kagablog

Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) has not … proved to be the fatal blow to South Africa’s oligarchs that Nelson Mandela and black nationalists of his era once envisioned. In fact, it strikes a fatal blow against the emergence of black entrepreneurship by creating a small class of unproductive but wealthy black crony capitalists made up of ANC politicians, some retired and others not, who have become strong allies of the economic oligarchy that is, ironically, the caretaker of South Africa’s deindustrialization … BEE in South Africa is, in reality, another attempt to siphon savings from private-sector operators in an environment where there are no peasants and where most of the private sector is locally owned.

The fact that BEE is an uphill battle for South Africa’s political elite is the result of the ability of the private sector to resist dispossession. But these are early days. Time will tell who will emerge best from what could be a titanic struggle by the political elite – recently joined by organised labour – to confiscate the wealth of South Africa’s current private-sector owners.

An even bigger question, however, is what impact these struggles will have on the growth potential of the South African economy … Most people in South Africa, in Africa, and the rest of the world naively believe that BEE was an invention of South Africa’s black nationalists, especially the African National Congress (ANC), which won the first democratic election in April 1994, leading to Nelson Mandela becoming the country’s first black president. This could not be further from the truth. BEE was, in fact, invented by South Africa’s economic oligarchs, that handful of white businessmen and their families who control the commanding heights of the country’s economy, that is, mining and its associated chemical and engineering industries and finance.

The flagship BEE company, New Africa Investments Limited (Nail), started operating in 1992, two years before the ANC came to power. It was created by the second-largest South African insurance company, Sanlam, with the support of the National Party government-controlled Industrial Development Corporation (IDC), a state-owned industrial investment bank created in 1940. The formation of Nail was soon followed by the creation of Real African Investment Limited (Rail), sponsored by mining giant Anglo American Corporation through its financial services subsidiary Southern Life.

The object of BEE was to co-opt leaders of the black resistance movement by literally buying them off with what looked like a transfer to them of massive assets at no cost. To the oligarchs, of course, these assets were small change.

Sanlam created Nail by transferring control of one of its small subsidiaries, Metropolitan Life, 85 per cent of whose policy-holders were black, to several ANC and Pan Africanist Congress affiliated leaders. The device used was to split shares of MetLife into a small package, dubbed high-voting shares, which gave the politicians (funded by a loan from the IDC) control of the company. Overnight the politicians were transformed into multi-millionaires without having had to lift a finger because all the financial wizardry was performed by Sanlam’s senior executives. All the politicians had to do was show up at the party to launch Nail and thank their benefactor. Even the debt the politicians incurred was largely fictitious as it was MetLife that had to pay it back to the IDC.

This financial razzmatazz was designed to achieve a number of objectives. It was intended to:

wean the ANC from radical economic ambitions, such as nationalising the major elements of the South African economy, by putting cash in the politicians’ private pockets, packaged to look like atonement for the sins of apartheid, that is, reparations to black people in general;

provide the oligarchs with prominent and influential seats at the high table of the ANC government’s economic policy formulation system;

allow those oligarchs who wanted to shift their company’s primary listings and headquarters from Johannesburg to London to do so;
give the oligarchs and their companies the first bite at government contracts that interested them; and
protect the oligarchs from foreign competition while opening up the rest of the economy, especially the consumer goods and manufacturing sector, to the chill winds of international competition.

All these machinations were eventually incorporated into South Africa’s democratic Constitution by the creation of a category of citizens, apparently 91 per cent of the population, to be known as Previously Disadvantaged Individuals (PDIs). The ingenious legal notion of previously disadvantaged individuals created the impression that all black South Africans could or would benefit from BEE. This legitimised the co-option payment to the black political elite by dangling before the black masses the possibility that one day they, too, would receive reparations for the wrongs done to them during the apartheid era.

BEE and its subsidiaries – affirmative action and affirmative procurement – which started off as defensive instruments created by the economic oligarchs to protect their assets, have metamorphosed. They have become both the core ideology of the black political elite and, simultaneously, the driving material and enrichment agenda which is to be achieved by maximising the proceeds of reparations that accrue to the political elite. As we shall see below, this has proved to be disastrous for the country.

Reparations

The black elite, which describes itself as made up of PDIs, sees its primary mission as extracting reparations from those who put it in a disadvantaged position. To achieve this requires the transfer of resources from the wrongdoer – perceived to be white-owned businesses and the South African state – to the victim, the PDIs. By this logic the South African state owes the PDIs high-paying jobs. This transfer of wealth from the strong to the weak is what has come to be known as BEE.

Enormous consequences follow from this apparently simple formulation:

1. In order for the wrongdoer to be able to pay reparations, the wrongdoer has to maintain a privileged position. This is the principle of fattening the goose that lays the golden egg. What this means is that the corporations that were allegedly responsible for victimising the PDIs must not be transformed beyond putting a few black individuals in their upper echelons. The protection of these corporations has gone so far as to allow them to move their head offices and primary listings from Johannesburg to London in order to shield them from possible economic and political upheaval in South Africa. At a broader level, the battery of Washington Consensus policies – which include trade liberalisation, balanced budgets, privatisation, inflation targeting, as well as the small state – all serve to protect the interests of South Africa’s big business, one of the two main payers of reparations.

2. For the victim to continue to draw reparations it is critical that he or she remains perceived as a victim and as weak. This means that the former freedom fighter must be transformed from a hero who liberated South Africa into an underling. The payment of reparations to the black elite thus achieves the opposite of what it is claimed it was designed to do, that is, make its members leading players in the economy. In reality, it makes members of the black elite perpetual junior support players to white-controlled corporations.

3. One of the most destructive consequences of the reparations ideology is the black elite’s relationship with, and attitude to, the South African state. As the state is said to have been party to the disadvantaging of the PDIs it is therefore also perceived to owe them something. By way of reparations the state must therefore provide PDIs with high-paying jobs. By extension, the assets of the state are seen as fair game. The approach of the black elite to the state is, therefore, not that of using the state to serve the needs of the people but rather of using it, in the first instance, to advance the material interest of PDIs. Not surprisingly, corruption under the ANC government has grown by leaps and bounds, leading Transparency International – the worldwide watchdog on corruption – to downgrade South Africa in the world’s corruption tables. According to the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index South Africa dropped from number 34 in 2000 to number 54 in 2008. In 2008 the least corrupt countries were Denmark, New Zealand and Sweden and the most corrupt country was Somalia, ranked at 180.1 Ironically, one of the most important restraining influences on the abuse of the state for the self-enrichment of the black elite is the white-controlled corporations – the abovementioned layers of golden eggs – because these corporations need the South African state to function efficiently in order to provide a stable business environment as well as functioning transport and communication infrastructure. The judiciary and the independent mass media also play an important role in this regard.

4. The ideology of reparations traps members of the black elite into seeing themselves as the beneficiaries of the production of other social groups and therefore primarily as consumers. To facilitate their role as consumers the black elite sees the state essentially as distributive rather than developmental. Most importantly, the black elite don’t see themselves as producers and therefore do not envisage themselves as entrepreneurs who can initiate and manage new enterprises. At best, they see themselves as joining existing enterprises, the process of which is to be facilitated by the distributive state through reparations-inspired legislation. This is the most striking difference between the black elite of South Africa and the elites of Asia, where the driving ideology is entrepreneurship.

an excerpt from the book “architects of poverty”

We can’t carry on harmful practices in the name of culture
29 June 2010
Andile Mngxitama

Andile Mngxitama

IT’S that time of mass killing of boys in the name of a myth called manhood.

Already this season more than 50 boys are said to have died from botched circumcisions.

No one should die from the removal of a piece of skin. It’s an indictment of our nation that such predictable suffering is allowed to occur every year.

Why do we send our young men to the mountains to make them men?

Thando Mgqolozana has written a powerful novel called A Man Who is not a Man.

This novel takes us through the terror and horror of botched circumcision. It tells the tale of a cultural practice that has lost its usefulness.

The novel needs to be read by all South Africans, especially those who continue to practice ulwaluko.

Hopefully someone in government will see the value of putting money into translating the book into our languages and getting someone like Mgqolozana to lead dialogues at village level so that some sense can prevail .

For a week on my facebook wall we discussed the implications of ulwaluko.

Those people who defended the practice have failed dismally to answer two simple questions.

What is a man and what is manhood? The children are being butchered and killed in the name of a myth called manhood.

How does manhood serve the interest of black people who remain poor, landless, divided and victims of racism? In Western Cape the powerlessness of blacks is expressed not only in the open-air toilets, but the plastic huts our initiates use in the passage to so- called manhood. We have lost even the ownership of our grass.

Ulwaluko is indefensible, just like other backward and barbaric practices such as ukuthwala.

Ulwaluko gives powerless men a false sense of importance.

It created masculinities of subjugation because all black people in front of whiteness are boys and girls! All answer ja baas to the impatient call from our white counterparts.

The initiate who is driven to delirium by pain imagines that something special has happened to them. Survival is key to externalising the myth of manhood.

Those who don’t survive or come out scared are men who are not men to borrow from the novel.

We discard them. The dead we bury, those we maim we forget while alive, pretending nothing happened to them. Silence is part of the conspiracy of death. And we wonder why our men are so violent.

It is the height of slave mentality and stupidity to carry on practices that go against value systems of life and equality, because “it’s our culture”. Manhood as currently constructed is about patriarchy.

It’s about justifying the differential treatment men enjoy over women.

It’s about who can get into the kraal and make decisions. Manhood is not consistent with rational thought or equality.

It must be said that even if no one died from the practice the same question of what is manhood would be as important.

We need new values and identities of who we must be. We can’t carry on harmful practices in the name of culture. Culture must serve us or cease to exist. Ulwaluko must be abolished!

this article first published by sowetan.co.za

niks kom van niks af nie
stilte skree in stilte
bloed soek na bloed
the blind lei die blinde
as daar met net die een-oog koning was
praat geen kwaad
hoor dit nie
as jou een oog uitgelpluk is, sal jy die kwaad nie kan sien nie
bloek soek na bloed
bloed roep uit vir nog bloed
bloed roep uit, waar is jou stem
uit jou keel uitgepluk?
uitegeskeur?
sit jou stembande dalk om my gewrigte vasgedraai
jou tong is ingesluk en steek by jou keelgat uit
stilte skree in stilte
die stilte fluister nou

The subject of reconciliation has become an area of critique and indeed greyness in relation to South Africa’s history. After 50 years of Apartheid racial government and 350 years of European hegemony on the southern tip of Africa, white minority rule finally ended in 1994 with Nelson Mandela elected the new leader of Africa’s newest democracy. In reality what the black leadership inherited was 350 years of unsolved psychological problems of which many of them themselves were deeply inflicted. One only needs to look at the record of corruption in the post‐Apartheid ANC government to see that some people couldn’t wait any longer to steal wealth stolen from them and their ancestors. I do not intend to excuse this corruption but to suggest ways of understanding it.

The deal of reconciliation was struck with the white man and made visible by the truth and reconciliation commission, which granted amnesty to those willing to fully disclose wrong doings within the dark days of Apartheid. Amnesty would then only be granted with the approval of victims or their families. Within this process of national reconciliation a new constitution was also formulated. A process heavily flawed and a compromise to the longterm aspirations of a black majority, the economic minority, says Andile Mngxitama author of a current political journal called Frank Talk. He is a contemporary commentator on the legacy of Steve Biko, deceased Black consciousness leader. He suggests what Biko’s stance would be on various topics within the contemporary South African political landscape.
Unequivocally he believes that Biko would abstain from voting in the new South Africa. An initial compromise during the transition of power is cited as the biggest obstacle. It secured peace through amnesty and reconciliation but ensured the economic structures of racialcapitalism and the entrenchment of white wealth within the guise of a free and democratic South Africa. That the subsequent black governments have implemented policies of black economic empowerment within this structure but through inadequate and exploitative implementation, has allowed for the creation of a buffer of black middle class elite who legitimise the minority of white wealth and the inherited racial capital system. It is clear that what is at fault is the system.

Mngxitama also exposes a fallacy namely, that South Africa is a non‐racial society. Many of the liberation movements, most notably the African National Congress who are the current government, preach(ed) a message of non‐racialism; that South Africa belongs to all its people black and white. These words come directly from their Freedom Charter, a document used as a guideline for the current constitution. The problem arose when liberation was achieved and a democratic, non‐racial state proclaimed. There is a large gap in the jump from fighting for non‐racial ideals and then its immediate proclamation when the revolution is supposedly won.

What is non‐racialism? As espoused by the liberation movements it means a society in which there is no regard or judgement by race, egalitarian if you will. The problem is that the country still has an inherent racist structure especially economically. A strategy of nonracism should be first on the agenda. What is non‐racism? It is the addressing of racist structures in society. One cannot ignore race until all the inequalities linked to its notions are removed. The systems of Black economic empowerment, affirmative action and racial quotas in sport are attempts to change the structure of racism, but need to be implemented more effectively and given more time. Non‐racism leads to non‐racialism. Non‐racialism is the end not the means.

It is my inference and I suspect the implication of Biko’s legacy that a second liberation struggle must be fought, this time on an economic and cultural level. As Nelson Mandela said after his release and his election as president and I paraphrase: We have not yet achieved true freedom, we have merely achieved the freedom to be free. Aluta continua, the struggle continues.

THE CIRCUMCISION REFERENCE LIBRARY
BRITISH JOURNAL OF MEDICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Volume 38: Pages 321-31,
December 1965.
Printed in Great Britain

PROBLEM

In his writings on sexual development, Freud postulated that around the fourth or fifth year of life, the genital concentration of all sexual excitement is achieved and the boy’s interest in the genitals attains a dominant significance. At this phase of infantile genital organization, the phallic stage, the sexual organs gain a great narcissistic value. The fear that something might happen to this prized organ is called castration anxiety.

Castration anxiety gains significance in the child’s life also when related to the nature of relations characterizing the phallic stage. According to Freud, at this stage of development, the boys experiences strong genital strivings for his mother and death wishes for his father, conceptualized as the Oedipus complex. The discovery of sexual differences between boys and girls raises the expectations of castration for himself, as a retaliation for the forbidden sexual desires toward his mother (Freud, S.,1920, 1953).

Clinical observations by psychoanalysts, evidence from anthropology, religious and folk myths, artistic creations and various other sources suggest that the narcissistic fear over the loss of the genital organ leads to the renunciation of the Oedipal attachments. This resolution ushers in a new developmental stage – the latency period.

It is now generally accepted that under the impact of Oedipal strivings and castration anxiety, children at the phallic stage are disposed to experience fantastic fears of bodily damage. Masturbation, medical treatment, traumas, accidents have been shown by many to create disturbances in the psychic life of the child (Coleman 1950; Deutsch 1942; Jessner et al. 1952; Miller, 1951). Anna Freud has indicated that ‘…any surgical interference with the child’s body may serve as a focal point for the activation, reactivation, grouping, and rationalization of the ideas of being attacked, overwhelmed and (or) castrated….The actual experience of the operation lends a feeling of reality to the repressed fantasies, thereby multiplying the anxieties connected with it. Apart from the threatening situation in the outer world, this increase of anxiety presents an internal danger which the child’s ego has to face. Where the defence mechanisms available at the time are strong enough to master these anxieties, all is well; where they have overstrained to integrate the experience, the child reacts to the operation with neurotic outbreaks; where the ego is unable to cope with the anxiety released, the operation becomes a trauma for the child’ (Freud, A., 1952)

It is noted in the psychoanalytic literature that operations actually performed on the penis, such as circumcision, arouse castration fears whatever the level of libidinal development and facilitate the development of homosexual trends in boys. (Fenichel, 1945). Nunberg, in a most interesting article on circumcision and the problems of bisexuality, points out that injury to the penis may intimidate the boy and impair his development to full virility. However he also proposes that circumcision may stimulate the masculine strivings of the child by encouraging identification with the father. (Nunberg,1947).

Circumcision as a religious custom, has been and is being performed in various parts of the world, in primitive and modern societies. It is a general custom among the Turkish people, finding its justification mainly in religion. Among the educated, it is practised for hygienic purposes. Children are circumcised in Turkey between the ages of 2 and 10 but very often before starting school, i.e. around 5-7. Very little or misleading information is given to the child about the nature of the operation.

The practice of circumcision among the Turks around the phallic stage raises some interesting questions as to its effects on the psychology of the child. Although it is common knowledge in psychoanalytic circles that an operational procedure on the child’s sexual organs at the phallic stage will augment his anxieties about castration, no research exists in the literature investigating the specific effects of circumcision practised around these ages. From the formulations of the psychoanalytically oriented writers, we can hypothesize that circumcision will be perceived by the child as an attack, will have detrimental effects on the ego, loosening the fears of castration and rendering a reality to them, thus establishing the feelings of ‘I am now castrated’. According to Freud’s hypothesis, we can also postulate that circumcision around the phallic stage, by establishing the feelings of being already castrated, will initiate in the child a confusion about sexual identity and dispose him toward femininity. This study was carried out to investigate the validity of these hypotheses.
PROCEDURE

Twelve children between the ages of 4 and 7 were used in the study, six came from families of low and six from average economic and social level. Except two cases, none was given explicit information about circumcision. Apart from two, none had yet begun schooling. Their physical condition during testing was normal. Prior to the study, only one had witnessed a physical trauma, specifically a head injury which had occurred 2-3 years ago. The other children had the usual sicknesses without any major complications or hospitalizations.

The children were seen about a month before the operation. A questionaire was given to the mother, which sought information concerning the child’s living conditions, development, social, emotional, intellectual adaptation, his and the families reaction to circumcision. Following this, Goodenough Draw-a-man test, Rorshasch, CAT and a set of stories were admininistered to the child.

Three to seven days after the operation, the child was seen again and the same tests were readministered, except parallel form of stories. A second questionaire was given to the mother, this time investigating the child’s physical and psychological reactions to the operation. By the time of the second testing most of the children had overcome the physical discomforts of the operation.
RESULTS

Questionaire

Although the results obtained from the two questionaires are not directly related to the subject of this study, they furnish material about the child’s living conditions which might be of interest to psychologists abroad.

Only three of the subjects had separate bedrooms, two shared it with a close relative, but five with their parents. One child slept in the same bed with this brother and one with his sister.

The children from low income families lived under very strong psychological and physical deprivation. Most were threatened by a realistic fear of hunger and quite justified fears of destruction, resulting from continuous mal- treatment. The children from average income level faced the typical problems of an American child of the same social class.

The mothers showed considerable resistance against observing signs of mental disturbance in their children and, apart from two, described their children as ‘emotionally, socially and intellectually healthy’. The observations made during testing sessions and the innocent remarks of the mothers revealed that all of the children had certain psychological problems, such as bed-wetting, phobias, temper tantrums. Two subjects were severely disturbed. However, the mothers considered these symptoms as normal manifestations of childhood and seemed totally unaware of their psychopathological character.

Only two mothers had given some information to their children about circumcision. The rest had refrained, due to various rationalizations. Often ‘a small lie’ was told to the child, such as ‘you’ll receive lots of gifts and have great fun’. However, the mothers reported that the child actually knew what would happen. Most children had collected some kind of information from friends or relatives. The mothers rationalized their reluctance to give information by stating that the child would be fearful if told the truth and refuse to cooperate. They preferred the child be fooled and should he manifest signs of alarm or disturbance after circumcision, this, they believed would be overcome by time or ‘fate’.

The mothers were also resistant toward observing the psychological reactions of the children following the operation. In the second questionaire, they described the children’s behaviour to the operation as ‘healthy and mature’. They explained the temper tantrums the child manifested, a typical reaction, as the result of being ‘spoiled by the attention and the gifts given to him’.

From the interviews with the mother, it seemed in general, that they had little understanding into the child’s psychological state, regardless of circumcision. Particularly in the families with low income and little education, the child’s needs and anxieties were rarely recognized and little or nothing was done to protect him from dispair. The child was left alone to struggle with and solve his fears, curiosities or strivings. The fathers, having left the care of the child to the mother, seemed to be even more distant emotionally.

keep reading this article here

Ask us about Shangaan Electro a week ago and we’d ask you to speak slower. Ask us this week and we’ll rave about one of the most astounding records we’ve heard this year. The erstwhile and intrepid ears of Honest Jon’s Mark Ainley and Hardwax/Basic Channel legend Mark Ernestus have been following this niche style from Soweto, SA, for a hot minute, long enough anyway to pick out twelve extraordinary examples of 180bpm, marimba-laden, afro-dance diamonds hewn from rickety drum machines and keyboards shaped into dazzling fillips of pure dance energy. We almost couldn’t believe our ears on first listen, or the tenth. It was perhaps only when we witnessed the accompanying videos on youtube that it started to settle into place, watching liquid hipped Shangaan dancers scuttle and stomp like folk possessed by something untold but completely comprehendible. It’s not a large punt to draw distinctions between this and Chicago footwurk or Caribbean Soca styles, from the high tempo velocity to use of basic equipment all deployed with the intention of eliciting faster and more furious dance moves from the participants. Essentially this is a continuation of traditional styles, only plugged in at the studio of Nozinja Music Productions to become utterly electrified and electrifying. But these aren’t simply instrumental rhythms, they’re also songs with passionate, soul wrenching vocals and head-rushingly sweet synth melodies. Four exemplary contributions from the scene’s lynchpin Zinja Hlungwani are worth the entry price alone; from the gripping hypertension of ‘Ntombi Ya Mugaza’ to the warbling duet of synthesized and human soul in ‘Nwa Gezani My Love’, or the alien harmonics of ‘Nwa Gezani’, you’re paying to experience a mesmerizing sound that you simply can’t hear anywhere outside of Limpopo or low-res youtube clips. Nozinja is responsible for the breakneck speed of Shangaan Electro, responding to public demand for faster rhythms since opening his studio in 2005, even creating “boy bands” like the boiler-suited and clown mask-wearing Tshetsha Boys and producing for the rest of the artists included here. To be fair, this music is still a totally niche prospect, but initial reactions from friends we would never expect to like it have been as immediate as the music itself and there’s no denying this will be one of the years most lauded albums among adventurous listeners. This is genuinely some of the most exciting music you’ll hear this year, and alongside the Footwork/Juke craze currently taking hold, you’ll have heard little like it before. ESSENTIAL PURCHASE!

this review first appeared on boomkat.com

From The Life of Henry Fuckit, 1950-2015
by Ian Martin

“This is a dwarf but massive tree,” said Albert Adendorff, retired professor of Applied Palaeontology and part time curator of the Luderitz Museum. He laughed ironically. “You might think that I attempt to make an ironical paradox by speaking in funny contradictions, but let me assure you all, even you my little friend,” and he patted the head of a three year old, “there is a giant hiding beneath this, this … this miserable excrescence.” And it WAS a miserable excrescence, Henry silently agreed. A pretty good description for the heap of rubbish around which the party was grouped. Two families, two older couples, and himself. The same heap of rubbish he had seen in the station garden at Aus, only this one was bigger and more rubbishy. Henry was recovering from his disappointment. When he had shown Bergson’s map to Professor Adendorff the old man had pointed to one of the red circles and said, “This is easy. I can take you there tomorrow.” It had been abundantly obvious, as they arrived, that there was no possibility of a duct in this area. No rocky outcrop promising the possibility of a cave, no gaping fissure leading down into darkness. Just this big expanse of barren waste littered with flint and dominated, if one could use such a word, by the abominable floral specimen. There was certainly no point in lugging Lady Provider out here. Bergson had made a mistake.

“That is most without doubt the origin of the Linnean nomenclature. According to the binomial system of classification the first word, in this case Welwitschia, denotes after whom the plant is called. Gottlieb Welwitsch, renowned adventurer. ‘Mirabilis’, the second part of Welwitschia mirabilis, is the descriptive component and very accurately captures the general demeanour of this amazing plant.”

His English was easy and polished from much use and the German accent was an embellishment to his speech, lending a professorial ring to his words.

“Welwitschia mirabilis, the giant dwarf. This is not my field of speciality. My speciality is fossils, and I have spent my life studying the structure and evolution of extinct animals and plants, not living ones. Nevertheless, I cannot fail to be fascinated by Welwitschia mirabilis. Consider how it has been driven underground by the rigours of the desert climate.” They dutifully regarded the specimen, the object they had trailed some two kilometres over the gravel plain to behold. Even photographs were taken. “The stem is more than a metre in diameter and stands about a metre above the ground. There will be two to three metres of stem below ground before the taproot begins. The crown, if we may use so regal a word, is flattened and saucer shaped, protruding from the ground like an inverted elephant’s foot, the hard, dark brown wood cracked and warty and more resembling a clump of rock than a living tree. Please be so kind as to note the two semicircular grooves from which the leaves grow. Yes, these are leaves.”

“Are you sure this isn’t refuse blown inland from the harbour?” Henry felt obliged to show interest and ask a question. After all, the old boy was genuinely enthusiastic about his subject and wished to share his knowledge free of charge.

“No, no. This is positively identifiable as Welwitschia mirabilis. You see, the plant produces only two leaves throughout its life. They are persistent, continually growing out form the base, like tough leathery paste being squeezed from a great tube. The ends of the leaves are constantly blackened and worn away by the desert sun and searing winds and, in fact, the entire leaf blade becomes torn into long thong-like shreds, resulting in this tangled mass lying before us.”

“Does it have any uses?”

“No. Unfortunately not. And it is of great interest that you should ask the question, for it adds to the exceptional nature of the plant. It has been found to be entirely useless. No part of it is edible, the wood cannot be worked and as fuel it is impossible: it will only smoulder, giving off a foul smelling black smoke that attracts flies and mosquitoes and irritates the mucous membranes. Even the Bushmen were unable to fashion something from it. Their name for it was Tamboa, meaning God’s mistake.”

They had been standing around the tree for some fifteen minutes, looking at it from all angles, marvelling at its ugliness and its uselessness, and now the children were restless and wanting to go back. Henry fell into step with the professor as they trudged over the flinty, broken ground to Luderitz.

“How long did you say the tap root was?”

“Ah, yes! The taproot. Now the tap root has been estimated to reach a length in excess of one kilometre, but of course no one has ever been able to excavate the full depth due to…”

Henry liked the professor. He was mild mannered and humorous; correct but lacking in pomposity. His interest in this ridiculous plant was academic but not entirely serious. Surely that was an essential ingredient. To think that anything was particularly serious was to be deluded. As if sensing Henry’s train of thought the professor cut short on the tap root and said,

“I devoted my life to the search for ‘the missing link’. Fossil proof that man had developed directly from the same source as anthropoid apes… and I found it, the proof. Did it bring me recognition? Did it bring me contentment? It brought me nothing but trouble. I was driven from the university, branded as a lunatic and a fraud. And my senior colleagues then stole my work and claimed credit for the discovery. The last ten years of my career I was forced to spend at Fort Hare University, searching for the Missing Link that would prove beyond doubt that the black races of Africa evolved from a different type of ape – an inferior ape. Ha ha ha! Can you believe the stupidity?”

“So you were a failure?” Henry was surprised at the lack of bitterness in the old man’s laugh.

“No. Not in my own eyes. In the eyes of others, maybe yes. But that is of very little real consequence. Not so?” And he gave Henry a challenging look, as if to say, “You don’t look as if you care too much about what others think of you.”

“But what about science? What about the pursuit of knowledge? How can you still believe…?”

“But I don’t!” Behind his spectacles his eyes sparked fiercely. “Human behaviour stirs different emotions in me. Sometimes I am uplifted, at other times I am sickened. There is irony in everything man does. Do you know what amuses me most?” But they had reached the road and the group gathered in a knot about the professor. One of the older women was asking him about the salt surface that substituted for stone chips and tar.

Ian Martin’s controversial novel Pop-splat is now available from http://www.pop-splat.co.za