United Kingdom

The Tony Blair Faith Foundation has just published Emily Mellgard’s “Must Reads on Religious Conflict in Nigeria.” As Mellgard observes, Nigeria has a rich literary tradition, and the Lagos International Book Fair is the largest in Africa. She suggests that an entry point into the complexities of the country is through its literature and what others have written about the country. Her list of "must reads" starts with two classics by Chinua Achebe,  Ngozi Adichie’s first novel, and  Saro-Wiwa’s  travel memoir. Her non-fiction selections are focused on the interplay between religion and politics in Nigeria. The full selection includes: Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God Noo Sara-Wiwa, Looking for Transwonderland Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom:  the Rise of Global Christianity Ruth Marshall, Political Spiritualities:  The Pentecostal Revolution in Nigeria John Campbell, Nigeria:  Dancing on the Brink John Paden, Muslim Civic Cultures and Conflict Resolution:  the Challenge of Democratic Federalism in Nigeria Julius Adekunle, ed., Religion in Politics:  Secularism and National Integration in Modern Nigeria Toyin Falola, Violence in Nigeria:  The Crisis of Religious Politics and Secular Ideologies Readers of Africa in Transition will recognize Emily Mellgard as its editor and also a contributor, especially on environmental issues. She has now moved to the Tony Blair Faith Foundation in London where she will continue to follow Africa and religion.

In a recent al-Jazeera broadcast, former president of South Africa Thabo Mbeki claimed that then United Kingdom prime minister Tony Blair pressured him to cooperate on joint British–South African military action to depose Robert Mugabe as president of Zimbabwe. Blair was UK prime minister from 1997 to 2007. From media reports it is unclear when Blair allegedly pressured Mbeki, who was South African chief of state from 1999 to 2008, but dominated the South African executive after 1994. Mbeki claims that Blair pressured retired UK field marshall Baron Charles Guthrie to approach Mbeki, but Guthrie pushed back. Guthrie retired in 2001 but continued to advise Blair’s government on a variety of issues. Former Prime Minister Blair has issued a statement denying that he put pressure on South Africa to remove Mugabe in a military operation. According to his spokesman quoted in Agence France Press, Blair “long believed that Zimbabwe would be much better off without Robert Mugabe and always argued for a tougher stance against him, but he never asked anyone to plan or take part in any such military intervention.” Mbeki’s spokesman says the former president stands by his words. What is going on here? Mugabe’s regime is delighted with the allegations. Mugabe’s governing ZANU-PF party has long claimed that the UK and the United States seek regime change through violence if necessary and in cahoots with Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai. A Mugabe mouthpiece, The Herald, quotes Guthrie as saying to the British media (without specific attribution) that he pushed back against Blair, warning that it would be “suicidal to pit British troops against ‘the tried and tested veterans of the Congo,’” where Zimbabwe had intervened. So ZANU-PF is also able to trumpet the Zimbabwean army -which many observers see as rag-tag at best- as striking fear in the heart of a British field marshall, even a retired one. I think we can take Blair’s flat denial at face value. British public support for military intervention in Zimbabwe is almost inconceivable and would have hardly advanced Britain’s wider interests in Africa. So, why did Mbeki say it? He may actually believe it. He may have seen Blair’s tough stance on Mugabe as somehow involving possible military intervention. Mugabe has been bitterly critical of Western intervention in Iraq and Libya; he may find the notion of British military intervention in Zimbabwe so likely that, in hindsight, he may read that intention into what his British interlocutors had to say about Zimbabwe. Among South African political leaders, Mbeki has also long been seen as “soft” on Mugabe, whom he sees as a fellow leader of the African liberation struggle.

One for all and all for one. That simple principle underlies all alliances. But what happens when the all dwindles and the one ends up alone? That’s the position Britain found itself in the late spring of 1940. Poland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France had all fallen under the Nazi jackboots. Britain was the only thing standing between Adolf Hitler and control of Europe. With Britain tottering on the abyss, its prime minister, Winston Churchill, gave one of the great rallying cries in world history, the "finest hour" speech of June 18, 1940. As Churchill wrote the speech—he did not rely on others to craft his words—the situation was dire. Indeed, over the previous six weeks Churchill had given two major speeches preparing Britons for what was to come, first telling them he had “nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat” and then urging them to “never surrender.” Now the Germans had raised the swastika over Paris. It was just a matter of time—four days in fact—before the French government would formally surrender. Britain was left alone to face Hitler’s Germany. When Churchill began speaking on the floor of the House of Commons, his fellow parliamentarians knew that June 18th marked a significant date in British history—the 125th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, when British troops under the Duke of Wellington defeated Napoleon. Churchill’s task was to rally their descendants to stop another authoritarian from dominating the European continent, this time against even longer odds. Churchill spoke for thirty-six minutes. His final paragraph summarized what Britain and the world faced: The Battle of France is over: the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say: This was their finest hour. That night at 9:00 p.m., Churchill repeated his speech almost word for word, this time on BBC radio. An estimated 60 percent of the British people listened to the broadcast. Churchill’s delivery left a lot to be desired. He spoke the entire time with a cigar in his mouth, leaving some of his listeners to conclude he was drunk. However imperfect Churchill’s delivery may have been, the emotional power of his words is unquestioned. Three weeks later, on July 10, 1940, the German Luftwaffe began bombing Britain. What Churchill had named the Battle of Britain had begun. The tribulations of that summer would show Britons at their finest hour, in no small part because Churchill gave one of his finest speeches at his country’s moment of greatest need.

Epic defeats are usually the source of national shame and humiliation. But not always. Sometimes defeat reveals character and gives a leader a chance to inspire a nation. Such was the case on June 4, 1940, when Britain completed its rushed evacuation from the beaches of Dunkirk and British prime minister Winston Churchill pledged that Britain would “never surrender” to Nazi Germany. The march to Dunkirk and Churchill’s speech began with the end of the so-called Phony War that had prevailed in Europe in the seven months after Germany attacked Poland in September 1939. On May 10, 1940, the German army invaded France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. The result was as devastating as it was rapid. By May 26, some 400,000 British and French troops were surrounded at Dunkirk, a small port city northeast of Calais on the French coast six miles from the Belgian border. After just two weeks of fighting, the Allied military coalition faced a catastrophic defeat. By late afternoon on May 26, British officials acknowledged reality: if they did not begin evacuating Dunkirk immediately, their troops would either be annihilated or captured en masse. At 6:57 p.m., the order went out to begin Operation Dynamo, so named because it was directed from a room under Dover Castle that had once housed an electric dynamo. The goal was to ferry as many Allied soldiers as possible across the English Channel. News of the evacuation became public on May 29. Within hours, hundreds of private boats, dubbed the “Little Ships,” joined the Royal Navy to help ferry soldiers back to English soil. Over the next week, ships large and small crisscrossed the English Channel, dodging Luftwaffe fighters in a bid to save as many soldiers as they could. The Royal Navy had originally estimated that Operation Dynamo would save at most 40,000 men. By the time it ended on June 4, roughly 340,000 soldiers—nearly 140,000 of them French—were rescued. Although the British were forced to abandon most of their tanks and armored equipment at Dunkirk, the British Army lived to fight another day. And they would do so alone. Paris fell to the Germans just ten days after Operation Dynamo ended, and nearly all of the French troops returned to France to sit out the remainder of the war. Churchill was left with putting the best face on the terrible news at Dunkirk in a speech to the House of Commons on June 4. He offered up one of the most famous and stirring calls to arms ever delivered in the English language. He carefully avoided saying that escaping Dunkirk amounted to a victory because “wars are not won by evacuations.” He instead acknowledged the failure on the continent, hailed the “miracle of deliverance” at Dunkirk, and looked to the future. The final lines of his speech are unforgettable: Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old. In oft-told and possibly apocryphal story, Churchill turned to an aide while the House of Commons cheered after the “never surrender” line and whispered, “And we’ll fight them with the butt ends of broken beer bottles, because that’s bloody well all we’ve got!” In another version of the story, Churchill said, “we shall fight with pitchforks and broomsticks, it’s about all we’ve bloody got.” Whether true or not, the story of Churchill’s whispered aside highlights the reality of what Britain faced in June 1940: a brutal war against a brutal opponent with no immediate prospect for help. Churchill’s reference to the New World coming to help the Old World alluded to his hope that the United States would come to Britain’s aid. But American assistance would be slow in coming. American isolationists were bitterly resisting calls to aid London. The Destroyers-for-Bases deal, the Lend-Lease Act, and the eventual U.S. entry into World War II would come well after Churchill and his countrymen faced the terrible test that the summer of 1940 brought: the Battle of Britain. No one can say to what extent Churchill’s defiance rallied Britons to face the travails that the summer of 1940 brought. His remarks, which lasted about 30 minutes in all, were only summarized on the radio that evening. A transcript was published in the British papers the next day. It was recorded later for release to the public. Perhaps it’s only through the misty gauze of memory that Churchill’s speech takes on the importance we give it today. Or maybe it did inspire a nation at the moment that inspiration was what it needed most. And maybe, just maybe, Churchill’s “never surrender” speech deserves being hailed, as a Sony poll found, as the top moment in the history of radio.

You finally land the job you have long coveted. But many of your colleagues dislike you, and the task you have been given may be undoable. That’s the situation that Winston Churchill found himself in on May 13, 1940. He responded with what is regarded as one of the greatest speeches ever delivered in the English language—and one that helped rally Great Britain at one of its darkest moments. Churchill was offered the prime ministership on May 10, 1940. His predecessor, Neville Chamberlain, had resigned after it became clear that he had lost the confidence of his fellow Conservative Party members. Chamberlain had championed the appeasement policy that was supposed to preserve peace in Europe. It had the opposite effect, emboldening rather than satisfying Adolf Hitler. Churchill had been a biting critic of Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, even though he too was a Conservative. Churchill’s unrelenting criticism had angered many of his fellow Tories. They were not celebrating his elevation to prime minister; some privately expected (and perhaps hoped) to see him fail. But Churchill’s domestic political difficulties paled in comparison to Britain’s foreign policy problems. The so-called Phony War that had prevailed in Europe since Germany invaded Poland the previous September had ended in April. Denmark and Norway had fallen to the Nazis. On May 10 the German army invaded France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. Faced with this peril, Churchill addressed Parliament for the first time as prime minister on May 13. He spoke for just five minutes. His speech included these riveting lines: I would say to the House as I said to ministers who have joined this government, I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I say it is to wage war by land, sea, and air. War with all our might and with all the strength God has given us, and to wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is victory. Victory at all costs - Victory in spite of all terrors - Victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival. Let that be realized. No survival for the British Empire, no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for, no survival for the urge, the impulse of the ages, that mankind shall move forward toward his goal. If Hollywood had staged the scene, Churchill’s defiant words would have been met with thunderous applause. But life seldom follows Hollywood scripts. Few MPs clapped. Many of Churchill’s fellow Tories grumbled. They still preferred Chamberlain. No one outside of Parliament heard the speech live; BBC reports merely summarized it. Churchill’s first radio address to the nation would not come until May 19. It would take days for word of the speech to seep out into the broader public. A version of the speech was eventually recorded for broadcast. Disagreement exists as to whether Churchill recorded the speech himself. Some experts argue that Norman Shelley, a BBC actor, taped the speech because Churchill was too busy to do it himself. Historians note that the line about “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” wasn’t entirely original. Churchill likely took it from Giuseppe Garibaldi, the nineteenth century Italian revolutionary who once rallied his troops by saying he could only offer them “hunger, forced marches, battles and death." But genius often lies in borrowing from the past and reinventing it for today. That gift may be why Churchill remains the only politician ever to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Churchill’s promise that he could offer only “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” was sadly accurate. As he was speaking, the German army was crossing the River Meuse into Sedan. France fell just six weeks later. With the United States still clinging to its neutrality, Britain was left to battle Nazi Germany alone. In the Battle of Britain that lasted throughout the summer of 1940, the Luftwaffe devastated many British cities. Blood and tears flowed freely. But Britain survived its darkest hour, in good part because of Churchill’s determination. So it is fitting that in April 2013 the Bank of England announced that the “blood, toil, tears and sweat” quote will appear alongside the portrait of Winston Churchill on Britain’s new five pound notes.