18/09/2017

La France et la mémoire de l'esclavage


Tribune publiée ce week-end dans le Monde :



Mémoire de l’esclavage : « Débaptisons les collèges et les lycées Colbert ! »


TRIBUNE
A l’initiative de Louis-Georges Tin, président du CRAN, et du philosophe Louis Sala-Molin, plusieurs personnalités signent une tribune afin que le nom de Colbert, ministre de Louis XIV et acteur de la légalisation de l’esclavage, soit retiré de l’espace public.

La statue du général Lee est enlevée à Dallas, au Texas, le 14 septembre 2017. REX CURRY / REUTERS

Tribune. Tous les médias ont parlé de Charlottesville, de la statue du général Lee, de la « white supremacy », etc. Mais rares sont ceux qui ont évoqué ce problème dans le contexte français. Or la question des emblèmes esclavagistes dans l’espace public se pose également dans notre pays. Elle est formulée depuis au moins trente ans par des citoyens – qu’ils viennent de l’outre-mer ou non – qui demandent que ces symboles soient retirés.
Cette exigence suscite chez certains de nos compatriotes une certaine angoisse : jusqu’où, disent-ils, faudra-t-il aller ? La réponse est claire : on ne pourra sans doute pas modifier tous les symboles liés à l’esclavage dans l’espace public, tant ils sont nombreux et intimement liés à notre histoire nationale. Mais on ne peut pas non plus ne rien faire, en restant dans le déni et dans le mépris, comme si le problème n’existait pas. Entre ceux qui disent qu’il faut tout changer et ceux qui disent qu’il ne faut rien changer, il y a probablement une place pour l’action raisonnable.
On pourrait, par exemple, se concentrer sur les collèges et les lycées Colbert, qui existent dans plusieurs villes de France. Il s’en trouve à Paris, à Lyon, à Marseille, à Reims, à Thionville, à Tourcoing, à Lorient, à Rouen et dans quelques autres villes. Pourquoi Colbert ? Parce que le ministre de Louis XIV est celui qui jeta les fondements du Code noir, monstre juridique qui légalisa ce crime contre l’humanité. Par ailleurs, Colbert est aussi celui qui fonda la Compagnie des Indes occidentales, compagnie négrière de sinistre mémoire. En d’autres termes, en matière d’esclavage, Colbert symbolise à la fois la théorie et la pratique, et cela, au plus haut niveau.

Histoire, mémoire et transmission

Ceux qui sont attachés à Colbert à tout prix, et veulent retenir de lui non pas l’esclavagiste, mais le ministre qui sut établir la grandeur de l’économie française à l’époque, agissent comme ces gens, quelque peu douteux, qui affirment qu’ils célèbrent en Pétain non pas le représentant de Vichy, mais le vainqueur de Verdun. C’est un argument quelque peu délicat. Par ailleurs, comment Colbert a-t-il développé l’économie française au XVIIe  siècle, si ce n’est sur la base de l’esclavage colonial, justement ?
Mais pourquoi évoquer particulièrement les collèges et les lycées ? Parce que la question posée aujourd’hui est justement celle de l’histoire, de la mémoire et de la transmission. Si l’école républicaine elle-même renonce à ces valeurs, elle n’a plus lieu d’être. Comment peut-on sur un même fronton inscrire le nom de « Colbert », et juste au-dessous, « Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité » ? Comment peut-on enseigner le vivre-ensemble et les valeurs républicaines à l’ombre de Colbert ?
Certains commentateurs affirment qu’il ne faut pas changer ces noms, car il convient de conserver la trace des crimes commis. Mais les noms de bâtiments ne servent pas à garder la mémoire des criminels, ils servent en général à garder la mémoire des héros. C’est pour cela qu’il n’y a pas en France de rue Pierre-Laval, alors qu’il y a de nombreuses rues Jean-Moulin. Et si on veut vraiment sauvegarder la mémoire de l’esclavage, il vaudrait mieux donner à ces établissements les noms de ces héros, noirs ou blancs, bien souvent méconnus, qui luttèrent contre l’esclavage. On pense ici à des figures comme Delgrès, le héros de la Guadeloupe, ou aux habitants du village de Champagney (Haute-Saône), qui, pendant la Révolution, plaidèrent pour l’abolition. Pour ce qui est de Colbert, il faut bien sûr que son action soit enseignée – à l’intérieur de ces établissements, dans les cours d’histoire – mais non pas célébrée – à l’extérieur, sur les frontons.

Reconnu comme crime contre l’humanité

Votée à l’unanimité en 2001, la loi Taubira demande que l’esclavage soit reconnu comme crime contre l’humanité, et enseigné en tant que tel. A l’évidence, les collèges et les lycées Colbert sont au minimum en porte-à-faux par rapport à cette loi, et par rapport aux valeurs républicaines qu’ils se doivent de transmettre. Par ailleurs, en outre-mer et dans l’Hexagone, plusieurs rues ou bâtiments ont été débaptisés ces dernières années. En 2002, par exemple, la rue Richepanse, à Paris, qui célébrait ce général ayant rétabli l’esclavage en Guadeloupe, est devenue la rue du Chevalier-de-Saint-George, pour rendre hommage à ce brillant musicien et escrimeur du XVIIIe siècle. Ce changement, qui constitue une sorte de jurisprudence, a été effectué sans problème majeur.
C’est pourquoi, dans le cadre de cette rentrée 2017, nous, citoyens, professeurs, élèves, parents d’élèves, demandons au ministre de l’éducation nationale d’engager une réflexion, en concertation avec les personnalités qualifiées, les associations, les syndicats et les établissements concernés, afin que les symboles qui célèbrent Colbert dans ces institutions éducatives soient remplacés par d’autres noms qui valorisent plutôt la résistance à l’esclavage. C’est aussi cela, la réparation à laquelle nous appelons le ministre de l’éducation nationale.
Signataires : Christophe d’Astier de la Vigerie (éditeur), Fritz Calixte (philosophe, directeur du journal « Haïti Monde »), Isabel Castro Henriques (historienne), Juliette Chilowicz (secrétaire générale de la Fédération indépendante et démocratique lycéenne), Christine Chivallon (anthropologue), Catherine Clément (philosophe), Rokhaya Diallo (journaliste, documentariste), Didier Epsztajn (rédacteur en chef du site Entre les lignes, entre les mots), Mireille Fanon-Mendès-France (ancienne présidente du groupe d’experts de l’ONU sur les personnes d’ascendance africaine), Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison (philosophe), Victorin Lurel (ancien ministre des outre-mer), Jacques Martial (directeur du Memorial ACTe), Harry Roselmack (journaliste), Patrick Silberstein (directeur des Editions Syllepse), Michel Surya (directeur des Editions Lignes), Lilian Thuram (footballeur)

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"Little has changed for black America"


New day, new dawn at Velvet Film.

Our latest project is now reaching Australia.

Interview with filmmaker Raoul Peck:



Oscar contender I Am Not Your Negro 

finds little has changed for black America


Filmmaker Raoul Peck puts writer and social critic James Baldwin back into the frame.


Filmmaker Raoul Peck loved films as a child, but ''suddenly, in that world you thought you were part of, [you realise] ...
Filmmaker Raoul Peck loved films as a child, but ''suddenly, in that world you thought you were part of, [you realise] you are just a footnote''. Photo: Jacky Ghossein

Four out of the five contenders for Best Documentary at this year's Oscars were made by black directors. That was fortuitous, given the controversy raging about lack of diversity in Hollywood, but it wasn't planned. 
"It was just pure chance," says Raoul Peck, whose astonishing film I Am Not Your Negro was among the five. "The Oscars are about films that have been made already, when the big problem is who decides which films are made, who gets green lit. Four out of five: that is just bizarre. But it's not substantial. It's not structural. Nobody has done anything to make that happen." Nothing, in other words, has really changed. 
The question of whether anything much has changed runs like fuel through I Am Not Your Negro, which is both inspired by and pays tribute to the writer, political activist and public intellectual James Baldwin. Baldwin's novels Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953) and The Fire Next Time (1963) were two of the great literary companions to the civil rights movement of the '60s; an intervening novel Giovanni's Room (1956) is a classic of gay literature. Baldwin, who died in 1987, was witty, incisive, angry, articulate and cool; to see him demolish a conservative opponent on Dick Cavett's chat show is to be reminded of a time when people talked seriously about things that mattered on prime-time entertainment shows. In that respect, things probably have changed.   
What remains very much the same is the police violence against African-Americans castigated by Baldwin in his chat-show answers, his galvanising speeches to student bodies and in his writings. In I Am Not Your Negro, Peck alternates Baldwin's own with the voice of actor Samuel L. Jackson performing his words to underscore footage of recent Ferguson and #blacklivesmatter demonstrations, making inescapable the parallels between then and now.


"That is the crazy part of it," says Peck. "He wrote those things 50 years ago and they're even stronger today. Because you know what he says? 'You cannot hide the truth any more'."  
Raoul Peck was born in Haiti in 1953. After his father had been imprisoned by the Duvalier dictatorship, his family moved to the Congo. He has strong memories of military roadblocks both in Port-au-Prince – "I remember being in my pyjamas in the back of the car, and my mother driving through the city trying to find where my father was" – and in Congo, where there were frequent rebellions followed by army crackdowns.
"It was always about how does the conversation go?" he told National Public Radio in the US last year. "You need to give the right answers to the questions, and depending on the answer you gave, you know, you could be arrested as well." 
His early travels, he believes, gave him his perspective on the world. "I would not believe the propaganda they were feeding me in one country because I knew the reality in another. I'd see an American politician talking about democracy when in my country they were supporting the worst dictatorship ever. So you start to ask questions."  


He now lives in France; his previous films include a documentary about his home country's 2010 earthquake, Fatal Assistance, and two features, Lumumba and Sometimes in April, about the Rwandan genocide. Along with the Baldwin film, which has been an ongoing project over 10 years, he  recently finished The Young Karl Marx, a dramatic interpretation of Marx's life and thinking.    
"I was always privileged because I came to cinema though politics, through my civil engagements," he says. "I never do any movie because I have some extraordinary idea. Cinema was always something that had to do with my life. Marx and Baldwin: they are both people who shaped me, so to engage in projects related to their work is like giving back to a younger generation something essential that changed my life. I never saw myself as a film-maker who wants to tell stories."   
The young Raoul Peck was a big reader and avid film fan, but he was always aware that the stories he was imbibing were not about him. "When you are not coming from, let's say, the very Eurocentric way of seeing the world," he says, "you look to film, books or sometimes music and suddenly, in that world you thought you were part of, [you realise] you are just a footnote. It's not your story." 
And if he wasn't the footnote, he was the enemy. "Like Baldwin says in the film, he was rooting for Gary Cooper until he realised that Gary Cooper was killing the Indians and the Indians were him. And that is what most people in the Third World grew up with. We always had to deconstruct what they were showing us."
Reading Baldwin, he felt he was at last seeing his own world and being seen in it. He still has his teenage collection of Baldwin books; they are, he told Toronto's Globe and Mail, underlined almost from beginning to end. Everything spoke to him. 
For I Am Not Your Negro, he had access to a vast amount of material in Baldwin's estate, including unpublished manuscripts. Among them he found Remember this House, a recollection of his political comrades Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Medgar Evers.  Assassinated within five years of each other, they all died before they were 40.  Baldwin had told his literary agent in 1979 that he planned to write a book about them in which their lives "would bang against and reveal each other as they did in life", but he had only written 30 pages of it when he died.
 "Having this document in my hands, for me as a filmmaker, it was like having an incredible mystery book," Peck told Globe and Mail. "This book needed to be not finished, but found. So my theory was that he wrote it already, and my job was to find it through his body of work." I Am Not Your Negro is so forceful not least because there are no qualifying interviews with friends, family members or observers about its subject; we just hear Baldwin speaking to us directly, either through his writings or from the archives.  
Once a literary celebrity, Baldwin's star had waned by the time he died. Sidelined politically by the rise of Black Power militants such as Eldridge Cleaver (for whom Baldwin's frank homosexuality was an issue), he was no longer a go-to television commentator. Gradually, his novels disappeared from bookstores and academic syllabuses. For Raoul Peck, however, he was a constant presence, his mentor when times were tough. 
"There is a reason why we are pushing him out," says Peck. "My obligation was to put him back, because I was seeing people even quoting him now without saying it's him." Giving a voice to black narratives, he says, is as urgent as ever.  "And he did it not only from the point of view of a black man or a black gay man, but from a very humanistic point of view. 
"Because what he writes is not just for black people. It is even more important for white people, because he teaches them this is your history, you need to own this history. You can't pretend to live in a world like this and say you are innocent. Walls were made in your name, discrimination was made in your name. The price of comfort and security is very heavy."
I Am Not Your Negro opens on September 14 and screens at ACMI until November 1.


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16/09/2017

From Marx to Tricks: about interviewing the Knowle West Boy


 What an amazing week here in Paris!

While Raoul Peck's film about Karl Marx' youth was premiered in the heart of Paris, I also got a chance to interview Tricky again, two years and a half after our last meeting for my book, in February 2015 at Le Bataclan.

We also met in a very visual hotel that reminded me of the promo video of 'Karmacoma'...




He was in a extraordinary lovely mood and we talked a lot about my book, Bristol and of course Massive Attack... But that's the private part!!

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We mainly discussed his coming album, his love for Berlin and the featuring artists...



I'm writing an article in French, to be released next week.
If I have time, I'll write further in English. But for now, enjoy the music!










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Bonus:




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"Life and death in Apple’s forbidden city"


“It’s not a good place for human beings.”

 I'm as much of a user as many of you. And because I am, I believe we have a responsibility to insist on stopping this.

Apple used to be the outsider, the intelligent resource that could beat the market-dominating Microsoft. They are also making billions of dollars a minute... Can't they pay properly workers in the USA who need decent jobs? All is wrong with this, all.

Read, learn and ask for change.

Thank you.



Life and death in Apple’s forbidden city

 
In an extract from his new book, Brian Merchant reveals how he gained access to Longhua, the vast complex where iPhones are made and where, in 2010, unhappy workers started killing themselves

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-life-death-forbidden-city-longhua-suicide-apple-iphone-brian-merchant-one-device-extract

The sprawling factory compound, all grey dormitories and weather-beaten warehouses, blends seamlessly into the outskirts of the Shenzhen megalopolis. Foxconn’s enormous Longhua plant is a major manufacturer of Apple products. It might be the best-known factory in the world; it might also might be among the most secretive and sealed-off. Security guards man each of the entry points. Employees can’t get in without swiping an ID card; drivers entering with delivery trucks are subject to fingerprint scans. A Reuters journalist was once dragged out of a car and beaten for taking photos from outside the factory walls. The warning signs outside – “This factory area is legally established with state approval. Unauthorised trespassing is prohibited. Offenders will be sent to police for prosecution!” – are more aggressive than those outside many Chinese military compounds.

But it turns out that there’s a secret way into the heart of the infamous operation: use the bathroom. I couldn’t believe it. Thanks to a simple twist of fate and some clever perseverance by my fixer, I’d found myself deep inside so-called Foxconn City.

It’s printed on the back of every iPhone: “Designed by Apple in California Assembled in China”. US law dictates that products manufactured in China must be labelled as such and Apple’s inclusion of the phrase renders the statement uniquely illustrative of one of the planet’s starkest economic divides – the cutting edge is conceived and designed in Silicon Valley, but it is assembled by hand in China.



A protester dressed as a factory worker outside an Apple retail outlet in Hong Kong, May 2011. 
Photograph: Antony Dickson/AFP/Getty Images 


The vast majority of plants that produce the iPhone’s component parts and carry out the device’s final assembly are based here, in the People’s Republic, where low labour costs and a massive, highly skilled workforce have made the nation the ideal place to manufacture iPhones (and just about every other gadget). The country’s vast, unprecedented production capabilities – the US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that as of 2009 there were 99 million factory workers in China – have helped the nation become the world’s second largest economy. And since the first iPhone shipped, the company doing the lion’s share of the manufacturing is the Taiwanese Hon Hai Precision Industry Co, Ltd, better known by its trade name, Foxconn.
Foxconn is the single largest employer in mainland China; there are 1.3 million people on its payroll. Worldwide, among corporations, only Walmart and McDonald’s employ more. As many people work for Foxconn as live in Estonia.
Today, the iPhone is made at a number of different factories around China, but for years, as it became the bestselling product in the world, it was largely assembled at Foxconn’s 1.4 square-mile flagship plant, just outside Shenzhen. The sprawling factory was once home to an estimated 450,000 workers. Today, that number is believed to be smaller, but it remains one of the biggest such operations in the world. If you know of Foxconn, there’s a good chance it’s because you’ve heard of the suicides. In 2010, Longhua assembly-line workers began killing themselves. Worker after worker threw themselves off the towering dorm buildings, sometimes in broad daylight, in tragic displays of desperation – and in protest at the work conditions inside. There were 18 reported suicide attempts that year alone and 14 confirmed deaths. Twenty more workers were talked down by Foxconn officials.

The epidemic caused a media sensation – suicides and sweatshop conditions in the House of iPhone. Suicide notes and survivors told of immense stress, long workdays and harsh managers who were prone to humiliate workers for mistakes, of unfair fines and unkept promises of benefits.
The corporate response spurred further unease: Foxconn CEO, Terry Gou, had large nets installed outside many of the buildings to catch falling bodies. The company hired counsellors and workers were made to sign pledges stating they would not attempt to kill themselves.
Steve Jobs, for his part, declared: “We’re all over that” when asked about the spate of deaths and he pointed out that the rate of suicides at Foxconn was within the national average. Critics pounced on the comment as callous, though he wasn’t technically wrong. Foxconn Longhua was so massive that it could be its own nation-state, and the suicide rate was comparable to its host country’s. The difference is that Foxconn City is a nation-state governed entirely by a corporation and one that happened to be producing one of the most profitable products on the planet.


A cab driver lets us out in front of the factory; boxy blue letters spell out Foxconn next to the entrance. The security guards eye us, half bored, half suspicious. My fixer, a journalist from Shanghai whom I’ll call Wang Yang, and I decide to walk the premises first and talk to workers, to see if there might be a way to get inside.

The first people we stop turn out to be a pair of former Foxconn workers.

“It’s not a good place for human beings,” says one of the young men, who goes by the name Xu. He’d worked in Longhua for about a year, until a couple of months ago, and he says the conditions inside are as bad as ever. “There is no improvement since the media coverage,” Xu says. The work is very high pressure and he and his colleagues regularly logged 12-hour shifts. Management is both aggressive and duplicitous, publicly scolding workers for being too slow and making them promises they don’t keep, he says. His friend, who worked at the factory for two years and chooses to stay anonymous, says he was promised double pay for overtime hours but got only regular pay. They paint a bleak picture of a high-pressure working environment where exploitation is routine and where depression and suicide have become normalised.

“It wouldn’t be Foxconn without people dying,” Xu says. “Every year people kill themselves. They take it as a normal thing.”

Over several visits to different iPhone assembly factories in Shenzhen and Shanghai, we interviewed dozens of workers like these. Let’s be honest: to get a truly representative sample of life at an iPhone factory would require a massive canvassing effort and the systematic and clandestine interviewing of thousands of employees. So take this for what it is: efforts to talk to often skittish, often wary and often bored workers who were coming out of the factory gates, taking a lunch break or congregating after their shifts.

The vision of life inside an iPhone factory that emerged was varied. Some found the work tolerable; others were scathing in their criticisms; some had experienced the despair Foxconn was known for; still others had taken a job just to try to find a girlfriend. Most knew of the reports of poor conditions before joining, but they either needed the work or it didn’t bother them. Almost everywhere, people said the workforce was young and turnover was high. “Most employees last only a year,” was a common refrain. Perhaps that’s because the pace of work is widely agreed to be relentless, and the management culture is often described as cruel.

Since the iPhone is such a compact, complex machine, putting one together correctly requires sprawling assembly lines of hundreds of people who build, inspect, test and package each device. One worker said 1,700 iPhones passed through her hands every day; she was in charge of wiping a special polish on the display. That works out at about three screens a minute for 12 hours a day.

More meticulous work, like fastening chip boards and assembling back covers, was slower; these workers have a minute apiece for each iPhone. That’s still 600 to 700 iPhones a day. Failing to meet a quota or making a mistake can draw public condemnation from superiors. Workers are often expected to stay silent and may draw rebukes from their bosses for asking to use the restroom.

Xu and his friend were both walk-on recruits, though not necessarily willing ones. “They call Foxconn a fox trap,” he says. “Because it tricks a lot of people.” He says Foxconn promised them free housing but then forced them to pay exorbitantly high bills for electricity and water. The current dorms sleep eight to a room and he says they used to be 12 to a room. But Foxconn would shirk social insurance and be late or fail to pay bonuses. And many workers sign contracts that subtract a hefty penalty from their pay if they quit before a three-month introductory period.


On top of that, the work is gruelling. “You have to have mental management,” says Xu, otherwise you can get scolded by bosses in front of your peers. Instead of discussing performance privately or face to face on the line, managers would stockpile complaints until later. “When the boss comes down to inspect the work,” Xu’s friend says, “if they find any problems, they won’t scold you then. They will scold you in front of everyone in a meeting later.”

“It’s insulting and humiliating to people all the time,” his friend says. “Punish someone to make an example for everyone else. It’s systematic,” he adds. In certain cases, if a manager decides that a worker has made an especially costly mistake, the worker has to prepare a formal apology. “They must read a promise letter aloud – ‘I won’t make this mistake again’– to everyone.”
This culture of high-stress work, anxiety and humiliation contributes to widespread depression.

Xu says there was another suicide a few months ago. He saw it himself. The man was a student who worked on the iPhone assembly line. “Somebody I knew, somebody I saw around the cafeteria,” he says. After being publicly scolded by a manager, he got into a quarrel. Company officials called the police, though the worker hadn’t been violent, just angry.

“He took it very personally,” Xu says, “and he couldn’t get through it.” Three days later, he jumped out of a ninth-storey window.

So why didn’t the incident get any media coverage? I ask. Xu and his friend look at each other and shrug. “Here someone dies, one day later the whole thing doesn’t exist,” his friend says. “You forget about it.”

‘We look at everything at these companies,” Steve Jobs said after news of the suicides broke. “Foxconn is not a sweatshop. It’s a factory – but my gosh, they have restaurants and movie theatres… but it’s a factory. But they’ve had some suicides and attempted suicides – and they have 400,000 people there. The rate is under what the US rate is, but it’s still troubling.” Apple CEO, Tim Cook, visited Longhua in 2011 and reportedly met suicide-prevention experts and top management to discuss the epidemic.

In 2012, 150 workers gathered on a rooftop and threatened to jump. They were promised improvements and talked down by management; they had, essentially, wielded the threat of killing themselves as a bargaining tool. In 2016, a smaller group did it again. Just a month before we spoke, Xu says, seven or eight workers gathered on a rooftop and threatened to jump unless they were paid the wages they were due, which had apparently been withheld. Eventually, Xu says, Foxconn agreed to pay the wages and the workers were talked down.

When I ask Xu about Apple and the iPhone, his response is swift: “We don’t blame Apple. We blame Foxconn.” When I ask the men if they would consider working at Foxconn again if the conditions improved, the response is equally blunt. “You can’t change anything,” Xu says. “It will never change.”

Wang and I set off for the main worker entrance. We wind around the perimeter, which stretches on and on – we have no idea this is barely a fraction of the factory at this point.
After walking along the perimeter for 20 minutes or so, we come to another entrance, another security checkpoint. That’s when it hits me. I have to use the bathroom. Desperately. And that gives me an idea.

There’s a bathroom in there, just a few hundred feet down a stairwell by the security point. I see the universal stick-man signage and I gesture to it. This checkpoint is much smaller, much more informal. There’s only one guard, a young man who looks bored. Wang asks something a little pleadingly in Chinese. The guard slowly shakes his head no, looks at me. The strain on my face is very, very real. She asks again – he falters for a second, then another no.

We’ll be right back, she insists, and now we’re clearly making him uncomfortable. Mostly me. He doesn’t want to deal with this. Come right back, he says. Of course, we don’t.
To my knowledge, no American journalist has been inside a Foxconn plant without permission and a tour guide, without a carefully curated visit to selected parts of the factory to demonstrate how OK things really are.

Maybe the most striking thing, beyond its size – it would take us nearly an hour to briskly walk across Longhua – is how radically different one end is from the other. It’s like a gentrified city in that regard. On the outskirts, let’s call them, there are spilt chemicals, rusting facilities and poorly overseen industrial labour. The closer you get to the city centre – remember, this is a factory – the more the quality of life, or at least the amenities and the infrastructure, improves.


‘Not a good place for human beings’: Foxconn Longhua. Photograph: Brian Merchant

As we get deeper in, surrounded by more and more people, it feels like we’re getting noticed less.

The barrage of stares mutates into disinterested glances. My working theory: the plant is so vast, security so tight, that if we are inside just walking around, we must have been allowed to do so.

That or nobody really gives a shit. We start trying to make our way to the G2 factory block, where we’ve been told iPhones are made. After leaving “downtown”, we begin seeing towering, monolithic factory blocks – C16, E7 and so on, many surrounded by crowds of workers.

I worry about getting too cavalier and remind myself not to push it; we’ve been inside Foxconn for almost an hour now. The crowds have been thinning out the farther away from the centre we get. Then there it is: G2. It’s identical to the factory blocks that cluster around it, that threaten to fade into the background of the smoggy static sky.

G2 looks deserted, though. A row of impossibly rusted lockers runs outside the building. No one’s around. The door is open, so we go in. To the left, there’s an entry to a massive, darkened space; we’re heading for that when someone calls out. A floor manager has just come down the stairs and he asks us what we’re doing. My translator stammers something about a meeting and the man looks confused; then he shows us the computer monitoring system he uses to oversee production on the floor. There’s no shift right now, he says, but this is how they watch.

No sign of iPhones, though. We keep walking. Outside G3, teetering stacks of black gadgets wrapped in plastic sit in front of what looks like another loading zone. A couple of workers on smartphones drift by us. We get close enough to see the gadgets through the plastic and, nope, not iPhones either. They look like Apple TVs, minus the company logo. There are probably thousands stacked here, awaiting the next step in the assembly line.
If this is indeed where iPhones and Apple TVs are made, it’s a fairly aggressively shitty place to spend long days, unless you have a penchant for damp concrete and rust. The blocks keep coming, so we keep walking. Longhua starts to feel like the dull middle of a dystopian novel, where the dread sustains but the plot doesn’t.

We could keep going, but to our left, we see what look like large housing complexes, probably the dormitories, complete with cagelike fences built out over the roof and the windows, and so we head in that direction. The closer we get to the dorms, the thicker the crowds get and the more lanyards and black glasses and faded jeans and sneakers we see. College-age kids are gathered, smoking cigarettes, crowded around picnic tables, sitting on kerbs.
And, yes, the body-catching nets are still there. Limp and sagging, they give the impression of tarps that have half blown off the things they’re supposed to cover. I think of Xu, who said: “The nets are pointless. If somebody wants to commit suicide, they will do it.”

We are drawing stares again – away from the factories, maybe folks have more time and reason to indulge their curiosity. In any case, we’ve been inside Foxconn for an hour. I have no idea if the guard put out an alert when we didn’t come back from the bathroom or if anyone is looking for us or what. The sense that it’s probably best not to push it prevails, even though we haven’t made it on to a working assembly line.

We head back the way we came. Before long, we find an exit. It’s pushing evening as we join a river of thousands and, heads down, shuffle through the security checkpoint. Nobody says a word. Getting out of the haunting megafactory is a relief, but the mood sticks. No, there were no child labourers with bleeding hands pleading at the windows. There were a number of things that would surely violate the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration code – unprotected construction workers, open chemical spillage, decaying, rusted structures, and so on – but there are probably a lot of things at US factories that would violate OSHA code too. Apple may well be right when it argues that these facilities are nicer than others out there. Foxconn was not our stereotypical conception of a sweatshop. But there was a different kind of ugliness. For whatever reason – the rules imposing silence on the factory floors, its pervasive reputation for tragedy or the general feeling of unpleasantness the environment itself imparts – Longhua felt heavy, even oppressively subdued.

When I look back at the photos I snapped, I can’t find one that has someone smiling in it. It does not seem like a surprise that people subjected to long hours, repetitive work and harsh management might develop psychological issues. That unease is palpable – it’s worked into the environment itself. As Xu said: “It’s not a good place for human beings.”

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• This is an edited extract from The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant, published by Bantam Press (£16.99). To order a copy for £14.44 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

• The Samaritans can be contacted in the UK and Ireland on 116 123.
In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255.
In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14.

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