The Pre-WWII Malayan Anarchist Movement

The world's most cosmopolitan city of the era: Singapore in the 1920s, Photograph courtesy of Tripadvisor

Bayly and Harper write that Britain’s South-East Asian empire was somewhat unique, with the Malayan economy for example based not only on rubber plantations worked under a strict hierarchical regime by Indian migrant labourers, plus tin mines in the Kinta Valley in Perak, producing by 1905 some 50% of the world’s tin, and coal mines at Batu Arang in Selangor worked by Chinese labourers under slightly less onerous conditions – giving Malaya an unusual concentration of industrial workers – but also opium, official duties on which accounted for an astounding 40-60% of annual revenue: “The British crescent in Asia [from Assam on the Chinese border to Singapore at the tip of the Malayan peninsula] was supported by narco-colonialism on a massive scale.” Apart from being a narco-colony, Malaya was home to a polyglot multiracial society of British, mixed-race Eurasians, Chinese, Malayans, Tamils from India, Burghers from Sri Lanka, Sikhs, and others – all discretely discriminated amongst by class, caste, religion, language, labour and colour: “British Malaya was built on a viciously insidious form of apartheid.” They note that in that era, Singapore was probably the world’s most cosmopolitan city – even more so than New York, and boasted electric light, refrigeration and air-conditioning. The Malayan peninsula was administered by a patchwork consisting of: the British “Straits settlements” at Penang, Malacca and Singapore; the “federated Malay states,” indirectly ruled via local collaborationist potentates, of Perak, Selangor, Pahang, and Negri Sembilan; and the “unfederated states,” essentially protectorates, of Kedah, Kelantan, Trengganu, and Johore. Yong notes that "Communism as an ideology was first introduced to Malaya by Chinese anarchists, and not by Kuomintang [Guomindang] Left, Indonesian communists or Chinese communists as claimed in existing scholarship. A handful of Chinese anarchists arrived in British Malaya during the First World War to take up positions as Chinese vernacular school teachers or journalists. These Chinese intellectuals harboured not only anarchism but also communism, commonly known then as anarcho-communism." 

Yong says that the ideology of these pioneers – men such as Hu Tu-tsu, Fan Chang-pu and Goh Tun-ban – was based both on Kropotkin’s mutual aid and violent social revolution, with a distinct anti-militarist and anti-imperialist flavour. Citing colonial police records, Yong says Hu and Fan were alleged to be “the leaders of an anarchist society in Singapore, called Truth” – this is probably the Society for the Truth of the South Seas founded in Singapore by Liu Shixin, which established small branches across the East Indies archipelago – and admitted to having organised a strike among Chinese workers employed in the city’s Japanese engineering firms in protest against the Japanese occupation of Germany’s former Shantung Peninsula territory in northern China. Both men were deported back to China, but Goh, who had emigrated from the anarchist stronghold of southern Fujian province in China, remained in the city of Kuala Lumpur. There, he befriended local Guomindang intellectuals and businessmen – at this time, some Chinese anarchists were close to or even inside the Guomindang’s left wing – and with their aid, launched the anarchist-communist journal Yik Khuan Poh (To Benefit the People), which carried articles from both the anarchist and Bolshevik perspectives. Yong says that in 1919 in response to the May Fourth Movement in China, Goh published a series of articles on “national self-defence”, “national self-determination” and “national self-government” – but this was to have been on a Bolshevik Soviet model which Goh, from the distorting great distance of Malaysia, saw as rule by the popular classes, the “ideal of anarcho-communism”. Confused as this was, when Goh was tried after being arrested with five other militants in the so-called “Six Gentlemen Incident”, he nevertheless stated he was an anarchist who wished to destroy the chiang-chuan (oppressive authorities). Goh and the other five were deported to China and the editorship of Yik Khuan Poh was briefly taken over by the moderate socialist P’an Ssu-choon. The May Fourth Movement also sparked anarchist organising: according to Kim and Mahl, one of the leaders of the movement in Malaya recalled, “this enthusiastic movement had a great effect upon the whole [Chinese] nation, and later on the South Seas (Nanyang). Many propertyless men in the South Seas long sunk in slumber were awakened. And for the first time they began to know that there has existed such a thing as Labour Day”.  Bayly and Harper confirm that “The labouring world of Kuala Lumpur was a hotbed for the first Chinese anarchists who came to Malaya in the wake of the May 4th movement of national awakening in China.” The anarchists’ recruiting-ground was the ethnic Chinese trade guilds in Malaya and shortly, Kim and Mahl write, “The Anarchist Party was established in Malaya by 1919 and its objectives were stated to be as follows: ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Community of Goods, Co-operation; each does what he can and takes what he needs: no government, laws or military forces, no landlords, capitalists or leisured class. No money, religion, police, prison or leaders. No representatives, heads of families, no person uneducated or not working: no rules of marriages, no degrees of high or low, rich or poor, and the method to be adopted is given by organisation of comrades by means of communication centres, by propaganda in pamphlets, speeches and education, by passive resistance to those in power. Do not pay taxes, cease work, cease trade; by the method of direct action, assassinate and spread disorder. Anarchy is the great revolution’.”

Kim and Mahl state that “By 1920, Anarchist societies… existed in Singapore, Penang, Ipoh, Kuala Lumpur and Seremban. Some of the Chinese schools were important centres of activities.” P’an was replaced in 1920 by Liu Ke-fei, the younger brother of the celebrated Chinese anarchist-communist Liu Shih-fu. Kim and Mahl write that prior to his arrival in Malaya, Liu the younger had edited a paper in Manila, the Philippine capital, presumably anarchist in orientation. His articles over the following year tended towards a rose-tinted view of the Bolsheviks, but also promoted anarcho-communism, “proletarianism” and class war – which he said in the undeveloped world was rather between the populace and the warlords and bureaucracy than between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Kim and Mahl state that: “May Day was first celebrated, clandestinely but with great enthusiasm, by the Anarchists in Ipoh in 1921. A big meeting was held which was attended by workers and students. The following year it was intended to distribute tens of thousands of leaflets on Labour Day but the scheme fell through because no printer was prepared to undertake the job. However, numerous Anarchist publications entered the country that year among which were: Kung Sai Yam (Save the World), Kung Chan Tong (the Communist Party)” – in these early days, there was often a misidentification by militants of Bolshevism with anarchist-communism – “and Anarchist Morality by Kropotkin. There were also pamphlets printed or published locally such as the Tai Yeung (the Sun) printed at the premises of the Yik Khwan Po in Kuala Lumpur and Yan Kheun (Power of the Proletariat) which was published in the town of Gopeng, about ten miles south of Ipoh. The Anarchist movement in Malaya entered an even more active phase in 1924 when several new leaders emerged especially in Kuala Lumpur.” Crisi identifies one of them: “One of the premier Malaysian anarchists was Lau Hak Fei, who was editor of several newspapers in Manila and Kuala Lumpur, one of them the Po Yik Khwan. From the decade of the ’20s, the momentum of the experience was from anarchism in China, and many unions were founded throughout the Malay Peninsula.” 

The first communist cell was only established in Malaysia by Chinese immigrants in 1921, with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party and to the Guomindang left wing, relations which improved after the 1924 ZGD-Guomindang pact. Some communists worked alongside the anarchists on Yik Khuan Poh. In 1925, the Chinese woman anarchist Wong So-ying bombed the Chinese Protectorate in Kuala Lumpur, injuring two officials and herself. Kim and Mahl recall the bombing so: “The last major activity of the Anarchists in Malaya occurred in 1925 when an attempt was made, first to assassinate the High Commissioner of the Federated Malay States and Governor of the Straits Settlements, Sir Laurence Guillemard. When this failed to materialise they turned their attention to Daniel Richards, the Protector of Chinese for Selangor. On January 26, 1925, a Chinese woman (Wong Sau Ying), about 26 years old, with bobbed hair, wearing a white jacket, black shirt, white shoes and white stockings, arrived at the Chinese Protectorate in Kuala Lumpur. She bought with her a small brown attaché case. Finding Daniel Richards and his assistant (W.L. Blythe) seated at a table, she entered the office, placed the case near a corner of the table and spoke softly to Richards. She then fumbled with the catch of the attaché case [and] pushed it towards Richards. There was an explosion. Both Richards and Blythe were injured but survived.” Bayly and Harper hint that Wong’s motivations, while intimately personal, were also indicative of the repressive climate under which the colonised survived: “The bomb was retribution for those who had banished her lover to China and caused his early death. It was Malaya’s first act of political terrorism.” Yong says that the British interrogators were unable to crack Wong – who had also been injured in the explosion – and she was jailed for ten years, while the authorities rounded up and deported “quite a number of Chinese anarchists”. Kim and Mahl say that while serving her time in Pudu Gaol, Wong “committed suicide by hanging herself”. In response, there was an anti-British boycott in the anarchist stronghold of Guangzhou, southern China, where the anarcho-syndicalists had by 1922 built unions 300,000-strong (and where they conducted a social revolution that controlled most of the Guangdong province as well as southern Fujian province over 1921-1925). Yong cites a report into the anarchist movement following the bombing by A.M. Good, the Secretary for Chinese Affairs, which revealed that an “Anarchist Federation” had existed in Malaysia since 1919 and by 1925 had an estimated membership of fifty. This is presumably the Anarchist Party referred to by Kim and Mahl, who also state that “there were probably not more than 50 hardcore members in the Peninsula. Their influence was reported to have reached a much wider circle of Chinese, especially among the school teachers”. 

But by this stage, the communists were surpassing the suppressed anarchists, with a nascent communist party, the Nanyang Public Bodies’ Union (later the Nanyang Communist Party, NCP) founded in 1926 under Chinese Communist Party patronage and with its own labour arm, the Nanyang General Labour Union (NGLU). In 1930, the Comintern, in an apparent attempt to supplant Russian influence for Chinese, directed the NCP to transform itself into the Malayan Communist Party (MCP), but despite this, it and the NGLU remained Chinese-dominated and thus marginalised from the Malayan majority. Bayly and Harper write that Malaya’s industrial concentration of 724,000 industrial workers by 1931 was unique in South-East Asia: “this was about 16% of the total population. It was a unique concentration of workers: only perhaps 0,7% of the population of India could be classified in this way.” Nevertheless, the impact of the Great Depression saw half the Chinese tin-miners, some 75,000 – repatriated to China. And yet thanks to the opium trade, Malaya never required outside assistance to ride out the Depression, and in 1934, new finds of bauxite and manganese in Kelantan and Trengganu saw massive mines established there, one at Dungun employing 3,000 miners. Kim and Mahl note that “After the bomb incident, the Anarchist movement in Malaya fizzled out. The Communists took over the role of inciting workers to oppose their employers and government and government. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s the Chinese were the active trade unionists, receiving no official sanction though, in Malaya. Their leaders, being mainly leftists, were arrested as soon as they gained influence.” Still, Bayly and Harper write: “By the late 1930s, trades unions and the Malayan Communist Party had made inroads in the small industrial towns of the west coast.” In 1937, a wave of protests involving some 100,000 workers swept the rubber plantations and tin mines – and a Batu Arang Soviet was established at Malayan Collieries, but it was suppressed by 250 police and 200 troops, leaving one worker dead and four injured; hundreds of “soviet” labourers were deported to China. Kim and Mahl write: “It was only after World War II that the government embarked on a deliberate policy of grooming Indians to take control or workers’ unions as a counter to the influence of the radical Chinese.”

Sources:
1. Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies: Britian’s Asian Empire & the War with Japan, Penguin Books, London, UK, 2004.
2. Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 1992.
3. Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire, California World History Library, USA, 2011.
4. C.F. Yong, Origins and Development of the Malayan Communist Movement, 1919-1930, Modern Asian Studies Vol. 25, No. 4, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 1991.
5. Datuk Khoo Kay Kim and Ranjit Singh Mahl, Malaysia: Chinese Anarchists Started Trade Unions, The Sunday Star, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, September 12, 1993.
6. Emilio Crisi, Revolución Anarquista Coreana en Manchuria, Editorial Libros de Anarres, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2015.

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Keeping the Public Interest at Heart

Michael Schmidt, executive director, Institute for the Advancement of Journalism, The Media, 15 November 2010

It has become a commonplace over the past two years for leading lights in the South African media to state that that media – and by extension, free speech and thus democracy itself – is under threat by dark forces. But I believe that South African society is robust enough to resist the current statutory threats to our media freedom: the proposed Media Appeals Tribunal (MAT), the Promotion of Information Bill (POIB) – the so-called “Secrecy Bill” – and other pending legislation: the Public Service Broadcasting Bill, and the ICASA Amendment Bill. My stance is in fact a little harsh on the media itself, because I believe the media could well do with a little more introspection on what has provoked this raft of constrictive new rules. 
Some of the causes are indeed rooted in the skullduggery of a kleptocratic clique that has wormed its way into the leadership ranks of the ruling African National Congress, a clique whose apparent drive towards impunity by means of removing their henchmen from media scrutiny gives notice of what can only be described as criminal intent. But the ANC leadership is also possessed of a majority of irreproachable cadres steeped in a vigorous democratic tradition nearly a century old. It is just not that clear which faction is in the ascendancy. But what is clear is that the media failed to raise as big a stink as was warranted when the National Prosecuting Authority committed seppuku in public last year by announcing in effect that justice could be bought, by admitting that in capitulating to Zuma as it had to Mbeki before him, the NPA would bend whichever way the prevailing political wind blew. If the media had taken as strong a stand then in defence of the rule-of-law aspects of our democracy as they are now in defence of its free speech aspects, I would be more inclined to believe today that they were being public-spirited in asking civil society to rally to their cause. It was a missed opportunity and I am reminded of Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous statement on his incremental failure to resist the Nazis, how by failing to protect others, he eventually failed to protect himself.
The key question is whether this contest over public space is in itself injurious to democracy. And my short answer is no, precisely because of the complexity of that contest. For example, I will happily welcome the launch of The New Age as an implicitly, or even an explicitly, pro-ANC daily – when it finally gets its presses rolling. After all, when one travels in France and picks up a copy of Libération one knows one is reading a centre-left newspaper, and that with le Figaro, one is reading a right-wing newspaper. Perhaps the time of all South Africa’s mainstream newspapers huddling safely in the political middle, proclaiming bland constitutionalism to be their only creed, is over. Now they can feel free to express their genuine orientations, interests and prejudices, to nail their colours to the mast in the spirit if not style of Daily Sun. I will also answer no as to whether the contest of ideas polarizes us: once the democratic genie is out of the bottle, it is very hard to force it back in, if only because its sheer, expansive size is no longer confinable in such a small space. Those social, political and economic complexities that apartheid tried to divide-and-rule, have now meshed together and the process, while seldom smooth, is irreversible. This is not to say that new democracies do not have fragilities and that they will not perhaps suffer reversals of some elements of their hard-won freedoms from time to time, ground that will have to be won back, but that the tide of history is on the side of greater freedom of expression and thus of the media that convey it. The question of whether smaller reversals can be prevented is based on the depth of implantation of democratic practice and the strength of institutions such as my own that facilitate that implantation. If we are to be honest with ourselves, we will have to recognise that the state itself is no democracy, rather it is akin to a bureaucratic army; and businesses are very seldom run as democracies, enlightened autocracy being the best we can expect from them. And so the task of ensuring that the balance remains tilted in favour of socially-responsible freedoms rests with other interest groups, whether formally organised or not: civil society, labour, political organisations, faith-based communities, community-based organisations, the media. This is not to grant any of these the status of unalloyed champion of democracy, however, because all are exceptionally diverse realms in themselves where progressive and reactionary ideas clash continually; but that’s the substance of a democracy and should not in itself be of concern to free speech advocates.  
What are of concern, of course, are statutory media restrictions. But I believe that the advocates of the Secrecy Bill have realised that they have overreached themselves in pushing for a law that they would balk at having applied against themselves (the sure litmus test of fairness), and that before it is passed into law, it will be substantively softened in deference to the domestic and international pressures being exerted to bring it into line with democratic norms. We may have a tougher time arguing against the ICASA Amendment and Public Service Broadcasting Bills, if only because their drawing of the SABC closer under the skirts of the communications minister is nowhere near as wildly intemperate as the Secrecy Bill; but again, a campaign dedicated to ensuring that we never, never, and never again have a his-masters’-voice SABC but rather a genuine public broadcaster will go a long way towards curbing that. The Media Appeals Tribunal remains the wild card, in part because it has not yet been codified into a Bill and remains a vague, formless threat, so we don’t know what its exact content will be, but more precisely because the ANC also claims it is batting for the public interest here: while its own gripes against the current Ombudsman have been shown to be bogus, there are no doubt genuinely aggrieved readers, listeners and viewers who feel slighted at times by an arrogant media, too comfortably assured of its unassailable status as the Fourth Estate – and there is an even broader tinderbox rent-a-crowd out there, ever ready to get out the pitchforks and light the torches whenever the ANC barks against its perceived enemies.
But a bigger threat may be the long-term impact of the recession. After the closure of The Weekender, it is perhaps only a matter of time before other mainstream titles begin to shut down – or at the very least cut their operations down to the bone. Mainstream media houses have already embarked on huge cost-cutting exercises: newsrooms have been trimmed down even beyond what were considered crazy staffing levels only 10 years ago and “expensive” experienced journalists laid off, or like myself faced with the option of languishing in dead-end senior posts or leaving journalism; layoffs have also particularly affected sub-editing staff, the last bulwark of quality journalism. Dire warnings about the demise of the print media are hardly limited to South Africa, however. In the United States for example, venerable mainstream newspapers such as the 150-year-old Rocky Mountain News in Colorado have been forced out of business, while even world-class standard-bearers like the New York Times are reeling from the twin blows of the recession and the lock-stock-and-barrel shift of classified advertisers to online services.  
Alexander Cockburn, editor of the respected online American political journal CounterPunch, painted a scene of panic about the very future of American democracy in a June 2009 column provocatively titled Who Needs Yesterday’s Papers?: “Sonorous phrases about ‘public service’ mingle with fearful yelps about the ‘dramatically diminished version of democracy’ that looms over America if the old corporate print press goes the way of the steam engine. In The Nation recently, John Nichols and Robert McChesney quavered that ‘as journalists are laid off and newspapers cut back or shut down, whole sectors of our civic life go dark’ and that ‘journalism is collapsing, and with it comes the most serious threat in our lifetimes to self-government and the rule of law as it has been understood here in the United States’.” But Cockburn, who co-wrote the book End Times: The Death of the Fourth Estate, stated bluntly that apart from “a brief flare-up of investigative zeal” in the early to mid-1970s, “any exacting assessment of the actual performance of newspapers rated against the twaddle about the role of the Fourth Estate spouted by publishers and editors at their annual conventions would issue a negative verdict in every era”. He claimed that the mainstream press had in fact, at every turn since at least the 1930s, failed to serve the public interest, and warned that many would dance on the graves of a mainstream press that avoided reporting coherently on the economic, political, social and environmental processes that affected the lives of their readers. The lesson for us here is clear: unless our media holds the public interest at the core of its operations, we are merely giving ammunition to the demagogues who would see the media turned into the mouthpiece of vested interests. And against this backdrop, the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism has a clear mandate: to remain a lighthouse of progressive, quality, socially-uplifting, cutting-edge, public-spirited journalism training on the continent.

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El Sindicalismo Revolucionario, Comunismo Libertario y Control Territorial

Charla pública de anoche en la ciudad de Puebla, México: "Sindicalismo Revolucionario, Comunismo Libertario y Control Territorial", un prelanzamiento de mi libro A la Sombra de un Huracán, que consta de tres estudios de caso de las revoluciones en Ucrania, Heilongjiang-Jilin (Manchuria) y Guangdong-Fukien (China), y el Uruguay antifascista de posguerra. Gracias a Rene Garcia Espinosa de BUAP y al traductor Chantal Seoane.

En esta presentación, presenté por primera vez algunos de mis modelos de movimientos anarquistas armados Makhnovistas, Coreanos-Manchurianos, y Uruguayos en los períodos 1917-1919, 1921-1929 y 1958-1972, respectivamente. Destacé 
1) la ubicación del anarquismo dentro del ala izquierda de la tradición izquierdista que surgió de la Revolución Francesa, incluida su corriente mayoritaria dentro de una corriente comunista libertaria más amplia que incluye narodnikas, nihilistas, maximalistas, revolucionarios de izquierda, comunistas de izquierda y comunistas de consejo; 
2) las formas de organización masiva del anarquismo dominaron a la izquierda desde la división de 1872 en la Primera Internacional, especialmente en América Latina, donde el sindicalismo protorevolucionario había surgido en México en 1869, en gran parte del mundo hasta principios de la década de 1920; 
3) que estas formas, al crear el contrapoder proletario contra las élites burguesas, se armaron, sin embargo, sometidas a cuerpos sociales deliberativos más amplios; y 
4) que estas organizaciones (revolucionarias / anarcosindicalistas, militares, sociales / soviéticas, deliberativas / delegadas y específicas) fueron organizadas, modernas y controladas por enormes territorios con millones de habitantes.

Por ejemplo, presenté por primera vez los siguientes cálculos aproximados, Comparando los Territorios Comunistas Libertarios, 1905-2019:
* Guria, Georgia (1905-1907): 0,1-millón personas, 2,033km² (sobre el tamaño de Mauricio, una pequeña isla en el Océano Indico).
* Mexico Central-Sur (1911-1920) – Mexico, Tlaxcala, Puebla, Guerrero, Michoacán y Oaxaca: 5,08-millón personas, 281,600km² (más grande que el Ecuador).
* Zaporizhia, Ucraina (1918-1921): 2,5-millón personas, 27,000km² (sobre el tamaño de Haití); incluso Dnipropetrovsk, Kherson y Donetsk: 7-millón personas, 114,000km² (más grande que de Honduras).
* Guangdong-Fukien (1921-1925): 41-millón personas, 240,500km² (más grande que Gran Bretaña).
* Heilongjiang-Jilin (1929-1932): 2-millón personas, 350,000km² (sobre el tamaño de Alemania).
* Catalonia-Aragón (1936-1939), excluyendo Asturias, Valencia y Andalucía republicano: 3,6-millón personas, 32,100km² (más grande que Bélgica).
* Rojava, Siria (2014-hoy): 4,6-millón personas, 50,000km² (sobre el tamaño de Costa Rica).

Voy a publicar un video y / o audio de la charla en breve.

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Reflections on 2018 and 2019

As I reflect on 2018, it has proven to be a busy and diverse year, full of challenge, promise and, for want of a better word, blessings. It has taken me from the depths of the  massive refugee camp at Khutupalong in southern Bangladesh, near the epicentre of the Rohingya Genocide, to the heights of the ash-clouds of a freshly-erupting Popocatepetl volcano in central Mexico, has embraced four journalism conferences, travel to four countries, marked my first entry into the world of film-making, and resulted in the completion of four significant works: a unique monograph on African Anarchist Movements; a book on love, loss, sex and death; the third-edition rewrite of Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism for its Arabic and Spanish translations, and the completion, after eighteen years' unpaid labour of my magnum opus, the global anarchist movement history In the Shadow of a Hurricane which is now being reviewed by a subject-matter expert prior to publication. I am now on the verge of signing a contract for an intense new book that I will write over 2019.

Although I continue to write on African affairs, especially in the under-covered maritime sector, journalism is now the minority of my work, and my transformation into a human rights rapporteur is nearing completion as we prepare to establish the first Safe Haven for persecuted human rights defenders in Johannesburg, the culmination of a process that began back in 2012. I am very excited about this, especially given that I hope we can name the initiative after my late friend Anton Hammerl, killed in Libya in 2011, but there is trepidation too, because after having worked on several relocations of at-risk people already, I am aware of the many pitfalls and do not want to fail my charges. Fortunately, I am consolidating a team of women, three in Johannesburg and three in Cape Town, who have demonstrated a passion for getting on board this project. On that note, given the depredations inflicted on women globally by those who desire to control all of us, I will foreground women's protections in my work going forward as I bring the Safe Havens conference to South Africa for the first time in 2019.

In the coming year, I am definitely queued to work at least in Namibia, South Africa, and possibly Mozambique and Zambia (as a researcher), India (as a trainer), and definitely in the Netherlands (as a rapporteur), with further work in South and South-East Asia on the cards too (perhaps embracing countries as diverse as Nepal and Vietnam), as my conflict-sensitive journalism training deepens its reach into Asia as part of a three-year regional project. I have also been invited to a literary festival in Georgia in the Caucasus, and might also speak on my work in Canada and Russia should those opportunities bear fruit. There is also a possibility that I may be contracted to do work in Boko Haram territory around Lake Chad (Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon), though the current state-backed linguistic conflict in Cameroon and the security situation in the region in general makes this tricky. And then there is the question on doing on the ground research into the Rojava Revolution - very difficult given the blockade on all sides by Daesh (Islamic State), Turkish, Syrian regime, and right-wing Kurdish forces - but not impossible... if a Norwegian friend in her sixties can do it, so can I ;) 

I am also embarking on some new directions, including research and possibly script-writing for film, the establishment of a much-needed blues bar / intimate theatre since the closure of The Blues Room in Joburg several years ago, and some perhaps more reflective explorations. The year has seen the forging of new friendships, the testing of old friendships, and what I guess you could call the closure of a quarter-century romance cycle. I look forward to seeing what personal developments 2019 will bring. Here is a sketch of key events of my life this past year:

2018: Rewrite of 3rd edition of Cartography completed
          Contracted research into pro-apartheid background of UK “ex”-fascist Max Mosley
          Ran four In-depth Journalism Boot-camps for 57 journalists (Bangladesh)
          Ran Conflict-Sensitive Journalism Workshop for 25 journalists (Bangladesh)
          Reporting on the Rohingya Genocide at Kutupalong (Bangladesh)
          ProJourn delegate to Menell Media Exchange 2018 
          Radio Freedom’s second podcast with Taurai Mabhachi during Radio Days Africa
          Chaired debate on fake news – "Reading Between the Lies" – at ISS
          Ran Advanced In-Depth Journalism Workshop (Bangladesh)
          In the Shadow of a Hurricane completed
          Presented on "Writing Narrative Non-Fiction" at SA Book Fair 2018
          ProJourn delegate to Anti-Racism Network of South Africa conference
          Chaired ProJourn debate on the Rohingya Genocide at Holocaust & Genocide Centre
          Started research work for fact-based African feature film
          ProJourn delegate to Crisis & War Reporting in Africa conference
          Official rapporteur at Safe Havens 2018 (Sweden)
          SACRP announcement of opening of Safe Havens initiative in Johannesburg
          Contract secured in principle for writing a new book over 2019
          African Anarchist Movements: Race, Class & Liberation published (Mexico)

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Flying the Enemy's Flag

Book review of James Ellroy’s Perfidia, Penguin, 2014

In the age of sail it was an acceptable ruse de guerre to sneak up on an enemy ship flying his own colours as camouflage to get oneself to a position advantageous to a swift and successful assault; but to fail to run up one’s own colours before actually attacking and attempting to kill or seize the prize was ungentlemanly conduct known as perfidy. 
The theme was applied to love and betrayal by Mexican composer Alberto Domiguez for his song Perfidia which became a 1940 hit for Xavier Cugat, band-leader at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City during WWII – and now crime noire don James Ellroy has employed it as the treacherous heart of his latest novel, Perfidia, revolving around Japanese fifth-column activity in LA in the weeks after Pearl Harbour. 
In tune with this age’s fascination for prequel narratives of popular works, Perfidia lays the groundwork for Ellroy’s LA Quartet of novels: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential, and White Jazz. Of those, the first three – Dahlia and Confidential were made into compelling films – are masterful but the final volume runs out of steam and appears to lose its way off the central narrative.
That is despite the fact that the central figure in the last three novels is former IRA gunman turned brutal LA policeman on the make Captain Dudley Smith, a great literary creation at the nexus of the torsion between shady cops and the criminal underworld of 1946-1958 Los Angeles. 
But in Perfidia, which covers only 6-29 December 1941, the Dudster, then just a sergeant, is on the rise, exploiting his confessional ties to JFK’s bootlegging father Joe Kennedy, to Chinese tong boss Uncle Ace Kwan, and to Mexican blackshirt state policeman Carlos Madrano, his killer instinct honed by a racist and yet entirely opportunistic Irish Catholicism, and abetted by a deliciously droll patter delivered in a seductive brogue.
Many other Quartet figures find their first breath here, but one stellar entry who only passes by in The Black Dahlia is 21-year-old Midwestern farmgirl Kay Lake, an arriviste ingénue and quick-study whose penetrating personal diary forms the connecting tissue of the narrative. Lake’s pitiless yet charming self-assessments of her own perfidy are stunning and deliver a nuanced, flawed, dynamic character worthy of big screen treatment. 
Ditto for the rapid evolution of the moral ambivalence of closeted young queer Japanese police forensics buff Dr Hideo Ashida, desperate to prove his worth to bad men like Sergeant Smith in order to gain protection for his brother Akira and their drunken, Tojo-supporting mother Mariko as it swiftly becomes clear the country’s Japanese population are headed for mass wartime internment.
For Ellroy fans, although his inimitable blend of fictional and true-life characters remains, there are several departures from his usual style. For one thing, James Ellroy is the anti-James Lee Burke; where Burke’s denouements resolve high dudgeon with an unusual quietness, Ellroy is infused with the Götterdämmerung of his native Hollywood and his novels end not with a whimper but a bang – yet here, the key mystery of the novel – who murdered the fifth columnist Watanabe family, trying to make it appear like a family suicide, and how is this linked to plans to profiteer from the looming mass internments – is resolved with somewhat unseemly, almost offhanded speed. 
Then, apart from Lake’s diary, Ellroy’s usual technique of using FBI memos and other quasi-documentary snippets to link the narrative are gone. And despite the fact that the entire book is driven by a visceral exploration of post-Pearl Harbour anti-Japanese animus, often referencing a then-still-potent domestic and international fascism, Ellroy has tempered the racist language that marked – some would argue, marred – all his other works, in particular the brilliant Underworld USA Trilogy which covers the dramatic seven years from 1958-1972 covering the JFK assassination and its aftermath from the perspectives of them what done it. Perfidia is not quite up to the Trilogy’s standard, but will prove more than satisfactory to those readers hungry for a foretaste of the characters that made three-quarters of the LA Quartet great.

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The Red of His Shadow

Book review of Mayra Montero, The Red of His Shadow, Panther, 2002

Vodoun, the syncretic religion of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, comprising Haiti in the west and Dominican Republic in the east, is seldom accurately represented in fiction, subject as it has been for centuries to white mistrust of black theology, and in recent times to B-grade horror movie renderings of zombies.

Even Harvard scientist Wade Davis’ excellent 1985 book The Serpent and the Rainbow – a unique investigation into the real psycho-pharmacological bases of zombiesm, combined with a history of the rebel black republic of Haiti after its successful slave revolution of 1804, and a detailed explanation of how vodoun developed as an underground slave exaltation of West and Central African religions under the guise of their overlords’ Catholicism – was turned into a cheap Wes Craven thriller in 1988.

An unsurpassed exploration of the roots of rock ‘n roll via Haiti, where the faiths of African and Irish slaves combined to form vodoun and shape modern American culture, is the 1985 essay by Texan writer Michael Ventura, Hear That Long Snake Moan, which is available online. But Davis and Ventura offer rare English-language non-fiction insights into vodoun, so it was perhaps inevitable that an accurate depiction in fiction would be penned by a Cuban writer, in Spanish.

With a light touch, but penetrating empathy, Mayra Montero explores the mutual antagonisms, racism and interwoven cultures of pitch-black migrant Haitian “Congo” cane-cutters working for a pittance in a coffee-coloured Dominican mulatto world. Bucking traditional prejudices and a rain of curses from her family, the clairvoyant Dominican Anacaona marries the Haitian cane-cutter Jean-Claude Revé, brother to the vodoun houngan Papa Luc Revé, whose shy but willful daughter Zulé, possessed of a natural susceptibility to be ridden by the Loa, those ancient African gods, is destined from a young age to become the mambo of her own vodoun Societé.

Every year during Holy Week, Zulé’s Societé prepares itself with incantations, appeals to the Loa for protection and profit, dresses in its finest, beats its ritual drums, and, lead by its elders and queens, sets out from the batey, the worker’s barracks near the sugar mill, on a sacred procession, a Gagá, through the countryside, during which time they will exchange gifts of rum, cigars, cakes and fowl with the batey communities and Societés they encounter, while the mambos and houngans dispense advice and intercede with the spirit world.

It is usually a time of great celebration, but this year everyone is on edge because they know Zulé’s Gagá is destined to cross paths – and machetes – with the rival Gagá of the Haitian houngan Similá Bolosse, feared as a bokor, a master of the dark arts, not least for his connections to the disgraced yet still dangerous tonton macoute death-squads of ousted Haitian president Papa Doc Duvalier, and their drug shipments, the loss of one of which is blamed on Zulé. 

Montero’s lush and livid prose is brought to us by the skilled translation of Edith Grossman, who has also made Latin American greats like Gabriel García Márquez accessible to English readers. Peppering her text with vodoun chants and slave songs in Haitian Creole, Montero draws us into the realities of the cane-cutter’s physical poverty and spiritual abundance. 

With language as plain as cassava yet as firey as rum, she spins a tale – apparently inspired by a real crime of passion – which for all its grittiness has the lyrical, doomed beauty of many of Latin America’s great voices; definitely a talent to watch.

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The Two Faces of Global Separatism (2014)

Catalan anarchist flag, a variant on the separatist estelada (the communist version has a red canton and yellow star). Not all Catalan anarchists desire Catalan separatism per se, even if they support the region's claims to linguistic-cultural identity - the anarchist vision being rather of decentralised multi-ethnic societies along the lines of the current Rojava Revolution.

I wrote this piece for Daily Maverick in September 2014. Events in Basque Country, Scotland and especially Catalonia have since evolved - while the Rojava Revolution has seen an area larger than Belgium become independent in northern Syria under a feminist-ecological libertarian communist social system (although this is explicitly a pan-Syrian and not a separatist project). The piece was selectively quoted by my dilettante political opponents to try and "prove" me to be an ethnic separatist, but as I make clear in the text, separatism in South Africa is a dead letter and a political chimera. 

- Michael Schmidt

My father until very recently lived in a stone house on the wild outer reaches of Scotland, on South Uist, the southernmost island in the remote, Atlantic-lashed chain called the Outer Hebrides. He appealed to me to visit, but my cynical response was that I'd have to be on a cod-fishing trawler headed from the Danish Faroe archipelago to Iceland and get blown off course by a storm to wind up in South Uist, it is that far off the charts. 
For four fractious centuries, the Outer Hebrides formed part of the inconsistent Norse Kingdom of the Isles which included the Inner Hebrides, Shetland, Orkney and the Isle of Man, and it only became a part of Scotland in 1266. It has more than 50 uninhabited islands, has barely any trees, and until fairly recently could only be reached by ferry from the mainland. So if today's Scottish referendum on dividing the two old sovereignties goes against Whitehall, the bucolic wastes of the Outer Hebrides may recede further from the world we know.
I like to joke that the Romans, having conquered the known world, reached the plains of Caledonia, and on being confronted with wild Picts who dyed their skin blue with woad, spiked their hair with lime and ran naked, screaming into battle, decided, "To hell with them, this is the end of civilisation as we know it!" and threw up Hadrian's Wall. In all seriousness, many South Africans have sympathy for the cause of Scottish separatism as many Scots fought on the side of the Boers against the British Empire a century ago.
But separatism has a chequered history, here and around the world. Some acts of "national" reassertion, often on cultural/linguistic/ethnic grounds, have descended into appalling blood-letting, as was the case in ex-Somalia which has been without a unitary identity since 1991, being torn between rival regionalist tribes, Salafist fanatics, expat wannabe authorities, and foreign interventionists. And such tribal feuding is not the exclusive preserve of "backward" societies, as was sadly proved in the heart of Europe by the case of ex-Yugoslavia, which rapidly descended into fratricidal war in 1990-1999, stuttering on until 2001 in Macedonia and Preševo.
Earlier this year, I visited beautiful Slovenia, which was the most fortunate of the statelets which emerged from the wreckage of Yugoslavia, having only experienced 10 days of war in their battle for independence in 1991, with only 19 killed. But can one really call a land with only two million people a country? Does it have the requisite critical mass in industry, finance, hell, even the arts, to be truly sovereign? Is separatism a necessary surgical response to an increasingly bland monocultural world? Would an independent Palestine not in truth remain an economic vassal of Israel? A resident of the Slovenian capital Ljubljana boasted that her country had lead a charmed existence, surviving the Napoleonic Wars, the Balkan Wars, World Wars I and II, and the break with Yugoslavia almost unscratched.
This was not entirely true, for the darkest (and mostly unacknowledged) part of Slovenian history was the massacres and death marches of Četniks by Tito's communist partisans in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Ironically, this bloody backlash against the very concept of nationalism which, once the liberal dream of Woodrow Wilson, had become warped and tainted by six years of Nazi rule, resulted in four Cold War decades of an Eastern Europe consisting of states with the most ethnically homogenous populations ever.
During its painful dissolution, parts of ex-Yugoslavia saw a descent into barbarism unseen in Europe since the Nazi era. There was a deliberate evocation by Croatian extremists of the genocidal wartime regime of Ante Pavelić, whose Ustaše (Insurgent Croatian Revolutionary Movement) clerical fascist regime's pogroms and concentration camps killed around 29,000 Roma, 30,000 Jews and perhaps 600,000 Orthodox Serbs. 
In the 1990s, European neo-Nazis proudly took the opportunity to sign up as neo-Ustaše irregulars, and the world was once again faced with images of skeletal creatures hanging on barbed wire in concentration camps. Forensic scientists poked around mass graves, and a chilly new term, "ethnic cleansing," entered common parlance. The amoral slaughter was powerfully captured in books such as Madness Visible by Italian war correspondent Janine di Giovanni, and films such as Oliver Stone's deeply unnerving, almost unwatchable Saviour (1998).
There is a nasty threat of a reprise of that time in the current separatist versus anti-imperialist war in the eastern Ukrainian oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk, where the confused situation precipitated by the barely-disguised Russian annexation of Crimea in the wake of the Maidan and Anti-Maidan protests for and against Ukraine's toenadering with the European Union, has seen Kiev, desperate to stave off the loss of more of its Russophone eastern territories, allowing the formation of the neo-fascist Azov Battalion to fight the pro-Russian separatists. 
At 300 strong, armed with tanks and heavy weapons, and with historical inspirations from ultra-nationalist one-time Nazi allies the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, Azov is a force to be reckoned with and has also attracted foreign white supremacist volunteers. While claims of atrocities committed by its soldiers against civilians appear to be the stuff of Russian propaganda, there remains a serious question of what role these fascists will legitimately be able to claim they deserve to play in Ukrainian public life after the battles are over, for having defended Ukraine's sovereignty. 
While the disputed yes vote in the March 2014 referendum for Crimea to separate from Ukraine - to which it was only added by Khrushchev in 1954 - may have been the legitimate expression of most Crimeans' desire for reunification with Russia, it was hardly the result of a process as legislatively clean as that playing out in Scotland right now because the choices were loaded between joining Russia and quasi-sovereignty, both of which meant a degree of separation from Ukraine. But it was certainly more legitimate than the clandestinely-armed separatist war underway in Donetsk and Luhansk. Separatism can be a painful, even murderous, business. 
But sometimes it evolves from terrorism into democratic dissent. That certainly has been the case with Quebec in Canada, where the violent separatism of the communist Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) peaked in the "October Crisis" of 1970 in which an FLQ kidnapping and a murder saw martial law imposed on Quebec - and improved the fortunes of the legalistic route to Québécois independence of the social democratic Parti Québécois which attained its first of several periods of governance of the province in 1976. And yet, in 1980 and again in 1995, referenda on Quebec separatism were defeated by 60% and 50.6% of the Quebec electorate respectively, so though separatist fortunes cannot be said to be in terminal decline, popular resistance such as last year's "Hot Spring" in Montreal did not advance a devolutionary agenda.
I have just returned from the Spanish "autonomous commune" of Catalonia, which, like the Basque Country to the north-west, has a long tradition of separatism and which will be going to the polls to vote on separation from Spain on November 9 in a non-binding referendum that Madrid, terrified of losing its industrial heartland, has vowed to block by any legal means in Spain's constitutional court. Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel García Margallo warned on Tuesday that a yes vote in Scotland would set an "awful precedent" for Spain and the EU, one that would unleash a process of "Balkanisation"; Spain has vowed to block an independent Scotland's entry into the EU.
In Barcelona, the separatist movement, buoyed by the closeness of the Scottish vote, is divided along ideological lines, between the bourgeois separatists who want industrial and tax autonomy from the politically dominant yet under-contributing centre, and the socialist separatists who see in an independent Catalonia a chance for leftist reconstruction. In its grandest formulation, it is a vision of a Catalan-speaking country that includes coastal Valencia and the Balearic Isles (but excludes the tiny mountain enclave of Andorra and the Catalan-Occitan southern reaches of France around Perpignan). During the Spanish Revolution of 1936-1939, Catalan politics was given a separatist flavour by the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC), though the anarcho-syndicalists were overwhelmingly the largest faction in the region.
In the down-at-heel district of Gracia, I revelled in a 16th Century festival that sees each street lavishly decorated, troupes of drumming children dressed as devils unleashing squalls of fireworks, and adults building the teetering human towers known as castells which are recognised by UNESCO as a uniquely Catalan "Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity." 
Here, one can enter a store draped with the Chappie-wrapper yellow-and-red striped Catalan flag and purchase maps of Greater Catalonia and T-shirts in English hailing "Freedom for the Catalan Territories". In the store, I asked if I could buy something not distinctly Catalan at all, but rather something of from a sister movement, a Basque Ikarruña, its nationalist flag, a Union Jack in red, green and white - and indeed I could, for here even the anarchist movement, today represented by the third-largest trade union federation in Spain, is a staunch supporter of territorial cultural-linguistic autonomy for the likes of the Kurds currently fighting Islamic State fanatics. 
The Basque fight for independence, wonderfully told in Mark Kurlansky's The Basque History of the World (1999), has embraced both the political path of those like the Basque Nationalist Party, and the guerrilla path of clandestine groups such as the left nationalist Basque Homeland and Freedom (ETA), and its anarchistic splinter of the 1970s-1980s, the Autonomous Anti-capitalist Commandos (KAA), both of which were involved in assassinations, viewed by themselves as legitimate elements of a liberation war, and by their enemies as sheer terrorism. 
ETA's closest international relations have been with the Provisional Irish Republican Army, whose goal is the separation of the entire island of Ireland from British control. Boers certainly loved the 19th Century Irish for their resistance to Britain and for their support during the Boerevryheids Wars, but the  socialist tinge of the Provos scared off the politically conservative Boers in the 20th Century. Now, however, the neo-Boer right such as Front Nasionaal is quite happy to look to national secessionist movements of all political stripes as justification for their renewed calls for the establishment of a Boerestaat, basing its argument on Article 235 of the Constitution and similar self-determination clauses in international conventions such as the United Nations Charter. 
The Soutie left also produced a secessionist formation, the Cape Party, which argues for independence for the old Cape Province, basing its argument on the same legal grounds (but not on ethnic hegemony), making a very Catalan-like complaint that the Cape's tax contribution to the wealth of South Africa is disproportionately spent elsewhere by Pretoria. But neither party won seats in this year's general election, leaving it to the conservative right Freedom Front Plus to carry the Vierkleur forward - a dubious proposition given that it's leader was seduced into Cabinet by the previous Zuma administration. 
Serious separatism involves a lot of shrewd economic and political calculations - and hard realpolitik horse-trading - but ultimately, it rests on mobilising the historically-rooted sentiments of a defined populace, of tapping into their "oral and intangible heritage". In Scotland and Catalonia, such sentiments are running closer than the Québécois ever attained in favour of independence, though fortunately neither have given rise to extremism of the sort erupting in eastern Ukraine. In South Africa, by contrast, separatism whether by force of arms or by the book appears to have died on the vine.

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