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UnFreedom Day / Asikhululekile

2006-04-21T09:24:00.000-07:00

The 27th April marks the day in South Africa on which the first free elections were held in 1994: Freedom Day, is how the government consecrated the event. The end of Apartheid has been followed by arrangements that are less detestable, but not by much. Inequality is up in what was, by state policy, one of the world's most persistently unequal societies. Not to worry, you might counter. If inequality is increasing, it's not because the poor are getting poorer, but that there's a few people getting richer - an augury of redistribution and high income for all. But the poor are getting poorer. As this report suggests, "50 percent of South African households lived on less than R2 899 per month for a household of eight in 2004, up from 40 percent in 1994."

In Durban this year, the 27th is being marked as UnFreedom Day by a number of Durban-based social movements, including the Shackdwellers, the South Durban Environmental Action Coalition and the Concerned Citizen's Forum. You can read more by downloading a bilingual flyer, a press release in English or Zulu, or an excellent 1.4MB pamphlet.

The Thornbirds, The Thornbirds, The Thornbirds, Dallas

2006-04-12T06:13:00.000-07:00

I really think we need to be a little more surprised about this than we are. It's a link to the UK National Grid's top ten power spikes associated with TV viewing. The spikes tell of the action of people who, in TV ad breaks, collectively bugger off and make a cup of tea, causing trouble to electricity suppliers across the nation.

Since 1990, the list has been riddled with sporting events. The highest 'TV pick up' to date came after the 1990 World Cup Semi Final between Germany and England, rated at a healthy 2800 MW. Other high pick up matches include England vs Brazil, Juventus v Manchester United and, improbably, a 2002 Nigeria v England match.

The 1980s pickups are utterly different, dominated (with five years between the #1 and #2 slots) by The Thornbirds, The Thornbirds, The Thornbirds, and then Dallas. The only vaguely sporting event on the 1980s list was the 1981 Royal Wedding, (which I think the Windsors won on goal difference), causing a power spike which came #7 in the decade, hot on the heels of vastly more enjoyable Coronation Street / Blue Thunder double billing.

You have been part of the solution

2006-03-31T10:45:00.000-08:00

Today, the Women of Ward 80 marched on their councillor, Bhekisisa Elliot Xulu. Like many councillors, Xulu is corrupt. The litany of allegations against him reads like a career in crime. You might wonder why the ANC allows so many corrupt councillors to operate so blamelessly. Well, it turns out that Xulu has struggle credentials: he was part of the United Democratic Front in the 1980s, and this, it seems, is his trump card. Having successfully associated himself with an (at the moment) unimpeachable moment in the New South Africa’s memory, he has bought himself immunity from prosecution.

Xulu preys on the old. A story that incensed many at the march today was the tale of his extorting R30,000 from a pensioner, in exchange for a one-roomed Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) house. Of this, R10,000 was for the house, and R20,000 was for ‘insurance’, for what “might happen to the man inside the house”.

Many of the pensioners at the protest today were from Mkhumbane - Cato Manor in English - Durban’s equivalent of Johannesburg’s Sofiatown, or Cape Town’s District Six. Like them, Cato Manor used to be a zone of non-racialism, a zone of liberation, creativity, and resistance. Like them, it was regarded as a threat to apartheid. Like them, Cato Manor was forcibly shorn of its residents, who were evicted in the 1950s and early 1960s.

When Xulu steals from them under the protection of his new masters, he makes flesh the preying of one history (of the 1980s struggle against apartheid) on another (the experience of, and resistance to, forced removals). And the latter history is one that the current city management would very much like us to forget. To remember it is to make possible the questioning of today’s “Slum Clearance Programmes”, which in language and action, replicates almost exactly the apartheid programmes. Well, not exactly. Under apartheid, people were moved to better houses than they are under the ANC.

And so people marched today. They marched against the councillor’s corruption. They marched for dignity. They marched in the memory of Monica Nomthandazo Ngcobo, a 23 year old woman, who was walking on the pavement on March 2, near a protest against Xulu, and who was killed by the police. Hit in the stomach and head by a rubber bullet, claimed the police. Except that she was shot in the back with 9mm pistol and an R1 rifle.

The march was plagued with difficulties. The Municipality, as ever, dragged its feet in issuing an acknowledgement of the right to march. Few South Africans realise that they live under some of the most progressive freedom of expression legislation on earth – all they have to do to have a legal march is inform the police seven days in advance. That’s it. The police can choose to negotiate the route, call a meeting, issue paperwork, or shoot people. But the right to march is more or less sealed with the handing of an appropriate form to an appropriate officer.

Unfortunately, because few people realise this (and because the government is reluctant to publicise it), many still hope for a march ‘permit’. And when it doesn’t come, people get anxious. The police confirmation arrived yesterday at 4pm. Soon after that, Xulu travelled the streets, announcing through a loudhailer that the march was illegal, and anyone who went would be shot.

Despite this, around 1000 people showed up today, in defiance of Xulu, in fear of being shot, certainly, but ready to fight anyway. It was a serious victory, and it gave people courage. The police then told the marchers that they were simultaneously both too early to march, and too late. Once it became clear that the police were clearly talking shit, the marchers got aggravated, and the police backed down.

The police tried to hustle the march along, and the marchers fought back. At a crucial intersection, with the police urging the march through, everyone just sat down. Plonk. In the middle of a major street. The police were not pleased.

On the way, they passed this sign.

It’s wonderfully ironic. The City has gone all out to stigmatise precisely the people marching here. They tried, hard, to get a new ANC councillor. One sign – “We Love the ANC, We Hate Bheki Xulu” sums it up nicely. Xulu was appointed as an ANC candidate in 1994, on the basis of his struggle credentials, elected, and then re-elected after his first term because the community felt he’d been insufficient time to ‘deliver’. Toward the end of his second term, in August last year, community representatives approached the ANC Branch Executive Committee (BEC), to ask that a different councillor be appointed. The BEC told them that the nomination had already happened. They then approached the Regional committee, who referred them back to the BEC. After pointing this out to the regional committee, the community was met with silence. They took their complaints to the provincial committee, which was equally unresponsive.

An independent candidate ran against him in the recent elections. It was a tough, and close run race, as you can see from the election results here. The election was held amid a number of irregularities. ANC staff were tending polling booths as IEC officials (Independent Electoral Commission, though some signs rewrote it as independent electoral crooks). After death threats for not voting ANC, physical attacks against the opposition, and some very fast and loose with the numbers, Xulu got 5330 votes, the runner-up independent candidate was 246 votes behind with 5046.

Xulu threatened individuals on the march. Monica Ngcobo’s uncle was one of the four people (and the only man) leading the march. He said that Xulu’s men had come by the night before. He said they’d kill him. And he said he didn’t care – there was a place waiting for him by his niece’s side. And a place for everyone else who stood up to them.

Unimpressed, Xulu came to the march:

Overlooking the rallying point at the end of the march was a girl’s school. The students chanted and sang along with the speeches. And, after one particularly loud chant, they shrieked and ran away. We looked up, and saw a lone man run up to the hill, and point a camera down. Soon after, three, four and then a dozen other men charged him, and kicked him to the floor. There were arrests.

The story, apparently, was that Xulu had brought the cameraman to find out who was at the march. Some of the younger members of the crowd had spotted Xulu’s tinted-windowed car prowling behind the march, and had run after it. The car had driven into the school, and they followed. When the cameraman got out, they jumped him. And then they in turn were jumped by the police, and the cameraman driven away, apparently to hospital (at least, I hope so, he got quite a kicking), by his boss.

But - now here’s a thing that doesn’t happen often – the police swept up about 20 men, bundled them into the back of the van, took them down to the station and then, and then, and then, let them go. And another thing. After the white and Indian police had left, a few African boys in blue took one of the police vans, and drove the elderly and overheated protesters back home.

Chinks in the armour of the state? Not sure. Most likely, though, from the way a couple of the uniforms were talking, they were as sick of Xulu’s immunity as everyone else. And if the ANC won’t let the police get him, perhaps the police are happy for the people to prevail. And if they do prevail, perhaps, once again, they will have been part of the solution.

NB Full photo story at Indymedia here.

Stanisław Lem enters deep cryogenic sleep

2006-03-27T23:44:00.000-08:00

It takes the death of one of my favourite authors to coax me back, albeit briefly, into cyberspace. I’d never had known, but that a geek over at the BBC had seen Solaris, or possibly was just a big George Clooney fan, and noted Lem’s death.

Lem was science fiction’s Pole star and one of Polish literature’s most thoughtful practitioners. Although, like Borges, Le Guin and Philip K. Dick (who denounced Lem to the FBI), he could turn the present on its side, and look at it through the future, he broke with his peers in having a wicked sense of humour. His tales of Pirx the Pilot, Fiasco, and One Human Minute (in which he calculates the breadth and velocity of the jet of human sperm currently being ejaculated) are some of the most darkly comic meditations on philosophy and the Cold War to have made it out from behind the Iron Curtain. We was also deeply critical of American SF, which motivated Dick to mount an attack against him, and which got Lem expelled from the Science Fiction Writers of America. Among the handful to protest this travesty was Ursula K. Le Guin, people’s hero. Lem’s thoughts on the matter: “it would be a lie to say the whole incident has enlarged my respect for SF writers.” Also, he’s the only SF writer to win the Medal of the White Eagle. More at the seemingly official online Temple of Lem.

The Subaltern Studies Speaks

2006-03-15T14:52:00.000-08:00

This month's Monde Diplomatique has a wonderful, concise and erudite introduction to what Subaltern Studies means and why it's important, written by Partha Chatterjee, one of the school's foremost scholars. Unfortunately, it's only available on the Monde Diplomatique site if you subscribe. Fortunately, it's also right here. You lucky people. Via FOIL.

He doesn't look black

2006-03-10T13:39:00.000-08:00

Props to Dan Moshenberg, head of Women's Studies at George Washington University, good mate, and now a guest blogger over at BlackProf.com. His engagement with race and gender is deeply serious, non-self-exculpatory, angry and, as his positions at GWU and BlackProf suggest, chock full of insight and critical consciousness. Check his thoughts on the silence in the U.S. media on International Women's Day here.

Glen and Me, again

2006-03-09T06:36:00.000-08:00

I've come across Superintendent Glen Nayager of the Sydenham branch of the South African Police service before, when he stole my camera and shot my mates.

Last week, we had rather a large protest in Durban, and I found myself in the shack settlements at 6 a.m., having a discussion with The Super about the jurisprudence of the Regulation of Gatherings Act. He was trying to ban the march, and I was trying to point out that he was in breach of the act. It took a High Court interdict to persuade him, and I've no doubt that, next time, he'll behave just as badly. But at least we won this time. Last time, the police opened fire, with live rounds. (They did this last week after the elections, shooting in the back, and killing, a passer-by.)

And Nayager has, of course, behaved far worse, having been at Chatsworth Police Station when a deaf man, coming into the nick to lay a charge, was mistaken as drunk and insubordinate, and then was beaten to death. (Richard Pithouse has stories of some of Nayager's colleagues here). It was this that got Nayager transferred from Chatsworth to Sydenham.

Shannon Walsh, who's down with us at the Centre for Civil Society, managed to capture the fun and games here, together with a photo that I'm so proud of, I've decided to nick it. Do read Shannon's account. It's gripping stuff. And the rest of her blog wins her a place in the blogroll there on the right.

Once more with feeling

2006-02-24T03:27:00.000-08:00

In the same place where the Peoples' Power Revolution ousted Ferdinand Marcos twenty years ago today, there's turmoil again. Meanne writes:

A state of National Emergency or Proclamation 1017 has been declared by Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. The emergency rule gives the military and the police the power to arrest and use force against whosoever they perceive as ‘enemies’. There are now threats of more political repression and curtailment of peoples’ rights. And the situation is bound to get worse. Opposition Senator Aquilino Pimentel has called for an emergency session of the Senate to look into the latest actions of Malacanang.

Another group of protestors are currently massing up in Ayala, Makati City as the wave of protests calling for the ouster of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo continues.

Photo credit: Joseph Purugganan. For more, check Manila and Quezon City Indymedia.
http://manila.indymedia.org/
http://qc.indymedia.org/
[Via Meanne].

Cheney's Got A Gun

2006-02-17T13:03:00.000-08:00

Good new things on the Ashwin Desai Struggle sub-site, including a recent spat in the pages of the Mail and Guardian here in South Africa, in which Makgoba opines that New Media is the " 'opiate'of the weak and disgruntled forces globally" and Desai responds by comparing the Vice-Chancellor to his aunty Ivy. Plenty worth reading here (scroll to the newest newspaper articles).

Luckily, I can't possibly be weak or disgruntled. I've not been blogging properly for over a week, and have successfully been conducting an off-line life with few withdrawal symptoms. Had I been more addictively online, I'd have noticed that this post didn't quite make it out of the Draft Post folder. It came in last week, following the news of the Vice President of the United States's drunken gun story. Aziz Choudry, comrade, activist, antipodean, and eighties junkie, has offered this hymn:

Cheney's Got A Gun
Cheney's Got A Gun
His dog day's just begun
Now everybody is on the run
What did Harry do?
It's Cheney's last I.O.U.

He had to take him down easy
And put a bullet near his heart
He said 'cause nobody believes me
The man looked like a birdie
He ain't never gonna be the same

(c) Choudry/Aerosmith/Church of England.

Bread & Roses, Batons

2006-02-15T10:11:00.000-08:00

A story for another time involves my only trip to Bulawayo, where several men desperately wanted me to be Jewish. In the meantime, more serious things are afoot in Bulawayo. Over 400 women from WOZA - Women of Zimbabwe Arise - were protesting for "Bread And Roses" this Valentine's. The roses, incidentally, symbolising dignity, and bread symbolising bread. And for this, they have been arrested. Read more here.

True or Horseshit?

2006-02-08T20:14:00.000-08:00

"for centuries England has relied on protection, has carried it to extremes and has obtained satisfactory results from it. There is no doubt that it is to this system that it owes its present strength. After two centuries, England has found it convenient to adopt free trade because it thinks that protection can no longer offer it anything. Very well then, Gentlemen, my knowledge of our country leads me to believe that within 200 years, when America has gotten out of protection all that it can offer, it too will adopt free trade."

These words, attributed to Ulysses S. Grant, have been bothering me. They seem to have begun life in Andre Gunder Frank's classic "Capitalism and underdevelopment in Latin America : historical studies of Chile and Brazil". The quote is accompanied by the following parenthesis: "cited in Santos 1959:125 and retranslated from the Spanish by the author". My 1969 edition, enlarged and revised, according to Monthly Review Press, contains no such reference. And, well, I'm not sure where to turn. With the uptick of Monthly Review readers and editors over here at Class Worrier, I thought I'd appeal to you, dear reader. Any thoughts on how to find out whether Grant ever said anything remotely like this?

Trajectories of technology

2006-02-08T19:21:00.000-08:00

Props to Brainy. She works with maths and science students of color in the Bay Area, and she has been teaching them how to podcast. BusinessWeek just blogged the project, and it's well worth having a look-see, at Smashcast. It's tremendously heartening to hear the trajectory of the podcasts, from an initial 'hey, shit, we're podcasting', to product reviews for media players, to the racial politics of the Kentucky school system.

Strike struck dumb

2006-02-04T07:50:00.001-08:00

We're on strike at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. The university is offering a 4% salary increase for staff - not a penny more- but management is taking 12%. Negotiations have deadlocked, and we're taking it to the streets, or as near to them as the restrictive industrial action legislation will allow us to get. We were on strike almost the same time last year - but for the 2006 round, the four unions that represent staff on campus have assured their members that they're not going to sell us out. In 2005, we were on strike for barely a day, after which the ANC instructed NEHAWU and NTESU to settle, which they did. This didn't go down too well with the rank-and-file.. Promises have been made, this time, to bring all decisions to a mass meeting. I'll believe it when I see it.

The biggest source of worry, as ever, is management. Yesterday, we were sent a number of emails about how our strike would disrupt the students (don't we care about students?) and then, Dasarath Chetty, our censorship czar, sent out these velvetted instructions:

Public Affairs and Corporate Communications would like to request that all staff who receive any media query related to the impending industrial action refer these calls to Jennene Singh 260 2386 or Bhekani Dlamini 260 7115. We appreciate your assistance in this regard.
Professor Dasarath Chetty
Executive Director

Like Fight Club, the number one rule about the strike, apparently, is that one doesn't talk about it. Jimi Adesina, one of the continent's most thoughtful and engaged scholars, has written a lacerating response. Read it in full here, and study this example:

I have before me a copy of the ban order that the Government of the Republic of Transkei issued against Clarence Mlamli Makwetu on 7 December 1976; it carried the signature of KW Matanzima. CM Makwetu was asked by Matanzima to "immediately withdraws (sic) together with your wife, children and household effects from the said area in the said district [Tembuland] and proceed to NYANDENI AREA... And there to take up residence at a place to be pointed to you by the Magistrate, Libode." All nice and orderly, isn't it? "Proceed", "take up residence", etc. KW Matanzima could argue that he never used the word "ban" or "restriction", as I suspect you would argue that your e-mail to the staff of UKZN never used the word "gag" or said that UKZN staff could face disciplinary action if they flout your instruction. You could argue that it is an "injunction," an "advice" not an order or even an instruction. But Matanzima fooled no one; neither will you...

Toytowns

2006-02-04T07:50:00.000-08:00

These are wonderfully delicate photographs. Trying to understand how it is that they look like pictures of model towns (they're not), the focus, and slight over-exposure certainly help. Mainly, though, I don't think I'd ever thought it possible to see cities at a distance through air this clear. [Via Li. ]

Ashwin Desai Struggle update (for Monthly review readers)

2006-02-02T16:07:00.000-08:00

A warm Class Worrier welcome to those who've arrived here via this month's Monthly Review editorial. A timely missive it is too. It has prompted me to deliver on the promise of making a new Ashwin Desai Archive section in the sidebar up there (and also prompted a bit of housekeeping in the list of recommended reading: guess I never got around to adding "Monthly Review" above "New Left Review").

Right. Back to the AD-archive. It's the place to go for the latest information on Ashwin's struggle which, more than ever, is providing occasion for optimism of the will. For the annals of email, transcripts, articles, letters of support, and frequent buffoonery from the management of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, click here.

More Desai Correspondence

2006-01-31T06:23:00.000-08:00

For those following the Ashwin Desai struggle, some more news, this time from the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa.After writing this , and having received a message in return to which I do not have access, they have responded by writing this.

Soon, I'll try to collect all these documents on one page. But for the moment, enjoy CAFA's crisp downsizing of Prof Makgoba:

You ask whether academic freedom operates above the laws of a country. We do not believe that the question of whether academic freedom has been violated can be answered by saying that the law requires one course of action or another. It has frequently happened, not least in apartheid South Africa, that violations of academic freedom have had the sanction of law. They were violations nonetheless.

The Sunday Times Reports Ashwin Desai's Reinstatement - in 2003

2006-01-30T12:47:00.000-08:00

More news on Ashwin Desai's campaign. Turns out that the Sunday Times in 2003 printed an article celebrating Ashwin's reinstatement at the University of Durban-Westville (text-only version available here). And the then-deputy chair of council, now-attorney general of KwaZulu-Natal went on air last week saying that Ashwin had "most definitely" been "rehabilitated" in 2003. Which leaves our Vice-Chancellor in an awkward position. Always one to share, the Vice-Chancellor has left the country, putting on of his deputies in an awkward position too. But not without, yesterday, announcing in the Sunday Times that Noam Chomsky is possibly senile. The Chomskians in our linguistics department are very upset. As are the people he maligns and betrays at the beginning of the Sunday Times interview.

What goes 200mph and is full of shit?

2006-01-24T11:49:00.002-08:00

It's A-1 Grand Prix time here in Durban. They've just finished building this track around large bits of public land on the beachfront, officially recognising what we knew all along - that public highways double rather nicely as racing circuits. Thing is, the A-1 is right outside peoples' homes. They can't get in because the entrances to their apartment buildings lie within the race perimeter. The police have helpfully suggested that they should buy tickets to the races, which will allow them unimpeded access to their bedrooms. Of course, all this private inconvenience is being justified in the name of the public good - mirroring a recent supreme court ruling in the US, to which activists have cleverly responded by petitioning for the demolition of the house of a supreme court judge, so that a leisure complex might be built there. I'm not sure what the response should be in South Africa. Building a racetrack around Tokyo Sexwale's house is likely futile - I suspect he's already got one.

Looking for Weil's Disease in All the Wrong Places

2006-01-23T13:43:00.000-08:00

Top left, above the fold, in today's Mercury is a fascinating wee article. Blood tests for shack dwellers, we're told. Shack dwellers in Cato Manor had blood drawn last year, to test for diseases which they might have caught through contact with vermin.

"Blood and tissue samples from four species of rats and mice collected in Durban during the past two years all came up negative for bubonic plague, but in some parts of the city more than 30% of rats were found to be carrying leptospirosis [aka Weil's disease] and about 10% were carrying toxoplasmosis. Both diseases can be passed from rats to humans. Although healthy people are unlikely to suffer much more than flu-like symptoms, the sicknesses can be fatal for the very young or old, as well as people infected with HIV/Aids."

Meanwhile, at the Leptospirosis Centre, we discover that in 1995, two years into the Clinton presidency, the number of cases of Weil's disease in the United States dropped to zero. What's their secret? Say the researchers at Leptospirosis.org: "our conclusion has to be that the US reporting and testing system failed." It certainly has. At the World Health Organization, even with a vastly deficient reporting system, it seems the U.S. mortality rate from Weil's disease is higher than that of Madras.

Yes, alright, if the US figure is rubbish, the Madras one might be too.

But the bottom line is this: what the fuck?

Diseases that hop from one species to another are, of course, alarming. But in the case of bird flu, we'd not have to worry about it half as much if it weren't for the industrial farming conditions that provide the perfect environment for these diseases to incubate. And in the case of rats? One would have thought that the elementary sanitation clues, discreetly left across Europe by the Black Death, might have been picked up on by the European Union, who are funding this study. But are they coming to install sanitation for the shackdwellers? They are not. They are coming to measure how they might die, not how they live.

And besides. Having spent time in the shacks, I can say with some confidence that I've seen bigger rats in New York.

The Housing Policy That Dare Not Speak Its Name

2006-01-17T12:50:00.000-08:00

Yes indeedy. This weekend the ANC tried to campaign in the shack settlements. The police were on hand to make the ground safe for democracy, but even then, the KwaZulu-Natal Premier couldn't get into the settlements safely.

Some of this is captured in an article in Durban's Mercury newspaper here which, although it has my byline, was definitely a team effort by the good people at the Centre for Civil Society, notably Stephanie Lane, Richards Pithouse and Ballard and, of course, S'bu Zikode and Mnikelo Ndabankulu.

As a gloss to the many of you from outside South Africa who visit Class Worrier, Jayraj Bachu is the councillor in one of Durban's more well-to-do mainly Indian neighbourhoods, in which there are a number of shack settlements. Bachu has recently been praised for his successes in clearing the poor out of the middle class ghetto. Bachu has the good sense to cloak his interventions in terms of "helping house prices". Other folk, notably the poisonous Amichand Rajbansi- a man who led the Indian collaboration with apartheid - have been embroiled in scandal over the past week, for wanting to keep certain areas "for Our Indians". Bachu wants to help the middle class. Rajbansi wants to keep Chatsworth Indian. But both are effectively calling for the same thing - out with the African poor. This is the post-apartheid housing policy that dare not speak its name.

ANC vs ANC

2006-01-15T15:59:00.000-08:00

I know I'm stealing the title from this article in the Mail and Guardian, but it's hard to resist describing this weekend's confrontation between the ANC and the Kennedy Road shackdwellers in any other terms. ANC vs ANC captures it nicely. As does this quote from Mnikelo Ndabankulu of the Abahlali Base Mjondolo in the Foreman Road settlement: “The thing I want to clarify is that we are the ANC. We reject the current ANC nominee for our ward and we therefore have a policy of no vote for this election. We will vote in 2009 when we are happy with the nominee.”

The Year of Mobilisation for People's Power through Democratic Local Government

2006-01-11T01:55:00.000-08:00

Goodness. The National Executive Committee of the African National Congress has a lot of free time. Their Statement on the Occasion of the 94th Anniversary of the ANC is a fine example of the sort of bureaucratese that aims to convince through stamina, rather than force of argument. The best bits are at the end where, among the salutes for the Royal dead, and an outline for women's transformation (scheduled between July and September) the ANC Salutes its best cadres, and declares 2006 The Year of Mobilisation for People’s Power through Democratic Local Government. Luckily there's an election this year, and the ANC has arranged ballot boxes for everyone's convience. Otherwise, the masses would have to think of creative ways of mobilising for accountable government.

WTO, Food and Dirt, Hong Kong and Koreans from the US.

2006-01-09T14:40:00.000-08:00

The struggle against the WTO has become the struggle against the Hong Kong administrators. Fourteen people protesting against the WTO, mostly Korean, are now political prisoners in Hong Kong. Read more here.

The roar of its many waters

2006-01-03T14:40:00.000-08:00

I've often seen the line, attributed to Frederick Douglass, "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. ". These good folk have done their homework, sourcing the quote, and its context.

Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North, and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages, and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others."

Source: Douglass, Frederick. [1857] (1985). "The Significance of Emancipation in the West Indies." Speech, Canandaigua, New York, August 3, 1857; collected in pamphlet by author. In The Frederick Douglass Papers. Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews. Volume 3: 1855-63. Edited by John W. Blassingame. New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 204.

Optimism of the will

2005-12-31T14:17:00.000-08:00

If there's one struggle that's looking on the up at the moment, it's the fight to get Ashwin Desai's job back at the Centre for Civil Society, where I work. Ashwin's one of few veterans of the anti-apartheid struggle who has neither self-destructed nor self-enriched. Click here for a fine interview with him in Z Magazine, and here for an excerpt from his excellent We are the Poors. The uncompromising honesty of his analysis might explain why, now, he's being banned from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, as the University refashions itself as a credentialing institution for the middle classes.

Here's the story.

Ashwin applied for funding earlier this year to undertake research on the history of race and sport in South Africa. He's clearly got the skills; his scholarship on the politics of poverty in Durban, his deep engagement with anti-apartheid struggle, and his history of research on sport in South Africa – including co-editing “Blacks in Whites - A century of Cricket Struggles in KwaZulu-Natal” - clearly mark him as qualified for the job. But the Vice-Chancellor, Malegapuru William Makgoba, instructed the selection committee at the University of KwaZulu-Natal not to consider Ashwin's application. Makgoba also prevented Ashwin from coming back to campus even as an unpaid honorary fellow.

Why?

It goes back to struggles in the post-apartheid academy, in which Ashwin fought against the then barely-reconstructed managerial forces at the University of Durban-Westville. In 1996, in a move that saved many of his fellow protesters their jobs, Ashwin made an agreement with the Vice Chancellor of UDW under which he resigned, and submitted to being banned from entering the campus. He then taught at the Workers College in Durban for a number of years, as well as continuing his activism, most famously with the Concerned Citizens Forum.

In 2003, Ashwin was appointed to the position of an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Natal's (UN) Centre for Civil Society. The University of Natal, clearly, had no objections to his appointment. Further, Saths Cooper, the then Vice-Chancellor of the UDW, lifted the ban against Dr. Desai from entering UDW. In 2003, the predominantly Indian UDW and largely white UN were merged to form the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

So this is where it gets odd. For a while, Ashwin was free to work on campus. But then, towards the end of this year, the university administration began to grumble. The source of the trouble was rather quickly identified as William Makgoba, the Vice-Chancellor, who had got it into his mind that, actually, the old banning order was in fact still valid, despite its being rescinded by his predecessors. So Ashwin became a persona non grata on campus. The Vice Chancellor made clear that if he wanted his job back, he’d need to supplicate in front of the university senate, and they would deliberate on it, with the matter being kicked to committee and, in the best case scenario, Ashwin getting six months back pay and no job. Makgoba’s tactic is, however, nonsensical – there are no grounds for demanding that Ashwin submit before the university senate, because he has done nothing that would demand such a move.

The question, then, is why the Vice Chancellor would want Ashwin out, and why he’d be prepared to draw such attention to himself to do it. Two answers suggest themselves. One traces Makgoba’s appointment to the Vice-Chancellorship to his connections with the ANC, and understands that he is the drone of the Ministry of Education, at which are employed a number of people against whom Ashwin protested while at UDW. This answer, in other words, sees Ashwin’s persecution now as the cold revenge of old adversaries.

The second answer lies in the Vice-Chancellor’s proposed R27 million (US 4.3 million) cut of staff salaries and bonuses next year. It’s going to be hard for Makgoba to make these cuts without staff discontent, and he may believe that Ashwin, ceteris paribus, is the only man with the right sort of experience to lead the fight against the management. In this, the Vice-Chancellor is mistaken. There are many among the staff who are prepared, and wise enough, to take him on. Tying up Ashwin with bureaucracy is a profoundly ill-advised move. Ashwin has already moved his research money elsewhere, and there are many folk among the staff who are prepared to take on the administration. Makgoba seems to have shot himself in the foot here. But he’ll only find out when staff get back from the holiday break in January. And when they do, the staff will have words. Of course, Makgoba’s tactic will be to buy the union leadership off, as he did last year. If he succeeds with this tactic two years in a row, it’s the union membership, not leadership, that deserves a good kicking. As President Bush tried to say a little while back – fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

These reasons for Makgoba’s behaviour are neither comprehensive nor mutually exclusive. But there’s a enough truth in both to be deeply worried. And many have already expressed their concern by writing to the Vice Chancellor. Among them, are David McDonald , The Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa , Issa Shivji and Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Noam Chomsky, Michael Albert, Naomi Klein, and Avi Lewis.

Do drop a line to Makgoba and let him know what you think. He’s at

Professor M.W. Makgoba
Howard College Campus
University of KwaZulu-Natal
Durban 4041
South Africa

fax: +27-31-262 1873

Update
You can now sign an online petition in support of Ashwin Desai here.

Update #2
Zackie Achmat, nominated for the Nobel Prize last year, Chair of the Treatment Action Campaign, has written in support of Ashwin here.

Update #3
As people trickle back to work, the number of signatures on the petition is on theup. Do sign if you haven't already. I'm not usually a fan of online petitions, but this is almost certainly a case where your signature will make a difference - our vice-chancellor is very sensitive to international opinion. And Makgoba has been sent two more letters, from Dennis Brutus and the Combined Staff Association of the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

Update #4
From Richard Pithouse, on Jan 19th, who writes:

Last night there was a fantastic meeting in Wentworth - supported by people from Sydenham, Abahlali baseMjondolo, Meerbank, Chatsworth (Westcliffe) etc, etc. There was a petition against the banning of Ashwin Desai and lots of people spoke about their deep appreciation of Ashwin's commitment to struggles in Wentworth. Hundreds of people signed the petition last night and it will be taken door to door now. Des D'sa said that he's aiming at thousands of signatures.

In other news, Rhodes University has asked Ashwin to move his work on sport there, with the anticipation that "your presence on campus will add greatly to the critical intellectual environment that we are attempting to foster at Rhodes."

Update #5
The debate drags on, with Makgoba behind a shield of technicism. He took his dog and pony show to SAFm today. You can find a transcript of the show here. Makgoba's "I can't do anything about it, I'm just a bureaucrat" line is disingenuous, and it is pierced very effectively by this letter from UKZN's biggest union, the Combined Staff Association (COMSA).

Make Capit a dirty word

2005-12-31T13:48:00.000-08:00

News from Retort

you can't even mention the words "socialist" or "socialism" in comments on Salon blogs any more. For why? It's the Scunthorpe problem: the words contain the brand name for a Viagra-type medication -- Cialis. So the unresticted global capitalism of the spammers' economy has finally made it impossible even to mention an alternative.

The irony is that, invariably, there's more to socialising than sex. Unless you're doing it with an American spelling.

Do they know it's Christmas?

2005-12-31T13:43:00.000-08:00

The Independent carries news of how Geldof, Bono et al hijacked the Make Poverty History campaign. Seasoned Class Worriers will, of course, have seen this coming a mile off (the hijack, not the audit). A better sense of what's happening in poverty this Christmas can be found through
this article, from two women in the Kennedy Road Informal Settlement in Clare Estate. Endemic structural violence, poverty and sexism aren't anything that our fading pop-star heroes have yet addressed. And we know better than to give them time.

Stop All the Clocks

2005-12-31T11:53:00.000-08:00

Birjinder Anant is dead. Hear him here, read him here, see him here.

I can't help feeling that if Birj is gone, nothing now can ever come to any good.

What science fiction?

2005-12-29T08:48:00.000-08:00

I've been following Chris' advice, and reading the judgement in the Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District case. It's fantastic, and far funnier than it has a right to be. There's something I need a hand with, though. Here's the background, from the John Jones' judgement:

Indeed, the assertion that design of biological systems can be inferred from the “purposeful arrangement of parts” is based upon an analogy to human design. Because we are able to recognize design of artifacts and objects, according to Professor Behe, that same reasoning can be employed to determine biological design. (18:116-17, 23:50 (Behe)). Professor Behe testified that the strength of the analogy depends upon the degree of similarity entailed in the two propositions; however, if this is the test, [intelligent design] ID completely fails.

Unlike biological systems, human artifacts do not live and reproduce over time. They are non-replicable, they do not undergo genetic recombination, and they are not driven by natural selection. (1:131-33 (Miller); 23:57-59 (Behe)). For human artifacts, we know the designer’s identity, human, and the mechanism of design, as we have experience based upon empirical evidence that humans can make such things, as well as many other attributes including the designer’s abilities, needs, and desires. (D-251 at 176; 1:131-33 (Miller); 23:63 (Behe); 5:55- 58 (Pennock)). With ID, proponents assert that they refuse to propose hypotheses on the designer’s identity, do not propose a mechanism, and the designer, he/she/it/they, has never been seen. In that vein, defense expert Professor Minnich agreed that in the case of human artifacts and objects, we know the identity and capacities of the human designer, but we do not know any of those attributes for the designer of biological life. (38:44-47 (Minnich)). In addition, Professor Behe agreed that for the design of human artifacts, we know the designer and its attributes and we have a baseline for human design that does not exist for design of biological systems. (23:61-73 (Behe)). Professor Behe’s only response to these seemingly insurmountable points of disanalogy was that the inference still works in science fiction movies. (23:73 (Behe)).

What science fiction has Behe been watching? When hapless, and usually soon-to-be-devoured spacefarers find something complicated, their line of argument doesn't proceed

1. There is something complex here
2. Humans didn't build it.
3. Therefore God did.

Invariably it's more along the lines of

1. This is far too complex for us to have built it, though we can sort of see quite how well designed it is
2. We don't have this level of technology. Yet.
3. Captain, there's something else down here.
4. Captain?

In other words, even the science fiction films depend on some sort of baseline for design skill. And hypotheses about the desires and motivations about designers are revealed, bloodily, in the ninety minutes subsequent to discovery of complicated and alien things.

Or is there a SciFi movie that I'm forgetting?

Africans should emulate Punjab's example

2005-12-29T03:05:00.000-08:00

At nearly all our childhood tables, we were fed the following non sequitur: “eat your greens! there are children in Africa who are starving!”. In Africa, at least, the lesson is a little more accurate “eat up! there are children in India who are dying of hunger!”. In the gruesome arithmetic of famine-related deaths, there are indeed more in India than Africa. Which makes today’s news all the more chilling.

In Indian newspapers today, we read of the premier of KwaZulu-Natal, S’bu Ndebele, who has just spent the past two weeks imbibing the wisdom of the subcontinent. The Indian papers are very pleased with Ndebele’s visit, because at the end of all his journeying, he has become convinced of the sorts of things that Indian pundits have been saying all along. The headline in today’s Financial Express: ‘Africans should emulate Punjab's example’. India rocks, and if only they were more Indian, Africans wouldn’t be in half the trouble they’re in now.

So what, exactly, has Ndebele learned? Well, in his own words

Too many of our people are literally starving in a province that is arguably the most fertile in the country. We can benefit a great deal from the province of Punjab in India where the state has succeeded in turning the rural poor into a thriving and growing state economy and has become the `food basket of India'.

Although he might like us to interpret his words as meaning that “a green revolution in KwaZulu-Natal will make the poor richer”, it’s hard to do this for the very good reason that, in Punjab, precisely the opposite has happened. A quick visit to those bomb-throwers at the United Nations Development Programme paints an unflattering state of post-green-revolution agriculture in Punjab. You can read the details here, but the upshot - of increased levels of suicide, poverty, and environmental degradation despite an initial promise of exactly the opposite - have been snappily summarised as a “Green Revocation”.

At another level, it’s important not to gloss Ndebele’s words. In Punjab, the state has indeed succeeded in “turning the rural poor into a thriving and growing state economy”: turning the poor into the ground like so much manure, grinding them into the soil, but for the greater benefit of a growing state economy.

Perhaps, though, Ndebele has learned a different lesson. With a number of land claims in KwaZulu-Natal piling higher, and beginning to fester, perhaps the benighted premier has come up with a way to pour lime on the rot. As SS Gill, at the Punjab Agricultural University, notes, the Green Revolution acted as a substitute for land reform. Although the question of an insurgent and armed peasantry is far from the South African political agenda (compare with the Naxalites), the demands for redistribution, over a decade after the end of Apartheid, have become fairly central. In 2005, there were nearly 900 protests by poor people in South Africa demanding, in the words of the South African government ‘service delivery’. But these protests, at least in the ones I saw, were calls for far more – for service delivery? Sure – water, electricity and the odd toilet would be nice. But also dignity, recognition, land, and some say in the future. This was, after all, what the struggle was for, and the ANC government’s failure to deliver on its promise is something of which it is becoming increasingly aware. So what better, under the circumstances, than the distraction of a technological production fix (for a few people) in rural areas. And, for the rest? Well, Ndebele picked up another lesson in India too.

In the print edition of today’s Indian Express, Ndebele is reported as being “very impressed with the Taj Mahal and would use the knowledge of India to attempt similar cultural projects in Kwazulu-Natal.” We’ll forget that, during the struggle against Apartheid, the kinds of Zulu cultural nationalism for which Ndebele has become a patron, were actively fought by the ANC, in much the same way that the Congress party – nominally ‘secular’ has puppeted chauvinism and xenophobia since its inception. More than that, Ndebele announced that “Various projects will be developed at a technical level to enable to mutual aim of linking islands of knowledge to the mainland of need”.

It’s a striking image. S’bu Ndebele: stranded in a sea of ignorance, cast off the shores of need, building bridges from the dry land of knowledge to the dry land of, er, need and then, um.

Okay. As a metaphor it doesn’t really hold together. But as intent, it does just fine. It flags South Africa’s brave new world – technicist and, therefore, nationalist too. One in which the culture is removed from work, where knowledge is removed from the people, and where capital gets to control both, in technological transformations to agriculture, and in little cultural theme parks, where heritage can safely replace history.

If these are the lessons that Ndebele has picked up from the Congress Party in India, then he’s learned well.

The Rise of the Machinima

2005-12-27T23:28:00.000-08:00

As ever, Wikipedia has the good stuff when it comes to breaking news about techie innovation. Machinima is the net's newest fad (though by the time you read this, it will no doubt have been overtaken, and rendered obsolete, by several others). Still, if it produces thought-provoking representations, such as this one, of the recent Parisian uprisings, then it deserves a full and long life on the web.

Incentivising Tlön

2005-12-07T10:06:00.000-08:00

It's assessment time in the South African academy. To understand how the hard work of supervision, learning, teaching, writing, reading, research, administration, public service, peer support and review are all combined into an assessment of your net worth, you need two things: a system of logic, and a standardised calculus on which to apply it. The logic is summarised well by Jorge Borges in his discussion of mathematics on Tlön.

The geometry of Tlön comprises two somewhat different disciplines: the visual and the tactile. The latter corresponds to our own geometry and is subordinated to the first. The basis of visual geometry is the surface, not the point. This geometry disregards parallel lines and declares that man in his movement modifies the forms which surround him. The basis of its arithmetic is the notion of indefinite numbers. They emphasize the importance of the concepts of greater and lesser, which our mathematicians symbolize as > and <. They maintain that the operation of counting modifies the quantities and converts them from indefinite into definite sums. The fact that several individuals who count the same quantity would obtain the same result is, for the psychologists, an example of association of ideas or of a good exercise of memory.

This extract, from Borges' Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is a philosophical classic, a challenge to all that is sacred in reason, a freedom from the violence of Euclidean thinking, a spear in the side of Baconian science. It's also precisely the training you need in order to be able to shear from yourself any vestiges of 'old thinking', and undergo the conceptual revolution that is the South African Post-Secondary Education assessment process. In addition to the logic of Tlön, you'll need the following table of definite numbers to really appreciate the beauty of SAPSE mathematics.

CATEGORY	NO. OF PRODUCTIVITY UNITS
Refereed Conference Proceedings	4
Journal Editorial	8
Accredited Journal Article	60
Chapter in Book	15
Edited Book	15
Creative Contribution (Local)	15
Creative Contribution (International)	50
Graduating Course Work + Research Masters Student (with ≥ 50% dissertation component NRF approved)	6
Graduating Full Dissertation Masters Student	12
Graduating Doctoral Student	60
Patent	80
Book (entire)	100

So, let's learn together. Public service, undergraduate lecturing and any other activity not explicitly mentioned are, obviously, 'null spaces'. In the spaces that matter, we see that supervising a full dissertation masters is worth almost as much as a performance at the North Sea Jazz Festival in Cape Town, which is worth three times less than a Karaoke performance in an armpit bar in Sheffield, which is worth a little less than a peer reviewed journal article. But two journal articles are worth more than a book.

Borges doesn't write about the kinds of incentive structure that Tlön's geometry sets up. But I bet it's not half as fucked up as the South African academy.

A Man Who Will Do What He Must

2005-12-02T23:01:00.000-08:00

The new English textbook for XI graders in Pakistan contains a meditation on leadership. The Pakistani Government's National Book Foundation said the order of the first letters in each line was entirely coincidental. Read here. Another fine story from the Forum of Inqiliabi Leftists.

Solidarity fer later

2005-11-27T02:56:00.000-08:00

I'm reminded by Hogarth, writing in today's South African Sunday Times that in the 1970s, when the CIA wanted to spread propaganda, they'd plant a story in the foreign press. The U.S. media would then pick it up, et voila! News. It worked well with the (as far as we know, utterly baseless) story that Cuban soldiers were raping women in Angola, which was picked up by the Guardian, New York Times and Washington Post.

So here's something to file under 'second time as farce'. The British press, including The Grauniad, is up in arms. So is the Middle and Far Eastern media. There's a bit of a storm about the contents of a leaked memo in which Tony Blair talks Bush out of bombing Al-Jazeera's headquarters in Qatar. Google news collects the coverage. But here's a thing. There's not a sniff of this story in the U.S. media.

Far from being appalled that their colleagues would be executed by their commander in chief, the U.S. news seems almost patriotically mute. Nothing in the New York Times, Washington Post or Los Angeles Times. MSNBC carries a Financial Times version of the story, and CNN.com nods towards it too. And there's an "Unconfirmed Sources (Satire)" link that, in broadening the story to the bombing of NPR, CBS and CNN, is neither as dark nor as comic as the triangulations of the Ministry of Defence and Pentagon.

But for Al-Jazeera's journalists, solidarity from their U.S. colleagues looks like it'll have to wait.

Which reminds me. If you've not yet seen Control Room, do. Buy the DVD for the out-takes. They're harrowing, and many of them really ought to have made it into the final cut.

Go home and make new lies

2005-11-22T13:21:00.000-08:00

Here’s some follow up to last week’s Fucker Stole My Camera post. It’s a sorry story, involving a lot of very frustrating telephone calls. Lucky for you, dear reader, I made notes on every one, and wrote a transcript of a long exchange at a police station. I was wondering how to present this, but the direct transcripts themselves do ample justice to this tale of constabulary absurdism.

It began on Thursday, after I’d got the camera back, with a call to the Independent Complaints Directorate, the place that I’d been pointed to as a reasonable place to lodge a protest at having it swiped by the police in the first place. System Cele, the young woman who had been roughed up and her teeth knocked out (before she was interrogated, it turns out, not afterwards as reported last week) was ready to lodge a protest too. So, we were ready to go.

Me: Hello? Independent Complaints Directorate?
ICD: Yes.
Me: I’d like to make a complaint about an assault and a theft.
ICD: Where are you?
Me: Durban.
ICD: Can you phone the Durban ICD. Thank you. [Click]

Me: Hello? Independent Complaints Directorate?
ICD: Yes?
Me: What’s the number for the ICD in Durban?
ICD: 031 310 1300. [Click]

Me: Hello? Is that the Independent Complaints Directorate in Durban?
ICD-Durban: Yeees. Shut up! I’m on the phone. Sorry, yes.
Me: Ah yes, I was hoping to be able to report a case of theft and assault by the police. You see what happened is...
ICD-Durban: Sorry, you can’t report it here.
Me: This is the Independent Complaints Directorate, isn’t it?
ICD-Durban: Yes, Shut UP, can’t you see I’m on the phone?
ME: So I’d like to report a complaint.
ICD-Durban: No, you see, you have to report it to a police station.
Me: I have a complaint against the police, and I have to report it at a police station?
ICD-Durban: Yes.
Me: But isn’t that something of a conflict of interest?
ICD-Durban: Well, you don’t have to report it at the same police station. It can be any police station. We just need a case number.
Me: You can’t investigate unless I have a case number?
ICD-Durban: No.
Me: And the only way to get a case number is to go to the people who I’m laying the complaint against.
ICD-Durban: Yes.
Me: [Click]

So, System Cele and I bravely head off into the night, and turn up at Umbilo Road police station, me with pictures of Glen Nayager,

System with a picture of the guy who knocked her teeth out.

We agree that I’ll go first, so that System can see what the process is all about. We're both a little nervous about it, but System has much more at stake than I. So. Me first.

Me: Hello there. I’d like to report a theft and an assault
Sergeant Zondi: Fill these out. [Foolishly, I supply name, address and passport details.] Now, what happened? [opens up case file]
Me: Well, I had my camera taken, against my will, by a man with a gun.
S.Z.: When did this happen?
Me: Monday.
S.Z.: Why didn’t you report it sooner?
Me: Because I was waiting to get it back.
S.Z.: What do you mean?
Me: It was in police custody. The man who took it was Glen Nayager.
S.Z.: So he took your camera?
Me: Yes.
S.Z.: [Puts pen down.] There’s no case here.
Me: What I would like to do is report this and get a case number. If you don’t want to do this, tell me, and I’ll make note of this, Sergeant Zondi [pull self up to full height while sat on bench, and puff chest out.]
S.Z: Wait here. [picks up papers and walks, harried, into an office]

Enter Captain Rhynes, a thirtysomething station captain who looks strikingly, and I mean almost exactly, like a schoolfriend from England who is now working in Bagdad for the Iraqi government’s WTO accession. Both of them are as sharp as knives, and it seems Captain Rhynes shares with my WTO friend a certain dissatisfaction with her working environment. It turns out Rhynes is leaving the force in two weeks time to become a life skills instructor at a private girls school. Annyway, the conversation, somewhat edited, ran like this:

Captain Rhynes: Hello there, I’m Captain Rhynes, now how can I help?
[the situation is explained].
Captain Rhynes again: Now this doesn’t look like a case of theft to me.
Me: Why not?
Captain Rhynes: Because there wasn’t the intent to deprive anyone of their property.
Me: But, um, he forced me to give him the camera.
CR: Yes but he’s a police officer. He has a duty to ensure that everything runs smoothly. Now I don’t know what you were doing with the camera, but theft involves the intent to permanently deprive someone of their property.
Me: But he didn’t ask for my name or address. How could he get it back to me? It certainly felt like he was taking it for keeps, and there wasn't a reason to think otherwise. Why else would he have taken it?
CR: But he gave you his name and address?
Me: He said “Nayager”. I had to ask other people who he was and where to find him. And the only reason people knew is because he’s got a reputation.
CR: Well, I don’t know who he is, and if he’s done something wrong, you can report it to the ICD.
Me: But the ICD want a case number or they can’t investigate.
CR: I’m sure you’ve done your homework, but why don’t you do your homework, and then go to the ICD. They’re on the sixth floor of Durban Central police station.
Me: Okay. And they’ll process the enquiry without a case number?
CR: But this wasn’t a case of theft. When you went to the evidence room to get it back, what did it say on the SAP 13 form? What reason did they give you for taking the camera?
Me: None at all. That’s the reason I want to file a complaint with the ICD.
CR: Well why not get the SAP 13 form and see what it says?
Me: Because I’m not the ICD. I can’t just go into a police station where I’ve laid a complaint and ask them to hand over the documents.
CR: Well there are sometimes reasons why police people want to stop the media from taking pictures. Remember when Princess Diana died? Well, the police needed to stop photographers from entering the scene. It was gruesome, remember. Now I don’t know what you were doing..
Me: I was standing at the side of the road taking a picture of Superintendent Nayager arresting someone.
CR: That may be the case, but you know, we don’t know who’s who in the zoo.. You should go to the ICD.

The conversation continues, with more circular logic than a Marx brothers skit. At some point, I give up, and ask another question, on System’s behalf. How easy would it be to file an assault charge? Impossible, it turns out, because if the police are trying to keep the peace, they’re well within their rights to knock you over the back of the head as you’re running away from them, even if you’ve done nothing wrong and they’ve no reason to suspect you have.

We leave the police station annoyed and humiliated. And although we’ve written to the ICD and the Public Protector, we’re almost certain nothing will come of it. The ICD will automatically put this in its low priority folder because, in the words of a prominent South African counsel, “it doesn’t involve death, maiming, or someone senior from the ANC.” And the Public Protector, Lawrence Mushwana, will surely not trouble himself with this trifling issue because he’s busy covering the government’s arse over the recent Oilgate scandal, among many other incidents in which government officials’ behaviour has been so egregious, it has required an independent body to condone it.

But we felt we needed to do it, even if our little acts of protest are policed, channelled, received, scrunched up into little balls and used as kindling. I’m certainly not holding out any hope that Nayager will feel any compunction to behave any better in future protests. He threatened another journalist, Carvin Goldstone, at the same protest, into not printing photographs of the protest “or he’d come get him”. Incidentally, Carvin was able to get a case number for being talked to roughly by Nayager, while System couldn't get one for losing her teeth, and I couldn't get one even with demonstrable proof that he'd taken the bloody camera. Props to Carvin and The Mercury for standing by him. But you've got to wonder about how arbitrary this all is, and how much more frequent are abuses of power. At another protest last week in Petermaritzburg, an activist was cornered by the police, prevented from taking photos, and made to delete the pictures off the camera in front of the officer caught on (digital) film.

An article today by Richard Pithouse in the Mercury will certainly raise the stakes far more than a direct complaint will. And the increasing international attention that the Abahlali basemjondolo (shackdwellers) movement is generating might give the municipal authorities – the Mayor and City Manager in particular - sleepless nights. One can only hope the insomnia is contagious.

The freedom of expression issue, and the crackdown on dissent, these are tremendously important battles. But this isn’t the first time System has been through the government humiliation machine. She’s used to it not from the behaviours and actions that we dignify with the name 'activism', but from those which are routinely dismissed as 'everyday life'. The pathologies that are revealed by protest and dissent are endemic. Disrespect for the poor is a standard feature of the government bureaucracy. For instance; System has four children. She receives child support for three. “Nobody believes I have four children. Two live with me, two with their father. But when I go to the office to tell them to increase the benefit, they tell me “Go home and make new lies.” I have the birth certificates to prove they’re my children, but the government won’t believe me. I don’t know what to do.”

Freedom of expression is desperately important. But people express themselves everyday. The problem is making the government listen.

Glen and me

2005-11-16T15:01:00.000-08:00

Got the camera back today, at attempt #5. It's hard to imagine a den of officiousdom than Sydenham police station. Lots of tubby men with moustaches sitting at desks, backed up with their little police martial arts statuettes and models of armoured personnel carriers. (Actually, it was worse under apartheid. One of the Cape Town police stations had in it the sign "If we wanted your opinion, we'd have beaten it out of you.")

The photos are online here. I'm quite pleased with the last of them. It's the one that got the camera swiped in the first place.

Fucker stole my camera and shot my mates

2005-11-14T16:00:00.000-08:00

It was an ordinary mugging. The bastard had a gun, a swagger, a gang and didn’t seem to want to me to take his photo when he was roughing someone up. So he came up to me and told me to hand over the camera. Timid as I am, and not wanting much further trouble, I handed it over. There were witnesses.

“What’s your name?”

“Nayager”, he said, pointing to his badge.

Superintendent Glen Nayager, it turns out. This is he.

This is mugshot from the Sydenham Community Police Forum. Not without irony, he’s the one in charge of Crime Prevention. Turns out, talking to those more familiar with the Durban scene, that he’s a man with a history. He faces several pending charges, but has enough protection from his patrons to carry on with that particular blend of thuggery, racism, and vendetta, known in Durban as ‘community policing’.

It’s a shame he stole my camera. I had plenty of shots on it of today’s protest in Foreman Road. Pictures, for example, of the police charging on unarmed protesters. Pictures like this one:

Todd McPherson, one of our fellow travelling photographers, managed to shoot this feller.

Yes, that’s a pistol. Witnesses say he shot off a few rounds into the backs of retreating protesters. Luckily, he managed not to hit anyone. His brethren were armed with rubber bullets, and they also sprayed the crowd, though with more enthusiasm than competence, it would seem. Finally, they managed to rugby tackle someone in the bushes, and shot him point blank. There’s a fairly grim picture, not yet on Indymedia (though watch this space), of a man shot in the head with a rubber bullet. To ensure optimum fish-in-barrel shooting conditions, the police sealed off the Foreman Road informal settlement, preventing anyone from entering, and firing at anyone trying to leave.

Richard Pithouse caught a rubber bullet in the foot. This was before he’d had a chat with a white policeman, name Swart (trans. Black), who said, pointing around at the informal settlement “There’s no democracy here.” The implication was clear. Just as Foreman was shielded from the main road – it’s in a ravine, far from sight – so the actions of the police were invisible. Then the police came after Cde Pithouse. “I want to arrest the white guy,” said Mr. Swart. Richard managed to dodge them, and get out.

But I digress. I was saying that I managed to take a good few photos. One was of the toilet bloc in Foreman Road. If memory serves there were four toilets there. Foreman Road is bigger than Kennedy Road and, as one newspaper reported, Kennedy Road has six toilets for six thousand people. The ratio is surely worse in Foreman. But Foreman doesn’t have the good fortune to be visible to passing traffic.

Which reminds me. A little while ago, Cde Pithouse sent news about the e.coli count in water around informal settlements. Just so you know, any e.coli is a bad thing. Anything above zero is considered hazardous, and the relaxed South African guidelines suggest that “even the recreation potential is negatively affected by the presence of E.coli as counts in excess of 400 counts per 100 ml”. The figure was 1 080 000 around the Palmeit river, which the Kennedy Road settlement borders. In the uMlazi river, the count is 10 000 000 and exceeding 100 000, 60% of the time because of broken sewers in uMlazi Township.

This hasn’t, however, prevented the Metro Water Authority from receiving an award for its work on water in Umlazi. Check this citation, from the UN’s Urban Infrastructure and Services Practices database

In Umlazi (population 262,000) for example, blockages have been reduced from approximately 1300 per month to 300 - 400 per month, after a period of about one and a half to two years. Sewage blockages throughout the Metro area have resulted in savings equivalent to US$ 200,000. The education campaign has reached 141,646 learners and 212,104 adults. The entire education programme has been introduced in 226 schools and many clinics. In addition, within the period of one year, 550 street theatre performances were held in the Durban metropolitan area, reaching approximately a further 35,600 adults and 40,000 school children.

Aww, bless. No toilets for the settlements, sewers that are falling apart, but street theatre can still win you prizes from the United Nations.

Unclear what the prize will be for today’s street theatre, but I’ll be damned if the police don’t pay a very high price. I want payback, not least because Nayager’s tactic worked. He scared me. After he took my camera away, I was so fucking gobsmacked, that I just stood there. Stood there when System Cele, a 19 year old woman, who had come to the protest with her infant, was marched to the police van. I managed a hoarse “Hey, System”. And then the police threw her in the back of the van. When they got her to the police station, they interrogated her, asked her to confess that S’bu Zikode – the leader of the Abahlali base Mjondolo, the informal settlement dweller’s association - forced her to march. She said “there are people marching all over the world. Can S'bu be making them all do it?”. They smashed her face into the ground, and broke her teeth.

In fact, S’bu had been advocating that people not march, because he knew that the march had been banned (illegally, more here) by the council. But people wanted to march, and that was that. And slowly, it's turning out to be payback time, not merely for me, but for Durban's poorest people. This week, the council, and Mayor Mlaba in particular, are going to fry.

Okay, it's late and I'm beginning to fade. I realise that I’ve mainly told the stories of middle-class activists here, because those are the ones I’ve heard so far. But theirs won’t be the last stories, nor the most important. More soon.

Dionysus Stoned

2005-11-14T00:12:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to update the blogroll and overall layout of this page for a very long time. It's going to have to wait just that little bit longer, unfortunately, but in the meantime, have a butchers at Dionysus Stoned's fine blog. Ignore the fact that, for no good reason, many of the posts claim to be vacant. DS is on a photo-posting binge at the moment, and he has found some hum dingers.

Didn't you get the Memo?

2005-11-08T12:50:00.000-08:00

The ANC is getting creative with democracy again. The Durban Municipality has developed a new tactic to prevent dissent, in this case, a protest against the ANC's imposition of councillors. Those wanting to march against this rather unaccountable (in every sense) process, were refused a permit to march because "there's no one to receive the memorandum". Well, alright, the march is still going ahead, with a rally at a different venue, but this is a tactic to watch out for in the near future. And it's also a tactic that's bound to backfire. If groups aren't allowed to deliver memoranda, they'll end up delivering something far less pleasant. More here.

Gone in 60 Seconds

2005-10-31T09:11:00.000-08:00

On Saturday, Brainy and I went to this counterprotest, where we marched against the people who shoot immigrants coming across the border. No, not the Bureau of Homeland Security, but the people who shoot without a licence - the Minutemen.

At the protest itself, 700 counter protesters faced up to 200 Minutepeople who scattered themselves on the steps of California's State Capitol Building in Sacramento. The counterprotest wasn't allowed to remain anywhere near the Minutemen - we had to keep moving in order to avoid arrest. Not, of course, that there weren't arrests; the police, egged on by the Minutemen, got a little too frisky and rode their horses into a clench (the appropriate collective noun) of Black Bloc kids.

What I did hear of the Minutemen didn't reflect terribly well on them. Brainy took this photo, which is tremendously telling.

That the rally happened on the steps of California's State Capitol building in Sacramento was significant not only because Gov Schwarzenegger was invited to speak, but because around 2% of Californians are registered with the American Independence Party, whose candidate in an upcoming Orange County election, Jim Gilchrist, founded the Minutemen. The Minutemen themselves have, according to Gilchrist, a membership of around 4,500 of whom 6% are Latino.

I’m curious about people of colour who see themselves in a movement like this. I haven’t explanations other than pop-psychological ones involving self loathing and internalised racism which explain why they would want to sign up to bigotry. Then again, perhaps one doesn’t need to plumb the depths of the unconscious – my dad once told me there were too many immigrants in the UK. When I pointed out that he was an immigrant, his response was “Ah, but when I came over, I was a British subject.”

And perhaps the “immigrants are costing us millions, stealing our jobs and fucking our women” rhetoric really is as powerful as all that. Particularly on those who are confused about, and want, an identity. One woman on the Minuteman platform confessed "I'm the daughter of a Chinese immigrant, and I'm a Minuteman." Someone from the counterprotest pointed out "BUT YOU'RE A WOMAN". But I take her point - I don't think she'd like to be called a MinuteMaid. Also, as the counterprotest marched by, and there were scuffles with the police, the Minuteman MC told the crowd sadly "there's just not one American flag down there. There's anarchist flags, the green party flag too probably." Mainly, though, there were Mexican flags, which I found a bit troubling - substituting one kind of national tyranny for another isn't very wise. The Zapatista support group was there, and they very conspicuously were not waving Mexican flags.

But a good protest nonetheless. Plus, there was plenty of good art. Like this, a fine collage of our dear Governor, and Yosemite Sam.

Pakistan Quake

2005-10-25T22:56:00.000-07:00

Oxfam is pointing out the obvious once again, but it really doesn't hurt to restate - people in the aftermath of the South Asian earthquake are being allowed to die. The UN is finding it unusually hard to raise cash. The Beeb reports Oxfam as saying

the US, Japan, Germany and Italy have given much less then they could have done according to the size of their economies...[and].. Belgium, France, Austria, Finland, Greece, Portugal and Spain - had so far donated nothing at all.

Do both write to your parliamentary representative to let them know you're appalled, but also send cash direct to Pakistan. Best place to send it - and comrades in and from Pakistan speak with one voice on this - is the Edhi Foundation. They're not online, but some bright sparks based out of MIT have put together this website through which you can funnel funds. Let them know that you want to donate to Edhi or, indeed, ADP which also gets a thumbs up.

She was also fined $14

2005-10-25T00:00:00.000-07:00

In memoriam, Rosa Parks .

Capitalist Nigger

2005-10-08T06:48:00.000-07:00

Chika Onyeani, author of Capitalist Nigger: The Road to Success: A Spider-Web Doctrine , is full of shit. He's in South Africa at the moment, promoting his uniquely odious mixture of self-loathing, lies, and unreconstructed stupidity. Here's a bit from the Mail and Guardian's interview with him.

...What about the possibility that the Pakistani(sic), like the Chinese, have access to cheaper raw materials and commodities because of the lower cost of doing business in their countries?

People in Africa should not demand such high wages. The Indians don't mind working for peanuts as long as it is for the good of their communities.

But there are wealth-gap issues in both India and China.
Why must we concentrate on the negative? In India, the larger part of the population is still poor. So what? India is leading in a lot of ways. If you make a call to [a] credit card company, chances are it would be answered in India. Just because of the way they have been able to do the (sic) things. The reasons we have so many people going to Europe looking for work is because we have not been able to provide jobs for our people.

What would you say to comments that you are playing into the hands of racists by depicting black people as lazy and inefficient?

I don't care about what white people are thinking. It is what we think about ourselves. If we talk about it, perhaps we will stop doing it.

At the end of his book tour, I imagine he'll be welcomed as part of Hernando De Soto and Madeline Albright's High Level Commission on the Legal Empowerment of the Poor.

The End of Jeffrey Sachs

2005-10-05T09:00:00.000-07:00

Just been reading a paper in the European Economic Review by Elizabeth Brainerd (2001:1007-1019), on the relation between suicide and those inequities, thefts, corruptions and killings that are sanitised by the name "Economic Transition". I know I've opined about Jeffrey Sachs on these pages before (though I don't believe that I recorded that Columbia University students, in their end of year review, performed a broadway musical number in his honour to the tune of "Jesus Christ, Superstar", the chorus being "Jeffrey Sachs, Jeffrey Sachs, Turn your PR Machine to the max"). But one can never be reminded too often of the horrors that Sachs and his Harvard-based colleagues inflicted on Russia, particularly as Sachs has since tried to reinvent himself as Bono's guru, and White Wizard of Poverty Alleviation.

Brainerd's article puts the consequences of Sachs' economic prescriptions slightly differently. The graphs show the male suicide rates for a range of countries. If memory serves, Sachs had considerably more to do with the countries in (a) than in (b).

Better living through Stalin

2005-10-01T15:40:00.000-07:00

The BBC reports on Stalin's Gujarati antics. Heartwarming stuff.

Negroponte and the World's Most Expensive Lightbulb

2005-09-30T02:46:00.000-07:00

News on the wires yesterday was that Nicholas Negroponte and the other pointy heads at MIT’s media lab have decided to release details of a $100 laptop so that kids in the Global South can own their own computer, and finally straddle the digital divide.

It’s a bad idea.

Or rather, it’s a bad idea to build $100 laptops from the ground up when you start more seriously to consider the alternatives. Like recycled computers.

Negroponte runs through some of the FAQs, and has this to say about recycled computers.

regarding recyled machines: if we estimate 100 million available used desktops, and each one requires only one hour of human attention to refurbish, reload, and handle, that is forty-five thousand work years.

And he’s right. If one person were tasked with upgrading them all, it’d take a while. But if we assume a 40 hour working week, and a year to fix as many machines as you can, you end up paying 50,000 people to refurbish 100 million machines. The advantage of this is that refurbishers could be in the same places where the computers are destined to run. So, not the suburbs of Hyderabad, Taipei or Seoul. In rural areas, in favelas. And by the same token, these newly trained hackers will be needed for tech support – each one responsible for 2000 machines to cover them all. And, there’s nothing to say that these new gods of tech support couldn’t and shouldn’t teach others how to keep the machines on the road.

There are, after all, a couple of questions that Negroponte doesn’t consider. The first is – what happens when (not if) the computers break? A decentralised network of fixers with access to skills and equipment is going to be much more helpful than a three year return-to-base warranty in a place without roads. Granted, having a range of different machines, with different components inside, is a headache to plan for. I was hoping to make the analogy that it’s much harder to get a Porsche fixed in India than the local variant of the Morris Minor, the Ambassador. But I’ll admit that the comparison falls apart since recycled computers aren’t generic, and the hassle of getting appropriate components is one to think through. This doesn’t, however, strike me as any kind of killer objection.

The second, and more interesting, question that Negroponte doesn’t ask is this: where’s the power going to come from?

Don’t get me wrong. It’s smart to have a power-source built into the machine – it’s a disruptive technology, it’s a way to be free of an unreliable and fickle regional power grid. But “where’s the electricity?” is not a question that features in Negroponte’s FAQ. Perhaps he envisages that every day for half an hour, classes of kids will work on their wrists by cranking enough juice into the laptop to get through the morning’s lessons. Which would be fine, except that the machine is designed to run thin-client software. Where’s the power for the server going to come from?

The constraints that I saw most kids studying under over the past few months were that
1. they don’t have books
2. they don’t have school rooms
3. they don’t have teachers
4. they don’t have enough money to afford to be able to go to school
5. there’s no light to be able to read after hours.
This last problem is solved with the laptop if, every night, people wind the thing up, turn it on, open it up, and hang it from the ceiling. Which, apparently, they have.

Bringing the laptop home engages the family. In one Cambodian village where we have been working, there is no electricity, thus the laptop is, among other things, the brightest light source in the home.

At which point, it stops being the world’s cheapest laptop, and becomes the world’s most expensive lightbulb.

What irks me most about Negroponte’s rather immodest proposal, though, is the assumption that education is, ultimately, an individual process, and that the technology to support it must therefore be geared towards single students. This assumption pokes through in moments such as

there are many reasons it is important for a child to "own" something—like a football, doll, or book—not the least of which being that these belongings will be well-maintained through love and care.

Even if we discount the “laptop as Chihuahua” thinking here, the problem remains that education happens in classrooms, outside of which are families and communities in which the children and their computers have to live, even if Negroponte doesn't. If you’re planning an intervention like this, why marginalise them?

Going the route of recycled computers is cheaper. And the cash (not to mention pollution and energy) you’d save on manufacturing might be better deployed in providing sustainable power to the village, perhaps by building a school building to put the photovoltaic cells on, and the kids in. And while you're at it, why not a teacher or two? That way, you might be able to do things like run a clinic, have lighting, and maybe even energy for a communal kitchen. Of course, a big whack of cash would be required not just for harvesting the energy, but storing it and maintaining the local grid. Fuel cells are currently too expensive, but that’s because they’ve not had serious amounts of coin thrown at them at the IT industry has. Recycled computers for families, training for people to maintain them, investment in education infrastructure and creating power for a village – that would be disruptive technology. It wouldn’t all come in one box – it just means thinking outside of one.

And a word of caution. When the Indian government invented the Simputer, a similar bridging of the digital divide was presaged. Today, the thousands of unsold versions of the Simputer have found a new home – as a handset through which Bangalore police can issue on-the-spot parking tickets. Beyond the fact that Simputers are now incredibly cheap, the most important reason that they’re being used is because they can issue the tickets in Kannada.

Time for forced evictions

2005-09-29T12:20:00.000-07:00

The American Civil Liberties Union have recently persuaded a New York judge to release a further set of pictures from Abu Ghraib despite the embarrassment it might cause the present White House incumbent. But the ACLU also tell us that

the Supreme Court has ruled that a public housing tenant, who has committed no wrongdoing, can be evicted because a family member "engaged in drug related activities" off the premises.

Until the legislation is struck off, here are some thoughts to consider:

1. Alcohol is a drug.
2. Jenna Bush has been convicted of underage drinking.
3. The White House is public property...

Yeah, I know. Fat chance.

Logo lovechild

2005-09-29T09:09:00.000-07:00

Kanye West isn't a man of humble means. But when his contract is dropped by Pepsico for summarising the White House's race relations policy in the aftermath of Katrina as "Bush doesn't care about black people", I feel perhaps that I ought to boycott Pepsi's products even more than I do now. So I followed the link in an email about Cde West, to the Pepsi website: http://www.pepsico.com/company/brands.shtml Seems the page doesn't exist anymore, or has been in some way removed. But check this.

If you breed the austerity and thinly varnished designs for world domination behind the World Bank's logo

with the dynamism of the World Trade Organization

you'll end up with the global brand logo for the Pepsi Cola Company.

Magic.

Lionel Richie does not come from Cape Town

2005-09-28T07:15:00.000-07:00

Occasionally, living in South Africa, I pick up snippets of what the cultural life under apartheid was like, and the affirming myths that circulated in Durban. Like the one that Commodores' front man Lionel Richie was a coloured man born in Cape Town who made it out, and made it big. Alas, Richie's from Tuskegee, but the fact that he's not from Cape Town (unlike Jonathan Butler) isn't half as interesting as the fact that so many people wanted to believe that he might have been.

Catalytic converts

2005-09-27T06:04:00.000-07:00

More suicide fun today, with the discovery of RE Kendall's proposition in The Lancet (1998; 352:1525) that the advent of catalytic converters on cars has reduced the incidence of suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning. In response, PA Toseland (1999; 353:244) suggests

we should remember that when town gas was converted to carbon monoxide-free gas, the number of people who jumped in the canal, went up.

Bush Braces As Cindy Sheehan's Other Son Drowns In New Orleans

2005-09-26T23:14:00.000-07:00

The Onion's recent article on Tyler Sheehan's death, and Bush's unhappiness with the consequences, just got funnier and/or irrelevant. Cindy Sheehan was arrested yesterday in front of the White House.

We have both kinds of music here, country and western

2005-09-26T12:49:00.000-07:00

Writing about farmer suicides is fairly glum work, rendered yet more depressing by the array of factors volunteered to explain it which turn out, on closer examination, to boil down to the fact that farmers were generally unhappy. But the claim that people in the teeth of the US farm crisis were, in fact, killing themselves because they were listening to Country and Western music has brightened up my day a little. Chris did a fine literature review last year, when it was announced that the study that originally advanced this claim had topped the Ig Nobel awards. Jim Gundlach, one of the co-authors of the original article, suggested that the results may no longer hold true because "country music today is peppier". Whee.

No Longer Newsworthy

2005-09-24T13:21:00.000-07:00

This just in from Alabama, where Katrina (pictured) has gone to die.

Via IB, SB and Retort.

Update: While reading Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide, I came across a mention of this Rilke poem, a portion of which reads

Denn das Schöne ist nichts
als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen,
und wir bewundern es so, weil es gelassen verschmäht,
uns zu zerstören.

and which I think translates best as:

For beauty is nothing
but the start of a terror we can hardly bear,
and it amazes us so, because it serenely declines
to destroy us.

Representing Iraq

2005-09-23T05:39:00.000-07:00

Check this graph. The dotted lines could be done a little more elegantly, but the authors have managed to squeeze onto a line-graph more information about Iraq and its representation than you'd think possible. Clever.

Mars is from Venus

2005-09-20T15:19:00.000-07:00

Today at the Nutrition Congress in Durban, Class Worrier's blinding clairvoyant skills were again proved: a nice man from Mars, Inc told the world about how they're helping make the world a better place through the Initiative for African Cocoa Communities. The language is of Increase "farm family incomes" and "Improve the health, safety and well-being of cocoa farmers and their families". The substance of the programme is that farmers are told how, when cocoa prices are in long term decline, to squeeze more out of their land so that Mars can buy more of it from them. This was a job formerly undertaken by the state, which has recently collapsed in Cote d'Ivoire, thus preventing it from servicing Mars, Inc's needs. Bravely, when there is no one else to pick up the tab, the company marches in, and makes good PR out of agricultural extension service necessity. Anyone who believes that this is anything other than naked self-interest is obviously from another planet. Or possibly works for Oxfam.

Neither Animal Nor Mineral

2005-09-18T13:30:00.000-07:00

The splendid Bob and Jenna Torres have written a book! It's guaranteed to be funny, erudite, and enlightening. And, judging by the title, it's guaranteed to involve veganism in some way. Check out Vegan Freak: Being Vegan In Non-Vegan World, and send in your vegan-related problems (there's a section in the book on sex-toys) to the cucumber-equipped team Torres here.

Mince of the Penguins

2005-09-18T03:02:00.000-07:00

The New York Times reports that March of the Penguins is getting lots of favourable coverage from the Christian Right in the US because

"Some of the circumstances they experienced seemed to parallel those of Christians," said [Ben Hunt, a minister at the 153 House Churches Network] of the penguins. "The penguin is falling behind, is like some Christians falling behind. The path changes every year, yet they find their way, is like the Holy Spirit."

In which case, Wendell and Cass, the two gay penguins at New York Zoo should expect to burn in hell.

We're all going to die #6

2005-09-18T02:55:00.000-07:00

This week saw the International Association for Suicide Prevention World Congress in Durban entitled, in a mix of the sombre and the uplifting, "Scaling the Summit: Suicidal Behaviour in Diverse Cultures". One look at the programme, and I knew it wasn't worth going. It's not that suicide isn't a serious issue. It is. But the mind boggles at the banality of what passes for suicide prevention strategy. The core of the symposium was dedicated to various kinds of low level governmental intervention, and different ways of persuading individuals that they probably oughtn't to kill themselves. Rarely was it suggested, even in the title of a talk, that there may be other forces at work, beyond individual pathology. The logic of this approach is to suggest that large parts of the world are fucked up, and it's all their own fault. China, for example, has an estimated 2 million suicide attempts per year. That's a lot of fucked up people. But it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that the Chinese government, along with pretty much every other government, has abandoned its commitment to people living in rural areas. When I was in India two weeks ago, in the hot zone of farmer suicides, the pattern was clear. Farmers who had embarked on a neoliberal route, shifting towards cash crops dictated by the world market, were the ones who ended up giving themselves. When they died, they were invariably in debt, and saw no other way out. If this is pathology, it is pathology on a mass scale. We have a word for this. It's "politics". Meanwhile, the suicidologists, do what they can. Avenues of inquiry such as "Conceptualising a strain theory of suicide " or "Psychosocial characteristics of suicide victims in central Slovenia " give the measure of thinking in the world of suicide prevention. In short, it was a congress of people doing everything they could about suicide, except confront the reasons why people do it. Because, if you want to keep the epidemological cash flowing, suggesting that there are political forces at work is suicidal.

And its conference season in Durban. Next week it's the turn of the 18th International Nutrition Congress, (click here to find out about its Nutrition Safari - We're In Africa!which will be punctuated by the Kellogg's Special K and Run Walk for Life, and which features interventions such as "Cocoa, Flavanols and Cardiovascular Health: Translating Fundamental Science Into Nutrition Action" no doubt sponsored by Cadbury's. With corporate partners such as these, surely it is only a matter of weeks before hunger in the Third World is eradicated, and we can watch television programmes in which grinning African children, mouths smeared with chocolate, grin at us in gratitude, hearts bursting with health.

Once more, with feeling

2005-09-15T02:29:00.000-07:00

Once again, the good folk at Kennedy Road, together with a widening group of supporters, took to the streets to tell their corpulent councillor quite what they thought of him. They did this by mourning his death. Among the wails, his passing was grieved with cries of "No one abused us like he did" and "No one gave us biryani at election time like Baig". Baig, unrepentently alive, didn't see the funny side, and hid inside an armoured personnel carrier for the duration, emerging only to accept a memorandum. The little shit.

Best moment involved some dodgy looking Afrikaans speaking teenagers. They came with signs demanding toilets. People asked what they were doing there. They said that they were from an orphanage in Pretoria, and were on a camping holiday. One of the people who cleans their toilet block lives in Kennedy Road, and had told them of the march. So they'd come down to support him. Good people.

Anyway, some snaps up online here, hosted at the excellent SouthAfrica.Indymedia.org.

Loot, addendum

2005-09-10T10:22:00.000-07:00

White Foragers Report Threat Of Black Looters

2005-09-08T23:08:00.000-07:00

Right, I'm on my way back to Durban after marathon tour. I'll be writing up this book, videoblogging, and otherwise finding excuses not to apply for jobs that I won't get. So expect plenty of posts. And links. Including this, from the Onion...

NEW ORLEANS—Throughout the Gulf Coast, Caucasian suburbanites attempting to gather food and drink in the shattered wreckage of shopping districts have reported seeing AfricanAmericans "looting snacks and beer from damaged businesses." "I was in the abandoned Wal-Mart gathering an air mattress so I could float out the potato chips, beef jerky, and Budweiser I'd managed to find," said white survivor Lars Wrightson, who had carefully selected foodstuffs whose salt and alcohol content provide protection against contamination. "Then I look up, and I see a whole family of [African-Americans] going straight for the booze. Hell, you could see they had already looted a fortune in diapers." Radio stations still in operation are advising store owners and white people in the affected areas to locate firearms in sporting-goods stores in order to protect themselves against marauding blacks looting gun shops.

The Future is Japanese

2005-08-24T21:47:00.000-07:00

Brainy has come up with the goods again. Even though I'm still on the road (now in Bangalore) doing primary research for me book on the world food system, it turns out that you can already buy it in Japan. At today's rates, Amazon.co.jp are slashing the price of the book from its GBP12.99 cover price to, er, GBP 14.81. Still, I urge everyone to go out and buy it. It'll save me the hassle of actually writing the damn thing.

Quick update on Kennedy Road

2005-08-16T05:59:00.000-07:00

Still on the road - today in Bangkok - so a short post. But the very very good news is that the Kennedy Road comrades were acquitted today. Regular readers will remember that they were protesting against a rather nasty local councillor. After a bit of a rumble on a major road, 14 people were swept up at random by the South African police, and charged with public violence. Rather than make an admission of guilt, the 14 went to trial. The judge took the opportunity to point out to the police that if they were going to bring cases of public violence, it helps to be able to prove that the people who are accused of a crime actually committed it, rather than prove that they were there when it happened. Good news all round.

Worrying Silence

2005-06-16T14:02:00.000-07:00

Right. That's me on the road. For three months. I'm in Senegal today, experiencing an extreme contradiction. A nice man in the bar from which I write is singing some fantastic Wolof tunes. Good. He's accompanied by a Bontempi organ, with the cha-cha-cha drumbeat turned up very loud indeed. Bad. Not sure I can stand it for much longer. But before I flee, a note:

Expect little from Class Worrier over the next couple of months while I do my bit for the activist tourism industry, and net some interviews for a book on the global food system.

With luck, it'll end up being a bit more interesting than it sounds at the moment.

Headline of the moment

2005-05-31T08:04:00.000-07:00

Fewer cheese-rollers injured than usual .

Update
And the article is pretty damn funny too. You crazy Brits.

The ANC’s Winter of Discontent

2005-05-31T02:04:00.000-07:00

Couple of weeks back, I wrote about the march by folk in the Kennedy Road informal settlement, who protested with other residents of their ward here in Durban to unseat their ANC (previously Democratic Alliance, and National Party before that) councillor. A full article’s up at the Voice of the Turtle, co-written with the estimable Richard Pithouse. So here’s an update. The ANC responded valiantly and bravely to criticism last week, calling one of the community leaders at 4pm to tell him that he’d been summoned to a meeting at 7pm. The community rocks up at 7 on the dot, and are told to wait outside because the ANC is caucusing. The ruling party caucuses, and then invites the informal settlement residents in. “No,” they say. “We’re caucusing too.” “Sorry,” says the ANC. “We’ve got some very important people in here. You can caucus later.”

So in they go. And see, arms folded, grinning, the very councillor they’d protested against. In the ensuing meeting, the residents are lambasted, excoriated, hauled over coals, have their throats shat down, and in various other ways made to feel the ANC’s extreme displeasure over being embarrassed in the papers by the actions of the constituency. The meeting runs until 2am. The Kennedy Road folk get home at 2.30am. They leave for work at five.

Let’s not be too harsh. It wasn’t all shouting. The ANC also asks questions. At one point, the ANC asks “Was there a third force behind the protests?” For those unfamiliar with South African politics, this is a reference to the Inkatha Freedom Party – the ‘third force’ in KwaZulu-Natal politics under and since apartheid, puppeted in part by the apartheid state. The ANC’s paranoia is boundless, but it’s also strategic. In raising the spectre of the third force, they’re prompting South Africans to recall and relive a moment in South African history, but not as the history actually happened. The apartheid struggle involved a good many forces, not just the ANC. Since 1994, those other forces have been written out of the struggle. One of the ways the ANC has achieved this is precisely through this kind of exercise of memory, resurrecting past pariahs to reconstitute the present.

The present is, however, a foreign country. We do things differently here. And the ANC would know this if they weren't so insulated, ideologically and materially, from the rest of the world.

On Friday, there was a fire at the Kennedy Road settlement. Fourteen shacks were consumed by the blaze. I’ve never seen a fire department act with such languid abandon, strolling down to the flames, and then pottering up to the fire truck to plug in a hose. I’m told that this behaviour fits into a pattern, one in marked contrast to the response to housefires in wealthier communities. The Kennedy Road folks are once again looking for housing material to rebuild their shacks - one estimate from a second-hand building parts dealership put the cost of replacing a 3m x 4m shack at R2000. (If anyone can help, do drop a line. Big props go to the Jaggarnath family for sorting out blankets - in a case like this, the local Disaster Relief authority is prepared to provide one blanket per now-homeless-person made out of what feels like sandpaper.)

One reason that the shacks caught fire is because there was no electricity in that part of the settlement. The city won’t extend the connection there. So the residents have to make do with candles and paraffin stoves, in shacks built of wood, tin and sometimes plastic. Of course there are going to be fires. But the other reason that the shacks burn this time of year is that it's cold - winter is digging into the settlements. If you live in a plush house, you're not going to notice. If you live in the settlements, you certainly will.

The ANC is busy looking for a third force, wondering why it is that people living in substandard housing, after eleven years of quiescence and compliance are rising up across the country. Well, goodness. What sort of force is it that affects a wide geographic area of poor people living in substandard housing with some kind of temporal synchrony? The third force, after more than a decade of patience, is winter.

55% Non!

2005-05-29T15:56:00.000-07:00

The French have told Chirac et al to fuck off. "In the final count, the "no" won by a clear 2 million votes, 55 % from the left (from the Socialist Party and left) and 45 % from the right (including the UMP, the UDF and the National Front). Seventy five per cent of industrial workers and 66% of employees, voted no.", says Nick Bullard, who has just returned from the vin rouged celebrations in Paris.

Looking, as one does, for informed commentary on the events of the day, I went on over to Paris.Indymedia. There, you can delight in "L'oligarchie britannique nous appelle - voter OUI" - the British Oligarchy calls on us to vote YES. Who are the evil doer promoting sedition among the French? Er, the scientific journal, Nature, who wanted a Oui to further intra-European scientific collaboration. Not the most compelling argument, but then of course, it'd be odd for Nature to be arguing for a Oui vote on grounds that it'd be good for the marginal tax rate.

I'm sure there are other more insidious people out there to play the role of the evil British oligarchy, though non? Like, for instance, the British traditional leadership. Headline news in the South African Sunday Times today was this news from the beginning of the month about the pittance that the Windsor traditional authority pays in rent for its palaces. Bet they were gunning for a non as well. Fuckers.

Stop funding your own oppression.

2005-05-28T04:09:00.000-07:00

The anti-corporate globalisation movement has a friend at BadCorp.org. There's a helpful "Corporate Shitlist" and a solid "Who owns whom" database. Good times and straight talk here.

Lookalike

2005-05-25T11:18:00.000-07:00

Just in case the nice people at Private Eye decide they don't want to remark on this, I'd like to offer the following observation on similarity. Exhibit A: Steven Berkoff, thespian, man frequently typecast as a vaguely European psychopath.
Exhibit B: Pascal Lamy, former European trade negotiator, now head of the World Trade Organisation.

Two of my favourite things.

2005-05-25T10:37:00.000-07:00

Not a few folk have been trying to cash in on Star Wars fever to further their campaigns. MoveOn have their Save the Republic soapbox. Best to date, though, is one following in the footsteps of The Meatrix . Grocery Store Wars is chock full of puns for those strong with The Force. For those who've been untouched by Star Wars, it has visual gags far funnier than a cheap short film about vegetables has any right to. Star Wars and organic food. Who could ask for anything more? Well, me. If you're going to bring down the military-industrial-food complex, it's going to take a little more than picking up organic food off the shelves. It's like shopping in the Death Star. But, at the end of the day, it's a movie funded by the Organic Trade Association. Clearly a bunch of trekkies. [Via Tom.]

Overheard

2005-05-23T14:03:00.000-07:00

It's not stalking. It's being prepared.

Disinformation and pitchforks

2005-05-19T13:14:00.000-07:00

The Newsweek fiasco vindicates Naomi Klein's sensible thoughts on torture - the bodies subject to misinformation and disorientation aren't only the ones living the horrors in Abu Ghraib. But only one blogger has had the courage to speak the difficult truth. That blogger is Medium Lobster. Quoth:

Newsweek - and the entire liberal media! - is responsible for smearing America's good name with the blood of innocents. This is a violation which must be answered for, and there is no answer for it but the replacement of the free press with the only entity pure enough and untainted enough to restore the image of America's government: America's government. The Medium Lobster can direct you to the torches and pitchforks.

Read Medium Lobster, Fafnir and Giblets over at Fafblog!

George Galloway Did Not Happen

2005-05-17T12:56:00.000-07:00

George Galloway has been busy doing what he's good at - pissing people off. In style too. At the U.S. Senate. I don't think I could imagine more delightful testimony short of Jon Stewart being summoned. For instance:

"Now, the neo-con websites and newspapers in which you're such a hero, senator, were all absolutely cock-a-hoop at the publication of the Christian Science Monitor documents, they were all absolutely convinced of their authenticity. They were all absolutely convinced that these documents showed me receiving $10 million from the Saddam regime. And they were all lies.
"In the same week as the Daily Telegraph published their documents against me, the Christian Science Monitor published theirs which turned out to be forgeries and the British newspaper, Mail on Sunday, purchased a third set of documents which also upon forensic examination turned out to be forgeries. So there's nothing fanciful about this. Nothing at all fanciful about it.

The full transcript is full of good giggles, and likely to be more entertaining and informative than the US news sources (with the possible exception of the Daily Show). At the moment, none of the U.S. newspapers of record have anything but a dull AP wire story. Given the fact of politics as spectacle, this is the sort of spectacle one can quickly see being prioritised somewhere below the launch of Playstation 3. But just in case this receives the oxygen of publicity which it so richly deserves, I've prepared a fieldguide to the logic and language you can expect to see in the U.S. press:

Moustachioed Scot…loose canon … weapon of self-destruction … famously litigious … meanwhile, Senator Norm Coleman … if these allegations turn out to be true … not a credible witness … held to account … transatlantic alliance … safely ignored … Saddam Hussein … Islamic peril...

Just here to help.

The Logic of Protest

2005-05-15T12:41:00.000-07:00

I don't want to become a documenter of Thabo Mbeki's mots justes , not least because I'd be kept very busy thus. But given my activities over the past week, here’s one too priceless to let pass.

“We must stop this business of people going into the street to demonstrate about lack of delivery. These are the things that the youth used to do in the struggle against apartheid.” Mbeki, speaking at the municipal imbizo in Rustenburg. [In 13-19 May 2005 Mail and Guardian, p17]

As we've already established, Thabo is big on logic, which is why it's worth just making explicit the reasoning behind his thinking here:

In the struggle against apartheid, all kinds of actions seemed reasonable. The fight for democracy condoned a wide range of noxious acts, though with heavy heart. But there is no more sanctioning this kind of behaviour now that sanctions are over. The fight has been won. There is democracy. There may not be service delivery, granted. But since going to the street to demonstrate is a right belonging to all South Africans, the universality of this right is precisely the reason that no one should exercise it.

Happily, lots of people are ignoring the President's dazzling command of reason. Including the good people of Kennedy Road, about whom I’ve written here and here. On Friday, they took to the streets in one of Durban’s largest post-apartheid protests. There were well in excess of 3000 people, a figure made all the more impressive because every other protest in Durban since 1994 – notably the World Conference Against Racism and Xenophobia in 2001 – all had vast amounts of donor cash for banners, sound and transportation of warm bodies to the barricades. Friday’s protest happened without any of that, which perhaps explains why every political party is shitting on them from a great height. And all because they wanted a decent candidate to vote for in the next election, rather than the corrupt parasite who has been the one representative in Durban's Ward 25 since before most people could vote; Yacoob Baig participated in the appalling tri-cameral system under apartheid, switching to the Democratic Alliance, before then crossing the floor to the ANC. The ANC said that the Kennedy Road poors should have gone through the ANC structures. This is hard, since the ANC structures have never bothered to return their calls, and have instead sold off the land which had been promised to the people in the informal settlement.

The key demands, then, were "Land, Housing and Baig must go". The fuller memorandum of demands is itself a fine document. You can read the version submitted to the municipality here. The key point is in the first line: "We the people of Ward 25, loyal citizens of the Republic of South Africa, unite behind the following demands..." No party political affiliation, no claims to rights beyond the ones to which ever South African is entitled. Hell, there were even T-Shirts with Mbeki's face on it at the march. You can see some pictures from the event here . Note the yellow troop carrier picture. Under apartheid, police cars and vehicles were all painted yellow. (The first post-sanction Lonely Planet guide to South Africa strongly advised against hiring yellow cars – silly really, since no car hire company offered the option.) After the democratic dispensation, the police rebranded themselves, with the universal blue-and-white uniform we normally associate with the people who persecute immigrants and the poor. But controlling the anger of the oppressed is an apartheid art, and the colours of this piece of crowd control equipment reflect this all too well.

Where does that leave Mbeki’s logic?

Mbeki Tells It How It Is

2005-05-15T07:01:00.000-07:00

Regular readers will recall Mrs Thatcher explaining monetarism.Seems as if Cde Mbeki has been taking clarity lessons from the great dame. In this week's ANC Today, the President explains the compatibility of vast job losses and grinding poverty with a glowing assessment of the ANC's economic record

"In other words, with reference to the paradigm of simple logic, a specific progression from the particular to the general has sought to present a general picture that is putatively consistent with the particular, but is, in fact, inconsistent with the overall general reality. "

Read Mbeki's fuller thoughts on logic
here.

short tales

2005-05-12T15:47:00.000-07:00

There's a new kid on the blog. Check DS, and his heavy-weight thoughts on South African politics, here. He'll make it to the sidebar just as soon as I get my shit together. Past experience suggests that this may take some time.

Pythagorarse

2005-05-08T16:25:00.000-07:00

Been doing a bit of gastronomic detective work of late. Some may know that Pythagoras had a thing about beans, forbidding those in his retinue, men and women, from ever going near them. But why? Colin Spencer in his wonderfully readable, highly speculative and often flat batty "Vegetarianism: A History" suggests:

There are a number of possible explanations for the Pythagorean abstention from bean-eating. It might partly be traced back to the Egyptian priests, as Herodotus observes .The authors of Food: The Gift of Osiris remark that the priests merely wished to avoid the impurity of their emanations. A priest’s dignity could suffer if he were to fart in the midst of holy ritual. But beans are not the only food to induce flatulence and these authors continue with a more symbolic explanation. The Egyptian word for bean, iwryt, is similar to the word iwr, meaning to conceive or to generate. This association for the Egyptian priests may have endowed the bean with a sacred aspect. Pythagoras also forbade them because, two theories suggest, beans were generated by the same putrefactive material that generates human beings or, according to Pliny, because he thought that the souls of the dead dwell in them. I would also suggest that fava beans, squinted at sideways, bear a resemblance to female pudenda; added to the similarity between the Egyptian words described above, this might have been seen as another indication that beans were indeed sacred and somehow fused with the act of creation. Pythagoras, according to Plutarch, called eggs ‘beans’, making a pun on the word for conception. Porphyry tells us that Pythagoras buried some beans in mud in a pot, and when he dug them up ninety days later they had taken the shape of a woman’s vagina. (Perhaps, as well, this is why throughout history, until very recently, beans have been thought to incite lustful thoughts.) A more prosaic explanation is that the bean was sued as a voting token in elections; thus abstention from the eating of beans meant ‘abstain from politics’. And another is that foods which can at times be toxic become taboo. Favism is a hereditary disorder which involves an allergic reaction to the broad bean. Sufferers can develop a blood disorder (haemolytic anaemia) by eating the beans or even walking through a field of them when they are in flower. The disease can affect people living around the Mediterranean shores. Finally, the smell of foods was of great significance in the preparation and cooking for aromas made their way to the gods – and beans were held to smell of dung.

Discreet enquiries at a Buddhist retreat this weekend, where they also choose not to serve beans, corroborates the simple explanation. Priests tend not to want to fart during long hours of silent meditation - gives people the giggles, apparently.

Creative Recycling

2005-05-04T12:40:00.000-07:00

Splendid picture up at the BBC.

It's a man making puppets out of recycled World Bank reports.

"We keep getting these reports that no one reads, so we decided to put them to some use," Mr Roy says.

Full caption here. Via Palash.

Operation Muslim Vote

2005-05-03T18:09:00.000-07:00

We've just added a fine new article by Naima Bouteldja to the Turtle, on why many Muslims will be punishing Labour, and possibly voting Respect, on Thursday. More here.

BishopWatch

2005-05-01T16:38:00.000-07:00

Q:How do you know the car in front of you contains the KwaZulu-Natal Anglican bishop?
A: The number-plate is "Bishop ZN".
Just thought you should know.

Insomnia

2005-05-01T16:34:00.000-07:00

Carn't sleep. Not last night neither. At least not until 6am. And then was woken up at midday by a glorious bit of close-harmony May Day celebration booming across from the sports fields outside my flat. Good times.

Why my mum will be voting Green

2005-05-01T15:58:00.000-07:00

This will be the first British election in which I won’t actually cast my own vote. Luckily, my mum has stepped up to the plate, and will be voting for me. No postal vote allowed, since I won’t actually be in the country to fill it out and send it in. So I’ve proxied my poor mother to stuff the ballot box on Karl Marx's birthday. And this election, like every other, I’ll vote Green. Except that my mum will.

I wasn’t enfranchised in time to boot out Finchley and Golders Green’s most notorious MP – she was already Lady Thatcher of Finchley by the time of my first election. Since her departure, the choice of candidates in Finchley has lost its dark sparkle, and I expect it to remain a constituency dominated by grey reactionaries of one stripe or another until I die. This year’s ballot paper gives you some idea of democracy’s standard fayre for Finchley.

Andrew Mennear, Conservative
Noel Lynch, Green Party
Rudi Vis, Labour
Sue Garden, Liberal Democrat
Jeremy Jacobs, UK Independence Party
Rainbow George Weiss, Rainbow Dream Ticket

Yes indeed. Rudi Vis, the little shit, won by a fair majority last time (46.3%) and the time before that (46.1%), and I expect him to do the same again this. Little chance of Mr Mennear doing much. Which means that I’m in not much danger of being complicit in a Tory return. (And given the contempt in which we ought to hold both HMG and the Opposition, and given the vanishingly small difference between them – at least viewed from here - my conscience would be largely untroubled by such complicity.)

But this is more than just a protest vote. It might be pathetically simple minded to vote on grounds of manifesto promises and past performance, but if you're going to vote at all, these might not be the worst grounds from which to cast. And on The Issues, I'm tempted by Green because:

They’ve the most literate manifesto in a field which, as Private Eye observes in its splendid Election Special (offline only, sorry), is characterized by mediocrity. Compare the Lib-Dems'

“our instinctive internationalism – through positive and proactive engagement with Europe, the United Nations and the Commonwealth – is ~~instinctive~~ definitive”

with the far punchier

“Greens are internationalist by nature.”

Hell – they even manage to get a ‘nature’ in there, bless. And the Greens don’t even mention the Commonwealth, which is surely a point in their favour. The Manifesto is also dedicated to the fine Mike Woodin, who died last year.

They have moderately sensible thoughts on taxation, smarter at least than anyone else running in Finchley.

The Turtle’s Hal Berstam seems to be voting green too.

They want to decommission nuclear reactors, which is nice.

They’re disestablishmentarian (see here ) and almost-but-not-quite republican.

The Green Party has no clear leader whom I can identify. This is good. The structural politics of party political leadership encourages wankers, tyrants and the sort of type-A people whom you’d rather see restricted to careers as bouncers or lawyers.

It’s more properly Finchley and Golders: Green.

Even if the candidate’s called Noel.

There’s enough wrong with the Green’s immigration policy to give me the willies, mind. Here’s their manifesto blurb on the subject:

People fleeing persecution, torture and human rights' violations should always be welcomed by Britain and offered our full protection and asylum. The Green Party is concerned that public debate often confuses the issue of asylum with that of economic migration.

When so much environmental politics is a cover for fantasies of racial purity and/or misanthropy, it’s as well to hold the Greens to a higher standard. There’s clearly a difference between torture, and economic persecution, but I wish they’d talked about what this was, and how they were going to address both. They’re also wildly off base with their endorsement of carbon trading, increased international aid (though there’s a concession to canceling third world debt and scrapping the WTO) and in their decision to call their anti-free trade platform “Taming the Tiger”.

Still. There are constraints to my organizing a write-in campaign for Bruce Springsteen. And they’re vastly better than any of the other choices. So what are you waiting for? Send your mother out to vote for you on Friday.

Update
Read the Lib Dems manifesto, only slightly mangled above (thanks, Hal), here. The Greens have their manifesto online here. And, another reason to vote for them, silly me for forgetting, is that they've rather consistently been against the war on Iraq.

Guess I'm not quite over my Star Wars issues quite yet.

2005-04-26T18:40:00.000-07:00

As Father Ted once put it, "fascists are men who wear black and run round telling people what to do. Priests are.... well... more drink!" And so it is with Imperial officers here.

Taking the Sith

2005-04-23T23:29:00.000-07:00

Okay, I think I've worked out the last of my Star Wars issues. It has taken a good couple of days, and a great deal of sneaking around the rubbish bins of Skywalker Ranch rooting around for discarded hard-drives and, when that failed, long hours of communion with The Force. Finally, though, Class Worrier is happy to host the first review of The Revenge of the Sith, based almost entirely on information received directly from midi-chlorians. Their verdict: better than you’d expected.

The Sith rounds out the Star Wars cycle with Anakin’s head in a black helmet. Like the excellent Empire Strikes Back (the most consistently rewatchable of the cycle), you know that it’s going to end on a downbeat. Unlike Empire, this movie isn’t directed by Irvin Kershner, but by his student, the vastly less ept George Lucas, whose strong points are mythics and visuals and not, as we’ve found out by watching the past two films over and over, character development, dialogue, psychology or concessions to intelligent viewers. Luckily, this film lets him play to his strengths, and for that, I think we’re all willing to dumb ourselves down a little. If in the previous films we wanted for characterization and more intelligent dialogue (failing which, less talking altogether) in this film, all we want is dark closure. And some cool space ships.

And this the film provides. No longer motivated by a barely outlined Oedipal drive, or by precociousness, Anakin is now more realistically motivated by fears of Padme’s death. Yes, it’s exactly like The Matrix: Reloaded. And sometimes, even better.

This is a fair achievement given the resources the film has to work with. Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan fails to communicate the gravity or charm in three episodes that Alec Guinness achieved in twenty minutes of screentime. Hayden Christensen is just as wooden as he was in Attack of the Clones – clearly, he’s been taking lessons from Keanu Reaves. But Lucas has been watching the Wachowski brothers, and picked up a trick or two about filming fight sequences. No bullet time, but quite the opposite – fantastically fluid and choreographed real-time light saber fight sequences, with a speed to make Jackie Chan's eyes water. Mace Windu is, of course, defeated by skullduggery – but in the battle between Anakin and Dooku (which rather hamfistedly quotes the battle that Vader and Skywalker have at the end of Return of the Jedi), and in the spectacular lavalamp sequence that births Vader from fire, the fight sequences are balletic.

But character development there is, of a kind. Yoda emerges as the sort of guru that Hindu nationalists, and the white people who lap up their excretions, have been pining for since the 1960s. Complex, wise, Gnostic, and good with an edge weapon. The Emperor unmasks himself with suitable bassassery. And we even get to catch a glimpse of the Wookie’s history of slavery. Natalie Portman is wasted, of course. But that’s okay. It’s not really about her, or about Lucas’ appalling skills as a director (actors report that his standard and oft-repeated guideline is “faster, more intense”). This is about the film’s subconscious, about the context in which it was made.

In the beginning, Star Wars was made in defiance of the big studios – it knew where to position itself in the battle of good against evil, even as it was, a big-budget film coming out of the Fox studios. And, largely because of the contract Lucas made with Fox – with Fox shrugging off the merchandise rights – Star Wars is a vast franchise. Lucas knows evil intimately, and it shows. In the end the bad guys triumph hamfistedly, through attrition, and backed up with a mighty horn section. Who could ask for anything more?

The Star Wars Saga – an all-purpose post-colonial review

2005-04-23T16:06:00.000-07:00

It began, as the best stories do, half way through .. a battle against Empire... 1970s....liberation struggle... a new hope... New International Economic Order... Wizardry... Nelson Mandela... Jedi Nationalism... Dark Father, idiot, it’s Dark Father... Good droid, bad droid.. AT-AT is anagram of Tata: Coincidence? … the slug and the princess … Ewoks: Muppetry of the penis… Indigenous peoples as soft toys… Mark Hamill scarcely believable as human, let alone Jedi…. Vast pots of LucasCash.. And so after two decades… Trade disputes, taxes… World Trade Organization… thinly-veiled-racial-stereotypes... Culture Wars…Urban fantasy: "The Entire Planet’s a City".. Who mops up on Coruscant? … Republic Complacency.. Democratic party… Imperial overstretch… Iraq… Jedi as terrorist… death in childbirth… what a wookie…Emperor… Karl Rove … Grima Wormtongue … no redeeming value… can’t wait for episode seven.

Self portrait machine

2005-04-23T15:59:00.000-07:00

Following in the footsteps of the Brooke brothers, I thought I'd give the South Park self-portrait machine a go. Feel my wrath and tremble.

Galileo Galileo

2005-04-20T22:46:00.000-07:00

Now that Kurt Waldheim has been named Pope, the world can get back to business. And business is what my mate Ignacio Chapela's getting back at (great link, no?), having filed suit against the Regents at the University of California at Berkeley.

His suit has three barrels - the first, is that he's a victim of retaliation for blowing the whistle on the biotechnology industry. The second is that he has been discriminated against on grouds of race (throughout the UC system, people of colour are denied tenure far more often, other things being equal), and third - and I like this the best - that he's a victim of fraud. Why fraud? Ignacio's colourful lawyer puts it like this: when you buy a house, and the owner knows it's on a fault line but doesn't tell you, that's fraud. When you apply for tenure, but you're not told that you had to have opinions in keeping with those on the tenure committee, that's fraud too.

The University is currently reviewing his tenure case, but he's pressing ahead with the suit in part so as to retain his rights to redress (a statute of limitations was about to kick in) but in part so that he can blow the whistle on all this a little more loudly. To aid in his amplification, he's got a website www.pulseofscience.org on which you can find one of the worst graphs ever. I have taken a particular dislike to this particular piece of data presentation, in no small part because I once had to wear it. (Yes, that's me wearing a Chancellor-encrusted bag on my head.)

Timeless observations on Christianity, civilisation, and bread in the US

2005-04-17T10:14:00.000-07:00

Who said this, and when?

"..time has passed, and in that time the Christian world has revealed itself as morally bankrupt and politically unstable. The Tunisians were quite right in 1956 - and it was a very significant moment in Western (and African) history - when they countered the French justification for remaining in North Africa with the question "Are the French ready for self-government?" Again, the terms "civilized" and "Christian" begin to have a very strange ring, particularly in the ears of those who have been judged to be neither civilized nor Christian, when a Christian nation surrenders to a foul and violent orgy, as Germany did during the Third Reich."

That's right. James Baldwin, 1963, in The Fire Next Time (pp51-52) where he also penned this fine observation (p43), which is tremendously germane to my interests at the moment, being as I am in the US, and researching as I am, food:

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous now, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become.

Incidentally, the best places to eat bread again in the Bay Area are to be found here, at this range of worker owned cooperatives, where the bread's not bitter, and the workforce as un-alienated as it's possible to be in these parts.

Lunacy

2005-04-14T08:47:00.000-07:00

Today is a day of parts. Thanks to Hal Berstram I have discovered that Robert Kilroy-Silk's odious "Veritas" party is actually a cover for sick Marmite-related S&M activities. Thanks to the BBC, I have discovered this splendid picture, showing participants negotiating a hurdle at the Porcine Olympics. And from the good folk at the New Economics Foundation in London, I am pleased to share a call for jokes concerning the new President of the World Bank, in a new Wolfowit campaign.

The Turtle Does The UK Election

2005-04-10T16:54:00.000-07:00

The incisive Hal Bertram, longtime friend of the Turtle, has now found an online, and hopefully not too temporary, home in the bosom of the People's Beast. Your one stop shop for pointed and healthy cynicism - the Turtle's Election Blog - is now open for business.

Rome from Home

2005-04-09T14:40:00.000-07:00

Bit late, this, but that's because I've been in Texas, where I managed to pick up a remarkable insult from Jagdish Bhagwati: "That Patel Fellow! You know, it's an oxymoron. You can't be a Gujarati and be a marxist." Anyway, enough about me. As I say, a bit late, but nonetheless an important bit of popery here and a fine new blog, the Chronicles of Ryan, here.

ParasiteWatch

2005-04-05T22:41:00.000-07:00

[Another delayed posting] Since the last posting here on Class Worrier, two presidents have been selected. With profound clairvoyance, Mugabe got the two thirds majority he thought he would in Zimbabwe, while Wolfowitz passed, unhindered, into a comfy chair on K Street. George Monbiot, incidentally, seems to agree with the Worrier on the utility of Wolf-2 for those opposed to the Bank. Clever boy.

Now, as predicted, bottom-feeding is rife in Washington DC. Here's the text of an invitation doing the rounds at the moment:

We are writing to invite your organization to be part of the Host Committee for a reception commemorating James D. Wolfensohn’s tenure as President of the Bank. The event, Civil Society and the World Bank, will take place on May 26, 2005 ... As Mr. Wolfensohn’s term comes to an end, the Bank Information Center, InterAction, and Oxfam America are organizing a reception to recognize his personal role in creating space for civic engagement. This space has allowed civil society to promote more equitable and sustainable development practices at the Bank. ... Invited guests would include civil society leaders; World Bank directors, management, and staff; members of Congress and other US Government officials; diplomatic corps; and senior IMF, IDB, and other IFI officials. The formal program – of about 45 minutes – would include a series of short speeches and an open space for reflection and comment. Mr. Wolfensohn has already agreed to attend and speak at the event. Host Committee members will be invited to attend one or two planning sessions to help with arrangements, offer their logo for the formal invitations, and make a contribution of $500 to help cover the event costs. If the suggested contribution is difficult at this time, please feel free to provide as much as is comfortable."

Space for civic engagement? This is the guy who set about rebranding the World Bank so that it became a Listening Bank, who listened to the World Commission on Dams, and the Extractive Industry Review, decided that he didn't like what he was hearing, and told civil society to go fuck itself. And he has created space for civic engagement? This invitation comes from organisations that purport to be among the Bank's most vigorous critics, and whose websites promote a patina of heartfelt virtue not unlike the Bank's own shoulder-on-sleeve liberalism.

We've enough trouble with 'fake' NGOs, ones funded and set up by capital to deflect and baffle criticism from social movements. When the 'real' NGOs prove to be such craven fools, it does rather suggest that 'progressive NGO' is a contradiction in terms. With the exception of the excellent Focus on the Global South, it's hard to think of an NGO that isn't, at some level, deeply reactionary. Sometimes, it's hard not to want to side with the right, and their swivel-eyed lunacy, such as the delerious NGOWatch.org. At least with the American Enterprise Institute, you know what you're getting. And with friends like the Bank Information Centre, InterAction and Oxfam America, who needs enemies?

[Update: The Bank Information Centre has decided that it's probably not a good idea to do this. Sensible move, lads.]

Apologies for Tyrants

2005-03-30T21:59:00.000-08:00

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

2005-03-30T21:44:00.000-08:00

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

2005-03-29T12:23:00.000-08:00

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

2005-03-29T11:31:00.000-08:00

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

2005-03-26T02:27:00.000-08:00

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

2005-03-24T23:30:00.000-08:00

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

2005-03-24T23:17:00.000-08:00

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.