Help Nombeko leap over to Australia

From Pam Zeplin comes the following request:

Nombeko Rwaxa was one of the B&B hosts for the 2007 South Project Gathering in Soweto. She was an integral part of the supportive local community in Orlando, Soweto that made this event so successful.

Nombeko has also been professionally associated with the music world with figures such as the late Lucky Dube. She received a kidney transplant not long ago and successfully competed in the National Transplant Games in South Africa. This has qualified Nombeko to come to Australia and compete in the World Transplant Games at the Gold Coast  (Queensland) (August 22-30 2009), under the auspices of South African Transplant Sports Association (see attached letters and website www.transplantsports.org.za .

This association and its athletes are seeking sponsorship to attend these games. Individual as well as corporate sponsorship can be accepted. As a previous guest at her Zizwe Guesthouse in Orlando, Soweto Nombeko has asked me to help find sponsors for this life affirming project.

For further information Willie Uys, National Chairman, South African Transplant Sports Association (E-mail: info@transplantsports.org.za )

Our Other Hemisphere

Below is the original of a slightly edited article for The Age:

Kevin Rudd has spent the last week heralding an Asian century. Now he has returned back to Australian soil, it’s timely to open up Rudd’s narrative to scrutiny. There are some big questions yet to be asked.

Rudd claims that ‘Australia has to make itself the most Asia-literate country in the collective West'. Debate so far has focused on becoming more engaged with the Asian region. But this misses the wood for the trees. There’s a larger assumption in Rudd’s statement that has so far escaped our attention.

‘Collective West’?

Curious, isn’t it, for a country in the South-East end of the world to be part of the West. It’s more politics than geography. The ‘collective West’ is a natural complement to the earlier grouping, the ‘Global South’, which includes countries in the geographical North such as China and India. Our position inside this ‘collective West’, yet located South, should prompt more discussion than it does.

The 'collective West' is conjured today in a number of ways. Positively, it is the bastion of liberal values, promoting democracy, religious tolerance and individual freedom. Defensively, it is the target of resentment by those on its fringes, such as Islamic fundamentalists and ex-communists. Conservative commentator Victor Hansen describes the ‘collective West’ as a ‘wandering Odysseus’ encountering monsters at every turn. It is an epic of progress that we share with the first rank of nations.

But the phrase has a particular meaning to Kevin Rudd. In his 2005 address to University of New South Wales, Rudd described how Christianity has been displaced from its once privileged position at the centre of the 'collective West' to its current status as a marginal faith, returning to its origins.

This concept of a minority belief sets up Australia’s position as a marginal but friendly force within the wider Asian context. Rudd used his Indonesian visit to call for an interfaith dialogue to explore common values of Christian and Muslim societies. Rudd’s ‘collective West’ is no crusading power, seeking to bring the world under its dominion. It can be a key player in someone else’s game.

So why should one of its lesser powers, Australia, be granted this privileged position in Asia? Geographic location seems an obvious advantage, but it is quicker to fly to Beijing from London than Sydney. More likely it is our shared time zones and—as a younger nation—our capacity to adapt to Asian values.

And why should we want this position? For a politician, Asia brings home the bacon. We hope to ride the Asian tiger, feeding its hunger for development with our minerals and degrees. But what does this say about our identity as a nation? Are we anything more than regional opportunists?

The ‘collective West’ ennobles our ambitions. It is heartening to be part of a bigger team. In colonial times, Australia was the 'last outpost of the British empire'. During the war on terror, we proudly wore the badge of ‘Deputy Sheriff’.

Australia lost the first position when Britain joined the European Union. Our position of deputy is now endangered by the emergence of a new Sheriff, China. Rather than continue to be left out of the main game, Rudd offers the hope that we can be at the centre of our own regional grouping, an Asia Pacific Union.

But it’s only one side of the story. Rudd talks about the need for a spirit of cooperation in ‘our hemisphere’. Let’s not forget our other hemisphere. That mysterious title ‘Great Southern Land’ has traditionally identified Australia with the antipodes. Despite these romantic images, we maintain a blinkered vision, only looking north.

We tend to see ourselves alone in the South. Our common boast is to possess the 'biggest in the Southern Hemisphere,’ which can apply to anything from Highland Gatherings to car parks. This South is a kind of B League where we can excel, knowing we would be thrashed in the Premiership Division.

But Australia is not alone in this aspiration. When you look on the Internet, you find that Brazil, the China of the South, has twice as many claims to this distinction as Australia. Our ‘big pond’ mentality blinds us to those across our own latitude.

What about the view to our east, with the emerging economies and creative talents of Latin America? Or to our west, with the trade in our other ‘big pond’, the Indian Ocean? With strengthening democracy and economic growth averaging 5%, the South is a region waiting for our attention.

We have more in common that we realise. It’s with the South that we share the irony of a summer Christmas, imagining we’re in the North Pole while it’s 40 degrees outside. Australia is just one of many Southern countries increasingly dependent on China’s hunger for our resources. And we share the challenge of talent drain, as our best and brightest are lured to the prizes of the North. Aspirationalism alone doesn’t change that fundamental global asymmetry. We need to re-imagine what it means to live in the South.

Regardless of continental shift and rising water levels, we’re likely to remain in the South. We will continue to dwell in that half of the world which the West once chose as its collective mine, farm and prison. We share with other countries in this region a common legacy of repression and similar hopes of reconciliation.

There’s no doubt that our main bets will be placed with Asia, at least for economic reasons. However, we need to complement this northern push with an increased engagement across our South. Finding a place among our southern cousins is just as much part of our journey as doing business in Asia.

As Nelson Mandela says, ‘True reconciliation does not consist in merely forgetting the past.’ Nor should progress consist in forgetting where you are now.

Time to start a Black Party in Australia

While the Australian Minister for Immigration Kevin Andrews made the decision to cut the refugee intake form Africa a few weeks ago, he has come out now to politicise the issue, no doubt with the whiff of an election in the air. The xenophobia card has got the Liberals out of jail before, when the Tampa crisis raised the spectre of Australia being flooded with Middle Eastern refugees.

Now the art of 'double speak' that cutting this intake is designed to protect the immigration program:

A day after conceding that a failure of African migrants to "integrate" into Australian society had prompted the decision, Mr Andrews told journalists in Melbourne he was acting to maintain community confidence in Australia's immigration program.
Andrews releases 'evidence' - National - theage.com.au

Andrews' evidence is vague and repeats the allegations that have been made towards other refugee groups in the past, such as the Vietnamese. Naturally, the opposition have followed their Liberal Lite strategy and backed Andrews on this kind of discrimination.

It's a very sad state of politics where the two major parties feel they have to appeal to the racists and selfish instincts of the population. For Australia to continue as a white fortress is to cut the nation off from the world and to create a false sense of complacency.

Thankfully the church has come out:

Reverend David Pargeter, from the Uniting Church's Synod of Victoria and Tasmania, said: "When a Government minister, on the eve of an election, connects violent action with one particular cultural group, we know we have reached deeply into the darkness of racial politics."
Minister's African dossier renews racial tensions

As the Greens Party promotes the cause of the environment, it would be good to have a political voice that specifically championed an open Australia, that celebrated its multicultural fabric with a generosity and openness that has marked other great nations of immigration. If there was a Black Party, which had a broad platform of cultural dialogue, both in Indigenous and migrant voices, I would certainly support it.

Is deracialization the best future for non-indigenous?

Melissa Steyn

In African Studies Review, Thomas Blaser reviews Melissa Steyn's book Whiteness Just Isn't What It Used to Be": White Identity in a Changing South Africa. Steyn advocates a future for whites in South Africa that involves transcending concepts of race. Blaser is skeptical:

I agree that deracialization is the objective, but perhaps we will have to settle for a mutual acknowledgment of differences that minimizes conflict. Steyn does not approve of such a multicultural approach to race and ethnic relations, for it leaves the white master narrative untouched. Nonetheless, to shed the skin of white identity and move beyond imaginaries of the Other requires processes that take time. It also is not clear what makes white people adopt the narrative of hybridization.

Thomas Blaser  'Changing South Africa'

So is there an alternative between white supremacy and deracialisation? Perhaps it is worth seeking meanings for whiteness that already exist in indigenous cultures.

Whiteness just isn't what it used to be

The ANC website has been running an interesting series of articles in a series 'White Identity in a Changing SA'. A core text in this analysis is Whiteness just isn't what is used to be.

The narratives in Steyn's book include:

• Still colonial after all these years
• This shouldn't happen to a white
• Don't think white, it's alright
• A whiter shade of white
• Under African skies (or white, not quite)
• Whiteness just ain't what it used to be

Here's a sample of the ANC discussion:

In the introduction of the book, Steyn notes this tendency - "of considerable resistance to talking about race as a social category" - represented, in part, by questions such as "Aren't we beyond this?"

Let us return to the strand, 'Whites are doing it for themselves', in the present narrative. "Perhaps," continues the insurance broker speculatively, "being white affected my life in a positive way, while being black affected many blacks negatively." The insurance broker concludes with the punch line: "White people tend to care more about their surroundings and keeping it clean than blacks do."

The familiar subtext - of a superior culture - underlying the previous narratives, infuses the 'Whites doing for themselves' strand of the 'Don't think white, It's all right' narrative.

Melissa E. Steyn Whiteness Just Isn't What It Used to Be: White Identity in a Changing South Africa (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001) read

A Black week

This has not been a good week for tolerance. Not that there has been any overt violence against others, like in the Cronulla riots, but that material has been gathered to make it more difficult for people who are different from the mainstream, particularly in colour.

The Sudanese man Hakeem Hakeem was sentenced to 24 years this week for serious offences against three women. This has prompted the Federal government minister Kevin Andrews to consider limiting intake from the Horn of Africa. I was in the court when Hakeem was sentenced and met his father, who attends the same Catholic Church as my father. Hakeem's crimes do seem heinious and inexcusable, but he has a punishment to fit that. With the little I know of the family, I can merely guess what a shock it is to move from the chaos of civil war in Sudan to the eerily quiet security of Melbourne. You would hope that as a community we could see their problems as our problems, rather than an alien infiltration.

Then there was the Geoff Clark case. And last night I saw Fox Studios Last King of Africa, which reinforces every prejudice you might have about black African men. It's not that it is inaccurate in its portrayal about Idi Amin, but that it leaves with the audience with virtually no knowledge of the culture of Uganda, it only confirms the suspicion that white people have to be wary of their black neighbours.

A saving grace was finishing the novel by André Brink, which tells the story of a Khoi San man who converts and tries to become a missionary. His mentor, the Reverend James Reed, writes about the experience of coming to grips with Africa:

How old and remote Europe seemed from here: old, and remote, and -- yes -- beautiful, but inexorably sinking, drowning, fading into futility and pastness. Where here, in the midst of these sounds of menace and violence and lurking death, here was something different, a timelessness, an awareness of futurity, a still untamed, unpredictable, savage energy, a passion unquenched and unquenchable, a force that might destroy people and lives, but which was life itself, a physical reality, a closeness, an urgency, a rare and unspeakable presence of wonderment and joy.
André Brink Praying Mantis London: Secker & Warburg, 2005, p. 140

Yes, let's not forget the 'wonderment and joy'...

A tale of two utopias

This summer I've had the opportunity of learning about two seemingly contrary stories of collective aspiration. The Australian colony in Paraguay was a botched socialist project espousing equality of men, except for those who weren't white. On the other had, the freedom struggle in South Africa was an inspiring struggle for equality of men, which resulted in a workable nation state that provides a place for all colours.

The leader William Lane combined his desire for worker's justice with a strong moral commitment to 'straightness', which included teetotalism and racial purity. It was interesting to read that after the failure of the colony in Paraguay, Lane went on to become editor of the New Zealand Herald, where he became a critic of unionism and advocate of imperialism, speaking often of 'We British...' There seem to be many reasons for the failure of the utopian quality, but a large measure of blame seems to lie with Lane whose self-pity left him unable to respond to the problems of others.

Gavin Souter writes about the racism in New Australia:

'...the assumption that Anglo-Saxons were inherently superior to Hispano-Indians was as much a part of the colony's creed as teetotalism, a principle which had also been made explicit in the New Australia articles of association, but was now an unwritten law. The racial attitudes the colonists had brought with them from Australia were revealed by some of the facetious advertisements in Evening Notes: 'Boycott the Chinkie and save yourselves from the Yellow Agony by buying your vegetables from white gardener -- John Wilson'; 'Baxter's shoes - Nigger tickler clogs.'… this was not gracious, for on the whole Cosme fared well in its deadlings with the Government of Paraguay.'
Gavin Souter A Peculiar People: The Australians In Paraguay Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1968

By contrast, the lives of Walter and Albertina Sisulu demonstrated enormous courage and fortitude. The scenes at the Rivonia trial in 1963 were extraordinary, as men like Walter and Mandela were getting ready to spend an indefinite period in Robben Island, and their wives Albertina and Winnie virtual widowhood. At the time, it seemed like the apartheid regime so lacked legitimacy that it was bound to crumble. To think that it would take another thirty years to finally end.

A recent book by their daughter-in-law Elinor artlessly balances dramas on the main political stage with the small domestic scenes that hold life togther. Here's an interesting practice that developed late in the struggle:

'The Sisulu family observed a 'Black Christmas' at the end of 1985. This was the practice, began after the 1976 uprising, of eschewing the luxuries associated with Christmas and keeping expenditure to a bare minimum. Black South Africans felt that they had nothing to celebrate and saw no reason to swell the coffers of white-owned businesses. By 1985, there was almost a total observation of 'Black Christmas' in black communities around the country. Some white also observed this practice…'
Elinor Sisulu Walter & Albertina Sisulu: In Our Lifetime London: Abacus, 2003 (orig. 2002), p. 430

I realise that this kind of comparison is in danger of being judged an expression of self-loathing typical of liberal elite in Australia. Rather than settling into a fixed position about Australia as a 'white fortress', I prefer to see its history as a challenge for the future. Lane's experiment provides us today with the challenge of establishing a relationship with the Guaraní that he disregarded. It was interesting to meet with Ticio Escobar, the director of Paraguay's Museo del Barro (Museum of Mud), which houses work of the Hispanic-Guaraní Baroque. He had never heard of Nuevo Australia. Here perhaps is an opportunity to restore the conversation, and bring something of the Paraguayan culture to Australia.

The example of South Africa shows that 'our roots aren't our leaves'. The failures of the past point us to the potential successes of the future.