1989 Peace March: apartheid revisionism or memory playing tricks?
For Desmond Tutu, the 1989 Peace March was a “tipping point”, for Allan Boesak, it “wasn’t about getting permission, it was about marching for peace come what may”. Those who were in the front of the 30 000 gathering which became the last “illegal march” under apartheid, at least in the minds of the majority of people who were there — a supreme act of defiance against the regime of FW de Klerk — appear to contradict today’s revisionists who at once focus on the failure of the government to suppress the march as evidence of the man’s noble intentions (which had yet to manifest in tangible policy) while writing off an act of insurrection by Cape Town’s Mayor at the time, Gordon Oliver.
Oliver is a Unitarian and thus his views are not readily given the kind of credit they deserve, at least as far as the Anglican Church is concerned. I attended today’s commemorative event hosted by St Georges Cathedral and was swept up in the highly emotional interfaith service which appeared to unite various strands of the Abrahamic tradition. From a Call to Prayer by Yusef Ganief which utilised the supreme acoustics of the venue, to the closing hymnal of Birkat Khohanim, a Judaic paeon to Peace sung by Jessica Thorn, the whole event struck a raw nerve. I was simply and elegantly brought to tender tears by the Cape Cultural Collective, after a candid speech by the Cape Flats’ Cheryl Carolus who surely embodies the youthful rebellion of the time?
It is easy to forget the kind of political will which exemplified itself in People’s Power and which made the United Democratic Front (UDF) such a revolutionary force in South Africa. One can always slip into neat semantics of the kind which gets people Nobel Peace Prizes and forget the fortitude and determination which marked the crowd of “students, business people, domestic workers, civic and political activists; of every race, faith, age and class”, some of whom had witnessed the Purple Rain debacle ten days earlier and the chaotic start of a defiance campaign spurred on by an all-white election, and a velvet revolution which was occurring in Eastern Europe (which would result in the End of the Cold War and fall of the Berlin Wall).
IBM and apartheid reperations
If you’ve been following the events surrounding the ongoing saga of apartheid reparations and the recent turnaround in South African government policy which had previously blocked the action, then you’ll probably want some background on the IBM story. Back in 1990 I wrote a letter to a technogeek science fiction magazine that had just launched on the West Coast, complaining about the way anti-apartheid activists were being targeted by American technology in particular the computers produced by well known US companies.
The publication was called Mondo 2000, and the letter was carried in issue 2 of the magazine which achieved a cult following before being sidelined by Wired. After years of calling for reparations for apartheid victims, I am happy to say my correspondence has paid off. Look forward to seeing a lot more about this topic as the case progresses in US courts.
Independent Group on verge of collapse
One has got to feel a little sorry for the fact cats at Independent right now. No sooner had they restructured the company to spin off their South African billboard advertising operation with the renamed INM outdoor, when the man who owns 26% of the company Denis O’Brien blocked the sale by calling a shareholders meeting. The result could put a permanent end to the O’Reilly dynasty. In order to bankroll the conglomorate, and keep titles such as Independent and Independent on Sunday afloat, the O’Reilly’s have to pay banks some 50 million Euros this month, which would have come from the sale of INM Outdoor.
It appears billionaire investor O’Brien wants to get rid of the O’Reilly shareholding once and for all by masterminding a collapse of the company which would allow him to cherry-pick assets. Needless to say, INM CEO Gavin O’Reilly is accusing O’Brien of having no interest in the core-business, which is surely newspapers and the newspaper industry?
Although the group has some 135 titles, when it comes to business, it is all about baked beans and crystal and O’Reilly whose interests in Heinz and Waterford Wedgewood, no longer amount to anything, will surely realise the time to make an exit is now.
Gavin O’Reilly’s father, Tony is world renowned for taking an Irish brand of yellow journalism worldwide, in an aggressive expansion of interests which blurred the boundaries between what was considered acceptable practice in the industry, and outright manipulation of news — what media critic Noam Chomsky calls the “manufacture of consent”.
Under the O’Reilly’s control, the Independent Group became merely another advertising and publicity department of commerce and real estate which was allowed to dictate and in certain circumstances fabricate news to conform with editorial policies that were driven by a boardroom populated with neo-conservatives and members of the oil industry.
Full story can be found on the Guardian
End Telkom carrier preselect on Cable
ZA-FREE started out as a simple request to end the R152 surcharge on Internet access. In effect we are asking for the right to use any of the competing DSL and VOICE services available in the country and to stop Telkom’s practice of insisting that users pay rental on Voice as well as Data on the same line, in effect a policy of double-dipping.
I still believe this demand is a good one and the argument for doing so is valid. However, shortly after instituting the campaign, I realised there was another solution which would probably achieve a better outcome, since it dealt with the existence of the current regime and merely requires that Telkom institute the same kind of practices already at play in the wireless sector.
Everybody knows that when you buy a cellphone, some phones are network locked. This is called carrier preselect. Your phone in all likelihood is already locked to a particular carrier who bills you for services.
Likewise, when you order a landline (from Telkom) it comes with services that are already preselected. It is impossible, as far as I am aware, under the current system to dump voice services and to have a data-only line in the household market. If one is a business, such a possibility exists at a premium.
If Telkom carrier preselect was ended, and your household landline were no longer network locked for voice services, we would be able to prevent Telkom from double-dipping and extorting various surchages.
For example, the line rental would probably be a basic R152 discounted to R100 and that would be that. Cable would be just like any rented device, and you could then choose which services you needed based upon a fair market which was open to competition.
If you needed voice services from another company, you would purchase these services on top of the basic infrastructure supplied by the cable company. Yes, this is what has been left out of the equation all along, the damn cable. Its a word that became associated with network television companies in the USA, and with the digital migration that is occurring everywhere, it is a good word to describe Telkom, South Africa’s Cable company.
In the old days, a phone line would come with a free telephone. Then Telkom decided to charge rental for the phone before shopping this out and turning the devices into another market. Telkom thus no longer provides you with a telephone as such. In fact what is it that the company actually does? How many subsidiaries are profiting from the simple provision of cable services to households, without actually providing any value to the consumer?
If ZA-FREE demands were met and implemented Telkom would probably become three separate companies/divisions.
The first division would merely supply the cable and the basic switching infrastructure needed to access Voice and Data services.
The second would supply data services.
The third would supply voice services.
A competitive environment created by such a restructuring would result in greater bandwidth and better services for consumers. We would not have to choose between cable and wireless, because the system would be integrated and allow consumers to make educated decisions based upon economic need.
A consumer might decide that the only cable services required in a household are data, and use wireless for voice services. Likewise, another consumer might find voice on cable to be cheaper, and data on wireless to be a better option.
In fact there is an argument to be made that Telkom should only be a cable company and nothing more. It should be restricted from supplying voice and data services altogether because these services would be better off if they were supplied by an open market instead of a government monopoly or parastatel.
End of the day, it is the consumer which benefits, not simply shareholders and fatcat CEOs. The Internet surcharge which has characterised the South African telecoms landscape would therefore come to an end and be replaced by a legitimate charge for cable.
Telkom would be furthermore forced to acknowledge that charging line rental for voice services and line rental for data services via carrier preselect was an unfair and invalid practice that resulted in double-dipping and even tripling of costs for the consumer down the line.
I therefore urge you all to demand an end to Telkom Carrier PreSelect! Down with the surcharge on Net Access!
Feel free to circulate and forward this message. Please use the group as a forum for discussion and debate. VIVA ZA-FREE VIVA.
Caster Semenya deconstructed
Caster Semenya has a right to be a woman. Irrespective of whether or not Science agrees, we cannot deny her this right under SA Law, and yes, this is the ANC strategy for world domination of women’s athletics. Is the world ready for Caster? What is getting lost in the media frenzy surrounding the current 800m women’s athletic champion and the debate which has splintered into polar opposites, with those living in the North, taking the dominant view of rule by genes and hormones , while those in the South appear to take the opinion such genetic presumptions constitute a gross, unfair and discriminatory practice in the light of equality and transgender politics, is the cadence of opinion.
Officials from the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), track and field’s governing body for the world, will be conducting a gender testing procedure that includes an endocrinologist, a gynecologist, a psychologist, and both internal and external physical examinations.
Bio-ethicists and civil rights advocates are strikingly absent from a panel which favours a literalist cum positivist approach to the problem of gender.
The IAAF director of communications, Nick Davies, says that the organization does not believe Ms. Semenya has been intentionally cheating but is the victim of a medical condition known as Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS).
AIS is a condition in which a person who is genetically male but is unaffected by male sex hormones known as androgens. Some people with AIS will have a totally female body on the outside, but will lack ovaries and a uterus while others may demonstrate partial AIS and will develop more muscle mass and have more facial hair than usual.
AIS, as its name suggests is a “syndrome” not a disease and the board of inquiry comprising various specialists will therefore have to explain why, if ever, a person with such a syndrome should be excluded from track and field events amidst calls from within the Social Sciences to ignore the data as invariably biased in favour of a biological view from the 19th century that has fallen out of favour with the advances of the 21st.
Will South Africa be able to sustain an ideological attack against Scientific determinism, or are we literally becoming a breed apart? It is a problem that is not going to go away. Whatever the outcome of the international panel, the fact of the matter remains, racial discrimination (the gross violation of human rights known as apartheid) has created a political necessity for denouncing genes and hormones as the mark of a bygone era.
In a sense Semenya is an innocent victim of the kind of politics which has created 50/50 power sharing between men and women in Parliament as well as our nation’s boardrooms. The need to cross ideological boundaries and cater for the intersexed may well have spurred the ruling party into a decidedly un-Scientific position. ANC Youth League spokesperson, Julius Malema, never want to court adversity, has even gone so far as to characterise the Scientific wisdom of the day, as nothing more than “educated racism”.
But the mainstream press, controlled as it is by the barons of industry, chooses to see such meanders off the seat of reason, as evidence of insanity. As a nation, when it comes to gender, the casual observer may be forgiven for thinking South Africa to have finally lost its marbles, in fact we are no longer even sure what gender is, let alone what kind of suffering is required in order to endure the hope that Science (not democracy), will one day win the day, providing us all with the means of escaping race (and along with it the various isms that mark such discrimination as a decidedly false endeavour).
We must therefore boycott the Great Race Science, along with the international panel of inquiry into gender which has become nothing more than a means of deflecting public outrage. Rather, let us all believe strongly then, in the virtue of human dignity and imagination. If an athlete wishes to live as a women, then what right do we have to question such a choice? If a person classified as black wishes to be regarded as white, who are we to enforce the fiction of race? Surely the rules of the World Athletics Union, make a mockery of justice and present us with a classic constructivist dilemma necessitating a 21st Century solution.
The world in which we live is not purely scientific, there are other considerations that must come into play, considerations that take into account not mere human evolution, but the evolution of our social and political structures. If we let go of these historical constructs, which invariably result in a neat teleology, then we let go of the stuff that binds us together as a global society still struggling to escape the horrors of slavery and colonialism. The question then — which world would we rather live in?
A world in which the final arbiter of truth is Science, or the Freedom of our Dreams?
Appearances for example can be misleading. Semenya may well turn out to be 100% female, then again she might not. Would we wish to dethrone her, simply because she chooses to be a woman? Less than 85% female or a victim of AIS, what then? She might not even possess the kind of genetic structure that would have classified her as a male or female in other less enlightened societies?
Exactly who or what determines where this distinction lies? Is it our chromosomes, our hormones, or socialisation? The Nature vs Nurture debate has instead turned into a Nature vs Peer Review fiasco in which anything can happen.
Come what may, Caster is surely a result of the strident changes apparent in South African society today, caused as a result of the freedom granted by our country’s constitution. Let this light of intellectual inquiry into the existential and phenomenological dimension of race and gender therefore never die out, or be snuffed into dust by stuffy phallocentric journals with a simple complexity theory — a mathematical shudder emanating from the laboratories of Geneva that reduces the sum total of the human experience to a simple equation.
Will the SA Press Ombud clear up the lies?
Publish and be damned, as the old saying goes. For too long South Africa’s press have been allowed to print lies and get away with not telling the truth. The two rulings on “anonymous sources” by the Press Ombudsman may help to save the reputation of the mainstream media, but it does absolutely nothing to quell suspicion that print media lies and often gets away with it.
I can name the names of professional liars at Media24 and the Independent Group. In fact I have evidence which will not see the light of day, because the media insist the rules only apply to the rich. If you have wealth and money in South Africa, you can apply to the Press Ombud for a ruling. If you are poor and do not have the luxury of legal representation, then don’t bother making a submission.
This is the fate of those who raise the ire of the people in charge — the hoodlums who have forgotten why the press is what it is — who essentially make their money out of the politics of influence and affluence.
The corruption does not stop with diversification into the advertising and public relations industry, nor does it end with deals made with the petrochemical and property giants.
The rot at Independent and Media24, ironically two media houses to escape the wrath of the Ombud, is pretty serious.
Journalists are getting gagged by the very same people who proclaim to hold up the ideals of press freedom.
People are being frauded by the very same people who claim to expose fraud in high office.
South Africa’s press is corrupt and needs to clean its own house.
It can start by firing reporters who concoct and fabricate news. It can clean-up by demonopolising and removing coporate interests that present clear conflicts of interest.
If it cannot, then the Media deserves to be regulated, if only to save it from itself.
DRL out-tweets Media24 conference site launch
Well, I don’t know how stupid Media24 is, but the company that tried to gag me is now getting a taste of its own medicine. An order by the CEO for employees to begin tweeting had some unintended consquences last week.
My tweets dissing the corporation for being nothing more than a bunch of racist lackeys are now being carried by the newsite.
Here is the evidence, check the bottom most tweet. I kid you not!
Swine flu “epidemic” adversely affecting the young?
Unlike seasonal flu, the H1N1 flu continues to pose more problems for younger people, Dr. Anne Schuchat, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said. “There are a higher attack rates and hospitalizations in younger adults and children,” she said, during a press conference held in July 2009.
A number of Peninsula High Schools reported incidents of swine flu, and today’s absenteeism associated with the H1Ni strain, amidst signs of a growing media panic about the “pandemic” on various City campuses is cause for concern.
New Scientist, reports instances of the H1N1 prior to 2008. “In 1977, an accidentally released mild H1N1 virus simply circulated alongside the existing flu, H3N2.”
Death toll in the US from 1958 “Asian” flu was approximately 69,800, according to the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) quoted in Greene Jeffrey. Moline, Karen. [2006] (2006) The Bird Flu Pandemic. ISBN 0312360568.
Last month, researchers reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that, unlike seasonal flu, the new H1N1 flu strain attacks younger people and can be more severe and deadly in that group.
A media which stifles criticism is no media at all
SOUTH AFRICA’s media suppresses dissent and drowns out opposing views in a manner that has turned into simple but efficient marketing. While we are constantly told how are opinions are valued, most opinion is formed by a small elite who are given a disproportionate amount of time and space to air their views. Take the gerontocratic journalist Alister Sparks who drives most of the Cape Times op-ed pages, with nobody else in sight except perhaps John Scott who takes the prize for “that funny guy you stopped reading back in 1972″, or eighties columnist and Uncle Tom, Jon Qwelane who has slowly progressed into becoming His Masters Voice, along with the bigotry and audacity of pride needed to expurgate on his views about homosexuality , which he believes is akin to bestiality, and therefore should be outlawed.
The so-called “marketplace of ideas” is really a “cartel of hatred”, pumped out by the O’Reilly marketing machine and former apartheid heavies. A press which cannot be bothered with the truth, is no press at all. Lies are allowed to go unchecked. Blatant fibs stand without correction. South African journalism has reached its lowest ebb, and it is therefore not surprising that readers are turning to the Internet, and blogs like this one, in order to get a more balanced view on subjects which are often completely ignored, or written off as the ravings of a lunatic.
Here are my views on the various titles and channels that claim to represent “the media”
DAILIES
Business Day - a good read if you are a bigoted, monied racist.
Cape Times – we don’t like Jews any more than we have to, in fact if you are a Heimie or a coolie, don’t bother submitting your cv.
The Times - News with all that serious, critical stuff taken out. If it were any less chewier, it would be bubblegum
Sunday Times - weekend entertainment for the whole family, not your family dammit, the other family, you know the one with two cars, a second house and a DSTV decoder.
Sunday Independent - If this is the O’Reilly flagship, then I guess a limp dick on a poop deck surrounded by faggots must be evidence of the ultimate failure to raise circulation which has resulted in the thinnest Sunday paper in SA. compared to the bulging, phallocentric Sunday Times, I would rather gag on the Weekend Argus than shit on a paper nobody can afford.
Weekend Argus (Sunday)- overweight and cluttered with trivia compared to the Times, more influential than the Independent, because, Independent is a vanity read brought to you by people who think Britain is the centre of the universe.
Weekend Argus (Saturday) – budget Saturday paper for people who can’t afford to buy the weekly.
Die Burger – a must if you want to catch up with the Volkstaat, DA politics and believe Zille is God
Daily Voice – gutter journalism at its worst and worser. Independent Groups’ pathetic attempt to cater to a “working class” market under the false impression SA working class can’t spell, have no command of English and are only interested in sex and “Sabela” i.e. prison talk.
Sun/Son - Media24 attempt to milk the working class by offering a slightly classier read than Daily Voice, brought to you by your former jail-keepers, the Apartheid System.
Mail & Guardian - former leftist rag which outgrew its audience by decades, then developed into a ‘whose who’ for Oil Sheik waBenzis before converting to radical armchair Jihadism. Great paper if you need to keep up on the mindless prattle that passes for academia or still think the world can be changed by buying bleach-free toilet paper and supporting the PLO.
TELEVISION
ETV – Rupurt Murdoch’s Trojan Horse, the Fox Network, not too shabby, allows Debra Patta to keep a handy supply of tampons while giving enema’s to her victims.
SABc 1 2 3 – bouquet channels for overweight plebs who haven’t anything better to do than watch daytime soaps, Wielie Walie reruns and old American TV series. Out of date by a decade TV that isn’t any more interesting because its old. The evening viewing isn’t any better, and as for news, switch off before we bore ourselves to tears with ANc infomercials.
DSTV - can’t comment since I never got MNet during the Struggle and now we have democracy, still can’t afford a dish and the subscription to Toss off TV.
RADIO
Heart 104.9 – easy listening for victims of cardiac arrest brought to you by people of colour who wish they were white and whites who wish they were black.
Good Hope FM - its roots in bland, white South Africa, for a time it became hip somewhere over the turn of the Millennium. Last track with its audience when everyone converted to Satellite.
capetalk – meaningless talkshow radio for pensioners, has one or two good programmes on Alzeimhers and Lime disease.
METRO - for loudmouth DJs who wish they were on 5FM
5FM - providing the kind of sound young folk would have listened to in the 90s if they had been born back then. Whatever happened to the sound of today? What, no SA Top Twenty, you kidding me?
The curse of King Tantalus and the Internet
Here’s the rub, according to Greek legend, King Tantalus was condemned by the gods for file-sharing. Okay, its a modern version of the old legend. But this part is true. In one version, Tantalus (from whence the English language evolved the mythos related to the word Tantalising), was given an unusual punishment. Forced to stand in a pool of water, from which he could not drink, under an apple tree from whose fruit he could not eat, Tantalus found to his horror, that whenever he reached down, the waters receded, and whenever he reached up, the branches lifted so that whatever he did, his actions were thwarted by some unseen power he could not comprehend.
South Africa recently saw the commissioning of the 1.26Terabyte Seacom Cable. The service will only be officially launched later this month. If Seacom were the only cable connecting our continent to the rest of the world, we will have surpassed our previous national bandwidth capabilities by a thousand fold. Seacom has apparently 28times the capacity of Sat1. According to the laws of supply and demand, prices for connectivity are meant to come down. They have not.
This is not the only intercontinental fibre optic project to arrive on our shores. There are at least several other projects, each one, in and of itself, capable of reducing the digital divide to zero, as the Internet becomes a real-time event and no longer the World Wide Wait. The West Africa Cable System (WACS), previously known as Infraco, in which Government, Telkom, Vodacom, Nortel and MTN are investing, was recently extended to South Africa. WACS will link SA and West African coastal countries to Europe, offering the highest capacity of all the African undersea cables at 3.8 terabits per second.
Glo-1 another spanking new west African undersea cable system that will connect Nigeria to the UK, with additional landing points in Portugal, Ghana, Senegal, and South Africa, has a capacity of 640 gigabits per second.
Another robust cable is MainOne, a 1.92 terabits per second line that will connect Portugal to Nigeria, Ghana, Angola, Gabon, Senegal, Congo, Ivory Coast, Morocco and SA and which is scheduled for completion in the second quarter of next year.
In addition, France Telecom-Orange is building the African Coast to Europe (ACE) cable system, which will link 20 west African countries to France, with a possible extension to SA. Consumption of French Baguettes and membership of the Alliance Francais is predicted to increase.
Then there is the EASSy cable, which will link SA and east Africa, with landing points in six countries, providing a capacity of 1.4 terabits per second, which is expected to go live in the second half of 2010. What a treat.
The East Africa Marine System (TEAMS) will link Mombassa on the cost of Kenya to Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates will have no direct impact on SA but will increase the overall capacity of the African Internet and presumably result in an influx of cybertourists to the South. There is also a Far East Cable project linking the island of Mauritous, India and Kwazulu-Natal, and the hotspots of Mumbai.
Predictably, the mandarins in charge at Telkom and other telecommunications operators want us to continue thinking in terms of scarcity and Mbs per second. In fact estimates about the growth of web-use by South African’s over the next five years already seem like attempts to downplay the new capacity which is already available.
Lets take a step back. Verizon recently unveiled a 1Gbs service in New York. Enough for a hot New York Minute. Compared to the average 40Mps here this is more than quadruple the speed of you average household cable and as capacity increases, expect to see downloads occurring at light speed. Yes, that’s right , the difference between copper cabling and fibre optic is startling and represents not just a paradigm shift, but a quantum leap forward towards a post-scarcity economy, at least in terms of broadband connectivity.
It does not take a Steven Hawking to explain the modus operandi of the corporate executives who wish to profit from their investments until the seventh generation. The current owners of the metred IP system based upon copper cable are keeping mum. Even though the the roll-out of fibre by companies such as Dark Wave Africa is creating expectations on the ground of immediate access to the African Information Superhighway, consumers are unlikely to see any of the benefits of realtime IP, because like King Tantalus, we are all being punished for file sharing, downloading, and expressing ourselves by the people in charge. Telkom know they have us by the balls.
South Africa has always suffered from geographic isolation. As a long-haul destination, most of the free World is a 14 hour flight away. Our neighbours such as Mocambique, Botswana, Namibia, the so-called Frontline states, are relatively underdeveloped and dependent upon us for exports. Worse, we have a basket-case Zimbabwe 0n our doorstep and a constant flow of immigrants, refugees and exiles fleeing repressive government, conflicts and wars up North.
The Internet is the only technology capable of changing this equation of underdevelopment, but by bringing the world closer, we will share both the benefits and the problems of West. Can South Africans cope with the inevitable culture shock? Can the rest of the world cope with digital Africans zipping around on the Information Superhighway and demanding goods and services?
The danger of doing this in a phased transition might outway the problems of a Big Bang. Imagine arriving your African destination from a first world country with progressive communications and open-access Internet services that run at light speed. You are likely to find the following;
1. Newspapers which are out-of-date by a quarter of a century.
2. Stagnating development in which most people cannot name the most important Scientific inventions
3. Technology which has long since been relegated to the arc or the city rubbish dump, still in service.
4. Inability to comprehend the global vernacular which is being created by services such as Twitter, Yahoo, Myspace and Facebook.
5. In our strange land, where none of the major innovations have reached the majority of citizens, a casual tourist from the future might relate the following story:
“[South Africa] is a beautiful country. Its citizens are like docile sheep. They willingly pay taxes to a telecommunications elite who control all the money and let them rule but without passing any of the benefits on to the majority who suffer and languish as is they were still caught-up in the 16th century.”
A pretty picture indeed. This is what the big media houses want, a phased transition that locks in profits while keeping consumers entertained with content that is created in Hollywood instead of being exported by the netizens of the future. Life goes on, profits are what is important, not people, and who are we to think different?
Tantalus is no longer King, but rather the tantalizing fate of everybody living in this transition to the light-age.
Medialternatives challenges you to question the status quo. Feel free to raise uncomfortable questions.
