Dropping the race fraud charges isn’t good enough

YESTERDAY South Africans awoke to discover the press were having a field day with Glen Snyman, a teacher at Grootkraal Primary School in the Karoo region. Snyman apparently was charged with fraud after he allegedly identified himself as “African” on his CV for a position at another school in 2017, but had indicated “coloured” on other documents.

If destroying the man’s career in order to promote a new form of petty apartheid in the form of the Employment Equity Act wasn’t enough, the insinuation that Snyman, the founder of People Against Race Classification (PARC), was not merely breaking the law, but was now passing himself off as someone else, in effect, pretending to be black, was truly galling.

In dropping the charges without issuing a retraction of its race-inquiry, the Education Dept, appear to be saying: ‘We’ll overlook what Snyman did, but don’t do it again”. Instead of introducing a points-based system in order to tackle the problem of historical disadvantage within a neutral and objective framework, the law has unfortunately, tended to encourage and even retrace failed policies related to pseudo-scientific racism.

In 2008 Kobus Faasen sued Media24’s Die Burger for collectively describing persons of colour as ‘Bushmen’, only to discover that the law also regarded him as a Bushman, and he had been passing himself off as a “Coloured” for years.

In 2010, my own identity became the subject of a racist religious inquisition at the behest of a corporation instrumental in the creation of the apartheid state, a corporation which thought nothing of deploying one of its own representatives, Halton Cheadle, to act on the bench.

In March this year, global media carried the story of one Jessica Krug a “white professor of African-American Studies, who in her medium confessional claimed: “To an escalating degree over my adult life, I have eschewed my lived experience as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City under various assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim …”

She appears to conclude “I have built my life on a violent anti-Black lie, and I have lied in every breath I have taken”.

Unfortunately the same may be said of any person who has ever been inspired by the works of Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Steven Biko.

The two incidents, that of Snyman and Krug, are reminiscent of the 2015 Rachel Dolezol affair affecting the anachronistic National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) whose aims include ensuring ‘a society in which all individuals have equal rights without discrimination based on race”.

As Jelani Cobb put it, if Dolezol was lying, ‘she was lying about a lie, the lie of race’, or in words of author Ta-Nehisi Coates, ‘race is the child of racism, not the father’. Read: We are All Rachel Dolezol Now. And my unpublished letter: The context of race in today’s society is anything but normal.

Both Krug and the Dept of Education, erroneously assumes there to be distinct race categories separating black and white, and thus if one follows the resulting analysis, readers can be forgiven for assuming blackness to be the result of the ‘colour of ones skin’, or a ‘preponderance of African ancestry,’ both claims resoundingly disproven and shot down by science.

It was the late black consciousness leader Steve Biko who challenged the apartheid state by seeking to move blackness away from the realm of pseudo-scientific inquiry and into the realm of political and existential thought, in the process eschewing legalistic definitions deployed by the apartheid state, and related to ethnicity, hair and skin colour.

Recently Dr Lee Berger, well-known paleoanthropologist and discoverer of Homo Naledi, reiterated the evidence that there is ‘no separation between the species’, we are all one species, Homo Sapiens, with a common heritage in Africa.

That there is such a thing as a truly authentic identity, a coherent mental attitude constituting a standard of normality, is unbecoming of our Dept of Education, which should at least be familiar with the tragic attempt by the Nationalist government of South Africa to police race segregation.

In short, all human identity is fictional at best, since the moment one examines a human being in situ, the physical facts of our inter-relatedness emerge, as too our common African ancestry.

SEE: David Masondo’s Are Indian, coloured and white people really African in post-apartheid South Africa?

Telkom frauding consumers on Internet dailup

Hellkom is a reality!
Hellkom is a reality!

READING blogs about the saga involving Telkom’s insistance that Internet dialup during callmore time’s “FREE local and long distance calls of up to an hour per call” is not included in the “terms and conditions” of the ordinary landline contract, is like watching roadkill on the information highway as consumers get run-down by multinational corporate communications staff who think a R900pm phone bill is par for the course.

As an ordinary consumer, just wanting to experience a little bit of the net, in my own time, on a budget and on my own terms, I’m flabbergasted at this blatant denial of consumer rights.

Fortunately this country has some progressive legislation when it comes to telecommunications, and I would be extremely interested in seeing how Telkom manages to explain all this away with regards to contract:

a) They are not providing me with Internet Service, which I have purchased from a third party.

b) There is no connection between the contract I signed and the terms and conditions as they are being applied. Hell, there is no definition of modem or data, and absolutely no mention of the word “internet”.

South Africa’s Commercial Press taking flack

Headline today: Media24 in hot water. Apparently staff have been misrepresenting circulation figures to advertisers, resulting in a furore over billing. A routine audit of a number of Media24 magazine titles, according to IOL has revealed “certain discrepancies”, the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) was reported as saying on Friday.

The ABC had apparently asked Media24 to restate the circulation data of some titles, according to ABC general manager Charles Beiles, raising the question of what else is the African Media Giant hiding? Well, this blog can reveal that there is a lot more going on at Media24. Take the group’s attempts to squash my own case of discrimination (in which I have complained about racism and antiSemitism after being fired for writing a piece about a black jazz musician for a community newspaper published “in a coloured target market” nogal), or the failure to report  the pathetic gagging and “urgent interdict” brought against my person, for supposedly publishing “false or misleading statements” of the kind the group is now having to restate.

Can one really believe the kind of brainwashing going on nowadays? Especially when corporate media start looking a lot like just another sports and entertainment utility and less like the daily press. Well, you heard it from me, so for what its worth, check out Zoopy, an interesting new video utility that allows one to upload the truth without fear of censorship, and keep on blogging.

That’s all for now, I’m off for a surf.

http://www.zoopy. com/video_ 2630_David_ Robert_Lewis_ My_Story_ Part_1.html

http://www.zoopy. com/video_ 2632_David_ Robert_Lewis_ My_Story_ Part_2.html

http://www.zoopy. com/video_ 2633_David_ Robert_lewis_ My_Story_ Part_3.html

http://www.zoopy. com/video_ 2653_David_ Robert_Lewis_ My_Story_ Part_4.html

http://www.zoopy. com/video_ 2655_David_ Robert_Lewis_ My_Story_ Part_5.html

http://www.zoopy. com/video_ 2656_David_ Robert_Lewis_ My_Story_ Part_6.html

http://www.zoopy. com/video_ 2662_David_ Robert_Lewis_ My_Story_ Part_7.html

http://www.zoopy. com/video_ 2665_David_ Robert_Lewis_ My_Story_ Part_8.html

http://www.zoopy. com/video_ 2673_David_ Robert_Lewis_ My_Story_ Part_9.html

http://www.zoopy. com/video_ 2690_David_ Robert_Lewis_ My_Story_ Part_10.html

http://www.zoopy. com/video_ 2693_David_ Robert_Lewis_ My_Story_ Part_11.html

http://www.zoopy. com/video_ 2694_David_ Robert_Lewis_ My_Story_ Part_12.html

Independent Media hypocrisy exposed

CAPE TOWN: The Independent Group has refused a request for information relating to its liability as a corporate entity and ongoing participation as a media company in civil litigation. The request filed on behalf of the Alternative Media Forum (AMF) — an ad hoc grouping of media activists and civil society organisations — was submitted to Independent’s Chief Executive Officer, Tony Howard, but access to the information was refused.

In a legal brief, Independent News & Media (INM) has supplied a number of reasons why it believes it should not grant access to the information requested and why it believes the information is protected from public disclosure. None of the reasons supplied address the key issues raised by the AMF relating to the group’s responsibility as a media organisation to keep the public informed.

According to INM’s lawyers, “the right to be informed is not a right”, and consequently one may draw the conclusion that the group is neither serious about press freedom, nor bound by the Press Code of Professional Practice as it relates to corporate affairs. According to a copy of the Press Code of Professional Practice supplied by the Press Ombudsman, to which Independent is a signatory, “the basic principle to be upheld is that the freedom of the press is indivisible from and subject to the same rights and duties as that of the individual and rests on the public¢s fundamental right to be informed and freely to receive and to disseminate opinions.”

The AMF intends appealing against INMs decision, before bringing an action before a court of law, that could force full public disclosure. The response by the Independent Group, calls into question the sincerity of its own executives in furthering the interests of the media as a whole. The contradiction between the way the group views its business and the demand for accountability and press freedom should also be noted. The interests of media bosses, like so many claims of this nature, are being seen as paramount to the interests of a free press, in a plutocracy that sees small publishers as a threat to their own survival. Furthermore, INM, via its various corporate holdings, continue to operate as if it has sole proprietorship over the daily press in South Africa. The group has now flouted both common sense and decency, by not disclosing this information, and is evidently hiding behind a veil of corporate secrecy.

In effect, the refusal to give details of civil litigation to which it has has been a party, simply because INM is a “private company”, renders litigation in lower courts impotent and without any remedial value. The group recently refused to supply details of a court case which it lost in 2003, while using the information to smear the convener of the Alternative Media Forum, David Robert Lewis.

The Alternative Media Forum is now claiming in papers that will be filed for review, that although INM is a private body that enjoys certain commercial rights, as a press group these rights have been superceded by the public’s “right to know”, furthermore, media interests gained via the constitutional guarantees on free speech, transparency, openness and access to information should be open to public scrutiny. It is the function of a public role which has added emphasis to these rights, and the public has a right to be informed of matters relating to freedom of the press.

There will be a meeting to discuss this response and other events surrounding press freedom and the media at a future date and venue to be announced.

ALTERNATIVE MEDIA FORUM
PO BOX 4398, CAPE TOWN 8000 RSA

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ALTERNATIVE MEDIA FORUM
PO BOX 4398, CAPE TOWN 8000 RSA