More Desai Correspondence

For those following the Ashwin Desai struggle, some more news, this time from the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa.After writing this , and having received a message in return to which I do not have access, they have responded by writing this.

Soon, I'll try to collect all these documents on one page. But for the moment, enjoy CAFA's crisp downsizing of Prof Makgoba:

You ask whether academic freedom operates above the laws of a country. We do not believe that the question of whether academic freedom has been violated can be answered by saying that the law requires one course of action or another. It has frequently happened, not least in apartheid South Africa, that violations of academic freedom have had the sanction of law. They were violations nonetheless.

The Sunday Times Reports Ashwin Desai's Reinstatement - in 2003

More news on Ashwin Desai's campaign. Turns out that the Sunday Times in 2003 printed an article celebrating Ashwin's reinstatement at the University of Durban-Westville (text-only version available here). And the then-deputy chair of council, now-attorney general of KwaZulu-Natal went on air last week saying that Ashwin had "most definitely" been "rehabilitated" in 2003. Which leaves our Vice-Chancellor in an awkward position. Always one to share, the Vice-Chancellor has left the country, putting on of his deputies in an awkward position too. But not without, yesterday, announcing in the Sunday Times that Noam Chomsky is possibly senile. The Chomskians in our linguistics department are very upset. As are the people he maligns and betrays at the beginning of the Sunday Times interview.

What goes 200mph and is full of shit?

It's A-1 Grand Prix time here in Durban. They've just finished building this track around large bits of public land on the beachfront, officially recognising what we knew all along - that public highways double rather nicely as racing circuits. Thing is, the A-1 is right outside peoples' homes. They can't get in because the entrances to their apartment buildings lie within the race perimeter. The police have helpfully suggested that they should buy tickets to the races, which will allow them unimpeded access to their bedrooms. Of course, all this private inconvenience is being justified in the name of the public good - mirroring a recent supreme court ruling in the US, to which activists have cleverly responded by petitioning for the demolition of the house of a supreme court judge, so that a leisure complex might be built there. I'm not sure what the response should be in South Africa. Building a racetrack around Tokyo Sexwale's house is likely futile - I suspect he's already got one.

Looking for Weil's Disease in All the Wrong Places

Top left, above the fold, in today's Mercury is a fascinating wee article. Blood tests for shack dwellers, we're told. Shack dwellers in Cato Manor had blood drawn last year, to test for diseases which they might have caught through contact with vermin.

"Blood and tissue samples from four species of rats and mice collected in Durban during the past two years all came up negative for bubonic plague, but in some parts of the city more than 30% of rats were found to be carrying leptospirosis [aka Weil's disease] and about 10% were carrying toxoplasmosis. Both diseases can be passed from rats to humans. Although healthy people are unlikely to suffer much more than flu-like symptoms, the sicknesses can be fatal for the very young or old, as well as people infected with HIV/Aids."

Meanwhile, at the Leptospirosis Centre, we discover that in 1995, two years into the Clinton presidency, the number of cases of Weil's disease in the United States dropped to zero. What's their secret? Say the researchers at Leptospirosis.org: "our conclusion has to be that the US reporting and testing system failed." It certainly has. At the World Health Organization, even with a vastly deficient reporting system, it seems the U.S. mortality rate from Weil's disease is higher than that of Madras.

Yes, alright, if the US figure is rubbish, the Madras one might be too.

But the bottom line is this: what the fuck?

Diseases that hop from one species to another are, of course, alarming. But in the case of bird flu, we'd not have to worry about it half as much if it weren't for the industrial farming conditions that provide the perfect environment for these diseases to incubate. And in the case of rats? One would have thought that the elementary sanitation clues, discreetly left across Europe by the Black Death, might have been picked up on by the European Union, who are funding this study. But are they coming to install sanitation for the shackdwellers? They are not. They are coming to measure how they might die, not how they live.

And besides. Having spent time in the shacks, I can say with some confidence that I've seen bigger rats in New York.

The Housing Policy That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Yes indeedy. This weekend the ANC tried to campaign in the shack settlements. The police were on hand to make the ground safe for democracy, but even then, the KwaZulu-Natal Premier couldn't get into the settlements safely.

Some of this is captured in an article in Durban's Mercury newspaper here which, although it has my byline, was definitely a team effort by the good people at the Centre for Civil Society, notably Stephanie Lane, Richards Pithouse and Ballard and, of course, S'bu Zikode and Mnikelo Ndabankulu.

As a gloss to the many of you from outside South Africa who visit Class Worrier, Jayraj Bachu is the councillor in one of Durban's more well-to-do mainly Indian neighbourhoods, in which there are a number of shack settlements. Bachu has recently been praised for his successes in clearing the poor out of the middle class ghetto. Bachu has the good sense to cloak his interventions in terms of "helping house prices". Other folk, notably the poisonous Amichand Rajbansi- a man who led the Indian collaboration with apartheid - have been embroiled in scandal over the past week, for wanting to keep certain areas "for Our Indians". Bachu wants to help the middle class. Rajbansi wants to keep Chatsworth Indian. But both are effectively calling for the same thing - out with the African poor. This is the post-apartheid housing policy that dare not speak its name.

ANC vs ANC

I know I'm stealing the title from this article in the Mail and Guardian, but it's hard to resist describing this weekend's confrontation between the ANC and the Kennedy Road shackdwellers in any other terms. ANC vs ANC captures it nicely. As does this quote from Mnikelo Ndabankulu of the Abahlali Base Mjondolo in the Foreman Road settlement: “The thing I want to clarify is that we are the ANC. We reject the current ANC nominee for our ward and we therefore have a policy of no vote for this election. We will vote in 2009 when we are happy with the nominee.”

The Year of Mobilisation for People's Power through Democratic Local Government

Goodness. The National Executive Committee of the African National Congress has a lot of free time. Their Statement on the Occasion of the 94th Anniversary of the ANC is a fine example of the sort of bureaucratese that aims to convince through stamina, rather than force of argument. The best bits are at the end where, among the salutes for the Royal dead, and an outline for women's transformation (scheduled between July and September) the ANC Salutes its best cadres, and declares 2006 The Year of Mobilisation for People’s Power through Democratic Local Government. Luckily there's an election this year, and the ANC has arranged ballot boxes for everyone's convience. Otherwise, the masses would have to think of creative ways of mobilising for accountable government.

WTO, Food and Dirt, Hong Kong and Koreans from the US.

The struggle against the WTO has become the struggle against the Hong Kong administrators. Fourteen people protesting against the WTO, mostly Korean, are now political prisoners in Hong Kong. Read more here.

The roar of its many waters

I've often seen the line, attributed to Frederick Douglass, "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. ". These good folk have done their homework, sourcing the quote, and its context.

Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North, and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages, and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others."

Source: Douglass, Frederick. [1857] (1985). "The Significance of Emancipation in the West Indies." Speech, Canandaigua, New York, August 3, 1857; collected in pamphlet by author. In The Frederick Douglass Papers. Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews. Volume 3: 1855-63. Edited by John W. Blassingame. New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 204.