I’m gonna celebrate with some Fela Kuti.
Monthly Archive for May, 2008
The violence in South Africa (which started in Jo’burg) has spread to Cape Town and, I hear from friends, to Durban. My Zulu language teacher, who is Ndebele and from Zimbabwe, says that one of the reasons Zimbabweans are being attacked (beyond the recent influx of possibly up to a million refugees) is because there was a higher literacy rate in Zimbabwe than in other countries (including South Africa) and so immigrants from Zimbabwe never had problems finding jobs. This article concurs with my teacher, claiming that the problem isn’t xenophobia but jealousy, while these comments on the spreading violence remind South Africans that Zimbabwe and other southern African countries offered shelter to tens of thousands of South Africans during apartheid.
Njau Kimemia, a Kenyan working in South Africa, has written an editorial, claiming that racial profiling is still occuring in South Africa at the airport–a decent black, he says, will be treated worse than a drug-smuggling Caucasion.
Police officer tries to defend foreign immigrants in Jo’burg.
photo taken from Zimbabwe Situation
For those of you who are fans of fair trade and like shops like the Ten Thousand Villages congomerate, I recently discovered Global Girlfriend, a like-minded nonprofit that benefits artists in developing countries. You can also give gifts that “give more”–for example, you can send two girls to school in Afghanistan or buy shoes for schoolgirls in Africa. Happy shopping!
This short video clip shows the inside of a detention center for immigrants who are waiting to be deported or waiting for a trial to see if they will be allowed to remain in the U.S. According to the news report, there is a failure of due process of law; there is a failure to give detainees access to legal counsel; and there is a failure in oversight and monitoring of what goes on inside. Complaints by detainees who claim they are abused are reviewed by the very people being complained about, with no outside monitoring. Like Guantanamo, it is evident that people can disappear inside these institutions for months or years without anybody knowing where they’ve gone and without any way for them to contact their families or lawyers.
Here’s an essay at The Atlantic, defending C.S. Lewis against growing criticism of rampant sexism and racism in The Narnia Chronicles. Actually, the essayist doesn’t do so well defending Lewis against charges of racism–rather, he defends against charges of racism while admitting that there is a clear and problematic British imperial worldview in the book (not a surprise given the time period and Lewis’s nationality)–but he does do a pretty good job of putting the sexist charges to rest.
I had an interesting conversation with Henry Trotter today, who has been living in South Africa for a few years now and hanging out at the docks in Cape Town and Durban, doing research on prostitutes and sailors for a Ph.D. he’s finishing up at Yale. He’s bringing out a book, Sugar Girls and Seamen: A Journey into the World of Dockside Prostitution in South Africa, next month and you can read some of his blog posts on sugar girls and seamen here.
When we were talking about sex, health, and culture in South Africa, Henry mentioned that 4 prostitutes he knew in Durban recently died of what was apparently AIDS–but their friends mentioned that they had been bewitched instead. He said that was a very different thing than what happens in Cape Town. A woman he knows in Cape Town recently died of AIDS but, although nobody talked about it, there was no doubt what she died of. It’s a different understanding of the etiology of disease.
“The implications of this are very important for health-seeking behavior. If you don’t see this as caused by sexual decisions, [then why would you seek medical help?]” he asked. “And also, for instance, in Durban, the women were more likely to have interactions with local partners than the Cape Town women, who were a little more ‘professional’ about it and tended to stick to sailors, who were from East Asia, also coming from a relatively low HIV-infection rates. The local colored and white women were getting involved with local colored and white men, where infection rate is low. But in Durban, those women were interacting with different nationalities, but also with local men. Sometimes the relationships with men were not a strict sexual transaction….There was very much a blurred line between whether this was a professional relationship or not, whereas their relationships with the sailors were a little more professional. It is ironic that one would expect prostitutes would be very wise about the risks of HIV they’re taking—but they’re also young people, 25 years old, and they don’t think they’re ever going to die. Not every decision I made when I was in my twenties was free—. You didn’t think you could be struck down. You just don’t think it’s going to happen to you. [Besides,] they are making more money than they’ve ever made or ever will make, actually, too. So in that environment, it’s pretty easy to make compromised decisions about health. They were more worried about pregnancy than viruses. All of them had given birth to babies, all of them knew what pregnancy entailed, and it was scary. They understand that risk. But the virus—they put it on the backburner. Most of the women don’t know their own status. I did come to an estimation of who was using condoms and who was not, or what was the relevant frequency. It was most important how close they were emotionally to the man…It was actually the clients that they liked the most, they would not use condoms. It was a reward on the one hand to a loyal client, but it was also a sensibility that ‘I know this man, I’ve been with him before, he must be clean.’ So they rely on other assessments of the man to make assessments about the virus. If he was clean, depending on the nation he came—Japanese men are considered very clean compared to Chinese men—these were all part of the decisions they made.”
Henry made other interesting comments and I’m looking forward to interviewing him at length when I’m in Cape Town. And I cant wait to get a copy of the book!
Although I am a huge fan of the ability to easily publish things on the internet–maybe I’m more into free culture than I realized–I’ve also wondered how many problems crop up. I’ve looked occasionally at ratemyprofessor.com, and though I’ve never been rated (either my students don’t love me enough or don’t hate me enough to rate me, though actually I think it has more to do with the lack of technological know-how among El Paso community college students), I’ve frequently wondered what I would do or how I would feel if one of my students wrote a bad comment about me. The New York Times today has an interesting article about what happened when some teachers at a very elite private school in New York City privately logged on to Facebook and found some hate groups directed at themselves. Scandals like these lead to questions about what “free speech” really is and really means, what privacy is and what it means, and whether posting something on a supposedly “private” site like Facebook (which is still accessed by millions of people) is actually “private” or whether it’s “publication” and thus subject to defamation claims.
Yes, I am on a roll tonight, when in fact I should be writing a high-falutin, inaccessible, very academic paper on the Aladura churches of Nigeria….I guess it’s all the pent-up blog energy floating around inside that has to be let out sometime.
I would just like to say here and now that even while I frequently sigh over the problems with scholarship and the academy (its frequent elitism, its inaccessiblity to everyday people, its writing style, its occasional problems with superiority even when it’s just stating the freakin’ obvious, its erudite vocabulary that contributes to its inaccessbility), I am really truly grateful for the people who spend years researching the things they research. And I am truly grateful for the many wonderful, intelligent people in academia who, instead of taking their careers in money-making directions, have taken the time to teach people what they know and to make their years of research available to the public. And I am also so so so grateful to academic presses who publish these books that never make any money but are worth it for the contribution they make to our ever-growing sum total of knowledge.  Without it, I couldn’t do what I do. It makes my job as a creative writer possible. Thank you thank you thank you for what you do!
