Letters

I counted myself a Roger Federer fan for some years, so I began Edmund Gordon’s review of new books on the three tennis titans of recent times, plus the poignant memoir of a less successful Irish player, hoping for a new angle on my favourite sport (LRB, 26 June). But it seems these volumes do little more than rehearse familiar stereotypes and clichés: that Federer is an artist, Nadal a warrior and Djokovic a philosopher (possibly). These players have transcended their sport to join the contemporary Mount Olympus of celebrity. They are crossover figures, who have – Federer particularly – melded sport, extreme wealth and mass cultural glamour into a personality or brand. This may be partly due to the nature of tennis itself: a sport of individuals, competing in a closed arena, every aspect of their appearance, their moods, their movement magnified in close-up on TV screens across the world. And tennis has somehow retained an atmosphere of garden party cachet (shamelessly exploited at Wimbledon), despite the ferocious demands of the game, which leave players little time to become interesting as people.

Perhaps the authors of these new biographies hope to prolong the afterlife of the fading GOATs as new stars explode into view, or to offer fans the balm of nostalgia. To be a Federer fan was to belong to a relatively benign cult, in which certain truths could never be disputed: that ‘Roger’ was better looking than he actually was and that he inhabited a higher moral plane than the rest of us, because in becoming so rich and successful he was somehow ennobled, even deified. I didn’t really believe all this, but in purely tennis terms he was for me a tragic romantic hero, because he was an all-court player in an era when surfaces had been drastically slowed down and favoured grinding baseliners. I felt this was unfair and benefited his rivals. Fandom expresses a longing for intimacy, but fans seldom become friends with their idol. Virtual friendships between fans on Federer’s website in some sense fulfilled this need. We knew we were the true believers as our hero inevitably faded and became a lost cause (it was rather like belonging to a left-wing party at the end). Even today when I catch sight of an ageing spectator wearing the cap emblazoned with Federer’s logo, I feel a sentimental glow.

Jeremy Harding writes about the Africa Museum in Tervuren, which opened in 2018, five years after the closure of the former Royal Museum of Central Africa (LRB, 5 June). He pays particular attention to the question of restitutions. Any path to restitution begins with owning your colonial history. The African blood that paid for the RMCA is part of Belgian colonial history. ‘This history would have to be addressed,’ Harding writes of the renovation. Except it wasn’t.

I worked for several years as a guide, translator and editor at the RMCA. The physical renovation took five years, but the whole fitful process took a generation. When I asked Guido Gryseels, then the director of the RMCA, in 2019 whether the sliver of colonial history in the revamped museum might be expanded, he replied with emphasis: ‘We weren’t going to do it at all.’ In 2013, Gryseels had invited thirteen European museum experts to review the new permanent exhibition plan, and they had said that omitting colonial history would be conspicuous. The consultation seemed tardy: scant space remained. An independent, diaspora-only advisory ‘Group of Six’ artists and academics was convened in 2014. ‘When they started disputing scientific facts,’ Gryseels told me, ‘our scientists said: “The hell with you, you have no scientific background.”’ It was reported that of the €66.5 million allocated for renovation, 0.25 per cent (about €166,250) was spent on diaspora collaboration. By comparison, €1 million was spent on the museum’s fountain.

‘How can a museum be decolonised if the descendants of colonised Congolese can’t gain access to its archives?’ Harding asks. ‘Until that happens, you’d have to call it a museum of reappraisal, mostly by Europeans, of their colonial past.’ Scant reappraisal: Colonial History and Independence takes up a mere 3 per cent of the museum’s floor space; the title suggests a hurry to move on. ‘It’s still a propaganda museum,’ a department head said to me.

Harding closes with a literal embodiment of restitution: the Belgian prime minister presenting Patrice Lumumba’s only remains – a tooth kept as a trophy by one of the two men who dissolved his body in acid – to his daughter Juliana. Although a civil lawsuit filed by his family in 2011 accused ten Belgians of involvement in Lumumba’s murder, none has ever faced justice. One of them, Jacques Brassinne de La Buissière (knighted in 1988, promoted to grand officier of the Order of Leopold in 2004), even visited the newly reopened museum in 2019, the year this 120-year-old ‘museum about Africa’ first hired African guides. Brassinne died in 2023. The lawsuit languishes. Only one of the accused, aged 92, remains alive, evidence of a history unaddressed.

I am one of the ‘lucky Balts’ Susan Pedersen refers to in her review of Sheila Fitzpatrick’s book on Soviet displaced persons (LRB, 5 June). As she acknowledges, ‘lucky’ is a relative term. I was fortunate in my parents’ survival of the Nazi occupation of Latvia; in their escape from Soviet occupation; and in my five years in a non-oppressive displaced persons camp for Latvians and Lithuanians in Germany, where I spent my early childhood and attended Latvian kindergarten. Not long after that we were on a military ship bound for Ellis Island and New York. I was lucky that unlike Jews, and other survivors of labour, concentration and death camps, we were welcomed as immigrants; at the time, most of them were not.

Today’s migrants aren’t so lucky either, facing hostility, stereotyping and racist attitudes. I feel I am living in a 1930s time warp, with almost half the population cheering on an administration that seeks authoritarian powers and is fabricating a past that never was. Instead of welcoming and rewarding the efforts of immigrants (legal or not), the United States, a country historically built on migrants, seems intent on rejection, putting people in detention camps and then throwing them out. Perhaps our luck has run out.

Jack Shenker, writing about the housing crisis, notes that one proposed solution is rent controls (LRB, 8 May). If the aim is to drive private landlords out of the market, that is certainly one way to achieve it. If I were to sell an empty property to an owner-occupier and put the proceeds of sale in a deposit account, I could make a risk-free return of maybe 4.5 per cent. Hold my nose and put the money in oil shares, and I would get 6 per cent. Who can honestly say they would instead choose to keep the property, bear all the expenses of insurance, repairs and void periods, and rent it out at a lower controlled rent?

In fact, we know the answer because we have already been there. The reason for the ‘Eclipse of the Private Landlord’ in the 1970s wasn’t that there was plenty of local authority accommodation available to rent – there was not – but the ‘fair rent’ regime established under the Rent Acts, which ensured that only people like Peter Rachman were willing to rent out properties. Everyone else sold them off to owner-occupiers when they became vacant.

The only effective way of reducing rents while maintaining supply is to reduce the capital value of properties. But which politician is brave enough to say that they are in favour of crashing house prices?

Tom Stevenson points to the declaration in the Strategic Defence Review that Britain’s military should be organised to be ‘Nato first’ in the face of Russian aggression (LRB, 26 June). Yet, as he observes, just as ministers were trying to get the public to accept hefty increases in the defence budget to deter Putin, the aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales was sent to the Far East. The navy has described such missions as ‘flying the flag’ for a ‘global Britain’, an objective that is both nebulous and potentially so provocative as to be counterproductive.

There is a much cheaper, more credible, more effective way to make the point and that is through soft power. Yet two of the main institutional arms of soft power, the British Council and the BBC World Service, are facing savage cuts, while universities – a third arm – are being discouraged from accepting foreign students.

The Commons Public Accounts Committee has now added its own concerns about what it calls the ‘high-level’ ambitions set out in the SDR, saying the public still lacks a reliable assessment of whether the government’s defence spending plans are affordable, and voicing its ‘extreme disappointment’ that the Ministry of Defence continues to fail to facilitate parliamentary scrutiny and has refused to publish its equipment plan since November 2022.

James Butler writes about Labour’s failure, and Reform’s success, in May’s local elections (LRB, 22 May). He mentions the Greens only in passing as ‘perpetually befuddled’. Still, they gained 44 council seats in May, taking them to a new high of 895. Reform has 804.

Ferdinand Mount writes that in 1925 the US Supreme Court ‘accepted that the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 applied to free speech, because individual states had no more right than the federal government “to make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States”’ (LRB, 22 May). The case in question is Gitlow v. New York, which incorporated the protections of the First Amendment to apply to state governments. But the constitutional basis is not the privileges and immunities clause of the Fourteenth Amendment: it is the due process clause. Though many later commentators have indicated that the privileges and immunities clause might be the more natural basis for the doctrine of incorporation, it was largely evacuated in the Slaughter-House Cases decision of 1873. Justice Sanford wrote for the majority in Gitlow:

The precise question presented … is whether the statute, as construed and applied in this case by the state courts, deprived the defendant of his liberty of expression in violation of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment … For present purposes, we may and do assume that freedom of speech and of the press which are protected by the First Amendment from abridgment by Congress are among the fundamental personal rights and ‘liberties’ protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment from impairment by the States.

This has been the framework governing the doctrine of incorporation since.

James Vincent writes that during the Reformation, ‘the Church of England placed altars in the north of the church or had the priest stand at the north end of the communion table instead of facing east’ (LRB, 17 April). It should be noted that this did not direct worship away from the east. The end of the altar was the station of a servant at his master’s table. The worshippers continued to face east.