Republic or Death! (43 page)

*

When I first heard about the Swiss contest, I thought it was a fantastic idea. Here was a country getting rid of an unloved anthem for once, rather than miserably holding on to it and quietly hoping a revolution would come along to force a change. I also admired its desire to modernise the anthem, to in effect create the first for the twenty-first century – one that is not so much about a country, but about its people's values. If the organisers were successful, they would end up with a song that couldn't be dismissed by anyone as just banal nationalism. Who could argue against an anthem that called on people to be tolerant and to care about their environment, rather than telling them the scenery outside their window is nice or that God is watching over them?

The problem was, the more I thought about it, the more I realised that Switzerland had next to no chance of producing a decent anthem this way. The world's greatest anthems weren't chosen through competitions or written by committee; they emerged by accident. They were composed on the spur of the moment, in a single night or over a few exhausting days, written by people panicking that their country was about to be overrun, or breathless with excitement at having seen the last of some long-despised regime. It's exactly because they're written at such times that they have melodies that crawl into your gut and words so vivid you're almost afraid of singing them. That's why people always come back to the best anthems, whether they are Brazilians throwing Molotov cocktails while protesting against bus prices or Tunisians kick-starting the Arab Spring. It's much harder to conjure such passions when you're writing to a deadline or trying to make a song comply point by point with a set of rules.

(Yes, some of my favourites – like Nepal's – were written for competitions, as were other much-loved anthems like Turkey's, but even those were written at critical times in those countries' histories; moments that could inspire anyone. They weren't written during any ordinary year.)

The other nagging problem I started to have with Switzerland's quest was the very thing that had made it so appealing in the first place: that focus on values and that desire to write an anthem open to the world rather than closed off from it. I'm just not convinced that people actually enjoy singing about the values they hold. In every country I travelled to for this book, I asked people to sing their anthem, and the place people enjoyed doing so most was the one where the anthem was most anachronistic: France. ‘La Marseillaise' waits six whole verses before talking about France's cherished
liberté
; another three before mentioning
égalité
.
Fraternité
doesn't even get a look-in. You could argue they simply enjoyed singing it because the tune is fantastic, but that music demands the words it has – a melody as aggressive as ‘La Marseillaise' wouldn't work if it had, say, the words to Swaziland's anthem over it, everyone praying to God ‘to grant us eternal wisdom without deceit or malice'.

There has been one previous attempt to write a modern anthem. In 1971, U Thant, then Secretary General of the United Nations, asked W. H. Auden to compose one for the organisation's twenty-fifth anniversary, saying the world had enough war songs already. ‘Let music for peace / be the paradigm,' it goes.

For peace means to change

at the right time,

as the world clock,

goes tick and tock.

It was performed at the anniversary celebrations. It wasn't brought out again twenty-five years later.

*

When I started this book, I set out to find out if anthems were important – even I-M-P-O-R-T-A-N-T at that. I wanted to know if they really had been at the centre of global events, wars and revolutions, to discover if protestors were managing to hold back police just by singing them and, likewise, if police were keeping people in jail just for playing with their words. But deep down I feared that what I'd actually discover was that anthems are meaningless – sung solely through force of habit by bored schoolchildren and drunken sports fans – and that the only function they now serve is to gently remind the forgetful of where they were born. I worried that if that were the case this book would end up simply as a collection of anecdotes with a title like
The Wacky World of Anthems
. It would be filled with fascinating but ultimately inconsequential facts, such as that Greece's anthem is based on a 158-verse poem (luckily for every Greek, its government only adopted two of them for the official version).

The highlight of that book would have been a few pages outlining the (admittedly brilliant) story behind Mexico's anthem – the only one written out of lust. In 1853, Mexico's government launched a contest for words for a new anthem and a woman called Guadalupe González del Pino begged her poet fiancé, Francisco González Bocanegra, to enter. He, however, didn't fancy it – perhaps he was afraid his poems weren't good enough, or perhaps he just wasn't very patriotic – so one day she is meant to have taken him to her parents' house, whispered suggestively in his ear at the kitchen table and dragged him to a bedroom. The couple paused at the door, Pili – as she was known – pulling Francisco close for a kiss and beginning to untuck his shirt. But just as he was about to grab her dress, she kicked him inside, slammed the door and bolted it shut. Francisco looked up to find himself in a room covered with paintings of Mexican military victories, piles of dead Spaniards everywhere. Pili shouted through the wood that he wouldn't be let out until he had written an anthem, and stomped off. Francisco sullenly slipped ten verses under the door four hours later.

As entertaining as such stories are, I feared that if they were all I could find to talk about, I would be forced to conclude that anthems aren't important at all, merely curiosities that should be filed away in museums' sound archives along with the half-remembered speeches of dead politicians and old television theme tunes.

But gradually, as I travelled from place to place, that fear lifted. The more I looked into these songs, the more I realised just how much they still say about countries – their characters, their history, their politics – and also just what an impact they've had. Armies
have
fought wars while singing these songs. Protestors
have
used them to help bring down governments. Some of the most important figures in recent history have toyed with them in an effort to manipulate voters, while others have tried using them to heal bitter divides. For a good few hundred years, they have either been at the centre of world events or reflecting them in ways you wouldn't believe minute-long songs could.

But I don't think it's that which really drove home the importance of anthems to me; instead, it was learning the personal impact they have had. These are songs that have ruined some people's lives, weighing families and communities down like the worst of tragedies. You only have to go to Japan or Bosnia to realise that. But they have also inspired people, made them dream about what their countries could be – should be, in fact – encouraging them to take stands and risks I could never take myself, or just to work harder and treat their neighbours a little better. Just think of Paraguay's anthem, or even South Africa's. It's not just hard-core nationalists who find worth in these songs either – your stereotypical flag-waving bigots with their allegiance literally tattooed on their chests – it's everyone from teachers to heroin addicts to the most arrogant of rappers. And when I saw all the ways these songs have influenced individuals I had to decide, with a little relief, that, yes, anthems are a little bit I-M-P-O-R-T-A-N-T after all.

This doesn't mean I've become an evangelist for them and that I think people should stand and bellow them at every opportunity. Far from it. I still think my own is ludicrous. If you asked me to sing ‘God Save the Queen' right now, I would probably just laugh, a little embarrassed, search though my pockets as if my phone had started ringing, then run out of the room. But I do think we should be taking these songs a bit more seriously: asking if they are what we want to represent us after all. I don't mean that just lyrically; most of the world's countries really need to ask why their anthems sound so much like Anglican hymns and nothing like the music you hear in their streets.

I admit that asking people to do that might be going a bit far, so perhaps I should set my sights on something smaller instead and ask people to just give some more thought to the men and women who have written anthems, because for songs that are so ever-present – played every day in schools, in sports stadiums and on TV and radio, used as shorthand to represent countries, joked about and mocked, celebrated and praised – it is perverse how unknown the poets and musicians who have written them are. These are people who have tried to give their countries songs of hope and ambition, love and devotion, and in return most have just got a road named after them, normally hidden away on some industrial estate, the street sign rusting, litter piling up below it. Some anthem composers are among the most thoughtful and fun people you could come across; others so dubious I would advise you never go near them. But all deserve more than they have got. And, who knows, if the composers were celebrated, perhaps countries would get better entries the next time they run a competition to change their own.

*

It's January 2015 when I find a letter from Switzerland sitting in my hallway. ‘
Monsieur
,' it begins, ‘in the name of the Swiss Society for Public Good, I want to profoundly thank you for participating in the project to create a new Swiss anthem.' I can hear the ‘unfortunately' coming with every word. Yes, there it is: ‘Unfortunately, your contribution could not be taken forward.' Bugger, I think. There goes my shot at 10,000 Swiss francs and the chance of having a road named after me in a Zurich business park. But as I keep reading, another sentence catches my eye. ‘Despite our decision, we wish to encourage you to carry on pursuing your artistic activity and utilise, if possible, your effort in another manner.' Hang on. Doesn't that mean they think my song could be anthem material after all? That it might not be good enough for Switzerland, but with a little tweaking, a line changed here, a different adjective there, it could be perfect for someone else? There'll surely be some new countries popping up soon. Catalonia, Darfur, Wallonia, perhaps. Maybe I can give it to one of them.

You have your wars.

You have your blood.

But we're the Walloons.

We are the Walloons!

That has a certain ring to it. Right?

An almost overwhelming number of people helped me write this and, if I had space, I would thank everyone I met or spoke to over the years researching it, from those who gave hours of their time to tell me the stories of these songs to those who just gleefully sung me their anthem after I cornered them in the street (then ran away in case I tried to get them to do anything else). But clearly I owe the biggest thanks to the people who wrote these songs – the poets and composers – for making anthems so intriguing that I wanted to investigate them in the first place. I am grateful to every one of those people that I met, as well as to their families and descendants.

I should also apologise to those I spoke to, but was unable to fit in to the final book: Kenrick Georges, who wrote and composed Saint Kitts & Nevis's ‘O Land of Beauty!'; Jean-Georges Prosper, who wrote the words to Mauritius's ‘Motherland'; Henri Lopès, who wrote the words to ‘Les Trois Glorieuses', the anthem of the People's Republic of Congo from 1970 to 1991; Pa Benedict Odiase who wrote the music for Nigeria's ‘Arise, O Compatriots' and sadly passed away in 2013; Sota Omoigui who co-wrote the words to Nigeria's anthem; and Mido Samuel who helped write ‘South Sudan Oyee!', and spoke to me in pitch darkness a few days before his country gained its independence, as he had no electricity. You all played a huge part in my thinking.

I also owe enormous thanks to my sister, Jenny, and to Peter Robins, who happily read every chapter of this book even when it looked like it'd be nothing but a vanity project; and to Dominic Curran, although he was lucky enough to get away with only reading about a quarter of it. They all gave fantastic suggestions and dealt with a stream of annoying queries, although I owe them most simply for their encouragement without which I would never have got to the end.

I'm grateful to all my friends and family for their encouragement too, especially those – Kensuke Takaoka! – who ended up acting like a hotel, translation and problem-solving service, somehow without complaint. Thanks to Alex and Claire Whittaker, Tom and Ele Perkin-Brown, Paul and Caroline Hailey, Tricia Mundy, Ed Yong and everyone else from Pembroke, Ben Musgrave, Mark Willingham, Anthony Dhanendran, Seb Skeaping and the rest of the City journalists, Simon Evans, Francois Le Goff and Margaret Curran for their help with the Swiss anthem entry, and Alan and Tricia Marshall who for some reason let me steal their lives for the Nepal chapter.

Some people went out of their way to help me in each of the countries I visited, especially the many interpreters who worked for me seemingly more because they were interested in the subject than for any other reason. I would recommend the following to anyone: Dragan Markovic in Bosnia; Miki Wada, Izumi Kano Guisando and Yukiko Sadaoka in Japan; Artur Lyubanskiy in Kazakhstan; Ram Tiwari in Nepal; Aldo López, Silvia Terol and Silvia Sánchez di Martino in Paraguay; and Mariana Giménez and Frederico Casal in Uruguay. Other people I am particularly indebted to include Chika Yoshida at the Foreign Press Centre in Tokyo for securing so many interviews; Aleck Skeie for his help in Sera; the Nashville Sounds for letting me audition; and Ati Metwaly and Reem Kelani for so many contacts in Egypt.

I am also, of course, indebted to my agent, Jon Elek at United Agents, for seeing the strength of this idea in the first place, and to my editor, Harry Scoble-Rees, and everyone else at Random House Books, for doing so not long afterwards and then working so hard on it. I also owe Harry enormously for all his suggestions that have much improved the book, for his enthusiasm and, probably most of all, for not insisting I went to the Islamic State to give that chapter more of a travel narrative!