A History of the World in 100 Objects (84 page)

It reminds me of the conflict in Sierra Leone, where lots of boy soldiers were involved. Soldiers as young as 8, 10, carrying Kalashnikovs, almost as tall as they were, trained to kill. I recall as Head of Peacekeeping Operations touring Sierra Leone with some of our peacekeepers and trying to see how we redeem these boys, and put them through training, prepare them for a life after this conflict.

There are a couple of things which are absolutely essential if a society is going to deal with the past. They need to be able to work on reconciliation. You also need to look at the society and ask the questions, ‘What happened?’, ‘How did we get here?’, ‘What can we do to ensure that this horror is not repeated?’

The main challenge in Mozambique was to decommission the millions of surviving guns and to equip the former soldiers and their families to rebuild their lives. The Throne of Weapons became an inspirational element in this recovery process. It was made as part of a peace project called Transforming Arms into Tools, which is still going today, and in which weapons once used by combatants on both sides were voluntarily surrendered under amnesty, and in exchange the people who gave them up received practical and positive tools – hoes, sewing machines, bicycles, roofing materials. Surrendering the guns was an act of real bravery on the part of these ex-soldiers and one of enormous significance for their families and the whole country. It helped break the addiction to the gun and to the culture of violence that had afflicted Mozambique for so many years. Since the beginning of the project more than 600,000 weapons have been relinquished and handed over to artists to be disabled and turned into sculpture. In the words of the project’s patron, Graça Machel, widow of Mozambique’s first independent ruler Samora Machel and now wife of Nelson Mandela, the aim was ‘to take away instruments of death from the hands of young people and to give them an opportunity to develop a productive life’. The guns themselves were to be turned into works of art. The project was started in 1995 by the Anglican Bishop Dinis Sengulane, of the Christian Council of Mozambique, with the support of Christian Aid:

The purpose of the project is to disarm the minds of people and to disarm the hands of people. Why should this world have hungry people? Why should this world have a shortage of medicines? And yet, the amount of money which can be made available almost instantly for armament purposes is just amazing, and I would say shocking.

I felt I should be part of shaping that peace. And of course we find the Book of Micah and the Book of Isaiah in the Bible, where it says they will turn their swords into ploughshares, and people will sit under their trees and nothing will frighten them.

We discovered that many monuments were a glorification of war, and we know that monuments are made by artists. So we invited artists and we said, ‘What about using your skills to glorify peace? We have got these guns – could you see whether you could convey a message of peace by using the bits and pieces of these guns?’ It was in that context that artists began to make different works of art. And one of the items produced was the Throne of Weapons.

The throne was made by a Mozambican artist known as Kester. He chose to make a chair and call it a throne, which immediately makes a particular statement. Chairs, as distinct from stools, are rare in traditional African societies, reserved for tribal heads, princes and kings; they are ‘thrones’ in the truest sense of the word. But this is a throne on which no one is meant to sit; it is not for an individual ruler but is intended as an expression of the governing spirit of the new Mozambique – peaceful reconciliation.

This piece seems to me to have a very special pathos, precisely because it has been made in the form of a chair. When we talk about chairs we always speak as though they were human beings – we say they have arms, legs, backs. They are, after all, made to be an echo of the human form, and they become almost a metaphor for living people. So there is something particularly disturbing about a chair made out of weapons designed specifically to maim backs and arms, legs and feet.

Members of Kester’s family were themselves maimed in the conflict:

I wasn’t affected directly by the civil war, but I have two relatives who lost their legs. One stepped into a minefield and she lost her leg, and the other, a cousin of mine, lost his leg because he was fighting with FRELIMO.

And yet Kester made this throne as a means of conveying hope. Two rifle butts form the back of the chair. If you look closely at them it seems as though they have faces – two screw holes for eyes and a strap slot for the mouth. They almost seem to be smiling. It is a visual accident that Kester spotted and decided to exploit which denies the guns their central purpose and gives this work of art its fundamental meaning, as he himself explains:

There is no conflict between us any more. I didn’t carve the smile, it’s part of the rifle butt. The screw holes and the mark left from where the strap was attached to the gun. So I chose the guns and the weapons that had the most expression. At the top you can see a smiling face. And there is another smiling face – the other rifle butt. And they are smiling at each other as if to say, ‘Now we are free.’

If you were to ask people which twentieth-century invention had most impact on their daily lives today, instant answers might be their mobile phone or their PC: not many people would think first of the little plastic rectangles that fill their wallets and purses. And yet, since they first emerged in the late 1950s, credit cards and their kin have become part of the fabric of modern life. Bank credit is, for the first time in history, no longer the prerogative of the elite, and – maybe as a result – long-dormant religious and ethical issues about the use and abuse of money have been reborn in the face of this ultimate symbol of economic freedom for millions, as some would see it, or, for others, of triumphant Anglo-American consumer culture.

In the last two chapters, we examined sex and war. Now it is the turn of that third great constant of human affairs, money. Money has featured throughout this history, from the gold coins of the legendarily rich King Croesus of Lydia (
Chapter 25
), and the paper money of the first Ming emperor (
Chapter 72
), to the first world currency, the king of Spain’s silver pieces of eight (
Chapter 80
). Now it is the turn of the modern manifestation of money – plastic.

The modern credit card is an American creation, the successor to retail credit schemes pioneered in the early twentieth century. After the end of the Second World War, wartime restrictions on lending were lifted and the credit boom began. The first general-purpose charge card was the Diners Club card, introduced in 1950. In 1958 the next step came with the appearance of the first real credit card, issued by a bank and generally accepted by large numbers of businesses. This was the BankAmericard, ancestor of Visa, and the first universal credit card to be made of plastic. But only in the 1990s did credit cards become truly global, widespread beyond North America and the UK.

Of course, a credit card isn’t itself money – it is a physical object that provides a way of spending money, moving it and promising it. Money is now more likely to be numbers and digits on statements and invoices than physical coins and notes. None of us is ever likely to see most of our savings turned into actual cash, even in a bank vault. Credit and debit cards bring home to us daily the fact that money has now lost its essential materiality; money spent through them is always new, fresh and unused. It can be called up virtually anywhere in the world instantaneously, regardless of national boundaries. Where as all the coins or banknotes we have looked at so far had king and country marked on them, our card acknowledges no ruler or nation in its design and no limit to its reach, other than an expiry date. This new money is supranational, and it seems to have conquered the world. And yet even on credit cards the echo of traditional money remains: the card that is telling our story is keen to present itself as a Gold Card.

What the card does of course is to guarantee payment. A complete stranger can be confident that he will ultimately be paid. For Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, these cards are merely a new solution to an age-old problem:

As in all types of money or cards used to finance transactions, the acceptability, the trust which the other side of the transaction puts in it, is paramount. I could give a different example, which I think illustrates the importance of trust here: when Argentina had its financial collapse, and reneged on its national debt, in the 1990s, its currency became worthless, and in some of the villages of Argentina the use of IOUs as a substitute for paper currency started to grow up. But the problem with the IOU is that the U has to trust the I, and that may not always be the case. So what happened was that in the villages some people would take the IOU to the local priest and ask him to endorse it. Now here we have an example in terms of the use of religion that was not fundamentally about religion as such, but which was about enhancing the trust that people had in the instrument that was being used.

In the absence of a village priest with global reach to endorse our IOUs, we use credit cards which span the world.

This credit card, issued in the UAE, has both English and Arabic writing on it

This particular Gold Card is issued by the London-based bank called HSBC, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. It functions through the backing of the US-based credit association, VISA, and has on it writing in Arabic – it is in short connected to the whole world, part of a global financial system, backed by a complex electronic superstructure that many of us barely think about as we key in our PINs. All our credit-card transactions are tracked and recorded, building a huge dossier of our movements, writing our economic biographies on the other side of the world.

The scale of modern banks is far beyond anything previously known, and their global power now transcends national boundaries. As Mervyn King emphasizes:

The spread of a wide range of financial transactions, whether using cards used by international banks or the other services that they offer, has created institutions which are trans-national, which are bigger than the ability of national regulators to control, and which, if they do get into financial difficulties – fortunately not many have – can cause enormous financial mayhem.

In the past rulers could walk away from their debt and leave banks to collapse, but today, it is apparently more difficult to allow a bank to fail than it is to see a government fall.

Some aspects of a credit card need no describing. Every credit card in the world is of the same internationally agreed size and shape, to fit in all the ‘holes in the wall’ that now puncture our urban world. In one respect, cards are like traditional coins and banknotes. They have two sides, each holding important information. If you turn this card over, the back shows us a magnetic strip, part of the electronic verification system that allows us to move money around the world relatively securely and permits instant communication, instant transactions and instant gratification. Many cards now incorporate an even more sophisticated piece of electronics, a microchip. It is this microtechnology, one of the great global achievements of the last generation, that has made the worldwide credit card possible – and with it, the worldwide banks. This little black strip is the hero – or villain – of this chapter. All the rest is simply a consequence of it.