This post comes to you from my new favourite place: the island of Curacao.

The blog is back, and so am I! I am writing this on the island of Curacao in the Caribbean. I have been on tour with three other writers: Helon Habila of Nigeria and the United States, Rodaan Al-Galidi of Iraq and The Netherlands and David Van Reybrouck of Belgium. Courtesy of Writers Unlimited, who organise the Winternachten Festival in The Hague, we have been doing some mad island-hopping: we travelled to Aruba and St Maarten as well as to Curacao to attend three literary festivals. It has been one of those life changing weeks. I have much to think about writing, being a writer, history and memory. I will be sharing some of my reflections in the coming week, but in the meantime, here are some  stunning pictures from what is now my favorite Caribbean island. 

Next week, I am in Geneva for a literary discussion at the United Nations.

If my friends, readers and other interested people in Geneva are reading this, please come to the Palais des Nations on 9 November 2011, to Room XXIII in Batiment E, for a celebration of the Year of the People of African Descent. I will be on a literary panel with writers from Brazil, Haiti, Panama and the United States. Details are on this flyer. There will be an exhibition. And music. It will be a party! I hope to see you there!

In which the symbolic fifth billion child and the symbolic sixth billion child misunderstand the meaning of symbolism.

The seven billionth baby has been born, welcome to the world little one, whoever you are. That baby is not Danica May Camacho, the little cutie from The Phillippines who is one of several symbolic seventh billion babies. Danica is not the actual seventh billion baby to be born - she merely represents the idea that we are now 7 billion.

Perhaps someone should have explained the largely symbolic nature of this to the fifth billion child and the sixth billion child, because they are not very happy.

According to the Guardian:

Previous children picked out at birth by the UN to mark world population milestones have complained that the international body forgot about them later in life. Both 12-year-old Adnan Nevic of Bosnia Herzogovina, the sixth billionth baby, and Matej Gaspar from Croatia, who was number five billion, have complained that the UN chose them at birth then largely ignored them. "We saw Kofi Annan as almost like a godfather to him," Adnan's father, Jasminko, told the Guardian. Adnan said: "He held me up when I was two days old but since then we have heard nothing from them."

Read the full story here.

Mr. Annan, if you are reading this, please call Adnan and tell him that when you held him up at the age of two days old, you were not making a lifetime commitment that the UN would always be there in his life, but really only just using him for PR purposes. Please also explain to Adnan the meaning of the following words: this exploitation of cute little babies for purely symbolic reasons? Enough already.

As sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti.

I am back in Arusha. Yesterday morning in Harare, as I left my apartment, I heard Toto’s Africa, one of my favourite songs ever. This was the second time in twelve hours: I had heard it the night before, on Friday, in The Lounge, my neighbourhood bar in Newlands. It sounds very, very good on a double gin and tonic. Three hours ago, I looked out of my window on the flight from Nairobi to Kilimanjaro Airport and there, imperial, majestic, rising like Olympus above the Serengeti and framed by clouds as white as the snow cresting it, was Mount Kilimanjaro. I have seen Kili dozens of times from the air, but it never, ever gets old. Next year, I am going all the way to the top. And Toto will give me wings. Here’s Toto ...

The TWAG Quote of the Week: George Charamba on the nefarious plot by the Swiss to untie what God has tied together.

Last week, the Swiss denied visas to members of President Mugabe’s entourage who wanted to go to Geneva for an ITU meeting. Among those denied visas was the President’s wife, Grace Mugabe. The President rarely misses an opportunity to attend the ITU annual meeting - he was to have been on a panel with Swiss and Rwandan Presidents Micheline Calmy-Rey and Paul Kagame.

Paul Kagame was to speak by video-phone from Kigali.

Our President, never one to turn away from a lectern if he can lambast Western powers from it, was to be there in person … along with a 62-member entourage.

The Swiss issued visas to the President and a significant number of the entourage, but felt, reasonably enough in my view, that not all 62 were on UN business, and that some were in fact using the UN mission to avoid the sanctions that have been imposed on their travel to Switzerland.

This seems entirely reasonable to me, but then I am not entirely unbiased: my view is grounded in the fact that the last time the President went on a UN mission, he is said to have spent more than 5 million dollars – his entourage on that occasion included his young children who undoubtedly had pressing UN business in New York. My view is also influenced by the fact that government owes the City of Harare about 80 million dollars, which explains the smell of rubbish that is piling uncollected outside my apartment complex and the nasty pothole on Arden Drive that I almost drove into last week. Most of all, I am exercised by the fact that the Harare City Library, whose board I chair, and which is the biggest and most popular library in Zimbabwe, has a leaking roof. If you knocked off about 20 intelligence agents and associated aides from the 62, that would be enough money for a new roof.

But back to the Swiss. They refused to issue all the requested visas. Cue vociferous objections from all sorts of people including the African Union. The Swiss eventually issued all the visas, including the First Lady’s, but by then, the President had had something of a hissy fit and decided not to go.

This is the context in which I introduce to you our TWAG quote of the week, from the always entertaining, Shakespeare and Bible quoting presidential spokesman George Charamba.

"By denying the First Lady the visa, the Swiss were trying to put apart what God had tied," Charamba told AFP.

Let's have that again:

"By denying the First Lady the visa, the Swiss were trying to put apart what God had tied."

There you have it. Mrs Grace Mugabe has nothing on Ruth, whose beautiful words of loyalty to her mother-in-law Naomi you all know so well: where you go, I will go also, your people shall be my people, and your God shall be my God.

Where the President goes, the First Lady goes. And the Godless Swiss tried to break them up for the whole three days that the President would have been away! As it is so clear that the First Couple cannot bear to be apart even for a few days, I want, at this point to dedicate to the First Couple the famous song by The Police that is meant to be a love song but that, because of the menacing obsession that it implies, is more suited to be the anthem of all stalkers everywhere:

Every breath you take,

Every move you make,

Every bond you break,

Every step you make,

I’ll be watching you.

Mr. Charamba, let's have it once more, loud and clear for the cheap seats:

"By denying the First Lady the visa, the Swiss were trying to put apart what God had tied."

Yes people, the blog is back!!

Ozymandias in Tripoli.

From the wonderful Nick Hayes at the Guardian.

On David Starkey, whites becoming black and blacks becoming white.

When I was at Cambridge, some of my fellow students, and some dons, used to say this thing that first amused me, but became increasingly irritating. I would be at a party, talking nineteen to dozen in my usual way, and then I would find someone staring at me with a look of wonder. The inevitable remark would then come. “You speak such good English.” And this at Cambridge, one of the most competitive universities in the world. To be at Cambridge was surely to be among the best: it is why I had applied in the first place. Why would anyone be surprised that a student at Cambridge spoke good English? Isn’t it a condition of admission? Wouldn’t you imagine that we all spoke good English?

But the subtext was clear: you are a black person and, therefore, you are not supposed to speak such good English. I was the first black African student at my college, and no, this was not as long ago as you think. My special status was stressed to me a number of times, particularly by one don who beamed at me and said, as soon as he met me, that I was the second Rhodesian at Sidney Sussex! And are you going back to Rhodesia after you finish, he asked, to which I responded that that was an impossibility as the country no longer existed.

I eventually developed an effective response to the you speak such good English comment. Anytime I heard this, I said, why so do you, in a tone of happy camaraderie.

These memories came back as I listened in wonder to the historian David Starkey on Newsnight. He said three things: that Enoch Powell was partly correct in his Rivers of Blood speech and that the white kids who looted all over England were victims of black culture, and, finally, that if you heard the Oxbridge-educated Tory MP David Lammy speak without seeing him, you would think that he was white.

He speaks such good English, you see.

That a historian would bandy about such imprecise terms as white culture and black culture is frankly baffling. What is white culture? Going to the opera? Divorce? Or having a nuclear family? Atheism? Or the creationism that is becoming rampant in the American south? Scientology? The gay pride parade of Amsterdam? Or the gay curing programmes of the kind advocated by Michele Bachmann's husband? The binge drinking of London? Football hooliganism?

And don’t get me started on black culture, which seems to be reduced by Starkey, to a very specific sub-culture influenced by hip hop and rap music and street gangs.

But gangs, of course, are not part of white culture, because the Teddy Boys, back in the 50s were not white at all, oh no. And those Victorian street gangs, the Sloggers, the Scuttlers? When Dickens wrote about Fagin’s gang of pickpockets, about murderous gang member Bill Sykes, why he must have had some sort of Jamaican influence because Bill Sykes? He was acting black.

Missing in David Starkey’s analysis is any awareness of class. Because this is the essence of Starkey’s reasoning: any white person who is not how you imagine a white person to be has become black, and any black person who is not how you imagine a black person to be has become white. To be black is to be poor, it is to be uneducated, to be inarticulate. A middle class black man like David Lammy becomes, not middle class, but white. And the working class hooligans who were looting trainers are acting black.

I very much fear that England is going to get this spectacularly wrong. All the commentators, like Starkey, are responding reflexively from within the narrow framework of their entrenched positions.

But that is another subject for another day. Listening to Starkey took me back to Cambridge, where my fellow students actually thought to express surprise that a fellow Cambridge student spoke English well. And why? Because I was black.