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/ 21 December 2006
To drive by moonlight down the Cape Peninsula’s western shore, and to be lost in that silvery no-man’s-land night between stone-pine and kelp forest, is to be reminded of how beautiful fire can be. You see it far away, at first, nothing more than a blob of incandescence against the black surge of the Atlantic.
There’s an advert emblazoned on the sides of London double-decker buses for a computer game: ”Paste your girlfriend’s white bits here.” Another irritating sexualisation of public space, another insistent, insidious message of how culture shapes expectations of our sexuality.
By the time you get into bed tonight, more people will have died brutal deaths in Iraq. The toll in the two weeks after the destruction of the Samarra mosque was 500, which averages 35 people a day — men, women and children. The explosions and the deaths have become so routine, they barely register with public opinion any more.
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/ 8 February 2006
To real enthusiasts — they call themselves transhumanists — humanity is on the point of being liberated from its biology. They believe that humans are on the brink of a huge leap in development, leaving behind the sick, weak, fallible creatures we have been up to now. We will be, as their slogan goes, ”better than well”’.
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/ 30 November 2005
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In the sandy compound of his extended family’s home, six-year-old Manuel Rafael is playing with his cousins. He doesn’t know he is HIV-positive, and doesn’t understand his grandmother’s explanation in Portuguese about how he could have died but for the anti-retroviral treatment he began when he was just a year old.
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/ 9 November 2005
Governments across the Muslim world are irritated by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s forthright criticism of their lack of democracy and free speech, yet he is consulted by leaders such as President Bashar Assad of Syria and Moammar Gadaffi of Libya. His outspoken support for the Palestinians and defence of suicide bombing have led to a ban from the United States and could see him excluded from Britain under new anti-terror laws.
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/ 9 November 2005
Ask a woman if she is ambitious and you either get a short, horrified ”no”, or a long speech in which the word is defined, redefined, qualified and explained. After a generation of women working outside the home, they are still squirming with embarrassment around an old problem — ambition.
Call me naïve, but I thought it was possible that 2005 could achieve even more than a historic breakthrough deal on debt relief and aid for Africa. The conjunction of this key political moment with a huge cultural festival, Africa 05 — television and radio programmes, seemed to hold the promise of achieving one of those lasting shifts in public understanding of Africa.
A recent survey found that 31% of British people thought Easter was sponsored by Cadbury’s, while 48 % had no idea what the religious festival was about. The survey adds to evidence of how Britain has been de-Christianised in the past 50 years. What’s interesting is how peculiar this phenomenon is in a global context.
The issue of aid and how it’s being played on our television screens reminds us what this war is all about. Not oil, not weapons of mass destruction, but a demonstration of United States power, necessary after 9/11 to impress appropriate fear and respect in the hearts and minds across the globe — in Europe as much as in the Middle East.