Richard Stupart

One of the most rewarding aspects of travel for me is that it is a learning experience, serving to correct my own misconceptions as much as it gives me the opportunity to try and communicate something of what my own life and country is like to those I meet. On more than one occasion in Sudan, I would have to give lengthy explanations to customs officials, bus drivers and other interesting people as to how it is possible for me to be white and South African. Many refused to believe that such a thing was possible. I’d like to hope that in a good humoured way, my white face and South African passport will leave behind some new views of my country – ones fractionally closer to an understanding of what my life is like, in exchange for the same incremental understandings of others’ worlds. But while it may be understandable that a customs official on the Ethiopia/Sudan border may still think that I live in some alternate African reality, I find it less amusing for an educated Chicago editor to have similar views.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dear President Zuma

This letter has been a long time in coming. Writing it now is one of many intellectual steps I had hoped never to see myself going through on a journey that I had hoped I would never find myself taking. And when I talk of ‘me’,  I include the uncounted numbers of thinking, reasoning, believing South Africans across this beautiful country. People who, like me, grew up in a new country born in pure principles of the rule of law, non racialism and a respect for the fundamental human dignity of our fellow citizens. We were going to show the world what a truly principled nation might look like. A miracle in the history of human rights and an enlightened democracy.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last weekend was spent in Swaziland. If you have no idea where that is, then you would be forgiven. As long as you are not South African, in which case knowing the names of the landlocked nuggets of independence that constitute Swaziland and Lesotho really is expected. But I digress. Aside from such bizarre experiences crammed into 48 hours as a massage in a nightclub and watching a man dressed in an admiral’s outfit jam to the tunes in a club called House on Fire (Swaziland is landlocked. No I am not making this up), we also had a near brush with death on the first night traveling to the border.

Read the rest of this entry »

I wrote this in July last year, about our dictator-for-life in the country next door. I really do think that someone should consider hiring me as a political analyst. Or at least as a minion in the Office-Of-The-Sadly-Obvious in the department of home affairs. I wish I couldn’t say  I told you so, but… well… I told you so.

It comes as part of being a South African, particularly a white one, that when travelling abroad and meeting people who are remotely educated about world history, that the fat elephant of my country’s racist past comes stomping into the room and taking residence. I never really understood what the fuss was about, and visitng the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg yesterday was an fascinating re-education on exactly from where (and how far) my country has come.

Read the rest of this entry »

Departing Johannesburg International Airport for Maputo, I picked up a copy of Falling off the Edge: Globalisation, World Peace & Other Lies by James Perry, African Bureau Chief for Time Magazine. In the book, he argues compellingly for the simple conclusion that globalisation causes wars. Incidental to this is are some fascinating analyses of the causes of the rise of the new global left under the leadership of personalities such as Hugo Chavez, and the (argued) globalisation/economic roots of many of the developed world’s anti-western insurgencies – from the likes of the more populist Al Quaeda, to lesser known (in the developed West) groups such as the Shining Path and India’s Naxalites. Read the rest of this entry »

A girl carrying her sibling on her back cries as she looks for her parents in the village of Kiwanja. Civilians have been on the march in eastern Congo, uprooted by fighting between the country’s army and rebels. November 6, 2008 (Associated Press / Jerome Delay)

My brother has recently posted a piece on what is happening in the Congo that anyone who considers themselves a person of principle should read. There are some things in the world that are more important that respecting the sovereignty of a nation or the ego and whims of a ‘general’ (Nkunda in this case). There can be no excuses for and no accommodating of this sort of pain in the interests of someone’s desire for power. No matter how well armed or inconvenient that person may be to remove.

It’s photos like that he has posted which force those of us sitting in comfort to have to face what is happening to fellow human beings and, looking inside, realise that there is no explanation or excuse we can give for not being involved that will ever be enough to justify accepting that this exists in the world. It is not enough to mean well, or to care in your heart. Without the courage of conviction to act when prompted, to connect your destiny in some way with those of people like this, we are nothing more than spectators to the worst of human impulses. The white noise that hides the screams and tears of the oppressed.

With all of the fuss and bother over the resignation of Thabo Mbeki, I am starting to hear those conversations again. The ones that involve packing your bags, or procuring arms – depending on the militancy of your position and your access to overseas flight tickets. It is part of what makes a crisis so crisislike that people must panic in the face of deep and unanticipated change. Which is most certainly what we are dealing with here. That said, however, we would do well in keeping track of some important truths of the current situation before we leap into assuming that the riders of the apocalypse will shortly touch down in the Parliament buildings.

Read the rest of this entry »

There is an irony, although it is a sad one, that I should have found myself on Robben Island the day that the ANC National Executive Committee (NEC) convened to decide the future of Thabo Mbeki. It was a poignant contrast to visit a place where unity had prevailed through so many hardships and attempts by the government to drive a wedge between them and weaken what they stood for, right down to the food they ate and the clothes that prisoners of different races were given to wear. Despite this, and despite any personal animosity individuals may have borne, they remained undivided in the face of those oppressors.

Read the rest of this entry »

I was lucky enough to have a conversation the other day that doesn’t get had much or very loudly in South Africa. More so for a white adult male like me. Yes, it is that conversation. There were a thousand threads to the actual dialogue as it happened, which would be difficult to coherently re-tell here, save for one discussion – around the issue of to what degree and why I feel a need to be involved in helping bridge the yawning chasm of inequality that is post-apartheid South Africa.

Read the rest of this entry »