Stories worth reading as you head into the weekend:
Is there instability among the destabilizers? It appears so in the southern Somalian port city of Kismayo where there are serious divisions between armed Islamist factions.
From South Africa: “This week, a South African call-center business, frustrated by persistently slow Internet speeds, decided to use a carrier pigeon named Winston to transfer 4 gigabytes of data between two of its offices, just 50 miles apart. At the same time, a computer geek pushed a button on his computer to send data the old-fashioned way, through the Internet.” These problems are being addressed, of course, and how this story is framed runs the risk of playing into the hands of those who want to denigrate Africa’s primitivism. Just keep in mind that consistent high-speed internet has not even been a fixture in most of the United States for all that long and it’s not as if we are immune to the frustrations of internet issues in the States today. Anyone who dealt with dial-up internet faced many of these same issues not long ago.
This week’s Springbok-All Black Tri Nations clash in Hamilton also carries with it a hint of history, as in 1981 when the Springboks visited Hamilton to play a provincial side they met with massive anti-apartheid protests. Issues of race and racism still haunt South African rugby, but the progress made under the once-racist Soringbok logo is still pretty remarkable. Some of South Africa’s strongest players in 2009 would once never have been able to imagine donning the green and gold and their coach would never have been allowed anywhere near the squad. In the words of Bok Captain John Smit, “Now we’ve got an opportunity to celebrate how far we’ve come since 1981 as a country, and to celebrate that in no better way than using rugby playing for our country against the All Blacks who are our greatest foe. So it’s a wonderfully positive thing to be able to do so and see how far as a country we’ve come in a short period of time.”
Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu has suffered a spine injury and will be laid low for a couple of weeks, but apparently is in his usual high spirits.
The Eastern Cape was long a hotbed of anti-Apartheid activity and political ferment. The region’s ANC leaders are meeting in East London this week for the first provincial party conference since the country’s elections earlier this year and tensions are running high. The Congress of the People took a chunk out of the ANC’s support in those elections in a part of the country that has historically been an ANC stronghold. The party will elect its regional leaders and the results might prove telling, the process even more so.
IRIN has some alarming statistics on the security of aid workers and peacekeepers in Darfur.
Finally, in the most frustrating story of all (for me at least) SADC once again punted with regard to Zimbabwe. I do not know why I let myself believe that this time would be different given the fecklessness that the regional body has shown in the face of Mugabe, but like Charlie Brown thinking that this time Lucy would let me kick the football, I let myself believe. Good grief.