Sotho

Lawyer, born into a prominent Afrikaans family. He studied law in South Africa and as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. He became an active member of the Communist Party, while also reaching the heights of the legal profession. He defended those charged in the prolonged Treason Trial of the 1950s, and led the defence team at the 1964 Rivonia trial. In 1964, he was arrested and charged with membership of the then underground Communist Party, and in 1966 was sentenced to life imprisonment.
www.biography.com

Bram Fischer stood up for what he believed, and what he believed was that the former system in his home country (South Africa) was grossly unfair toward the larger part of the population. He went to prison for that thought. He was born on 23 April 1908. Happy birthday to him.

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Here is a comment to one of my posts. I decided to turn it into a full-blown post because of its length. So here it is. Khotso to all.

Reply:
‘Dear Tim,

“We” can’t freely move anywhere, to Darfur or elsewhere, if any survival attempt on the African’s part is clouded with taunts and suspicions of incompetence and stupidity. “We” can truly start moving when the African has got the respect (s)he deserves.

History is never over as it always has a bearing on the present. It stands to reason that what happened yesterday influences what happens today and what will happen tomorrow. America is a gun-wielding, trigger-happy nation because the Far-west happened. Many African nations are poor today because their people were stolen, their economic and political structures destroyed, their land occupied, and so on.

Tim, of course people, not peoples, do things. People enslaved the African, colonised the African, Jim-crowed the heck out of the black person. But you must admit that very few, if any, American Indians did these things. Few Canadians, few Peruvians, few Inuits, few Mexicans. Perhaps they did other ills, I don’t know. The question here is not that.

It is interesting that you might say, ‘…most of us do not want to know about the slavery, the French in the North, the English in the south,the Boer’s, The Belgians in the Congo or Germans in Southwest Africa, where the phrase ‘final solution’ was first used.‘

Why in Heaven’s name would you want to zap that? In that case, zap Lincoln, and his four-score speech. Zap Franklin and his kite. Zap the Pilgrims and that rock they landed on. The Wright brothers, the American’s struggle of independence against England, and in a few years, zap Vietnam, too, the atom bombs in Japan, zap Iraq, zap Michael Jackson and his best-selling album. Zap the hostage-taking crisis in Iran when Carter was president, Elvis and Martin Luther king Jr (?) and Malcolm X (?) and Monica Lewinsky and Reaganomics and 9/11 and all the history of the blooming world. Let’s zap the big bang, too, while we’re at it. I went to prison in South Africa for pass laws. Let’s zap that. Zap slavery and colonisation and Apartheid, as you suggest.

China. China is another question. It is messing up in Tibet and has messed up in Darfur. Does that give me the right to say, ‘Don’t talk about the fact that I pounded your face into the ground yesterday. Chun-Lee here is pounding it into the ground now.’ Perhaps Chun-Lee is doing it because I got away with it. Learning from history isn’t just a cliché, it’s something we must do. We must all be accountable. You, me, them, everybody. If we’re all equal on this planet, then no one gets away with pounding another’s face into the ground. China is beginning to have the sort of fiduciary influence on Africa that leads straight to dependence, and the notion that the money-lender can do whatever they want. That’s very bad, and Africans should not let it happen. Why they might is beyond the scope of this post.

Still, I think your comment of ‘the ignorant’ concerning the Chinese is not fair. Nowhere in your comment do you say that Caucasian people are ignorant, although they’re the ones that have done a lot of atrocities against the African (and the Australian Aborigine and the American Indian)

I’m not sure I know what you mean by the following, Tim: ‘So … why do I suppose it is that I sit here in front of a shelf full of books on African History yet I remain astounded at the ignorance about it?‘ But let me take a jab at it: What I say and other Africans say isn’t in your history books? Or, you haven’t actually read the history books on your book-shelf? In either case, what happened in the past still happened. Give you the South African example. History books never mentioned the African hero, of the African good deed, or the African innovation, or the African suffering. That was until some African scholars decided to write real history books that told it all, good and bad, and across the spectrum of southern African life.

Get back to me if you’d like, Tim. If you’d rather not post openly (and not anonymously), my e-mail address is retjoun/gmail/com. And if it is your wish, I’ll keep such correspondence private.
Cheers.
Rethabile’

Facebook | Message: Satire Poems - Prompt Writing

SPEED WRITING Call for Satire: deadline March 15th! Let your talent speak for many. We urge you to write a satirical poem—poke fun at the leader of your choice to flaunt your freedom of speech and your own government’s respect for that human right! This isn’t about politics. It is about supporting the rights of all to write what they want - despite politics. On February 4th the satirist Hédi Ouled Baballah was arrested—behind bars, Baballah can’t continue to speak his mind. Please use your talent and add your voice to protest this infringement on the human right of free speech. More information can be found at www. protestpoems. org (don’t feel sorry for colleagues abroad. do something) All poems will be considered for inclusion in Babel Fruit.

Ed: The deadline has been moved back to the 18th of March. Please participate.
(Rethabile)

Tags:
Malcolm X
Malcolm Little
Shabbazz
Black History Month

Sowetan:

A few years ago we had a young kwaito sensation aptly named Lekgoa [sic] because he was white and lekgoa [sic] is Sesotho for white person.

But never have I read anywhere that this young musician was the first white artist to choose kwaito. Neither were many eyebrows raised when Johnny Clegg and PJ Powers branched out.

Are we wittingly going back to the days when we read about “Two men and three blacks killed in a car accident”?

Themba Molefe here touches on a subject I’ve harped on for a long while, as have other people. He talks about black people always being labelled “the first African to…” or “the first black female to…” and so on. While white people who do firsts are not (Themba mentions Johnny Clegg, PJ Powers and a “young kwaito sensation.”).

My interpretation is that people don’t expect blacks to do something, which, when they do, comes as a surprise that warrants “the first black man to…”. But they expect whites to do any and everything, hence no surprise and no firsts there.

Themba also mentions the Senegalese singer Ismael Lo, whose music I admire. Apparently when asked if he was the Bob Dylan of Africa, he replied that perhaps Bob Dylan was the Ismael Lo of America. My sentiments exactly about my country, Lesotho, being named The Switzerland of Africa, but Switzerland not being named the Lesotho of Europe.

I have been told before, whenever I’ve brought this up, that of course Switzerland is famous and well-known, so it’s normal to compare Lesotho to it. But that’s just due to whose standards are being used, and therefore doesn’t work for me.

Question: is a colourless society impossible? I think it is. Here you are, walking down the street, and this white guy is in front of you. You can’t not see that the person is white. And if you’re black, they can’t not see that you are. We can’t achieve a colourless society.

What we can achieve is enough maturity to understand why our outsides are different. Understand that there is occurence of albinism and melanism in America,  in Africa, in Asia, everywhere. That when people are afflicted with these ailments, their characters and what is contained therein do not change. That nurture plays a bigger role than nature in differences among us. And that’s just for starters. There is a long way to go before we mature enough to pretend to live in a colourless society. Even then, the colour will have been ignored only by the force of the spirit, and not by anything else.

So, Themba, the kind of reaction you lament here is gonna go on a lot longer than we’d like it to. Unfortunately. I googled “the first black” and got 3 400 000 ghits (1). Some of these were about Bill Clinton as the first black President of the United States. Then I did “the first white” and got 744 000 ghits (2). Draw your conclusions. First black woman and first white woman get you 157 000 and 21 200 respectively, while the guys get you 82 100 and 67 200 respectively.

Public Enemy’s Chuck D mentions Elvis and Eminem (3) in the same breath, and I add that they haven’t and aren’t being called “the first white men to…”

South African theologian and university administrator to lead February Meetings:

Karen B. Eldridge, Director of News and Public Information
865.981.8207 — karen.eldridge@maryvillecollege.edu

Dr. Russel Botman, rector of Stellenbosch University in South Africa and president of the South African Council of Churches, will be the speaker for Maryville College’s 2008 February Meetings, scheduled for Feb. 4-5. Held annually at the College since 1877, February Meetings have offered the College and local community an opportunity to reflect on authentic Christian faith and action in the contemporary world.

In years past, guest speakers and special music have been highlights of the condensed lecture series, which is open to all members of the College community, people in the area and visitors, including the College’s Board of Church Visitors.
[more…]

2 January 2008

Press Freedom Round-up 2007
86 journalists killed in 2007 - up 244% over five years

In 2007:
  86 journalists and 20 media assistants were killed
  887 arrested
  1,511 physically attacked or threatened
  67 journalists kidnapped
  528 media outlets censored

Online:
  37 bloggers were arrested
  21 physically attacked
  2,676 websites shut down or suspended

In 2006
  85 journalists and 32 media assistants were killed
  871 arrested
  1,472 physically attacked or threatened
  56 journalists kidnapped
  912 media outlets censored

[more…]

“The American scientist at the center of a media storm over comments suggesting that black people were not as intelligent as whites said Thursday he never meant to imply that the African continent was genetically inferior, adding that he was mortified over the attention his words had drawn.”
[source]

Mr Watson, who should be whacked on the head, has reportedly said that:

1. “tests showed Africans did not have the same level of intelligence as whites.”
2. “he was ‘inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa’ because ‘all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really’.”
3. “he was ‘mortified by what had happened’.”
4. he couldn’t “understand how [he] could have said what [he is] quoted as having said.”
5. “to all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologize unreservedly. That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief.”
6. “there are many people of color who are very talented.”
7. while he hopes that everyone is equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”
8. “a woman should have the right to abort her unborn child if tests could determine it would be homosexual.”
9. there is a link between skin colour and sex drive: black people have higher libidos

He should be whacked on the head because a scientist who’s famous for his work on genetics, who’s credited with working out the double-helixed genetic information, should know better. Or perhaps he’s already fallen and knocked his head.

Read more:

1. telegraph.co.uk
2. gnxp.com/blog
3. dailymail.co.uk
4. huffingtonpost.com
5. en.wikipedia.org/wiki

‘President George W. Bush strongly urged lawmakers Wednesday to reject a resolution that describes the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Armenians early in the last century as genocide - a highly sensitive issue at a time of rising U.S.-Turkish tension over northern Iraq.

“We all deeply regret the tragic suffering of the Armenian people that began in 1915,” Bush said in a brief statement. “But this resolution is not the right response to these historic mass killings and its passage would do great harm to relations with a key ally in NATO, and to the war on terror.”’
[more…]

UPDATE:
The bill passed anyway. Aznavour will be happy.

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”
~Desmond Tutu

Desmond Mpilo Tutu was born on 7 October 1931. Happy birthday to him. In the photo he is reacting to testimony on Apartheid presented during a Truth and Reconciliation session in his native South Africa. He chaired the committee and in 1999 was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize for his work there.

He has recently drawn fire for criticising some of Israel’s actions against Palestinians.

UPDATE: Read Mike’s American Sacrifices post

“I am Jewish, and stifling debate and dissent [and] criticism of Israel is a disservice to all Jews, the state of Israel and the American people,” [Marv Davidov] said.
[source]

Mr Davidov was referring to the decision by St Thomas University in Minnesota not to invite Desmond Tutu. The reason the school gave was that Bishop Tutu “compares Jews in Israel to Hitler [and] in another section he questions Jewish faithfulness to God. (1)”

It is indeed a pity that those who made the decision to bar him from speaking at the school feel Israel cannot be criticised, or that people’s faith cannot be questioned.

A professor at the university who was pushing for the invitation to be accepted by the school has been “removed as director [of] the university’s justice and peace studies program. (2)” Someone was very strongly against inviting Tutu to the school, which says that Tutu “has been critical of Israel and Israeli policy regarding the Palestinians, so we talked with people in the Jewish community and they said they believed it would be hurtful to the Jewish community, because of things he’s said. (3)”

Please visit The Jewish Voice for Peace (4) and join the campaign to write to St Thomas’s president, Father Dease, about the injustice of this act, and demand the reinstatement of Professor Toffolo as head of the university’s justice and peace studies program.

The Jewish Voice for Peace further says that “the rumor of Tutu’s alleged ‘anti-Semitism’ is based entirely on a propaganda campaign waged by the extremist group, the Zionist Organization of America. Though he is outspoken in his criticism of Israel’s occupation regime, sometimes even bellicose, Tutu has never displayed anything other than deep concern for all peoples and his sympathy for Palestinians suffering under the yoke of occupation.”

See Tutu’s CV (5)

A few minutes ago I visited one of my favourite blogs, Le Chamois, and the title of a post (reproduced here for this post) was what happened to me this morning, and just about every day, or quotidiennement. I walk my two kids to school, and they always want to take the subway — not the tube but the little tunnel that allows people to cross a busy street.

At the other end, more often than not, is a Caucasian man who hands out leaflets about a phone subscription, or something. For those who don’t know me, I’m Negroid. The man gives out his circular/round advert only to white people. I made it a point to observe him, and he will not extend his hand when it’s a black person going by. This morning he gave his advert to a white woman before us, didn’t give it to me, and gave it to the white couple behind us. I waited at a distance and watched. A black woman went by. The man didn’t offer her the circular/round handout.

I live in France where liberté, fraternité and égalité are supposed to be the norm. But in fact, no. They petered out long ago. My nephew in South Africa is trying to visit us for a week, but the procedure is so long and discouraging (read about it here, hat tip to Le Chamois for the link), I’m beginning to think my sister has given up. On the other hand, I went home for the summer. My French wife and my French children didn’t have to ask for a visa, and they could stay in South Africa and Lesotho for 90 days, just like that. L’exclusion quotidienne. No payslips to produce, no electricity bills, no birth certificates, no letters from the chief of their village. Just a valid passport at the airport.

It doesn’t stop there. Now Africans and other immigrants have to undergo blood tests to prove parental relations with family members already in France. Please visit Le Chamois for more commentary and more links.

“President Bush, in a confrontation with Congress, on Wednesday vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have dramatically expanded children’s health insurance.”
[Read more…]

Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered Saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;
Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones,
Forget not: in thy book record their groans
Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piemontese, that rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
To heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O’er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple Tyrant; that from these may grow
A hundredfold, who, having learnt thy way,
Early may fly the Babylonian woe.
© John Milton

John Milton is the guy who wrote Paradise Lost. This sonnet was written as a result of the massacre of the Waldensians by the Duke of Savoy in 1655. The Waldensians are a small Christian (Protestant) church that has existed since before the Reformation. Why did the Duke of Savoy want them dead? As early as 1211, more than 80 Waldensians were burned as heretics in Strasbourg (1). In fact all of this began much earlier when the Pope refused Waldensians the right to preach without the green light of the clergy. They went ahead and preached, and started going against the Catholic church. For centuries persecution against them continued, on and on through the ages.

The Inquisition sought them out like common criminals, and they were often depicted in images as witches (at that time if you wanted someone burned at the stake, you called them a witch.) But all of it matters little today because we’re in the 21st century, and we know better. Right?

Wrong. Le Chamois reports of Waldensian persecution in Italy in 2007, and Christian conservatives are the persecutors. “Les membres de l’Eglise vaudoise du Piémont en Italie ont été insultés le week-end du 22-23 septembre dernier par un mouvement extrémiste (2).” Or, Members of the Waldensian church in Piedmont, Italy, were insulted on the weekend of 22-23 September by an extremist movement. September this year, yes!

Le Chamois further tells us that phrases such as, “To the stakes with Waldensians!” have appeared on walls of San Germano Chisone and Turin churches. That is a serious threat that evokes what previously happened. Slain by the bloody Piemontese, Milton says in his sonnet. Today it’s: threatened by a politico-Christian minority. What next?

17 September 2007

ERITREA

Democratic governments urged to summon Eritrean ambassadors on anniversary of 18 September 2001 crackdown

Reporters Without Borders calls on the foreign ministries of the leading democracies to mark tomorrow’s sixth anniversary of the start of a wave of arrests in Asmara by summoning Eritrea’s ambassadors to express disapproval for a crackdown that led to the suppression of all freedoms and the imprisonment of more than 10 journalists in unknown locations.

Governments that believe in press freedom should make a formal protest about the complete secrecy surrounding Eritrea’s political prisoners and the threats and extortion to which the Eritrean diaspora and exiles and the families of political prisoners are subjected, the organisation said.

“Eritreans need the support of the democracies in order to get President Issaias Afeworki’s regime to loosen its grip on them and their families,” Reporters Without Borders said. “This anniversary must be used to show that press freedom and human rights are not a luxury reserved for a few prosperous nations but a universal right.”

The organisation added: “It would be inconceivable if this anniversary were to pass without any sign of solidarity with Eritrea’s detainees from governments that should make at least some, minimal demands on the countries that have embassies in their capitals.”

On 18 September 2001, the Eritrean government suddenly ordered the closure of all the privately-owned media and began throwing their executives and editors one by one into prison. For several weeks, the political police waged a manhunt in the capital of Africa’s youngest country.

Hundreds of government opponents have been held in unknown locations ever since then. They include at least 12 journalists – Dawit Isaac, Fessehaye “Joshua” Yohannes, Yusuf Mohamed Ali, Mattewos Habteab, Dawit Habtemichael, Medhanie Haile, Temesgen Gebreyesus, Emanuel Asrat, Said Abdulkader, Seyoum Tsehaye, Hamid Mohamed Said and Saleh Al Jezaeeri.

According to the information available to Reporters Without Borders, four of these journalists have already died in the 314 prison centres scattered throughout the country. The few Eritreans who have managed to escape or have been released say conditions in the prisons are appalling.

Those who have not been arrested or who have not managed to flee the country are forced to live under the yoke of an all-powerful government. After the defection of several leading state media journalists, the authorities began last November to arrest other journalists suspected of staying in contact with the fugitives or of planning to flee themselves.

One of the suspect journalists arrested at the end of last year, Paulos Kidane of the Amharic-language service of state-owned Eri-TV and radio Dimtsi Hafash (Voice of the Broad Masses), told Reporters Without Borders after his release: “We were beaten and tortured in prison for refusing to give the passwords to our e-mail accounts. In the end we cracked because the pain was too much.” Kidane died a few months later, in June, while trying to flee on foot across the border into Sudan.

Daniel Mussie of Radio Dimtsi Hafash’s Oromo-language service has not been released since last November’s crackdown. Eyob Kessete, a journalist with the Amharic-language service of Dimtsi Hafash, and Eri-TV editor Johnny Hisabu were arrested while trying to leave the country clandestinely across the border earlier this year and are still being held somewhere.

Even those Eritreans who manage to get out of the country continue to have to submit to the government’s dictates. All members of the diaspora are obliged to keep paying 2 per cent of their income to the Eritrean embassy in the country where they reside. If they do not comply, they are banned from ever returning home, owning any property there or even sending packages back to Eritrea.

The families of journalists and others who flee abroad are exposed to reprisals and there have been cases in which close relatives – brothers, sisters or parents – have been imprisoned indefinitely and denied contact with the outside world.

—————–

ERYTHRÉE

Sixième anniversaire du 18 septembre 2001 : Reporters sans frontières demande aux gouvernements démocratiques de convoquer leur ambassadeur d’Erythrée pour lui signifier leur réprobation

Reporters sans frontières appelle les ministères des Affaires étrangères des grandes démocraties à convoquer l’ambassadeur érythréen de leur pays respectif, en commémoration des grandes rafles qui ont démarré le 18 septembre 2001 en Erythrée, conduit à la fermeture totale du territoire et à mené à l’incarcération au secret de plus d’une dizaine de journalistes.

L’organisation demande aux gouvernements attachés à la liberté de la presse de protester ainsi, officiellement, contre le secret absolu imposé sur la situation des détenus politiques en Erythrée et le chantage organisé envers la diaspora, les fugitifs et les familles des prisonniers.

“Les Erythréens ont besoin du soutien des démocraties pour que le régime de fer d’Issaias Afeworki desserre l’emprise qu’il maintient sur eux et leurs familles. Cette date symbolique doit être utilisée pour montrer que la liberté de la presse et les droits de l’homme ne sont pas un luxe réservé à quelques peuples prospères, mais un droit universel. Il serait incompréhensible que ce sixième anniversaire se déroule sans qu’aucun signe de solidarité avec les prisonniers érythréens soit donné par les Etats qui ont un minimum d’exigence envers les pays qui disposent d’ambassades sur leur territoire”, a déclaré Reporters sans frontières.

Le 18 septembre 2001, tous les médias privés ont été soudainement fermés sur ordre du gouvernement et leurs responsables ont commencé à être jetés en prison, un par un. La capitale du plus jeune pays d’Afrique s’est transformée en terrain de chasse pour la police politique pendant plusieurs semaines. Depuis, en plus de centaines d’opposants, une quinzaine de journalistes ont disparu dans les geôles du pays. Ils s’appellent Dawit Isaac, Fessehaye Yohannes, dit “Joshua”, Yusuf Mohamed Ali, Mattewos Habteab, Dawit Habtemichael, Medhanie Haile, Temesgen Gebreyesus, Emanuel Asrat, Said Abdulkader, Seyoum Tsehaye, Hamid Mohamed Said et Saleh Al Jezaeeri. Selon les informations de Reporters sans frontières, quatre d’entre eux ont d’ores et déjà trouvé la mort dans l’un des 314 centres pénitentiaires qui parsèment le pays. Les quelques Erythréens qui ont pu fuir après avoir été libérés de prison font état de conditions de détention effroyables.

Ceux qui n’ont pas pu fuir ou que la police n’a pas arrêtés ont été contraints de vivre sous la férule d’un gouvernement tout-puissant. En novembre 2006, suite aux défections de plusieurs journalistes célèbres des médias publics, les autorités ont arrêté ceux qui étaient suspectés d’être restés en contact avec les fugitifs ou de chercher à fuir eux-mêmes. Selon le récit qu’il avait fait après sa libération à Reporters sans frontières, l’un d’eux a été “battu et torturé en prison, après avoir refusé de divulger les mots de passe de [leurs] adresses électroniques”. “Finalement, nous avons craqué parce que la douleur était trop forte”, avait-il ajouté. Paulos Kidane, journaliste du service en amharique de la chaîne publique érythréenne Eri-TV et de la station publique Dimtsi Hafash (Voix des larges masses), est mort quelques mois plus tard, en juin 2007, alors qu’il tentait de fuir à pied vers le Soudan. Daniel Mussie, journaliste du service en oromo de Radio Dimtsi Hafash, n’est quant à lui jamais sorti de prison. Eyob Kessete et Johnny Hisabu, respectivement journaliste du service en amharique de la radio publique et monteur de la chaîne de télévision publique Eri-TV, ont été arrêtés alors qu’ils tentaient de passer clandestinement les frontières du pays et sont toujours détenus quelque part.

Même lorsqu’ils sont parvenus à quitter le territoire, les Erythréens continuent de subir le diktat du gouvernement d’Issaias Afeworki. Tous ceux qui vivent en diaspora sont ainsi contraints de verser 2% de leurs revenus à l’ambassade d’Erythrée de leur pays, faute de quoi il leur est interdit de retourner sur leur terre natale, d’y posséder un bien quelconque ou d’y envoyer des colis. Des représailles sont exercées contre les familles de ceux, notamment les journalistes, qui sont parvenus à s’exiler. Des membres de leur entourage proche, des frères, des soeurs ou des parents sont incarcérés indéfiniment, sans contact avec l’extérieur.

__________________________________________

Leonard VINCENT
Bureau Afrique / Africa desk
Reporters sans frontières / Reporters Without Borders
5, rue Geoffroy-Marie
75009 Paris, France
Tel : (33) 1 44 83 84 76
Fax : (33) 1 45 23 11 51
Email : afrique@rsf.org / africa@rsf.org
Web : www.rsf.org

The 11th of September, dubbed 9/11 by many, was a horrendous day that I think I will remember for the rest of my days. Here are the reasons why. (1) Many innocent people lost their lives, quite unnecessarily and in quite a cruel manner; (2) Most of those who flew the planes or helped hijack them had a future, family, prospects, and they chucked it out the window. I don’t understand; (3) The tragedy was spectacular, and I keep seeing the second plane slamming into a tower; (4) The amount of hate that goes into planning and executing something like this is beyond my comprehension; and (5) I’ve already seen a few films and documentaries on the subject, and I’m sure there’s more to come.

How can we forget, and why should we? How can we forget tragedy? Loss of life? Cruelty? La bêtise humaine? How can we forget 11 September 2001? How? How can we forget the Shoah? How can we forget slavery? How can we forget the dying populations of Iraq? How can we forget Rwanda? How can we forget New Orleans and Katrina? How can we forget Darfur? How? And more important, why should we? How can we forget Apartheid?

Google the phrase “we will never forget” and see how many links you come up with. I hit 946 000. If half of them talk about something other than the 11th of September, there’s still 473 000 people on-line who will never forget. Plus three quarters of the off-line population of the world. Now google 9/11. My point?

This is a long way of saying, I’m glad we aren’t forgetting this, my way of saying we must never forget those, either. No tragedy should be forgotten, and the perpetrator(s) need to be punished. I needed to go this long way to assure my reader that I do refer to all human tragedies. All of them.

I also needed to say this after the day of 11 September (out of respect), but close enough to the day for my little “diatribe” to hold some meaning. Some time ago I read a poem that may perhaps illustrate my feeling more clearly. Poems always do, don’t they? If you want to comment on my opinion here, please do so (agree, disagree with me). If you want to comment on the poem, please do so (poetics of the poem). Here it is:

A MOMENT OF SILENCE, BEFORE I START THIS POEM

Before I start this poem, I’d like to ask you to join me
In a moment of silence
In honor of those who died in the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon last September 11th.
I would also like to ask you
To offer up a moment of silence
For all of those who have been harassed, imprisoned,
disappeared, tortured, raped, or killed in retaliation for those strikes,
For the victims in both Afghanistan and the U.S.

And if I could just add one more thing…
A full day of silence
For the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have died at the
hands of U.S.-backed Israeli
forces over decades of occupation.
Six months of silence for the million and-a-half Iraqi people,
mostly children, who have died of
malnourishment or starvation as a result of an 11-year U.S. embargo against the country.

Before I begin this poem,
Two months of silence for the Blacks under Apartheid in South Africa,
Where homeland security made them aliens in their own country.
Nine months of silence for the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Where death rained down and peeled back every layer of
concrete, steel, earth and skin
And the survivors went on as if alive.
A year of silence for the millions of dead in Vietnam - a people,
not a war - for those who
know a thing or two about the scent of burning fuel, their
relatives’ bones buried in it, their babies born of it.
A year of silence for the dead in Cambodia and Laos, victims of
a secret war … ssssshhhhh….
Say nothing … we don’t want them to learn that they are dead.
Two months of silence for the decades of dead in Colombia,
Whose names, like the corpses they once represented, have
piled up and slipped off our tongues.

Before I begin this poem.
An hour of silence for El Salvador …
An afternoon of silence for Nicaragua …
Two days of silence for the Guatemaltecos …
None of whom ever knew a moment of peace in their living years.
45 seconds of silence for the 45 dead at Acteal, Chiapas
25 years of silence for the hundred million Africans who found
their graves far deeper in the ocean than any building could
poke into the sky.
There will be no DNA testing or dental records to identify their remains.
And for those who were strung and swung from the heights of
sycamore trees in the south, the north, the east, and the west…

100 years of silence…
For the hundreds of millions of indigenous peoples from this half
of right here,
Whose land and lives were stolen,
In postcard-perfect plots like Pine Ridge, Wounded Knee, Sand
Creek,
Fallen Timbers, or the Trail of Tears.
Names now reduced to innocuous magnetic poetry on the
refrigerator of our consciousness …

So you want a moment of silence?
And we are all left speechless
Our tongues snatched from our mouths
Our eyes stapled shut
A moment of silence
And the poets have all been laid to rest
The drums disintegrating into dust.

Before I begin this poem,
You want a moment of silence
You mourn now as if the world will never be the same
And the rest of us hope to hell it won’t be. Not like it always has
been.

Because this is not a 9/11 poem.
This is a 9/10 poem,
It is a 9/9 poem,
A 9/8 poem,
A 9/7 poem
This is a 1492 poem.

This is a poem about what causes poems like this to be written.
And if this is a 9/11 poem, then:
This is a September 11th poem for Chile, 1971.
This is a September 12th poem for Steven Biko in South Africa, 1977.
This is a September 13th poem for the brothers at Attica Prison,
New York, 1971.
This is a September 14th poem for Somalia, 1992.
This is a poem for every date that falls to the ground in ashes
This is a poem for the 110 stories that were never told
The 110 stories that history chose not to write in textbooks
The 110 stories that CNN, BBC, The New York Times, and
Newsweek ignored.
This is a poem for interrupting this program.

And still you want a moment of silence for your dead?
We could give you lifetimes of empty:
The unmarked graves
The lost languages
The uprooted trees and histories
The dead stares on the faces of nameless children
Before I start this poem we could be silent forever
Or just long enough to hunger,
For the dust to bury us
And you would still ask us
For more of our silence.

If you want a moment of silence
Then stop the oil pumps
Turn off the engines and the televisions
Sink the cruise ships
Crash the stock markets
Unplug the marquee lights,
Delete the instant messages,
Derail the trains, the light rail transit.

If you want a moment of silence, put a brick through the window
of Taco Bell,
And pay the workers for wages lost.
Tear down the liquor stores,
The townhouses, the White Houses, the jailhouses, the
Penthouses and the Playboys.

If you want a moment of silence,
Then take it
On Super Bowl Sunday,
The Fourth of July
During Dayton’s 13 hour sale
Or the next time your white guilt fills the room where my beautiful
people have gathered.

You want a moment of silence
Then take it NOW,
Before this poem begins.
Here, in the echo of my voice,
In the pause between goosesteps of the second hand,
In the space between bodies in embrace,
Here is your silence.
Take it.
But take it all…Don’t cut in line.
Let your silence begin at the beginning of crime. But we,
Tonight we will keep right on singing…For our dead.

© Emmanuel Ortiz (published on 11 September 2002)
* Listen to the poem (1)
* Other poems against human tragedy (2)

Zoe, my brother, says “On this day, the 4th of September, in 1981, our home was attacked in the middle of the night by armed soldiers. The target was our father, Benjamin Masilonyane Masilo, who escaped the shooting by the skin of his teeth. It is truly a miracle that he survived the attack. Motlatsi however, his three-year old grandson and our nephew, was not so lucky. He died, presumably in his sleep because he was still in his position on the bed, when the bullets ripped his stomach open.

Lest we forget, and so that such things may not continue to happen to other people, we need to tell this story and those of others similar to ours, over and over and over again.” I say amen to that. I’d hate for what happened to us to happen to someone else. That’s because I know first hand the horror of it, and how much it can destroy a life, lives, not of the killed only, but of the survivors as well. Lest we forget, our job, all of us, is to prevent this sort of thing from ever happening again. We must remind our leaders day and night, and we must be prepared to affront them with guts and integrity.

I refuse to wish anyone a happy 4th of September…

AGENDA #74 – Rape

Poems will be considered for publication in Agenda 74, which will be published in the beginning of December 2007.

Poetry can be but does not have to be on the theme of rape.

Length of contributions: Poems have to fit a full page of Agenda (slightly bigger than A5)

Submission deadline: 14 September 2007

Submission requirements:

1. All submissions must be emailed to editor@agenda.org.za.
2. All submitted poems must come with a short bio and contact details of the author.
3. If you would like to publish anonymously please state so clearly in your submission.

Please feel free to forward this poetry call to anyone you think might be interested.

I have seen many documentaries on genocide and human atrocities. Movies too. Hotel Rwanda? Killing Fields? Roots? Schindler’s List? Been there, done that, and after each time I incredulously asked: “how did all the ‘good people’ allow this to happen?”
[Continue…]

AND I WATCH IT IN MANDELA (by John Matshikiza)

It is not for the safety of silence
That this man has opened his arms to lead.
The strength of his words hangs in the air
As the strength in his eyes remains on the sky;
And the years of impatient waiting draw on
While this man burns to clear the smoke in the air.
There is fire here,
Which no prison
Can kill in this man;
And I watch it in Mandela.
© John Matshikiza

Nelson Mandela was born today in 1918. Happy birthday to him. I won’t bother you with the details of who he is and what he’s done. I’ll bother you by telling you what he means to me. It is immeasurable and it stifles me, prevents me from writing a poem about him, even if that very idea remains one of the aims of my writing life.

When Nelson Mandela was released, I was on a sofa in a small French village called Lamorlaye, staring at the telly. We waited quite a long time because something wasn’t right or wasn’t ready, and we waited. I was excited. “What does he look like?” I’d only ever seen two or three photos of him, and they were 27 year-old photos (or older).

When I was in high school in the late 70s, Soweto happened, and young, black South-Africans poured into Lesotho to escape persecution and death in their homeland. Some were supporters of the ANC, while others were of the PAC, and still others of the BPC. All were after one thing, however: free South Africa from Apartheid. I learned a sort of discipline from some of them. We would gather and sing South African freedom songs into the night. They were in Zulu, Sesotho, Xhosa and English. One of my favourites was, “Nantsi indoda emnyama, Vorster! Pasopa, nantsi indoda emnyama, Vorster” (Here comes the black man, Vorster! Watch out, here comes the black man, Vorster).

Through my new friends we discovered the Freedom Charter, which started off by declaring that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it.” In the early evening after supper we’d huddle around a small transistor set and try to catch Radio Freedom, an ANC station broadcasting out of Tanzania.

Nelson with wife, Graca

I had memorised a chunk of ntate Mandela’s defense speech (Rivonia trial), and eventually threw in ntate Sobukwe’s statements and my own into it. A pot-pourri of freedom words. I was moved every time I recited it, privately or publicly. One of my friends told me to remove the word Azania from the speech and replace it with South Africa. I saw no reason why not.

When he emerged, fist up, Winnie by his side, I immediately broke down and fell, sobbing, into my wife’s arms. I was moved beyond any expectation. Later on we listened to his first words after 27 years. He said that he wasn’t a prophet, but “a servant of you, the people.” Something like that. But I’ve got to find an exact quote:

Friends, comrades and fellow South Africans.
I greet you all in the name of peace, democracy and freedom for all.
I stand here before you not as a prophet but as a humble servant of you, the people. Your tireless and heroic sacrifices have made it possible for me to be here today.
I therefore place the remaining years of my life in your hands.
[source]

That’s how he began. I have been permanently touched by this man. I have also been permanently touched by other events that occurred in southern Africa, especially in Lesotho. I would like to wish Nelson Mandela a happy birthday, and to thank him for being the person who he is. South Africa is a better place because of people like him. Sobukwe. Biko. Sisulu. Fischer. Motsoaledi. Tambo. Mxenge. Mbeki (the father). Tutu. The list is long. One day when I get to write that poem about him, it’ll most probably be what will happen after he goes, or what happened after he left. A portion of what i had memorised in high school says,

Above all, we want equal political rights, because without them our disabilities will be permanent. I know this sounds revolutionary to the whites in this country, because the majority of voters will be Africans. This makes the white man fear democracy.

But this fear cannot be allowed to stand in the way of the only solution which will guarantee racial harmony and freedom for all. It is not true that the enfranchisement of all will result in racial domination. Political division, based on colour, is entirely artificial and, when it disappears, so will the domination of one colour group by another. The ANC has spent half a century fighting against racialism. When it triumphs it will not change that policy.

This then is what the ANC is fighting. Their struggle is a truly national one. It is a struggle of the African people, inspired by their own suffering and their own experience. It is a struggle for the right to live.

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.
[source]

My link in Lesotho says, “Hooray!!! Judge ‘Maseforo Mahase of the Lesotho High Court has ordered that Makotoko Lerotholi (a former soldier), the first man to be abducted by the masked men, be released to his family immediately.

Last evening Advocate Haae Phoofolo, a human rights lawyer based in Maseru, lodged an application before the High Court for an order demanding the immediate release of Lerotholi, pointing out that he was unlawfully arrested and has not been charged since. This came after the army had attempted to dump Lerotholi and Motlomelo, another abductee, into the hands of the police. The police agreed to take Motlomelo in (I’m not clear on the grounds yet), but refused to take Lerotholi into their custody citing the horrible condition of his health and self as their reason.

The respondents in the application were as follows: the Army Commander, the Minister of Defence (who happens to be the Prime Minister), the Commissioner of Police, the Superintendent at the Makoanyane Army Hospital and the Attorney General.

Visibly shaken and unstable, Lerotholi arrived at the High Court at around 21:00 hours led by members of the Lesotho Defence Force. He, through his lawyer, recited his story since the abduction at the entrance to Lakeside Hotel on the 22 of June 2007. He was taken by about ten heavily armed men, blindfolded and driven somewhere into the mountains. Along the way he was repeatedly gunbutted and kicked.

His abductors demanded that he tell the whereabouts of the armoury where the guns taken from ministers’ bodyguards was. His torture was systematically directed to the kidneys and genitals, and this has rendered his urinary system malfunctional.

The judge ordered that he be released immediately to his family and after condemning the whole saga, prayed to God that she never in her whole life presides over a similar case. We are continuously encouraged by such judgements and look at them as a good sign of sanity amidst the madness we live in.

The questions remain: why did the army deny any knowledge of the whereabouts of these men? Why did the government spokesman, Minister of Information and Broadcasting, deny any knowledge by the government of the whereabouts and condition of these men? If any wrong was done, why were the men not arrested by the police and charged, instead of being abducted by the army and tortured? Why? Why? Why?”

Monyane Moleleki

Thabo Thantsi, the abductee who was hospitalised at Makoanyane Army Hospital, has escaped and resurfaced somewhere in South Africa. He came on air on Harvest FM’s “Rise and Shine” morning show and gave a thorough detail of his ordeal at the hands of the army. He is a former soldier himself.

The details of his ordeal are gory and I shudder at the mere recollection. He says he was in the hands of the army and he has divulged the names of the officers who were interrogating him, demanding that he produce the guns taken from ministers’ bodyguards recently. He says another question was why he had resigned from the army (in 2003) and why he is now a bodyguard to Motsoahae Thabane, the ABC leader.

He has named the Minister of Natural Resources, Monyane Moleleki, as the mastermind behind these abductions. According to Thabo, his feet were chained and padlocked, his hands cuffed behind and to the chain around his feet. When his folks came to see him he was uncuffed and unchained and asked not to reveal his condition to them. He further reveals that many of the abducted men, some still actively employed in the army, are at the army hospital in varying conditions of torture.

From what he says he heard while his abductors were talking, the Minister has already paid up and the elite group has two weeks to finish off all members of the ABC who are perceived to be active and dangerous.

I tried to find the name Thabo Thantsi on the Internet, and actually found two links, his voter details (if it’s the same Thabo Thantsi): here, and mention of him in the Lesotho Forum: here. I looked up the minister allegedly involved, and found a Wikipedia mention, an article about the 2006 attack on him, a speech in Iran Daily (scroll down a bit), and a short interview.

This is in response to a blog post I came across. The writer was wondering whether Tutu was a Christian or not. Since I think he’s one of the better public people on this planet, I decided to put my two-cents’ worth. I modified the original comment slightly to turn it into a blog post.

“Elie, No problem for the belated response. I understand what you’re saying, and still I disagree. But it’s a free country, and you can believe what you wish. Ditto for me. I’m not gay. I’m married to a beautiful woman and I have two children. I’m attracted by women, yes. None of your business, true, but I’m trying to convince you of something important.

But that doesn’t mean I have anything to say against gay people. I know gay folks who are godly, and who are most probably going to heaven. I know so-called straight folks who are shits. Pardon my French. Sex orientation has very little to do with anything.I’m a Christian, raised in a Christian family. I’m saying this only to assure you that I do know 1 Corinthians 9:1-12. But do you?

What language do you read it in? French? English? Jesus didn’t speak any of those languages. Man translated the Bible into French and English. Do you know what the word for homosexual in Greek is? In Latin? In Aramaic, the native language of Jesus? If you don’t know, then either you dig and find out, or you ponder who Jesus was/is, and ask yourself if he wasn’t/isn’t all-encompassing in his love and in his understanding, like Tutu says. If you don’t know, how can you be so sure that Jesus “was/is against homosexuality”? Are you just repeating things that are said by other people?

I looked around your blog and didn’t see anything on the war in Iraq. Nothing on Darfur, either. Start there, I say.

That is all I have say. Please keep speaking out on your blog, because it’s important to speak out. But make sure you choose wisely who you speak out against. Don’t shoot the good guys. By the way, you speak out against the parents of little Maddie, as having lost the little girl “because of their strong uncontrollable desire for pleasure.” They left the kids in the flat and went to a restaurant.

But they should be able to do that! The fault is not with the parents but with the criminal who took their child. I and many others have plastered photos of Maddie on our blogs. We’re doing something. Are the people who took Maddie Christians? If not, speak out against them, not against innocent people.

By the way, I have a very good friend in Sucy-en-Brie, which I know is attached to Bonneuil. I had another friend in Bonneuil who worked for the Port Autonome de Paris. But I don’t know where he is, now. Cheers.”

News from Lesotho is disturbing. Democracy and the rule of law are advancing backwards. Recently, a curfew was put up, after attacks were carried out on prominent politicians’ homes. That rings a bell. If you can link to this, or reproduce it on your blog, I would be most grateful. Or tell a friend over coffee. Or just read it and sympathise with us in spirit (or whatever deed). I know I sound desperate — I am. This needs to be talked about and shared. I have just received news from home that:

Thabo Thakalekoala of Seapoint in Maseru, a vocal and prominent freelancing investigative journalist, was arrested on Friday morning (22 June 2007) and charged with high treason. He is appearing in court today (25 June 2007) to be formally charged.

On the day of his arrest he had just read a letter over the air on his popular morning programme “Rise and Shine” on Harvest FM. The letter was supposedly given to him by a group of army men and requested to read it on his show. The soldiers vehemently denounced the rule of one Mosikili in Lesotho who they say is a foreigner and therefore is not elligible to hold such office. This comes after it was discovered that the PM holds a South African identity document (a fact he has publicly admitted), no wonder the rampant looting of state coffers by way of the 84% salary increments and the M4000.00 Kompressors and the M2000.00 Camrys.

We look back in sadness at the deaths of Mahlomola Motuba and Mike Pitso, two journalists who were killed for their brave and fearless reporting of unfairness and prejudice in the past regimes. We have been taken back decades in our learning curve, and are now starting from scratch to plant the seed of unity and true freedom. We take courage from the fact, however, that history has not been kind to dictators who parade themselves as democrats. ‘Nete ke tutulu ha e patehe, or “Truth is ‘unhideable’.” We call on the international media to take note of this heinous act by the Lesotho Government to gag transparency and free access to information, especially as state media is totally not accessible to anyone else but the ruling party.

Re sa lebeletse. Khotso.

Background information:
www.protectionline.org

UPDATE (26 June):
News from The People’s Choice FM: Written by Falla
People`s Choice FM Management, Mr. Motlatsi Majara & Mrs Kholu Qhobela paid a visit to the detained Media Insitute of Southern Africa regional Chairperson and Harvest FM freelancer, Mr. Thabo Thakalekoala yesterday.

The Main aim for the visit was to give support and courage to him as a brother, colleague and journalist at this trying time that he is going through.
Mr. Thakalekoala who is charged with high treason is in police custody and is expected to appear before Magistrate Court today, and on the hand the Regional Director of Media Institute is expected to be in the country today.

He is in the mean time refusing to eat anything (hunger strike), insisting on his liberty and justice.

Submitted by ‘Marafaele Mohloboli

---

Links:

• http://khotla.blogspot.com
• http://lesothoforum

“Jesus did not say, ‘If I be lifted up I will draw some’.” Jesus said, ‘If I be lifted up I will draw all, all, all, all, all. Black, white, yellow, rich, poor, clever, not so clever, beautiful, not so beautiful. It’s one of the most radical things. All, all, all, all, all, all, all, all. All belong. Gay, lesbian, so-called straight. All, all are meant to be held in this incredible embrace that will not let us go. All.”
~~ Desmond Mpilo Tutu

Thoughts:
Can homosexuality be cured?
An open letter for acceptance
Young Brazilian Catholics Disagree with Vatican

Tags:
Tutu
Homosexuality
Christians and Homosexuality

I was fifteen, but I remember the events of 16 June 1976 like it was last week. Black kids rose against the Apartheid state in South Africa, and refused Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in schools. They stamped their collective foot and said “No!” And their cry shook the world. Police opened fire and the first kid to go down was Hector Pieterson. I know you’ve seen the now famous picture of his limp body in the hands of Mbuyisa Makhubo, his sister running alongside them.

“I saw that he was bad, but I thought that he was just wounded, you know,” remembers Hector’s sister, Antoinette Sithole. [source]

There were to be many victims that day. Hector’s photo was plastered on the conscience of the world (though few did anything about it), but there weren’t enough photographers to shoot take pictures of the other victims. Hastings Ndlovu was another such victim, and it is said he may have even died before Hector. Here’s the story of his death.

Klein was dumbstruck as to how a school child, in the middle of the morning, was being admitted to Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital with gunshot wounds, and questions raced through his mind.

“Children with bullet wounds?” he wondered. “But how? And by whom? A robbery? By school kids? In the middle of the day? Where would the guns come from? Black South Africans are prohibited from owning guns.”

The answer came: “They were shot by the police.”

Klein says a quick survey in the casualty ward revealed that all except one child were shot above the waist: in other words, the police had shot to kill. Then his old high school friend and a neurosurgeon, Dr Risik Gopal, arrived and checked Hastings’ condition.

Gopal confirmed what Klein had suspected: no one could survive such an injury. And indeed, a “short time later, Hastings was dead”, having been in a coma from the moment he was shot, Klein says.

Klein worked in Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital for several years, and had been warned that it would be a “baptism in blood” - particularly on Friday nights. But after years of handling “grisly injuries” from assaults using a range of weapons, he thought “nothing could penetrate the emotional barriers I had learned to erect”.

Not that day.

The sight of “uniformed children riddled with bullets”, accompanied by their “terminal breaths”, left Klein feeling helpless and hopeless, and he could only watch in despair as life ebbed from the “fragile frame” of Ndlovu.

The white hospital administrator walked into the ward and Klein told him to expect trouble that night in Soweto. The administrator replied: “Oh, no, by tonight everything will have blown over.”

Klein, a coloured doctor who under apartheid ethos had no authority to shout at a white person, couldn’t contain himself. He yelled: “In Soweto, you do not shoot children and get away with it. There is going to be shit!” He walked away with tears in his eyes.

Klein had to break the news of Ndlovu’s death to the boy’s friends and relatives, a difficult task not made easier by repeating the news to other relatives of dead children. “I remember the looks of disbelief, the anguish, the tears. And I remember my own grief welling up afresh each time I delivered the grim news.”

Gopal, now the chief neurosurgeon at the hospital, said they stood at the window and watched police shooting children. Some of the staff members saw their own children being brought in with gunshot wounds. “There was a lot of emotion on the day. It was just chaos,” he says.

By late afternoon the government had prohibited blacks from assembling in groups larger than three. Workers, when they disembarked from trains and taxis, got together before walking home, wondering what was happening, unaware of the ruling.

Police opened fire on them, expecting them to know about the prohibition, and they arrived at hospital asking innocently why the police were shooting at them.

Others arrived at hospital with strange wounds, says Klein: small entrance holes in their upper bodies, with larger exit wounds lower down. One man said: “We were sitting in our kitchen, having dinner, when bullets came in through the roof and hit us.” Police were firing from helicopters overhead. [source]

The purpose of this post is of course to remember these children’s sacrifice. I remember the personal friends I made after refugees started flowing into Lesotho from all over South Africa. I remember how we would gather round and sing freedom songs in the evenings, how knowing them made us better politicians at that young age (I was fifteen). I remember how we’d listen to Radio Freedom being broadcast from Tanzania by the African National Congress. I remember how the sound sucked because the Apartheid government was doing its best to kill the signal.

I remember.

The other purpose of this post is to warn us about being inactive in the face of grave injustices. After 1976 and what it brought to South Africa, you’d think the world would do something. You’d be wrong. You think the world might do something for Darfur today? Wrong again. Mention a calamity in the world and ask yourself if the world might intervene, and you’d be wrong to think it might. But America did intervene in Iraq (not in Darfur). Find the error. Did America intervene in South Africa with

1. the mere existence of Apartheid
2. laws such as The Immorality Act of 1950, which stated that no one could make love to anyone outside of his or her race
3. Nelson Mandela and many other leaders in prison
4. the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960
5. the Soweto uprisings of 1976
6. the fact that more than 3 million blacks were forcibly removed from their homes and resettled in black ‘homelands‘.
7. the gruesome killing of Steve Biko in 1977
8. the killing of Ruth First, wife of Joe Slovo, by means of a parcel bomb
9. and many other injustices carried out against a whole people because of the activity of melanocytes in their skin

So, how did the world react? How did the big Occidental powers react? This is part of what happened: “[Chester] Crocker attracted the attention of the Reagan transition team with an article he wrote in the winter 1980/81 edition of the Foreign Affairs journal. In the article, Crocker was highly critical of the outgoing Carter administration for its apparent hostility to the white minority government in South Africa, by acquiescing in the United Nations Security Council’s imposition of a mandatory arms embargo (UNSCR 418/77) and the UN’s demand for the end of South Africa’s illegal occupation of Namibia (UNSCR 435/78). [source]” That’s what happened. The Reagan administration went on to apply and implement its policy of Constructive Engagement.

Let us remember this day with a particular thought for those who died; let us remember it also with a particular thought at preventing it from happening in the future now. So, whatchu gon’ do?

Nkosi, sikelel’i Afrika

“Mankind protects and feeds the panda, but exposes and starves Darfur.”
~~ Rethabile Masilo.

I said that here.

Our bowls clanking
like ghost vessels,
we stand against sun and wind,
and death that loops over
to take our vision;
when all else has deserted us
in the blankness of the hour
the horizon, our last scene,
comes at us
from where no sun
will ever rise.
© Rethabile Masilo

This poem is in memory of Kevin Carter, and that little Sudanese girl in his snap.

The ash moon like a hole
siphoned all flowers
to adorn the other side.

Every plant of every seed
all gone for the sole
glory of hyper-powers;

gone forever is the star’s
confession, where we stood
in lineage a little while,

God’s hope, the life of soil,
the need that feeds my hours
in the night, muddied blood

let for gain. Look at the sons
of slavery among the saints!
© Rethabile Masilo

Tags:
Slavery
Slaves
Triangular trade

The ANC has betrayed the masses of people, the poor, the vulnerable and most needy sections of South African society both in the urban and in the rural areas. HIV and AIDS are lived experiences for everyone in these areas. As someone said to me – we in the townships, the informal settlements, the rural areas all live with HIV – no one has friends, relatives and family who are either positive or who have died of AIDS – it is everywhere sometimes openly sometimes secretly amongst us but it is there and it speaks [Continue]…

21 Hlakubele 1960
Tsatsing leo, batho ba batšo ba 69
ba bolailoe ka lithunya, ba 180 ba ntšoa likotsi*

If when this township
was placed under siege
you were present, you
would have seen life
lamented, batho
wailing, the quick
holding their heads in the
sky to speak incantations
to disconsolate gods,
The dead still, stacked
against the guards, body
upon body, dead
but unbowed in their
steely will that no man
can bend. Quite suddenly
a woman, pail balanced
upon her head, hurls
her soul to the sky, ad
libitum. O Sharpeville!
And her cry rises forever
high – until heaven itself
gives, and what once
was black or white becomes
nil, wherever you look.
© Rethabile Masilo

*This is Sesotho for, “That day, 69 black people were gunned down; 180 were injured.”

Discussion:

1. The Sharpeville Massacre was one of two biggest events that shaped a direction for South Africa’s black citizens. What was the other one, and on what year did it take place?
2. If you went to South Africa today, what would you expect to find in terms of rights and freedoms for the different ethnic groups there (black, white, mixed)?
3. Have you ever read a book or seen a film on South Africa? If not, try (a) The Covenant by James Michener and/or (b) Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton for books, and (c) Tsotsi and/or (d) Cry Freedom for films. There are also many documentaries and other books, including the autobiographies of (e) Nelson Mandela (Long Walk to Freedom) and (f) Frederic De Klerk (The Last Trek, A New Beginning)
4. How do say “March” the month in Sesotho?
5. Has your country distanced itself from the problem evoked by this poem?

Let’s discuss it: poefrika thingy gmail thingy com

Link: My sista friend Busi!

The fact that African American history, culture, and especially literature means so much to me can be (and probably should be) cause for suspicion. But rather than in futility attempt to submerge into my own motives (and the motives for those motives, and the motives for the motives of those motives), I’d like to offer some quotes (and maybe, maybe not) some later meanderings of my own about specific writers. The latter might even be instructive for someone. [source]

That’s a quote from Jon’s blog. He likes the black writers he mentions, but he’s careful to give us the motives, lest we think he likes black people, full-stop. What’s the motive for liking art? Ehh…, because you like it? because it’s good? Heck, I don’t know. I’m black, and I read and like a lot of white writers. Motive? Awright, I’m guilty. Cuff me and put me away. When I get out, I’ll go right back to reading them good white writer folks, and that’s the honest truth.

I’ll damn well read the black ones, too, but at least there I don’t need motives. Jon, do you need a motive other than talent and enjoyment, to listen to Miles Davis, Ella Fitgerald, Béyoncé, watch Denzel Washington, Serena Williams, Michael Jordan, read Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, listen to Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Malcolm X, and so on, ad infinitum? Maybe I didn’t quite get the gist of your post.

Technorati: Black writers

Propos de Pascal Sevran: un dérapage inadmissible.

Dans un entretien à Var matin, publié mercredi 6 décembre, l’animateur de télévision, Pascal Sevran, est revenu sur son dernier livre “Le privilège des jonquilles” où il écrivait: “La bite des noirs est responsable de la famine en Afrique”.

Pascal Sevran, a déclaré : “Et alors ? C’est la vérité ! L’Afrique crève de tous les enfants qui y naissent sans que leurs parents aient les moyens de les nourrir. Je ne suis pas le seul à le dire. Il faudrait stériliser la moitié de la planète ! “.

Le Parti socialiste condamne fermement ces propos, véritable apologie du racisme et de l’eugénisme. Nous demandons également à Patrick de Carolis, Président de France Télévisions, de sanctionner sévèrement leur auteur, dont les déclarations réitérées ne sont pas compatibles avec sa participation au service public de l’audiovisuel.

Nicolas Sarkozy doit aussi dire publiquement s’il se désolidarise de Pascal Sevran, qui compte parmi ses soutiens les plus actifs.

Communiqué de Faouzi Lamdaoui,
Secrétaire national adjoint à l’Egalité et au Partenariat équitable

This is a loose translation of the above quote, with my own comments interspersed. Pascal Sevran is a French TV host. In his latest book, “Le Privilège des Jonquilles,” he says, “The black man’s dick is responsible for hunger in Africa.”

When you hear that for the first time you go… what?, and you try for a second reading. When asked to clarify such an outrageous statement, he said, “So what? It’s the truth! Africa is dying due to all these children being born to parents who have no means of feeding them. I’m not alone to say so. We’re gonna have to castrate half the planet!”

The above quote is from the website of the French Socialist party. The rest of the article just condemns Mr. Sevran and asks him to come out and apologise, as well as Mr. Sarkozy, a presidential hopeful backed by Mr. Sevran.

It took me a while to decide to blog this, and now that I’ve decided to go ahead, I find I have no steam to go full force against Pascal for what he said. My original reluctance of definitely-not-worth-it has come flooding back; and so I’ll leave it at this. The one thought that does keep bugging me, coming back, this little whispering voice in my head, is, “Wow… now they want to slice our dicks off.” Niger has done better than me, Niger has hauled Pascal’s ass to court. His employer has also asked him to apologise or quit.

Tags: Pascal Sevran; Le Privilège des Jonquilles; Racism

Dear Steven,

You said, “We do not want to be reminded that it is we, the indigenous people, who are poor and exploited in the land of our birth. These are concepts which the Black Consciousness approach wishes to eradicate from the black man’s mind before our society is driven to chaos by irresponsible people from Coca-cola and hamburger cultural backgrounds.”

They feared you, hence they killed you. The new ideas you were working out jangled their nerves, and you became a problem without a solution, just like we all were. But they couldn’t get the whole black nation to slip on a bar of soap. No. that was reserved for top problems like you.

Why didn’t they just send you to Robben Island, like the other top problems of the day? Perhaps you could have had your own political party, perhaps you could have become president of your land one day. Or vice-president. Or foreign minister. Youth minister would have suited you so!

We miss you, man.

I remember one day thinking how things would have been, had you been around to blog. Biko’s Blog. Biko’s big, bad, black blog. A big, black-green-red weblog emblazoned against our consciousness. Whose nerves would that have jangled then? I wonder what brand of soap they conjured up in their imagination as they declared your death. Sunlight? Lifebuoy? Palmolive? What does it matter? I wonder who made the decision to seal your lips with blows, what in your thinking pushed them over the edge, how many of the top brass watched the fatal beating, what they said to their spouses when they got home (”My God, I killed a man today,” or, “Hi honey — killed another kaffir today.”). They needed your consciousness movement, Steve, in order for them to have a consciousness of their own.

Bantu Steven Biko

BTW, they released ntate Mandela and other prisoners a while ago. He became president, then stepped down to let a younger Thabo take the reins. You remember Thabo, don’t you? Well, you probably know his dad, Govan Mbeki, also on the island prison. Man, so much things to say. South Africa is a real nation, now, with tons of problems like any other real nation. There’s unemployment and joblessness and urban violence. But nobody is being beaten to death and announced accidentally dead in detention, or having committed suicide.

After you died, some looked away, as they had for the very longest time. Most of them now have their guns trained on the ANC government. Paradoxal, huh? But others asked questions: “How did Biko receive the injury that caused his death? Who inflicted it, under what circumstances? Why was he kept naked and chained? Why did the doctors who attended him fail to interpret the undisputed signs of brain injury? Why did the doctors and all the police who were with him from the time he was injured until he died, all fail to notice the wound on his forehead which is so clearly visible in photos taken after his death?”

“And even more: why was the brain-damaged and dying man finally sent off on the long, terrible drive to Pretoria from Port Elizabeth, a big city with adequate hospitals? Why did the police give conflicting evidence, often caught out in contradictory statements or outright lies, none of which could explain the head injury? They had the time and the ability to concoct a story that would, at least superficially, account for the wound on Biko’s head. Why did they not do so? Why was an inquest held, why were details of the way he was treated permitted to be broadcast to the world. Why did the inquest find that no one was responsible for his death?”

No answers. There are never any answers to such things. Unfortunately for us, you were right when you told us that, “These guys - the day they get me - they’ll kill me, because I’ll beat up the guy or make him beat me so that I just die. If my hands are tied, I will spit in his face. I’m not going to answer questions that I don’t want to answer.”

Happy birthday, man!

Bantu Steven Biko, born on 18 December 1946 in Ginsberg, a suburb of King William’s Town.

[More]

Tags: South Africa; Steven Biko; Apartheid

[…] Of course this isn’t really about Madonna. It is about a formula that well-meaning people have adopted in looking at Africa, a surface-only, let’s-ignore-the-real-reasons template that African experiences have all been forced to fit in order to be authentically “African.”

If I were not African, I wonder whether it would be clear to me that Africa is a place where the people do not need limp gifts of fish but sturdy fishing rods and fair access to the pond. I wonder whether I would realize that while African nations have a failure of leadership, they also have dynamic people with agency and voices. I wonder whether I would know that Africa has class divisions, that wealthy Africans who have not stolen from their countries actually exist.

I wonder whether I would know that corrupt African countries are also full of fiercely honest people and that violent conflicts are about resource control in an environment of (sometimes artificial) scarcity. Watching David Banda’s father, I imagined a British David visiting him in 2021 and I wondered what they would talk about.
Negrophile

A Dutch aid worker was killed in an attack by unknown gunmen at the house of Lesotho’s trade and industry minister, police said Saturday. Police spokesperson Pheelo Mphana said that the 36-year-old woman, who has not been identified pending notification of next of kin, worked for the Clinton Foundation, which runs HIV and Aids programmes in the poor mountain kingdom.

The woman, her husband and two American aid workers arrived at Minister Mpho Malie’s house in a taxi late Friday. As they got out of the car, they were attacked by heavy gunfire, Mphana said.
http://www.iol.co.za

This [August 1968] issue of Glamour model Katiti Kirondi II on the cover features the “Best Dressed College Girls.” This marked the first time an African-American woman appeared on the cover of a national women’s monthly magazine. This issue featured the 10 best-dressed college girls and 100 great fall looks, which included mini-skirts and psychedelic colors. [www.magazine.org]

Sans doute une info qui est passée presque inaperçue. Elle est signalée dans Le Canard enchaîné du 18 octobre dernier : “Bon nègre”, avait intitulé l’hebdomadaire satirique pour rapporter le “délit de faciès” subi par deux attachées parlementaires noires, l’une travaillant pour le socialiste Yannick Bodin et l’autre pour le questeur socialiste Gérard Miquel. La scène, d’après Le Canard, s’est passée le 10 octobre dans une cafétéria du Sénat.

Les deux attachées parlementaires de couleur sont apostrophées, à leur entrée dans la salle, par un Sénateur UMP du Val-d’Oise Hugues Portelli (en photo), qui leur lance : «Vous pouvez nettoyer, parce que c’est sale ! On ne peut pas se servir, ici, c’est vraiment dégoûtant». Et comme les deux attachées parlementaires, sous l’effet de la surprise, ne bronchent pas, le Sénateur UMP enfonce le clou : «Vous comprenez ce que je vous dis ou pas ? (…) Nettoyez, vous comprenez ou, ou pas ?»

Alors, l’une des deux femmes lance : «C’est vrai que nous sommes noires, et qu’en général les femmes noires sont au Sénat pour faire le ménage. Mais là, nous venons juste nous servir un café. Nous sommes des assistantes parlementaires.» Et comme le pauvre type de l’UMP se rend compte de son impair, il emprunte plus qu’un terrain glissant, question de se rattraper : «Vous savez, je ne suis pas raciste, mon beau-frère est antillais, mais je pensais que vous veniez là pour travailler.»

Allons, allons, avis aux autres qui se livreraient à un tel amalgame : prévoyez un beau-frère de couleur. Mieux encore, vous pouvez trouver un beau-frère de votre beau-frère qui a épousé une personne de couleur… [Toutes les négresses ne font pas le ménage au Sénat]

Alain Mabanckou speaks of an incident that was reported in a French paper, about two black, female, parliament assistants who underwent what I undergo rather regularly. I will accurately translate only what was said; the rest I’ll just summarise for you.

The two ladies had gone to a beverage place to get coffee for themselves when a white MP said, “Why don’t you clean this place up a little, it’s filthy! One can’t even help themselves, it is really disgusting.” They drew blanks — they were either too shocked to speak, or they didn’t know what he was talking about.

He continued, “Do you understand what I’m saying? Clean this place up (…). Do you or do you not understand?”

One of the women said, “It is true that we’re black, and generally, black women set foot in this Senate only for the purpose of cleaning and tidying it up. In this case, however, we’ve come to get us some coffee. We are MP assistants.”

It’s hard to cover up ignorance or prejudice or whatever it is had driven the man to act the way he acted. Moreover, in that specific situation, the wrong-doer always says something similar to what that man blurted that day: “What it is is that I’m not racist; my brother-in-law is West Indian. I just thought you were here to work.” Which they were, but he just couldn’t get used to the idea that their work wasn’t cleaning up or tidying up.

I’ve often blogged about people asking me, in supermarkets, where the potatoes (or the onions) were. About a week ago it happened again. When I told the woman that I wasn’t an employee of the supermarket, she looked at me intently, with not a little surprise, and said, “En plus t’es habillé en rouge.” Or, “What’s more, you’re dressed in red.” Store workers there wear red tops.

What she meant by that was, of course, that on top of being black, I was wearing the shop’s uniform. What a surprise that, with not one (skin colour) but two (skin colour and uniform) traits, I wasn’t an employee of that shop after all?

Alain’s blog always has tidbits like this one. Do check it out (in French).

My Proust Questionaire, Damnit
I love Vanity Fair’s Proust Questionnaire even more than I do Esquire’s “What I Learned” column. But look, I’m never going to be famous enough to ever merit a page in Vanity fair and even if that miracle happens, it will take years and I don’t have time to wait. So here are my Proust answers, because unlike 99 percent of the people Vanity Fair usually asks, I’ve actually read Proust.

That’s how Marlon James introduced his questionnaire. I got to his blog through Geoffrey Philp’s blog. I got to Geoffrey’s blog through Stephen’s blog. That’s the Internet for you. Virtual communities, some of which are burning to be lived outright. Geoffrey is preparing an interview with Marlon that should be interesting, as such interviews always are to anyone wanting to be a good writer or a good reader. Almost everybody, in other words.

Here’s my questionnaire:

What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Connecting with my wife and getting a poem to work in the same time frame.

What is your greatest fear?
That my kids do not get the same chances and opportunities I did. In other words, I’m afraid some idiot will blow the planet to smithereens.

Which living person do you most admire?
For me it’s people: my mother, and Nelson Mandela.

What is the most overrated virtue?
Mother-Teresaism. It should be natural and ubiquitous.

What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Prejudice fuelled by racism

What is your greatest extravagance?
Music and books. I wish I could afford more of ‘em.

What is your favourite journey?
Going home

On what occasion do you lie?
When my wife asks, “How’s this skirt?”

Which living person do you most despise
South African racists whose only dream is to discredit the ANC

Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
“How is it going?” and “If I were you…”

What is your greatest regret?
I’m sorry I didn’t become the football great that I could have been

When and where were you happiest?
Maryville College in Tennessee, where I met Mrs Rethabile

What is your current state of mind?
Bitter sometimes, exhilarated at other moments. I don’t know.

If you could change one thing about yourself what would it be?
I would spend more time writing.

What is your greatest achievement?
Not getting angry at ignorant people in supermarkets who ask me where the potatoes or the onions are.

If you were to die and come back as a person or thing what do you think it would be?
Me, but wiser.

What is your most treasured possession?
I own very few things. Perhaps a scrap-book of poetic scribblings that I mean to turn into a book one day.

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery
Suicide

Where would you like to live?
Maseru, Bloemfontein or Gaborone

What is your favourite occupation?
Both writing and playing football

What is your most marked characteristic?
Timidity

What is the quality you like most in a man?
Frankness and bonhomie

What is the quality you like most in a woman?
Sexy, non-sexist womanhood

Who are your favourite writers?
Chinua Achebe, Robert Frost, Julie Humpert (she doesn’t know it) and David Diop. There are many others, but let’s stop there for now.

Who is your favourite hero of fiction?
Indiana Jones

Who are your heroes in real life?
Jesus Christ, Nelson Mandela and my mother

What is it that you most dislike?
Racist hypocrites

How would you like to die?
I don’t wanna die. If I have to, I’d like to go while making love

What is your motto?
C’mon, you can do it!

Why don’t you do one yourself?

I live in Midville where the sun’s unhappy,
where one answer to what we seek as a folk
is cross-burning; and though madam’s alone today,
the ranch quiet, I’m not taking chances.

Without a squeak I slink from the sill and go
past the tree branch, which has seen men hanged
for less than a peek into a lady’s sleep room
[that tree, btw, should have long become
a monument], and on to the back stables
by the sty.

A steed stamps as I approach,
prances, brooding perhaps over my manhood,
what the purpose of it is, the why to all of that,
and can I explain this pain I hold? On what basis
are people crowned, horses thoroughbred,
while some are common?

I grab the curry comb to groom, to
straighten my thoughts in that stall once and for all,
for I do seek things in life, like justice, and I seek
the knowledge of why the earth is round,
the sky blue, the pygmy small, though above all
it is God I seek [in the end it always is]
so we can speak of negroes and stuff; and won’t God
be aghast?

Man, life here overseas is no oasis,
so lost in the stars, in these concrete deserts
so friendless and vast. But now at last I’ve got
my rendezvous, and I’ll see about completing
the ellipsis, all the way through, at least once.

© Rethabile Masilo [more…]

Mazisi Raymond Fakazi Mngoni Kunene, poet and activist, born May 12 1930; died August 11 2006

gnalafostohk
ho moholoane oa ka
ea shoetseng jokong

tebello begot the child and stood near
death for it — a boy she at once made man
before he had known how to conquer fear
by himself, warrior of the sotho clan.

he followed certain roads the long way here,
living among castes where the african
spirit endures, a rush of angry tear
turning mere soldier into veteran.

and as he went forth in dreams of his own,
learning how to cope in quest of good
for together with life he was alone,

what prospects he received, at heaven’s whim,
became his with no hopes misunderstood,
all of the rhythm having entered him.

© Rethabile Masilo [more…]

Okay, it looks to me like this is the last version, without it being the final one.

© Rethabile Masilo [more…]

This poem does not want to finish. No poem ever does, but this one is particularly stubborn. I’ve turned out several versions of it, but have never really understood where it wants to go. It is an ongoing project and I publish it here, before it gets to where it’s going, because I tend to understand poems better when they have just been put up for everybody to see.

The latest version is at http://sotho.blogsome.com/2006/10/08/madam-in-the-bedroom-4

I’ve worked on this poem some more, and moved it. Click here.

A United States (US) expert in African studies has lambasted the government of Botswana for using its judicial instruments to violate the rights of indigenous people. The Basarwa tribe living in Central Kalahari Game reserve outside the capital Gaborone, have taken the government to court for what they say is forced removal from their ancestral land. Dr Kunnie of the University of Arizona says the rights of indigenous groups need to be respected. "This is a very important principle that we must recognise that the indigenous people like the San people are among the oldest people in the world. They are people from whom we need to take some cues," says Kunnie. He says the indigenous San people should be left alone by the Botswana government. [SABCnews.com]

The Basarwa (Baroa in Sesotho) deserve to live on their land, as did the native American, in the same way they have been living on it since the dawn of man. In effect, the Botswana government can only put forth weak-kneed arguments for adopting and enforcing a removal policy, as could the US government from 1930 on.

If my comparison is a low blow, it is the only tool in my arsenal to show some of my readers that yes, it’s happened before and that yes, it did happen in the United States of America. As a result, those readers and I start off on a clean slate and consider the naked facts, unclouded by any paedagogical intentions and/or holier-than-thou aspirations. 

I’m sure you’re wondering with me if Botswana is being blinded by the prospect of riches, for the land of Baroa is apparently equivalent to forcefully whispering the word, diamonds. The answer is, I don’t know. Mud is being slung from all sides, with the government insisting that it is taking action to precisely protect Baroa populations, and people like the present writer countering that it is probably to get richer.

In the past, new arrivals to somebody’s land — i.e. those who arrived because thanks to their technological superiority they could arrive — these always screwed the locals, and then, years and years later, well established and rich, they’ll usually screw newer arrivals. When compared to American history, the case of Botswana is still at the first phase: screwing the people whose land it legitimately is and was. And then soon it’ll be the turn of immigrants, people usually driven toward such a country by economic want. The excuse given for the abuse meted out to such immigrants is that they don’t adapt, they don’t fit in. Jeneane dismisses this second phase nicely: "Your ancestors weren’t the first ones here and no one saw their asses assimilating to the customs and language of the Cherokee [Source]." Touché.

Before I start this poem, I’d like to ask you to join me
In a moment of silence
In honor of those who died in the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon last September 11th.
I would also like to ask you
To offer up a moment of silence
For all of those who have been harassed, imprisoned,
disappeared, tortured, raped, or killed in retaliation for those strikes,
For the victims in both Afghanistan and the U.S.

And if I could just add one more thing…
A full day of silence
For the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have died at the
hands of U.S.-backed Israeli
forces over decades of occupation.
Six months of silence for the million and-a-half Iraqi people,
mostly children, who have died of
malnourishment or starvation as a result of an 11-year U.S. embargo against the country.

Before I begin this poem,
Two months of silence for the Blacks under Apartheid in South Africa,
Where homeland security made them aliens in their own country.
Nine months of silence for the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Where death rained down and peeled back every layer of
concrete, steel, earth and skin
And the survivors went on as if alive.
A year of silence for the millions of dead in Vietnam - a people,
not a war - for those who
know a thing or two about the scent of burning fuel, their
relatives’ bones buried in it, their babies born of it.
A year of silence for the dead in Cambodia and Laos, victims of
a secret war … ssssshhhhh….
Say nothing … we don’t want them to learn that they are dead.
Two months of silence for the decades of dead in Colombia,
Whose names, like the corpses they once represented, have
piled up and slipped off our tongues.

Before I begin this poem.
An hour of silence for El Salvador …
An afternoon of silence for Nicaragua …
Two days of silence for the Guatemaltecos …
None of whom ever knew a moment of peace in their living years.
45 seconds of silence for the 45 dead at Acteal, Chiapas
25 years of silence for the hundred million Africans who found
their graves far deeper in the ocean than any building could
poke into the sky.
There will be no DNA testing or dental records to identify their remains.
And for those who were strung and swung from the heights of
sycamore trees in the south, the north, the east, and the west…

100 years of silence…
For the hundreds of millions of indigenous peoples from this half
of right here,
Whose land and lives were stolen,
In postcard-perfect plots like Pine Ridge, Wounded Knee, Sand
Creek,
Fallen Timbers, or the Trail of Tears.
Names now reduced to innocuous magnetic poetry on the
refrigerator of our consciousness …

So you want a moment of silence?
And we are all left speechless
Our tongues snatched from our mouths
Our eyes stapled shut
A moment of silence
And the poets have all been laid to rest
The drums disintegrating into dust.

Before I begin this poem,
You want a moment of silence
You mourn now as if the world will never be the same
And the rest of us hope to hell it won’t be. Not like it always has
been.

Because this is not a 9/11 poem.
This is a 9/10 poem,
It is a 9/9 poem,
A 9/8 poem,
A 9/7 poem
This is a 1492 poem.

This is a poem about what causes poems like this to be written.
And if this is a 9/11 poem, then:
This is a September 11th poem for Chile, 1971.
This is a September 12th poem for Steven Biko in South Africa, 1977.
This is a September 13th poem for the brothers at Attica Prison,
New York, 1971.
This is a September 14th poem for Somalia, 1992.
This is a poem for every date that falls to the ground in ashes
This is a poem for the 110 stories that were never told
The 110 stories that history chose not to write in textbooks
The 110 stories that CNN, BBC, The New York Times, and
Newsweek ignored.
This is a poem for interrupting this program.

And still you want a moment of silence for your dead?
We could give you lifetimes of empty:
The unmarked graves
The lost languages
The uprooted trees and histories
The dead stares on the faces of nameless children
Before I start this poem we could be silent forever
Or just long enough to hunger,
For the dust to bury us
And you would still ask us
For more of our silence.

If you want a moment of silence
Then stop the oil pumps
Turn off the engines and the televisions
Sink the cruise ships
Crash the stock markets
Unplug the marquee lights,
Delete the instant messages,
Derail the trains, the light rail transit.

If you want a moment of silence, put a brick through the window
of Taco Bell,
And pay the workers for wages lost.
Tear down the liquor stores,
The townhouses, the White Houses, the jailhouses, the
Penthouses and the Playboys.

If you want a moment of silence,
Then take it
On Super Bowl Sunday,
The Fourth of July
During Dayton’s 13 hour sale
Or the next time your white guilt fills the room where my beautiful
people have gathered.

You want a moment of silence
Then take it NOW,
Before this poem begins.
Here, in the echo of my voice,
In the pause between goosesteps of the second hand,
In the space between bodies in embrace,
Here is your silence.
Take it.
But take it all…Don’t cut in line.
Let your silence begin at the beginning of crime. But we,
Tonight we will keep right on singing…For our dead.

© Emmanuel Ortiz (published on 11 September 2002)

SELECTION		VOTES
Just fine	32%	7
Not so fine	50%	11
Worsening	9%	2
Just plain bad	9%	2
22 votes total
Poll powered by Pollhost. Poll results are subject to error. Pollhost does not pre-screen the content of polls created by Pollhost customers.

 

---

First of all, let me remind you to vote in our present poll about official languages in Lesotho.

The poll that is mentioned here is not scientific, and 22 votes is hardly enough to base an opinion on. But 22 people did vote, and this poll shows what they think, unrepresentative as it may be. Our national morale has just taken a hard knock, following the Mercedes Benz/Toyota Camry scandal that Idland and others exposed to the world. 

If you have more than a fleeting interest (pun intended) in Lesotho politics, read a post in our discussion group. It seems that a good part of Basotho feel that the recent scandal is a shame and a scam. Without the benefit of having listened to the government’s "explanation," I feel the same. It’s a shame because Lesotho was doing so well that people were referring to our government as the example, and as a trigger to the demise of corruption on the continent. It’s a scam because those who benefitted from the cruelly cheap, cheap sale of national patrimony thought they could get away with it. And it’s indecent because, one,  not every civil servant could purchase the cars, and two, we’re at war with the AIDS virus.

Has the government of Lesotho taken a leave of absence? Are our leaders out of their minds? Instead of acquiring a Toyota Camry, how about doing something for joblessness, for AIDS patients? What if the fleet of cars was sold at normal prices and the funds collected were used to build a hospital in a mountain village? What if… In a poor country, the possibilities are endless.

It is all the more weird when one goes back into recent Lesotho history. Ruthless dictator (Leabua Jonathan). Military coup d’état. Elections. Present government’s victory. Hope for Basotho, especially for the present writer. Illegitimate opposition uprising following elections. Quelling of uprising by SADC. And the next step is… government corruption?

I am the grandchild of genocide survivors who lost all their relatives at the hands of Turkish butchers in 1915.

That’s the passage in Elif Shafak’s book "The Bastard of Istanbul" that got her sued. The charge? Belittling Turkey. I mean, shite, it’s a book of fiction, for crying out loud. Big muzzlers they are. Ms Shafak realises the danger she is in, but still has enough spunk to say the whole situation is grotesque, which it is [Source].

UPDATE: Hooray, they dropped the charges against her! [Source]

Whites who never benefitted from Apartheid. Via Fodder. This appeared in my older blog which is dying. The comment section on this post from Fodder is particularly gripping.

 

 

Let Stephen tell this one.

Should a police officer who’s a member of a recognised "racist" group be left alone, or should such an officer be thanked and let go? Don’t we all have the right to think what we like and act how we like (within the confines of the law) in private? Suppose it were indeed so, would such a police officer not be tempted to act differently toward other "races"?

These are questions that eventually led to the sacking of Omaha, Nebraska’s State Trooper Robert Henderson. He had joined the Klan because his wife "divorced him for a minority." [Source]

Authorities insist Henderson wasn’t fired because he was a member of the KKK, but because he couldn’t "uphold public trust while participating" among the groups he disliked. If I were white and my house was being burgled, I don’t think I’d want a cop from a Caucasian hating group to answer my call and show up. I just feel like it wouldn’t be a very good idea.

Many law enforcement officers may indeed belong to this or that hate-group, but they probably don’t announce it; and when asked, they probably won’t say it’s because their spouse dumped them "for a minority." I’m glad Henderson was axed. He should go drive a cab, and pick passengers up according to whatever criteria he used when he decided to join a hate-group.

http://128.241.192.81/2006/08/blacks-are-biggest-racists.html

Somali Islamists have decided to ban the export of both charcoal and wild animals from their country. They bring up the reason of fighting deforestation/erosion and protecting rare animals [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/5274620.stm]. That’s a good ban if ever there was one, and a fresh one, too, as opposed to the usual ones against music or film or statues or women’s faces. 

Suppose the ban was targeted at Somalis for chopping down trees for firewood and killing rare animals for food? Then it wouldn’t be a fair ban and would have had to be fought. Apparently the main importer of Somali charcoal and animals is the United Arab Emirates. And shouldn’t the ban come from their side of the table? Shouldn’t they not import such commodities from a country that is still suffering, if they want to help that country?

Lesotho is heavily deforested, marked by dongas and gulleys, and devoid of wild life. We grazed our cattle on whatever grass was left, cut trees down to cook with, and ate the last rabbits and antelope. Nobody can say a word, unless they provide electricity and jobs. Nobody has a right to criticise such a populace for surviving.

We’re animals, so we bunch up easily. That’s why we’re always fighting amongst ourselves, whether as gangs, countries or religious cliques. But we’re also human, with an in-built discerning soul, which is why it’s hard to learn that, "When viewing photographs of social out-groups, people respond to them with disgust, not a feeling of fellow humanity."
[http://cognews.com] 

I did not know Michelle — Meg — and was just an admiring user of her talent. I have no business talking about her, you could say, but you see, people who did know her portray her as this conscientious, lovable, fighting person. If that is anywhere near the talent and spirit evident to everyone else, then she must have been some woman indeed. I guess the above endeavour is a bit of why they portray her as such. Her Mandarin Designs are quite marvellous, and rather easy to use as she chews the code before offering it to us. Here are some of her friends bidding her farewell :

—- http://home.egge.net/~savory
—- http://128.241.192.81
—- http://allied.blogspot.com

NB: If you decide to use the above Food Not Bombs message, be aware that in the HTML you should modify this http://orlandofoodnotbombs1.org to this http://orlandofoodnotbombs.org (remove the 1).

What is the use of emancipating one person to subjugate another? There isn’t any. What is the use of emancipating one person, period? It is the ideal. Is such an ideal attainable? I don’t know. It seems to me that in many parts of the world the status quo is best represented by a see-sawing movement, and the latest example is perhaps South Africa.

Black people were legally excluded from the riches of that country, until 1994. Does freedom for them presuppose exclusion of white people? I think it would be a grave mistake to think so, and an even graver one to apply such thoughts. If affirmative action serves to impoverish one section of the population, then it must be looked at again and modified. Its aims need to be an improvement of conditions for previously “defavourised” people, not a worsening of conditions for previously “favourised” people. Willie Spies says that

government and young people should talk to each other, so that all young people in South Africa had reason to celebrate [Youth Day]. He said many young Afrikaners were excluded from university by quotas. When they do find a place they have to attend classes in English. On leaving they struggle to find work due to affirmative action, and when they want to start their own business they can not do so due to black economic empowerment requirements. [www.int.iol.co.za]

Those conditions sound a lot like what used to happen to black people and other “minorities” in South Africa, and which led to the Soweto uprising of 16 June 1976, exactly thirty years ago today. South Africa is on the right road and should bend over backwards to satisfy all sections of its rainbow population. A hard task indeed, but then South Africa has overcome steeper adversity before, and could write a book on how not to sombre into bloodshed following centuries of oppressive bloodshed.

Interesting opinions:
— http://mithrandr.moria.org
— http://fodder.blogs.com
— http://commentary.co.za
— http://sotho.blogsome.com
— http://aconstrainedvision.blogspot.com

     La 21 Hlakubele 1960, batho ba batšo ba 69
     ba bolailoe ka lithunya, ba 180 ba ntšoa likotsi

If when this township was placed under siege
You were present, you would have seen
Life lamented, batho wailing, the quick
Holding their heads in the sky to speak
Incantations to disconsolate gods,
The dead still, stacked against the guards,
Body upon body, dead but unbowed
In their steely will that no man can bend.
And quite suddenly a woman, pail
Balanced up on her head, hurls her soul
To the sky, ad libitum, O Sharpeville!
Let my cry forever rise high until
Heaven itself gives, and what once was black
Or white is now nil, wherever I look.

© Rethabile Masilo [more…]

1. If Africa’s rich, why is it poor?
2. Would it help Africa if its regional communities (eg SADC) grouped into much more than monetary entities?
3. Why do white people think they are superior?
4. Would you let your child marry a person of a different colour?
5. Why has there been no retaliatory bloodshed in South-Africa since apartheid came to an end?
6. Affirmative Action, like communism, does mean well, but unlike communism, does it do well at all?
7. What exactly is the role of the United Nations, apart from what the United Nations says its role is?
8. What cruelty is this: to put man on a planet, and let him savage it?
9. What is the contemporary American’s stance on what happened to the native American?
10. Why are there so many coup d’états on the African continent?
11. Why do other African countries not hold Truth and Reconciliation sessions to heal scars, like South-Africa did?
12. I understand why America went into Afghanistan. But why did it go into Iraq?
13. Does having a lot of money dull the spirit and the senses?
14. What are the three greatest songs of all time? In other words, which three would you need to have with you on the proverbial exile to a desert island?
15. If God exists, why are we going through what we’re going through?
16. Did Albert Gore win or not win that fated election?

(more…)

Bashing can come in many forms. Make no mistake, they’re all wrong, even when they are in jest. In the first article on Bashing I talked about telling nigger jokes or other inappropriate jokes: “Hey, Jackson, can I tell you an inoffensive black joke?” There are very few inoffenssive ones because by necessity they’re based on racial stereotypes. Blacks are lazy, whites smell bad, Jews are stingy, Italians are dirty, the list is long. It’s hard to squeeze humour out of that. It’s Almost Supernatural says

People in a democracy should not defend a person’s right to hate speech. To brand some citizens as inferior to others on the grounds of race, religion, or sexual orientation is inconsistent with the fundamentals of a liberal democracy. When freedom of expression is no longer viewed in isolation of other values we can begin to realise that restrictions are needed. [http://supernatural.blogs.com]

In effect, if it’s a democracy, we do not consider only the rights of the basher to bash, but also the rights of the bashee not to be bashed. It’s fundamental. That leaves us then with checks and balances, and common sense, mostly. A Christian who tells atheists they’re stupid is using religion to bash. An atheist who tells Christians they’re stupid for believing in Jesus Christ, or in the Bible, is using religion to bash. Both instances should be considered religious slurs.

In terms of religion, if being a Christian is so good, then there’s no need to yell it to the world with a megaphone; by the same token, if atheism is so great, why shout? My solution? Live it, be the example, and those who are in admiration may wonder why you’re so happy, or so strong, or so whatever, and conclude that it’s your religion or non religion.

The point I’m trying to make encompasses religion and other choice concepts. Telling others they’re stupid and puerile for their beliefs is bashing. It’s like gay bashing, and it’s like telling nigger jokes. It’s like saying, “Hey Jackson, can I tell you you’re stupid for believing in/not believing in this?” No, you may not.

 

19 May was his birthday. He was born in 1925 as Malcolm Little. He was killed in New York City in 1965 as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, aka Malcolm X. Malcolm would have been 80 years and four days old, today. When he got back to America after his hajj to Mecca, he said

“Human rights are something you were born with. Human rights are your God-given rights. Human rights are the rights that are recognized by all nations of this earth.”

“In the past, yes, I have made sweeping indictments of all white people. I will never be guilty of that again — as I know now that some white people are truly sincere, that some truly are capable of being brotherly toward a black man. The true Islam has shown me that a blanket indictment of all white people is as wrong as when whites make blanket indictments against blacks.”

“Since I learned the truth in Mecca my dearest friends have come to include all kinds — some Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics, and even atheists! I have friends who are called capitalists, socialists, and communists! Some of my friends are moderates, conservatives, extremists — some are even Uncle Toms! My friends today are black, brown, red, yellow, and white!” [http://en.wikipedia.org]

Ms Margaret Walker wrote a poem, a sonnet, for Malcolm, and duly called it For Malcolm X. It’s a well crafted piece that has the merit of talking to us about the recent past and dishing out both history and pleasure. Everytime I read the poem I’m struck by the force of the image she uses in verse 10… your sand-papering words against our skins… That’s painful, and sandpaper is always meant to remove something unwanted, perhaps those who [Hate] white devils and black bourgeoisie of verse 6, or the Hating white devils and black bourgeoisie themselves. Who knows? Check out the work for yourself:

 

For Malcolm X

All you violated ones with gentle hearts;
You violent dreamers whose cries shout heartbreak;
Whose voices echo clamors of our cool capers,
And whose black faces have hollowed pits for eyes.
All you gambling sons and hooked children and bowery bums
Hating white devils and black bourgeoisie,
Thumbing your noses at your burning red suns,
Gather round this coffin and mourn your dying swan.

Snow-white moslem head-dress around a dead black face!
Beautiful were your sand-papering words against our skins!
Our blood and water pour from your flowing wounds.
You have cut open our breasts and dug scalpels in our brain
When and Where will another come to take your holy place?
Old man mumbling in his dotage, or crying child, unborn?

© Margaret Abigail Walker

Jeneane Sessum (thanks Mike) talks about the present immigration chaos in America. Let me assure Jeneane that America isn’t the only country going after immigrants. France is, too. They have even made a law for it, referred to in the street as l’immigration jetable, or disposable immigration, and “l’immigration choisie” in the halls of power. Use them, abuse them, but at election time tell ‘em to go back “home” since they are occupying jobs that real nationals could be holding.

Jeneane’s post asks a basic question: Did the Red Indian require the arriving European masses to assimilate or integrate or learn the language of the Cherokee? She says

your ancestors weren’t the first ones here and no one saw their asses assimilating to the customs and language of the Cherokee; and number two, a very large and distinct portion of America’s ancestry is made up of people who were bought, chained, flogged, and shipped here, where they were sold, chained, and put to work to build this-land-is-your-land without pay in slavery. Assimilate THAT.

In France, the new bill tabled by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy went through parliament easily. Piece o’ cake. The new law comes at a time when France is examining itself for different uncool phenomena, like discrimination at the workplace. The law stipulates that,

:: Only the qualified get “skills and talents” residency permit,
:: Foreigners only allowed in to work, not live off benefits,
:: Foreign spouses to wait longer for residence cards,
:: Migrants must agree to learn French,
:: Migrants must sign ‘contract’ respecting French way of life,
:: Scraps law on workers getting citizenship after 10 years,
http://news.bbc.co.uk

So I feel like saying Madeleine Albright, Isaac Asimov, Charles Atlas, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Alexander Graham Bell, Irving Berlin, Andrew Carnegie, Charlie Chaplin, Claudette Colbert, Albert Einstein, Gloria Estefan, Patrick Ewing, Michael J. Fox, Greta Garbo, Andy Garcia, Marcus Garvey, Bob Hope, Al Jolson, Henry Kissinger, Ivan Lendl, Martina Navratilova, Mike Nichols, Hakeem Olajuwon, I.M. Pei, Sydney Poitier, John Secada, Levi Strauss, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Elizabeth Taylor, Eddie Van Halen, Elie Wiesel, for America, and Guillaume Appollinaire, Charles Aznavour, Josephine Baker, Michel Berger, Patrick Bruel, Manu Chao, Georges Charpak, Michel Coluccci, Le Corbusier (Charles Edouard Jeanneret), Dalida (Yolande Christina Gigliotti), Joe Dassin, Marcel Desailly (Odonkey Abbey), Serge Gainsbourg, Jean-Jacques Goldman, Johnny Halliday, Marie-Antoinette, Rethabile Masilo (yes, me), Tony Parker, Mary Pierce, Nicolas Sarkozy, Tintin, Sylvie Vartan, Patrick Vieira, Zinedine Zidane (زين الدين زيدان or our very own Zizou who is a kind and talented fellow who promotes racial and religious tolerance) for France. Voila.

Bashing is the practice of attacking someone or something  physically or verbally. French bashing, gay bashing, celebrity bashing, male or female bashing, Christian bashing, atheist bashing and any-thing-you-want bashing are some form of attack, usually verbal. Is it free speech? Where do we draw the line between (1.) attacking a group of people verbally and (2.) exercising the right to free speech? Is telling nigger jokes bashing or free speech?

In my case, I draw the line just before belittling, denigrating or insulting what others are, what they think, or what they believe. In relation with a contoversial subject, I’ll gladly say what school of thought I subscribe to; I’ll even say why I may think it wrong for someone to be, think or believe something. And that is my difference between free speech and bashing. Wikipaedia defines freedom of speech as being

the liberty to freely say what one pleases, as well as the related liberty to hear what others have stated. Recently, it has been commonly understood as encompassing all types of expression, including the freedom to create and distribute movies, pictures, songs, dances, and all other forms of expressive communication. [http://en.wikipedia.org]

As I see it, that definition is incomplete and should include the part about consulting one’s conscience on whatever it is you’re free-speaking about. I guess I’ll have to go back and edit the part in myself. No matter how stupid, wrong or dirty you think a group or a thing is, you are not free to insult the group or the thing, whereas the group or the thing are free not to be insulted. Your freedom has limits, and the limits of your freedom should be established by your conscience and by general common sense, a rather subjective endeavour, I must concede. It wouldn’t be wise to bring the law-makers in on this one, as they may end up making laws that may end up reducing our freedom of speech.

It is not right for the government to censor speech because it is offensive -
it is not the government’s place to take a certain stance on offensiveness or
morals, even if it is a stance shared by 99.9% of a country’s citizens.

[…]

Maybe freedom is more important than my comfort or my sensibilities. Maybe true
freedom sometimes means that you have to let other people say what they want to
say, even if it hurts you. [www.moralfiber.blogspot.com]

Let us look at what James of Moral Fiber says in the quote above. I think that a government censoring speech is dangerous, full stop. Whether that speech is offensive or not depends on a lot of things that in turn depend on the ear of the listener, and that is what makes censoring both dangerous and difficult. But there are times, when slurs like, "a good nigger is a dead nigger" make me wonder. James suggests that freedom is perhaps more important than the listener’s comfort or sensibilities. Yes, it is, and no, it isn’t. It is so because free speech must by all means be protected. It is not so because speech, whose degree of freedom we’re debating, is directed at someone or at a group, and either one has rights of their own. True freedom may indeed be having to "let other people say what they want to say, even if it hurts you," but woven into taking "a certain stance on offensiveness or morals."

I discovered the site Without Sanctuary when I was researching for my post, Dear Mr & Ms Racist. The site disturbed me and worked me up to a near frenzy, all of which was positive, because what I saw charged me with the energy to never want to do, to another being, anything remotely similar, let alone to another human being. If you’re sensitive, turn back now and do not visit the site. If you feel you can handle it, and if you want to learn, then please proceed. But learn? Learn what?

It is important for all of us to know the history of our species that is pertinent, so that we may better understand most of today’s reactions from some members of that species. A week does not go by when someone on the South African blogosphere wonders why there’s such a thing as affirmative action, or someone on the American blogosphere wonders why it’s OK to profess black pride but not really white pride, or someone on the global blogoshere wonders why Jews don’t stop talking about the Shoah. Learning about these happenings will usually lead to a better understanding of these why, why, whys?

When you get to the site in question, look left. The menu suggests Overview, Movie, Photos, Forum. It is good to do them in just that order. The flash movie doesn’t contain all the images, but gives a good intro with narrative commentary just before the photos which are more numerous and contain each a text commentary, and sometimes an inscription by the photographer or the postcard sender. "Coon Cooking" is one such
inscription on a postcard showing the lynching and subsequent burning of John Lee on 13 August 1911, in Durant, Oklahoma [Without Sanctuary]. Poet Jake Adam York puts it this way,

NEGATIVES

      Townspeople gathered for the burning of John Lee. August 13, 1911,
      Durant, Oklahoma. Gelatin silver print. Real photo postcard. 5½ x 3½”

You cannot see the body
each eye fixes, the focus

of the plume that angles every head,
John Lee, curling skyward

from the fire,
a town’s worth of bullets

searing white in the char
that was a man, gunned down

and set ablaze. John Lee
will burn till sundown,

till ash and a few charred parcels,
till the crowd disbands and spreads

to the corners of the town
now shut of every black,

and poor Miss Campbell’s poor white soul
drifts, avenged, to heaven

till the photographer bends to his film
to darken the postcard caption,

block letters that will blaze white
COON COOKING — the barbecue

one will later describe
on the opposite side. But for now

you can see only smoke
and the appetite on the faces

closest to the heat,
the desperate arching of a body

eager for a glimpse of the gravity,
the magnetism of this powerless man.

But let us imagine
just afterward, the camera slung

on the taker’s shoulder,
and at its heart a thousand blacks

staring into this cloud of light,
for a moment neither

gathering toward nor
descending from heaven,

but waiting in their adoration
and blessing each with its glow —

a vision of these thousand whites
turned dark for an hour

and praying, terrified, to this pillar
for the rectifying light

and then imagine,
their prayer, the paper

slowly darkening in the light
until they are restored, white from dark,

but the cloud now a dark tornado
caught on the verge of breaking through,

ready to consume each watcher
until all there is is this plume,

the body enlarged,

its ash, a thousand postcards
of a world he dared not dream he dreamed,

signed with the names of all who watch,
ready to inscribe the scene

Wish you were here.

The introductory page to Without Sanctuary says,

Searching through America’s past for the last 25 years, collector James Allen uncovered an extraordinary visual legacy: photographs and postcards taken as souvenirs at lynchings throughout America. With essays by Hilton Als, Leon Litwack, Congressman John Lewis and James Allen, these photographs have been published as a book "Without Sanctuary" by Twin Palms Publishers. Features will be added to this site over time and it will evolve into an educational tool. Please be aware before entering the site that much of the material is very disturbing. We welcome your comments and input through the forum section.

Experience the images as a flash movie with narrative comments by James Allen, or as a gallery of photos which will grow to over 100 photos in coming weeks. Participate in a forum about the images, and contact us if you know of other similar postcards and photographs [Without Sanctuary].

I wrote Madam in the Bedroom a few weeks before discovering these troubling images and the story behind each one of them.

Shock Treatment:
With reference to your behaviour in these past few years, I’d like to inform you that more and more people are waking up to the fact that the premise of your beliefs rests on scorn. For example, today more and more performing artists and others are spreading the message, and it seems to me that you’re more isolated now than you’ve ever been. One of your complaints is the practice of affirmative action, usually observed in places where you have recently been, like America and South Africa. You say that qualified white people are not getting jobs while unqualified minorities are. In America, affirmative action “can call for an admissions officer faced with two similarly qualified applicants to choose the minority over the white, or for a manager to recruit and hire a qualified woman for a job instead of a man" [www.washingtonpost.com].

One thing that’s clear is that as long as we’re physically different, racism and discrimination will never leave our world. Unless something enormous happens. Something more threatening than an ominous cold war or a murderous hot one, something bigger than a natural catastrophe, something deadlier than any killer virus or monstrous organisms, more unthinkable than any evil you can imagine. Wars and viruses have so far not been able to right the world, and I doubt they ever will. We could bring up "religion" at this juncture as a possible solution but frankly, "religion" has been one of the bigger dividers of men and remains so, even as I type these words.

The truth is that humans and most other animals are conquerors. Dogs piss out a territory; humans kill or enslave those they find on a territory. Throughout their history, those humans with more advanced technology were able to travel wide, and wherever they did, they killed or conquered other humans they found there. It is amusing that as we plod onward as a species we’re only just beginning to realise the value of protecting other species. Protect and feed the panda, but expose and starve Darfur.

In the face of adversity, folks have come together before. In Africa, villages would be foes and nations enemies; they would fight wars and struggle against one another until something big and unexpected came along, whether slavery, colonialism or apartheid. Then they’d suddenly come together as siblings, in Africa, America or the Carribean, one against a common enemy. That is why black people call one another "brother" or "blood". No one else that I know of does. European tribes fought amongst themselves, too. They have just never had to deal with unimaginable adversity. Too bad Hannibal failed to make it all the way across.

In order to realise and thus combat racism and discrimination, humans need an unimaginable shock, right here, right now, something to pit earthlings against a common enemy, preferably one with more firepower and with nasty, malicious intent. Unfortunately for me I don’t believe in flying saucers and little green men. Not today. So I don’t think that kind of threat is on its way here. But I’m afraid it’ll take nothing less to knock sense into humankind. For a few weeks the East Asian tsunami had the world acting as one, for the benefit of other fellow humans. At that time, there had just been danger that was unpredictable, that was far superior in strength to humans, and that could potentially have hit any other human. So we bunched together.

Similarity of Whites and Blacks:
So, if racism and discrimination will never leave the world, you’re perhaps wondering what I am prattling about. Well, my potential friends, I happen to believe that all humans harbour discriminatory thoughts, drilled into them by culture and through other means. You’re not the only ones. However, the question isn’t whether or not to harbour such thoughts (all humans do, whether they like it or not), but how to overcome them. You’re walking down the street and you see this Latino spitting. How could you not think or say, “Dirty Spic,” like so many would? How could you be told by a black person that you smell bad and not think or say, “Fucking nigger. Needs to be put in his place," like so many would? How could you hear, “We don’t serve your kind here, boy" and not think that “honkies” are all the same “fucking racists?” It’s hard, yet humans need to see other humans as just that: humans — and not as colour or as belonging to a group. People will always be outwardly different, which unfortunately puts other-feature humans in their vicinity on guard. With practice, this habit could go away, white ladies could stop switching their purse to the other side when approaching a black man.

There are more genetic similarities between blacks and whites than among whites themselves. Black people in one part of the world differ with those in another part in a significant way. And that gap is wider than it is between blacks and whites. Simply put, the criteria that you, Mr and Ms Racist, usually refer to when you distinguish race, are but skin deep. Is the place of origin sunny, snowy, windy or what? Is social life there calm, turbulent or what? These are what determines your criteria for distinguishing race.

“Race is a social concept, not a scientific one,” said Dr. J. Craig Venter, head of the Celera Genomics Corporation in Rockville, Md. “We all evolved in the last 100,000 years from the same small number of tribes that migrated out of Africa and colonized the world.” It is timely that scientists are now realizing what many indigenous people and our history have been saying to us. The scientists did not set out to prove the interconnectedness of us humans. They were searching for European greatness; they were searching for products to further exploit the sick, and this allowed for the unearthing of fundamental truths. www.trinicenter.com/sciencenews

Race is terribly relevant to life outcomes. The likelihood that toxic waste has been dumped in your neighborhood, your ability to get a home loan, the quality of your kid’s education, connections to job opportunities, whether or not you’re likely to be followed in a department store or pulled over by police, are all influenced by your race. Race does matter. Not race as genetics but race as lived experience, what sociologists call “social” race. Social race is an important variable for health researchers and epidemiologists. www.newsreel.org/guides/race

What Exactly is Racism?:
It is different things to different people. To see what I mean, think of the idea of terrorism. To one group it’s fighting for freedom, to another it’s terrorism. Racism is somewhat similar. Answers dot com says,

rac·ism (rā‘sĭz‘m)  n.
1. The belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability and that a particular race is superior to others.
2. Discrimination or prejudice based on race.
rac‘ist adj. & n. [www.answers.com]

Notice that the definition does not declare as racism acknowledging differences among people. You can’t help that, and I know of no one who can. It is what you do with that acknowledgement that makes you a racist (or a non-racist, in other cases). An Arab job-candidate who thinks, "Uh-uh… white interviewer? Goodbye job" is a racist. No matter how many times white people have denied  Arabs jobs on the basis of colour, those white people were individuals as much as the present interviewer. No individual can act for a group, and it is wrong to see what an individual does and think that others with the same physical traits would act similarly.

Racism is the Ottoman massacre of Armenians, it is slavery, it is the holocaust, it is apartheid, insults, cruelty, lots of cruelty, stupidity, cruel stupidity, cruel insults, and blind opposition to laws like affirmative action. Clinton was probably right when he said of affirmative action, mend it, don’t end it. Following are some comments by various speakers on the subject of racism and discrimination. The aim of the passages here is to get you to see a variety of views, and to ponder the situation with a maximum of opinions before you.

"Black pride" is said to be a wonderful and worthy thing, but anything that could be construed as an expression of White pride is a form of hatred. It is perfectly natural for third-world immigrants to expect school instruction and driver’s tests in their own languages, whereas for native Americans to ask them to learn English is racist. [www.stormfront.org]

Of the many sorry things about the contemporary United States that the Katrina catastrophe has exposed, perhaps none is more depressing than what it showed about the abiding divide in American thinking about race and racism. The televised and photographed spectacle of Katrina’s aftermath in New Orleans in particular revealed that the vast majority of those worst affected were black, in numbers disproportionate even to the large percentage of blacks within the city. [http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org]

Today in the United States and most of the White world, as soon as a White child is old enough to understand language, he is told that he should feel guilt for the crimes of his ancestors. Guilt for finding, conquering, enslaving, and killing off non-Whites around the globe… and littering in the process. Guilt, not for his own crimes, but for the crimes of other people of the same race. But he is also told that he should feel no pride in the amazing achievements of his race. No pride in the pyramids and the Parthenon, no pride in the arch and the dome, no pride in White science and technology and medicine, no pride in the glories of European painting and sculpture and music, no pride in Plato and Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, no pride in the exploration of the globe and the conquest of space. Pride, not in his own achievements, but in the achievements of other people of the same race. [www.nationalvanguard.org]

You pass me on the street and sneer in my direction.You call me "Cracker", "Honkey", "Whitey" and you think it’s OK. But when I call you, nigger, Kike, Towelhead, Sand-nigger, Camel Jockey, Beaner, Gook, or Chink you call me a racist. You say that whites commit a lot of violence against you, so why are the ghettos the most dangerous places to live. You have the United Negro College Fund. You have Martin Luther King Day. You have Black History Month. You have Cesar Chavez Day. You have Yom Hashoah. You have Ma’uled Al-Nabi. You have the NAACP. You have BET. If we had WET(white entertainment television) we’d be racists. If we had a White Pride Day you would call us racists. If we had white history month, we’d be racists. If we had an organization for only whites to "advance" our lives, we’d be racists. If we had a college fund that only gave white students scholarships, you know we’d be racists. In the Million Man March, you believed that you were marching for your race and rights. If we marched for our race and rights, you would call us racists. You are proud to be black, brown, yellow and orange, and you’re not afraid to announce it. But when we announce our white pride, you call us racists. You rob us, carjack us, and shoot at us. But, when a white police officer shoots a black gang member or beats up a black drug-dealer running from the law and posing a threat to society, you call him a racist. I am white. I am proud. But, you call me a racist. Why is it that only whites can be racists? [www.snipeme.com]

In stark contrast to Martin Luther King’s advocacy of nonviolent resistance, the Black Panther Party believed in arming for self-defense against police brutality. While arming provided protection, it also led to incidents that ended in violent standoffs with the police. [http://afroamhistory.about.com]

I’m not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or a flag-waver–no, not I. I’m speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare [www.socialistworker.org]

Former South African President Nelson Mandela, who Bush has praised as a hero of human rights, joined the chorus of critics by calling Bush arrogant and implying the president was racist for threatening to bypass the United Nations and attack Iraq. "Is it because the secretary-general of the United Nations is now a black man? They never did that when secretary-generals were white," Mandela said. Most pronouncements of racism I can at least understand, though usually not accept. This, though, makes very little sense to me. Why did Mandela choose to call Bush racist, instead of one of the many other possible pejoratives which would be at least a bit more relevant to the topic of discussion? I don’t agree with most of the criticisms of Bush concerning Iraq, but if people are going to criticize him, I’d think they’d at least choose a criticism about Iraq. [www.discriminations.us]

France was Europe’s fourth largest slave trader after Portugal, England and Spain and transported about 1.25 million slaves. France abolished slavery in 1794, after a successful revolt by slaves in the island colony of Haiti. This has already sparked debate about France’s colonial past and immigrants from most of its former colonies. There is also a question of French citizens who are direct descendants of slaves who have felt they are being marginalised. However, these groups also feel that the commemoration is too little and too late. On 10 May 2001, France passed a law recognizing slavery as a crime against humanity. The law requires schools to include lessons about slavery as an important part of class curriculum. [www.andnetwork.com]

Today is the 10th of May. Children are not the only ones who need to learn about history. I look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely
Rethabile

I have worked a bit more on this poem and reposted the latest version here.

It is wonderful and good to be able to criticise a government.
It shows maturity and democracy on the part of such a government, although the ability to be criticised in itself does not guarantee maturity and democracy. There are other factors that, lumped all together, make for a mature, democratic, legitimate, progressive, people’s government. Where was blogging when we needed it? In the 1976 disturbances in South Africa, wouldn’t it have been great to have bloggers telling the world what was really happening?

Imagine Steve Biko blogging.
Would we have been indifferent? Judging by the number of people who frequent popular blogs, I doubt it. More of us would have listened more intently. And perhaps more of us would have done something. I also wonder what the reaction of apartheid South Africa would have been. One of the advantages of blogging in such a climate is, of course, that traces can be wiped and blurred, to make it difficult to be caught. And the mobile phone can be carried anywhere by anybody. The people at Liliesleaf Farm could have received a call on someone’s mobile phone with the simple and urgent message, “Get out. Now!” And what would have taken place then, with Nelson Mandela’s comrades “free” to roam and plan? Would there have been a Soweto 1976?

With communication technology so ubiquitous, is it getting harder for governments to become, or to remain, rotten?
In 1998 there were riots in Lesotho, following that year’s May vote. The commotion quickly reached the ears of the world, and especially of SADC. South African and Botswana troops rolled into Lesotho and quelled what was in fact an attempt at overthrowing the government. But in 1970, when the election was annulled and the incumbent Prime-Minister, Basotho national party leader, staged a coup d’état, Basotho were alone to face the consequences. Nobody heard, and if they did, they pretended not to. Following is a table of what African countries and the world failed to hear in January 1970.

January 1970 National Assembly Election
Voter Turnout: 81.9%
—————————————-
Party: Basotho Congress Party (BCP)
% of Votes: 49.85%
N° of Seats (60): 36

Party: Basotho National Party (BNP)
% of Votes: 42.20%
N° of Seats (60): 23

Party: Marematlou Freedom Party (MFP)
% of Votes: 7.30%
N° of Seats (60): 01 [Source]

Leaders of the party that had 50% of the vote and a majority 36 seats were sent to prison.
Besides ratting on unfair players, technology also facilitates democracy in many other ways. The very fact that democracy need be highly interactive between governor and governed, implies that technology will encourage rather than inhibit democracy. We’re all afraid of what we don’t know (of the dark), but technology is there to lay things bare and demonstrate the workings of government, and educate the masses. “Democracy cannot survive without an unswerving commitment to education“. And what’s more, technology may be leading us away from being represented in government toward representing ourselves directly. Nelson Mandela says that technology democracy is when you “reach out to people themselves, involve them, engage them, and listen to what they say” [Source].

“In a country where fighting misinformation is a major part of the battle against HIV/AIDS, I am not sure these crusaders have picked the right side. The sad thing is, I don’t even think they are ill-intentioned. I am willing to bet Angley and his gang are here at a loss, funded by their church in Ohio. It’s not a scam: they really believe in what they are dispensing. (Though I bet their home church in Ohio is not doing too shabbily…) No matter how many people show up to a crusade in Maseru, an offering plate passed among the poor here is not going to make a dent in the airfare or hotel budget of Angley and his friends.”
http://wakanaka.blogspot.com

“Whatever the case it was clear that he’s using the Aids pandemic to make as much money as possible, promising people that they and their entire families can be healed of Aids through him.”
http://www.tashitagg.com

This morning, like on most days, I took the tube to go to work. I entered a wagon and saw a true spectacle. A black lady was standing in the middle, talking to the seated travellers, or rather scolding them.

“Wake up, people! You must get involved otherwise the world is going to pot, starting with poor countries. We live in the same world, yet we don’t share it’s resources equally. African school children sit on the floor and scribble on that same floor. Richer countries have cheated poorer countries of their right to the planet’s resources. Wake up and do something today. Don’t look to politicians, they are crooks. Come together in God and do something, I beg of you. Thank you.”

And she got out when the underground stopped. The whole speech, which was already on when I boarded, was a clear message from a person who has been deeply hurt, or a person who sees the world is heading for disaster, unless we “do something” now. It was a powerful moment for me. The rest of the passengers dug deeper into their newspapers or books. Many kept their headphones on.

www.46664.com

THE World Cup in Germany is set to become a battleground between fascists and Muslims, an Italian member of a new European neo-Nazi movement warned. In a statement published by Italian daily Repubblica, the member of AS Roma’s notorious ultras hooligan group claims neo-Nazis across Europe met in Braunau in Austria to plan attacks against supporters from Islamic countries during the World Cup in Germany from June 9 to July 9.
http://foxsports.news.com.au

Black & White

“Scientists said Thursday that they have discovered a tiny genetic mutation that largely explains the first appearance of white skin in humans tens of thousands of years ago, a finding that helps solve one of biology’s most enduring mysteries and illuminates one of humanity’s greatest sources of strife. The work suggests the skin-whitening mutation occurred by chance in a single individual after the first human exodus from Africa, when all people were brown-skinned. That person’s offspring apparently thrived as humans moved northward into what is now Europe. […] In fact, several scientists said, the work shows just how small a biological difference is reflected by skin color. The newly found mutation involves a change of just one letter of DNA code out of the 3.1 billion letters in the human genome.”
http://www.chron.com

It is true that it sounds more benign when called thus: capital punishment. But it is ‘killing’. Let’s call it not capital punishment, not the death penalty, but killing. Stanley Tookie Williams died today after being injected with a lethal concoction. Let us not say that, either. Let us say, Stanley Tookie Williams was killed today. Tookie had allegedly taken the lives of four of his countrymen. That sounds too soft, too; he had allegedly killed four people with a shotgun at point blank. So he deserved to die. Or did he?

Who killed these people? If we kill Tookie for killing, who kills us for killing Tookie? Who kills the person or people who killed 30,000 civilians in Iraq, plus about 2,150 American soldiers, plus non-civilian Iraqis? Tookie had no right to do what he did. What right have we to “do to him what he did to others?”

The pain of family and friends must necessarily come into play. Tookie’s victims had family. The pain must be tremendous, even after such a long time (The crime occurred 26 years ago). Twenty-five years ago someone pressed the trigger of a machine gun and blew my sleeping, three-year-old nephew to bits, brain and all. A few years before the same person or someone else had snuffed out my brother’s life. We don’t know how. We were never given the body.

I’m in no way trying to compare pains, but rather to make my statement more understandable. It is the statement that “if those who kill your loved ones are killed for it, your loved ones do not return.” If you quote that, credit it to me, Rethabile Masilo. What’s more, I feel that the perpetrators of those crimes against my family are now in deep shit, both as human beings, full-stop, and as human beings before God. If my family and friends had gotten them killed, and then gloated, wouldn’t we be the ones in deep shit today? Besides

I know from talking to many others who have shared that chamber with me before that when months or even years have gone by, there will be no real closure or peace after what we saw Tuesday morning. Williams will not be alive for the supporters who wanted to save him, and the people he was convicted of killing will still leave huge empty spaces in the hearts of their loved ones. [Source]

Killing is wrong, no matter who does it and for whatever reason. Let’s start from there, before we even think of working our way out toward whether Tookie should have been pardoned, or whether the killer of 30,000+ people should go scot free, or whether the system is or is not flawed, killing innocent people, or whether the system is or is not racially biased, killing more minorities than other Americans, or whether religion gives us the right to play God and kill, or whether killing criminals lowers the crime rate… Let us start from the beginning and gently remind ourselves that killing is wrong. Now, what?

Relevant reading: http://www.huffingtonpost.com

This is some scary stuff…

UPDATE: The link I provide above is dead. Here’s a functioning link (http://allafrica.com)

“Civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks has died at the age of 92. It was 50 years ago this December that she refused to relinquish her seat to a white man aboard a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Her act of resistance led to a 13-month boycott of the Montgomery bus system that would spark the civil rights movement. We go back to 1956 to air a rare interview aired on KPFA with Parks. [includes rush transcript]”
{Source}

Were we really the first to recognise Nelson Mandela with an honorary degree? According to the article reproduced below, and others, we were. It was on 29 September 1979 at the National University of Lesotho, and Ntate Mandela was still on Robben Island.

On his behalf Alfred Nzo, the then General Secretary of the ANC, received the degree. Funny that I do not remember the event, although I was at the National University of Lesotho in 1979. Perhaps my brain has chosen to remember inside politics, which at the time were on the brink of spilling over, threatening to erupt and disrupt. The end result was the murder of some Basotho and an attack on our home. And the screwing-up of the lives of many Basotho.

It is also funny that a government that felt it could honour Ntate Mandela thus and at risk, also felt it could kill its own citizens and carry out a quasi reign of terror. The two actions do not match, when one doesn’t know that the government at the time was sucking up to North Korea and Cuba. All that was a long time ago, but one does have a hard time forgetting. Never mind that the then government of Lesotho may have been thumping its nose at the big, bad Apartheid regime and trying to get closer to the Eastern block, the move was good, and it set off a world-wide avalanche of honorary degrees for the famous prisoner. Here’s the article: (more…)

NIGGERS (PTY) LTD

This picture and its accompanying story were sent my way by Hubert, a long-time friend. Please get the full story: over here. I have always heard the word used by blacks when humourously referring to other blacks; I have always heard the word used by rappers, a lot, as well as by stand up comedians. The points that David Sylvester makes may seem common and unimportant, but ironically, that is why they are all important. Thanks for the article, Hubert.

The whole thing is tantamount to calling a shop KAFFIRS or COOLIES or CHINKS. Or any other word meant to degrade.

I can’t deny it – the news footage coming out of Fallujah is exciting. We’re watching history in the making, folks. The fate of Iraq will be decided in the days and weeks to come, and who knows what else with it.
[ Source… ]

One of the more common uses of the adjective exciting is “which makes one happy.” The other one is “causing reaction.” I hope Laurence meant the second meaning, because the footage coming out of Fallujah is anything but “making one happy.” The bold declaration that begins Laurence’s post is giddy and happy, though, which makes me unhappy.

I also do not think that the fate of Iraq will be decided by the ongoing battle for control of the city of Fallujah. Those who may think so have another think coming. The fate of Iraq will most probably be decided by Iraqis themselves.