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Is Abubakar Shekau dead or no? Reluctant to trust claims about Boko Haram from Buhari.
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Aug 23, 2016 17:44
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KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD posted:Is Abubakar Shekau dead or no? Reluctant to trust claims about Boko Haram from Buhari. It just happened, give it time. Man, I wish I were there for that Kerry visit. Kudos to him for going north, but it should have been Jos or Kano to inspire confidence, Sokoto is too safe
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Aug 23, 2016 17:49
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KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD posted:Is Abubakar Shekau dead or no? Reluctant to trust claims about Boko Haram from Buhari. I think this is the second time he's been declared fatally wounded? Though last time he did seem to be out of action for a bit and rumours of a split/coup where spread around by Chad. Though, if you're not keeping up, its worth remembering Shekau has technically been given the sack by ISIS and replaced with Abu Musab Al-Barnawi, the last surviving son of Boko Harams founder Yusuf. Though Shekau has denied this (but has started using Book Haram's pre-ISIS merger name again) - even though the word came from ISIS sources
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Aug 23, 2016 18:01
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Lead out in cuffs posted:Have you tried the Life&Style section of the Sunday Times and/or various men's magazines? David Coltart is a middle class author of an excellent book on Zimbabwe's situation who was both pissed at Rhodesia policies and at Mugabes antics. I was wondering if there was a similar author like that for South Africa so i could learn of the entire situation there.
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Aug 23, 2016 23:08
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Grouchio posted:David Coltart is a middle class author of an excellent book on Zimbabwe's situation who was both pissed at Rhodesia policies and at Mugabes antics. I was wondering if there was a similar author like that for South Africa so i could learn of the entire situation there. Again, if you want to know what the life of privileged white people is like in South Africa, reading those newspapers will give you a good idea. It will also be about as accurate a picture of "the entire situation" as you'd get asking a white Nashville suburbanite about race relations in the deep South. If you want to get a flavour for the country under Apartheid, Nelson Mandela's autobiography "Long Walk to Freedom" is excellent and beautifully written. For more recent stuff, I'm not too sure about books, but how about a blog by a university professor (who is also a black woman and a feminist)?
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Aug 24, 2016 07:30
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LmaoAP posted:Nigeria president says Boko Haram leader has been wounded
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Aug 30, 2016 15:23
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http://mg.co.za/article/2016-08-29-pretoria-girls-high-school-pupil-i-was-instructed-to-fix-myself-as-if-i-was-broken http://voices.news24.com/aviwe-ndyaluvane/2016/08/33450/ quote:Pretoria Girls High School pupil: I was instructed to fix myself as if I was broken
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Aug 31, 2016 23:47
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Reminds me of this cartoon article about, well, essentially the same issue of Black girls being taught that their hair is wrong.
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Sep 1, 2016 14:17
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Cat Mattress posted:Reminds me of this cartoon article about, well, essentially the same issue of Black girls being taught that their hair is wrong. Yeah, it's pretty much exactly that. Except, except that this is also a group of teenage black girls who staged a protest which has sparked a national dialogue and forced reforms in schools around the country. In the end the story is actually pretty encouraging. South Africa's in a weird place at the moment. The structural racism put in place by Apartheid is still very much in place. White people are still (vastly) disproportionately wealthy, have better access to education, hold somewhere around 60% of managerial positions (despite being only 10% of the country's population), etc, etc. Meanwhile, the race gap in income has actually grown since Apartheid ended. While the growth is likely due in part to the inequality-amplifying effects of neoliberal economics, it does speak to a dire need for economic transformation. Yet many (most?) white people are quite comfortable in this privilege-bubble, and get quite reactionary to efforts towards economic equality. At the same time, because of privilege, white people's voices are amplified in political discourse, even though we represent a tiny minority of the electorate. A lot of these voices come from a position of colourblind or even more overt racism, and there's a lot of white saviour complex. Consequently, there's a (not unreasonable) tendency among the majority-black electorate to reject white voices in politics, and "liberal" is often a negative epithet (in the sense of "not left enough"). At the same time, Jacob Zuma is a frightening figure to have at the head of the country. In his favour, he comes from a ridiculously poor background, and has no formal schooling (not even elementary school -- he taught himself to read and write). This makes him a pretty sympathetic figure for poor South Africans. In fact, much of his platform for election (and for taking over control of the ANC) was of populist economic transformation. However, his involvement with politics in the ANC had him sent the USSR for training, which he applied in his position of head of intelligence of the ANC in exile, complete with purges and secret police. You only need to look to Russia to see what happens when you have a former spook in power, and coincidentally Putin and Zuma are best buds. While Zuma ostensibly got into power with the goal of improving the lot of the poor, this has measurably not happened (see the chart linked above), and there has been a parallel increase in in unrest. (Though, to be fair, this began in 2004, before Zuma was elected). Instead, he seems to have followed more of a Putin trajectory of consolidating power both within the country and within the ANC through purges and spies. This has included taking control of the state media as an effective propaganda outlet of the party. So, we have a country in dire need of economic transformation, but a government that clearly is not up to the job (and is busily trying to suppress the independent press and other sources of opposition). At the same time, the most vocal critics of the current government are rich white people. The optics of this are obviously terrible to the poor black majority who have the biggest say in elections. A revolution is needed, and it cannot come from either Zuma and his sycophants or from privileged white people. And this is why I get excited when I see young black women engaging in protest actions. The FeesMustFall earlier this year, where they started at Wits University, was led by an Indian and black woman. RhodeMustFall continues to have a strong intersectional feminist presence. The ANC's victory speech after this year's local elections were interrupted by four black women standing front of Jacob Zuma, protesting against rape and against lovely misogynistic things he said during his rape trial ten years ago. There is a new class of political activists, who are young, black, intensely-educated, radical and fed up with the current political class. A meme that was going around on Facebook during FeesMustFall was that this was the class of 2016 against the class of 1976 (when the Soweto uprising happened). I think there's a lot of hope for the future with them. Anyway, way more words than I thought I'd write, but that's hopefully a fair overview of South African politics at the moment.
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Sep 2, 2016 21:48
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Holy poo poo, some potentially maybe good news if it doesn't end in a massacre for once in this thread. 
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Sep 2, 2016 21:54
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my dad posted:Holy poo poo, some potentially maybe good news if it doesn't end in a massacre for once in this thread. Hey, South Africa's only had one massacre in the last ten years.   
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Sep 2, 2016 22:07
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Look at the mess in Gabon. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-37252778 http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/gabon-election-protests-1.3743962
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Sep 2, 2016 22:30
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It's been really heartening to see intersectionality actually working in minority protest movements over the past few years- the original BLM really stood out to me in this regard.
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Sep 2, 2016 22:55
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I've heard that it is more beneficial in being black in South Africa than white. I also heard that South Africa has a lot of affirmative action policies that go way too far and are disastrous to the country (specifically the farm relocation program). This BBC documentary seems to back these statements up, at least the former one. How true is all this? Lead out in cuffs posted:Great stuff. Thanks for this.
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Sep 3, 2016 01:08
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Lead out in cuffs posted:
what ever happend to that kid who acted like a dickhead to the waitress and laughed about it online and was also part of the RhodeMustFall campaign. I agree with his campaign(gently caress rhodes) but that just seemed overly dickish and spitful. http://www.timeslive.co.za/sundaytimes/stnews/2016/05/08/RhodesMustFall-activists-snub-last-straw-for-waitress
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Sep 3, 2016 01:25
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punk rebel ecks posted:I've heard that it is more beneficial in being black in South Africa than white. I also heard that South Africa has a lot of affirmative action policies that go way too far and are disastrous to the country (specifically the farm relocation program). About as true as saying that affirmative action has made being black better than being white in the Deep South. Less true, even. I'll re-link some of the stats: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/12/06/chart-of-the-week-how-south-africa-changed-and-didnt-over-mandelas-lifetime https://africacheck.org/reports/race-poverty-and-inequality-black-first-land-first-claims-fact-checked/ The first is from the Economist, and has a definite (mildly racist) agenda, but points out that black people are vastly poorer than white people on average. The second is a fact-checking (by the equivalent of Politifact) of a radical land redistribution organisation, so goes into a good analysis. There's also plenty of overt and structural racism against black people: http://www.thetablet.co.uk/news/3085/0/institutional-racism-still-rife-says-south-african-archbishop http://www.latimes.com/world/africa/la-fg-south-africa-racism-20150531-story.html http://www.lhr.org.za/news/2015/return-dompas-institutional-racism-21st-century-south-africa I've skimmed through that video you linked, and a handful of white squatters in no way supports the idea that life is terrible for white South Africans. There are literally millions of black South Africans living in conditions equal to or worse than that. (That myth is also a pretty popular little bit of white fragility that gets trotted out a little too often.) punk rebel ecks posted:Thanks for this. You're welcome.
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Sep 3, 2016 02:12
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Most of the criticism that gets thrown at South African land reform was that is a bungled mess that lacked follow through support for the early community ran farm co-ops that where launched in the pre-Mbeki days before the policy shifted to focus on a more individual entrepreneurial idea of land distribution. It's important to remember South African land redistribution operates on a willing seller willing buyer scheme (something the EFF has demanded be scrapped) - I'm just going to exclude the whole issue of communal land and tenure security because when people talk about land redistribution they are usually talking about movement from whites>blacks rather than reforming communal land. Only about 7% of land has been redistributed and it's important to remember that a lot of what is being redistributed is marginal land. The collapse of Apartheid brought an end to the lavish farm subsidies and tight import/export controls the Apartheid government used to prop up an agricultural sector that was already beginning to struggle (and secure support from the political vital constituency of white farmers) - with many of the financial supports withdrawn marginal land ceased to become profitable and suddenly farmers became "willing sellers". At the same time a process of land consolidation began in the 80's continued as large scale producers snapped up smaller farms with good land to increase their holdings, the number of commercial farmers has almost halfed since the end of Apartheid and there has been a significant shift to high-intensity farming due to the favorable economy of the scale (production has stayed relatively on top of consumption even with steadily declining farm numbers). South African agribusiness has become an increasingly unwelcoming place for the "family farm" dynamic Add on to that drought and increasing water scarcity and it's a pattern that's not going to change any time soon
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Sep 3, 2016 02:21
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Dapper_Swindler posted:what ever happend to that kid who acted like a dickhead to the waitress and laughed about it online and was also part of the RhodeMustFall campaign. I agree with his campaign(gently caress rhodes) but that just seemed overly dickish and spitful. http://www.timeslive.co.za/sundaytimes/stnews/2016/05/08/RhodesMustFall-activists-snub-last-straw-for-waitress I don't know, but do you notice how that article has about two pages worth of quotes from the poor little white girl, and no direct quotes from Qwabe? Here's his response: http://www.thedailyvox.co.za/ntokozo-qwabe-black-people-whiteness-rhodes-scholar/ It was a dick move, but the overall media coverage (not least of all in the UK press), speaks volumes.
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Sep 3, 2016 02:30
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Fascinating stuff in here. Just curious as you guys seem educated. What would you say that South Africa needs right now?
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Sep 3, 2016 02:56
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The problem with the "... must fall" campaign is that they kind of lost direction and got too violent. The fees/original Rhodes must fall campaign may have had good intentions, but trying to bring it to the UK so forcefully was a mistake. Most people just saw that the instigator was a recipient of the Rhodes scholarship and seemed rather hypocritical, so there was no real support and it kind of discredited the whole movement, making it a huge embarrassment. Then it moved into the campus housing situation which evolved into burning the school, destroying lots of historical artwork and shutting down universities, radicalizing the movement too fast and turning off a lot of the moderates. Then the whole anti-white movement came out to the forefront, around the same time as the Gupta scandal, the sacking of the finance minister, and other poo poo going on. I suppose all of those scandals and riots going down at the same time must have had an effect on the municipal elections. It certainly has been an interesting year. It's hard to say what SA needs, the problem is that there's an elite force of both black and whites who control everything and at the moment have had only provided excuses to poor blacks and Afrikaners (usually related to Apartheid, they tell the blacks that all of their problems are due to it, and the Afrikaners lost a lot of their jobs due to BEE and have not been able to re-enter society successfully, so they blame Mandela / De Klerk for everything and ignore all the evidence of the likely civil war that would have taken place). There needs to be some way to provide infrastructure and economic improvement to those groups, which the DA has been promising. For the most part DA seems to have run the Western Cape fairly well compared to the competition, but you still have areas like the Cape Flats which haven't seen much improvement. It's not really a black/white issue, it's completely an economic one, but a lot of people only see it as a battle of races which makes it difficult to proceed. I think changing the mindset is the first step, but of course that's much easier said than done.
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Sep 3, 2016 03:13
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Original_Z posted:Most people just saw that the instigator was a recipient of the Rhodes scholarship and seemed rather hypocritical, so there was no real support and it kind of discredited the whole movement, making it a huge embarrassment. Who are "most people"? Anyway, I don't really see any hypocrisy in Qwabe holding a Rhodes (ugh) scholarship. What's he going to do, turn down the scholarship created with money ill-gotten off the backs of his ancestors because it bears the name of the racist colonial mogul who created it? Original_Z posted:The fees/original Rhodes must fall campaign may have had good intentions, but trying to bring it to the UK so forcefully was a mistake. I'm not sure I understand how it was "forcefully" brought to the UK. If anything the criticisms I've seen are that it was too watered down. Anyway, given the propensity for the wrong end of the British political spectrum to have wet dreams about the "civilising influence" of the British Empire, I'm actually pretty OK with that being thrown in their face a little I would also take most British reporting on this with an enormous helping of salt. A large part of the British press is racist as gently caress (see Brexit), and loves them an opportunity to cast "the natives" in a bad light. Original_Z posted:Then it moved into the campus housing situation which evolved into burning the school, destroying lots of historical artwork and shutting down universities, radicalizing the movement too fast and turning off a lot of the moderates. RhodesMustFall is a large entity, and both the lecture hall fire on Wits and the burning of paintings at the UCT residence were carried out by minority groups within it. The lecture hall burning was pretty inexcusable. For the paintings, I can understand how black students, after having sat through years of being surrounded by paintings of rich white people in their dining room, while experiencing racism on a daily basis, could want to take those paintings down. Burning them was lovely, though. Original_Z posted:the whole anti-white movement Can you explain what you mean (or think you mean) by this? Original_Z posted:It's hard to say what SA needs, the problem is that there's an elite force of both black and whites who control everything and at the moment have had only provided excuses to poor blacks and Afrikaners (usually related to Apartheid, they tell the blacks that all of their problems are due to it, and the Afrikaners lost a lot of their jobs due to BEE and have not been able to re-enter society successfully, so they blame Mandela / De Klerk for everything and ignore all the evidence of the likely civil war that would have taken place). There needs to be some way to provide infrastructure and economic improvement to those groups, which the DA has been promising. For the most part DA seems to have run the Western Cape fairly well compared to the competition, but you still have areas like the Cape Flats which haven't seen much improvement. It's not really a black/white issue, it's completely an economic one, but a lot of people only see it as a battle of races which makes it difficult to proceed. I think changing the mindset is the first step, but of course that's much easier said than done. Afrikaners are like 5% of the population, and still one of the most privileged groups by a huge margin. They really, really do not need more infrastructure and economic improvement. Also, economic disparity in South Africa is almost entirely a black/white issue, and it's pretty disingenuous (or ignorant of facts) to say otherwise. PS: The DA's management of the Western Cape has involved literally rounding up homeless people and putting them in camps. They have a long way to go before they can present themselves as actually caring about anyone other than the rich middle class.
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Sep 3, 2016 07:46
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kustomkarkommando posted:Most of the criticism that gets thrown at South African land reform was that is a bungled mess that lacked follow through support for the early community ran farm co-ops that where launched in the pre-Mbeki days before the policy shifted to focus on a more individual entrepreneurial idea of land distribution. It's important to remember South African land redistribution operates on a willing seller willing buyer scheme (something the EFF has demanded be scrapped) - I'm just going to exclude the whole issue of communal land and tenure security because when people talk about land redistribution they are usually talking about movement from whites>blacks rather than reforming communal land. Yeah, true this, although admittedly some of these factors (land consolidation/the death of the "family farm") are at play in most parts of the world. I think it's similar to how a lot of the efforts at black economic empowerment / affirmative action have been counteracted by neoliberal economics tending to make the rich richer on a global scale, and especially since the 90s (which is coincidentally also the post-Apartheid period).
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Sep 3, 2016 07:50
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How big is "Socialism" in South Africa? Or does race relations play a forefront in political discourse?
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Sep 3, 2016 15:50
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Original_Z posted:Most people just saw that the instigator was a recipient of the Rhodes scholarship and seemed rather hypocritical What's hypocritical about that? Does the scholarship requires you to pledge allegiance to the ghost of Cecil Rhodes? Was the Rhodes Must Fall campaign militating for the abolition of scholarships? Does the Rhodes Scholarship actually need to remain named "Rhodes Scholarship"?
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Sep 3, 2016 17:20
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Rhodes Must Fall millennials in the UK mainly shouted about how that statue needs to be taken down in favour of shouting about anything of substance. It was at that point that they crossed over from being serious movement that attempts to put social issues into the public eye to being a stupid movement for self righteous idiots.
suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 17:38 on Sep 3, 2016 |
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Sep 3, 2016 17:35
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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blowfish posted:Rhodes Must Fall millennials in the UK mainly shouted about how that statue needs to be taken down in favour of shouting about anything of substance. Taking down a statue honoring a terrible person is a thing of substance, see: Confederate statues in the US.
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Sep 3, 2016 17:37
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Badger of Basra posted:Taking down a statue honoring a terrible person is a thing of substance, see: Confederate statues in the US. No, that's not how you do it. You leave the statue there and maybe add things like plaques explaining the historical context.
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Sep 3, 2016 17:40
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Thank god the chief statue knower is here to tell black people what they should do, about the statues
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Sep 3, 2016 17:52
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Badger of Basra posted:Taking down a statue honoring a terrible person is a thing of substance, see: Confederate statues in the US. It's a paradigm-setting case of insubstantial change. The confederate statues were never a source, but rather a third-tier symptom, of problems of reconstruction and ongoing racial inequality.
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Sep 3, 2016 18:15
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Badger of Basra posted:Thank god the chief statue knower is here to tell black people what they should do, about the statues *pulls down statue of dead Bad GuyTM* *declares mission accomplished in facebook post* *enjoys just and fair world* suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Sep 3, 2016 |
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Sep 3, 2016 18:18
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blowfish posted:No, that's not how you do it. You leave the statue there and maybe add things like plaques explaining the historical context.
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Sep 3, 2016 18:26
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blowfish posted:
A campaign to take it down is confronting it.
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Sep 3, 2016 18:28
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Grouchio posted:And paint the words "TRAITOR" or "HORRIBLE PERSON" all over them. A better idea than just taking it down.
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Sep 3, 2016 18:44
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The fact that a simple statue can't even be taken down says a lot about how willing people are to confront real issues.
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Sep 3, 2016 18:47
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computer parts posted:The fact that a simple statue can't even be taken down says a lot about how willing people are to confront real issues. Enforcing civilised discourse over an attitude "i unbellyfeel $historical_figure" is a good of its own.
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Sep 3, 2016 18:52
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#AllStatuesMatter
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Sep 3, 2016 18:54
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blowfish posted:No, that's not how you do it. You leave the statue there and maybe add things like plaques explaining the historical context. This statute was erected to honour a man who gave us a ridiculous amount of money when he died and only attended this college as he saw a studying here to be necessary for his social advancement.
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Sep 3, 2016 19:14
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P.s. we know his reputation was largely in tatters when he died and public opinion considered him a controversial figure even contemporaneously but did we mention he gave us a lot of money
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Sep 3, 2016 19:16
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Badger of Basra posted:A campaign to take it down is confronting it. No, it's blindly smashing things that upset you, and it's the very definition of refusing to confront them no matter whether you're powerful enough to succeed or not. kustomkarkommando posted:This statute was erected to honour a man who gave us a ridiculous amount of money when he died and only attended this college as he saw a studying here to be necessary for his social advancement. A better idea than taking it down.
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Sep 3, 2016 19:17
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blowfish posted:No, it's blindly smashing things that upset you, and it's the very definition of refusing to confront them no matter whether you're powerful enough to succeed or not. No, challenging the presence of a statue honouring a man who's achievements where the subjugation of African peoples for direct personal profit whose white supremacist ideas where considered controversial even at the time of his death is confronting the issue
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Sep 3, 2016 19:27
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