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Posts Tagged ‘south africa’

Mr Chameleon (2005) is the autobiography of the South African political activist, poet, and novelist Tatamkhulu Afrika, who was born in Cairo in 1920 and died eighty-two years later in South Africa South Africa, Afrikaans Suid-Afrika, officially Republic of South Africa, republic (2005 est. pop. 44,344,000), 471,442 sq mi (1,221,037 sq km), S Africa. . In often beautiful prose, Mr Chameleon recounts a narrative that traverses from Egypt to the Bo-kaap, reversing the colonial Cape to Cairo denigration den·i·grate  

tr.v. den·i·grat·ed, den·i·grat·ing, den·i·grates

1. To attack the character or reputation of; speak ill of; defame.

2.  of Afrikaners. The implementation of racial categories under apartheid is therefore based on a complex evolution of notions of “race” in South Africa.

The assertion under apartheid of a pure and unadulterated whiteness in South Africa that is also explicitly European thus both continued and radically contradicted concepts of race that developed under colonialism. This history of race is crucial to understanding Mr Chameleon. Tatamkhulu Afrika’s autobiography maps the entanglements and contradictions that subvert the certainties of racial labels and unsettles the assumption of a stable notion of Europeanness and Africanness in South Africa. In fact, by the changes in name and identity recounted in Mr Chameleon, Afrika’s most subversive assertion in apartheid South Africa is to show that Europeanness could be indistinguishable from Africanness, and that whiteness is impossible to differentiate from blackness, an anxiety that recalls the repressed intimacies of the colonial period.

In the South African and Indian colonial territories, and later in apartheid South Africa, Islam played a crucial role in the colonial anxiety about policing difference. Europeans in the colonies compulsively policed difference through an assertion of separateness between themselves and the “otherness” of colonized subjects. Yet colonized subjects refused to remain stable in their difference, and, as a result, the mutability of the colonized body was a source of severe anxiety to colonists. (4) Only one figure superseded the threat inherent in the changeable colonized body: a European in the colonies who went over to the other side. An exemplary story of such mutability is found in the figure of Fernao Lopez told in the collection imprisonment Imprisonment

See also Isolation.

Alcatraz Island

former federal maximum security penitentiary, near San Francisco; “escapeproof.” [Am. Hist.: Flexner, 218]

Altmark, the

German prison ship in World War II. [Br. Hist.  for acts of "terrorism."

The last sight Afrika recounts seeing before being released from Victor Verster Prison is not of his fellow activists but that of a nonpolitical prisoner, a rent-boy edging near madness, whose resonant image ends the book. During the months of his imprisonment, Afrika had watched the young man polishing a pair of red boots every day, "an Jacana ja·ça·na   also ja·ca·na

n.

Any of several tropical water birds of the family Jacanidae, having long toes adapted for walking on floating vegetation. Also called lily-trotter.  Media, 2005.

Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. Kwela n. 1. A kind of danceable music popular among black South Africans; it includes a whistle among its instruments.

Noun 1. kwela - a kind of danceable music popular among black South Africans; includes a whistle among its instruments  Books, 2001.

Jacobs, Rayda. The Slave Book. Cape Town: Kwela, 1998.

Jeppie, Shamil. "Reclassifications: Coloured, Malay, Muslim." In Coloured by History, Shaped by Place: New Perspectives on Coloured Identities in Cape Town. Ed. Z. Erasmus. Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2001.

Lichtenstein, H. Travels in Southern Africa in the Years 1803, 1804, 1805, and 1806. Trans. A. Plumtre. Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 1928 [1812].

Stobie, Cheryl. Somewhere in the Double Rainbow: Representations of Bisexuality in Post-Apartheid Novels. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu Natal Press, 2007.

Tayob, Abdulkader. Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press (known colloquially as CUP) is a publisher given a Royal Charter by Henry VIII in 1534, and one of the two privileged presses (the other being Oxford University Press). , 1998.

Worden, Nigel. Slavery in Dutch South Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Note: This essay is an excerpt from a chapter in Africa Writing Europe: Oppositions, Entanglements, Juxtapositions, forthcoming from Rodopi.

(1) The politician and mining magnate Cecil John Rhodes exemplified the British imperialist dream of controlling Africa from the Cape to Cairo.

(2) Hendricks, “The Land Question,” 37.

(3) Coetzee, White Writing, 24.

(4) Bhabha, Location of Culture, 78-79.

(5) Worden, Slavery in Dutch South Africa, 4.

(6) Tayob, Islam in South Africa, 24.

(7) Chris Hani was the general secretary of the South African Communist Party and a revered Umkhonto we Sizwe leader and activist. His murder on April 10, 1993, was part of a rightwing plot to assassinate leaders of the derail de·rail  

intr. & tr.v. de·railed, de·rail·ing, de·rails

1. To run or cause to run off the rails.

2.  the transition to a new political order.

Gabeba Baderoon received a PhD in English from the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies The Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies (OCIS) is a Recognised Independent Centre associated with the University of Oxford, England. It was established in 1985 with the aim of encouraging the academic study of Islam and the Muslim world. The centre’s Patron is Prince Charles. , and the African American Studies African American studies (also known as Black studies and/or Africana studies) is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to the study of the history, culture, and politics of African Americans.  at

"global aids", and that the other guys (republicans) were not.

The following link begs to differ. what say you?

articles.cnn.com/2010-07-23/opini…

It we want to spend money for this problem, why not put the monies in methods that would attempt to solve it. It's quite evident that one factor that many here will not be familiar with is Spiritual Taboos in Africa for instance. did you know that if a Father of a family contracts HIV/AIDS, it is believed the the "gods" will have favor on him if he has sex with his younger daughter and he will be cured from the dreaded disease…Now, we have two with the killing disease. So where has our monies and funding been gone all these years to educate South Africa and there regressing instead of progressing….So our plan to fund them for help is evidently not working on a Government level. Missions and contributions from churches are having better luck as they go and personally teach and work with the afflicted.

I say you linked to an opinion piece that lacks facts…

PepFar was funded at $48 billion for 2009 to which Obama added $3 Billion. Bush from 2004 to 2008 funded a total of $15 Billion. $51 Billion is substantially more than $15 Billion,

avert.org/pepfar.htm

shouldnt people who get aids, shouldnt they take som eresponsibility for their own health and welfare. After all I am sure missionaries were sent to Africa, and did they listen, or were the missionaries laughed at, when they tried to teach them to keep it covered.?

So you don't like Obama because he's not doing enough to fight global AIDS?

Any money spent to try and stop the spread of AIDS in African is twice as bad as not spending it at all.

Say I that Bush had some serious love for AIDS.