Tennis player and coach Bob Hewitt is a member of the
International Tennis Hall of Fame who has held all the men's doubles and mixed doubles Grand Slam titles. Hewitt, who was
born in Australia but became a South African citizen by marriage, also captained the 1974 South African Davis Cup champion team.
The Boston Globe reports that Hewitt's lengthy coaching career in the US and South Africa has long been accompanied by allegations that Hewitt sexually abused
his female students, mostly adolescents but one as young as 10. Hewitt denies the charges.
posted by catlet
on Aug 29, 2011 -
13 comments
If we have, at the back of our minds, a stereotype of the censor or the censor type, it is probably of some nondescript male bureaucrat who comes to work punctually at 8:30 in the morning, locks his office door behind him, and spends the day going through piles of books, underlining dirty passages in red ink and stamping pass or fail on the cover, or else pouring over strips of film with scissors at the ready, ready to snip out images of breasts and bums, who, when the clock at last strikes 5:00, emerges into the daylight, catches the bus home to some anonymous suburb and spends the evening watching reruns of sitcoms on television before donning his pajamas and falling into a dreamless sleep. Or if we're thinking not of full time censors, people who dedicate their professional lives to the business of censoring, but of part time censors, people who like to do a bit of censoring on the side, then we might imagine that retired teachers, clergymen and moral busybodies in general would be attracted to the craft. But the records of the South African system don't quite fit the stereotype.
- J. M. Coetzee, Nobel laureate author,
speaks at his alma mater University of Texas Austin about his experiences with censorship in his native South Africa during apartheid. Coetzee mentions
this essay he wrote about his time at UT Austin and a book he wrote on censorship,
here's the preface to it.
posted by Kattullus
on Jul 11, 2011 -
12 comments
'In South Africa's black townships, being gay can be fatal.' 'South Africa has a
liberal constitution promising
equal rights for all.' 'In a society that is deeply religious, traditional and highly patriarchal, lesbians and gay men contradict the dominant view of African manhood.' 'Across Africa, gay people are threatened, humiliated, raped, beaten, killed, jailed, outed in front-page newspaper stories, condemned by preachers as un-Christian and by
politicians and traditional leaders as un-African.' 'In South African townships there's a
crime dubbed "corrective rape," rape to "cure" lesbians, and sometimes gay men and transsexuals. They are told they are being taught a lesson: how to be a real woman or man, survivors say.'
[more inside]
posted by VikingSword
on May 28, 2011 -
29 comments
This is not the South Africa we dream of... (NSFW) "Using a Pentax camera with 35mm focal-length lens, Billy Monk photographed the nightclub revellers and sold the prints to his subjects. His close and long friendships with many of the people in the images allowed him to photograph them with extraordinary intimacy in all their states of joy and sadness. His images of nightlife seem carefree and far away from the scars and segregation of apartheid that fractured this society in the daylight."
posted by artof.mulata
on Jan 22, 2011 -
54 comments
Toothed female condom unveiled in South Africa.
South African Dr. Sonnet Ehlers was on call one night four decades ago when a devastated rape victim walked in. Her eyes were lifeless; she was like a breathing corpse.
"She looked at me and said, 'If only I had teeth down there,'" recalled Ehlers, who was a 20-year-old medical researcher at the time. "I promised her I'd do something to help people like her one day." [more inside]
posted by sio42
on Jun 24, 2010 -
186 comments
Stadiums in South Africa are currently
resounding with the riotous blare of the
vuvuzela. And while most of the folks making their joyous noise in the stadiums will be doing so in a basically random fashion,
this vuvuzela ensemble is demonstrating the funky hocketing technique that is a feature of certain strains of traditional African music, played for centuries on horns very much like these modern-day plastic versions. Well, anyway, like the shoe ads
almost say,
just blow it.
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Jun 8, 2010 -
49 comments
BBC World Service has over 500 audio documentaries you can download. The subject matter is incredibly wide ranging, for example,
internet cafés,
the influence of Islamic art on William Morris,
South African female AIDS activist Thembi Ngubane,
Yiddish,
the importance of cows,
novelist Chinua Achebe,
financial risk management,
Obama as an intellectual,
the physical and emotional effects of a car crash and many, many more. If the quantity and variety are overwhelming, you can subscribe to a
podcast, which delivers a new documentary to you every single day.
posted by Kattullus
on May 8, 2010 -
22 comments
Neill Blomkamp talks to the LA Times Hero Complex blog about what's next after District 9, making science fiction films and why he is turning down big budgets to make better movies:
Part 1,
Part 2,
Part 3
posted by Artw
on Jan 6, 2010 -
41 comments
In 2010,
Obama will have a miserable year,
NATO may lose in Afghanistan,
the UK gets a regime change,
China needs to chill,
India's factories will overtake its farms,
Europe risks becoming an irrelevant museum,
the stimulus will need an exit strategy,
the G20 will see a challenge from the "G2",
African football will
unite Korea,
conflict over natural resources will grow,
Sarkozy will be unloved and unrivalled,
the kids will come together to solve the world's problems (because their elders are unable),
technology will grow ever more ubiquitous,
we'll all charge our phones via USB,
MBAs will be uncool,
the Space Shuttle will be put to rest, and
Somalia will be the worst country in the world. And so
the Tens begin.
The Economist: The World in 2010.
[more inside]
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane
on Nov 14, 2009 -
60 comments
This past Thursday the Canadian government
granted refugee status to Brandon Huntley, a South African who has been living illegally in Canada since 2005. Huntley claimed that if he were to be repatriated back to South Africa he would be persecuted due to the fact that he is white. The South African government
is not amused.
[more inside]
posted by PenDevil
on Aug 31, 2009 -
56 comments
Jacob's Ladder.
Jacob Zuma is a former goatherd, a master of traditional Zulu stick-fighting, a resistance hero, a one-time spymaster, a graceful dancer, and the father of some 20 children. He has been tried for rape and indicted for corruption, racketeering, and fraud. He has been called the next Mandela and the next Mugabe, a black Jesus and a crass rube. A profile of South Africa's recently elected president.
posted by lullaby
on Jun 3, 2009 -
22 comments
William Kentridge creates animation by working into charcoal drawings; drawing, erasing, redrawing, layering, to create stories that frequently link the intensely intimate with the politics of his native South Africa.
Johannesburgh -1989 introduces characters that recur through many of his films.
[more inside]
posted by louche mustachio
on May 6, 2009 -
5 comments
The Zine Library has
hundreds of zines in pdf format for your perusal. They are organized into categories ranging from the common political (
anarchism,
political prisoners &
animal liberation) and identity based zines (
indigenous,
race &
gender) to the more esoteric (
anarchist history,
primitivism &
theory) as well as the useful (
cooking,
DIY &
organizing manuals) and arty (
art,
comics &
music). Now, zines are by their very nature hit and miss but there are some real treasures to be found. I recommend these three:
[all links pdf] The Rebel's Dark Laughter - The Writings of Bruno Filippi,
Barefoot in the Kitchen and
Delivery from Below, Resistance from Above - Electricity and the Politics of Struggle in Tembisa, South Africa. Note: Many if not most zines are set up to be printed out and bound together in chapbooks. That requires a bit of going back and forth when reading in pdf-format, but they wouldn't be real zines if they were straightforward to read ;) Don't know what a zine is? A pretty good overview is provided by zine librarian Jenna Freedman in
Zines Are Not Blogs: A Not Unbiased Analysis.
[This site has been posted previously but was buried deep in the weeds of more inside]
posted by Kattullus
on Mar 10, 2009 -
16 comments
A recent series of posts on the web site of First Things magazine looks at what could be described as a reactionary moment on the part of some folk and roots musicians in Québec and around the world... and we're not talking
The Goldwaters (
Wikipedia).
[more inside]
posted by Jahaza
on Jan 7, 2009 -
10 comments
African Swim is the newest free album being offered by Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. This time the album features South African hip hop groups.
posted by drezdn
on Oct 21, 2008 -
12 comments
