Leaves caution behind

Rastafarian waving a flag in protest against xenophobia, at a vigil outside Parliament, on May 23. No politicians attended the vigil. Rastas have been brutally assaulted when standing up against xenophobic mobs.

The use of the term “internment camps” for the City of Cape Town refugee camps, by the Treatment Action Campaign, has become somewhat controversial. This is my view, posted as a comment elsewhere. I omitted to mention the sheer terror with which many refugees, victims of state violence elsewhere on the continent, respond to official action :

["Internment camps" is] a very emotive term — but the city was at one stage undoubtedly heading towards creating places that would have been internment camps in all but name.

I have absolutely no doubt about this, because I heard discussions amongst city officials myself, in person, with my own ears, showing that they were at times considering lockdowns on the camps and sites, for ’security reasons’, and that they thought they might end up forcibly removing people from certain locations. At least one of the sites was in fact locked down over Sunday night. What’s more, the city wanted to remove people from all the smaller refuges and concentrate them in the camps. Read the rest of this entry »

Refugee leader Theo addresses his fellows outside Caledon Square police station, in central Cape Town

I can’t get the stench of urine out of my nostrils. It’s the smell of fear, anger and humiliation.

I smelt it last night, when I spoke to the refugees outside Caledon Square police station. I saw it running thick in the gutters a couple of feet away from where people were sleeping. I smelt it again this morning, when I went round to advise them that lawyers and press were about to visit to take statements. The refugees were preparing to embark on a hunger strike. Theo, a published author from the DRC, was standing on a milk crate, addressing his comrades. They were refusing to abandon the pavement, in protest at their treatment by the government.

There must have been a whole lot of developments during the day which I was unable to track, as this evening they were being driven to a community hall in Sea Point, awaiting a visit by the provincial premier or his representative. Read the rest of this entry »

This evening, I stood outside the Caledon Square police station, where 150 displaced South Africans of other nationalities are sleeping on the pavement, amidst a heavy smell of urine. They’ve been here for two nights already. The rain is about to come, heavy rain for the next three days. Around them swirls a fight between the city authorities and the provincial authorities. No more than 20m from a fucking police station, and they’ve not after two days been provided with anything other than food and blankets by members of the community.

Zimbabweans who have been holed up in a backyard shack in Khayelitsha for three days, after being stoned by locals, prepare to leave

My armchair theory that South Africa is in fact one of the continent’s least developed countries, when one looks at human decency and not at numbers of shopping malls, looks dismayingly substantial.

A group of 12 people from the DRC and Tanzania and Rwanda and Burundi and Somalia surround me (not threateningly) and grill me on what’s happening. “My business of ten years has been destroyed, how can I go back to my mother empty-handed?” “How will we get restitution?” “This government treats us like animals.” “Where is the government, why do they not come to talk us?” “We don’t trust anyone any more, we want the UNHCR.” “They must send us to Namibia, to Zambia. There we will be okay.” Read the rest of this entry »

Archbishop Thabo Mokgatho addresses a protest meeting in Cape Town’s St Georges Cathedral. His plea for an end to the furious finger-pointing that surrounds us has so far gone unheeded.

I’d prefer to be doing something more ‘useful’ but I’m sitting in St. Georges Cathedral, waiting to play into a microphone, a sound clip of refugees speaking of their experiences. It’s one item on the programme at a public meeting protesting xenophobia. I’m wearing a t-shirt that says ‘foreigner on the front’, as are many. Archbishop Mokgatho’s wearing it over his long purple robes. I haven’t had a chance to read the back yet.

Themba Baleni, my soundman from Beat It days, greets me – we haven’t seen each other for over two years. He tells me that Peter, the cameraman we used to work with, is now living on the streets in Muizenberg. This I had heard already; but had hoped might have changed.

The cathedral is filling up with people from all Cape Town’s communities, archbishops, imams and chief justices will speak alongside the activists. Read the rest of this entry »

Police at anti-xenophobia ‘vigil’ outside Parliament on Friday 23 May

This was written on the night of Sunday 26. By Monday midday, fortunately, it seemed sense had prevailed, in good part due to strong pressure from the likes of TAC, and the authorities had retreated from insisting that all refugees be concentrated in a few large camps.

I’m sitting in the Cape Town Disaster Risk Management Centre, around a square of desks, cables, microphones and cables. It’s 2am, and half the eight people in the room are asleep. They’re not being neglectful – out on the flats and in the townships, the violence has, for tonight at any rate, subsided. No more bullets fly in Du Noon, that we know of. (“Who’s shooting?” “If there were names on the bullets, we’d know.”)

In front of me is the carefully tabulated Treatment Action Campaign/Aids Law Project/MSF assessment of the refugee situation: “Displaced persons, Sunday 25 May: 8969”.

Phrases: “entirely lacking in all supplies”, “incidents of intimidation at hospital”, “desperately need more ablution blocks”, “seems to be well-kept and under control”, “military providing protection”, “crowd unsettled, concerned for lack of safety; lack of drinking water”.

Over 650 people are in the Gant’s warehouse in Somerset West, 500 in the Desmond Tutu hall, 1320 in the Kraaifontein Youth Centre. Read the rest of this entry »

Last night I dreamt of someone I knew at school. He has not entered my conscious mind in nearly twenty years, probably because before that I didn’t like him very much. In the dream he offered me a bite of a roast potato, while my car was burgled. Hmm. But the potato, the car and the burglary are not the point of this excursus (thanks for that word, Nadia; perhaps blogs should rather be called excursions).

Joseph Paton’s Study for the quarrel of Oberon and Titania.
Pic: Wikimedia Commons

For on waking I remembered how very different people seemed to me as a child. When I was six, in a school in Johannesburg, bathed in the (then) comfortingly bright light of fluorescent tubes as the deep gloom of thunderstorms battered around us, as beans grew behind blotting paper in glass jars and potatoes surrendered to the hands of early Gutenbergs, the forms of people around me shifted immensely. If children of 11 or 12 entered the classroom, there seemed to my eyes to be very little difference between them and the teacher. All were huge, infinitely wise and worldly, inhabiting a remote domain I could only dream of entering. Of my peers, who to adult eyes would have seemed then almost uniformly innocent, some were saints and some literally almost as threatening as trolls; and indeed, some would waylay me on the road home.

It seems possible then, given these huge variations in perception, that the realm of fairy tales is perhaps not so much one originally conjured by those who wished to spin tales for the entertainment of the young, but a function of the medieval tribal mind boggled by encounters with merchants and nobles; encounters which for many, isolated by geography, must have been far, far more occasional than we imagine. And if I, as a medieval peasant remote even from the feudal system, somehow entered the world of these “elves and fairies”, and for a few years lived a vastly different and more prosperous life away from my people, then on my return to those left behind, they would indeed have been aged by grueling lives, while I in turn would feel comparatively untouched by time.

We do not know how dark are the depths from which we have sometimes clambered. (I say sometimes, for I do not believe the minds of all pre-feudal peasants were dark; while many of us remain in the dark.) These fixed forms, our bodies, are more instantly mutable than we imagine; they shift and change in the minds of others. The shape of the world we see is far more a function of our minds than we imagine. The gloomy insistence of science that there is an objective, “standard” reality to which we should shape our perceptions and conform, is rather totalitarian. Sure it’s helpful, when we’re conducting open-heart surgery, or casually obliterating children and their mind-cloud-blossoms of light and thought with high-tech weaponry, but it’s totalitarian.

Reality is a language we speak to each other.

(Or shout at each other. Or broadcast with stadium-scale speakers. So blogging, the willingness, most often, to speak only to the few – or none – is many times an advance.)

[There are a number of retrospective postings on this blog.]

Update: 12 October 2009 Okay, this post is pulling a ridiculous amount of traffic, and obviously for the wrong reasons, so I am retitling it.

Update: 3 September 2009 [Snow Leopard's arrival] Dear visitors, please note that this post is not about how to downgrade from Snow Leopard, or Leopard, to previous versions of OS X. I mention this, as Snow Leopard’s release, interestingly, has brought to this post many people searching on “Leopard downgrade”, and related terms. For the record, since writing the original post, I have upgraded to a Macbook, an environment in which Leopard seems to function rather better. Given what I’ve read about Snow Leopard, I expect to wait for 10.6.2 before upgrading.

Original post commences: Given all the buzz (to put it mildly) around Mac OS X Leopard, I was quite looking forward to the “upgrade”. I obviously had not taken into account the reality distortion zone that surrounds all things Apple.

Used to be the world’s best operating system

Now, as Leopard has soured for me, the extent of that distortion zone has become clearer: bloody hell, it’s vast. I’ve compiled a list of problems in Leopard over a few weeks, as things irritated me — and the list just kept growing. At the same, I’ve started working on another Mac still running Tiger at work — and haven’t missed Leopard for one moment.

Read the rest of this entry »

The central government buildings in Windhoek, which remain almost entirely the same as during the time of South African overrule.

I’ve just visited Namibia, and really enjoyed the experience, despite mild official harassment for being a journalist. I had a very strong sense of it being a smoothly functioning nation, which is particularly notable for its being lodged in Africa, and having recently been prone to serious attempts at plunder and depredation by Germany and South Africa.

The capital, Windhoek, is neat and clean, far cleaner than many European cities.

Then I stumbled on this article in the New York Times, which tells us San Marino (pop. 30 000) has only one prisoner, giving it the world’s lowest incarceration rate.

The Guardian publishes a wonderful article on Iceland, which in turn sounds like a remarkable place: happy people, well-developed health system, successful movement away from oil-based energy to renewable energy over the last 50 years, no standing army for the last seven hundred years.

What about Costa Rica, which has, like Iceland, abandoned a standing army, and resolutely resists exploitation of its oil resources, avoiding the dismal fate of other petrocracies?

Clearly, small states work very well. When society is so closely knit that citizens and politicians work practically alongside each other, it’s difficult for the former to feel too awed, or the latter to feel too self-important. Namibian politicians were, in my brief experience, remarkably self-deprecating, commenting on the tedium of their own speeches, and addressing (with merciful brevity), a conference dinner gathering with words along the lines of, “Ladies and gentlemen, ambassadors, and everyone who’s been elected.”

The same proximity makes for administrative efficiency. Walking into Namibian Home Affairs, one discovers that the minister’s office is in the same drab corridor as the clerks who issue visas. No South African minister would deign to share such modest accommodation. (Though, it must be admitted, the Namibian government has recently constructed a large new official residence for the president, State House, a vulgar monstrosity on a Windhoek hilltop – which the president is rumoured to be reluctant to actually occupy.)

That’s what we need, a world of small, happy states, flying under the radar. Let’s tear down the borders and throw up thin fences, and celebrate the micro-state. After all, small states are what democracy was “designed” for.

God judging Adam — William Blake, 1795 … Poor Adam

One of the oddest things about Richard Dawkins’ scathing opinions about religion is that in forming them he has ignored phenomena that inform his life’s work: inheritance and mutation, which I think he would agree apply to memes as much to genes.

The concept of inheritance is relevant to religion because it describes the transmission, generation to generation, version to version, language to language, context to context, culture to culture, oral history to written word, via which concepts and histories and traditions are passed down.

But what of mutation and evolution? Dawkins himself extended these to cover memes. For each new iteration of manuscripts, concepts, histories and traditions, for every passage from one mind to the next, there are invariably mutations and changes.

So when we read in the Bible that “the Lord said to Moses, or Joseph, or Isaiah …”, the connotations of these statements are vastly different for us and our peers to how they seemed to those who originally heard and wrote them.

Was “the Lord” in each instance a spirit? Was he visible or invisible? Was he merely a compelling presence in the mind of the awed prophet? Was he a voice in the head, or an urgent feeling or sensation, or even an impulse? What did the particular word that is translated as “said” mean to those who first wrote or heard it? Certainly scholars of ancient Aramaic, Hebrew or Greek may give us a more precise idea – but they cannot be certain of all the varieties of ways in which the word was used at the time, for we know that ambiguity in play or relation to context is inherent to the human use of language.

In other words, evolution applies to meaning as much to beasts. But Dawkins ridicules and parodies religion as if he has access to the meaning of its original concepts, while ignoring the best contemporary interpretations. In his ignorance of the original meaning of religious concepts and his blindness to the most blessed of modern interpretations, he stands shoulder to shoulder with the fundamentalists he abhors.

Update: 31 May

After visiting churches involved in refugee relief, and seeing what good they do, quietly and without fanfare, I cannot help thinking what self-indulgent, ignorant fools Richard Dawkins and the rest of the militant atheist crowd are, with their sweeping condemnations of religion.