People who idolised him not so long ago — and indeed propelled him to the highest office in the land — have now become his harshest critics. Nobody was more passionate about Zuma than Cosatu’s Zwelinzima Vavi.

But last week Vavi was warning of a coming predator state headed by “powerful, corrupt and demagogic political hyenas” using the state to enrich themselves and their families. Comparing a person to a hyena is the crudest form of insult.

Hyenas are ugly, devious, cowardly things which often feed on other animals’ prey. They are scavengers. Many cultures have a negative view of the hyena, often associating it with gluttony, uncleanliness and cowardice.

In African folklore, witches and sorcerers are believed to ride hyenas at night. Clement of Alexandria noted in Paedagogus that the hyena was “quite obsessed with sexual intercourse” and some Europeans used to associate the hyena with sexual deformity, prostitution and deviant sexual behaviour.

The word hyena is apparently derived from the Greek hyaina which means “pig”, and has an association with treachery and greed.

I’m not sure if Vavi’s choice of a hyena to make his point was deliberate or off the cuff. Nobody seems to have a kind word for Zuma these days . Thabo Mbeki must be chuckling.

But events under Zuma’s non-leadership are no laughing matter. The country is reaping what the likes of Vavi have sown . Nobody championed Zuma’s cause with more vigour than Vavi. He raised him from the dead, figuratively speaking. Now the tsunami has turned out to be a murky pond whose stillness merely reflects the paucity of ideas and lack of vision.

Zuma’s ascent to power was supposed to have led to the ultimate comradely nirvana, with the communists and the unions having sole proprietorship of his nose and his ear. It hasn’t turned out that way, as Vavi has attested. Hell, it seems, hath no fury like a trade unionist scorned. But if even Zuma, that likable malleable, cannot be the glue that holds the alliance together, who can?

The constitution allows the president to serve two terms. If Zuma is denied a second term, it would mean none of the presidents since 1994 would have finished two terms in office. Nelson Mandela stood down voluntarily; Mbeki was forcibly removed by the very people now baying for Zuma’s blood.

That suggests there’s something fundamentally wrong with the way we elect our leaders. In fact they are elected by a small coterie, on whose mood swings the country’s fate thus depends. It cannot be right, for instance, that politicians, perhaps against their better judg ment , sheepishly kowtow to the moronic exigencies of the ANC Youth League simply because it can make or break their careers. It is as humiliating to them as it is dangerous for the country.

The crucial issue is lack of democracy within the ANC, and a system that forbids the public from directly electing its leaders. The ANC’s deployment policy and its so-called anti-careerism stance mean that people with leadership ambitions are either coy about, or discouraged from, throwing their hat into the ring. It’s left to a few individuals to act as kingmakers. Which is why a flawed candidate such as Zuma was able to triumph.

The ANC should ditch its Stalinist mentality and embrace democracy. Leaders with impeccable credentials will then emerge.

And the case for ordinary citizens to directly elect their leaders, including their president, in a democracy is incontrovertible. It needs no argument.

Whilst I was there, my sense of cynicism at the state of South Africa – politically, judicially, economically and socially – was given a brief reprieve. In the weeks preceding my week-long trip, we witnessed xenophobic violence, blatant attacks on our country’s judiciary, political rhetoric by the ANCYL, the SACP, COSATU, and perhaps most tellingly, the ANC, ‘warning’ of a threat by ‘counter-revolutionaries’ (does this remind you Mad Bob’s talk of Tony Blair’s – now Gordon Brown’s – and Britain’s undying quest for a re-colonisation of Zimbabwe), and the now infamous words of the young, mischievous, and sometimes too passionate Julius Malema – OH, the intemperance of youth!

Prior to my trip I was entering into a slough of cynicism, depression and despondency. How could I not? We face so many obstacles that we have to, that we must, overcome. The people in charge, our political leaders (or as they should perhaps be reminded, our political representatives), however, seem determined to ‘lead’ us into the abyss. As succinctly put by Plato: ‘It is the punishment of those who are too intelligent to engage in politics, to be governed by those who do’.

HOWEVER, notwithstanding this – the onslaught of incompetence, the signs of an impending totalitarian state and the ANC’s recently expressed desire to ‘regulate’ the judiciary – my week long participation in a Moot Competition involving some of the best legal students from around the continent, inspired me to think of a future in which not only South Africa, but indeed the African continent, is able to give effect to, what time has now seemingly rendered, the fictitious principles of democracy and human rights.

Throughout the week I engaged in discussion with fellow students whose views, insights and ideas astounded me. Their brilliance truly gives me hope for the future. It gives me hope that if properly utilised and facilitated, if allowed to bloom without ‘regulation’ and with the freedom that any successful democracy so desperately requires, the current generation of despots that plague the continent of Africa will, as so eloquently said by Deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke, be the last that we have to suffer.

HOWEVER, on returning home, sick with flu, vulnerable and susceptible to the old and familiar enemy of cynicism, I began reading the newspapers. I had been inoculated from the happenings of South Africa whilst in Pretoria, fortunately or otherwise, and when trudging my way through the papers of the week gone by, the immensity of the task ahead of us was truly illuminated. In paraphrasing the words of Jody Kollapen, Commissioner of the SAHRC, itself recently subjected to an attack by the ruling elite: “We are a country of staggering highs, but we are also a country of depressing lows”. The future may seem bleak. It may seem without hope. BUT I cannot, I will not, accept that our future is predetermined. I must believe that we as a people, individually and collectively, can escape the horrors that Zimbabwe is now suffering. For without hope we have nothing. We all have the potential, the capacity and the ability to make a difference. My means of trying to make a difference shall be through the use of the law. How will you make a difference?

By Ian Macdonald (SA Goodnews)

Here we go again. For the umpteenth time, the issue of whether the Springbok, as the emblem for the South African national rugby side, should be scrapped is once again being debated. The poor old Bok has emerged from these debates before, bloodied and in need of intensive care. This time, however, it looks terminal. By the time you read this, it could be dead.

My initial reaction, as a rugby mad South African who has supported the Bokke since my childhood, is one of despair and of anger. It is a symbol that means so much to me. To me, it represents South Africa as world beaters. To me, it represents my national pride.

But to many South Africans it represents something else entirely. To many, it represents our divided past, Afrikaner entitlement and/or white arrogance.

In short, it embodies what is right and what is wrong in our complex nation.

When I read the news articles that quote South Africans who are opposed to the retention of the emblem, I get a sense of why the Springbok is endangered.

“The Springbok divides us. We have a responsibility to unite our country on one national emblem… I want you to observe the arrogance of white people over the Springbok emblem,” says controversial chairman of Parliament’s sports portfolio committee Butana Komphela.

“Many people now see Mandela’s (gesture of reconciliation at the 1995 World Cup final)  as a mistake,” Qasim Bhorat, a team doctor for the Soweto rugby club, is quoted as saying in an article in the UK’s Guardian newspaper. “This is the last stand of the Afrikaner. They believe rugby belongs to them and they don’t want to give it up.”

As so often happens in South Africa, the real issue is about race. A lot of white South Africans, rightly or wrongly, feel relatively powerless in the South Africa of today, disadvantaged, marginalised and unable to make an impact in the politics of the land. Rugby – and the Springbok emblem – has assumed a massive role in defining white South African culture. For many, it’s what they have left.

Taking away something that they hold so dear would be a massive blow, a blow to their very psyche and, instead of uniting the country, I think it would further polarise white and black South Africans. But here’s the rub: I think that whites, not politicians, are to blame.

It was Mandela’s magnificent gesture in 1995 that showed the power of reconciliation. It couldn’t have been easy for Madiba, but it paid off handsomely. It showed his willingness to compromise for the greater good of South Africa. But how have whites responded? How have they compromised? I don’t think that white South Africans have given much in return and if they have, then it is been under duress and with reluctance.

Nowhere is this more apparent that in our rugby stadiums when the Springboks are playing. While, thankfully, the old South African flag is no longer being waved in our rugby stadiums, listening to the anthem being sung before Test matches is revealing. The “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrica” part is barely audible as the crowd mumbles its way through it, but the anthem comes to life during the singing of “Die Stem“. This is another example of many white South Africans’ appalling response to the spirit of compromise that made our peaceful transition to democracy possible.

White South Africans will point to the national jubilation and sense of national unity following the 1995 and the 2007 World Cup victories. They will talk about the crowds at the national victory parades that represented  the full spectrum of our rainbow nation. It’s one of the most powerful brands in world rugby; it’s worth a fortune! Black South Africans wear the Springbok jersey in shopping malls on the day of the big game! We have a black Springbok coach, for goodness sake, and the team that thumped Australia 53-8 earlier this year had six black Springboks in the starting line-up…

But while those arguments have definite merit, it’s just not enough. For the Springbok to be maintained, white South Africans have to do more to show that we are capable of compromise too.

Of course, I am making massive generalisations and I know that there are many white South Africans who have embraced these realities. But as a collective, and it pains me to say this, white South Africans are responsible for the death of the Springbok.

For me, it’s a clarion call for white South Africans. Getting rid of the Springbok will address the symptom and not the cause, but it is an indication that Khompela et al have lost patience and are using the Springbok to strike at the heart of white South Africa. It is a powerful statement and it is meant to hurt.

I hope that my beloved Springbok lives to fight another day. I still believe it could play an important role in South Africa’s progress, as a source of national pride and of our reconciliation between our people. I still believe that it could become the symbol that binds us rather than divides, a constant reminder of what we are capable of.

It may be too late to do anything to save the Springbok now; the horse may have already bolted. Whatever the outcome, I hope we can learn the lessons that are there to be learnt.

Black South Africans have shown incredible patience, magnanimity and a willingness to compromise.  But that patience is starting to wear thin. The more white South Africans resist the changes that need to happen in South Africa and in our hearts, the more we will be marginalised and the more we stand to lose.

(Source: South Africa: The Good News)

One of the untold stories about language is the large percentage of Xhosa learners in former coloured schools and the ways in which they adapt their language skills. Research done at Wesbank, one of the newest townships in Cape Town, showed that the ongoing migration from the rural areas to its cities is exerting strong changes on the language practices of the young, as they learn to cope with new living spaces where languages and cultures converge.

Wesbank, established in 1999, was one of the first formal low-cost housing developments in the new South Africa, where groups formerly housed separately by law could live together. It consists of small housing units, a high school, three primary schools and a supermarket, but there are no public amenities such as a community centre, parks or sports fields. Despite the provision of housing and basic services, the community is still characterised by poverty with unemployment higher than 61%. Of approximately 29,000 people, 73% are mixed-race, mainly Afrikaans-speaking Coloured people, 25% are Xhosa people and a further 2% are White, Asian or from Somalia, Nigeria and the Congo.

It can be argued that everyone in Wesbank is a migrant from elsewhere, and that

each member of this ‘created’ community now has to negotiate her own group, this new space and an individual identity within it. New social networks have had to be created, and people have had to learn to cope very quickly with the languages used within communal areas.

The ways inhabitants devise to function within such a variety of languages and cultures have been described by academics as transidiomatic  and transcultural practices to draw attention to the constant processes of borrowing, bending and blending of languages into new modes of expression. They have also broadened the notion of multilingualism to mean not only what people can or cannot speak, but what their environment enables or disables them to speak. Different areas in Cape Town which have developed distinct linguistic profiles may have different enabling and disabling effects on the language use of its migrants.

Many of the older Wesbank inhabitants expressed to our research team the challenges faced by them as parents around family cohesion, parental control and the exercise of traditional practices and values. These parents felt alienated in the new township and referred to the rural areas where they were coming from as a “heartland” and strongly identified with it as an idealised place. Even the teenage respondents did not feel an association with their urban township, stressing their migration from the Eastern Cape and the particular village that they were coming from. The strong rural links that families retain through traveling back and forth during Easter, Christmas or for family events, contribute to the continuing vitality of their Xhosa. They believe rural Xhosa to be of ‘deeper’ and ‘purer’ variety than the ‘light’ urban version.

Despite these close rural bonds, the rural variety of Xhosa soon shows signs of being modified. Adolescents and teenagers find themselves attracted to the urban slang spoken by the city youngsters, whom they respectfully call “amajoin”- people who come from the urban to the rural area for a visit. The term itself is a blend of Xhosa (“ama” meaning person or persons) and English (join) and literally means ‘those who join or link the cities with the rural areas’. The older members of the community maintain that “amajoin” was not always a term of respect, but was used to label those who dropped out of school in rural areas and then had to go to the cities to make a living. Over the years the meaning had changed into somebody to envy.

Once the rural children arrive in the urban areas, they prefer to use what they already know of the urban varieties in order not to be marked as “ibharu” (Afrikaans word baar meaning uncivilized) someone backward. But although the urban vernacular is rapidly making inroads into the rural varieties, the positive attitude towards the rural variety persists.

At Wesbank High School, one-third of the learners are Xhosa mother-tongue speakers. Most of them learn Xhosa as their first language and English as their second language, while a minority chooses English as first language and Afrikaans as second language. The vernacular spoken by the Xhosa learners shows increasing signs of code-mixing with Afrikaans and English:

Ek sê (Afrikaans for ‘I say’) bafobethu! . . . . molweni ni alright?  (Hi guys, how are you, are you alright?)

Ku grand akhoneks (adapted from the Afrikaans ‘niks’, meaning ‘nothing’)

(Fine no problem.)

The above conversation is an example of what I would classify as Flaaitaal (the language of city slickers) as opposed to Tsotsitaal. The term “Transtaal” is perhaps even more apt given the strong evidence of borrowing and blending that are so typical of  transidiomatic and transcultural practices.

Among Grade 8 learners a close personal identification with Xhosa was found:

IsiXhosa sabalulekile kubantubamaXhosa ngo xasisenza amasiko siye sithethe isiXhosa sethu esisifumana emabeleni oomamabethu, xasithe tha ezilwimi ziminzi abazali bethu abakhulu abasiva. (Xhosa is important to the people of the Xhosa because our Xhosa we get from the breast of our mothers. When we are speaking these many languages the elders do not hear us.)

This example of a pupil newly arrived in Cape Town, shows her knowledge of correct Xhosa sentence formation, idiomatic expression and Xhosa culture.

IsiXhosa sibdulekile ngukuba ekhaya sisebenzisa sona kunye nasecaweni sisebensisaso and isiXhosa ndisincanebeleni linamawam. (Xhosa is important because it is our home language and we use it at church as well.)

This pupil has been in Cape Town for at least a year. His language use is beginning to show evidence of code switching (the use of ‘and’), and there are more errors in spelling and grammar, particularly, at the level of concord.

IsiXhosa sibaluleke ngokuba Umntu wesiXhosa asazi ngoba awonukwazi ukuba uthi

ungumXhosa phakathi kwabanye abaXhosa ube uthetha elinye ilwimi luhlazo kutho

oko. (You can’t be a Xhosa person among the other Xhosa speakers if you speak

another language, that will be a disgrace.)

This pupil has been in Cape Town for approximately four years. There is again

evidence of concord errors as well as the abbreviation of the negative form. The

normal word order has been dramatically simplified, with certain prefixes simply

omitted.

More evidence of how surroundings enable or disable the language knowledge of learners came forward during individual interviews.

L. is a Grade 10 learner who arrived in the Western Cape in 2005. His mother, a matriculant, works as a security guard. L. says that he uses Xhosa in his dreams and when speaking to himself. Xhosa predominates at home, but he feels comfortable using English and Tsotsitaal (mixed with some Afrikaans) with his Xhosa and Coloured friends. But he may not use any Afrikaans in front of his mother, because she doesn’t like the language. Xhosa is the dominant language at his church, he reports that Afrikaans and English are also used to accommodate non- Xhosa-speaking congregants. He speaks Xhosa to his girlfriends.

A. is another Grade 10 learner, arrived in the Western Cape in 2003. Her parents both

completed high school. Her father works as a security guard. A. reports using Xhosa

when talking to herself, but ‘with my family of eight people, we mix all three

languages, English, Afrikaans and Xhosa. My father is the one who speaks

Afrikaans more than the rest of us’. At the shops in Wesbank, she uses English, She

also uses English in her interaction with Coloured friends, but ‘. . . some Afrikaans

gets mixed in as well’. At church English is the dominant language, although some hymns are in Xhosa.

What we observe in these narratives is how a particular urban environment can lead to a kind of truncated multilingualism in which linguistic competencies are organized topically on the basis of domains or specific activities. This does not mean that all people are fully competent in all the different languages they use. For example, a teenager may have picked up urban slang in one language from his peers, but be unable to interact in that language when talking to an older family member.

In general positive attitudes of black communities towards English were confirmed when Grade 9 pupils provided reasons why they feel good about English:

. ‘It helps me to communicate with others’;

. ‘It’s important to find work’;

. ‘It will change my life by leading me to employment’;

. ‘I feel very good about English. Xhosa is my home language and is good for

me and my culture. About English I feel like a White man, rich and not

poor . . . I can say this language is the best’;

. ‘I can’t go anywhere without English. It is important to use it overseas. English

is the no.1 language for communication’;

. ‘English is important because there are so many languages here in South

Africa we need to understand each other so we can communicate in English’.

The references to English were mainly outwardly directed, to the bigger, different, outside spaces where the language appears most dominant. The pervading view of English in Wesbank was as an instrument of spatial and social mobility which could move them out of the township and situations of poverty.

Language shift and loss are always part of a wider pattern of economic dispersion and social shifts, and it is therefore very likely that the continued migration from the rural areas to the cities currently underway in South Africa, will continue to strongly affect people’s patterns of language use and attitudes.

(Prof Charlyn Dyers teaches in the Department of Linguistics, University of Western Cape)

In the depths of the country I opened an e-mail from Prof. Njabulo Ndebele inviting me to a Dialogue between four young South African novelists and Ariel Dorfman, the world-acclaimed Chilean-American author on Suspect Reconciliation to take place three days later at the Fugard Theatre.   There was something in his personal tone and the quality of the invitation that compelled me to change plans, take a plane from Port Elizabeth to be there, believing that, that it is surely suspect if we think we have achieved Reconciliation yet  After three hundred years of colonialism and oppression it will take a little longer.

In his attached “Thought Piece”  Ndebele observes that:  “Reconciliation seemed to transform minimal loss (the previous oppressors lost very little materially) and minimal gain (the previously oppressed gained minimally) into the impression of universal gain.”

A false impression, because minimal gain has, in fact, “rendered the previously oppressed vulnerable to permanent poverty”. And, “while continuing poverty might be embarrassing for a liberation movement now in power, it may also turn out to be a convenient advantage … Especially at election time it could be good to have the poor.

“The obscenity of distributing food parcels among the poor to attract them to election rallies might be difficult to resist.  That the poor accept such poisoned gifts does not necessarily mean they are grateful.

“At that precise moment they confront the choice between hunger and dignity.  It is a demeaning choice forced on them by a ruling movement proclaiming abiding concern for them.  Torn up by contradictions, the poor vote to keep the movement in power… Could Nelson Mandela have misled the poor?”

Dialogue around this question, insight by four young novelists and relevant autobiographical input from Dorfman’s life by the Chilean-American writer who is giving the 8^th Nelson Mandela lecture this week, opened our minds.

The dialogue took place in the new Fugard Theatre, a beautifully renovated space recently given to Capetonians as a gift.

Athol Fugard recently returned to South Africa to produce his new play The Train Driver, symbolically to anoint the theatre with a work he felt compelled to write, honoured that it is in his name.

No better venue could have been found for the Dialogue, filling its huge, warehouse-rehearsal-room upstairs with a diverse collection of writers, academics, journalists, TRC commissioners, poets, actors, activists – evidence that almost all responded to this important topic, the on-going questioning of the concept of reconciliation.

I filmed Ariel Dorfman speaking at UCT twenty-five years ago, at the height of apartheid’s assassination-squad era when troops were constantly in the townships.  His famous play Death and the Maiden touches everyone whose lives have suffered under ruthless dictators.

In his play a young wife recognizes her torturer when her husband brings a man back to their holiday house because his car has broken down.

It is about her confrontation of him, her capacity to take charge.

Dorfman wrote: “I found the characters trying to figure out the sort of questions that so many Chileans were asking themselves privately, but that hardly anyone seemed interested in posing in public. How can those who tortured and those who were tortured co-exist in the same land?

How to heal a country that has been traumatised by repression if the fear to speak out is still omnipresent everywhere? And how do you reach the truth if lying has become a habit?

How do we keep the past alive without becoming its prisoner? How do we forget it without risking its repetition in the future?

Is it legitimate to sacrifice the truth to ensure peace? And what are the consequences of suppressing that past and the truth it is whispering or howling to us?

And how guilty are we all of what happened to those who suffered most?

And perhaps the greatest dilemma of them all: how to confront these issues without destroying the national consensus, which creates democratic stability?

Reconciliaton goes hand in glove with creating a true democracy, freedom of speech, freedom to speak out, experiment, uncover the truth, not to be afraid of rocking the boat.

South Africa did not experience a revolution although it was close to an undeclared civil-war.  Its leaders negotiated a settlement to the astonishment of the whole world.

We have just achieved another accolade by hosting the FIFA World Cup so successfully. But the deeper questions remain in spite of our brilliant capacity to do this, to be able to construct outstanding stadiums, to set violence and crime aside, replacing it with a sense of physical freedom and laughter, singing and dancing with the world at large.

When the party is over, unease creeps back because of the desperate inequality of our people.

Reconciliation is certainly suspect in the light of this truth. This is what has to change.

Is it surprising that people revolt when the whiff of apartheid returns in disguise by insulting the poor with the despised toilet bucket system or by replicating box houses row upon row in many of the small towns, re-enforcing  the image of separateness like the old ‘townships’ of the past?  What else is in disguise?

Kevin Bloom, one of the young novelists on the panel, considers Johannesburg ‘a city always in disguise’.  He tracks the three kilometers between himself and his friend Themba, a student at Wits doing two degrees.

He, Kevin, lives in a normally comfortable Killarney apartment and Themba lives in Hillbrow in a room without running water or electricity, his space subject to constant false raids in the early hours of the morning by the supervisors of the building.

So Themba lives there with his suitcases always packed:   “I’m threatened I’m not settled”, he tells Kevin,

Truth, confined to gross human rights violations committed under apartheid, was successfully uncovered by the Truth & Reconciliation Commission, yet few of the perpetrators apologised and those who did not come forward have never been prosecuted as was understood in the original brief.   Reconciliation began there but it was clear that it would take much longer.

Even in a minor domestic spat it takes time:  someone has to apologize.  A deeper consciousness and understanding of what really happened needs more time and reflection.  Previously privileged South Africans, who were classified ‘white’ in the old South Africa – myself included – have not yet had the maturity to say sorry effectively - if at all.  We have not said sorry for the truth we need to acknowledge:  that whoever we are, whatever stance we took, whichever political affiliation we had or refused to have, we gained.

We gained health, wealth and prosperity at the expense of all those South Africans previously classified black, coloured or Indian..   It is time to say sorry properly and to start giving back in real terms.

Henrietta Rose-Innes, another young novelist, read out an honest, moving, autobiographical account of the rambling home she moved into as an innocent child.

She describes the vague and somewhat sinister way the previous owner of the house was referred to by her parents and how his name, written into one wall, could not be removed in spite of numerous coats of paint.  Years later the truth dawned on her that her childhood home had previously been the home of someone who had been forcibly moved from it by  the Group Areas Act, which claimed it for ‘whites only’, that her parents had probably got it at a good price.

“The rainbow nation needs to start mixing rather than keep running parallel.   We need to start touching one another,” observed Thando Mgqolozana who wrote his excellent novel A Man Who is Not a Man, about a traditional circumcision which goes horribly wrong.    Thando is appalled at the equanimity with which people are able to look at death and dying all around them – and not act.

Niq Mhlongo (Dog Eats Dog) was possibly the most irreverent of the four, quoting a conversation from his book about  reconciliation having been ‘over-sold’ and sensing the importance of opening up further conversations with  people who consider that they have the right to loot as much as they like.

“We have to be loyal to our community by betrayal of that community,” said Ariel Dorfman,  “near enough to understand but distant enough to criticize.”

Could this be the beginning of a new style of dialogue of support where creative writers, poets, film-makers and other artists take courage from one another to truly tell their most intricate, secret stories, revealing their real fears and opening up the baggage of damage our society continues to manifest – and courageously acknowledge the healing it needs?

“People want to talk.  What South Africa needs is the entering of personal intimacies into the public space”, concluded  Njabulo Ndebele.  What better place to continue this than at the Fugard Theatre?

Lindy Wilson is a Cape Town based Film Maker

business day 07/07/2010

MEDIA reports of xenophobic threats have become commonplace. After the horrors of the last wave of attacks in 2008 that left more than 60 people dead, one would expect a more vigorous response from across society. Local mobilisation has been the key to preventing this kind of attack. But there needs to be more consistent support from leaders in the government and civil society for community groups — whether African National Congress (ANC) branches, unions or churches — to take a stand.

For a longer-term solution, SA needs a policy on immigration that addresses the realities, above all the long-standing dependence of some communities in neighbouring countries on exporting labour to SA and the effects on migration of the economic and political crises in Zimbabwe.

Development in SA was long dependent on imported labour from across southern Africa. To this day, about half of all miners are foreign born. Agriculture and domestic work have also long employed tens of thousands of poorly paid foreign workers.

From the late 1970s, however, the South African economy changed in ways that made migrant labour increasingly difficult. The sectors historically open to low-skilled foreign migrants saw severe job losses. According to Quantec, between 1985 and this year, employment in mining and agriculture fell by more than a million, or more than 40%. In contrast, overall employment expanded by 20% in this period, with most of the new jobs in retail, business services, construction and private services.

But the growing sectors did not have systems or traditions of employing foreigners. Slow employment creation from the mid- 1980s through the mid-2000s entrenched high joblessness overall, intensifying competition for employment opportunities.

Slower employment creation in SA was not offset by expanding opportunities in neighbouring countries, despite improved economic conditions after 1994. In every southern African country except Angola and Zambia, the International Labour Organisation found that the share of the working- age population with income-generating employment declined between 1994 and 2005. SA continued to provide a beacon of hope to poor people across the region.

In addition, the disastrous economic and political situation in Zimbabwe for much of this decade accelerated migration to SA. According to World Bank data, between 2000 and 2005 Zimbabwe’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita dropped by more than 25%. The share of manufacturing in its GDP plummeted from almost 20% in the early 1990s to less than 10% in the mid-2000s. Political oppression added to the pressure on ordinary people to seek a living elsewhere.

In short, the long-standing structure of labour markets across the region combined with economic and political developments to ensure a continuous flow of migrants to SA after 1994, despite growing competition for jobs amongst lower skilled workers. Yet the democratic state has not established clear and constructive policies to manage the situation. We share that shortcoming with virtually every other country facing large-scale in-migration — there is no easy solution.

But the policy vacuum comes at a high price. The burden of dealing with large-scale in-migration has been left to the poorest communities — informal settlements, run-down inner-city neighbourhoods in Johannesburg, and working-class townships. The worst-off South Africans have ended up having to share their already limited resources with migrants. Not surprisingly, xenophobic complaints revolve heavily around areas of competition among the poor: for jobs, housing and customers. In addition, the marginalisation of foreigners in normal labour markets inevitably leads to over-representation in criminal activities.

Given these circumstances, it is not surprising that some affected groups mobilise on nationalist lines. Perhaps more surprising, and heartening, has been that the majority of ordinary South Africans, even in poor neighbourhoods with large foreign-born populations, have rejected xenophobic solutions. The 2008 violence would have been much worse were it not for grassroots solidarity in many communities.

It is crucial that this kind of community mobilisation be supported. In the short run, that means political and other organisations need to send an unambiguous and emphatic message to their local structures that they should actively resist xenophobia.

In the longer run, the government has to tackle the hard questions around migration. First, since large-scale in-migration will continue for the foreseeable future, the government must ensure that the poorest communities don’t end up paying for it. The only way to achieve that is to do more to empower and upgrade poor communities comprehensively, rather than to target foreigners.

Second, SA can no longer act as if economic and political difficulties in neighbouring countries are not our business. As long as labour markets remain regional, factors that intensify migration will affect SA directly. In its own long-term interest, SA has to initiative a more proactive and rights-based approach to development in southern Africa.

Makgetla is an economist at the Development Bank of Southern Africa.

For a longer-term solution, SA needs a policy on immigration that addresses the realities, above all the long-standing dependence of some communities in neighbouring countries on exporting labour to SA and the effects on migration of the economic and political crises in Zimbabwe.

Development in SA was long dependent on imported labour from across southern Africa. To this day, about half of all miners are foreign born. Agriculture and domestic work have also long employed tens of thousands of poorly paid foreign workers.

From the late 1970s, however, the South African economy changed in ways that made migrant labour increasingly difficult. The sectors historically open to low-skilled foreign migrants saw severe job losses. According to Quantec, between 1985 and this year, employment in mining and agriculture fell by more than a million, or more than 40%. In contrast, overall employment expanded by 20% in this period, with most of the new jobs in retail, business services, construction and private services.

But the growing sectors did not have systems or traditions of employing foreigners. Slow employment creation from the mid- 1980s through the mid-2000s entrenched high joblessness overall, intensifying competition for employment opportunities.

Slower employment creation in SA was not offset by expanding opportunities in neighbouring countries, despite improved economic conditions after 1994. In every southern African country except Angola and Zambia, the International Labour Organisation found that the share of the working- age population with income-generating employment declined between 1994 and 2005. SA continued to provide a beacon of hope to poor people across the region.

In addition, the disastrous economic and political situation in Zimbabwe for much of this decade accelerated migration to SA. According to World Bank data, between 2000 and 2005 Zimbabwe’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita dropped by more than 25%. The share of manufacturing in its GDP plummeted from almost 20% in the early 1990s to less than 10% in the mid-2000s. Political oppression added to the pressure on ordinary people to seek a living elsewhere.

In short, the long-standing structure of labour markets across the region combined with economic and political developments to ensure a continuous flow of migrants to SA after 1994, despite growing competition for jobs amongst lower skilled workers. Yet the democratic state has not established clear and constructive policies to manage the situation. We share that shortcoming with virtually every other country facing large-scale in-migration — there is no easy solution.

But the policy vacuum comes at a high price. The burden of dealing with large-scale in-migration has been left to the poorest communities — informal settlements, run-down inner-city neighbourhoods in Johannesburg, and working-class townships. The worst-off South Africans have ended up having to share their already limited resources with migrants. Not surprisingly, xenophobic complaints revolve heavily around areas of competition among the poor: for jobs, housing and customers. In addition, the marginalisation of foreigners in normal labour markets inevitably leads to over-representation in criminal activities.

Given these circumstances, it is not surprising that some affected groups mobilise on nationalist lines. Perhaps more surprising, and heartening, has been that the majority of ordinary South Africans, even in poor neighbourhoods with large foreign-born populations, have rejected xenophobic solutions. The 2008 violence would have been much worse were it not for grassroots solidarity in many communities.

It is crucial that this kind of community mobilisation be supported. In the short run, that means political and other organisations need to send an unambiguous and emphatic message to their local structures that they should actively resist xenophobia.

In the longer run, the government has to tackle the hard questions around migration. First, since large-scale in-migration will continue for the foreseeable future, the government must ensure that the poorest communities don’t end up paying for it. The only way to achieve that is to do more to empower and upgrade poor communities comprehensively, rather than to target foreigners.

Second, SA can no longer act as if economic and political difficulties in neighbouring countries are not our business. As long as labour markets remain regional, factors that intensify migration will affect SA directly. In its own long-term interest, SA has to initiative a more proactive and rights-based approach to development in southern Africa.

- Makgetla is an economist at the Development Bank of Southern Africa.

IT IS one of the many ironies of South African politics that the bitterest battles of our age have been waged within the ranks of the anti-apartheid movement itself — not between the movement and its foes. It is within the ranks of the African National Congress (ANC) and its allies that SA has seen the worst fighting over race, class, gender, sexual orientation, corruption and many other questions of our times.

Take the old and ugly spat between former president Thabo Mbeki and Mac Maharaj, Jacob Zuma ’s “envoy” and SA’s de facto president. On the face of it, the clash between the two men is one of egos. Mbeki thinks he is smarter than Maharaj; Maharaj thinks he is smarter than everybody. Mbeki thinks we owe our freedom to his strategic nous; Maharaj believes our liberation is due to his daring and swashbuckling manner. Both are equally petty. That is on the surface.

But below the surface the fight between the two men is about class and race. In Mbeki, we have a black Victorian whose elite upbringing left him with a severe strain of the “talented tenth” syndrome. The man believes he was fated by history to lead. In Maharaj, we have a self-declared Brahmin who believes he was endowed at birth with every gift imaginable — from a sharp intellect to a fearless ego. Mbeki was born a class above Maharaj, but Maharaj seems to think his Brahminism places him a few notches above everybody else. But it does not end there.

Mbeki has always resented attitudes that suggest that Africans are by definition stupid and incompetent. He has always looked askance at Maharaj’s preference for the likes of Zuma, simple folks who pose no challenge to Maharaj’s supposed brilliance. Mbeki has always disliked Maharaj’s penchant during the struggle days for underground networks, in which Africans were at best marginal. For his part, Maharaj has always thought Mbeki’s intelligence overrated. The fight between the two men is as bitter as it is old.

Then there was Mbeki versus Joe Slovo. Here was a fight between, again, a black Victorian and a (white) immigrant son made good. In many ways, the fight between Mbeki and Slovo was fought over the same terrain as that between Mbeki and Maharaj.

The fight was as much about egos as it was about race and class. This is not to suggest that Mbeki did not have whites and Indians to whom he was close. But he seems to feel more keenly whatever slight, both real and perceived, is directed at him in particular and Africans in general.

Mbeki, Maharaj and Slovo are not the only people involved in some of the ugliest fights of our age.

The ANC has yet to come to terms with the legacy of its treatment of women in its military camps. It has yet to come to terms with the meaning of its lip service to gender equality. Many women in ANC camps were treated as male accessories and, worse, “perks” for commanders and other senior leaders. It did not take many women recruits long to realise that the struggle for freedom was as necessary within the ANC as it was in SA.

Sadly, very few women will talk about their exile experience today. The few who tried to do so via the truth commission were discredited and shunned. When they tried to speak out, those who suffered physical and sexual abuse were “abused” again as their integrity was called into question and loyalty to the freedom struggle disputed.

There was also the ugly demon of tribalism within the anti-apartheid ranks. Stories abound of Joe Modise, the hapless commander of the ANC’s military wing, preferring only Tswanas and Sotho speakers for special treatment. Ditto Chris Hani and Xhosa speakers. Moses Mabhida, the ANC and communist party stalwart who presided over the ANC in Mozambique, was said to favour mostly Zulus in his network — a network that included at some stage our dear President Zuma.

If SA’s freedom struggle was made out of such crooked timber, to steal an expression from Immanuel Kant, is it any surprise that the ANC has spent the past 16 years getting more corrupt? More importantly, what is it about SA’s struggle for freedom that made it both just and the moral question of the late 20th century, if the men and women who led that struggle were made of such crooked timber?

We should not expect the men and women who lead the ANC today to provide us with answers to these vexing questions. They are joined in battle — fighting over everything from power and the spoils of office to history itself. Just this week, Zuma went out of his way to thank Nelson Mandela for landing SA the 2010 Soccer World Cup. With all due respect to Mandela, the old man was long retired when SA won the hosting rights. It was Mbeki wot did it. Zuma and Maharaj can’t bring themselves to give Mbeki credit. It was the same with Zuma’s state of the nation address earlier this year. He found time to praise everyone except Mbeki.

Mbeki, Maharaj and Zuma are all former members of the South African Communist Party. If there is one thing they have learnt from their time in Soviet bosoms, it is how to brush opponents out of history.

That is what it means to fight bitter struggles. You fight until there is only your version of history left.

- Jacob Dlamini is the author of Native Nostalgia (2009)

May 30, 2010 11:05 PM | By Raymond Suttner

In the struggle against apartheid, millions of people were united and stood as or with the oppressed. The basic unifying component was promotion of human dignity and standing with the downtrodden. This included political organisations, community organisations and some churches and communities of faiths.

The Zuma administration continues old relationships, such as the tripartite alliance, and reconfigures others. The alliance with chiefs has been strengthened, counterposing unelected chiefs to democratically elected local government. This is not to say that there is no place for chiefs, in so far as some or many might be supported by their communities and link with cultural practices that do not conflict with the constitution.

However, in the administration of justice, it is intended to allocate powers beyond any possessed by chiefs under apartheid.

There are also totally new alliances, as with the National Interfaith Leadership Council, (NILC), led by Ray McCauley, of Rhema, which has apparently displaced that with longtime liberation ally the SA Council of Churches (SACC).

What do these changes mean for the ANC? What are the ties that bind these emerging relationships? The NILC mission statement speaks about service provision. Can this be the same as work by SACC regional offices in communities, on HIV/Aids, poverty and related concerns?

The choice of alliances cannot be coincidental. Both the chiefs and the NILC are committed to eradicating the “sin” or “unnatural”, “un-African” practice of homosexuality, reversing gender equality and potentially undermining human liberties, including gender equality.

Resolutions of the Polokwane conference and the January 8 ANC anniversary statements do not mention protection of freedom of sexual orientation – at a time of attacks on gays and lesbians, including “curative rape” and large-scale murder of African lesbians.

The ANC has not expressed any concern. These sexual identities are constitutionally protected. What does it mean when they are not protected on the ground?

Are silence and failure to protect not complicit in erasing important liberties enshrined in the Constitution? Might this synchronise with personal inclinations, exemplified by Zuma’s reminiscences of childhood gay bashing?

The president apologised, with some qualifications, about being quoted “out of context”. But what does he understand as the relevant context? Clearly, it is not that experienced by non-heterosexual individuals who, when victimised, cannot rely on support systems. They encounter a user-unfriendly environment, including many doctors who “out” victims of attacks and put their lives in greater danger.

Earlier this year, it was revealed that Jon Qwelane, a self-proclaimed homophobe who publicly equated homosexuality with bestiality, was to become high commissioner in Uganda, where the death penalty has been advocated against homosexuality.

The international relations ministry said, however, that no appointment had been made. But, meanwhile, Qwelane was smuggled into Uganda, signifying solidarity with Ugandan homophobes.

Foreign policy, scholars say, expresses domestic policy. The ministry assures us that there is no intention to advance South Africa’s constitutional principles on gender equality and sexualities in multilateral forums. It takes domestic reality, the government and ANC passivity on gender abuse and homophobia into international relations.

Domestic violence is said to have reached epidemic proportions. A former intelligence head, Manala Manzini publicly asserted his “right” to beat his wife, Mavivi Myakayaka-Manzini, for failure to conform to notions of a domesticated wife.

This is encouraged by an atmosphere of glorification of a warrior tradition. Private and public patriarchal practices and statements are clear in their affirming of militaristic masculinities, encouragement of the use of lethal force and treating deaths of innocent bystanders as “inevitable” in the “war” on crime. Zuma’s political rise has been tied to the imagery of violent masculinities.

Outside his rape trial, he sang a song – Bring me my machine gun – suffused with phallic imagery. His election campaign saw his self-representation as a hyper-masculine warrior. The presidency was to be in the hands of a “real man”.

A climate of violent suppression of freedom of political expression was created prior to the elections, and is seen today in the condoning of political violence against the Western Cape DA-controlled government.

In combating this trend at the top, it is important that those who believe in gender equality and sexuality rights accept the reality that these are not part of the consciousness of ordinary people or of the membership of the ANC and its allies.

The freedom to choose is, as distinguished Indian scholar Nivedita Menon says, part of “outing heteronormativity”; that is, questioning the notion of heterosexual as “natural”. Those who believe that patriarchal domination and heterosexual relations are part of the order of nature, need to be engaged with and know that there is a great deal in African, Asian, European and other histories testifying to a range of different sexualities coexisting with heterosexuality.

Interaction is needed to explain that attacks on gender equality and sexuality rights are part of a broader undermining of constitutionalism.

We need to bury many of our differences, and patiently build on commonalities and move towards a broader consensual, democratic and emancipatory project.

• Raymond Suttner is a former ANC underground cadre, political prisoner and leader in the UDF, ANC and SACP. Currently a professor at Unisa, he is preparing a book on the Zuma period and beyond

It warms my heart to see these flowing gowns.  I congratulate you on work accomplished!  For over a millennium, these gowns have been a symbol of high learning from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic.  Should anyone ask you where they came from, tell them that the early universities of Europe – Oxford, Cambridge, le Sorbonne – borrowed them from the Islamic madressa of the Middle East.  If they should seem incredulous, tell them that the gown did not come by itself: because medieval European scholars borrowed from the madressa much of the curriculum, from Greek philosophy to Iranian astronomy to Arab medicine and Indian mathematics, they had little difficulty in accepting this flowing gown, modeled after the dress of the desert nomad, as the symbol of high learning.  Should they still express surprise, ask them to take a second look at the gowns of the ayatollahs in Iran and Iraq and elsewhere and they will see the resemblance.  Education has no boundaries.  Neither does it have an end.  As the Waswahili in East Africa, which is where I come from, say: elimu haina muisho.

Today, I want to talk to you about the core value of the liberal university, critical thought, not just any thought, but thought which dares to stand up to the dictates of power and to the embrace of wealth, even to the seduction of popular prejudice.

Yesterday, when I was in Cape Town, a friend gave me the week’s edition of Mail and Guardian.  I went straight for my favorite section, the cartoon by Zapiro.  To my surprise, Zapiro featured a cartoon of Prophet Mohamed, agonizing: “OTHER Prophets have followers with a sense of humour! …”  I want to take this opportunity to reflect on times and places when humour turned deadly.  Such a reflection should allow us to think through the relationship between two great liberal objectives, freedom of speech and civil peace.  Since Zapiro seems to present his series of as a second edition of the Danish cartoons, I shall begin with a reflection on the original.

When the Danish cartoon debate broke out I was in Nigeria.  If you stroll the streets of Kano, a Muslim-majority city in northern Nigeria, you will have no problem finding material caricaturing Christianity sold by street vendors. And if you go to the east of Nigeria, to Enugu for example, you will find a similar supply of materials caricaturing Islam. None of this is blasphemy; most of it is bigotry.  It is well known that the Danish paper that published the offending cartoons was earlier offered cartoons of Jesus Christ.  But the paper declined to print these on grounds that it would offend its Christian readers. Had the Danish paper published cartoons of Jesus Christ, that would have been blasphemy; the cartoons it did publish were evidence of bigotry, not blasphemy. Both blasphemy and bigotry belong to the larger tradition of free speech, but after a century of ethnic cleansing and genocide, we surely need to distinguish between the two strands of the same tradition.  The language of contemporary politics makes that distinction by referring to bigotry as hate speech.

Just a few weeks after the Danish cartoons were published, the German writer Gunter Grass was interviewed in a Portuguese weekly news magazine, Visão.  In that interview, Gunter Grass said the Danish cartoons reminded him of anti Semitic cartoons in a German magazine, Der Sturmer.  The story was carried in a New York Times piece, which added that the publisher of Der Sturmer was tried at Nuremberg and executed.  I am interested less in how close was the similarity between the Danish and the German cartoons, than in why a magazine publisher would be executed for publishing cartoons.  One of the subjects I work on is the Rwanda genocide.  Many of you would know that the International Tribunal in Arusha has pinned criminal responsibility for the genocide not just on those who executed it but also on those who imagined it, including intellectuals, artists and journalists as in RTMC.  The Rwandan trials are the latest to bring out the dark side of free speech, its underbelly: how power can instrumentalize free speech to frame a minority and present it for target practice.

To understand why courts committed to defending freedom of speech can hold cartoonists responsible for crimes against humanity, we need to distinguish between bigotry and blasphemy.  Blasphemy is the practice of questioning a tradition from within.  In contrast, bigotry is an assault on that tradition from the outside. If blasphemy is an attempt to speak truth to power, bigotry is the reverse: an attempt by power to instrumentalize truth.  A defining feature of the cartoon debate is that bigotry is being mistaken for blasphemy.

The history of blasphemy as a liberating force is particularly European, not even American. To understand the political role of blasphemy in Europe we need to appreciate the organization of the Church as an institutional power.  Institutionalized religion in medieval Europe was organized as a form of hierarchical power, with an authority from the floor to the ceiling.  Institutional Roman Catholicism mimicked the institutional organization of the Roman empire, just as the institutional organization of Protestant churches in Europe borrowed a leaf from the organization of power in the nation states of Europe.

The European example was not emulated in the United States of America. Though blasphemy marked the moment of birth of the New World, the New World was not particularly receptive to blasphemy.  The big change was political: Puritans and other Protestant denominations were organized more as congregations and sects, more like voluntary associations, than as hierarchical churches.  There was also a change in religious practice: the puritans shifted the locus of individual morality from external constraint to internal discipline, displacing both the Pope and the Scriptures with inner conscience. Pioneered by the Quakers, the Christ of scriptures became the “Christ within”.  Unlike in Europe, religion in the rapidly developing settler democracy in the United States was very much a part of the language of the American Revolution and of the public sphere.  The European experience has to be seen more as the exception than the rule.

And yet, the European experience is not without a lesson for the rest of us.  It is precisely because of a history of opposition between organized religion and political society, and the consequent history of religious civil wars, that compromises have been worked out in Europe both to protect the practice of free speech and to circumscribe it through laws that criminalize blasphemy.  When internalized as civility, rather than when imposed by public power, these compromises have been key to keeping social peace in European societies.  Let me give two examples to illustrate the point.

My first example dates from 1967 when Britain’s leading publishing house, Penguin, published an English addition of a book of cartoons by France’s most acclaimed cartoonist, Siné.  The Penguin edition was introduced by Malcolm Muggeridge. Siné’s Massacre contained a number of anticlerical and blasphemous cartoons, some of them with a sexual theme.  Many book sellers, who found the content offensive, conveyed their feelings to Allan Lane, who had by that time almost retired from Penguin.  Though he was not a practicing Christian, Allen Lane took seriously the offense that this book seemed to cause to a number of his practicing Christian friends.  Here is Richard Webster’s account of what followed “One night, soon after the book had been published, he [Allen Lane] went into Penguin’s Harmondsworth warehouse with four accomplices, filled a trailer with all the remaining copies of the book, drove away and burnt them.  The next day the Penguin trade department reported the book ‘out of print’.”  Now. Britain has laws against blasphemy, but neither Allan Lane nor Penguin was taken to court.  Britain’s laws on blasphemy were not called into action.  I want to point your attention to one issue in particular. Allan Lane was not a practicing Christian but he had internalized legal restraint as civility, as conduct necessary to upholding peaceful coexistence in a society with a history of religious conflict.  To put it differently, the existence of political society requires the forging of a political pact, a compromise.

My second example is from the United States.  It concerns a radio show called Amos ‘n Andy that began on WMAQ in Chicago on 19 March 1928, and eventually became the longest running radio program in broadcast history.  Conceived by two white actors who mimicked the so-called Negro dialect to portray two black characters, Amos Jones and Andy Brown, Amos ‘n Andy was a white show for black people.  Amos ‘n Andy was also the first major all-black show in mainstream U.S. entertainment.  The longest running show in the history of radio broadcast in the U. S., Amos ‘n Andy gradually moved from radio to T.V.  Graduating to prime time network television in 1951, it became a syndicated show after 1953.

Every year, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) protested against the racist character of the portrayal that was the show.  Giving seven reasons “why the Amos ‘n Andy show should be taken off the air,” the NAACP said the show reinforced the prejudice that “Negroes are inferior, lazy, dumb and dishonest,” that every character in the all-Black show “is either a clown or a crook.” “Negro doctors are shown as quacks and thieves,” Negro lawyers “as slippery cowards, ignorant of their profession and without ethics,” and Negro women “as cackling, screaming shrews … just short of vulgarity.”  In sum, “all Negroes are shown as dodging work of any kind.”  But CBS disagreed.  You can still read the CBS point of view on the official Amos ‘n Andy website which still hopes that Black people will learn to laugh at themselves: “Perhaps we will collectively learn to lighten up, not get so bent out of shape, and learn to laugh at ourselves a little more.”  I was reminded of it when I read the Zapiro cartoon in Mail & Guardian yesterday.

The TV show ran for nearly 15 years, from 1951 to 1965.  Every year the NAACP protested, but every year the show continued.  Then, without explanation, CBS withdrew the show, in 1965.  What happened?  In 1965 the Watts riots happened, and sparked the onset of a long, hot summer.  The Watts riots were triggered by a petty incident, an encounter between a racist cop and a black motorist.  That everyday incident triggered a riot that left 34 persons dead.  Many asked: What is wrong with these people?  How can the response be so disproportionate to the injury?  After the riots the Johnson administration appointed a commission, called the Kerner Commission, to answer this and other questions.  The Kerner Commission Report made a distinction between what it called the trigger and the fuel: the trigger was an incident of petty racism, but the fuel was provided by centuries of racism. The lesson was clear: the country needed to address the consequences of a history of racism, not just its latest manifestation.  Bob Gibson, the St. Louis Cardinals pitcher, wrote about the Watts riots in his book From Ghetto to Glory.  He compared the riots to a “brushback pitch” – a pitch thrown over the batter’s head to keep him from crowding the plate, a way of sending a message that the pitcher needs more space.  CBS withdrew Amos ‘n Andy after the long hot summer of 1965.  The compelling argument that the NAACP and other civil rights groups could not make, was made by the inarticulate rioters of Watts.

Why is this bit of history significant for us?  CBS did not withdraw Amos ‘n Andy because the law had changed, for no such change happened.  The reason for the change was political, not legal.  For sure, there was a change of consciousness, but that change was triggered by political developments.  CBS had learnt civility; more likely, it was taught civility.  CBS had learnt that there was a difference between black people laughing at themselves, and white people laughing at black people!  It was like the difference between blasphemy and bigotry.  That learning was part of a larger shift in American society, one that began with the Civil War and continued with the civil rights movement that followed the Second World War.  This larger shift was the inclusion of African-Americans in a re-structured civil and political society.  The saga of Amos ‘n Andy turned out to be a milestone, not just in the history of free speech, but in a larger history, that of black people’s struggle to defend their human rights and their rights of citizenship in the U.S.

Can we deal with hate speech by legal restriction?  I am not very optimistic.  The law can be a corrective on individual discrimination, but it has seldom been an effective restraint on hate movements that target vulnerable minorities.  If the episode of the Danish cartoons demonstrated one thing, it was that Islamophobia is a growing presence in Europe.  One is struck by the ideological diversity of this phenomenon.  Just as there was a left wing anti-Semitism in Europe before fascism, contemporary Islamophobia too is articulated in not only the familiar language of the right, but also the less familiar language of the left. The latter language is secular.  The Danish cartoons and their enthusiastic re-publication throughout Europe, in both right and left-wing papers, was our first public glimpse of left and right Islamophobia marching in step formation.  Its political effect has been to explode the middle ground.  Is Zapiro asking us to evacuate the middle ground as testimony that we too possess a sense of humour?

If so, Zapiro has misread the real challenge that we face today.  That challenge is both intellectual and political.  The intellectual challenge lies in distinguishing between two strands in the history of free speech – blasphemy and bigotry.  The political challenge lies in building a local and global coalition against all forms of bigotry.  The growth of bigotry in Europe seems to me an unthinking response to two developments: locally, the dramatic growth of Muslim minorities in Europe and their struggle for human and citizenship rights; globally, we are going through an equally dramatic turning point in world history.

The history of the past five centuries has been one of western domination.  Beginning 1491, Western colonialism understood and presented itself to the world at large as a civilizing and a rescue mission, a mission to rescue minorities and to civilize majorities.  The colonizing discourse historically focused on barbarities among the colonized – sati, child marriage and polygamy in India, female genital mutilation and slavery in Africa – and presented colonialism as a rescue mission for women, children, and minorities, at the same time claiming to be a larger project to civilize majorities.  Meanwhile, Western minorities lived in the colonies with privilege and impunity.  Put together, it has been five centuries of a growing inability to live with difference in the world, while at the same time politicizing difference.  The irony is that a growing number of mainstream European politicians, perhaps nostalgic about empire, are experimenting with importing these same time-tested rhetorical techniques into domestic politics: the idea is to compile a list of barbaric cultural practices among immigrant minorities as a way to isolate, stigmatize, and frame them.

But the world is changing.  New powers are on the horizon: most obviously, China and India.  Neither has a Muslim majority, but both have significant Muslim minorities.  The Danish case teaches us by negative example.  To the hitherto dominant Western minority, it presents a lesson in how not to respond to a changing world with fear and anxiety, masked with arrogance, but rather to try a little humility so as to understand the ways in which the world is indeed changing.

There is also a lesson here for Muslim peoples.  The Middle East and Islam are part of the middle ground in this contest.  Rather than be tempted to think that the struggle against Islamophobia is the main struggle – for it is not – let us put it in this larger context.  Only that larger context can help us identify allies and highlight the importance of building alliances.  Perhaps then we – and hopefully Zapiro – will be strong enough to confront organized hate campaigns, whether as calls to action or as cartoons, with a sense of humour.