Stephen Smith

I’m driving in South Central Los Angeles in my rented Ford, which is calculated, with its icing-sugar bodywork and sappy sprig of an aerial, to lose itself in the fitful lines of flaking write-off and deckled insurance jobs. My chrome is see-your-face; theirs is in-your-face. It’s a loweringly humid afternoon on which four white men are standing trial in a city courthouse accused of depriving a black man of his civil rights, especially the right not to be batoned following traffic violations. The sheriff’s car with which I have been making tender eye-contact in the rear-view mirror seems to have turned off, somewhere on Compton or Alondra. I’m now the only white man for blocks. I know this because the people of South Central LA are on the streets – black teenagers wheeling buggies to the 99-cent thrift shop, moustachioed Hispanics waiting in line for a bus near the Solid Rock Church. When people tell you that nobody walks in LA, they mean nobody except people of colour: the euphemism preferred by the hand-wringing classes, all of whom consider the idea of going to the ghetto – you mean actually going – one of the worst they’ve ever heard. The man at the hire-pound had been uncommonly sanguine, perhaps because he had learnt his roadcraft on the streets of Lagos.’

Reflecting on Somalia at the recent UN-sponsored peace talks, I found the more I heard about warring factions, Western intervention and the re-drawing of boundaries, the more I felt like shouting: ‘That’s enough about Bosnia – what about Africa?’ Although it was impossible to grudge the Bosnians their summit in Geneva, it was possible to be disappointed that the serious British media were in Switzerland for talks on what used to be Yugoslavia instead of in Ethiopia for talks on what used to be Somalia.’

I had that Terry Waite in the back of the car once. Unlike the celebrity fares picked up by Private Eye’s proverbial taxi-driver, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s special envoy was technically occupying the front passenger seat. But such were the dimensions of legate and vehicle – the one broad yet gangly, the other originally designed by the Germans to give a thousand years of ergonomic motoring – that my companion seemed to be resting the crown of his head against the rear de-mister. I had asked him for an interview, and natural negotiator that he is, he had matched me by requesting a lift to Birmingham New Street. While I drove him to his train, he spoke skittishly of the politicians with whom he had to treat. The sight of the Cannon cinema on the Hagley Road elicited a lively appreciation of the neglected art of the Western. A short time later, when Terry Waite was held hostage in Beirut, journalists found themselves asking what his links were with Oliver North.’

Born too late – and that was the least of it – to be James Fenton, I cannot claim to have spent the fall of Saigon hitchhiking to President Nguyen Van Thieu’s palace aboard a Northern Vietnamese tank. By the time I reached the city, more than a decade after the President’s government was toppled, I was also a little late to experience the thrill that the poet and war correspondent had felt in living through its death throes. Nevertheless, I called on the former United States Embassy fondly hoping to pick my way through poignant debris like portraits of Presidents behind crazed glass, and the bust of a bald eagle gleaming dully from a nest of old communiqués. The miserable photographs I had seen of the Embassy failed to do the place justice. The real thing was much worse, windowless and swaddled in concrete. It reminded me of a vast cold storage vault at Nine Elms, South London. Because I turned up on a Sunday, I was able to convince a guard called Tuan that I might promenade the grounds with him. A bonfire was smoking, and chicken pecked the dirt beside a cycle-rack.’’

The cars drive into the United Nations compound in Mogadishu. The two Somalis get out, and so does the Filipino woman, and the sad-looking Egyptian who has been telling everyone he must be on the flight back to Nairobi at four o’clock. I am the only one who is going on, to the Save the Children Fund compound. Ahmed turns the car around and there are only the two of us in it. The guards open the tall metal gates to let us out, and there is no sign of the Toyota pick-up which escorted us from the airport, a machine-gun mounted behind the cab, a man braced against it as if he were in the prow of a whaler. I catch sight of an anxious face in the wing mirror and recognise it as mine. There is a ceasefire in Mogadishu but it doesn’t involve anything so prosaic as a cease in the firing. What it means in practice is no first use of artillery, a moratorium on heavy ordnance. It has not put an end to the shooting: thirty casualties a day are turning up at the couple of gamy hospitals in the city.