black – Page 2 – praag.org

White man from Pretoria sues police for wrongful arrest, rape by cell full of black detainees

A Pretoria man who claims that fellow detainees in police cells spent a night raping and assaulting him after he was unlawfully arrested, is suing the minister of police for more than R1 million, Beeld reported on Monday.

According to documents handed in at the High Court in Pretoria, the victim was released unconditionally, but later in the same case re-arrested and assaulted in the police cells for a second time, before again being released unconditionally.

According to the victim’s lawyer, Robert van Wyk, his client, who lived in Brooklyn and was expected to testify on Monday, was extremely traumatised and humiliated by the attacks.

He reportedly had to undergo three courses of anti-retroviral drugs to combat HIV.

“Fortunately he was HIV-negative,” Van Wyk said.

The victim had brought two claims against the minister of police, the first of which, for R940,000, was due to the arrest and detention involving the alleged rape, and the second, for R150,000, was for the second arrest and detention.

The plaintiff was arrested on September 16, 2011 at the Rustenburg Mall on charges of human trafficking and taken to the Rustenburg police cells, where he was detained in a cell along with about 20 other men.

He alleged that they stripped him, sexually assaulted him, raped, and severely beat him until 6am the next morning.

He asked police several times the next day to see to his needs and told them that he had been assaulted and raped, but they reportedly did nothing, and refused to allow him to call his family.

Police had denied all the allegations. – Sapa

Do South African whites really ‘have it so good’?

by Dan Roodt

In today’s City Press newspaper, Frans Cronjé of the South African Institute of Race Relations claim that whites live in some kind of paradise.

He cites statistics claiming the following:

“Between 1994 and 2012, the rate of unemployment among white people increased from 3% to 5.7%…

The white unemployment rate was low, even when compared to a host of international benchmarks. In the US, for example, the rate in 2012 was 7.6%, in Britain 7.9% and in Canada 7.2%.”

Apparently praising South African white entrepreneurship, he goes on to say that “while a black university graduate is more likely than a white graduate to find a job within 12 months of graduation (due to strict affirmative-action laws-DR), white graduates are four times more likely to start and operate businesses”.

I would treat these statistics about low white unemployment with a great deal of caution. Many whites are not on the unemployment statistics as they do not claim benefits from the government. Driving around many white areas, you notice their old, decrepit cars, lack of maintenance to their properties and other signs of economic distress.

Go to any five-star hotel now and you will find blacks sitting around in designer clothes. The only whites there are foreign tourists. Most cars costing R1 million (about $100 000) and more that I see every day in Johannesburg are owned by blacks, not whites. Blacks get all the lucrative corporate directorships and make easy money as “tenderpreneurs” to the state and municipalities.

I know of thousands of whites who literally had to leave the country to find jobs, in the Middle and Far East where they do dismal work as part-time English teachers or pack groceries in Australian supermarkets.

Many small businesses started by whites have failed, not least because of the racial laws and regulations imposed by government and the corporate sector. The corporate sector – banks and large companies – are now arguably more anti-white than government. They do not trade with white-owned businesses and generally sue or harass small businesses at the drop of a hat. Many whites have lost their homes which the banks require them to pledge as collateral for a simple overdraft for their small businesses.

More whites now live in so-called “informal housing” than at any time since the Great Depression. Solidarity estimates that up to 800 000 whites – educated, literate and previously taxpayers – now live in squatter camps and other “informal areas” such as this one:

Poor South African whites living in cabins normally used as garden sheds

We are witnessing the greatest social-engineering programme whereby one race is economically subjugated to another that this country and perhaps the world has ever seen.

The very notion that whites could be “liberated” by such an unfair and racist system is so fundamentally cynical that it has an Orwellian ring to it. But that is why the mainstream media no longer has any credibility among middle-class whites.

The South African media are loyal to foreign and corporate interests who see South African whites as an unwanted presence in the country, preventing them from bribing their way into looting most of the remaining assets in South Africa. That is why the SA mass media are constantly attacking whites, accusing them of racism, “apartheid privilege”, and the like. White males even get blamed for the intense crime and lawlessness in the country! Every white person knows that 99% of the violence is committed by other races, yet we are blamed for everything. If all else fails, there is always ever-increasing “the legacy of apartheid” to blame.

What I find amazing is that Frans Cronjé published two contradictory articles today, one in Rapport and this one in City Press. The one in Rapport, written in Afrikaans and therefore intended for a mainly white audience, shows how 500 000 middle-class taxpayers essentially contribute 50% of all personal taxes in South Africa. White readers of that article would be understandably outraged that, while still contributing a large share of the country’s taxes, they are treated as second-class citizens.

English in South Africa is increasingly the language of blacks and the internationalist whites who are hostile to Afrikaners and the white middle class, for reasons explained in the paragraph above, namely that their ownership of land and role in the judiciary and the accounting profession prevents the wholesale looting of our country. Even though looting is already taking place, there is still some semblance of legality left. Clearly, this has to go.

This article in English about whites is therefore intended for a black and foreign audience, to convince them that South African whites “have never had it so good”. Understandably the very real hostility felt for those dastardly Nazis and perpetrators of a “crime against humanity” will only rise upon reading this article. It will undermine any inchoate sympathy whites enjoy with their less brainwashed brethren in the West and Europe.

The most absurd sentence of all is the following: “(Whites) were liberated, first, from the guilt and pariah status that had been attached to their support and enforcement of apartheid.”

On the contrary, South African whites are now more hated and stigmatised than ever! Over the past twenty years the SABC and the mainstream media have played their quasi-communist propaganda about white evil and viciousness over and over in South Africa. Most of the time this propaganda is literally the work of unreconstructed communists who occupy powerful positions in South Africa, being the “white face” of the ANC government, the SABC and other state agencies. The British media, including the BBC, see us whites as free game now that we are utterly without any political power and lack any form of state support. More
unfair and one-sided news stories have been published and broadcast about us since 1994 than ever before, barring perhaps the 1890s when the Uitlander press and the London newspapers were publishing war propaganda about the Boer republics.

As for white guilt, there is a whole industry meant to inculcate it into us, almost from birth. At school our children are exposed to compulsory subjects such as “Life Orientation” containing political propaganda of the worst kind, meant to persuade them that their parents were all war criminals killing thousands, if not millions, of blacks. In reality, of course, only 500 blacks died at the hands of the SA police from 1948 to 1994, fewer than die every year as a result of police brutality under black rule! However, the foreign whites and media do not write about police brutality anymore because it is now committed by blacks and therefore of no interest.

More than 80 000 whites have been murdered since 1994 and up to a million white women have been raped. Four thousand farmers, their wives and children have been killed, many of them spending their last hours under dehumanising torture.

While all this is going on in the ghoulish present, not a week goes by without newspapers and radio programmes calling for whites to “repent about apartheid”, surrender the meagre assets that they still control or simply leave the country as they “have outstayed their welcome”. People are constantly telling me to “go back to Europe” or “get lost”, even though my forebears came here in the early 1700s.

Apart from racial quotas in education that prevent whites from obtaining a tertiary education, especially in medicine and other fields, an aging white population now endures a third-world system of medical care. Prior to 1994, whites had one of the best healthcare systems in the world, with both a private and a well-managed public hospital system.

Corruption and mismanagement have reduced the public system to a shambles while the costs of private healthcare have gone through the roof. Only the corporate elite can now afford private healthcare. Whites are almost banned from studying medicine by the universities so that their parents and grandparents may just die from neglect in the state hospital system.

Despite being well-educated and hard-working, affirmative action and so-called BEE (black-economic empowerment) have reduced most South African whites to poverty. Their mean income per capita is far less than the minimum wage in many European countries.The following table shows annual per capita income growth from 2001 to 2011 for all racial groups in South Africa:

Table-for-census-story — Source: Moneyweb/SA census

If the R365 134 earned by the average SA white is translated into dollar terms at $40 970, this is way below minimum wage levels in most European countries. However, this very modest white income gets taxed at 40% to fund the megalomaniac dreams of this make-believe government whose only interest is in seeking international prestige while it cannot even mend our roads, nor deliver school books on time. In a real sense, white poverty is caused by government, either through its high taxes or its racially interventionist policies.

This is Frans Cronjé’s “white paradise”!

The D-bomb has dropped

by Ilana Mercer

In our democracy – for we are no longer a republic that upholds individual rights and limits central power – you vote not for the representative who will defend your inalienable, individual rights. Rather, if you are The Rich – whom the left treats as a reified, rigid state-of-being – you vote defensively. If you are The Poor, you vote extractively – you empower your guy to steal The Other Guy’s stuff and hand it over.

Elections are when the politically dominant majority gets to thump the politically weak minority.

The Moron Media, left and right, are sticking to their story. Barack Obama had “out-hustled” Mitt Romney. Obama ran a better “ground game.” He triumphed “in the trenches,” “neutralized” his rival. He had not stopped campaigning since 2008. The president’s mega-machine was unbeatable, even though his vision was lacking. (As I like to say, a visionary bureaucrat is a voracious one. The best leader is one who leads in limiting his leadership.)

Had Romney, say some of the analysts, been a better tactician, scrappier, less of a patrician – he’d have won.

The media so arguing have advocated for immigration policies that have helped, over the decades, to replace the American people with a new, vastly different people. Although whites broke for Romney in a big way – as a proportion of the voting public, the founding majority is teetering on minority status. It has shrunk to the point where it is becoming powerless against a coalition in opposition.

As an extension of their life’s work, the “news” people aforementioned have anointed a string of progressive commentators who are distinguished from the Democrats with whom they cavort in studios in one way only: They call themselves Republicans.

This lot’s line on the Republicans’ Nov. 6 defeat went as follows: Be nicer to the axis of Asians, blacks, browns (and brown-nosing bimbos) who handed the Democrats a handy victory.

In a word, neutralize the D-Bomb.

Order lIana Mercer’s brilliant polemical work, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”

For years, those of us who’ve warned about demographics have been dubbed racists. But the D- Bomb has dropped. Its debris is scattered across “the field” upon which Mitt Romney said he “left everything.”

Asians, blacks and Latinos united for Obama.

As always, women voted with their wombs, although married sisters were less wild for big daddy O. (Oh, how we suffer for the female suffrage! I once vowed to “give up my vote if that would guarantee that all women were denied the vote.”)

To the pox of the 19th Amendment – it granted women the vote – add the 26th Amendment. Smuggled into the Constitution by statute, it artificially swelled the ranks of Democratic voters by millions of 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds. While they don’t work for a living, the vote grants youngsters a claim on the livelihood of those who do.

Overlapping voter categories notwithstanding, Obama thus curried favor with females – single ladies, in particular – the faithless, kids and minorities.

Put differently, those earning less than $50,000 trended Barack Obama; those earning more than $50,000, and certainly individuals in the upper-income tax bracket, preferred Mitt Romney.

People with higher incomes constitute a minority, an economically dominant minority (to paraphrase Amy Chua). People with low incomes are in the majority, a politically dominant majority.

The rich are politically impoverished; the poor politically rich. The rich dominate the economy; the poor dominate the polity.

When elections roll around, the politically powerful exact their revenge against the economically powerful.

What kind of a right gives one man control over another man’s life? In a democracy, the right to vote does just that.

As for demographics, they have become destiny. They were not necessarily so. Demographics have been the excuse central planners have advanced to persevere with immigration policies that destroy civil society and shore up the welfare state.

The now-waning West became great not because it outbred the rest of the world. The West was once great because of its human capital – innovation, exploration, science, philosophy; because of superior ideas and the willingness to defend such a civilization, not because it was more populated than the rest of the world.

America doesn’t need more people; it needs better people.

Making nice with constituencies that vote repeatedly and habitually for the candidate who promises them more stuff is tantamount to sleeping with the enemy. The only voters who could be swayed by the promise of the free market are the Democratic Party’s Asian supporters, since they enjoy higher incomes and stabler families than the party’s Hispanic and black devotees.

Ultimately, elections are about perception – the way in which the people perceive the political planks of the two parties.

The American people perceive the Democratic Party as the party of entitlements. They think of the Republican Party as the party of austerity.

History and reality tell us that both parties have grown government into the gigantic, intractable, wealth-gobbling Thing that it is. But in the age of reality TV, reason and reality are meaningless.

Perception is everything.

The idea of an American People is yet another misconception. The extravaganza that had one adorable, carrot-topped kid bawling “no more ‘Bronco Bamma’ and Mitt Romney, please” has ended. But if this advance auction of stolen goods – H. L. Mencken’s definition of an election – proved anything, it is that America is a mass of competing factions.

Some vie to keep more of their rightful property; others fight to get their paws on that very property.

And the tipping point has arrived. This, Nov. 6, 2012, has proven.

Ilana Mercer is a classical liberal (libertarian) writer and a fellow at the “Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.” She is the author of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.” “The titular tease,” explains Ilana in the book, “is meant as a metaphor and is inspired by Ayn Rand’s wise counsel against prostrating civilization to savagery.” Ilana’s website is IlanaMercer.com.. She blogs at www.barelyablog.com.

Racial goals for maths and reading

The Florida State Board of Education passed a plan that sets goals for students in math and reading based upon their race.

On Tuesday, the board passed a revised strategic plan that says that by 2018, it wants 90 percent of Asian students, 88 percent of white students, 81 percent of Hispanics and 74 percent of black students to be reading at or above grade level. For math, the goals are 92 percent of Asian kids to be proficient, whites at 86 percent, Hispanics at 80 percent and blacks at 74 percent. It also measures by other groupings, such as poverty and disabilities, reported the Palm Beach Post.

The plan has infuriated many community activists in Palm Beach County and across the state.

“To expect less from one demographic and more from another is just a little off-base,” Juan Lopez, magnet coordinator at John F. Kennedy Middle School in Riviera Beach, told the Palm Beach Post.

JFK Middle has a black student population of about 88 percent.

“Our kids, although they come from different socioeconomic backgrounds, they still have the ability to learn,” Lopez said. “To dumb down the expectations for one group, that seems a little unfair.”

Others in the community agreed with Lopez’s assessment. But the Florida Department of Education said the goals recognize that not every group is starting from the same point and are meant to be ambitious but realistic.

As an example, the percentage of white students scoring at or above grade level (as measured by whether they scored a 3 or higher on the reading FCAT) was 69 percent in 2011-2012, according to the state. For black students, it was 38 percent, and for Hispanics, it was 53 percent.

In addition, State Board of Education Chairwoman Kathleen Shanahan said that setting goals for different subgroups was needed to comply with terms of a waiver that Florida and 32 other states have from some provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. These waivers were used to make the states independent from some federal regulations.

“We have set a very high goal for all students to reach in Florida,” Shanahan said.

But Palm Beach County School Board vice-chairwoman Debra Robinson isn’t buying the rationale.

“I’m somewhere between complete and utter disgust and anger and disappointment with humanity,” Robinson told the Post. She said she has been receiving complaints from upset black and Hispanic parents since the state board took its action this week.

Robinson called the state board’s actions essentially “proclaiming racism” and said she wants Palm Beach County to continue to educate every child with the same expectations, regardless of race. – CBS

Don’t poke fun at a black man!

obama-bush-clinton-marijuana-smokers — The Pot Smokers

Credit R. Wallace “Wally” Hudson, chairman of the Mecklenburg County (Va.) Republican Committee, with demonstrating how new social media platforms can broadcast ancient hates.

The Post reported this week that the county GOP’s Facebook page had displayed for months photos portraying President Obama as a witch doctor, a caveman and a drug dealer.

Virginia’s Republican Party chairman, Pat Mullins, ordered the offensive photos be taken down. But Hudson, who acknowledged posting most of the images, stood his ground, saying he didn’t see what all the fuss was about. “We know our regular readers, who are good conservatives,” he told The Post on Tuesday. “They’re gonna get a kick out of it.”

Sadly, the Mecklenburg GOP’s disgusting images—which have since been removed—are not an isolated case of ugliness.

Baylor University assistant professor Mia Moody did a study of social media stereotyping of Barack and Michelle Obama; her findings appeared in the journal New Media & Culture.

Moody researched hundreds of Facebook groups and pages. She found numerous examples of the president and the first lady being targeted with racist and sexist rhetoric that, not surprisingly, also indirectly spread hatred toward women and blacks.

Moody found that some Facebook pages build on ideas that black people are different from members of the dominant group. Several photos showing Michelle Obama dancing drew comments about her “always jigging.”

One group called “Obama Sucks” primarily served as an outlet to post fake photos of the president. One picture featured him wearing a bandanna and gold teeth. The caption: “OBAMA Going For The African American Vote.”

Moody found that many Facebook hate pages also focused on cultural narratives. Some photos depict Obama or his family as animals, particularly apes. One picture showed male and female apes holding an infant ape with Obama’s face superimposed on it.

Tasteless. Disrespectful. – Colbert King, Washington Post

Theresa Reel sexually harassed by black, Hispanic boys

A white high school teacher who said she was sexually tormented by her students and then punished for complaining has scored a $450,000 settlement from the city, reports the New York Daily News.

Theresa Reel, 52, who quit her job when she signed the deal, said the knowledge that she never has to set foot in the High School for Legal Studies again is just as sweet.

“I wasted six years of my life being treated like dirt — less than dirt,” Reel told the Daily News on Thursday. “I can’t put into words how happy I am.”

The Mississippi native started working at the Williamsburg, Brooklyn, school in 2005 and within a month, her job was a nightmare. The High School for Legal Studies is 62% black and 35% Latino.

In a lawsuit she filed three years later, she described how students called her filthy names, flung condoms at each other and even touched her breast.

Her pleas to school bosses were met with accusations that she showed too much cleavage, she charged.

When she told then-Principal Denise Morgan that she made a student leave the class for sexual comments, the official’s response was: “And how does that threaten you?”

Morgan defended her handling of Reel’s complaints.

“I am very comfortable with the professional manner in which I responded to this teacher’s concerns,” she told The New York Daily News.

After Morgan was replaced at the troubled school, the new principal, Monica Ortiz, gave Reel unsatisfactory ratings.

And a 2008 letter from the Department of Education chastised the social studies educator for “inappropriate attire,” described as a “low-cut, V-neck lace top.”

“It made me feel like I was worthless, like my own supervisors believed that I deserved to be treated like this,” Reel said at the Woodside, Queens, home she shares with her cat.

Reel’s court papers detail the barrage of X-rated insults she faced in the classroom and corridors.

One boy allegedly told her: “I’ve got rubbers — want to party?” Another student accused a classmate of performing a sex act on Reel for good grades, she said.

She recalled one male student crossing a hallway so he could graze her breast with his elbow and then “smirk” at her.

“I was screaming,” Reel said.

She said the harassment made it impossible to function some days.

“Sometimes I’d break down on the subway,” she said. “I would go home, sit in front of the TV and cry.”

At one point, she said, she was suicidal.

“I had a plan in mind,” she said, without elaborating. “It got so black and bleak I couldn’t see it getting any better.”

The city tried to get the federal discrimination suit tossed out, arguing Reel did not prove the school was a hostile environment, that she was singled out for her gender, or that she faced retaliation.

On each count, the judge ruled there was enough evidence to let a jury decide and set a trial date for Sept. 10.

On Aug. 31, the city agreed to pay Reel $450,000 and remove the poor ratings from her record if she resigned.

“We think she had a very strong case,” said lawyer Joshua Parkhurst of Cary Kane LLP. “We ultimately agreed to settle because it allows our client to get on with her life.”

Reel has been on an unpaid leave of absence for a year, spending down her pensions savings. She’s been looking for a new job, but was even turned down for a cleaning gig.

DOE had no comment on the case.

Morgan, the former principal, is now an assistant principal at the High School for Violin and Dance in the Bronx. Ortiz is still the head of Legal Studies, a D-rated school which had less than 60% of its students graduate in 2009.

Legal Studies made headlines in 2010 when teachers were caught taking a lavish, taxpayer-funded junket and students were busted for using cell phones to film brawls and sex acts.

Reel wasn’t the only person at the school who thought pupils were out of line. In a 2010 city survey, only 49% of the students said learners treated teachers with respect.

South African rugby ‘too white’, says former Springbok coach

By making the Springbok team too white, black South Africans were being alienated from the sport and the team, which was divisive for the country, former Springbok coach Peter de Villiers said in an internet radio interview.

“We have to know what country we’re living in, and at the moment we’re turning a lot of black people against us by making the team white,” he told Ballz Radio earlier this week.

De Villiers did not want to comment on the Springbok team’s recent performance, as he said he had not watched the team lose their match against the All Blacks 21-11 in Dunedin, New Zealand last week, Beeld reported.

“People don’t want to talk [about race], but I have to… we’re breaking up the country, and damaging a sport that we all love,” De Villiers said.

He did not want to comment on current Springbok coach Heyneke Meyer’s selections for the team, but said that the best players should be sent onto the field.

“I don’t want to comment on his team selections, but I do know that you can’t keep doing the same thing and expect different results.” – Sapa

Education, not race determines employment in South Africa – SAIRR

Educational achievement is a more important indicator of why people are employed rather than race, the SA Institute of Race Relations (Sairr) said on Wednesday.

“The proportion of people by race in professional positions closely mirrors the proportion of people by race with professional qualifications,” said research manager Lucy Holborn in a statement.

The data challenged the view that South African employers were resisting racial transformation in the workplace.

According to the data, there were about 41 percent of black people with degrees and there were 36 percent of blacks in professional positions.

There were 45 percent of white people with degrees or higher qualifications and there were 42 percent of them in professional positions.

“While a degree of racial prejudice exists in all societies, the data suggests that educational achievement will determine the pace of future employment equity progress in South Africa,” she said.

Sairr sourced information from Statistics SA and the Commission for Employment Equity.

FW de Klerk pontificates on inequality and our ‘catastrophic education system’

deklerk_fw — FW de Klerk, former President of South Africa

The outcome of the ANC’s elective conference in Mangaung at the end of the year could have a big effect on South Africa’s future, former president FW de Klerk said on Thursday.

“I do think the choice of leadership in this December can positively or negatively effect our future in the short and the medium term,” he said, speaking at a Cape Town Press Club memorial dinner.

It was important that African National Congress members attending the conference acted in the interests of the country, and not individuals.

“Therefore I think it’s important that, in the context of a party structure, that the conference goers take good account of what is in the best interests not of person A or person B, but what is in the best interests of South Africa.”

De Klerk called for a return to the spirit of seeking reconciliation that prevailed in the country in the years immediately after 1994.

“How can we rise above grabbing and looking for positions and filling your pockets?”

South Africa needed political leaders who could serve communities and “put their hands and their heads together in ensuring we tackle the challenges we face”.

Responding to a question on whether South Africa should not be promoting itself with a massive international “road show”, De Klerk said investors had been frightened by what they had seen happening in South Africa over the past 18 months.

“What has happened at Marikana will make a joke of any road show,” he said, referring to the shooting dead of 34 striking mineworkers by police in North West on August 16.

They were also put off by reports of corruption.

“Investors are put off by factual accounts of the unbridled corruption that is taking place in South Africa. You can’t have a road show unless your house is in order.

“We need to sell ourselves, but we need to get the product right [first].”

Earlier, De Klerk, who turned 76 in March this year, said the main inequality divide in South Africa was no longer between blacks and whites, but between unionised and employed workers on the one hand, and unemployed on the other.

“It is a divide that lies at the heart of our inequality challenge.”

It was also a divide “that the Congress of SA Trade Unions is determined to defend by vigorously opposing any efforts to make the labour market more flexible”.

Another principal cause of inequality was the “catastrophic failure of our education system”.

A total of 60 percent of those who left school did so without a matric, and those who passed matric did so with an average mark of less than 40 percent.

De Klerk criticised the ruling party’s affirmative action and black economic empowerment policies.

“In the face of increasing national inequality, there is good reason to conclude that the government’s affirmative action and BEE policies have failed to address inequality, and might even have aggravated it.

“This is because most affirmative action and BEE occur in the top 10 to 15 percent of the income pyramid and have little or no impact on the bottom 85 percent of our society.

De Klerk, who served as South Africa’s last apartheid president from 1989 to 1994, called for these policies to be abandoned.

“Shift the accent in affirmative action programmes from race to relative disadvantage,” he said.

He also offered recommendations for the promotion of equality, including a more flexible labour dispensation, accelerated economic growth, and the rooting out of corruption, among others.

– Sapa

‘Black aspiration and white fear causing tension in South Africa’

Much patience is needed for South Africa to develop social cohesion, black church leader Reverend Frank Chikane said in Kliptown, Soweto on Thursday.

“We need to be ready to listen to each other,” he said during a report back from commissions at the national social cohesion summit.

“To build social cohesion and a common nation, a national identity is needed.”

Chikane, former director general in the presidency, was reporting back on the commission which dealt with prejudice and discrimination.

He said it was a difficult commission. High levels of sensitivity and humility were needed.

“We need to listen to each other… We must also listen when people speak in strange tongues.”

The two-day summit, organised by the department of arts and culture, broke up into five commissions on Thursday. Language was a recurring theme in each commission.

Wits University Professor Yunus Ballim, reporting back from the commission on economic inequalities, said South Africa needed to develop a shared discourse.

“Just to have the ability to greet each other in an African language or say goodbye in an African language.”

It was embarrassing that many people could not do that after 18-years of democracy.

Social historian Luli Callinicos said minority groups had done very little to try learn an African language.

“Our own culture is being undermined… We need to restore ubuntu,” she said. “Because this is something we can teach the rest of the world. We must be careful not to lose it.”

Callinicos was part of the commission on social interaction, co-operation and solidarity. Poverty and inequality added to the lack of social cohesion.

“Cohesion, if you are deprived, is going to be very difficult,” she said.

People in most of the commissions also called for a public dialogue and said the development of social cohesion started at a local level and needed to be ongoing.

Former ambassador to France and jazz legend Hugh Masekela’s sister Barbara Masekela said the relevance of the Constitution should not be set aside only for when needed but should be used in people’s daily lives.

This was part of the commission on national identity and unity.

Chikane said delegates questioned the Constitution.

“There were questions about the foundation of our new society in terms of the Constitution,” he said.

He said there were good structures and institutions but they were not doing enough to develop social cohesion.

Another commission on special divisions focused on the issue of land.

Leonard Martin, who reported back, said there was an urgent need for a land audit because of the persistent problem of “landlessness”.

He said land had caused great tension in South Africa. There was “black aspiration and white fear”.

He said the commission urged people to build a unified country.

“Build a South Africa that belongs to all.”

Martin said there needed to be robust and honest discussions about South Africa’s past. – Sapa

‘Black Madam’ arrested in bad buttocks injections

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A woman who calls herself the “Black Madam” could face charges in the death of a London tourist who received illegal buttocks-enhancement injections last year in a Philadelphia hotel, police said Thursday.

Padge Victoria Windslowe, 42, was arrested Wednesday night as she prepared to host a “pumping party” where she was to illegally inject clients, according to police. She faces charges including aggravated assault and deceptive practices after one of her clients, an exotic dancer, suffered serious lung problems after an injection, Philadelphia police Lt. John Walker said. Windslowe was arraigned Thursday and was being held on $10 million bail, prosecutors said.

Windslowe is a “person of interest” in the death of the 20-year-old London woman who last year received injections at a hotel near Philadelphia International Airport, Walker said.

He said she will likely be charged with murder in that case if the medical examiner rules Windslowe’s injection caused the death of Claudia Aderotimi, who complained of chest pain and difficulty breathing following the procedure. No charges have been filed.

“We knew she was the injector back in the 2011 (Aderotimi) case,” Walker said, adding that the investigation has lingered as police awaited a ruling on the cause of Aderotimi’s death.

Delaware County Medical Examiner Fredric Hellman has been in communication with prosecutors and is “striving to bring the investigation into the death of Claudia Aderotimi to as speedy a resolution as possible,” a spokeswoman said in a prepared statement. Hellman is awaiting results from a Food and Drug Administration lab, the statement said.

A message left for an attorney who has represented Windslowe was not returned Thursday. She declined to comment as police escorted her to a waiting cruiser Wednesday night.

In recent years, cases of illegal cosmetic injections causing death, disfigurement and health problems have been reported from New York City to Los Angeles and beyond. Solange Magnano, a 38-year-old model and former Miss Argentina, died in Buenos Aires in 2009 from complications after having cosmetic injections on her buttocks.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FDA do not keep data on injuries or deaths caused by illicit cosmetic injections.

In Windslowe’s case, investigators describe an operation in which she had “recruiters” who went out in search of people who wanted buttocks enhancement, reaching out to potential clients via email, blogs and conversations, Walker said.

Then, they would set up a time and place to meet, usually at a hotel or private residence, Walker said. The procedures cost anywhere from $700 to $1,800 in cash. Windslowe allegedly moved her operation around to avoid detection. Overall, police believe Windslowe has injected about 14 people dating to November 2011, mostly advertising through word of mouth, Walker said, with the operation moving all around the Philadelphia area.

“The operation moves,” Walker said. “They don’t want to get caught.”

As part of the procedures, authorities said, Windslowe would clean the site and then inject a substance she described as silicone into the client’s buttocks. When the procedure was done, she would cover the wound with glue, Walker said.

During the arrest, police seized vials of superglue, needles, gloves, bottles and other items. Walker said police are conducting tests on the material that Windslowe was allegedly injecting into her clients, trying to determine what it is. In the most recent case, the victim is currently on oxygen and at home in Philadelphia but had to spend seven days in the hospital, Walker said.

Windslowe’s next court appearance is scheduled for March 13.