Hell's Teeth

Thirty Three out of One Hundred

2012-01-07T21:54:00.000+02:00

I joined the ANC in 1979. It was in Lesotho. I had left South Africa as a War Resistor. That was all I had done. Soweto 1976 came and went. I read the headlines with rising alarm. I was a student at a very rightwing university, at the time - Rhodes University. We were all white students. There were a couple amongst us mad enough (or brave enough) to join Nusas. But not me.

Steve Biko got killed. The news was told me by a black stranger on the streets of Grahamstown. He was in shock – that was clear. He said what I thought was “Steve Peacock is dead!” I tried to look sympathetic, but had no idea what he might be talking about. I only later found out that it was Steve Biko as all the headlines screamed at me – and still I was none the wiser. Who was Steve Biko? I had never heard of him.

I remember that some of us got captured by the thing. It was horrific – that was clear. We were students. Students protest. So we protested. The Minister of police at the time tried to tell everyone that he had killed himself by not eating for 8 days. So we fasted. We would meet once a day at lunch time in the office of the Philosophy Professor, an enigmatic ex-Methodist Minister by the name of James Moulder. We fasted for eight days. And that was it. There was the occasional student protest about stuff I knew nothing about. But that was it. That was my entire experience of the struggle.

Well, not entirely. Up the road from me had lived Eli and Violet Weinberg – Communists under house arrest. The Security Police would sit all night long in a car across from our house – watching the Weinberg house. My mother used to chat sometimes with Eli, over the garden fence. She found it odd that a Communist would, on a yearly basis, send us a Christmas card.

Just up the road from us in Fanny Avenue, lived a woman called Helen Joseph. My mother had a strange fear and fascination for her. She was clearly bad news, because she consorted with the natives – but at the same time, my mother admired her principles and the fact that she stood up for them.

It was only when I was a student in Cambridge that I read some of the speeches from the Treason Trial. I read the Freedom Charter. They were a revelation. They determined for me that, no matter what, I would not allow myself to be conscripted. I was lucky enough to have a wife then, who agreed with me and supported me. Together, we decided to leave the country. It was a big thing for us. But that is all it was.

So we encountered a very suspicious ANC in Lesotho. Our first contact was with someone whose name we had been given while inside the country. The reception was chilly. We decided not to push the issue. And so we were watched. Background checks, presumably, were done on us. And eventually, it became clear that we were to be regarded as comrades, rather than spies. That realisation does not give any sense of the dramatic and dynamic change which was happening inside us.

For the first time, in our lives, we were living amongst black people as equals. For the first time in our lives, we were interacting with black people at an eyeball to eyeball level. For the first time in our lives, we were not the “baas”. Lesotho provided all of us with a foretaste of what liberation might be like. What it might be like to live side by equal side. Cheek by equal jowl.

For many of us, when we found ourselves elsewhere in the world down the years, it was Lesotho that we pined for. Because it was there that we experienced what we could never experience inside South Africa itself. We experienced a unity of purpose. We experienced and we started to live a progressive, revolutionary and life-changing ideal. And once you have crossed over that bridge, you can never go back.

It was black ANC members and the people of Lesotho who gave us back the humanity that apartheid had robbed us of. And this is something I, for one, cannot ever forget. Jacob Zuma held underground meetings in our back bedroom. Tito Mboweni learned to drive in our Volkswagen Beetle. Ngoako Ramahlodi ironed his shirts in our living room. Others, with equally big names bathed in our bath; made tea from our kettle; spent the night on the lounge sofa. And then there were those people, whose real names one never knew – until they were killed in one of the two raids which the Boers (and I use that term knowingly) executed with such extraordinary cruelty in Lesotho.

I wish, passionately – I wish with every fibre of my being – that every white person in the country could have experienced what we experienced. I wish they could have learned, as we did, that white people could not lead the struggle. I wish they could have eaten from that same pot. I wish they could have drunk from that same river. Alas, it is impossible.

But you ask me today why I am still a member of the ANC and I will say this to you: I will say that it is the ANC which has led this country to a peaceful and successful democratic reality. It has done so with the utmost generosity and grace to the former oppressors. It has done so in a way which has ensured that – against all odds – the country still functions and the economy continues to grow. It has done so without violence. It has done so in a way which has been respectful of culture and heritage and origin. It has never faltered from its commitment to non-racialism and non-sexism.

You and I may criticise the ANC. That, in itself, is an amazing achievement. You and I may stare in disbelief at some of the antics of some of its members – but you cannot suggest, if you are in any way honest, that the ANC has failed. That would be not only churlish, it would be fantastically ill-informed.

The ANC has gone through some difficult times of late, but when I compare policy for policy, position for position, principle for principle, I have no doubt where my loyalties lie. And I would suggest that everyone who has come to love and honour that former “terrorist”, who made the difficult decision to opt for armed struggle – Nelson Mandela – should look beyond him to the Movement which gave him life and breath and to which he still owes allegiance. Look to the principles of the Freedom Charter. And once you have done that, take courage in the Constitution of the country, which is our joint crowning achievement.

I have been a member of the ANC for 33 of its 100 years. I have had my doubts. I have had my worries. I have had my moments of anger and even rage. But I look back on the 100 years of struggle which this movement has led and I know, beyond any doubt, that I made the right decision way back then. I look at where we are now, and where we could have been - and I know it. I look at the tremendous achievements we have made - and I know it. I look at the peace we enjoy - and I know it. I look at the greed and the gluttony and the shenanigans and the unsupportable nonsense - and I know, beyond any moment of doubt, that the spirit of the Charter and the will of the people will survive it all. We just need to make it so. Aluta Continua!

Ringing with lost songs

2012-01-03T22:57:00.001+02:00

Eli Weinberg

This poem is dedicated to Eli Weinberg. He and his wife, Violet, lived two houses from us, when I was growing up in Plantation Road, Gardens, Johannesburg. I remember the Special Branch sitting all night, every night long, in a car, parked opposite our house, watching their house. I remember how Violet needed to go to report to the police station every morning (and maybe every evening as well - I don't remember). Eli used to "chat" to my mother across the fence. She found it strange that a communist would give us a Christmas card every year. I remember their son, Mark, who eventually killed himself, having to read the newspaper under the streetlamp, because the regime had turned off the electricity in their house.

WAGON WHEELS

By Hugh Lewin

After evening lock-up at the Fort
the bandiete would shout "Wagon -wheels, Mr Weinberg!"
and Eli, communist and kantor, would pause
between the Internationale and Nkosi
to sing, schul like,
Wagon-wheels, wagon-wheels
Wagon-wheels carry me home
Wagon-wheels carry me home

And if you stopped a moment
on your way up Hospital Hill
into the rising hum of Hillbrow
you'd have heard it -
only an echo perhaps
behind the walls and the double doors
hiding the nation's underbelly

Waggon-wheels, Mr Weinberg

You won't hear it now.
Forty years on the Fort still squat on Hospital Hill
where I'm propelled past by the evening traffic
passed the door which spewed me into unimprisonment

and I can't help thinking of symbols
and the perpetuation of walls which stand still
ringing
with lost songs.

(Printed in The Big Issue 2011 collector's edition)

The Chinese idea of football

2011-12-28T21:54:00.001+02:00

It began with a seemingly innocuous text message from my partner. "Please get a Fussball for G - Red - at the Sportsman's Warehouse". Dutifully, I went to the said Sportsman's Warehouse and asked for a Fussball - Red, please, without any idea of what I was asking for. After some discussion between the shop assistants, I was presented with a very large, extremely heavy cardboard box. The shop assistant seemed eager to assist. They could make it up, if I wanted. I wondered whether or not I could see the finished product - and was shown - to my astonishment a hand football set, as pictured above. Far too large to fit into my modest little car. So I smiled bravely and said, no, it was fine. I would assemble it on my own. No, No, No! I insisted, it would be fine.

Christmas day brought the usual and wonderful excitement. The tree, the clutter of presents beneath it, the lies and deception of the cookie crumbs and drained Amarula liqueur glass, which Santa left behind as evidence of his appearance down the chimney. The indecent ripping of paper and unwise tearing open of boxes containing the only dreamed of treasures. The chaos, the confusion, the joy - followed by the harsh reality that someone, somewhere, needed to put the Fussball thing together. All eyes fell on me.

And so, dutifully, I started with the instruction manual, which, albeit only four pages, had such density of instruction, such complexity of design and arrangement, that I reeled in disbelief. But there was my son Gabriel, staring at me, with such utter belief in my ability, that I simply could not declare the job as one needing an engineer to complete - I had no escape route. I had to do it.

Together we made a start on the first set of instructions. You had to first take the two sides of the thing with holes in them and turn them upside down, so that you would be working on them upside down. Then, according to strict instruction, you needed to thread both of the sides onto the skewers which have various numbers of footballers on them. You start on the one side with the one (presumably the Goalie) then you build up to two, three, five, five, three, two, one - you get the picture. The instructions were extremely explicit - we followed them to the letter.

Three hours later, thousands of numbered screws later, aching knees, wrists and sweating brow - triumphant, we carefully turned the entire apparatus to stand for the first time, right way up. We stood back to admire our handiwork. We started putting the final touches to the construction, adding grips to the skewers, goals to the gaping spaces etc. And then I (hardly the football expert, you understand) noticed that the Goalies were facing their own goals! That seemed a little strange - even to a non-footballer.

Further investigation revealed that just about everything which could be wrong with the arrangement of the skewers of footballers, was. With rising hysteria, I re-checked the instructions, point for point. We had followed them to the letter. And then my eye spotted the country of origin - China. The awful reality began to dawn.

Now, given the fact that it was the very first manoeuvre which we had performed, the entire structure depended on it. To undo it (my hysteria started to rise uncontrollably at this point) meant that we had to undo everything. Absolutely everything.

It was at this point that I noticed the first flicker of uncertainty in my child's eyes. Was it possible that he was staring at an inadequate parent here? Someone who simply could not be entrusted or relied upon to put together a simple Fussball table? Was it possible that he was looking at a bluffer? A fraud? An incompetent? And if I had tried to deceive him about my ability in this regard, what else had I deceived him about?

Now, did I mention that the requirements of putting this Fussball table together required the use of virtually every tool in my toolbox? A cement mixer? A welding kit? Bricklaying abilities? Structural engineering qualifications which would have put the construction of the new World Trade Centres to shame? I didn't? Well, it did!

Did I mention that after round one, I needed a knee replacement? Swedish Sports massage? 6 months rehabilitation and occupational therapy? I didn't? Well, that's what I needed. So, as calmly as I could, under the circumstances, I told my child that we would have to re-do the thing later on.

Of course, I admit, I tried to think of ways never to return to the task again. I rehearsed telling him seriously that the Chinese were like that. They always gave instructions which didn't work and if you don't understand Mandarin, you will never get it right.

Needless to say, tired, resigned and weary, I returned to the job an hour or so later and after another grueling three hours, the task was finally complete.

I am recuperating from the rigours of the festive season. Parenting is not for sissies - and not helped at all by our close ties with China.

Sacred Cow

2011-12-17T12:13:00.000+02:00

I have learned, through bitter experience, that there are some things I dare not bring up at even the most boring of dinner parties. It is simply not worth it. It is not worth the inevitable tirades, the abuse, the threats and the eventual injured silences. Somehow, certain topics just seem to trigger it all off. Like ... Satanism, for example.

There, I have said it. I'm sure you won't be surprised to discover that all sorts of people, from all walks of life live in constant dread that their children and other loved ones are going to end up, unwittingly, in some terrible, bloody sacrifice to Satan, before which, they will attend raves, wear black, take drugs and burn a couple of crosses and bibles. The words to bandy about in this regard, are "pentogram", "coven" and "high priest" etc. Cats also seem to feature prominently and there is always someone who actually knows someone who was involved in this sort of thing.

On television, it gets one better. There you will find some rather begraggled looking creatures, with funny squares dancing all over their faces to protect their identity, saying how they were involved in a "coven" and then this and that happened and eventually, tired of drinking cat's blood, they saw the error of their ways and became converted to Christianity. You know the story.

Satanism is not a good topic at a dinner party, no matter how dispassionately you may hope to approach it. It is not worth taking the chance. It is probably better to avoid religion altogether.

Having said that, let me hoist myself on my own petard. Mother Theresa. Now there is a fairly safe religious topic if ever there was one. Or is it? The woman is now formally recognised as a Saint. She was a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. If you are looking for an almost perfect example of what it means to live a life of self-sacrifice and Christian virtue, then you point at her.

I remember from my teenage charismatic days, how we were fed on a fairly solid diet of Something Beautiful for God a dewy-eyed 20 minute film made by Malcolm Muggeridge, on the exclusive subject of Mother Theresa. I remember thinking, even then, that it was a bit strange for us to be venerating a Roman Catholic nun - because at the same time, we were being told that the pope was the anti-christ and that Roman Catholics worshipped idols.

I now understand what the connection was between us and her. We were all in the business of furthering a very extreme form of fundamentalist and mostly fairly right-wing Christianity. So we could, for the moment, overlook the fact that she was in some way, connected to the pope. Maybe, even the pope was, in some way, connected to Christianity! It was all a bit contradictory as far as the pope was concerned - but not with Mother Theresa, about whom there was never any doubt.

Closer inspection, however, reveals some fairly unsaintly aspects to the Mother Theresa phenomenon. Like, for example, she seemed to pop up in support of extreme right-wing dictatorships all over the place - like the notorious Duvalier family in Haiti. Like the fact that she intervened to support the Irish Catholic Church during the divorce referendum, when it threatened to deny the sacrament to women who had been divorced. To her, it didn't matter what the circumstances were. You could be married to a man who beat you to a pulp and raped your children on a nightly basis.There would be no exceptions. That was the position of Mother Theresa, the Saint.

I remember when she arrived in South Africa, when apartheid was still in full swing. She made not a single statement about it (which for a Saint, you will agree, was a little bit odd). All she seemed interested in getting, was monetary support the house which she was setting up for her Order in the country.

Her Order, of course, is worth a fortune.Evidence from a former member of the Order, who was once in charge of Mother Theresa's bank accounts in New York, estimated then (and it was many years back!) that the account held in excess of $50m in that account alone. Now that, let us be frank, is not what would easily be defined as poverty.

But what was the money spent on? Maybe there we would find the clue to saintliness, despite the fact that public audits appear not to be easily available.

Well, the money is not spent on medicine, or drugs, or treatment of any kind. That is not what Mother Theresa was into at all. She was interested in providing a place for the poor to die with dignity. The point being, if you were doing anything other than dying, you would be in big trouble if one of the Sisters of Poverty got hold of you.

Mother Theresa had the view that the suffering of the poor is something very beautiful and that the world is enriched by the nobility of this suffering and misery. All this perceived nobility and stuff is the reason why Mother Theresa did not allow the use of something as basic as pain-relievers in her clinics, not medical treatment of any kind. Now, to my mind, that is not only horrible, it is downright evil.

This might be some of the reason why she herself might have been a little reluctant to go to one of her own clinics when she had a health problem. Her health problem required very sophisticated surgery and the very best of medical skill - which included, one can only presume, a pain-killer or two every now and again. She was reluctant to go to one of her clinics, because she didn't want to die in the same way she allowed others, who were less fortunate than she was. And all in the name of that noble cause called the suffering of the poor!

The truth of the matter is that the millions and millions of Dollars which she regularly received were not spent on relieving the suffering of the dying - well not in medical terms anyway. They appear to have been spent on the upkeep and guaranteed posterity of her Order so that more people like her could find some sort of crazy notion of nobility in the misery of the poor, who cannot afford the medical care which members of the Order receive as a matter of course.

It was a weird sort of saintliness, and frankly, I never bought it.

Book Review: P Denis and G Duncan, The Native School that caused all the trouble. A History of the Federal Theological Seminary

2011-11-19T14:07:00.001+02:00

Book Review: P. Denis and G. Duncan, The Native School that caused all the trouble. A History of the Federal Theological Seminary of Southern Africa, Cluster Publications, Pietermaritzburg, 2011. 319pp

I have to say, it was a painful and unique experience reading this book. Painful, because I taught in the institution which is the substance of the book and I witnessed the beginnings of its collapse and demise. Painful, because it brought back a period of my own personal history and the history of Pietermaritzburg, which was often extremely dangerous. And unique, because of the extraordinary privilege I feel at having had the experience of life, with all its ups and downs, in the Federal Theological Seminary.

The Federal Theological Seminary (Fedsem) was established in 1963 in Alice, in the Eastern Cape. From the beginning, the Apartheid state watched it with growing concern. It was multi-racial. It was a place where critical thinking was encouraged. It was a place where black people could get quality education and think however they chose. The state soon expropriated the land on which it was situated in 1974, forcing it to become a nomad, settling first in Umtata, then in Edendale and finally in Imbali, Pietermaritzburg.

In the eyes of the apartheid state, it was a radical hotbed of revolution. A sinister and dangerous place. For the churches, which sent students to study there, (from the Methodist, Anglican, United Congregational and Presbyterian traditions), it was, for three decades, the main place for training their black students. (Which is not to say that the Churches did not have their hesitations about the place, either).

Because that was the curiosity of Fedsem. It was paradoxical and contradictory. It was certainly a place where radical thought could be espoused, but at the same time, it was a place of extraordinary conservatism. It was Ecumenical, but it was divided. It was multiracial and challenging, but never unified. The very design of the buildings in Imbali gave impetus to this paradoxical existence. Revel Fox was instructed to design a set of buildings which both retained the separate essence and existence of the various church denominations, and also to join them together.

The result was bewildering. Three separate, but identical blocks, cascading from cell-like single rooms, to student married houses, to (larger) lecturer’s houses. Everything looking exactly the same as everything else. The red brick of the place, stark and monochrome, but strangely, not entirely unpleasing. These three identical blocks were all joined by a rigid system of corridors – and seldom did the inter-connections get used. We all lived together, but mostly (and sometimes aggressively) we lived apart.

The architecture of the seminary was indicative of its disastrous attempt at forging the kind of unity where everything is presumed to be equal. And equal means “the same”.

There is another feature of the architecture which the writers of the book neglected to emphasise. The Seminary was bounded by a huge impenetrable fence, separating it decisively from the surrounding community. We may as well have been living on the moon, for all the contact we had with the people of Imbali. The surrounding community seldom, if ever, had access to the place. They didn’t own it or use it in any real way. And when the opportunity presented itself, they tore down the fences and looted the place, until there was not one brick standing on top of another.

Denis and Duncan make much of the standard of theology which was taught at Fedsem – and rightly so. Compared to many other colleges, the students at Fedsem were given the freedom to explore and question their faith, their history and their context in a way which few others seemed prepared to. This proved not only to raise the eyebrow of suspicion in the state, but in the churches themselves. Church leaders, even the greatest amongst them, do not generally like to be questioned. They seldom like to be challenged. And if they are questioned, then they prefer it not to be too rigorous.

So there was then (and I have no doubt that there remains today) a preference for “tame” priests and ministers, rather than hell-raisers. Contextual theology was regarded with alarm. Biblical Criticism, Redaction Criticism and Form Critical analysis – the real basics of Biblical study and Systematic Theology, were regarded as apostasy or heresy. The centre could not hold, because there really was no centre to hold. There really was no standard of education which one could apply from anywhere else. And in that kind of a religious context, fairy tales will always trump analytical fact.

The other rather complex point, which I think the writers under-explored, was the issue of the political operatives who were working in the Seminary. For instance, they assume that some of the lecturers were raising funds for primarily theological purposes. They find no link between the students or staff of the Seminary and the unrest in Imbali. That may be indeed true. Because the political operatives were not interested in Imbali. They were interested in recruiting students from every corner of the country, which is what made the Seminary such a suitable place to be! They were interested in building political critical mass in the church (something, I think those of us who were involved can say, without any shadow of a doubt, we failed hopelessly at doing!). The purpose was political. And it was that which was spotted by some of the ultra-conservative (and allegedly corrupt) elements in the leadership of the Seminary. And that is the reason we became such threats to their power. (The allegations of corruption against them, by the way, were legion towards the end. This is a subject which is simply avoided and needed to be faced, in my opinion).

Arrogance, ignorance, stupidity and greed is a very a heady mixture. The book shows that the leadership of Fedsem had that in bucket-loads, in the end days. They seemed utterly incapable of seeing the consequences of their actions.

The book is a fine one and I can only but congratulate the authors. Its readership is unlikely to be wide. But if only the buffoons who brought about the collapse of what was both a progressive and noble ideal read it - and learn something from it - then it will have been well worth the effort.

To Moira

2011-11-05T21:09:00.004+02:00

To Moira

27 November 1936 - 27 October 2011

Your life, my sister, has never been straightforward. Yet you have always been straightforward, honest, loving and true.

I remember you being there, all my life.

I have a picture of you holding me as a baby. I cannot remember, but I know you did it.

I remember how, without any hesitation, you pushed our new baby in his pram, with such pride, through Cresta shopping Mall.

I remember how you brought your small children to our parent’s house on a Sunday, to give them a decent meal.

I remember how you loved every child that was lucky enough to find you.

I remember you singing “clap handies, clap handies, till daddie comes home”.

I remember the flat in Sonja Court, with its two-bar heater, that didn’t work. And its courtyard of tar, where your boys grew up.

I remember going fishing with Johnnie in his red Prefect at the Vaal and how exasperated you were when he stopped to help every broken-down car on the road.

I remember the Cottage.

I remember146 Henrietta Rd, where you squeezed in, not only your children, but our parents and me – with my piano, practicing every night until midnight, for matric.

I remember you gave Jane a home there as well. That house had elastic walls and a heart of Platinum.

I remember you working till 2am in the morning and getting up at 6.

I remember “Conference”, every year.

I remember you telling us how Simpson Frankel was going to be computerised.

I remember how fast you typed.

I remember how fast you knitted.

I remember, when Brian killed himself, how you arrived with a bag packed to stay the night with me.

I remember how you stood by each one of your sons – and me amongst them – when we were in trouble.

I remember how you rejoiced in our successes.

I remember how we laughed about Claude.

I remember “A Rich… a Greg … a Stephen … a Ribs”.

I remember you getting off the bus after a long day at the office.

I remember the piles of library books you would get through in a week.

I remember “one-two-cha-cha-cha” in the lounge.

I remember Fred jumping naked into the fishpond.

I remember how you loved my marmalade and Leon’s Christmas cake.

I remember how you loved my children and how proud you were of me for being a father to them.

I remember that crazy holiday in Durban, when Alan made us miss the train home.

I remember how much you loved rugby.

I remember how much you spoke about Stella and how much you missed her.

I remember Suzie, the mad dog.

I remember how happy you were at Sonneglans.

I remember how all your friends would come and visit you.

I remember the cups of tea you made me when I visited.

I remember how we laughed at the same things.

No-one could have a better sister, or mother, or friend. I can’t think of a better human being.

You had so very little.

You gave so very much.

You gave everything you had.

You gave yourself.

I remember you and I miss you.

Your brother, Michael.

Hidden meaning

2011-10-11T20:30:00.000+02:00

The story which my son read to me today was fairly shocking. I suppose it wouldn’t have been shocking in 1923, which is when it was written, by a man called James H Fassett. The forty-eighth edition of the reader, called “Briar Rose” was the edition my son was reading from.
I started feeling a bit uneasy with the title – “Escape from Red Indians” and my alarm grew as the story unfolded.

“Many years ago”, it began, “two boys lived on a farm in America. It was so long ago”, the story continued, “that there were very few white people in that country”.

“Indians” lived very far away in the woods, but occasionally, they would “come down to where the white people lived and capture any white person whom they could find”.
It went further in setting the scene. “White prisoners would be taken to the Indian villages and would be held there as captives”.

The story is about how one child, "John" – a white innocent of course, was captured by savage Indians. He had his skates with him at the time of capture. The Indians thought the skates “must be some of the white man’s magic”, so they ignored them.

There are then descriptions of the savage conditions in which the Indians lived and John was given to an Indian mother, who treated him “as if he was her own son”.

John was of course very brave and astonished his savage peers with his bravery, even in stick fighting and the use of bow and arrow. However, because he was white, the Indians made him go with the women “squaws” to hoe. John had learned from his Indian peers that hoeing was for squaws and not for warriors and so he quickly rebelled. He had learned to “speak their tongue” but they nevertheless did not trust him.

On the day of his escape, the river had frozen over and so he brought out his skates and put them on one of his peers, who fell about on the ice, much to the merriment of everyone. There was much hilarity and mirth. When John put the skates on, he too fell about, pretending to do the same as all the other non-skaters.

Then, when he was far enough away from everyone, he skated off into the sunset down the river, towards the sea (because he knew the white people lived near the sea), found his parents again and lived happily ever after.

Now, besides the fact that this story belongs to a completely different time, I ask myself, is it appropriate in the South Africa of the 21st Century, for our children to be reading such stuff? There are all the usual facets of colonial writing in it: the glorification of whites and the demonization and idiot-ization of everyone else. More than that, the sexism of the time is simply assumed along with the unquestioned fact that we all belong with “our own” and should stay with “our own”. Indeed, we are safe with “our own”, happy with “our own”, and constantly in danger of being attacked and abducted by “them”. It is typical frontier storyline. But is it appropriate for children who are trans-racially adopted, in a country whose constitution guarantees the rights of everyone to live in dignity and peace – such as mine are? More than that, is it appropriate for any children for that matter, transracially adopted or not?

It is in these standard ways, where stories are told without questioning their content, that prejudice gets passed on down the line. I can only conclude that it is either laziness on the part of the school, or a simple lack of the most basic content interrogation, which allows this kind of story to be amongst the instruments of learning in a school, in Africa, some 88 years later?

To protect or not. That is the question

2011-08-28T20:30:00.000+02:00

When you get the newspapers delivered to your house in Cairp Tahn, they are always wrapped in plastic. It doesn’t matter what time of the year it is, sudden, tremendous and unexplained downpours are possible. If people could walk around wrapped in plastic all the time, it would be the preferable thing to do, for the same reason.

So, when I collected my Sunday newspapers from the driveway this morning, and tore off the standard plastic wrapper, there was nothing unusual about it. In fact, there is a kind of delayed gratification thing which happens – because you don’t get to see the headline, until you have done so. So, I tore off the plastic wrapping and ceremoniously opened the newspapers.
I could not really have been prepared for what I saw. A picture of a white man, with a hunting rifle, kneeling over what appeared to be a dead, black, child – as a hunting trophy.

I read the story, my head reeling. It appears that this lunatic has a Facebook page with this picture on it. He calls himself “Terrorblanche”. But he is not alone. He has some 590 friends, on Facebook. So, there are at least 590 people out there, who would actively press the befriend button, to link themselves with a person who would post this picture on his page.

I went to his page, to see what kind of a person this might be. He describes himself (I presume he is a he) as having matriculated at Krugersdorp High School. He is self-employed. He likes Bok van Blerk, Leon Shuster and Afrikanse Musiek, amongst other things. His activities are self-defence and close combat fighting. His lists “knifes”, firearms and weapons as his interests. He has a picture of the original Eugene Terreblanche riding a horse, with the flag of his right wing organisation unfurled. So, in all likelihood, the man is close to psychotic.

Now, the immediate problem we, as parents, needed to deal with was, what to do with the picture on the front page of the newspaper? Do we leave it lying around? Do we hide it? Do we leave it lying around in the hope that they would not see it? What would we say if they did see it?
On a recent holiday to the Devon, in the UK, we went one day to visit Exeter Cathedral. As we arrived, a memorial service for a child was just ending. There was a picture at the entrance of the child, who had drowned and the body had not yet been found. Our eldest child, Gabriel, was extremely interested. Who was the child? Why did he die? More and more questions. And they continued for the rest of the week, because each day, there were more pictures of the child on the front pages of the newspapers – until eventually the body was found.

Our child was clearly dealing with the reality of death. Not for the first time, but this time, it was the death of a child he was dealing with. We explained that death is as natural as birth. That yes, we all have to die sometime. That some people die younger than others. No, only a very few children die at a young age, and it is usually because of accidents, like this one. No, we as his parents are probably not going to die very soon.

These were normal worries and fears, which any child goes through – and especially for an adoptive child. We dealt with them, as best we know how. Honestly and un-emotively. Telling him the truth, without the embellishments of afterlife and religion and bargaining. The moment passed, as is right.

But this! This is a picture, (which is probably staged – but then how does one explain to a child why it is staged?), where it looks as though a black child has been shot by a white game hunter – for sport! It is on the front page of the Sunday newspaper. That, I am afraid, I simply can’t explain. So, for better or for worse, we hid the page, from our two black children.

"Skoonheid" - (Beauty)

2011-08-28T17:49:00.000+02:00

So, I have this cousin, who lives in Fish Hoek. He likes to walk on the mountains which surround the village, barefoot. He has a head full of shockingly white hair and a Stalin type moustache on his lip. He is a straight up-and-down kind of guy, in most senses of the word. I was therefore very interested when, casually, he told me about this movie that he had seen recently, “with loads of graphic gay sex in it. I was expecting him to dismiss it – but he didn’t. Far from it! “It was a brilliant movie!” he pronounced.

The movie he was talking about was “Skoonheid” – (translated Beauty), which has been getting some measure of high regard at the recent Cannes festival. It stars Deon Lotz – an actor, I have to admit, I have never heard of - and a range of other people I have never seen before in my life.

What is the movie about? Well, it is about this very ordinary Afrikaner who lives a very ordinary kind of life. Of course, he is gay (though he would not admit that) and fixates on a good looking young man at his daughter’s wedding. He becomes extremely compulsive about this young man. Essentially – that is what the film is about.

Now, you might think that is hardly novel – and indeed it is not. But what is so extraordinary about this film is the intensity of the primary role. The film is layered – repressed Afrikaner males, hypocritical, violent, angry, tending toward psychotic - and all the expected avenues are explored at that level. But there is another level, the ease and unfettered freedom of the beautiful young man – uncluttered with the history of the country. The electrical “charge” in which the younger generation operates, where older men on the prowl are simply invisible. The straightforward unedited, un-nuanced, almost naive business orientation of the new generation – happy to simply use contacts, situations, relationships etc, for whatever scheme they might have in mind.

And yet another level is that of the kind of inner turmoil in which some people still labour – there are frequent references to how little the government does, or cares; how the law enforcement agencies are sadly wanting; how the country is falling to pieces. Yet these remarks are made within a ring of deceit and evil which is carefully hidden from view – but indulged in and continued.

The layers are all there – in the veneer of respectability; in the role of father, husband and provider; in the lostness of someone still essentially damaged by apartheid; in a culture of ipods and trance music; in the hypocrisy of a person living an individual lie, but never hesitating to point to failure and corruption in the state.

The main character, Francois, is plainly a very disturbed individual. He cannot cope with the reality of his sexual orientation, but that does not stop him (and a portly bunch of similar men), gathering on a regular basis at remote farmhouses to have orgies. He starts to spin completely out of control – becoming completely predatory on the one hand and then reacting like a 12 year old, when he discovers his daughter in what seems to be not much more than a casual friendship with the object of his own desire. He stalks his wife and stalks this younger man. He plots in a cringe-making, amateurish way, to engineer a sexual encounter with him.

The result is explosive, extremely violent and utterly awful. The tension gets ratcheted up to an almost unbearable level – and then, one is faced with the mundane once again, with all of the contradictions still intact.

There is no resolution. There is no light, no glimmer of hope. The man continues, corrupt, abusive, self-destructive and unrepentant - dispensing either money or forgiveness to the people who are actually his victims. It is shocking to watch. Particularly if one is, let us say, of a certain age.

The title, “Skoonheid” is an interesting one. It is translated beauty – and the beautiful young man is the obvious object of the older man’s desire. But it can also mean “displaying an excellent character” – and with that in mind, the movie is certainly worth pondering.

Some reviews have criticized the movie for being "plodding". I have to say, I did not feel that. I thought it was brilliantly acted, nuanced and certainly unpredictable. But more than that, it has a gritty realism about it, which kept me wide awake.

Starring: Albert Maritz,Charlie Keegan,Deon Lotz,Michelle Scott,Roeline Daneel,Sue Diepeveen
Director: Oliver Hermanus

Our road, in the general direction of Damascus

2011-07-23T20:53:00.001+02:00

I have to say, my partner was always sceptical. He experienced, first hand, the sheer awfulness of the church as a gay teenager. He says he will forever be scarred by it and he can never again go under the banner of Christian.

When we adopted our first child, a debate arose between us and our Muslim social worker, about what religion we intended bringing up our children in. Our initial instinct was to say none – and she would not have minded – she made that quite clear. But it was I who blinked.
I suggested to Leon, and he agreed, that faith, of whatever kind, is an important human thing to experience. It matters not if it gets rejected – that is irrelevant. But you can’t teach a child faith. You have to experience it, contradictions and all, for yourself.

A friend of mine told us at the time about her experience of bringing up her children athiests. She said it seemed fine for a while, but she had noticed their loneliness when things went bad, or wrong. They seemed to have no one to turn to, not even an imaginary friend. How lonely indeed.

So, we found a church. It had splendid music and some sense of liturgy and decorum. We were welcomed there and no-one seemed to make any fuss. Whatever stir one middle aged white man, a younger man and two black babies caused, was well managed. And the children would have been none the wiser.

Spurred on by baptism and early communion our boys have therefore, for several years now, attended church. I have been the one to take them, mostly. Leon would come with us on the odd occasion, and then would attend to the needs of his Blackberry during the service. Our eldest son Gabriel became a server while Joshua went through the motions in a good-spirited sort of way, but would much rather have been playing some computer game.

That was how it was for years. The church we attended in Cape Town was spikey, with lots of prancing around and doffing of birettas and a congregation whose attention was focussed forwards in the direction of the choir and the altar, rather than communal - so that suited me perfectly. Sermons were short, incidental and easily ignored. The music was good. The language was the austere beauty of the King James, which could either serve a comedic purpose or else lull one into a sense of quiet comfort.

Then came the attack. I happened to be looking for the address of one of the Bishops on the internet, when I came across an article in a blog relating to a priest, who has, for other reasons, been relieved of his licence to operate as a priest. In it, my name was mentioned, together with a list of statements about me, which amounted to an extraordinary and vicious attack. I knew I had to take action immediately.

I withdrew Gabriel from the server's guild and indicated to the parish priest the nature of the attack and the fact that we would not be returning to the church unless we could be afforded some measure of protection from this man. Silence was the response.

I approached the Bishops and the Archbishop, asking the latter for an interview. Again, silence was the response and no interview was granted. Instead, the Archbishop suggested through his Provincial Officer that I be urged to "pray" for the perpetrator of the attack. In general, bar one or two notable exceptions, silence has been the response of the parish priest and parish as well.

Now, I venture to suggest, had this attack been a racial attack, or a xenophobic attack, or even an attack against a woman - the response would have been markedly different. It would have been immediate and it would have come from the highest levels of the church. But in this instance, clear sustained homophobia, there has been silence, except for a short statement given out by the office of the archbishop, which in the end I offered to help draft.

The clear and distinct impression we have been given, as a family, is that we are not wanted. This despite mouthings to the contrary elsewhere. Homosexual people are supposedly welcome - (but more singly, than in pairs, it seems). Homosexual priests are not welcome - that is very clear indeed - (again, despite mouthings to the contrary). And homosexual priests with a heathen partner and two adopted children seem to deserve no protection from homophobic attacks by another priest - within the ranks of the church - and who is quite obviously in need of psychological care.

I withdrew immediately from the church, and as I had guessed, this priest came looking for me on Sunday mornings at Mass. Had I and my children been there, there would have been, I am quite sure, no protection from him. It was not a risk I was willing to take and certainly not one I was willing to expose my children to.

At the start of this whole situation, Leon had asked a fundamental question. He asked "What kind of an institution is this, that we are exposing our children to?" And I had to admit, it was not a safe one for them, or us. Now, it is doubtless true that they will be exposed to a whole range of issues and problems throughout their lives. They will doubtless encounter homophobia in their schools, on the sports fields, etcetera etcetera. But that does not mean that we should be actually seeking out places for them to be abused? The church is clearly one such place. It is not a safe place for them, or for us. But more than this, the church is an environment where gay and lesbian people are second-class citizens and that is intolerable.

From the perspective of faith, well, that is something one must mould for oneself in any case. And my life is not, and never has been one which depends on a faith in God for its goodness. I have not quite worked out how we will be explaining to the children why we don't go to church anymore - but I guess the truth won't hurt them. I might just say this to them - that the church just wasn't a safe place for us. We can do much better elsewhere.

The Bottomless pit

2011-07-17T21:37:00.001+02:00

Widecombe-in-the-Moor, Devon

So, I have just had the most wonderful holiday. This makes a change in itself – because usually, I find holidays deeply stressful. Lying on the beach has never presented itself to me as something a sane person would want to do. You either get burnt to a cinder – or the wind blows the sand-dunes into your eyes – or both at the same time.

Similarly, staying in a hotel makes me long for home. I get irritated with the service, the room the lift, the other holiday-makers. I get irritated with being irritated quite soon and make everyone around me miserable. So it is better, I have found, not to go on holiday.

Well, you can imagine, I went, this time, with a tremendous sense of resignation and it did not take very long for me to confirm my worst fears. The 12 hour flight was hell on wings. A baby some four rows from where we were seated, screamed and howled at intervals, throughout the entire night. No amount of volume on the headphones on my part, and seemingly, no amount of attention from its parents would help the matter. She simply screamed on, and on and on. The wailing continued in the immigration queue. She was relentless and determined.

But the holiday, I am very pleased to say, turned out to be a challenge to my many preconceptions. We stayed with friends in the tiny village of Widecombe-in-the-Moor in Devon. I use the word “village” somewhat judiciously, because it is a village with what cannot be more than fifty people living in it. The Old Rectory, where our friend lives, is precisely that. It is a gracious building, with an Aga in the kitchen which never goes off, spacious rooms looking on to a perfect English garden, with ponds and a steam running through it. The landscape is a tapestry of greens and yellows. It is achingly beautiful countryside.

There are scores of wild ponies on the Moor. Our boys fished with nets in the streams and rivers, chased the sheep in the pasture and caught crabs off the pier, in nearby Teignmouth. We were asked to come to talk to a class in a school in another nearby tiny village, called Berry Pomeroy. We had apparently been advertised to the class we were going to address as a “family from Africa” - which is, of course, not incorrect. The thought did cross my mind through, that the class may well end up with a slightly strange idea of what families in Africa looked like, when they met our two black children with their two white dads. But no-one mentioned it on the day, so neither did we!

After our idyllic stay in Devon, we did some of the tourism necessities in London, before returning home. And it was on our return that my partner, Leon, made an observation which seems to me to be so astute, that I would love it to have been mine. He said that what he noticed most about returning to South Africa is that “everyone is so angry”.

Now there is a thing. And I think he is right. Listen to the political debate going on. Read the newspapers. Drive in the traffic. Shop in the Mall. And you will see this thing – it is anger. It is seldom directed at anyone in particular. It is written on the faces of people. It is etched on their foreheads. And it is caused by a truckload of factors. It is caused by our history – of separation, of hatred, of suspicion, of exploitation. It is caused by opportunities, or lack of them. It is caused by crime and recession. It is caused by lack of respect and lack of hope. It is caused by the way we have learned to treat people, whether because of colour, or because of nationality, or because of gender, or because of age.

Anger has been somehow scorched onto our national soul. It is as much part of our identity as is Nelson Mandela or boerewors. And it is a really debilitating thing, because it becomes the way we act, the way we speak, the way we think, the way we behave towards each other on a daily basis.

And the really sinister thing about it is that it has seemingly become normal for us to be angry. That is just the way we are. The question I have to ask – and I ask this of myself – is this: Will we forever remain that way? And what is the damage we are doing, to ourselves and to our children? Because while it remains within us and amongst is, our peace is paper-thin. And what the consequences will be, we can only guess at.

"Annabel" by Kathleen Winter

2011-07-11T21:34:00.000+02:00

Annabel is a novel about intersexuality – basically that. The child of Jacinta, a rather strange mindless woman with flashes of genius and Treadway – a trapper of very few words but impeccable principles, is born intersex. The parents decide that the child will grow up male and surgery is performed in order to enable this – by and large.

But Wayne, the child (and the parents) always know that there is something different about him – and the novel explores the psychological journey which he takes to eventually ditching his pills and allowing his bodiliness to have its way.

It is dull. It is tedious and it is dreary. For a book which was listed for the Orange prize, all I can say is YAWN! Everything about it is completely obvious. The mother nurtures things in her heart, but can’t talk to anyone about them. She cooks a lot and remembers what it was like to live in a slightly more habitable place that the Labrador coast. The father is a mono-dimentional. He traps. He likes the outdoors. He doesn’t say much. He eats caribou. He talks to birds.

The son is so passive about everything that one just loses interest. And everything which happens to him – down to the violent abuse he receives from workmates when he finally goes to the city – is completely expected. The only thing which is not expected, is that he can be so bloody boring in the living of his life!

And yes, I get it – the Labrador coast is inhospitable – and that is what it is like when you are intersex. Page, after page, after page of inhospitability. I really did get it! I got it quite early on and had to endure it for the rest of the book. (Gosh – maybe that was the point! But please – enough!)

Don’t read this book. It is a monumental waste of time! Don’t read it if you are in any way interested in intersexuality – it will teach you nothing at all. Don’t read this book. It is just too tedious for words.

The imperative of Restitution

2011-06-03T22:01:00.000+02:00

Yesterday, I had a conversation with an extremely powerful man. It’s not the first time I have spoken to him. And now, as before, I was struck by his ordinariness. He is, to be sure, unprepossessing. He is a grey man outwardly, but far from colourless. You wouldn’t notice him in a crowd. You would be unlikely to strike up a conversation with him in the lift. He dresses plainly but casually and he heads a vast, successful multi-continental commercial empire.

He is not afraid to give you his opinion and when he speaks, it is with the authority of a man who is not used to hearing the word “no”. When he speaks, he uses examples from his personal experience. And the examples he uses are engaging and easy to understand. When he speaks, he demonstrates that he has thought about the subject matter carefully. He has reached a conclusion and he shares his wisdom easily, in an unfussy and unpretentious way.

The myths and legends about him are legion. Barely mention his name in the sphere of his influence and you will hear a story of his genius, his vision, his insight, his commercial courage. People quake visibly at the mere thought of his censure.

We were talking about why I had decided to move back into government, to do the job I will be doing for the foreseeable future – the job of Restitution. Now I noticed, right from the start of our conversation, that his position, (which was entirely negative of the endeavour) was not an uninformed one. This is markedly different from many other white people who have shared their opinions with me on my move, recently. Most white people immediately mistake Restitution for Redistribution. The moment they hear the words “Land Claims” they assume the Mugabe position. Why, they want to know, would I want to have anything to do with taking people’s land away from them and giving it to other people who are ill-equipped to run it?

Their lips curl. They bare their teeth at me and they snarl their disapproval. It matters nothing, when I point out that Apartheid did exactly what Mugabe is doing. It took land away from people who were its legal owners and in most cases did nothing to compensate them. But for these people what Mugube is doing is wrong and it somehow wasn’t wrong when the Nationalist party did the same thing. (Or, if not that, then it is just ignored as a comparison). They simply cannot hear the argument.

Not the man I was speaking to. He knows exactly what Restitution is. He can cite precise examples. Nevertheless, he rejects it. He says it is – (and this is a word I found really extraordinary) – “immoral”.

He says it is about the past, and South Africa should be about the future. He says that most of the people who suffered dispossession are dead. He acknowledges easily that what was done to them was terrible – but he says it is too late to compensate them. Even if one could quantify the damage done to them, it is unproductive to travel the path to Restitution. He cites China and Japan as examples of forward looking nations – where the past was the past and the future is the future. So, they simply started again from scratch. What happened, happened. It is over. It happened long ago.

He gave an example of his own family sitting around the dinner table. His father would refer to a party which was taking place at the nearby farm owned by the Van der Westhuizens. “Now I hope”, his father would say, “that none of MY children will be seen at the Van der Westhuizen’s party”.

Why? Because during the Anglo-Boer War, it was Van der Westhuizen’s grandfather who pointed out to the British where the Boers were hiding.

It was a long time ago – and yet the fires were still burning. The hatred still there. Let it all go! He said. Why would you want to get involved in something like that, which can never be solved?

How convincingly I answered, I do not know, but what I said was this: I said that this was the essence of the settlement. This is the reason why we have peace, rather than blood in our country today. That was the deal. There will be no retribution, because there will be restitution.

If that position gets shifted, for whatever reason, whether it be because the claims are too difficult or to complicated; or because there are competing interests; or because “people should just move on and be done with it”, then in my opinion, the deal will collapse and the capitulation to commercial interests will be complete.

Not to mention the moral imperative. Not to mention the fact that people who were driven from their lands and their homes were raped emotionally and robbed of their dignity. Not to mention the effects it had on the children and their children after them. Restitution is the very least that can be done. And white people in this country, in my opinion, should keep very quiet about Mugabe, when we still have our own tragic history to deal with first.

It is all very well, and not a little disingenuous, to say “forgive and forget”, when the person urging everyone to do so is still reaping the not inconsiderable benefits of our inequitable, distorted past. The past is not the past. The past is still with us. It won’t disappear because we might like it to, or because it would be easier if it were buried or ignored. The past is still with us and it will be for a long time to come.

On the death of a friend

2011-04-25T15:11:00.001+02:00

Yesterday, a friend of mine died. We were somewhat estranged, yes. But we were friends. We shared a history. We grew up together. She claimed that we bathed together as children. I don’t see how that could have been possible.

Her mother was a severe Scot, who never really acclimatized to the heat and dust of Africa. She married an Afrikaner and came to despise him and his name. They divorced, leaving her with an only child – my friend. I remember her as a severe, tight-lipped woman with long grey hair, tied in an unforgiving bun. A matron at a general hospital. She would appear tired and irritable at the door of her flat at the end of the day. She would light up a cigarette and settle down in an armchair with a cup of tea – the reward she would give herself for the hard life her now dead husband had left her.

She was entirely unforgiving of her child, who could never do right in her eyes. She was never good enough. She was never clever enough. She would never get anywhere in life. She was too tall. She was too fat. She was too lazy. Yes, it is true, she herself was tired. She worked hard, in difficult conditions and under difficult circumstances. She was a single parent. But she took her despair out on her child, relentlessly.

This woman went to church regularly. The church was in one of the leafier suburbs of Johannesburg – where judges and advocates would go to worship on a Sunday morning. Thinking back on it now, I can see that she was the wrong class for that set. And her religion far too judgemental and singular – to sparse, too lean for a perfect fit. But she was always there. And so was her daughter.

That is where we met – the two of us slightly out of our class. Singing music in the choir neither of our parents would ever normally have listened to. Learning to be polite, in that refined environment. We became friends. We became teenagers. We made pacts with each other, that we would meet in our twenty-first year in Oxford; that we would travel to China; that we would be wild and free.

Life intervened for her. She got married and had a child. And her mother maintained her unwavering air of disapproval. The marriage ended in divorce. The child was brought up first and unsuccessfully by his father and then much more happily by his mother, who, having abandoned her responsibility initially, went back and made good for the rest of his upbringing.

She had some wild moments in her life – like the Indian boyfriend, when such a thing was unheard of and illegal. Like the buckets of marijuana she would get through on a regular basis. Like the spur of the moment (and disastrous) second marriage to an idiot and a fraudster. Like the squander of a small inheritance on holidays in Scotland, when there were much more pressing needs.

But there were some things which were never to change. It was as if the burden of disapproval weighed on her cellular structure. She gained weight to an alarming degree and simply would never shed it. She became sedentary and would sit in a smoke-filled living room watching hours of television and moving only to find another packet of cigarettes. The telephone would be near her. There would be a large, un-emptied waste basket for her butts and a lamp to switch on when it got dark. Her cat or her dog would share the couch.

I came to understand her behaviour as depression of the most profound kind. Every now and again she would seek treatment, but it was always half-hearted and never followed through. It was not something she would discuss with any ease.

She loved a drama, but I saw in later years, that even dramas seemed to prove too much effort for her. So she started to withdraw. Her mother’s death gave her the ability to resign from her job for a few years, and this proved, to my mind, to be the worst possible thing that could have happened to her. Because it enabled her to withdraw completely.

I tried making contact on numerous occasions, but she did not want it. Others have told me the same. She wanted to be alone. She wanted to disengage. Her self- loathing had started to feed on itself and needed the half-light of anonymity to grow and to finally overcome.

And that is how she died. Entirely alone. And when I think about it, I have to come to the conclusion that she was severely damaged. And that the damage caused to her, was caused to that person in turn, by someone else – and that story one may never know.

And so it goes, if one lets it. It travels down the generations, finding new blood for itself. New ground to grow its roots. New air to spread its branches. If one lets it.

You were a brave soul, in many ways, my friend. In some ways you managed to challenge that darkness. Your intentions were always good. You protected your son from the marauding that you had to face. Mostly you did, I think. So, it may be different for him.

But you – you were a victim. And now you are dead.

Well, goodbye my friend. I am sorry I could not help you. I don’t think anyone could. Perhaps, now, the poison has run dry.

More interesting takes on the buriel of Jesus

2011-04-23T10:02:00.000+02:00

"Pieta" by Elizabeth Ohlson Wallin, 1998

The "Jesus" in this picture was a gay man, who was about to die of AIDS. The artist wanted him to pick his Pieta. He chose a female leather bar employee, well known in Stockholm for mothering gay man. They posed at the door of the AIDS ward of a Stockholm hospital.

The man wanted people to remember him after his death - but his "Jesus" experienced his own personal resurrection. Shortly after the photo shoot, he began taking the new Aids drug cocktail. A decade later, Ohlson Wallin could proclaim "Jesus is alive!" And the AIDS ward no longer exists.

Information gleaned from Kittredge Cherry, 'Art that Dares. Gay Jesus, Woman Christ and More' Androgyne press, Berkeley CA, 2007.

Interesting takes on the buriel of Jesus

2011-04-23T09:36:00.002+02:00

Maerten van Heemskerck - Man of Sorrows

The sheer homo-eroticism of this image has always compelled me. Of course, what is extreme about it, is that one is viewing a dead body. That same tremens et facinens aspect is present in Anglo-catholic practises of the Benediction - where the consecrated host is revealed and worshipped - or, where on Good Friday, the Cross is kissed by members of the congregation. It is, after all, a dead body that is being venerated.

The genius of Elizabeth Ohlson-Wallin - Krucifix

2011-04-22T22:45:00.001+02:00

Elizabeth Ohlson-Wallin: Krucifix

The thing which interests me about this crucifix is firstly the sheer artistry of the photograph. Overtones of sexuality permeate the scene. It is, however, sensual, without being in any way offensive. The elements which make it up are entirely natural. There is something essentially voyeuristic about it - not unlike the unveiling and display of the consecrated Host at Benediction. At the same time, the perfect, yet deathly outline of the Cross is apparent, but a cross which one has succumbed to - which has extracted the last from the tormented body. I find it an extraordinary piece of work.

More interesting depictions of the crucifixion

2011-04-22T22:29:00.002+02:00

Francis Farmer as Jesus (Artist unknown)

Interesting depictions of the Crucifixion

2011-04-22T22:16:00.002+02:00

By Hans Schaufelein (c 1515) and Madonna

The Killing - Edwin Muir

2011-04-22T21:51:00.002+02:00

Pic: Becki Jayne Harelson - Crucifixion of Christ

The Killing

Edwin Muir

That was the day they killed the Son of God
On a squat hill-top by Jerusalem.
Zion was bare, her children from their maze
Sucked by the dream of curiosity
Clean through the gates. The very halt and blind
Had somehow got themselves up to the hill.
After the ceremonial preparation,
The scourging, nailing, nailing against the wood,
Erection of the main-trees with their burden,
While from the hill rose an orchestral wailing,
They were there at last, high up in the soft spring day.
We watched the writhings, heard the moanings, saw
The three heads turning on their separate axles
Like broken wheels left spinning. Round his head
Was loosely bound a crown of plaited thorn
That hurt at random, stinging temple and brow
As the pain swung into its envious circle.
In front the wreath was gathered in a knot
That as he gazed looked like the last stump left
Of a death-wounded deer's great antlers. Some
Who came to stare grew silent as they looked,
Indignant or sorry. But the hardened old
And the hard-hearted young, although at odds
From the first morning, cursed him with one curse,
Having prayed for a Rabbi or an armed Messiah
And found the Son of God. What use to them
Was a God or a Son of God? Of what avail
For purposes such as theirs? Beside the cross-foot,
Alone, four women stood and did not move
All day. The sun revolved, the shadows wheeled,
The evening fell. His head lay on his breast,
But in his breast they watched his heart move on
By itself alone, accomplishing its journey.
Their taunts grew louder, sharpened by the knowledge
That he was walking in the park of death,
Far from their rage. Yet all grew stale at last,
Spite, curiosity, envy, hate itself.
They waited only for death and death was slow
And came so quietly they scarce could mark it.
They were angry then with death and death's deceit.

I was a stranger, could not read these people
Or this outlandish deity. Did a God
Indeed in dying cross my life that day
By chance, he on his road and I on mine?

Pickled Fish

2011-04-20T21:24:00.000+02:00

I had no idea, until moving to Cape Town, just what a big deal Pickled Fish is. It is available in every house in Holy Week - and eaten by Muslim and Christian on Good Friday. My parents migrated from Cape Town to Johannesburg, where I grew up, and I remember my mother cooking this dish for Good Friday every year. Thinking back, it was a tradition she had brought with her to Johannesburg - because no-one else I knew did it.

Pickled Fish

1 bottle brown vinegar (spirit is ok, but I prefer wine)
1 cup brown sugar ( to taste – sauce should be quite sweet)
2 T pickling spice
2 T Turmeric
1 t (possibly more) salt
2 large onions
1 heaped tablespoon hot curry powder
1 packet frozen Whiting – or of course, fresh fish is best (I like Gurnard. I find game fish, such as yellowtail is a bit too strong. Go for the milder varieties, hake, Cape Whiting, Silver etc Fresh Snoek does well, but remember the bones!).

Batter

2 eggs
1 Cup flour
1 t white pepper
Salt and pepper
1 t Corn Flour
Oil

If you are using frozen fish – no need to defrost, turn fish in seasoned (salt and peppered) flour – then dip in beaten egg and fry in oil. (Don’t make the oil too hot and cook the fish slowly). When nicely brown, drain on absorbent paper and cool.

Sauce

Place in a saucepan the bottle of vinegar, sugar, pickling spice, turmeric, curry powder salt and sugar as well as onions cut across the bulb into circles. Bring to the boil and allow to cook until the onions are just tender – with still a bit of crunch in them. When the sauce is ready mix the Corn Flour with a little cold vinegar and then mix into the sauce to thicken.

Arrange the fish in a large glass dish with a lid, and pour over the sauce. Stand for at least a day and then refrigerate.

Bringing a Carnival to life

2011-04-03T21:30:00.001+02:00

I can say, without a shadow of a doubt, that organising the Cape Town Carnival has been the most complex and difficult job I have ever had. Just before I took up the position of CEO, I was in charge of Fanparks and other social legacy matters for the Western Cape Province, in the 2010 FIFA World Cup. In comparison, it was a doddle.

In the World Cup, I didn’t need to dress the participants. I didn’t need to design their costumes. I didn’t need to bus them to a central place and then put their clothes on them and put make-up on their faces. I didn’t need to feed them. I didn’t need to get them all to the bottom of Long Street at the same time and in order. I didn’t need to get them to practise ten different dance moves which they all needed to do together. I didn’t need to build nine huge floats and arrange for volunteers from three universities to push them and arrange ten different music genres to sound from them. In addition to all of that, I didn’t need to manage 60000 spectators who were watching them!

For the 2010 FIFA World Cup, it was easy. All I needed to do was set up a big screen and a couple of fences and sit back and watch.

But the truth is, that something fundamental happened for Cape Town in the 2010 FIFA World Cup. The people of what must be the most divided city in South Africa, were somehow given permission to enjoy each other and swan around in funny costumes and parade up and down the streets, in the middle of the night. The crowds were completely diverse. There was barely a person in Cape Town who was not positively touched by the spirit of it all, in some way.

And the genius of it all was that you really didn’t need to like soccer! You didn’t even need to understand the rules of the game! All you needed to do was enjoy yourself, and enjoy other people enjoying themselves. The parading around went on regardless.

On 19 March 2011 the Carnival happened in Cape Town. 2 500 volunteers, from communities as diverse as Strand, Grabouw, Hout Bay, Langa and Constantia paraded down Long Street. They were cheered by a crowd of 60 000 people – undoubtedly the most diverse since the soccer World Cup. They danced. They pranced. They strutted in gorgeous costumes. There were birds; creatures from the sea; costumes lit up with LED lights; massive costumes worn by flag-bearers from Brazil. It was an extraordinary sight.

As each float went by, the crowd cheered and clapped. The energy of it all was extraordinary. After the parade was over, the barriers were taken down, and DJ Fresh was let loose on the crowd to weave his particular kind of magic. He tweeted that it was the best gig he had ever done in his life. For one, spectacular night, Cape Town re-experienced the joy and unity of the World Cup. It was an evening of real legacy.

For me, the wonder of the event was in the preparations for it. I saw, in the weeks and months of preparation such a unity of purpose amongst the participants – such extraordinary dedication – such amazing patience and good grace. Because of the fact that I wanted large groups doing the same thing, many of the cultural groups were forced to work together with other groups from different areas – people they had never met before and would probably never work with. The result was an extraordinary demonstration of social cohesion amongst a diverse range of communities.

The same was true of the crowd. It was as mixed as one can possibly get – in terms of race, in terms of gender, in terms of age. And the same was true of the parade itself. The youngest child was 13. The oldest performer, an astonishing 85! There was Muslim, there was Christian, there was Hindu, there was Jewish. It was an amazing thing.

In Brazil, they have one religion, one language and one beat. That is certainly not what we are. Here in Cape Town, in Africa, we celebrate something directly opposite. We celebrate our great and beautiful diversity. That is who we are. And Carnival is the showcase for it all.

Is there life before death?

2011-03-05T19:34:00.001+02:00

My mother, on her deathbed – well not precisely at the time she breathed her last – but on the same bed and around that sort of time – (things become a little blurred – you know how it gets?). Anyway, my mother, who had always been a very devout, church-going sort of Christian, turned to me and said, “Do you think I’m going to see your father?”

She always referred to him as ‘your father’, as though that was the only sort of connection she could think of between him and her. It was a curious thing, this.. It wasn’t as though they were terribly unhappily married or anything. He didn’t beat her up or abuse her in any way I could detect. Yet there was this thing that made her speak of him as though they weren’t really connected in any particularly important way.

I looked at her, a little alarmed. Was she losing it, I wondered? He whom she referred to as ‘Your father’ had been dead for two years at that point.

“In what way do you mean”, I enquired gingerly.
“I mean do you think, when I die, I’m going to see your father?"

Well, there it was. I was completely on the spot now. I had to come clean. I mean, it is not every day that your own mother is lying on her deathbed wanting to know whether she was going to meet husbands, friends, erstwhile bowling-club companions, her mother, the next-door neighbour from 1925 and God knows who else? I mean, just how the hell does one handle this? I mean, what exactly was she looking for?

So I braced myself. My mother knew me very well. I wasn’t about to fool her now that she was dying, let me tell you. So I said: “Well, I have to tell you, I don’t think so".

She kept on looking at me. She wanted me to go on, so I did.

“It doesn’t really make much sense to me. What age would he be? Would it be just before he died? Would it be when you first met and in the first flush of love? And what would you both do with each other? Would you just carry on after a kind of two and a half year’s break in transmission?”

I piled rhetorical question on top of rhetorical question. I don’t think she was looking for a deeply theological answer anyway. I think she was fairly sick of theological answers. In any case, the one thing the word ‘dead’ doesn’t mean, is ‘alive’!

“What do you think?” I asked.

She looked away. Not in anger. Not in despair. She looked away, almost because she had come to a life-long different conclusion, almost because she had surprised herself.

“I don’t suppose I really think I will see him again, either”.

I heard in those words the most honest and real longing. But with this, a factual and absolute grasp of reality. And I felt sad for her, because her Sunday-school faith had failed her now, when it was supposed to be her rock.

At other times she would rage. She would wallow in self-pity. Why did this have to happen to her? (What? She was seventy four years old! But life is precious, no matter what age you are). Rage at God, she would, for not keeping to the bargain she had made with him. It went like this …

“I go to church on a regular basis; pray; don’t commit this sin and that sin. In turn, you don’t let me die”.

She wasn’t in any pain. I asked her over and over, but she wasn’t. She was old and she was going to die. That was all. And the greatest tragedy for me, was not that she came to the realisation that there wasn’t going to be pie in the sky, but that she had realised it too late to enjoy – to really enjoy – her life before her timeous death.

A poem for Sarah Baartman - Diana Ferrus

2011-02-27T19:25:00.002+02:00

I heard, the other day on the radio, a description of Hankey - the tiny little town where Sarah Baartman, the so-called "Hottentot Venus" was born and in it has, at last, been buried. The grave has, apparently, been vandalised. I recalled the poem written for her, by Diana Ferrus. (This is the only version I could find. I find the word "wretch" in the second verse a bit strange. I wonder whether it should not be "wrench"?)

Recently, I have been having rather spirited discussions with regard to body types - and what some consider "ideal". In the midst of the heated discussions, I thought of this poem.

A poem for Sarah Baartman
By Diana Ferrus

“I’ve come to take you home –
home, remember the veld?
the lush green grass beneath the big oak trees
the air is cool there and the sun does not burn.
I have made your bed at the foot of the hill,
your blankets are covered in buchu and mint,
the proteas stand in yellow and white
and the water in the stream chuckle sing-songs
as it hobbles along over little stones.

I have come to wretch you away –
away from the poking eyes
of the man-made monster
who lives in the dark
with his clutches of imperialism
who dissects your body bit by bit
who likens your soul to that of Satan
and declares himself the ultimate god!

I have come to soothe your heavy heart
I offer my bosom to your weary soul
I will cover your face with the palms of my hands
I will run my lips over lines in your neck
I will feast my eyes on the beauty of you
and I will sing for you
for I have come to bring you peace.

I have come to take you home
where the ancient mountains shout your name.
I have made your bed at the foot of the hill,
your blankets are covered in buchu and mint,
the proteas stand in yellow and white –
I have come to take you home
where I will sing for you
for you have brought me peace.”

A street child's tale

2011-02-26T20:55:00.002+02:00

I dreamed, last night, I was a street-child. In my dream, I woke up under a bridge in the centre of the city. It had been raining all night. I was cold and I was hungry. I wandered around the town. It was mid-morning when I did my usual thing of directing cars into parking places – even where there were many available. I put my head to one side and said words – any words – to the people passing by. I said “Please, I’m hungry”. I said “Please baas, two Rand to buy some bread”. And occasionally, someone would give me something. Always very little. And sometimes, I had enough to buy something.

But there was nothing which could take away the ache I had in my stomach. Nothing I ate could take it away. Not even the food from the dustbins outside Kentucky. I sniffed some glue which I bought with some of my money. I felt my head turn and spin and the blood rush to my eyes. I felt the glue burn my nose. I felt as though nothing at all mattered for a few minutes.

And then I felt a sharp pain in my back. I was thrown onto the floor and kicked in my head. In my stomach. In my mouth. “Give us your money!” they shouted. They were bigger and they were older and they had knives. I gave them my money. My little money. I must get a knife, I said to myself.

Now I had a bloody nose and I hurt all over. I asked a white woman for some money. She looked at me and her lips curled back in disgust. “Vra Mandela”, she spat (“ask Mandela”) and walked on clutching her handbag.

I went to the park and washed the blood off my face. A man in a big black Mercedes stopped and offered me fifty Rand to do things to him. We drove to a quiet road where no-one could see. I did what he wanted. When he finished, he hit me and threw me out of the car. He didn’t pay me. As he drove away, he made the window go down and shouted “Thanks!”

Now I was lost. I cried because I was alone. I walked down the road in my broken shoes. They were broken and they smelled so badly. No-one looked at me. No-one saw me. I was a lost child, walking down the road with tears in my eyes and no-one saw me. I had no-where to go.

In the university, I was chased away, even by the cleaning woman, who just swore and me and waved her hand. She had no food for me. She had no money for me.. I must go and get work. Yes – if I stopped sniffing glue and fighting, then maybe I wouldn’t be in such a bad state. No, I must go away – she has children of her own to worry about.

The students didn’t see me either. I lay down on the pavement and shivered, because it was now late and I had nothing warm. I pulled my thin jersey over my knees. I saw children in cars going home with their parents. They were smiling and playing. They had toys. They were eating things – sweets and chips – and they were happy. And when they saw me they looked at me. Their smiles stopped for a second. They paused on their way. And then the lights changed and they were gone.

I walked across to the shelter called Khayalethu. There was no-one there. They had closed it down because there was no money to run it anymore. Then the big boys found me again. I ran away over the road and a car swerved and then hit me – and I died.

I went to heaven and there was God in all his glory. He had a golden crown on his head and he had a long white beard and he wore a shining white robe. I was excited and happy to see God. I said “Hello God. My name is Immanuel Mkhize”. But it was strange, because God met me on the outside of the gates. He said he was very sorry, but he couldn’t let me in. There was nothing he could do about it. He gave me a piece of cake and patted me on the head and smiled at me and then left me alone.

And in heaven, beyond the Pearly Gates, I could hear the sounds of laughter and people singing hymns. I could see people smiling at each other. I could see and hear all these things, but I could have none of it. I was a street-kid, even after death. And no-one saw me.

Rejoicing in my ape ancestry

2011-02-26T06:32:00.001+02:00

My first real job was teaching in a very rural school in the tiny University town of Roma in Lesotho. The learners were still called “pupils” in those days. It was a Roman Catholic school, run by monks and discipline was high.

I taught a miscellany of subjects, ranging from English to Biblical studies and the examining body, was Cambridge. Never mind the students, it was I who learned a huge amount! I was a naïve white boy. My contact with black people had been – up to that point - rather limited. And here I was, suddenly confronted with an entire class of children who were all of them, black. Or brown. Or a fairly uniform dark colour – or so it appeared to me.

But it soon became clear that black people saw things that I simply didn’t. When someone at the back of the class made a noise while I was writing on the board, I would round on the class and demand to know who was the culprit. “It was that black one at the back!” a chorus would shout. I would look at the back row and see a row of black kids – all of whom looked pretty much the same to me and be simply none the wiser.

Similarly, I realised that the boys in the school class didn’t see the kind of signifiers I saw in white people. A boy would come and tell me that someone had been looking for me. I would ask for more description. They would look blank. “She was white”, they would say. I would ask if she had dark hair or light hair? They would stare at me blankly. It was something they simply did not seem to notice. But the tiny differences in skin shade between themselves, that they would be acutely aware of.

The problem started when I was teaching them about the two creation narratives in the Genesis story – the first (and more recent one) from the Priestly source and the second and earlier one from another entirely different source, called “J” (or the Jahwist). They were two entirely different writers, writing in different contexts and with different objectives. Their stories differ from each other fairly seriously. It would be very difficult to see them as the same story, written by the same author. (Try reading from Genesis 2 vs4b and tell me it isn’t the start of an entirely new narrative, different from Genesis 1.1ff)!

I was teaching them, in the light of the genesis myths, the scientific view of the universe – of the slow march of evolution – where branches of ape-like creatures start to walk upright and whose brains start expanding and being used in artifacts and technology. They looked extremely puzzled. Was I saying we were descended from apes, they wanted to know?

Well, yes, in a way, I was. I talked about the various kinds of hominid which we knew about from the fossils, Paranthapus, Australopithecus, Homo Ergaster and so on. They listened intently, but I was getting nowhere. “:Look”, I said, getting creative and unbuttoning my shirt, “see how hairy I am!” – revealing my ample chest hair. “That comes directly from my ape ancestry!”

The children stared at me, horrified. “Well”, they said finally, “You might come from ape ancestry – but we certainly don’t!”

I found much the same kind of attitude with well-meaning (but ill-educated) religious people when I was running the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site in Gauteng. They seemed to find it extremely hard to believe that Homo Sapiens Sapiens (which is what anatomically modern humans are) is just another formulation of ape, along a long and bushy chain of ancestry. Somehow, because we are now describing our species – we are wanting some special dispensation. Some unique quantifier that makes us special and different. There isn’t one. We are, quite simply, what we are. And what we are is because of where we come from. (Where we will journey to from here, is an entirely different matter!)

From our perspective then, two things seem to me to be extremely interesting. Firstly, the colour of our skins – an extremely recent development in our make-up - is the least important (from a genetic point of view) thing about us.

And secondly, the development of speech and language, and much later down the line, the development of symbol and religion is also something relatively extremely recent. It is neither helpful, nor accurate to imagine that these things were with us from the very beginning. They are latecomers in the slow millennial trudge of human development. (That trudge has now, of course, evolved into something close to the speed of light in this, the information and communication age, but it is all based on the same developmental linage).

I have this amazing thing in my possession - a stone tool. I picked it up amidst the huge earth-moving excavations which were being done, just outside of what is now called the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site - which is the project I used to work on.

A scientist told me that it was probably a "core" from which flakes were chipped off. Because of the excavations, it was completely displaced from where ever it would have originally been, and therefore not of worth much from a scientific point of view.

When I hold it in my hand, it fits extraordinarily snugly. And I can imagine, just dimly, that creature before me, working on it, some 2 million years ago, which held it in the hand as well. It is an extraordinary feeling, this link between me typing on a computer and that creature (probably Homo Habilis, a distant ancestor of modern humans known now as "the tool-maker").

So, when I hold in my hand, a stone tool that I picked up one day in modern Gauteng and I feel the weight of it, the cut of it and I know, the probable last creature to hold it lived 2 million years ago. I can see the direct line between that kind of ancient Oldowan technology tool-making and the computer on which I am typing this article, strange as that may be. It is a wonderful, extraordinary linage. The link is those elements of consciousness and ingenuity which makes us today what we are, and made them what they were.

That, and nothing else, needs to be the basis on which we exegete the creation narratives of Genesis 1 and 2 – and indeed, any other creation narratives which may be around! If we don’t – if we try to mask this obvious reality – we simply expose ourselves as intellectual clots.

Goodbye my brother

2011-02-19T21:10:00.003+02:00

Alan, the Sunday cricketer

I grew up, to all intents and purposes, an only child. Both my brothers and my sister were much older than I. My mother confessed to me once, that she had worn black throughout her pregnancy with me because she was ashamed that people would know that she and my father were still having “relations” at the age of 45. When I asked her, on another occasion whether she ever enjoyed having “relations”, she shrugged her shoulder and said “well, your father seemed to enjoy it”.

It was a different time. It was more than half a century ago. My brother Alan and his family would come to visit every Sunday for lunch. He was a sporting type – good at all of them. He would fashion a cricket bat out of a plank of wood, and to my horror, we would all have to stand around playing cricket after lunch.

It was awful. I always managed to get injured in one way or another. Either I would collide with someone in a catch (which I would inevitably miss); or the ball would hit me in the eye; or the wicket would mysteriously jump up and hurt me; or the dog next-door would bite me when I would be sent to fetch the ball. It was always the same.

And Alan would be kind and encouraging. I was after all, a disappointing wimp. He was well aware of the fact that I would have preferred to be playing the piano or reading a book. He simply could not understand it, so there I was, forced to play that dreary bloody game Sunday after Sunday.

He was what was called “a man’s man”. He was big and muscular and from the pictures I have seen of him, very good looking in his youth. A sportsman, who got honours for this and credit for that. He was smart as well. He effortlessly passed school and part time university. He became a chartered accountant, passing his board exam the first time around, with flying colours. He went into business, made a million or two and looked like he was headed for the top.

My mother was never convinced. “Why does he always need to talk in telephone numbers, when it comes to money?” she would ask. She wasn’t impressed with his bragging, or his penchant for the finer things in life. She thought, correctly, that most of it was a sham.

It didn’t stop him living in big houses and driving expensive cars. It didn’t stop him developing a drinking and a gambling habit which nearly sank his family and himself. He was a flawed personality, but he was also extraordinarily affable. And he got by on that affability. People liked him, were drawn to him. He could sell ice to Eskimos. When you listened to him talk, you would believe what he was saying, whatever it might be.

And that was, of course, in many ways his downfall. He got to depend on his mouth and his personality and to get by on reliance on both. I saw him drunk out of his mind and talking nonsense on many an occasion. But I also saw him sober and kind. As a child, he taught me how to make a kite out of dowel sticks, string and tissue paper. He took me on holiday with his family more than once. He was very kind to me.

Then I went to university, and became (I think) too wild for him, because we drifted apart. He came to stay with me once, some years later and ran up a massive telephone bill and then disappeared without settling it. And that, besides his son’s wedding 12 years ago, was the last I saw of him.

We became strangers. We shared the same DNA, but nothing else. Not ideas, nor politics, nor philosophy, nor pain, nor joy. Two weeks ago, when it became clear that he was dying of renal failure, there was an opportunity to go and see him in Port Shepstone with my other siblings. I declined. I declined not because I had any particular problem with him, but because it simply felt completely inauthentic to rush to his bedside when he was dying, but to have had nothing to do with him, for most of his life – as he had nothing to do with mine.

Was I wrong? Should I have gone, just to “do the right thing?” Should I have just pretended and just dealt with my feelings of fraudulence? I am sure that there are some who will argue that I should have. But I say this. He was my blood brother. That was really all he was. He did a couple of kind things to me when I was a child. That was all. We had nothing more in common than the fact that we made our appearance into the world through the same aperture and caused by the same natural process.

But we were no more connected in life than I am with the person sitting opposite me in the train on the way to work. We had a certain, vague familiarity, but no commitment. That was the choice we both made, for whatever reason.

And so, I would now consider my family to be others. Some of them might be blood relatives, but most of them are not. They are the people that I need, and who need me. They are those who have bothered to engage with my life and whose lives intersect with mine. They live in my house and they live in my heart. They are bound to me in ways so complex and layered that I cannot even start to disengage or disentangle. They are my family, and in more instances than not, they have no genetic relationship to me at all.

So, Alan, I thank you for being kind to me when I was a child. I wish we had been more to each other than we were, throughout our lives. But it would be false to pretend otherwise.

May you rest now from your labours, from your trials and struggles and the demons you faced in life and as you approached your death. Goodbye, my eldest brother. Goodbye.

Pear and Cranberry Chutney

2011-02-13T12:17:00.000+02:00

This is a really wonderful recipe. I added chillies for some bite. Lots of pears around at the moment.

Pear and Cranberry Chutney

1kg Firm pears
185g Onions
405g canned cranberry sauce (you can get it easily at supermarkets)
225g Demerara sugar
1/2t Ground ginger
1/2t Allspice
1/2 t White pepper
1t Sea salt
3 Birdseye chillies (depending on your need for bite)
2 1/2 Cups cider vinegar

Core and dice the pears (no need to peel). Peel and chol; onions. Place all ingredients in a nmonreactive saucepan over medium heat and stir for 10 minutes. Bring the mixture to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer the chutney, uncovered, for about 1 hour, or until it starts to thicken.

Ladle it into warmed, sterilized jars, leave to cool and seal well. Store in a dark, cool place.

Adapted from Jan Berry and Rodney Weidland Art of Preserving ten speed press, Berkeley, Calif, 1997

Wearing women's clothing

2011-02-13T11:56:00.001+02:00

There must be a reason, though no-one has ever told me, why it is that women hang up their underwear in bathrooms. I have tried to figure it out whenever I have been invited out for a meal or something, to a house with women in it. You go to the loo and there they are, languishing on taps; trailing off shower nozzels; dangling from window fasteners; draped over the basin.

Why? Men don’t do it – and I have done my own washing for long enough (before any of you women start howling) to know that I have never been gripped by a sudden and inexplicable desire to dangle my Jockies over a tap!

It’s not that there is anything essentially wrong with it, I suppose. It just seems to me to be very strange. Especially, when sometimes bits and pieces of lingerie seem to be forgotten there. Lives get lived around them. They become part of the bathroom, like some strange, bizarre ornament. Age starts to solidify them. They start to glue themselves to the thing they were placed on. When you touch them, they crackle. When you lift them, they seem to maintain the shape of the thing they have been clinging to.

The questions remain: Why were they placed there in the first place? Is it something that mummies teach their daughters to do from a very early age and is it followed unquestioningly by every generation?

I ask, because on one occasion, I had a frightening encounter with several generations of women’s underwear, happily cohabiting in one bath room. I knew they belonged to different people, because some were slinky and frilly and flowery, while others were vast and a sort of off-brown colour and seemed to have vast amounts of elastic everywhere. Some pieces looked more like something one would use to restrain a lunatic, than wear routinely.

Personally, I have never understood the mechanics of some of the strange pieces of clothing which women wear and I have certainly never contemplated wearing them myself. Which is why I was more than curious, the other day, to meet someone who confessed to me to being a cross-dresser. Actually, he likes wearing the underwear, not the top wear. So, if he didn’t tell you, you wouldn’t guess. He was in his late twenties, masculine but quite pretty in a strange sort of way – and heterosexual. He told me about his fetish almost like he was telling me he preferred a BMW to a Merc. He told me he didn’t like men very much and he loved women. He had a girlfriend, and she didn’t know, though he wished he could tell her.

In the same week, I was told about a pre-school where the children were encouraged to cross dress for a day. It was meant to be a sort of “fun” thing to do and most children and parents entered into the spirit of the thing and had a great time. Sure, some of the parents thought it was horrible and revolting and were certainly not going to have their little Skye or Tristan in a dress. Heaven forbid!

But I was told this by one of the mothers who, like me, thought it a really imaginative, brave and laudable thing to do, on the part of the school. She asked her little boy, as she adjusted the pink bow in his hair and brushed up his rouge, whether he was expecting anybody to laugh at him. “No”, he said, “we have been told that everyone is doing it, so no-one is going to laugh.”

My friend, the mummy in question, pointed out to me the dynamics of what was hidden behind some of that kind of thinking. “You almost never find men or boys being allowed to dress ‘down’ and wear women’s clothes,” she said, “though it is quite OK for girls to dress ‘up’ and look like men and entrench all this ‘power dressing’ stuff which seems so much a part of the scene at the moment”.

And my hat, there is certainly a great deal of it about these days! All our parliamentary women (and one or two extra parliamentary ones as well) power-dress like crazy. Except, it isn’t the pseudo men-in-a-suit look at all. It is those extraordinarily large, violently colourful (in the green-to-red-to-orange-to-purple range) dresses with lots of machine embroidery – in a sort of West African style, with one helluva matching head-dress and a pair of Cazel sunglasses, which makes up the womanly power-dressing look of today.

I once sat in a steakhouse in Randburg with a friend. A more macho setting, one could not hope for. And in walked a really sexy looking woman – short skirt, legs to- die-for doll, stunning hair, which she swooshed around her. The heads turned appreciatively. There was a wink there and a nudge here. The boys were all eyeing her. She turned to the waiter to order and turned out to be very much a man! Like everyone else, I was a bit flabbergasted. The waitron fainted. But I don’t think I have ever admired quite so much, in my life. I didn’t want to dress like him, or her, or whatever, but which of us could honestly say we couldn’t do with a bit of that kind of courage?

(First published inb the Natal Witness 04.04.1997)

Me and the sangomas

2011-02-12T16:47:00.002+02:00

Look, I’m not your average white boy. I can’t jump particularly high, or run or dance – but I’ve seen a thing or two in my time. Like, for instance, the things that sangomas do.

Now, for the uninitiated amongst you, let me tell you how to spot a sangoma. Number one – they wear lots of beads in their hair. Or, at least, they wear a wig over their hair, with lots of beads on it, dangling down. Next, some of them wear strange looking yellow bubble-like things on their heads, which, I discovered, are dried goat bladders. (Listen, don’t criticise what you haven’t tried!). These are attractively arranged, usually, with a spray of chicken feathers.

Next, they wear a sort of cross-your-heart bra like thing, either made out of beads, or skin. Often there is quite a lot to cross, but they never seem to be too bothered. Often they wear strings of bottle-tops around their ankles, which sort of jingle as they walk or stamp, which they do when they dance.

When they are together, the dancing is rhythmic , often circular, and the singing, extremely repetitive. On top of all of this “herbs” are burnt (nothing I have ever smelt before) and vast quantities of snuff is taken. Meetings with sangomas are punctuated by alarmingly loud sighs and even louder yawns. These indicate the presence of the ancestors – or something.
Now, the reason I’m telling you all this is because I thought I was fairly au fait with the sangomas of KwaZulu-Natal. At least, I could recognise them a kilometre away. I knew how to greet them – “Makhosi!” I would say, hands beating together. And again “Makhosi!” and they would respond in kind.

So, with all this intimate cultural knowledge, I found myself travelling along a very rural road in Deepest Limpopo. I was told, helpfully, that we were going to be meeting “a group of women” – nothing more.

Now, I want to emphasise the rural nature of the surroundings. I mean, this was rural with a capital R. After about four hours of hard travel, we reached a settlement of sorts. In it, we asked where the meeting was going to be. We were directed to a spot further along the road, where there was a large shady tree. Under this large shady tree were seated about thirty women. But there was something extremely odd about these women. They were all wearing tinsel on their heads!

Now, I know what KwaZulu- Natal sangomas look like. I know what Cape Town sangomas look like, but I had absolutely no experience of Limpopo sangomas. But … after all if you can wear blown-up goat bladders on your hear, why not tinsel? Why not indeed!

So, I treated them with the utmost respect. I clapped my hands and said “Makhosi!” They looked at me a little strangely, but responded in a good natured sort of way. (I put it down to linguistic and cultural differences.) I then engaged the person who was translating the rather rapid Northern Sotho for me in conversation about the difference between the way Western medicine views disease and the way in which traditional healers view disease. He listened attentively, responded cautiously and politely changed the subject. I returned to the topic, which I found extremely interesting and which I assumed he did too.

After a while, his eyes lit up. “Oh, I see!” he said. “You think these women are sangomas. Well, they are not. They are drum majorettes!”

(First published in the Natal Witness 24.04.1996)

Being an eternal victim

2011-02-10T20:54:00.000+02:00

Every now and again throughout my life, I have found myself bowled over by something said, or read, or reported. Something which is so utterly profound, that my entire perspective, from that moment on, is completely altered. They are moments of enlightenment, of nirvana, of extraordinary understanding. Unfortunately, I can’t think of a single instance of such ingenuity emanating from me! But, I suppose, it is that which separates the geniuses from the mediocre.

There is a wonderful moment in Peter Schaffer’s play “Amadeus”, where Salieri, a somewhat pedantic and altogether boring contemporary, who is hopelessly outshone by Mozart, lament’s his rival’s genius. What galls him most is the fact that Mozart seems to show no appreciation for the tremendous gift he has. All Salieri can do is watch, and listen, and seethe. He rails against the God that created things so unfairly and so maliciously, by enabling Salieri to recognise that genius, but never to produce it.

Some years ago now, I was reading Albert Luthuli’s autobiography Let my People Go – and words leapt at me from the page. Luthuli was reminiscing about his teaching days at Adam’s college and recalling a white member of staff – a Mr de Villiers, who was later to become Secretary for Bantu Education. Luthuli remarks that this man made him understand something of the way in which Afrikaners understand themselves as being victims of their past. And then. Almost in passing, Luthuli makes a remark which changed my perspective forever. He says this, “The tendency to see oneself perpetually as a victim will lead to the evasion of responsibility and the condoning of evil…”.

I was standing in a queue which was, apparently, going nowhere this week. I was born in June and therefore I needed to take myself off to the licencing department to get a new driver’s licence. I thought it might probably take about half an hour. I was wrong. Hopelessly wrong. It actually took four hours!

But standing in that queue gave me a chance to not only hear some curious conversations, but to reflect on one or two things as well. The sojourn didn’t begin well. Three of Cape Town’s finest members of the master race decided that they didn’t really need to worry too much about the curious, but terribly reasonable etiquette which one follows when standing in queues. Had they been black and jumped the queue, there would have been hell to pay, I can promise you. But they were white. So people behind them just sort of pretended that it wasn’t happening.

I felt my blood pressure peak and said loudly, clearly and in my most indignant and assertive English voice, “Excuse me, but that is not your place”. Now, one would expect some measure of embarrassment. One would expect some sign of contrition.. One might even expect them to move. None of the above happened.

The woman in the group – let me describe her. Shortish, lycra longs, pulled over her stick-insect legs, feet forced into medium high heeled shoes (one heel a bit worn), brightly coloured top with badly dyed hair, blue make-up on her eyes. Anyway, this blommetjie van die veld rounded on me like a snake. Who did I think I was? she asked, not requiring an answer. How long had I been standing there? she wanted to know. Did I have any idea how long she had been standing in the queue? She had been there longer than anyone, and she was sick of it. I looked like the kind of person that was just looking to cause trouble. Why don’t I just grow up!?

I have to say, words, for once, failed me dramatically. I looked around me for support. There wasn’t much, I can tell you. Two blacks who were unfortunate enough to be behind this woman and her cronies looked like they wanted the ground to swallow them up. The people I was with looked supportive, in a non-involved sort of way, but said nothing.
I tried saying something else, I forget what. She with the blue-eye make-up rounded upon me again. “Oh shaddup!” she said between clenched teeth. “I’ll give you a bladdy slap!”

I realised that she wouldn’t be moving. The two men she was with looked minimally more contrite than she did, but they were clearly onto a good wicket, so they just stood around, bodily disengaged in some mysterious way from the real action – parasitic on the ferocious one.

Standing in the queue for the next few hours, listening to their inane chatter, enabled me to ponder the situation in some considerable depth. What I realised was that this woman’s real gripe with the world was that she was somehow owed something. Due to what, in particular, I did not know. But that was the reason behind this patently unfair behaviour of hers. She could justify the clearly unjustifiable, by resorting to the “I am owed” reality in her mind.

I have written often on the issue of black entitlement. Of course, the entitlement is not and never has been a black preserve. There is good reason to argue that the whole edifice of apartheid was built on the belief that whites were entitled. And behind all of this, lurking in the shadows, gnawing at the vitals, is the concept of victim. I am a victim, therefore I am owed.

I was talking, the other night, to someone whose life is spent dealing with victims. Real victims, that is, not the imaginary ones who just believe themselves to be victims. These are people who have been tortured, raped, abused, hijacked and so on. He said that he often holds workshops for victims and in them, there often comes a point when a victim is faced with his or her own ability to victimise. That is the turning point. That is when a person stops being a victim and has the courage to face their own inadequacy – their own evasion of responsibility and condoning of evil. Often they find themselves facing their own much more active victimisation of others. And then – and perhaps only then – they are free.

A visit to the dentist

2011-02-09T21:02:00.000+02:00

I think it might have been because I wasn’t expecting the dentist to be a woman that we started our brief relationship on a slightly rickety footing. She, not I, was 25 minutes late for the appointment.

The receptionist and I glared at each other from time to time. She busied herself on the telephone with friends from far and wide. After a long while, she actually spoke to me.

“Uh dunnah wheh she uz,” she said. I glared. There was an awkward silence. Then, out of the blue she said, “Hev you evah met a blek then invented anything?” I said I had not. “Thet’s right!” she beamed. She hadn’t either! This appeared to prove something profound to her. She was quite unmoved when I added that I had never met a white that had invented anything either. I pondered the prospect of what it must be like to look at a picture of, say, Thomas Edison, and experience a feeling of deep racial pride swelling in my breast.

Her next conversational offering was “Wheh does your waahff buy her washing powder?” I explained that I did not have a “waahff” – (“shame”, she said) but that we bought it anywhere we happened to be shopping. (“Rehlie!” she said). Could she interest me in a whole complicated scheme of biologically friendly products, so pure you could literally drink the water after doing your washing? There were facial creams for the girlfriend (she decided I must at least have a girlfriend), and slimming products – (she wasn’t sop rude as to say for whom these might be put to use). Oh, and gardening products as well. Before I could blink, she had a glossy pamphlet out, with all her products on display. I was sampling the Aloe Vera suntan lotion and she was filling in a list of items I would be purchasing.

Luckily, at that moment, the dentist came in, gesticulating and muttering about the children and school. I listened hard, but I didn’t hear any apology. But then who has ever been apologised to by a health practitioner who is late?

I was shown to another room and made to lie in that extraordinary position which, I imaginbe, would be ideal for giving birth. “Ah”, she said, endearingly, as she snapped on her rubber gloves. “I like this kind of mouth. So big and wide!”

Then she started poking about and counting things off. The hygienist type person, behind me, was writing things down. There was lots of counting. “H1” and “B12” and “S12” – and stuff like that. I wondered what it could all mean. Then X-rays were taken. “Shouldn’t you be hiding behind a screen wearing a lead vest?” I asked. “Oh no”, she said in a rather patronising voice, “technology is so advanced these days” (don’t you just love that…?) “that the dose is completely harmless”.

I was told that there was nothing “essentially” wrong with my teeth. I could have told her that. But despite this fact, it was her considered opinion that I should have all my “ugly metal fillings” removed and replaced with porcelain fillings. “You have a lovely smile”, she said, pandering to my not inconsiderable vanity, “why ruin it with all these ugly shadows?”

I suddenly saw my mouth in a whole new way. What was before, just my mouth, had now become a ghastly pit of black, shadowy fillings, begging to be removed! “And how much would this whole thing cost?” I asked gingerly. “Oh” she said vaguely, “what medical aid are you on?”
Before I knew what was happening she had the oral hygienist on the telephone to my medical aid asking how much they would pay “for this kind of procedure”.

The news wasn’t good. The medical aid would only pay R2 000 a year. That translated into about one-and-a-half teeth, she said. “But”, she brightened considerably, the new medical aid year is in April, so we could fit one in now and then get more in the new financial year!”

And I, gormless twit that I am, allowed her to book an appointment for me for the next week. It took me an entire day to see the light and change my mind. I related this story to someone who sells things for a living. He smiled knowingly. “All she needs is one in eight clients to buy her line and she will make a very good living. That is the way we all work it.”

This article first appeared in The Natal Witness, March, 1998

Apple and Plum chutney

2011-01-22T17:21:00.002+02:00

This is a recipe from a book I have used over and over for the past 12 years. It is the first present I bought for Leon. True to form, he never looked at it ever again, and I used it constantly. Try it, this is a really good chutney.

Apple and Plum Chutney

With some adaptation, from I. Berry and R. Weidland : The Art of Preserving, 10 Speed Press, Berkley, 1997.

You can use slightly unripe apples and plums for this recipe. And any variety of plum. This is a sweet chutney. I like to give it a bit of a kick by adding some chillies. If you don’t have any, Cayenne pepper will also do.

Ingredients

1 kg firm green apples
2 kg plums
3 large onions
2 cloves garlic
2 cups sultanas
2 cups white wine vinegar
3 cups brown sugar
2 t salt
1 t Allspice
5cms fresh ginger (chopped finely)
½ t ground nutmeg
¼ t ground cloves
¼ t freshly ground black pepper
1 t mustard seeds
3 or 4 dried Birdseye chillies

Peel, core and dice the apples and place in a large (I emphasise LARGE) nonreactive pan. Halve, pit and dice the plums and add to the pan. Peel and chop the onions and garlic and add to the pan together with the remaining ingredients. Stir for 5 minutes over a medium heart. Bring the mixture to a boil and then simmer, uncovered, stirring occasionally, until the chutney thickens (about 1 ½ hours). Ladle into warm sterilized jars, cool and then seal.

"Room" by Emma Donoghue

2011-01-08T18:17:00.003+02:00

“Room” by Emma Donoghue (London, Picador, 2010)

My partner, who read this book first, didn’t want to reveal anything about it to me, when he suggested that I read it. He said he could not say anything at all, because it would spoil it. When I did read it, I kept wondering why it was that he had been so reluctant to say anything. The fact is, the book is either a complete puzzle to begin with, or it is not. In my case, it wasn't. I think it may have been more complex an experience if it were, but for me things were fairly clear from the first few pages. If you suspect that you might find it a complete puzzle – and would enjoy that experience, then stop reading NOW and go and get it. Because it is certainly one of the most worthwhile books I have read in a very long time.

This is the first book I have read with a child narrator. Jack, aged 6 has grown up in a single room, 11ft by 11ft. He was born in this room, which he and his mother have lived in for 7 years – imprisoned, and against her will. For Jack, however, this is the only world he has ever known. It is a friendly place. His reality is defined by objects which are named with capital letters – “Door”, “Rug”, “Table”, “Bed”. There is only one of them in his life. They each take on particular personality and are often spoken of with gender attached to them. For Jack, his world is small, but it is highly ordered, interesting, wonderful, exciting and safe.

His mother is an extremely sensible and utterly heroic figure, who is coping with the extreme situation as best she can. She has to manage the sexual regime of her captor who is the only link to the outside world. She does this, keeping him away entirely from her son, who is, obviously fathered by him. She creates and maintains the order of her own and her child’s world. The only thing which she does not control is the erratic behaviour of her captor.

The story is told entirely from the perspective of Jack. Language is used often as a 6 year old would use it. And the tiny world is described entirely from his perspective. The reader learns as he learns; experiences as he experiences. He is completely connected to his mother and the room he lives in, but entirely disconnected from the rest of the world. Indeed, the outside world simply does not exist. His mother is complicit in making this true for him. This is a decision she has made. The world of the television is explained as another sphere of reality. It is, effectively, unreality. So what is real, is what is inside the room. What is on the television, is not real.

Throughout the book, I kept on asking myself what kind of decisions (like this one), I would have made, if I were in the same situation. I came to the conclusion that that I would, most likely, have confused the situation immensely, by not allowing the child to think that what was on the television was unreal. I came to see that her decision was an extremely wise one. An extraordinarily practical and Existentialist solution to the problem. By making the television world an outside phenomenon, which did not affect them in any way, she was creating an extremely safe place for her child. And that, surely, is the very basis of good child-rearing. If the child does not feel safe. If he or she does not trust their immediate environment, then the damage in later life is likely to be profound

Another decision the mother makes, is to continue breastfeeding. When one first encounters it in the book, it is noteworthy – possibly even strange. But then so is the entire situation. The fact is, the mother, in that situation, makes choices (and sometimes, chooses not to). That she manages to maintain order and regimen in that situation is what is remarkable about her and it is that which establishes itself as the major theme of the book. It is not unlike other memoirs of solitary confinement, where the person seeks to control the space in which they find themselves. As a protest. As a signal that nothing and no-one can take away their essential being.

It becomes clear that the birth of the child, in those circumstances is her lifesaver. She has, in him, someone to relate to; someone to communicate with; someone to teach and someone from whom to learn. The raising of the child becomes an amazing, liberating project. And it is because of his absolute trust in her - and through her, trust in himself - that they find they can both achieve the seemingly impossible.

The story reads, in places, a bit like an allegory. It is a testimony to the success heroism of most parents - and single parents in particular. It is impossible to be a parent of small children and not place yourself in that scenario. And, as I say, I found myself wanting in several instances.

The captor’s appearances are necessarily shadowy, because the child has learned to stay hidden from him. It is thus from this position, seen through the imagination and narration of a child, that the reader encounters this controlling character. To the child, however,(“Old Nick” as his mother calls him) is the bringer of “Sundaytreats”. He makes the bed squeak. When he comes in, the cold outside air follows him in. The mother manages to keep the two worlds entirely separate – just as she does with the television. The captor, also, is part of unreality. It is unpredictable. It is dangerous. Her world, on the other hand, is real, trustworthy, reliable and warm.

She uses everything she has to create this sense of security for her child. She is not overly religious, but the sun and the moon, which pass over the skylight are described as the faces of God. After an incident which involves them being punished by the captor, Jack wonders :

““Why is he still punishing us?
Ma twists her mouth. “He thinks that we’re things that belong to him because Room does”.
“How come?”
“Because he made it.”
That’s weird. I thought Room just is. “Didn’t God make everything?”
Ma doesn’t say anything for a minute and then she rubs my neck.
“All the good stuff anyway”.”

Donoghue offers us in this extraordinary book, an insight into the mind of a 6 year old as he experiences the world - normality and abnormality; trust and fear; safety and extreme danger; comfort and unimaginable responsibility. The fact that these experiences are in a microcosm, makes no real difference to their intensity. They are newly-minted experiences. They are utterly vivid and full of the intensity of new life.

But more than that, Donoghue offers us a profound insight into the heroism of the captive. I was drawn not only to her practicality but also the remarkable depth of her inventiveness and love. Her determination - the way she drew on the fundamentals of her experience to pull them both through. As a character, she is far from flawless. But she is brave and ordinary and extraordinary.

You don’t need to be a parent to read this book (though if you are, the experience will be heightened tenfold!). You just need to be human. Because that is what the book is about – a celebration of the essence of humanity.

Robben Island - a pilgrimage by a struggle hero

2011-01-01T22:52:00.003+02:00

In the 1980's Pietermaritzburg was a cauldron of warfare between Inkatha and the African National Congress. They were terrifying times. Aided and abetted by the apartheid state, Inkatha rampaged everywhere, killing and intimidating. Priests and ministers of the church who were actively engaged were few and far between. Many of them just battoned down the church hatches and hoped it would all go away. Not the Revd Ben Nsimbi - a humble and remarkable Methodist, who was there for the people who were suffering - who stood out in any crowd, despite his slight stature.

He expressed the hope, some time ago, that he wanted to see Robben Island before he dies. I, together with a struggle lawyer in Durban, have been privileged to be a part in enabling this dream to come to fruition. He and his wife Thoko have been staying with us for the past few days, during which they went to the Island.

What follows below are his impressions of the visit. I will comment, at the end of them, on what I see to be really significant insights - put in a really simple way:

Visit to Robben Island
31 December 2010
Revd Ben Nsimbi

As our feet touched the ground, Cde Madiba’s words during the Rivonia trial came to mind -

“I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

My soul, my mind, my body – yes, my whole being felt revitalised and rejuvenated. I am not a politician, but all of my life has been unfortunately negatively affected by the notorious apartheid system. I could write volumes about this, but God forbid!

This Robben Island was a curse to our black community and foolishness to the whites. It was foolishness because they thought the size of their army; the huge machinery of their security forces and; (worst of all), the myth of their having been ordained by God to rule over us, could never be challenged.

Like the lepers of the ancient days, political prisoners were dumped here, lest they contaminated the rest of their fellow human beings with their ideology. Today, the Island has become an international attraction for tourists of all walks of life, young and old.

Our minds were challenged and our hearts moved when we met a boy of 10, who had travelled with his father from Australia to see the place whose name is now synonymous with Madiba. In his hand this boy carried a book entitled “Viva Mandela!” On the ferry he was enthusiastically paging through it. The question went through our minds, how many South African children of that age would take an interest in the liberation struggle of their own country? For me, this is a crucial question, because if we forget where we come from, the gains that have been made will vanish into thin air. There are many battlefields inside and outside South Africa, against the apartheid regime, but Robben Island, surely, remains unique.

The young man who was our tour guide in the bus spent time showing us where the PAC leader, Mr Robert Sobukwe was placed in solitary confinement. He briefly outlined his biography. His telling of the story was extremely impressive and reminded me of the special parliamentary session which was called at the time to pass the so-called “Sobukwe Bill” (The General Laws Amendment Bill) This Bill would permit the detention in solitary confinement without trial for 90 days. One particular clause was directed at Robert Sobukwe. He had been due for release, but instead was transported to Robben Island, where he stayed in 24-hour solitary confinement for six years.)

From the bus, a middle-aged ex-convict, Mr Msomi, took us through the different sections and cells in the prison. I did wish that we could have been divided into smaller groups at this stage, because the group we were in numbered more than 100 people. This meant that we could not hear some of his comments or explanations. It was very much a rushed process and we could not ask some of the questions we had on our mind.

To Thoko, my wife, who has never been imprisoned, it was horrifying. To me it was less so (of course, I was not imprisoned on Robben Island).

Ideally, we would have liked to spend more time on the Island. We would have liked time to digest and to reflect on what we had seen. We would have liked to hear what some of the other convicts had to say. In a word, there was not sufficient time for contemplation.

We went to the Island expecting something educational and spiritual. This could have been better achieved if there was more time, less rush, and more interaction with the guides. Instead what we experienced was a commercial one, rather than an educational one. Despite that, however, it was an extraordinary experience and has fulfilled one of my life-time ambitions.

Revd Nsimbi raises several interesting observations which, I would think, need much more further discussion. Firstly, there is the issue of the interest which South African children have in history. He wonders whether a South African child be as interested as was the young Australian boy he encountered, in his/her own history - let alone someone else's history? There can be no doubt that South African learners of today are very much less engaged with the struggle against apartheid. In many ways that is a good thing – something one would want. But it soon becomes clear, when one engages in discussion with many young people, that there is just a simple ignorance about the most basic facts of South African history. Equally because of the way the present curriculum is structured, there is equal ignorance on other struggles, both present and past, in other countries. This has been an issue which has been widely debated and acknowledged – but it remains a blight on our educational system and will have profound effects on the way the future generation understands and interprets itself.

The second observation he makes is that Robben Island needs to be celebrated as a primary site of black consciousness. A visit to the Island does highlight the importance of certain people such as Robert Sobukwe, but somehow the contribution of Black Consciousness, in particular, seems to have got lost in the "rainbow nation" dream. It was (and to my mind, remains) a hugely important contribution to our struggle and I don’t think there is nearly enough focus on it.

Finally, Revd Nsimbi expected (not unnaturally) the experience of visiting the Island to be spiritual one. In some rather limited senses, it was. But there was not enough opportunity to pause, to reflect, to be contemplative. I would say that that must be a grave flaw in the tourism design of the place. Robben Island is not an ordinary museum. It is much more like a Cathedral, a Mosque, a Temple. It is a World Heritage Site and it was chosen to be that, because it is entirely unique. That, in itself, should be a limiting factor on the commercial opportunity – and a pointer to the design of an experience that enables the visitor to engage with it and be changed by it. It has not achieved that, unfortunately.

And a child will lead them

2010-12-24T20:24:00.000+02:00

I will never forget the moment, some 10 years ago now, when our Muslim social worker asked my partner and me the casual question - "And what religion will you bring the child up in". We were in the process of adopting our eldest child. We had not even met him yet. We were going through what seemed like a rather long process of being prepared for parenthood.

Being amongst the first Gay male couples to adopt a child in this country - the territory was rather new - for the social worker as well. They wanted us to "practise" for a while - and so for several miserable weekends, we were asked to go to the adoption home and feed the children. Dear Lord! It was a nightmare. I think they thought if we could survive that, we could survive anything - (I know that thought crossed my mind several times). But having passed the test, we were now looking at the nitty gritty of adoption. Who was likely to be the primary parent? Who was likely to provide the discipline? Etcetera, etcetera.

The innocent question about religion caused a three week break in the process, while we discussed the matter. Backwards and forwards it went. My partner, Leon, loathed the Church. The Church had almost proved his mental undoing, in its lack of care for him; in its homophobia; in its dreadful hypocrisy and alienation of Gay and Lesbian people. He was very uncertain indeed. On the other hand, he was pretty much at sea from a religious perspective. A kind of wannabe "spiritual" type, with not a great deal of focus, or specific practise to offer.

I, on the other hand, had been a priest - had studied and taught Theology for gazillions of years and had left the Church the moment the struggle was over. What was the answer to the Muslim social worker’s question? The truth is, it was an inoffensive question. She wasn’t expecting any particular answer. We could have said “None!” and we would just have moved on in the conversation. But we decided to interrogate the matter with what was, for both of us, surprising intensity.

We discussed the nature of faith. We discussed the practise of belief. We discussed our own journeys – the positives and the negatives. And we came to a decision – strange in the eyes of many and peculiar, sometimes, even in our own judgement. We decided that we should raise the children in the context of the Christian faith –despite our own serious misgivings.
And so that is what brought me back to the Church. A baby. The absolute epitome of human frailty and human need. A baby, with a newly minted laugh and eyes so clear, you could see eternity in them. A baby that came into our lives, to change them forever.

We called him Gabriel – and it is his job to put the angel on the top of the Christmas tree every year. We called him Gabriel, the harbinger of good news. We called him Gabriel, because that was the first name we agreed upon while flipping listlessly through a bible one Sunday in Church, during a boring sermon.

And tomorrow, Gabriel will be serving at the High Mass on Christmas Day, dressed in a cassock and surplice and looking utterly angelic, smothered in incense and feeling the surge of the Haydn “Jugendmesse” and the swirl of hieratic language. Of course he may, one day reject it all. That will be his choice and that will be his unquestionable right. But when and if he does so, it will be from the position of an insider. He will know the stories that form such a massive part of our philosophy and our culture, for good or for ill. He will understand why some people pray to a God and have hope for the future and show love to their neighbour. And, hopefully, if he does reject it all, he will be a better person for having taken what is good in religion and making it his own.

Of course, there are dangers. It is also possible that he will imbibe the bewildering levels of prejudice; the terrible bigotry and the hatred, which is also part of religion. It is possible that he will start to see himself as superior to other people. It is possible that his brain will start to ossify and become closed to science, and change, and possibility. That is also a feature of religion. But it is bad religion – and I hope that he will be enabled to see that and to reject it.

In the meantime, I will thrill at the sight of the child I have been entrusted with, dressed like an angel, doing his service with a diligence and dedication that really inspires me, when together we pause at the crib of another baby. A child who, it is said, can lead the lion and the lamb to find peace with each other. That is an ideal I want for Gabriel. That is a vision I want for myself.

Solar

2010-12-18T16:04:00.001+02:00

Ian McEwan is undoubtedly a great writer. Few would argue with this assertion. He is also a great thinker and is wont to research the topic of his novels to virtually PhD level. In this one he is a physicist, in Saturday he is a neurosurgeon, in Amsterdam a musicologist and in Enduring Love, a micro-biologist. It must be exhausting! I mean, writing a novel is hard enough. Writing a novel which sometimes reads like a thesis on opaque material, is another thing altogether!

Many of the reviews say that the main character of the novel, Michael Beard – a Nobel Prize winner in Physics – is dislikable. And of course, that he is. He has lived for years in the glow of one solitary achievement. Indeed, his entire career has been based on that one event. He is uncaring. He is selfish. He is entirely unfaithful. He steals ideas. He eats too much and he drinks too much. He uses his intellect to put people down and intimidate them. He is, truly, a dislikable character.

But at the same time, he is pretty much the victim of his own circumstance. The death of his student, whom he discovers cheating with his fifth wife, is not his fault. He sees it as an opportunity, however, to settle scores and does so with precision and clinical care. He simply makes the best of a bad situation, instead of doing the honest thing and suffering the consequences.

As in all McEwan’s novels, there is a singular event, which sets in motion the course of the rest of the story. This is the event, and there are, of course, consequences. And the consequences play themselves out. But in this one, I could not but help remembering an event in my childhood. The consequences were not the same, but the feeling of powerlessness was.
I cannot remember how old I was, but probably a teenager, living with a brother who was 10 years older than me. He was tidy. I was not. He would empty his rubbish into my room. I would just accept it.

One day, however, I came home to find my mother looking very serious. She held up part of a book (a book which had obviously fallen into pieces) and asked me if I knew what it was. I said it was part of a book. Which book? She wanted to know. I said I had no idea. But this she would not believe. It was a “dirty” book, she said, and of course I knew what it was because it was found in my room. It didn’t matter how much I denied it. I was guilty. And the guilty party – to save his own skin – stood by silently, accepting nothing. I was powerless. The evidence was clear.

Now, Professor Michael Beard, the Nobel laureate of the book, was equally not guilty. But he then makes himself guilty, of other crimes. Of covering up. Of being a coward, a liar, a cheat. These are things he has control over. These are things he could have done differently, and morally and without damage and hurt to others. But he chooses not to. And the position of privilege he has always enjoyed, allows him to make those negative choices.

So, he forges ahead on his stolen idea, buoyed by his previous easy history, with no fears for his future. And of course, this is the point. His work is now in climate change. It is about creating new ways of creating and harnessing and deploying energy. He is, in himself, the very image of the human species – arrogant, bloated, self-satisfied, armed with a little knowledge. Instead of choosing the ethical route, it creates ways of justifying its present destructive position.

And my view is that you cannot read this book and not see yourself in there somewhere. Somewhere in his “dislikeable” and unpleasant character lies the you and the me. And that is what makes the book so extraordinarily readable – despite is sometimes fairly dense scientific passages.

McEwan has that most admirable quality in a writer – the ability to observe and document human nature, in all its bewildering perplexity and contradiction. And so, yes, it is true, Professor Michael Beard is a horrible person. But if you cannot see yourself in some measure, in that really unpleasant character, you are, I would suggest, deluded.

Solar by Ian McEwan is published by Jonathan Cape, London, 2010

Lunch with the Chancellor

2010-12-11T18:01:00.001+02:00

Yesterday, as a guest of Tito Mboweni, I attended his graduation where he received an honorary D (Comm) from Stellenbosch University, one of the major intellectual centres of the Western Cape. A number of things surprised me.

Firstly, the casual nature of the affair. I was uncharacteristically, in suit and tie. The last time I attended a graduation (my own!) that is what people wore. But here, the rest of the audience was in short pants and T Shirts (I exaggerate a little, but not very much!)

Secondly, I was surprised by the huge amount of black graduands in a thing called “Military Science”. No-one could explain to me what the attraction might be. Otherwise, this particular graduation was the science graduation. And the lines and lines of white young things who were graduating in various genetic, physics, biology and suchlike degrees was tedious in the extreme, but interesting in comparison. There would be an occasional (apparently unpronounceable) black surname, which would herald whoops and shouts and ululation from the black sections of the crowd – while the white bulk of the crowd would tolerate it all good-naturedly. (Or, when it got a bit out of hand, shake their heads slightly and mutter something to each other.)

So, there was an obvious pattern. In general, the lower degrees were dominated overwhelmingly by white students. Higher degrees, however, showed a good mix, if not even a parity of black students. And Military Science, conversely (and whatever it might be!) had the very rare white student. I am sure there must be some explanation for why this is the case, but it certainly looked peculiar to me.

At the luncheon afterwards, the two graduands, honoris causa, gave speeches. The one was Whitey Basson, driving force behind the mighty Shoprite Checkers group. Johann Rupert, inheritor of the Rupert tobacco industry fortune and Chancellor of the University, got up to introduce him. They were clearly friends. Basson gave three sentences of his speech in English and the rest in Afrikaans. The American sitting at my table was lost. The South African black, sitting next to me, shook his head.
Then Mboweni got up to speak. He began by saying that he had thought rather hard about accepting a doctorate from Stellenbosch, for three reasons:

Firstly, because he wasn’t sure that the ceremony would be in a language he could understand; Secondly, because Stellenbosch has a very particular negative history in South Africa and he was not convinced that it was engaged in changing that image as fast as it might; And thirdly, because he didn’t know what his comrades in the struggle would have to say about his accepting a doctorate from that university.

I noticed that the Afrikaner couple opposite me got that glazed look my children get when I am telling them something they don’t want to hear. The former Reserve Bank Governor went on. He spoke about the drama of returning exiles being faced with turning round what was essentially a bankrupt economy. And, as he had been frequently reminded by the likes of Johan Rupert, they “had never run anything”. Not a shop, not a business, not a city – and certainly not a country. They had never run anything.

And then he spoke about the remarkable turn-around which had been effected, by a left-leaning government (no less!), consisting of people who had “never run anything” – but who were clever enough to work in close conjunction with the people who had been running the country up to that point. And then to turn the titanic economy of the country around, to a point where, just before the world crash, we enjoyed a surplus.

He emphasised again, that the people who had done this had “never run anything before”. Indeed, the person they appointed as the finance minister was a “skollie” from the Cape Flats who had once apparently stabbed someone.

I saw Johann Rupert’s face become somewhat glum. And I enjoyed it enormously. Of course, he was politely agreeing. But it was polite, nothing more. And then Tito went on, talking about the University. There could be no “Afrikaans” University in South Africa. Because all the Universities need to belong to all the people of South Africa. All the schools in the country need to belong to all the people of the country.
And so, Tito concluded, he had decided to accept. It seems his fears were unfounded.

The ceremony was, to a completely acceptable degree, in English. And where it was not, it was translated. Secondly, the Vice Chancellor, Russel Botman has managed to change the face of the previously all-white, apartheid-loving institution to one which is at least somewhat more credible. At least it was the case that at the Chancellor’s lunch, something more than lip-service was being paid to the demands of transformation, by a range of people. And that has to be a good sign. (It was an equally good sign when whites started giving each other Mandela’s biography for Christmas, many years back).

But a curious joke, made by Rupert himself seemed to me to sum up the situation. He said that when the end of the world came, he wanted to be in Stellenbosch – “because Stellenbosch is at least 20 years behind everywhere else in the world”. Personally, I think that could be said for most of the Western Cape.

Priscilla revisited

2010-11-27T20:19:00.000+02:00

For those of you too young to remember, “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” is a 1994 Australian movie, starring Hugo Weaving, Guy Pearce and Terrence Stamp. It involves two drag-queens (Anthony/Mitzi and Adam/Felicia) and a transexual (Bernadette) who are contracted to perform a drag show at a resort in Alice Springs, a town in the remote Australian desert. They head west from Sydney aboard their huge bus, called “Priscilla”. En route, it is discovered that the woman they have contracted to do the work with is Anthony's wife. The bus breaks down in the middle of the desert and gets repaired by a salt-of-the-earth type called Bob, who travels on with them. We decided to watch it last night, with our children, aged 7 and 8– one of whom has, since a very young age, shown a serious interest in cross-dressing.

Now, immediately, there were some issues. Firstly, the movie far from clean in its language. Secondly, it deals with cross-dressing as a major theme. And thirdly, some of the situations these drag queens get themselves into could have proved themselves a little difficult to explain to a child. So then why did we do it, and how did we justify doing it?

Firstly, we dealt with the swearing. Both the children know words like “Fuck” and “Shit”. (It is not unknown for me to use them myself – but I certainly do so only by mistake in front of the children. And we frown upon others who might not have children and not be practised in the art of avoidance of words like these in normal conversation). Both children have demonstrated to us that they are aware of words such as these and we do not allow them in the house at all.

On the issue of cross-dressing – well, this is an issue we had had to face in the life of one of the children from his earliest years. Neither my partner, nor I cross-dress. Nor do we have any men friends who do so - (with women, it is sometimes a bit hard to tell whether the cross dressing “line” has been crossed or not).

But our child has just always done it! He would twist a T-shirt into a boob-tube. He would turn anything available into a skirt. One Christmas a friend gave him a wig, which we could almost never get him out of. It got so serious that, at one point I called a sexologist for advice. She listened to the story and said, firstly, that counselling could not start until the age of 9, and that gender reassignment (if that was the outcome of it all) was not possible until after the age of 20. (At this point, I was hyperventilating!). And that (and here was the real nub of the matter) perhaps I “should just get used to the idea that I might be living with a transgendered person”.

Our response to his cross-dressing has always been neither to encourage it, nor to show disapproval. We have simply allowed him to do it, if he wants to, in the home. I note that it seems as though social pressure outside the home (such as the school, for instance) may well have made him stop the behaviour. Because, at the moment, I can see that what used to be an almost daily occurrence, has now virtually disappeared.

Then why would we want him to see things like Priscilla? Do we not stand the risk of reinforcing a behaviour that is now apparently, a thing of the past? We don’t think so. But we did manage the process and intervene on several occasions to explain what was going on in the movie.

Both children watched it through to the end, and both said that they enjoyed it. When the younger one asked why “those men are wearing girls clothes” (despite that fact that he has grown up with his brother doing it all the time), we explained that that is what some men wanted to do. It made them feel good and it made them like themselves. And that it really doesn’t matter what people choose to wear.

That settled, the movie continued and we laughed at the funny bits and felt sad at the sad bits. When the trans-sexual (Bernadette) confronted a bigot who was threatening her, our eldest said “she’s gonna beat him up!” And she sure did, much to everyone’s great enjoyment.

As for “Priscilla” itself – it was a bit strange to be taken back into a world where neither cell phones, nor computers were anywhere evident. And the issues which came up in the movie, many of them, demonstrated how much further we are all conceptually. For instance, they have obscenities painted on their bus, which link them to AIDS. No-one in their right mind would necessarily put the two together anymore. Similarly, the issue of being in gender transition seems to be much less of an issue today than it was then.

Or maybe not. Maybe it is just me that has grown a bit older and a bit wiser. Whatever the case, we want to create a home environment where our children can know that nothing they choose to wear, and nothing that they authentically are, will ever put them outside of our love.

Morality or Illness?

2010-11-21T09:13:00.002+02:00

You know how sometimes, in a word or a phrase, or in a picture, or in a moment – suddenly something becomes clear? Archimedes “Eureka”? Oprah’s less durable “Aha” moment? Well, it happened to me yesterday in conversation with a friend. It was what she said that gave me that moment of clarity.

We had been discussing an article that I and a colleague had written nine years ago, in a little known Festschrift for Albert Nolan. It was called “Oil and Water: the impossibility of Gay and Lesbian identity within the Church”.

This long-forgotten article has suddenly re-surfaced the other day. It was found a by an apparently not unsympathetic cleric, who is attached to the University of Cape Town, and who is valiantly trying to “listen” to LGBTI people in the “conversation” which the church is presently supposed to be having on the Gay issue.

The article had given him quite a shock,apparently. Because it is completely uncompromising and unforgiving. Both I and my Lesbian colleague described, in some fairly graphic detail, the journey we had taken to get us to this place. We decided not to pull any punches and consequently, the piece is fairly candid.

And that was that for a very long time. It seemed to have been studiously ignored, until now, when a shocked Dean of Studies from the University of Cape Town stumbled across it and raised the alarm. He is, I understand, one of the few Evangelical Anglicans around who is willing to even consider the issue.

So, I was talking to my friend about how it is that this, out of all the things I have written and said about the Church, should become the focus of concern? I have had “controversial” views on a range of things, and I have written extensively about them. But this is the area where the alarm persistently gets raised.

The article said, in brief, that sex should not be determinative of relationship. That there are other things much more significant than sex, which determine and define relationships. That of itself, sex is not particularly significant and should not be held as the grounds to decide anything at all.

And specifically with regard to homosexuality, we argued that a church which was entirely and disastrously hetero-normative cannot expect homosexuals to simply buckle under and accept (or even worse – promote!) hetero-normative standards and ideas. Because time has proved these to be changeable things in themselves and that the path chosen by the church is both unrepresentative of the human reality and disastrous in its own right.

So, if there is to be a “discussion” or a “debate” or “listening” to LGBTI people, then it has to consist of much more than the one side happily talking to itself, while the other side stands obediently silent. If the church wants to listen to the experience of Gay and Lesbian people, then it needs to accept the possibility that its present hetero-normative paradigm regarding sexuality might be so seriously flawed as to be worthy of being dumped. And if that is not at least a possibility, then the conversation is not worth having.

My friend then made the point which sharpened my perspective. She said this: She said that the view of the Church is essentially the view of an addict. When a food addict is at a party, they will know what every person in the room has eaten; they will note each time a person returns to be buffet table and they will observe what has been placed on the plate. An alcoholic will know where the liquor is in every house they visit. They will know where the liquor store is in every suburb. They will know the alcoholic content of every drink.

It is an obsession. It is a sickness. It is something which takes over rational thinking and distorts it and twists it and produces a view of reality which is profoundly dis-ordered. It shows itself in the kinds of decisions which have been made protecting priests who are paedophiles. It shows itself in the way in which parts of the church have handled intersex people. It shows itself in the discrimination which of Gay and Lesbian people in the church routinely endure. It is an obsession. It is an illness. It is not wholesome.

It cannot be expected that Gay and Lesbian people have any responsibility to protect this obsession, or to perpetuate it. It cannot be expected that we have any reason to tolerate or entertain a system of wrongdoing which is so clearly and obviously distorted, in its view of reality.
So when the Church tells us that they want to “listen” to us – then that is what they need to do. It needs to start by shutting up and allowing us to say what we need to say. It needs to start by dumping the sanitized and doctored versions of tame homosexuals who actually believe that the homosexual orientation is something less glorious than the heterosexual one. They are the “Bantustan leaders” on the sexual map. They are the “Uncle Toms”.

If the Church is not willing to accept that LGBTI people can teach it a new and better way of being the Church, then frankly, they should just stop talking. It is wasting everyone’s time. Because the sickness lies within the Church, not elsewhere.

The article I refer to above is in:

Spekman MT & Kaufmann LT (eds) Towards an Agenda for Contextual Theology. Essays in Honour of Albert Nolan. Pietermaritzburg, Cluster Publications, 2001.

Garner H and Worsnip M, "Oil and Water: The impossibilility of Gay and Lesbian identity within the Church".

The kids are alright

2010-11-14T20:08:00.000+02:00

In Cape Town, one is going to find a somewhat unexpected audience attending a movie such as this. Don’t ask me why – that is just the way it is. So, I was not surprised to see half the bowling club walk in and sit down in the row in front of me.

The story is an interesting one. It is a snapshot of a particular moment in time in the life of a somewhat unconventional family. A lesbian couple, played superbly by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore, whose children are now 15 (Laser) and 18 (Joni). Joni is about to leave home for college. Laser is curious about the identity of his sperm donor father.

The children are ordinary teenagers. Somewhat petulant, irritated by their parents, but otherwise well rounded, curious, differently gifted, and each imbued with a particular personality. The parents are similarly individual. Nic (Annette Bening) is the more serious one. The worrier, the one bringing home the bacon in the high pressured responsible job. Jules (Julianne Moore) raised the children, dithered about her career, tried several things which didn’t quite get off the ground and is now setting up a business in landscape gardening.

The son, Laser (Josh Hutcherson), wants to meet his father and pressures his sister into making the contact. They both meet Paul (Mark Ruffalo) and, after the first awkward meeting, start to develop something of a relationship. Laser’s interest is far from intense, and once the initial meeting is over, he seems to lose interest, whereas his sister’s starts to increase.

Paul owns a restaurant, shags one of the staff every now and again and generally leads a fairly calm, but unremarkable life. His reaction, when he is phoned by the sperm donor agency to say that a nineteen year old girl bearing his DNA is looking for him, is mild curiosity. The problem is, it doesn’t end there.

He and the family start to get enmeshed. Jody, his biological daughter and Jules in particular start to get emotionally involved with him. Laser to a lesser extent, but it is only the one mother, Nic, that is excluded. Jules starts to fall for him and he for her and the result is a sexual liaison which is neither expected, nor altogether explained. But the fact is, it happens. And when Nic and the children eventually find out, the hurt which it causes is devastating.

What is so interesting and exciting about this movie, is the profound normalcy of the same-sex set up. The family is an ordinary one. The children are ordinary. The tensions and deceits and heartbreaks are ordinary. That is what makes it so powerful.

The fact is, this is a particular set of circumstances which brought a third party into the relationship. It could have been other circumstances. It could have been other impulses. This is just what it is.

And it is this which makes the movie so profound. On the one hand, there was someone in the audience who obviously had difficulties with Lesbians. You could hear this from the over-loud laughter and the obtuse reactions she gave. But even she could not have failed to recognise the universalizability of the experience. Because there was nothing particularly Lesbian about the betrayal. It was just a betrayal. The circumstances for it may have been somewhat different from the norm, but the actions and reactions could and would have taken place in any relationship – anywhere.

The film is a snapshot into the life of one family. One normally happy, sorted family, which, at one particular moment reached breaking point. It is emotional and touching in its rare and uncomplicated approach to life. It is very worth seeing.

Directed by Lisa Cholodenko; written by Lisa Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg; Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.
WITH: Julianne Moore (Jules), Annette Bening (Nic), Mark Ruffalo (Paul), Mia Wasikowska (Joni), Josh Hutcherson (Laser), Eddie Hassell (Clay) and Yaya DaCosta (Tanya).

Worshipping Mary but overlooking women

2010-11-08T22:09:00.002+02:00

Growing up, as I did, in a kind of Broad Church environment, Mary was considered a necessary part of Christmas, but to be ignored for the rest of the year - with occasional curt nods in her general direction, during the singing of the Magnificat.

Indeed, we eschewed anything which could be considered vaguely Roman. There were two - and only two - candles near the altar. Saints were in the stain-glass windows and nowhere else. Crossing one’s self would have been seen as an indication that one wouldn’t be taking communion, because the Holy See had forbidden it.

I first encountered Mary through a friendship I developed with a monk of the Community of the Resurrection. He was a man in his sixties and I was an irritating 20 year old. He was blessed with an impish sense of humour. He loathed posturing and falseness and would poke merciless fun at all pretence and posing. He would laugh uproariously at some of the things I took extremely seriously, at the time. Not because he was cruel, but because he was forgiving of my youthful enthusiasm.

It was he that introduced me to Mary. His devotion to her was neither extreme, nor passionate. It was just something ordinary, natural and true. And I suppose I sort of decided to emulate him and, from a very uncertain base, conjured up and fashioned an untutored but real devotion to the Mother of Jesus.

He once told me a joke, which I suppose, demonstrated his ease with the holiest of things. Pope Paul VI (it was round about that era) died and went to heaven. There at the pearly gates he was met by St Peter.

“How wonderful to meet you!” said St Peter. “God has told me to tell you that he is so pleased with your work on Earth, that I should grant you one wish – and that I should grant it – whatever it is”.

Pope Paul, rubbing his hands in abject humility, was overcome by God’s gift. After thinking about it for a while, he responded in Latin.

“St Peter”, he said, “it was a great honour and privilege to be the Pope and I really don’t feel I need any recognition at all. But if God insists”, he said, “and if it isn’t too much trouble, I would very much like to meet the Virgin Mary”.

“Done!” said St Peter. He snapped his fingers and a golden chariot, drawn by 10 white horses drew up. Pope Paul got into the chariot and the horses took him a couple of heavenly kilometres down the road. The horses stopped at a tiny little house on one of the streets of gold.

Pope Paul nervously stepped down from the chariot, went to the front door and knocked, with due reverence. After a while, the door opened a crack. Then wider, revealing a tiny little old lady.

She looked at him, but said nothing.

“Virgin Mary”, said St Paul, dropping to his knees, “it is such a privilege to meet you, considering you are the Mother of our Blessed Lord”.
There was a long silence, and Pope Paul nervously looked up from his kneeling position.

“Vell, you see”, said the little old lady, “he vas a great dishapointment to us, you know. Ve vanted him to be a lawyer!”

I recount this story, not only because it is a good story, but because it so scandalously (and thoroughly) demystifies Mary. Mary, seen as a little old “Bobba”, instead of the Queen of Heaven.

And my point is this. It is all too easy to worship a deified serene image of the Virgin with gold rays beaming from her crowned head. That is the religious imagery of wonder and awe and mystery and divine fabulousness. That is flawless stuff. It is the stuff of which worship and devotion is made.

It is much more difficult. Much, MUCH more difficult to see and to worship Mary in the "Bobba" next door. And there is the heart of the contradiction. Why is it so easy for Catholics to adore the showgirl, but to ignore (at the very best) any other girl?

While this is not something which men do alone in the church, it is something which has its essence in a patriarchal world view. A view where, functionally, to be divine is to be male. And, most of the time, to be human is to be male as well. Women need to define themselves in the light of the male paradigm, which is fearlessly and vigourously defended at every turn.

And so the image of Mary is stately, regal, virginal and ageless. That is the pristine image which is venerated. She didn't grow old and ordinary. Her breasts remained pert and firm. Her lips rounded. Her eyes clear. Her waist slim. That is the image of the theotokos - the God bearer.

But there is a slight of hand in the image. Because it is unreal, because it is much more similar to a Hollywood movie than any common reality, it is controlable, manageable, essentially dismissable. If the image were not like that and more like reality, it would point us inexorably to the woman sitting next to us in the pew, or in the traffic, or in our street. Then it would lose its glamour and become disturbingly familiar. It would then lose its holiness. That is the sad truth of the matter.

It strikes me, altogether more so in a consciously Catholic parish, that the veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary is no guarantee of an exalted place for women in general. In fact, it is disturbingly true that, more often than not, that where Mary is most fervently honoured, women are most emphatically overlooked. And if not that, then held in lower esteem in one way or another. Or made to occupy a place specially reserved for them, away from the real action.

It is a strange and curious contradiction and I think it has something to do with the problem we have with seeing the Blessed Virgin Mary as someone's rather ordinary grandmother.

Book review - MJ Hyland - "This is How"

2010-10-30T21:02:00.002+02:00

MJ Hyland is an extremely proficient writer. Of that, there can be no doubt. I first encountered her in "Carry me Down", some years back. And I was entranced by her humanity and her eye for the ordinary.

This book, which has sat on my shelves for quite a while now, is very different. It is extremely stark. It is written in a relentless first person and every detail, every observation, every passing thought, every waking moment of the narrator is bare and shorn and as brutal and factual as anything one can imagine.

This fact makes the book feel rather pedestrian. But that is surely the point she wants to make. That life is usually pedestrian and ordinary. And that we are all just travellers together on the journey of life, from its start to its end. We do the best we can. We make mistakes - and some of these mistakes have disastrous consequences for us. And sometimes we face them and sometimes we try to avoid them. That is just the way that life is.

Patrick Oxtoby is very much a loner. He has the kind of petulance and dismissiveness of many young men, when they leave home and try to find a place for themselves in the world. His home is filled with middle-class dreariness. It is unimaginative, unexplosive and dull. When he leaves, it is not so much as a form of protest, as an obvious need to disengage from them and to make a life of his own.

He finds himself in a boarding-house in an unnamed seaside town with two rather irritating Oxbridge types. He himself, much against his parent's wishes, has chosen a career as a mechanic. He is a very good mechanic and he enjoys the ability he has to fix cars well. But his career could never be thought of as glamorous. So he observes. He engages from the perifery. And the two Oxbridge types irritate him in their lack of decorum and control.

Through a set of ordinary circumstances, he finds himself committing an act of violence - both intended and unintended. And here begins a journey he is forced to take, which is anything but pleasant.

He goes through a trial, with inadequate preparation and in a system which appears entirely incapable of hearing any point but the simplistic one and delivering any judgement but the obvious and the statutory. There is no understanding of human complexity and no willingness to entertain any perspective other than the mundane. That is how the law works, after all.

And it is then that he enters a world of unrelenting darkness. And it is here that Hyland's choice of using the first person for the narrator reveals the depths of desperation and loneliness. I have seldom seen the device used more effectively.

It is not an easy novel to get through. But the journey one is taken on, is not an easy one either. And that - perhaps that bleakness which one is given access to through the novel - is a high artistic achievement.

MJ Hyland "This is How", Canongate, London, 2009

Making a saint out of Newman

2010-09-25T08:29:00.001+02:00

I have to say, I have watched the recent scenes of the visit of Benedict the 16th to the United Kingdom, with some amazement. Besides the screams, the adulation, the mumbled apologies and exchange of pleasantries, the highlight was the beatification of John Henry Cardinal Newman. Personally, I have not a single doubt in my mind that he should be recognised. If sainthood provides the context for that to be done – then so be it, and jolly good luck to it. At university, I read his works and they inspired me. I changed my perspective fairly fundamentally because of him. As a student, I read his “Apologia pro vita sua”. And found it both moving and profound.

But until very recently, I had missed something fairly essential about the man. He had a long term relationship with another priest, by the name of Fr Ambrose St John. They lived together for a considerable period of time and it was Newman’s express wish to be buried with him.

His desire was very clear and unambiguous. On no less than three occasions, he indicated it, in writing. The last time, a few months before his death in 1890.

“I wish with all my heart to be buried in the grave of Fr Ambrose St John. I give this as my last, my imperative will.”

On the death or Fr Ambrose, Newman wrote the following:

"I have ever thought no bereavement was equal to that of a husband's or a wife's, but I feel it difficult to believe that any can be greater, or any one's sorrow greater, than mine”.

He had waited some 15 years to be buried with his beloved. This was no will-o’-the-wisp. It was obviously something very clearly thought out. It was something he wanted very passionately.

Two years ago, in preparation for making him a saint – the Vatican gave the order for him to be disinterred and to leave any remains of Fr Ambrose in situ, and to remove Newman’s remains to the Birmingham Oratory.

On opening the grave, very little was found. Some hair, apparently, and a brass plaque with his name. The coffin was a wooden one and the ground wet.

Since discovering this, I have to say my mind has played on it a lot. I am left aghast at the sheer arrogance of it all. Newman had expressed his will in the clearest terms imaginable. Yet the Vatican decided that his body should be elsewhere. I understand that moving the bodies of saints – or people soon to be saints – is “traditional” (whatever that might mean!).

Now, obviously, I think it is at this stage impossible to prove conclusively that Cardinal (now “Blessed”) John Henry Newman and Ambrose St John were lovers. But it certainly looks likely. And one would not need to be a member of the “homosexual lobby” to come to such a likely conclusion, based on the evidence which is already at hand. Whether or not they remained celibate is another matter entirely and, from my perspective anyway, has little bearing on the substance of the enquiry.

But for the church to simply extract elements of his life which they like – and make a big hullabaloo about them and sanctify him because of them, while ignoring other equally significant elements, is sheer cynical manipulation of the facts. Indeed, the same could be said for the way that the church generally does its theology. It parades the easy bits and ignores the more difficult, as a matter of course.

But there is a problem with doing this, because eventually common sense (or science, or history) will catch up with it and expose it as fraud, as it has already, on so many other issues. The secularism of the United Kingdom, which the Pope seems to find so problematic, is in fact not only a consequence of the church’s continued fraudulent theological thinking, but represents a triumph of progress and rational thinking over idiocy and ignorance.

The only way in which this could be seen to be problematic is if one had some kind of vested interest in keeping people stupid, by denying the facts. Such as the facts about HIV/Aids; contraception; women; abortions etc etc. Oh, and did I neglect to mention the historical prevalence of gay and lesbian people within the ranks and hierarchy of the church itself?

On the tombstone where John Henry Newman and Ambrose St John lay buried for just shy of one hundred years, was written the following:

“Out of the shadows and phantasms, into the truth”.

Maybe one day, a long time from now, society will write the same on the grave of the church itself.

Jesus had AIDS

2010-09-04T09:00:00.002+02:00

As something of an illustration of how simplistic and how literal the general level of theological understanding is, amongst people in the parishes, an article appeared in this week’s Mail and Guardian entitled: “Pastor crucified for saying Jesus had Aids” (p.16).

There is a picture of a forlorn looking pastor, the Reverend Xola Skosana of Khayelitsha, Cape Town, who is baffled by the fact that his congregants took offense when he preached a sermon suggesting that Jesus had Aids.

“When we attend to those who are sick, we are attending to him. When we ignore people who are sick, we are ignoring him”, the pastor is quoted as saying.

He went on to quote from the Bible, where Jesus says “I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me”. However, he explained, there had been extremely hostile reaction to his sermon and to he and some members of his congregation publicly taking an HIV test.

“The scathing attacks I have received from Christians are unbelievable. They are saying you can’t reconcile Jesus and Aids. They assume it means Jesus was promiscuous and had many sexual partners.”

That analysis may be true. In part, I am sure it is true. However, I think there is something else which lies in the depths of this response and it is this. It is the complete inability of the majority of Christians to consider anything in the Bible as anything other than literal. So, you have a literal figure in the Old Testament being swallowed by a big fish. He literally lives inside the creature and he is literally vomited up on a shore somewhere. While he was inside the creature, he managed to compose one or two poems.

You literally have a person walking on water, and you literally have him flying into the sky and zooming off to heaven like a rocket. The disciples literally do not recognise Jesus on the Road to Emmaus (What is wrong with them? Did they suddenly turn into complete idiots?). And all of this is not helped when it is clouded in holy and religious language. Faith starts to mean believing what you know to be untrue.

Now the fact is, if this is the case, it is because of a complete failure on the part of the church itself and institutions of higher learning to teach people about meaning and symbol, about poetry, about different kinds of literature and the way in which they function. Consequently, the bible is read in much the same way as is the newspaper and then – surprise surprise! Someone comes along and says “Hang on! That is a load of hogwash!”

On Facebook the other day, there was an article relating to Stephen Hawking’s latest book, which states, triumphantly, that God isn’t a necessary part in the scientific explanation of the origin of the universe. Now, honestly and truly, is this news? Is this a shock? Does this in any way alter the way we think about anything at all? Did I wake up this morning depressed to discover the possibility that God did not create the universe?

I did so, only if I need literal truth and only literal truth. Only if my world is so small, and so confined to one kind of reality, that it will not even venture into the realm of dream, of fantasy, of story and myth. It is a world in which I will dismiss “Alice in Wonderland” as untrue, because it is not literally true. That is the world in which some scientists and many Christians and other religious people dwell – and I pity them. Because it is a world where there is only one note, sounding over and over and over again. It is a good note. It is a true note. But it is a singular note.

Praying for Women

2010-08-15T22:02:00.000+02:00

As I have indicated many times - I am not a real Catholic. I have journeyed a very circuitous route, via the Charismatic Movement, where we munched on "Love Buns" - to Liberation Theology, in the midst of which I once consecrated Coca-Cola.

It caused severe trauma amongst the theological students at what was then St Paul's College. They rushed out of the Mass, tears of Catholic righteousness streaming down their cheeks and badly in need of counselling.

The point I was making was a fairly simple one. The party drink in Jesus day was wine. The party drink in our day is probably, more universally, Coca-Cola. Wine, quickly came to symbolise blood in the Christian church. In our day, it is not difficult to see Coca-Cola, and all it stands for, as somewhat bloody.

In my defence, I tried to explain that in huge swathes of the Christian Church, alchohol is not used, and where it is and grapes are not available, other means are used, such as rice wine, or pineapple wine etc etc. But I was dealing with delicate theological minds, who could not see past the dog-collars they were so desperately begging for.

So, after being hauled before bishops, archbishops and the entire court of heaven, I was ecclestastically slapped on the wrist. Needless to say, I have never lived the matter down. The church has an exceedingly long memory, for certain things (and an exceedingly short one, for others!)

Now I mention this, because it was about this kind of time that the "debate" about whether or not you needed to have a penis to consecrate bread and wine became fierce within the Anglican Church. And it was about then, that I met feminism, both theologically and otherwise, for the first time.

My encounter with feminism was much the same experience as meeting Black Consciousness, for the first time, when I, along with another white colleague, was forcibly removed from a meeting. It was a damn good lesson - and one for which I will be forever grateful. The message was pretty unambiguous. It was this: "Just shut up! If you want to learn anything - then just shut up!"

And the feminists told me much the same. "Don't call yourself a feminist", they said, "You are a man - so just shut up".

Now this morning I was sitting quietly in church. It was this rather peculiar Feast of the church called the "Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary". I won't go into the details of what that all means - (even if I thought I knew) - but obviously, Mary was very high on the agenda of the worship. And during the prayers, the man leading them gave thanks to God for "women", for their "ministry" - for things like their love and their care and their this and their that. I found it galling.

This is, after all, a church which never has had and (chances are good), probably never will have, a woman as a priest. Women seem not to be allowed as servers, or sub-deacons or anything else up front, except in the chior. I note also that women are allowed to bring up the collection and elements of bread and wine.

So, when we pray for them, it is basically in their role as tea-makers and equivalent. Not in their role as leaders of nations; of Bishops and Archbishops; of surgeons and nuclear physicists, no! The tone of our prayer relegates them to what is quite simply a second-rate place. Then what we do is, we cloud that all in mystery and glory and wonder in our adoration of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

But it is a hoax!It is a complete hoax. What we are doing is patronising them - and calling it adoration. It is a clever thing we do, us men.

If I were a woman, sitting in that service this morning, I would have been profoundly irritated - no, I would have been disturbed and I would have been angry.

I am extremely glad I am not a woman, much the same as I am extremely glad I wasn't born black. Because life, really, would be a whole different ball game, if I were. That is one of the things I know for sure...

Incidently, I find what happens on "Women's day" - our South African nod in the direction of women generally as a nation, on 09 August each year, to suffer from much of the same problems. The difference between "celebrating" women, once a year and having women as equal in all respects to men - is vast.

What about the Ancestors?

2010-08-01T20:20:00.000+02:00

I remember that day very clearly. An excited call from my partner, Leon, saying “We have got a child”. I went into panic mode. I had made my position very clear, both to him and into Social Welfare. I wasn’t going to have just any child thrown at me. I wanted to be sure that I could “bond” with the child first – not that I had the vaguest idea of what that might mean.

So I went to see this child, which they thought would be right for us. He was lying quietly in his cot at the far end of the room, sucking his finger. I looked at him. He looked at me. After a while, I put out my finger and he took hold of it. And at that moment – that instant – I knew that this child was mine. I knew that I was his father and he would be my son.

When we adopted our children, the legal wording of the adoption order was, for me at least, very important. It said that this child was now “as if born to you”. The ancestors of that child (and the state) for whatever reason, handed him over to me and my partner. Our children were not “abandoned”. They were consciously and lovingly handed over. Those children are now mine - “as if born to me”. These two black boys now have two white fathers.

And it happened quite naturally, fairly early on, when I was asked by one of them about the identity of an old white lady in my photograph album, that I explained that she was my mother. “Your grandmother”, I explained, “she died a long time ago”. And we moved on to the next set of pictures. “And that is your Aunt, and that is your cousin…” and so it went.

Both the children refer to Leon’s parents, who are much more to them than pictures in an album - as “Granny” and “Grandpa”. And Leon’s parents make no distinction between our children and the children which his brother has produced biologically. Our ancestors are now the children’s ancestors. They have no others.

Of course besides anything else, the question of culture has also come up fairly frequently. Just because of the fact that these children happen to be black and me white, do I need to start doing a course in gumboot dancing? Should I rush off and get myself circumcised? Should I have a regular supply of Mopani worms in the house to make them feel secure? This is as crazy as it is bizarre and it reveals, I am afraid, just how far we are away from a really non-racial society, where colour is the least significant thing about a person.

No, we are not there yet. And yes, I have no objection to “exposing” my children to cultures other than my own. I also have no illusions about the difficult path they will need to tread. They need to be secure, not in some fantasy culture from somewhere else, but in their own skin, for who they are. And force-feeding them Mopani worms will not make it easier for them. It may make it a whole lot worse.

Markers of change

2010-07-20T11:17:00.000+02:00

The daughter of a friend of mine - a beautiful, lithe Lesbian aged 20 – recently went on that mandatory trip to Europe, which every student is supposed to do. You are supposed to visit every art gallery you possibly can. You are supposed to party till dawn in a foreign city. You are supposed to starve, because you don’t have enough money over there. You are supposed to hitch rides, because you can’t afford the train. You are supposed to be wild. You are supposed to be free. That is all part of being a student.

So she went. And she had a ball. And she spent her last penny. And she was standing in a long queue at Heathrow airport waiting to catch her flight home. There were mostly South Africans standing in that queue. Behind her was a large-bellied, shorts-wearing, Afrikaner. He had a greying, nicotine-stained moustache. The lithe student had made up her mind that this was not the kind of person she would see herself associating with. She was fairly certain about that.

Some way in front of them, also standing in the queue was a woman in full Purdah, wearing that suddenly controversial garment which covers the face, the Burka. She was called out of the line by the security officials. In full view of the other people in the queue, she was ordered to take off her head-dress. At first she resisted, but then complied, when it became clear that if she did not, she would not be allowed to board the plane home. There she stood. To her, she could have been stark naked. She tried to hide her face. She squirmed in shame and embarrassment.

My friend’s daughter felt the blood rise to her head. She felt utterly powerless and utterly outraged. And then she heard the man behind her, muttering under his breath these few words: He said “Dis nie reg nie”. (That is not right).

She turned to him and they spoke to each other in Afrikaans. They both agreed that what was happening was outrageous. Why was the woman not taken into a private space, if they were so desperate to search her? Why was she allowed to be so publicly violated, in a so-called liberal country?

So there were these two individuals. A pot-bellied Boer and a young Lesbian student, bonded together in their disgust for what was happening to a Muslim compatriot. And their whispered converse left them both with an extraordinary pride in what they were and how far we as South Africans have journeyed, to become what we are.

During the World Cup, my job took me to every corner of the Western Cape Province. I have had detailed negotiations with virtually every municipality in every District. And this is what I have seen: I have seen white people and black people and coloured people working together, and working hard. I have seen honesty and integrity. I have seen competence and I have seen government officials willing to work overtime, without recompense. (I have seen idiots and crooks as well). But in general, I have to say, that what has impressed me the most are the white officials, mostly Afrikaans speaking, who do their jobs and do them well. And who have changed beyond recognition. They are comfortable in their own skins and the people around them are comfortable with them.

Transformation has happened and it is a wonderful thing to see. And it is things like this that should give us as a nation, real pride in the journey we have taken and the point we have reached. But besides anything else, I would want to say that it is very likely indeed that it is because minority groups like the Muslim community feel not only respected in our society, but integral to it, that we could host a totally safe World Cup.

I am a Mandela dissenter

2010-07-18T20:53:00.003+02:00

I hate to admit it. In fact, it is probably dangerous to admit it. But I am. I really am a Mandela dissident! I have to confess to being more than a bit bewildered by the "proclamation" of "Mandela Day". As I am by the extraordinary zeal that there is, in his universal and international adoration.

Now, let me say immediately that of course he is a wonderful human being. Of course he is! And I have no doubt that these musings of mine will be swept aside on the tide of popularism, but these are some of the things which alarm me:

Firstly, I have a real problem with political and national deification. Analysis later on almost always proves the greatest heroes to be flawed, in one way or another. Think of the Churchills; the Malans; the Smuts's; perhaps even the Gandhis and the Nehrus. Time exposes them and their flaws lie there in ridged profile against the sky, for all to see. And what becomes completely clear, with the benefit of hindsight, is how time and context bound each of them are.

Secondly, popular opinion is a very unreliable test of sainthood. Hitler, after all, was an exceedingly popular man.

Thirdly. Have we forgotten the Arms deal? I think, somewhere down the line, when all the euphoria and adulation has died down, this single deal, under Mandela's presidency, will prove to be the source of a great deal of the poison in South African society today.

Fourthly, despite occasional, weak appeals to the contrary, a cult of personality (benign though it might be) has been allowed to develop - not only within the ANC, but within the country as a whole. And that, to my mind is going to be our great undoing. It is anathema to the ANC - or at least it was, during Oliver Tambo's time. And the fact that it is allowed - (and now more than encouraged, it is virtually institutionalised) is, (or at least should be) a very worrying development.

The result has been to take the sting out of ANC policy - and replace it with warm fuzzy feelings, while the crooks can just get on with their business. And is it not extremely strange that Mandela - the man - can somehow be divorced from the ANC as an organisation, in some sectors of the popular mind? Because it is one thing to love Mandela and call him "Tata". It is quite another to accept that his vision for the country is an ANC vision, and always has been. On the other hand, the annual hullabaloo about Nelson Mandela seems to have absolutely no impact on the divisions and ructions within the ruling party. Everything just carries on as it has before, after brief pause of tearful adulation.

Fifthly, I do not believe that one can heal either the racism endemic in our society, or issues of economic disempowerment, by creating fantasy all the time. That, after all, is what the 2010 FIFA World Cup was all about. We all walked around in a fantasy - the fantasy was that we all love each other and that we are all happy together; the fantasy was that we can all walk around at night in big cities in fancy dress, without looking over one's shoulder all the time.

Mandela is another fantasy. He is the fantasy that we all love each other and respect each other and do good for each other. He is the fantasy that we are a major player on the world stage and that the world gives a fig about us. He is the fantasy that personal sacrifice and hardship will do good to everyone generally.

So we can love Mandela and underpay our workers. We can love Mandela and be an unconverted racist on every other matter. We can love Mandela and steal the state coffers blind. We can threaten and kill foreigners who come from other African countries and ignore the fact that Graca Machel comes from Mozambique. We can do it, because we can hoist the fantasy - and everyone will be so busy cheering and waving flags in an orgy of patriotism and fuzzy feeling that they don't see the wood for the economic trees.

Lastly, and in this regard, I don't think that Nelson Mandela can take very much credit for the fundamental task of changing the lot of the poor in this country. Yes, he got Oprah to build an elite school here, and other rich people to donate towards this hospital and that child clinic there. But the lot of the poor remains - to this day - mostly unchanged. That is Mandela's other legacy.

The really important question.

2010-07-07T21:53:00.001+02:00

Many years ago, when I was working as General Secretary for the Christian Council of Lesotho, there was a knock on the door and into my office walked two hippies. You could tell they were hippies, because of his shoes and her sandals. You could tell they were hippies, because she had her hair braided in a particular kind of way and wore a particular kind of dress. He had a particular kind of haircut and he carried himself in a non-macho kind of way.

They introduced themselves as Justin McCarthy and Amanda Heddon. They were newly arrived, back from New Zealand and they wanted to start a leather working outfit in Lesotho.

They explained that they would use local shrubs to extract tannins and they would use local leather and would teach Basotho how to do what they did and make what they made. They wanted to know if I was interested in partnership at all. I was more than interested. To what extent I could help, if at all, I can’t remember. And we kept up contact after that.

I remember being so utterly impressed with them. They were so purposeful. They had no airs and no graces. They seemed to be such good and honest and likable people. Over the many years that I continued to know them, I found out that they were, just plainly and simply, all that they appeared to be.

After a while, frustrated by the lack of interest of Basotho in their project, they decided to relocate to Curry’s Post, in Kwazulu-Natal and start afresh. And it was there that they set up the now hugely popular and internationally known “Groundcover” brand. Justin told me gleefully how he had seen a wood-and-iron house advertised in the press, on day and how he had bought it. And how it arrived in bits and pieces and how he had to fit it all together, like a Jigsaw puzzle.

I visited them both often in their wonderful house overlooking a green and peaceful valley. I would walk sometimes with him to their dam. He once stripped naked and jumped in, mid-sentence, just because he felt like it. Their children seemed to grow up carefree, integrated and wholesome. Their business thrived and the quality and attractiveness of their goods became renowned throughout the country.

It was, of course, deeply shocking to hear of Justin’s death some days ago. He was killed, entirely unnecessarily. He was on his mountain bike and a car overtook another on a blind rise. We have not been particularly close, for many years, but I know that if last week I had walked unannounced into their kitchen, it would feel as warm and as friendly as it always did.

On a long drive that I have just done, with nothing but spectacular scenery to keep me company, my thoughts wandered back over the many years I have known them. And about Justin himself and the gentle and lovely person he was and the fact that he is now dead.

Death is always so damn final. It is that full-stop at the end of a saga. It brings a silence. It does not allow for argument or negotiation. It says “that is the end of that”. And all you are left with, if you are lucky, is memory.
And what is sad, is not so much that death happens. What is new is that when I next walk into that kitchen, Justin won’t be there. That is just the way it is. His voice is now silent. We can only remember him now. We can only bring him into our living through piecing together the bits and pieces of residue and shadow that we have left. There will be echoes of him. But he will not be there. Not ever, and not again.

Some people fear death terribly. Like a child sometimes fears the dark, or being on their own. There is that terror of abandonment, that inner scream of utter loneliness.

But why should it be so? Why should death not be as basic as birth? As individually unnoticeable as passing from one age to another? And why should it not be so, no matter how it happens?

Unlike me, my father was a man of very few words. On his deathbed, he looked at my distraught sister and said, “Everybody has to die”. I have always marvelled at the simplicity and profundity of those words. Because in the end, we can spend our whole lives fearing that, or we can just get on with the business of living in the best way we can.

The real and difficult question for me has always been not “Is there life after death?” There is a real sense in which that is a useless question. A question with very little content. The really important question is, “Is there life before death?”

A death at the office

2010-07-02T23:16:00.002+02:00

Well, I have said it many times – the 2010 FIFA World Cup is not for sissies! Some months ago, we purchased six LED screens at some quite considerable expense. We had to go out on tender. It took months and months. Before that, there were negotiations with District Municipalities about which local municipality would be the recipient of these screens. That took months and months and months!

And what was the intention of these screens? Well, twofold really. The first use would be for the screens to serve as count-down clocks to the 2010 FIFA World Cup. This would create excitement about the impending tournament (how little it takes to get people excited apparently.

But the second usage would be for legacy. They could be used as information boards; they could be used for advertisements and income generation for the local municipalities; they could even be used as big screens for mini Fan Parks for the future.

Now, the tender processes of government are agonizingly slow, and often do not produce the best results. This, in my estimation was one of the best examples of the worst results. A company we had already used, very successfully, for the supply of one LED screen, had to be knocked out of the process, for reasons I forget. But, I want to emphasise, that we had very good service from them. So now, we had to go with another company. This company has given us the worst service imaginable. But apart from anything else, to actually change anything on these screens is a complete nighmare!

So, the other day, we noticed that even though the screen outside our office was counting up – i.e. this is the 12th day of the 2010 FIFA World Cup – it was 12 hours ahead and days were changing at Midday, instead of midnight.

So, we ranted and we raved and eventually someone came to fix the clock. On his way out, he dropped dead outside the lift on the first floor. I was not there, but it was apparently very dramatic.

Now, two things happened. After the medical emergency people and the police were called, the news quickly spread that a man had died on the first floor. Black people in the building went into what I can only describe as “funeral mode”. Something deep inside them made them want to sit with the body. To “respect” the dead person. So there they came and there they gathered – sitting with the dead body. To such an extent that it eventually needed to be announced on the email that the 1st floor was now out of bounds, because there were too many people there!

White people on the other hand (and here I include “coloured” people as well, as part of the same kind of cultural milieu),fled. They couldn’t be seen for dust! If they found themselves in the unfortunate position of the lift doors opening on the first floor, they would suck in their stomachs and hide in a corner of the lift. They wanted to be as far away from the dead body as they possibly could be.

And then, after several hours, the wife of the dead man was brought to the scene. For whatever reason, and who knows what it was, the black guardians of her dead husband were shocked to hear that what she seemed to be most concerned about was that he had been carrying Dollars and she was worried that the Dollars might have been taken from him!

So, this is the way it played out. There was this white dead body lying on the floor, outside the lift. The black employees – or several of them – felt in some way culturally bound to come and “look after the body” and show it “respect”.

On the other hand, apparently, the man who had died was supposed to be going overseas the next day and had gone to the bank to get Dollars. These were apparently in his pocket. But what the black people sitting around, being respectful to the corpse heard – not having that piece of information - was that the wife was concerned that they might have robbed her husband’s corpse.

Who knows why she said it. It could have well been part of the confusion which profound shock brings. It could have been anything. But that is what got heard across the racial divide. (It was reported to me, some time later, I have to say, by a black colleague - and in good humour).

Such is everyday life, in a country - and with a people - which has effectively been robbed of its humanity. We are on the verge of bidding farewell to the hundreds of thousands of foreigners who have visited our shores to watch the soccer. At the same time, there are persistent rumous of threats being made to black African foreigners, whgo happen to be living here. We are, all of us, damaged. That is just the truth.

The Gospel of the Poor

2010-06-30T19:38:00.000+02:00

More years ago than I care to remember, when I was living in rural Lesotho, some American missionaries, who had attached themselves to the parish I went to suggested that the parish have a “Carols by Candlelight” service for Christmas. The suggestion was dismissed with virtually no discussion by the other members of the parish. “We have spent our whole lives trying to get away from candles”, they said, “Why on earth would we want to use them at Christmas!?”

The New Testament is replete with vignettes on the theme of the partiality of God towards the poor. The God of the New Testament appears to show, at the very least, what seems to be a surprising and extraordinary bias. It is bewildering. It is unfair. It is not cricket. And there seems to be ample evidence for it. The God of the Bible has a bias away from the rich and towards the poor.

There are indications of this bias on virtually every page. Jesus is born in anything but salubrious circumstances. His life is hardly that of a bling-seeker. He seems to deliberately choose the company of the outcasts, the heretics, the untouchables, the pariahs. He seems to enjoy the level of distaste which these extremely public displays of bias and unfairness evoke.

And when he is not deliberately provoking the religious orthodox, he is challenging the state. Even his death seems to have been engineered to some extent – down to passwords about donkeys and masters needing them and verbal displays of deliberate provocation to the ruling authorities. The Gospels are at pains to show that he “knew” his death was impending. It was no surprise. It was a fate he was prepared to meet. It was a fate he appears almost prepared to ensure.

The circumstances of his death, similarly, appear designed to cause a degree of solidarity with the criminals and murderers of his society. The lowest of the low. The most despised of any society. These are the people Jesus dies amongst. And seemingly, if the Gospel accounts are to be believed, he could have chosen otherwise. Judas might have betrayed him in the pursuit of his particular plan, but the plan of Jesus was already set.

And even the resurrection narratives are a bit disappointing, if it is pyrotechnics one is looking for. Yes, in Matthew, the graves do open and one or two apocalyptic things seem to happen in Jerusalem, but in general what do you have? A couple of second-class citizens seeing an empty grave and concluding that something miraculous, rather than sinister had occurred.

And then the group is on the run. In hiding, the leaders are in an upstairs room. It is there, in that situation that they encounter him again. Others are walking along a road, dejected and beaten. It is there that they encounter him again. In those less than grand circumstances. And that encounter is apparently so profound, so essential, so complete, that from that moment on, they are entirely changed – and so is the world.

And we must know – because that is what the stories mean - that in so far as we are different from that, so, most likely, is the measure of our encounter with the divine. There is no account of the rich and the powerful rejoicing at the news of the resurrection.

I am not saying that it is impossible for someone to have such an encounter in a Herbert Baker building with a wonderful choir, a superb organ and attention to detail in the liturgy. I am not saying that the generous incense and multiple candles do not serve an enabling function. But I am saying this: I am saying that camels go through needle’s eyes with a fair amount of difficulty. And it is difficult for me not to wonder what it is that the poor, the marginalised and the outcasts have, that God seems so terribly partial to

Why I hate flag-waving

2010-06-18T21:58:00.001+02:00

When I was working as a priest in Manchester, England, there were one or two things I battled with in the realm of the Church of England, as the Established church. The Queen is the head of that church. That struck me as more than odd. And allied with that the national flag, the Union Jack, is every now and again brought into the sanctuary and left to stand there proudly. On nationalistic occasions, like Armistice Day and on other peculiar occasions, like when the Scouts and Girl Guides have a Sunday parade and when various military regiments, which are somehow attached to the church (in ways I could simply never fathom), come and celebrate this or that.

It made my skin crawl. I felt the hair standing out on the back of my neck. Because I looked at that flag, not as an insider, but as an outsider. I saw it, in my mind's eye, fluttering over God knows how many battlefields throughout the world, including many in my own country. I saw it as a symbol of colonial domination and power. I saw it as a symbol of a great deal of evil, to go with all the trumpeted benefits which it was supposed to bring throughout the Empire, when the Empire was viable. I could not pay it any honour. And I would not.

I can remember the first time I saw the new South African flag. It was flying late in that heady period betwixt the release of release of political prisoners and the inauguration of the new democratic state. It was flying, for no apparent reason, on a semi-famous landmark in Johannesburg - Gallagher's corner, in Orange Grove.

I slowed my car down to a crawl and savoured the moment. I wept, like everyone else, when the helicopters flew the new flag at the inauguration of our first democratic President. My heart skipped a beat, for a while after that, every time I saw it on a government building.

And now, the flag is, undoubtedly, a significant focus of unity, in the context of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Faces are painted in its colours. Shirts and socks and hats and scarves. The commercial opportunities seem to be endless - and especially for those highly inventive Chinese, who make most of it.

But by identifying oneself so visibly as one thing, you are, almost by definition, identifying others as another thing. We celebrate being South African. And that does not include Zimbabweans, or Nigerians. It is explicit in its exclusions. There are those inside and there are those outside. That is just the way it is. That is the way it is designed to be. That is the function it serves.

And then we lose. And then the flag-painted Vuvuzelas go quiet. And fewer flags flutter on the cars. And fewer faces are painted. And a national gloom settles in, while others are raised high in victory.

That is the problem. Because flags inevitably make an "us" and a "them". That is what they do. That is what they are designed to do. And it is a short step away from "them" taking "our" jobs. "Them", the criminals and "us" the victims. "Them", who shouldn't be allowed into "our" country. That is what flags do. They engender nationalism. It starts off with a thing called "national pride" and if not extremely carefully controlled in a very sophisticated way, it ends up in xenophobic violence.

While I am happy to acknowledge the role our flag has played in enabling South Africans to find each other, then and now, I remain deeply suspicious and extremely wary. Because waving a flag does not make one patriotic. Criminals can wave flags and sing the national anthem with the rest of us. I see people speeding past me on the highway, talking on the cellphones on their ears, with numerous flags a-flutter on their cars. It is the way one lives, as a South African, that reveals one's true patriotism, not the flag one flies.

Ritalin part 2

2010-06-13T15:58:00.000+02:00

Some weeks ago, I wrote about the uncertainty I had about giving our youngest son, Joshua, the drug Ritalin. He has been diagnosed ADHD – the hyperactive version. I said then, that I was completely amazed by what the drug was able to do for him. Suddenly, he is able to concentrate. Suddenly, he is able to complete a task which is given to him. And, for us as parents, it is such a great pity that he had missed out on a year and a half of taking the drug, because, I am certain, had he been on it, he would not be facing the possibility of repeating Grade 1 – which he is now. I am certain that on the drug, he will be fine, going forward – repeat or not.

Then there is our eldest son, Gabriel (aged 8). He has always been extremely weak academically. He can dance fabulously. He can draw really well. But ask him to add one number to another and he is completely befuddled. For years now my partner, Leon (who is saddled with most of the homework chores) has been saying that the child just doesn’t get it - with reading, writing and arithmetic. Now the school is saying it as well.

So we had both of the children assessed through a fairly expensive and extensive process, involving an educational psychologist. Her diagnosis was that Gabriel is in real and urgent need of a fairly serious remedial intervention. He is in Grade 2 at the moment - and obviously not coping, despite continuous and dedicated help with his homework and support from both inside and outside school. “Perhaps”, said the psychologist, “Gabriel would also benefit from Ritalin”.

At this point I started to get suspicious. It seemed to me impossible that two such different children, one hyper-active and the other a complete dreamer, could benefit from the same drug. But then I discovered that, actually, they can. It is a drug which has had over sixty years of usage, so there are not many surprises. And indeed, it both can and does help children (and adults) on both sides of the disorder.

So, we are now giving it to Gabriel as well. Within days, I saw a remarkable change in him. It was as if someone had unlocked his tongue! He was talking about all sorts of things – and more surprisingly, talking to me! He has always been Leon’s child. He tolerates me if he has to, but the relationship has never been easy – or in any way over-enthusiastic from his point of view. But suddenly, I am being told stories about this person and that person. About what happened at school and what this friend said and what that one did.

And there is another line of astonishing development. He asks questions about what is happening on the television. He is paging through magazines, prompted by no-one. He seems much more aware of his surroundings than he ever was before. These are, believe me, profound developments! And I can only put them down to the drug.

While our youngest child has experienced a lack of appetite as a side-effect, Gabriel has had no such difficulties. The technology of the pill is extraordinary in itself, in that it releases specific doses throughout the day, for a 12 hour period. So the drug is administered once early in the morning, with no need for a re-dose later on. And all I can say is that it is helping both of them at the moment. And if it becomes clear that they can do without it, or that it isn’t helping anymore, we can simply stop it.

I asked the doctor about why I had heard that the child can be taken off the drug for weekends and school holidays. He said that this was the result of what he called “insecure doctors” who saw that the parents were uncomfortable with the allopathic diagnosis, and who wanted to sort of “give them a bit of comfort”.

“But”, he said, “”if your child was diagnosed with diabetes, would you not give him the drug on certain days?” It was a rhetorical question, of course. And I am sure that it must be very difficult dealing with parents. Because any normal parent really wishes their child is not in need of the medication.

Similarly, I got a flood of suggestions, with the last article, on “natural” remedies. Personally, I believe in drugs. I know they can be dangerous. I know taking them has dangers of its own, but what I have seen so far has been so remarkable and so good, that I have to say I no longer have any doubts. For my children at least.

Patriotism, nationalism and the rest...

2010-06-04T18:34:00.001+02:00

The country, at the moment, is going through a surge of patriotism. There are flags everywhere. Sometimes they are the right way up and sometimes not. Sometimes cars have socks over their rear-view mirrors. Sometimes they have flags on the aerial. Sometimes they have flags on the boot, the bonnet, the windows. And sometimes, on all of these.

What I find astonishing is that white people who, a year or two ago were sneering, and saying we would never be ready, and the crime rate, and bemoaning how boring soccer is in comparison to rugby, these are now festooning their cars with flags. And, don’t get me wrong, I don’t see anything essentially wrong with that.

Is it that there has been a sea-change in the way in which people are looking at their country? Are they displaying pride in the achievement of getting ready for the event? I hear discussions about the 2010 FIFA World Cup in the changerooms at the gym. Whereas before, white men would be dismissive and churlish about it, suddenly they are speaking authoritatively about it. They have opinions on who is going to win. They have all been to see something in the stadium – and they are impressed. They like this player, that team and this coach. It is a remarkable and noteworthy change.

Clearly, the sport of football will never be the same again in this country. Young children are bewitched by it – mine are, and I am not a soccer fan. The blue eyed boy of apartheid – rugby – is now joined by a fairly well resourced competitor. At the moment, there is only one game in town and its balls are round.

And it is true that when you watch television broadcasts of South Africans singing the national anthem, a lot of whites still do not know anything other than the English and Afrikaans parts of it, while a lot of blacks either do not know (or refuse to sing) the English and Afrikaans, or they refuse to sing it.
But generally, despite things like this, there is a general outpouring of patriotism.

Now, simultaneously with this experience, I have been having some – well, “discussions” would be too grand a term for these things – but let us say “interchanges” with a range of my friends on Facebook, about Israel and the recent international outrage which the Israeli government has committed with the “Freedom Flotilla”, leaving 9 people dead. Some of my harder core Jewish friends – maybe even Zionist friends – are infuriated that I should even think such a thing. Because to them it seems, Israel is not capable of doing wrong. It is only “them” - Muslims, Arabs and non-Jews who do terrible things to Israel.

It has frequently become extremely nasty indeed, these Facebook inter-changes. It happens whenever I, or anyone else associated with me, takes a negative view of Israel. And it has given me pause for some serious thought on the issue of patriotism.
Because, if I am honest, I have to say that I am deeply suspicious of patriotism, in any form and in any guise. When I see flags fluttering in the wind in numbers, I see Nazi Germany. I see the kind of fervour which that maniac Hitler was able to whip up and the way in which that entire nation, young and old, were enthralled. And I hate it with every fibre of my being. It is that kind of stuff which enables evil to be baptised good. And I cannot but see the same thing happening in Israel today. It is a strange and curious irony indeed.

I think, in the case of Israel, that the land has been deified. To the extent that it needs to be served unconditionally. To the extent that it has power to demand absolute loyalty and allegiance. To the extent that some people are prepared to defend it against any and all odds. To the near hysterical responses to even the mildest criticism. This is the behaviour of a worshipper – a devotee - not a citizen.

And it is this worship of the land that I fear so much. Here, the xenophobic attacks that have happened are usually based on gross ignorance; on lack of analysis and education; and on huge doses of selfishness and ingratitude. But what it finally based on? It is based on this thing called being “South African”. And that “being South African” can somehow be used to justify terror, murder, robbery, and that thing which the bible (in the story of Sodom) identifies as virtually unforgivable, inhospitality.

It is the same with Israel. It was the same in Nazi Germany. It was the same in apartheid South Africa. It is horrific.

Facebook and other vices

2010-05-30T20:19:00.001+02:00

Driving manically around the Western Cape Province, as I am at the moment, in the vain attempt to get everything ready for the hoards which are supposed to be arriving from abroad for the 2010 FIFA World Cup, and the hoards which I know will be pitching up at Provincial Public Viewing Areas, I get to listen to quite a bit of radio.

And on one programme, there was an interview regarding the new privacy settings on Facebook. Apparently, there is an issue. There has been something of a revolt in the Facebook community and Facebook has responded to it by upping the ante in relation to privacy settings. As I understand things, it has something to do with who can see your profile. The person who was being interviewed said that he didn’t do much Facebooking, because he was rather old fashioned in relation to friendships. He didn’t want to have such a wide circle of friends able to read everything he said to all his other friends. And that got me thinking.

When I first encountered Facebook, introduced as I was by my internet connected partner, I was appalled by it. I was appalled by the level of inanity I encountered. There were people I was connected to (in one way or another) telling me what they had for lunch; what they thought of the weather; what they thought about random issues; what they liked at that particular moment, or not; what happened to them in the lift, and so on.

There were pictures of all sorts of things one would normally avoid, unless one were to be trapped in one of those “Oh, I must show you my pictures of my trip to Venice” moments. There were groups about this and groups about that. There were causes about this and causes about that. There was an unbelievably witless thing, which I never got to the bottom of called “Farmville”. There were suggestions about who I might like to befriend, even though I had never met them before. And so it went.

I wanted out immediately. To my horror, I discovered that it was impossible to delete one’s profile. You could sort of make it dormant, but never delete it. I made it dormant and felt extremely relieved. My partner smiled wistfully and just carried on with his Facebooking and Tweeting and all the other things he does on the internet.

It didn’t take long and I was back. Doing many of the things which had so repelled me in the first instance. There was (and is), to be sure, a kind of social voyeurism, which is satisfied by it. I have discovered the block button and have blocked all the wildly Evangelical Christians and irritating racists I had somehow managed to get entangled with. If I get a friend request from someone I have never heard of, with no explanation or context, I just ignore it. I seldom – very seldom - join causes, no matter how important they might seem. I automatically delete (or is the word “unfriend”) anyone with anything to do with Farmville. And I have to say, I am a whole lot happier about my association with Facebook. I did have one extremely unpleasant encounter, with someone I was not connected to and the incident warned me that this mechanism could be less than benign. But despite it, I have continued.
But I have to wonder, is the whole thing just simply narcissistic? I have a whole lot of friends who are not on Facebook, and when I think about it, they are my closest friends. Most of them are not on Facebook because they either don’t have the computer literacy, or because they have taken a deliberate decision not to be. And we service each other as we always have done. We occasionally call each other to catch up on news. Perhaps we email each other. We see each other for a meal. We go to each other’s houses and talk to each other.

And all the bits which happen between encounters are filtered. They are either ignored, or they are selected for updating. But they are seldom paraded in a completely unessential fashion. Let me give an instance in my own Facebook behaviour, which is perhaps questionable.

I often go onto Facebook and read about everyone else’s day. Then I think, “Well, what can I say?” Now my day, believe me, is seldom anything interesting enough to publish. “I sat in a meeting for most of the day, listening to people jabber on about boring things”. There is nothing interesting or even mildly curious about that. Why would you tell anyone about it?

So then I think, well why not put what I am listening to at the moment. So I put “is listening to … (some fairly obscure 20th century composer)’s … (equally obscure piece in a foreign language)…”. And I often get responses to that. By the one or two or three people on my list who either have actually heard that piece, or who have heard it and liked it and are glad that there is another person in the universe who likes it as well.

So why do it do it? Why do I tell EVERYONE connected to me what piece of music I am listening to? Isn’t that as bad as telling everyone my dream last night? Or the menu I am planning for my next dinner party, to which they are not invited?

Well, I don’t know, fully. I think there is an element of conceit in it. And curiosity – exploring the off-chance that there are others in the universe with a similar mien. I also think there is an element of neighbourliness. I suppose it all depends, psychologically, which element is dominant in one’s personality.

Protecting God

2010-05-22T17:11:00.002+02:00

In the wake of a rather strange Facebook campaign – “Everyone draw the Prophet Mohammed”, our very own Zapiro (aka Jonathan Shapiro) published a cartoon in the Mail and Guardian yesterday, of the Prophet reclining on a psychiatrist’s couch, bemoaning the fact that other prophets had followers with a sense of humour.

The outage has been instantaneous, from a wide range of people (within a fairly narrow band, of course). Inevitably from Muslims – who say it is wrong to draw the Prophet at all and from a particular type of Christian, who, while not wanting to protect the Prophet Mohammed from anything in particular, imagines the same kind of thing with Jesus on the couch – and doesn’t like the feeling. And from people who want to protect religion in general from anything and everyone.

Now I will tell you why, if I were a famous cartoonist, I wouldn’t draw a picture of the Prophet Mohammed doing anything at all. It is because I would be scared shitless of the result it could induce from some of his followers! Firstly, there would be offence. That is because it is apparently an offensive thing to draw the Prophet. I can’t imagine why, myself, but religion has seldom claimed to be rational. But that would not be the end of it. There would be fatwas announced (and there probably will be - on Zapiro’s head). There would be threats of one kind or another. There would be venom and hatred. There would be real, present and extreme danger. So, frankly, laudable as freedom of expression is – I would be happy just not expressing anything here.

Does that make me a coward? No, I don’t think so. You pick your battles in life, and this, sure as nuts, isn’t one of them which I would be tempted to pick. I heard the another really good South African cartoonist, Jeremy Nell, on the radio yesterday making a valid point and which was niggling at the back of my head when I first heard about this Facebook campaign. He was saying that, in his estimation, the whole campaign was based on completely the wrong principle. He said, as a cartoonist, he would draw whatever he wanted to draw – but this campaign was actually based on hate – and he would therefore have nothing to do with it. Because, lets be honest here, a glance at the page reveals a medium for every Muslim-hating person on the planet to vent their spleen – despite the fact that it proclaims itself as “not a hate speech” page.

Zapiro is not unfamiliar with deep and sometimes violent reaction to his work, though. He doesn’t mind who he goes for – and like the court jester of old – he often speaks the truth. He is Jewish, but that hasn’t stopped him lambasting Jews in the modern State of Israel, where for many, as far as I can see, the land itself seems to have replaced their concept of God. He has attacked Apartheid and he has attacked the ANC and other liberation movements alike. And the reactions have been similarly hysterical. He is a really good cartoonist.

But is he a sensible one? We are less than 20 days, as I write, away from the 2010 FIFA World Cup, which is going to be held in South Africa. This event is already a target for mad people and extremists the world over. Already there has been a threat against the Danish and French teams (both of whom are staying in Knysna, by the way), because a Danish cartoonist drew the Prophet Mohammad with a bomb as a turban, and the French ban on the Burka. Now we have a South African cartoonist added to the mix, to refine the target. I think it was a naïve and silly thing to do.

And not because I think religions of all kinds with immature, extreme followers should be protected – but because I think that discretion is by far the better part of valour. And besides freedom of speech and all that, God is not protected by any of this. That is the really crazy part about it all. What a bizarre idea it is, that God or any of the Prophets of any religion should need us to protect them?

Living with Ritalin

2010-05-12T23:04:00.006+02:00

Ritalin has a very bad name. In most parents, the very word conjures up images of robotic children, chemically manipulated into silence. I have to say, that was my initial prejudice.

It was indeed a prejudice, because I knew virtually nothing about the drug. When confronted with the possibility of using it on one of my children, my immediate reaction to it was, "I am not going to drug my child". But of course, that was a lie, and it was easily exposed. I drug my child when he has a cold. I drug my child when he has an infection of one sort or another. I drug my child when he has a temperature. And I do it without any hesitation. I have even considered (believe me!) drugging him when he didn't need it, but I have restrained myself. I am happy to get him inoculated with anything that might be around. Flu, Measles, mumps and the rest of it. I believe in drugs!

And besides that, I could never be accused to being drug-free myself! I am, a complete sissy with illness. I spurn "natural" remedies. I have tried them - I really have. But besides the dent in my pocket, I have noticed very little other effect. So yes, I am prepared to accept that if I fed him vast quantities of fish oil, there may have some positive result - but I doubt it. I really doubt it.

Joshua, our youngest son, was kept in the orphanage for three months too long. There were some worries about the size of his head and other things - but the end result was that when we got him, he was a child whose lights had almost gone off. He didn't cry. He didn't complain about anything. He just sat and watched, with large, staring eyes. It was so bad that our childminder called her sister and said to her that she really didn't know what we had brought home. Joshua seemed like a seriously damaged child.

And three weeks later, this child woke up. My God did he wake up! He just wouldn't stop. And yes, he was delightful and charming as well, but as he grew and as he went to school, these became his stand-out characteristics: He was over-busy. He seemed never to be able to complete a task. He became worryingly devious and dishonest. The name "Joshua" would be yelled, shouted, screamed 150 times a day, as you would tell him not to do this and not to do that. We initially put it down to an exploring nature.

But, at the same time, his record at school was also not too good. He fought with others. He interfered with other's work. He got himself and those around him into trouble. His lack of concentration meant that his work was not good, though his intelligence was obvious.

We met with his Occupational Therapist and she seemed to me to be going round the houses on the issue of drugs. Eventually I asked her straight out, making it clear that I was not averse to considering them. She said yes. She thought he could be an ideal candidate. And so we started to explore further.

A friend of mine, a long time teacher, told me what it was like to teach ADD and ADHD learners. She said, if she were teaching something at the front of the class, she would immediately be able to recognise a child with attention deficit. If there was a sprinkler outside on the lawn, every flash of light would get his or her attention. If there was an ant on the floor, then that would. If there was a ceiling fan going round - and so on.

The doctor we consulted described it to us in terms of receptors in the brain. He held out his fingers separating them as wide as he could from each other and with the forefinger on his other hand he pointed to the tips. These were the receptors and past them whooshes a vast amount of information. The job of the receptors is to distinguish that information which is necessary to the present task from that which is not - and to discard that which is unnecessary. The ADD or ADHD child cannot do that.

The drug Ritalin has been found to do that task. It usually works, apparently. We were told that if we did not notice an immediate and positive change in the child, then it was the wrong drug for him. You play around with it until you find the correct dosage and then the child will be on it for as long as it is useful. It isn't habit forming and can be stopped at any time.

But there are, usually and unfortunately some significant side-effects. Sleeplessness is one. Joshua now goes to sleep around 11 pm. This stretches one's patience a good three hours past reasonable endurance levels.

And eating. He has dropped weight fairly dramatically. He eats virtually nothing during the day and with no real commitment during the other meals in the morning and at night. This represents a fairly dramatic change in behaviour for him.

But he has also become quieter, more obedient - in every possible way. Far less dishonest and deceitful. Far less scheming. More careful in everything and less damaging and wilfully destructive. But he now has this curious, uncharacteristic quietness about him. If you tell him to hold your hand - that is what he does.

At the same time, we have noticed a high rise in what is sometimes inappropriate emotionality. He will cry over the simplest thing. And it is real tears that flow.

His interactions and play with his brother has been far less fractious. He seems to remember more and retain more and is generally more polite and more concerned about the wellbeing of the other.

But, for me there is something creepy about it all. I cannot stop thinking about Stepford Wives - that group of women who were chemically dealt with, so that all possible irritating feminist rebellion is brought to a halt. Is that what we are doing? Are we chemically manipulating his brain, to suit ourselves? Or to benefit him? For the present, it seems to be doing both.

Mother and Child

2010-05-09T07:09:00.006+02:00

Rodrigo Garcia, the director of this film, is an undisputed genius at crafting the unexpected. There is no way in which one could have second-guessed this complex narrative of a mother and daughter, separated at birth, who both struggle with the damage done to each of them. It is a narrative of loss. It unfolds slowly, uncompromisingly, deftly. The viewer gets drawn into the complex disentanglement of three separate sets of lives, all of whom are linked to each other.

The film opens with with two 14-year-olds kissing. The scene fades into an unplanned pregnancy - leads to a birth - a glance at the child by her mother before it is taken away for immediate adoption.

The rest of the action takes place 37 years later, when the audience starts on a journey of discovery which has as its basis the terrible effect of this event on the two women. Annette Bening's Karen, the mother, lives a sterile life. She hasn’t married and cares for her ailing mother (Eileen Ryan). There is a wall of silence between these two women. They are unable to communicate with each other. They are unable and emotionally ill-equipped to deal with each other’s pain. Karen's mother relates better to her home helf than she does to her daughter. In turn, Karen’s interaction with others is equally awkward and lacking in emotion. She is damaged and one learns that the source of the damage is the child she was forced to give up by her mother and whom she writes to regularly, imagines, but makes no effort to seek out.

Naomi Watts' Elizabeth has overlaid her pain with high quality legal work. She is unable to relate emotionally to men and uses them mercilessly through risky and emotionless sex. She is fiercely independent but she is something of a drifter. But she returns, several times, in her roaming to the town in which she was born.

A third storyline follows another unwanted pregnancy and an adoption process. Kerry Washington's Lucy in unable to have children with her husband (David Ramsey) and they seek a child through a Catholic adoption agency, to meet a young prospective mother who, though willing to give up the baby, is extremely demanding in terms of what kind of family she wants for her baby. The interplay of power and helplessness in this narrative is almost frightening. On the one hand there is the need of Lucy, both to satisfy the needs of their marriage, and the apparent (somewhat ruthless) needs of the expectant mother, to dominate by means of the trump which which she holds over them.

Elizabeth, on the other hand, as well as her birth-mother, Karen, have their own issues of power. Neither has sought the other out, even though, for both, this could have meant resolution. When they eventually do, neither of them can claim any victory.

A gentle Jimmy Smits, is attracted to Karen but her response to him is almost violent rejection. When her mother dies, she is able to give in to his attention and give herself up to it. There is an interesting sub-text regarding God, and religion throughout the piece. It is a Catholic Adoption Agency which keeps the records of the adoptions. The nun who forms the centrepiece of connection is kind and gentle and humane. But it is it also the same agency which is the cause of botching critical connections between the players. The Jimmy Smits character admits to not believing in God, but his over-religious daughter describes him as the “kindest man alive”.

Lucy is interrogated ruthlessly by the prospective birth-mother on her religious beliefs. When she admits to her that she is an atheist, she believes that she has lost all hope of winning the birth-mother over. Only shortly afterwards to discover that the mother is convinced by her honesty.

Elizabeth gets sexually involved with her boss, played by Samuel L. Jackson, at a Los Angeles law firm. The relationship is curiously ambivalent and nothing one might expect. There is an age difference between the two of them, which is simply there – never noted or even acknowledged by anyone. But it is there – at the height of him achieving orgasm – Elizabeth calls him an “old man”. He is black, she is white. This fairly significant issue is never mentioned by anyone. When there is a need for introduction, she introduces him to others as “her father” – without further comment. Later on, the issue becomes extremely important in her life – but again, utterly refreshingly, it is never mentioned.

The three narratives eventually collide. Not in an easy way and not in a way where there is necessarily any resolution. The characters remain their own individual selves. The connection is real, but circumstantial. It does not control any of them, but it is the drum-beat at the centre of their being.

What is so magnificent about this movie is that it is always understated. It tries to resolve nothing artificially. At the end, there is a peace. But it is a heart-wrenching, gut-aching peace of real life. It is the peace of a complex set of lives. It is the peace we go about making for ourselves – or not.

It is a magnificent piece of cinema. Utterly magnificent.

The Third Reich and the 2010 FIFA World Cup

2010-05-03T21:13:00.003+02:00

The other day, I was asked to do a presentation to the Western Cape Provincial Museum’s services, on how we have achieved legacy from the 2010 FIFA World Cup. It was in Stellenbosch. I battled to find the venue, which was part of the Stellenbosch Museum. And the reason I battled to find it, I discovered later, was that the sign had fallen down, and no-one had bothered to put it up again!

I thought I was pretty much on time – but discovered that the speaker before me was still in full flight, giving a talk on the way in which the Nazi’s had tried to use the 1936 Olympics to benefit Hitler and the Reich. It was sobering stuff indeed!

The presenter was illustrating her talk with various athletes, who had been sidelined or excluded, either because they were not Aryan enough, or because they were too dark. She spoke of a contestant from the United States, Jesse Owens, who was (what would now be called) African-American. He won four gold medals and became a nightmare for the Nazis, because he was besieged by autograph hunters and was cheered every time he entered the stadium. Rather than acknowledge him, as he had done for all other athletes, Hitler chose to leave the stadium early.

She told the story of Jewish athletes who were excluded from participation. She spoke of one young Jewish athlete, Helene Mayer, who was used for publicity (unbeknown to her) and because of extreme pressure from the USA on the Reich to include Jewish athletes in the German team. She was used as a kind of window-dressing. She was chosen, because she was “half Aryan” – and generally had physical features which the Nazis found vaguely acceptable. And so pleased was she to have been included in the German team, that, like everyone else, there she was lifting her arm in the Nazi salute.

The presenter spoke of how Berlin was “sanitized” before the games. How vagrants, the indigent, street people, the poor – were all gathered together and moved out of Berlin. What was presented to the world was life under the Reich as being something very close to paradise.

I could not help looking for parallels with what it is we are doing here. Every so often, one hears of plans to take street-people beggars and street-children elsewhere, so that the visitors from elsewhere will not be unduly bothered by them. I do not know of any actual plans to do that, I have to say. But the rumours persist.

And so, at the last Technical Steering Committee for the Province, I made the following suggestion: I said, in the light of the kind of Constitution we enjoy, and the kind of rights every citizen in this country holds under it, I would propose that we enable this category of citizen - the street-people, the homeless, the street-children - with a chance to “Touch the World Cup”. Because, it will be things like that – tokenistic though they may be, which will distinguish us, in the end from the kind of event which was held in 1936.

There is, at this moment, a “tour” beginning of the actual World Cup. It is made, I hear, of 18 carat gold. It has its own security crew. It travels the world under high security and individuals are allowed to be photographed next to it. It will be in Cape Town in a few days time. And the poor will love it and be pleased to be photographed next to it. It is Sepp Blatter’s “Let them eat cake!”

I want just one occasion, when they are not used for any other purpose, other than for them to be recognised as the people that they are. Just one occasion, amidst the hype and the money and the glitz and the show. And I want the Ambassadors of the participating countries to be there when they are.

Measles, misery, tonsils, medicine and doctor's waiting rooms - more and more doctors waiting rooms

2010-04-29T20:31:00.004+02:00

If you follow my blog, you will have noticed a certain - (how shall I put it?) - lack of posts, over the past while. It has been due to the above. And it continues! It continues erven now - I have just returned from another incredibly long wait at the Mediclinic with my youngest child - Joshua. I swear, if I see another one, I am going to jump over a cliff!

Anyway, eventually the mist clears and the sun breaks through. Eventually!

The bed he made for himself.

2010-04-07T08:10:00.007+02:00

Jopie Fourie

Eugene Terreblanche was, by all accounts, a dreadful man. He has been a part of my life for a very long time now. He formed the AWB, the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging, a neo-Nazi organisation which even modeled its flag and insignia on the swastika. They rode around on horses, invoking the brave days of the Boer Commando. When he spoke, even I would listen! His Afrikaans was unbelievably beautiful, lyrical, passionate, inspiring - if racism was the kind of inspiration you were looking for.

When you started to analyse what he was actually saying, as opposed to the sound of what he was saying, it was all a load of utter rubbish. It was premised on the innate superiority of the “white” race. It believed that there was some kind of connection between this “white” race and the Christian God. It saw itself, in the Afrikaner version of the white race, as the true successor to the special relationship which, biblically, was once held by Israel.

And it is at this point that serious psychological disorientation starts to set in. With it comes paranoia, insecurity, false aggrandisement, a serious lack of reality and perspective. The followers (because there must be a “leader” and there must be “followers”) pattern themselves on the struggles of Israel (though, for reasons unclear to me, they hate Jews). They are engaged in a titanic struggle of the light (them) against the darkness (anyone else, especially the English and “blacks”). Everything is seen in grandiose apocalyptic terms. The defeat of the Satan is their goal.

These are lofty positions. And I have often found myself wondering, especially when I had some proximity to these people (when I still worked near Krugersdorp and in the vicinity of Ventersdorp, what these Khaki-clad beer-bellied visionaries might be thinking. The last thing they would want is for South Africa, under black leadership, to succeed. In discussion with them (such as is possible) this thing becomes clear. South Africa cannot succeed, unless the Afrikaner is in control. Because only the Afrikaner is chosen by God. Only the Afrikaner understands what needs to be done to put us all on the right path again.

Of course, the sub-text is a kind of strange contorted logic about self-preservation. There are forces ranged against the Afrikaner Volk at every side. There are even forces ranged against the Boer nation, which are within. The paranoia is profound and all-embracing. It never rests. It never goes on holiday. It never gets any better.

And, sure enough, the self-fulfilling prophesies start to play themselves out. Crime gets worse in the country. Zimbabwe implodes. Corruption increases beyond any even vaguely forgivable levels. Racism increases and the kind of white people who collected tins of sardines and built bunkers in their back yards to get themselves through the predicted catastrophe of the first democratic election, now see themselves, individually, as the direct victims of black racism and exclusion.

It is these whites, which have been largely sidelined, disarmed and silenced, who are now raising the Vierkleur on the gates at the entrance of the Terreblanche farm. You are I know he was just a has-been before his death but he is now raised immortal. That is how resurrections tend to happen. Violent deaths often seem to be an indicator.

It all reminds me of the archetypal Boer hero, Jopie Fourie. He was born in the Pretoria district in 1878. He was a scout and dispatch rider during the South African War, and was wounded and captured in an action north of Pretoria. After the war he became a captain in the Active Citizen Force, and in 1914 decided to join the rebellion in protest against Prime Minister Louis Botha’s decision to invade German South West Africa as part of the international war effort against Germany. He was captured in the Rustenburg area on 16 December 1914 and was court-marshaled. On 20 December of the same year he was executed by firing squad.

That is the tradition in which the AWB sees itself. They feel that they have been betrayed. They feel their cause against the state is just and they feel that they are martyrs. The memories of the Concentration camps in which the British incarcerated 23 000 of their number, are ever present. And what they see as the ultimate betrayal of FW de Klerk simply stands in that long line of betrayal and deceit and evil against the Volk.

So, with this burden, this weight of history, the actual numbers of the AWB and the things they do, (like riding around on horses and wearing Khaki shorts) – has always seemed to me to be a rather pathetic shadow of the ideals themselves – however much one might not want to support them.

But now, they have a martyr. Crime has given them a martyr. He was reprehensible and criminal himself. His thoughts were ugly; his vision limited by hatred, fear and prejudice. But now he is a hero and he will live forever as the flag-bearer to this crazy ideal of separate nationhood and self-determination.

I looked, today, at the picture of his unglamorous rough-hewn and now bloodstained bed, in a house that spoke very clearly of extremely poor circumstances. This is now a shrine to racial superiority. This is now a place of pilgrimage to a divisive and destructive philosophy. This represents the resurrection of hate.

One of the most profound theological insights I ever had as a student was when I read a theologian called Paul Tillich, following Rudolf Bultmann. It was there that I first considered the possibility that resurrection, if it happens ever and at all, it is most likely to happen inside of us. We each have a level of choice in the matter. Will the bloodstained and divisive spirit of Eugene Terreblanche be born in us today? That is the question, I suppose.

Getting the thing I wished for

2010-04-03T21:30:00.005+02:00

So, being Easter, I went to hear the Messiah last night at the beautiful Cairp Tahn City Hall. It is a really magical building, with frosted decoration on the ceiling and booths, and grand chandeliers which have a thousand light bulbs. The stage is backed by a massive organ. The woodwork is wonderful and the seats suitably uncomfortable for a building of that age.

Now, I always have mixed feelings about going to the Messiah. I mean, apart from the fact that one has heard it a gazillion times, you never know what you are going to get. I have sat through Messiah’s with a “cast of thousands” – which sounded like Messiah for the very hard of hearing. Then, on the other hand, I have had Messiah on authentic instruments played and sung by males only, wearing wigs. That was an equally strange experience.

I have wept in the Messiah. I have fallen asleep in the Messiah. I have regretted going because I was bored out of my mind and I have wondered why I thought, even momentarily, that I wouldn’t go, because the experience was so wonderful.

So last night, I went, with this “lucky-dip” mentality. Last year, there was a counter-tenor singing the Alto part that was spectacular. This year a mezzo that I had heard before and has a harsh edge to her voice and a tendency to have so much vibrato, that she frequently quavers right off the note – so I wasn’t expecting very much. Nicholas Cleobury was conducting, though – so it stood some chance of being, at least tolerable.

Curiously, there was a row of empty seats in front of me. I looked around the Cairp Tahn audience. Predictably white. A dot, here and there, of another colour but mostly, blindingly, depressingly white.

It started. Cleobury was taking it at quite a cracking pace. The tenor was lyrical and sweet – “Comfort ye, my people”. Suddenly, one of the side doors burst open and in walked a row of young , hip, gum- chewing, black, (I would say) 20 year olds. One of them had a T-shirt which read “Reaching your full potential IN GOD”.
They had the extensions; the dreds; the shiny African-American relaxed and gelled look. They carried bottles of Coke and they seemed intent on sitting in the row in front of me. They showed no sign of guilt or embarrassment at their lateness. They sat down. They giggled at the irritation of the people around them. They whispered loudly to each other, then they settled down to enjoy the performance. They conducted the air. They twiddled their fingers at the string sections. They lip-synced the words, (when they knew the words). If there was the slightest hint of a beat, such as in “Why do the nations rage”, for instance – they jived along with the music, while mercifully still seated in their seats.

Sometimes, with some of the less well-known recitatives and choruses, they started sending and receiving text messages on their phones and passing them to each other to read. They opened their coke bottles with a loud hissing sound. In a word, it was profoundly disturbing. At the end of part one, there was a moment’s indecision on the part of the conductor. They clapped. There was some lacklustre support for them from one or two others in the audience. They complained to each other loudly, that “these people are scared to clap!”

During the interval, I thought about what I was witnessing here. On the one hand, I have long complained about the complexion of Cape Town Symphony Concert audiences. On the other, here I was complaining where black youngsters sitting in front of me didn’t know how to behave!

On the one hand, it is a question of them simply not understanding the conventions. On the other, it is precisely the conventions which have kept people like them outside the concert halls and attending hip-hop events instead.

The point I reached, eventually, was that it was infinitely better for them to be there – visibly enjoying the music of a European composer who died 251 years ago, to them not being there at all. I am not saying that they shouldn’t shut up and sit still during the performance. What I am saying, is that all that kind of stuff can follow.

The Help – by Kathryn Stockett , Penguin/Fig Tree, London, 2009

2010-03-30T21:05:00.007+02:00

I have to admit, when I first started this book – many months ago – I had my doubts. (I have to also admit that most of my reading takes place, these days, on aeroplanes, or at airports waiting for them). The doubts were about the voices which are used throughout the book, predominantly of Southern black (African-American) women.

It takes some getting used to. But after not too long, I found it starts to read perfectly naturally. We have all, after all, been thoroughly attuned to that voice through the medium of television and movies. It is nothing unfamiliar. It is just that one doesn’t see it written very often. The first time I did encounter it was in The Colour Purple. (I have to admit it took me one hell of a long time to work out what “Shug” might be!)

But it really is a voice we know, albeit in this unfamiliar form. And once you start getting into the book, it becomes a really exciting and different experience. Through the device, you are suddenly projected into this unfamiliar world.

The author herself, (she reveals in her afterword) had doubts about this decision. Of course she did! The chances of sounding patronising, or of sliding into some really offensive “white” take on African-Americans, were pretty good. But she doesn’t – well not from my perspective anyway. African-Americans will obviously have their own opinions on the matter.

I tried to imagine what the effect would be, if a white person in South African were to write a novel in the black voice – recording the details and mannerisms of accent. The likelihood of misunderstanding and/or real offense would be very high indeed. Does anyone remember that ghastly programme which used to run on Springbok radio called the “Pip Freedman Show”? He had a number of personae – all of whom were racially defined. A “Cape Coloured” man called Ghatipi (I am not sure of the spelling here) sticks in my mind. It was demeaning and offensive – though of course, no-one white thought so for a moment.

When I was writing my novel, “Remittance Man” (UKZN Press, Pietermaritzburg,1997) I started by putting one of the characters in accent. But it really did come across forced and painful – so I dropped it.

But there is none of that here. The voices seem to be to be as clear as a bell and as practised and authentic as you can get. It is beautiful. I read the book in awe of her art and her ability. It is quite spectacular.

The stories she tells, of the relationship between maids and their employers, is by no means an unfamiliar one to any South African. The assumptions are all the same. The fear is kept firmly in check. Some of the conditions are indeed vicious and uncaring. But there are a number of vital differences.

Firstly, the African- American “Helps” drive their own cars. They talk on the telephone to each other and there seems to be very little restriction on them doing so by their employers. They own their own houses. Their children go to school and sometimes to University. They seem to be poor, but they are not living in the kind of abject poverty that we have all around us. The same insane racial sense of superiority pervades the parallel world which the whites are living in. They talk about “Nigras” to each other, in the presence of the Help, as if they are not there. To be human is, nonetheless, to be white.

The story is about several of the people living in Jackson, Mississippi (only one white amongst them) who start making the journey to find each other. It is a truly inspiring and magnificent tale. What is so remarkable about it, is that it gives the reader a glimpse into the world as it was then – on the brink of irrevocable change.
Read through the eyes of a 50 year old South African, it is so easy to simply flip the switch of translation and to remember one’s own youth, with “the Maid” and the kind of complex relationships which developed. The story made me think about a woman who looked after me when I was a child of 6 or7. Her name was Bertha. She taught me my first words in Sesotho. She loved me and looked after me.

One day, she was gone. I was told that she had gone home and wasn’t coming back. S few days later, she appeared, nervously at the gate with a gift for me. It was a vest, wrapped in giftwrap. She said I should take it, and not tell my mother she had given it to me. And when I wore it, I should think of her.

I found out many years later, that our lodger, a certain “Mr Page” had raped Bertha, while we all on holiday. Bertha had laid a change – and that is what got her fired.
My mother and father were good people. Simple people. They were also deeply racist. That was all they really could be, with relatively little education and exposure and living in a system designed to make them so. When the chips were down they would protect their own, no matter what the morality of the issue, no matter consequences.

That is what this book is about. The many consequences.

Death, be not proud

2010-03-23T19:32:00.004+02:00

As a teenager, I used to earn a couple of Rand during school holidays, by playing the organ at the local crematorium. Yes, I admit, on the scale of things, it was a somewhat odd thing to do. I mean, after all,most of my friends were working as packers in the local Checkers. One or two of them had holiday jobs at the local movie house. Me? I played the organ for funerals.

It was pretty good money, for doing relatively little. I could virtually play “Abide with me” in my sleep. Handel’s Largo I could have done blindfolded and with someone tickling my feet. There were relatively few surprises. The Priest or Minister would usually be the only person singing along and the services were relatively short – never more than half an hour. So I could usually end up with six or seven services a day and pay was for each individual funeral – so I was pretty much in clover.

I took a book along to read during the sermons. I wore a sad expression on my face. That was all I needed to do. Except on one day.

On this day, the undertaker asked me if I wouldn’t mind helping carry one of the bodies into the chapel, because the trolley had broken, or something. I was sixteen. I was happy playing the organ and ignoring the coffin. I was not used to schlepping bodies around. But I agreed. He made it sound as though it was the most normal thing in the whole world – which, of course, for him, it was!

I was surprised by the weight of the body. How four of us battled to carry the coffin. And I was completely overwhelmed by something else, which I had really not been prepared for – the smell of death. Even with the overpowering scent of flowers on the coffin, it was there. It was unmistakeable.

The undertaker noticed my reaction. “Oh, sorry!” he said, “This one isn’t too fresh”. I reeled. I had not expected such a casual approach to the issue. “Yes!” sniggered one of the others, “Maybe we need to get an air freshener or something. They are going to notice, for sure!”

Last Good Friday, I attended the service at my local parish church, St Michael’s Observatory. It was my first experience of a really high Catholic Good Friday service. My upbringing has been much more in the tradition of preaching on the seven last words from the cross – which, both when I was preaching on them and when I was listening to someone else doing the preaching, almost always left me feeling a little like it was me that was being crucified. So, the service at St Michael’s was, in some aspects, completely new.

It began on entry into the church. From the doorway to the High Altar was a completely unexpected riot of colour! Rose petals had been scattered thickly in the aisle. (I subsequently discovered that this is normal practise where there is a procession of the Blessed Sacrament – it is nothing I had ever seen before!)

But the effect was astonishing. This rampant shock of colour against the stark bleakness of the undressed stone church. And it is not only the sense of sight which is assaulted. It is also the sense of smell. The perfume of roses - heady, overwhelming, intoxicating. Almost too much to take in.

And the silence. Heavy. Solemn. Profound.

Suffice to say, it was one of the most moving and profound services I have ever experienced, in my life. The music, the words of the liturgy, the readings and the solemnity had me, at one point, in tears. (Now, believe me, that is no great feat – I cry in “Bambi” - but still… ).

I was moved, profoundly. And one of the memories which those scattered rose petals brought back to me was my first experience of carrying a coffin. Of flowers used to mask the smell of death. Of my first realization that one day, undertakers would, most likely, be carrying my body, in a coffin, too.

Good Friday brings us all, if we will let it do so, to that profound moment. The moment when our world goes dark and our senses are no more and our bodies are carried to their place of decay. At that point, we can if we choose to, smell the roses. Smell the roses.

The conundrum that is Winnie Mandela

2010-03-22T20:40:00.004+02:00

The Federal Theological Seminary, in Imbali, Pietermaritzburg, was an interesting institution. All the churches which sent students there saw it as a hotbed of political activism and theological radicalism and students which emerged from it, were regarded by their churches, routinely, with huge amounts of suspicion at best. Or awe, at worst.

The fact is, it was fairly middle-of-the-road. It had some theological greats in its history, but it also had dreadful bigots and dreary, self-seeking conservatives. The really radical figures which had passed through its portals, had long since left, by the time I got there. The seminary continued in their glory, while demonstrating very little of their courage and intellectual acumen. It was, in many ways, a fairly sad place. A place which pretended to be progressive, but acted out all the petty divisions of the mainline churches and where even the mildest excursions into progressive theology was shown a fair amount of disapproval.

But at the same time, some of the students were committed struggle people. They worked hard in the underground structures. They were sometimes arrested – causing panic in the rest of the student population, who would then resort to fervent prayer and concern, furrowed brows and occasional baskets of food delivered to the local jail.

One year, the Seminary did what everyone thought was a really radical thing. We invited Winnie Mandela to speak at the graduation. Now let me say immediately, that in the scope of things, at the time, it WAS a big thing. Immediately the security police became more interested than usual. The students got so worked up about it, that it seemed to me that some of them might need medication. The lecturers started positioning themselves, either as to who would be introducing her, or who would be welcoming her. The conservatives, and the would be radicals alike were swept up in the excitement of the event.

She kept us all waiting for about three hours. But did we mind? Not at all. Because the Mother of the Nation was visiting the Seminary. Did we mind that she looked either drugged or drunk when she eventually did appear? Not at all! She was the Mother of the Nation, after all. Did we even comment on the fact that she talked the biggest load of unprepared twaddle when she got up to speak? Why would we? The Mother of the Nation was speaking. And many of the students themselves were steadfastly resisting theological education because of the havoc they knew it would play with their prejudices.

In her speech, she revealed all the prejudices, all the conservatism and all the bigotry of someone who is not theologically educated (and I am talking in a theological context here). The students, most of them also bigoted, prejudiced and conservative, loved and adored her.

I was reminded of this, because a short time ago, our newspapers were filled with outrage at some of the things which Winnie has been saying (apparently a very long time ago – like August last year!). Mostly, the papers have been flabbergasted by her saying that Nelson Mandela, her former husband and soon to be Saint, had sold the poorest, (who are almost always black) – down the river. (Shock and horror!). The blogs, the newspapers, the twits and the airwaves all played in concert a symphony of disgust and reprobation. She was unhinged, resentful, way off-the-mark and easily dismissed as a loony tune. More than anything she was disrespectful to her former husband. And that is a sin of huge proportions. There is probably no forgiveness to be found. This time she has gone too far. Oh yes, she also called Desmond Tutu a cretin for forcing her to appear before the Truth and Reconciliation commission, which he headed.

I saw also, using Fatima Meer’s funeral as her stage, she has lashed out at the press, claiming that she never gave the Evening Standard any interview at all and spent a huge amount of time doing damage control from it.

Well, I suppose that is what happens when you have two personae – one for public consumption and the other for private. Because everything she seems to have said in the non-interview was for apparently only for private consumption. Just a pity the person to whom it was said was partially involved in a newspaper

Whatever the real reason, it looks as though she did actually say those things, not imagining that they were going to appear down the track in a newspaper. And for that reason, I think we should look at them a little more carefully.

Is it true, we need to ask ourselves, that her former husband, Nelson Mandela sold the poor down the river? What message did he think he was giving when he received his Nobel Peace Prize with his former captor? Is it not the case that the riches of the country have circulated in a very controlled, very small pond?

I don’t see anything particularly off-the-wall about that. It is what most of the people I mix with say all the time. They just don’t say it in print or in an interview.

The question is, are the things she said true or not?

Much as one may not like her, Winnie Mandela is far from stupid. She may be pig-headed. She may even be profoundly unwise to say the things she says - but she has never given a ten cent piece for public opinion. She may be a liar and she may even be guilty of most of the things she has been accused of. But one thing is for certain. No-one in the country is able to articulate, as she can, the general mood of the people. (And by “the people”, I mean those who are mostly excised from the general sway of political decision-making and power.)

And the reason for this is that wherever people are suffering, Winnie Mandela is there. And this is something they remember. And this is the reason they take her into their confidence. It doesn’t matter about her dubious history. It doesn’t matter that she was convicted of various crimes. The fact is, she cares about the poor – or at the very least – appears to care about them.

Did things change fundamentally for the poor when Mandela took over the reins of state? It is perfectly obvious that the nature of the political settlement required that virtually nothing would change in relation to the ownership of wealth. That was the point of Mandela accepting the Nobel Peace Prize with his former captor, FW de Klerk.

The effects of that settlement, on the poor, is that their economic situation remains dire, 16 years into democratic government. That, I am afraid, is the truth. It is a pity Winnie Mandela appears as unable to admit to telling it, as she was to her deeds before the courts and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It is a pity, because it appears to be the truth, nonetheless.

Precious - a really difficult experience

2010-03-21T06:25:00.006+02:00

Mo'Nique as the Mother in "Precious"

I could not help wondering, while watching this movie, about the story behind Gabourey Sidibe herself - the person who plays “Precious” in the film. Because, I suppose, that is the point behind this rather harrowing film.

Our society looks at a fat person, and judges them fairly mono-chromatically, against the backdrop of acceptably thin people. They are almost never judged on their own terms.

The film is about Precious’ “own terms”. About the fact that she was raped repeatedly by her father. It is about the extreme and extraordinary violence of her mother. About the shocking realities of the kind of circumstances in which she grew up. And about the titanic struggles she engaged in to take herself out of those horrific circumstances. It is about the fact that there was no-one to protect her when she most needed it.

To see her in the street, she would present as only one thing, in the kind of society which we term “normal”. You would see her as fat. Perhaps, you might also see her as “black” and fat. (Let me not disengage here. Let me not say “you”. Let me say me. I would see her thus).

And to do so would be to radically miss the person she is – or the person she has become, by being the person she is. Her size, like her colour, is at once her defining characteristic and the most irrelevant thing about her.

It was a difficult movie, not only because of its content. It was difficult because of the fact that Precious mumbles a lot, in an accent so strong that it is sometimes incomprehensible to a non-American. Her acting is fairly indifferent and she is, both willingly and unwillingly, completely overshadowed by her Oscar winning “mother” – who goes in real life by the curious name of Mo’Nique (no surname – like the author of the book on which the film is based - Sapphire. The book is called “Push” – also one word – and I would be grateful if someone would explain its relevance to me – along with Mo’Nique and Sapphire!)

The bleakness of the social setting is something extremely difficult to relate to, if that is not something you already know. It is a bit like watching Martians going about their Martian daily business. But I realized, while I was watching, that the fact that I have not experienced that kind of life doesn’t mean for a second that it is not commonplace. The grinding poverty. The collusion of silence. The unspeakable perennial horror of child abuse within the family. These are commonplace realities of our society, just as much, if not more so than in America.

What is surprising, is the generosity and tolerance of the middle-class teacher in the film. And that is a harsh criticism of the rest of us, who are not tolerant – who can’t (or don’t, or won’t) see through the fat and the illiteracy. The fact that the tolerant and sacrificial teacher also happens to be a Lesbian, was, to my mind, slightly gratuitous – besides the fact that it showed up how Precious’ mother could hold both moralistic positions on others, while deftly ignoring her own morally abandoned circumstances.

Mo’Nique’s acting in this role was quite extraordinary, both in her rage and in her silences. The horror, for me was that I could see some of her anger mirrored in some of my own performances on the home front. I could hear snatches of myself, bits and pieces in her dismissive sarcasm, in the way she sneered. It wasn’t in the overt stuff. Not in the “get yer Muthafuking fat arse down here” stuff. No, it was in the kind of harassment of accusatory questions, which a parent will pile up, one on top of the other, reducing the child to silence. And suddenly, there it is, spewing from your mouth. There you recognise the echo of words and phrases your parents used, and which were used on them, presumably by their parents. But even worse, I really battled to see anything of myself in the kind, understanding, yet highly focussed teacher that was set in counterposition to the brutal mother. That is who I would have liked to identify with. But sadly, not.

Much as one may not like it and much as one may want to act out a different parental role, the truth is, your parents rise from the dead in you. Both for her mother (and for me) that kind of thing lies waiting in your synapses. What is extraordinary beyond measure, if that it did not rise up in her.

I could identify with Mariah Carey, who played the social worker. Ever so slightly prissy, trying not to be judgemental, deeply professional. She managed to be professional, yes, but she was also completely ineffective. It was the school mates. It was the children of the incest. It was sheer character and courage that got Precious through it all. The social worker had only one thing to offer – the threat or the withdrawal of the welfare cheque. If that were to be removed from her arsenal, she had nothing to offer. And all the cover-up games, the wigs, the children bouncing on the knee to appease her and her cohorts, were paper-thin in the face of what was really there and what she and the system managed to miss completely.

So, it is a difficult movie for me. Not least, because of the extraordinary levels of violence, but more because or the recognition in myself, of my own prejudices; my own “violence”; my own lack of care for others. That is not the kind of movie one can easily recommend.

Suicide - 11 years on

2010-03-07T22:14:00.006+02:00

Every year, around this sort of time, I start to get jittery. When I take in the date, it all starts to become clear as to what the cause is. The 2nd of March is the day my former lover, Brian, killed himself.

It was a gruesome business. And his death was as dramatic as his life. At the time, we were, curiously, living apart. Me in East London, acting as Land Claim’s Commissioner for a while; he in Pietermaritzurg. We would meet, every now and again, as schedules allowed, at our home in Johannesburg.

Previously Brian had worked for Rentokil, but now he had grand designs of running his own business. I subsequently found that this business wasn’t working at all. But despite this, he had delusions of grandeur. He lived in a dreary little garden flatlet near the university in Pietermaritzburg, and to pay for his staff and his own lifestyle, he started pimping himself out through adverts in the newspapers, going under the name “Steve”.

This shocked me, a little, when I found out about it after his death, but it didn’t surprise me. I was a bit concerned about the HIV factor and when I heard about rumours to that effect after his death, I went around to all the local pharmacies, to try to discover whether or not he had been on anti-retrovirals or not. It was a fruitless task, which led me nowhere.

Brian, in a fit of madness really, had set up the suicide event, so that I would be the first person to find him. He was hanging from one of the gum tree rafters of our thatch, on a dog lead. And I suppose it is as he would have wanted it - that I would never get that image out of my head.

I went into immediate therapy, firmly resolved that I was not going to give up my house because of the spectre which his death presented. It was his choice, I rationalised, not mine. So I refused to leave my house, where we had lived for the past 7 years and where he had chosen to hang himself. His last message to me, which out of some kind of embarrassment, or projectile judgement on my part, I hid from the police for a while. It read something like this: “Now you can have all the things you have always wanted - the house, the car etc”. and that was that! No “And I really love you” or “I’m sorry it has to end like this’. But there it was.

These are the raw memories to the event. As I said, I went into trauma therapy immediately. My therapist was an Afrikaner woman, who was married to a Chinese man. In the days when she must have married him, when Apartheid was rampant, this must have been an extremely radical thing to do. She was mild mannered, but extremely clear and forthright. She was also a person who could show a genuine sense of understanding and compassion.

Her major work was with perpetrators of violence. With the people who had tortured and killed people during the apartheid era, in particular. I once asked her how she managed to cope psychologically with this. How did she deal, day after day with these most vile criminals, who had, through their actions, inflicted the most terrible pain on others. Her answer was startling. She said, “I just keep on thinking, that person could be me”.

For a long time, from that moment on, that thought haunted me. I wondered if it was possible for me to also be a perpetrator of violence. I felt myself, in my partner’s death, to be a victim of the violence of his death. I felt angry with him, shocked by what he had done to me. Could it possibly be that I too could be capable of the same thing?

Over the months of counselling which I had, I came to realise that it was certainly possible. Not because I am a particularly violent person, or a vengeful one, or a bad one. But simply because I am an ordinary one, who does, on occasion, make bad decisions.

One of the most interesting things which I discovered on my journey to calm, after the storm that was his death was that many suicides think that they will somehow “live” to extract the vengeance they seek. “I will kill myself, and then…”. They are incapable of seeing that there is no “…and then”.

Then I started with serious, uncontrollable and surprising flashbacks. The therapist started the fairly new and as yet untested EMDR (Eye Movement Desentsitization and Reprocessing therapy). It was a very strange process, involving you thinking about the things you were troubled by. And while you were doing that, she would wave her finger, or hand slowly backwards and forwards in front of your face.

I wept, I howled, I railed, I sat silently bubbling. But, my heavens, did it work! The terror had its sting drawn from it. I could face it again. I could walk away from it, momentarily. (It would be back, but some of the terror would be gone). And so it would lessen and grow weak. It would never disappear completely, but it would grow weaker.

It certainly worked. Within three months, I had no more terror attacks. Brian had closed all the curtains in the house and consequently,I could not allow curtains to b e closed, under any circumstances – for many months. But eventually, this too faded.All of the strange effects that violence and that shock had on me, have passed. What is left behind is a whisper and a trace. And fond memories of the man.

So, if you have had a trauma, of some kind – don’t get spooked by the idea of EMDR. It really works. Even for those with a serious attempt to keep their minds operating, without resort to what could so easily look like hocus-pocus. Because, as we all know, "There are more things on heaven and earth than you have ever dreamed of in your philosophy, Horatio”. This is one of them.

Nuclear Disaster

2010-02-22T21:01:00.005+02:00

Our house in Gerardsville - gosh how things have changed!)

We used to live in a lovely spot, called Gerardsville. No-one in Gauteng has ever heard of it. It is near the slightly better known Hennopsriver. It was thornveld. Our house looked out onto a faraway hill called Kopjie Alleen (literally “hillock standing on its own”) and further West, into the distance, onto the hills of Lanseria and the Cradle of Humankind.

We lived in a thatch house with an upstairs bedroom. I looked out of it one evening, to see that in the untouched land beyond my stone wall, someone had pitched a tent! I was a bit puzzeled and went to enquire, fearful that squatters might suddenly take it into their heads to spoil my remote and unspoilt bliss. It turned out to be inhabited by two of the strangest and most unlikely characters. Two Eastern Orthodox Monks!

I greeted them breezily, as though it was entirely the usual to find two fully robed, bearded Eastern Orthodox Monks camping in a tent on the borders of one’s property, and enquired as to what they might be doing there. My heart sank. They belonged to the Eastern Orthodox Church. They were “missionaries” and they had just purchased the property which bordered mine and were going to build a bloody great Monastery on it!

And they did just that. The chapel was odd looking, to the non-Eastern Orthodox eye. It had a great Christos Pantocrator image on the ceiling, with blazing eyes. (It was apparently painted by one of the nuns, who had to be given some kind of special dispensation to enter the Chapel and lie on her back for a couple of months on scaffolding while she painted Jesus.)

The Chapel had nowhere to sit and everything about the rest of the Monastery looked vaguely mid-Eastern European rural. Somewhere Borat or someone of similar ilk would be very much at home. They ploughed up the virgin soil and planted non-indigenous things in it. They rang bells at four o’clock in the bloody morning. The objected to my tenant, who lived at the other end of my property, (but closer to them) playing Madonna after they had gone into the Eastern version of the Greater Silence.

It was difficult. But it was when Leon noticed them burying dead brethren in the grounds of the monastery – in a completely dolomitic area – that he suggested we start looking for somewhere else to live. That was the one problem.

The other, I had noticed soon after moving into the area. It was signs which were put up on the few stop-signs that there were (in the absence of lamp-posts, about a meeting which was going to be held at the Tusker’s Arms, on a Saturday afternoon, to discuss how to stop the PBMR. Now for those of you who may not know, the PBMR stands for the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor – and it was a grand scheme of the government which was intended to end South Africa’s impending energy woes.

I and a friend, who knows about such stuff, went to the meeting. It was one of those hot wintery afternoons on the Highveld. The Tusker's Arms had the overwhelming smell of stale ale. It seemed to infect everything. The wooden bar stools, the fake leather couches, the curtains, the floor the ceiling.

There a somewhat rag-tag bunch of anti-nuclear activists, and one or two locals, listening with increasing horror to the details of what it was all going to cost; what the impact would be; what the risks would be of trucks trundling along the R511, past one of the fastest growing townships in South Africa, carrying nuclear waste for disposal God knows where.

Then we heard from a smug, self-satisfied representative of Pelindaba, the plant where the PMBR would be housed. We heard how this was the safest option for energy in the whole wide world and how we didn’t have any other realistic options and how everything else would be, in the long run, less efficient and more expensive.

Between 2006 and 2010, the PMBR received a mere R7.2 billion from the state, according to the recent issue of the Mail and Guardian (19 -25 Feb 2010). PMBR was a public private partnership (PPP) between nuclear industry players and the government.

Last week, that was dropped to R11.4 million for the next three years (effectively about plus minus R3.5 million per annum). Approximately 600 or the 800 employees are about to be retrenched. Effectively, the PMBR is dead.

Apologies for the fruitless and wasteful expenditure of R7.2 billion are eagerly awaited by all of us, who sat that dreadful day, in the Tusker’s Arms, being fed a load of nuclear bullshit.

Jesus in tap shoes

2010-02-20T08:00:00.006+02:00

“Infecting the City” is a novel programme of public Art, which Spier funds on a yearly basis for Cape Town. One of the items interested me especially, and luckily was outside the Michaelis Art Gallery on Greenmarket Square, which is about 10 steps away from where I work.

So, I stood in the sun, with a small crowd of mostly young, “alternative” sorts of people. We were looking at the entrance of the Gallery, which has some nice steps, a covered area and columns on either site. Between the columns had been mounted Beezy Bailey’s two life sized bronze pieces which are part of the performance. Like most of his work, they are quirky and strange. A man with long hair and a beard, in a loincloth, with stick-thin legs, arms outstretched, in high heels, and obviously doing some kind of dance.

The performance started, and out of the double doors of the gallery appeared a man with false beard, long hair and wearing a loincloth and in tap shoes. It was unmistakeably meant to be Jesus. Whereas the bronzes were white, this Jesus was black, young, slightly rounded of figure and camp as a row of pink tents.

He danced to a suped-up version (sometimes breaking into rap!) of “Lord of the Dance”, with words written by Sydney Carter. It was a short piece, lasting no more than 5 minutes. I was extremely interested to watch the crowd. They clapped enthusiastically at the end and some of them jigged along with the beat in a supportive, sort of approving way, during the performance.

Before the performance, I had asked one of the organisers where “Infecting the City” got their funding from. “Spier, and only Spier”, was his response. I asked him what the reaction to the piece had been. He said that they had received a whole lot of hate mail from “Christians”.

Of course it was predictable that they should get hate mail from “Christians”, but it got me thinking about a whole lot of things. When Sydney Carter wrote “Lord of the Dance” in 1963, it was partly inspired by Jesus and partly by a statue of Shiva as Nataraja . It was an adaptation of Joseph Brackett's "Simple Gifts", and he intended it as a tribute to Shaker music.

"I did not think the churches would like it at all”, he said later. “I thought many people would find it pretty far flown, probably heretical and anyway dubiously Christian. But in fact people did sing it and, unknown to me, it touched a chord ... Anyway, it's the sort of Christianity I believe in."

"I see Christ as the incarnation of the piper who is calling us. He dances that shape and pattern which is at the heart of our reality. By Christ I mean not only Jesus; in other times and places, other planets, there may be other Lords of the Dance. But Jesus is the one I know of first and best. I sing of the dancing pattern in the life and words of Jesus. Whether Jesus ever leaped in Galilee to the rhythm of a pipe or drum I do not know. We are told that David danced (and as an act of worship too), so it is not impossible.”

Now, I know that “Lord of the Dance" is an extremely popular song in both the mainstream churches and in the Evangelical tradition. I can only imagine that some of the hate-mail which the organisers of the Exhibition received, was from people who themselves, at some point of their lives have sung “Lord of the Dance”. I can only wonder at what they were thinking when they were singing the song!

I can remember very clearly, when I was growing up in a tending-towards-Evangelical Anglican Church in Johannesburg, singing another of Sydney Carter’s hymns “Standing in the rain” (1965). It had a very catchy tune and we used to sing it often. However, verse 4 read as follows:

Christ the Lord has gone to heaven
One day he'll be coming back, sir
In this house he will be welcome
But we hope he won't be black, sir.

This verse was routinely omitted in my church. Because many of the congregation indeed fervently hoped he wouldn’t be black. Indeed, the mere possibility of him being black was deemed offensive in the extreme!

Recently I found some amazing pictures on a blog I follow called – Jesus in love blog. Both pictures are by photographer Bill Burch. The one is Transvestite Jesus. The other is even more strange, I think, which, if I understand it correctly, is cocking a snoot in the direction of some feminists, as well as the more general swathe of patriarchists. It is called Fur Coat Jesus. And there is Jesus, as a woman, standing in a fur coat on the cross.

One of the readers of the blog describes them as “disturbing”. I suppose many, if not most religious people would find them “disturbing”. They are certainly not the norm!

But the point all of them are making, this and the Beezy Bailey exhibition – one amongst many points - is a relatively simple one. Any and all pictures of Jesus are necessarily interpretive. What mainstream “orthodox”, or even so-called “Bible believing” Christians may see as the “right” kind of picture of Jesus, others could find offensive, disturbing, or blasphemous. Either that or is Jesus so fully and so comprehensively defined in patriarchal, hetero-normative terms, that nothing else is even remotely or conceptually (or even artistically) possible? I fear that might be nearer the
real truth.

Dancing Jesus - Performance Art - Greenmarket Square, Cape Town

2010-02-17T21:11:00.009+02:00

As part of the "Infecting the City" public arts festival, I saw today Beezy Bailey's short piece "Dancing Jesus" which involves two life-sized bronze sculptures and a tap dancing, high heel wearing Messiah, doing his thing to a very contemporary (almost rap) version of "Lord of the Dance".

I spoke to one of the organisers, who said that they had received a lot of hate mail from "Christians". Isn't that ironic? I wonder if those same "Christians" sing "Lord of the dance"? And if they do, I wonder what they think it might mean!

Lord of the Dance by Sydney Carter

I danced in the morning when the world was begun,
And I danced in the moon and the stars and the sun,
I came down from heaven and I danced on the earth;
At Bethlehem I had my birth.

Refrain:
Dance, then, wherever you may be;
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,
And I'll lead you all, wherever you may be,
And I'll lead you all in the dance, said he.

I danced for the scribe and the pharisee,
But they would not dance and they would not follow me.
I danced for the fishermen, for James and John
They came with me and the dance went on.

Refrain

I danced on the Sabbeth and I cured the lame;
The holy people said it was a shame.
They whipped and they stripped and they hung me on high;
They left me there on a cross to die.

Refrain

I danced on a Friday when the sky turned black
It's hard to dance with the devil on your back.
They buried my body and they thought I'd gone;
But I'm the dance and I still go on.

Refrain

They cut me down and I leapt up high;
I am the life that will never, never die;
I'll live in you if you'll live in me
I am the Lord of the Dance said he.

Refrain

Breakfast with Nelson Mandela

2010-02-14T19:10:00.007+02:00

Me and the late Harry Gwala, in front of Nelson Mandela, back in the early 1990s in Pietermaritzburg

A few months after Nelson Mandela’s release, he came on a visit to the Kwazulu-Natal region, to assess for himself what was going on in relation to the terrible violence which was wracking the province. I was, at the time, working quite closely with Harry Gwala, who was also a Robben Island prisoner and, by virtue of that, the de facto leader of the ANC in the area.

Gwala was an amazing, albeit flawed man. He suffered from a terrible degenerative disease, which meant that he had no use of both his arms. You would think this would be something of a limitation, but it wasn’t. He was an orator like none I have ever heard. He could get a crowd raging, or weeping, or quiet and obedient, within a few sentences.

He was an unashamedly unreformed Stalinist. (In fact, I would sometimes sit turning pages of this or that work by Stalin, which he would be reading at the time). He held Stalin and Shakespeare on probably the same level – both with deep reverence and he would quote both, from memory and with the same amount of passion.

He was also a warlord, I’m afraid. He had an outright hatred of Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s Inkatha movement – which was a breakaway Zulu-based movement in Kwazulu-Natal, which was friendly with (and many would say supported by) the apartheid state. He did not believe that talking to them would do any good and he believed that we, in the ANC, should fight fire with fire. His warlike stance was, undoubtedly, a contributing force in the escalating violence of the time.

But he called Mandela to come and visit the province. And he came. He stayed at Harry Gwala’s tiny house. It was all supposed to be fairly low key. He wanted to meet people and get to know what was happening. What we did not expect was the kind of support the man had. “Mike”, Harry Gwala said to me, “we have a secret weapon here”.

So, we drove Nelson Mandela all over Pietermaritzburg. Up hill and down dale. We drove him into every township, and wherever we went, he was greeted with crowds of people. Sometimes, it was almost impossible to actually drive the cars. People were singing, chanting, shouting, waving. People were crowding around the vehicle. People were crying. People were laughing. It was indescribable.

Early one morning, during the visit, it may have been 6 o’clock, I got a telephone call from Harry Gwala. “Mike”, he said, “I want you to come here now”. Being the naturally obedient type, I jumped into my clothes and ran to organise another priest to say Mass at the seminary, where I was teaching. I jumped into the car and rushed to Gwala’s house, which was not too far away.

I was met at the gate by Gwala. “I have to go somewhere urgently”, he said. “Please keep Madiba (Mandela’s clan name) company for breakfast”. Needless to say, I was a bit taken aback.

As I entered the lounge of Gwala’s house, I could see Mandela sitting, with his back to the window, dressed in a lounge suit. Gwala escorted me in and introduced me to Mandela. He did not rise to meet me, but shook hands very warmly, as though I was an old friend, and asked me to sit with him. (There was no dining-room in the house. Breakfast was going to be served on our laps and in the lounge). There I was, sitting, alone, with the mythical Nelson Mandela. Here was the man who had been in prison for 27 years; who had made that immortal speech from the dock about being prepared to die in the fight against white domination and against black domination; the man who picture none of us were allowed to see until very recently; the man on whom the hopes of millions of people in the country depended. There I was, about to have breakfast with him.

We spoke for quite some time. It was mostly on the situation in Kwazulu-Natal. And I could tell, even then, that his view of the world was one very different indeed from Harry Gwala. But there was one incident, during that breakfast, which remains indelibly etched in my memory.

At one point, one of the women who had been cooking breakfast in the kitchen came in and whispered in my ear, that there was someone who desperately wanted to see Mr Mandela. She addressed the request to me, out of a kind of reverence for Mandela himself – almost as though the use of a proxy was necessary in the face of such eminence.

I asked Mr Mandela, if he would mind meeting a young member of the ANC youth. He had no hesitation. “Of course!”, he said, “Of course!”. The message was relayed. Then, shuffling into the room, on his knees, with his eyes averted, came a boy, who could not have been more than 17 years old. He was on his knees, out of respect. He averted his eyes, because to look at the man would be too much of a disrespect for his person.

Mandela was holding a teacup full of tea. When he saw the youth come in, he passed the cup to me and, saying nothing, struggled to his feet, with a fair amount of difficulty. The youth was now terrified and started shaking. “I always stand in the presence of a young lion”, said Mandela. “Thank you for coming to see me”.

When I see the politicians of today, puffed up with too much food; expensive whiskey; and too much reverence being shown to them for their less than admirable persons, I remember this incident. I think I can say, without any doubt, that it changed me forever. I am pretty sure it had the same effect on that young boy.

Another great leader, (one whom I had the privilege of serving under as a priest), made the same point, in different words. Desmond Tutu said that we need to genuflect to our neighbours. Ah yes, these were really great leaders. How much they stand out and how sad the contrast with what we have today.

The violence of culture

2010-02-09T20:22:00.005+02:00

The other day, I glanced, casually over at the naked man, who was standing next to me’s gym bag – the way one does - (you know how we boys have to compare everything). And to my horror, I saw, lying amongst the aftershave, sweaty Jockeys and hairbrushes, a gun! It was a large looking gun in a leather holster, and it was lying at the bottom of his gym bag!

I shook my head in disbelief. I looked up at the naked man and then back at the gun. He glanced disinterestedly in my direction and went on dressing. I said “Is that a gun in your gym bag?”. He looked into the bag with some surprise, as though I was asking if it were, perhaps, a tortoise.

“Yes!” he said, followed by a silent “Duh! Of course it is a gun, you idiot! What did you think it was – a tortoise?”
“In the gym!?” I said, my voice rising the way it does when I am about to have a heart attack.
“In my gym BAG!” he responded aggressively, as though that solved everything.

I left the matter. I said nothing. I stared horrified at the bag and its extraordinary contents again and then I just carried on getting dressed. On my way out, I asked for one of those silly little cards to write down a complaint, (which never gets attended to, or answered in my long experience at Virgin Active). I asked whether Virgin Active had any policy about bringing guns onto the property. The unhelpful man at the desk didn’t know if there was any policy. When I asked him whether Virgin Active had any safe to lock the gun away, or any system to keep it safe. Or any sign anywhere prohibiting bringing guns into the gym. He said no, it didn’t.

I once made a suggestion, on another one of those placatory little suggestion cards which the gym provides to make you think something is going to be done about your issue , that Virgin Active provide condom dispensers in the change-rooms. After all, a healthy lifestyle is what a gym is all about, surely this would be a little thing to do, which could go a long way in making free condoms available in a closed and non-threatening environment. The smiling man who continuously asks me how I am, but doesn’t give a fig, stopped smiling briefly when he read my suggestion. He said he didn’t think “they” would allow it, because the gym was a family gym. So, condoms are not allowed, but guns are. It is a strange world we live in!

Indeed it is a strange world. It is a strange world where it is fine for dad to leave the house in the morning, on his way to the gym, with a gun strapped to his chest. It is a strange world where his partner sees that as normal. And, in an environment such as that, it is even stranger that a business seemingly dedicated to health, wellness and all those other good things, can simply ignore the fact that in the flimsiest of lockers, with the tiniest of locks, a gun can be left lying in a gym bag, unattended!

But that is now our culture. And the more we accept it, the more we remain silent in the face of it, the more it gains power and credence and the more it becomes normative. That is the tyranny of culture. Because “that is what we do”, it is allowed to go unchallenged. So, we can publicly torture bulls to the point of death, before we stab them in Spain, or we can tear them apart with our bear hands in Kwazulu-Natal – because “that is what we do”.

We allow the thing to gain a power of its own, because we are too feeble to call it what it is – ghastly and unacceptable, whether or not, it has the veneer of “culture” hiding its ugliness. The man in the gym, with his gun lying in his gym bag undoubtedly felt it was his “right” to carry a gun. One could say, I suppose, that carrying a gun is now part of his “culture”. He would undoubtedly argue that there is a prevailing “culture of violence” in our society and that he is simply trying to protect himself. But the violence of his “culture” - of gun-owning and gun-carrying and gun-leaving-lying-in gym-bags - simply adds to it, and allows it to normalize and continue.