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.
The Afrikaans struggle
Documentary: ‘The Price of Kings’
In an astoundingly ambitious new series of 12 feature-length documentaries titled The Price of Kings (available to watch online) the British production company Spirit Level Films challenge the perception of leadership in provocative and imaginative ways. Through a creative counterpoint between historical ‘truth’ and memory, and supported by powerful archival material, the series thoughtfully and powerfully critiques often intractably difficult political histories. Melding archival footage with interviews with some of the most prominent (and controversial) politicians and activists alive, the series delves into the careers of divisive characters in recent political history, starting with Yasser Arafat.
World famous in South Africa
The history of popular music in South Africa continues to interest documentary filmmakers. Of recent offerings two films stand out: “Punk in Africa,” about the history of the genre in Southern Africa since the 1970s, and Daniel Yon’s film about jazz singer Sathima Benjamin, “Sathima’s Windsong.” I’ve just gotten word of “Searching for Sugar Man,” about a 1970s Detroit-based Mexican American musician, Sixto Rodriguez, who was unknown at home, but became very famous among young white South Africans at the time. Rodriguez had staged his suicide on stage after he had released two albums with little popular success and had vanished from the music scene. Meanwhile, in South Africa, his music had developed a cult following, especially among white conscripts fighting Apartheid’s wars in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. (It also turns out he was popular among suburban high school kids in South Africa the 1990s.) Below is an interview with director Malik Bendjelloul by Sundance TV around the time the film made its US debut and was picked up by Sony Classic Pictures (despite some critics’ doubts ) for distribution: [Read more...]
February 11, 1990
Today, 22 years ago, Nelson Mandela walked free from a prison outside Cape Town. Four years later, in April, the ANC won South Africa’s first democratic elections and in May 1994, Mandela was inaugurated as South Africa’s first black president. These were, however, only 22 years in the 100 year history of the ANC and in the long history of colonialism, Apartheid and now brief freedom in South Africa. Last month the ANC held a massive party in Mangaung, the place where it was founded in January 1912 by a small group of activists. Hundreds of thousands people headed to the capital of the now Free State province. But this is also a different ANC. Its legacy is not so clear cut anymore and we have covered the personalities that shape it as well as some of its calamities on this blog. Amongst the thousands at the ANC celebrations in Bloemfontein was Prexy Nesbitt, a trade unionist, college professor (he’s taught for years at Columbia College) and leading figure in the US anti-apartheid movement as well as the liberation struggles in Angola and Mozambique between the 1960s and the 1980s. He has a long association with Southern African freedom movements. When Prexy returned to his home in Chicago, he jotted down his impressions of the celebrations, of the ANC and South Africa. With his permission we republish it here. We think it is a fitting reflection on the commemoration of a momentous day. –Sean Jacobs [Read more...]
Tech Apartheid
Our tech posts never stray from tweeting new data on Twitter and Facebook usage on the continent–but now and then–as occasional readers of Gizmodo and Kotaku–we pause:
Paul Simon’s Graceland Reconsidered
2011 was the 25th anniversary of Paul Simon’s “Graceland.” I don’t have to remind you of the album’s significance. It is hard to imagine now the impact of that album, but it did a lot of things: it resurrected Simon’s stalled career, was the first “World Music” album to be a crossover hit, won Simon a Grammy and sold millions of albums. The usual celebratory articles appeared in late August (which is when the album was released in 1985). I (!) was even interviewed for one by news agency AFP: Anyway, I think the album deserves a proper retrospective, not least because it was birthed in controversial circumstances [Read more...]
A Conversation on Apartheid
Keeping with our South Africa thread.
For our readers in Southern California, a very important conversation will be taking place at the University of Southern California on Thursday, 12 January. Omar Barghouti, one of the organizers of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, will join legendary U.S.-based scholar-activists Angela Davis and Fred Moten to discuss the correlations between the divestment campaign against South Africa’s apartheid regime and the ongoing Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
The Dutch Disease
The Nonviolent Transition in South Africa
The American philosopher Lewis Gordon, in an essay on affirmative action:
There are those who praise South Africa for making the transformation to a supposedly post-Apartheid society nonviolently. Without violence? The many blacks (in the Black Consciousness conception) and their supporters who were killed, tortured and imprisoned; the many protesters harmed; the tanks; the guns; the dogs; the 3 AM knock on the door; the many instances of trauma, none of them count? What is hidden in this misguided notion, as with what is suppressed about racism and sexism in the anti-affirmative action rhetoric of reverse discrimination and qualifications, is this: in a white supremacist state, violence is only recognized if it is waged against whites.
So, the hysteria about crime, about insecurity in South Africa is, as no doubt everyone knows, similar to the same in the United States. Even when the actual figures of violent crime declined, incarceration of blacks was high, because there was, in effect, the criminalization of a people. As violent appearance, black visibility was criminalized.
An odd feature of post-colonial states is that criminalization of black populations doesn’t require white institutional leadership. In so-called black countries, the phenomenon is there and it is color dependent, where darker-skin blacks are the most criminalized. The reasons for this are manifold, but most amount to the near isomorphic relationship between closed social options and skin color as a legacy of racialized slavery and colonialism in the midst of post-colonial environments heavily invested in keeping capital in the hands of the former governing population.
Song and Dance
By Dan Moshenberg
Tuesday, August 9, 2011, was the annual celebration, in South Africa, of National Women’s Day. This public holiday commemorates August 9, 1956, the women’s march on the Union Buildings in Pretoria, in protest of the infamous pass laws. That day 20,000 or so women famously, and heroically, chanted, shouted, screamed: “Wathint’Abafazi Wathint’imbokodo!”. Translation: “Now you have touched the women, you have struck a rock!”
That was 55 years ago.
On Tuesday morning in South Africa (I am visiting here this week), the morning news talk shows, such as Morning Live on SABC2, celebrated with song, dance, some discussion. Women, and men, challenged the nation to do more, to do better. It was both festive and moving.
At the same time, there was a silence at the center and heart of the celebrations.
