This past week, while US President Obama conducted a state visit to Jamaica, so too passed the 150^th anniversary of the final battle of his nation’s Civil War. As the topics of Jamaica’s modern challenges and the two countries’ intertwined histories of slavery converge, the OXO Tower’s current exhibition, Jamaica: Hidden Histories, seems all too pertinent.

With the photography of Sir H. H. Johnston, the exhibition presents the conditions of rural Jamaican life with such a wonderful rawness as to have seemingly lost nothing in that risky transition between the scene and the lens.

Even after the 1833 abolition of slavery, the island’s black population remained in a state of abject poverty with an almost-complete reliance on their former masters for work. Only with the sterling work of cooperating labour movements, trade unions, and exemplary public figures such as Norman Manley would the exploitation of international corporations be curbed to instead bring some actual benefits for the island’s citizens. With the political stagnation of the post-independence 1970s and the consistent economic decline since then, however, such benefits have largely been futile.

For a time, the idea of a sovereign West Indies Federation – one which unified the islands of the Caribbean in a way the colonial powers always feared and sought to prevent – seemed an appealing one, but the craving for national independence around 1962 overwhelmed the dream of a new commonwealth. 

This independence brought with it a reassertion of Jamaican values and practices, from art and language to music and dress. These were championed abroad as well as at home, from the Bronx to Battersea, and the Jamaican influence in these metropolises is detailed at the exhibition in its full vibrancy and passion. 

Through global fame in reggae and cricket, Jamaica was able to present itself in the way it should have been able to decades previously when Caribbean migrants aboard the SS Empire Windrush were brought in to help rebuild post-War Britain. Bob Marley was extremely popular, and the West Indies cricket team in 1963 beating their former colonial masters at their own game, from Old Trafford to The Oval, dismantled any residual claims to the legitimacy of white superiority.

Yet with Marley’s death long ago, the glory days of Caribbean cricket fading now to a memory, and the current critical condition of Jamaica’s economy, it would appear that there would be more cause to look back to better times than forward. Rather than dwell in the past, however, Hidden Histories presents it to us not merely as a collection of artefacts but as a repository of rich materials from which an equally strong future can be built.

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Hidden Histories runs until the 17^th of May at Oxo Tower Wharf, Bargehouse Street, South Bank, London, SE1 9PH. Open from 11:00am – 6:00pm. Admission is free.

If ever an army could claim to possess ‘strength in numbers’, it was the Iraqi security force in June 2014. The Americans’ strategy for rebuilding the Iraqi army, after its near instantaneous dismantlement in 2003, displayed great faith in the power of big numbers to resolve a tricky situation: by the time they withdrew in 2011 they had spent £25 billion on the creation of a million man army to keep the country stable. Yet when in June 2014 the fifty thousand man garrison of Mosul found themselves besieged by thirteen hundred Islamic State militants, they were as quick to rout as Saddam’s forces in 2003. Their doing so, at the time, made no sense. It seemed like an anti-miracle: an event too fantastically dreadful to be explicable. 

The purpose of Patrick Cockburn’s book, The Rise of Islamic State, is to make sense of this catastrophe as the product of American blunders, Iraqi prejudices, and the calamitous geopolitical situation in the Middle East generally. One might think his strident belief that America is partially culpable for the rise of ISIS would blur his account of it with polemic. But Cockburn’s style is not that of the highfaluting rhetorician; his prose consists almost entirely of the sober accumulation of hard facts, and these do not cast a favourable light on Washington. ‘Big numbers will solve everything’ wasn’t the only article of faith the Americans mistakenly held – big corporations too, it was insisted, should sell supplies to Iraqi commanders instead of the government giving them to them. By making Iraqi commanders responsible for purchasing their own soldiers’ supplies, Washington accidentally provided them with the opportunity to profiteer on a major scale. He writes:

“It started when the Americans told the Iraqi army to outsource food and other supplies around 2005. A battalion commander was paid for a unit of 600 soldiers, but had only 200 men under arms and pocketed the difference.”

This kleptocracy was driven by need as well as desire: until very recently officers had to pay for their commissions, the cost of which they then had to recuperate. No matter how assiduously Obama tries to disassociate ISIS from Islam, this book makes clear that the war against it was caused by faith – his own government’s faith in the private sector. Cockburn doesn’t let off the Americans easily: in his view this failing was just one of many within a disastrous foreign policy, which has stage managed the situation in Iraq to create a farce, and then a tragedy. For instance, he incorporates into the book an interview with a jihadist who rejoiced when the Americans armed the ‘moderates’ in Syria because his war band was immediately able to buy or steal them.

The attempt to write a history of the present is one especially likely to be thwarted by its author’s subjectivity, yet throughout his book Cockburn maintains a near magisterial perspective, identifying the blind spots in the Western media’s portrayal of the rise of ISIS as cogently as he provides own view. He writes that:

“[In the summer of 2014] there was an excessive focus by the media on the actions of Western governments as the prime mover of events. This was accompanied by an inadequate understanding of the significance of developments on the ground in Iraq and Syria as the force really driving the crisis.”

It is perfectly understandable why Western governments would comfort themselves with this solipsistic fiction given how rapidly the situation evolved in the second half of 2014. The best evidence for the success of Cockburn’s account of ISIS’s evolution is that his argument has not itself been made obsolete by the rapid changes in the Middle East since its publication. The Western media is still solipsistic, and this is best borne out by the recently concluded siege of Kobane. A battle of little strategic importance, it was portrayed to be crucial not only because, unlike most of the fighting, it could be easily reported on by Western journalists, but because it provided hard, if misleading evidence, of the effectiveness of coalition airstrikes. The avidity with which the media reported on the fighting made the eventually Kurdish victory seem momentous. It was not, and the media saw in it what it wanted to see.

That a book so hastily written could also be so prescient shows that Cockburn is one of our sanest and most disenchanted foreign correspondents writing about the Middle East today. I started his book because I didn’t trust the news, and I finished it wishing I could, wishing Cockburn was wrong about the West’s part in the creation of Islamic State. 

Doppelgängers – urban legend or scientific phenomenon? Last week, a Dublin University student, Niamh Geaney, found her own ‘double’, Karen Branigan, on Facebook following a challenge she and her friends set themselves to find their twin strangers from anywhere in the world. The resemblance between the two women is uncanny, and Niamh reportedly found Karen, whom she says looks “closer than some of my sisters”, in just two weeks. While in a video posted on YouTube they appear thrilled to have discovered each other, in the past, encounters with one’s ghostly double have been seen as a bad omen and often associated with ill fortune or death.

While the idea of Trinity conjures up dreams of permanent sunshine, the English summer would have it otherwise. Rainy days spent in Oxford’s theatres instead may prove to be the more viable option, with a range of brilliant new events through which to escape when necessary:

Living Together at The Oxford Playhouse – Olivier and Tony Award-winning playwright Alan Ayckbourn’s Living Together runs in 2nd Week (Wednesday 6th to Saturday 9th May) as the main piece of student drama at the Playhouse this season. The chaos of family and one man’s attempts at reconciling its ever-fraying ties are explored in this pithy comedy, which is not to be missed.

Mess at The North Wall – Thursday of 4th week (21st May) brings Caroline Horton’s newest play Mess to The North Wall Arts Centre in Summertown. The group won the 2012 Stage Award Winner for Best Ensemble and this latest piece, in association with the UK’s Eating Disorder Charity Beat, has garnered rave reviews all round. Anorexia and addiction are big themes to confront in a three person play but so are staples of the everyday, like getting out of bed. It is through observing the presence of these big themes within small actions that the company poignantly tackles what has previously often been treated as a taboo topic in this brilliant tragi-comedy.

Richard Alston Dance Company at The Oxford Playhouse – One of Britain’s foremost choreographers brings his company to Oxford in 5th Week (Tuesday 26th and Wednesday 27th May). The company celebrated its 20th anniversary last year and its founder Richard Alston is a stalwart of British dance, known for his lyrical pieces centered around music. The set being brought to the Playhouse is no different, taking three pieces by the British composer Benjamin Britten and the words of the poets Christopher Smart, Friedrich Hölderlin and Arthur Rimbaud as their inspiration. The corresponding pieces move through the energetic religious fervour of ‘Rejoice in the Lamb’ and the vivid images of Rimbaud’s Illuminations. A free pre-show talk being offered at the Playhouse on Tuesday offers the rare chance to hear insights from Alston himself about his 45-year career in the British dance scene and looks to be a fantastic event.

The Oxford Revue and Friends at The Oxford Playhouse – The Revue is collaborating with the Cambridge Footlights and The Leeds Tealights to bring you a fun-filled finale to their year’s work in 6th week (Saturday 6th June). Having already had a sell-out success last year, this is an event to indulge in before the stress of exams pervades and all your friends seem to disappear into the aether.