OGONILAND
Indigenous Niger delta kingdom.
The turnout for the first Ogoni Day in 1993 indicated something was seriously wrong. Three hundred thousand people celebrated the United Nations Year of Indigenous Peoples by peacefully protesting against the environmental destruction of their homeland. Drums were played and schoolgirls danced in the sunshine. Those without banners held up big white sheets of paper with ‘Assassins go home’ written across them. People without paper waved leafy branches pulled from the trees. They mopped their brows with handkerchiefs while Ken Saro-Wiwa, a celebrated author and Ogoni spokesman, called for reparations and an end to their mistreatment.
Their protest was against thirty-five years of oil exploitation in their territory, the fertile delta plains of the Niger River where Ogoni people have fished and farmed for centuries. Plains that were now rather less fertile, thanks to spillages, slicks, fires and blowouts. Mr Saro-Wiwa called it an ecological war against ethnic Ogonis and held the Nigerian government and the oil industry responsible. The multinational Shell Petroleum Development Company was declared persona non grata in Ogoniland.
Mr Saro-Wiwa and his colleagues rallied international support for their plight but government troops arrived in response to Ogoni demonstrations. Saro-Wiwa was repeatedly prevented from travelling abroad, harassed and arrested, while the Ogoni suffered escalating violence – much of it, they thought, orchestrated by the military.
In May 1994, four Ogoni leaders were attacked by a mob and killed. The exact sequence of events leading to the murders remains controversial, but many suspected agents provocateurs. Saro-Wiwa and others were arrested, tried and sentenced to death. The UK prime minister at the time called it ‘a fraudulent trial, a bad verdict, an unjust sentence … followed by judicial murder’. Witnesses at the hanging reported Saro-Wiwa’s last words: ‘Lord take my soul, but the struggle continues.’
BAROTSELAND
Long-standing monarchy seeking recognition as Africa’s newest state.
Barotseland is traditionally a mobile kingdom. Every year, as Zambezi River floodwaters seep slowly into their pastures, they up sticks and move to higher ground. This annual migration is celebrated in a ceremony known as Kuomboka, literally ‘to get out of the water’. When the moon is full, the thundering of huge drums calls the royal paddlers to assemble from far and wide. Wearing bright red berets, and accompanied by jubilant singing, they propel the royal barges towards the wet-season capital. It is the signal for the king’s subjects to load their possessions into dug-out canoes and join the flotilla, leaving their now waterlogged villages behind for another year.
This has been the way of things for as long as anyone can remember. The kingdom has a history stretching back five centuries, but during colonial times Barotseland was a British protectorate, a status allowing greater autonomy than the rest of the area with which it was governed. Northern Rhodesia had colonization; Barotseland had colonization lite. When independence loomed in the early 1960s, the king was persuaded to muck in with what would become the new country of Zambia, on condition that Barotseland maintained that element of self-rule. An agreement was signed allowing the monarchy to pass its own laws over many local matters, including hunting and bushfire control, internal taxation and the beer supply. The deal was called the Barotseland Agreement 1964. BA64 for short.
Only BA64 was never implemented. Successive Zambian governments promised, then failed to honour the deal for the kingdom to enjoy autonomy, systematically ignoring and rebuffing all arguments to the contrary. By 2011, Barotseland’s royal household had had enough. A deal is a deal only if honoured by both sides. They pulled out, promising a peaceful disengagement from Zambia, a move denounced in Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, as tantamount to treason.
PONTINHA
Former stronghold of the Knights Templar granted sovereignty in 1903.
They say the steps up to the fort were hacked out of the rock in the early 1400s. Two sea captains, sent by Prince Henry the Navigator, stopped 700 kilometres off the coast of West Africa and made the small island their base for expeditions into nearby Madeira. For hundreds of years this fortress, rearing up out of the rugged basalt, remained a staging post for explorers and merchants sailing into the Atlantic and beyond. During the Napoleonic Wars, British forces used it as a military base and penal complex.
At one time, the fort became a stronghold of the Order of Knights Templar, descendants of the warriors who occupied Jerusalem during the Crusades. The connection sparked an archaeological frenzy when, in 2010, a nail from the time of Christ’s crucifixion was found in an ornate casket buried beneath the ancient battlements, alongside three skeletons and three swords. One of the swords sported the Knights Templar cross engraved upon its blade.
The fort remains, but Pontinha is a tiny island no more. Much of it was blasted away in the nineteenth century when Funchal’s harbour wall was built, but what remained was sold in 1903 under a royal charter by King Carlos of Portugal. The regal letter granted sovereignty to the owners of the ‘fort and the rock upon which it stands’.
Today, if you stroll along the concrete harbour wall you can’t miss the red carpet that covers the first few steps across the Pontinhan border. A sign declares ‘VISITORS WELCOME (AT OWN RISK)’. Renato Barros, a schoolteacher, is the proud owner of the fort and wants the rights due to all countries, including the full 200 nautical miles of territorial waters extending out into the Atlantic. Admission is free, but donations are welcome to help with restoration work.
SAHRAWI
Also known as Western Sahara
Africa’s last colony.
On the outside, they call it the Wall of Shame, a gargantuan earth embankment second only to China’s Great Wall in length. Patrolled by sentries and studded with mines, it consolidates the control of their homeland by an occupying force. Safe on the inside, Moroccans plunder their resources: nearly half the world’s phosphate reserves – essential to modern farming – oilfields and rich fishing grounds offshore.
The United Nations has been searching for a political solution here in the arid Western Sahara since Spain, the European colonizers, withdrew in 1976. One colonial power was replaced by another and the Sahrawi people rose up to fight for their rights. After fifteen years of fruitless combat they laid down their arms and lobbied for a referendum, allowing Sahrawis the right to vote for independence or permanent integration with Morocco. But the referendum has never taken place.
Decades of endless negotiations have failed to determine who should be entered on the electoral register. Sahrawis demanded the removal of Moroccan settlers; Morocco argued that settlers be allowed to vote, now that they are citizens of the region, whereas many Sahrawis, located in dusty tented camps in neighbouring Algeria, should not be registered since they do not live in the country.
One of the longest decolonization conflicts in history has vanished into an endlessly twisted discussion on procedure. Meanwhile some Sahrawis have spent forty years as refugees in Algeria. They have reached middle age living in a Kafkaesque transition period without end. They know little more than their prison of sand.
They have never set foot on their native soil, but each night they dream of freedom, of an independent Sahrawi republic. A Sahrawi lawyer sums up their faith in a land they are yet to see. He asks: ‘Do people change their religion because they don’t see God?’
LAKOTAH
Indigenous American people that unilaterally withdrew from all treaties with the USA.
They won’t take the money. Why should they? To them, the Black Hills are sacred and not for sale. And they were stolen anyway. Accepting the money would legitimize the crime.
In 1868 the Lakota Sioux signed a treaty with the US government that promised the Black Hills would be theirs forever. But just a few years later gold was discovered and the government changed its mind. It reneged on the deal and expropriated the land.
The Lakota name for the Black Hills is Wamaka Ognaka I-cante, ‘the heart
of everything that is’. According to Lakota creation legend, in the beginning the universe was given a song and a piece of the song is held in each piece of the universe. Except the Black Hills, that is. They hold the entire song. It should come as no surprise to learn that the Lakota have fought for 150 years, on battlefields and in lawcourts alike, for the return of this most spiritual of places.
More than a century after it was expropriated, a US judge awarded compensation for the land – at 1877 prices plus interest. The Lakota are not rich. They languish on a few reservations, ragged scraps of their territory by treaty. By all economic measures these are places of misery and deprivation; not charming, agrarian poverty, but the grimy, squalid, no-hope variety normally associated with urban ghettos. They could use the half-billion dollars of compensation money but still they won’t take it. A price tag is only one measure of value, they say.
In December 2007, the Republic of Lakotah was formed. A delegation travelled to Washington DC to deliver their formal withdrawal from the treaties signed with the US government. Not so much a secession as a reassertion of sovereignty. The case of the Black Hills land claim continues.
REDONDA
Sovereignty declared in 1865 by the first king, whose position is now disputed by several claimants to the throne.
Christopher Columbus himself was the first to record a sighting, on his second voyage of discovery in 1493. Impossibly steep on all sides, only swooping boobies were able to nest on this immense, treeless remnant of an extinct volcano.
Nearly 400 years later Matthew Shiell, a trader from nearby Montserrat, claimed the island as his kingdom. But the short-lived King of Redonda was unable to resist when Britain annexed the land to mine its phosphate-rich guano – the excrement of seabirds accumulated over centuries. A jetty and a cable-hoist were installed and shelters erected. Food was brought in from Montserrat, guano sent out on oceangoing steamers. They shipped the shit to fertilize the fields of Germany and the United States.
Work halted at the outbreak of World War I, and never resumed. A hurricane tore down most of Redonda’s buildings, but the craggy kingdom’s monarchy persisted in exile. The first king abdicated in favour of his fifteen-year-old son, who left to become a popular novelist in his new home, England. On his deathbed the royal Redondan lineage was bequeathed to a poet, his literary adviser. In the 1940s and ’50s several bookish figures of note were given Redondan royal appointments, from Lawrence Durrell to Dylan Thomas, Dorothy Sayers and J. B. Priestley. Falling on hard times, the island was offered for sale to the Swedish royal family, who declined.
In his later years, the poet king spent much of his time in the Alma Tavern in London’s Westbourne Grove. It is said that in return for buying the monarch a drink a dukedom or knighthood could be obtained, with a royal inscription on the back of a napkin. And the true current King of Redonda? Unknown. A recent count identified nine pretenders to the throne, testament to the royal confusion perpetrated by the poet.
DINETAH
The largest reservation-based Indian nation in the USA, with a degree of self-government.
They put a stop to it in 2005. When the act was finally signed into law, uranium mining and processing in the Navajo Nation ceased at a stroke. Too many Navajo had died from cancer or other diseases associated with radiation exposure. As one campaigner put it, this legislation had just chopped the legs off the uranium monster.
After World War II, mining provided significant income to the Dine, better known as Navajo, the name given them by neighbouring peoples. Dine veterans, who had used their language to create an unbreakable secret battlefield code while fighting the Japanese, returned home to find work in uranium mines on reservation lands. Unaware of the dangers and without protective clothing, the effects of uranium poisoning ravaged an entire Navajo generation. That was before the worst nuclear accident in US history, which saw 100 million gallons of radioactive mining wastewater released into a local river.
Traditionally, the Navajo’s homeland of Dinetah never had precise boundaries but was marked by four sacred mountains at the cardinal compass points. This territory was lost altogether in the mid-nineteenth century, when the Navajo people were marched, at gunpoint, 350 miles to a squalid internment camp. After four years’ imprisonment, in 1868 they were handed a treaty to sign. It confiscated 90 per cent of their homeland and allowed them to walk back to what was left.
Over the years additional plots were returned by presidential order until the Navajo Nation now stands as the largest Indian reservation in the USA. Given US citizenship in the 1920s and permitted to teach their own language in schools in the 1960s, the Navajo were granted self-determination in 1975. Hence the authority to ban uranium. But with unemployment on the reservation at nearly 50 per cent and many people lacking basics like electricity and running water, self-determination comes at a price.
GREENLAND
Also known as Kalaallit Nunaat
Autonomous part of Denmark moving towards full independence.
The Queen of Denmark donned national dress for the occasion: knee-high sealskin boots, hoodless anorak and a wide collar decorated with coloured glass beads. She was in Nuuk officially to deliver the law granting self-rule to Greenland’s parliament. After the handover ceremony, down by the jetty, a brass band played as men in kayaks made a paddle-past.
The self-governance law had been approved by referendum in the depths of the previous winter. Under its provisions, Queen Margrethe II remained as Greenland’s head of state but the world’s largest island gained control of its police force and justice system. Greenlandic, spoken by nearly all the island’s residents, became their official language.
The Inuit have lived here for 4,000 years, but never ventured far inland. Little point: it’s just one huge mass of ice, kilometres thick and devoid of life. There were always plenty of seal, walrus and whale to hunt along the coast. The sparse human population had no centralized administration before the modern colonization of Greenland began in the 1720s. Without any organization above household communities no locals were interested in defending their power, so colonizing Greenland was a peaceful affair. Greenlanders suffered the standard cultural imperialism that comes with colonial status, but never oppression by force. Relations with Denmark were largely cordial. In 1979, Greenland got home rule and in 2009 the Queen turned up to give them self-rule, so ending 300 years under Danish authority. The penultimate step, they say, towards full independence.
To mark the event, the government harpooned a couple of whales, enough to provide celebratory meat for Greenland’s entire population. Officials in Nuuk handed it out to local residents in bulging plastic bags; Air Greenland’s fleet of small planes was commissioned to distribute the flesh to everybody else: 40,000 people in tiny hamlets dotted round the edges of the great, icy interior.
LUBICON
Indigenous community never formally ruled by Canada.
The children began to complain of headaches and sickness on Friday morning. The principal decided to send them all outside, to get some fresh air, but this changed nothing. The air smelled terrible and the children were still distressed.
Four days passed before the community of Little Buffalo was officially informed of the oil spill. A local government agency sent them a fax saying that 28,000 barrels of crude had leaked from a nearby pipeline. The statement said that no air quality guidelines had been exceeded.
In a sense, the Lubicon Cree of Little Buffalo are victims of a clerical error. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Canadian government dispatched commissioners to sign a treaty with Alberta’s indigenous peoples, so allowing the government to govern the province. The treaty-makers simply missed the Lubicon, so they never gave up rights to their territory. In 1939, Canada promised they would create a reserve for the Lubicon, but never got round to doing so. Lubicons just carried on as usual, hunting, trapping and fishing as they always had, since long before the creation of Canada.
Everything changed in the 1970s, w
ith oil and gas development on their land. Thousands of wells were drilled on Lubicon territory and as moose and other game left the area, Lubicons lost their self-sufficiency. Legal redress disappeared in a maze of wrangling, some laws redrafted retroactively to prevent certain claims. In October 1988, Lubicons blockaded their land, asserting an independence they had never given up. Five days later, Lubicon was invaded. Armed police arrived with attack dogs and helicopter support. Twenty-seven people were arrested, though later released.
Dialogue over the land claim remains unresolved, while oil and gas wells keep pumping. Moose and other wildlife have not returned. Chief Ominayak is nervous. As he put it, ‘Even if we win, we’ve lost.’
An Atlas of Countries That Don't Exist Page 4
