This is the final draft of an article that was published in Studies in Travel Writing, Vol. 15, No. 2 (2011): 189-209

The Politics of Investigative Travel Writing: An

Interview with George Monbiot

Martin Padget, Dept. of English, Aberystwyth University,

Wales; mtp@aber.ac.uk

AbstractGeorge Monbiot is a well-known journalist, author, environmentalist and social justice campaigner whose weekly columns for the British national newspaper, The Guardian, are read by hundreds of thousands of people across the world. In this interview he speaks candidly about the experiences that led to the publication of his first three books: Poisoned Arrows: An Investigative Journey through Indonesia, Amazon Watershed: The New Environmental Investigation and No Man’s Land: An Investigative Journey through Kenya and Tanzania. Significantly, whilst each of these volumes is a work of investigative travel, Monbiot states that he never saw himself as a travel writer. Indeed, Monbiot is rather dismissive of recent British travel writing in general, with the notable exception of figures such as Bruce Chatwin, Charles Nicholl and Wilfred Thesiger, whom he met in Kenya in 1994.

Introduction

George Monbiot is a well-known journalist, author and

environmentalist whose weekly columns for the British

national newspaper, The Guardian, are read by hundreds of

thousands of people across the world. Through his regular

1

appearances on radio and television, as well as in print,

Monbiot has forged a role as a prominent public

intellectual over the past two decades. He is the author

of seven books, including the best-selling Captive State: The

Corporate Takeover of Britain (2000). Together with his column

for The Guardian, which he began writing in the mid-1990s,

this book established his name as a radical commentator

on current affairs. Through his extensive writings and

media appearances, Monbiot has garnered a reputation as

an anti-Establishment figure and a scourge of vested

interests.

In Captive State, Monbiot makes a series of journeys

through Britain to document the frequently invidious ways

in which the interests of modern corporate capitalism are

changing the geographical, social and political landscape

of the country. Amongst Monbiot’s targets in this book

are the major British superstores, for their monopolistic

marketing strategies, and multi-national biotechnology

companies, such as Monsanto, for the manner in which they

have sought to control the food chain through the

development and distribution of controversial GM crops.

2

Monbiot states pithily: ‘The struggle between people and

corporations will be the defining battle of the twenty-

first century. If the corporations win, liberal democracy

will come to an end.’1

Since the appearance of Captive State, Monbiot has

published three further books. The most important of

these are The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order

(2003) and Heat: How We Can Stop the Planet Burning (2006). The Age

of Consent contains a series of radical proposals that are

designed to transform the existing world of inequality

into a more just and equitable environment in the age of

globalisation. Taking his cue from the emergence of the

Global Justice Movement, Monbiot makes an empowering

critique of the ways in which the overwhelming economic

and political power of dominant corporate and financial

interests can be challenged and reformed in order to

create a richly and provocatively imagined new global

politics. To this end, Monbiot argues for the

establishment of a democratically elected world

parliament, a reformed United Nations General assembly to

improve world security, an International Clearing Union

3

to replace the International Monetary Fund and the World

Bank, and a Fair Trade Organisation to take the place of

the existing World Trade Organisation.

In Heat, Monbiot presents, firstly, a stark warning

of the dire consequences of unchecked climate change and,

secondly, a series of radical but practical measures

that, if implemented, could hold global warming to

manageable levels in the twenty-first century. Among the

many points argued in this politically and morally

challenging book, is one that is sure to give great pause

for thought to scholars of travel writing whose

enthusiasm for studying the genre is matched by their

desire to travel personally. He concludes one chapter,

‘Love Miles’, by stating: ‘it has become plain to me that

long-distance travel, high speed and the curtailment of

climate change are not compatible. If you fly, you

destroy other people’s lives.’2 This bleak proclamation

comes after Monbiot has exhausted the possibility of

finding viable alternative forms of international travel

to rival the jet-powered planes of the current commercial

aviation industry. According to Monbiot’s logic, there is

4

no such thing as ethical tourism, which has become one of

the ways in which increasing numbers of well-educated and

socially minded people in the West justify their

enthusiasm for long-haul travel. Whilst it remains to be

seen whether many of those people who can afford to

travel by plane will curb their desire to do so in the

near future, surely Monbiot is correct to point out the

unsustainable nature of current levels of growth in

transcontinental travel by plane.

With the benefit of hindsight it is clear that

Monbiot’s three investigative travel books, which are the

principal topic of discussion in the interview that

follows, provided the impetus for the work that he has

undertaken since the mid-1990s. After graduating from

university with a degree in Zoology in 1984, Monbiot made

radio programmes with the BBC’s Natural History Unit and

for the World Service. It was while working for the BBC

that Monbiot first developed a passion for investigative

journalism, focusing his attention on environmental

issues. In 1987 he set out on a journey to West Papua

with his friend the photographer Adrian Arbib, who

5

specialises in the documentation of human rights issues

and has worked for the Red Cross and other international

aid organisations. Monbiot’s first book, Poisoned Arrows: An

Investigative Journey through Indonesia (1989), recounts the two

young men’s intrepid journey through the interior of West

Papua to document the impact of the controversial

transmigration programme on the indigenous population of

West Papua. The programme was implemented by President

Suharto, the dictatorial leader of Indonesia who annexed

West Papua in 1963, to relieve congestion elsewhere in

the sub-continent, by transplanting thousands of people,

principally peasant farmers from Java, to West Papau. The

country’s tribal people have been devastated by the

subsequent impact of land encroachment, epidemic disease

and their widespread removal to sordid shantytowns where

they eke out a poverty-stricken existence.

The second of Monbiot’s three volumes of

investigative travel is Amazon Watershed: The New Environmental

Investigation (1991), for which he travelled alone and acted

as his own photographer and sound recorder. In this book

Monbiot investigates the reasons behind the destruction

6

of the Amazon Forest and predicts the catastrophic

environmental and social impact of continued

deforestation and land speculation in Brazil on the

world’s most important living system. He set out to

explore the political as well as ecological factors

behind the movement of settlers and miners into the

Amazon Basin, and the consequent despoliation of forests

as the land was opened up to inefficient forms of

farming, the logging of ancient trees and the

exploitation of mining resources. As he did in West

Papua, Monbiot also charted the distress of the region’s

indigenous cultures, such as the Yanomami Indians, as

their ancient lifeways were undermined by land loss,

subjugation, disease and demoralization. Not

surprisingly, the narrative is compelled by a great sense

of urgency at the ongoing ecological catastrophe in the

Amazon Basin. At the same time, however, Monbiot has

recalled the extraordinary sense of freedom that he felt

while spending time with the garimpeiros, the miners drawn

to the northern Brazilian rainforest in search of gold.

These men led a precarious and frequently violent

7

existence, and their presence in the land ravaged the

traditional livelihoods of the native population of

Yanomami Indians through the introduction of guns,

disease, alcohol and prostitution. Monbiot was

exhilarated by the time that he spent with these men, who

lived an elemental, if sometimes violent, life of

freedom, without social constraints.3

No Man’s Land: An Investigative Journey through Kenya and Tanzania

(1994), Monbiot’s final travelogue, is a powerful work of

witness in which he recounts a journey through Kenya and

Tanzania to document the violent suppression of nomadic

herding cultures, such as the Turkana, Maasai and

Samburu, by a toxic combination of inhumane official

policies, government neglect, and foreign countries and

agencies with economic interests in the region. At one

point in the book, Monbiot reflects on his curiosity and

empathy for traditional pastoralists, stating that ‘a

world without diversity – a diversity of cultures,

beliefs and approaches to the many problems besetting us

1 George Monbiot, Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain (London: Pan Macmillan, 2001), 17.2 George Monbiot, Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning (London: Penguin, 2006), 188.3 Monbiot, Heat, 143.

8

– would be a world without hope’.4 For this journey,

Monbiot again travelled with Arbib, whose compelling

photographs complement the written account.

In the interview, Monbiot observes that he adopted

the genre of travel writing to witness the impact of the

transmigration programme on the West Papuans and convey

his findings to a general readership. He did not think of

himself as a travel writer when undertaking his journey

through Indonesia, nor when he set out on his two

subsequent investigative journeys through the Amazon and

East Africa. Indeed, Monbiot is rather dismissive of

British travel writing as a whole, with the notable

exception of figures such as Bruce Chatwin, Charles

Nicholl and Wilfred Thesiger, whom he met in Kenya in

1994. As he puts it in the interview, ‘I don’t like the

genre on the whole’. What Monbiot means by this comment,

I think, is that he has little truck with the sort of

self-deprecating irony present in the work of certain

contemporary travel writers, an irony that actually

reinforces, rather than ostensibly downplaying, the

4 George Monbiot, No Man’s Land: An Investigative Journey through Kenya and Tanzania(London: Macmillan, 1994), 54.

9

author’s individualism and heroism. Monbiot reserves

admiration for Thesiger because of the latter’s empathy

for the people he encountered and because it was their

story, rather than his own, that he wished to tell.

I met with Monbiot at his home in West Wales on two

occasions to conduct the interview. He was a courteous

host and gave generously of his time. In the course of

editing the transcript, I have changed the order in which

certain questions were made and answered, omitted some

material that proved to be extraneous, and made some

minor corrections to expression.

The Interview

MP: What did you think you could achieve by making

journeys abroad, into uncharted territory for you,

rather than focus your investigative energies at

home?

GM: Well, I think I had a mixture of motives. Partly a

death wish, I suppose, or something pretty close to

one! A desire to have adventures which were

certainly out of the ordinary furrow of the life I

10

had been leading. But above all because I had a

thirst for knowledge and for seeing parts of the

world I had always been interested in but had not

visited before. And the thing is, in journalism you

can’t really know something until you’ve been

there. You can read as many reports as you like, you

can read as much data as you can get hold of, but

it’s not until you’re actually there that anything

makes sense. And of course as soon as you get there,

you find that the stories you’ve been reading are

wildly wrong and often completely irrelevant, and

that they tend always to be the same stories. They

get recycled amongst journalists who go there for

half a day to find the story which they’ve read some

other journalist telling. And it’s generally a false

or very partial view story from the beginning, and

the mistakes get amplified as that story is

repeated. What I was doing was immersing myself in

particular places for very long periods of time and

trying to see and understand and engage as much as

possible. It’s not until you are really tested in

11

situations which are fairly extreme that you find

out much about yourself, let alone about human

nature and how politics and life work.

MP: At the outset of Poisoned Arrows you note that you were

‘looking for an entirely absorbing project with

endpoints that would justify overturning my

comfortable existence’. Bearing in mind this

statement, what kind of traveller were you when you

set out on your journey to West Papua, and why did

that country in particular attract your interest?

GM: I was very green, very naïve. I had travelled

before. I had spent about six months of my gap year

in East Africa, and I had been to Indonesia before

for about a month. That was really about the extent

of my travelling outside of Europe, although I had

been going on holiday by myself since the age of

seventeen. When I was seventeen I had this crazy

idea of going to the Scottish Highlands for a month

and living off the land, and the land lived off me

12

really in the form of various illnesses, midges and

all the rest of it, and I ended up having a very

miserable time. But I was asserting my independence,

I suppose, which was the point of the exercise. Let

me go back a bit. I worked at the Natural History

unit and things went very well there. I was a radio

producer and was making investigative environmental

programmes that worked out very well. We won a Sony

Award for one of them and it was all looking quite

good. And then Thatcher launched her coup against

the BBC, sacked the director general, Alasdair

Milne, appointed Michael Checkland in his place and

overnight the culture of the BBC was transformed. I

remember my bosstelling me that that’s the end of

investigative programme making and we can’tsee that

there’s anything left for you to do here.

At that point I had already been working on an

idea to cover the transmigration programme in

Indonesia. I was offered a staff job by another BBC

department, which would have meant a job for life if

I had wanted it, but that prospect filled me with

13

horror. I loved the BBC and I thought it was a great

place to work but I didn’t want to be there for the

rest of my life. And I didn’t want to become the

sort of person that I saw other BBC people becoming.

In other words someone quite comfortable, maybe a

bit complacent, who knows exactly what his place in

society is and fulfils a pre-allotted role. I wanted

a wilder and more adventurous life. I think it was

really the offer of the staff job that did it at

that time. It was the point at which I panicked and

thought that I want to be out leading a wild life, a

life of freedom. I’d been investigating this

transmigration programme but I couldn’t do anything

on it now for the BBC. So I approached Michael

Joseph, a division of Penguin, with a proposal for

an investigative travel book, going to investigate

the issue but writing it up as a travel adventure

book—the story of the investigation as well as the

outcome of the investigation. Then I realised that I

actually knew very little about Indonesia and very

little about the world in general, so I took a six-

14

month job working in current affairs at the BBC

World Service, producing the current affairs

programmes Twenty-Four Hours Outlook and The World Today. I

did that for six months and then thought, right,

it’s time to take the plunge and go to Indonesia.

MP: Looking back at your three travel books together, it

seems to me that Poisoned Arrows is notably different

from the two ensuing volumes, No Man’s Land and Amazon

Watershed. For instance, quite a substantial part of

Poisoned Arrows recounts an intrepid journey through

West Papua during which you cross tough terrain and

meet different tribal populations. The narration of

that journey could be seen as being closer to

classic accounts of travel than the other two books

that are notably different in this respect. Do you

think the first book was indeed different from the

two more investigative travel books that ensued?

GM: I never saw myself as a travel writer. I saw the

travel writing as being the vehicle for the

15

investigative work that I wanted people to read

about. But I knew that if I wrote it up like an

Oxfam report or an Amnesty International report

nobody would read it. I always felt strongly that

you have to capture people’s attention if you are to

encourage them to be interested in an issue that is

unfamiliar to them. It’s not enough simply to

bombard them with the facts. You have to make it

attractive, you have to give people a reason for

reading, so it has to be a good story, or it has to

be particularly well written, or it has to encourage

new insights into life in general. It’s not enough

simply to say ‘this awful thing is happening and I

want you to know how awful it is’. You have to give

people a reason to get to the end of the book, and

the prospect of more depressing facts is not going

to do it.

MP: Could you say something about how you plotted

Poisoned Arrows? If it is an investigative book then

there has to be some sort of revelation in the

16

course of the narrative. How did you combine facts

and aesthetics when writing the book?

GM: I couldn’t plan the revelations, for obvious

reasons. We had to find an area which had been very

little covered, especially by journalists, and an

issue that had been very little covered. We really

did not know what was going to happen. When I say

‘we’, I refer to myself and the photographer Adrian

Arbib, who I worked with in both Indonesia and East

Africa. We did have a rough idea of what was going

on out there as we had read lots of boring reports

about it, but they were generally second-hand

reports. I don’t think there was any reporting of

the transmigration programme in West Papua at all

before we went out there. And so we only had a vague

idea of what we would find as far as the issue was

concerned. We had no idea whatsoever of what we

would find as far as the travelling was concerned

because neither of us had been to West Papua before.

Most parts of West Papua under the Suharto

17

dictatorship were closed to outsiders so there were

very few contemporary accounts of the places we were

due to visit. And we really had very little idea how

we were going to travel and what the conditions were

going to be. I remember flying over the western

fringes of West Papua en route to Biak in the north,

where we were going to land in a Hercules plane with

a group of trans-migrants, and looking down out of

the windows at unbroken rain forest which looked

black under a very close covering of cloud, and

feeling a sense of dread and a sudden sense of what

a mess we were likely to be getting ourselves into.

MP: Did part of you want to get into a mess at that

time?

GM: There was one moment—I don’t think I put this into

the book—where Adrian and I were in the mountains

and we were in some trouble, but we were also

surrounded by fascinating people and in

extraordinary circumstances. We were in a cave

18

trying to get some sleep when Adrian said, ‘I don’t

care if I live or die’. I was shocked by that

sentiment, and I told him so. And he said, ‘Well, do

you?’ And I said, ‘Actually, no I don’t’. I suppose

like a lot of young men—I was twenty-two when I set

out—I had a bit of a death wish. I also thought that

the adventure we were having was so far superior to

anything I else I had experienced in life that I was

very happy to follow it wherever it might take me.

MP: Could you say more about the transmigration

programme—what it consisted of, and how it was

impacting the indigenous people of West Papua?

GM: Ostensibly the purpose of the transmigration

programme was to relieve population pressure in Java

and Bali, which are both very densely populated

islands. But it was being run by the Suharto

dictatorship as a means of controlling the unruly

outer islands of Indonesia. It is a vast

archipelago, about 14,000 islands, some of which are

19

a long way from Jakarta, the capital city, and some

of which had been annexed by Suharto. I’m thinking

of East Timor and West Papua, and arguably Ache and

the northern tip of Sumatra. The people there had

been denied the independence they had been promised.

Transmigration was used as a tool by Suharto to, in

the words of the government of the time,

‘Indonesianise’ the outer islands, or, in the words

of the people in those outer islands, to ‘Javanise’

the outer islands. Many of the trans-migrants sent

to the border areas, for instance in West Papau,

were retired military officers. Their purpose was to

secure the border. And the purpose of the

transmigration programme in general was to turn this

into a functioning part of Suharto’s empire. It’s a

very old technique. There were trans-migrants dumped

in Romania by the Romans, for example. The British

black-birded people all over the empire because they

would have loyal subjects who were totally dependent

on their patronage, and who would side with the

colonial master against the indigenous people.

20

Something very similar was taking place in this

case. It was a vast programme involving hundreds of

thousands of people, and it was partly funded by the

World Bank. The World Bank, then as it is now, was a

tool of the Washington consensus, meaning it was

really controlled by the US Treasury, and it took a

wholly partisan approach to hemispheric politics

during the Cold War and its aftermath. Suharto was

considered to be a Western asset, so the World Bank

backed Suharto’s projects, not least the projects

which were intended to secure his continued

dominance, and to ensure that there were no

subversive forces left in Indonesia. The World Bank

claimed that it believed this was a humanitarian

programme for improving the lives of crowded people

living in the inner islands. It knew perfectly well

what the real intent of the programme was. As we

discovered, it was devastating to local people, who

were losing their land and being forced into model

villages in some places, and also to the trans-

migrants, some of whom were dumped in the forest

21

very far from schools, hospitals, boats, other

facilities, and told to get on and farm rice, which

simply wasn’t a suitable crop for the places they

were left in. The trans-migrants were assailed by

pests and flooding, and all sorts of problems, as

well as by conflicts with the local people.

MP: Concerning the local indigenous people, what prior

conception did you have of the tribal cultures? When

you wrote about them in the book to what extent were

you relying on first-hand observation and to what

extent were you informed by written sources, such as

anthropological texts or even missionary accounts of

these cultures?

GM: Before we set out I read as many anthropological

accounts as I could lay my hands on. There wasn’t a

great deal. The literature was quite sparse. The

Baliem Valley, which is the centre of the Highland

civilisation of West Papua, was first seen by

outsiders in 1938. So the literature was

22

comparatively recent, but because of the

inaccessibility and because of the paranoia of

successive Indonesian governments there had been

very little documentation. The papers we read were

fascinating. They gave a glimpse of a series of

remarkable cultures which had developed at a very

far remove from the countries with which we were

familiar. Until we saw the Papuan people for

ourselves we really had no idea what to expect, and

we had no idea whether we would be able to

communicate successfully and be treated

sympathetically. What we reckoned without was the

tremendous hospitality that most indigenous people

give you in most parts of the world. We were treated

as friends until proven otherwise. Of course to a

Western person that’s an alien concept.

MP: You were also fleeced by the locals from time to

time. There’s quite a memorable character called the

Weasel. Do you recall much about him?

23

GM: Yes. I don’t think he was really called the Weasel,

that’s just the name we gave him! He did have a face

that made him look rather like a weasel and some

unfortunate habits, including ripping us off quite

badly. Of course we were quite vulnerable because we

were thrown on the mercy of the local people in an

environment we didn’t know at all and, as we found

out, they didn’t know very well either because we

kept getting lost. The people we hired to take us

through the mountains didn’t know the paths. And

indeed, after reading various reports subsequently,

it seems there weren’t many paths due to the very

great depopulation of that part of the mountains

because of malaria moving in quite recently. So

people cleared out about twenty years before. At the

time we thought the guides were incompetent, but

they were probably doing it as well as they could

under the circumstances. On the whole we had very

good experiences with the people who took us over

the mountains. However, there was one man in

particular who would quite happily have left us

24

there to die of starvation while he went off with

our rucksacks.

MP: One of the things that struck me while reading

Poisoned Arrows is the way in which you write about

certain of the missionaries that you met, especially

a Dutchman named Tan. It appears quite obvious that

you felt a great deal of admiration for him,

although obviously not for all missionaries. Could

you say more about how you view the role of Tan and

other liberally minded missionaries in the lives of

the various tribal peoples you met? Also, do you

think that figures such as Tan and yourself have a

certain degree in common and share similar cultural

and moral values?

GM: Before I went to West Papua I subscribed to the

general Western view of missionaries, which is that

they were altogether a bad thing and that their

purpose was to tame people in order to make them

more tractable subjects of empire. There were

25

certainly many missionaries in West Papua who did

fit that description. Most of them were Southern

Baptists and they had an extremely crude view of the

welfare of the local people, which was that if their

souls were saved nothing else mattered. They

effectively handed them over bound and gagged, so to

speak, to the Suharto government. They misled the

people horribly and told them a pack of lies,

helping to assist in the theft of their land, the

minerals under the land and the environmental

resources, such as timber. There were some

profoundly evil people working as Southern Baptist

missionaries there. But then we came across the

Catholic missionaries working in the south of the

country. We had no intention of meeting them and we

were very suspicious of them, as we were of all the

other missionaries. But we found among them what I

suppose in Latin American would be called Liberation

Theologists. They didn’t call themselves that, but

looking back that’s plainly what they were. I should

add at this point that I’m not religious—I don’t

26

subscribe to any religious doctrine at all. Their

primary purpose was to defend people from the

atrocities perpetrated by the Suharto government and

they put themselves at great risk in doing so. One

or two of them were killed by Suharto’s soldiers in

seeking to defend the indigenous people. They lived

an extraordinarily adventurous life of the spirit in

going out to defend people living in very remote

communities.

One man in particular, who I suppose became a

hero of ours, was called Joe Haas, an Austrian

Catholic missionary working with the Mill Hill

Brothers. He would go out in a dugout canoe for

weeks at a time and live off the land. He would kill

wild pigs and forage and hunt and gather and live

with the indigenous people just as they did. And he

would stand in front of the soldiers. At one point

he had a gun put to his head by a man counting down

from ten but still refused to yield and do what he

was told to do. They showed remarkable courage and

it was a courage that was completely unrecorded

27

until we got there. I’d read nothing about these

people; I didn’t even known they were there. They

didn’t want publicity; they were just trying to

provide a last line of defence against this very

cruel government. We came away aware that there was

more than one kind of missionary and that among them

were some of the most admirable people on earth.

MP: At the end of the book you look at the Baliem Valley

and imagine its future, which didn’t appear at all

promising. What do you know of subsequent events and

how that area has been impacted in the last twenty

years and more?

GM: I’m afraid to say that West Papua in general has

been devastated by a combination of transmigration,

the exploitation of resources and the militarisation

of the province. Far from achieving independence,

which is the almost universal demand of the West

Papuan people, it has been ever more successfully

colonised. Huge areas have been wholly deforested.

28

The great ironwood forests that we travelled through

in a dugout canoe have all gone—they’ve been

completely flattened. Mining has expanded and has

been accompanied by appalling human rights abuses as

people have been bombed out of their villages in

order to prevent them interfering with the digging

up of their land. Very large numbers of people have

been killed and tortured and disappeared, not just

by the Suharto government but also by the supposedly

democratic governments which have followed. West

Papua now is wholly controlled by military holding

companies which are ostensibly private corporations

but are really run by units of the military who

compete with each other. While supposedly securing

the province for the greater good of Indonesia, they

are in reality securing it so that they can take

resources for themselves. There has been a vast

planting of palm oil, partly now to supply the

desire for biofuel in the West, particularly in

Europe. People have been expelled from huge tracts

of land and are now forming shantytowns in what were

29

very tiny settlements when we were there but which

are now big sprawling cardboard cities.

MP: In a while I would like to return to this subject

because one of the motifs of all three books is the

rise of shantytowns and the migration, often forced,

of people from rural and even wilderness areas into

cities. Moving on to your second book, Amazon

Watershed, could you explain how you chose to

undertake this project and how it built upon your

earlier project in West Papua?

GM: I remember when we were in West Papua thinking to

myself, this is how I wish to live the rest of my

life. The strongest thought I had was: I never want

to have a boss again! That was closely followed by:

I want to be able to go where I want, when I want,

without having to ask anyone’s permission. And so I

had no inclination at all to go back to the BBC or

back to a cosy job at home. I had a taste for the

extreme life I had experienced in West Papua. I

30

remember going back to my parents and they asked me

some questions about how it had been. I gave them

quite a censored version because I didn’t want to

alarm them too much. Then I asked what’s new here,

having been away six months. My mother said me that

Mrs Arnold’s cat had died. I thought, I can’t come

back to live in Britain, there’s not enough

happening. I want to be on the frontier of the great

events shaping the environment, shaping the future

course of human life. It seemed to me the place to

be was the place where indigenous people were losing

their land and being swept aside. That was where you

could see a great turning point taking place. At the

time I suppose it must have been that sixty to

sixty-five per cent of people on earth were rural.

The majority of the world’s population were rural

people, many of them indigenous people, most of the

rest peasant farmers. That’s now changed as the

majority of people are urban people and the world

today, over twenty years later, is a very different

31

place from the world that I went out to find when I

started this in 1987.

MP: Could you explain how you set things up for this

book? For example, how did you develop linguistic

skills, contacts with local people and knowledge of

the geographical terrain before setting out on your

journey?

GM: Well I wish I could say all of it was worked out

before I set out on the journey! I went to meet

people who had worked in the areas that I was going

to work in. Brazil, even though it was under a

military dictatorship at the time, was much more

accessible than West Papua. The dictatorship was a

less oppressive one. In fact Brazil’s problem was

that anything went, and did. So while it’s a

wonderfully laidback place, it’s also a place in

which people can oppress others with very few forces

to stop them. Brazil’s problem was almost that of

anarchy rather than dictatorship, but it was anarchy

32

assisted by the military dictatorship. As in

Indonesia, I learned the dominant language, in this

case Portuguese, before I went out. And I read as

much as I could. There’s only so much you can

discover before you’re in a place. One thing I found

with all three books was that it seems a lot harder

to do before you get there. Once you are there

barriers you had built up in your mind, which

appeared to make the task impossible, disappear.

Graham Greene noted this in The Quiet American, where he

describes attempts to get through battle lines and

to find out what was going in various places in

Southeast Asia. Everyone told him it was impossible

but when you get there it turns out that there are

no impediments. One of the dangers of preparing too

well is that you start to become afraid. To an

extent I deliberately prevented myself from learning

too much before I was there, because it would

discourage me and I would lose my nerve. And of

course theoretical knowledge doesn’t get you too far

in a situation like that. You have to see it for

33

yourself to understand what’s happening, to

understand where the danger lies, to understand what

is possible and who the real forces are. As in all

cases, there is no substitute for seeing things

first hand. You can never get as clear a view of the

situation from other people’s accounts.

MP: One of the things you point out at the outset of

this book is that the book required a new kind of

journeying in which the traveller was not only an

observer but also a potential victim of the

processes being observed. To what extent were you a

dispassionate and/or an entangled observer in the

scenes before you?

GM: I took away from West Papua a strong sense that I

was no longer an observer, that I was now a

participant. I arrived there with my head filled

with BBC producer guidelines and a clear view of

what objective and impartial journalism looked like,

and I saw myself as an objective and impartial

34

journalist. I came away as a campaigner. I saw that

I had no option but to be a campaigner having seen

what I had seen. When you see oppression on the

scale of that meted out by Suharto in West Papua you

cannot remain neutral. You have to be able to say:

this is wrong and something has to be done about it.

From that point I became entangled in the story.

Once I had written my book I worked with various

organisations, such as Survival International and

Amnesty International, to try to publicise through

them what was going on, and to organise campaigns.

In fact we launched a petition to the United Nations

to have UN observers placed in West Papua. It wasn’t

taken up, but in short I could not simply report on

what was going on. I had to do something about it as

well. I knew that in Brazil some great injustices

were taking place. I knew that, again, I would not

simply be reporting those injustices. When I saw

harsh things done by powerful people to weak people,

I would have to take sides.

35

MP: How did you set out to write about such a vast area

as the Amazon Basin, and how did you choose to go to

the particular places you wrote about?

GM: You have to be, to an extent, guided by inspiration.

In other words you see a particular story, or you

capture a glimpse of a particular story, which

suddenly inspires you. You think that sounds very

interesting and I want to stick my head into that

particular hornets’ nest and see what’s going on

inside it! If you made a long list of everything

that was taking place there and tried to prioritise

it you might achieve something closer to a

comprehensive view, but the book would probably be a

very dull one, and you might well be covering

stories that were already quite well covered. As it

happened, most of the stories covered in those books

were generally new stories to Western audiences

because they arose partly serendipitously; I would

be following one lead and accidentally stumble

across another which was much more interesting. And

36

partly they would be the consequence of following a

story beyond the point where most journalists go

home, in other words generally when the bullets

start flying! At which point you start to see some

very interesting things indeed. It was the things

that caught my imagination that I went for; whether

they were the most important things objectively

speaking, I couldn’t tell. To me they seemed like

the most pertinent issues and the ones which I had

the best chance of using to spark public interest.

MP: Did you have other authors in mind as models perhaps

to emulate or to differentiate yourself from when

you set out to write Amazon Watershed and the other

two travel books? I’m thinking of historical as well

as contemporary writers.

GM: Well, I hadn’t read much travel writing, and I have

to say that I don’t like the genre on the whole.

I’ve never really got on with it. And some of the

famous travel writers, like Patrick Leigh Fermor and

37

people like that, I just don’t get it at all. One

book that did make an impression on me was Fruit Palace

by Charles Nicholl, where I felt that what he did

very effectively was to marry the hard-nosed

investigative reporting with the colourful

travelogue and to tell a rollicking good story while

telling a quite important story at the same time.

And that was definitely something I learned from. I

like Bruce Chatwin’swriting as well. But there

weren’t many other travel writers I really rated.

The other aspect of it is that in every case I

was reading a lot, but it was mostly anthropology,

politics and geography. Factual material. I found

the anthropology reading fascinating in all cases.

Also the ecological reading. In fact when I was in

Brazil I spent far too much time reading papers on

Amazon ecology. They weren’t of much use to me

eventually, but at the time Amazon ecology was the

cutting edge of ecological science, and a lot of the

world’s best ecologists were there. And so it was a

very exciting place to be. I felt that by getting my

38

head around all of that I was right on the edge of

understanding how the world worked. In fact I was

having discussions with a lot of these ecologists,

and during those discussions we were testing ideas

which may or may not have been borne out by

observation. But it was a very exciting moment when

you had the sense that you were peering over the

abyss into the unknown world.

MP: One of the things that come across in all three

books is that you are dealing with different sorts

of travel in the most general sense of the term. As

we have seen, you discuss transmigration in Poisoned

Arrows while in No-Man’s Land, your third book, you

write about the displacement of nomadic peoples in

Kenya and Tanzania and their forced migration to

cities and other lands. In Amazon Watershed you pay

particular attention to the Yanomami and to the

Garimperos (gold diggers), the peasants who are

displacing or impacting on the indigenous cultures

39

of the region. Could you explain who these peasants

were and what was happening at the time?

GM: One thing I very quickly learned in West Papua is

that the blundering white jackasses, myself and my

friend the photographer Adrian Arbib included, who

had gone to report this story were not the heroes of

the story. We were the clowns of the story and the

heroes were the people we were reporting on. The

mythical status of the travel writer ceased to exist

for us the moment I recognised that we had entered

the daily lives of people infinitely tougher than

ourselves. The experiences that were for us often

traumatic were mundane experiences for the people

whose lives we were reporting on. This was much the

case for those who were travelling either because

they were forced to do so or because it was the best

option they had, as it was for the settled

communities that I came across. I came across real

travellers and I was not among them. There was one

man I met who had walked two thousand miles across

40

the Amazon to the gold mines carrying nothing but a

rifle. Other people hadn’t walked quite so far, but

they’d covered very long distances before taking

riverboats and then eventually flying into the gold

fields, as I did, in a beat-up DC3. The extreme

toughness of some of the people I came across was

humbling. There was no way in which I could regard

myself in a heroic light when I compared myself to

them. In fact I remember a rather interesting minor

occurrence in the gold mines where I had spent time

staying in a miners’ camp. One evening I said to the

men there, ‘I really admire you guys, you’re so

tough, you get up before dawn, you’re out there up

to your waists in freezing water and you are

scrambling through this gravel and spray all day

long and then you come back and you are shot at and

you go to bed at night and you go to sleep for a few

hours and then you do it again in the morning, and

I’m amazed at how you do it’. And they said, ‘But we

were just saying how much we admire you’. ‘Why,’ I

asked. ‘Because all day you sit there reading

41

without moving your lips!’ So I suppose what you

admire is what is most different from yourself.

I started with these peasant farmers of

Maranhão, in northeast Brazil, who were being thrown

off their land by a combination of the local

landowners backed up by military police, themselves

supported by the state and federal government. There

was a massive land grab going on where ranchers were

greatly adding to the size of their lands and

expelling the people who lived on those lands. It

was a great enclosure of the commons, effectively,

and very similar to the enclosure movement in

Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Those people were then forced to go elsewhere to

survive. And one of the places where many of them

went was to the gold mines in the far north of the

Amazon. In effect I followed them there having

witnessed first hand the attempts to expel them, and

indeed, having suffered from those attempts!

42

MP: What was fuelling the expulsions of peasant farmers

from their lands?

GM: It was land theft, as simple as that. Ranchers who

either originally came from the communities

themselves or who came from outside were trying to

expand the size of their holdings, primarily for

speculative purposes so that they would use their

land certificates as speculative assets. They

wouldn’t do very much with the land having expelled

people. Once they had got vacant possession they

could then start trading their items, and they could

do very well because there was a great deal of

inflation in Brazil at the time and land was a safe

bet. And so people bought into land, and the real

price of land kept rising. So if you could obtain it

you could do very well, and people were utterly

ruthless in the way in which they obtained it. They

would torture and kill in order to get it, or they

would hire the police to torture and kill on their

behalf. And the police were very similar, really, to

43

a private security force working for the landowners,

much as the yeomanry was in Britain during the

enclosures.

MP: You make quite specific links, about halfway through

the book, between the Amazonian present and the

British past. Would it be fair to say that you are

also looking at the British past through the

Amazonian present?

GM: Well I didn’t realise that at the time, and it was

only later when I got back that I started talking

with people who had studied the enclosure movement

and some of the other events that took place between

the English Civil War and the end of the nineteenth

century that I realised that there were some very

strong parallels. I began to see in Britain that we

had had a series of events very similar to those

taking place in Brazil at the time, but I didn’t

know that when I was in Brazil. And so it was

44

interesting putting it into context after I had

witnessed what was happening.

MP: What is also interesting is that after you have made

these overt links between what was happening in the

Amazon and the impact of enclosure—environmentally,

socially and politically—in Britain prior to the end

of the nineteenth century, you then make a

generalising comment about modern humanity. You

speak of people, principally in the West,

experiencing a human identity crisis due to their

alienation from the material environment. You write:

‘Rather than constrain ourselves to suit the

constancy of nature, we have changed nature to serve

what we guess are the constant needs and

characteristics of mankind. Having lost our

constraints we seem to have lost our place in the

world. I believe that the identity crisis we appear

to suffer is the result of the disintegration of the

natural world which shaped us. Without a natural

45

order, we do not know what human nature is’.5 What

are the constituent factors of this identity crisis?

GM: I’m not sure that I would express it in the same way

today, but I do think that we suffer from anomie. In

many ways of course we have benefited enormously

from the overthrow of the old social order which

accompanied a particular ecological order, in that

the control of the land and its resources by the

aristocracy in Britain under the feudal system

certainly preserved many of those resources but it

preserved them through an extremely repressive

political system. I’m not sure that nowadays I would

use such a term as ‘a natural order’, but there is

no doubt in my mind that we are constantly seeking a

place for ourselves. This is not something that

indigenous people have ever been troubled by in my

experience. They have always known exactly who they

are and exactly what their relationship with their

surroundings is. While there are constraints in

that, there is also a kind of freedom because you 5 George Monbiot, Amazon Watershed (London: Michael Joseph, 1991), 205.

46

are spared this constant self-analysis and sense of

being displaced and lost, which I think a lot of

people in the West suffer from.

MP: Could you say something about the indigenous

cultures you travelled amongst in the Amazon and

comment on the relations that developed between

yourself and the people that you met?

GM: The indigenous cultures I saw, just as in West

Papua, were those that were in the process of being

broken. Among the Yanomami I witnessed an appalling

social catastrophe. Had it persisted it would have

been the end of the Yanomami. What I saw would have

been the beginning of a partly accidental genocide.

I stayed in a village in which the eldest active man

was eighteen years old because everyone older was

either dying or dead. And so these villages were

being led by children. What had happened was that

the gold miners had brought in malaria—it was in

their blood, and the local mosquitoes had picked it

47

up and transmitted it to the Yanomami. It was an

alien disease that had not been in that area before.

They were also suffering from the destruction of the

riverine systems due to the gold digging, which was

taking place on a very large scale indeed to very

destructive effect, and the introduction of alcohol,

drugs and guns, all of which were physically and

socially destructive. There was also a lot of

economic and sexual exploitation of the Yanomami

taking place as well. It was devastating. It was

rather like having an insight into how it must have

been during the Conquista, in that here was an

entire tribe that appeared to be dying through

introduced diseases. It wasn’t just malaria, it was

measles and one or two other common Western

diseases, and very large numbers of people were

dying. In the maloca, or roundhouse, in which I was

staying, most of the adults were lying in hammocks

in a high fever and dying before my eyes.

48

MP: Needless to say that must have been a very

devastating and depressing thing to witness. You

conclude the book by stating that the 1990s would be

the watershed of Amazonian development. Looking back

how do you view the developments that have taken

place since you made that statement?

GM: Recently I read in the newspaper that at current

rates of deforestation all the primary forest in the

Amazon will be gone by 2030. I think I said at the

end of Amazon Watershed that unless there was a

drastic change in policy the forests had thirty or

forty years to go. So that prediction appears to be

more or less on course, I’m afraid to say. What

we’ve seen under the more democratic government in

Brazil is really a continuation within the Amazon of

the trends which began under the military

dictatorship. In this case it’s because there is

insufficient governmental control, or because there

is corruption under which government officials

permit destructive policies to take place. As

49

before, the demand to turn natural resources into

money is ripping through the Amazon’s eco-systems

and displacing large numbers of people. Huge areas

now are unrecognisable from what they were when I

was there. It does look as though we are going to

lose the Amazon to a combination of direct

deforestation and deforestation caused by climate

change, unless things change very rapidly indeed.

MP: As a relatively privileged person in Britain, was it

liberating or unsettling to be in social situations

where you were perhaps viewed according to different

criteria from those that would have been the case at

home? It’s a question about status, I suppose.

GM: Yes, it’s an interesting question. I found often I

was almost like a ghost in the countries I visited,

that I could be almost anyone I wanted to be because

there were no clear preconceptions of who I ought to

be. I was a foreigner – that was my defining

characteristic. Exactly where I was from, what I

50

stood for in the country I came from, what my

profession was, all those things were irrelevant

beside the overwhelming fact that I was a foreigner.

And sometimes as a foreigner you would get a huge

amount of attention, and often unwelcome attention.

You would be at the centre of people’s conversations

and you would have no hiding place. At other times

it was almost as if I wasn’t there. I was passing

through these places as if I were the invisible man.

And because I wasn’t part of the story that was

unfolding – I was an observer, and people were so

busy getting on with the story it was as if they

couldn’t see me. And so it was disturbing in that

respect because it’s deeply challenging to your

identity and to the very fundamental need that we

have, which is to be acknowledged. But yes, it was

also completely liberating because in Britain in

particular, which is very class-based and where you

are judged by class, you are constrained by other

people’s expectations. Whatever you say or write or

do, people say you are coming at it in this way

51

because of who you are and where you come from. So,

for instance, I’m told by people who are opposed to

environmentalism that I am only an environmentalist

because I’m a posh git who wants to keep everyone

else in their place. And I’m doing that by

preventing them from spending their money because

they would then be uppity people who would usurp my

social position. Or I’m told that I can’t really

have left-leaning tendencies because my parents have

been active in the Conservative Party. You can’t

escape in this country in particular from those

supposedly defining characteristics, whereas

elsewhere you really can.

MP: Could you explain something of the processes that

you used for translating, recording and transcribing

material when it came to writing your books?

GM: I was, I suppose, an early multimedia journalist in

that I was doing sound recording at the same time as

writing when I was there and, in the case of Brazil,

52

where I was without a photographer, doing the

photography as well. I wasn’t doing any filming

because in those days cameras were a rather

different proposition to what they are today. Then

they were very big and very heavy and very

expensive. You certainly couldn’t have found any

power source for them in most of the places I was

working. So that wasn’t an option. I saw myself as a

writer but I was also recording radio programmes

when I was there, very much in the same spirit as I

was writing the books in that I didn’t produce

anything until the whole trip was over. And I quite

consciously and deliberately set myself against the

standard model of journalism, which was very quick

turnover. You turn up in a place, make a very rapid

assessment, you write that assessment up and it’s on

the evening news. In fact nowadays, of course, you

have this rolling news where people don’t have any

time at all to engage with anybody because they’re

standing on the roof of a hotel reporting from the

scene in front of them to forty different programmes

53

and websites and commentaries of all kinds. It’s all

output and no input. I’ve always hated that model of

journalism. I quite deliberately set out to do very

long term, slow-burning stuff where I wouldn’t write

anything at all until I had been in the country for

a long time, read a great deal and tried to make

sense of it. And in doing so I very rapidly

discovered just how misleading and plain wrong the

great majority of journalism on those places was.

And so the process was that at the end of every day,

whatever the circumstance and however difficult,

uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous the situation,

I would make time to sit down to write up my notes.

The problem was that the more eventful the day, the

more I had to write and the less time I had to do

the writing! At times it became quite stressful

because I had to set aside two or three hours to

write up the events when I’d had an extremely

eventful day. And often I would be working until

long into the night.

54

What I found, when it came to writing the

books, was that those notes taken on the day itself

were invaluable, partly because the vividness of the

recollection wasn’t anything you could ever replace.

Writing it down just after it had happened enabled

me to remember detail and sensation that I couldn’t

otherwise have recreated. Also it meant that the

recording process was a lot rawer and my emotions

were much closer to the surface. And so I could

convey those feelings because of course in travel

writing you have to do the feeling for readers, you

have to allow them to see what your reactions are

all the time. Those reactions are more powerfully

expressed if they’re written down on the day itself.

So there would be that long process of writing up

notes I had kept in these spiral-bound notepads. In

Brazil I would buy these school notebooks, A4-size

and very thick, with hideous photos of pop stars,

kittens, lovers - all these horrible, naff, gross,

pictures on the front – that I would fill with

55

details of the most horrific events. There was an

incongruity there.

MP: Did you ever lose any of your notebooks?

GM: No, though after I came back from Indonesia I had a

series of very scary events. First of all with a guy

sitting outside my house for a whole week in a car –

an Indonesian man, clearly sent by the Indonesian

Embassy in London. Then being followed by two thugs

employed by the Embassy, who followed me everywhere

and who would jostle me at the talks I gave. In one

case, this cultural attaché held me by the arm while

these people put long lenses into my face and fired

off a roll of film. I decided at that point that

there was so much sensitive material in my notes –

that there were scores of people literally who could

have been killed by the Indonesians – that I burned

them. It was with great regret and sadness that I

did so, but I thought that was the only way I could

be absolutely sure that those people would be

56

protected. I was very sorry to have lost those notes

and I would love to have them today. They were very

detailed and extensive, and to start off with I made

photocopies and thought I would secrete them

somewhere safely. It was just the fact that I was

being so intensively followed and scrutinised and

watched that I thought wherever I put them they

could be found. Maybe I got a bit paranoid and maybe

they would have been safe in a bank vault or

something, but I realised that the lives of dozens

and dozens of people were in my hands because

everyone who had helped me and everyone whose

identity I had disguised in the writing – I mean in

many cases the identity was disguised in the notes

as well, but not nearly as heavily as in the writing

– I have no doubt at all that in the hands of the

Suharto government those people would have been

summarily executed. It just wasn’t worth it for me

to keep those notes.

57

MP: Amazon Watershed clearly conveys an environmental

perspective, and of course subsequent to the book’s

publication you have become well known in Britain as

an environmental campaigner. What role did the

writing of this book play in shaping your growing

awareness of environmental issues?

GM: I’ve always been interested in environmental issues

from when I was a small child. I don’t really know

why except it was something that fascinated me. I

saw Brazil as my postgraduate studies. That’s where

I learned more at any time before or since. I read

voraciously – huge quantities of material, whatever

I could lay my hands on. I threw myself into every

interesting situation that I could find. I learned a

lot about the world, a lot about myself and a lot

about the political and economic forces which shape

us. I saw at first hand the destruction of the

world’s greatest and most bio-diverse eco-system. I

couldn’t fail to develop as an environmentalist

having seen that.

58

MP: Let’s turn to No-Man’s Land, the last volume in this

trilogy of travel books. At the outset of this book

you make fundamental claims about the ways in which

settled people, the agriculturalists of the world,

have looked at nomads with disdain. The particular

story you follow here concerns a number of tribal

peoples that have been displaced from their

homelands, or incorporated into new settlements in

Kenya and Tanzania, in East Africa. How did you come

to take on this particular project?

GM: What I realised after finishing Amazon Watershed was

that without intending to do so I had been looking

primarily at land alienation in both cases. I had

been looking at theft of land from either indigenous

people or peasants by well-capitalised operations –

the government and the World Bank in the case of

Indonesia, and generally free enterprise supported

by the government in the case of Brazil. I realised

this was an issue I wanted to learn more about, and

59

there was another strong example of where this was

taking place which was in East Africa. Again it was

an issue involving vast areas of land with a great

deal of trauma and suffering caused by its seizure.

And in this particular case the issue was much

better documented than the issues I had covered in

Brazil or in Indonesia, in that there had been a lot

of academic work in East Africa looking at the

problems affecting the nomadic peoples there. But

very little of it had been translated into popular

work, and so I saw my role there really as a

bridging role through which I sought to popularise

an issue that was well known to academics but poorly

known elsewhere.

MP: One of the most striking things that comes across in

No Man’s Land is how some of the terrain you covered

is now open to tourism. What has been the impact of

tourism on the Maasai? I am thinking of how you

write about the postcard image of the Maasai not

60

conforming to the real life people you met in the

course of your travels.

GM: I seem to remember at the end of Poisoned Arrows

suggesting that tourism might be a solution in West

Papua, that it might be a means of providing an

income for indigenous people which did not have to

destroy their culture. After my work in East Africa,

I realised that was a rather naïve position because

I found that the very industry which was supposed to

be celebrating the culture of the indigenous people

was helping to displace them. Very large areas of

land, and generally the prime grazing lands of some

of the nomadic peoples, were being taken for tourism

operations because there was a huge amount of money

in it. In this case land alienation was actually

accompanying environmental conservation, whereas in

Brazil it accompanied environmental destruction.

Here it was being alienated for the purposes of what

purported to be conservation but which was really

money making from tourists, which of course required

61

some conservation in order for that money making to

be sustained. The Maasai were allocated a role in

the story that was told to tourists but it was a

role they did not control. It was a role that was

scripted for them by the travel companies. So they

were encouraged to build manyattas, these special

villages, on the tourist routes. The tourists could

visit and the Maasai could pretend to be the people

they really were. Whenever one of the lookouts saw

the tourist buses approaching down the road they

would call out and everyone would troop out of their

houses and start dancing up and down. The tourists

would believe that they had caught the Maasai in a

rare and secret ceremony, and think that there was

something very special taking place here. They would

unpack their video cameras and then afterwards they

would buy some beadwork and haggle furiously to get

it as cheap as possible. The Maasai would make a

little as a result of this activity. In some cases

they were paid a retainer by the tour companies.

They were almost satirising themselves, because

62

normally the only people who would dance in that

fashion were graduating Morans, the warrior youths

who were graduating to become fully fledged men. In

this case, people of all ages were dancing up and

down. Instead of painting themselves with red ochre,

they would paint themselves with orange paint

because it was cheaper. There was no cultural

significance to what they were doing, so it didn’t

matter. Instead of dancing in a circle facing each

other they would line up like an aerobics class and

dance up and down in front of the tourists. It was

interesting to see that they simultaneously welcomed

the money that the tourists would bring in and

despised the tourists and what they were having to

do. They were effectively forced to become clowns

because their other means of survival had been taken

from them by what was fundamentally a tourist

operation.

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MP: Moving away from Africa, is there any context in

which you consider eco-tourism can aid tribal

communities?

GM: I can see in principle that it’s possible. If the

operation is primarily controlled by local people

then it can very much be to their benefit. Of course

the concept of eco-tourism is one that I have

trouble with now that we know the full impact of

aviation on the climate. It’s very hard to see how

the idea can be sustained that the environment can

be helped through tourism. Certainly as far as

benefits to local people are concerned, if they

control the land and control the operation I can see

how it could definitely be beneficial. But in this

case, as I suspect in most cases, it was other

people controlling the operation from start to

finish, leaving behind very little money indeed. The

Maasai received a few pence per tourist for each

visit by mini-buses—perhaps a few pounds altogether,

which didn’t go very far at all. Actually they were

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helping to promote an industry that was destroying

their real livelihood.

MP: What about the tourists, what did they gain from

their interaction with the Maasai?

GM: Well, one of the tourist guides I interviewed called

it a cultural exchange. Yes, I thought, the tourists

are getting a parody of Maasai culture, which they

can show their friends when they get home because

they were all taking video film of it. They can

pretend to have journeyed into the dark heart of the

real Africa, and of course it’s a Disneyland

experience. It’s all fake but as long as they

thought that what they were seeing was authentic—and

they earnestly believed they had stumbled across an

authentic Maasai ceremony because when I interviewed

the tourists that’s what they told me—then obviously

it didn’t matter to the tourists what they were

seeing as long as they believed they were getting

something genuinely African. As far as the Maasai

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were concerned they had an utterly cynical view of

the situation and they knew all they were getting

out of the encounter was money. There was no culture

in this exchange as far as the Maasai were

concerned.

MP: Could you say something about the situations faced

by the tribal cultures you met in East Africa? What

were the conditions experienced by the Turkana, the

Maasai and further tribes that you wished to

investigate?

GM: These were very tough people—people who survived a

great deal of ecological change because they lived

in a place in which ecological resources were

transient. Savannahs have a boom-bust ecology.

Sometimes there is a tremendous growth of grass and

movement of animals and abundant wild fruit and

seed, and other times there is nothing and there is

a blasted, semi-brown desert. So these are very

tough and adaptable people, but they were being

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pushed to and beyond their limits. Primarily either

because their most important grazing lands had been

taken from them for the purposes of conservation and

of arable farming, primarily dairy, or because their

cattle were being taken from them by government

sponsored raiding. We know that Daniel arap Moi’s

Government was extremely corrupt. One of the ways in

which people in that government enriched themselves

was to use state resources to steal cattle from the

nomadic peoples. This was particularly the case

among the Turkana in the northwest corner of Kenya.

They had always been a tough and warlike tribe and

had fought off all-comers, but now they found that

the Pokote to the south of them were being armed by

Kenyan politicians or possibly at a central level by

the Kenyan government with powerful automatic

weapons. And the Toposa to the north of them had

been armed by the Sudanese government who wanted to

fight the SPLA, the Sudanese People’s Liberation

Army. The Turkana were stuck between these groups

with only a bunch of old Lee-Enfield rifles to try

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to defend their herds. Of course they didn’t stand a

chance. The Toposa weren’t interested in fighting

the SPLA; they were interested in stealing the

Turkana’s cattle. And the Pokot were actually

encouraged to steal the Turkana’s cattle because

those cattle were being sold for the benefit of

Kenyan politicians. And so the Turkanas were

experiencing a series of devastating raids, some of

which left everyone, or almost everyone, in the

village dead. People were again being displaced from

the best grazing lands. Heavy droughts were taking

place at the time right across the Sahel. It now

seems these droughts occurred due to sulphate

pollution in North America and Europe. It’s a very

odd and fascinating geo-climatic story, but that’s

another issue. The Turkana were hammered by this

combination of raiding and drought, and many of them

were pushed into starvation as a result.

MP: The book ends with you travelling to Kitale in

Kenya. You spend time with Turkana children, many of

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them orphans and all of them displaced from their

former homelands. You find elements of brutality

amongst those children, but also tremendous human

qualities. How do you come away from such an

experience without feeling emotionally overwhelmed

by what you have seen, particularly so when faced by

the prospect of very vulnerable children?

GM: The truth is that I did become emotionally

overwhelmed from time to time by what I saw, and I

still do become emotionally overwhelmed by what I

learn about today. Generally I find to my surprise

that I’m a very happy person despite this and I feel

almost guilty about that. I should be perennially

depressed by the things I’ve seen and learned. But

I’m not. I don’t think that I would have been able

to do all this if I were that sort of person. I’ve

noticed that most of the environmentalists and human

rights campaigners I’ve met are generally happy

people. I think maybe there’s a process of natural

selection that takes place: you can’t hack it

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because you become too depressed at the state of the

world. Alternatively another possible explanation is

that if you face these issues and try to get to the

bottom of them you can see where hope lies. Whereas

if you only have a vague awareness of them, and you

have this sense of them looming over your shoulder,

they can then feel very oppressed indeed and you

can’t see a way through them. And so it’s possible

that by facing these issues you actually make them

easier to deal with than if you don’t confront them.

I don’t know where the truth lies, and maybe it’s a

bit of both.

MP: A number of other British authors have written

accounts of travel through East Africa. Were there

any writers, such as Wilfred Thesiger, for whom you

felt a certain affinity?

GM: As it happens we visited Thesiger in Samburu

District. He was a very old man then, in his

eighties and living with a Samburu family in a

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little tin shack as an honorary grandfather. He was

a delightful man. I had read The Life of My Choice, which

is his autobiography, and thought it a beautifully

written book and a fascinating one. We heard he was

living very close to a place we were visiting so we

went to meet him. We were very struck by the idea

that this man had lived according to his beliefs

right toward the end of his life. He didn’t want to

live in grey, rainy old Britain and end his days in

a retirement home staring at the television. He

wanted to carry on with his life as he had chosen to

live it right to the very end. We admired this

greatly, but the cost to him was very high. He was

living in very basic conditions, which was no

hardship to Thesiger—it would have been to almost

anyone else of his age. All his possessions were in

a battered old leather suitcase under his bed,

including his precious old Leica camera. He really

had one change of clothes and that was about it. He

still wore his tweed suit and he was quite an

incongruous character in this remote Samburu

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village. But as he had started to run out of money

the villagers had turned against him. While

previously he had been welcomed as a sort of

beneficent godfather to the village, when we met him

he was sleeping with a spear beside his bed because

a young man whom he had almost fostered in the

village had beaten him up. As the money had run out

they became resentful of him. It was a very unhappy

story, really, and now he was in fear of his life.

He was becoming quite frail. After we had taken tea

with him we went outside and he said, ‘Are there

blue flowers out here?’ We said there weren’t, and

he exclaimed, ‘Damnation, my eyes are playing tricks

on me again. I think I might be going blind’. There

was a very strong sense of pathos we had about this

remarkable tough old man whose powers were deserting

him. So yes, I greatly admired Thesiger, not least

because of his great empathy with the people amongst

whom he travelled, which marked him out from many

other travel writers. For many of those who have

travelled to East Africa it’s about the writer and

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what a hero he is, whereas with Thesiger it was

about the story of the people he encountered.

MP: What is the link between these three books and what

you have done subsequently? Also, after completing

No-Man’s Land, were you tempted to undertake another

investigative travel book, and what influenced your

decision to embark on your fourth book, Captive State?

GM: Several things came together which encouraged me to

come back to Britain. The first was that I got very

ill in East Africa when I contracted cerebral

malaria. I never quite got my strength back after I

recovered from it, which meant that every fortnight

or so I would get another illness and I would go

down for a week, not able to get out of bed. It

seemed to be getting worse rather than better, and

it seemed to be having a cumulative effect on my

immune system. It was making working extremely

unpleasant and very difficult. I realised that I

would need at least a couple of years back in

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Britain, out of the way of tropical diseases, if I

were to get my health back. During that time, at any

rate, I would need to stop travelling. At the same

time I had the sense that I had been going around

the world for seven years telling other people what

they should be doing in their countries. I felt it

was time to start attending to what was happening in

my own country, especially as my own country was

among those causing the problems that I had been

witnessing. But there was something else which had

perhaps an even greater effect. Which is that when I

went back home, I went to live in Oxford and I fell

into a group of people who were taking environmental

direct action. This hadn’t happened in Britain for a

very long time. Soon before I returned from East

Africa the big campaign against road building at

Twyford Down had begun, and then against the road

building programme in general. I was swept up in

that. I found something quite fascinating because it

reminded very strongly of what I had seen in

northeast Brazil – these popular movements trying to

74

take on the land alienation driven by big capital,

which was exactly what was taking place with the

road-building programme. I found a political

movement that I could relate to very strongly taking

place in my own country. So I became part of that

movement and then realised I had a role in Britain.

I became involved in British politics fom being

involved firstly in the direct action movement

trying to stop the road building programme, which in

fact succeeded more or less in stopping the road

building programme, and then in some of the direct

action movements which grew out of that that. It was

my recognition of the corruption attending many

development projects I came across while campaigning

over here that I saw there was a book to be written

about corrupt Britain and about the excessive

corporate influence over government policy. That was

Captive State. Having written that I then saw there was

a book to be written on what to do about it, and

from there I just carried on. It was while

campaigning on various issues in the mid-nineties

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back in Britain that I was offered a column at The

Guardian, and that also helped to revitalise my

interest in British politics. I haven’t lost my

interest in the politics of other countries, and I

still write about them quite a lot, but I don’t

think I will ever be a travel writer again.

MP: If you were in the position to go on another

investigative journey, to where would you travel?

GM: I’ve often thought about that or perhaps more

accurately fantasised about it because the way

things are at the moment that’s not an option for me

with the various ties I have. Maybe the Democratic

Republic of Congo. The eastern Congo is the place

where you see life led in the rawest possible way

and in the wildest and worst extremes. It’s very

clearly hell. The whole thing is driven by the rich

world’s demand for minerals: all the massacres and

the displacements and the starvation and the other

horrors that take place there. I would find it very

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difficult because it’s a profoundly disturbing

situation in so many ways – a rougher situation than

any of those I encountered before, with by the sound

of it far fewer redeeming features. But it’s a place

I feel a compulsion to visit, and not just to visit

but to spend a long time in.

MP: Do you think that might happen?

GM: One day. Ages and ages hence!

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