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; [email protected]
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
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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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