BECOME A SPONSOR OF THE WORLD'S MAGAZINE. WHY should you advertise here? We'll tell you. VETERAN? Need to know how to access more of your benefits? Need help buying a home for your family? These folks can help: VA LOAN INFORMATION and VETERANS' MORTGAGES KATRINA & THE LOST CITY OF NEW ORLEANS by Rod Amis New Orleans is the Lost City of America. New Orleans has disappeared as surely as the lost city of Atlantis or the lost city of Pompeii, which former mayor Marc Morial and Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA.) have compared us to in their statements. That New Orleans, the New Orleans I mean to tell you about, that will never, ever, exist again--that city of love, lust, death and sex--will never exist again. A portion of the proceeds of this book will go to the New Orleans Hospitality Workers Fund. The cooks, servers and restaurant workers of New Orleans have provided fabulous times and memories for millions. Now we must remember them in their time of need. Buy the book or get a downloadable PDF Copy now! To order on Amazon.com, go here! AFRICA FRESH! New Voices from the First Continent An anthology of African writing only featured on the Internet until now, this book features the collected works of writers for the G21 AFRICA section of G21.net. The eight writers represented here are from around the continent and present an exciting look at cutting-edge fiction and reporting from the first continent today. Buy the book or get a downloadable PDF copy now!

by Mphuthumi Ntabeni

G21 Staff Writer

To read this article in Deutsch, Francaise, Italiano, Portuguese, Espanol, Korean, Japanese, Dutch, Greek, Chinese and Russian, copy and paste the complete URL ("http://www.g21.net/africa109.html") and enter it in the box after you click through.

an oasis for the thoughtful

G21 #431: YOUR NEWS PARTY AMERICAN DREAMS DAY ONE G21 AFRICA G21 ASIA G21 BOTTOM 10 OF 2005 JOIN OUR MAILING LIST. It contains more jokes than not. G21 E-MAIL NEWSLETTER HOT LINKS IRISH EYES NEW YORK STATE RECOMMENDED DAILY REQUIREMENT RECOMMENDED DAILY REQUIREMENT ARCHIVES SMOKE & MIRRORS VOX POPULI LAST WEEK's EDITION MEET THE G-CREW! These are the people behind this jam-band every week. HOME TABLE OF CONTENTS & BACK ISSUES BECOME A SPONSOR OF THE WORLD'S MAGAZINE. WHY should you advertise here? We'll tell you. We know you're lazy. Here's a button for a quick translation of this page. Just click on the flag for your country. You're welcome! OR TRY THIS GOOGLE TRANSLATION SERVICE.

MY COLOURS AT THE MAST - Mphuthumi Ntabeni uses an e-mailed description of himself by a friend as a starting point for self-evaluation, an affirmation of his view of "Africanness" and a statement of his political and religious beliefs.

Mphuthumi Ntabeni

East London, SOUTH AFRICA - I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. -- Shakespeare ("Hamlet")

A friend recently sent me a copy of an email in which another afriend described me to him. This is an excerpt:

Mpush is not your typical African thirty-something. He's autodidactic, bookish, personable, good-humoured, and articulate. His strengths are of an attentive observer and an even better listener. His writings are often that of a sort of the outcast, an oral historian of despised, abused, or otherwise marginal populations. He's adverse, perhaps too adverse sometimes, to the murkiness, ambiguity and the drift that so bedevils our relativistic age. He has a liberal religious mind that is profoundly Catholic, which might seem like a contradiction in terms, but it is not. Somehow all these things co-exist in his person. He craves understanding through contact, seeking out encounters that provide the ground to test his ethics. He scorns judgments that are based on moral abstractions without the corroboration of experience ...

'Not your typical African?' I enquired, and was told this because of 'my more than average knowledge of Western intellectual culture'. I like to think that my more than average contact with Western culture has made me more African, acutely aware of my own Africanness. I may admire Western intellectualism but I see myself as a township lad. It is the township streets that define me more than anything else though I wouldn't say I'm a full-bore pantsula (streetwise-township-smart-ass) or something.

I regard liberalism as far too narrowly Philistine and materialist to account for the intimations of transcendence, which is one of my major interests. I'm traditional, but that does mean I treat tradition as static heritage that must limit creative inquiry. I believe the past and the future are a dimension of the present. I admire the largely introspective culture in liberalism but feel this excellence has been at the expense of individuals loosing organic relation with their communities.

I've been lucky enough to be born close to the uncontrollability and unpredictability of the African continent; her struggles run through my veins. Like most Africans, this has predisposed me to religious consciousness and the fusion of one's identity with the collective.

I try to avoid, sometimes, narrow African tribalism while detesting the bland universalism of liberalism. I make every effort possible to ground myself in my own tradition while being open to valuable influences of other cultures. I believe it possible, by retrieving the spiritual heritage of our traditions, to come up with assimilated creative solutions of our common humanity.

I like to watch and listen to people, with the absorption of a psychologist, the opportunism of a collector and the affection of a humanist. I distrust the easily raised emotions of ill-informed sectarianism, abhor fundamentalism in anything, especially religion. I'm intensely attracted to concision and precision. I respect affable manners, simple living, and the culture of the mind.

I love,\ what's fast becoming only an idea in the American creed, the noble idea of equality. In my naive youth, I thought it realisable in the U.S.A. I saw in the American creed the idea that we can all grow up to be noble by acknowledging the virtue of aristocratic greatness while reconciling it with equality of all men. I thought America's major problem was only finding a way of spiritualising the overwhelming scramble for material success. I was very, very wrong.

I've had a rude awakenings concerning America's predilection for using its economic wealth as an atomising, demoralising force for the less successful in material wealth. I detest the way the American government uses the deadening forces of economic and cultural hegemony for the imperial ends of the New American Project.

I've learnt to loath the American government manner of highjacking high ideals (human rights, liberation, democracy, relief of suffering and so on) for non-ideal ends like insatiable profit making. My distrust fell over to the general American public when they decided to reward the Bush II administration for a disastrous war launched and conducted under deceitful pretences.

I love the strength of secularism in governments because it gives an idea of neutrality on moral issues. I love the impact of a progressive economy, mobility and technology on identity and social interaction when it promotes human freedom. But I despise the manner by which contemporary culture has hijacked spiritual language for the promotion of consumerism.

I believe there's a crisis of transmission in the cultures of our age as a whole, demonstrated by numerous current meanings and misunderstandings, which give opportunists, like fundamentalists, an opportunity to play on people's confusion.? I often notice people try to escape the effort of conscience-growth by transforming their preferences or repugnance to moral shocks and call that religion. That's not how I define religion.

Religion to me is the collective ability of a faith-sharing group reaching out to the incomprehensible mystery that is the indestructible base of our being. Hence religion uses rituals, symbols (which words like God and Allah are part of) to make or tame the incomprehensibility of the mystery. I am extremely attracted to faiths that believes the ultimate essence of this mystery to be LOVE.

I do not believe that faith will inevitably be pushed to the margins by our secular world. I strongly believe religion, with all its faults, is capable of refreshing what is valuable in cultures, and to inspire progress. I believe religion, at is best, is the best creative force of culture; at it's worst, it can destroy the very ideals it espouses. I believe all religion needs, in our era, is to find proper, relevant language. And I believe in the Nicene Creed (the faith of the Roman Catholic Church).