To listen to the UN security officer’s briefing in Nairobi prior to visiting Somalia, you would think Mogadishu was Armageddon on steroids. Each and every Somali would be extremely hostile, he warned, snipers around the presidential compound of Villa Somalia would pick me off if I stepped out onto a balcony, and the seaport would be raining bombs and mortars. The weather was harsh, the mosquitoes unbearable and the African Express flight was relatively secure only because the terrorist group Al Shebab used it so were unlikely to blow it up. He shook his head at this latest lamb heading off to the slaughter. “You’ll be lucky to remain safe,” he said. At least the swimming in the Indian Ocean was sensational, I ventured. “Good luck,” he shot back. “You will be welcomed by sharks.”

From the manicured lawns of Nairobi, Somalia is indeed a dark and fearful place. For two decades the country has known little but war. As a result of this relentless fighting, the statistics are surreally ghastly. An estimated 3.2 million Somalis, or 42 per cent of the population, require humanitarian assistance. There are 1.2 million internally displaced people fleeing from the conflict. While acute malnutrition among the under-fives stands at 20 per cent, one in 22 children is severely malnourished and at nine times greater risk of death than properly nourished children. Life expectancy, depending on who you believe, ranges from 47 to the mid-fifties. GDP per capita stands at an estimated $600 – most statistics are estimated in Somalia – placing the country 224^th out of 228 countries. The seaport, the country’s main commercial link to the outside world, generates $11m a year. In 2002, urban unemployment was 65 per cent. “It can be assumed that the situation in Mogadishu has deteriorated since then,” says a UNDP report.

Conflict has a changing face in Somalia. What has been constant since 1991, when the military dictator General Mohammed Siad Barre was deposed by warring clans after 21 years at the helm, is bloodshed and instability. Clan warfare evolved into warlordism – epitomised by the anarchic savagery of “Black Hawk Down” in October 1993 – which in turn metamorphosed into religiously inspired conflict. This was only brought to an end when the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) captured Mogadishu in 2006, ushering in what some Somalis call “the six months of paradise”. The US-supported Ethiopian invasion in late 2006 quickly defeated the ICU, but it also had the unintended consequence of uniting Somalis of all political and religious hues against their old enemy. Fresh instability followed the subsequent Ethiopian departure.

Today the conflict pits the fledgling transitional federal government (TFG) of onetime ICU leader President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, supported by the African Union Mission in Somalia (Amisom) against Al Shabab – literally ‘The Youth’ – an unsavoury alliance of local Islamists, foreign Al Qaeda fighters and the great unwashed, brainwashed and unemployed.

The fighting in Somalia can no longer be dismissed as an obscure domestic struggle in an unimportant country of no wider relevance to the world. The crackle of machinegun fire in Mogadishu, the regular thwump of mortars, the ground-shaking shelling by Amisom tanks and the sporadic suicide attacks by delusional youths represent the frontline in the international fight against Al Qaeda. “The instability in Somalia is a threat not only to its neighbours but more widely,” says Robert Macaire, British High Commissioner in Nairobi. “The terrorist threat is very real. We’re concerned about the risk of extremists travelling to Somalia and returning to the UK to conduct attacks.” The Somali diaspora has also been well represented in terrorist attacks inside the country.

On 1 February Al Shabab announced it was making common cause with Al Qaeda in an effort to establish an Islamic state in Somalia and fight for Muslims across the Horn of Africa. Islamists gravitate towards failed states as water finds its own level. In fact, the UN recently upgraded Somalia from “failed” to “fragile” state, but the point is the same. The level of insecurity and lack of centralised law and order provide ripe conditions for repressive Islamists to flourish.

Major Ba-Hoku Barigye, Amisom’s spokesman in Mogadishu, has daily contact with Al Shabab. His phone beeps and rings every few seconds, day in, day out, as hundreds of texts and calls come in. Although they attempt to be blood-curdling, including repeated (and unfulfilled) threats to kill him, most are moronic, some unintentionally hilarious. “You are infidels and hypocrites the doomsday you are and your friend allah will punish as hell amisom i,m muslim and my religon is the best religon?” reads one.

Al Shabab controls much of southern Somalia and a good deal of Mogadishu. As an example of its concern for the wellbeing of ordinary Somalis, it recently forced the World Food Programme to suspend its activities in most parts of the south and said foreign humanitarian organisations were no longer welcome. Forty-seven aid workers, most of them Somali, were killed in 2009 and many were abducted. Al Shebab doesn’t really go in for human rights, much less women’s rights. According to Amnesty International’s 2009 report on Somalia, “Aisha Ibrahim Duholow, aged 13, was publicly stoned to death on 27 October [2008] by some 50 men in Kismayo. She was convicted of ‘adultery’ by a Sharia court without legal defence after she reported to local authorities that she had been raped by three men. The men were not prosecuted.” Al Shebab justice often comes at the end of a blade. The most serious transgressors are beheaded, other miscreants have their limbs hacked off. Some are simply shot.

Going out into Mogadishu with Amisom’s Ugandan troops in an armoured personnel carrier reveals the scale of the challenge they, the fledgling government and Somalia face. With azure skies, a streaming breeze and foam-flecked seas beneath a fiery sun, Mogadishu could be a preternaturally beautiful place. Instead, the decades of fighting have reduced homes, streets and buildings to rubble. Kabul has nothing on Mogadishu in terms of being razed to ground zero. Bombed-out and shot-out shells rise from potholed roads and mud tracks. Cattle and goats saunter along past old men in white skullcaps and veiled women in a blaze of bright colours. There is no electricity except from generators. Government services are virtually non-existent. Squalor is the norm.

The night before the first anniversary celebration of President Sharif’s administration

the ground shakes for four hours during fierce fighting between Amisom and government troops and Al Shebab. The BBC reports at least eleven killed. The next morning we drive across town to Villa Somalia, the presidential enclave on a modest bluff overlooking an astonishingly green city. Somali poets, singers and comedians take to the stage to entertain the president, prime minster, cabinet and assorted MPs. The joyful mood is suddenly shattered as mortars explode only metres away, killing one Ugandan and one Somali and injuring several more. An Amisom tank responds with gusto and then there are no more mortars. The show goes on. “The opposition has no programme but killing,” President Sharif says later in an interview.

A couple of days later, I speak to Ismail Mahmoud, 21, a former member of Al Shabab. He was injured in an attack against an Amisom position late last year. Two men fighting alongside him were killed. He was taken to the Amisom hospital and had his left leg amputated. There is nothing menacing about Mahmoud. He is a pitiful young man with a worn-out, hunted expression and an uncertain, unenviable future. Like so many Somalis his age, he has had no proper education. Now that his jihad is over, I ask whether he will find work and get on with his life. “When I had two legs, I was not able to find a job,” he replies. “How will I be able to when I only have one?”

Although Somali society is fantastically complicated by clan histories, loyalties, divisions and strife, this latest conflict is simple at the most basic level. What it boils down to is this. Al Qaeda and its supporters are providing Al Shebab with men and materiel. According to Major-General Nathan Mugisha, Amisom’s Force Commander, they are well resourced and becoming more battle-hardened and resilient by the day. Expertise is mobile and comes from the battlefields of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East. “With time Al Shebab is becoming a credible force,” he says. “We don’t need to give them this time.”

The international community, by contrast, is dawdling on the sidelines. “At the moment it’s only paying lip service to Somalia,” argues Jibril Mohammed, a Somali businessman. The UN’s position is clear. On 30 January, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said it would not deploy until the fighting stops, employing the old adage that peacekeepers need a peace to keep.

That leaves a desperately under-strength, under-financed African Union force of 5,300 Ugandans and Burundians manning the barricades in one of the world’s most fragile states. According to Amisom’s Major Barigye in February, its soldiers had not been paid since August. Whatever their promises of assistance, in practice African troop-contributing countries are deterred from providing manpower by the low levels of payment they receive compared with supporting other missions, such as the much better resourced joint UN-African Union force in Darfur. It may seem an unimportant bureaucratic quirk but on such questions of finance key decisions turn in the developing world.

The future necessarily lies with the TFG, but it too will need to be properly funded to kick-start a government that is able to provide the most basic service of all: a modicum of law, order and security. There is a long way to go. “Take out Amisom and the TFG would collapse in 30 minutes,” says one analyst. Again, the signs suggest the international community understands neither the urgency nor the gravity of the situation. In the latest UN report on Somalia, issued on 31 December last year, it was reported that of the $58m pledged to the TFG by foreign donors in Brussels last April, the government had received $5.6m. It is difficult to build an army from that. “If the TFG can get a small, capable and loyal force going, this could make a significant difference on the ground,” says Ernst Jan Hogendoorn, Horn of Africa project director for the International Crisis Group in Nairobi.

The most terrifying thing I encountered in Mogadishu had nothing to do with the UN security officer’s apocalyptic warnings, not even the cluster of mortars that dropped on us in Villa Somalia. Instead it was a story about a Somali child who came back from school in Mogadishu one afternoon to find his father listening to pop music. “Dad, you’re an infidel,” the child said. The father decided then and there it was time to leave Somalia and took his family to Kenya.

Another generation may soon be lost to the toxic delusions of Islamic fundamentalism if the international community fails to respond urgently to what is happening in Somalia. “I don’t think the West understands the magnitude of the spread of Islamic fundamentalism and its influence in the Horn of Africa,” says Abdusalam Omer, a government advisor. “There’s not a three-year-old in Somalia, Djibouti or Yemen who isn’t affected. At the moment Al Shebab is in the ascendant, opening schools in many cities. Yet if a reasonably modest investment is made in TFG they can defeat Al Shebab and Al Qaeda for the first time in any country.”

I couldn’t help it. I whooped uncontrollably into my Jordans Country Crisp with strawberries when I heard the news last week, startling my wife and spilling milk and crispy clusters onto a bemused but grateful dog. An Italian team of archaeologists had made what looked like a hugely important discovery in Egypt’s Western Desert, apparently unearthing remains of the lost army of Cambyses which, according to Herodotus, was swallowed up by a ferocious sandstorm 2,500 years ago. Had they laid to rest one of the world’s greatest archaeological mysteries?

Alfredo Castiglioni, director of the Eastern Desert Research Centre in Varese, who led the expedition with his twin brother Angelo, certainly thinks so. The team discovered a bronze dagger, a clutch of arrowheads, a silver bracelet and earring, and fragments of a necklace. ‘These objects certainly date to the Achaemenid period and so far these are the only Persian objects found in the western Egyptian desert on the border with Libya where Cambyses is said to have sent 50,000 men to conquer Siwa,’ Alfredo told Discovery News. Nearby they also found hundreds of sun-bleached bones, together with a horse bit and more blades and arrowheads — tantalising evidence of the lost army sent by the Persian Great King to sack the Oracle of Ammon in what is now the Egyptian oasis of Siwa in 525 bc.

The reason for my cereal-spluttering glee was simple. If true — and the internet is abuzz with conflicting claims, some of which cast doubt on the findings and the professional standing of the Castiglioni brothers — the discovery was another feather in the cap for Herodotus, the fifth-century bc historian rightly acknowledged by Cicero as the Father of History. In the first century ad a mean-spirited Plutarch derided him as the ‘Father of Lies’, since when history has been rather unkind to the man who invented it. Since I have spent much of the past five years travelling in his footsteps and slipstream, the Castiglioni brothers’ findings were welcome news.

All we know about the lost army of Cambyses comes from Herodotus’ Histories. The Persian force began its fateful march across the burning desert from Thebes (Luxor) on the Nile, he tells us, and got as far as the oasis of Kharga. After that, nothing more was ever heard of it. Herodotus goes on:

So much for the most catastrophic lunch in the annals of desert picnicking. The lines have prompted generations of archaeologists and Egyptologists, not to mention the television producers who prod me from time to time to have a look in the sands, to hunt for the lost army. One of the most enigmatic among them was the Hungarian aristocrat Count László de Almásy, aviator, explorer, soldier and sometime spy, inspiration for the Herodotus-loving protagonist of Michael Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient, played by a brooding Ralph Fiennes in the eponymous film.

The controversial discoveries in the Western Desert are only the latest suggestion that Herodotus is more reliable as an historian than has generally been recognised. In 2007, a series of studies by geneticists, which looked at mitochondrial DNA from Tuscan residents and cattle, lent weight to Herodotus’ controversial claim that the ancient Etruscans originally hailed from Lydia (in today’s Turkish region of Anatolia) and later migrated to Italy, a suggestion that has often caused offence to Italians and a good deal of scoffing in Chiantishire.

Tall stories abound in the Histories, though on further examination some of the most notorious are a good deal less fanciful. Take the ‘snakes with wings’ Herodotus writes about. Today these are thought to refer either to locusts or, simpler still, the pictures of snakes with wings our itinerant historian would have encountered on Egyptian monuments. As for the fabulous ‘gold-digging ants’ in the easternmost provinces of the Persian empire, the French anthropologist Michel Peissel believes these are Himalayan marmots, a species that inhabits the Deosai plateau of Pakistani Kashmir and from whose burrows local tribes gather excavated gold dust.

What today’s historians often forget when they assess Herodotus is that he was operating in a largely oral culture in which he had to solicit information from people rather than books. Mistakes were inevitable. He couldn’t have been an armchair historian because there were no earlier works to consult. He was the first. Also, he knew a lot of the information he gleaned was hearsay, rumour and legend, some of it complete nonsense. He was quite clear about this. ‘I am obliged to record the things I am told, but I am certainly not required to believe them,’ he writes, playing a memorable get-out-of-jail-free card. ‘This remark may be taken to apply to the whole of my account.’ When you’re giving live performances of your oeuvre to austere audiences you need to give them something to keep them on the edge of their marble seats, whether it is life-saving dolphins, multiple testicle-slicers, otherworldly animals, women having sex with goats or beard-growing priestesses.

Ultimately, however, the strongest defence for Herodotus as the Father of History is made by today’s historians, whether they realise it or not. Survey the field of history across the 2,500 years since Herodotus lived and at almost any point during that time, the answer to the age-old question, and title of E.H. Carr’s classic monograph, What Is History?, was straightforward. History was the exclusive pageant of kings, battles, empires, statesmen and laws, what we call political and constitutional history. The rest of the human race, the seething mass of men and women who weren’t monarchs, statesmen or generals, simply weren’t invited. In a word, it was Thucydidean.

It was this uniquely political model, emphatically not that of Herodotus, which historians followed right into the 20th century. Only with the birth of social history did the freewheeling spirit of Herodotean inquiry return. History, ever since, has rolled back the barriers. The historian’s proper field of inquiry has expanded dizzyingly across miles and miles of uncharted terrain. It is perhaps the greatest posthumous tribute to Herodotus.

There is economic history, women’s history, demographic history, intellectual history, feminist history, gender history (herstory?), sexual history, black history, oral history, cultural history, psychohistory, history of history, and so it goes on. A good deal of this may be pseudo-academic rubbish, of course, and some of it is unquestionably boring, but the point is that the very best historians today write across a wide range of subjects with verve and to popular acclaim, prizing the art of storytelling which was one of Herodotus’ greatest gifts.

The final word should be left to Professor Paul Cartledge, Herodotus guru and A.G. Leventis, Professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge University. ‘Herodotus the Father of Lies?’ he says. ‘Surely not. Dead men like those 6th-century Persians mouldering in the Egyptian desert tell no false tales.’ Like it or not, and even allowing for some Castiglioni legerdemain, we are all Herodoteans now.

Justin Marozzi opens his diary

I’m researching a new history of Baghdad. What strikes you most about this unfortunate part of the world is how extreme violence and bloodshed have been endemic to the city from its foundation by the Abbasid Caliph Mansur in ad 762 to the present day. Baghdad may have been christened the City of Peace but, as Richard Coke wrote in the last history of the Iraqi capital in English, published in 1927, a year after Gertrude Bell’s death, ‘The story of the City of Peace is largely the story of continuous war.’ Hardline Sunnis were impaling and burning alive ‘heretic’ Shia 1,000 years ago. Jews and Christians occasionally got it in the neck, too, and caliphs were always on the lookout for mo re ingenious methods of inflicting pain. An Iraqi colleague is translating a seven-volume Abbasid treatise on torture for me. They have been lopping off heads here for ever. The caliph Hadi (785-786) once interrupted a banquet to rush off and personally behead two of his slave girls who had been caught having an illicit lesbian affair. His companions were horrified to see his eunuch bring the bloodied, bejewelled heads to the table on a platter. A dear Iraqi friend calls from Baghdad. He has already lost several family members in the violence since 2003; four more of his relatives were badly wounded in the huge bombing outside the foreign ministry, some of them blinded by the blast. ‘Perhaps it is our destiny to live like this,’ he says.

***

The highlight of a hellishly hot visit to Baghdad was a down-the-line interview with Sandi Toksvig for her excellent programme Excess Baggage. We discussed some of Herodotus’s observations on the curious sexual customs of foreign peoples. The Greek historian was much taken by the unique post-coital habits of the Babylonians, who used to fumigate their genitals with incense after a bout of lovemaking. Sadly our chat about necrophilia in Ancient Egypt was edited out. Herodotus, who was always up for a story to titillate his audience, related how when a particularly beautiful woman died, her family would only deliver the body to the embalmers after three or four days, when it really=2 0started to pong. This was, he tells us, ‘a precautionary measure’ to prevent lusty embalmers from interfering with the corpse.

***

A colleague in Baghdad, a retired senior army officer, says he’s going to buy property in Amman. ‘Jordan has everything you want in a country,’ he says. ‘First of all, a monarchy. Second, there are no speed limits. Third, no smoking ban, so you can light up wherever you like. And best of all,’ he adds with a steely look, ‘it has the death penalty.’

***

The kerfuffle surrounding the release of the convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi reminds me of when I interviewed Gaddafi Junior a few years ago for this magazine. Saif al-Islam al-Gaddafi, son of the Islamic-socialist-cum-pan-Arabist-cum-pan-Africanist-cum-pan-lunatic leader, was staying in the royal suite of Claridge’s at the outset of his campaign to improve Libya’s image in the West. He spoke a lot of nonsense about Libya becoming an ‘oasis of democracy’. Although he said it was ‘unthinkable’ that he would be the next leader, I suspect his passion for democracy will not stop him indulging in a bit of dynastic succession in Tripoli when Daddy’s had enough (40 years and counting on 1 September, incidentally). The then editor of The Spectator, horrified to see Gaddafi swanning around London and being feted by society, made some mischievous changes to my piece and headlined the article ‘Son of Mad Dog’. The Libyans, like most Arabs not known for their love of dogs, went ballistic. I haven’t been back to the country since. A question relating to al-Megrahi’s release from prison occurs. Whose version of events would you be more inclined to believe, that of Mandelson or Gaddafi? It’s an unsavoury choice but my money would be on the Libyan.

***

Thoughts on cricket and ancient history: Thucydides is to Herodotus as Boycott is to Gower. One is rigorous application and puffed-up pomposity, the other easy grace and self-deprecating charm. Both essential in their own way, but be honest. Who would you rather read and watch?

***

A summer in north Norfolk drifts to a close: eating masses of samphire, sailing in Burnham Overy Staithe, swimming in Stiffkey and Wells amid wide skies and stretching sands. A Handel and Scarlatti concert at Salle, a spectacular 15th-century church with extraordinary acoustics. Dancing to Aretha Franklin in Walsingham Abbey. And the Ashes, the Ashes. Long days drunk on cricket, walking from room to room clutching a radio permanently tuned to 198 Long Wave, alternately cursing, fearing, celebrating and occasionally whooping. Panesar and Anderson hanging in there at Cardiff, Blowers and Tuffers discussing lobst er dinners, batting collapses, magnificent Strauss, Broad evolving from boy to man, another hot-to-Trott South African saviour, Freddie bowing out with the electric run-out of Ponting, the fabulous drama of Test cricket against the old enemy. What better way to celebrate the delirium of victory at the Oval than by dashing off to Holkham, the most glorious beach in the country, for a late evening swim. Isn’t it good to have the Ashes back?

Justin Marozzi will be speaking about The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus, published in paperback this month, at the Edinburgh Book Festival on Saturday 29 August at 8.30 p.m. at Peppers Theatre.

What is the Royal Geographical Society for — exploration or ‘post-socialist urban identities’?

Time was when most educated people knew, more or less, what geography meant. Putting aside its Greek etymology (“earth description”), for people of a certain age it instantly evokes images of oxbow lakes, valley-scouring glaciers, mountains, volcanoes, alluvial fans, cloud formation and perhaps a bearded teacher.

Physical geography is the venerable descendant of the early investigative forays made by the ancient Greeks who took the first steps in this formal examination of our planet — men like Anaximander of Miletus, the sixth-century BC polymath credited with introducing the gnomon, an early sundial that helped determine solstices and equinoxes, to Greece.

With considerable input from Chinese and, later, Arab civilisations, geography emerged as a curious hybrid of cartography, geometry, astronomy, philosophy and literature. Perhaps no one expressed the emerging discipline with quite as much chutzpah as Herodotus, the fifth-century BC Greek whose traditional “Father of History” moniker belied his position as an early and itinerant — if madcap and unreliable — geographer. In Egypt, he set up his vast open-air laboratory and studied its mysteries, the source of the Nile, its seasonal flooding and alluvial deposits, its flora and fauna. He understood, as many physical geographers do today, the compelling need to take to the field for his research and conduct the ancient world equivalent of empirical observation. No armchair geographer he.

In the 19th century, when the Royal Geographical Society was a byword for international exploration and scientific discovery, the German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt helped lay the foundations for modern geography with his magnum opus Kosmos, a prodigious, five-volume attempt to unify the various strands of geographical science. Charles Darwin considered Humboldt “the greatest scientific traveller who ever lived”.

For many geographers today, this sort of physical geography is deeply unfashionable and downright irrelevant. Human geographers, by definition, are more interested in people than in places. They are interested, among other things, in gender, culture, health, development, urban environments, behaviour, politics, transportation and tourism. Many physical geographers feel increasingly alienated by their colleagues’ distrust of empirical science, a scepticism informed largely by the post-modernist assault on geography in recent years.

The tensions within geographical science have come to an acrimonious head at the RGS. A high-profile initiative, named The Beagle Campaign in honour of Darwin’s ground-breaking, RGS-assisted expedition to South America in 1831-1836 and launched on the 150th anniversary of his On the Origin of Species, aims to restore balance to the Society’s activities by getting it to mount its own field research projects again. The Society has failed to mount a single expedition in a decade. On 18 May, Fellows voted 61 per cent to 38 per cent against the initiative, an extraordinary show of support for the underdogs. The campaign, with which this writer is closely involved, has uncovered deep fissures within an organisation that for almost two centuries has been a broad church of interests and experiences at the forefront of geographical discovery (www.thebeaglecampaign.com).

The stakes remain high. Although the debate has largely been confined to 10,500 Fellows, given the status and historical significance of the RGS, its ramifications for geography are likely to be felt far more widely worldwide. The contention revolves around the Society’s failure to mount even one large multidisciplinary research project — as expeditions are now known — in a decade. As astonishing as it may sound, the RGS no longer conducts any of its own research, a serious indictment of its loss of vision and purpose. It is no exaggeration to say that through its major field projects of the 19th and 20th centuries, which went to the ends of the earth, the RGS (with the Institute of British Geographers, to give it its full title) has contributed much to our knowledge and understanding of the world. Names like Scott, Shackleton, Livingstone, Speke, Stanley, Burton, Doughty and Everest all convey a humbling thrill when visitors step inside the Society’s magnificent Ondaatje Theatre.

The Society’s response to this debate provides a sobering snapshot of what it is, or what it can be, to be a geographer today. Among six projects that the RGS says demonstrate its commitment to support (other people’s) research, are two fairly eyebrow-raising studies. One, conducted by Dr Craig Young and colleagues from Manchester Metropolitan University, is entitled “Global change and post-socialist urban identities”. Another, led by Dr Heaven Crawley and colleagues from Swansea University, is “Children and global change: Experiencing migration, negotiating identities”. Professor Ian Swingland, founder of the Durrell Institute for Conservation and Ecology, is unimpressed. “My scientific and international experience strongly suggests to me that neither of these projects is academically robust, likely to change anything on the ground, improve the status of the environment or the social woes of the world, and they are frankly to a large degree incomprehensible,” he wrote in an open letter to Sir Gordon Conway, the RGS president. “They will make no difference to anything other than those prosecuting the work. What are ‘post-socialist urban identities’ exactly? What are ‘children’s reflexive negotiations of their identities’ precisely? And does it matter? And will this work educate the future ways we can help the world?”

What such research appears to demonstrate is the tragic introversion and irrelevance of swathes of contemporary academe, academics writing for academics, leaving the rest of the world none the wiser — or better off. In an era when environmental woes and challenges press in on us, the RGS’s failure to provide high-profile leadership on vital issues such as climate change, global warming, biodiversity, the forced migration of species, deforestation, desertification and a host of other scientific unknowns is deeply regrettable. What can one say of post-structuralist cultural studies other than they provide careers for a certain breed of academic geographer?

The internal RGS debate has nothing to do with romance, nostalgia or pith helmets, as critics of The Beagle Campaign have rather lazily argued. It is all about science and real-world, empirical observation and exploration at a critical time for humankind and its interaction with the planet. Often there is simply no substitute for getting out into the field.

As the environmental scientist James Lovelock warns in his latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning, “Observation in the real world and small-scale experiments on the Earth now take second place to expensive and ever-expanding theoretical models” of questionable reliability. “Our tank is near empty of data and we are running on theoretical vapour.” Herodotus, Humboldt and Darwin would have understood this in a flash.

Worlds Apart
June 2009

What is the Royal Geographical Society for — exploration or ‘post-socialist urban identities’?

Time was when most educated people knew, more or less, what geography meant. Putting aside its Greek etymology (“earth description”), for people of a certain age it instantly evokes images of oxbow lakes, valley-scouring glaciers, mountains, volcanoes, alluvial fans, cloud formation and perhaps a bearded teacher.

Physical geography is the venerable descendant of the early investigative forays made by the ancient Greeks who took the first steps in this formal examination of our planet — men like Anaximander of Miletus, the sixth-century BC polymath credited with introducing the gnomon, an early sundial that helped determine solstices and equinoxes, to Greece.

The Royal Geographical Society is housed in a red-brick building just south of Hyde Park, at a junction of Kensington Gore and Exhibition Road that London cab drivers call “hot and cold corner”. Its façades are decorated, respectively, with statues of the most famous explorer of Africa, David Livingstone, and the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, hero of perhaps the greatest survival story of all time.

In 1998 when I was 27 and had just left the Financial Times after two years in the Philippines I was planning an ambitious 1,200-mile exploration by camel across the old slave routes of the little-travelled Libyan Sahara. Among my first ports of call was the RGS. I wanted to consult its unrivalled store of maps and charts of the world’s least hospitable places. Inside, it fairly hummed with potential expeditions, a stopping-off point for people about to set off to the remotest parts of the world. The walls of the society’s wonderful auditorium carry the names of great RGS-backed explorers of the past, including Sir Richard Burton, the great Victorian who, with John Speke, made two journeys into central Africa to locate the source of the Nile. And, of course, Captain Robert Falcon Scott, whose second expedition to the South Pole in 1912 ended in his death. Through their often heroic efforts the society advanced our understanding of the world.

On that first day I was there to study in the fusty grandeur of the panelled Map Room. I would politely ask the supervisor for what I needed and he would disappear, locate each map of the interminable desert wastes, and bring it to my desk. He might, I thought, have been there since Scott of the Antarctic set off across other, icier, wastelands.

Originally founded as a gentlemen’s dining club in 1830, within 30 years the RGS had established itself as the heart of what is now often described as the “heroic” age of expedition. As I explained what I was planning in Libya, an expedition to the historical centres of the Saharan slave trade, the RGS’s in-house expedition advisory centre put me in touch with some of the most notable desert explorers. They included Sir Wilfred Thesiger, then 88, and the charming octogenarian Rupert Harding-Newman, veteran of the Long Range Desert Group in the second world war. The latter was invaluable in helping me to learn the essentials of desert navigation.

Without this first encounter with the RGS, my Libyan journey (which I later wrote about in my first book, South From Barbary) might never have happened and I would probably never have become a fellow of the society. There are 10,500 fellows, all of whom have been nominated and approved for fellowship, and then have the right to vote on RGS resolutions.

That year – 1998 – was the last time that the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers, to give it its full title) organised, paid for, and launched one of its own expeditions, an extensive study of the marine environment in the south-west Indian Ocean, involving 200 scientists from 21 countries. The team generated huge quantities of scientific data and trained hundreds of local officials in marine education and management. Since 1998, the RGS has given money to many expeditions, but it hasn’t launched a major expedition in its own right.

Perhaps this is unsurprising. By 1998 the age of heroic exploration was long over – possibly the last great “expedition” was the RGS-assisted trans-Arctic expedition of 1967-69, described by then British prime minister Harold Wilson “as a feat of endurance and courage which ranks with any in polar history”. Three men and 40 dogs, carrying 32 tonnes of food and equipment, took more than 15 months to cross 3,800 miles of frozen wilderness. It was the longest sustained polar journey in history and almost certainly the first surface crossing of the Arctic Ocean.

The Earth has now been almost entirely charted (though we know little about its oceans). Yet there is still a world to be discovered by teams of geographers and scientists working together to improve our understanding of the fragile balance of life on our planet. As the distinguished environmental scientist James Lovelock laments in his book The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning: “Observation in the real world and small-scale experiments on the Earth now take second place to expensive and ever-expanding theoretical models” of questionable reliability. “Our tank is near empty of data and we are running on theoretical vapour,” he argues. There is a compelling need for “more tiresome and prosaic confirmation by experiment and observation”.

The RGS has a record of mounting data-collecting expeditions of world-class importance. In 1987, for example, John Hemming, then its director, led a 200-strong expedition to the Maracá rain forest project in Brazilian Amazonia. At the invitation of the Brazilian government and in collaboration with the National Amazon Research Institute, researchers surveyed the rich forests of the riverine island of Maracá, together with four related programmes on forest regeneration, soils and hydrology, medical entomology and land development. The success of the project led to an accord between British and Brazilian scientists for long-term research in Amazonia. It represents, I believe, the RGS at its finest.

Yet the past decade has seen the society shift its focus towards academic geography, and away from exploration and field research. In 2006, for instance, the expedition advisory centre was re-branded “geography outdoors”. It was a move widely seen by fellows as a downgrading of expeditions and exploration within the society. It was, said the veteran explorer Robin Hanbury-Tenison, when I interviewed him for a newspaper, “mealy-mouthed”.

In May 2006 Alistair Carr, a Suffolk-based travel writer and desert explorer, went to the RGS archives and called up a copy of the society’s original, hand-written Royal Charter. He was looking for something that might back his hunch that the direction of the RGS had, in recent years, veered too far from exploration. Poring over the hard-to-read text, he found this: “The Royal Geographical Society, for the advancement of Geographical Science … has since its establishment sedulously pursued such its proposed object … by carrying out, at its own expense, various important Expeditions in every quarter of the Globe, and by assisting other Expeditions with grants of money and otherwise … ”

Carr realised that this could be a chance to change things. “I started talking to people all over the country – scientists, zoologists, entomologists, marine biologists, the British Antarctic Survey, the Natural History Museum and so on,” he says. “The more I spoke to these people, the more I realised there was this crying need for these multidisciplinary expeditions and that the society was losing this wonderful opportunity. With all those unknowns out there, in the oceans, rainforests, mountains and deserts, there’s so much more to be done. I felt the RGS should be leading the way.”

Over the next few months, he assembled a group of six like-minded RGS fellows, including myself, all in their thirties. Carr already knew Tim Bosworth, an environmental scientist, and the others were all keen to meet – so in April 2007 Carr, Bosworth, and I met up in London with Jo Vestey, an award-winning photographer, explorer and broadcaster Oliver Steeds and James Aldred, a rainforest veteran and specialist wildlife cameraman.

Over the past two years, we have exchanged numerous letters with the RGS leadership. We have sat down with the director and president and members of its council. Our request was that the RGS should return to launching its own multi-disciplinary scientific research projects and expeditions. The RGS itself says that over the past four years it has supported more than 250 projects involving 1,250 people in 118 countries with more than £600,000 in funding.

Our small group talked and the RGS listened. But, while we believe the society’s recent emphasis on geography and education is commendable, we feel that this must not come at the expense of its important core activity – running its own expeditions. So this month, our campaign, which we are calling the Beagle Campaign in honour of Charles Darwin’s 1831-1836 expedition – assisted by the RGS – to South America, went public.

Two days ago, a parcel was delivered to Lowther Lodge, the society’s home. It contained a special resolution, instigated by Carr and his five original signatories, calling for a return to the society’s own expeditions. The resolution calls on the RGS to honour its obligations as set out in its Royal Charter of 1859: in a word, to explore.

For a special resolution to be taken to a vote by the RGS, it has to be signed by six fellows and supported by at least 40 more. Our resolution has been co-signed by 80 of the most distinguished figures in the fields of exploration, geography, science, literature and travel. They include Sir Ranulph Fiennes; George Band, who was at 23 the youngest climber to scale Everest for the first time in 1953, along with his equally distinguished successors Sir Chris Bonington and Doug Scott; and the modern polar explorers Pen Hadow, who is currently in the Arctic, and Tom Avery, the youngest Briton to reach both poles.

Other supporters include Ian Swingland, a world expert on conservation and biodiversity, Andrew Mitchell, an authority on forest canopies and climate change, anthropologist Dr Audrey Colson and cave specialist Andrew Eavis.

The next step for the RGS would be to call a special general meeting and send out ballots to its 10,500 fellows. The wording of our resolution modifies its charter’s requirement for the RGS to fund expeditions “at its own expense”. It calls, instead, for a return to sponsored expeditions. (Major RGS expeditions from 1977-1998 include an impressive list of corporate backers: Shell, Cathay Pacific, British Airways, Wimpey, Honda, Land Rover.)

In response to receiving the resolution this week, the society’s initial statement said: “The RGS-IBG would like to make it clear that the society’s objective, as set out in the royal charter of 1859, is the ‘advancement of geographical science’. The ways in which the society does this is a matter for the trustees at any particular time. The society continues to support exploration constantly.”

If it’s no longer mountain summits or poles we seek, so much as greater knowledge about climate change, growing urban populations, poor water supply, forced migrations and a host of other unknowns, our knowledge of species on the planet still has an enormous way to go. Marine biologists estimate that there may be up to 50m new species within the largely unexplored oceans, and up to 10m new species of insects, many of them in the world’s endangered tropical rainforests.

For a model of the sort of expedition that we hope will once again set out from South Kensington, look at Hadow’s latest Arctic expedition, an international venture funded by sponsors, including the insurance group Catlin, and bringing science and exploration together in an effort to answer one of the most critical environmental questions of our time: how long will the Arctic Ocean’s sea ice cover remain a permanent feature of our planet?

In 1980, the RGS celebrated its 150th anniversary with the publication of To the Farthest Ends of the Earth, a history of the society by Ian Cameron. In a foreword, RGS fellow Sir David Attenborough said the next 150 years would witness different sorts of RGS expeditions, “But the stimulus that sends its members on arduous journeys to remote places will surely remain the same; and the society, thankfully, will continue to serve them.”

The Beagle Campaign offers thousands of fellows and members – together with the public – the chance to make our voices heard. We welcome all support from anyone interested in this cause. If successful it will help ensure that the society, in addition to supporting research projects, starts to field its own major expeditions once again. The future of the planet deserves nothing less.

www.thebeaglecampaign.com

JUSTIN MAROZZI FROM YPRES
December 2008

Just past midnight on 11 November, the Menin Gate of Ypres is quiet and still. Even the rain, a constant companion on any winter visit to Flanders, falls silently. The peace is disturbed only by an occasional passer-by trotting past, collar upturned against the weather, or a car slipping quickly through the gate, wipers working overtime.

The heart of the night is a good time to arrive at one of the greatest memorials of the Great War. In a few hours, it will be impossible to get close as the town commemorates the 90th anniversary of the Armistice.
Although officially this is a gate, it is so broad many visitors consider it a tunnel. The reason the Menin Gate is so deep is to accommodate the names of 54,896 missing British and Commonwealth soldiers who lost their lives in the Ypres Salient, a Dantean hell of noise, mud, blood and slaughter from 1914-1918.

The missing men remembered here are a small fraction of the several hundred thousand killed in this corner of Belgium. They came from a very different Britain, from long-vanished regiments like the 57th Wilde’s Rifles, Lord Strathcona’s Horse and the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment, augmented by imperial forces from India such as the 35th Sikhs, 40th Pathans and the 9th Bhopal Infantry.

Flanders Fields Museum, a stone’s throw from the Menin Gate in the vast Grote Markt square, gives a disturbing picture of what it was like to live and fight in the Ypres Salient in this “war to end all wars”. Paul Nash, the English war artist, called it “one huge grave”: “unspeakable, godless, hopeless”. “I am a messenger who will bring back the word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on forever,” he wrote in 1917. “Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls.”

By mid-morning, the crowds are lining Meensestraat several deep to get a glimpse of the veterans’ parade and service beneath the Gate. Joining the townsfolk and the largely British visitors are the immaculately turned out veterans. Hundreds of bereted Brits, Belgians, Kiwis and Canadians, as well as Indians in yellow turbans. Medals glimmer and helmets shine in the oozing rain. Waxed moustaches bristle to attention. Those unable to get near the Gate gather under umbrellas in front of a giant screen in Grote Markt.

Benoît Mottrie is chairman of the Last Post Association, which organises the town’s daily honouring of the war dead. Every evening at 8 o’clock, the traffic is stopped beneath the Menin Gate to allow the buglers to sound their mournful tribute.

The clock sounds 11 o’clock. Mottrie gives a moving speech in which he rebuffs recent suggestions that with the Great War receding from personal experience into distant history, it may be time to review the daily act of remembrance. They have sounded the Last Post 27,569 times since 1928, he reminds the crowds. Were they to sound it for every life lost, they would be busy until 2610.

“It is only right and proper that sacrifice on this scale should be remembered,” he says. “Our debt of honour to the past has not yet been paid.” It will be properly discharged “only when people learn to resolve their differences peaceably”.

One by one, suited dignitaries lay wreaths in the heart of the memorial. The Gate is flanked by an expanse of sodden, scarlet poppies, a “Flanders Field” organised by the Royal British Legion. The famous lines from Laurence Binyon’s Ode to the Fallen – “At the going down of the sun, and in the morning / We will remember them” – are written on the petals, with messages of support on the back. “May we never forget your sacrifice and hope that men soon cease to wage war,” a typical one reads.

Back at the St George’s Church Hall, the British veterans are tucking into post-parade beers. The room is filled with a strong sense of British decency and dignity. Most veterans see remembrance at Ypres as an essential way of honouring both those who have served this country and those who serve in distant wars today. “To us as ex-servicemen, Ypres is where the whole tradition of remembrance begins,” says Eddie Hefferman, a trustee of the Royal British Legion.

Yet one can wonder where, if anywhere, remembrance takes us, beyond the simple honouring of the war dead. Siegfried Sassoon despised the Menin Gate and what it represented. “Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime / Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime,” he wrote.

Another veteran in the church hall admits he has “mixed feelings” about remembrance. “You see people laying wreaths while our soldiers are being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. We just never seem to learn. I don’t think we’re doing enough to frighten the younger generation away from war.”

Remembrance alone can never curb man’s instinct for war. It is as inherent as his need to defecate. Without memory, though, we would be even worse at restraining this primeval urge to fight. One takes away a sense of “never again” defiance, however futile, from the many memorials and oceans of white headstones in Flanders. Perhaps, as Benoît Mottrie suggests, collective remembrance becomes more, rather than less, important as those who fought in the Great War pass away.

Several miles north-east of Ypres, Tyne Cot Cemetery marks the final resting place of a further 35,000 British and New Zealand soldiers, most of them killed in the nightmarish Passchendaele Offensive around Ypres. One of the headstones is particularly striking. It belongs to Second-Lieutenant Arthur Conway Young, of the Royal Irish Fusiliers, killed on 16 August, 1917, at the age of 26. He was, says the inscription, “sacrificed to the fallacy that war can end war”.

It is sad and strange to watch Greece go up in flames. Particularly from Baghdad, where Iraqis, daring to believe that the worst is finally over after five nightmarish years, struggle to understand why Greeks are setting their country alight.

“We don’t know why they are doing this,” my friend Hussam said while we were watching the news last night. “They have everything. They have democracy, human rights and a good economy, but still they are destroying their country.” Put aside for a moment the irony of an Iraqi commenting on civil strife and bloodshed in a Western democracy. Part of that analysis is spot on. For many onlookers from the developing world, Greece has it all. An admirable standard of living, a decent economy, a shipping industry that is the envy of the world, a sybaritic climate and celebrated cuisine, membership of the EU and precious few enemies.

One thing missing from the Iraqi analysis, however, is a sense of history. As is so often the case with events in Greece, we’ve been here before.

Athens first went up in smoke in 480BC, when the Persian army of Great King Xerxes, King of Kings, Lord of Light, fresh from what would prove a pyrrhic victory over King Leonidas and his 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, thundered south across the plains of Attica and put the city to the sword, then to the fire. The Acropolis was burnt, the 5th-centuryBC Greek historian Herodotus recording the damage to the defining symbol of Athens, “which the Persian fire had scorched”. As Tom Holland writes in his history of the Persian Wars: “The great storehouse of Athenian memories, accumulated over centuries – the city’s very past – was wiped out in a couple of hours.” Greek protesters are doing their best to wipe out a lot more this time. The thing about the Greeks – proud democrats that they are – is that they strike and take to the streets at the drop of a hat. Take the annual November 17 march, ostensibly in memory of the 1973 Athens Polytechnic uprising against the military junta of George Papadopoulos. Few outsiders recall that the confrontation, which led to more than 20 deaths, started with a strike. Only in Greece could students strike. With the self-dramatising flamboyance of youth, they called themselves the “Free Besieged”, in honour of the poem of the same name written by the 19th-century

Greek national poet Dionysios Solomos, a tribute to the Siege of Missolonghi, cornerstone of the Greek fight for independence.

The student strike rapidly grew into a tense stand-off until the tanks rolled in and bloodshed ensued. The confrontation set in motion a series of events that led, via the calamitous Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, to the collapse of the junta, the return of a former Prime Minister,

Constantine Karamanlis, and parliamentary elections later that year. Democracy was restored.

Karamanlis, incidentally, was the uncle of the current Greek Prime Minister, Kostas Karamanlis. The political class likes to keep it in the family.

At times, Greek democracy appears to consist of little more than the Karamanlis and Mitsotakis dynasties taking it in turns to hold power.

This, together with the corruption that tends to follow in its wake, is one of the country’s enduring problems.

The November 17 march offers some powerful insights into the violence of the past week. Join the demonstration, as I did a couple of years ago, and it doesn’t take long to realise that it is just as much an anti-American, anti-capitalism protest as a commemoration of the student uprising. Surrounded by thugs with motorbike helmets under their arms and cudgels disguised as flags, we snaked through Athens until reaching the American Embassy when the rioters donned their helmets, hurled petrol bombs and charged the lines of riot police. Within moments the streets were full of teargas and broken glass. Anarchy is an essential component of Greek democracy.

Kostas Karamanlis might regard the protesters as “enemies of democracy”, but those on the streets consider it their fundamental democratic right to run amok.

Ask students why they march – and strike – today and they tell you that it’s for “bread, freedom and democracy”.

I remember one young woman telling me that Greek students were starving. The Government was forcing them to pay for their studies, and they now had to find work to support their studies. To say that they lacked a bit of get-upand-go was an understatement. Haven’t they heard of holiday jobs? The students had been on strike for months, occupying universities and refusing to let anyone in. High-school students caught the strike bug and joined in, too. It was a free-for-all for Greek lazies, not unlike the current student-led spectacle.

One aspect of my Iraqi friend’s analysis of the Greek riots is off the mark. It is no coincidence that the violence ripping across the world’s oldest democracy is happening at a time when the economy is in the doldrums and youth unemployment is extremely high. Instinctively anti- American as a nation, Greece has had little appetite for globalisation. A large number of Greeks are fundamentally anti-business, among them the hardcore of several hundred anarchists in Athens. The current confrontation can be viewed at one level as a contest between a deeply unpopular, reforming government and defenders of the status quo. In the flames and carnage convulsing the nation there are shades of the unrest that occurred in Britain when Margaret Thatcher took on the miners. Greek unions, for now at least, are strong.

One wonders what the astute Herodotus would have made of the mayhem. Perhaps he would have considered it as nemesis arising from the hubris of the political class. In which case, we must hope, just like the Ancient Greeks, that catharsis is just around the corner. 6 Justin Marozzi is author of The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus, published by John Murray

Justin Marozzi finds time to salsa amid the sirens and window-rattling helicopters of Baghdad…

Plenty of interrupted nights in Baghdad this week. I’ve been startled out of sleep by early-morning prayers from a nearby mosque, wailing police sirens, window-rattling Black Hawk helicopters thundering overhead and volleys of gunfire from the shooting range. It could be worse. Last summer it was mortars, the one before that car bombs – one threw me out of bed – so on a sliding scale of violence things are definitely looking up. It also makes a change from waking up to Jim Naughtie on the Today programme.

*Having spent the past five years travelling around the ancient world with Herodotus, researching The Man Who Invented History, I have become slightly obsessive-compulsive about him, to the point where it is now difficult not to spot echoes of the great man everywhere, especially in Iraq. His warnings against imperial overstretch, the caution that hubris invariably leads to nemesis, his call to respect other people’s customs, traditions and religion, and the portrait of a clash of civilisations between East and West all have a powerful resonance here.

He even has something instructive to say about the financial crisis. “Often enough God gives man a glimpse of happiness, and then utterly ruins him.” Hedge-fund types take note.

*On Tuesday, switching from travel writer to security consultant, I nip into town to speak to some Baghdadi businessmen. The security situation has improved beyond recognition post-surge but it’s still a good adrenaline boost. The streets bristle with moustachioed policemen and soldiers, and checkpoints every few hundred yards. Traffic is often at a standstill and you can’t help wondering whether you’re going to be blown up. Amazing that many people here still refer to

the Red Zone. How about calling

it Iraq?

*Thursday night is Pizza Party at the Italian embassy. My Italian cousins lend a burst of colour and glamour to an otherwise drab world of concrete blast walls, khakis and beige cargo pants, sorry, trousers. Needless to say, they also have the best uniforms. Goateed carabinieri strut around in black summer kit with red piping (paramilitary chic, brought to you by Giorgio Armani), gazed at by hopelessly smitten young women from the State Department. The DJ plays thumping salsa. Then the Italian peacocks take their pick of the prettiest girls and hit the dance-floor. They may not be the most formidable soldiers in the world but the Italians know how to party in a war zone.

*Or should that be post-conflict environment? Assessing where Iraq is these days remains as intensely political as the decision to go to war. If you opposed the conflict, it’s all disaster – Iraq is doomed to a downward spiral of sectarian fighting and disintegration. If you were an ardent supporter, the surge has worked wonders and Iraq is now a bastion of freedom and the biggest commercial opportunity in the world.

Justin Marozzi is the author of ‘The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus’, published by
John Murray.