South Africa Parliament chamber ‘completely gutted’ by fire

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Written by northsouth

Category: Africa

Published: 03 January 2022

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By GERALD IMRAY

CAPE TOWN, South Africa - Fire crews have continued to work at South Africa’s national Parliament complex in Cape Town on Monday after a major fire blazed through the buildings a day earlier, causing extensive damage.

The main chamber of the National Assembly was “completely gutted,” City of Cape Town safety and security official J.P. Smith said, and parts of the roof had collapsed.

“The entire Parliament complex is severely damaged, waterlogged and smoke damaged,” Smith said.

Firefighters were still working on “hotspots” in the National Assembly building more than 24 hours after the fire started, Cape Town Fire and Rescue Service spokesman Jermaine Carelse said. But the fire crews had been scaled back from around 70 firefighters Sunday to 20 by Monday morning.

Other buildings in the complex were also damaged by the fire that started early Sunday morning and spread from an old Parliament building that now houses offices to the National Assembly building.

With grand columns and stately white and red brick buildings, the Parliament complex has been at the center of South Africa’s history for more than 130 years. Some of the buildings have weathered British colonialism, the apartheid regime and South Africa’s transition to democracy under the presidency of Nelson Mandela.

A man arrested Sunday is being questioned in connection with the fire, police said. He is to appear in court on Tuesday and is expected to face charges of breaking and entering, theft and arson, while he will also be charged under South Africa’s National Key Points Act, a security law controlling access to places of national importance and government buildings.

The man had to be rescued from the fire on Sunday, according to South African media reports. Parliament was closed for the holidays and no injuries were reported.

Patricia de Lille, the Minister of Public Works and Infrastructure, said Sunday that someone had turned off a valve which prevented a fire sprinkler system from functioning.

She said an investigation into the cause of the fire has been taken over by the Hawks, a South African police unit that deals with serious and high-profile crimes.

Tutu: a man of empathy, moral ardor, and some silly jokes

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Written by northsouth

Category: Africa

Published: 28 December 2021

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By CHRISTOPHER TORCHIA

PRETORIA - One Christmas Day in the 1980s, Desmond Tutu led a packed church service in Soweto, the Black Johannesburg township and fulcrum of protest against white racist rule in South Africa. An American family — mine — found standing room at the back.

We were among the few white people in the congregation and, as we shook hands with Tutu on the steps upon leaving, he made a joke. Something like: “So, it really is a white Christmas.”

Evoking the Irving Berlin song ’’White Christmas,” famously crooned by Bing Crosby, in tense, dusty Soweto was quintessential Tutu. He couldn’t resist a pun about race in an inflamed country suffering the agonies of apartheid, the system of white minority domination that was extinguished in 1994.

(Actually, every once in a very long while, it has snowed in Johannesburg, but certainly not at Christmas time, which falls in the Southern Hemisphere’s summer).

When Tutu died Sunday at age 90, he was remembered as a Nobel laureate, a spiritual compass, a champion of the anti-apartheid struggle who turned to other global causes after Nelson Mandela, another moral heavyweight, became South Africa’s first Black president. Barack Obama praised Tutu for fighting injustice wherever he saw it.

But the former U.S. president also recalled the activist’s ″impish sense of humor.″ And it is that Desmond Tutu — the funny, kind, gracious man behind the icon — whom I and so many others recall.

To see Tutu up close was to bask in his rollercoaster laughter, to revel as his eyes would widen theatrically, to luxuriate in his pristinely enunciated remarks, and to come away infused with the man’s joy and warmth. If he had a chance to dance, usually in church, he was on his feet — with the help of a cane in later years, as he grew more frail.

He seemed to embody the best of what it is to be human, at a granular level. The small generosities, the willingness to listen, the empathy, lightening the mood with … let’s face it, some pretty silly jokes.

He kept that up through grim times in South Africa, showing anger and frustration too at dehumanizing state policies, the violence of white-controlled security forces and the killing within Black communities as apartheid, a scourge that he described as ’’evil,” played out bitterly.

Not everyone was a fan. His moral ardor ran up against realpolitik. His notion of the ″rainbow nation,″ an idealized vision of racial tolerance, is at odds with the social and economic imbalances of South Africa today.

But he always reached out, always looked for and found the humanity in people. In advance of a small service at St. George’s Cathedral in 2015, participants were asked to send photos of themselves; I watched as Tutu went around the congregation, asking each person to say a little about themselves.

I was a boy on that Christmas Day when Tutu riffed on Bing Crosby, and my father was reporting for The Associated Press in South Africa. In 1989, my parents moved to Stockholm. A few months before they departed, a postcard arrived with Tutu’s scrawl on the back.

’’Go well. Thanks for your splendid service,” he wrote. “Will miss you. Will certainly try to see you in Sweden. God bless you.”

In time, I became a journalist and also worked for the AP in South Africa, sometimes covering Tutu’s post-apartheid commentary on corruption and other challenges, as well as his hospitalizations for the prostate cancer that afflicted him for nearly a quarter century.

I would recall the one time he visited our Johannesburg home for dinner. He didn’t stay long. He was charming, easygoing.

Afterwards, he sent us another postcard. On the front was an elephant; on the back was something that could be taken both as a bread-and-butter note and as an unintended valedictory from a remarkable man who, even at age 90, left the world too soon.

“Just an inadequate note to thank you very much for your kind hospitality,” he wrote. “I enjoyed myself and was sorry to have to leave early. God bless you.”

It was signed, simply, “Desmond.”

South Africa’s last apartheid president F. W. de Klerk dies

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Written by northsouth

Category: Africa

Published: 11 November 2021

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By ANDREW MELDRUM

JOHANNESBURG — F.W. de Klerk, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Nelson Mandela and as South Africa’s last apartheid president oversaw the end of the country’s white minority rule, has died at the age of 85.

De Klerk died after a battle against cancer at his home in the Fresnaye area of Cape Town, a spokesman for the F.W. de Klerk Foundation confirmed on Thursday.

De Klerk was a controversial figure in South Africa where many blamed him for violence against Black South Africans and anti-apartheid activists during his time in power, while some whites saw his efforts to end apartheid as a betrayal.

It was de Klerk who in a speech to South Africa’s parliament on Feb. 2, 1990, announced that Mandela would be released from prison after 27 years. The announcement electrified a country that for decades had been scorned and sanctioned by much of the world for its brutal system of racial discrimination known as apartheid.

With South Africa’s isolation deepening and its once-solid economy deteriorating, de Klerk, who had been elected president just five months earlier, also announced in the same speech the lifting of a ban on the African National Congress and other anti-apartheid political groups.

Amid gasps, several members of parliament members left the chamber as he spoke.

Nine days later, Mandela walked free.

Four years after that, Mandela was elected the country’s first Black president as Black South Africans voted for the first time.

By then, de Klerk and Mandela had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 for their often-tense cooperation in moving South Africa away from institutionalized racism and toward democracy.