The Archbishop and the Mayor

Photo credit: Graeme Williams

I once shared a lift to a hospital with two Mayors and an Archbishop.

They were all chatting about the National Health Service, personal memories of south east London, getting arrested by a brutal authoritarian police state - the usual stuff. I was in the front seat listening to every word of the conversation, barely able to believe I’d played a role in making it happen.

We were on our way to the opening of a new wing of Lewisham Hospital where the Archbishop, who served as a curate at St. Augustine’s church in Grove Park in the 1970’s, would be the guest of honour. He’d been invited by the Mayor of Lewisham, Sir Steve Bullock and I was working in Sir Steve’s office at the time, managing a civic partnership between Lewisham and a newly-created municipality in South Africa.

The Archbishop and the second Mayor in the people-carrier that day were South Africans and this December both of them died within ten days of each other.

To say the Archbishop - with his purple robe, white clerical collar, infectious giggle and defiant fist - was an icon of the struggle against apartheid is almost a cliché. Desmond Tutu became a living, visual embodiment of the righteous howl of indignation at a grotesque system of racial oppression. Later, as spiritual guide to the new South Africa’s ‘Rainbow Nation’ we saw more of the funny, kind, emotionally intelligent Tutu. There was also the broken Tutu, with his head in his hands weeping as he heard testimonies at the Truth & Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the process that began to shine light on the horrors that apartheid had wrought.

This “Rabble-Rouser for Peace” remained fierce and blisteringly articulate in his moral focus, as well as joyously radical in his interpretation of scripture and what it means to love all of God’s children without conditions. In recent years he became a thorn in the side of a government and ruling party as it succumbed to corruption and incompetence. Quite simply, Desmond Tutu was precisely the kind of priest the church will never have enough of and the significance of his passing stands alongside the loss of Nelson Mandela in December 2013 – two totemic figures of church and state.

The other South African who Tutu and Sir Steve were speaking to on the way to the hospital that day was Duma Nkosi, Mayor of Ekurhuleni. If you’re not South African you may not have heard of Duma or know where Ekurhuleni is, but you will have at least seen TV footage of the place.

The news reports announcing the death of Tutu on Boxing Day were packed with archive footage from the 80’s and 90’s of protests, riots and street battles blurred by teargas and smoke. A lot of that footage was filmed in the townships on the East Rand of Johannesburg - Thokoza, Kathlehong, Vosloorus - where violence erupted between state security forces and local communities, as well as between different political factions of the struggle. Today, the eastern flank of the Johannesburg city region, including the international airport, is called Ekurhuleni, meaning ‘place of peace and prosperity’ in Xitsonga. But in the early 1990’s, when the negotiations to agree a path to the country’s first democratic elections were at their most tense, South Africa was on the brink of civil war and Ekurhuleni was ground zero.

Duma was Chair of the ANC in Thokoza at the time, one of the townships worst hit by the violence of the transition. He’d already been arrested and imprisoned several times, including a stretch on Robben Island where Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Ahmed Kathrada and the rest of the African National Congress (ANC) leadership spent most of their time in captivity. I once got talking to a former inmate on one of my visits to the island and I mentioned Duma. He casually pointed to a dilapidated old building surrounded by weeds and said, “I remember Duma, he was over there in cell block E.”

Like so much of South Africa’s recent history, the narrative thread that connects the great iconic characters of its national liberation story also runs through the local stories of countless other people and places. We’re always inspired to see political leaders setting aside their differences, reaching across the aisle and making peace whether it’s Mandela and de Klerk in South Africa, or McGuinness and Paisley in Northern Ireland. Yet we rarely hear what it’s like on the ground in city halls and municipal meeting rooms even though the stakes can be just as high at the local level. Hardly anywhere else in the world is that more the case than in Ekurhuleni, where no less than nine municipalities would be amalgamated into one new ‘metro’ stretching across South Africa’s most politically divided region.

I’m reminded of the senior leadership team that Duma, a former comrade in the armed struggle, created when he became Mayor in 2001 after serving as an MP in South Africa’s first democratic Parliament. It included for example, a white Afrikaans-speaking former tank commander in the South African Defence Force, as well as the ANC’s main weapon’s supplier who spent time on death row for a bombing and was given amnesty by the TRC, chaired by Desmond Tutu.

In fact, the TRC was a decisive factor in the peace that was eventually achieved in Ekurhuleni and one of its most significant achievements was felt in Thokoza, where the conflict had been the most bloody.

An early Cabinet appointee of Duma’s was also a civic leader from Thokoza days and the two of them played a key role in encouraging combatants to disarm and engage with the peace process. In time they would move on to the broader, longer-term and more difficult task of reconciliation and the myriad practical issues it entails at the local level; setting up local peace committees, creating opportunities to train and upskill people, establishing a municipal police service made up of officers from both sides of a conflict that had once ripped a region apart. One of Duma’s early Mayoral initiatives was not only getting former combatants into secure jobs, but also collecting and preserving the stories from that time so as to remember, honour and commemorate the trauma an entire community experienced.

On Christmas Eve I watched Duma’s funeral streamed online from Katlehong and I heard described by so many of his friends and family the same Duma I had the privilege of meeting and spending time with, both in Ekurhuleni and here in London. A funny, kind, emotionally intelligent father, husband and brother, but a leader of principle and discipline too. You couldn’t have a conversation with Duma without laughing at some point, and yet he always had a reflection to share about the bigger picture too, a gentle reminder of what we were all trying to achieve together and for whom. It was always ‘we’ and ‘us’ with Duma, which for me, as an outsider, was particularly humbling.

After a long illness Duma passed away on 16th December. It was a public holiday in South Africa. Since 1995 it’s been celebrated as the Day of Reconciliation.

When the news of Desmond Tutu’s passing broke on Boxing Day I remembered that day at Lewisham Hospital, how the sight of his iconic purple robe literally stopped traffic as he crossed Rushey Green, and what his return to the Borough meant to the local community. Up at the podium he moved and inspired us one minute, then had us in stitches the next with stories of loss and despair and grief coming full circle to ones of liberation, reconciliation and hope.

But as the archive news footage of apartheid South Africa and the troubled streets of Ekurhuleni began to roll this week, I was also reminded of that conversation in the back of the people-carrier en route to the hospital, between a civic leader from Thokoza who once encouraged his angry young comrades to hand in their weapons and commit to the work of reconciliation, and the Archbishop who chaired the symbolic, high-stakes first step of that national process.

Duma leaned over to Tutu and said, “You know, I had to learn how to go from stone thrower to stone collector.”

In any other context Duma’s comment would have been the inspiring reflection of a politician, a challenge to others to join the collective effort of writing an exciting new national story. In fact, he often used the phrase in meetings and speeches so I’d heard it before.

Yet in the back of that people-carrier, sitting next to Desmond Tutu, Duma seemed to strike a softer tone. It was as if the Mayor of the region where South Africa had once stared into the abyss was confiding in someone who knew more than most the hard graft that had to be done inside the heart of anyone who had truly lived the horror of the old story. And what rebuilding a community and a people from the ground up - brick by brick, stone by stone, heart by heart - was really like.

*****

In memory of Desmond Mpilo Tutu (1931-2021) and Duma Moses Nkosi (1957-2021).

Rising Seas

Credit: Canberra Times. Photo by Awais Butt

It’s the last weekend in October and I’m packing my bags to leave London for the UN’s COP26 Climate Summit in Glasgow. My head is full of last-minute tasks and to-do lists, pre-COP punditry, and questions for Mayors, bankers and tech companies about financing low carbon infrastructure.

Suddenly Twitter informs me that the Australian rock band, Midnight Oil has released a new single called Rising Seas. I stop what I’m doing, reach for my headphones and I’m immediately impressed with what I hear. It’s a classic return to form for the band and the timing of its release is deliberately provocative.  

“Temperature rising,
climate denying,
fever is gripping,
nobody's listening…”

I’ve been obsessed with The Oils since I first heard them over 35 years ago on a car radio in Australia when Diesel & Dust first dropped. I was a kid in the mid-80’s and by then I’d already lived in four countries. It was the height of the Cold War and I was fascinated by the forces, seen and unseen, that were shaping our world.

My immediate world at the time was Sir Joh Bjelke-Peterson’s staunchly conservative Queensland and white Australian indifference to the Lucky Country’s shamefully etherised history. In 1988 we celebrated Australia’s 200th birthday by making cakes decorated with figurines of sailing ships and Captain Cook. Of course white men in tights waving the Union Jack are a consequential part of Australia’s story, but beyond that story there was nothing else worth seeing back in ‘88. Not in my world at least.

At my Christian primary school I read insulting stories about ‘the Abos’ who, until only the 1970s had, in law, been little more than the fauna and flora of an ‘empty landscape’. I lived in places called Mudgeeraba and Boonooroo yet learned precious little about Australia’s continuous 60,000 year old civilisation or the roughly 300 languages that were spoken before European colonisation began.

It was lovely growing up in a country as innocent as I was. Even if the beds really are burning, it’s easy to get a full eight hours of shuteye in suburban Australia.

So thank Christ for Midnight Oil.

Their songs pointed me to another Australia and a much bigger world of stories than the insultingly conservative dreamworld of my early teenage years. The Oils introduced me to the plight of indigenous Australians and the vexed politics of land rights, forgotten histories, foreign wars, rapacious mining companies and dying asbestos miners. When the Exxon Valdez oil spill was all over the news Midnight Oil were singing about corporate lobbying, environmental destruction, and the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation in the South Pacific.

“So you cut all the tall trees down
You poisoned the sky and the sea
You've taken what's good from the ground
But you've left precious little for me…”

To say The Oils have been consistently on the enlightened side of the argument over four decades is a compliment so banal it’s almost patronising. Hearing Peter Garrett’s wailing vocal protest as I got ready for COP26 was like getting a call out of the blue from an old mate. I headed to Glasgow with the anthemic howls of an angrier-than-ever Oils’ track in my head; layers of chiming guitars, organs and vocals reminding me of the first time these blokes introduced me to the western plains of that vast, red continent that so itched my young imagination.

“In the desert in the dry
Sun sits so high
Long day's mile and the
Radio crackles and the bones bleached white”

Two weeks later it’s my last day in Glasgow and I’m absolutely exhausted. I’m walking around the COP26 Green Zone on the banks of the River Clyde with one of my colleagues, barely able to string a sentence together.

We get talking to a twenty-something at an exhibition stand for the supermarket chain I buy my groceries from every week. He’s waxing lyrical about their comprehensive strategy to reduce plastic from their products and the four pillars of their values-led approach to decarbonising their supply chain by 2035.

It’s a word salad and my colleague and I know it. Our frustration shows. What does that even mean? Why 2035? That’s a generation of your workforce away? If it’s so important then why not sooner?

He squirms slightly but he holds the line well. He may be young and straight out of Uni but he’s bright and, more importantly, he cares. He genuinely wants to see the supermarket that I have a 10am delivery slot with tomorrow become the sustainable business that it needs to be. If anything he’s more frustrated than we are.

My colleague and I ease off, perhaps because we too know the difficulty of making word salads real. None of us are blameless on the maddeningly complex journey towards a decarbonised world. But one final line pricks our attention again.

At the end of the day we have to take our customers with us on the journey, the young graduate says sagely, barely sounding like he means it.

My colleague, who’s in his 50’s, leans forward, his frustration returning but with generosity in his voice.

Why do you have to take them with you? And who are ‘they’ anyway? Your generation cares about this, right? It’s old crusties like me who are dragging our heels. Don’t try and bring us all with you. Do the right thing now.”

*****

As I leave the Green Zone I pass the noisy crowds of young activists outside the Blue Zone where the world’s leaders are still negotiating. These protestors have come from every corner of the planet - from the rainforests of Brazil and Indonesia to the deserts of the Sahel and the Andes. And from the South Pacific too where rising sea levels are threatening entire coastal communities in Vanuatu, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands and the Torres Strait.

I’m reminded again of those ageing Australian rockers from Sydney who first packed out the Royal Antler Hotel on Narrabeen Beach almost fifty years ago, and a song they released the year I left Australia in 1993.

“I grew tall in this lucky land
and I thank God for that, but there's needles in the sand…

…rises in rivers in power of the sun
rises in sea level, look out Mammon's bastard son”

I never got to see The Oils in concert when I was a kid. But a few years ago they toured Europe and I finally saw this band I’ve loved for so long perform live at the Hammersmith Apollo.

They rocked the place with the energy of the twenty-somethings they were when they first played Hammersmith in the 70’s. Peter Garrett’s staccato dancing seemed to punctuate every lyrical twist in songs that have more than stood the test of time. When he left the band in the early naughties Garrett stood for Parliament and ended up in Government. I couldn’t help smiling to think that the bloke screaming into that arena for over two hours about environmental recklessness, vested interests eroding democratic institutions, the grotesque legacies of imperialism, and the barbaric treatment of refugees was Australia’s former Federal Minister for the Environment.

The subject matter may be a long list of downers but The Oil’s songs themselves are utterly transcendent; not for the sake of recreational art, but as reminders that what needs to be witnessed is being witnessed, the stories that need telling are being told, and in the witnessing and the telling there is common cause to be found and reason, however faint, to hope.

As I watch the young protestors chanting and dancing outside the Blue Zone while world leaders continue to haggle over the wording of legal texts, the lyrics of Rising Seas keep coming back to me.  

“If you can't decide
between wrong and right,
if you can't see through
all that you hold true…”

Perhaps the most poignant thing about Midnight Oil’s new single isn’t the fact they’ve been telling these stories and voicing these warnings through their music for so long now. I keep thinking about their individual ages - all well into their 60’s with Garrett pushing 70 - and I wonder if we’re not only living through a crisis of political leadership today, but a crisis of eldership too.

Maybe that’s why these ageing, writhing, endlessly energetic Aussie rockers inspire me so much. Do I not see in them the kind of passionate and articulate elder statesmanship that so many of us are craving in these intellectually denuded times?

Because the demographic data is stark.

The ballot box has no chance of holding governments to account for climate action for as long as our elders continue to fret about the things they currently fret about and vote the way they currently vote. That’s not to say the older generation doesn’t care about the climate, it does. In fact, recent polling suggests that there isn’t the generational divide on climate issues that young people often assume there is.

Yet caring and voting are two different things. Voting is a judgment call, a weighing up of multiple issues while balancing one’s individual interests with those of the collective, perhaps even those of the ones who’ll reap the benefits long after the voter is gone. In the ageing societies of the West at least, too many of our elders have fallen victim to the seductive whispers of blood and soil populism, the nihilistic rhetoric of all manner of denialism, and of course conspiracy theories - intellectual porn for uniquely uncurious minds obsessed with the eternal mad riddle of what’s really going on, while remaining predictably disinterested and bored when it comes to what’s actually going on.

Our politics is being shaped by an ageing cohort of voters self-described as alienated (though mostly alienated by choice rather than circumstance) who have stepped away from informed debate and the accountability of the public square to paint themselves as the oppressed victims of complexity and social change. Believing themselves to be the ‘Nelson Mandelas’ of common sense they’ve in fact become the squabbling lost boys of denial and grievance - the useful idiots of all manner of real and observable vested interests.

“Dinosaur stories,
reliving past glories
lusting for gold,
fishing for souls…”

Back in my hotel lobby, I’m collecting my luggage before I begin my journey home to London, and I’m wondering what it means to be a good elder in a time when so many of our elders have already checked out.

Perhaps eldership has nothing to do with age or experience at all, but everything to do with a deliberate decision to become informed and involved, and to approach both actions with serious intent and accountability. That’s just as possible for an eager twenty-something who wants to help a supermarket become more sustainable as it is for a septuagenarian rocker who’s seen and done it all.

Maybe that’s why those elders who’ve journeyed with us and kept us informed and angry and inspired over the years command so much of our respect and affection when we see them still creating and screaming and dancing and raging against the inevitable dying of the light. They’re an antidote to the crushing disappointment of their ageing peers who gave up long ago - or never really bothered much at all - the ones whose wisdom and voices are so needed, yet remain in such short supply.

“Queen of the firmament
Lord of all beneath
Masters of the universe
we're all refugees…

…so open up the floodgates
to the rising seas.”

Showering In Hell

Reflections on the Australian bushfires and the seductive cult of denial

Source: ABC News (supplied Gena Dray)

I’ve had friends visiting London from New Zealand this week. They’ve just left for the next phase of their European rail journey, leaving me to catch up on the news as I make my way home by train across a darkening, wintery London.

It’s cold and foggy outside the train carriage, but I’m thinking about the fires in Australia, a heatwave rolling in across New South Wales and Victoria, smoke making its way across the Tasman to the skies over New Zealand, and the multifarious versions of my own story that both countries tell.

Australia - that vast and sprawling continent that looms as vast and sprawling in my happiest childhood memories as it does on any map. Images and smells of the Australian bush now coalescing in my mind against the surreal backdrop of suburban London.

Blood red earth, bone dry creeks, skies of ash and fire. A place of lyre birds and cicadas and changing seasons where now they’re praying for any kind of change in the weather as oil-rich canopies of eucalypts ‘shower in Hell’, to quote the late ‘Bush bard’, Les Murray.

It’s heart-wrenching watching footage of this unutterably beautiful country burning, and to sit here by a train window and hear about the lost people and animals, the families and homes and farms and towns and communities ripped apart by tsunamis of fire.

The Australian bush - the harbour of the Australian mind - as the writer Don Watson puts it, the nation’s idea of itself ablaze. Entire towns on the beach waiting for world’s end like the characters of a Neville Shute novel, and all within the frame of a misty train window and the passing lights of Clapham Junction.

This is a familiar perch for many antipodean Londoners.

Even in normal times, in the chilly depths of my European winters, thoughts of summer ‘somewhere south’ are never far away. I always have a window open to the opposite of the season, to the places where I’m not, instead of here, and here of course is always a bloody long way from there.

But I’m reminded now of my accumulating balance of European winters – German, French, Swiss and English – which I draw so much inspiration and happiness from, and how they always seem to include train journeys along cold rails of steel, and reflections on the unspeakable beauty of the natural world.

In his book ‘Winter: Five Windows on a Season’ the Canadian writer, Adam Gopnik charts a journey through the modern idea of winter via the work of artists, poets, scientists, writers and thinkers. He opens five windows on winter and how we think about the season; romantic, radical, recuperative, recreational and remembering. 

Gopnik begins the book with a quote from another Canadian writer, Northrop Frye;

“The cultural insulation that separates us from nature, is rather like…the window of a lit-up railway carriage at night. Most of the time it is a mirror of our own concerns, including our concern about nature. As a mirror, it fills us with the sense that the world is something which exists primarily in reference to us: it was created for us; we are the centre of it and the whole point of its existence. But occasionally the mirror turns into a real window, through which we can see only the vision of an indifferent nature that goes along for untold aeons of time without us, seems to have produced us only by accident, and, if it were conscious, could only regret having done so.” 

The commentary around the world on the Australian fires is itself a forest of urgent, wagging fingers. Nature, it would seem, is regretting having produced us and the world now sees an unsettling new reality in the window.

The irony of course is that she’s an unusually fragile pinot noir, Australia; vulnerable to changes of temperate, moisture and season, the new extremes of which the overwhelming majority of scientific evidence tells us is undeniably human-made.

But if Australia’s environmental fragility isn’t enough to have the rest of us reflecting on our own vulnerability and whether or not we’re doing enough about it, the loud and increasingly shrill denials in the face of reality are eerily familiar.

Australia is a country that has become one of the most belligerent on the planet when it comes to reducing carbon emissions and tackling climate change. Both Australia’s main political parties are so snuggly ensconced in the odorous embrace of the fossil fuel lobby it’s almost comical.

Tragically, the Australian fires tell a story that mirrors not just the uninhabitable future facing millions of people across the globe, but also the cynical manipulation of scientific evidence and the dangerous levels of ignorance in the water supply of populism which nourishes denialism and do-nothing, crocodile-tear neglect.

Australia isn’t lonely on this front. One of the worst emitters of ‘burn the house down’ denialism is Australia’s cultural cousin and not-so-near Pacific neighbour, America. A country that has mastered the art of cult-making.

It was a rather bizarre reference to a mass shooting in America that got me thinking the other day.

One commentator suggested last week that these fires could be for Australia’s climate change debate what the school shooting in Sandy Hook should have been for the gun-control debate in America; i.e. a turning point. Surely, the argument ran, any sensible, level-headed, caring person must now have been pushed off the fence of indifference and into the field of action.

I wish I had that kind of optimism, I really do.

But it’s jaw-dropping – though not surprising - the lengths to which deliberate disinformation campaigns are now casting doubt on the causes of these fires; everything from Chinese billionaires using lasers to create room for new cities, to Islamic state waging a new form of warfare, to a federal government conspiracy to clear the east coast of Australia for a new railway line are to blame.

That’s without mentioning the most popular focus of misinformation that’s long been peddled by the Australian government (and repeatedly debunked); that Greens and ‘urban liberals’ are conspiring against state-led back-burning and fire management efforts.

I could go on. And on. And on. My fist-chewingly depressing point however is that Sandy Hook is indeed a good analogy, but for a very different argument.

Grotesquely, eight years on from the massacre, one of the names most synonymous with Sandy Hook is the far-right Texan conspiracist Alex Jones. Not only did he claim the Sandy Hook shootings were faked by the ‘deep state’ but his ramblings also sparked a cruel and unimaginably sick campaign of abuse against the families of the victims.

This week his website InfoWars was one of many extremist outlets promoting conspiracy theories about the Australian fires, including the deliberate manipulation of the statistics on arson arrests made by Australian police long before the current fire season started.

So why even mention a swivel-eyed Texan nutbar?

Perhaps because a lot of conservative Australians – self-styled Texans of the south Pacific – have always looked to the English-speaking north when thinking about politics. And these days there’s a rich and comforting smorgasbord of denialism to be found not just in America, but in that other belching emitter of confusion; Britain.

Watching these fires from London is depressing on a number of levels.

The UK is also a country increasingly singing along to the praise and worship of America’s head-in-the-sand cult of denialism. For many of the self-proclaimed patriots of Britannia Unchained, new, unquestioning, anti-intellectual loyalties, and disdain for expertise are common place.

Of course, there’s more anger than joy to be found in belting out the greatest hits of conquest and empire. Such have always been the contradictions of nostalgic nationalism.

Instead, much of the Anglosphere now sounds like a platoon of defeated soldiers slurring the chart toppers of yesteryear, oblivious to legacies of environmental destruction on a scale that a single human mind can barely fathom.

Britain and Australia both had general elections last year.

Australia’s was supposed to be about the extreme drought that’s decimating farming communities and the rural economy, the death of the Great Barrier Reef and average summer temperatures that now regularly smash 40C.

Instead, during the hottest year that Australian thermometers have ever recorded, the question of who should run the country was spun as a battle against the evils of tax by blokes who love four-wheel drives. And the blokes won.

London was well impressed.

So it pinched Canberra’s campaigning talent; those Neville Chamberlains of Australian politics, as the journalist Nick Cohen describes them, who managed to convince Aussies to ignore the greatest ever threat to their nation’s security.

Hence we now have in the UK – a country in the iron grip of denial about pretty much every difficult question it faces – a uniquely dishonest and stupefyingly vacuous national conversation to which the electorate has repeatedly responded by drop-kicking itself into a precarious future.

None of this is new of course. To deny our susceptibility to the power of denial is to also deny vast swathes of human history.

This isn’t just about bushfires, crack pots and governments you wouldn’t trust with your underpants. There’s a cultural and political firestorm raging in Australia, and it’s eerily similar to the one that’s burning over here. Both countries urgently need sensible, informed adults in the room, and the evacuation from high office of the charlatans and snake-oil salesmen who pour petrol on the flames of confusion and denial.

My train is passing through the darkening suburbs of south London, my attention returning to the wintery north, to this island where sensible, informed adults are now in daily combat with the peddlers of fantasy. An identity economy in which insisting on reason and expertise is not just the quickest route to losing an argument, it’s taken as a sneering, personal insult to those who enter the public square with little more than ‘I’m just putting it out there’ conspiracy theories.

“Occasionally the mirror turns into a real window,” wrote Northrup Frye “through which we can see only the vision of an indifferent nature…”

For the thinking antipodean in the northern hemisphere in these surreal times, Britain and America are proving to be friends best kept at arm’s length, lest we too find ourselves beginning the new decade…

“…staring into a darkening train carriage window that’s become a mirror, convinced that the world is something which exists primarily in reference to us; created for us; we at the centre of it and the whole point of its existence.”

Dusk is falling across London, it will soon be night time and this entire view will be only reflections of the commuters in this train carriage.

Yet images of Australia linger like sunspots in my imagination; a snarling kangaroo carcass in the wires of a fence, koalas falling from trees like fire balls, twisted corrugated iron and the charcoal ghost of an entire town. It’s not just our burning, melting, flooding world that’s bringing a tear to my eye this evening.

These are only symptoms of a far deeper sadness; the slow dying of our moral imagination, to quote the writer Mark O’Connell.

In the long run it’s not the cruel inferno and the indifference of nature that does the most damage.

It’s happily believing any exciting story of smoke and mirrors, except the one we’re living in. Because as we learn from history, yet fail to remember time and time again, the most devastating human-made destruction always relies on the seductive wink of conspiracy, the comforting stroke of denial, and the indifference of those not yet ‘showering in Hell’.

Are You My Tribe? Part III

I’ve been thinking a lot about tribes recently; how we seek them out, how they come to shape us, how we need them for our sense of security and belonging. Especially when the ground beneath our feet is moving and everything around us seems to be swaying to the rhythms of rapid and unsettling change.

In this series of blogs I’ve been rummaging through my diary, my bookshelves and the news headlines to try and get a handle on why searching for a tribe can be such a tricky thing.

Part III: Narcissism

It’s been a month since the clocks went back, and it’s now a month till Christmas.

It’s dark, it’s cold and to add insult to autumnal injury, we’re only halfway through the slap-and-tickle pantomime of a Parliamentary-Arithmetic-themed, tarts-and-vicars lock-in. From ‘technology lessons’, ‘vivacious bombshells’ and ‘my cheque book’s bigger than yours’, to ‘how many kids have you got’ and ‘I’ll press the nuke button the hardest’, this campaign is so off-the-leash it’s almost pornographic in its screaming excesses of weapons-grade testosterone.

‘Testiculating’ (waving one’s arms around while speaking utter bollocks) isn’t just 2019’s newest verb, it’s 19% ahead in the polls. Is that unchained Britannia and the Churchillian spirit going at it hammer and tongs behind the bins outside? Actually, don’t tell me. The entire soundtrack to this year has been the beery “Phwoar!” of an island drunk on its own myths of conquest and derring-do. Call it a general ‘election’ if you must save your blushes, but we both know there’s only a consonant in it.

I know, I thought we’d reached Peak Cray Cray too. But hey, who knew? Seems there’s another series still to go of this macabre workplace bloopers video. But hey ho, it’ll all be over just as soon as we ‘Get Brexit Done’ right? Bless. I’m ever so sorry, but you’re going to have to assume the brace position (Oh, Matron!) for a lot more episodes of Irish Border and Bad Deal or No Deal. Oh, and regular outbursts of hurt righteousness from Workington Man ‘saying the unsayable’ into an infinite number of TV cameras somewhere in an endless middle England.

But wait, there’s more.

Thanks to the sepia Upside Down of Brexit, this election is also a Carry-On-inspired am-dram production of tribes, sub-tribes, parallel tribes and meta-tribes. In fact, it’s less about actual tribes and more about packages of tribes and the cat’s cradle of potential alliances between, within, adjacent to and around tribes.

Prince Andrew has less convoluted alibis. Britain’s political menu in 2019 is less pizza buffet and more psychological assessment centre. The electorate is now weeping into a hideous foldout menu of set meals that even the chef doesn’t understand. There’s hardly a voter in the land who’s not wondering if they can’t swap the BBQ beef in meal B with the pepperoni in meal A, or why C is so expensive just because it includes garlic bread.

The only thing this election is going to settle is whether or not there are less complicated decision trees in the damp basement of the English planning system. If you’ve had any interactions with Schedule 2, Part 1, Class B of the Town and Country Planning Act (General Permitted Development) (England) Order 2015 (as amended) then you’re welcome. It’s a cracking analogy, I know.

We’ve had enough of this shit. We’re either marching in the streets, throwing the remote at the telly, or standing suicidal in the pissing rain outside Boots arguing with a complete stranger about abstract nouns like sovereignty. The Great War of The Mounted Unicorns has begun and our boys won’t be home by Christmas. Orders have been dispatched from the Ministry of Doublespeak & Clean Breaks. Every patriot must register with a shrill and infuriatingly self-righteous tribe of his or her choice.

Perhaps that’s it in a word, the word for our age. Not sovereignty or unicorns or doublespeak, but choice. More choice. Consumer choice. Informed choice. Creating choice in the market. Making better choices.

Like it or not, we’re about to be given a choice; of our elected representatives, and their tribes. So why do I want to ‘slide my ticket back across the table’ and get off the train, to paraphrase a certain Russian (sorry, too soon?)

It feels counter intuitive to say this, but if I’m honest I really don’t want to make this choice.

Sure, I value my vote and the stakes in this election could not be higher. Britain is up shit creek. This is serious. And the very thing that defines our atomised consumer culture of rampant individualism is the cult of choice. So choosing shouldn’t be this hard. I’m geared for choice. It’s my Nicaean Creed. I believe in the only-begotten Choice. I am consumer choice.

But I’m also the ironically detached shrug. I am the booming satire industry. I am the audience laughing at the eye-wateringly sad contradictions in society. I am the satirist with gags but no solutions. I am the cynical detachment in everything from Seinfeld to South Park. I am the hollow hilarity of the Daily Show and Have I Got News For You. Ironic detachment and the selfishness that sustains it is the air I’ve been breathing most of my life; from the insular narcissism of Nirvana’s Nevermind a quarter of a century ago to the insular narcissism of Love Island; I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise.

Mine is the generation of Reagan and Thatcher, economic pragmatism, the ideology of ‘there is no alternative’ and yes, all the things we rejected along the way. Big ideas. Idealistic causes. Political zeal. Community. Sincerity.

Let’s be honest for a minute. Is it just Brexit and the rise of nationalist populism that’s broken everything? Don’t get me wrong, the bed has well and truly been shat by this recent nonsense, but we’ve been gorging on our detachment from each other for decades now. And all the while we believed that the clocks could never go back, that human progress was inevitable, that despite the occasional glitch in The Matrix we were on a pre-destined Darwinian escalator of betterment.

Yet now we’re being reminded that things can go backwards, easily and rather quickly. And while this Brave New Netherworld of blood and soil ethno-nationalism might not have directly affected all of us yet, it’s already reality for a lot of very real people. The rest of us will be in that ‘desert of the real’ soon enough.

So what to make of all the sun-dappled propaganda in this Battle of Britain jockstrap of an election?

Search me. I’m scratching out my eyes here.

But ask yourself this perhaps…

In a deeply divided, hyper-narcissistic identity economy where food banks are a booming cottage industry and the social safety net is described by the UN as being "deliberately removed and replaced with a harsh and uncaring ethos”, maybe the most radical thing you can do isn’t to exercise your individual choice in the marketplace of tribes. At best that’s just a means to far more important questions - ones best asked not of yourself but of others - and the personal actions that are a consequence of asking.

Who is least spoken for? Who is most vulnerable and needs the most help? What help are we offering? How can this place I call home become a kinder, fairer place at peace with itself and the wider world? And how, where and with whom can I make a practical contribution?

If vote I absolutely must, then call me whatever you like, but those are the all-too rare and urgent questions I’ll be asking any Great British Patriot who might emerge, dishevelled or otherwise, from behind the metaphorical bins of our rancid national conversation to ask for my vote.

Are You My Tribe? Part II

I’ve been thinking a lot about tribes recently; how we seek them out, how they come to shape us, how we need them for our sense of security and belonging. Especially when the ground beneath our feet is moving and everything around us seems to be swaying to the rhythms of rapid and unsettling change.

In this series of blogs I’ll be rummaging through my diary, my bookshelves and the news headlines to try and get a handle on why searching for a tribe can be such a tricky thing.

Part II: Cynicism

The behaviour on this island is getting out of hand, just like it did when the lost British boys in William Golding’s novel, Lord of the Flies started going feral. We’re angry, we’re confused and we’re turning on each other. No one on the island wants to suffer the fate of Piggy. But unlike the novel, there’s no adult naval officer about to walk up the beach and bring an end to the madness. We’re on our own.

Yet we’ve been splintering off into rival tribes for some time now. Reason and nuance were helevaced out a long time ago. Supplies of goodwill are running low. We’re down to our last rations of patience. And as storm clouds gather, the only company we can tolerate is that of our own tribe. Everyone else can quite frankly do one.

Tribes come in all sorts of forms of course; family, friendship groups, faith groups, work cultures, sports teams, nations etc. But I’ve been thinking about ideological tribes in particular. The one’s where the campfire is a shared vision of a better society, a campaign for meaningful change, a cause worth fighting for. Because in this tumultuous climate I wonder sometimes if I shouldn’t be part of a tribe. Or at least I should know which one I best fit into if I ever decide to join.

I ask myself, Who am I prepared to stand alongside, applaud, champion, march with, collaborate with? I follow the activities of political parties and campaign groups. I read commentary and analysis voraciously. I go to talks, debates and festivals as if I’m the little bird in that children’s book “Are you my mother?”

“Are you my tribe?” I find myself asking the various hens, cows, sheep and horses on the animal farm of British politics. But before I get an answer my political Tourette’s invariably kicks in; that alter-ego tick that immediately and involuntarily gravitates towards ‘contrary’, as if despite speaking the language of the barnyard fluently I can’t help putting on a heavy, ungraceful accent.

Keep this to yourself though, but if I’m really honest, I don’t want to fit in most of the time.

I resist the badges and T-shirts even if I am supportive of the cause. I wait for the Q&A before lobbing provocative, grenade-like questions at panellists I broadly agree with. In the bar afterwards, I go full method as the devil’s most awkward advocate. I run the rhetoric through the ‘bloke down at the Dog & Duck’ filter. I agree and agree and agree and agree and then vehemently disagree over an ill-considered assumption.

I’m careful of course. I know I can’t afford to be too serious. Not in Britain. Mustn’t forget to be pant-wettingly hilarious. It’s the regulations. So I wheel out the giggles and they mostly land, and we laugh and laugh and I feel well-informed and well-read and well witty. Until I just can’t be arsed anymore because what we’re talking about really fucking matters and why should I have to make the Irish border ‘funny’, you utter plum.

I’ve come to accept that when it comes to tribes, at best I’m engaging and interesting albeit non-committal. At worst I’m a pedantic, judgmental arse. I’m basically Miles in the film Sideways, being dragged out to dinner with friends while yelling, “Fine! But I’m NOT drinking merlot!”

It’s a problem and it concerns me. Because I’m not comfortable with the cynical shrug. It reminds me of the pissed-off woman sitting next to me in the woods in Part I of this blog, who made me laugh until I almost cried. I laughed because I too was struggling to tolerate the wankery that you inevitably find at a festival for idealists and activists in the woods.

I saw a reflection of myself in her glazed, rolling eyes. There we both were, two people, both keen to get involved, lend a hand, put our shoulder to the wheel and make a difference in these fractured and angry times, yet instead we were leaning back and mocking.

I wonder if in our sniggering at those around us, we weren’t the butt of another kind of joke. Or perhaps in our agonising over whether to join a tribe or not, we were at least asking the wrong question.

Are You My Tribe? Part I

I’ve been thinking a lot about tribes recently; how we seek them out, how they come to shape us, how we need them for our sense of security and belonging. Especially when the ground beneath our feet is moving and everything around us seems to be swaying to the rhythms of rapid and unsettling change.

Over the next few blog posts I’ll be rummaging through my diary, my bookshelves and the news headlines to try and get a handle on why searching for a tribe can be such a tricky thing.

*****

Part I: Fear

It’s a baking hot Sunday in August and I’m at an independent journalism festival in the East Sussex countryside; a tribe for writers, campaigners, activists and doers. I’ve come not just for the talks and debates, but to also meet people, allies, potential collaborators.

But it’s not something I find easy because I really struggle with tribes.

We’re just down the road from Forest Row - a town known for its dreamcatchers and Reiki healers. This is a corner of England that’s forever ‘summer of love’. It’s less Forest Row and more Earth Mother or Dances with Quinoa or Séance in a Crop Circle. It can feel a bit cliquey if you’re not a tie-dyed Marxist, or if you don’t feel the need to ‘jazz hands’ at the end of a long speech by a woke millennial from Bristol who’s come draped in the EU flag.

I’ve come with an open mind though, and I’m really trying. I’m sitting in a circle of chairs outside a tent in the woods, waiting for a workshop to start. It’s about managing fear. So timely, I tell myself, so the Zeitgeist. I mean, who isn’t fearful these days? You HAVE to be afraid. It’s the regulations.

The guy leading the workshop is tall, good-looking and incredibly relaxed. He used to be a high-flyer in the city and his man-spread is like a vast emerging market. He’s written two books on fear and you can tell. He’s clearly smashing life. Look at him, just look at him for pity’s sake. He has a calm, self-possessed air about him that makes you wonder if your life isn’t just an out-of-control dumpster fire. And he sees you, Mother of God he sees right through you.

He opens the workshop by looking fantastic for a few minutes, before sharing his own journey with fear. Within seconds you’re violently nodding in agreement. Because you’ve been there. You’ve so been there. In fact you’re there right now if you’re perfectly honest. That’s why you’re in the woods attending a workshop on ‘managing fear’ when you could be at the Notting Hill carnival, off your face on rum and enjoying life.

You’re up to your eyeballs in fear, you tell yourself. You really are that out-of-control dumpster fire and now you’re desperately hoping that at some point in the remaining 53 minutes this tall, slim, tanned, Birkenstocked guru will magically hose down your anxieties with his…, Oh, for the love of God man, you’re straight for fuck’s sake.

It must be the heat, you tell yourself. Repeatedly.

We’re given post-it notes and sharpies. He asks us to write down our single biggest fear. For some in the group their post-it notes speak of regret, not making a difference, getting arrested, the Tories, crashing out with no deal, the grotesque excesses of financial capitalism, wasting this reincarnation, misinterpreting my cosmic calling, remembering what I did on stage at the rave last night.

But it’s the pissed-off-looking woman next to me who absolutely nails it.

Suddenly the entire point of the workshop, nay, the entire point of the early start, the train journey to East Sussex, the taxi from the station and the festival entrance fee is to witness first hand this extremely unhappy woman passive aggressively sticking her single biggest fear onto a board deep in the woods.

 “Not collaborating with anyone because of all the wankery”

 …and I am, within an instant, utterly fearless. I could suddenly spot a starving grizzly bear in the woods, I wouldn’t care less. My head is swimming beneath a canopy of leaves and dappled light. I’m struggling to even see because I’m so close to passing out with a type of laughter - high, frantic and keening – that I never knew I was physically capable of.

Goodbye Johnny Clegg

I heard about the death of the South African musician and anthropologist, Johnny Clegg shortly after getting home from visiting the Migration Museum in London; Britain’s first museum dedicated to the movement of people to and from these Isles, and how these journeys and crossings shape who we are.

As the news sunk in I found myself suddenly and involuntarily sobbing.

It’s hard to express just how much of a cultural hero Johnny Clegg is to so many South Africans of all races, or how his death will be felt right across the country and beyond. His manager, Roddy Quinn announced the passing of his friend with a beautiful string of words when he said, “Johnny leaves deep footprints in the hearts of every person that considers himself or herself to be an African.”

I am however, not an African.

Nor have I ever tried to be one, despite my deep love for the southern tip of the continent; an affection which, I’ll admit, often feels eerily inexplicable and at times overwhelming. I guess I’ve done my best over the years to respect the boundaries of birth, genealogy and lived experience in a part of the world that hardly needs any more outsiders claiming any more of it as their own.

Yet ask me to describe my feelings for South Africa and the work of so many of its storytellers, and ‘intimate’ is the word that comes to mind.

As a kid in the mid-1980’s, overhearing my South African mate’s Mum quietly crying in our kitchen out of fear of the compulsory military service that awaited her sons when they returned home, the word was ‘afraid’. In my student days that word would have been ‘fascinated’. When I first started working with democratically-elected leaders in a new, post-apartheid Johannesburg, that word was ‘inspired’.

It feels like I’ve had my ear to South Africa’s kitchen door for decades now; listening, absorbing and trying to understand the subtle tones of a place where cruel, crazy and beautiful truths can so easily go unheard by the outsider. South Africa taught me to shut up, lean in and listen. Because intimacy is something that evolves quietly and slowly over time. It’s the sharing of deeply personal stories, quiet confidences and difficult to voice fears.

It’s found, if it’s ever found at all, in the details of a story, and it was the music of Johnny Clegg that introduced me to so many of South Africa’s vicious and heart-rendingly beautiful details.

His songs and stories – with their drums, harmonicas, strangely-tuned guitars and stomping feet - have merged with so many of my own memories over the years; grilled meat spitting and popping on a braai in the Mpumalanga bush, the damp smell of rain after a Highveld storm, fields of sunflowers beneath a copper sky and the endless hum of a coastal road. Within his songs were my first words of Zulu, my first glimpse of township life, forgotten stories of colonial battles refreshingly told from an African perspective, and a yearning to ‘make that crossing’ to a South Africa free from racial oppression.

Yet perhaps I saw a little bit of myself in Johnny too. For a start, he was a ‘whitey’, known affectionately by black and white South Africans as the ‘White Zulu’. In fact, he wasn’t even born in Africa. He was British by birth, born to a Zimbabwean mother in Bacup, a small town nestled on the edge of the Pennines, half way between Rochdale and Burnley.

A bit like me, he left the country of his birth when he was six and made the vast crossing south from rural Lancashire to urban Johannesburg. My own six-year-old crossing was northbound from the south Pacific, and it led me eventually to Oldham, on the other side of Lancashire to Bacup.

Like me, Johnny moved around a lot as a kid; three countries and half a dozen schools in as many years. He talked in interviews about his struggle to reconcile the different aspects of his identity. “There is a part of myself”, he once said, “that identifies with the life of a migrant worker and the accompanying sense of dislocation and displacement.”

It was this part, or parts, of Johnny that resonated most with me. Not just on a personal level, but because so much of my time in South Africa has been spent in a city the locals know as Egoli, the ‘place of gold’.

For well over a century Johannesburg has been the final destination for migrants from across southern and central Africa who boarded ‘South Africa’s first tragedy’ as Hugh Masekela described the steam train; ‘young and old African men conscripted to work on contract in the gold and mineral mines of Johannesburg and its surrounding metropoli. Sixteen hours or more a day for almost no pay...’

“Migrant labourers in Africa, Europe, everywhere, are like universal joints,” Johnny once said, “they are this incredible human resource who are just sucked up by the capitalist system and used anywhere. The system makes no concessions and so the workers have to create a whole new universe of meaning.”

You hear this meaning being grasped for in songs like ‘African Sky Blue’, a cry from deep inside the back-breaking darkness of a mine several kilometres deep.

The warrior's now a worker and his war is underground. With cordite in the darkness he milks the bleeding veins of gold. When the smoking rockface murmurs, he always thinks of you. African sky blue, will you see him through?

Or in ‘Woza Friday’ (Come on Friday), and the longing for the end of the working week even though there’s barely any money to be found there.

Webaba kunzima kulomhlaba. Webaba lomsebenzi uvukile. Webaba nemali ayingeni. Engathi leliviki lingaphela. Ngithi woza, woza Friday, my darling...

Oh father, it’s difficult on this earth. Oh father, this work has awoken. Oh father, the money isn’t coming in. It’s as if this week could end. I say come, come Friday, my darling…

It was on the East Rand of Johannesburg where South Africa came perilously close to civil war in the early 1990’s and the hotbeds of dissent were often the hostels which were built for mine workers. Songs like ‘Bullets for Bafazane’ speak of the lurking threat of political violence in townships like Thokoza and Katlehong; places where I’ve met and interviewed some of the most resilient local leaders I will ever meet.

Shadowmen from the outlands come to town. Looking for Bafazane. They want to gun him down. They say he thunders too loud and his people are proud. He's got iron in his soul. He's got a smile in his eyes. He makes dancing shoes from old car tyres. And it’s the sky up above that he loves…

But what suddenly brought me to tears when I heard that Johnny had passed on, wasn’t just the personal connection I felt with a guy who I’ve watched mesmerised at the Hammersmith Apollo and who’s appeared in multiple guises throughout my travels across southern Africa. Nor was it just the profound sense of loss that I knew so many South Africans, and friends of South Africa would be feeling.

There was other stuff going on too; the news coming in from a President’s Twitter account in Washington, the cancer of racism that continues to metastasise in our body politic, the howling identity crisis of whiteness, the industrial levels of ignorance about our own histories and migrations, and everywhere the toxic, artificial architecture of race.

These themes had all been on my mind throughout my visit to the Migration Museum, and then suddenly, while making a cup of tea in my kitchen, I read a beautifully written Facebook post by a Zimbabwean friend, and all I could think of were the footprints that Johnny has left in my heart, and the crossings he helped so many of us to make.

In many ways he was an outsider with the empathy and insight to create a ‘new universe of meaning’ out of dislocation and displacement. In giving voice to the stories of so many people on the margins, Johnny found a way of articulating and celebrating his own fractured sense of self.

In doing so, he showed the rest of South Africa what was possible, and my God the world he leaves behind could do with a reminder.

You know this is hard for me
Facing the judgment of history
I'm a small man, I never stood up
Against anything at all
Always been just another brick in the wall

It's hard to know how to make a change
It's hard to give up what you got and walk away
You know it's so hard to fight on your own
Against the fading of the light

From the school to the church to the heart of the state
To the invisible power of the hidden hand of hate
Where was I when this all began
From the father to the son to the man

Asilazi, asilazi thina ilanga lethu lizofika nini
We do not know when our day will come
Silindile ngenhliziyo, yonke kodwa senzeni na?
We have been waiting with all our heart, but what have we done?

It was the second line of Roddy Quinn’s tribute to his friend the other day that best captured Johnny’s legacy, “He showed us what it was to assimilate to and embrace other cultures without losing your identity.”

For all the stories, the songs, and the twisting, quivering, stomping dance of the possible, ngiyabonga kakhulu umfuwhetu.

You’ll be missed far beyond the Limpopo River. 

Hamba kahle.

Tyranny & Distance

It’s on the heart-breaking days when London and New Zealand feel so close they could be one. Despite the tyrannical distances that separate them both it’s a closeness that can be visceral.

In recent years the heart-breaking days have been about earthquakes, tsunami warnings, hurricanes or mining disasters.

So today wasn’t the first time I’ve woken to the sound of distressed Kiwi accents on BBC Radio 4. Nor is it the first time I’ve switched on my phone, only to have the screen blink into life with a string of alerts.

BREAKING NEWS. WhatsApp messages. The names of Kiwi friends. Mum. Christchurch. Death toll. ‘Wake up, bro!’

Today is one of those days, yet today also feels so different too. Other worldly. Trance like. As though despite New Zealand feeling so close, I’m struggling to recognise it. My eyes haven’t adjusted yet. I can’t seem to judge distances.

Today’s disaster wasn’t down to the geomorphological forces of continental plates or the power of the wind or tides. This new tragedy now being absorbed and comprehended was no ‘act of God’.

It was an act of man against God, or at least man against those who believe in a God; that familiar and uniquely human kind of disaster which comes with its own bespoke set of horrors.

New Zealand, they keep saying. New Zealand of all places. And I’m there in an instant. This paradise. This Godzone of mine. But today’s New Zealand? This can’t be us.

Yet it’s Friday and we’re inside a mosque. Blood and gunsmoke. Semi-automatic weapons delivering deadly rounds into Dads and Uncles. Live on Facebook to sounds of cheers from onlookers. Many of them Kiwis.

The story of this new horror is starting to be told, words slowly coalescing around the incomprehensible, and I start noticing the language.

A shocked Kiwi friend who used to live in London texts me to say, “I moved home to feel safe”.

I want to reply, “But you are safe. You don’t spend your Fridays in Mosques. You don’t wear a headscarf on the street. You don’t have brown skin.”

A well-meaning Professor from the University of Auckland says, “We need to rally around the Muslim community - they are the targets, not New Zealanders.”

What do you mean, I want to scream, are Muslims not New Zealanders? Didn’t I just see a teary-eyed All Black sending his Du’as and Salaam Alaikum to the victims?

The phrase, “New Zealand is their home. They. Are. Us.” begins to trend online.

But there’s something about doubling down on the word ‘they’ which sits uneasily in my ear. Why do we even have to say ‘they’ on a day like today. Can’t we skip ‘they’ and go straight to ‘us’? Why can’t the default always be ‘us’ whenever any arsehole from anywhere for whatever reason starts filling people with bullets?

I try not to react though. Doing so would be churlish. I’m confused and angry. All we have is words and every one of them feels so pathetic. We’re all grasping for and stumbling over words to describe what is, let’s be honest, an utter head fuck. Today isn’t the day for polished prose.

I get on a train and head into town. I watch London go by. I try to join the dots.

Maybe I’ve learned more from my 18 years in London than I’ve wanted to. Because days like today now have an intimate familiarity. There’s horror and revulsion, but there’s not as much shock as there used to be.

It’s a resilience that I’ve come to resent. I find myself reflecting on how it builds up over time.

Fourteen years ago. The morning of the 7/7 bombings. I’ve just arrived in the office to complain about Transport for London. Something about a power surge on the Tube this time. Then my phone starts to ring. All our phones start to ring. And someone turns the news on.

A few days later the entirely innocent ‘Muslim looking’ Brazilian, Jean Charles de Menezes is killed by the Met Police in Stockwell tube station. My brother had exited the station moments earlier.

I’m a block away from Parliament, locked in a boardroom on Whitehall because a fanatic in a Hyundai has just mowed down pedestrians on Westminster Bridge.

Another bridge. London Bridge. I’m in an electronics shop on Tooley Street hours before a van full of machete-wielding jihadis pulls up outside Borough Market.

The London riots. Walking a female colleague home through empty streets. The eerie silence of a central London train station during rush hour. Plumes of smoke rising from Croydon town centre above the skyline at the end of my garden. Choking up on the phone to Dad.

My London. Our London. That palpable sense of unity. The default ‘us’; unconscious, unquestioning. All the stories of London in one seamless story of defiance, unity and acceptance.

I’ve experienced that story so many times now.

But I’ve never had to tell a story like this about New Zealand.

We’re a country apart from it all. Hemispheres and oceans away from race riots, clan meetings, the clash of civilisations. We’re at the uttermost edge of the earth; which is kind of the whole point of New Zealand. We like it out here. We’re all good thanks.

They’re talking about a ‘loss of innocence’. And I get it. I feel it. But it’s not the whole picture and we know it. ‘Loss of Innocence’ will be an inadequate single story for the conversations we’re about to start having.

I only have to think of the people I know who will baulk at my even mentioning this to be reminded that race, identity, belonging, and how we think about the others among us are conversations that Kiwis struggle to have too.

The truth is, we’ve never been as apart from the wider world as geography would have us believe. We’re not as unique or different as we like to think we are. And no, we’re not entirely innocent either. Like any imagined collectiveness, the classless, welcoming, egalitarian ‘Kiwi Way’ is only partially true.

A mate of mine is a teacher. He’s wondering what to say to his pupils at school on Monday.

He mentions the Muslim kid he taught when he lived in Christchurch well over a decade ago. Visiting his home. Attending the funeral. The boy’s Dad had fled Afghanistan and made it to New Zealand on the Tampa, only to be beaten to death in his taxi by a local white supremacist.

There have been protests against Asian immigration going back years in New Zealand. Visible minorities have suffered violence. More recently, crowds holding posters of the far-right British hate preacher Tommy Robinson have gathered in Aotea Square.

I know the killer was an Aussie. And yes, so much of this was imported from a globalised digital economy of hate. But ‘at least we’re not as racist as Australia’ won’t do for the conversations that lie ahead.

This global resurgence of white supremacism is every bit connected to New Zealand, where it has has also been fermenting for years.

Americans, Brits, Germans, Canadians, Poles, Russians, Australians and yes, New Zealanders are finding community and common cause in a global web of half-truths, imagined grievances, seductive conspiracies, religious rhetoric and hate.

It’s a netherworld I intuitively understand far better than I’d like to. A parallel universe where apocalyptic Christianity, revisionist theories and conspiracies about all-powerful nefarious ‘others’ prod at the wounds of our unfinished histories. It’s a place of hidden agendas where nameless elites and invading hoards (take your pick) are constantly morphing and conspiring against you, so long as you remain detached from reality and unaccountable to informed debate.

There’s community to be found out here at the edge of reason too. A sense of being part of a small and select elite who ‘really know what’s going on’. Yet as we’ve been reminded of today, it takes someone supremely ordinary and worthless to act on the hate that festers here.

How do we come back from the edge of it all?

Call me a hippie. Call me whatever you like but all I can think of right now is the word ‘love’. How do we love better?

Jacinda Ardern’s loving response to these attacks has been a poignant reminder of just how poorly served those questions are right now by her counterparts in Washington, London, Moscow and many other European capitals.

The rest of New Zealand will follow her lead and I know for a fact that the warmth and affection of the overwhelming majority of Kiwis will genuinely touch the world. I may be biased, but New Zealand at its compassionate best is a very special place.

I guess it will start with little things. It’s always the way with love, eh?

My Kiwi friend, who text me about moving back home to feel safe, went and laid flowers at her local mosque. She felt nervous going there with her toddler today, and how could you blame her.

I’ve been to mosques all over the Muslim world; Egypt, Morocco, Turkey, Palestine, Pakistan. But I have to admit, I haven’t a clue where the mosques are on the North Shore of Auckland. And now suddenly I want to know.

Because for the first time that’s the New Zealand I’m thinking of here in London.

Not the New Zealand of meat pies and guitars and swims and ‘pass the bloody ball’. That New Zealand isn’t under threat. Relax. It’s going nowhere. Enjoy your snapper.

I’m thinking of the New Zealand of Yawm al-Jum’ah, the rising sound of a Muezzin calling out the Adhan, open palms and a quietly whispered Du’a as the hustle and bustle of the week fades momentarily away.

These are the most important Kiwis right now.

Arohanui from London.

Salaam Alaikum.