Wednesday, June 15, 2022

When the Establishment No Longer Calls the Shots in Writing History

From Tiananmen Square to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, deciding how the past is remembered is one of the invisible roles of rulers. But newer social movements are challenging whether the narrator should be a hero or a villain

A statue of Confederate States President Jefferson Davis lies on the street after protesters pulled it down in Virginia in 2020
/ Parker Michels-Boyce / AFP via Getty Images


“What you can’t do is go around seeking to change our history retrospectively,” proclaimed British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in January 2022, “or to bowdlerize it or edit it in retrospect.” The prime minister was reacting to a jury verdict acquitting four protesters who had joined a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Bristol, England, in June 2020. The four were prosecuted for toppling a public statue of the 18th-century philanthropist and slave merchant Edward Colston.

One Conservative member of Parliament, Tom Hunt, added that the verdict would give a “green light for all sorts of political extremists . . . to ransack our past.” Another party member and former minister, Tim Loughton, objected that the jury decision “effectively allows anyone to rip down statues, vandalize public art and memorials or desecrate buildings because they disagree with what they stand for.” But the left-leaning writer Nesrine Malik fired back, accusing these Tory grandees of overlooking “deep inequalities that run, like cracks, from the past to the present.” Malik cast British history as a “legacy of supremacy, both racial and national” — a legacy that still lives on “not just in our streets and squares but in our politics, our education and our economy.” Malik charged that the country remains “as delusional about the moral integrity of its colonial heroes as it is about the health of its race and ethnic relations.”

Nothing about these disputes is uniquely British. Iconoclasm dates back over millennia, recurring in many cultures during turbulent times. When rival factions clash, their politics end up tied to memory. Moreover, in today’s world, social media fuel street rebellions by increasing their payoff, particularly when monuments seem to glorify, say, European imperialism or the American Confederacy. Militants who deface these displays enjoy instant audiences and can spark global movements — or rather, they can do so if they live within sufficiently open societies. After all, China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre claimed over 10,000 victims, yet when Hong Kong universities removed public memorials commemorating it in 2021, barely a peep was heard. Few Chinese can afford to ruin their or their families’ lives by candidly challenging official histories. The ordinary citizen cannot even obtain basic information about the uprising (China has banned search engines such as Google and Yahoo, allowing only more restricted ones), so many people know little about it.

The warning sounded by George Orwell back in 1949 still rings true today: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” This raises a question that is relevant from Bristol to Beijing: Can we discover any patterns in how governments around the world promote public understanding of history?

Official histories usually glorify the state’s heroes, lament its victims and condemn its enemies — but rarely do such histories proclaim open remorse for past sins. Those that do tend to come from democratic rather than autocratic governments, even if the line between the two is sometimes hard to draw.

One context in which officials openly condemn their own state’s past is revolution, as far as the new government proclaims a sharp break with its predecessor. By emphatically charging the old order with wrongdoing, the new regime aims to bolster its public approval. The French revolutionaries of 1789 were eager to proclaim the state’s past injustices so the revolutionaries could then be seen as legitimate, rightly overthrowing the brutal and corrupt ancien rĂ©gime. They presented the aristocracy as traitors, as aliens, as part of the “they” and not part of the “we,” or even as a kind of foreign occupying force. In the 20th century, Bolsheviks condemned tsarism in similar terms, just as Mao’s cultural revolution turned on older imperial remnants. Cuba, Nicaragua and others furnish further examples. In these revolutionary contexts the government realigns itself with the state, as if it were not only the government but also the state itself that was being renewed. The new officials feel confident about condemning the state’s past wrongdoings as a means of justifying the overthrow of their predecessors.

Yet revolutions are the exception in history. Most of the time officials wish to exhibit continuity between the state and government. They hesitate to condemn past evils committed by their own states, particularly when those evils do not lie far back in time, because that would mean condemning some predecessor government along with often vast portions of the population who supported it. After the demise of leaders such as Italy’s Benito Mussolini and Spain’s Francisco Franco, any official proclamations of their crimes became a perilous affair, likely to spark outrage and faction, likely to divide populations and even families. Former administrators and supporters of those regimes — also called collaborators, depending on where you stand — were still alive, often still young and professionally or civically active. For many governments, silence seems to offer the only pathway toward national reconciliation.

Today, we can make sense of the politics of memory, of who is remembered and how, by starting with four assumptions. Each of them, it seems, is uncontroversial. First, most nations today have emerged because someone exerted power over others, whether that power be military, economic, ethnic, national, religious, gender-based or something else. Second, those power differentials have bred injustices, at least in the eyes of later generations, if not always from the standpoint of those who held power at the time. Third, it remains rare for governments to publicly proclaim their own responsibility for histories of mass and systemic injustice. Official histories usually glorify their own heroes, lament their own victims and condemn their real or fabricated enemies — but rarely do they proclaim open remorse for the state’s own wrongdoings, at least insofar as the existing constitutional order is still largely in place. Indeed, highly autocratic governments sanitize history by turning such acts into taboos, as in North Korea, China, Russia, Turkey and elsewhere. Democratic regimes may be more inclined to issue such statements, but the wording is often parsimonious since officials seek to avoid not only political backlash but also lawsuits from victims or their descendants who may be numerous and may demand large sums in compensation.

Yet despite all such obstacles, governments do, from time to time, confess past wrongs, which leads us to the fourth precept: The dividing line between the governments that are willing to acknowledge guilt and those that are not falls largely between democracy and autocracy — even if boundaries between these two terms have become ever harder to draw. Not only between democracies and autocracies, but also within democracies we witness autocrats like former U.S. President Donald Trump, France’s far-right provocateur politician Eric Zemmour or the former leader of Germany’s right-wing Alternative for Germany party Alexander Gauland pushing against self-critical histories in favor of sanitized national histories. To be sure, officials within democracies generally have an easy enough time apologizing for incidental mishaps, for example, by openly apologizing for the death of a military recruit who has been killed in a botched military exercise. The harder task is to take responsibility for mass injustices.

Only after World War II do we witness a break from those habits of silence and avoidance, most notably in what was then West Germany, when the government and intelligentsia adopted the narrative of a collectively responsible “we.” The disgraced Nazi regime would henceforth be treated not as “other” but as part of an ongoing history for which present and future governments would have to take responsibility. This has come to be known as “Erinnerungskultur,” literally “memory culture.” The phrase may sound stilted in Anglophone ears, but it has become mainstream, almost colloquial in Germany, where it no longer sounds novel or exotic.

To be sure, public consciousness is one thing, but public consensus is another. Even in Germany’s political mainstream, commemorative projects spur controversy. Berlin’s massive Holocaust memorial, built in 2005, has long sparked quarrels about its aims and design. For many people, its conception seems inappropriately amorphous; at worst, there is the unseemly reality that visitors can easily flaunt their disrespect. Similarly, since reunification in 1990, disputes surrounding the former East Germany have proved contentious around topics like the dictatorship’s political legitimacy, its citizens’ participation in it, and West Germany’s overt and covert dealings with it during the Cold War. And yet surely all these disputes display not the weaknesses of Erinnerungskultur but its strengths. If democracies thrive through collective self-examination, then surely they offer a natural home for self-critical histories. When people like Trump reject critically minded memory, they reject the very idea of democracy as an arena for collective and deliberative reflection.

Obviously, stories of national guilt need not eclipse all others, nor do stories of national loss need to be excised. Russian or Polish authorities can credibly commemorate mass sufferings at the hands of Nazis. China can justifiably remember atrocities committed by Japan. Vietnam and Cambodia can rightly recall the victims of American war crimes. But when officials entrench mythologies about their nation solely as the hero or the victim, silencing any discussion about its role as a perpetrator, then they take ever further steps away from democracy itself. The problem is not that there is necessarily autocracy wherever we find sanitized history, but the converse: Wherever we find autocracy, we are sure to find sanitized history. In the same way, we do not necessarily find self-critical history wherever we find democracy, but the converse: Wherever we find self-critical history, we can surely expect to find at least incipient, if not yet full-fledged, democracy.

One hotly disputed by-product of Erinnerungskultur has been Germany’s ban on public statements that deny the occurrence or the extent of the Holocaust. Such a ban, also adopted in France and many other Western democracies, ends up placing one civic value above another, since the government’s constitutional duty to protect free expression becomes subordinated to a collective ethical duty of remembrance. The anti-denialist law coerces citizens either to confirm both the existence of the Holocaust and its gravity, or to dodge the matter when speaking publicly. What results is a rift in memory politics. In opting for such bans, countries like Germany or France subscribe to “militant democracy” as immortalized in the words of the 18th-century Jacobin Louis Antoine de Saint-Just: “no freedom for the enemies of freedom.” That philosophy contrasts with the Anglosphere’s traditionally laissez-faire policies, where governments certainly engage in commemorative activities yet prefer to leave much of the discussion, debate and research in the hands of citizens without imposing bans, as in the United States, or imposing comparatively mild ones, as in Britain.

Despite such surface disagreements between contemporary democracies, we should not exaggerate the divergences between Western European and Anglo-American attitudes. What unites them is a goal of strengthening the democratic public sphere, even if they dispute the best means of achieving that goal. In the past I have criticized speech bans by arguing that democracy cannot legitimately subordinate free expression to historical commemoration. I continue to hold that view, yet the difference between the age-old policies of officially self-glorifying histories and this newer, self-critical stance reveals something unprecedented, indeed admirable, about the German and French policies. Whatever may be the advantages and disadvantages of their speech bans, the anti-denialist laws contrast starkly with, for example, Poland’s 2018 legislation imposing criminal penalties on speakers who blame the Polish state or nation for complicity in Nazi atrocities.

What’s the difference? Polish authorities like to equate their ban with the German one, defending their crackdowns by arguing that Germany does the same. Yet the aims and effects of the two countries’ bans could not be more different. For all its faults, the German ban adopts the democratically credible stance of acknowledging the nation’s wrongdoings, while the Polish ban merely defaults to the old sanitizing rhetoric of officials proclaiming their nation’s heroism or victimhood. The Polish ban penalizes references to historically documented events, while the German one primarily obstructs the dissemination of patent falsehoods and conspiracy theories (which, incidentally, tend to be laced with hefty doses of antisemitism). The German ban raises concerns about democracy as far as it curbs speech, and yet it strengthens democracy by entrenching a culture of collective self-criticism. The Polish policy fails on both counts.

Apologists for the Polish ban complain that frequent references to “Polish” concentration camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec or Sobibor, which the Nazis built in the occupied country, run the risk of misleading the public by suggesting that those compounds had been managed under Polish authority. But that’s a poor excuse. Warsaw’s lawmakers know that there are alternative means of avoiding that error without having to adopt a law so blatantly designed to curtail public discussion and scholarly research about Poles’ wartime crimes. Polish officials’ bad faith is underscored when we recall that, even before 2018, the governing party had sought to bring prosecutions for criminal libel against the Polish-American historian Jan Gross, who has published research on atrocities committed by Poles against Jews during the war.

It is important to add that Germany has also promoted measures that are less coercive but more effective — measures that can advance Erinnerungskultur without having to punish speakers. In particular, German school curricula do much to promote Holocaust and wartime education, often including guided class trips to former concentration camps, as well as long-standing policies within the mass media to expand documentary programming, and promotion of information and discussion through museums and other public forums.

Similar policies have been adopted by other Western nations, yet not without backlashes. In former imperial powers such as Britain, France or the Netherlands, it has become increasingly untenable to discuss the achievements of the empire without paying serious and even primary attention to the prices paid by colonized and Indigenous peoples. Recently in the Netherlands, some commentators have argued that the time has come to stop calling the 17th century — the era of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals, Spinoza, Huygens, the world’s first stock exchange and the Dutch East India Company — the “Golden Age,” given blights of slavery, poverty, imperialism and warfare that followed on its heels. Meanwhile, in recent decades American classrooms have devoted greater attention to the bleak pasts of slavery and Jim Crow along with the brutalization of various Indigenous and immigrant peoples yet have simultaneously faced hostility from reactionaries who seek to erase or downplay those histories and would restore schoolbooks to tales of Anglo-Saxon glory.

Despite the emergence of more self-critical official histories, it is self-glorification that continues to dominate throughout much of the world. People who face struggles in their daily lives may feel little sympathy for victims and events that seem far away. Many crave collective pride, not collective shame. Few politicians score points by telling the nation how horrid its ancestors were. Yet democracies have no other option. Self-critical history is not only a necessary ingredient of truth-telling at home but also of credibility abroad if democracies are to challenge others about past and present human rights violations.

Against the backdrop of official histories, how and why did this new countercurrent of self-criticism start to emerge? After all, self-evaluation is an ancient norm, found in many cultures and belief systems. Socrates launched much of Western philosophy by embracing such self-criticism, and yet he urged it only on individuals, not on governments acting in their official capacities. Similarly, we cannot rule out the origins of autocritique in medieval Christian practices of self-chastisement, yet here, too, such rituals were individual, never formally instituted as government practice.

The late Middle Ages and Renaissance gave rise to “mirrors for princes” and “mirrors for magistrates,” namely handbooks for rulers on good governance that highlight the value of self-reflection. These texts urged leaders to embrace self-mediating qualities of humility, compassion and other such virtues of benign government (as poignantly ironized in Shakespeare’s mirror-smashing moment in “Richard II”). Desiderius Erasmus’ “The Education of a Christian Prince” offers a prominent example of the genre, but similar advice can also be found in non-European systems such as Confucianism, Buddhism and Islam. Albeit in their own idioms, all such traditions urge rulers to exercise power with erudition, yet here too, these teachings never recommend that governments must engage in open self-rebuke by taking public responsibility for mass injustices.

One might argue that earlier societies felt no need for official proclamations of wrongdoing given that their evils did not take place on the scale witnessed in industrialized societies. Yet that argument is unpersuasive. After all, mass atrocities were certainly known in premodernity, even if not in numbers witnessed in more recent times. And at any rate, it would seem easier for officials to take blame for wrongdoings that were smaller in scale, so it does not seem to be the sheer degree of wrongdoing that explains the recent shift toward self-critical history.

The reasons for the shift lie elsewhere and can be viewed as the logical conclusion of an admittedly idealistic, post-Enlightenment cosmopolitanism that reached a pinnacle around the mid-20th century in response to the horrors of World Wars I and II. Idealistic cosmopolitanism is a worldview that envisions a society of critically aware citizens who jointly agree about past failures and future reforms. It assumes a common “human family” sharing universal moral values, as witnessed when the U.N. General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, a document that opens by proclaiming that “disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.”

Of course, the problem with that humanist idyll is that no such universal conscience ever existed. The U.N. Declaration’s drafters, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Peng Chun Chang, Charles Malik and others, were well-meaning yet privileged elites who shared little with ordinary people. In the long chronicle of human civilization, the shift from sanitized histories toward collective self-rebuke may yet prove to be a flash in the pan, a luxury of momentary prosperity.

Yet no one who believes in democracy can take an entirely pessimistic outlook. Policies of national self-inculpation are likely to remain the rare exception. But let’s not forget that constitutional democracy itself remains exceptional in history.

Eric Heinze is the professor of law and humanities at Queen Mary University of London
May 27, 2022
Baby Formulas and Cash Crops in Africa Led to Poor Diets

How the colonial powers’ pressure to wean babies and boost the food economy hid a faulty argument on famine and malnutrition
June 7, 2022
A farmer works in his farm in Khartoum, Sudan, May 22, 2022 /
 Mohamed Khidir / Xinhua via Getty Images


Afew years following the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, when the Gold Coast was gaining independence from Britain in the early 1950s, the British colonial government released a cookbook called “Gold Coast Nutrition and Cookery.” Maintaining a soft policy of influencing Ghana’s food culture, the 347-page book detailed a wealth of recipes.

Apart from the fritters and, bizarrely, embroidery it recommended — among other standard British and Ghanaian food staples — the book made the connection between nutrition and health. The text further suggested the consumption of meat, fish and cheese as well as adding milk to a cup of tea as sources of protein.

The book also extended animal milks to infants, stating that breast milk for the first six months of a baby’s life is not sufficient in terms of nutrients. It explicitly denounced breast milk being the only nutritional source for a baby during the first six months of life.

In his study on malnutrition and imperialism, John Nott, a professor of economic and medical history at the University of Edinburgh, explained how bottle-feeding boomed in the mid-20th century across all of colonial Africa. Near Kampala, Uganda, the percentage of children being bottle-fed increased from 14% in the early 1950s to 42% a decade later.

Women were told breastfeeding was not enough, and as far as colonial administrations were concerned, milk had to be part of the nutrition plan for infants and children. Breastfeeding was discouraged, and baby formulas were replacing much of infant rations. This was later heavily encouraged through aggressive marketing of baby formulas. In fact, in the early 1970s, Nestle was accused of dressing their employees in nurse uniforms in maternity wards in Africa, South America and South Asia in an attempt to promote dependence on breast milk substitutes. Even though the World Health Organization (WHO) promoted breastfeeding under the “International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes,” which it adopted in 1981 on the heels of the Nestle scandal, it was estimated in 2015 that six companies, including Nestle, spend close to $50 for each baby born worldwide to market breast milk substitutes, a total of $6 billion a year.

This push for bottle-feeding was also noted as far back as 1939, when Cicely Williams, a pioneering Jamaican physician of acute malnutrition on the Gold Coast, said this kind of marketing and policy shift toward breast milk substitutes amounted to “murder.” While governments in Africa no longer promote substitutes and breastfeeding is deemed necessary for the first six months of a baby’s life, Nott believes dismissing breast milk substitutes entirely is too simplistic and less than helpful. “Breast milk substitutes are valuable for women who have to work,” Nott added.

In addition to taxing colonial Africans toward the end of the 19th century, it was only a matter of time before the colonial administration created a policy encouraging production at the expense of reproduction. In contrast to previous incentives for reproduction, women were encouraged to substitute breast milk with baby formula in order to earn enough income to cover the projected taxes — all while making food aid contingent on planned parenthood. The language about overpopulation became demonizing, correlating food insecurity and burgeoning malnutrition and famine with the size of a population, and interfering with reproductive rights.

“This shift towards cash earning and a productive economy … it undermines the reproductive economy and labor. And so it demands a more efficient form of child rearing,” Nott explained.

Between controlling food sources and scorched-earth policies, in which countries like Britain burned crops and livestock in an attempt to sway Kenyans to conform to the cash-crop economy, these efforts were consolidated in 1937 when the colonial administration ordered Africans on reserves (what colonial administrations called the colonies) to grow cash crops as a matter of economic policy, thereby controlling the workforce and arable land.

“What you’ll realize when you look at the history is that maize was also grown to feed cattle in the U.K. But because you’re growing it in Africa so much, there’s a surplus, then you have to create a policy that then makes it a staple of the people,” noted Mercy Lung’aho, a researcher on food consumption and micronutrients at the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture.

Such a transition in nutrition was accompanied with symptoms of edema, in which fluid is retained in the feet. Distended bellies, changes in skin and hair pigmentation as well as weight loss and muscle atrophy were also found in children. But research into nutrition in the colonies was heavily discouraged and depoliticized by colonial administrations in Uganda and Ghana. These administrations pushed for the narrative that wasting and hunger, if present, are caused by poverty and ignorance.

But it wasn’t until 1935 that the set of symptoms plaguing populations in imperial Africa was given a name: “kwashiorkor.” Williams worked extensively on identifying the disease, linking it to malnutrition caused by severe deficiency in protein and associating it with the new food habits of the colonies.

The word kwashiorkor comes from West Africa’s Ga language, meaning “disease of the displaced child,” and refers to weaning practices that accompanied the changing food habits in the region. But these symptoms were not novel. In Europe, these symptoms along with other diseases such as rickets, stunted growth and gastroenteritis, among many others, existed three centuries before being identified in Africa.

“In some respects, all diseases are social constructs. To some extent a disease is made when we decide to give it a name. … So when we find it, that’s kind of when this disease comes into being. But you know it had been somewhere; it had existed,” Nott remarked.

Lung’aho described stunting and malnutrition as intergenerational, explaining, “Because as an adolescent girl, you have to grow and enter your period of reproductive age at optimal nutrition for you to give your child a chance to have optimal nutrition, and therefore have [a chance to] to live up to their potential. So because we have this cycle of malnutrition, which is intergenerational, it’s often linked to poverty.”

Lung’aho explained that nutrition during a human’s first 1,000 days, from when a woman conceives up to when a child is 2 years old, is fundamental. She also reaffirmed that food is a human right. “When your right is taken away from you, it’s a form of abuse. It becomes very difficult for you to not have food, and then think governance [in the former colonies] should improve, because your sole purpose will be trying to sustain yourself,” she added.

As with Maslow’s hierarchy-of-needs psychological theory, food scarcity and attitudes toward nutrition hamper any other needs or rights a person can exercise because they are preoccupied with food instead of seeking education, health care or the tools to acquire higher needs. Few people have the capacity to fight for better governance when they are malnourished.

Lung’aho also pointed out that children who have gone through food scarcity had a very poor relationship with food and grow up to develop poor eating habits. “If you’re not nurtured well, your priorities are lopsided,” she said.

The researcher talked about the systematic erasure of Indigenous knowledge about cropping and early warning systems as another reason food scarcity is synonymous with continental Africa.

In a book called “Indigenous Food Systems,” Indigenous knowledge included food security and sovereignty through upholding traditions and calendars for each indigenous crop. The waning of these crops also disrupted local agricultural policies and food habits.

Through talking to communities such as the Maasai, one thing stood out to Lung’aho: “You realize that grandparents would sit outside for long periods of time. You think they were just lazy, but they were monitoring the weather, and they had warning systems in place.”

In another study addressing intellectual developments of nutritional science, Nott described African malnutrition and its connection to overpopulation.

“During the early years of colonial rule it was generally assumed, in the absence of credible census data, that Africa’s population was stagnating and that it would grow only through Western intervention. In extremely invasive regimes, as in the Belgian Congo, colonial governments and expatriate companies explicitly promoted high birth rates and short birth spacing through financial incentives,” the study read, highlighting the policy some colonial administrations adopted to exponentially increase the workforce through encouraging births.

The study further added that overpopulation under a relatively stable colonial power seemed unsustainable and overreached ecological restrictions. Reversing course, the powers thereupon blamed overpopulation, and family planning became the paramount policy.

In the 1950s, private groups, namely the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and the Pathfinder Fund, built birth control clinics to limit pregnancies. In the following decade, USAID and the U.K. Ministry of Overseas Development made food aid contingent on family planning, which infringes on reproductive rights.

“Hunger in Africa was defined as a problem of overpopulation. Rather than considering the nature of food production and food supply, demographers, ecologists and environmentalists argued that high fertility rates were causing populations to grow beyond their means. This is the basis of Neo-Malthusian understandings of hunger. The result of this logic was a whole load of policies and funding targeting fertility reduction all across Africa. These arguments are still very common today,” Nott commented.

Regarding fertility, Lung’aho blamed mismanagement of resources but highlighted the noticeable drop in fertility rates. “Long gone are the days women had 10-plus children,” she said. According to the World Bank, Africa’s fertility rate of 4.5 children per woman in 2017 is significantly lower when compared with the rate of 6.6 children in 1980.

But even as food aid is a tool meant to sustain developing countries, it is still far from sufficient. In fact, in September 2021, the World Food Program (WFP) announced that it would cut food aid by 48% for 440,000 refugees in Kenya because of a lack of funding.

The number of refugees in the East Africa region is 4.7 million, and there are 12.4 million internally displaced people, according to WFP’s head of Relief and Refugees, Felix Okech. “WFP estimates that funding shortfalls and ration cuts are affecting up to 70% of the refugees in the region,” Okech explained.

In the Kenyan context, Okech added that funds won’t run out completely. “But, you know, you’re supposed to provide 100% of the minimum food basket, except we can only provide 50% of that for the next four months,” he said in early spring.

Okech expressed cautious optimism, saying that food insecurity is an international event and responsibility: “The countries that can help should step up and offer support.”

“We’ve dug a pit of reliance on foreign aid,” Lung’aho reflected. “And now that the people have new priorities and cannot continue to give, we’re now stuck in our own scarcity where we cannot innovate our own solutions and cannot look within to empower ourselves to come up with solutions when we do have the potential.”

Along the same line, Lung’aho said that over time, it has become politically correct to just look at the science and politically risky to point out the root cause of the issues. Her studies center on creating solutions with the guidance and consent of communities using acquired as well as Indigenous knowledge.

“Having a holistic approach, and thinking about systems, rather than individual problems, is how we move forward as Africa,” she noted.

Lung’aho went on to describe the groundwork she has been doing in Kenya and Nigeria, where she documents the pockets of Indigenous knowledge on one side and makes them part of a sustainable practice where ancient knowledge is relearned and adopted.

“Foreign aid is a two-edged sword. If managed well, it can do good. If mismanaged, it does cause harm,” Lung’aho said, referring to an event that took place in April 2021, when hundreds of thousands of Kenyans petitioned the IMF to hold $2.3 billion in loans for Kenya, citing the country’s poor track record of corruption under hashtags such as #stopgivingkenyaloans. The package was approved as part of Kenya’s COVID-19 response plan.

“The positive impact of foreign aid is often marred by bad governance, weak rule of law, high levels of corruption, absence of strong democratic institutions, lack of accountability and information control by government officials. Overdependence on aid is rendering the continent’s current development model unsustainable,” Lung’aho said. She also asserted the importance of self-sufficiency and homegrown solutions.

“Our policies had a different priority when they were set,” she added. “They needed to be realigned and corrected to focus on nourishing communities and creating decent livelihoods while protecting the environment.”

Eman El-Sherbiny is a Nairobi-based freelance journalist
The Suffering of Crimea’s Tatars

Crimean Tatar leader and Soviet dissident Mustafa Dzhemilev talks to New Lines about a war that, for him, began in 2014 and has only grown worse since

Riada Asimovic Akyol
Mustafa Dzhemilev / Inna Borodaieva / Ukrinform / Future Publishing via Getty Images


Crimean Tatars, the indigenous Muslims of Ukraine and the country’s largest ethnic minority, have joined the fight against Russia’s invasion. Tatars serve throughout Ukraine’s military ranks and as civilian volunteers offering humanitarian help.

Tatars are Turkic-speaking Muslims who have lived in Crimea since the 13th century. Russian rulers have persecuted them for almost 300 years. One of the greatest tragedies in Tatar history was their genocidal expulsion from Crimea by Josef Stalin in 1944. About 200,000 Tatars are said to have been forcibly deported to Central Asia by the notorious Soviet secret police, the NKVD, in cattle cars. According to estimates, half died before they even reached the inhumane labor camps where the Soviets forced them to work and dwell.

Tatars were allowed to return to Crimea in the late 1980s, but most did not go back to their homeland until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. In 2014, Tatars faced Russian aggression once again, when Russian President Vladimir Putin’s army annexed Crimea.

In 2022, many Tatars have helped Ukraine defy its invaders. This is the latest Tatar struggle for freedom from Russian imperialism. The memory of pain and a history of repression form the basis of Tatar support for Ukraine’s defense, though Muslim neighbors with similar historical experiences — like some Chechens — have openly joined their oppressor’s side.

New Lines spoke with Mustafa Dzhemilev, a venerated leader of the long-persecuted Crimean Tatars. Dzhemilev is also a member of the Ukrainian Parliament and a celebrated human rights activist. He has been nominated several times for the Nobel Peace Prize, including this year. Dzhemilev spent 15 years in prison camps in the Soviet Union, and he once went on a 303-day hunger strike.

Despite experiencing imprisonment and systematic political persecution throughout his life, Dzhemilev continues to raise awareness about human rights violations and the oppression of his people. He resisted Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and has staunchly opposed its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The Russian authorities have illegally denied him entry to Crimea, his homeland, until 2034.

Dzhemilev was in Kyiv on May 6 at the time of this interview. He spoke by video about the horrors of violence and the war crimes Russia is perpetrating across the country. He also addressed the situation of Crimean Tatars, and he shared his views about Ukraine’s immediate and future needs, including military support and sanctions.

New Lines: How are you doing these days, considering the difficult circumstances that Ukraine is in currently?

Mustafa Dzhemilev: Thank goodness I’m fine, now I’m at home. There are occasional alarms, the bombardment continues, but they are dropping bombs on the whole of Ukraine. Now the weakest part for Ukraine is that we don’t have air [defense systems]. Our soldiers are brave, they are fighting, they inflict a lot of damage to the enemy. According to Russia’s plans, they were going to take Kyiv in three days. Now, on the 71st day of the war, they are expelled from Kyiv, but there are ferocious fights in the Donetsk region, serious battles on the Kherson side. Our losses are quite substantial — of course not as much as the Russians’, but still a lot. The saddest part is that there are a lot of dead civilians. According to today’s figures, at least 247 children have been killed. I went to Bucha, the place where they killed the most, and they showed me pictures of children. [Setting aside] the ones who died at the time of that bombardment, they shot with guns in the chests of the little children and killed them. What kind of people are these people, actually these creatures, we can’t understand.

NL: A Russian-controlled court set up in occupied Crimea has recently declared you guilty of several charges: illegal storage of ammunition, improper storage of weapons and illegal border crossing. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine protested the decision against you, describing Russian accusations as “unjustified.” The MFA reminded that this is not the first attempt by the Russian occupation administration to restrict your freedom, further explaining, “The so-called courts are pursuing a purposeful policy of Russia to persecute the Crimean Tatar people and its leaders in order to expel the Indigenous people from Crimea.” What is your comment on this development, and what are the consequences of this decision?

MD: I am really sad. They give 15, 17, 19 years of imprisonment to normal people there — to those who say a few words opposing Russian occupiers. To me, they gave three years, and a conditional sentence on top of it, like I did almost nothing. I was a bit sad of course.

In fact, this is my eighth time in court. This is a ridiculous court. The main accusation is that I broke the law for illegal crossing of the Russian Federation border. I was going to my house in BaÄŸĂ§asaray. Actually I couldn’t pass those borders — I didn’t. I couldn’t get to the checkpoint, because there were tanks there. They greeted us like that, as if they had come to a war.

Negotiations took place in a neutral place. They spoke with the Turkish ambassador, they said, [Turkish President Recep] Tayyip ErdoÄŸan and [Turkish Prime Minister at the time Ahmet] DavutoÄŸlu are watching the events there, because they were broadcasting it to the whole world. They said, please go from there. A new front might open against Ukraine, but we would try to solve your entrance to Crimea with diplomatic ways. At that time, our citizens, up to 1,000-2,000, who crossed those borders, had passed. I stated my conditions and said, “You will put them back in Crimea. You will not punish them, then I will withdraw.” That’s how we did it. But, the Russians, of course, were deceitful, as they always are. They punished the people there a lot, gave fines, put three people in jail, and then they filed a lawsuit. In fact, they opened that case in 2016. They appealed to Interpol, but since then I have been to many countries. I did not surrender. Interpol doesn’t listen to them.

They filed a lawsuit again in 2019, and the reason for that is that we were going to march toward Crimea, so [they wanted] to scare us. It was along the lines of, “If you cross the border, we will catch you, you will go to prison.” They said that to me and Refat Chubarov, the head of the Majlis of the Crimean Tatar people.

We did not do that march, but not due to fear of their punishment. With the COVID pandemic, it was not possible to gather that many men. We delayed it. For two years, they continued this trial. My lawyer is a renowned, very good lawyer, Nikolai Polozov. He had to leave Russia because of some threatening signals that they would imprison him. He is in Turkey now. So, they recently announced the verdict in absentia. Three years in prison conditionally. But the prosecutor protested my supposedly soft sentence, so there will be another trial, yet again.

NL: Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine has been going on since Feb. 24. Russian troops have carried out airstrikes on important military and civilian infrastructure, destroying military units, airports, oil depots, schools, churches and hospitals. In your interview with the Crimean News Agency on April 27, you made some statements after visiting Bucha. You said, “Things that are unbelievable for the 21st century have happened here.”

Despite this nightmare, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy stated that Ukraine has entered a new phase in the war against Russia, with Ukrainian troops stopping the advance of the invaders. Zelenskyy said that Ukraine must first do everything to stop the war and then move on to diplomacy. What do you think about these statements?

MD: Actually, I didn’t think highly of Zelenskyy before. We didn’t vote for him. I didn’t take him seriously. The comedian man, in such a difficult situation, became president. I did not vote for him. I supported [former President Petro] Poroshenko. But I see that after this war started, he behaved very well. He was very determined, very brave. I said to his face too: “I am proud of my president.”

The negotiations with the Russian delegation started a month and a half ago. First there were talks at the Belarus border, and then in Istanbul. In Istanbul, I was there too. These negotiations make no sense, because of Russia’s ridiculous demands: You will recognize the Crimean Peninsula as Russian territory. You will recognize those self-proclaimed, lawless republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. You will give up your intention to join the EU and NATO. You will return your weapons taken from abroad. So, we would completely surrender there.

Now, we said, “Look, let’s talk about the cease-fire now, because it is necessary not only for us, but also for you. Collect your own dead here.” There are hundreds of dead bodies that they do not take. There are trains full of corpses, the refrigerators are full of mortal remains, and they do not accept it. “No, our demands are like that,” they say. [The only thing that was] agreed is to make human corridors from the few besieged places under Russian control, but those agreements did not work either. Because you start to let the people in the corridors upon which we agreed, and they pass, but [the Russians] also open fire. So the people are forced to go back.

Currently, the most difficult situation is on the Mariupol side. The commander of Mariupol sent me a clear video request a couple of days ago, actually not on my behalf, but asking for help from Tayyip ErdoÄŸan. We delivered it to Mr. Tayyip and sent it to HĂ¼rriyet, CNN TĂ¼rk, Sabah [Turkish media]. This is what we can do.

Yesterday [May 5], there was a Crimean Tatar medic at Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol who also appealed for help. He expects something from Mr. Tayyip … because in Ukraine, Turkey’s reputation is very high, they love Mr. Tayyip very much, they trust him very much. But unfortunately, Mr. Tayyip could do nothing.[Turkish presidential spokesperson] Ibrahim Kalin paid a visit here recently and spoke with [Sergei] Shoigu, the Russian defense minister, on this Mariupol issue. Shoigu said, “We will allow the wounded and civilians to pass but let the soldiers surrender. Let Zelenskyy order them to surrender.” Mr. Ibrahim responded to him: “Look, no commander has the right to say ‘surrender’ to his own citizens. Therefore, we offer you, the people there, your captives.”



We have more than a thousand Russian captives. [Quoting Ibrahim:] “Let’s exchange them. One of Turkey’s ships is waiting in Istanbul, it can take more than a thousand men. When you [Russians and Ukrainians] make a decision, we will come by ship to the port of Berdyansk. We will take the men out with buses that are under our control, we will take them to Turkey by ship, and we give you our word that they will stay in Turkey until the end of the war. We will host them there.”

But no, they did not agree.

Now they have their holiday, “Russia’s Victory Day,” on May 9. On that holiday, they want to hold a rally, [celebrating that they] took Mariupol, took captives, and things like that. But our people won’t surrender, so people most likely will die. Our friend who sent his message yesterday from Azovstal is actually a doctor. He says there is no material, no medicine, that people die in doctors’ hands. But we unfortunately get nothing.

NL: Yes. Yesterday, media around the world shared a video that an unnamed man who described himself as a Crimean Tatar, a Muslim medic, posted late night on Thursday, May 5, to Instagram, as a direct appeal to ErdoÄŸan. He called for help to save the lives of civilians who were still trapped in the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol. So, is it true that the Russian invaders brought at least 13 mobile crematoriums to Mariupol to hide the traces of their crimes? Journalists and officials in Mariupol also reported that at least three mass graves were found.

MD: They use mobile crematoriums not only in Mariupol, but also in Donetsk. They send a few bodies, but they burn most of the dead there to reduce their number. According to our Interior Ministry’s writings, 12,000 parents from over there [Russia] made phone calls or went to our websites to ask about their children. These are parents of children [we are] 99% [certain are] dead. But they don’t ask the Russian authorities, because they are afraid. According to their laws, they give some money for the dead soldiers. So they say [to parents] that if you report this information, we will not pay you, and we will say that your child is missing, or we will say that he was lost during a drill. We will not mention war. To get the money, parents don’t tell anyone about their dead children. That is what’s happening.

NL: In an interview with the Associated Press on May 5, even Russia’s close ally, Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, admitted that he felt the “Russian special operation” was not going as planned. Considering this situation, what can we expect from Putin? Of course, he probably will not take a step back, but will he use more violence?

MD: If this president of Russia was a normal person, then it would be possible to make predictions. But he does not think about Russia or the Russian people. If he had really thought about Russia’s future, he would not have come to Crimea in 2014. He would have thought a little about his fate. Now he has entered the territory of another independent country — with a total of 190,000 soldiers. What would the world’s reaction be to that? And what are you going to do after you enter the country? In 2014, [then-German Chancellor Angela] Merkel said to him, directly to his face: “You probably live in the 15th or 16th century, that is your logic.” Indeed, he is like that.

At the moment, all sorts of analyses are being made, with guesses as to what he might do. But it’s a little hard to say for sure. … There are other issues, but it is not about just pressing a red button, there are seven or eight stages before that. They say it is very difficult to use a nuclear weapon, that it is 99% impossible, but even if there is a 1% chance, it is a danger to the world.

In the first days of the war, our people fought really bravely. The enemies thought they would take Kyiv in three days, according to their plans, and that they would hold a parade on the fourth day. They were going to hold a celebratory concert. But half of them were destroyed, half of them escaped to Bucha. They started to torture civilians around Kyiv, and they killed a lot of people. Now they have left the Kyiv region. According to their plan, they want to take Donetsk, Luhansk — the Donbas region. They want to take Kherson and pass to Moldova, to Russian-controlled Transnistria. They also want to make Donetsk a corridor to the Crimean Peninsula. They want to besiege Ukraine, to close the exits to the seas. They intend to make the country helpless.

I am sure that they will not carry out these plans, because thanks to them, the Western countries have given a lot of weapons. We expect the situation on the fronts to change a lot soon.

NL: You warned in the past that Russia would use occupied Crimea to attack the rest of Ukraine. Today, the whole world admires the high motivation of the Ukrainian army and the Ukrainian people in defending their homeland. You said it’s hard to make predictions, but what are Ukraine’s most pressing needs? I think the European Union’s oil embargo against Russia is essential to limit Putin’s financing of war against Ukraine. Do you agree?

MD: The most urgent need is to close the air space. We need planes, we need air defense systems. They are firing S-300 rockets, and we can’t do anything. They are deploying Iskanders on ships from the Black Sea, and we cannot respond. Our rockets cannot reach that distance. These howitzer weapons, which will be given from America, give the opportunity to hit a 35-40 km (22-25 mile) area, but to reach Sevastopol from the territory of Ukraine that is under our control, we need rockets with a range of at least 400 kilometers (250 miles). Unfortunately, we do not have those rockets. This is our weak side. But our advantage here is that people have great motivation, they fight very bravely. The Russians’ main motivation is to make raids in the occupied lands. They allow women to be raped. They have no other motivations.

People call me from Crimea and say there are trucks filled with used phones, washing machines for sale, things raided here and sold in occupied lands. And people buy because of the low prices.

NL: Among the Ukrainians resisting the Russian occupation, there are also the Crimean Tatars. In early April, several Ukrainian media outlets shared your statement that all institutions, businesses and schools have been instructed to regularly post on Facebook in support of Putin, and to support what they call the special operation. At that time, you also shared with the media that kidnapped civilians from the Kherson and Melitopol regions were taken to, and brutally tortured in, Crimea. So what’s going on in Crimea right now?

MD: There is tension there at the moment. Everyone in Crimea has been instructed to be ready for war. I [talk by phone] with our citizens there. I tell them, “Look, we actually had a plan to save Crimea from occupation without a war, but since they occasionally open fire on the Crimean Peninsula, maybe Ukraine will have to reciprocate. Take your precautions, protect your lives.”

The peninsula of Crimea is now practically closed. It is not possible to get out of there, nor is it possible to enter. … We occasionally appeal to our citizens over there to not come here in any way. If you come here, you will either become a corpse or a murderer. Therefore, refuse. Do not go into the Russian army.[For a failure to enlist], the punishment is up to two years in prison. The best thing is to go to jail. But do not come to war. Yet it is very dangerous for them to surrender, because their relatives are held as hostages in Crimea, and they are in such a difficult situation. So there’s a lot of tension. FSB [the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation] men come to the houses of many people, our activists, and threaten them if they write words of support for Ukraine. The punishments would be such and such — so there is terror.



NL: During your recent visit to Antalya during The Diplomacy Forum, you said, “The West does not fully understand that we are fighting not only for ourselves, but also for them.”

MD: It really is like that. Ukraine is now the main war front against this totalitarian fascist regime. If Russia is victorious here, after that it can attack other countries. Firstly, the Baltic countries and Poland — and they do not actually hide that they have such intentions. That is why now it is a little immoral to look at this war from the outside and be an impartial spectator, because our war is not only for ourselves, but for all freedom. That’s why we always expect support from countries.

Fortunately, the countries in the West are giving enough support now, but if they had given this support in 2014, when the Russians occupied Crimea, if these serious sanctions had been imposed then, maybe we would not have come to this day. Unfortunately, countries in the West were a little late in this regard.

NL: What are your hopes and expectations for the future of Crimea?

MD: The war is actually a bad thing, but as a result of this war, we hope very much that there will be a chance to save Crimea from occupation. That is to say: This war started in Crimea and will end in Crimea as well.

Because until the full territorial integrity of Ukraine is restored, this war will not end. But Russia will certainly not triumph here. How long will the war in question continue? This is the main issue. Ukraine will of course fight to the end, for the whole of its own territory, for freedom.

NL: You said in an interview a few years ago that Putin cannot be trusted. You stated, “There is no point in believing Putin, because he is a person who can violate any contract he signs.” What kind of person do you think Putin is?

MD: About 99% of the words he says are lies. But it’s a very strange thing. At the same time, according to the Russian press, Putin’s ratings are rising. It is not possible to believe their statistics, because it is dangerous for someone to [give an answer the authorities] don’t like. A Russian journalist said that according to some sociological studies, 87% of the people living in Crimea are very happy about being part of Russia and asked me how I interpret that. I said it is possible, but the problem is this: If people say, “I don’t recognize the Russian occupation, Crimea is part of Ukraine,” that person stays in prison for five years, but comes out as a dignified person. If you give the death penalty for that [response], then 99% would say they support Russia. That is the situation. It is impossible to believe the statistics there.

The truth is that they have a lot of propaganda. People living in Russia mainly watch their own televisions — they can’t access many other internet sites, because many have been closed by the Russian government. If Russia’s politics continues like this, the Russian state has no future. Gradually, the Russian state is turning into a big North Korea.

Oil embargoes affect the economy of Western countries. But as time passes, the situation will change. Therefore, as much as possible, all sanctions should be applied now. If it is too little, then Putin’s regime will stay in place for a few more years. This is very harmful, both for the world and for the Russian people.

NL: In your message to the Crimean News Agency a few days ago, you congratulated all Muslims on the Eid al-Fitr holiday. Emphasizing that many Crimean Tatars have had to celebrate the holidays away from their homeland for eight years due to the Russian occupation, you said, “We believe that we will mark the next and future holidays in our own lands.”

I have to be honest and ask you a difficult question: Are you worried about the future of the next generation of Tatars? Is it difficult to keep them attached to the Tatar culture, language and religion as Muslims under constant pressure?

MD: [The Russians] make moves not against [the Tatars’] religion, but against their identity. They’re closing schools. Russification is everywhere — that’s where the danger lies. There is a lot of propaganda. Our people should not be blind, as they were in Chechnya. But you know, we were under Soviet propaganda for more than 70 years, and a few years after perestroika, people’s minds were restored. Now, if there was freedom there, our children, our people would be fine. But it is a pity, of course, that people do not speak in their native language. There is so much discrimination. They are treated like second-class citizens. They are also trying to comply with the laws in order to find a place for themselves, and this causes great harm to the mentality and honor of a people.

The sooner we are saved from the occupation, the better.

Riada Asimovic Akyol is the strategic initiatives editor at New Lines
May 12, 2022
The Last Days of the Ottomans – with Eugene Rogan
New Lines Podcast
A Turkish soldier wearing a WWI uniform / Ozan Koze / AFP via Getty Images

The fall of the Ottoman Empire has continued to resonate, right down to a century later. There are still things that we can point to and say, ‘This influenced the world as we know it now.’

For six centuries, the Ottoman Sultans held dominion across most of the Middle East, North Africa and Southeastern Europe. But by the eve of the First World War in 1914, the empire was already in steep decline. It is at this moment of crisis that the preeminent historian Eugene Rogan begins his bestselling book “The Fall of the Ottomans.” In this podcast, he talks to New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai about those decisive final years.

Though more than 1 million Ottoman subjects died in the conflict, Rogan argues that the Middle Eastern front of the Great War has been relatively neglected — both by scholars and in the popular imagination of the region’s peoples. He points to an enduring perception in much of today’s Middle East that it was “someone else’s war.” Certainly the war inflamed preexisting ethnic and confessional fractures. In an effort to suppress the national movements erupting across the empire, the Ottoman government turned to increasingly repressive measures against its own population, culminating in the brutal genocide of the Armenians.

But Rogan is quick to point out that the Ottoman troops also fought bravely and tenaciously, turning back Western and Russian forces who, unwisely underestimating them, hoped to knock the empire out of the war early. Their eventual defeat came far later and transformed the region into the Middle East we know today. Yet although the challenges facing the Ottomans may have been formidable, Rogan asserts that this ultimate collapse was not inevitable. Had their rulers not made certain choices at certain crucial moments, he says, we could have seen a Middle East still dominated by Ottoman sultans to this day.

The Realm of the Devil and the Destroyers of Rome

How the north came into its allure and the south lost its glory

World map prepared by the Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi (1100-1165) for King of Sicily Roger II 
/ Universal History Archive / Getty Images

Where is “north”? Take, for example, the volcanic Bouvetøya or Bouvet Island. This ice-covered speck of Norway, about 19 square miles in area and inhabited by seals, penguins and seabirds, has been a nature preserve for half a century. In 1739, French mariner Jean-Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier and his companions sighted it, but forbidding glacial cliffs prevented them from landing. Britain first claimed this remote outpost, but after Norway’s Harald Horntvedt explored it more thoroughly and planted the Norwegian flag there in 1927, Britain eventually ceded its claim. In one sense, Bouvetøya lies in the North — but only from the perspective of the South Pole. The island is located between South Africa and Antarctica and is also known as “the last place on earth.”

The north begins where the south ends. But where is the border between them, how can we recognize it, and who has the right to define it? For the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the Brenner Pass in the Alps connecting Austria and Italy constituted the “dividing line between the South and the North.” His contemporary, historian August Ludwig von Schlözer took up this question and wrote: “We Germans do not consider ourselves to be part of the North; only the Frenchman views our land as his North, and he speaks of Berlin as we do of Stockholm. Spanish writers commonly understand the North as Great Britain, and it is of course natural that African geographers and historians refer to the Mediterranean as the North Sea and believe that all Europeans are northern peoples.”

The concept of “North” (and of “South” respectively) represents a space both real and imaginary. At the beginning of the 19th century, before the competing concepts of the “West” and the “East” became Europe’s dominant paradigm, Russia was commonly considered part of the North.

The center of the world for the Europeans of antiquity, for people like Herodotus (c. 484-c. 425 BCE), was the extended Mediterranean. This is evident in a map of that era that depicts the Mediterranean, the Black Sea and their environs relatively realistically, whereas the northwest of the European continent is rendered as a single curved line that offers no intimation at all of the British Isles or Scandinavia. That wasn’t Herodotus’ or anyone else’s fault, of course. People could only depict on their maps what they knew from personal experience — or had at least read or heard about. The North was a phantasmagoric dark spot beyond the border of the Greco-Roman universe, on the other side of the Alps and the Black Sea. The ancient Greeks invented the legendary region of Hyperborea and located it in the European northeast, beyond the north wind Boreas, which was itself named after the god who brought winter. They imagined it as a land of plenty, populated by giants, wise, happy and immortal, who devoted themselves to music and dance and knew neither illness nor other human plagues. The catch was that there was no way for mortal men and women to get there. The Greek geographer Strabo, who came much later (c. 64 BCE-c. 24 CE), already had a far more concrete view of the North as encompassing northwestern Gaul, the British Isles, the Lower Rhineland and Scandinavia.

For a long time, in Europe, the North was considered the realm of the devil, the place from whence evil would come upon the world. By contrast, the Middle East was where the religions of the Old World had developed. The prophet Jeremiah further fleshed out the dichotomy, specifying that evil would take the form of invading northern hordes. In the superstitions of many cultures, northern peoples of various stripes have been considered harbingers of doom. Most famously the barbarian hordes from the North were blamed for the fall of Rome, while scholars now believe it collapsed under the weight of its own internal conflicts. Since antiquity, the North (as well as the West) was regarded as a region of cold and darkness, devoid of sunlight and inimical to life. This convenient interpretive system remained in place throughout the Middle Ages and continued in the speculations of 16th- and 17th-century alchemy.

The 12th-century medieval mystic Hildegard von Bingen derived her world view from Adam’s turn to the East after his creation. To Adam’s right was the blessed South, and to his left was the dark North. According to Hildegard, the north was the direction from which the church was menaced, and a “threatening, angrily growling bear” was the origin of the “godless” North Wind, “divorced of any utility, felicity and holiness” and bringing only misfortune and storms. The perniciousness of the North Wind was the basis for the character of the other three winds, which blew in opposition to it. These vague ideas about the North became more concrete as contact, both hostile and friendly, was established with the people who lived there.

Forays by aggressive Scandinavian warriors from the north left many people in the south fearing for their lives. The commercial network of the Vikings was gigantic, stretching from the northern Atlantic to Russia, Central Asia and the Arabian Peninsula. In this sense, they were pioneers of globalization, dealing in honey, amber, dried meat and pelts. They also sold loot from the cities they sacked. Their boats were powered by the strength of human arms and the wind. When winds were favorable, they were even able to sail their vessels against river currents, having adopted the square-rig sail that had been used for centuries in the Mediterranean. In 860 CE, the Varangians, a Swedish subgroup of the Vikings in an extended sense of the term, attacked Constantinople, and in 885 CE, Danish Vikings invaded Paris. In subsequent centuries, the Normans conquered Normandy, southern Italy and England.

The Vikings weren’t the only ones sailing the seas of the High North and establishing connections. Irish monks are thought to have sailed to the Faroe Islands and Iceland as early as the seventh century — most likely they were looking for solitude rather than trying to convert the few heathens who had settled there. In 1136, a monastery was founded in Arkhangelsk in northern Russia, and a century after that, monasteries dotted the map in Scandinavia and Iceland. With the increasing activity of missionaries, Christianity would also remain an important bond connecting Europe’s North and South for centuries — until the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War, which would pit northern and southern Europe against one another.

How did cartographers eventually decide to put the north exclusively at the top of their maps? And why did this mode of representation become the dominant one? The practice goes back to second-century Greco-Roman mathematician and astronomer Claudius Ptolemy, if we are to believe the surviving copies of his works made by Byzantine monks more than 1,000 years later, in the 13th century. The cartographers who created the first mappa mundi — Gerardus Mercator, Henricus Martellus Germanus and Martin WaldseemĂ¼ller — respected Ptolemy as a leading authority, took their cues from him and adopted his habit of putting the north at the top. Nonetheless, the Christian maps of the Middle Ages chose another perspective. A map of Europe and Africa made by Venetian seafarer and cartographer Andrea Bianco in the 15th century has the east on top and Jerusalem in the middle. Similarly, in maps from the Islamic world, north often appears at the bottom, as in Moroccan Muhammad al-Idrisi’s Tabula Rogeriana, made in 1154 for King Roger II of Sicily. The same is true of the 1459 mappa mundi of Fra Mauro, even if it is today usually reprinted in repolarized form (it just has to be flipped on its head to make sense to us). One possible reason is that 15th-century compasses pointed south. While it’s difficult to generalize about the sophisticated Chinese mapmaking tradition, the famous “Composite Map of the Ming Empire,” possibly created at the end of the 14th century, has north at the top. With the waning of Christian or Muslim views of the world that had put the east or south at the top, the north secured its fixed spot at the top of maps. But as self-evident as that shift might seem today, there was no strictly logical reason for the change.

Apart from Ptolemy’s precedent, there are at least two other potential reasons why north drifted to the top of maps. One is its use in navigation. Before the compass was imported from China via the Arab world around 1300, European seafarers used the stars to tell what direction they were headed in. The most useful one was the North Star, since it remained in one place, almost exactly at due north, while the other fixed stars seemed to move around the sky because of Earth’s rotation. The compass likewise pointed north (with the exception mentioned earlier).

Invented in China some 2,000 years ago during the Han dynasty, the compass was made of naturally magnetized lodestone and used for geomancy (a method of divination that interprets markings on the ground or the patterns formed by tossed soil, rocks or sand) and fortunetelling. By the time it came to be used for navigation on the seas, during the Song dynasty, it already had the needles we associate with the compass today. Another plausible explanation may be that information on the upper margin of maps was more easily visible and thus made to seem more important. European mapmakers, of course, lived in the Northern Hemisphere, so they may simply have wanted to see their own homeland as occupying a privileged position in the world.

When Geneva historian Paul Henri Mallet published translations of Old Norse tales written down in the 13th century, including the Prose Edda and excerpts from the Poetic Edda from Iceland, this triggered a new perception of Scandinavia in the eyes of many European intellectuals, including German poet Johann Gottfried Herder. He developed a euphoric sense of belonging to an imagined homeland in the North. Old Norse mythology offered an alternative to a stale classicism that venerated Greco-Roman legends and myths. Many people at the time were sick of the South. While Herder was opposed to the idea of distinct races, he was convinced that one human race had diversified into different cultures: “In all the different forms in which the human race appears on earth, it is nonetheless everywhere one and the same human species.” However, this sort of “cultural pluralism” didn’t prevent Herder from thinking in racist categories; he asked his readers “to sympathize with the Negro, but not despise him, since the conditions of his climate could not grant him nobler gifts.” He had few sympathies with the Chinese, “who, in their own corner of the earth, refrained, like the Jews, from mixing with other peoples.”

Herder’s rejection of the genealogy of Noah was unambiguous: “The various efforts of people to make all nations of the earth, according to this genealogy, into descendants of the Hebrews and half-brothers of the Jews, contradicts not only chronology and the entire history of humanity but also the standpoint of this narrative itself. … Enough of it! The fixed center of the largest part of the world, the primeval mountains of Asia, provided the first place of residence for the human race.” For Herder there were two basic coordinates: the North and Asia.

Even beyond Germany, he was an important force in paving the way for the categories “Aryan” and “Semitic” that, as Maurice Olender stressed in “The Languages of Paradise” (1993), “would influence scholarship in the human sciences throughout the nineteenth century.” Herder found a spiritual ally in Friedrich Schlegel, who had learned some Sanskrit during a stay in Paris and who declared at an 1805 lecture, “Everything absolutely everything, comes from India!” Schlegel also revived the term Aryan as a combination of the Sanskrit name “Ari” (meaning, among other things, lion, brave, inner skin and eagle) with the German word “Ehre” (honor). The concept can be traced back to the 18h-century French Orientalist Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, who coined it in his translation of the Avesta, the holy book of Zoroastrianism. It was subsequently adopted by linguists in various countries.

However, at the turn of the 19th century, more and more people were no longer content to learn about the North from the comfort of their reading chairs and were willing to get their shoes a bit muddy to see it for themselves, both scientists and more romantic travelers. This was partly because the French Revolution made it more difficult and sometimes impossible to travel to central Europe, whereas English and German travelers could reach Scandinavia and Scotland without any great problem. Increasingly, tourists began visiting the North rather than the sites of antique culture in Italy and Greece. To stand in the Roman Forum as the first Caesar Augustus did or visit the ruins of Pompeii, one of the most dramatic natural disasters of antique Italy, had lost some of its appeal.

But how would the North of the mind materialize? While some of the travelers followed in the footsteps of the great Carl Linnaeus, who had undertaken a botanical-ethnographic trip to Lapland, among them were readers of the Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau who were hoping to find people in a “state of nature” — noble savages. Or they had heard about the wonders of the midnight sun and the majestic fjords of Norway. Journeying to Scotland, as to Scandinavia, didn’t present foreign visitors with a particularly stern test of courage. There, too, it was easier for women to travel than in the South or in the Middle East, particularly on their own. Emilie von Berlepsch, who visited in 1799, was a close acquaintance of Herder and, as she proudly described herself, “the first German woman who traveled to the fatherland of the bard [Ossian].” Having set off from Hamburg, she made landfall near Glasgow on the “classical ground of Ossian’s songs.” She believed that bagpipe music, which had “quite unpleasantly assaulted” her ears, must be a recent distortion of Scandinavian culture: “It is impossible to conceive of the beautiful, gentle emotions of Ossian arising during and being accompanied by this shrill bleating.”

In the summer of 1794, English author and women’s rights activist Mary Wollstonecraft made a journey through southern Norway, western Sweden, Denmark and northern Germany with her 1-year-old daughter, Fanny, and her governess. This was hardly a vacation trip. Wollstonecraft was there on a mission. With England and France at war, she was trying to help the American business owner Gilbert Imlay, who had attempted to smuggle a large amount of silver from France to Scandinavia. According to Wollstonecraft’s “From Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark,” she wanted to find a ship and retrieve the cargo.

Around the same time, naturalist Giuseppe Acerbi set off from Lombardy for the North. Why did he, a man of the South, “a native of Italy, a country abounding in all the beauties of nature, and the finest productions of art, voluntarily undergo the danger and fatigue of visiting the regions of the Arctic Circle?” His answer to his own question: “There is no people so advanced in civilization, or so highly cultivated, who may not be able to derive some advantage from being acquainted with arts and sciences of other nations, even of such as are the most barbarous.” The ultimate destination of his voyage was the North Cape: “Here everything is solitary, everything is sterile, everything sad and despondent. The shadowy forest no longer adorns the brow of the mountain; the singing of the birds, which enlivened even the woods of Lapland, is no longer heard in this scene of desolation; the ruggedness of the dark grey rock is not covered by a single shrub; the only music is the hoarse murmuring of the waves, ever and anon renewing their assaults on the huge masses that oppose them.”

Do cold north winds correspond with the mentality of the people living there? Does the lack of warmth mean that northern people lack passion? Is there a connection between their toughness and the harshness of the landscape? Speculations about how climatic conditions affect people’s mental and physical constitution began in antiquity and can be found across the ages.

A passage from the enormously popular polemic “Les Semaines” (The Weeks) by the 16th-century Huguenot writer Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas read:

The northern-man is fair, the southern foul:
That’s white, this black; that smiles and this doth scoul;
Th’one blithe & frolike, th’other dull & froward;
Th’one’s full of courage, th’other fearfull coward;
Th’one’s hair is harsh, big, curled, th’others slender;
Th’one loveth labour, th’other books doth tender;
Th’one’s hot and moist, the other’s hot and dry.

The French philosopher Montesquieu used the contrast between a cold cultural zone and a hot one as the basis for a cultural anthropology that privileged the man of the North, insofar as he remained on his home terrain, over the man of the extreme South. Crucially, Montesquieu disputed that there were any inherently northern or southern character traits, insisting instead that people were formed by their surrounding climate. In his 1748 essay “Of Laws in Relation to the Nature of the Climate,” he conflated climate and mentality in idiosyncratic fashion: “The inhabitants of warm countries are, like old men, timorous; the people in cold countries are, like young men, brave. If we reflect on the late wars … we shall find that the northern people, transplanted into southern regions, did not perform such exploits as their countrymen who, fighting in their own climate, possessed their full vigor and courage.” Furthermore, Montesquieu made the remarkable observation: “I have been at the opera in England and in Italy, where I have seen the same pieces and the same performers: and yet the same music produces such different effects on the two nations: one is so cold and phlegmatic, and the other so lively and enraptured, that it seems almost inconceivable.” He also held that freedom, such as it existed in Europe, originated with the Scandinavian peoples, whereas he associated the South and the Orient with a distorted picture of despotism he believed still predominated there.

A few years later, in his lectures on physical geography, German philosopher Immanuel Kant assigned humanity to various “races” with differing characters. He proposed: “If one enquires as to the sources of the forms and temperament inherent in a people, then one need only consider the variations of animals in relation of form and behavior, for as soon as they are transported to a different climate, different air and food, etc., make them to be different from their descendants. A squirrel that is brown here will become grey in Siberia. A European dog taken to Guinea will become misshapen and bald, and so will its descendants.” Kant expanded this logic to human beings: “The descendants of the northern peoples who went to Spain not only have bodies that are not nearly as strong as they were originally, but also their temperament has changed into one very different from that of a Norwegian or Dane. The inhabitant of the temperate zone, especially in its central part, is more beautiful in body, harder working, more witty, more moderate in his passions, and more sensible than any other kind of people in the world. Consequently, these people have always taught the rest [of the world] and vanquished them by the use of weapons. The Romans, Greeks, the ancient Nordic peoples, Genghis Khan, the Turks, Tamburlaine, and the Europeans after Columbus’s discoveries, have astounded all the southern countries with their arts and their weapons.” Kant suggests a familiarity with circumstances in faraway places, which is ironic, because he spent nearly all his life in Königsberg (today, the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad), in provincial East Prussia, and received much of his knowledge from often obscure travel accounts and from conversing with sailors at the harbor of his home city.

Another passionate participant in the discussion about northern and southern people was Friedrich de la Motte-FouquĂ©, a Prussian officer from an aristocratic Huguenot family, whose most famous work, aside from the fairy tale “Undine,” was the Nibelungen trilogy “The Hero of the North,” in which he appropriated elements of Norse mythology. In 1828, he published a book responding to Alexander von Humboldt titled, “The Man of the South and of the North.” While he ascribed a great flexibility to both north and south, he wrote: “As it happens, people of the south are often found sunken in a certain external calm that almost resembles beatitude but that is anything but. If there’s disturbance making it undeniable clear that they reside not in the land of fulfillment but rather in the fundamentally impoverished one of privation, the rage that elicits resembles that of the lion or tiger. By contrast, the man of the north can be better compared with the eagle, which also prefers to live in that region. Wrathfully hard where there is battle, but also silently alert and scanning in the distance, he never lapses back into that deceptive comfort that views the outbreak of martial struggle as something monstrous and entirely unexpected.”

Ernst Moritz Arndt, who made several trips to Sweden and was one of the most important early 19th-century German nationalist writers of the Napoleonic Wars and beyond, came late to the discussions concerning people of the north and south. His thoughts were guided by the principle that people became like their land. In 1844 he wrote: “Much here in the North that seems born happy and triumphant remains undeveloped or semi-developed like a clump of substance, rotting away in the fullness of its germs and drives that never finds the necessary sun. In the south, everything finds its natural development easily. In the north, a lot decays because of overabundance that cannot gain proportion and form.”

As evenhanded as Arndt sounds here, he thought the halfway point between the Arctic and the Equator was the ideal soil for cultural development — not coincidentally this was where he himself called home. For Arndt, the Germans were the epitome of settledness despite admittedly being, “as Christians, roving pilgrims and foreigners on earth in all respects.” The antithesis of Germans, in Arndt’s eyes, were “the Jews and gypsies scattered and intimidated across the great world, who never had a place on earth where they had the right to lay their heads.”

Obsessed with all things German and preaching a philosophy of Nordic love of nature, Arndt wasn’t even slightly interested in the historical and cultural connections between Europe and India that many of his contemporaries were investigating. His world was divided along clear lines: on the one hand the Germanic tribes, on the other the Romans; on the one hand the Germans, on the other the Jews; on the one hand the forest, on the other the desert. He degraded the semi-nomadic SĂ¡mi people as “spoilers of the forest,” while on another occasion he berated Italy as the “land of lemons and bandits.”

A little later, the talk about North, South and East and the peoples and mentalities associated with these directions began to take a decidedly different turn. In 1853, the French diplomat Joseph Arthur de Gobineau published the first half of his study “The Inequality of the Human Races.” He broke humanity down into the “white, yellow, and black” races — intending them to be understood in precisely that hierarchical order. Gobineau had a romanticized fascination for all things Oriental, and the following year brought an opportunity to further develop his ideas in a place that suited his fancy when he was sent to Tehran as a secretary to the French diplomatic mission there. During his three-year stay, he threw himself into learning the Persian language and Persian history. Before he began working on his book, he had spent the preceding decade studying the leading philosophers of his time. In 1843, Alexis de Tocqueville, one of France’s major liberal intellectuals and the author of “Democracy in America,” engaged Gobineau’s services for a research project on the origins of customs and morals in modern Europe.

For Gobineau, humanity was in decline, and racial intermingling was the reason. He loathed democracy and revolution and considered the Germanic peoples to be the creators of modern European culture, calling the Baltic coast and the Scandinavian Peninsula the “maternal lap of nations.” He considered the Aryans — the “honorable men” — to be superior. Gobineau turned the term Aryan, which until that point had only been used in a linguistic sense, into an ideological cypher for “Indo-Germanic.” The basis of this shift in meaning was a fateful conflation of the supposed congenital nature of a person (“race”) and their culture (“language”).

While the use of the term “Nordic,” which is connected to the German “nordisch,” meaning belonging to the North of Europe, can be traced long back in time, Russian-French anthropologist Joseph Deniker, chief librarian at the Paris Natural History Museum from 1888, first applied the term “nordique” to the concept of “races.” Things gained further momentum during the early 20th century, when racial categories were linked with earlier mythic ideas about Northern and Southern mentality and the idea of “blood.”

One important work in this context was “The Passing of the Great Race; or, The Racial Basis of European History,” published in the United States in 1916 and still one of the most famous and notorious racist texts ever. Its author, Madison Grant, was the scion of a wealthy New York family who devoted himself to his racial obsessions. Grant promoted the “Nordic race” as superior and responsible for Western civilization’s greatest achievements. His book discussed the geographical migration of peoples and “races” and glorified light skin and blond hair. In Grant’s view, the “great race” had originated in the forests and plains of eastern Germany, Poland and Russia. He also advanced the strange notion that Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Dante must have had “Nordic blood.”

While German philosopher of history Oswald Spengler, in his epochal work “The Decline of the West” (1918), didn’t lionize the North to the extent of many of his contemporaries, he nonetheless gave a decisive role in the course of world history to the people who lived there, writing that the “old Northern races, in whose primitive souls the Faustian [spirit] was already awakening, discovered in their grey dawn the art of sailing the seas which emancipated them. The Egyptians knew the sail, but only profited by it as a labor-saving device. They sailed, as they had done before in their oared ships, along the coast to Punt and Syria, but the idea of the high-seas voyage — what it meant as a liberation, a symbol — was not in them.” “Because of an internal reason,” Spengler wrote, the men of antiquity — and thus of the South — could not become conquerors, and “the Romans made no attempt to penetrate the interior of Africa.”

Intellectuals across Europe continued to glorify the North, reaching higher and higher levels of hyperbole. The South didn’t even enjoy its symbolic monopoly on the light anymore: Scandinavia as the realm of the midnight sun and bright light. The dark days and long nights of winter that weighed so heavily on the first European travelers to the region were hardly ever mentioned.

Speculative theories proliferating about “the North” and “the South” possessed an irresistible appeal to those who repeatedly tried to define those concepts. In 1929, Prussian Culture Minister and Orientalist Carl Heinrich Becker wrote: “The South is what we don’t have but desire. The North is very different. We feel the North present deep within our most personal life. We cannot escape it. It lives in our blood, in the mysterious depths of our personality as a people and as individuals. Our creative spirit somehow comes from the south, but the primeval creative power of our soul is of northern origin.”

After Adolf Hitler had come to power, the Nazis found like-minded allies in the nearby South, in Italy. And since Nazi ideologues understood the ancient Greeks as part of the “Aryan race,” there were no obstacles to enlisting them for the cause, especially as National Socialist visions of the ideal human body were borrowed from sculptures of ancient Greek athletes. This logic was extended to include the notions that “Aryans” had founded the antique culture of southern Europe during the migration of peoples and that the Greeks were “Aryan brothers” of the Germans, who, curiously, were also seen as having come down from the North. In a 1935 proclamation by Bernhard Rust, the Nazi minister for science, education and popular training, this vacuous theory was declared a fact that was henceforth to be promoted without contradiction: “World history is to be presented as the history of racially determined ethnicities. Taking the place of the school of ‘ex oriente lux’ (meaning “from the East comes the light”) is the knowledge that at least all of the Occidental cultures — in Asia Minor, Greece, Rome and the rest of the European countries — are primarily the work of Nordic peoples, most of whom prevailed in battle with other races.” And the Nazis had no objection to depictions of Italian and Arcadian landscapes, and Roman virtues were proclaimed as German ones as well, since both groups were considered Indo-Germanic. The Germanic tribes were thus no longer seen as the antipode of the Romans, as they had been in previous simple North-South antitheses. The main line of conflict now ran between Germanic people and Semitic people, especially the Jews, with all the disastrous consequences that ensued.


Bernd Brunner is an author
May 6, 2022

Adapted from “Extreme North: A Cultural History,” W. W. Norton, 2022 (original translation by Jefferson Chase, a few paragraphs are not part of the English-language edition)