Leaves caution behind

The only time I have heard [Western Cape premier] Ebrahim Rasool speak was at the launch of a book of Sufi philosophy I had helped edit.

The launch was in a museum in the Bo-Kaap. Rasool was on his home turf, comfortable amidst his community. He was confident, humane, urbane, knowledgeable and deeply impressive.

The now notorious refugee camp called Soetwater is a few kilometres from where I live. Three thousand people have been living there in bitter cold, increasingly wet tents for two weeks, tortured by uncertainty. They were wrenched from their homes and businesses by violence and terror. Overnight, the patient, painful work of years was plundered, burnt or crumbling behind them. The response of the authorities, and the UN, to their plight has been to insist that they must return to the communities that turned on them so suddenly and brutally. In other words, preserving the illusion of national harmony and tolerance is considered more Read the rest of this entry »

This is a young woman’s experience of xenophobic violence, and police complicity, in her community:

I live in Joe Slovo settlement, in Milnerton. It was Thursday afternoon (22 May). Me and my friends were talking, and my friends were saying, “These foreigners, they must leave the country.” My feelings were different, that these are Africans, and we must stand together, but my friends said their parents feel betrayed by these foreigners, because they’re losing their jobs to these foreigners. So if someone’s standing with foreigners looking for a job, the foreigners will say to whoever’s going to hire them, “You can give me less money than to the South Africans.”

That’s where the complications come in, like say, the Somalians, they have these shops, where the prices are cheaper, which makes it difficult for the other black people, like the Xhosa, because people are going to go to the Somalian shops. So that’s where the conflict comes in.

And the other issue that came up in our discussion is that [my friends] believe that these foreigners come to South Africa with drugs, and that these drugs are affecting their children and their lives. But me, in my own opinion, there may be some who come in and sell drugs and stuff like that, but the other [foreigners] who are innocent, they work very hard, like five to five a day for minimum wages . . . But my friends say, “They’re not supposed to be here, they must go back to their country, ‘cause they’re simply messing up our country.”

But at the same time, while these riots are happening, our brothers, our brothers who are very close-minded, criminals who normally do stuff, get a chance to do things. So that night, when the riots were happening, they were burning people’s containers, you know, where [the foreigners] do business. People were burning Read the rest of this entry »

On a slightly lighter note than recent circumstances have permitted:–

Oh simple cylinder:
You have not changed; you are constant,

you are the brown paper bulwark I have always known;
unstamped, unnamed, unmottled;
you do not come in a fresh multitude of seasonal colours;
you have not been plasticised, imbued with essence of potpourri, lavender
or 16 other fresh new fragrances that will have my friends
wondering how they slipped behind in the racing cargo cult;
you do not offer coy shelter to special offers or once-in-a-lifetime opportunities
to scorch the planet in flight to ever more indistinguishable destinations.
Without fanfare or hesitation or hope of recognition,
you simply give invisible and unfailing support,
as do all the world’s real heroes.
Unwrapped and shredded on soil, you do not fight death
but yield perfectly to oblivion — or kindergarten craft.
You are neither new nor improved, your humility has not yet been torn
from you by the greed of others;
you are, without pretence, just perfect.

[this doesn't really work as a poem as the humour is trampled by earnestness, so it's posted as socioeconomic commentary!]

I’m at the World Economic Forum for Africa. At least I think I am. Four of the five panelists at the opening press conference were most certainly not African, so perhaps I’ve been transported to some parallel, non-African dimension. But then, this is the WEF on Africa, not the WEF for Africa.

I was greeted by Lucy at media registration. Irish, I think.

She told me that quite a few sessions are off-limits for the media. ‘Why, is that because the lizard people need a chance to breathe and scratch their scales?’ I ask. She was unfazed.

But back to that press conference, an insipid ritual designed only for casting some few shards of offhand wisdom to less-than-agog hacks.

Mrs Ogata, head of the Japanese Overseas Development Agency, and a previous head of the UNHCR, tells us that Japan’s overseas development priorities have now shifted: ‘Asia has moved up. Our main focus has shifted into Africa.’

Perhaps the Japanese are feeling left out of the sudden tumble to exploit Africa’s commodity markets. The Chinese have been tumbling in for the last couple of years, with partnerships, initiatives and the usual arsenal of ‘we take your stuff and give money to your elites’-type strategies. By some accounts, the Chinese were bankrolling Mugabe’s regime till recently.

The Japanese are burdened with having to be a little more respectable, Read the rest of this entry »