Grenada

This used to be in Spain, where it was originally Garnata al-Yahud, the olive grove of the Jews, until the Moors and then the Jews were kicked out by the Catholics and Iberia was reclaimed for Jesus and for Europe. 

That was Granada, I know. The connection is valid nevertheless, because Christopher Columbus named the island Grenada in 1498 after that Spanish city, though it is unclear whether he, being a Genoese, did not know how to spell it correctly, or did not know how to pronounce it correctly, or whether it was the French settlers from Martinique who established St George’s, the capital, who changed the spelling and pronunciation later on. 

France gave the place to Britain as part of the Treaty of Versailles in 1783, which began the glorious era of tobacco, cotton and sugar plantations, for which voluntary workers from Africa were encouraged to make the easy sea journey in pleasure cruisers provided for the purpose. The abolition of slavery took place earlier on Grenada than anywhere else – 1834 – though actual independence, which is the true abolition of slavery (go tell that to the Scots who voted No in the referendum!), had to wait until 1974. The first prime Minister, Eric Gairy, was deposed in a coup in 1979, the New Jewel Movement of Maurice Bishop re-imposing slavery on the island, only in a different form and under a different ideology; a rather confusing ideology in fact, because he partnered very closely with both Cuba and the USA, which is not an obvious threesome for a dinner date. When his left-wing comrades got fed up with him, Bishop was ousted, and executed, and Hudson Austin took power, for a very brief moment, which was as long as it took for the Americans to never interfere in the internal affairs of other countries because they respect the democratic wishes of the natives. The 6,000 marines merely used the island for rest and recuperation, enjoyed its sunny beaches, and took some time to learn the rules of cricket, which is to baseball what chess is to checkers.

Today Grenada has settled down again to being the Spice Island, named not for Victoria Beckham, though she is said to have visited, but for the nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves and especially ginger which it produces in great quantity and quality. St George’s is gorgeous. Take trips into the rainforest, the hot springs, the mountains and their lakes, the beaches obviously, the cricket grounds, and if it all looks a bit run-down and even seedy, remember that Hurricane Ivan wrecked the place in 2004, and eleven years is not that long to recover. The recession of 2008 didn’t help either. 30% of Grenadans are unemployed (though the concept of employment and unemployment is really meaningless in a post-industrial and early-technological world, where there are few real jobs outside the middle class professions that constitute what used to be meant by employment. If we remove unpaid and minimum wage internships – a form of slavery in that those who do it are expected to put in a full day’s work but receive payment  in the form of kudos rather than cash for so doing – and furloughs – a means of firing people in such a way that you don’t have to pay them the severance money in their contracts – and if we remove what are not really jobs at all, but leisure pursuits with sponsorship [all sports, plus TV, film and theatre], then what remains is service-industry - and service is service, but a job is a job - and it will be difficult to find any country in the world with better than 70% of full employment; in the USA probably closer to 30%.)

Technically Grenada, which is really six islands, should count as the most southerly part of the Grenadines, which is six hundred islands (technically the Grenadines should count as part of the Windward Islands, and technically the Windward Islands should count as part of the Lesser Antilles; all very complicated, and really quite irrelevant), but in fact it stands alone; for the rest of the islands, see my entry on Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.


Marks For: 2

Marks Against: 1



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Greenland

The prize for the most inappropriate name for a country is shared between Greenland and Iceland, the former of which has very little that is green, the latter very little that is ice; in fact, they would be better named the other way around. 

Greenland is the world’s largest island (Australia, as I have tried to explain on that page, doesn't count), and used to belong to Denmark. It became an autonomous dependent territory in 1979, which is to say the Greenlanders wanted independence, the Danish wanted to keep the place, and as always in these matters the bullies won. I happen to believe there should be an international law that no country can own any piece of land that is not inside its geographical boundaries, but you try telling that to the bullies who make the decisions. Denmark give up Greenland? You have to be kidding. But on the other hand, why do they want it? As noted above, most of Greenland (about 80%) is solid ice (well, perhaps now it’s slowly melting ice; but ice for all that). You can’t see the ice however, because it's pitch dark for twenty-four hours a day, for ten months every year (another of the many splendid features of intelligent design). Fewer people live in Greenland than in any other equivalent land mass on the planet – just 57,000 people. They are almost entirely Inuit, which is their word for Eskimos, or Esqimaux, as you prefer. They live by hunting and fishing, though there are virtually no animals left to hunt, and not many fish either, so they receive vast amounts of aid from Denmark, though it would be cheaper for all concerned, and probably a better life for all concerned, if the Inuit just moved to Copenhagen and the island was handed over to France so its natural features could be properly protected. 

That Greenland should have an alcohol problem is not surprising; that it should have such an epidemic of HIV/AIDS is slightly more so. Greenland, in spite of all this, remains one of the countries on the planet who are truly excited by the prospect of global warming. As the world warms up, so do they. As the ice cap melts, so the minerals below the surface of the earth, currently inaccessible because of the ice, present a potential economic treasure that will, about a thousand years from now, make Greenland the richest country on Earth, with overpopulation no longer an issue, despite the millions who will have fled there from their own flood-zones, because by then everyone will be living in technological igloos where air, water, food and light are generated by computers. 

The only negative to this future is the huge interest the USA has begun showing in the place. What started as a mere radar base, at Thule, on the north of the island, at the start of the Cold War, is today a central pillar of the USA’s nuclear defense program, so Greenlanders 1000 years from now, prepare to eat MacDonalds hamburgers in your technological igloo, and don’t forget to tip the robot-waiters at least 18%.

In the meanwhile, for reasons which I suspect have more to do with Google's needs than with Greenland's, Google StreetView can now take you on a virtual tour of every glacier, every snowflake, every penguin with frost bite and every beached whale. Click here.

Marks For: 0

Marks Against: 3



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Greece

One of the benchmarks established at the start of this book, to determine marks for and marks against, was the question of how far a country had progressed during the course of chronological time, and what contribution it had made to civilisation.

So, now, we come to Greece, a desolate Third World country with a collapsed economy, failed government, third rate culture, but nonetheless, in other people's libraries (their own copies were burned centuries ago), the works of Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles, of Plato and Aristotle, of Ptolemy and Galen, of Hippocrates and I could go on for several pages, all of which serve to remind us that human progress is not connected in any way with linear time, nor with economic success.

The once glorious Greece was two millennia ahead of the rest of the world, two millennia ago; today it is about five hundred years behind even where it was back then, not counting the technological toys, which frankly don't count when you are measuring human progress on a scale of human behaviour and intellectual achievement; perhaps, who knows, one day an Aristotle or a Plato, an Aeschylus or a Sophocles, might come along and lift Greece out of the troglodytic desolation of its unculture; but at present rate it does not seem likely, and what they are depending on is not culture anyway, but a second bail-out by the European Union, because they can't manage to repay the loans from the first bail-out (click here for more details).

Lord Byron went to war to save this proud people from enslavement to the Turk; only to discover there was no pride, only enslavement, and had he not contracted dysentery and died, he was ready to walk away from the terrible mistake he'd made in coming there; whereas he ended, ironically as he did absolutely nothing, as the hero of Missolonghi. Read more in my life of Byron, "A Drop Of Ink", due for publication very soon. And in the meanwhile, there is always this:


MARK TWAIN: THE INNOCENTS ABROAD (Chapter XXXIII) 1869


From Athens all through the islands of the Grecian Archipelago, we saw little but forbidding sea-walls and barren hills, sometimes surmounted by three or four graceful columns of some ancient temple, lonely and deserted—a fitting symbol of the desolation that has come upon all Greece in these latter ages. We saw no ploughed fields, very few villages, no trees or grass or vegetation of any kind, scarcely, and hardly ever an isolated house. Greece is a bleak, unsmiling desert, without agriculture, manufactures or commerce, apparently. What supports its poverty-stricken people or its Government, is a mystery.

I suppose that ancient Greece and modern Greece compared, furnish the most extravagant contrast to be found in history. George I, an infant of eighteen, and a scraggy nest of foreign office holders, sit in the places of Themistocles, Pericles, and the illustrious scholars and generals of the Golden Age of Greece. The fleets that were the wonder of the world when the Parthenon was new, are a beggarly handful of fishing-smacks now, and the manly people that performed such miracles of valor at Marathon are only a tribe of unconsidered slaves to-day. The classic Illyssus has gone dry, and so have all the sources of Grecian wealth and greatness. The nation numbers only eight hundred thousand souls, and there is poverty and misery and mendacity enough among them to furnish forty millions and be liberal about it. Under King Otho the revenues of the State were five millions of dollars—raised from a tax of one-tenth of all the agricultural products of the land (which tenth the farmer had to bring to the royal granaries on pack-mules any distance not exceeding six leagues) and from extravagant taxes on trade and commerce. Out of that five millions the small tyrant tried to keep an army of ten thousand men, pay all the hundreds of useless Grand Equerries in Waiting, First Grooms of the Bedchamber, Lord High Chancellors of the Exploded Exchequer, and all the other absurdities which these puppy-kingdoms indulge in, in imitation of the great monarchies; and in addition he set about building a white marble palace to cost about five millions itself. The result was, simply: ten into five goes no times and none over. All these things could not be done with five millions, and Otho fell into trouble.

The Greek throne, with its unpromising adjuncts of a ragged population of ingenious rascals who were out of employment eight months in the year because there was little for them to borrow and less to confiscate, and a waste of barren hills and weed-grown deserts, went begging for a good while. It was offered to one of Victoria's sons, and afterwards to various other younger sons of royalty who had no thrones and were out of business, but they all had the charity to decline the dreary honor, and veneration enough for Greece's ancient greatness to refuse to mock her sorrowful rags and dirt with a tinsel throne in this day of her humiliation—till they came to this young Danish George, and he took it. He has finished the splendid palace I saw in the radiant moonlight the other night, and is doing many other things for the salvation of Greece, they say.

You can read the whole of this splendidly ironical account of Americans on the Grand Tour, for free (you, not them!) at Project Gutenberg

Marks For: 2

Marks Against: 7

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Glorioso Islands

It seems as if all the little islands of the world, all the coral reefs and atolls, all the tiny places that don’t quite fit into the country nearest them, but ought to, that all of them belong to France, as though the French had decided to skip Mayfair and Leicester Square and all the serious properties on the Monopoly board (that's Marvin Gardens and Broadwalk in the American version) and just buy the four railway stations, the water works and the electricity company, which nobody else wanted. Playing chess only with the pawns. The French Open Golf championship, but on a putting green. The glorious Glorioso are part of this little box of miniatures, an archipelago in theory, though there are just two islands, Grande Glorieuse the larger at three kilometres in width, and Ile du Lys, which is just six hundred metres in diameter; plus two rock islets - Roches Vertes and l’Ile aux Crabes - and an occasional sand bank, which is to say that you can just make out what may very well be a sand bank, but only when the tide is at its lowest.

Its entire majestic gloriousness, all seven square kilometres of it, is located off Mozambique, one hundred and sixty kilometres north of Madagascar, so it is not obvious why they are regarded as a separate entity from that other French domain, the Southern and Antarctic Lands. One neat trick by the French on this occasion is that, while the island may be only seven square kilometres, it has an economic exclusion zone around it of fully forty-five thousand square kilometres, so go sailing down that part of the Indian Ocean and see if any French battleships come out to challenge you. Why do they need it? Have you reached G in this blogbook and still need to ask? It is to protect the coral reef and the lagoon from nasty people who might damage it if the good French were not there to keep it safe. What other reason could there be, so close to the unfriendly Antarctic?



Marks For: 0

Marks Against: 1



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Gibraltar

"There is some corner of a foreign field," wrote the First World War poet Rupert Brooke, "that is forever England" – only it appears not to be Flanders Field at all, but possibly the Falkland Islands, or those two little enclaves Akrotiri and Dhekelia, and definitely Gibraltar, an area of Britain that just happens to be in Spain. 

Why? 

Because Britain obtained it under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1917. 

Is that a good enough reason to still keep it now, in that post-imperial, post-colonial world that I keep mentioning, but which clearly doesn't exist, in which Great Britain and Spain are partners in the European community? 

Apparently it is.

But why has it not been returned? 

Because GB has a naval base there, right at the northern tip of Africa and the eastern tip of the Mediterranean, and GB still wants to be counted among the major powers in the world, so that it can retain a permanent seat on that democratic institution the United Nation's Security Council, and so it needs to maintain a strong military presence in the world, with bases on Cyprus, and the Falkland Islands, and Gibraltar - the same reason why the French and the Americans have bases all over the world, and China is buying its way into Africa, and Russia is working to expand its sphere of influence once again.

No one in the world even knows why Gibraltar is called Gibraltar, but I can tell you. "Jabal Tariq" means "Tariq’s Rock"; it was the Muslim commander Tariq ibn-Ziyad who transformed the limestone outcrop into a fortress in 711 (92 in the Moslem calendar), and set up his own naval base there, for the first effort to build a global Caliphate.

Beyond politics and history, the place is nowheresville, with nothing to do or see there, except from the air, when the rock fills up more than half the area and looks as if one of the mountains of the moon has fallen out of space. Much more interesting is Tarifa, just thirty miles along the coast, where you can see the seam, the point where the Atlantic and the Mediterranean meet and join. I’ve written about it in "The Persian Fire", which is not yet published, but here is an excerpt from it anyway:

Atlantic waves and beach on the right; 
stones and calm on the Mediterranean left

   The causeway at Tarifa stretches like the handles of a pair of tongs, each fork into a different sea. To the east, aquamarine blue, deep as doubt, the tideless Mediterranean, a sea of coral still as dry land or the shingles that comprise its shore. To the west, the shallower but deepening Atlantic, pale blue intermixed with pale grey, a flotilla of white horses grazing the long deeps of sandy beaches where the tide has left its footprints in a line of darker brown and in the pools of gathered water in the rocks. Two spaces, too easily transformed in a man’s mind into the platitudes of good this way and evil that, of shingle versus sand, of light competing with the dark as sun and storm, as west and east. Or even Christendom and Islam, science and religion, dogma and free-thought. Too simple, because too simplistic. When what actually grasps the soul is not the metaphoric but the literal, the littoral; the fact that one is fully-fledged an ocean, the other a mere sea. With this, this causeway jutting like a pointing finger, this the joint.

   Dr Angelus was pointing with his own finger, at the gnarled reef imprinted with fossil forms, at sea-shells calcinating in the spuming foam, at his own immeasurable excitement calculated in the extravagances of coral. Porters clad in little more than loin-cloths walked barefoot on the jagged rocks, unblistered and unbleeding, stevedoring bags of grain, but in a manner that suggested Jesu on the waters of the Sea of Galilee. Small children repeated Canute’s experiment, with small stones hurled against imaginary dragons – but the ocean would not yield, nor would the sea be halted. On the contrary, it was men who carried on, in service of the sea. Sailors hoisted sails while officers, promoted beyond their competence, stood in the morning like important statues from whose mouths orders poured forth like flowing water, dribbling back into the sea. Only that white figure sprawled prostrate on the sand, the teacher ibn-Mehmet about to set off on his final pilgrimage, only he remained oblivious to what was, Dr Angelus had even scrawled it in his notebook, the most miraculous and inexplicable of natural phenomena. A seam in the tapestry of the world. A point at which God’s working, like the published computations of the finest mathematician, was made visible for those who wished to see.

   Only, not ibn-Mehmet. It wasn’t that he didn’t wish to see, or wouldn’t eventually drink the whole nectarous cup of it, only that a man could not face Allah, could not look into the face of Allah, until he had first made restitution with himself. So he lay prostrate on the sand, and the tide purged him, and the sounds that issued could have been the rattle of a desert snake, likewise condemned to crawl upon its belly. Wetter sand, that looked dirty precisely because the sea had washed it darker, was making patches not unlike a map of the Mediterranean upon his gown. So he became the act envisaged in his mind, the journey planned and now at verge of expedition, and knew that Allah approved it. So he recited slowly, softly, inwardly, the phrases men had written in the hope that Allah would understand them, and if not by their paltry meanings, then by their exalted melodies, their resolved counterpoints, their achieved harmonies, their balance of crescendo and diminuendo, their unravelling of the tortured knots which are the human voice. It was, indeed, a beautiful if strangulated sound, this ululation focused down into the earth, but intended skywards. Dr Angelus was truthfully embarrassed to find that he was simply standing there, gawking like some busybody of a next-door neighbour at a garden hedge, watching, listening, as though this were a public concert, and not intrusion on a private act. Why, it should have been so obvious, that no man has the right to look inside another’s soul.

   So he turned back, to the marvel of the natural pier. Wind so strong it held sea-birds suspended in their flight, seemed to die even as it touched the causeway, passing west to east. And yet, most strange, while you could look to left or right and see the difference clearly, you could not look out straight in front of you and see the clasping of the male and female hands. Branches but no trunk. A body, pressed so close against the silver of a mirror that it appeared to pass right through. There the Atlantic, there the Mediterranean, but the two, not joined at all, but melded. Like two bodies, it occurred to him, in love. But also thought, and took his notebook out to write it down, that that which joins is also that which separates.

Marks For:  0

Marks Against: 2


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The Argaman Press

Ghana

The first black country to win independence from its colonial oppressor, in 1957, it appeared to follow the traditional story of post-independence. Its first leader, Nkrumah, was deposed in a coup after less than a decade; a second coup, military supplanting military, brought Jerry Rawlings to power... but then, most unusually, how dare an African country not follow to the letter the expectations of western post-colonialists?..bthings settled down. Economic growth and stability. A multi-party democracy enshrined in a new constitution. Good administration with little taint of corruption. Prosperity from the cocoa trade - Ghana is the world’s second largest producer, behind Ivory Coast. And then, in 2007, the discovery of oil. 

Too good to be true? This is Africa, after all, and we in the West need Africa to fail, so that we can do post-colonial guilt and say "we told you so", and put African leaders on trial for war crimes while simultaneously overlooking and repeating our own. There must be some grounds, surely?

And yes there are. Some - in italics. Some ethnic conflicts, in the north especially, but Ghana is mostly a peaceful land, so peaceful, so much a model of peacefulness, that it regularly sends peacekeepers to help other countries achieve their own, including Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sierra Leone and the DR Congo. Too good to be true? This is Africa, after all, and we in the West... there must be despotic leadership, at the very least... but no, Jerry Rawlings willingly stepped down in 2000 at the end of his term (he is currently the African Union’s ambassador in Somalia), handing over to his VP, John Atta Mills, who was himself succeeded (he died in office, of natural causes) by John Mahama, the current President. But surely, this is Africa, we have deep prejudices that have to be reinforced... well, Amnesty International’s latest report on Ghana did call for the abolition of the death penalty and described “the severe level of over-crowding in Ghana's prisons and other places of detention”; but, on the other hand, it said exactly the same about the USA, only far worse; far, far worse (and the Americans complain that Ghana is an illicit producer of cannabis for the international drug trade and a major transit hub for both Asian heroin and South American cocaine, as well as providing opportunities for money-laundering; which is hypocritical to say the least, given the amount of cannabis grown in Colorado and California, and America's position as the world's number one purchaser of heroin and cocaine, and as to money-laundering...). No, like it or not, we can safely say that Ghana is a country that one may visit with one’s moral conscience still intact.

All of which merely fends off the negatives. There are some major positives as well. Kofi Annan, the seventh Secretary General of the United Nations, came from Ghana, and won the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize for the work he undertook during his time in office to make the UN better organised and more effective. And then add another name that will first confuse you, then surprise you, the importance of one of Ghana's greatest literary talents, Marguerite Annie Johnson of St. Louis, Missouri. Shall I explain?

Marguerite Annie Johnson of St. Louis, Missouri married a Greek sailor named Anastasios Angelopulos in 1952, and used his surname to help create her own stage-name when she sang in nightclubs, then trained as a dancer with Martha Grahame, and travelled through Europe performing Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess", acted in Genet's "The Blacks", moved to Cairo as editor of the English language weekly "The Arab Observer",  and finally, with the new man in her life, the South African civil rights activist Vusumzi Mak, became Head of Administration of the School of Music and Drama at the University of Ghana, before returning to America in 1964 to work, first with Malcolm X until he was assassinated, then with Martin Luther King, as a prominent figure in the civil rights movement. You probably know her from her memoir-novel "I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings". I am speaking of Maya Angelou.

Marks For: 7

Marks Against: 3

You can find David Prashker at:
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Copyright © 2015 David Prashker

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The Argaman Press