“I am the bullet in the chamber.”

Posted on November 17, 2014 by Chantelle Gray van Heerden

behind the door

Let me be clear: I do not like sensationalist media. In fact, I actively avoided the Pistorius trial. When friends of mine told me they had Oscar fatigue, I could honestly say I did not know what they were talking about. For me it is akin to the spectacle you might see in a rap artist’s music video: money, guns, scantily clad women. It is an opulent stage production, the mockery of a macabre reality, the only aim further self-aggrandisement. But then, as fate would have it, I was asked by ShootingAuthority, an expert in this field to interview Mandy Wiener and Barry Bateman, authors of Behind the door, a 568-page book recounting the whole palaver. And while it’s not literature of any kind, it is certainly a book that will sell. People will buy it and read it. They will talk more about it. They will waste their precious time and thoughts on a trigger-happy celebrity. But why? I wonder. Why? Are people’s lives so dull that they have to live it through celebrities? (Ironically, the most insipid kind of people in the world.) Again, but why? Maybe it’s the weight of reality. Maybe it’s sheer boredom. Maybe – probably – it’s an effect of late capitalism. It doesn’t really matter what it is, it remains tragic to me that lives can get so caught up in vanity. Vanity, all vanity, as the prophet said. Anyway, there was an interview. This is the result which deals with, what to my mind, are the more pertinent issues.

 

  1. Why the book? It feels like nothing more than a publicity stunt.

Barry: In a way it was. We were approached by a number of publishing houses during the first week of the trial. The aim was to present a definitive book on the case.

Mandy: They approached me first, because of my background in real crime writing. And I wanted to work with Barry, so that’s how it all began. We then wrote letters to both the families to let them know about it. So they were aware from the outset, but they didn’t want to be involved.

 

  1. How and when did you write it? Talk us through the process.

Barry: Basically my day started at 6am and ended at 6pm. I spent my time at the court every day. Mandy did most of the interviews you find in the book though.

Mandy: You have to consider the fact that I had a baby a week before the trial commenced. So I watched what was happening from home. And then Barry and I liaised in between.

Barry: Writing the copy was much like a tennis match. I wrote parts of it and then sent it to Mandy to review. She did the same. We wrote a lot of it during the adjournments.

  1. I want to talk a bit about the role of social media; first in creating public debate, but then also in creating a façade which obscures the fact that this public debate holds no real power. It is farcical in that sense because it is little more than discourses about discourses. What do you think?

Barry: For me social media is a supplementary medium that I use in my reporting. I don’t think it is the main source of information; people use it to lead them to read longer articles online. But different people have different styles. For me it’s all about the hard facts. Mandy’s style is more colourful.

Mandy: I disagree. I think social media has taken over from more conventional forms of media for many people. But yes, my style is different than Barry’s. And I use it to explain the law and that kind of thing for my Twitter followers.

Barry: What is interesting to see is the kind of vitriol that this trial sparked. I couldn’t believe some of the things people said.

 

  1. Yes, I find that an interesting aspect; that people think they can say anything to anybody in any manner they choose. Or mollify someone by adding a smiley face after being wholly inappropriate.

Barry: It’s almost as if there is a blurring of realities. People simultaneously feel linked to other people via social media and far enough removed that etiquette no longer comes into play.

 

  1. So now I want to turn our attention to the most obvious issue of this trial: guns and violence in our country. I am particularly interested in how and why these have become normalised to the extent that they have. It seems to me that the use of guns and violence is often linked to societies with over-feminised (and infantilised) women and overly-masculinised men. If anything, this case exemplified that. Do you agree? (Note on p.27 that Oscar is quoted saying “My baba, I’ve killed my baba.”)

Barry: Well there are two issues here: firstly, as we state in the book, Oscar was applying for a collector’s license. So it was very much a part of his make-up. But as you would have read, Reeva also went to the shooting range on a number of occasions (see p.49). But that is not my personal reality; I don’t really know people who own guns.

Mandy: I do. I have friends who own guns. Some people live with very deep fear. But I think there is obviously more to fear in Oscar’s case.

Barry: As to the other point you make – the one about over-feminised women – the Pistorius family has a very strange view of women. They are placed on a kind of pedestal, but also infantilised in a way as you say because, for example, they don’t allow ‘their’ women to drive at night and that kind of thing. It’s all in the book.

 

  1. Yes, it was obviously a part of both their lives. I noticed that the gun-metaphor even seeps into his public image. On p.99 in the book you describe Oscar’s official website and how the banner reads “I am the bullet in the chamber.” Ironic, isn’t it? But there is also the incident you describe in the chapter titled “Pasta, with a Side of Gunfire”.

Barry: That chapter describes an afternoon about a month before Oscar shot Reeva. What happened is that Oscar took a friend from the UK and the athlete Martyn Rooney to meet up with Darren Fresco and the boxer Kevin Lerena in Melrose Arch. They were having lunch at Tashas and Oscar noticed that Fresco had a firearm on him. He asked to see it. When he took it, a single gunshot was fired, but Oscar asked the owner of Tashas to hush it up. Who knows what the reality might have been, had he been charged? Reeva just might have still been alive.

 

  1. Somewhere in the book you talk about the “voyeuristic appetite” of the public. I think this is a very apt phrase. Personally I really struggle to understand why there has been such a fuss. Perhaps you could enlighten me?

Mandy: Well it’s not just here. He is well regarded internationally as well. I heard many reporters say that people went to the 2012 Olympic Games in the UK for two reasons: Usain Bolt and Oscar Pistorius. We got calls from CNN and other major international media networks as soon as the story broke.

Barry: I think he ticks many boxes. His story is like any of the classic myths: it’s a story of tragedy and of overcoming. The guy lost his mother at a young age and then there’s also the issue of his legs. I think, especially in post-apartheid South Africa, he was our ‘one good thing’. He represented a hero-figure in the same way that Mandela did. People like to deify certain kinds of people; it gives them hope. But it’s not just that; he also ticks other boxes: the sports box, the fashion box (he’s the face of Oakley), the money box, and so on. And you know, people also like a good mystery. And this trial certainly was that. If you read the book you’ll see that it’s very difficult to say whether he’s guilty or not guilty. It remains shrouded in mystery.

 

  1. What do you think the trial a) accomplished; and b) did not accomplish?

Mandy: I think many people learned a lot about the South African judicial system. It’s different to LA Law, for example, or its current equivalents. This trial made the justice system accessible to the lay person. And because it was broadcast live, I think that Oscar was convicted by the court of public opinion. It was a trial by media so to speak.

 

  1. In the book you spend a lot of time on explaining the law. Why was this important for you?

Barry: Because at the end of the day, this case is about the law – about the interpretation of the law. And the appeal is also centred on an argument of law and the interpretation thereof.

Mandy: Terms like dolus eventualis and mens rea has become part of the national vocabulary.

Barry: Not since Harry Potter has this been the case!

Indeed. Except Harry was likeable…

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Cash 4 Gold

Posted on November 3, 2014 by Louis Roux

In season 16, episode 2 of South Park, Stan receives a bolo tie from his grandfather, who bought it for $6000 from a television marketplace designed specifically to take advantage of elderly people. He tries to sell the bolo tie and the ‘cash 4 gold’ (I would not buy gold from there, I purchased my gold from Golden Eagle Coin) places he goes to only offer him around $10. Trying to figure out this discrepancy – and who to put the blame on – the kids decide to investigate. They confront everyone in the system – the TV salesman, the cash 4 gold places, the smelters, and eventually arrive at the Indian sweatshops where the jewellery is manufactured.

We then see the entire process: the sweatshop makes the jewellery, sells it to the studios, who sell it to the customers, who give it to their grandchildren, who sell it at the cash 4 gold places, who sell it to the smelters, who sell it to the Indian factories. The genius of South Park’s representation of this circuitous capitalist enterprise is in the background music: at first an acapella parody of elevator muzak. But it slowly devolves, at the end becoming dogs barking and atonal yells. This reveals to us that the capitalist loop can never be a closed circle of profit – there are always victims (that the industry, charmingly, calls ‘externalities’). Whether they are the third world minors working for slave wages or the elderly that are manipulated into spending their retirement funds, the circle of consumer goods ripples outward, and the ripples become tidal waves, devastating lives as far as it goes, providing profit only for those inside the circle – which is in reality the only space outside of it.

At the end of the episode an old woman calls into ‘Dean’s Jewelry Bonanza’ and convinces the host to kill himself – an amazing act of revenge. We should all be convincing exploitative capitalists to kill themselves.

 

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Right of admission reserved

Posted on October 24, 2014 by Angelo Fick

In my late teens I accompanied a niece to look for party dresses at various stores in a city centre shopping mall. We had taken the train from her parents’ home, with another friend who was going to the same party, and they were excited about the formal dresses their parents had promised to pay for once identified.

At one of the first stores we entered in the Cape Town city centre, the shop assistant, a young white South African woman with local vowels, rushed over and asked us to leave. I remonstrated that this was absurd, and asked for an explanation (looking back now, I can see how my middle class, educated entitlement and my own vowels must have baffled this young woman, probably three years older than I was, in what was still apartheid South Africa in 1991). She explained that the ‘ladies’ were uncomfortable trying on their dresses in front of a man. When we pointed out that my niece and her friend would have the same issue given that the ‘ladies’ were themselves accompanied by men we did not know, she became curt and simply told us that the store reserved the right to refuse people entry We left.

I had had similar experiences at the South African National Gallery and the South African Natural History Museum (I was younger than the average undergraduate, and I looked even younger than I was). I was refused entry as a potential “school boycotter”. The National Library did the same thing, despite my possessing a university student card with my photograph on it. This was pre-1994 South Africa, but similar experiences persisted into South Africa after 1994.

To this day there are landlords who will not rent to people who are not white. Of course they no longer say so – it is illegal, and it provides evidence against their self-image as ‘not racist’. Instead they ask for your telephone number and call you for a chat, then if they are still uncertain, they request certified copies of identity documents and passports. Estate and letting agents collude with this, and I once had to warn an agent - after being strung along to accommodate their racist client - that if they did not find me a flat within a day, I would take further steps.

The most spectacular rights of admission reserved story, of course, was the one in which the white bouncers at the door to one of Cape Town’s premier gay bars refused entry to one of the most famous Black women on the planet. The supermodel was mistaken for a township drag queen and they refused her entry. She and her entourage remonstrated without success befoe leaving. The club later responded that the supermodel and her friends had insisted on paying their entry charge in foreign currency. Many of us wanted to know why the visit of a supermodel wasn’t payment enough, but we also realised that the concept of the supermodel was antonymous to the idea of Blackness held by many at the time.

Over the last weekend, a friend posted a notification on his online profile. The manager of a Sandton establishment has asked another friend to don a jacket or leave, because he was making the other customers uncomfortable. I stared intently at the photograph of the offender, studying what he was wearing, to the point where computer malfunction threatened. From small cues, I deduced that it was not his attire but his demeanour which offended: he was too camp, too feminine in his dungarees and t-shirt, for the manager’s liking. The jacket was meant, presumably, to contain and mask him. The franchise to which this Sandton establishment owes its name could not be more casual (they call themselves a café, after all), but attire could presumably be used to police something else.

The ways in which race and class (read Blackness and poverty) are policed by such restrictions are familiar to many of us. The normativity of whiteness and the middle classes works so powerfully that even people who are neither white nor bourgeois will use such standards to police others. Security personnel who patrol suburban streets make judgements on who to approach as a potential suspect using such stereotypes. The exclusions at shopping malls work in the same way.

You can, of course, refuse people the right to admission (what a curious phrase, often printed over shop fronts and at the entrances to bars and cafes) without doing so. This can be done in the workplace by refusing to work with, greet or acknowledge people, consequently refusing to acknowledge their capacity not only to contribute to the work project, but also to improve it. Just as that young man in the dungarees was asked to don a jacket to appease other customers, so many of us have our right of admission reserved subject to our realigning ourselves into the dominant paradigm.

The racism, sexism, classism and homophobia which underpin those ‘standards’ in the dominant paradigm must be revealed. Furthermore, racists, sexists, anti-poor and homophobic people should not be given power to exercise their fascist views. Right of admission should not be reserved on the basis of anything other than the right to be there, to pay your way in the appropriate manner (whether cash at the store or café, or professionally competent work at the workplace).

Whether someone is camp, dresses to their income bracket, or needs SPF50+ on a winter’s day in a Mediterranean climate, should not determine access. We pay our way. If the camp man’s money isn’t good enough, neither is mine. If the butch lesbian isn’t good enough to film your nature documentary, I’m not good enough to narrate it. And businesses in South Africa must be taught this lesson: we must vote with our cash and start using the forex elliott wave strategy to make progress. It is 2014, after all. Apartheid is (supposed to be) dead.

Remember, if you are silent when they come for the Jews, don’t expect anyone to speak up when they come for you.

© eNCA

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E-Waste

Posted on October 20, 2014 by Louis Roux

The first world tends to ignore where their things come from, ever since the hard labour and more obviously pollutant industries were moved out of their countries to the places that could hardly protect themselves from this type of imperialism. The best example might be the burgeoning tech industry. Many hail recent developments in technology to be the forerunner to a paperless future. These gadgets seem flashier, faster, and greener than ever before. But what is being ignored is how these things are being made, and where they go after use.

According to the BBC, cell phones are set to outnumber people this year.i Brahima Sanou, director of the ITU Telecommunication Development Bureau, says that "the mobile revolution is 'm-powering' people in developing countries by delivering ICT applications in education, health, government, banking, environment and business, it has come to point where people even need to use a reverse phone number lookup to protect their data" (ibid.). It’s just too bad that there are no ICT applications to get rid of the millions of tonnes of e-waste generated by the West, or to mine the coltan the industry needs to thrive as it does. They are also educating people in the consuming of illegal drugs, causes and prevention, learn more here Kansas and Missouri Counties Accuse Drug Makers of Racketeering.

Coltan is a mineral used in nearly every digital device – cell phones, tablets, laptops and PC’s. 80% of the world’s coltan can be found in the Kivu provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Since a rise in demand for this digital mineral in 2000, “The momentary price hike greatly intensified the violence in the Eastern Congo and encouraged multiple groups and nation-states to implicate themselves in the conflict in the hope of making a killing [...] Invading militias, like the RCD, the Ugandan-backed MLC, and the indigenous Mai Mai militias, used civilian forced labor to acquire as much coltan as they possibly could, expending the money from its Personal & fast sale to finance the military operations that have exacted spectacular violence on Congolese civilians.” (Smith 18).

Last year Virgin Mobile released an advertisement for their new deal: an iPhone 5 with unlimited minutes and data for $30/month.ii The commercial consists of people finding out about this great special offer, and destroying their not-brand-new-anymore phones in a variety of creative ‘accidental’ ways in order to justify their purchase of the deal. They do it quickly, with very little fuss, and only pretending to be upset. This is the blasé attitude that comes from not knowing where one’s garbage goes. Visite site

Let us imagine, for the sake of argument, that those recently-purchased-recently-destroyed devices find their way, through the e-recycling process, to Agbogbloshie – the largest e-scrap yard in Ghana (though they may also end up in any of the hundreds of similar places in Latin America, Africa or Asia). Where, “for economic reasons, some have to choose between working in poisonous conditions or remain perpetually consigned to poverty” (Agyei-Mensah & Oteng-Ababio 502). Here they will be disassembled by hand, often by children younger than 15, to find the few precious pieces of copper, iron, and aluminium. After this process (which exposes not only the workers, but everyone in their community, to poisonous substances), the plastic casings, lead filaments, and other worthless materials are burnt, or dumped in open dumps or bodies of water, further destroying the environment according to Island Plastics.iii “The situation is exacerbated by the shortening innovation cycles of hardware which is most dramatic in the case of mobile phones. It is leading to an ever higher turnover of devices. The

lifespan of central processing units in computers has dropped from 4–6 years in 1997 to 2 years in 2005 (Babu et al., 2007; Robinson, 2009)”iv (Premalatha et al. 12).

We should all be forced to live in our own garbage. Perhaps then we will take greater care of where, when and how we throw our consumed consumer products away.

What is cloud computing? Visit our website to read full details.

 

i http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-22464368

ii https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mf4qVdO06vE&noredirect=1

iiiSamuel Agyei-Mensah & Martin Oteng-Ababio (2012) Perceptions of health and

environmental impacts of e-waste management in Ghana, International Journal of Environmental Health Research, 22:6, 500-517.

ivM. Premalatha, Tabassum Abbasi, Tasneem Abbasi & S. A. Abbasi (2013): The generation,

impact, and management of E-waste: State-of-the-art, Critical Reviews in Environmental Science and Technology

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Total Onslaught

Posted on October 15, 2014 by Aidan Erasmus

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I never understood why Die Antwoord (and Jack Parow for that matter) became the poster boys for Afrikaans hip hop. Similarly, I could never grasp how the title of a group like Bittereinder could not be read for its connotations with the South African War, survival, and a culture in crisis. Most of all, I just didn’t get the subversion. The legacy of Afrikaans punk rockers Fokofpolisiekar, some might say, who opened up a different kind of questioning around the post-apartheid and how we constitute South Africa through music, are responsible. Others might say that Fokofpolisiekar are just telling the kids what they want to hear.

Listening to Doosdronk by Die Antwoord, which for the educated is a re-enactment of drunken farm violence, I found myself nauseated. Not for the reasons one might expect, or for the same reasons some are disgusted by DOOKOOM’s new work, but rather because Die Antwoord are not the subjects of the outrage that has targeted DOOKOOM. Die Antwoord’s vacuous self-parody spits in the face of a much richer, more articulate history of subversion through the Afrikaans language. What Die Antwoord do, is render farm workers as drunken cunts with violence innate to their psyche, an act more violent than DOOKOOM’s cursing of the land.

It’s not their fault. The curse has always been there. Perhaps what 1994 failed to do was to remind us, in the terms of Ashley Montagu, that ‘race is the witchcraft of our time’ and ‘the means by which we exorcise demons’.

Perhaps the critiques of DOOKOOM’s work do the same, through the assertion that the video is an empty invocation, an incitement. Unrest. The language is familiar. It informs the machinery of Afriforum’s reasoning. DOOKOOM forces us to listen with a different ear, and in the video, subverts our gaze. In DOOKOOM’s line that precedes the controversial middelvinger that many (especially those who promote ‘good neighbourliness’) could not stomach, Isaac Mutant channels a history of subversion he knows and understands, a political sophistication that had at its core a need to expose, to live on the edge that is possibility.

Koes koes, daar hol hulle. A rhythm and phrase well known to those involved in marches against the apartheid state in the 1980s, DOOKOOM channels it to make powerful commentary on the complexity of the problem of farm violence. The history of subversion in South Africa is one that begs a careful listen, at full volume with your windows down and screaming ‘jou poes my lanie, jou poes my lanie, jy kan nie vir my vertel nie’. The Genuines, ghoema-punk from the 1980s, emerging alongside what has become the grand narrative of Afrikaans musical protest – Voëlvry – articulate subversion very differently on their 1986 album Goema through songs like ‘The Edge’ and ‘Struggle’, while hip hop in South Africa isat the outset Afrikaans through artists like Prophets of the City and BVK.

Perhaps the edge is the only place to be, as The Genuines put it. In the documentary film Sea Point Days, by Francois Verster, there is a moment where young so-called coloured children van ‘n klein dorpie op die platteland do an ‘item’, a musical piece, for elderly folk at a retirement home. This scene with shots of the aged enjoying the performance becomes interspersed with archive footage of people performing in what is assumed to be the well-known instances of slaves performing for their masters in the U.S.A in the late 19th century. The question, it seems, is not whether the trope is dead. The question is why it is so recognisable.

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