> Steve Perry wrote:
>
> >well, as they say--shit flows downhill. and we are
> >accustomed to ours winding up a very great distance
> >from us.
>
> There's a South African restaurant in the Fort Greene neighborhood of
> Brooklyn that has a poster from the SA Department of the Environment
> on the door. The poster is a cartoonish view of a poor township, with
> all kinds of advice on how to keep things reasonably clean and
> healthful. Their shit seems not to wind up a very great distance from
> them at all.
No, indeed not. South Africa's townships are a great place for re-learning sensibilities. For example, the shopping centre where I sell papers every now and again has a whole range of stalls located next to it. My particular nemesis is the one which sells sheeps heads and entrails, which invairably sets up shop right in front of where I'm standing. In shackland, where there is no plumbing, and what toilers exist are generally poor quality and inadaquate, wastes of all kinds mix with blood from improvised slaughterhouses, to form a potent brew whose presence cannot be ignored.
I wonder what impact that D of E poster made - the D of E often seem to be beaurocrats from another planet, paternalistic Afrikaans schoolmarms offering Western advice for township dwellers. They always seem a bit uptight (or should I say anal?). Around this contradiction, much in South Africa revolves.
Peter -- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844