What can we do?

What are we to do and where do we start - to correct the ongoing poor state of education in the Eastern Cape? Yes, of course, this is not simply about matriculation, but the annual focus on matric results is an opportunity to stand still and ask: what in the name of all that is good is going on? Why is there such a gemors? And what can you and I do to make things different - and better? What do we do, whether we are (take your pick and leave a comment):
Learners / pupils?
Teachers?
Parents?
Grandparents?
Education officials?
Other Government officials?
Academics?
Policy developers?
Politicians?
Activists?
Business people?
Professionals?
Pen pushers?
Unemployed?
What do we do? 

On Tweede, third and fourth New Years

On Tweede, third and fourth New Years

By RAY HARTLE

I cannot trace exactly my roots back to the slaves who worked on farms and estates in the Western Cape 300 years ago. If truth be told, the family history is misty even around three generations ago - it may have had something to do with hiding from some ancestors. Like Uncle Japie, officially a fisherman, but one of the original bootleggers, living on the coast somewhere between Cape Town and Mossel Bay. Japie always just happened to be in the vicinity when a huge hessian bag of goods somehow came unstuck from its deck moorings in the rough seas somewhere off the coast. Or disavowing certain bloodlines in an effort to land on one side of the population registration laws of early legislated apartheid.  

But the slave ancestry is not in dispute; the connections to Khoi, Malay and even St Helenian forebears are rock solid, even if I don't have a ghoema bone in my body. So I take full ownership of the Western Cape's Tweede Nuwejaar (Second New Year) celebration, the modern-day carnival through the streets of Cape Town  from District Six to the Bokaap marking the one day of freedom in the year slaves enjoyed on January 2, after toiling to ensure the slave masters had a "heppy" (sic) 364 other days. Today, after a journey of a thousand miles on New Year's Day itself, that second unofficial holiday allows me to figure out just the right combination of reflection and get-up-and-go voema I need to set myself up for the year ahead. 

In pure South African fashion, we conspired this year to push the Tweede to a fourth New Year's - for ostensibly religious reasons deciding that we couldn't march on January 2. The majority of we irreligious "New-Year's-a-jorl" types would have happily taken the extra holiday on the 2nd with not a thought for our religious sensitivities or sensibilities. But, thanks nonetheless to the Muslim community in this instance - apparently - for the unofficial Vierde Nuwejaar celebrations. It got me out having the ball of the year on the streets of Cape Town on the Tweede, third and fourth days after New Year. It also allowed more time to consider my past year, my ancestors passed (sic) and contemplate  the jorls in 2014 I would yet be let loose for from the drudgery - if not the slavery - of my usual existence. 

Cape Town mayor Patricia de Lille was even more South African, however, "decreeing" that politics has no place in the cultural expression that is the Cape Minstrel carnival. Culture arises from who people are, where they are and how they are. It is inherently political and seldom is this seen more clearly than in the minstrel annual celebration. Historically, the minstrels' poignant celebration of life and freedom was rooted in and reflected the lived experience of black slaves of the Cape. It was a hugely politicized moment. They sang, danced, laughed on this one day despite - or, perhaps, because of - the oppressive conditions under which they found themselves. This one-day political expression continued throughout the decades-long legal oppression of apartheid. It is there today on the carnival streets, bright, colourful, raucous, cheery, yet painfully showing off the racialised historical disadvantage evident throughout the Cape flats. How can that carnival not be a political expression? 

But Aunty Pat's ban on ANC armbands during this year's minstrel procession also shows a naïveté about how politics is more than simply the accoutrements and symbolic expressions of party politics. Politics - even in a democracy, nay, especially in a democracy - is more than the formal rituals like voting for public representation. In this context, any democrat must be aghast that a city government can ban anyone - whether or not that individual is a recipient of city resources -  from expressing publicly a view with which it corporately disagrees - and even if that view favours a rival political party. 

I have an affinity with the minstrel parade because something in the depth of my soul remembers and responds to its affirmation of part of my ancestry. That does not apply to every South African. But, for non-black South Africans who have never known the chains of oppression and enslavement, and for new South African blacks who have forgotten in the move from the ghetto to the plush suburbs, cultural moments like these provide an opportunity to reconsider injustice. They must not be quietened.  -RAY HARTLE