff was summoned to ‘try’ us. Naturally there was no legal representation for any of us. The university’s case was prepared and prosecuted by a local QC named Stannard. We looked in vain for anyone who would defend us, scouring the empty campus for witnesses, not least for Kilroy, but alas he must already have been ‘tanning up’ for his TV career.
Pete Creswell, a committed member of the Socialist Society, drew a water-pistol during the proceedings, and at least had the pleasure of seeing the kangaroos dive for cover. All ten of us were naturally found guilty of the charge of ‘bringing the good name of the university into disrepute’. Creswell and an anarchist called Ian Williams were expelled, the rest of us were rusticated, or sent down, for one year or two. In my case it was for a year, on the grounds that my tireless efforts to sustain the fabric of the Senate building counted in my favour. The whole charade was so blatant a denial of natural justice, and the expulsion so large even in those rebellious days, that the national press picked up on it. Even the Telegraph led its front page with it.
Buoyed up, we decided to appeal. Suddenly the offers of legal help came forth. John Griffith, the celebrated Professor of Law at the LSE, came up at his own expense and slept on one of our floors. E. Rex Makin, a controversial local solicitor, nicknamed ‘Sexy Rex/, offered his help to me. Even my dear father unexpectedly weighed in, writing a top-of-column letter to The Times, signed ‘Bishop of Whitby’. It was somewhat undermined by his omission of the detail that he was the father of one of the students. Despite apparently sharing no common ground with any of our demands, he remained steadfastly supportive.
On the day of the appeal, the local unions called a one-day strike and demonstration on our behalf at the pier head. It had been called for 3 p.m., which we thought would be safely after the appeals had ended, so that we could join the protest. But Professor Griffith and Sexy Rexy entered so spirited a defence that it was five to three by the time the last four of us had presented our appeals.
‘Never mind,’ said Makin, Til get you to the pier head. My car’s round the back here.’
We had not bargained for a gold Rolls-Royce. ‘We can’t possibly travel in that load of capitalist trash,’ said Ian Williams. ‘I’m walking.’
‘You’ll miss the whole thing,’ I said. ‘It’s a demo in aid of the Liverpool Ten. We can’t leave them with just six of us.’
So we all piled in. As we neared the demonstration, the projectiles began to hit the Roller. Poor old Rexy: no fee, and damaged bodywork to boot.
The next day I left Liverpool with a very heavy heart. I did not know it then, but I was never to return to the university. My vast ambition, built on slender academic achievement, to secure a degree, and choices, and eventual return to Uganda, had crashed. I wasn’t even a member of any political party. I had no ideology that might provide answers to what I perceived to be the unjust and archaic actions of a supposedly liberal seat of learning.
Things couldn’t have looked worse. I felt that what I had done had come from my heart, had sprung from the African bush, from an innate sense of justice. At just twenty-two years old I felt very wronged, and very broken.
