[Marxism] ANC govt terrified of music, says Hugh Masekela [?!?!]

[Walter Lippmann]

While reading this comment and preparing to respond:
Listen to Hugh Masekela play and sing "Happy Mama"
http://www.myspace.com/masekelajazzfoundation 
It's nice, happy music

Hear Masekela speaking to his South African audience:
http://tinyurl.com/2koou2
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When we read that South Africa's government is "a harsh neoliberal
capitalist regime that is now Washington's appointed major partner on
the African continent", one wonders what the author has been smoking?

"Washington's appointed major partner?"?!?!?!?!? Somehow I thought
that places like Cairo and Lagos and Yamoussouko were of greater 
importance on the African continent?

DOES WASHINGTON'S APPOINTED MAJOR PARTNER DO THIS?????
South Africa and Hamas
Why Jewish S. African minister forms friendships with Israel's enemies 
Kransdorff, Magid Published:  05.30.07, 08:14 / Israel Opinion  
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3405940,00.html

Washington's appointed major partner even has relations with that
pesky little place whose name we won't mention here but the one
with the four-letter name whose first letter is "C" and isn't Chad?

The use of such wild rhetoric means that, as a socialist, indeed a
revoloootionry socialist, a Marxist, he favors the overthrow of the
South African Government and its prompt replacement by a socialist
government more to his liking. Words have meaning and consequences.

As yet this is the first time outside of the Spartacist press that 
I've seen such a clearly-expressed program, so Norm's put this out
so forthrightly is to be appreciated. If this rhetoric is to be at
all taken seriously, it's a call for the formation of a brand new
revoloootionry party in South Africa which would fight for there
to be a socialist revoloootion there, or perhaps Norm exaggerates?

There hasn't been a socialist revolution in South Africa, but no
one ever claimed their has been, so what is our critic arguing so
fiercely against? 

Contrary to what is written, Masekela's criticism wasn't rejected at
all, I asked simply if something else MIGHT be going on here, since
he COULD live in South Africa, but CHOOSES not to do so. He travels
to South Africa from time to time to perform, and, as I demonstrated,
the South African government's Arts and Culture Minister, who was my
old college chum forty years ago, Z. Pallo Jordan, lavishes praise 
on Masekela. If a cabinet minister does that, it doesn't sound like
he's putting out the "unwelcome mat" to Hugh Masekela, unless I'm
missing something. Most of the people in South Africa don't today
have the freedom which Masekela has, to choose not to live there.

I'm sure he has his reasons, and no one here has criticized him
for the choices he chooses to make. Everyone makes choices. 

Anyone who has seen TSOTSI, the Academy Award-winning feature film
from South Africa, also highly touted by the government of South
Africa, led by the ANC, knows that it portrays South Africa today
as having a society which can only be described as harsh, capitalist
and quite repressive. No one pretends otherwise, at least no one
I'm aware of. 

Perhaps Norm hasn't had a chance t see Tsotsi, now out on DVD,
but you can find a good review of it at the Green Left Weekly:
http://www.greenleft.org.au/2006/661/7099 

STYLUS MAGAZINE REVIEW OF A RECENT HUGH MASEKELA RECORD:
Hugh Masekela’s Live at the Market Theatre is a historical document;
the album celebrates 30 years of Johannesburg’s rebellious, dissident
arts venue, one of the few places where even during the dark days of
apartheid mixed race audiences could sit together and watch
iconoclastic works like “Woza Albert,” a play that wrung irreverent
comedy from the ironies of a visit by the Messiah to South Africa.
(The authorities shoot a missile at Jesus as he walks across the bay
from the prison on Robben Island, inadvertently destroying most of
Cape Town.) The album was recorded in the year Hugh Masekela turns
67, secure in his place as grand old man of South Africa’s musical
struggle yet obstreperous enough to take potshots at the current
generation of African leadership (“These are people who sit to dinner
together, who drink wine together. I won’t say they protect each
other, but they are not going to do anything.”) His grizzled frown on
the album cover looks as indomitable as ever, but leaves the sneaking
impression that Masekela may have been overtaken by the times.

For there are moments when the album struggles under the weight of
all that history. Masekela is a shit-stirrer by temperament, and his
slightly knock-knee’d tributes to the current South African
government, on tracks like the preternaturally patient “District
Six,” come across as more dutiful than heartfelt. Masekela breaks out
the best of his raging protest songs, including “(Bring Back Nelson)
Mandela” and “Stimela,” but the context is entirely different. When
he dedicates “Stimela” to anyone in the audience working for almost
no pay, the audience giggles: the Market, like Masekela’s music
perhaps, is now a luxury concern for South Africa’s rising classes.
It is not Masekela’s best version of the song—it is hard to top the
incendiary take from the 1987 “Graceland” concert in Harare—but his
eloquent horn solo and the band’s scrupulous attention to detail
belies Masekela’s determination that neither he nor the history he
has recorded in song be forgotten.

FULL:
http://www.stylusmagazine.com/reviews/hugh-masekela/live-at-the-market-theatre.htm 

Stylus magazine: "Our agenda at Stylus is to have no agenda."
http://www.stylusmagazine.com/about.php 


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NORM DIXON writes (among other things:
To be blunt, Walter and Mikhail, this is just convoluted apologetics for 
the ANC government, a harsh neo-liberal capitalist regime that is now 
Washington's appointed major partner on the African continent. Worse 
still, in effect you choose to place yourselves -- and urge other 
socialists to place themselves -- on the side of the ANC government 
against the actions and criticisms of the very real and growing 
movements of the working class, poor communities, the AIDS sufferers 
WITHIN SOUTH AFRICA -- that are beginning to lay the basis for the 
building a genuine militant, hopefully socialist, alternative to the ANC 
capitalist regime.

Walter dismisses Masekela's criticism of the ANC regime, first with the 
insinuation that he may have has some unstated selfish or sinister 
motive (but Walter quickly admits he has absolutely no evidence upon 
which to base that speculation), and then secondly that Masekela resides 
outside South Africa, as if that invalidates his very accurate 
description of the ``new'' South Africa.


FULL
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism/2007-August/015946.html

Is this the same Tahir Wood who told Doug Henwood:

"Look, I don’t spend a lot of time in the useless 
task of debating leninists on anything, because as 
I have made it clear I don’t respect their positions 
on many things." FULL
http://henwood.blogspace.com/?p=3217

And this, whatever it is?

Tahir: Yes and the kind of teleology that is "much" is the kind that I
don't have any use for. But to say that workers will struggle is to me
not any sort of teleology at all, any more than to say that when the
weather is hot people will wear lighter clothes. It is a tendency not an
end.  FULL:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/hegel-marx/message/1446

Please clarify if this is the same Tahir Wood. Thanks.
I don't know the chap. The name doesn't ring a bell.

SOME SHORT COMMMENTS: 
First:    Walter L.  lives thousands of miles away.
Second:   Norm Dixon lives thousands of miles away
Third:    H.Masakela lives thousands of miles away.
Fourth:   So what? Distance proves nothing, by itself.
Fifth:    Who said anyone shouldn't be critical of life
          in South Africa? I keep recommending that you
          go and see the movie TSOTSI. It depicts today's
          South Africa as a country where the masses of
          people live lives of poverty and oppression
          while a few blacks are doing quite well from 
          an economic point of view. It's a highly and
          harshly critical look at South Africa today,
          a capitalist country under capitalst rule.

          If Tahir Wood's one-sided geography lesson
          and Hugh Masekela's claim that the government
          of South Africa is afraid of his music is all
          the critics can come up with, it's not a very
          imposing opposition movement.


Walter Lippmann
Los Angeles, California
(ten thousand miles from Cape Town)
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>Tahir Wood, inside South Africa comments:
>
>Walter Lippmann: ``I keep on being puzzled about why these radicals
>living thousands of miles away are on the perennial warpath against
>the African National Congress.''
>
>The first thing that needs to be corrected is this: You are the one
>living thousands of miles away; most people who live here, whether
>"radical" or not, are hugely critical of the government. What exactly
>is so puzzling about the appalling conditions of life that the vast
>majority of South Africans live under, which are continually getting
>worse, while the government fatcats continue to prattle on about "a
>better life for all". Which part of this don't you understand?
>
>Tahir


================================
WALTER LIPPMANN
Editor-in-Chief, CubaNews
writer - photographer - activist
http://www.walterlippmann.com
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