TORA, Tora, Tora, I found myself shouting as the flying Japanese backline headed for the corner in the final seconds of that historic win over the Springboks. It was not because I am against the green-and-gold — I back them to make the final — but, for a moment, I was transported back to my childhood in the 1960s.
Back then, the Springboks were a Second World War unit that had fought in the North African desert, and the Japanese were, well, the Japs, as the Germans were the Jerrys. The Japs wore funny squared-off baseball hats, as if they had retrieved them from a lunchbox at the bottom of a tank.
We re-enacted war scenes from pocket cartoon books sold at the café, depicting blonde captains dashing about in Jeeps. We pushed our teeth over our lower lips, pulled our temples back and said "hai", a lot. In an era when parents were not much bothered by stereotypes, we were encouraged to express our innate fighting natures, little soldiers in the making to later fight apartheid’s wars.

THE world has undergone a sea change since, and one of the greatest dividends is a move away from postwar militarism. That the differences among European nations — like those between Germany and Greece over government debt — could be settled on a battlefield is close to completely unthinkable now.
A key contributor to the new peacenik ethos is the rise of international sport. Instead of military battles, men now turn to enormous stadiums, where often more than 100,000 spectators get the chance to sublimate their aggression in Colosseum-like arenas replete with the symbols and markings warriors have displayed since the dawn of man.
Among the so-called contact sports, rugby stands out as the one which most resembles the "close combat" for which every soldier gets trained — even today when they call the shots by remote control drones.
Far from being the gentlemanly sport that according to legend arose from one schoolboy’s impatience with the tardiness of soccer — the primordial rugby player William Webb Ellis supposedly picked up the ball and ran with it to the goal posts instead of kicking it — its real roots go back centuries to man’s inhumanity to man.
Until quite recently, the 19th-century designers of the rugby union code had succeeded in convincing the sporting world that Ellis was the first rugby player. Although he did exist, he was used as propaganda in England's class war.
Large numbers of people began paying to watch sportsmen during the "Birth of the Modern", the years after the Napoleonic wars in the 1820s and 1830s. Chaotic versions of what was called ‘‘mob football’’, in which dozens of boys wrestled over the ball, were played at elite schools for the aristocracy. In attempts to bring order, pupils had by 1845 agreed to ban carrying the ball.
But when the kicking of shins was banned too, the upper classes baulked, and returned to mob football, especially at Rugby School, where sport was regarded as an essential ingredient in forming the patriotic types ever ready to sacrifice life and limb for the empire.

EACH school had its own rules — during interschool matches, the first half would be played according to the opponents' rules, and the second those of the hosts. So some senior pupils came together to draw up a unified code, seeking to preserve the basic wrestle-and-run ethos of mob football. But to remove the reference to the lower classes, they renamed mob football ‘‘rugby’’ after the school they were gathering in.
Meanwhile, the rebel entrepreneurs continued with the simplified version, making money by charging spectators nominal fees to watch teams play on land they owned. In order to make it ever more watchable, the game was progressively simplified until the Football Association was formed in 1863, giving us the word soccer.
This was easy to copy in the city streets of urbanising countries and, before long, soccer had become the relish of the British working classes.
Other working class off-shoots gave us rugby league and American gridiron, which both sought to limit the mindless brawls of mob football by declaring the ball dead as soon as it touched ground. Such simple changes have made these three dissident codes much more popular.
Rugby union, to justify its existence as a separate code — and as the aristocratic form of football — stuck to the unsightly schoolground brawls. By the 1890s, the aritcocrats realised they were losing the battle against the working classes.
So in 1895, after rugby league had followed soccer and formally inducted itself into a separate code, Webb Ellis was drafted to serve as the messenger of rugby as a game for the more advanced. A plaque was solemnly unveiled to commemorate his purported rebellion against soccer, setting sail one of sport’s most enduring legends.
Comparing sports for their levels of barbarism is neither here nor there — players are killed participating in supposedly genteel sports like cricket — but the mob football played at Rugby and other schools dates back to the Middle Ages in Europe, especially France. It is apt that Webb Ellis was buried in the campagne, not in England.
The first record of a rugby-like sport comes from Roman times. It surfaces again in the late middle ages, as a violent game played between villages in rural Normandy, land of the war-like Viking settlers.
Called la soule, after a leather cushion usually taken from a cathedral or church, it involved up to seven villages in one game and, on one recorded occasion, 800 players in a game that lasted several days. The aim was to get the soule to a specified spot, the door of a cathedral, or a pole in the middle of a stream between villages.
There were no rules. Church leaders oversaw the games, but this did not entail much more than warning shopkeepers to board up their shops for the duration. There were pitched battles between village factions, family feuds were played out and knives were frequently pulled.
The soule came to be ensheathed in tin to protect it from being cut up. Things got so bad that King Charles V tried to ban it in 1365, and in 1440, the bishop of Tréguier wanted to excommunicate players.
The game has survived to this day, and is played in a heavily policed form in French villages such as Vendome near Le Mans.
It spread across the channel, as mob football, and in the early 19th century it became entrenched at elite schools, no doubt as part of the sadistic prefect culture.
Every year, it is resurrected at Ashbourne as Royal Shrovetide Football, also with armed police contingents on standby.

WHEN the schoolmasters decided in 1845 that football had to be brought back to its roots, the rules they drew up to regulate the age-old brawling, and stop hour-long pile-ups, proliferated. After 180 years of trying, the game’s designers are still struggling to work out ones that are proper and fair. The brawls are nowadays called scrums, most probably from the French ‘‘escarmouche’’ for a group protective action, which gave English the word skirmish.
Every year, new permutations are tried and during every game, coach and player alike throw up their arms in perplexity over an incomprehensible interpretation.
So next time the scrum collapses after minutes of direction by an exasperated referee, be patient, as this is a far better expression and sublimation of the war-like impulses of males than, say, trench warfare near the Somme. When Eben Etzebeth next swats a mouthguard from an opponent's teeth, give the guy a break, at least he is not carrying a knife in his socks and that is not a gun in his shorts.

http://www.bdlive.co.za/opinion/2015/04/02/transformation-will-only-happen-if-it-is-embedded-in-a-local-language

GOING against the trends, an isiXhosa newspaper in the Eastern Cape has been launched, led by Unathi Kondile. Will this turn out to be a watershed moment, not only for the media industry and its twilight print segment, but for the country itself?

Other titles do exist in local languages, but these are usually just shells run by a core staff in which news produced by others is poured in in translated form. Ilisolezwe aims to have a proper staff producing news in isiXhosa from the start.

Independent Newspapers under its new management has acquired a reputation for running titles into the ground, so it remains to be seen whether the project will succeed. The least we can hope for is that its arrival will put the spotlight on an issue that is hugely underplayed, but which several thinkers, academics and administrators believe is a key factor in SA’s development: language.

As the "Africa rising" narrative rolls on, and the continent’s middle class grows, calls for the vernacular are increasing. Recently Tanzania announced plans to have all education eventually presented in Swahili.

Anton Harber wrote on this website about the change in his students’ preference for their mother tongue, from just about zero two years ago to a fair majority this year. Earlier this year reports highlighted the far better performance of grade 6 pupils in maths, who responded to instructions in their home languages.

Among educationalists and cultural experts there is little doubt that mother-tongue education is essential for a child’s full development. Paradoxically, this is most true for maths and science. Most pupils displaying talent in these disciplines are a little less proficient in languages and therefore need instruction in the language they understand the best, the one they grew up with. The only real argument in this broad consensus is at which level teaching should change to the lingua franca of science, English. Must it be at primary school or only at postgraduate level, which is the case in most European countries?

In SA, however, there seems to be an enormous bias against local languages. One factor certainly is the conflation of ethnicity with language, another disaster of the homeland system that we are unable to shake off. But it is also negative fallout from globalisation, which has induced in many members of the middle classes a disdain for the vernacular.

It is important for the issue to be seen in the context of transformation, and here the events at the University of Cape Town (UCT) can provide a useful lens.

Many commentators were quick to state that calls for the removal of Cecil John Rhodes’s statue is really about the slow pace of transformation at the university. Some have made a convincing case that discrimination on racial lines is still being practiced. Looking in from the outside, academia appears like a labyrinth of firewalling and gatekeeping in which merit does not always determine the pecking order. It does seem, however, that such merit is insisted on when the applicants are black.

But what is transformation about? If it has to do with rooting out discrimination or adapting the curriculum, then it should be easy to bring about. Such transformation is merely an affirmative action, that awkward euphemism for token change. By pursuing such an agenda exclusively, you are merely reinforcing a very Eurocentric discourse, suffused in the liberalism activists so despise.

Transformation has to be about more than that. It must have to do with eradicating the economic ills left by white colonial domination, with transforming a deadly system that relegated poor black people to lives of misery into one in which the opportunities are equal for all. Which is why the anti-Rhodes movement has become so important. It allows us to move beyond a debate that is stuck in anti-apartheid discourse, in angry demands for blackwashing institutions with tokens and quotas.

The problem I have with the commentary is a failure to understand the "enemy". UCT is not a standalone, provincial backwater devoted to Seffrican culture. However conservative you may find it to be in your limited exposure to it in your field of specialisation, it is a globalised entity, fully integrated into a vast network of institutions. Technology has changed it into more of a node for tertiary learning than a site-specific edifice.

This is by virtue of English, its medium of instruction, which is a language without parallel in its ability to absorb and transmit knowledge from other cultures and languages. English has an array of usages and an archive so enormous that no single person has been able to have a full grip on it for several generations.

You cannot transform it, it transforms you. When commentators in the Rhodes debate speak of transformation, they can only mean transformation of the humanities, and some minor sections of law, because in other faculties not much more can be done than the cosmetics of blackening the staff complement. The basis of their knowledge will stay Eurocentric for a long time to come. This is especially so as we negotiate the extended information technology revolution. Scholars such as Nicholas Ostler, in his Empires of the Word, have shown how lingua francas such as Greek, Latin and English rode on technological innovation and vice versa.

Even if the humanities were to become founded on postcolonial studies, to manufacture a scenario, the already globalised nature of postcolonial studies will ensure they remain Anglocentric. Already most work in the field is being done at American universities and while the offerings from African universities will certainly improve, they will remain overwhelmed by the other "Englishes" for some time to come, perhaps forever. Postcolonial studies will never really gain traction unless they are extended to include colonial studies in general, incorporating the many examples of colonialism in other worlds than just the Third World.

This will be neither here nor there for the many black Africans whose command of English is as good as any, but gaining such command is only possible if your parents have had the financial means and access to Eurocentric schools. In the developing world English has become the dividing line between the haves and the have-nots. And vociferous campaigns for the removal of discrimination and adaptation of curricula could merely end up in promoting the process of Eurocentric absorption.

The way out lies in promoting the vernacular. Insisting on lectures being given in local languages might go some way and will help students master their course material, but will not really address the concerns above unless the whole university becomes embedded in a particular vernacular. In UCT’s case this is very unlikely, not only because it serves a well-established English-speaking community in the Western Cape, but because its attraction to its customers is being a gateway to the global economy.

But we could nominate other universities to transform themselves into carriers of the vernacular. Rhodes University springs to mind. Its incongruity, always fondly remarked on by visitors can be ameliorated by turning it into a bilingual university where all lectures, from maths to the arts, have to be in isiXhosa.

Achille Mbembe, one of the foremost postcolonial thinkers in SA, points to already well-established models, one of which is just down the road from UCT. At Stellenbosch University one has a living example of real transformation, which turned a creole, "bastard" language from the 19th century into a vehicle for the rapid development of a society of poor white Afrikaans speakers.

Sure, colonial and apartheid policies played their part, but SA would have had even fewer engineers, scientists and artists had it not been for the Afrikaans language movement. There is no reason why this cannot happen in any of the other indigenous languages.

Setting up a newspaper in a local language may be a good start. Indeed, a key part of the Afrikaner transformation was the establishment of Nasionale Pers, which in its current incarnation of Naspers has become a global economic player.

There is a cycle of scandal. In the media it manifests in a first stage of wild rumours being published while abusing all the tricks of the trade. This is accompanied by jokes on comedy stages, and public apologies for them. Then follows the reactionary stage, when disgust is expressed with the first stage. Next comes the court stage, when suspects appear in a cloud of denial and spin, and details are picked over in a pretence of objectivity. Last is the reconciliation stage, when family and society express their satisfaction or not with the official outcome.

In the Oscar Pistorius story, there has been a particularly emphatic response to the display of the victim’s body on the front pages of the gutter press. One of the best, with whom it is easy to identify for every liberationist, which includes most journalists, is Marina Hyde’s in the Guardian, under  the heading, “Reeva Steenkamp's corpse was in the morgue, her body was on the Sun's front page.” She has set off a storm of protest and many expressions of shame in the social media worldwide.

I too, identified with this disgust, but in a long career in journalism, and with many friends whose skills I respect working in the gutter media, I have also learnt to think beyond my own knee-jerk reponses – ironically, of course, since the gutter media thrives on the jerking of members of the body.

Or do they? It’s easy to accuse the Sun of exploiting Steenkamp’s body, and there is indeed the sickening realisation that it re-enacts in a crude way several aspects of the killing, and deliberately so, despite the knowledge that hypothetically there are perverts who may get off on it. But I also know that much thought and skill went into that layout, much more, anyway, than in the financial press.  And comparing it with The Guardian’s own layout, I was reminded of the Allan Boesak infidelity scandal all those years ago. That was when literally dozens of journalists, including myself, resisted attempts by the security police to foist videos of his trysts  on us – until The Star broke the story and justified it on the grounds that it wanted to expose the state’s dirty tricks.

One needs look no further than The Guardian’s very clever headline. Without having to publish the Sun’s front page, it still expolits it, since many of its readers would have seen it on newsstands, in the streets and on the underground. But whereas The Sun dramatises the killing, the Guardian goes one step further: It invites us to imagine Reeva’s corpse, lying in the morgue. And since the most vivid images we have of her are those in a near naked state, the Guardian can quite coherently be accused of promoting necrophilia – if one applied Hyde’s criteria for unacceptable journalism.

To put it another way, since I shall never condemn The Guardian, one of the best newspapers in the world, I am forced also not to condemn the gutter press, to be consistent. The big difference between the gutter press and the serious media, after all, is merely that the former beats the latter to the rumour. Indeed, if I go back on my own receptory steps, it is clear that certain subtleties, not always visible to the intellectual eye, are being ignored by a knee-jerk rejection of The Sun’s page.

The first is the assumption that readers will perve over the image. Maybe it is my advancing age, but it is long since I have found images of bikini-clad women sexy. Sure, there is always that jolt when it is a strikingly beautiful woman, but it is almost always followed by a sense of absurdity. It is highly uinlikely that one would ever find Steenkamp in such a pose, even if you dated her, unless it is some kind of half-hearted send-up of herself. Which is always undermined by that slightly goofy expression that models try to put on to suggest innocence or some such suspected state.

The assumption of perving gets even more questionable in the light of the contemporary ubiquity of internet porn. Bikini-clad girls come across as rather coy compared to the high definition displays of woman’s and man’s most intimate parts, readily available on cellphones and quite respectable in certain cultures.

In short, the bikini-clad girl is most often little more than a generic image of millions of similar bodies of which millions of copies have been made. The critic Walter Benjamin has written of mechanical reproduction that strips the subject of its aura, and Steenkamp’s photo is an excellent example. In fact, few would have noticed any individual aura had it not been for her killing. And the Guardian is just as instrumental as The Sun in enveloping her image with a new aura, whether as fodder for sexual perverts or as fodder for feminist moralists.

One should also note that it’s not really her body in the image. Behind that image lies another generic, of that kind of photogenic body that fits the specifications needed for the stock image of the sexy blonde. Media and advertising workers will know that the most beautiful models on the glossy page are not always the most beautiful in real life. And the most beautiful women do not always shine on the glossy page.

In fact, the supermodel and all the discipline and physiological austerity that goes into producing such stock bodies, are the stuff of modern myth. This probably allows those models who do feel uncomfortable with the exploitative aspects of their job, to distance themselves from it: “What you see, that’s not the real me.” Indeed, one of the early lessons of life for any man is that one should not fall for women just because they are beautiful.

I am not trying to be antifeminist here, and I still do not read the gutter press. Since women still have a raw deal even in the most progressive countries, I would say, go girl, if Marina Hyde’s excellent rhetoric promotes women’s liberation. But one has to ask: which would be the most effective in such a cause, the Sun’s exploitation of a lust for killing women, or the Guardian’s necrophilia?

Necrophilia is very rare; one has to break into a morgue to commit it. The lust for killing women would be much more common, if one accepts for the sake of the argument that the huge jump in the Sun’s circulation figures does attest to its prevalence. (Ignoring for the moment that the Sun’s numbers actually show that the gutter press is consumed by a small fraction of the total UK population.) Does its dramatisation in a very public space then not confront certain members of society with such lusts?

Is there a point where the lust of the reader who buys the paper because of the bikini on the front page, gets converted into feelings of shame and disgust, at which point he/she throws it into the gutter? Is there not a case to be made for the gutter press performing the function of producing a necessary disgust over the contents of the gutter, of which the removal has been the physical mark of human civilsation since ancient times?

In that first stage of scandal the apprently wild and uncontrollable mass media, which nowadays are being led by the even wilder and more chaotic internet, tend to soak up all rumour like a sponge cleaning up the scene of a crime. In its hyper-exposure of any remotely relevant tidbit, it neutralises such information into hundreds of factoids, denuding them of all feeling and morality. All players and props on the stage of the scandal become equal to each other, while we wait for the truth to emerge in court.

There is something quite democratic about this process of showing up, all over again, the banality of evil, and how we can all end up as suspects in its commission.