The sixth letter in the alphabet is the consonant “F”. Pre-English, the Phoenicians used to write “F” with a symbol that looked a lot like “Y,” and pronounced it waw. The ancient Greeks changed it into digamma and put a tip on the “Y”, transforming it into the sixth letter in the alphabet we readily recognise today. The “f” sound has a kindred spirit in the “ph” as the two can be interchangeable in spelling, eg, people who live in the Philippines are called “Filipinos”. “F” for frank and forthright and “F” for frivolous and fickle…it would however be remiss of us to not acknowledge that the expression “F-word” has another, polarising, connotation which for many in society is still is a taboo one, as, to use a somewhat old-fashioned-sounding term, a “swear” word… “fuck” and its many derivatives such as “motherfucker”, “fucker”, etc. ad nauseam. So there you have it, “F”, all in all a letter for all seasons and dispositions!
Falerist (or Phalerist): someone who collects and studies medals, badges, pins, ribbons and other decorations [from the Greek mythological hero Phalerus: Gk. Phaleros]
Farraginous: consisting of a confusing mixture, orig. of grains for cattle feed (cf. Farrago); jumbled; messy; heterogenous[L. far “spelt” (ie, grain)]
Favonian: pertaining to the west wind (esp mild, gentle) 💨 [L. fovēre (“to warm”)] (cf. Zephyr)
Firmament: (Relig.) the vault or arch of the sky; the heavens; the field or sphere of an interest or activity [Late Latin. firmamentum, from L. firmare (“support”)]
Firmament
Flâneur: a man who saunters around observing society; a stroller (fem: approx comparable to Flaneuse). [Old Norse. flana (“to wander with no purpose)]
A metropolis full of flâneurs (image: The Art Story)
Flexiloquent: speaking evasively or ambiguously [L. flexibilis (“that may be bent”) + –loquēns (“speaking”; “talking”)]
Florilegium: an anthology esp excerpts of a larger work; collection of flowers [L. flos (“flower” +-legere (“to gather”)] 🌺
Frotteur: (Psycho-sex.) a person who derives sexual gratification—Frottage—thru contact with the clothed body of another person in a crowd [Fr. frotter (“to rub”)]
Funambulist/Funambulator: a tightrope walker; an acrobat who performs balancing acts on a taut, high horizontal rope (also known as an Equilibrist [L. funis (“rope”) + –ambulare (“to walk”)]
Funambulist ice-veined Philippe Petit with his flares at full mast, at his day job, Twin Towers 1974 (photo: Alan Welner/AP)
Fusilatelist: someone ( with a lot of time on their hands) who collects phone cards from telcos (origin unknown)
Fuselatelist: UK £5 telco cards (source: chinarfidfactory.com)
Futilitarian: a person devoted to futile pursuits; one who believes that human striving is futile [(19th neologism, a portmanteau word formed from blending “futile” and “utilitarian”]
Fysigunkus: a person devoid of curiosity [Scot. Eng, (19th. origin unknown]
In the 1950s and ‘60s Berlin, bisected into eastern and western sections, was ground zero for the Cold War. One surprising arena for the head-to-head competition between the rival political systems/ideologies was the public zoological park. Before 1955 there was just one zoo in the divided city, the historic Zoologischer Garten in West Berlin, immensely popular and well patronised, not just by West Berliners but by citizens from the Eastern sector as well𝟙. In that year the East German Communist state established its own (East) Berlin zoo, called the Tierpark (literally “animal park”), to counter the popularity of the Zoologischer Garten. The rivalry between the two Berlin zoos for hegemony sustaining itself over the next 30-plus years would be a personal as well a political one.
Heinrich Dathe (Photo: Katrin Böhme, Ekkehard Hölxtermann, Wolfgang Viebahn: Heinrich Dathe – Zoologe und Tiergärtner aus Leidenschaft)
Zookeepers at 40 paces! The new zoo in the East has the advantage of a dynamic, forceful director, zoologist (Curt) Heinrich Dathe, who managed to wrangle funds out of a cash-strapped GDR to enhance the zoo’s collections and facilities impressively. Construction of the new polar bear habitat for instance was financed by the Stasi (State secret police). When Heinz-Georg Klös took over as director of the Berlin Zoo in 1957 the competitiveness between the two zoos became deeply personal, with a bitter hatred developing and enduring between Dathe and Klös𝟚. The two directors were constantly engaging in contests of oneupmanship…if one zoo acquired a rhinoceros the other zoo got one, or as Jürgen Lange, director of West Berlin Aquarium, described the two men’s relationship: “if one of them buys a miniature donkey, the other buys a mammoth donkey” (Mohnhaupt). Sometimes Klös would get the upper hand…knowing that it was hard for the GDR to get certain exotic animals and that there was a shortage of raw materials in the East, he built an ape house which Dathe couldn’t muster the resources to reciprocate (Mohnhaupt & Frisch). Notwithstanding this, under Dathe the Tierpark was an instant success, so successful that by 1958 it was attracting 1.7 M visitors, 200,000 more than was going through the turnstiles of Berlin Zoo and Aquarium combined.
Source: etsy.com
Baby Vietnamese elephant, Tierpark (Photo: archiv Freunde des Haupstadt)
Proxy cultural war Dathe modernised the look of his zoo with innovative flair while the Zoologischer Garten remained more of a traditional zoo…in 1963 the Tierpark opened the Alfred-Brehm-Haus, at that time the largest and most modern animal house in the world. Containing a massive 50,000-foot state-of-the-art facility for big cats, the Brehm-Haus boasted the first barless enclosures for lions and tigers. The Tierpark, with the advantage of boundless space (set on 160 hectares), eventually became the largest zoo in Europe𝟛. The GDR loudly trumpeted its modernised zoo, heralding it as a triumph of socialism over capitalism, the zoo which due to a shortage of labour in East Germany was built partly by citizen-volunteers. Meanwhile Klös anxious to keep up with Dathe, was busy adding to the Berlin Zoo’s species collection, making it the most biodiverse zoo in the world. The duelling zoos in Berlin had become showcases for each side in the Cold War conflict (Rotondi). When either zoo notched up some success it was taken as an endorsement of its political system, a symbol of superiority and the validation of its society.
Zoo Berlin (Source: Reddit)
End of the zoo wars This cultural competitiveness between East and West, the preoccupation with demonstrating “who’s got the better zoo?”, purportedly asserted to be an indicator of a superior society and way of life, persisted right up tothe collapse of the Eastern Bloc and Wiedervereubugung (German unification) in 1990…it was only in that year that “Professor” Dathe relinquished his iron-grip hold on the Tierpark. With unification came a thaw in the combative climate and a subsequent rapid shift from rivalry to cooperation between the Berlin zoos, symbolised by the appointment in 1991 of a single director in charge of both zoos.
(Elephant Gate, Zoo de Berlin)
Footnote: ZoomaniaAs can be inferred from the above, zoos were and still are a big deal in Germany (in both the bisected and unified eras), a product of the salient fact that the Germans are basically “animal tragics”…it’ssaid that Berliners love animals more than people (Mohnhaupt), a measure of which is the astounding number of zoos Germany has, in a country smaller than the US state of Montana, they number more than 880!
Image source: design-mkt.com
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𝟙 zoos provided the perfect diversion for Berliners from both sectors during the Cold War, availing them of the opportunity to escape from the city of walls and connect with the world of nature (Rotondi)
𝟚the relationship deteriorating even to the point of a physical confrontation between the two zookeepers in Berlin Zoo’s elephant enclosure
𝟛 cf. the much smaller, cramped, inner city Zoologischer Garten with little space to expand
Bibliography
J.W. Mohnhaupt, The Zookeepers’ War, (2020)
‘Even Before the Wall, Berlin’s Zoos Were Already Cold War Rivals’, J.W. Mohnhaupt & Shelley Frisch, Time, 12-Nov-2019, www.time.com
‘The Cold War Rivalry Between Berlin’s Two Zoos’, Jessica Pearce Rotondi, History, 08-May-2023, www.history.com
“To plunder, to slaughter, to steal … these things they misname empire.” ~ Tacitus, (Roman historian) c.AD 98.
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For much of the 19th century and beyond Britain had a preoccupation with the country of Afghanistan. Basically, it was all about Russia and India. Britain was engaging in a power struggle with Tsarist Russia for influence and expansion in Asia and Africa, part of what later became known as “the Great Game”. Russia had slowly grown its empire through “expansion creep” over several centuries, eastward to the Pacific but also pushing south deep into Central Asia. Britain’s concern was the security of its greater Indian sub-continent which provided the vast treasure trove of riches and resources which bankrolled Britain’s industrialisation juggernaut as well as paying for the upkeep of its other imperial territories. Russia’s systematic conquest of the Muslim states of Central Asia signified to Britain the likelihood that British India was also on the Russians’ radar.
Afghanistan & Central Asia, 19th century
Afghanistan found itself in the middle of this emerging 19th century conflict, stuck between the imperial ambitions of Britain and Russia. From the British perspective, Afghanistan, commanding the strategic northwestern passes into British India, its value to Britain was as a buffer state blocking Russian expansion any further south. British policy, hell-bent on preventing Russia getting a foothold in Afghanistan, led directly to war between Britain and Afghanistan in the 1830s with a British invasion (First Anglo-Afghan War, 1839-42)…a war not universally popular in Britain as a number of politicians believed the Russian threat to India was highly exaggerated.
Map image: collection.nam.ac.uk/
Britain invaded Afghanistan with its “Army of the Indus” comprising East India Company troops including a large number of Indian sepoys. The army had early successes, capturing the seemingly impregnable Ghazni Fortress in 1839 and was able to march on the Afghan capital Kabul unencumbered. The British turfed out the ruling amir Dōst Mohammad and replaced him with the previous ruler Shah Shujā. This turned out to be a grievous misreading of the political situation by Britain which held a false notion of Afghan national unity (at best the country was at that time a loose grouping of semi-autonomous tribes) [Jones, Seth G. Review of Imperial Britain’s Afghan Agony, by Diana Preston. The National Interest, no. 118 (2012): 52–58. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42896440.] Shujā, of the deposed Durrani dynasty, far from being a strong, unifying ruler, was an oppressive tyrant extremely unpopular with the masses. Consequently insurgency broke out in Kabul and in different regions of the country, forcing the British force to abandon Kabul and retreat from Afghanistan. The retreat was calamitous, one of the worst calamities in British military history. Beset by harsh winter conditions (subzero temperatures) and rugged terrain, the straggling army “was eviscerated as it battled through biting cold, knee-deep snow and apoplectic tribesmen” (Jones). Of an original 4,500 soldiers and 16,000 support personnel, only a handful of men made it back to safety.
British army, Bōlan Pass into Afghanistan
Stinging from the catastrophic defeat and the loss of an entire army, a disgrace for nation and empire, the British Raj command launched a retaliatory raiding party from India several months later which sacked Kabul, but this was only ever, after the main event, a pyrrhic victory for the British. In 1843 the hated Shujā was assassinated and Dōst Mohammad and the Bārakzai dynasty duly resumed the Afghan throne.
Russia also experienced a military setback trying to invade the Khanate of Khiva in 1839
1878 Afghan war
The British made a victor’s choice for the new amir of Afghanistan, Abdur Rahman Khan (Sher Ali’s nephew), who agreed to Britain taking control of Afghanistan’s foreign policy (making it a protectorate of Britain) while London promised to not interfere with Afghan internal affairs (the status quo within the country was thus resumed). Within several years Britain and Russia reached a deal which demarcated the northern frontier of Afghanistan[̊𝓪], clearly defining the southern limit of Russian expansion in Central Asia [Azmi, M. R. (1984). RUSSIAN EXPANSION IN CENTRAL ASIA AND THE AFGHAN QUESTION (1865-85). Pakistan Horizon, 37(3), 106–135. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41393703].
Panjdeh incident
Before the Russo-British accord was reached, a diplomatic incident at Panjdeh, just inside the Afghan border with Turkmenistan in 1885 brought the rival empires to the brink of war. Owing in part to the poorly-defined boundary, a clash ensued between a Russian army and a force of the amir’s Afghans, with considerable casualties on the Afghan side. In the end diplomatic negotiations and a timely intercession from the amir averted war. Afterwards Russia and Britain nutted out an agreement on the issue which allowed the Russians, despite having been the aggressors, to keep the Panjdeh territories.
Gurkha Rifles v Afghan tribesmen. Artist: Frederick Roe, 1920 (collection.nam.ac.uk/)
1919 Afghan war
A palace coup in 1919, bringing a new amir, Amānullāh, and the “war hawks” party to the helm of Afghan politics, was the spark for an Afghan military incursion into eastern India in the aim of encouraging rebellion in India’s northwestern frontier and regaining lost Pathan lands. Amānullāh had timed the invasion to take advantage of British and Indian war-weariness from four long years of world war. The fighting was pretty indecisive but with the British blocking Afghan invasion routes into India both parties soon agreed to a ceasefire[̊𝓫]. The subsequent Treaty of Rawalpindi handed Afghanistan one definite positive from the war, Britain finally extended full recognition of Afghan sovereignty[̊𝓬], and for the British, the peace of mind of having the Durand Line reaffirmed as the undisputed frontier between Afghanistan and British India.
Afghan delegates to 1919 peace talks with British (source: afghanistan-analysts.org/)
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[̊𝓪] establishing what British Prime Minister Disraeli called a “scientific frontier”
[̊𝓫] beyond the peace maverick Afghan tribesmen continued to raid British forces in Waziristan and along the northwest frontier
[̊𝓬] accordingly Afghans also refer to this conflict as the War for Independence
The fifteen or twenty years following WWII witnessed a very uneven pattern of decolonisation in Asia and Africa, with a number of the old European powers slow to cast off their coloniser mantle…the Belgians in the Congo; the French in Algeria and Vietnam and the Netherlanders in Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) in the end were extracted only after engaging in costly and unpopular wars. As the global wave of decolonisation gathered traction and other colonisers from the Old World divested themselves of their imperial territories, the Estado Novo regime of Portugal steadfastly clung on to its possessions – Angola, Mozambique, Portuguese Africa (Portuguese Guinea, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe), Goa (plus four minuscule enclaves on the western Indian coastline), Macau and East Timor.
Salazar: saviour of nation and empire
Portugal had been the first of the European powers to establish overseas colonies (enthusiastically followed closely by Spain), its earliest colonies date back to the 15th century. The Portuguese colonisers’ attitude towards the peoples they colonised in Africa, Brazil and elsewhere was really no different to any other rival European imperialist power of the time…undertake a Christian civilising mission to enlighten(sic) the “savages”, while economically exploiting them and their territories. In the 1950s with decolonisation starting to gain momentum, Portugal, a unitary, one-party state headed by dictator Antonio Salazar, looked for strategies to preserve its empire, aware that it faced a backlash from newly independent states in Africa and Asia who were a growing voice in the UN demanding it and other imperial powers decolonise ASAP. In 1952 Portugal effected a constitutional change, overnight the empire ceased to exist, Lisbon officially rebranded all of its overseas territories as províncias ultramarinas (overseas provinces). On paper it seemed Portugal had no colonies to decolonise, but the bulk of international observers saw the transparency of this, a technicality by Salazar to try to ward off criticism of the country’s failure to decolonise (a ploy that did buy Portugal some time but was always only a delaying tactic)[Bruno Cardoso Reis. (2013). Portugal and the UN: A Rogue State Resisting the Norm of Decolonization (1956–1974). Portuguese Studies, 29(2), 251–276. https://doi.org/10.5699/portstudies.29.2.0251].
‘The Masters and the Servants’ (source: errancias.com/) Enter Freyre and Lusotropicalism
The Estado Novo in the Fifties turned to a Brazilian writer Gilberto Freyre for guidance. The noted sociologist had developed a theory⦑ą⦒ in the 1930s concerning the effect of Portuguese culture on its former colony of Brazil, a phenomena that became known as Lusotropicalism⦑ც⦒. Basically, Freyre’s thesis was that Portugal and Portuguese culture diverged from other late-stage imperialist countries because of two factors, the first Portugal’s unique history as a “pluricontinental nation”, in the pre-modern era being inhabited by Celts, Romans, Visigoths and Moors et al resulting in extensive integration between the different groups⦑ƈ⦒. Freyre contended that (extensive) miscegenation in Portuguese metropolitan and colonial societies was a “positive” in that it led to the creation of “racial democracy” across the empire (ie, Portuguese and Lusophone society was “non-racist”)…as supposed evidence of this Freyre and conservative apologists could tender the de jure eligibility for Portuguese citizenship availed to non-white people, the attainment of assimilado status. The stark reality however is that the Portuguese authorities put so many obstacles in the way that made it virtually impossible for blacks from the colonies to ever secure the same legal rights and status as white citizens [Almeida, J. C. P., & Corkill, D. (2015). On Being Portuguese: Luso-tropicalism, Migrations and the Politics of Citizenship. In E. G. RODRÍGUEZ & S. A. TATE (Eds.), Creolizing Europe: Legacies and Transformations(pp. 157–174). Liverpool University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1gn6d5h.14]⦑ɖ⦒.
Lisbon street scene, late 16th century Just your warm and friendly colonisers?
The other component of the Freyre thesis concerns the Iberian climate. Portugal’s warmer climate, Freyre argued, made it more humane and friendly, and more adaptable to other climates and cultures⦑ꫀ⦒. The combination of these two factors led Freyre to conclude that the Portuguese were “better colonisers”. A question arises, given that Spain shares the same climate and its “biological stock” and culture has undergone the same process of multinational hybridisation over epochs of history as its contiguous neighbour, why wouldn’t Spain be equally good as assimilators and have a similar experience of inter-racial harmony?
Salazar, though initially wary of a controversial philosophy which had at its centre a “glamourised” miscegenation and pseudoscientific mythologising about race, eventually reshaped Freyre’s theory into his regime’s official doctrine, a framework staking Portugal’s claim to ideological legitimacy to continue its anachronistic practice of colonisation. Lisbon’s politicians and diplomats were unleashed in the UN to burst forth with volleys of rhetoric about the soi-disant “special” relationship between the homeland and the overseas provinces⦑ᠻ⦒: the two were indivisible; the provinces were an integral part of Portugal’s unique, singular, multiracial nation; Portugal’s very identity depended on their retention, etc. [Cristiana Bastos, ‘Race, Racism and Racialism in Three Portuguese-Speaking Societies’, in Luso-Tropicalism and its Discontents, edited by Warwick Anderson, Ricardo Roque and Ricardo Ventura Santos (2019)].
Portuguese military in the colonial war with Angola
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Pariah state or defender of the West?
A spate of new decolonisations, speedily attained after 1960, leveraged even more pressure on Lisbon to decolonise – or at least to seriously begin a dialogue about a path to decolonisation, Salazar dugs his heels and refused to do either. Portugal was condemned in the UN as a practitioner of “colonisation in denial and in disguise” and was even more trechantly criticised after the coloniser engaged colonial rebels in Angola, Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea in wars of liberation. Lisbon responded by making a Cold War pitch to try to shore up Western solidarity on the issue…Salazar claimed to be defending Western civilisation in Africa against the menace of communism. This earned them few brownie points in Washington where the Kennedy Administration was among those pressing Lisbon to decolonise, while at the same time not going too hard, remembering its own vested interests (US was using the Azores Islands as an military base courtesy of Portugal). To its UN detractors and to the international community, Portugal throwing itself in full-scale colonial wars to prevent decolonisation was not a good look, resulting in further condemnation (Reis). Portugal’s international position was further undermined when, first, India overran the Portuguese colony of Goa by force in 1961 and annexed it, and later in the decade, another blow to Portuguese prestige, it lost control of its tiny enclave Macau to Communist China. Portugal, against the tide of history, continued to cling doggedly to its small portfolio of overseas possessions long after it could be said to amount to anything worthy of the name empire.
The Carnation Revolution overthrows Portugal’s “New State” (Image. lisbonlisboaportugal.com)
Postscript: Old habits
Significantly, the Lusotropicalism mindset didn’t end with the overthrow of the Estado Novo dictatorship in 1974, despite the new democratic government moving quickly to grant independence to the Portuguese colonies…conservative apologists in Portugal’s democratic era continue to celebrate and romanticise “mixedness” as “something inherently progressive” [‘Luso-tropicalism’, Global Social Theory, www.globalsocialtheory.org]. It seems the Portuguese politics has still not freed itself from the national myth-making that its long-dead leader Salazar had institutionalised in the 1950s…in 2017 the Portuguese head of state at an international meeting in Senegal was happily extolling “the virtues of Luso-exceptionality” (Bastos).
Endnote: Social integration myth The Lusotropical notion which claimed that Portuguese colonists integrated with the colonised subjects in a superior way was contradicted by the Portuguese town planning model for Africa, the colonatos. This scheme envisaged whites-only settlements which were intended to be “miniature Portugals”. When put into practice in Angola and Mozambique the colonatos were organisational disasters, poorly planned, little infrastructure and technical assistance, poor transport lines, etc. [Cláudia Castello, ‘Creating Portugal in Colonial Africa’, Africa is a Country, 25-May-2020, www.africasacountry.com].
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⦑ą⦒ labelled a “quasi-theory” by some scholars (Cláudia Castello, ‘“Luso-Tropicalism” and Portuguese Late Colonialism’, Buala, 28-May-2015, www.buala.org)
⦑ც⦒ Luso = pertaining to Portugal + tropicalism
⦑ƈ⦒ with transference to Brazilian society through its coalescence and integration of Europeans, enslaved Africans and native Amerindians
⦑ɖ⦒ with regards to colonial Brazil Freyre in his best known work The Masters and the Slaves misrepresents slavery as “a mild form of servitude” and he has been further criticised for exonerating the absolving the colonisers of any racist practices in modern Brazil and glossing over the iniquities of the slave trade [Wohl, Emma (2013). ‘“Casa Grande e Senzala” and the Formation of a New Brazilian Identity’,
