A sad email from an Angolan friend yesterday morning finally gets me writing about the
Africa Cup of Nations. Just this once I'll mention the championship of countries that keeps Africa under its spell until February 10. I am not going to utter profundities about football - I'll leave that to sympathetic sports loving colleagues like
Marc Broere on the extensive website
Road to 2010. But it is a nice opportunity to say something about the backgrounds of some of the matches. For example why the game
Angola - South-Africa earlier this week was nothing less than an African version of a match between the Dutch and the Germans.
(more) 'My country is falling apart, we find ourselves in a crisis in every aspect,' says writer
Marlene van Niekerk about South Africa. It was not an optimistic conversation I had with the famous author on one of the first days of the year.
Van Niekerk is in the Netherlands. She holds the new Africa Chair at the University of Utrecht, where she delivered her inaugural lecture last week. She will work on the position of the novel and the novelist in post-apartheid South Africa. In our interview she states: 'I am waiting for an enlightened young black writer who dares to denounce the failure of South African politics. Someone to describe how the post-apartheid regime might have given a different shine to society, but how it did not change anything for most people.' According to Van Niekerk the poor have remained poor and find themselves in the same hopeless social economic situation, while the rich are getting richer. The only difference is that some of those rich people now are black.
'Africa really is a mess', he says to me, after I told him where I usually work as a journalist. He recently saw a film on some African country where one tribe had all but annihilated another one, was it about Hutus and Tutsis or something? Such arbitrary violence between former neighbours the Serb finds impossible to understand. It's not often that I find myself without words, but last night my Serbian companion's remark on this barbaric African tribal war managed to silence me. Especially because the
Rwandan genocide took place in the nineties, the same period as when
former Yugoslavia fell to pieces so violently. We're on a New Year's Eve party and guests in Belgrade, so I don't pursue the matter a lot further. But this morning - it's been snowing for hours - I muse upon this rather surprising conversation.
(more)
A sad email from an Angolan friend yesterday morning finally gets me writing about the Africa Cup of Nations. Just this once I'll mention the championship of countries that keeps Africa under its spell until February 10. I am not going to utter profundities about football - I'll leave that to sympathetic sports loving colleagues like Marc Broere on the extensive website Road to 2010. But it is a nice opportunity to say something about the backgrounds of some of the matches. For example why the game Angola - South-Africa earlier this week was nothing less than an African version of a match between the Dutch and the Germans.
'My country is falling apart, we find ourselves in a crisis in every aspect,' says writer Marlene van Niekerk about South Africa. It was not an optimistic conversation I had with the famous author on one of the first days of the year. Van Niekerk is in the Netherlands. She holds the new Africa Chair at the University of Utrecht, where she delivered her inaugural lecture last week. She will work on the position of the novel and the novelist in post-apartheid South Africa. In our interview she states: 'I am waiting for an enlightened young black writer who dares to denounce the failure of South African politics. Someone to describe how the post-apartheid regime might have given a different shine to society, but how it did not change anything for most people.' According to Van Niekerk the poor have remained poor and find themselves in the same hopeless social economic situation, while the rich are getting richer. The only difference is that some of those rich people now are black.
'Africa really is a mess', he says to me, after I told him where I usually work as a journalist. He recently saw a film on some African country where one tribe had all but annihilated another one, was it about Hutus and Tutsis or something? Such arbitrary violence between former neighbours the Serb finds impossible to understand. It's not often that I find myself without words, but last night my Serbian companion's remark on this barbaric African tribal war managed to silence me. Especially because the Rwandan genocide took place in the nineties, the same period as when former Yugoslavia fell to pieces so violently. We're on a New Year's Eve party and guests in Belgrade, so I don't pursue the matter a lot further. But this morning - it's been snowing for hours - I muse upon this rather surprising conversation.
