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.”
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.
An extended look at Malan’s first book since My Traitor’s Heart:
In a career spanning three decades, perhaps no other South African journalist has been equally as admired and reviled as Malan. Twenty years ago, after the publication of his memoir My Traitor’s Heart, the book every South African journalist at the time wished they had written, Malan was hailed for his courageous and brutally honest confrontation of the anxieties and uncertainties of white South Africa in the last days of apartheid and became a sought-after commentator on the state of the nation in international publications from Esquire to Rolling Stone and The Spectator.
But as far as the locals were concerned Malan quickly became a nay-sayer, an incompetent, a publicity whore, an amateur statistician and a mass murderer whose questioning of Aids statistics “strengthened those who would deny the acute nature of the Aids problem”.
Writer and musician, Rian Malan, doesn’t shy away from uncomfortable topics. The following excerpt from his latest book, Resident Alien, is a case in point. Malan describes attending the Mighty Men Conference led by lay-preacher Angus Buchan:
Angus Buchan is a white African of Scots extraction, born in Zimbabwe and raised in Zambia, where he farmed as a young man. When Zambia's economy collapsed in the 1970s he bought some wasteland near Greytown, built a crude mud house in the Zulu style and set forth to hew a living from the soil. He had no water, just one tractor and too little capital.
For a while, it was touch-and-go. Buchan started dropping tranquillisers, drinking heavily and taking out his frustrations on his labourers. Shamed by his actions, he turned to the Lord on February 18, 1979, and lo, miracles ensued. His crops flourished. Boreholes struck water. Rain quenched a bush fire that threatened to ruin him, and a Zulu woman struck by lightning was raised from the apparent dead by prayer. These and other wonders were recounted in Faith Like Potatoes, his 1998 autobiography, made into a movie in 2005.
The recording includes three readings from the book by Gevisser:
We knew we were competing with Buzz Aldrin and SPACE ( Mark Gevisser and I were in the Function Room adjacent to the RFH where Buzz was on stage) but we were at least firmly on this planet, with a rapt audience – yes, truly! after 1 1/2 horus they still wanted more! – and engaging with one of the key political issues and politicians of our time – the freedom struggle in South Africa and with Thabo Mbeki, SA’s leader for 10 years.
In a way Mbeki is as mysterious as space and if it weren’t for SA journalist, author and political analyst, Mark Gevisser, who spent 9 years on a voyage of discovery of the man and his motivation then we’d still be in the dark.
Mark’ s riveting biography of Thabo Mbeki has been showered with superlatives:“a towering brilliant biography”…”memorable and definitive” …”epic”..”monuemtal”. It draws parallels with Mbeki’s evolution and with the modern evolution of SA.
Mark’s original 900-page megatome –The DREAM DEFERRED – was launched in SA in 2007 and caused a sensation. He has just “repackaged it” for us “foreigners” in a new, shorter version – A LEGACY OF LIBERATION: THABO MBEKI AND THE FUTURE OF THE SA DREAM. It’s still a long read but there is A LOT to say about Mbeki, the man who has dominated post-apartheid politics in SA.
And I cannot praise the book enough. For someone like me who grew up partly in SA, who has worked there often for the BBC, this book is a profound, substantial “primer” and addition to my education. It helped me understand both why I was so disappointed in Mbeki as a leader but also, thanks to Mark’s book, I can indeed admire his early diligence and devotion to the liberation struggle and the ANC.
Dr Clare Hart is back … Margie Orford’s chilling prequel to Like Clockwork, Daddy’s Girl, raises the stakes and the suspense to gripping new levels.
Sharply intelligent and stunningly beautiful, investigative journalist turned profiler Dr Clare Hart has a reputation: she can see into the darkest places of the violent criminal mind.
Riedwaan Faizal is a member of the South African Police’s elite Gang Unit. Tough and streetwise, he is used to being a target. But when the danger of his one-man anti-gang war envelopes his only daughter, and he becomes the prime suspect in her abduction, there is little he can do.
Distraught, Faizal turns to a skeptical Clare Hart for help. Their desperate search for the missing child, whose chances of survival diminish with each hour, unravels a tangled web of deception and danger that puts all their lives at terrible risk. (more…)
Who will ever forget Graeme Smith striding to the wicket with a broken hand in the third Test match in Australia? This after already winning the series. If ever there was a moment to define the man, that was it.
The Proteas entered the history books in that series, the first South African team to beat the Aussies at home. Earlier in 2008, they beat England and drew a Test series in India, making 2008 one of the most successful years on record. For good measure, South Africa also became the highest ranked one-day side in the world.
Smith pinpoints the tour to Pakistan in October 2007 at the time his team started taking shape, and in A Captain’s Diary he records an extraordinary 18-month journey, from Karachi to Newlands via Lord’s, Leeds, Melbourne and Sydney. (more…)
Editors Liz McGregor and Sarah Nuttall will entertain and enlighten you with anecdotes from the stories contained in their new book of “non-academic” non-fiction.
Published at a time of great uncertainty – during the so-called “Second Transition” – these stories reflect the ambivalence and anxiety of our age. (more…)
Jonny Steinberg is currently a fellow of the Open Society Institute in New York. In the following podcast he discusses his research and experience of policing in South Africa, engaging with Herb Sturtz:
In 2007, Jonny Steinberg spent several months accompanying police patrols in Johannesburg townships to conduct an ethnographic study of the emerging relationship between democratic South Africa's police officers and its citizens. He argues that a democratic citizenry is policed only to the extent that it consents to be, and that South Africans have yet to give their full consent to being policed. The democratic state is in a sense half-formed, according to Steinberg; there are grey zones in cities where state institutions are sucked into a logic that long precedes democracy.
This talk focused on the controversial police practice of “stop-and-search” and the broader lessons for criminal justice reforms in emerging democracies.
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:
