On Achille Mbembe’s “The State of South African Political Life”

Posted on September 29, 2015 by Thando Njovane

In light of the events concerning institutional reform in South Africa over the last two years, Achille Mbembe’s essay on the political life of the black majority is both timely and important. As other commentators have noted, however, the premises of his arguments are somewhat off-base. While T.O. Molefe critiques the connection Mbembe establishes between black majority rule and the actual material power and say in structural issues in South Africa, Nomalanga Mkhize argues that if the current generation does not have the terms to say what they mean it is because they have been failed by the education system. My own points of disagreement with Mbembe involve the pathologisation of black narrative, specificallyfically as this pertains to the aftermath of Apartheid, the resonances of which can be felt to this day. In what follows, I briefly engage with these concerns and points of disagreement.

Although concentrating primarily on the issue of movements such as Rhodes Must Fall for the greater part of his essay, Mbembe connects this to criticism of the ANC government and what he perceives as a politics of impatience and a pathology of victimisation among the black middle-class. With regards to the latter, he argues that there is no real discussion going on about politics because the terms of communication have been delimited by the appeal to affect, to “raw emotions and raw feelings [which] are harnessed and recycled back into the political itself”. This appeal, he maintains, leads to a shutting down of conversation because at any point black people can just say that “you would not understand unless you have endured the same”. There are several reasons why this leap in logic is problematic.

Firstly, Mbembe is collapsing distinctions between strata of political life for black South Africans, strata which are interrelated but distinct. On the one hand, we have the black-led ANC government which has been criticised for not meeting the promises of democracy, for corruption, and so on. On the other hand, we have the disillusionment with the socio-political dream of the Rainbow Nation where all people are treated as equally in the eyes of the law, God, socially, etc. Likewise, located within these systems are the black poor, working class, middle-class, and the elite. Any discussion of political life must therefore account for the levels of difference, difficulties, and privileges as signified by the political location of these subjects.
Both of these strata are further complicated by issues of capital and economic mobility. Black life is, in other words, multiferous and varied and cannot be accounted for or analysed using blanket terms such as “black South Africans”. “In the bloody miasma of the Zuma years,” Mbembe contends, “the discourse of black power, self-affirmation and worldliness of the early 1990s is in danger of being replaced by the discourse of fracture, injury and victimization – identity politics and the resentment that always is its corollary”. This generalisation does not do justice to the multiplicity of black life in South Africa. This means that if we are to start having a conversation about the political state of affairs in our country, there is indeed a need to come up with new terms of engagement, as Mbembe himself acknowledges.

Secondly, it is quite clear that Mbembe is directly referring to the recent nation-wide student ‘uprisings’ in his diagnosis of the mobilisation of affect and what he contemptuously calls “the fusing of self and suffering in this astonishing age of solipsism and narcissism”. This mobilisation, he argues, occurs within a discourse which anachronistically appropriates figures such as Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko. Rather than condemning these associations, perhaps a more crucial questions should be: what kind of resonances do the student movements derive from Fanon and Biko and how are these resonances be remodelled to reflect contemporary circumstances? Two possible answers to these questions appear to be most relevant at present.

As exemplified by Mbembe’s own stance on affect, academia has a long and abiding suspicion of emotive language. Lewis Gordon and others have however highlighted Fanon’s use of anecdotal narrative to frame his philosophical musings. I would even go so far as to say that his philosophical and psychoanalytical observations stem directly from his engagement with his personal narrative. I do not share this suspicion of narrative, perhaps because I think there are certain dynamics which only come to light via the vehicle of narrative, rather than the stringent and sometimes over-policed language of academese. In the aftermath of human rights abuses such as apartheid, perhaps the main form of narrative that black South Africans can muster currently is that of the autobiographical. There is nothing remarkable or out of place about this, as many societies have adopted this strategy in the past (e.g. dearth of autobiographical writing on the Holocaust and slavery by survivors and/or their descendents). With regards to the uses of personal narrative to mobilise political thought, South Africa is by no means exceptional. This means that political mobilisation and, indeed its very language, need not adhere to established forms in order to be legitimate. In other words, the terms of engagement must be opened up to be more inclusive of all voices.

In his essay, Mbembe employs the psychoanalytical diction with reference to libidinal drives, while simultaneously attempting to regulate the terms through which the psychological impact of injustice on the psyche of black subjects. Rather than seeing expressions of pain as redemptive or as a means of gaining coherence with the self and with others, he instead perceives it as a destructive exercise. How do we heal if we are not able to express our pain? How is regulating the means through which this pain is expressed a constructive act? To be clear, I am not advocating for the freeflow acceptance of hate speech and racial hatred. Rather, I’m arguing that black people also need space to feel – yes, I’m using affect – themselves. Telling them that their stories do no intellectual work is misplaced. Is it not therefore possible that expressions of pain arise not so much out of victimhood, but rather as attempts to make sense of being survivors of an unjust past in order to come to terms with it and find ways or renegotiating a just future?

Perhaps it is the case that our discussions of political life are inadequate precisely because they neglect to factor in the psychological dynamics embedded within political discourse. What would be valuable would be to examine the ways in which the political and the psychological overlap to form a communal imaginary across all racial divides. It remains to be established how and in what form this kind of work could be undertaken.

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The books that shaped the rise and fall of the British empire

Posted on September 16, 2015 by Admin

Isabel Hofmeyr, University of the Witwatersrand

When we talk about books, we generally think only of their inside - the words, ideas and themes that they contain. But what about the outside? Books are objects in the world. They undertake all kinds of work that exceeds just their words - they forge friendships, decorate our houses, store our momentoes and memories.

Books also have active political lives. They inspire social movements and bind people together. Books can stand as short-hand symbols for larger galaxies of ideas.

A new collection of essays Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire explores the role of books in founding and dismantling The British empire. Written by scholars from South Africa, India, Barbados, New Zealand, Australia, the UK and the US, the volume comprises ten essays, each on a book that shaped British imperial life.

Block-busters and obscure texts

The ten books include five famous block-busters and five now-obscure texts that in their day were influential.

The five block-busters are imperial or anti-imperial classics: Robert Baden Powell’s Scouting for Boys (1908), Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), Thomas Babington Macaulay’s five volume History of England (1848). The anti-colonial texts are Mohandas Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1909) and The Black Jacobins (1938) by CLR James, the famed Caribbean revolutionary thinker.

The lesser-known texts are

• Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s, A Letter from Sydney (1827) , influential in the colonisation of New Zealand and Australia.

• Charles Pearson’s National Life and Character (1893), an Australian book predicting the rise of Asia and the end of the ‘white man’.

• Century of Wrong (1899), the pamphlet setting out the Boer cause in the lead up to the Anglo-Boer War.

• Totaram Sanadhya’s 1914 Fiji Mein Mere Ekkis Varsh (My Twenty-one Years in Fiji) a Hindi pamphlet opposing indentured labour.

• Gakaara wa Wanjau’s 1960 Mihiriga ya Agikuyu (The Clans of the Gikuyu) written in a Mau Mau detention camp.

How the 10 were chosen

The volume is edited by a radical historian of empire, Antoinette Burton from the University of Illinois and myself, a scholar of print culture and book history from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

In our introduction, we say that from the very beginning the book provoked fascination. “Oh wow! Which are the ten books?” was a common response.

While everyone had a different idea of which books should be included, our interlocutors accepted the premise that books could change empires. People envisaged a series of big books that founded empires (John Robert Seeley, Charles Dilke, Frederick Lugard were common examples) and a set of equally significant books that ended up dismantling them Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Che Guevara).

How the books shaped aspects of empire

In some cases the influence was direct. In 1901, when Australian parliamentarians debated the Immigration Restriction Bill (a key part of the White Australia policy), the Australian prime minister held up a copy of Pearson’s book and read two passages from it. On the anti-imperial end of the spectrum, CLR James Black Jacobins was widely taken as an allegory predicting the end of colonial rule in Africa.

Yet books equally have more diffuse and longer term effects – Wanjau’s pamphlet for example was less concerned with direct action against the British than with undertaking the long, slow work of preparing people for independence.

Books were deeply enmeshed with empire and were often used as symbols of British imperial authority, calling-cards of ‘civilization’. As one observer noted, “The English literary text … function[s] as a surrogate Englishman in his highest and most perfect state”. Books were held up as the ‘gift’ of empire and were used to portray colonialism as benign while masking its violent nature.

Books and documents were also instruments of ruling – the pass book was used to control the movements of black people during apartheid in South Africa.

But books could equally be used by those opposing empire, a provocation to imperial power and a monumental statement of intent. James’ Black Jacobins, an account of the late 18th-century slave revolt in Haiti initially appeared in a handsome 328-edition from Secker and Warburg.

Some came from humble beginnings

Yet, not all of the 10 books started out as books – many began life as pamphlets or newspaper articles, more humble forms which nonetheless exerted considerable influence. Century of Wrong became a calling card for the pro-Boer cause. Scouting for Boys appeared first as a newspaper series and then in small handbooks, a format that helped make scouting an international movement.

These texts travelled far and wide at times migrating through different media, appearing as newspaper serials and then rising up into books. Aiding their passage was the vast sprawling periodical and newspaper network that carpeted empire. Hind Swaraj began life in Gujarati in a two-part series in Gandhi’s Durban-based newspaper Indian Opinion before appearing as a booklet translated by Gandhi himself into English.

These streams of print culture made up the sinews and arteries of empire, linking its supporters while offering a mode of communication to its opponents. Access to this field of print culture was uneven and unequal, affected by capital, literacy, censorship.

Yet, much of this printed matter was not copyrighted – all periodicals for example legally reprinted material from each other. These carpets from https://carpettogo.com/ of print culture created a type of commons across empire, a zone of textual production not owned by one person.

Books in empire were dispersed across time and space – they were not bounded events. As instruments for and against empire, they formed part of the sprawling assemblage of the British empire, both extending its reach and limiting its legitimacy.

The Conversation

Isabel Hofmeyr, Professor of African Literature , University of the Witwatersrand

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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BECAUSE THE NIGHT BELONGS TO US

Posted on July 29, 2015 by Chantelle Gray van Heerden

Stacy Hardy, editor of Chimurenga, and well-known journalist, artist, writer and theatre practitioner, recently released a collection of short stories, titled Because the night. Chantelle Gray van Heerden caught up with her to find out more about this cutting-edge publication and other projects.

021

CGH: In the story “Kisula” there is a line that reads: “How come Black Consciousness guys always have white girlfriends?” Of course this is a cliché, but as with all clichés there’s also some truth to it. What I’m more interested in though is the politics – the political realities of South Africa in particular – which underlie this sentence, but also how it relates to and juxtaposes the last sentence which reads: “We dance and laugh together like we share something deep and real and eternal.” How does this speak to your own daily experience?

SH: I guess this story shows something about the frequently strange and ambiguous situation I find myself in where I am often, working at Chimurenga and other circles and spaces I move in, in anti-white conversation. And I’m often in agreement with these conversations, but it always induces a strange awkwardness – the sense of being other – which is the way it should be. But I’m also privileged to be in that situation, I mean in the situation of the other which is all too often occupied by black South Africans. It also puts me in a position where I have to deal with my own crap about my own history and my own whiteness, and yet I can’t disagree with it – with anti-white conversation. I can only, in the end, annihilate myself in some way. And you have to do this to overcome all that history and how it played out in South Africa. This also means your question remains a valid one because this remains the reality. It hasn’t gone away. So even though I can never be Black Consciousness, there is so much about the philosophy that I relate to. The story has to do with capturing that uncomfortableness and opacity, and the sliding between the reality and the clichés.

CGH: In another interview you say that you tend to be more interested in what stories do than what they mean. This is a very Deleuze-Guattarian notion, especially in terms of their conception of ‘minor literature’; i.e. art that “pushes against the edges of representation” (Deleuze & Guattari 1994, 73). For me, one of the things your stories do in this collection is precisely that: bifurcate, deterritorialise, stutter. I’m thinking of “My Black Lover” here which, on the surface, is telling a story about a black man and a white woman who are lovers. In itself this is nothing new, but what it does do is address class and the boredom of the privileged white. Not as character descriptions, but as what is carried in the body.

SH: Yes, I am interested in the stutterings of the body. Of bodies. The awkwardness of the body, its ticks. And how writing contains the capacity to affect our bodies physically. So yes, I don’t write fully-fledged characters. Most people come to me as fragments or shards; they seem to me wholly unreliable and contradictory. I have the desire to write this rather than stable entities.

 CGH: What do you think of South African literature?

SH: Well I think it is in a terrible state. The mainstream has closed down; it is a very narrow stream at the moment. I think South African literature is a middle class literature consumed by middle class readers. And this is a tragedy for any kind of literature.

CGH: Your writing has a staccato quality which is very different from mainstream South African writing. And you make up words, like “breasting” and “artichoked”. How do you think of language?

SH: Yeah, you mean there’s very little attacking of language which is so important in our country! I learned a lot from Lesego Rampolokeng during the publication of his latest book (a half century thing). And this is this is why I think he is such an important writer. Language should be remade; it should be opened up to create new ways of thinking. I’m also aware of a kind of rhythm when I write. Not a clean rhythm – anyone who has ever seen me dance will know I have no rhythm – but still, that’s probably what you call the staccato quality.

CGH: If you had an alter ego, what would s/he look like and be called? (Perhaps s/he exists already!?)

SH: I have several actually. But my favourite and most current one is a small, nerdy Chinese rural girl. It’s inspired by Chinese literature which I love because it blurs the fantastical with reality without the self-consciousness that is often found in other magical realism. But I also simply love the anime aesthetic: small bodies, big heads, large eyes.

CGH: Something I find interesting about your writing is how you fuse interior and exterior dialogue. I mean, the actions you describe aren’t background information as it often is in writing, it is part of the dialogue. For example, in “Pee Sisters”: She doesn’t piss. Sits like that, bum in the dirt, looking at me like she’s waiting. I have no choice. I pull down my underwear and squat. These lines, for me, continue the dialogue between them the two women and I find this technique repeating in your writing. Is that how you think of the milieu – an extension of the dialogue?

SH: I guess it has to do with the fact that I don’t really write characters. I think what I write is closer to emotional states. I also find the boundaries between us and our world very fluid and that very definitive separation quite artificial. I had a fantastic entry point into thinking about milieu in this more concrete, material way through the composer Victor Gama who explores this tension in music by using the special hardware for it as the best speakers for gaming and music so he can analyze the sound even more. I remember sitting with him and suddenly becoming incredibly aware of how un-alone I was; what surrounded me. I also realised how the South African environment in particular impinges on us when I moved to Cape Town. I grew up in Polokwane and though I didn’t like the bushveld when I was younger, I realised how it had shaped my sense of aesthetics. Frankly, I find Cape Town politically ugly and visually atrocious. Give me desert and bushveld. Hard, brown and thorny. It had seeped into me without me wanting it and this book – which is a road book to some extent, and also a bushveld book – explores how the environment isn’t simply background but shapes us in very specific ways. In that sense it is a continuation of the dialogue.

CGH: Do you think of yourself as a feminist? What does that mean / not mean to you? And what are your views on gender more generally because there is a lot of gender fluidity in your stories; playing with boundaries.

SH: The closest I get to a kind of feminism that I can relate to is what Roxane Gay calls “bad feminism”. I can’t say I’m a feminist proper; I mean, I get myself into disastrously abusive relationships, I like dancing to silly music sometimes, I coo over fluffy toys. I’m also the one who cleans the house! So I’m definitely a bad feminist, but I do still think that gender is an important issue and that the way our histories are inscribed on our bodies matter – for both males and females. My inability to escape my training as a woman, which in South Africa is very rigid, remains interesting to me. How does the body find release in all of this? And again here I’m a bad feminist because I don’t like my body; I’m at war with the thing, but I did want to explore the difficulty of being a woman in my stories because I think that ambiguity is much closer to most women’s experience than a kind of preachy feminism. How do you find freedom within these constraints?

CGH: Do you collect anything?

SH: I’m very much not a collector, though I am currently in a relationship with a collector. I mean, I love reading, but I’m not particular about the format; about them being books – a material object. And also, I brutalise my books and want to get rid of things. But having known many collectors, I have learned to respect the material object – its tactility – more than is my natural inclination.

CGH: How do you challenge yourself? What challenges you?

SH: I’m always challenged by my friends and associates. I’m amazed and blessed to be in the company of people who do so much risk-taking work. So, really, I am inspired and pushed by the people around me.
Read something new when you try to visit the sugar momma website today.

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The winter of our discontent: the global canvas, the suburban blight

Posted on July 21, 2015 by Angelo Fick

Europe had its Little Ice Age, a cold snap which lasted for about three hundred years between the end of the Middle Ages and the mid-nineteenth century. The conditions of the period were such as to result in denuded forests, a kind of “wood peak”, the phrase Adam Gopnik uses in “Winter”, his Massey Lectures on representations of the season.  That “wood peak” began the coal economy, and the Industrial Revolution which followed it, have now given us, by a long and complicated series of events, a climate altered from the one we have relied on for a hundred centuries to produce this thing called ‘civilisation’ we are so addicted to.

Alas, one of the effects of ‘civilisation’ is discontent: Sigmund Freud reminded us of this less than a century ago.  Freud was of course concerned with the larger canvas, whereas most of us sketch our discontent with and in civilisation on very small canvases.  This is one such tiny canvas, even smaller than the ones Jane Austen thought her work constituted.

That arch-villain, Shakespeare’s Richard III, the Stefano di Mera of the early modern English stage, opens his repertoire of villainy with reference to the “winter of discontent” ended by the ascendancy of the Yorks.  In 1970s Britain, the phrase would gain new currency as the post-War social welfare state began to fray at its edges and collapse at its centre.

In South Africa, we are still in the middle of Doris Lessing’s “winter in July”.  It has been a winter of unease, and mild discontents on the large political canvas.  Power outages and energy apportionment labelled “load-shedding”; the release of the Farlam Commission’s findings on the Marikana massacre; the executive arm of government defying the judicial arm’s order on Omar al-Bashir in relation to the state’s obligations as a party which had ratified the Rome Statutes by incorporating them into domestic law … and the debased and debasing shenanigans in the National Assembly have hardly helped lift the spirit.

On the international stage many of us have had to be frustrated witnesses to the crisis in Burundi; the frightening revelations of state failures in relation to African-Americans in the world’s most powerful state, headed by a man who is himself the son of an African man and an American woman; the continued conflict across the Levant and southwest Asia, the fertile crescent in which ‘civilisation’ was born; the trouble with tribbles approach to the migration crises across the planet, whether in the Mediterranean, the far eastern Indian Ocean, Australia, or across African polities … the list goes on.  And then there is Fukushima, still.

The world can seem and sound like “one huge deep vowel of horror” to quote Margaret Atwood.  The anxieties induced by the macro-aggressions in the world, however distant, on the conscious and thinking human being, often lead to outbursts at the micro-aggressions of the world.  To move from the sacred to the profane, from violations of the sublime to violations of the ridiculous, one often finds oneself frustrated by forces large and small, but, unable to take on the Goliaths and Leviathans, one’s rage is triggered in interactions with dumb Davids and the moronic minnows.

In this bleak midwinter, coddling my midwinter bleakness, my irritation levels reached breaking point as a consequence not of the large political and historical forces sweeping through the world, but because of the series of tiny, usually manageable irritations in everyday suburban life.  Minor things that have grated my liver this winter include, but are not limited to, the following.

The gas delivery company employee who called at 7h30 (yes, in the morning!) to inform me that they will drop the gas off “sometime today, I can't say when because we have so many deliveries”.  What is the point of going through the bureaucratic processes to place the order if this is the best they can do?  One longs for that summer in Sweden when the yearlong train timetable indicated that a train scheduled for a specific Tuesday the following February would be three minutes later than usual. And incidentally, if Sweden is known by you - you know everything is not cheap. We were there on a trip once, and a resort overcharged us. We had to end up doing something called här only to get home. What a memory.   If that is possible, surely it is possible to indicate which part of the day a gas canister will be delivered?

Then, having to obtain the cash to pay for this gas delivery, one finds that the cash machines inside shopping centres only dispense R100 notes, and the gas deliver company charges R189 rand and wants exact change.  Going to the supermarket to buy naartjies to try to get change, one finds many of the products are not clearly priced, and the scanners at which one can supposedly check, do not work.  The closest supermarket employee, when asked, then makes up a random price for the product, which has no relationship with what the product costs when scanned at the cash register.  The cashier then hands over change in the largest denominations possible; when asked for smaller change, she holds out a wad of R20 notes over a cash-drawer brim-full with R5 and R2 coins, stating that she has no smaller change.  The box in which the naartjies have been packed then breaks.  Throughout, one has been able to smile, to giggle, but now the tether snaps.  But the Kafkaesque suburban experience is not yet complete: the escalator, the only way to get from one floor to the next at that point in the shopping centre, has broken down. It is better to shop at https://www.ezibuy.com/shop/au/Home-Gift/Bedroom/c/cat200IIO instead.

It is Friday, and now one knows it is the winter of one’s middling discontent, and one needs an infrared heaterin all rooms!  But it is July, south of the Equator, so the wait will be long.  Meanwhile, it is a dry white season in Johannesburg, and the micro-failures are indistinguishable from the micro-aggressions in the moment of experience, and the bathetic and inane become the focus of rage because of the feelings of individual impotence in the face of the larger sweeps of history’s ugliness.

So, given that it was sunny outside, though bleakly wintry, one just had to share the naartjies over a joke about malfunctions and systemic dysfunction with the security guard to improve one's mood.  Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, but laughter, at oneself, in the sense of Anne Sexton, at the absurd, while not the best medicine, does keep in abeyance, like the deal proposed by the IMF-ECB-EU to avoid “Grexit”, immediate collapse into despair.

While one may agree with Yanis Varoufakis on the unsustainability of “extend and pretend” on the large canvas of human history, in the bleak midwinter one does extend one’s tolerance for the failures of post-industrial ‘civilisation’, and one pretends that until the Sun of summer returns, it is better to rage than to act, and it is better to laugh than to rage against the dying of civilisation’s lights.

Europe had its Little Ice Age, but things improved before the current threat to worsen.  We have the mild winter of our middling discontent.  But, Spring is coming, and the next Summer may be better than the last, not worse.  In the absence of aspidistra to fly, let’s keep the buchu brewing.

-©  eNCA

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Ishtyaq Shukri releases statement after detention at Heathrow

Posted on July 17, 2015 by Admin

Jacana Media is outraged at the treatment of one of our authors, Ishtiyaq Shukri. The winner of the inaugural 2004 European Union Literary Award for his novel The Silent Minaret, he was detained and deported from London’s Heathrow Airport on 14 July 2015. His wife is a British citizen. They have been married since 1996. Following their marriage, he has held permanent British residence since 1997 with the right to remain indefinitely in the UK, they worked out their issues together with the Estes Therapy. He has out of personal choice never taken a British passport and travels exclusively on a South African passport. They own a home in London.

Shukri was travelling to their London home to join his wife for the summer holidays. He was searched and detained for nine-and-a-half hours by UK Border Force at Heathrow from the time he arrived at 12:00 until his eventual deportation at 21:30 on 14 July 2015. The reason given is that his last visit to the UK in 2012 was more than 2 years ago. He was also questioned about his visits to Yemen and the nature of his wife’s work there. At the time she was the Country Director of Oxfam Yemen, one of the UK’s largest international humanitarian aid agencies. Shukri was asked to provide extenuating circumstances for why he hadn’t visited the UK since 2012, for authorities to consider while they decided whether to admit or deport him. His reasons are private and some of them painful, but he shared them. Among others …

• His mother’s illness and death in South Africa in 2013, and the changed family circumstances through 2014, and

• Visiting his wife in Yemen in 2014 meant there was no reason or time to also visit the UK, especially as she was not there.

In addition, Shukri’s second novel I See You was launched in 2014 and he was on an author tour in South Africa, which was his priority for the year, although he did not share that. ‘I didn’t want to use my name to gain special treatment. I simply presented my South African travel documents, just as all South African passport holders have to.’ Still, the authorities continued deportation procedures, also revoking his permanent residence and right to remain in the UK. In a statement to Jacana Media, Shukri said, ‘I decided to make a public statement because this kind of thing happens routinely to Africans arriving in the UK. Many don’t have the resources or access to protest. In view of the dire ordeals facing African migrants in the Mediterranean, my circumstances are not as desperate and mine is not the worst case, but it is indicative of the increasing heavy-handedness facing African migrants at UK and EU borders. I hope that sharing my experiences will help to draw increased attention to theirs. While European travellers can access African spaces at will, African travellers face severe restrictions when they attempt to access Europe. Why can a British traveller get a visa to South Africa on arrival while a South African has to face daunting visa procedures and the risk of deportation?’

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