Johannesburg, SOUTH AFRICA - The situation is totally absurd. I'm seated in a cubicle looking at a man, black like me, standing, a pink dildo attached to his waist jiggling like a gigolo. I smile because I'm about to laugh and don't want to. He's talking. I don't remember what exactly he was saying but whatever it was, he delivered it in such an earnest tone, it only made me want to laugh more. He was a medical assistant, a fresh one too it seemed judging from his earnesty. I was a patient. At the Men's Clinic.

I'm sitting on a bed with a prostitute, Violet, in a dingy room in Joburg. The mattress is bare as is she below the waist. She's holding my penis in her hand, pumping her arm, up, down, up, down. "It's not standing," she says.

I don't look down. Instead I reach out for her bare waist.

"Don't touch me, I'm not your wife."

Her words dispel any hope I may have had that anything was going to happen that afternoon. ... READ MORE

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X.N. IRAKI EXHORTS ACADEMICS TO SEEK WEALTH & POWER:

Jackson, Mississippi, USA -?Two major forces smoked academics out of their Ivory Tower in the US. The first force was the internet revolution, which a cademics played a big role in commercializing. Some got burned when the bubble burst, not unexpected in any investment. Contrary to the popular belief, this revolution showed that academics can respond to incentives. The belief that academics are only fascinated by ideas soon found a ready competitor, money and wealth.

The next force is biotechnology. This one has not yet played itself out, we are not sure who will be the winners and losers. California, has an idea; as other states dither over [the] ethics of stem cell research, she has already committed three billion dollars into this area of research, deemed to be the next frontier in medicine. Imagine being able to "grow" your own heart instead of waiting for a donor. Even the US House of Representatives and the Senate are rethinking [their approach to biotechnology issues].

The US is not very famous for missing opportunities to make money. Few people in academics or elsewhere can deny that stem cell research is the next long wave. And with Koreans ahead in the cloning game, scientists and entrepreneurs in the USA [are taking notice.]

But there is another area where academics have been flexing their muscles, s ilently, away from the prickly eyes of the public. It is in the rooms of the boards of directors. A quick sample finds that the boards of Proctor and Gamble and Sprint have a professor from Yale; an MIT professor sits on boards of Citigroup and IBM; Harvard professors sit on the boards of Merck, Intel and Microsoft. Stanford professors sit on the boards of Exxon Mobil and Google. Princeton dons sit on the boards of McDonalds and Merck. The President Emeritus of the University of Michigan sits on the board of Ford Motor Company. A don from Oxford sits on the board of Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC). ... READ MORE


MPUTHUMI NTABENI REMEMBERS:

Queenstown, SOUTH AFRICA -

Our hearts build precious shrines for the ashes of our dead hopes -- Bertrand Russell

I'm sitting before my computer, blank and empty, looking through the window to the wind blowing the fallen leaves. It's autumn on the Southern tip of Africa. Fall, as Americans call it, gives me an idea of being naked against the elements.

From my computer Leonard Cohen is softly serenading a song, 'Chelsea Hotel', which he said he wrote at a bar in a Polynesian restaurant in Miami in 1971 and finished in Asmara, Ethiopia, just before the throne wa s overturned. Asmara now is part of Eritrea and its dispute goes on with Ethiopia.

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
you were famous your heart was a legend
you told me again you preferred handsome men
but for me you would make an exception.

My heart rasps with rustling leaves. My mind travels back about a decade. A woman friend from varsity days is visiting, stopping over to say "Hi "on her way to a water project eighty kilometres from PE (Port Elizabeth) where I'm residing. Little did I know her phreatic studies would start in my apartment when I decided she could stay with my girlfriend and I instead of some tent in some God-forsaken forest.

She became friendly, too friendly as it turned out, with my girlfriend. My girlfriend reciprocated her attention, started telling her personal stories that were ostensibly told only to me. The versions she gave my friend were rich with artistic inventions. She made more effort to please her. Whenever I said something it was compared and ridiculed against our visitor's. This humiliated and reduced my stature. Afterdinner time was ritually spent in the visitor's room holding hands and laughing out loud, talking about muddleheaded-hand me down Dalai Alami's maxims and such. I felt irrelevant. ... READ MORE