LIMINAL

I have to pinch myself. The skinny man with a funny name is making me dizzy with hope. A black fellah on the yellow brick road to the American Presidency! Throughout the world Obama's ambition is sending a ripple through neighbourhoods of 'colour' and neighbourhoods where racism still threatens to dwarf self determination and aspiration. My birthplace, South Africa, made sure I was conscious of my colour and everybody else's. People of mixed blood - "coloured" - as my mob were referred, were distinct for all the wrong reasons. Australia and its acceptance of me and my family has made me see that more clearly. Apartheid was like living at a foreign airport, having to go routinely through the ritual of customs. That ritual is characterised by the assumption of one's criminality, of one's shame or guilt. You approach the desk with all your papers intact but with a sense of being called to prove yourself. You learn to be polite, clear and efficient,...

Canberra Times, December 22, 2007 South Africa is facing its greatest upheaval since its historic leap towards democracy in 1994. The elevation this week of the populist, charismatic and allegedly corrupt politician Jacob Zuma to the leadership of the ruling party threatens to take South Africa on a much more turbulent course. Whoever leads the African National Congress is traditionally the party's presidential candidate. The party's overwhelming backing has ensured victories first for Nelson Mandela in '94, then Thabo Mbeki in 1999 and 2004. The main opposition party called the ANC convention vote on Tuesday “dismal” for the ANC and for the nation; an indictment on the ruling party that they could find no better candidate than Zuma to lead it. It's true. Zuma's win says more about the failings of South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki’s than Zuma's strengths.

Anglican News, October 2007 The sunset over Darwin’s Arafura Sea is spectacular and swift. Against the falling red sun, the aqua ocean is picture perfect toward the end of this, typically hot and sticky day. But things are not all they seem. The locals know that the sea is full of stingers. Only ignorant tourists take the risk. There’s something unnerving about the country up here, particularly for me; someone made soft by the more temperate weather down south. But it’s not just the environment. It’s the territory's poverty and economics too. Delegates from around Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea at the Anglicare National Conference this month were confronted with the realities of life for many Northern Territorians. Few of us, I believe, grasp how big the gap between Indigenous Australians and the rest of Australia is and the sweeping nature of the change being rolled out under the Commonwealth’s Northern Territory intervention passed with the support of both...

The Canberra Times, April 17, 2007 It's enough to make you weep. Zimbabwe's once thriving economy is on the brink of collapse. Robert Mugabe's post-independence paradise, the erstwhile breadbasket of Southern Africa, is now so dependent on international aid millions would go hungry without it. And still many do. Even with significant aid, Zimbabwe's life expectancy, about 34 years, is among the lowest in the world. Recent elections have been a farce and people are being brutalised every day by a regime led by an ageing despot determined to cling to power. It has been that way for years but it took the senseless bashing of opposition members by ZANU-PF thugs to make us really sit up and wrestle with the question: "What can and must be done?" Australia's John Howard attacked Zimbabwe's leader, calling him a disaster presiding over a "heap of misery". But Howard, like Tony Blair and George W. Bush, insists South Africa can do more a...

Sydney Morning Herald , January 22, 2002. Apartheid lives on in the mindsets of South Africans especially in those of the coloureds, observes Toni Hassan. I WAS born in South Africa as a so-called "coloured" person of mixed race, and migrated with my family to Australia in 1978. I was six. I have been back twice: first in 1994 when South Africa said "Yes!" to an amazing transition led by the country's first black leader, the patron saint Nelson Mandela. I returned again recently to see what real change there has been. Among my mob the coloured people there are resignation and despair. There is a curse on coloured people, they say. As my uncle said over breakfast, "During the bad old days of apartheid, the coloureds were too black to get jobs and now they are too white to get what few jobs are left after the good ones have been given to blacks."