Darren Gorton had a brilliant idea. He wanted to rally bloggers to write a book, altogether, all at once and all online. Some of us agreed. Here’s the list so far:
- Eve Dmochowska [read more about Eve here]
- Duncan Drennan [read more about Duncan here]
- Paul Jacobson [read more about Paul here]
- Melissa Attree [read more about Melissa here]
- Nic Haralambous [read more about Nic here]
- Saul Kropman [read more about Saul here]
- Justin Hartman [read more about Justin here]
I think the idea is a great one with loads of potential. I also believe that one of the things that needs to happen is user involvement. This is imperative to the success of the book. We need people to read and interact with this book (if I am getting this all right).
My part according to Darren is thus:
I thought, based on your writing and projects, that you would be perfect to write about contributing positively to the country’s development and growth in a tough, negative social climate, and the importance of each individual’s contribution. If you think that needs adjustment in any way, let me know, but it’s the main topic that fits into the overall theme and should complement the other topics.
So I want to know what you think I should write. Obviously not verbatin, but give me an idea, a thought, a topic or anything that you think is relevant. I want to know about the importance of the individuals contribution to a negative climate of a positive country. Give me your feedback.
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Popularity: 5% [?]
May 15th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
Awesome idea… Fantasy / Sci Fi…
Or – take a chance and go for non-fiction. Might actually end up being fairly interesting. These things always hang on the “amount” of text that each blogger writes. They’ve got a book on audible.com written by top thriller writers from the states. They wrote a chapter each with the main idea guy writing the first and last chapter. apparently – it’s good.
May 15th, 2008 at 9:24 pm
Well, whatever you do – don’t write ten reasons why you stayed in SA, okay?
How about the economy for dummies in SA?
May 16th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
Hey Nic, way to go on the crowd-sourcing – I see you’re taking it to a totally new level
Nice approach though, hope you get some decent feedback. Thanks for mentioning the blook here, looking forward to reading your masterpiece!
May 16th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
Hey Nic, I wrote the following article for my magazine ahead of freedom day, I’m not sure whether it would be of any use to you. While its past its sell-by date now, I feel very strongly that as South Africans we need to develop a stronger communal sense of needing to move forward, with a clear picture of where it is that we want to go. And it illustrates what i mean when I make the suggestion that you contribute to the book by perhaps painting a picture of where we ought to be going as a nation, as someone who seems very in touch with the multiple aspect that it comprises, and why we should all get on board.
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Next week, Monday, Thursday and Friday will all public holidays, and as much as a two day working week offers us greatly appreciated relief from the toils of our labour, the days have significance which is often not noted by anyone other than SABC 3 continuity presenters. Of these holidays, perhaps the most noteworthy Freedom Day, the day on which we remember our first democratic election. In a time when load shedding is giving new meaning to the term “Darkest Africa”, petrol prices, rates hikes and inflation are burning holes in pockets, and the voice of Mr Mbeki narrating our future in the “Alive with Possibility” ad campaign elicits more cynical snorts than it stirs sentimental notions of national pride, perhaps, this year more than any other we should be reflecting on what Freedom Day means to us, other than a chance to slap on some sunscreen and head to the beach.
I recently had the opportunity to eat lunch in the company of the esteemed Breyten Breytenbach when he visited Durban as part of the Time of the Writer festival. He is involved in a project called “Imagine Africa”, which seeks to inspire people to imagine a future for Africa in the same way as they did during struggle periods, to see themselves as part of a movement. He is a person who commands attention when he speaks, and although he has been criticised for perhaps being rooted too deeply in the kind of revolutionary attitudes that are no longer relevant in this country in 2008, is convincing in advocating a revisualisation of what it is that we’d like this country to be.
A child of the eighties, I grew up in that utopian time of the “Rainbow Nation”. In primary school, I represented the colour yellow as a butterfly in our school play “The Rainbow Children”, which was meant to instil within us and our surrounding community values of equality, diversity and confidence for the path that lay ahead of us as the youth of an equally young nation. As horribly contrived as all of this was, I do find myself longing for this time of unfaltering positivity in the same way as I’m beginning to long for my coinciding childhood, being surrounded increasingly by frowns and grumbles and people looking to our Northern neighbours to foretell our future.
Although, perhaps, even a small measure of realistic foresight might have been quite valuable to the nation over the last 14 years, especially with regard to “The Darkness” (the term I now use to describe the power crisis in general), I feel that sometimes a little childish optimism is both necessary for the sanity of the general population, particularly in times when the height of the hurdles in front of us has made itself blaringly obvious, as well as absolutely indispensable to finding the motivation to jump over them.
Freedom day should help us to return briefly to that moment of jubilation in the mid nineties, when living in this country was still commonly regarded as something to celebrate, and remind us that in amongst the corruption, incompetence and the many other kinks still to be worked out in our young country, that the democracy we’re celebrating is still very much in place (something that can’t be said about Zimbabawe, and why we can’t be compared.) That’s because we are realising that as hard-won as our freedom was, we’re not there yet. We’re still fighting for it.
John Pilger said this to graduating students at Rhodes University recently:
Oscar Wilde wrote: “Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue.” I read the other day that the South African police calculated that the number of protests across the country had doubled in just two years to more than 10 000 every year. That may be the highest rate of dissent in the world. That’s something to be proud of — just as the Freedom Charter remains something to be proud of.
Let me remind you how it begins: “We, the people of South Africa, declare that our country belongs to everyone …” And that, as Mandela once said, was the “unbreakable promise”.
South Africans always have, and hopefully always will be, fighters, and with the failures we’ve experienced over the last 14 years, instead of shaking our heads and packing our bags, on this Freedom Day we need to remind ourselves of this and use what we’ve learned to fight with all our hearts for that beautiful picture we had in our minds in 1994.