the SABC one more time

So this is what has happened so far in this on-going not-ready-for-prime-time soap: Dali hates Khanyi, who wants Dali fired because Dali hates Snuki, who is almost universally hated by the entire jouralistic community as a conniving weasel of a government stooge. Those damned journalists want Dali fired too, and Khanyi and several other Thabo-ists drummed off the SABC board because he put them there as hand-puppets anyway. Got that?

Then, with the world’s public television industry and many, many indie TV producers in attendance at a huge international conference in Joburg hosted at great expense by the SABC… Dali – and the Board – are called to explain to parliament in Cape Town WTF they’re doing!! They return just in time to get a tongue-lashing by Harry Belafonte, who also slams the SABC as a whole for being a gutless organization that has fallen back on its former role as a propaganda machine. Dali then beats the SABC board to the punch by firing the much-hated Snuki before Snuki manages to get Dali fired. All of this as stunned producers from around the world hit the bottle so this might be able to remember this all like the last episode of Dallas (remember, it was all a very weird, bad dream).

Then, Snuki pulls some strings and gets Dali fired by the board, which then has to re-hire Dali after he takes his case to court. But the SABC board ain;’t done with him yet, and remains fit to be tied with Dali as a parliamentary hearing is about to take place… Which is then cancelled just in the nick of time, before the ANC has to answer some very troubling questions about Thabo’s role, the Board’s role, and Dali’s and Snuki’s roles in an international embarrassment – but also avoiding unsettling questions about the SABC’s now familiar role as official fart-catchers to the stars.

Ach, shame.

When Winnie speaks…

…as the voice of reason and sanity in South Africa on violence in the townships… Well, you can just fill in the blanks all by yer lonesome. Cuz I dun’t want no soccer club coming after me. I’m a foreign devil, alright. And that makes me fair game in these here neck of the woods. So I’ll just mosey on over to the editorial and comment pages at the Mail & Guardian, one of the best English-language newspapers here abouts.

If you go there, check out the Winnie Madikizela-Mandela interview, the Drew Forrest commentary (really great analysis on why President Thabo Mbeki is such a dud, and why the ANC and every newspaper in the country wants him gone asap).

“zenophobia”

I read a column by Jonathan Jensen in the Times (of Joburg) entitled “The Machetes Of Our Minds.” Great title. It’s on “zenophobia,” as Jensen writes on a blackboard in a primary school classroom. The students immediately correct his spelling; it’s spelled with an X. He’s a bit surprised, but only a bit, that these school children know how to spell the word perhaps even better than their parents. Everyone, Jensen writes, has been throwing the word around during the past few weeks.

Jensen is shocked by the killings that have torn apart townships from Joburg to the Cape Flats: “But is it xenophobia?” He notes that everyone is throwing the word around. He also says that he is in no way downplaying the seriousness of the violence. Still, Jensen questions “the lazy tendency to label a complex phenomenon and then satisfy ourselves that we have a neat explanation for an atrocity.”

That was my point in a previous post.

Jensen writes that it is so easy – too easy – for the government and the police to label the violence as “xenophobia” but also to attribute it to a mysterious “third force” that is never identified by them. Few reporters chase them for an explanation for their use of these two terms, except for those from the Mail & Guardian.

In Jensen’s view, the present violence is the result of frustration with long-standing grievances that the poorest in this country have against the ANC government for failing to control immigration, to build new homes and create jobs fast enough for the original residents while at the same time allowing immigrants and refugees to jump queues by taking advantage of corrupt authorities with bribes and pay-offs. Combine all of the above with a long history of violence in this country that has seen 14,000 people killed in the four years from 1990 to 1994, and the ANC’s first term as national government.

During that same period, 22,000 people were injured in the violence, mostly between the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party. This is many times more than the total numbers of people killed or injured in all of the violence from the 1960s, when townships exploded in anti-apartheid demonstrations, until 1990 when the ANC and other parties of liberation were unbanned and Mandela and others walked out of prison.

The present violence in South Africa, according to Jensen, may be traced to this long history of violence; violence as a means to an end, as a constant facet of society, as the backdrop to everyday life. Look at the endless taxi wars, the break-ins and armed roberies, the gangs, and much more, he writes.

“We are all traumatised by our violent past; this time it was foreigners, tomorrow it will be someone else.”

“If any evidence was needed that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission failed to deal with national trauma, the events this month were it. It does not matter, therefore, whether you spell the word with a Z or an X, the problem staring all of us in the mirror is not xenophobia.”

I don’t entirely agree with his assessment, but it makes one think about the the link between SA’s violent past and how it has affected so much of the population – of all races. I don’t have the personal experience to refute his argument. I hear similar statements from taxi drivers, although in very different language. It’s his assessment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which he states has failed to resolve the national trauma as though there were an inherent promise there.

Everyone I’ve discussed the TRC with has said that it accomplished its main goal – helping avoid a civil war and bloodbath on all sides. It was a compromise arrangement, a stop gap, between the former Afrikaner rulers and the incoming coalition of liberationists. The TRC was designed to allow people from one end of the country to the other to express their pain and anguish, to ask for answers (such as where their loved ones might be buried), to permit them to confront their antagonists, to demand the truth about their perpetrators’ crimes from the perpetrators themselves, and thus allow an amnesty – if and only if they told the truth. But it was not about healing the national trauma.

Because its scope and direction was so limited by the two main opponents (Afrikaner and ANC), the SA Truth and Reconciliation Commission was hamstrung from the start; unable to demand answers from international corporations and businesses that propped up the apartheid regimes for deecades, that funded and supported the former SA regime’s destabilization of other countries in southern Africa (and protecting their business interests in the process), that instigated foreign governments to support, train and fund counter-insurgencies in countries such as Namibia, Angola and Mozamibique. So not everyone was compelled to come forward to testify, to answer charges against them, to tell the truth, to seek amnesty.

Some individuals, like those corporations, got off scott-free.

People know that. They also know that some in the ANC got off with their crimes as well. So did those in the Inkatha Freedom party, in particular Manogsuthu Buthelezi and King Goodwill Zwelethini for ther crimes committed in their names or under their direction. That was the compromise. What the TRC could not do was instruct or direct the incoming elite to NOT order that big mansion, those gas-guzziling Mercedes sedans, those expensive Italian suits, to not resemble so very much the pigs in George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”

this morning, in Johannesburg

I have quite deliberately avoided writing about the outbreaks in violence in South Africa. They call it by a rather disgusting euphemism, “xenophobia.” It becomes this all-encompassing bit of code that includes everything from ethnic hatred to petty crime to murder. I don’t understand why they always seem to find these buzz words that hide meaning instead of calling the individual act what it is. So instead of writing or saying that “10 people are dead, murdered by marauding gangs bent on robbing people on the pretense of ethnic tensions,” they say “there were 10 victims of xenophobia last night near Cape Town.”

I joke about the fact that I’m a foreigner here. I grabbed a taxi at the airport to get to the guest house where I’m staying in the east rand, just north of the airport. I began asking the driver what had happened while I was gone for those five days in Namibia. I tell him I heard that “foreign devils like me” have something to worry about. The driver laughs, and tells me it’s is calmed down a bit, thanks to the police action.” To really understand what he meant, you must read between the lines: the police cracked down and a number of people have been killed, wounded and arrested. The driver isn’t sure how many.

That’s the pathology of violence here. It began during the 70’s and 80’s, with the student riots, and then the third force and the hostels, necklacing, and more. It’s become a feature of the society here. It is an unwanted but daily occurence. This is reality.

People try to explain why the outbreaks of violence, and why at this time. They talk about desperate people willing to work for much lower than the unionized SA workers, jobbers and companies willing to hire these desperate foreigners and undercut the unions and their collective agreements, the fact that this Somali family has a house while this Xhosa one is on an 8-year waiting list for one, the TV’s and radios that the Ethiopian folks have, the gangs run by the Nigerians, the dope trade pinned on the Zimbabweans, and so on. Of course, all of the above have long been fixtures in South African society too.

We arrive at the guest house, my taxi driver and I. We land in the midst of a mini-refugee camp. There are 28 Malawians sitting in chairs, watching TV, hovering around the rooms. There is one white woman on the phone, desperately trying to arrange safe passage for them across the borders and back to Malawi. It’s a nightmare because of the situation here in South Africa, which is cracking down at its borders, the situation in Zimbabwe, which is a nightmare at the best of times and the crackdown on its borders, similar freezes at the borders of Swaziland and Mozamibique. Who has the money to buy all these folks air tickets so they can jump over this awful mess?

“They can’t stay here forever,” says one white guy in a lawn chair. “I mean, there is a limit to what we can give them.” It’s the truth. It’s also bloody cruel reality. But it comes across as mean and, well, xenophobic. I refuse to use the word “racist” because the question is: What can be done to help – realistically?

Meanwhile, as I write this, four children play on the grass lawn outside the window. They’re singing, holding hands, falling down. I don’t know the game. The big german shepherd, a guard dog, plays fetch with another child. I hope things turn out alright for them.

The Real Desert (May 26)

A friend sent me an SMS about a dream. She wrote that it was about my brother Joe, but he said it was okay because he said his name wasn’t Joe. She also described a wolf and a bear in this dream. And pages of words piled up like translucent 3D pages floating in stacks. The dream meant something, she wrote. She wasn’t sure exactly what it meant, but she knew she had to share it with me.

I am on a bus as it arrives on my cell phone. My phone is on and then off again the further we travel north into the Eastern Western Cape (once more, thx Suite Basil, weblog editor par excellence) and the mountains and valleys on the road to Namibia. You can go 40 minutes or 4 hours without seeing a town, gas station or restaurant, but off in the distance are farms. I am able to receive her message when I check my phone periodically, but by the time I finish reading it my phone is almost out of power and definitely out of range of any signal.

Later, after I am in Windhoek and have managed to get my phone working again, I reply to my good friend via text message that my brother’s real and proper (Mohawk) name was Tehawehron. My mother, Watsenniostha, was bear clan. My father, Tehotention, was wolf clan. I cannot know what those pages of floating words and pages mean, but I can guess.

I think my Mohawk ancestors are talking to her Khoisan ancestors. They may be gathering, getting together, perhaps to let me know they are here, perhaps to protect me, perhaps to remind me of things I must do. I have heard them whispering to me from time to time since I arrived in South Africa. That I have left SA may be one reason they have reached out. I think the time has come to decide something important in my life. The message or meaning has arrived as I ride a bus through the Eastern Cape on the road to Windhoek and the Namib desert. Perhaps it is one last warning not to be distracted or diverted. Perhaps it is a calling out to be somewhere. Perhaps.

Isn’t technology wonderful? Talk about long distance communication! Only a fool would ignore it.

The Namib (May 26)

I met Dalene van der Westhuizen 17 years ago, shortly after the so-called Oka Crisis which was really a Canadian – not a Mohawk – crisis. We shared a Commonwealth Fellowship, met the British Queen in Buckingham Palace, was her Mother’s guest at Cumberland Lodge near Windsor, travelled to the South Pacific nations of Tonga, Solomon Islands, Western Samoa with a layover in Fiji. One night, on the flight from Singapore to Brisbane, we sat up all night unable to sleep, talking, drinking wine. We talked about ourselves, where we came from, and where we were going. 17 years dropped like a pebble in the stream when she picked me up the other morning.

Back then, I remember telling her that we (Mohawks) didn’t want trouble. But neither were we able to ignore the massive insult to our ancestors when the neighbouring mayor threatened to bulldoze their graveyard and slash those pine trees to extend a golf course where Indians weren’t even allowed to play. At the time, I remember saying, we just reminded Canadians of something they have tried repeatedly to purge from their collective memories, like erasing files from a computer hard drive. Even computers, however, retain copies of these trashed files until they are over-written by something else. So we Indigenous types confound these attempts by dredging up these unwanted and uncomfortable memories by recovering them over and over again, and putting them back onto the desktop.

These are my thoughts as Dalene describes what we are about to see once at Wakopsmund on the Atlantic coast, about three hours drive west of Windhoek. I arrived in Windhoek after a 20-hour bus ride through the Eastern Western Cape (merci, encore, my unofficial blog editor, Basil Appollis) from Cape Town, through spectacular mountains, then into the semi-arid land that has some of the richest and most productive farmlands in South Africa. Did I mention that midnight body search at the border by SA police and customs officials? And the sniffer dogs? After a long walk to downtown Windhoek, I look forward to something – anything.

Six hours after my arrival that morning with no sleep in two days, Dalene and I are in her car heading out into the desert. The sights are stunning. She explains much about the geology and history of the places we pass. Over there, a volcanic upshoot that never developed fully. Did I know that the mountains were carved by massive glaciers that scraped volcanic rock underneath leaving other mountain ranges? Or that there was once a vast sea where now there is desert as far as you can drive in one day. Dinosaur bones of huge sea creatures are under the sands out there.

The Herero people are here. We pass some in Usakos; women in spectacular German missionary-style multi-layered gowns with wide, horn-like bonnets in vivid colours as they sway majestically down the dusty street. The San are further north in the Kalahari, the Caprivi Strip area and Botswana. As we drive, Dalene points to mountains that shoot up from flat desert. Out there, she says, is where the Hamib people live. “There is nothing out there,” she says. “Absolutely nothing. They are a beautiful, wonderful people who wander and exist where almost nothing else can.” There is admiration in her voice.

Later, at a museum, we see pictures of people with fine almost delicate features, dark copper skin and beautiful faces, and a glow that seems to emanate from within even in these old pictures. I can’t help but wonder, though, the way in which this museum deals with them as museums do with so many peoples around the world – as artifacts of a dead or dying people and culture to be preserved and displayed for a paying public.

Is this the best that modern societies offer them? Even after European societies and their Afrikaner off-spring hand over control to African societies and their new governments? I look at jars with snakes, scorpions, geckos faithfully preserved and labelled and wonder how I would look if my people had not adapted but sought to remain as they had 250 years ago. I can’t but think that we, too, would have made a beautiful and majestic bunch of museum artifacts.

Meaning in Everything (May 24)

A friend sent me an SMS about a dream. She wrote that it was about my brother Joe, but he said it was okay because he said his name wasn’t Joe. She also described a wolf and a bear in this dream. And pages of words piled up like translucent 3D pages floating in stacks. The dream meant something, she wrote. She wasn’t sure exactly what it meant, but she knew she had to share it with me.

I am on a bus as it arrives on my cell phone. My phone is on and then off again the further we travel north into the Eastern Western Cape (thank you, my unofficial blog editor, monsieur Suite Basil) and the mountains and valleys on the road to Namibia. You can go 40 minutes or 4 hours without seeing a town, gas station or restaurant, but off in the distance are farms. I am able to receive her message when I check my phone periodically, but by the time I finish reading it my phone is almost out of power and definitely out of range of any signal.

Later, after I am in Windhoek and have managed to get my phone working again, I reply to my good friend via text message that my brother’s real and proper (Mohawk) name was Tehawehron. My mother, Watsenniostha, was bear clan. My father, Tehotention, was wolf clan. I cannot know what those pages of floating words and pages mean, but I can guess.

I think my Mohawk ancestors are talking to her Khoisan ancestors. They may be gathering, getting together, perhaps to let me know they are here, perhaps to protect me, perhaps to remind me of things I must do. I have heard them whispering to me from time to time since I arrived in South Africa. That I have left SA may be one reason they have reached out. I think the time has come to decide something important in my life. The message or meaning has arrived as I ride a bus through the Eastern Cape on the road to Windhoek and the Namib desert. Perhaps it is one last warning not to be distracted or diverted. Perhaps it is a calling out to be somewhere. Perhaps.

Isn’t technology wonderful? Talk about long distance communication! Only a fool would ignore it.

numbers, numbers, numbers

42 dead. 237 arrested. More than 600 in the hospital with gunshot wounds, knife wounds, broken bones, various other traumas. More than 700 homes and shops destroyed in townships around Johannesburg. Violence spreading to other cities and parts of the country. The latest flareups taking place in Kwa-Zulu Natal in the east, Mpumalanga in the north, and threats of more violence in the East Cape. Sadly, that’s the score card that most of the media is reporting. Numbers – not people.

The media also reports the main cause is “xenophobia.” People are upset that immigrants from other countries are undermining the gains made by unions for a decent or at least existence wage, and by willing to accept less are taking away jobs. They have homes while good South Africans have waiting lists for homes. They have CD players and TVs while they must go to a relative’s home or a friend’s place to watch TV. It’s beginning to sound a lot more complex than just “xenophobia.” But the media here likes labels and lots and lots of alphabet soup.

The SANDF has been called in by the ANC government to enter and subdue unrest in the Johannesburg CBD. Got it? Good.

Must go think about things some more. Must go pack for a long trip tomorrow to another country, more stories. The long bus ride will give me plenty of time to think and to write.

What the… ?

Sounds ominous. There are actually quite a few really good mysteries in the Cape. Maybe someday, I might get to the ones I remember.

In the meantime, check these out. First, why did they begin to build this four-lane elevated highway through through one of the busiest areas of town… and then just stop work on it 20 years or so ago? The other end of this highway is about two blocks away. It just stops. Right there. Hanging in the middle of nowhere.

The other thing that strikes me as weird is this sign for a fast food joint. Why the North American Indian with full plains headdress? Maybe it’s like the Mohawk gas stations in western Canada? And who gave them permission to use these symbols. Any copyright lawyers in the house?

Back in funky, funky land

If you haven’t guessed, I’m back in Cape Town. Have been since Thursday afternoon after a quick trip to Muizenberg. I spent most of yesterday (Friday) doing what I try to do whereever I go: I wander on foot. First, I have a load of lard to lose around my waist, a result of banging up myself on bicycle, quit smoking, keyboard addiiction, and still eating like a teenager – which I can’t do anymore. Without a bike, I try to get my feets working at least an hour a day. My walkabouts can take a lot longer, like yesterday.

Before I begin, let me say that I love Cape Town. The scenery is stunning, the old parts of the city are amazing, the food is fabulous. But it’s the people that make any place. So I love heading off to little corners, just wandering to see where I might end up, what amazing people await. Yesterday, I hit the Victoria & Albert Waterfront with a purpose though. No time to dilly or dally. I needed to find a tourism office or travel agent for help.

First, any touristy pic of Cape Town will show you the V&A with Table Mountain behind it. Guaranteed. It’s famous. Second, I haven’t been to the V&A in ten years. I was shocked. It was like going to a theme park, a Disneyland or some other major tourist trap. If you read a previous post on Sandton, in Joburg, then you might have an idea what I’m talking about. Finally, I realized that the V&A has become another one of those little safe havens for people with money and time to spend it. My mind had to make that adjustment before it could assimilate it all.

But I saw something else; lots of other people who did not seem to have a lot of time or money wandering about just like me. I pondered that for a moment or three before coming to the conclusion that perhaps like everyone else they need a break from outside realities, a diversion for an afternoon, a safe place for a young family to be together.

Just like me.