This may make for depressing reading with your breakfast, but there’s nothing new about the entrenched homophobia in South Africa, a place where men rape lesbians to “correct” them, a government minister last month refused to open a state-funded exhibition featuring photographic images of intimacy between gay women (the image above is an example), and Jacob Zuma, the country’s president, once said that when he was growing up gay men would not have stood in front of him. “I would knock him out.”
Today, March 21, is Human Rights Day in South Africa. It should be called Sharpeville Day instead. 50 years ago today white police attacked and killed 69 black protesters (they also wounded or injured several others) who were peacefully protesting the pass laws which restricted the free movement of black South Africans. But what is life like for the residents of the township today?
Apart from formal political freedom, apparently not much has changed:
Some of you probably heard about Equal Education, a new South African mass movement to campaign for and end to education disparities inherited from Apartheid and neglected by the democratic government, for the first time when The New York Times ran a feature about them in September 2009.
As The Times reported at the time: “… [i]n the Western Cape [the province where Equal Education is the most active] only 2 out of 1,000 sixth graders in predominantly black schools passed a mathematics test at grade level in 2005, compared with almost 2 out of 3 children in schools once reserved for whites that are now integrated, but generally in more affluent neighborhoods.”
Equal Education sets itself “practical goals” to change these realities. Thus far it has gotten the education authorities to replace broken windows in poor black township schools, secured a science teacher for seniors at one school, and agitates for libraries and librarians in schools in these communities. (Only eight percent of public schools have adequate libraries and most of these are in privileged former white schools.). But the larger point is to make democratic citizens out of young South Africans.
Today–to celebrate Human Rights Day–Equal Education expect thousands of people to gather for a protest march and music concert in central Cape Town in support of their demands. Later this week, on Friday, they will march in Pretoria to protest the central government.
I am not sure about the ethics involved in making this film or how truthful the experiences of British journalist Sorious Samura are, but “Living with Illegals,” his 50 minute documentary (made for British television) is depressing viewing. To investigate undocumented migration from Africa to the European Union, Samura (who is originally from Sierra Leone and made films about the civil war there) decides to become an undocumented migrant.
An excerpt from a report in the UK-based The Independent:
Every woman remembers her wedding day with a tear in her eye – but, here in Ethiopia, the tears are different, and darker, and do not stop. Nurame Abedo is sitting in her hut high in the clouds, remembering the day she became a wife. She lives hundreds of miles into the countryside, thousands of feet above sea-level, in the hills of the bridal-kidnapping capital of the world. For 40 years, she didn’t talk about her wedding, or how it came to happen. If she tried, she was beaten by her captor, who said good women never speak of such things. So she tells her story slowly, haltingly, her sentences punctuated by sudden high-pitched laughs that seem to erupt involuntarily from her gut….In the middle of this darkness, Boge Gebre is sitting in her office, working. (Her name is pronounced Bo-gay.) She is the woman who began the rebellion of Ethiopian women – and at first glance, this is not improbable. She is slim and tall, like a weapon. When she was born in the early 1950s, she was expected to have the same life as Nurame. She says: “Women were regarded as no better than the cows they milked. We have round houses made from mud, and within each home there is a strict division. One side is for the men, and other is for the women and the animals.
As my friend the gender activist Dan Moshenberg notes “… despite the articles lurid, breathless tone, it actually tells a story of women in movement, a story worth sharing, worth talking about.”
William Kentridge appears to be everywhere in New York City this year.
With a show, “Five Themes”, at MoMA (until May 17), an opera at The Met, and in the summer through early fall he’ll exhibit at the Jewish Museum. And, of course, for this we love him at Africa is a Country. In this video (part of the publicity blitz for his MoMA show, “Five Themes”–Kentridge discusses his early ambitions to be a performer, a conductor and an actor. Go see the exhibition.
[HT: Nerina Penzhorn]
– Sean Jacobs
“We Want What’s Ours,” a documentary film in progress on the complications of land reform in South Africa in Soweto–in this case competing claims between groups of black South Africans–by Chicago law professor Bernadette Atuahene and Sifuna Okwethu.
Via Laura Flanders’ GRIDtv.
During the Cold War tens of thousands of black students went to study in the Soviet Union. (I know some South Africans who did.) That world is now far away as this video report on Globalpost by journalists Miriam Elder and Dmitri Venkov show. Instead It’s largely a life of drudgery, survival, poverty and fearing arbitrary attacks from racist rightwing thugs. (Thanks Dmitri.)
The United Nations released its annual State of the World Cities report this week and three South African cities top the list:
Three South African cities top the list of the most unequal cities in the world, when measured on income-based data gathered in a UN-HABITAT survey of cities in 109 countries from all regions. In its State of the World Cities 2010/2011: Bridging the Urban Divide, UN-HABITAT cites Buffalo City (East London), Johannesburg and Ekurhuleni (East Rand) as extremely unequal with Gini coefficient values of 0.71 or more. These are followed by the Brazilian cities of Goiana, Fortaleza, Belo Horizonte, and Brasilia; all of which feature income Gini values above 0.60.
