What a drag it is getting old

The Extra Ordinary Life of Frank Derrick, Age 81 by J.B. Morrison
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
What a drag it is getting old.

Actually that is one of the few songs that I don't recall being mentioned in the book, but it sums up the theme pretty well. Frank Derrick is an 81-year-old pensioner who is harassed by people trying to sell him stair lifts, and ends up in hospital after being run over by a milk float. When he is released from hospital with an arm and a foot in plaster his daughter in America thinks he needs home care, and so he has a nurse visit him once a week to see that he is OK and help with the housework.

He looks forward to the visits and so enjoys the company that he doesn't want the visits to end, and spends most of his time planning how to raise money to continue the care.

When I found the book on the library shelf I nearly put it back. I'd read other similar books, like The 100-year-old Man who Climbed out of the Window and Disappeared and I Didn't Know You Cared. But then I thought, the bloke in the story is 81, I'm 81. What better time to read it than now, before I turn 82? I'm not lonely and living on my own like the bloke in the book: I have a wife and two sons and a daughter-in-law (who happens to be a caregiver, like the other main character in the book). But yes, I have known people like that. And it seemed appropriate to finish reading it on the 70th anniversary of the day I started high school, at a brand new school -- new not just to me, but to everyone there. So the school has been going for 70 years now, a good pensionable age.

So I've read it, and quite enjoyed it, but I don't think I'd want to read it again, as I have re-read I didn't know you cared. But it's worth one read at least.



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Total Onslaught: Apartheid's Dirty Tricks Exposed

Totale Aanslag: Apartheid se Vuil Truuks Onthul by De Wet Potgieter
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The history of the Total Onslaught and the dirty tricks of the apartheid regime, told by a journalist who doesn't bother to hide his sympathy for them.

That was all I wrote as a "review" on GoodReads, and it wasn't really a review, just a copy of a note I had made in a list of books I had read. 

I read it 14 years ago, and couldn't really write a review now unless I read it again. 

My reason for posting this now is that an online friend mentioned on Facebook that he was reading it, so I mentioned that I had read it and found a kind of dissonance between what was said in the book and the way in which it was said. 

On the surface, a catalogue of evil deeds of the apartheid security forces (Shock! Shock! Horror! Horror!), but a subtext of salaciousness (Nudge! Nudge! Wink! Wink!), like a British tabloid gleefully reporting the vicar's adultery. And  the author describes with relish how the perpetrators of some or other outrage would gather in some bar to celebrate it and congratulate each other.

It occurred to me, as I said that 14 years later, that this might, just possibly, have been very subtle satire that my mind was too coarse to grasp, but on finding the book on my shelf and opening it, I thought that unlikely. 

It also made me a bit curious about the English translation. In the Afrikaans the subtext is there, plain to see. But the nuance could be lost if it is translated into English, because the idioms do not translate well, or do not have the same force when translated.

But what confirmed my initial evaluation was a caption to a photograph. 

The photo showed a worried-looking President de Klerk, and the caption read:

F.W. de Klerk, 'n duidelik bekommerde man in die dae toe hy Suid-Afrika uit die era van Totale Aanslag gelei het na Totale Oorgawe

I don't know what the official English translation says, but my reading of that is, F.W. de Klerk, a clearly worried man in the days when he led South Africa from the era of Total Onslaught to Total Surrender. 

"Totale Oorgawe" can be translated as "Total Surrender" or "Total Capitulation", and it is the kind of phrase that only a diehard bittereinder supporter of the apartheid regime would use, and it, as well as the more nuanced idioms, clearly shows where the author's sympathies lie. Anyone else would say something like "a negotiated settlement".

Do "left" and "right" in politics or economics mean anything?

For a long time now I have found it difficult to understand what people are talking about when they use terms like "left" or "right" to describe people's political positions. It seems that they can be used to mean opposite things, and none more so than in the following article, which I came across on the web yesterday -- The concerted, cowardly #MeToo attack on Harvard professor John Comaroff - World Socialist Web Site:

John Comaroff, professor of African and African American studies and of anthropology at Harvard University, has become the target of what has all the earmarks of another filthy #MeToo witch-hunt. In August 2020 Comaroff was placed on paid administrative leave in the midst of an investigation into several allegations of "unwanted touching", "verbal sexual harassment" and "professional retaliation."

Please read the whole article, and tell me which of the parties in the dispute described there are, in your opinion, the "left" and which are the "right".

From my reading of it, the source of the article is "left", Prof John Comaroff is "centre left", and his attackers are "far right" and exponents of the "cancel culture". But what do you think?

I've blogged about the left/right confusion before (see this article on the "theological left", for example), but the Comaroff one takes the cake.

The way I discovered this article, and the many other issues it raised, is quite complicated, and shows that the world is a lot weirder than I thought it was.

It began when a friend sent me an article claiming that the QAnon conspiracy theory in the US was started by a South African cartoonist and was based on African witchcraft. That sounded like a metaconspiracy theory on its own. It was a topic my friend knew I was interested in, and I've written a couple of children's novels and an academic journal article in which witchcraft is one of the themes. One of the things that interested me was the fact that there was almost no overlap between the bibliography in my article -- Christian Responses to Witchcraft and Sorcery -- and the QAnon one.

I therefore did a web search for articles by the anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff, using the search terms "Comaroff witch devil", and the list produced on my desktop computer, which uses the DuckDuckGo search engine, contained not a single academic journal article, but only news items about some allegations against Prof John Comaroff. 

Later, working on my laptop, which uses Google as the default search engine, I wanted to read more about the controversy, and, using exactly the same search terms, not a single news article turned up, but only a list of academic journal articles. 

Intrigued by this, I tried other search terms to find some articles on the controversy, but with no result. As far as Google was concerned, the controversy did not exist. 

That is enough to make one suspect a conspiracy. 

It's a conspiracy-theory generator par excellence.

Why was Google apparently suppressing the story of that controversy? Did they think it was fake news? But reading the article, it doesn't look like fake news. And there are apparently several other articles on the same topic which I haven't read yet. And if it were fake news, surely a web search would turn up something from Harvard University denying that such a controversy had ever taken place?

And then to add to it all, someone I've known online for several years, a fellow blogger who, like me, often blogs about the Inklings literary group and their writings, announced that she has a written a paper on Christian Nationalism and the occult -- another overlapping topic -- which appears in my children's books, and is of interest to me, since Christian Nationalism was the ideology behind the apartheid policy of the South African government between 1948 and 1994, which we thought was thoroughly discredited 30 years ago, but now seems to be making a comeback in some circles in the USA and Russia (try a web search on "Dugin"). 

It looks as though I have a lot more reading to do to catch up, but sifting out the fake news and the conspiracy theories and the metaconspiracy theories is not going to make it easier, especially in a world that, like Nineveh in Jonah's time, contains millions of people who don't know their left from their right.

The Young Unicorns

The Young Unicorns by Madeleine L'Engle
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've just finished reading this book for the third time, and was surprised to find that I could remember very little of the plot, the characters, or what happened in the story, so it was almost like reading it for the first time. That's one reason that I haven't written a review on GoodReads before now -- though I remembered reading it, I could not remember enough of the story to write a review. I find that with all the books by Madeleine l'Engle that I have read, though I have not read many, because they do not seem very popular in South Africa, and so they are very hard to find.

The story is set in Manhattan in New York City, where three children pass a junk shop on their way home from school. They pick up an old lamp, and one of them rubs it when challenged to do so, and a genie appears. The girl who rubs it, Emily Gregory, is blind, and makes a wish, that she would be able to see again, at which point a stranger interrupts and says that he wouldn't trust a twentieth-century genie.

It turns out that Emily Gregory, now aged 12, was blinded in a robbery attempt a couple of years earlier. The family of the other children with her, Suzy and Rob Austin, rent part of Emily's father's house, so they live together. The Austin children have an older sister Vicky, and there is an older boy Josiah "Dave" Davidson, who helps Emily with her homework by reading to her from her school books.

"Dave" Davidson's father, whom he doesn't get on with, works as a handyman/maintenance officer at the nearby Episcopalian Cathedral of St John the Divine, and the cathedral itself is almost a character in the story, and some of its clergy are also characters in the story. And that was my main reason for reading it this time.

I've been writing a children's novel which features St Mary's Anglican Cathedral in Johannesburg and its clergy, and so I re-read The Young Unicorns to see how Madeleine l'Engle handled such things. I did that partly because in the secular West, where most readers of English children's books live, religion, and especially Christian religion, seems to be a touchy topic, at least in reviews that I've read. 

Plenty of popular adult (as opposed to "Adult") novelists, like Susan Howatch and Ernest Raymond, heirs of Anthony Trollope, have written books full of vicars, canons, prebendaries, deans, bishops, cathedrals and such things, but mentioning them in children's books seems, to judge from some reviews I have read, to be a semi-taboo topic. Synagogues, mosques, gompas and covens are fine. But cathedrals? A bit iffy.

And, having said that, I recalled that the previous time I had read the book, in 1998, I was also writing a children's novel that mentioned St Mary's Cathedral, though more in passing than in the current case. 

On my third reading I was struck by the richness of the description of the settings, which Madeleine l'Engle seemed to do particularly well. The McGuffin is a new device for laser surgery, called a microray, which the father of the Austin children had moved to New York to work on in collaboration with a surgeon, Dr Hyde, with whom, however, he does not get on. This gives a slightly science fictional atmosphere to the story, though it cannot really be classified as science fiction. I had added it to my fantasy shelf on GoodReads, but it isn't really fantasy, in the literary sense, either. It is fantasy in the sense that some of the characters have fantasies about what they will do and achieve with the microray device, but that's about all.

There are hints that the backstory of Dave and Emily, and possibly of the Austin family, are told in other books, though I have never seen or read them, but I enjoyed this one enough to want to read them if I can ever find a copy, and I keep looking in second-hand bookshops for other books by Madeleine l'Engle.

One thing that twenty-first-century readers may find not quite to their taste is that Madeleine l'Engle doesn't adhere very closely to the "show don't tell" rule of fiction. There is quite a lot of telling in the story, especially of the main plot and the denouement.

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A Real-Life Spy Story

The ANC Spy Bible: Surviving across enemy lines by Moe Shaik
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A real-life spy story that is as gripping and exciting as any novel.

But I very nearly didn't read this book. I picked it off the library shelf and when I saw the name of the author, and immediately a phrase sprang to mind: "a generally corrupt relationship". 

Those were the words of a High Court judge speaking about Schabir Shaik, brother of the author, and his relationship with a prominent politician, Jacob Zuma. I very nearly put the book back on the shelf. I didn't want to read about sleaze, and nothing more could be more sleazy than the dealings of corrupt politicians and businessmen. 

And then I thought, aren't you being prejudiced? Take it out and read it, and if it's too sleazy, you can change it for another book in a fortnight's time -- you're not buying the book. So I took it out, and I'm glad I did. It is well worth reading and raises a lot of interesting and important questions.

Moe Shaik was a member of the African National Congress (ANC) underground in South Africa in the 1980s when the movement was banned and being a member was illegal. He was arrested and detained for questioning about the whereabouts of an ANC courier, and after being tortured by the Special Branch was eventually released, but not before making contact with someone in the Special Branch (SB) who was sympathetic, and after his release began feeding him with information from within the SB.

This resulted in Moe Shaik starting a special intelligence unit within the ANC. Just as the Special Branch tried to collect information on the ANC, so the ANC began collecting information on the SB -- what they knew and what they didn't know, and some of their sources of informatio0n within the ANC. It was dangerous work, and there was always the risk of being caught.

When the ANC was unbanned in 1990, and political prisoners were released, people like Moe Shaik had to continue underground for a while. The National Party politicians might be willing to negotiate with the ANC, but there were many in the security services who continued to fight the war, perhaps in the hope that they could change the minds of their political bosses.

As the new democratic South Africa was born, Moe Shaik and his colleagues were faced with a different question: what was the role of an intelligence and security service in a democratic society?

This is one man's view of events, one man's memoir, but it is just such personal views that make history come alive and be more than a boring chronicle that reads like minutes of a meeting. It gives valuable insights into the history of the period, and if you like spy fiction, you'll probably also enjoy it.

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Early Days of the Internet in South |Africa

There's an interesting article here on How the Internet got started in South Africa. 

 I found it particularly interesting as I played a small part in that history.

On 24 October 1988 I attended a Uninet conference. Uninet was the nascent Universities Network of South Africa, much of the work on the founding of which is described in the article linked above. 

The Uninet Conference was held at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in Pretoria. The plan was apparently to set up a high-speed link between the universities, but it seemed to me that it was a bit like trying to build a freeway without access roads, because the networks within the universities were not sufficiently developed to enable us to gain access to the existing networks, such as SAPONET and the rudimentary Uninet.

I was there representing the Editorial Department of the University of South Africa, and we were concerned to gain access to library and terminology resources as well as being able to consult with colleagues in the field on questions of language and usage. 

But I also participated in amateur BBS (Bulletin Board System) networks of which the main one in South Africa at the time was Fidonet. It was run by a system of private enterprise socialism in which sysops (system operators) of individual BBSs shared their resources with anyone who cared to phone them, and shared the expense of passing messages around the country and around the world over dial-up landlines. All you needed to start a BBS was a computer with the right software (mostly freeware), a modem, and a phone line. People could call in, leave and read messages, and participate in discussion forums, called "conferences", some of which were local to a particular BBS, some national, and some international. Through the ASIAN_LINK conference some of us had first-hand accounts of the Tianamnen Square demos and massacre in China. 

One of the things discussed at the Uninet conference was the difficulty of international communication, including such things as JANet (the Joint Academic Network in the UK) using a different form of domain name addressing to everyone else. Instead of university.ac.uk they used uk.ac.university. But that was a purely theoretical problem if we could not actually connect. 

On the second day of the conference I managed to talk to some interesting people, like Mike van der Linde, of Pretoria University, and Neville Spicer of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, and Francois Jacot-Guillarmod of Rhodes University. I suggested that they set up a Fidonet-Uninet gateway, and route international traffic through it. Francois Jacot-Guillarmod took the bait, and within a couple of months had set up a gateway at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, which connected to Randy Bush's BBS in Oregon, USA. He ran the Fidonet Echogate for Africa there.

Fidonet and its members benefited in that Rhodes University paid the phone bills for all the international traffic, both Uninet and Fidonet, that went through their line over a 9600 bps modem. That carried the whole of South Africa's international internet traffic for the next few years.

The Secret Seven revisited

Good Old Secret Seven by Enid Blyton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Jack is given a telescope, which he shares with the Secret Seven, who notice strange doings at an old castle up on a hill.

Load shedding at 6:00 am, so I read Good Old Secret Seven, and finished it in an hour and a half before load shedding ended. I'd read a few of the Secret Seven books, but even as a child had not been very impressed with them. My main memory of them was the children's encounter with the village policeman who kept telling them to "Clear orf", but he didn't appear in this one. And the only one who seemed to have any character was Susie, the villain of the sub-plot, and she was far more interesting than the rest of them put together.

Perhaps that is because readers are expected to be familiar with the Secret Seven from reading the earlier books in the series, but, on the other hand, Susie is the sister of Jack, who seems to be one of the more prominent members of the group, so she probably makes an appearance in the other books as well.

Perhaps this is may also be because Enid Blyton's kid whodunits, in which a group of children encounter and outwit a group of criminals or other bad guys, are strictly age age graded. The Secret Seven books seem to be aimed at readers aged about 7-9, the Famous Five at readers aged about 8-9, the "Secret of" series at readers aged about 9-10, and the "of Adventure" series at readers aged about 10-12. The ones for older readers seem to have more definite characters. 

 

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1950s sf written in the 1960s: Chocky, by John Wyndham

Chocky by John Wyndham
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Back in the 1960s, when I was young, I read quite a lot of science fiction. and in many ways the 1950s and 1960s were vintage decades for science fiction. Later I rather lost my taste for it, or else the genre itself changed, and the newer productions did not appeal to me so much. One of the sf authors I liked most was John Wyndham. I recently re-read a couple of his novels to see how well they had stood the test of time, and found them surprisingly old-fashioned. In hindsight, the writing seemed to have the flavour of the 1940s, very much mired in the time it was written, like the writing of Nevil Shute.

But when I found Chocky in a second-hand bookshop, I was interested because I had not read it before, and it was also published later than most of the others, in 1968, which was the year of student power and student revolution. So I wondered what the atmosphere of the story would be like. And it seemed to be describing British middle-class life in the mid-1950s.

One of my reasons for reading it now is that I am writing a series of children's novels set in the 1960s, and so I am interested in books published in that period, and the kind of language they used. One of the ones I've looked at is The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner. In that one, the language has hardly dated at all, and it could have been written in almost any decade since then. Not so the works of John Wyndham.

Another thing that I found interesting from the point of view of a writer is that several of the people who have read my children's books have commented that in the stories the children seem to have a lot of freedom, and are allowed to roam around freely without adult supervision. They have suggested that this makes the stories seem rather unrealistic. So I was interested to see that in Chocky Matthew and his sister Polly are given what is possibly an even more unrealistic degree of freedom, even after being in danger. And this in a book that is not merely written about the period, but in the period itself.

In the story an 11-year-old boy, Matthew Gore, starts talking to an invisible friend. His parents are concerned, because though his younger sister had an invisible friend, it was at a much earlier age, and she had already got over it. Also, as the younger sister Polly informs the family, when she had an invisible friend, she talked to her friend, her friend did not talk back to her. Matthew, however, is heard arguing with his invisible friend as though the friend is talking back to him.

His parents are worried because "hearing voices" could be a sign of mental disorder, and their concern makes Matthew sometimes wonder if he is going mad. Then his teachers at school start complaining about his school work. He starts solving mathematical problems using unorthodoc methods, he argues with his geography teacher about the location of earth, and with his physics teacher about the speed of light.

The end of the story is predictable and slightly disappointing, and the thing I liked most about the story was the attitude and character of Matthew himself.

There is one other respect, however, in which the story seems dated, and especially not fitting its 1968 publication date, and that is the sexist language. I've read many other 1960s authors, and few of them are as sexist as this. Yet another characteristic that adds to the 1950s "feel" of the book.


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Elon Musk, before you wreck Twitter, heed what happened to Yahoo! Tumblr & other Internet flops

I watched a TV news report about the upheavals at Twitter, and Elon Musk's plans for revamping it and his firing of more of the staff, which have got a lot of Twitter users in a bit of a tizz, wondering whether their fears that it is about to collapse are justified.

I suspect that a lot of their fears are justified. It has been very common in Internet history for a web site that does one thing, and does it well so that it attracts a lot of users, to be taken over by someone bigger and then wrecked, so that it no longer does the thing that made it successful in the first place. Or if it does do that thing, it does it badly and then flops.

One of the companies that specialised in doing that sort of thing was Yahoo! It was very big and a power to be reckoned with on the Internet about 20-25 years ago. It started off as a search engine, but when Google produced a better search engine they decided to diversify, and started buying up other web sites that did one thing, and did it well. Nothing wrong with that. But then they started to mess with those web sites without apparently understanding what had made them popular and successful in the first place. The list of things they took over and wrecked is a long and a sad one. Here aree some of them:

• YahooGroups - Yahoo! took over Egroups, a mailing list host, and added a few useful features. Then they installed a new manager who had the brilliant idea of making it more like Facebook, It did what Facebook did very badly, and also did badly at what it had formerly done well -- mailing lists. Eventually groups.io sprang up to replace it in its original function, and YahooGroups closed
• Geocities - a free webhosting site that had the novel idea of grouping the sites it hosted into communities based on common interests. The people at Yahoo! didn't get the community thing, which helped to make free webhosting profitable, and it collapsed
• WebRing - another scheme that linked web sites into communities of web sites with similar themes and interests. Again, the people at Yahoo! didn't understand what had made it attractive, and wrecked and then closed it
• BlogLog - something like WebRing, only applied specifically to blogs and online journals. It was a kind of communal blogroll, and became very popular, which made it attractive to the people at Yahoo! But the people at Yahoo! didn't understand what made it popular, and took that away and tried to replace with with something else, which flopped.-

Yahoo! lost an enormous amount of goodwill through this, and is now a shadow of its former self, and now Twitter users fear that something similar will happen to Twitter. Let Elon Musk study what happened to Yahoo! and learn from its history before he repeats their mistakes.

There have been plenty of other examples; they are not limited to Yahoo!

There was Technorati, a kind of communal blog tagging site. You could visit the site to see who had tagged particular themes in their blogs, and when. You can do something like that with search engines, but Technorati was much more efficient. You could find the most recent blog tags on a topic. But the people who took over Technorati had the Facebook mentality. They wanted people to stay on their site. Facebook doesn't object to people going to other sites if the owners of those sites advertise on Facebook, but if you post a link to a blog post on Facebook, Facebook will show it to very few people unless the first few people react to it by "liking" it. Technorati tried to do something similar, which was totally counterproductive. People went to their site to see what blogs had similar tags. The new owners tried to get people to stay on their site by providing articles to rival the blog posts, which they simply could not muster the expertise to do. As a result, people stopped visiting their site. They did one thing well, got greedy, and stopped doing the one thing they did well, and tried to do something else badly. Elon Musk, take heed! It doesn't work.

Another example is Tumblr. It offered a lot of attractive features. E-mail posting, blog aggregating, and so on. At one time I used to put my Tumbler address in my email signature, because I could tell people that if they went to Tumblr they could see all my stuff, It had links to all my recent blog posts on other sites too. But none of that works any more, and as a result I haven't visited Tumblr for months, perhaps years.

I'm not saying Twitter can't be improved. It does one thing well, but it could do it a lot better. Its algorithms, for example, can be enormously frustrating to users, and create a very bad user experience (#UX). So Twitter users have to spend quite a lot of time and energy trying to work around the algorithms, and resent being manipulated by them. The current crisis has helped to make a lot of Twitter users aware of a rival outfit, Mastodon, which is algorithm-free.

But before making changes, make sure you understand why people who use Twitter are there, and don't alienate them in the hope of attracting others -- Yahoo! Technorati and Tumblr tried that, and failed. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, 

Why has Blogger lost its search function?

 Blogger now won't let me enter anything in the search box.

Are the people at Google out to kill Blogger and blogging?

Why this reduced functionality?

They made the "Blog This" function post garbage. See, for example, my Simple Links blog, which I used as a straight blog, that is, a web log of sites visited that I might want to refer to again. The "Blog This" feature worked well for that purposes, as well as for quoting extracts from other sites to quote in blog posts. Then Google decided to "improve" it, which made it useless for any purpose at all -- have a look at Simple Links to see how "improved" it is.

They made the editor a lot more difficult to use too. So much so that I went back to LiveJournal, until they decided to go one better than Blogger by making their editor not only more difficult but impossible to use.

All the blogging platforms seem to be in an intense rivalry to produce the worst UX (user experience) ever.

Cross Purposes: A New Novel

I've written a new novel, Cross Purposes (ISBN 9781005618209), which was released as an ebook on 22 October 2022. It is available from Smashwords and other ebook retailers here..

It's intended to be a children's story for kids aged about 9-12, but adults who like books like C.S. Lewis's Narnia stories or books like The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner might enjoy it too.

The main characters, who appeared in my earlier books Of Wheels and Witches and The Enchanted Grove,  are Sipho Mdluli (13), Jeffery Davidson (12), Janet Montgomery (11) and Catherine Kopirovsky (10). Catherine is given a jewelled cross by he grandmother, an ancient family heirloom from Russia, which gives them mysterious signals when they go on holiday together. At first they think it might just be warning them of danger, but later it seems to be leading them on a quest, whose nature they must find out as they go along

I quote from one review (well, the only one so far, but I won't link to it because it has too many spoilers):

These books seem to me to be what (Charles) Williams might have written, had he been spared to do so, if he had decided to write children's novels, somewhat under Lewis's influence, South African children in the early 1960s (with, yes, all the social and political baggage that implies). They have (to me) the same sense of the blurring of the natural and the supernatural so that the natural becomes numinous and the supernatural sensorily immediate that I love in Williams.

You will be at a *slight* disadvantage if you start with this one; it is about four characters established in the earlier novels, and, perhaps as a courtesy to those who have read those other books, does not spend as much energy in setting up the children as another writer might. There are no plot summaries to explain how they, and especially Sipho, met and became friends; you just have to take it as given.

The stories are set in the mid-1960s, which is when apartheid was at its height in South Africa, so in a way that makes them historical novels, because any children, even South African children, who are in the age range of the target readership will have had no experience of what apartheid was like, and part of the aim of the first two books was to give children who didn't live through it some idea of what it was like to live under apartheid. 

This isn't really the aim of Cross Purposes, though, because most of the action takes place outside South Africa. But I've tried to make the historical background as accurate as possible without being too didactic about it.

This one is less ambitious than the immediately preceding one in the series, The Enchanted Grove. I made that one available in hard copy, and asked my son (an artist) to design a special cover, and made it available in a paperback edition as well, but it didn't sell enough copies for me be able to buy enough copies to send to the copyright libraries, never mind pay my son for the cover design. So this one is less ambitious: ebook edition only, and an el cheapo abstract cover. In the unlikely event of the sales of this one covering the production cost of The Enchanted Grove, I may think about new paperback editions of the other two with better covers. The only way that can happen is if this one gets a lot of good reviews. 

The Dispossessed: an sf novel on two dystopian cultures

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One of Ursula le Guin's better novels, I think.

Two planets orbiting the same sun act as moons to each other, and the inhabitants have split because of political and cultural differences. Anarres is dry and austere, and its inhabitants are libertarian and socialist. Urras is lush and green, and its inhabitants are authoritarian and capitalist, or propertarian, as the Anarresti like to call them.

Shevek, a physicist on Anarres , feels that his research and discoveries are unappreciated at home, and makes a journey to Urras to meet physicists there, but finds that the Urrasti want to use his discoveries to increase their own power.

The people of both Anarres and Urras have adopted a kind of apartheid, and want to keep their cultures and political systems separate, so that neither will be contaminated by the views and principles of the other. . The culture of Urras is closer to that of the world we live in and so is easier to depict; the culture of Anarres has no real life model, though certain aspects of it have been advocated by some anarcho-syndicalists, thus it is harder to depict in a convincing way. But authoritarianism manages to creep in there, under the guise of protection of liberty. Though I'm inclined to favour anarcho-syndicalism myself, I've never really tried to envisage just how such a society would work. Ursula le Guin makes a valiant attempt, but it is not quite convincing enough. For the most part Ursula le Guin does a fairly convincing job of showing how such diverse cultures might interact with each other.

Apart from space travel, le Guin does not envisage much technological development in society, and most of the technology -- transport, communications, computers, and the like, are much as they were in the mid-20th century on earth. Anarres has abandoned the week, and based its time measurement on units called decads, presumably of 10 days. But they also speak of "years" when referring to the age of people, and though it seems that these years must be fairly similar to earth years, it is nowhere stated that they are, or how it relates to the orbits of Anarres and Urras.




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Diepsloot, a paradigm case of an informal settlement

Diepsloot by Anton Harber
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Diepsloot is an informal settlement (shanty town) on the northern outskirts of Johannesburg and the southern outskirts of Tshwane. It began post-apartheid in the late 1990s and this study of it was made by journalist Anton Harber about 2010, so it is probably out of date now. At the time the author estimated that there were about 1700 similar settlements throughout South Africa, and there are now probably many more. This detailed examination of Diepsloot at a particular point in its history gives a pretty good picture of how a lot of South Africans live today, and the number of people who live in this way continues to increase.

Anton Harber analyses Diepsloot from many different points of view -- its history, how people came to live there, the difficulties of life, accommodation, transport, housing, schooling, municipal and government services and the lack of them, and protests against lack of "service delivery".

Diepsloot and its problems are rarely known to anyone outside, and the place is rarely mentioned in the news media other than from an outside point of view, the only exception to this being the Daily Sun, which, however, concentrates almost exclusively on crime stories.

Diepsloot consists mainly of shacks erected in unplanned fashion by those who live in them, and the shacks were erected before there was any infrastructure like roads, sewerage or electricity, so providing such services is difficult without disturbing or demolishing existing shacks, which of course evokes protests from the residents.

Crime is rife, and the police were absent for a long time -- the nearest police station was in Erasmia, 16 kilometres away in the City of Tshwane, though Diepsloot itself is in the City of Johannesburg. so by the time a crime was reported to the police, and the police had arrived on the scene, the perpetrators had long gone, if they had not been caught be people in the vicinity and often dealt with by vigilante justice, so by the time the police arrived the only people they could arrest were those who had punished the original criminals by beating them up or even killing them. Later a police station was built, but because of the difficulty of reaching places within Diepsloot by vehicle, the police could still not reach crime scenes quickly.

Places like Diepsloot illustrate the problem of housing in South Africa. The figures for the provision of housing are impressive, but the need for housing is growing faster. Harber analyses this, and shows, pretty convincingly I thought, that the need is not so much for housing as for accommodation, and the distinction is significant and important.

The provincial and local government have tried to provide "RDP" houses, which are single-family houses in the middle of their own plot of land, very much on the same pattern as the previous apartheid government sought to provide. There is a shortage of land for such houses, and that makes it difficult for Diepsloot to expand for its increasing population, which is also complicated by some nearby land being the breeding ground of an endangered species of frog.

Outside politicians and bureaucrats have tried to impose a "one family, one house, one plot" model, but the people of Diepsloot gravitate naturally to a pattern in which

...shacks are in small family clusters, bunches of them sharing small courtyards and fenced off as units... People have structured the space to serve their needs, and it means that child-headed households, for example, get the support and assistance of their neighbours.

Finding solutions is made more difficult because of bureaucracy. Money is budgeted by one agency and allocated for something like road improvements, for example, but that requires drainage and various other planning permissions from different departments, which takes longer, and so the allocated money is not spent and has to be returned to the Treasury. The City of Johannesburg decided some years ago to separate the provision of electricity, water, and rubbish removal into several autonomous "silos", each with its own bureaucratic structure, so coordinated planning is almost impossible. 

...the electricity, water, refuse removal and transport departments... (were) carved off into independent companies, known collectively as City-Owned Enterprises.... Coordination, though, is a nightmare. Now they have more silos than a Free State farming cooperative and getting them all to operate and implement, in harmony, is extremely difficult.

One harassed bureaucrat from the Development Bank of Southern Africa showed Harber a shelf full of files of completed development plans, waiting to be implemented.

Because of this, the people of Dielsloot have de3veloped their own structures and systems of authority, and these are often rivals, and there are rivalries within rivalries. The ANC, the dominant political party in Diepsloot, sees power struggles between the ANC itself and its alliance partners. There are also tensions between businesses -- small businesses and bigger businesses, and between local business people and foreign traders.

Harber tried to interview representatives of each, bureaucrats, business people, teachers, NGOs, politicians (local, municipal and provincial), teachers, health workers and others, to build a picture of the settlement. People like to speak of the "community", but in fact there are so many overlapping and often rival "communities" within a place like Diepsloot that it is a misnomer.

 I found it particularly interesting  because some members of our church in Atteridgeville live in such an informal settlement, Phomolong in Atteridgeville West, and they sometimes mention similar problems. And sometimes our diocese has tried to negotiate for places for building temples in such places, without understanding the complexity of political structures and power relations. Some of that is unique to Diepsloot, of course, but the complexity is universal. We have been trying for 20 years to get a church site in Soshanguve, but the land, earmarked by the City of Tshwane as a church site, is registered in the deeds office as owned by the Gauteng Province, and before the site can be allocated and developed, someone must pay the conveyancing fees, and is it the municipality or the province? So people tell us to make like an informal settlement, and just build something on it before someone else does.
This book is important reading for South Africans, both those who live in places like Diepsloot, and perhaps even more, those who don't.




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Academic versus spiritual knowledge

Someone asked on Twitter

Academic Bible readers, how do you separate the head knowledge from feeding the spiritual, contemplative side of your faith?

My short answer was that I try not to separate them, but to integrate them, but it deserves a longer answer, which is not possible in the 240 or so characters allowed by Twitter, because it's not really as simple as that. 

Academic theology tends to be book knowledge, learned from reading a lot. But Evagrius of Pontus said that a theologian is one who prays, and one who prays is a theologian.

In the Orthodox Church there is book learning, certainly, but you cannot really learn about Orthodoxy from books, or from searching stuff on the Internet, because the core of Orthodox theology is enacted theology. Yes, people wrote theological books, but the people who wrote the books also participated in the Divine Liturgy. They followed the rhythim of the liturgical day, week and year. They fasted and prayed, and that shaped the books they wrote and the way they wrote them.

Western theologians often fail to understand this, and tend to get things very wrong when writing about Orthodox theology. For an example of this, see here: Constants in Context: A Theology of Mission for Today (Book Review).

So trying to separate the academic head knowledge from the spiritual and devotional knowledge of the heart can be a dangerous and limiting thing. The very title of the book was misleading, "constants in context", because in the Orthodox case the context is Orthodox liturgy and worship, so in that particular book the Orthodox constants were taken out of context.

Theology can also be anecdotal, or, as the academic theologians like to say, narrative. So here is an anecdote or narrative from my own experience. 

As an undergraduate in the 1960s I studied theology at the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg, and our lecturer for both New Testament II and Doctrine II was Vic Bredenkamp, who was also a Methodist minister. He was teaching on Ephesians 6about St Paul's reference to "principalities and powers", and what he said blew my mind. 

My conception of "principalities" was places like Monaco and Andorra, and  "powers" were the USA and USSR (in the 1960s the Cold War was at its height). So I asked Vic Bredenkamp about this, and he pointed out that St Paul was referring to these principalities and powers (rulers and authorities) in the heavenlies. 

He referred me to a book, Principalities and Powers by G.B. Caird, which explained the context of St Paul's teaching on the topic. The context was the institution of divine kingship, and the Roman religion of emperor worship. The Romans did not worship the flesh and blood emperor, but they worshipped his genius. The emperor's authority (exousia) was a spiritual power in the heavenlies. 

The point here is mythical and symbolic. When a traffic cop holds up his hand on a busy highway, he can stop a 26-wheeler truck. It is not his flesh and  blood that stops the lorry -- if he tried that, it would squash him flat. It is his exousia, his authority, that stops the truck. If he were not wearing the uniform that symbolises his exousia, and were naked, or wearing pyjamas, the truck would not stop. It his his exousia, symbolised by the uniform, that stops the the truck.

The "powers", like the USA and the USSR, had their angels, their archons, in the heavenlies. Nations had "national spirits" (archons) in the heavenlies (cf Daniel 10:12-17), as did most earthly power structures. The "prince (archon) of the king of Persia" was analogous to the "genius of Caesar". This made clear to me the meaning of some other Bible texts, like Deuteronomy 32:8-9, and Psalm 81/82. YHWH, the "great king above all gods", speaks to the assembled gods and tells them they have messed up, and the psalmist prays "Arise O God, judge the earth, for to thee belong all nations" -- a prayer that Jesus answered in John 12:31-32.

But this is all experienced in the context of Orthodox worship on Holy Saturday, when the vestments  etc are changed from Lenten purple to Paschal white, and during the singing of Psalm 81/82 the priest bursts from the holy doors scattering bay leaves while shouting "Arise O God, judge the earth, for to thee belong all nations" and the congregations sings the refrain and the reader chants the rest of the psalm, and everyone bangs on the floor or the benches or anything that will make a noise, symbolising the earthquake.

Vic Bredenkamp's dry academic lecture opened my eyes to that, and also to the demonic nature of the contemporary government policy of apartheid, which, in the words of Psalm 81/82, failed to give justice to the weak and needy, or deliver them from the hand of the wicked.

Many years after I had graduated, I saw Vic Bredenkamp again, and thanked him for opening the holy scriptures to me, and was greatly disappointed to realise that he didn't get it. He wittered on about "ripe scholarship" and it became clear to me that for him, what's said in the classroom stays in the classroom, and had nothing to do with the world outside, or spiritual and devotional life. What he had said in his class all those years ago was to remain locked up in the academic ivory tower. 

I close with another tweet:

Electric man has no bodily being. He is literally dis-carnate. But a discarnate world, like the one we now live in, is a tremendous menace to an incarnate Church, and its theologians haven’t even deemed it worthwhile to examine the fact (Marshall McLuhan, 1977).

Bog Child

Bog Child by Siobhan Dowd
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is classified as "young adult" -- at least I found it in the Young Adult section of the library, but i can say that this old adult enjoyed it immensely, and I think it can be read by adults of any age. When I picked it up and started reading the blurb, I immediately thought of The Barrytown Trilogy and others by Roddy Doyle, but it wasn't really like those, though it does deal with Irish family life.

Fergus McCann is 18 years old, living with his parents and two younger sisters in Northern Ireland. His brother Joe is in jail for IRA activities, and thinking of joining other prisoners in a hunger strike. While out with his uncle digging for peat Fergus discovers what appears to be the body of a child. The place where they are digging is close to the border, so they notify the police from both sides, but the pathologist recons the body is old, and so they call in an archaelogist.

Fergus has a lot on his plate. He is writing his A-level exams and hopes to go to Scotland to study medicine. He's also learning to drive and hopes to pass his driving test. One of his brother's mates asks him to take dubious packages across the border, so he feels under pressure from all sides. The book is about how he tries to cope with all this, and all the way through you can feel the pressure on Fergus, feel for him as he tries to cope with several dilemmas and no sooner has he dealt with one than the unfinished business of one of the others crops up. And thoughout it all he dreams of the bog child, and shat she might have faced.

Not quite a Bildungsroman, but the picture of a young man at a particularly intense and stressful period of his life.




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