Forget the murders, rapes, poverty and disease, here is some happy news: Walt Disney serves only South African wine at its Animal Kingdom Lodge in the US.
Care for more? South Africa’s economy is expected to grow by 3% this year, twice the world average. British television viewers voted Cape Town the world’s best holiday city. Soweto hosts 400 foreign visitors daily.
There is, it turns out, a bottomless well of uplifting stories about South Africa, which its depressed citizens can now access for the cost of an SMS.
Ivan Booth, an entrepreneur and professional optimist, has launched a mobile phone service which delivers packages of positive news in the form of text messages.
”I hope we can uplift the whole mood of the country,” he said.
For the small fee, customers of the country’s largest mobile phone network, Vodacom, will receive a daily message of 160 characters.
”I agree that terrible things happen in South Africa every day,” Booth wrote in yesterday’s the Citizen newspaper.
”But the impression created in the media is that South Africa is the capital of everything evil, shocking and bad,”
”Maybe this is true, but South Africa is also a country of tolerance, reconciliation, natural beauty, diversity, hope, love. SA is the miracle capital of the world.”
To counter recent headlines covering the worsening Aids crisis, murdered tourists and a right-wing bombing spree, the happy news campaign has announced that South African wine will be drunk by Robert De Niro in his next film, Godsent.
It also spread the word that the international data analyst Standard & Poor’s has upgraded its economic outlook for South Africa, and that the UN has praised the country’s crime prevention strategy.
The news service was launched at the same time as a new coffee-table book, South Africa, the Good News, which features uplifting views from 50 contributors.
The education minister, Kader Asmal, endorsed the book and said the impression of a crime-ridden country came from flawed statistics.
However, according to a global attitudes survey published this week, the rainbow nation’s gloom is deepening.
The Washington-based Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press said 79% of South Africans were dissatisfied with the way things were going in the country, 96% considered crime a very big problem, and just over half thought President Thabo Mbeki was a bad influence.
The only silver lining, if it could be called that, was that Nigerians and Kenyans were slightly more miserable. – Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001