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.
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.”
Last week journalist and author of Zuma: A biography Jeremy Gordin stood up for South Africa’s beleaguered President, who is in the throes of what might be called “Khozagate“. After some reflection, though, Gordin has come to realise that Zuma has placed himself in a pickle with his latest faux pas – as evidenced by his lack of support from the usual quarters:
But never mind all my words and your words and Zapiro’s nasty little cartoons and all the moral indignation.
What is way more interesting has been the reaction from the tri-partite alliance. There has hardly been one. Remember a while back when Helen Zille made her ad hominem attacks on Zuma? Remember how the alliance, and especially the ANC, reacted? They turned on Zille. They turned on anyone who dared criticise Zuma. Actually Little Julie said he would kill for Zuma (or maybe that was on another occasion – but you get the picture).
But now? Now there has been a cold, cold, an icy, silence from everyone – in the ANC, the SACP, and Cosatu. They are seriously pissed off with Zuma – hence, the apology of last weekend (versus the silly first reaction from the presidency, the one about the press report blighting the life of an innocent mother and child). And this silence – this lack of obvious support for Zuma – is actually very serious for him (for which “insight”, by the way, I thank Anton Harber for pointing out to me).
Jeremy Gordin, biographer of Jacob Zuma, has come out in defense of the president over his latest “love child” scandal, saying that what Zuma does or does not do between the sheets is no one else’s business. Gordin goes further by explaining why it’s not in the public interest to know the intimate details of Zuma’s relationships – and where those who think it is got it wrong. Save your indignation, he says, for the important stuff:
My musings came in the wake of Sunday’s “revelation” about President Jacob G Zuma having engendered a 20th child because …..because, geez, have you ever encountered, listened to or read such an outpouring of pathetic, heart-tearing envy in your life?
From Redi Direko on Radio 702, to Justice Malala and Phylicia Oppelt in The Times, to Helen Zille in Cape Town (well, sort of expected it from her), to the Rev KRJ Meshoe, MP, of the ACDP and the whinnying legal expert Pierre de Vos, what a bunch of Mother Grundys…!
Let’s get a few things in perspective, shall we? We Africans are, as Alex Shoumatoff wrote 22 years ago, a sex-positive bunch. We like to slip, and to receive, what the late Frank Zappa, may his memory be blessed, referred to as the big chiluga. We’re a fun-loving bunch. As far as I can tell, everyone, everyone, in this country – except me, and maybe not my wife – is going at it like a jack rabbit.
Brent Meersman, on a tour of South America, catches up with South Africa’s newest ambassador to Argentina, the former leader of Democratic Alliance opposition, Tony Leon:
BM: Had you been to Argentina before?
TL: Yes, bizarrely enough I spent my 50th birthday here exactly three years ago. I went on a cruise from here up the coast to Brazil. I thought it a very nice city and country. I didn’t think I’d spend my 53rd birthday here in residence.
In fact, when the offer of an ambassadorship came, I was offered a choice of two countries and I chose this one because I’d been here before and I thought it a great place. There is a difference of course between living here and visiting as a tourist. [It is] Quite a challenge sometimes living here, but the people are fantastic.
South Africa has a very positive image so it isn’t a hardship being the ambassador to Argentina. But I also have two other countries, Uruguay and Paraguay, though because of bureaucratic slowness on various sides, I haven’t yet presented my credentials. All three countries have qualified for the [Fifa] World Cup, as well as Chile, so this southern cone is in terms of proximity quite a buzz. The World Cup is important to our diplomacy.
Vroeër jare sou menigte mense heel waarskynlik twee keer gekyk het as hulle Pik Botha en Rian Malan saam sien rook het. Wie weet, miskien selfs vandag nog. Die twee was nou nie juis aan die selfde kant gewees tydens die Apartheidsjare nie. En tog, hier staan hulle en “reminice” langs die Muur van Herinnering.
Kirby van der Merwe het saam gekuier terwyl die twee teruggedink het oor daai jare en, verbasend tot dieselfde gevolgtrekkings gekom het oor baie wat gebeur het. Wys jou net – in retrospeksie kan dinge baie anders lyk. Lees meer oor hoe Rian destyds oor die Angola oorlog, kommunisme en die ANC gevoel het in My Traitor’s Heart. Sy nuutste boek is Resident Alien.
Pik Botha en Rian Malan was in die ou bedeling nie juis aan dieselfde kant van die politieke muur nie. Kirby van der Merwe het hulle gevat na mure wat in die nuwe Suid-Afrika al vir omstredenheid gesorg het.
Rian Malan is bekommerd oor sy lang hare. Oor wat sy ma in die aftree-oord in Parys in die Vrystaat daarvan gaan dink as hy soos ’n takhaar in die koerant verskyn. “Ek moet die goed laat sny,” sê hy terwyl hy die slierte met sy vingers kam.
Douglas Rogers is a journalist who’s written frequently about the situation in his home country of Zimbabwe. But when regaling a colleague with some of his experiences there, he realised that he needed to take a look from a different perspective – the result of doing so was his gripping account of his parents’ late-Mugabe-era lives, The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe.
Rogers elaborates on this and more in the following Q&A:
Q: The book is very funny, despite the harrowing subject matter. How did you come to write it this way.
A: I was in a restaurant in Manhattan one night in early 2005 with the writer Melanie Thernstrom and I told her the tragic story of my parents’ lives, how their once beloved backpacker lodge was now a brothel, how my Mom was reduced to cooking meals on a portable gas cooker, that my Dad was cultivating a marijuana crop to earn a little money. Tears were rolling down her face. But she wasn’t crying, she was laughing. She said something like, “I’m really sorry but what you just told me is actually quite funny.” I realized then that I had to look at it in a completely different way.
When Douglas Rogers was in his early teens, one of his sisters returned to the family farm from the nearest town, Mutare, in eastern Zimbabwe, with a videotape of Out of Africa. As the film started and Meryl Streep’s incarna-tion of Karen Blixen drawled, “I had a fa-a-rm in A-afrika,” the Rogers kids, in unison, said, “Oh, God, not this s**t,” and switched it off.
But that farm in Africa which he and his siblings so passionately hated when they were young, and which they could not leave fast enough once they had grown up, has haunted Rogers mercilessly over the past decade. It has yapped at his heels and, as Zanu-PF unleashed the full horror of its violent persecution of the millions of Zimbabweans who oppose its regime, it started growling and biting.
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.
