The World

* Kenyatta died in 1978 aged eighty-four, leaving his family one of the richest in Kenya, but his sons were too young to succeed him. He selected a henchman, Daniel Arap Moi, who ruled for twenty years. Kenyatta’s son Uhuru served as president from 2013 to 2022 – another African dynast in a flawed but functioning democracy.

* That week, a British art and drama student and singer-songwriter from Brixton named David Bowie (né Jones) released a song, ‘Space Oddity’, that told the story of a stranded astronaut, Major Tom, who orbited earth forever. Fascinated by space travel, Bowie – a figure of cadaverous beauty and vampirical glamour – now chronicled the messianic strangeness of fame in the age of mass consumerism in his album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. His only equal as a songwriter and showman was his contemporary, also a working-class Londoner, Elton John (né Reggie Dwight), who also chronicled the space world in his ‘Rocketman’ and whose masterwork ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ expanded what was meant by pop music. Their fusion of theatre, fashion and music showed that rock was becoming the dynamic wing of art, while their exploration of sexual androgyny (both caused much shock by admitting to being bisexual), exotic hedonism and their near destruction through cocaine addiction marked the end of the utopian Sixties and the dawn of the darkening Seventies. But it was the Rolling Stones, whose ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ – the best history song of all time – confronted the Age of Aquarius with the satanic forces of history. The Sixties unofficially died on 6 December at the Stones concert at Altmont, California, when a fan was stabbed to death by marauding Hells Angel security. But the Stones survived it all and played to vast stadiums for the next fifty years.

* Pakistan smarted from the disaster, its president ceding power to its dynamic foreign minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, a socialist heir to 250,000 feudal acres in the family power base Sindh, educated at Oxford and Berkeley. Two weeks after taking office he summoned Pakistani scientists: ‘We’re going to have the Bomb. How long will it take?’ But Indira Gandhi was pursuing the Bomb too. Aided by the Soviets, in 1974 she tested an Indian device that, feared Bhutto, would establish Indian ‘hegemony in the subcontinent’. He accelerated the Pakistani project, promoting a young scientist, A. Q. Khan, who started to buy plans and equipment for an Islamic Bomb. ‘Christian, Jewish and Hindu civilizations have this capability,’ said Bhutto. ‘Islamic civilization is without it.’ He tried to combine Pakistan’s different sides. ‘Islam is our faith, democracy our policy,’ he declared, ‘socialism our economy.’ But he was overshadowed by a military which regarded itself as the guardian of the precarious state. In the east, the founding leader of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, nicknamed Bangabandhu (Friend of Bengal), ruled the new state until his assassination in 1975; he founded a dynasty – his daughter Sheikh Hasini ruled autocratically into the 2020s.

Houses of Solomon and Bush, Bourbon, Pahlavi and Castro

WILD BEASTS AND LIONS: THE ASSADS OF DAMASCUS

On 6 October 1973, Yom Kippur – holiest day in the Jewish calendar – Egyptian and Syrian troops attacked Israel across the Suez and Golan, taking the Israelis by surprise, despite warnings from their agent in the Egyptian president’s office.^* Two new leaders, in Egypt and Syria, had changed the Arab response to Israel: one would prove a peacemaker of courage and pay for it with his life; the other founded a gangster dynasty that would cost his country the lives of many.

The change of the guard had started with the biggest funeral in world history. On 28 September 1970, Nasser, only fifty-two, died of a heart attack with his vice-president and fellow Free Officer Anwar Sadat at his bedside. As over ten million Egyptians mourned him, King Hussein sobbed for the man who had almost killed him, but he was himself fighting for survival against the PLO under Arafat, who tried to kill him and convert Jordan into its base. Hussein was aided by Israel, Arafat by Syria, until a ceasefire was brokered by Nasser.

There had only been one Nasser, but there were several pretenders to his throne. The new contenders paraded their credentials at the funeral. The first mourner, sobbing ostentatiously, was the twenty-nine-year-old Lieutenant Muammar Qaddafi, a good-looking Libyan Bedouin who had been trained in Britain, where he played football in Hyde Park and promenaded down Piccadilly in Arab robes. He had worshipped Nasser and founded his own Free Officers, who in 1969 deposed King Idris. Promoting himself to colonel and president, Qaddafi rushed to Cairo. ‘A nice boy,’ Nasser had thought, ‘but terribly naive.’ He was much worse than naive.^*