The scorn of Philip Pullman

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.

MPs, Electoral Systems and Accountability in South Africa

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’.