The sentence du jour is from an editorial from South Africa's Mail and Guardian on the most exotically and manly dangerous leader of a democracy, Jacob Zuma, South Africa's president:
The biggest bridge Zuma needs to build is the one across his own credibility gap.
How credible could a man who believed that he could avoid an HIV infection after raping having forceful sex with an AIDS infected women by taking a shower be?
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Interesting stuff from Sandile Memela on South Africa and its mining crisis:
Corruption has been rated as the biggest scourge afflicting our fledgling democracy. What I don’t understand is why economic inequality is not treated with the same contempt and disdain. It’s economic inequality that leads to corruption because those who have nothing or less desire more. Ask the same person if they’d like to fight corruption as active citizens and I’m pretty sure that not only would they mumble helplessness but the answer would be “no!” It’s not their problem and they’ll claim to be too busy.
I disagree with the assertion that economic inequality creates corruption for the American example shows that more often than not it is a contempt for the process and the system that leads to corruption. Memela shows that South Africa has a fundamental and urgent inequality problem that it isn't addressing and with a leader like Zuma and essentially for now a one party system, things are only going to get worse.
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Quote of the year from Jacob Zuma, the President of South Africa, who epitomizes the fact that the end of Apartheid in his country didn't mean the end of misogyny:
I wouldn’t want to stay with daughters who are not getting married. Because that in itself is a problem in society … Kids are important to a woman because they actually give an extra training to a woman, to be a mother.
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Sugary excerpt of the day from Jennifer Thorpe's take on the whole Brett Murray's Zuma painting (The Spear of the Nation) with his cock exposed:
Zuma has characterised himself as a man’s man. He celebrates a masculinity that emphasises sexual virility and supports polygamy in the face of an HIV epidemic spread by multiple concurrent partners; a masculinity that emphasises that men take sex when they want it and, despite being accused of rape, never once says that violence against women is wrong; and a masculinity that is heteronormative and homophobic (see comments about pushing down gay men, and appointment of John Qwelane and Mogoeng Mogoeng). His masculinity has been the core of his politics thus far, and perhaps the core appeal to those who vote for him. When it is under threat the very core of what he stands for is under threat. That the painting was defaced by men is interesting and reflects that perhaps these scary sentiments about manhood and its untouchability are shared by many other men, not only Msholozi.
For now we’ll have to see what happens in court for Zuma and for the two men who defaced Murray’s painting. In the meantime state resources will be spent in court cases that focus on what it means to be a man. The politics of the cock are alive and well. And this whole saga had taught us all that they are not up for discussion.
I have to admit that I believe that the painting to be on point for it goes to the core of what/who Zuma is and why his politics are problematic: they justify the worship of the cock, any vile behavior in the name of a non-existent africanness which force morality, ethics to be about who people are (which is determined by their race, gender, class for individuality isn't allowed) rather than about what they do. This explains why Zuma can rape have manly sex with a HIV positive woman and still become president of South Africa.
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Interesting and informative words from Sanza Tshabalala (first quote) and Ann Berstein (second) on the South African World Cup, the obsession with race and the horrendously stupid and anti-intellectual notion that it was the African World Cup:
The more the African teams were going down, the more I started getting worried about our race relations. I thought, we [Africans] are not doing well otherwise and I thought we would do well in football and it would maybe do something with our pride.
I’m obsessed with race issues. South Africans should be behind African teams. Then I went to see the Argentina-Nigeria game, at Ellis Park. And I see young Indian professionals, white people, all dressed up in Lionel Messi jerseys, and the few of us [who] are supporting Nigeria – probably 2 per cent of the stadium. I sat there thinking, ‘What’s this society going to?’ Because we’re meant to be supporting an African team, aren’t we?
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Why? Why should we support an African team? There isn’t a black view, nor is there a white view. What’s striking to me, going to a Soccer City game, was that you were seeing very large numbers of this emerging black lower middle class. They could afford to come to the game, they had all the right clothes and they were there. Class is more important now.
This World Cup confirmed my belief that Africanity/Africanness is a concept created by those who refuse to acknowledge the complexities and the diversity of the African continent either because it challenges their prejudices and received ideas or because it is more convenient for them to believe that the populations of the African continent, as Conrad's cannibals, are the same and therefore have the same views, the same needs, and the same identity. It would be too inconvenient for Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA, the football international governing body, to accept the idea that the South African World Cup was solely the one of a country not of a continent because it would mean taking the risk to have another country on the same continent host the World Cup sooner than in a decade or two. In short, africanity/africanness is about anything but reality for it is an attempt to take short cuts to avoid acknowledging unsettling realities and to be content with bienfaisant paternalism or simply paternalistic humanism.
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Predictable difficulties to the beginning of the World Cup in South Africa:
(...)at the last African Union summit Zuma declared that this was not South Africa’s World Cup but Africa’s and that all African heads of state were welcome. It now emerges that 50 out of 52 are said to be coming plus their considerable retinues. Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, may be among them, although there is a warrant out for his arrest from the International Criminal Court, and legally South Africa would be compelled to detain him. Another difficult case will be Robert Mugabe, since Biden and many others will wish to avoid having to meet the Zimbabwean president or shake his hand.
My guess is that both Mugabe and al-Bashir will act as if their most ardent desire is to participate to what they will claim to be an 'African' party until the last minute. The goal will be to play, as usual, the role of victims, but neither of them will show up. Omar al-Bashir will be too afraid to get arrested and Mugabe won't dare to embarrass Zuma who is a key ally.
However, there is another 'colorful' character that will certainly show up and do everything he can to attract the spotlight: Gaddafi. He will wear his usual pin of Africa and act as if he is the 'African president.'
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Roger Southall offers this assessment of Jacob Zuma's one year as South Africa's president, which I believe, is on point:
The coalition of the left and the politically aggrieved that brought Jacob Zuma to power is now openly fragmenting, and Zuma seems at a total loss at how to deal with the process. As a result, there is a widespread sense of a vacuum at the centre of his government, with important policy matters drifting and the different tendencies fighting.The present struggle is a vitally important one. The left is divided from fiscal conservatives on matters of economic policy, yet they share a common interest in confronting the dangers of growing patronage and corruption. Whether they can bury their differences sufficiently to confront a common enemy is a question without an answer. An alarming prospect is that they will knock each other out in battle, leaving the third tendency to march South Africa along the road to Zimbabwe.
The problem is that for South Africa and South Africans, there is, for now, no alternative to Jacob Zuma and to the ANC.
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Sugary excerpt of the morning from Jennifer Thorpe:
The saga around the gender testing of Caster Semenya rocked our foundations last year. Suddenly we weren’t sure what the boundaries for man and women were. We were forced to reconsider the nature nurture debate, but it remained a theoretical one as the protections for her dignity prevented us from knowing the results of these “gender tests”. The result would not have been able to answer the question though. Caster Semenya might not tell us whether her test revealed that she was female, or male, but she might be able to tell us what it means to be a woman, having been subject to such scrutiny herself.
Perhaps she might tell us that women in South Africa don’t have it easy. It’s hard to feel free when you must constantly evaluate your surroundings waiting for a rapist to strike. It’s hard to be free when the crime of rape is one of the only crimes where the burden of proof is on the survivor because of a problematic definition of rape that talks about consent, rather than coercive circumstances.
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