Leaves of language

Published in the Cape Times in September, and apparently never posted to their site.

President Thabo Mbeki addresses Parliament; the weariness of the speaker suggests he’s been at it for a while. Pic: The Presidency

It’s not unusual to hear South Africans smugly declaring the globe-straddling superiority of our constitution – but when did you last hear someone saying, ‘We’ve got the world’s finest Electoral Act and the most independently-minded, accountable Members of Parliament: men and women who know their minds and speak them without hesitation.’?

The Constitution specifies that we have an National Assembly, and that we all get to vote for it. But it’s the Electoral Act that defines the process by which our Members of Parliament are selected – the accuracy, or crudeness, with which our desires as voters are translated into representives – and we don’t have one.

Well, we do, sort of. We have the left-over, provisional arrangements made for the 1994 election. When the framers of the Constitution finished off their work in 1996, they also said a new Electoral Act must be in place by 1999. But somehow, no one quite got round to it.

Which is why Dr F Van Zyl Slabbert, who headed the Electoral Task Team (ETT) which made proposals for a new Electoral Act in 2003, could write then that, ‘Technically speaking we are without an electoral system’. Read the rest of this entry »

A photograph I took in the Eastern Cape in late 2003 was chosen by my friend Helen Moffett for the cover of her collection of South African landscape writing, Lovely Beyond Any Singing. A news article about the book and its author appeared recently on the University of Cape Town website.

The photograph was taken just before dark with a Pentax K1000 through the front windscreen of a VW Kombi minibus, being driven by a crackhead at a speed of 140km/h. The setting sun was directly behind us, streaming through a tunnel formed by the land, low dark clouds, and lines of hills on either side.