Richard Gott

Richard Gott is a former Latin America correspondent and literary editor at the Guardian. His books include Cuba: A New History and Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution.

Letter
The Mau Mau practice of obliging its activists to swear secret oaths of allegiance, referred to by Bernard Porter (LRB, 3 March), was by no means confined to Kenya. The phenomenon was common to many rebel organisations throughout the history of the British Empire, and deliberately mirrored a long-established British tradition. Instead of swearing loyalty to the British monarch on the Bible, a procedure...

A new history of the British Empire might be expected to concern itself with such issues as the construction of military dictatorship through the imposition of martial law; the violent seizure and settlement of land; the genocidal destruction of indigenous peoples (and their culture and environment); the establishment of what is now called ‘institutional racism’; and the continuing...

Letter
What a brilliant pastiche by R.W. Johnson (LRB, 10 May) of a Daily Telegraph journalist visiting post-independence Africa in the 1960s. The unfortunate breakdown of the Volkswagen, the roads decaying ‘along with everything else’, the country ‘gripped’ in a fuel crisis, and a maize field burnt dry, a clear indication ‘of approaching famine’. When the intrepid reporter meets African women...
Letter

Do they drink the oil?

17 February 2000

Leo Zaibert (Letters, 1 June) accuses me of naivety and optimism, because I wrote positively about the Venezuelan Government of Hugo Chávez. It is safer, of course, to greet every new development in Latin America with cynicism. For the moment, however, Chávez's project appears to be the most interesting development in Latin America for many years. He has staked his reputation on rooting out the corruption...

The mountains of Venezuela rise up almost sheer from the shores of the Caribbean, with gashes of red earth below and vivid green forest above, the peaks entirely lost in grey cloud. From the aeroplane window I have often liked to imagine this as the land on which the local Indians stood when they first discovered Columbus on their beach in 1498 – although he landed some four hundred miles to the east, on the Peninsula de Paría, across the water from Trinidad.

Perfidy, Villainy, Intrigue: The Black Hole

Ramachandra Guha, 20 December 2012

In 1931, Gandhi visited England to discuss India’s political future. In a speech at Oxford, he hoped that when the empire finally ended, India would be an ‘equal partner with Britain,...

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America first

Felipe Fernández-Armesto, 7 January 1993

‘See America first’: the old tourist-office advertising slogan made it sound easy. The most famous moment in the history of exploration, however, is also one of the most baffling. In...

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