Some random history: The Guardian yesterday published a short obituary of Bruce King, the British anti-apartheid campaigner–and also “an eminent geomorphologist (a scholar of landscapes) and a pioneer in the science of remote sensing.” Hamba Kahle Bruce King. The obituary, among others, makes reference to his marriage to his South African wife, Jamela Adams. It describes their wedding in “a Muslim ceremony in Cape Town” in 1964 in defiance of the Mixed Marriages Act. The couple left for England (presumably to have another ceremony there), and was then predictably refused entry back into South Africa. They then moved to Tanzania. But there’s this tidbit about their time in Tanzania: “Jamela broadcast in Afrikaans for the ANC radio station transmitting to South Africa.” I want to know more about that story.

* BTW, for those who don’t know anything about Radio Freedom, here’s a snippet, here it gets sampled and there’s also a full album dedicated to it (the image above is from that album cover).

Further Reading

Goodbye, Piassa

The demolition of an historic district in Addis Ababa shows a central contradiction of modernization: the desire to improve the country while devaluing its people and culture.