Douglas Rogers, author of The Last Resort, is a man who’s been places – he’s been to over 50 countries at last count, and still traveling. Lisa from the Globe Corner Bookstore – “the largest and one of the oldest travel book and map stores in North America” (it’s in Cambridge, Mass.) – caught up with Rogers between travels to find out how he does it, which places he still wants to visit and to chat about his book and the story behind it.
1. First, a preliminary travel preference question: do you take the aisle or window seat? (Please explain.)
Aisle – for stretching and proximity to wine trolley.
2. Also, according to your biography you have traveled to over 50 countries. But there is always that tiny Baltic Island whose ferry is never running or that pueblo in Taos that is always closed for an indigenous ceremony – we’ve all got a place where fate won’t let us go. Is there a destination that still eludes you?
Yes, any island off Maine. This will sound pathetic to someone from Boston, but I’ve been planning to visit Maine ever since moving to the US seven years ago and it’s never happened, usually because of poor organization on my part. It’s not easy to get my head around that state because it’s so huge, and the idea of going to the wrong island and being stuck there for a week terrifies me. So a request – can any of your readers advise me on a cool, remote island hideaway to visit in June with my family, how to get there, and where to stay?
Last week was a difficult President Zuma, ragged as he was by the British press, which had a field day with the President’s polygamous lifestyle during his visit to the country.
Zuma biographer Jeremy Gordin takes issue with one paper and reporter in particular: Stephen Robinson of The Daily Mail. For those of you who missed it (could you possibly have?) Robinson wrote the now famous words, “Jacob Zuma is a sex-obsessed bigot with four wives and 35 children.” Gordin makes a valid point or two his “hands off” response:
If you do not know about the brouhaha surrounding President Jacob G Zuma and the English newspapers – mainly of the tabloid shape and mindset (for want of a better word) – you must either be poor (for which I'm sorry) or perhaps living in some bizarre, cut-off place such as Hogsback or Cape Town. Yet even in those outlandish places, I understand, the Internet exists.
It’s been great fun, hasn't it, watching the souties (or rooinekke, if you prefer) having a go at the President. The President has, by the way (this info is for those residing in Hogsback) gone to London, with one of his three wives, Thobeka Madiba-Zuma, to see Queen Elizabeth II and a few other handlangers, such as Prince Phillip and Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
Jonathan Ball and The Book Lounge invite you to a conversation between poet, deputy transport minister and SACP official Jeremy Cronin and the authors of the biography of Chris Hani, Hani: A Life Too Short.
Chris Hani’s assassination in 1993 gave rise to one of South Africa’s great imponderables: if he had survived, what impact would he have had on politics and government in South Africa? More pointedly, could this charismatic leader have risen to become president of the country?
Come listen to what is bound to be a telling and invigorating talk.
While the world celebrates the 20th anniversary of the unbanning of the ANC and Mandela’s release from prison, Rian Malan, author of Resident Alien, defends the role of FW de Klerk in ending Apartheid. Particularly against one resistant Englishman:
I almost punched an Englishman the other day. We were sitting in a bar, talking about the 20th anniversary of F.W. de Klerk’s Great Leap Forward of 2 February 1990 — the day he rocked the world by announcing that he was about to unban the revolutionary movements, free Nelson Mandela and turn South Africa into a land of peace and justice. I was explaining why I thought de Klerk’s move was an act of heroism almost unparalleled in the history of humankind, but the Englishman didn’t want to know. ‘De Klerk was a loser,’ he said, ‘a racist battered into submission by sanctions, township violence and global isolation, and then forced to do a decent thing that should have been done decades earlier.’ The corollary was of course that Mandela was a sweet old man who shouldn’t have been locked up at all, and the ANC an army of hymn-singing moderates who just wanted to establish a democracy like Great Britain’s. Like I say, I wanted to moer him, and I’d better explain why.
Dr Frederik van Zyl Slabbert is a man deeply involved in the politics of South Africa, having earned the loyalty of his allies and the respect of his enemies. Fellow political commentator Max du Preez and others recently came together to publish a book of essays about the man and his legacy, The Passion For Reason.
John Robbie from 702 Talk Radio met with van Zyl Slabbert to discuss politics, redemptive theory and making a difference.
Veteran journalist and author, most recently, of First Drafts, Allister Sparks speaks out against Julius Malema in today’s Business Day. Sparks says Malema has been misstating Nelson Mandela’s view on the nationalisation of mines, banks and monopoly industries. While it is true that Mandela did at one time advocate nationalisation, he firmly changed his stance before becoming president. Sparks encourages Malema to stop using Mandela as a means to further his own ends:
AS JULIUS Malema’s misdemeanours multiply, one of the most egregious has been allowed to go unchallenged for months. This was his misrepresentation of former president Nelson Mandela’s position on nationalisation.
In punting his own populist campaign for the African National Congress (ANC) to adopt a policy of nationalising the country’s mines, Malema has sought to give his proposal unchallengeable support by claiming the great man as a champion of it. In fact Mandela, though once a believer, rejected nationalisation as ANC policy a full two years before becoming president.
Malema, who began his nationalisation crusade last July, dragged Mandela’s name into the heated debate four months later, when responding to criticism by Jeremy Cronin, deputy general secretary of the South African Communist Party.
The Passion for Reason is a collection of essays in honour of an Afrikaner and African icon – Frederik van Zyl Slabbert.
For decades, Frederik van Zyl Slabbert has been one of South Africa’s towering public figures. As an academic, politician, thinker and businessman, Slabbert has made an enduring contribution to many fields, playing a critical role in the transition to democracy and in the creation and building of civil society institutions.
As the leader of the official opposition, he fought in Parliament against the apartheid system. As one of the co-founders of IDASA, he led a group of Afrikaners on the historic 1987 trip to Dakar to meet the ANC in exile. With the advent of democracy, he became the founding chair of the Open Society Foundation for South Africa, deepening a lifelong commitment to the freedom of the individual and the consolidation of democratic governance in South Africa.
The Passion for Reason is a celebration of Slabbert’s life and achievements, bringing together leading writers, academics, commentators and friends, who reflect critically on his life and work over the years. The book includes an introduction by his children Tania and Riko Slabbert and essays, recollections and contributions from:
The slow quickness of life (Thinking about my friend, the Chief) Breyten Breytenbach
An amalgam that worked Alex Boraine
Slabbert’s opening of the apartheid mind: Portrait of an unrecognised patriot Heribert Adam & Kogila Moodley
Responsibility without power: South Africa’s liberal precursors of democracy Theodor Hanf
Golden boy, golden opportunity: A note on Van Zyl Slabbert Hermann Giliomee
The man who wasn’t there Ken Owen
Dakar impressions Max du Preez
Van Zyl Slabbert: Sociologist at work in advancing democratic politics Wilmot James
Ice, steam and water: Non-profit organisations in South Africa Michael Savage
Deadly Statistics: Cold Facts Virginia van der Vliet & David Welsh
Gender politics in South Africa: In need of a resurrection Rhoda Kadalie
Land reform in the new South Africa – ‘good times, bad times’ Errol Knott Moorcroft
Author and columnist Jeremy Gordin knows a thing or two about the ANC. He is after all the biographer of its current president. But Zuma’s one thing, Julius Malema’s another, and Gordin is fed up:
What do we know about Little Julie? Well, he’s 29 years old and he was raised by a single mother, a domestic worker. I have seen reports, though I can’t remember where, that he has a child somewhere. Having various children “somewhere” seems to be de rigueur for our leaders, but let’s not go there right now. I have, however, never seen Little Julie (in photographs or TV footage) with a woman – he’s always with that bunch of guys from the league who look like clones.
His school career seems to have been rather undistinguished. He failed two high school grades as well as several subjects in his final secondary school examination. His highest mark attained at school was apparently a “c” for second language English and he’s reported to have scored less than 30 percent for maths and woodwork.
I would have been inclined not to take too much notice of Julie’s school marks. Not everyone is cut out to be an intemallectual and, if you think about it, what did you learn at school and university that was worth diddley? C’mon, be honest. And, well, I have soft spot for people lousy at woodwork – I think I got three percent for the subject (besides setting a Transvaal record for biology, 8 percent).
In this fascinating and indeed heartwarming article by Robert McKay in The Times, two recently-married gay men and one gay woman are canvassed for their views on that formerly most heterosexual of institutions, marriage. Mark Gevisser comprises one of the interviewees:
His family’s reaction was another revelation. “I think that straight people often feel that we judge them because we’re cooler, we don’t do all the boring conventional things that they do. I had a distinct feeling that they saw our marriage as an affirmation of their values.”
Commenting on the parlous state of gay rights in Africa, Gevisser says he is saddened by recent news from Malawi, Uganda and Kenya.
However, he is confident in the inexorable march of progress under way in South Africa. In fact, he says, even liberal, progressive France stops short of granting gay couples the exact equivalent of marriage. The French can enter into an agreement called Pacte Civil de Solidarité.
“The first time I had to deal with the authorities they asked me if I was Chetty’s concubine and I took great offence. But that’s what they call you in France.”
Jonny Steinberg forces Sunday Times’ readers to face up to certain truths about the economic edifice upon which their – our – lives are built:
If this logic is true of New York, it is surely a hundred times truer of South Africa’s major cities. Each has a large minority of well-off people, while thousands upon thousands of the poor arrive every day in search of work. Like New York’s sex workers, South Africa’s urban poor dream of careers and professions. Our cities are full of “self-employed entrepreneurs” in the business of painting, landscaping, bricklaying, guarding buildings and removing rubbish. Like New York’s sex workers, they gravitate to where the money is, to the well-off. And the well-off are very pleased to have them because they work hard and they are cheap.
Soon, entire sectors of the urban economy are operating “off the books”. From skyscrapers to neighbourhood lawns to the coat of paint on the police station: all of these are produced on black markets. We do not think of them as such because, like New York’s johns, we use another language: “Mozambican work ethic”, “vibrant entrepreneurship”, or “emerging businessmen”.
Douglas Rogers, author of The Last Resort, is a man who’s been places – he’s been to over 50 countries at last count, and still traveling. Lisa from the Globe Corner Bookstore – “the largest and one of the oldest travel book and map stores in North America” (it’s in Cambridge, Mass.) – caught up with Rogers between travels to find out how he does it, which places he still wants to visit and to chat about his book and the story behind it.
