by Luso on 22 May 2012
On her Talk Radio 702 book show, Jenny Crwys-Williams discusses the six books shortlisted for the 2012 Sunday Times Alan Paton Award.
The shortlist
Listen to the podcast:
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by Lindsay on 21 May 2012
By Tymon Smith for the Sunday Times:
Andrew Feinstein tells Tymon Smith about the shady dangers of the arms trade – and what ordinary citizens can do about it
Andrew Feinstein is a former ANC MP and author of After the Party, a memoir of his time as an ANC MP and member of Scopa, the parliamentary organisation first tasked with investigating the arms deal. He now lives in England, where he is head of Corruption Watch, an anti-corruption NGO, and chairperson of the Aids charity FoTAC. His latest book, The Shadow World, is an exhaustive investigation of the global arms trade and has been shortlisted for the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award.
Was the decision to write this book, which looks at the arms trade globally, a logical follow-on to After the Party, in which you dealt with the South African arms deal?
I think there were two elements. The one was, having done so much work on those who had been corrupted and the impact of that in South Africa, my desire to know more about whether this happened everywhere or was fairly unique to us and also to know more about those who do the corruption. The second thing was that, when I moved to the UK about 10 years ago, there were so many people who had heard about the South African deal and wanted to talk to me about things that happened in their countries and companies – whistleblowers, a lot of prosecutors, investigators and investigative journalists. So, without realising it, I developed this international network. I also realised that very little work had been done in this area – the previous accessible book on the arms trade was Anthony Sampson’s and the first edition of that was published in the late ’70s. I think people were so excited that somebody was doing work on this and that’s why a lot of them came to me. Having this network, I felt a responsibility to do something with it.
Some might argue that the arms trade and its practices are just like those of any other large industry. Would you agree?
I don’t think it is an industry like any other – it is quite unique. Most of the companies, even when they’re fully listed companies like BAE, Lockheed Martin and so on, operate as almost quasi-parastatals because they operate with government, particularly defence departments and intelligence. That enables them to live in a parallel legal universe because their governments will protect them. The irony, though, is that these big companies and the governments are also working with the guys who trade on the black market, so that makes it different as well. It’s the most extreme manifestation of the relationship between business and politics and the damage it can do, both to the effective functioning of the market and to the practices of accountable governance. As to why it’s so inherently corrupt, I think it’s built into its DNA.
What makes the SA deal different to other deals you examine in the book?
We were probably hoodwinked more than most others because of our naïveté. Our ANC government had not had anything to do with this industry before. So it’s the usual practice – you hoodwink the generals into buying toys they don’t need, you promise all sorts of benefits they’ll never get, you build that into the purchase price and you have a country – usually a developing country – that gets a whole lot of weapons it doesn’t need and barely uses, so you have very few post-sale problems. What the arms deal signified was how quickly we adopted politics as it’s practised everywhere else in the world. It was the ultimate symbol of how we were prepared to use this industry primarily for party political financing and political patronage. We developed a modus operandi for major corruption that would benefit the major political party.
What has been the effect of the arms deal on governance in SA?
Two things. It created a template for the way in which we do corruption, with the governing party as a primary beneficiary. All of the Chancellor House stuff, the tenderpreneur stuff, all comes to ultimately benefit the ANC – but also as a source of largesse and political patronage, so whoever is in power at the time can distribute that largesse. We have over a trillion rand’s worth of power contracts about to be tendered, which will make the arms deal look like chicken feed. The system has become, from the perspective of that small clique , incredibly efficient and effective.
What can ordinary citizens do about the arms trade and its corruption?
Anthropologist Margaret Mead said many years ago, “History is changed by small groups of thoughtful, committed citizens,” and I really do believe that. Our politics have become so crass and self-serving that it becomes more and more incumbent upon ordinary people – taxpayers – to show we don’t like it. We’re also at a political moment globally where people are saying, “This system isn’t working for us,” and I would like this book to contribute to that and help people to become active citizens again. Voting every few years isn’t really active citizenship and demanding what we do and don’t want from governments should become a priority.
Do you think there was a political motive to the timing of President Zuma’s announcement of the Seriti Commission of Inquiry?
I think Terry Crawford-Browne‘s Constitutional Court process was essential because it was clear Zuma’s lawyers didn’t want to put in responding papers. The day on which he announced the establishment of the commission of inquiry was the final deadline for submission of responding papers, so it was clearly to avert that process. There was a second factor at the time: the Youth League was doing to Zuma exactly what Zuma had done to Mbeki. They were saying they wanted an inquiry or they would reveal the corruption within the ANC. Sometimes the political machinations which get you out of a corner at one point may backfire at another. That’s why it’s important to support the commission in the hope that quite a lot of the information can come out. If the commission looks at the evidence against Fana Hlongwane and various others in South Africa, there is no way they can do anything but call for them to be charged with grand corruption in relation to the arms deal. Whether that will happen is another story. Of course, the difficulty in prosecuting someone like Fana is that he knows a lot. It’s like the difficulty in prosecuting Schabir Shaik – their political masters will protect them because they don’t want them squealing. So it’s a very delicate balancing act for Zuma now as to how the inquiry can take place without indicting his little circle, who could, in turn, turn on him.
What are you working on next?
This work continues through Corruption Watch in the UK. There’s a film being made of the book by a New York production company. Then I’m trying to decide. What I really want to do after writing a book with almost 3000 footnotes is to write a thriller that doesn’t have a single footnote and is based on composite characters of people I’ve met and deals I’ve heard about. My agent and publishers are also pushing me to write a book on the role that the banks play in trades like this and in providing banking services to dictators and criminals.
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by Sophy on 21 May 2012
By Tymon Smith for the Sunday Times:
Tymon Smith talks to short-listed Michiel Heyns about the Karoo, international recognition and the rewards of writing
Michiel Heyns’ previous novel, Bodies Politic, was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize in 2009 and he shared the prize for his translation of Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat in 2007. His novel Lost Ground, shortlisted this year, is set in the fictional Karoo town of Alfredville, torn apart by a shocking murder. His latest novel Invisible Furies was published by Jonathan Ball this month. Heyns is a former professor of English at the University of Stellenbosch and he lives in Somerset West.
Are your novels inspired by a sentence, an image, a place or is the starting point different for each one?
It differs every time. Lost Ground started from an idea – not a terribly wonderful idea and one I jettisoned. Actually, it started from a news report about the young Inge Lotz being murdered in Stellenbosch. What intrigued me was that she was found with the television remote in her hand, so obviously knew her murderer. This image of a young woman sitting with a remote in her hand is what happens to the victim in my novel. That’s all I had to start with. Then I thought: how could this have happened? For some reason, I thought of Othello, so I gave her a black husband. Once I did that, a whole can of worms just opened and then the other characters developed around that. At first I thought: let’s have the Othello story in a South African setting but that’s what I jettisoned in the end. It’s useful to have a structure you can jettison because what emerges then will have more urgency.
Is Alfredville based on a real place or is it an amalgamation of Karoo towns?
It turned into an amalgamation. It started off as Barrydale and then I spent a weekend in Barrydale and realised it didn’t have the infrastructure for a murder mystery. You need a vet and a chemist and so on, all of which Barrydale doesn’t have. Someone said to me, “Oh this is Montagu.” I didn’t have Montagu in mind but that would be about the right size.
Do you spend much time on research for your novels?
With Google everyone’s a researcher, so I don’t deliberately sit down and say, “I’m now going to research this novel.” But if something crops up, it’s wonderful what you sometimes find and that can give you ideas. With Bodies Politic, at times I felt I was in a straitjacket because I had to keep to the facts. That was in some ways the most difficult novel to write because I could invent the interchanges between characters but I was basing them on real people and had to keep to the facts. It was fun in Lost Ground to say: here’s a character, put him somewhere and see what happens to him, because I really didn’t know what was going to happen to this chap when he arrived in Alfredville. That’s one of the great joys of writing a novel: you have to see what happens.
There is a debate about whether or not the crime novel is the new political domain of South African literature. What do you feel about this?
My view is that, like any other novel set in South Africa, the crime novel is going to have a political element to it. In a crime novel, the political element may be closer to the surface because crime is closer to the surface of the political situation. But I suppose the political novel is still Nadine Gordimer in the sense of politics being the driving force. Politics are, by and large, incidental to the crime novel but I don’t think such authors set out to make a political statement, as Gordimer does.
For you as a local novelist, how much does international recognition matter – if at all?
It matters. It shouldn’t, but it does. You do want to be part of the bigger picture. I mean, this is colonial cringe but you do want the recognitions of the larger world. I translated the biography of JM Coetzee written by John Kannemeyer and it’s interesting to see from what an early age Coetzee was setting his sights on the international stage. He wanted to write internationally before he had ever even written a novel and I think we all have something of that in that we think real recognition is out there, although I’ve become less enchanted with that idea. I like writing in South Africa for South Africans, often about South Africans, but I’d hate to be limited to only writing about South Africa. Two of my novels have been set in England and I jealously guard the right to write about anything.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a novelist for you?
I think the most rewarding thing is that I can count on being published again. For instance, now that I’ve been shortlisted for this year’s Sunday Times Fiction Prize, it’s wonderful from that point of view because you have a certain amount of money in the bank with publishers, so by and large you will probably get published again and that is a huge load off your mind. I wrote my first two novels without ever thinking I would get published and I often read manuscripts for publishers and it’s heartbreaking because I know the care that’s gone into them and I have to write a regretful report back saying that this is wonderful in all sorts of ways but I don’t think it’s publishable. That is very sad in all sorts of ways and it’s very rewarding not to be in that situation.
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by Mafeno on 18 May 2012
Earlier this month, Ethiopian musician Mulatu Astatke was presented with an honorary doctorate from Berklee College of Music, alongside fellow musicians the Eagles and Alison Krauss. Astatke, known as the father of Ethio-Jazz and notably Berklee’s first African graduate, delivered the 2012 commencement address to over 900 graduates.
Close to 900 graduates from 58 countries received degrees today at Berklee’s 2012 commencement. Berklee president Roger H. Brown presented honorary doctor of music degrees to Rock and Roll Hall of Famers the Eagles, 27-time Grammy Award winner Alison Krauss, and innovative Ethiopian musician Mulatu Astatke. Astatke delivered the commencement address to the graduating class and an estimated crowd of more than 4,000 guests at the Agganis Arena.
In his address, Astatke, Berklee’s first African graduate, thanked the college for opening doors for musicians from developing nations, and encouraged graduates to think outside the box. “At Berklee, I was immersed in a motivating and creative academic environment where Ethio-jazz was conceived,” said Astatke. “You now have the skills and the education to create new innovations in music …You are a selected few with a special gift, and we all have great expectations for you.”
Watch a video of the graduation ceremony, including Astatke’s address:
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Photo courtesy Berklee College of Music
by Amy on 17 May 2012
Following the success of the inaugural Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Award in 2011, Jacana Media is motivated to further strengthen South Africa’s voice and creative spirit.
To ensure that all South African poets have the opportunity to give a voice to their vision, the deadline for submissions for the Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Award 2012 has been extended to 31 May 2012.
The prize, for poetry in ALL 11 South African languages, will be awarded later this year. All selected works will be published in an annual anthology. Selected poets will be invited to appear at a South African poetry festival and a cash prize of R10 000 will be divided among the selected poets.
Rules
- Entrants are encouraged to write in their mother tongue.
- Poems may not have been published in book form before, but may have been published in journals or magazines.
- Entries are limited to 3 poems per poet.
- Entrants must be South African citizens permanently resident in South Africa.
- Entries must include 6 copies of each poem entered plus a soft copy in a suitable word-processing package. No handwritten entries will be considered.
- Entries must include a separate one-page biography of the author, including the name of their poem and current contact details.
- The award is judged blind and therefore any poems that include the author’s name will be disqualified.
- By entering this competition, entrants give permission for the publication of their poem for no payment if selected in the annual anthology. If the entry is not in English, they give permission to translate the poem into English for publication together with the original language poem.
Submissions
Submit your entries by 31 May 2012 in a clearly marked envelope indicating the award and the language of entry. The entry form must be included and is available to download at www.jacana.co.za. Submissions not accompanied by an entry form will not be accepted!
Send to: Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Award, PO Box 291784, Melville 2109
Or deliver by hand to: Jacana Media, 10 Orange Street, Sunnyside, Auckland Park, Johannesburg 2092
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by Sophy on 17 May 2012
The shortlists for the 2012 Sunday Times Alan Paton Award and Sunday Times Fiction Prize were announced last Saturday at the Franschhoek Literary Festival. The Sunday Times Good Times captured some footage of the shortlisting ceremony:
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The 2012 Sunday Times Literary Awards shortlistees speak out:
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