MICHAEL O. ALLEN

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Snapshots of Nation at its Birth

By Homepage, New York Daily News, South Africa: The Freedom VoteNo Comments

By GENE MUSTAIN and MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writers | Sunday, May 1, 1994

JOHANNESBURG—Not every little story got told in the telling of the story of South Africa’s epic election this past month. But not every little story got told.

  • In the plush Carlton Hotel, President-to-be Nelson Mandela was telling the nation how it had to get a handle on its crime problem. Two blocks away, in a spartan Methodist Church, friends were mourning Ruby N’Kosi.

Ten days ago, she was murdered in her home by four young black youths she caught trying to steal her stereo. She was 60 years old, and she and her husband had spent their lives fighting apartheid.

“The minister told us how tragic it was that just as she was about to realize her dreams and hopes and vote for the first time, she had to come across these young thugs,” said a friend, Themba Ntshalintshali. Read More

April 11, 2009
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Mandela, ANC Heading for Solid Win in Election

By Homepage, New York Daily News, South Africa: The Freedom VoteNo Comments

By GENE MUSTAIN and MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writers | Monday, May 2, 1994

JOHANNESBURG—Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress was headed for victory yesterday with a 54.7% share of the vote so far in South Africa’s national election.
Despite slow and chaotic vote counting, the ANC and its president, Mandela, appeared headed for a convincing, yet mildly disappointing victory in seven of South Africa’s nine new provinces.
About 23 million ballots were cast in the nation’s first all-race election last week.
With only about 21% of the vote counted, ANC spokesmen were reluctant to claim victory. But they projected that the party would receive 54% to 58% of the vote—about 20% more than former President F.W. de Klerk’s National Party.
The strong showing by the National Party, however, suggests a post-apartheid power structure similar to the Mandela-de Klerk team that led the transition to democracy.
“In spite of the proportional voting system, we are headed for a two-party system,” Sampie Terreblance, referring to the allocation of parliament and cabinet seats according to each party’s vote total.
Read More

April 10, 2009
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BRIGHT NEW DAY IN SOUTH AFRICA: We’re Also Set Free by Vote, Whites Say

By Homepage, New York Daily News, South Africa: The Freedom VoteNo Comments

By GENE MUSTAIN and MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writers | Tuesday, May 3, 1994

JOHANNESBURG—After thinking about it for three decades, 74-year-old Arthur Holland decided to become a South African citizen yesterday.
“My conscience won’t bother me anymore,” said the semi-retired white businessman, who came here with the British army and never left.
“This has been my home and life, but I could never bring myself to becoming a citizen until now,” he added, a few hours before 76-year-old Nelson Mandela accepted the responsibility of leading the new South Africa.
The results of the nation’s first all-race election show that the overwhelming majority of whites support the transition to a nonracial democracy and have undergone the same remarkable transformation of spirit as F. W. de Klerk, the leader of the former masters of apartheid, the National Party.
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April 9, 2009
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FREE AT LAST_Jubilant Mandela Recalls King

By Homepage, New York Daily News, South Africa: The Freedom VoteNo Comments

By GENE MUSTAIN and MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writers | Tuesday, May 3, 1994

JOHANNESBURG—Invoking the epic cry of another great liberation struggle, Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress proclaimed South Africa “Free at last.”
With only about half the ballots counted and the conclusion foregone, they claimed victory in the nation’s founding election, then vowed to roll up their sleeves immediately and begin improving the lots of millions of impoverished blacks.
“This is a joyous night for the human spirit, you have ended apartheid,” Mandela told a joyous throng of supporters at a downtown hotel. “Now is the time for all South Africans to join together to celebrate the birth of democracy.”
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April 8, 2009
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Musings, strange

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Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes

A Facebook friend, John Burroughs, posted this searing Langston Hughes poem today:

Song for a Dark Girl

Way Down South in Dixie
(Break the heart of me)
They hung my black young lover
To a cross roads tree.

Way Down South in Dixie
(Bruised body high in air)
I asked the white Lord Jesus
What was the use of prayer.

Way Down South in Dixie
(Break the heart of me)
Love is a naked shadow
On a gnarled and naked tree.

Which brings to mind Billie Holiday’s hearbreaking song:

Billie Holiday, 1949

Billie Holiday, 1949

Strange Fruit

Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

I would put a Youtube video of the song up except those links, over time, are not that reliable.

UPDATE: Alright, here’s the Youtube video. If it doesn’t play, doubleclick on the video to go to Youtube, then refresh until it plays:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4ZyuULy9zs[/youtube]

April 8, 2009
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INCREDIBLE ROAD TAKES HIM HOME: Mandela Has Only Begun to be Great

By Homepage, New York Daily News, South Africa: The Freedom VoteNo Comments

By GENE MUSTAIN and MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writers | Tuesday, May 3, 1994

JOHANNESBURG—This day was never supposed to come.
Nelson Mandela was never supposed to return from life imprisonment to divert South Africa from the ruinous path apartheid has laid for its peoples.
And blacks in this country were never supposed to vote in an election. Hendrik Verwoerd—one of architects of the apartheid system—guaranteed these things. Yesterday, he was proven spectacularly wrong, and Mandela was the one proven right.
He spoke from the heart and danced like a boy. It was a victorious day for all South Africans, he proclaimed, ever the unifier. “The people have won.”
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April 7, 2009
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Men’s laws for women’s bodies

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Zina Saunders did this piece to accompany an article in The Nation magazine. Ordinarily, it would carry her byline but I do not want attribute to her my own thoughts on this issue. My thoughts, such as they are, are unformed and unsophisticated, incoherent even. Try this:

Isn’t it time we men stop manifesting our anxieties about our mothers’, daughters’, wives’, and sisters’ sexuality by passing laws to govern what they can and cannot do with their own bodies, their own lives?

I don’t have an answer. I just know that man’s laws and decrees, especially when they try to govern what women do with their bodies, wreck lives instead.

April 7, 2009
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It’s a New Day for S. African Women

By Homepage, New York Daily News, South Africa: The Freedom VoteNo Comments

By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer | Sunday, May 8, 1994

JOHANNESBURG—Zodwa Tshabalala, her left leg shattered at the knee, crawled through an open gate as neighbors who heard her screaming clustered around her.
“I’ll kill you if you are not gone by the time I come back,” her fiancé told her before he drove away.
Thembi, the fiancé, spent this March afternoon battering her, punching her face, kicking her prone, injured body. He then threw her and their eight-month-old daughter out of the home the couple bought when they decided to marry months earlier.
It has been two months since the attack.
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April 6, 2009
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