* Some seek fame, others have fame etcetera. Take Durban. It spends millions promoting itself. Mainly it talks about the sand and the sea and the Gunston 500 surfing contest. This week it was dazzled to find itself in its own right an international media event it hadn’t even bargained for.
Television crews flew in with cameras and boxes of equipment, and foreign correspondents lazed around the beachfront bars. Smart-alec taxi-drivers turned down ordinary fares because they said scornfully that, sorry, they were working for the press. Magnus Malan had come to town.
It was a whacko case for the press. Not one former general, but five were in the dock, including the long- time former Minister of Defence, Malan, not to mention a former vice-admiral and a slew of other officers, the lowest-ranking a major.
When you guys do it, said one visitor admiringly, you do it big. It’s better than South America.
Just a few years ago these men were used to luxury limos with chauffeurs, little flags on the bonnet and sometimes outriders and sirens.
This week they had to make do with security police swarming in the court foyer and metal detectors to check nobody could get a gun into court to shoot them. Or anybody else.
* Many people in KwaZulu-Natal probably didn’t mind too much this week that they couldn’t vote but they were sore they didn’t get a day off work.
Bosses warned workers to ignore Government Gazette No. 16777 of October 20 1995, which made November 1 a paid public holiday because of the community elections. Notices went up saying: “Please note, November 1 will be a normal working day for all employees.” Several thousands skipped work nonetheless, to march through the city to protest at the vote delay.
* The BBC was up early on voting day. A correspondent in Orlando, Soweto, said a polling station there opened late and “there seem to be more joggers around than voters”.
* Latest contender in the bid to host the 2004 Olympics is China. Well, why not. Some of its athletes have been doing very well in international competitions, some of them on drugs.
China didn’t say this week which of its cities it will propose for the Games, except it is unlikely to be Beijing, the capital.
A Dutch news agent that commented on the bid ran through a short list of possible alternatives. He concluded, at this stage, Cape Town, South Africa, is the leading contender. It probably reflects a widely held view overseas. The local Bid Committee must be gratified, but South Africans generally seem lukewarm.
* American law took a beating with the OJ Simpson case but Islamic law, the Shuri’ah, isn’t coming off so well in the case of a young Filipino girl who killed her employer in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, where they say you can shop till you drop. The girl says she killed her elderly employer in revulsion because he raped her.
Sarah Balagan, a Filipino immigrant from an impoverished family, very alone in a strange land, was inveigled into working in Dubai where she was a latter- day vassal in a wealthy Arab household.
She was importuned, she claimed, by her elderly employer who raped her.She killed him in revenge, she said. She was sentenced to death.
A second court upheld her appeal against the sentence – – apparently the dead man’s family decided not to press for death. The court sentenced her to a year in jail instead, but also to an additional punishment of 100 lashes “under Shuri’ah law”.
Scant comfort for Sarah. Even 100 “ceremonial” lashes sound horrific.
There is also a question of “blood money” to be paid to the dead man’s family. People in the Philippines have collected the equivalent of about R150 000 as compensation. It is not clear if this will be enough to set the young girl free.
* The cliffhanger vote over Canada’s putative volkstaat, Quebec, ended with fisticuffs and about one- and-a-bit percentage points between the Fors and Againsts. Disappointed voters who wanted the province, one of Canada’s 10, to become independent, rioted in Montreal, burnt the Canadian maple-leaf flag and fought the riot police. The provincial premier resigned.
In Quebec, there was a rush for Canadian passports before the vote. Quite a few people left the province altogether.
But economists didn’t think a political divorce would work; Quebec would quickly be back in bed with Canada economically, whatever the voters said. After the vote, the separatists said they would try again.
* France is singularly unpopular because of its nuclear tests on an atoll in the South Pacific. These are underground but there is speculation that if there are many more the atoll might split right open “like an egg”.
The third explosion this week, in spite of protests internationally, has made many people in South Pacific countries deeply angry. They accuse President Jacques Chirac of “sublime arrogance”. An Australian politician said if France really thought it could produce a “safe” nuclear device the country should test it, at peak hour, under the Eiffel Tower.
Early in the week, John Major, the British prime minister, got it in the neck from a New Zealand member of parliament for not criticising the French tests.
Later in the week it became obvious why. Major and Chirac agreed their countries should collaborate on a nuclear programme. The British police broke up a demonstration at Chequers, and the South Pacific countries remained generally disgusted.
* Prostitution may be the oldest profession, but a recent survey by NGOs in Africa indicate it also has some of the youngest employees. A social worker based in Kenya even said Africa was becoming a paedophiles’ paradise, displacing some Eastern countries. She said there were little girls as young as six working the streets in Nairobi. Girl prostitutes of eight and 12 were common.
One girl told a pitiful tale. A social worker asked her what she would do with her money. Buy new shoes and a dress, the child said.
Why, she was asked. So she would look nice for men.
She was asked if she had ever been to school.No, but she could write her name. She did so, slowly.
Did she want a job? Not particularly. Did she want to go to school? Not particularly. What did she want? She said it would be nice to be married, to have a husband “to look after me”.
Social workers blame extreme poverty and the breakdown of the extended family system for the increase in prostitution. The social workers also felt that many girls considered prostitution better than just begging.
The girls have heard about Aids. A young girl in Nairobi said she insisted that men she went with wore condoms.
But girls in Luanda, in Angola, weren’t so particular, provided men paid more if they weren’t protected. “Otherwise we get very hungry,” one girl said. “You know.”
* There is another side to the coin. The latest figures available in Zimbabwe indicate that 100 000 people will die of Aids there within the next 18 months.
Radio Netherlands reported there are already mortuaries in the country where bodies “are lying three in a tray” because of the Aids epidemic.