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

This April from Jacana Media

Spilt Milk is the story of two passionate people who share a shameful past and a tenuous present.

Decades after a childhood love affair earns upright school principal Mohumagadi and disgraced preacher Father Bill expulsion from their communities, the two characters are brought back together under the most unlikely of circumstances.

Mohumagadi, headmistress of the elite Sekolo sa Ditlhora school for talented black children, takes in Father Bill as a teacher much to the dismay of her students and faculty. Thus begins a battle of wills and wits for the hearts and minds of the students living in the shadow of revolution and change.

About the Author

The EU Literary Award-winning Kopano Matlwa is one of South Africa’s most vibrant young writers. A medical graduate, Kopano is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Coconut. She is a founding member and chairperson of Waiting Room Education by Medical Students, a non-profit organisation run by students and is a 2010 Rhodes Scholar.

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• Spilt Milk by Kopano Matlwa
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  EAN: 9781770097919
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David Lush chats to author Paul Trewhela about the significance of his book Inside Quatro in today’s South Africa.

While Inside Quatro documents meticulously the abuses of the ANC and Swapo in exile, there is little reflection or analysis on what implications these abuses have had for the ANC and Swapo’s governance of South Africa and Namibia respectively. Wasn't this a missed opportunity?

PT: Primarily the book has an historical character, though with open-ended relevance to the present and the future. The two most important chapters in the book, in my view (chapters 2 and 11), are not ones written by me, but give first-hand accounts of the experience in exile in the ANC and Swapo camps. As I explain in the Introduction, all but four of the 14 chapters are from Searchlight South Africa, which was banned in South Africa. While available to academics, and quite widely cited in various publications since then, these texts have not been available to the general public until now.

• Read the complete article at TheCommune.org

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• Inside Quatro: Uncovering the Exile History of the ANC and SWAPO by Paul Trewhela
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  EAN: 9781770097766
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It was a sweltering summer night and the groaning air conditioners stirred the air about listlessly as the throngs gathered at the Book Lounge. A number of supporters prouldy sported t-shirts proclaiming their positive status – and positive attitude.

They’d come to hear a fascinating encounter with the author of Debunking Delusions: The TAC campaign against AIDS denialists, Nathan Geffen, who was joined by Cape Times editor, Alide Dasnois, and AIDS survivor, Andile Madondile. The crowd, which burst into applause and later into song, was certainly not disappointed by the evening’s discussion.

In his introduction to the panel of speakers, Mervyn Sloman recalled amidst much laughter his first meeting with Geffen. “It was many, many years ago at a summer camp of the most conservative of Jewish youth movements.”

He paused to query whether this was more embarrasing for him or for the author and said he wants to believe that they were both undercover agents with a mission to counter the Zionist propaganda that was on the daily menu. “But in the interests of the truth, I will simply say that we were very, very young!”

Turning substantially more serious, Sloman reflected on how post-Polokwane, it was remarkable how every social ill was blamed squarely at the door of Thabo Mbeki. “People who hadn’t said a critical word during his time in office were jostling each other in the queue to celebrate the passing of the Devil and the heralding of a new era of political openness and delivery.”

“There is no doubt that there is criminal culpability it was the embracing of AIDS denialism and the impact this had on South Africa’s AIDS policy. At the top of the list is the tragic loss of thousand of lives. This extremely well-written book explains the science and treatment of HIV/AIDS in an informative and accessible way. He contrasts the claims of the lunatic fringe of quacks who somehow found the ear of the presidency with the campaigns and successes of the TAC. Much has been written about the villains of the last ten years; less has been written about the heroes. Nathan Geffen is one of the heroes and it’s a privilege to have him here tonight.”

Alide Dasnais, editor of the Cape Times, welcomed this as an important book and commenced by reflecting on how journalists are trained the importance of hearing the other side, the importance of diversity of opinion and the right to reply. “As I read this book, the theme running through my mind was the question “At what point does the right of reply no longer force itself upon us? At what point is the opposite opinion no longer legitimate?”

“This is a question we deal with in the media all the time. At the moment, issues surrounding climate change pose a similar challenge.” She said she’d found an answer in this book, but wanted to hear from the author when the other side no longer has a right to reply?

Geffen said this was a critical question and a difficult one to answer. “I’ve grappled with this and am still not sure of the answer. To give an analogy, if someone were to submit a piece to the Cape Times saying that FW de Klerk was still the president of South Africa, it’s immediately obvious as nonsense and you wouldn’t publish it. But with science it’s harder. Few people have the skills and training to discern good science from bad.” He suggested that every major media house needed a science expert on its team. That’s not always easy in light of the current economy, but it would help.

“I can live with the writings of AIDS denialists appearing on the letter’s page of the newspaper where people understand that this is someone writing in with a crazy opinion, but when it gets into the op-ed pages, it’s problematic. When there’s a broad scientific consensus on an issue like HIV or global warming, I believe it’s irresponsible for a newspaper to give editorial space to views that have been scientifically discredited.”

By way of introducing Andile Madondile, Dasnais read – with his permission – the book’s gripping introductory paragraph. Describing how, with his body wasted and covered in sores, he visited traditional healers in Cape Town but his symptoms got worse.

He hung a rope from the roof of his shack, placed a chair beneath it, placed the noose around his neck, removed its slack and kicked the chair away. “He dropped and dangled. As he swung from the rope, dizzy and gasping for breath, his three-year-old daughter, Elihle, entered the room. She gasped and screamed.”

Madondile told the rest of his story, recalling the trauma and shame of his diagnosis, his belief that he’d been bewitched by jealous neighbours, the disclosure of his status to his mother, a nurse at Baragwanath, and then the painful disclosure to his partner, now his wife.

His wife, present in the audience, stood to receive the applause of the audience. His young daughter, who at three saved his life with her screams, recently celebrated her ninth birthday. When he first started anti-retroviral treatment, his CD count was 34. Five years on, Madondile is alive to tell this brave account of overcoming the obstacles and prejudices of obtaining treatment.

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• Debunking Delusions: The TAC campaign against AIDS denialists by Nathan Geffen
  EAN: 9781770097810
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Jacob Dlamini regularly teeters on the edge of controversy with his alternative historical views. In Native Nostalgia, for example, he investigates the positives of Apartheid while in the following article, written for Business Day, he questions the 1913 Land Act, asking whether it was indeed our nation’s original, political sin:

The 1913 Natives Land Act is considered by many people to be SA’s original political sin. The act, which became law on 19 June 1913, limited African land ownership to 7% (increased to 13% via the 1936 Native Trust and Land Act) of SA and barred Africans from buying land in 93% of SA set aside for white control. It did this in part by enacting a legislative distinction between white-owned areas and native reserves, also known as scheduled areas. It also introduced anti- squatting measures to put a stop to sharecropping.

It was, said Sol Plaatje in his 1916 classic Native Life in South Africa, a “cruel law” that turned Africans into pariahs in the land of their birth. Commenting in 1991, more than 70 years after Plaatje first published his observations, then state president FW De Klerk said: “Of all the processes which have brought about the inequitable distribution of wealth and power that characterises present-day SA, none has been more decisive and more immediately important to most black South Africans than the dispossession of land.”

• Read the complete article

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• Native Nostalgia by Jacob Dlamini
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  EAN: 9781770097551
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Contributors to TRANS: Transgender Life Stories from South Africa and representatives of Gender DynamiX, a Human Rights organisation promoting freedom of expression of gender identity, with a focus on transgender, transsexual and gender non-conforming identities, have added their voices to poets, Yvette Christiansë and Gabeba Baderoon, in expressing their concern at Minister Lulu Xingwana’s reaction towards lesbian photographer, Zanele Muholi’s work.

Special to the Jacana Media blog, Robert Hamblin and Caroline Bowley speak on this topic with passion and conviction:

***

Gender DynamiX is deeply concerned about the policing of bodies by the State. A very large part of our work is centred on examining the practices of the Department of Health (DoH) and the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) and their unethical activities towards Transgender people. We are now faced with the question whether this is becoming a government trend.

Has the Department of Arts and Culture now joined hands with the DoH and the DHA in their discriminatory practices towards gender variant bodies? Minister Xingwana’s recent behaviour regarding the work of gender activist artist Zanele Muholi adds to the gravity of what seems to be a growing conservative trend in state departments.

“Immoral, offensive and going against nation-building,” said Lulu Xingwana, the Minister of Arts and Culture about Muholi’s work. “Immoral and offensive” speaks to the old “art vs. porn” debate, as well as to peoples’ personal opinions. The point of advocacy art is not aesthetics. It is to educate, to stimulate debate, to object to it if you wish, and to give people a platform from which to voice opinions. When Xingwana publically gives an opinion, she’s doing it on behalf of us all. She is a government minister and so in condemning it outright in essence, she claims that of the entire nation echoes her opinion. It most certainly doesn’t, as recent reactions in the City Press, the Times etc. clearly show.

“Nation building,” according to our very fine constitution, includes lesbians, transgender, gender non-conforming people, and so on – and it certainly includes artists. The constitution even has room for reactionary and conservative opinions like Xingwana’s – but not as our national representative of arts and culture in this country and worldwide.

Zanele Muholi is the kind of artist you would never have experienced in the bad old days of apartheid. She’s black, she’s a lesbian, and she has very clear messages for her community – for us. Her photography tells truths many people don’t enjoy – that there are black lesbians and gender variant people in South Africa. Her work also tells us that we are allowing the ongoing rape of black lesbians in order to “cure” them and all too often, their murders. Zanele Muholi is a symbol of the inclusiveness of the constitution.

Xingwana has publicly and officially expressed her personal negative feelings about gender variant peoples’ bodies and how they should interact. The figures in Muholi’s work are clearly not engaged in sexual activity. We interpret it as the minister’s policing of bodies and the behaviour of those bodies.

There are disturbing parallels between this and the way the Department of Health discriminates against gender variant bodies, noting that discrimination is taking place in the form of exclusion / gate keeping for treatment at most government hospitals. At the Department of Home Affairs there is a clear trend where the Department is not implementing the Amendment of Act 49 of 2003. Act 49 explicitly allows trans and intersex people to amend their documentation without requiring genital surgery. This law was amended partly because of the lack of access to, and gate keeping at State Hospitals.

Gender DynamiX would like to see government officials and especially Xingwana embrace our diversity, and make a concerted effort to sensitise themselves to gender variance, to educate themselves about art activism, and to acknowledge that gender variant people too are part of the rainbow nation that we are building!

In addition, Gender DynamiX demands public acknowledgement by the Government Ministers concerned, of the vulnerability of our constituency, and of the ongoing prejudices lesbians, gays, transgender and intersex people, artists and many other marginalised groups are facing on a daily basis.

Book details

• TRANS: Transgender Life Stories from South Africa edited by Ruth Morgan, Charl Marais, Joy Rosemary Wellbeloved
  EAN: 9781920196226
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Inside Quatro provides a first-hand account of the ANC’s Quatro prison camp and of the mutiny in Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) in Angola in 1984; articles on the SWAPO ’spy drama’ of the 1970s and 1980s; an analysis of a death in exile with implications relating to Jacob Zuma; and a study of the responses of both the ANC and SWAPO to these episodes of intolerance, repression and excess. In all his essays, Trewelha analyses problems of the liberation struggles with a former insider’s knowledge and a journalist’s ability to ferret out the facts.

Here is an excerpt from the book:

In April 1990 a group of eight former members of Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) returned to South Africa a few weeks after Jacob Zuma, but under very different conditions.

While Zuma was smuggled into South Africa in secret by the government (with Penuell Maduna, head of the ANC’s legal department) to prepare for negotiations with President FW de Klerk, the eight had fled from the ANC in Tanzania following six traumatic years after mutinies of ANC troops in Angola in February and May 1984.

Less than two months after their arrival back in South Africa, one of the eight, Sipho Phungulwa — a former bodyguard of the South African Communist Party leader and MK chief of staff, Chris Hani — was shot dead by ANC members in Mthatha in a daylight public assassination early in June 1990, after he had left the ANC offices with a colleague, Nicholas Luthando Dyasophu.

• Read the complete article in the Mail & Guardian

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• Inside Quatro: Uncovering the Exile History of the ANC and SWAPO by Paul Trewhela
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  EAN: 9781770097766
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In 2005 Jacob Dlamini and a friend first remarked on Jacob Zuma’s rise to popularity and what it would mean for democracy in South Africa. At the time they speculated that his populism would be beneficial. Now Dlamini rescinds that view in an opinion piece for the Business Day.

As with many others who once had high hopes for a better government after Mbeki, Dlamini believes that Zuma has been a negative influence, keeping democracy floating in the murky shallows of corruption and greed. Dlamini is the author of Native Nostalgia.

In November 2005 an American friend and I wrote an opinion piece for the Sunday Times looking at Jacob Zuma ’s populism. Zuma, fired by then president Thabo Mbeki in June 2005 following the conviction of Schabir Shaik for corruption, was at the time conducting what we called a “low-intensity campaign” for the presidency of the African National Congress (ANC) and SA. He had yet to be charged with rape but my friend and I were convinced Zuma would not rise from his weakened position.

We were interested in what we believed was the long-term value of Zuma’s populism for SA’s democracy. Our interest stemmed from two sources. The first was our discomfort with what we saw as knee-jerk and classist opposition to the very possibility of a Zuma presidency. We wrote: “Those allergic to the thought of Zuma inheriting president Thabo Mbeki’s towels (in the presidential residence) share a simple fear: our fragile democracy will go to hell in a hand basket if this cattle herder is let loose.”

• Read the complete article

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• Native Nostalgia by Jacob Dlamini
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  EAN: 9781770097551
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In The Angina Monologues three women medical interns from vastly different backgrounds are sent to a rural KZN hospital where gang assassinations and rogue snakes are facts of life and AIDS simply does not exist.

Pampered, spoilt Rachel struggles to establish her independence and learns to love across the cultural divide. Conservative, beautiful Seema struggles to end a relationship that has become increasingly abusive. And street-savvy Nomsa finally learns to accept a past she has spent a lifetime denying.

This is the story of three women finding courage, love and compassion in the most unlikely places. Like its bestselling predecessor, The Karma Suture, The Angina Monologues brings readers face to face with what it takes to be woman doctor in the New South Africa without losing your soul.

About the author

After studying medicine for six years and then working as a doctor for another five, Rosamund Kendal decided that the creative side of her brain needed some stimulation and enrolled for the Masters degree in creative writing at UCT. She hasn’t been able to decide whether she prefers being a freelance writer or a general practitioner, so she’s come to a compromise and does both part-time.

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• The Angina Monologues by Rosamund Kendal
  EAN: 9781770098121
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Zapiro is a busy political cartoonist these days, with our nation’s, erm, leaders providing more than ample fodder for his sharp wit. DStv subscribers will be able to enjoy his ZA News – a satirical puppet TV show based on his drawings, created by Thierry Cassuto – on Summit TV as of today, March 2nd 2010.

The Summit clips will be the same as those aired on the internet – see below for a sample!

Zapiro’s latest collection of cartoons is Don’t Mess with the President’s Head.

A satirical puppet show, the brainchild of cartoonist Zapiro and producer Thierry Cassuto, will hit the screens tomorrow evening, after it was yanked from the SABC line-up two years ago just before it was to debut on the state broadcaster.

The project had been partially funded by the SABC, which spent R1-million to create a pilot video in 2008, initially called ZNews. It was never screened, with the SABC citing finances and the sensitivity of viewers before pulling out of project.

At the time the show was canned, Jonathan Shapiro, better known as cartoonist Zapiro, said he was not surprised.

• Read the complete article at IOL Tonight

Watch the latest ZA News broadcast here:

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Book details

• Don’t Mess with the President’s Head: Zapiro Annual 2009 by Zapiro
  EAN: 9781770097575
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