Alex Smith

1917

I was up before 5.00am and got off the carriers. I left at 6.00am, crossing a swampy plain. The natives have constructed a miniature embanked track, about four feet high, and between six inches and a foot broad on top, through the worst part of the swamp. It is composed of clods of clayey soil, strengthened by tough grass roots, and winds its way through still-running water, two or three-feet deep. The sure-footed carriers travel along it with ease, but it is a rather perilous undertaking for the bebooted white man who does not want to get wet. There must be excellent snipe shooting on this plain and I put up several jacksnipe when I left the track. What, at first sight, appears to be a system of irrigation proves, on closer inspection, to be a series of small dams constructed to catch fish on the subsidence of floods. Channels, through which the water can flower from one damned area of land into another are cut in the various embankments and in these are inserted long fibre baskets with an entrance placed upstream, but no exit. As the floods subside, the fish are driven into these baskets from each succeeding area. On approaching the river, the track winds through large plantations of Guinea corn and millet, and a number of small boys who followed us made them re-echo with their shrill screams as they started to drive off flights of birds, which were already at work on the ripening crops
Yeji Province, Captain Challoner

Gold Coast Diaries: Chronicles of Political Officers in West Africa, 1900-1919
By Thora Williamson, Anthony Hamilton Millard Kirk-Greene
Published by The Radcliffe Press, 2000
ISBN 1860644511, 9781860644511

1922

Lady E. arrived.
and brought bird.
Arrived at entrance doorway
Engelbach came with some friends
Brunton, daughter of Lady A.’s sister, Mr Burton & ?someone else.
Slept night at tomb.
Took photos. & notes.
Lady E. arrived.
Callender reached as far as the first doorway. There proved to be sixteen steps.
Now that the whole of the sealed doorway was laid bare various seal impressions bearing the cartouche of Tut-ankh-Amen were discernible, more in particular in the lower portion of the plastering of the doorway where the impressions were clearest.
In the upper part of this sealed doorway traces of two distinct reopenings and successive reclosings were apparent, and that the seal-impressions first noticed, Nov. 5, of the Royal Necropolis – i.e., `Anubis over Nine Foes’, had been used for the reclosing . Here was evidence of at least the reign of the tomb, but its true significance was still a puzzle, for in the lower rubbish that filled the stair-case entrance we found masses of broken potsherds, broken boxes, the latter bearing the names and protocol of Akhenaten, Smenkh-Ka-Ra, and Tut.ankh.Amen, and with what was even more upsetting a scarab of Tehutimes III, as well as a fragment bearing the cartouche of Amenhetep III. These conflicting data led us for a time to believe that we were about to open a royal cache of the El Amarna branch of the XVIIIth Dyn. Monarchs, and that {the} from the evidence mentioned above it had been probably opened and used more than once.
Engelbach, the Chief Inspector Antiquities Dept., came and witnessed the freeing of rubbish from the first doorway. With him came several of his friends, among others Brunton.
Slept the night in the valley. Carpenters commenced upon making a temporary wooden grill for fixing over first doorway.
In Luxor, Howard Carter

Tutankhamun: Anatomy of an Excavation.
Howard Carter’s diaries.The first excavation season in the tomb of Tutankhamun.
Part 1: October 28 to December 31, 1922

1996

The city white in the rain and the way I saw it, driving towards Cecilia Forest this morning, the mountain-line descending through the rain.
‘Have I not enough without your mountains!’—Charles Lamb to his friend Wordsworth. And who would not agree that there are few things as boring as the language of being. Those moments that define it are, like the experience of sex, cruelly designed to tempt the writer to pull out his big guns. Whereupon he does little more than shoot himself in the foot.
Yet at the present historical moment no language seems more despised than the language of being. (The ideology of the deconstructionists presents only an extreme instance of how utterly Being, as Heidegger would put it, has been forgotten in this later time at the end of the modern age.) Besides, a poetry that lacks any idea of being (in this sense) will appear to us as deficient in being. And any poetry of presence will, by the same toke, pronounce a severe word of judgement on the received wisdom of the present—whether people are aware of it or not.
In Cape Town, Stephen Watson

A Writer’s Diary
By Stephen Watson
Published by Queillerie Publishers, 1997
ISBN 1874901546, 9781874901549

2007

The CHOGM and the big white chieftess are meeting this week in Kampala Uganda – a chance for leaders to come together and exchange tips on how to steal money, mismanage their economies, how to repress and generally ignore the needs of their citizens.
This year’s CHOGM includes a People’s Forum –
The People’s Space at the Commonwealth People’s Forum is a free space, quite literally for the people!
A People’s Space is being created to provide a bold, exciting and inclusive experience for people other than the official delegates to be part of the Commonwealth People’s Forum and CHOGM experiences……..Through various interactions hundreds of people will leave the People’s Space with renewed energy to facilitate social change with a clear sense of working and building together in a different way. The People’s Space will attract participants from other CHOGM events including government officials, youth and business sector delegates……….The People’s Space will be open from Monday 19 – Friday 23 November.
On Wednesday, the People’s Forum issued a memorandum proposing the rights of minorities including LGBTs, be recognised and presented it to CHOGM. Following the presentation of the memorandum, members of the East African LGBT community also went to the People’s Space to speak but were physically prevented from speaking by the Ugandan police.
SMUG (Sexual Minorities Uganda) have issued this press release stating the “violence and discrimination”they faced at the People’s Space.

The Ugandan police displayed embarrassingly inhuman and unprofessional behaviour, attacking the LGBT speakers and breaking sticks from trees in preparation for greater harm to the speakers. The LGBT speakers entered the People’s Space to prepare for the addresses they were scheduled to give according to the programme. Police began forcibly removing them. Victor Juliet Mukasa, a Ugandan LGBT Human Rights Defender stood her ground, declaring, “I am not moving a single step from this place.” The police continued their aggressive affront. “They threw me down. Those who came back to help me from the ground
faced it tough. One person was caned for doing so.” Both homosexuals and straight Ugandans are increasingly becoming fed up with the violence and discrimination being directed toward people of different sexual orientations. Heterosexual Ugandans have begun to speak out against such police brutality, stating that they will not tolerate any
kind of violence against another human being, regardless of their sexual orientation.
The LGBT speakers remained standing outside the gate in quiet protest, waiting to be allowed back in to deliver their speeches. They were there for a total of seven hours. What was supposed to be one of the greatest fora for free speech has become a disappointment and an embarrassing case of discrimination for Uganda.

During the showing of a film discussing homosexuality made by a Ugandan film company, Amakula anti-gay religious leaders held a press conference calling on the Commonwealth
“to not legislate for human wrongs. Homosexuality is an evil, which should never be discussed during Chogm. In Chogm meetings, we should advocate for them to change because the act is unnatural,” Bishop Niringiye said……The issue of rights of gays and lesbians was one of the recommendations in the Civil Society Statement to the Commonwealth Heads of State Meeting……Bishop Niringire said, “As a church, we are telling Commonwealth heads of governments to formulate value systems to solve the question of lesbianism and homosexuality being a human right.” From Nigeria originally, blogging from a village in Spain, Sokari Ekine

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