South Africa

I have been silent on the fiasco going on at the University of the Free State largely because some stories almost write their own commentary. Mix Afrikaner racism with white and black college students and the possibility of a combustible mix will be present. The Mail & Guardian’s “Thought leader” has had a couple of worthwhile pieces if you are in search of commentary, including pieces by Christi Van der Westhuizen and Michael Trapido.

The outrage is warranted and necessary and anyone who downplays what happened at the Universiteit van die Vrystaat is either hopelessly blind as to South Africa’s lingering racist history or is simply a fool. And we ought not to suffer either gladly. Nonetheless, we should not be surprised precisely because of the country’s racist legacy. And Afrikaners, not all of whom are racist by any measure, nonetheless have a great deal to account for when it comes to the country’s racist past. If events such as those at UFS manages to remind South Africans of the reality of race, then it will have served a purpose, which is not to say that it was necessary or good, but rather than from the terrible comes the hope for redemption.

The Mail & Guardian has a feature on Kader Asmal, who is leaving politics to take on a post at the University of the Western Cape in Bellville. Asmal’s peripatetic career in opposition to the Apartheid state and in support of democracy took him to Bellville in 1994, where he lectured at UWC after he returned from exile. Asmal’s career has blended academic and activism and politics in vital ways and one wishes for him a long career at UWC.

Thirty years ago this week the South African political philosopher Richard Turner was assassinated in his Durban home.

 South African History Online (SAHO) has put together a special feature on the anniversary of Turner’s shooting. His daughter, the journalist Jann Turner, has included her own personal reflections of her father’s life and death and what it meant not only for her, but for South Africa’s liberation struggle.

Today marks the 30th anniversary of Steve Biko’s death while in police detention.  

Newsweek has a story on the United States’ efforts to step up anti-terrorism activities in the Horn of Africa as embodied in Africom, the military’s planned Africa Command.

The United States lauds the role that South Africa played in helping to bring about the conviction of Gerhard Wisser, who was deeply involved in the notorious Pakistani AQ Khan’s nuclear netowrk.

South Africa appears to have made some laudable progress on achieving a host of targets related to dealing with the country’s AIDS crisis. On the other hand, there is a cloud of mistrust that charecterizes much of the debate over AIDS policy that will have to be addressed for progress to continue to occur. 

Is division within the ANC largely a creation of the media? Or do members of the party agree? The Mail & Guardian has one perspective.

If’s a busy news cycle right now in Southern Africa. here are a number of stories that caught my eye in today’s chock-full Mail & Guardian and elsewhere:

As the thirteith anniversary of the murder of Steven Bantu Biko at the hands of the security forces approaches different South Africans remember Biko’s life and death differently.

the Zimbabwe crisis continues unabated. The economic calamity has opened the door for corruption. Some maintain hopes  that South African-brokered talked will lead to a resolution of the political elements of the country’s conflicts, but it seems that  this may not be the time for whistling past the graveyard.

Meanwhile, transformation isn’t always easy. Members of the Democratic Alliance (DA) are up in arms over the Tshwane metropolitan council’s reported ban on white businesses. If the allegations are accurate, the DA would certainly seem to have a case that they will bring before the Constitutional Court. Meanwhile in a  pronouncement that is likely to be equally tendentious, the Black Management Forum  (BMF)  has argued that white women should be removed from the list of groups previously disadvantaged ”in terms of . . . employment equity legislation.” It is a bit hard for white women who benefitted in every imaginable way from apartheid suddenly stepping forward to claim their lots alongside the black South Africans on whose backs the Apartheid system built white privilege.

Finally, the M&G’s longtime rugby columnist Andrew Capostagno has a nifty piece on how this Rugby World Cup represents a “big chance” for the Springboks. He concludes his historically astute article by arguing that if the Boks achieve their considerable promise and “Win this one” South Africans “can forget, for a long, glorious moment, about politics.”

I have previously discussed the controversy over changing names of municipalities, streets, and the like in South Africa. These debates tend to be so contentious because they operate at the nexus of history, identity, ethnicity, and mythology, a potent brew anywhere, but particularly pungent in post-Apartheid South Africa. 

About a year-and-a-half ago I tried to wrestle with some of these issues with regard to both naming but also urban identity in South Africa. Given that there is once again momentum to officially change Pretoria’s name to Tshwane, I’d like to revisit some of those thoughts:

One time when I was staying at a hostel in Cape Town in 1999 I overheard a young woman . . . dismissing South African cities as not being African at all, but rather too European. It was a pretentious thing to say from someone who, come to find out, had spent all of three total weeks in Africa, but felt fully comfortable pontificating at length about the fundamental nature of Africanness, urbanness, and African urbanness.

That said, I guess I get a sense of what she was saying without saying it — she had some sense of what is and is not African, and Cape Town did not seem to be it — too white, too cosmopolitan, not tribal enough. In sum, she revealed her own stereotypes about Africa, but couched them in dismissive platitudes. She had her images of what African cities should be, some exotic idea fixe, and when Cape Town fell short of her Heart of Darkness view of Africa, it was Cape Town’s failure, not hers. And of course what better way to solidify one’s credentials as a fan of all things Africa than to blithely dismiss one of the world’s truly great cities by referring to it as “too European”? Then again, I’m the sort of retrograde anachronist who LIKES London, so I am contemptible to begin with.

I could not help but think of that vexing conversation when I spent all day wandering Pretoria, or Tshwane (”We are all one”), as it is also known now. Pretoria was the bastion of Afrikanerdom. It was the heart of Paul Kruger’s Zuid Afrikansche Republiek, later the Transvaal, and Pretoria was the administrative capital of the country, and still is. So it is shocking to wander Pretoria’s streets and look around and think, much like that young woman who so fetishized Africanness, “this is an African city.” I don’t think I meant it in the same way that she did, and a little part of me lamented that white South Africans seem to have forsaken the city that still is in many ways the emotional heart of Afrikanerdom. It is here in Pretoria that the Vortrekker monument Still draws crowds and evokes tears, as it did on Friday when, sadly, too many white South Africans chose to honor the covenant of the past rather than reconciliation with it. Maybe Pretoria is now a “more African” city than it must have been in 1965 if one adheres to a color by numbers view of African cities. And if this transformation is so, it is, on balance, a good thing. But it says a good deal about too many South African whites that it has become this sort of city not because of the demographics, but rather because of white abandonment. To be sure, whites still work in the city, but they come in during the day, park in protected environments, work during the day, and drive to their posh homes in the suburbs at night.

That said, it is nice to see the bombastic statue of Paul Kruger serving largely as a place on which pigeons shit and African children play, blithely unaware of its symbolic past, save perhaps when bothered, verkrampte Afrikaners wait for these cildren to move when they make the pilgrimage into the city to get their photo of their great founder of the Boer republic. I took a picture today of two young black children playing on one of the four Boers that serve as part of the foundation for the sturdy base. I hope it comes out. The picture, that is, not the pigeon shit.

The controversy over what Pretoria or Tshwane will officially be called hits the heart of what it means to be a South African in the new century. The past is past, to be sure, but it is not merely history. And fundamentally, these questions are as much about the past as they are about the present. The past seems capturable, containable, controllable in ways that the present, with its messiness and contingency and infinite possibility (which is itself both exciting and scary), does not.  For those South Africans reluctant to embrace change, whether Pretoria is Tshwane is less about what the city means now than what it once meant, and if what it once meant is so easy to eradicate, that has profound implications for a small slice of white South Africans and their identity in what is at times a frightening new nation.

Just some quick headlines from today:

The Springboks defeated Australia today in a nailbiter, 22-19, in the first leg of this year’s Tri-Nations. The Wallabies led 16-10 at the half and put up a more spirited front than most experts anticipated.

Author Ronald Suresh Roberts has published his long-awaited bography of Thabo Mbeki. The Star has an article that might or might not be an excerpt from the book — it is hard to tell — revealing Mbeki as  a man of the people, including the poor whites and Cherlize Theron. It is difficult to get a grip on the gravity of the book from this example, but it certainly has aroused controversy in some circles.

The nationwide strikes are at a “make or break” point as COSATU and the government prepare to lock horns on Sunday in hopesof breaking the impasse.

June 16 marks Youth Day in South Africa, and commemorates the anniversary of the start of the Soweto Uprising. It also has, according to the Zimbabwean opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), mobilized and inspired Zimbabwe’s young people, though so far whatever impetus those events have inspired have yet to yield fruit. The Mail & Guardian, meanwhile, uses June 16 to celebrate 100 young South Africans. The M&G recommends you take them to lunch.

Happy Youth Day. Honor the spirit of Soweto and remember what the events of that South African winter represent for the cause of freedom and human dignity.

A few headlines that have caught my attention as I enjoy the first days of my honeymoon in the Pacific Northwest:

Massive strikes, organized by the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), continue in South Africa. They have been largely peaceful, but as the strikes enter their third week there have been some incidents of violence and threats, though the army has been called out to ensure public safety. The central issue is pay for public-sector employees, and as the sides grow entrenched the threat of a “total shutdown” become more real. The trade union movement was central to the anti-apartheid movement and COSATU sees itself as the vanguard of left politics in South Africa. Given that the strike effectively pits COSATU against its tripartite ally the ANC it will be interesting to see what effect this has on the alliance and on the future of South African politics.

The cost of living in Zimbabwe continues to skyrocket. This comes amidst concerns that the Democratic Republic of Congo had shut off power supplies to the beleaguered people of Robert Mugabe’s thugocracy.

At NPR Correspondent Ofeibea Quist-Arcton discusses some of the latest issues facing Africans, including a bombing in Nairobi and the latest G8 summit. In a similarly Pan-African vein, the Mail & Guardian reports that African leaders hope to end the “theater of violence” that racks the continent. 

There has been a perplexing story unwinding in South Africa over the course of the last few weeks. The Springboks are gearing up for their World Cup run later this year. The start has been promising — two South African teams, the Bulls and the Sharks, made the finals of the Super 14 with the Bulls pulling off the win. The annual Tri-Nations clashes, pitting the national teams of traditional powerhouses New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa, will provide the usual measuring stick for where the teams are. Then will come the World Cup, which South Africa has only hosted once, in the epochal 1995 victory in which Nelson Mandela donned a Springbok jersey and for a brief moment the supreme icon of Afrikaner nationalism, the Springbok, became a symbol of reconciliation.

 But in the midst of the preparations for the World Cup a peculiar story has bubbled that reveals all of the fissures in South African society, but in a bizarro world sort of way. The controversy involves team selection. South Africa’s national sports teams bear the burden of trying to compete at the highest level while at the same time helping to make a transition from apartheid sport in which black athletes were inelegible to compete on the national teams. The processes of trying to promote inclusion have led to some tense moments and have brought affirmative action into the public dialogue in a way that tends to reveal deep-seeded politics rather bluntly.

The most recent controversy involves the inclusion of Western Province Stormers flank Luke Watson on the Springbok squad. The solons of South African rugby want him on the team. The coach, Jake White, does not. Watson is a good player — he was Vodacom Cup player of the year last year. But White argues that Watson is not big enough for the style of play — brute force upfront, a traditional Springbok hallmark — that White hopes to implement.

But the twist is that Watson is white. Though he also unabashedly claims to be African. And to make matters even more inscrutable, some, including Western Province ANC Premier Ebrahim Rasool, have taken to calling Watson a “black” player.

The further twist is that Watson is the son of “Cheeky” Watson. Watson and his brother, Valence, were sterling rugby players in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. But they chose to turn their back on the white rugby establishment, and thus the Springboks, in order to play with black players in the townships under the old South African Rugby Union (SARU).  The Watson brothers’ stance — Cheeky turned down Springbok selection in 1976 because of the country’s racial policies – made them virtual pariahs in white South Africa. Many observers believe that their stand so many years ago provide the foundation for the opposition to Luke Watson by many in the current rugby structure. In other words, the Watsons’ anti-apartheid activism might be harming Luke Watson so that even though Luke Watson is white, racism plays a part in this imbroglio. SARU deputy Mike Stofile, for example, accused White of being prejudiced against Watson because of his father’s fight against rugby racism during the apartheid era. Furthermore, some of the black members of the rugby hierarchy, particularly Springbok manager Zola Yeye, are old friends with the Watsons, and thus the politicization of the sport takes another bizarre turn. 

Coach White insists that Luke Watson’s inclusion is not a problem on the squad. Watson will not be on the roster for the test match against England, the defending world champions, this weekend nor will he don the Springbok jersey for the second England match, but he will appear against Samoa on June 9 in the last test match prior to the start of the Tri Nations series. 

The Watson case has drawn a tremendous amount of attention across South Africa. The odds are that it will not abate soon. The controversy over Watson has overshadowed a host of other stories regarding the maekup of the squad. Perhaps the biggest irony is that lost in the shuffle has been that the national governing body imposed another player, the Sharks’ Odwa Ndungane, onto the squad over White’s preferences. Ndugane’s inclusion (he will join his twin brother Akona on the squad) may well have represented an attempt at racial balancing.

If nothing else is clear amidst this muddle, there is no doubt that rugby, race and politics create a peculiar, vexing, and fascinating mix in South Africa.  It is likely that by the time of the World Cup this controversy will be long past, though the Watson backstory will probably prove too alluring for it to recede too deep into the background and race will continue to be an issue in the sport for so long most closely associated with white supremacy in South Africa.

Over at The Boston Globe Derrick Z. Jackson reminds readers that among Jerry Falwell’s many loathsome views, the recently departed openly and unrepentantly supported Apartheid South Africa. While it may not be especially edifying to dance on a man’s grave, there also are few reasons to celebrate Falwell’s life in which hatred was couched in a flatulent and warped version of Christianity.