I am a scholar, writer and photographer from South Africa, resident in the United States since 1998. I teach International Relations at Elon University. Before completing a PhD in 2008, I worked in national and international politics; I am fairly sure this gives me some insights into policy-making and "real world" experience - whatever that may mean.  Nonetheless, after an extended period as a journalist and 26 months in the first post-apartheid government, I returned to the London School of Economics in 1997 where I completed a Master's degree in International Political Economy. In 1999 I was posted in the  Office of the Chief Economist of the World Bank... after which I returned to graduate school at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Following the defence of my thesis - an explanatory critique of Neo-Classical Economics as the basis of global capitalist governance - I was awarded a doctorate in October 2008.

I left South Africa for London in 1997, to return to the London School of Economics where I completed a Master's degree in International Political Economy, before returning to graduate school to do a doctorate at the University of Wales, Aberystywth. My doctoral dissertation was an explanatory critique of Neo-Classical Economics as the basis of global capitalist governance.

Journalism

In a previous incarnation I worked as a journalist; at various times I worked as a sub-editor, reporter and photojournalist. The last position I held was the national political correspondent for Sowetan, at the time the biggest newspaper in the country. In 1990, on behalf of Sowetan, I became the first correspondent from a black newspaper in South Africa to be accredited to the Parliamentary Press Gallery.

I worked as a journalist in South Africa during the darkest period of the region's politics. During this period I met some fine people; the man in the middle was not one of them.... Chester Crocker was a right-winger, Ronald Reagan's envoy in Africa, and one of the people who were directly responsible for Washington's funding of more than two-decades of war in Angola. On his left is my former editor, Aggrey Klaaste. At Sowetan I wrote mainly current affairs, but during my time on the paper I broke some important stories, such as  story of a slave trade involving teenage refugees from the civil war in Mozambique who were sold to white farmers in South Africa. The picture, below, is the front page of the Sowetan on the day we published the story.

Between 1980 and 1995 my work appeared in most South African newspapers, including The Star, The Argus, The Cape Times, the Sunday Times, the Sunday Express, the Sunday Tribune and the Rand Daily Mail. I am also fortunate to have been associated with the Weekly Mail (now the Mail & Guardian) from the earliest days of its inception. Immediately below are some of the pages that carried my photographic work.

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The next front page has a picture of Bishop Tutu saving a man from a group of incensed ant-apartheid protesters; the man was suspected of collaborating with the repressive regime in Pretoria.

For a brief period, six months or so, I worked on The Citizen as a sub-editor - a story I should tell, but later. I was also a regular analyst and commentator for the BBC World Service, less regularly for Radio Blue Danube, which is now defunct (for more information, see this link) and the Breakfast Club of Newstalk93 in Kingston Jamaica. For about 10 years I was the Southern African correspondent for the New Straits Times of Malaysia.

The First Post-apartheid South African Government

I left journalism in June 1995 to take a position in the office of Trevor Manuel in the first post-apartheid government of South Africa. My reasons for leaving were two-fold; in the first instance I felt at the time that I was (personally) becoming over-exposed. The fact of the matter is that journalism was never about me, it was about writing and about responding to injustice. While there is some truth in the Orwellian aphorism that we write out of “sheer egotism” or that we were motivated by a “desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death,” I started working as a journalist primarily out of a sense of (as Orwell also wrote), " a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice."* In the second instance, I considered the move to government as an extension, as it were, of my commitment to a just and democratic society – that which we fought for during the apartheid years. Two years later I left the government.

The World Bank

In part by accident, in part by circumstance I would, later, reprise the role I played for Trevor Manuel in the office of Joseph Stiglitz, the Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank. At the Bank I was overpaid, under-used and felt terribly uncomfortable for 28 months. Besides serious problems I have always had with World Bank policies in the developing world, something which, it should be said in fairness, Stiglitz himself had, I encountered people in the organisation whose deeds and ways I found deeply disturbing. For one, the pukkah careerists at the World Bank were invariably from the developing world. Perhaps more seriously, I found it troubling, also, that Nobel Prize Laureates could be as cold and callous as saying: "If we improved the living conditions of slum dwellers they would not be able to continue living there; they would not afford it and have to move on and create new slums. Of course, that statement does not leave this room." A remark which was followed by chuckles, chortles and grinning and guffawing. Perhaps it was because they were economists that they could rationalise such things away; the ones who seemed most amused were all white, male and citizens of the United States and European - with vacuous encomia from the Janissaries in retinue.... When all is said and done, I consider my having worked for the World Bank as a failure on my part; the economists in this institution have helped reproduce much of the poverty and misery that was so intrinsic to the iniquities of European colonialism in Africa. This brings me to my scholarly and intellectual interests.

Academia

I left the World Bank in May 2001 and returned, for the third time, to graduate studies in Britain, this time to do a PhD in International Political Economy at the University of Aberystwyth. Rather fortuitously I ended up as a Visiting Scholar at the University of South Carolina in October 2005.

My primary interests as a scholar is in inequality; especially the inequality and injustice that is so part of capitalism. I find it quite ironic that liberal capitalists show the same blind faith to Adam Smith's ideas as do religious fundamentalists to their scriptures - especially since Smith was rather candid about the iniquitousness of capitalism's division of labour. This is clear in the following passage from Book V of his Wealth of Nations:

In the progress of the division of labour… the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.

A secondary interest, closely related to inequality, is dominance and the unspeakable violence that has been applied to societies in Africa, Asia and Latin America by European expansion into these regions since the earliest days of imperialism and adventurism and the expansion of capitalism, that which the British historian, JM Roberts described as Europe's "assault on the world". In particular, I am interested in the ways in which this assault on people in Africa, Asia and the Americas have been justified. Indeed, possessed by a self-image refracted through a belief in their own "manifest destiny," settler colonialists in North America waged bloody and brutal campaigns of expansion and violence against indigenous people. In North America these campaigns were justified as the most "righteous of all wars" by US President Theodore Roosevelt, because they were against people whom the settlers considered to be "savages" standing in the way of settler colonial expansion.

You may have been directed here from my photography page, in which case you will know that I am also a photographer. Over the very short period I worked as a photo-journalist I did a few interesting projects; nothing really outstanding. Sometime in the mid-2000s I began to take photography seriously again, but faced the daunting task of converting to digital technology. It didn't help, also, that I became interested in photography again while I was a doctoral student. So, time and money constraints meant that the transition has been slow.

The title of my main blog is l’engagé. This phrase is drawn, in this particular case, from the French intellectual tradition whereby one chooses to commit oneself to a cause and engage it actively as a scholar, a writer and an activist. I chose the phrase purely on the basis that the first and most formative intellectual influence(s) in my life were the ideas and work of Jean Paul Sartre (among others). In this sense the engagé is no different from the role of the writer envisaged by George Orwell, who explained that he always wanted to write and turn political writing into an art.

* This passage by Orwell was taken from, Orwell: The Collection of Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume 1 An Age Like This (1982) Penguin, New York, p 28