The World Cup is on!

Rightfully does South Africa and the world celebrate this soccer fest. The mood in the country, despite Bafana's defeat against Uruguay, is exhilarating. I can't remember any time since 2002 that people were so friendly, even more than usual, and all the daily strain seems so distant.

This is perhaps what makes this African and South African World Cup: the excitement across the country. There may be glitches with ticket sales, rather a problem of FIFA's greed, and transport, but the happiness factor that comes with soccer is quite unique.

The question remains: is it worthwhile for a developing country to spend obsence sums of money on a soccer fest that benefits Western capitalists and the mafia that is FIFA? It is clearly a problem that we don't know the salaries of the FIFA head honchos and that an organisation with such global importance has not accountability and is a law unto themselves. See the Insititute for Security Studies report at http://www.iss.co.za/pgcontent.php?UID=29940

Can we tally up the expenses for the World Cup with what we could have built in houses, job creation, and other programmes? Or can we say that the gain in happiness for a few weeks across the country was worthwhile the money spent?

I think the answer is yes and no. Remember that South Africa's development problem is not lack of funds - it is the lack of coherence and organisation in delivery, in creating and executing policies that advance the country. Perhaps then, the expenditure is justified and the gain in goodwill and happiness will create a better country which will be able to do things better.

Yet, the FIFA money fest has contributed to more corruption and unjustifiable expenditures. As a mafia organisation, besides the soccer fun, we cannot expect good practice to come from such an organisation. Also, instead of getting light headed through games, should we not focus on what needs to be done to improve the country? Rolling-up the sleeves, not partying should be the order of the day. And then, the World Cup money could have been spent on improving governance and towards sustainable livelihoods.

Perhaps we can say that if we could be assured that the World Cup was a clean business, we would be more understandable of the expenses. Also, if more would go towards supporting poor communities than just celebrating the rich, the fiesta that world soccer is, would gain much.

Tertiary Education - what will the Stakeholder Summit bring?

It is never good to announce bad news, especially when you are new in a place. Nobody likes a Cassandra - the harbinger of bad news. The best example I can think of, and an object lesson in electoral politics that speaking the truth even, and especially if, it is bad news, is never popular, was the contest, after the unification of East and West Germany, between the Social Democrat Oskar Lafontaine and Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl for the Chancellorship.

To punch drunken Germans, still celebrating the newly united country, Lafontaine warned that it will be a very expensive unification and Germany would better think clearly this one through and find ways to mitigate the problems that may emerge.

Not so Kohl. He celebrated the unification, and promised "flowering landscapes" to an eager electorate. And Kohl won, and Germany is still trying today to digest the unification.

I digress.

But as recent graduate students at the University of the Witwatersrand, we faced so many obstacles and so little support, it was indeed a miracle that students managed to finish their degrees. And when we warned that things were not rosy, we were just ignnored and silenced. I do not intend to pick unfairly on Wits, but this is where I got my degree from and where I made my tertiary experience.

Clearly, the university was under enormous strain and faced capacity problems. But what strikes me even today is that all the people, instiutions, and individuals who 'carry' the university were unable to acknowledge and act upon the problems that threaten the health and contintuation of the academic and intellectual endeavour.

In any forum within the university that issues were raised, a stony silence and passive resistance met the complainants. And of course, nothing changed. So it is with no surprise that we learn of the Declaration that the recent Stakeholders Summit of Higher Education had made, and particularly the focus on improving the conditions of studying and ensuring that universities produce new cohorts of graduates who are smart enough to take up teaching and research positions.

The writing is on the wall. University faculty is aging and we are not producing the graduates who can take up their positions.

http://www.mg.co.za/article/2010-04-30-declaration-embracing-the-opportunity

Just to consider a few examples. Graduate students need support and facilities. At one Faculty Meeting, the library asked for more money. The good librarian was told that Faculty would not use the library as its holdings were poor and Faculty would not divert 'their' money to the library. Now, how are graduate students supposed to do cutting edge research which requires books when Faculty says the holdings were so poor that they were not using it?

Another issue is the low level of throughput. A high percentage of students fail. This reflects the poor education that especially undergraduate students, even at formerly white universities, receive. Too many students walk away with a three year BA degree but they can't read and write properly.

This is a dangerous situation for any developing country. When I studied about the causes of the war in the former Yugoslavia, one contribution to the war was the easy mobilization of young men ready for war and highly gullible, somewhat educated but not quite, yet easily seduced by the facile explanations of populist leaders. The authoritarian university system had produced graduates who had certain skills but were in fact only semi-educated.

Now, if South African universities continue to churn out half-baked graduates, we create cohorts of young men and women with high aspirations but little chances to make it into well-paying jobs and into a better life.

Pseudo-education and resentment create individuals who may easily fall for a populist leader, promising easy solutions to complex problems.

Yet universities, given their limited capacities, ignored the problem. But I still don't understand how come that all the issues that students had raised about 10 years ago, internally, are only now recognized at a high-level university forum as pressing?

If the stakeholder summit reflects a change in thinking, maybe university education can still live up to the needs of a modern and developing society.

Walter Benjamin. The know-how of the author in thirteen theses

I was away for a week writing, out in the bundus, and Benjamin was helping.


I. Whoever intends to write a considerable work, should enjoy themselves and allow themselves, after having finished their daily work, whatever does not render its continuation impossible.

II. Talk about what you have achieved, if you want to, but do not read [to others] while you are still working on it. The satisfaction that you thereby acquire slows down your speed. If you follow this commandment, your growing wish to communicate will eventually become the engine of accomplishment.

III. In your work setting, try to avoid the mediocrity of your everyday life. Semi-quietness, surrounded by dim noises engenders disrespect. However, the accompaniment of an etude or murmuring voices may become as important for your work as the silence of the night. In case it will fine tune your inner ear, it will turn into a testing ground of a diction that is so thorough that even eccentric noises will be drown out.

IV. Avoid random tools of the trade. Pedantic insistence on certain paper, pens, and ink is useful. Not luxury, but the abundance of these utensils is absolutely required.

V. Do not let pass any thought unnoticed [incognito] and be as serious in keeping track of them as the immigration police is of foreigners.

VI. Guard your pen against a spontaneous idea and it will, with the strength of a magnet, attract even more ideas. The more circumspect you treat an idea, the more mature it will turn out to be. Speech conquers thought but writing is in charge [control] of it.

VII. Never stop writing because you lack inspiration. It is a commandment of literary honor to stop only for keeping an appointment (a lunch or dinner appointment or a meeting) or if your work has been finished.

VIII. The absence of inspiration shall be filled with copying what you have achieved. Through it, your intuition will awaken.

IX. Nulla dies sine linea (Not one day without [writing] a line) – but certainly weeks.

X. Never consider a work as accomplished if you have not even sat over it from evening to morning.

XI. The final lines of a work do not write in you usual work space. You would not find the courage to finish in it.

XII. The steps of writing: thought – style – written word. It is the meaning of the proper copy that that it focuses the attention on the calligraphy. Thought kills inspiration, style attaches thought, the written word remunerates style.

XIII. The opus is the death mask of the concept.


From: One Way Street. (Einbahnstrasse). Bibliothek Suhrkamp, 1991, p. 46 – 49. Translated by Thomas M.Blaser

Running a marathon: experiencing race

This past weekend, I was running a marathon in the south of Johannesburg, in the Klipriver area, a suburb wedged between Soweto and Kathlegong. It was my first ever and it was my last chance to qualify for the coming Comrades Ultramarathon, from Pietermaritzburg to Durban.

The race went well and I qualified by running the intermediate to difficult parcours in 4 hours and 53 minutes.

One reason for my success was that from mid-way on, I joined the 'bus' led by Tebogo from Kathlegong whose flag that he carried on his back read he would drive his bus over the finishing line in under 5 hours.

The running bus was a piece of black culture in motion. There was about a core group of 10 runners who appeared to know each other well for they run in harmony, even synchronized, in breathing, gesture and rhythm. From time to time, a member of the group would start a chant into which the entire bus joined. "E-zy", "e-zy", one would go. Another went "hayi-bo", 'hayi-bo". There was also "So-ber", "so-ber" and a few others. Members would hurry in front from the back and fire the group on through exhortations. Given the last chant, I could picture the entire group during a church service. Indeed, it felt a bit like being in a black church. But foremost through the running in rhythm, I was taken back 18 years, when I was dancing to the rhythm of the congas at the Othella Dallas Dance School in Basel, Switzerland. It was the same feeling of unity, of captivating rhythm in phyisical exertion that made me feel good and in unity with humanity and the universe.

What struck me also was that this bus was running in formation and with much unity. For those who were a bit tired and struggled, including me, the group carried us forward and over the finishing line in time with ease. Perhaps not with ease, but rather so that the pain no longer mattered.

The race war that wasn't

Judging from some international media reports, one could have thought that a race war had finally arrived in South Africa. Some local analysts found that racial tension had heigthened. In contrast, a recent survey found that overall race relations were improving (http://westcapenews.com/?p=1389), despite the murder of neo-nazi leader Eugene Terreblanche and the diatribes of Julius Malema, the leader of the African Congress Youth League.

How should we interprete what is currently happening? I think that all of that has only apparently so much to do with race, but South Africa is foremost dealing with political problems that manifest themselves in leaps and bounds.

In my Phd submitted in 2007, I talked to young Afrikaners in order to get their sense of how they feel about the country, politics, black people, the legacy of apartheid, and so on. There was very little sense of taking up arms in order to defend an Afrikaner nation or ward off a black assault.

All manifested displeasure at affirmative action and almost all denied any responsibility for the apartheid past. In fact, there was not even a sense of belonging to a persecuted white group that required minority status protection.

Some scholars claimed that the minorities in South Africa, read, the white minority (for the other minorities, usually referred to as the Indians and Coloureds, are seen to carry much less weight in terms of numerical clout and organisational power), would more and more organise in order to resist the encroachment on their privileges. Yet I fail to see the evidence that this is happening.

The followers of Terreblanche who received so much media attention are hardly representing Afrikaners. Indeed, Afrikaner nationalism is dead and neither the ghost of Terreblanch nor the success of the song 'De la Rey' will galvanize a people into action to take up arms or to mobilize ethnicity.

The intellectual emptiness of the post-colony

William Gumede and Leslie Dikeni call it 'the poverty of ideas' in the title of their recently published collection of essays. For Peter Vale, it is the think-tanks that should launch new ideas and provoke through launching challenging debates. Yet all they do is rehash old and tired, ideological standpoints.

Professor Achille Mbembe, in his opening two part lecture of the Sawyer Seminar series at Wits University, reviews Frantz Fanon and his relevance for South Africa, and Africa, today. In Fanon's analysis of the newly liberated countries, ruled by the nationalist parties of the liberation movements, a profound lack of intellectual engagement dulls the spirit of the post-colony. Lazyness, especially of the intellectual type, marks the landscape.

Parallels with our present of this observation are all too close. On the left, we have the resurrection of a revolutionary discourse that adds however little insight. It is a mere regurgitation of apparently anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-imperial agit-prop as it has been the staple of left-wing, Marxist inspired discourse since the 1960s. Or how does the equalisation of the white liberal with the racist, criminal murderer a la 'prime evil' Eugene de Kock add any new insights to our contemporary society and politics ?

From the right, we read that affirmative action, as it is practiced today, is the precursor of genocide. Current BEE policies are the same as the policies implemented by the Nazis in the 1930s in Germany against Jewish Germans. This is a variant of a theme that compared apartheid oppression to fascism, an existing strand in standard academic discourse on apartheid. Again, little insight about current predicaments is gained from such arguments.

Unfortunately, I could continue with this list.

So where to can we turn for the emergence of an intellectual discoursre that deserves its name and will provide us with new insights on our current politics and society? We may be quite far away from such a new impetus, and perhaps a long spell of a sobering draught is upon us, but I think it will emerge from a push for a renewed affirmation of non-racialism and in defence of the values enshrined in our constitution.

Another taxi blog

This Sunday eveing I was doing my usual jogging in the Emmerentia area. As I was climbing up Hill Street, reaching Judith Street, I heard an enraged yell. "Move you Kaffer, move!" Had I heard right? A small grey car, trailing a fully loaded minibus taxi, was slowly climbing up the road above me. "Move you Kaffer", the agitated, white head shouted again. I did not trust my ears but the repetition made it clear: 'ordinary' racism taking its course.

As I write this, I think back of two other encounters in which white South Africans gave free vent to their racism. It is in theses moments that I doubt my own, usually held view that many young and white South Africans try to break with their heritage of white supremacy and apartheid racism and strive to live with black Africans as equals, as fellow human beings, and not as a racialized and inferior others.

What the chattering white classes forget is that the racialized populism of a Julius Malema, and the race-card-as-trump-card that Thabo Mbeki used to pull, resonate only because of the persistence of racism, ordinary and everyday.