LITERARY CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON CHRISTMAS EVE

This morning, while I was having my daily lemon poppyseed muffin and coffee at the Cafe Carolina, I idly glanced through the Arts section of the TIMES, the Tuesday crossword and Ken Ken puzzles requiring very little time, as usual.  I happened on a story about John Goldwyn, grandson of the legendary Samuel Goldwyn of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer fame, who is trying to make a comeback as a movie producer with the just released The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.  I have seen previews of the movie, a fifty million dollar spectacular, starring the always egregious Ben Stiller.  My first reaction to the previews was a silent "Oh, no!  That is all wrong!"

Anyway, the TIMES piece got me thinking about the larger question of the appropriateness of adaptations and modernizations of classic literary works.   You know the sort of thing I mean:  King Lear set in 1930's Weimar Germany, Romeo and Juliet as a musical about New York gangs.  Sometimes these work exceedingly well.  West Side Story is, for my money, a completely legitimate take on the Shakespeare play.  Sometimes these adaptations are disasters.  Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law as Holmes and Watson are so completely wrong that their version of the great Conan Doyle characters struck me as a deliberate piece of camp [and a bad piece at that.]

The problem, as I see it, is this:  a great author integrates the characters and plot lines so perfectly with the social, legal, political, and cultural milieu in which the story is set that the two cannot be disambiguated.  Pride and Prejudice is set in a world in which property and marriage and family connection are inseparable.  Darcy's hesitations about marrying a daughter of the Bennett family makes no sense if the story is transported to 1990's San Francisco.  Richard III is incomprehensible if Richard is figured as a New York corporate executive.  The motivations of the characters, the constraints on their choices, the tragedy of their situation are all inseparable from the social world they inhabit.

Now, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a delightful James Thurber short story about a meek little man -- a Casper Milquetoast, if I may show my age -- who carves out a tiny interior space in his imagination into which he can retreat from his overbearing wife [A Thurber standard] for fleeting moments of satisfying fantasy.  One of his little flights of fancy, for example, takes place in the brief time that he sits in his car at a traffic light, waiting for the red to turn to green.  To render this fiction cinematically by a series of dramatic, expensive special effects episodes completely loses the charm of the original story [you will notice that I say this confidently despite having not seen the picture.]  As for the casting of Ben Stiller, words fail me.  Walter Mitty is not a mugging self-referential clown.  Far from it.  Kevin Kline might be able to carry it off, but not Ben Stiller.

If I may recur to Aristotle -- always a permissible move for a philosopher -- the great writers succeed in finding the universal in the particular.  They do not write the universal and then arbitrarily set it in some particular to which it bears no intrinsic relation.

Very much the same thing is true of great composers, I believe [although here I suspect I will get a strong argument from some performers as well as from some composers.]  The original pianoforte [soft-loud -- rather like the pushmepullyou in Dr. Doolittle] is very different from the modern concert grand.  It makes a different sound.  When Mozart wrote for the pianoforte -- I am convinced -- he did not write for some ideal perfect piano which, alas for him, the available pianoforte only imperfectly instantiated.  He wrote for the existing instrument.  Had someone made a modern concert grand available to him, mirabile dictu, he would have written different music.  That is why not even the immortal Glenn Gould was able, on a piano, to play harpsichord music as it was meant to be played.

Well, as I say, I have not seen the movie.  I am still trying to find the time to see The desolation of Smaug.

MUST READ

My old friend, Enver Motala, has just sent to me a lengthy document adopted by a meeting of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa [NUMSA].   I have archived it as a pdf file at box.net, accessible via the link at the top of this page.  I very strongly urge you to read it.  This is what real worker thinking and action looks like.  I weep at the realization that there is no organization in the entire United States capable of producing a document of this sort about America.  Note, by the way, that the South African Communist Party [SACP] is now hand in glove with the ruling ANC against the interests of the workers.

FILM ECHOES

One of the most enjoyable pastimes of dedicated film buffs is finding deliberate directorial echoes, moments in which one director frames a scene or a bit of action as a kind of silent homage to an earlier work.  Yesterday afternoon, Susie and I were idly watching a television screening of The Wizard of Oz when I saw just such a moment.  I am going to assume that everyone has seen both The Wizard of Oz and The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Recall that after Dorothy has been captured by the Wicked Witch of the West [Margaret Hamilton, who was, believe it or not, only 37 when she played that memorable dual role], Toto escapes and leads the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion back to the Witch's castle to rescue Dorothy.  The three distinctly trepid saviors clamber over some patently fake rocks and finally crouch behind an escarpment, peering over at the entrance to the castle as the Witch's mock-fearsome troops march in and out, singing as they go. 

As I saw that scene for the hundredth time, I suddenly recalled the genuinely scary scene from The Lord of the Rings in which Frodo, Sam, and the gollum crouch on a high cliff and watch Sauron's very scary Ork forces marching through the large gate into Mordor.   As soon as I made the connection, it was obvious that Peter Jackson had made a conscious allusion to the iconic Wizard.

I invite my faithful viewers to tell us their favorite examples of cinematic allusions.

WINTER SOLSTICE

Today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year.  I saw a hawk this morning as I walked.  Even though it has been unusually warm, even for North Carolina, I have a primal desire to pull the covers over my head and stay in bed.  Indeed, it was almost six before I got up, dressed, and went walking.  I find this time of year depressing in general -- too many days without mail, without the regular affairs of the world to distract me.  This year is a bit harder, because my eightieth birthday approaches.  Exactly six months from now, we shall be in Paris for fete de la musique on the longest day of the year.  That is a very much more cheerful time.

Next week I shall play Mozart's great violin/viola duet, K423, with a violinist I found listed in the Amateur Chamber Music Players' membership catalogue.  The ACMP is a world-wide organization of amateur musicians who enjoy playing chamber music.  One is required to self-evaluate one's skills and list oneself as Professional, A, B, C, or D in skill [with pluses and minuses, to boot.]  I chose to list myself as Viola B, which is certainly not an undervaluing of my skills.  I have been practicing K423 for days.  My secret hope is that I do reasonably well when we play and that she in turn talks it about in the Triangle musical world that I am OK violist, thereby perhaps making it possible for me to get into a regular quartet.  A bit like an old-fashioned version of Internet dating.

TFIOS Tagline - "It shows the humor of the story"

On Wednesday morning, the official TFIOS movie poster was released, causing many to tweet "OMG," "DYINGGGGG," and "How am I going to suvive June 6?" While many were excited, some were actually shocked by the tagline written underneath Hazel (Shailene Woodley) and Augustus' (Ansel Elgort) faces. "One sick love story." As huge fans of the book, we actually loved it because it's not a cheesy love tagline, it gives an insight to the humor that is the book and will be in the movie.

John Green, who did not write the tagline, talked a little bit about the tagline on his "Project For Awesome" livestream.

"The book has a reputation of being dramatic and making people feel all of the things. One of the things is humor," John said. "I think it cuts the softness of the image to say 'You're not going to be watching a soft sentimental movie, you're gonna watch a movie that has an edge to it.'"

When a commenter wrote that the tagline was "sick-ploitation" John responded that he did not think so.

"I don't think so. I think this is pretty much a joke Hazel would make," John replied. "Hazel is pretty explicit about her illness and makes fun of it quite a lot."

John also addressed a question about the tagline on his Tumblr page
Watch the entire video below

WHAT IT IS TO BE A TEACHER

Several e-mail responses to my "small triumph" post yesterday expressed distress at the lack of real mentoring these days in the Academy.  As I was taking my walk this morning at 6:30 [a lovely full moon hanging low in the western sky], I thought back to my first year as a senior member of the Columbia Philosophy Department, forty-nine years ago.  The department at that time was like a three generation family party.  There were the old wise men, at or near retirement -- Ernest Nagel, John Herman Randall, Horace Friess, and James Gutman -- the grownups -- Justus Buchler, Bob Cumming, Albert Hofstadter, Charles Frankel -- and the kids -- Sidney Morgenbesser, Richard Kuhn, Richard Taylor, Arthur Danto, James Walsh, Charles Parsons, and myself.  I had been told when I was hired that my "teaching load would be two and two" -- academic shorthand for a responsibility of teaching two courses each semester.  But the old men in the department, all of whom had come up in the Great Depression, had no conception of a teaching load.  They were simply teachers, and when students wanted to learn something they taught it, whether that meant teaching two courses a semester or five.  The year I arrived, Randall, Friess, and Gutman were teaching a seminar on something or other, joined by Frank Tannenbaum, a distinguished historian.  They asked whether I would like to join them and I said sure.  The seminar, if you can call it that, was a hoot.  We sat in a room with maybe fifteen graduate students from all over the university and talked about whatever the students were interested in.  There was no sense of "fields," or "specialties."  We were all just teachers.  There were some delicious moments.  Every so often, for example, Jimmy and Horace would have a disagreement, and like as not Jimmy would say, "Horace, I seem to remember you took a different view of that question in 1937."  Then Jack and Frank would try to recall whether Jimmy was right.  I was thirty at the time, and I felt really privileged to be allowed to take part, sort of like being permitted to join in the conversation as a kid when my parents had friends over of an evening.  I never forgot that window on an earlier time, when teachers taught, not counting credits or teaching loads or contact hours.

In the Spring of 2000, I was a Professor of Afro-American Studies at UMass and Graduate Program Director of our new doctoral program.  None of our graduate students knew anything about Marx, so I decided to teach them.  I announced a series of evening classes on Marx and about seventeen students showed up -- almost all of our doctoral students at that point.  We met for as many weeks as it took for me to give them the elements of Marx's thought, and to their credit, these overworked students all stuck it out.  There was one wonderful moment, but a little background is required.  At that time, not a single member of the department had anything that could by the wildest stretch of the imagination be called a religious belief, but at least half of our students were serious Christians of one sort or another.  [When you called Chris Lehman on the phone, for example, if he wasn't in, you got blessed three times before the beep.]  Anyway, I was lecturing on Marx's early views one rainy evening, and a propos of I know not what, I remarked in an  off-hand fashion, "Of course, there is no God."  Just at the moment, there was a tremendous clap of thunder.  I did not know it at the time, but I later learned that a number of students took it as a sign.

Official The Fault In Our Stars Movie Poster!

BuzzFeed revealed the official movie poster for TFIOS. It features Shailene and Ansel lying on the ground, eyes closed, facing each other. We are so excited. Check it out below!

RESPONSE TO A COMMENT

I was just checking the comments, as I do every day, and found a very troubling comment on an old August post by "Theceltiberian" [??] about Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis.  He [she, they] says that they have turned very much to the right in recent years.  Can that be true?  Does anyone know?

A SMALL TRIUMPH

More than six months ago, I met with a bright young UNC Philosophy graduate student who had worked as my research assistant on several book projects.  She was ready to start writing her dissertation, but was rather daunted by the prospect, as many graduate students are when they become "ABD."  I offered her the following deal:  If she would write one page, or perhaps two, of her dissertation every single day, and send me what she had written that day as an email attachment, I would read it immediately and send back comments on the same day [or early the next morning.]  She agreed, went home, and that night wrote page one of the dissertation.  Every single day since then she has sent me a page or two and I have read it, save for a break this Fall when she had to do the elaborate preparation the Philosophy Department requires of those going on the job market.

Yesterday she sent me the last two pages of the final chapter.  She now has a complete draft of the dissertation, just as I promised she would.  There will be revisions, of course, but it is a certainty that she will receive the doctorate.

This is the fourth time I have done this with  a student -- the first  three with Afro-American Studies doctoral students at the University of Massachusetts.  This is her triumph, not mine.  After all, I did not write a word of the dissertation.  But I take a certain pride in the accomplishment none the less.

REFLECTIONS ON ENVER MOTALA'S ESSAY -- PART TWO

Now we come to what I find especially interesting in all of this.  The South African educational system, even after Liberation, offers nothing remotely resembling the structure of "second chances" that are provided to Americans by Community Colleges, Extension Programs, and other ways of accumulating tertiary education credits that can be applied toward a tertiary degree.  In America, a young man or woman who does poorly in high school and has made little or no effort to continue on to college can take college level courses at a local Community College.  If he or she does well, those credits can then be transferred to a nearby campus of the State College system, and those credits in turn can be carried over to a branch of the State university.  All of this is out of the question in South Africa.

But South Africa is full of able, intelligent Black men and women who have learned a great deal of real value on the job or in life, as we like to say.  Let me give just one example.  The largest of the Townships contain hundreds of thousands of residents -- Wikipedia gives the population  of Soweto as more than 850,000.  Under the apartheidregime, the national government did very little in the way of internal management of these huge urban populations, and informal, unacknowledged, unofficial governments sprang up that provided internal policing and other city functions.  The Black men and women who performed these functions did not have university degrees in Political Science, but they knew how to run a big city.  So those engaged in educating and training township residents or union members, like Enver, seized on the existing educational theories of alternative education and formal credentialing of practical knowledge, arguing that so long as the society demanded educational credentials for the best jobs, the non-white men and women who had over many years acquired demonstrable skills should receive credentialed recognition of that fact.

At the same time, Enver and others began to elaborate on the old argument about the destructive consequences of the separation of "head work" from "hand work."  We are all familiar with that distinction.  In the United States, it is sometimes described as the distinction between White Collar jobs and Blue Collar jobs, or between "suits" and "shirts," or between working class and middle class.  There is a long tradition in European and American radical educational circles of challenging the legitimacy of that distinction as not intellectually or educationally grounded, and as serving primarily to enforce and rigidify social and economic class divisions.

When I first arrived in South Africa in 1986, before Liberation, I was enchanted to discover that in that politically enslaved country these ideas were alive and well, while in supposedly liberated America, they were all but dead.  This was one of the reasons that I fell in love with South Africa and committed my time and energy to the struggle for liberation both there and here in America.  This is a long and very sad story, but the short of it is that after Liberation, few if any significant changes were made in the South African tertiary educational sector.  There was a years-long hullaballoo about "transformation," but aside from some mergers and reshufflings at the administrative level, the hide-bound old-fashioned rigid educational system continued.  The only difference was in the shades of color of the faces of the students.

My experiences in South Africa forced me to reexamine my assumptions about American higher education.  As my one book length discussion of the subject [The Ideal of the University, 1969] makes clear, the early part of my long career was spent in the elite, privileged private sector of American higher education.  I taught at Harvard, at Chicago, at Columbia.  When I moved to the University of Massachusetts in 1971, I thought of myself as going into the belly of the beast, but of course UMass is itself part of the elite sector of higher ed.  Wikipedia says that there are 2774 four year degree granting educational institutions in America.  UMass is surely among the top three or four hundred, and perhaps among the top two hundred.  So in leaving Columbia for UMass, I was, so to speak, going from a gated community to an upper-middle class suburb.

But that of course does not begin to capture the reality of American society.  Only slightly more than thirty percent of Americans over the age of 25 have earned the B.A. or its equivalent.  It is important to pause for a moment to reflect on the significance of that statistic.  Seventy per cent of the adults in this country are simply ineligible for almost every decent job because they lack the appropriate educational credentials.

To be sure, you need a college degree to be a professor, a doctor, or a lawyer.  Indeed, you need several.  But you also need a college degree to be a high school teacher, to be an elementary school teacher, to get into a corporate management training program, to work for a business consulting firm, to be an architect, a Registered Nurse, an FBI agent, to have any hope of working for a non-profit.  If the Walmart website is to be believed, your chances of becoming a Walmart store manager without a college degree are minimal.  So seventy percent of Americans can kiss all of those jobs goodbye.   

Since virtually everyone who talks or writes about education and the American economy is in that thirty percent -- and most are in the very much tinier segment of graduates of top colleges and universities [counting UMass and its equivalents as part of the "top"], the talk is all about how hard it is to get into the elite handful of Ivy League schools and their equivalents, as though that were the only question worth discussing.  Save when the conversation turns to African-Americans and Latinos, no one really acknowledges that most Americans do not have college degrees.  Now, to be sure, a larger share of each age cohort gets some post-secondary education.  After all, those 2774 four-year schools manage, on average, to graduate within six years only about 55% of the students who enroll.  But the fact remains that even now, not having a college degree is the norm.  By the way, when I was an undergraduate, only about six or seven percent of Americans had a college degree!

REFLECTIONS ON ENVER MOTALA'S ESSAY --- PART ONE

There is so much to say about Enver Motala's essay that I am somewhat at a loss to know where to begin.  I have, over the years, written a great deal about education both here in the United States and in South Africa.  I shall draw on some of that body of material in this discussion, which, now that I am started, strikes me as likely to last more than a single day.  From time to time I shall even incorporate passages from those writings into this extended essay.  I suppose I think of myself as being somewhat like the composers of the baroque or classical period who did not hesitate to borrow from themselves.

Let me start by telling you a bit about the context within which Enver has spent his life working.  South Africa in the apartheidera had an extremely rigid and traditional educational system at every level from elementary to higher education.  As you can imagine, the schools were rigidly segregated, not simply into white and non-white systems, but into White, African, Indian, and Coloured systems mirroring the geographic and residential segregation of the nation.  The Indian people are the descendants of workers brought from India to labor in the sugar fields of Natal Province on the eastern side of the country.  The Coloured people, who speak Afrikaans, not English, as their native language, are the mixed race descendants of Dutch settlers and Malay and African residents of the Western Cape section of the country.  When the Boer government implemented the theory and practice of apartheid, or "separateness." the non-white peoples were forced to relocate in areas designated for them, with the African majority population being forcibly separated into ten or more groupings according to their native languages.  The white population depended on the labor of non-whites, but at the same time did not permit them to live within the cities where their labor was required.  Thus grew up the institution of racially segregated townships just outside the White cities where African, Indian, or Coloured families could stay when their work day was done.  [The so-called influx control laws and pass laws forbade non-whites from saying in the cities after sundown, so early each morning hundreds of thousands of Black men and women would begin the long trip by train or bus into the cities to work and then retrace their steps each evening.]  The best known township is the African township Soweto [ = SOuth WEst TOwnship].

 

The educational systems were organized along the same racial lines, with elementary and secondary schools for Whites only, Africans only, Indians only, and Coloureds only.  Although the official ruling ideology originally denied that non-Whites were capable of higher education, eventually the economy developed to the point at which there was a need for non-White workers trained even beyond secondary schooling, and so in addition to the Afrikaans-language and English language universities that were established by Whites and which flourished, a series of universities came into existence specifically to educate non-Whites.  The oldest such university, Fort Hare, is the alma mater of Nelson Mandela and many other South African and Southern African political leaders.  The University of Durban-Westville was established to educate Indian students, the University of the Western Cape was founded to educate Coloured students, and several universities in addition to Fort Hare were founded to educate African students, among them the University of Zululand, Transkei University, and the University of the North.

The education in the universities was a mixture of British and Continental traditions, in both cases extremely hidebound, with year-long courses graded with a single end of year examination, and virtually no possibility of partial credit for the work done during the year.  There was also no way to transfer credits from one institution to another, not even, say, from The University of the Witwatersrand to Cape Town University, the two leading English language universities in the country.  All of the good jobs were reserved for whites, of course, and typically required university degrees.  Virtually the only fellowship support came from the mining companies, which offered bursaries to undergraduates who were willing to commit to working for the companies after they earned their degrees.

Even to be eligible to apply for admission to a university -- any university -- required a performance of a certain level and nature on the school leaving exams called by everyone "matrics".   All of the universities are state funded, and if one of them chose to admit a student who had not "earned a matric" the university would not receive state support for that student in the funding formula used to calculate how much each university received each year.  Each racial group took a separate set of matric exams, and the exams administered for the small group of African students who actually took them were often graded in a haphazard and irrational fashion.  Roughly two percent of each African age cohort "earned a matric."  This does not mean that two percent of each year's Black eighteen year olds went to university.  It means that only two percent were even eligible to go to university.  When Jakes Gerwel, the first Coulored Rector of the University of the Western Cape, declared a policy of "open admissions," he did not mean -- he was forbidden by law from meaning -- that every young Coloured or African or Indian man and woman who completed high school would be admitted on a first-come first-served basis [which is roughly what "open admissions" at City College in New York meant during its open admissions policy.]  Gerwel meant that he would accept any student who managed to earn a matric.  Some years later, using a loophole in the law, UWC experimented with admitting several hundred non-matric students under a State policy of allowing a University Faculty Senate some discretion in admissions.  These so-called "Senate Discretionary" students, for whom of course the university received no state subsidy, were then followed at UWC to see how their performance compared to that of students who had earned a matric.  I was not at all surprised to learn that there was no discernible difference in the academic performance of the two groups.  For several years, my scholarship organization gave money to UWC specifically for bursaries for those non-matric students in an effort to encourage the experiment.

How does this relate to what Enver Motala has spent much of his life doing?  [You may be able to tell, by the way, that having spent twenty-five years of my life deeply involved with South African education, I could go on for many, many pages discussing this or that aspect of the system, but I will spare you.]  Well, while all of this was going on in the universities of South Africa, millions of African, coloured, and Indian men and women were leading their lives effectively excluded from formal higher education, and provided with woefully inadequate primary and secondary education as well.  Enver and many other committed activists have devoted their lives to offering worker education to union members [mine workers, factory workers, and so forth], to township residents, and to the rural population forced to live in the so-called Homelands.

WASTING TIME

Very tricky NY TIMES crossword puzzle today.  I had filled in more than half of it before I finally caught on to the gimmick.  After that, it was not hard to finish.

Good news.  I have found a violinist with whom to play Mozart's great duet, K423.  We shall see how it goes.

John and Ansel tweet about TFIOS movie

"The fox studio lot. Great meetings today about #tfiosmovie! Big things coming soon..."

"Been hearing amazing things about #tfiosmovie. Really amazing things. Just got off the phone w @joshboonemovies"

CLARIFICATION

A reader of this blog wrote to me, disturbed to have found a story online about the corruption and evil doing of Enver Motala.  There are two Enver Motalas in South Africa, my friend, and a notorious crook.  I should have disambiguated them.  Sorry about that.

AN IMPORTANT GUEST POST BY ENVER MOTALA

Enver Motala is one of my oldest friends in South Africa.  He has spent a lifetime in the struggle, mostly in worker education in the townships and the unions.  He is an admirable example of the sort of coimmitted union organizer who seems not to exist in the same way anymore in the United States.  Over the years, we have talked for many hours about worker education, the breaking down of the walls between handwork and headwork, the principle of formal educational credentialing for life experience, and the problematic relationship of the labor movement in South Africa to the ANC and to the embrace by Thabo Mbeki of World Bank-style economic rationalization.

Yesterday he sent me this paper, which will appear in a forthcoming book.  It has appeared, in this form, in  The Mail and Guardian, the leading South African Newspaper.  Tomorrow, I will write an extended commentary relating the things Enver says to the American experience.  I urge you to read this important document.

                                                      ********************

COMMENT

Enver Motala & Salim Vally

Profound conceptual problems arise from the untested assumptions that pervade much of the thinking and research on the relationship between education, skills development and employment. Such assumptions pervade public policy, market-driven and even academic discussions about education, skills development and job creation, with the result that more fundamental and transformative approaches are deliberately underrepresented or omitted.

We believe that a number of very important -- perhaps fundamental -- issues arise for examining the relationship between education and training and the economy.

To begin with, conceptualising the relationship of the economy to education and training systems should be preceded by some orientation to the nature of the economy that is being referred to. As we know there were substantial differences within the state planning-driven economic systems that characterised the former Soviet bloc, on the one hand, and the wide varieties of capitalism that have existed throughout the 20th century, on the other.

There are also differences between post-colonial states themselves, ranging from states largely based on rural subsistence and agribusiness to those based on extractive economies or a mixture of such economies and a manufacturing sector. More recently there are economies based on a newly developed tertiary and service sector and some characterised by a high level of militarisation of economic activity.

These economies, in all their forms, exhibit a considerable variety of political systems ranging between statist and varieties of social democratic, religio-nationalist and military-oligarchic dictatorships and permutations of these. It could be argued that if there is any single thread of similarity between these systems, this would be that all these forms of political economy and statism are characterised by huge inequalities of social power expressed through the extraordinary power of statist bureaucracies on the one hand and, in the case of the varieties capitalist economies, pervasive (even if different) differentials of wealth, incomes, property ownership and socio-economic status.

All these societies evince social cleavages and structural differences that express themselves in the forms of social, class and gender disadvantage based on racial categorisation, religio-cultural prejudice, caste, geographic and other forms of social differentiation and discrimination -- whether or not these are legislatively prescribed. The defining attributes of such societies, even if they are more pronounced in some societies relative to others (Scandinavian countries relative to the United States, developed relative to underdeveloped or peripheral), have been amplified in every case by the processes of global environmental degradation whose effects have been profoundly more damaging for the lives of the urban and rural poor of these societies.

Taking just one of these multiple forms of social and political systems: What are some of the implications that are assumed -- yet untested -- about the core assertion that there is a strong relationship between education and jobs?

a)      One implication is that under the forms of production prevalent in this economic and social system there is a readily available supply of jobs if the requisite skills are there -- or that, conversely, once there are skills in the market the jobs will follow. The further assumption that follows this is that such jobs are there if not immediately then at least in the short term -- regardless of the conditions for the reproduction of capital, its composition, the social conditions for its investment, global financial flows, or even the resistance of labour to the form of its investment.

Given especially the composition of capital in market-driven economies it is unclear whether the increasing mechanisation and robotisation of work results in increases or decreases in the availability of jobs. What is the presumed relationship between the new forms of technological innovation and employment? What is the record of this relationship over time, and what similarly is the role of capital mobility in the sustainability of jobs in any national employment system. What evidence is there about this relationship in the global arena where increases in rates of unemployment are egregious?

b)      Another implication is the assumed relationship between jobs and skills demand that is largely silent about the qualitative attributes of work: that is, about all those attributes of the nature of work even in developed economic systems, such as its racialised and gendered nature, the hierarchies intrinsic to it, the lack of work security in market-based economic systems, the phenomenon of child labour, the problem of alienation, and the lack of any serious conception of citizenship and a broader framework of rights in society.

These attributes and many more characterise the constitutive social relations affecting work in all societies, making the assumptions drawn from developed economic systems about job opportunities to economic and social systems based largely on the primary economic sector or for subsistence economies untenable.

c)      How does one understand the conundrum posed by the simultaneous complaint that there are no jobs even for graduates while there are no skills that are appropriate for the economy? Is it simply that those who do have unused skills are wrongly educated and trained -- too many humanities and biblical studies degrees and too few science and technology? Or is this conundrum really an expression of the contradictory and selective preferences of capitalist labour markets, which can refuse particular skills while simultaneously complaining about the absence of skills, at once kicking out some workers while employing others based on the narrower requirements of the industry and its plants.

Indeed, underlying every anecdote about failed attempts at securing employment opportunities is the fear that for every story about an employer who seeks “qualified employees” there is a compensatory story about employers with impossible hiring requirements.

d)     And in any economic system -- and certainly in countries such as South Africa – how does the extreme concentration of capital in a few large multinational corporations affect the possibilities for employment creation both in the private sector and in a highly dependent informal economy, and what is the impact of the extreme mobility of investment capital on the possibilities for job creation in any area of work other than formal sector employment?

Assuming, however, that the corporate capital sector is not the main area of concentration of job possibility, and assuming that in fact it is in the small business, public, informal and care economy, what then are the necessary conditions that would make these areas of economic activity actual and meaningful possibilities for work? What in that case would be the types of useful economic and social activities which can be explored for the purpose of job creation and social investment – that is, outside of the formal private sector economy? What  openings are there in such economic systems not only for the much vaunted SMME's but also for alternatives based on cooperatives, the care economy and the care of the environment as part of a wider planetary responsibility and justice,and the green economy?

What realistically are the possibilities for supporting rural economic activity in the absence of the resolution of the “land question”. And if these alternative forms of economic activity and work were to be encouraged, what specifically would be the similarly alternative forms of education and skills development, alternative institutional forms, curriculum and all the associated issues that speak to a systemic approach to reconfiguring the present system quite fundamentally. And how would these be funded?

All of these, we assert, are assumptions that remain untested but are critical to any real understanding of the relationship between societies and their systems of socialisation through the processes of learning through education and training.

We can conclude from these observations that poorly developed conceptions of education and training, and their relationship to “the economy”, remain a key barrier to constructing a meaningful discourse, policies and practices about the usefulness of education and the potential role that post-school education might play in society.

Crude formulations of the connectedness of economic activity and knowledge mar any serious view of how knowledge is produced, what are its useful characteristics and how it might be assured. Complex questions reduced to “quick fix”, facile and reductionist approaches to knowledge development and particular explanations of the national skills strategy are hopelessly inadequate.

Enver Motala is a researcher at the Nelson Mandela Institute for Education and rural Development at the University of Fort Hare and Salim Vally is senior researcher in the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Education Rights and Transformation. Both institutions are part of the Education Policy Consortium. This is an edited extract from Work, Education and Society, edited by Motala and Vally, forthcoming from Unisa Press

 

IDLE AND MINDLESS SNARK

It is reported that Karl Rove says he knows a woman with tattoos who will not be voting Democratic.  I am not impressed.  I know an old White man who will not be voting Republican.

MORE MUSICAL MEANDERINGS

My ruminations about viola playing have elicited several long and very interesting comments, by C. Rossi and James Camien McGuiggan.  I turned these over in my mind this morning as I took my daily walk, huddled inside my sweater and hoodie against the 27 degree cold.  What follows is a rather unstructured series of thoughts provoked by those two comments, and by some memories from long ago.

C. Rossi raises a number of questions about the role of the conductor in a musical performance, keyed to a lovely story about Yitzhak Perlman [I accept his emendation of my spelling of Perlman's first name.]  To save space, I am going to assume that you have all taken the time to read the two comments.  He is quite right that we must include trios, quintets, and even sextets with the more familiar quartets as instances of cooperative music making without a conductor.  In a quartet [the genre with which I am most familiar], the first violinist starts them off by raising the violin a bit, or by a nod of the head or some other signal, but thereafter, the four musicians interact with one another constantly rather than following one leader.  The only exceptions to this convention of the first violinist cuing the group are those cases in which one or more of the other players begin a movement and the first violin is silent for a bit.  [For obvious reasons, my favorite example of this is the last movement of the third Rasumowsky -- Beethoven Opus 59, #3 -- a blindingly fast fugue in which the viola !! states the subject -- a rare moment for a violist.]

There are some modern examples of chamber orchestras that play without a conductor, but the modern full scale symphony orchestra is always led by a conductor who stands on a podium, facing the musicians rather than  the audience, and like as not reading from a full orchestra score set on a stand in front of him or her [although even now it is almost always a man.]  I should say that my last personal experience of playing in an orchestra was sixty-three years ago, when I was a student at Forest Hills High School in Queens, New York.  The conductor of the school orchestra was a music teacher named Max Pollock, who was rumored to play jazz in his off hours.  We were not much of an orchestra if the truth be known.  Our signature pieces were Leroy Anderson's "The Syncopated Clock" and Borodin's In The Steppes of Central Asia, but Mr. Pollock's principal task was getting us to play the National Anthem sufficiently in tune to allow the students to sing it at school assemblies.  This is the reason why, to this day, I have an imperfect grasp of the words of The Star Spangled Banner.  I never actually got to sing it in high school.

We are all familiar with the theatrical bobbing and weaving and exaggerated arm movements that pass for orchestra conducting these days.  Modern conductors remind me of nothing so much as Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, mimicking the extremely dramatic style of Leopold Stokowski as he conducts an army of brooms carrying pails of water.  All of that modern dance on the podium has virtually nothing to do with the actual music making of the instrumentalists, of course.  Now, I am sympathetic with the conductors.  After all, they never get to actually make music.  The lowliest second violinist in the last chair is contributing more sound than the conductor.

This is not to say that the conductor is superfluous.  Far from it.  It falls to the conductor to choose, and then to elicit, an interpretation of the music, which, as James McGuiggan quite correctly reminds us, is very much more indeed than just playing the notes in time and in tune.  A real big league orchestra conductor will have a deep knowledge of the entire score, right down to the last note of every line, and he or she will make a large number of choices, not only about tempo and dynamics [loud or soft, etc.] but about such things as the balance among the several string sections at each point in the piece and even where exactly the wind players will take their breaths.  The conductor may decide that there is a place in the music where a passage played by the cellists needs to be heard above the violins and violas, or that a phrase played by the oboist should be unbroken by a breath.  Those tiny choices, folded into a professional performance by musicians who can be counted on to play the notes correctly, can dramatically alter the aesthetic quality of the final performance.  It is no small thing to master the score of, say, a Beethoven symphony so completely that you can make those choices and communicate them to the musicians.  There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, about the legendary conductor of the New York Philharmonic, Arturo Toscanini.  As the orchestra was about to begin working on a new piece, the second oboist raised his hand and said "Excuse, me, Maestro, but I am not certain I can play today.  The B-flat key on my oboe is broken."  Toscanini paused for a moment, looked off into the middle distance, and replied, "It is all right.  You do not have a B-flat."

When I was a boy, my parents were very friendly with Joe and Vera Vieland, who, it was said, had escaped from Russia after the revolution by walking all the way across Asian Russia to Vladivostok and then taking a boat to America.  Joe was a violist with the Philharmonic.  Fifty years later, when I was studying the viola seriously, I was thrilled to find myself working on a number of compositions adapted from the violin or cello literature for the viola that read in small letters over the right-hand end of the first line "arranged by Joseph Vieland."  Toscanini was a tyrant and Joe was a rebel, and apparently he would laboriously work his way up to first desk in the viola section, only to have a fight with the Maestro about something that would land him back at the last desk again.  It was Joe who pointed my parents toward Mrs. Zacharias when I decided as a boy to study the violin.

But all the real work of the conductor of a big league orchestra is completed during rehearsal.  If that work has been productive, and if the conductor's musical vision is compelling, the result will be a truly memorable performance that can rightly be described as an "interpretation," not just as a performance.  The hand waving and bobbing and weaving is for the audience, many of whom probably are as capable of distinguishing a great from a merely competent performance as they are of telling a great Cabernet from two buck chuck.

ONCE AGAIN, A REPLY TO JERRY FRESIA

As so often happens, Jerry Fresia asks questions that cut to the heart of my blog posts and elicits from me responses I would not otherwise have thought to include in my ramblings.  He really asks three or four questions, and I have a different reply to each one.  Here is his complete comment:

"While your story of learning the mechanics, as it were, is fascinating (I'm still trying to fathom how playing notes with a bow differs from striking a keyboard), I'm more curious about what playing the music (once you get to it) does for you as you play it. After all, there is a lot of work going into this, so what's the payoff? Or maybe I should ask this: suppose you were technically perfect, you still wouldn't rival Perlman and Zuckerman, would you? What is the "music"?

Is the language, "to die for," reserved for such things as being moved by music or could you use the same phrase in relationship to, say, reading Kant?"

First things first.  When you strike a key on a piano, inside a little cloth covered hammer hits a string.  Thus, a piano is a percussion instrument.  When you strike a key on a harpsichord, a plectrum [?] plucks a string.  [Hence you cannot play a harpsichord soft or loud -- pianaforte].  When you draw a bow over a string on a violin, or viola, or cello, or double base, friction catches the hairs of the bow on the string and causes it to vibrate, producing a sound amplified by the box and sound post of the instrument. 

It is very hard for me to say exactly what playing the viola does for me.  There are, in me, a complex mixture of emotions and thoughts.  First of all, there is the pleasure on those occasions -- rare or common as may be -- when I make a resonant and beautiful sound.  Making a sound is fundamentally different from merely hearing a sound, although they are related.  When I play an entire phrase in tune and with a good tone, there is a special pleasure [no easy matter on the viola -- pianists have it easy, which is why they play so many notes.  Any idiot can play one note on the piano, and it will sound as good as though it were played by Alfred Brendel.]  Second, there is the pleasure of accomplishment, of working hard and actually getting better.  Then, there is the thought, deep inside but never absent, that my mother and father, sainted be their memories, would be pleased.  Even men approaching eighty feel that somewhere inside.  When I play in a quartet, there is the comradeship of making music with my fellow quartet-mates.  Each quartet experience is different.  In Pelham, MA, I would sit next to the cellist, Barbara Davis, in our quartet, and listen to her beautiful tone as I strove to match my own tone to hers.

There is one thing I am not able to do, simply because I do not play well enough, and that is to craft an interpretation of the music.  That takes a good deal more skill than I possess.  Now, it is of course possible to "master" an instrument and play with a soulless technical excellence.  That is the way I have always imagined Condaleeza Rice playing the piano, at which she is apparently technically quite proficient.  [I may be doing her a profound disservice, in which case I humbly apologize.]  But only in the everyone-gets-a-trophy world of modern private elementary schooling do we pretend that a novice performer is offering an "interpretation."  It is all I can do to play all the correct notes in the right tempo.  I could no more choose to give a Romantic reading of a Bach sonata for unaccompanied cello, arranged for the viola, than I could decide to do a Triple Lutz on the ice.

The last question is one about which I have thought a good deal.  My reference here is the wonderful old movie, The Hustler, starring the young Paul Newman as Fast Eddie Felsen with the always great George C. Scott, and Jackie Gleason doing an unforgettable turn as Minnesota Fats.  You will recall the scene in which Fast Eddie and Fats play pool all night.  Newman moves around the table like a great cat, at one point saying, "I can't miss."  Please forgive me for how this sounds, but there have been times in my life, teaching a class on the central argument of the Critique of Pure Reason or Das Kapital, when I have felt like that.  The words flow effortlessly, I can see the arguments as though they were suspended in air before me in all their beauty and simplicity, and I know that I cannot miss.  That is a feeling I do know, a feeling I have earned, and those moments are for me the supreme moments of my life.  I can imagine Yo Yo Ma feeling that way as he leans back from the neck of his cello and simply allows the music to flow from his fingers and bow arm as though it had a life of its own.

 

THE JOYS AND SORROWS OF THE AMATEUR VIOLIST

My efforts to find or form a string quartet have thus far failed to produce results.  Rather than just put the viola away for another five and a half years, however, I have decided to continue practicing until I can find someone to play with me.  My first choice has been a wonderful Mozart duet for violin and viola, K423.  I went to the Shar Music website and ordered the sheet music.  Several days ago it arrived, and I have started learning the first movement.

This is serious music, not like the little Haydn duets I pulled out and played through two weeks ago.  One of my treasured CDs is a recording of Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zuckerman playing violin/viola duets, the first of which on the CD is K423.  As you might expect, their performance is to die for.

Now, let us be perfectly clear.  There is no discernible musical relationship between what I am doing and Zuckerman's playing of the viola part in K423.  Or rather, there is, I suppose, something like the relationship between the Form of a Bed and a drawing of a physical bed, which, as Plato tells us, is at a third remove from the Form.  Still and all, as I get the sixteenth note runs under my fingers and work out manageable fingerings for the double stops, I begin to achieve some facility, and as I play through the movement, in my head I can hear Perlman playing the violin part along with me. 

Why, you might ask, do I bother, inasmuch as I will never play this one duet well enough even to perform it for anyone else, let alone match the performance of Perlman and Zuckerman?  It is rather hard to explain.  One reason is that studying something like K423 gives me an insight into what Mozart was doing that I, at least, cannot acquire merely from listening to it.  Oh, I can hear when Mozart moves into the development section, and when he returns to the statement of the original theme, but it is quite different actually to feel the sense of recognition [and relief] as I reach the restatement after a page and a half and get to play again the notes I have already mastered.

I have taken to starting each rather brief practice session by playing the series of twelve three-octave major scales, C major to B major.  [Well, to be honest, I cannot quite play the very last notes of the third octave of the B major scale since I am so high up on the A string that my left hand is wrapped around the body of the viola like a boa constrictor, my thumb locked under the neck of the instrument.  Fortunately, no one ever writes those notes for a viola part.]  On the first day of practicing, I play every note on a different bow.  The next day, I play two notes on a bow, the day after that three notes on a bow, and so on until on the twelfth day of practicing I play the series of twelve scales twelve notes on a bow.  [Seven notes on a bow and eleven notes on a bow are rather tricky to keep in your head.]  If I am being really serious, as I was back when I lived in Massachusetts, I then spend twelve days in the same rotation playing natural minor scales, then twelve days of melodic minor scales, and twelve days of harmonic minor scales.  Finally, I play one day of scales in which I play the C major scale one note on a bow, the C sharp natural minor scale two notes on a bow, the D melodic minor scale three notes on a bow, the D sharp harmonic minor scale four notes on a bow, and so on through three rotations, ending with the B harmonic minor scale twelve notes on a bow.  Later today I will play the major scales three notes on a bow.  There is something very peaceful about those scales. [Fortunately, I am no longer in psychotherapy, because if I ever told all of this to an analyst, I would be diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and put on medication.]

Josh Boone - Tumblr Q&A

Josh Boone, the TFIOS director, often answers fan questions on his tumblr. A few days ago he responded to a question regarding a TFIOS trailer, saying he doubts one will be released before March.

He also answered a question about his first movie, Stuck in Love (out on DVD now) with Nat Wolff.

AN IMPORTANT GUEST POST BY AN OLD FRIEND

Twenty-six years ago, I visited Cape Town, South Africa for the first time.  There I had lunch with the Rector of the University of the Western Cape and his senior staff, among whom was a plump middle-aged man with an engaging manner and a somewhat unclear role at the university.  Later, as I was walking across the campus with him, I learned to my astonishment that he had recently come out of prison, where he had spent seven years for spying on a South African nuclear energy plant that was later successfully blown up by ANC commandos.  He had been released from prison on condition that someone would give him a job, and UCT had stepped up.  He held a doctorate in Politics from Oxford University.  That man, Dr. Renfrew Christie, became one of my very closest friends in South Africa, and though I see him  only rarely, I think of him as one of my closest friends in the world.  He has for many years been Dean of Research at The University of the Western Cape, the university originally created for the Coloured population of the Western Cape and now the leading Historically Black University in South Africa.  It is to UWC that I have been sending the money from my charitable organization, University Scholarships for South African Students, for a number of years.

Recently, Renfrew gave the keynote address to a meeting convened to address the subject of judicial torture in South Africa.  I reproduce it here exactly as he sent it to me.  It is long, and it is deeply distressing, but I urge all of you read it from start to finish.

UNIVERSITY OF THE WESTERN CAPE

DEPARTMENT OF RESEARCH DEVELOPMENT

 

 

KEYNOTE ADDRESS

 

Domesticating the UN Convention against Torture and the Robben Island Guidelines for the Prevention of Torture in Africa

 

ARTICLE 5 FORUM

WEDNESDAY & THURSDAY, 13 & 14 NOVEMBER 2013

 

UWC Community Law Centre Civil Society Prison Reform Institute

UCT Gender, Health and Justice Research Unit

University of Bristol Human Rights Implementation Centre

African Policy and Oversight Forum

 

 

 

Professor Renfrew Christie DPhil Oxford, FRSSAf, MASSAf
Dean of Research, University of the Western Cape

Keynote Address to the

Community Law Centre Conference on

The Law of Torture

 

Domesticating the UN Convention against Torture

And the

Robben Island Guidelines for the Prevention of Torture in Africa

 

 

 

On the evening of 23 October 1979, I had a date to take a fair maiden to dinner. Instead, that afternoon, I was arrested by eight very large South African policemen. Perforce, I stood the fair maiden up. Not being stupid, she promptly disappeared before she too could be arrested. I spent the next seven and a bit years behind bars. A month or two after my release, I met the fair maiden. She did not greet me. The kind words, “Hello, how are you?” did not escape her lips. All she said was, “You’re late!”

I was told by the police to put on a tracksuit because I had a hard night ahead of me. I put on a suit and tie. I had been buying crockery for my new flat. I was told I would never get to use it. Seven years later, I used it with glee!

I was taken to Caledon Square Police Station where I was forcibly made to stand all night.  I was prevented from sleeping, until I wrote a “confession”, eighteen hours later.

I was then moved to John Vorster Police Station in Johannesburg.  I was kept there for six months, incommunicado and in solitary confinement, until I was charged under the Terrorism Act.  After being charged, I was moved to the old Pretoria Central Prison building to await trial, still in solitary, but now in the condemned cells of what had been the old hanging prison in the time of Herman Charles Bosman and Cold Stone Jug.  In total, I was in solitary for about seven months.

In John Vorster Square, at first I was in a cell sealed with inch-thick transparent Perspex on all the windows, with a one-inch gap for air. It was very hot in summer. I lost ten kilograms in weight on the sparse diet they fed me.

But one day they arrived and moved me to another cell, because the sealed cell was for those who they really wanted answers from, and they now had a new victim.

During the weekdays, the Special Branch would take me for showers alone; but over weekends, the ordinary police were a bit lazy, and saved time by putting people in showers together.

One weekend I was naked in a multiple-head shower room, when the new prisoner was put in naked beside me. Picture two startled men, suddenly together naked in a shower. He screamed: “I am not a terrorist! I am not a Terrorist! Tell them I am not!” He did not trust me at first. He thought I was a nark, an impimpi. But over successive weekends, we were showered together and he came to realise that I too was accused of Terrorism.

His name was Mordecai Tatsa. And over the weeks he appeared naked in the showers, each time with more evidence of gruesome tortures on his body. They beat his feet to the size of rugby balls. He had rope-burn marks on his neck, where they tightened a noose until he was nearly strangled, then released it, and then tightened it again.

I could do nothing except watch in horror, as each week he was in a worse condition. Eventually, I understand, they had tortured him so badly that they could not put him in front of even one of their own tame judges. I am told that Mrs Helen Suzman did a deal by which he was released into twenty-four hour house arrest, provided he kept his mouth shut about the torture. I have never seen him again.

Also in John Vorster Square, I could look across a courtyard into cells of ordinary alleged criminals. One day a policeman had two men handcuffed to each other. He would hit one hard in the face; then knee the other in the balls; punch the first in the stomach; then kick the second in the face bent over.  He kept at it for some time, clearly trying to get an answer that did not come. At night, I would hear a young person being flogged in a cell below me. I would hear feet running up; then the sound of a cane or whip thrashing a body; and a scream.  This went on and on, seemingly forever, and night after night.

At my “trial”, the onus of proof was reversed so that I had to prove my innocence.  The judge decided to admit my so-called “confession” as evidence, despite accepting that I was tortured to get it.  State versus Christie was much criticised by the academic lawyers, but it was used as precedent in later political trials, in which tortured “confessions” were admitted as “evidence”.

“Terrorism” in 1980 in South Africa was a capital offence. The headlines on 5 June 1980, around the world, read something like, “White scientist may face gallows”. The headlines on 6 June 1980 read: “White scientist escapes gallows.” I was quite pleased that I was finally not going not to be hanged!

Nevertheless, after the trial, I was taken from the old hanging prison to the new hanging prison.  I was placed on the Death Row closest to the gallows in the Pretoria Maximum Security Prison, along with five other “white” male political prisoners, some of whom had been in jail for almost twenty years. We were not to be hanged. They just wanted us to listen to the hangings. Over the next two and a half years I listened to perhaps three hundred people being hanged.

The whole prison would sing for two or three days before the hanging, to ease the terror of the victims. “Senzeni-na? Senzeni-na? What have we done? What have we done?” It was the most beautiful music on earth, sung in a vile place. Then, at zero dark hundred, the hanging party would come through the corridors to the gallows, slamming the gates behind them on the road to death. Once they were at the gallows there was a long pause. Then “crack!” the trapdoors would open, and the neck or necks of the condemned would snap. A bit later came the hammering, presumably of nails into the coffins. And another day in Pretoria went on – for the living. (We were later moved to the re-built Pretoria Security Prison, where we did not hear the hangings.)

The warders queued to be members of the hanging party. They put their names down on a list, and waited impatiently for months or years, till the day came when they could help to snap a neck. They left a little model of a gallows, with a hanged effigy in it, in our living space. They gloried in their power; they gloated.

Yet seven of my warders committed suicide while I was in prison. They were fresh off the farms, “white” boys chosen for their ideological party. They had been taught that all authority comes from God, to the State President, to Mammie, Pappie, die Dominee and die Onderwyser. They had been taught that the big city was a sin; that sex was a sin; and that all liberals were communists and terrorists who would rape their sisters.

They discovered that the big city was nice. Sex was fantastic! (They were eighteen.) And as for those liberal, communist, terrorist, sister-rapers: we were human. We were not monsters. They could talk to us. If they were studying, we might help them with their studies.

They would end up in a guard tower at minus two degrees Centigrade in a Pretoria winter. Their entire cosmology had collapsed. Everything they had been taught was false. And their girlfriend had dropped them, as happens at the age of eighteen. They would put the rifle barrel into their mouths and pull the trigger.

One poor kid wisely shot himself in the shoulder. He lay on the floor of the tower, screaming, “Help me! Help me!” The only people who could hear him were his prisoners. The International Committee of the Red Cross had insisted that we should have intercoms, with which to summon help if we were, say, having a heart attack. In those days we called the warders “Boers”. The problem with the intercoms that night was that either the Boers had switched them off, or they were not listening. So the kid lay on the floor of his tower, bleeding until the shift changed. I think he lived.

During my seven years in prison I had a wisdom tooth removed. There were twenty Boers in a truck in front, with rifles. There were twenty Boers in a truck behind, with rifles. I was in the prison ambulance in leg irons. I was handcuffed to Sergeant Arendse. Sirens blaring, we screamed from one end of Pretoria to the other, from the Pretoria Security Prison to the HF Verwoerd Hospital, stopping all the traffic for my wisdom tooth. At the hospital, the parking lot had been cleared of cars and was surrounded by armed Boers. There were snipers on the roof of the hospital. Inside, the passageways were empty, except for Boers with rifles.

The ward had forty beds, all empty, except mine. Sergeant Arendse put on little green sterile booties, sterile green trousers, a sterile green smock, and a sterile green cap. Overall he put his unsterile service pistol in its unsterile holster. The last thing I saw as I went under the anaesthetic was his snorr moustache, as he beamed down at me.

Going back to the prison was the same: sirens, snipers, armed guards by the truckload, and handcuffed to Sergeant Arendse. I was in pain, and nauseous from the anaesthetic. I threw up. I vomited all over Sergeant Arendse. I could do nothing else: we were shackled together! 

Today, of course the Verwoerd Hospital is named for Steve Biko.  We have a democracy; a Constitution; a Bill of Rights; and an independent judiciary.  Nonetheless, we still have torture. We meet today to work out how to reduce torture; perhaps to get rid of it entirely, although I believe that is impossible.

What can we learn from my story, for the laws against torture?

From the depths of hell, let me assure you that there is no practical difference between “Torture” and “Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment”. I have been there.  I am a witness and a victim. It is all torture, whatever the silly lawyers say.

Forced standing is torture; sleep deprivation is torture; bastinado of the feet is torture; near-strangulation is torture whether it is done with ropes or by water-boarding; incommunicado is torture; solitary is torture; death row is torture even if they are not going to hang you.  Death row is torture, all the more so, if they are (or might be) going to hang you.

Imprisonment itself is torture, especially indefinite imprisonment. The sexual deprivation implicit in imprisonment is torture. Whether carried out by prisoners or police or warders, assault behind bars is torture. Rape in prison is torture. It did not happen to me; but prison rape of men or women is patently torture. Serious overcrowding is torture. Gang domination in prison builds up an overwhelming fear and a paranoia amounting to torture.

The mental effects of all this are as devastating as the physical effects and both are torture. The torture goes on for the rest of one’s life, be it short or long. You do not “get over it”. The terror and the nightmares do not wear off; they do not go away. I gave my torturers no names; but to this day if you ask me my mother’s name I will not be able to answer you for twenty-four hours. Moreover, the effects of torture can be as bad for the torturers as for the tortured. Seven of my warders killed themselves.

Torture does not work, as I shall show; but every State on earth today tortures willy-nilly, as they always have done. Humans have tortured since the dawn of time and they will torture until the end of time. All we can do is seek by all legal means at our disposal to diminish it.

In one of my remand hearings, I was put in a cell with a blond, blue-eyed sixteen year old. While hitchhiking, he had broken into an empty caravan to sleep. For this he had been sentenced to a judicial flogging. He was rightly terrified out of his wits. I think they put me in with him to help to calm him. I could do nothing. He was about to be judicially tortured, and every lawyer in the land was complicit in his torture. At least today we no longer officially flog people, but I do not kid myself that the inmates of our cells do not get “unofficially” thrashed, bashed or beaten. We have a long way to go.

But if we no longer judicially flog, we still imprison. The United Nations Convention on Torture says that, legally, torture “does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to, lawful sanctions to the extent consistent with the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners”. So imprisonment is torture, unless the imprisonment is a lawful punishment to minimum standards. Then it is no longer torture, except perhaps in the mind and body of the prisoner, who undoubtedly thinks it is a torture.

But even if we accept that lawful, minimum standard imprisonment is somehow necessary and therefore not torture, the moment we imprison unlawfully, before or after trial, or if we do not imprison to minimum standards, we are torturing.

Just as every lawyer in Apartheid South Africa was complicit in the torturing of flogged juveniles, so today every lawyer in the country is complicit in torture when people are held awaiting trial for too long; when minimum standards are not met, either for awaiting trial or for sentenced prisoners; and especially when people are raped or otherwise assaulted behind bars. And whenever we imprison an innocent person we commit torture.

If rape is a standard occurrence in our police and prison cells, then every lawyer in the country is complicit in that rape. If gross overcrowding is standard in our cells, then the imprisonment becomes torture and every lawyer in the country is complicit in that torture. If juveniles are imprisoned with adults, minimum standards are not met, and the imprisonment becomes torture, in which the whole judicial system is complicit. Be careful what you wish for. Becoming a legal officer of the court makes you complicit if the legal system commits torture, as it undoubtedly does. The better we make our whole justice system, the less torture we will be committing. That is why we are meeting today.

Torture does not work.  I do not believe the torturers got anything useful out of Mordecai Tatsa. They ended up with the option of killing him or of releasing his mangled ruin into house arrest and silence.

In my own case I was able to use my so-called confession as a way to communicate with my African National Congress control, to pass on the results of my spying. I put into my “confession” exactly how I believed the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station could be attacked with explosives without endangering the people of Cape Town.  The idea was to plant the bombs and set them off just before the radioactive fuel was brought to the site. Bombs on the reactor heads and in the pipe works would ruin the quality control which is essential in a nuclear plant. The damage would cost hundreds of millions of dollars.  And so it did.

I treasure a story of a young lawyer, Penuel Maduna, faxing a copy of my “confession” from Johannesburg to London.  The police arrived as he was doing so; he put the “confession” in his shirt and clung to the iron work under the fire escape until the police went away. He ended up Minister of Justice in the democratic South Africa.

My Judge was kind enough to read out my whole confession to the press of the world in the courtroom, including my recommendations to the ANC.  Everything I spied on was eventually bombed or blown up: the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station, Sasol, and other coal fired power stations. Of course, no spy ever knows how or whether his data is actually used. I take no blame and I claim no credit. I was just a spy. I cannot know whether the information I passed back was useful. The heroes were the Umkhonto we Sizwe cadres who bombed the targets. But what I do know is that in my case, torture backfired.

The Koeberg Nuclear Power Station was bombed by the ANC in December 1982, three years after my arrest, by Rodney and Heather Wilkinson. They got jobs in building the power station; they hid bombs in their back packs; they placed the bombs where and when I had recommended; the radioactive fuel was not yet on site; and the bombs did damage which cost $519 million, in 1982 United States dollars, much as I expected.  Wonderfully the auditors forced Escom to publish the cost of repairing the damage. Rodney and Heather later told all this to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

My confession had dealt with my supplying data to the ANC about Sasol. The bombing of the Sasol plants happened the night before my trial.  My lawyer came into my cell with front page photo in the Rand Daily Mail, of Sasol burning.  There was a plume of smoke going up a hundred thousand feet, almost like a nuclear explosion. The total cost of the damage to Sasol and to Koeberg and to the other targets, on which I spied, came to about a billion dollars, US 1982. Other power stations, fired by coal, were mentioned in my confession and someone blew them up. Even the Calueque/ Ruacana hydroelectric schemes, the subject of my 1975 UCT master’s thesis, which I had sent to Swapo, was blown up by someone. 

These explosions had nothing proven to do with me: “it was two other guys and it fell off the back of a bus”. But I do know in my case that torture was completely counterproductive.  They got an outcome exactly the opposite of what they wanted.

This all feeds into the debate about the “ticking bomb” argument, in favour of torture in the United States. David Luban has written a cogent article destroying the “ticking bomb” argument, published in 2005 Virginia Law Review, pages 1425 to 1461. Essentially, it was argued after 9/11 that torture was justified in a liberal democracy if it could prevent a “ticking bomb” from exploding and killing people.  Torture the person you think has placed the bomb; you will be told where it is and you will defuse it in time.  Luban shows beyond reasonable doubt that this argument is nonsense.

The man may be the wrong man; he may send you to the wrong place even if he is the right man; tortured people will say anything they think may stop the torture, so they are unreliable; and so on.  You could torture a thousand innocents and still not get to defuse the bomb. Read Luban yourselves: he is persuasive that torture does not work. It certainly was no use to my captors: quite the opposite.

Torture does not work; but every nation on earth has tortured in my lifetime. Spies were tortured on both sides of the cold war. NATO soldiers tortured each other on exercises in the cold war. Police of every nation have beaten so-called “confessions” out of prisoners. Gangs routinely torture inside and out of prisons.  Organised criminals torture the world over. In prisons, the warders torture the inmates.  The torturers act with impunity. And states do this as policy; or they turn blind eyes to it; or they secretly connive at it.  Torture happened on all sides in all the many hundreds of wars since 1945, from Korea to Vietnam to the Gulf.

To take just one example, John T Parry has published a conclusive torture case against the United States, showing in irrefutable detail that America has tortured from the beginning of its history to the present. His title says all you need to know: “Torture Nation, Torture Law”, The Georgetown Law Journal 2009, Volume 97, pages 1001 – 1056. Torture does not work but all states do it. Impunity reigns, OK?

Our task today is to make it possible to reduce torture by using the composite tool which is called the Domestication and Implementation Package.  We must get co-ordinated action; we must institutionalise collaboration; we must ensure that research is done; we must increase monitoring across the board.  Governments at all levels and in all relevant departments; national human rights institutions; and civil society organisations must be made to work together to reduce torture and to prosecute and punish torturers. We must work together to prevent torture; to combat impunity; to bring redress to the tortured and their families; and we must report properly under the Convention Against Torture and the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights. As but one of the millions of tortured people, I ask you to do this, with passion, professionalism and vigour.[1]

---

[1] I am grateful to Lukas Muntingh for suggestions regarding this keynote address; any errors are mine, not his.