HAND OVER FIST PRESS
SHEEP
IN THE ROAD
18
& again, its money money money
& you still can’t take it with you
d
SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER 18
The
CONTENTS ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Edit & Design: Alan Rutherford Published online by www.handoverfistpress.com Cover photograph: Alan Rutherford Frontispiece: Hans Holbien
Opening 03 Trump Trump Quack
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Artwork: Alan Rutherford
Fidel Castro
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10 lies
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Photographs, words and artwork sourced from ‘found in the scrapbook of life’, no intentional copyright infringement intended, credited whenever possible, so, for treading on any toes ... apologies all round!
Born a Crime
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Another Angry Voice
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The Lucas Plan
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Joana Foster
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Rape articles
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There is no deadline for submitting articles to be included in the next issue, it will appear whenever, or in your dreams!
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Articles to: alanrutherford1@mac.com
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OPENING Blah-blahblah-blahblah––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Print by Karena Colquhoun of MAGIC JELLY, Adelaide, Australia
The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end
Hello, Welcome to magazine number 18. Still trying to ignore the media circus, lies and bullshit that parades as news ... misdirecting our attention, here is a magazine produced freely to be read freely. All articles and artwork supplied, or found in newspapers lining the bottom of the canary cage, were gratefully received and developed with love, enthusiasm and sympathy here at Hand Over Fist Press.
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Nobody got paid. Perhaps that is the problem? Anyway, ‘Sheep in the Road’ will now appear very sporadically. Without contributors this project has failed to live up to its original ideal! Maybe the last issue for a while (or maybe
Leon Trotsky not?) ... in the meantime, a luta continua!
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4 Artwork: Alan Rutherford
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TRUMP TRUMP QUACK Donald Trump is being briefed on the US’s ‘deep secrets’. The US President-elect is scheduled for numerous briefings on US intelligence, security and defence Bob Woodward Mr Trump is being briefed on the US’s nuclear weapons tactics. One of the most important phases of the transition to power for President-elect Donald Trump includes briefings on U.S. intelligence capabilities and secret operations as well as separate descriptions of the extraordinary powers he will have over the military, especially contingency plans to use nuclear weapons, according to officials.
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In 2008, after then-President-elect Obama was given one sensitive intelligence briefing at a secure facility in Chicago, he joked, ‘It’s good that there are bars on the windows here because if there weren’t, I might be jumping out.’ Though Trump has been given some intelligence briefings on threats and capabilities, there are a series of separate briefs scheduled for the president-elect into what Obama has called ‘our deep secrets.’
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Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks said she could not provide any information on the schedule for the briefings. Previous presidents received them over the course of the entire transition.
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First is a detailed look at technical and human intelligence sources and methods that provide critical information on Special Access Programs – the most sensitive top-secret undertakings – for drone strikes and other intelligence operations. This would include the disclosure, if Trump wants the names, of the dozens of officials abroad paid by the CIA, to the tune of millions of dollars. Though entitled, presidents normally have not asked for names unless the secret relationship involves a particularly important CIA asset. Other methods include the most sensitive technical capabilities of the National Security Agency to intercept communications abroad, store them and make them instantly available to analysts and operators. Trump will learn that the president is considered ‘The First Customer’ by the intelligence community, which has a tradition of responding to any and every presidential request. A second briefing will be on the covert actions undertaken by the CIA that are designed to change events abroad without the hand of the United States being revealed publicly. There are currently about a dozen such ‘Findings’ – intelligence orders signed by the president. Some are broad authorities to conduct lethal counterterrorism operations in dozens of countries. Others are narrow, such as support for clandestine efforts in a single country to stop genocide or payments to political opposition or rebels.
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Under law and procedures, such covert-action orders are issued by the office of the president, and Obama’s orders will continue unless Trump, as president, changes them. Normally, the president-elect will review current covert actions and decide before the inauguration whether he wants to continue, modify or cease any. He also could add new covert operations after taking the oath. Under law, the president can decide to launch new covert operations but must inform the Senate and House intelligence committees. For particularly sensitive operations, the president has to see only that the Gang of Eight is informed. The eight are the two party leaders of both the Senate and House, plus the chairman and ranking member of the intelligence committees. Among the most important ‘Findings’ are counter-proliferation operations designed to prevent a country from obtaining a nuclear weapon or a nuclear weapon delivery capability.
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Other operations are offensive aggressive cyberattacks involving stealthy computer hacking designed to break into computer systems of foreign governments. Previously, they have been called the Computer Network Attack (CNA) and are among the most highly secret undertakings of the U.S. government. In addition, Trump will receive information on domestic counterterrorism overseen by the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. After the 9/11 attacks, the FBI was turned loose to stop the next attack. Efforts to penetrate banks, communications and foreign corporations in the United States have been significantly expanded.
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Trump will also be given information about ‘Continuity of Government,’ which are the plans and procedures designed for implementing the line of presidential succession. That could be in case of a terrorist attack or other emergency in which the president dies or could not carry out the duties of his office. A third briefing will be on nuclear-war plans and options. The ‘football,’ a briefcase carried by the military aide to the president, includes authentication codes designed to ensure that any launch order comes only from the commander in chief.
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The ‘football’ also contains a book of options benignly called the ‘Presidential Decision Handbook.’ This top secret/code-word book, known as the ‘Black Book,’ of about 75 pages has separate contingency plans for using nuclear weapons against potential adversaries such as Russia and China. The president can select nuclear strike packages against three categories – military targets, war-supporting or economic targets and leadership targets. There are sub-options, and the menu allows a president to withhold attacks on specific targets. Two officials said that the ‘Black Book’ also includes estimates on the number of casualties for each of the main options that run into the millions, and in some cases over 100 million. Officials who have dealt with nuclear-war options said that learning the details can be horrifying and that there is a ‘Dr. Strangelove’ feel to the whole enterprise.
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President-elect George W. Bush did not receive his briefing on nuclear options until five days before inauguration in 2001. Top White House officials say that presidents in the past have had no love and little interest in getting the nuclear war plans briefing and almost recoil at the prospect of having such authority. Under practice as the commander in chief, the president can employ U.S. military forces as he sees fit. The system of authentication and options is designed for quick response to attack in an emergency. A president might have to make a decision in a matter ofminutes with little or no time to consult the secretary of defense, military leaders or the National Security Council.
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In addition, Trump will receive briefings from the Pentagon on current military operations, including the deployments in the ongoing wars in Afghanistan, against the Islamic State and other Special Operations actions abroad. After one of the briefings in 2008, Obama told a close adviser that it was perhaps one of the most sobering experiences of his life. He said, ‘I’m inheriting a world that could blow up any minute in half a dozen ways, and I will have some powerful but limited and perhaps even dubious tools to keep it from happening.’ In an Oval Office interview on July 10, 2010, Obama confirmed that he had made that sort of comment.
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‘Events are messy out there,’ he said. ‘At any given moment of the day, there are explosive, tragic, heinous, hazardous things taking place.’ He acknowledged that as president it was his responsibility to deal with all these problems. ‘People are saying, ‘You’re the most powerful person in the world. Why aren’t you doing something about it?’’ The power of the presidency has two sides. On one, it is an extraordinary concentration of constitutional and legal authority. On the other, as Obama said, it can be limited and dubious. Soon, Trump will experience both the power and its limits.
10 from The Washington Post
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WHEN ELEPHANTS FIGHT ITS THE GRASS THAT SUFFERS
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A KIKUYU PROVERB
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OBITUARY SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER 18
FIDEL CASTRO (1926-2016)
Fidel Castro stood for the liberation of humanity; not only for his own country Cuba whose struggle for freedom from US imperialism he led and won alongside Che Guevara and others; but also for the peoples of the world fighting for selfdetermination, freedom from colonialism and the right to choose political and economic systems based on equality, not exploitation. He was a towering figure of twentieth century politics. The CIA tried and failed to as invade Cuba and many times tried assassinate him. The role of Cuba in international solidarity has been remarkable; from fighting against the apartheid regime in South Africa, to working countries such as Venezuela and others. Nelson Mandela always acknowledged that apartheid was dealt a crushing blow by the intervention of Fidel troops in Angola where they took on and helped defeat the South African Defence Force. The support given by Cuba to the Vietnamese people in face of US aggression, will also never be forgotten.
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From 1959 onwards, Cuba under Fidel, inspired a generation of anti-imperialist struggles all over the third world. Cuba has the most highly educated population in Latin America and its free healthcare system is, to this day, universally admired. It was the first country to respond to the recent appeal for help with the Ebola epidemic in West Africa and regularly has 50,000 trained doctors and other healthcare workers in other parts of the world. Â As the world enters a dangerous period with the rise of the far right, Fidel remains an inspiration in our work to unite and defeat this reactionary wave. Â Hasta la victoria siempre!
Fidel Castro Obituary by Professor Robert Arnott
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Grand Hotel Abyss: The LIves of the Frankfurt School by Stuart Jeffries is published by Verso.
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10 LIES ABOUT THE XMAS CONSUMERIST CIRCLE OF HELL As we approach the Christmas shopping season finale, what can neo-Marxist analysis teach us? Stuart Jeffries from The Guardian Ladies and gentlemen, we have started our descent. From now until closing time on Christmas Eve, we are destined to fall towards an existential abyss. Some of us may have experienced an unpleasant altercation with another shopper on Black Friday over the last discounted PS4 in a warehouse on the North Circular. Others will be on our knees in Hamleys begging the assistant to check again in the storeroom to see if they have that on-trend Zoomer Chimp, a £119.99 plastic robotic ape that comes complete with voice command recognition and – please God, no – 100-plus tricks. And then, sometime around 10am on Christmas Day, our nation will be united by a warm fuzzy feeling. What’s that feeling called again? Buyer’s remorse.
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One thing I’ve learned in researching the lives of that bunch of mostly dead neo-Marxist German Jews called the Frankfurt School is that shopping isn’t so much a satisfying pastime that boosts the economy as a burning wheel of Ixion on which we are bound until death secures our release. ‘The ‘modern’ [is] the time of hell,’ wrote Walter Benjamin, the brains behind the Frankfurt School operation, in his critique of consumer capitalism, The
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Arcades Project. He wasn’t writing about Saturday at 5pm in Toys R Us, but he could have been. Here then are 10 lies about shopping to help you escape the seasonal consumerist circle of hell so appalling that even Dante didn’t dare imagine it.
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1 More choice makes us happier No, it doesn’t. The idea of shops offering us 101 kinds of muesli is that we are rational utility maximisers who have the time and temperaments to make sense of endless options. But we aren’t: that’s why Nobel economics laureate Herbert Simon came up with the idea of ‘satisficing’. Any firm that tried to make decisions that would maximise its returns would bankrupt itself in a never-ending search for the best option. Instead, they ‘satisfice’, which means they content themselves with results that are ‘good enough’. And what goes for firms goes for shoppers: endless choice makes us miserable and so to reduce that misery we make bumbling choices that are good enough. The Frankfurt School argued that we have been conditioned to accept the goods that are on offer; effectively, we are ideologically shaped to demand what is supplied. That is why Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their classic Dialectic of Enlightenment wrote, ‘freedom to choose an ideology – since ideology always reflects economic coercion – everywhere proves to be freedom to choose what is always the same’. 2 Stuff comes for free On the back of the Zipvan in my street is a logo telling passers-by that the rental car firm pays for fuel, insurance and the congestion charge,
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adding in brackets, ‘We’re nice like that’. Did these guys never hear of Milton Friedman? ‘There is,’ said the economist, ‘no such thing as a free lunch.’ Somebody always pays for it, usually me. Businesses are never ‘nice’ and don’t give stuff away without expecting to cultivate misplaced positive feelings from their customers and as a result prise more cash from their bank accounts. When Adorno and Horkheimer wrote the following words, they weren’t thinking of my experiences in BOGOF bookshops or with on-street car rental firms, but they apply to them perfectly well: ‘All the violence done to words is so vile that one can hardly bear to hear them any longer.’ 3 Stuff is built to last No, it isn’t. In 1921 the Phoebus cartel created lightbulbs that would break after 1,000 hours instead of providing the 1,500-2,000 hours previous bulbs managed. Why? To make profit from, as far as I can tell, consumer misery. The nightmare of ending-is-better-than-mending consumption imagined by Aldous Huxley in 1932’s Brave New World has been realised. Nowadays the practice is everywhere: you have to buy a new toothbrush because the batteries can no longer be replaced.
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Walter Benjamin recognised that in consumerist society we’re locked into a kind of degrading compulsion: we buy new stuff to conceal from ourselves our disappointment about the failings of the old stuff. And then the new stuff becomes old, and so we upgrade – in part to hide from ourselves our disappointment at the unbearable failure of our earlier purchase. Benjamin strove to make us see that what we’re doing is nuts. As Benjamin scholar Max Pensky puts it: ‘The promise of eternal newness
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and unlimited progress encoded in the imperatives of technological change and the cycles of consumption now appear as their opposite, as primal history, the mythic compulsion toward endless repetition.’ Which is just one reason why you shouldn’t upgrade to an iPhone 7.
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4 Some brands can be trusted to make great products Remember the Apple Newton? Of course you don’t. Steve Jobs pulled the plug on this much-mocked disaster in 1997, four years after it was launched. It was supposed to be a personal digital assistant that worked through handwriting recognition: you scribbled on the pad and – lo! – a digitised note appeared. Except it didn’t: like Mr Magoo, it was always mistaking something for something else. Garry Trudeau satirised the Newton in his Doonesbury cartoon strip: it misreads the words ‘Catching on?’ as ‘Egg Freckles’. Maybe some of you are thinking Apple’s Siri is the Egg Freckles of voice recognition software. I couldn’t possibly comment. If Benjamin were still alive, he would own an Apple Newton. He collected the worthless, the trashy, the things that seemed to promise utopia but quickly became embarrassingly naff, obsolete. In doing so he thought he could expose the lie at the heart of consumer capitalism and effect revolutionary change. But the revolution, you’ll have noticed, didn’t happen. Argos still exists; Amazon Prime still seems like a solution to, rather than cause of, our problems. We’re still in the hell he diagnosed. 5 You can never have too many shoes Such, at least, is the wisdom of Joanna Lumley’s Patsy Stone from Absolutely Fabulous. (The full quote is even more bonkers: ‘You can
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never have too many hats, gloves, and shoes.’) In fact you can. Consider Imelda Marcos. She left behind 1,220 pairs of shoes when she fled Manila with her husband, President Ferdinand Marcos, during a 1986 uprising. That’s too many. Thirty years later that collection of shoes is reportedly worthless. Marcos’s shoe fetishism is an example of what Marx called the fetishism of commodities, and which the Frankfurt School thought had become more widespread since their mentor wrote Das Kapital in the Victorian era. What is the fetishism of commodities? When a pair of shoes or an iPhone is sold, it is exchanged for another commodity (money for instance). The exchange takes no account of the fact that, for example, some of Apple’s overstressed and underpaid workers contemplated suicide in order to escape the penal servitude of manufacturing musthave commodities for you and me. That erasure of the economic circumstances in which a commodity is made, and the phantasmagoric, unreal life it takes on as a result, makes us fetishists.
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György Lukács, the great influence on the Frankfurt School’s developing neo-Marxism, put it in his classic History and Class Consciousness that a new kind of human arises in this world of rampant commodity fetishism, along with 20th-century mechanisation and specialisation of industrial work processes. That new human sees the world as a series of commodities and his or her own self as a thing to be bought and sold. That new human is so degraded that buying and selling is its essence: truly, the new human Lukács envisaged can say: I shop therefore I am. Instead of uniting to start the revolution, we buy more shoes.
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6 It’s worth paying more for quality When Vivienne Westwood launched a collection in 2010, she said we should not buy new clothes for six months. ‘My message is: choose well and buy less,’ she said – as if to suggest you should buy one Westwood dress rather than filling Primark trolleys regularly with disposable tat. But, Dame Vivienne, sustainable consumerism isn’t that simple. A couple of years after I interviewed Westwood about her fashion worldview, a friend bought me a Vivienne Westwood watch. It was beautiful and I was happy, thinking it was built to last. Then the numbers fell off, the strap broke and the clock hands collapsed within a year. Next time I need a new watch, I’ll try Poundland.
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Just as, in some religions, an object invested with supernatural powers becomes a fetish for those who worship it, so commodities under capitalism are accorded magical powers and illusory autonomy. The Vivienne Westwood brand had, for me, just such magical powers. Even when its logo appeared on a dodgy watch made under licence. Reading the Frankfurt School disabused me of this fetish. When it comes to shopping, I don’t trust anyone anymore, not even one-time punk couturiers. 7 There are things that we ‘must have’ Hollister has a range of must-have T-shirts. Business Insider can direct you to a list of 20 must-have tech accessories for under £20 (including a multi-port USB wall charger, armband phone case and a carphone mount). And then there’s musthave.co.uk, whose beauty products include a 15ml pot of Truefitt & Hill Moustache Wax for £17.50. What do all these must-haves have in common? You don’t need them.
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Why haven’t we revolted against consumer capitalism and its system of lies masquerading as injunctions? Because, for the Frankfurt School, we’ve become comfortably corrupted. Such at least was the view of Herbert Marcuse in his 1964 classic One-Dimensional Man, where he despaired of the working classes to rise up and cast off their guided chains: ‘If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television programme and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.’ As Malcolm X put it in a different context: ‘I say you’ve been misled, you’ve been had, you’ve been took.’
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8 There are things that are ‘investment pieces’ Most cars lose between 50% and 60% of their value in the first three years of ownership. The great French novelist Marcel Proust, who was a profound influence on the thoughts of Walter Benjamin, saw through that kind of nonsense at the age of 18: ‘Desire makes all things flourish,’ he wrote, ‘possession withers them.’ True, he was mostly focused on the objects of sexual desire, but his words apply equally to a used BMW X5. 9 Flatpack furniture makes a happy home Earlier this year my wife and I assembled a Pax wardrobe. Only because we have agreed to lock the memory of that weekend in our marital psychic vault does our relationship survive. Indeed, there’s a very useful pie chart
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showing how time is spent immediately after shoppers return from Ikea: just under 25% involves making ‘that’s what she said’ jokes, more than 40% involves swearing, and a substantial proportion includes taking whatever you were assembling apart because you did it wrong.
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But here’s the twist, diagnosed by the Frankfurt School 70 years ago. We all know that when we buy Ikea we’re buying flat-packed misery, but we carry on shopping regardless. Our knowing cynicism about shopping doesn’t stop us buying, since we’re too ideologically entrenched. As Adorno and Horkheimer put it: ‘The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.’ 10 Happiness rises in line with material possessions On the contrary. ‘Strong materialist values are associated with a pervasive undermining of people’s wellbeing, from low life satisfaction and happiness to depression and anxiety, to physical problems such as anxiety, and to personality disorders, narcissism, and antisocial behaviour,’ wrote psychologist Tim Kasser in The High Price of Materialism. For the Frankfurt School, the pursuit of happiness through shopping and material acquisition is obscene. Benjamin wrote: ‘There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.’ One application of this dictum is that the pursuit of happiness through buying consumer goods involves erasing the human misery and exploitation that made the degrading and, ultimately, self-defeating pursuit possible. Merry xmas!
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Artwork: Alan Rutherford
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BORN A CRIME Trevor Noah charts his rise from South Africa’s townships The Daily Show host’s new book reveals how he bridged the race gap to become one of the country’s brightest exports Marianne Thamm from the Daily Maverick Trevor Noah is regarded as one of South Africa’s biggest exports: the boy from the townships who made it big in the US and ended up hosting The Daily Show, one of the most influential satirical news programmes on American television.
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But the odds always seemed stacked against Noah, as they are for South Africa’s black citizens. Many are trapped by the legacies of colonialism, apartheid and post-apartheid profligacy and face poverty, hunger, violence, bullying, racism and limited opportunities. But there was an extraordinary buffer between this brutal world and Noah, as his autobiography, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood, makes clear. ‘For my mother. My first fan. Thank you for making me a man,’ Noah writes in the book’s dedication. For indeed without his mother, Patricia Nombuyiselo Noah, and the rebellious spirit that enabled her to face
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down a hostile and inhospitable world, Noah would not have ended up where he is. There were so many perks to being ‘white’ in a black family, I can’t lie. I was having a great time Trevor Noah
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Born a Crime is an engaging, fast-paced and vivid read, traversing Noah’s early childhood, confined by the absurdities of apartheid, where he could not walk openly with either of his parents, where he was often closeted inside his grandmother’s two-roomed home, where he was mistaken for white, through to his troubled years at school, his brief incarceration and to his budding success as a hustler selling pirated CDs and DJing at parties. Noah was ‘born a crime’ because his Xhosa mother had conceived a child with a white Swiss-German, which was illegal at the time. And while Noah was born in 1984, in the turbulent dying days of apartheid (he was only six when Nelson Mandela was freed from prison in 1990), the world into which he was delivered was riven with the deep scars of history. ‘The fact that I grew up in a world run by women was no accident,’ Noah writes. ‘Apartheid kept me away from my father because he was white, but for almost all the kids I knew in my grandmother’s neighbourhood in Soweto, apartheid had taken away their fathers as well, just for different reasons.
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‘Their fathers were off working in a mine somewhere, able to come home only during the holidays. Their fathers had been sent to prison. Their fathers were in exile, fighting for the cause. Women held the community together.’ Noah writes of his profiling as white in a black world with characteristic insight and humour. ‘There were so many perks to being ‘white’ in a black family, I can’t lie. I was having a great time,’ he writes. Only the young Noah did not think this special treatment was because he was light-skinned, but because he was special. ‘It wasn’t ‘Trevor doesn’t get beaten because Trevor is white’. It was ‘Trevor doesn’t get beaten because Trevor is Trevor’,’ he writes. This was, he says, because he had no other points of reference. ‘There were no other mixed kids around so I could say ‘Oh, this happens to us’.’
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In the end Noah chose to be black, a state of mind that had so much more to do with his lived experience than someone else’s notion of who he was, and is. ‘I soon learned that the quickest way to bridge the race gap was through language. Soweto was a melting pot: families from different cultural groups, and thus different homelands. Most kids in the township spoke only their home language, but I learned several languages because I grew up in a house where there was no option but to learn them.’ Noah’s story provides an intimate ringside seat, for those who might not have one, to the fractured arena where a divided South Africa – white,
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black, coloured, Indian, Zulu, Xhosa, Pedi, Tsonga and so on – intersects. There is a deeply touching moment in the book when Noah describes how his violent stepfather (who later shoots his mother) kicks his beloved dog, Fufi. ‘The strange thing was that when Fufi got kicked she never whelped or cried. When the vet diagnosed her as deaf, he also found out she had some condition where she didn’t have a fully developed sense of touch. She didn’t feel pain.’ Noah, too, appears not to have felt the pain or, at least, to have turned it into humour.
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The book is essential reading not only because it is a personal story of survival, leavened with insight and wit, but because it does more to expose apartheid – its legacy, its pettiness, its small-minded stupidity and its damage – than any other recent history book or academic text. That Noah has emerged miraculously unscathed, filled with determination, grit, wisdom, a searing intelligence (cultivated through the books he read as a loner) and an enduring mischievous glint, is inspiring. These are all qualities that the millions who know him as a standup comedian in South Africa have come to love. A version of this article first appeared on the Daily Maverick.
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From Thomas Clark aka ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE I began writing this blog in 2010 in order to express my opinions about current political, social and economic issues. I chose the name Another Angry Voice on the spur of the moment because I thought it sounded good at the time and I had to call it something. I don’t believe it is a particularly acurate descriptor, given that I strive to to base my arguments on facts and analysis, and to include reliable sources, rather than simply writing emotionally fueled rants. The objective of this Political Myth Busting series is to demolish some of the facile and often completely counter-factual myths that get used over and again.
anotherangryvoice.blogspot.com
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THE LUCAS PLAN The Lucas Plan was a pioneering effort by workers at the arms company Lucas Aerospace to retain jobs by proposing alternative, socially-useful applications of the company’s technology and their own skills. It remains one of the most radical and forward thinking attempts ever made by workers to take the steering wheel and directly drive the direction of change. The ideas being proposed filtered out to other factories and the plan was looked at by some workers at Smiths Industries, Bishops Cleeve.
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Today, in 2016 – 40 years after the Lucas Plan – we’re facing a convergence of crises: militarism and nuclear weapons, climate chaos, and the destruction of jobs by automation. These crises mean we have to start thinking about technology as political, as the Lucas Aerospace workers did. You can be part of this. It’s in our hands: we have to show that alternatives are possible. Together we can start creating the Lucas Plans of the future. It could be the best way to make sure we still have a future.
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JOANA FOSTER ‘She made African women realise they can do anything’ Joana Silochina Foster, the formidable Ghanaian-British activist and lawyer who died last month, co-founded Africa’s first feminist philanthropic institution. She oversaw the expansion of a women’s law network in 26 African countries through her work with Women in Law and Development in Africa. Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah
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Before the fourth world conference on women, held in Beijing in 1995, Joana Silochina Foster, a Ghanaian-British activist and lawyer, attended a workshop organised by the Global Fund for Women. She happened to be seated next to Dr Hilda Tadria, a Ugandan scholar and activist whom she had not met before. Turning to Tadria, Foster said: ‘What we really need are our own resources.’ And so the idea of a fund for African women was born. At the time, it was a groundbreaking notion: no such institution existed on the African continent, where funding for women’s rights was primarily channelled through international NGOs based in the global north.
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The creation of a fund to support the work of an African women’s movement began, but was put on hold when Foster took up the role of regional coordinator at Women in Law and Development in Africa, in which she oversaw the organisation’s gradual expansion into a women’s law network covering 26 African countries.
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Despite her engagements, Foster did not give up on her dream of a fund led by African women that would support the work of African women’s rights organisations. In 1996, a conversation with Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi – a Nigerian feminist who, at the time, headed Akina Mama wa Afrika, a pan-African women’s rights organisation based in the UK – led to a partnership that culminated with the creation of the African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF) in 2000. Co-founded by Foster, Tadria, and Adeleye-Fayemi, the institution has since provided funding of more than $28m (£22m) to a total of 1,200 women’s rights organisations in 42 African countries. Speaking on AWDF’s 10th anniversary, Foster said: ‘The concept of a fund for African women was an innovative idea. The launch of AWDF in 2000 was the result of a compelling vision, strategic planning and years of hard work. AWDF is an excellent example of solidarity amongst African women.’ Foster died on 5 November 2016, after a two-year battle with cancer. She was 70. Her lifelong journey as an activist started at 17 when she became a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the UK. She studied law, and practised in both the UK and Ghana, focusing on poverty, race equality and women’s rights. From the early 1990s Foster devoted her working life fully to the non-governmental sector, becoming
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the country director of Cuso, Ghana, a Canadian non-profit organisation committed to social justice around the world. Foster was an elegant, graceful woman, with an aesthetic and style that spoke to her dual Ghanaian and Indian heritage. She often dressed in white or cream-coloured cotton tunics, with a colourful shawl draped around her slender frame. She always made time to give everyone a hug, and had a particular interest in connecting with – and inspiring – younger feminists. ‘Joana put all her energy into everything she did,’ said Dorcas CokerAppiah, executive director of the Gender Studies and Human Rights Documentation Centre based in Accra, which Foster co-founded. ‘[She was] willing to stand back and let others take the limelight. As a cofounder of the gender centre, she was always ready to support our work, pointing us in the right direction.’
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Akua Kuenyehia, a Ghanaian lawyer and former international criminal court judge, said: ‘Joana, together with others, began the process of getting African women to realise that they can do whatever they set their minds to because they are capable.’ The African women’s movement has lost a formidable activist. Joana Foster is one of 60 feminists commemorated in Awid’s 2016 online tribute to women’s human rights defenders who have died
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IT’S A FUCKING EVIL CRIME! AND YET MORE THAN A QUARTER OF EUROPEANS BELIEVE RAPE IS SOMETIMES JUSTIFIED 27 per cent of people living in Europe believe rape is acceptable under some circumstances, most commonly citing drug or alcohol intake, ‘revealing’ clothes or going home alone with an attacker Edited from Siobhan Fenton
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Research suggests that a quarter of people living in Europe believe that a crime against humanity, rape, is justified in some circumstances. Shocking! The figures have been published in a report commissioned by the European Union into gender-based violence. Researchers asked 30,000 citizens of different EU countries whether they thought forcing someone to have sex against their will was acceptable under a number of circumstances, such as if a person is wearing ‘revealing’ clothes or if they are incapacitated with alcohol consumption. As shown in the chart above, created for the Independent by Statista, 27 per cent of respondents across the EU thought forced sexual intercourse
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was acceptable in at least one set of circumstances. 12 per cent said it was acceptable if the victim had taken drink or drugs, 11 per cent said it was acceptable if the victim voluntarily went home with someone, 10 per cent said it was acceptable if they didn’t clearly say no or physically fight back. The figures vary by country, with 60 per cent of people living in Romania telling researchers that they felt it was acceptable in at least one set of circumstances.
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Among UK respondents, 22 per cent of people think the criminal offence is acceptable in some circumstances, with 12 per cent citing a victim’s drink or drug intake as a reason. It is estimated that around 1 in 5 women are raped at some point in their lives, while around one in 71 men will be raped. YES MEANS YES, NO MEANS NO FUCKERS!
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DIRTY LAUNDRY WASHING LINE ART HIGHLIGHTS SOUTH AFRICA’S RAPE EPIDEMIC INSTALLATION FEATURES USED KNICKERS SAID TO ILLUSTRATE NUMBER OF ATTACKS THAT TAKE PLACE AGAINST WOMEN EACH DAY Peter Lykke Lind
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Thousands of pairs of used knickers have been hung above the streets of Johannesburg as part of an installation to raise awareness about the country’s record rates of rape. Devised by two sexual assault survivors, the installation consists of washing lines 1,200 metres long displaying 3,600 pairs of pants – matching the number of rapes estimated to occur on a daily basis, according to the artists. Jenny Nijenhuis and Nondumiso Msimanga put out a public call for donations of underwear under the hashtag #SasDirtyLaundry, and set up a Facebook page, Pantiesplea. They arranged collection points across the city.
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Carmen Ives, a volunteer who helped with the project, said each pair donated ‘speaks loudly’ of severity of the situation in South Africa. ‘One pair of panties is one pair too many. It made me think that today, some girl is being raped somewhere,’ she said. On display until Sunday, the installation has received a largely positive response from the public. On Twitter, one user wrote that the project ‘feels like a movement’. Another said the project connected ‘very deeply with experience of sexual assault, emotional abuse and trauma’. However, the exhibition has faced questions over the rape statistics it uses. While South Africa undisputedly has the highest rates of rape in the world, estimates on the number of assaults each day vary greatly. The 3,600-a-day estimate from the medical research council is far larger than the UN estimate of 132.
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Responding to criticism Nijenhuis said that the figure was ‘symbolic’, adding that just a fraction of attacks are reported to the police. Lisa Vetten, a research associate at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, said: ‘The problem of under-reporting [assault] means that we cannot know whether the drop [in recent rape statistics] is due to fewer rapes occurring, or fewer victims reporting. ‘The most conservative research estimate suggests that only one in seven victims report being raped, but other studies suggest the figures may be higher.’
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Africa Check, an organisation promoting accuracy in public debate and reporting, said the 3,600 figure remained unproven. ‘When people use flawed statistics, and have a voice as is the case here, they neglect the complexity of issues, and make it seem like there are valid statistics, which is not the case,’ said Anim van Wyk, editor-in-chief of Africa Check. ‘We need better statistics to do something about the root of the problem … to offer solutions.’
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Anne Githuku-Shongwe, a representative for UN Women, said southern Africa was ‘the epicentre of the pandemic of violence against women and girls’, and the cost of violence ‘economically, physically and emotionally’ must be recognised. She advocated caution when using numbers. ‘[The exhibition] is great to spotlight the issue, but we must be careful not to sensationalise,’ she said.
Sheep in the Road comment: Picking up on ‘numbers’ here is a deliberate misdirection, just one rape is one too many! One has to wonder at the motives of anyone who would want to diffuse the impact of such a powerful protest/exhibition by quibbling over numbers?
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Activists Nondumiso Msimanga and Jenny Nijenhuis. Photograph: Zeno Paterson
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Crickey ... a virtual keyboard, use it at your own peril SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER 14
deep breath comrades ... capitalism, war, brexit and a macho trump sit high on our compost heap stinking the place out ... they need to be turned over!
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Artwork: Alan Rutherford
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Writing worth reading Photos worth seeing
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http://www.coldtype.net
SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER 18
Why trump Won | r.w. johnson the rocky road to independence | thomas harrington spiralling into permanent War | Conn m. hallinan
ColdT ype W r i t i n g Wo r t h r e a d i n g | p h oto s Wo r t h s e e i n g
issue 129
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Artwork: still unknown
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WAFFLE LETTERS –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Dear Editor ... Same old same old! Absolutely damaged by the swiftly decaying state of the world ... Words fail me, what is the use of words when the person you are saying them to is unable to grasp your, and their, meaning? [again, is this the only letter we have? ... (‘yes’, ed.)] Worryingly, we have left even that irrational road, the one where stupidity reigns, and now follow a path where basic facts and knowledge acquired over time are being replaced by entrenched banal myths, hearsay and superstition. The shit-faced fudge of complacency and the mad spouters will now be defended to the death by the threat of nuclear war. Reason cannot be relied on in the present or near future (if ever?) and its utterly terrifying. Just who are the terrorists? For evidence of this I direct your attention to a President Donald Trump and his campaign to trump-trump-trumpety-trump all over the world. And, as Britain’s government is the happy lapdog of US mischief in the world ... and a blindly loyal follower of US foreign policy, what will our May government do now as Trump begins his Term of Ignorance?
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Whilst I remain optimistic about the future I am absolute in my scepticism about whether the business-arses and their sycophantic political stooges, Blairites and Tories – or the US circus and their trumping flunkies – will come up with anything remotely of benefit to anyone other than the rampantly corrupt ruling class wankers intent on fucking us all. XMAS 2016
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1 9 8 6 2 0 1 6 SHEEP IN THE ROAD (as magazine) #3 October 2015
SHEEP IN THE ROAD Vol. 2 Alan Rutherford 2015
SHEEP IN THE ROAD Vol. 1 Alan Rutherford 2014
KAPUTALA The Diary of Arthur Beagle & The East Africa Campaign, 1916-1918 Alan Rutherford Updated 2nd edn: 2014
IRISH GRAFFITI some murals in the North, 1986 Alan Rutherford 2014
NICETO DE LARRINAGA a voyage, 1966 Alan Rutherford 2014
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SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER 18
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IN THE ROAD Sheep in the Road as a magazine has writing, photography, cartoons and odd assemblages of ideas, rants and reviews ... eminating from a socialist and thoughtful core. Contributors have included: Brian Rutherford, Rudi Thoemmes, Joe Jenkins, Robert Arnott, Cam Rutherford, Steve Ashley, Lizzie Boyle, Chris Dillow, Chris Hoare, Joanna Rutherford, West Midland Hunt Saboteurs, Chris Bessant, Craig Atkinson, Martin Taylor, Martin Mitchell ... A pleasure to produce ... thank you
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