Exemplary world leader Nelson (named Rolihiahla, "Troublemaker" by his father) Mandala has "passed on," as the South Africans prefer to say. I think I would like the expression to be "has passed through" -- like a fresh breeze -- but some hit a brick wall, as in the vicious ending suffered by fellow opponent of the South African apartheid, Bantu Steve Biko…and so many others.
Click on this photo to enlarge:
It was so long ago that I am only assuming that I took this photograph of leaflets plastered to a wall when the progress of the Anti-Apartheid movement seemed just as tattered. Expressing support for it was sometimes greeted with cynical disdain as the corporate powers of the American government, with their military, police, and secret service enforcers, supported the Apartheid government.
Yet progressive efforts that look as if they will, at best, take a thousand years to effect have a way of happening sooner than expected because of the smaller and larger efforts of good souls; never soon enough, of course, to catch those who fall before a final victory.
People in the United States are currently seeing (or avoiding) the great film, 12 YEARS AS A SLAVE. An audio reading of Solomon Northrup's account, by that title, is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-ILc8W0P3Y
I suppose that anyone to whom I address writing on this blog is already well-informed about anything I say. Accounts of the horrors of American slavery will unfold forever, but cannot obscure the fact that the horrors are not entirely in the distant past, as revealed in the mass incarceration and disenfranchisement of Black men (THE NEW JIM CROW), and with bloody echoes of that time in so many incidents, and as portrayed in the new book I AM TROY DAVIS, which documents how an unspoken network of organized racism triumphs over facts to kill another Black man -- with traps provided by the law.
Click on this photo to enlarge:
It was so long ago that I am only assuming that I took this photograph of leaflets plastered to a wall when the progress of the Anti-Apartheid movement seemed just as tattered. Expressing support for it was sometimes greeted with cynical disdain as the corporate powers of the American government, with their military, police, and secret service enforcers, supported the Apartheid government.
Yet progressive efforts that look as if they will, at best, take a thousand years to effect have a way of happening sooner than expected because of the smaller and larger efforts of good souls; never soon enough, of course, to catch those who fall before a final victory.
People in the United States are currently seeing (or avoiding) the great film, 12 YEARS AS A SLAVE. An audio reading of Solomon Northrup's account, by that title, is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-ILc8W0P3Y
I suppose that anyone to whom I address writing on this blog is already well-informed about anything I say. Accounts of the horrors of American slavery will unfold forever, but cannot obscure the fact that the horrors are not entirely in the distant past, as revealed in the mass incarceration and disenfranchisement of Black men (THE NEW JIM CROW), and with bloody echoes of that time in so many incidents, and as portrayed in the new book I AM TROY DAVIS, which documents how an unspoken network of organized racism triumphs over facts to kill another Black man -- with traps provided by the law.
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