Harry Targ : My Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela, 1918-2013.

My Nelson Mandela

Real historic figures get lionized, sanitized, and most importantly redefined as defenders of the ongoing order rather than activists who committed their lives to revolutionary changes...

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / December 10, 2013

One of the ironies of 21st century historical discourse is that despite significantly increased access to information, historical narratives are shaped by economic and political interest and ideology more than ever before.

Widely distributed accounts about iconic political figures such as Dr. Martin Luther King stun those of us who are knowledgeable about the times in which these figures lived. Real historic figures get lionized, sanitized, and most importantly redefined as defenders of the ongoing order rather than activists who committed their lives to revolutionary changes in the economic and political structures that exploit and oppress people.

Most of the media reviews of the life and achievements of Nelson Mandela fit this model.

However, most of my remembrances of Nelson Mandela are different.

First, he committed his life to the cause of creating an economic and political system in his homeland that would provide justice for all people.

Second, Nelson Mandela was part of the great wave of revolutionary anti-colonial leaders who participated in the mass movements for change in the Global South in the 20th century. These movements for independence led to the achievement of liberation for two-thirds of the world’s population from harsh, inhumane white minority rule. The campaign against apartheid in South Africa was part of this anti-colonial struggle.

Mandela shared the vision of such figures as Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharial Nehru, Kwame Nkrumah, Amical Cabral, Franz Fanon, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevara. These leaders were spokespersons for mass struggles that transformed the world in the 20th century.

Third, Nelson Mandela gave voice and inspiration to young people in the Global North who sought peace and justice in their own societies. Mandela inspired movements that went beyond the struggle against racism and imperialism to address sexism and homophobia as well.

Nelson Mandela, c.1950. Photo by Apic/Getty Images.

Fourth, Mandela made it clear to many of us (despite sanitized media frames) that he saw himself as part of the movements of people who themselves make history. He worked with all those who shared his vision of a just society: grassroots movements, the South African Communist Party (SACP), the South African labor movement (COSATU), the Black Consciousness Movement, and progressives from faith communities.

To quote from Mandela’s first speech upon release from prison on February 11, 1990:

On this day of my release, I extend my sincere and warmest gratitude to the millions of my compatriots and those in every corner of the globe who have campaigned tirelessly for my release.

I send special greetings to the people of Cape Town, this city which has been my home for three decades. Your mass marches and other forms of struggle have served as a constant source of strength to all political prisoners.

I salute the African National Congress. It has fulfilled our every expectation in its role as leader of the great march to freedom.

I salute our President, Comrade Oliver Tambo, for leading the ANC even under the most difficult circumstances.

I salute the rank and file members of the ANC. You have sacrificed life and limb in the pursuit of the noble cause of our struggle.

I salute combatants of Umkhonto we Sizwe...who have paid the ultimate price for the freedom of all South Africans.

I salute the South African Communist Party for its sterling contribution to the struggle for democracy. You have survived 40 years of unrelenting persecution.

I salute General Secretary Joe Slovo, one of our finest patriots. We are heartened by the fact that the alliance between ourselves and the Party remains as strong as it always was.

I salute the United Democratic Front, the National Education Crisis Committee, the South African Youth Congress, the Transvaal and Natal Indian Congresses and COSATU and the many other formations of the Mass Democratic Movement.

I also salute the Black Sash and the National Union of South African Students. We note with pride that you have acted as the conscience of white South Africa. Even during the darkest days in the history of our struggle you held the flag of liberty high. The large-scale mass mobilisation of the past few years is one of the key factors which led to the opening of the final chapter of our struggle.

I extend my greetings to the working class of our country. Your organised strength is the pride of our movement. You remain the most dependable force in the struggle to end exploitation and oppression...

I pay tribute to the many religious communities who carried the campaign for justice forward when the organisations for our people were silenced...

I pay tribute to the endless heroism of youth, you, the young lions. You, the young lions, have energised our entire struggle.

I pay tribute to the mothers and wives and sisters of our nation. You are the rock-hard foundation of our struggle. Apartheid has inflicted more pain on you than on anyone else.

On this occasion, we thank the world community for their great contribution to the anti-apartheid struggle. Without your support our struggle would not have reached this advanced stage. The sacrifice of the frontline states will be remembered by South Africans forever.

Finally, Nelson Mandela inspired many of us in our own ways to commit to the historical march of people to make a better world. That commitment is powerfully described by a friend, Willie Williamson, a retired teacher from Chicago:

As a young man I learned about Nelson Mandela serving time in prison in South Africa. At that time I was politically ignorant about international affairs, but became curious about the Apartheid racial system because it reminded me so much of the small Mississippi town that I grew up in.

Already angered, after completing a stint in the Vietnam War, I became outraged and somewhat withdrawn. But it was the fight to free Mandela that brought me around to understanding that I had to become a part of a movement with justice at its core. I have Mandela to thank for my understanding of how to relieve an unjust power of its stranglehold. The fight must always be for justice throughout the world!

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University and is a member of the National Executive Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. He lives in West Lafayette, Indiana, and blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Danny Schechter : Malls Are Temples of Debt for the 'Sheeple'

Durban, South Africa's giant Gateway Mall is a "theater of shopping." Image from JoeTourist.

For the 'sheeple':
Malls are temples of consumer debt

The mall is for the modern economy what the factory was for the old one, until consumption trumped production as the engine of economic activity.

By Danny Schechter / The Rag Blog / March 5, 2013

DURBAN, South Africa -- Back in 2002, South Africa hosted a UN environmental Summit on sustainability. It drew a ragtag army of green activists from all over the world, many excited to visit the now free South Africa that they fought for through the apartheid years, and hoping to meet members of the liberation movement led by Nelson Mandela

The closest to Nelson Mandela they got was to gather in front of a giant statue, created by a Swedish artist, in a commercial Square named after the South African icon. When they pictured the new South Africa, they probably saw the townships where tens of thousands of people marched for justice.

Instead, they found themselves in Sandton, a “township” that only capitalists could imagine, an upscale enclave within the city of Johannesburg devoted to corporations, banks and giant malls even more opulent than similar temples of consumption in other countries. Many wandered around in front of the luxury shops, safeguarded by a security army, wondering what that had to do with saving the planet.

South Africa has become a Mall country. There’s even one now in Soweto.

In the old days, empires colonized countries; now their economic combines colonize consumers into market segments that depend on modern malls to organize the shopping that drives economic life.

The mall is for the modern economy what the factory was for the old one, until consumption trumped production as the engine of economic activity. We no longer make many goods; we just generate demand and sell goods others produce in a transaction-based culture where whole societies are organized around venues for routinized and regimented shopping that is masqueraded through advertising as “fun.”

Durban’s giant Gateway Mall, with its food stores, restaurants, game parlors, and movie theaters, calls itself a “theater of shopping.” It claims to be the largest in the Southern Hemisphere.

The academic, Christopher McElligot sees the mall as a “consumer dreamworld for the constantly moving 'happiness machine.'" Another professor, Dr Arzu Seri, goes further and locates malls in the structure of how our modern economies operate, noting, “In shopping malls, the material culture of capitalism creates an appearance of variety, a colorful surface, which hides the uniformity of capitalist relations and the resulting inequality and poverty.”

These institutions are now referred to as pillars of a “consumer democracy” by analysts writing in The Globalist who say there is a showdown coming between China’s economy and our own.

Write Nicolas Berggruen and Nathan Gardels:

The United States has turned into a borrower and consumer-driven economy dominated by the financial sector and services industry and a country where inequality has grown dramatically. In contrast, China is an investor and export-driven economy that is still industrializing, still largely impoverished and sharply unequal.

This contrasting dynamic between two clashing systems has generated an imbalance in the global economy that, if not corrected, threatens the peace and prosperity that has so far been achieved through globalization.

Julian Delasantellis speaks in Asia Times about malls as key to American survival but they are now also a global phenomenon as you can experience every day in South Africa:

In what is, according to some media reports, the bleakest time in finance history since the moneychangers were driven from the Temple, Americans keep spending. How can they not?...  No matter what the politicians bleat on in the Iowa cornfields about the centrality of Jesus in American life, the country’s real unifying faith, affirmed no matter what race, color, creed, gender, or sexual orientation, is mindless consumerism. In this, the nation’s 1,100 enclosed shopping malls are temples to this national faith, with the 500-store Mall of America, in Bloomington, Minnesota, the faith’s new Vatican, its shining food court on a hill.

My friend, the late Alexander Cockburn. saw the Mall as a mirror of an economic culture in crisis, writing,

The left, by and large, never much cared for malls. They represented privatized space, the collapse of the public realm, and the freedoms -- of association and public protest -- protected in public space. Malls, whether in strip or covered form, symbolized a conversion of people from citizens to consumers, the death of Main Street, architecture reduced to utter banality Today, mirroring the distress in the mother ship of capitalism, its colonies and settlements are in decay.

In short, as we shop until we drop, it is our society that is dropping too under the weight of the debts we have been encouraged to accumulate. What many don’t see is that even as the cash registers churn, so do the credit card machines. Our acquisition habit is being funded by lenders who tack on interest while taking their cut when shoppers inevitably fall behind in paying their bills, as they know they will.

In this age of the Sequester, government debts are on the agenda. in part because many of the debts to be repaid are owed to foreign governments and big banks that have the clout to lobby the political system to get their money with interest!

But the enormous debt load strangling families as consumers who have no choice but to continue running it up if they want to feed and cloth themselves is much less visible.

That debt is rising. MarketWatch reports: “American consumers increased their debt in the final three months of 2012 for the first time since the fourth quarter of 2008,,, Consumer credit rose $31 billion to break a four-year downtrend.”

The ultra-modern Malls, with their vast parking lots, are, like casinos, magnets for “the sheeple” looking for bargains but ultimately seduced into spending more than they have. The high real estate expense adds to sales costs for upscale retailers insuring that only chain stores can afford to sell there. Overall, prices are unaffordable for South Africa’s poor black majority that trades in an informal economy of unhealthier food and cheaper goods.

Meanwhile, as Patrick Chalmers, a former Reuters journalist turned critic of financial reporting and the creator of Fraudcast News, notes, the financial solutions being proposed in no way respond to the real economy problems squeezing the public.

“Our leaders' feeble attempts at regulating banks, international finance and global markets have totally failed, leading to ongoing financial crises since the global meltdown of 2007-2008, “ he writes.

“The false debates created with regard to conventional economics, and our policymakers' fixation with a sterile definition of prosperity as determined by economic growth, are major barriers to change.”

And so, once again, as governments look out for themselves, allegedly to deal with debts and deficit and pay off vast military expenditures, often fueled by corruption, their austerity-driven massive layoffs will force the newly unemployed to go on to unemployment doles, and into deeper personal debt.

Around and around we go; where we stop, nobody knows.

[News Dissector Danny Schechter made the film In Debt We Trust in 2006 that warned of the financial crisis. He edits mediachannel.org. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org. Read more articles by Danny Schechter on The Rag Blog.]

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Danny Schechter : South Africa's Political Wars

South African President Jacob Zuma was caught up in a personal corruption scandal that he "narrowly slithered out of." Photo by Reuters.
South Africa’s political wars
begin to resemble our own

The African National Congress is riven by factions, ambitious politicians, and an environment of jostling for power and position. Corruption is embarrassingly all too blatant while basic needs go unmet.

By Danny Schechter / The Rag Blog / June 27, 2012

CAPE TOWN, South Africa -- When I came to South Africa, I thought I was escaping the way our news programs are totally dominated by political coverage even though the election is months away and everyone knows none of this polling and hyped-up speculation matters until October.

The fight between the Democrats and Republicans is an obscenely costly affair which none of our political pundits care to investigate in terms of why so much is being invested and what the likely payoffs will be, and to whom.

Business Day, The Wall Street Journal of South Africa, featured an essay recently with a headline that offers insight into the motivation of politicians in both countries: “PUBLIC OFFICE JUST A WAY TO PILLAGE THE STATE.”

In the U.S., of course, we have two principal parties, almost like two wings on a plane. The Republicans, now the captive of the hard right, and the Democrats, firmly ensconced in the center, partial to corporations but with some issues and positions that appeal to liberals and even parts of the left.

Obama is posturing at being a progressive on domestic social issues while refusing to crack down on Wall Street fraud, and promoting Bush-style war on terror military interventions. Romney is running on a one-point program: blame Obama for everything wrong in the world.

Both parties are beholden to money and the people who supply it. We are talking billions! Of course, this immense money power corrupts the whole system. The Supreme Court has just ratified the decision that allows it.

In South Africa, corruption doesn’t grow out of the competition between two parties with more in common that you’d think. Here, there’s only one party that really matters -- the African National Congress (ANC) that is riven by factions, ambitious politicians, and an environment of jostling for power and position. Corruption is embarrassingly all too blatant while basic needs go unmet.

No one quite expected this when the world cheered as Nelson Mandela was swept into office in 1994. He had an ambitious program for ending poverty and transforming the country. People spoke of the changes in South Africa as a “miracle,” branding the country a “rainbow nation.”

Reality quickly set in. Racial division was only one of many economic and social problems, all impervious to quick fixes. The government soon found that it had to overcome many forms of resistance to change including the vested interests of the business sector, the status quo orientation of international agencies like the IMF and World Bank, as well as the go-slow counsel of Britain and the U.S.

A long suppressed black middle class wanted what it thought was its due and wanted it now! Inexperienced politicians luxuriated with new perks and fancy cars, quickly putting their needs ahead of demands from their constituencies. Corruption soon surfaced and was largely ignored. The unity of the liberation struggle gave way to power games of every kind.

The Mail &Guardian reports political scientist Achille Mbembe saying in a debate in Johannesburg, “after 18 years of relative complacency and self-congratulatory gestures” the ANC was realizing South Africa was an ordinary country and not a miracle.

South Africa’s miracle of the 90s “can now be better categorized as a stalemate," he said. “One of the main tensions in South African politics is that its constitutional democracy did not erase the apartheid landscape.”

But then AIDs emerged as a fatal health problem, catching the country off guard. Its health infrastructure had been crippled by years of apartheid underfunding. Early projections suggested that virtually the entire State treasury would have to be diverted to stop millions from dying. There was denial and stigma.

That was one of the realities confronting Mandela’s deputy and successor, Thabo Mbeki. That may help explain his attempts to downplay the AIDS threat and find others to blame for it. Mbeki had ambitious notions of an “African renaissance,” and turned South Africa into a force on the Continent while also alienating members of the ANC at home who resented what they saw as arrogance and elitism.

Although reelected, he became a divisive force in the party and was toppled before he could finish his second term. This was all evidence of democracy within the ANC, but also the emergence of other splits and splinters, as well as chaotic factions with the ANC’s own youth League demanding nationalization of the mines. (This demand was treated as an example of “radical populism” by some, and as a tactic to shake down industrialists for bribes by others, even though it did point to a certain laxness in the government’s unwillingness to crack down on business. Sound familiar?)

Former ANC exile and military chief Jacob Zuma toppled Mbeki with populist rhetoric -- he sang a Zulu song, “Bring Me My Machine Gun” during his campaign even though he was caught up in a personal corruption scandal that he narrowly slithered out of.

Now, some of the same pressures facing Mbeki are facing Zuma, as supporters rally to his Deputy President Kglalema Mothlane or Zuma’s Minister of Settlements, the charismatic former guerrilla turned billionaire, Tokyo Sexwale. Both seem poised to want to replace him.

Meanwhile, the ANC is running a key policy conference to debate a document calling for a “Second Transition.” Mothlane recently sneered at the idea in a speech saying, “Second Transition! Second Transition! From where to where? What constituted the first transition?”

In response, President Zuma has, according to the Mail & Guardian, “launched a veiled attack” on Kgalema for questioning the “Second Transition.” The crusading newspaper also reports:

Supporters of ANC president Jacob Zuma will stop any attempts to discuss leadership issues at the ruling party’s policy conference this week.

This is the unyielding view of sources within the ruling party, who told the Mail & Guardian they will “suppress” any attempts to discuss succession within the ruling party.

So much for the state of internal debate, yet clearly Zuma knows he’s a facing a serious internal fight.

Even as the politicians scramble for positions, there is mounting criticism of how South Africa is being governed. Law Professor Koos Malan challenges the way public office here is misused, writing, “public office somehow entitles public office-bearers to exploit the power and authority of public office to achieve maximum private gain... and to receive public accolades for these successes.”

As the country prepares to mark Nelson Mandela’s 94th birthday in July, South Africa is also facing a dangerous downturn in its economy thanks to the world financial crisis and soaring crime and unemployment.

The spirit of many here remains infectious but there’s trouble on the horizon.

[News Dissector Danny Schechter blogs at Newsdissector.net. He is in South Africa making a film about the making and meaning of a major movie underway on Mandela’s life. His recent books are Occupy: Dissecting Occupy Wall Street and Blogothon (Cosimo Books). He hosts News Dissector Radio on PRN.fm Fridays at 1 p.m.  Email Danny at dissector@mediachannel.org. Read more articles by Danny Schechter on The Rag Blog.]

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James McEnteer : Proud Heritage of Indians in South Africa

Indians first came to South Africa 150 years ago. Photo from Hindi Blog.
Indian givers:
South Africa isn't all black and white

By James McEnteer / The Rag Blog / December 3, 2010

KWA-ZULU NATAL, South Africa -- South Africans of Indian descent are commemorating the arrival of the first indentured Indian workers here 150 years ago. In November 1860, two ships brought nearly 700 laborers from India to Durban. By 1911 more than 150,000 indentured Indian workers had landed in South Africa. Most came to what is now the province of Kwa-Zulu Natal, where more than half of them worked in the sugar cane fields.

Today about 1.5 million Indians live in South Africa, a small but influential minority comprising about three percent of the country's population. Indian South Africans have distinguished themselves in many professions, including medicine, academia, and commerce. Some have risen to Cabinet level government positions. Navanethem Pillay, a South African lawyer, university professor and judge of Indian descent has served since 2008 as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Before the British abolished slavery in 1833, some Indians had been sold into slavery along with Malays and Africans, primarily to work harvesting sugar cane in Britain's tropical colonies. The British had become addicted to the sugar that went so well with the tea from India they had adopted as a comfort ritual on their cold island, a bit of cultural colonial blowback.

Workers contracted to work for five years for whatever employer they were assigned. After five years they could re-indenture or look elsewhere for work. Workers who spent 10 years in the colony had the right to a free passage back to India, or to remain as citizens in the colony.

The British tried to regulate the conditions of indenture, but workers often lived and worked in primitive, brutal circumstances, like slaves. Isolated from legal oversight, employers abused their indentured laborers with impunity. Workers returning to India complained of the overwork, malnourishment, and squalid living conditions they had to endure. A Coolie Commission was appointed in 1872 to protect Indian immigrants, but failed to prevent abuses.

The overtly racist government and society of the time dictated where Indians could live and how they could travel within the country. Despite this discrimination and the limitations on their freedom, more than half of the indentured laborers elected to remain in South Africa. Besides the cane fields of Natal, Indians worked at the port of Durban, in hospitals, in the coal mines, or helping to build the railroads.

A momentous event for the future of Indians in South Africa, and for the future transformation of the entire nation, was the arrival in the country of a young, newly-minted Indian lawyer, Mohandas Gandhi, in 1893. Gandhi had come to represent an Indian firm on a one-year contract. Less than a week into his stay, on a train from Durban to Pretoria to attend court, Gandhi was ordered out of his first-class compartment. When he refused to leave he was ejected from the train at Pietermaritzberg and forced to spend a cold night on a station bench.

Mahatma Gandhi shortly after arriving in South Africa, in 1895. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
In his Autobiography Gandhi describes his conflicting emotions during that long night and his temptation to return immediately to India. Instead he elected to stay, despite being barred from hotels and suffering other acts of discrimination daily, including violence. Gandhi extended his stay to oppose a bill denying Indians the right to vote. He helped found the Natal Indian Congress in 1894 and survived the attack of a white mob in Durban in 1897. When the government passed a law requiring registration of the Indian population in 1906, Gandhi led a mass protest, adopting non-violent resistance for the first time.

That struggle continued for seven years. Thousands of Indians were jailed, including Gandhi. Others were flogged and even shot for striking, refusing to register, or burning their registration cards. The public outcry at the government's harsh methods of repressing the peaceful Indian protesters eventually forced South African officials to compromise with Gandhi.

Inspired by the success of this Indian movement, Black African leaders formed the African National Congress in 1912 to mount a similar resistance against racist oppression of their own kind. ANC efforts against apartheid, modeled on Gandhi's non-violent principle of satyagraha, or “the force of truth,” encouraged massive peaceful disobedience of repressive laws. Ultimately, South Africa's apartheid government yielded to ANC pressure and world sanctions without the massive bloodshed many feared was inevitable.

For these reasons and others, Indian descendants of indentured laborers have the right to be proud of their forebears. ANC political leaders owe Ghandi and other Indian activists thanks for being the catalysts of their own peaceful revolution. All South Africans, regardless of race, should be grateful for the Indian contributions to their current prosperity and cultural panache.

[James McEnteer is the author of Shooting the Truth: the Rise of American Political Documentaries. He lives in Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa]

Top, Indians arriving for the first time in Durban, South Africa, exact date unknown. Photo from Wikimedia Commons. Below, indentured Indians, still on the boat. Photo from SAHO.
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Harvey Wasserman : 'Pebble Bed' Nuke Bites the Dust

The "Pebble Bed" design. Graphic from Anthonares.
No go for 'Pebble Bed' nukes:
South Africa ditches much-hyped technology

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / September 27, 2010

As the "reactor renaissance" desperately demands new billions from a lame duck Congress, one of its shining stars has dropped dead. Other much-hyped "new generation" plans may soon die with it.

For years "expert" reactor backers have touted the "Pebble Bed" design as an "inherently safe" alternative to traditional domed light water models. Now its South African developers say they're done pouring money into it.

The Pebble Bed's big idea was to create a critical mass of uranium particles coated with silicon carbide and encased in graphite. These intensely radioactive "pebbles" would seethe in a passive container, cooled by helium. Without the need for a containment dome, the super-heated mass would produce both heat and electricity. Touted as needing no back-up emergency systems to prevent a major disaster, the plan was to mass-produce these "smaller, simpler" reactors for use throughout the industrial world.

Pebble Bed technology originated in Germany. But it was adopted and developed by the government of South Africa. For some it was a source of pride that a "developing" nation had become a significant player in the so-called nuclear renaissance.

But the South African government has now cut off funding for the project. Public Enterprises Minister Barbara Hogan has told the National Assembly that "sobering realities" included the lack of a working demonstration model, the lack of customers, the lack of a major investment partner, and the impending demand for $4.2 billion in new investment capital. As deadlines consistently slipped, Westinghouse withdrew from the project in May.

South African officials say the U.S. and China are still working on the technology. But economic realities make any tangible future Pebble Bed as a major source of new energy largely imaginary. Critics also worry that without a containment dome, the pebble beds would be vulnerable to small groups of terrorists with simple shell-lobbing mortars. And that critical metal components would not perform as needed under the intense stresses of heat and radiation.

The death of the Pebble Bed has considerable significance. For nearly two decades reactor backers have counted it in the imaginary fleet of new generation reactors coming to save us. Its alleged bright future would make it just one of the many new nuclear technologies that would render solar and wind energy unnecessary.

This anti-green arsenal has also included fast breeder reactors, which would magically create new fuel from used fuel. Canada's heavy water CanDu. Thorium reactors, which would burn a radioactive element other than uranium. Fusion reactors, which would mimic the gargantuan power of the sun. The AP 1000, new from Westinghouse. The European (or Evolutionary) Power Reactor, new from France's Areva. And a whole fleet of "Fourth Generation" designs which are unproven and often wildly impractical.

Like older proposed projects such as nuclear-powered aircraft, homes built of uranium, and nuclear-tipped anti-ballistic missiles, all have run afoul of reality. None offer a realistic solution to the problems of waste or terrorism, not to mention cost, heat emissions, and greenhouse gas production in all but the fission/fusion portion of the process. The first big breeder, Fermi I, nearly exploded in Monroe, Michigan, in 1966, threatening to irradiate the entire Great Lakes region. Today's models are extremely dangerous, dirty, and have been widely rejected outside France and Japan, where they barely operate.

Canada has been unable to find buyers for its CanDu design, and has put its own Atomic Energy of Canada, Ltd., up for sale. Thorium reactors are unproven, with no prototypes. Fusion reactors are periodically hyped and always "20 years away." The AP1000 and EPR face major regulatory, safety and financial hurdles.

Meanwhile a "Fourth Generation" of proposed reactors is theoretical and all over the map. As Michael Mariotte of the Nuclear Information & Resource Service puts it: "The Pebble Bed has failed for the same reason all the other new reactor designs ultimately will fail: they are too expensive compared to the competition. Renewables and energy efficiency are cheap and getting cheaper; nuclear is expensive and getting more so."

Sensing an unending march of hotly hyped but feeble headed new design failures, the U.S. industry is now pushing hard to get its aging fleet -- originally designed to operate 30 to 40 years -- licensed to run for 60 to 80 years. But not one of 104 U.S. reactors has a containment dome designed to withstand a serious jet crash. Reactor builders now say they'll put stronger domes on the new models, but prefer not to discuss cost or logistical realities.

The Pebble Bed's backers could not find private investors, and the South African government finally got tired of footing the bill. If/when that happens here -- and the sooner the better -- the Solartopian technologies of true green power and efficiency will finally get their day.

Then the "too cheap to meter" six-decade Peaceful Atom fantasy, with its fast breeding corps of failed new designs, can take its final rest in the very dead pebble bed.

[Harvey Wasserman's Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth is at www.solartopia.org along with Pete Seeger's "Song for Solartopia!" He edits the NukeFree.org website and is senior editor of www.FreePress.org.]

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SPORT / John Ross : World Cup as Bread and Circus

Bread and Circus: Circus Maximus in Rome, which seated 200,000, was the site for massive spectacle designed to keep the masses distracted. Image from Santa Barbara County Education.
Copa del Mundo de 2010:
The world's cup runneth over

Ever since the bad old days of ancient Rome, bread and circuses have been a powerful formula for social control. In South Africa, as in Mexico, the World Cup is designed to make the discontented forget their discontent.

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / June 11, 2010

MEXICO CITY -- The Caliente Sports Book down the street is buzzing with betters studying dog and horse races, Major League Baseball, even golf, on the multiple screens. Of particular interest are those channels running wrap-ups of the afternoon match between Mexico and 2006 World Cup champion Italy from which the national team emerged victorious in a final prelim before this year's edition of the Copa del Mundo gets underway later this week.

Italy, it may be remembered, won the much-coveted cup four years ago on penalty kicks after France was reduced to playing with 10 men on the field when super-star Zenedine Zidane was disqualified for ferociously head-butting a rival who purportedly called his mother and sister "whores." Beating Italy was a decided plus for Mexico's downtrodden spirits as the Mundiales approach.

But one group of aficionados was not much interested in Mexico's fortunes in the upcoming fandango in South Africa. Instead, they gathered around a big screen in one corner of the betting parlor cheering on the Los Angeles Lakers in a National Basketball Association finals match-up with the Boston Celtics. "Forget about football," sneered "El Guerro" Gonzalez, a regular, "this is where the real money gets made."

Because pro basketball games routinely rack up hundred point scores, betters have multiple opportunities to wager on winners and losers, over and under point spreads, total points in a quarter, and whether Kobe Bryant will hit the next three-pointer.

But with a maximum of four play-off games left on the NBA calendar, the basketball euphoria will dissipate post haste as the World Cup takes center stage. Although the NBA's despotic commissioner David Stern promotes his product as the world game, basketball hardly holds a candle to what the U.S. provincially terms "soccer" and the rest of the Planet Earth, football.

Indeed, the "Copa del Mundo" ("Cup of the World") will soon sweep every other sporting event from the screens, let alone political scandal of which there is plenty in this distant neighbor nation, the upcoming Super Sunday gubernatorial elections July 4th, and even droughts, floods, and other natural disasters.

The interminable drug war that has taken 23,000 lives in the past three years will move to the backburner. Ditto an economy that is tail spinning out of control -- a million workers lost their jobs in the first three months of this year alone despite President Felipe Calderon's rosy claims of "recovery." Speculation about the disappearance of one of the nation's most powerful politicians will fade from the prime time news and the first year anniversary of the incineration of 49 babies in a government-run day care center owned in part by the first lady's cousin, will not even be noticed.

The military takeover of the great Cananea copper mine and the dissolution of the miners union, is not news. New revolutions -- this is, after all, the hundredth year anniversary of our landmark revolution -- could rock the land but for the next month, but Mexico will live and die on what happens to the national team in South Africa.

"In football, we find our revenge against the adversaries of our lives," philosophizes sociologist Jose Maria Candia in a recent Contralinea magazine interview, "if it goes badly at work, in the economy, politics, the project of the nation, when 11 boys put on the green jersey and do well in an international tournament, we feel vindicated by life."

With 32 national teams from all five continents in the competition for the World Cup, the fate of the "seleccion" will have palpable impact on domestic tranquility. The political outfall of the Mundiales is unpredictable. Pumped up on toxic nationalism and xenophobia, football is a blood sport in southern climes. Honduras and El Salvador once fought a full-fledged war over soccer.

If the national team wins or acquits itself well, success will strengthen the government in charge no matter how poorly it has served the country. Likewise, a shoddy performance can topple rulers. In Mexico, increasingly unpopular president Felipe Calderon who won high office in fraud-marred elections three years ago is banking on the national selection's triumphs in the opening round to invigorate his deteriorating image. Calderon's bet is hardly a sure thing.

Mexico, Number 17 on the Federation of World Football Federation's rankings (now the Coca Cola FIFA rankings), plays host South Africa in the inaugural match of the tournament June 11th and "His Excellency" Felipe Calderon (dixit South African president Jacob Zuma) will be a guest of honor. The "Bafana Bafana" ("Boys Boys") as the locals are worshipped, have won their last four prelim matches and in the 2009 Confederation Cup took Spain, which some football gurus fix as the best team in the world, into overtime. Their fanatics' incessantly droning "vuvazelas" or plastic trumpets are said to drive opponents mad.

On the other hand, should Mexico beat sentimental favorite South Africa, it will make Calderon few friends on the African continent -- five other African teams are in the draw with war-torn Cote d'Ivoire the cream of the crop.

Aside from the Bafana Bafana, France and Uruguay are the real class of Mexico's four-team group -- while the French have appeared lackadaisical of late, whipping the South Americans is improbable. Anything less than reaching the quarterfinals will not rehabilitate Calderon's popularity.

Mexico has a young team that fluctuates between indifference and playing out of control. It is anchored by seven Mexican players from the European and Turkish leagues, and the wily but slow-footed veteran Cuauhtemoc Blanco. Burned repeatedly by the national team's poor performances in the Mundiales, many fans such as Manuel Garcia, a waiter at the old quarter Mexico City eatery Café La Blanca, consider that only divine intervention can save Mexico -- and Calderon -- from ignominious elimination.

When and if Mexico wins its matches though, wild celebrations are guaranteed to erupt around the gilded Angel of Independence on the bustling Paseo de Reforma -- drunkenness, fisticuffs, and hooliganism are de rigor. Flag-draped caravans of honking cars will jam the boulevards of this conflictive megalopolis.

On game days, half the population of Mexico, led by its president, will don green jerseys and play hooky from work and school. Saloons will fill to the brim with fans spilling out into the streets, jostling for a peek at the plasma screens. Masses to insure that God is on Mexico's side, will be pronounced from the altars and saints will be dressed up in the national colors.

Although football is tantamount to religion in this country where 70% of the population lives in and around the poverty line, only the super rich will have the wherewithal to jet off to Africa. Instead, the underclass will monitor the Mundiales at the "FIFA Fan Fest" on giant screens erected in the great Zocalo plaza from which nearly a hundred hunger-striking members of the Mexican Electricity Workers Union (SME), near death after a month of voluntary starvation, will no doubt be evicted so as not to dampen the fiesta.

Televisa and TV Azteca, Mexico's two-headed television monopoly, which will transmit the games (the premium package includes 3-D) will have the nation eating out of its hands (and guzzling Corona beer.) The TV monoliths have leased rights to broadcast the Mundiales from the Swiss-based FIFA, the absolute dictator of the sport for the past 106 years that counts 204 out of 208 football federations worldwide on its roster. FIFA TV revenues are expected to top $167,000,000 USD for the 2010 World Cup.

This year's Copa del Mundo is awash with drama. Will the Argentine selection, a perennial favorite, graced by the world's best player, Leonel "the Flea" Messi, blow up under their sometimes psychotic coach Diego Maradona, himself a Mundiales immortal? Will the first round match between England and the U.S. (14th on the FIFA listings with a world-class star, Landon Donovan, to prove it) invoke the star-crossed Yanqui upset of the Brits 60 years ago in 1950 in Brazil, the only time these two teams have ever met in the World Cup?

If the U.S. gets by England, a match between Mexico and its hated gringo rival would up the drama quotient here considerably. A face-off between South Korea and North Korea, both of which are in the draw albeit in separate groups, could lead to nuclear confrontation.

How will tiny, bruised Honduras, which played through a coup d'etat to qualify, fare against the big guns? What kind of karmic reward is in store for France which slimed its way into the World Cup with mega-star Thierry Henry's illegal hand-slap goal against the Irish? Will Germany be dispirited by the suicide of its troubled veteran goalie (is this a Wim Wenders' film?) Will five-time champ Brazil, which is hosting both the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, be so overloaded with hubris that the selection will forget to play football?

But unquestionably the drama of dramas is focused on host South Africa, the land of blood and gold, Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko, Joe Slovo, and the last great struggle for liberation from colonialism.

South Africa, an unlikely site for the World Cup, was promised the games by Swiss football impresario Joseph Batter during his 1998 campaign to become the czar of the FIFA -- Blatter, who was said to have been backed by Middle East oil money, needed African votes to put him over the top. Although Nigeria and Morocco were also proposed to host the 2010 Cup, South Africa, the continent's fastest-growing economy, was chosen both as a tribute to African football and to Nelson Mandela. Blatter even flew the frail, aging apostle of African liberation, to London to ballyhoo the designation.

Whether the beloved Mandiba will be well enough to attend the inauguration is the drama within the drama.

In his youth, Nelson Mandela was a keen amateur boxer and enthusiasm for sports has colored his life. Football is indeed the national sport of black South Africans, 75% of the population. During Mandela's 28 years of imprisonment on Robbin Island for the crime of defying apartheid, his fellow prisoners and comrades in the African National Congress (ANC), played football incessantly, taping up rags into balls, and booting them up and down the narrow prison corridors. But Mandiba was held in isolation and could never participate.

Nelson Mandela's vision for the new South Africa encompassed sports as a path to racial reconciliation. If football was a black sport in South Africa, rugby is an Afrikaner obsession -- the Springboks were the maximum icon of the apartheid regime. As president, Mandela brought the 1995 World Rugby Cup to Johannesburg, a story fictionalized in the film Invictus, and won the hearts and minds of his former persecutors. Now the World Cup 2010 is slated to project South Africa before the world as a dynamic, multi-racial powerhouse.

The truth is always more diffuse. Jacob Zuma, the country's very corruptible third president, and his predecessors have sunk between $3.7 and $6 billion USD in infrastructure to burnish their images in a nation where 43% of South Africa's 45.000.000 peoples live on $2 or less a day.

The gleaming $300,000,000 Soccer City Stadium where the July 11th finals will be staged, abuts Soweto, the festering high-crime enclave of 3,000,000 mostly threadbare citizens, 30% of whom suffer from AIDS, according to the World Health Organization. Gangs of orphaned children rule the street.

Similarly, the stadium at Port Elizabeth on Nelson Mandela Bay, which came in at $287,000,000, was built over a slum from which hundreds were evicted. A school complex was demolished to make way for the Neusprot venue (only $140,000,000) -- 13 such stadiums have risen from the dust amidst a storm of charges of kickbacks, bribery, and favoritism. Some who have spoken up have been brutalized.

If recent history is any hint, the new stadiums will quickly become certifiable white elephants. Even Beijing's much-praised "Birds' Nest" coliseum designed for the 2008 Olympics, is reportedly tenantless, and the Greek economy just collapsed under the burden of debt incurred for infrastructure for its Olympic Games.

With a population scuffling just to feed itself, filling all this dazzling stadia with paying customers is problematic. Even the $18 cheap seats -- a week's wages in the cities and a month's income in some rural areas -- are mostly out of reach in a country where 50% of the work force is out of work. To deflect a grave social crisis in the making, the FIFA is offering 120,000 free admissions, about 2,200 seats for each of the World Cup's 62 contests. Riots have already occurred at "friendly" preliminary games.

Ever since the bad old days of ancient Rome, bread and circuses have been a powerful formula for social control. In South Africa, as in Mexico, the World Cup is designed to make the discontented forget their discontent. For the next month, the violence, corruption, and class and race hatreds that dominate daily life in Mexico, South Africa, and the rest of what used to be called the third world will disappear beneath the social surface.

Although conflict is my bread and butter, I'm not going to miss the 2010 Mundiales for the world.

[John Ross is at home in the maw of the Monstruo watching the World Cup. You can complain to him at johnross@igc.org.]

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SPORT / World Cup in South Africa : 'Neoliberal Trojan Horse'?

Thousands of residents from the township of Oukasie, 60 miles north of Johannesburg are marching [on March 21, 2010]... to bring attention to the plight of impoverished areas of the country...

They argue it is wrong for the government to be spending so much on hosting the World Cup when so many South African residents still live in squalor in various townships outside the main cities. -- Metro.co.uk

'At least under Apartheid...':
South Africa on the eve of the World Cup

By Dave Zirin / June 11, 2010

At long last, soccer fans, the moment is here. On Saturday, when South Africa takes the field against Mexico, the World Cup will officially be underway. Nothing attracts the global gaze quite like it. Nothing creates such an undeniably electric atmosphere with enough energy to put British Petroleum, Exxon/Mobil and Chevron out of business for good.

And finally, after 80 years, the World Cup has come to Africa. We should take a moment to celebrate that this most global of sports has finally made its way to the African continent, nesting in the bucolic country of South Africa.

And yet as we celebrate the Cup’s long awaited arrival in the cradle of civilization, there are realities on the ground that would be insane to ignore. To paraphrase an old African saying, “When the elephants party, the grass will suffer.”

In the hands of FIFA and the ruling African National Congress, the World Cup has been a neoliberal Trojan Horse, enacting a series of policies that the citizens of this proud nation would never have accepted if not wrapped in the honor of hosting the cup. This includes $9.5 billion in state deficit spending ($4.3 billion in direct subsidies and another $5.2 billion in luxury transport infrastructure). This works out to about $200 per citizen.

As the Anti-Privatization Forum of South Africa has written,

Our government has managed, in a fairly short period of time, to deliver "world class" facilities and infrastructure that the majority of South Africans will never benefit from or be able to enjoy. The APF feels that those who have been so denied, need to show all South Africans as well as the rest of the world who will be tuning into the World Cup, that all is not well in this country, that a month long sporting event cannot and will not be the panacea for our problems. This World Cup is not for the poor-- it is the soccer elites of FIFA, the elites of domestic and international corporate capital and the political elites who are making billions and who will be benefiting at the expense of the poor.

In South Africa, the ANC government has a word for those who would dare raise these concerns. They call it “Afropessimism.” If you dissent from being an uncritical World Cup booster, you are only feeding the idea that Africa is not up to the task of hosting such an event.

Danny Jordaan the portentously titled Chief Executive Officer of the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa lamented to Reuters, "For the first time in history, Africa really will be the centre of the world's attention -- for all the right reasons -- and we are looking forward to showing our continent in its most positive light.”

To ensure that the “positive light” is the only light on the proceedings, the government has suspended the right to protest for a series of planned demonstrations. When the APF marches to present their concerns, they will be risking arrest or even state violence. Against expectations, they have been granted the right to march, but only if they stay at least 1.5 km from FIFA headquarters in Soccer City. If they stray a step closer, it’s known that the results could be brutal.

You could choke on the irony. The right to protest was one of the major victories after the overthrow of apartheid. The idea that these rights are now being suspended in the name of “showing South Africa... in a positive light” is reality writ by Orwell.

Yet state efforts to squelch dissent have been met with resistance. Last month, there was a three-week transport strike that won serious wage increases for workers. The trade union federation, COSATU, has threatened to break with the ANC and strike during the World Cup if double digit electricity increases aren’t lowered. The National Health and Allied Workers Union have also threatened to strike later this month if they don’t receive pay increases 2% over the rate of inflation.

In addition, June 16th is the anniversary of the Soweto uprising, which saw 1,000 school children murdered by the apartheid state in 1976. It is a traditional day of celebration and protest. This could be a conflict waiting to happen, and how terrible it would be if it’s the ANC wields the clubs this time around.

The anger flows from a sentiment repeated to me time and again when I walked the streets of this remarkable, resilient, country. Racial apartheid is over, but it’s been replaced by a class apartheid that governs people’s lives. Since the fall of the apartheid regime, white income has risen by 24% while black wealth has actually dropped by 1%. But even that doesn’t tell the whole story since there has been the attendant development of a new Black political elite and middle class.

Therefore, for the mass of people, economic conditions -- unemployment, access to goods and services -- has dramatically worsened. This is so utterly obvious even the Wall Street Journal published piece titled, "As World Cup Opens, South Africa's Poor Complain of Neglect." The article quotes Maureen Mnisi, a spokeswoman for the Landless People's Movement in Soweto saying, "At least under apartheid, there was employment -- people knew where to go for jobs Officials were accountable."

Anytime someone has to start a sentence with “At least under apartheid…” that in and of itself is a searing indictment of an ANC regime best described as isolated, sclerotic, and utterly alienated from its original mission of a South Africa of shared prosperity.

A major party is coming to South Africa. But it’s the ANC that will have to deal with the hangover.

[Dave Zirin is the author of the forthcoming Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love (Scribner). Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.]

Source / The Nation

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South Africa's Dennis Brutus : A Poet for Human Rights

Dennis Brutus. Photos by Victor Dlamini / Flickr.
He will be remembered for his art and for his life:
Liberation poet Dennis Brutus (1924-2009)

By Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog / January 2, 2010

See 'The Poetic Justice of Dennis Brutus,' by Amy Goodman, Below.

South African liberation poet Dennis Brutus passed away during the recent holidays. Of several online obituaries and tributes, the following, from Amy Goodman, best illustrates Brutus' importance to poets and human rights activists worldwide.

At the Rag Blog, some felt a special kinship with the deceased through his connection with our sister, imprisoned anti-imperialist activist and poet Marilyn Buck. Marilyn's CD, Wild Poppies (2004, Freedom Archives), was recorded while she was -- as she still is -- in a federal prison in California. She recorded some of her work for the CD, over the telephone -- recording equipment is not allowed in prison visiting rooms -- with the chaos and pain around her adding their ragged, random accompaniment.

Many other poets (myself included) contributed to Wild Poppies by reading Buck's poems for her; Dennis Brutus was by far the best-known. (Kwame Ture, the former Stokely Carmichael, voices a tribute to Buck on the CD.)

Some poets who participated read their own poems, touching on themes that pervade Marilyn's work, or poems Marilyn has translated from Spanish, but the South African Poet Laureate read one of her poems ("One-Hour Yard Poem") -- a very fine compliment from this man who was himself a prisoner of conscience and of apartheid, alongside Nelson Mandela. He also read one of his own ("Letter #18"). (Listen to Dennis Brutus reading these two poems, below.)

Like the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, Brutus will be remembered for his life and times as well as his lines, a poet lucky enough to witness extraordinary events, using his gift to open not only prison doors, but the doors of perception.


From Marilyn Buck's Wild Poppies:

Dennis Brutus reads Marilyn Buck's 'One Hour Yard Poem':

Dennis Brutus reads his 'Letter #18':


Photo by Victor Dlamini / Flickr.

There will come a time
There will come a time we believe
When the shape of the planet
and the divisions of the land
Will be less important;
We will be caught in a glow of friendship
a red star of hope
will illuminate our lives
A star of hope
A star of joy
A star of freedom

-- Dennis Brutus, Caracas, October 18, 2008

The poetic justice of Dennis Brutus

We are going to say to the world: There’s too much of profit, too much of greed, too much of suffering by the poor... -- Dennis Brutus

By Amy Goodman / December 29, 2010

Dennis Brutus broke rocks next to Nelson Mandela when they were imprisoned together on notorious Robben Island. His crime, like Mandela’s, was fighting the injustice of racism, challenging South Africa’s apartheid regime. Brutus’ weapons were his words: soaring, searing, poetic. He was banned, he was censored, he was shot. But this poet’s commitment and activism, his advocacy on behalf of the poor, never flagged.

Brutus died in his sleep early on December 26 in Cape Town, at the age of 85, but he lived with his eyes wide open. His life encapsulated the 20th century, and even up until his final days, he inspired, guided and rallied people toward the fight for justice in the 21st century.

Oddly, for this elfin poet and intellectual, it was rugby that early on nagged him about the racial injustice of his homeland. Brutus recalled being sarcastically referred to by a white man as a “future Springbok.”

The Springboks were the national rugby team, and Brutus knew that nonwhites could never be on the team. “It stuck with me, until years later, when I began to challenge the whole barrier -- questioning why blacks can’t be on the team.” This issue is depicted in Clint Eastwood’s new feature film, Invictus. President Mandela, played by Morgan Freeman, embraces the Springboks during the 1995 World Cup, admitting that until then blacks always knew whom to root for: any team playing against the Springboks.

In the late 1950s, Brutus was penning a sports column under the pseudonym “A. de Bruin” -- meaning “A brown” in Afrikaans. Brutus wrote, “The column... was ostensibly about sports results, but also about the politics of race and sports.” He was banned, an apartheid practice that imposed restrictions on movement, meeting, publishing, and more. In 1963, while attempting to flee police custody, he was shot. He almost died on a Johannesburg street while waiting for an ambulance restricted to blacks.

Brutus spent 18 months in prison, in the same section of Robben Island as Nelson Mandela, where he wrote his first collection of poems, Sirens, Knuckles, Boots. His poem “Sharpeville” described the March 21, 1960, massacre in which South African police opened fire, killing 69 civilians, an event which radicalized him:

Remember Sharpeville
bullet-in-the-back day
Because it epitomized oppression
and the nature of society
more clearly than anything else;
it was the classic event

After prison, Brutus began life as a political refugee. He formed the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee to leverage sports into a high-profile, global anti-apartheid campaign. He succeeded in getting South Africa banned from the Olympic Games in 1970. Brutus moved to the United States, where he remained as a university professor and anti-apartheid leader, despite efforts by the Reagan administration to deny him continued status as a political refugee and deport him.

After the fall of apartheid and ascension to power of the African National Congress, Brutus remained true to his calling. He told me,

As water is privatized, as electricity is privatized, as people are evicted even from their shacks because they can’t afford to pay the rent of the shacks, the situation becomes worse... The South African government, under the ANC... has chosen to adopt a corporate solution.

He went on:

We come out of apartheid into global apartheid. We’re in a world now where, in fact, wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few; the mass of the people are still poor... a society which is geared to protect the rich and the corporations and actually is hammering the poor, increasing their burden, this is the reverse of what we thought was going to happen under the ANC government.

Many young activists know Dennis Brutus not for his anti-apartheid work but as a campaigner for global justice, ever present at mass mobilizations against the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund -- and, most recently, although not present, giving inspiration to the protesters at the UN climate summit in Copenhagen.

He said, on his 85th birthday, days before the climate talks were to commence: “We are in serious difficulty all over the planet. We are going to say to the world: There’s too much of profit, too much of greed, too much of suffering by the poor... The people of the planet must be in action.”

[Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 800 stations in North America. She is the author of Breaking the Sound Barrier, recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller. Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.]

© 2009 Amy Goodman

Distributed by King Features Syndicate

Source / truthdig

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Children March for Education in South Africa

Now this is grassroots organization. We could take a lesson from their effort. You don't get anything if you don't ask for it.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

South Africa schoolchildren marched to City Hall in Cape Town this week to press for libraries and librarians at their schools. Education lags in the country. Photo: Pieter Bauermeister/New York Times.
South African Children Push for Better Schools
By Celia W. Dugger / September 24, 2009

CAPE TOWN, South Africa — Thousands of children marched to City Hall this week in sensible black shoes, a stream of boys and girls from township schools across this seaside city that extended for blocks, passing in a blur of pleated skirts, blazers and rep ties. Their polite demand: Give us libraries and librarians.

“We want more information and knowledge,” said a ninth grader, Abongile Ndesi.

In the 15 years since white supremacist rule ended in South Africa, the governing party, the African National Congress, has put in place numerous policies to transform schools into engines of opportunity. But many of its leaders, including President Jacob Zuma, now acknowledge that those efforts have too often failed.

The new protest movement, with its practical goals, youthful organizers and idealistic moniker, Equal Education, is a quintessentially South African answer to a failing education system, one that self-consciously acknowledged its debt to the past in the march to City Hall.

In 1976, when police officers shot a 13-year-old named Hector Pieterson in Soweto, a children’s uprising against apartheid emerged and spread across the country to Cape Town, where students from a mixed-race high school, Salt River, marched in solidarity with black schoolchildren.

Zackie Achmat, South Africa’s wiliest campaigner for AIDS treatment, was himself a 14-year-old marcher that September day 33 years ago. Mr. Achmat, now graying, was among the protesters following the same route this week, his white straw hat bobbing in a sea of plaids and ginghams.

The idea for a new movement dedicated to educational equity was his, and he helped nurse Equal Education into being, counseling its young leaders to work with teachers and government officials whenever possible. The country’s leadership, which has been slow to grapple with the AIDS crisis, understands the urgent need for better education, he said. The new director general of the country’s Higher Education Ministry, Mary Metcalfe, has served as head of Equal Education’s board.

“In building a citizens’ movement, the most important element is giving people the sense of their own power to change things with little victories,” Mr. Achmat said.

The job of organizing the group has fallen to a pair of law school graduates from the University of Cape Town. Doron Isaacs, 29, its coordinator, was leader of Habonim South Africa, an organization of young, left-wing Jewish activists with whom Mr. Achmat has worked for years. Mr. Isaacs recruited a classmate, Yoliswa Dwane, 27, who was raised by her seamstress mother and now lives in a shack in the township of Khayelitsha, south of Cape Town, where she is caring for nieces, ages 12 and 17.

The marchers in Cape Town, who numbered in the thousands. The marchers echoed a children's uprising against apartheid in 1976. Photo: Pieter Bauermeister for The New York Times.

Last year, Equal Education gave students in Khayelitsha, home to more than 500,000 unemployed and working-class people, disposable cameras to document problems in their high schools. They returned with shots of leaking roofs, cracked desks and children crowded around a single textbook.

One image — a bank of window panes at Luhlaza high school, all shattered, captured by a student named Zukiswa Vuka — proved the most resonant. Some 500 windows at the school had been broken for years, leaving the students shivering in wintertime classes.

Equal Education’s first campaign was to get them replaced. The school agreed to put up about $650, an amount the group said it would match. That left some $900 still needed. Over months, the group met with local and provincial managers, organized a communitywide petition drive, held a rally of hundreds of township students and garnered coverage in local newspapers.

Finally in November, provincial education officials announced that the windows would be fixed and that a sum almost 10 times what the students had requested would be invested in the school.

This year, students successfully agitated for a science teacher at Chris Hani High School when it had none for the seniors.

They also led a drive to get their classmates to come to school on time, with early-morning pickets at school gates — an effort that also showed up late-arriving teachers.

The libraries campaign is the group’s first attempt to tackle a national issue. With financial support from Atlantic Philanthropies and the Open Society Institute, among others, it is also hoping to broaden its membership to include teachers and more parents and to graduate to bigger victories.

Mr. Isaacs said Equal Education’s members knew that problems far harder to fix than windows or missing libraries awaited and that part of the answer was building alliances with the teachers’ union, which is in the governing alliance.

“We know that the teachers’ union is one of the most powerful institutions in the country,” he said, “and if we style ourselves as its adversary, we’ll be dead in the water.”

The marchers, stretched out Tuesday along Main Road in the shadow of majestic Table Mountain, were themselves a wealth of stories.

Nkosinathi Dayimani, a senior, was one of the beneficiaries of the new science teacher this year, but not soon enough to prevent his failure on the recent trial run of the national science exam.

Asanda Sparks, a petite ninth grader from Kraaifontein Township, has been hoping for a library in her school since bullies picked her pocket as she walked to the public library to research Nelson Mandela’s life.

And Nina Hoffman was among the dozens of white students who joined the march from one of the country’s formerly all-white suburban high schools — Westerford — which can afford a well-stocked library because parents pay annual fees of more than $2,200 per child.

“Coming to a march like this, I realize even more how privileged we are and how much I take for granted,” she said.

During their two-hour walk to City Hall on a gloriously sunny afternoon, the young people seemed buoyed by the hope of making a difference.

Abongile, the ninth grader from Luhlaza high school, noted appreciatively that she did not have to sit with chattering teeth in class this winter because the broken windows had been fixed.

“I saw that Equal Education can make something impossible possible,” she said.

Source / New York Times

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Rape Not Just South Africa's Problem

Women place white flowers outside parliament during a demonstration in Cape Town. Photo from AFP.

While the South African numbers may be particularly high, this is a worldwide problem. Men... have been brought up to believe that women are second-class citizens -- sometimes little more than property to be used as a man sees fit.

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / June 20, 2009

The South African Medical Research Council has just conducted an anonymous survey in that country concering rape, and the results were quite shocking. The survey was conducted in both rural and urban areas and crossed all racial lines. Here is what they found:

• One out of every four men admitted to committing at least one rape.
• Of that 25%, nearly half admitted to committing multiple rapes.
• 73% of those admitting rape committed their first one before age 20.
• One in 20 men has committed a rape in the last year.
• Gang rape was common and considered a form of male bonding.

Obviously, that country has a serious problem. Professor Rachel Jewkes, who carried out the research, says, "The absolute imperative is we have to change the underlying social attitudes that in a way have created a norm that coercing women into sex is on some level acceptable... it's partly rooted in our incredibly disturbed past and the way that South African men over the centuries have been socialised into forms of masculinity that are predicated on the idea of being strong and tough and the use of force to assert dominance and control over women, as well as other men."

Mbuyiselo Botha, from the South African Men's Forum, which campaigns for women's rights, agreed, saying, "I think that yes, the figures are that high and for us, for me in particular, that is a very sad state of affairs. It means that we continue in South Africa to be one of the highest capitals of rape in the world. I don't think it's cultural per se; I think it has to do with how a lot of us men worldwide were raised. The issues of dominance against women, issues of inequality, are pervasive and you find them throughout the world."

Botha is right. While the South African numbers may be particularly high, this is a worldwide problem. Men all over the world have been brought up to believe that women are second-class citizens -- sometimes little more than property to be used as a man sees fit.

And we in the United States should not be feeling superior to any other country. Although things are slowly beginning to change here, we have a history of relegating women to an inferior status. It was not until well into the twentieth century that most women in America even gained the right to vote.

In fact, the idea of second-class status for women is so pervasive that it has even been codified by many of America's religious institutions. And this is true in all religions (with the possible exception of some modern pagan sects), including christianity. It is not uncommon to hear ministers and priests telling women to be obedient to their husbands, and denying them leadership positions in the church.

As long as this type of thinking occurs, as long as women are relegated to an inferior status in our institutions and in our society, rape will continue to be a problem. And America does have a serious rape problem. Consider some of our own statistics:

• Nearly 15% of American women have been raped.
• About 15% of rape victims are under age 12.
• Every two minutes someone in the U.S. is raped.
• In the last thirteen years, there were 4.2 million rape victims.
• About 73% of rape victims knew their rapist (acquaintance, family, boyfriend, husband, etc.)
• And perhaps the worst statistic of all -- ONLY 6% OF RAPISTS WILL EVER GO TO JAIL!

Those statistics may not be as high as South Africa's, but they are just as unacceptable. We preach gender equality in this country, but seldom is it practiced. Far too often, women are relegated to second-class status. And if a man believes women are inferior, it is just one more small step to commit and/or justify a rape. That is the true root of the problem.

Too often our society wants to blame rape on things like movies, magazines, music, books, television or the internet. But these things aren't the cause or the problem. They are merely symptoms of the real problem -- the societal treatment of women as being inferior to men.

The only way to stop rape is to start treating and respecting women as equals to men. Of course, those who commit the rapes must be punished, but this alone will not solve the problem. We must stop mouthing the word equality and make it a reality.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger, an excellent Texas political blog.]

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Robert Jensen : Lingering White Supremacy in South Africa Feels Like Home

Sign in South Africa from the days of apartheid -- the practice of racial "seperateness" that was dissolved in 1994. White supremacy, however, is not so easily dispatched by changes in laws. Photo from SouthAfrica.TO.

Lingering white supremacy in South Africa sounds much like United States

...it is clear that we white people can’t hide behind the litany of excuses we use to justify our failure to confront white supremacy.

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / June 9, 2009

Apartheid is dead in South Africa, but a new version of white supremacy lives on.

“During apartheid the racism of white people was up front, and we knew what we were dealing with. Now white people smile at us, but for most black people the unemployment and grinding poverty and dehumanizing conditions of everyday life haven’t changed,” a black South African told me. “So, what kind of commitment to justice is under that smile?”

This community activist in Cape Town said that, ironically, the end of South’s Africa’s apartheid system of harsh racist segregation and exploitation has in some ways made it more difficult to agitate for social justice today. As he offered me his views on the complex politics of his country, Nkwame Cedile, a field worker for People’s Health Movement, expressed a frustration that I heard often in my two weeks in the country: Yes, the brutality of apartheid ended in 1994 with free elections, but the white-supremacist ideas that had animated apartheid and the racialized distribution of wealth it was designed to justify didn’t magically evaporate.

That shouldn’t be surprising -- how could centuries of white supremacy simply disappear in 15 years? What did surprise me during my lecture tour was not the racial tension but how much discussions about race in South Africa sounded just like conversations in the United States. There was something eerily familiar to me, a lifelong white U.S. citizen, about those discussions. I have heard comments from black people in the United States like Cedile’s, but I’ve also heard white Americans articulate views on race that were sometimes exactly like white South Africans’. I learned that even with all the differences in the two countries there are equally important similarities, and as a result the sense of entitlement that so many white people hold onto produces similar dodges and denials.

Those similarities: South Africa and the United States were the two longstanding settler states that maintained legal apartheid long after the post-World War II decolonization process. The crucial term is “settler state,” marking a process by which an invading population exterminates or displaces and exploits the indigenous population to acquire its land and resources, with formal slavery playing a key role at some point in the country’s history. Both strategies were justified with overtly racist doctrines about white supremacy, and both required the white population to discard basic moral and religious principles, leading to a pathological psychology of superiority. Both of those settler strategies have left us with racialized disparities in wealth and well-being long after the formal apartheid is over.

The main difference: The United States struggles with its problem with a white majority, while South Africa has a black majority. But what I found fascinating is how little difference that made in terms of the psychological pathology of so many white people. So, as is typically the case, my trip to South Africa taught me not only about racism in South Africa but also in the United States, which reminded me that perhaps we travel to observe others so that we can learn about ourselves.

From a two-week trip I wouldn’t claim deep insights or knowledge about South Africa. My contact in the country, outside of informal chats with people on the street, was limited primarily to university professors and students, or left/progressive activists in Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Durban. I didn’t have a chance to get behind the gates in the wealthy neighborhoods or talk to elite business people, and my travels in the black townships were limited in time and scope. But with those limits, some clear patterns emerged about the moderate/liberal/left white people I engaged with.

[A footnote on racial terms: In South Africa people sometimes talk about race in terms of white and black, with “black” in that context meaning all people who aren’t of European descent. More specifically, the black population is made up of black Africans (such as the Zulu and Xhosa), Indians (descended from various waves of immigration from India), and coloured (mixed-race). Most whites tend to identify as of primarily English or Dutch/Afrikaner background. Many people in South Africa try to avoid apartheid-era terminology but still sometimes use these four traditional racial categories, in part because they are the basis for measuring economic progress in relation to various forms of affirmative action.]

The first trend was the belief that whatever racism remained in South Africa, things will get better naturally, as long as South Africans respect all cultures. The argument seems to go something like this: Apartheid is over, we have a black government, and now it’s time to move ahead by understanding that the problem of race in no longer political but one of inadequate cultural understanding and engagement. This celebration of diversity is familiar to us in the United States, where institutions (especially corporations and schools) tend to address difficult questions about disparities in political power and the distribution of wealth through multiculturalism. While there’s nothing wrong, of course, with acknowledging cultural diversity and helping people learn more about other cultures, multiculturalism does not take the place of real politics, no matter how much many white people wish it could. Understanding others doesn’t automatically mean that those with unearned privileged will work to undermine the system that gives them that privilege.

During my first days in the country, my host for the trip, Junaid Ahmad, reported an incident that drove home how superficial such commitment to multiculturalism can be. Ahmad, a Ph.D. student and activist at the University of Cape Town, had been asked to appear on the campus radio station opposite the student government president to discuss race issues. When the other student (a white man) pointed to a recent musical performance in which black African and coloured choirs sang together, Ahmad (a Pakistani-American) challenged the assumptions of multiculturalism-as-a-solution behind the comment. The student body president got more and more agitated with Ahmad’s critique until finally, as the interview was ending, the student president turned to him and said, “You should be careful.”

Ahmad said the man didn’t appear to be reminding him to look both ways while crossing the street or to be careful driving in heavy traffic. The vague warning wasn’t a direct threat, but Ahmad said that given the context of a white man angered by a challenge from an Indian (the category into which Ahmad would likely fit in South Africa), it was hard not to interpret the comment as white-supremacist. The white man had acknowledged that racial issues still haunt South Africa but wasn’t eager to engage in a debate about his assessment of what was needed for real progress, especially not when the critique came from …

Though his expression of his emotional reaction was crude, the young man was not idiosyncratic. In my experience, many whites -- in South Africa and the United States -- expect their endorsement of multiculturalism to be accepted as evidence of a serious commitment to ending racism.

After a talk at the University of Johannesburg in which I argued for always keeping discussions of race grounded in the white-supremacy of the culture, a faculty member there took issue with the tone of my remarks. If we want to be a “post-racial” society, she suggested that dialogue without all the political baggage was necessary. The only path to racial harmony was to put aside the bitterness and find a common humanity, and part of the success of the interracial dialogues she was part of was the ability of the group to put race aside, she said.

I told her I had no problem with people pursuing such discussions so long as we didn’t pretend we could erase the effects of race with the snap of our fingers. Racial distinctions and racialized disparities in wealth endure, even without the legal enshrinement of them, and that reality has to be acknowledged. She pressed the claim that such a focus on race undermines commonality, noting that as a person of German and Jewish heritage, she knew this first hand. The comments from blacks in the room who disputed her call for color blindness didn’t dissuade her; she was adamant about the proper path. As she pressed on, I noticed a row of black students behind her rolling their eyes, suggesting they had heard this before and were tired of it. The price of admission to these race dialogues was to leave behind what people of color know about race, and one thing they know is that we whites typically are too quick to believe we have transcended race.

There’s nothing new about either of these examples, of course. The student leader’s sense of supremacy that lingered just below his multicultural commitment is a painfully obvious sign of self-deception, but so are the feel-good claims of the fans of race dialogues. In 1970 one of South Africa’s most eloquent voices for justice, Steve Biko, referred to these black-white circles as “tea parties” that turn out to be “a soporific on the blacks and provide a vague satisfaction for the guilty-stricken whites.” Biko can’t be written off as a black separatist from a bygone era who is no longer relevant; he maintained personal and political relationships with principled white allies while he was alive, and today even with a black-run government South Africa’s economy is dominated by whites with privilege. Biko’s analysis rings as true today as it was in the years before he was murdered while in police custody in 1977. Quoting more extensively from that same essay, “Black Souls in White Skins?”:

“Instead of involving themselves in an all-out attempt to stamp out racism from their white society, liberals waste lots of time trying to prove to as many blacks as they can find that they are liberal. This arises out of the false belief that we are faced with a black problem. There is nothing the matter with blacks. The problem is WHITE RACISM and it rests squarely on the laps of the white society.”

In rejecting what he saw as a false integration, Biko made it clear he believed in real integration premised on a struggle for justice:

“If by integration you understand a breakthrough into white society by blacks, an assimilation and acceptance of blacks into an already established set of norms and code of behaviour set up by and maintained by whites, then YES I am against it. … If on the other hand by integration you mean there shall be free participation by all members of a society, catering for the full expression of the self in a freely changing society as determined by the will of the people, then I am with you.”

Those principles were central to the black consciousness movement that Biko helped lead in South Africa, and they apply just as clearly to the United States, then and now. As I read Biko’s words while in South Africa, I was reminded of my own attempts in the past to prove my anti-racist bona fides by creating the appearance of solidarity when I had yet to demonstrate real solidarity. I cringed at how much I still struggle to avoid this.

My point is not that all problems in South Africa or the United States are the result of racist actions of whites. In South Africa I heard a steady stream of criticism of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) for its failure to live up to the promises in its Freedom Charter that had helped define the struggle against apartheid, for what some see as its willingness to sell out the interests of ordinary people to the white elites who were allowed to retain much of the wealth acquired under apartheid. Leaders such as Biko don’t blame everything on whites but instead analyze the effects of white supremacy and ask for accountability on the part of everyone. For people with unearned privilege, that accountability is too easily avoided.

I finished reading “I Write What I Like,” the book of Biko’s writings quoted from above, while sitting in the Cape Town airport waiting for my flight home. The book stuck out of my over-stuffed shoulder bag as a white South African sat down next to me and said hello. Tired of reading, I put down my newspaper and responded to his friendly conversation starter. As we chatted about our personal lives and I reported on my experiences in the country, I could see his eyes glance several times over at the Biko book. After a few more minutes he felt comfortable enough to ask me what I knew about Biko. I mentioned I had taken a South African history course around 1980 and had read about Biko right after his murder. But this was the first time I had read his own writing, I said, and I was sorry I had waited so long.

After acknowledging Biko’s political skills and courage, my conversation partner warned me not to be too taken in by the “cult” around Biko. “Remember, he died before he had a chance to get corrupt,” he said. Playing a bit dumb, I asked what he meant, and then the floodgates opened. “Just look,” he said, at the litany of incompetent and corrupt ANC politicians. They’ve gotten rich but are slowly turning the country into “one more basket case in Africa.”

Were there no honest black leaders? Was corruption more common in a black government than a white one?

He conceded that there were honest ANC leaders, and perhaps the ANC was no more corrupt than a white party. But it’s not just about honesty, he said, his sentence trailing off. I asked what he meant.

“South Africa is a modern society. We have advanced technology,” he said. “We’re more like a European country than an African one.”

That is the other face of white liberalism. A “hard-headed realism” that understands you can’t really expect the blacks to run the complex society that whites built. After our initial amiable chatting, I was taken aback by the overt racism, though I knew enough to know lots of pleasant people are racist. I awkwardly excused myself to go to the bathroom, though it was as clear to him as to me why I was leaving. As I walked away I immediately felt ashamed for not confronting him. I told myself that this wasn’t my country and it wasn’t my job, that I was legitimately tired, that the man likely would have dismissed me as a naïve American. I told myself that it was okay to walk away, and maybe it was in that particular situation. I reminded myself that I was emotionally and physically exhausted from the trip, but the more I reminded myself, the less compelling my excuses sounded to me. I couldn’t avoid the fact that I, like other white people, always have the choice to walk away.

Whatever my obligation was that day in South Africa, it is clear that we white people can’t hide behind the litany of excuses we use to justify our failure to confront white supremacy: “you have to pick your battles,” or “you can’t change every person.” Maybe that’s all true, but as I got in line to board the plane and looked up to see the man smirk at me, I realized my failure and recognized my moral laziness. The question for me, and for all whites, is whether we learn from those failures or remain stuck in the laziness.

[Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. His latest book is All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice (Soft Skull Press, 2009). Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu and his articles can be found Source.]

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