University celebrates Internationalism, Multiculturalism with diverse array of stereotypes

Saying they wanted to celebrate the rich and varied heritages of their students both local and international, lecturers and staff at an area University this week celebrated the diverse and fascinating heritages of their campus using a wide and colourful range of stereotypes and cultural oversimplifications.

“We all know that national identities are at their core monolithic and static entities,” said event organiser Carrie Kature, “so what better way to celebrate our wide and diverse collection of peoples, cultural heritages and traditional backgrounds than through a series of reductive representations of complex cultures, such as cliché meals, national dresses out of a 50’s NatGeo mag, and flags?”

And students could not be happier.

“Itsa true-a! They’ra a-celebrayting-a la diversity!” said Italian exchange student and third-year Guido Linguini, working his way through a bowl of pasta while kissing his fingertips. “Eetza so grayta!”

Other students agree.

“Zis ‘is ze faanest way to zelebrate ze rish culture of ma favorit quantree, le France!,” said French postgraduate student Ommelay Du Fromage, munching a croquet-monsiquer and tilting his beret. “I weesh zat all ze kantreez kud zelebrate la culture comme ca!”

The University is already hard at work preparing for its next celebration, South Africa’s heritage day.

We’re really looking forward to Heritage Day,” said the Uni. "So we can celebrate our country's turbulent history and wide array of tribes and peoples by charring some fillet and vors."

Immigration - the scourge of the whole world

You know what’s ruining this country – no, the entire blerrie world? Immigrants. Guest Writer Johan Van Eksteen tackles this uncomfortable topic, showing us the truth behind something many people are hesitant to talk about frankly and honestly.

Immigration, my friends. Is it just me, or does this problem seem to be getting worse and worse every year? It seems that no matter where you go, you can’t even move without bumping into someone who isn’t from here. With xenophobic attacks so recurrent and regular that Somali shopkeepers could set their fiscal calendars by them, I decided to look at this issue. And let me tell you, it’s a lot more complicated than it at first seems.

Now, immigration has long been a problem in almost all societies. Immigration goes as far back as the unwanted and dirty flood of Jews and Irish and Poles into America in the 19th and 20th centuries. Hell, we could go one step further and say that this scourge was affecting societies even as far back as the Southwards migration of Zulu and Bantu peoples into XhoiSan territories in South Africa in the early AD, or the northwards migration of Homo Habilus and other pre-modern humans nearly 70 000 years ago, or even the ugly, unstoppable wave of society-leeching primordial fish-lizard creatures that crawled unwelcomed and unwanted onto the prehistoric marshes of Pangea hundreds of millions of years ago.

Of course, today the problem is far, far worse, because back then there were no jobs or healthcare to steal.

Yes, friends, it might shock you to hear this, but immigrants are taking our healthcare and our government grants: you know, those things that are supposed to be reserved for South Africans, that our hard-working tax payers shell out for after they’ve finished handing billions of Rands to Zuma for his giant luxury Palacemansioncompound?

I remember a time when I used to think “but surely getting healthcare requires a valid ID and many documents proving your status as a tax-paying citizen? Surely getting the laughably paltry handouts that thousands of below-the-breadline South Africans survive on every month is a bit more difficult than just walking into a SASSA office and putting out your grimy, Zimbabwean hands?” Turns out I was wrong, friends. And that’s scary, because I’m never wrong.

And it doesn’t stop there: our jobs are being thrown out the window and into the laps of Malawian borderjumpers. “But that makes no sense,” I hear you predictably retort, “Johan, wouldn’t most companies be hesitant to give scarce jobs to what you have on many, many occasions, called ‘a bunch of lazy, good-for-nothing unskilled thieves who don’t even speak our language’? Surely any employer would want to avoid huge legal ramifications and massive fines for breaking labour laws by making sure to go Proudly South African?” Well, to that I say “that’s the kind of senseless, contradictory society we live in.”

However, the damage goes beyond just the financial: what’s being hurt even more is our national culture and identity. All these immigrants make no effort to fit in, to try and be a part of South African society.

You know, every day I drive from my job at a single-language newspaper back to my home in that gated, all-white, English-Afrikaner closed community in Sandton and I pass these Somali or Zimbo neighbourhoods, these anti-nationalist, unpatriotic attempts to stick to one culture without embracing the beautiful diversity of South Africa. It’s sad and sickening. The put themselves behind these walls and barriers, and don’t even try to mix with everyday South Africans. Hell, they don’t even make an effort to try and learn any of the 11 official languages of South Africa, for example English, or Afrikaans, or, er, one of those other ones. Even the Zulu security guy who mans the barbwire, electrified gate of my suburb comments on it sometimes.

Or at least, I think he does. I don’t speak Zulu.

But what I can’t stand most of all is the pretence they put up, the lies and excuses they tell me to try and make us feel sorry for them. They put up this sad story of running away from hateful or outright murderous political regimes or iron-fisted dictatorships; they give us these sop tales of “brutal police” and “racist officials and harsh, anti-human immigration laws”; they wax lyrical about having left everything – their language, their home, their history, their culture, their families, their entire way of life and identity – just to live in fear and poverty in a country that despises and assaults them just for wanting a better life for them and their children. And why? Well, so that you won’t complain when they take that below-minimum-wage, no-security job that rightfully belongs to people born here!

You know, it’s exactly for this reason that I stopped my application to live and work in England or Australia. All I want is to go there, trade in my green passport, and live and work in peace: but how can I move overseas to live on greener pastures when all these bloody immigrants are stealing the jobs that I want, taking the healthcare and government grants that I’ll need when I get there? It’s absurd.

This, my friends is why I congratulate the ANC on at least one thing: that they’ve stood up for South Africans’ rights everywhere. You know, silly organisations like the Human Rights Watch, or so-called Amnesty International, might condemn South Africa’s diplomatic and political stance on human rights atrocities in other African countries, and her harsh, “unjust, retrogressive” immigration laws that miss opportunities to integrate trained professionals such as teachers, scientists and skilled workers into our society to better serve our people, but I say “well done.”

As tempting as it is to enjoy the cheap labour these guys offer (and that cool perk of being able to fire them at will, which forces them to never complain about how little you pay them for fear of you reporting them to the police on trumped up charges of theft) we need to stick to a strong code of national pride and moral integrity, to support - and ardently defend the rights of - those human beings who share a birthplace with us.

After all, how can we possibly have a better South Africa if it’s full of Zimbabweans?

Johan is a guest columnist at Muse and Abuse. Widely renowned for his non-nonsense approach to controversial topics, Johan shines a blinding light of truth on subjects like why white people should vote ANC, why Blackface isn't the real racist problem in SA, and how Black Privilege is an ugly truth that no one wants to admit. He also thinks gay marriage should have been outlawed years ago.
He also doesn't know his editor and employer is Zimbabwean.

Football “still definitely newsworthy” – BBC

It was a resounding victory for journalism today, after football, rugby, cricket, tennis – as well as many other sports codes including but not limited to curling, archery, bowling, darts, pool, rowing and professional tiddlywinks – were reaffirmed as “still definitely newsworthy and important journalism” by a BBC-funded study.

“For years now our screens have been filled with hundreds and thousands of hours of slow-motion replays, critical analysis and up-to-the-minute updates on everything sports-related, like match scores, financial transfers, or even who is fucking whose wife in the national team,” said a spokesperson for the BBC. “Today, we are pleased to announce that these events are still as important as ever, and deserve their hours-long slots just after international affairs and current events.”

The study has irrefutably proven that football – along with all sport – is still on par with disease, war, political scandals and the myriad other important current events that define our generation and necessitate ceaseless coverage and debate.

“Although football was first started as a social experiment in the 1960s to see how much a human being can be paid for doing as little and as inconsequential, meaningless-in-the-grand-scope-of-the-universe work as possible, it quickly blossomed into something as important as Ebola killing white people, or famine killing brown people, or war,” said the study. “Hence the dozens of channels dedicated to every goddamn fart Lionel Messi makes.”

The study has since been welcomed and applauded by leading institutes of journalism and media studies.

“People misunderstand sport,” said professor Rum Rogeny of the Rhodes School of Journalism and Media Studies. “It’s not an opium of the people designed to distract them with irrelevant and endless arguments about who has the better team or the most trophies and titles or who beat who in the umpteenth iteration of a packet-of-air-kicking-contest between two groups of millionaires. Soccer is relevant. It's the only time God ever does anything on Earth. It’s politics but with a ball. It’s war, but with better hair and fake injuries."

In spite of mounting criticism from dissenting critical voices who steadfastly claim (in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, of course) that sport is a form of ‘soft politics’ that allows you to pretend to take part in pseudo-political arguments without any of the reprisals or repercussions of holding a real political view – much like a child walking around in his father’s oversized shoes in imaginary games of ‘play-play’ – many thousands of normal people around the world have welcomed the study.

“Football is super important,” said a man counting an imaginary list with his fingers. “It has kicking. It has passing. It has tackles – some of these tackles are illegal. Some are in a grey area. These are important debates. Debates which the news tries to distract us from with news like which country is invading which country, or new about stupid so-called ‘mass protests’ in Mexico City.”

The study also definitely ruled out the possibility of think topics, debates, art exhibitions or any kind of cultural thing as ‘news’.

“Even things like massive scientific accomplishments – like a ten-year project to land a tiny satellite on a comet one hundred million miles away – are fucking definitely not news. The thing is, how many people really understand science enough to make an opinion on it? There just isn’t any controversy around these events. How are we supposed to get ceaseless heated debates, long, angry blogposts and opinion columns, pages and pages of incensed comments defiantly touting their entrenched viewpoint, and metres of print responding not just to the story, but also responding to responses - and therefore endless pageviews and unfathomable advertising revenue – out of that boring crap? That’s why we make it more about the little things. Like sexist shirts. Now THAT is news.”

Muse and Abuse would like to invite any reader who didn't understand this to form a very angry opinion about it and write their own blog on why we're a bunch of morons.

Dear Black Bloggers (A Response to Dear White South Africans)

Emotion can be a dangerous thing. Sure, anger can lend to our words and actions a passionate intensity that enables a vociferous, unbidden expression of what we’re feeling at the time, but it also brings with it a dangerous cloud of obscurity to our thoughts, a choking fog that surmounts clarity and seeps in at the cracks of our rhetoric and renders it illogical, irrational.

Which is why when I read a Facebook-furore piece yesterday entitled “Dear White South Africans” , I was unsurprised to see what can only be described as dangerous, illogical generalisations at play in the form of that ever-emotional issue, race.

The context for this article was the silly Braai Day thing that happens to override Heritage Day once a year. Readers who have been on this site before will know my thoughts on such a matter – I feel that Braai Day, a capitalist, consumerist and shallow hijacking of a public holiday - distracts us from remembering our unique history.

Now then, to the issue at hand: it would be easy to call Mazwai’s blog post a baseless, moronic, stereotyping, hate-mongering mess of oversimplified sweeping generalisations and unfounded accusations, but in lieu of an ad hominem attack, I feel it is better to debunk the article on its own merits and bases.

First of all, postulation on others’ original heritages and countries of origin is meaningless, really, in this scope of argument. If we look back far enough (as the Nando’s advert so wonderfully pointed out) we can see that ‘Afrika’ doesn’t really belong to anyone (or at least, that Africans are just as guilty of colonisation over the Khoi San as the ‘whites’), and if it does, it probably belongs to the common ancestor who preceded Homo Habilus, Homo Erectus and our modern species. History, wars, civil unrest and the general passage of time can have monumental effects on ‘countries’ you supposedly come from. What about in the early 1800’s, when Germany and Poland were not real states, divided and shared between other nations? Indeed, our origins - black, white, whatever - are a subject of far more complexity and depth than a simplistic Ancient Nation Origin. As another blogger put it "Calling me one of the children of Hitler is like calling you a child of Charles Taylor, this is simply wrong". If it is written in On The Origin Of the Species that we all probably came from the Ocean, then does that mean we should all fuck off back into the Atlantic?

The idea of having multiple contrasting heritages is also not made on logical ground. Yes, technically white people may or may not come from countries where they were the “children” (not literally, obviously) of “Elizabeth, Hitler, Bismarck”, but what of those living in the diaspora, those who were born in countries outside their so-called “homes”? I am ineligible for citizenship in my “homelands” Scotland, France and Britain (so much for being the son of Napolean and Louis XI, right?), was born in Zimbabwe but have South African citizenship – how then, does my belonging here be erased because a bunch of unrelated humans came before me? In the same light, there are many aspects of these ‘bad’ legacies that can be celebrated: Nazis pioneered rocket engines, Uganda wants to kill gays***, and the industrial revolution was thanks mostly to the Scottish people. Any Heritage comes with good and bad: if you chose to celebrate Shaka Zulu’s legacy, you would also have to accept his dark, violent, warmongering side instead of just sanitising his historical image as a faultless black Jesus.

The claim that we come from a legacy of “stealing lands and making people slaves” is also a knee-jerk red herring. Slaves have been owned by many cultures and peoples stemming back thousands of years, including Biblical and African cultures. Pots cannot really call kettles black. In the same way, many African as well as Western cultures extended their lands and kingdoms through military campaigns, violence, war and slavery. Again, you cannot blame solely whites for these specific human evils.

What, also, is the basis for saying that white people have issues centred on their “SELF importance”? According to whom, to what data, what empirical research? Without a proper basis of fact to make such an allegation, it becomes mere conjecture, a subjective anecdotal posturing that is as weasel-wording-y as “scientists believe” or “they say”.

Similar easy debunking can be applied to the claims “This confuses me because you did not build your own empires, we built them for you”, “You did not raise you own children, we did that for you” and “You did not stand up when the injustices of Apartheid were happening, we stood up for ourselves”. This, again unfounded, baseless, claim is nothing short of an opinion. Which empires? How do you term ‘build’? Many whites raised their own children, just as many whites stood against apartheid, which did not benefit all whites equally (hence white women being included in BEE legislation). If we look into white struggle contributions, you cannot say that any one people put an end to it. The downfall of Apartheid was a complex and sophisticated convalescence of many wide influences and factors. Saying white people were only the perpetrators of Apartheid and that only Africans ended it carries with it a magnitude of imbecility that defies description. In the same way, did not Afrikaaners fight during the Boer War to ensure that British Rule ended? You cannot just whitewash (blackwash?) history.

“You’ve been too damn arrogant to learn the language” – sadly, this is a whole messy debate in and of itself. I myself learnt French and chiShona in school, but having been kicked out of Zimbabwe and now working in France, I would say that not learning the language has been a benefit. Again, learning a language must be something that is decided on relative merits. There are many reasons why learning another language might not be done: one of these is that many vernacular languages lack the grammatical complexity to be university instructional languages – how, for example, would one learn quantum physics or advanced organic chemistry in isiXhosa? And there are over 250 dialects in DRC alone, with RSA having 11 official languages – if you learn seven of them, are you not still being exclusive? Additionally, saying “with all due respect” means that technically you cannot follow up by being hugely disrespectful. But then, if you understood English, you’d understand paradox, contradiction, or oxymoron.

I would say that I have heard some white folk dumb down their English when speaking to black people, and I would agree that this behaviour is patronising and insulting. However, generalising that all “you white people” do this is, again, empirically unfounded. Anecdotal evidence is not the rule. Following on from this, who says it’s “ignorance”, “arrogance” or “a desire to be asked to go back to your lands” that whites disrespect Heritage Day? And why is it specifically YOUR (I take it the author here means “belonging to Africans”) Heritage Day? The history of its development clearly shows that it was meant to be a celebration of Heritage (and be definition that means all peoples, cultures and traditions in South Africa, not just the ones you acknowledge or deem more important). Braai Day is stupid, yes, and it warped Heritage Day just in the same way Valentine’s Day, Easter, Christmas and a whole host of other public holidays have been hijacked. Have we not seen Youth Day devolve into just a day off school to nurse hangovers? (This is a generalised statement, I admit). But if the esteemed author had read any of the interviews done in the course of the Heritage Day controversies, she would know that the original creator of the day had only the best intentions, but now kind of regrets the whole thing. Besides, who are you to tell people what aspects of culture are best and how or what we should celebrate on this day? It is exactly a South African celebration, which is why braaiing is perfectly fine.

As a (white) someone who got “chased off the land […] in a ‘Zimbabwe situation’”, I would say that the Zimbabwe Land Reforms were not as simplistic and puerile as white people being arrogant. A whole host of political and racist motives moved the land, starting with the failed move to change the Constitution in the referendum of 2001 and demonstrations by old Chimurenga War Veterans. Again, the author simply has not done any research or reading into the claims she makes, preferring the easy, knee-irrationality that is designed only to sow hatred and garner pageviews and perhaps advertising revenue.

In short conclusion, this article is nothing but a condescending, patronising, baseless bunch of unfounded opinions and childish assumptions that lead up to grotesque mess of hatemongering drivel. The author should, in future, not be so clinically myopic or as viciously race-hate hungry.

Notes: A reader corrected me - the Referendum was in 2000. Also, the title was intended as a sardonic, ironic rebuttal rather than any racial motive aimed at black bloggers.

*** a reader pointed out the structural ambiguity here: though placed in between two arguable progressive things, my addition of Uganda killing gays is sorely mistaken. I wrote it in a way that was meant to show how, terribly evil, mixed message, or good for all, each culture has a complex history and background that must be taken into account when celebrating it. Let me be clear that I fully believe gay rights should be a global given. I find it absurd to imagine the comparative equal: having to tell society "I am heterosexual" before "being allowed" to say that I love a woman because she is a particularly gender. Thank you for pointing this out, and I apologise for any misunderstanding.

“Charring meat on fire” still best way to celebrate diverse heritage, culture

Government spokespeople and social commentators put on a united front today, after unanimously agreeing that even now, many hundreds of years into South African democracy, the best way to celebrate and pay tribute to our country’s unique history, peoples and rich traditional background during tomorrow's National Heritage Day celebrations is through the delicious smell of grilling meat on a nice charcoal fire.

“When you see that 2kg Woolworth's prime rib slowly darkening to a rich, mouth-watering deep shade of brown, or hear that spritely sizzle of steaks on the griddle, what else comes to mind than the words ‘heritage’, ‘culture’, ‘nationalism’ and ‘pride’?” said Heritage Day Coordinator for Johannesburg Mr Bryan Stakes.

“When you hear the word ‘Zulu’, does it not conjure up thoughts of lamb shanks braised in a red wine and rosemary sauce scorching on the braai?” he asked. “I mean, what is more indicative of the deeply sincere traditionalist roots of Afrikaans solidarity and tenacity than a slowly charring coil of lightly peppered Oom Charl’s vors? And come on, what is heartier and more typically English than a quick-seared medium-rare steak? Well, that and the invention of concentration camps.”

Heritage day experts have been quick to publish their advice on having a truly authentic Heritage Day celebration.

”For a truly South African experience, be sure to slowly grill your garlic-and-lemon-basted chicken on signed copies of A Long Walk To Freedom,” said braai expert Karl Nivoar. “As you turn the bird, you’ll see the hopes and dreams of our fore-Presidents slowly curl, burn and seep into that lovely browning skin.”

However, despite some ardent and vociferous critics claiming that “[this] YOLOised and capitalist hijacking of a public holiday essentialises, oversimplifies and debases the truly rich and diverse collection of peoples, cultures, rites and traditional heritage that make up modern-day South Africa”, many people reportedly “don’t really give a stuff, china”.

“People say that this is an insult to our heritage, that it makes us so concerned with a trivial, shallow braai – which happens every weekend anyway – that we forget our own real history and the tales of those who came before us,” said Cape Town resident Weld Hun. “But seriously, what better way to remember Olivier Matambo and Nelly Madonsela and their ceaseless struggle during A Party Hate all those hundreds of years ago?”

Muse and Abuse would like to wish all its readers a happy Inkosi Asimbanano for tomorrow