Part 1: My background and why I wrote A Theory of Everyone
LSE Launch event online and in person Sept 28
Hi Lab,
In just 6 days, A Theory of Everyone will be released in the United Kingdom, Australia, and the rest of the Commonwealth with an LSE launch hosted by The Time’s Matthew Syed. As always, you can pre-order the book here: http://atheoryofeveryone.com
I thought I’d share a little bit about my background and why I wrote this book. It’s a long post, so I’ve split it into 2 emails.
Let’s go back to 1997.
I am a young boy crouching in my bedroom furtively sneaking peeks through my window at the angry men armed with M16s screeching by in military trucks. They are on their way to Papua New Guinea’s Parliament House.
PNG's parliament house is an arrow-shaped edifice adorned with carvings and artwork reflecting traditional architecture and the hundreds of tribes without a common language forged into a nation. Our house, in a barbed-wire walled compound, is just 500 yards to the south.
I try to calm my crying 8-year-old sister as gunfire, looting, and explosions turn PNG’s capital, Port Moresby, from an everyday level of deadly threat to a violent coup that later became known as the Sandline Affair.
Sandline referred to the British mercenary corporation, Sandline International. Prime Minister Julius Chan, the Australian-educated son of a Chinese trader and a native from PNG’s New Ireland province, had lost control of the military and the Bougainville region. His solution: bypass the army by hiring mercenaries. Violent protests and a military coup followed.
Chan was replaced by Bill Skate, a well-known gang leader who was caught on tape boasting, ‘If I tell my gang members to kill, they kill . . . I’m the godfather.’ In many countries Skate would be a wanted criminal; in PNG he was the new prime minister.
Papua New Guinea, like it’s pidgin English creole official language, is a chimera. Australians had brought a British parliamentary system to the most linguistically diverse country on earth. The 5.5 million people who lived in Papua New Guinea were split by over 840 distinct languages.
Australia and Papua New Guinea are both rich in natural resources and share the same governmental institutions. But unlike Australia, Papua New Guinea was and is poor, violent, and unstable. As I grew up, I needed to understand why. 8/
During my time in PNG I had a front-row ticket to a terrifying clash of Western institutions and tribal politics. But it wasn’t my only formative experience, or even my first.
In Sri Lanka, where I was born, I learned how two peoples who looked so similar to outsiders – Tamils and Sinhalese – could come to hate each other. I learned how ordinary everyday existence can be, even during a civil war.
Oppression, military checkpoints, the ever-present danger of explosions & sudden chaos can all fade into the background until punctured by the reality of violence. 11/
My grandmother worked across the road from the Central Bank when it was rammed by a Tamil Tiger truck loaded with 440 pounds of explosives. That was the first time I saw my father cry.
First from the uncertainty and then from the relief when he brought her home, still wearing clothes soaked with blood from exploded shards of glass; shaken but alive.
I spent most of my childhood in Botswana, South Africa’s northern neighbor. My memories are filled with the dusty streets of Gaborone, camping deep in the Kalahari Desert under the unobstructed majesty of the Milky Way, and the splendor of South Africa during the nineties.
I loved the beautiful plateaus of Table Mountain, framing the sprawl of Cape Town as it met the sea; the smells of fusion foods – biltong jerky, braai BBQ, potjiekos stew, bunny chow curry – devoured on Durban’s expansive white sandy beaches; the bustle of Johannesburg; the excitement of Sun City. I also remember the exhilaration and trepidation as South Africa transitioned from apartheid.
Splashed across every television and newspaper was the powerful image of the last white Afrikaner president, a somber F. W. de Klerk, his face set with a faint smile next to the beaming new President Nelson Mandela, their arms raised and hands clasped together as they ushered in a new era filled with hope and uncertainty.
The waters of the world may be very different, but they are all part of the same ocean.
I was in London when bombs exploded on three busy underground trains and the top deck of an iconic red double-decker bus. It was a coordinated attack designed to terrorize ordinary British people on an ordinary Thursday on their ordinary commute to work. But what struck me most was the identity of the bombers: ordinary British citizens.
Unlike 9/11 four years prior, this was not an act committed by outsiders. Three of the terrorists, Hasib Hussain, Mohammad Sidique Khan, and Shehzad Tanweer, were born in Britain. The fourth, Germaine Lindsay, had moved to the UK when he was five.
To be continued in Part 2…
Best wishes,
Michael