kagablog

keep reading this article here http://www.citypress.co.za/Columnists/A-law-unto-ourself-20120324

Venue : Art.b Gallery, Bellville Library Centre
Carel van Aswegen Street, Bellville

A strong focus of the CHR is the project on aesthetics and politics,
which aims to foster debates on artistic production, and to lay the
foundations for new concepts for research. To these ends, the CHR is
committed to exploring the relation between aesthetics, politics and
society in order to contribute to a post-apartheid sensibility. In
keeping with its thematic concerns, the CHR acquired an important and
historic body of artworks in 2008 – the Community Arts Project (CAP)
collection, which consists of over 4,000 paintings, prints, posters,
sculptures and drawings by various artists. ‘Uncontained’ comprises a
selection of prints from the CAP collection. The show mainly
introduces the linocuts that form part of the collection, a medium
intimately associated with both the now defunct community arts project
movement and the history of modern black art practice in South Africa.

CAP’s emergence in 1977 coincided with the rise of the Black
Consciousness movement and the student uprisings of 1976, which
sparked a new, more determined upsurge by urban youth against
apartheid. CAP was known for its non-sectarian political stance. Its
members spanned a range of anti-apartheid organisations and political
persuasions. It was also a project subscribing to non-racialism and,
as such, was aimed at constituting communities of a post-apartheid
future. While CAP was construed as transgressive by the apartheid
state for this reason, it also functioned as a liberated zone – “an
island in the middle of an abnormal world,” as a former CAP member has
put it.

Although CAP was open to anyone interested in developing their
creativity, its particular mission was to provide accommodation,
facilities and training in the arts for artists and learners who were
marginalised under apartheid, and to develop the cultural voice of
Cape Town’s oppressed communities. This intervention generated a
discourse on art that would prove indispensable for imagining a
post-apartheid South Africa.

During the struggles of the 1980s, CAP artists played a prominent role
in shaping the notion of “culture as resistance” to apartheid and
promoting the idea of “people’s culture”. In 1982 CAP participated in
the historic Botswana Arts Festival in Gaborone, which resulted in CAP
artists re-inventing themselves as “cultural workers”. This new
identity was adopted to reflect their involvement with the political
and social concerns of communities and their organisations, and their
intent to make work that upheld the interests and political
aspirations of the oppressed.

After the elections of 1994, CAP transformed from a training
organisation, and home for artists, into a more formally constituted
education NGO for unemployed adults and youth. Its role was now quite
different from what it had been in the heady days of political
struggle and intervention.
Twenty-five years after the establishment of CAP, the organisation and
its offspring, Media Works, which mainly produced posters, amalgamated
to form AMAC (Arts and Media Access Centre), located in central Cape
Town. As with CAP, AMAC’s goal was to empower people from marginalised
communities through training in the arts and media. When AMAC closed
its doors in 2008, it brought an end to a chapter in South African
cultural history characterised by a firm commitment to, and belief in,
the idea that the arts were both critical and indispensable for
producing the worlds of the oppressed, beyond the forces of power that
sought to contain their creativity.

‘Uncontained: opening the Community Arts Project archive’ celebrates
the CAP legacy and pays homage to the organisation and its artists.
The title of the exhibition literally refers to the unpacking of the
works from the cardboard boxes in which they arrived at UWC, after
they were hauled across the city and the Cape Flats. It also refers to
the opening to the public of a collection of artworks that has largely
lain dormant in the storerooms of CAP and AMAC, and the re-activation
of the archive from its neglect by mainstream cultural history.

Most of the prints on exhibition are from the turbulent 1980s, the
decade marked in history as the final push against apartheid. Many are
visualisations and amplifications of the anti-apartheid struggle, and
were made, not simply as personal expressions, but to create awareness
about people’s resolve to overcome their oppression and
dehumanisation. Made by artists who themselves were burdened by
apartheid oppression, they are also insider narratives from the very
heart of political forms of resistance.

On the one hand, the resistance works on the show are reminders of an
era in which artists responded to a crisis of the human condition
resulting from apartheid. On the other, these artworks offer us the
possibility for thinking about the post-apartheid present, given the
dehumanising legacy of apartheid. In both respects, they invite a
re-imagining of political society in the face of unemployment,
poverty, disease, unequal education, persistent racial divisions and
new class polarisations. These works therefore remind us that the
question of the human condition is still at the heart of understanding
post-apartheid society. They also draw attention to the silence of
cultural re sistance in contemporary times.

The exhibition is, however, not limited to narratives of resistance
and issues of politics as it presents a broad array of subjects and
concerns. Through works of portraiture, scenes of rural life, urban
life, music, children, play, ritual, animals and a range of other
themes, the show also provides us with a sense of other ways of
seeing, and thinking, and being. As such, our aim with the exhibition
is to provide open-ended and complex narratives about human
experience, imagination, and social and personal relations in the
world of apartheid and, more importantly, in its aftermaths.

While the exhibition is thematically diverse, all of the prints on the
show are testimonies to an era in which there was a strong belief in
the idea that marginalised people could empower and humanise
themselves through creativity. Shaped largely by the experience of
apartheid, the works are both instances of “people’s art”, and
representations of the counter-culture movement of the 1980s and early
1990s.

‘Uncontained: opening the Community Arts Project archive’ is
accompanied by a book of the same title. The book is the outcome of a
writing project involving 31 authors, mainly academics but also
creative writers and intellectuals from cultural organisations and
NGOs. Each author was invited to contribute a thought-piece on a
particular theme, as represented in the CAP print collection. The
texts offer a variety of fresh perspectives on, and insights into, a
rich body of work, so opening up
new directions for thinking about aesthetics, politics, society and
human relations in the world.
Through the book, the CHR at UWC hopes to demonstrate the significance
of the arts for the exploration of the human, and to recover aspects
of our cultural and aesthetic history. It also hopes to prompt new
ways of considering the human condition in the aftermath of apartheid,
a predicament out of which we all have to yet emerge.

http://www.uwc.ac.za/index.php?module=cms&action=showfulltext&id=gen20Srv23Nme0_33949_1334670667&parent=gen20Srv23Nme0_9912_1257932410

Dear Mandela is a gripping documentary that shows how the SA government is trying to ‘eradicate the slums’ by evicting shack dwellers from their homes at gunpoint, in scenes eerily reminiscent of apartheid-era forced removals. It will be screened for the first time in the Western Cape Tuesday 15th May, at 6pm at the Alternative Information Development Center.

Determined to stop the bulldozers that are destroying homes and communities, a new social movement made up of the nation’s poorest is challenging the evictions on the streets and in the courts. Dear Mandela is the remarkable story of Abahlali BaseMjondolo – Zulu for ‘people of the shacks’. It is considered the largest movement of the poor to emerge in post-apartheid South Africa.
“Unexpectedly gripping, eye-opening…humanizes the nameless protesters we see on the news hurling bricks at the police through a haze of teargas….What is most striking about Dear Mandela is its ability to capture life in Kennedy Road without prettifying it or horrifying it – without the tinged wide-angle or the shaky camera. We move through schools, initiation ceremonies, shack fires, evictions, onto taxis, into courtrooms, to illegal electrical wirings, through Gulag-like transit camps of tin shacks and – jarringly – to swanky casinos where government housing bosses sip champagne and congratulate themselves.” City Press

For more information, see:

http://dearmandela.com/?q=node%2F1

Refreshments served.
Transport will be provided.

AIDC Solidarity Center
129 Rochester Road
Observatory, Cape Town
Contact: 072 988 5564

from muammar gaddafi’s “The green book”

‘POLLUTION’ IS IN FASHION TODAY, exactly in the same way as revolution: it dominates the whole life of society, and it is represented in illusory form in the spectacle. It is the subject of mind-numbing chatter in a plethora of erroneous and mystifying writing and speech, yet it really does have everyone by the throat. It is on display everywhere as ideology, yet it is continually gaining ground as a material development. Two antagonistic tendencies, progression towards the highest form of commodity production and the project of its total negation, equally rich in contradictions within themselves, grow ever stronger in parallel with one another. Here are the two sides whereby a sole historical moment, long awaited and often described in advance in partial and inadequate terms, is made manifest: the moment when it becomes impossible for capitalism to carry on working.

A time that possesses all the technical means necessary for the complete transformation of the conditions of life on earth is also a time – thanks to that same separate technical and scientific development – with the ability to ascertain and predict, with mathematical certainty, just where (and by what date) the automatic growth of the alienated productive forces of class society is taking us: to measure, in other words, the rapid degradation of the very conditions of survival, in both the most general and the most trivial senses of that term.

Backward-looking-gas-bags continue to waffle about (against) the aesthetic criticism of all this, fancying themselves clear-eyed and modern and in tune with their times when they argue that motorways, or the public housing of a place like Sarcelles, have their own beauty – a beauty preferable after all to the discomfort of ‘picturesque’ old neighbourhoods. These ‘realists’ solemnly observe that the population as a whole, pace those nostalgic for ‘real’ cooking, now eat far better than formerly. What they fail to grasp is that the problem of the degeneration of the totality of the natural and human environment has already ceased to present itself in terms of a loss of quality, be it aesthetic or of any other kind; the problem has now become the more fundamental one of whether a world that pursues such a course can preserve its material existence. In point of fact, the impossibility of its doing so is perfectly demonstrated by the entirety of detached scientific knowledge, which no longer debates anything in this connexion except for the length of time still left and the palliative measures that might conceivably, if vigorously applied, stave off disaster for a moment or two. This science can do no more than walk hand in hand with the world that has produced it – and that holds it fast – down the path of destruction; yet it is obliged to do so with eyes open. It thus epitomizes – almost to the point of caricature – the uselessness of knowledge in its unapplied form.

Admirably accurate measurements and projections are continually being made concerning the rapid increase in the chemical pollution of the breathable atmosphere, as of rivers, streams and, already, oceans; the irreversible accumulation of radioactive waste attending the development of nuclear power for so-called peaceful purposes; the effects of noise; the pervasion of space by plastic junk that threatens to turn it into an everlasting refuse dump; birth rates wildly out of control; the demented vitiation of foodstuffs; the urban sprawl everywhere overrunning what was once town and countryside; and, likewise, the spread of mental illness – including the neurotic fears and hallucinations that are bound to proliferate in response to pollution itself, the alarming features of which are placarded everywhere – and of suicide, whose rate of increase precisely parallels the accelerating construction of this environment (not to mention the effects of nuclear or bacteriological warfare, the wherewithal for which is already to hand, hanging over us like the sword of Damocles, even though it is, of course, avoidable).

5n short, if the scope and even the reality of the ‘terrors of the year 1000’ are still a subject of controversy among historians, terror of the year 2000 is as patent as it is well founded; indeed, it is now based on scientific certainty. At the same time, what is happening is by no means fundamentally new: rather, it is simply the ineluctable outcome of a longstanding process. A society that is ever more sick, but ever more powerful, has recreated the world – everywhere and in concrete form – as the environment and backdrop of its sickness: it has created a sick planet.

A society that has not yet achieved homogeneity, and that is not yet self-determined, but instead ever more determined by a part of itself positioned above itself, external to itself, has set in train a process of domination of Nature that has not yet established domination over itself. Capitalism has at last demonstrated, by virtue of its own dynamics, that it can no longer develop the forces of production – and this, not in a quantitative sense, as many have taken it, but rather in a qualitative one.

For bourgeois thought, however, speaking methodologically, only the quantitative is valid, measurable and efficient, whereas the qualitative is no more than vague subjective or artistic decoration of the really true, which is gauged solely by its actual avoirdupois. For dialectical thought, by contrast, and hence for history and for the proletariat, the qualitative is the most decisive dimension of real progress. That is what capitalism, on the one hand, and we, on the other, will eventually have demonstrated.

The masters of society are now obliged to speak of pollution, both in order to combat it (for after all they live on the same planet as we do – which is the only sense in which it may be said that the development of capitalism has in effect brought about a measure of class fusion) and in order to conceal it, for the plain fact that such harmful and dangerous trends exist constitutes an immense motive for revolt, a material requirement of the exploited just as vital as the struggle of nineteenth-century proletarians for the right to eat. Following the fundamental failure of the reformisms of the past – all of which without exception aspired to the definitive solution of the problem of class – a new kind of reformism is heaving into view which answers to the same needs as the earlier varieties, namely the oiling of the machine and the opening up of new profitable areas to cutting-edge enterprises. The most modern sector of industry is racing to get involved with the various palliatives to pollution, seeing these as so many new opportunities made all the more attractive by the fact that a good part of the capital monopolized by the state is available for investment and manipulation in this sphere. While this new reformism is guaranteed to fail for exactly the same reason as its predecessors, it differs radically from them in that it has run out of time.

The growth of production has until now entirely confirmed its nature as the realization of political economy: as the growth of poverty, which has invaded and laid waste the very fabric of life. A society where the producers kill themselves working, and can do nothing but contemplate the product of their labour, now allows them in all transparency to see – and breathe – the general result of alienated labour, which has proven lethal. This society is ruoled by an overdeveloped economy which turns everything – even spring water and city air – into economic goods, which is to say that everything has become economic ill – that ‘complete denial of man’ which has now reached its perfect material conclusion. The conflict in capitalism between modern productive forces and the relations of production, whether bourgeois or bureaucratic, has entered its final stage. The rate of production of non-life has risen continually on its linear and cumulative course; a final threshold having just been passed in this progression, what is now produced, directly, is death.

Throughout a world where employers wield all the power thanks of the institution of labour as a commodity, the ultimate, acknowledged and essential function of the developed economy of today is the production of employment. A far cry indeed from the ‘progressive’ nineteenth-century expectation that science and technology would reduce human labour by increasing productivity, and thus more easily satisfy the needs heretofore deemed real by all, without any fundamental change in the quality of the goods made available to that end. It is for the sake of ‘creating jobs’ (even in country areas now devoid of peasants), that is to say for the sake of using human labour as alienated labour, as wage-labour, that everything else is done; and hence that, stupidly, the very foundations of the life of the species – at present even more fragile than the sinking of a Kennedy or a Brezhnev – are put at risk.

The old ocean itself cares naught for pollution, but history is by no means indifferent to it. History can be saved only by the abolition of labour as a commodity. And historical consciousness has never been in such great and urgent need of mastering its world, for the enemy at its gates is no longer illusion but its own death.

When the pitiful masters of a society whose wretched destiny is now discernible – a fate far worse, be it said, than those evoked in the fulminations of even the most radical Utopians of an earlier time – are obliged to admit that our environment has become a social issue, and that the management of everything has become directly political, right down to the herb of the fields and the possibility of drinking water, sleeping without pills or washing without developing sores – in such circumstances, it is obvious that the old specialized politics must perforce declare itself utterly bankrupt.

Bankrupt, indeed, in the supreme expression of its voluntarism, namely the totalitarian bureaucratic power of the so-called socialist regimes, where the bureaucrats in power have proved incapable of managing even the previous stage of the capitalist economy. If these regimes pollute much less (the United States alone produces 50 per cent of worldwide pollution), it is simply because they are much poorer. A country such as China, if it is to retain respect as a power among impoverished nations, has no choice but to sacrifice a disproportionate part of its slim budget to the generation of a decent quantity of pollution, as for example, to the (re)discovery or touching-up of the technology of thermonuclear war (or, more precisely, of the terrifying spectacle of thermonuclear war).

Such a high quotient of poverty, both material and mental, buttressed by so much terror, amounts to a death warrant for the bureaucracies presently in power. What dooms the most modern forms of bourgeois power, by contrast, is a surfeit of wealth that is in effect poisoned. The supposedly democratic management of capitalism, in any country, offers nothing except the electoral victories and defeats that – as has always been obvious – have never changed anything in general and precious little in particular with respect to a class society which imagines it can last forever.

Nor do elections change anything more on those occasions when the system of management itself enters a crisis and affects to desire some vague kind of guidance in the resolution of secondary but urgent problems from an alienated and stupefied electorate (as in the United States, Italy, Great Britain or France). All the experts have long noted – without bothering to explain the fact that voters almost never change their ‘opinions’, the reason being that voters are people who for a brief instant assume an abstract role that is designed, precisely, to prevent them from existing in their own right and, hence, from changing. (This mechanism has been analysed countless times by demystified political science and by revolutionary psychoanalysis alike.)

Nor are voters more likely to change because the world around them is changing ever more precipitately: qua voters, they would not change even if the world was coming to an end. Every representative system is essentially conservative, whereas the conditions of a capitalist society have never been susceptible of conservation. They are continually, and ever more rapidly, undergoing modification, but ultimately favour giving the market economy its head – are left entirely to politicians who are no more than publicists, whether they run uncontested or against others who are going to do just the same thing – and say so loudly. And yet the person who has just voted ‘freely’ for the Gaullists or for the French Communist Party, just like someone who has been forced to vote for a Gomulka, is quite capable of showing who they really are a week later by taking part I n a wildcat strike or an insurrection.

In its state-run and regulated form, the ‘fight against pollution’ is bound, at first, to mean no more than new specializations, ministries, jobs for the boys and promotions within the bureaucracy. The fight’s effectiveness will be perfectly consonant with that approach. It will never amount to a real will for change until the present system of production is transformed root and branch. It will never be vigorously carried on until all pertinent decisions, made democratically and in full knowledge of the issues by the producers, are permanently monitored and executed by those producers themselves (oil tankers will inevitably spill their cargo into the ocean, for example, until they are brought under the authority of authentic sailors’ soviets). Before the producers can rule and act on such questions, however, they must become adults: they must, all of them, seize power.

Nineteenth-century scientific optimism foundered over three main issues. The first was the claim that the advent of revolution was certain, and that it would ensure the happy resolution of existing conflicts; this was the left-Hegelian and Marxist illusion, the least acutely felt among the bourgeois intelligentsia, but the richest, and ultimately the least illusory. The second issue was a view of the universe, or even simply of matter, as harmonious. And the third was a euphorically linear conception of the development of the forces of production. Once we come to terms with the first issue we shall deal by extension with the third, thus enabling us, albeit much later, to address the second, to make it into that which is at stake for us. It is not the symptoms but the illness itself that must be cured.

Today fear is everywhere and we shall escape it only through our own strength, our own ability to destroy every existing kind of alienation and every image of the power that has been wrested from us: only by submitting everything – except ourselves – to the sole power of workers’ councils, possessing and continually reconstructing the totality of the world – by submitting everything, in other words, to an authentic rationality, a new legitimacy.

As for the ‘natural’ and the man-made environment, as for birth rates, biology, production, ‘madness’ and so on, the choice will not be between festival and unhappiness but, rather, consciously and at every turn in the road, between a myriad of possibilities on the one hand, happy or disastrous but relatively reversible, and nothingness on the other. The terrible choices of the near future, by contrast, amount to but one alternative: total democracy or total bureaucracy. Those with misgivings about total democracy should try to test its possibility for themselves by giving it a chance to prove itself in action; otherwise, they might as well pick themselves a tombstone, for, as Joseph Déjacque put it, ‘We have seen Authority at work, and its work condemns it utterly.’

The slogan ‘Revolution or Death!’ is no longer the lyrical expression of consciousness in revolt: rather, it is the last word of the scientific thought of our century. It applies to the perils facing the species as to the inability of individuals who belong. In a society where it is well known that the suicide rate is on the increase, the experts had to admit, reluctantly, that during May 1968 in France it fell to almost nil. That spring also vouchsafed us a clear sky, and it did so effortlessly, because few cars were burnt and the shortage of petrol prevented the others from polluting the air.

When it rains, when there are clouds of smog over Paris, let us never forget that it is the government’s fault.

Alienated industrial production makes the rain.

Revolution makes the sunshine.

By Joe Hani
25.04.2012

This is the interview Revistatag.com.br magazine in Sao Paulo, Brazil did with me on the Occupy South Africa movement.

Interview done by Regiane Folter.

1. First of all, what’s ur full name and what’s your function in the movement Occupy South Africa?

A1. I am known as Joe
Hani and my role is
restricted at the moment
to participating in online
organizing and creating
and sharing awareness
media material such as
our short videos
produced by Winds of
Change Media.

2. When did the Occupy start in South Africa? And who took this idea to your country?

A2. The first countrywide
occupation took place
on October 15th 2011 in
5 cities simultaneously.
The event started with
online Facebook events
set up and the idea took
on a life on its own from
there.

3. In which aspects Occupy South Africa is similar to Occupy Wall Street? And what are the differences about them?

Occupy South Africa is
nowhere near the size
and consistency of
Occupy Wall Street yet.
But the similarities lie in
the general anti-
capitalist theme of both
movements as well as
the recognition that the
movement is against all
corporate political
parties. Unlike the
assumption of some, our
anti ANC stance does
not mean we are pro
DA. This was proven in
the ‘Battle of the
Common’.

4. How does Occupy South Africa organize itself? Do you use internet and social medias a lot?

Organizing in the
beginning relied a lot on
the internet but as the
movement developed
the organizing shifted
primarily to on the
ground organizing with
the internet being used
to facilitate.

5. How do you act in South Africa? In how many cities?

The first South African
occupation was held
simultaneously in Cape
Town, Johannesburg,
Durban, Grahamstown
and East London. Since
then the core
participants in each city
have developed Occupy
according to their local
circumstances. Occupy
Durban has all but died
out and I hope it will be
revived soon.
Grahamstown have a
dynamic alliance
between the
Unemployed People’s
Movement and Students
for Social Justice of
Rhodes University. UPM
has also over the last
few months met with
the few but very
determined activists of
Occupy East London
and are working on
ways to spread the idea
throughout the Eastern
Cape. Johannesburg
have set up a Drillhall
where they gather on
weekends to discuss
creative ideas to combat
the system. But the most
active of the cities has
been Cape Town. Late
January 2012 Occupy
Cape Town together
with more than 20 poor
community organizations
took part in an
occupation of a
common public piece of
land in a wealthy area
of Cape Town and the
mayor of Cape Town
ordered a heavy police
crackdown on the
people which resulted in
the aggressive arrests of
42 people including old
women with sicknesses.
This was all caught on
camera and proved
once again that the DA
is no less an anti-poor
authoritarian party than
the ANC. As a result of
this event, Occupy Cape
Town developed into
the ‘Taking Back the
Commons’ Movement
which is very active in
Cape Town and
surrounding areas. This
Friday they will be
holding a Guerilla walk
to commemorate
UnFreedom Day which is
officially known as
Freedom Day, but we
say that none of us are
free until all of us are
free.

6. What are the most important ways that OSA is using to send its message?

Through meetings,
networking between
groups, online through
websites, Facebook,
Twitter, Youtube, as well
as articles written by
activists in the
conventional media.

7. Is OSA getting any results? Are you reaching your goals?

Id say in Cape Town and
in the Eastern Cape it is
moving forward at a
good pace. I encourage
those in Gauteng to
organize bold events
that will actually
confront the state.

8. What are the most difficulties that Occupy South Africa face?

Lethargy, refusal of
some to let go of their
political allegiances
whether it be to the
ANC or the DA, Trade
Unions schizophrenic
attitude to the people
vs. the state scenario etc
and a few others. The
government however is
doing a good job at
ensuring that more and
more people are taking
an anti state stance.

9. What are the opinion of the population? Are they joining the movement?

Personally, I am not
interested in all South
Africans ‘Joining Occupy
South Africa’ and this
will not happen. This is
so because there
already exists an uprising
of the poor in South
Africa in townships
across the country which
is growing in
momentum, size and
radicalism. Professor
Peter Alexander called
this the “Ring of Fire”
uprising which is closing
in on the big cities and
he among many others
including myself predicts
that this will eventually
lead to a Tunisia style
total and complete
revolt.

10. Do you think that the Occupy movements are going to change the present democratic systems?

A.10 Occupy, Take Back
the Commons, Take
Back South Africa, UPM,
the township
movements and many
other groups in South
Africa will all contribute
to challenging the so
called democratic system
yes. It is not a matter of
if but when, and not
only organized groups
but the suffering masses
will definitely rise-up, its
inevitable. My message
to Jacob Zuma and
Hellen Zille is that your
time is running out. You
are oppressors and we
are oppressed and when
the day of confrontation
arrives it will benefit you
to remember that we
the people of South
Africa are the sons of
struggle, we came from
her belly and we drank
from her breasts and we
will not stop until Anglo-
American leaves our
land and until all of you
are tried for your crimes
against the people of
South Africa.

11. Which others movements does Occupy South Africa respect?
A.11 Any movement that
strives for the liberation
of mankind. Personally I
respect the movements
that toppled the
dictators in North Africa,
the Greeks and
Spaniards, The Yemeni’s
and my most heartfelt
respect and awe goes
out to the brave people
of Syria standing up to
the oppressive regime of
Bashar. They will go
through trying times
ahead when the East
and the West tries to
feast off their struggle
so I encourage them to
maintain the purity of
their struggle and to
remember that victory is
merely an hour of
patience.

Proudly Cloetesville backyard dwellers is constituency of all community members of Cloetesville advocating for decent housing and living conditions,the organisation is mandated in October 2011 to negotiate on behalf of the community.
Proudly Cloetesville met with councillor Fernandez and brought the petitions of the community under her attention.We discussed possible areas to allocate for decent housing and decided to meet again to formulate strategy.

During November 2011 we constantly attempt to make a follow up meeting with the councilor as decided at our previous engagement.We were advised to await 2012 due to the festive season.
With no luck during January 2012 we then shifted our focus on the municipal manager(Mr.Daniels) and succeeded to get appointment on 30 January 2012 with councilor Fernandez declining attendance.Eventually only head of Dpt. Housing administration and municipal manager present at meeting.
An agreement was made by the MM to bring matter before council and we can expect feedback within 4 weeks.

Unfortunately we recieved no feedback from MM office and decided to communicate with the councilor Fernandez via email on 28 February (see attachments)expresing our dissapointment of her communication and participation strategy.We are well aware of the municipal systems act,which states that councillors,officials and community are partners to ensure effective governance. (Local Municipal Systems Act 2000,section 2(b).

The Speaker communicated via telephone (01 March 2012) explaining that we need to be patient as Stellenbosch Municipality is still finalising their ward committee structures (08 March-ward 16) and after which we can engage with them.
Proudly Cloetesville forwarded email to Speaker on 02 March 2012 (see attachments) expressing our disapointment highlighting the key documents relevant for participatory local governance and ward committee system.
Ward 16 had two meetings and our representative were silenced and threatened with law enforcement if dare to speak

The fact above indicate that Stellenbosch Municipality have no intention of engageing with ward 16 community and we highlight the deliberate marginalisation of the community by the councilor and Stellenbosch Municipality’s head of public participation and Speaker.

A dicision was made in public meeting on Sunday 15 April 2012 to demonstrate our dissapointment by means of public protest proposed for 27 April 2012.We are in the process of negotiating with Stellenb

Press Statement by activists in support of Andries Tatane*

It is exactly one year since the South African government murdered teacher
and activist *Andries Tatane *
.

Today we are holding a surprise funeral procession inside the Cape Town
Civic Centre. At exactly 12pm, we will walk together inside the Civic
Centre and lead a funeral procession in honour of Tatane and the other
hundreds of people who die at the hands of the SAPS every single year.

We will call on Patricia de Lille and her cabinet to come down from her
office and join the funeral procession and pay her respects to our fallen
freedom fighters.

We will also call on her to attend our memorial service for Tatane and
other victims of police violence which will be held in Mandela Park
(Khayelitsha) on the 22 of April 2012. At this memorial service,
communities from all over Cape Town will be asked to come forward and
testify about their own experiences with the police.

It is clear now to many that it is not only the individual actions of
police that are violent and vicious, but the administration of all three
tiers of government which sanction and often even instigate such violence.

At the national level, the militarisation of the South Africa Police
Service is one example of this.

Here in Cape Town, the DA-led government is equally complicit. For example:

– The weekly harassment by the Anti-Land Invasions Unit and the Metro
Police against the Symphony Way Pavement Dwellers after *their brutal
eviction in from the N2
Gateway
* in February 2008.
– The *attack on the community of
Hangberg
* authorised by Helen Zille where hundreds were shot with rubber bullets
and three residents each lost an eye (September 2010)
– The *violent eviction of
thousands
* of landless people from Swartklip field in Mitchell’s Plain (May 2011)
– The *shooting and
arrest
* of peaceful protesters at Khayelitsha Hospital and the deployment of
the South African Army to intimidate protesters (January 2012)
– The *pepper spraying, assault and arrest
* of peaceful protesters on the Rondebosch Common (January 2012)
– The murder of Zamuxolo Zozo of Nyanga in police custody (January 2012)

These are just some of the more well-known examples of police violence and
brutality in Cape Town.

Our politicians must be held to account for condoning violence against the
people of this country.

For comment about today’s action and the memorial on the 22 April, please
contact:

*Anele @ 0834472939 or alternatively 0795125677*

Introduction

The inequalities in South Africa have reached a point where it cannot be sustained anymore. The government has become ineffective in taking our country forward. The only way forward is the coming together of the people in taking the country forward.

The rich are sucking the people dry and you can only take so much from the people before the people stand up. We have reached that point in South Africa. The levels of poverty are so harsh where thousands of people are scavenging for survival. The rich are oblivious to this reality. For them it is business as usual. Threatening people with legal action for failing to pay housing bonds and rent and accounts is only deepening the crisis. Instead of giving people breathing space the banks, big businesses and the City are driving people into poverty.

The Freedom Charter

In 1995 the majority of people of South Africa came together to draw up the Freedom Charter. This was the most democratic process in the recent history of our country. A door to door campaign was embarked on in rural communities and in the cities where people were asked to give their views on what they would want in a free South Africa.

The views of the people were brought together and consolidated into the Freedom Charter at the Congress of the People, Kliptown, on 26 June 1955

The people then dreamt of a society in which there would be Houses, Security and Comfort, where the Doors of Learning and Culture are Open and where the People Share in the Country Wealth.

The preamble states, amongst others:
• “that our country will never be prosperous or free until all our people live in brotherhood, enjoying equal rights and opportunities;
• And we pledge ourselves to strive together, sparing neither strength nor courage, until the democratic changes here set out have been won”

Many comrades have sacrificed their lives to achieve the ideals as enshrined in the Freedom Charter. Many struggles have been waged over the years:
- in the 1960s which lead to the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela of many others, the banning of the ANC and other progressive formations.
- In the 1976 we witnessed the student uprisings which started in Soweto and spread across the country
- The 1980s witnessed the final push towards the dismantling of apartheid.

However we failed to take forward the gains of defeating the apartheid government. Instead we left it up to the government to take us forward and we demobilized the people. The government in turn embraced the apartheid institutions instead of transforming the state to serve the people. We have witnessed cosmetic changes in government but the institutions and luxuries of the old government have remained intact. The judiciary, the police, the government departments continues to resemble the South Africa as we knew it under the National Party. The voice of the people is being silenced every day. In the Western Cape under the DA of Helen Zille we are seeing the shutting down of democratic space of engagement with the closing down of the social transformation programs in 27 communities as well as the shutting down of the Provincial Development Council. All stakeholders to the PDC have called for the continuation and strengthening of the PDC but this is being ignored by the government who fails to listen to the views of the people. She is closing down all democratic space of engagement. This is a recipe for confrontation as the people will not be silenced. The aim is to keep us divided.

The Way Forward – building people’s power

Nelson Mandela had this to say in the 1960s about the charter – “the Freedom Charter is a revolutionary document precisely because the changes it envisages cannot be won without breaking up the political and economic set up of the present South Africa”.

These words are as relevant then as it is today. The old political system remains intact as the government continues to disregard the voice of the people. We are held to ransom having to listen to the drivel of the politicians daily whilst the people have to resort to protest to be heard. The wealth remains firmly in the hands of the white minority and supported by a black elite.

In the poor communities on the Cape Flats residents are coming together and realizing that the rich is not going to come to our rescue and that the government continues to fail us. We know that we are on our own and are starting to stand together more and more. As the repression increases so the resistance increases.

We have not forgotten what it took to bring down apartheid in the 1980s and are learning from our past experiences to unite the poor in building a society in which the people govern.

In Manenberg we face the divide and rule attempts by Helen Zille as she tries to stop Proudly Manenberg from building people’s power. We have been doing this for the last six years and a new community is taking shape in which we are ridding ourselves of being stereotyped as gangsters and criminals. We are building a proud Manenberg and are restoring the dignity of our people. Nothing will stop us from doing so.

We have marched against evictions, for the scrapping of rent arrears, home ownership and housing for our people. All attempts to negotiate have fallen on deaf ears. The provincial government and the City of Cape Town refuse to engage with us. Only the national government through the 1000 CWP job opportunities project is supporting our work.

The resilience shown by Proudly Manenberg is growing in other communities and we are working towards launching our JOBS, LAND and HOUSING campaign on the 27 January 2012. People will be marching from various communities to the Rondebosch Common where we will occupy the land, and start a process of planning how the land will be used to serve the interest of the poor. We will be holding a people’s conference where everyone is welcome to give their views taking back our land throughout the Western Cape.

Whilst our views are ignored by the mainstream media we realize that our future is not determined by whether the media has a view on our struggles or not. We know that the only way forward is for the integration of the rich and the poor where we live side by side in peace and friendship. That is not asking a lot.

We do not know how the state machinery will respond to the uprising of the people but believe that a peaceful transition in South Africa is possible. Ashley Kriel, Chris Hani, Solomon Mhlangu did not die in vain, we will realize the dream of a society in which people live in peace and comfort.

The revolution is not an event and is growing every day. The struggle continues!

Comradely

Mario Wanza

this interview first published here: http://thepopulation.wordpress.com/2009/04/10/the-cry-of-jazz-q-a-with-director-edward-bland/

Created by: Online Criminal Justice Degree

keep reading this article here: http://www.opendemocracy.net/christopher-mcmichael/green-zone-nation-south-african-government%E2%80%99s-new-growth-path

INTERVIEW WITH ALBIE SACHS
13/07/11 Cape Town

Take 1

00:00:14:00
Justice Albie Sachs, thank you very much for doing this interview today. When did you first meet Nelson Mandela and in what context?
00:00:22:08

00:00:24:10
My first recall is, as a young law student at the University of Cape Town, I would go every winter up to Johannesburg and I would pay my respects to the firm of Mandela and Tambo – crowded office – and Ruth Mompati, the office Manager, would meet me and take me through the room and offer me a cup of tea and call for either Nelson Mandela or Olliver Tambo to come and say hello and one of the other would come very polite, very courteous “How is the struggle going in Cape Town”, I always said “The struggle was going well”, “Sorry we don’t have much time to speak to you, you can see how busy we are”. It was really a courtesy call and I couldn’t have been received with more courtesy. That would have been in the early-mid 1950’s. And the next time I recall meeting him was deep in the underground, 1961 and very, very tense, the time of terrible repression, and we are all waiting with some excitement, the security people are tracking out, in-walks Nelson Mandela, it was literally like a saddle we were in, and he is a tall person and he would like bending down and he stood up and that wonderful [...] – we now call it Madiba smile – was there even when everybody is very, very tense. So these were 2 completely different memories that I have with early meetings.
00:01:56:19

00:01:58:14
Thank you. You become very animated as soon as you speak about him, it’s beautiful to see. What were your impressions of Nelson Mandela on meeting him for very first time?
00:02:09:03

00:02:10:20
I have given them.
00:02:11:16

00:02:22:12
I think what the question is possibly linking to is this, was there a hint then of the stature that he wouldattain?
00:02:30:05

00:02:40:11
I can’t remember vividly whether it was Nelson Mandela or Olliver Tambo, they like merged into each other as they did politically so strongly, they were really intensely close, different in style, Mandela, little more imperious, a little more impetuous in those days more upfront; Olliver Tambo, a little more reticent but each had that marvellous smile, that warm embrace; they belong to a generation, they didn’t stand out as individuals then, they stood out as people if they had to be in a mould, a mould of Albert Luthuli; and Albert Luthuli was the person who was sort of the prominent figure that embodied hopes and aspirations and style and that sense of embrace, I could see the new South Africa embodied, incorporated into the personality Albert Luthuli. And here where we now, as it were protégés of Luthuli, different from each other, but in that particular mould; afterwards, of course, each one became an exemplar in himself, continuously maintaining that sense of connection and huge respect each had for the other, each insisting the other was the top lead of the ANC – I heard that with my own ears and on different occasions – and each having that element of grace, of thoughtfulness, of a human empathy, willingness to listen and a deep, deep internal confidence, confidence that came partly from personality but very much from the sense of the justness of the aspirations, of their goals, of their vision.
00:04:26:08

00:04:28:11
Thank you. How active were you in his political activities in the years prior to his imprisonment.
00:04:36:05?

00:04:37:20
I was in Cape Town, he was in Johannesburg. I joined the defiance campaign leading a group of young white people to sit in Cape Town Post Office on the seats marked “non whites only”. He was the commander in [...], not the commander in chief, the volunteer in chief – Volunteer No. 1- in Johannesburg, he had been earlier. But the remote figure, somebody I read about in the newspaper, but one of our leaders; and in Cape Town we always look to Johannesburg, that’s where the leaders were. It was very comforting to have leaders not in the sense of people you would blindly follow because they were leaders, but the feeling of intense intelligence and collegiality and thoughtfulness, being base at the centre, represented by individuals, but not simply the composite of the individuals, a kind of political intelligence and courage of which Mandela and Tambo and the others would have been simply important personalities. But they didn’t stand out then, it was only when the treason trial really got underway that from this large body of people who regarded themselves as the lieutenants of Luthuli, of all the 136 people on trial for treason, Nelson Mandela emerged as somehow the strongest presence. It was a physical thing he was physically taller than anybody else, it was an articulation thing, it was a clarity of expression thing, it was just a sheer was in which he would address an audience and be listen to, and some people started speaking more and more about “Did you hear that fantastic testimony that Nelson Mandela gave while in the witness box, and then he began to emerge as somebody, if you like, more equal that the other who would belong to that generation of equality.
00:06:44:13

00:06:45:23
Thank you. How much did Nelson Mandela mean, and to what extent was he involved in the activities of the anti-apartheid resistance in exile?
00:06:55:12

00:06:57:23
Mandela’s role in exile was purely symbolical but intensely symbolical; it was easier to capture international attention by focussing on a splendid individual with whom people could identify than to speak min abstract terms about the prisoners in Robin Island, although we always mentioned the other prisoners as well; and all the posters, the leaflets, the literature, all the names would be given of the Rivonia Trial lists, and mentions would be made of the women who were in jail, people elsewhere in the country in jail for other reasons, he epitomised, he spoke for, he became the ambassador if you like, the representative of all the imprisoned people and all the people in South Africa fighting for freedom. So, in some ways as a totally detached, independent personality, detached from his body, his actual voice – we didn’t hear his voice, we couldn’t see him, he was blotted out completely, he became exceptionally potent. And the ultimate for me was reached when I hadn’t been long out of the hospital after I had been blown up, I think it was late 1988, I went to my first pop concert – I didn’t know what do you do at a pop concert, you know, you use to bend up and I was kind of rather nervous; so it was me and 70,000 young British people, we were then called “yobs” and uninterested in politic, 70,000 “Free Nelson Mandela…”, and it was tremendous. And when Archbishop Edelstein came to the microphone and said “I am here to call for the release of Nelson Mandela”, 70,000 young people stood up and cheered and cheered, the song had ignited their interest and enthusiasm. But through him, he symbolised the freedom struggle in South Africa, symbolised the injustice of apartheid and such a fine person was being held in prison and the enduro-quality of the anti-apartheid struggle. So, in paradoxical way, his absence, his invisibility, being silenced became an intensely powerful voice that echoed around the world far more powerfully than if he had been travelling around, speaking at microphones himself.
00:09:37:11

00:09:38:22
So, the symbolic value was in fact more important than the real value?
00:09:42:12

00:09:43:00
The symbolic value became the real value, it wasn’t a contrast between the two.
00:09:47:20

00:09:49:03
Thank you. In what ways have you been involved with him, in the years after his release?
00:09:54:19

00:09:58:14
It was in early march 1990, I am in Lusaka doing work for the Constitutional Committee of the ANC and we told the Robin Island prisoners and the others are coming up to Lusaka; so, that’s after 30 years of separation, these different branches of the ANC are linking up again at Lusaka, immense excitement, that’s change, and it’s like “we’re winning, democracy is winning, it’s the breakthrough; and at the airport we hear the shouting and the cries as you can hear Nelson Mandela walking through the crowd on the tarmac getting closer and closer, and suddenly there he is in front of me; and to be honest I literally threw myself at him and embraced him with my arms and kind of stood back and smiled and he said “Tell me comrade Albie [...]” and he asked about my family by name. It was amazing after 30 years and we haven’t even been intimate, we haven’t been in correspondence, but he had heard that I had married somebody who’d been on the struggle and it was very lovely and then he moved on. And then he gave a speech that evening – it’s still vivid in my memory – he said “I am at the disposal of the ANC, I am an ordinary, I have been the member of the ANC since I was a young man, I will die (as) a member of the ANC”; then he said “If you give me a stick and a cap and a whistle, and you say you want me to be the night-watchman outside the ANC office, will gladly accept, I am in your hands”. He was really the point that he’s not coming out as the leader the messiah to lead the masses, but he’s coming out with the lead of an organisation, as a lead of the organisation at the behest of the organisation, the organisation commands him, he doesn’t command the organisation; and he used that vivid image of the night-watchman, you don’t see people quite like that today as you would have in the 1960s when he went into jail or even in the early 1990s. And that was a very vivid way of explaining how he understood his relationship to be; he was quite solemn then; it was a marvellous moment of reconnection, people we hadn’t seen since they were young and we were young and thin and black hair and now grey hair, we are bold and some have quite big bellies and at first we didn’t recognise and we re-encountered after 30 years; but the connection was very, very intense. And there was something sort of lofty about him – lofty in a nice sense of the word – sort of the posture that he wouldn’t rush and hurry, at the same time he wouldn’t brag or so (that) “he is a prince who needs somebody to hold up his train”; very easy meddling with people and very gracious and those elements were immediately evident he hadn’t come out of prison uncouth, raw, hard, inwards withdrawn, he’d come out as a person with bestthyl [bestow], with an ability to connect, to reach out, curious about the world, interested, loving to meet people, to touch people to be held by people, all of this was very evident.
00:15:00:00 [NOT TIME CODE]

Take 2

00:00:04:21
He came out as a person, not withdrawn, angry, inwards, beaten down, but as person with the kind of calm in ebullience, a lot of vitality, and you could feel how much he enjoyed connecting out with people, reaching people, touching people, he wasn’t the messiah “Follow me I am going to lead you to freedom”, it wasn’t that sense at all, it was south African re-emerging to meet up with his comrades, fellow south Africans, people who weren’t comrades but compatriots who belong to the same country; and that sense of the fan and pleasure of reaching out, proud, not bending the knee, not supplicating, not promising things, being as he was you just felt the attractiveness of the person in every way. And he embodied the pride of the struggle, the pride of the community, the pride of a nation, if you like, that refused to capitulate to the argument and logic of racism and division and denial; and that expressed that theme of humanity and the way we will survive in South Africa is not by stronger that the others by beating them in the way that they beat us, but by being more human than them and enabling them to discover them they own humanity. And he was so confident about it, it wasn’t a strain, it wasn’t a pitch, it wasn’t something he was doing to win over anybody; it’s who he was, and being like that he was epitomising something in maybe our generation, our movement, our struggle, our ideals, our hopes; he didn’t create it, but he articulated it, expressed it in a particularly affined, almost an aristocratic but a gentle aristocratic way that carried enormous conviction and made it easier for us to work in a collegial manner because the person who now emerged, just the prominent individual wasn’t obsessive, wasn’t concerned about the trappings and accumulation and show off and [...] If anything he would like to show off is how non-show off he was – if that’s not too much of a contradiction in terms.
00:02:44:00

00:02:46:00
To what do you attribute Nelson Mandela’s tremendous stature, both in South Africa and globally. I think you have covered that to an extent.
00:02:58:19

00:02:59:14
It’s clearly personality comes into it, and style and his literary style and his speaking style and his posture, great intelligence, he loved ideas, he loved argument, he loved debate, he loved listening, he loved contestation of ideas, in that sense of real, true democrat, you felt you can always learn from testing ideas; but it was connected with the personal warmth and an ease and strong sense of history, it was very widely read and thought for, I would say, would say deeply influenced by the Indian independence movement of his generation, the thought of Nero would have been important, he studied Marxism, amongst many other political philosophy; but developed a very south African voice and style and pronunciation, if you like, of our politics; and became deeply, deeply non-racial, through struggle, not simply through forcing his mind to say “Well, I want to believe that everybody is equal and so on”. Struggle on the island where people of the Indian origin were given little privileges that black persons didn’t have, they struggled together as prisoners, as human beings in a very forceful way and he’d seen already in the underground where white comrades hid him and took lots of risks together with him and joined Umkhonto We Sizwe, and risks their lives for the freedom struggle in South Africa. Through all those experiences, he imbibed the non-racial ideal and consciousness and somehow that got out when filtered, and whether it was the guards, whether it was the people he was negotiating with, whether it was people he was speaking to in Paris or in London or in New York, he was flashmobbed everywhere, he could do it with comfort and ease because of the strength of his vision and his internal – if you like – solidarity with himself, he was able to connect up with other people in that way.
00:05:21:23

00:05:23:22
How have you viewed the relationship between Nelson Mandela and the Jewish community as a whole?
00:05:32:05

00:05:34:05
It’s quite amusing to look back 1990-1991, I spoke to a lot of Jewish groups in Cape Town, by “lot” I mean a lot: Jewish women and Jewish seniors and there were even Jewish dentists, my friend Martin belonged to a group of dentists and said “Martin are you Jew as dentist or dentist as a Jew”; and 6 months latter he said “I am still thinking about that”. And the one question I would get over and over again – I am speaking about the freedom charter, a non-racial democracy and Jews are part of the nation and they come in as Jews, they don’t have to shed their culture and their vision and their beliefs to be part of this diverse nation, their emerging; and they would say “What about Yasser Arafat?; any question that seem to blot out almost everything else, until I guess it would have been about 1992, maybe 1993 and the Mayor of Cape Town, Patricia Sulcas said “Albie, will you come to the Marais Road synagogue on” – she gave the date. Mandela has been projected as a “saint and a miracle worker”; well one miracle I can attest true myself, and that is he got me to go to Shul. I grew up at the most secular world imaginable, but I gladly went because Nelson Mandela was going to visit the Marais Road Shul, the place was packed out, he was magnificent, one has to use that word. He came in like and elder with the other elders – well, now they are all rather proud to be connected with him, they didn’t ask him “Pss! What about Yasser Arafat?”. He spoke so graciously, they were tears down people’s eyes, he spoke about the Jewish firm of attorneys who has taken him on as an article clerk; he said many of you have got children in Australia and Canada and elsewhere, tell them to come home if they can come home, we would love them to come back if not keep in touch with them, tell them about the progress. He spoke with such affection and connection with the community, understanding where they were and he didn’t as I recall deal very robustly or directly with the question of Israel and Palestine; but whatever words he used would have been employed with sensitivity and yet without appearing to be sucking up to them or trying to “graciate” himself in any way. And I remember going up to Millie’s, that delicatessen quite nearby, and not long afterwards, one by one the people streamed in from the non-real fromose, the fromose wouldn’t get it to the delicatessen to buy some coffee, and they were all talking, “Nelson Mandela, Nelson Mandela”; and I think that changed the interrogation. The next thing I remember in that connection was Nelson Mandela coming up with the idea of a group of South Africans going to Israel-Palestine to make a contribution towards peace and the project of an independent Palestine, next to an independent Israel, both secured and proud and self reliant. I know Gill Marcus would have been involved in that, I was asked if I could participate; Archbishop Desmond Tutu, I think was very keen to participate and Nelson Mandela himself I think was thinking about it. But then his term as President came to an end; and then came the Sharon connection with the Muslim Tume and the 2nd Intifada and the atmosphere was destroyed, so that possibility was lost.
00:09:52:09

Take 3

00:00:02:20
If I understand from that you didn’t identify yourself as a Jew, if you were brought up in a secular environment what was your identity, I am curious about that
00:00:12:20

00:00:16:05
I was a Jew, I am a Jew, it is part of my background, my history influences my culture in all sorts of ways. But you don’t have to be religious to be a Jew; you don’t have to go Shul to be a Jew. There are lots of people who go to Shul and who chief Rabbi Harris would have said are bad Jews, and they give to charity and they do all the right things, but in their hearts they’re bad Jews. Cyril Harris actually spoke wonderfully at the inauguration of Nelson Mandela, like a prophet and magnificently at the funeral of Joe Slovo, and he said “Joe Slovo was a good Jew”; although Joe, like myself, was totally secular, didn’t go to Shul but was quite proud of the fact he had been born a Jew and had to [...] a certain heritage went with it, his Jewishness, if you like, would have come out through maybe certain taste in food, through his humour, through his style, his competivity, there are lots of different adjectives some based on stereotype that one would adopt, in my case I would see some of my dream in those millenarian thing. When I was in jail and the only book I had was the bible, the Old Testament and the New Testament, I found a lot of the Old Testament very hard, very savage, very severe but the Song of Songs, the Solomon period was beautiful and gracious and then the prophets, the period of oppression and the balanced type of exile, the beauty of the language of the dream of the world not just for the Jews but for all humanity that reached very, very strong into me. so, one doesn’t have to be a Jew, a good Jew, if you like, if I could use the Cyril Harris definition, you don’t have to go to Shul, you don’t have to pretend beliefs that you don’t have, respect people who do go to Shul, that’s their right, that’s their belief, you respect the culture, you respect the faith as you would respect other faiths as well. You don’t have to have a pre-defined position in relation to Israel and Palestine because Jews fight and argue amongst themselves over that as non-Jews do as well. And certainly speaking for myself, I hate it to be imprisoned in a notion of Judaism and being Jewish that diminished me as a human being, as a person, as somebody with my own conscience and thought. If being a Jew meant anything to me, it meant respect for conscience, integrity of conscience the true person you are and the integrity of your beliefs; and if I felt that the person whom I was, whom I aspire to be and the dreams that I want to immerse myself in, perhaps influenced by a Jewish background and a history and a culture and so on, meant that I didn’t follow orthodoxy in anyway, so be it.
00:03:28:10

00:03:30:05
May I ask subsequent to that day that you went to Shul for Mandela, have you been back?
00:03:37:04

00:03:40:01
I haven’t been back as a congregant; I went to a Shul in London and I spoke at the Shul, I addressed the people there, it’s a very special Shul with that deeply religious person in charge but very concerned with the issues of the world and he felt a connection with me, even though I didn’t attend the religious part of the service I was quite comfortable being there, I had no problems with being there; in terms of my own world view and connecting up with people easily and comfortable, they all happen to be Jews I happen to be a Jew but not participating in forms of connect with tenets of religion, that I don’t share.
00:04:30:19

Take 4

00:00:00:05
Nelson Mandela, in his long walk to freedom wrote “I have found Jews to be more broadminded than most whites on issues of race and politics, perhaps because they themselves have historically been victims of prejudice…”; then the question, is there something specific to the culture of Jewish life and Jewish identity that explains the substantial contribution to social change and civic life in South Africa?
00:00:28:13

00:00:28:12
I think the history particularly of Jews who came from faith of pogroms in the Lithuania and couple with the Anti-Semitism in South Africa meant that Jews were not incorporated into white society with quite that facility that other white immigrants had. And I think some of the restlessness, some of that vision of the prophets, some of that millenarian view of making the world a wonderful place for every human being was part of the culture. At the same time I think one has to say “Jews were whites, participated in the benefits that whites got, a lot of the white racism and sets of assumptions seeped into the Jewish community as elsewhere” but there was enough of the legacy, the settlement, if you like, of the prophetic vision of the world. Many Jews joined the labour movement, they came as poor workers, first of all many were in the communist party, others joined the liberal party because of a certain hope for something better and a certain detestation of racism; and the extent to which Hitler and his supporters attacked Jews as such and the denial of humanity to people because they were who they were, I think that had an impact on the consciousness of the Jewish people. Some people then directed their energies purely to the vision of the future Israel others directed their energies to contest the apartheid, a few; some had one foot in either camp. But, I think it’s no accident that not only in South Africa where the race issues are so predominant, in many countries of the world, many, many Jews were active as writers, as critics, as philosophers, as academics, as medical people, as lawyers on the side of progressive, emancipatory thinking; and I think that has something to do with the history of persecution, of being displaced, of being forced to know the whole world whether you liked it or not; I think that became element in South Africa as well.
00:03:12:15

00:03:15:09
Mandela made tough foreign policy decisions when he started his world tour after prison, some offended the Jewish community, others did not. What is your take on those events?
00:03:26:06

00:03:27:12
He made I think a very, very important point. You don’t adapt your foreign policy to the immediate whims and needs of the moment and getting good headlines and to stroke certain people, you actually use respect if you do that. There were people who stood up for the ANC and back the ANC in very, very difficult years; and the 2 countries that [...] or the 2 personalities whom he insisted on embracing quite figuratively and literally, without necessarily embracing all the ideas ad policies, Fidel Castro and Yasser Arafat. And he said upfront, he didn’t do it in clandestine ways, he didn’t denounce Arafat then whisper to the PLO “Don’t worry I am really on your side but I have to do this”. And to my mind is to the discredit of those people in the Jewish community who simply tested Mandela’s calibre by whether or not he’s friend of their friends; that they could not understand that, I think to this day they – many People – don’t understand that why took the position that he did.
00:04:47:10

Take 5

00:00:06:00
Shed some light on the complexity of the Jewish community, Percy Yutar, prosecuted Mandela and others while Jewish and other lawyers defended the Rivonia trialists. So, how do you characterise the Jewish contribution to the South African struggle?
00:00:21:11

00:00:23:15
When I used to address Jewish audiences in Cape Town 1990, I would see few hundred people there, and I would see 3 things in that same group, the one would be people very responsive to culture, to ideas, the notion of freedom and you could debate the issues and ideas matter not only to Jews but somehow it’s quite strong; then I would see who are very community-oriented, looking after elderly, people in trouble and schools and Shul and things of that kind and that’s people’s right and to the extent that they relieve the state with certain burdens that is actually helping the society; and then I would see whites, whites with servants, with a lot of attitude those whites in South Africa had and all 3 elements would be connected up; and I guess in some individuals the first element the idealism, the love of ideas, the sense of compassion was very pronounced and one can think of marvellous people happened to be Jews and were relatively high proportion of those whites who took part in the struggle, very high proportion were Jews, so, that can’t be purely accidently. And then you would have at the other extreme, the people who, they didn’t see themselves as whites, but would absorb by the whole white culture and speak about those fractures and or if not using that language, would behave, with the same disrespect with that people in other countries show towards Jews in other circumstances. And then you would find individuals locating themselves along the spectrum in different ways. I would say though that only was there relatively high proportion of Jews amongst the real activists Denis Goldberg, there’s quite a long list one can give; the Orensteins and many, many more; Sam Kahn, as a lawyer he taught me so must preparing me for law; Hani Bernard, Marcy Jaffe, my doctor was more than just a doctor, the list goes on and on. But we were a small percentage of a Jewish community altogether, there was a much bigger group who were kind of liberal and descent and progressive and to whom you would go for support maybe raising some funds maybe some of them helped with the “End conscription campaign”, people hiding out, others would help with their writing, Gerald Gordon, in whose home we are actually conducting this interview at the moment, did marvellous work for civil liberties, his son and Nancy’s son, Steven, helped the people refusing to fight in the army, they weren’t directly with the ANC, maybe Steven had some connections with the underground; that was quite a large community and even larger one that would help out a little bit with through their professional work, would do their work as good doctors, as good lawyers, as honourable people, not refusing to attend simply because the people who needed nursing or healing or legal defence happened to be co-terrorists, whatever that might mean. But I think looking at the community as a whole there was heck of the lot on the other side; they’re not running around with big flags today, saying “Well, we supported the Nats or [...]” even the United Party which was pretty conservative in those days. So, there’s a sort of continuum which goes all the way through. I think quite striking would be Jews in the area of culture and one thinks of people like Nadine Gordimer, again very secular in her approach but the Jewishness of her background must have been a very important factor for her and a brilliance, sharp brain, intellectual critic of tremendous calibre; and then when it came to the play King Kong and I remember it so vividly in the 1950s, it wasn’t an accident, Spike Glesser with a lot of the music collaborating with [...]
[...] Collaborating with Todd Matshikiza, Leon Gluckman doing the staging, Harry Bloom with some of the lyrics, some of the words and so on. And it was partly the anti-racism, but partly their love culture and their willingness to enjoy the music and the song and the theme and [...]; so, that was a very rich area of intervention. Who was that [...]? Leonard Schach did quite important work in the theatre area; there was somebody in Jo’burg, what was his name [...]
[...] Toby Kushlik, whom I didn’t even know, I just knew the name; so it was an accident that Jews were so prominent in what initially were white cultural circles, broadening out to embrace or to connect up with very resurgent black culture that was emerging in the townships and in the urban areas, the connections were very, very vivid.
00:06:25:06

00:06:25:23
Just to go back to an earlier point you made, I can remember a strange sort of horror that I felt when I was in a Johannesburg Shul, and I opened quite an old prayer book and there on the back page was “Die Stem”, so, your kind of Jew was definitely the minority Jew in terms of how Jews operated in South Africa.
00:06:56:00

00:06:56:00
Certainly in terms of numbers; but it was quite a large spectrum goes on, you know the gradations; if I think of the lawyers, there were some like Rowley Arenstein, Joe Slovo -100%, he gave up he’s legal practice, an advocate to be in the underground and then to become a military commander afterwards, and then to become minister of housing – never losing he is tough, competitive Jo’burg advocate style Rowley Arenstein in the underground in prison, I was working in the underground also in prison. And then there was another grouping, people like Arthur Chaskalson, Denis Koenig, of a younger generation and then older people, Isie Maisels, Sydney Kentridge, it’s not an accident, it’s so many of them, and many of them quite brilliant lawyers, they didn’t work in underground as I know, maybe they did have some connections, but they did their work through the legal profession like to the maximum, providing brilliant legal defence, it was more than just technical legal defence, it was asserting the dignity of people who were fighting for freedom through the mechanism that the law allowed to be exposing torture, it would be giving people and opportunity, a moment, a platform to speak, to address the world when they were banned their works wouldn’t be quoted at all unless they were in a court when their words could be quoted maybe to some extent. And also the humanity of that they showed through the professional services I think was important creating the non-racialism that emerged in South Africa, it wasn’t exclusively Jewish by any means but the Jewish participation was very strong in that area.
00:09:04:06

00:09:04:20
Thank you very much. Could you speak about the Jewish contribution to the development of black performing arts under apartheid?
00:09:12:10

00:09:24:07
Black performing arts began to effervesce and break into the public domain in the late 1950s, against enormous odds; so, they were seeking platforms, outlets, channels, places completely dominated by whites; so, somebody like Linda Goodman, I think it was from her heart, her vision, her eye, she just sensed, she saw the vitality, its passivity of artists like Dumile Feni and others; she also saw the commercial opportunity, so one wasn’t against the other, but I don’t think she was driven primarily or even substantially by commercial objectives then, it was a love of art for people; and so, her gallery became a place where people could exhibit. One sees people like Leon Gluckman, the theatre director seeing the opportunities to participate in putting on the King Kong, helping to coordinate the whole project with the great singers and voices, people became famous afterwards and musicians Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela, a whole generation emerged from that, and it wasn’t just that got opportunities, it was confidence, it was suddenly the emergent of range, the potential of what you can do and go abroad and perform for South Africans and break through all these barriers that were hemming people in, these were broken in many ways. But, I wouldn’t like to say that somehow or another the Jews were the pioneers who opened the way for black counter production; black people were expressing themselves very powerfully and Jews, amongst others Bernard [...],– what was his first name? – he did a tremendous amount of work for music and theatre; his daughter Linda is very active in the culture sphere now. So, they were many others, working like that and their contribution was significant and this part of the South African story, a prominent part.
00:12:00:13

Take 6

00:00:04:06
Barney Simon played a particularly significant role through the market theatre, it was very intimate, it was very direct and Barney had a marvellous intuitive feel for theatre, he wasn’t a great writer himself but he could spot the writer in others, he wasn’t a great actor himself but he could spot the actor in others, and he knew how to bring people together and allow them to interact and to see the way the drama of everyday life, the drama on the street corner could now become a drama in the theatre that was totally at odds with the imported west and star lies over and ritualised, sophisticated, “look at these great actors” kind of drama; So, Barney’s contribution was very strong and very, very direct. Again not Barney on his own, he was part of the team, Mannie Manim and others, played quite a very important role there; but Barney maybe had more obsession more craziness in this area, maybe than anybody else and the results there were quite spectacular.
00:01:19:23

00:01:21:17
Thank you, you have 2 more questions. Can you give us a short tribute to Helen Suzman and her contribution to democratic change?
00:01:30:06

00:01:34:07
Helen played a very significant, very powerful role in the transformation in South Africa. Because she was like in the enemy camp, the kind of solitary brave voice speaking out, needling, provoking, using the institutions of racist domination from inside with a very strong voice, I mean I can even hear at Helen’s [...], the tambour of her voice, it was literally a strong voice in itself but a style of work and which an irony [...], the sharpness and the confidence that was very special. I owe Helen a tiny bit as Albie because when I was in detention she asked the question in Parliament about me, as she did about many others, and these little things accumulated, they just made me a tiny bit, I wouldn’t say more immune but less isolated and defenceless than I might have been otherwise; much more important was, she linked up with Robin Island prisoners, who had a much more robust philosophy than she did, and she saw them as human beings, as freedom fighters, people dignity, and they respected her so much – from what I can read and hear – for being that; and, you know, these tones about “who the hell is she, wattle boy coming in and [...]”, that entered the scene; what mattered was where she had something to contribute, she did and she did it well. She wasn’t the liberator of South Africa, she wasn’t the Joan of Arc, she wasn’t in that sense a freedom fighter in a way that millions of the very humble ordinary African women who were freedom fighters, but within the white community she was brilliant and she was meaningful and was part of that panorama, and I think the strength of the anti-apartheid movement came from its diversity, its range; and people did what they were good at doing, she wouldn’t have been good as an underground militant; I don’t think, with her philosophy, she was rather conservative in many ways, but she was brilliant as a speaker, as an accuser, as somebody exposing and denouncing the evil of corruption and violence of apartheid. She opposed the boycotts internationally, we were fighting for them, she conceded – the only one she would concede afterwards – where she would be wrong, she would say “there’s sports boycott”; but I think that’s partly because she didn’t like sports very much, it sounded relatively easy for her; economic boycott she never supported I think right till the end. So, in that sense she wasn’t on the side of, if you like, the masses fighting for freedom inside and outside South Africa; but if she’d been on the side of the masses, she would have been just another one with her own vocal capacity which would have been terrific. But she stuck to her lust, she did what she did she was good at and she did it brilliantly and well; I am true to say to be honoured; I am still hoping in spite of her own wishes that they will be a major street in Houghton named after her.
00:05:16:06

00:05:17:02
It has to be in Houghton of course.
00:05:18:12

00:05:18:16
It should be in Houghton, and all the contradictions of her life and the beauty of her life are represented by that.
00:05:25:16

Take 7

00:00:00:06
Please, Justice Sachs, can you give us a short tribute to Judge Arthur Chaskalson and his contribution to democratic change.
00:00:07:09

00:00:10:06
Arthur is so formidable; I heard his voice just the other day where we were planning to do an oral history of the achievement of the negotiated constitution, and there was that firm voice, that clear thinking, the warmth, the humanity, quick thinking that he always had; and when you think of integrity, intelligence, sensitivity to context situations, you think of Arthur Chaskalson; when you think of somebody who works for the team, who organises, who respects others, you think of Arthur Chaskalson; and when you think of a legal brain, a quite marvellous legal brain you think of Arthur Chaskalson, you combine qualities that you don’t often get in one individual. It was remarkably up-choice to make him head of South Africa first constitutional court, I think it emerged as a marvellous court, excellent judicial organ that holds its hand with pride anywhere in the world and Arthur provided that steady leadership, but right at the prow, he was really at the prow of that project and endeavour from the beginning with the strength of his reasoning and his ability to draw people in and find the strength that all their own individualistic, fiery, sharp, brilliant, sometimes even mannered colleagues on the court head; he just distilled and got the best out of us and produced that terrific mix that became the [...], that created the cement, if you like, of the constitutional jurisprudence. I have nothing but respect for Arthur Chaskalson.
00:02:13:09

00:02:14:00
Thank you very much. I would like to close off with going back to the point you made earlier; there was a very interesting point about the notion of being a Jew but not necessarily a good Jew and sort of bringing in the issue of secularity; you are closer now to the end of your story than the beginning, does the closeness to the end not place doubts on one’s secularity?
00:02:38:06

00:02:41:17
People say that when your years are passed and you become aware of your mortality you tend to retreat to your earlier sets of beliefs and if that’s the case then I retreat to my total intense complete secularism. But it wasn’t secularism in a form of an aggression and hatred and denial of beliefs of others; it was just that we find our moral faith and our moral centre in terms of an intense set of beliefs that motivate our conduct in life. I remember so vividly – I must have been about 8, crossing the street with my mother, and then we got to the other side and I said “Mummy if we don’t believe in God what do we believe in?” and she said “We believe in doing good and being good”; I was l totally satisfied with that answer; then I am satisfied with that answer today. I think the changed that’s come in my life is that I am far more tolerant and accepting of the beliefs that others have, not simply as their right to have their belief but as the meaning of their beliefs to them as human beings, if they get their dignity that somehow believing in a supernatural order that I don’t share in that belief doesn’t diminish them to me, it’s just the way they are. I have got an agreement with Vanessa my wife, she believes in afterlife, I don’t, but the agreement between us is I am up there and she’s down here, she is allowed to say to me at first words “I told you so, Albie”. I wouldn’t have even made that joke when I was young.
00:04:56:16

00:04:58:04
You’re less rigid, less rigorous?
00:05:00:07

00:05:01:10
It’s not [...], I suppose, I am more open to pluralism generally, to diversity, to [...] I remember coming up with this notion of these Cold Knowledge and Warm Knowledge; and Cold Knowledge is scientific knowledge, it’s objective, it’s impersonal, it’s dispassionate, it’s the truth; and maybe at one stage I would see all warm knowledge as obscurantist and as unprovable, unproven belief systems and so on. And now I can see that warm knowledge is very meaningful to many people; warm knowledge inputs [..], compresses history and compresses experience and uses parable and indirect ways of embracing truths and memories and expectations and hopes in a way that cold knowledge doesn’t do, and the world need both of them and in that sense; I am much more open and I might be wrong. I used to console myself as a child – it was very tough being a non believer in a believing environment – but I felt that to pretend a belief I didn’t have would be disrespectful to myself and to God – if God exists – if I didn’t believe in God and to pray to God that I didn’t believe in. You know, it was quite tough for an 11 – 12 year old kid. But I remember saying to myself “God if you do exist, I am not a bad person, I wouldn’t behave in any different way whether you exist of not, if I do good things, it’s not because I want to go to heaven or get some kind of reward, because this is the way I see the world, this is who I want to be”. So, in that sense already at early age it was immaterial whether God existed or not, just in my case I didn’t see the capital “G” kind of person or spirit or essence of being out there that somehow would be responsible or intervene in our faith; we had to take responsibility, for our own faith, our own choices, our own dilemmas and retrieve our own joy in our own way.
00:07:24:21

Take 8

00:00:00:00
May I distil from that the ideal that you always operated from your own conscience?
00:00:00:00

00:00:01:06
I think that’s being the inner core of myself since then. Even when I was in prison, at one stage in such a confinement I had had body experiences which were very vivid; very, very kind of strong and rather weird; it never shook my basic belief that I am a body than this person who’s speaking to you know, when I am dead I am gone, if I live on it’s through children and books I have written, constitutional court building, judgements I have written, things that I have said, interviews I have given in all sorts of obvious ways and often in settle ways, gone! [...], and I haven’t changed from that; but what was very important for me was becoming part of a broad movement and movement that transcended, just me, my family, cultural grouping, certainly the whiteness of my skin, my belonging to privileged section of white South Africa, my being simply a South African. And in that sense it’s me inside embracing all these other things, and the me inside becoming stronger and richer because it’s opening up, it’s less suspicious it’s more giving, it’s more embracing than it would have been just me inside on its own as purely inward looking, also strict, self-referential being.
00:01:35:20

00:01:35:20
If we can understand the notion of an individual’s conscience, is there such a thing as a Jewish conscience?
00:01:42:14

00:01:45:01
I can see [...] I wouldn’t see my conscience as a Jewish conscience, but I would see it as a conscience that has a certain element of Jewish input that maybe quite an important one. But I don’t frame my decisions in life in terms of references, express references to Judaism, to biblical texts or writings of great Jewish Rabbis or commentators, certainly not to the pronouncements of particular Jewish leaders or people speaking of a Jewish state; but I can’t speak for other people I know people like Denis Davies, who went to the Otsleo, he frequently expresses views very similar to mine and he will frame them as a Jew, as a good Jew, that’s the way he sees things. In terms of a good Jew- bad Jew, well if I was confused before, I even more confused after Cyril Harris, the chief Rabbi of South Africa said “Joe Slovo was a good Jew”, it means a bad Jew, a very bad Jew, he didn’t have a mezuzah he didn’t give to charities, he didn’t go to Shul, I believe these were the 3 (three) little linchpins of being a good Jew in London when entry to a Jewish school was being discussed in the supreme court there. But Rabbi Harris said he was an intensely good Jew because of the ethical quality, he happened to be a Jew and the Jewishness is not something he despised or shed or repudiated, I think Joe took it with him to his grave [...]
00:03:35:10

Take 9

00:00:01:22
I think Joe took it with him to his grave but he wasn’t buried at the Jewish cemetery, there’s no Magen David on his tombstone, there’s no Hebrew lettering there, there’s nothing at all to stamp his final resting place, a place where a Jew is buried. But if idealism as the vision of emancipated humanity owed anything to the prophets and to the vision of an emancipated world then he would have taken that with him to his dying day. If he had a sense of humour, that somehow it’s a humour, it’s an irony, it’s not just being able to tell a joke, it’s ripe way of seeing the world, that it’s no accident, it’s very strong in Jewish culture, and a Jewish tradition, maybe counterpoised to the heavy dogmatism of so much of Talmudic kind of reasoning, Joe would have had that I think more towards the end. So, it all depends on what one means by a good Jew. If Joe was a good Jew then I am good Jew, if Joe was a bad Jew then I am a bad Jew; and Joe and I were very different in many, many ways, but I think it’s these elements that we certainly had in common. I remember at school, I was at Sachs boarding school for quite a long time; and about half the kids they were Jews, many of them children of Jews who owned a shop or hotel or something in little doorpies and they would send their boys to Sachs school in Cape Town and a frommer would come along and would lay down the law: “you can’t have milk and meat together for 2 hours” so for a week or so we would all be looking at our watches and then you kind of forget it and the a few month later another one would come along, and that would be an 1½ hour; but what surprised me was that often the boys who were the most frommed in terms of these details they would steal, they would lie, they would be mean, there wasn’t a direct connection between observance and the moral qualities; I wouldn’t say there was an inverse one, I wouldn’t say the more frommed they were the more disrespectful they were to others, they was just no connection at all, they seemed to belong to different orders of the world of behaviour of values. And it’s given me a disrespect for formal overt science of proving your religiosity – that’s detached from actual meaning, although I have learnt, this has come very, very late to respect some people whom I like very, very much, who are very observant, they don’t use motorcars and electricity on a Sabbath, and at first I thought this was very weird but I can see it’s kind of mental space acquired a sabbatharianism in their lives, a form of identification, that’s all the more important because it doesn’t signify anything other than itself, I respect that. So, I have had to grow a little bit to become more embracing, more encompassing, to acknowledge, the intensity and meaning of what might appear to be absurd rituals for people who follow them, but please don’t try to impose them on me; that touches on something very deep in me I feel offended, I feel respected, if people try and create a compulsory potential faith that I don’t have, and yet I will wear a yarmulke, I go to Shul if I am [...] I love going to Osheshwana dinners places of dinners, I go along; I am only terrified that they will pass the Haggadah and it will come to the plagues, it’s one thing for sure I will never pronounce the plagues and certainly not the smacking of the first born; it was a near missed once, and luckily I was given the passage which was just before that to read, and then I would just throw the book down, that would be too much of the range for me. So, I owe respect for the home that I am visiting, the people, their beliefs, I will certainly conform, but I want pretend the belief that I don’t have myself.
00:05:03:21

00:05:09:00
Just wanted to mention that the Baal Shem Tov himself, the man who formed the Hassidim, said there’s actually only one rule of Judaism and that is to love God love, and love of God is the single fundament upon which all the other rules are based, love is the fundament of the Jew.
00:05:28:03

00:05:28:05
Well you see, I could follow that but I would give it a different philosophical framework but it’s intensely the same, yeah. Love of God would mean loving of the beauty and the good and the possibilities, ineffable qualities of the world and so on.
00:05:45:13

00:05:47:10
Has struggle been a manifestation of love for you in your life?
00:05:51:03

00:05:52:23
Struggle has been part of expressing love, expressing highest qualities, but also knowing fear and terror, it’s been a testing ground, often a very tough testing ground in many different ways, but for me it’s been ennobling and enriching overall, it’s been diminishing in some ways, a kind of relation that we developed that gave us courage, it gave us conviction and strength; even back now I can see we weren’t critical about that, we should have been critical of; they had been disappointments in individuals, in movements, philosophies and so on, but overall it’s been very affirmative, very positive and very enriching for me. For me as a white person being in lash with black movement, it all pick it out of my skin to move, to sing in public to loosen up, to lighten up to dance, and that’s an immediate sense; but also to be more tolerant to be more sensitive to be more open and that’s where people like Olliver Tambo had a huge influence on me and many, many others; it’s kind of Ubuntu in practice embodied in individuals, in people; that’s been very, very strong for me. And when I read a book like “Disgrace”, my disagreement with J. M. Coetzee – he’s a brilliant, brilliant writer – is that he doesn’t have that connection with Africa, African culture, African people at an emotional, some luminal level that I have, that I got very much through the struggle, through the tradition of my parents, my mum worked for Moses Katani, I was named Albert after Albert Muzule an African trade union leader, I am sure I picked up a lot being carried on her back, of an African woman who might or who might not have been a comrade but just hearing the music and sort of seeping to me. And all of that is somehow connected with a world of ideals, of vision of humanity but also a world of fun, of music, of movements, of possibilities that fitted into immense petri-notions of the revolution of transformation, of change, sharing risks, made it meaningful and the connection was very, very meaningful; and with it disappointments and setbacks and terror and raid and sleeplessness – it wasn’t all just beautiful you know, along the way – but overwhelmingly positive.
00:08:40:06

Take 10

00:00:06:17
It might or might not be pure coincidence, but after I was blow up and I am in total darkness, and I don’t know what’s going on and I heard a voice saying “Albie we are in Maputo central hospital, your arm is in lamentable condition, you have to face the future with courage”, and I said into the darkness “what happened?” and the woman’s voice said “it was a car bomb”, and I think back that euphoric I know I am safe, I have survived; and then I wake up I still can’t see, I am feeling very light and very happy and I tell myself a joke about “Amy Cohen falls a bus” – it’s an old joke – “and gets up and he does this and someone says: Amy, I didn’t know you catholic”, “what do you mean catholic? Spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch” and I started with testicles all in order, wallet okay, head is ok and my arms fit down and I realised that I had only lost an arm, and I felt joyous because that moment the freedom fighters waiting for, will they come for me? They came for me and I survived, that was fantastic. Well, maybe it’s an accident, I tell most of the Jewish joke at that moment maybe that is part of the culture that help people survive, that helped me survive in that particular moment.
00:01:33:02

00:01:35:00
So, the Jewish joke is a survival mechanism against the pogroms against these atrocities that people in the Diaspora have faced?
00:01:41:20

00:01:41:20 [NO TIME CODE]
The theme of humour, many oppressed communities use humour to fight off the power of the dominant group, sometimes humour at themselves, it enables them to survive, to manage; so why take on the world? it certainly helped me at that particular moment. I joke, therefore I am; to me humour, there were lots of jokes told by Joe Slovo and about Joe Slovo that entertained all of us and kept up our sense of comradeship during the struggle. Myself, I remember thinking the person who organised the bomb in my car, must have been anti-Semite because we Jews we need 2 arms to tell the story, I don’t tell that joke very often, though willing to say it now.

I’M LOOKING FOR MY COUNTRY
There is MONEY here and naïveté,
MIX the two together and you get a MANUFACTURED CULTURE
there is also rubble and puddle and there is a huddle of people
but somewhere, somewhere there is a country
take the trees don’t mind the BEES ignore the NEWS
that building gets put into a muddle the LINES get READ between
but I’m just looking for my country
the WHITE boys confuse their mission
the WHITE girls are taking it all for granted
put up a NO-ENTRY sign turn right turn left turn right turn left turn right turn left

SOMEONE screamed too loud or too late
SOMEONE chose, leaving me to pick up the pieces
the CAR LOAD shattered into a million REASONS
when the left explodes its called the ANC
when the right explodes all I see are SHARDS of Hitler and FESTERS OF IGNORANCE
and yet those that THINK get blamed for causing the CONSCIENCE to collide
but I’m just looking for my country
that man is quite SICK he looks quite healthy but on CLOSER inspection
his HEART is a sickly shade of YELLOW my PILLOW gets WET from all these tears
they years are turning into coagulation and YES your dress is a mess
but I’m just looking for my country
No no no NO NO I don’t mind what LANGUAGE you speak just speak the same language
as me if only you’d throw your tongue FAR enough all over the world

there are people with problems but the KEY the KEY has been to open the door
not shut it in his face his RACE is MIXED but that’s no sweat he’ll win the race
don’t you want to know what’s going on because
I’m just looking for my country
take the WINNERS and the losers don’t think twice we think we’ve paid the price
but it looks like they want us to pay more for their patience has been running THIN
and the drums BEAT in the distance of your HEART and you start to pay no attention
did anybody mention there was a country here looking for me?
that BLACK man over there, he should be ahead and that man over there
he’s lost his CRUTCH not much to be done I’m AFRAID to DATE nothing much
has been happening that’s gonna make me take off
although I never thought I would live to see the release of the world’s most famous
PRISONER instead I land with a SCREECH about who is killing WHO
not much building to be done today but didn’t I say that
I was looking for my country?
the WEST they say is confused with some kind of a test the rest are headed towards
some kind of a PLAGUE SCAREMONGERING in a way that would make any MONKEY
wear a SHEATH the age of COUNT the cost is upon us the NEW shall sweep away the
old even though they act so BOLD but out there somewhere is a country
WAITING for the BREAK
waiting for the INFORMATION
waiting for the NEW GENERATION

take me he she it they theirs those these them I
I’ve been waiting quite a long while now and the CLOAK gets heavier
and someone is switching off all the LIGHTS the DARKNESS
never scared me thought I have my own light tonight
TONIGHT I wish I would fall in love LOVE love love love but that GLOVE
you’re wearing is so old its COLD hey didn’t I say
there was a country here?
PRAY I’ve heard them say that we should pray but the only thing that truly preys
around here are those REAL animals we only get to see on our TV SCREENS
then someone went and blamed the lack of OZONE on an aerosol can and clean
forgot about the ATOMIC contest
I wonder who’s MONEY is invested?
This large ZOO has me tongue tired and then someone went and tied our hands
behind our backs and the TRACKS were washed away in the FLOODS
BLOOD BLOOD flows thicker than water in any COLOUR mother, mother
I’m just looking for my country
help me help me help me don’t just stand there THROW a cartwheel
place a bet or just get the hell out of here or else I’ll tell the world on you
I could go to hell for you in fact I’ll get a HARD ON for you if you’ll only just stay
and play with some kind of REAL interest not thinking about what to TAKE
but rather trying to MAKE something out of it,
this CENTRE WHICH CANNOT HOLD
like a CAMEL on the tip of an ICEBERG
like a BEAST that cannot BEAST
and WHO told you to THINK for yourself huh?
you want to be a REBEL too?

They make it THAT easy but don’t go thinking that it is THAT EASY
or how about being like one of those university lecturers who seem to think
that ANARCHISTS come in package deals?
The TRUTH is hard to come by REALITY is in short supply and just try
just try and stop them making BOMBS! Didn’t I hear them say there was a
country here looking for me?
A CONFUSION OF TONGUES and a MISCALCULATION of the weather
don’t know whether I’m going to make it through the night
where were you when I needed you
things were CHANGING in a way that was making all of us loose PATIENCE
but not anybody was needed to fill this gap which had become a VACUUM
and who lit you a CIGARETTE while others were burning down BRIDGES?
Hey man, are you alive or are you dead? Your head is probably in need of repair
care to mention why your heels DRAG so or is your new suit enough for you?
Don’t give me the same old story isn’t it time for something BOLD?
The city is the place to be but why all the BARRICADES I thought a sign of VIBRANCY
was when CONNECTIONS were being made and didn’t I hear someone say something
about a country with only ONE forty-five year old HORSE?
It’s a cry in the night for a long dark overdue with a HUE and a cry I try to keep
my head above going UNDER I wonder who else thinks like this?
I need to live with you WITHOUT the barriers
how far do you want to go now
I’m still just looking for my country
HEY COUNTRY BOY are you close enough are you BOLD enough
is there MUD in you EYE and GRIT beneath you nails?
Are you to be my guide can you take this all in your STRIDE?
Aaah but I see a head that’s been bred on a NAZI mentality and so I just can’t help
wondering what you MOTHER looks like so don’t bury your head in the SLUDGE
it gets hard to breathe when you’re six feet deep and DOING everything
you can to stay alive its after five in the morning and very little else is dawning
and someone has just asked me out but they’ve FORGOTTEN its all wrong
they just don’t know where they are heading there’s a landing somewhere
almost close by but
I’m still just looking for my country
I asked him to use his IMAGINATION and he looked at me as if I were responsible
for HIS FLAT TYRE he’s not going anywhere anyway but he needs to blame somebody
ANYBODY out there with a broader point of view who could come to my RESCUE
there’s something to be learnt from a MISTAKE but this takes the entire slice of cake
and WHO baked you an APPLE? And just what do you do with those COLOURS that
BRILLIANT in spite of the DULL THUD of your EYES?
Take away the rules and we get some IDIOTIC MALE with illusions of ADEQUACY
practising every form of MISCONCEPTION and won’t someone give me a clue
as to where I am going to find my very own PENIS?
It all depends on whose side you’re on if you are not on the one
you’re an enemy of the other and I cannot think of anything more INHOSPITABLE
but if you’re on MINE you seem unable to SPEAK
so STAND UP and get ready to SPIN if you dare
no don’t GRIN way ahead of my time they said
well that’s what its like when you’re on a LADDER that reaches for the SKY
and I would die I could just fall down ALIVE
if I don’t find this country
won’t somebody give me the LEFT OVER forms to fill in so that I can get this all right?
But do you mind, I think I’m gonna just have to help myself if only you’d keep your
SHADOW to yourself and stop passing the BUCK
it’s a long time since I last had a FUCK
but it’s all just a matter of choice which is no way of saying anything at all
but I did not say that I was trying to COMPROMISE or even meet you a THIRD
of the way its not much fun getting RUN OVER this way
the BRUISES don’t show and this WAY seems to go on forever with myths
and counter myths COUNTER spies and counter INFORMERS counter
COUNTER BEURO’S some councillors got stuck in that war time ZONE
and all of THIS is supposed to make SENSE?!!!
But I’m just looking for my country
last night feels like a year has gone by but for you TIME seems to have no meaning
so just try, just try holding our BREATH for a minute or two and you say you’re
CONFUSED and lack DIRECTION?
Well the answer would bite you were it a snake its so close
everything seems so close so close so close its almost WORTH the GAMBLE
today today I could not tell if you were a boy or a girl
but you would not let me hold your hand you STOPPED everything at your HEART
you weren’t prepared to take the risk and I, I, I, I, I tried, I tried, I tried
but still could not break through and yet you still expect me to break my BACK for you
SLAY three dragons for you but
I’m just looking for my country
and don’t ask
yes do ask all the AWKWARD questions one of them is bound to throw the FAT
into the fire there is so much BLOOD being swept under the carpet
but do not ask NO DO NOT ASK the policeman why he hasn’t got any MANNERS
as he comes barging in or BULLDOZING over or whatever it is that he likes to
call himself BIG DADDY told him manners maketh the COWARD and somewhere
along he way BIG MOMMY must have agreed oh I’ve been told that MOTHERS
rule the world but this is ridiculously INCOMPATABLE
and whose generation gap is this anyway?
And just WHAT do you do with a young BLACK BOY whose first TRAUMA trauma
was being dragged behind a police van in a DUSTBIN with a lid on it? But
I’m just looking for my country
and how are your SOCIAL SHARES standing today huh? UP or down?
Did somebody start a nasty RUMOUR about you too? That’s all they ever seem to do
around here is to talk AT each other over the ‘phone, it makes them think that they’re
alive living their lives through other people’s lives over the phone the telephone
syndrome it goes on for weeks years months and hours about other people taking risks
oh my just look at the time in just under five minutes he or she will be home
and I haven’t even slaughtered the HORSE yet and there are those that confuse
CHRIST with CHRISTIANITY and place mongering and GOSSIP with FICTION above
FACT I wonder who told them to NARROW their minds it surely wasn’t CHRIST
but I’m just looking for my country
and then he likes to play DEAD just when you think he’s coming alive
and then he hides in the CLOSET and pretends to be ALERT
who INVERTED him with a girlfriend under one collar and a SURFBOARD
under the other BOOT now they’re ready for any BEACH south of the BORDER
but his mommy likes it this was but her daddy isn’t too sure and he tries to remember
with EFFORT the passport to HETEROSEX but the ball got lost trying to decide which
way to BOUNCE an OUNCE or a pound of your FLESH will pay for yet another CRIME
which breeds PESTILENCE once there was a way but he still seems to think
that every LOVE SONG is about HIM
and yes I can see the BLOOD as it oozes from your BROW in unquenched
unsurrendered DESIRE and
I’m still looking for my country
the CAT grinned at me in that KNOWING way but I knew it knew nothing
it only seemed that way but you were taken in
you haven’t yet learnt how to tell what is REAL and what only PRETENDS to be real
you’ve always been fooled by the SHINY face you’re trying to hard to be ORDINARY
you’re beginning to DIE INSIDE you haven’t had a single thought in your head you
can call your own I enjoy my own company anyway even though this country is
INVISIBLE
in fact it’s DIVIDED and the heat is on for a NEW NATION
but the platform gets over crowded and the TRAIN just will not arrive at all being
STALLED with white hands and BLACK hearts with BLOOD on their seats and BLOOD
on the walls, BLOOD in the gullies, and BLOOD on the tracks must more BLOOD SPILL?
And then I see this hand which asks for money
but honey, honey, I just don’t have any can’t you see I’m just like you
without these clothes? I’ve had my fare share of CULTURAL TORTURE so why make a
bee line for me or is it just that I have a white skin?
So let’s get back to the end and practise what we preach or else we remain out of reach
so TEACH me TEACH me the value of being me in this land I’m trying so hard to reach.
And then somebody asked if I was BORN here and I said where? where? where?
And he repeated what he didn’t say and then this voice in the WILDERNESS asked if I
was lost and I said well NO not really I’m just sitting on the EDGE of my seat even if I
watch this film it’s still some form of FOREIGN contact the distance seems less far
are you tall enough to reach the bottom?
If the shoe fits throw it away
today today I am going to stop play if things don’t reach some form of APPARITION
and you say you want to be my friend yet when you see the PRICE you ain’t got no
GUTS so just be nice to me huh for once
I’m at the end of my tether
but that’s what its like when you are MAROONED without a saving grace and the
only thing to do has been to TRANSFORM to take an INTERNAL JOURNEY
I’m at the end of the weather
don’t know whether I am ever going to find
my country

Paternalism: the policy or practice on the part of people in positions of authority of restricting the freedom and responsibilities of those subordinate to them in the subordinates’ supposed best interest.

South Africans generally, across all race groups suffer from PATERNALISM: too scared to challenge authority because to do so is seen to be going against ‘the father’. This sickness in our society underlines our inability to openly (and justifiably) confront stupid rules and regulations. If you DO, you are labelled a TROUBLEMAKER and people view you with AUTOMATIC suspicion. The AUTOMATIC underlying notion is that the SYSTEM (i.e. the father) cannot be wrong and it is YOU that is in the wrong, In short, the system is inviolate and to challenge it is to challenge GOD.

Exactly WHO do you think you are?

On a personal level I have always found that if you challenge authority you are seen to be challenging the PERSON responsible for the implementing the authority. The silly person has totally identified them self with the silly rule i.e. it all gets taken personally.

Subsequently we have, I think, one of the most violent societies in the world.

We all know how paternalism manifests in the private domain: domestic violence (battery), rape, misplaced discipline, authoritarianism, teenage rebellion in the form of: drug abuse, pregnancies, suicides, bullying, wanton rebellion etc etc etc.

Paternalism is of course chauvinist: and with that goes racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, xenophobia, fear.

Because paternalism presumes to know what’s good for you, it also presumes to control how you should think, what you should like, who you should associate with, how you should spend your time, what you should wear, and who you should worship.

Paternalism opens the door for weirdos who want to weild their wiley power willfully: Hitler, Verwoed, Mugabe. And it looks like it now wants to open the door for Malema too.

I am convinced that paternalism is behind our extraordinary high incidence of traffic accidents where idiots scream around our roads (particularly at 4 am) thinking that they are invincible! I do not think there is a single traffic light (even the most obscure ones) at any major intersection in Durban that has not been christened with death, destruction, ruined lives.

PATERNALISM underlines and accentuates any clashes in the public domain where there is poor governance, poor leadership, poor service delivery, corruption, and nepotism. Those in authority seem to think that they can do what they like purely because they are in authority and ALSO because AUTHORITY to them IS INVIOLATE and they PRESUME that it should NEVER BE QUESTIONED. The fact that what they are doing is UNJUST never seems to register with them. They develop a type of schizophrenia that defies their level of insight and their ability to make sound moral judgements based on impartial assessment of facts. I have seen even the most highly educated people stick to what they consider to be ‘principle’ in spite of damning logical common sense evidence to the contrary!

The sum total of the attitude is IMMATURITY: political, social, spiritual, emotional.

The entire construct upon which APARTHEID was based was on PATERNALISM.

I am of the opinion that it was because of PATERNALISM that apartheid survived for so long.

It is now an accepted fact that apartheid could not have been MORE WRONG.

Why then does paternalism continue to exist?

Paternalism is fostered by lack of knowledge or half-knowledge both of which are of course framed by IGNORANCE.

Paternalism favours a TOP DOWN approach which creates short term solutions for long term problems.

Paternalism has a ‘structure’ to it and people therefore ‘relate’ to it easily: it is adopted comfortably and belies the intricate manner in which people relate meaningfully to one another.

Paternalism is the ever pervasive negative manifestation of patriarchy.

Paternalism is propagated by almost all religions.

Subsequently we live in a PUNISHMENT DRIVEN SOCIETY.

And as we move more and more into our democratic/lateral thinking society paternalism feels more

and more threatened. It thus lashes back with a violent and brutal vengeance!!

I have an inbuilt AVERSION to PATERNALISM.

BUT

just IMAGINE

if we lived in a

REWARD DRIVEN SOCIETY!