Better Make Way For The Young Folks in Egypt
I have been glued to Aljazeera on my computer for a week. I am bleary-eyed. This youtube video posted today was a bit uplifting. Notice all the women.
African Continent
Following Uprising in Egypt on Twitter
Protests going on from early morning and people will remain in Tahrir Square all night. It’s spread all over the country and other countries. Three dead. It’s after midnight there and twitter, cell phone, TV and all the rest have now gone down but there are some iconic pics that have been coming out of Egypt. And YouTube is full of video. This uprising is a really big deal! Even a friend in Serbia is all but afraid to hope.
My fav post:
Lessons of Tunisia:
To the Arab dictators: u r not invincible.
To the West: u r not needed.
To the Arab people: u r not powerless
Trouble In Egypt
An explosion has taken place in the ancient area of Al Hussein-Cairo, Egypt, the number of killed and wounded is still unsettled. How the bomb was exploded is not exactly specified. It’s the most glorified and valued area for Egyptian and every Muslim; for both Sunni Muslim and Shiite Muslim this place is highly sacred. It’s the place where prayer is practiced every day, and it’s the place where Al Hussein (Prophet grand son) is believed to be buried. It is also the place of an important market and center of business where hundreds of Egyptians make a living on selling goods and offering services to visitors. It is well known that the place is a preferred spot for Egyptians and foreigners to spend an evening, says one Egyptian.
The news agencies are saying it was a militant Islamic group.
“Muslims usually comes to this place seeking spiritual calmness and peace of soul, not it’s ridiculous to claim that a cowered act like this would be made by a Muslim or some one who understand and believe what Islam is,” says this Muslim. He believes it was Mossad, the intelligence arm of the Israeli government.
But consider this. If it was done by an Islamic group why would an Islamic do such a thing? Here is one answer.
I know next to nothing about Islam but it just so happens that I just finished reading Bernard Lewis’ 2002 book “What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity In the Middle East.” He takes 105 pages to itemize, often from journals and diaries, the gradual contacts of Islamics with the West, from the beginning of Islam, and the resulting modernizing influences of the West over the centuries on the Middle East. (This book was written for the Western reader so my apologies for copying much of what may already be known.) Then he goes on to say: Read More
Dual Pricing
Found a hilarious travel article on Bootnall today about the luxury tax…or dual pricing for foreigners as it is called:
The Luxury Tax – Asia, Europe, South America
By: Adam Jeffries Schwartz
The following is a guide to how the luxury tax is levied, worldwide.
ASIA
China has the highest tax in the region! Charging a hundred times the regular price is typical. If you negotiate at all, they will stand two inches in front of your face, and scream You PAY, you PAY NOW.
Note: Exactly!!!
Read More
The Looming Tower
Have recently finished the acclaimed “The Looming Tower” by Lawrence Wright which is a history of Islamic radical fundamentalism beginning in the 1930’s and 40’s and ending with the bombing of the World Trade Center. Including the ridiculous and ultimately tragic machinations of the CIA and FBI, it reads like an unbelievable novel…and it left me drained and feeling hopeless.
The Christian Science Monitor reported today that Al-Qaida said in its monthly magazine posted on an Islamic web site that “cutting oil supplies to the United States, or at least curtailing it, would contribute to the ending of the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.” The group said it was making the statements as part of Osama bin Laden’s declared policy. It was not possible to verify independently that the posting was from the terror faction, said the Monitor.
Al-Qaida claimed responsibility for last year’s attacks on oil installations in Saudi Arabia and Yemen after bin Laden called on militants to stop the flow of oil to the West. The group also was behind the 2002 attack on a French oil tanker that killed one person in the Gulf of Aden, according to the paper.
Also reported today was that Egypt has arrested nearly 80 members of the Muslim Brotherhood.
What really frightened me recently was the sight of a young artist, on his knees in front of Santo Domingo, working on a gigantic poster of Bin Laden. It was never put up because the next day the PFP routed and burned the planton in the Santo Domingo Plaza.
Sleepover In Soweto
A Sleepover in Soweto-Africa’s largest township
On our way to India we stopped in Johannesburg for two days to stay with Lolo Mabitsela in her Bed and Breakfast in Soweto-a township about 30 minutes outside the city where most of the violence occurred in the years leading up to the end of apartheid. Lolo’s nephew who runs Jimi’s Face To Face Tours, picked us up at the Johannesburg airport in his van.
Soweto has always had a small and thriving middle class and after all the press about the violence before the end of apartheid they are anxious to get the message out.
About one million people live in the township that was designated for blacks and established in the early 1900’s. The community is still poor and more than half of its adults are unemployed. Roughly twenty percent live in one room tin and cardboard shacks. Lolo, a retired high school principal and school inspector, lives in middle class Diepkloof Extension, however, in a new two story brick faced multi bedroom/bathroom home that would sell for half a million dollars in California. A member of Parliament lives across the street.
Lolo raised several of her niece’s children and her one natural child is an attorney and works for the Justice Department. But she said that blacks didn’t have electricity and she never saw TV in a township until about 1982. She worked 35 years as a teacher and for that she only receives a $300 a month pension. This is because blacks didn’t pay into the pension fund because they were not going to be given pensions.
Lolo cooked us a feast of dumplings, oxtail stew, fried chicken, carrots, beets, salad and fruit. The cuisine includes other traditional treats such as mealie-pap, samp, spinach and ‘mabele’ porridge.
The next day she drove us to the largest hospital in the southern hemisphere where we walked through the pitiful emergency area with people inside and outside lying on gurneys. Most of the doctors are young white doctors from other countries eager for the experience they will gain here-especially with weekend knife and gunshot wounds.
The next morning she drove us to the beautiful Museum Africa housed in what used to be a fruit and vegetable market. One section dealt with the four and a half year trial of 156 people opposed to apartheid that were arrested in 1956. All, many of whom were white allies of the freedom fighters were eventually acquitted. Most of the defense were white and the trial was held in a Jewish Synagogue.
Another interesting section depicted the places and activities of Mahatma Gandhi who lived for a time in Johannesburg. His philosophy of “Satyagraha” or passive resistance was shaped by his 10 year resistance to black discrimination in South Africa.
Finally we drove out to Liliesleaf Farm where Mandela and about 10 other political activists were arrested during a resistance planning meeting. Apparently they had been given away by someone on the inside. The beautiful 29 acre farm and buildings now in an upscale Johannesburg suburb-far from Soweto-had been purchased with Communist Party funds for the use of the freedom fighters. It has been a guest house but recently was sold and will become a museum next year.
Back in Soweto we drove by Mandela and Winnie’s old house that has since been bombed, by Winnie’s new big beautiful home and Archbishop Tutu’s home (yes, he still lives in Soweto! Two Nobel Prize winners on the same street!
For dinner we stopped at a tavern owned by one of Lolo’s former students and had a wonderful supper of African delicacies-mielie pap (corn porridge picked up with the fingers and dipped into a gravy), lamb ribs in gravy, chicken, beet salad, lettuce salad, green mango chutney, cole slaw and I can’t remember what else.
I asked Lolo what happened between Mandela and Winnie. She said it was personal and had to do with the bedroom. But it is only speculation as to who was sabataging the relationship and for what reason. Mandela has since married the pretty widow of the President of Mozambique.
As a single divorced mom Lolo didn’t say how she was able to afford her home. The most curious thing though, was that there was not a single African-motif item in the entire house. A walk inside and you could have been in a quaint B&B in a western country…the new black rich…
Reflections on Africa
We loved Africa and feel sad to be leaving. But the one single strong impression is how little Africans everywhere we traveled, black and white, knew about the outside world and how few, even those who could afford to, had ever traveled out of their own countries. The news media is pathetic and our references to current people and events went clear over the heads of the people we talked to whether it was the sophisticated gay Afrikaner managers in the Waterkant office across the street or Lolo in Soweto.
Jimi, our driver who was born and raised in Soweto and who picked us up at the airport said that he didn’t know what poverty was until he made a trip to the Congo one year… “that was poverty,” he exclaimed! Ironic.
Jimmy’s Face to Face Tours arranges overnight stays with families in Soweto, including Lolo’s Guesthouse, for $52 a night per person, including breakfast and transportation to and from the township, at 8.15 rand to the dollar. Information: (27-11) 331-6109 or (27-11) 331-6132, http://www.face2face.co.za.
Lolo’s Guesthouse: Diepkloof Extension. lolosbb@mweb. co.za. Lolo Mabitsela charges about $50 a night for two, which includes dinner and breakfast. She can accommodate up to four and can be reached at 011 (27-11) 985-9183 or at 011 (27-82) 332-2460.
The Soweto page of Johannesburg’s Web site, http://www.joburg.org.za/soweto, has the most useful visitor information for the township. Gauteng Tourism Authority has regional info at http://www.guateng.net. You can also contact the Soweto Tourism Association’s Dumisani Ntshangase, 011-27-73-310-5886, or Zodwa Nyembe, 011-27-72-437-3944.
Hout Bay Township Tour
Just outside Cape Town we visited a squatter’s camp where poor people including immigrants from Zimbabwe and Algeria, who were not allowed to live in Cape Town prior to apartheid, live on “no man’s land” and try to find fishing jobs on nearby Hout Bay.
The hillside facing the bay is covered with little tin and cardboard shacks that remind me of the worst of the migrant housing at home. We took a stroll up and down the narrow dirt lanes while Bob entertained the children with his digital camera-taking their pictures and then letting them see themselves on the video screen.
In one small shack some women were sewing some skirts and “aprons” (worn if you were married) so I bought an outfit and put it on. Idle people (unemployment is about 90%) gaped at the white woman with her cloddy athletic shoes and long black pants underneath their local African costume and laughed and shook their heads as I paraded past them. One woman in a “shabeen” (home where beer is made and sold) dipped some homemade beer out of an old keg into an empty gallon can from which we took turns drinking…
Table Mountain & District 6
The geographical configuration of the city of Cape Town at the foot of Table Mountain is as beautiful as everyone has said it is. We took the cable car to the top of the mountain on a clear beautiful day. We rented a car and took a ride down to the Cape of Good Hope (Cape Town isn’t actually on the tip of the Cape) about 20 miles down the peninsula where Bob hiked up to the lighthouse to get a good view of the Atlantic on one side and the Indian Ocean on the other.
Music
The epic documentary by American Lee Hirsch, “Amandla! A Revolution in four Part Harmony,” had its first South African outing on June 16 at the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. The film that earned two awards from the Sundance Film Festival describes the arc of the ANC’s resistance to apartheid from 1948 to the moment when Nelson Mandela dropped the first black vote into the ballot box in 1994 via the music that gave shape and direction to the war on apartheid. It has been entered for the US Academy awards. It will be showing in the States.
District Six
We visited the museum where a former Indian occupant expained that 60 to 70 thousand people-freed slaves, immigrants, labourers, merchants and artisans-used to live in the one and a half square km district spread along the flank of Table Mountain south of the center of Cape Town. In 1975 District Six was officially declared an area for white people only and bulldozed flat. All that remains now is a grassy area…but “they” had gotten rid of the Blacks, Colored and other undesirables that lived on the edge of the city…
The museum was established in 1992 to commemorate the destruction of the area and the sense of loss has been sensitively captured by the many artifacts donated by the ex-residents.
The Cannon is on Signal Hill right behind our apartment and is fired off every day at noon and makes your heart jump out of your skin. Started in the 1800’s we are told, when the English withdrew after the English/Boer War. They fire off the cannon 21 times at important times or when important dignitaries visit the city.
Robben Island
June 16 to July 13, 2002
Standing bunched shoulder-to-shoulder in the small anteroom of the prison on Robben Island where Mandela and others were political prisoners, our half of the ferry load of visitors impatiently waited. Well, for Pete’s sake, I thought to myself…what a disorganized outfit…should have had someone to meet us here by now…and then finally….a tall large-bellied black African burst into the room from a side entrance, squeezed his way to the front of the group and quickly apologized for keeping us waiting. Come, he said, lets go see the prison rooms now.
On our way out to the exercise yard our guide stopped at the foot of a staircase. “I was imprisoned here for 9 years for the trumped up charge of sabotage, he said, and this is where all the orders came from,” he said as he looked to the top of the stairs at the door behind which pain and torture, psychological and physical, were incarnated. “All letters in and out of the prison were intercepted here…my father never received my letters…they led him to believe that I was dead…he only found out I was alive the day I arrived home from the prison all these years later,” he said. Here the decision was made to separate the political prisoners from the general population. The most feared political activists and the most watched, like Nelson Mandela, were kept in “B” section. The rest were put in other sections…
Out in the yard our ex-prisoner guide talked about the lack of medical care. “The doctor would put his stethoscope to my heart and all the time his ear pieces would still be hanging around his neck. Later, when I became very sick I was finally diagnosed with severe diabetes. I was assigned to work in the kitchen. That was how we communicated with Mandela and the others…messages were passed on with the food.” He showed us the spot where Mandela buried the original of his memoirs after they had been transcribed on tiny pieces of paper and smuggled out of the prison. Then we entered a door off the exercise yard, walked down a narrow hall and took turns looking in through an iron bar window into Mandela’s cell that was only a space of about 8 feet by 8 feet.
When it was discovered that he had been collaborating with the other prisoners, Mandela was moved to another prison in Cape Town and kept in isolation. It was from there that, as the recognized head of the African National Congress (ANC), he was able to get messages out asking for negotiations between the ANC and the South African government to end apartheid. When international pressure mounted and the internal violence continued, and it became apparent that apartheid was on it’s way out, Mandela was finally released in 1993-27 long years after his incarceration. Within a year he was elected President of South Africa.
Many of the former guards are still working on the island that has now become a national museum and there are about 15 former political prisoners who are volunteering daily to lead public tours. When someone asked how it felt to be around his former captors, our guide told us about his reconciliation with one of the most cruel guards who came to him and asked for forgiveness. “It is very very difficult for all of us…all these many years later we are told that it is good to come here and confront the truth of what happened to us.” he told us that the reason he was late meeting the tour group was because another former guard and his wife were in the group just prior to ours. “When they departed, he said, I couldn’t stop myself from breaking down and crying…and as it all came back to me I just couldn’t stop for awhile…”
Robben Island was used at various times between the 17th and 20th centuries as a prison, a hospital for socially unacceptable groups and a military base. Its buildings, particularly those of the late 20th century such as the maximum security prison for political prisoners, witness the triumph of democracy and freedom over oppression and racism. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Cape Town!
June 15, 16, 2002
James make an unbelievable maneuver with the truck into the Lion’s Head Lodge & Backpacker Compound around a corner and in between parked cars on both sides of the street. We are amazed! He has done this before. He parks beside several other trucks. And we can’t believe the trip is over! I will miss the crew.
Cape Town, about 40km from the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of the continent, is a beautiful city up against the 1000 meter high giant Table Mountain. Lonely Planet calls the city a “volatile mixture of the Third and First Worlds.” The cafes on Long St. and the bars at the Waterfront could be in any cosmopolitan capital but the townships on the bleak, windswept plains to the east of the city could only be in Africa.”
We all eat a last meal together at a wonderful seafood restaurant in the upscale Victoria and Albert Waterfront Mall that evening. Bob and I come back to the compound and fall into bed; the others find a hip hop club and dance and party until 4:00 in the morning. Boy do we feel past that stage!
Laughingnomad 