FOOTBALL, ROBBEN ISLAND & THE RELATIVISM OF POLITICAL CRUELTY

From JamyangNorbu.com Well, the World Cup’s over and the teams and visitors have all gone home, but the afterglow of achievement hasn’t entirely faded for South Africans. The people of this struggling “rainbow nation”, especially its new president Jacob Zuma, can be deservedly proud of having successfully hosted this tremendous international sporting event. Over forty years ago Zuma was a player himself, in fact the captain of the Rangers club, one of the teams that made up the Makana Football Association, organized by the prisoners of South Africa’s notorious Robben Island state prison.

An article in the New York Times mentioned that in Robben Island “…soccer brought relief from the exhausting life of breaking rocks in a quarry. It conferred dignity on prisoners subjected to beatings and humiliating body searches.” An inmate, Lizo Sitoto who was imprisoned on Robben island from 1963 until 1978, claimed that “football saved many of us. When you were outside playing, you felt free, as if you were at home.”

Nelson Mandela was kept in an isolation unit and not allowed to play football, but it appears that he somehow managed to keep himself physically fit. On Thursday February 11, 1990, when he was released from Robben island and the whole world celebrated his freedom, some observers noticed how spry and energetic he looked in spite of his 27 years behind bars.  His physical and mental fitness, was of course, in great part, the product of his own discipline, political focus and iron will.

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FUNERAL GAMES*

Few pleasures can beat the funeral of someone you loathe. It is not, I admit, a very Buddhist sentiment, but I think karma (the hardcore, not the new age version) will, this once, overlook my rancor, when I add that the someone in question is the late...

RANGZEN ALLIANCE, SWITZERLAND

I was in Switzerland at the beginning of this month and gave a slideshow and talk at Zurich on Saturday the 5th, “Was Tibet an Independent and Sovereign State?”, based on my essay Independent Tibet – The Facts, but with a more polemical title. The talk was well attended by Tibetans. In fact the auditorium [...]

TREMORS OF HISTORY: GYALRONG 2008 & 1775

You would think that the first requirement in reporting a natural disaster would be getting the name of the geographical location right, especially in the case of an earthquake, which unlike unlike a messy flood or a roving tornado, has an identifiable epicenter. The initial reports in the New York Times, BBC, and CNN on the recent earthquake at Kyigudo mentioned that it happened in “… a remote area of Western China.” Only later, and especially when Tibetan monks in their distinctive wine-red robes appeared in their many hundreds for rescue and relief work, was the fact of the town’s Tibetan name and the region’s Tibetan identity revealed. This widespread amnesia regarding most things Tibetan is, of course, the result of China’s long-standing strategy of renaming and re-designating (in pinyin spelling) Tibetan villages, towns, settlements, areas and geographical landmarks – sometimes even re-situating them, administratively and cartographically, with the long-term intention of eradicating the special historical and cultural identities of all Tibetan areas, and making it appear that  they had been part of China all along – or that they were just uninhabited wilderness that China was now opening up for development. (more...)

KYEGU, ON MY MIND

When I saw photographs of the tough, determined looking monks digging through the ruins of Kyegu town, I was struck by a sense of helplessness and frustration. Probably, some of you readers felt that way too. I wanted to be out there with those monks, helping to find survivors in the rubble, or at least unearthing the bodies of those that had perished — cleaning them up, restoring some dignity to them, before taking them away to be cremated. The only thing I could actually do that was perhaps faintly comparable, in a feeble academic sort of way, was to go through my library and my notes and dig up all the information, geographical, historical, ethnological, cultural — everything I could — on the people and land where the earthquake had struck. I wanted, in my minds eye, to see all those who had perished there not as faceless victims, but as actual, flesh-and-blood individuals, with real lives and stories, and try to establish the role that they, their forbears, and their homeland or phayul had played in the ongoing story of the Tibetan people and civilization. (more...)