SAUDI LEADERSHIP ON LIFE SUPPORT: Okay, call me a softie, but every so often I do feel sorry for those pampered little rich boys (and girls) called the Saudi royal family… The only family on the planet, by the way, to have a whole nation-state named after them. Well, maybe it’s something to do with them never having actually been forced to develop a work ethic, Protestant or otherwise. This idea that merely because of massive mineral wealth the rest of the world will come flocking to your doorstep looking for work or handouts.
But now, they’re in serious trouble.
As I see it, the trouble is this. The King, Fahd, has by common consent been almost completely out of it for (at least) the past eight years. But no-one’s had the decency to pull the plug on his many life-support systems, thus enabling a decent handover to the designated Crown Prince (and currently, the effective ruler), Abdullah.
Abdullah’s almost as geriatric as his elder half-brother, but has more of his wits about him.
So why hasn’t Abdullah or someone close to him pulled the plug on the old guy? Because they can’t figure out who, among the “senior royals” the NEXT Crown Prince (and therefore, the next in line to the throne) should be.
For the 30-plus years I’ve been watching the Saudi situation, it’s been assumed that next after Abdullah would come Sultan… And then, there’s a whole raft of further brothers and half-brothers– all of them the sons of the incredibly fecund King Abdul-Aziz Ibn Saud.
But by all accounts Abdullah can’t stand Sultan. And I guess he’s unable to impose his own choice on the situation.
Then, beyond that, if this succession rule of continuing down the row of brothers and half-brothers to the very last surviving son of Abdul-Aziz carries on, that might take a further 25-30 years of Extremely Geriatric Rule in the Kingdom. I think the youngest son of A-A is now in his mid 60s? And then, every single advance known to medical science that prolongs the life of older people is available to the senior “citizens” in THIS particular family. We are talking, the cutting edge of human longevity there…
Which may not, alas, be the best thing for the many other citizens of that troubled land.
Actually, many senior members of the NEXT generation are now themselves looking incredibly aged. Saud Ibn Faisal looks older now than his father did at the time of his assassination in 1975. And the luster has really gone off Bandar Ibn Sultan’s once-polished public image…
But the problem is, once you do move down to this “next” generation– I’ll not say “younger”, because some of them aren’t– whose descendants win the big prize at that point??? Hah! It’s because the family hasn’t wanted to decide that question definitively at any point over the past decades that they’ve carried on with this brother-to-brother thing.
There is something to be said, maybe, for British-style rules of strict primogeniture. (If not necessarily for the quaint old British custom of a newly enthroned king having all his younger brothers strangled in their beds.)
But that marrying-and-begetting strategy that made so much political sense for old King Abdul-Aziz as he gamboled priapically around his kingdom in the early years of the 20th century marrying strategically– one wife from this family, one from that region, one from that city; tying the new in-laws into loyalty to the centralized state by virtue of their concern for the resultant joint offspring– well, it may have made sense back then. Now, 100 years later, the results look quite dysfunctional.
So here’s a startling idea. Instead of having a centralized monarchical system, how about making this nation-state–whatever it may end up being called; and maybe “Saudi” Arabia is as good a name as any–into a state of all of its citizens?? One in which the joys and perils of sovereignty are shared equally among all of its people??
So far, the commonly held view has been that “ruling” over Saudi Arabia is something that confers only huge benefits. Oh, in the form of family-held monopolies (including over a good chunk of state revenues).
Right now though, I bet that if I were a senior royal, I would see the position of being “King” as also one involving incredibly tricky and dangerous decisions.
So okay, Fahd and Abdullah– go ahead– share those risks around! Democratize!! Do (at last) what you’ve vaguely been promising to do for so long!!!
You’ve got to admit, democratizing would also get you all out of the bind of deciding which particular Saudi royal gets to be the next Crown Prince, and which branch of the family walks away with the “big prize” in the next generation. Looks like a win-win situation to me. Or am I missing something?
INTO THE VIOLENCE CYCLE:
INTO THE VIOLENCE CYCLE: So here’s how it goes. Leader X (call him George Bush, call him Ariel Sharon, call him whatever you want) perceives that his nation/group/whatever is experiencing a security problem. He proposes a large-scale application of violence as a way to end this problem. He applies the violence. The problem doesn’t stop. In fact, it gets worse. (Duh! This is what srategic-affairs experts call “the security dilemma”.)
So our intrepid and wise (!) leader needs to explain the fact that his group’s security problem continues, and has gotten worse. That is, that the “solution” he earlier proposed to the problem has notably failed to deliver what it promised. How does he do that? Why, easy! He argues that the fact of the continuation of the security problem–despite the wise measures he took to end it– just proves that “the opponent” is even more heinous and threatening than anyone had realized.
Therefore, even more violence is needed to deal with him!
And so it goes… Escalation piled upon escalation. Casualties, grief, and human needs shamelessly exploited for what becomes (if it wasn’t already) a highly ideological agenda. On both sides.
How to get out of this spiral of violence? That’s one of the things I am looking at in my current project on “escaping from violence” in Africa. In Mozambique, the escape from the violence of the civil war (which came after 500 years of ruthless colonial violence) took the relentless grinding-down of both the “sides” to the civil war to the point that mass starvation and pauperization was already a present reality. And then, it took some smart and compassionate diplomacy from church bodies and the UN to get the two sides to a peace agreement.
In South Africa, according to Fanie du Toit of Cape Town’s Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, it took a deep pragmatism from elites in both core communities (“black” and “Afrikaner”) as well as the extremely smart and disciplined leadership of the black rebel movements. (Some black South Africans with whom I spoke argued that their side’s ability to maintain a small military/violent component in their movement was also important in bringing the Afrikaners to the negotiating table.)
So what will prevent George Bush and his advisors from exploiting the fact of the latest anti-Western and anti-Saui bombings in order to justify launching even more belligerent and violent policies against targets in the Muslim world?
How do we pull him back from plunging the whole world into the abyss of a longterm inter-group confrontation that almost inevitably, if it continues, will take on an increasingly “religious”, Christian-vs.-Muslim aspect?
Violence begets violence. There are many, many better ways to build a world safe for all than trying to build the “security” of one small group of people on the insecurity of others. Maybe someone should introduce Pres. Bush to some of those pragmatic Afrikaners.
South Africa really is, in many ways– in the struggles it continues to face against poverty and inequality as well as in the steps it has already taken towards political democratization and multiculturalism– a microcosm of the situation of the whole world. And the Afrikaners have great lessons to share with the “powers that be” in the global west about what has worked better to preserve their people’s sense of security: violence, or respectful negotiation and problem-solving.
For more than 40 years, from 1948 through 1990, the Afrikaners tried to apply imposed solutions to their non-white fellow-citizens, backed up by the massive application of physical and administrative violence. It didn’t “work”. Oh yes, apartheid’s policies worked in that they inflicted untold misery, deaths, maimings and massive disruptions on the lives of millions of black and other South Africans, as well as on millions in neighboring countries (Namibia, Angola, Mozambique, etc) who were the target of the apartheid regime’s deliberate and largescale destabilization campaigns. But they didn’t “work” in the sense of bringing to Afrikaners themselves an abiding sense of security and wellbeing…
Violence, as I said, has this strong tendency to stoke the flames of further violence.
AFTER THE TRIP:
AFTER THE TRIP: So this is how it is. Ever since I took the decision, back in about February, that Iraq war or no Iraq war I would proceed with my research trip to Africa, I’ve been strongly focused on planning for and then undertaking the trip.
And now I’ve done it. It was great. But I have definitely been on an adrenalin low this week. I think that gradually I’m coming out of that. Getting my act together for all the great writing that lies ahead.
Such a lot of great stuff to be done. (I try to tell myself.) Starting with a piece for Al-Hayat about the District 6 Museum in Cape Town. What a great story to write about!
But other, huger, more devastating things are cascading through the Middle East. The bombings in Riyadh. Continuing messy aftermath in Iraq. So-called (destination-free) ‘road map’ coming unraveled, and more deaths in Gaza. I need to get my head back around all that stuff, too, even while I do the writing-up on Africa. Family stuff to look to, too. I guess I can do it. I always have.
CAPE TOWN (CONTD.):
CAPE TOWN (CONTD.): I’m writing this Saturday afternoon, a couple of hours before Leila and I need to leave for the airport at the end of our time here. What a beautiful city! We figured out fairly well how to get around on the train system. Today, we took a long walk from the Observatory district, where we’re staying, over to the UCT campus in nearby Mowbray. But we couldn’t take the cable-car ride up Table Mountain, because of high winds.
Well, Thursday morning we took the Robben Island tour, as highly recommended by many friends.
We had two tour guides. The first, who led us on the bussed part of the tour, left us with a determinedly upbeat message that, “Things like this musrt never happen again”. The second guide, who took us on the inside part of the tour, was himself a former prisoner, and gave us a sober account of his time there. Afterewards, I was able to catch a few words alone with him, and got his view of the whole TRC and amnesty process.
In the afternoon, we met a guy called Roger Friedman who covered the TRC as a journalist and has since done a lot of media work with Archbishop Tutu.
Yesterday (Friday), we started off by going by train to Rondebosch, two stops along the line, and then walking to something called the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation. I had had a longstanding appointment with its director, Charles Villa-Vincencio. But he was busy, so instead we met with his deputy, Fanie Du Toit. I was actually glad we could do that, as Fanie is himself a really interesting, thoughtful person. One of the things he talked about was coming of age as a young Afrikaaner, and how excited he’d been as a freshman at Stellenbosch university to be invited to join the Junior Broederbund; and some of the slightly glasnost-y things that were happening in the JB at that time (mid-1980s).
Then, we went to the Direct Action Center for Peace and Memory, where we had a quick meeting. Then we had a great lunch with Leslie Swartz, a professor of clinical psychology– currently at Stellenbosch, formerly at UCT– who has written a really intriguing book on “Culture and Mental Health.”
I had enjoyed Leslie’s book so much that I was afraid I’d be setting myself up for disappointment on meeting the actual person. But luckily, no! He talked really interestingly over a great, late lunch in a part of the city we hadn’t been to previously.
This morning, Hugo Van Der Merwe, who works here for the Center for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, came over to our B&B and we had a good final discussion with him.
The notebooks are full! I got so much great material– notes that (mainly) Leila took from our meetings, documentary materials that I gathered here, general impressions and ideas for how to push the project further forward. Now, I certainly have more than enough material from the three countries I’ve been to on this trip– as well as from my 2001 trips to Brussels, The Hague, Jo’burg and Maputo, and from last year’s trip to rwanda– that I certainly can start writing the “Violence and its Legacies” book once I get myself organized to do so.
Anyway– the next post on here will be from good old Charlottesville, Virginia. That’s where I’m headed now.
Home!
ALBIE SACHS AND OTHERS IN CAPE TOWN:
ALBIE SACHS AND OTHERS IN CAPE TOWN: Our first day in Cape Town was really productive and full. I’d been in touch for a while with the office of Albie Sachs, the long-time ANC leader who was the target of a car bomb in Maputo in the 1980s, and who now sits on South Africa’s Constitutional Court. On Tuesday, I finally got to speak to Albie himself, and he said there might be a chance we could meet yesterday (Wed.), at his beach-side place in/near Cape Town– provided I could get there early in the morning. Plus he could only give me 30 minutes…
Well, we got there– Leila and I– to the bus-stop in Clifton that he had designated. I called him from the cell. He said we should wait right there while he came up to fetch us. The housing on that cliffside above Clifton’s beaches is a confusing rabbit-warren, laced through with tiny well-concreted paths and steps. I don’t know how anyone moves furniture or building materials in or out! After we’d waited a few minutes, he emerged from one of the paths and led us down to his place.
When you meet Albie Sachs he holds out his left hand to greet you. The stump of his right arm hangs inside a shirt sleeve from his shoulder. That–and some other injuries– is what the car-bomb did to him. He has a crinkly though tired-looking smile. He took us down to his place, and we sat there, with him framed against stunning views of the Atlantic Ocean as I fired off my questions and he gave reflective, well-argued answers. He gave us considerably more than 30 mins. At the end, I asked if we could take photos. He was terrifically gracious and helpful about this, leading us out into a tiny courtyard to use the boldly painted mural out there as a ‘backdrop’ for the pictures.
As we left, I asked him if he could have ever imagined, back in the 1970s, say, that he would be occupying his present position and that the ANC would have won so much of what it wanted. He recalled that he had joined the movement back in the 1950s, and that the ANC at that time had been espousing a nonracial order in South Africa and had seemed to be making some progress… But then came the Sharpeville massacre of 1961 and the decades of harsh repression that followed it– years when he himself had had to go into exile and when many of his comrades were killed.
“But we always knew we would win,” he said with a quiet smile. “And then, at the beginning of the 1990s, our movement more or less picked up where we had left off in 1961. So yes, we lost three decades there. But we always knew we would win.”
… Leila and I walked back up to the road, still mulling over our incredible good fortune in having been able to meet such an inspiring and historic figure.
The taxi driver who had taken us there was still waiting. He then drove us along a seafront route to the District Six Museum near the center of town.
District Six was a near-in neighborhood of the city that until the late 1960s was a racially mixed neighborhood. In fact, our driver himself, Isgaak, had grown up there. He’s a Muslim of Malaysian origin, as many D6 residents were– but there were also numerous residents who under apartheid’s bizarre system of racial ordering were classified as ‘whites’, ‘blacks’, or ‘coloreds’.
One day in the late 1960s, the government issued an order that D6 was to be abolished, and all its residents dispersed to mono-racial residential districts– many of them very far from the city. The actual destruction of the district took place a few years later. Nearly every structure inside it was bulldozed. A small portion of the area was used to build a technical college, and the rest remained as a grassy inner-city wasteland. Former residents now had to commute many miles from their new homes to the jobs in the city center. More importantly, their historic and multicultural community had been disbanded.
In the early 1990s– after those three “wasted decades”– a Methodist church near D6 donated its premises to a group of former D6 residents who wanted to create the D6 Museum. It is a most amazing place that has become a focus for guarding the history of D6 as well as of the enormity of the forces that broke it up. It has also, evidently, served as a new community center for many of the former D6 residents, who are happy to gather in the museum to work there, to plan for new exhibits, or simply to get together and reminisce. (Some of that was going on in the coffee shop there as I sat there going over my notes.)
The main floor of the former church is now covered with a detailed street map of what D6 formerly was, with even the names of individual families marked in. Hanging from high up in the vaulted ceiling are huge cloth “scrolls” with embroidered on them representations of different aspects of the community’s former life. One such scroll simply has embroidered on to it messages that had previously been written on it in marker by former residents and some of the museum’s earlier visitors.
The museum uses many artefacts from the old district that have found their way here. Such as, many of the original street-name signs, now slightly rusted and chipped. Many of them have been incorporated into a tall virtual “tower” at one end of the church’s former worship space. Around the edge of the worship space, and along the galeries that run up above it are numerous small exhibits representing the lives of individuals and families, and the activities of community groups and well-loved community institutions.
Of course, I could not help thinking how wonderful it would be if Palestinians and Jews inside Israel could create such museums to mark the existence of some of the Palestinian towns, neighborhoods, and other communities that were wiped off the face of the earth– and their residents scattered– in 1948. Walid Khalidi and others have done something to preserve memories of those communities through the publication of books or other documenation. But a museum is so much more “living” as a way to preserve, reinterpret, and present such histories.
When we were there, there were constant groups of visitors coming in. Including at least one school group– youngsters in their early teens, mainly “black” but with many Indian-looking kids– girls and boys in neat uniforms who rushed around filling out worksheets and animatedly discussing the exhibits with each other.
I tagged onto the end of a tour group that was being shown round by museum “fixture” Noor Ibrahim, a former D6 resident who had contributed a lot–icluding many photos– to the collection with which the museum had started out. Most of the participants in the tour seemed to be white toursists.
What struck me most about Mr. Ibrahim’s presentation was the gentle but devastatingly “amazed” way in which he referred to the idiocies and brutalities of apartehid’s practicioners. His tome was often one of amazement and mockery…. “Yes, they divided people up into all these different groups. And everyone had to have identity cards which marked which of these groups they eblonged to… Can you believe this, ladies and gentlemen? And then look, here are pictures of the cards everyone had to have, with their racial group clearly marked on it… But only the blacks had to carry their passes all the time, 24 hours a day. And the black passes were called ‘dom-pass’– can you believe that? That means ‘a pass for a dumb person’. Can you believe they called them that?”
One of the most devastating things Mr. Ibrahim showed us was a large panel which swiveled around a vertical pole going down its middle. On one side was a large black and white picture of Richmond Street in D6, as it had appeared at the end of the 1960s. Mr. Ibrahim then slowly swivelled it arund to show a full-color picture of the exact same view, from the same spot, today. Where shops and houses had stood in the earlier photo, now only grass bew in the wind. All traces of the homes were gone.
Just before I left the tour-group, Mr. Ibrahim was telling them about the plans the government has been making to re-gather all D6s former residents and their descednants back into a rebuilt version of the community. “I am very excited!” he said “Very, very excited at the thought of coming back.”
Earlier, our driver, Isgaak, had said that his family, too, had discussed the prospect of him moving back to the rebuilt D6. “But my kids persuaded me not to go ahead with it,” he said. “They said that I would just be living in the past if I went back there. They said that they had grown up in our new neighborhood and have little interest in moving back. So I guess we won’t be going.”
… Well, that was District Six. Leila and I then spent a little more time looking around downtown Cape Town before we went for a late-lunch meeting with Mxolisi (‘Ace’) Mgxashe. Ace had been a reporter on the ‘Cape Argus’ before, in 1995, he took up a job in the research department of the TRC. A longtime supporter of the Pan-Africanist Congress, one of his first jobs was to investigate and draft the part of the TRC report that would deal with excesses committed by the PAC during the struggle years…
We had an interesting discussion, which I don’t have time to recap here. Afterwards, Ace took us walking through the huge ‘Golden Acres’ development around the city’s central train station and up to the rooftop central depot for the citys extensive system of minivan (combi) taxis. He found us the right combi to get in for Mowbray, the suburb that was our next destination. The combi had its full complement of 14 or 15 passengers, and it soon set off.
As we approached Mowbray, we asked the “conductor” who sits by the passenger door handling the 3-rand fares and drumming up business from the street if we could get off near the Maternity Hospital. There was some discussion among the passengers over the best place to do this, but one young woman took us in hand and told us with some detail how to get there. Where we were going was the Quaker Peace Center which is not far from the hospital. We arrived there only a little late for our meeting with its director, Jeremy Routledge.
No time to write much about that meeting, either. But afterwards, Jeremy did invite us to go to his home for dinner. We accepted. o as the meeting ended we climbed into his very small car; he stopped at a supermarket to pick up a few groceries; and in short order we were at his home.
Jeremy’s wife Nozizwe is a longtime ANC activist, now not only a parliamentarian but also South Africa’s Deputy Minister of Defense. (And a Quaker, too.) She has been in Pertoria most of this week– where they also have a flat. So I haven’t met her yet, and most likely won’t get to on this trip. But because of her position she alsdo gets allocated a government house in Cape Town, for her family to stay in, and for her to use when the parliament is in session here and all the government ministers have to be in Cape Town, not Pretoria. So that was the house we drove to. It was a large Cape Dutch-style house set in a lovely lawned garden guarded by a high wall and SAPS guards at the gate.
That evening we helped Jeremy cook dinner (well, Leila helped a lot more than I did); and then we ate it with Jeremy and his two sons in the dining-room of the house that was formerly home to apartheid-era Defense Minister P.W. Botha, among other famous and infamous former residents…
SOWETO AGAIN AND CAPE TOWN
SOWETO AGAIN AND CAPE TOWN: Actually, I think I’ve got it about Soweto. It’s not so much a set of disadvantaged suburbs of Johannesburg. It’s not so much an entire sister city. It’s more like a whole parallel universe out there.
Today we went back to the edge of Soweto once again. This time we were visiting “17 Shaft”, a project run by a former MK (ANC military) leader called Steve Corry– well that’s his present name, not his nom-de-guerre. The project provides skills training to former MK fighters and family members thereof. Steve himself wasn’t there, but we sat in his amazing office with one of his assistants who told us about the project and brought in an interesting ex-combatant to talk to us.
Steve Corry is white.
Anyway, 17 Shaft is located between three of Johannesburg’s enormous great goldmine slag heaps. Nicky, the woman who showed us round a bit, did say that when the wind blows the dust comes off them pretty badly…
We had also had a good meeting this morning with a political science professor who gave a very well-authenticated account of how the TRC’s failure to deal with issues in particular of violence between the ANC and Inkatha, in Kwa-Zulu-Natal, had left a nasty legacy of ANC-IFP violence in that province which has claimed >2,000 lives since 1994.
That’s an angle of the story here that is really of interest to my project.
We also had an interesting lunch today with our host here, Shirley Pendlebury, her colleague in the Wits Education School Penny Enslin, and our friend and colleague Peter Maselwa, who has been amazingly helpful during pur time in South Africa…
Anyway, this is a little random as a list. But the day has been full, and now we’re in Cape Town. The sea air smells great but we arrived when it was already dark. No idea where Table Mountain is in relation to us.
MORE ON SOWETO
MORE ON SOWETO: Yesterday I didn’t get to finish writing my account of our Sunday visit to and around Soweto with Emily Mnisi. Now, I’m in a hurry, but I want to bring this as up-to-date as possible. On Sunday, we had a traditional African lunch with Emily’s friends Ria and Charles. Then we went to drive around Soweto some with Emily, Ria, and Ria’s daughter Rudo. We went to Vilakasie Street– the only street in the world that is home (or former home) to two Nobel Peace Prize winners! We took a couple of quick pictures at Nelson Mandela’s home, which is now run as a museum by Winnie Mandela-Madikazela. (Desmond Tutu still lives in his house just down the street.)
We also tried to visit the Hector Pieterson Museum, which is at the site where 13-year-old Hector Pieterson was killed, on June 16 1976, at the beginning of the Soweto uprisings which soon spread like wildfire throughout the country and signaled the beginning of the end for the apartheid regime. But it was closed…
So yesterday, we had some time free in the afternoon and went back to the HPM. It was truly worth a visit. It only opened last year. It’s situated on a little knoll right in the middle of the Soweto neighborhood of Orlando West, and has many great presentations about the struggle for democracy here…. No time to write more…
We also had a really serendipitous meeting yesterday morning with Khoisan X (the former Benny Alexander, who under that earlier name was Secretary-General of the Pan-Africanist Congress during the crucial period of the negotiations that ended apartheid.) Luckily, he had some spare time right when we met him. My friend and driver Peter Maselwa had recognized Khoisan and asked if we could sit and do an interview for the project, and Khoisan agreed. So while he ate breakfast in a cafe in a shopping mall here, he gave us all these really interesting and helpful recollections about how the different parties had addressed the issue of amnesty during the ll-party negotiations– a crucial part of what I need to learn for my project.
Sitting in a shopping mall in the blazing sun. Amazing.
Today we have a few really interesting things to do here, then this evening we’re flying to Cape Town.
Last night I quickly wrote a column for the CSM about Mozambique. It should run Thursday. Did I tell you that Saturday or so I wrote a column for Al-Hayat? Sometimes the pace and the sheer variety of different issues I’m dealing with seem a little hectic. But it’s all one big project, I keep telling myself, the true nature of which will become clearer to me over time.
SOWETO AND JOHANNESBURG:
SOWETO AND JOHANNESBURG: We had a busy and informative weekend. On Saturday we had lunch with Emily Mnisi, a Quaker woman from near Jo’burg whom I had gotten to know last year when we were both on an international Quaker fact-finding mission in Israel and Palestine. Emily is a special-education specialist who currently trains and supervises the house-parents at a residential farm for some 70 people with mental handicaps, half an hour out of Jo’burg.
Then I had a long conversation/interview with Dr. Mongezi Guma, who is Executive Director of the Ecumenical Service for Socio-economic Transformation. He talked mainly about the topic I first asked him about: the effectiveness or otherwise– as viewed today– of the TRC process whose open hearings were such a prominent feature of South African public life in the 1995-98 period.
The TRC has only now been winding up its final work. On April 15, it presented its final report– including recommendations on reparations to victims of serious abuses under apartheid and on amnesties for perpetrators who confessed–to President Mbeki. He then requested parliament to pass bills funding the reparations. And I think– though I’m not quite clear on this– that parliament is now working its way through this process. So I need to nail down those facts a little better.
Anyway, Dr. Guma was really interesting about the TRC– and he also talked a little about what he did as a church-based social activist during the dark days of apartheid. One of the things he was working on was church-based support for the families of political prisoners.
Yesterday Morning, Leila and I went to the 9:30 worship session of Johannesburg Quaker Meeting. I’d worshiped there before, when I came here in August 2001; and this time they had asked me to stay afterwards and talk a little about the present US-Iraq war. Well, it was a little challenging to get my head around that, so I gave some personal reflections on what I saw as the motivations of the warmongers in Washington– and also on the potential strength of the movement for peace and justice there.
It really has been quite interesting, over this past month, following the news of the US-Iraq war FROM AFRICA. I mean, using force to impose your will on distant lands; doing so in the name of some attractive, “modernizing” ideal; and doing it also with a firm eye on control of natural resources– all these things are very familiar to people in Africa. And they seem SO VERY NINETEEENTH CENTURY….
Well, Emily Mnsisi had been at the Quaker sessions yesterday, and afterwards she had promised to take us on a visit to Soweto. On our way there, we stopped to get something to drink at Gold Reef City, the amazingly kitsch amusement park where on Firday we had gone down the unused gold mine. But yesterday, we went into the casino which is part of the park, as Emil had heard of a nice restaurant inside there.
Well, there we were three Quakers in a casino on a Sunday morning… (Not sure if Leila describes herself as a Q these days; but you get the drift.) For Leila and me, it was our first visit inside one of these huge, ugly, money-gobbling behemoths. People inside there looked so sad in the gloomy light, with their faces lit mainly by the strange flashing tones of the slot machines into which they stared, likes zombies.
That was quite a strange thing to be doing on our way to visit Soweto.
So then, on we drove. And drove and drove and drove. The first stop Emily had planned to go have lunch with an old college friend of hers called Ria, a special-ed specialist who runs programs for the provinicial government here in Gauteng Province. Ria and her family live in Protea, which is in a far-out part of Soweto, so we drove for many miles along a sort of perimeter highway before we got there.
I’ve had Soweto in my mind since 1976 or before. That was the year the schoolkids there all walked out of school on June 16 to protest new requirements that would force them to pass exams in some subjects in Afrikaans, not in English or a native language. The police met the walkout with violence, killing two that first day and many hundreds more over the half-year of insurrection that followed.
The uprising that the Soweto schoolkids started that year spread to all the major South African urban areas (except, apparently, Durban). It did not immediately lead to the victory of the African nationalist/liberationist movement. But it did dent the self-confidence of the apartheid bosses considerable, and it started a longterm process whereby black resistance made the apartheid system fundamentally unworkable and thus forced the National Party to the negotiating table. The economic sanctions imposed on the regime by all major outside powers (except Israel… ) also helped to bring this about.
Oh, wouldn’t it be great if we could see the same support from outside powers for the movement for equality, peace and justice in Israel/Palestine???
But anyway. So, I had known and thought a lot about Soweto since 1976. But I’d never visited it at all till 2001, when Harold Annegaarn took Bill and me on a quick visit by car to some parts of it. On that occasion, I gathered that Soweto is large– but yesterday, I really got a better feel for its true enormity. It is like a huge sister-city to Johannesburg, spread out to the southwest and separated from Jo’burg by the massive, rhomboidal slag heaps produced by the gold mines all round here…. (more to come, later)
REMEMBERING PAST ATROCITIES, IN MOZAMBIQUE AND SOUTH AFRICA:
REMEMBERING PAST ATROCITIES, IN MOZAMBIQUE AND SOUTH AFRICA: I’m writing this, on Saturday May 3, sitting in the lovely home of our friends Shirley Pendlebury and Harold Annegaarn, in Johannesburg.
Leila and I got here on Thursday evening, after bidding a sad farewell to Salomao in Maputo. But we’ve been so busy that I haven’t blogged since about Tuesday. Too bad! I’d gotten into such a rhythm between experiencing interesting things and then blogging about them almost immediately– but now that rhythm has been all upset. I mean, what is more important in life: having experiences or blogging about them???
Actually, for me as a writer, having the experiences as fully and as “presently” as possible, and then writing about them as well and effectively as I can, are both equally important jobs. (And no, I don’t consider that my writing on the blog is the “best” that I can do. It is, rather, a handy supplement to my notes; a form of five-finger exercize for subsequent writing; and a way to share some of my experiences and reflections in near-real time with anyone including my family and friends who chooses to read them.)
So here are the highlights of what we’ve done since I last blogged:
(1) On Wedesneday morning, we got up early and drove with Salomao and Zunguza to a place called Chiboene, some 40 kms from Maputo, where there was a terrible massacre of local militia trainees sometime in the mid-1980s.
You don’t have to drive far out of Maputo to get into the real, hardscrabble Mozambican “bush”. We left a tarmac-ed road about 15-20 kms out of town and then drove for a further 35 minutes along very bumpy dirt tracks. Lucky Zunguza had agreed to come with us and drive us in his 4×4. There weren’t many high trees where we were, but a lot of scrbby, 4-foot-high bushes, punctuated every so often by either ruined-looking small breeze-block homes or compounds, or by round or rectangular straw huts. As throughout Africa, people were walking along the track carrying work implements or harvested goods, or schoolbooks as they went to school.
Salomao commented that most of the Mozambican civil war had been fought in just such terrain as this– but with the important differece that you’d never see anyone else on the roads, because if they heard a vehicle coming they would hide. Plus of course, back then, many of the roads, trails, and just bush areas were heavily mined. This area– though still quite close to the capital– had only been demined to an “acceptable” degree within the past couple of years.
Luckily, he knew which forks to take as the road divided and re-divided along the way. We came to Chiboene Primary School– a large, spiffy-looking structure that Salomao said had been built since his last visit here two years ago. Scores of kids were playing in its big dirt yard.
We drove around the school, and on into the bush a little. Approaching a small cluster of huts, Salomao called out to a young man to ask for someone to escort us to the mass graves. He’d earlier told me that on his previous visits, there was a local “secretary” who organized the visits. This time, though, it seemed to be in the hands of a group of three local women who came to join us at the boy’s request. One of them hurried off to fetch a big jerry-can of water and a dipper, and the three of them piled into the back of the car.
The graves were, actually, very nearby. There were two of them. both were under the spreading boughs of cashew trees. One was “marked” by a ten-inch-high platform of crumbling cement about 20 feet by 10 feet. Both grave areas were also marked by numerous sprigs of a tough-looking form of impatients growing out of the dun-colored earth.
The women– Priscina, Antonietta Jeremias, and Ana-Paula– were joined by an old man in gumboots. The women picked sprigs from some of the impatients plants and handed them to each of us four “visitors”. Then they kicked off their flip-flops and walked into the grave areas, bending from the waist to clear away dead leaves, twigs, etc., from the grave area. At first, we were at the cement grave. After they’d cleared it, they stood back, and sang a couple of hymns in Shangana, and said a quick prayer. Then, the ritual continued with each of them in turn taking a dipper full of water from the can and sprinkling oit over the grave, and also planting the sprig that she had earlier reserved for herself, into a crack on the top of the crumbling cement, and firming the sprig upright into the crack with wettened earth.
The dipper was then passed around for each of the rest of us to do this turn.
Then, we walked the short distance to the other mass grave– each held the remains of 22 men slaughtered during that massacre, Priscina told us.
Anotnietta Jeremias told us her father had been with the militiamen who were training here when they were killed, but that he had been one of the lucky ones to escape alive.
They dated the event as “somewhere in the mid-1980s”.
They said they’d been living in a communal village not far away at the time, and they had heard the screams of the men being slaughtered, and the firearms with which many were killed.
With Saloamo interpreting, I asked them how they thought about those acts of violence, and whether they still blamed the people who had committed them.
They said they found it difficult to feel blame. It had been such a hard time, altogether, during those years, they said, that it was hard to keep strict accounts of who to blame for what, when. “Sometimes, we even had to smother our own babies in the bush, if their crying would give away our hiding place,” one said. Evidently, issues of “blame” and accountability seemed very different to them than they might in most western-style courts of law.
“But now, the violence is finished, and we just pray that we don’t have violence again,” Priscina summed it up at the end.
I said a few things that concurred with the latter wish, and made them a small gift.
This place is one of only two memorials that Salomao knows about, in the whole country, to the million or so Mozambicans who died during their ghastly, 16-year civil war. I felt blessed and privileged to have been able to participate in the ceremony with the women at Chiboene. Actually, very few people even in Mozambique know about the place. When we met with Archbishop Dinis Sengulane, the Anglican archbishop of Maputo who played an important part in getting the civil-war peace talks started, he hadn’t heard about it– even though the women there said that they had some connection with the Anglicans…
(2) Anyway, moving right along to Johannesburg… Yesterday (Friday) Leila and I took an organized tour down a now-unused gold mine, which was a vivid reminder of the role of western colonial powers both in this area and, by extension, throughout much of the non-western world. Somehow, launching imperialist wars for so-called “strategic” resources seems so terribly 19th century, doesn’t it?
And then, we moved straight across the road to the very new Apartheid Museum that a small group of entrepreneurs has opened up there. It is apparently quite controversial. The Government is supposed to be building a Museum and Study Center and lots of things as part of the follow-on work from the TRC. But these entrepreneurs evidently figured they’d try to break into the market first…
And then, still on the theme of remembrances of atrocity, we all went to “The Pianist” in the evening. Adrien Brody was incredible. But I wonder how Jewish israelis would feel seeing the movie. So very many of the things portrayed in it are exactly what Israel is doing to the Palestinians right now. (That is, in the phase of “concentration” of the Jewish community of Warsaw; but before the phase of “extermination” began.)
“Concentration” of poentially suspect populations was developed most fully in the recent era right here in South Africa, of course: by the Brits against the Afrikaaners during the Anglo-Boer wars. I note that it did NOT make the Afrikaaners into a cuddly, compliant bunch of people….
HAYAT COLUMN DEADLINE COMING UP:
HAYAT COLUMN DEADLINE COMING UP: Oh my goodness, it’s nearly the end of the month. Which means I need to get my head around doing my next column for Al-Hayat. There is so much going on in the Middle East. But probably people don’t need me, from Africa, to tell them about it.
My old nemesis Martin Indyk being quoted as saying that given the failure of Iraqis to come out and greet the US forces as liberators (duh!), then “There is nothing for it but the use of classic imperialist policies of divide and rule” — or something very similar to that.
So Martin, like, it worked for the imperialists did it? Kept their empires safe forever? Made them loved by all who knew them?
But I don’t feel any of my readers in Hayat really need me to point to the silliness of Martin, Ari Fleischer, or the rest of the US neo-imperialists flailing around in the mire of their own retrograde rhetoric.
Have to think of something else to write about.