The BBC South Africa editor, a splendid woman with a clear voice, talked about how change would come to South Africa
in this upcoming election because the old dreams of the African National Congress were betrayed and dead. (If you want to know how dead, SA advocated the equivocation of Palestine’s Hamas and Israel’s Prime Minister – a diversionary tactic designed to take attention away from years of bent politics, increasing violence and no more for the poor under their own than at the hands of the white masters of apartheid – no jobs, no light, no loos.) In other words, don’t look at us, look at them. More money was embezzled through government in the two years of the pandemic than in President Zuma’s nine.
There was a thoughtful item on a young white mayor in a rural seat in the Western Cape, who is going for government via one of the minority parties and he is fluent in a couple of African languages.
Language was always a big part of the deal in SA (see Rian Malan, My Traitor’s Heart)
The young paramedic who has just moved in upstairs remarked that she had a love/hate relationship with SA having been there earlier in the year. “It is so beautiful” she said “ but there is so much wrong.” I went too early to see the current decline but I remember the beauty.
And no, I am not writing about South Africa and the Middle East because I won’t look at what is wrong in my own country. But in the hunt for some piece of good news,
I found the story of a man who discovered an abandoned park on his doorstep in Johannesburg. And who, one day, fed up with having to drive to space when space was on his doorstep, he borrowed the key, took his torch, and opened the gate. He didn’t go very far because everybody had told him how dangerous it was. But it wasn’t. It was deserted.
So he went in with clippers, his dog and a bucket for weeds. He asked friends to help, he crowdfunded over ten years having formally adopted the space from the city council who agreed to mow and remove the waste – but he would do everything else. The biggest difficulty was persuading people it was safe. So he made 67 metal owls, painted different colours. Children loved them. “Everyone told me they’d be stolen – but they weren’t, not one.”
He put in red kudu, orange monkeys, yellow pangolin and a pink and yellow giraffe five metres tall
– all in all, over 100 sculptures and welcomed 10,000 visitors a month. And everybody picks up after themselves. Asked by others for advice, he answers (in a variant of Field of Dreams) “if you start clearing, people will join you.” A Soweto born colleague agrees: “There is no messiah coming to save us … no point in just waiting for this perfect South Africa. We have to save ourselves.”
The nearest I came to such a story in Britain was of a retired domestic science teacher who learned by chance that nearby women with young families couldn’t cook because they hadn’t the money to spend on ingredients. She knocked on doors and offered to show them how to knock up a meal from what was in the cupboard, or with minimal extras. One woman’s triumph was making a birthday cake for her daughter . I waited for a follow up. It never came, sidelined by the developing passion for bad news.
In the desperate hunt for a vote raiser the government is talking about National Service
– an updated version, please, designed to recognise gifts that don’t fit, and allocate everybody who can’t be enlisted into community services like weeding and clearing, helping out and picking up. If you don’t see people do it out of conviction, you don’t believe it exists.
The political system in Britain will break before it changes but the way it is employed and spoken of, could change. If Keir Starmer isn’t offering miracles, it’s because there aren’t any. Wouldn’t you rather have a nice surprise than a broken promise ? The change is in style, not content.
Bring it on.
Many thanks to Christina Lamb of The Sunday Times for the story about James Delaney.
Annalog 