Recollecting Robert Papini

In Memoriam

 

This is a belated tribute to Robert Papini, particularly for his contributions to interfaith, notably with the International Association for Religious Freedom.  I also include excerpts from his other activities, with a sprinkling of quotes to offer glimpses of his erudition.  I hope to highlight in these brief excerpts how he exemplified the voluntary and vocational nature of his work and reflected deeply.

Background

Robert was originally from South Africa, with Italian ancestry through his father who was originally from Florence.  Possessing an open and inquisitive mind, he developed an interest in people, culture and the environment, which he nurtured throughout his life.  His academic study included two degrees in the UK: a Bachelor’s in English and African & Caribbean Studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury and a Master of Studies in Ethnology and Museum Ethnography together with Museology at the Department of Ethnology & Prehistory/ Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (as a member of Linacre College).  This led to employment as a Research Officer in the Local History Museums, Durban from 1989 to 2002.  Some fruits of his research are evident in papers on his Academia site.

Robert at IARF

About a year later, from November 2003, he started a new job in Oxford, as General Office Administrator at the Secratariat of the International Association for Religious Freedom (IARF). IARF is one of the first international interfaith organisations, which traces its formation to 1900 and is a UN NGO with general consultative status, which means it can be consulted on any matter, not just religion.

Robert was soon immersed at his desk in a compact office space, within a series of rooms on the top floor of a corner block in Market Street, which also housed the World Congress of Faiths (WCF), the International Interfaith Centre (IIC) and, in little more than a storage room, Rissho Kosei-Kai (RKK).  There he started to familiarise himself with the organisation and the distinctive features of dealing with adherents of world religions and the complexities of faith-based issues.  There were numerous projects that needed planning and facilitating.  It was a demanding initiation into international interfaith work.

I had been a member of the IIC and kept in touch with the office, sometimes exchanging e-mails.  At the beginning of March 2004, I sent a note about a Dhammakaya meditation session that I was organising at the Friends Meeting House in St Giles, which was circulated internally.  Robert picked it up and was interested.  He had already practised Vipassana as taught by S.N. Goenka, but was open to exploring other methods. 

However, he was swamped by work.  It was not until June, when another series of classes was on offer, that he felt that he was starting to cope with his role and ready to attend, commenting early in June 2004:

Many thanks for this; six months on, & I'm a bit more on top of admin routines at IARF, so have some time for myself now. Am definitely there for the first & last of the dates mentioned...

Robert did make it, but only just, and couldn’t stay:

Very sorry to have had to walk out on the class - please excuse, I was just so shattered from the day's work, found myself dropping off as soon as the eyes closed, in spite of all efforts!

I need to have a good day at work first, I realise...

Robert’s exhaustion came from his wholehearted efforts and over the next years he continued to grapple with – what seemed to me – an exceedingly demanding job.  In typical corporate style, his job titles were frequently shuffled without a clear career progression; from Office Administrator, he became (in succession): Office & Research Co-ordinator, Executive Officer, Office Manager and later he signed off merely as Admin.

Occasionally, Robert’s dissatisfaction was intense (he once admitted to me that he had walked out on an important meeting), but by and large, Robert gradually found his way, managing the challenges more effectively.  One of his most impactful involvements was in human rights education, especially in India, resulting in numerous training sessions.

In parallel, with opportunities to explore near and far, he developed his leisure activities. He drew on a long-standing interest in photography that inspired the likes of High School students and photojournalists (archived), with camera in hand, he started to reacquaint himself with the geography of Oxford and the Thames, dutifully contributing photographs of historic landmarks to the Historic England Archive IOE Series.

In Osaka

His travel abroad provided an opportunity for him to apply his empathic approach towards different cultures and for others to experience his considerable writing skills, whether that meant capturing the zeitgeist in brief pithy comments or much longer, evocative narratives.  This was epitomised in an unexpected turn of events. 

By 2007, as documented in the annual report of 2008/9, IARF was suffering a crisis and underwent major organisational change with operations moved to Japan.  After holding the fort in Oxford, Robert, as the sole surviving staff member, was sent to Osaka in mid-December, to run operations out of IARF’s Japan office, assisted by unpaid volunteers.  At the invitation of Reverend Yoshinobu Miyake, he was hosted by the Konko Church of Izuo (of the Shinto tradition), one of the charity’s main supporters.

Robert was once again having to orientate himself in a new culture and, despite severe financial constraints, he embraced it with enthusiasm, vividly penning his initial impressions:

Getting back to UK end-2003 was a buzz, but this is another order of excitement. Always been hard for me to remember what it's like when you land blind in a totally new country where the script is a scribble to you, and a handful of words is all you have.

During his first week, his creative juices started flowing:

18/12/2007
OK, this should be on a blog, but gimme time - I just got here...!.

(How about 17 years or so?)

He could barely wait to describe his environment:

Evening of my third day as a transient of Izuo neighbourhood, Osaka – just got back from my first real solo sortie into the surrounds, & my virgin supermarket safari. Been itching to get reactions to file, so lucky i brought over the old Toshiba laptop from Oxford, as no office PC bought yet, let alone set up in the new IARF office, which is double ex-res rooms two doors along from my little living-cell here on level three, topmost, of the Izuo Konkokyo church residential block (From my window, that's filled with the watercolour-fine foliage of dwarf bamboo and looks directly onto the Ancestors' Hall, I can see the massive coped gable of the mighty temple's great tiled roof, which is steep & gold-monogrammed, and the antique pale green of oxidized bronze).

The loaded term 'cell' i mean in the fully positive sense – i'm sat tapping away right now on the beautiful fine-weave /tatami/ mat flooring that's integral to the traditional Japanese home, with enough room on one edge of the living space to have a mattress, on the other a thin futon for my morning & evening bodywork; no furniture, but a roomy built-in cupboard & wall-mounted heater/aircon. My tiny kitchenette has a sink, mini-fridge & single electric ring, which would be fine anyway (though you might think I look a bit outlandish looming over my wok in its recess) but there's a much bigger cooking space, with gas, in the office-to-be, where i'll likely do most feeding..

Robert proceeded to describe his use of the local public bath (for his ‘cell’ had no shower or bath) as very much a social activity, but a tradition in decline as a result of Western influence.  Then came further details of his residence,

So anyway – there it is, my monkish cell with its outhouse ablutions. In all it's small for a great lunk of a spotty barbarian like me, kinda 'cubicular' i guess, but perfect for your stripped-down living, your monastic aspiration, and i have near-perfect silence here. There's a little street goes down the one side of this long 3-storey residential block, but hardly any traffic, and it's utterly charming, in the way of everything i've seen so far in the neighbourhood: /so/ different from our innercity streetscapes, obv everything three-quarter size, yes, but in many other ways such an insight into pre-modern urbanity while being totally modern, and refreshingly non-postmodern in the human scale of it, the sense of neighbourhood & the diversity & almost hobbitonian individuality of structures, the mingling of small business with residential, the balconies, jungle of oldstyle wiring overhead through all the interlinked alleyways & arcades that make up our Izuo 'hood, in the district here of Sangenya Nishi, a ward of Taisho, one of the many areas of what is a truly huge, trade-grown megasprawl between distant coastal mountain range and bay, with a good part of it reclaimed from the sea (including the airport, built by infilling the bay with mountain-top) --- and much of that in centuries well before the Dutch began their much-celebrated polders.

Bringing his historical survey into present times, he paused again to reflect:

Not too hard then, wandering about, to sense for oneself how the cities of pre-modern Japan must have been before American bombs & the post-war boom ushered in the built environment we see now. And this Now itself is all very much of that era; what gives the charm is the 50s/60s retro feel in building design, kinda like visions of old-school futurists, now a little worn & dated, but very much inhabited & alive, & conforming well to a certain stereotype we have of Japan (or at least, that the sophisticated have; I'm disturbed to discover how crude were my notions of this country & culture - just as with everywhere unknown, you come to realise. Pious it may sound to ask again, but the old chestnut stands: When will we learn to attribute the very same full humanity to others as we do to ourselves & 'our own'? Travel the cure? Shame it has to be on fossil fuel).

And found other sites particularly striking for being of a certain period:

Took a wander around the neighbourhood this afternoon … Found my way into the Osaka Dome (Police & Bon Jovi to play soon), & it's so /very/ much of its time - 80s futurist, now beginning to wear a bit. This was the Wembley Arena of its day, and vast it must have seemed then. Still pretty impressive. They have some kind of snowmaking lark going on at the top level, & loads of young people were buying snowboarding & other gear at a big indoor market, then queuing to get in. All the rage, obv. Minded me of Dubai's snow mountain in the desert, & other insanities of the incipient anthropocene era of atmosphere-wrecking.

Back in the office, it was time to deal with some practicalities.

Izuo, Osaka

18 Dec 07

dears

First day spent assembling the few bits of office furniture, devilish diagrams but eventually got them figured & glued, banged & screwed all together, trala, with just one cockup, of slight consequence though odd appearance (I blame it on a skewhiffed hands-off education. Come naa then, Bob the Builder To Be, make yo papa's ghost proud...)..

He was seemingly adopting the famed Japanese work ethic, as exemplified by his distinguished host:

 … Tomorrow we go off to Kyoto again, this time to some of the great shrines, for a 'greeting'. And it seems there's a trip to Tokyo next week, for this G8 Religious Leaders thing of Rev. Miyake's. He richly deserves the honorific 'tireless' that's given him in the biography of his grandfather that i'm reading: having gotten back from Tokyo at 3.30am this morning, after three top-level meetings with cabinet secretaries, etc., he was up at 4.30am to hold a temple service, then hit the desk to complete a newsletter for a 11am deadline! Even with the flu that he's inevitably picked up (quite a few people going about in facemasks, as it's said to be bad this year), he remains cheerful as ever, happy to help me out, managing well enough without his office girls today (Tuesday is a day off around here).

After an eventful start, he was in good spirits, sending the following note to welcome the arrival of 2008:

Dear friends

This year I count myself probably the first of you to greet the new year, here in Osaka, on the western Pacific rim. Aah yes - to be first, for once... ;}

(Most of you at least nine or ten hours away from first continental landfall of Jan 1st. 2008, some much more. Shame... But the suspense is everything, right?)...

Enjoy it when it comes, & here's to the year -- hope you're facing it with courage & commitment.

As ever -  Life, Love & Unity  !

Robert was in his element on this sojourn.  With his stay being extended, his wife, Catherine, went over several times to join him.  After a successful spell that met the approval of his hosts, he returned towards the end of 2008 to establish a ‘virtual office’, subsequently returning to Osaka for shorter spells.  In the minutes of the IARF Council Meeting of March 2009, the Personnel Committee reported:

Guji Takahiro Miwa had supervised the Osaka Office and was pleased with Robert’s performance. From November 2008 Robert had operated a virtual office from his London home and this had worked well with appropriate cooperation from the Church of Konko, whose staff had checked the incoming post. The three months in Osaka and three months in London arrangement will continue during 2009. A motion of thanks to Guji Takahiro Miwa, Guji Yoshinobu Miyake and Robert Papini was passed by acclamation.

Through generosity and fruitful collaboration, IARF survived and was able to maintain a significant international presence, providing input on a range of issues that affected religious practice directly and indirectly.  Robert provided a continuous thread to all these activities, not merely in fulfilling his office duties in practical terms, but, more profoundly, by his sincere cultural adaptation, demonstrating a deep dialogue with the Japanese members who provided the main financial support.  He earned considerable respect and hence encouragement to keep going.

Laying Foundations for Digital Communications

IARF’s severely limited financial resources prompted the organisation to make increasing use of electronic means of communication, a direction already evident in Council Meeting minutes of 2009.

Robert was again instrumental in this development; the ‘IARF - RFYN Young Adults’ Human Rights Training, Kolkota: 2011’ report noted:

Mr. Robert the administrator-IARF has began with session where he has made us know actualization of HRD ie “Human Rights Defenders” He introduced us with the various sources from where we can began and channelize our revolution towards Peace. In his continuing session he has mention the various ways ie media, SMS, Facebook, and Twitter can play significant Role.

The IARF Website was intended to be central to these developments.  Unfortunately, it was not fit for purpose.  Navigating from the home page, one  encountered pages authored in 2009, in one design, and a presumably early 2008 design used for news in 2010.  The site also had a discussion forum that was swamped by spam, and with custom PHP coding that was not maintained, the security status was questionable.  And then there were the styling and presentation issues, the variability in layout, fonts, colour schemes.  All in all it was a mess.

So IARF sought a solution based on an established content management system and Robert was tasked with delivering it.  A tender was put out, to which several companies responded, but I suspect that the budget was not adequate for commercial rates – even after significant discounts.  It likely prompted a reassessment and a reaching out to existing contacts in the hope of finding someone with requisite skills (and a charitable disposition).  That let Robert to me.

At that time, I was employed half-time as Web Officer at the Museum of the History of Science, so I had some spare capacity.  And having developed and consolidated the museum’s web offerings in WordPress, I had some idea about content management.

On 11 May, following a face-to-face chat, Robert sent me their requirements document.  At the end of the month, after further exchanges, Robert wrote:

Apropos, this email is really to tell you some good news (well, I hope it's good for you! - i.e. that you're not committing out of any sense of obligation to the interfaith cause.  The consensus seems to be that our new site project is in better hands with you than with some anonymous vendor for whom we're just another client.

Agreement was reached, and I started the work in early June.

There was endless scope for design, but Robert kept things fairly simple - it would suffice to make the site resemble or, at least, be in tune with the United Nations(!).  At that time, the U.N. site was heavily information-oriented, with hierarchical navigation, which actually suited me because I tend to think that way and am not a specialist in front-end graphic design or user interfaces. I proceeded to customise an existing WordPress theme by Brian Johnson, a member of the IARF US Chapter, extending it to accommodate the wider remit of the parent organisation.

Robert was keen for the site to emphasise its global scope and for it to act as a conduit in both directions and he wanted visitors to be aware of this and hence the use of the Pulsemaps heat map WordPress plugin.  He also sought to offer various means for essential communication from those directly affected by religious persecution.  Hence the Skype contact and the brief contact form, encrypted in case of snooping, especially by state authorities.

The main work was completed in about six months, in time for Christmas 2011; the site was duly delivered on a new virtual private server with not insubstantial system resources allocated.  I provided various documentation and training with further consultancy in subsequent months, when I departed for Qatar to take up a full-time post at the Qatar Museums Authority.  I would come back periodically to the UK and as Robert lived near Heathrow, we met up a couple of times in Terminal 4 before my departure back to the Gulf.

Whilst laborious, the website re-development project consolidated Robert’s knowledge of the entire organisation in its various strands, right across the world.  The international scope was reflected in Robert’s promotion of IARF work on social media, establishing a Flickr group, which featured the Human Rights Education and Training Programme in India.

where he was also involved in panel discussions

With the projects being delivered, his contributions became duly recognised in various countries outside the UK, not just Japan and India.  For example, for his role in the founding of the Kenya chapter:

To IARF administrator brother Robert Papini, I thank him for all the support he has shown towards the formation of IARF Kenya chapter.”  (Rev. Lawrence Adera, Secretary General IARF Kenya chapter)
Midview Hotel, Nairobi, 20 July 2013

By 2015, the website was well established and in much better shape.

The international reach of IARF was evident in its member groups:

 

Having implemented these major deliverables, Robert decided that it was time he moved on and he retired from his post in June 2015. 

Vade Mecum

Over the years, we met up periodically for wanderings on foot, sometimes joined by Catherine; and after leaving IARF, he had more time to roam. For, Robert noted, “We 'obligate bipeds' are in prime health when doing around 20km per day!”

We met mainly in towns and cities, which served as sources of endless anthropological fascination as we navigated across centuries of development and bounced ideas off each other.  One such meander was in 2016, assisted by Designs of the Times: Self-guided walk through the Square Mile (archive).  Always with Robert, as an allotment holder, having an eye for uncovering green spaces (the so-called secret gardens):

Robert in Christchurch Greyfriars Church Garden.

 

[See also some photos on Flickr.]

The next day, Robert reflected:

a very promising beginning to possible probings of whatever may remain neglected & unilluminated in this breathtaking megalopolis.

And in response to a tentative proposal I had in mind for a “3D illuminations of neglected spaces (or similar)”, he was encouraging, clearly seeing a deeper potential:

I've been interested in Psychogeography for a while, though never had the chance to really go into it. Seems all a bit trendy at the moment, but nonetheless may have merit if it matures along with the kind of technology you're clearly thinking about applying.

[See, e.g., an explanation of the term by the Tate. ]

Occasionally, we met in more rural settings, such as Wytham, where we’d observe other kinds of wildlife going about their business.  But it didn’t really matter where we ambled for Robert was perspicacious in any environment.

Thursday’s Lotus

My own introduction to interfaith work, which led to my meeting Robert, was through my mother, the late Fuengsin Trafford, who worked for 10 years at the Multi-Faith Centre in Birmingham before it ceased operating in the mid-1990s.

Shortly after my mother passed away in 1995, I started writing her biography.  By the time Robert left the offices in Market Street, I had a complete draft and was getting editorial feedback with a view to publication.  Robert offered his services and agreed to compile the index, patiently and painstakingly using DEXter, a clever, but somewhat temperamental tool that provided wonderful automated assistance most of the time, but not always.  A little over twenty years after commencement, Thursday’s Lotus was finally published and I was pleased to present a copy to Robert. 

He graciously responded:

I do have to say, it's such a total pleasure to heft in one's hand the finished work -- thank you!  It's been a while since I was involved in anything that saw the solidity of bound paper.

To say it again, it's been a privilege to be associated with something out of the ambitious world of interfaith that has this much integrity & worth. So much of what I toiled at with IARF so often seemed futile, but your labour of love has gone quite a way to persuading me of the merit of its wider context.

I’m sure that if Robert had been writing to or about someone he worked with at IARF, he would have been more positive, for he appreciated his colleagues in the office; his frustrations were (I feel) to do with the organisation's corporate management.  At the same time, some of these comments came from a natural modesty and humility, indications of his own integrity, which were what encouraged him to persevere.  But also, in hindsight, these were signs of low self esteem.

Environmental Awareness and an unusual Anthropological Project

Robert’s connection with Nature was deep, informed by study of evolution and observation of the present.  In May 2020, the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, Robert drew further inspiration from cultivating his allotment plot to  fuel a passion for returning to a more sustainable living and community:

I've never been more physically exhausted in any Springtime of soil toil - but it's fantastic, a joyful weariness. The life of plants, I've come to realise, is an allure that beats any that comes out of a screen.

I'm investigating a place called Tinker's Bubble, down in Somerset. Check it out, there's a great video on Vimeo.

Tinkers Bubble is a small off-grid woodland community in Somerset.  This ‘back to basics’ lifestyle was, Robert mused, probably too radical for Catherine (or, indeed, most of the population used to their creature comforts), so he wondered about milder alternatives and, so, I suggested the LandARK.  Naturally, he had already come across it and considered its viability:

Thanks for reminder of this excellent venture, which I stumbled upon years ago, bookmarked, and had not revisited. The question would be, of course, where one might be permitted to plant one's little bubble. Might it help to be tugging one's forelock before the great & good one percent who own more than half this island?

We exchanged further speculative messages against a backdrop of a world in utter confusion, without any definite conclusion.

Meanwhile, at the writing desk, within a year of leaving IARF, Robert embarked on an ambitious writing project, a kind of anthropological novel describing Mesolithic life in Africa.  He was tentative about revealing it, perhaps fearing that it wouldn’t lead anywhere, but did share a few tantalising glimpses.  Robert first mentioned his ideas to me in a park café near SOAS towards the end of October 2017 shortly before I attended an evening meeting of The Biographers' Club.  Afterwards, I wrote to him to relate that there was reflection on how to 'enter' a different time and land; in all cases the key was immersion, directly or indirectly.

Robert responded:

 …  Interesting to hear that biographers do still cherish the credo that it's possible to immerse in another time. It undergirds the whole craft, I suppose, but as the tired saying goes 'The past is another country...they do things differently there'. So I propose to market my work as a satirical subgenre of Fantasy, so absurd do i find the proposition that a modern consciousness can evoke anything faintly approaching the conditions of life even a century back - let alone the millennia that 'prehistoric fiction' wades blithely about in...

Serious fiction is only ever contemporary.

But my hunch is that even as the globe shrinks & the old nomad wanderlust of our kind dies spatially, it will compensate temporally, and while the kids are hurtling off to fantasy worlds rich in dragons & elves, or fearsome deep-space aliens, the adult imagination will want inter alia to probe further & further back into our imagined past.

And what the market calls for, none shall gainsay! Hooray indeed. Long may huddled creatives continue to earn a crust down the 'satirical fantasy' alleyway... with cakes & ale to the trailblazers, of course.  ;)?

Gradually, having got to know about Robert’s project, friends and family became curious about his writing.  I was not alone in thinking that a publisher might be interested and, so, enquired about samples.  In March 2021, replying to a message which had started on zero emission zones, Robert was characteristically thoughtful:

Molweni, bra Paul (Gauteng-greets)

Thanks for asking about my long-ongoing writerly ambitions.
It's become more effortful as I've had to start infilling the structure with plausibly thought-out, anthropologically-informed pattern & process around the storyline.

I wish it were possible to offer some sample, as it seems most creatives are able to do even just a few months after conceiving a project (mine has been five years in the making so far). 

However it's a 'built world' I'm about, so even a short passage would demand of any reader an immersion into backdrop detail (I provide it in maps, timelines, synopses, etc.) which few are prepared to undertake, given the Titanic-scale 'raft of alternatives' on market offer any day of your life... (and all within a few seconds' whisper of your fingers' busy tap-tapping). 

That begs the larger question of whether readerly attention span nowadays has any inclination toward 'built-world immersion' (aka Fantasy?). Maybe the New Pandemia inclines the newly underemployed among them that way? 

I'm counting on a few other things to make the offer stand out - not least that Fantasy has always been hugely ethnocentric. Counting most riskily of all, though, on a readership that's able to slow down, in order make sense of language rendered faux-archaic.
Not much ask there! :)

He confirmed his commitment in further correspondence.:

I've come too far now to abandon it. Huge investment of time, and sacrifice of earnings. Sometimes I do wonder what can have driven me to it!

Sadly, he would never see its completion. 

Robert’s Passing

Robert Papini passed away suddenly and unexpectedly on Saturday 23 April 2022 shortly after 3pm.  Whilst difficult to comprehend, there has since come to light much of biographical interest.  This post offers just a taste of Robert’s life, one that epitomised an enquiring mind and service to humanity. He worked hard, facilitated, inspired and did not seek credit.  It’s especially evident from his time at IARF, where he made a major contribution in delivering projects across the world, touching many people’s lives in a positive way.