Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 640

The Politics of Necessity

Over the course of fifteen years (1994-2009), Elke Zuern has interviewed civic and social movement leaders, local government leaders, members of NGOs and other community organizations in South Africa. In her new book, The Politics of Necessity,* she compares these movements in South Africa to those elsewhere on the continent (Botswana, Nigeria), and beyond (Argentina, Chile, Mexico). We definitely recommend The Politics of Necessity. Below follows an excerpt from the introduction to the book:

From apartheid to democracy, South African movements have drawn connections between material necessities, stark inequality, and basic rights. Through popular protest they have constructed their understandings of what democracy must entail. South Africa under apartheid offers one of the clearest cases of cumulative inequality: poverty, race, and a complete lack of political rights all overlapped. Like Brazil (and the United States among advanced industrialized states), South Africa has long stood out for its high levels of income inequality. Similar to those in Brazil, South African survey respondents have expressed high levels of dissatisfaction with their democracy. In the Afrobarometer surveys conducted from mid-1999 to mid-2001 in twelve largely English speaking African countries that had undergone some degree of political and economic reform, South Africans expressed the highest levels of dissatisfaction with their democracy (44 percent of respondents were "unsatisfied with democracy"), followed by Malawi and Zambia (Bratton, Mattes, and Gyimah-Boadi 2005, 83). This is particularly striking when contrasted with external perceptions of South Africa as one of the strongest and most vibrant democracies on the continent. Countless analysts have lauded the rights and freedoms enshrined in South Africa's new constitution; Freedom House (2010) has given South Africa high scores for both political rights and civil liberties. In South Africa, in contrast, less than half of the survey respondents defined themselves as "very satisfied" or even "fairly satisfied" with democracy in 2008 (Afrobarometer 2009a). Since 1999 this dissatisfaction has increasingly been seen on the streets. During the 2004/2005 financial year, almost six thousand protest actions took place across the country (Atkinson 2007, 58). In 2009, protest actions once again reached new heights as citizens demonstrated their frustration with the government by marching, submitting petitions, and at times destroying government property (Sinwell et al. 2009). Clearly those who praise the extent of South Africa's democracy are missing something to which both the survey respondents and the protesters wish to draw attention.

South African respondents stood out across the surveyed African countries in that they expressed more substantive understandings of what a democratic regime should entail by including socioeconomic conditions in their definition of democracy. They also demonstrated a greater readiness to engage in protest actions. This led Michael Bratton, Robert Mattes, and E. Gyimah-Boadi (2005) to suggest that South Africa may be exceptional as a product of its apartheid past and its recent liberation. However, if one approaches the case of South Africa with an eye to the experiences of Latin American states, South Africa appears as much less an outlier. Growing dissatisfaction with democracy and high levels of protest action, often in response to poor living conditions and services, seem to be correlated with a perception of relative deprivation and high levels of inequality. In fact, given South Africa's significant political and economic reforms as well as its urbanization, processes that all African countries are struggling with in different ways, the South African experience may well be an indicator of challenges that other states and societies will increasingly face. Just as apartheid was an extension of the broader politics of colonial rule rather than an exception (Mamdani 1996), South Africa's current challenges and its citizens' discontent are a product of severe inequities that are felt across the continent and around the globe.

Over a decade after the African National Congress (ANC) came to power, addressing the material poverty of the majority remains a stark challenge. Government development indicators show persistently high unemployment rates. According to the narrow definition of unemployment, which includes only job seekers who looked for work in the four weeks before the survey, unemployment declined slightly from a high of 31.2 percent in early 2003 to 25.3 percent in mid 2010 (SSA 2010, xii). In the broad understanding of unemployment also presented in government indicators, 36 percent of South Africans remained unemployed in 2010 (Economist, August 23, 2010). South African survey data from 1993, 2000 and 2008 show a substantial increase in inequality, both within the population as a whole and within the African population (Leibbrandt et al. 2010). In 2009, the government reported that income inequality still had not been reduced despite years of economic growth (RSA, Presidency 2009, 25). Although the indicators do show some growth in the incomes of the poor, the rich have gained at a faster rate.

Poverty remains pervasive. Government indicators report only a slow decline in poverty since 1993. By 2008, 22 percent of the population (the "hard core" poor) continued to live below the very low international poverty line of $1.25 a day, or R283 per month (RSA, Presidency 2009, 27). Afrobarometer's 2008 survey offers indicators of "lived poverty": 42 percent of adult respondents said they "went without" food at least once in the past year (down only 1 percent from 2004); 36 percent said they went without clean water (the same as 2004); 52 percent went without electricity (up from 47 percent in 2004); 53 percent went without a cash income (down from 60 percent in 2004) (Afrobarometer 2004, 2009a). While stark, these numbers may still underreport indicators of lived poverty, due to the difficulty of reaching the country's poorest citizens (Cape Times, March 11, 2005). They do, however, demonstrate the impact of state interventions: the decrease in people without a cash income is a product of the increase in social grants, and the increase in people without electricity is at least in part due to disconnections for nonpayment.

These grim realities are a product of South Africa's past as well its present. A few statistics, while offering a partial and vastly incomplete picture of the brutality of apartheid, demonstrate the great challenges that postapartheid governments have faced. In 1946 white per person income was more than ten times that of African income (L. Thompson 2000, 156). Between 1960 and 1983, an estimated 3.5 million people were forcibly removed from their homes and communities to the overcrowded and impoverished "homelands" far from urban centers and jobs. In 1975–76, an astounding 381,858 Africans were arrested for violating the pass laws, which were designed to keep them out of white areas where they sought to find work. Even after a considerable increase in the number of African children enrolled in school by 1978, the apartheid government still spent ten times more per white student than it did for each African student (L. Thompson 2000, 193–96). The legacies of racial discrimination in education and job opportunities, the removal of so many people from their homes and communities and the impact of a migrant labor system that separated families are profound and daunting. As Jeremy Seekings and Nicoli Nattrass argue: "No other capitalist state (in either the North or South) has sought to structure income inequalities as systematically and brutally as did South Africa under apartheid" (2005, 2).

These hardships have led to what is termed here a "politics of necessity," where engagement in the public sphere is defined in an environment in which many struggle just to get by: to feed their families, to maintain a home, and to obtain basic access to health care, education, and paid work. In certain circumstances, these needs lead to community organizing and concerted efforts to bring material and broader demands to the attention of government. The politics of necessity is not exclusive to South Africa. In their discussion of Latin American social movements, Sonia Alvarez and Arturo Escobar have referred to a "politics of needs" mobilizing popular struggles (1992, 320). In Mexico City, Miguel Díaz-Barriga found a discourse of necesidad among urban movements; grassroots activists defined their goals in terms of necessities that included land, education, and basic services such as electricity, potable water, streets, and medical clinics (1998, 257). Around the globe, the absence of what people locally define as basic necessities can translate into movements that work to bring the private struggles of marginalized individuals and silenced communities into the public discourse with potentially profound implications for democracy.

* Published by the University of Wisconsin Press and the University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

'The Most Phenomenal Finale'

I don't watch much rugby these days, but the final moments of cup final the 2011 Edinburgh IRB Rugby Sevens Festival between Australia and South Africa a week ago is worth reliving.

Blogging The Caine Prize

A decade into The Caine Prize for African writing, it has carved a space for itself as one of the more significant institutions by which new African writing gets an international audience. But like bloggers such as zunguzungu have pointed out, the Alglophonic nature of the Booker or the Commonwealth Writers prize signify the inherent problems and limitations of many of these competitions. And yes, as zunguzungu has pointed out, the Caine Prize is specific to writers writing in English, so "the short list seems to be dominated by the same half-dozen countries, with only very rare exceptions; the Caine prize's 'Africa' more or less means South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Uganda, and the diaspora living in Britain and the US."

Before  the winner is announced on July 11, along with a group of bloggers I'll be blogging on the 5 stories shortlisted for the prize, beginning with Bulawayo's "Hitting Budapest" and Lamwaka's "Butterfly Dreams."

Here are links to all the shortlisted stories.

NoViolet Bulawayo (Zimbabwe) 'Hitting Budapest'

Beatrice Lamwaka (Uganda) 'Butterfly dreams' 

Tim Keegan (South Africa) 'What Molly Knew'

Lauri Kubuitsile (Botswana) 'In the spirit of McPhineas Lata' 

David Medalie (South Africa) 'The Mistress's Dog' 

So here's my first two reviews:

"HITTING BUDAPEST" by Noviolet Bulawayo

Crossing Mzilikazi Boulavard, for the characters in Noviolet Bulawayo's story, is like crossing over to Europe: the "Budapest" of this story is a neighbourhood within walking distance, a cityscape of abundance, cleanliness, order, and big affluence that serves to impress the impossibility of crossing over. Though it is not necessary for the narrator to tell us that "Budapest is like a different country," or that it is a "country where people who are not like us live," we don't mind the obvious statements, because we experience this day through the lives of children: "Bastard and Chipo and Godknows and Sbho and Stina" and "me," the storyteller. It is an ordinary day, one like every other day, when the children walk away from the disinterested eyes of their own mothers (too distracted by gossip and hair to pay attention to setting limits for them), and the men of the community (too busy with a daily game of draughts) in "Paradise." A brief journey, and they enter this extraordinary country of Budapest, where it looks as though "everybody woke up one day and closed their gates, doors, and windows, picked up their passports, and left for better countries." This vast landscape is so silent, and so empty that the children's entrance has the strange ring of conquest: it is as if they are the latest round of colonists, walking into the "empty land" that native inhabitants did not want, use, or need. Even the air in Budapest smells of nothing – no cooking fires send wisps of smoke to show that hunger and desire exist here, too.

The gut-chewing poverty with which the children are familiar, on a daily basis, is obvious from the start: this is a mission to steal guavas from Budapest—fruit that hangs ripe and uneaten in the screaming gaudiness of abundance. That their lives are riven by disorder and violence of the most intimate sort is also impossible to ignore, in the nonchalant way that hunger is always present, and in the way that ten-year-old Chipo's pregnancy is mentioned: she is a hindrance on their missions, because she cannot run as fast as she once used to. The unreality of their dreams, possible only through dream-talk of escape into materially better lives, only serves to exaggerate impossibility. Each child, dressed in tattered clothes that bear the marks of other worlds—t-shirts that bear the name "Cornell"—know that escape from their "Paradise" will only be possible via the conduits of family members already abroad (a pipe dream, knowing that aunties and uncles abroad "clean poop" in hospitals, and disappear after a few letters), an education (one that we as readers know is not accessible to these children), or their physical beauty (an escape that we know will only provide a troublesome and temporary respite). The refrains "I'm going to America to live with my Aunt Fostalina," or "I'm going to marry a man" who will "take me away from Paradise, away from the shacks and Heavenway and Fambeki and everything else," ring like hymns about crossing the River Jordan and entering heaven.

As zunguzungu writes in his review of this story, "it traffics in the familiar genre of Africa-poverty-pornography, by which I would mean that its 'story' is only an obligatory excuse for the parade of affect-inducing spectacles which are the story's real reason for existing." His is a legitimate criticism. Are these "lazy stories," where writers purposefully skew plots in the direction of spectacular societal failure, in order to please the Caine Prize judges?

The nuances in the ordinaryness of the violence that the children encounter in "Hitting Budapest"—and the impossibility of mutuality, despite what Levinas writes about regarding the lives of Others—is executed in such subtle terms that the painful is sublimely beautiful at times. The intensity of the hunger and desire is so everyday and so immediate that even a dead body they encounter only leads to a  joyful possibility of bread (selling the hanging woman's shoes). The finesse of Bulawayo's writing, I think, rescues this story from the grasping crassness of poverty-porn.

"BUTTERFLY DREAMS" by Beatrice Lamwaka

What I remember, as I read Lamwaka's first words, is the way in which we woke up at 6AM in the cloud of rainy season river fog, to glue our ears to the shortwave: what a prize possession it was, in the early years we spent in Zambia. My father listened, with the worry and attachment of the nationalist, who had abandoned loved ones and nation, in a bid to secure himself, and those closest to him.

In Lamwaka's story, we walk straight into the auditory dreaming of a "string of parents…who listened to Mega FM" every day, "[l]istening and waiting for the names of…loved ones…hearts thump[ing]" every time they hear familiar names of places or even the names of loved ones. After one hour of wordless listening, they "sighed after the programme" concluded. They listen to hear news of children lost to war and chaos, in the interminable waiting of a refugee camp. Though most abandon hope for their lost children, "Ma dreams of butterflies" filling the room, as if those wings, on their pilgrimage of renewal, are a harbinger of  her child's return. After five years of waiting, and rumours that others had seen their beloved Lamunu's body "bursting in the burning sun," they hear, on Mega FM, that Lamunu is at "World Vision, a rehabilitation centre for formerly abducted children," where children are being "taught how to live with us again." But when Lamunu returns, the facial scars scream the story of a child soldier, though the family hastily arrange for a ritual to cleanse that story out of Lamunu's private experience, and their collective body. Lamunu obeys quietly, and remains silent.

It is then that the reader who is unfamiliar with the name learns that Lamunu is a girl – her "breasts were showing through the blue flowered dress that [she] wore." The family wait, through her silence, to see when she will say something, laugh, and play the mischievous child they knew – to see if her tipu (spirit) has returned to her body. They have rituals to ensure that an abandoned tipu is buried into the earth with a body, but none for those whose bodies still exist above ground, with their tipu buried long ago.

"Butterfly Dreams" is a story about the interminable waiting of a refugee camp, and about how swathes of people learn to incorporate disruption as an everyday experience. Instead of groundnuts, their "gardens grow huts." It's a story about dreaming and aching for returns—returns of loved ones like Lamunu, or perhaps even for the life they once had—but as with the story of Lamunu, a return does not mean a return of the familiar or the comforting.

This story, though it reaches moments of revelation that are beyond "poverty porn," does mine extensively from the cliché. Again, I have to return to zunguzungu's anxieties about stories addressing the "Africa" of the Western imaginary, by which writers seem to be guided as they vie for prizes. Zunguzungu refers to Ikhide Ikheloa, who regards the Caine Prize's shortlist as indicative of the How to Write About Africa syndrome, and as "a riot of exhausted clichés…huts, moons, rapes, wars, and poverty," in which "[t]he monotony of misery simply overwhelms the reader." While zunguzungu is "not that interested in banning all stories that contain 'huts, moons, rapes, wars, and poverty' from the canon of Real African Writing"—since "it's not like slums and poverty and social dysfunction are a 'non-African' subject"—commodifying it may be what's obscene. In Lamwaka's story, there's an element of "mining" for misery that feels distinctly unsettling.

There is a powerful Jim Goldberg photograph I've written about ("New Europeans"): a man stands in the foreground of the image, radio pressed close to his chest. In the background are the layers and layers of tents, the life from which this radio allows a brief respite. He looks as though he is praying, as if all the words that pour out of this antenna-ed box contain and control him.

I wish that "Butterfly Dreams" was similarly able to transcend the clichés of African war, African refugees, and African horror, and reach towards a similar kind of communication about impossibility, dreaming, and the shadows that exist between the two.

The Caine Prize

A decade into The Caine Prize for African writing, it has carved a space for itself as one of the more significant institutions by which new African writing gets an international audience. But like bloggers such as zunguzungu have pointed out, the Alglophonic nature of the Booker or the Commonwealth Writers prize signify the inherent problems and limitations of many of these competitions. And yes, as zunguzungu has pointed out, the Caine Prize is specific to writers writing in English, so "the short list seems to be dominated by the same half-dozen countries, with only very rare exceptions; the Caine prize's 'Africa' more or less means South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Uganda, and the diaspora living in Britain and the US."

Before  the winner is announced on July 11, along with a group of bloggers I'll be blogging on the 5 stories shortlisted for the prize, beginning with Bulawayo's "Hitting Budapest" and Lamwaka's "Butterfly Dreams."

Here are links to all the shortlisted stories.

NoViolet Bulawayo (Zimbabwe) 'Hitting Budapest'

Beatrice Lamwaka (Uganda) 'Butterfly dreams' 

Tim Keegan (South Africa) 'What Molly Knew'

Lauri Kubuitsile (Botswana) 'In the spirit of McPhineas Lata' 

David Medalie (South Africa) 'The Mistress's Dog' 

So here's my first two reviews:

"HITTING BUDAPEST" by Noviolet Bulawayo

Crossing Mzilikazi Boulavard, for the characters in Noviolet Bulawayo's story, is like crossing over to Europe: the "Budapest" of this story is a neighbourhood within walking distance, a cityscape of abundance, cleanliness, order, and big affluence that serves to impress the impossibility of crossing over. Though it is not necessary for the narrator to tell us that "Budapest is like a different country," or that it is a "country where people who are not like us live," we don't mind the obvious statements, because we experience this day through the lives of children: "Bastard and Chipo and Godknows and Sbho and Stina" and "me," the storyteller. It is an ordinary day, one like every other day, when the children walk away from the disinterested eyes of their own mothers (too distracted by gossip and hair to pay attention to setting limits for them), and the men of the community (too busy with a daily game of draughts) in "Paradise." A brief journey, and they enter this extraordinary country of Budapest, where it looks as though "everybody woke up one day and closed their gates, doors, and windows, picked up their passports, and left for better countries." This vast landscape is so silent, and so empty that the children's entrance has the strange ring of conquest: it is as if they are the latest round of colonists, walking into the "empty land" that native inhabitants did not want, use, or need. Even the air in Budapest smells of nothing – no cooking fires send wisps of smoke to show that hunger and desire exist here, too.

The gut-chewing poverty with which the children are familiar, on a daily basis, is obvious from the start: this is a mission to steal guavas from Budapest—fruit that hangs ripe and uneaten in the screaming gaudiness of abundance. That their lives are riven by disorder and violence of the most intimate sort is also impossible to ignore, in the nonchalant way that hunger is always present, and in the way that ten-year-old Chipo's pregnancy is mentioned: she is a hindrance on their missions, because she cannot run as fast as she once used to. The unreality of their dreams, possible only through dream-talk of escape into materially better lives, only serves to exaggerate impossibility. Each child, dressed in tattered clothes that bear the marks of other worlds—t-shirts that bear the name "Cornell"—know that escape from their "Paradise" will only be possible via the conduits of family members already abroad (a pipe dream, knowing that aunties and uncles abroad "clean poop" in hospitals, and disappear after a few letters), an education (one that we as readers know is not accessible to these children), or their physical beauty (an escape that we know will only provide a troublesome and temporary respite). The refrains "I'm going to America to live with my Aunt Fostalina," or "I'm going to marry a man" who will "take me away from Paradise, away from the shacks and Heavenway and Fambeki and everything else," ring like hymns about crossing the River Jordan and entering heaven.

As zunguzungu writes in his review of this story, "it traffics in the familiar genre of Africa-poverty-pornography, by which I would mean that its 'story' is only an obligatory excuse for the parade of affect-inducing spectacles which are the story's real reason for existing." His is a legitimate criticism. Are these "lazy stories," where writers purposefully skew plots in the direction of spectacular societal failure, in order to please the Caine Prize judges?

The nuances in the ordinaryness of the violence that the children encounter in "Hitting Budapest"—and the impossibility of mutuality, despite what Levinas writes about regarding the lives of Others—is executed in such subtle terms that the painful is sublimely beautiful at times. The intensity of the hunger and desire is so everyday and so immediate that even a dead body they encounter only leads to a  joyful possibility of bread (selling the hanging woman's shoes). The finesse of Bulawayo's writing, I think, rescues this story from the grasping crassness of poverty-porn.

"BUTTERFLY DREAMS" by Beatrice Lamwaka

What I remember, as I read Lamwaka's first words, is the way in which we woke up at 6AM in the cloud of rainy season river fog, to glue our ears to the shortwave: what a prize possession it was, in the early years we spent in Zambia. My father listened, with the worry and attachment of the nationalist, who had abandoned loved ones and nation, in a bid to secure himself, and those closest to him.

In Lamwaka's story, we walk straight into the auditory dreaming of a "string of parents…who listened to Mega FM" every day, "[l]istening and waiting for the names of…loved ones…hearts thump[ing]" every time they hear familiar names of places or even the names of loved ones. After one hour of wordless listening, they "sighed after the programme" concluded. They listen to hear news of children lost to war and chaos, in the interminable waiting of a refugee camp. Though most abandon hope for their lost children, "Ma dreams of butterflies" filling the room, as if those wings, on their pilgrimage of renewal, are a harbinger of  her child's return. After five years of waiting, and rumours that others had seen their beloved Lamunu's body "bursting in the burning sun," they hear, on Mega FM, that Lamunu is at "World Vision, a rehabilitation centre for formerly abducted children," where children are being "taught how to live with us again." But when Lamunu returns, the facial scars scream the story of a child soldier, though the family hastily arrange for a ritual to cleanse that story out of Lamunu's private experience, and their collective body. Lamunu obeys quietly, and remains silent.

It is then that the reader who is unfamiliar with the name learns that Lamunu is a girl – her "breasts were showing through the blue flowered dress that [she] wore." The family wait, through her silence, to see when she will say something, laugh, and play the mischievous child they knew – to see if her tipu (spirit) has returned to her body. They have rituals to ensure that an abandoned tipu is buried into the earth with a body, but none for those whose bodies still exist above ground, with their tipu buried long ago.

"Butterfly Dreams" is a story about the interminable waiting of a refugee camp, and about how swathes of people learn to incorporate disruption as an everyday experience. Instead of groundnuts, their "gardens grow huts." It's a story about dreaming and aching for returns—returns of loved ones like Lamunu, or perhaps even for the life they once had—but as with the story of Lamunu, a return does not mean a return of the familiar or the comforting.

This story, though it reaches moments of revelation that are beyond "poverty porn," does mine extensively from the cliché. Again, I have to return to zunguzungu's anxieties about stories addressing the "Africa" of the Western imaginary, by which writers seem to be guided as they vie for prizes. Zunguzungu refers to Ikhide Ikheloa, who regards the Caine Prize's shortlist as indicative of the How to Write About Africa syndrome, and as "a riot of exhausted clichés…huts, moons, rapes, wars, and poverty," in which "[t]he monotony of misery simply overwhelms the reader." While zunguzungu is "not that interested in banning all stories that contain 'huts, moons, rapes, wars, and poverty' from the canon of Real African Writing"—since "it's not like slums and poverty and social dysfunction are a 'non-African' subject"—commodifying it may be what's obscene. In Lamwaka's story, there's an element of "mining" for misery that feels distinctly unsettling.

There is a powerful Jim Goldberg photograph I've written about ("New Europeans"): a man stands in the foreground of the image, radio pressed close to his chest. In the background are the layers and layers of tents, the life from which this radio allows a brief respite. He looks as though he is praying, as if all the words that pour out of this antenna-ed box contain and control him.

I wish that "Butterfly Dreams" was similarly able to transcend the clichés of African war, African refugees, and African horror, and reach towards a similar kind of communication about impossibility, dreaming, and the shadows that exist between the two.

Sierra Leone's WeOwnTv

WeOwnTv is a nonprofit organization that works with film as a tool for social change. It was co-founded by the American filmmaker Banker White and Sierra Leonean musician Black Nature.

During a visit to San Francisco in March, I interviewed the two co-founders, while they were working on new songs and film projects. Check out the interview with Black Nature and learn more about WeOwnTv and hear a exclusive private performance by Black Nature. Unfortunately, the sun was setting while the interview took place, so some of the footage is a little too dark.

* Meanwhile, WeOwnTv are working on a new film project about 50 years of independence in Sierra Leone. They have started a Kickstarter project and they have almost reached their goal. You have until Wednesday to support the project.

Newt Gingrich goes to Africa

News that New Gingrich and his third wife, Callista, is going on vacation from his campaign to become the next US president in 2o12, reminded us of the time he went to Africa. We're afraid for his hosts.

In the video, above, Newt talks about how when he was a boy, he wanted to work with the natural world. I had those same dreams. Mine were fueled by watching Richard Attenborough's "Life on Earth." But my hopes for the future didn't include putting the animals into zoos.

Maybe that's where Newt Gingrich and I went our separate ways.

Gingrich emotes (as much as he's capable) here about his youthful dreams of becoming a vertebrate paleontologist, or a zoo director. (He's visited over 95 zoos in the world.)

Perhaps part of a campaign to look less animal and more human, Gingrich and his current wife went on a whirlwind Smithsonian-National Geographic-San Diego Zoo joint trip to Africa that took them from Luxor, Egypt, to Rwanda (where he supposedly "hiked" in the Ruwenzori), the Serengeti (in time to see the annual great migration), Zambia (where his wife, Calista, walked out of the hotel room to shoo away a monkey in order to photograph a giraffe), Mali, "a very poor country," and finally, Marrakech, which "surprised" them in its comparableness to "Italy" (and therefore a place he would recommend to anyone).

Throughout the interview, Newt can't help doing the zoo-director-educational-bit: in Madagascar, they "spent time with the lemurs, which are "very early pre-monkeys" that didn't evolve from their 'primitive' state because the island was isolated from the mainland.

In Cape Town, he saw actual people when he went to mass: there, the "Ho-sa community" sang Amazing Grace "in Ho-sa" (we think he means Xhosa). It reminded him of being in Beijing, where they heard the same hymn sung in Chinese. These two experiences culminated in profound thoughts about the "diversity" in the world – though to us, it seems more of an indication of the power that neo-Evangelical Christianity has to flatten diversity.

And finally, it comes out: he and Calista are "fortunate" to be working with "Citizens United" (watch out, the webpage opens to a creepy montage of shooting, explosions, and other war sounds). Citizen's United landing page states that it "seeks to reassert the traditional American values of limited government, freedom of enterprise, strong families, and national sovereignty with security," and seems to misuse French writer, Alexis de Tocqueville's admiring-yet-wry critique of "American Exceptionalism." In Newt and Calista's hands, de Tocqueville's analysis is wholly laudatory: America, as a "new republic," is a place where one's social standing has no bearing on one's potential, but a place where "liberty, equality, individualism, and laissez-faire economics defined the 'American Creed,'" in which the American people rise "to great challenges — sometimes out of necessity but often out of the determination to create a better future."

Values that couldn't be more "African." 

The Ideology of the Democratic Alliance

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This piece, below, on the politics of the South African opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (led by Helen Zille, above), was written by Jane Duncan (a journalism professor at Rhodes University) well before the recent local government elections in South Africa, but has a shelf life far beyond that result:

The DA under the leadership of Helen Zille is a political phenomenon. It is winning more hearts and minds, including in working class communities that had previously shunned the party. Many people are desperate for an electoral alternative to the ANC. But as tempting as it may be, South Africans must be wary of adopting an 'opposition at all costs' approach.

While tons of ink have been spilled analysing the social justice content of ANC's policies and practices, very little serious attention has been paid to what the post-fight back DA actually stands for, and what the long term implications are of its growing popularity. The media's focus on the touchy-feely aspects of Zille's campaign has also obscured more substantive questions.

What type of society does the DA want to build? The core concept of Zille's DA is one of an 'open opportunity society for all,' which it counter poses to the ANC's 'closed crony society for some' where a clique rules to accumulate wealth. For the DA, a competitive job-creating economy, supported by an efficient education system, are the main drivers of this society.

The DA is not the originator of the open opportunity society concept; it has a long historical pedigree in political theory and practice. This society is a meritocracy, where government enables individual advancement on the basis of supposedly inherent talents and industriousness, measured usually through academic credentials, rather than on characteristics such as race, gender or political affiliation.

Open opportunity proponents proceed from the assumption that society should consist of hierarchies of achievers and non-achievers: so, they do not reject the notion of social hierarchy per se.

The open opportunity society is based on a conservative political philosophy, as it provides an ideological defence of the capitalist system. The children of the historically advantaged invariably have a head start in realising inherent talent. This society attributes an individual's lack of success to individual weaknesses, not the system.

Britain's New Labour party, under Tony Blair, also adopted the open opportunity society as the ideological counterpart to its neoliberal restructuring of the economy and society. As a result, inequality grew more rapidly than it did under John Major's conservative government. The capacity of those on the higher rungs to reproduce their privileged positions increased, with no evidence of downward mobility if their offspring were less talented. In contrast to the stated intention, Blair's open opportunity society became, in Alex Callinicos' words, "entrenched inequalities of opportunity."

The DA does acknowledge that the enjoyment of opportunity and choice has been heavily affected by apartheid. But its proposals for redress are inadequate, and are likely to be overshadowed by its broader societal framework, which is much more out rightly neoliberal than the ANC's: a sort of Growth, Employment and Redistribution Plan (GEAR) on steroids.

The party advocates public sector rollback in the direct delivery of services as a backlash against the ANC's strong developmental state. Rather, government should facilitate service delivery, mainly by the private sector, in the classic neoliberal mode.

The DA aims to provide what it refers to as a framework for choice of goods and services, such as schools. The party bases their conception of choice on trickle-down economics; so, as global competitiveness drives economic growth and society becomes richer, its members will be able to exercise the rights and choices for services.

Choice was an often-heard slogan of the Blair administration as well, where it was used to justify the marketisation of social services like housing to create more choice, leading to those with access to capital being unfairly advantaged. In his critique of Blair's housing policy Peter Malpass argued, "choice is a weasel word, a seductive device concealing that what is really afoot in the opportunity society is promotion of the interests of the better off and toleration of wider social inequality, to the further disadvantage of the poor."

The DA's economic policy is business friendly in the main, as it advocates the cutting of corporate tax and the reviewing of labour legislation to make it easier to hire and fire workers. Infrastructure rollout should be privatised through public-private partnerships, as should public health care provision, where possible. These proposals are to the right even of the ANC's GEAR plan.

Government should devolve as much power as possible to schools, universities, hospitals and local governments to manage their own affairs. The danger with this approach is that it will entrench pockets of privilege, where dominant social groups contract themselves out of the national agenda under the guise of 'self-government'.

The DA's education policy subscribes to human capital theory, which considers the purpose of education to be the production of skills for the market, and the raising of productivity and hence economic growth. Tellingly, its policy is silent on the role of education in producing a critical citizenry.

In the long term, individual advancement and competitiveness will be incentivised through a voucher system aimed at giving learners from low income households an opportunity to receive better education, thereby increasing their choice of schools. Schools achieving outstanding results will also receive incentives. Underlying these proposals is the assumption that competition produces efficiencies in the delivery of services.

The voucher system has evoked controversy internationally for draining public money away from already-underfunded public schools, which is then used to cross-subsidise private schooling: a sort of privatisation by stealth.

The DA sees higher education as a gateway for social mobility, where students are encouraged to hold the tragically impoverished view that personal growth amounts to advancement in professional markets. The party invokes the technocratic discourse of 'innovation' – where companies seeking competitive advantage over their competitors use universities as knowledge factories – to promote greater private sector involvement in the higher education sector. The negative implications for academic freedom should be self-evident.

The DA also advocates differentiation in higher education, where Colleges of Higher Education develop skills for the market, universities provide teaching, and Centres of Excellence (which the DA intends to be elite institutions) provide cutting edge research.

Such differentiation is pedagogically questionable, as it will artificially strip off teaching from research, impoverishing both teaching and research. Clearly the DA wants the education system to produce subjects, not citizens.

In addition, differentiation will probably lead to the lion's share of public resources being directed to the most likely candidates for Centres of Excellence, the former historically advantaged universities, which are still populated largely by the sons and daughters of the powerful and privileged. This 'aristocracy of merit' will dominate knowledge-generation, which is likely to lead to a society that is unable or unwilling to resolve its most pressing problems.

The DA's communication policy argues for light-touch regulation in the era of convergence, which will pave the way for the dominance of the post-digital migration airwaves by media monopolies. Its policy is completely silent on the future of the most popular and accessible medium in the country, the South African Broadcasting Corporation, suggesting that the broadcaster's future may be precarious under a DA government.

This is not to say that the DA does not recognise the need for redress or the social wage. The party argues for the universalisation of the old age grant, as well as the adoption of the basic income grant. But these proposals will do nothing to correct the structural distortions in the economy that create vulnerability.

The tent pole of the DA's strategy for local government elections is to use Cape Town as a model for good governance, and to capitalise on the ANC's many failings at local government level. Certainly there are indications that the DA has done better administratively than the ANC.

But the roots of the near-collapse of many local governments need to be understood, as the problems are deeper than poor administration. With the onset of GEAR, national government transfers to local government were drastically reduced, forcing local governments into self-sufficiency that many could simply not afford.

The DA policies suggest that the party will drive local governments even further down the road of self-sufficiency, further disadvantaging poorer municipalities outside the wealthier Western Cape.

In view of South Africa's liberation history, it is a tragedy that that the second biggest political party in the country is to the right of the ANC. It creates space for a shift to the right in South Africa's politics generally, which in turn provides a basis for the ANC to continue its centrist shift as well.

If this shift takes place, then mass unemployment, service-delivery cut-offs and inequality generally are likely to intensify. But then these problems will be blamed on the lack of industriousness of the individual, not on the policies. Mass despondency is likely to set in. The insufferable white arrogance that is such a strong feature of life in the Western Cape is likely to spread further afield.

In campaigning against the ANC's rocky performance at local government level, Zille has portrayed herself as a champion of social justice, even invoking the names of Nelson Mandela and Chris Hani.

Yet Zille's open opportunity society is a clear and present danger to the social justice agenda.

The more the political debate revolves around a centre-right axis, the more impossible it will become to achieve, or even imagine, the conditions for true human emancipation …

Source.

Music Break

The new music video for "Drip Dry" by the Johannesburg hipsters Dirty Paraffin. The video was shot and edited by the people known collectively as Cuss Monthly.

H/T: Dylan Valley.

'Short Cut'

The trailer for the feature film "Short Cut" (to be directed by Norman Maake) about the quest of two brothers to escape a life of hardship and political turmoil in Zimbabwe and decide to travel to Johannesburg only to be forced into slavery in an illegal mine in a border town. As Maake explains: "They plot an escape but are seperated instead. One gets deported back and the other is left stranded in no man land.. Inches away from freedom he is forced to turn back and search for his brother dead or alive bring him back to the city of promise or slums."

The film is still in development phase.

For more information also read this essay (part of a fundraising effort) about the genesis of"Short Cuts" by the film's producer David Max Brown.

F***yesafricans

Someone started a a page called fuckyesafricans in the vein of the "fuckyes" tumblr meme. For those unfamiliar with the format, the dry title is meant for irony filled humor to follow once you click the link.

Fuckyesafricans has its funny moments, but it lacks irony, which makes it kind of miss the point of the fuckyes meme. There are other ethnically oriented pages, so at least it's nice to see someone repping for "the Africans." The page, which takes submissions from readers, seems to be mostly aimed at youth in the diaspora since many posts are about generational conflict. Some posts seem like cathartic complaints about the purported abuses of African parents. Some things just seem out of date like post 117 about cellphones.