A journalist again

I’m now, for a short time, the editor of Research Africa. It’s strange and wonderful to feel like a fully fledged journalist again, after two years working as an editor.

Research Africa covers the research environment — policy, funding, infrastructure, training — across the continent. Much of it, I fear, is at present crashingly dull: notices of conferences, scholarships and funding opportunities, lightened (if that is the word) by a heady mixture of endless announcements by aid organisations, governments and other earnest twiddlers of the knobs of continental development. These announcements are rarely if ever accompanied by statements of past achievements or measurable targets, and so far my efforts to discover just how much is achieved, and when, and where, are proving frustrating.

I have gained new insight into just how much aid and development is designed without consulting Africans, how much those running these organisations like to patronise Africans, and how self-interested much of this purported benevolence really is.

But the attempt to uncover these things, at least, is enjoyable.

My contract with Research Africa ends on 20 July.

The arrogance of Philip Pullman

Another world, another Oxford. Lyra on the rooftops. In the first book of His Dark Materials, Pullman is still writing from the right side of his brain; later, the urge to preach overwhelms him. Image from the film, The Golden Compass.

I very much enjoyed reading Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, which has recently spawned yet another fantasy film franchise, starting with The Golden Compass (titled Northern Lights outside the US).

But Pullman’s attitudes towards his predecessors, particularly Tolkien and CS Lewis (and I now no doubt join leagues of their defenders) are arrogant and a bit silly.

Pullman has disparaged Lewis as racist and sexist, to some extent a meaningless criticism as it applies to so much of the literature of that time. Modern readers, hopefully, know to read around such ignorance.

Then he dismisses Tolkien’s work as trivial, despite roots in European myth and lore even deeper than his own Miltonian echoes. But Tolkien’s sales are still far in advance of Pullman’s, making this criticism presumptuous, not to mention rather churlish. In Pullman’s

South Africa in Africa: The Post-Apartheid Era

Earlier this year, I was contracted by Electric Book Works to work as copy editor with Adekeye Adebajo and the Cape Town-based Centre for Conflict Resolution to produce South Africa in Africa: The Post-Apartheid Era, now published by UKZN Press.

In this rigorous and policy-relevant book, a diverse group of Pan-African scholars examine South Africa’s post-apartheid foreign policy, arguing that an effective foreign policy can only be built on a strong domestic base. The authors assess key challenges of regional leadership for South Africa, addressing traditional issues of leadership, military and economic power, and less conventional foreign policy concerns such as land conflicts and HIV/AIDS.

Walking near the Goukamma

That day, we laboured long up the blinding beach towards the oyster beds, past Sandkop and Spitoukop, towards Goukamma, the wind pouring relentlessly into our faces and stopping our ears, the sand-built boulders and dark green-forested ancient dunes on our left, the ocean tapping at the shore with hammer waves on our right. Fine spray flew towards us in a constant slow torrent till it dropped from our hands and our foreheads and soaked our shirts.

My relationship with Saddam Hussein

My relationship with Saddam Hussein has taken a difficult turn – he was hanged at dawn five days ago.

We first met through the pages of TIME magazine in 1991. No, not a personal ad. He had just invaded Kuwait and by some trivial coincidence my own military career had just started. I was scurrying about, a very small and miserable mammal, in a dust-bowl artillery base near Potchefstroom, living by the commands of the capricious moribund apartheid military.

It is as an ordinary soldier that one can see most clearly just what a pathetic thing an army is; it is here that we unzip our fragile cultural suspensions and lose all manners. For it is simply not polite to kill someone else, whatever the excuse; worse still, to order someone else to do so. To accept the order is the greatest act of cowardice.

A footnote on electoral systems

In today’s Observer, columnist Nick Cohen describes closed-list electoral systems in rather unflattering terms: “Straw wants a modified version of the closed list system, the neatest swindle ever dreamt up by machine politicians.”

While I think there were good reasons for introducing a closed-list system in South Africa in 1994, the time has come to revamp it. The flood of talent that entered Parliament then has now largely departed, and measures to renew standards are urgently needed.