Spring Special

The Industrial Revolution was one of the main drivers of social and economic change in England in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Rapid urbanization and industrialization led to an explosion in city populations, which, in turn, resulted in increased crime rates and social unrest.

The legal system at that time was characterized by harsh punishments, even for relatively minor offenses. The so-called Bloody Code prescribed the death penalty for many, let’s call them venial crimes, which made the public and politicians increasingly uncomfortable. At the same time, prisons were terribly overcrowded and conditions were desolate, to say the least. And sending convicts to penal colonies like Australia—a once popular alternative—was seen as too excessive and expensive.

In response to these shortcomings, the Criminal Law Act of 1827 was introduced. The law allowed judges to show mercy and, for example, issue suspended sentences. This was significant because it marked a shift towards a more lenient approach in the justice system. By suspending sentences, judges could give offenders the opportunity to rehabilitate without immediate imprisonment.

Suspended sentences have remained a common feature of criminal justice systems in many countries. They are often used in conjunction with probation and other forms of community supervision.

Despite the introduction of suspended sentences, the English justice system is not beyond all doubt. In 1978, for example, John Cooper Clarke, often dubbed the “punk poet,” created a sharp social commentary challenging themes of crime, punishment and the judicial system. 

“They'd hang you for incontinence and fiddling your tax; failure to hang yourself justified the axe,” he notes at one point in “Suspended Sentence”, a tongue-in-cheek song featuring Cooper Clarke’s typical spoken word-style lyrics that are augmented by a good portion of dark humor and irony.

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Although clouds seem to be as light as feathers, a typical fair-weather specimen can weigh something between one and two million pounds (500 to 1,000 tons). This weight is due to the large amount of water droplets that constitute the cloud.

Think about this the next time you see clouds moving on [sic] the sky. And make sure to turn on today’s song while watching the big fluffs. The listening experience, and the life story of the woman who composed the song, is just as sensational as the thought of millions of pounds floating above your head.

The creator of the song is Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, an Ethiopian woman who got to be known as the piano-playing nun. Born in 1923, Gebru was an acclaimed musician in her youth. At one point she even performed for Emperor Haile Selassie. However, Gebru’s life changed dramatically after she wasn’t allowed to study at the Royal Academy of Music in London under mysterious circumstances. 

She gave up music and for the next decade, she lived a secluded life in a hilltop monastery. After her new home had to close due to the patriarch's death, she returned to her family in Addis Ababa and gradually resumed playing the piano, composing idiosyncratic pieces that are equally influenced by ancient Ethiopian music and Western classical music. In the 1980s, Gebru fled Ethiopia due to the persecution of her religion under the dictatorship of Mengistu Haile Mariam. She relocated to Jerusalem, where she lived and worked—as the first woman—for the Ethiopian Orthodox Patriarchy until her death in 2023. 

Before her passing, Gebru focused on publishing her work, editing bags full of manuscripts with the help of musician Maya Dunietz. Her debut vocal album Souvenirs, recorded between 1977 and 1985, was released in early 2024. It opens with today’s song—the beautiful and somehow feather-light “Clouds Moving on the Sky”.

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As of 2023, the country of South Africa finds itself 269.75 billion U.S. dollars in debt and is projected to rack up even higher red numbers in the coming years. No wonder, then, that Tzaneen-born artist Dr. Skaro’s motivation behind the feel-good track “Akena Selo” is to encourage listeners to persevere in the face of financial hardship.

While many factors contribute to South Africa’s current financial troubles, the energy crisis is one of its most telling examples: Traffic lights, phone lines and anything else running on electricity is rendered unusable to the population for several hours each day due to systematic shut-downs of the power network. Ironically, this so-called load-shedding is necessary to keep the country’s electricity network from collapsing altogether.

South Africa’s power grid was first built in the 1920s to supply the newly founded state with nationally sourced, coal-based power. The power plants were, in accord with South Africa’s socialist mind-set, all owned by a single state-owned company: Eskom. This worked quite well throughout the 20th century, but as the new century approached, it became clear that Eskom’s available resources would be maxed out by 2007.

But until well past 2007 and into the 2010s Eskom—by law—remained the only company producing energy for South Africa, all while producing too little of it to meet demands. And so in order to keep the overloaded network running, the concept of load-shedding was introduced.

While South Africa has been trying to fight the ongoing crisis with privately owned power and renewable energy, load-shedding goes on to cause logistical and financial problems—something that surely contributed to last week’s seismic event of the ANC losing the majority vote in the South African elections for the first time since it came into power 30 years ago.

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