UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR SLAMS 'F*** YOU' ATTITUDE OF ANC GOVERNMENT

Rector of the University of Free State, Professor Jonathan Jansen, today slammed the ANC government for having a 'f*** you' attitude towards the people of South Africa, citing appalling conditions in the health and education departments caused by apathy, mismanagement and corruption and saying, with admirable vitriol, that no one in government 'has the balls to fire a pathetic principal'.


Jansen was quoted as saying 'A person just has to walk into a state hospital, a weak school or a department of home affairs to see the government has a f*** you' attitude towards the people.' Speaking at the anniversary of the Federation of Governing Bodies of SA Schools, Jansen added that since 1994 South African schools had become worse even though they received the most money.


From a university professor this is damning indeed, an indictment that South African citizens are being subjected to wanton ineptitude. It has also left me in no doubt that South Africa is now governed by a hive of rogues and criminals bent on their own self-serving and exploitative agenda.


Further information can be found at http://bit.ly/stf7sE 




Bruce Cooper

DESTINATION EASTERN CAPE

Rich in cultural diversity and heritage, the extraordinarily beautiful Eastern Cape offers the tourist superb value in activity and entertainment for a classic holiday.

History and People

The Eastern Cape is the birthplace of the iconic Nelson Mandela, former apartheid political prisoner and first black President of South Africa. The Xhosa-speaking peoples, from whom Mandela is descended, comprise most of the population and inhabit predominantly the pristine, beautiful eastern region called the Transkei. Many yet are seen in their natural habitat living as they did centuries ago in round, thatched dwellings constructed of clay and straw practicing their age-old traditions and customs.

Disrupted by the arrival of the Afrikaners and the British, these peaceful, indigenous people fought over 100 years to preserve a heritage which is still proudly intact. During the twentieth century their suffering continued, but in that time they became part of the backbone upon which the South African nation is built.

Spread across the region, in the cities and on vast areas of farmland, the English and Afrikaans-speaking white population integrate happily with the indigenous Xhosa and descendents of the Coloured/Malay people of the south Western Cape, creating a rich collage of diverse cultures.

Uniqueness in Diversity

The country’s most mountainous and second largest Province justifiably claims the title as the most bio-diverse area in South Africa and one of the most bio-diverse in the world. Five of the country’s seven biomes (bio-geographic areas) are found in the Eastern Cape.

Stunningly different landscapes consisting of semi-desert plains, bushveld, luxuriant forests, snow-capped mountains, perfect beaches and rugged coastline provide an ecstatically awe-inspiring experience.

Host to some of the foremost and finest surfing in the world, the 800km long coastline is the longest in South Africa. The profusion of sumptuous white beaches, wild coast and protected bays is the region’s main tourist attraction and leisure resorts abound along this magnificent stretch of coast. Other

water sports such as angling, diving and sailing thrive in the unique conditions.

The region has several sophisticated and easily navigable coastal towns unique in kind and quality.

Boasting a plethora of basic and luxury accommodation, the historical and picturesque Port Elizabeth, located on Algoa Bay where the 1820 British Settlers alighted, is the largest, offering more sunshine than any other coastal town in the country. Rated as having the fourth best weather of any coastal city in the world this metropolis is the gateway to a tourist mecca of activity and entertainment which includes abundant inland and coastal scenic hiking trails, historic sites, and nature and game reserves of international quality.

This area is home to the internationally renowned Shamwari Game Reserve and Addo Elephant Park, the largest elephant park in Africa. Boasting regular royal visits and Big 5 safari areas, Shamwari distills the total African experience into its exclusive reserve, offering unique safari-based activities to allow for a completely 5-star tailor-made experience. The 164 000 ha Addo Elephant Park is sanctuary to over 450 elephants, a variety of antelope species, Cape buffalo, black rhino and set to expand into a 360 000 ha mega park.

Rich as a diverse eco-tourism destination and South Africa’s only river port, situated at the mouth of the Buffalo River, East London is a stepping stone to three of the Eastern Cape’s tourist destinations.

The Sunshine Coast to the west offers African safaris, adventure travel, rich historical sites, stupendous scenery, some of the finest beaches in the world and game lodges offering Big 5 game viewing in a malaria-free environment.

To the east, with its vast stretches of mangrove forests, caves, bays, shipwrecks, cliffs, lies the world-renowned and remarkable Wild Coast - an awesome coastline that can be traversed, in its entirety, on foot along the acclaimed Wild Coast Hiking Trail. The unique conditions along this pristine coastline invite all forms of fishing, 4x4 adventure, bird watching (320 listed species of bird), snorkelling and scuba diving that frequently yield odd bits of treasure from the many shipwrecks.

It is not surprising that the Amatola Mountain Escape is said to have inspired JRR Tolkien’s best-seller, The Hobbit. One of the finest examples of rare natural beauty, this outstanding mountain range is a haven for tourists wanting to leave the beaten path. The small village of Hogsback is central to this wonderful area of breathtaking hiking trails, ancient San rock art, cascading waterfalls, pools, forests and invigorating pure mountain air in which Nature weaves her powerful therapy on the tired and stressful mind.

Known to the ancient San peoples as ‘the place of sparkling waters’, the magnificent 80-kilometre Tsitsikamma National Park lies along a whale- and dolphin-populated coast at the eastern border of the region. Comprising hiking trails of international repute and indigenous 800-year-old yellow-wood trees,

South Africa’s first National Marine Park offers a unique plant and animal world experience.

On a seemingly endless central plateau in the north, the region’s scenery changes dramatically from abundant luxuriance into majestically still, austere mountain ranges and arid plains. Considered the world’s best stargazing destination in the world, The Karoo Heartland offers the astronomer, rock art lover, mountaineer, hunter, historian, game viewer, ancient fossil collector and bird-watcher an immense and unforgettable experience.

Economy and Industry

A buoyant, modern and export-oriented economy dominates three main sectors comprising manufacturing, agriculture and government services.

The hub of South Africa’s automotive industry, the Eastern Cape is home to several of the world’s biggest motor vehicle manufacturers: Volkswagen, General Motors, Ford and Daimler Chrysler. Acknowledging Corporate Social Responsibility in redressing socio-economic imbalances, these companies contribute to the principles of transformation and sustainable development, aligning themselves with the South African Government’s broad-based black economic empowerment, or BBBEE, process. This commitment to social upliftment has greatly benefited the region in the fields of health, environment, arts & culture, job creation, sports development, education, community development and regional heritage.

Abundant fertile land provides fruit, maize, sorghum, chicory, dairy and olive farming.

Squid is the basis of the Province’s lively fishing industry followed by commercial and recreational fishing for line fish.

20 Kilometres east of Port Elizabeth, the deepwater port and industrial development complex, Coega, rapidly gathers investor momentum. Developed on 12 000 hectares of industrial land, it is the largest infrastructure project since 1994 and will showcase the South African Government’s ambition to be a global manufacturing centre. It epitomizes the regions confidence to attract massive investor potential and stimulate an unprecedented cycle of economic growth.

The Eastern Cape will enlighten and entertain, and you are unlikely to find traffic jams or queues in this kaleidoscopic and tranquil region which, with its timeless beauty and scattered, hospitable people, is for many the quintessential Africa.

Published in Sawubona

HARDY REDEEMED

TS Eliot, in After Strange Gods, said of Thomas Hardy:

'[He] seems to me to have written as nearly for the sake of ‘self-expression’ as a man well can; and the self which he had to express does not strike me as a particularly wholesome or edifying matter of communication.'

But Virginia Woolf, in The Second Common Reader, was lavish in her praise:

'Thus it is no mere transcript of life at a certain time and place that Hardy has given us. It is a vision of the world and of man’s lot as they revealed themselves to a powerful imagination, a profound and poetic genius, a gentle and humane soul.'

The two views are antithetical but Eliot’s the more accurate.

That a commanding poetic and critical genius of Eliot’s stature should find nothing worthy to say about Hardy is perplexing, and suggests an insufficient or hasty scrutiny of the poet’s work as I shall demonstrate below. Woolf’s evaluation, not surprisingly, stems from a poor critical grasp. That he had a powerful imagination is not altogether true, but he was undeniably gentle and humane. That he was profound, or a poetic genius, is sheer exaggeration.  

Eliot has been criticised (mostly by Hardy devotees) for imposing too harsh a view on his poetry and not doing him justice as a critic. But Eliot is vindicated in that much of Hardy’s poetic work is sentimental and merely seeking, as he correctly pointed out, ‘self-expression’. Hardy has the unwitting knack of deceiving the less guarded on a first reading, when a closer examination reveals the weakness:

                 I glanced aloft and halted, pleasure-caught

                   To see the contrast there:

                 The ray-lit clouds gleamed glory; and I thought,

                   ‘There’s solace everywhere!’

                                                  A Meeting with Despair

The poet betrays the weakness in ‘pleasure-caught’, ‘The ray-lit clouds gleamed glory’ and the effusive ‘There’s solace everywhere!’ Such striving after effect cannot signify a major poet and, to Hardy’s credit, it was something of which he was unaware because in some of his elegiac poetry he comes close to achieving major status. But he should not be remembered, or celebrated (as he is so often), for his oeuvre as a whole.

Eliot’s comment that:

‘...the self which he had to express does not strike me as a particularly wholesome or edifying matter of communication.’

shows a distinct and surprising lack of insight from arguably one of the finest critics in the language and betrays, as it does, a smugness suggestive of cursory dismissal. For Hardy, following the death of his first wife, rose to the occasion and produced some fine elegiac poetry that can only be construed as particularly wholesome and decidedly edifying as matter of communication.

That a poet can go from the contrived and would-be dramatic:

             I have seen the lightning-blade, the leaping star,

                   The caldrons of the sea in storm,

                   Have felt the earthquake’s lifting arm,

              And trodden where abysmal fires and snowcones are.

to the keenly sensitive and poignantly felt:

                  Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,

                 Saying that now you are not as you were

                 When you had changed from the one who was all to me,

                 But as at first, when our day was fair.

should provide much interest and speculation for a literary historian possessing a close critical proclivity. There is nothing contrived here, only pure pathos, and the final stanza consolidates and reinforces the poet’s keenly felt sensitivity to the memory of his dead wife:

                 Thus I; faltering forward,

                 Leaves around me falling,

                 Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,

                 And the woman calling.

The image of a confused and grief-stricken man is finely felt and evocative. And the reader feels compassion for the misery endured.

Hardy’s lesser poetry (and it is mostly second-rate) suggests he spent inordinate amounts of time trying to ‘feel’, as if he desperately wanted to be a poet and convey faithfully what he saw and ‘felt’:

                I have seen the lightning-blade, the leaping star,

                The caldrons of the sea in storm...

is a striving to feel and express and is written, as Eliot said, ‘...as nearly for the sake of “self-expression” as a man well can.’ But when the feeling is real, and emanates from a personal and confounding grief, the tautness and concoctions of the lesser work give way to a natural and true expression:

                 Here is the ancient floor,

                 Footworn and hollowed and thin,

                 Here was the former door

                 Where the dead feet walked in.

                 She sat here in her chair,

                 Smiling into the fire;

                 He who played stood there,

                 Bowing it higher and higher.

                 Childlike, I danced in a dream;

                 Blessings emblazoned that day;

                 Everything glowed with a gleam;

                 Yet we were looking away!

                                                  The Self-Unseeing

The effect of this simple verse is telling and can claim to be considered among at least what is good in English poetry. Had Hardy been less impelled to produce, more of the same quality might have been forthcoming. Had he read, and noted, Samuel Johnson’s praise of Denham’s Cooper’s Hill:

'It has beauty peculiar to itself, and must be numbered among those felicities which cannot be produced at will by wit and labour, but must arise unexpectedly in some hour propitious to poetry' 

      

he might have fared much better.

HAS MOGOENG THE GUTS NOT TO BE A PUPPET?

New South African Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng assumed office on Tuesday when the National Assembly bade farewell to former Constitutional Court chief justice Sandile Ncgobo.

The role of the judiciary came under the spotlight when that master of insinuation, Jacob Zuma, set the ball rolling with a speech that was hardly surprising but ominous in its effect.

Zuma said 'There is a need to distinguish the areas of responsibility between the judiciary and the elected branches of the state, especially with regards to policy formulation. The executive must be allowed to conduct its administration and policy-making work as freely as it possibly can. The powers conferred on the courts cannot be disregarded as superior to the powers resulting from a mandate given by the people in a popular vote.'

If a genie were to offer Jacob Zuma and the ANC a single wish, they would unhesitatingly ask to be rid of the constitution of South Africa - not because it encumbers their 'policy formulation' but because it places obstacles and scrutiny in their endless and irredeemable path of cronyism and corruption. To them the rule of law is anathema. Without it, they could achieve so much - for all senior party cadres. The poor are factory fodder, inculcated with party political rhetoric and promise of a new tomorrow that never sees the light of day.

After Zuma had finished his speech, Osiame Molefe, who witnessed the event, wrote in the Daily Maverick: 'The image that followed - of Justice Mogoeng sitting with President Zuma and sharing laughs as justice minister Jeff Radebe ever so tenderly lavished adoration on Mogoeng is, in isolation, not concerning. But given the ruminations from the ANC on curbing the authority of the judiciary, it ought to give pause.'

And indeed it should. Mogoeng's appointment to the top judicial post was controversial, to say the least. Whether or not he is an established Zuma crony is a moot point. If he is, our constitution will not be well represented. But if he has a streak of independence, and wants to serve his office with probity, the pressing question remains whether or not he will have the guts, in times of constitutional crisis, to stand up to those who anointed him. Only time will tell, but initial signs are not promising.

MALEMA PRAISE MISPLACED

There has been a groundswell of euphoria in South Africa surrounding the recent Malema march to the JSE and Union Buildings, some elevating the firebrand to the status of a quasi-hero. You don't go from being a self-aggrandising rabble-rouser to hero in one easy step and the naive and impressionable would be well-advised to consider that his march was simply political guile cunningly executed. Malema doesn't care for the poor - he rides on their backs.