Tuesday, October 29, 2013

It's Tax Season and I am Being Audited !!!


Comment: So they audited me today.  Because they can.  

And now they want receipts or I will have to pay them more over the too much I am already paying because they have laws and guns and jails to back up the legislated thievery.

But I suspect you know all about the almighty state and its evil and corrupt grip on your hard earned moolah.

I so hate being grown up.  Too many damn headaches, no.

Onward!

PS. My life is not all doom and gloom though.

Did I tell you that I won the President's award for the best academic paper at the South African Museum Association's (SAMA) conference last week and Friday?

Of course I did.  Probably at least twice - or 'two times' like they say in the empire.

But just in case hey ... I want to be sure all three of you are keeping tabs on my fabulous 'career' in the confines of the delusional cesspool where I am being audited.
Cartoon Credit

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Peace Be Upon You Ridwaan,

I read you blog ever so often.

Please share the details of the academic paper or perhaps the web link.

Regards, Bash

P.S. Moulana Jeena 'runs' an Islamic museum in one of the old Council buildings in Kimberley

Ridwan said...

WSLM Bash:

Great to hear from you. Thank you for reading here.

I know Moulana Jeena but did not know about the Islamic museum. Very interesting nonetheless.

My paper at the SAMA conference was entitled "The Politics of Memory and the place of museums in post-apartheid South Africa".

The paper will be published by SAMA as part of the conference proceedings. Not sure if it will be available online but I will check with the conference organizer and get back.

If you send me an email address to laher@iname.com I can share the paper with you once it is published.

This is the abstract for the article:

On August 12, 2012, President Jacob Zuma called for the decolonisation and urgent transformation of museums in South Africa. His remarks came during a speech at the reburial of Klaas and Trooi Pienaar in Kuruman. The occasion marked the intersection of memory as struggle and the post-apartheid directive to confront South Africa’s past. Klaas and Trooi Pienaar are Khoisan descendants whose bodies were removed from their graves and taken to Vienna by Austrian scientist Rudolph Poch in 1909. The science that Rudolph Poch advocated sought to advance the dubious notions of race and racial hierarchy common in that period. President Zuma used the occasion to call for a critical examination of the legacy of race as science and the relationship that contemporary museums have to that thinking. The President warned that no South African should be considered a “colonial object” and that museums must foster “heritage and expertise which respect all peoples and cultures.” It was a decisive comment that raises a host of questions about the content and manner of transformation in the museum sector. This paper aims to contribute to a conversation about the role of apartheid memory and its representation in museums. It is couched in Postcolonial Theory and uses a narrative methodology. A key concern is on how to make the past known as a means of advancing the democratic values of accountability, inclusion, equality, and justice. In a nation-state still struggling to redefine itself these values are mostly aspirational and, consequently, it raises the very difficult question of how to balance transformation with political directives. This brings the analyses to a final key concern and that is the role of the state and its influence on the politics of memory in museums.