Joe blogs.

Crammed into one of the smaller lecture theatres at the LSE this evening, a mix of old and young, black and white visitors sat silently. They listened intently to the narrator of an astonishing story. 

Peter Godwin came across as a good journalist should – providing short, evidence based analysis, briskly pacing through the years since independence (as Zimbabwe), brushing aside what he called lazy pan-African themes wrongly applied to Zimbabwe. He dismissed the prevailing Western media’s narrative of Mugabe as crazy, insane, or simply as a frontman for a range of corrupt generals and officials. 

His version was humane, rational and despite everything, maybe even optimistic.

Below are some quick notes on the stuff I found interesting, paraphrased, but you’d do better to read his excellent books. When a Crocodile Eats the Sun is superb.

On writing:

 Writing in the first person and in present tense allows you to acknowledge the real path of events…the path of history is only inevitable when you look back.

On Mugabe

Mugabe has always been consistent. It was the world that changed around him. In the 1980 elections, Zanu were always likely to win free and fair elections, but the victory followed the threat of violence if the result went against Mugabe, setting a precedent that he would keep to again and again.

Mugabe used the dual smokescreens of the Cold War and the persistence of apartheid in South Africa. If you criticised Mugabe’s policies at home, he could spin it to claim you were a supporter of the Afrikaner government.

On South Africa:

There must have been a deal – SA would stop interfering in Zimbabwe, and in return Mugabe refused to allow the armed wing of the ANC to use Zimbabwe as a launch pad.

South Africa is key to the solution [of Zim]. It always has been. South Africa gave up support for Smith – his govt collapsed. It must withdraw its support for Mugabe.

What draws SA and Zim together is the bond of post-liberation governments: all of the Southern African liberation parties are still in power.

SA allows the international community to abrogate responsibility.

On the West:

When I worked for the Sunday Times, my editors put the Matabeleland killings on the front page for three weeks running. It was met with silence. Nothing changed…When the land invasions [of white-owned farms] started, suddenly this became international news.

People were massacred in Matabeleland in 1983/4: at the same time Mugabe received honorary degrees from several universities, including Edinburgh, and in 1987 was awarded a knighthood.

He claimed that there was considerable evidence worthy of a prosecution for crimes against humanity for the torture, rape and killings that followed the 2008 elections. It seems impossible that Zimbabwe, with its close ties to China, could be referred to the ICC by the Security Council.

The event was hosted by the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics and LSE Ideas.

I thought Joan Miro was a woman. He wasn’t. Turns out Joan is the Catalan version of Juan, which Miro preferred. 

Tate have assembled a remarkable collection of his works in Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape. Some of them make sense. Some of them don’t. It’s intriguing. Some of them are beautiful. Some of them really aren’t. But that’s okay, cos I don’t think that’s what he was going for.

May 1968 is one of the beautiful, hopeful works. I think.

Made me think about Egypt.

And as seems essential with each Tate Modern exhibition now, there’s an excellent short film on Miro to go along with the exhibition.

The exhibition focuses on this idea that Miro was painting a way out of Franco’s dictatorship – painting as his weapon in the fight against Fascism and then dictatorship, painting as violence against a regime and as inspiration for a free Spain and his homeland, Catalonia. There’s some quite Romantic stuff in his early works. It’s all interesting stuff, although it’d be interesting to know a little bit more about the way the works were constructed.

The short copy alongside the paintings tend to describe the form, style or subject matter. All of which is nice, but left more questions unanswered. Which perhaps was the idea. I wanted to know more about his choice of colour, something never mentioned in the exhibition, which to me seems the most striking thing about his works – the combination of shape, form and colour. Many works only feature four or five colours – an ochre red and yellow (see the flag of Spain, solid blocks of black and white. And that Miro blue.

The Escape Ladder

Woman and birds

A Star Caresses the Breast of a Negress (Painting Poem)

The burnt canvases are amazing: seen in this handy Guardian slide show.

For more, Tate blogs has a few good posts from the loving curators.

A tall skinny blonde in a snug suit jacket climbs on stage, smiles at the audience, sits down at the piano and says, with a lilting slightly-stuttering Scandinavian accent,

‘Hello, good evening, my name is Agnes Obel and we’re going to play some songs for you’.

I’m basically already in love with her.

Aside from a few instrumental pieces reminescent of Michael Nyman, but not quite as enchanting, most of the set list is beautiful duets set to piano and cello. Very melancholic, with Cat Power reverb and delay settings on the microphone, it goes down terrifically well.

Following a standing ovation she and Anita Müller, her cello accompaniest, are drawn back on stage with terribly modest politesse, unsure of what to play for an encore:

‘Thank you so much…we haven’t discussed this at all!’ 

Spellbinding, other-worldly etc etc – she’s selling a lot of albums. Deservedly so.