KEEP IT BRIEF!

When I was a child in the early 1960s, I loved chatting over the telephone. My father, whose childhood was spent in South Africa, did not share my enthusiasm for this; he kept his calls brief and to the point, and continues to do so today. I remember him telling me at least once that the telephone was designed to be used for giving short messages and for emergencies only, not for chatting. I often wondered why he had that idea.

Recently, as part of my research for a biography of my great-grandfather Senator Franz Ginsberg (1862-1936) I was leafing through some old issues of the Cape Mercury (published in King Williams Town in South Africa) dating back to 1924, when my father was a child. Almost every issue had a large advertisement giving the prices of three minute telephone calls from King Williams Town to other parts of South Africa. When I saw the prices, I began to understand my father’s feelings about telephone usage.

The same decaying newspapers that contained the telephone tariffs, also contained the daily market prices for foodstuffs and other commodities in the market at King Williams Town. These prices of everyday foodstuffs and so on put the prices of telephone calls into realistic perspective. For the same price as between 1 to 6 cabbages, sixpence, one could make a 3 minute call to nearby Peddie. The two shillings and sixpence that you might have spent on a three minute call to Port Elizabeth could have bought you any of the following: a dozen eggs; a live chicken (a good breed); a pound (454 grams) of butter; at least 33 pounds of forage for animals; or almost 100 pounds of tomatoes. In 1924, when my father was a child, telephone calls were really expensive. 

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An Albanian Affair

You might wonder why I am writing about Bashibazouks in Albania as reported in a newspaper published in Cape Town in 1911. The answer is easy. During my researches into the life of my great-grandfather the late Senator Franz Ginsberg (1862-1936) who migrated from Prussia to the Cape Colony in 1880, I needed to leaf through the pages of South African newspapers that are stored in London’s British Library. So it was that I happened by chance to spot a small item about the struggle between the Ottoman Turks and the Albanian independence fighters in a 1911 edition of the Cape Times Weekly.

The Bashibazouks[i] (the Turkish word başıbozuk, literally means ‘damaged head’) were Turkish irregular soldiers, who often lived off loot. Some of them were not Turkish. They included Circassians, Kurds, Arabs, and also Albanians. Incidentally, the word ‘bashibazouk’ appears often (as a term of abuse used by Captain Haddock) in the English language versions of the adventures of Tintin by the Belgian cartoonist George Hergé (1907-1983).

‘Tusi’ is a spelling of the town of Tuzi (‘Tuz’ in Albanian), which is now in the Republic of Montenegro and is close to the border of modern Albania. The news item that I found in the Cape Times Weekly refers to an incident during the events, which led eventually to the First Balkan War (1912-1913). In the last days of March 1911, the (Roman Catholic) mountain people residing in northern Albania were called to arms by one of their leaders Ded Gjo Luli (1840–1915), and revolted against the Turks[ii]. During this uprising, the flag of Albania bearing Skanderbeg’s two-headed eagle was raised on the summit of Mount Dečić (Deçiq). This is said to be the first time that the flag had been flown on Albanian soil since the death of George Castrioti Skanderbeg. This revolt was considered premature by various committees of Albanians which were planning a larger scale, coordinated effort against the Turks. It was considered to have damaged the plans of the other groups. Edith Durham wrote[iii] that in March 1911:

“I left Egypt for Constantinople in March, and found on arriving that the revolt had broken out prematurely amongst the Maltsors of Maltsia e madhe only, and they were carrying all before them – had chased away the scanty Turkish garrison and taken Tuzi. This sudden commencement before due preparation was a fatal error, engineered possibly by folk who meant the revolt to fail.”

Maltsors in Tuzi (from Durham's book)

The ‘folk’ who might have ‘engineered’ this could well have been the Montenegrins, whose King Nikola might well have supplied the rebels with weapons[iv]. That Tuzi was not held for too long by the Albanian rebels is evident in the small article that I found in the South African newspaper.

Although Tuzi had been recaptured by the Turks, it was not free of trouble. In about July, after a rising in Djakova during which the Turkish Kaimmakan (an Ottoman official, a sort of ‘sub-Governor’) was killed, Albanian rebels:

“… made a successful raid, and cut off the water-supply of Tuzi.[v]”

Soon after this, according to Durham, the Turkish Government offered the rebels terms, which included that an Albanian-speaking Kaimmakan be appointed at Tuzi, and that he should be a Christian. Mihilaki Effendi was appointed[vi].

Tuzi figures in Durham’s book again, but after the events described above. She wrote that eleven political prisoners who had been involved in the Bomb Affair in 1907 had burrowed their way to freedom under the walls of the prison at Podgoritza, and:

“…taken refuge with Mihilaki Effendi, the Kaimmakam, who brought them at once by steamer to Scutari.[vii]”

The ‘Bomb Affair’ was an attempt by pro-Serb radicals to assassinate the Montenegrin Prince Nikola in his capital Cetinje[viii].

Tuzi, which was on territory granted to Montenegro by the Treaty of Berlin (1878), was retaken by the Montenegrins from the Turks in October 1911. Their soldiers captured the nearby Fort of Shipchanik, and occupied the town. Edith Durham wrote[ix] soon after this:

“The woe of the conquered land had already begun. The newly appointed Montenegrin Governor of Tuzi - Gjurashkovich – proceeded to “rub it in” by hanging a portrait of King Nikola in the hospital, and joyfully informing the Turkish staff that the Montenegrins had occupied Plava and Gusinje, and, of 2000 Moslems who had endeavoured to take Berani, (they) had slaughtered all but 250.”

Montenegrins near the Fort at Shipchanik after taking it from the Turks

(from Durham's book)

Edith Durham visited this hospital again in 1912. According to one of her biographers Marcus Tanner:

“In a filthy hospital in Tuzi, a recently captured village on the Ottoman side of the border, Durham was horrified to discover why the bandaged faces of eight captives were curiously flat. Removing the bandages she found that their noses had been cut off.[x]”

She tended to these unfortunates and many other similarly mutilated victims as part of the humanitarian work for which she is so well known in the Balkans.

So much for Tuzi, a place which I had not heard of until I chanced upon it in an old South African newspaper. The little article was written during a revolt of the Albanians, which had been encouraged not only by the Montenegrins but also by an Italian of Albanian ancestry, an Arbëresh man from the region of Cosenza in the South of Italy. Terenzio Tocci (1880-1945), who was eventually executed by Enver Hoxha, travelled to the Balkans in April 1911 to participate in the Albanian uprising. According to Robert Elsie:

“On 26 April 1911, he gathered the chieftains of Mirdita near Orosh and proclaimed the independence of Albania, hoisting the Albanian flag for the first time since the death of Scanderbeg, and formed a provisional government, which had the support of much of northern Albania.[xi]”

Tocci returned to Italy before becoming involved with the administration of first Zog’s, then later Mussolini’s, Albania. His collaboration with the Italian Fascists led to his death in Albania in the hands of the young Communist regime led by Enver Hoxha. When I visited the Arbëresh town of Piana degli Albanesi in Sicily in 2014, I was told that even when being led to be shot Tocci maintained his dignity, and was most concerned that his polished shoes would not be soiled[xii].

My ‘discovery’ of an item of long out-of-date news whilst researching a quite different topic, namely the biography of a Jewish immigrant in South Africa, led to the exploration of an aspect of Balkan history that is new to me. It is serendipitous revelations such as this that adds much enjoyment to researching historical topics and almost anything else.

Adam Yamey has written two books about Albania:

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[i] See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bashi-bazouk, accessed 25^th August 2015.

[ii] See: The History of Albania by S Pollo and A Puto, publ. by Routledge & Kegan Paul, London: 1981

[iii] See DURHAM: The Struggle for Scutari, by ME Durham, publ. by Edward Arnold, London: 1914

[iv] See: The Albanians, by M Vickers, publ. by IB Tauris, London: 1997

[v] See: DURHAM

[vi] See: DURHAM

[vii] See: DURHAM

[viii] See: Montenegro: A Modern History, by K Morrison, publ. by IB Tauris, London: 2009

[ix] See: DURHAM

[x] See: Albania’s Mountain Queen, by M Tanner, publ. by IB Tauris, London: 2014

[xi] See: Historical Dictionary of Albania (2^nd. Ed.), by R Elsie, publ. by The Scarecrow Press, Plymouth (UK): 2010

[xii] See: From Albania to Sicily, by A Yamey, publ. by Adam Yamey, London: 2014

Between profit and philanthropy

This is an introduction to a book that I am currently writing. There is much more work to be done before my manuscript is completed, let alone edited.  Any comments or reflections on this will be gratefully accepted.

Steve Biko (1946-1977), the black anti-apartheid activist and founder of the Black Consciousness Movement was callously murdered by the South African police. He was born ten years after my great-grandfather Franz Ginsberg (1862-1936) died in South Africa.

At first sight, there would appear to be little to link a German Jewish immigrant, such as Franz was, with a martyr to the cause of freedom of the black people in South Africa. However, there is a connection. Biko was born, and also lived in, an African ‘township’ in King Williams Town, a major industrial town in the eastern part of the Cape Province. Steve’s birthplace, Ginsberg Township, was named to honour my great-grandfather. The founding of this township and (others like it) marked a significant stage in the evolution of apartheid, an evil which Biko and his colleagues strove to combat.

Ginsberg arrived in South Africa aged eighteen with a basic education, and then began work as a photographer’s assistant. Within a few years, he became one of King Williams Town’s leading industrialists. Soon after that, he entered local, and then national politics. By 1927, he was awarded with South Africa’s highest honour: he was elected a Senator.

He left Germany both to seek his fortune and also to escape anti-Semitic persecution. In his adopted country, South Africa, he found himself privileged to be a white man accepted by others on the basis of merit rather than religious beliefs. Unlike many – if not most – of his white contemporaries in South Africa who regarded non-white people as members of an inferior species worthy of suppression and servitude, Ginsberg regarded them as fellow human beings. There is no doubt that he felt that the ‘white man’ should remain in charge in South Africa, and not risk being in competition with people whose background was not European.  However, he was a man of conscience with great sympathy for his non-white neighbours. During his life in South Africa, he tried hard and earnestly to balance his interests in safeguarding the advantages of the white people against his desire to ease the lot of their severely disadvantaged non-white neighbours.

My forthcoming book, which is at an early embryonic stage in its life, will describe the many-faceted life of my great-grandfather Franz Ginsberg – a patriotic capitalist with a philanthropic heart.

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ROAMING WITH THE ROMA

The Gypsies (aka ‘Roma’ or ‘Rom’) are much maligned and misunderstood. Two books written by the Belgian Jan Yoors present the nomads of Europe in a positive and life-enhancing light. 

Here are my reviews of his two books.

 "THE GYPSIES"

I first learned of the existence of this extraordinarily fascinating book by Jan Yoors when I was reading Fonseca's book about gypsies (Roma), "Bury me Standing". Published in 1967, this book is available from on-line second-hand stores.

Sometime in between the 2 world wars, Jan Yoor, a young Belgian teenager, did something very unusual. He ran away with the gypsies. He joined a group ('kumpania') of Roma camping near to his home, and was eventually adopted by them. His understanding parents did not seem to mind him being away from home and school for long periods whilst he wandered around Europe with his new companions.

Yoor's first-hand experiences of living the life of a young gypsy were not wasted. Years later, he described them in his book "The Gypsies". His account of living with the Roma is detailed and seems accurate. Yet, it is not a dispassionate anthropological study. As I read his book, I felt that I was almost experiencing the trials and tribulations of life on the road with the gypsies. Yoors shows a deep understanding of the subtleties of the Roma mentality, and describes their beliefs, traditions, and daily life, exquisitely. At times, his writing has a poetic quality, yet it never becomes trite or flowery. The Roma could not have wished for a more sympathetic yet objective description of their lives than that written by Yoors.

Read this gracious book, and you will see the Roma in an entirely new light.

"CROSSING"

This book is written by the Belgian Jan Yoors. It is the second of his books that I have read. In his first book “The Gypsies” he describes how he began living with a gypsy (Rom) ‘cumpania’ as a teenager, and begun to learn about their ways of life whilst they gradually accepted him as one of their own kind. In the second book, “Crossing”, Yoors, by now regarded as a fully-fledged Rom by the cumpania that had adopted him and also by other Rom that he met, writes about his experiences with the Rom community during the Second World War (‘WW2’).

The Allied authorities fighting the Germans realised that the Rom were eminently suited to assist the efforts of the Resistance in France. Monsieur Henri recruits Yoors to become an intermediary between the Rom and the mysterious groups who worked incognito to organise acts of resistance against the Germans. All goes well for a while, but inevitably Yoors is arrested by the Nazi security police.

As in his first book, Yoors writes lyrically and sensitively about the Rom and what he learned about their idiosyncratic philosophy of life. It was what he learnt from his fellow Rom that helped him survive the most horrendous imprisonment and interrogations.

The last and very exciting part of the book describes Yoors’s role in smuggling people from Axis-occupied Europe across the Pyrenees into Franco’s neutral Spain.

After the war, Yoors became an artist in the USA, specialising in tapestry. This book, like his first, is a work of - art a fascinating tapestry of words beautifully woven together.

Read more about Jan Yoors on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Yoors

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Only at Christmas...

-A  divertissement-

I qualified as a dental surgeon at University College Dental School (London) in March 1982. I began my first job in practice soon after that. I joined a small well-run practice in Rainham (Kent), an overgrown village between Gillingham and Sittingbourne. I was about 60 miles (~96 Km) from Central London, but it felt as if it were on a different planet.

My patients were delightful on the whole, and not overly demanding. The principal dentist, Julian Unter, was helpful and never put me under any pressure. I recall once after I had been in practice for only a few weeks that a patient asked me how long I had been a dentist. Not wishing to alarm her that I had only been ‘let loose’ from dental school a few weeks earlier, yet wanting to be honest, I replied: “I have been working up in London for five years”.  This, which was true because I had been studying in a dental environment for that length of time, appeared to satisfy the questioner.

There was a branch of Tesco’s supermarket in Rainham. I used to buy bits and pieces there for my lunch. Whenever I handed a chocolate bar or any other piece of dentally unsuitable confectionary, the cashiers, many of whom were patients of our practice, would then wave the chocolate or similar in the air and then shout to everyone in the shop: “Look what the dentist is eating”.

I was brought up eating Mediterranean dishes at home, and learned to cook them myself. Garlic was an essential ingredient in my cooking. I used to cook for myself in my digs in Kent. One day, I was working on an elderly lady’s teeth, when she swept my hand away, and exclaimed: “Ooh, you’ve been eating garlic, Mr Yamey.” From then on, whilst I was working in Kent – and that was for about 11 years – I desisted from eating garlic during the working week. Now, I work near Central London and few of my patients are of Anglo-Saxon origin, and almost all of them eat garlic, so my consumption of the stuff is no longer a problem.

Parsley was another of my favourite ingredients during the 1980s when I worked in Kent. When I began working there, I went into Tescos, which was almost the only food store in the village, and asked for parsley. The reply I received from the surprised store assistant was: “No dear, there’s no call for it. We only get parsley in at Christmas.” I was only 60 miles from London, where parsley was readily available throughout the year, but no one wanted it in Rainham except at Christmas. This and many other similar cultural differences made me realise how different Kent was to London and many of the exotic places that I had visited much further away from it.

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Distasteful matters in biography

I am in the process of writing a biography of one of my 19th century ancestors, who gradually assumed great importance in the political life of South Africa during the last decades of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th centuries.

I have been led to believe that my subject was sympathetic to the problems faced by his black African (‘Native’) and other non-European neighbours and fellow countrymen. This has been acknowledged by at least one black African organisation, the Steve Biko Foundation in King Williams Town. When I visited their headquarters in 2003, I saw a plaque commemorating him alongside a number of other similar memorials. He was the only white person considered to be worthy of honouring by the Foundation.

So far so good!

As I report on his activities in matters concerned with the treatment of black Africans  in King Williams Town, and then later elsewhere in South Africa, readers, many of whom are imbued with today's 'politically correct' notions, might well be surprised at what he, a so-called liberal, said and did.  The reader of an account of a far-off era must always remember that the actions and views of my ancestor, some of which may surprise the reader today, were quite liberal in comparison with those of many other South Africans of European origin. Therefore, we cannot, and should not, judge my subject's approaches to what used to be called ‘Native’ matters through 21st century eyes. Instead, we should try to understand and judge them through 19th century spectacles.  This won't make the unpalatable more palatable, but at least it makes it understandable and helps to judge more fairly a man, who meant to do his level best for those less fortunate than him.

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From Europe to Freedom

 * * * * *

Almost as soon as the British took over the Cape Colony from the Dutch at the beginning of the 19^th century, practising Jews began arriving there. At first, most of them were occupied in trade although at least one was a medical practitioner. Amongst the earliest traders were well-known names such as Bergtheil, Norden, Solomon, Thalwitzer, and the Mosenthals. The latter were responsible for opening up the interior of the Cape to trade, as well as bringing out more Jewish men from Germany (mainly) to work in their network of trading stores.

Until the discovery of first diamonds and then gold in what is now South Africa, most Jews leaving Europe tended to head westwards to the USA. After the valuable products started being unearthed, the number of Jews heading towards South Africa rose sharply. Both the increasing prosperity of the 4 constituent territories (that were to unify in 1910 to become South Africa) and also the pogroms in Tsarist Russia led to Eastern European Jews, especially from Lithuania and its neighbours, flowing into the country in ever increasing numbers.

Despite the Jewish people always being a small proportion of the European population of South Africa, they ‘punched above their weight’ – they made a disproportionately large contribution to its development, economically, politically, and in many other ways. This has been described masterfully and in great detail in “The Jews of South Africa” edited by Saron & Hotz, which was published in the 1950s.

My book “Exodus to Africa” approaches the story of Jewish migration from Europe to South Africa from a different angle. I have used the stories of some members of my large South African family to exemplify and illustrate a range of aspects of this movement of Jews out of the lands where they were subject to oppression to a place where they were largely respected and allowed to lead their lives without undue hindrance. My story begins with the earliest member of my family to arrive in the Cape (in 1849), the German Heinrich Bergmann, and it ends with the last person to arrive from Europe, Hendrik Jami. He arrived in the Cape in 1949, having travelled from Lithuania via Shanghai.

“Exodus to Africa” - a study of mass movement of an oppressed people - describes why Jewish people left Europe; how they got to South Africa; what they and their descendants did there; and how some of them influenced the history of the country. My stories include those who witnessed, or were in some way directly involved in: the Cape Convict Crisis of 1849; the Anglo-Boer War; the Union of South Africa; railway building in the Eastern Cape; diamond ‘mining’ in South West Africa; Jewish Territorial Organization; the Grey Shirts; building ‘locations’; fighting in both World Wars; municipal government; and opposing apartheid. My book adds a personal flavour to spice the general history. The examples chosen from my family all illustrate general points relevant to the history of the Jews in South Africa. My story might well be subtitled ‘From Mosenthal to Mandela’

The book is available in paperback ( from www.lulu.com) and also in the Amazon Kindle format.

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