Wild Life

chameleon

This story is just a newer version of a large cooking pot and cannibals. There's no accounting for white fools addicted to life in Africa.

jean edmunds

My family and several friends live in South Africa. I pray for them every day and I send a small monthly donation to Zane, the Zimbabwe-aid organisation.
This is all I can do. I'm enraged by the travel articles extolling holidays in South Africa, not to mention the people who say Oh,we had such a lovely holiday in Cape Town.'
I lived in South Africa for most of my life, kept there by circumstances (family, finances etc). I know the reality of it as it is now - crime-ridden, HIV/AIDS haunted, ruled by a corrupt and incompetent government (the last one was corrupt but competent), future extremely dubious. I'm so grateful to be back in England at last (for 5 years now).
Anyone who lives in Africa if they don't have to is out of their mind.

David Short

Chameleon, you are wrong. Aidan Hartley is Kenyan. Why should he not live in his own country?

I'm presuming you're British. If you get mugged, would you like people to say you're a fool (whatever colour you are) addicted to life in Britain?

David Short

Jean Edmunds, don't confuse South Africa with all of Africa.

A number of African countries are pleasant and moderately safe to live in, Kenya included.

Paradoxically, SA is the most unsafe African country (outside of a war zone) despite it appearing 'normal' and 'developed' compared to, say, Angola or Botswana.

You cannot walk safely on the streets in Joburg at any time of day; you cannot walk on the beach at dusk in Cape Town, as you'd expect to do in any beach resort in the world, or climb alone up Table Mountain.

But you can walk the streets of Luanda, the capital of Angola.

You're not even safe in your house in Joburg.

Very, very few people know the truth of SA.

Lots of journos there now, for the elections, saying 'oh,it's bad but not as bad as before, etc'.

Once the elections are over, they'll come home and forget about the country with the highest rape statistics in the world, the second highest murder rate (after Colombia) and the grouping with the highest murder rate in the world (white farmers).

jean edmunds

I see your point, David Short - but is there a rush of people going to Angola ? Has it a tourist industry for example ?
I've never seen a travel article extolling its wild life, for example.
And would anyone chose to move there ?

Schutz

What a trite and foolish comment, Chameleon; clearly for you it is all about colour. Lucky you can change yours at will.

As for South Africa it is, like any developing country, a dangerous place to live; like London was a few centuries ago.

But is it not wonderful to have an African country with such strong economic growth, continually expanding infrastructure, a vigourous media, booming tourism and the ability (unlike the UK, it would seem) to host major global events at very short notice? As for corruption, um Jacqui Smith anyone? Incompetent- er, Tony Blair? Gordon Brown? It is astonishing to me such an "incompetent" government entirely avoided the problems of toxic assets and fiscal meltdown that such competent Western government engendered.

I can't help feeling that jean is a little bitter- maybe she misses the mountains, the sunshine, the smiles and the optomism of the only country in the entire continent that has made the transition from the (most noxious form of) white supremacy to democracy without war, famine and the wholesale destruction of Western infrastructure and institutions.

lauriemacdonell-sanchez

These events are ominously redolent of the beginnings of Kenya's Mau-Mau Uprising (God forbid a recrudescence of anything similar!). This sort of criminality is common in the rural fringes of many post-colonial African economies that have cratered or are about to, owing not so much to depredations by the colonials as to the inevitable & intended outcomes of chaos, political dislocation & economic disintegration of the foreign adventurism whose aim was expulsion of the colonials. Impoverished rural populations anywhere in the 3rd world (& So. Africa is behaving more & more like a 3rd-world country than the industrialized nation it still purports to be) constantly hover on the edge of the law in their desperation to survive & are natural breeding grounds of this type of criminality, from narcotrafficking & guerrilla activity in Colombia to Somali fishermen-turned-pirates. I imagine the remaining white farmers of Zimbabwe & So. Africa would consider the Hartleys' brush w/disaster to have had an outcome nothing short of miraculous.

chameleon

Responses to a chameleon?

Well, I never.

1st: David Short, Anyone who endures what Hartley relates, knows for himself that he is a fool. Fools do what they do because they think it is worth it! This doesn't make Hartley a nasty fool - just a silly fool. You, on the other hand, are a smug fool, who feels the need to have an opinion on everything down to an April fool.

2nd: Shutz is a pleased with himself as a political opinion fool with a hang up about colour which he freely daubs on others.
Shutz, try talking to real people who live in SA, the little everyday, oppressed rainbow people, they are not seeing much of your vaunted boom, vigorous media and economic growth. They see and experience what Hartley talks about and it bears no resemblance to your "eye popping, hair raising, mind boggling, unnecessary account of corrupt British officials who have yet to murder anyone.

By the way, that noxious form of white supremacy , had more sense in handling transition than a dimwitted fool would ever realize but, of course, your hair raising, frightful version of noxious white supremacists sounds so much more interesting to all sorts of fools.

This chameleon is off to have root canal treatment. Easier than dealing with a variety of self satisfied fools.

jean edmunds

No Schutz, I'm not bitter, just irritated by the naive suggestion that I miss the sunshine, etc. Heard that one many times since coming back to the UK. Thanks, I'd rather sit in my tiny English garden surrounded by all the sounds and sights of spring. Also naive is your 'smiles and optimism' comment. Clearly you have never lived there. Almost everyone has been touched by crime. How would you like to live behind bars, security gates, pay armed response protection, all the time ? As for the infrastructure - public transport is atrocious, the state hospitals battle with insufficient staff (I once counted 75 people waiting for their prescriptions in the
pharmacy), power cuts, a government which can't cope with crime or HIV/AIDS - I could go on and on ... but someone like you won't take any notice anyway.

Schutz

Well well it's a big day for SA. Which leaves me a day off work and that "atrocious" public transport which I share daily with all the "little, everyday rainbow people" to get back to the mud-slinging!

I feel very strongly that it is patronising to maintain that someone is a "fool" or "out of their mind" for living where they live. Yes and trite too. I have been telling everyone I meet recently (and yes, I am mainly talking about the people I meet on the train everyday, which, by the way, has not once in the last year been delayed or cancelled) that they are fools, out of their minds! That gets a good laugh- esp as half of them have moved from elsewhere to live in SA! I look forward to telling them that they are "little rainbow folk!"