Jacana

When not writing, Jacob Dlamini is a student of history. His most recent archive yields show how past attitudes regarding the “black taxi driver” are similar to the ones held today. In an article that combines both of Dlamini’s passions, he concludes that the stereotypical image of the unwashed and violent, cowboy taxi driver is not necessarily a thing of the present.

I used to think that the idea of the black taxi driver as the stuff of SA’s urban nightmares was a recent phenomenon, something that came into being as the old apartheid order was crumbling in the late ’80s. I believed that the image of the rude, violent, unwashed and unlicensed black taxi driver was an exaggerated example of what “black freedom” meant: chaos, lawlessness and a general collapse in standards. However, I now realise that I was wrong.I have been trawling the archives for my “day job” as a history student and have been examining newspapers from the beginning of the 20th century. I am slowly making my way through a long list but the newspapers I have looked at so far include Sol Plaatje’s Koranta ea Becoana/Tsala ea Becoana established in 1901, Umteteli wa Bantu founded in 1920, The Barberton Herald and Advertiser from the late 1800s and Bantu World set up in 1932. The trawl has revealed worlds I never knew existed. These worlds included black cricket, cycling and hockey clubs. In 1932, for example, there were 13 hockey teams, 15 cricket teams and about 10000 black “sporting” cyclists in Johannesburg alone.

• Read the complete article in the Business Day

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• Native Nostalgia by Jacob Dlamini
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  EAN: 9781770097551
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Image courtesy the Guardian UK

Raymond Suttner, an activist and author (most recently of The ANC Underground in South Africa) – and a person familiar with Jon Qwelane’s controversial career as a journalist – takes a closer look at what the rumoured appointment of Qwelane as South Africa’s ambassador to Uganda means for our democracy:

AT THE moment columnist Jon Qwelane is in the middle of controversy about possibly being appointed ambassador to Uganda. Before focusing on the present, let us rewind to the 1980s when Qwelane was a reporter for The Star. At that time a fake priest in Port Elizabeth, Ebenezer Maqina, purporting to represent the Azanian People’s Organisation (who later disowned him), repeatedly claimed attacks by United Democratic Front supporters. He was awarded honours by cities and given similar recognition. He was exposed in the late 1980s and it was found by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that Maqina had been a SADF agent and had incited the abduction of then-trade unionist, Dennis Neer and journalist Mona Badela. Among other matters he was implicated in killings.

In the meantime, Maqina’s false claims had been popularised and never scrutinised by Qwelane. He has never returned to the subject, where he misled the public and helped spread lies on the word of Maqina. I do not thereby claim that there were no misdeeds by the UDF. I merely point to an element of Qwelane’s past that has receded into the memory of a few people who were politically active then.

The response of ANC spokesperson, Jackson Mthembu, to objections to a self-confessed homophobe being sent to a country which has strong backing for legislation to hang gays/lesbians, is “bring the proof”. Now Mthembu seems to confuse his role. He forgets that he is not a government spokesperson and it is Foreign Affairs or the Presidency which ought to answer.

• Read the complete article in the Daily Dispatch

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• The ANC Underground in South Africa by Raymond Suttner
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  EAN: 9781770095977
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The co-author, most recently, of The Poverty of Ideas, shares his thoughts on why South Africa needs to invest more in education – starting now:

Education is the single most effective black economic empowerment strategy, or redistribution tool, to reverse the crippling apartheid legacy of deliberately under-developing black communities, to lift substantial amounts of the poor out of poverty. The continued slide in black education entrenches apartheid patterns.

A minority that are in private schools, mostly white, and a small black middle class, can access education that can compare with the best in the world. The majority, overwhelmingly black, gets the worst education imaginable, leaving them without the skills to navigate the world of work.

At this rate, blacks will continue to do the menial work, and whites will manage the sophisticated parts of the economy. But the lack of skilled blacks is not only a drain on the economy, black resentment, anger and powerlessness because of the economic marginalisation is a ready time-bomb.

• Read the complete article at Pambazuka

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• The Poverty of Ideas: South African Democracy and the Retreat of Intellectuals by William Gumede, Leslie Dikeni
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  EAN: 9781770097759
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Justin Fox, deputy editor of Getaway Magazine and editor of Africa Lens: 20 Years of Getaway Photography, recently traveled to the picturesque Drankensberg mountain range in KwaZulu Natal. And came back with amazing photographs, of course:

I’m just back from the Drakensberg and stunned by the early summer beauty to be seen in South Africa’s highlands.
 
My trip was an eight-day meander from Royal Natal National Park in the north to Sani Pass in the south. The weather didn’t always play along, but when the sun did poke through the thunderheads the opportunities for photography were amazing.

• Drakensberg Photoblog at Getaway

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• Africa Lens: 20 Years of Getaway Photography edited by Justin Fox
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  EAN: 9781770097605
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One wonders if Jacob Dlamini realised how contentious his book Native Nostalgia would turn out to be? In it, the author argues that many look back at aspects of the Apartheid era with a kind of longing. Ido Lekota defends this view in the Sowetan and joins Dlamini in a call for people to remember to keep the good:

IN HIS book, Native Nostalgia, Jacob Dlamini tackles the subject of how often we hear of black people seemingly hankering after “the good days of apartheid”.

This normally happens when people complain about how their lives have changed for the worst in
post-apartheid South Africa.

This knee-jerk reaction, as Dlamini correctly points out, is (especially for those in power) to reject these comments as “reactionary”.

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• Native Nostalgia by Jacob Dlamini
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  EAN: 9781770097551
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A dedicated group of folk who care deeply about the environment gathered last night in Noordhoek’s Wordsworth Books to celebrate the launch of Grow to Live: A simple guide to growing your own good, clean food by Pat Featherstone.

The author, who is the founder of Soil for Life, a Cape Town-based NGO which teaches people to grow their own food, works with the premise – healthy soil, healthy plants, and healthy people.

Environmental activist Anthea Torr, who edits Biophile magazine, introduced Featherstone’s book, saying, “Grow to Live is a tremendously timeous publication for people moving towards living in a sustainable way. We just have to look at the weather to know that it’s time to become reverent towards our life on this planet. With the world facing three major interlinked crises simultaneously – financial, food and environmental – it is evident that those who acquire the knowledge and skills for cultivating the soil and are confidently utilising any space they have available, no matter how small, will be the protagonists of the future.”

Torr introduced the author: “Born, bred and educated in Zimbabwe, Pat Featherstone moved to Cape Town, in 1973 to take up a teaching post at a local High School. It was not the teaching that brought her here, but the father of her about-to-be children. Three girls down the line and many life experiences under the belt, Pat was propelled into the life she had been born to live. Having returned to her home country to set up a new life in the early 90’s things didn’t turn out quite as expected.

“Tough as it was about to be, she drove from her refuge in Zimbabwe, with dogs, children and scant possessions and enjoyed the freedom of just being. No home, no belongings worth mentioning, no work, no money, and no future on the horizon. Only the multitude of gifts bestowed upon her on entering this world, and her three sisters and a mother who believed that there was a life to be lived.

“With the children out of the nest and armed with a BSc Honours degree, a certificate in higher education and twenty years of teaching experience in biology, biochemistry, parasitology, animal diversity and evolution at secondary and tertiary institutions, Pat committed herself to using all of her God-given gifts, to pursuing her passion for the environment, and to helping people to help themselves to a better quality of life.

“She believes that ‘in the end we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.’

“Best we love our planet now,” she concluded.

A Gallery of Gardeners

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• Grow to Live: A simple guide to growing your own good, clean food by Pat Featherstone
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  EAN: 9781770096509
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The launch of the EU Literary Award winning novel, Saracen at the Gates, at The Book Lounge on Friday saw a large audience kept chortling along by Zinaid Meeran’s eccentric take on his upbringing, the writing process and the movie version of the novel.

He claimed he didn’t write the book at all. “There was a groundswell of feeling in the world that chanelled itself through me,” he said. “People, fed up with being stuffed into concrete identities, wanting to express their fragmented selves, seeking a flow, spoke up and the novel wrote itself. Their protests cover every element of identity: race, class, gender and sexuality. The potential of every human being has been squashed for too long into absurd postures.”

He said the characters in the novel, which appeared in a caffeine-fuelled fog, are yearning for “fluidity of living and were tired of being in camouflage”. In the novel, they manage to bust their way out of their stereotypic existence.

Meeran, who grew up on the KwaZulu-Natal coastline, said, “I grew up marooned between the green swathes of endless fields of sugar cane and the blue swathes of the endless ocean on a small strip where there were so many frogs in spring that you needed a snow plough to clear the drive way. Then there were the sardines, clogging the sea if you risked the Zambezi sharks to go surfing. It was intense!”

Adding to the concentrate, he grew up “with two dozen aunties and a handful of grannies” but he’d lost count on the exact numbers. “The two male role models were my father, strapped into a lazyboy made by the NASA interstellar travel people, who was fed by the maid – no… wait, that was my aunty slapped into a maid’s outfit bringing in saucers of boiling water and boiled egg snackwiches – and my grandfather, who both wanted me to be a man. I have no idea why they wanted that…”

Meeran also has “a Cape Coloured mother, absent; a father of cane-cutter stock; those ancestors were thrown into the jungle in 1860; and English-South Africa step-father and a Cape Coloured grandmother of Malaysian origin.” He reflected that even were the racial categories 100% sorted, things would still be puzzling.

“There’s a need to carve out a space for a different way of thinking. The novel issues a rallying cry for a hammered concrete block. It means a lot to those who all wrote this book to have the cry heard.”

Taking questions from the floor he said Joburg had been chosen as the setting for the story because there was a lot of power the “curry mafia” had invested in that world. “It makes for more skills: bandicoots of the highest order trying in the worst possible conditions to escape the camouflage. Joburg has a sci-fi-dark-underworld feel to it.”

Meeran said he’d fled Durban because while he was away for a month on holiday he returned to discover that a leather bag he’d owned had been eaten by bread mould. “It was striking,” he said.

When asked to comment on the humour in the book he said he felt surpised when ever people noticed that. “I’m not a humourous guy. I’m a very pained person. I see things in a twisted way. To survive.”

When asked about the movie version of Saracen at the Gates, in the works, he said, deadpan, “Dan, our producer, says that when all the SABC guys are released from prison and they’ve paid back their gazillions in debt, we’ll make this at the level of The Titanic.”

The author, who is also a film-maker with his Team Tarbaby twin brother, Jean, was asked about how he writes. He said, “The world of film becomes so annoying and scary. I flee that to go and write, but then I get sick of being alone, so I return to film. Oh. And there’s lots of coffee involved. Large sections of the novel are unadulterated caffeine abuse. I recently read the whole book from started to finish, and I’m shocked at the quality. Caffeine is a bandicoot as well.”

Johan Hugo, of The Book Lounge, who facilitated the dialogue, said the book was created from a splendid riffing structure that made great dialect. “It’s fantastically entertaining with fun, colourful and sparkling variation.”

Gallery

Book details

• Saracen at the Gates by Zinaid Meeran
  EAN: 9781770097704
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Aspasia Karras interviews European Union Literary Award winner Zinaid Meeran for the Sunday Times:

‘As children Zakir and I would empty out the bottom shelves [of the fridge], remove the racks and play David Cronenberg’s The Fly in this gleaming chamber.

My mommy’s bridge cronies would come by to admire the fridge, it being an Italian import. Once we were mid-body in the transmogrification process when aunty Farah opened the door to test its luxurious handling. I was perched on the crisper trays, half fly, half human.”

The transmogrification of Zakira, the lead character in Zinaid Meeran’s European Union Literary Award-winning novel, Saracen at the Gates, is the subject I want to talk to him most about when I meet him for coffee in Parktown North, Johannesburg.

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• Saracen at the Gates by Zinaid Meeran
  EAN: 9781770097704
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Jacana Media and Exclusive Books are pleased to invite you to the launch of The Democratic Moment: South Africa’s Prospects under Jacob Zuma by Xolela Mangcu with guest speaker, editor of Business Day, Peter Bruce. Please see the event details below.

About the book

The Democratic Moment is, among other things, a look at the mass forces that swept Jacob Zuma to power in 2009 and put an end to the elite politics of the Thabo Mbeki era.

Trenchant and provocative as always, Xolela Mangcu looks at the new configuration of power in South Africa and in the process illuminates such topics as the new black elite, the role of Julius Malema, the cartoons of Zapiro and the fortunes of COPE. This is a book that will stimulate ideas, provoke discussion, create controversy and help us understand where we are as a society and a nation.

We look forward to welcoming you in Hyde Park:

Event Details

• Date: Thursday, 05 November 2009
• Time: 5:30 PM for 6:00 PM
• Venue: Exclusive Books, Hyde Park, Shop U30, Hyde Park Corner
  Jan Smuts Avenue
  Craighall, Johannesburg | Map
• Guest Speaker: Peter Bruce
• RSVP: hydepark@exclusivebooks.co.za, 011 325 4298

About the author

Xolela Mangcu is well known as a newspaper columnist and public commentator. He writes regularly for the Sunday Times, Business Day and The Weekender. He is executive chairman of the Platform for Public Deliberation and a visiting scholar at the University of the Witwatersrand. The Platform for Public Deliberation is a not-for-profit think-tank set up to promote a culture of open dialogue on political, cultural, and economic matters affecting South Africa, Africa and the world. His most recent book was entitled To the Brink: The State of Democracy in South Africa (2008).

Book Details

• The Democratic Moment: South Africa’s Prospects under Jacob Zuma by Xolela Mangcu
  EAN: 9781770097742
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Jane Taylor’s richly imagined new work is of two men; Hawthorne, an organ recipient, and Barnard, the first person to perform a heart transplant. The novel opens with a mystery: an unexplained violent death and a video tape left with the body.

Your achievement is all the greater for being accomplished from Cape Town, I said in response to his complaint that the world was catching up. It will signal that our country is thriving. In those days I did not align myself with the nay-sayers who were making so much fuss in the aftermath of the Terrorism Act.

“You are our sputnik.” I spoke in a florid set of comparisons, as I often do when seized by an enthusiasm. I wasn’t exaggerating. “Our Yuri Gagarin”.

These words are spoken to Christiaan Barnard by Guy Hawthorne, the narrator of this gripping piece of storytelling, an investigation within an investigation.

Infused with the halfway modern spirit of South Africa in the 1960’s, this poetic and haunting thriller captures the tensions of the times, the story of medicine and psychological twists that lie at the heart of celebrity and obsession.
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