1. 16 Sunday Argus May 15, 2016
News Review
Developing an appetite for the Chinese way of life is hungry work
C
HINA, eh? Funny old
business. I had one of them
Chinese in the back of my
car once. Well, he was in
the boot, actually.
Come to think of it, that wasn’t
a Chinese at all. It was a spare tyre.
Probably made in China. It’s a
slippery slope.
Starts with tyres and next
thing you know you’re marching
in lockstep and quoting from
Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book.
As a precaution, I am learning
Mandarin. I have learnt how to say,
“Please don’t eat me.” This is all the
Mandarin anyone needs.
They are very big eaters, the
Chinese. Well, they’re small eaters,
but with big appetites. When
Chinese babies are teething, they
are given rocks to chew on. This is
why there are almost no rocks left in
China today.
We export a lot of our rocks to
Beijing. The Drakensberg will be
gone in a few years. Good riddance,
I say. It blocks the view and does
nothing to help feed the poor.
Did you hear about the Chinese
fishing fleet sailing under the
radar off our coast? Apparently
they sneaked in under cover of
darkness in the hope of pillaging
our sardines.
Well done to them, I say. Sardines
are the work of the devil. They
are slippery customers who will
betray you the moment your back is
turned.
The only honourable member
of their family is the anchovy, a
humble little fish who is happiest
when neatly arranged on a pizza.
Countries are meant to report
to the UN’s Food and Agriculture
Organisation, the agency that keeps
track of global fisheries catches.
For instance, Spain might report
having caught
five million tons
in foreign waters
in any given year,
while the Chinese
government is
more likely to
tell the FAO that
its 3 400 vessels
operating in the
coastal waters of
94 countries caught three swordfish,
two mackerel and a snoek.
This is nothing more than
creative accounting and, in my
book, any form of creativity is to be
applauded.
Greenpeace, that ragtag bunch of
neo-liberal woolly jumper-wearing
do-gooders, says that sub-Saharan
Africa is the only region on Earth
where per capita fish consumption
is falling as a result of foreign
fishing fleets nicking all the aquatic
edibles.
I don’t know about that. I was at
John Dory’s a couple of nights ago
and watched a Cro-Magnon family
from the hinterland stuffing so
much fish into their fat, prehensile
faces that the only thing in danger
of falling was the toddler choking
on a giant piece of hake.
A few weeks ago, Argentina’s
coast guard opened fire on a Chinese
trawler fishing illegally in its
waters. The trawler sank.
Maybe we should bring out the
Corvettes. I’m not talking about
the patrol boats we bought in our
squeaky-clean arms deal, obviously.
Those are up on bricks at the
moment.
I’m talking about the Chevrolet
Corvettes I saw driving around
Simon’s Town last time I was there.
They could park down by the water’s
edge, facing the Chinese, and
frighten them off with a display of
synchronised hooting and revving.
Meanwhile, China appears to
have eaten everything in Zimbabwe.
Our appalling neighbour’s annual
international trade fair ended this
week in Bulawayo.
Hall 1 was always China’s turf.
You wanted to flog a rhino horn or
buy a second-hand Shenyang J-31
fighter jet, you went to Hall 1.
Not this year. This year the
Russians moved in. I won’t say
anything about this lest Vlad the
Impaler calls in an air strike on my
house.
Farmers were disappointed that
there was no cattle show this year.
Maybe the Chinese ate them all. The
cattle, not the farmers.
On a more positive note, Zanu-
PF commandeered Hall 5 where
officials tried to encourage people to
join the party.
No trade fair is really complete
until men in dark glasses start
rabbit-punching visitors in the
kidneys.
Anyway, let’s not be churlish.
There aren’t many international
trade fairs that can boast of being
officially opened by the likes of
Togo’s President Faure Essozimna
Gnassingbé.
There were no Togolese
exhibitors at the fair. Perhaps he
took the country’s only plane. Either
that or the Chinese have eaten Togo.
Deputy President Squirrel
Ramaphosa said last year he
wanted to see more South African
companies expand into China.
Distell has already established a
presence. This is good news because
alcohol lowers inhibitions and if
there’s one thing this world needs,
it’s more Chinese people.
The queen of England was
caught on camera this week saying
she thought the Chinese were “very
rude”. That’s rich. Do you know
what’s rude? Hogging the throne
while your son is desperate to have a
go. And having your daughter-in-law
whacked. That’s way ruder than the
Chinese.
On the other hand, stealing
Tibet and harvesting the organs of
political prisoners is also quite rude.
Right. Enough about the Chinese.
Moving on to Oupa Bodibe, a man
who sounds more like someone’s
avuncular grandfather than a
raving jingoistic loyalist.
To be fair, he is only the
spokespuppet for Gauteng’s
education department, so the idea
of having South Africa’s coat of
arms on every school uniform by
2017 is probably not his.
Why stop there? Why not make
the uniforms from South African
flags? While we’re at it, let’s make
sure the kids’ gardens feature
nothing but the national flower and
they eat nothing but the national
fish. Boiled galjoen for breakfast.
Yum. They should also have nothing
but the national anthem on their
iPods and they must replace their
pets with the national animal.
Council by-laws might have to be
amended to accommodate the influx
of springboks – a small price to pay
if we hope to raise a nation of ANC-
voting superpatriots.
Speaking of which, Defence
Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula
said on Wednesday that the defence
force was “making progress”
recruiting young white people.
There were 103 white recruits in the
2016 intake.
This might not sound like
progress, but we’re talking about 103
of the best and brightest the white
tribe of Africa can offer. Don’t for
one minute think the army is the
only place that would have them.
We should all sleep easier at night
knowing that they are out there.
Instead of here.
A
S IF washed by an
unforgiving savannah
light, the photographs
are almost pallid, offering
what seems a slightly faded
reflection of the prelude to the last
of Africa’s liberation triumphs a
quarter of a century ago.
Their vividness, on the
other hand, lies arguably in the
complicated clash of contradictions,
sentiments and ironies bound up in
the images themselves, the gestures,
the routines of life in exile and
the personalities of the emergent
force in a South Africa embarked
onreimagining itself.
For all the details that date
the subject matter – dowdy
wallpaper, boxy briefcases, outfits
of unfashionable cut by today’s
standards – there’s a pungency in
the actuality of living memory, our
familiarity with the power brokers-
to-be and the chronicle of national
rebirth triggered in 1990, but also,
as Siona O’Connell believes, in the
palpable sense of what’s been lost,
abandoned or neglected in the years
since.
The newly appointed director
of UCT’s Centre for Curating the
Archive hastened to add that –
especially in an election year – the
exhibition of award-winning
Laurie Sparham’s photographs
is no electoral or party political
intervention, whatever its punchy
title might suggest.
Indeed, O’Connell is candidly
partisan – “I want the colours of
black, green and gold to be shined
up a bit,” she said in an interview
this week – yet she is every bit
as candidly disillusioned, too.
Culpability for the faltering of the
liberation project, she insisted, was
shared by every South African, “a
contemporary landscape of lies in
which we are all complicit”.
The exhibition, made up of 80
photographs presented against the
backdrop of the Freedom Charter
and framed by a short sequence
of archived film footage from the
time, seeks to “offer an opportunity
to think about the growing
chasm between the promise of
freedom then and the reality of a
contemporary moment marked by
crisis and failure”.
The exhibition was opened on
Thursday by former MK operative
Ivan Pillay, the former senior
Sars official whose own difficulties
in recent times doubtless reflect the
disquiet felt by O’Connell
and others.
The photographs might never
have seen the light of day had it not
been for a fortuitous association.
In 2014, O’Connell collaborated
with film director Paul Yule on a
documentary on the Spring Queen
tradition in the Western Cape.
In November, Yule got in
touch with her to say that Sparham,
a good friend of his, had a collection
of negatives that might be of
interest to her.
Sparham, it turned out, had
visited Zambia and Tanzania in 1989
and 1990, recording the ANC’s last
months in exile. At the time, he was
working as a photo-journalist for
leading international magazines
and newspapers, earning attention
and awards for photo-essays on
Northern Ireland, the Tamil Tigers
in Sri Lanka and life in Cuban
prisons.
Needless to say, O’Connell
jumped at Yule’s offer.
“We couriered the negs from
London. It was very exciting not
knowing what was there.”
Happily, the negatives were in
good condition and O’Connell was
delighted by the results.
“One of the things I especially
like is the ordinariness of the
colour; there’s no hyper-saturation
and you get a sense of the realness
of the moment.”
Beyond technical and aesthetic
considerations, it was the historic
We can’t ever allow
ourselves to forget
‘Promises and Lies’, an exhibition of historic photographs of the last months of the ANC’s exile in Zambia
and Tanzania, reminds us of an imagined, but unrealised, liberation, Siona O’Connell tells Michael Morris
CURATOR: Dr Siona O’Connell, conceiver of the provocatively framed
Promises and Lies exhibition at UCT’s Michaelis Gallery.
PICTURE: MICHAEL WALKER
LEADERS: Jacob Zuma, then ANC head of intelligence, in Tanzania
in 1990 with two fellow exiles – both later to become diplomats for a
democratic South Africa – Josiah Jele, left, and Tony Mongalo.
HOPE’S BLOOM: A young MK soldier savours the scent of a frangipani blossom during a break in training in Promise and Lies, an exhibition of
historic photographs of the last months of the ANC’s exile in Zambia and Tanzania. PICTURES: SUPPLIED
STANDARD BEARERS: A solemn moment as the flag is raised at an ANC
training camp in Tanzania.
moment captured in the images that
stimulated O’Connell’s thinking.
It was a moment that was
politically, logistically and
psychologically challenging
for ANC leaders at their tin-
roofed headquarters off Lusaka’s
Cairo Road, as much as for
families who had, by then, lives
and routines in exile.
The uncertainty following
the unbanning of the liberation
movements in the first week of
February 1990 was captured in the
recollection last year of journalist
Gaye Davis of reporters from
around the world crowded into
the foyer of the Pamodzi Hotel
in Lusaka tearing their hair out
because “three days after (FW) De
Klerk’s speech, there was still no
official response from the ANC”.
Inescapably, however, it was
also a moment that heralded the
realisation of rewards of the long
years of struggle.
“For me, it’s not merely a
question of looking at history, but
of recognising the sacrifices of
ordinary men and women who
had given up so much – many
lost their lives – in imagining
a future of freedom and for us,
today, acknowledging that we are
all accountable for having let this
freedom slip away.
“We have all sold ourselves
short... with every racist slight,
every failure to step up and say, ‘This
is not what we fought for’, every
snide remark about a foreigner,
every act of violence against women
and children. And we need to hold
one another to account, to be frank
and ask ourselves: ‘Where have we
gone wrong?’”
Singling out photographs of
Walter Sisulu, Chris Hani, Oliver
Tambo, even Jacob Zuma, O’Connell
said: “You cannot look at these
figures and not see the emerging
statesmen… and yet be confronted
with the question, ‘What happened?’
“Is it that power corrupts?
Is it that apartheid was just so
catastrophic and we have not learnt
a new way of being… or have we
simply learnt the lessons of our
colonial masters so well that we
cannot step out?”
In her curatorial statement,
O’Connell writes that the
transitional quality of the late 1980s
and early 1990s – “the fall of the
Berlin Wall as a visual marker of the
demise of the Cold War and the fall
of apartheid through the return of
exiles and the negotiations process”
– has been echoed in a “shift” in the
past two years signalled by events
such as “student-led protests over
the slow pace of transformation
and the recent Constitutional Court
ruling on the Nkandla saga”.
The exhibition, then, becomes
“a crucial prism through which to
think about how we want to live,
our own accountability and what
questions we want to put to
history in order to live up to the
still-to-be-realised promise of
freedom made in 1994”.
O’Connell said: “For me, the
moment of casting my vote for
Mandela in 1994, looking for the
black, green and gold on that
ballot sheet, was one of the
highlights of my life. But those
colours have faded a bit and we
need to sparkle them up.”
Her professional preoccupation
lay in examining the “archive of the
ordinary, the texture, the messiness
of life, which does not fit easily into
any structure and makes you feel
awkward”.
O’Connell – born into a family
of teachers (her father Patrick was
a headmaster, her uncle Brian the
long-time rector at UWC) – was
brought up in Walmer Estate and
went to school on a scholarship at
Waterford in Swaziland. Her PhD at
UCT was on land reform.
She regards herself in one
sense as the “epitome of a colonial
product” (her mother Elaine’s
father was an Indian immigrant,
a great-grandfather was an Irish
magistrate), but was formed
principally by the accommodations
of life under apartheid.
“Living as a black family under
apartheid, you carved out a life. My
mother took me to ballet, I had bows
in my hair, I looked beautiful, but
at the same time, people were being
detained around us.
“In these things, our past
has scripted the present. It’s me
knowing I could only go ice-skating
on certain days, while my sister,
Lesley, who was a little lighter, could
slip in on other days, all the while
being terrified of being found out.
And the question is, how do we deal
with this?”
The answer, not least in the
context of O’Connell’s exhibition
at the Michaelis Gallery, is that “we
need to re-look at the past and say we
need to do things differently”.