A Twist of Sand: a novel set in Namibia 65 years ago

A Twist of Sand by Geoffrey Jenkins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I first read A twist of Sand about 60 years ago, before I ever went to Namibia, so because that is the setting, it played a big part in my preconceptions. It is set in the Skeleton Coast, the dry north-western part of Namibia, then known as South West Africa, and ruled by South Africa. The only other thing I had read about it was set in the same area, it was a piece in a children's encyclopedia about the wreck of the Dunedin Star on the same coast. When I saw a copy of the book in a second-hand bookshop, I thought it would be interesting to read it again, after having been in Namibia.

It is the story of the captain of a trawler operating out of Walvis Bay, Geoffrey Macdonald, who is asked by a man he takes an immediate dislike to, Dr Albert Stein, if he can charter his boat to take him up to the Skeleton Coast, an the vague pretext that he is searching for an unusual beetle.Because of his past criminal activity, we discover that Geoffrey Macdonald isn't even his real name.

A Twist of Sand was the first novel by Geoffrey Jenkins to be published, and when I read first read it, soon after publication, I enjoyed it, and thought it was quite good. I read a few of his later novels, and thought they were rather flat by comparison. On rereading it, I still enjoyed it, but became aware of things about it that I missed on the first reading. For one thing, the plot is as full of holes as a Swiss cheese. The protagonist is just as much an immoral criminal as the villain. That might not be a bad thing, in some ways, it makes the book perhaps more believable than those in which the good guys are too good and the bad guys too bad.

I first went to Namibia in 1969, just 10 years after the book was published, so the country would not have changed a great deal in that time. I got a job with the Department of Water Affairs, which took me to to most parts of the country within my first three months there. and I am pretty sure that in those three months I saw more of Namibia than most people who were born there saw in their life time. In the month I spent with Water Affairs (before being fired for suspect associations with the Anglican Church and the Christian Institute) I had been to Lüderitz in the south-west (including the Koichab Pan in the prohibited diamond area that Jenkins writes about); to Kamanjab in the northwest, and had driven down the dry beds of the Hoanib and Hoarusib Rivers, experienced a break-down in a Jeep in the Kaokoveld (the dreaded Skeleton Coast that Jenkins writes about); and gone to Rundu and Mukwe and camped on the banks for the Okavango River. On these journeys, which lasted for a week to 10 days, we camped out every night, and took a trunk of tinned food to eat on the way. Any tins left over at the end of the trip looked like rugby balls and had their labels rubbed off from bouncing over rough roads and tracks.  So I know that quite a lot of what Geoffrey Jenkins said about the country was inaccurate. 

At one point in the story he has his characters going up the dry bed of the Cunene River, but it is, in fact, one of the few perennial rivers in Namibia. All the perennial rivers in Namibia are on its borders -- the Kunene (Cunene if you're in Angola), the Okavango and the Orange. All the rivers wholly within the country are seasonal (my job at Water Affairs involved servicing instruments to measure the depth of the water in the rivers when they did flow). For any one interested, you can find more descriptions of journeys in some of the remoter areas of Namibia here.

I read some of the other reviews on GoodReads, and noted that some of the reviewers said that the book was "dated" because of the racism and sexism displayed by the characters. But at that time quite a lot of the white people in Namibia were racist or sexist or both, and that was perhaps one of the more accurate portrayals in the book. he, like The violence and criminality of the main characters in the story are perhaps exaggerated; if there were characters like that back then I didn't meet them, but the racism and sexism were not exaggerated. After I was sackedand she transformed the  from Water Affairs I worked for the time on the Windhoek Advertiser, and a South African journalist, Willie Lamprecht, came to work as the assistant editor. His wife Madeleine took over the women's page, and she was a feminist, though not one spoke of feminism back then, we said rather that she was into women's liberation, and she transformed the women's page from being full of cosy housekeeping tips into pointing out how women, including black women, were overworked and underpaid. This did not go down well with the establishment at the time, and Willie and Madeleine Lamprecht were sacked after a few months.

Jenkins contrives to give the impression that the Kaokoveld was virtually uninhabited, yet if anyone entered it without a permit the police would be on to them within 24 hours. In the desert areas along the coast it was largely uninhabited, but there were people living in most places though the population was sparse. And though the police were not quite as efficient as Jenkins suggests, they did nevertheless arrest people for being there without permits -- my wife's great-uncle, Frederick Alwyn Greene, served time in prison for being in that part of the world without a permit, and he, like the characters in the story, seems to have lived on the wrong side of the law for most of his life. 

In spite of its shortcomings, however, I still enjoyed the book on a second reading. It was a toss-up whether to give it 3 stars or 4, and in the end I thought it deserved 4.





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The Sea -- a novel of first love, marriage, loss and death

The Sea by John Banville
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Max Morden reflects on some of the turning points of his life after his wife dies and he tries to come to terms with widowerhood. He recalls first love, marriage, being a parent and experiencing the loss of people he has loved.

I looked at a few of the other reviews, and see that some complained that it had no plot, or that it was too slow-moving. Earlier today I read on social media about some children's programmes on TV that were said to be too fast, and recommended that parents should not allow their children to watch them, because studies had shown that they ruined children's attention span. They were fast, noisy, and no scene lasted longer than three seconds.

I found something different. The Sea was in a batch of books I had bought at a second-hand book shop a few days ago, and I looked at them all to see what I had got. And having picked this one up, I couldn't put it down. I put other books I had been reading aside, so I could finish this one. It was, as they say, a "pageturner". But why?

I think in part it was because of Banfield's detailed descriptions, both of settings and people. It made the people and places in the story seem more real, more three-dimensional. I cared what happened to them and their relationships, not only to the protagonist, but to each other. As Max Morden reflected on his experience of other people, so I reflected on mine. I appreciated the detail that came with the slow pace, which one would never see in a TV programme with scenes lasting 3 seconds or less.



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The Other Inklings: interviews with scholars of the Oxford Inklings

The Other Inklings: Interviews with Scholars on C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and Inklings-Adjacent Figures by G. Connor Salter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have often found that I enjoy reading literary biographies as much as, and sometimes more than I enjoy the works of the authors themselves. Though The Other Inklings is not biographical, but rather a series of interviews with people who have studied the work of the Oxford Inklings, I enjoyed it immensely.

In reading it I came across several names that I was familiar with, either because I had read what they had written in books, journals or blogs, or because I had seen their names in footnotes or bibliographies. I was pleased to learn something about them and how they had encountered and enjoyed books that I too had enjoyed. I also appreciated the way in which G. Connor Salter had added comprehensive references to each of the interviews, making it easy to follow up things I wanted to know more about.

There were, however, a couple of deficiencies (the reason I did not give it five stars). One is that it had no index. Of course in the ebook edition, which I read, it is possible to search for text, but even so it is good to have at least a list of names of persons mentioned in the text. The other deficiency was that there were more than the usual number of typing or spelling errors. I know it is not possible to get rid of such errors completely, and I've often checked something for the fifth time and then spotted a new error as the page comes out of the printer. Some of the errors were in the names of authors or the titles of books and articles.

One thing that I was not expecting was that nearly half the interviews were of scholars of the work of William Lindsay Gresham, the biological father of C.S. Lewis's stepchildren. I'm not complaining; it just came as a bit of a surprise. Gresham was the first husband of Joy Davidman, who later married C.S. Lewis. Gresham therefore does fit the description "Inklings adjacent", and also, I learned, wrote an introduction to one edition of The Greater Trumps by Charles Williams. From those interviews I learned that both Gresham and Davidman were authors in their own right, and had been quite prominent figures in the American Literary Left.

There were some things that I had half-hoped to find, and didn't. This is not a flaw in the book, but just a hint for future research, or perhaps a second volume. Why no interview with Brenton Dickieson, when one of the citations was to a guest post by G. Connor Salter in Dickieson's blog A Pilgrim in Narnia? Why no Tolkien scholars?

When I first got access to the Web, thirty years ago, I looked for fellow Inklings fans, and one of the first I found was The Avenging Aardvark, fellow by the name of Ross Pavlac. Alas he died soon after I discovered his pages, but I half-hoped that his name might crop up in one of the interviews. 

And I wondered why I seemed to be the only one (yes, I was among the interviewees) who mentioned fantasy authors like Alan Garner or Phil Rickman whose fantasy works seemed comparable with those of the Inklings?

Anyway, many thanks to G. Connor Salter for giving us this book, and I hope there will soon be a second volume, and perhaps a third.

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The Day we met a Saint

Thirty years ago today we met a man I believe should be numbered among the Saints. 

On Monday 1 April 1996 I spent most of the day working at my job as an editor at the University of South Africa, editing a Science of Religion study guide. When I got home, Fr Nektarios Kellis phoned. 

He was a missionary priest in Madagascar, and said he was on his way back to Madagascar from
Zimbabwe, and was staying in a hotel near the airport waiting for his connecting flight which only left the next morning. The hotel he was staying in was in an industrial area, so there was nothing to do there. Going for a walk among dark empty factories closed for the night was not an appealing prospect, so he tried to phone someone just to talk to. He had my phone number as a contact, and so he phoned me.

I had never met Fr Nektarios, but I knew of him from a student of his whom I had met in Nairobi the previous year when I was doing research for my doctoral thesis on Orthodox mission methods. As part of my research I had interviewed Jean Christos Tsakanias, who came from Madagascar. 

He told me that the Orthodox Church there had been started by Greeks in 1953, and had been purely Greek. It had closed in 1972, when foreigners, including the priest, had been expelled after political disturbances on the island. It had remained closed until last year, when the Greek community made announcements in various periodicals, and an Australian priest, Archimandrite Kellis, had come to the
island, and began active mission right away. They were then under Bishop Chrysostomos of Zimbabwe, who had already ordained several local priests, and the Divine Liturgy was celebrated in the Malagasy
language. 

It sounded as though Father Nektarios had achieved an amazing amount in the 18 months he had been there. Jean Christos told me he would travel with Fr Nektarios down the east coast of Madagascar, and when he saw a village without a church he would stop, and ask the chief of that place if he could meet any people who might be interested in Orthodox Christianity. If the chief agreed, he would make a date to return and speak to the people, and if any were interested, would start a new parish there. In this way he started about 12 parishes within 18 months.

So when Fr Nektarios phoned on that Monday afternoon I didn't just want to alleviate his boredom by chatting on the phone, I wanted to meet him. My wife Val then worked in Klipfontein, which was halfway to Kempton Park, where the airport was, so she went to fetch Fr Nektarios from the hotel after work and brought him to our house in Kilner Park, Pretoria. I thought we could take him out to supper, so he could be with people instead of just sitting in a hotel room. 

We took him down to Johannesburg to show him the parish we then belonged to, the Church of St Nicholas of Japan in Brixton. Then we looked for a place to eat, but being Monday, all the restaurants were closed. 

We took him to see Fr Chrysostom, then our parish priest, and then took him back to his hotel at 11 pm. 

In the course of all this driving around Father Nektarios told us a bit of how he had got to Madagascar. He had been in Adelaide, South Australia, as chaplain to an old age home, and read an article in a publication from Greece about Madagascar, appealing for a priest there. It turned out later that the article was phony -- no one in Madagascar was appealing for a priest, just someone in the magazine office thought it would be a good idea.  But he thought God was calling him to Madagascar anyway, though he had a difficult job persuading his bishop, who was reluctant to lose a priest from his diocese. Eventually the bishop allowed him to go only because he saw that he would be resentful if forced to stay. 

Father Nektarios had been visiting Zimbabwe, where the Patriarch of Alexandria was blessing a monument to the first bishop, who had died in Bulawayo. While they were there the Metropolitan of
Zimbabwe, Archbishop Chrysostomos, had had a heart attack, and had only just come out of hospital, so Fr Nektarios had stayed until he was well enough to go home, and so only now was he returning to Madagascar. There were no direct flights from Harare to Madagascar, which was why he had had to come to Johannesburg and stay overnight. 

Fr Nektarios was very interested in mission and was keen to see mission happening in Mocambique and other places in the diocese. He thought we should go to Zambia, where there were several people who wanted to become Orthodox.

Well, that was thirty years ago, and a lot has happened since then. Madagascar was later made a diocese in its own right, and Fr Nektarios was elected as its first bishop. Sad to say, he was killed in a helicopter crash along with several other clergy, including the Pope and Patriarch of Alexandria, Petros VII, on 11 September 2004.

May their memory be eternal!

 

 

Mistborn: The Final Empire -- book review

Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I think a couple of people recommended this book, probably at one of the literary coffee klatsches were had before Covid put an end to them. it is somewhat reminiscent of A Game of Thrones in that it deals with political rivalries and conspiracies, But whereas A Game of Thrones deals with rivalries between different kingdoms, in this one the rivalry is between aristocratic families in the same empire.

In The Final Empire there is also a clear class division between the privileged nobles and the oppressed underclass. In that respect it seemed to be a kind of parable of the old Rhodesia, with a great contrast between the privileged nobles and the oppressed underclass, the skaa.

I didn't like it as much as A Game of Thrones, and it was only after about 500 pages (of 643) that I began to feel sympathy for any of the characters. Perhaps it was partly because I don't like the genre much -- books where the heroes have superpowers of some sort, which sets them apart from other people. In this case it it due to the ability of some people to consume and "burn" metal, with different kinds of metal enhancing different abilities. Those who could do this were called "Mistborn", and there are some whose abilities are limited to one metal only, who are called Mistings. In addition there are Obligators, who form a kind of bureaucratic class, and a group of enforcers, called Inquisitors, who also have special superpowers.

Those who like superheroes with superpowers will probably enjoy it more than I did. 

Oh, and, for what it's worth, you can click here to read my review of A Game of Thrones. And (spoiler alert) I gave up halfway through the second book. It was just too much. 

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Abandoned books

There are many reasons one might abandon a book before finishing it. When I do, it is usually because I find it boring, or because I have a lot to do and after a few busy days or weeks have lost the urge to read it. But here is a book that put me off before I reached the end of the first page.

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness


I'm not going to rate it, because I haven't read it.

I don't usually write reviews for books I haven't read, but I thought I would say why I don't think I'll finish this one, and in fact I didn't get further than the first page. There were two things on the first page that put me off.

"...the summer crush of visiting scholars was over and the madness of fall term had not yet begun."

The speaker, the first person protagonist, is apparently something like a visiting scholar, and is in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University in England. Oxford University does not have a "fall term"; it has a Michaelmas Term. Calling it a "fall term" tells me either that the supposed scholarship of the protagonist is phony, or the author has done a poor job of research for the book.

I suppose one could argue that the author is American, the character is American, and the envisaged (or should that be envisioned?) readers are American, so "fall term" would be understood by them all, whereas "Michaelmas term" might not be. But what would be wrong with "...the summer crush of visiting scholars was over and the madness of Michaelmas term (as the fall term is called at Oxford) had not yet begun." It makes the characters and the setting more authentic, and the readers learn something about the setting. 

And then the visiting scholar or whatever she is thanks the librarian for getting the books she had ordered, "flashing him a grateful smile". I'm not quite sure why, but that phrase put me off completely. It's the kind of language I associate with badly-written and poorly-edited self-published Y/A fantasy novels (for an example, see my review of The Enchanted Crossroads).

I found more examples of such usage in another such book I read recently, The Raven Moonstone, which had phrases like I tossed Jesse a questioning look and Jesse shot me a dopey grin. 

The thought of another nearly 700 pages of the same put me off. If it were 200 or even 250 pages I might persevere in the hope that it would improve, but this fat book is just too long. I read one Twilight book, and that was enough.

But perhaps if I post this here someone who has read it might tell me that my judgement is too hasty, and if I read on it might improve, and I might even enjoy it.

I read somewhere that Stephen King said that Fritz Leiber had written some good books, so when I found Ill Met in Lankhmar in the library I took it out and began to read it, but didn't finish it. Leiber may have written a good book, but this wasn't it.

But there are some bad books (or at least books that I have thought bad) that I've not only finished, but have actually read twice, mainly because I couldn't believe they were as bad as I thought them after the first reading. More on that here: On Reading Unbelievably Bad Books. 

Generation Z and Religion

The maps on this page, though from different sources, seem to be based on the same data, showing the religious affiliations of Generation Z in Europe.

Two things struck me about them immediately:

First, that while the current map shows that secularism prevails in Western Europe, Eastern Europe is predominantly Christian. I suspect that a similar map produced 40 years ago would have shown precisely the reverse: the East would have been secular, the West Christian. Back then people in the West regarded people in the East as “godless commies”; now, it seems, the people in the West are godless capitalists.

Secondly, it has often been said by some of the more militant atheist embracers of secularism that religion has been the main cause of wars throughout history, and that if religion were abolished, wars would cease. Yet among the counties marked on the map as secularist are those that are most supportive of the current genocide being perpetrated by Israel in Gaza, especially Germany, France and the UK, and whenever there seems to be the possibility of peace in the Russia-Ukraine War, those same countries are the ones most rigidly opposed to peace, and urge Ukraine to fight on.

There are also some things of deeper significance, among which are what Samuel Huntington got wrong.

I thought Samuel Huntington's book, The Clash of Civilizations, got a lot of things right about the post-Cold War world -- that the "three-worlds" model would be exchanged for a "nine civilizations" one. But he made the mistake of thinking that Western Civilization was fundamentally Christian. As this map shows, Secularism is the established religion of the West. It doesn't matter whether you are called atheist, agnostic, or "none", it's secularism all the way down.

What do I mean by "secularism"?

Going back not 40 years, but 60 years, Western Christian theologians were concerned about the secular meaning of the gospel. There was even a book with that title -- see here. An American theologian, Harvey Cox, wrote The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective in which he explained the important distinction between "secularization" and "secularism".

"Secular" means pertaining to this age, and Christian theology makes a distinction between "this age" and "the age to come", between what is temporal and what is eternal. Civil government, for example, is concerned with the things of this age, not with the age to come, so we speak of "secular governments".  An English monarch once ordered clergy of the Church of England to keep registers of baptisms, marriage and burials, because he wanted statisstics of citizens. Now it is good that the church should keep records of its members, but its purposes are differen It is related to the concept of separation of cht from those of the state, so in 1837 the English government began secular registration of births, marriages and deaths, for its own secular purposes. This process is called secularization. It is related to the concept of the separation of Church and State, and Harvey Cox in his book explains why he thinks it is a good thing. 

Secularism, on the  other hand, is something else. It is an ideology in which people believe that there is only this age, and no age to come. And of secularism, Harvey Cox (1965:21) says:

While secularization finds its roots in the biblical faith itself and is to some extent an authentic outcome of the impact of biblical faith on Western history, this is not the case with secularism. Like any other ism, it menaces the openness and freedom secularization has produced; it must therefore be watched carefully to prevent its becoming the ideology of a new establishment. It must be especially checked where it pretends not to be a world-view but nonetheless seeks to impose its ideology through the organs of the state.

The word "atheist" means "godless", and, in demographic terms, "none" also means "godless". If there is a difference, the main difference that one can find in English is that atheists are self-consciously godless; "nones" are equally godless, just less self-consciously so. Secularism describes the worldview of both. 

Forty years ago the equivalent of Generation Z would be the age-cohort born between 1957 and 1972,  and it was probably these that Samuel Huntington had in mind when he wrote The Clash of Civilizations. He wrote before any of the current Generation Z were even born, and so probably did not foresee the secularization of the worldview of Western Europe.

I don't think, however, that that change invalidates the main thrust of Huntington's thesis: that after the end of the Cold War conflict would not be so much between ideological blocs wedded to capitalism or communism as between civilizations clustered around a common religion. If you don't regard atheism or secularism as fitting the definition of a "religion" you can substitute "worldview" if you like.

To see the change, you can regard the area coloured yellow in the map on the left as Huntington's conception of Western Civilization, while that coloured grey on the map was the bit he didn't foresee,

Huntington believed that conflicts within civilizations would tent to remain local, while those between different civilizations would tend to become wider. 

And the question arises: how do the changes reflected in these maps affect present conflicts, and how might they lead to future conflicts? And how do these changes affect our understanding of the world we live in?

I have discussed Generation Z and religion before, and especially how some of those members of Generation Z who are turning to God also seem to be attracted to right-wing politics. If you are interested you can find more on that here.  

 

Twentieth Blogiversary

I started this blog 20  years ago today, on 28 Nov blame mi   blameasdLSKgokjik2005.

I was going to say more but the paragraph I just typed just disappeared, and I can't be bothered to type it all over again. I blame Microsoft with their stupid keyboard driver -- there is some key that if you press it by mistake defines a whole bunch of text, and the very next key you press, no matter what that key is,  deletes it.  That was really a most idiotic design. Text should not be deleted unless you press the Delete key, and preferably after an "Are you sure?" notice pops up. 

 

 

 

Memories: The Alexandra Bus Boycott 1957

Someone recently posted a historical note on exTwitter about the 1957 Alexandra bus boycott. Reading the comments that followed the post, I realised how little people knew of the history, and how much of what they knew was wrong.

You can find a broad outline of  the event on WikiPedia, and a fuller account here, in a chapter of a book by Ruth First, but few have any conception of what it was actually like. The boycott began in early 1957 when the Public Utility Transport Corporation (PUTCO), which ran the bus service between Alexandra Township, 11 miles north of the city centre, raised the fare by 25%. People who worked in the middle of Johannesburg walked or cycled to work rather than ride on the buses. 

I was then 15 years old, and attended a boarding school, though the boycott actually started in the school holidays, when I was at home. A few months earlier I had read Alan Paton's novel Cry, the Beloved Country, which had a description of an earlier bus boycott in the 1940s. I was fascinated to see history being repeated before my eyes. Almost everything Paton had written about it was being re-enacted, almost exactly as he described it.

My mother then worked as an estate agent, and had a nearly new car, a Wolseley 4/44, which in addition to travelling to and from the office, she used to show clients houses they might want to buy. When she passed along Louis Botha Avenue, the route most of the bus boycotters took to and from work, she would stop to give some of them a lift, usually women loaded with parcels, or older people who looked tired. Occasionally, if they looked very tired, she took them past where she usually turned off to Sandringham, where we then lived, and took them on to Alexandra. 

Putco was a commercial company, listed on the stock exchange, and the Johannesburg Chamber of Commerce took their side, and tried to break the boycott, among other things by persuading the municipal traffic cops to ticket motorists who gave lifts to the boycotters. In those days the Joburg traffic cops wore very smart charcoal grey uniforms, and rode powerful BMW motorbikes, and they would give tickets for a variety of alleged offences, like obstructing traffic when motorists stopped to pick up boycotters, or running an unlicensed taxi service.

On one occasion, when I was back at boarding school, I had to go to the dentist in the middle of Joburg. I had money for the bus fare from school to town, and my mother was going to pick me up after work and take me back to school, but she forgot. I didn't have enough money for the bus fare, so I walked home with the bus boycotters, since it was the time when everyone was going home from work. I did it one way, once, but they did it twice a day, morning and evening, for nearly six months. 

A few years later I went to work for the Johannesburg Municipal Transport Department as a bus conductor, and one of the older conductors told me that during the bus boycott many of the boycotters got on the municipal trams at Yeoville and rode into town from there. It shortened their journey by a couple of miles. Putco and the municipal services were entirely separate, and so travelling on a municipal tram did not break the boycott. The municipal tram service was also segregated. Trams for black people were painted silver, while those for white people were maroon and cream. In 1960 the Yoville trams were replaced by buses -- trolley buses for whites, and oil buses for non-whites. The buses for black people weren't painted silver, but the same maroon and cream, but had bords on the front and side saying "Non-Europeans Only/Slegs vir Nie-Blankes". For more on the municipal transport services, click here.

During the bus boycott the tram service, the old conductor told me, was almost overwhelmed. He could only collect fares on the lower deck and didn't even try to get to the upper deck. But his waybill would still show that he had carried a full load.

A few corrections to misconceptions revealed in comments on exTwitter.  

Someone thought that the bus boycott was the occasion for the introduction of minibus taxis. It wasn't. In those days "Second Class Taxis" (as taxis for black people were called) were mostly 10-year-old American saloon cars, most popular were Chrysler, Plymouth, Dodge and Desoto, with curved sloping backs. Ten years later, in 1967, they were still 10 years old, but 1957 models, longer, wider, and with enormous tail fins. It was in 1969 that the first Toyota HiAce minibuses were landed at the Durban docks, each with two nuns installed in the front seats. And from then the min ibus taxi undustry began to grow, about 12-15 years after the bus boycott.

The Putco buses, like the one in the picture above, were painted dark green, with "Public Utility Transport Corporation" painted on the side. Nowadays they use the acronym PUTCO.  There were some buses that had "PUTCO" written on the side -- they were painted blue-grey, and travelled between Johannesburg and Pretoria. They were only for white people, and on the sides was written "PUTCO Operating and Technical Services."

The boycott ended when the Johannesburg Chamber of Commerce agreed to subsidise the bus service by paying the increase. That always struck me as a strange anomaly -- subsidising a profit-making company. It would have been better to subsidise the municipal bus service, to pay for a public service, and not subsidise the shareholders' profits. 

 

Beware of scam ads on Facebook and other Meta sites

Recent news reports have revealed that Meta (which owns Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram) has knowingly made large profits from scam ads. See, for example, this article.

In this blog post I will describe how I tested a scam ad, and what happened when I reported it to Facebook. 

A couple of years ago Facebook started showing me ads that looked "too good to be true". They claimed to be from well-known chain stores, like Makro or TakeALot, and advertised excess, damaged, or outdated stock at very low prices -- laptop computers or cell phones were often advertised for R35.00, or somewhere between R35.00 and R39.00. 

One day I decided to check one that advertised Apple iPhones for R35.00. They were so cheap because the packaging had been damaged, or some such story.  I hovered my cursor over the link, and the URL was totally different from the name of the chain store selling them. I nevertheless went on to the site. And they said that this Apple iPhone for R35.00 would be delivered to my home within 2 days. I just needed to answer some questions. I answered some questions, gave my card details, and got an acknowledgement of payment. It then went on to a different site, dealing with something totally different, and at the end a message flashed across the screen saying "Thank you for subscribing to..." and was gone before I could see what it was thanking me for subscribing to.

I immediately called the bank and cancelled my card. 

Later the same day the bank phoned me, and said they had received by request for cancellation, but two requests for payment had come in since then -- one for R35.00, and the other for R650.00. Did I want the bank to pay them?

I said they should pay the R35.00, but not the other one. I had reckoned on losing R35.00 if the ad was a scam, but if I cancelled the payment I would never know, so I let it stand. And no iPhone ever was delivered to me, so I now know for certain it was a scam. And if I had not cancelled my card when I did, they would probably have taken the R650.00 every month as well.

But since I had responded to one such ad, Facebook began showing me a lot more. I would hover my cursor over them, note that the URL never corresponded with the ostensible advertiser, and would then report it as a scam. Sometimes Facebook would acknowledge by email that I had reported it, but would never say what action they had taken, except in a few cases where they responded by saying that they had investigated my complaint and found that the ad I had complained of "does not contravene our community standards".

I also once tried advertising on Facebook. I write children's books, and wanted to make them known to more potential readers. Setting up the ads was not easy, because the instructions were vague. I tried to specify the kind of people who would be interested in such books, but Facebook apparently showed them to a bunch of random people. They told me who had "liked" them, but none had shown any interest in reading them, and the demographic data showed that the people who had "liked" them would not be very likely to want to read them.

So the lesson I draw from this is twofold:

1. Don't buy stuff advertised on Facebook & other Meta platforms

2. Don't advertise stuff on Facebook and other Meta platforms

 

Modernised Christianity in premodern Africa

The Primal Vision by John V. Taylor
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is one of those life-changing books, which changed my attitude to a lot of things, and taught me things that proved useful in later life.

It is part of a series of books on Christian presence among other religions -- in this case the religions of sub-Saharan Africa. John V. Taylor, a British Anglican, served in East Africa, and read widely in books about other parts of Africa. He noted that in much of Africa Christianity was a classroom religion, because that is how it was taught to many Africans, and so it was remote from the everyday life of the people.

I later learned different words to describe what Taylor wrote about -- that sub-Saharan Africa had a premodern culture, and missionaries from the West had, by the 19th century, inculturated Christianity in to modernity, and so found it difficult to communicate it to pre-modern Africans. Western Christianity had been reshaped to deal with modern problems; and so could not help Africans with many of the problems they faced. So Western missionaries concluded that civilisation must precede Christianisation. Africans had to be modernised to that they could have the modern problems that modern Christianity had been contextualised to solve, the problems of an urban industrialising society. 

The book was written more than 60 years ago, and Africa has changed, as has the West, from which most Christian missionaries to sub-Saharan Africa  came in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was written before the rise of Neopentecostal megachurches, which have modernised African Christianity in ways that Taylor never thought of.

I first read The Primal Vision 1967, and then again four years later. In between those readings I read The Secular City by Harvey Cox, a paean of praise to Western modernity. Where Taylor saw the value of the premodern worldview, in which the world was seen as enchanted and alive, Cox says

Both tribal man and secular man see the world from a particular, socially and historically conditioned point of view. But modern secular man knows it, and tribal man did not. Therein lies the crucial difference. The awareness that his own point of view is relative and conditioned has become for secular man an inescapable component of that point of view.

Both books show how some people, at least, saw these things in the 1960s, but they also worth reading to see how we got to where we are now. View all my reviews

Secret of the Night Ponies (book review)

Secret of the Night Ponies by Joan Hiatt Harlow
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A historical novel set in Newfoundland, Canada in 1965, when people were being encouraged to move off smaller islands and live on the main island, where it was easier for the government to provide infrastructure and services like schools, hospitals, etc. Many ponies were left abandoned on the small islands, where they sometimes starved in winter. Thirteen-year-old Jessie Wheller had taken her own pony to the mainland, but then learned of the fate of some of the others, and urged her friends to join her in doing something about it.

Young Jessie actually has three rescue adventures in the story, first of some people whose boat is wrecked in a storm, then of a younger school friend who is abused by her foster parents. This seems to cram too many adventures into too short a time, but it's fiction, and people who have adventures in fiction usually have more than in real life. Also, her participation in the earlier rescues gives Jessie the confidence that leads her to believe that she and her friends can rescue a whole herd of ponies.

Because of the setting and the age of the main characters I found it rather similar to Anne of Green Gables, and readers who enjoyed the stories of L.M. Montgomery will probably enjoy this one too. It is an exciting adventure story, well told, and gives an interesting glimpse into place and period.

View all my reviews

Speaking ill of the dead

What did your pastor preach on today?

That was a post I saw yesterday on exTwitter.

I was the one who preached yesterday in our small congregation in Atteridgeville. Since we use the old calendar, I preached on St Simeon the Stylite and the Ecclesiastical New Year, remarking that in our part of the world it coincides with spring, and that is appropriate for the beginnings of things. 

On the way home after the service we stopped to take photos of the camel's foot trees in bloom, which is always one of the first signs of spring in our part of the world.

Out of curiosity I looked at the comments on the exTwitter post, and found that almost every one of them was about whether the preacher in their church preached on, or mentioned Charlie Kirk. Some of them said that they were never going back to that church because the preacher had not preached on Charlie Kirk.

Until last week I had never heard of Charlie Kirk. The first I heard of him was a bunch of angry posts on social media saying that he was a terrible person who said terrible things and deserved to die.

So that was the first thing I learned about Charlie Kirk: that a lot of people didn't like him, and didn't like the things he said, and thought he deserved to die.

After reading a bunch of posts in this vein I came a couple of others that said he was a fine upstanding young man and that he didn't deserve to die. 

So there were the second, third and fourth things I learned about Charlie Kirk: that some people admired him, that he was young, and that he was dead.

And then more messages appeared about his wife and children, and the manner of his death, and so on.  

Now Charlie Kirk wasn't the only one to die last week. He wasn't even the only one to die violently. In the same week we had heard about 11 people who died violently on a boat in the Caribbean, shot by the US Navy. And some people had been killed in Ukraine, and some in Gaza, and some in Qatar who were trying to make peace. But none of these others were of any interest to the Twittering classes. Their names, their ages, their opinions, their families, were of no interest to the news media or the Twittering classes. The only one that interested them was Charlie Kirk.

Then I started seeing all sorts of opinions about Charlie Kirk from people who knew no more of Charlie Kirk than I did. I began to get a sense of pressure from social media, that one ought to have an opinion on Charlie Kirk. One ought to be able to say whether he was in heaven or hell. I felt a bit uncomfortable about that; after all, "vengeance is mine says the Lord, I will repay" (Romans 12:19).

If, as some people were saying, Charlie Kirk had said some bad things, then, without judging him as a person, one could at least comment on the things he said. But what did he say? 

People who knew him, who had listened to what he had said or read what he had written, might be able to form a judgement. But I hadn't heard him speak or read what he had written. All I had on social media was third-hand or even more remote -- people who had heard someone else say that he had said something. That's hearsay, not evidence on which one can make a judgement.

I suppose I could do some research.  I could search the web for a speech, writing, utterance or statement he had made, study it and then embark on a critique of his views, opinions or character. I could search for evidence of his actions. But why bother?

Perhaps one should bother because a lot of people seem to think it is important to have an opinion about Charlie Kirk. But is it really? I think it is no more important to have an opinion about Charlie Kirk than it is about the 11 people who died on a boat in the Caribbean. I think that Charlie Kirk no more deserved to die than they did. 

One of the problems of the world, or perhaps one of the things that exacerbates the problems of the world, is this rush to judgement. The perceived need to identify the "good guys" and the "bad guys" in any conflict, what Americans call the "black hats" and the "white hats" (from the old Western movies of the 1930s and 1940s). And social media tend to exaggerate this tendency. It seems that their algorithms are even designed to do so.

As a result, in the conflicts of today there are no good actions or bad actions, only good people and bad people. Genocide is bad if the bad people do it, but good if the good guys do it. Terrorism is bad if the bad guys do it, but good if the good guys do it. As a result the needle of the world's moral compass swings about wildly. An act by those we designate as bad guys is an outrage, and the needle points north. The same act by those we designate as good guys is a brilliant strategic move, and the needle swings around and points south.

For Christians, at least, one way to steady the moral compass is to remember the adage Love the sinner, hate the sin. But I've said more about that here. 

Goodbye to Zoom?

For the last couple of months ominous notes have appeared on my computer whenever I've used the Zoom conferencing app, telling me that Zoom will no longer be supported on my computer after December 2025, and saying I could learn more on their web site. So I went to their web site where I read:

In November 2025, Zoom plans to release the final version of the Zoom Workplace app for Windows 32-bit. The anticipated version number of the final release for Windows 32-bit is the last minor release of 6.6.0. Anyone who is still using a device running on a 32-bit version of Windows must prioritize upgrading to 64-bit.

Well, no, I will not prioritize downgrading to 64-bit with its reduced functionality. The reason I bought a computer running 32-bit Windows is that the 64-bit version will not run several programs that I use every day. The 32-bit version of Windows has this functionality, the 64-bit version lacks it. I use Zoom roughly once a fortnight. So if I am forced to choose between programs I run every day and one that I run once a fortnight, I know what I'll prioritise.

The Zoom page doesn't say that the 32-bit version will stop working after December 2025, it just says that that will be the date on which the last update of the 32-bit version will be released, so I hope it will go on working for some time after that. But I suppose sooner or later someone will introduce something that breaks it, and then it is likely to stop working. 

But I think email mailing lists will still work, and I think they is one of the best means of group communication, and long may it continue. If you'd like to keep in touch by that means, come and join us in the Offtopic forum, where stuff that is off-topic in more specialised online forums may be freely discussed. To learn more, click here!

A Literary Mystery

 Now here is a literary mystery that puzzles me, and if you are reading this I hope you might try to help me solve it, especially if you enjoy reading books and use the GoodReads web site.

I've written four novels, three for children and one for adults, and some people who've read them have written reviews and posted them on the GoodReads web site. If a book on the GoodReads web site gets ten or more ratings (books are rated with from one to five stars), it gets a list of other books attached -- "readers who enjoyed this book also enjoyed".

I was hoping to see such lists for my books, partly because I thought that if people who enjoyed my books liked them, I might like them too. And also because, knowing what readers of my books liked could help me to know what kind of books I should write in future. So I was very pleased when one of my books, The Enchanted Grove, got the required 10 ratings and I could see what other books its readers liked.

But the result was weird:

 

 I can't imagine any readers of my books liking those two books, which I've never heard of. So if you've read The Enchanted Grove,  or any others of my books, and rated them on GoodReads, please let me know if you're read either of those two.

 

Also, if you've read any of my books and have not rated them on GoodReads I'd be very grateful if you would rate them, and better still, write a review, and check to see if any of your favourite books appear on this list.

 

What I think may have happened is this: I got a couple of spammy emails from people asking for a link to my book. I gave them a link, and then a couple of reviews appeared. Both were filled with fulsome praise for the book which I was pretty sure were written by AI, and that the people who had posted these reviews had not read the book at all. It looks like some kind of scam to get the two books shown above listed on my book's page as a means of promoting them. The implication is that most of the readers of The Enchanted Grove had those two books as their favourites, which I find very hard to believe. 

 

If you haven't read The Enchanted Grove, and would like to, you can find out more about it, including where to get a copy, here.