Sunday Feature: Keeping in Steppe (Radio 3) | iPlayer
Private Passions (Radio 3) |iPlayer
The Life Scientific (Radio 4) | iPlayer
Mongolian pop songs have two subjects: mothers and horses. They call their homeland on the vast Asian steppes the place “where the land meets the sky”, and in Cambridge anthropologist David Sneath’s examination of Mongolia in Sunday Feature: Keeping in Steppe, you got the sense of an awful lot of land and sky, and a people balanced somewhere in between at an uncertain juncture of history.
For many centuries Mongolia was a Buddhist aristocracy, but for most of the 20th century it was a communist state under the firm guidance of its neighbour, the Soviet Union. When that all collapsed, there were plenty of Mongolians trained in Marxist-Leninist dialectics but few who had any idea about how to move into the future. So they took refuge in the past.
Under the communist regime Mongolia’s epic history – it can boast the largest unbroken land empire ever known, stretching from Korea to Hungary in the 13th century – had been all but removed from textbooks. Ghengis Khan was practically unmentionable. Nowadays everything is named after him: squares, vodka, an airport. And instead of a mass killer, he’s seen in Ulaanbaatar as a pioneer of globalisation.
Yet there was a palpable sadness among Sneath’s interviewees. Mongolians seem to be yearning for something deep in the culture that has been lost over a long and punishing time. Perhaps a horse or a mother.
Robert Harris is a writer fascinated by empire. He made his name and debut as a novelist with Fatherland, a book about the Nazi imperium that would have been created had Germany won the war, and has since written about the Roman empire. But his real topic, he said on Private Passions, is power.
The former political editor of this newspaper remains absorbed by the machinations of major players. “Politics is an endless remorseless grinding of events,” he said joyfully. “You serve your time at the wheel and then you’re thrown off the deck unless you have the good fortune to be assassinated.”
In among a selection of Bach, Beethoven and Benny Goodman, perhaps the most unlikely choice was the oratory of Michael Foot. I’d forgotten what a keen wit the Labour leader derided as Worzel Gummidge could be. In a recording of a speech he made about Keith Joseph, a Thatcherite before Thatcher, Foot reduced the House of Commons first to rapt silence and then booming laughter.
There aren’t many politicians who can do that now. Just as few could play Bach to concert level as Helmut Schmidt, former chancellor of West Germany, did in a Concerto for Four Harpsichords. As Harris lamented, the statesmen of that generation had what Denis Healey liked to call a “hinterland”. It was a nice touch that Harris’s own hinterland included Amy Winehouse, who’s not heard nearly enough on Radio 3.
In politics, said Peter Piot on The Life Scientific (R4), there is economics and security, and the rest, as the French say, is literature. Piot is the man who identified the Ebola virus in 1976 when he was 27 years old, and then a decade later played an instrumental role in linking a new virus afflicting Africa with the epidemic laying siege to the gay community in the west: HIV.
He went on to become the executive director of the UN programme on Aids and realised that he was not getting very far with scientific facts and rational argument. Some of the major NGOs didn’t want to confront the problems of Aids in Africa, where many political leaders were in a state of total denial – South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki steadfastly refused to accept the established link between HIV and Aids.
So Piot took his case to the UN security council, where it became the first health crisis ever discussed by that powerful body. Suddenly attitudes and policy changed and Aids in Africa began to be dealt with. For someone who is partially responsible for saving perhaps tens of thousands of lives, Piot spoke with great humility. Science, he argued, needs to question conventional wisdom. These days it has become conventional wisdom to question the role of science. But without it, we might as well be stuck in a yurt, singing sad songs about horses.
