Instead of Women’s Day, What About Women’s Enjoyment of Freedom Day?

August 12, 2011 by Dan Moshenberg 1 Comment

In South Africa, August 9 is National Women’s Day, and August is Women’s Month. This August, the Tshwaranang Legal Advocacy Centre, a South African women’s rights and well-being organization has a simple and direct question for everyone, “So just how real are women’s rights?”

They began, publically, to answer that question yesterday, August 11, with a new report, “The Right & The Real: A Shadow Report Analysing Selected Government Departments’ Implementation of the 1998 Domestic Violence Act and 2007 Sexual Offences Act”. On one hand, the answer paints a dismal picture. Only 8% of police stations meet their obligations under the Domestic Violence Act. Compliance would include helping a victim to find shelter and obtain medical assistance, serving notice on an abuser to appear in court, arresting an abuser who breaks a protection order, and, critically, keeping records of domestic violence. Failure to comply means misconduct, and should result in various forms of sanction and punishment. It hasn’t. Police stations ignore their responsibilities with impunity.

In 2007, 57% of police stations were compliant. Now … less than 8%. That’s not a drop, not even a steep drop. That’s a nose dive.

The report focuses on the failure of the South African Police Services and the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development (which includes National Prosecuting Authority), as well as the Departments of Health, Social Development and Correctional Services. The press has covered this failure as a failure to protect women and women’s rights, which it certainly is.

But Tshwaranang’s analysis goes far beyond the failure to protect.

The real of women’s rights is more than, bigger than, and more profound than “protection”. The real of women’s rights is freedom, and specifically the enjoyment of freedom:

“South Africa’s Constitutional Court makes it clear that, `few things can be more important to women than freedom from the threat of sexual violence.’ So important is this right to be free from all forms of violence that, along with the rights to life and dignity, it imposes two sorts of duties on the state: the first obliging the state to refrain from acting in ways that infringe on these rights, and the second compelling it to develop legislation and structures guaranteeing those rights….It is not only sexual violence that constitutes a rights violation of the sort requiring state intervention: `Indeed, the state is under a series of constitutional mandates which include the obligation to deal with domestic violence: to protect both the rights of everyone to enjoy freedom and security of the person and to bodily and psychological integrity, and the right to have their dignity respected and protected, as well as the defensive rights of everyone not to be subjected to torture in any way and not to be treated or punished in a cruel, inhuman or degrading way.”

Imagine a South Africa in which all women are free to move around as they please, dressed as they please. Imagine a world in which all women are free to move around as they please, dressed as they please. Imagine a world in which democracy means the enjoyment of freedom. Instead of celebrating Women’s Day, what about Women’s Enjoyment of Freedom Day?

(Photo credit: Halden Krog / Times Live)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Dan Moshenberg, enjoyment of freedom, freedom, Haunts, National Women's Day, police, protection, sexual violence, Shukumisa, South Africa, The Right & The Real, Tshwaranang Legal Advocacy Centre, women, Women's Month

Violence against women haunts independence

August 7, 2011 by Dan Moshenberg 3 Comments

Egyptian men and women in one hand

“After the revolution”. In Egypt and Tunisia, women who made the revolution, women who pushed Mubarak out, are now facing the struggle for more rights, autonomy, and physical safety. This should come as no surprise to the rest of the so-called independent world.

Yesterday, August 6, Jamaica celebrated 49 years of independence from the United Kingdom. There were celebrations. At the same time, sexual violence against girls is both increasing and intensifying.

Across the African continent, August is celebrated as Women’s Month. August was chosen to commemorate the August 9, 1956, women’s march in Pretoria, in protest of the infamous pass laws. The women chanted, shouted, screamed: “Wathint’Abafazi Wathint’imbokodo!”. “Now you have touched the women, you have struck a rock!”

That was 55 years ago. Today, the women are still being `touched’, and in the most violent ways. Across the nation, campaigns, such as the One in Nine Campaign, and organizations, such as the Rape Crisis Cape Town Trust, struggle to address and end violence agains women. Organizations such as Free Gender struggle to address and end violence against lesbian, and in particular Black lesbian, women. All of these women’s organizations, all of these women, all of these feminists, struggle to address and end the hatred that is rape.

In many places, such as in the United States, that hatred often takes the form of legislation. For example, in 2005 Wisconsin passed a law that barred access to hormone therapy or sex reassignment surgery for prison inmates and others in state custody. Three transgender women prisoners, Andrea Fields, Jessica Davison, Vankemah Moaton, challenged the law, and this week, after six years, won their case in a federal appeals court.

Meanwhile, in Washington, DC, the nation’s capital, transgender women are hunted, attacked, often killed. For the crime of being transgender women. For the crime of being women.

What is independence? What is a revolution? Across the globe, women continue to struggle for the basics of independence, of autonomy. That begins with real recognition, that begins with the State as well as the citizenry and the population ensuring women’s safety. Women are not specters and are not promises to be met. Until women’s simple physical integrity is ensured, rather than promised, violence against women will continue to haunt independence.

(Photo Credit: NPR / STR / AP)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Andrea Fields, Dan Moshenberg, Egypt, Free Gender, Haunts, independence, Jamaica, Jessica Davison, One in Nine Campaign, Pretoria, Rape Crisis Cape Town Trust, sexual violence, South Africa, Tunisia, United States, Vankemah Moaton, violence against women, Washington, Wisconsin

Do nothing (for 67 minutes)

July 8, 2011 by David Kapp Leave a Comment

Do nothing (for 67 minutes)

Do nothing
for 67 minutes
in defiance
of the call

Do nothing
for 67 minutes
out of the glare
of the public eye

Don’t abuse
your partner
or even your pet

67 minutes
of doing good
in honour of an icon
(there are but a few)

Do nothing
for 67 minutes
around and about
your usual everyday

Don’t smoke
cuss and curse
or spit in public
(be soft and gentle too)

(Might you apologize
for the inconvenience)

Do nothing
for 67 minutes
nobody will know
but it might tell

It might be an end
to woman and child abuse

Now go and do nothing

We are asked to give of ourselves for 67 minutes.

(Image Credit: O-blog-dee-o-blog-da)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: David Kapp, end women and child abuse, South Africa, The very unfortunate

Apartheid haunts domestic work

July 4, 2011 by Dan Moshenberg Leave a Comment

In Los Angeles County, there is one bus route, the 305, that directly links the low- and no-income residents of the southern suburbs to the wealthy homeowners of the West Side. Millions rely on the 305. Millions of employers, millions of workers. The 305 only exists because of decades-long struggles by people of color, in the streets, in the courts, in the corridors of power, in the living rooms and kitchens of neighbors and family. And after all that struggle, there’s one line. And that line is about to be closed.

It’s called an efficiency. Close the one line that actually serves low-income workers of color, and replace it with `a hub’. How’s that worked for the airline industry? Not so well, but that makes little to no difference. After all, what’s a few more unpaid, and costly, hours in transit in the daily lives of workers of color? It is estimated that the hub system will double the length of commutes and triple the price. Los Angeles doesn’t allow for free transfers from one line to another. It’s called efficiency.

Who are these workers? Janitors, nannies, maids. Women of color, women of color, women of color. Women of color with names. Guadalupe Lopez. Ana Hernandez. Marina Tejada. Silvia Conjura.

Every day hordes of `colored’ and Black women board the buses, and travel for hours, to tend to the needs, desires, idiosyncrasies, and mess of wealthy, more-often-than-not White individuals, families, households, neighborhoods, communities. Every day, women workers of color pay more and get less. Every day their debt increases. Every day their own families, households, neighborhoods, communities suffer the irretrievable lose of time. Every day.

And every day, the State figures out a new way, through efficiencies, of seizing yet another dollar, yet another hour, from the pocket, purses, bodies, and days and nights of these women of color. If this sounds familiar, it should. It was the logic of `public’ transport under the apartheid regimes in South Africa.

For coloured and African women workers, the State made transportation impossible and necessary, unaffordable … and required. It was a clear weapon in the war of some against the many. To this day, the country still struggles with the apartheid geography of impossible and unaffordable transport. As one writer noted yesterday, commenting on the death of his own nanny, Florence Mbuli, “You can now easily replace the word `Bantustan’ with `township’ or `informal settlement’”.

Yes, we can.

Across South Africa, women workers organize daily on the trains that take them to work. They organize domestic affairs, they organize political interventions, as women workers, as women of color. In Los Angeles County, the same is true. Women workers, every day on the bus, are organizing, organizing information, organizing domestic affairs, organizing political interventions.

Florence Mbuli lived to see the apartheid regime end. She lived to see her children grow up into “very successful people”. But the trains remain, the buses remain, the collective taxis remain, because the distances between home and work, the distances created by an apartheid logic of efficiency, remain. In fact, in many places, most notably the Cape Town metropolitan area, the distances have grown greater since 1994.

Today, Florence Mbuli rides with Guadalupe Lopez, Ana Hernandez, Marina Tejada and Silvia Conjura. Together they measure the time, the cost, the distances. Together they organize. The State can claim to reconcile individuals, even communities, but it can’t reconcile space. It can’t reconcile distances. From Watts to Westwood, from Khayelitsha and Mitchells Plain to Claremont and Rondebosch, and beyond, apartheid haunts domestic work.

(Photo Credit: Monica Almeida / The New York Times)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Ana Hernandez, apartheid, Cape Town, Claremont, Dan Moshenberg, domestic workers, Florence Mbuli, Guadalupe Lopez, Haunts, Khayelitsha, Los Angeles, Marina Tejada, Mitchells Plain, public transportation, Rondebosch, Silvia Conjura, South Africa, Watts, Westwood

In the steam room: 3 May 2011: Steamed and single but not rising to the top

May 4, 2011 by Venitha Pillay 1 Comment

The one thing you learn in the steam room, without the help of a teacher (an outdated word I know, but one which to my mind carries some sense of warmth and responsibility, unlike educator which in South Africa, offers a cold and fictional professionalism- but that’s a whole other story), is that hot air rises. So if you are sitting on the top level, things can get awfully hot up there, an experience which can evoke untold overused metaphors of how hot it gets at the top. In linguistic kindness, I shall refrain. Few of us venture up there and when we do we tend to descend rapidly. So some weeks ago I was listening to a lecture (no not in the steam room, in the Senate Hall, a very prestigious place where everyone is dressed to the hilt so unlike the steam room) about African women and leadership. It was a brilliant piece of research, exceptionally researched and creatively presented. There were few surprises: there is very limited research in this area and that a minimal number of African women occupy positions of leadership and that these are primarily in the service sector. And then the presenter threw in a seemingly small tidbit that perhaps I have intuitively known for some time: the majority of those women who do make it to leadership positions are either single or divorced. But having it said out loud to a huge hall full of people seemed to accord to it a sense of reality that I have hitherto avoided. Simply it meant that women who wanted to be executives had to make a choice: family or CEO? I have yet to read a story fictional or otherwise of a CEO breast feeding, taking kids to school, or even having husband and kids in the family portrait on the desk. Nope, seems like this is not a possibility. Nor does it exist even in the realms of fiction or fairytale. Which means it is not even something we can create in our imagination. Nope, have not even dreamt this. So should we be bodacious and write our own “I have a dream…” story? Yep, I think so.

But then a few days later I was assaulted by another presentation which told me that 56% of South African households are single parent families, of course the majority of these are women headed households and that 79% of single parent homes are among African people and that more than half these families live in poverty. Ok so we have a huge number of single women, but they are going nowhere near the top. They would be lucky if they could simply keep their heads above the quagmire of unemployment, abuse and poverty. In the midst of all this bleakness I heard we are devising a Gender Equality Bill that may seek to enforce gender quotas with respect to positions of power in government and private companies. So how does this Bill live alongside the cultural anachronism of polygamy, the apparent reality that single women have a better chance of a successful career, that even if she is single and competent, the chance of being in leadership is small, that if she is married and has children, she can forget it, and the figures that show a huge number of South African women are bringing up their children without fathers. The mind boggles and the heart sinks!

In the hazy steam room I feel the heat but am bogged down by so many clammy forces that keep me from rising. There are many dreams we have yet to dream.

(Image Credit: David Guglielmo / Moneyweb)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: In the steam room, South Africa, Venitha Pillay, women

Call them, simply, workers

May 2, 2011 by Dan Moshenberg 1 Comment

Yesterday was May 1, 2011. Around the globe, millions marched. Among the workers marching were sex workers, domestic workers, other denizens of the informal economy. Today is May 2, 2011. What are those workers today? Are they considered, simply, workers or are they `workers’, part worker, part … casual, part … informal, part …shadow, part … contingent, part … guest? All woman, all precarious, all the time.

Categorizing workers as part of a somehow other-than-formal work force and work space naturalizes their exclusion and subordination. Why should they have full rights when they’re not full workers? Minimum wage? For `real’ workers, yes. For live-in domestic workers? Not yet.

Why should informal workers have full `protections’ when they’re not full partners in the social industrial contract? They didn’t sign on. They’re informal. How could they have? They were coerced, trafficked, seduced, forced into their current jobs. They must have been. Otherwise, how could they have accepted such abysmal working conditions? The logic is impeccable … and wrong.

Over the weekend, sex workers in South Africa and India brought the lie of the informal economy logic to light. In South Africa, three Cape Town sex workers are suing the State for harassment. They say they were repeatedly taken into custody and held for forty-eight hours, after which they were released without being charged. The three women argue that when they were arrested, they were not `on duty.’ They were not arrested as sex workers but rather as women who at some point or another have engaged in sex work.

This some-point-or-another is the main insight of The First Pan-India Survey of Sex Workers, a major study of sex workers in India, released on Saturday, April 30. Over the past two years, Rohini Shani & V Kalyan Shankar surveyed three thousand women sex workers from fourteen states.

They found that poverty and limited education matter, but not in the way many expect. Poverty and limited education push girls into labor markets early on, often at the age of six or so, but not into sex work. The largest principal employment sector for the very young was domestic labor. The majority of women waited until they were somewhere between 15 and 22 before entering into sex work. That means women had been wage earning workers, for nine to sixteen years before they entered into sex work.

Over seventy percent of the women said they entered sex work of their own volition. For the vast majority, income was the reason. Sex work pays better than domestic labor, agricultural work, daily wage earning or so-called petty services.

In other words, from the perspectives of the sex workers, sex work is one of a number of `livelihood’ options, as Shani and Shankar conclude: “Sex work cannot be considered as singular or isolated in its links with poverty, for there are other occupations as well which fit into the category of `possible livelihood options’ before sex work emerges as one of them. Sex work is not the only site of poor working conditions. For those coming from the labour markets, they have experienced equally harsh conditions of highly labour intensive work for very low incomes. It is from these background cases, that the significance of sex work as a site of higher incomes or livelihoods emerges.”

From South Africa to India and beyond, the sex worker story centers on the fluidity of identity. In South Africa, three women argue that sex work is a job. It’s not an identity, it’s not permanent. Like any other job, when the worker leaves work, she gets to become herself … again. As herself, she has rights, including the rights to dignity, security, and the preservation of freedom.

In India, the researchers learned that context counts. They had to accept women’s multiple work identities if they wanted to depict and understand women’s choices and situations. As women sex workers described their working lives, they moved fluidly among various occupations, often in the same time period. For Indian women struggling in an unforgiving economy, no occupation is an island entire unto itself.

South African sex workers suing the State, Indian sex workers discussing their lives have something to say to workers, trade unions, researchers, and allies everywhere. Sex workers are not like workers nor are they labor lite. They are workers. While it may be true that none of us is free until all of us are free, they tell us that none of us can talk about women workers’ freedom until all of us recognize the fluidity of women workers’ identities. But for now, as a start, call them, simply, workers.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Bangladesh, Cape Town, casual worker, contingent worker, Dan Moshenberg, domestic work, domestic workers, fluidity, guest worker, Haunts, India, informal worker, Kenya, May Day, precarious worker, sex work, sex workers, shadow worker, South Africa

The dead shall not walk through those open doors

April 17, 2011 by Dan Moshenberg 6 Comments

Who is the stranger in our midst? Ask the police.

There was a protest, a service delivery protest, on Wednesday in Setseto, outside of Ficksburg, in the eastern part of the Free State, in South Africa. During the protest, Andries Tatane, a 33 year old activist, approached the police. Either he approached the police to plead for some consideration for an elderly man who was not part of the protest or he approached the police to ask them to stop using water cannons because there were elderly people in the protest. Tatane was shirtless, unarmed, unthreatening. About six or seven riot police attacked him, beat and kicked him. Then Andries Tatane was shot. Finally he collapsed, and died, 20 minutes later. By the time the ambulance arrived, Andries Tatane was dead, and the mourning, and outrage, had begun.

There was a protest, a student protest, on Monday in Kabale district, in southwestern Uganda. Students at Bubaare Secondary School went on strike, protesting a policy shift affecting the disposition of male and female students. During the protest, Judith Ntegyerize, a senior, walked by, on her way to classes. The riot police showed up just then, allegedly shot their rifles in the air, and a `stray’ bullet hit Ntegyerize in the head and killed her, instantly.

These are only two stories, only two stories from the past week. In the past year, there have been similar stories of unarmed innocents killed by police fire everywhere. Around the world there are murals to the martyrs, more often than not young women and men, such as Oscar Grant, in the United States, or Neda Agha-Soltan in Iran, or the young women and men killed by live fire in protests in Yemen, Syria, Bahrain, Egypt. Sometimes, their names become known, more often they remain anonymous. Sometimes, the State apologizes, but usually it just spins.

Whenever police are armed with live bullets and sent to a protest, the State has decreed that deadly force is an acceptable means to an end. But what is the end? It is the identification of the strangers, the strangers in our midst. Only the strangers can be so blithely beaten, kicked, shot, disposed of, dumped like so much garbage, killed. That is the nation-State’s rule of law, the law that protects `citizens’ against the threat, the pathogen, of strangers.

In a poem entitled “Passover”, Primo Levi enjoined us, all of us, to “light the lamp, open the door wide so the pilgrim can come in”. That poem ends with these words: “This year in fear and shame, next year in virtue and in justice.” Open the door, open it wide, and when you do, remember Andries Tatane and Judith Ntegyerize. Remember. The dead shall not walk through those open doors.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Andries Tatane, Bahrain, Dan Moshenberg, Egypt, Ficksburg, Free State, Haunts, Iran, Judith Ntegyerize, Kabale, Neda Agha-Soltan, Oscar Grant, Passover, Primo Levi, Setseto, South Africa, Syria, Uganda, United States, violence, Yemen

State sexual violence haunts the world

March 28, 2011 by Dan Moshenberg 1 Comment

Eman Al Obeidy burst into a hotel dining room in Tripoli, Libya, on Saturday, and struggled to tell the story of how she’d been raped and beaten, for two days, by Qaddafi’s forces. She was then attacked, in the hotel dining room, and carried out. Journalists present were disturbed, as much by the treatment they witnessed as by Al Obeidy’s account. The latest report suggests that she is being held hostage at Qaddafi’s compound in Tripoli.

Salwa al-Housiny Gouda was one of the proud citizens of Tahrir Square, in Cairo. She was also one of seventeen women, arrested by the Egyptian army, imprisoned, tortured, stripped and subjected to a `virginity test.’

These women’s stories are critical to any understanding of the ongoing struggles in particular places, such as Libya, such as Egypt. They are also part of the treatment of women in prisons around the globe. There are more prisons and jails now then ever before, and women are the fastest growing prison population, globally and in many regions of the world. Across the world, nation states rigorously refuse to address sexual violence. At the same time, across the world, nation states build more prisons in which sexual violence against women intensifies and spreads.

From the United States to Jamaica to South Africa and beyond, rape kits sit unprocessed for months, some times years. In the United States, many cities, such as Los Angeles and Chicago, have failed to process rape kits in a timely manner … if at all. When called to task for the failure, the administrations stonewall or, if forced to reform, drag their feet. Illinois just this past week passed a law “that will force law agencies to submit DNA evidence for testing.” They had to pass a law to make agencies process DNA. In New Jersey, also last week, the State legislature passed a law banning the practice of charging rape victims for the cost of processing the rape kits.

In Jamaica, rape survivors wait an average of two years for their attackers’ cases to be heard. In South Africa, the State has failed to adequately educate police about the appropriate procedures to follow in cases of sexual violence. Sometimes the training is a pro forma run through, with little follow up or evaluation. More often, there’s no training at all.

This is the state of the world. This state is made most manifest in the asylum and immigrant detentions centers. When the United Kingdom set up its fast track asylum processes, it did so with complete disregard for the women asylum seekers who are fleeing sexual violence. For example, one woman applied for asylum. She was part of a dissident movement in Angola, had been tortured, raped, and suffers from post traumatic stress syndrome, among other mental issues. The first official to hear her case, in 2008, decided she was `lying’. She was detained at Yarl’s Wood, despite compelling evidence of both torture and mental illness. All part of the system.

This is just one of many such tales. The asylum system has been described as “simply not equipped to handle rape, slavery, the threat of ‘honor killings,’ or other complex claims”. The simplicity of being unequipped is this: the state chooses not to equip, because women, and especially women of color, don’t matter.

At the same time, women prisoners suffer sexual violence at the hands of prison staff. Jan Lastocy is a woman prisoner in the United States, and hers is a typical story. She was raped, repeatedly, by a corrections officer. The warden made it clear that any reports of problems tagged the prisoner as a troublemaker. Lastocy was a few months from release. For seven months, three or four times a week, the prison guard raped Jan Lastocy. Terrified and desperate, she kept her silence. Upon release, she reported the assaults, and now suffers a sense of great and intense guilt for her silence. According to recent US government studies, the vast majority of sexual violence committed in prisons is committed by the staff.

Prison rape is a human rights crisis in the United States today. It is a crisis in juvenile prisons. It is a crisis in women’s prisons across the globe. This crisis is not accidental nor is it exceptional. It is the crisis of predictable consequence. Rape today is being used in Libya as a weapon. That is terrible. Rape has been used, across the globe, as a tool in the construction of so-called criminal justice systems, in the construction of more prisons with more women prisoners. That too is terrible, and to continue to claim shock and surprise at the use of rape is unacceptable. State sexual violence haunts the world.

(Photo Credit: suzeeinthecity/ Mira Shihadeh and El Zeft)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Chicago, Dan Moshenberg, Egypt, Eman Al Obeidy, Fast Track Asylum System, Haunts, Jamaica, Jan Lastocy, Liby, Los Angeles, mental illness, New Jersey, prison, rape, rape kits, Salwa al-Housiny Gouda, sexual violence, South Africa, torture, trauma, United Kingdom, United States, Yarl's Wood

That’s how I got caught on it

March 26, 2011 by David Kapp Leave a Comment

That’s how I got caught on it
(an ode to Crystal, not the meth)

That’s how I got caught on it
not the Cape’s drug of choice’
tik – methamphetamine –
says Bonteheuwels’ Crystal Cupido
UWC Lifelong Learning Award Winner

Crystal, not the meth
many of us are hooked on
getting high on the drug
and not on the everyday of life

Getting high she did
at the tender age of 6
(courtesy of her mother)
on Bronté’s Wuthering Heights
and other such pleasures

That’s how I got caught on it
literature from long ago
made her want to study English
though she faltered at Grade 12

Crystal, not the meth
from out Bonteheuwel way
where news is habitually bad
(the area once a liberated zone)

She is high on literature
got her chance at UWC when
lots of people closed their doors
(she determined like never before)

So while tik has made it
ruining the lives of many
might Crystal’s perseverance
make it in yours

“Crystal’s resolve has life lessons for all” (Athlone News, March 23 2011)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Bonteheuwel, Crystal Cupido, David Kapp, education, lifelong learning, methamphetamine, South Africa, The very unfortunate, tik, UWC

In the steam room: not the cricket thing to do

March 14, 2011 by Venitha Pillay Leave a Comment

This may be surprising but the topic of sport can easily raise the temperature in the steam room.

Yep, we talk about sport in there and it’s usually when one of two extremes happen: we won or we lost. Imagine that!! There’s not much focus on amazing agility or magical manoeuvres. It’s all about whether our team did us proud or not. And the code of sport is not really of consequence. But this Sunday things got a bit hazy in there. Yep we beat India in the cricket match when there seemed little hope of winning. But the glory of this victory was clouded by the previous loss against England.

As I watched wicket after wicket fall in the SA vs England game, my other fallen hero, Hansie Cronje, then captain of the South Africa cricket team and who had confessed to match fixing and taking bribes, came to mind. In the glory days after apartheid I believed he was the role model of sportsmanship, of integrity and doing the right thing on the sports field. But then my hero went up in flames when his crooked ways came to light, this being followed by his plane crashing against a mountain. Talk about divine justice. Sadly the apologies and explanations of being led by the devil did not heal my broken heart. And making a movie about it all seemed like just another get rich ploy.

Today our newspapers are filled with stories of struggle heroes and comrades getting sickeningly rich through tenders to build national highways and collecting tolls. On the one hand we cannot build roads at the expense of the national treasury. We are not a socialist state and we have to live in the real world. And of course we cannot become a ‘welfare’ state. Let’s forget for a moment that the state is the main source of sheltered employment (those endless circles of de ja vu are driving me batty). Someone must pay for the roads. Forever. On the other hand let’s nationalise the mines. After all we professed socialism. Mmmmm impending implosions?? And for whom do these bells now toll?

So we girls added more lavender to the steam, waddled over to our bits of colourful towels, and found momentary solace in the professed peacemaking of lavender. Somehow Cosmo seemed more plausible than anything in the real world at this moment.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: cricket, Hansie Cronje, In the steam room, South Africa, sports, Venitha Pillay, women