27 October 2011

The Swan thieves - book review

The Swan ThievesThe Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


A psychiatrist, Andrew Marlow, has a patient, Robert Oliver, who attacked a painting in an art gallery with a knife. Oliver will not speak, and so to try to understand him Marlow visits and interviews people who had known Oliver, to try to understand his behaviour. As he uncovers more of Oliver's past, he finds it leads back into art history, and the history of the Impressionists in France.

In a way, the book follows a formula that has been used by other authors, such as Robert Goddard -- a mystery in the present whose answer is to be found in something that happened in the past.

I don't think it's qute up to the standard of the best of Goddard, but it's a lot better than his worst, and the pace is a bit more leisurely. It's the kind of book you can spin out, reading a chapter or two at bed time.



View all my reviews

SA Blogging Awards

Just got a message to say that the SA Blogging Awards close today. I didn't realise they had opened because Telkom had reduced our bandwidth without informing us, and so we were without Web access for four days. Not that it makes much difference, because the SA Blogging Awards are just as narrow-minded this year as they were last year.

The categories to enter have been simplified this year, and are as follows:

  • Best Business / Political Blog
  • Best Entertainment / Lifestyle Blog
  • Best Environmental Blog
  • Best Fashion Blog
  • Best Food & Wine Blog
  • Best Music Blog
  • Best Photographic Blog
  • Best Science and Technology Blog
  • Best Sport Blog
  • Best Travel Blog

Please choose a category which best fits your blog.
None of my blogs, nor any of the blogs I regularly read, fits into any of those categories. The organisers seem to have a very blinkered view of human life. Or is is just me?

As far as I can see there are huge swathes of human life and experience (which is what most blogs are about) missing from the list. I think quite a large number of the missing ones are covered by the H*U*M*A*N*I*T*I*E*S. As, of course, are the categories in Digg, which I avoid for the same reason.

I really think that blogging awards thingies should not be run by technogeeks. For them things like art, literature, history and religion simply do not exist.

Is there anything else you can see that has been left out?

20 October 2011

This is what Occupy Wall Street is all about

The 1% steal 99% of the money and get 1% of the jail time. The 99% steal 1%of the money and get 99% of the jail time (or something like that!)

19 October 2011

Historical revisionism on the First Crusade

As a student I must have had to write at least six essays on the First Crusade -- in Hitory I and History I, in Church History I and Church History II and in several other courses. It seemed to be a favourite topic with lecturers, and now along comes a historian who seems to be telling them that they all got it all wrong. Hat-tip, once again, to The Pittsford Perennialist: Crusade Revisionism

Historian Peter Frankopan is challenging a millennium of scholarship in his view of the First Crusade | The Australian:
FOR a thousand years the idea of the crusade has defined nations and empires, justified wars and acts of terrorism and inspired everyone from medieval minstrels to Ridley Scott.

But is all that potency built on a misunderstanding? New historical research suggests that the campaign that became known as the First Crusade was not a religious war, was not started by the Pope, was not really about regaining Jerusalem and was actually a direct result of a little local difficulty in modern day Turkey [sic].

15 October 2011

Where child sacrifice is a business

A few years ago there was quite a lot of publicity in the media about allegations of "ritual abuse", especially of children, and the general conclusion seemed to be that this was an urban legend cooked up by religious crazies, and that had been completely debunked. Nevertheless there have continued to be reports of ritual murder in various parts of the world.

Now (hat tip to The Pittsford Perennialist: In Defense of Witch Trials) it seems that they are focusing on Uganda: BBC News - Where child sacrifice is a business:
The villages and farming communities that surround Uganda's capital, Kampala, are gripped by fear.

Schoolchildren are closely watched by teachers and parents as they make their way home from school. In playgrounds and on the roadside are posters warning of the danger of abduction by witch doctors for the purpose of child sacrifice.

The ritual, which some believe brings wealth and good health, was almost unheard of in the country until about three years ago, but it has re-emerged, seemingly alongside a boom in the country's economy.

The report, however, is slightly misleading, with its mention of "witchdoctors".

Witchdoctors are those whose job is to counter witchcraft, not to practise it.

Witchdoctors who engage in such activities are like policemen who take part in bank robberies and vehicle hijackings -- they find it more lucrative to practise crime than to catch criminals. We should be careful not to give the impression that those are part of the job description.

I would also take issue with The Pittsford Perrennialist on the question of witch trials. The witch trials of the Great European Witchhunt were largely based on false accusations, made for the same reasons as those engagecd in child sacrifice in Uganda and other places today -- greed and covetousness. The accused were accused of Satanism, but the accusers were actually far more satanic, because the main characteristic of the satan in Christian theology is the making of false accusations.

For more on witch trials, witch hunts and witchcraft accusations, see my article on Christian Responses to Witchcraft and Sorcery.

In addition to revelations about child sacrifice in Uganda, there is also the news that the US is now sending troops to Uganda. Perhaps it has something to do with allAfrica.com: Uganda: Scramble for Minerals Begins:
The revelations come shortly after an aerial survey report confirmed that Uganda is endowed with copper, iron ore, cobalt, tin, gold as well as platinum.

There is anticipation for Foreign Direct Investment in the mineral exploration sector in the Great Lakes region as China looks for raw materials to oil its growing economy.

China's entry into Africa is seen as catalyst for renewed interest in Africa by the European Union and US to undermine China's emerging influence due its non-political interference policy on investments in Africa and the potential for monopoly access to energy and mineral resources.


Another hat-tip to The Pittsford Perennialist: Another War?.

14 October 2011

Whiteness revisited -Foreskin Man and Vulva Girl

I recently discovered a new academic discipline, or pseudo-discipline, called "Whiteness Studies", through some friends who appear to take it seriously.

From what I've been able to see, it this discipline proposes to cure racism by encouraging racist thinking, which, it seems to me, is a bit like an alcoholic thinking that the cure for his craving is another drink.

If any of this interests you, I've written a series of four blog posts on it, here:

Comments welcome, there or here.

I thought I'd written enough on it, but someone posted something on Facebook that made me change my mind: Foreskin Man and Vulva Girl Team Up to Battle Circumcision in Africa:
Foreskin Man and Vulva Girl Team Up to Battle Circumcision in Africa

Male and female circumcision collide in Foreskin Man #3 when America’s most controversial superhero attempts a daring rescue in the jungles of Kenya.

That looks like a rather good candidate for #20 Being an expert on YOUR culture | Stuff White People Like, though with a somewhat different slant on it. That seems to be the essence of Whiteness, as defined by the American discipline of Whiteness Studies.

But I'm getting ahead of the story, which begins here, in a web article someone recommended to me, about Racism 2.0, which is the racism practised by white liberals in the USA Tim Wise | With Friends Like These, Who Needs Glenn Beck? Racism and White Privilege on the Liberal-Left. And, it seems to me, the comic book Foreskin Man and Vulva Girl Team Up to Battle Circumcision in Africa seems to be a good example of Racism 2.0 as practised by white liberals in America. The gallant white superhero, representing enlightened Western values, sets out to rescue the barbaric Africans from their darkness. The cover of the comic says it all.

One of the things that human beings seem to do a lot is modify their bodies. The way they do this varies with different cultures, and as time passes cultures change, and bodily modifications fall in and out of fashion. One such fashion in the USA has been male circumcision. Another, common in the Western world, has been female ear piercing, and in some sub-cultures in the West piercing other parts of the body and sticking safety pins and other objects in the holes. A southern African varient of earpearcing, about 70-80 years ago, involved putting wooden cotton reels in holes in one's earlobes.

Other such practices are knocking out front teeth, tattooing, and lengthening necks and penises. In China there was the practice of foot-binding of girls, because small feet on women were fashionable.

Another thing about this is that bodily modifications that one culture regards as normal seem bizarre and barbaric to people from other cultures.

In the 19th and early 20th century Christian missionaries travelled from Western Europe and North America in large numbers to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ to people in other continents, and they came across many cultural practices that they found strange, and some that they found abhorrent. Among the ones they found abhorrent ones were foot-binding and female circumcision.

In China it was Christian missionaries who founded the Natural Foot Society, to discourage the practice of foot-binding. And in parts of Africa missionaries, who were associated with colonial governments, discouraged female circumcision. In Kenya, where, in the 1920s, all schools were controlled by various religious bodies, some missionaries, led by the Church of Scotland, insisted that all teachers in the schools should take an oath against female circumcision, which was practised by the Kikuyu (Agikuyu) people. This led to the formation of independent African-led educational associations, and eventually contributed to the establishment of the Orthodox Church in Kenya (see Orthodox mission in tropical Africa).

The policy of demanding oaths came back to bite the colonialist missionaries, however, when, about 20 years later, the Mau Mau movement began getting their members to take oaths to fight against the British colonial regime. Suddenly "oath-taking ceremonies" were made illegal, and suspicion that someone had participated in one became sufficient cause for detention without trial. All Kenyan Orthodox clergy were detained.

White Western secular liberals have often been quite vociferous in condemning the way in which Christian missionaries "destroy indigenous culture", but are not averse to doing exactly the same thing when other people's cultural values conflict with their own, and using neocolonial powers to put the squeeze on people who resist.

In a way, I can empathise with those who object to female circumcision. I can still recall the shock and revulsion I felt when I read about it as a teenage schoolboy in a book called Blanket boy's moon by Peter Lanham and A.S. Mopeli-Paulus, which described the practice in Lesotho:

The first night of the (circumcision) school is known as the Marallo, the secret night. This night is spent outside the village in the dongas, where ritual dances are taught and new code names are given to the girls -- so that they can afterwards challenge the claim of any woman who states that she is circumcised.

At Marallo, too, the Khokhobisa-tsoene, or "Hiding-of-the-monkey" is encompassed. The girls are cut with a blade in their outer sexual organs, and a flap of flesh is drawn down to cover that mischievous "monkey" which can be the source of much pleasure to uncircumcised girls. The performance of this rite tends to encourage chastity among the women, for a circumcised girl can know little of the joys and passions of physical love. During this ceremony when the blood flows from the wounded flesh, black magic medicine is rubbed in as a protection against bewitchment.

It can perhaps be said that the circumcision of women not only denies the girl great pleasure and joy in the sexual act, but must in consequence lessen the happiness and exaltation of the man, and thus shut out any upliftment of the spirit -- lying with a woman, then, becomes a selfish rather than a mutual pleasure. Here in the very homeland, in this circumcision of women, lie the seeds of the physical love of man for man, which is brought to flower in the living conditions imposed on African mine workers by the white man.

As a schoolboy I found that more scary even than a description of a ritual murder elsewhere in the book.

But an interesting thing is that though the protest against the Protestant missionaries' attempt to suppress female circumcision was one of the factors that helped the Orthodox Church to grow in Kenya, very few, if any, Orthodox Christians practise female circumcision today, not because of high-handed colonial or neocolonial suppression, but rather as a result of people seeing no need for it within a Christian worldview.


Western cultural imperialism hasn't changed very much. Whether practised by Protestant missionaries or liberal secularists, it looks much the same. And I won't say it doesn't exist in South Africa. There are signs of it, for example when you get white suburbanites objecting to their black neighbours next door ritually sacrificing a goat, but generally I think white racism in South Africa takes different forms from that in North America. The North American version, with Foreskin Man going out to deal with the black savages in far-away places, is perhaps typical of the American version. And Foreskin Man doesn't seem to be interested in rescuing the people his fellow-countrymen drop bombs on, in places like Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq, where they lose a great deal more than their foreskins.

Apart from anything else, to me Foreskin Man and Vulva Girl sound utterly kitsch. But that's probably just my cultural prejudice speaking.

13 October 2011

Before the frost - book review

Before the FrostBefore the Frost by Henning Mankell

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Detective Kurt Wallander's daughter Linda is about to join him on the police force in the town of Ystad in southern Sweden, and while she is waiting to start work Linda re-establishes contact with a couple of old school friends, Anna and Zeba. Then Anna says she thiinks she has seen her father, who had been missing for many years, and shortly afterwards goes missing herself. Linda begins searching for Anna, and thinks her disappearance may be linked to a case her father is working on, of animals that have been cruelly killed and then a murder, that seems to be linked to a religious motive.

Until about halfway through, I thought that this was the best book Henning Mankell had written. The point of view has shifted to Linda Wallander, and we see her father through her eyes, rather than his own rather jaundiced view of the world, and his battles with booze. There seem to be too many boozy policeman novels nowadays.

The second half doesn't hang together too well, and there seems to be too much of the deus ex machina. Perhaps, however, that is more what real police work is like -- strokes of luck and chance happenings.

Despite these faults, however, it is still one of Mankell's better novels.



View all my reviews

11 October 2011

Steve Jobs more popular than Michael Jackson?

At first I was surprised at the way the death of Steve Jobs dominated Twitter and other social media sites. I hadn't seen anything like it since the death of Michael Jackson. Then I thought it was probably because the people I follow on Twitter and similar sites are more interested in computers than in pop music.

But then it seemed that it was actually pretty universal. Millions mourn because he touched the lives of millions.

He didn't really touch my life much, though. At least not in a good way.

I once played some games on an Apple ][ computer that a friend had borrowed from work.

I was an avid reader of computer magazines in those days, and one of the things that they all praised Apple computers for was their open architecture. You could put all kinds of third-party cards in them to make them do things that went far beyond their original design. There was a card that had a Z80 processor on it (remember those?), which made it possible to turn an Apple computer into a CP/M machine, and run all kinds of interesting software.

Then the Apple Mackintosh appeared, and it had a decidedly closed architecture, and I lost interest. I played with one in a shop once, in the days when it was a kind of oblong vertical box with a monochrome screen, decided I didn't like it, and that was the last time I played with an Apple. Oh, there was one other time, when a student whoe thesis I was supervising got an Apple laptop, and we had enormous problems transferringt it back and forth so I could read and comment on it.

More recently we bought a gadget that is supposed to convert audio tapes to digital format. It is basically a tape player that runs off a USB port. It cost R500.00, which was quite expensive for what it is, but I thought it would be useful if I could convert all the tapes I have lying around the house and then toss them out.

When I got it home and opened the box, however, I discovered that the gadget only converted the tapes toApple's iTunes format, which is virtually useless, except for commercially produced music tapes that have "tracks". Most of the tapes that I have are speech, or mixed speech an music. The ones I want to convert are mostly research interviews I recorded for my masters and doctoral theses and other research projects. So I spent R500.00 to convert three music tapes I had, and could have bought the CD versions in a record shop for a lot less. There was nothing on the outside of the box the gadget came in to indicate this limitation.

I think Apple took a massive wrong turn when it switched from an open to a closed architecture.

So, though I agree with John Donne that "any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind" I don't really see Steve Jobs as someone who has benefited me in any way -- rather the reverse. And still less do I see him as a benefactor of mankind. Meet the workers dying to meet your iPad 2 demand
If you're frustrated at being unable to buy an iPad 2, spare a thought for the Chinese workers who may never be able to afford one of the shiny new gadgets but are literally dying to get them out fast enough to meet Western demand.

A new report into conditions at Apple's manufacturing partner, Foxconn, has found slave labour conditions remain, with staff complaining of being worked to tears, exposure to harmful disease, pay rates below those necessary to survive and military-style management that routinely humiliates workers.


Though to be fair, it is not only those who are waiting for an iPad who are contributing to those working conditions. When I booted up my computer this morning, which has no connection with Apple, the first thing that appeared on the screen, in big white letters on a black background, was Foxconn.

So perhaps it is worth quoting the rest of John Donne's meditation from his Devotions upon emergent occasions:

Now this bell tolling softly for another, says to me, Thou must die. Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me and see my state may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that.

The church is catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that head which is my head too, and ingrafted into the body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

As therefore the bell that rings a sermon calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come, so this bell calls us all; but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness. There was a contention as far as a suit (in which piety and dignity, religion and estimation, were mingled) which of the religious orders should ring to prayers first in the morning; and it was determined that they should ring first that rose earliest. If we understand aright the dignity of this bell that tolls for our evening prayer, we would be glad to make it ours by rising early, in that application, that it might be ours as well as his whose indeed it is.

The bell doth toll for him that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God. Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? but who takes off his eye from a comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? but who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world?

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Neither can we call this a begging of misery or a borrowing of misery, as though we are not miserable enough of ourselves but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbors. Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did; for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by it, and made fit for God by that affliction.

If a man carry treasure in bullion, or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current moneys, his treasure will not defray him as he travels. Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, but it is not current money in the use of it, except we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it. Another man may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels as gold in a mine and be of no use to him; but this bell that tells me of his affliction digs out and applies that gold to me, if by this consideration of another's dangers I take mine own into contemplation and so secure myself by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security.


And perhaps that links to Charles Williams's idea of coinherence.

But that is really a topic for another post.

07 October 2011

The adventures of Sherlock Holmes - book review

The Adventures of Sherlock HolmesThe Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This blog has moved. If you and to comment on this post, see here.

 I quite enjoy reading whodunits, and when I saw this volume of short stories about Sherlock Holmes, I thought it might be interesting to read some early examples of the genre.

The narrator is Holmes's friend Dr Watson, who says he is telling the stories to record the remarkable powers and abilities of his friend Sherlock Holmes, and I didn't really enjoy the first couple of stories very much, as the adulation of the sycophantic Watson was jusdt too much. After that, however, it settled down, and by the end Watson was becoming more critical of Holmes. And as Holmes became more human, the stories seemed to become more interesting.

It is interesting to compare 21st century detective stories with those of 130 years ago, Most of the modern protagonists of detective fiction are part of what Holmes called "the official police". He, however, was a private detective, working for a fee, and often solving mysteries and crimes that the police were too unobservant to see. The amateur detective, and the "private eye" seem to have faded from detective fiction after about 1960. Sherlock Holmes was followed by Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, Dorothy Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey, G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown and juvenile equivalents like Nancy Drew and the Hardy boys. But since the 1960s most fictional detectives have been part of the official police.

Another difference is that, for the protagonists of current detective fiction, the only crime they have to deal with is murder. No detective mystery story is complete without a corpse, and preferably two or three, or even more. Sherlock Holmes, however, seems to deal with a much wider variety of crimes, including solving mysteries that aren't really crimes at all.

Another, and more obvious difference is that Sherlock Holmes doesn't have high-tech methods at his disposal. There are no DNA samples, not even fingerprints. Though Holmes is something of an amateur chemist, he doesn't seem to spend any time examining blood or tissue or soil samples from the scene of the crime. His method is to make "deductions" from data.

And this is where things begin to be confusing, because Sherlock Holmes's method is clearly inductive reasoning rather than deductive, yet Conan Doyle persistently refers to it as "deduction".

I wonder how many philosophy students were confused as a result.



View all my reviews

No visa required!


You can't make this stuff up (though perhaps you can photoshop it).

Or is that just an example of entrepreneurship?

My wife sent me this photo -- it's one of thse circulating by e-mail.

Click picture to enlarge if you can't read the writing.

05 October 2011

Whiteness just isn't what it used to be - book review

Whiteness Just Isn't What It Used to BeWhiteness Just Isn't What It Used to Be": White Identity in a Changing South Africa (Suny Series, Interruptions: Border Testimony by Melissa E. Steyn

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


For most of my lifetime obsession with whiteness has dominated South African politics, society, economy and even the landscape. When I heard quite recently that there was an academic discipline called "Whiteness Studies" my immediate reaction was negative. Some of my blogging friends assured me that they had found it useful, and this was one of the books they recommended, and since it was based on stories told by people I found it in the library and began reading it.

Melissa Steyn collected stories from 59 white people in South Africa and divided the narratives into different categories, and commented on the various approaches. This book is the result.

The first chapter is a kind of potted history of "Whiteness Studies" and the various view its practitioners have taken to the phenomenon of "whiteness" in a global sense. In part it deals with the fairly well-known phenomenon of Western modernity, where Westerners (mainly from Western Europe and North America) thought that their society was central and normative, and others quaint and peculiar and exotic. So, for example, Western anthropologists confined their studies to non-Western cultures (and often did so in the service of colonial rulers). The proponents of Whiteness Studies call this kind of cultural chauvinism "whiteness". But even after reading Steyn's book, I am not convinced of the adequacy of the description, and I find that Steyn herself falls into the same cultural chauvinist trap by not disclosing where she is coming from, and pretending to be "objective", even when she is aware of the dangers of that approach.

The main manifestation of this in the book is that, while the bulk of the book is devoted to the the analysis of people's responses to Steyn's questionnaire, the questions that elicited those responses are not revealed to the reader. If this forms the bulk of the book, then surely the questions themselves could have been put in an appendix. Apart from anything else, that might give readera a chance to try to answer the questions too, and try to analyse their own responses.

In addition, while Steyn collected 59 narratives, these narrators are not really allowed to tell their own story. Steyn is the only narrator, setting the scene, telling the story, and pulling a quotation, sometimes as short as a single sentence, to illustrate the point in her story. So I get the impression of a stage magician, displaying tricks to an audience, with the quotations from the stories being pulled out like a rabbit from a hat or a coin from the sleeve at the appropriate moment, with only Steyn really knowing what is going on behind the scenes.

For instance, there is this:

Such is the fear of being perceived to be aligned with what is morally reproachable that even to talk about "race" could implicate one in racism. The topic is a no-no:

"Whites can never know how blacks were affected by Apartheid. [computer analyst] "

At first sight, this seems to be a complete non-sequitur. It certainly doesn't seem to be an instance of race being a "no--no", because it mentions race ("whites", "blacks") and the relations between them ("Apartheid"). Either Steyn is misrepresenting the narrator, or she is interpreting it in the light of its context, which she has failed to quote, and this is withheld from the reader.

Taken on its own, the sentence can be interpreted in a variety of ways, of which the most likely (it seems to me), is that since, because of Apartheid, whites were separated from blacks, they could not know how blacks were affected by apartheid because they were kept isolated, and whites could not see what was happening, and their was little comparable in their experience. For instance, if a black man died in town, his wife and children, if they were allowed to live in the town at all, would be endorsed out to a "homeland" because they became surplus to the labour requirements of white society. Much of this was invisible to most whites, and so they did not know and could not know the extent to which this took place, nor what it was like do be endorsed out and forced to go and live in a rural area where you knew no one.

Maybe the context shows that the narrator meant something different, but Steyn does not show us the context.

Similarly, Steyn castigates those she regards as adopting a liberal "colourblind" approach, saying that they are "in denial", yet when, in another section of the book, she cites an example of that approach, she praises it.

The Apartheid system tried to make me think about "white" in a certain way and about "black" in another way. I strive to define my own reality and I try to avoid being hamstrung by other people's projections. [lecturer]


Steyn says "Whatever whiteness may have meant in the past, this narrative perks up in tone when it considers what may develop now that whiteness has lost its power to dominate."

Yet elsewhere she says that to claim that whiteness has lost its power to dominate is to be in denial. The difference, if any, isd hidden behind the stage magician's black cloth that she pulls away to reveal the rabbit in the hat.

One of the narratives, however, I could identify with:

I have discovered that, despite apartheid, I have more in common with black South Africans than with other whites, be they British, Dutch, French or American... When I first went overseas in 1986 I thought because of my colonial British background I would find Britain home. Instead I became increasingly aware that I was not British, and that I was African. This is how I came to see myself as a white African. [lecturer]


I wrote something very similar in a blog post at What is African? Race and identity | Khanya long before I had ever heard of "whiteness studies".

Steyn summarises the argument of the Introduction in her conclusion
In the Introduction, whiteness has been theorized as the racial norm, the invisible center that deflects attention from itself by racializing the margins, and constructing them as the problem. Whiteness then believes in its own homogeneous neutrality. Whites are then described [in the Introduction - STH] as generally unaware of their own racialization, unconscious of their privilege, or of how their implicit assumptions of white entitlement are a consequence of certain historical relations, not something essential about whiteness itself.


I'd go along with that, especially where North America is concerned (and Steyn wrote the book while living in North America). South Africa, however, is somewhat different. Whiteness was anything but unconscious.

But it appears that Steyn was also suffering from the same disease.

On page 26, writing of English-speaking South Africans' attitudes towards poor rural Afrikaners, she writes, "Like ethnic working class whites and partially racialized groups in America, Afrikaners had to 'fight' for the status of first class citizens."

"Ethnic working class" what are they? Just as "whiteness" is invisible to the dominant white group in America, so is ethnicity. "Ethnic" whites are the "other", the "them". And Steyn uses that terminology without batting an eyelid, withouit scare quotes, without even the almost obligatory [sic] used in some academic writing when politically incorrect language comes up. But Steyn is not quoting, she is using the terminology herself, thus identifying with those who believe they have no ethnicity, and manifesting "ethnic blindness".

Perhaps I might have read this book differently if I had read it before engaging in a discussion on whiteness studies with some others (see Whiteness, whiteliness and White Studies | Khanya).

And one of the biggest problems I have with this book is that it seems to be saying that even if we have deconstructed whiteness, and dumped it, we must now reconstruct it in order to deconstruct it again, like Sisyphus. It's a bit like a child being told by its mother, "You must have a bath tonight, whether you need it or not." And the proponents of whiteness studies seem to be saying "You must have an identity crisis, whether you need one or not."

One thing I will say, though. I didn't find it boring. It was a page-turner.



View all my reviews

Zuma sells SA sovereignty to stop two old men having a party

The pettiness of the refusal of the government to give a visa to the Dalai Lama to stop two old men having a party puts us back to square one.

As Mamphela Ramphele puts it Ramphele backs Tutu on Dalai Lama - Times LIVE:
"Isn't it ironic, that when he's celebrating his 80th birthday, the most fundamental right -- the right to association -- is being taken away from him?

"He can't have a party with his friends and they are just old men," Ramphele said on Monday evening at a candlelight vigil outside Parliament to put pressure on the government to grant the visa.

That's exactly the kind of petty nastiness one had come to expect from the National Party government. And it's worse, because our constitution now upholds the rights to freedom of religion, freedom of travel, and freedom of association -- all of which are trashed by this act. The old National Party was not as cynically hypocritical as that. They made no bones about it -- any foreign religious leader was a persona non grata, and found it very difficult to get a visa. And any Nobel Peace Prize winner, domestic or foreign, was the same, and so the combination would not have much hope.

I suggest that any Southern African religious bodies hosting international conferences to which foreign religious leaders may be invited should seriously think of moving the venue to Botswana or Namibia, or they may find that their speakers are unable to attend. That would include the congress of the Southern African Missiological Society, due to be held in January 2012.

The petty spitefulness of stopping two pensioners having a party, however, is overshadowed by the implications for South African sovereignty. Zuma, who was elected ANC leader by promising to be all things to all men and courting universal popularity, is now finding that popularity gurgling down the drain, and trying to shore it up by disciplinary hearings of his most vociferous critics, but not daring to contradict his (and our) colonial masters.

As a student I sometimes enjoyed listening to Radio Peking (as it was spelt in those days), denouncing US imperialism as "a paper tiger, a bean curd tiger". But Chinese imperialism seems to be lapping up South Africa like bean curd.

The Dalai Lama visited South Africa when Nelson Mandela was president, and again when Thabo Mbeki was president. Why not now? And above all, why stop him from coming to Desmond Tutu's brithday party?

Sleepless night

Our son Simon usually rides to work on his bike at about 3:30 pm. We drive to fetch him and bike when he finishes work at 10:00 pm (he works at a bookshop in a shopping mall) because it's more dangerous riding a bike at night.

Last night he phoned to say he would be late -- he had to wait in the shop while some workmen put up a shelf, so he rode back on his bike when they were finished, arriving about 1:30 am. We were woken by the dogs barking to welcome him come. And about 20 minutes later there were two shots and the white of ricocheting bullets, quite close. We were glad that he got home before that. It set the dogs off barking again, and we looked out of the window, but couldn't see anyone.

But after being woken twice within half an hour, I couldn't get back to sleep. Now it's just after 9:00 am, and I feel sleepy.

02 October 2011

First rains

I'm sitting here listening to the rain thumping on the roof, some hail, too.

First real rain of the season. There was some last night and this morning, not enough to make run-off and puddles, just enough to make the roads slippery, and cause accidents. We were held up by one on the N1 at the Olifantsfontein Road exit this morning and arrived at church halfway through Matins. It seemed a bad one, involving at least three vehicles, and there were ambulances, so some people were probably injured. Lord have mercy.

And it's been raining heavily for at least 10 minutes now. Reminds me I need to get the lawnmower serviced, but it should make the weeds easier to pull.

LinkWithin

Related Posts with Thumbnails