When Fenner Brockway exposed forgery by the ‘Daily Express’ and the Ghanaian opposition

Ekow Nelson

In July 1965, Fenner Brockway, the radical UK Labour Party politician, caused an uproar with an exposé in the UK Houses of Parliament. He was no stranger to controversy: he had been in and out of prison, including the dungeons of infamous Tower of London for his early opposition to conscription and for being a conscientious objector in the early part of the last century.

A fierce opponent of imperialism, by WWII, Brockway’s was a leading voice in the anti colonial movement that was building up to a crescendo. He was a campaigner for Indian independence, leading member of the league against imperialism, and a target of Adolf Hitler (with an entry in Hitler’s infamous ‘Black book’ of people to be eliminated).

Brockway opposed the UK government’s response to the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya and forced a debate on the banishment of Botswana’s Sereste Khama from his homeland, for marrying a white English girl against the wishes of Daniel Malan and his awful apartheid government in South Africa.

He travelled far and wide across Africa and was a friend of the early stalwarts of the anti colonial movement across the continent. His decades long efforts to end colonism and racial discrimination earned him the well-deserved sobriquet of the ‘Member for Africa’.

On 7th July 1965, the now Noble Lord Brockway rose in the House Lords and exposed what he described as the “greatest forgery since [Richard] Piggott” – the Irish journalist and newspaper owner who forged evidence against the Irish nationalist Charles Parnell’s complicity in the assassination of British officials in the ‘Phoenix Park Murders’ of 1882.

Here is the Hansard record of his full presentation Newspaper Photograph Of Alleged Ghanaian Prisoners to a packed House.

Ekow Nelson

Abu Dhabi, March 2024

Lord Brockway rose to ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they will establish an inquiry into the circumstances which led the Daily Express to publish a photograph of alleged political prisoners in chains in Ghana in March, 1965, which was in fact a photograph of prisoners in Togoland in January, 1963. The noble Lord said: My Lords, I rise to put the Question in my name on the Order Paper. I regret that I am again initiating a debate at what is a comparatively late hour for this House. That does not mean for a moment that I regret the length of the previous debate. If I should be in order in so doing, I would express appreciation to the noble Lord, Lord Amulree, for having initiated that debate, and also my appreciation to those who took part in discussing a subject which is of such overall human importance.

I particularly regret that the Minister who had the duty of replying to that debate also has the duty of listening to this debate and of replying to it at the end. I am anticipating that more Members of this House than those who have placed their names on the list of speakers will be taking part. I want just to say that I have had a letter from the noble Lord, Lord Luke, who sits on the opposite Benches regretting that he is unable to stay, but saying that I can quote him as supporting me in my remarks—an expression of confidence before having heard the remarks I am going to make!

I should like to begin by saying that I am not raising this matter from political antipathy to the Daily Express. I am, of course, opposed to the general policy of that paper, although I should like to express appreciation of its contribution to good inter-racial relations in this country. The Editor who resigned yesterday is an old friend of mine; he was at one time Editor of Tribune; and although the Daily Express has said rude things about me during the last week, I have no grudge against it. That is not the motive of my raising the matter this evening.

I have tabled this Question for three reasons. First, I am by profession a journalist and am jealous of the honour and integrity of my own profession. Second, I think there is evidence that the responsibility for the circumstances which led to the publication of this forged photograph was part of the machinations of a wider circle, which used the Daily Express as an instrument for its purposes. Third, I am concerned that justice is done to Ghana. Ghana is a member of the Commonwealth and her President at the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference gave, and is still giving, signal service to the British Government.

I hope that during this debate no one will attempt to excuse the publication of this forgery because of their criticism of Ghana’s detention of political offenders. I share that criticism. By public statements, by correspondence and by personal conversations I have made my views known to the President. Indeed, when the Daily Express published this photograph I wrote at once to Dr. Nkrumah expressing my deep revulsion.

If such was the effect on me of this photograph, one may sense what was the effect upon others less sympathetic towards African independence.
Let me relate the facts. On March 17 this year the Daily Express published a photograph across seven columns of a page. I have here a copy of that day’s issue of the paper. It is a photograph of a number of prisoners shackled together in chains. The caption beneath the photograph reads: “Shackled together like slaves of a bygone era—Ghana politicians and Opposition Party officials in a Ghanaian prison.”

This spectacular photograph was accompanied by a dispatch from the Daily Expresscorrespondent at Lomé in Togo. I quote the opening two paragraphs:
“These men shackled together in a Ghana prison camp are members of Ghana’s loyal Opposition. Among them are politicians and officials of the Opposition United Party and leading citizens who have been critical of the regime of Kwame N’krumah of Ghana. This picture, given to me by Mr. Idana Asigri, a Ghanaian Member of Parliament who spent two years in a Government prison camp before he escaped, is proof of the incredible political situation in Ghana.”

The dispatch ends with these words: “Those that resisted the Government including Members of Parliament were sent to political prison where they have languished in chains for six years.”

The Daily Express accompanied the photograph and that message from Togo-land by an editorial article in which it used these words:
“The other African members of the Commonwealth should rise in anger against N’krumah. They can count on the support of all in this country who believe in justice and decency.”

That, I suggest, was a very serious incitement to the other African Governments who are members of the Commonwealth.

The authenticity of this photograph was generally believed by the political commentators in our Press. Even so fair and objective a writer as my noble friend Lord Francis-Williams, who will be taking part in this debate, accepted that authenticity when writing for the New Statesman,though, with characteristic honesty, in the journal Punch, for which he is now writing, he indicated that that view was then mistaken. This picture and the report of the Daily Express must have made an impression of revulsion not only on the public in this country but on persons of influence, and indeed on the Governments of the world, through their Embassies in London.

This was not all that the Daily Express did. It syndicated this photograph and its report throughout the world. I have here copies of photographs of some of these reproductions which show that in other countries this photograph, which was later to prove to be forged, was published widely everywhere. For example, Paris Match, which has one of the largest circulations in France, published the photograph on an even larger scale than the Daily Express had done in this country. The widely circulated paper in Germany, Stern, similarly reproduced the photograph and published the reports as given in the Daily Express. Perhaps what is more serious is that it was published in other African countries, and in African countries in the Commonwealth the effect could only have been to cause serious doubts and divisions. I have in my hand a copy of the picture as it was published in the Nigerian Daily Express, again with a report attacking the Ghanaian Government in the belief that this photograph was accurate.

My Lords, people throughout the world must have seen this photograph giving a distressing image of Ghana in every continent, an image of a cruel and barbarous Government which, by its behaviour, had placed itself outside the pale of civilisation.

I wish to say in fairness to the Daily Express that when, at last, it was convinced that this photograph was a forgery, the Editor communicated with the papers to whom the photograph had been sent and withdrew any claim for payment for the provision of this forged photograph. I do not know how fully or adequately the papers concerned corrected the mistake, but the damage had been done. One can never catch up with a spectacular lie which circulates the world.

What followed? On March 26, Dr. Nkrumah, the President of Ghana, denied in the Ghanaian Parliament that the photograph was of any political prisoners in Ghana. The next day the Daily Express recorded his repudiation, but republished the photograph and again asserted that it was genuine.

On April 13 the Ghanaian Minister of Information
held a Press conference in Accra at which the former Director of Togolese Information Services gave the facts regarding the photograph. It had been taken not in a Ghanaian prison at all, but in Togoland, to illustrate how prisoners had been treated there. After President Olimpio had been overthrown, the new régime collected former prisoners together and posed them in this and in other photographs to demonstrate how prisoners had been shackled under the previous dictatorship.

One of the prisoners shown in the photograph, a Lomé taxi driver (Lomé is the capital of Togo) appeared at the Press conference and corroborated the Director’s account. He was clearly recognisable as being in the photograph, and he gave the names of nine other prisoners in the picture. The next day the Daily Express gave a brief report of the Press conference in two paragraphs, but again asserted that the photograph was genuine.

On April 15 the Agence France Press published a statement quoting official Togolese sources to the effect that the Government of Togo deeply regretted that a photograph taken to expose oppression in Togo under the regime of President Olimpio should have been used to mount an entirely unfounded attack on the Government of Ghana. The Daily Express does not subscribe to this agency, and unfortunately it did not appear to note the reproduction of the message of the agency which appeared in the official bulletin published by the Ghanaian High Commissioner.

This was the situation when the Commonwealth Prime Ministers met. The Daily Express, despite all the evidence, was still maintaining that this photograph was authentic.

To the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference came a group of Ghanaian editors, one of whom was chairman of their association and of the Ghana Radio and Television Corporation, and three of whom were Members of Parliament. They raised this matter with the Editor of the Daily Express. As a result of their doing so apparently, in June the Daily Expresssent a “senior executive” to Africa to investigate.

His report was received on June 23. I quote: “It confirmed that the picture was not taken in Ghana but Togo when some prisoners who had been released on the fall of the Olimpio Government posed for a photograph to show the conditions under which they suffered.”

On June 24, more than three months after the first publication of the photograph, and after the Daily Express had repeatedly declared that it was genuine, it acknowledged that the photograph was a forgery. It wrote:
“We regret this error and express our apologies”.
I think that most people would regard the apology as inadequate. In a statement of 500 words, there was only one sentence of eight words of regret and apology. Indeed, a large part of the statement was devoted to a repetition of the charges against the Ghanaian Government’s treatment of political prisoners and their statement of regret and apology ended with these words:

“The mistake—”

mistake!—
“that the Daily Express has made in this matter is, we venture to think, relatively unimportant—”

relatively unimportant!—

“compared to the unrequited wrongs of these wretched people.”

The Daily Express statement repeated that the photo came through an ex-Ghanaian M.P. then in Togoland. As I have already indicated in my reading of the original report he was Mr. Idana Asigri, one of the Opposition, in exile. It is difficult to believe that Mr. Asigri did not know the truth about the photograph. It was extensively used by the Togo Government as propaganda against the preceding Olimpio régime which it had overthrown. It was widely distributed in Lomé. It seems impossible that anyone in political life in Lomé would have been unaware of the true origin of this photograph.

This leads me to my second reason for raising this subject to-night. I think it is clear that the “planting” of this photograph was part of a comprehensive plan to defame the Ghanaian Government. One cannot refrain from saying that the role played by those who participated in this forgery inevitably causes one to doubt the wider allegations which they made. Let us look at the sequence of events.

On March 16, the British Press, including the Daily Express, published an account of a letter submitted to Mr. Harold Wilson, the Prime Minister, by Dr. Busia, Leader of the Opposition, the United Party in
Exile, asking for the intervention of the Commonwealth countries, following the death of Dr. Danquah, into the ill-treatment of 600 political prisoners. I should say at once that I had been deeply concerned by the detention of Dr. Danquah.

I have little doubt that some leaders of the Opposition had been guilty of a conspiracy to assassinate the President, but I knew Dr. Danquah and I do not believe it of him. I expressed my disquiet to Dr. Nkrumah at the time. I was distressed to hear of Dr. Danquah’s death, but I know of no evidence of his ill-treatment in prison.
In view of the identification of the Opposition with this forgery, one cannot accept the statement of the United Party’s Secretary at Lagos that Dr. Danquah’s death was due to police tortue. That statement began the campaign which had its climax in this forgery. It was followed by Dr. Busia’s letter to the Prime Minister, which alleged that Dr. Danquah had been tortured and kept in chains for thirteen months. This was followed by the publication of the forged picture in the Daily Express. I ask: can it be a coincidence that the photograph was published on the day following Dr. Busia’s letter to the Prime Minister?

The serious fact is that it was on the repeated evidence of Opposition leaders that the Daily Express for three months justified its publication of the photograph. I have in my hand a copy of the letter the Editor of the Daily Express sent to the Ghanaian editors when they approached him. It is quite clear from this letter that it was on statements of the Opposition leaders, who had made these charges of torture and of prisoners being in chains, that the Daily Express rested its case.

“On March 17,” says the Editor, “the Daily Express published the photograph of chained political prisoners supplied to our correspondent in Togo through the agency of officials of the United Party.”

I quote from the Editor’s letter again:
“On March 26 the Daily Express quoted the Press officer of the United Party of Ghana, who named two members of the detainees in the picture and identified them as members of his party known to him and still in a Ghanaian prison. He added that the photograph had been taken within 24 hours of the arrest of the prisoners.”

A third quotation:
“On April 18 Mr. Ekow Richardson, the General Secretary of the United Party, claimed that the picture published in the Daily Express was genuine.”

A fourth quotation:
“On May 29 a detailed letter from the Secretary of the U.K. Branch of the United Party to the Chairman of the I.T.A., a copy of which was sent to the Daily Express, again confirmed that the picture published in the Daily Express was authentic.”
Finally, the Editor stated that
“Dr. K. Busia, the leader of the United Party in Britain has today “—
that was June 17
“made the following statement: ‘ I have no doubt that the picture published in the Daily Express was taken in Ghana. Its authenticity has been thoroughly checked ‘.”

I give those quotations because they indicate that the Daily Express repeated its charge that this photograph was genuine on the statements of the Leaders of the Opposition in Ghana. All these statements have now been proved wrong. After the falsehoods of which the leaders of the Opposition have been guilty, one cannot accept the long series of grave charges they have made about prison conditions; and it will not be possible to believe them in the future. I think it is clear that the forged picture was a deliberate part of a conspiracy to denigrate the Ghanaian Government by allegations which in tested cases have now proved not to be true. Incalculable harm has been done.

My Lords, I want to conclude by asking what can now be done to right this wrong. The Government may say that they have no responsibility in this matter. But this is a case where a British newspaper, of mammoth circulation, has given publicity to a forgery which makes an atrocious charge against a Government of the Commonwealth, and it has distributed that forgery around the world. It is a case where subjects of the United Kingdom and of the Commonwealth—the leaders of the Opposition—have initiated that forgery and identified themselves with it even after it has proved to be untrue. Not since the case of the forged “Parnell letters”, published by The Times during the Home Rule conflicts, has a graver political fabrication been committed. The Government cannot ignore this affront to a member of the Commonwealth.

In my Question I ask whether the Government will establish an inquiry. Before the forgery was proved, the Editor of the Daily Express suggested to the Ghanaian editors that the International Commission of Jurists at Geneva should be asked to make an inquiry. In the present circumstances, it would be difficult for any Government to accept the services of that Commission to inquire into the case of an admitted forgery. Moreover, the Commission is not a constitutional tribunal, and could not require evidence to be given; and undoubtedly it would be ignored by some of those whose evidence would be needed.

I put the following alternative suggestions for action by the Government. First, the attention of the Press Council has been drawn to the forgery. In view of the gravity of the case, I think the Press Council would be justified in adopting an exceptional course which is permissible under their constitution. In order that justice shall not only be done but shall appear to be done, and in order that the truth may be made known to the deceived world, why should not an inquiry be held in public at which those who contributed to this fabrication could be asked to give evidence and could be examined? This is possible within the constitution of the Press Council. I refer to subsection (3) of Clause 2, which under the heading “Objects of the Council” reads as follows:
“to consider complaints about the conduct of the Press or the conduct of persons and organisations towards the Press; to deal with these complaints in whatever manner might seem practical and appropriate, and record resultant action.”

I ask the House to note especially the fact that the terms of reference of the Council include not only the conduct of persons, but of organisations, towards the Press. This would allow an examination into the charge that there was a conspiracy to plant this forgery on the Daily Express by the Opposition Party. Your Lordships will note, also, that the Council is authorised:
“to deal with these complaints in whatever manner might seem practical and appropriate”.

A public inquiry, therefore, is not excluded. This would surely be an appropriate method to do justice to the Government of Ghana in the eyes of the world, and to reach the truth of how the forgery came to be perpetrated. I may add that I gave notice to Lord Devlin, the Chairman of the Press Council, that I intended to refer to this tonight.

My second suggestion is that the Public Prosecutor should be asked to consider whether this is not a case appropriate for prosecution for criminal libel. One must bear in mind that not only was this appalling forgery printed and distributed throughout the world, but editorially the paper urged African members of the Commonwealth to rise in anger against Nkrumah. There is surely a prima facie case, first, because a forgery has been published, and secondly, because there was incitement of Governments to rise against the President of a fellow-member of the Commonwealth.

Thirdly, I would ask the Public Prosecutor to consider whether perjury has been committed. The Daily Express justified its repeated assertion that the photograph pictured Ghanaian political prisoners in chains by reference to statements made by leaders of the Opposition Party. It is difficult to believe that the Editor would have accepted statements in this grave matter, involving the honour of his paper, unless they were sworn statements. Were they? If they were, those making any false statement could be charged with perjury under the Statutory Declarations Act. I ask the Government to consider this, and to make the necessary inquiries.

Finally, I ask the Minister to make clear in his reply to this debate the abhorrence which Her Majesty’s Government feel at the atrocious wrong which has been done to Ghana and its President. Surely this is due to a member of the Commonwealth. It is due, particularly at this moment, to the President, who, despite doubts by other African Governments, is co-operating courageously with our Government in the greatest of all causes, the cause of peace.

8.10pm

I weep for Gaza, not Navalny

A Gaza destroyed

Ekow Nelson

I am surprised I am not moved by the passing of Alexei Navalny, the leading opposition to Russia’s Vladimir Putin. I have been wondering why.

I have never been a fan of the current Russian Czar – never been impressed with his  skulduggery to remain in power forever- that whole musical chairs  with Medvedev was farcical. His grandiose vision of a greater Russia after the collapse of the USSR has only fueled his megalomania.

When he invaded Ukraine I was vociferous in my opposition calling for him to go. I wrote this then: “Putin continues to rue the collapse of the USSR and is possessed by a belief, religious and historical, that Russia must be restored to its former ‘greatness’. That means projecting force and incorporating bordering lands he believes to be Russian to restore his fantasy of the glorious years of his heroes, Peter and Catherine the Great, who expanded the Russian empire south to Crimea, what was called New Russia,(Novorossiya) stretching from Donetsk to the Odesa coast and further westwards to the Polish-Lithuanian border.

He believes Ukraine is Russian, certainly much of southern and eastern Ukraine. He has himself said Ukraine is a made up country but so is Ghana, and indeed every sovereign African nation that exists because of the nineteen century Berlin Conference. So is Pakistan and so is Belgium, much of the Levant and countless other nations.

Nothing Zelensky has said or will say will stop Putin from butchering Ukraine.”

You would think therefore that I’d be incandescent with rage at the demise, perhaps elimination, of his foremost political opponent. But I am not. Why? It may well be because I was never enamoured by Navalny in the first place. He held some abhorrent racist views and spoke about Muslims and immigrants in rather unpleasant ways. Amnesty International stripped him of his ‘Prisoner of Conscience’ status after it discovered videos of him  describing  immigrants as “cockroaches”. There was also a video of him on YouTube dressed as a dentist among immigrants in which he says everything that bothers us must be removed like  rotten teeth. He refused to disavow it.

His views on immigrants are as odious as Trump’s, accusing central Asians of bringing drugs into Russia as Trump said of Mexicans. He is a Russian nationalist much like Putin and even supported his brutal invasion  of the former Soviet state of Georgia. Try as the western media did, Navalny was no Andrew Sakharov or Irina Ratushinskaya. Just a western propped up Putin-lite.

I think though that my lack of any sense of sympathy has been shaped by the West’s complicity in what has been unfolding in Gaza since October 2023. How can I feel pain for the  passing of Navalny – even if Putin murdered him – when 30,000 Palestinians have been blasted to death? When 70 percent of Gaza has been destroyed and 2.3million people are now huddled in the southern border close to Egypt which is now being bombarded.

The unrelenting destruction of Gaza

The International Court of Justice established after the Second World War to prevent the recurrence of the Holocaust urges Israel to do all it can to prevent genocide and to allow humanitarian assistance. Immediately after this ruling  western nations led by the US cut off support for the main UN agency that can deliver such assistance in trumped up charges brought by Israel. Multiple tens of billions of dollars are approved by the US congress to support Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

In the words of the former speaker of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset,  “Jerusalem is governed from Washington, which provides it with the kind of money, weapons, support and diplomacy that permit Israel to take actions in Gaza and the occupied territories that no other western country would be allowed to do.”

The world of international rules-based order, offered as the  guarantor of peace and protector of human rights, has no longer  the support of its creators, the West;  they no longer believe in  it or support its precepts when it comes to Israel.

Two US University professors have lost their jobs along with countless others across much of the western world. Free speech, which for years the west argued was the cornerstone of a free society is being trampled upon and critics of the Israeli government’s actions are being muzzled.  Across the EU and US, calls for ceasefire have fallen on deaf ears and those who advocate it, including young kids on college campuses are accused of antisemitism.

Western leaders in silent lockstep in Paris

In 2015 Western leaders  joined arms in a silent but powerful march in Paris to rightly express their revulsion at the Charlie Hebdoo killings. Today those same leaders refuse to call for the end to the killings of tens of thousands of Palestinians. Worse, they supply the weapons for the slaughter unfolding before our eyes.

And I am supposed to feel revulsion, with all the lurid headlines  in the main western newspapers  – from the Economist, which has been  gung-ho about the bombings in Gaza to the NYT, notorious for its less than truthful reporting, and acts as a mouthpiece for the IDF – at the death of an opponent of Vladimir Putin? No !

As a placard at one of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations all around the world read, the moral superiority of the west in relation to human rights, died in Gaza.

(C) Ekow Nelson

February 2024, Abu Dhabi

My 2023 music list – updated

Chike’s Roju

Ekow Nelson

It has taken me a little while to share my annual compilation of the best of what i listened to and read in 2023. This year I have decided on two lists; one for music and another for books.

There was an eclectic mix of music that I enjoyed through the year. Some for sentimental reasons and a throw back to a nostalgic past. I have provided links to my selection for your listening pleasure.

I begin my list though with the coronation of King Charles III of the United Kingdom at Westminster Abbey in London. The high point of this ancient religious ceremony is when the Archbishop of Canterbury anointed the new sovereign with holy oil behind a screen with his ceremonial robes removed, while the chapel choir sang George Fredrik Handel’s ‘Zadok the Priest’. The best rendition of Handel’s grand anthem I enjoyed most was this dedication: Zadok The Priest – by The Harmonious Chorale of Ghana conducted by James Varrick Armaah. The performance was flawless, the interpretation outstanding and the singing, simply glorious.

In the month of the coronation we lost the actor, musician, political activist, and relentless anti-racist campaigner, Harry Belafonte. Among the many Jamaican folk music he repackaged for a global audience, I relived the joy of Mama Look a Boo Boo which as I recalled in my tribute to him – A giant staple of the US Civil Rights and Anti-Apartheid movements – has a special place in my memory of the growing up years of my children.

We also lost Tina Turner, the ‘Queen of Rock and Roll’ in the same month. Her death sent me back to 1984 and her biggest selling single, What’s love got to do with it, that also won her a Grammy.

My nostalgic mood was heightened further by the young Stephen Sanchez’s Until I found you which sounds so eerily like something from the 1960s. The song was everywhere : on the radio, on Emirates flights around the world, on TV etc. Each time I heard it, it stirred a longing in me for a time and place in the past buried in the deep recesses of my mind, but which I could nevertheless recollect vividly.

In July, the American musician Randy Meisner passed. I grew up with the music of the Eagles and so on hearing the news, I naturally reached for their signature song, Take it to the limit, which Randy Meisner sang like no one else, especially when he hit those high notes.

Among the burst of creative talent in the new generation of musicians from the African continent are the likes of Burna Boy and Davido who have become global phenomena with their music appreciated by audiences from all cultures around the world. My favourite among this up and coming bunch of talented musicians however, is the Nigerian Chike Ezekpeazu Osebuka. There is a lot of his dance music I could list among my favourites of 2023. But if I have to choose one, then it is Roju (portmanteau for Romeo and Juliet) from his ‘Boo of the Booless’ album that celebrates love at its most colourful and with a pulsating rhythm that is difficult to resist.

Opera is an art form I discovered much later in life but it has become a regular staple in my listening repertoire. This year we travelled to Budapest for the first time and fortunately the Hungarian State Opera had a production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Nabucco on. Tickets were sold out but with a bit of charm and cajoling we managed to secure seats for one of the performances. Set in the 6th century BC, the story is about King Nebuchadnezzar’s attack and vandalism of Jerusalem in a bid to enslave the Israelites. The climax of the opera is the grand Chorus of Hebrew Slaves (based on Psalm 137) sung by the Israelites as they yearned for their lost home. And as usual, we the audience, fired up by the stirring performance of the chorus, sang along to the encore as the final curtains fell. Here is a snippet of the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves from a Metropolitan Opera House production earlier in the year.

As has become a family tradition, this summer, I visited Glyndebourne in the south east of England to see a production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni based on the adventures of the notorious, philandering Spanish lover, Don Juan. A thrilling comedy of morality, deceit, vengeance and power, laced with beautiful arias, I never tire of this opera. Here is one beautiful, playful scene, Giovinette che fate allamore (Young ladies who make love) from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, featuring the American baritone Alfred Walker and the Chinese soprano Ying Fang

In November we lost another great talent from my youth, George ‘Funky’ Brown, Co-founder and drummer for Kool and the Gang which afforded me another trip down memory lane with Get Down on it . And with the demise of Shane MacGowan who also departed this world in November, and whose Fairytale of New York has been a permanent feature in our household at Christmas, we bade farewell to a another great artist.

I can’t end this compilation without a bow to the extraordinary “Hommage to Daniel Barenboim” organised by the Italian mezzo soprano Cecilia Bartoli for her mentor as part of the Salzburg Whitsun festival in 2023.

A child prodigy, Daniel Barenboim rose to prominence very early on, and has been at the top of his game as a pianist and conductor since. I last saw him perform in Abu Dhabi with the West-Eastern Divan orchestra he founded with the late Edward Said, that brings together musicians from many countries including Palestinian and Israelis – the original impetus of the orchestra. A decade later in Salzburg he looked frail but still with an active mind.

When Barenboim announced his retirement we knew this may be our last opportunity to see the great maestro of our times in performance. So off we went to Mozart’s place of birth, home of the annual Salzburg music festival (and where the classic 1965 movie, ‘The Sound of Music’ was filmed).

Zubin Mehta, Daniel Barenboim and Cecilia Bartoli at ‘Hommage to Barenboim’ in Salzburg, May 2023

The concert itself was a gala performance with many of the great and good of the classical music world – Zubin Mehta was the main conductor for the event, Lang Lang, Cecilia Bartoli herself and Placido Domingo all performed.

The climax of the occasion for me was when Barenboim took to the stage and performed with his fellow child prodigy and Argentine compatriot, Martha Argerich. I had only seen YouTube videos of the pair play Mozart, Debussy and Bizet in the most intimate and sublime performances. But to see them perform live, even at their advanced ages, was something else.

Overall it was a delightful evening, raucous at the end, with multiple standing ovations as the Salzburg Festival, of which Barenboim has been an integral part for years, gave this most accomplished classical musician of our times – a man who has done more than most to bring people together through music – his well deserved swansong.

Ekow Nelson, Abu Dhabi

February, 2024

My 2023 music compilation

1. Zadok The Priest – by The Harmonious Chorale

2. Mama Look a Boo Boo, Harry Belafonte

3. What’s love got to do with it, Tina Turner

4. Until I found you, Stephen Sanchez

5. Take it to the limit, Randy Meisner and the Eagles

6. Roju, Chike Ezekpeazu Osebuka

7. Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves, Giuseppe Verdi performed by the Metropolitan Opera House, New York

8. Giovinette che fate allamore, excerpt from Don Giovanni by Wolfang Amadeus Mozart with Alfred Walker and Ying Fang and the Metropolitan Opera House, New York

9. Get Down on it, George ‘Funky’ Brown and Kool and Gang

10. Fairytale of New York, Shane MacGowan and The Pogues

Apartment hunting at the ‘Last Judgement’ – Gore Vidal on the late Henry Kissinger

Michelangelo’s Last Judgement – Sistine Chapel, Vatican City, Rome

Ekow Nelson

Henry Kissinger has passed. While I will not celebrate his demise, there will be glowing tributes from many of his admirers – I am not one. But as a global statesman who dominated the foreign policy stage through much of my life (from 1969 when he became National Security Advisor to President Richard Nixon) and who wielded so much power and influence in and out office, it is fair for his detractors too, to remind us of how they saw him.

The writer Christopher Hitchens famously catalogued ‘Kissinger’s crimes’ as he put it, in his prosecutorial book “The Trial of Kissinger” and literally hounded him in the pages of the New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair and wherever he was allowed to speak. Activitists like Peter Thatchell attempted to arrest him in publicly staged stunts designed for publicity and shine a light on his involvement in massacres from Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh to East Timor.

My favourite though is this by the stylish American writer, Gore Vidal (whose writings I devoured so much as a graduate student), about an encounter with Kissinger in Rome with his usual coruscating wit, from his memoir, “Palimpsest” .

Vidal wrote:
“The Agnellis had taken over the newly restored Sistine Chapel for an evening; then dinner for 150 in the Hall of the Statues, a brilliant long room with statues in niches like front-line troops poised to defend Olympus from the Titans.

Among the crude Titans was Henry Kissinger. In the next few days he and I attended a half-dozen functions together. I have no idea what he was doing memorializing the American Academy; but the people who give money for such causes have made something of a pet of him, rather as they had made one of Truman Capote in an earlier time. I could hear the ceaseless rumbling voice in every corner of the chapel. The German accent is more pronounced in Europe than on television at home. He has a brother who came to America when he did. Recently, the brother was asked why he had no German accent but Henry did. “Because,” said the brother, “Henry never listens.” As I left him gazing thoughtfully at at the hell section of “The Last Judgement” (as pretty and bright now as Tiepolo), I said to the lady with me, “Look he’s apartment hunting.”

Ekow Nelson

30th November 2023, Abu Dhabi

Interview with Swedish Business Council

Ekow Nelson, Vice President, Head of Global Customer Unit e& and Pakistan and Country General Manager at Ericsson

This month I was interviewed by the Swedish Business Council in the United Arab Emirates in my capacity as Head of Ericsson in the country.

Thanks to the Swedish Business Council for giving me the opportunity to reflect on my incredible journey, influences and dreams and the impressive transformation of the #UAE. I hope it inspires others to #imaginepossible. For nearly 150 years Ericsson had been connecting the world and creating a global platform for innovation. Once again we are writing the new chapter in the book of telecommunications.

In this interview I reflect on my career journey, passions and influences. The link to the interview is below but I also reproduce the full text in case the link does not work.

Enjoy !

Swedish Business Council, UAE

This month, we get to know Ekow Nelson, Vice President, Head of Global Customer Unit e& and Pakistan and Country General Manager at Ericsson. He is a multi-traveller telecom executive who found his home in the UAE and at the Swedish global company Ericsson approximately a decade ago. Ekow is playing a vital role at Ericsson Middle East and Africa to develop the important 5G in the region with a dream to create the enabling environment for everyone to realise their full potential.
Click https://www.sbcuae.se/news/2023/9/12-ekow-nelson/ to read the full interview.

Passionate Global Telecommunications Expert

This September 2023, we get to know Ekow Nelson, Vice President, Head of Global Customer Unit e& and Pakistan and Country General Manager at Ericsson. He is a multi-traveller telecom executive who found his home in the UAE and at the Swedish global company Ericsson approximately a decade ago. Ekow is playing a vital role at Ericsson Middle East and Africa to develop the important 5G in the region with a dream to create the enabling environment for everyone to realise their full potential.

Ericsson is one of the leading providers of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to service providers. They enable the full value of connectivity by creating game-changing technology and services that are easy to use, adopt, and scale, making their customers successful in a fully connected world.

Hej SBC Member!

Who is Ekow Nelson?
By way of introduction, I am a Telecommunications Media and Technology (TMT) executive and a thought leader and I lead Ericsson’s global business with e& and in Pakistan. I am also Ericsson’s Country General Manager for the United Arab Emirates. Beyond selling and delivering large-scale telecoms networks, Cloud platforms and IT solutions to create value for my customers, I operate at the confluence of business and digital technologies with a proven track‐record in strategy and advisory, product and sales management, large-scale technology-driven business transformation and technology innovation.

At a personal level the best way to describe myself, borrowing from a veteran American journalist who like me spent most of her adult life in Britain, is as a vestigial African. My formative years were spent on the continent that is the cradle of mankind, in Ghana specifically, but for much of my adult life, I have lived and worked in many countries across Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Over the past decade or so, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has been my home away from home in England where my family – my wife and our two wonderful children live and work.

Professionally I began life as a software engineer, in a small family-owned business in Waterbeach, near Cambridge in England writing firmware for networking personal computers. After my postgraduate education at University College London, I joined Uniplex Software Limited in England then the global leader in office automation on Unix, developing electronic communications and collaboration applications (such as e-mail, e-calendar, document management), leading software development teams and later as Head of Sales for Asia-Pacific which gave me the opportunity of extended stints in places like China, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Australia, and New Zealand.

I joined Coopers & Lybrand (later PwC) as a management consultant and became part of the team at the forefront of the burgeoning e-commerce and e-business era ushered in by the Internet and the worldwide web. As mobile telecommunications transitioned from voice to data with 2.5G and later 3G, I was among the pioneering team that established the global mobile business consulting practice for PwC across Europe Middle East and Africa.  For a decade or so I held senior sales, telecom industry and thought leadership positions at IBM Corporation before joining Ericsson in 2012.

In my spare time, I write and contribute articles to various business and industry publications on the telecom, IT and media industries and technology convergence.

You started at Ericsson in 2012. What made you join Ericsson in the first place, and how have you seen your career develop during these almost 12 year?
Having spent a couple of decades working with largely IT companies in engineering and sales roles, I decided, with the looming convergence between Telecom and IT, to make a career move to bolster the telecom part of my background. It was a matter of joining a Communications Service Provider (CSP) or a Network Equipment Provider (NEP) – as we used to call them. 

Coincidentally Ericsson had also made a strategic decision to move the other way, from telecom into IT for a share of the spoils of large-scale IT-driven transformations. I was hired as Head of Sales for Consulting and Systems Integration to work with Etisalat who were undertaking a transformation of their legacy business and operational support systems in the UAE. The objective was to reduce complexity, increase agility and responsiveness and improve time to market. I had the opportunity to work with and get to know, many of the Executives at Etisalat in the UAE, Egypt and in Mobily in Saudi Arabia. Many of these relationships remain intact till this day.

After a successful three years I was asked to lead global consulting at Ericsson with over 500 consultants in operations and technology advisory. While technology is at the core of many transformations it was increasingly obvious that successful outcomes depended on the ability to align business processes and organizations to exploit the new capabilities more effectively.  

We delivered lots of advisory work from pre- and post-merger consolidation, target operating model design, to defining customer journeys and business process alignment. It was a great opportunity to spend time at the mothership in Stockholm. I improved my understanding of the company and its culture, accelerated my integration and it afforded me the opportunity to expand my network which has been a most incredible resource base for my growth and development.

Next stop was India where I took responsibility for the newly established IT and Cloud Unit. When I arrived in India in 2016, there were roughly 6-8 Service Providers. The newest entrant was Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio which was just about to launch in September 2016. A 4G-only network, Jio had the ambition to enroll 100m subscribers within the first six months of launch. A frenetic set of activities were set in motion to achieve that goal and for me, that involved a lot of travel between Delhi and Mumbai and a ringside seat to witness industry transformation at full speed.

At the same time, the market in India began to consolidate with a flurry of mergers that saw the number of CSPs shrink to three main ones. It was incredible to be part of that journey with opportunities to consolidate large scale networks (involving disparate spectrum assets and hundreds of thousands of sites) and IT platforms.

In 2018, the opportunity to lead the Global Customer Unit for Etisalat and Pakistan came up and I moved back to Abu Dhabi to lead that business for Ericsson. In June 2022 I also became Country General Manager for Ericsson UAE as a natural extension of my role.

You have worked with many countries throughout your career, how do you see the UAE differentiate itself from others?

The UAE has an incredible story to tell. It is a beacon of inspiration for nations seeking the path of accelerated development. When the British decided in 1971 to give up governing the then Trucial states it came as a sudden surprise.  With no national army to defend it from external aggressors or a semblance of a local civil service, the UAE had to form an autonomous functioning nation in short order. Under the leadership of the founding father HH Sheikh Zayed of Abu Dhabi, and leaders from the other Emirates, they painstakingly wove together a new Union that formed what is today’s UAE. And it hasn’t looked back since.

The first Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, famously wrote ’From Third World to First: The Singapore Story 1965 – 2000’, describing the then unparalleled transformation of his city-state to a prosperous nation that gave us the world’s best airline, busiest airport, and active trading ports. Today, that remarkable transformation story is the UAE’s, whose bold, visionary leaders have created a modern metropolis brimming with the most daring and confident architecture supported by worldclass infrastructure.  

A harbinger of digital government, it boasts the highest household penetration of fibre network deployment anywhere in the world, the fastest mobile communications network and expect one in four cars on their roads to be driverless by 2030. It also has some of the most advanced universities in the Middle East, even the world; and has sent a man into space.

The UAE knows that the world does not stand still and is determined to be at the forefront of technological innovation by harnessing the talents of its people – local and foreign – who have something to contribute to its progress. In a country where every nine in ten of the population is foreign, the relative peace and harmony in which we all live is beyond remarkable. It is a country of a tolerant mix of cultures and rich in diversity.

Having lived here on and off for over a decade, I know that the country’s achievements are not accidental. Much of what the world sees is grounded in the long-term vision of its leaders and enabled by a steely and unwavering determination to be simply the best. On the few occasions when I have had the privilege to meet some of the UAE’s national and business leaders, I have been blown away by their far sightedness, supreme confidence, and a belief that nothing is impossible. More than this, it is their ability to dream and imagine possible, coupled with the willingness to create the enabling environment for growth and advancement, that sets the UAE apart.

What is more remarkable is that these great strides have been achieved without jettisoning the past. In response to Wilfred Thesiger’s question about whether the UAE’s modern renaissance might not lead to the loss of innocence and the country’s naturalness of yore, the late Sheikh Zayed said this to his old friend, whom he described as an adventurer and traveller passing by: “We want our people to possess all the reasons of power and civilization and at the same time we will not abandon our past and history”. And they haven’t! This ability to blend the old with the new; to be authentic and progressive at the same time, is one of the hallmarks of this remarkable, young nation.

When looking towards the future of telecom, how do you think it will evolve, and what are some of the new trends?

Modern communications technology has already revolutionised the way we connect. Previous generations of mobile technology help us collapse time and distance. I believe that in the future, advancements in mobile communications, broadband and the internet will continue transforming our lives and opening new possibilities.

With its faster speeds, reduced latency, and increased capacity, 5G will enable seamless connectivity and new forms of interactions. This will bring ground-breaking innovations, like Apple Vision Pro that blends digital content with physical space, into the mainstream. Instead of smartphones, we may communicate via wearables.

These new devices and interaction models will impose greater capacity and performance requirements on ICT networks. Processing will be offloaded to the edge/cloud to keep devices lightweight and reduce heat dissipation. This will drive the need for ultra-fast connectivity. 5G and the cloud will enable new immersive experiences, whose disruptive impact will be felt across multiple sectors – from healthcare, transportation, and education to retail and financial services.

What are some of the proud initiatives you have driven during these years?

Ericsson and e& have a shared commitment to technology leadership. As one of the early adopters of technology, the UAE has always provided a platform for us to try out new things. Among these are launch of the first of 5G in the region and as well as a global first with native 5G voice (aka VoNR). Another is our collaboration with Etisalat by e& to demonstrate an uplink data peak rate of 2 Gbps on a commercial network using 5G dual connectivity (DC) and carrier aggregation. This was the first time such a high data speed had been achieved in the MENA region.

As we head towards COP 28 to be hosted in the UAE, I am especially proud of our partnership with Etisalat by e& to build more sustainable network and the success of our initial deployment that resulted in a substantial reduction in energy consumption of up to 52% without compromising the network quality and customer experience. One of the first projects of my early tenure in the role is the record time in which we deployed the mobile financial services platform that powers e& Life’s e& Money service. We have since extended this to e&’s subsidiary in Saudi Mobily with the launch of MobilyPay in the Kingdom’s vibrant fintech market.

Another initiative worth mentioning is the Together Apart Hackathon that has been running in various countries, including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, since 2021. The competition invites young innovators to present their innovative solutions showcasing the power of connectivity and 5G. A part of the grand prize was a visit to our headquarters in Sweden to exchange ideas with our technology experts and gain inspiration for future projects.

On the educational front, I am proud to have played a role in the launch of our Fresh Graduate Program in the UAE and Pakistan.  As part of our commitment to building ICT leaders of the future, the initiative has created an open ecosystem for research and implementation of innovative projects powered by 5G, and a healthy pipeline of young talent for our operations.

We are proud to be a member of the Champions 4.0 Network, an initiative spearheaded by the UAE Ministry of Industry and Advanced Technology (MoIAT) that aims to accelerate the integration of Fourth Industrial Revolution solutions across the industrial sector.

What are your interests and hobbies and who are your greatest influencers?

Although I studied Computer Science and later an MBA both of which have dictated the trajectory of my professional career, what defines me is my natural affinity for history and world affairs and in particular, an inexhaustible passion for the history of postcolonial Africa, interests in all things political, literary, track and field sports and of course, Arsenal Football Club.

I was hugely influenced by soul music and R&B growing up and enjoy modern hip-hop too. But I also adore the sacred music of JS Bach, the operas and concertos of WA Mozart, the grand symphonies and sublime piano works of Ludwig van Beethoven and revel in the effervescent popular musical genres of the Congo, Ghana, and Nigeria.

In terms of heroes, I don’t have many because all human beings are flawed. Still, there are a few whose visions, actions, and example, alter the course of mankind and of history and these I call my change makers. Preeminent among them is Kwame Nkrumah who led Ghana to become the first African country to achieve independence from Britain. It was no surprise that at the turn of the last century in 2000, he was voted ‘Africa’s Man of the Millennium’. I have since coming to the UAE added the late Sheikh Zayed to my very short list. His visionary leadership and best example of leader-as-servant of his people, is admirable and reflected arguably in the most remarkable transformation of any country. 

My favourite movie of all time is ‘Shawshank Redemption’ a riveting story about an escape from a notorious prison, with Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins. I also, for sentimental reasons, loved Richard Attenborough’s ‘Cry Freedom’ with Denzil Washington as the late anti-apartheid activist, Steve Biko who like Nelson Mandela sacrificed much for the freedom of their people.

As a student of history, I have been influenced by many writers too many to list. Among those whose works i have most admired in recent times are David Blight, the eminent Yale University Professor of American Civil War and Slavery and biographer of the great abolitionist, Frederik Douglass, a man born into slavery with no formal education, but blessed with an extraordinary gift of communication, he wrote prodigiously and persuasively on many subjects from law, philosophy to political science and art.  Like Sheikh Zayed, Douglass said he would never forget his “own humble origins”, nor cease “while Heaven lends me the ability to use my voice, my pen or my vote, to advocate the great and primary work of the universal and unconditional emancipation of my entire race”.

I have always been fascinated by the pioneers of my industry – from the folks who created the first public packet-switched computer network at ARPANET and those at the highly innovative Xerox PARC, to today’s so-called magnificent seven tech giants – who have given us the tools to improve and transform our lives in ways that were simply unimaginable a few decades ago.

It is no surprise, therefore, that Margaret O’Mara’s ‘The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America’ at the intersection of history and technology, a book I’d love to have written myself, is a clear favorite. It traces the history of Silicon Valley from the barren land it was in the early 20th century, to today’s haven of hyper-innovation and enormous wealth created through human ingenuity yes, but also enabled by careful and deliberate interventions by governments in search for a countervailing response to the growing technological advancement of the Soviet Union in electronics and space technologies.

The Valley has gone on to change much of our world. Among its greatest shapers who stand out for me are Bob Noyce (co-inventor of the integrated circuit) and Gordon Moore his partner at Intel; Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak for the Apple Mac and everything afterwards; Bob Metcalfe and Charles Thacker for Ethernet networking; Bob Khan and Vint Cerf for inventing the TCP/IP protocol that underlies all modern communications systems; and Andy Bechtolsheim of Arista Networks, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, formerly of Cisco and the man who gave Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google their first US$100,000 in 1998. The rest, as they say, is history!

 

What are your dreams in life?

My dream in life is to create the enabling environment for everyone to realise their full potential. That is why I am so passionate about technology because it enables change and empowers us to do many more things wherever and whenever we want to. We no longer have to go to the theatre to watch a movie or a concert hall to listen to music; we don’t have to go to the shops for essential purchases and in the future, we may not have to sit in our cars to drive them.

One of the most pressing challenges the world faces is climate change, and my hope is that we will be able to harness the power of technology to reverse the tide. But technology alone cannot solve this global challenge; it will also require changes in behaviors that derive from recognizing our stewardship towards the environment. That means not continuing to plunder the earth’s resources and treating its vast oceans as a waste bin. We each have a role to be more environmentally responsible and together we can assure a more sustainable world for future generations.

Above all my dream is for a more just and fairer world; that the many opportunities I have been privileged to enjoy are more widely available to anyone who so desires.

In the end, I dream of making time for what former British politician Denis Healy called one’s ‘hinterland’ – my absorbing passions and interests outside professional work – of writing about history, politics, and technology.

---

Thank you, Ekow for sharing your story! We wish you all the best with the coming years!

Ekow Nelson
LinkedIn
Website

Ghana’s descent into Raubwirtschaft – symptom of the failure of the western model of democracy

Constitutional democracy bequeathed us by Britain has failed. But we have nothing to replace it with
Ekow Nelson

Across former European colonies particularly in Africa, constitutional democracy was introduced as the system of governance at the fag-end of colonial rule. Western style constitutional democracy did not exist in Africa prior to colonisation and the colonisers themselves did not govern their colonies based on the principles of constitutional democracy – there were no elections, no parliament and only an executive branch to administer treaties and agreements on behalf of the monarch. Even where local courts existed to settle disputes, the final Court of Appeal was, in the case of Britain at least, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council appointed by the monarch in far away England- a vestigial relic that still operates in remaining British overseas territories in the Caribbean and elsewhere.

Africans, no matter how educated in the ways of the European elite, had no prior experience of the system of government they were force-handed at independence. Systems of governments are not invented overnight; they are part of the cultural fabric of how societies are organised and evolve over time. The history of the colonial powers themselves is testament to this.

The system of government in Britain today has its roots in Oliver Cromwell and the ‘Wars of the Three Kingdoms’ – of Roundheads and Cavaliers. France’s democratic history may be more recent but with antecedents in the storming of the Bastille in 1789 when the Ancien Régime of Louis XIV was overthrown. Germany has only existed as a nation-state since Otto von Bismarck brought together the kingdoms of Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony and Württemberg along with the Grand Duchies and Duchies, principalities, and three Hanseatic cities, including Bremen and Hamburg, in the late nineteenth century. Still, its federal structures and fierce independent identities of its constituent city states (Stadtstaaten) from Schleswig-Holstein in the north to Bavaria in the south, closely resemble the Bishoprics of the Holy Roman Empire from which they emerged.

The evidence shows that successful systems of government emerge from within and are a culmination of years of internal struggle, disagreements, conflicts (some of them tribal and ethnic) and the compromises and resolutions to these are what shape the settled status we call systems of governance.

For over one hundred years neither the British nor the French (or indeed the Portuguese, Belgians or Germans) administered their colonies in Africa based on the system we call constitutional democracy. Yet it has become an article of faith that this is the most appropriate system of government for post-independent Africa.

Apologists for empire argue that the legacy of constitutional democracy bequeathed us by Britain is one of the crowning achievements of empire because many / all of us continue to govern our countries on that basis. Except it isn’t working! From war-torn Sierra Leone to war-weary Ivory Coast, impoverished Togo and Benin, to Ghana and Nigeria both mired knee-deep in corruption with impunity, our constitutional democratic experiment is failing and it certainly isn’t delivering for the people. And yet our elite revel in interminable debates about articles, clauses and subsections in our constitutions, drafted by people we grandly refer to as ‘framers’.

When leaders of the 13 states came together to form the union of American States, they did so with the express wish to design something new that would subsume what existed prior. In that sense they were not just ‘framing’ a document, they were architecting a new nation state that would not only replace George III and his empire, but one that integrated and bound the existing states into a new federal union to which everyone owed allegiance.

We instead bolted an imported system of governance on to our complex and varied age-old traditional systems held together by a document many ordinary people can’t read and certainly don’t understand. Writing a constitution does not make a nation or a republic. It is a paper exercise that has failed to bridge the gulf between the principles it set out and the actual reality of the structure and needs of our society and of competing loyalties and allegiances.

The truth is our small band of western educated elite who authored and administered our western constitutions have no first hand knowledge of how it should work in practice, beyond legal showboating, nor are they invested in its success. On the contrary, they are experts in exploiting the extraordinary powers it confers on rulers for their own ends – to ‘chop’ and to loot – rather than develop and improve! We lack the institutional, muscle memory and habit-forming norms embedded in the alien democratic culture imposed on us and failed to adapt to our realities.

Successful ex-colonies like Singapore managed the experiment better; they adapted what they inherited for their local circumstances, jettisoning the parts they believed were not fit for purpose. In a speech to the Singapore Law Society in 1962, Lee Kuan Yew set out the challenge faced by ex-colonies who absorb without question, the constitutional and legal precepts of the colonial master. He said: “There is a gulf between the principles of the rule of law distilled to its essence in the background of peaceful 19th century England, and its actual practice in contemporary Britain. The gulf is even wider between the principle and its practical application in the hard realities of the social and economic conditions of Malaya. You will have to bridge the gulf between the ideal principle and its practice in our given sociological and economic milieu. For if the forms are not adapted and principles not adjusted to meet our own circumstances but blindly applied, it may be to our undoing.”

Lee Kuan Yew’s party has dominated the politics of Singapore since independence with most of the opposition crushed. Of its three Premiers since independence in 1965 two are from the same family – father Lee and son Lee Hsien Loong*. LKY also delivered a prosperous nation that is the envy of the world with almost no natural resources other than being in a strategic maritime location and as a beachhead for the emerging economic super power of the twenty-first century that is China.

In 1971 when British Prime Minister Edward Heath informed the Trucial Sheikhdoms of what is now the United Arab Emirates, that Britain was ending the treaty with Bhahrain and Qatar, that it could no longer afford to offer them the protection it had over the years, it came as a lightning bolt from nowhere to the rulers. As the late Sheikh Zayed of Abu Dhabi said, the decision came as a big shock – all of a sudden, they were left to their own devices. They had no army or any semblance of a civil service and had to create one in short order before the British withdrawal.

Sheikh Zayed calmly gathered the rulers of Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Fujairah, Bhahrain and Qatar to agree on a union because as individual sheikhdoms they knew they could not survive on their own. Building on their traditional forms of governance, they painstakingly stitched together a system of government that wobbled at the beginning (leading to the exit of Qatar and Bahrain who struck out on their own) but has since stood the test of time, admitting Ras Al Khaimah and Umm Al Quwain into the Union along the way.

What they’ve achieved cannot be attributed only to the undoubted vast wealth from the oil of Abu Dhabi. After all Angola and Nigeria and now Ghana, have plenty of oil and it hasn’t helped. Besides we in Africa too are endowed with many natural riches from gold, diamonds to copper and many other resources that have been indispensable to the accumulation of wealth from the success of the industrial and digital revolutions of the past couple centuries.

Much of what these other nations achieved is through human ingenuity and a determination to make the most of what they had and never again to be at the mercy of a foreign power that would leave them unprotected and defenceless in a very volatile region of the world.

We did not get that. Perhaps we are too fractious a people (see neighbouring Ivory Coast for example) to have made the most of that opportunity to determine our own future. We may have ended ethnic rivalry through wars, but residual ethnic tensions (aka tribalism) spilled over into other spheres – in the civil service and armed forces in particular, and have since undermined national unity of the kind one finds in the Gulf countries and south east Asia.

Instead, Ghana has had four constitutions since independence, interrupted by four military regimes and we seem to be going backwards when others have made huge strides forwards in their development. The gulf between our constitution and native systems of governance grows ever wider as we alienate and sideline that which is authentically ours.

The institutional safeguards of the Fourth Republic that should act as a bulwark against impunity have proven powerless and ineffective. Parliament does not hold the executive to account with the two main parties behaving like a cartel, colluding to share in the spoils of power and patronage. There are no guardrails.

The finance minister and his henchmen have all but captured the state and numerous boards of state-owned organisations packed with friends and family, lobbyists and journalists (many with no prior corporate experience) who are sympathetic to the government. The judiciary holds anyone who questions its impartiality in contempt. And our last line of defence, quasi-independent institutions like the Auditor-General and the Office of Special Prosecution, have been emasculated with their former ‘too-known’ heads removed for investigative overreach.

Without being overly dramatic what we have constructed is a Raubwirtschaft (a looting and plunder economy) of the kind that presaged the decline of the western Roman Empire. And there is nowhere to turn as we stare into the abyss of despair, until 2024 when the electorate is called upon again to vote – with the usual inducements.

Herein lies the weakness of the constitutional democracy we were bequeathed – massive impunity with no form of effective accountability between elections while the ship of state sinks. This is clearly intolerable but it is also ominous.

We all know what happened when the western Roman Empire fell; the Barbarians took over and Europe entered the Dark Ages or saeculum obscurum (whose literal translation in English I shall leave to readers to lookup for themselves) as the cardinal historian Caesar Baronius named it.

(c) Ekow Nelson
London, August 2023

* In contrast with Singapore, Ghana has had 12 heads of state since independence in 1957 and only three Asantehenes in that period.

An epitaph for the aborted story of Britain in Europe

It’s seven years since Britain voted to leave the EU. It was not until January 2020 after Boris Johnson was elected Prime Minister that Britain actually left the Union after 47 years.

Among the many requiems written to mark or lament our departure, was this column by the NYT’s Richard Cohen which best captured the significance of the loss.

First my preface:

“When Richard Cohen is on top of his game, his is as lyrical as the best :

“Poorer materially, of course, but above all poorer in its shriveled soul, divorced from its neighborhood, internally fractured, smaller, meaner, more insular, more alone, no longer a protagonist in the great miracle of the postwar years”

“Britain, in a fit of deluded jingoism, has opted for littleness.”

Above all, Cohen is absolutely right in his final obsequies for the UK in Europe. The pain is palpable. Britain was great as an empire. It was never great the small island Brexiteer have condemned it to. So this delusion of a return to greatness is befuddling as David Reynolds observed in “Island Stories”. Indeed the surprise was that England rose to become an empire that ruled over 25 percent of the world.

Professor Reynolds quotes Francois Crouzet : “it is a mistake to think that England’s original supremacy normal and her decline abnormal”. On the contrary, what needs explanation, Reynolds avers, “is the original supremacy”. And much of supremacy can be explained by the “lucrative Atlantic slave trade” . Reynolds writes: “half of all Africans carried into slavery during the eighteenth century were transported on British vessels -and the profits for that trade lubricated [his word] Britain’s commercial and industrial revolutions”.

Brexit May well be the swan song for the end of the British empire – finally !

Ekow – February 2020

Abu Dhabi

Requiem for a Dream

Britain exits Europe. It will be poorer, above all in its shriveled heart.

By Roger Cohen

Opinion Columnist

• Jan. 31, 2020

I have covered many stories that marked me over the past 40 years, in war zones and outside them, but none that has affected me as personally as Britain’s exit from the European Union. Brexit Day, now upon us, feels like the end of hope, a moral collapse, a self-amputation that will make the country where I grew up poorer in every sense.

Poorer materially, of course, but above all poorer in its shriveled soul, divorced from its neighborhood, internally fractured, smaller, meaner, more insular, more alone, no longer a protagonist in the great miracle of the postwar years — Europe’s journey toward borderless peace and union. Britain, in a fit of deluded jingoism, has opted for littleness.

The fiasco was captured this week when that pompous and pitiful British nationalist, Nigel Farage, waved a miniature Union Jack in the European Parliament as he bid farewell and was cut off by the vice-president of the Parliament, Mairead McGuinness. “Put your flags away, you’re leaving, and take them with you,” she said.

Farage looked like a sheepish schoolboy caught breaking rules. He blushed. An Irish woman from a country uplifted by European Union membership reprimanding the new breed of little-England male as he exits history in pursuit of an illusion: the symbolism was perfect. “Hip, hip hooray!” Farage’s flag-waving Brexit Party cohorts chanted. Save me, please, for I shall weep.

Speaking of symbolism, the fact that President Trump has been a fulsome supporter of this folly is apt. An ahistorical, amoral American leader cheering on a British abdication sums up the end of an era. The world was rebuilt after 1945 on something of more substance than British-American lies and bloviation; it took resolve. The torch has passed. To whom exactly is unclear, perhaps to a country slow to contain a plague. That is a problem.

Brexit belongs to this era in one quintessential way. It is an act of the imagination, inspired by an imaginary past, carried along by misdirected grievances, borne aloft by an imaginary future. The age of impunity is also the age of illusion turbocharged by social media.

Inequality, poor infrastructure, low investment, inadequate schools are real British problems but the take-back-your-country transference of blame for them onto “Brussels bureaucrats” proved that the imagination now overwhelms reality. Truth withers. The mob roars. This, too, is a problem.

Yes, Britain was undefeated in World War II and helped liberate Europe. But it could do so only with its allies; and it was precisely to secure what it is now turning its back on: a free Europe offering its people the “simple joys and hopes which make life worth living.” Those are Churchill’s words in 1946 in a speech that also contained this phrase: “We must build a kind of United States of Europe.” Unbowed Britain was once consequential Britain; no longer.

I used the word “abdication” advisedly. Europe needs the great tradition of British liberalism at a moment when Hungary and Poland have veered toward nationalism and, across the Continent, xenophobic hatred is resurgent. It is perverse for Britain to try to look away. Europe is part of Britain. Visit the great Norman monasteries in England and tell me this is not so. The British dead who lie in the Continent’s soil having given their lives for its liberty tell the same story of interlaced fate from a different perspective.

To be so orphaned is painful. The 47 years of British membership cover the entire arc of my adult life. Europa was our dream. I covered Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president, speaking to the European Parliament about hope and peace in 1981, eight months before his assassination. So much for dreams.

Yet they persist, for otherwise life is unlivable. I wandered from Brussels to Rome to Paris to Berlin to London and everywhere I lived I experienced some iteration of Europe’s beauty, as a physical thing, as a cultural bond and as a transformative idea.

The sensation was most acute in Germany, where the idea of the union was the most effective escape from postwar shame and the rubble of 1945, a form of atonement. But it was ubiquitous, the guarantor of our deliverance and the symbol of our capacity to reinvent the world and even make it better.

Every European country, through the goal of ever closer union, changed itself. They grew richer, no small thing. But they also reframed their self-image.

Italy and Spain left Mussolini and Franco behind to become stable, prosperous democracies. France found its tortuous way to truth after the humiliations and predations of Vichy and discovered a European avenue to express once more its universal message of human rights founded on human dignity.

Central European countries stabilized their escape from the deadening Soviet imperium to which Yalta had confined them. Britain ceased equating Europe with scourges like intellectuals, rabies and garlic, as it had in my childhood. Hyde Park became a babble of European tongues. The British economy surged. Britain had given up its colonies and found a new identity in association with Europe, or so it seemed, flickeringly.

Then I lived in Sarajevo covering the Bosnian war and I saw, in inert bodies torn by shrapnel, and in history revived as galvanizing myth of might and conquest, the horror from which the European Union had saved my generation. It had laid bad history to rest. That was enough to be forever a European patriot.

But not enough for the British a quarter-century later. In the words of my friend Ed Vulliamy, who also covered that war, Britain has become a country “that boards cheap flights for stag outings to piss all over Krakow.”

Hip, hip hooray!

When I lived in Berlin, I would cross the nearby Polish border and never failed to marvel that where millions had perished decades earlier a nonexistent frontier traced its invisible line across fields of wheat. I would pass from the German world to the lands of the Slavs and nobody asked me who I was, what papers I bore or what was my intent.

If German-Polish reconciliation has been possible, anything is possible, my only solace at this moment. A bunch of flag-waving fantasists, at the wrong end of actuarial tables, have robbed British youth of the Europe they embrace. They will be looking on as 450 million Europeans across the way forge their fate. Their automatic right to live and work anywhere from Lisbon to Stockholm will be lost.

I’ve lost a limb; more than a limb, my heart. Europe helped Britain grow bigger and more open and more prosperous. Now it will shrink. Another suffering friend, Patrick Wintour, the diplomatic editor of The Guardian, sent me these lines of Auden:

In the nightmare of the dark

All the dogs of Europe bark,

And the living nations wait,

Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace

Stares from every human face,

And the seas of pity lie

Locked and frozen in each eye.

A better epitaph for the aborted story of Britain in Europe and the tragedy of a disoriented nation’s willful infliction of enduring self-harm is impossible to imagine.

Broadcaster and commentator Winston Davies passes

Ekow Nelson, December 2021

I learned from Unco Ade yesterday that former GBC TV sportscaster and personality Winston Davies had passed in London.

I met Winston twice in my life: once in his offices (for his day job) in Accra when I was soliciting sponsorship for an event I was organising. The second was at a funeral in London. But I grew up with his voice as a football commentator every Sunday when there was televised KBL-sponsored soccer.

Between him and Edward Faakye (of Ghana Television News) and later, Prof Ivan Addae-Mensah, they provided much eloquent commentary that was as delightful to listen to as the game that was being played. I could never tire of the dulcet tones of his voice – indeed I never wanted to him to stop speaking.

All seasoned commentators have well-rehearsed lines they deploy as needed. The best ones made them sound effortless and off-the-cuff and Winston perfected the art. I used to have a stock of memorable Winston Davies riffs but with the passage of time they have faded. One remains forever etched in my memory, however. A beautiful pass was threaded to the feet of the centre forward of an attacking team, but with almost no defence between him and the goal post, he shot wide and missed the chance. As soon as he did, an instantaneous, thunderous admonition boomed from Winston in the commentary box with, “what a lackadaisical approach at goal!” Whereupon we all reached for the dictionary.

He was great man of language and words. He once told me how his love for language was cultivated growing up in Kumasi, inspired by the legendary sociologist, Dr. Alex Kyeremanteng, to whom an entire generation owed their literacy and fondness for reading and language.

No wonder when another great literary figure, the late Kofi Awoonor, passed, Winston paid him the following eloquent tribute:

“This news has taken us all by surprise leading to a lot of unanswered questions.

I really don’t know why he went there but knowing him he had friends in both academia and the diplomatic world so he might have been on a personal/private or a professional one. No one is saying as yet.

This is a man I have known most of my adult life. He was a very good friend of my late uncle and a bosom companion of my brother-in-law, so I always found my self in his company, in Ghana or in New York.

As an educator he had very few equals and as a friend he was not only trustworthy but also one who stuck to you through thick and thin.

His command of the English language made him unique in our world. He chose his words very carefully for both substance and weight. He never wasted a word and that quality endeared him to some of us mere mortals.

Ghana has lost a very illustrious son and he will be sorely missed. May he rest peacefully in the arms of The Lord.

So I have started my mourning process.

Winston Davis
Former GBV-TV Sportscaster & Personality
London, UK, September 26, 2013”

It’s a shame that like many other capable people, Winston had to leave Ghana to settle abroad and deprive us of this most natural-born of raconteurs.

I know he was an avid rugby fan too. He was quick to remind me during a World Cup tournament, when I was supporting England and sharing ‘Swing lo, sweet chariot’, that he was a fan of Welsh rugby (he was part Welsh) and was almost always overcome with emotion whenever their national anthem, “Land of their fathers”, was sung by The Dragons. Here is a typical scene https://youtu.be/AM4mIlYKG9s Real goose pimple stuff; and it shall be my abiding memory of a man I did not know well but whom I held in great admiration all of my life

Rest in Peace, Sir!

Ekow Nelson

December 2021

Fifty years after the first mobile phone call what’s next?

Air Mail Letter of yore

Ekow Nelson

The first mobile telephone call was made 50 years ago in April 1973.

On Christmas Day 2018, my team made the first 5G voice call in the Middle East over the first commercial 5G network in the UAE. While many others were digging into their roast turkey, we huddled in an old telephone exchange building by the Airport road in Abu Dhabi as we tried valiantly to score another first for the record books. But what else could this new 5G technology be used for?

Triumph at last! When we made the first 5G data call on December 25th, 2018

As with previous generations of mobile technology, the useful application of 5G beyond voice and faster connectivity, remain elusive but it got me thinking about how we as an industry have attempted to tackle two of three remaining barriers to communications: time and distance (space). The third, and possibly the most intractable challenge which emerging Generative AI may well help us crack, is real-time multilingual communications but that is not the subject of this piece. Here is a slightly modified version of what I wrote then.

In years gone by everything was local. The food we ate came from the farm next door, water from the local stream, or river or below the water table under our feet. Our houses were built from local materials and the carpenter was known to us as was the blacksmith who forged local metals. We shopped for essentials in local markets which also doubled as social meeting places.

Today, many of us do not know the source of the food or meat we eat. Our water may be sourced from rivers well beyond our local communities, even imported from natural springs in the hills of Europe or Australia.

We don’t have to visit the local market for our groceries; we purchase them online as we do our books and pretty much anything we need. And we meet on social media and in other virtual hang outs.

The houses we live in may be built by local work men but the materials come from many places. Tiles and ceramics may be from Caltagirione in Sicily (if you can afford them), Windows and doors from Guangzhou in China, furniture from Roche Bois Bois in Paris or Malaysia and roofing from some other part of China.

In the early years of humankind our conversations were limited to those in close proximity to us – neighbours, local communities, friends and family. Even the loudest voice in the neighbourhood got attenuated at some distance. The closest we had to broadcast were sanctioned announcements in public places – ‘dawuro’ in Akan, when a town crier shared an important community announcement like the death of a King or of a muezzin calling Muslims to prayer.

Thanks to communications technology our daily conversations are no longer limited to neighbours; we communicate with family and friends as far apart as Asankragwa and Tokyo through mobile telephony, WhatsApp and social media. Attenuation has been conquered and our ‘voices’ can be heard far and wide.

We see who we are talking to live, regardless of where they are. We can have group discussions much like old community gatherings in villages except the participants can be anywhere in the world. We form and disband groups at will; join and exit others as we please.

The church, mosque or village noticeboards are no longer the main places for public announcements and while muezzins still perform their sacred duty, ‘dawuro’ has become extinct and Town criers are no longer necessary thanks to new media that afford us far better and targeted reach than ever before. Radio (or wireless), the pride of many households of yore, is no longer a transfusion box or gadget but an application accessible from the internet. Gone are the shortwave, longwave radios, 90M Bands and the statics too !

As a kid growing up in Ghana, I would have had to make an astronomically expensive ‘Trunk Call’ to wish you a Happy New Year and even then I could not have done so on a mass scale as I can now with a simple online posting. I may have written you an ‘Air Mail’ letter on one of those blue coloured sheets but it would have taken a few days, possibly a week, to get to any of you from where I am in the desert.

We may not know where the meat on our plate came from but we can track its origins to the farm and cattle that produced it. In short we live locally but we consume and communicate globally.

Much of this transformation has been made possible by advances in communications technology – telephony, broadband, the web etc. With these technologies we have transformed our world beyond recognition, created new possibilities, business, social and behavioural models that were unthinkable only a few years ago.

Underpinning these technologies is the quest to solve two age-old barriers to communications in the physical world: time and distance. Fifty years ago, when the first mobile phone call was made, we opened a new frontier and generations of mobile technology have since built on earlier attempts by broadcast and fixed telephony, to shrink time and distance further.

The first global, mass mobile communication system deployed in the early 1990s was 2G. It allowed us, for the first time, to communicate untethered, from a fixed location outside our homes, unencumbered by wiring. More than that, we could communicate with anyone while on the move.

In the early years, when the idea of talking to another person while on the move without any wiring, was a novelty, mobile telephony was also known as “me gina abonten”. With the 2G revolution we stopped connecting only (fixed) places – strictly speaking, fixed telephony was assigned to households,, offices – and started connecting individuals wherever they were. Whether at home, in the gym, at a friend’s house or in a taxi, anyone could now be reached at the same number regardless of location.

The next generation of communications, 3G, allowed us to use the mobile device for more than voice – we connected to the internet and browsed the web; did emails and even watched some movies. Fourth generation (4G) mobile communications, along with smartphones and their ecosystem of applications spawned a new App economy worth over 6 trillion US Dollars, or 7 percent of global output. Today we live our lives through these devices with an App for everything – from healthcare, fitness, travel, entertainment, retail to digital banking, payments and much else besides.

With 5G, IoT, AI and other advanced technologies, doctors may yet be able to perform surgery on a patient thousands of miles away as we continue to shrink time and space and make the world a smaller and a much better place for all, Inshalla!

To you all at the dawn of a new era in communications with 5G, Happy New Year !

December 2018

Abu Dhabi

The world lost a language stylist extraordinaire in Martin Amis

The talented and glamorous English trio of Martin Amis (centre), Christopher Hitchens and Tina Brown who took on the publishing world and America

Ekow Nelson

https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2023/may/20/martin-amis-era-defining-british-novelist-dies-aged-73

Martin Amis, arguably the most stylish writer in the English language of his generation has passed from oesophageal cancer at his home in Florida.

He burst on to the British literary scene in the early 1970s with the publication of The Rachel Papers, his first and most garlanded work. Along with his longtime friend Christopher Hitchens, they were the ‘les enfants terrible’ of the 1970s and 80s literary world. Chain smoking, womanising and always with a drink in hand, they enraptured the reading public and the chattering classes with their provocative and often contrarian essays and articles that captured the zeitgeist of the Thatcher years.

Dashing in appearance as he was dazzling in his writing, the broadcaster and writer Melvyn Bragg once described him as the “good-looking bad guy of late 20th-century English Lit”. He was a model for younger, wannabe writers, many of whom went on to achieve success and fame. Zadie Smith, Megan Nolan, Nicola Barker and Will Self are among his admirers who admit to having been influenced by him.

He was a writer about whom the word, ‘wordsmith’, was a most apposite description. A great exemplar of writing as art, he constructed sentences and paragraphs as Picasso would a painting, Henry Moore a sculpture and Frank Lloyd Wright a building. As one of the many obits doing the rounds noted, Amis was a “stylist extraordinaire ….brilliantly witty and a fearless writer”.

Amis wrote with rhythm and supreme elegance, often speaking about the “music of sentences”. And his sentences had as many words as were necessary, but the right ones too. In an interview at the University of Chicago, he explained his painstaking process of composition (in the truest sense of the word) as follows: “The style is, I hope, does not vaunt itself at all: every sentence has a minimum elegance and euphony. And really the process is saying the sentence – subvocalising it in your head – until there is nothing wrong with it. This means not repeating in the same sentence suffixes and prefixes. If you’ve got a ‘confound’ you can’t have a ‘conform’ ; if you’ve got ‘invitation’ you can’t have ‘execution’. You can’t repeat the ‘ing’ or ‘ness’; that has to be one per sentence! I think the prose will give a sort of pleasure without you being able to tell why. That is what I hope”.

In my review of books and podcasts of 2020, I wrote this: “I am now reading Obama’s ‘The Promised Land’, and Martin Amis’s ‘Inside Story’ on his friendships with various writers including his close friend and confidante, the polemicist, the late Christopher Hitchens. Amis and Obama are such good writers I am savouring every word, sentence, paragraph and chapter with no desire to finish either book in a hurry.” As the writer Christian Lorentzen put it, “sometimes the worst thing about a sentence is the full stop.”

He may not have won any of the grand literary prizes of contemporaries such as Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan or Julian Barnes but as The New Yorker acknowledged in an article in 2018, few writers are as rapt and rigorous in their celebration of prose.

For me, however, Amis the unconventional, the intellectual-provocateur – a reputation he shared with his friend Christopher Hitchens – is who I found most endearing.

In the first of his 1993 Reith Lectures, the late Edward Said profiled protagonists from three 19th and 20th century novels to underscore his definition of an intellectual whose duty, he argued, is to challenge the status quo, raise embarrassing questions, confront orthodoxy and dogma rather than produce them. Of the three, Amis most resembles Yevgény Bazarov, the main character in Ivan Turgenev’s ‘Fathers and Sons’, who in the words of Said “appears, … challenges, and, just as abruptly, … dies”. Seventy-three is rather too young!

As Said reminds us in the lectures, Bazarov “severed his ties with his own parents and seems less a son than a sort of self-produced character, challenging routine, assailing mediocrity and cliches.” Amis’s own strained relationship with his father was born out of neglect and abandonment by the older Kingsley who walked out on Martin’s mother. Like Bazarov, Amis too loathed clichés and railed against them routinely. He even titled his collection of literary articles The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000.

But the similarity was deeper than that. What we remember of Bazarov, Professor Said wrote “is the sheer unremitting force of his questing and deeply confrontational intellect, and although Turgenev claimed actually to have believed he was his most sympathetic character, even he was mystified and to some extent stopped by Bazarov’s heedless intellectual force as well as by his readers’ quite bewilderingly turbulent reactions. In the end, Fathers and Sons cannot accommodate Bazarov to the narrative; …his peremptoriness and defiance as an intellectual lift him out of the story, unaccommodated to it and somehow not fit for domestication”.

Amis too could not be accommodated at home in England and followed in the footsteps of his friends, Hitchens and Tina Brown (long time editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker), and made his home in United States.

Almost in spite of his patrimony, he appeared on the British literary scene with a sudden blast; provoked, achieved celebrity status in no time, and left in much the same way – every major national newspaper today leads with his passing and the loss that is England’s. May he rest in peace.

Ekow Nelson

May 2023, Abu Dhabi