Rules of Engagement

I travel because people are interesting, and when you travel you get to meet all sorts of interesting people with different views of the world.

There was one night when I agreed to go to Zula in Town for a show, and whilst there a guy asked me why I kept up with 'the Jesus look', and at first I said I didn't know (it's a fairly common question). But then when he went to empty his beer-filled bladder, I thought about it in my half-cut stupor and realized that I did know why I did it: because I always feel weird going up to engage with randoms, but this look seems to pique plenty of curiosities and allows me to meet plenty of people. And it seems in some cases I don't just meet them, but they seem to somehow trust me implicitly and admit striking things to me about themselves.

"We all have secret lives/In our secret rooms/Living in our movies/Humming our own tunes" -- Bruce Dickinson

At one venue in Zimbabwe, I was at a pub where they were having a 'ladies night' with musical chairs and other things for prizes. After the spectacle ended and I was hanging around without a partner, the emcee of the session, who seemed strong and independent, came up and started chatting with me. She then took me aside to the patio where we could talk without shouting and asked many questions about my lifestyle of travel, why I did it, etc. She seemed very interested in me, and after the pub closed, we walked back to the hostel I was staying at to continue the conversation. At the gate the security guy asked which room I was staying and when I replied that I was staying in a dorm, he said that I couldn't bring a woman in with me, and I replied that that was not my intention. So despite it being quite late and very chilly, we sat by the fire and talked more about various things. And then she started to speak about herself, revealing to me that her father left when she was very young and her stepfather was happy to pay to put her through some of the best schools in the area, but was also molesting her. And all of a sudden this confident-looking woman (of 29) broke down and started telling me that although she had her job emceeing and such, that she felt 'totally useless' and that she felt her life was 'basically pointless' and she needed to find closure somehow, and really had nowhere to go.

In another instance, I was helping an individual prepare for exams, and it came out that she had been in a relationship with a very, VERY famous South African. I had barely known her a few days, and I probably would be unlikely to see her again after that, but as she dropped me back at my place, she told me all about how she felt during the relationship, living in his shadow, often being in a long-distance relationship, etc., but eventually having to break it off, and crying for a week because of it. Throughout the conversation I gave my input and at the end of it all she told me that she doesn't normally like to talk about it, but for some reason talking through the details with me made her feel better.

There are a fair few such stories of this type that have been revealed to me either by people making my acquaintance and telling me about themselves, or physically showing me and including me in various things that reflect the way they live: sleeping on floors of ghettos, 'showering' from a basin because there is no running water (luckily by the time I got to Mafeteng, I had plenty of experience of this in Chamanculo), and other things that most Canadians would have a difficult time even fathoming.

One thing that struck me as incredibly profound, however, was when my friend and I decided to spend an afternoon in the township of Langa. As black townships go, it is probably one of the safest in Cape Town. We had originally hoped to go to Khayelitsha for a day, but the weather was against us so we had to put it off. What was profound was not what we saw in Langa, but after, when he turned to me and said "we go to these places and lambaste the locals for being afraid and carrying stereotypes about how dangerous they are, but what about us? What about 'local tourism'? Would you hang out on a Native reservation when you get back to Canada?" My first thought was "fuck, no! That's way too dangerous, and what would be the point?" But then I realized the reality of the situation and it shows how much Ive learned from Africa, especially the manner in which the existential doors have been thrown wide open in terms of what I can and cannot do or should and should not do, and I realized that the correct answer was

"I can't wait. It's gonna be so amazing, and so absurd!"

Tourist Traps: How I hate them

Victoria Falls is probably the first heavily touristy niche Ive been to in Africa. It is probably the first such place Ive been to since Siem Reap almost 18 months ago.

The entry into the park containing the waterfall is $30, which, considering it costs only $20 for a day pass to Angkor and you can walk around for hours, seems a bit steep. Touts follow you around and harass you to no end about buying their carvings, going on the their rafting trips, bungee jumping, etc. But the main difference between Victoria Falls and Siem Reap is that Cambodia probably gets a huge portion of its income from tourism: go anywhere, and there are plenty of tourists. On the other hand, Im not sure Ive seen a single tourist in Zimbabwe (including Harare, Rushinga, Bulawayo, and Bindura) since I arrived two and a half weeks ago (outside of Victoria Falls, of course, which is swimming in them... no pun intended). Maybe one or two, but I wouldn't swear to it.

So I asked a number of people how they came to be there. It seems many are on tour buses from Johannesburg, some fly straight into Livingstone (internal flights are pretty ridiculous outside of South Africa), others come via Zambia. But what worries me most is the perception that the hordes of tourists may get of Africa in general and Zimbabwe in particular. Victoria Falls isn't Africa at all, and you really learn nothing about Africa by coming here. If you only came to Victoria Falls, there is nothing to say that you're in Africa other than that the local touts are black. For example, an individual I met said that some people he knew 'didn't like Zimbabwe at all', and I can see why if they only visited Victoria Falls. But we aren't in Zimbabwe. We are in a tourist bubble.

Like China, Zimbabwe is probably, on the whole, safer than North America. Consider the fact that in Canada you have to practically get cavity searches before you get on buses, and even a small pair of cuticle scissors will often have to be put with your stored luggage. On the other hand, at Mbare bus station when I was sitting on my bus waiting to go to Rushinga, there were touts outside the bus selling plenty of bizarre things, including 12-inch long kitchen knives and 15-inch sickles (which Li Weiguang could have used to behead an individual in one swipe...), their points capped with a small piece of cardboard or the top of a Coca-Cola bottle. Then on the bus as we were traveling through Harare, there were a few touts who stayed on the bus to do their selling. Standing in the middle of the bus aisle, he pulled out a chopping board and some cabbage to demonstrate the manner in which his 5-in-1 knife could shred cabbage. He then brought out some green onion and made short work of those. After this demonstration, the asking price was a dollar each and he distributed them like candy around the bus to anyone who put up their hand.

I can't explain this phenomenon completely, but my guess would be that there are at least two major contributors (aside from the completely random, absurdly gruesome, and probably unrepeatable Li Weiguang incident, which actually started the checks on buses in the first place). The first lies with the traditionally communal and often pacifist nature of Africans. Many are farmers (especially those going to remote villages like Rushinga) and survival is by no means a given (see the previous post), so violence is basically unheard of in many parts (putting aside violence between tribal factions, that is). In North America, the ultra-competitive and high intensity nature of society seems to lead people to adopt much more aggressive and dog-eat-dog demeanors. I have seen a few fights arise in bars in Africa now and again, but there is always a certain level of pride and humility involved on both sides. It isn't what sometimes feels like Hollywood nature of a lot of the bars in Canada with guys in muscle shirts calling each other out and heckling each other because they are so incredibly bored and need to somehow validate the inflated and often farcical notions of 'respect' and 'street sense' that they take from sitting in front of gangster and/or ghetto survival movies.

The other reason is likely the manner in which 'lawsuit society' has crept into Western society. Bus companies probably care much more about not being sued or getting bad publicity over some incident than the actual safety of their customers. When it is possible to sue the Winnebago company and win (and this may be an urban myth, I haven't corroborated that such an absurd incident actually happened) because it crashes because you put yours on cruise control to go into the back and make a sandwich, and 'it wasn't in the owner's manual that I couldn't do that', then companies this side really need to cover their asses.

But it brings me to a notion of freedom: in Africa there is much more freedom because of the organic nature of society, whereas in North America, everything is much more scrutinized and much more controlled. We may think we have more freedom because of the constant banding around of political buzzwords like 'freedom' and 'democracy', but in the end society ends up controlling itself through (amongst other things, see for example, Adam Curtis' series The Trap and/or Ray Bradbury's short story The Pedestrian), a combination of vanity and lack of confidence in one's ability to think for oneself. Acceptability and unacceptability to often come down to popularity amongst the general population: people think it absurd that I could study mathematics and philosophy with no eye to a possible career.

Education as an end in itself? You actually what to learn about the world for it's own sake? You want to satisfy your own curiosities about the underlying secrets of human nature? Have you seen a psychiatrist lately?

Africa and Consciousness

I lasted less than 24 hours in Gaborone. It is something like a Johannesburg in the sense that a western business sense seems to have been ushered in, which is possibly justified by many opinions that Botswana has 'the fastest growing economy in Africa', or something like that. But what does it mean for an economy to grow?

When I was in Lesotho, the individual that I spent my time with and stayed with his family once said to me 'Lesotho is a poor country'. I asked him why he said that, and noted that the notion of 'poor' is based on a western model of GDPs and capital, but Lesotho is, in fact, a rich country in the fact that it has sufficient land for its population and has a very agrarian lifestyle. I told him that money with only get you so far, as you cannot eat it. Those who control land and food production are the ones that will be guaranteed survival, as Tolstoy so aptly noted in his allegory Ivan the Fool.

One of the things that has really come to the fore, however, and really made me understand the situation in Africa, that is, the social situation in Africa, is what I can only best sum up as:

"Regardless of whether it is a socio-political challenge created by the environment one lives in or a personal challenge created and implemented by one on oneself, it is only when survival challenges an individual that that individual becomes and remains conscious."

By that I mean I realize why I enjoy Africa (and 'the developing world', like during my travels in Asia) so much more than 'the west' is because people are forced to be conscious so that they may survive in a socio-economic environment where survival cannot be taken for granted, as it too often is in the affluent west.

One can think about it this way: if one knows that all one needs to do is 'enter the system' and they will basically be guaranteed eight hours a day five days a week doing whatever but, importantly, making more than enough money to survive, there is no reason for that person to change their ways, unless they feel that there is more to survival than simply being able to afford whatever basic needs and luxuries that they should require.

And this is a vicious cycle perpetuated by the capitalist mentality, and exemplified by the fact that the names on people's lips are no longer the Platos, Leonardo da Vincis, Max Plancks, and Alexander Flemings of the world, i.e. those that contributed to our collective well-being through theory and practice. Rather, it is the Bill Gates's, the David Beckhams, the Justin Biebers, the Johnny Depps, and the American Idol winners of the world, i.e. those with power (in whatever form) and money.

This shows the dramatic shift that has occurred in the past century where capital has usurped merit with regard to importance to the 'random individual'. And because of this, there is an abyss that has opened up before us because, as Marx said 150 years ago, capitalism, which is based on profit, cannot sustain itself, because eventually there are no new markets that can be exploited for profit. This may be a blip in human evolution where a few decades or a few centuries down the road we realize the pointlessness, uselessness, and stupidity of following a track that is based on vanity and personal acclaim over merit, theory, and socio-political sustainability. The human race is at a very interesting crossroads. It is of my humble opinion that the current situation can be summed up best by a quote from Patrick Stewart (as Captain Jean-Luc Picard) in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation:

"For us to go forward, the cycle must end."

On the Road

No, not the Jack Kerouac novel, but I dont have regular access to email as I've been running from pillar to post: Cape Town to Mafeteng (Lesotho) via Bloemfontein and Maseru, then on to Joburg where I stayed in Soweto (wonderful!! I think my new favourite intellectual pastime is walking through 'seedy' black townships and fraternizing with the locals) and now after a number of breakdowns, Im in Gaborone, Botswana. Off to Harare next week.

It's a rough life...

Notes from a Small Country

It's been awhile since I posted, mostly because it's largely been business as usual around here now that university is out and Im preparing to spend my break in various other southern Africa countries.

Today, however, I had to go into town to do a bit of volunteer work with an organization that is trying to put together cheap high school textbooks to help get more people educated in a country where a lot of people have few resources, especially in the townships.

As I got on the train car at Rondebosch, I heard an all-too-familiar 'commotion' in the form of some random guy blithering on about how Africa must give themselves over to Jesus Christ and yadda-yadda-yadda. While I stood there, a guy opposite me was taking a bit of an interest in me. The usual 'icebreaker' followed: "Hey man, you know, you look a lot like... Him." I said "Yeah well..." because as much as my appearance has got me into many interesting conversations with many interesting people, most of them just sort of make that comment and it doesn't really go anywhere. But then he pushed to the 'next level' asking me if I was a Christian. And then we got into a discussion about religion. So I asked him what I usually ask these sort of people in true 'Fanonist' style: why is it that after being persecuted and enslaved for over a century by Europeans, and still to this day feeling a fair bit of animosity towards colonialism and neo-colonialism (with good reason), they find favour in 'the white man's religion'?

But this guy was quite smart and quite interesting. It turned out that he was from Gabon ("Libreville?" I asked, since I know all the capital cities) and then he started talking about the 'head of his tribe' in his village. I didn't know much of anything about Gabon, and he told me that he came from a village called 'Bongoville' that was named after this 'tribal head' who he described alternatively as his 'uncle' and 'basically his father', namely Omar Bongo, who ruled Gabon for 42 years from 1967 to his death in 2009.

What struck me most about what he talked about, however, was the manner in which he described the situation in Gabon in such graphic detail. I had used terms like 'fucked over' and such, and this guy proceeded to use the same sort of terms in such graphic detail that I didnt know whether he was speaking figuratively or was actually describing what happened. He told me something like "when the white men came to Omar Bongo and took him into the forest and fucked him [and he actually went through the somatic motions to go along with act], he didn't cry. He let them do it again and again, but he didn't say anything, because his sadness was inside him. Then when they were done with him and left, he told them when they came back that if they ever touched anyone else in his tribe, he would kill them [and here again he acted out a few mock haymakers]."

As I said, I didn't know anything about Gabon at the time, but reading the wiki article about Omar Bongo, it seems that Gabon had incredible wealth, which now justifies why he kept telling me how the faith in African people derives from the manner in which they have been blessed with resources, and that the people of Gabon strongly feel that they are, in some sense, 'chosen ones' because of the rich wealth that was bequeathed to them. He told me, in a way that very creepily reflects Sartre's declarations in the preface to The Wretched of the Earth, e.g.:

1961. Listen: ‘Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe. For centuries they have stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual experience.’ The tone is new. Who dares to speak thus? It is an African, a man from the Third World, an ex-‘native’. He adds: ‘Europe now lives at such a mad, reckless pace that she is running headlong into the abyss; we would do well to keep away from it.’ In other words, she’s done for. A truth which is not pleasant to state but of which we are all convinced, are we not, fellow-Europeans, in the marrow of our bones?

He said that Africa in general is where things actually happen, that Westerners are basically zombies made content by wealth. That Westerners come to Africa because the peoples and cultures are interesting and beautiful to behold. That Africa is where all the resources are, it has been richly endowed with resources.

That is why people have faith, he says. Because they can see that they are in a privileged position, despite their history being sabotaged by economic crimes.

But it wasn't all fun and games. He told me with brutal honesty how as a young boy of around 9, he saw his mother raped and his village compromised. That there were definitely things that he had seen growing up that were filled with shocks and horror.

When I got off the train, I was already sort of 'late' to where I was supposed to go, but still I spent about 10 minutes standing at the train station listening to this guy's story. And then he told me about how he had actually fled from Gabon for various reasons, that people were looking for him for some reasons, that in his village and later in Libreville there had been problems, but I didn't really understand what was behind it all.

And then he told me he had to go to a class. He was being taught how to fight like Bruce Lee, so that when it came time for him to meet these assailants, he would be ready.

The Morals of the Wretched (Conclusion)

Well, it's nice to wake up for the second straight day to a fire-and-brimstone-free morning. However, there are likely a fair few (including Harold Camping) that are NOT waking up to an egg-on-face-free morning. Though I AM waking up to another been-to-Mzoli's-free day, as the plan for Sunday failed to materialize. Such as it is.

As I mentioned in my previous post, (oh, and by the way, here is the B.I.N. Laden parody I mentioned), we were supposed to experience the end of the world on Saturday. It failed to materialize (as far as I can see, though it seems people continue to justify that there was an apocalypse in SOME domain and the world will, indeed, end on October 21... after what will likely be a disappointingly tame six months of fire and brimstone), and there a fair few articles about the after-effects, but one of the most interesting articles includes a psychologist's assessment:

"It's very hard for us to say, 'Boy, was I stupid!' " says Elliot Aronson, a prominent psychologist and co-author of the book Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, And Hurtful Acts.

"The more committed a person is to their prophecy," he says, "the more likely they are to justify that action, and to try to convince people that their belief was in some way right or good."

I mention that simply because a lot of what I have talked about during this thread has to do with psychology and its 'consequences. So with that in mind, let's move on to the two anecdotes I promised:

The first involves a family I stayed with in Elsiesrivier, one of the more notoriously dangerous 'coloured' suburbs in Cape Town. Because the train ends early and the taxi service ends early, there were more than a few instances where I had to walk about twenty blocks through said 'notorious' neighbourhood to get back to where I was staying, and when I arrived safely, it was always 'a miracle' that I survived. But that's not really the story; it just sets the tone.

This family is devoutly Christian. The father is born-again, or some such, saying that he turned to it as a means to getting his anger and violence in check. And from the stories I've heard he's a pretty crazy mofo telling me about numerous times when he let his fists do the talking with some fairly extreme consequences for others (he kind of has to being a white South African in a coloured neighbourhood) and also about the insane shit that he went through while 'fighting the Cubans in Angola' during the early 80s.

Anyway, during one exchange about religion, I was pressed about whether or not I believed in God. I replied that I had no opinion. I was told that that is not possible. I replied that I don't know enough about it to conclude one way or the other, so I just let it be; at the end of the day, whether God exists or not is beyond my comprehension, and it won't affect the way I live my life, so who cares? Just like I don't know enough about quantum physics or string theory or M-theory or the Higgs Boson or who knows what else to have an opinion. Why is it that the existence of God seems to be the one highly contentious metaphysical issue in the world that you have to have an opinion on??

So anyway, as a demonstration of my apparent 'stupidity', the daughter of 17 called in the 5 to come into the room. And she proceeded to put him on the spot: "Wilfred, does God exist?" He had a very wide-eyed anxious look on his face, and didn't answer. She repeated the question. Still the only response was him searching the eyes of everybody in the room (the sister, the mother, and I, all of whom he knew quite well and was very comfortable around by the time). After a third time, he let out a barely audible, totally unconfident 'yeaaaahhhh'. He was then sent from the room and the daughter triumphantly declared, 'there, you see? A 5-year-old!' I could have gone on and told her how completely ridiculous this 'proof' was, but I decided to save my breath because I knew I wouldn't get anywhere. Whenever I need some sort of religious insight, I always turn to Herr Kierkegaard, and this instance is no exception:

"If you want to be loathsome to God, just run with the herd."

"The self-assured believer is a greater sinner in the eyes of God than the troubled disbeliever."

But the inquiries kept coming as to how I could not be religious. So one day, I sat down at my laptop, and composed a brief text file, which was basically an outline of the argument put forward by Nietzsche in 'The Genealogy of Morals' that I've already briefly summarized in Part I. After reading through it, the mother said something to the effect of 'if I didn't know you better, I would think that the Devil was in you'. And I immediately launched my usual counter-attack to these sorts of absurd allegations, namely if the sole purpose of the Devil is to corrupt Christians, then surely he would have been clever enough to write a book, claim it was actually written by God, and have all Christians follow it blindly...

Anyway, perhaps the ending of that was rather anti-climactic. I find most religious debates are, since it usually ends with people agreeing to disagree because neither will budge from their position. But let me speak of another thing that happened to me, the irony of which was so incredibly amusing, and everything set up so incredibly perfectly, if anything would have made me religious it would have been that. But then the way Christians proclaim God as dolefully caring and just, rather than a trickster having a rich sense of humour, the god I would be forced to believe in would be nothing like that. If anything I would have to choose a Loki-esque god. But anyway, here goes (this is a cut-and-paste job I sent to a friend of mine from back in January):

A few days ago I had to invigilate on a math exam. When it ended at 7PM I headed to the train station. There, a man with few teeth and whom age had seemingly not been kind to poked his head around the corner and told me that when he saw me, Jesus came to mind, and, predictably, started launching into a monologue that I have heard many times before wherein people talk about how much they had sinned in the past, then found Jesus and dropped all their bad habits because they had given themselves over to God, God was watching, God would judge, etc. So eventually the train arrived, we went our separate ways and whatever.

Today, I got on the train and found that this same guy was coming towards me trying to sell things to various traingoers (as many in this country do), but he hadnt seen me as he was too busy selling. And even despite the narrow passageway, he didnt look up when he squeezed past me standing in the middle of the aisle, but all the while I was observing him. Then a funny thing happened:

I was standing near the end of the traincar, with only about 4 people on each side in the seats between me and the end of the traincar. And as he got to the very end, he turned to a girl who had apparently asked for what he was selling, but instead of conducting himself in an appropriate manner, he took what he was selling (small sealed packages of razorblades) and made an attempt to place it between the rather massive cleavage that was hanging out the top of her shirt. She appeared very disconcerted about it and he quickly righted himself by jokingly saying 'no sorry let me place it in your hand, all the while sporting the sly grin of an old pervert'.

So of course I started to laugh inside at the irony of it: that he had basically confessed to me as if I was Jesus one day, and then, after walking past me as if I wasnt there, proceeded to 'sin' in front of me, all the while, unbeknownst to him, 'God' was indeed watching.

So after this little episode, he started back, noticed me, asked if i remembered him and what we had talked about. I, still quite amused, said nonchalantly 'dont you think thats a bit hypocritical after that?' and nodded in the direction of the 'incident'. So he murmured some excuse that it was her who had asked him to place it in her breasts and he (gentleman that he was) had declined and placed it in her hand instead ('didn't you see?' he asked). After which he quickly changed the subject to loudly mentioning something about my apparent non-committal to religion and slunk away out of the traincar at the next station.

Maybe next time, he'll take a quick look about to see if 'God' is watching before he decides to 'sin' again, no?

The Morals of the Wretched (Interlude: The Walk of Life)

I didnt actually expect to create this entry, but neither did I expect to create the last interlude to my entry on (see causality of this article) et al. But just like in that instance, 'something came up', and it just happened to fit with the theme (with a little stretching involved).

In January, a Toronto police representative made an ill-advised comment that “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized”. And so the SlutWalk was born to 'take back the word slut' and bring the public's attention to the manner in which people (predominantly women) are marginalized, bullied, and generally treated with contempt when their freedom of expression goes against the often dominant voice that advocates sexual conservatism, and the dangerous precedent that this stereotyped objectification sets. Marches have been held in many cities throughout North America, and over the next few months, these demonstrations are being planned in Amsterdam, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.

The phenomenon was originally brought to my attention by a feminist activist friend of mine, and at the time I didn't really think much of it other than 'huh... interesting concept', but on Sunday there was a BBC article that gave it a good deal of publicity, and the following day, a second BBC article announced details of the SlutWalk planned in London for June 4, rightly saying: "Organisers say the aim is to highlight a culture in which the victim, rather than rapist or abuser, is blamed. So what started as an 'interesting concept' was suddenly becoming a global phenomenon.

So the request, as put to me was "I would like to see an entry on people's delusion that they can provide any help for a cause by participating in a 'walk'". Now, I'm not a psychologist, nor do I have the ability to read minds, so I cannot know for sure how close my assessment will come to the reality of the situation, and clearly different people have different reasons for participating in public demonstrations, but I'll give it a go, but before I do, let me motivate the topic a bit by mentioning a few anecdotes about the situation in South Africa.

First and foremost is the HIV/AIDS problem. Sub-Saharan Africa, especially Southern Africa, has probably the highest proportion of HIV positive cases in the world, and the prevalence of rape, which, up until very recently when it was updated, was justified by a "Sexual Offences Act [that] dates back to 1957: the days of apartheid when the country's rulers were not only all white, but also all male." It doesn't help that the country's president is a polygamist with five wives, two fiancees, and twenty children, and had gone through an infamous rape trial when he had sex with an HIV positive woman (and later revealed he had 'showered to avoid HIV'). Indeed, under the previous government, president Thabo Mbeki pretended there was no HIV problem, and dismissed anti-retroviral treatment as 'toxic and dangerous'. Things are getting better, with groups especially from the townships like Khayelitsha coming together and boldly wearing shirts describing themselves as HIV positive, and billboards with celebrities like Ryan Giggs saying things like 'Be a man. Know your status." with regard to HIV.

Another, more personal story, occurred when I was sitting in the pub in a discussion with some friends of mine. For some reason we got into the topic of rape, and the gal at the table, who I didn't know, volunteered that there was an instance when she had been at a party and would have been raped but for a friend of hers happening to walk in 'just in the nick of time'. The gentleman to my left then volunteered that he 'had heard' that most rape instances 'are actually when women have second thoughts after the fact'. I told him flat out that this simply wasn't true, that if it is truly consensual, then there shouldnt be any 'second thoughts' and if there is any doubt there shouldnt be any sex. I told him about the historical accounts of women being intimidated and marginalized to the point where they rarely report rape cases, where too often the burden of proof is on them to prove that it wasn't consensual and that it often simply comes down to her word against his and she usually ends up losing out. A story was brought to my attention by friends of mine in Ghana about a purported 'thief' in a student housing block who was eventually mass-raped by a group of students. I have followed people's reactions (i.e. friends of friends in Ghana) on the story, and most of them (who are males) tend to offer little sympathy, justifying it by saying 'she got what she deserved'.

So what does this tell us? It tells us that there is a problem. As I alluded to in my gender bender story, the history of patriarchy means that gender equality is still not taken very seriously by many, even in 'developed' countries (and this includes the current Prime Minister of Canada). And this apparent 'ignorance' seems to grow in proportion to conservatism, especially religious conservatism. So what can be done about it? Well it appears that one may run into difficulties and general inaction if one petitions one's government representative to take it up as an issue, so there must be another way (though this is usually how it is).

I will start by saying that such a 'walk' is a form of 'direct democracy', a "form of governance in which people collectively make decisions for themselves, rather than having their political affairs decided by representatives." The truth is that if democracy was all about voting every couple of years, any majority government could do whatever they pleased (we will see if that is the case in Canada), when, in fact, mass protests are the means for people to tell their representatives in no uncertain terms that they are not doing a very good job if they refuse to deal with issues that are important to those that they purport to represent. Moreover, it sends a message to the general public that this is, indeed, an important issue that cannot be absorbed or swept under the carpet. Instead of dropping hints here and there, there is an active and very real component that brings people together in protest, and also brings people who may never have thought about such an issue to get the gears in their mind turning, and (hopefully) they may begin to ask themselves what they really think about the issue and why. Even if they do not agree, critical engagement and dissenting voices are always important democratically to figure out the best way forward.

And protests are important to keep governments in check. Oftentimes it turns out that violent protests, though riskier, are often much more effective (my Ghanaian friend's treatise on student activism gave me an intimate look into this world), but one must remember that non-violent protests are a show of obstinate defiance and (assuming the Declaration of Human Rights is upheld) insulates protesters from being victims of violence themselves. This is also what eventually allowed Gandhi to free India from British colonial rule.

So I ask who is responsible enough to stand up and fight for the rights and morals of the wretched, in this case, victims who have to carry the burden of the shame of objectification, marginalization, manipulation, and egregious invasions of their personal privacy?

Lest we forget also that protests are a means by which like-minded people come together for a cause, so it also presents the opportunity for a very interesting and often very rewarding social experience for everybody.

Hmmm... I had better get that 'SlutWalk Cape Town' ball rolling...

The Morals of the Wretched (Part I)

The Genealogy of Morals is a book written by Friedrich Nietzsche talking about his perception of how morality arrived at its present state as upholding asceticism, piety, and pacifism.

I would recommend it as an interesting historical account of the power balance between politics and religion that is ongoing, but basically he surmises that way back when, when 'good' was associated with power and 'bad' was associated with inferiority, the clerics sought to upset the system, suddenly defining 'good' as pious and 'evil' as powerful. Meanwhile, the clerics could now count on an army of people wishing to be 'saved' which would bring them power and control.

It is an interesting idea, and one that I take seriously. The situation that exists between politics and religion is still a very real one, and it just goes to show the somewhat paradoxical outcome of colonialism which ended with the colonized accusing the colonizers of tyrannical brutality, yet embracing the religion that these 'tyrants' brought with them:

"All values, in fact, are irrevocably poisoned and diseased as soon as they are allowed in contact with the colonized race. The customs of the colonized people, their traditions, their myths—above all, their myths—are the very sign of that poverty of spirit and of their constitutional depravity. That is why we must put the DDT which destroys parasites, the bearers of disease, on the same level as the Christian religion which wages war on embryonic heresies and instincts, and on evil as yet unborn. The recession of yellow fever and the advance of evangelization form part of the same balance sheet. But the triumphant communiqués from the mission are in fact a source of information concerning the implantation of foreign influences in the core of the colonized people. I speak of the Christian religion, and no one need be astonished. The Church in the colonies is the white people’s Church, the foreigner’s Church. She does not call the native to God’s ways but to the ways of the white man, of the master, of the oppressor. And as we know, in this matter many are called but few are chosen."

--Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

But then what comes of this? Today as I was walking to the university, an individual called out to me ('Jesus!') from the place by the river where he regularly squats with other destitute individuals. He told me of his situation. That they are harassed constantly by the authorities, that the situation is so unfair because whenever he has bread, he shares it with his comrades but they do not reciprocate. That he cries a fair bit because of his destitute situation (though when he mentioned this to me, I wasnt sure if this was actual or metaphorical), that he was born in Guguletu, and had a pretty rough life, that he was born in 1974 and had lost his mother recently, that he had talents and liked to sing, and wanted to somehow find a change for the better and no longer live and be treated like an animal. During that time, a 'Groote Schuur Community Officer' came and started harassing him and his fellow strugglers, and forced them to disperse, while they protested that they werent cheating and stealing; they were just trying to live. And so during the conversation, we moved from the open to a more discrete location away from the main road while he continued his talk. And after this, he did indeed start to weep at his miserable plight. But a common theme kept arising: his Christian faith.

Although I often lend an ear to such people, I am not always inclined to help them. When I was in Oxford, and even back in Canada, people ask for money on a lot of occasions but it is fairly easy to shut them out. You wonder what has crept into their situation: if you give them money, how will it be used? Yesterday at the pub, my friend pointed out a grizzled elderly white woman that had tried her best to add some notion of beauty to her features with little dabs of makeup here and there. She had started coming to the pub fairly recently (as far as I could see), but I thought I remembered seeing her somewhere before. And then my friend said 'I see this old woman in Observatory all the time and I always give her a bit of change when she asks me for it. Seeing her in here purchasing beers, I now know where my money is going.' Sad.

But you cannot blame these people, as I mentioned in the post on death, I spoke of the book 'Better Never To Have Lived', and the difficulty that children face when they are brought into this world. Of course, some have it much more difficult than others, and it is not always easy to deal with hardship and have the strength to continue. Sometimes when I see Rasta at the house after a hard day's work, it really pains me that I can't do more. But when it comes to randoms, Cambodia always comes to mind, and I remind myself that I can't save everybody. And so anyway, these people must find a way to continue the struggle, often by bypassing the reality of the situation through substance abuse, domestic violence,... or religion:

"Here on the level of communal organizations we clearly discern the well-known behavior patterns of avoidance. It is as if plunging into fraternal blood-bath allowed them to ignore the obstacle, and to put off till later the choice, nevertheless inevitable, which opens up the question of armed resistance to colonialism. Thus collective autodestruction in a very concrete form is one of the ways in which the native’s muscular tension is set free. All these patterns of conduct are those of the death reflex when faced with danger, a suicidal behavior which proves to the settler (whose existence and domination is by them all the more justified) that these men are not reasonable human beings. In the same way the native manages to by-pass the settler. A belief in fatality removes all blame from the oppressor; the cause of misfortunes and of poverty is attributed to God: He is Fate. In this way the individual accepts the disintegration ordained by God, bows down before the settler and his lot, and by a kind of interior restabilization acquires a stony calm."

--Ibid.

Anyway, this individual, 'Albert', wanted me to sing with him, and went into some hymn or something or other about how Jesus saves and all that, while all the while I watched him and the other passersby who were curious about this white man being entertained by a homeless local. The Officer came back briefly but didnt approach us while I was with this man. Then Albert asked me for food, as I knew he inevitably would. Normally I say no to these people, but he had done some work: telling me about his situation, about the situation of many of his ilk in Cape Town, singing for me, etc. He had wanted to follow me into the shop, but as he approached, he was barred from entry but the security guy, so I went in myself. As I had left him to go in, he had called after me requesting a veritable smorgasbord of food. I at first thought that I would 'do the usual' and just buy him a loaf of bread, but then as I was near the deli, my eye looked over the possibilities on offer, and there was a fairly cheap chicken curry and rice, so I went for that and repaid him in kind with some rice and chicken curry from the Pick n Pay that came to about R18 ($2.50). I emerged from the store just in time to see a group of these guys (including Albert) getting shooed away by the security staff, and as he moved away, I caught up to him, gave my offering to him, said 'best of luck', and walked off.

I had to go, and I wasnt particularly interested in hearing his long-winded lamentations about how he had just been treated.

Who is responsible?

An individual from Ghana that I have become connected to through the miracle of facebook via various condemnations I made of policies taken in Libya on the BBC 'Have Your Say' page sent me a message on Sunday night. A few years ago, he had a work published containing anecdotes of his time as a student activist at the University of Ghana, the difficulties he faced during the time as both student and activist, and recommendations for the means and the justifications for other students to become active. He wanted my help in making the piece 'more international'. In an almost Trotskyist way, he wanted to reach out to the international student community with a universalizable creed.

So I read it that night, all 167 pages of it. And it was quite a thrill for me, because through his many anecdotes and many attempts to incite student action, and many mentions of tribulations that came from government resistance, reactionary student resistance, etc., I saw what I had been missing being educated in the first world. As I said to him in my reply,

"Although you wish to make it ‘more international’, I believe that the struggle facing the students in the developed world are diametrically opposite to the struggle facing students in the developing world. Those in the developed world are in a state of apathetic contentment because of the privileged socio-economic conditions that they have inherited, while those in the developing world are in a state of resistance against neo-colonialist control and marginalization because of the oppressive socio-economic conditions that they have inherited."

In other words, the means to action in the developed world is not really present because those that are oppressed to the point of desperation (I mean, pretty much everyone who works for a large corporation is oppressed, the CEOs laughing all the way to the bank), are a minority. Most of them are the Native peoples that have been treated like primitive beings since North America was colonized: marginalization on reservations as their land was stolen, sterilization programs and residential schooling as their right to maintain the existence of their beliefs and life-world were stolen, forced into various substance abuses and addictions as their collective dignity was stolen, etc. Much of these individuals live outside of the student collective, and those that find themselves within it do not really have a voice: they are quickly marginalized by their 'archaic' nature, and the mistrust and subjugation that too often exists between racial groups, especially those that have been almost totally disenfranchised.

People in South Africa think that it is all rosy in North America, but I tell them that this is really not so. We have Native populations that are subjugated just like in South Africa. The only difference is that they have no voice because they are neither of the economic majority (as the whites are here) or of the population majority (as the blacks are here), so they are successfully either marginalized or assimilated.

When I ask 'who is responsible?' I do not mean 'who is responsible for this state of affairs?' because I already know the answer: the minority who control the majority who produce through economic and other oppressive means. Rather, I ask 'who is responsible?' as in 'who is going to become responsible enough to answer Bob Marley's plea?'

You can fool some people sometimes,
But you can't fool all the people all the time.
So now we see the light,
We gonna stand up for our rights!

In other words, what is your/my/our role as students? The author of the piece is absolutely correct. He says:

"It is even more worrying as the fallacy of “future leaders” is gaining acceptance not only among the general student mass but beyond. This may result in a situation where majority of the youth across the continent will not take initiatives today because they have accepted that they are the leaders of tomorrow; they will not take responsibility today because they are the leaders of tomorrow, and more important, they will not provide answers to problems today because they are the leaders of tomorrow. For them the future is tomorrow.

Already, in spite of the myriad problems confronting students amidst gross and glaring human rights abuses on their various campuses, student leaders do not feel inclined to fight, or more importantly, propose solutions. Choosing between their fellows and university administrators or the Government has almost always seen them leaning on the latter alternative because it seems to have proven safer and more rewarding, given the fact that either the administration or government could guarantee the safety of their positions and sometimes their grades.

Indeed, it is not surprising to find highly disappointed students encouraging themselves with a rather awkward question: “How many days more do I have to leave this institution?” Obviously, even a whole academic year of eight months could be reduced to 224 days. Thus, by this thinking, they unfortunately leave behind problems that could have been resolved in their time, arguing that the purpose for schooling is the essence of studying, and that is what they do exclusively. As a result, students who could have provided alternative solutions to some teething problems in their various institutions or the nation as a whole sink that innovative side of their minds into oblivion."

I read this and immediately thoughts began to swim through my head: we, as students, have the power to control, because we are collectively pursuing all modes of education that are required to govern, to control, and, ultimately, to lead. All that is required is collaboration, organization, and mutual aid. The author cites one such instance:

"On the streets however, the police fired tear gas to disperse the thick crowd of protesting students. But with the help of some chemistry students, the mob soon learnt that by wetting their handkerchiefs with urine and placing them against their noses, they could still stand safe in the midst of the poisonous fog."

So who is responsible? Who are the people who will lead? Who will say 'no more' to our fathers and forefathers who treat us like children: marginalize us, disrespect us, steal from us, and try to convince us that it is just, all in the name of their own greed? All in the name of the carrot that is dangled before the noses by the global economic powers that be who want nothing more to preserve the status quo: that keeps the dinosaurs laughing all the way to the bank, grooming the next generation to take their place as the next generation of oppressors?

I thought of this and envisioned parallel entities being created through the collective will of the student body: parallel universities where students come together to share their knowledge, and to educate their brethren through the two modes of learning: academic and existential. But by so doing bypassing the stringent corporatization of education that seeks to put money in the coffers of the ruling elite in return for a piece of paper that makes one's academic achievements 'official'. Parallel housing structures that are erected by students for students to come together in parallel committees and discussion groups to discuss what needs to be done to expand the mandate of those who have every right to lead: the people. And who can speak better for the people than those who must enter into and deal with the world that they have inherited from the previous generation? Who is better to say 'no, we dont want this world of pollution and corruption, fragmented and divided, full of mistrust because of all those individuals who will sell their mothers, daughters, brothers, and sons for the almighty buck'?

I mentioned this vision to him and he replied "won't this be seen as subversive?"

You bet it will.

Hate Speech, Violence, Struggle Songs & Reggae

The ongoing Julius Malema saga constitutes an interesting philosophical question: when can historically relevant modes of expression—such as, in this case, his singing of "awudubhulu ibhunu" or "shoot the boer", a black struggle song, at a university campus over a year ago—be prosecuted as 'hate speech'. There are many interesting angles with respect to the sorts of incidences, but I think there are two that are most important; first, is it still relevant after the conditions that created it have changed, and second, what is the motivation for the person in question singing it?

It is useful that Bono was just down a couple of months ago and had plenty to say about 'shoot the boer', likening it to rebels songs in Ireland about the Republican army.

"We sang this and it's fair to say it's folk music ... as this was the struggle of some people that sang it over some time. But would you want to sing that in a certain community? It's pretty dumb," Bono reportedly said.

This caused some major controversy:

[Afrikaans singer Steve] Hofmeyr, writing in Afrikaans on his official Facebook fan page yesterday, said he 'just chucked his two, R2500 U2 tickets into the Jukskei [River]'. "Bono is trying to lick the asses of the ANC by attempting to validate hate speech struggle songs by comparing them to Ireland's songs. The difference Bono? Your songs are in a safe context while ours are not. You live in peace in Dublin while our boere are exterminated like flies. The Irish songs are cold nostalgia - ours are warm blood," wrote Hofmeyr.

On the other hand,

Kallie Kriel, CEO of AfriForum, yesterday said the organisation "welcomed" Bono's comments. "It's actually a reflection of what we're saying. We don't want to wipe any struggle songs off the history books. [Bono] said there are rules as to when you can sing these songs, and Julius Malema does not abide by those rules," he said.

But Dirk Hermann, deputy director-general of trade union Solidarity, whose uncle was murdered in a farm murder last week, said he was "nauseated". He "dared" Bono to still call the song a folk song if his "uncle or brother or father was murdered in such a cruel manner on a farm".

So what is the final verdict? Well it isn't final, but my opinion would be to side with Sartre on this one:

"The only possible way out was to confront total negation with total negation, violence with equal violence; ... colonialists needed a sub-proletariat, but they had to live at the frontier of the impossibility of life because wages had to be as close as possible to zero. The violence of the rebel was the violence of the colonialist; there was never any other. The struggle between the oppressed and oppressors ultimately became the reciprocal interiorisation of a single oppression: the prime object of oppression, interiorising it and finding it to be the negative source of its unity, appalled the oppressor, who recognised, in violent rebellion, his own oppressive violence as a hostile force taking him in turn as its object. And against his own violence as Other, he created a counter-violence which was simply his own oppression become repressive, that is to say, reactualised and trying to transcend the violence of the Other, in other words his own violence in the Other."

--"Racism and Colonialism as Praxis and Process" in Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960)

In other words, the 'violence' that the Afrikaaners see in the singing of such songs is not just a veiled fear that these will initiate a certain call to arms. It is also a form of humiliation: a symbol of the counter-violence that had to be acceded to by the natives because they were pushed by violent means to ever-more marginalized status by colonialists. And it is the same dialectical violence: thrust and counter-thrust. What they have begun has come back to haunt them: the violence that they are experiencing is the same violence dished out through decades of repression. But is it right to 're-open old wounds'?

Well from my experience, these wounds are anything but old. Racism and discrimination still exist on a very large scale in South Africa; people have just learned to 'bottle it', i.e. it has become internalized. But the truth is that whatever is bottled often comes out in the heat of emotion, and the fall-out from apartheid is a topsy-turvy situation of thrust and counter-thrust: whites argue that blacks are taking advantage of their 'newfound equality', blacks claim that these objections by whites is a veiled attempt to perpetuate inequality, oppression, and racism (and the coloureds sit in the middle, lashing out at both sides and believing that since the situation was flipped on its head, they've gone from the middle of the old system to the middle of the new system, basically remaining completely ignored). The externalization of such racism in the singing of such songs has become a major taboo, because it is symbolic of the precarious socio-political position that the people of South Africa find themselves in. It is akin to a truce in which each side is still wearing the scars of history, and always have their arsenal of weapons at the ready in case 'someone' should break the ceasefire.

It is true that as a nation, South Africa needs to move on, but all African nations need to move on, and that is not really possible while they are still being oppressed in violent ways. Just because the violence is now economic rather than physical it makes no difference: "Repression is repression, no matter who does it [or, for that matter, how it's done], and it's got certain consequences, irrespective of the ethnic origins of those who are practicing undemocratic measures" (Ngugi wa Thiong'o). And what is violence? According to one definition on dictionary.com: "an unjust or unwarranted exertion of force or power, as against rights or laws: to take over a government by violence." When you change the type of power (economic instead of feudal), you equally change the definition of violence.

The bottom line is that things like the UN Charter of Rights and Freedoms basically make it illegal for the oppressed to meet violence with violence. As explained earlier (6th paragraph), the violence that the colonialists used before was feudal violence using superior weapons; if African natives wish to use feudal violence to counteract this problem, as they are now more able to do so (look at the weapons that the Libyan government has: the models may be outdated, but the weapons themselves are still modern enough), the rules have already been changed and feudal violence is no longer allowed. Instead, economic violence through superior capital is being used to undermine nations by establishing monopolies and oligopolies, assimilating or driving small-market competitors, etc. out of business, until the point where these corporate consortiums can charge whatever they want.

If people don't believe me, they can look at an article written about the economic downfall of the Goulart government that I came across:

"Although the Brazilian industrial and commercial entrepreneurs publically announced several times that they were prepared to assist the government as much as they could to control inflation, they actually used the power they had to speculate and to rise disproportionally the prices of their goods, passing along the stabilization costs to the customers. In a meeting promoted by the Association of Commerce of Sao Paulo at the end of 1962, for instance, this issue of speculating as well as transmitting and even anticipating increasing output costs to prices was raised by a member of the Association, who wanted to denounce to the press those firms that did not respect the agreement made with the government. Nevertheless, one of the most important and affluent commerce leaders in Sao Paulo, Nivaldo Ulhoa Cintra, who was also attending the meeting, opposed drastically to that proposal. Nivaldo pointed out that the Association of Commerce could not release a public statement recognizing that its members were increasing disproportionally the prices of their goods, contributing to the mounting inflation. This would be an issue, according to him, which should be discussed within the “walls of the Association”, but not out of them.

--Felipe Pereira Loureiro "Economic Policy and Social Actors: The governments of Janio Quadros and Joao Goulart in Brazil (1961-64)."

That may have been decades ago, but we can see that this sort of thing goes on by looking within South Africa itself at the recent bread-fixing scandal:

"The commission's investigation established that between 1995 and 2006, Premier Foods, Tiger Brands, Pioneer Foods and Foodcorp were involved in price fixing and market allocation. The commission found that they held telephonic discussions and meetings where they directly fixed the selling price of bread; directly fixed the dates when such agreed price increases would be effective [drastically raised in tandem during the holiday season]; and divided markets by allocating territories where each firm would be the only one operating a bakery in a particular territory and supply all distributors in the allocated area."

And what does all this have to do with Reggae? Well a couple of days ago I watched Marre's 'Roots, Rock, Reggae' documentary: "An extraordinary year for Reggae music, captured live in this award-winning film. Roots Rock Reggae was the first in-depth documentary about Reggae music in Jamaica and looks at the social and political importance of this 'cry of the people'." When does a 'cry of the people' become outdated? I would argue that it becomes so when the suffering that has necessitated this cry becomes outdated.

Does this mean that I support Malema's position? No. Because the suffering that has necessitated this cry HAS become outdated. "You are rich because you are white and you are white because you are rich," as Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, is no longer a valid claim. Although it is true that the roots of economic power still lie with the whites, this is the 'old money' and there is becoming more and more 'new money' that is showing up in the form of rich blacks, and that group includes you, Mr. Malema (note how he predictably turns it into a race issue: "The problem with you is that when an African child is emerging and becoming successful, that is when you have a problem"). Hypocrites, one might call them, 'walking left and talking right' as it were, though this was predicted by Fanon in the chapter "Pitfalls of National Consciousness": "The ministers, the members of the cabinet, the ambassadors and local commissioners are chosen from the same ethnological group as the leader, sometimes directly from his own family. Such regimes of the family sort seem to go back to the old laws of inbreeding, and not anger but shame is felt when we are faced with such stupidity, such an imposture, such intellectual and spiritual poverty. These heads of the government are the true traitors in Africa, for they sell their country to the most terrifying of its enemies: stupidity." So there is now no longer a major racial component because there is no longer an equivalence between race and economic class. If they changed it to 'Shoot the Rich (Especially Hypocritical) Assholes', then I would applaud.

But then Malema would have a real dilemma on his hands...

Cargo Cults, Causality, Capitalism (and Mathematics) (Part II)

And now the next, and quite possibly last chapter.

Teaching mathematics, especially in Africa, is a bit thankless. The foremost reason for this is that, more often than not, no one really cares. People take a course and they say "I cant wait to be done with this. All I need is a pass and then I will never have to take another mathematics course again." And I ask "so why are you in this course then?" And more often than not, the answer is something to the effect of "because I have to"; most of these individuals are in economics or math finance or actuarial or something like this. In other words, mathematics has gone from a search for truth to a means to perpetuate greed. Hurrah!

But there is a reason for this, and it points to a much larger problem. Basically, I think there are two elements at play here. One is that the lack of real conflict in the last century on North American soil has meant that it has been able to maintain a great deal of uniformity in its educational approach, and hence it has been allowed to develop in a way that maintains a certain amount of continuity with much more historical treatments of education, namely in terms of a more meritocratic system of developing ideas, experimentation, discovery, and notions of 'truth'. Because of this, the strong roots that it was allowed to maintain with mathematics in terms of major ideological debates that strike at its very core, such as the one that surrounded the Hilbert program, etc. This has allowed it to able to maintain a certain level of 'ivory tower' status against the recent push for the commodification and corporatization of education. On the other hand, South Africa in particular and Africa in general does not have: a) the historical continuity that allows for this, b) the economic history to that allows it to put 'theory' before 'practice' (since so many people have so little, it is incredibly difficult to conceive of people having time to spend 'contemplating their navels' as it were), and c) the current economic feasibility to try to instill any sort of change in ideology, etc.

But the bigger problem is the state of education in general. A recent article that notes that there are only one or two universities in Africa that feature in the top echelons of university rankings systems provides some insight:

“Africa inherited a higher education system that was a carbon copy of [that of] the powers that colonised it. Right from the beginning, Africa started on a wrong footing – well behind the starting line, so to speak. Despite all the political and economic turmoil it has gone through since independence – often of its own making – it is now expected to compete on a completely non-level playing field. Not only is this unfair, it is also inappropriate,” says Mohamedbhai, who has also served as vice-chancellor of the University of Mauritius. “One could argue that other regions that were also colonised – South Asia, Latin America – are doing reasonably well. However, none of these regions suffered from the sort of exploitation that Africa underwent and continues to experience.”

Latin America cannot be put in this category simply because their colonization occurred centuries before Africa and Asia: they have been able to generate a reasonable amount of uniformity and, moreover, when the Europeans relinquished control of these countries there was still a fairly long period within which they could develop out of the limelight of the 'modern world' that allows for individuals, groups, corporations, etc. to jump from one continent to the next at the drop of a hat. Brazil's independence from Portugal was 'recognized' in 1825, Argentina from Spain in 1816, Chile in 1844, etc. In fact, other than the three 'Guyanas' that were claimed by the British, Dutch, and French respectively, and are largely seen politically as part of the West Indies, only one country achieved full independence after Canada did in 1867. That country was Peru: although it was declared long before in 1821, it was only officially 'recognized' in 1879. Contrast that to Africa where, aside from Egypt which has basically been able to maintain its independence throughout its history because of the very strong historical legacy of Egypt, all countries only emerged from European colonization in the mid-20th century, with Tunisia and Morocco the first to gain independence in 1956, and Ghana the first sub-Saharan country to gain their independence in 1957.

Moreover, South Asian universities also tend to be quite low on the scale, and aside from Thailand, which has maintained its monarchical rule throughout its history, all of these other South Asian nations also emerged from colonial rule only post-WWII. Those countries that have done exceptionally well in Asia, namely Japan, China, and South Korea have largely been spared the Western colonial cosh, though they have had their differences throughout history (i.e. the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, and their occupation of the Korea peninsula until the division of Korea occurred post-WWII).

The two exceptions are Hong Kong (1841 to Britain, 1997 back to China) and Singapore (1963 from UK, 1965 from Malaysia). But it should be no surprise that these are exceptions: they have few natural resources, and a high population density, meaning that the people were forced to develop their know-how since they couldn't very well live off the land. On the other hand, most colonial 'land-grabs' were for the purposes of owning land and the corresponding resources. There was no need to educate the people, since they basically were enslaved to serve as free labour for the production of goods. When they were allowed to declare their independence, globalization had already had its say: transport of people, goods, and information across great distances was now fairly routine, so they were given no period of 'privacy' to establish what was to be done. For example, Indonesia were able to declare independence from Japan in 1945, but were besieged for the next four years by the British and the Dutch trying to retake control of the archipelago. After this, they had to deal with the fact that most of the industry was ethnically controlled, namely by the Dutch and ethnic Chinese.

Thus, the problem is not that such nations are incapable due to their people, it is rather that history has dealt them a very cruel hand, and they have only emerged with some difficulty from colonial rule during a period when they are being constantly scrutinized by powerful countries with superior military and economic might. Emerging, as it were, with these very same countries still owning the brunt of the economic resources (e.g. the situation as it has played out in Zimbabwe). It is difficult to decide what is to be done in one's own country when no one will leave a people alone to make this decision, and no one will leave a people alone to take stock of THEIR OWN RESOURCES to decide how best to allocate them for THEIR OWN INTERESTS. I already dealt with the other side of this problem in Part I.

So let me get back to the mathematical side of things. Although frustrating, it seems that one cannot but accept that mathematics as a tool to business is, in some sense, a necessity. It is unfathomable why an individual would study Banach algebras over finance if there is little money available in mathematical research and one is likely living like the much of the rest of the population: day-by-day hand-to-mouth.

It is not difficult to see why the educational systems in these countries are poorly conceived of and poorly managed; it is because they have not had any time to themselves since independence: they have been thrown into the deep end of a world that is constantly spinning about them both economically and politically, with their former colonial masters standing at the poolside constantly taunting them and pushing them back into the middle should they get to close to the edge where they might gain some sort of respite from their perpetual treading of water. Continuing the above article:

In light of the continent’s urgent problems, Mohamedbhai thinks that African universities should absent themselves from the race to rise up the rankings and focus their efforts on immediate needs. “Do African universities need to be ranked globally? I don’t think so. Their mission should be to produce the appropriate manpower required for Africa’s development, to undertake research that is of direct relevance to Africa – which may not be acceptable for publication in the best scientific journals – and to reach out to assist the communities in the many challenges they are facing, especially poverty reduction. None of these fits the criteria used for global ranking. African universities have a duty to serve their countries and region first before seeking global glory. The tragedy is that many African governments, blinded by the prestige of global rankings, are challenging their universities to be ranked without understanding the consequences of the grossly inappropriate use of resources that that would entail. At the end of the day, this brings us back to the very purpose of higher education in a country. Not all universities in the world can have the same mission. Priorities are different in different countries, and universities must not be forced to conform to a single model of a world-class university.”

I personally believe that there is a different type of education that Africa (and many countries in Asia) requires: a push towards a much more critical pedagogy that provides its people with an understanding and a genuine belief that it is not them that is the problem; it is rather their colonial wardens that give them no peace that are the problem. They must learn and understand who they are and what is at stake. They must realize that Africa and its people are ontologically no different than anywhere else. That it has the potential for greatness if only enough people see and genuinely believe in this greatness and are willing to come together to enact real change towards a real Africa that is Africa through and through rather than an poor interpretation of Western society.

And, most importantly, they must understand that this change can only come from them.

Cargo Cults, Causality, Capitalism (and Mathematics) (Part I)

It is interesting how the strangest discussions can produce some of the most amazing moments of clarity and insight.

I will always remember the local bus ride from Bhubaneswar to Puri, not so much because of the scenery (which was quite amazing!), but because of the subject matter of the conversation. I was sitting with my traveling cohort in the bus, trying to think of something to pass the time. So I turned to him and asked him 'What do you think the strangest possible name for a city could be?' We threw around a few names and had a few laughs, and then he mentioned one name that I cannot repeat here because the title was so ironic and hilarious in so many ways, that it quickly went from a discussion about random names to analyzing this odd phrase. And from that phrase grew an idea for a novel that could be used as an allegory to produce a rather damning critique of the practices of the rich global elite. As the plot got more and more absurd the more 'accurate' the metaphor was, my friend mentioned that he wanted some place in it for some sort of cargo cult (as he thought that this would be a rather hilariously naive sequence of events to add). At the time, it seemed a bit daunting to know how to fit it all in (and he soon put me in sole charge of any sort of novel that might come of it, so I tried to develop the idea and still believe it can and should be written once I get the time to do so, hence why I would rather not reveal the phrase in question).

But recently I was reminded of this with regard to the situation in Libya and Africa in general. I started using the term 'cargo cult' to describe a lot of American foreign policy because by looking through history, it seems that in the post-WWII era almost every coup, coup attempt, or other such means to usurp power in the third world has some connection to the United States (and, it seems, the World Bank and IMF are not far behind) either as supporting it or helping to defeat it: Chile, Brazil, Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Vietnam, Korea, Philippines, Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Iraq, Iran, the list goes on.

And in the aftermath of these we see the hypocrisy surrounding American claims for 'freedom', 'democracy', and 'overthrowing of dictators'. Few Chileans, for example, will forget the brutality of Pinochet, few Congolese will forget the personality cult and autocracy of Mobutu, few Egyptians will forget the exploitation by Mubarak. And of course, there is the perpetual eye-sore of Vietnam: when I was in HCMC/Saigon, I did the rounds in the Vietnam War Museum and literally left in tears. Of course, the term cargo cult refers to the ill-conceived beliefs of various tribes of Pacific Islanders throughout history believing that foreign explorers were spirits, etc., but it is also idiomatically used (in the words of wikipedia) "to mean any group of people who imitate the superficial exterior of a process or system without having any understanding of the underlying substance". In other words, for some reason (well... not 'some reason', but mostly due to the overinflated Western media spreading its hegemonic pro-capitalist message) too often people see the United States as some sort of unbiased saviour and morally righteous actor in a Manichean interpretation of the global world. If only they would learn a bit of history.

Anyway, where philosophy really kicks in here is the fact that what underlines cargo cults is an egregious logical flaw: P implies Q is obviously not logically equivalent to Q implies P, and moreover, the association of two events does not necessarily imply logical dependence. So we have that explorers come and bring strange goods to the islands, but that doesnt imply that strange goods on an island implies explorers came (as in, instead of making religious sacrifices, these goods could be scientifically assessed to try to recreate them without 'foreign intervention'), nor does it mean that a certain religious ceremony being performed on the day that said explorers arrive implies that the perpetuation of said ceremony will imply that said explorers will arrive again. The same ideas can be applied to American foreign policy: even if American foreign policy produces 'change' (irrespective of one's assessment of the qualities of said change), this does not mean that some sort of change requires the intervention of a Western power. Moreover, 'change' and 'good' are not always synonymous, and history shows that there are many 'changes' that the US has brought about that really aren't so 'good'.

For example, it is clear from the difference I see in the manner in which some/many South Africans conduct themselves socially versus the ease in which other Africans conduct themselves socially that the apartheid history has had a major effect on South Africa. A brief look into the books of history shows that the Soweto uprisings in 1976 should have spelled the beginning of the end for apartheid in South Africa. By December of 1980, the Carter administration had almost convinced Botha, the leader of the apartheid government, to grant Namibia its independence, and this would likely have had a domino effect on political policies in South Africa in general. A month later, Botha suddenly made an about turn. The reason? Reagan became president and threw his weight behind Botha's racist regime in order to have a staunchly anti-communist ally to undermine socialism in southern Africa and possible give Reagan an upper hand in the Cold War: cue a lengthy civil war in Angola, and a perpetuation of apartheid in South Africa for a further ten years. And, of course, cue the 'sacrifices' for the sake of perpetuating American self-interest. Interestingly, a main reason for Botha relinquishing control of the ruling party was because of a heart attack he experienced two days before Reagan's second term ended. He expected an individual that backed his apartheid approach would come into power, but he guessed wrong and De Klerk gained control of the National Party, the catalyst for the end of apartheid. Although Botha bitterly maintained his hold on the presidency for a further six months, he relinquished control in protest when he realized that he no longer had any power.

If one agrees that the perpetuation of apartheid in South Africa was not 'a good', but one doubts the role that the US played, they can read various letters between Reagan and Botha that are available in the public domain. Reagan's response to Botha includes an opinion that criticisms of South African policy (i.e. apartheid) are “over-simplified or distorted notions and frequently from sources that have little to brag about themselves,” maintaining it was “all the more imperative that pro-democratic blacks join – and be seen to join – [Botha] in building a new South Africa.” On the other hand, he offers the following 'political support': “it will be possible for my administration, our business community and key allies of the United States to play a more constructive role” in backing the South African apartheid government. Of course, this was dependent on various 'conditions' being met, including support for Angolan free-marketer Jonas Savimbi (which resulted in South Africa invading Angola and contributing to a decade-long civil war) in order to "erode Soviet political influence over Angola", and a commitment to the Nkomati Accord, which basically monitored and put pressure on socialist moves in Mozambique and, indirectly, in neighbouring Zimbabwe.

If one STILL does not agree, that individual should note that the passing of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act passed in 1986 by the US administration, which really turned the thumbscrews on the Botha government by isolating South Africa economically, was vetoed by Reagan. It is the only instance in the 20th century when a presidential veto on foreign policy was overturned by the necessary two-thirds majority in Congress.

ANYWAY, after I thought about it in this way, I realized that perhaps a cargo cult really is needed in that novel... if I ever get around to writing it.

Tune in later (maybe tomorrow if I get around to it) for Part II, which, I promise, will include some talk of mathematics (YAY!) and will not include tirades that 'vilify' those involved in enacting and carrying out the policies of Team America World Police.

'Life is so hard, mah man'

I used to really enjoy going to Western Europe. The history is interesting, the architecture so beautiful, there is a more social and less xenophobic feeling in the air because of the manner in which it seems to be able to integrate itself through public transport and public spaces being so common and so well populated.

On my way to South Africa last year, I took 10 days in Europe en route, a few days in Copenhagen, and then a week to troll a bit around southern Europe before I flew to Joburg from Malpensa airport just outside of Milan. But despite all the interestingly colourful architecture, the 'openness' of staying by the water and having canals run underfoot, and of course the beautiful young Danish women in their summer dresses riding down the streets of Copenhagen on their bicycles, something felt wrong. It was different than before. True, I still had to finish my thesis revisions before my re-submission and I was a bit pressed for time, and I also was about to step into the unknown in terms of committing to a year in South Africa, a country I had heard so many horror stories about in terms of personal safety, but it was much more than that. For the first time, I really started to look at the people... search their faces... observe their mannerisms... and for the first time, I didnt understand.

My time in Asia the winter before had had a major effect on me it seemed. Here was a world that was so strange and foreign to me, but I had had a number of interesting experiences where, despite the language barrier in a Chinese village and a Vietnamese town, I was made to feel like I belonged; I was included in various things that happened to be shared by the community at the time. And now searching all these faces in Denmark, there seemed to be an emptiness about it.

Of course, I am a bit of an elitist because I can survive comfortably in the developing world and I dont know what its REALLY like to be oppressed and impoverished, but one of the main things that I realized is that I travel to engage with people, because people are the most interesting and unpredictable beings in the world. I realized that my boredom in North America stems from the predictably of it all. Most people take life for granted because they dont have to be challenged, they dont really know or care whats going on outside of their immediate social circle because they dont have to. There is the implicit understanding that despite their not having as large a house and as many cars as the next person, they will survive. Or maybe it just doesnt occur to them to critically engage with reality should their bubble be effectively burst.

South Africa, in particular, I really really love. When I first arrived, I was a bit paranoid because of what I had heard about this unknown country. But when I arrived back from India, I just said 'fuck it' and stepped boldly out into the unknown, which provided me with interesting experiences aplenty. But the main thing is that I have a public place where I can constantly engage with people. True, it gets a bit boring now and again, but what doesnt? The main point is that I would very rarely go 'clubbing' or 'partying' back in Canada because I already knew what it was about: expensive beers, pointless conversations, 'dancing', some people trying to hook up, others trying to start fights... in general it too often seemed to be a pointless exercise. But here I go out most nights. One is because the beer is ridiculously cheap (750ml for R13 ~ $1.80), but the other is that its a 'black bar', meaning that ex-pats looking for opportunity in Cape Town come together with backgrounds from all around Africa, and they always have interesting things to say about their own countries and what's going on, but they also understand and are interested in discussing the situation in general. It is because they are in a position where if they begin to take life for granted, if they stop being vigilant, then their situation will become precarious.

One of, if not the, closest friend I have at the moment is one of my roommates, 'Rasta'. He's from Tanzania, looking to make ends meet in Cape Town. He does leatherworking at a kiosk in the area, making belts, handbags, sandals, etc., fixing shoes, etc. But whenever I talk with him, whether it be in the evening over a toke or in the morning after starting the day, I can see the strain on his face, and he often begins with a sigh and the utterance 'Life is so hard, mah man.' Ive known him for a fair bit of time, and we often end up discussing similar things. He tells me 'it's not hard if you have a bit of capital, because then all you gotta do is be creative'. He tells me about how he wants to meet a beautiful girl, but not yet because he doesnt want to bring a child into the world while he's in his financially tough situation. He tells me about how much he misses Tanzania, but that he can see how South Africa is slowly turning into Tanzania, and its becoming more and more difficult to survive. He tells me 'the government, they dont tell about the real situation, the people on the streets, you only really understand when you have to go hungry and you dont know where your next meal is going to come from'. He tells about how tired he is because he has to wake up every morning, haul out and set up the kiosk that sits in storage overnight about half a block from where he sets up his shop. He tells me about how much he wants to go back to finish school if he can put some money together, but he's 28 and isnt sure when or if he can make ends meet. But in the end, he reiterates 'Life is so hard, mah man'.

When I first went to Asia, I had real sympathy for people and wanted to help them out, but after being in Cambodia, where there are people constantly haranguing on you because civil war and vast economic inequality has made a lot of people desperate, I realized then and there and said to myself 'you cant save everybody, especially with the little money you have'. But there are sometimes when I must help. When I stayed in Chamanculo, the individual there that I went to visit turned to me one day and asked 'can you help my family put a proper roof on the house?' and I said 'ok.' I didnt know it would cost 5000 meticais (about $130) and this perturbed me a little as it started with a bit of money here and there and slowly escalated, but at the end of the day, despite my frustration, I was happy to help: by depriving myself of few extra luxuries here and there, I was able to provide something sustainable for a family living in abject poverty. And anyway, they allowed me to stay at the place for free, so I suppose it was the least I could do.

And then there is Rasta. There are many times when we go to the pub to hang out or play pool or whatever, but despite his upbeat approach to the world, I can always see that behind it all, there is a battle going on, a battle to survive. Now and again I give him R100 'to buy ganja', because I smoke with him plenty, I needed a belt, so I went down to his shop and had him make one for me. He said it was R150, but I gave him R200 and said 'keep the rest for smokes'. He told me about how sore he was from having to set up and take down every day, so I told him to wake me tomorrow and I'll walk up with him and help him set up. Why not? I think about maybe in a few years when Im living in Dar es Salaam or Accra or Bombay or Manila or Canada or who knows where, I can contact him, bring him to where I'm living and just let him take it easy for a bit and enjoy life.

It is true. I can't save everyone. But sometimes, in certain situations, I feel that I must do something...

'Desperate Times' and all that

On my way to and from my place in Rondebosch, I must pass by a huge office complex that has been newly built. There are always a couple of black guys who are wearing foam arrows on their hands and wearing signs about the Open House that's happening to try to rent out office space. It reminds me of the high school dropouts in Canada who get jobs where they stand by the side of the road wearing signs advertising the $5 'Hot n' Ready' pepperoni pizza outside of Little Caesar's joints.

But what really got me was another pub experience at my usual watering hole. I swear that if there were more places like that around the world, everyone would feel so much better, because it seems no matter what youre looking for, everything happens there.

Anyway, I was doing my usual intermittent observing of the local fanfare and my eyes kept falling back on two quite attractive ladies who were decked out in flashy green habits (hooded cloaks) and apparently just standing at one end of the bar, sometimes talking to people, but mostly minding their own business.

My first impression was that maybe they were part of some religious cult and had just come from some service or were doing some sort of recruitment drive (believe me, its no so far-fetched given the amount of times I've got onto a train in Cape Town and some individual is going on in an apparently psychopathic fever about how Jesus saves). I didn't really want to get into a religious argument, especially with two beautiful women, but finally my curiosity got the better of me and I walked over to inquire. And I walked away absolutely astonished.

You see, these two individuals were actually there promoting Marlboro's new brand of cigarettes. They told me that advertising regulations made it so that they could not do 'forced advertising' of tobacco products, so they basically had to stand there and wait for people to come to them after they became curious enough (like me). The one of them asked if I smoked, and I said 'well, not tobacco', and after that point she said that she was bounded by the guidelines of her job that she could no longer talk to me because I wasn't interested in her product. When I protested and said that I wanted to know about it so that I could tell my friends, she calmly replied 'then tell your friends to come over here, i am not allowed to talk to you while im working'. And I walked away absolutely astonished that corporations could so badly objectify people, exploiting the fact that there is so much unemployment in South Africa that people will pretty much do anything. And the rest of the evening, I watched as her and her comrades (there were also two smartly dressed guys who I hadnt noticed before) moved about the crowd, sometimes posing for photos with people who wanted a pic of the girls, but ended up getting a pic of the girls with a giant green packet of Marlboros in the middle of the shot.

Wow.

'Living Labour' or 'Human Capital'?

As I was walking through Observatory last night on my way back from Rondebosch, I happened to look up at a sign I had seen numerous times before: it was an advertisement for the company that resided there, called 'CallStaff'. I had seen the name before and assumed it must be a temp agency, so I hadn't bothered too much with on the previous occasions that I had walked by. But last night I chanced to read (and process) the entire sign. At the bottom of the sign it said something to the effect of 'Temporary, Contract, and Permanent Labour Solutions', but right above that it said 'Human Capital Management'.

Human capital? I've heard of 'living labour' (as Marx termed it), but human capital? Isn't capital simply a broad term for financial assets, such as 'investment capital' is the amount of (surplus) financial assets that one has to re-invest? If that is the case, isn't it rather absurd to say that humans are 'owned'? (I mean, one could give the case that they are, at the very least, treated as such. But doesn't just coming out and saying it like that seem a bit brash?)

So I hired the help of dictionary.com, which provided me with the answer:

capital:

4. the wealth, whether in money or property owned or employed in business by an individual firm, corporation, etc.

5. an accumulated stock of such wealth.

6. any form of wealth employed or capable of being employed in the production of more wealth.

On the surface of it, it is perhaps a case of splitting hairs, when you hire someone to work for you, it seems a bit impertinent to say that you own them or that they are your property (at least, one would like to think this, though the reality of the situation is that one would likely not be surprised to see employees treated in such a way). But what is more interesting is definition #6. What is 'wealth'? Mostly we would think of wealth in terms of riches or abundance of something, or at least some sort of property, but Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations might lead us to be a bit suspicious of these general 'un-economic' ideas of wealth. So, dictionary.com again.

wealth:

3.a. all things that have a monetary or exchange value.
b. anything that has utility and is capable of being appropriated or exchanged

Ahhh! So now we have our answer. 'Human capital' is 'human wealth' (i.e. beings that can be utilized) capable of being employed in the production of more wealth.

Should we really be surprised, though? From my observations, the growing trend is that employees are facing greater and greater dehumanization for the sake of expanding the coffers of the rich elite. And yes, one may accuse me of being on a bit of a 'Marxist streak' after recent events in terms of completing my thesis. However, the main problem I have is when companies like 'CallStaff' are allowed to openly undermine human dignity by advertising themselves as a company that basically treats people like game pieces.

Or maybe that's not such a bad thing. Maybe it means that eventually people will be pushed to the limit and be forced to respond.

Any takers for the slogan 'Human Livestock Available! Rock Bottom Prices!'?

Welcome to my world

I'm 29, from Canada, and doing my Mathematics MSc at the University of Cape Town.

If the world was fair, I would also have my Philosophy MA from back in Canada by now, but two and a half years (and 12 countries) later, 'final revisions' on the Marx part of my thesis still have to be OK'd by the Marxist faculty member who is now the sole 'guardian of the gate'. Such as it is.

There have been instances in the past where people have recommended to me to write a blog especially because I travel a fair bit, and the 'travelblog' has become fairly popular to keep friends and such updated. To this, I once said that I would never write a blog, simply because the internet has made 'talk' incredibly cheap. One no longer has to have anything of substance to say to get 'published' simply because there is a means to get published for free and (in theory) have what you publish available to billions of people at the drop of a hat.

I suppose this is good and bad for the same reason: since one no longer has to go through the long arduous process of either stumping up the capital required to publish or going through a publishing house that must deem the work profitable, more people can have their 'say', and this gives the opportunity for budding novelists to unearth themselves without having to take a huge chance in terms of time and money. Unfortunately, this also means that there is evermore piles of junk and thoughts of no real substance that accumulate on the internet and must be sifted through in order to unearth any sort of 'gems'.

So why have I done an about-turn now and risked branding myself a major hyprocrite and/or pretentious elitist? Not because I suddenly think that I have a lot of very important things to say, but simply because it has been put to me by a rather dear friend of mine that (and I quote) "If there was a blog about Ludwig Wittgenstein I'd religiously read it every morning with my tea" and I volunteered to 'establish the truth value' of this statement (as Frege would put it). Although I don't intend to write exclusively about Wittgenstein, maybe one or two more philosophy blogs to go with the vast sea of fashion and travel blogs wouldn't be so bad.

Right, Eleni?