On a wet Saturday afternoon outside the Malawi High Commission in Hampstead, north London, about 250 people gathered in support of Steven Monjeza and Tiwonge Chimbalanga, a Malawian couple sentenced to 14 years for being in love.
The chants included: '2 4 6 8 spread the love not the have. 3 5 7 9 they should not be doing time.' 'True love is not a crime, why should they be doing time?' and "we are standing in the rain cause homophobia is a pain."
As we got home we learned that they had been pardoned by the Malawian president. Not that there should be anything to pardon.
More pictures are available on my flickr account here. Several of these pictures were used in this youtube video
Last night I attended a lecture by local historian Stephen Humphrey who discussed the general history of the Elephant & Castle, focussing more particularly on what he called its heyday (between 1850 and 1940). This is part of a week-long art project ( The Elephant Project ) hosted in an empty unit on the first floor of the infamous shopping centre, aiming to chart some of the changes currently happening to the area. When an historian starts talking about the Elephant and Castle, there is one subject he can not possibly avoid, even if he wanted to. Indeed my unsuspecting announcement on Facebook that I was attending such talk prompted a few people to ask the dreaded question: Where does the name of the area come from, for realz? Panoramic view of the Elephant and Castle around 1960/61. Those of us less badly informed than the rest have long discarded the theory that the name comes from the linguistic deformation of "Infanta de Castille", a name which would have become at...
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