Mzansi Afrika

Quote of the day

"We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the internet, we know this is not true."

Robert Wilensky, American academic

Secrets

Post Secrets has been voted one of the top 50 blogs by Time Magazine. People post their  deepest secrets and they get put up on the blog. Some are dark, others funny, endearing or disturbing, all written on homemade postcards and collected by US blogger Frank Warren.  Anyone can contribute, and thousands have.

Technology and relationships

I am one of those people who hate cell phones. Of course, I’ll shamelessly admit to be being a complete hypocrite - I don’t hate them enough to go without one myself. The main reason I like having a cell phone is from a practical point of view - like if I ever happen to get stuck driving alone on the highway in the dark I can call for help. It’s also convenient to be able to contact people if something important comes up when you’re out and about.

The thing that drives me crazy about cell phones though, is that just because you have one, people expect you to be on 24 hour standby. Gone are the pre-cellular days, when if a person phoned you and there was no reply, they just assumed that you were out and that was that. Nowadays, if you don’t answer your cell phone instantaneously, people seem to get unreasonably tetchy, and leave sarcastic messages whinging on about how they don’t understand what the point of having a cell phone is when it never gets answered. Sheesh, you’d think that not answering your cell phone is tantamount to inflicting a grievous and unforgivable personal insult to whoever is trying to get hold of you.

As far as SMSing goes, well I completely missed the boat on that. It takes me half an hour to type a few mandatory sentences, it’s so much easier just to call and get it over with asap. Of course, that’s just me, I really admire other people who seem to acquire the necessary skills and can SMS so fast you can barely see their fingers move. As for anyone who has figured out how to use predictive text, they have my deepest respect. That is totally beyond the scope of my ability. SMS’s have their relationship downsides too, one of my friends got dumped via SMS which is pretty damn low if you ask me. One of my colleagues is currently conducting a flirtation, if you can call it that, with someone via SMS. She hasn’t even spoken to the guy, let alone met him, yet the whole thing seems to be taking up an inordinate amount of her mental space. That’s kind of bizarre.

Email, internet and cell phones have opened up a whole new way for people to conduct personal relationships in a way that it becomes so much more difficult to know what the other person is really about. It becomes possible to conduct a relationship in a sort of void removed from reality and lacking in intimacy. I guess the irony is that while internet relationships make it easier for some people to open up about themselves, it also makes it easier to be conned by unscrupulous people.

Reclaiming our past

One of the important tasks that South Africa has had to tackle since the advent of democracy has been to reclaim the past of the country - historically, politically and culturally. Cynics might argue that historical reality can never be objective - it always reflects the narrative of the ruling class. In the retelling of history new "myths" are propagated. Well, of course this is true of contemporary South Africa, just as we had the Afrikaner Nationalist version of history in the past, we now have the ANC narrative dominating the reclamation of our history. The only difference, and most importantly so, is that the ANC version is closer to the truth, it is for the most part reconcialatory and it encompasses all South Africans.

While we have paid a lot of attention to reclaiming our political history, the so called "arts" have often been given the short end of the stick. But even so, there has been an increasing effort over the past few years, to recognise the important contributions made by black fine artists. An interesting initiative is currently underway to try and track down South African artwork from the 1970s and 1980s. The task is not easy because a lot of "township art" was taken out of the country during the period spanning the Soweto uprising and the 1980s state of emergency. Few South African galleries bought these works at the time, which form an important part of the country's heritage, so much of it left the country in the hands of foreign diplomats and private collectors.

The Ifa Lethu Foundation (which is supported by the arts and culture department and private business), is leading the job of tracking down the missing artworks. So far, it has identified 170 artworks in countries as far apart as Australia, Sweden, Canada and the US.