Write On

South Africa is a friendly place. Even though there are 40 million people here, it seems like they all know each other personally. Enrique Orta is a good friend and comrade from the Cuban Embassy in Pretoria. He wrote a letter to the Saturday Star complaining about Michael Schmidt’s previous bad-mannered, unkind and insulting article. Both items are linked below. Schmidt could not even have the grace to leave it at that. He just had to have a second bite (see the bit in italics below Cde Enrique’s letter). Schmidt is a declared anarcho-syndicalist who uses his Saturday Star column as a bully pulpit. The proprietors obviously don’t mind so long as he keeps bashing the communists. Nobody is checking his facts, least of all himself. If you want to defend the honour of our Cuban comrades against the loud-mouthed vulgarian, Schmidt, please send your letters to the Saturday Star at saturdayletters@inl.co.za . Mac and Zarina Maharaj are going up against the NPA/Scorpions, challenging the constitutionality of the NPA act which allows powers like those taken by the ancient Greek Draco or later on in England by the Court of the Star Chamber. It is hard to see why, if ours is the “best constitution in the world”, we manage to end up with summary procedures like these, and like the “asset forfeiture”. Read the article, hope that you never fall into the hands of the Scorpions, and support Mac and Zarina! Makhosini Nkosi has had enough, at least. He is quitting as the Scorps’ public mouthpiece, for reasons given in the article (see the link below). The CU is not vindictive. We hope he gets a more respectable job this time round, that’s all. And we hope nobody else takes the stinking job that Nkosi has wisely left behind, no matter how desperate they may be. It’s a small world for Richard Calland, all right. He has talked to nearly everyone who is anyone, including the man who told him that “The President always takes the call” from his big capitalist boss (see the linked article). Which confirms what the CU has contended: the poor get toy-telephone “consultations”, and sometimes not even that. But the rich man’s telephone call gets answered by the President in person. “The rich man’s fart has no smell”, as Ngugi wrote in “Devil on the Cross”. But what Calland has also done is to take seriously the May 2006 SACP Bua Komanisi on State Power, which makes one realise how little the communists themselves have taken advantage, so far, of the discussion period opened up by the 2005 SACP Special National Congress and their own discussion document. Lebo Mathosa was killed in a car crash. People were shocked and saddened. South Africa is a family, after all. But as in an ordinary family, we don’t have to pretend that everything is perfect all the time, when it is not. The story of Lebo has more than one side. Here linked below is one version from the Sunday Times. Meanwhile the City Press went completely over the top and covered its paper with a special four-page Lebo supplement, as if this was Lady Diana all over again. Click on these links: Unions in Cuba support Fidel Castro, Enrique Orta, Saturday Star (470 words) When Castro falls unions will celebrate, Michael Schmidt, S Star (556 words) Angry Mac fights back, Makhudu Sefara, City Press (746 words) Makhosini Nkosi forced to quit Scorpions, Ngobeni, Mahlangu, S Times (332 words) With Richard Calland in the SA parlours of power, Sunday Times (1354 words) Lebo, made in a free South Africa, Andrew Donaldson, Sunday Times (1371 words)