On Mining and Labour

For many years now, since even during the economic “boom” years of the Mbeki administration with its promises of trickle down prosperity, mining has contributed increasing less and less to the nation’s gross domestic product (and yet, if UNCTAD reports are to be believed, has received the bulk of foreign direct investment flowing into South Africa, even with a 74% drop in total FDI between 2014 and 2015). In the ten years between 2005 and 2015 mining (and quarrying, as it is classified in SARB reports) has decreased by an average of 0.35% annually, continuing a steady trend downwards. A trend the origins of which can be traced back as far as 1993 when mining held the lion’s share of contributions to GDP at levels close to 20% before reaching 12% by 2015. 

For nearly 150 years, the men (and, lately, women) of this country have toiled underground, at great risk to their lives, to dig up ore of varying composition and quality. Gold, our most prized element - holding, as we do, the worlds largest known reserves of the stuff - comes out in such poor quality ore that one ton of earth must be excavated to yield a mere 5.6 grams of pure gold. That alone should have been enough to divert resources to unlocking the secret of the philosopher’s stone, were it not for the notion of “cheap labour” that we have become most famous for over these past few centuries. Today we have the curious situation where, as noted in a tweet by mining and labour analyst Mamokgethi Molopyane, “those who actually do (the) physical work to create the wealth of this country earn less than R5 000 on average”.

On August 16, 2012, 34 miners were ruthlessly gunned down by members of the South African Police Services’ Public Order Policing unit. Their crime: demanding an across the board minimum monthly salary of R12 500 - twelve comma five like the big bag of sugar/flour/mielie meal that gets many low income families going through the month. You would have to be blind to the everyday reality of thousands of households who depend on incomes as meagre as R4 500/month that some mine workers reported to be earning at the time - for some, unchanged since the 80s - to miss the poignant and poetic symbolism contained in demanding itwelf-koma-five. Even after the tragic event, even after the international outrage and national mourning that followed and continues even to this day, those miners are yet to realise their dream of earning what was then slightly less than the national average for the year. Every time there is any protest that seeks social justice involving anything to do with money, the reflex reaction from those appointed to mind the gates to the bountiful wealth of this country is to blame the economy for not being efficient enough to produce equitable outcomes - as though they themselves aren’t active agents in the working of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”. For mine workers on the platinum belt, the excuse was the financial meltdown of 2008 and the sluggish global recovery therefrom. 

Thomas Piketty, seemingly playing devil’s advocate and referring directly to the tragedy at Marikana, argued in Capital in the 21st Century that perhaps the best way to proceed would be full disclosure on the financial state of the mine, using the example of Rhenish capitalism as a lesson in how to reconcile competing interests in industry (profit maximising vs maximising the price for which individuals trade leisure for labour, according to the neoclassical model). But full disclosure is not a thing one can trust South African mining houses with, as evidenced by the tasking of the Davis Tax Committee by the National Assembly to look into transfer pricing. For the uninitiated, transfer pricing is the commonplace act of moving profits from the operational organisation to a separate but related organisation, usually one registered in a tax haven, in order to “avoid” (and evade) taxes in the land where the profits were first earned. The committee, comprised of some of South Africa’s sharpest economic and legal minds including experts on inequality like Prof. Ingrid Woolard, have gone on record citing the many challenges they face in determining when such pricing is indeed avoidance (which is legal) and what is evasion (which is illegal). Such challenges also include the lack of capacity within the state revenue agency, SARS, to investigate and bring offenders to justice. What chance then do mineworkers have - many of whom are barely literate, -against such sophisticated obfuscation that confounds even those who profess to be experts in their field?

On March 22, 2016, Sikhosiphi Bazooka Rhadebe was murdered in his home, while his family watched helplessly. For him, this was a culmination of a long fight against the awarding of rights to a foreign multinational behemoth to mine the pristine and picturesque sands of Xolobeni - a stretch of virtually untouched beach on the Wild Coast of the Eastern Cape. It is not known definitively who killed Bazooka, or who, if indeed at all, ordered his assassination. What is known is that there is a large Australian mining company interested in the titanium that lies, ripe for the picking, in the sands of those beaches. Politics of the stomach have given rise to an internecine conflict within the community represented by AmaDiba of Xolobeni. Sluggish economic growth, growing unemployment all serve to create a powder keg of conditions within the community with those who see the job opportunities presented by potential mine operations pitting themselves against those who wish to retain the community’s control of the land. It is not the intention of this article to put intentions in the minds of this latter group, but instead to outline a perspective on the history of mining and the notion of citizens acting merely as labour for the enrichment of foreign interests.

Mining is clearly on the decline and, as also astutely observed by Molopyane in another tweet, South Africa needs to prepare for a life after mining. South Africa should have started preparing for such a reality when mining first lost first place to financial services with regards to contribution to GDP nearly a decade ago. Currently in third place (if we disregard government services), there doesn’t seem to be any hope of a resurgence, especially considering the fact that mining by definition deals in non-renewable resources. The only way in which mining could re-emerge as the champion of economic growth is through the discovery of new mineral deposits such as those at Xolobeni. However, the idea that the community residing in the area - a community that faces great upheaval should mining go ahead, including the disruption of burial grounds - should serve only to as a source of cheap labour to mine the wealth of the land of their ancestors to expatriate to the asset portfolios of foreigners is beyond insulting. Knowing what we know about the exploitation of South African mine workers, we cannot, in all good conscience, stand by and allow the repetition of the mistakes of yore, which all but brought the economy of this country to its knees. 

It cannot be denied that the people of Xolobeni are sitting on a proverbial gold mine. For them to not realise, in real monetary terms, the wealth contained in those sands while trying to keep the wolf of poverty at bay would be a great tragedy. Add to this the very real possibility that strong lobby groups paid for with Australian dollars may eventually manage to sway the government to force the community to accede to the pressure, and the tragedy takes on the aspects of dark comedic farce. A combination of Rhenish capitalism, cooperative mining and public-private partnerships where the community retains complete equity on mining operations and merely pays fees (regulated by government to ensure fairness) to the mining houses and related operators for the management and operations of the mine seems like the best option. From this the community may follow the path of nations like Saudi Arabia and Norway who have built vast sovereign funds from their natural resource endowments and are now able to diversify away from these as they move into a future that is not threatened by the declining reserves of non-renewables.

[Originally published in the Comment & Analysis section of the Mail & Guardian's 02 June 2016 edition. Also available here.]

The Blues of Being a Stay-At-Home Gay

“I don’t know when love became so elusive /all I know is no one I know has it”, Beyoncé says as I contemplate my own love life on board a flight from Johannesburg to East London. I was trying to stir up the FOMO of the lady seated next to me by watching Lemonade during the flight and instead found myself deep in my own feels. I think I know when love became elusive for me - it was the day I discovered internet dating sites and apps. The first time I realised the internet could be used to find love, as a young freshman at Fort Hare, I soon realised that they only really worked in the big cities. They worked even better overseas. But doesn’t everything though? (Don’t answer that.)

Returning home last year to become a part-time stay-at- home gay while figuring this funemployment thing out, my sex life abruptly became the no life of my younger days. It used to be that when you returned from “the mountain”, your parents bought you a new bedroom suite and built you a backroom where you could live out your manhood to its fullness. The backroom is a rite of passage in and of itself. It’s the aspiration of many a young boy growing up in a township home. For a time, I did have a backroom at home but I relinquished it for economic migration to the big city (and the promise of busier Manhunt and Grindr pages) before I could really put it to optimal use. Without an established pattern of behaviour (and without the requisite knack for the age-old tradition of ukungenisa) I returned an old dog reluctant to learn new tricks and settled for an inside-house room where the wifi signal is stronger.

When I was in the big city, I wasn’t quite as shumanekile as I am now. My experience of some 20 years as a practicing homosexual has led me to some of the darkest parts of male sexuality. Not least of which is evinced in the unrelenting fuckboism that is Grindr (or indeed any of the many dating/hookup platforms available to same-sex loving men). The greatest of which comes neatly packaged as a set of “preferences” most commonly hurled at you by various headless torsos and other NSFW avatars. “NO FATS!” “NO FEMMES!” “NO BLACK!” “NO ASIANS!” are by far the most popular. One may rightfully argue that this is indeed a simple matter of preference. A favourite aunt of mine would say “de gustibus non disputandum est” - there’s just no disputing taste (aphorisms always seem to hold more weight when expressed in a foreign and/or dead language spoken only to sound like a pompous git). We all have preferences - for example I prefer Chicken Licken hot wings with the hot sauce to Nando’s any kind of wings. What I don’t do, however, is stand in the middle of the food court at The Mall of Africa and shout that out at the top of my voice. My analogy is simplistic and borderline egregious, but it serves my argument well in that, by extension, what civilised people are expected to do is to wait to be offered the undesired wings before politely declining without even mentioning a preference for wings that aren’t Portuguese. It’s humiliating and dehumanising to Portuguese chickens.

With a population of 267 000 (if Wikipedia is to be believed), after making the necessary adjustments for demographics (locating the sweet spot in the male population between Ben10 and half-past blesser), eligibility, queer-drain (like brain-drain, but with queers) and so on, the only people left are the four other gay men in my East London circle of friends. The worst thing is at my age, even as an openly out homo, I am starting to get the “when are you getting married” question a lot at family gatherings (damn you Constitution of South Africa!) Soon one of my siblings will be getting married and I need to be prepared. So my mission between now and then is to find someone to be my date to the wedding, so that when I get asked that question I can deflect and point to him on some “mbuze, nanku”. That ought to buy me some time I think. Or get me chose. Either way, I win.

[Originally published in the Friday section of the 6 May 2016 edition of the Mail & Guardian.]

Passing The Bhokhwe

A little while ago I was sitting at my workstation at home minding my own business, as one does. The radio, which I wasn’t really paying attention to, was tuned into uMhlobo Wenene FM - the midmorning weekday show, Khanya Gqiyazana, was on. The show normally deals with issues around gender, “with a bias towards women issues”. I sat down at my work station to begin the day’s work when just then the host announced what the following segment on the show would be about. 

There’s something about being other that makes you acutely aware of when the temperature in the room changes and you sense that what will follow will leave you feeling naked and exposed. The host began by explaining how as Xhosa people we practice our customs with a certain pageantry that relies heavily on the gender binary as an anchor. Suddenly the room got cold. Her question to her listeners that morning was how did those she described as “amadoda athandana namanye amadoda” (men who love other men) handle those situations.

Ever since the very public traditional wedding in KwaDukuza between two men in 2013 that went viral across the world (ending in a zealously instagrammed divorce two years later), the topic of marrying tradition to constitutional freedoms has been a recurring one, mostly on social media networks. I consider myself a traditionalist, because that’s just how I was raised. In the same way that someone thinks themselves to be Jewish or Muslim, I consider myself to be umXhosa. I also just happen to be indoda ethandana namanye amadoda.

The radio show host invited calls exclusively from men who self-identified as such.  Knowing they were likely to attract trolls, they spared no effort in screening the calls. When the first caller eventually got through he took the host completely by surprise. He spoke with a bass in his voice that sounded like it had the power to shake the foundation of a heteronormative home. His Xhosa was uninflected, radiating a mixture of Model C twang lying just under the surface of his down home country boy charm. “Bhuti uthandana namanye amadoda phofu?”, she asked a little suspiciously, like he’d slipped through her carefully constructed firewall. “Ewe, ndithandana namanye amadoda”, he boomed proudly out of the radio speakers. 

The call ended at that point and the signature music came on. You could almost sense the host’s disappointment at so uneventful and far from titillating conversation. A little while later, the host returned to announce that she had just been informed that there are what are termed “butch” men who love other men. God bless her producer for trying to educate her but it was all such a mess. The show was not going as she had hoped and she was starting to fray at the edges. A few other callers came on and in the end she found one caller who managed fit her narrow fetishism of queer men who don’t “pass”.

As someone who easily switches between masculine and feminine expression, I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve had to “pass” when around family, especially extended family. It’s just easier for me - it may not be for someone else. When you’re black, being a family is a lot of work. Even the word for the things that bring us together as family and friends “imisebenzi” - literally “works”. For me, passing is the path of least resistance.

I’ve seen others pass too. I’ve also seen others who don’t. I’ve also encountered feminine men who self-identify as straight. It’s really not that linear. 

I remember once my mother asked me how I was going to have children. Her concern was how I was going to carry on the family name. A fair question, now that I look back - I wasn’t so magnanimous when it was asked though. That’s the advantage people who enjoy the company of the opposite sex have over people like me - this sort of built-in feature to make more people. I do envy that. Being a “thoroughbred” homo, as it were, I feel I’m far too long in the tooth to experiment with the most widely practiced method to procreate. I’m too broke for a surrogate (also, ethical questions and such). So things aren’t looking up for me in the making my own people department and preserving the family line. Which I’ve learned not to mind really, particularly now. Especially now. For all my life, I’ve only had sisters up until two weeks ago when I discovered that my late father had made a spare. So we may yet save this branch of the family tree.

[This is an unedited version of a piece that appeared in the 1 April 2016 edition of Mail & Guardian's Friday under the title "On code switching and men who love other men". I had hoped the edited version would be available online so I can link it here. In the absence of the link, I have taken a pic of the article as it appeared in the paper and pasted it below. I hope it's readable.]

Look How Far We’ve Come

Twenty years ago I knew of only one gay person. Apart, of course, from rare characters on the tv screen, who caused me great unease and consternation whenever they appeared during family viewing. They were always white tho - except that one time Sophie Ndaba’s husband lampooned an experience that wasn’t his to perform, of the black amab (assigned male at birth) fem in the hair salon. But at the time I didn’t know things like that. I just knew of this one guy.

The Eastern Cape queer community was thin in numbers - or rather, thin in number of people living full unhidden lives. I remember overhearing a conversation my mother was having with a friend of hers some time when I was in high school. They were talking about a mutual friend of theirs home they knew to be gay who had moved from Johannesburg back to her rural home in the Transkei somewhere. “Yhuuu!”, my mother’s friend exclaimed. “Uzotabaneka nabani ke apho?”. I don’t know if she knew how profound that question is. Having no one to tabaneka with I think is the loneliest experience.

A year later, in my first year at the University of Fort Hare, I came out to a friend, who also happened to be the first out lesbian I had ever met. There were two other guys on campus, she informed me. But they were rarely sighted on account of the fact that they were always in Port Elizabeth, where the social scene was less unwelcoming of queer bodies. Although, my friend didn’t appear to have this problem - but that’s maybe because she bested the dudes at basketball and they had mad respect for her or something. 

Anyway, later she introduced me to that one guy I had known of. He was widely popular in Mdantsane where I grew up, having held the title of Mr Ciskei at some point in the 80s. He was possibly equally notorious for a number of reasons related to his sexuality. His house was like a French salon for those of us who ached to be among others like us, others who felt like us, people to tabaneka with.

We were a small clique of boys and men of varying ages, and as far as we knew, we were the only self-identifying gay men in town. We also knew all the lesbians. We spoke a local dialect of Gayle - the Cape gay slang - peppered with words borrowed from its Zulu equivalent, isiNgqumo. I never did become fluent in either - frankly, my isiNgqumo vocab is non-existent, I only know to recognise the language when it’s spoken in my presence. I know a bit of Gayle, just enough to know in which direction to “kala the vas beulah bag next to Alice”. [Translation: check the hot guy next to “Alice” - Alice is a place holder and can be anything really, depending on the context.]

Over the years this small clique grew and splintered and eventually dissipated as we got older and moved on. I joined the nomadic economic migrant hoards and left for the big city, coming back for iBig Dayz like the rest of them, to find that I knew fewer and fewer of the queer people I was meeting. Many of my friends from that period were felled by the HIV wave that seems to have peaked in the early 2000s.

Today I watch with a little envy as my social media timeline floods with young people from East London and elsewhere in the Eastern Cape, expressing their queerness openly, fearlessly. Expressing thoughts and desires that we only ever mentioned in the safety of the salon - hair or otherwise - or in Gayle when in mixed company. I feel an inescapable surge of pride every time a new video from Moshe drops on the interwebs. 

We have also come a mighty long way from when I knew the names of every out black gay man in East London, and we still have a way to go. Killings of queer women and effeminate gay men in particular are still a fixture of our reality. But man what a time it is to be alive. To live in a time where the mood is decolonisation and everything in its way must fall, is to live in a time where we begin to decolonise the many varied queer experiences lived by millions of Africans also. 

[This is the unedited version of a column that appeared in the Mail & Guardian of 11 March 2016 under the headline "Queer How Far We've Come". The edited published version does not differ significantly from this one.]