Luv Your Bum

This comes from the packaging for a roll of toilet paper we bought recently.



Notice the upside down heart. That is an upside down heart, isn't it?

Dear Dolly II

As promised last week, here's a few more letters to Dear Dolly, the "agony column" of South Africa's Drum magazine, circa 1954.

Dear Dolly, I have been in love with another man's wife. But when her husband found out he took the matter to the elders who didn't believe me when I said she had tempted me. Later, all the presents I had given her were returned, with the exception of a 10 pound note which I had given her. She says she still loves me. But how can I get my money back?

"Dolly" replies: Your letter shows that you have been behaving in a very silly way and you were lucky not to have been punished. You would look foolish if now you made a fuss about money, so let your loss warn you against such behaviour again.

Dear Dolly, I'm in love with a girl in my district and want to marry her. She loves me but goes out with other boys as well. I haven't told my mother about her. Should I make the girl pregnant first so that I can get a chance to marry her or should I propose marriage to her direct?

"Dolly" replies: What a disgraceful suggestion! She doesn't love you enough to stick to you alone, my dear, and making her pregnant can only cause complications for all concerned. Ditch her!

Beverly Hills

Forever growing on the edges of the townships outside Cape Town are endless acres of shacks. You can see them when you drive on the highway to the airport or to Stellenbosch. It's clear from the highway that these are barely habitable homes, though its impossible to divine much more about them from the road. And, strangely, though there are shacks shoulder-to-shoulder with each other for miles along the highway, it's hard to pick out actual people in the settlements when you're speeding past at 120 km/h.

A few weeks ago, I had the chance to visit one of these so-called informal settlements and speak to some of the people who live there. This is one of the reasons I love being a reporter: even the South Africans we're friends with were amazed that I had an excuse to drop in on such a community, and more amazed that I was welcomed with open arms. This might be a sign that we need to branch out a little bit in the group of people we're friends with... but, nonetheless, I was glad to have an excuse to drop by for a visit.

The informal settlement I visited was representative of the living conditions of millions of South Africans, though this particular settlement was a bit out of the ordinary. The term "informal settlements" is the polite way of saying that the people who live there are squatters; their dwellings are illegal, and they've taken over the land by necessity and inertia, as the townships that were demarcated by the apartheid-era government have become too small to contain the mass of people flooding South Africa's urban areas. Though they're technically taking over state-owned land, this country has a severe housing crisis, and the government only makes halfhearted attempts to kick people off the land a few times before deeding them temporary status... which is a step towards the government admitting that the people who are squatting there can stay.

Most of these illegal settlements are built of the edges of government-acknowledged townships, with a group of hastily assembled shacks bulging out into a field next to a vast expanse of slightly more habitable legal buildings--legal buildings that might have such amenities as running water, or electricity.

The informal settlements usually have neither. The "homes" are one-room shacks, though even calling them shacks might be a bit generous. Shacks have walls. The structures I saw were constructed largely from plastic sheeting, like you would use for a drop cloth when painting a room. A few two-by-fours provided the frame, and corrugated tin served as a roof. Large rocks sit atop the roof; it took me ages to figure out that, with the brutal winds we get here, this wasn't as ascetic choice but a necessary one to keep the roof intact.

The shacks I visited were a bit unusual. Instead of being built on the edges of a township, they were built in a field right in the middle of Cape Town proper, in what has to be one of the most beautiful couple of acres in the world. Table Mountain is behind them, and the smaller peaks of Lion's Head and Signal Hill are to their left. The people who live there are isolated from the world by this huge field of weeds, whose height prevents most passersby from even knowing they're there.

The field is actually the former home of a vibrant neighborhood called District Six, which was the sight of an apartheid-era "forced removal." At one point it was apparently a nearly magical place, where blacks and coloureds, Jews, Christians, and Muslims all lived side-by-side in absolute harmony. It was cleared during a two-decade period when apartheid was at its peak, when the "Group Areas Act" went into effect, requiring blacks and coloureds to move out of the cities. In fact, this particular forced removal might be the most tragic, and recognizable, of the evictions after Sophiatown.

Most amusing about my visit was the discovery that the hundred or so people who live in the tall weeds of District Six had a wry sense of humor about their living conditions.

But, to explain the joke, I need to explain that it's a common practice for the squatters to come up with a name for their neighborhood. The name usually becomes accepted by the larger community, and then the government as it becomes apparent that the squatters aren't going anywhere. I think the leading name for squatter camps across the country is Mandela, with the names of the struggle leaders grabbing the other top spots.

Another common practice is to pick names of people or events in the news, so there are squatter camps called Iraq, Tsunami and Osama Bin Laden.

The last theme is my favorite, and is the one that the folks living in the shacks in District Six employed. This one involves looking around at the crappy houses, the lack of proper sewers, the rocks on the roofs and the cooking fires that stand in for proper stoves, to ponder hard about the harassment by the police, about your unemployed neighbors and your ill friends, and come up with a name that implies the exact opposite.

The one I visited was called Beverly Hills.

My article is here. My unpublished pictures from Beverly Hills are here. And don't miss my cameo in the Christian Science Monitor's daily feature called Reporters on the Job.

Mandela Magic

To hear some people tell it, one of the great turning points towards reconciliation in the new South Africa wasn't the day Nelson Mandela was released from prison, or when he was elected president, or even when he picked the last apartheid-era president to be his deputy president. No. What brought people together, united them in their pride for their country... was a rugby game.

Not just any rugby game. It was the Rugby World Cup, which has only a slightly greater claim to being a worldwide sporting event than baseball's World Series. The game in question happened about a year after Mandela was elected president. South Africa had only been allowed to participate in international sporting events for just a little longer than Mandela had been in office, since, under apartheid, no one would agree to play them.

Rugby here has traditionally be a sport for white people, but after that game against New Zealand, South Africans of all stripes, colors and political persuasions could finally be proud of something that their country had accomplished on an international stage. That's how several people have explained it to me, anyway.

The fact that South Africa's national team, the Springboks, upset rugby powerhouse New Zealand in a nail-bitingly close game was part of it. But the real magic happened after the game was over, when Nelson Mandela was one of the first people on the field to celebrate the victory. He was sporting both a huge grin and a green Springboks jersey, and the crowd greeted him with chants of "Nelson, Nelson, Nelson." People still talk about that moment, reprint the picture of his shaking hands with the team captain while wearing the captain's number on his newly-donned jersey, and wax nostalgic about the pre-match attention Mandela showered on the team, letting them know that they were playing for more than a rugby championship. People say it was Mandela who inspired the team to beat someone they really had no business beating.

The tenth anniversary of the world cup victory was a few weeks ago. This article, written by François Pienaar, the revered team captain, actually made my a bit misty-eyed...though I'm a sucker for these sorts of inspiring sports moments.

On Saturday, Katie and I joined several South Africans to watch a recently created annual rugby match--inspired by that magic moment ten years ago--called the Mandela Challenge. It's timed to coincide roughly with Mandela's birthday, and beforehand, there were lots of onfield celebratory events for Mandela, who was there.

Everyone in the sports bar where we were watching would turn to the television and become enraptured whenever Mandela was on the screen. The best moment of the pre-game ceremonies was when the 60,000-plus crowd serenaded Mandela with "Happy Birthday." When they got to the part where they sang his name, the 87-year-old Mandela joined in with an emphatic "me" and pointed his thumb at his chest. The whole bar went wild. One of the people we were watching the game with actually cried at the sight of the great man.

As for the game itself? It was rougher, tougher and faster than American football, but I'll stick to paying attention to the sports I grew up with.

South Africa won handily, though if I'd had all my rugby facts straight, I would have been even less riveted than I was: no one told me ahead of time that since that famous world cup victory ten years ago, the Springboks have never lost a game that Mandela's attended.

Jou Ma Se...

The Daily Voice was in fine tabloid form late last week, spending all its considerable energy in going after a local government official named Blackman Ngoro who stupidly posted a meandering article on a website about why "Africans" are better than "coloureds," which is the term here for people of mixed heritage. The newspaper even pulled out an extremly vulgar Afrikaans insult and ran 75 percent of it on the front cover, but more on that in a minute.

As an outsider, I will always marvel at the fact that there is ongoing tension between South African blacks and coloureds even now, eleven years after democracy arrived in this country. But tension there is, especially here in Cape Town. This corner of the country is the only place that isn't composed of a majority of black people. Instead, it has a coloured majority, which has a distinct culture and cuisine. And, by the looks of the Daily Voice this week, some people here are really mad.

Here's an excerpt of what got them so angry, from Thursday's paper:

The mayor's toy boy media advisor has launched a stinging attack against coloureds.

The R500 000-a-year [about $80,000] spin doctor labels coloured people as rude drunkards who cling to apartheid with the help of cheap wine.

Blackman Ngoro further says "Africans" are culturally superior.

He says coloured families raise their laaties to hate blacks. And he warns that it they don't accept black rule, they will die a drunken death.

Ngoro made the shocking statements, littered with grammatical errors, in an article on the Internet.

And he only refers to blacks as "African," ignoring the fact that coloureds, whites and Indians are born in Africa too, making them as African as Nelson Mandela or himself.

The South African Human Rights Commission has slammed the article as "harmful and undesirable."...

The headline on the front page was "Jou Ma Se..."

Katie and I asked around about this, and it turns out that it's most of a common Afrikaans vulgarity. When we brought it up to a group of South Africans on Saturday night, we didn't even have to remember what the headline was before they jumped in with their guess. Not that they read the Daily Voice. Katie and I are the only ones we know who make it part of our weekday routine.

In any case, the part of the insult the paper printed translates into "Your Mother's..."

I leave the rest to your imagination.

But the story didn't end there. The next day, Friday, the Daily Voice came back with another front page attack, and followed up with three more pages of coverage inside. The headline was "Ngoro is a Dumb Ass." Click here for a larger view of the spread.

The Daily Voice has tried to give the mayor's racist spin doctor Blackman Ngoro a taste of coloured culture.

We delivered a polony gatsby [a locally invented sandwich] to the mayor's toyboy media advisor yesterday.

And to help display the best that coloured culture has to offer, the klopse were on hand.

They were carrying posters reading "Jou ma se.." -- another important part of Cape Flats culture, according to Ngoro.

But Ngoro refused to come down to collect his tasty offering.

The security guards promised Ngoro would receive it.

And while the cultural offering was under way, coloured staff members in Mayor Nomaindia Mfeketo's office were venting their anger at Ngoro.

They are pissed off at being called drunks and inferior to black people in an article written by her R500 000-a-year spin doctor...

I'm off to buy today's paper in a minute. I suspect this story isn't over.

Dear Dolly

Dear Dolly, I am 20 and single, and have been accused by a neighbour of being in love with his 19-year-old wife. Her husband has even threatened to kill me. But the accusation is false. Now his wife has suggested to me that we fall in love so that I can at least be accused of something true. Should I follow her suggestion?

That's a letter to Dolly, the advice columnist for Drum magazine, circa February 1955. I found that letter in a book Katie's checked out of the UCT library for her thesis. She's writing about Drum, though on more weighty topics than its advice column.

But this book, called Dear Dolly, is priceless. It features the best exchanges between Dolly and her readers spanning a period of nearly 30 years.

Katie tells me that there wasn't a Dolly at all... or that the one Dolly who ever worked at Drum, a Dolly Kassim, wasn't ever the person writing it. They picked the name because there was a famous South African singer at the time of the magazine's founding named Dolly Rathebe, and they were trying to cash in on her name.

The person stuck with writing the column every month would rotate, at least in the fifties, which is the era that Katie is researching. The staff writers--nearly all of them being among the best, most literate, most cultured South African journalists working in the era--hated writing the column, so they would fight over who had to do the job.

The questions, and the answers, reveal a lot about the issues facing South Africans at the time. The ones collected in the book, of course, are the more outrageous letters, usually because of what they reveal about how traditional African culture was clashing with the newly urbanized, increasingly more sophisticated world of black South Africa. And THAT--the idea that Drum both celebrated, and helped create, the emerging urban culture--is actually the topic of Katie's thesis.

So expect a few letters to "Dolly" in this space on Fridays for the next several weeks.

For now, I'll end with Dolly's response to the letter I shared with you above:

You will only get yourself into real trouble if you follow this stupid advice. Leave her alone! Keep the company of a decent and single young woman and the husband will realise his mistake.

Words to live by.

Rain's Back

Hm. As soon as I said something about how great the weather's been lately, the rain and the wind came back. Our car flooded again, and the curtains are at full sail.

But this morning, we were treated to a fantastic view out our kitchen window.



Here's a link to a second one from this morning that shows Katie's school, the University of Cape Town, nestled at the base of the mountain on the left hand side of the frame. Our growing gallery of Table Mountain pictures taken out the kitchen window is here.

Happy Birthday, Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela turns 87 years old today. The nationwide celebration began last night with a midnight fireworks show over Robben Island in the harbor off Cape Town's Waterfront. We're several miles away, but the fireworks rattled our windows and I peeked outside long enough to see one burst over the rooftops.

Katie and I both highly recommend Mandela's autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. Our pictures of our trip to Robben Island are here. Katie wrote about our trip here.

I See the Devil in Her Eyes

A street musician says a sangoma is stealing his talent.

He says every day the witchdoctor stands silently and stares at him until he sees dead people in her eyes.

"She is pulling all my talent out of me with her witchcraft," says Francois Tiemie.

Tiemie is now scared that he will lose his only means of an income -- his music.

He says the woman even makes him see things like faces.

Tiemie says his daily income from playing the recorder on an Outdshoorn main road is starting to shrink because of the woman's dark magic.

Everyday she stands in front of him, glaring at him, until he sees the devil himself, he says.

He says she walks around with black bags of potions and spells.

"She doesn't say a word," says Tiemie.

"She just stands there until I can see dead people in her eyes.

"Two small men walk with her and pull faces. I can't play my flute.

"I get so scared that I want to pee in my pants. I get confused and every person that walks past laughs at me," he says.

Tiemie says he is already dreaming that his recorder is a snake.

Yep. It's Monday, which means it's time for another story from the Daily Voice. A sangoma, if you don't recall, is a kind of holistic medical practicioner. Or, in the parlance of the Voice, a witch doctor. Sangomas have featured in one other Voice story I posted here before.

Why We Stopped Complaining About the Weather

I worried for a time that this website was going to turn into one big whine about the weather. Even though I didn't write about it often, it was always the first thing I thought to complain about when we were having six straight weeks of wind and rain.

It's still winter here, but these last two weeks have delivered 14 straight days of perfect weather: 75 degress every day, with barely a cloud in the sky.

Every morning, we've been waking up and saying to each other, "Yep. These winters are brutal." And then putting on shorts and sandals.

While I enjoy the weather, a small part of me feels a bit guilty. There was a pretty serious drought here last summer, and real Capetownians are hoping for more rain so there aren't water restirictions again this year. Not me. I had my fill, and I rejoiced over this article in today's paper, which says that the serious rains are probably over the year.

Today, we celebrated the continuing water shortage by going for a drive down to Muizenberg, a beach town about 20 minutes from our apartment. Here's what the dead of winter looked like today:







Click the pictures for larger images, or view all our pictures from various trips down the Cape Peninsula here.

Howzit

"Howzit."

That's the expression South Africans use to greet each other when they meet. It's short for, "How's it going." But, as when someone says, "What's up," in the states, they aren't really asking a question so much as offering a greeting and following a pre-established pattern to get a conversation started.

It's also apparently used quite commonly in Hawaii.

In any case, when someone said "Howzit" to me at the store today, I didn't think he was really trying to be all that friendly. In fact, I thought he was a stranger who was amused by my sweater.

I was feeling a little self-conscious in the store, or else I probably wouldn't have made the mistake. Katie and I had gone to sit and have some coffee at our usual spot, and get some work done, and afterwards we decided to do a little browsing at the closest clothing store. Katie went one way, and I veered off the other way by myself before realizing that I was wearing a sweater that I had purchased at that very same store not even one month earlier, and that there was a big stack of the same sweaters in a massive display right next to me.

Just then, this guy glances up from a rack of clothes. He's holding a pair of pants in either hand. And he looks at me, smiles, and says "Howzit."

"Oh, crap," I thought. "Someone noticed my frigging sweater. He must be a store employee."

Outloud, I said: "Hey."

But then I kept looking at him. All of a sudden, he looked very familiar. And a fraction of a second later, I realized that he was not a store employee. Not by a longshot. He was South Africa's leading AIDS activist, a man who has led the fight that's moved this country drastically in the right direction in its AIDS policy despite some very misinformed people in the national government, a man who is nearly universally admired for his intelligence and leadership. I interviewed him and photographed him a couple times for a story I did awhile ago.

"Oh. OH!," I said. "Hey!"

I didn't say anything else, as he was clearly aware that I didn't recognize him at first and had gone back to looking at pants. Embarassed, I slunk off to go find Katie and tell her that I'd made an ass of myself.

It was only later that I realized I should have said: "Rubber bullets, huh? What's up with that?"

The whole ride home, Katie kept giggling and saying "Howzit."

The First Lady

So Laura Bush has been in town for a few days.

I went to a few events she appeared at yesterday, and one of them dovetailed nicely with a story I had been meaning to do for awhile, so I finally managed to get something in the newspaper. It's very short, seeing as there were arrests in London yesterday, but if you want to look, be my guest.

The first lady's first stop was a visit to a maternity ward in the township of Khayelitsha, where a group called the Mothers Programmes operates. The secret service had come in force well in advance of her arrival, and required everyone to be there about two hours early, including all these HIV-positive moms who didn't have much of a clue as to who this Laura Bush woman was. Watching their amused expressions while a secret service agent ran a metal-detecting wand over them was priceless. The chest of one bosomy woman was setting off the wand, until she reached into her bra and took out her cell phone, whereupon it was everyone else's turn to laugh at the look on the secret service agent's face.

I should say that the secret service people were largely very good natured and the whole process of watching them secure the room was quite interesting.

The funniest moment of the day came at the end of her visit. The secret service whisked the first lady out the back entrance to the room where everyone was gathered, and I bolted out the front, with a pressing need to find the facilities. But I ended up in the same room as the first lady again, as the secret service appeared that they had only taken her out the back because it was part of some circuitous route that might have thrown someone off if they were looking to do her harm.

So there I was fumbling with the keys in the lock for the bathroom, when she comes blowing into the room again, saying hello to all the women at the front desk of the building. At that moment, a secret service guy taps a South African policeman on the shoulder. The policeman was on the security detail too, and had his cameraphone out. He was snapping pictures.

"Um," said the secret service agent, "please don't take pictures of the principle when you're on the detail."

"Oh," said the policeman. "Okay."

I finally got the bathroom door open, shut it behind me and realized there was a little window that looked right at the black SUV that was going to whisk the first lady away momentarily. So I stood inside this little room while listening to the first lady speak with people about five feet away, wondering if it would be disrespectful to use the bathroom given the circumstances.

But I didn't wonder long.

A few minutes later, I came back out, and the motorcade was just pulling off. The police officer was still there, holding his phone up, snapping away.

My own pictures of the day, in a higher resolution than you can get on a cameraphone, are collected here.

Man Bites the Head Off Python

A man bit the head off a giant snake to save himself from being crushed to death.

Sidwell Moremi fought for nearly three hours with the two-metre-long rock python.

But only one of the two emerged from the battle. And it was not the beast.

Moremi, 45, is the fourth man to survive a python attack in the last three weeks.

Moremi decided to take a short cut home from work yesterday.

But the shade of a tall tree was too irresistible to pass up after a hard day's slog in the hot sun.

Moremi says he dozed off under the tree while leaning against a rock. He was close to a river where the villagers swim.

But he was startled awake by the powerful grip of the thick snake coiling itself around his body.

And even though Moremi was aware that the snake was not poisonous, he knew it could crush him to death.

Moremi struggled for what seemed like ages, he says, before using his teeth to bite off the snake's head.

The snake died instantly and Moremi sold the body to a samgoma who uses pythons for muti.

It is illegal to kill rock pythons, which are commonly found in Limpopo.

Yes, that was from the Daily Voice, the fine tabloid that graces Cape Town's newspaper stands five days a week.

Newspapers that have "standards" and abide by silly things such as "telling the whole truth" usually try to tell you the who, what, when, where, why and how of the story as close to the top of the article as possible. You'll notice that the Voice has perfected the art of leaving out the all-important "where" element.

I'm convinced this is on purpose, so you have to read the whole article before realizing this happened nowhere near Cape Town. In this case, Limpopo is to Cape Town what Arizona is to New York. In other cases, they'll run snippets of wire copy from Germany, Thailand or Australia and leave out where it happened until the very end.

So don't worry, mom. I won't get eaten by a snake.

Eating Out

Our favorite restaurant in Cape Town, the place where we go often enough that we're practically regulars, isn't some place that serves traditional African fare. You'd think that, since we took the trouble to come all the way from New York to spend a year here, we'd want to take this opportunity to eat a bunch of oxtail stew and sample all the local delicacies.

We certainly are making an effort to try at least one of everything while we're here, but the place we go to most often would actually be right at home in Brooklyn. They serve pizza.

Well, gourmet pizza. With salmon and blue cheese and other vaguely interesting toppings. But it's still pizza.

The restaurant is called Diva, and it's located in the neighborhood whose name gives us so much trouble.

If we were on vacation, Katie and I would scoff at eating pizza in Africa, or ordering the mezes platter in Italy, or getting Thai food in Turkey.

But we learned quickly that you can't challenge your taste buds every day with new stuff, and you need to mix in some comfort food along with your culinary adventures. That's why I keep making tuna casserole at home.

We did eat at a fantastic restaurant last Friday night, though, that serves "Cape Malay" food. That's the term given (by whitey) to all the slaves they imported from West Africa and Asia after the colonial government passed a law that said that slavery was a-okay. . . just as long as you don't enslave the locals. I think that was considered progressive legislation at the time.

Anyway, Cape Malay food is a mixture of the food from some of those slave cultures, and the curries are sweeter than your usual Indian curry. It was fantastic.

I kept eating until I was the last one in the entire restaurant with food still in front of me, and until the waitress came by a third time to ask if she could take my plate.

The Apprentice: SA

In case anyone was wondering, at the end of The Apprentice: SA, when they're all in the boardroom and someone is getting axed, the phrase that's used to send someone away isn't Donald Trump's snarky "You're fired."

Instead, it's a rather stately "You're dismissed."

Otherwise, everything else is the same.

Petrol

We've put this off for a long time, but today, after filling up the gas tank, I finally took the time to grab a pen and write down all the relevant stats I need to figure out how much we're payin to fill up the car

The reason we've been dreading this moment, of course, is that gasoline is more expensive pretty much everywhere else in the world than it is in the states, but the combination of measuring the volume of gas in liters and the price in South African rand meant that we really had no idea how much we were paying per gallon.

Nor could we really figure out our gas mileage.

But this afternoon, curiosity won the day, and I scribbled down these numbers:

* 5.29 rand for a liter of leaded petrol (yes, our car takes leaded gas.)
* 17.29 liters to fill the tank
* 562.7 kilometers worth of driving on the last tank

And then I got home and looked up the conversions. There's 3.79 liters to the gallon, and 1.61 kilometers to the mile. The rand is at 6.8 to the dollar, which means we're effectively getting about 6.7.

(On a side note: we put some money into a South African bank account right when we got here, figuring the dollar would continue to tank, but have never drawn on it, since the South African government is actually actively trying to drive down the value of the rand against the dollar to increase exports, and the dollar has improved about 15% since we arrived. Which means things are getting cheaper if we continue to take money out of our American accounts via the ATM--where the fees are cheaper than if we withdrew from an ATM at a bodega in Brooklyn.)

So what was the verdict today?

* We're getting about 28 miles to the gallon...almost exactly what my Honda Civic gets back home, though we drive far less in South Africa.
* It cost just over $37 to fill up the tank with 12.3 gallons of gas.
* Today, gas cost us almost exactly $3 a gallon.

On the Tube

It stands to reason that you can learn a lot about a country by watching its television, and in that regard, Katie and I are missing out on a bit of our education. We priced out TVs when we got here, but decided not to buy one. So, except for a few days in Durban, we've managed not to watch any television since March. (Though we do watch a lot of DVDs on our computer.)

But the most interesting thing about South African television is its history. Or, rather, it's lack of a history. Television wasn't introduced here until 25 years ago. It was the last industrialized nation in the world to have T.V. The National Party--the crazy folks who invented and implemented apartheid--thought it was immoral. Imagine that: they were denying a massive majority of the population even the most basic of human rights, and they still had time to reflect on what was "moral," and on how television might rot your brain. They were busy folks.

For years after it was introduced (in January 1976, I think), it only broadcast for a few hours a night. Several people my age say they remember sitting in front of the T.V. and staring at the test pattern--first, because that was entertainment enough, and later, because they were waiting for their favorite shows to come on.

During the first fifteen years of its history, the state-run South African Broadcasting Corporation was an instrument of apartheid. This was by design, of course. Its news department was so in favor of the apartheid regime that, when the National Party finally came to the table in 1992 to negotiate an end to apartheid and the first ever democratic election, the African National Congress insisted that no elections could be considered free and fair if they were being covered by the SABC as it was then structured. So they had to appoint a whole new board, remake the news department and revamp the entire company. It's all covered in a fascinating chapter in this book by Allister Sparks, who served on the reconstituted SABC board and also ran the news division for a short time.

Now, they try to broadcast a little bit every day in all eleven of this country's official languages, over three SABC channels. These days, some people complain that they're still biased... but in favor of the ANC. I wouldn't know if that's true, since I've barely watched it. There are also two other options for channels, bringing the grand total to five.

In any case, a couple that lives down the hall from us asked us to watch their place this week while they're on vacation in Jo-berg. So last night, our curiosity got the better of us, and we made the thirty-yard trek to see what we could learn about this fantastic and diverse country from their broadcast T.V.

That's what we told ourselves anyway. Then we watched Will and Grace.

We also watched the season premier of Footballers' Wives. It's a British show, and I'm glad I saw it, if for only one reason: I am armed with the perfect counter-argument if anyone ever insists that British television is better than its American counterpart. The show was awful.

So, in the absence of learning anything about South Africa from the television, perhaps we can all learn something from looking at the South African Broadcasting Corporation website together. You'll notice there's a lot of American soap operas and sit-coms, a bunch of bad American movies, and a South African version of the Apprentice. In place of Donald Trump, the host is a businessman and former politician with the fantastic name of Tokyo Sexwale.

Sexwale, a stalwart of the African National Congress through the decades of struggle against apartheid, was forced to resign his premiership post a few years ago after allegations surfaced that he had been plotting to overthrow President Thabo Mbeki. It turned out the allegation wasn't true, but by the time the fact had been established, Sexwale had given up politics and entered the business world, in which he's apparently already made a kajillion dollars.

This country is small enough that I only know about 10 people here... and one of them is the sister of one of the contestants. He's still in.

The Apprentice SA airs on Thursdays at 8:30. Don't try calling us on our land line then. We'll be down the hall, learning about South Africa.

Barely a Whisper

Sorry, folks. Nothing from the Daily Voice this week. There wasn't anything in the last seven days that lived up to the low, low standards that the newspaper has set for itself.

Maybe next week.

Sushi

We had lunch with some friends at a fancy-shmancy sushi place called Tank yesterday. It's supposed to be the best sushi in the city. Their website is here, and the menu is here.

Before you click and start drooling, you should know that the South African rand is at 6.8 to the dollar. Okay, now go.

Cookout

I hope all our friends over there in that country we left behind have grand plans this weekend to char some meat over an open flame in celebration of our country's independence.

Given the approaching holiday, this seems like the appropriate time to break the news that the uniquely American tradition of the barbeque isn't as unique as you might think. In South Africa, there's an even more pervasive barbeque culture than in the states. I know people in the American South take their BBQ sauces and BBQ methods quite seriously, but they aren't as serious as some South Africans seem be about their study of the art of the braai.

"Braai" is the South African term for barbeque. Actually, it's short for braaivlais, an Afrikaans word that means "meat grill." And grill they do, cooking everything from beef or lamb cutlets to ostrich and boerewors ("farmer's sausage"), a spicy South African specialty.

The braai is so pervasive that when we went on our epic search for a place to live at the start of our stay here, the people showing us each apartment would refer to the area for the cookout--the "braai area"--as if we had assumed there would be one. Katie and I have hypothesized that somewhere in South Africa's lengthy and liberal new constitution, each citizen is given the constitutional right to a braai.

This right was apparently extended to non-citizens. On our sets of keys for our apartment, we were given three keys: one for the apartment door, one for the patio door, and one for the communal braai area. It is our goal, by the time we leave here in March, to host a braai in our communal braai area for our growing group of South African friends.

But first we have to go to someone else's braai to see how it's done, and our neighbors said they would bring us with them the next time a particular friend of theirs hosts a cookout. They said he's the best at it.

We're told that braais always follow the same routine: the men gather around the grill, grunt, and poke at the meat. While they're debating the relative merits of particular meats and cooking methods, the women are supposed to be inside making potato salad.

It all sounds oddly familiar.