Birth of a Nation – from ‘Lost in the Reptile House’

That evening, the man from the Ministry of Information revealed the ‘something special’ he’d been promising for the March Past – at midnight the Fourth of February Eternal Flame would be lit, never to be extinguished.

This was it, the symbolic birth of a nation that had echoes of Leni Riefenstahl, the picture that would sew it all up visually and erase images of bloated cows and rusting wreckage from London’s memory. The Man from MINFA had finally come good.

At eleven o’clock he loaded the press party aboard the MINFA coach, slapped the driver on the back and shouted the Portuguese for “Let’s Go.” Nothing moved. A discussion began, punctuated by the raising of shoulders and voices, till he turned and shouted down the bus, “Does anyone know where the Eternal Flame is going to be lit?”

The silence was broken by a Kenyan working for Swedish TV.

“I heard it was going to be on an island,” he said.

“Who told you that?” asked the Man from MINFA.

“The girl who changes my bed at the Tropico,” said the Kenyan, and in that moment you felt Leni Riefenstahl slowly drifting away as the creaking coach rocked over rutted roads for the next half hour as we searched for the Flame, stopping anyone who looked remotely intelligent, but no one had told them about the birth of the nation.

At ten minutes past midnight, with the Flame officially Eternal and bickering filling the rear of the coach, the Man from MINFA shouted and the coach lurched to a stop alongside three youths struggling with a banner in the night breeze. I wasn’t expecting the Nuremburg Rally, but this was ridiculous.

“Is this it?” I asked.

He looked insulted. “This is just the start of the March to the Ceremony.”

“But where?”

He looked less insulted. “No one knows – someone will tell them on the way.”

It finally took place in the back of a Land Rover at the Bus Station. Now what would Leni have done with that?