BOOK SA’s normal magazine excerpt service will resume next week. Meantime, we present five excerpts unearthed elsewhere on the web for your reading pleasure.
You’re permitted to cast a slightly dubious look at the first one, which comes from The Scramble for Africa: Darfur-Intervention and the USA, whose authors are Kevin Funk and Steven Fake. It’s no joke:
Just as the Clinton administration mostly continued its hostility towards Khartoum for the rest of its term, the presidency of George W. Bush did not give any initial indications of a dramatic change in policy. Just six weeks after the September 11 attacks, and subsequent to the declaration of the “War on Terror,” the Bush administration developed a list of countries to target in a five-year plan: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Libya, Somalia, and Sudan. Yet it was also largely because of September 11 that relations between Washington and Khartoum began to strike a more conciliatory note.
Following the attacks, Sudan began increasing its sharing of “counterterror” intelligence with the U.S. Though Sudan had been attempting to curry favor with Washington by passing along intelligence for several years prior, it was only upon the commencement of the “Age of Terror” that the US government fully appreciated the benefits of this unsavory alliance. Accordingly, Washington began to warm to Bashir’s regime, with Khartoum moving to stop militants from entering Iraq to fight against US forces, and granting US officials access to detained Al-Qaida suspects. The CIA has collaborated with Khartoum’s Mukhabarat intelligence service to spy on Iraqi rebel movements, and reportedly there are daily liaison visits between the two intelligence agencies.
New AllyIn turn the State Department has praised Khartoum for taking “significant steps to cooperate in the war on terrorism;” the Sudanese intelligence official Major General Salah Abdallah Gosh, who is accused of planning and participating in attacks against Darfurian civilians, and whom the United Nations has singled out as a figure who should be sanctioned, was brought to visit the White House in April 2005 after being flown to Washington on a CIA jet. Such has been the level of cooperation that Sudanese government officials had reportedly been invited to Bush’s 2004 State of the Union address, though they were later told not to attend due to the increasing attention being paid to the conflict in Darfur. Additionally, Sudan has made significant neoliberal economic reforms, and has accordingly received high praise from the IMF.
Protecting its new ally, the Bush administration rejected the Sudan Peace Act working its way through Congress in 2001, which would have financed support for anti-Khartoum forces, instead signing into law a watered down version the following year. According to John Prendergast of the International Crisis Group, Khartoum’s current intelligence-sharing with Washington as part of the “War on Terror” has greatly dulled whatever appetite the U.S. may have had for confrontation with Sudan. “When the two objectives [of intelligence-sharing versus a supposed desire to end the Darfur conflict] go head to head, counterterror wins every time,” as Prendergast comments, perhaps explaining why Washington lobbied to remove “one of the chief architects” of the Darfur crimes (Gen. Gosh) from inclusion on a list of 17 individuals to face international sanctions drafted by a UN panel. Or why it successfully protected “top Sudanese commanders” from UN Security Council sanctions.
Next up, a poem from Wendy Woodward’s Love, Hades and Other Animals, published by Protea Boekhuis:
Who speaks for the Jaguar?
This is the wrong question to ask, rendering her “permanently speechless, forever requiring the services of a vetriloquist”.
- Donna HarawayHow to speak with her instead?
when we wield a language
of stolid sounds, too primitive
for her deep shades
where smells may sing
and glances may trumpet narratives
we can scarcely guess at?
But what if no razor-pawed translator
volunteers to take up a soap box
on the forest floor
to stand, a Dolittle in reverse,
interpreting her life codes
for those who believe they command the present,
while the future absconds to a place more habitable
than this earth we have made deadly?
Moving along, an excerpt from Biko Lives! Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko:
“This is one country where it would be possible to create a capitalist black society, if whites were intelligent, if the nationalists were intelligent. And that capitalist black society, black middle class, would be very effective … South Africa could succeed in putting across to the world a pretty convincing, integrated picture, with still 70 percent of the population being underdogs.” – Steve Biko (1972)
The 30th anniversary of Steve Biko’s murder in police custody (on September 12 1977) comes almost 15 years after the formal ending of apartheid in South Africa. This fact alone raises several fundamental questions: how do we remember Biko? What contributions did the black consciousness movement make to the course of black liberation in South Africa and the world? How does the conception of black liberation, as enunciated by Biko and his colleagues, square up against the realities of post-apartheid South Africa?
Indeed, Biko lives today in South Africa, but so do the material outcomes of colonialism, segregation, apartheid and – most recently – neo-liberal economic policies. South Africa continues to be characterised by sharply contrasting realities.
Under the terms of the negotiated settlement of the early 1990s, the ANC won political – but not economic – power. Less than 5 percent of the country’s land has changed hands from white to black since 1994 and four white-owned conglomerates continue to control 80 percent of the Johannesburg stock exchange.
Fourth, an artistic interlude, courtesy Taxi Art 9:
Should you wish to meet Kagiso Patrick Mautloa, you could follow the route he takes to his studio every morning. The changing seasons spanned between the extremes of dry winters and summers of torrential rains would take you through a city which seems to change from hour to hour. Departing from Alexandra, where he lives, you would stroll through the shapeless township where broken tar-strips, revealing the textures of sand, take you past rusted metal and board structures, tightly packed together. You would see new housing developments below Reconstruction and Development billboards, and huge adverts for beer, mobile phone services and washing powder looming in the gloom – flaking and peeling. The area would be shrouded in smoke, the air sulphurous with anthracite. Alexandra township, a free-holding area from which black South Africans could not be removed under apartheid, would have an unreal, spectral quality.
And we end with a bang, with this excerpt from the lucky Lauren Beukes‘ Maverick:
Daisy de Melker was not overly concerned when she went on trial in 1932 for fatally poisoning two plumber husbands and one slacker son who had failed to become a plumber or much of anything at all.
In fact, the murderess with the slight lisp confessed her delight to her lawyer, Harry Morris, at all the people who had come to see her. Daisy would greet the crowds with the elegant wave of a ‘cinema star’ and was seen taking copious notes in court, which she planned, she said, to develop into a ‘Hollywood scenario’, after she was acquitted; she had no doubt that she would be.
The public was enthralled. They would queue for hours to get a look in on the trial and some were prepared to pay as much as 25 shillings from savvy scalpers to secure a primo seat in the galleries that were crammed to capacity.
That a woman could perform such vile and heinous deeds was shocking enough – but what a woman! Author Sarah Millin, who later wrote a rather dull novel about Daisy called Three Men Die described her in another book, The Night is Long as ‘really ugly’, although she seemed to blame this as much on Daisy’s appalling fashion-sense as any physical limitations.
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January 7th, 2009 @14:45 #
Well archeologised, sir.
It just so happens that I have the last 13 copies of Maverick in the world (not including previously owned specimens) gathering dust in a box nestled under my desk.
Based on my earlier luck, I'm gonna reciprocate the love and offer up the last remaining books for a good cause.
So Book SAers, here are the options:
Either:
Nominate an under-funded library that would want such a thing and I'll donate a copy to them.
OR:
You can buy a signed copy with personal message for R150 + postage and I'll donate R100 of that sale to a suitable bookish charity.
(anyone have any suggestions? The Little Hands Trust?)
January 7th, 2009 @15:49 #
That's very generous, Lauren. I nominate Cape Town Central Library on Darling Street, which I'm nearly 100% positive doesn't have a copy, but should.
January 7th, 2009 @16:16 #
One down. 12 to go.
January 7th, 2009 @17:30 #
Count me in. My beloved Obs library.