Correspondents' Correspondence THOMAS LAND & RUSSELL WARREN HOWE
ARTICLE
Correspondents' Correspondence BRIEF TAKEOUTS OF MORE THAN PERSONAL INTEREST FROM LETTERS AND OTHER COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED BY THE EDITORS. Gypsies' Hard Road Salgotarjan, Hungary-The...
...The national press calls him Janos Balazs, and hails him as Hungary's first important Gypsy artist...
...They expose the poverty in my house...
...Thomas Land Unrest in Nigeria Lagos-General Yakubu Go-won's junta has responded to its growing unpopularity by increasing the Armed Forces to 250,000 men, 25 per cent larger than they were during the civil war...
...At Dodan Barracks, where he is sheltered from the subsurface unrest, Gowon tends to be concerned about a palace revolt...
...The enormous publicity he has been receiving in recent months has already made him stop painting, at least until the clamor dies down, and turn to poetry...
...In Jeune Afrique, French Africa's main weekly, Wolf described at length Nigeria's rampant bribery, particularly the exactions forced on African ambassadors in Lagos...
...But there is nothing romantic about being a Gypsy in Hungary...
...I get so many visitors...
...He found highway robbery reminiscent of medieval Ethiopia, but on a grander scale, with soldiers and policemen??or civilians disguised as such??collecting road tolls...
...If my paintings really mean so much to other people, that is because I am honest as a painter...
...Its chief organization, the Nigerian Trade Union Congress, receives training and aid from the American AFL-CIO to counter the attentions of Moscow, yet its younger leaders seem more responsive to China...
...In addition, Gowon periodically reshuffles the military governors who serve as the virtual Gauleiters of the federation's 12 "states"??divisions adopted one day at the Officers' Club, without benefit of parliamentary vote or the constitutionally required referenda...
...Thus it is generally assumed that the coup will be of the Cromwellian variety, led by those purist lieutenants still honest enough to be living no better than physicians...
...And if the coup leader happens to be a Muslim, his model will probably be Libya's Muammar el-Quaddafi.- Russell Warren Howe...
...As a result, the market women??who could make or break any democratically elected regime??are restive...
...Though he finally consented to a brief show in the club rooms of the local Hall of Culture, he declined to attend...
...Since the old parties have lost most of their influence, the frustrated and persecuted labor movement has emerged as the nation's most powerful civilian political force...
...The rest do odd jobs for the [agricultural] cooperatives, weed between the railway tracks, clean the streets, catch stray dogs, clean latrines, wash tripe for the butcher and gather medical herbs...
...In the harsh words of the New Hungarian Quarterly, a literary and political journal published in the capital, the existence of the Gypsies "in a miniature form begins to resemble that of the American Negro...
...Clad in brown, baggy clothes, he truly looks like the magical elves of Central European folklore...
...Gowon recently admitted Jean Wolf, a Paris journalist who had been editing Nigeria's official French-language handout, along with a sympathetic London Observer correspondent...
...They complain that the country's new oil revenues are being consumed not only by the high military budget but by the equally high lifestyle of middle and upper echelon officers...
...This country has given me nothing...
...For all the immense passion and power of his paintings, Uncle Janos is a short, fragile man of 67 with small, alert dark eyes, wispy white hair, a toothless smile, and long fingers tapering to clawlike nails...
...weaving sedge and cane into breadbaskets, bowls and doormats??are no longer needed...
...Nonetheless, the present regime is expected to fall as soon as military power divides on classic coup d'etat lines...
...Despite a history of domestic repression, the Nazi extermination campaign, and paternalist government pressure to settle down and integrate, the Gypsy caravans can still be seen winding their way through the mountains...
...Only 1.5 per cent of all working Gypsies are skilled," writes one specialist...
...I cannot work any longer," Uncle Janos told me...
...Many intellectuals are calling for amended school curricula and specialist teachers, as well as for Gypsy newspapers, films and radio programs...
...Yet to those who live in the miserable mud huts of the Gypsy camp high above Salgotarjan, a city of some 35,000 people near the Czechoslovakian border, Uncle Janos' new fame is little more than a nuisance...
...Janos started painting only three years ago, when several children, the first from this settlement to attend primary school, brought home paints and brushes...
...Both wrote highly critical reports...
...Hundreds of thousands of citizens are said to have bought hand guns from soldiers, and stormy Ibadan University is reputed to be capable of resisting a military siege...
...No, I am not interested in politics...
...He has bun-deled off to London General Hassan Katsina, the powerful Fulani aristocrat who was his chief of staff, and Colonel Ben Adekunle, the Ibo-baiting southerner who won notoriety for bullying unarmed prisoners during the Biafran conflict...
...After a year of experimentation, however, his work exploded in vibrant colors and fantastic figures??a unique combination of exuberance and menace that startled the critics...
...repairing umbrellas and rifles...
...As was the practice in the Congo in 1960, embassies urge their nationals not to stop at night for what appear to be official roadblocks...
...They drag my paintings out to take photographs...
...The Army, stressing the corrupt irresponsibility of pre-1966 civilian regimes, has threatened to rule until 1976...
...Anxious to protect its image abroad and paranoiac in its hatred of its West African neighbors, the junta restricts foreign press visits almost exclusively to newsmen based outside the continent, and even then visas are slow...
...They do not work, even when there is an opportunity, they do not go to school, they do not adapt to the customs and culture of their environment, and at the same time their numbers are increasing rapidly and they are beginning to demand their rights...
...His account of that city's chaotic port would seem excessive in a work of fiction...
...Some here have even begun to look to Uncle Janos as a political spokesman...
...I would not be honest to pretend I am a politician...
...Since set working hours and quotas are unfamiliar concepts for them, they mostly fail at their work...
...making whitewashing brushes from grass, and bricks from adobe...
...How would I fit into a committee meeting...
...The Nigerian pound, officially valued at $3, sells for slightly over a dollar in Dahomey...
...Nigeria has always been the continent's most exuberantly venal republic...
...now, with oil money pouring in and a consumer market of 70 million people attracting heavy investment, the temptation among the educated to loot the nation has evidently become irresistible...
...But the deep-seated prejudice and hostility of the peasants undermines such programs for Gypsy assimilation...
...The government has been making commendable efforts to lift the Gypsies out of poverty and into the mainstream of Hungarian life by making available considerable funds for housing and job training...
...The industries that have traditionally sustained them??crafting household implements and trinkets...
...But he wants no part of it...
...Although fearful of Gowon's harsh measures against critics, unhappy Nigerians privately accuse the authorities of accelerating the bureaucratic inefficiency, fiscal extravagance and widespread corruption that were the alleged causes for the 1966 coup, as well as stimulating tribalism in what was already Africa's most ethnically divided territory...
...Nonetheless, Hungary's wandering Gypsies may have reached the end of their road...
...It is genuinely difficult for military ex-ministers to survive under civilian restorations in Africa, where??except for Dahomey ??the Latin American custom of subsidized exile in neighboring states remains underdeveloped...
...He just wants to be left alone...
...Hungary's Gypsy minority is the largest in the world, estimated by various sources at 200-400 thousand, or 2-4 per cent of the total population...
...In fact, lately there has been increasing public pressure on the administration to abandon its paternalistic policies and allow this minority to retain its singular culture...
...Let it sort out its own problems without me...
...Gypsies' Hard Road Salgotarjan, Hungary-The authorities would have liked to mount a major one-man exhibition for Uncle Janos' paintings at the National Gallery in Budapest, but the old Gypsy refused to cooperate...
...In Ibadan, the three top police officers were recently convicted of organizing bank robberies...
...Since the day a Salgotarjan artist "slumming" on the mountainside noticed a large canvas drying in the sun, hordes of journalists and art lovers have invaded this hitherto neglected Gypsy community...
...I am a lone man," he said, "and I don't want to take on new ties now...
...Originally thought to be of Egyptian descent, the Gypsies actually migrated from India, arriving here in the 15th century??only 500 years after the Hungarians, themselves an Asiatic people...
...few here doubt that, given the chance, the junta would prolong its mandate even further...
...The cost of living has more than doubled in three years, thus widening the gap between the rich, who live much better than any colonial, and the poor, who are considerably worse off than in the '50s...
...Using bedsheets, old shirts and rags as canvases, he initially produced childlike, rather stiff portraits and landscapes...
...Nigeria's next government, moreover, will almost certainly be military, ascetic, vengeful, Left-wing, oriented toward workers and peasants, and antiwhite...
...Civilian commissioners are disgruntled by their powerless-ness...
...at the street and village level, the populace is clearly disgusted with the brutal, dishonest tactics of the undisciplined soldiery, overwhelmingly backwoodsmen...
Vol. 55 • March 1972 • No. 6
