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On the Life of Dennis Brutus, Poet and Activist
by Adele on 12 Mar 2010 |
An late obituary for South African activist and poet Dennis Brutus which functions as a near comprehensive biography.Best known as founder of Sanroc, the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee, as a rival to the official committee Sanoc, he became a familiar figure in the corridors of Olympic power. Sanroc's brilliantly-conducted campaign persuaded individuals and international sports federations that to compete in South Africa, or even against South Africans, was to condone apartheid.
After the historic transition from rule by the National Party (NP) to the African National Congress (ANC), Brutus was virtually written out of the history of the period, because he had only for a time, while living in England, been a paid-up member of the ANC. Though he had worked closely with Nelson Mandela and other ANC leaders, he prided himself on his independent base in Sanroc.
Book details
- Poetry and Protest by Dennis Brutus, Aisha Karim, Lee Sustar
EAN: 9781869140809
Find this book with BOOK Finder!
Image courtesy the Telegraph
- Poetry and Protest by Dennis Brutus, Aisha Karim, Lee Sustar
Why am I writing about teeth? If I had to write about Malema, I'd open my wrists in the bath
by Ben Trovato on 12 Mar 2010 | Funny things, teeth. They have a lot in common with women. Can’t live with them, can’t live without them. If you don’t pay them plenty of attention, they fall apart. And they frequently bite the hand that feeds them.
Why am I writing about teeth? Why not? If I had to write about Julius Malema, I would end up drinking a bottle of vodka and opening my wrists in the bath. I may do that for a laugh, anyway.
Besides, teeth are becoming something of an issue thanks to a deprived childhood. We couldn’t afford milk so I have no calcium in my body. For a treat, my mother would give us strawberry-flavoured battery acid.
The other day I was gnawing on a chunk of biltong Brenda had tossed to me as a reward for good behaviour when the north face of my top right molar sheared off like an Arctic glacier succumbing to global warming.
I braced myself for the kind of pain one might expect to feel moments after sitting on a PMA-2 blast mine.
Minutes passed and I felt nothing. Then days went by. Still nothing. I cautiously unbraced myself. Brenda said she wasn’t surprised because it had been years since I had last showed signs of feeling anything at all.
I said this is what happens when a wife emotionally eviscerates and psychologically emasculates her husband over a long period of time. She made a cry-baby face and pretended to play the violin.
I kept my face the way it was and playfully pretended to cut off her oxygen supply.
She brought her knee up into my groin and, moments before I lost consciousness, I discovered that I could, in fact, feel.
And while you can’t take every traumatised testicle to the doctor, you do have to take mangled molars and crumbled cuspids to the dentist. However, I wouldn’t do it solely for cosmetic reasons. Broken teeth are nothing new to me and I have been told that they lend a certain charm to my face. Of course, people who say this sort of thing tend to view teeth as an absurd pretension of the upper classes and generally pass the time idly swinging from the bottom rung of the social ladder.
Frankly, like most married men, I no longer care what I look like. If you are in a monogamous relationship, which, if I value my life, apparently I am, there seems little point in spending time making yourself look presentable. I am blessed with a wife who doesn’t seem to notice what I look like. But, like all blessings, this comes with its own auxiliary curses. For example, she doesn’t seem to notice that I need regular feeding, watering and fondling, either.
So it is perhaps understandable that, as one lets oneself go, one’s mouth might begin to look as if a tiny car bomb had exploded inside it. I am left spitting out shrapnel while the Plaque Revolutionary Front and the Tartar Liberation Organisation bicker over claims of responsibility.
No, I do not need the perfect American smile to enhance my visage. The only reason I want teeth is so that I can eat like a real man. I am not one of your postmodern men whose diet is meticulously restricted to protein-boosted smoothies and high-energy gruel. I like my food like my women – hard and crunchy. None of this slurpy, sucky nonsense for me. When I eat, I want to hear things splinter and shatter. I want to feel as if I am pulverising something. I want to hear my food scream as my incisors tear it apart. I want to feel things struggle to escape the grinding of my powerful jaws. Brenda says I am an aggressive eater. What the hell does that even mean?
Nadira Naipaul Writes on Her Visit (with VS) to South Africa, Opens Can of "Winnie vs Nelson Mandela" Worms
by Ben - Editor on 09 Mar 2010 | 
Alert! Don’t Africans get it by now? Never trust a Naipaul. Not under any circumstances, not even if you’re Winnie Mandela, and if the Naipaul in question is merely a Naipaul by marriage, being the wife of the big fish, VS.
You’ll recall that the literary Naipauls visited South Africa in July last year – VS to conduct research on a new book, and Nadira, presumably, to clear a path for the great man in whatsoever direction he should step.
Turns out the Lady Naipaul had more in mind than accompaniment, however, but had also packed her gossip’s hat. She’s now published a kiss-and-tell account of an afternoon at the Soweto mansion of the “mystifying Winnie Mandela” that quotes the latter extensively, and none too flatteringly, about former president Nelson Mandela.
Did the Naipauls rock up at Winnie’s door the same day that they visited the Hector Pieterson memorial (as pictured above)? It would seem likely – the one’s a stone’s throw from the other. What’s less certain is whether their wide-ranging convo with the mother of the nation – which traversed the Stompie murder, the TRC, Nelson’s Nobel peace prize, and more – was on or off the record. Given VS’s initial reluctance to make the visit, as reported by his wife, one suspects that it might not have been strictly “on”. In which case, there’s suddenly much surplus egg for the conditioning of Winnie’s “uncreased brown face [which has] lost the softness”.
Africans, never trust a Naipaul – not even if they’re married to a living legend like you:
Winnie brought up his name very casually, as if it was of no real value to her: not any more.
“This name Mandela is an albatross around the necks of my family. You all must realise that Mandela was not the only man who suffered. There were many others, hundreds who languished in prison and died. Many unsung and unknown heroes of the struggle, and there were others in the leadership too, like poor Steve Biko, who died of the beatings, horribly all alone. Mandela did go to prison and he went in there as a burning young revolutionary. But look what came out,” she said, looking to the writer. He said nothing but listened.
It is hard to knock a living legend. Only a wife, a lover or a mistress has that privilege. Only they are privy to the intimate inner man, I thought.
“Mandela let us down. He agreed to a bad deal for the blacks. Economically, we are still on the outside. The economy is very much ‘white’. It has a few token blacks, but so many who gave their life in the struggle have died unrewarded.”
Jacob Zuma's Britain Visit Shows the President is Weak and Embattled
by Mark on 09 Mar 2010 | Jacob Zuma is an affable man justly lauded for attempting to recreate Nelson Mandela’s reconciliatory style in the aftermath of Thabo Mbeki’s deeply divisive tenure. In this context, the new South African president’s prickly attack on neocolonial British attitudes towards “barbaric” Africans was remarkable. It was reminiscent of Mbeki himself, and even Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe.
The column that provoked the attack, by the Mail’s Stephen Robinson, was indeed an instance of the kind of sarky condescension with which Zuma takes issue. But by rising to the bait at the outset of his most important foreign tour yet, Zuma manifested a dawning truth about his fledgling presidency: he is weak and embattled, not least by the latest revelations about his messy personal life.
A month ago, the South African media revealed that Zuma had a secret child born out of wedlock; after brazening it out for a few days with the “this is my Zulu culture” defence, he was forced to offer an apology. This was not because of an uproar from white racists, but rather, because of the disquiet and outrage of black South Africans, who understood that he was abusing traditional customs to justify his own goatishness. There is no question that he had broken the very strict rules of traditional African polygamy by impregnating the daughter of Irvin Khoza, a close personal friend and South Africa’s football supremo.
The episode compromised Zuma’s authority, already weak by virtue of the fact that he is in power thanks to the sponsorship of a disparate group of ANC leaders with little in common. These include leftwing trade unionists, ambitious businessmen, Zulu ethnicists, and spooks and provincial strongmen sidelined by Mbeki – all of whom saw in Zuma a route into power, and now would like to call in their bets.
Most of them lined up behind Zuma for the simple reason that he was not Mbeki, and was willing to take the man on; many, now, are reckoning with their bad call. Observing Zuma deliver his state of the nation address in parliament a week after his apology, the South African commentator Richard Calland wrote that he could “smell the sense of distance and disdain” towards Zuma from ANC parliamentarians:
“You hear it in the conversations of longstanding ANC members and activists, who remember the days when the ANC’s grand mission was not only to conquer apartheid, but also to do so with a compelling sense of modernity, of non-ethnicity and non-sexism, to set a new standard as a paragon of decency and dignity that would surprise the world and win Africa new-found respect and intellectual status.”
Much remains good about Jacob Zuma presidency: rational leadership at last on Aids; a talented and heterodox cabinet held to account by performance appraisals; a lack of the defensiveness that characterised the Mbeki era. Zuma’s populism has rendered the South African government more responsive and accessible than it was during the aloof Mbeki’s tenure. But it has also meant that Zuma presents himself as all things to all people – and he seems unable to be the kind of decisive leader South Africa needs, if it is going to combat its huge problems.
AA, BEE: A New Racism that Boomerangs
by Denis on 09 Mar 2010 | I stiffened the sinews, clenched my teeth and tackled the 134 comments addressed to two recent columns. One was by me: “if today’s fashion is ‘give the job to the black oke!’ tomorrow’s fashion will be ‘bring back the whiteys!’ “. The other was Frans Cronje on Politicsweb saying much the same thing, though better researched: “the cliché of South Africa’s future and irony of its recent past [is] that affirmative action disempowered its greatest proponents while empowering its most fervent critics.”
I expected wading through these 134 comments to be sewer-repair work, clothes pegs on the nose. How nice to discover that no, comment-lines are not only populated by bile-and-imbecility merchants, there are real people with sincerity and ideas, exploring ways out of decline, in to respect and confidence.
I’d had a wrong idea, I confess, but I claim that it’s not an irrational wrong idea to have. The last few times I’ve checked Moneyweb’s comment lines I’ve been struck by racist scorn (two-way, I add, though sometimes I see bilious black responses as almost forgivable in retaliation to bilious white derision.)
Racist insults are like squashy turds on a footpath; when they recur a few times you cease to notice the nice flowers and upright plants; you get a yecch impression of the footpath. I’d become quite deterred from writing this column, loath to be linked to Neanderthals looking for put-downs.
But now, finding all those real people, I take heart and I also redefine. I declare that henceforth this column is for those people, the ones interested in discussing ways towards a strong, sound country. It is not at all for the delectation of the scorn brigade. Bigots who burn for excuses to whack the blacks can feel free to scoot away. A click or two should deliver them a more congenial home, with the same initials daarby. And for the funnymen yearning to scrawl their witty and entertaining “Yawn” over any place that requires time out from spleen-venting for brain-using, here’s a friendly tip: this column hereby becomes yawn, yawn, all the way. Wander away now, and stay awake.
Let’s now go through some aspects of this proposition that Frans and I have – rather uncannily and with nil consultation – presented to you simultaneously. We each say in essence that the new racism, whether defined as AA or BEE or BBBEE or what, boomerangs. It damages the cause it is meant to help.
Thereafter I suppose we part a little. Frans argues that the whiteys benefit but I’m cautious about that. Yes, it does mean the whiteys, or non-Africans in general, again becoming artificially favoured in the job queues. But that isn’t really “benefit”; it is just another perverse twist in the racism tango, sowing the seeds of the next pile of disillusion and reversal. And while Afrikaners who used to wield rubber stamps are overjoyed to have been pushed into starting their own mini-businesses, they are as un-beneficially affect by the collapsing civil service as anyone else.
I’d say that no one benefits from BEE, except short term. Sudden fortunes must be fun. But we know where sudden fortunes end. We also see lots of evidence now of the pains they cause even while they ride high. The new mansion and the new supercar get an ashen taste when your peers are sniggering behind your back.
Proposition One, for today: I put it to you seriously that there is no real beneficiary from the new racism, and there is a categorical loser; the regular humble South African who needs a growing economy. That person – child or granny or parent, worker or work-needer or grant-receiver – loses because of the iron law that for your economy to select its players on grounds other than ability to hone its cutting edge is sabotage.
Even when you focus solely on choosing the best person for the job, you get it wrong half the time. A policy that condemns a nation to restrict the candidate pool is a policy that’s betting on the other side. That’s why you hear of BRIC, Brazil, Russia, India and China as the up-and-coming. It’d be BRICSA if our nation was not being stabbed in the back by its own government. Basic net effect: we enter an era where central decisions affecting SA’s life are made by people who have no intention of being in SA while the consequences of those decisions play out.
That’s bad news, not for “blacks”, not for “whites”, bad news for people who want to live here permanently and peacefully. That’s why I thump this tub. We’ll get nowhere while BEE is a race war. We start getting somewhere when we agree that we all want an unchained economy, and when no one fears it’s un-black to say so.
Proposition Two is: the enemy is distortion; the enemy is not people’s colours.
Reading these single-digit IQs shrieking abuse — “go back to swinging in your tree” and the ilk – I wonder what death-wish is at work. People right here in Africa get hysterically hostile to everything about Africa; does that add up? You can see their frustration. They see BEE appointments meaning jobs not done, half-done, done wrong. They see people with half their service and a third of their capability being promoted above them. At the office they must put on shit-eating grins, it’s not surprising that they turn to vitriol under the anonymity of the internet.
Poets Yvette Christiansë and Gabeba Baderoon Respond to Minister Lulu Xingwana
by Liesl on 08 Mar 2010 | 
Hello Nigeria! has been the sense on the ground since word broke of Arts and Culture Minister Lulu Xingwana’s dismissal of a photography exhibition at Constitution Hill as “pornographic” and “immoral”.Penny Siopis voiced her dismay. Bongi Bhengu, curator of the exhibition held in August last year, and photographer Zanele Muholi, have responded to the schizophrenogenic insult.
Xingwana’s disingenuous response inspires little optimism. She claims, “I was not even aware as to whether the ‘bodies’ in the images were of men or women”. Oh, sister, did they pluck out your eyes? Are you also the victim of hate crimes? What will it take for you to look?
One can’t help wondering what her budgeteers have told her about the forthcoming slew of South African authors attending the London Book Fair, some of them on her coin.
Special to BOOK SA, Yvette Christiansë, poet and novelist, unpacks the Minister’s recent utterances, pondering the meaning of the Xingwana’s stance for practitioners of the written word – particularly those in the LGBTI community:
**
One name came to mind as I read the article in The Times: Eudy Simelane.
For a government minister to accuse women who love women of being destructive to nation building is dangerous discrimination. Discriminatus: to be in a state of separation. Set apart…Need I say more?
And I seem to recall the only too recent linking of intimacy with immorality and nationalism. Will the Minister strike a special squad? Why, it could be called the Immorality Squad.
Perhaps a key procedural question is: Can a government minister be so cavalier about a nation’s hard won Constitution? Surely such cavalier disregard is unconstitutional, which is to say dismissive of the foundation of rule and law that is a nation’s highest aspiration. A Constitution is, or we hope it is, where the idea of nation resides and is imagined, in the articles of law that protect us all from each other and even from ourselves (as when we are moved by any unexamined discriminatory impulse). Is there not an oath that a minister swears?
Can a government minister, a leader of an elected government, elected according to the provisions of a Constitution, be dismissive of her/his Constitution? If the answer is yes then everyone, but everyone, must be afraid. If the answer is no, we are talking about unconstitutional declarations.
Pornographic? How quickly that word came up. And how revealing. Perhaps the meaning of pornography that comes immediately to mind is that which refers to the explicit display of sexual subjects to explicitly arouse the viewer sexually, and for the personal gain of the pornographer. This is clearly not the case in these photographs. They are moving, yes, in very, very different ways from what the Minister clearly thought.
This is a very touchy subject, but one issue about pornography is the way that it renders feminine and feminized subjects as the passive, mindless players in a script that cares nothing for them as people. Zaneli Muholi and Nandipha Mntambo produce caring, respectful, mindful images that are critically aesthetic. I don’t have to rehearse a long history of portrayals of bodies that have nothing to do with pornography even if they show the erotic (the erotic is not divorced from the aesthetic in the portraits I am thinking of, and that is why they are not reductive and pornographic).
Porno: from prostitute. Graphos: to write. To depict (only) the body vacated of all interiority that is not relevant to sex.
The images that Muholi and Mntambo create are explicitly caring of their subjects. They show love. And sexuality. Not simply sex. There is a difference. With due respect to the Minister, to reduce someone to sexual object alone is to misread.
While we are all invited to be viewers, as the artist is herself, not all viewers see pornographically. The risk that the artist and her subjects take is that she and they cannot predict or control the fact that some viewers only see women’s bodies as displayed for pleasure no matter what the artistic intent is, or that some viewers would only see the erotic and not the aesthetic.
Discrimination is pornographic in the extended usage of the term. The extended meaning pornography that is so often overlooked is the pornography of violence. Discrimination is violence because, outspoken, it has a purpose. Its purpose is to illicit or stimulate reaction and further discrimination. In the Minister’s case, such outspoken statements are clearly able to ’stimulate’ action even at a bureaucratic level as, according to The Times, some of the Minister’s remarks imply.
The Times reported the Minister as demanding to know why the exhibition “was not censored and why her department had contributed R300,000 to it” (let all of the participants be warned-there is no freedom of association, they are all implicated and that is the real unraveling power of discrimination; it cannot stop at one group, it can only begin to look at anyone associated with that group). Discrimination is pornographic because it incites social, political, unconstitutional violence.
And in a context in which homophobia has already targeted women who love women, the Minister’s statements are not simply unfortunate. They are downright dangerous. I say this name here and we should all inhale and have a moment’s silence: Eudy Simelane.
South Africa is preparing for the World Cup Soccer. Whether one is a fan of soccer or not, or a sports minded person or not, soccer has been described (by Achille Mbembe for one) as a sport that cuts across race, class, ethnic and, to some extent, gender boundaries. Bafana Bafana is hailed as a team that brings positive attention to South Africa.
Eudy Simelane’s team, Banyana Banyana, has represented South Africa internationally and South Africans were very happy to cheer them on and send them off under the flag. They play as South Africans, members of the nation that their parents worked to bring into being, and that they are proud to represent. Eudy Simelane played as a South African, as someone who helped bring positive attention to the nation in Cyprus, in Holland and they have their eye set on Germany 2011.
A visit to Banyana Banyana’s facebook shows such statements as “Go play with pride for our motherland” and “do us proud” or “go make South Africa proud and lets do our best.” This is the language of inclusion. It is exactly the expression of “social cohesion and nation building.” Or is this not the kind of social cohesion and nation building that the Minister envisages?
Let me stress that I am not suggesting that all of the women in Banyana Banyana love as Eudy Simelane did. I was drawing attention to her participation in this team’s achievements, which, for the team’s considerable fan base, reflect positively upon the nation. And I was drawing attention to the fact that her team members accepted and valued her for the fully rounded, fully contributing person that she was.
But, in truth, it should not be necessary to marshal Eudy Simelane’s role in Banyana Banyana’s achievements as evidence in order to counter the implication that someone like her could/should be discriminated against or singled out as being an improper citizen or, worse, be accused of being a presence that threatens social and national cohesion.
If this were true, there could be no single nation existing on the face of this planet because gays and lesbians are a fact. We are here. We contribute. We believe. We serve our communities, our nations. We love each other. We love in complex ways. We love with all our hearts and minds, with our bodies. We pay the price for love. We cannot, ever, take our love for granted. And we therefore are very, very mindful and careful about squander. Love can never be squandered. Never. The squandering of love is hateful because hate fills the place where love should be.
It might not be the Minister’s intention to incite violence, but the cold and deadly fact is that her statements would be welcome among those who seek to justify their violence. They already believe themselves sanctioned by all the hoary, spurious biology about gays and lesbians.
I am tired of being scapegoated. But my weariness is a privileged, lucky distance from what happened to Eudy Simelane. It is a distance that should not be a privilege or luck. It should be the right it is. A Constitution says that. And the Minister is sworn to uphold the Constitution. A Minister is sworn to put into practice the ideals that have liberated a country and leave them to be dead letters of law.
Why am I still being so over polite about this business? Is the Minister ashamed of South Africa’s Constitution? Shame on the Minister. Shame.
**
In a second piece special to BOOK SA, poet and academic Gabeba Baderoon writes “On Looking and Not Looking”, an open letter responding to the Minister’s comments about the Innovative Women Exhibition:
**
On Looking and Not Looking
by Gabeba BaderoonDear Minister Xingwana,
To place yourself before a work of art is a complex and potentially transformative experience. Sometimes that means looking at something you’d rather not see. But as the Minister of Arts and Culture, you preside over a realm in which that line between what you’d rather not see and what you need to look at is an ever-present factor, and a theme of much art.
Minister, I invite you to look at art that challenges you, like that of Nandipha Mntambo and Zanele Muholi. That looking is an active and complicated experience that includes all the discomfort, shock, unsettling of established notions, new ideas and feelings that you appear to have had at the Innovative Women exhibition, and that together can amount to illumination. That is what art does. The problem with walking out of an exhibition is that you miss the many meanings that the works evoke, both separately and together. You miss what they create and unsettle, and therefore the possibility of transformation.
Immoral, offensive and going against nation-building … there were children as young as three years old in the room … where do we draw the line between art and pornography.
Minister, where does this language come from?
When you turn to such justifications for your actions, it is our duty as artists, writers, feminists and citizens to point out how revealingly close your words are to those of the apartheid censors.
Artists and governments have always had a contentious relationship. Artists can reach into the minds of people and change them. That is a power that states are wary of and want to regulate. But to constrict art is to erase the capacity for imagining what does not yet exist. We need that capacity because our world is imperfect and we need brilliant, epiphanic initiatives if we are to succeed in changing it. Art generates epiphanies.
So let us name what happened in that brief glance, that instantaneous assessment, that abrupt walking out, and the explanations from your office that followed. Let us name it and its dangers.
The name is censorship, and the dangers are reactionary ideas about art and the fueling of homophobia.
Fortunately, there is another language for thinking about art and artists.
Minister, what would you have seen if you had stayed and viewed the works of Nandipha Mntambo and Zanele Muholi alongside all the other artists in the Innovative Women exhibition and talked about them with other visitors?
You would have seen works that use the language of allusion, intimacy, beauty and pleasure.During your brief glance, you may have mistaken the intimacy in Muholi’s images for pornography and the erudite allusions in Mntambo’s work for carelessness about sexual violence, but that mistake can only be sustained if you don’t truly look at their art. If you stood in front of Muholi’s photographs, you would see lesbian lives outside of the narratives of violation and pornography through which they are more commonly presented to us. You would see how her work opens up a discussion about visibility itself.
For lesbians, visibility carries an immense cost – the feminist writer Pumla Gqola calls this a “hyper-visibility” that has been used to violate lesbian lives through a sensationalistic focus on suffering that has simultaneously made it possible to ignore that suffering. Muholi’s images confront such hyper-visibility and reclaim a space for the women in her photographs away from denigration and hostility and toward presence, pleasure and wholeness. Her work show us there is no category of human being whom it is safe to despise and whose hurt it is expedient to ignore.
And once the photos existed and came into public view, other good followed. Some of the best new South African writing on art, citizenship and belonging has been sparked by Muholi’s work, including essays by Desiree Lewis, Pumla Gqola and Gabi Ngcobo. You might be pleased to know, Minister, that this new direction has also been traced by a vanguard of the African continent’s finest feminist scholars, among them Sylvia Tamale, Patricia McFadden and Charmaine Pereira.
No artist is afraid of being a dissident to conventional thinking. That is their role. Mntambo, Muholi and other artists continuously spark our creative, ethical and political responses, but also our personal and affective ones. We envisage ourselves anew after their art enters our imaginations. If we see someone’s wholeness, can we continue to ignore their violation? The most radical possibility of art is to generate change – and in the process create a more inclusive notion of community.
Minister, perhaps unintentionally, your words have generated a great deal of alarm in the world of the arts and among those of us who strongly support the rights of gays and lesbians. We wonder if we are entering “our George Bush years,” as Gender Commissioner Yvette Abrahams asserted on hearing your comments.
I would like to imagine a different possibility, Minister. I want to imagine you will come back to the images you walked away from, and look deeply at what you thought you didn’t want to see. I imagine you rethinking received ideas about art and pornography (the great poet and activist Audre Lorde gives us some beautifully nuanced insights on this) and arriving at a hard-earned transformation.
I think of you reflecting on your responsibilities as the guardian of the nation’s best impulses in art and culture – which is not to limit but to enable such work. Then perhaps this experience of looking again at the thing you didn’t want to see will have brought you closer to the best and most expansive possibilities of art.
**
Should you feel disconsolate, dear reader, don’t do what I did. Avoid the comments from Joe Public on these articles, lest you find yourself compelled to vomit with grief.
We must ask once again: Minister, where does this language come from? Where indeed?
Book details
- Imprendehora by Yvette Christiansë
EAN: 9780795702907
Find this book with BOOK Finder!
- The Dream in the Next Body by Gabeba Baderoon
EAN: 9780795701979
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Photo courtesy Victor Dlamini
- Imprendehora by Yvette Christiansë
WADA, wada, wada: My guide to southern Africa's most popular, erm, herbal remedies
by Ben Trovato on 05 Mar 2010 | Fifa is worried that soccer players at the World Cup could use stimulants derived from traditional African medicines that aren’t on the list of banned substances.
Fifa medical committee chairman Michel D’Hooghe said he wanted the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) to analyse African plants that could give athletes an unfair advantage.
“If we don’t have control over these specific traditional medicines, then we can’t say we have control over all the medication in football.”
Well, let me give you a hand, Mr D’Hooghe, if that’s your real name. After all, you can’t be expected to know the names and properties of everything that grows in the country.
- Dagga: SA’s most popular herbal remedy helps alleviate a number of physical and mental problems such as manual labour, premenstrual wives and Sunday afternoons. Not commonly regarded as a great performance enhancer outside of laughter therapy groups. Heightens perceptions, usually of being arrested.
- Juliusoria Malemaris: a stubby, resilient vegetable with a thick, fleshy epidermis. Does not do well in poor conditions and must be watered regularly with Moët & Chandon. More of a depressant than a stimulant. Repeated exposure leads to delusions of grandeur. Vomiting may result if taken in large doses.
- Jacobulata Zumarensis: has powerful roots but can be easily displaced every five years. Recognisable by its unusual style, swollen stamen and constantly growing stigma. Has a machine-gun instead of a pistil. A fast reproducer, it is part of a broader organic system that contains nuts. Has been known to provide users with an unfair advantage. Side-effects of prolonged use include immense wealth or imprisonment.
- Helenii Zillespora: a sub-genus of the Venus Fly Trap family, this small but perfectly formed flowering tree is capable of changing its appearance on a weekly basis. It thrives on attention and yet has no visible means of support. Has been known to cause indigestion among its natural enemies. Mildly hallucinatory, its bark is worse than its bite.
- Pieteranthus Mulderata: a non-indigenous hybrid that thrives on farmland. It leaves a bitter taste in the mouth and needs to be crushed, then diluted with one part tolerance and two parts acceptance. Its powerful properties have all but disappeared over the past 15 years. Moves are under way to permanently eliminate this alien growth. Limited in its performance-enhancing abilities, it is likely to find itself on the list of banned substances by 2020.
- Dannyosa Jordaanifera: an interesting genetic mix, this rather miserable-looking specimen should not be taken lightly. Eaten raw with a side dish of lightly grilled Bafanaspicata, it has been known to provoke feelings of misplaced patriotism. Approach with cautious optimism.
- Bennimonium McCarthyllum: a distant relative of Bafanaspicata, it should be taken with a pinch of salt. This rare, indigenous alien needs to be handled gently. Pay it a lot of attention or a lot of money and there is a good chance it will shoot.
Mr D’Hooghe, you should also be aware that sangomas are preparing a special batch of muti that will make our national side invisible. After the first round you won’t see them again.
Bongiwe Mchunu Reviews Basotho People at Work by Rene Gosselin
by Jani on 05 Mar 2010 | 
Verdict: carrot. Book: unusual.This book is about the Basotho people of the kingdom of Lesotho: how they live, play and work amid the beautiful landscapes. They come across as hard- working and peace-loving.
The pages and pictures are well co-ordinated in their layout. Gosselin’s skill shows in the way his subjects are relaxed as they go about their daily lives as he documents them; one can see that the photographer spent time with them, learning about their ways before documenting their lives.
Book Details
- Basotho People at Work by Rene Paul Gosselin
EAN: 9780620453899
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- Basotho People at Work by Rene Paul Gosselin
My repulsive loin fruit, Clive, showed no interest in golf until Tiger got bust
by Ben Trovato on 03 Mar 2010 | The image of golf has suffered terribly as a result of Tiger Woods’ breach of marital etiquette. Yes, I can see how that might happen. I was thinking of taking it up, but then Tiger ruined it for me by making a billion dollars a year and sleeping with dozens of beautiful women.
I, for one, will have no truck with such filth. Instead, I shall take up a sport in which I stand to make no money at all and get to sweat so heavily that I attract stray dogs rather than hot girls.
You have to hand it to the Americans. You can get caught pimping underage immigrants to support your heroin habit, but if you squeeze a drop of glycerine into each eye and go on TV and apologise and say you’re taking gender sensitivity classes and checking yourself into rehab, the nation will rise up and applaud you.
This applies to celebrities more than it does to garbage collectors and other members of the proletariat, whose mea culpa is generally described as a confession rather than a courageous admission of their human frailty. It only works for Americans, though. When British actor Hugh Grant’s willy accidentally fell into a prostitute’s mouth while the two of them were discussing the Middle East crisis in a side street off Sunset Boulevard on June 27 1995, he never tried to “rehab” his way out of it.
His laddish grin on the Los Angeles police department’s mug shot said it all. What happened in the car that night – that was the treatment. Let us be clear on that. Suffering from a prolonged dearth of fellatio, Mr Grant had his ailment treated by the nearest qualified person, nurse Divine Brown. Tiger, on the other hand, speaks for 13 minutes and convinces the world he is a very sick man deserving of our sympathy.
Halfway into his statement, something very strange happened. I began feeling as if I had done something wrong. As he spoke, the burden of guilt lifted from his shoulders and settled on mine. He was pulling some kind of weird voodoo stunt and getting away with it.
He blamed the media for daring to suggest his perfect Swedish wife, Elin, had clubbed him like a baby seal on that terrible Thanksgiving evening.
“It angers me that people would fabricate a story like that.”
I hung my head in shame.
“Elin never hit me that night or any other night.”
Brenda snorted: “Some Viking she is.”
Tiger went on: “There has never been an episode of domestic violence in our marriage.”
Well, maybe there should have been. You would be surprised at how effectively sexual tension can be relieved by smacking one another around for an hour or so. It works for Brenda and me.
“I felt that I had worked hard my entire life and deserved to enjoy all the temptations around me. Thanks to money and fame, I didn’t have to go far to find them.”
And the problem is what, exactly? This is precisely why fame and fortune are a tad more in demand than, say, obscurity and penury. What is the point of being rich and powerful if you’re going to be like the rest of us and go home to a cold, hostile wife who puts your dinner plate on the floor and expects you to get down on all fours and eat it like a dog?
We are the way we are only because we are too goddamn lazy to work relentlessly at something until we are so ridiculously good at it that people line up to throw money at us just to watch us do whatever it is that we do.
Tiger apologised to parents who pointed to him as a role model for kids. What rubbish. Show me a teenage boy who spent weeks sobbing in his room after hearing his hero’s idea of relaxation was to check into a R40000-a-night hotel, drop a little A-grade ecstasy, and lick Beluga caviar off the quivering thighs of naked porn stars while cocktail waitresses queued in the corridor. Show me that boy and I will show you a pervert in the making.
My repulsive loin fruit, Clive, showed no interest in golf until Tiger got bust. Now all he wants to do is get his hands on a bagful of clubs, Ambien and one of those Thai masseuses who work in the house across the road. That’s my boy.
Instead of being lauded for making golf an aspirational sport, Tiger was forced to grovel. Shocking, really, and a scathing indictment on what kind of world we are bringing our children into. Hooking and slicing his way through the rough, he played a freaky shot that put him on the green and into the bunker at the same time.
“It’s hard to admit that I need help, but I do. For 45 days from the end of December to early February, I was in in-patient therapy receiving guidance for the issues I’m facing. I have a long way to go.”
Right there, the attitude of millions of people watching Tiger beat himself up went from self-righteous disapproval to a weird mix of empathy and pride. You did bad, Tiger, but you’re dealing with your problem and we’re proud.
Date for Project Submissions for Durban FilmMart Extended
by Sharlene on 02 Mar 2010 | Plans for Durban’s inaugural FilmMart, jointly hosted by the Durban Film Office (DFO) and Durban International Film Festival (DIFF), go up a gear as the closing date for the submission of entries approaches.
“We are heartened by the submissions we are receiving from entrants throughout Africa,” says Toni Monty, acting CEO of the Durban Film Office. “In addition, we received significant interest from organisations and individual producers on our recent trip to the International Film Festival Rotterdam, where we launched the Durban FilmMart to the international community of producers and also established a partnership with the world-renowned Cinemart. The support for a well-structured forum giving the rest of the world access to African content and projects, is really encouraging.”
“We urge potential entrants to get their submissions in by the closing date of 29 March,” says Peter Rorvik, director of the Durban International Film Festival, “as the Durban FilmMart provides a perfect entry point for African film-makers to pitch film projects to leading financiers and network with international directors and producers.”
Projects with an African citizen attached to any one of the three creative roles of writer, director or producer are eligible to participate in the Durban FilmMart. These include fiction features, animation features and documentaries suitable for international co-production and distribution.
The Durban FilmMart is a joint project of the DFO and the Durban International Film Festival (DIFF) and will take place during the 31st Durban International Film Festival which runs from 22 July to 1 August. For more information on the Durban FilmMart and project submission visit www.durbanfilmoffice.com or contact Musonda Chimba at the DFO on +27 31 3114248 or by e-mail on chimbam@durban.gov.za.
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