ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
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Lessons in decolonisation
Education is key to Indigenous progress in Bolivia, and the racist, US-backed white elite cannot turn the tide, writes GAVIN O’TOOLE
School lesson in Challa, a village on Isla del Sol, on the banks of Lake Titicaca
SUE TURNER welcomes a thoughtful, engaging book that lays bare the economic realities of global waste management
JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
MICK McSHANE rubs shoulders with Mod legend Steve Craddock and joins in with the joyous Glasgow choir
DENNIS BROE sifts out the ideological bias of the newest TV series offerings, and picks out what to see, and what to avoid
The Lettered Indian: Race, Nation, and Indigenous Education in Twentieth-Century Bolivia
by Brooke Larson
Duke University Press, £25.99
THE US-backed right-wing coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia in 2019 and the violent turmoil fanned by the white elite that both predated and followed it demonstrated above all else that, for this country’s Indigenous majority, there is much unfinished business.
Jeanine Anez, the usurper who, with the support of the military, all but installed herself — now jailed for her political crimes and facing genocide charges — epitomises the racism at the heart of the imperial legacy, wont as she is to describe Bolivia’s Indigenous majority as “savages.”
No matter where you stand on mistakes made by Morales’s Movement for Socialism (MAS), to a large extent the coup represented a white, racist reaction to the prospect of the country’s first Indigenous president of Bolivia remaining in power after 13 years.
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