Headline of the moment

Fewer cheese-rollers injured than usual .

Update
And the article is pretty damn funny too. You crazy Brits.

The ANC’s Winter of Discontent

Couple of weeks back, I wrote about the march by folk in the Kennedy Road informal settlement, who protested with other residents of their ward here in Durban to unseat their ANC (previously Democratic Alliance, and National Party before that) councillor. A full article’s up at the Voice of the Turtle, co-written with the estimable Richard Pithouse. So here’s an update. The ANC responded valiantly and bravely to criticism last week, calling one of the community leaders at 4pm to tell him that he’d been summoned to a meeting at 7pm. The community rocks up at 7 on the dot, and are told to wait outside because the ANC is caucusing. The ruling party caucuses, and then invites the informal settlement residents in. “No,” they say. “We’re caucusing too.” “Sorry,” says the ANC. “We’ve got some very important people in here. You can caucus later.”

So in they go. And see, arms folded, grinning, the very councillor they’d protested against. In the ensuing meeting, the residents are lambasted, excoriated, hauled over coals, have their throats shat down, and in various other ways made to feel the ANC’s extreme displeasure over being embarrassed in the papers by the actions of the constituency. The meeting runs until 2am. The Kennedy Road folk get home at 2.30am. They leave for work at five.

Let’s not be too harsh. It wasn’t all shouting. The ANC also asks questions. At one point, the ANC asks “Was there a third force behind the protests?” For those unfamiliar with South African politics, this is a reference to the Inkatha Freedom Party – the ‘third force’ in KwaZulu-Natal politics under and since apartheid, puppeted in part by the apartheid state. The ANC’s paranoia is boundless, but it’s also strategic. In raising the spectre of the third force, they’re prompting South Africans to recall and relive a moment in South African history, but not as the history actually happened. The apartheid struggle involved a good many forces, not just the ANC. Since 1994, those other forces have been written out of the struggle. One of the ways the ANC has achieved this is precisely through this kind of exercise of memory, resurrecting past pariahs to reconstitute the present.

The present is, however, a foreign country. We do things differently here. And the ANC would know this if they weren't so insulated, ideologically and materially, from the rest of the world.

On Friday, there was a fire at the Kennedy Road settlement. Fourteen shacks were consumed by the blaze. I’ve never seen a fire department act with such languid abandon, strolling down to the flames, and then pottering up to the fire truck to plug in a hose. I’m told that this behaviour fits into a pattern, one in marked contrast to the response to housefires in wealthier communities. The Kennedy Road folks are once again looking for housing material to rebuild their shacks - one estimate from a second-hand building parts dealership put the cost of replacing a 3m x 4m shack at R2000. (If anyone can help, do drop a line. Big props go to the Jaggarnath family for sorting out blankets - in a case like this, the local Disaster Relief authority is prepared to provide one blanket per now-homeless-person made out of what feels like sandpaper.)

One reason that the shacks caught fire is because there was no electricity in that part of the settlement. The city won’t extend the connection there. So the residents have to make do with candles and paraffin stoves, in shacks built of wood, tin and sometimes plastic. Of course there are going to be fires. But the other reason that the shacks burn this time of year is that it's cold - winter is digging into the settlements. If you live in a plush house, you're not going to notice. If you live in the settlements, you certainly will.

The ANC is busy looking for a third force, wondering why it is that people living in substandard housing, after eleven years of quiescence and compliance are rising up across the country. Well, goodness. What sort of force is it that affects a wide geographic area of poor people living in substandard housing with some kind of temporal synchrony? The third force, after more than a decade of patience, is winter.

55% Non!

The French have told Chirac et al to fuck off. "In the final count, the "no" won by a clear 2 million votes, 55 % from the left (from the Socialist Party and left) and 45 % from the right (including the UMP, the UDF and the National Front). Seventy five per cent of industrial workers and 66% of employees, voted no.", says Nick Bullard, who has just returned from the vin rouged celebrations in Paris.

Looking, as one does, for informed commentary on the events of the day, I went on over to Paris.Indymedia. There, you can delight in "L'oligarchie britannique nous appelle - voter OUI" - the British Oligarchy calls on us to vote YES. Who are the evil doer promoting sedition among the French? Er, the scientific journal, Nature, who wanted a Oui to further intra-European scientific collaboration. Not the most compelling argument, but then of course, it'd be odd for Nature to be arguing for a Oui vote on grounds that it'd be good for the marginal tax rate.

I'm sure there are other more insidious people out there to play the role of the evil British oligarchy, though non? Like, for instance, the British traditional leadership. Headline news in the South African Sunday Times today was this news from the beginning of the month about the pittance that the Windsor traditional authority pays in rent for its palaces. Bet they were gunning for a non as well. Fuckers.

Stop funding your own oppression.

The anti-corporate globalisation movement has a friend at BadCorp.org. There's a helpful "Corporate Shitlist" and a solid "Who owns whom" database. Good times and straight talk here.

Lookalike

Just in case the nice people at Private Eye decide they don't want to remark on this, I'd like to offer the following observation on similarity. Exhibit A: Steven Berkoff, thespian, man frequently typecast as a vaguely European psychopath.
Exhibit B: Pascal Lamy, former European trade negotiator, now head of the World Trade Organisation.

Two of my favourite things.

Not a few folk have been trying to cash in on Star Wars fever to further their campaigns. MoveOn have their Save the Republic soapbox. Best to date, though, is one following in the footsteps of The Meatrix . Grocery Store Wars is chock full of puns for those strong with The Force. For those who've been untouched by Star Wars, it has visual gags far funnier than a cheap short film about vegetables has any right to. Star Wars and organic food. Who could ask for anything more? Well, me. If you're going to bring down the military-industrial-food complex, it's going to take a little more than picking up organic food off the shelves. It's like shopping in the Death Star. But, at the end of the day, it's a movie funded by the Organic Trade Association. Clearly a bunch of trekkies. [Via Tom.]

Overheard

It's not stalking. It's being prepared.

Disinformation and pitchforks

The Newsweek fiasco vindicates Naomi Klein's sensible thoughts on torture - the bodies subject to misinformation and disorientation aren't only the ones living the horrors in Abu Ghraib. But only one blogger has had the courage to speak the difficult truth. That blogger is Medium Lobster. Quoth:

Newsweek - and the entire liberal media! - is responsible for smearing America's good name with the blood of innocents. This is a violation which must be answered for, and there is no answer for it but the replacement of the free press with the only entity pure enough and untainted enough to restore the image of America's government: America's government. The Medium Lobster can direct you to the torches and pitchforks.

Read Medium Lobster, Fafnir and Giblets over at Fafblog!

George Galloway Did Not Happen

George Galloway has been busy doing what he's good at - pissing people off. In style too. At the U.S. Senate. I don't think I could imagine more delightful testimony short of Jon Stewart being summoned. For instance:

"Now, the neo-con websites and newspapers in which you're such a hero, senator, were all absolutely cock-a-hoop at the publication of the Christian Science Monitor documents, they were all absolutely convinced of their authenticity. They were all absolutely convinced that these documents showed me receiving $10 million from the Saddam regime. And they were all lies.
"In the same week as the Daily Telegraph published their documents against me, the Christian Science Monitor published theirs which turned out to be forgeries and the British newspaper, Mail on Sunday, purchased a third set of documents which also upon forensic examination turned out to be forgeries. So there's nothing fanciful about this. Nothing at all fanciful about it.

The full transcript is full of good giggles, and likely to be more entertaining and informative than the US news sources (with the possible exception of the Daily Show). At the moment, none of the U.S. newspapers of record have anything but a dull AP wire story. Given the fact of politics as spectacle, this is the sort of spectacle one can quickly see being prioritised somewhere below the launch of Playstation 3. But just in case this receives the oxygen of publicity which it so richly deserves, I've prepared a fieldguide to the logic and language you can expect to see in the U.S. press:

Moustachioed Scot…loose canon … weapon of self-destruction … famously litigious … meanwhile, Senator Norm Coleman … if these allegations turn out to be true … not a credible witness … held to account … transatlantic alliance … safely ignored … Saddam Hussein … Islamic peril...

Just here to help.

The Logic of Protest

I don't want to become a documenter of Thabo Mbeki's mots justes , not least because I'd be kept very busy thus. But given my activities over the past week, here’s one too priceless to let pass.

“We must stop this business of people going into the street to demonstrate about lack of delivery. These are the things that the youth used to do in the struggle against apartheid.” Mbeki, speaking at the municipal imbizo in Rustenburg. [In 13-19 May 2005 Mail and Guardian, p17]

As we've already established, Thabo is big on logic, which is why it's worth just making explicit the reasoning behind his thinking here:

In the struggle against apartheid, all kinds of actions seemed reasonable. The fight for democracy condoned a wide range of noxious acts, though with heavy heart. But there is no more sanctioning this kind of behaviour now that sanctions are over. The fight has been won. There is democracy. There may not be service delivery, granted. But since going to the street to demonstrate is a right belonging to all South Africans, the universality of this right is precisely the reason that no one should exercise it.

Happily, lots of people are ignoring the President's dazzling command of reason. Including the good people of Kennedy Road, about whom I’ve written here and here. On Friday, they took to the streets in one of Durban’s largest post-apartheid protests. There were well in excess of 3000 people, a figure made all the more impressive because every other protest in Durban since 1994 – notably the World Conference Against Racism and Xenophobia in 2001 – all had vast amounts of donor cash for banners, sound and transportation of warm bodies to the barricades. Friday’s protest happened without any of that, which perhaps explains why every political party is shitting on them from a great height. And all because they wanted a decent candidate to vote for in the next election, rather than the corrupt parasite who has been the one representative in Durban's Ward 25 since before most people could vote; Yacoob Baig participated in the appalling tri-cameral system under apartheid, switching to the Democratic Alliance, before then crossing the floor to the ANC. The ANC said that the Kennedy Road poors should have gone through the ANC structures. This is hard, since the ANC structures have never bothered to return their calls, and have instead sold off the land which had been promised to the people in the informal settlement.

The key demands, then, were "Land, Housing and Baig must go". The fuller memorandum of demands is itself a fine document. You can read the version submitted to the municipality here. The key point is in the first line: "We the people of Ward 25, loyal citizens of the Republic of South Africa, unite behind the following demands..." No party political affiliation, no claims to rights beyond the ones to which ever South African is entitled. Hell, there were even T-Shirts with Mbeki's face on it at the march. You can see some pictures from the event here . Note the yellow troop carrier picture. Under apartheid, police cars and vehicles were all painted yellow. (The first post-sanction Lonely Planet guide to South Africa strongly advised against hiring yellow cars – silly really, since no car hire company offered the option.) After the democratic dispensation, the police rebranded themselves, with the universal blue-and-white uniform we normally associate with the people who persecute immigrants and the poor. But controlling the anger of the oppressed is an apartheid art, and the colours of this piece of crowd control equipment reflect this all too well.

Where does that leave Mbeki’s logic?

Mbeki Tells It How It Is

Regular readers will recall Mrs Thatcher explaining monetarism.Seems as if Cde Mbeki has been taking clarity lessons from the great dame. In this week's ANC Today, the President explains the compatibility of vast job losses and grinding poverty with a glowing assessment of the ANC's economic record

"In other words, with reference to the paradigm of simple logic, a specific progression from the particular to the general has sought to present a general picture that is putatively consistent with the particular, but is, in fact, inconsistent with the overall general reality. "

Read Mbeki's fuller thoughts on logic
here.

short tales

There's a new kid on the blog. Check DS, and his heavy-weight thoughts on South African politics, here. He'll make it to the sidebar just as soon as I get my shit together. Past experience suggests that this may take some time.

Pythagorarse

Been doing a bit of gastronomic detective work of late. Some may know that Pythagoras had a thing about beans, forbidding those in his retinue, men and women, from ever going near them. But why? Colin Spencer in his wonderfully readable, highly speculative and often flat batty "Vegetarianism: A History" suggests:

There are a number of possible explanations for the Pythagorean abstention from bean-eating. It might partly be traced back to the Egyptian priests, as Herodotus observes .The authors of Food: The Gift of Osiris remark that the priests merely wished to avoid the impurity of their emanations. A priest’s dignity could suffer if he were to fart in the midst of holy ritual. But beans are not the only food to induce flatulence and these authors continue with a more symbolic explanation. The Egyptian word for bean, iwryt, is similar to the word iwr, meaning to conceive or to generate. This association for the Egyptian priests may have endowed the bean with a sacred aspect. Pythagoras also forbade them because, two theories suggest, beans were generated by the same putrefactive material that generates human beings or, according to Pliny, because he thought that the souls of the dead dwell in them. I would also suggest that fava beans, squinted at sideways, bear a resemblance to female pudenda; added to the similarity between the Egyptian words described above, this might have been seen as another indication that beans were indeed sacred and somehow fused with the act of creation. Pythagoras, according to Plutarch, called eggs ‘beans’, making a pun on the word for conception. Porphyry tells us that Pythagoras buried some beans in mud in a pot, and when he dug them up ninety days later they had taken the shape of a woman’s vagina. (Perhaps, as well, this is why throughout history, until very recently, beans have been thought to incite lustful thoughts.) A more prosaic explanation is that the bean was sued as a voting token in elections; thus abstention from the eating of beans meant ‘abstain from politics’. And another is that foods which can at times be toxic become taboo. Favism is a hereditary disorder which involves an allergic reaction to the broad bean. Sufferers can develop a blood disorder (haemolytic anaemia) by eating the beans or even walking through a field of them when they are in flower. The disease can affect people living around the Mediterranean shores. Finally, the smell of foods was of great significance in the preparation and cooking for aromas made their way to the gods – and beans were held to smell of dung.

Discreet enquiries at a Buddhist retreat this weekend, where they also choose not to serve beans, corroborates the simple explanation. Priests tend not to want to fart during long hours of silent meditation - gives people the giggles, apparently.

Creative Recycling

Splendid picture up at the BBC.

It's a man making puppets out of recycled World Bank reports.

"We keep getting these reports that no one reads, so we decided to put them to some use," Mr Roy says.

Full caption here. Via Palash.

Operation Muslim Vote

We've just added a fine new article by Naima Bouteldja to the Turtle, on why many Muslims will be punishing Labour, and possibly voting Respect, on Thursday. More here.

BishopWatch

Q:How do you know the car in front of you contains the KwaZulu-Natal Anglican bishop?
A: The number-plate is "Bishop ZN".
Just thought you should know.

Insomnia

Carn't sleep. Not last night neither. At least not until 6am. And then was woken up at midday by a glorious bit of close-harmony May Day celebration booming across from the sports fields outside my flat. Good times.

Why my mum will be voting Green

This will be the first British election in which I won’t actually cast my own vote. Luckily, my mum has stepped up to the plate, and will be voting for me. No postal vote allowed, since I won’t actually be in the country to fill it out and send it in. So I’ve proxied my poor mother to stuff the ballot box on Karl Marx's birthday. And this election, like every other, I’ll vote Green. Except that my mum will.

I wasn’t enfranchised in time to boot out Finchley and Golders Green’s most notorious MP – she was already Lady Thatcher of Finchley by the time of my first election. Since her departure, the choice of candidates in Finchley has lost its dark sparkle, and I expect it to remain a constituency dominated by grey reactionaries of one stripe or another until I die. This year’s ballot paper gives you some idea of democracy’s standard fayre for Finchley.

Andrew Mennear, Conservative
Noel Lynch, Green Party
Rudi Vis, Labour
Sue Garden, Liberal Democrat
Jeremy Jacobs, UK Independence Party
Rainbow George Weiss, Rainbow Dream Ticket

Yes indeed. Rudi Vis, the little shit, won by a fair majority last time (46.3%) and the time before that (46.1%), and I expect him to do the same again this. Little chance of Mr Mennear doing much. Which means that I’m in not much danger of being complicit in a Tory return. (And given the contempt in which we ought to hold both HMG and the Opposition, and given the vanishingly small difference between them – at least viewed from here - my conscience would be largely untroubled by such complicity.)

But this is more than just a protest vote. It might be pathetically simple minded to vote on grounds of manifesto promises and past performance, but if you're going to vote at all, these might not be the worst grounds from which to cast. And on The Issues, I'm tempted by Green because:

They’ve the most literate manifesto in a field which, as Private Eye observes in its splendid Election Special (offline only, sorry), is characterized by mediocrity. Compare the Lib-Dems'

“our instinctive internationalism – through positive and proactive engagement with Europe, the United Nations and the Commonwealth – is instinctive definitive”

with the far punchier

“Greens are internationalist by nature.”

Hell – they even manage to get a ‘nature’ in there, bless. And the Greens don’t even mention the Commonwealth, which is surely a point in their favour. The Manifesto is also dedicated to the fine Mike Woodin, who died last year.

They have moderately sensible thoughts on taxation, smarter at least than anyone else running in Finchley.

The Turtle’s Hal Berstam seems to be voting green too.

They want to decommission nuclear reactors, which is nice.

They’re disestablishmentarian (see here ) and almost-but-not-quite republican.

The Green Party has no clear leader whom I can identify. This is good. The structural politics of party political leadership encourages wankers, tyrants and the sort of type-A people whom you’d rather see restricted to careers as bouncers or lawyers.

It’s more properly Finchley and Golders: Green.

Even if the candidate’s called Noel.

There’s enough wrong with the Green’s immigration policy to give me the willies, mind. Here’s their manifesto blurb on the subject:

People fleeing persecution, torture and human rights' violations should always be welcomed by Britain and offered our full protection and asylum. The Green Party is concerned that public debate often confuses the issue of asylum with that of economic migration.

When so much environmental politics is a cover for fantasies of racial purity and/or misanthropy, it’s as well to hold the Greens to a higher standard. There’s clearly a difference between torture, and economic persecution, but I wish they’d talked about what this was, and how they were going to address both. They’re also wildly off base with their endorsement of carbon trading, increased international aid (though there’s a concession to canceling third world debt and scrapping the WTO) and in their decision to call their anti-free trade platform “Taming the Tiger”.

Still. There are constraints to my organizing a write-in campaign for Bruce Springsteen. And they’re vastly better than any of the other choices. So what are you waiting for? Send your mother out to vote for you on Friday.

Update
Read the Lib Dems manifesto, only slightly mangled above (thanks, Hal), here. The Greens have their manifesto online here. And, another reason to vote for them, silly me for forgetting, is that they've rather consistently been against the war on Iraq.