Cameron Duodu
LETTER FROM THE NORTH
Scene: the Security Council chamber at the United Nations headquarters in New York. nnnnnnnnnnnnnnn President of the Security Council: “Meeting is called to order.”
Secretary general: “Mr President, I congratulate the council on the resolution that will send a force to East Timor. I would like to thank the government and people of Australia.”
British delegate: “Mr Secretary General, for the record, please don’t forget to inform the council that the British government is making the Second Battalion of the Royal Gurkha Rifles available as part of the Australian contingent.”
Secretary general: “Yes, of course, Mr Ambassador.”
Chinese delegate: “Yes – the British are willing to send British soldiers to East Timor, as long as they are not white. When can we expect the American Haiti contingent?”
American delegate: “Mr President, I move that those remarks be struck from the record. The United States army is the most integrated – well, it’s made up of the seven rainbow colours.”
Russian delegate: “Oh, come off it! If your civil rights legislation allowed it, you would have a Harlem Battalion and a Watts Contingent and a Chicano Division, and we all know who would be sent to trouble spots in the Third World first.”
American delegate: “Where is your Belarussian or Caucasian …”
President (bangs gavel): “Distinguished delegates, I should be most grateful if we could all extend the spirit of friendly co- operation …”
(Loud banging is heard on the door to the chamber.)
Secretary general: “That is an unusual noise.”
(Banging continues and gets louder.)
Secretary general: “I’ve never heard any noise like that in all my years at the secretariat, and I’ve been around here for a long time.” (He dials phone.) “Cripes! The phone is dead.” (He and every delegate dial cellphones.) “The cellphone is also dead!”
American delegate: “Wait … what’s this, for Christ’s sake? I can’t get the White House! I can’t get the White House! Can you believe that? I can’t get the Secret Service! I can’t get the State Department! I can’t get the National Guard!” (Yells in despair.) “I can’t even call home!”
(Banging on the door gets louder. Door is thrown open. Hundreds of men and women, carrying cleaning brushes and pans, Hoovers and dusters, enter the chamber.)
President: “Who are you? Who is your leader?”
Man: “I have no leader. I am a refugee from Congo. My leader was killed under the noses of UN troops.”
Woman: “I too have no leader. I come from Vietnam. My leader was killed by the Americans. General K …”
Secretary general: “But we are not discussing Vietnam, dear lady. Anyway, the UN was never involved in Vietnam.”
Woman: “I now live in America. Why should I be driven from my country when there is a UN?”
Man: “Me, I am from Korea. The UN was there. Only it wasn’t the UN at all!”
Woman: “I am from Cambodia, or do you prefer Kampuchea?”
President: “But what can we do for you? The people of Guatemala – Oops! – I mean Nicaragua …”
Secretary general (helpfully): “Sahrawi Arab Republic?”
President: “No! I mean …”
Man: “It doesn’t matter. We all have the same charge to bring. You, the distinguished members and excellencies of the Security Council, are respectfully charged with crimes against humanity!”
Woman: “We, the overlooked peoples of the world, most of whom are reduced every day to refugee status by the incompetence of politicians like yourselves, and who can only earn a living cleaning your offices, manning your telephone exchanges, driving your cars or guarding your premises, are sick and tired of your bolting the stable doors after world peace has already escaped.”
African delegate: “But I know you from my embassy! You are so eloquent and you never say anything but ‘Yes, Mr Ambassador’ to me? What a waste of precious time.”
Woman (in a mocking tone): “You can’t flirt with me and dehumanise me, your most honoured distinguished excellency! Today everything has changed. All the cleaning and technical staff at every hotel, condominium, embassy, government office and business suite are on strike. We demand a Security Council that will really look after the weak peoples of the world.”
Man:”We whom you see here are merely the storm troopers of a new, worldwide organisation that will lock all politicians out of home and office until true world peace is delivered. We have the TV networks in our pockets already.”
Woman: “Yes, you all leave us your most important keys, because you think we are dumb.”
(Enter TV crews.)
Woman: “Citizens of the world, I am addressing you from the chamber of the UNSecurity Council. I am addressing the council on your behalf. These people should have sent troops to protect the women and children, the old and the infirm, the strong and the weak of East Timor, before they held the referendum there on August 30. They failed to act in time, as they have failed to do in many other parts of the world. Only now that thousands upon thousands of people like me and you in East Timor have perished, are they sending troops. To do what? We demand a new Security Council without the veto!” (Loud cheers.) “We demand that the dues of member states of the UN should be paid by the International Monetary Fund on their behalf because the IMF has already got the funds!” (Loud cheers.) “We demand that all the armies of the world should regard the UN as their first master before their home governments.”
(Prolonged loud cheers.)
Secretary general: “These are brilliant reforms! I think I’ll join these people.”
(He rises from his chair and is carried shoulder high by men and women. Uproar. Curtain.)
@The erosion of Parliament’s powers
Howard Barrell
OVER A BARREL
We have a window of opportunity about three years wide to correct a number of shortcomings in the way we rule ourselves. If we don’t do so, we may place at risk a number of our most valuable achievements since we began normalising our politics in 1990.
Parliament’s ability to oversee the government and to look after our interests is being eroded. These weaknesses result from the way the institution is being run and how we elect our MPs.
It is not generally known that we have now to draw up a new law governing the election of MPs. The applicability of the old law ended with the general election of a few months ago. In order to avoid in 2004 the kind of last-minute rush that almost placed the election in jeopardy, we need to pass a new law and have it up and running within the next three years. This gives us an opportunity to bring about a number of electoral and other changes designed to deepen MPs’ sense of responsibility to us as voters, and improve their ability to pass appropriate laws and hold the government to account on our behalf.
Parliament, like most other state institutions, is experiencing a budget squeeze. This may seem just. Basically state expenditure – that is to say the ministry and department of finance – decides Parliament’s budget. And if state expenditure is cutting back on fat elsewhere, why shouldn’t it oblige those in the saloon car of the gravy train also to tighten their belts?
It may be that simple. But I don’t think so.
The part of Parliament that really counts is its system of 40-odd committees. They are the engine room of the legislative branch of our government. In general, there is at least one committee of MPs for each Cabinet portfolio. Members of each committee are supposed to develop expertise in their portfolio – say, trade and industry. Their main roles are to take on the devil in the detail, to propose or amend legislation, and to take on the government, the executive arm, if it appears guilty of any shortcomings or abuse.
The performance of these committees varied widely in the last Parliament, according to an excellent, accessible, short book just published by the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa), The First 5 Years: A Review of South Africa’s Democratic Parliament, edited by Richard Calland, head of Idasa’s political information and monitoring service. Where committees functioned well, this was often because of strong chairs – such as Johnny de Lange on the justice committee or Gwen Mahlangu on the environment committee.
If they were lucky, these chairs also had a handful of hardworking individual MPs on their otherwise sedentary committees. But – and this is the point – these committees are hopelessly underresourced. Most have no, or almost no, research or administrative capacity.
To allow this underresourcing is to endanger one of the cornerstones of our Constitution: the separation of powers between the executive, legislative and judicial arms of the government and the adequate resourcing of each so that it can exercise oversight over, and balance, the powers of the other two.
Calland writes: “Each committee should have its own legal adviser, communications clerk, administrator and at least one researcher on the portfolio’s subject area.” He is right. We cannot and should not expect the self-sacrifice of a few individuals to sustain these important institutions indefinitely.
For the committees to get the necessary resources, Parliament may need to assume a larger and more decisive role in deciding its own budget. If this budget is not increased substantially, Parliament’s rules committee, the speaker and parliamentary managers may need to reprioritise radically how the money is spent. There is, for example, little reason why there should be, at times, nearly one waiter per MP in some of Parliament’s restaurants.
The rules committee and the speaker may also need to look into the level of dissatisfaction that has developed this year among some able parliamentary support staff. Their grievances include high-handed employment practices and some odd appointments. For example, seven middle managers involved in producing, among others, Hansard, the record of parliamentary proceedings, were summarily demoted earlier this year. Institutional memory – even from the apartheid past – is valuable in an institution as complex as Parliament.
I cannot, however, claim to be entirely heartbroken at Parliament’s eccentricities on appointments. For, following one of its stranger staffing decisions, we at the Mail & Guardian have recently obtained the services of Barry Streek, doyen of parliamentary journalists.
Streek was, until recently, Parliament’s media liaison officer. But his contract was not renewed. This can only be because some commissar decided the post should be filled by someone who was not, by an accident of birth, pale. I presume to say this because Streek knows Parliament, its secrets and its past shames better than anyone else; journalists of all shades and persuasions found his help invaluable; and he was as congenial and good at his job as his waistcoats and braces are unfailingly loud. As such, he played an extraordinarily valuable role in ensuring that what happened in the people’s Parliament reached the people. His successor will not easily fill his shoes: it can take some of us a month before we are reasonably sure of being able to find our offices in the parliamentary maze each morning.
But even more important perhaps than finding the way around Parliament is how MPs make it to Parliament. Our current system of proportional representation allows an MP very little independence from his or her party. The party bosses rule. Expulsion from the party means the loss of a member’s seat and means of livelihood. This, too, does not make for independence of mind or oversight of Cabinet members who are, invariably, also senior figures in the ruling party.
Across a broad political spectrum, there is growing political support for the injection of some constituency element into the election of MPs – which would make MPs directly and primarily accountable to a clearly identifiable section of voters. This would enhance MPs’ sense of independence from senior figures in the parties and can only promote independent oversight of the government.
It is a change that is particularly necessary where one party dominates Parliament as thoroughly as the African National Congress currently does. Opposition cannot be allowed to come only from the ranks of opposition parties. Our new electoral law must see to that.
@Africa’s otherness lingers deeply in European minds
Bryan Rostron
A SECOND LOOK
Constantly it strikes me, returning home after nearly three decades, how many white South Africans still don’t really want to live in Africa: they just want to live in a sunny suburb.
The otherness of Africa lingers deeply in the European mind – Africa, as for early colonists and explorers, remains remote: out there, unknown, menacing.
It can be tamed by virtual reality fantasies like the Lost City or Ratanga Junction, or safely savoured by the pool in the white hunter fictions of Wilbur Smith.There is also a pride in displaying glossy picture books of game parks on the coffee table, conferring a frontier ruggedness to essentially suburban aspirations. But like the first maps of the Cape colony, beyond the detailed configurations of the European settlement, Africa frequently remains an ominous blank.
This curious European ambivalence has a long history. Shortly before returning to South Africa, I spent some months at the British Library with early maps and old leather-bound volumes, exploring through unknown Africa. It was a strange, exhilarating adventure, penetrating into uncharted territory, where – as the saying goes – no white man had trod before.
>From yellowing pages emanated a potent mixture of curiosity and dread, attraction and repulsion, combining to create a country that was little more than a figment of the author’s imagination. Somehow, it all seemed eerily familiar.
Europeans, then as now, often erected a complex edifice of attitudes on a base of crude misunderstanding. One such initial error, made before Jan van Riebeeck’s time, can even be traced into the mainstream of Western philosophical thought.
In 1615 Edward Terry, a chaplain, passed through on his way to the East. “The sun shines not upon a people more barbarous,” he wrote of the people then called Hottentots, describing them as “beasts in the skins of man, rather than man in the skins of beasts; as may appear by their ignorance, habit, language, diet; with other things, which make them most brutish”.
In his book A Voyage to East India Terry gave a description of “Coree”, more commonly known now as Xhore, who had been kidnapped two years before and taken to England to live with the governor of the East India Company, Sir Thomas Smythe. Terry was baffled why “Coree” did not wish to remain in this grand household, and describes how the poor man would lie on the floor and cry, “Coree go home, Souldania go, home go.” The following year Xhore was allowed to return to Table Bay, then known as “Souldania”.
Though questioned about rumours of gold and precious stones, and the fabled kingdom of Ophir, the unwilling guest, “did not give away one scrap of information”. But when asked about his conception of religion, “Coree” is recorded as lifting up his hands and replying, “England God, great God, Souldania no God.” Terry concluded solemnly, and totally erroneously, that these “brutes” acknowledged no God.
Thirty-five years later the English philosopher John Locke picked this up in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Lockecited this “fact” as proof of his crucial contention: that ideas, such as the notion of God, were not innate.
However, the Khoisan did have a conception of deity. This error does not demolish Locke’s theory; but on such fundamental misinformation, in South Africa, did Europeans construct elaborate doctrines to justify their behaviour; we still live in the shadow of such illusions.
Many whites, it seems to me, still shelter behind an invisible frontier. This mental barrier creates a gaping chasm between a logic applied to their own lives and the legion of absurd myths uncritically circulated about life beyond the suburban stockade. It’s as if, like strangers in a strange land, they will credit almost any outlandish traveller’s tale.
But then there has always been a ready audience for tall tales out of Africa. Early European attitudes to Africa are mirrored in the account of a young Yorkshireman, who accompanied Charles I’s ambassador to the king of Persia.
On his return in 1631, Thomas Herbert wrote his popular Some Years’ Travels into Africa and Asia the Great, in which he described the voyage down the west coast of Africa, past mythical kingdoms, where even men’s shadows took on peculiar shapes. Herbert reported that the Cape of Good Hope was inhabited by “incestuous troglodytes”, who “eat men alive or dead”.
Indeed, such was his revulsion from these “monsters to all civilised eyes” that he had to resort to Latin for a summation of their character: “Inhumani, impuri … falsissimi, fraudulentissimi, cupidissimi, perfidissimi.”
Perhaps it is not altogether amazing that the imaginations of early voyagers should be so overheated. It was not long since it was widely believed that Europeans proceeding beyond the equator might simply liquify or turn black.
The Atlantic was called “the green sea of darkness”. With uncertain winds, broiling heat and violent monsoons, the voyage to round Africa held many terrors. Maps from that period reveal considerable ambivalence: a potpourri of allure, mystery, anxiety and dread. For Europeans, until the 1870s, most of Africa was considered res nullius, a no man’s land.
On to this seemingly blank screen were projected many subconscious fantasies. Cartographers filled in these blanks with myths, monsters and chimeras. Sebastian Munster, for example, in a famous map of 1545, shows the “monoculi”, or one-eyed man.
In 1626 the first map of Africa by an Englishman, John Speed, depicts “anthropophagi”, cannibals who eat their own infants to avoid the bother of raising them. Speed fills the continent with imaginary mountains, rivers and cities, and on the back gives a description of the mythical Christian kingdom of Prester John.
In 1790, Scottish traveller James Bruce produced a map to prove that the “Land of Ophir” (from whence king Solomon, according to the Old Testament, shipped his fabulous riches), was roughly aligned to modern-day Zimbabwe.
The misnamed “Empire of Monomotapa”, also in the region of today’s Zimbabwe and reputed to contain awesome gold mines, was frequently shown as occupying much of Central and Southern Africa. Maps pinpoint the fabled but mythical cities of Davagul and Vigiti Magna.
It wasn’t long, of course, before explorers went in search of these fanciful civilisations. Van Riebeeck sent expeditions to reach the celebrated empire of Monomotapa. He even calculated the city of Davagul was 1 300km from his fort in Table Bay. But the further these early settlers explored, the less they found their dreams.
The conflicting impulses of those first years of settlement still continue to exert a pull on the immigrant mind: on the one hand, a sense of perching, temporarily, at a way station; on the other, attracted inland, lured by greed. This colonial heritage persists, an unresolved paradox.
In such an uncertain no man’s land, many whites have lost their bearings. Today, there is so much they simply cannot comprehend; indeed, how many can now pronounce the names of Cabinet ministers? In such a void, urban legends flourish. I am always astonished at the bizarre fables well-educated white South Africans will swallow about their fellow countrymen.
Rumour, of course, flourishes in times of uncertainty. I used to collect such apocryphal tales and included one in a play, Dizzy Heights, produced in Johannesburg four years ago, where a paranoid white spymaster allows the terrors of his subconscious to surface as “fact”.
A woman takes her son to a shopping mall. He wants to go to the toilet, and goes in alone. Mum waits and eventually asks a security guard to check. He finds the boy in a pool of blood, penis severed.
Later, I found this very myth in a collection of local urban legends, The Rabbit in the Thorn Tree, by Arthur Goldstuck. The story’s manifold appearances in many countries over many years is also recorded in Professor Jan Harold Brunvand’s The Chocking Doberman. Brunvand sums up the latent message as a warning that “other” people (often black) are out to get “our” children (usually blonde). The aim of such myths is to caution against a feared minority. South Africa’s unique variation is to transform this into a defamation of the majority.
Recently, however, a former colleague of my wife phoned from South Africa, saying she had just visited the son of a friend in hospital. You can guess the rest. Truth or paranoia? On the volatile, imaginary South African frontier, it has always been hard to disentangle fact from fear.
“Reader,” cautioned Terry in 1655, “there never was an age more guilty than this present, of the great expense, and waste of paper; whose fair innocence hath been slubber’d by errors, heresies, blasphemies, and what not.”
Figments of the imagination, from Van Riebeeck onward, have routinely determined white perception. It is in the depiction of the original inhabitants of the Cape, the Khoisan, that we see the most potent fantasies. Some Europeans, like Terry, depicted them as hardly human, stinking beasts with no religion; others saw them as unspoilt “noble savages”.
Each writer, in effect, projected his own hopes and fears on to an alien culture. They travelled a long way in order to have their preconceptions confirmed. White South Africans don’t have to travel so far today; many simply stay at home to have their suburban prejudices reaffirmed.
Lockeargued that ideas are not innate, but maintained that the human mind was also capable of producing ideas that do not correspond to anything in the world. He gave the example of a unicorn. Yet in the early 19th century several European explorers in South Africa, including reputable naturalists, hoped to bag one.
In 1801, the meticulously rational British civil servant Sir John Barrow, venturing into the interior, wrote: “We still continue our search in the kloofs of the mountains in the hope of meeting with the figure of the unicorn.”
On discovering a San painting of an animal with a single horn, the earnest Barrow offered a huge reward for the capture of this mythological beast. “The colonists,” asserts Barrow, “take it for granted that such an animal exists beyond the limits of the colony.”
That precarious frontier, a constantly shifting line between differing ideas of order and chaos, fluctuated for nearly 350 years. Living abroad, I often wondered if that frontier had really, finally, vanished. Sadly, I believe, this line still sears its way across the mental map of suburban South Africa.
Verily, verily, we have enough problems in reality: poverty, inequality, violence. However, the privileged few often seem to feel uniquely, self-pityingly, vulnerable – as if they were the true victims. This is partly because they are still pitifully unable to acknowledge that it is others who continue to endure, by far, the worst afflictions. It is also a colossal failure of imagination; such minds are already possessed by hostile shadows.
Today, quarantined in their fortified sanctuaries, many white South Africans continue to believe in fanciful chimeras: out there, still, in some mythical Africa, unicorns and man-eating troglodytes continue to roam the uncharted savannahs of fearful colonial imaginations.