Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 458

What are the politics of the briefly banned film “Of Good Report”?

When I was at the Durban International Film Festival (DIFF) last month, I was perusing the program, and for one reason or another, Jahmil X. T. Qubeka’s feature “Of Good Report“ caught my eye. Perhaps I was pleased to see an isiXhosa-language film so heavily promoted, but my friend shot down my selection. “Seriously?” she asked. “He named the underage girl ‘Nolitha’? That’s too corny to see.” Instead we regrettably opted for “Durban Poison,” a great film when you bracket its implicit race politics, a decent film after you learn that it took a quarter century to make, and a straightforwardly awful film once you’ve listened to the director run through a coke-addled bout of misogyny during the post-screening Q&A.

Two days later, we heard about the banning of “Of Good Report”–we couldn’t have seen it anyway. As previously covered on this blog, South Africa’s Film and Publication Board defined the film as child pornography, a classification absolutely incomprehensible to anyone who has seen the film. Less than half an hour in, the protagonist Parker Sithole (Mothusi Magano) is drunkenly seduced at a local bar by Nolitha Ngubane (Petronella Tshuma), and they return to Sithole’s rented room for sex. Of course at this point in the film, it remains unresolved whether Sithole recognizes Ngubane as a pupil at the rural school where he’s just accepted a teaching job, or conversely, whether she realizes he’s a teacher at her school. During this initial encounter, Ngubane rejects a hypermasculine larger man, who immediately suggests sex after he buys her a drink, and opts for the lanky man in a sweater vest and glasses sitting by himself at a table. Is the appeal the transgression of the taboo on intimate relations between teachers and students, adults and children, or something else entirely? I couldn’t help but wonder if this was going to be one of those films where the victim initiates all contact with the rapist/murderer, where he just sits back and lets himself become passively obsessed with his object of fixation. (It is.)

The sex scene is relatively tame as far as these sorts of things go. To be honest, I was more shocked by the discourse about the film than the film itself. There’s actually quite limited nudity in the movie – especially for one primarily about sex – and while Ngubane wears a 9th grader’s school uniform, the actress who plays her character is nearly a decade older than that. That would be like banning episodes of Beverly Hills 90210 for suggesting sex between minors, even though Luke Perry was in his 30s for much of the filming. In short, the decision to ban the film was lazy, ill informed, and above all, the inexplicable work of people who have no business controlling film releases.

All of that said, I was pretty taken aback at the post-banning discourse that dominated discussion in the mainstream South African press and blogosphere. Qubeka himself called the censorship “a bit fascist” and an attempt to “silence a voice.”  For Riaan Hendricks, director of the brilliant new documentary The Devil’s Lair, “It was a difficult experience seeing a film being met with political power in that way.” In short, the post-banning commentary enacted a well-rehearsed script, in which we as citizens must take a stand against arbitrary censorship, defend freedom of speech, and reject state oversight of all artistic endeavors.

First, even if the Film and Publication Board is inconceivably incompetent, the fact remains that the film was never censored due to its narrative or political content. It was prevented from being shown because the FPB was under the impression that the sex scene in the film constituted underage sex. Sure, we don’t learn Nolitha is underage until a subsequent scene – there’s no way the FPB could’ve actually known she was a minor at this point in the film–but incompetence aside, the film was banned because it was alleged to contain underage sex. End of story. Actually, not end of story: once the FPB was challenged, they revisited the case and quickly unbanned the film. Again, I’m not apologizing for the FPB’s ineptitude, and they certainly shouldn’t be let anywhere near a film festival again. But the hand wringing over a “fascist” state engaging in political censorship is hard to take seriously.

Meanwhile, one film screened at the DIFF actually was banned on strictly political grounds. Cameroonian director Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s “Le President,” a mockumentary about the disappearance of a figure obviously intended to be the authoritarian Paul Biya, is now illegal to screen in that country. (See Megan Eardley’s interview with Bekolo on this blog.) I actually found the film itself to be a bit tedious and repetitive, but Bekolo immediately won me over during the Q&A. It is a deliberate work of political propaganda, and he’s currently working on facilitating its free online distribution–in short, bootlegging his own film–for a Cameroonian audience. The story of Le President’s banning, however, has barely made the South African press, and when it has, only as an afterthought to Qubeka’s own banning, part of a narrative of “the trend of censorship creeping into Pan-African film-making.”

Second, for all of the discussion around the film being banned on political grounds, there has been no discussion whatsoever about the film’s politics. Certainly this is a psychological study of one man’s descent into deranged pedophilia and murder. But far from a simple narrative of unrequited love, his anger at Ngubane is refracted through his hatred for his ailing mother. After a scene in which she calls out to him repeatedly – Boyboy! – so that he comes to the outdoor toilet, wipes her, and carries her inside, his hatred for her deepens to the point of obsession. Unable to eradicate her memory when he forcefully smothers her with a pillow, he hears her call–”Boyboy!”–and sees her likeness in the mirror immediately before beating Ngubane to death with a cricket bat. All of this is to say that this is clearly a film about pathological misogyny, not one about a corruptible good guy whose only foible is his libido. As if the juxtaposition of the mother and Ngubane’s visages weren’t enough, he also bloodies the only other woman in his path, this time a cop. Her dislodged teeth wind up buried in his scalp, and his plucking them out, one-by-one, constitutes the revolting opening scene of the film.

The film’s only hackneyed dimension–and funnily enough, its only explicit political point–is its conclusion showing an escaped Sithole being employed in a Zimbabwean secondary school. The woman who employs him tells him he’s come “of good report” and will obviously be hired by the school. The point, of course, is that coming of good report is absolutely meaningless; Sithole has actually come as a wanted statutory rapist and murderer.

The message then, if there is one at all, is that bad apples aren’t always immediately apparent, and that we’re doomed to repeat what we just witnessed. There’s no attempt to represent the systematic violence and asymmetry structuring gender relations in South Africa and abroad – even, if not especially, those as mundane as teacher-student relations. This is quite clearly a film made from man’s-eye-view: a woman – no, a girl – apparently seduces an innocent man, disappears on him, and then provokes his wrath when she returns. He’s rendered in such passive mode that he doesn’t utter a single line in the entire film.

Rather than actually engage the content of rape culture and child pornography in a meaningful way, commentators have feigned outrage over this instance of “political” censorship. Meanwhile, the film was released after all, the only casualty being Qubeka’s obscurity. Less than a month after its initial Durban screening, Of Good Report is being shown regularly in Johannesburg and Cape Town, and the South African press has transformed Qubeka into an overnight celebrity. This isn’t a bad thing: technically, creatively, and aesthetically, this is easily the best South African feature film I’ve seen this year. I eagerly await his follow-up, though I hope next time people take the film itself seriously, rather than focusing exclusively on the discourse about the film. Maybe that’s why despite all the hype, there were only four other viewers at a weekend after-dinner showing at the V&A Waterfront.

“Zulu,” the film–starring Forest Whitaker and Orlando Bloom–gets lukewarm reviews. Is the novel any good?

Caryl Férey’s 2008 crime novel Zulu won the French Grand Prix prize for best crime novel. The film version, starring Forrest Whittaker and Orlando Bloom, closed the Cannes Film Festival. Originally, there was talk Djimon Hounsou would star. Sean talked about it here. The French-South African production received less than stellar reviews post-Cannes. The film is not yet out on general release in the U.S., France, South Africa or anywhere else, but I was surprised to find the English translation of the book in a local shop in small town, Michigan. So, is the book any better?

Like most who had heard about the novel and film, I was skeptical. But after reading, I’ve decided, one has to give Férey some credit. In the first forty pages he manages to weave nearly every violent crime and negative stereotype associated with South Africa. There are drugs, assaults, rapes, murders, robberies, incest, Dashiki-speaking Nigerian gangsters, HIV, and even a mutilation associated with the application of muthi. And this is just the first forty pages. The black chief of the homicide branch of the Cape Town Police must solve the violent murder of a young white woman, the daughter of a prominent Afrikaner rugby family, who had begun experimenting with drugs and sex (and not always with nice white boys). And so we wait with baited breath. Can South Africa solve its violent crime problems on the eve of the 2010 World Cup? Can South Africa become the rainbow nation envisaged?

The protagonist of the story is the isZulu-speaking Ali Neumann. (What’s that you say, that doesn’t sound like a very Zulu name? It’s not. Ali changed his surname in an attempt to run from his ethnically violent childhood.) In Ali, Férey creates a new kind of “noble savage.” This gallant Zulu is not the awe-inspiring warrior of the 1964 Zulu film and countless other Zulu war stories—but he is a brave man on a mission. Ali is on the run from his Zulu past and the trauma he experienced as a child at the hands of Inkatha vigilantes. He guards his secret history and keeps to himself, despite his circle of (mostly white) close friends and colleagues. In his quest to conquer Cape Town’s crime, Férey’s character appears to be trying to shed his ethnicity, to overcome not only his experience of violence but an inherent tendency of his people to beat on the drums, perform war dances, and of course, act violently. (See, for instance, his interactions with the fiery and mysterious Zulu dancer Zina whose Inkatha past enables Ali to track down the culprits.) Férey wants you to pull for Ali. Can he triumph? Will he solve the murder(s) and ascend to the head of the Cape Town South African Police? Will he let the women in his life closer, be it his hidden mistress Maia in Manenberg, his mother’s close companion and nurse Miriam, or even Zina, who calls him her Zulu king?

While some crime thriller aficionados have interpreted Férey’s novel as a scathing social critique, the work employs gratuitous violence for the sake of violence and several scenes suggest the author tried too hard to ethnicize Ali. For instance, the portrayal of Ali’s torment. “You see what happens, little Zulu?” his Inkatha torturers taunted him as his father hung and his brother burnt. Most historical accounts of this transition era violence make it clear that Inkatha supporters saw their adversaries as lacking Zuluness. They were more likely to call Inkatha opponents such as Ali and his family “amaGula” (Koolies) or “amaIndiya,” referring to the Indian members of the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal. This same scene leaves Ali impotent—the noble savage need not only overcome his violent ethnicity, but also his lack of manhood. While Férey has elsewhere commented that his outsider status enabled him to address the “taboo” transition-era violence more candidly, Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying and Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother do so quite well.

As though the clichés and extreme violence were not enough, as Zulu progressed, it started to seem eerily familiar. SPOILER ALERT. As Férey reveals that the gangsters responsible have been working for a shadowy former “Third Force” Afrikaner operative now in cahoots with international big pharmaceuticals, one gets the feeling that they might have heard this story somewhere before. Perhaps in another crime thriller set in Africa? Perhaps in that one novel also made into a major motion picture? Ah, that’s it, John le Carré’s The Constant Gardener. If the parallels with the major pharmaceutical testing dangerous drugs on poor and unknowing Africans is not enough, Férey’s protagonist ends up dead in the desert, just like the reluctant hero of The Constant Gardener. For Férey, Ali the noble savage was unable to overcome, unable to resist the need for vengeance that ultimately leads to his death. But Férey’s verdict on South Africa is still out.

Weekend Music Break 50

The hip hop collective Odd Future’s public profile is largely built around Tyler the Creator, Earl Sweatshirt and Frank Ocean. (BTW, both Tyler and Earl are children of African immigrants.) Less prominent has been the group’s main DJ, singer, producer and only female member, Syd tha kid, as well as producer and illustrator Matt Martians. These two also run their own band, self-described as playing “soul funk.” Here’s a 22 minute set of them playing live on LA radio station KEXP’s Street Sounds show in November 2012:

Then there’s Cecile Mclorin Salvant, the Miami-born singer (mother French; father Haitian) with a political science degree, who reinterprets jazz and blues standards. Her album “Woman Child” (2013) is worth checking out. In the video below, recorded at the Detroit Jazz Festival, she performs first a song by Bert Williams, who is considered the best selling black artist before the 1920s and who performed in blackface. Then she does “Yesterdays” by Jerome Kern.

Njabulo Madlala, a South African opera singer who lives and performs in London. Here he performs a Miriam Makeba standard “Qongqothwane,” live for Classical Kicks, a series geared to classical music started by violonist Lizzie Ball (she played with Nigel Kennedy) at Ronnie Scotts in London:

I always return to Tutu Puoane, the South African-born, Belgium-based singer. Here’s two tunes. First “Love Ends”:

And “Alone at last” has Puoane performing with the Royal Flemish Philharmonic in Antwerp. The song features Bert Joris (he is trumpet and composed the song) and Puoane’s husband, Ewout Pierreux. Live @ de Roma, Antwerp, 24 march 2013:

In April–along with fellow AIAC’ers Elliot Ross, Ben Talton, Dan Magaziner, and Derica Shields–I went to see Christian aTunde Adjuah (the former Christian Scott) at the Jazz Standard in New York City. Scott spent the evening alternating between talking and playing (with a little too much emphasis on the former). One highlight (for me at least) was his remix of Jay Z and Kanye West’s “No Church in the Wild.” Here’s a link to the original, and here’s a video of Scott and his band performing the song live in Amsterdam:

The Cape Town singer Melanie Scholtz decided to put poet James Matthews’ work to music. The result is the album “Freedom Child.” Here’s a live performance of one of the songs, “Black I Am”:

My children love this Gregory Porter tune and the video. I am their dad, so I like it too:

Then there’s the much older Mike Gibbs (actually born in the then Southern Rhodesia in 1937) and the Kinetic Jazz Orchestra performing an old standard, “Sadie Sadie” by Horace Silver:

Finally, in honor of the 34 miners of Marikana murdered by police one year ago today in South Africa, here’s Charlie Haden and his Liberation Music Orchestra performing the South African national anthem (and no, not that version sung by rugby teams):

Marikana Memorial

This time last year, platinum workers (all black) at a mine in South Africa’s North West Province, went on an illegal strike against workplace racism, bad conditions, low wages and their ineffective trade union. The standoff started around August 10th, and by August 16th, they had shut down all production. Government Ministers hardly showed their faces. Most of the South African and “global” media made the workers out to be irrational, emboldened by “magic potions.” The main trade union abandoned them as the police, the mining company (the dubious Lonhro) and the state (which ruling party most of them still voted for in large numbers) conspired to send in the police to mow them down in broad daylight. At the time, Dan Magaziner and I suggested (in a post for The Atlantic) that South African politics was no longer an exceptional and that it might help to read Marikana against the backdrop of what workers worldwide are facing. It’s one year later. What are the lasting legacies of those events, politically, economically, socially. Since no one piece of writing, film or audio file, can capture the impact of those events, below we’ve collected a few references (we also excerpted some choice parts from these):

Labor journalist Terry Bell on what it means for next year’s general elections, the country’s 5th since independence:

[Marikana] triggered the biggest upheaval the modern labour movement has faced as thousands of miners deserted the once dominant National Union of mineworkers (NUM).  It is the veritable collapse, certainly on the platinum belt, of the NUM, that has been the most obvious, immediate, change wrought. But it is the involvement of political groups and parties that may have as big, if not bigger, an impact in the longer term.

The major beneficiary of the desertions from the NUM has been the Association of Mining and Construction Union (Amcu) that, so far, remains determinedly non-aligned politically. However, Amcu is affiliated to the politically non-aligned National Council of Trade Unions (Nactu) that is headed by general secretary Narious Moloto who currently doubles as the general secretary of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC).

Moloto says he has no political ambitions and has “stepped in on a temporary basis” to help the PAC get back on its feet. But just as the large-scale influx of members to Amcu boosted the flagging fortunes of Nactu, there are obvious hopes within the PAC that it will have a similar impact on their party.

In publicity terms, however, it is Julius Malema who has had more impact. Not only by quickly intervening after August 16 and organising legal representation for mineworkers, but also by being barred from the area by police.

Malema and his newly launched Economic Freedom Fighters clearly hope to win electoral support on the platinum belt. So too does the also recently formed Workers and Socialist Party (Wasp) that has — in the form of the Democratic Socialist Movement (DSM) — had a presence for some time in the Rustenburg area.

ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe provided a considerable boost to the DSM and Wasp with his allegation that Wasp member Liv Shange was solely responsible for the “anarchy” in the mining sector. But the DSM is only one of several groups that have seized the opportunity to try to win support and members among the disillusioned miners. Elements of the Democratic Left Front, an umbrella group that contains a number of small Left groups, has also been active.

However, a political party that has had little public exposure but which may have the greatest impact is the United Democratic Movement (UDM), headed by former Transkei leader, Bantubonke Holomisa. His main electoral base is the Eastern Cape, home to most of the migrant miners of Marikana and to their extended families. These families, in their turn, have familial links to the Western Cape.

Some indication of who might be the beneficiaries and who the losers — and the level of impact the Marikana watershed has had may become clearer after next year’s elections.

Left activist (and former Communist Party spokesperson) Mazibuko Jara:

The strike at the Lonmin mine in Marikana has deep systemic roots in the conditions of workers in that mine. For several years now that mine has increasingly used labor from labor brokers. So they would hire a company to bring workers on a part-time basis to work the mines, particularly underground. That group of workers who were brought in through labor brokers did not have full benefits and were paid very low wages. So that’s quite significant, because many of these mine workers need to support two families: one in the mining area, and one in their rural homes in far-flung provinces or in nearby countries. But also, another factor is that the mining system has taken away the subsidy for accommodations that it used to provide to workers. It is true that these accommodations in the mining compounds were horrible. But now, the mining companies charge the workers for these accommodations in the mining compounds. So many of the mine workers have opted to stay in the informal settlements that emerged around the mining areas. That was a further squeeze. Apart from that, there have been very problematic attempts by management to increase salaries for certain parts of the workforce, but not for the entire workforce. And by the union’s own calculation, that was meant to reward those more critical in the production process. But you can imagine the kind of unhappiness that this would generate, given that very few workers were getting any kind of fair wage.

But also: the National Union of Mine Workers (NUM), the largest union representing mine workers in South Africa, had increasingly become removed from the conditions, the grievances, and the demands of the lowest rank of the workers, the most exploited — particularly those who drill the rocks. Because those who drill the rocks must be physically strong, since they work the hardest and work the longest, and they were not getting increased wage rates at all. The NUM had increasingly been led by a layer of quite streetwise, English speaking, white-collar workers. Most of them had been working above the ground, as mining clerks or other officers in the system. So this combination of factors meant that there was no outlet, there was no forum, to hear and address the grievances of underground workers. In this combination of circumstances what then emerged was very significant anger, very significant agitation, which led to what is called an unprotected strike from the end of July or the beginning of August at Marikana when workers demanded a way out of their squeeze: they demanded a living wage, a wage that would make it possible for them to meet their expenses and live decently. This strike was basically an initiative of the workers themselves. Of course, the NUM was facing some competition from a smaller breakaway union called AMCU (Association of Mine Workers and Construction Union). However, to view the strike as NUM vs. AMCU is not helpful, because it ignores the real, concrete conditions that workers were unhappy about. NUM vs. AMCU is a dynamic that is part of the strike, but it is not the main dynamic. And anyway, as it turned out, that strike saw workers wanting to negotiate with the management on their own. That logic of workers wanting to feel their own power was also present in other strikes triggered by Marikana.

Finally, one of our favorite writers, the Mail & Guardian’s Niren Tolsi and photographer Paul Botes produced this special on Marikana.

Reimagining the image of the modern Arab man

French photographer Scarlett Coten’s latest project is an exploration into reimagining the image of the Arab man. Coten’s work in the region has evolved over the course of her career, as she has documented a variety of her own experiences, from encounters with Bedouins in Egypt, to playful beach scenes colliding with the vibrations of social unrest in Essaouira, Morocco.

This latest, and ongoing, endeavour entitled Mectoub took shape as the spirit of revolution and social change spilled over and began to engulf the region. Coten explained that in the climate of popular protest, she perceived her subjects to be more amenable than ever to exposing their individuality to her lens. As she described the encounters that led to this most recent body of work, they seemed to be characterized by what was for her an unprecedented openness around sexual orientation, and general candor about personal convictions and individuality.

When asked about the inspiration for the project, Coten expressed her desire to depict a reversal of roles, explaining that most often one finds men photographing women. In her words, she seeks to explore this role reversal in the context of Arab society, where men tend to dominate the public sphere.

“In these countries (specifically Morocco and Egypt), you find yourself surrounded by men in public space. But no one really talks about them, people [in the Occident] tend to be concerned with the conditions of women.” Coten explains that, in her experience, while the men tend to have more social mobility, the ability for them to express themselves is limited, they exist within the same social context that limits the movement of women. The implication here is that mobility is only granted to a certain “type” of man. Coten’s work seeks to look beyond this accepted stereotype, exposing a more diverse, and perhaps softer image of the Arab man. “We [tend to] see men in the context of war, or conflict, or revolution. Men in intimate situations we don’t see.”

She admits the frequent focus on females is “for good reason”, but explains her choice of subject in a quiet and nuanced manner. Coten is not from the region that she has chosen to document, and for her, that means limiting her commentary. She perceives her work as the documentation of her own experiences, wishing to avoid cultural interpretation and political engagement, which she says is not for her to do.

Of course this is all but impossible, particularly when one is attempting to present an alternative narrative of a society. Coten described the bouts of censorship and criticism she has faced throughout her career, but lamented that with Mectoub, she has faced the greatest opposition. She says that because of the sensuality and openness of the images, she has repeatedly been questioned on how she achieved such intimacy with her subjects.

“I’ve been asked many times if I slept with them.” This was just one of the many crass inquiries that have been tossed her way in response to her latest body of work. Coten chalks it up to a reversal of traditional roles, and a discomfort with seeing a population in a different light. “These questions would never be asked of a male photographer taking pictures of females.”

Perhaps these experiences are part of why Coten is tempered in describing her work. “I can’t talk about my work,” she said, “People either assume I am sleeping with the men in my photos, or they say I have created an exhibition on homosexuality in the Arab world. It is none of these things, I have found that the work just has to speak for itself.”

In these tumultuous times, Coten has deliberately chosen to focus on the younger generation. “I didn’t want to photograph the older generation because I didn’t want to fall into the classic clichés of how the societies are portrayed. I photograph the new generation because [they are the ones] who are determining the future of their countries.”

Mectoub is still a work in progress. So far, Coten has documented men in Morocco and Egypt. However she wishes to continue photographing in other countries in the region. Her hope is that the diversity of her work – the inclusion of men from different corners of the Middle East and North Africa – will give a level of complexity and profundity that would not exist if she were only to capture the men of one country.

Since 2009, Coten’s work has been displayed Galerie 127 in Marrakech, and the EAST WING gallery in Dubai. Her photographs have been well received in the Arab World, but she has encountered more challenges introducing her photography in the West.

Ultimately, Coten concludes, “My work must be effective because every time I try to do something I am censored. My work is not provocative for the sake of being provocative. I have a lot of love for the people I work with, a lot of respect, these are real exchanges and there is real affection. I don’t do this work to show something that is unsavoury; I don’t carry judgement. I take pictures of individuals who are open, who are having a good time with friends, these are individuals I respect and that I l profoundly like…but it is work that provokes censorship.”

5 New Films to Watch Out For, N°29

Nègre Blanc (“White Negro”) is Cheikh N’diaye’s new film about albinism, in which he tackles rumors, stereotypes and misconceptions through the eyes of Cameroonian storyteller Léonard de Semnjock:

Sans Image (“Without Image”) is a French documentary film by Fanny Douarche and Franck Rosier about three sans-papiers from Mali (Matenin, Gaye and Abdoulaye) who work on a theatre piece that reflects their daily hustles as workers “without papers” in France:

Pokou, Princesse Ashanti is marketed as the first animated film coming out of Côte d’Ivoire — produced by Afrikatoon:

Christian Lajoumard’s documentary In the Courtyard of the Puppeteers of Burkina Faso is part of a mini-series about puppets from around the world. In Burkina Faso, a number of young puppeteers have revived this dying art, and today about twenty troops flourish in the country. These small enterprises with limited means usually set up shop in the courtyards of family homes:

La Rive Noire (“The Black River”) is a documentary by Blaise Ndjehoya (Cameroon) and Olivier Van’L — after historian Michel Fabre’s book by the same title — about the Transatlantic links (from Harlem to Paris) between African-American and African-French thinkers and artists at the beginning of the 20th century. Names and interviews include those of Aimé Césaire, Howard Dodson, Lilyan Kesteloot, Daniel Maximin, Gordon Parks, Herbert Gentry and Manuel Zapata Olivella:

 

 

 

 

What is wrong with Italian Reality TV?

National public television channel, Rai, in partnership with the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, and the NGO Intersos, are bankrolling the show. “During the show there will be no game elements,” assures Rai in a press release, “… while in the studio there will be in-depth analysis about refugee themes and commentaries from those who have lived inside a refugee camp for a long period of time.”

As far as we know the premiere episode was shot in South Sudan last year–that news slipped out when Michele Cucuzza (in picture above with an unidentified man), one of the participants told a tabloid about the “fear” of being there and the risk of getting ebola–and is scheduled to be aired December 4 and  11 on the Rai Uno channel.

“It’s poverty pornography,” complains the NGO’s and the journalists who cover human rights issues.

“No, we’re bringing the reality of refugee camps to prime time so as to make it known to the general public,” replied Marco Rotelli, secretary-general of Intersos, which after a week of debate online finally broke the silence with a press realease to explain their endorsement and participation in the program. “We are afraid to watch pain slammed on prime time, with exploitation of stories and people,” adds Christopher Hein of the Italian Council for Refugees to the non profit agency Redattore Sociale.

Newsmagazine Espresso titled their story “Africa sfigata, ci mancava Al Bano,” stressing that bringing celebrities to the African continent only adds complicates the lives of the people the program and its participants claim to help.

“I can’t describe the shame I felt when I heard this news,” says Claudia Mocci, a young aid worker working in Chad, whose letter opposing the program has been “liked” by more than 2,000 people on Facebook in one week. “I thought about all the people I have met in the refugee camp in Goré, in Chad, and about their pleas not to be photographed, because they didn’t want to live twice the trauma of being scheduled and filmed by the police arriving in the asylum country.”

Last week the issue arrived at the Parliament, thanks to a point of order raised by the left party Sinistra, Ecologia e Libertà (Sel). The President of the Chamber of Deputies Laura Boldrini, a former UNHCR spokesperson, was already aware of the show because she had launched the idea while she was working at the UN, inspired by the Australian show “Go back“.

In a letter to the national newspaper La Repubblica, Boldrini explains that “the original goal was to make more comprehensible to the public the real condition of refugees, too often and too quickly represented as a threat for our safety. I suggested to have a look at the Australian format, in which there were common people with different ideas of asylum, not celebrities.”

The writers of the program, Tullio Camiglieri and Antonio Azzalini were also forced to defend themselves:

We have been accused of making an entertainment show of the refugee situation, but we hope to have such an entertainment, because in that way the topic will reach the general public.

More tolerant seems Davide Demichelis, author and director of the program Radici, which is instead a positive example of reporting in developing countries with the participation of  migrants who travels in their native land with the journalist. Despite the fact that he is against any kind of ‘entertainment of pain,” Demichelis believes that “we should give the show a chance and not try to stop the broadcasting with a petition.”

As for me: Since the first episode had already been filmed, I’m looking forward to reviewing it for Africa is a Country.

Writing Windhoek

Literature in Windhoek takes many forms. Tucked at the intersections of Independence Avenue and Sam Nujoma Drive in the city centre, Wordweaver Publishing accomplishes perhaps its most challenging format: books. Outside the publication house’s yellow-painted bungalow-sized offices are posters advertising recent titles: Mama Namibia and This is not a Flowerpot.

Wordweaver Publishing House is one of Namibia’s few fiction publishers. As founder Bryony van der Merwe tells it, most publishers in the country survive on education textbooks. This is not to be taken lightly. Struggles for education in Namibia – first under German colonial rule and subsequently under South Africa’s program of Bantu Education – are reflected in the history of textbook publication. It involves early mission presses, for a long time the only ones that printed books by and for black Namibians; imported German textbooks which maintained a monopoly even after South Africa took power over the territory; the 1958 Van Zyl Commission which formally entrenched apartheid into Namibia’s education system; the Namibia Project and SWAPO’s Literacy Program which published textbooks and self-teaching books for exiled youth and adults; and Gamsberg Publishers, which in 1977 became not only the sole local educational publisher in Namibia, but emphasised local languages. It was only after independence, in 1990, that a host of publishing houses were founded which could compete to produce educational textbooks from within Namibia.

For Bryony, however, this lasting focus on textbooks has come at the expense of fiction. Even if a novel was published, she says, it received minimal, if any, marketing. She founded Wordweaver as a way to promote literacy and writing; as an avenue through which Namibian stories could be told; and to open up space for fiction writing, publishing and reading. Since March 2012, it has published 16 titles including short stories, poetry, novels, children’s books as well as various non-fiction titles meant to have a broader appeal. Bryony is not the first to try this and much of this past year has been a matter of proving Wordweaver viable in order to gain the support of other institutions. If the response from others in her field has been skeptical, the response from prospective authors has been enthusiastic. She receives more manuscripts than she can publish, working within multiple constraints, most of which come down to funding, some of which come down to quality.

Though one major challenge for Wordweaver has been a dearth of booksellers in Namibia, I saw the novels in the window of a bookshop on Windhoek’s major street, advertised in a restaurant and, surprisingly, at the National Art Gallery of Namibia (NAGN). This is not a Flowerpot, about an abused woman, stood displayed among the art pieces in NAGN’s exhibition about gendered violence.

Wordweaver seems to be part of a broader upswing in institutional activity around literature in Windhoek. The Namibian Youth Book Fair took place for the first time last year; Namibian Children’s Book Forum recently gave out their annual award for the first time since the early 2000s; a Windhoek school is hosting Book Week; reading events are held by various groups; Gamsberg, for so long focused on textbooks, has increased its trade titles. [Spoken Word], for one, has been going strong for almost 10 years. It started when a group of friends in Windhoek, sitting around one evening, wrote a poem together. Oshosheni Hivelua, a writer, organizer and filmmaker, was one of them. She soon became a co-founder of [Spoken Word], a monthly evening of poetry performances meant in part as a corrective to the sense that there was “not much entertainment around here,” as she put it. It is organized by a rotating committee of nominated members.

Nomadic for years, sometimes forced to find a new home because the event’s seedy venues would shut down, it has boomed since settling in at the Warehouse Theatre. It’s a fitting venue, as Oshi sees [Spoken Word] as part of Windhoek’s theatre/performance scene. At Warehouse Theatre, the event attracts a full house, though the venue is only part of the reason. [Spoken Word]’s reputation has changed. No longer seen as a closed underground intellectual club, it now brings in a diverse audience which includes students, artists, performers, creative industry-types and an older demographic seeking to further satisfy their love of literature. Oshi is hard-pressed to name a common theme among the poems, but notes that an increasing number are about gendered violence. The NAGN’S exhibition also includes poems from some [Spoken Word] performers.

About half of [Spoken Word] performers are students, who also receive a platform at the Polytechnic of Namibia (PON). There, POLYSH exists as a student poetry journal. Though they lack the funds to print a full publication, they have used the public pinboard in the school’s Office Building, facebook and a recently-launched blog to publish student work. At PON, educators are faced with a disconnect between students and literature, one facilitated by an education system and ministry little interested in the arts. Though PON receives over 100 applications for their Bachelor of English/Lit in English program, few are able to pursue it because very little funding is given to humanities students.

Annemarie Heywood, a long-time academic and educator now retired, commented that tertiary education in Namibia has historically been about developing human capital, casting out the humanities. She fought against this, filling the University of Namibia’s library in the 1980s, when it was still the Academy of Tertiary Education, an apartheid government-created institution. She lined its shelves not only with the usual cannon of English literature, such as Shakespeare and his commentators, but with “world literature, avant-garde” work, and two copies of the entire African Writers Series collection, donated by their offices in Johannesburg. This was partially a battle of languages: she insisted on English literature as an antidote to the Christian national education taking place in Afrikaans.

English’s place in contemporary Namibia is much more contentious than a simple binary of language of oppression vs. language of liberation. Though during Namibia’s liberation struggle students fought for English as a medium of education, it has not thoroughly penetrated the country. According to Sarala Krishnamurthy, Dean of School of Communications at PON, 98% of teachers are not proficient in English. In 2007, she founded Namibian English Teachers Association (NETA) to facilitate competence and skills training and informal capacity-building networks. It began as a group of 20 PON staff. It now boasts almost 800 members and several chapters: NETA Coast, NETA North and NETA South as well as the original in Windhoek.

Sarala told me that there is a “very strong orientation towards literature.” Sitting on a National Arts Council committee which funds literary publications, she sees how much is written, and how little is published in comparison. Yet she and her colleagues agree that Namibia’s primary and secondary curriculum don’t properly teach literature: it is integrated late, introduced at too-challenging a level (the first play students read is King Lear) and leads students to believe that literature means only Shakespeare. Some students enter university unaware of the existence of any Namibian or other African authors.

Namibian authors, however, seem to have a place in Windhoek, though the literary scene is hard to pin down; it pulls in people from various circles. Several authors published by Wordweaver, for example, have made a name for themselves outside of Namibian fiction: Amy Schoeman as a photographer, John Henschel as a columnist, Sylvia Schlettwein as a language specialist. The same is seen with [Spoken Word], where there is a loyal core group which itself slowly rotates, each member participating in other facets of Windhoek life, and a much larger number of people who come and go. And though [Spoken Word] is on the surface a stand-alone event, it is connected to a host of other happenings in the city: it sometimes features musical performances; pairs with comedy events; funds the One Love Trust; and collaborates with cultural centres to run workshops with international poets. It may even be publishing in print, film and/or photography. Students who write for POLYSH come from faculties as diverse as engineering, land management and transport and logistics as well as from within the humanities.

Namibian literature is a subject that usually draws a blank look and those deeply involved face many frustrations. When asked, everyone I spoke to lamented the lack of reading culture, shorthand for complex issues of adult and child literacy; high cost of books; access to libraries; Namibia’s literacy curriculum; a history of deliberately under-educating the majority of Namibia’s population; and the relationship between oral and written literature, among other things. Oshi had to think out loud “Who would be Namibian literature?” She grew up largely on her mother’s bookshelf, filled with the giants of Anglophone African literature, mainly from South Africa and Nigeria. She even had a hard time finding possibly the most prominent Namibian novel, The Purple Violet of Oshaantu. She didn’t have her hands on it for long, though, as she lent it to a friend, who lent it to a friend.

And so it seems to be with much literature in Windhoek. Because it circulates among overlapping networks, is dynamic, largely undigitized, incoherent, depends on constant production, and is based in a relatively small city, Windhoek’s literary scene is easily rendered invisible. Yet it exists as books, as performances, as works of art, as unpublished manuscripts, as pinboard publications. It proliferates.

Hiding in plain view: Dealing with the legacies of Dutch slavery

The year 2013 marks 150 years since the abolishment of slavery in the former — mostly Caribbean — Dutch colonies. It’s worth mentioning at the outset that the Dutch abolished slavery a while after the British (1833) and French (1848) and, only after much resistance. To mark the occasion, Africa in the Picture, an African Film Festival based in the Netherlands, started ‘The Next Step’, a master class for upcoming films talents and a program for high school kids. The central question of the ‘The Next Step’ program is: ‘What does slavery mean to you, anything or nothing?’

Young filmmakers and high school students are challenged to make a 150 second film related to this question.While the legacy of slavery should mean something to everyone in the Netherlands, due to the lack of education on slavery, the politics around the commemoration of the abolishment of slavery and the silence of families that became wealthy through the slave trade means that many believe that slavery was really just a ‘black page in history.’ This phrase is frequently used by the Dutch to discuss the legacy of slavery. This is not only a false representation of history but also insulting given that the legacies of slavery are so present today – hiding in plain view.

An additional educational program on slavery is much needed and one hopes many young filmmakers and high schools will start thinking about the legacies of slavery and the role of the Dutch in this history. I say this especially because I have very little faith in the actual Dutch educational system to teach children about slavery. Being schooled in the Netherlands myself, I did not learn about slavery in school until my parents told me about it.

Melissa Weiner, an American sociologist, has done some outstanding and much needed research in this regard. She has studied depictions of slavery and multiculturalism in Dutch primary school history textbooks and norms and practices privileging whiteness in a diverse Dutch primary school classroom. Weiner’s findings, which will be published soon, are quite telling of the Dutch attitude towards the legacy of slavery. This attitude is a mix of denial, ignorance, (supposed) innocence, and misplaced entitlement. Resistance to the dominant Dutch historic narrative is often met with aggression, marginalization and disdain. People that do question the dominant narrative — from activists to scholars — are often subjected to some fine Dutch repression, not only in everyday life but also institutionally. Try get funding as a scholar to research racism in the Netherlands or set up black, postcolonial, “critical race” or any critical studies departments in this country – it will never happen.

Part of the Africa in the Film program was the documentary film, “Traces of the Trade” by Katrina Browne, who discovered that her New England ancestors, the DeWolf family, were the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history:

The story of the DeWolf family is one that probably resembles many stories of Dutch slave trader families in the Netherlands. The legacies of slavery are everywhere around us: from the canal houses, graves of unnamed slaves, the depiction of black people in Dutch paintings and ornaments on the streets of Amsterdam, all the spices that are available to us, to the undeniable presence of people from the former colonies that live here.

Weiner studied 203 textbooks and found that only 96 mention any kind of slavery (47,3%). Only 49 mention black slavery in the Dutch colonies (24,1%). The books barely talk about resistance to slavery; only 10 books (20.1%) speak about resistance of slavery on the plantations. Tula, who was enslaved on Curaçao and was leader of the 1795 slave revolt, is not mentioned once. A Dutch Caribbean film about Tula, ‘Tula: the Revolt’ (the first feature film to portray Dutch colonial history; trailer below) just came out and already stirred up conversations about ownership of legacies and representation back in 2011.

Weiner has also looked into how books speak about slavery. The focus is on what the Dutch colonists, not those they enslaved, had to endure. Any 10-year old student confronted with this past, may very well get the impression that slavery was quite an ordeal for the Dutch with phrases such as ‘the Dutch had a very hard time on the plantations’ or the Middle Passage was ‘a dangerous undertaking [for the Dutch]’. Another writes: ‘The Dutch found slavery very normal for over 200 years.’ It seems they still do. Contemporary legacies of slavery and the commemoration are hardly addressed either. Only 6 books mention Keti Koti, the commemoration of the abolishment of slavery in the Netherlands and Suriname on July 1, 1863.

On a side note, the depictions of Africa and multiculturalism in primary school textbooks do not score high either. Let’s just say that the AIAC tagline is pretty accurate here: Dutch textbooks basically say and show that Africa is one big country, filled with famine and violence from which only UNICEF or Bono can rescue Africans because ‘independence is not always a good thing.’

So yes, extra educational programs are much needed to make sure that kids do engage with the history of slavery and stop thinking that Dutch history is only about World War II (in this instance, the story is one of resistance, rather than the massive compliance and complicity with the Nazis). We should be worried about the fact that the legacies of slavery are so present but are denied, not spoken about and deemed as unimportant because its ‘that long ago’.

What happens after this year that marks 150 years of commemoration (actually it should be 140 years since the end of slavery because it took the Dutch another 10 years to abolish slavery completely) that is filled with special slavery exhibitions, plays and books and projects? And yes, it does matter because the legacies of slavery and racism are real and tangible today, as is the fact that there was a system in place through which people benefited from slavery, which has subsequently influenced their privileged positions in society today.

Weiner found one primary school textbook that mentions racism in the Netherlands today. That comes as no surprise but it does mean that we’ll be needing a lot of 150 second films to tackle the idea that racism has seized to exist and that slavery is just ‘a black page in history’.

There is no liberal tradition in South Africa

Liberalism regards the individual as the ultimate social and political agent, endowed with a number of rights. The ideology also acknowledges that individuals live in societies and are not totally autonomous. Consequently it also recognises a number of societal obligations the individual should fulfil in order to co-exist with others. In the continent of its birth liberalism proved most attractive to the propertied classes who had embraced the anti-feudal ethos of high social status attained through individual achievement rather than through birth. As propertied persons the early liberals were, however, very distrustful of the working poor and the property-less, whom they saw as venal and easy to corrupt. The franchise and attendant political rights were therefore to be enjoyed by the propertied classes and extended to the other classes on the basis of merit, demonstrated by a certain lifestyle.

At its birth in the 19th Century Cape Colony, South African liberalism emerged into the midst of an expansionist European settler colonial society in which class, race, ethnic origin, religion and even home language directly impacted on a person’s status. Liberalism was a political current among the White settlers and fraught with ambiguities and contradictions.

These are captured in the persons of Thomas Pringle and William Porter. Pringle, the abolitionist and pioneer of a free press, identified with the Africans’ resistance to colonial subjugation. His poem, ‘Makanna’s Gathering’ is an unequivocal endorsement of the defensive wars of resistance waged by the Africans against Boer and Brit.

The other renowned liberal, Porter, was a clever imperial political strategist. As Attorney General of the Cape Colony he was largely responsible for the 1853 Cape constitution that was deliberately designed to counter the weight of the Afrikaner vote by encouraging a compact among the propertied classes of all races. Porter famously remarked: ‘I would rather meet the Hottentot at the hustings, voting for his representative, than meet the Hottentot in the wilds with his gun on his shoulder’.

South African liberalism’s split personality can be traced to the decades preceding the opening up of the mines in 1867. The humanism integral to liberalism persuaded men like Pringle to raise their voices against racism, slavery and colonialism. But the liberals were also integral to the colonial settler society and saw their future within it. Like his European contemporaries, Porter and his supporters distrusted the poor. In the Cape Colony the working poor were coloureds and Africans. The Cape franchise thus had both a class and racial dimension.

For African and coloured voters the Cape franchise was the token of their citizenship, the promise of an expanding floor of rights as equal subjects of the British Empire with the whites. For the strategists of empire it was a political instrument to impose and secure British hegemony in South Africa by containing the Afrikaners, on one hand, while co-opting the black propertied classes as junior partners, on the other. The Colonial Office in London regarded the Cape franchise as a device to build a multi-racial bloc amongst the propertied classes as the bulwark of empire in Southern Africa. Concrete material and political interests undergirded Cape liberalism.

In exchange for the surrender of Boer sovereignty at Vereeniging the British surrendered the political rights of their erstwhile African and coloured allies in the Cape. The Cape franchise was sold down the river at Vereeniging, a betrayal confirmed by the 1905 Native Affairs Commission at which the colonial system that evolved into apartheid was first elaborated. The 1905 Commission charted a new path for South Africa in which only whites would be citizens and all blacks would be reduced to subject peoples. The tattered shreds of the Cape franchise were swept away in 1955 when the NP finally disenfranchised the coloureds.

For most of the 20th century the overwhelming majority of whites refused to accept and embrace the verdict of history: that it was impossible to unscramble the historic omelette that South Africa has become. Twentieth century white South African politics was dominated by ever more dangerous attempts to deny and reverse the reality that black and white lived together in a common society, in which powerful centripetal forces were knitting them ever closer together.

Running like a blue thread through the history of South African liberalism is a readiness to defer to white prejudices that has been consistently repaid in the coin of unambiguous rejection. Left to their own devices after the removal of the Natives Representatives, for the next 25 years the white electorate denied every liberal, save Helen Suzman, a seat in Parliament.

The recommendations of the Fagan Commission of 1946 represent the farthest that post-war South African liberalism was prepared to go in embracing a common society. One of Fagan’s findings was that African workers were destined to displace whites in virtually every sector of the economy.

Smuts downplayed the significance of the Commission’s findings for fear of confirming the NP’s ‘swart gevaar’ electoral rhetoric in 1948. It remains a matter of speculation what direction South African politics might have taken had Smuts had the political courage to run on the Fagan Commission’s recommendations in 1948. Fear of the conservatism of white voters persuaded him to be cautious.

The vision of the liberals of the 1950s was essentially integrationist. They sought a state designed, defined and dominated by the white minority, into which ‘deserving’ blacks would be integrated on the basis of merit. As Percy Qoboza once explained, there was degrading racial presumption implicit in the notion of a qualified franchise that assumed that any white tramp was competent to have the franchise, while the African editor of an important daily newspaper was required to demonstrate his competence.

South Africa’s liberals tried for decades to merge elementary democratic principles with a political order that would give the white minority veto power over the will of the majority. During the early fifties they thought a qualified franchise, applicable only to blacks, would achieve this. Liberals accepted that white and black lived in a common society, but it would be on terms determined by the whites.

The Liberal Party found it increasingly difficult to manage this tension in its politics. Ghana’s independence in 1957 had set in motion the rapid decolonization of the African continent. Patrick Duncan used his journal, ‘Contact’, to cover these unfolding African events. By 1962 the Liberal Party was ready to embrace a universal franchise and was remaking itself as a predominantly black party, supportive of majority rule. Patrick Duncan, the most radical among them, ended his life as a member of the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC).

The Liberal Party opted to disband when the NP statutorily banned non-racial political parties. The Progressive Party (Progs), explaining that this was the only way to retain a foothold in Parliament, bowed to the racist ban and expelled its black members. For well-nigh 20 after this the Progs managed to hold on to exactly one seat in Parliament.

For diametrically opposite reasons, both white and black South Africans distrusted liberals and found liberalism unattractive. The gestation of South Africa’s liberal democratic Constitution was ironically a dialogue between parties from the opposing poles of the political spectrum – the ANC on the left, the NP on the right. Representing constituencies that were suspicious of liberalism, in the process of finding each other in negotiations they arrived at the common ground of the institutions of liberalism.

Racial oppression and apartheid in South Africa were the institutional framework brought about by the development of capitalism in a colonial environment. It required mass action, in which the individual was often subordinated to the collective, to bring it down. Liberals played a very marginal role in these developments.

Because they have historically preferred reformist instead of revolutionary methods, liberals have invariably locked themselves into white South African politics, making them hostages of the racially privileged whites. The poor performance of the Progs after 1963 indicates that it was only the wealthiest whites, fearing no competition from blacks, who were ready to relax the regime of racial oppression.

For two decades after 1910 black leaders clung to the illusion that political moderation on their part would persuade a critical mass of white voters to elect a reformist government that would incrementally abolish racism. But Liberals made no headway among a white population that recognised and cherished its status of privilege at the expense of the blacks. Liberals consistently opted to yield to the prejudices of the whites, leading to a parting of the ways in the post-war years.

‘The Africans’ Claims’, adopted by the ANC conference in 1943, defines the divergent paths hewn by those who had formerly been allies. Democracy in South Africa would inevitably result in the political dominance of the African majority. As this was an outcome whites found unacceptable, the liberals preferred to compromise democratic principles and capitulate to racial bigotry. In opposition to the integrationist project of the liberals, the liberation movement put forward a national democratic revolution. The liberation movement’s vision is captured in the preamble of the Freedom Charter, as ‘South Africa belongs to all who live in it!’ But this would only be realized by a democratic transformation that would amount to a political revolution.

A South African nation, defined not by race, color, creed or ethnic origins, was considered an extremely radical idea during the mid-1950s. By the 1970s it had become so commonplace that only the most dogmatic racists and ethnicists rejected it. Yet at that moment the party that had become the flagship of liberalism, the Progressive Federal Party (PFP), was still not comfortable with a universal franchise. When it finally did embrace this basic democratic notion, the PFP hedged its bets with a policy of federalism, explicitly designed to thwart what it delicately called ‘majoritarianism’.

After the revival of a mass movement in the wake of the Soweto uprising, those liberals who had overcome their fears of African majority rule found ways of cooperating with the movements of the oppressed. Despite their own misgivings they discovered that the ANC had acquired a growing hegemony over the struggle for change and in order to be relevant they had to relate to it. Liberals, who remained fearful of democracy, sought and found temporary allies amongst homeland leaders, toyed with various constitutional models or tried to stimulate dialogue among the antagonists.

As the system of apartheid unravelled during the 1980s, liberals could be found spread among a number of political trends. On the right, the Institute of Race Relations, the Urban Foundation and a few smaller bodies that had recently discovered the evils of apartheid on the right. On the left, the Five Freedoms Forum, the End Conscription Campaign plus smaller bodies affiliated to the United Democratic Front. In the centre was the Institute for a Democratic South Africa (IDASA). There was also a new phenomenon, which Thabo Mbeki dubbed ‘the New Voortrekker’. The 1988 elections indicated shifts in the tectonic plates of white political opinion. A few liberals were elected on the PFP ticket. But in CODESA I and II the liberals were a sideshow.

Liberalism remained an isolated minority trend among whites. The NP’s impressive showing in the 1994 elections demonstrated that the majority of whites still supported the party of apartheid, perhaps in the hope that it would thwart the ambitions of a democratic government.

The political practice of our liberals tends to be ambivalent, betraying a lingering scepticism about the political capacity of the poor and non-propertied. South African liberals express this in insulting references to our general elections as ‘racial referenda.’

Under Helen Zille’s leadership, liberalism’s flagship, the Democratic Alliance, has finally come to terms with the post 1994 political settlement and dropped its ‘fight back’ posture. It is trying to appeal to black voters by appropriating the language, style, the icons, images and totems of the liberation struggle.

Perhaps one’s final verdict could be the words of Oscar Wilde: ‘Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery!’

* Z. Pallo Jordan, one of South Africa’s foremost intellectuals, is the former Minister of Arts and Culture in the South African government. This essay appears in the new issue of Amandla! Magazine which goes on sale today. It is kindly republished here with the permission of the editors.