Leaves of language

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Mail & Guardian

Johannesburg, South Africa
March 17 2000

By KHADIJA MAGARDIE and DAVID LE PAGE

Statements questioning the cause of AIDS have caused dismay among local and international scientists.

LEADING international AIDS scientists and researchers this week unanimously dismissed the South African government’s suggestion that the link between HIV and AIDS be “re-examined”.

Head of the Medical Research Council Professor Malegapuru Makgoba also lashed out at the so-called Aids dissidents, describing them as “failures in their own countries” and warning that South African is becoming “fertile ground for pseudo-science”.

Their statements came as the government’s apparent readiness to overturn the principles behind its own Aids policies began to attract further disbelieving international attention.

A lengthy story in New York’s influential Village Voice this week is subtitled: “South Africa’s president may become the first world leader to believe that HIV is not the cause of AIDS.”
Read the rest of this entry »