Maybe this is related to the concerns about degenerating water infrastructure, about which I wrote some months ago. Maybe it’s not. Who knows? It’s not like they told us much more than “don’t drink the water“.

Residents in Northern Johannesburg areas were on Friday warned not to drink tap water as the quality was not up to standard, Johannesburg Water said.

Spokesperson Baldwin Matsimela said during routing (sic) sampling on Thursday it was found that the water supply was not up to standard and people in the Northern Johannesburg areas should boil their water before drinking it.

The areas affected are Northcliff, Linden, Cresta, Blairgowrie, Fairlands, and the areas immediately surrounding them.

That’s me, and the areas surrounding me. Sounds like a single incident, not a general problem. It may or may not be the result of old and decrepit water pipes (or “reticulation”, as bureaucrats call it for the sake of clarity), we aren’t being told.

“The water quality has been compromised and we are conducting more tests to find out the source of the problem.

“We do not know as yet what effects or symptoms it would have on people who have already consumed the water,” he said.

So, uh, how do you know the water quality has been compromised? What with? Mud? If so, I’ll take my chances. Sewerage? If so, I might increase my electricity usage contrary to the explicit instructions of minister Buyelwa Sonjica. Or I might avoid it altogether. The beer is still safe, I assume?

According to Johannesburg Water if there is a serious problem with the water, residents will be brought water through alternative methods.

“Lab results of water samples taken yesterday [Thursday] will be known by 1pm and from there we will know how to proceed,” said Baldwin. — Sapa

Well, it’s past one, and on cue, the news is coming over the radio that the tests came back negative. Nice to know.

Now here’s some advice for our public servants and their public relations staff. Stop scaring the living bejeezus out of thousands of people, half of whom drank the water before they heard the warning. Perhaps a little more clarity about what exactly happened and why — which I still want to know, by the way — would go a long way.

As I said, I still want to know what happened, where and why. Is this an idiot with a big machine who broke a pipe? Hey, it happens. Is it a pipe that spent the last 40 years rusting in peace? Why wasn’t it replaced at the end of its design life? Was it a sewerage spill or pollution incident? What did you do about it, and have the guilty parties been fined or fired?

People deserve to know these things. Especially when their health depends on this infrastructure.

It used to be a matter of pride to tell foreigners that unlike in some first world countries, our tap water is not only potable, it actually tastes good.

It would be nice if we could keep it that way. It would be nice not to have to listen to more humiliating comments from president Thabo Mbeki like his recent explanation that many other African countries also suffer serious electricity crises. We weren’t going to be like them, remember? I felt for him, at that moment. That comment must have been heartbreaking.

On the other hand, we still have lions, you foreign people. And elephants. Not in the streets, mind you. Not yet, at least.

When I first wrote about David Bullard’s dismissal over his Sunday Times column on colonialism, I described it as offensive and condescending. Given the supercilious faux-Victorian persona he’s cultivated, however, I found it not all that surprising, and not worth suppressing by his dismissal or otherwise.

I must admit, I did not expect an apology from Bullard, but that’s exactly what he’s written in Business Day today.

I can’t claim to believe everything I have written because some columns were written purely for sensation. Readership of the column grew and I became heady with its success and pushed the boundaries. Last week I pushed that boundary too far.

…I offer sincere and heartfelt apologies to those who were offended, including Mondli Makhanya, my friend and former editor, whom I respect enormously.

Given his previous comments on Makhanya, notably that, “I was found guilty in the kangaroo court of Mondli Makhanya,” and that controversial Empire column on his motoring gig in the Sunday Times, I’m not sure what to make of this turnaround.

It seems clear that the vast majority of readers missed the satire. That few saw it as a provocative fiction, designed to make a point about a particular narrative about the past that is partly true but wholly one-sided, and to make a point about the convenient politics of always blaming present ills on these past evils.

Condescending and offensive though I found the column — writing is rarely as ugly as when satire fails — I never thought he intended to offend, or meant to present those crude caricatures as reality. Either way, it appears out of character for the public Bullard persona to apologise when readers misunderstand his intention and take offence. So why the groveling now?

Update: Ray Hartley, editor of The Times comments on his blog:

Where does that leave all those readers who came out in defence of Bullard’s column, saying that it was a legitimate piece of commentary? Gazzam, you was all outed!

I’m not so convinced. Most people I have read on the subject agreed that his comments were offensive, that the column was badly written, and that even if there was a valid debate about colonialism to be had — as I maintained — that he made several points with which one might disagree.

He apologised for causing offence, which is fair enough as far as it goes, but that just says he agrees the comments were offensive and the column was badly written. It says nothing about the validity or otherwise of the commentary, or about those who defended him. Besides, until a few days ago, one person who came out consistently in defence of David Bullard was, ahem, David Bullard. Where does that leave him?

Every economist, expert and commentator I’ve seen seems to be flummoxed (and mildly panicked) about food inflation. The question on everyone’s lips is, “What can be done about high food prices?” The answer to that is fairly simple. I asked Thomas Carlyle’s parrot to explain.

Price is a wonderful number. It contains a lot of information, and alerts both producers and consumers to a variety of facts. Examine each of these signals, and you’ll have a fairly good idea whether a perceived problem really is a problem, and if so, what public policy prescription might help.

The first point to make is that the solution to high prices is high prices.

Read the rest of this entry »

Surprising news from what’s left of the Bikini Atoll, in the south Pacific, where they used to stage nuclear explosions for the benefit of press photographers. Here’s New Scientist:

What does a coral reef look like 50 years after being nuked? Not so bad, it seems. Coconuts growing on Bikini Atoll haven’t fared so well, however.

Three islands of Bikini Atoll were vapourised by the Bravo hydrogen bomb in 1954, which shook islands 200 kilometres away. Instead of finding a bare underwater moonscape, ecologists who have dived it have given the 2-kilometre-wide crater a clean bill of health.

“It was fascinating – I’ve never seen corals growing like trees outside of the Marshall Islands,” says Zoe Richards of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies in Australia.

Richards and colleagues report a thriving ecosystem of 183 species of coral, some of which were 8 metres high. They estimate that the diversity of species represents about 65% of what was present before the atomic tests.

The ecologists think the nearby Rongelap Atoll is seeding the Bikini Atoll, and the lack of human disturbance is helping its recovery. Although the ambient radiation is low, people have remained at bay.

This mirrors a similar story a few years ago about the remarkable recovery in biodiversity in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, compared to regions outside it.

One doesn’t want to oversimplify a complex, non-linear system, or pretend that nuclear contamination isn’t a serious threat to life, property and the environment. However, such counter-intuitive findings do reinforce the point that nature is really a resilient, adaptible, stable system, and is surprisingly capable of recovering from or evolving through even major catastrophe. It isn’t the fragile, unstable and static system that is so often portrayed by environmental doomsayers and media sensationalists.

(Hat tip to Rich for forwarding the link.)

There are some good observations on the Bullard affair by the guys hosting ZA Tech Show — a fairly new, very informative, and at times highly entertaining South African podcast.

The subject starts about 51:40 into the show, and it’s worth a visit, in particular for the apt discussion on the Streisand Effect.

The only point I’d take issue with is the comparison of David Bullard with Darrel Bristow-Bovey (the late and much lamented Robert Kirby had one take on that particular saga, in a column here.)

Yes, both were fired, but one over either perceived racism, or criticism of his employer, or both, or neither, and the other over multiple instances of plagiarism. I hardly think condescension, however offensive, is comparable in any way to plagiarism. The latter deserves disenfranchisement as a journalist, the former merely a snide rebuttal.

Update: Reader Cam Silver points to an amusing consequence of Bullard being a bastard, on Hayibo.

I haven’t weighed in on the noise about the Forum for Black Journalists, whose racist admission policy was recently declared unconstitutional by the Human Rights Commission. Since the story broke days after my rant about white racists exploded into a raging inferno, I had been toying with the idea of using the FBJ issue to make a similar argument against black racists. But I admit, I was weak. I felt swamped by — and tired of — the subject of racism. Another reason I desisted is expressed well in this excellent editorial on the reaction to the ruling, by political analyst Prince Mashele.

What both whites and blacks in our country seem incapable of, however, is to subject racial questions to rational thought. And unfortunately, this failure leads to an automatic expectation of racially solidaristic approaches to issues of race. As a result, simplistic formulas take the place of dispassionate analysis — so commentary on racial questions becomes predictable and a platform to parade racial correctness.

Whenever race issues arise, one can easily tell whether it is a white or black person commenting, not on the basis of accent or style of writing, but based on their unconcealed preference for racial solidarity over sound argument.

It’s this kind of approach that has made blacks who dared to raise critical questions about the FBJ’s racial policy to be quickly labelled “coconuts”. In the same vein, a white person expressing sympathy with black people is generally interpreted as a buyer of favour. Is there nothing like a race-neutral mind?

This question makes me sorry I didn’t post my position on the FBJ. In my view, as a white journalist, it has every right to exist, and every right to exclude whites. Why should I care? I feel the same about white racist groups. If they want to congregate and burn crosses and do what white supremacists do, that’s their problem. In their case, I’d only object when they start committing crimes. When it becomes harrassment, assault or murder, we have a problem, but that problem does not affect the right to freedom of association or freedom of expression.

Similarly with the FBJ. If they feel the need to have a racially-exclusive club because they prefer to think in terms of race and solve problems based on racial analysis, that’s their loss, not mine. I think it’s rich of people who support such organisations to claim racism in others, but that’s also their loss, not mine.

Here’s my objection to the FBJ, though. I have a serious problem that a senior political figure agreed to meet with them in a closed, off-the-record session. If you’re going to have discussions with exclusive groups, by all means do so. The FBJ wouldn’t be the first group of limited membership and special interests to meet with the government or the ANC. But then disclose what was discussed.

You see, there’s an important feature of the constitution that is often overlooked. The function of a constitution is to bind government, and protect citizens. The constitution explicitly says so, making only specific provisions, “where applicable”, binding on other persons. For binding citizens, we have the statute books — regular law — which serves essentially the opposite function.

So while the FBJ has a clear right, in my view, to associate however it wishes, that Jacob Zuma meets behind closed doors with an explicitly racist body strikes me as unconsitutional discrimination on the part of Zuma. Especially since, at the time, he was refusing to grant interviews to most other journalists. His argument might be that he was acting in his capacity as ANC president, not as an agent of goverment, but that seems like a weak defence.

Zuma’s meeting with them, not their existence or constitution, is my main problem with the Forum for Black Journalists. And I disagree with the Human Rights Commission’s ruling.

Is that point racially neutral enough?

Long, long ago, when the spike was little, and computers were still steam-driven and made of wood, I posted a selection of case mods that recall this elegant Victorian era of computing, or were otherwise notable for originality and craftmanship.

I’d like to add one to that collection. Made by Ryan Sawyer (if I’m not mistaken), an illustrator of considerable skill, he posted a few pictures under the name Absinthetic to his LiveJournal. (Not only is that a blogging platform I just don’t get, but links from there get hidden in dark, dusty recesses by my own WordPress dashboard. Bad WordPress. But then, LiveJournal isn’t very nice to WordPress users either. But that’s a different rant for a different day.)

The computer is just beautiful, but the photos appear a little rushed, sadly. They could do with a more carefully set up, lit and staged shoot. Still, a couple are well worth reproducing here. He has some more views of his classy steampunk box, and while you’re there, check out the funky grandfather clock too. (Update: My bad. It’s a Chronotheric Fluxing Capacitron, not a clock, geriatric or otherwise. It does have a time-related function, though, since it served the Victorians as a flux capacitor.)

Nice work, Absinthetic. I’m all a-goggle.

Posting numbered updates to this story is getting tiresome, so here’s a new post, freshly baked.

BizCommunity, which has been following the David Bullard affair comprehensively since it broke, has published well-known marketing writer Chris Moerdyk’s take on the issue. It is the clearest, most definitive analysis I have yet read.

With one reservation, I agree with his comparison:

Bullard clearly did not learn any lessons from the fate of Sowetan sub-editor Llewellyn Kriel who was fired by Sunday Times owners, Avusa, in November last year for criticising his employers in a blog published on a competitor’s website.

Kriel’s blog can be found on ThoughtLeader, where Moerdyk blogs too (as, in the interest of disclosure, do I). Wisely, Kriel has left the blog defunct since taking up his new position.

Kriel played the incident up as his martyrdom for free speech, but that was a suspect defence. An employer has every right to expect staff to protect the company’s interests in public, and has every right to axe staff who are not prepared to do so. His post was, I thought, rather ill-considered. In the case of a media organisation, a dismissal is not a denial of freedom of speech either, since the disaffected journalist could simply go to a competitor to tell the full story. He’ll surely find someone to give him a platform to disclose the facts, if the facts merit disclosing.

Bullard, ironically, has more claim to a free speech defence than Kriel did, because he was ostensibly fired over perceived racism in his Sunday Times column, and not over his criticism in Empire. It would have been far less complicated and controversial had Mondli Makhanya, the Sunday Times editor, simply acted then, on grounds of betraying the trust of an employer. Or even if instead of denying it, when asked if this was the real reason, he’d answered simply: “Well yes, we were none too happy with that either, and that alone would be sufficient cause for dismissal.”

The editors at Empire have bowed to the clamour of the unwashed hordes on the internet, and have posted the now-infamous column in Empire, in which David Bullard throws a haymaker at Sunday Times publisher Avusa, online. Nifty layout when you click through to the story. Very classy-magaziney. (Click on the image to the right to skip the front page and go directly to the column.)

I and several other people, including Bullard himself, have speculated that this column, rather than the one published in the Sunday Times last weekend, is the real reason for his summary dismissal.

(For the record, I write a regular series on media hoaxes for Empire. I claim no credit for its design, nor do I claim responsibility for its columnists.)

Prompted by the debate David Bullard tried — but probably failed — to stir (as I argued on Friday), I wrote a short opinion on colonialism, which I reckon is worth posting separately. Thanks to Dawn for the comment that prompted this thought.

My own view on colonialism is that it was a logical development in a world that had until then been isolationist and mercantilist. At the time, trade with enemies or foreign countries was often embargoed, subject to high tariffs and duties, or simply forbidden. Establishing friendly trading colonies was a necessary step on the way to building global trade.

Though deeply marred by illiberal practices such as corruption, annexation, slavery and war, such practices do not negate the mutual benefits of trade expansion, which was the primary purpose of colonial expansion by the major economic powers. One could argue that some (though far from all) colonial trade was involuntary, and that some colonialists did not respect the property or political rights of indigenous peoples. Inasmuch as this was the case I’d agree that an honest case for “mutual benefit” cannot be made, but then, inasmuch as this was the case, the trade wasn’t free at the time.

These are among the reasons that colonialism would always have to be superceded, and why it couldn’t be anything other than a step towards a freer, more modern world in which the benefits of trade can be enjoyed by all its citizens. However, that it did expand the world’s horizons and build the world’s institutions to a level at which capital could be more efficiently deployed and resources more efficiently harnessed, is hard to dispute. Without the expanded production base created by growing trade, I doubt we could have supported the unprecedented population growth of the 20th century. In fact, I doubt that growth — and the concomitant growth in global prosperity and quality of life indicators — would even have been possible without growing global trade.

That we’re in a better world now than under a colonial trading system is indisputable. The advance of liberty is always an improvement in society, as is the growing sophistication of governments, markets and the institutional structures that support it.

That a colonial trading system was a useful step on the way to today’s increasingly free and prosperous world is perhaps more controversial, and whether its benefits exceeded its obvious costs is less immediately clear. But it’s a debate worth having, if only so that in focusing our efforts on an increasingly free and prosperous future, we can learn valid lessons from our less free and prosperous past.

Yet another big banner headline. Yet another braindead “news” room exposed. “Lost girls in MXit drama”, the bold black letters scream, above photographs of two teenagers. The sub-headline repeats the headline, as if readers are too dumb to get it the first time: “Chat service linked to disappearance”.

The basis for this sensationalist drivel in the Saturday Star is that, amazingly, both girls are among the 5.2 million people in South Africa who (the article claims) use MXit. Unnamed experts warn of the “massive risks” on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace (which have squat to do with MXit). Desmond Olivier, a “private investigator” associated with Missing Children SA, says MXit is “evil”.

If the girls had disappeared from the mall, would the headline have screamed “Lost girls in mall drama”? If they had met some guys at a disco, or communicated by telephone rather than by text, would the story have railed against the dangers of nightclubs? Would it have called the telephone evil?

Besides, what massive risks? Two missing girls among 5.2 million users is 0.0000385% of the user base. Stop the presses! Hold the front page! Oh wait, that’s exactly what the idiots did. Yet by my reckoning, such odds make MXit the safest possible thing for kids to be doing while awake.

It would have been real news is if they managed to disappear without being able to communicate with anyone. That takes some doing.

It gets better, though. One of the kids, 15-year-old Chantelynn Janse van Resnburg, lives with her father in Orania. She travelled alone, by bus, to visit her mother in Naboomspruit (which someone should inform the sub-editors is officially known as Mookgophong) and upon her return, instead of meeting her father in Hopetown, got off the bus in Johannesburg. Now I haven’t been to Orania, a kind of ultra-conservative white Afrikaner enclave, but I have been to Hopetown. There, I met the local satanist, a 17-year-old boy, so known by the townsfolk because he preferred black t-shirts and wore an earring. That his sights were set on escaping to the “big city” was not the most surprising news I’d heard that day. If I were that teenage girl, I’d also get off the bus in Johannesburg, rather than return to Hopetown or Orania.

The other girl, 17-year-old Hannelie Grabie, packed a suitcase, and took her make-up, hairdryer and back medication with her. Either that, or robbers who specialise in teenage accessories stole them. “We don’t know if she’s run away or disappeared,” says our private investigator. Boy, I hope he has a day job. What do you think, genius? That you need a hairdryer to access MXit? And this is the Clousseau who proposes to find South Africa’s missing children? I sure hope he’s not representative.

Both sets of parents are surprised at their daughters’ disappearance. Aren’t most parents of runaways surprised? If they had a clue, the girls probably wouldn’t have felt the need to run away.

I feel for the parents, and I hope the girls are found, and that they’re okay. But there’s nothing more to this story than a pair of runaways. Plain and simple. Unhappy at home, bright lights in their eyes, fell in with dodgy company, who knows? Slapping this on the front page, and blaming it on MXit, or Facebook, or MySpace, or the internet, or cellphones, or postcards, or bus services, is absurd. It’s braindead sensationalism which does the girls’ case more harm than good and slanders both the creators of MXit and its 5 199 998 other users.

The front page of the Saturday Star is worse even than its back page. At least the back page features serious news, such as: “‘My Nazi orgy with twisted F1 boss’”. Now that’s real journalism.

David Bullard has been fired by the Sunday Times. Ostensibly, it was over last Sunday’s column, in which he envisioned what South Africa would look like had it not been colonised by the Dutch and the English. His vision isn’t exactly complimentary.

The column is condescending at best, and probably racist. But so what? It stokes debate, and that debate should not be about freedom of speech.

Before I talk about that debate, the obvious question is why fire Bullard for being offensive now? Hadn’t the Sunday Times’s editor, Mondli Makhanya, read him before? Doesn’t an editor who once bravely put “Manto: a drunk and a thief” on the front page agree with Salman Rushdie that without the freedom to offend, freedom of speech ceases to exist? Maybe he does. But Bullard made the fatal mistake of offending his paymasters. For that, of course, they have every right to tell him to sod off and exercise his freedom of speech elsewhere.

Except that his paymasters deny that’s why they’re firing him. Makhanya says his 19th century views are unacceptable in the newspaper. Yet Bullard has been cultivating that persona in the very same newspaper for years. He unapologetically trades on his arrogance, his Victorian superciliousness, and his ability to provoke outrage. If he steps over lines, it’s because with his dandy sartorial style, his whisky-drinking tastes and his cigar-smoking condescension, he consciously — and self-consciously — stations himself above arbitrary lines drawn by the hoi polloi.

It is certainly not the first time Bullard has been racist or offensive. Why didn’t he get fired before? The only other possibility that springs to mind is that the political class strongarmed the newspaper by threatening to pull advertising. That is, of course, their right, but it would genuinely surprise me if Makhanya, who stood firm in the face of far heavier political pressure caved over something as inconsequential as a column by a known stirrer. My bet is Makhanya was just waiting for an excuse to fire Bullard after the latter’s scathing attack on his bosses in the recently-launched media magazine Empire — an attack he has exploited on several public occasions to arouse shock and mirth. Sarah Britten speculates along the same lines, and reckons his axing can only be good for Empire. Bullard himself agrees. (I share Britten’s wish that Empire would get around to discovering these newfangled intarweb tube things. On the other hand, we all know what Bullard thinks of the internet. And in the interest of full disclosure: I too write for Empire.)

For my part, I agree with Rushdie. If Bullard’s column is racist, or offensive, or contains 19th century views, so what? You’re free to disagree. In fact, it’s far better for racism to be declared openly and discussed freely than to be suppressed. Just because it’s taboo in public discourse doesn’t mean it’s not flourishing in pub discourse. Or should that read “festering”?

What will get lost in the noise is the debate Bullard appeared to be trying to stir. Not very well, in my view. He expressed the argument in an offensive, condescending way, but there is a valid debate to be had about the modern tendency to dismiss colonialism as mere racist oppression and exploitation. It definitely was, in many cases, mercenary and ruthless. The degree of depravity differed from one colonialist to the next, and the English were far from the worst.

Many writers take the line that colonialism in India, for example, had substantial benefits, in addition to the well-known drawbacks and injustices. Those writers are not only Western apologists for racist oppression, but also Indian economists, historians, and prominent politicians, writing about their own country. For all the harm colonialism did, they argue, it also brought with it civil institutions and infrastructure. India can thank Britain, they say, for its liberal education, modern jurisprudence, and functioning civil service bureaucracy. Once liberated, it was on these institutions that economic progress could be built.

Reasonable arguments can be made on both sides of this issue. As Bullard shows, the same goes for unreasonable arguments. But that his column was grating and offensive does not mean it’s not a debate worth stirring. Yes, it means suspending conventions about what is politically correct. It means challenging well-established orthodox thinking on issues of history. It means treading sensitively around, and not being over-sensitive to, issues of race and oppression. It means rejecting the victim complex to which Bullard refers in his final paragraph, as well as the instinctive slam-dunk defense offered by perceptions of racism. But is it a debate worth suppressing?

I don’t think so. Frederick Douglass, a former slave, once expressed the 19th-century view that “[t]hose who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its many waters.”

It appears that view is also too 19th-century for Mondli Makhanya’s Sunday Times.

Update at 21:00 on 11 April 2008: If you’re interested in David Bullard’s columns, I hope you have bookmarks. Because you aren’t going to find them — not even previously published ones — at The Times website. They appear to have been orphaned. They still exist. For now. The link to his column in the copy above still works, and so do the links from that page, but without an article ID number, David Bullard is just a bad memory for the Sunday Times.

Update at 22:00 on 11 April 2008: Bullard responds, inserted in the copy above.

Update at 13:00 on 12 April 2008: The Saturday Star was quick to exploit this competitive opportunity, and published a page three article on Bullard in today’s first edition. It isn’t yet available online, but an image of the page is here. In it, he is quoted as saying that the column was merely an excuse for Makhanya to get rid of him, after he refused to apologise for claiming, in his Empire column that standards at the Sunday Times and other Avusa publications were in decline. After all, he says, his brief was to be “controversial” and “outrageous” and “to upset people” on a Sunday. “I was found guilty in the kangaroo court of Mondli Makhanya,” the piece quotes. Marvellously in character, he is pictured in a flashy pin-stripe suit and tie at the opulent Rand Club. “Wait until you see the next article in Empire,” he promises, “because now I don’t have to hold back at all.”

Update at 12:00 on 13 April 2008: Prompted by my response to Dawn in the comments section, I posted a short follow-up piece on the debate I believe Bullard was trying to stir: In defence of colonialism.

Update at 15:00 on 13 April 2008: Bullard’s Empire column, along with a full complimentary issue, has been published online. I noted it here. The direct link to his column is here.