Skip to main content

Dear Ms Baloyi,

“Matumi”
P.O.Box76
Schagen 1207

9 November 1998



Dear Ms Baloyi,

I’m sorry we weren’t able to meet, as a follow up to your phone call, but I do hope that we can do so before too long. Tony and I made a visit to the office, and made contact with Obed, and I hope that he’ll keep us in touch with events and meetings. As we told him, we’d like to transfer our ANC membership from Yeoville to Schagen.

I’m writing this letter because both Tony and I will be away for the next two months, until about 12 January (though I will be back at home from 8th to 21st December) and I want to keep in touch. Obed told us that you and he were keen to develop community activities in Schagen, and I’d like to contribute where and how I can. Mary Turok may have told you that I’ve been working for the International Labour Organisation these last 15 years or so (though I’m now semi-retired), and my special interest and expertise is in women’s employment and self-employment, and in community development generally. I’m sure there’s a lot of scope for that sort of work around here! I’ve also been involved with the ANC Women’s League over the years (in exile, not in SA). Do you know Aggie Msimang? She’s urging me to get back in, but I’d much rather work at the local, community level, and not specifically for the Women’s League.

It seems we’ve lost the battle as far as the post office is concerned. I wonder what will happen to the actual building? That corner isn’t very savoury at the moment, particularly Fridays and Saturdays when there are people hanging around the bottle store getting very drunk! That’ll get worse now; I suppose. Clearly that should be the location for the police station Obed was saying you were hoping could be established!

I’ll try to drop in to the office in mid-December, when I’m back home for a couple of weeks.

With very best wishes

Eve Hall

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Guardian: Kate Harding's reactionary censorious blog on CiF

It should go without saying... ....that we condemn the scummy prat who called Liskula Cohen : "a psychotic, lying, whoring ... skank" But I disagree with Kate Harding , (in my view a pseudo blogger), posting her blog in the Guardian attacking bloggers. It's a case of set a thief to catch a thief. The mainstream media is irritated by bloggers because they steal its thunder and so they comission people like Kate Harding , people with nothing to say for themselves, apparently, other than that they are feminists, to attack bloggers. I'm black. So I can legitimately attack "angry white old men". I'm a feminist, so I have carte blanche to call all anonymous bloggers "prats." Because yes, that is her erudite response to bloggers. No I don't say that the blogging medium can't be used to attack progressives in whatever context. Of course it can. But to applaud the censorship of a blogger by a billion dollar corporate like Google, and moreov...

The Guardian books bloggers' poetry anthology

There more to composing poetry online than this. ..isn't there? I don't really like conventional poetry of knowing. I love the poetry of words coming into being. The Guardian is going to publish a printable book online with our poems in it and the Irish poet, Billy Mills is getting it together with Sarah Crown, the literary editor. Good for them. Let's also remember that Carol Rumens got the ball rolling. Does Des feature in this anthology? Taboo-busting Steve Augustine decided not to join in. So what are we left with? In the anthology we will be left with a colourful swatch of well-meant, undeniably conventional, occasionally clever, verses - some of them. But there could be, there should be and there is a lot more to on-line poetry than this. Than agile monkeys, koalas and sad sloths climbing up word trees. Perhaps we should focus in on translation, because in translation there is a looseness of form and a dynamism such as, it seems, we can't easily encounter in our...

Guardian books blog fringe: Norman Mailer

FLASHING THE GUARDIAN -- A BOOKS BLOGGERS' REBELLION :  The unheroic censor with a death wish Part 1: In which Norman Mailer stars in an experiment in search engine optimisation By ACCIACCATURE 3 February 2009 When Norman Mailer died in 2007, informed opinion – in the blogosphere, people who had read at least two of his books – was split. The army of readers who saw him as one of the most despicable misogynists writing fiction in the 20th century was perfectly matched by warriors on the other side, who raged that the label wasn’t just unwarranted but tantamount to heinous calumny. Before commenters returned to bitching-as-usual, tempers were lost on literary sites all over the net in debating temperatures high enough to bring to mind tiles burning off space shuttles re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. After I'd agreed to a spontaneous suggestion by our good friend Sean Murray -- a pioneer and stalwart of the comments section of The Guardian’s books blog – that we re-...