Those posting questionable ads are just wasting their time. The editor will remove them instantly!

Talk about the "cuckoo in the nest!" While the person who contributed the photos in his  comment provides some interesting Johannnesburg up-dates, he has succeeded in obliterating much of what the writer was trying to convey and made it difficult to get back to where one has left off. I take exception to that, and can't help wondering why he does not create some blogs of his own!!!

South Africa, Oh, South Africa, Land Of My Birth, I Weep For You!

Dear God! What next?

I can’t stand it!  I left South Africa many years ago, but it is hard to break all ties with the country of one’s birth, and particularly so for someone whose family is so deeply rooted in its past. I cringed when the Times of London recently featured a story under the heading of “Polygamous South African president Jacob Zuma weds for a fifth time.”

Now we have to learn that he has admitted fathering his 20th child with a woman who is neither one of his three wives nor a fiancée!

Surely it must be plain from all the blogs I write, that I have been disenchanted – nay bitter — about what has been happening there, for some time, but disenchantment has had to be replaced with ‘disgust’ in order to counteract the heartbreak and searing bitterness..

Nelspruit

A town that has long seemed a magical place to me — which is why I chose it as the setting for my book When You Know That You Know, That You Know! Or The Redemption Of Benjamin Ashton. It is true that I claim that this book virtually wrote itself. It simply carried me along with it. There were times when I did not know who would be on the other side of a door when someone knocked on it; however, the memory of the view from the balcony of a Nelspruit hotel where, together with my husband’s band, I went, long ago, to play for a dance, remained so powerfully with me, that I knew I would have to write about it some day. The air was heavy with the perfume of orange blossom at sunset, and, except that there are no gorgeously plumed peacocks parading among the green and gold of the citrus trees, that is the view I have  described from ‘Benjamin Ashton’s stoep.

I am certain that the "benign" spell Nelspruit cast that night was the reason for making that book the first of a trilogy. Because I could not get Nelspruit out of my mind, I now shudder at the stories about the ghastly goings-on at the border, not too far from there. How absolutely shattering to be sent yet another link to a Times Report, this time dealing with the rampant practice of witchcraft. To read the report in the study by the Human Rights League and Childline which details gory accounts of children's frozen heads and genitals being smuggled into South Africa from Mozambique!

I wanted to be sick when I found, highlighted in the report from an area close to where I went to elementary school, the story of a woman in Bloemspruit, Free State, who told researchers that she was advised by a traditional healer to wear a belt made of young boys' penises and little children's fingers to help ease her difficult pregnancy! (A study found that the most highly sought-after body parts are generally male genitalia, followed by human hearts, breasts and fingers.

Evidently the sangoma or ‘traditional healer’ referred to in the Bloemspruit story charged her client R4000 (roughly $1,000 Canadian and $1.0734 USD,if my calculations are correct) for the advice! 


And It Gets Worse!
I was recently sent another News 24 link, this time providing the details surrounding evidence of cannibalism, submitted in a statement read in the Nelspruit circuit of the Pretoria high court case last year. The man had killed his grandfather with an axe, ripped out his heart and seasoned it with muthi (‘Magic’ medicine) before sitting down and eating it. The accused, aged 26, claimed he had done it because his sixty-three-year-old grandfather had asked him to.

"He asked me to kill him because he was old,” the accused stated, adding that he had chopped a hole in his chest with an axe and removed his heart." His grandfather's body was discovered by family members on September 03/2007.

When the accused was sent to a psychiatric hospital, three psychiatrists found him fit to stand trial. Because he admitted that killing his grandfather was wrong and that he had willingly made the statement, the judge accepted the man’s plea and found him guilty of murder, but added  that she appreciated the fact that he had not wasted the court's time, and had co-operated with police to the extent of  showing investigators where he had hidden the murder weapon!

Thanks For The Memories

What  fun when someone is available to turn the hose on you!

Embittered and cynical as I have become, I am not ashamed to have been born in South Africa. I am proud of how it used to be; grateful for the wonderful schools and mentors that were available to me — starting with Lizzie of the the multitudinous Shwe Shwe (calico)  petticoats, whom I loved better than I did my mother... Buxom Lizzie with the safe, welcoming lap and satiny brown skin, her face scarred with the traditional black lines etched into it, who was prevented, in the nick time, from affectionately doing the same to mine; who taught me to sing and speak  "Sesuto", and who warned me (when I was only five) never to leave hair on my hairbrush lest it be used to put a spell on me!

The first Holocaust of the 20th century

THIS IS SO SAD...!

The real tragedy of South Africa is that the rest of the world has never been content to leave it alone. In common with every other country, in every other corner of the world, it has had its internal problems from time to time, but whenever it did, it was not long before the powers-that-be somewhere else, would see fit to intervene -- that is, if they weren’t actually bent on taking it over altogether! -- only to make matters worse! Finally such interference has contributed to reducing to utter chaos what was once a sublime place in which to live. A country respected by the rest of the world, a place where the world’s first heart transplant was carried out, has been damaged, wrecked, soiled to the extent that we read in an Australian newspaper, under the title of Wounded Nation that, ‘after bathing in the warm, fuzzy glow of the Mandela years, South Africans today are deeply demoralized people!’... That, in a country that provided some of the best Battle of Britain pilots; a country, one of whose Prime Ministers – Jan Christiaan Smuts - was among the architects of the ‘League Of Nations’, an association of countries established in 1919 by the Treaty of Versailles to promote international cooperation and achieve international peace and security! When it was replaced by the United Nations in 1945, it was Smuts who drafted the Covenant of the United Nations, which is considered to have been his major achievement; but it should also not be forgotten that as a Field Marshal of the Allied Forces during WW2, he enjoyed the respect and friendship of both General Eisenhower and the King of England.

I am indebted to, and wish I could find the name of the author of that Australian article, who goes on to report: “The lights are going out, in homes, mines, factories and shopping malls as the national power authority, Eskom - suffering from mismanagement, lack of foresight, a failure to maintain power stations and a flight of skilled engineers to other countries - implements rolling power cuts that plunge towns and cities into daily chaos.” He, or she laments that South Africa has become a country where crime is rampant and the national police chief faces trial for corruption and “defeating the ends of justice, as a result of his alleged deals with a local mafia kingpin and dealer in hard drugs.”

Oh, what agony it is to think back to the days when many of us, including my husband and I, were regarded as the skunks of the universe! When people, recognizing our accent, scrambled out of the elevator at the Regent Palace hotel in London; when Arabs left the bus in which we were all going to Heathrow Airport, at Hounslow, rather than travel with white South Africans. It was all supposed to get better, and the country was supposed to emerge from the darkness after 1994, but the newly-lit candle of hope very soon flickered and burned out.

It is possible that, around the world, many supporters of the of ANC (and they are legion) are unaware of the fact that Jacob Zuma, the recently elected African National Congress (ANC) leader – and thus the State President-in-waiting - narrowly escaped being jailed for raping an HIV-positive woman last year, and faces trial on many other charges, among them soliciting and accepting bribes. This last offence is in connection with the country’s alleged deal with weapons manufacturers in Britain, Germany and France.

I understand only too well what that writer means when he goes on to say that in 2008 the big shots of the ANC 'still speak in the spiritually dead jargon they learned in exile in pre-1989 Moscow, East Berlin and Sofia’ while promiscuously embracing capitalist icons.’ – But does the ‘rest of the world’? And does that ‘rest of the world’ feel pleased with itself?

Nothing I can say can compare with what Anne Paton (widow of Alan Paton, author of ‘Cry the beloved country’, has written in a letter to the Editor of the London Sunday Times. She speaks for many when she confesses: “I love this country with a passion, but I cannot live here any more. I can no longer live slung about with panic buttons and gear locks.” She is tired, she says, of driving with her car windows closed and the doors locked. Tired of “being afraid of stopping at red lights.” She is tired of 'being constantly on the alert, having that sudden frisson of fear at the sight of a shadow by the gate, of a group of youths approaching - although nine times out of 10 they are innocent of harmful intent. Such is the suspicion that dogs us all.'

I can't bear to think of my Dutch pioneer ancestors who came to found a new country in 1652; my Huguenot forebears who fled from religious persecution in France, and their descendants who have fought and died for South Africa (in the Boer War, on the side of Britain in the two world wars, alongside the United Nation Forces in Korea, and, at the behest of the Americans, in the seemingly interminable Angolan conflict.)

Maybe that's why I write novels about the way it used to be. I want my readers to know the good stuff, but have I not perhaps been hiding the truth of how it is now?

ALMIGHTY GOD TO WHOM ALL HEARTS BE OPEN...

"Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid: cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of Thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love Thee and worthily magnify Thy holy name, through Christ our Lord. Amen."

Each new day began with this prayer at Windsor House Academy, the private school I founded in the early seventies, in Kempton Park, South Africa. The Lord's prayer then followed; said alternately, on succeeding days, in English and Afrikaans, because it was a bi-lingual (not 'dual-medium') school.

We used the Book of Common Prayer version for the opening prayer - retaining the words 'Hid', 'Thee', 'Thy', and so on, but, to this day, although the prayer has been updated - and those teenagers have grown into men and women, many with children of their own - I see those young faces before me, and, as I recite it in church, I send up prayers for them, and bless them in my heart.

I feel very sure that they can all do with prayer - especially those left behind in the country of my birth, which is in such turmoil - but I am assuredly the one most in need of having the 'thoughts of my heart' cleansed by the inspiration of His Holy Spirit!

I think that is was for this reason that I was led to start this blog. No matter how hard I try to shake them off, I allow far too many things to 'get' to me, and I guess it serves as a form of catharsis to let off steam in a blog. - Is that why so many people become bloggers?

ET TU BRUTE, MANDELA?

BREYTENBACH’S 180-DEGREE TURNAROUND.
Who would ever have thought …?

Well it seems that Mrs. Paton isn’t the only disillusioned one as far as the country itself is concerned - many, many others have expressed the same sentiments - but that Breyten Breytenbach, the passionate former activist who spent seven years in South African prisons for his anti-apartheid activities prior to 1994, should find fault with his hero, Nelson Mandela, even going as far as to allude to him as 'Moneydeala,' is almost beyond belief! Can it be that his own ‘emperor’, like Aesop’s, was actually not ‘wearing any clothes’? Whatever the case, he supports this reference by accusing Mandela - in an article that appeared recently in Harper’s Magazine, and cited in the Boston Globe - of surrounding himself with ‘greedy, always needy sycophants, and enjoying the ‘idolatry’ (which the famed poet describes as ‘obscene’) as though he, Mandela were an ‘exotic teddy bear to slobber over’.

1994 – THE YEAR OF 'THE NEW SOUTH AFRICA!'
Since then, if one may rely on some of the Internet statics - 3025 South African farmers have been murdered. The daily violence and the shocking crime rate are no secret to people around the world, and when Breytenbach, was asked about whether he would advise people to stay and stick it out, his response, according to the Harper’s Magazine story was, “My bitter advice to young South Africans, would be to go.” - Since his own nephew was stabbed in a parking lot, it is perhaps not surprising that his reasons correspond with those offered by the thousands who have already left: ‘Ghastly, violent crime!’

More discouraging observations
Hassan Masiky, an author who resides in Kenitra, Morocco, supplies details of a posting on the Morocco American Community Board to the effect that South Africa's stint at the UN Security Council (UNSC) was “disastrous; and bitterly disappointing to the aspirations of the African continent." This observation ends with a blunt: "Good riddance!!”

“The African National Congress (ANC), a treasured political organization that embodies the struggle of Africa against oppression and colonialism," he goes on to state in a blog, “was torn apart due to Mbeki's intransigence and self-serving interests. Mbeki's refusal to accept his dismissal from the ANC has plunged the country into a turmoil that would undoubtedly further the suffering of poverty stricken South Africans.”

UPDATE December 28, 2008
Wouldn't you know it? I have just received, via a Google Alert, the following headline from a publication called Plus News:

SOUTH AFRICA: Global Fund money gets stuck with health department.
The reference is to the fact that South Africa's Department of Health has failed to channel the US$3.9 million in donor money - a grant delivered to the health department in mid-November - to 13 HIV/AIDS organizations. The delay, which has left these organizations underfunded, is attributed by the Global Fund spokesperson, Jon Lidén, to the department's 'slow and inefficient system for dispersing funds.'
Their explanation:
"The department has been slow to appoint full-time staff to deal with the allocation of this money."