Juanita Balkisson

Mbongeni Ngema sure burst that little non-racial bubble, didn’t he? 

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Robert Mugabe: Power, Plunder and Tyranny in Zimbabwe. By Martin Meredith.

Jonathan Ball, 2002. (published in Europe and North America by Public Affairs Books

as Our Votes, Our Guns: Robert Mugabe and the Tragedy of Zimbabwe

This book’s jacket suggests, unoriginally, that Robert Mugabe is ‘essential reading for anyone who wants to understand today’s Africa.’ What it is, is a fast-paced and readable account, mainly of why Mugabe is a really bad man. But while this is certainly a rich subject, it is hardly a novel insight, or the key to ‘today’s Africa.’

Dominique Malaquais

It is a grey Monday morning. In an hour or so a funeral will start at a church a block away from where I write. Besides the scores of regular worshippers and community activities of Harlem hosted by Riverside Church, enigmatic and provocative figures like Martin Luther King and Fidel Castro have orated from its pulpit. This morning it will be the place for a farewell to an enigmatic figure who was not without a certain controversy, especially in this city to which he gave so much. It is difficult to imagine saying farewell to Edward Said. And in fact it cannot quite be a farewell since his presence escapes the finitude of his body, which ultimately after a tenacious battle, succumbed to leukemia. But it is perhaps a farewell to a future which will be without the reliable, clarifying, passionately angry, intellectually and morally demanding prose which he produced so diligently. He leaves us both edified and wanting. His words found us in South Africa, as it has so many others around the world, in so many different ways and roles- as an inexhaustible scholar, activist, artist and adversary. His world was so large and his contribution to it so varied and complex that one can but only reflect with inadequacy on fragments which come to mind right now.

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My writing is not on anybody’s bandwagon. It is on the sidelines where I can more or less think things out with a clear head. We may be at a turning point and need new names for human dignity, new codes of honour all nations can abide by. (Bessie Head in a letter to Michael Scammell)

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JM Coetzee was born in South Africa in 1940, eight years before the birth of legislated racism. He was born into a country already ravaged by colonial struggles and the politics of hate. But as we now know, worse was still to come. Apartheid elevated and normalised racial suspicion and hatred; putting race at the centre of every human interaction and every economic transaction. It was brutal and laughable all at the same time. Black people, though a majority, could not vote, could not legally own property in 87% of the country, could not pursue certain occupations, could not even move freely within the country as potrayed in The Life and Times of Michael K, could not marry across the colour line…the list is endless. All manner of “tests” were relied upon to determine race in ambiguous cases because everyone had to be classified – a documented, government-certified racial identity was a prerequisite for existence. Sometimes individuals were even reclassified, with usually devastating consequences. This madness finally came to an end in 1994, when black people were enfranchised. That the end of such an inhumane system could be achieved through a negotiated statement has been hailed by many as a miracle.

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The events of 28 August 2003 are straightforward and can be easily narrated.
At 01:20 I join the queue on Bell Yard outside the Royal Courts of Justice in Central London where, at 10:30, Prime Minister Tony Blair will appear before the Hutton Enquiry into the death of the British Government’s weapons expert, Dr David Kelly.

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