ISIS Magazine: The Go Issue (MT11)

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CONTENTS

4 Beatles & Animals 6 War & Fairytales 8 Boat Burning 14 FEMEN 18 Up! 22 Jean-Robert Cadet

26 28 30 34 36 40

Dau & Chessboxing FOUND Cuban Ice Cream Shirley Eaton North Sentinel Island Arash Hejazi

44 Hoaxes & Jokes 46 Migrants 49 Camila Vallejo 52 Immortality 56 Witch-Doctors 59 Fashion

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Editor - Jane Saldanha Deputy Editors - Alex Hacillo, Ben Kirby Sub Editors - Ellen Jones, Rosie Ball, Sean Wyer, Stephanie Vizard Website Editors - Douglas Sloan, Laurie Blair Creative Director - Leo Simonsmith Deputy Creative Directors - Sarah Moore, Neal Shasore Creatives - Sophie Hatcher, Whitney Conti Staff Illustrator - Inez Januszczak Staff Photographers - Genevieve Wastie, Harriet Baker Collage work - Milly Peck Fashion Editors - Ali Fortescue, Holly Tabor PR Team - Emma Phillpot, Natasha Jackson cover - Angus Hodder Published by Oxford Student Publications Limted Chairman - Mark Brakel Managing Director - Katie Chung Company Secretary - Alistair Smout Finance Director - James Gibson Directors - Isabelle Fraser, Robert Morris

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here are few things as frustrating as squandering an opportunity; whether it be letting those old McDonalds vouchers run past their expiry date or forgetting to buy a lottery ticket the night your numbers come up.

Or leaving your friend John Lennon’s band to become a policeman. This is the unenviable choice that Peter Shotton, John Lennon’s best friend and early bandmate made in 1957, leaving Lennon’s band The Quarrymen only five years before they were catapulted to superstardom on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Admittedly, Shotton’s musical prowess left much to be desired; his instrument of choice was an old washboard, which he rubbed a stick along to make an unpleasant percussive noise. John Lennon took his decision to leave the band with characteristic tolerance and good grace, smashing Shotton’s washboard over his head on his birthday.

Even more unfortunate was Pete Best, who was ditched as drummer for the Beatles for Ringo Starr, allegedly because he was too handsome. After their performances in Hamburg, girls would swarm round Best, ignoring John, Paul and George. This fired up a whole host of late-adolescent hormonal tensions, and Best was jibbed from the band for Ringo once they got back to England. He did still have time to indulge in arson with the other Beatles, nailing a condom to their landlord’s door and setting it on fire. John Lennon also urinated out of a window onto a passing nun.

Not strictly related, but disturbing nonetheless.

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More tragic was the case of Stuart Sutcliffe, another friend of John Lennon’s who is credited with helping come up with the name “Beatles”. He also accompanied The Beatles to Hamburg, fell in love, and left the band. After featuring in an article for the tabloid newspaper The People (headline: “The Beatnik Horror”), he died of a brain haemorrhage in 1962.

But what of them now? Conspiracy theories abound, with Stuart Sutcliffe’s sister continuing to insist that Sutcliffe was romantically involved with Lennon, and that his death was brought about after a lovers’ tiff between the two, in which John kicked Stuart in the head. Pete Best went on to join an unsuccessful band called Lee Curtis and the All Stars, married the woman working behind the biscuit counter at Woolworths, featured in a Carlsberg advert (“Probably the Pete Best lager in the world”) and recorded a long and bitter interview on The David Letterman Show. Peter Shotton’s case is more surreal. He ended up becoming a general skivvy for John Lennon in his later years, leaving his family at short notice to keep John company, taking John’s wife to the cinema and essentially being an abused and neglected dogsbody. John at least bought him a Supermarket in Hampshir, and he later started ‘Fatty Arbuckle’ restaurant chain.

Perhaps this unfortunate trio had the last laugh. Actually, they definitely didn’t. But at least Peter Shotton got a supermarket out of it.

ALEX HACILLO

ANIMALS IN SPACE

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efore the small steps and the giant leaps, before the USSR launched their first ‘cosmonaut’ into space in 1961, the scientific community struggled to understand the perils posed by human space flight.

There was only one way to move forward: before a human could be sent higher into the sky than ever before, another animal would have to get there first. More importantly, these unknowing creatures would have the tricky task of actually returning alive.

The first substantial attempt at animal space travel is the lightly documented case of Albert the rhesus monkey in 1948. Little is known about his flight, but if the appearance of an Albert II just one year later suggests it wasn’t a happy ending then the launch of an Albert V in 1950 confirms it. Perhaps believing that five dead Alberts was officially ominous, in 1951, NASA switched to a monkey called Yorrick as well as 11 mice, all of whom returned safely to earth after a 71 kilometre ascent.

But the title of “first canine suborbital astronaut” goes to a set of Russian dogs Dezik and Tsygan who were the first of seven more to be launched in the space of year. One named Bobik ran away only to be swiftly replaced by a mutt found near the local canteen. This replacement dog was given the pithy title ‘ZIB’, an acronym of ‘Zamena ischeznuvshemu Bobiku’ (‘Substitute for Missing Dog Bobik’). One of Russia’s space dogs would even go on to be the matriarch of one of the most power-adjacent doggy dynasties of recent history. Strelka gave birth to a puppy named Pushinka (‘Fluffy’) who was given to JFK’s daughter as a present in the 60s. But even the escalating pressures of the Cold War could not get in the way of true love and Pushinka soon fell pregnant with a litter of ‘pupniks’, fathered by a White House terrier named Charlie.

So, when you watch the footage of the moon-landing or look at the images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, spare a thought for the monkeys, dogs, guinea pigs, bullfrogs, albino rats, sea urchins and amputated newts that faced the final frontier for the sake of scientific endeavour.

Animals of space, we salute you.

JANE QUIAMBAO

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SEALED KNOT

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s the prisoners are brought out to be shot, their wives and children wail and scream, cursing their captors. The captured soldiers are thrown to the ground. Their enemies raise their weapons, and they just have time to proclaim their allegiance – “Charles Stuart, King of Scotland!” – before the order to fire is given. When the smoke clears, they all lie dead. After a brief pause, a few feet away the line of spectators – wielding cameras and brollies, cagoule-clad in the thin Scottish rain – begin to applaud politely, and the dead soldiers rise from the ground and exchange handshakes and jokes with their erstwhile executioners.

This is only a re-enactment of the 1645 Battle of Philiphaugh, Scotland, but for the several hundred members of The Sealed Knot – a nationwide English Civil War re-enactment society – the event is taken very seriously. The Sealed Knot has hundreds of members organised into various regiments across the country, and every year sees them take part in several hundred events; these range from educational visits in schools, memorial services and talks to full-scale ‘battles’ with over a thousand combatants.

Perhaps the most surprising thing is the variety of ages of those involved. From doughty old matrons tending bubbling pots of 17th century fare, via rakish students trading jokes and practice sword blows to enthusiastic, costumed children, it’s clear that the Knot is for all ages, and often very much a family affair.

Janet, who joined in 1985, has travelled all the way from Essex for the event, and tells me that she met her husband in the society. The best thing about the Knot for her is the sense of community and merriment shared by all members – “You can walk into a pub, see other people in uniform and get chatting right away,” she enthuses.

However, it’s not an entirely innocent pursuit. A company of re-enactors from Memmingen, Germany explain that full battle reenactments are outlawed there. Yet as the regiments disband, return to civilian garb and return to their normal lives, it seems right that there are those who are dedicated to keeping alive the memory of the Civil War, a period which serves as a grim warning of the dangers of sectarian and regional hatred. Nevertheless, watching two young women soldiers wrestle each other to the muddy ground in the course of the battle, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that for most of its members, the Sealed Knot is the most fun you can have without taking off your armour.

LAURIE BLAIR 6

TELLING TALES

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nce upon a time, long before Mr. Disney, when the Brothers Grimm were telling the stories, fairytales were a little less PG.

It wasn’t always ‘true love’s first kiss’ that woke Sleeping Beauty. So the story goes, dreaming wasn’t all she’d been doing for one hundred years. During her slumber, she had a late night visit from a prince, fell pregnant and gave birth to twins. She only awakes when her baby mistakes a finger for a nipple and sucks out the cursed splinter.

But at least she lived to tell the story. Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Mermaid wasn’t so lucky.

Having cut out her tongue as payment for her new legs, every step hurt as though she was treading on knives. When the Prince fell for someone else, she threw herself into the ocean and her body dissolved into foam.

Her’s wasn’t the only nasty ending. Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio was hanged for being too naughty, but not before he’d been plunged in flour and cooked in a frying pan, strapped in a dog collar and locked in a kennel and, every little boy’s worst nightmare, dressed up like a girl and made to dance.

Little Red Riding Hood climbed into bed with the wolf. Naked. Hansel and Gretel were thrown out by parents who couldn’t afford to feed them. Cinderella’s ugly sister chopped off her big toe to fit the glass slipper. As for Goldilocks, her tale had a variety of sticky endings. She was variously burnt alive in the fireplace, drowned in a river and dropped from a steeple. Or simply eaten by Papa bear.

Now fairytales are back on the silver screen. They may be darker than Disney but they still shy away from the most sinister finales. “People want to see these stories get subverted,” says Daniel Barnz, director of Beastly, a modern day take on Beauty and the Beast. “But certain things still need to happen in the film. It’s not like we could have allowed the beast not to be turned back.”

Why not? From Charles Perrault to the Brother’s Grimm to Walt Disney, fairy tales have been chopped and changed as much as the ugly sisters’ feet. If there’s a moral to be shared, it’s that the story of the fairytale is far from over yet.

GEORGINA WHITELEY

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BOAT BURNING

On a stretch of beach on the South-East coast of Zanzibar, groups of fishermen burn the bottoms of their boats to remove algae, ensuring that they can go as quickly as possible through the water.

ANGUS HODDER

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Eastern Europe’s most notorious feminists strip off to fight corruption, prostitution and sex tourism.

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FEMINISM LAID

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n the August heat, topless women lay siege to a Kiev court. Angered by what they believe to be widespread political corruption within their country, they climb the roof of a police transporter. Once there, wearing little more than shorts and traditional flower wreaths, they shout at the politicians: “This is the place for all of you. Inside.

With the rest of the criminals.”

This was not the first time that FEMEN, Ukraine’s most famous feminist organization, staged a protest by half-naked activists. Their aims, as stated on their Facebook page (initially blocked as “pornographic”), are not limited to ‘’shaking women in Ukraine and making them socially active”. If FEMEN get their way, 2017 will mark a fully-fledged women’s revolution across the country.

“They might well make it someday,” says Sveta, a maths student at Kiev University. “Just look what a long way they’ve come”. Sveta has been following FEMEN’s actions since the group’s beginnings in 2008.

In that year, a young economist named Anna Hutsol decided that Ukraine was ripe for change.

Sex tourism and international marriage agencies became the first targets. “In high school, I dreamt of marrying a French man”, Hutsol records halfironically. “But in Ukraine, a foreign tongue hardly ever speaks the truth.” Shocked by the stories of girls duped by false promises, she gathered a group of likeminded Ukrainians and set up a movement aiming to wipe out the exploitation of women in the country.

They knew they would need more than conventional tactics.

In late September 2008, the Turkish embassy in Kiev saw an unusual performance. Young girls in revealing nurse outfits chanted and danced around the building, protesting the influx of “sex tourists”, many of them Turkish, into their country. “Ukraine is not a brothel” read one of their slogans. A few months earlier, they spelt it out with their own bodies on a hill in front of the Cabinet of Ministers.

FEMEN members are passionate about destroying Ukraine’s image as a country of cheap, casual sex. Initiatives that seem to perpetuate it are in for a scathing attack. This was the case with a 2011 New Zealand radio contest, quite unabashedly entitled “Win a Wife”. Targeting the predominantly male audience of Radio Rock FM (tagline: “Bands, Babes, Balls’n’Bull”), it offered the winner “holy matrimony with a potentially hot foreign chick”. But two weeks’ accommodation, a spending fund and “the lucky lady” was not all that awaited him in Kiev.

“FEMEN warns the ‘lucky’ winner of the New

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Zealand competition that he can expect an unhappy ending in Ukraine,” Alexandra Shevchenko, one of the leading activists, wrote in a statement on the group’s blog. “Our women are not a commodity.”

They are, moreover, vehemently opposed to the legalisation of prostitution. In 2009, the group proposed imposing criminal responsibility on ‘sex tourists’ travelling to Ukraine. “This is a wild country,” Hutsol commented. “More women will slip if we make [prostitution] legal.”

The ideas proved popular with members of Kiev’s youth. The group now comprises over 300 active members, with female university students forming the backbone of the movement. Men are scarce. Yet some of them, like the group’s PR manager Viktor Svyatskyi, have become some of the most vocal advocates of FEMEN’s cause.

“A woman in this country is born as a sex object,” Svyatskiy recently explained to the Kyiv Post. “The mentality from the film Pretty Woman prevails in our culture. I don’t like it.” Sveta could not agree more. “Ukrainian society is very maleoriented,” she says. “I don’t want to generalize – I’m sure not everybody thinks that way – but there are lots of men who’d like to treat us like furniture.” ‘’To me, this makes no sense at all,” judges 22-yearold Katya from Kiev’s Solomyanka district. “If they’re against objectifying women, why do they parade naked through the city centre?” The accusation is not uncommon. FEMEN activists have long had a reply at hand. “This is the only way to be heard in this country,” the movement’s website proclaims. “If we staged simple protests with banners, our claims would not have been noticed.”

Hutsol herself is succinct on the issue. “If we dressed like cleaners, we would not attract much attention,” she told reporters after the Turkish embassy demonstration. “Our girls are used to wearing short skirts. It’s part of our culture. But we are not for sale.”

Yet she never takes part in FEMEN’s topless rallies.

UKRA IS NO BROT

The organization needs “serious people” to communicate with the media.

FEMEN are often the subject of negative perceptions. “Russian agents” and “junkies” are just a few of the gamut of popular insults. Some criticize their actions as a tasteless search for the media spotlight: the case of a member exposing her buttocks, apparently in protest against the lack of public toilets in Kiev, is often invoked.

FEMEN activism raises hopes, enrages the establishment and, occasionally, estranges families. “Each morning I listen to people reprimanding me for my daughter’s behaviour,” Alexandra Shevchenko’s mother told the Kyiv Post. “I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. I can’t live worrying about her all the time. We tried to persuade her not to take off her clothes anymore. But when she’s in Kiev she does not listen to us. FEMEN leaders have brainwashed girls like her.”

Their daughter is ready to defend her actions in public, emphasizing the group’s new attempts to venture out of the feminist ghetto and join the mainstream of Ukraine’s political struggles: “There is a desperate need for a women’s political party, completely different from the existing ones. I think we have every chance of success in local elections.”

FEMEN’s first political demonstrations were relatively vague: topless mudwrestlers “struggled with Ukraine’s dirty politics” in the centre of Kiev, while girls in flower wreaths demonstrated in front of the ballot box (“Don’t be a slut, don’t sell your vote”).

Over time, the group became more outspoken about their political position.

In the spring of 2010, they prepared a warm greeting for the visiting Russian president Dmitri Medvedev. Prevalent Ukrainian fears of Russian intentions to drag the country back into its sphere of influence resounded in their protests with extraordinary force.

FEMEN’s performance, called “Scratched by Medvedev,” involved an activist stripping herself naked at

AINE OT A THEL

the door of President Yanukovych’s cabinet, her body painted in what resembled traces of bear claws (as “Medvedev” resembles the Russian word for bear).

Prime Minister Putin, visiting Ukraine in September, also became a target. “Ukraine is not Alina!”, the activists chanted, referring to his alleged lover Alina Kabayeva.

Domestic politicians were not spared either. In early 2010, FEMEN called the ministers’ wives for a sexual boycott in protest against Prime Minister Azarov’s alleged chauvinism. “A woman cannot rule a country,” Azarov claimed, aiming to justify his failure to include women in his cabinet. “Women are not able to say ‘no’ decisively.” Hutsol replied with a passionate polemic in the Kyiv Post: “Azarov’s sexism is hurting this nation,” she wrote. “Fear is rising in Europe that, after five years of Orange Revolution moods, the ‘strong hand’ of the male is returning to Ukraine – and these hands are more likely to reach out to Russia than to the West.”

Yet there is more to FEMEN’s opposition than words, banners and chants (not to mention the obligatory bare chest). The group is now speaking about transforming itself into a formal political party. “If we succeed, we will be the very first Ukrainian independent political party made up of ordinary girls who dragged themselves out of the gutter to become democratic politicians,” an activist commented.

“The girls cannot run around Independence Square all their lives,” Viktor Svyatskyi told reporters. “We need to influence the decision-making and legislative process.”

Political analysts in Ukraine are lukewarm about the prospect. According to Volodymyr Tsybulko, a Lviv political consultant, “Ukrainian society is conservative enough. It won’t accept any provocative programmes that FEMEN could make. And it is clever enough to judge [FEMEN’s] politics by their actions.”

FEMEN members retorted by applying for registration as a non-governmental organization. More may be to come. “In 2017, we will organize a women’s revolution,” the movement’s website claims. “Our God is a woman, our mission is protest, our weapons are bare breasts.” While many doubt if pink will indeed be the colour of Ukraine’s next revolution, FEMEN’s motto is unwavering: “Prishla, razdelas’, pobedila,” their website proclaims. “I came, I undressed, I conquered.”

JOANNA KOZLOWSKA

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SEVEN

UP! The documentary series that’s lasted 56 years

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e’ve been given films that span a character’s entire life, even in reverse; we’ve watched documentaries that probe their subjects for the most private details, and reality TV shows whose participants offer up these details with pleasure. But the Up! documentary series is unique in showing us a group of real, ordinary people ageing naturally over the course of fifty years. Across episodes we see the participants - goofy and unselfconscious at the age of seven - mature, marry and divorce, get hired and fired, put on weight, lose their parents, move abroad, and in one case slide dramatically into a nervous breakdown.

Seven Up! was conceived as a one-off instalment in the World in Action current affairs series and broadcast on British television in 1964. The filmmakers gathered fourteen seven-year-olds from various social backgrounds and parts of England, and interviewed each one about friends, family, school and ambitions.

Taking inspiration from the Jesuit motto ‘Give me a child until he is seven, and I will show you the man’, they had an explicit agenda: to show that a Briton’s future is largely determined by his or her background, and that the country’s class system is alive and well.

Their choice of participants, who tended towards the extremes of the class hierarchy, reflected this motive.

In 1970 a follow-up was commissioned, in which the filmmakers caught up with the same fourteen kids, now in their early teens; by the time 7 Plus Seven was broadcast late that year the participants were more

Across episodes we see participants marry and divorce, put on weight, lose their parents, and in one case slide dramtically into a nervous breakdown articulate, and more aware of the programme’s political thrust and their own individual contribution to it. Producers were enticed by the prospect of telling the story of postwar British society through ordinary lives, and Up!’s future as a regular series was secured.

The filmmakers have returned to the same participants once every seven years since, and the format has remained the same: each episode consists of an interview with each of the participants in turn, accompanied by footage of them going about their daily business. None of the fourteen has died yet and only two of them have dropped out along the way. 56 Up, the eighth instalment, will be broadcast next May. It’s this consistency of tone, as much as the programme’s sheer longevity, that distinguishes Up!. Michael Apted, who worked as a researcher on Seven Up! and has directed every instalment since, has resisted pressure from his producers to implement all kinds of change, realising that consistency is crucial in help-

ing the viewer draw comparisons across episodes. He interviews each participant in a similar location every time, so that when clips from past instalments

The most common complaint is that Apted manipulates the life stories through editing are sprinkled into an episode the physical changes are plain to see. He uses no music, and he opens and closes every episode with the same footage of the seven-year-old participants playing together in a playground. He returns to the same fundamental topics each time – “Do you have a boyfriend?”; “Where do you see yourself in seven years’ time?” – and although his voice is heard his presence is never overbearing.

The series’ narrative gradually changes from social commentary to human drama as the subjects age and become more socially mobile. “The resonance is in the characters, both political and emotional,” Apted tells me. “But the film had to change as England changed.

The politics have become outdated over the years.”

Indeed, the range of participants is hugely skewed towards the social extremes. On the one hand we have the three impossibly posh boarding school boys, each confidently predicting his academic career path at the age of seven (right down to the Oxbridge college); on the other, the four easy-going working-class Eastenders, and the two boys living in a penurious charity-run children’s home (one of whom at seven doesn’t know what university is). This of course helps carry the filmmakers’ original argument about class divide, but it fails to predict the great story of postwar British society: the rapid expansion of the middle class. By 49 Up, two of the Eastenders and most of the richest participants have gravitated towards a comfortable middle-class life, and the disparity apparent in Seven Up! has faded.

So the Jesuit motto doesn’t hold up; but by the later episodes, Apted’s focus has shifted to the human aspect, the emotional resonance in the participants’ personal stories that simply didn’t exist in the earlier instalments. In Seven Up! and 7 Plus Seven the film-

One participant is asked “do you sometimes wonder whether you are insane?” makers ask generic, leading questions about social categories (“What do you think of the rich children?”; “What are your views on coloured people?”). Yet by the time the participants are in their forties they – not to mention their relationships with Apted – have matured enough to allow for searching, intensely private interviews (“Did you meet enough men before you decided to marry?”; “Do you sometimes wonder

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whether you’re insane?”). Apted pins down the programme’s voyeuristic appeal when he says that, with each new instalment, “I just want to know what’s happened to them.”

The rise of reality TV between 42 Up and 49 Up certainly impacted on the series, which many now see as a forefather to the genre. I ask Apted how aware he is of the danger of lapsing into Big Brother-style exploitation. “I think there’s a fundamental difference between reality TV and documentary,” he contends.

“The former puts people in contrived situations and watches events play out. The Up! films are as realistic a snapshot of peoples’ lives as I can achieve.” Some of the

One participant credits the Up! series with keeping his marriage afloat participants are nevertheless vocal about the drawbacks of participating. Several describe the process as emotionally draining, while another laments that his role in the programme has overshadowed his career as a physicist. Perhaps the most common complaint is that Apted manipulates the life stories through editing, cutting out crucial interview segments and juxtaposing clips from different episodes to suggest causal relationships between events in the participants’ lives that don’t actually exist. When it’s revealed in 21 Up, for example, that most of the privately-educated kids have indeed ended up at Oxbridge, Apted cuts to their seven-year-old selves boasting of how they expect a place there. Apted is defensive: “‘Manipulation’, ‘Creating’, ‘Shaping’ – choose your position. Editing is an essential part of any artistic endeavour.”

Given all this, I wonder why the participants keep on coming back. It’s important to remember that they never chose to take part in Up! – they were put forth by their schools at the age of seven; and although they have the freedom to opt out at any point, only two of the original fourteen have done so (one of them, intriguingly, went on to become a documentary filmmaker). “Even those who vocally object have some emotional connection to the programme,” Apted explains. Some do appear to see a kind of therapeutic value in participating. There are a few astonishingly candid on-screen conversations between married couples (especially Eastender Tony’s admission of

infidelity in front of his wife); one participant even credits the programme with keeping his marriage afloat, pointing out that whenever he and his wife argue they look back to the happier times preserved in the 21 Up footage and remember why they got together in the first place. Others take advantage of their role for promotional purposes (such as John, a conceited QC who spends most of his time in 35 Up advertising his philanthropist activities in Bulgaria).

But in all cases, with age the participants become increasingly conscious of their personal relationship to the series, and as we observe the extraordinary effects of participation on their lives we doubt all the more the programme’s validity as an objective social document of ordinary people.

Does Up! actually tell us anything general about British society? Apted is careful. “This is a film about people who were born in 1956. If I had started the film seven, fourteen years later it would have been quite different.” He regrets not choosing more kids from the middle class, and notes that the original episode would have been different if it had been conceived as the first in a series. The Up! format has been tried in other countries, often with Apted’s involve-

“The Up! films are as realistic a snapshot of peoples’ lives as I can achieve” ment, and it’s instructive to compare them with the British version. “They knew they were in for the long haul,” Apted tells me; “so they chose the participants with an eye to the future. For example, in Russia, we started as the Soviet Union began to disintegrate, so we chose the children geographically… The South African one is unique in that, by the age of twenty-one, four of the participants were dead.”

As social polemic the British Up! raises questions that will resonate today, amid government cuts and their implications for class divides. But this won’t be 56 Up’s main draw come its premiere. I’ve known these participants for fifty years – longer than I’ve known anyone else – and like Apted and the rest of the audience, I just want to know what’s happened to them.

ALEX DUDOK DE WIT

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PHOTO: LUCASTHEEXPERIENCE

THE LOST CHILDREN

Jean-Robert Cadet on a youth spent as a child slave.

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estavec is a Creole word meaning, literally, ‘one who stays with’. It is also the term for a Haitian child who spends their days in servitude in households more affluent than their own. Until very recently, this Haitian practice was virtually unknown to the outside world, and has only now been condemned as a modern form of slavery by the UN. UNICEF estimates that, on an island with a population of just 8 million, 300,000 children work as restavecs. years ago, the UN paid almost no attention to the issue, and had only a dim awareness that these restavecs even existed. After four speeches to the UN Assembly, two books, and tireless campaigning both

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in and outside of Haiti, it is no exaggeration to say that Jean-Robert Cadet is the man who put the Haitian restavecs on the map. A former child slave himself, Jean-Robert Cadet’s life story is one of violence and neglect at the hands of his former ‘owners’, of constant struggle against oppression and injustice.

Yet it is ultimately one of catharsis as his journey sees him cross, as he puts it, the seemingly unassailable gulf from “Haitian slave child to middle-class American”.

Jean-Robert Cadet sits across from me in an unassuming service station on the M4. He wears a baseball cap and in his soft French-Caribbean accent he speaks

confidently and candidly of his time as an abused and unpaid domestic servant throughout the first fifteen years of his life. He states bluntly: “I did not have a childhood.” The illegitimate product of his wealthy white father’s philandering with a maid, Cadet was sent as a restavec to stay with a high-class prostitute (known under the pseudonym of ‘Florence’) whose

Cadet knows where the blame lies: the French clients included numerous government officials. In her care he was treated like the thousands of other Haitian children deemed socially unacceptable, and was subjected to physical and emotional abuse. ‘Florence’ pulled and pinched his penis, beat him in his sleep, kicked him with her high-heels, forced his head down the toilet and made him wash her blood-stained menstrual rags.

However, it was the emotional and verbal abuse, Cadet confides, that left considerably deeper and longerlasting scars. Florence called him a dog, told him he would never amount to anything more than a ‘shoeshine boy’ and, by making him sleep on the kitchen floor and forbidding him ever to sit at the dinner table with the rest of the household, ensured that Cadet would be unable to endure almost any social situation for decades after he finally left her. It is this lasting psychological and social damage, so acutely described in his first book Restavec, which make his poise and ease so remarkable.

As a restavec, Cadet was made to believe that he was worthless. “In Haiti, sleeping in a bed means that you are somebody,” he explains. “I never had a bed; I slept under the kitchen table… I believed I was not worthy of a bed.” He was the victim of a fragmented society in which “everybody wants somebody underneath them… all the way down to dogs.” Cadet harbours few doubts as to where the blame for this fragmentation lies. “The French,” he answers firmly, Haiti’s former colonial masters. Cadet explains that France, along with other colonial powers, were responsible not only for ‘quarantining’ Haiti after the independence in 1804, but also for imposing rigid social hierarchies on Haitian society, hierarchies capable of perpetuating slavery long after the French had left.

Understandably, Cadet has little time for those who question whether the restavec system really constitutes slavery in the strict sense: “Restavecs are treated worse than slaves,” he says unequivocally. He is similarly brusque about claims, particularly those of his fellow Haitians, that this tradition is best understood as an underground foster care system, rather than a system of slavery. “Haitians are proud of their history”, he explains. “As the descendants of former slaves, most are unwilling to believe that they could have become slave-masters themselves.” Even those at the very top of Haitian society are complicit in this cul-

ture. Cadet explains that the Chief of Police also holds children in servitude. In a society in which vast extended families are the norm, it is easy for people like this Chief of Police to have a ‘niece of his wife’ living in his household, being treated, whether they acknowledge it or not, as more of a slave than a member of the family. The subtleties involved in this mean that it is often difficult for people and organisations unacquainted with the culture, such as UNICEF, to identify which child is a normal family member, and which is a restavec. For this reason, it is easy for some to deny that restavecs are treated badly, with many arguing that the system is a form of social welfare similar to those seen in other countries; a way of helping a child from a poor family.

“Haitians are proud of their history.

As the descendants of former slaves, most are unwilling to believe that they could have become slave-masters themselves” Cadet is dismissive of this. “The difference is the brutality,” he argues. “Many countries are very poor, and many may have similar systems, but the Haitian system is unique in its cruelty.” For Cadet, the reasons behind this are cultural; it is no use simply blaming poverty and assuming that the practice will disappear as GDP grows. Failing to value the sanctity of childhood is, according to Cadet, deeply ingrained in the country’s social fabric: “it is part of their cultural make-up dating back to colonial rule”. He explains that the Haitian language is rich in proverbs such as ‘a child is like an animal,’ and as such, the problem is

23

PHOTO: HARRIET BAKER

one of attitude and perception, rather than of material deprivation. This perhaps explains the prevalence of the system at all levels of Haitian society, and the lack of remorse on the part of Cadet’s former keeper Florence: “she felt no need to apologise. She didn’t think she had done anything wrong. She did what she did because someone before her had done the same.”

Cadet, unlike most of his fellow restavec children, was fortunate in that he was educated. He does not ac-

“I slept under the kitchen table. I believed I was not worthy of a bed” cept that this had anything to do with luck, however.

“It was a matter of convenience,” he explains. “When a visitor would come round and I answered the door, I was expected to write the name of the visitor down for Florence when she returned home. If I couldn’t write the name down, then I was useless. That’s why they sent me to a literacy centre.” For most restavec

children, education is not a possibility, but Cadet is insistent that this is the key to eroding this culture of slavery and abuse. An effective state education, and an education which instils Haitian children with the values of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ are what matters. The UN troops propping up the weak government are not the solution, nor are the NGOs, which, he says, are exploitative in their own way: “NGOs use the issue to make a living. Their programmes are not working.”

But if education is the most viable route towards a restavec-free future for Haiti, the 2010 earthquake certainly hampered its progress. Not only are the country’s institutions and infrastructure in tatters, but the number of restavecs has risen considerably.

Prospects look bleak, but there is certainly still hope.

The first step is in the work of people like Cadet; in people who decide to tell their stories rather than remain silent.

TOM GARDNER

24

NEVER-ENDING STORY T

here are innumerable legends about nightmare film shoots, experiences that drag on for months, consuming money and, occasionally, people. Francis Ford Coppola went half mad in the Philippines making Apocalypse Now, while for the last twenty years, Terry Gilliam has been almost destroyed trying again and again to adapt Don Quixote.

Yet even Gilliam’s appropriately quixotic struggle is incomparably tame when measured up to the bizarre, unfathomable and inexplicably on-going filming of Dau. When GQ sent a lone reporter to find out exactly what was going on, he discovered that Dau was, in fact, something of a cover for what was less a film shoot, more an artificial society, ruled over by a megalomaniacal madman.

In 2006, burgeoning young director Ilya Khrzhanovsky decided to adapt the life story of Lev Landau, a Nobel Prize-winning Soviet physicist and notorious sexual deviant who had a severe car crash at age 52, and never fully recovered. Not such a great challenge, you might think; the biopic is a popular genre, and rarely throws up too many problems. This could be a Russian A Beautiful Mind, with added totalitarianism and sex. Except Khrzhanovsky had other ideas.

Following the success of his first film, 4, Khrzhanovsky was able to negotiate total control on Dau: he would have the final cut, he could fire anyone at will, and – most significantly – he had no deadline. With this, he moved to Ukraine, and built an authentic 1950’s Soviet town, with as little evidence of the modern world as possible. He hired mostly non-actors, and inserted them into the set, thus gradually constructing an all-encompassing miniature world.

In the past six years, the film has used over 210,000 extras, many of whom live in the set itself. Everything here is unfailingly period-specific, down to the soap, the matches, and even the milk. There are microphones everywhere, and the actors (for want of a better term) must live their roles. And over all this, Khrzhanovsky presides with the authentic despotic zeal of a Soviet dictator. He surrounds himself with a crew of unrealistically beautiful women, while insisting on finding the truth in what he films – no-one is allowed to mention that all of this might be fake. On set, any reference to modern life results in a $125 fine from one of the ‘guards’, while the money itself is all accurately reproduced from 1952 Russian rubles, complete with Lenin and his immaculate goatee.

Though Khrzhanovsky insists the project is around 80% complete, it is surely impossible for a conventional film ever to do justice to his pursuit of authenticity and truth. In fact, the film now seems somewhat incidental. Though finances are threatening to dry up, Khrzhanovsky has built a miniature state over which he is the artistic dictator; he has made art quite literally into life. Welcome to The Truman Show, Soviet style.

BEN KIRBY

26

THE MYSTERY OF CHESS BOXING A fully bearded, six foot eleven mountain of a man wearing a hooded red silk robe with blue trim lumbers into a boxing ring. His opponent is a six foot four, heavyweight Dutchman.

They glance at eachother and prepare for battle. First move: pawn to D4. This is followed by a flurry of alternating hands: rooks, bishops and knights sweep mercilessly across the black and white checkerboard for four minutes and then a bell rings.

The chessboard is removed and the opponents rise. Two men collectively weighing almost a quarter of a ton begin landing punches so hard that the shock is undeniable, the thuds audible and the pain visible.

Such is the world of Chessboxing; 11 rounds of alternating speed chess and boxing, won by checkmate, knockout, technical knockout or a rundown chess timer. The hybrid discipline has a history to match its current, eccentric state: it starts with a comic book by Enki Bilal which formed the inspiration for a piece by performance artist Iepe Rubingh. Eventually it made its way into the underpopulated realm of composite sports where it sits alongside Slamball, Footvolley and Polocrosse.

But Chessboxing is surely the most surprising of them all. A recent London Chessboxing show involved one thrown in towel, one cabaret interlude and a sparkling, Bobby Fischer emblazoned belt. The chess rounds were also accompanied by a fully tuxedo-ed commentator who made the loss of a rook sound like an uppercut to the chin. He also found time to wax lyrical on the joys of the sport explaining that “anything can happen in Chessboxing ladies and gentlemen, and that’s why we love it.”

PHOTO: James Bartosik

JANE QUIAMBAO

LOST& FOUND 28

S

ince 2001, FOUND magazine have been carefully collecting “found stuff”: shopping lists that fell out of back pockets, love notes concealed in library books, polaroids from abandoned houses, discarded ticket stubs, letters lost in transit and a whole array of other objects which have been unwittingly mislaid. Covering a range from threatening notes to toddler’s doodles, these things have little in common except for the unique insight that they offer into another person’s life.

29

ICE CREAM AND COMMUNISM The sweet side effects of the Cuban Revolution

A

n immense ice-cream parlour stands on a leafy street in Havana, Cuba, like a towering UFO. Reputedly over 30,000 customers visit every day to devour scoops of Coppelia ice cream, Cuba’s government-subsidised snack of choice.

The Havana branch of Coppelia lies in the art deco time warp of Vedado, a district resembling 1930s Miami. When Communist revolutionaries took power in 1959, the space where Coppelia now stands lay empty following the demolition of a hospital, ready for the construction of what would have been the tallest skyscraper in Cuba.

After the revolution a tourist pavilion was opened there instead, complete with artificial lakes and floating stages. Then, in 1966, Fidel Castro, a great ice cream lover, asked the architect Mario Girona to design a giant ice cream parlour for the space. Girona has subsequently admitted that he “was a little taken aback.

There were no global benchmarks for such an immense ice-cream parlour.”

30

Girona’s design is comprised of five circular ice cream rooms, each with walls of striped stained glass, set round a central spiral staircase. The concrete roof forms an umbrella over the rooms and the long ice cream bar that is nestled downstairs; large beams reach out of the ceiling like spider’s legs, securing it to the floor. A huge Cuban flag hangs in the centre of the building. It even sprawls outside, into the lush leafy vegetation.

Signs indicate which queue to join, depending on your choice of flavour. People wait for hours, lines snaking round the square. Queuing etiquette in Cuba is not about standing in an orderly line until you reach the front. Instead, you establish who is the last in line by asking around, “ Quién es el último? ” - “who’s last?”. You keep an eye on that person until they disappear inside at which point you’ll know it’s your turn. In the meantime, you can do a bit of shopping, get a cup of coffee or sit in the shade. For Cubans, this is a daily activity, with long waits for tomato puree, the

bank and the one impossibly slow computer at a state run internet cafe.

Inside, the most enormous quantities of ice cream are consumed, not to mention wafers bought from vendors who roam the queues. Ex-

Every child under fifteen receives a free birthday cake each year as a gift from the state. tra portions are ordered and scraped into plastic bags and containers to take home. On the walls are photos of Fidel – rumour has it that he used to hand-pick the flavours himself each day – and other revolutionaries, along with inspiring messages. One pillar reads: “Revolution is about having a sense of our history, about changing everything that needs changing, about equality and full freedom, about treating others as human beings and in turn being treated as one, and about achieving emancipation by ourselves, through our own efforts.”

Brand advertising does not exist here - vending machines selling Durex condoms just read “The World’s Number 1 Condom Brand”. The Cuban brand, however, is advertised everywhere; beside a shooting game in Havana Zoo, stencilled words proclaim, “ Todo Cubano debe saber tirar y tirar bien ”: “Every Cuban should know how to shoot, and how to shoot well.”

If you want to avoid the queues at Coppelia there is a small ice cream bar where – if you’re prepared to pay about 100 times the price charged at the inside parlour – you can pay in ‘ chavitos ’ (also known as convertible pesos) rather than in Moneda Nacional (simply ‘ pesos ’). Two currencies operate on the island: state wages are paid in pesos, but anyone who needs

Rumour has it that Fidel used to hand pick the parlour’s ice cream flavours himself each day to convert their money into outside currencies has to use chavitos. This means that any goods specifically for tourists, such as hotels, or items that can be exported or imported (like Havana Club rum or branded biscuits) have to be paid for in chavitos.

Paying in pesos consequently makes life much cheaper. Subsidised rum is available in pesos for the equivalent of £1.20 a bottle, yet Havana Club can cost seven or eight times that. Similarly, foreign-owned Nestlé ice cream is available in chavitos for the equivalent of three or four

32

pounds, compared to Coppelia’s, which is just as creamy, but costs only a few pence.

With the state wage at the equivalent of roughly £14 a month, paying in chavitos and skipping the queue is not an option for most Cubans. The outside ice cream bar is mainly visited by wealthy tourists, many of whom visit after watching Fresa y Chocolate (the first Cuban film to receive an Oscar nomination), whose opening scene is set in Coppelia.

Paying in chavitos may mean you get to miss the queues, but as Conner Gorry, an American journalist living in Havana, says: “If you haven’t sat next to a gorgeous Cubana ploughing through 20 scoops of ice cream at Coppelia, you haven’t tasted the real thing. This is no exaggeration; an ‘ ensalada ’ consists of five scoops, and at such low prices, four ‘ ensaladas ’ are considered a normal sized portion.”

As I tuck into some excellent strawberry ice cream back at the house, my hostess tells me that her friend stole it for her – this stuff is only made for tourists in hotels. Due to restrictions on the sale of goods, the black market in Cuba is vast. Since the so-called ‘Special Period’ - Cuba’s economic crisis of the early 90s when shortages were such that recipes along the lines of ‘chopped beef ’ made from banana peel emerged - the black market has only grown and grown.

“If you haven’t sat next to a gorgeous Cubana ploughing through 20 scoops of ice cream at Coppelia, you haven’t tastest the real thing” Fruit is brought into apartments in bags on the back of bikes, supplies are hoisted up to balconies in buckets, a pig is bundled into the luggage section of a brand new Chinesefunded tourist bus before being unloaded down the road. Gorry explains: “If you have the ‘hook up,’ everything from gas to beef can be bought through informal channels.”

Meanwhile, a power cut hits Old Havana, and a lady runs around her dilapidated but beautiful colonial apartment shouting, “ No hay luz! No hay luz! ” (“there’s no light!”). The power cut was not her only complaint: she hasn’t been able to get hold of any honey; last month it was tea she was missing. Life in Cuba depends on both flexibility and resourcefulness.

Power cuts may be a frequent feature of Cuban life, but at least there is cheap subsidised ice cream. There is something undeniably

child-like in Cuba’s state provision of fun.

Rum, cinema tickets, salsa houses and ballet schools are all subsidised and every child under fifteen receives a free birthday cake each year as a gift from the state. They can also look forward to one final cake on their wedding day.

The old saying comes to mind, that you can keep the masses happy so long as you provide them with “bread and circuses”. In Cuba, a story that is something of an urban legend supports this idea: children would be told by their teacher to pray to God for candy and ice cream. Nothing appeared. The children were then told to ask Fidel for candy and ice cream, and someone in revolutionary uniform would arrive at the door with sweets for everyone.

Perhaps ice cream helps the bearded ones to, quite literally, keep people sweet.

Despite all its queues and frustrations, the standard of living in Cuba is very high given its GDP. Where the state can oppress, other agents cannot so easily; compare, for example, Bogotá in Colombia, where wealthy citizens have been reported to hire private police to

shoot the homeless. Their medical system is of a famously high standard, attracting so much healthcare tourism that medical care for foreigners is now managed by the state-run tourist board Cubancan. Crime rates are low and there is a very high literacy rate.

There is something child-like in Cuba’s state provision of fun. Rum, cinema tickets, salsa houses and ballet schools are all subsidised.

“It hasn’t been perfect, the Cuban revolutionary project,” Gorry admits. But despite its various annoyances, she is optimistic about the future: “I have seen what real inequity looks like; Cuba, for all its faults and missteps, has succeeded in constructing a more just and equitable society in my opinion and whatever happens moving forward, there is political and popular will to retain these gains.”

The Cuban government has had, and does have its problems. With agreed economic reforms ahead, the nation faces an uncertain future, which, in Gorry’s words, is “very complex and very stressful” for people living there. The major changes include cutting subsidies and abolishing the dual currency, and there is much debate about how these changes might affect life on the island. They could also spell the end for Coppelia itself.

At least for now, everyone has the right to cheap ice cream, free salsa houses, and subsidised rum. The good things in life are available for everyone to enjoy. Is there really much wrong with that? The consensus seems to be not.

Unless, of course, there’s been a power cut, in which case the ice cream will be melted, and there will almost certainly be a queue.

ROSIE BALL

33

THE GIRL IN GOLD Shirley Eaton, the ultimate Bond girl, speaks to ISIS

34

I

t’s an iconic moment in film. A beautiful young woman lies prostrate on a hotel bed, covered from head to toe in gold paint. She is dead, her skin ‘suffocated.’

The death of ‘golden girl’ Jill Masterson in Goldfinger (1964) was, and still is, emblematic of the James Bond films. It was the ultimate end for a woman whose fate it was to be seduced by the unfailingly charming 007. For the actress who played that infamous part, the enduring fascination with the role is a source of amusement. “Little did I know that I’d still be famous [almost] 48 years later,” Shirley Eaton laughs, “for that five minutes.

And I do see the irony.”

Eaton reprised her turn as the golden girl on the cover of Life magazine, a publication which, in her words, “never had Bonds on - they had the Pope”.

Now, she says, “to be naked and covered in paint” is something the public wouldn’t blink an eyelid at, but then it was “extraordinary”.

The gold, the nudity, all lend the image to interpretation: western materialism, excess and the objectification of women. “It’s all fantasy, darling.”

Eaton tells me, smoking a cigarette (her “only

“In my time there were only three types of women in films. How ridiculous when you think about all the shades of grey that women are” naughtiness”), as she prepares egg sandwiches and tea in the kitchen of her tidy Edgware semi.

“My answer to the feminist lot is, I don’t like women’s femininity to be taken away. I really like the fact that I’m a woman, and I really like the fact that men are men... The point is how you use your femininity.”

Eaton seems acutely aware of her own ‘femininity’. At 74, she looks immaculate - long, silver hair that has not yet succumbed to the bob or blue rinse, angular cheekbones, and a figure that many younger women would envy. In her youth, Eaton was, as she puts it, “drop-dead gorgeous”.

Yet although Eaton freely admits that she was “blessed” by her genes, her beauty was also a factor in the typecasting that prevented her from fulfilling her potential as an actress. “In my time there were three types of women [in films]: the girl next door; the whores - let’s says sirens, it’s nicer; and the character actor - who was always very plain. How ridiculous when you think about all the shades of grey that women are.”

Although emotion is never far from Eaton’s answers, her words seethe with it when the conversation turns to the fast track to fame, and the endless conveyor belt of the wannabe celebrity. Her

complaints are familiar, but hold particular weight from a woman who began acting professionally in 1949, at the age of 12.

“It’s gone from talent to celebrity. You can write that. It pisses me off! Anyone who’s in show business and worked hard, it makes us mad!”

Eaton seems too good-natured to stay angry for long, and she tells me she always remains “professional”, even when faced with a “shitty interviewer”. Shitty or not, she is always asked the three

“Little did I know that I’d still be famous 48 years later for those five minutes” same questions, yet Eaton doesn’t hesitate to make sure I have “the facts”.

What was it like being painted gold? It took about an hour. It was lovely, with a great big paintbrush about six inches wide. A sable brush. Like a gel, but it was millions of actual gold particles.

Difficult to get off? Took ages, with a makeup lady and wardrobe woman in the bath sponging it off.

And kissing Sean Connery? Here Eaton hesitates. “When I get a difficult, probing interviewer... I play it down. ‘He was lovely to work with, very professional, we talked off set.’ The more they probe, the more bland I get.”

But in reality, kissing Mr Bond was, “beautifully easy... You usually do mean it to be, but there’s an immediate chemistry.” Eaton admits that this easiness wasn’t entirely comfortable, as she was married at the time to her great love, Colin Rowe,

“My answer to the feminist lot is, I don’t really like women’s femininity to be taken away. I really like the fact that I’m a woman and that men are men” her husband of 37 years until his death in 1994.

“But I’m human, and he’s attractive, so it was very easy.” Throughout our conversation it is clear that Eaton strives to live a life of beauty and of passion. After retiring from acting in 1969 to care for her family, she began going to an art school twice a week. “I thought ‘Oh my God, I’ve been walking around with my eyes closed.’ I’m so rich with what we see everywhere.” She pauses, her theatrical voice deep with emotion. “I love it.”

RACHEL SAVAGE

35

THE LAST PLACE ON EARTH The Sentinelese are one of the few groups of isolated peoples on the planet but for how much longer?

O

n 27 January 2006, where the sand of North Sentinel Island slopes beneath the sea and meets the coral reef, an Indian Coastguard helicopter circles overhead.

Its downdraught scatters the sand across the beach, exposing the scarred bodies of two fishermen, with wounds cleaved in f lesh by axe and machete. The men, Sunder Raj and Pandit Tiwari, had been fishing illegally in the Bay of Bengal when, drunk on palm wine, their vessel ran aground on the reef surrounding the small island.

Their killers were the indigenous people of the island, the so-called Sentinelese who, bearing weapons fashioned from stone and seaborne detritus, violently resist all contact with the outside world. They live besieged on an island lying just twenty miles away from the Andaman Islands and the bustling Indian city of Port Blair. North Sentinel Island is an outpost, amongst the last remaining places isolated from encroachments of the modern world.

These people may be isolated but they are certainly no strangers to contact from the outside

36

world. Their history is not one of blissful isolation, uninterrupted by visitors from the peoples across the sea, but is instead peppered with interferences.

They are, however, more fortunate than their neighbours on the Andaman Islands, who once lived in the same state of isolation.

The Andamans crop up occasionally in the historical record, featuring in Marco Polo’s Il Milione , where it is mentioned as an archipelago of fearsome cannibals with the heads of wild dogs, who butcher and roast any outsid-

For the Sentinelese, avoiding contact with the outside world is a biological and social necessity ers with the misfortune to run aground upon their shores. This was before the Saxon sons of the British Empire came and claimed the islands for a small nation lying ten thousand miles away, a land about which their new subjects knew nothing but the bayonet point and the rif le butt. When the British commenced

construction of a penal colony at Port Blair in 1857, the tribesmen who struck terror into the Arab navigator and the Bengali sailor were reduced to the level of domestic pets; curiosities plied with opium, showcased alongside other ‘wild beasts’ at the Great Exhibition in Crystal Palace in 1851.

Settlement of the Andaman Islands was promoted by the post-colonial government, yet contact and civilisation have brought little but hardship for their inhabitants. Today, the various indigenous peoples of the Andaman Islands - the Jarawa, the Great Andamanese, the Onge - now number in the hundreds. The Great Andamanese, numbering over 5,000 upon the arrival of the British, have been reduced to a population of only 55, killed by disease, conf lict with settlers, and alcohol abuse. Sophie Grig, a senior campaigner at Survival International, an organisation campaigning for the rights of tribal peoples, warns that the Sentinelese face the same dangers as the Great Andamanese and that contact is potentially fatal: “the Sentinelese have made it very clear by their hostility to outsiders that they want to be left alone. This is their right and we should respect this. It’s also important because their extreme isolation leaves them extremely vulnerable to diseases to which they will have no immunity. Contact with outsiders is likely to decimate the tribe.”

Avoiding contact with the outside world is, according to Survival International, a biological and social necessity. Their arrows are capable of driving away government officials, but their susceptibility to external diseases renders them defenceless in the face of sustained contact. The neighbouring Jarawa ceased hostile encounters with the settlers of the Andaman Islands in 1998, with reports of them emerging from the forest and audaciously boarding

“Contact with outsiders is likely to decimate the tribe” public buses. In 1999, they were devastated by an epidemic of measles. Consequently, many have been forced to abandon their old modes of living and have become dependent upon state hand-outs and prostitution.

The Sentinelese are teetering on the edge of a precipice: either succumb to the pressures of a global civilisation or continue to exist in their present state of isolation. The threat of disease, and the experience of the Andamanese peoples, seems to destroy any possible middle way. These people will either fade away through interaction and assimilation with mainstream society, or must perpetually remain in their present state. As aeroplanes buzz overhead, and the surrounding seas swarm with Burmese

IMAGE: WWW.SURVIVALINTERNATIONAL.ORG

37

poachers, North Sentinel’s inhabitants continue to prowl the dense forests and comb the deserted beaches, their isolation only interrupted by the wreckage of ruined ships washing up upon the island’s shore.

Twenty miles away from the Andaman Islands, amidst the noise and heat of Port Blair, Pandit Tiwari’s father ponders his son’s death. In a Guardian article published shortly after the incident, he explained: “As far as I am concerned the Sentinelese are the victims in this, not my

Despite government bans on visits to the Island, ‘friendship expeditions’ by provincial officials continued into the 90s son. They live in constant terror of heavily armed poachers from Myanmar and Port Blair… we don’t want retribution.”

Pandit Tiwari’s father holds a view that is increasingly accepted as normal and as part of a rational humanitarian consideration for the welfare of others, regardless of modes of living.

Thanks in part to the efforts of Survival International, the argument that these bowshots are fired in ignorance, and that the Sentinelese should be inducted into mainstream society for their own benefit, is on the wane. Whereas the Sentinelese were once the subject of repeated attempts at contact by the Indian government, these have now subsided. This effort was at

38

least nominally enshrined in the Indian government’s heftily titled “Master Plan 19912021 for Welfare of Primitive Tribes of Andaman and Nicobar Islands”, which formally stated, “A constant surveillance by the Indian Coast Guard, Indian Navy and Police over this isolated island is to be kept so that no outsiders approach it. These forces too shall not land or go very near the beach of North Sentinel Island.”

Regrettably, reality does not always echo official proclamations and ‘friendship expeditions’ by provincial officials continued into the 90s. However, this policy represented an important step which, combined with the rapid decline of the Jarawa following contact in 1998, hammered home a difficult truth about the limitations of our own culture and society.

The great age of exploration is over, and those people untouched by global society are now confined to tiny, reservation-like portions of the globe; enclaves within organised states and nations. The blank portions of the map have gone, taking with them the possibilities for human expansion into the unknown. Adam Goodheart, a journalist and academic at Washington College who visited North Sentinel Island in 1998 believes that this is the reason behind our fascination with the Sentinelese and all isolated tribes: “In the last century or so the world has gone from seeming somehow bigger than homo sapiens

to being smaller than homo sapiens, to something that’s almost managed.”

Our desire to preserve the frontiers of the unknown is overridden by our longing to explore. Tribal reservations for the Sentinelese are created, only for their integrity to be violated by the anthropologist or the journalist, too eager to hoist the primitive peoples upon a pedestal on the cover of National Geographic for the world to see. It is, as anthropologist Stuart Kirsch puts it, “destruction in the moment of creation”. These ‘uncontacted’ peoples cease to truly exist as soon as we observe them.

Perhaps one of the most uncomfortable aspects of this situation is that people who are genuinely concerned for the welfare of the Sentinelese, like Adam Goodheart, are amongst those who contribute to their demise. “I think absolutely that that is the crowning irony of it, that I was contributing to it. That I was involved in my own voyeuristic and in a sense selfish experience of going there… I always try to discourage people [from visiting North Sentinel Island], which of course is completely hypocritical seeing as I went there myself. But I do feel gnawing pangs of guilt sometimes.”

But what of the future of the inhabitants of North Sentinel Island? The prescription of Survival International is simple: “No attempts should be made to contact the Sentinelese, unless they were to make it clear that they wish such contact.” The Sentinelese are lucki-

er than their counterparts on the mainland, as well as the isolated peoples of the Peruvian and Brazilian Amazon in that they are surrounded by water and do not sit upon valuable minerals and farmland. Survival International asserts

Tribal reservations for the Sentinelese are created, only for their integrity to be violated by an anthropologist or journalist that, provided they are left alone, they can continue to survive in their present state indefinitely. Government regulation is one thing, illegal fishing and felling of hardwood trees by poachers across the Bay of Bengal is another, and it is this which poses the greatest immediate threat to the security and safety of the Sentinelese. As for their continued isolation, it is difficult to remain optimistic. As the mysteries of the earth are gradually illuminated, it seems inevitable that these once unexplored places will eventually succumb to the creeping, unstoppable expansion of a global civilisation.

ALEX HACILLO

39

In 2009,

the world watched an in-

nocent woman shot dead in

Arash Hejazi

is

40

the man who save her.”

tried to

“HER

Iran.

EYES

T

he violent death of Neda Agha-Soltan

inspire in anyone. Her eyes in particular generate a

is perhaps the most watched in history.

deeply disquieting impact. She stares directly at the

The astonishing video which depicts

camera as blood cascades from her mouth and men

her murder shocked the world when it

gather around in a futile attempt to save her. The

emerged during the protests following Iran’s 2009

viewer sees the vitality behind the stare slowly disap-

presidential elections. Neda, and thousands more

pear until she can only give the camera a bloodied,

like her, believed that the published result which indi-

hollow glaze. Hejazi emphasises the motivational

cated a clear and unprecedented victory for Mahmoud

impetus that this experience generated within him:

Ahmadinejad was a consequence of flagrant electoral

“She looked at me as if to say, ‘Don’t let it be in vain’. I

fraud. She was shot dead at point blank range by a Ba-

felt that she was asking me to do something.”

siji, a member of the Iranian regime’s voluntary mi-

Hejazi did do something, and he did so quickly.

litia, on a crowded street during a peaceful protest.

He and his friend who recorded the incident imme-

The Basiji’s tactic on that day was to scatter clusters

diately distributed the clip via Facebook, YouTube

of demonstrators by shooting one individual in each

and email. The video spread virally across the world

cluster. Arash Hejazi is the man who can be seen in

within hours. Just a couple of days later, his friend

that video wearing a white shirt and blue jeans. He

Paolo Coehlo – who wrote the introduction to He-

is fruitlessly attempting to prevent the transfusion of

jazi’s recently published book The Gaze of the Gazelle

Neda’s blood from inside her chest onto the Tehran

– mistakenly gave away his identity online. This made

pavement.

Hejazi a target for an Iranian regime which was now

Hejazi is an unassuming political exile. He is dressed

cracking down on dissents with greater force than

casually, and appears relaxed. As he lights a cigarette,

ever. His determination that Neda’s murder be seen

he does not seem particularly insurrectionary, but,

by the world ultimately cost him his possessions and

as Hejazi admits, “I was never a freedom fighter or a

all his money, as well as the ability to see his extended

revolutionary. The revolution didn’t help us really, we

family. However, such losses were not the only im-

had a revolution and it didn’t help us. I don’t believe

pact of the clip: since its recording, Neda’s image has

HAVE FOLLOWED ME... in sudden change, I believe in gradual change.” He-

become an icon for pro-democracy movements in

jazi supported the establishment figure Mir-Hossein

Iran and further afield.

Mousavi in 2009 because of his belief that “the only way of getting change is from within”.

Hejazi fled to Oxford, where he was completing a Master’s Degree at Oxford Brookes and where he still

With his father studying for a PhD in Britain, Hejazi

lives with his wife and young son. This was the last

initially grew up in a Birmingham suburb. Aged four,

time he saw his homeland. “I realised afterwards I

he moved back to Tehran and witnessed the Islamic

never had the chance to say goodbye; I never had the

Revolution as a young child. His adolescence was de-

chance to see the places I loved for the last time; I

fined by the Iran-Iraq war, the longest conventional

never had the chance to see the people I loved for the

conflict of the last century. “Our teenage years were

last time. But it’s the price you have to pay.” Hejazi’s

spent going to funerals of friends who had been killed

parents still live in Iran, although his father, having

in the war.” A doctor by profession, death seems to be

been interrogated by the regime following his son’s

a prevailing feature of Hejazi’s life.

banishment, is now banned from teaching. “Other-

His manner is one of reluctant fortitude and gentle sincerity, emotions which the video of Neda would

wise, physically, things are fine.”

Most Western contemporary discussions of Iran

41

focus on its complex foreign policy commitments

remove the office of elected President entirely, is on-

and oblique nuclear arrangements. However, it is im-

going. Hejazi dismisses this as “a struggle for absolute

portant to remember that, day to day, modern Iran

power, a dictator wants to take over from another dic-

remains an intensely repressive place to live. Report-

tator”. He concedes it is difficult to see exactly where

ers Without Borders ranks the Iranian press as fourth

change in Iran can come from. It will likely require a

from bottom in the world in terms of journalistic free-

combination of international support and domestic

dom. Political opponents are routinely tortured. The

ebullience.

Basij militia perpetually hassles and intimidates citi-

There are enough people in Iran today who do not

zens whom it doesn’t believe are adequately adhering

want Neda’s death to be futile. Hejazi is just one of

to Sharia law. Hejazi draws a distinction between the

these. He is a trained doctor, and volunteered when

popular Islamic regime that

an earthquake devastated

was swept in on the back

the city of Bam in 2003, kill-

of the 1979 revolution, and

ing 26,000 Iranians. “Liter-

the current regime: “People

ally, I’ve seen thousands of

have lost their belief in what

deaths. As a doctor you have

they thought would be a re-

to be detached; you just

ligious Islamic government.

focus on the issue. People

It isn’t anymore; it’s just

come in with conditions so

an oppressive government

you are always dealing with

using Islam as a means to

the possibility of death. But

justify its actions. It is now

this one, afterwards when

just a typical totalitarian re-

it was over, I felt so terribly

gime.”

devastated because it was so

...EVER

SINCE.”

Hejazi believes that the

unfair. She had done noth-

West failed to put enough

ing wrong. It was her right

pressure on Ahmadinejad

to peacefully demonstrate

after his allegedly fraudu-

and disagree with anyone

lent victory. Countries recognised him as President

she wanted to. Then without any justification, they

and continued negotiations. Hejazi speculates that a

just shot her and she just died.” Hejazi is clearly still

domestically unpopular Iranian President is likely to

deeply affected by the experience. His own eyes blink

be more dependent on international legitimacy, and

at me above the bridge of his rimless glasses. “Her

thus more desirable to the West. He is also scepti-

eyes followed me, and have followed me ever since.

cal of the ability of the international community to

That’s why I talked, that’s why I wrote the book, that’s

generate real change in Iran. “The opposition outside

why I uploaded the video.”

Iran has its own agenda. However, inside Iran, I really think they are looking for change.” The current squabble between the President and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the most extraordinary recent development of which was the Ayatollah’s threat to

42

JOSEPH D’URSO

HOAX Life’s greatest pleasures are to be found in idle games. By this definition, life meant a very great deal to Georgian menfolk. Much of the energy of the young Regency upper classes was devoted to intensive rearing of the well-rounded prankster, or footler. Nowhere is this better shown than with the Berners Street Hoax. Theodore Hook – an Oxford man, aged twenty-one – made a one guinea bet with his friend Samuel Beazley that he could make a single address the most famous in London in simply a week. He chose 54 Berners Street, where he had a grievance against one Mrs Tottenham who lived there. Aided by a brace of accomplices and a month of preparation, at 9am on 27 November 1809 the hoax triumphantly began.

Hundreds upon hundreds of chimney-sweeps, cakemakers, colliers, fishmongers, doctors, housemaids, wigmakers, florists, priests, jewellers, lawyers, piano-bearers, dentists, undertakers, upholsterers, dressmakers, gardeners, shoemakers and dignitaries streamed into Berners Street plying their services. Mrs Tottenham had no idea what to make of it all. She had not ordered anything. She did not know why they were here. Neither did the arrivals: all they knew is that they had received orders to appear there.

Those orders, of course, were sent by the mischievous Hook who watched with delight as unutterable anarchy ensued in the tiny street.

ROBIN MCGHEE

44

ILLUSTRATOR: LARA BELLENGHI

There was barely room to move, and matters were only made worse when some high profile visitors were drawn by the commotion, including the Governor of the Bank of England, the chairman of the East India Company, the Duke of Gloucester, and the Lord Mayor. Alongside this, fights broke out over carts being upturned, and disorder reigned for the rest of the day. It was well after nightfall by the time the last of the stragglers had been shooed away, and the street was finally returned to its usual tranquillity. Perhaps sensibly, Hook never admitted that he was the originator of this elaborate, anarchic prank, and took precautions to ensure that the subsequent enquiry into the chaos didn’t point to him. Just as well, really; it’s a safe bet that his well-earned one guinea wouldn’t have covered the costs.

H

itler and Göring are standing atop the Berlin radio tower. Hitler says he wants to do something to put a smile on Berliners’ faces. So Göring says, “Why don’t you jump?”

The joke above is not especially notable for its hilarity or its intelligence, but for the fact that the person who told it was executed. Marianne Elise K. was a labourer in an armaments factory in Berlin who was reported by a colleague for reciting the joke, and sentenced to death on 26 June 1943. The judge told her that she had tried to undermine the “dedicated labour in the armaments sector…by making malicious remarks about the Führer,” and that the fact she was a war widow merely made her crime more heinous.

Such violent reprisals were also suffered by Burmese political comedy troupe ‘The Moustache Brothers’. After performing at an event for Aung San Suu Kyi in 1996, the troupe’s leader, Par Par Lay, spent five and a half years in a labour camp. Banned from performing to Burmese citizens in their native tongue, the trio now only put on small shows for tourists in broken English.

TOTALLY HILARIOUS However, totalitarianism’s effect on humour is not always simply to extinguish and eliminate all satire.

Humour can serve to alleviate the symptoms of oppression among a population. North Koreans, for example, are allowed to enjoy a dancing man cheerfully juggling bricks, in one of the longest running comedy shows in the world.

A more sinister manipulation of humour for political means is the use of state-authorised propaganda masquerading as comedy, but successful examples of this are hard to find. Rudolph Herzog’s book about humour in Nazi Germany, Dead Funny, features an analysis of a series of sketches featuring Tran und Helle. This simple double act showed Tran doing all the ‘wrong’ things, like complaining, buying oranges on the black market, or reading books by Jewish authors, before being reprimanded by the “dapper party loyalist” Helle. The sketches were immediately cancelled by Goebbels after it became apparent that people sympathised with Tran, the depressed and confused defeatist, rather than the smug and threatening Helle.

What Goebbels failed to grasp was that satire is all about the underdog, about laughing at those who have power, not chuckling along with them as the party line is trotted out. I suspect another reason pro-government comedy like Tran und Helle fails so miserably is that good humour rarely contains an explicit agenda – it’s just not funny to hear somebody turn to camera and say “but seriously…”

And yet regimes all over the world go to great lengths to stamp out satire.

Those in power perhaps fear laughter’s role as a gateway drug to genuine political action; if people are mocking you, they are refusing to engage with you on the terms you have imposed. This “voodoo magic”, as the Guardian cartoonist Martin Rowson refers to it, means that you lose control of people’s perceptions of you. In a totalitarian regime, control of everything, even humour, is paramount.

LIAM SHAW

PYLON: James Pockson DIVER: Isabel Bennett

45

STRANGERS IN A STRANGE LAND Oxford is one of the most vibrant and diverse cities in Britain. The Office of National Statistics in 2009 estimated that 19.6% of the city’s population were from black and minority ethnic backgrounds, compared to a national average of 12.5%. ISIS visited an English-language class run for migrant workers in Oxford by the student charity FELLOW to find out more about some of the usually anonymous faces we pass every day.

JAMES LESTER

OLIVIO arrived with his friend, Anito, in Oxford two years ago. After completing his education, he decided to follow his uncle to England indefinitely. He has found a job which he enjoys greatly, - working in the kitchens at a school in Headington.

46

SERVET left Turkey for Oxford a year ago, to join his wife who works at a hospital. They now live in Headington. He worked as a a security guard in Turkey, and hopes to do so again once he has learnt English at a college in Cowley. Whilst he thinks Oxford is very friendly and stated he hopes to remain in Britain forever, he sometimes misses the Turkish climate.

HONG BO moved to Oxford two years ago to take up a job as a chef in a Cowley noodle bar. He has not been back to China since, but next month is returning for a holiday, before spending another two years working in Oxford. Whilst he likes Oxford he plans to return to China permanently.

47

SHOOLAH is staying in Oxford with her daughter, who studies here. She will return again in four months. A very committed Christian evangelist, her “job is with Jesus� and she travels wherever he tells her to. It was his decision whether she could be photographed or not.

48

PHOTOS: HARRIET BAKER

THE FACE OF THE CHILEAN SPRING As a leading figure in Chile’s student movement, Camila Vallejo is changing policies and breaking hearts

49

C

lad in biker boots, a little black dress and complete with silver nose ring, the girl who sparked Chile’s worst social conflict since the end of General Pinochet’s regime could pass for a member of a rock band almost as easily as for a political activist.

For Camila Vallejo, the 23-year-old face of the ‘Chilean Spring’, charisma and beauty are essential. Not only has she managed to bring her city to a standstill and hold the attention of nationwide media, she has also made virtually every man who has set eyes on her fall in love. With a face clean of make-up, loose hair and an open expression, her nonchalant attitude to her appearance only adds to the appeal.

But Camila, for all her charm, is by no means just a pretty face. Second-ever female president of the most powerful student union in Chile, her determination and audacity are such that she has received death threats and now requires police protection. Confident on camera, she speaks with vehemence and absolute conviction: “For me, to be communist means to fight,” she declares, “because our country can overcome its past, and transform a present that is full of injustices.” Daughter of former members of the Chilean Communist Party who chose not to flee the country during the dictatorship, Camila herself is a member of the Chilean Communist Youth.

At first it was mass kissathons, dance routines, fancy dress, and a cacophony of pots and pans that characterised this year’s bizarre youth-led demonstrations demanding education reform, with Camila as the leading spokesperson. But what began as a gathering more reminiscent of a street festival than a protest soon brought over 100,000 students onto the streets and 300 schools to a standstill as pupils both in schools and universities boycotted lessons.

The demonstrations quickly took a more sinister turn, as many students embarked on hunger strikes and 16-year-old Manuel Gutiérrez Reinoso died from a gunshot wound, allegedly fired from a police vehicle, during street violence between authorities and student protesters.

The protest movement has been growing ever since President Sebastián Piñera announced wide-ranging education spending cuts earlier this year, culminating in two days of nationwide public sector strikes, violent clashes with police and more than 800 people arrested in a single day on 25 August.

Chile is home to a profoundly unequal university system, with private institutions benefitting from government aid whilst public institutions finance themselves mostly through student fees. A bill recently introduced by the Piñera administration has been accused by critics of suggesting that education should be turned into a commodity to be legitimately bought and sold. Unsurprisingly, an angry student population has stepped up its activism. Their recent demands include an increase in state contributions

50

to all educational institutions, a repeal of laws forbidding student participation in university governance, a move towards equal access with 100% free education and the creation of a government body to police higher education institutions that, through loopholes in the law, continue to make a profit. “Unfortunately the current government has made many errors”, explains Camila, “and this is no longer just my own judgement, but an opinion that is widely held by the population.”

In August, President Piñera’s approval rating dropped to 26% according to conservative think-tank CEP, the lowest presidential rating since the country’s return to democracy in 1990.

Camila now has more than 325,000 Twitter followers, along with guitarplaying strangers serenading her on YouTube Camila has stressed “the intransigence of the government in the face of social demands, its denial in the face of real debate and the brutal form that police repression has taken,” as their most recent errors.

“Obviously, it is a government which has not met our country’s needs, and today we find ourselves in a state of political isolation as a result.”

Nineteen-year-old Gloria Negrete, speaking on behalf of a group of 30 hunger strikers from a hospital bed in Buin, just outside of Santiago, joins Camila in piling pressure on the President: “We declare that whatever physical damage we suffer, the only one responsible will be President Sebastián Piñera.” Having lost more than 30lbs in a matter of weeks, Gloria is suffering respiratory problems as a result of her refusal to eat. With their failures explicitly pointed out by these protesters, it is imperative that talks between student activists and politicians are constructive if Piñera and his beleaguered government are to regain any popularity.

Unfortunately for them, they now face issues potentially much bigger than education reform. Camila increasingly emphasises her conviction that the current unrest is not just a student movement, but the beginning of a “social awakening” for Chileans of all generations. “It is not just students and young people,” she insists, “in Chile there is strong opposition to… the form which politics takes in our country: operating behind the public’s back, without truly serving to promote the common good.” After more than four months of demonstrations, Chileans of different generations from all over the country are showing their support for what the students have started.

As Camila’s own goals grow and expand, it is becoming increasingly apparent that her power to galvanise the public is not just limited to Chile. She helped draw 20,000 people onto the streets of the Brazilian capital when she travelled to meet President Dilma Rousseff

PHOTOS: MORTEN ANDERSEN

on 31 August, taking part in a demonstration organized by the Brazilian National Student Union. It’s not every day that a mere student is invited to tea by Forbes’ third most powerful woman in the world.

Camila now has more than 325,000 Twitter followers, along with guitar-playing strangers serenading her on YouTube. Even the Bolivian vice-president Álvaro García Linera has declared himself in love with her, and encouraged other student leaders to follow her lead.

Camila is fast becoming an international sensation, yet she is determined to use her looks only to spread awareness of her political vision. When asked about

“It is not just students and young people.

In Chile there is strong opposition to the form which politics takes” the attention she receives for her appearance, she explains that at first it was a distraction, with the media using her unlikely role as an excuse to bypass coverage of real political debate. Fortunately she has borne this out, and now is more positive about the reaction she garners: “Obviously I am very grateful to people who show spontaneous support as soon as they see me.”

However she is determined not to be distracted by the flattery, choosing to interpret it as “a sign that… as a student movement we represent the feelings of many Chileans. It is very satisfying to see how much support for students has grown.”

It will come as no surprise that numerous studies have shown that attractive people attract more media coverage. During last year’s UK general election

research published in the Journal of Public Economics concluded that voters are more likely to back attractive politicians, in a study involving 2000 political candidates and more than 10,000 members of public.

David Cameron was clearly onto something, with giant airbrushed posters of his own face pinned up around the country.

Interestingly Camila’s fellow activist and president of the Catholic University of Chile’s Student Union Giorgio Jackson has received very little attention, despite his continued participation in the campaign.

Short and scruffy-looking with a questionable moustache, it is no wonder all eyes are on her.

Local media are only doing the protesters a favour.

Photographs of Latin America’s current favourite with dripping wet hair after being hit full in the face with a water cannon, or footage of her with eyes streaming having been engulfed in a cloud of tear gas have been repeatedly broadcast. Her admirers are undoubtedly impressed by her determination in pursuing a cause, but on a more basic level people simply respond to beauty in a positive way.

There will always be questions surrounding the ethics of using looks to get ahead, but it is difficult to see that this girl is exploiting hers for personal gain. Will she be the next big thing to come out of Latin America? Whether because of her methods, her beauty or what she is fighting for, it is easy to imagine that that in years to come the name Vallejo might grace the upper reaches of the Forbes most powerful women list.

ELLEN JONES 51

IMMORTALITY: IN MICE AND MEN

ILLUSTRATION INEZ JANUSZCZAK

Why death from old age could soon be a thing of the past.

Have we found the philosopher’s stone?

I

n this world we are only certain of two things: death and taxes.” Over 200 years after his death, it appears that Benjamin Franklin could be half wrong.

Soon, a perfectly ordinary lab mouse may live for five years as opposed to three. 15 years after this breakthrough, scientific advances may allow a human to live to 150. Further advances could allow them to live up to the ripe old age of 1200; and by then they will only perish because of a freak accident. Welcome

52

to the brave new world of the Immortality Institute.

The Immortality Institute (known publicly as Longecity) is a nonprofit ‘transhumanist’ organization founded in 2002. Transhumanism is a growing intellectual and cultural movement which advocates the use of science to fundamentally alter the human condition. The Immortality Institute have taken on four research projects to date, three of them involved the biology of aging and one funding cryonics [postmortem freezing] research. Their stated goal is “to

conquer the blight of involuntary death”.

Bruce Klein, the founder of the Immortality Institute, explains the rationale behind this goal. “I call it the Silent Tsunami, every day more than 100,000 people die [from ‘old age’], quietly and acceptingly saying, ‘their time has come,’ or some other euphemism.

But, with a real tsunami, they say, ‘this is a tragedy, we must do things to prevent this in the future.’”

Why are aging and mortality so universally accepted? Aging is gently revered in some cultures, denied and reviled in others, but ultimately seen as a natural, if unfortunate, process. Perhaps this view is due to the fact that, throughout our history, we have been unable to conceive of any realistic alternative. There are very few species in nature with an evolutionary drive for immortality. Most species tend to die, making

The Immortality Institute’s aim is to “conquer the blight of involuntary death” space for a younger, better-adapted generation. We age because this strategy makes evolutionary sense in a fast-changing world.

The few species that appear not to show obvious signs of aging are generally very simple in body plan and tissue type and this provides a clue as to how to prevent aging. Take the Hydra, for example: these

small, seemingly un-aging, freshwater animals have very few specialized tissues which rely on long-lived cells.

Long-lived cells accumulate various types of damage over the lifetime of an organism; this is an inevitable consequence of the metabolism, which has been compared to a tiny fire burning in every cell of the body.

Short-lived cells can be easily replaced. Long-lived cells cannot, and thus the organism itself is replaced with a new and improved copy - its offspring. So, complex organisms such as ourselves survive to reproductive and child-rearing age via a clever system of damage repair processes, but these gradually fail as we outlive our evolutionary usefulness.

The metabolism is a very complicated process, as are the diseases caused by cell damage. However the Immortality Institute claims that there are only actually seven ways in which our blazing metabolism can damage us. Only seven ways in which most living things age and eventually die. There are also seven ways to fix these problems but before you reach for the phone to cancel your life insurance plan, you should know that the Immortality Institute would be the first to follow that claim with the phrase “in mice, and in principle”.

But this is still a giant leap forward in man’s obsession with eternal life.

One of the ways cells die is through epimutations in which a gene is switched on and off. This problem is closely associated with tumours but can be pre-

53

vented by a method called Whole-Body Interdiction of Lengthening of Telomeres (WILT). WILT is the most radical solution of the seven proposed by the Immortality Institute. It concerns telomeres, which are protective “caps” on the ends of DNA. Each time the cell divides, the telomeres shorten, and since they are vital to cell survival, they effectively determine cell lifespan. Telomerase is an enzyme that will replace the telomeres until the cell reaches a certain age. Cancer, in order to divide infinitely, can hijack the telomerase gene.

WILT eliminates the telomerase gene entirely. Hypothetically this means that the replacement of the whole stem cell population every ten years with a new group containing safe, lab-replenished telomerase could protect a particular tissue from cancer forever.

It may sound like a sci-fi scenario but the ‘self-renewing’ technique is already being tested on rodents: blood and stomach tissue are currently replaceable and other tissues are expected to follow shortly.

But for those without cutting edge labs in their back gardens, there is one widely available life-extension option. It sounds a lot like a fad diet, but it has been proven to extend rodent lifespans by up to 40%.

It is called Calorific Restriction, and consists of cutting your daily calorie intake by a third. It is also a total diet overhaul, involving cutting out most processed, sugary, fatty foods, and eating a lot of barley and vegetables instead. A major feature of the food

54

is its lukewarm temperature, as any sort of extreme heat causes production of damaging ‘advanced glycation end products’ – abbreviated, appropriately enough, to AGE.

There are only seven ways in which most living things age and eventually die. There are also seven ways to fix these problems.

In effect the diet consists of lots of berries, peas, soya milk and rice: all mashed together, boiled slowly, and served at breakfast. If that appeals to you then you’re probably going to live forever. But for those who like to eat their cake, is it really worth the sacrifice? To summarize one of the main arguments against life extension, “you can live to be a hundred if you give up all things that make you want to live to be a hundred” (Woody Allen). The extent of the trade-off is an individual choice.

The science behind aging is by no means straightforward. It is confusing, contradicting and often bitterly controversial. But the research is happening, and it is happening now. The five-year-old mouse may not be as far away as we think.

The Methuselah Mouse Project was established in 2003 and awards prize money (currently worth over $1.5 million) to the most successful researchers. It

has already started handing out these prizes, as mouse longevity and rejuvenation is increased far beyond previous “natural” levels. Sooner than we imagine, immortality may become more than a Twilight novel. But are we ready for it? The short answer is no.

Socially, politically, economically, medically, financially, legally: no. But perhaps we should start preparing.

The Immortality Institute has already started. Their Director and Teams Coordinator told the ISIS, “There are many details and idiosyncrasies that will arise as we move into the Transhuman era…we will adapt.

Let’s say that we had a 2000 year old person; would they enjoy disproportionate and unjust privileges and tenure over the people that were 20 through 100?

What might lead us to believe that might end up being the case?” Here, it is tempting to insert a snide reply about the current inequalities existing around the world.

But the Institute has thought of this too: “As time goes on, society as a whole and people as individuals, especially if they have indefinite lifespans, it seems will likely be getting more and more moral… We will be able to enable people to get better and better. Let’s say that some people are immoral because of things like depression, we will get better at curing that.

Let’s say some people are immoral because they were brought up in an immoral home. We may find ways to tweak those genes so that people don’t feel compelled to hold on to those spiteful feelings anymore. The older you get, the wiser you typically get, and we expect that trend to continue with indefinite life extension.

If it doesn’t then we will adapt.”

Our current political system may have no place in this immortal future, as the Institute argues that: “democracy itself might end up being incompatible with the future. Humanity will adapt as we go where need be as we have always done. After all, we that are here now are those gene lines, those progeny that were best at adapting.”

We are indeed the best copies of humanity so far – the most adapted to our rapidly-altering environment. So far this has been conducted by a long process of natural selection. But members of the Immortality Institute are planning for a future where we can alter ourselves at the most fundamental level. Tweaking our genes to ‘morality’ setting could create Utopia or a molecular version of Orwell’s 1984. The future is fast approaching, but will anyone want to live there?

ISOBEL STEER

55

THE ANCESTRAL CALL In South Africa, modern medicine is being shunned for the magic of the sangomas

I

t’s a controversial topic, alternative medicine.

Especially in times where proof of scientific process is viewed as integral to modern healthcare. But this expectation is not universal: according to report by the BBC earlier this year, 70% of the South African population would visit a sangoma or a ‘witch-doctor’ before consulting a whitecoat.

This percentage is significantly higher in townships and villages outside of the large cities, where sangomas enjoy immense social prestige. In the township of

56

Motherwell, near Port Elizabeth lives an old woman who calls herself Mamqocwa. There is an animal skull in her front yard, and a solar panel perched on her roof. Over 60 years of age, she is a self-styled sangoma. Inside her ndumba, a hut where her ancestors are said to reside, dramatic healing rituals take place. Drum beating, low chanting, vigorous dancing, incense sticks burning, eyes closed with tears pouring out – she is possessed by the ancestors who communicate with her patients.

Patients come to her with all sorts of ailments and family troubles. “Just this morning there was a man,” she begins. “He came here to see me because he had pains in his legs. Then I gave him something I made. Now he is OK, he’s fine.”

The medicine sangomas like Mamqocwa practice is called Muti. Mamqocwa wears the traditional garb of the Xhosa people when conducting rituals. Her ndumba is a small shack outside her house

Cases of murder and mutilations to obtain ingredients for medicinal purposes have been cited repeatedly in the press held together by pieces of cardboard and string, where she keeps an assortment of ingredients for her medicines. Among these are roots, dried leaves, shells, bones, all lined up in jars on two rickety shelves.

In recent years however, Muti has become increasingly controversial due to ‘medicine murder’.

Cases of murder and mutilations to obtain ingredients for medicinal purposes have been cited repeatedly in the South African press. A famous case was the murder of an 11 year old girl Masego Kgomo, who was killed on New Year’s eve in 2009 for her bladder and womb, which were then sold to a sangoma for 3000 rand (approximately £300) for use in medicines.

Mamqocwa explains how her family has long been a part of the tradition. “My grandmother and my great grandmother were also sangomas. So it was always in my blood, I knew.

“But I didn’t want to be a sangoma,” she explained. “Your ancestors talk with you. I was run-

70% of the South African population would visit a ‘witch-doctor’ before consulting a whitecoat ning away. My ancestors catch me and tell me I must be a sangoma. It is not something you choose yourself; your ancestors decide.”

Although this kind of medicine originates with the black African population of South Africa – amongst peoples such as the Xhosa, the Setswana, the Zulu and the Sesotho – its use is no longer restricted to them. White South Africans have turned to magic and witchcraft, with some even becoming sangomas themselves. Mamqocwa, however, doesn’t see anything strange about this: “Oh yes, I know there are many white sangomas. It is not about white or black. If the ancestors call you, you must go to them.”

Bad press for the sangomas has led to intense sus-

picion and speculation about their individual authenticity. This is often expressed in xenophobic terms against shamans from immigrant African communities. “You mustn’t trust a Nigerian sangoma,” my taxi driver explains. “He’ll take your money and vanish.

Never trust him.”

He recalls an anecdote of a friend of his who was visiting him. “Whilst he was here in Port Elizabeth he got very sick. So he went to the sangoma. The sangoma said, ‘Oh, the ancestors are not happy, you must sacrifice a cow.’ So the guy went out and paid 4000 rand to buy a cow. Then two days later he was still feeling sick so he went back to the sangoma. This time the sangoma said, ‘Oh, the ancestors are very angry with you, you must kill another 4 cows.’ So the guy spent another 20,000 rand and sacrificed the cows. Meanwhile this guy was getting so sick that he had to be rushed to the hospital and the doctor saved his life.

But oh, how we teased him. We said ‘You’ve bought so many cows, you could have opened a dairy farm!’

“I didn’t want to be a sangoma. It is not something you choose yourself; your ancestors decide.”

“I know one guy, he’s got a Bible and he opens it and he tells you to put some money inside. Then he flips the Bible and the Bible has a secret compartment and he tells you the money is going to the ancestors but really he’s just going to keep it for himself.”

But beyond financial gains, Sangomas often serve a crucial purpose in their society as counsellors during family conflicts and preserve a time-honoured connection with the community’s spiritual ancestors. Ancestors are contacted through dream-like trances, induced by drum-beating, chants and dancing. Through dreams, ancestors relay messages to the living from the afterlife. During a sangoma’s thwasa (training), they will be taught by an established sangoma to interpret the symbols and metaphors in dreams.

Mamqocwa also explains that animal sacrifice is an integral part of the initiation process as well as the healing rituals. “Before I became a sangoma I had to sacrifice two goats and then a cow. Now I am waiting to sacrifice one cow so I can become a big sangoma.”

“Enough now!” Mamqocwa ushers me out. It is possible that the entire experience has been a spectacle, with Mamqocwa dramatising her authenticity to a nosy foreigner. Her hospitality and charm have won me over but I sense that she has caught on to my doubts. “It is good you are curious. It is good you come to learn.” She knows I don’t believe her. “Never doubt the ancestors” she warns, “or they can come after you.”

VIDHI DOSHI 57

WANDERERS

Fatou wears sequin dress, Tophop & feather neck piece, rougepony.com; Julia wears blue sequin top, Topshop & black maxi-skirt, Unicorn; Chris wears white jeans Oxfram, military boots, All Saints

Julia wears feather neckpiece, rougepony.com, purple dress Gloucester Green market, Oxford; Chris wears blue velvet jacket Walters, Turl Street.

Chris wears grey t-shirt All saints, jeans and boots as before; Julia wears feather hat Rouge Pony, fur coat Gloucester Green market, body suit stylists own; Fatou wears union-jack jump suit and fur coeat stylists own, Fur headress Rouge Pony.

Chris wears wool t-shirt Topshop, feather neckpiece, white jeans and boots as before.

Styling, Ali Fortescue & Holly Tabor Photographer, Tommy Johnson tomcjohnson.com Make up Theodora Louloudis Models Chris, Julia & Fatou, Oxygen Models

STUDENT RELEASE 09AM THURSDAY 24th NOVEMBER 2011 47 Walton Street, Jericho Don’t Wait!! First Come First Served!!

Quality 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 & 8 Bedroom Student Properties in Jericho, Cowley and all other City Centre locations 2012/2013 Academic Year

01865 311745