Sunday, December 20, 2009

Hope-en-Hagen

They've re-invented the wheel. That's what I've taken from the news clusters and whittled them down to, with the aid of the image at least three newspapers were running today. Apart from the fact that the 'Developing Nations' cluster were coralled into a flakey deal with Obama, the bicycle 'good news' item is meant to offer hope. Isn't this a re-hash of the dynamo torch we used to clip to our bike wheels? Anyway, I like it because it wasn't just another mouth talking about end goals:
http://senseable.mit.edu/copenhagenwheel/
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Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Global archives

In the mission to find archival troves, I stumbled on this in The Weekender:

www.wdl.org (World Digital Library)

It's a project partly owned by UNESCO and partly by the Library of the US Congress, and a new fund of archaic maps and cultural info from 30 national libraries so far, including the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt. Says US Librarian of Congress James H Billington: "It's aims are to promote international and intercultural understanding".
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Friday, May 29, 2009

Ways of Staying

This is probably getting a little narrow in focus, but the elections were an emotional hot poker up everyone's rectitude, so that's why this blog went all internal. The political landscape is veeery interesting now though. LOTS of touchy feely sentiments. It's still a big inbreath, while we wait to see what the new guys do for South Africa.

Most recently published book to read right now: Kevin Bloom's WAYS OF STAYING
(Kevin's a journalist who reminds me of the guys in the Bang Bang Club - remember Ken Oosterbrook? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwbKPod2DtM)
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Wednesday, April 22, 2009

The Day of the Black Thumb

Those queues today are possibly closer to the ones we knew in the first democratic election in 1994.  The outcome is more or less set, but the way the country has moved politically over the past year makes this one as poignant.  They also keep count of your age - except it counts in fours.  Each time we line up, we're that much older.  
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Monday, April 6, 2009

Now is the winter of (our?) discontent made glorious Zuma

I’m trying to dredge the awkward discomfort I feel after today’s decision to drop all fraud and other charges against the ANC president. I want to be happy, like his supporters dancing in the streets. I honestly do. I want to understand how to feel happy about this, but would it mean serious compromise?
Would it mean that we have to live with that discomfort - like a dirty piece of toilet paper that has stuck to the shoe on the way out of the toilet? And the international media - who are not afraid of local protocol - WILL ask the question: ‘Did you take backhanders, mr president?’ What will he say? Will he say that the question is irregular?
I want to be certain that we stand on ethical principles, just like I was certain when Nelson Mandela became father of our nation. Under the dirty brotherhood of the National Party, I was embarrassed to admit I was from South Africa if anyone asked overseas. I was jealous of the Canadians travelling with me, who sewed their national flag onto their backpacks. It was unheard of to wave around our own flag.
We’re heading back there quicker than it took for democracy to arrive.
The level of understanding from celebrants on the streets today just seems functionary and misguided: ‘We always knew he was innocent’. What!? That’s not what the official NPA announcement was – however incoherent and inarticulate the speakers. What they DID announce was that the Zuma prosecution is riddled with irregularities (relating to the partisan Mbeki supports among its ranks), but not that the evidence was wrong after all.
That we should all simply accept this is what is disturbing. Add that to the list of home and foreign affairs decisions – such as the compromised passport fiasco leading to our new visa requirements for the UK, the rejection of possibly the most important icon of peace and statesmanship, the Dalai Lama, and it becomes disturbing.

Can anyone offer consolation? Show me why.

There’s a poem somewhere (If you find it let me know) about a dead Chinese emperor who was propped in a public square in an attempt to prove his existence to the populace. As time goes by he begins to rot and stink. Every day, someone (who has everything to gain from his ‘continued existence’) adds another pile of dead fish next to the corpse to disguise the smell and provide a decoy.

Have we lost our sense of ‘smell’?
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Sunday, April 5, 2009

When I click my fingers you will not remember anything

Here's how you can get off a criminal trial for fraud:
Usual procedure - Criminal act + Evidence = Prosecution
New - Criminal act + Evidence (Quickly, NOW, insert scandal and conspiracy) = Innocence
It's not rational I know, but hey, it works. I saw it in the paper today.
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Saturday, April 4, 2009

Daily Lama

Seems SA has a skewed picture of who the great leaders are: this week-end we await the announcement concerning the trial of our future president (oh come on, he is GOING to be, it's a no brainer) - will he answer to fraud claims? We - the people of SA, supposedly - have rejected the Dalai Lama's 'intrusion' on our 2010 world cup turf. His invitation to the peace conference notwithstanding. After all: 'Who IS the Dalai Lama?' asks our minister of finance. 'And what about his people's resistance to One China?'
An invitation by a former LEADER, Nelson Mandela, and compatriot Desmond Tutu.
Who is leading, really leading this country?
Hey there's always China and Libya to travel to if everyone else refuses US entry...
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The Daily Maverick

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Thulamela - ancient site in the Northern corner of the Kruger Park

As the marketing spiel goes, Limpopo Province is the land of legend. I’ve seen and heard more marketing rhetoric about Limpopo on radio spots and billboards than any other province over the past year or so. Still, it’d take a substantial chunk of holiday to become familiar with the layers of local heritage – natural and cultural. I’d made acquaintances a few years ago in Sibasa and spent some time at ‘prime tourism spots’: The sculptor Noria Mabasa’s house, the Sacred Forest, Lake Funduzi and the ‘potholes’ on the Muswodi road. We’d wrestled the donga-strewn village roads to get to Mukumbani, the official royal ‘palace’ of the Tshivase clan, constructed by the Vhavenda who’d originally migrated south after the collapse of Great Zimbabwe. Walking the permimeter of the mildewy walls whett enough of an appetite for another visit that would take in more of this part of the country’s heritage. The more you listen to the oral history of the region – emotive and engaging, unlike the antiseptic thesis of some academic papers – the more you find yourself lured into its vast controversies, tribal conflicts, magic, linguistic heritage and ancestry.

Take, for example the appellations: ‘Shangaan’ and Tshivase (Sibasa). The first is rooted in the fallout that occurred between two leaders within the Tsonga community a hundred or so years ago. One group beat a retreat towards Mozambique, subsequently absorbing some Portuguese into its lexicon while in exile. They were labelled ‘the ones who left their babies (‘Ma-shiya-ngani’), a term that is still pejorative compared with the one (Tsonga) used in ID books. Then there is the Tshivase clan, whose origins are rooted in the legendary pioneering chief ‘Tshivase midi ya Vathu’ (the one who burns down the houses of the people), who’d come from North of the Limpopo, and whose conquest hints at the violent overthrow of previous occupants of the local region.

Thulamela, accessible from the the Kruger Park’s Pafuri or Punda Maria gates, hasn’t enjoyed the kind of press that has accumulated around the World Heritage Site of Mapungubwe, but it is also only one of many archeological sites in the region that mark the ancient foundations of a society related to the Northern Vhenda and Shona groups. (Other sites include Mukumbani, referred to by the king as a living cultural centre, rather than a defunct ‘heritage site’, Dzata and the Dhlo Dhlo ruins).

The isolation of the royal family within the confines of a walled palace was first developed at Mapungubwe, continued at Great Zimbabwe (and Khami – nearby in Bulawayo) and later at Thulamela, before groups moved further south, carrying with them the legacy of the earlier social hierarchy and palace design.

Land rights become a tenuous issue - at least one reason for the denial of ancient settlements by the previous National government. It couldn’t have been politically expedient to talk of cultural heritage on this scale. My school history books covering matters this far north involved the heroism of the Boer nation, rather then the sovereignty of previous indigenous kingdoms which had settled here over 1000 years ago, not to mention the San presence which goes back 100 000 years.

I’m at the Pafuri gate at the Kruger Park by seven am. At eight there is still no sign of the guide I’d arranged to meet me. A series of conversations rally back and forth between the receptionist here and the one at Punda Maria. Today’s shift knows nothing of the arrangement. Eventually I’m told a guide will meet me at the picnic site 25km’s inside the park, once a 4x4 is organised. At the picnic site, I wait for another hour for a guide who has just finished a morning game drive. A panelled historical overview helps to pass the time constructively. It has been sponsored by the same beneficiaries involved in the site project: The Goldfields Foundation, NORAD, the Department of Environmental affairs and tourism, the Wits University archaeological department, the department of Anatomy Pretoria University and a Thulamela Trust.

As with the other sites, an elite ruling class and ‘divinely appointed’ king had grown with the affluence that accrued to the society as a result of trade with Arab merchants from the east coast. This site marked the stone wall headquarters of one of the groups that had moved across the Limpopo from the Zimbabwe region. (Oral tradition suggests that Thulamela and Makahane – 15km west – were Shona capitals. Later, by the 1500’s, Portuguese traders began to utilize the same trade routes. Their records verify some of the oral history.)

The site was discovered by a ranger who noticed the unusual arrangement of stones on the perimeter of the hill. A group of archaeologists from the University of Pretoria was invited to examine the area Erik, my guide, tells me as we park the Landy. He shoulders an elephant gun and we make our way through the thorn scrub towards the top of the hill. Erik is joined by another ranger, Frank, who sweeps the landscape with a twitcher’s eye, his Robert’s stowed under his belt and a pair of ranger’s binoculars dangling from his neck. Erik was one of about six men who joined the project to re-construct the walls of Thulamela. ‘I’m a stone mason, so I know how a wall would have been constructed’, he says, matter of factly. The group of masons, he tells me, only used the stones lying next to the foundations of the wall in order to get a true perspective of what the possible height and dimensions were. ‘This granite stone here had never collapsed…it’s what you call a monolith’. He gestures towards a dark meter long rock protruding from the earth on the inside of the wall near one of the openings. ‘In Venda they call them ‘Mafaru’, and in Shona: ‘Gandzelo’.

According to tradition, the monoliths would be placed near the entrances to ward off evil, and would have been erected on top of magical ingredients. ‘Even people who’ve lived nearby quite recently, talk of hearing drums being played here in the middle of the night, and would be too afraid to come near.’

We sit under the shade of a baobab as he speaks. There is evidence of previous social life here: two big squares had been cut out of one of the flatter sides of the tree. Roofing for a hut may have been cut here – or, because the bark is really fibrous - it would have been a useful source for rope or whips.

It was at the discovery of the burial sites that an anatomist from Pretoria University was called in. Two skeletons were recovered: one was of a woman who’d been buried in the Losha position (lying on the left side facing the rising sun, towards the west, where it is believed her tribe may have originated, with the hands in a ‘prayer’ position under the left cheek. In Venda culture, the position of supplication still signifies great respect. She was 1.73m tall, strong boned, and was most likely one of the king’s wives since she was buried with jewellery from her time. Carbon dating indicates that she must have lived in the 1600’s, at least two hundred years after the person found within the confines of the walled enclosure further up the hill. (Carbon dating of charcoal from ancient fireplaces has put the occupation period between 1550 and 1650.)

In contrast, the male skeleton is fragile and shows signs of a handicap in one of the legs. Its fragility suggests that the man probably never needed to exert himself with any laborious tasks, and that he may never have had to leave his sacred enclosure. This may have related to his role as a shaman. The age of the skeleton probably fits with the notion of a second burial: he had lived around 1450, which means that Thulamela might never have been his home either - one theory is that the body was brought across from Great Zimbabwe. The guides refer to a traditional expression that ‘a crocodile never leaves his pool’. They also make some attempt to explain the relevance of ‘the king’s stone’, a token of bone fide inheritance of the throne. A successor would have to swallow the stone vomited up by the previous king. In the case of the man found here, the guides say, the stone was still inside his body when he died, suggesting that he’d been stabbed. At this point the vagaries of translation and superstition veil the story. Both skeletons were reburied in 1996 during an official opening of the site and ritual ceremony.

We meander along the outline of the site, along the ledge which drops towards the elephant trail below that leads 350km north, we pass the midden dump and a whetting stone for hunting spears, and then move down through the lower enclosures that possibly belonged to the king’s brother.

Back at the Pafuri River Camp where I stay for the night, just outside the Pafuri gate, manager Dave tells me about some of the evidence he has seen of the old Muslim trade routes into the interior from the east coast. ‘You look across the Zambezi valley, for instance, and there are strings of Ilala palms where they would have used as their resting points. They aren’t indigenous: they were planted along the way. Slaves would need to be watered here too. I’ve even seen Ilala palms along the highlands in Zimbabwe in Nyange. Go to the Google Earth site and you can see them in the satellite images’ The conversation turns to a conjectural riff: ‘In fact, there are even slave pits which pre-date the Arab presence (after they’d forcibly taken the port at Beira around 800ad). The terracing effects you see in Nyange are Indian – and there are shrines too that look Indian…’ It’s all too overwhelming for one trip, but Limpopo province has a habit of doing this to you. You just have to keep coming back for more!

Mad-a-Gas-Car

Let me pick up part of the story at Mahajanga (Western Madagascar) - just because flying over Tsingy was the highlight of the trip:

The coastline has become an attractive alternative to the European lifestyles of some of its mostly French ex-pats. One of the neighbours has made good on chillis, another has semi-retired on mangoes. Bob a French dental surgeon is an advocate of eternal summer. He farms sunflowers in Toulouse, where he will eventually settle. But for six months of the year, he lives in Africa: Senegal, Congo, and now more recently in Madagascar. Bob (‘Burb’ in French) also happened to be the only available pilot for a day trip to the limestone rock formations called Tsingy.

We meet him on the Mahajanga runway, his cigarette dangling lackadaisically from his lips. (The airport is provincial but services a weekly flight on the national carrier twice a week to the capital.) Bob pulls the last drag from his Feel Good filtered and stubs it on the tarmac, and we’re off. “I always wanted to be a fighter peelot” he says non-chalantly, as we bank and dive along the massive Betsiboka river basin just south of the town, where the French offensive began in 1895. The 40th Battaillon de Chasseur à Pieds marched by way of the Betsiboka River to the capital, taking the city’s defenders by surprise in what was named the Franco-Hova War. Twenty French soldiers died fighting and 6,000 died of malaria before the War ended.
But it was a convincing enough defeat to justify the French Parliament vote to annex Madagascar in 1896. The 103-year-old Merina monarchy ended with the royal family sent into exile in Algeria.

I tighten my belt, for what it is worth. Down below the landscape is familiar. It’s like a National Geo panorama shot of the Amazon. A fisherman in a dugout canoe looks up from his net and waves. We pass over remote fishing villages and then turn inland away from thick green coastal forest into starker, drier land towards a rural landing strip near the Tsingy formation at Namoroka. The GPS marks out the Tsingy range, but cloud cover makes it impossible to see.

Our landing is a zig-zag feat of Bob’s aeronautical ingenuity on a red soil strip dotted with termite hills. We’re walled in by hundreds of children as we come to a stop. The next hour or so involved lots of singing and interaction, as Bob haggled for motorbikes to take us to the rock formations. After an arse bruising odyssey along knee deep muddy tracks, we arrived at the cave-like pathways cut into water eroded limestone. A phenomenon that gets its name form the Malagasy word “mitsingitsigina” (walking on tip toes), the clusters of rocks taper upwards into needle points that are really only appreciated from the air. At its most popular, accessible position, the Bemaraha National Park, there are suspension bridges and walkways that make this one of UNESCO’s world heritage sites worth visiting.

“Let me take you to L’avenue Champs ELysee” Bob says through the comms after take off, and swoops over a mass of rock needles that look like the gothic spires of a million Notre Dame de Paris jammed up together, and arranged in perfectly straight avenues that would be the envy of any city planner. Millenia ago, a Limestone seabed rose from the sea to form a plateau, and was eroded by heavy rains into forbidding needle sharp points. It is now the sanctuary of Lemurs, away from the intrusion of developers and foresters.

Oubaas Smuts

Smuts's House, Irene

If you had to put a finger on a fictional time-line between King Arthur's mentor, Merlin and Leonardo Da Vinci, you'd probably end up in Jan Smut's study. The jumbled books of magic and mystical clutter presided over by the wizard and his owl, Archimedes in the setting of T.H White's book ('The Sword In The Stone'), and the penetrating scrutiny in Da Vinci's studio as he bent over his Vetruvian sketch would possibly have had the same afterglow of Rennaissance Man that lingers in the Smuts study. The only difference would be the lack of clutter here.
The first time I heard about Irene or Jan Smuts was from my grandad. In 1930 he'd just found a locum post as a GP in Bothaville and needed driving skills for his house calls. His instructor was Marie Geldenhuys who 'lived at the farm "Emmarentia"' and whose father had been a member of the Union Parliament with Smuts. The two arrived at the 4000 acre farm called Doornkloof on a sunday afternoon in a model T Ford, when the servants had the day off and a relative of 'Ouma's' served tea. "General Smuts", said grandad, "was out on the farm".
The approach to the Irene nowadays (from the R21 or alternatively 'the road to Pretoria on which the local speed merchants are often to be found in action' he'd said of the early N1) is heralded by a monstrous development of faux Italian mansions before the road narrows and nudges its way into an avenue of Poplars, Planes and old Oaks. Perhaps the idyllic notion of country cottages tucked away into fruit orchards is naive. Thankfully the Smuts Museum house (an Edwardian take on a prefab structure of wood and iron) is preserved as a national monument, along with the surrounding farmstead. It's signposted and easy to find especially if you're in an Irene Market Day traffic queue. Smuts had had bought it for 300 pounds from the British and had it transported in pieces from Middleberg in 1909 to take on its second life as a family home. Its first was as an officer's mess that was commissioned by Lord Kitchener.
Exactly what Smuts was preoccupied with at the time of grandad's visit in about November 1930 is conjecture - his second term of office was only to happen three years later after the gold standard crashed. But it seemed to be common knowledge that when he needed to weigh up some matter of state or other, 'Oubaas' would take his contitutional along a well-worn path through indigenous forest and veld that lead towards a small koppie. By 1930 his book 'Holism and Evolution' had already resonated around the thinking world, and possibly as a result he had been offered the rectorship of St Andrew's University. The 'Oubaas Walk' is signposted about fifty meters from what is now the House Museum. It's a 2.3 km amble through the same forest and ends at a viewpoint where a concrete marker indicates where the great man's ashes were scattered with his wife, Isie's.
"In the large white chair over there" a museum curator points to a section of the lounge in the front of the house. "Heart attack" she tells a visitor who'd asked. The entrance to the house leads through the reception towards Ouma Smuts's enclosed balcony just outside her bedroom. An invitation to this part of the house was an indication that you'd been accepted as part of the family. Scattered across the small sewing table are English Woman's Weekly magazines from 1939 and the early forties, offering advice about how to make the ultimate pie crust, and announcing the advent of internal sanitary pads that do away with straps and pins. A heavy black machine in one corner is marked as a sock machine, which Ouma used as part of her war effort over and above meeting her own domestic needs. A pine box filled with perlemoen shells served as a toy box for the grandchildren.
The adjoining bedroom is filled with family photos, portraits and books in three languages: 'Von Wald und Welt Eichendorf' stands alongside Dickens' 'Bleak House', George Eliot's 'Adam Bede', Elizabeth Aubyn's 'The Silent Shore' and 'Gedigte van A.G. Visser' among others. When Ouma died she left behind historical caches that were packed into cupboards and shelves and pasted into scrupulously tended scrapbooks. "Where are we going to find a place for this, Ouma?" Smuts would ask. The task of archiving her husband's newsclippings and correspondance was hers. She'd set a precedent on this as the Boer war broke in 1900. The Smuts's were living in Pretoria while Oubaas was State Attorney for the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek, and were raided by British troops searching for state documents. They found nothing of importance: it was all hidden in the bamboo curtain rods that hang now in the museum lounge.
I am transfixed by the worn-out saddle on display in one of the spacious rooms which now serve as galleries. (The couple's own, separate bedrooms are left in more or less the state they were found in the forties, as are the kitchen, the guest room - once used for the convalescence of special friends such as Emily Hobhouse and Denys Reitz - the lounge and the study.) Smuts had commandeered a successful guerilla incursion right across the western part of the country and into the Cape on this very saddle. A picture of the small band of Boer desperados hangs above it. Smuts stands as straight as the muzzle of his Mauser rifle in the middle of the group which also included a very young Denys Reitz on his haunches bottom left. Smuts's expression betrays neither apprehension nor over-bearing confidence, but is as fixed as it is in most of the portraits that cover the walls. Reitz, in his war diary 'Commando', refers to General Smuts as having 'personality and influence over men' . These were neccessary qualities that saved his troops from 'going to pieces during the difficult period upon which we were now entering' (near Jamestown). The kind of qualities that secured Churchill a place as Prime Minister during the Second World War. (Even to Churchill the encounter with Smuts seemed to have left a reverential impression: there is a framed letter in the same room, written by Churchill to his wife, Clementine that refers to Smuts's intellect and his re-assuring knowledge of the war in Italy.)
Before entering the study, I park a surreptitious backside on the steel bed that stands in the enclosed corridor outside the sombre bedroom that he would have slept in. During the summer he preferred to sleep out here in the night air. I try to imagine the fragments of memory that would have filtered back to him with the night on his face. Would they have included the desperate trek through the Swartberge? Or the Great War efforts chasing around the elusive German guerilla leader Von Lettow-Vorbeck in German South West Africa? Before turning in he'd apparently clear his throat very loudly to indicate that all lights had to be turned out because he was going to bed - regardless of whether anyone else wanted to retire to bed or not.
The threshold to the study is about all one can cross before the glass barrier prevents further exploration. Bookshelves are arranged methodically from floor to ceiling, although the titles are mostly illegible from this distance. I can only make out the closest ones to the door: Demosthenes' 'Orations' stands near J.B.S. Haldane's 'Heredity and Politics' in one category while Animal Genetics, The Universe Surveyed and a biography of Einstein lean against each other in another. He'd ask his grandchildren to pick out any book from the thousands and read from an arbitrary page, then quote them the title and author. Signs indicate which items in the library were donated by significant world leaders - a solid oak desk, pen and ink sets, chairs. Under the formidable desk though sits a wicker basket which was lined with cotton by Ouma Smuts 'to stop his orange pips from falling through the gaps and littering the floor'. The home was governed by an even more supreme power!
Outside, the market stalls are being disassembled. I was counting on a homemade curry after my museum visit, but have to settle for date rusks. It's a quick sale before they're tossed back into a trailer. The Smuts Cadillac (an enormous ship of state that must weigh tons) glowers remorsefully from under its carport, hinting at a more austere affairs of the past. Since this is a forty something model, its offical outings had not yet arrived when grandad negotiated the Model T along the farm road and back towards Johannesburg with Marie Geldenhuys.
The next time grandad saw Smuts was in Cape Town, from behind the lens of a shaky 8mm movie camera about ten years later while on honeymoon. The footage has that fumbling urgency of the tourist who'd stumbled into a moment of history that he'd realised too late to frame and focus with any clarity at the time. But, amidst the throng gathered beneath the municipal buildings, he captured the ceremonious wave from a balcony clustered with Union Party bunting. In the centre of that grainy black and white frame, while the crowds cheer in silence, you can't help taking that wave personally. We may have been very different people; the country may have become a very different sort of place without Jan Smuts. Whichever way you see it.