My first outing for the Daily Maverick–
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Conflict journalism is never easy. The hardships male reporters experience pale against those, both tacit and blatant, that women have to face. The horrific sexual attack on CBS reporter Lara Logan at the height of jubilation in Cairo’s Tahrir Square has focused the spotlight on women journalists simply trying to do their jobs.
I’ve got a new post on the Mail and Guardian’s Thought Leader platform which you can read here.
The article was also posted in a guest slot at the Christian Science Monitor.
In the provincial town of Sidi Bouzid, in Tunisia, Mohamed Bouazizi was 10 years old when he became his family’s bread winner, selling fresh produce in the local market. While he attended a local high school, he did not graduate and his attempts at finding work in the public sector were futile. His day would begin in the town supermarket where he would load his wooden cart with fruit and vegetables and then walk to the local market five kilometres away. Bouazizi, at 26 years old was used to being accosted by the police. But in December last year, he was pushed too far. A policewoman confronted him on the way to the market and like a bully in an elementary school playground she insisted he hand over his scales for want of a trading licence. Bouazizi refused. After a heated verbal exchange, the policewoman slapped him and with the assistance of other officers, forced him to the ground.
His meagre stock of fruit and vegetables, as well as his scales, were confiscated. Publically humiliated, Bouazizi sought redress. After being denied an opportunity to speak to a municipal representative and in a fit of angry despair, Bouazizi set himself alight outside the municipal office. Some weeks later, Bouazizi died, a casualty of circumstance, if not abject anguish. In the days that Bouazizi lay in hospital, every inch of his body covered in bandages, his picture was printed in newspapers around the world. And if the rest of the world reacted with alarm, the desperation of Bouazizi resonated loudly with the Tunisian people.
In Tunisia, Bouazizi’s grave remains draped in the Tunisian national flag and his people continue the fight to shed the last remnants of an oppressive regime.
Now it’s the people of Egypt who have thronged to the streets resolute in their demonstrations against a stubborn dictatorship.
Their chants last Friday of “freedom, liberty, bread” have proved the plainness of their incentive. A remarkable 60% of the region’s population is under 30 and in Egypt the substantial chunk of that young population is severely stymied by the government’s failure to provide adequate schooling. They are largely inadequately educated and then let down by an economy that does not offer the jobs to match the abilities or aspirations of this population. A generation caught in limbo, with all the demands of adulthood but none of its means.
The scenes we’ve witnessed over the past week in Egypt and the level of anger they have conveyed prove that though this uprising was sudden and unexpected to the rest of the world, to the legions of the unemployed, uneducated and underfed it has been a long time coming.
In June last year, a young man called Khaled Said died in police custody on a street in Alexandria. Witnesses claim Said died after he was dragged out of a cafe and beaten up. The government, conversely, insists he swallowed a packet of drugs and choked. As news of the murky circumstances around Said’s death spread, Egyptians became incensed and took to the streets to vent their anger. For a nation living under emergency rule for so long, the death of Said was a turning point for Egypt, a sense of self-actualisation began to thrive. As, Mona Saif , a young Egyptian woman from Cairo puts it: “I think this different wave of protesting in Egypt started with Khaled Said, I truly believe that his death changed something in us all.”
Acts of self-immolation, similar to Bouazizi’s, have been reported everywhere from Mauritania to Saudi Arabia. In a very real sense, the entire region is on fire. Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, his penchant for the ridiculous undimmed by the revolution in Tunisia has chastised his neighbours for forcing his friend, Ben Ali, out. In a televised address to the Tunisian people he said: “I hope your sanity returns and your wounds heal, because you had a big loss that will never return.” Protesters have cited soaring food prices, coupled with a rising cost of living. Protesters have been vocal but governments in Yemen, Oman and Jordan have struggled to respond. Even Saudi Arabia, the most populous of the Gulf states saw dozens of people protest after flooding in Jeddah left 10 people (by the official account, at least) killed and three others reported missing. The protest, like most political dissent in the kingdom, was quashed by police. In Jordan meanwhile, responding to protests in his kingdom, King Abdullah sacked his entire cabinet in the name of political reform. While in Kuwait Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah has ordered a monthly grant of KD1 000 ($3 599) and free food for one year to everyKuwaiti citizen. In Yemen, officials close to the president say he will announce measures aimed at tamping down unrest that has swept the country. Whatever those measures actually translate to, it’s clear that the appetite for political repression may well be dwindling but the efforts to feed the feeble structures propping up these regimes will escalate efforts to remain in power.
Crippling levels of unemployment, rising food prices and poor education systems are hardly unique to the Middle East and North Africa.
The story of Bouazizi and his native Sidi Bouzid has reminded me increasingly of scenes in my own pocket of Johannesburg.
In Bird Street, Mayfair, a short walk outside the boom gates separating the enclave of larger, newer homes from the rest of the suburb, between the thriving Somali restaurant and the Pakistani tuck shop, is the Tanzanian fruit seller who echoes Bouazizi’s experiences. I’m reminded of a winter’s day two years ago when from the comfort of my Toyota, I watched her attempt to pack her things in a sack, grab her son and attempt to flee the marauding troop of Metro police officers demanding a permit, tea money or God-alone-knows-what from street vendors a corner away. Later that day, I watched Metro officers unceremoniously dumped her stock of fruit and vegetables on the back of a truck, her usual station at the corner, empty. I imagined her hiding in the Somali restaurant some metres away, watching her goods being confiscated and helpless to stop it, thwarted by the reality of eking out a living in the margins of formal society.
While we agonise over who exactly is awarded the right to be called “African”, we’ve neglected the shared experience that entrenches a sense of Africanness. It is a shared legacy of colonialism, a present set of imperfect circumstances and a driving will that ultimately is more definitive than a geographical location, or ethnic heritage. And yet thorough analysis and well thought-out opinion has been conspicuously absent in our coverage of both Tunisia and Egypt in South Africa. Most newspapers, reporting on unrest in Egypt, carried the same generic wire report over the past weekend. We have indeed been too busy cringing at the national police commissioner, clawing ourselves out of potholes and attempting to make sense of the billing chaos — in between observing a vigil at Nelson Mandela’s sick bed — to really look at fires burning beyond our border but it’s not just the rest of the world that we’re losing track of, we are failing as well to give voice to that facet of the South African experience that strongly resonates with the Egyptians and Tunisians.
As young people in South Africa grow in number and access to the internet improves, access too, to the kind of resistance we’re witnessing in Egypt and Tunisia will advance. The grand South African narrative may well be re-written.
Amid some noises about Julian Assange, Jazob Zuma and James Bond, I’ve written my first article for Thought Leader.
Julian Assange may well be a real life James Bond. His hair certainly fits the part, and his swagger is telling of a man with a penchant for the virtuously shaken and virulently stirred could ever dare. But it’s his decidedly Jacob Zuma air that is most striking.
Yes, you read right.
Take away the hair and the skin pigment and Julian Assange is to the rest of the world what Jacob Zuma was to South Africa five years ago.
Like our good president once was, Assange’s popularity is met with a forecast of doom, self-righteous posturing and a thinly disguised panic. He is a threat to the neatness of our world as we know it, a menace to the established order. Like Zuma, Assange is known to sponge off friends. Those suits obviously don’t come cheap. And while cash may be scarce, both Zuma and Assange certainly suffer no shortage of intimate companionship of the female persuasion. They also share particularly strong, albeit conflicting, feelings about secret information; Zuma flies to Mauritius to prevent papers from corroborating any allegations of corruption, piously defending his secrecy while Assange takes the moral high ground, simply pasting secret stuff all over the internet. Zuma sings a rousing “Umshini wami“, “Bring me my machine gun”, Assange writes in moral indignation, “Don’t shoot the messenger”. Like Zuma, Assange inspires deep-seated revulsion just as easily as he does avowed reverence. Most tellingly Zuma had an allegation of rape levelled against him and he defended himself by claiming the intercourse was consensual; that’s the line Assange’s taking too. M may once have accused Bond of being a misogynist pig, but Bond girls don’t cry rape.
Back when we were all up in arms about which dogs the country would go to should the unspeakable happen and Jacob Zuma actually become president, a family friend of the Zumas accused the ANC man of rape. He was subsequently acquitted of the charge and while he is yet to live off his shower head, the vigil Cosatu and the SACP held outside the Johannesburg High Court during the trial will go down in South African politics as one of the strongest displays of political allegiance in a time better known for the vagaries of the tri-partite alliance. Just as well-meaning analysts have been dexterously extending their pointy fingers to the CIA, Zuma’s rape trial was also seen by some as a desperate attempt by covert agents to besmirch him, severely subverting his designs on the presidency.
The “charges” against Assange (he’s yet to be criminally charged by Swedish authorities) which range from rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion have left even hard-lined feminists sceptical.
And yet rape remains a very real crime, a very real social ill.
The United Nations, that great bastion of staggering statistics, reports that one in three women will be beaten, coerced into sex or abused in their lifetime. And Interpol is plainly not sniffing out these offenders.
Most crimes of sexual violence go unreported, let alone see the light of the courtroom and yet Assange’s case has been fast forwarded through the motions before criminal charges are even laid. The zeal with which these allegations have been pursued makes a mockery of the very crime of rape and the level of interest it has aroused proves that the only time rape trials are at all fashionable, or inspire more than a flicker of interest, is when a political agenda is riding on it. There is no real concern for the welfare of the women at the centre of these allegations, no care for their bodily integrity or sexual autonomy, all that’s really at stake is the integrity of Julian Assange.
Rape is not a convenient penalty card on an aggrandised sports field that we get to waive about every time an opponent outstrips us. It must be understood as a serious crime.
Sweden, the land baying for Assange’s extradition from Britain, is home to one of the highest incidences of rape reports in the world. And while many of these cases are summarily dismissed (as Assange’s originally was) it must also be realised that part of Sweden’s high number of reported rapes can be explained behind a legal system in which women actually feel comfortable enough to dare to come forward and report rape or sexual assault.
Women who call rape are branded social misfits. We need just rewind to the Jules High School fiasco to understand that the pressure to recant is more severe than any level of protection offered. In Jacob Zuma’s trial the complainant was painted as a serial rape accuser, her “victims” were paraded across the witness stand, their stories splashed across the national papers, the complainant sinking deeper and deeper into a very public humiliation. Assange’s complainants have already been painted as an over-enthusiastic groupie on the one hand and a feminist who calls sexual harassment at the drop of every hat on the other. Zuma’s acquittal, like the Jules High School recanter have done little to advance the reality of rape as more than a convenient ploy in the minds of sick tacticians.
There is of course a good chance these allegations against Assange are more credible than an elaborate smear campaign. One Swedish law expert who describes himself as having the independence and integrity of Swedish judges and prosecutors in very high regard dismisses any chance of a conspiracy: “If the powers that be really wanted to set up Assange on trumped-up rape charges, they would make sure to find a victim with bruise marks, a bloodied nose, torn pantyhose and some ‘reliable witnesses’ “. There remains however strong disapproval of the manner in which the Swedish lawyers have gone about their business, the Swedish lawyer goes on to say, “Assange stayed in Sweden until the end of September. It is mind-boggling that he wasn’t called in for interrogation by either police or prosecutors, all the more since he is foreigner with no right of abode in Sweden and no known residence. He could have been interrogated without being arrested, as he repeatedly stated his willingness to be heard by Swedish police. To wait for him to be abroad, and to launch an arrest warrant that would inevitably imply arrest and detention pending the outcome of extradition proceedings — while perfectly legal, it should be said — does seem totally over the top.”
Assange’s version of events may well contradict the women’s stories, and Assange, like Zuma, may well emerge from this better endowed but it is time we call bullshit on political agendas that are furthered on the bodies of women, protecting men while allowing women to emerge only as dirty sluts.
The Proteas have made amends for their abysmal performance in the T20 World Cup. White washing the West Indies in both the T20 and ODI formats will certainly go some way towards taking the team into a new era. New combinations have been tried, the top order have been in blistering form, but as good as The Proteas were in this series the West Indies were woeful. We need to be cautious in celebrating this victory.
Chris Gayle, an individual talent stands head and shoulders above his team. And not just literally. His frustration with his team was exemplified in his blow out with spinner Suleman Benn in Dominca on Monday and Benn’s exclusion from the team yesterday ultimately cost the West Indies much-needed variation to their attack. The perennial reliance on Chris Gayle is unhealthy. On the day that Zimbabwe’s second defeat of India was celebrated as a victory for the development of the game, the cricketing world should also be concerned at the state of West Indian cricket. World cricket needs a strong West Indian team.