M and S pants

Radio 4 is, for many of us deskbound homeworkers, not so much something you listen to as something you hear: a human voice in the background to stave off cabin fever. The guest on today’s (repeated) Desert Island Discs is Sir Stuart Rose, executive chairman of Marks and Spencer and, so he claims, the only white elder of the Wagogo “tribe” of central Tanzania. He’s a little hazy on the details of that country’s birth, however. “My family and I left Africa in ’60, ’61 when Tanganyika, as it was, became independent Tanzania.”

Not quite. As those who love to flatter TV adverts with parody might say (cue soothing music and sumptuous visuals), “This is not just fact...” — or rather, this is just not fact. For the record, Tanganyika became independent in 1961 as Tanganyika. The island off its eastern seaboard, Zanzibar, gained independence two years later, and only in April 1964 did the two form a brand-new nation, the United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar, shortly afterwards renamed the United Republic of Tanzania.

So he plays a recording of some Wagogo traditional music and, without a hint of embarrassment or a flicker of irony, follows it up with a piece of hokum performed by a Lithuanian-born American Jew with burnt cork on his face. Yes, pop-pickers, it’s Al Jolson with “Mammy”. Rose remembers his parents “literally falling about laughing” when he would sing them this song as a young child in 1950s Africa.

What’s the one record he’ll cherish above all others? It’s a pop-style rendition by “crossover singer” Phillippa Giordana of “Casta Diva” from Bellini’s Norma. Or as Kirsty Young calls it, “Costa Diva”. Plenty of them hanging around the high-street coffee shops and the Spanish seaside resorts, I expect.

Breakfast was not the best time to hear Kirsty Young flirt and slobber nauseatingly over this tedious plutocrat — “you’re very dashing, and you’re very urbane ... you’d be a bloody good catch for someone, Stuart!” Yes, the underwear rail at Marky’s will never be the same again for Kirsty.

Whatever happened to the radio interview

Hey, I’m not going to be on the radio! The excellent Radio 4 programme Word of Mouth contacted me the other day to ask if I could say anything interesting about the way transliterations from languages such as Chinese might affect place name changes. After some serious thought I had to admit defeat. The only decent example I could think of that really fitted the bill was Beijing/Pekin(g), where the centuries-old English form comes to us through French, being replaced by the Hanyu Pinyin phonetic romanisation. Different ways of transliterating Russian have produced intriguingly inconsistent spellings of Russian names in English but I can’t think of any place names that have changed through that. If they’d asked about personal names I think we might have been on more fruitful ground, but hey.

Now doubtless someone will chip in with a huge list of good examples.

Whatever happened to the Persian Gulf?

It appears that the thought-provoking non-fiction smasharoo Whatever Happened to Tanganyika? is read in all the best radio production offices, and when they think geographical name-changes, they think Campbell. It seems I am going to be on the BBC World Service discussion programme World Have Your Say between about 6 and7pm tonight. Which is to say in less than an hour. Sorry you missed it!

Nobody’s business but the Turks’

For a little stocking-filler aimed at the UK market two Christmases ago, “Tanganyika” has really been getting a pretty good international audience. Thanks to the University of Toronto bookstore for a nice review on their blog: “a light-hearted but informative book that is a lot of fun to read … Campbell has added a few new examples to my corpus of useless knowledge”. Here at Campbell’s Fun Factoids we know no higher goal.

I’m also grateful for the information that “Berlin, Ontario became Kitchener during the First World War for patriotic reasons” — another one for the bulging file of name-changes that never made it first time round but would have gone into the sequel that my publishers came so close to commissioning for Christmas 09 before succumbing to a sudden and devastating attack of cold feet (and we’ll say no more about that). And yes, I know, I should have covered Istanbul/Stamboul/Constantinople/Byzantium, as so many have since pointed out. That was one of the first places I planned to include but it just narrowly fell off the list as the submission deadline approached — like seeing the exam invigilator approaching your desk as you furiously scribble down the last few precious words. Sorry Constantinople, you were on the tip of my pen.

Photo: © Oberazzi (Tim O’Brien)

Amikeyo

The latest edition (5 January) of the excellent Radio 4 programme Word of Mouth is about artificial languages, especially Esperanto. There is mention of Amikeyo, supposedly the world’s only official Esperanto-speaking state, which existed in the vicinity of a little village on the borders of Belgium, Prussia and the Netherlands. In the programme they refer to it as Kelmis, which is its name in Limburgish, the local form of Dutch. As Neutral Moresnet, the crazy sliver of a jointly-administered microstate that existed between 1816 and 1919, it gets the full nine yards in the compulsive geographical page-turner that is Whatever Happened to Tanganyika? — over a thousand words if I remember rightly. (I must admit it amused me that the tiniest territories, in this case about a square mile, should get the longest writeups.)

The equally excellent Strange Maps blog has a page on the subject, including not only a very nice map of the place but a historical timeline and some discussion of whether it was (and whether there has ever truly been such a thing as) a quadripoint, where the borders of four sovereign states meet precisely.

Stamp: Annie McFadden

Scarcity value

Too late, at least too late for Christmas, the world is waking up the true value of the woefully underpriced Whatever Happened to Tanganyika?. Doubtless by some clerical error, the thing was published at only £10! Not surprising then that it has sold out on Amazon. Back in the summer, second-hand copies were going for as little £23.99 – but now it’s Christmas and you’ll have to pay a proper price. $119.24.

Amazon horribilis

It hardly needs to be said that 2009 has been a woeful year in publishing. Some light relief, and some good news for one small-time non-fiction author, might be found buried in the gossip columns. Or rather, spread across the front pages of the mainstream serious press, as is the way with celebrity trivia nowadays. When Tiger Woods had his famous contretemps with various inconsiderately-located items of street furniture, he had a copy of a 1999 book called Get a Grip on Physics lying around in the car, clearly visible in the police photo of the crash. Cue much heavy-handed hilarity among Amazon reviewers and ludicrous prices for second-hand copies (£151.48, seriously?). The book’s author, John Gribbin, “just wish[es] it was … still in print”. (It might be flippant to suggest that an inadequate knowledge of physics was not first among a certain golfer’s problems at the moment and that he should perhaps concentrate on the first three words of the title.)

And what of Whatever Happened to Tanganyika?, that soaraway phenomenon of the popular history/humour sections, or travel in the case of shops where they don’t waste too much time looking at the stock before filling the shelves? Do I have the police of 50 states on retainer, armed with copies of my distinctive crimson volume to slip into shot at any high-profile celeb RTAs? Well no. A spike like the Eiffel Tower would do it little enough good at the moment, since both American and British Amazon seem to have run out of stock — just in time for Christmas, hoorah. No-one seems to know why or what can be done about it. Publishers have heard nothing from their Amazon sales manager: there “should be” stock…

By a charmingly nostalgic coincidence this is exactly what happened when this would-be Christmas bestseller first came out. Interview on Today prog, 6.6 million listeners: good. Amazon ranking goes through the roof: good, surely? Twenty minutes later, Amazon sells out with no hope of restocking before Christmas and spike does its impression of Eddie the Eagle with a bus to catch. Hey ho ho ho.

PS: You can still get a paperback copy. Paperbacks are nice too.

State for hire

One of the first places I knew I wanted to write about in my smash-hit non-fiction sensation Whatever Happened to Tanganyika? (now storming the charts in paperback) was the Republic of Nauru, once known as Pleasant Island. With phosphate reserves more or less exhausted and (forgive me Nauru) a tradition of government more hapless and inept than anything our own dear PM could be accused of, it has had to turn to more and more wacky ways to raise income. Nowadays it seems have resorted to (forgive me again) prostituting its sovereign status to the highest — or just the latest — bidder, becoming a pawn in superpower propaganda battles by conferring its official recognition on disputed nations like Kosovo, South Ossetia and Abkhasia. According to the Guardian, and indeed the Telegraph (or rather some anonymous stringer whose words were presumably copied and pasted by both papers), “In July 2002, Nauru accepted $130m from China to de-recognise Taiwan only to re-recognise it in 2005 after apparently receiving another, better offer.” Forgive me one last time, Nauru, but does “obscure microstate agrees to recognise obscure disputed territory, for money” really bring any kudos to either party? Then again who cares, it’s among the more harmless ways they’ve found of raising some much-needed cash.

(On the more mysterious question of how Nauru could remind even the most desperate and deadline-addled journalist of “a small dinner plate dropped into the gleaming South Pacific”, I have nothing to offer.)

“A real gem”

“It’s a great feeling to stumble upon a real gem. While browsing through a London bookshop last summer, it was chance that my eyes fell on a slim book, Whatever happened to Tanganyika? It turned out to be [a] quirky page-turner on what its author¹ called “nostalgic geography” — an A-Z of long-forgotten names of places and countries that interest a handful of dotty stamp collectors today. Yet, behind the trivia about Bechuanaland, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands and why national borders in Africa are often straight lines and right angles, there was a larger story: the tale of venerable statesmen meeting in Berlin, Versailles and Yalta to divide the world into colonies, protectorates and spheres of influence. ” (Swapan Dasgupta, Times of India)

¹ Actually no, for the record that was the coinage of Alexander McCall Smith, who wrote the foreword

Putting on the style

Those of us who have worked with style guides may enjoy the Twitter parody FakeAPStylebook. An enquirer asks “is it preferable to refer to the country as "Burma" or as "Myanmar"?” Back comes the answer:

If accuracy / Is what you crave / Then you should call it / Myanmar Shave.

Nice.

“Global perspectives for an American audience”

Here at the Campbell Word Factory we pride ourselves on our rapid response service. Almost within the hour, we can get a highly-skilled word-wrangler onto your talk radio programme, spouting away like nobody’s business about the subject of your choosing — obsolete placenames a speciality, of course. And thus it was that today, precisely ninety minutes after getting a call on my mobile (in the library!) from the thoroughly charming people at Public Radio International/BBC America, I found myself talking down the line to Marco Werman, presenter of PRI’s The World in Boston. Producer David Leveille (right) had spotted that the theme of my little anecdotes and musings was right up the street of his daily Geo Quiz, and a fuller version of that 15-minute interview will soon be appearing in Patrick Cox’s excellent podcast The World in Words.

I’ve often commented on the quality of such Public Radio programmes in America, which sometimes make dear old Radio 4 look a bit feeble, and now that — thanks to the internet — tuning in to them is no harder than switching on the Archers, I warmly recommend taking a look at these links.

Good as new — in fact, better

I see from Amazon that a good second-hand copy of the well-received work of popular nostalgic geography Whatever Happened to Tanganyika? is now a valuable “collectible” worth two and a half times the new price — and it’s not even out of print yet. Now that’s class.

Pop till you drop

Another nice American review. Among other things it points out that Whatever Happened to Tanganyika? is “small enough to pop in your bag”. And who should know better about that than PopMatters.com?

“From breathless historical recaps to miniaturist elegies”

Got back from a week abroad to find this very nice review in something called the Wall Street Journal (I think it’s American). Not one British newspaper bothered to give the thing a proper full-length review, as opposed to a cordial mention (with the possible exception of the Stroud News and Journal). Hoorah for the American quality press.