Apologies for Tyrants

Back when The Voice of the Turtle was a paper-bound beast, "Apologies for Tyrants" used to be a regular feature. Chris over at the Virtual Stoa is back from his Easter travels. He stopped off in Libya, where he collected a splendid piece of evidence regarding Moammar Ghedaffi's VW Beetle, a document that will undoubtedly feature in an encomium to the man once he cashes in his chips. Check it out.

Bruiser from Bulawayo

Norm, in anticipation of the Zimbabwean elections today, offers some words from MDC stalwart Eddie Cross, who claims

I have often pointed out to any who will listen, that the MDC is a Party of the Poor.

Could this be the same Mr Cross who said

We are going to fast track privatisation. All fifty government parastatals will be privatised within a two-year time frame, but we are going far beyond that. We are going to privatise many of the functions of government. We are going to privatise the Central Statistical Office. We are going to privatise virtually the entire school delivery system. And you know, we have looked at the numbers and we think we can get government employment down from about 300,000 at the present time to about 75,000 in five years.

Yes it could. There's more Cross firing, administered by Patrick Bond,
here. But to trash Cde Cross is not the point. Not today.

The folk at Sokwanele seem quite right to suggest that the MDC is the most popular party in Zimbabwe. The question is whether they will prevail at the polls. I don't think they can. The intimidation around the polls seems too systematic, despite the MDC's freedom to campaign. I've heard that vast rural constituencies have been discreetly appended to the voter rolls in the MDC's urban strongholds, and the dead have been resurrected so that they can ensure Mugabe's 'overwhelming victory'.

In the wake of a return in Mugabe's favour, I'd love to see, as Archbishop Pius Ncube exhorts, an Orange revolution (but without all that nasty foreign intervention). But again, what are the chances? Well, here I'm much less certain - two weeks ago, I'd have said it was impossible. While it seems fairly clear that most Zimbabweans are sick to the back teeth of Mugabe, the state is able to contain the elections through all kinds of gerrymandering. There's less that ZANU-PF can do about a disgruntled demos, but precautions have been taken. None too subtle warnings about what will befall those who might attempt an uprising have been farted from the organs of the police, the army, and the party, with its own militias and goons dotted about the country. Yet having seen in Durban what a group of pissed off people can achieve against the state, despite being intimidated, threatened and cajoled for over a decade, I'm not going to say never.

Pessimism-of-the-intellect-and-optimism-of-the-will time.

NewBlogWatch

Brainy, frequent commenter at the Worrier and much, much more, has decided to pick up the pen herself. Check out at her musings, and an important post on the movie born into brothels, at brainbytes.

Let Me Make McMillions For You

Ronald McDonald has found a new way to get down with the kids. McDonald's Corp. is going to offer between $1 and $5 any time a rap song featuring the words “Big Mac” appears on commercial radio.

It's easy to see how this can become lucrative. Although I haven't the time right now, I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to put together a brilliant and highly remunerative rap. The British poet laureate Andrew Motion did such a wonderful job of it for Prince William's birthday that I feel confident it'd take only a few moments' thought to earn millions.

Being the generous person I am, I thought I'd jot down the building blocks for any reader of Class Worrier who wants to make their fortune.

Big Mac, I have discovered, rhymes with the following words:

• big snack
• rib crack
• fig sac
• cardiac
• heart attack
• fat back

All you have to do is throw in a verb or two, and you’re away.

Once you're done, I can also provide you with a description of the genre:
mcrap.

I know. I'm all heart.

Splashy Fen, Buddhabrot

As ever, South Africa is reinventing itself. The latest iteration is the controversial decree that 57,000 places are scheduled to be renamed, with signposts such as "Kaffir Kraal" "Kaffirfontein" and "Bushman's Drift" quite rightly being consigned to the dustbin of history. Although 57,000 renamings looks like the erasure of history that precedes frothing-at-the-mouth national xenophobia, there are still far too many noxious places on the map.

In particular, I'm hoping that two other places, both of which I visited yesterday, will be on the list: Bushman's Nek is just a poisonous name for anywhere. And it's on the way to the irredemably twee Splashy Fen, home of one of South Africa's largest music festivals.



The festival itself has seen better days, and in the company of music critic, activist, and excellent gent, Richard Pithouse, I was treated to the story of why, these days, Splashy is more kak than kiff.

Despite the predations of mercenary promoters, it's hard to keep good South African bands down, though, and those looking for good new tunes could do much worse than the three bands we heard last night: Tumi and the Volume, 340ml and The Rudimentals, each bringing a multi-racial and anti-racist sound (hip-hop, dub and ska respectively) to a benighted and largely white-late-teen audience, who seemed more interested, as we all ultimately ought, in shagging and get high.

With the rise of music sharing, festivals become increasingly important. Bands are making their cash from gigs, not music sales (and this isn't so bad - the distributors are succubi whose demise ought to be celebrated). And the more people who go, the more we emancipate ourselves from the evil clutches of corporate radio (no, really). This is only really something that dawned on me on the way up to Splashy. Which is why, next time, I'll even pay my own way, rather than have the excellent people at Shisa give me a free ticket.

For those unable to enjoy the full Fen experience, get yerselves legal copies of Tumi and the Volume, and play loud while gazing at these Buddhabrot sets, the story of which, at Wikipedia, includes the priceless line

The Buddhabrot was independently discovered and later described in a Usenet post to sci.fractals by Daniel (later known as Melinda) Green in 1993, who wrote:If I were a religious person I would certainly take this as some sort of sign.

City of Struggle

Couple of days back, I posted on the fight around the Bisaser Road dump in Durban. We're still trying to get journalists interested in the largest streetfight in Durban since the end of apartheid, and trying to lawyers interested in freeing people from jail.

According to the excellent Richard Pithouse, the comrades in jail refused state legal representation, opting to represent themselves at the preliminary hearing. This because they've had nothing but racism from the (interpellated Indian) police. When the (Indian) magistrate heard the case, the prosecutor announced that the accused had run amok, smashing windows and setting fire to tyres. They said nothing in their defence, not knowing they could. So they were sent back to the holding cells, with a bail hearing postponed until next week.

At this hearing, the state may well consider them a flight risk, because they are in an informal settlement, and therefore presumably could just walk away. This is, clearly, bonkers. The informal settlement is and has long been home for many of them. If they'd as much contempt for their homes as the court does, they wouldn't have been fighting to defend it in the first place.

Richard is on this case, and has been dialing his fingers to the bone, trying to get any lawyer to take on the case. But none of the lawyers who ordinarily might have taken on the case in Durban seem interested, perhaps because it's a criminal, not a civil case, perhaps because it's a holiday weekend. Either way, there's little chance that they'll be out before Tuesday when the courts re-open.

But while the ANC has successfully incarcerated one lot of people, their tactics towards other groups has been, well, more discreet. Read about how the repression of the Bayview Flats Residents Association has developed here.

Reminds me not a little of another Bayview, the one in Northern California...

More World Bank fun

A few links for World Bank obsessives, the first being a link to a link back to this very page. Not terribly helpful in the long run, but the journey's entertaining- follow the white rabbit to the World Bank President site, and see what the NGO world in the EU and US are up to.

Then check out some of nuggets of wisdom from Wolf2 himself, including the observation that " if we liberate Iraq those resources will belong to the Iraqi people, that they will be able to develop them and borrow against them.” Clearly, Wolf-2 is a man with a plan.

And then ponder this: a comrade was making a list of awful things that Wolfowitz might do at the helm of the World Bank, only to realise that Wolfensohn had already done them.

Finally, marvel at the Daily Show's analysis.

And then you should probably take a walk, meet people, get out a little.

U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha

Cinema in South Africa going through a bit of a rejig at the moment, if not quite a renaissance. Almost certainly the best thing is that the price of movie tickets has more than halved, through a masterstroke by the cinema giant Ster-Kinekor. Cinema-going remains a rather stuffy affair, with tickets priced at R30 for the cheap shows, rocketing to R100 for the Friday evening show in a few places. That's about US$16. For this, you get reserved seats, and a cinema empty but for the tossers, including yours truly, who can afford to pay to get in.

The new deal is that, for a range of cinemas in areas where the rich don't go, you pay R14 (US$2ish) for the first seat you can grab. Which means that the cinema is stuffed, means that the people there aren't just the tossers, and which means that a mediocre film like Meet the Fockers (redeemed by Dustin Hoffman and, never thought I'd say this, Barbara Streisand) is elevated to a thoroughly good night out.

But the Hollywood venues aren't the only ones having a makeover. A movie I'm dying to see is U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha - Carmen in Khayelitsha. Despite the galling news that Trevor Manuel, evil South African Finance Minister, has been handing out the soundtrack like candy to his foreign counterparts, the movie looks thoroughly good, cast from township-bred talent. At the moment, the only place you can see it is in townships, and that's where it's going to remain on release for a couple of weeks. It's unlikely that the rich won't be prepared to wait a bit for the movie to come to them, but it sends a good signal.

A surprisingly good review of the movie phenomenon available at the BBC's site here, including the spot-on observation from one Khayelitsha resident that "The black people from here who've been successful in this film will move to the white suburbs, leaving us."

Dumped on

Here’s a dab of complex politics for you. First, the set up, from a recent article by my comrade Patrick Bond available in its entirety here

In South Africa, the World Bank’s primary emissions trading pilot is the controversial Bisaser Road dump in Durban’s Clare Estate neighbourhood.

The dump emits methane, which can be captured and turned into small amounts of electricity to augment the eThekwini metro’s supply. But the electricity produced costs more than double the rate that Eskom charges, so the project is not economically feasible without World Bank subsidies.

Carl Albrecht, research director at the Cancer Association of South Africa, likens Clare Estate residents to “animals involved in a biological experiment”. According to cancer victim Sajida Khan, 70% of neighbouring households have tumour cases, not to mention severe respiratory problems.

However, eThekwini intends making money off the dump when a $25-million World Bank investment begins this year. By not factoring in Khan and her community’s health crisis, the Bank termed the dump “environmentally friendly” in 2002. Because of past broken promises, Khan does not believe the metro council’s vaguely worded November 2004 decision to close the facility.

The dump is a toxic nightmare, and none know this better than the poor African families who live right on top of it in a squatter settlement. Their children fall ill, they are malnourished, water-borne diseases are rife. Yet they are also the most passionate advocates of the dump because, among other things, the dump gives them jobs, and no one else will. Mostly, they're used to being lied to.

The council, as recently as two weeks ago, promised that the squatter community would get land nearby. Then the bulldozers came in, and started building a brick factory on their promised land. So the community defended their ground. The police laid into them, injuring many. Fourteen young people were rounded up, and are now in holding cells. At least two of these people are under 16, and two are mothers. I know this because today I went to Bisaser Road, and took pictures of their children, as part of an effort to free them. More on this tomorrow, when there’s an article to accompany the photos. Lesson for the moment is, however, that while it’s important to slam the dump, it’s important to fight for those who depend on it.

Schadenfreude watch

This is a little old, but it’s tremendously revealing of the state of mind of the World Bank staff. They feel, it seems, that Wolfowitz is an inappropriate person to head their organization. And, check this. It’s not only because he doesn’t know anything about development. It’s because he may or may not be shagging a staff member. I suppose with six billion of us on the planet, one of us had to find the man attractive. Hard to believe, but I suppose if there's one of them, there might be more. I look forward to a Boeing-like scandal, or maybe even shenanigans with the interns, in the near future.

Ultimately, though, it’s good to see the Bankers squirm because of policies that are imposed on them without their consent, choice, or approval. Oh, except the guy who says "I would rather be led strongly even if I don't agree”, who clearly is just after a good spanking.

ahw bollocks

I swear, I'm going to rename this blog "Done, but with errors on page." Seems I can't actually finish a single fucking post without some fuck-stupid grammatical error creeping in. Will try to sweep some of these out. Apologies to those hooked up to Class Worrier's syndication thingy, who will over the next couple of days be receiving updates that contain nothing new of any merit.

Plus ca change.

Cultural Fusion of the moment

It really wouldn't work as food, but as music it's deeevine. DK has cooked up a fearsome mix of Italian and Indian influences over at his Norwegian blog. Not only for drum and bass fans, but certainly only for folk with a fast connection. Sorry. Check it.

Take that, America

When you've had it up to your eyeballs with the pissfights that routinely mop up spare time on the Left, it's always fun to be reminded that the Right aren't immune to the occasional spat.

The background is that Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of Gujarat in 2002 when he orchestrated a pogrom in which more than 2000 Muslims were killed, hundreds of women and young girls raped, and over 200,000 rendered homeless, was planning a trip to the US. He has never been held to account for his part in these crimes. No one has. Instead, he has been lionised as a hero of Hindu nationalism and of his Bharti Janata Party. You can find out more about the background at the splendid Coalition against Genocide site here.

When the news of his visit reached U.S. activists, they mobilised. They persuaded Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC's Hard Ball talk show to cancel an appearance with Modi. They had the American Express company in their sights too. And then something unexpected happened. The U.S. government denied Modi a visa. They said that he was denied his visa under the provisions of the Immigration and Nationality act, specifically the bit that makes "any government official who was responsible for or directly carried out at any time, particularly severe violations of religious freedom, ineligible for a visa".

A victory! Never thought I'd be pleased with the U.S. government's immigration practices, but there you have it.

"It's an insult to the Indian constitution and Indian sovereignty," said Modi when he found out, characteristically mistaking himself for the Indian state. And he's not the only one affronted. The Right in India are up in arms. They're not happy about U.S. bullies taking issue with the actions of a democratically elected representative. So a bunch of them decided to set fire to a Pepsi warehouse in western India, armed with "Down with Americans" placards. Not much nuance there, then, but one would hardly expect it from people who think that Muslims are worse than dogs.

Of course, there's plenty of reason for large chunks of the U.S. government to be denied visas for their part in a range of crimes against the poor. Let's hope that the Indian government retaliates.

The Wolf is Dead, Long live the Wolf

Paul Wolfowitz is the U.S. nominee to head the World Bank, replacing ‘Jim’ Wolfensohn, who retires this year. The U.S. gets to pick the head of the Bank, the Europeans pick the head of the IMF, and it's unlikely that the U.S. will brook any criticism of its annointed candidate.

FYI, Wolfowitz is the nice man who mops up the oil and starts the wars – Wolfensohn liked to see himself as the man who mopped up the wars and started the oil flowing again.

I’m having trouble seeing, though, why the nomination is a bad thing. The shrill and self-righteous end of the European NGO spectrum has put out a petition to denounce the U.S. nomination, which I’m not going to dignify with a signature. They’re entirely correct that the nomination process is shrouded in secrecy, and that Wolfowitz's career since being US ambassador to Indonesia during the Suharto regime has rendered him less than authoritative on the issues of good governance and probity on which the Bank prides itself. Wolf-2 is sensitive to this critique. In his words

“In order to develop my own vision, I intend to rely on a lot of listening and improving my understanding of the views of those who have served the world's poor with skill, devotion and compassion.”

(When he talks about “those who have served the world’s poor”, he’s talking about the people at the World Bank.)

There are a number of reasons to think Wolfowitz’s appointment isn’t so bad. First, it’ll stop the people who think that the Bank can be fixed. They’ve long been a problem to the movement, and a comfort to Wolfensohn during his ten year stint: he has always been able to drape an avuncular arm over the nearest pasty white boy from London or Brussels or Washington, squeeze their shoulder, and make them feel the Bank was becoming a better place. I’m told Wolf-2 is a little too oleaginous to quite manage a firm grip. Either way, any NGO that tried to get too close would be much more widely seen for the parasites they are.

Second, it’s much easier to see how war and the Bank are linked if the man who’s good at one can move to the other without skipping a beat. This helps movement-building, and makes it harder for the media to ignore the links, though in this, I imagine ignorance will prevail.

There may even be reasons to think that the Bank’s budget may shrink under Wolf-2, with Bush preferring the direct imperial control that the U.S. Treasury offers, and able to throw a bone to the non-passport-holding members of his party who wonder why they spend so much money on black people. If this is true, then this is again good. The governments of the global South need to wean themselves from the Bank, and there’s no time like the present to do it.

In short, the World Bank has a president that everyone knows and loathes, and this is going to make change easier. Welcome on board, Slick.

Update
This posting has been cleansed of grammatical error and factual inaccuracy.

Cunnilingus is a dialectic like any other

Ace flash movie of the moment available here. Best with sound.

Update
As part of Class Worrier's week of revisionism, this post has been updated to include the killer facts that
1. This flash movie contains a text by Kim Il Jong on post-capitalist sex and
2. Ryan sent this my way.

Commission for Africa: A Verdict

Another considered verdict from Class Worrier this week: Tony Blair's Commission for Africa is a bunch of wank.

Actually, it's a great deal worse. It's precisely the kind of unctious toss that we've expected to spurt from Labour's glands. And, now that they've released this sticky little report, we can only hope that Blair will roll over, fart, and go to sleep. Not likely that he will though. More than anything, the Commission for Africa looks like it's a manifesto for yet more fiddling about with Africa, once again in the name of 'development'. Consider:

"This world in flux has brought great opportunities along with confusion, change and anxiety. But such change poses great possibilities for us all and especially for Africa, that great giant finally beginning to stir itself from its enforced slumber."

Ahem. Africans have been wide awake throughout all these changes, and been yelling for the boots to be lifted from their necks. The only confusion seems to be in the minds of the authors of this vile little document. Check the history here:

"The world is vastly different to that of 20 years ago when we forcefully acknowledged the pity of the Great African Famine of 1984-85. The world, then locked into its Cold War political stasis, remained rigid in its competitive ideologies. The breaking of this deadlock, and the increase in global trade that followed, allied to new technologies and cultural shifts, have created a more fluid, less predictive yet more interdependent world."

Less predictive? "Pity"? It's widely acknowledged that the majority of African countries are worse off than they were 20 years ago, and this because of the economic policies to which they've been subjected by their erstwhile colonisers. Armed with this bit of information, it's a particular kind of masturbatory imagination that can see 'more fluid' as a good thing.

Wankers.

They want stiffening, even if the process coarsens them.

Continuing a couple of themes from the previous post, I went to a fine talk today by the splendid David Moore. David bounced off the thoughts of E.M.Forster, from whose excellent What I believe the title of this post is taken, and which is well worth a read if you've not come across it. It's the most eloquently qualified defence of democracy I've come across, smarter than it is objectionable.

Anyway, returning to today's talk, David offered two and a half cheers for elections in Zimbabwe, by asking this important question : if the elections in Zimbabwe aren't free and fair, and we can say now that they won't be, can they serve a different purpose than that to which we're accustomed? In other words, can voting be important even if the state pays no attention to your vote? David thinks yes, because in that tiny little cubicle where you cast your vote can come a moment of transformation, of realisation that you are a great deal more powerful than you think, that you can reject, that your consciousness of your relation to the state can be transformed there, and this can spur further and bolder action against the state.

I'm not sure this works. After all, think about the U.S. last year. Most people were voting in states where the return of their Electoral College was predicted months if not decades in advance. If the majority of U.S. citizens' votes were forgone conclusions, perhaps consciousness was transformed? Write in if yours was, and what bold action you've taken recently.

International Women's Day - a journey by cartoon

It'sYesterday was [ahem], international women's day and, for good reasons, I was at the New Yorker's Cartoon Bank searching for "tofu". Give it a go, and you'll not be unhappy. But search for "feminism" and you're going to end up annoyed. Few of the results are by women (an endemic problem) and the ones that the New Yorker has are neither particularly feminist, nor - with perhaps this exception - particularly funny. Two years ago, there was an International Feminist Cartoon Exhibition and some fine drawing hit the net. Not this year which, judging by the quality of 2003's entries, is a great shame. It's not like Ann Telnaes is the only feminist cartoonist around.

I see dead people

I know I began the last big post with the observation that the World Bank was to blame for my having to use Microsoft Outlook (the only mail program compatible with Google’s fab new search gizmo) only to admit, by the end of the rant, that in all likelihood the World Bank itself didn’t itself force me to switch to Microsoft. A reasonable person might suggest that I tend to see the World Bank’s invisible hand when it’s not really there. I’d advise that person to stop reading now. For the rest of you, here’s an iconographic thought experiment.

Imagine that you’re the World Bank.

Then imagine that you want to reinvent yourself, as a less monochrome outfit reflecting diversity and a range of other values that you think are just fab.

Then imagine that you want to blend in to Southern Africa, imagine that you want to indigenise. You pick a bit of iconography that matches many of the things you saw in the Johannesburg International airport's executive lounge.

And you want to make suggest that you’re a Knowledge Bank, the sort of institution that provides ideological guidance.

And then all you have to do is put it all together, and stamp your new self on every bit of stationery coming out of your latest outpost, and away you go.

It's black history month in Ghana

I shit you not. The US embassy in Accra decided that it was going to spend February this year celebrating Black history month in Ghana. Posters were plastered througout the city. Concerts and conferences were convened. Living historical figures, or at least people who could comment on them for money, were flown in. But for whom?