Month: February 2016

Virtual Video

Virtual Video

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

whichistherealsavimbiWhat’s the difference between a video game and a terrorist?

The family of a controversial Angolan rebel leader who died in 2002 is suing the manufacturer of the “Call of Duty” video game for defaming Jonas Sivimbi.

I interviewed Sivimbi in Paris when I was covering the Paris Peace talks (on Vietnam) for several U.S. newspapers. Back then in the 1970s he was a hero to the independence movement as well as the South African anti-apartheid movement, since South Africa was at the time fighting the independence movement in Angola.

Subsequent to my brief acquaintance, though, Savimbi’s reputation declined substantially.

Independence was won by a rival rebel group, MPLA, from Portugal in 1975, and though initially Savimbi was a part of the overall peace process, he immediately started a brutal civil war against the MPLA that lasted virtually until the moment he was killed by government soldiers in 2002.

During that civil war he grew vicious becoming the first warlord to finance his battle with blood diamonds. UNITA and Savimbi were ultimately investigated for war crimes by The Hague.

“Call of Duty” features Savimbi, or for sure someone who looks (and acts) the spitting image.

In answering the Savimbi family suit, the French creator and owner of “Call of Duty” claimed that Savimbi-in-the-game was actually shown in a “favorable light” and a “good guy who comes to help the heroes.”

Seeking 100 million Euros, Savimbi’s now 42-year old son said, “Seeing him kill people, cutting someone’s arm off … that’s not like Papa.”

I haven’t looked at the game. I can’t stand media violence and I know that “Call of Duty” is one of the worst.

NPR featured “Call of Duty” in its series of violence in video games in 2013 as at the time the most popular and most violent.

UNITA is now a franchised part of peaceful Angolan society, and they are encouraging – possibly joining – the Savimbi family in their suit.

The line between moral freedom fighters and amoral terrorists is thin. But there is no division at all between the violence of a video game and the violence promoted by today’s jihadists.

Games targeted to teenagers who have yet to fully develop their moral compass strikes me as one of the most barbaric outcomes of crass capitalism.

Ratings are only rarely useful and require parents or guardians actually capable of enforcing them.

If Republican candidates will blithely suggest carpet bombing the Levant, I guess it’s not radical for me to suggest that video games like “Call of Duty” should be banned.

I’ve no loyalty to my brief encounter with Savimbi, who at the time was a gentle, highly respected and admired grass roots leader. He turned, and so did a bunch of kids from Minneapolis who participated in the Westgate Mall attack and dozens of others from America who appear on jihadist videos.

Carpet bombing them simply cleans the field for new faces. Getting rid of their platform is the only way to end the game.

Halisi na ukweli!

Halisi na ukweli!

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

iowaelectionLetter to my African Friends:

Last night I watched the first official tallies of this presidential election. I realized that meaningful social change using democracy is something possible in Africa but not very likely in America.

This because in places like South Africa and Kenya you’re tinkering with new constitutions; in Tanzania you’re considering a whole new constitution.

America’s constitution will soon be 250 years old. Unlike Europe where constitutions were changed often radically many times, most Americans believe that our aged constitution remains the best plan for running a society.

That’s because most Americans are afraid of change.

In my short lifetime unexpected hurt has beset us Americans, social pain not experienced since our Civil War almost 150 years ago. Because for most of our 250 years American society was healthier, freer and happier than almost all the rest of the world, most Americans think our current hurt is temporary and unusual, and that we should just “keep on trucking” and ultimately things will get better.

Meanwhile with each passing year our constitution ossifies even more. Every constitution tries to perpetuate itself, and we let ours get away with murder.

Here’s what I want to tell you as you fashion your new societies with democracy:

1) Executive presidencies like America’s are bad. Too much attention becomes focused on a single person. Parliamentary democracies like Europe have a much longer and more prosperous future.

2) Don’t tinker with the media. We did. We allowed oligarchy business crazies like Rupert Murdoch to buy then control our media. Our free and democratic society should have stopped him. He did too many illegal or almost illegal things to gain control, and then with time this control seemed organic, not ordered like it really was. The desperate needs of one man started to grow through the entire society.

3) Don’t be afraid to enforce the truth. This is a touchy subject, and the retort you’ll hear is that there are differing views on what’s true. That’s playing around with the language. Kutekeleza ukweli. Swahili is better for saying this. There is a truth, a reality, an ukweli. Climate change is halisi. Put them together and “ukweli na halisi” is incontrovertible truth, and we’ve lost it in America.

We allowed economic forces to deny reality. I suppose that doesn’t matter in some cases, and the argument is that the “right to say anything” is a part of free speech. But when those forces deny climate change, deny womens’ rights, deny voters’ rights, deny science, it gets rid of truth. That’s what’s happened in America.

I think this is because our system is so old it perforce doesn’t work as well as more modern systems of government, and while that isn’t ukweli na halisi it’s close. Our society is afraid of change, and so much so that it now freely allows denial of the truth.

Finally don’t think you’re without problems or that we Americans don’t have a lot to admire. We’re much less racist and ethnic than you are. Racism and ethnocentricity could very well be your Achilles Heal, just as fear of change is ours.

We are fiercely independent, and you aren’t. Many of you think of independence as courageous but pointless. We equate independence with freedom, and so should you.

Those of you reading this are likely part of the “emerging middle class.” You’re no longer herding goats or trucking Jerry cans from the river. Your society has managed to liberate you personally from many economic hardships.

Lots of your brothers and sisters aren’t where you are, yet. Don’t abandon them for your own stardom, as we so often do in America. Don’t embrace the false notion that “you pulled yourself up” so why can’t they?

There’s not a one of us that did anything alone.

Last night as I watched my hero, an old man rally his young supporters, I too felt like an old man, and that America was an old man’s home. Youth in America is a minority, suppressed and coopted. But in Africa youth is the majority!

Any energy I have left to change my own society comes only when I think of you and the changes that you can bring to our world.

Virgin Applications

Virgin Applications

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

virgin applicationA South African mayor has reserved part of her town’s college scholarships for virgins.

Concerned with the high rate of Aids and unwanted pregnancies, Mayor Dudu Mazibuko told the BBC that 16 of the town’s 113 college scholarships would go to girls cleared as virgins.

The certification is performed by an elder woman as part of an annual ceremony of homage to the Zulu king. Special intermittent testing would then continue – much like drug testing for sports – and whenever a woman fails the test the “Maiden’s Bursary Award” is terminated.

Even if the recipient has a 4.0?

“Unsurprisingly, this has been met with much controversy,” writes teen reporter Casey Lewis for Conde Nast. Lewis further notes that a college-age virgin is “very, very problematic.”

“Virginity testing is an invasive, flawed, traumatising and sexist practice, that has no bearing on whether or not women should be granted bursaries,” an on-line petition organized by South African university students contends.

The petition points out that the policy doesn’t address the role that young men play in unwanted pregnancies resulting in an “unequal” approach to young women.

With less than a couple thousand signatures so far, the now week-old petition is not doing well by South African standards. Despite the resolute equality provisions of the young South African constitution – which among other progressive components mandates that a certain proportion of publicly elected officials be women – sexism remains strong in the country.

KwaZulu Natal where Mayor Mazibuko’s town is, is a particularly conservative region. In fact towards the end of the anti-apartheid struggle in the late 1980s the region broke away from the growing black power movement to support the white-led apartheid regime.

The fact that the policy was promulgated by an elected woman mayor illustrates a global phenomenon of conservatism beautifully discussed this month in Foreign Affairs’ look into “inequality.”

Michigan professor Ronald Inglehart links the decline of economic equality to “cultural issues [that] pushed many in the working class to the right.”

During a fall meeting with Pullman High Schoolers regarding a proposed bill in the Washington state legislature increasing access to birth control, the very conservative Olympia woman state representative Mary Dye shocked students by insisting the conversation be governed by whether or not they were virgins.

Education and women’s health are global as much as local issues. Economic declines are often surprising, or at least at the start seem uncontrollable at that moment. As Ingelhart implies the anger manifest in those hurt most by an economic decline is often expressed in support for cultural positions and personal values that are clearer to evince than policies for economic recovery.

South Africa has an inequality ratio considerably higher than the U.S.’ already staggering high one. The reasons for this include global factors and are certainly complex.

Mayor Mazibuko’s continued support is not unlike Donald Trump’s.