mwazemba got it wrong

http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/magazine/-/434746/1064372/-/121max1z/-/index.html

AFRICAN STUDENTS WARM TO MELBOURNE

the Star Tuesday, November 2, 2010 starlife 21
H STAR Life SINGER ADNAN
SAMI WOWS
NAIROBI
See Page 24
AFRICAN STUDENTS
WARM TO MELBOURNE
African students at Victoria
University have started holding
“harambees” to strengthen
their relationships and provide a
regular platform for discussion
with members of staff.
These are not your ordinary
20-something Aussies with few obstacles
to higher education: they are older, mostly
with families, and from conflict areas like
Sudan, Eritrea and Ethiopia. They are
enormously grateful for the chance to study
and the campus at Footscray is designed
for people like them, with plenty of extracurricular
help in the way of mentoring,
study support labs, English tuition and
pastoral care.
Of course there was excellent food,
music and dancing to create the right
atmosphere.
Most of them would be envious of
Kenyans and their grasp of English since
they have not been taught in the medium
before.
Incidentally, this has often struck me as
a missed opportunity: Kenya could attract
thousands of students from neighbouring
countries and offer similar money-spinning
courses if it seriously decided to become the
English-speaking hub of East Africa.
Kenya does not lack good teachers
and could capitalise on the substantial
collection of African writing in English
as a plus. Look at how many Kenyans
are leaving the country to study in South
Africa. Nobody wants to go far away
unless they really have to.
You can’t help admiring the
resourcefulness of the Africans in
Melbourne: though the facilities are good,
they are nevertheless stretched to the
limits, and so students have to fend for
themselves. They look for ways of getting
support within their own community and
form strong bonds with each other.
Mohammed who is 41 now has a
Bachelor of Engineering and can advise
and guide the younger ones. He came up
the hard way; having dropped out of school
in Sudan for 10 years, he went to Cairo to
teach English. Like many of his fellows,
he felt lost in Australia. When he saw the
name “Victoria University” he decided it
must be good because it was named after
the state. Now he is in love with it. “If
I was to marry a university, it would be
Victoria,” he says. But he had to conquer
feelings of inferiority at being so much
older, since in his society age-mates are
expected to be able to do the same things.
Mary, also from Sudan, has a Diploma
of Community Welfare and is doing a
Bachelor in Social Work. She overcame
her feelings of discomfort and nervousness
after coming to VU. Now working for
the International Red Cross, she is still
“climbing the mountain.”
She tends to speak in metaphors.
Because it is hard for these students to
be critical since they come from cultures
where politeness to elders and teachers is
instinctive, she gets round the problem by
comparing lecturers to driving instructors.
“If you push the car too hard it will crash,”
she says. A gentle push is what’s needed.
Encouragement and an appreciation of
how hard it is for these students are likely
to bring about success.
The Africans at VU have come up with
the idea of creating an American-style
“buddy” system where each new student
is assigned an older, more experienced
one to help them settle in. Mary has been
back to Sudan and found that she didn’t
feel at home any more. “Am I at home
anywhere?” she asked herself. “Where
I live now is home”, and that’s that.
“We can encourage friendship between
our countries and Australia and act as
ambassadors,” she said.
The education of foreign students has
been a big money-earner for Victoria in
particular, though there has been some
controversy about sub-standard colleges
and discrimination against Indian
students, which received bad press. As
a result, numbers may drop in future
which might be a good thing for existing
students who will perhaps get more
attention. Despite the negative publicity,
students get a good deal from the
government.
AMES (Australian Migrants Education
Service) assists with excellent free courses
in English and directs young women like
Bethlehem from Ethiopia to preparatory
courses like Gateway to Nursing so that
she now has a full Bachelor’s degree in the
subject. But Hakim felt there was a need
for yet more English teachers.
As parents, they are aware that their
children find things difficult; discipline is
far more lax in western countries and the
youth, caught between their parents’ world
and their new one are confused and lacking
in focus. They haven’t had to make the
sacrifices their parents made.
Mohammed pointed out that the
community had crucial role to pay here:
graduates should propagate the idea of
education amongst the younger ones and
help them find clear goals. They also want
them to retain a sense of who they are
and the cultural values of “home.” The
temptation to drop out, and get into bad
habits is always present.
Footscray is not one of Melbourne’s leafy
suburbs. It even feels like a bit of Africa
with its markets and African restaurants.
On a Friday night at the Lalibella, the
owner not only serves tables but also sings
and dances. Videos of Ethiopians in their
crisp white costumes dancing in front of
green hills make you want to be there.
Drop-out rates are a general problem
causing the state to look carefully at its
educational provision.
Together they can commit to getting
a quality education. “Everything is
available,” Hakim says. “It’s a good
environment.” And the staff are anxious to
get their feedback to make it even better.
betty.caplan1@gmail.com
LEGAL EAGLES WHO MAKE A MARK - Pages 22-23
forum: Victoria University students panel comprising older students, mostly
with families, and from conflict areas like Sudan, Eritrea and Ethiopia. Inset, the
administration block at the university.
letter from OZ
By Betty Caplan

Joan Root Biography by Mark SeaL

One woman's bid to save LAKE NAIVASHA


Rating

Wildlife researchers Joan and Alan Root in Naivasha. The two had a sense that the haven they inhabited after they married in 1961 was doomed, thus there was a terrible urgency about their attempts to immortalise it for posterity.

By Betty Caplan (email the author)

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Posted Monday, October 25 2010 at 20:53

Mark Seal’s biography of the woman who lost her life in a futile bid to save Lake Naivasha is welcome, though deeply depressing.

Seal originally wrote the story for Vanity Fair and later decided to make it into a book. It is story of someone whose life was so bound up with a love of Kenya and its magnificent wildlife — a love which in the end ensnared her in the complicated web of corruption and conflicting interests that have come to characterise any enterprise that has money-making potential in this country.

Having been herself actually conceived on the shores of the lake in 1926, its survival formed the lynchpin of her existence.

When she met Alan Root, who had arrived in Kenya at the age of 10, she found her soulmate, a man whose mission was to “capture the essence of Africa on film.”

The two had a sense that the haven they inhabited after they married in 1961 was doomed, thus there was a terrible urgency about their attempts to immortalise it for posterity.

Those who have seen the masterpieces they produced together will know that these were the greatest of the wildlife filmmakers; others have followed, but they were the first.

Because they inhabited the territory without making any human mark on it, they were able to capture, for instance, the life of the termite in Castles of Clay, the abiding mystery of how these tiny creatures make such large and well-designed structures, all at the behest of the queen who lays 30,000 eggs a day.

“Four inches long and as thick as a man’s thumb, this grotesque creature looms over the workers that attend her. Beside their queen, the workers look like a ground crew handling a half-inflated airship.”

This small extract underlines what was so special about their films — not just the photography, but the poetic script, which always helped to illuminate the images.

The film about the seasons covers just one small area of land and shows in minute detail how it changes as the rains come and go, and how the wildlife adapts.

Alan was mostly credited for the success their work achieved, but he always maintained that he couldn’t have done it without Joan, that she was his right hand.

The book is full of those marvellous brushes with death that are so common in Kenya — escaping puff adder bites (which cost Alan a finger nevertheless), stray hippos or falling out of hot air balloons.

Theirs was a true “marriage of minds” though, eventually, Joan’s health and eventually her life were sacrificed.

They survived their early years through sheer determination and dedication to their mission, but slowly things began to unravel.

Because of the punishment she had dealt her body, she developed myasthenia and, at the age of 36, suffered an early menopause.



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Joan Root Biography

http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/magazine/-/434746/1039064/-/item/2/-/vfa5qsz/-/index.html

Ayaan Ali Hirsi: NOMAD

http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/magazine/The%20restless%20enigma%20of%20Ayaan%20Hirsi/-/434746/994430/-/nhfejy/-/index.html

Dawkins: The God Delusion corrected - thanks to reader for pointing out error

http://richarddawkins.net/articles/2244-good-people-doing-evil-things

jewish artists in the great European paintings exhibition NGV

THE TRAGIC STORY OF GERMAN AND JEWISH ARTISTS WHO LED THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT

The greatest irony of the magnificent exhibition of European Masters from the Stadel Museum in Frankfurt is summoned up in the story of Max Beckmann. Born in Leipzig in 1884, he studied at the Weimar Kunstschule from 1900 to 1903. Eventually promoted to professor at the Stadelschule in 1925. once the Nazis came into power in 1933, he, along with many various great Jewish artists, was denounced as degenerate and fled into exile. Now his art holds a special place in the museum, 100 of whose works have been loaned to the NGV in Melbourne where they will be on show until October whilst the building in Frankfurt is being renovated.. They will not be seen anywhere else. It is a great tribute to the gallery that such priceless works can be safely shown to an eager public.
Like so many of his compatriots, Beckmann was proudly German; his greatest desire was to regenerate German art after the First World War which had affected him very deeply. Having volunteered as a medical officer, his world view was profoundly changed by the experience. The early self portrait of 1905 shows a budding artist looking out at us with questioning, gentle eyes. Behind him is a window as though the world were his oyster, but that was not to be. Compare it with the painting of the Frankfurt synagogue (1919) where everything leans at a dangerous angle, the buildings, lampposts, streets all crowding together in a claustrophobic space reminiscent of some of Van Gogh’s most disturbed works. A little band of odd characters wanders in front of the synagogue looking as if they had strayed from a circus. Like much of his later work, done in exile in Amsterdam, it is full of fear and foreboding as if he could sense what was about to happen. Beckmann was angry and disoriented by having to leave his beloved home to which he never returned. “The Circus Carriage” (1940) shows a stern Beckmann as circus master pretending to read a newspaper whilst an acrobat is trying to climb a ladder to get out of the room. But he is trapped in the picture as are we. The central figure is a reclining woman gazing blankly ahead – a fortune-teller perhaps, holding a hand of cards. A coarse animal- trainer holding a whip guards his fierce tigers in their cage. Though Beckmann, like his fellow Kirchner portrays a world on the brink of madness, the intensity of the colour and expression prevent the viewer from falling into despair. He points ahead to surrealism and the absurdist movements. But the utter humiliation of the Degenerate Art exhibition which toured Germany for four years was to damage his psyche. After he and his wife fled, they lived in Amsterdam for ten years and in 1947 emigrated to the US where he died three years later at the age of 66. The Australian born critic Robert Hughes says that this, along with Beckmann’s other triptychs “represent one of the greatest efforts of the symbolic imagination in all 20th century art, a sort of ....world theatre in which the follies and tragedies of Europe, along with its pining for a utopian order on the very brink of collapse, were given an unrelentingly vivid allegorical form.” Hughes believes that the power of Beckmann’s work comes from the heat it generates and has called him “the greatest German painter of the 20th century.”
As a failed artist, nothing was more important than art to Hitler. He based his thinking on a book by the Jewish writer Max Nordau (Degeneration,1892) which surprisingly supported the idea of superiority of traditional German culture, sowing just how assimilated many of Germany’s best intellectuals were. Twice rejected from the Vienna Academy, Hitler’s taste was limited to 19th century neo-classical landscapes and idealised figures. With Goebbels as Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, the systematic suppression of creativity in all the arts held sway.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was a contemporary of Beckmann’s and a founding member of a group called “Die Brucke (The Bridge) which aimed to draw a link between the art of the past and that of the brutal new era that was dawning.. Born in Dresden in 1880, he too volunteered for military service during World War I in 1914 but suffered a nervous breakdown in 1915 and was discharged, recovering for the next two years in sanatoriums in Switzerland.
In 1918, he settled in Davos, living in a farm house in the Alps; from this time onwards his main subject matter was mountain scenes. On 3 July 1919, he wrote in a letter from Davos, "Dear Van der Velde writes today that I ought to return to modern life. For me this is out of the question. Nor do I regret it.... The delights the world affords are the same everywhere, differing only in their outer forms. Here one learns how to see further and go deeper than in 'modern' life, which is generally so very much more superficial despite its wealth of outer forms."
The two of his works on show from the Stadel are so exquisite in their use of colour composition and surface tranquillity that they hide the angst that afflicted him throughout his life. “The Reclining Woman in a White Chemise” is a voluptuous picture redolent with sensuality, the well- proportioned lady showing off her ample curves; the huge flowers contrast brilliantly with the furniture, and the echoing curves of the sofa and wall behind give off an air of luxuriance that suggest that the subject was intimately known and loved by the artist.”The Sleigh Ride in the Snow” of 1927-9 is filled with movement – in the foreground the horse pulling the sleigh through the snow, in the background hills and rows of sloping hills and trees in a variety of sharp and light colours.
In 1933, Kirchner was labelled a "degenerate artist” by the Nazis and asked for his resignation from the Berlin Academy of Arts. In 1937, over 600 of his works were confiscated from public museums in Germany and were sold or destroyed. In 1938, the psychological trauma of these events, along with the Nazi occupation of Austria, close to his home, led to his suicide.
The list goes on: Max Ernst is represented by two works which illustrate how much he was influenced by Freud, as were the surrealists who came later. “Aquis Submersus” of 1919 exhibits an eerie still world centred around a swimming pool with lifeless figures dominated by a doll-like figure in the foreground without limbs and riddled with bullet holes. In the sky a clock replaces the moon. We are already into the world of the subconscious and dreams. He did in fact collaborate with many other artists including Dali and Paul Klee. He led the most extraordinary life, marrying many times and working with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes..Like a cat he seemed to have nine lives, escaping near death and two spells in concentration camps before moving to the USA which was the fortunate recipient of many of those European artists and intellectuals who were not destroyed by the Nazi onslaught.
The exhibition traces the history of 19th and 20th century Europe and contains far more than I can begin to describe. But out of the ashes of terrible persecution, Jewish artists managed to triumph and leave an outstanding legacy.
1239 words
betty.caplan1@gmail.com
Betty Caplan is a freelance writer and teacher based in Melbourne.