‘Literary gent’ hits back
Drew Forrest painfully exposes his colonial cultural cringe when he calls me an “Oxford-trained literary gent” (June 30). Then he shadow-boxes with his own “stripped” and “boiled down” rewrite of what I wrote, rather than arguing with what I actually wrote.
Forrest’s “Mbeki” has “embraced privatisation”, but the real Mbeki has privatised little of any importance. Post-1994 reforms in taxation, water, minerals, competition law and elsewhere have elegantly strengthened national sovereignty. The recent report, A Nation in the Making, confirms that social grant expenditure in excess of R22-billion has reduced both poverty and its rural bias since 2000. Water availability is up 187% in the poorest households; electricity up 578%; formal housing, 42%. That’s why Bolivian radical, President Evo Morales, came to have a look.
Nowhere, contrary to Shawn Hattingh’s fictional “Mbeki” (Letters, June 30), has the real Mbeki ever “declared himself the champion of the bourgeoisie, not the poor”. Did Hattingh sleep through the 2004 election campaign, where the African National Congress platform was a people’s contract to create jobs and reduce poverty?
Forrest fixes upon me a “conspicuous silence on black economic empowerment”, again ignoring what I actually wrote: the South African Communist Party “inadvertently assists the most hedonistic reaches of the black nationalist bourgeoisie, who can easily discredit the SACP’s unreconstructed Marxism of ‘more than 150 years now’.”
And Forrest overlooks the hefty delegation of SACP/Cosatu “Comrades in Business”. Broad-based black economic empowerment is, anyway, a constitutional and economic necessity, hardly an embarrassment.
National Labour and Economic Development Institute director Oupa Bodibe (June 30) xenophobically dispatches Frantz Fanon: South Africa is not Algeria, therefore Fanon is inapplicable, as though Fanon (any more than Marx) was a parochial local figure. Bodibe had better inform Cosatu of his Fanon veto, because Cosatu itself cites Fanon (lazily, breezily) in its own recent discussion document. I repeat: “The SACP document has only three insultingly casual occurrences of the word ‘rural’.”
Does Bodibe deny that?
Finally, Ebrahim Harvey’s letter attacks your editorial independence in publishing my piece, implicitly demanding that you blacklist me. — Ronald Suresh Roberts, Cape Town
Karl Marx (that cunning old dialectician) would applaud Roberts’s astounding ideological acrobatics. Now the nimble Mr Roberts has landed himself to the right of the SACP, Tony Leon and the Economist magazine.
I, like the rest of the masses, need patriotic intellectuals like Roberts. So teach us. Explain, please, why the ANC’s “radical” agenda necessitates massive unemployment, accompanied by the super-enrichment of a national bourgeoisie. And while you are at it, help us to understand why your programme of “radical anti-imperialism” demands that South Africa cooperate enthusiastically with the United States’s global war on terror? — Michael Osborne, Cape Town
The arcane rows of the ideological left are as invigorating these days as a medieval disputation on the Nature of God. Roberts castigates the SACP for “narrowly privileging its antique texts” — that is those of “Eurocentric Marxism” — because the new orthodoxy, arising from the “key advance upon Marx” by Lenin (who is unarguably a bit less antique) is apparently a “radical anti-imperialism that looks beyond [it] to a later anti-colonial Marxism”. This, as Anouar Abdel-Malek cleared up for us all, is “a dynamic movement rather than a fixed body of doctrine”. You could have fooled me. — Paul Whelan, Umhlanga
Drawing the right conclusions
I n response to Sindiwe Magona’s lament about African writers not writing in their mother tongue (“Books: So much potential, so little progress”, June 16), I, an illustrator on the pale end of the scale, would like to offer some hope.
In my experience of working with a well-known publisher in Pietermaritzburg, there seems to be no lack of capacity to produce children’s books in several African languages.
I have illustrated three Zulu “readers” and many textbooks in various languages. Although I understand Zulu, there were translations or at least explanations for each page.
What about putting English translations at the bottom of all African language pages? This will help readers learn a new language and makes the books accessible to all children who speak that language.
I agree with Magona. Ideally, an illustrator for a Xhosa book should understand the language and the cultural background. But the fact is there are many other African languages. No illustrator will speak all these languages, so translations will always be part of the process in this multilingual country.
Intensive research is important before each project, so, for example, you don’t put Zulu beehive huts in Venda. There is plenty of information available at libraries, not to mention the vast resources online, so there’s no excuse for pictures to slip into print that don’t reflect the subject accurately.
Most publishers are only too happy to look at new illustrators’ portfolios and are more than open to giving young artists a chance to get a foot in the door, especially in educational publishing.
The course “Illustrating Books for Children” by Marjorie van Heerden will take place at the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Extra-Mural Studies from July 21 to 22. For more info Tel: (021) 650 2888. — Savyra Meyer, Kalk Bay
Fishing quotas increase when the numbers are up
In “Hake has had its chips” (June 30), Fiona Macleod writes: “As a result of the increase in operators since 1994, total allowable catch rates for hake were permitted to rise from about 135 000 tons a year in 1993 to 166 000 tons by 2001.”
In fact, the reason the catches increased over this period was because both trawl catch rates (mass of fish per hour trawled) and the results from fishery-independent scientific surveys showed increasing trends. It is for the same reason, of more recent decreasing trends in these resource measures, that catches have subsequently been reduced.
There has not been any instance in the past decade that changes made to the hake catch by the minister responsible were not exactly as Marine and Coastal Management’s hake scientific working group had recommended in light of the trends mentioned above. The number of operators played no role at all in these recommendations.
In paying scrupulous attention to such scientific input, unlike the practice in many other countries to their longer term detriment, the government is to be commended. — D S Butterworth, department of mathematics and applied mathematics, University of Cape Town
No bank better than the other
I applaud Kevin Davie’s singling out of Absa’s opaque pricing policies (“Cut-price Venete”, June 16).
I recently moved from Rand Merchant Bank (RMB) to Absa Private Bank, but I’m damned if I can make head or tail of the status of my account.
At RMB I had one account and paid a fixed monthly management fee. Absa levies said fee, then charges a monthly fee for Internet banking and fees for every Internet transaction and many others. Ah, but cheques are free. Who the hell uses cheques these days? Hasn’t Absa heard of electronic transfers?
Indeed it has, and it knows where there is money to be made.
Then there is the account structure. Absa links your bond and current accounts, and “sweeps” money out of the bond account for transactional use.
Internet payments only go through at midnight. Meanwhile, it charges you the monthly payment on the full bond amount, whether you are drawn down to that or not. You are credited with the difference, so it says.
Meanwhile, two different account balances appear on statements. It is quite impossible to know which is the actual balance and which the artifice generated by its complicated accounting procedures.
Lastly, I have a “personal banker”. Nice woman, but she is stretched so thin she cannot help but sound impatient, sometimes desperate, on the phone. I started the process of a certain application two-and-a-half months ago, and don’t yet have an answer.
If I could, I’d move again, but it’s really just swopping a rock for a hard place, isn’t it? — Dr C Henderson
Help the poor
Niren Tolsi’s empathetic article (“No freedom for the poor”, June 30) is brilliant.
It is time someone took up the cause of the marginalised destitute.
Virtually every sentence conjures images of the horror and tribulation endured by these unfortunate people, simply to survive. His take on their miserable lives was long overdue.
Hopefully, it will nudge a bureaucrat or two in the right direction.
Consider now mobilising a group of our affluent citizens, including members of the medical profession, to adopt one such settlement (for starters) and contribute, on an ongoing basis, towards alleviating their misery. It could be a Mail & Guardian initiative. — Aziz Hassim
AK-47s not illegal
In “Behind the shootout” (June 30), Ben Coetzee, a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies, is quoted: “AK-47s are not used by the South African police or the South African National Defence Force, except for familiarisation purposes, and their presence in South Africa is illegal under firearms law.”
This statement is untrue. Nowhere in the Firearms Control Act nor in any of its amendments does it state that a citizen may not licence an AK-47. Nor does it state that the possession or presence of an AK-47 is illegal.
The illegal possession of an unlicensed AK-47 is an offence under South African law, as is the illegal possession of any unlicensed firearm. However, that is most definitely not what Coetzee is quoted as saying. — Chas Lotter, Centurion