My Book
I’ve been finishing a book, which will be out in May this year.
Posts and links to follow soon.
Posts tagged ‘South Africa’
Mar 28
Aug 16
Starved Out
Two years ago today, police opened fire on a group of striking mineworkers encamped on a koppie outside of Marikana. Mainly rock drill operators doing some of the most basic and difficult work on the mine, these men demanded that Lonmin – in whose platinum mine they worked – raise their salary to match that of literate, better skilled miners, to about R12,500 per month.
After weeks of sporadic violence on both sides – during which policemen, shop stewards, and workers were injured and killed – mine bosses urged the police to end the standoff. Jack Shenker writes:
It was the police who escalated the standoff at Marikana mountain, bringing in large numbers of reinforcements and live ammunition. Four mortuary vans were summoned before a single shot had been fired. Lonmin was liaising closely with state police, lending them the company’s own private security staff and helicopters, and ferrying in police units on corporate buses. Razor wire was rolled out by police around the outcrop to cut the miners off from Nkaneng settlement; pleas by strike leaders for a gap to be left open so that workers could depart peacefully to their homes were ignored.
Police opened fire as workers approached them. In the end, thirty-four were killed, seventeen of them at a nearby koppie where it appears that they were shot at close range. The Marikana massacre has been described as post-apartheid South Africa’s Sharpeville. As the inquiry into the events near the mine has revealed, police arrived not to keep order, but, rather, to end the strike through any means possible.
The poster for Rehad Desai’s documentary on the Marikana massacre, Miners Shot Down.
The killings were followed by a strike – the longest in South African history – until May. Of all the details to emerge in the coverage of life in the platinum belt, the one that seemed to encapsulate the desperation of striking miners and their families was in a 2006 report commissioned by Lonmin: researchers had discovered children suffering from kwashiorkor near the mine.
Although already identified in 1908, kwashiorkor was named by Dr Cicely Williams, a Colonial Medical Officer, in the Gold Cost during the 1930s. Tom Scott-Smith explains:
she noticed a recurring set of symptoms amongst children who were aged between one and four: oedema in the hands and feet, darkening and thickening of the skin followed by peeling, and a reddish tinge to the hair in the worst cases. There was a clear pattern in the incidence of this disease, since it occurred in children who had been weaned onto low-protein, starchy foods such as maize, after being displaced from the breast by a younger sibling. Williams’ description first appeared in print in 1933, and two years later she identified the condition by its name in the local language: kwashiorkor, the ‘disease of the deposed child’.
Williams diagnosed kwashiorkor as a from of inadequate nutrition – similar to pellagra, which is caused by a diet insufficient in vitamin B3 – related specifically to an intake of too little protein. Williams had noticed that newly weaned babies and young children – the ‘deposed’ children referred to by the word kwashiorkor – were particularly vulnerable to the condition, and surmised that longer breastfeeding or a diet rich in the nutrients non-breastfed children lacked – protein especially – would eradicate kwashiorkor.
By the 1970s, though, doctors argued that this emphasis on protein supplements – which had driven United Nations and other organisations’ efforts to address kwashiorkor – was incorrect. Kwashiorkor, they argued, was the product of under nutrition: of not consuming enough energy. Scott-Smith writes:
Evidence from the 1960s demonstrated that a less protein-rich, more balanced diet could cure kwashiorkor equally well, and by the 1970s a number of other causes for the disease were suggested – even today, the details of kwashiorkor are still not fully understood.
Had scientists paid closer attention to the name ‘kwashiorkor’ they may have come to this realisation sooner. It is a disease of poverty where adults are unable to provide weaned children with adequate nutrition. As a result, its solution is distressingly simple: better and more food.
If there is any indicator of the extent of poverty in the platinum belt, then it is the fact that children suffer from kwashiorkor. While Lonmin has ploughed some of its profits back into communities surrounding the mines – opening schools and running feeding schemes, for example – it remains the case that mineworkers and their families are still desperately poor.
Keith Breckenridge argues that the wealth generated by workers operating in exceptionally dangerous conditions is channelled largely to a small group of beneficiaries. He adds:
Under the current arrangements in the platinum belt there is almost no movement of resources from mining to the wider problem of maintaining the physical and emotional well-being of the general population working in the mines. Mine managers have retreated from maintaining order and health in the hostels, and they have ceded control over the key human resource questions – employment and housing – to union officials and their allies. Like foreign shareholders and local royalty owners, these union leaders, using their monopoly over jobs and housing, have tapped into the demand for employment to enrich themselves (often at the expense of the working and living conditions of union members). Local government – caught between the mines and the prerogatives of tribal authorities – has all but abandoned the project of regulating the living spaces around the mines.
Where once miners were coralled into the prison-like conditions of single-sex hostels where their food, accommodation, and other expenses were covered by mining companies, now meagre housing allowances are meant to support these workers and their families in the otherwise badly provisioned and serviced towns and villages in the platinum belt. Salaries tend to go straight to pay interest on loans granted by micro lenders, charging exorbitant interest rates.
As the incidences of kwashiorkor reported to Lonmin suggest, these men were not earning enough to feed themselves and their children. While under cross examination at the Farlam Commission of Inquiry into the Marikana massacre, Cyril Ramaphosa – current Deputy President and Lonmin board member who had emailed the then-Police Minister, demanding an end to the workers’ strike – remarked:
The responsibility has to be collective. As a nation, we should dip our heads and accept that we failed the people of Marikana, particularly the families, the workers, and those that died.
I dispute the ‘we,’ Mr Deputy President.
Further Reading
Keith Breckenridge, ‘Marikana and the Limits of Biopolitics: Themes in the Recent Scholarship of South African Mining,’ Africa, vol. 84 (2014), pp. 151-161.
Keith Breckenridge, ‘Revenge of the Commons: The Crisis in the South African Mining Industry,’ History Workshop Journal Blog, 5 November 2012.
Tangerine and Cinnamon by Sarah Duff is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Aug 3
Take the Biscuit
This week I attended the Johannesburg launch of Gabeba Baderoon’s Regarding Muslims: From Slavery to Post-Apartheid. In it, she traces the long history of the representation of Muslims in South Africa, arguing that this is crucial to understanding how ideas around race and sexuality, for instance, have changed over time in this country. Importantly, though, she also looks at how Muslims themselves have both responded to and challenged the ways in which they have been portrayed.
She devotes an excellent chapter to the meanings and uses of ‘Cape Malay’ cooking. This is a cuisine, Baderoon notes, that carries with it the memory of enslavement and violence – a memory which was erased, in particular, by the recipe books written by white authors about the cooking of the Cape’s Muslim population, most of whom are the descendants of slaves. Part of the purpose of books such as Renata Coetzee’s The South African Culinary Tradition (1977) was to use this cooking to demonstrate the existence of a particularly South African cuisine which was linked more strongly to Europe – albeit heavily influenced by southeast Asia – than Africa.
When Muslim women – both in the Cape and elsewhere – began to write their own books during the early 1960s, they acknowledged the ‘Africanness’ of their cooking. Their recipe books
meant that Muslim food would no longer be a realm presided over by white experts who drew from silent or apparently submissive black informants in their kitchens, and spoke on their behalf. The transformation of Muslim cooks from silent informants to spokespeople of tradition began to subvert the use of ‘Malay’ food to solidify a ‘general’ South African cuisine that marginalised Africans and centred a European-oriented whiteness.
Baderoon uses the example of the Hertzoggie to demonstrate how Malay food encodes a fraught, but also subversive, history.
Hertzoggies are small – delicious – cookies consisting of a layer of pastry, a blob of jam (usually apricot), and a dome of desiccated coconut. They’re named after JBM Hertzog, Prime Minister of South Africa between 1924 and 1939. Representing largely the interests of white Afrikaners, Hertzog oversaw legislation which further entrenched segregation. The landmark 1936 Native Trust and Land Act and Native Representation Act not only further restricted the land that Africans could hold, but also removed those Africans who qualified to vote from the voters’ roll in the Cape and dashed any hopes of extending the franchise to blacks nationally.
According to Cass Abrahams – an authority on Cape cooking – it was in this context that the Hertzoggie was invented. Baderoon quotes her:
[Hertzog] made two promises … He said that he would give the women a vote, en hy sal die slawe dieselfde as die wittes maak he will make the Malays equal to the whites. Achmat [Davids, the late linguist and historian] reckoned the Malays became terribly excited about this and they put this little short-crust pastry with apple jelly underneath and then had the egg white and coconut on top of it and baked it and called it a Hertzoggie in honour of General Hertzog. However, when he came into power he fulfilled one promise, he gave the vote to the women, but he didn’t make the slaves the same as the whites. So the Malays became very upset and they took that very same Hertzoggie and covered it with brown icing, you know, this runny brown icing and pink icing and they call it a twee-gevreetjie [hypocrite].
I had never heard this account of the origins of the Hertzoggie before and it rings entirely true for me – particularly because of the widespread use of desiccated coconut in Cape Malay baking. It demonstrates Baderoon’s point about the use of food as a form of subversion by people otherwise socially, politically, and economically marginalised, particularly well.
However, I think that it’s also worth thinking about the Hertzoggie in relation to other baking traditions. It’s a little difficult to keep apart these different strands of South African cooking. Hertzoggies appear in recipe books written by – and, presumably, for – white, middle-class class women during the 1930s. And, often, they placed alongside recipes for Jan Smutsies or Smuts-Koekies.
Jan Smuts – statesman, war general, philosopher – was Hertzog’s main political rival. Although the differences between Smuts and Hertzog’s politics, particularly as regards segregation, should not be overstated – after all, they formed the fusion government between 1934 and 1939 – they tended to represent opposing liberal and conservative impulses within South African politics during the 1920s and 1930s.
Smutsies are similar to Hertzoggies, but have a plain pastry instead of coconut lid covering the jam. Was the relative austerity of Smutsies a commentary on his asceticism? That said, other recipes imply that Smutsies and Hertzoggies are, in fact, exactly the same – only the name changes according to the political sympathies of the baker (or the eater).
The same recipe books which include Smutsies and Hertzoggies also refer to puddings and cakes named after other white, Afrikaans heroes: like General de la Rey (hero of the South African War) and President Steyn (the President of the Orange Free State during the same conflict) cake. (They’re both cakes heavy with dried fruit and nuts, although Steyn’s is decorated with meringue.)
I don’t write this to undermine Baderoon’s argument, but, rather, to note how entangled South Africa’s culinary traditions are. Also, I want to reinforce her point about the subversive potential of food: that a biscuit invented by poor, black, Muslim women first in support of, and then in criticism of, a political figure could be taken up and celebrated by precisely the people who voted for him.
Further Reading
Gabeba Baderoon, Regarding Muslims: From Slavery to Post-Apartheid (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2014).
William Beinart, Twentieth Century South Africa, new edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Saul Dubow, Apartheid, 1948-1994 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Tangerine and Cinnamon by Sarah Duff is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Jul 21
Old Bottles
I realised that I am a kind of wine snob when I moved to Joburg last year. (A year! I’ve been here a year. It’s been interesting, Joburg.) At a party I was asked if I wanted ice in my white wine. Having been raised in the Boland – one of South Africa’s oldest and most popular wine-producing regions – I know enough about wine to feel fairly strongly that it shouldn’t be diluted with water.
Most of my knowledge about wine I’ve learned thought being around my father and sister – whose blog you must read – and from spending a childhood in a region where we would spend Saturday mornings visiting wine estates in the area, where there were goats and ducks to feed, and my sister – an oenophile with strong opinions at the tender age of five – would have the odd sip from my father’s glass.
This was a time just before wine estates – and South African wines more generally – were marketed to foreign audiences. The standard guide to local wines – Platter’s pamphlet-sized annual rating of all the wines produced in South Africa – was only a centimetre thick. It’s now a dense, detailed compendium of a vast array of regions which had yet to come into being in the late 1980s and early 1990s: the Breede River Valley, West Cost, and Hermanus, for instance. It was a time when my sister and I could wander into the cheese room at Fairview, have a chat with old Mrs Back, and then see what wine my father was tasting.
Now, though, the winelands are a standard feature on tourists’ itineraries – after the delights of Cape Town and just before safaris in the northern provinces, quickly skipping over altogether more complicated Johannesburg. They have been used to denote a particular kind of South African-ness (or, more accurately, Cape-ness) of being at once part of an experience that is African and reassuringly European. They are Africa-lite.
The use of the wine industry to construct a version of national identity is not particular to South Africa. In When Champagne became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity, Kolleen M. Guy argues that, contrary to official histories of the French wine industry which portray it as forever having embodied the very essence of French-ness, the notion of French identity being expressed through its wine is a relatively recent phenomenon. As an international market for expensive champagne began to emerge in the second half of the nineteenth century – and as mechanisation of the wine industry allowed for increasing volumes of wine and champagne to be produced – the export of these luxury goods became increasingly associated with what it meant to be French.
These luxury goods were taken up to indicate France’s commitment to good wine and to good eating, as a prosperous nation which, although fully modernised, still relied on the work and wiliness of its peasants to produce goods for an international market. The idea of terroir was particularly important in constructing France as a nation with a uniquely perfect food culture: only French soil – and no other land – could produce wines as distinctive as France’s. These narratives hid fractures and changes within French society, as the new middle class sought ways to manifest their wealth and, they believed, their sophistication.
The opposite – the erasure of a winemaking tradition in aid of national re-making – has also occurred. For various reasons, I’ve recently been re-reading Robert Byron’s classic travelogue The Road to Oxiana. The story recounts his journey – on horseback, in cars, busses, lorries, and trains – from Palestine to Afghanistan, and from there to India, where the narrative ends. Although Byron’s interest in food is fairly limited, one of the most interesting and unexpected themes in the book is his commentary on local wines. Particularly in Persia, he comes across wines grown in the region, and of varying quality. He writes while staying in Shiraz:
Wine is another boon of the Persian South. Its fame has spread and etymologists argue as to whether sherry derives its name from Xerez or Shiraz. So far we have discovered three varieties here: a very dry golden wine, which I prefer to any sherry, though its taste is not so storied; a dry red claret, nondescript at first, but acceptable with meals; and a sweeter vin rose, which induces a delicious well- being.
In Azerbaijan he finds a wine which ‘tastes of a Burgundy grown in Greece. We have drunk a bottle apiece today.’
Gonbad-e Qabud, Maragha, Iran (from here).
Iran has a long history of wine production:
Many believe this rugged area of southern Iran was the original source of the grape used to create the world-famous Shiraz wine – today produced in vineyards in California, Australia, France and South Africa. The claim is disputed by some experts, who believe the grape to have originated in France. What is not in doubt, however, is the central place of wine in an ancient Persian culture held dear by many Iranians.
Iran’s most revered poet, Hafez, wrote voluminously on wine’s virtues, as did several of the nation’s other prominent bards. Even Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the famously ascetic father of the revolution – and an amateur poet in his spare time – composed verse praising ‘wine bearers and wine shops’, although it is widely assumed his references were allegory for the spiritual joy of religious belief.
The 1979 revolution banned the production and consumption of alcohol in Iran. Some religious minorities are allowed to serve alcohol at private gatherings, and there is a thriving trade in smuggled wine and spirits.
The Road to Oxiana was published in 1937, and it is in many ways a melancholy read at the beginning of the twenty-first century: several of the mosques, monuments, and tombs described by Byron have been destroyed during recent conflicts. And the relative religious tolerance he refers to has disappeared, particularly in Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The odd presence of Persian wine in the book is a reminder of a more complicated past than the current regime would like to allow.
I don’t want to make a glib point about using food to understand common heritages and shared histories, but, rather, at this moment of stand-offs, of stupid, pointless attack and destruction, that it’s worth paying attention to how narratives of national strength and vulnerability are constructed. Like Persian wine, they are often based on erasure and distortion.
Tangerine and Cinnamon by Sarah Duff is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Moving Goalposts
I returned to South Africa from the UK a month or so before the 2010 World Cup kicked off. Like a lot of South Africans, I had fairly mixed feelings about hosting the football: although much, if not all, of the infrastructure built for the event would turn out to be useful in the future, I and others were perturbed by the amount of money spent on preparations, and, above everything, by Fifa’s increasingly outlandish demands. Not only were small businesses penalised for using copyrighted words and images, but Fifa required special courts to run during the World Cup.
By the opening ceremony, Sepp Blatter was generally known as Septic Bladder. But, in the end and despite him and the (continuing) allegations of corruption levelled at Fifa’s leadership, there was something quite astonishingly wonderful about the World Cup. (John Oliver is particularly good on how it’s possible to love the game, but hate Fifa.) I had begun to suspect that it would be a few weeks of a particular kind of South African madness as I drove to my parents’ to watch the opening ceremony. While waiting at traffic lights, the driver of a hearse leading a funeral procession whipped out his vuvuzela, and blew it at passing traffic.
A supporters’ shop in Cape Town’s Long Street during the 2010 World Cup.
I wonder, though, what the legacy of the Brazil World Cup will be? Even more so than in the case of South Africa, it has shown up Fifa’s disregard for laws and the normal workings of democracy. (Will only countries with dubiously elected or appointed governments, like Qatar and Russia, be able to hold World Cups and Olympic games in the future?)
I think the best example of Fifa’s arrogance was its demand that Brazil lift its ban on drinking in stadiums for the World Cup. Instituted in 2003, this legislation was aimed at reducing violence between rival football clubs. As anyone who’s attended a World Cup match knows, the only beer (actually, ‘beer’) on sale at stadiums is Budweiser, one of Fifa’s official partners. And it was for this reason that Fifa requested that Brazil allow for the sale of beer at stadiums.
Unsurprisingly, very high levels of drunkenness have been reported at matches – so much so that even top ranking Fifa officials have noticed, and wondered if they went too far by not limiting beer sales.
Vuvuzelas for sale in Cape Town during the 2010 World Cup.
There has also been an outcry about Fifa’s partnership with Coca-Cola and McDonald’s. The Lancet argued recently:
The visibility and physical presence of these companies and their products is likely to be huge at the World Cup events and side events throughout Rio de Janeiro and Brazil. … Latin America is taking substantial measures to try to introduce healthy food laws to combat childhood obesity. Efforts in countries, including Brazil, have ranged from improving school food options to labelling regulations and advertising restrictions for unhealthy foods. The 2014 World Cup’s food and drink partners and sponsors represent a direct attack on these attempts to better child health.
When it is held in developing nations, the World Cup opens up new markets to Big Food.
The issue here is Fifa’s disregard for sovereignty. Because it refuses to pay taxes to host nations and demands preferential treatment for its partners, these companies have for a fairly long period of time a substantial advantage over not only local competitors, but over governments and organisations attempting to promote healthy eating. In a time of heightened social, political, and economic conflict – and when public health interventions have the potential to save developing nations millions in healthcare costs – it seems to me that the costs of hosting World Cups are beginning to outweigh the benefits.
Tangerine and Cinnamon by Sarah Duff is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Long Walk
This morning I went to the unveiling of a blue plaque in Fietas, a small, increasingly rundown suburb to the west of the old Johannesburg CBD. It was to commemorate the establishment of the Save Pageview Association, and particularly the work of its founder, Adam Asvat, on whose house the plaque had been placed.
Today, twenty years ago, all South African adults were eligible to vote in the country’s first democratic elections. Also, today sixty-four years ago, the Group Areas Act was passed. This piece of legislation had devastating consequences for Fietas and other, similar suburbs with racially mixed populations.
We remember the agonising destruction of District Six in Cape Town and Sophiatown in Johannesburg, but the attempt to rub out Fietas, its mosques and churches, its shopping street – Fourteenth Street – made famous by Nat Nakasa, and its history of anti-segregation and anti-apartheid struggle is, possibly, less well known. Although eviction orders were sent to Pageview’s residents from 1964 – the area was rezoned ‘white’ – the bulldozers moved in only a decade later. Shopkeepers were required to move to the purpose-built Oriental Plaza in nearby Fordsburg, and families were to leave for Lenasia, a relatively far-away suburb for Indians.
The Pageview Association resisted the removals at every step. In 1989 – a year before the release of Nelson Mandela, and fours years after the declaration of the first state of emergency – a court case initiated by the Association successfully ended the evictions.
Pageview – or Fietas as it is also known – had no happy ending, though. It was not properly rebuilt after the removals. The suburb is desperately poor and crime-ridden. Its streets need renovating and sweeping. The first poster I saw for the Economic Freedom Fighters – a far-left, nationalist organisation purporting to represent the very poor and marginalised – was in Fietas’s main road.
But today, as a group of people, some in their nineties and others just learning to walk, a few residents and former residents, a couple of students and journalists, a sprinkling of academics and activists, gathered to celebrate the lives of Adam and Khadija Asvat, I was reminded that when South Africans went to vote on 27 April 1994, it was by no means certain that the outcome would be even remotely peaceful.
I was about to turn twelve years old during those elections, and I spent them shuttling between the television and a science project. (The public holidays played havoc with the curriculum.) My parents voted, and my mother volunteered at the polling station in the Paarl town hall, fielding questions from old ladies (‘do I need to vote for the National Party twice?’). I was old enough to understand the significance of the election, but young enough to be reassured by my parents when they said that everything would be alright.
Although we lived in a smallish town in an agricultural district near Cape Town, we were acutely aware of the violence and radical uncertainty of the period, and not only because both my parents were opposed to the apartheid regime. There were riots in Paarl after Chris Hani’s assassination; the far-right Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging arrived to protect my white, girls’ school from whatever they believed we needed protecting from (and were told exactly where they could go and put their rifles by our outraged – Afrikaans-speaking – headmistress); the bomb drills; our neighbour who horded tinned food before the election; the threatening phone calls from the police when my mother’s work for the Black Sash drew too much attention to herself; the radio announcer counting the numbers killed overnight in violence in the Vaal Triangle, in KwaZulu-Natal, and elsewhere, as we ate breakfast before school.
Today’s guest of honour was Judge Johann Kriegler, who headed the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) in 1994. He spoke about the chaos of the election: of the difficulties of getting ballot papers and even telephone lines to the very rural parts of the country, and how they had to scramble to include the Inkatha Freedom Party on the ballot papers, after its last-minute decision to participate in the election.
To reduce election fraud and because so many people were scared to vote, the IEC imported invisible ink from the United States to mark the hands of those who had voted. This ink would be visible only to ultraviolet lamps distributed to polling stations. But the lamps didn’t always work, and the ink soon ran out. What to do? Officials were told to continue pretending that the lamps did work, and to use water instead of invisible ink.
And yet things worked out.
I wish the police would stop shooting protesting civilians; that the Department of Education would send adequate supplies of textbooks to schools; that so many officials – from police in my local traffic department to the President – were not implicated in corruption; that there was no need for people to take to the streets to protest lack of service delivery; that there were no attempts to stifle freedom of expression; that the incidence of gender-based violence was not so high.
But as we gathered in the Fietas Museum after the speeches and the unveiling, drinking tea and eating samoosas and koeksisters and chilli bites, I felt that for all this – for all that we have so much still to do, for all that we never really defined what we mean by ‘transformation‘ – we’ll be alright. It’ll work out. Somehow.
Tangerine and Cinnamon by Sarah Duff is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Mar 23
Hope is a good breakfast
Forty-five years ago, the Black Panther Party (BPP) established a programme for free school breakfasts in a church in Oakland, California. By 1970, the following year, similar projects were being run by local chapters of the BPP across the United States, feeding thousands of school-age children a breakfast which included orange juice, eggs, bacon, toast, and grits.
These breakfast clubs were only one manifestation of the Panthers’ extensive social welfare programmes, which ranged from the provision of healthcare and legal aid, to anti-drugs projects. As Alondra Nelson has argued, these projects have gone largely unremembered
due to a failure of our collective memory. We tend to remember the Black Panther Party through iconography – the symbol of the black panther borrowed from civil rights activists in Alabama and other idiosyncratic political art; the graphic identity the organization established with its newspaper, The Black Panther; and the many photographs that captured the Panther posture.
However, the BPP’s ‘survival programmes’ were integral to its wider political aims.
The first group to take the name ‘Black Panther’ was founded in Alabama in 1965, partly by the civil rights campaigner Stokely Carmichael. This all-black group inspired the formation of similar organisations elsewhere, and particularly in Harlem, where young African-Americans were influenced by Carmichael’s waning enthusiasm for the civil rights movement’s embrace of non-violent protest, and his formulation of a ‘Black Power’ political programme.
The most influential of these Black Panther groups was founded in Oakland in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. Armed with rifles and other weapons, the initial focus of the Oakland chapter was on defending the local African-American community against the police department. However, and despite fierce and occasionally debilitating infighting within the movement, the BPP soon developed a radical vision for the political, social, and economic upliftment of African Americans.
The Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfasts for Children Programme (from the British Library)
The BPP’s Ten-Point Programme established a revolutionary agenda which, among others things, demanded equality before the law, an end to police brutality, and social rights: housing, employment, education, and ‘bread’. Creating what was, effectively, a welfare system for poor and disenfranchised African-Americans was the logical outcome of this programme. Father Earl Neil, at whose church the breakfast project was founded, remembered:
the party was focused on developing further points of their ten- point programme, and one of the things that Bobby [Seale] and Huey [Newton] used to ruminate about and discuss, is that when they went to school and then they noticed a lot of the children go to school hungry, so there was the idea of starting a breakfast programme. … We started out with 11 youngsters, and by the end of the week it was up to around 140. We didn’t need to advertise, we just had to say ‘Do you want a free breakfast?’ Of course the word spread.
Although the US Department of Agriculture had piloted a free breakfasts programme in 1966, its reach was fairly limited. Because the BPP’s project was run by individual chapters of the Party – and it was soon compulsory for each branch of the BPP to have its own breakfast programme – it was able to reach the very poorest African-American children, particularly in urban areas. The success of the programme soon drew the attention of the FBI, which labelled both free breakfasts and the BPP ‘communists’. In 1969 an FBI memo argued:
You state that the bureau should not attack programs of community interest such as the BPP ‘Breakfast for Children Programme.’ … You have obviously missed the point. The BPP is not engaged in the program for humanitarian reasons. This program was formed by the BPP … to create an image of civility, assume community control of Negroes, and fill adolescent children with their insidious poison.
Although police and FBI agents attempted to disrupt this and other survival programmes – even assassinating Fred Hampton, one of the BPP’s key organisers in Chicago – these efforts served only to draw support to the Free Breakfast Programme. Much to the chagrin of the FBI, one imagines, in 1975 Congress rolled out a fully funded, nation wide free breakfast programme, modelled, to some extent, on the one pioneered by the Panthers.
I am writing this shortly after South Africa’s Human Rights Day, held annually to recommit the country to upholding citizens’ human rights, and also to commemorate the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre. In a particularly ugly juxtapositioning, on the day before Human Rights Day, the Public Protector, Thuli Madonsela, announced the findings of her investigation into renovations done to President Zuma’s private homestead in the rural KwaZulu-Natal village of Nkandla. She found, to no-one’s surprise, that millions of public funds were spent on upgrading his home – so much, in fact, that she argued that no single individual would ever be able to pay back that amount of money to the state.
Madonsela drew attention to the fact that spending on several of the additions to Zuma’s home – including a swimming pool, helicopter pads, amphitheatre, cattle kraal, and clinic – was justified on the grounds that these amenities would be to the benefit of the impoverished community in Nkandla. However:
Accessing the clinic would mean entering Zuma’s homestead, either by scaling the security fence or through a police checkpoint. The swimming pool has never been used by the local residents. The clinic remains without stock….
When the Mail and Guardian first reported on the development of the Nkandla homestead it added that a vegetable garden had been planted to ensure the ‘food security’ of the compound. In a country where around one fifth of all children have stunted growth because of poor nutrition, fencing off a vegetable garden seems particularly callous.
It is certainly true that the Panthers’ Free Breakfast Programme was ideologically driven (and that its roll-out and operation reflected the ingrained misogyny in the BPP (breakfast programmes were run mainly by women)), but it was part of a vision for remaking American society that recognised that the fight for civil rights had to be accompanied by demands for social rights. In other words, desegregating schools had to be accompanied by efforts to ensure that all children had access to the resources, like breakfast and books and transport, which would allow them to participate fully in education.
Sources
David J. Garrow, ‘Picking up the Books: The New Historiography on the Black Panther Party,’ Reviews in American History, vol. 35, no. 4 (Dec. 2007), pp. 650-670.
Nik Heynen, ‘Bending the Bars of Empire from Every Ghetto for Survival: The Black Panther Party’s Radical Antihunger Politics of Social Reproduction and Scale,’ Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 99, no. 2 (2009), pp. 406-422.
Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
Yohuru Williams, ‘“Some abstract thing called freedom”: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Legacy of the Black Panther Party,’ OAH Magazine of History, vol. 22, no. 3, Black Power (Jul. 2008), pp. 16-21.
Tangerine and Cinnamon by Sarah Duff is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Things that have happened in Johannesburg recently
Things that have happened in Johannesburg – second greatest city after Paris – recently:
A spitting cobra was seen slithering into a car parked at the Gautrain Midrand station. A spokeswoman commented: ‘Specialist negotiators were brought in from the SPCA but the standoff continues.’
At the Maboneng Precinct.
There is a new prophet in Johannesburg.
In Braamfontein.
On Thursday, there were power cuts across the country because the coal supply for the national grid had been drenched with rain.
In Cyrildene, Johannesburg’s second Chinatown.
The trial of Oscar Pistorius in Pretoria ‘has also attracted a new political party called Africa Unite, which says it hopes to attract attention by being outside the court.’
In Hillbrow.
Tangerine and Cinnamon by Sarah Duff is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Fragments
On Sunday I went on a guided tour of Sophiatown, presented by the area’s cultural and heritage centre. It was the 59th anniversary – to the day – that police entered the suburb to clear it of its residents. Sophiatown tends to represent two things to South Africans: on the one hand, the vibrancy of life in multiracial and multicultural suburbs in early twentieth-century South Africa. Sophiatown attracted writers, musicians, and activists to a socially mixed suburb – one where Dr AB Xuma, President of the ANC during the 1940s, could buy a grand, wooden floored and high ceilinged house with ample garden, but where poor families squeezed into dank, dirty, and often crime ridden slums.
At the Sophiatown Heritage and Cultural Centre
And on the other, it represents the forced removal of people partly as a result of the Group Areas Act (1950), which segregated all residential areas according to race. As a ‘mixed’ suburb, Sophiatown – alongside District Six in Cape Town, for instance – was deemed to be in contravention of this legislation. Over the course of eight years, Sophiatown’s residents were moved to areas on the edges of Johannesburg: Africans to Meadowlands, Asians to Lenasia, and coloured people to Eldorado Park. The area itself was bulldozed, rebuilt, and rezoned as white. It was renamed Triomf (or ‘triumph’). (And was the subject of a harrowing and damning 1994 novel by Marlene van Niekerk.)
In 2006, the Johannesburg City Council restored the suburb’s name to Sophiatown, and there have been several attempts to excavate the area’s complex – even hidden – past. The Sophiatown Heritage and Cultural Centre has an exhibition of photographs of Sophiatown before the bulldozers arrived, and attempts to provide some sense of what it was like to live there. One of its most successful exhibits is a large, rectangular Perspex box filled with sand and what appears to be, on first glance, rubbish.
The ‘ghost house’ – one of the three buildings to survive the bulldozing of Sophiatown.
But the objects partially hidden by brown dirt are things dug up by Sophiatown’s new residents – those who moved into Triomf – since the early 1960s: frying pans, children’s toys, cutlery, combs, and even sewing machines which families had to leave behind in the chaos of forced removal. What makes the display so poignant – other than the way it demonstrates how apartheid legislation was worked out on a domestic, personal level – is that it connects the suburb’s past and present residents in a shared remembrance of a profoundly violent episode.
It also resonates during the Centre’s guided walk around Sophiatown. Only three buildings survived the bulldozing: Xuma’s house (currently the site of the Centre), a decrepit building now renamed the ‘ghost house’, and the Church of Christ the King – in some ways the epicentre of resistance to the removals. The tour moves between these buildings, making detours to the remains of the oak tree in Bertha Street, and to part of a wall – once part of the Odin Cinema – which miraculously was not torn down during the late 1950s.
The memorial to Father Trevor Huddleston.
Today, Sophiatown looks much the same as any working-class South African suburb, and, despite the valiant efforts of the tour guide, it was difficult to imagine how bustling and full of people – and energy – it must once have been. What did help was the presence two former residents, both of them anti-apartheid activists, whose memories were able to evoke the suburb before and during its destruction.
Over the course of the afternoon, I was reminded powerfully of Antoinette Burton’s remarks about the archive, and historians’ relationship with the archive:
The history of the archive is a history of loss…. I would argue … that it is the archive itself which should be subject to continuous suspicion and radical doubt, serving as it often does to normalise, through classification and re-representation, what are invariably ‘fragmented, fractured and disassembled’ strands of historical evidence and experience. If we fail to recognise how historical practice (or, indeed, any practice of looking) is in danger of reassembling and recalcifying what counts as evidence … we miss a valuable opportunity to interrogate our own investments in those domains.
The few fragments that remain of Sophiatown – the objects unearthed in residents’ gardens, the two houses, the wall, the tree, the church, photographs, newsreels, and people’s memories – draw attention to the incomplete, piecemeal nature of the archive. We have access to the past only through the bits and pieces – the papers, objects – which have managed to survive bulldozers, fire, water, decay, and archivists’ best intentions.
As a result of this, argues Burton, historians need to be acutely aware of how they assemble these fragments into portraits – interpretations, narratives – of the past. There has been a tendency to romanticise Sophiatown in its heyday, not only to ignore the crime and poverty endemic to the suburb, but also to erase histories of anti-apartheid groups other than the ANC which were active in the area. Writing a more complicated, nuanced social history of Sophiatown is a useful way of demonstrating how historians, themselves, are complicit in remaking the past, and that the past is being constantly remade and reinterpreted.
Sources
Antoinette Burton, ‘Thinking beyond the Boundaries: Empire, Feminism and the Domains of History,’ Social History, vol. 26, no. 1 (Jan., 2001), pp. 60-71.
Tangerine and Cinnamon by Sarah Duff is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Tangerine and Cinnamon 
Apr 30
Throwing Light
At the beginning of this year, The Economist published a worried article about the state of South Africa’s electricity supply. Eskom – the parastatal responsible for both generating and transmitting electricity across the nation – is in serious trouble. Rolling blackouts – called load shedding – have become increasingly the norm, as they’re used to reduce pressure on a grid already under strain mainly because of poor maintenance of transmission infrastructure:
The introduction of artificial light – first gas lamps during the eighteenth century, then gradually electricity – profoundly shaped the ways in which human beings lived and worked. With lamps and bulbs to light the early mornings and nighttime, the workday lengthened, dinner moved much later in the day, and the hours of sleep were limited to the darkest period at night and the very early morning. Experiences of walking the city after dark changed. Sean Cubitt writes:
The gradual electrification of domestic appliances, the slow spread of gas and electric ovens and stoves, and the growing availability of better refrigeration not only changed how people shopped, cooked, and ate, but also freed up women from intensive domestic labour. For most of the world’s population, though, access to expensive electricity remains precarious. When Sierra Leone declared a three-day curfew to limit the spread of ebola, many worried that households would be unable to store fresh produce in a hot country where refrigerator ownership is rare. Going to market there – and other parts of the continent – doesn’t represent some kind of commitment to seasonal, locally produced, and organic eating, but is, rather, a product of necessity. Even in wealthier countries, irregular power supply is the norm, not the exception. As Alex Christie-Miller, a journalist based in Istanbul, remarked recently on Twitter, ‘people tweeting too much about power cuts’ is really a case of #SecondWorldProblems. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has written eloquently about the frequent power outages in Lagos:
As we adapted to light – as electricity or power is described in Nigeria – so we have had to adapt to darkness, to hot days in summer, to very cold nights in winter. To periods of internet-lessness, to laptops with better batteries. This disruption of patterns of living shaped by electricity has forced us all into a series of – reluctant – accommodations. Solar panels and lamps, miners’ lamps, generators, inverters, hot boxes, and gas stoves all help to facilitate some form of normality. But we’ve had to change our routines too. Friends with light at night entertain those whose houses are in the dark. If my suburb is due to be load shed at the worst time – between 18:30 and 22:00 – I rush to finish as much work as I can before then, and spend the hours of darkness cooking because I have a gas stove, and then reading by my solar lamp.
Streetlamp and power lines, Gardens, Cape Town
Load shedding cuisine has become a feature of these blackouts too. Food magazines post lists of restaurants which continue to serve food – albeit frequently from a load shedding menu – when the power is cut. More often, we have to plan more carefully what and when we cook and bake. My mother managed to make enough brownies to feed 150 people at my sister’s wedding, and all through keeping a beady eye on load shedding schedules. A couple of weekends ago, unsure if the electricity would go off in the afternoon, I made a cheesecake that didn’t require baking, only setting in a fridge – and fridges and freezers remain cold without power unless their doors are opened too often.
Some tips for coping with an uncertain electricity supply (when schedules fail, and when the inevitable barbecue isn’t possible or desirable):
More suggestions welcome.
In ‘A Temporary Matter,’ the first story in Jhumpa Lahiri’s collection The Interpreter of Maladies (1999), a couple working out the devastating consequences of a miscarriage find a new way of speaking the truth to each other during a series of planned power cuts. The darkness allows them to say all the things they’d kept secret or avoided thinking about during the short period of their marriage.
In the Company’s Gardens, Cape Town
Partly because electricity has shaped our lives to such an extent that it’s unusual to live in complete darkness, we attach all sorts of positive meanings to the dark and being without light. In disconnection, we find connection. Temporary darkness becomes a space for contemplation, for self-reflection, for re-connection with one another and the natural world. I don’t have much patience for those who suggest that this current round of load shedding will be morally improving for South Africans – that it’ll teach us the virtues of slowness, for instance – as access to electricity still remains fairly uneven, despite the post-apartheid’s state’s success in increasing the numbers of households with electricity from 35% in 1990, to 84% two decades later. Also, as Ngozi Adichie writes:
Hospitals are exempt from load shedding in South Africa, but her point still stands. The country comes to a grinding halt whenever electricity cuts. Nonetheless, in a way, the darkness has become a space for a kind of truth-telling in South Africa: of an increasingly discredited state unable to fulfill one of its most basic functions – keeping the lights on.
Neighbourgoods Market, Braamfontein, Johannesburg
I am, though, interested to see how frugal cooking habits shaped by unpredictable electricity will change over the next few years – and not only in South Africa. Increasingly fragile electricity grids are not limited to the developing world. How will food writers rewrite recipes that depend on long periods of braising in expensive-to-heat ovens? How will recipe books make allowance for the difficulties of keeping fresh produce, fresh? How will our shifting relationship with energy produce new ways of cooking and eating?
Further reading
Sean Cubitt, ‘Electric Light and Electricity,’ Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 30, nos. 7/8 (2013), pp. 309–323.
David E. Nye, When the Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).