As Onyango-Obbo sees it

At the rate it is going, South Africa could soon be expelled from the African Union for “setting a bad example” to the rest of the continent.

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CHARLES ONYANGO-OBBO: Is power-sharing the panacea?
African leaders, generally, hate three things. First, anyone who tries to take power away from them, even legitimately at an election.

Secondly, another African leader who shows that you can leave power when your second term is up.

Thirdly, a leader who resigns “prematurely” just because the public has become disgusted with their rule.

First, in 1999, when the iconic “Saint” Nelson Mandela would have won a second term without even getting out of his bed to campaign for president, he walked away from it and retired to his village.

His deputy ,Thabo Mbeki, duly stepped up to the plate and won the election.

Now, with less than a year left before he retires, the ruling African National Congress has revolted against Mr Mbeki. Instead of rounding up all the dissidents and feeding them to the crocodiles, he announces that he was respecting the ANC’s wishes and stepping down!

Before the continent had fully absorbed the shock of his actions, on Tuesday, it was announced that Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka too was resigning, along with 10 ministers, and three deputy ministers.

Mr Mbeki has a thousand faults, and he drove folks like myself to near-insanity with the way he mollycoddled Zimbabwe’s strongman President Robert Mugabe when he was ruining his country and tormenting its citizens, but on the whole, his achievements were quite remarkable.

While his critics have slammed Mbeki for being too business-friendly and not doing enough to tackle poverty and inequality, he presided over South Africa’s longest period of steady economic growth.

Mr Mbeki was, without doubt, the most intellectual African of the last two decades. Some years ago, an American magazine reported that when he travels abroad, aides usually go and knock on his hotel door at 3am, and remind him to go to bed because he has an early morning meeting. Sometimes, they sneaked back at 5am, only to see the light still on. Mbeki would still be either surfing the Internet, or reading a book.

The Internet was to be part of his doing, for there he met some chaps who had some crackpot views on Aids, and argued that it was not caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), but by various conditions arising from poverty.

MBEKI BOUGHT INTO THAT VIEW, which influenced his approach to fighting the disease even as South Africa became the country with the world’s highest infection rates. Mbeki’s government was slow to get on the ARV bandwagon, and become an object of hate for many Aids activists in the world.

South African newspaper The Times, quoted human rights campaigner Zachie Achmat, who had a memorable confrontation with Mbeki over HIV and Aids, saying: “This (Mbeki’s departure) is long overdue. Personally I would have liked to see him impeached for causing the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of people living with HIV...”

His attitude towards Aids, though it changed to conform largely to the conventional scientific view, nevertheless led his Health minister to encourage sufferers to treat themselves with a concoction of ginger, beetroot, and a mix of lizard tail powder or something like that.

Mr Mbeki was paranoid, and thus became the architect of the slash and burn culture that saw him hounded disgracefully out of office. In the end, the monster he had created devoured him.

Mbeki was aloof to a fault. You have to look hard to find a photograph of him holding a child, like other African leaders like to do. In the 2004 elections, he showed his aversion for the lowly moments of political rallies by campaigning mostly by walking through neighbourhoods and talking to small groups of people. Mbeki is not one to join traditional dancers, and would never don monkey skins and prance around on the stage.

He would never do a Raila Odinga, and turn up as the Prime Minister used to, with his wife Ida wearing uniform clothes for a public function.

He was also sometimes famously tactless. One case, not written about in South African media, but the subject of every dinner you have with journalists in the country, is how he treated Mandela.

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CHARLES ONYANGO-OBBO: Is power-sharing the panacea?
One of the reasons Mandela broke up with the fiery Winnie Mandela, is that she was cheating on him. One of the incidents happened when she was flying with then president Mandela in the same presidential plane from a foreign trip.

While the “Saint” napped at the front of the plane, in the back Ms Mandela was doing Satan’s work, making out with a young ANC activist. Mbeki later appointed this impertinent lad to head a major public corporation.

To the very end, Mbeki remained true to form. When he delivered his resignation speech, he was regal, and absolutely dry-eyed. A very presidential performance.

Conspiracy theory?

This year has been one heck of a strange one. My world as i have known it has turned on its head.

I am talking about the madness in Kenya (with the killings, the hate, and the displacements)

The xenophobic attacks on foreigners in South Africa

The crashing world markets! Between the Lehman brothers, AIG and now the series of banks that had to be rescued

Mbeki stepping down as president

Gordon Brown and the Isreali PM (not sure)

Its as if the world is reacting to an invisible fullmoon; as if we have been infected by some virus that is setting things in motion, ensuring that the world changes and things do not remain as they have been.

I think this is how discoveries are made, how geniuses are created. events such as these, which require superhuman brains to fathom. It may seem unrelated, but why is everything happening at the same time? Why can't the concept of predictability apply here? Is the world conspiring against us? Is the end coming??????????????

I have been reading Awake! so no, am not going crazy.

But seriously, what is happening to set these events off? Between the earthquakes, the tsunamis, the whirlwinds, hurricanes and so on, and the human initiated ones, am not too sure we are safe anymore (been watching sci-fi).........

Or maybe I just have too much time in my hands.

TV don’t teach nobody nothing!

I was reading Barack Obama’s Dreams from my Father the other day, and flowing with this man’s poetic language, when I bumped on a line that made me put the book down. He was talking about Maya, his sister by his Indonesian step-dad. He said,

“I scolded Maya for spending one evening watching TV instead of reading the novels I had bought for her” (DfMF 123)

I remember my feelings at that particular moment. Affront. Indignation.

Ok. I lie.

I remember wondering if in fact it was true that television did not teach anybody anything. I was astonished by how much I wanted to defend television. I felt a powerful emotion towards this piece of machinery, especially given my rather African background. Isn’t it true that the world has come to believe that radio is the one technical gadget that defines Africans? And isn’t it true that television in Africa has been regarded as the luxury that only the few rich ones can afford?

I remember growing up without television, until I turned nine. Then my dad brought into the living room this (it seems to me now) rather small strange looking television set. It wasn’t as big as our neighbours’. It was squeezed, reminded me of maths. You see, our teacher taught us the essentials of a cubicle. It was like a square, only three dimensional. That is how I imagined a real life cube to be. Small, compact, perfect. And it was black and white. I loved it.

Anyway, from the time this thing made its way into our house, I was glued. I never could explain it. My father could never explain it. In fact, my father tried to pry me away from it with everything he had. On some nights, when all the other children were asleep, and I was left there, staring into this machinery, my dad would stumble into the sitting room, reeking of alcohol, for he loved his beer (of course he had just arrived home). He would try to string enough words together, words that were designed to threaten me from the television.

“You have school tomorrow, what are you still doing up?”

Or

“This thing will make you go blind!”

I would calmly turn around and tell him I was doing homework. That without TV I could not do my homework.

Too drunk to argue, he would leave the room, sighing, and possibly look for my mother to blame for the destruction of one of his daughters. Nonetheless, they basically left me alone.

My older siblings, realizing that I got away with it, began joining me in my night vigil, watching, droning, thinking.

But none of them ever understood what it was that drew me to that television. It wasn’t the images per se, it was the comfort it brought me, the knowledge that a better or worse life than mine existed out there. It was the way in which I could lose myself in some senseless movie for hours without blinking, and the way I would be irritated when my mother chose a particularly interesting TV moment to send me to the shops, which were far away, at least by my standards. A kilometer journey was way too far, because I had to make the journey back, and then I would miss half of my He Man cartoon programme, or Sheera. I despised it when mum came home, bountiful, loud, interefering.

Yes, I watched way too much TV.

Then I grew up. I went to boarding school, where there was none. I entertained myself with watching people, following routine, numbing myself against the inevitable drone of class, games time, dining time, preps, sleep. I read novels. I discovered the hidden world of fantasy. I got lost in it. First, it started with the interesting stories from African writers. Kenjo Jumbam, I remember. I loved The White Man of God. I was fascinated with the child’s point of view that the author employed. I read. I later discovered Mills and Boon, and I thought I would die from the enticing romantic stories. Still, I discovered other romances, books that were taken away from me before I reached the end of these tantalizing narratives. The pain of loss that I felt then, I cannot dare to recount.

Meantime, in between, our television set was stolen, so for a whole year, as my mother pestered my father to buy a new television, we listened to radio. I got lost in the fantastic stories of Radio Theatre. Most of them were about romance, and AIDS. I enjoyed listening to the triumphs of the voices, and was as defeated as the characters were, when disaster struck.

Then I went to college. There was TV, but then there were so many other things going on. And so, once again, my love for TV was in abeyance.

Many years later, I could finally afford my own TV. I watched. I bought every single television series I could get my hands on. I hated movies, because they ended. I bought the entire series of Friends, bought Ally McBeal, Desperate Housewives, Nip/Tuck, Prison Break, 24….the list is endless. I was a woman possessed.

Then one day I asked myself, what had I learnt watching all this TV? People are busy reading. There is this new fad all over me. People no longer buy TV sets because its so …. Working class? People now only listen to Classic FM, or read M&G, or just read plain old classics.

Elizabeth Gaskell. Theodore Dreiser. Charles Dickens.

What was I doing to myself, enjoying this?

To make it worse, I wasn’t even a fan of news, and newspapers. I was doomed.

I was often chastised for not being more receptive to good books, and newspapers, and the news. But what was I supposed to learn from all these, if not repeated narratives of war and destruction, and mayhem, and cheating politicians. What was I supposed to do with things I had absolutely no use for? How was I supposed to learn from all these?

I thought. Then repeated the last series of Ally McBeal. She was funny. Very confused. Too much angst. Like me. But still quite funny.

Perhaps TV was bad, but it was definitely good for my mental health.

Sharlene Khan - What I saw, what I thought

On 4 September 2008, I had a rare opportunity to see the work of one of South Africa's young and upcoming artists' work on display. The exhibition titled 'What I look like, what I feel like' wasn't her usual work on urban immigrants, the work that has occupied her imagination for a while now. It was on an interesting theme, her.

While any work that is reflective of ourselves is often a risky project to undertake, many autobiographers often do it, because within the story of the self, emerges the story of others, in which concerns about one's identity become key in relation to the general context of the work's production. I am talking about great names like Eskia Mphahlele and Richard Wright, in literature, for example. Often, people who write or produce autobiographical work recreate their stories to embrace a certain theme that touches base with the stories of hundreds, even millions of others. Such has been the case for some of the most famous autobiographers.

It is with this is mind that I approach Sharlene Khan's exhibition at the Gallery Momo, in Parktown North. Her work was a collection of photographs, each telling its own story, yet all of them forming an intricate narrative of how she sees herself personally and as an artist in South Africa today. The style of presentation was quite interesting. Each piece consisted of two separate yet related photographs, which together told a story of how she viewed herself and her identity.

Her work rotated around questions of gender and power, education and unemployment; and unequal race relations in post-Apartheid South Africa. The displays were at once personal and public. Personal because the artist used the opportunity to directly speak about her feelings towards how very specific groups have viewed her in the last few years during her struggles to make a mark in South Africa as a young, black, female artist. She makes references to several controversial landmarks in her career.

For instance, one display titled 'Doing it for Daddy' makes special reference to an article she wrote a couple of years ago about the disadvantaged position of the black artist in the present South Africa. It inadvertently makes reference to the backlash she received for writing this piece. She also has a mounting based on a phrase that appeared quite recently in a blog spot which picked on her as an example of those artists who were not doing much to help in the Xenophobic violence. She clearly uses this space to speak to issues close to her heart using the most effective form of expression available to her.

An array of her pictures speak to more general themes. For instance, one of the pieces titled 'Princess Warrior' was particularly telling in a freudian kind of way. This is a picture of the artist dressed in army gear, holding a blood-stained knife on one hand, and on the other hand, holding a severed (white) head. She is in the process of wiping her brow with the knife-holding hand. Next to this photogragh is a rather completely different picture. It is of the artist sitting on a toilet seat, blowing into a air-bag, perhaps nauseous from the earlier exprerience?

In the 'gender room' we had a most inspiring piece about her identity as a Muslim woman, who although free, struggles with the demands of her culture. A very provocative piece, which was, quite naturally, the first to sell! In one picture, we have the artist standing naked, free, but already defined by the boundaries and expectations of her culture (demonstrated through the intricate stitchings in the form of gown measurements around the naked body). In the second picture, she is covered from head (face) to foot, in a bou bou, a prisoner in her clothing!

I was honoured to have been a part of this opening night, not because I know much about art, but because I thought this was a form of rebirth for many, who felt, thought and exprienced the things they saw on display.

An inspiring display of courage, determination and artistry! An evening well spent.