Updates (in progress)

Based on subsequent events, and on looking through the newspaper clippings I've saved and the notes I've written, here are a few updates to previous posts:

On corruption in the ANC and its effect on the current conflict between Malema and the party leadership (President Zuma et al): "The extent to which the ANC has lost its hold over its own core principles is astonishing... If corruption, verbal or monetary, is not dealt with the moment it manifests itself, the corrosion will spread. The more it spreads the harder it becomes to stop... It all on boils down to a question of leadership. Good leaders lead by example. Uphold your principles and the rest will follow. Condone and cover-up and things fall apart." (Cape Times editorial column by Allister Sparks - journalist, author, and political analyst; 14 April 2010)

Amid letters on... (uh oh! can't find the rest of this file...)

to be continued

One word...

Eyafjallajokull !

(Saturday, April 24th: Actually, my flight from Cape Town through Amsterdam went off as if the aforementioned Icelandic volcano were still dormant. There weren't even masses of stranded travellers in the Schiphol Airport. Duped by media hype again! The only jarring part of the trip home was the superfluous stopover in Minneapolis. With all due respect - and one branch of my family has roots in the region, it felt like I'd been dropped onto the set of the movie Fargo. I won't elaborate except to say that I clearly was NOT in Cape Town anymore.)

Wrapping up my stay (draft)

I am trying to take full advantage of my final days here. That has meant fitting in some excursions, such as a summit of 1000m Devil's Peak (got there this morning on the second try! The first one ended with driving my hiking partner to the ER, but that's another story...) and a great mountain bike ride (followed by a dip in a reservoir!) on the backside of Table Mountain. On the work front, I have been quite busy getting in my last visits to schools - mostly by bicycle (after getting the car collision damage repaired, but that too is another story). I did join the photography intern here from Seattle U for an epic pilgrimage by mini-taxi back out to Hector Peterson School for a last visit there.

A huge highlight was organizing what turned out to be a quite successful multi-school environmental service project yesterday. Thirty learners from seven different schools turned out to do some invasive plant clearing at a conservation area (co-located with an active horse racing track! We would pause to watch the races go by.). I was thrilled with the turn-out!

tbc

Zuma in the US; SA social fabric continues to fray

As I assume the US media covered, President Zuma was in Washington DC for the summit on nuclear security, at which South Africa was proudly singled out and praised by President Obama for being the first country to abandon a nuclear weapons programme. According to allAfrica.com, "South Africa gave up its pursuit of nuclear weapons in 1993 making it the first and only country to start abandoning a weapons programme voluntarily." Zuma also met with President Obama as part of the trip. Although the picture only appeared on page 5. I find it interesting to see the difference between the image chosen for publication here (above) and those published in other sources, such as below (from IOL) where JZ looks oddly deferential to a stern-looking Obama. IOL reports that the meeting "covered a number of bilateral issues, including strengthening co-operation on areas like agriculture and HIV and Aids. They also discussed the promotion of African peace and security within the ambit of the African Union and United Nations." (Ambit means "sphere or scope"; I had to look it up.) One has to wonder what was going through Obama's mind about some of the issues they didn't talk about (lifestyle audits, polygamy, etc.).

In other news, questions of race relations are still in the forefront of the public conversation, as are growing concerns that the World Cup may not be the economic boon and boost for the country that its promoters have been promising. An editorial in today's paper (Cape Times) encouraged South Africans to skip the games and instead to donate an equivalent amount to education or other needs. Coincidentally, the front page story this morning was of pupils going on a rampage in Malmesbury (a town about 45 minute north of Cape Town) to protest their over-crowded school. As legitimate as their concerns are (over 60 pupils in some classes), there is something disconcerting about students resorting to torching portables to make their point and about the incident escalating to police shooting kids with rubber bullets. In the melee, a "criminal element" apparently exploited the chaos to rob and vandalize some shops owned by "foreigners" and to beat the shopkeepers. In a related story, municipal workers all over the country went on strike Monday in response to a lack of progress in on-going labor negotiations. The images of the march were celebratory for the solidarity and resolve that they showed, but they were also menacing for the anger some workers expressed and for the vandalism engaged in by some of the protesters, particularly the gleeful overturning of rubbish bins onto the streets and the damaging of other municipal property (see Cape Town strike video here). According to the Cape Town mayor's office, for every three rand spent on upgrading municipal infrastructure, two more rand are spent protecting and repairing it due to rampant vandalism and theft. A lot of resources are being devoted to containing these festering problems in the run-up to the World Cup. Whether or not those efforts can be sustained or victorious in the long-term is an open question.

My advice: come to the World Cup if you can, but all bets are off for what happens in its wake.

Anniversaries & commemorations (*updated)

Largely overshadowed in the current media storms was the anniversary on Saturday of the assassination of Chris Hani. On 10 April, 1993, Hani was killed by right-wing extremists as he returned home to racially mixed suburb of Johannesburg. Hani was active in the apartheid resistance from the early 1960's on, and he was, among other roles, a popular leader of the South African Communist Party. Hani's death is widely viewed as a critical loss to the nation's leadership cadre right when the new nation was being forged. His killers were caught and convicted, and the TRC determined that his killers, who are still imprisoned for the crime, were not acting as part of a right-wing conspiracy (although some of his family and other supporters still appeal for a full disclosure of the circumstances of his death). In an ironic twist, the new constitution that they surely opposed spared Hani's killers from death sentences. Here are links to an overview of Chris Hani's life and to Nelson Mandela's speech at Hani's funeral. Many prominent South Africans have paid tribute to Chris Hani, including Blade Nzimande, Jeremy Cronin, and Tokyo Sexwale. These are easily found on the web.


Another tragedy being commemorated in April, also in Africa and from the same era but of an incomprehensible scale, is the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Starting on the night of April 6th, after the shooting down of a small plane which had the presidents of both Rwanda and neighboring Burundi on board, a mass slaughter began that would claim the lives of over 800,000 people (10% of the nation's population) in a mere 100 days. The details of this horror are numbing, and its roots and reverberations are complex. It was, as the title of an episode of PBS's Frontline declared "A Triumph of Evil," a near total moral collapse of an entire society. It was also a shameful abdication of responsibility on the part of members of the international community (including the US and the UN) who had the necessary information and means to have intervened to stop the bloodshed. (The Frontline website is an excellent resource to learn more.)

Here at UCT, the East African Student Society held a sober commemoration of the genocide. There were speakers, including officials from the Rwandan consulate, the reading of testimonies from survivors, and the screening of a documentary, "When Good Men do Nothing" (The BBC Panorama version of the Frontline program). Both titles come from words attributed to Edmund Burke:

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

The professor of the course I took also spoke. He was typically eloquent as he warned us in the audience to remember "how quickly we humans succumb to base and low instinct" during these "extraordinary examples or barbarism." He also exhorted us to apply the privilege of our university educations to the meaningful work of "expanding the boundaries of inclusion." His conviction is powerful when he speaks, and it makes sense that he has been appointed to the position of deputy vice-chancellor, responsible for, among other things, the institution's transformation strategy. (The UCT website has published a nice profile of him.)

One more April commemoration is the upcoming 30th anniversary of Zimbabwe's independence. While the holiday in Zimbabwe is this Sunday, 18 April, UCT's active and numerous Zimbabwean student group is hosting a retrospective lecture presentation this Thursday evening. South Africa has absorbed a large population of refugees from its troubled neighbor (related article and slide show), and, despite continuing support for Robert Mugabe from the ANC government, South Africa has recently taken a more active role in helping bring peace and order to Zimbabwe after years of conflict and unrest. (See post from March 20th.) I look forward to attending that event.

Lenses & mirrors

Here's something different for those of you not captivated by South African political squabbling (which is what the previous post focuses on after the first two paragraphs):

Experiencing the world from a different vantage point is one feature of living here, as is the case I suppose for any American who spends time in another country. I have gotten a chance to see some of the ways that South Africans view international events, which is a quite different lens from the one my news of the world is filtered through at home. I have also been exposed to how the United States is viewed in South Africa. While both of these perspectives are accessible to some degree from home, I am appreciating the frequency, variety, and proximity that being here affords. The US is much discussed here, both in a current events context, such as this past week when, on environmental grounds, the US opposed (along with and Netherlands) a $29 billion World Bank loan to South Africa for the completion of a coal-fired power plant. There are also frequent (and logical) social and historical comparisons drawn between our two countries. For me, it has been particularly interesting to have my "home" society and culture reflected back to me through the mirror of South African coverage and commentary, both formal and informal.

Here are a few recent examples of how the United States has come up in public discourse here: numerous parallels being drawn in classrooms, the media, and conversation between slavery in the US (and also the treatment of the Native Americans during our expansion) and apartheid; hearing a climate change scientist mention US plans to dump shiploads of scrap iron at sea as one of the threats facing the South Atlantic Ocean; and listening to a speaker at a Human Rights Day assembly indict IBM for its role in facilitating the implementation of apartheid laws (the subject of a current court case against IBM and other major corporations).

One that has caught my ear is a radio interview excerpt that has been played for weeks now as a promotion for the talk show. It has an American journalist (I assume) claiming that a “dirty little secret” of the US is that soccer is actually very popular but a different impression is conveyed by a “racist” media because “soccer is not popular in the white suburbs.” With as popular as soccer is in the US, particularly in the often very white suburbs, this seems an incomplete explanation for soccer's perpetual neglect by a media dominated by football, baseball, basketball, hockey, auto racing, x games, and golf. Here, especially with the impending World Cup, soccer shares the media stage with cricket and rugby, although the fan bases are largely divided on racial lines.

Anyway, I won't be coming home with a passion for following either cricket and rugby, but I do plan to keep checking the websites of South African newspapers as a way to sustain my exposure to the lens and mirror that they provide.

* Speaking of South African newspapers, here's an UPDATE for those rapt by the “ET” and Malema dramas... reports emerged this weekend, though from where it is not clear, as they conflict with official police statements, that Terre'Blanche was found naked and with a used condom nearby. The obvious inference is that he may have been engaging in a sexual liaison with one of his accused murderers. To me, this information smacks of a smokescreen or other such effort to discredit Terre'Blanche (as if he hadn't done a good enough job of that on his own!). Click here to follow the saga and its breaking news for yourself.

Meanwhile, Malema continues to stir up daily controversy and to be defiant toward more moderate voices in his party. The latter seems both a growing group and increasingly impatient. In a shrewd and hopefully sincere move, President Zuma came out strongly against the ANCYL leader's recent conduct.

And, of course, Jonathan Shapiro is offering his astute commentary on it all...

Eventful Easter

It’s raining this morning, not for the first time in the last three months, but in a more determined, ominous fashion than before. Even though most of the days are still sunny and warm, summer is definitely over here. I've actually been cold a few times in the evenings now, which was an unfamiliar and welcome sensation. Capetonians are starting to bundle up and even grouse a bit about the wind and the cool. For me, heading home (in a few weeks now) to springtime will make it easier not to miss this climate.

So, where have I been for almost two weeks? Well, the secondary schools have all been on a two-week Easter break, and, even though I still had UCT class and soccer commitments, this was a perfect time to host Kristina, my first and only visitor. (Everyone else I know seems to be waiting to come down here for the World Cup; go figure.) We rented a car and did some touring around the Cape Peninsula before heading into the Cederberg mountains for the long weekend. The towns in the mountain foothills were small and agricultural (Ceres, home of the juice, and Citrusdal, for example), and the setting was perfect to meet our goals: some hiking (we carefully selected hikes with swimming potential!), some relaxed meals, and some visits to the Atlantic coast. We also went to see Athol Fugard's latest play, which he is directing as the inaugural production at a new theatre named in his honor. The two-actor production was intense and provocative; it addressed the complexity and brutality of apartheid both in its time and in its legacies - and it did not provide any easy answers or happy endings.

Meanwhile, South Africa's problems and politics did not, of course, take a holiday. In news that I'm sure made the US headlines, Eugene Terre'Blanche, the leader of the white supremacist Afrikaner Resistance Movement (know by its Afrikaans acronym: AWB), was hacked and bludgeoned to death on Saturday by two disgruntled farm workers. Long controversial for his white-supremacist, secessionist, and racist views, Terre'Blanche's death comes amidst a furor over the singing of an apartheid resistance song by another controversial public figure, ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema. The song, "Kill the Boer," celebrates (and some say advocates) violence against white farmers, and Malema has taken to singing it quite publicly (and now in defiance of a recent court order). South Africa does have a problem of attacks on white farmers. According to the South African Institute of Race Relations there were 10,412 attacks on farmers and their families between 1991 and 2007 with 1,560 killed. Other sources have been repeating the statistic of 3,000 deaths in farm attacks since 1994. Either way, the numbers are disturbing (especially with the spectre of Zimbabwe's experience always looming). Some commentators have observed that these deaths represent a fraction of the total murders in a nation that contends for the title of murder capital of the world (18,000 people were killed in 2009), but there's little consolation to be found in pursuing that line of argument.

The Malema and Terre'Blanche stories have made an obvious point of dramatic comparison, and there is a strong sense that racial tension is reaching a dangerous point. This means that the ruling ANC government has a new and urgent item on its already full agenda, and expectations are high that it act to calm the situation. In a call for President Zuma to “show decisive leadership” and “rein in users of hate speech,” an editorial in Tuesday’s Cape Times reported on the tension: “FF+ (Freedom Front Plus) leader Pieter Mulder did not exaggerate when he said “the dream of national reconciliation and nation-building is at risk. The interracial atmosphere is brittle and potentially explosive. As [a University of the Orange Free State professor] noted last week, before the murder of Terre’Blanche, South Africa is in a dangerous state, on a ‘precipice’ regarding race relations. Has the ANC lost sight entirely of the Freedom Charter and their reconciliatory heritage which under Nelson Mandela’s leadership looked to be a happy and peaceful future for all in South Africa?” Despite its alarming tone, the commentator, Gerald Shaw, is the author of a book called “Believe in Miracles, South Africa from Malan to Mandela and the Mbeki Era.” (Link to the Cape Times website for more information and related articles.)

To add more calming perspective, the newspaper editor’s piece on the same page makes a case for not equating this year’s events with those of “Easter 1993, when a rightwinger shot dead SACP (South African Communist Party) leader Chris Hani and South Africa seemed to teeter on the edge of civil war.” The editorial does a succinct and cogent job of condemning both the murder of Terre’Blanche (along with a blanket condemnation of any and all murder) and any “foolish or conceited politician who dares to play with the threat of violence.” This is a clear reference to Malema, whose ilk the piece goes on to denounce as “tawdry populists.” Meanwhile, Malema finds himself besieged with scrutiny and criticism, even from within his own party's notoriously loyal leadership cadre. He just returned from a visit to Zimbabwe, where he managed to attract even more negative attention by getting provoked into a profane tirade by a BBC journalist at a press conference yesterday, and was on the radio today to explain himself. Although he can sound reasonable and thoughtful at times (and he does make some valid and convincing arguments), overall he seems disingenuous about reconciliation and dangerous in his revolutionary fervor.

The Cape Times editorial offered an important analysis of the current controversy: “Making Malema into a bogeyman is a convenient way to avoid the difficult question: why exactly is it that this rather unimpressive political leader can garner the support he clearly enjoys in some places? Is it perhaps that he offers an outlet for some of the frustration and disappointment of those who feel left out of the celebrated political ‘miracle’ to which Terre’Blanche was so hostile? Whatever one thinks of Malema, the question demands attention.” Indeed. What to do for the impoverished, disaffected, and increasingly discontented is the big question and challenge for South Africa - and perhaps the world. Clearly a topic worth returning to on another day.

(Here's a link to an interesting opinion piece that comments on the issue and specifically responds to the Cape Times editorial.)