Nowherelands: Lost Countries of the 19th and 20th Century
Yüklə 463,42 Kb.
|
- Bu səhifədəki naviqasiya:
- IQUIQUE
- Saltpetre War in a Dusty Landscape
- BHOPAL
- Burka-Clad Princesses
- Shaharyar M. Khan (2000): The Begums of Bhopal: A history of the Princely State of Bhopal Nawab Sultan Jahan Begum (1912)
- SEDANG
- From the Champs Elysées to Kon Tum
Anonymous (1875): Sketch of the Orange Free State Ingvald Schrøder-Nilsen (1925): Bland boerne i fred o krig Everybody coughed and cleared their throats good and long until the priest, who was also the choirmaster, intoned a prolonged, a particularly prolonged and shrill note. It ended in some frightful vibrato, and immediately afterwards, everybody else joined in as loudly as they could.
INGVALD SCHRØDER-NILSEN
Saltpetre War in a Dusty Landscape The mineral saltpetre is produced when the decomposed remains of plants and animals react with saline soil, for example in land that was once ocean bed but has since risen above sea level. The substance has been sought after since the early Middle Ages, when the Chinese invented gunpowder using a finely ground mixture that consisted of seventy-five per cent saltpetre, ten per cent sulphur and fifteen per cent charcoal. Spirits were then added to the mixture, which was kneaded into a dough and rolled out into sheets, then dried and broken up into the precious shiny black powder. Initially, it was mostly used for fireworks. After a gradual process of trial and error, it eventually became a crucial ingredient in wars all over the world as the fuel for cannons and guns. Over the 1800s, the applications of saltpetre became broader. The substance is almost pure nitrogen, so it could easily replace compost and natural fertilizer in the large-scale agriculture that was developing in Europe and the USA. Since technological developments in the explosives industry headed off in new directions, agriculture soon took over as the most important area of application for saltpetre. The planet’s very largest saltpetre deposits were in the Atacama Desert. Here it lay in metre-thick strata on a 100 m high plateau that stretched 600 km along the Pacific Coast of central South America. The deposits furthest to the north belonged to Peru, the part in the middle belonged to Bolivia and furthest south was a small section owned by Chile. Despite this, Chilean companies were the only ones involved in the mining, and were raking in all the profits, a fact that irritated both of Chile’s northern neighbours. They therefore warned that they would increase taxation and nationalize the business. This provoked Chile and in spring 1879 it declared what would later be referred to as the Saltpetre War. With their old-fashioned flintlocks and muskets, Peru and Bolivia were ill equipped to combat Chile’s modern army. Things were further complicated by the fact that the Chileans also systematically drugged their troops with chupilca del diablo, a mixture of gunpowder and strong spirits that transformed the foot soldiers into berserkers bereft of fear or regret. As the Chilean forces stormed onwards, we can assume they underscored their victories with rape and plunder, as in most wars. But they also used stamps. In all the towns they conquered, they immediately started to produce postmarks for use on the large stocks of Chilean stamps the army had brought with them. All of them bore the portrait of Christopher Columbus in his customary sailor’s hat, with peak and earflaps, and with an almost exasperatingly visionary expression on his face. These continual updates meant that the people back home could keep track of the advance, and every new postmark that arrived was a cause for jubilation.
Many of the directors of the big saltpetre companies also live in Iquique. One of them is a Briton called John Thomas North. He hadn’t seemed so upbeat when he landed at Valparaíso in 1866 with ten pounds in his pocket and dressed in a musty old suit. But he has gradually worked his way up and now runs his own company, which has a monopoly on the town’s water supply. Now new opportunities are emerging. The outbreak of war has caused the value of the saltpetre mines to sink like a stone. And in the chaos that follows, North stakes a claim to most of the businesses – whether mining, shipping and transport. He is blessed with success because once the Chileans have conquered the Atacama Desert, prices return to their earlier levels and beyond.78 On my stamp, we can just about see the year: 1882. By then, Iquique has been under Chilean occupation for three years, and it is also the year that John Thomas North returns to England, this time as one of the world’s richest men. He has earned the nickname The Nitrate King, and quickly begins to throw his money about. A lot of it is invested in splendid properties, racehorses and greyhounds. He also arranges extravagant parties, where he dresses up as Henry VIII and surrounds himself with a growing crowd of notables from the British elite, such as Lord Randolph Churchill and the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII.79 He is made an honorary colonel and the papers soon give him as much coverage as the royal family. And the rumours run rife. Under the headline ‘North Denials’, The Hampshire Telegraph publishes an exaggerated account of the whole business in the form of a series of denials. Colonel North has not offered the Government a cool three millions sterling for the contents of the National Gallery, and he has no intention of covering the walls of his dining-room with Old Masters obtained from such a source. The ‘Nitrate King’ does not propose to wear a dress coat embroidered with the Koh-i-noor and other Crown jewels at his next private hop. The Colonel has not purchased the Great Eastern, nor does he intend to fit it up as a floating palace and invite the Prince of Wales to go ‘yotting’ with him in it. The ‘Nitrate King’ invariably uses a gold toothpick after dinner; but he is not in the habit of shaving with a diamond razor and he doesn’t encourage Miss North to curl her fringe with brand-new Bank of England notes.80 Eventually the Saltpetre War fizzled out, and the peace treaty in late autumn 1883 stated that Peru must relinquish large areas of land to Chile, including Iquique. The year after that, it became clear that Bolivia had lost the whole of its coastline for good. [1878: Chilean stamp with Christopher Columbus, postmarked Iquique 1882] As a result, Chile gains geographic dominion over the saltpetre deposits. But most of the profit from the business still goes to foreign investors, mainly John Thomas North. This prompts the Chilean president, José Manuel Balmaceda, to propose the nationalization of the saltpetre mines in 1888. However, he meets with unanimous opposition from conservative politicians, who are heavily subsidized by a generous North. A civil war breaks out in which the conservative side is reinforced with British navy troops, who blockade the harbour. The British press follow up by describing Balmaceda as a ‘dictator of the worst stripe’ and a ‘butcher’.81 After being defeated Balmaceda commits suicide. John Thomas North dies of oyster poisoning a couple of years later, although this does nothing to lessen British influence over the Chilean economy. Now three-quarters of all exports go via England. And they are almost exclusively saltpetre. Working conditions at the saltpetre mines in the Atacama Desert were terrible, with sixteen-hour days and wages that were barely enough to survive on. In December 1907 the miners rebelled and marched into Iquique, singing and shouting slogans. This culminated in what became known as the Santa María de Iquique massacre, in which two thousand men, women and children were mown down by Chilean machine guns.82 By then, European researchers had already found a low-cost method for extracting nitrogen from the air. The process went into full production in the 1920s. Even so, demand for Chilean saltpetre persisted until the bottom suddenly fell out of the market halfway through the century. The Danish author Carsten Jensen went on a visit to the mining area in Iquique at the end of the 1990s and came across industrial ruins that were more dinosaur-like than dinosaur skeletons: ‘An archaeological Pompeii of industrialism, buried and abandoned under the rain of ash from falling share prices and plunging stock exchange listings.’83 William Edmundson (2011): The Nitrate King: A Biography of ‘Colonel’ John Thomas North The ‘Nitrate King’ invariably uses a gold toothpick after dinner; but he is not in the habit of shaving with a diamond razor and he doesn’t encourage Miss North to curl her fringe with brand-new Bank of England notes HAMPSHIRE TELEGRAPH
Burka-Clad Princesses ‘We were choking and our eyes were burning. We could barely see the road through the fog, and sirens were blaring. We didn’t know where to run,’ 84 says an eyewitness to the catastrophe that struck on the night of 2 to 3 December 1984, bringing herostratic fame to Bhopal, in India. A pesticide plant belonging to the American company, Union Carbide, had sprung a leak, releasing a gigantic cloud of methyl isocyanate, a corrosive, blinding poison gas. The plant was in the middle of a residential district and more than 15,000 people died in what would later be judged the world’s worst industrial disaster. Since then, the name of Bhopal has become pretty much synonymous with an earthly incarnation of hell. Before that fateful night, though, the name evoked quite different associations. Because it was here that Kipling’s Jungle Book had played out a hundred years earlier, following Baloo the bear, Bagheera the panther and Mowgli the jungle boy through hot, dry summers and rainy autumn monsoons. Here and there small sandstone hills pierce the canopy of the forest. The otherwise flat landscape is intersected by rift valleys and canyons, with rushing rivers. Small villages of mud huts lie in clearings and at the centre of it all is the beautiful thousand-year-old city of Bhopal, between its two artificial lakes. Following the withdrawal of the Persian Moghul empire, Bhopal had been an autonomous monarchy for more than a hundred years by the time it signed a co-operation agreement with the British East India Company in 1818. The country was assigned the status of a princely state. Put briefly, this meant that the British would take care of all foreign policy and trade, while the country would retain a small army, its own flag and its own prince, designated according to local laws of inheritance. Unlike in most of the other princely states, the population of Bhopal was Muslim. This made it even more remarkable that the first four rulers in the Begum dynasty were all women. First up was Qudsia, the pioneer princess. At eighteen years old, she insisted on taking over when her husband was assassinated just a few days after the establishment of the princely state. She ruled the country with a steady hand until 1837. She was followed by her daughter Sikander, the warrior princess: a virtuoso when it came to riding and the martial arts, and commander-in-chief of the army. Many of the local imams were angered, because they viewed female monarchs as un-Islamic. And it didn’t improve matters that both Qudsia and Sikander refused to submit to purdah, the dress code that required women to cover their bodies and faces. But the princesses were as honourable as they were British-friendly, so the British opted to keep them.
After the death of her first husband, she remarried. Her new husband, Siddiq Hasan Khan, of Persian descent, appeared orthodox on matters of religion. And the princess allowed herself to be swept away. She submitted to purdah and Siddiq seized the opportunity to take over all public communication, including with the British. This increased his power and influence. The first stamps were introduced under Shah Jahan in 1876. The motif is an octagon representing the diamond in the princess’s ring, with her name inscribed around it. In the twenty years that follow, the only thing that changes in the different issues is the spelling. On the first stamps, the letters are out of order and almost illegible. This is because, according to Islamic orthodoxy, all perfection leads to jealousy and the distortion of reality. Only Allah is perfect. On my copy, from 1890, most of the letters are in the right order. And it is probably not by chance that this happens the year after the British have removed Siddiq Hasan Khan following accusations of anti-colonial activities.85 The stamps also have more to offer: in the white field inside the octagon an embossed figure is just about visible. Again, it is the princess’s name, but this time in Urdu. The embossing process takes place at the castle, under the supervision of the princess, as a personal seal of validity.86 Note also the rough perforations. They have been pierced by hand using a single needle, hole after hole in bundles of ten sheets at a time. They emanate an intense feeling of presence, influenced by whether the person who made them was on form that day; whether they were diligent or distracted. In between her tasks at the castle, Shah Jahan travelled around the princely state. She was well liked, or at least that’s the impression given in the autobiography she later wrote.
At the same time, Kaikhusrau appeared to be even more orthodox than her mother. All her decisions were communicated through a screen or through the crocheted lattice of a burka. But this wasn’t just a matter of religion: it also limited the extent to which her many male adversaries, from local aristocrats to delegates of the British colonial administration, could exercise domination techniques. [1890: Barely visible embossed relief of Shah Jahan’s name, framed by the octagonal diamond in her ring.] When Kaikhusrau abdicated in 1926, allowing her son Hamidullah Khan to take the throne, she was breaking with a hundred-year tradition of queenly rulers. The odd thing is that we have no idea what any of them looked like. The first two ruled before the age of the camera, and the last two wore the veil. We know a great deal more about their husbands, all of whom were chosen after painstaking scrutiny by mother or daughter. And all of them without exception were extremely handsome princes with glittering almond eyes: fitting providers of divine bedtime delight or first-class decoration for the royal couch, clad in velvet and silk. The princesses’ efforts certainly paid off. After the British withdrew from the Indian continent in 1947, Prince Hamidullah Khan demanded full independence for Bhopal, but had to give in after massive local protests. Bhopal was then incorporated into the Indian Union from 1949, and was subsequently merged with the even larger state of Madhya Pradesh to the south. The Bhopal disaster, which struck less than twenty years later, would change almost everything. Shaharyar M. Khan (2000): The Begums of Bhopal: A history of the Princely State of Bhopal Nawab Sultan Jahan Begum (1912): An Account of my Life As soon as the people of a village become aware of my approach, the women come out in crowds to meet me, with their little ones in their arms, and carrying tiny bowls of water, the sprinkling of which, as they firmly believe, is to bring good fortune to their Chief and protector. NAWAB SULTAN JAHAN BEGUM
From the Champs Elysées to Kon Tum ‘I’ll get myself a kingdom.’ The indications are that this is what Charles-Marie David de Mayréna has in mind as he struggles across the green-clad mountains from the coastal town of Qui Nhon in Indochina. He is accompanied by his business partner, Alphonse Mercurol, four Chinese merchants, two Vietnamese concubines and eighty bearers, with eighteen local soldiers to keep guard. The expedition is aiming for the highland plateau that surrounds the town of Kon Tum. Where possible, they follow small paths between the region’s villages; elsewhere they have to hack their way through the wilderness of liana and bamboo. It is humid and muddy, hot and sultry – as far as one could possibly get from the Parisian boulevards where Mayréna has spent many years as a notorious dandy. He has fled after being charged with embezzlement. Now he is mulling his revenge, a splendid revenge. The ragtag caravan eventually arrived on the plain inhabited by the local tribes: the Bahnar, the Rongao and the Sedang. They were actually the region’s original inhabitants, but had been ousted from the coastal areas by the Chinese and the Malays. Here, they inhabited small villages, living off slash-and-burn agriculture and simple livestock farming. At the centre of every village were distinctive buildings called rongs. They stood on stilts, rising to heights of up to 20m, and looked like giant sailing ships, with their steep and slightly curved straw roofs. This was where the village council resolved its conflicts and made offerings to the gods. Because they were animists. And they didn’t use surnames, only a letter to indicate the sex of the person – A for men and Y for women – followed by a first name, so that the full name would be, for example, A Nhong or Y Hen. Another peculiarity was the language. It sounded like a gentle song and had over fifty different vowel sounds, more than any other language in the world. It is 1888 and a year earlier, France has established Indochina as a French colony. Mayréna has persuaded the French colonial administration that a demonstration of might is required in the western areas, which have not yet been visited by the French government. Moreover, rumour has it that massive gold deposits lie hidden here. But as we know, Mayréna also has personal plans. On arrival, he immediately commandeers a rong and summons all the local chiefs to a meeting. Here he declares that they owe nothing to anybody, neither the French nor anyone else, and that the time has come to respond. He suggests establishing Keh Sedang, the Kingdom of Sedang, with himself as king. And they agree. On 3 June, aged forty-six, he is crowned Marie the First. His partner Mercurol acquires the title of the Marquis of Hanoi. Mayréna moves into a huge straw hut in the capital of Kon Tum. The national flag soon flutters there: a white cross on a blue background, with a red star in the middle. The huge royal elephant is equipped with similarly embellished harnesses. Over the course of a few days, he gathers an army of 1,400 warriors to subdue the Jarai to the north. They have long been troubling the French missionaries in the area. The punitive expedition proves successful and wins Mayréna some sympathy from the French bishop in Indochina. When he goes on to declare Catholicism the state religion, he is honoured with a private prayer-desk, equipped with red draperies and a special cushion. He doesn’t get a great deal of use out of this, though, because he converts to Islam, in part so that he can marry a few of the tempting young daughters of the local chiefs. After a few weeks, Mayréna travels to Hong Kong with the bishop’s letters of recommendation in his pocket. He is seeking international recognition for his country and money to run it. Mayréna is tall, charming and good-looking, with coal-black hair and a full bushy beard. He makes a strong impression on those who meet him. There was power in every line of that face, in the hard, determined, cruel mouth, the dark and heavy eyebrows which nearly joined one another across the bridge of the nose, in the broad smooth forehead, in the eyes themselves, keen, fierce, piercing and cynical.89 This impression is hardly lessened by the fact that he is also dressed like a king, in a scarlet jacket with enormous epaulettes, trousers with a gold stripe, with copious decorations on his chest. Some Chinese businessmen quickly rise to the bait, ready to pay for the exclusive right to trade with the new country. He uses some of resulting funds to print stamps in no fewer than seven colours, their values expressed in local currency. The designs are identical: a coat of arms beneath a crown. Later, a new issue is printed in Paris. My stamp has an 1899 postmark, but there is some question about its authenticity. The local population was illiterate and it is doubtful that there was even any postal system to speak of. After that, everything went rapidly downhill. Mayréna visited Europe, starting in Paris, but met with a lacklustre response. He certainly lived as befitted his rank, staying at the best hotels, and handing out his ‘Order of Marie the First’ to all and sundry, along with honorific titles and all kinds of rights to mineral exploitation and trading monopolies. But people were unimpressed and the return was meagre. The French newspaper Le Temps described the whole business as ‘rather obscure’ and eventually there was talk of the Mayréna Scandal. The French state, which had initially assumed it would all fizzle out of its own accord, issued an unambiguous condemnation. It rejected all overtures seeking recognition for the Kingdom of Sedang and launched legal proceedings against Mayréna. Fearing a death sentence, Mayréna leapt on a steamer bound for home, but didn’t dare complete the last leg of the journey through French Indochina into Sedang. Instead, he barricaded himself into a hut on the small, lush but almost uninhabited island of Tioman off the eastern coast of the Malacca Peninsula. The hut had loopholes in the window shutters and was known as the Maison du Roi. In addition to two or three women, he was accompanied by his flesh-coloured French poodle, Auguste, from whom he always sought counsel.
Just a few days later, on 11 November 1890, Mayréna was bitten by a cobra and died. In accordance with his own wishes, he was given an Islamic funeral. France quickly ensured that all that remained of the kingdom was wound up, and also took the opportunity to settle accounts with the Catholic mission in the area. Today, the Sedang district has been renamed Xedang, and is part of Vietnam, close to the borders with Laos and Cambodia. The area was hard hit by the Vietnam War. It is still fairly isolated and, according to guide books, only around five per cent of the villages have been visited by tourists.91 Here and there lie the ruins of French mission stations. All that remains of the Kingdom of Sedang is its stamps. Yüklə 463,42 Kb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
|