Johnny Clegg and Juluka

When I was in Paris in spring of 1990, one of the few bright spots - aside from being with my dear friend Mimi - was the crazy hostel I stayed in. The women's "dorm" was a large room with four or five bunk beds. The advertised "hot showers" were not quite that. You stood in the shower and pushed one of those nobs like in the sink of public bathrooms. For 30 seconds you were blasted with the most frigid, cold water to ever leave a shower head. But by then you were covered in soap or shampoo which you had to get off so then you screemed through two or three more stinging pelts of the "shower".

Add to that someone laughing - hysterically - in the room. I came out, blue and a bit bruised, and she kept smirking.

And so began a friendship.

TM was from South Africa. The only other woman in the dorm was a petite Japanese who spoke no English. We figured out (through hand gestures, maps and some amazing shoes she bought) that she had been to Morocco, alone. TM and I felt pretty wimpy just being in Paris by ourselves.

I didn't run around Paris with TM but we exchanged addresses (this was, after all, pre-email). Once I got home we started to write (paper) letters to each other 3-4 times per year.

A few years after meeting in Paris, she wrote that she had a new job working for a South African musician. She didn't write his name out. I wrote back that I was (note: still am) a huge fan of Johnny Clegg. A white South African who formed a racially mixed band in the early 1980's during the apartheid government, he also published several academic papers before his music career took off.

A few months later I received a package with various signed items. It seems my friend was working for Johnny Clegg.

Johnny Clegg and Savuka - I Call Your Name (1988)

TM has moved on from music but whenever I hear Johnny Clegg I think of how she gave me a connection to one of my favorite musicians.

Who is playing this week?

Fourier Analyst (you gotta read her "coming clean" about her wild music performing days!)

Farewell Mama Afrika

I turned on the radio Monday morning and came in on the middle of a piece by the stunning Ofeibea Quist-Arcton about Miriam Makeba. I became very aware that Ms. Quist-Arcton was using the past tense which meant only one thing.

Miriam Makeba died early this morning after performing. It couldn't be a more fitting way for you to pass away. You lived in exile from your beloved South Africa for decades, singing the songs of your homeland. You made sure the world paid attention to the horrors of apartheid. And you did it with song.

This song is Pata Pata. In the interview I heard this morning, Ms. Makeba explained it is traditional wedding song. The English-speaking Africans called it "the clicking song" because they couldn't make the Xhosi sound. I've tried on number of times to make that sound with the back of my tongue up against the back of my mouth. I sound like a drowning badger.

Farewell Mama Afrika. You truly made a difference with your music.

The 46664 Concert

I was so excited to watch the recording of the Nelson Mandela 90th Birthday concert with my kids. Held over the weekend in Hyde Park, London, we just couldn't jet over for the show. We already had plans and our private jet was in the shop for repairs.

The newspaper coverage specifically mentioned that Annie Lenox, Peter Gabriel and Johnny Clegg were performing. So with much excitement we sat down on the sofa Tuesday night to watch the 90 minutes version on VH1.

There was no Johnny Clegg. Perhaps one of the most famous South African musical performers. Ok VH1 is culturally insensitive.

There was no Peter Gabriel. The man only wrote and performed Biko since 1980 in honor of 30-year-old anti-apartheid activist Steven Biko who was murdered by police while in custody. Ok. VH1 is historically ignorant.

There was no Annie Lennox. Annie Lennox is Annie Lennox. Now VH1 is f-ing clueless.

And there is no good footage of her speaking or performing at the concert. Please bear with the sound being a bit off from the footage I could find on YouTube. Her words and the children's performance should have been seen in the United States. The concrete story of a little girl with HIV regaining some health after only five months of simple treatment including medicine, food and nurturing care should have been heard. It makes real the difference our donations can make in the lives of people.

Instead we got three songs with Amy Whinehouse, including her butchering the 1984 protest song Free Nelson Mandela. This led the boys to keep asking me why she was even in the concert, what was wrong with her and that she couldn't sing. I could not have agreed more.

Annie, however, even with footage that is out of synch, is simply stellar.

The difference between L and R

Funny how two letters can make a big difference.

Please insert the letter "l" where the asterisk is located in this word:

e*ections

Now insert the letter "r".



I'll wait for you.


Done?


Have you giggled?

One word means, according to Merriam-Webster, "the right, power, or privilege of making a choice" while the other means "the state marked by firm turgid form and erect position of a previously flaccid bodily part containing cavernous tissue when that tissue becomes dilated with blood". When choice and freedom are involved, both feel really good.

One was, for the majority, illegal in South Africa until 1994 when the first multi-racial elections were held and the other was rarely discussed until a constitution was ratified that ensured the rights of all, regardless of who inspired their erections. Or elections.

Sunday night Amazing Guy and I attended Pieter-Dirk Uys' performance of Elections and Erections. We had seen his show Foreign AIDS three years ago. I became aware of him and his character Evita Bezuidenhout in 1999 while traveling in South Africa. I was floored to see on the newsstands this lovely lady of royalty (read drag queen) on the cover of their Time magazine equivalent. She had rented a decrepit bus and was traveling from black township to township promoting elections.

Evita Bezuidenhout is "the most famous white woman in South Africa" and was quoted as saying during her bus tour that voting is incredibly important, that is why the whites kept it away from the blacks.

Now Evita performs a cabaret show in a renovated train station in Darling, South Africa. She also travels from school to school in those same black townships talking about erections. Pieter is on a one man/woman campaign to honestly talk to children about sex and AIDS. His theater show three years ago, Foreign AIDS, reduced me to tears as he talked about the fears, dreams and misunderstandings of children and their teachers and parents.

I had the opportunity to meet Pieter after the performance. It was a fundraiser for the wonderful group that brings books to South African school libraries, among the other wonderful things they do.

I was marginally articulate (unlike if I ever get the chance to meet Vince Clark then I will be a blubbering, incoherent mess) and actually told him I liked the show three years ago better (maybe I wasn't so articulate). He graciously explained to me that he didn't want to spend the rest of his days telling stories about the children, which he could easily do. Amazing Guy later said he felt Pieter's more personal in this more recent production.

And as we parted, Pieter said to me, "I'll see you in Darling, darling".



He called me darling.

Oh now this is just wrong

From the BBC:

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has asked for "embarrassing" travel restrictions on Nelson Mandela and South African leaders to be lifted.

A bill has been introduced in the US Congress to remove from databases any reference to South Africa's governing party and its leaders as terrorists.

The African National Congress (ANC) was designated as a terrorist organisation by South Africa's old apartheid regime.

At present a waiver is needed for any ANC leaders to enter the country.

"It is frankly a rather embarrassing matter that I still have to waive in my own counterparts - the foreign minister of South Africa, not to mention the great leader, Nelson Mandela," Ms Rice told lawmakers in Washington.

Last week, Howard Berman, chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, who introduced the bill said it was "shameful" that the United States still treated the ANC this way.

"Amazingly, Nelson Mandela still needs to get a special waiver to enter the United States based on his courageous leadership of the ANC. What an indignity. This legislation will wipe it away," he said.

South Africa's apartheid government banned the ANC in 1960, imprisoning or forcing into exile its leaders.

Mr Mandela, who turns 90 this year, was released in 1990 after spending 27 years in prison.

He then became the country's first post-apartheid-era president, before retiring after serving one term in office.

He appears to be in reasonable health, but now makes far fewer public appearances.

As I've written before I visited South Africa in the late 1990's. I visited one of the prisons where Mandela spent 18 of the 27 years in government custody. It is incredulous that 18 years after being released from prison, 9 years after completing his term as the first democratically elected President in an election in which all citizens of South Africa could vote, regardless of his or her race, Nelson Mandela is still on a US Government terrorist watch list.

Shame on us. Shame on the US.

Gumshoe dancing at work

I work in a building full of non-profit organizations, or non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Folks work on a range of issues, including helping the food service industry be more green, saving animals around the world, working to make the US health care system more accountable to patients, and other issues to make our world more fair, equitable and just.

One group is South Africa Partners. They work to develop partnerships between US and South African institutions around education, health and economic development. They also sponsor the booksale I've been spearheading the last week. I'm pretty proud of the fact that between our church and an independent book store, we've together raised over $350 for underresourced school libraries.

Once a week in a conference room, a South Africa Partners staff member teaches a class in gumshoe dancing. After months of conflicts, being out with sick kids or travel, I finally got to put on rainboots at lunch time and head to the second floor. She explained to us the mine workers suffered from all sorts of foot ailments due to the water in the mines. Rather than create better drainage systems, the mine owners gave the workers gumboots, or wellies, to wear.

All of the men were unable to bring their families and therefore lived in large dormatories with other laborers from the same regions (in part to ensure that language barriers remained unbroken). To socialize with each other, they created this intense dance that doesn't involve musical instruments and would compete in weekly competitions.

Let's just say that less than half an hour of this and I was whiped.

Got a tune that exhuasts you? Do tell. And when you write about it, do link back. It is only fair...

Letters and books

Dear K
My name is S
I am 8 years old
I like to watch TV
I would like to know your name
Write back to me
Your Friend S

Dear J
My name is I. I am 9 years old. My favourite sport is rugby. I even like soccer too but I don't like soccer that much. Please write back if you can.
from I, your friend.

Dear: M
Hi My name is P. I am nine years old. My favourite animal is a dog. I want to be a television presenter. I like to play net ball. My favorite meat is a chicken. I would like to be your Africa friend. Please write back to me.
From P

Dear J
My name is L. I'm eleven years old. I am doing grade six. My favorite animal is a cat and my favorite movie is generation. I like to play netball. I am a beautiful girl. My favorite food is bread and meat. I like to sing and swim.
Please write back to me.
From your friend
L

Dear J
My name is B. I am 11 years old. I am in Grade 4.
My favourite animal is a cat and I like dance. My favorite story is Goston the Giant. I like to play Black toti. Write back to me please.
From B

Dear A
My name is L. I am 9 years old. I like to play rugby. My favorite food is samp and beans. Tell me what you play and what you like.
Your friend L

After months of waiting the children at our church finally heard back from their South African pen pals. These new friends have beautiful names like Soyama, Lutho and Bongi. This weekend we all wrote letters (I too have a very lengthy handwritten letter from the teacher) to our pen pals and organized a book sale of South African children's books. The proceeds from the sale go to buy books for under resourced school libraries in South Africa.


I hear the Easter Bunny likes to give books. Visit South Africa Partners to learn more about the initiative. And maybe buy a book or four.

Lorraine Hotel, 2008

In 1990 I visited Dachau Concentration Camp in Dachau, Germany. Opened in 1933 by the Nazis as part of their efforts to exterminate Jews and others deemed by them as "unworthy", it is now a museum. At one point I was walking along a path and heard a young boy around the age of 8 or 9 ask several times in English "but didn't they (the prisoners) know they were going into gas chambers?" He was clearly trying to wrap his head around both helplessness and evil. Pure, horrid evil.

At the end of the decade, in 1999, I went to Robben Island. Eight miles from Cape Town, South Africa it was the prison where Nelson Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years as a political prisoner of the apartheid government. Even in the summer the cells were cold and damp. The blinding sunlight glared off the lime quarry. Nelson Mandela has horrible cataracts in both eyes probably from being a forced laborer in the quarry.

I knew one of the places I wanted to visit during our recent family trip to Memphis, Tennessee was the National Civil Rights Museum located at the Lorraine Motel. On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on the 2nd floor balcony of the motel.

In some ways it felt horribly wrong to be standing so close to where he had been murdered. Where that photo I knew so well had been taken, of him lying on the balcony with someone pressing a napkin against his head.

But they did a terrific job showing the history of slavery in the United States and the subsequent struggles for equal rights after the Civil War. There were "interpreters" throughout the museum, people dressed in period clothes who either outright explained the area (e.g. a Montgomery bus with a statue of Rosa Parks sitting in the front, a lunch counter with statues of African-Americans sitting on stools while white men jeered at them) or actually acted (one woman played a reporter on a bombed bus while another sang a gospel song Mahalia Jackson sang at the 1963 march on Washington, DC). This had the intended effect of making it come "alive" for my guys. Little lady just wanted to sit on the bus and stare at the statue of Ms. Parks.

The museum has recreated room 306 where Dr. King was staying the day he was murdered. There is a large window overlooking the balcony where he was shot and a note explaining that the blood-soaked concrete had been removed. There is a noticeable square of clean concrete in its place. Amazing Guy had gone ahead with two of the kids so I stood there looking at the spot with one of my sons, barely containing the sobs that were growing in my chest.

My seven-and-a-half-year old son kept patting my leg, asking me to read something. I finally got through it with tears streaming down my face.

"Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!"
-- Martin Luther King, Jr. April 3, 1968 (the night before he died)

Sing for the New Year

"You can help break the silence.
Talk about HIV and AIDS.
Let us use the universal language of music
to sing out our message around the world."

Nelson Mandela
former President of South Africa
former Political prisoner # 46664

Happy New Year. And please sing just like Annie Lennox does for those who cannot.

None of us are healthy if our neighbors are sick. None of us are strong if some are weak. We are not smart if some are denied an education. And none of us are wealthy if there is poverty.

Sing loud. Sing proud. Sing for all of us.

Who else is singing on this last day of the year?

Wholly Burble

Mariposa

Flower Child

Jenn in Holland

Jen in Michigan

I'll be out-of-town for a couple's get-away for the next few days. Amazing Guy's mom has flown up to stay with the kids. Carry on without me. I'll be back.