A meme is an infectious chunk of information or prejudice that tells people what to think about subjects which they do not have the time, inclination or courage to weigh up for themselves.  You can tell that a meme has become particularly virulent when it shows up as media cliché.  Former president Thabo Mbeki, for example, is now memetically sealed as an aloof, pipe-smoking intellectual who coddled Robert Mugabe and whose apostasy on AIDS sent hundreds of thousands to a needlessly premature death. Read the full article

Judge Shira Scheindlin of the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York has spared President-soon-to-be-elect Jacob Zuma some trouble. She will not be seeking his opinion on the six-year-old lawsuits now before her which rely on the only-in-America Alien Tort Claims Act to extract reparations for apartheid from such household names as Daimler, IBM and General Motors. Read the full article

The ANC succession battle and the election have heaped so much slime on Jacob Zuma that the real man is hard to see. What I saw in the 90’s was a genuine conciliator with very traditional values. Some of those values, especially those that concern the status and treatment of women, are frightful but reflect where he’s from. In SA, the really revolutionary part of the ANC’s creed was, and is, non-sexism. Other aspects of the old ways, such as a leadership philosophy that emphasises the importance of listening to everyone’s opinion and seeking consensus, are more appealing and healthy. Read the full article

The government’s explanation for denying a visa to the Dalai Lama evolved.  Such evolution generally betokens discomfort. A fair conclusion is that this was a cup the ruling party would prefer to have had taken from its lips. It drank, but seemingly without joy, protesting a little too much that the decision to do so was its own. Read the full article

Buy a house, get a green card? Offering permanent US residence to any immigrant willing and able to reduce the stock of unsold new homes is an idea that could gain traction if American property prices keep falling. South Africa already faces serious competition for its skills. This could make the competition hotter. Read the full article

“Are you now or have you ever been an Arabist?” Could this be he signature phrase of a post-Cold War McCarthyism that poisons Washington’s ability to deal rationally with the Middle East and sometimes makes it Al Qaeda’s best recruiter? The admirers of Charles Freeman certainly think so, though few who seek advancement in this town have what it takes to say so publicly. Read the full article

Pushed over the edge by the slump, the American newspaper industry is going the way of buggy whips. But while we know what replaced horse-drawn conveyances, there’s no agreement on what is going to take over from the hunk of highly processed dead tree that lands on our doorsteps each morning, or, more accurately, how, and if,  the contents are going to be produced when the traditional container ceases to be viable. Read the full article

Like Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, Khulumani v. Barclays National Bank grinds on inexorably  before a federal court in New York.  We are now in the seventh year of this oft-renamed quest to extract reparations from multinationals that did business with the South African government under apartheid.  No immediate relief is in sight. Read the full article

David Tswamuno is both the tragedy and hope of Zimbabwe. Tragedy because he is not at home, putting his very considerable talents and energy to use for his country; hope because he is minted from the extraordinary human capital with which Zimbabwe is blessed and which could, in shorter order than many expect,  undo the damage done by the gangsters into whose hands his country fell. Read the full article

Just over two-thirds of South Africans polled by FutureFact last year agreed with the statement “South Africa will over time minimize the scourge of corruption”. Some observers, noting the imminent spectacle of the country’s president going on trial for corruption, would say South Africans were an optimistic lot. Global Integrity, a Washington-based NGO which puts out what is increasingly regarded as the gold standard of international corruption indices,  gives grounds for a less cynical view in its latest annual report, released on Wednesday. Read the full article

The number of foreign correspondents based in Washington has never been higher, the Pew Research Centre reported this week, perhaps counterintuitively. Close on 1 500 journalists are accredited with the State Department’s Foreign Press Centre, strategically located in the National Press Building, six floors down from the National Press Club bar. 15 years ago it was under a thousand. Read the full article

“I screwed up.” Not words you often hear from a politician, let alone an American president just two weeks in office. The phrase and variants of it were much on President Barack Obama’s lips last Tuesday afternoon in a series of interviews with America’s top television news anchors. A bad day for his fledgling presidency? No, I’d say a pretty good one. Read the full article

I am headed home to Washington after an afternoon in Chicago. It should have been a full day, but that’s the price of traveling between Washington and Chicago by train. The Amtrak timetable is to be taken with as much salt as Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich’s protestations that he did not try to sell President Obama’s vacated Senate seat to the highest bidder. Read the full article

Radio 702 called as I was walking to Washington’s Mall with a million others on Tuesday morning to be in the general vicinity when President Barack Obama was sworn in. Would I be available for an interview after the inaugural address, a producer asked. Sure, I said. Read the full article

If, after generations of conflict and oppression, the people of Iraq find their way to living with each peaceably, there is a chance that South Africa’s story as told by three of its central actors, Cyril Ramaphosa, Roelf Meyer and Mac Maharaj, will have been the catalyst. Read the full article

Predictions are often more useful for what they say about the predictor’s present state of mind than for what they tell you about the future. That’s certainly the case with the US National Intelligence Council’s latest peer into the crystal ball, Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World, neatly timed to coincide with President-elect Barack Obama’s transition to the White House. Read the full article

Kevin Desouza teaches electrical engineering at the University of Washington in the American northwest. Earlier this year he spent a couple of months as a visiting professor at Wits. He stayed in Melville. On the flight home, he wrote about it on his blog, Desouza’s Thinking. If you need cheering up about South Africa, go Google him. Read the full article

The videos president-elect Barack Obama’s campaign team loaded for free onto YouTube, the Internet site, were watched for a remarkable 14.5 million hours, political consultant Joe Trippi noted at last week’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco (itself viewable on the web). Read the full article

That Senator Barack Obama’s election as America’s 44^th president is of historic significance does not need to be repeated.  Whatever the future may hold, November 4, 2008 now takes its place with April 28, 1994, as a date that stirs the soul. Read the full article