Cape Tow last weekend was having a coffee festival thing (actually I’m not sure what that entails but, as coffee lover—more like coffee addict—I kind of liked the idea). I also heard it reported on South Africa’s Catholic national paper, The Southern Cross, that in Pusan, South Korea, some nuns have opened a coffee-book shop where people have an opportunity to discuss their faith in a relaxed atmosphere. If only we were so lucky here in Cape Town too.
The first thing that attracts you about Cape Town intercity, despite narrow streets and blasting underground clubs, is the airy cafe of round tables on pavements of people chattering in tell-tale vivacity, consciously dedicated to relaxed pleasure. They give a cultivated image of French characteristic enlightenment. I’m personally partial, too partial actually, to a good cup of coffee.
My favourite living philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, has lot to say about coffee and what it has done for Western civilisation. Coffee is one of those commodities, unlike sugar, not too associated with guilt ridden (slavery) foundations of Western civilisation. The history of coffee in recent years is wonderfully written by Markman Ellis in his competent book The Coffee-House: A Cultural History.
Most people wrongly attribute the discovery of coffee to the natural philosopher, Leonhard Rauwolf, when he first certifiably noticed it Aleppo in 1573. Yet, Ellis tells us, coffee was known for a very long time in the highland regions of Ethiopia before it was even discovered by the Turks who in turn introduced it to the Europeans. So coffee, like Cola, is an African thing even if the Europeans popularised and refined its usage.
Ellis tells us that the coffee-house throughout history has been a socialising idea, especially for gossip and debate. More than any commodity in the world it rewrote the experience of metropolitan life. The earliest users of coffee discovered that it induces mental alertness that delays sleep. It was even charged with qualities of comforting the head and heart, and good for digestion.
The shy and retiring librarian of Christ Church college Oxford, Robert Burton in his seminal treatise, The Anatomy of Melancholy of 1632, recommended coffee as a cordial for ‘mending the Temperament . . . to expell feare [sic] and sorrow, and to exhilarate the mind.’ He thought coffee had a potential for curing melancholy.
To early merchants coffee-houses were a nuisance that encouraged idleness. The businessmen associated them with ‘skiving and absenteeism’. To the puritan coffee-houses encouraged ‘licentiousness and superstition’. Men then in general did not think highly of the morals of women who frequented coffee-houses. To men of science the coffee-house was place for universal circulation of intelligence where latest developments and quack remedies were discussed.
To autocrats the coffee-house encouraged political dissent, rebellious attitudes and seditious intent. To the republicans coffee-houses were a home of spirit of faction, popular dissatisfactions and debate where to stoke fires of controversy. To the man of law they ‘harboured rogues and criminals’. To spies coffee-houses were a place to collect intelligence, suppress revolutionary notions and gauge public opinion.
For the man on the make, like Pepys, the coffee-house was a network of potential patrons and possibility of aggrandizing oneself to a better government position. And for the ordinary man a relaxing opportunity for speaking freely in an atmosphere where the fiction of hierarchy was cancelled; where one could put oneself on route to enlightenment, and live for a moment life under the rule of reason. To professional newsmongers, hack writers, sycophantic back-slappers, streetwise fops, and purveyors of gossip, rumour, innuendo, and scandal, coffee-houses were a heaven.
The coffee-house was where you could sway government or business personnel by flattery, insinuation or bribery. Where even the political emasculated could go to listen to the latest scandals. Where the stream of opinion, often undifferentiated, could easily be caught, and moral emptiness of the city closely observed.
The reporters of the first London daily newspaper, The Daily Courant, frequented the coffee-shop. So as you can see the coffee-shop has actually been active in breaking the bonds of feudal society; and for encouraging the culture of human improvement, even if it tended to be more of a mixed home of high culture and vulgar entertainment.
The murmur of coffee-houses, with the background of sipping and smell of ground coffee is something a free spirit can never fail to appreciate. From what I’ve read, it looks like the initial atmosphere of coffee-houses was more like our present alcohol bars today; with squabbles often degenerating into fist fighting. There were no polite limits as can be appreciated in most coffee-houses of our present day.
The coffee-house habituates to the customs and manners of its times, but its main popularity come in the rote of free communication and camaraderie. I guess you could say the coffee-house was the internet of those times. Is it any wonder in the present day you can go on-line in most coffee-houses. Artists, writers, aesthetes, decadents and the rest of fainéant purposeless men that beautify the experiences of our lives throughout history have been closely associated with coffee-house.
Cape Town is fast becoming Africa’s fairyland, with its nascent notions of egalitarianism and liberty to be filthy rich (Joburg has become too vulgar, flashy and fake with its roll calling imitative innovation and competition that’s corrupted by too much American pretensions). Still in Cape Town there’s still much that is foreign to the native eye, especially the opposing signs of magnificence and poverty.
Something still tugs at my mooring as I see too many people not having enough to buy basic needs while I sit seeping lattés I don’t really need. I know I cannot make the world right over night, but I just can’t stop thinking about story the young girl and the star fishes at the beach. Throwing one star fish back into the ocean sure makes a lot of difference. But there’s just so many of them. Perhaps if we each at least pick one star fish and throw back to the ocean before we seat and laugh, talking about the colour of Paris Hilton’s dress, we would get somewhere.
Well, the sea is sucking at the pebble beach, whiskers of mist rise in the clean shaven air. I order an extra shot of espresso to ease my itch and pull my hat about my ears. Twilight is deepening as the sun bleeds away in fiery strips of clouds.
Thursday, 20 September 2007
Saturday, 15 September 2007
It is Mercy I Seek
I recalled looking in vain during the kerkuffle of president Mbeki’s alleged AIDS denialsm, and because I could not find supporting evidence for it I decided to stay out of the noise. Then first came judge Edward Cameroon’s autobiography, the first among Mbeki accusers to admit that the president never actually denied HIV was the cause of AIDS, though he regretted the president’s attitude towards the topic; and so on and so on. Ronald Suresh Roberts in his competent book Fit To Govern: The Native Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki dedicate two chapters into refuting such allegations, and he is very convincing.
‘Mbeki’s sin was to reject a drug-based intellectual protectionism in favour of a free exchange of ideas on the proper solution to AIDS pandemic, including but not limited to drugs alone.’ So says Roberts in the book, and I’m inclined to believing him. Roberts quotes numerous people, institutions, and organisation, like WHO (World Health Organisation) who have come to understand that ‘you cannot separate prevention from treatment.’ Somebody corrects me if I’m wrong but isn’t that the consistent step taken by the Roman Catholic Church from the beginning, which most people are now starting to realise is the best of all possible ways to fight the pandemic. Yet I don’t see Roberts stating that on his book.
It was sad how the practical solution towards fighting the AIDS pandemic was hijacked by racial, political, religious or cultural agendas whose used and abused the forefront of TAC (Treatment Action Campaign) in this country. There was even a time of folly when condoms were preached as a pinnacle solution; but graciously sanity seem to be return among most activist.
I’m not sure why the message of behavioural change seemed to fuel mistrust and prejudices among most AIDS activists initial. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that they thought AIDS was the result of promiscuous behaviour. Whatever the case sanity is returning to all of us now; we’ve realised that among the best way to combat the pandemic is behavioural change.
A person who is looking for real solutions about AIDS must look at what is happening at ground level and make up her/his own mind. It is daily becoming clear that an effective and meaningful approach will come from experiences gained in ground level. It was the measure of our petty shallowness that we allowed petty issues to stand on the way of combating this pandemic together. We reached a stage where, due to assumptions about simplistic solutions or idealized notion, we talked at, not to, each other.
AIDS activists, most from Western NGOs, tend to come with naive assumptions that all individuals are free to make empowered choices about their worlds. And their African counterparts, for the sake of salvaging superficial pride, like to deny the obvious and fiddle while the continent is burning. Meantime, the graveyards are filling very quickly. We shall not even come close to denting the epidemic until we find an approach that seeks to take into account the complex social, cultural and economic factors that influence behaviours and the real conditions of choice in our respective societies.
Too often behavioural change is taken as individual prerogative. Most people assume we are autonomous individuals who can make informed choices based on in-depth understanding of the facts on the ground. But too often people don’t kow, or sometimes don’t even care about facts. AIDS education is not enough to turn the pandemic around. Facts on the ground, for instance, show that most people who’re HIV positive in our country (South Africa) already knew the rudimentary of AIDS education but ignored it.
In my hometown there’re about eighteen black medical doctors; six of them—I’ve been confidentially told by my cousin who works with an organisation that spreads AIDS education in the schools of the region—are HIV positive; and two have a full-blown AIDS. Even if I were to take what she says with some salt and assume half of that number it is still too much. Why, if AIDS education is so effective? The crux of the matter is that the rate of transmission of the HIV virus is highly determined by behavioural habits. There’s no running away from that fact.
Another erroneous assumption is that everyone in African communities wants to be, or is already, sexually active from early ages. This stereotyped attitude on the part of, especially Western AIDS workers, prompts negative responses from black Africans who feel affronted by the generalisation. In fact, there’s a growing number of South African youth, especially girls, who—through mostly the influence of mostly “born-again” congregations—prefer waiting for their wedding day for their first sexual experience.
My sisters who was twenty-four years when she married a few years ago was a virgin. My other one who is even older than her is still one because she says she is waiting for her husband. This sort of delaying sexual experience helps in the fight against AIDS. These girls, though born and bred in the township, are no longer easy victims of the promiscuous tendencies that increase a person’s exposure to the HIV virus. Admittedly these girls are still in a minority but it is growing especially mostly the educated and religious.
The immense social and cultural pressures to conform to accepted stereotypes remains one of the major general factors for the spread of HIV in the country. There’s the rate of promiscuity among the affluent, like the example of the doctors above, which spreads the virus at an alarming rate. Economic pressures are a factor working against receiving diagnosis and treatment, mostly among broken, poor families. The interchange of sexual partners among migrant workers, who spend months on end far from their spouses and family support system; and who’re plunged into unbearably harsh working and living conditions by exploitative local or multi-national employers, is another factor.
All-too-often AIDS education has failed to take this wider picture, opting instead for simplistic prevention strategies. Those efforts are doomed to failure, even in the short term. A fuller understanding of HIV prevention that identifies three “layers” (impact, risk reduction and vulnerability) in the pandemic has been promulgated by the Catholic Church from the begining. HIV prevention strategies must address all three layers if they are to be effective.
Impact emphasises the essential link between care and prevention. Keeping those affected by HIV in good physical, emotional and economic health for as long as possible. It is an essential component of prevention as it helps avert the decline of families into poverty and the stigmatisation that fans the pandemic.
Risk reduction involves providing individuals and communities with an accurate and full understanding of the risks of infection. It means helping people to acquire the skills and resources to make changes in their personal or professional lives to minimise these risks. This means enabling people to adopt measures, based on the fullest scientific evidence available, that afford them immediate protection, partial or complete. Typical risk reduction strategies include abstinence, mutual fidelity, having one sexual partner, and condom use. Because the sexual route is not the only source of infection, it means also ensuring safer blood transfusions, drug injecting and antenatal and delivery practices.
Reducing the risk of infection is not about choosing one or other option randomly to suit social or religious pressures. It is preferable to think of it in terms of a continuum running from high-risk activities to those carrying low or even no risk. Reducing risk is a process of moral education in which people come to see what risks their behaviour entails and continues until they take steps to reduce that level of risk in their circumstances. Any strategy that enables a person to move from a higher-risk activity towards the lower end of the continuum is a valid risk reduction strategy.
For a Catholic, like myself, this strategy is based on sound theological principles. For the non-religious it might be based on more traditional values, like the consideration of lobola (bride’s worth), which is higher for virgins. What is important is that we identify values which individuals subscribe to and use them effectively as weapons against the AIDS pandemic. There’s hardly any culture that does not understand the value of abstinence, chastity or faithfulness to one partner.
Sometimes people make choices that fall short of these ideals. That’s when moral compassion is called upon. It is useless, even cruel, for a Catholic, for instance, to insist on the evil of condom use for a person whose psychological understanding has not reached or refuses to acknowledge the wisdom of Catholic ideals. Or to expert a married partner not use condom when another is already affected.
Vulnerability requires HIV prevention strategies to address the fact that, too often, people’s behaviour does not change until their wider circumstances change—like gaining a higher moral conscience. Any attempt by an individual to carry out their chosen risk reduction strategy constitutes behavioural change for that person. Church-based programmes, with their prophetic role in seeking the social transformation that will enable personal growth, must help people to grow more fully in their God-given identity.
Discriminating against those who do not follow the Church’s teachings will gain us nothing. What is important is finding ways of curtailing behavioural choices of those who are vulnerable to infection. All initiatives that aim to reduce vulnerability are, and must be, recognised as essential components of a fuller HIV prevention strategy. The Church, with its rich body of doctrine and the theology of Catholic social teaching, has always demanded that its members denounce the injustices of the world and work to redress imbalances. We cannot sit around folding our hands while the pandemic sows death in our communities because we insist on our moral high ground then.
Promoting abstinence might mean upholding the value of not having sex until marriage, while also recognising that for some young adults abstinence might mean only delaying the age of first sexual encounter beyond the more physiologically vulnerable teenage years. In another sense, promoting abstinence might also mean waiting until one is in a more stable relationship. Worse still, we might not always succeed in getting our message through on others; but it does not mean we should leave them to the devil; it is mercy that I want said Christ after hearing all these things.
Faithfulness might mean the exhortation of mutual fidelity on married couples, while also acknowledging that, in another context, the component of faithfulness might mean fidelity to a single long-term partner or fidelity to a strategy of reducing the instances of casual sex. In the end sexual preference must depend on the moral conscience of the individual.
The data is clear that condoms, when used correctly and consistently, reduce but do not remove the risk of HIV infection. This fact cannot be excluded from, or misrepresented in any information on risk reduction strategies, regardless of the political or moral position of those promoting them. Condom campaigns have been particularly effective with groups at the highest risk—prostitutes, for example—who may have few if any other realistic options for reducing this risk without them. But facts show also that condom campaigns have been considerably less effective in the general population as a public health strategy. Hence I condemn the “condoms only” or even “condoms mainly” campaigns for the general population that have often been promoted with the same dogmatism as some “abstinence only” campaigns. These similarly distort information.
A complementary and collaborative approach for the dismantling of mutual prejudices deplores the obstructive positioning, judgementalism and dogmatism of opposing factions that too often feature simplistic polarised approaches. If we are to conquer the AIDS epidemic we must find a way of reconciling solid science and good community development practices with established and evolving moral teaching.
The Catholic Church is deeply rooted in local communities throughout the developing world, and is a major contributor to the struggle against AIDS in the countries worst affected by the pandemic. The Church is therefore well placed to promote a more holistic understanding of prevention and to foster reconciliation between opposing factions, drawing these towards an attitude of mutual acceptance and collaboration. The challenges of the pandemic are urgent and compelling; the challenges of the Gospel are no less so for Christians. The Church, rightly so, does not take her moral standards from the values of the world. But as Christians, we have to find a way of mercy while standing firm on our moral understanding, or the future generations will hold us to account on both.
‘Mbeki’s sin was to reject a drug-based intellectual protectionism in favour of a free exchange of ideas on the proper solution to AIDS pandemic, including but not limited to drugs alone.’ So says Roberts in the book, and I’m inclined to believing him. Roberts quotes numerous people, institutions, and organisation, like WHO (World Health Organisation) who have come to understand that ‘you cannot separate prevention from treatment.’ Somebody corrects me if I’m wrong but isn’t that the consistent step taken by the Roman Catholic Church from the beginning, which most people are now starting to realise is the best of all possible ways to fight the pandemic. Yet I don’t see Roberts stating that on his book.
It was sad how the practical solution towards fighting the AIDS pandemic was hijacked by racial, political, religious or cultural agendas whose used and abused the forefront of TAC (Treatment Action Campaign) in this country. There was even a time of folly when condoms were preached as a pinnacle solution; but graciously sanity seem to be return among most activist.
I’m not sure why the message of behavioural change seemed to fuel mistrust and prejudices among most AIDS activists initial. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that they thought AIDS was the result of promiscuous behaviour. Whatever the case sanity is returning to all of us now; we’ve realised that among the best way to combat the pandemic is behavioural change.
A person who is looking for real solutions about AIDS must look at what is happening at ground level and make up her/his own mind. It is daily becoming clear that an effective and meaningful approach will come from experiences gained in ground level. It was the measure of our petty shallowness that we allowed petty issues to stand on the way of combating this pandemic together. We reached a stage where, due to assumptions about simplistic solutions or idealized notion, we talked at, not to, each other.
AIDS activists, most from Western NGOs, tend to come with naive assumptions that all individuals are free to make empowered choices about their worlds. And their African counterparts, for the sake of salvaging superficial pride, like to deny the obvious and fiddle while the continent is burning. Meantime, the graveyards are filling very quickly. We shall not even come close to denting the epidemic until we find an approach that seeks to take into account the complex social, cultural and economic factors that influence behaviours and the real conditions of choice in our respective societies.
Too often behavioural change is taken as individual prerogative. Most people assume we are autonomous individuals who can make informed choices based on in-depth understanding of the facts on the ground. But too often people don’t kow, or sometimes don’t even care about facts. AIDS education is not enough to turn the pandemic around. Facts on the ground, for instance, show that most people who’re HIV positive in our country (South Africa) already knew the rudimentary of AIDS education but ignored it.
In my hometown there’re about eighteen black medical doctors; six of them—I’ve been confidentially told by my cousin who works with an organisation that spreads AIDS education in the schools of the region—are HIV positive; and two have a full-blown AIDS. Even if I were to take what she says with some salt and assume half of that number it is still too much. Why, if AIDS education is so effective? The crux of the matter is that the rate of transmission of the HIV virus is highly determined by behavioural habits. There’s no running away from that fact.
Another erroneous assumption is that everyone in African communities wants to be, or is already, sexually active from early ages. This stereotyped attitude on the part of, especially Western AIDS workers, prompts negative responses from black Africans who feel affronted by the generalisation. In fact, there’s a growing number of South African youth, especially girls, who—through mostly the influence of mostly “born-again” congregations—prefer waiting for their wedding day for their first sexual experience.
My sisters who was twenty-four years when she married a few years ago was a virgin. My other one who is even older than her is still one because she says she is waiting for her husband. This sort of delaying sexual experience helps in the fight against AIDS. These girls, though born and bred in the township, are no longer easy victims of the promiscuous tendencies that increase a person’s exposure to the HIV virus. Admittedly these girls are still in a minority but it is growing especially mostly the educated and religious.
The immense social and cultural pressures to conform to accepted stereotypes remains one of the major general factors for the spread of HIV in the country. There’s the rate of promiscuity among the affluent, like the example of the doctors above, which spreads the virus at an alarming rate. Economic pressures are a factor working against receiving diagnosis and treatment, mostly among broken, poor families. The interchange of sexual partners among migrant workers, who spend months on end far from their spouses and family support system; and who’re plunged into unbearably harsh working and living conditions by exploitative local or multi-national employers, is another factor.
All-too-often AIDS education has failed to take this wider picture, opting instead for simplistic prevention strategies. Those efforts are doomed to failure, even in the short term. A fuller understanding of HIV prevention that identifies three “layers” (impact, risk reduction and vulnerability) in the pandemic has been promulgated by the Catholic Church from the begining. HIV prevention strategies must address all three layers if they are to be effective.
Impact emphasises the essential link between care and prevention. Keeping those affected by HIV in good physical, emotional and economic health for as long as possible. It is an essential component of prevention as it helps avert the decline of families into poverty and the stigmatisation that fans the pandemic.
Risk reduction involves providing individuals and communities with an accurate and full understanding of the risks of infection. It means helping people to acquire the skills and resources to make changes in their personal or professional lives to minimise these risks. This means enabling people to adopt measures, based on the fullest scientific evidence available, that afford them immediate protection, partial or complete. Typical risk reduction strategies include abstinence, mutual fidelity, having one sexual partner, and condom use. Because the sexual route is not the only source of infection, it means also ensuring safer blood transfusions, drug injecting and antenatal and delivery practices.
Reducing the risk of infection is not about choosing one or other option randomly to suit social or religious pressures. It is preferable to think of it in terms of a continuum running from high-risk activities to those carrying low or even no risk. Reducing risk is a process of moral education in which people come to see what risks their behaviour entails and continues until they take steps to reduce that level of risk in their circumstances. Any strategy that enables a person to move from a higher-risk activity towards the lower end of the continuum is a valid risk reduction strategy.
For a Catholic, like myself, this strategy is based on sound theological principles. For the non-religious it might be based on more traditional values, like the consideration of lobola (bride’s worth), which is higher for virgins. What is important is that we identify values which individuals subscribe to and use them effectively as weapons against the AIDS pandemic. There’s hardly any culture that does not understand the value of abstinence, chastity or faithfulness to one partner.
Sometimes people make choices that fall short of these ideals. That’s when moral compassion is called upon. It is useless, even cruel, for a Catholic, for instance, to insist on the evil of condom use for a person whose psychological understanding has not reached or refuses to acknowledge the wisdom of Catholic ideals. Or to expert a married partner not use condom when another is already affected.
Vulnerability requires HIV prevention strategies to address the fact that, too often, people’s behaviour does not change until their wider circumstances change—like gaining a higher moral conscience. Any attempt by an individual to carry out their chosen risk reduction strategy constitutes behavioural change for that person. Church-based programmes, with their prophetic role in seeking the social transformation that will enable personal growth, must help people to grow more fully in their God-given identity.
Discriminating against those who do not follow the Church’s teachings will gain us nothing. What is important is finding ways of curtailing behavioural choices of those who are vulnerable to infection. All initiatives that aim to reduce vulnerability are, and must be, recognised as essential components of a fuller HIV prevention strategy. The Church, with its rich body of doctrine and the theology of Catholic social teaching, has always demanded that its members denounce the injustices of the world and work to redress imbalances. We cannot sit around folding our hands while the pandemic sows death in our communities because we insist on our moral high ground then.
Promoting abstinence might mean upholding the value of not having sex until marriage, while also recognising that for some young adults abstinence might mean only delaying the age of first sexual encounter beyond the more physiologically vulnerable teenage years. In another sense, promoting abstinence might also mean waiting until one is in a more stable relationship. Worse still, we might not always succeed in getting our message through on others; but it does not mean we should leave them to the devil; it is mercy that I want said Christ after hearing all these things.
Faithfulness might mean the exhortation of mutual fidelity on married couples, while also acknowledging that, in another context, the component of faithfulness might mean fidelity to a single long-term partner or fidelity to a strategy of reducing the instances of casual sex. In the end sexual preference must depend on the moral conscience of the individual.
The data is clear that condoms, when used correctly and consistently, reduce but do not remove the risk of HIV infection. This fact cannot be excluded from, or misrepresented in any information on risk reduction strategies, regardless of the political or moral position of those promoting them. Condom campaigns have been particularly effective with groups at the highest risk—prostitutes, for example—who may have few if any other realistic options for reducing this risk without them. But facts show also that condom campaigns have been considerably less effective in the general population as a public health strategy. Hence I condemn the “condoms only” or even “condoms mainly” campaigns for the general population that have often been promoted with the same dogmatism as some “abstinence only” campaigns. These similarly distort information.
A complementary and collaborative approach for the dismantling of mutual prejudices deplores the obstructive positioning, judgementalism and dogmatism of opposing factions that too often feature simplistic polarised approaches. If we are to conquer the AIDS epidemic we must find a way of reconciling solid science and good community development practices with established and evolving moral teaching.
The Catholic Church is deeply rooted in local communities throughout the developing world, and is a major contributor to the struggle against AIDS in the countries worst affected by the pandemic. The Church is therefore well placed to promote a more holistic understanding of prevention and to foster reconciliation between opposing factions, drawing these towards an attitude of mutual acceptance and collaboration. The challenges of the pandemic are urgent and compelling; the challenges of the Gospel are no less so for Christians. The Church, rightly so, does not take her moral standards from the values of the world. But as Christians, we have to find a way of mercy while standing firm on our moral understanding, or the future generations will hold us to account on both.
Burning whisper of silence
Dead things floats
Driftwoods no boats
A man and an ape stood
In the flotsam mood
Naked to marks the marks of weakness
Sharper in the pursuit of stillness
My hunger is complete
Detaches a beat In search of the heart
With the light of the head
Land on the disputed light
Between the heart and the head
The journey of the heart
Brings to the inner sanctuary
Where the bush burns
And Moses sees
Leaving behind the flocks he tends
Sandals off
Sky deep
Stars twinkle
Tears drop
The whisper of silence burns, Felt Elijah
Driftwoods no boats
A man and an ape stood
In the flotsam mood
Naked to marks the marks of weakness
Sharper in the pursuit of stillness
My hunger is complete
Detaches a beat In search of the heart
With the light of the head
Land on the disputed light
Between the heart and the head
The journey of the heart
Brings to the inner sanctuary
Where the bush burns
And Moses sees
Leaving behind the flocks he tends
Sandals off
Sky deep
Stars twinkle
Tears drop
The whisper of silence burns, Felt Elijah
Wednesday, 12 September 2007
Polemics Of History
A friend of mine wrote emailed me from London, asking what i thought of Dr. RW Johnson. I asked her to read my book review of his book i did a couple of years ago. She wrote me to say she could not find it on the internet, and so I've decided to republish it here again.
The book South Africa: The First Man And The Last Nation, written by the bel esprit of South African liberal thought, RW Johnson, is tedious and controversial from the very moment you pick it. Dr Johnson makes it clear from the preface of the book that he’s wielding a political axe to grind. Those who hate polemics in historical writings only go on reading hoping that, perhaps, such declarations are signs of unassailable integrity; or at least hoping fresh historical insight that’ll make reading the book worth one’s while. Alas all that to no avail.
Dr Johnson states his thesis from the beginning: 'We have to have to face the sad truth that South Africa , with the end of apartheid, exchanged one set of authoritarian, hegemonic nationalist for another and that many of the hopes of liberation have faded as the similarities between these two hegemonies have multiplied. One has to be frank about history. The job in hand, here in the southern tip of Africa , is to live through this period and to tell the truth about it so that we can one day go beyond it.'
Conspiracy mongering often serves as an excuse of avoiding the difficult task of finding a political alternative. One can be frank about history and still be dishonest if the motives are false. I suppose that’s what Freud meant when he wrote that the ‘Unconscious knows no negation.’ As if that was not enough, a nest of tedious exculpations try sustain shores of the discourse of Dr Johnson throughout the book with a tone of acquired subtle racism and Kliping’s colonialist ‘burden of the white man.’
Most of what Dr Johnson says has been said before, culled from pop history publications of South African history that sees themselves as promontory wall against the waves of false interpretations of history by African Nationalists. What the reader makes of statements like . . . 'and that many of the hopes of liberation have faded as the similarities between these two hegemonies have multiplied'. . . depends on one’s political leaning. Even so I cannot imagine the majority of people in our country agreeing with the statement. It makes one surmise that there’s an obvious truth in the belief of irreconcilable difference between liberal persuasions and the sentiments of ordinary people.
In reading Mr Johnson’s book one gets the feeling that we’re not dealing with assumptions of good old racists, but with a rise of imperialistic mind disguised in humanist language. We’re dealing with a prominent example of an urge to raise new walls of division by some Hesperian intellectuals in the name of progress. This new racism is in a way much more brutal than the previous one, because it’s implicit legitimisation is not naturalist—the superiority of the white race—but culturalist. It wants to preserve the Western cultural identity from the specious coming chaos of the ‘barbarians.’ We’re, in short, dealing with unabashed cultural egotism that has recently been heard calling for relocation of 20010 Soccer World amid unfounded fears that South Africa would not be able to cope.
Books like Dr Johnson’s projects fears, anxieties, rumours, and secret desires of liberals’ needs for intellectual prominence. Dr Johnson has collected and illuminated them into specious intellectual reports, and present them in the book as historical discussion. As the result the book is longueur-laden, fettered with irrelevant cultural sweeps that would make for another book in quotation. Where correct in it’s assessment, Dr Johnson’s book is unoriginal. It is a mixture of summaries from summaries, and reads like a poor slop of original tealeaves in their fifth wash of hot water.
Sometimes a reader may be taken in the book by the style of writing even though not necessarily agreeing with the author’s conclusions. The example of the Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee comes to mind. Dr Johnson, in every chance he gets, sets Coetzee as an example of a man of letters who could not live in clear conscience under governments of what he calls 'authoritarian, hegemonic nationalist'. Indeed, Coetzee is a master stylist whose sentences are classically balanced, dry, yet intimate and oracular. One is sometimes simply swept along by his writings despite the reservations he might have about content. Unfortunately the same is not true with Dr Johnson’s journalistic style of writing. One of the advantages artists have over historians is that they can compose works, even from dubious motivations, and still produce interesting and important, lasting, art. Historians are not permitted such margins. It matters that they get things right. Their opinions—which is all they have—in examining historical content are crucial. Wisdom in a historian is never an excess baggage. If only Dr Johnson had more wisdom and less thickly laid polemics.
The book South Africa: The First Man And The Last Nation, written by the bel esprit of South African liberal thought, RW Johnson, is tedious and controversial from the very moment you pick it. Dr Johnson makes it clear from the preface of the book that he’s wielding a political axe to grind. Those who hate polemics in historical writings only go on reading hoping that, perhaps, such declarations are signs of unassailable integrity; or at least hoping fresh historical insight that’ll make reading the book worth one’s while. Alas all that to no avail.
Dr Johnson states his thesis from the beginning: 'We have to have to face the sad truth that South Africa , with the end of apartheid, exchanged one set of authoritarian, hegemonic nationalist for another and that many of the hopes of liberation have faded as the similarities between these two hegemonies have multiplied. One has to be frank about history. The job in hand, here in the southern tip of Africa , is to live through this period and to tell the truth about it so that we can one day go beyond it.'
Conspiracy mongering often serves as an excuse of avoiding the difficult task of finding a political alternative. One can be frank about history and still be dishonest if the motives are false. I suppose that’s what Freud meant when he wrote that the ‘Unconscious knows no negation.’ As if that was not enough, a nest of tedious exculpations try sustain shores of the discourse of Dr Johnson throughout the book with a tone of acquired subtle racism and Kliping’s colonialist ‘burden of the white man.’
Most of what Dr Johnson says has been said before, culled from pop history publications of South African history that sees themselves as promontory wall against the waves of false interpretations of history by African Nationalists. What the reader makes of statements like . . . 'and that many of the hopes of liberation have faded as the similarities between these two hegemonies have multiplied'. . . depends on one’s political leaning. Even so I cannot imagine the majority of people in our country agreeing with the statement. It makes one surmise that there’s an obvious truth in the belief of irreconcilable difference between liberal persuasions and the sentiments of ordinary people.
In reading Mr Johnson’s book one gets the feeling that we’re not dealing with assumptions of good old racists, but with a rise of imperialistic mind disguised in humanist language. We’re dealing with a prominent example of an urge to raise new walls of division by some Hesperian intellectuals in the name of progress. This new racism is in a way much more brutal than the previous one, because it’s implicit legitimisation is not naturalist—the superiority of the white race—but culturalist. It wants to preserve the Western cultural identity from the specious coming chaos of the ‘barbarians.’ We’re, in short, dealing with unabashed cultural egotism that has recently been heard calling for relocation of 20010 Soccer World amid unfounded fears that South Africa would not be able to cope.
Books like Dr Johnson’s projects fears, anxieties, rumours, and secret desires of liberals’ needs for intellectual prominence. Dr Johnson has collected and illuminated them into specious intellectual reports, and present them in the book as historical discussion. As the result the book is longueur-laden, fettered with irrelevant cultural sweeps that would make for another book in quotation. Where correct in it’s assessment, Dr Johnson’s book is unoriginal. It is a mixture of summaries from summaries, and reads like a poor slop of original tealeaves in their fifth wash of hot water.
Sometimes a reader may be taken in the book by the style of writing even though not necessarily agreeing with the author’s conclusions. The example of the Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee comes to mind. Dr Johnson, in every chance he gets, sets Coetzee as an example of a man of letters who could not live in clear conscience under governments of what he calls 'authoritarian, hegemonic nationalist'. Indeed, Coetzee is a master stylist whose sentences are classically balanced, dry, yet intimate and oracular. One is sometimes simply swept along by his writings despite the reservations he might have about content. Unfortunately the same is not true with Dr Johnson’s journalistic style of writing. One of the advantages artists have over historians is that they can compose works, even from dubious motivations, and still produce interesting and important, lasting, art. Historians are not permitted such margins. It matters that they get things right. Their opinions—which is all they have—in examining historical content are crucial. Wisdom in a historian is never an excess baggage. If only Dr Johnson had more wisdom and less thickly laid polemics.
Saturday, 08 September 2007
Wagner’s Fans
I suppose I should not have been surprised when I read last week at The Sunday Times that our assiduous cultivator of his own subversive image, David Bullard, is a Richard Wagner’s fan (http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=552418) . After all the tone and context of his column, Out To Lunch, does read like he’s someone infected with embourgeoisement and Deutschtum [the German guiding idea of regenerating the human race], so disgustingly exploited by the Nazis. Thus Mr. Bullard is in the invidious company of Adolf Hitler who too was a Wagner fanatic.
I do not want to labour the similarities, or coincidences, of Mr. Bullard’s attendance of Wagnerian festival—of all the festivals to attend—but I’m using the same logic he uses in his satirical provocation that parodied South African politics to Wagnerian music. So if bright scorn is good for the gender it is good for the goose. In fact let’s do more than just follow Mr. Bullard let’s go into the attitudinising behind the topes and motes of his sarcastic grouchiness using the Wagnerian music he chose.
How and what Mr. Bullard writes in his column is not knew. Through out history imperialistic consciousness has needed and utilised culture to justify its hegemonic claim. From that has always been a small step for it to prattle in self-regarding aggressive mentality. Imperialist consciousness despises contamination to its own cultural ideal, and calls foreign influences vulgar to justify its racist and ethnic elitism.
What Mr. Bullard conveniently forgets to mention in his ominous piece, . . . are pompous and bombastic tendencies of Wagner’s music—just the thought of listening to Lohegrin makes my blood churn—perhaps because there are disturbing similarities to his writing style and Wagner’s stage theatrics, and pretensions to culture.
Thomas Mann was one writer who had a clear love hate relation to Wanger’s music. He defined it better when he equated it to a delighting adrenalin surge, holding the promise of flight and freedom. But he also warned that Wagner’s music has deathly powers of seduction; and when played, more often than not paralyzes the will. Perhaps frau Bullhard should make note too because Wagner’s music has been linked with impotence also, something the Nazi were very susceptible to.
Mr. Bullard in his comparison of The Rhinegold to South African politics; where the family of gods taking possession of a castle in Valhalla, and the Buddenbrooks occupy the house in Mengstrasse in Lübeck, is in his iconoclastic best. He forgot to add that conflicts ensue when the giants demand reimbursement for their construction work, and the Gotthold Buddenbrook seek payment for services rendered. Perhaps because this would have compelled him to mention that Gold and Geld [German for money] are at the heart of the story.
Some tend to read The Rhinegold as the demand by the ‘uncultured’ for their due; seeing that the proud ‘culture’ the Bildungsbürgertum (cultivated middle class) preen about is mostly built by the blood sweat of servile poor. But that cuts too close for the denunciatory embourgeoisement tendencies of Mr. Bullard.
Nazism has taught us, if anything, that there’s a fatal connection between conscious elitism of culture with subtle racism. Once it achieves power its outlets run tragically amok. Nazism used the dominant Wagnerian culture as a gateway into the educated bourgeois classes.
In South Africa, racial laagers use the competent articulating contempt of Mr. Bullard that prattles as integrity for similar tendencies. His column has ingratiated itself to the subtle prejudiced minds. In a country like ours, where rats are returning with steaming fetors of ideas of Rassenhygiene [racial hygiene], it would be ideal for columnists to medicine manners instead of adding force of cultural pretensions to racial illusions. Culture is never maintained in political vacuum.
Irony is the modern mode of commenting on frivolity and bleakness of our lives without falling into dourness and didactism. But sensitive balance has to be kept since our past is still a bruising place. That’s the lesson Mr. Bullard still needs to learn. Our future will also be coloured and refracted by our present cultural assumptions and attitudinising. And despite what the chattering class believes, the winner of the propaganda battle does not get to mold society, reality always gets the last laugh.
The skunk and skelter is pilling in at the rucks as our ruling party goes to Polokwane to nominate our next leader. Debate is vigorous and very healthy within our media, a wonderful thing one hopes the ruling party would adopt at the Polokwane National Conference. But freedom comes with respective responsibilities. And responsibility does not necessary mean dour dullness and lapsing into bien pensant clichés.
I do not want to labour the similarities, or coincidences, of Mr. Bullard’s attendance of Wagnerian festival—of all the festivals to attend—but I’m using the same logic he uses in his satirical provocation that parodied South African politics to Wagnerian music. So if bright scorn is good for the gender it is good for the goose. In fact let’s do more than just follow Mr. Bullard let’s go into the attitudinising behind the topes and motes of his sarcastic grouchiness using the Wagnerian music he chose.
How and what Mr. Bullard writes in his column is not knew. Through out history imperialistic consciousness has needed and utilised culture to justify its hegemonic claim. From that has always been a small step for it to prattle in self-regarding aggressive mentality. Imperialist consciousness despises contamination to its own cultural ideal, and calls foreign influences vulgar to justify its racist and ethnic elitism.
What Mr. Bullard conveniently forgets to mention in his ominous piece, . . . are pompous and bombastic tendencies of Wagner’s music—just the thought of listening to Lohegrin makes my blood churn—perhaps because there are disturbing similarities to his writing style and Wagner’s stage theatrics, and pretensions to culture.
Thomas Mann was one writer who had a clear love hate relation to Wanger’s music. He defined it better when he equated it to a delighting adrenalin surge, holding the promise of flight and freedom. But he also warned that Wagner’s music has deathly powers of seduction; and when played, more often than not paralyzes the will. Perhaps frau Bullhard should make note too because Wagner’s music has been linked with impotence also, something the Nazi were very susceptible to.
Mr. Bullard in his comparison of The Rhinegold to South African politics; where the family of gods taking possession of a castle in Valhalla, and the Buddenbrooks occupy the house in Mengstrasse in Lübeck, is in his iconoclastic best. He forgot to add that conflicts ensue when the giants demand reimbursement for their construction work, and the Gotthold Buddenbrook seek payment for services rendered. Perhaps because this would have compelled him to mention that Gold and Geld [German for money] are at the heart of the story.
Some tend to read The Rhinegold as the demand by the ‘uncultured’ for their due; seeing that the proud ‘culture’ the Bildungsbürgertum (cultivated middle class) preen about is mostly built by the blood sweat of servile poor. But that cuts too close for the denunciatory embourgeoisement tendencies of Mr. Bullard.
Nazism has taught us, if anything, that there’s a fatal connection between conscious elitism of culture with subtle racism. Once it achieves power its outlets run tragically amok. Nazism used the dominant Wagnerian culture as a gateway into the educated bourgeois classes.
In South Africa, racial laagers use the competent articulating contempt of Mr. Bullard that prattles as integrity for similar tendencies. His column has ingratiated itself to the subtle prejudiced minds. In a country like ours, where rats are returning with steaming fetors of ideas of Rassenhygiene [racial hygiene], it would be ideal for columnists to medicine manners instead of adding force of cultural pretensions to racial illusions. Culture is never maintained in political vacuum.
Irony is the modern mode of commenting on frivolity and bleakness of our lives without falling into dourness and didactism. But sensitive balance has to be kept since our past is still a bruising place. That’s the lesson Mr. Bullard still needs to learn. Our future will also be coloured and refracted by our present cultural assumptions and attitudinising. And despite what the chattering class believes, the winner of the propaganda battle does not get to mold society, reality always gets the last laugh.
The skunk and skelter is pilling in at the rucks as our ruling party goes to Polokwane to nominate our next leader. Debate is vigorous and very healthy within our media, a wonderful thing one hopes the ruling party would adopt at the Polokwane National Conference. But freedom comes with respective responsibilities. And responsibility does not necessary mean dour dullness and lapsing into bien pensant clichés.
The Rhetoric is no Longer Enough
The economies of developing counties, because they’re in state of transformation, award us means to critically examine the means and ways of balancing market economy with democracy. Latin America is presently under the popular explosive multiplier effect led by the firebrand Hugo Chavèz. All developing countries, South Africa included, will not be immune to consequent multiplier effects of what is presently going on in Latin America.
For instance, Chavez is in the process of building ties with the likes of Cuba and China in defiance of what he calls George W Bush’s imposing plans for a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Chavez has proposed a Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America and the Caribbean (ALBA); arguing that ALBA would redistribute wealth to the poorest, rather than siphoning it off to Washington fat cats. Facts on the ground are that he is remaining true to his aspirations.
On the other hand the Chinese economic reforms are fast producing consequences of income polarization, increased poverty for the majority, and intensified exploitation of the majority of people for the benefit of the few emerging rich hooded capitalists. The Chinese Communist party argues that such things are an integral part of the processes of capitalist marketisation that is a necessary step towards fully fledged socialism.
Then there’s India, where the class problem has become more acute with opening of markets and growth of domestic economies. The rich minority of India is mostly aborigine; hence it feels immune to criticism. It sees the country’s economic success as part and parcel of domestic empowerment. But militant parties are mushrooming all over India under the guise of religious tensions when in truth they are people who are frustrated with economic trend of the country that favours the rich and educated.
China has managed to smuggle probably the most radical form of capitalism under the guise of socialist rhetoric; while South Africa has been accused of tricky gymnastics of ‘talking left and acting right’ with an economic growth that is refusing to trickle down to the people on the ground. The truth of the matter, with all the talk of healthy fiscals and markets correcting themselves for the past eons of years, the poor everywhere are getting poorer while the rich are getting richer.
To answer Mr. Joel Netshitenzhe, in his piece Leadership for a new age on the Polokwane Briefing of the Mail and Guardian; yes the ANC is still probably the best party to lead this country forward to a much more brighter democratic future, but the glue is thinning out. What the ANC needs to learn—not emulate—from Asian nations, especially China, is that ingesting some new blood on a party affords it an opportunity to avoid entropy. The ANC is in desperate need of new ideas that’ll take the country into a new age.
A new dawn has come into the world and the ANC cannot afford to miss it. World people of goodwill have woken to the injustices of the present economic system whose status quo is biased to the poor. There’s a surge of civic and political activism that is opposed to the fundamental injustices of neo-liberal economic values: the brutal exploitation of resources, ruthless competition, vulgar materialism, rampant consumerism, morbid individualism, obscene greed, odious hypocrisy, and so on.
I know the ANC keep telling us that its policies are biased to the poor but the evidence on the ground suggests otherwise. South African economic policies are driven by the Washington Consensus with few insignifanct concessions there and there, and windfalls for the poor in the form paltry social welfare programs. When the president stands in front of the nation, as he did towards the national conference of the SACP to asks what’s the alternative; either he’s being naïve, ironical, or simply admitting to the dearth of ideas in the economic well of his party.
The ANC (African National Congress) on its discussion paper titled Economic Transformation For A National Democratic Society has admitted that; “We are still some way from our vision of the economic base of a national democratic society. The ownership and control of wealth and income, the poverty trap, access to opportunity and so on are, are all in the main defined, as under apartheid, on the basis of race and gender.”
It has finally realised that it is chasing a bouncing ball in thinking that the “changes we seek” will emerge from the “invisible hand” of the market.
It seems a paradoxical vacuousness of our times that even the political rhetoric of “bias towards the poor” serves only to feed the coffers of neo-liberal polices. Perhaps it is time for the ANC to realise that there’s an unbridgeable gulf between democratic socialism and neo-liberalism and start acting accordingly.
For instance, Chavez is in the process of building ties with the likes of Cuba and China in defiance of what he calls George W Bush’s imposing plans for a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Chavez has proposed a Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America and the Caribbean (ALBA); arguing that ALBA would redistribute wealth to the poorest, rather than siphoning it off to Washington fat cats. Facts on the ground are that he is remaining true to his aspirations.
On the other hand the Chinese economic reforms are fast producing consequences of income polarization, increased poverty for the majority, and intensified exploitation of the majority of people for the benefit of the few emerging rich hooded capitalists. The Chinese Communist party argues that such things are an integral part of the processes of capitalist marketisation that is a necessary step towards fully fledged socialism.
Then there’s India, where the class problem has become more acute with opening of markets and growth of domestic economies. The rich minority of India is mostly aborigine; hence it feels immune to criticism. It sees the country’s economic success as part and parcel of domestic empowerment. But militant parties are mushrooming all over India under the guise of religious tensions when in truth they are people who are frustrated with economic trend of the country that favours the rich and educated.
China has managed to smuggle probably the most radical form of capitalism under the guise of socialist rhetoric; while South Africa has been accused of tricky gymnastics of ‘talking left and acting right’ with an economic growth that is refusing to trickle down to the people on the ground. The truth of the matter, with all the talk of healthy fiscals and markets correcting themselves for the past eons of years, the poor everywhere are getting poorer while the rich are getting richer.
To answer Mr. Joel Netshitenzhe, in his piece Leadership for a new age on the Polokwane Briefing of the Mail and Guardian; yes the ANC is still probably the best party to lead this country forward to a much more brighter democratic future, but the glue is thinning out. What the ANC needs to learn—not emulate—from Asian nations, especially China, is that ingesting some new blood on a party affords it an opportunity to avoid entropy. The ANC is in desperate need of new ideas that’ll take the country into a new age.
A new dawn has come into the world and the ANC cannot afford to miss it. World people of goodwill have woken to the injustices of the present economic system whose status quo is biased to the poor. There’s a surge of civic and political activism that is opposed to the fundamental injustices of neo-liberal economic values: the brutal exploitation of resources, ruthless competition, vulgar materialism, rampant consumerism, morbid individualism, obscene greed, odious hypocrisy, and so on.
I know the ANC keep telling us that its policies are biased to the poor but the evidence on the ground suggests otherwise. South African economic policies are driven by the Washington Consensus with few insignifanct concessions there and there, and windfalls for the poor in the form paltry social welfare programs. When the president stands in front of the nation, as he did towards the national conference of the SACP to asks what’s the alternative; either he’s being naïve, ironical, or simply admitting to the dearth of ideas in the economic well of his party.
The ANC (African National Congress) on its discussion paper titled Economic Transformation For A National Democratic Society has admitted that; “We are still some way from our vision of the economic base of a national democratic society. The ownership and control of wealth and income, the poverty trap, access to opportunity and so on are, are all in the main defined, as under apartheid, on the basis of race and gender.”
It has finally realised that it is chasing a bouncing ball in thinking that the “changes we seek” will emerge from the “invisible hand” of the market.
It seems a paradoxical vacuousness of our times that even the political rhetoric of “bias towards the poor” serves only to feed the coffers of neo-liberal polices. Perhaps it is time for the ANC to realise that there’s an unbridgeable gulf between democratic socialism and neo-liberalism and start acting accordingly.
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