On Sunday 15 July Fabian and I visited the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town. After purchasing an admission ticket at the entrance we walked through through about 20 rooms to visit every gallery in this medium-sized museum. There was a mix of permanent and special exhibits in a variety of galleries. The art was appointed with museum labels, the exhibits had themes and the curators were able to show different themes in different galleries, and overall the presentation of the museum was what I would call typical for a museum.
What was unusual was that as we went through the entire museum we encountered no other museum guests or any museum security. I would have expected that on a Sunday people in their leisure would visit the museum. The museum is located in the Company’s Garden, a central park, which was full of people enjoying themselves walking, socializing, and being at leisure. It was a nice day to be at the park and to stay outdoors. Did we have an unusual experience and happen to visit the museum for the hour when no one else was there or came there? Is Cape Town a place which trusts people to be alone with art without security in the museum, or perhaps do tourists like us seem trustworthy enough that the guards will take a break if only we are there? Alternatively, does Cape Town have a huge art gallery amid a population who do not find its collection and purpose meaningful enough to visit?
African art is unfamiliar to me and I would be unable to say how South African art differs from what is common in African art exhibits. The museum seemed to be presenting South African art. The art from people of indigenous descent seemed interesting and foreign to me. Mostly I could not interpret it. I could see that contemporary artists like keeping ties to whatever old cultural traditions remain. A difference between American art and art from anywhere else is that America does not claim many old cultural traditions, and that even the oldest are from the 1700s.
I understand the art from colonial locals well enough. There were European Age of Sail paintings of Cape Town seaports and older paintings of Europeans standing around or in stately buildings. There was a contemporary exhibit which showed a South African European descent transman in photos with indigenous descent transwomen sex workers. I sort of understood that in context the intent was to raise the social status of an outcast group. I wonder if anywhere and anytime other than Cape Town right now it would be possible for a white artist to do a show like this with the indigenous people and actually show respect to artist, subjects, and gallery visitors?
I had a nice experience visiting the museum. I enjoy all kinds of museums and this one did well as a national art gallery.
Either I had a strange experience of visiting an empty museum that is usually with guests or the museum does not get many guests. Suppose that the museum does not get many guests. Why might that be?
It would not be of location because lots of people are in the Company’s Garden. It would not be for anyone’s lack of leisure because the garden is full of people with time to enjoy. The admission cost is on par with other countries – 30 rand when 20 rand/hour is minimum wage. In the United States $15 is common admission when minimum wage is $7.50-15/hour.
It could be that the art does not match the interests of the local people. I like the art and the art suited me, but I am from a Western culture. It could be that my tastes and the tastes of the indigenous people are different, and the art museum I expect is not the art museum that communicates the art which is meaningful to Cape Town’s native people. This is assuming that there is a native culture and a colonial culture.
I do not have a sense for how Cape Town works. In some ways, like the way that a Western person can feel entirely at home in Cape Town, it seems like the global culture to which the world is heading works in Cape Town. In other ways South Africa seems to elevate people of colonial descent and put down people of native descent. The most obvious way this happens is in distribution of wealth – white people seem wealthier and are less often publicly visible in lower class jobs, while black people are more visible in poverty and less often present in the public places were I saw more affluent white people. The museum was from the 1800s so was founded with a legacy of colonial money. I can only imagine that old colonial money still influences it.
I wonder what circumstances could change to result in the museum always having visitors at the times when a museum should be most busy? What do local people think of this museum?
Fabian and I visited Kruger National Park. On Wednesday 11 July we flew from Johannesburg to Skukuza Airport, which is in Kruger Park. We picked up a rental car and drove 2.5 hours to Satara Lodge where we stayed 2 nights. The night of the 12th we took a nighttime tour to see nocturnal animals and whomever was awake. The morning of the 13th we took a walking tour in the bush and got closer to animals than I would have imagined was possible. On Friday 13 July we shifted to Skukuza Lodge to be closer to our flight to Cape Town. Saturday 14 July we went to Cape Town.
Upon arrival we picked up a rental car. With 2 minutes of leaving the airport area we saw elephants in the road. I could only think to say not to crash the car into the elephants. We were going slow but the elephants were so close to the car it was surprising. Within 20 minutes more we saw impala, zebra, giraffes, and all sorts of birds. Over our stay we saw 1000s of impala, 100s of wildebeest, 100s of zebra, 10s of Cape buffalo, about 10 groups of 4-12 elephants plus single elephants, about 10 groups of 2-6 giraffes, a pair of lions and a pride of 8, several groups of vervet monkeys, several baboons, a hippopotamus, a crocodile, an ostrich, a group of 8 wild dogs, a few jackels, a few hyenas, many hornbills, a ring tail cat, Cape ground squirrels barking, a secretary bird, nyala, eland, and more deer-likes. We had the feeling of being able to travel in any direction for 5 minutes and see interesting animals doing interesting things. The plant life does not move but it all seems to be in transition as all plants, even larger trees, have interaction with other plants and animals as well as with the earth and wind and weather.
I read what I could about Kruger and South Africa before arriving. There is a marketing or fanbase concept of the “big five game“, which are the elephant, cape buffalo, lion, leopard, and rhinoceros. I understood that these animals were nearby and entered Kruger park but I failed to understand how closely together all these animals lived. The big five and others all live closely enough together to observe each other continually. They pass each other traveling like people in the subway and they eat together like groups of picnickers in Central Park. What I was seeing was what every zoo in the world displays as the popular animals who represent wildlife. All of these animals are in one place, living together, and interacting directly with each other constantly.
The Lion King talks about the “Circle of Life” in which every life form plays a part in the story of every other life form. This is true everywhere but now I see that no where else in the world is this more apparent than here in Africa. My familiarity with wildlife in the United States is that perhaps there is a deer in the woods, and sometimes a bear, or a smaller wildcat, and there are birds and rodents and insects and plants. It would be unusual in the United States to see a wild animal interact with another wild animal, and uncertain even for someone visiting a wilderness area to encounter any large animal, much less several, much less several species who interact. In the zoos of the world the separate animals are in separate pens. In Kruger all zoo animals are together in a single place at the same time and free to take whatever action they choose in response to their environment, the other inhabitants, and whatever life they have for themselves.
I was struck wondering who takes care of all these animals at Kruger. Who feeds them? Who washes them to make them so clean and sleek and groomed? Who directs the predators to their designated prey, and who protects all the prey from being devoured to extinction? The animals seem to travel daily over long distances. Who tells them where to go, where they will find their snacks, how they will access water, and how they can achieve whatever they seek to accomplish? Who tells them when they should play their sports, and when it is fine for them to have naps, how to socialize with their own and other species, and how to find their full and satisfying lives? It seems that they animals have been doing this for 65 million years of mammalian evolution plus whatever lizard hindbrains directed them as birds or reptiles.
I was struck by how fragile the park was. In reading about Kruger before arrival I failed to realize before observing the park the most obvious information: animals are all here together for humans to see. I depend on online information. Wikipedia seems like the most professionally developed information source, and as usual, Wiki is the best in the world and also not good enough to meet needs. In a dubious unsourced amateur publication I read some numbers of how many animals live at the park. The park is a certain size and has 150,000 impalas, several thousands of elephants, zebras, wildebeests, and others, some few thousands of lions and some others, and dozens of many other animals. This information seems reasonably accurate. What I take away from it is that park is huge, and in its most healthy state it has a carrying capacity of 150,000 of one large animal which is closer to the bottom of a food chain of other animals above it in the food chain which must be lesser in number. Humans have to leave the park undisturbed to sustain all this life, which only needs to be left alone as its care. Also, at its most robust, this huge park will sustain only thousands of animals. A human city with 150,000 people is medium sized and rarely will such a city establish any unique or lasting culture. This park is a world treasure for all its life and yet is so much more fragile than any of the many medium-sized human cities in the world. If there is any misstep between now and the end of history all the life in this park will die forever and the environment will cease to exist. The absence of any plant or animal in this ecosystem will lead to quick ecological collapse. None of these animals can exist without all the others.
South Africa is inexpensive to me coming from the United States economy. Travel, food, lodging, specialized tours, admissions, or whatever else all seems priced 20-60% of that which I expect of equivalents in the lower middle class life I lived in New York City or Seattle. Overnight in Kruger park is less expensive than a day in Woodland Park Zoo or Bronx Zoo. I am not sure how pricing happens here but it is out of whack with the world economy. If I met any local people other than servers in Kruger Park then I was not aware, as when I talked with people they were tourists. Whereas in the zoos of the city I always saw local school kids on field trips, and local community organizations taking their tour, and otherwise nearby people using the amenity, I did not have awareness of people of all social classes of South Africa having access to Kruger. I think that they do not.
Our camp, Satara, is 2.5 hours from the airport entrance, and perhaps to any park entrance. I asked a couple of workers if they lived at the park because I could not imagine them making a daily commute into the camp for work. They told me that the routine is 5 days working and 3 days off. I wonder if that means they commute 2.5 hours out of the park, and perhaps more hours to home, as part of those 3 days of time off. The cafe servers were working till 9pm and they were there the next day working at 7am. Perhaps when they are at the park the work consumes all their time.
It is not possible to request any African food at the park with the exception of the cooked meat which would be the same anywhere in the world. About meat – the park expects that guests want to eat the animals of the park as the various deer are on the menu. I suppose people go around the park, looking at the animals and salivating to eat them, then in the evening they eat the meat covered in sugary ketchup. The only food on the menu of the restaurants and cafe of Satara Lodge that was vegan was the toast and the iceberg lettuce salad. Fabian and I ordered the toast without butter and they served it with butter. We ordered a pizza without cheese and server asked us repeatedly what that meant. We explained, and eventually she said that we wanted the feta cheese pizza without feta cheese, and she instead gave us a regular cheese pizza. Among perhaps 10 waitrons none of them had ever heard the concept of vegan, and despite them all speaking perfect English and repeating back to us no meat, no butter, no cream, and no cheese, it was a great confusion for them and for the food service workers. If we had our way I would have liked to have had vegetables of the sort that any regional people ate but Kruger Park’s tourist accomodations exist to approximate what Africans who have never visited a Western country imagine that Western people experience.
We rented a car and could drive around freely. This was a nice experience but not at all sustainable if the park intends to ever increase tourism. Having fewer cars and more group transport would be more sustainable for more visits. There are no smoking signs everywhere with people smoking everywhere. People flick cigarettes from the windows of their cars. If animals are crossing the road and it delays anyone for a few seconds then many tourists will honk at them. If an animal is to the side of the road then people will drive by without slowing down, and only swerving. I doubt it is a problem to run over animals except to the extent that people would not want to pay for damage to the rental car company. It is as if the nature reserve is an amusement park with comestibles for marketplace consumption. People from Western countries should know better. The Chinese coming into the park seem oblivious and are dangerously nouveau riche with seemingly no awareness that anything they do can affect the future. If China develops as an economy, and it seems that it could, then the West has a weak position for requesting better behavior when so many Western people are setting an abhorrent example for the much larger upcoming global middle class. I have doubts that Kruger Park will exist much longer. Tourism is increasing, and the emphasis is on extracting money from the park and not for its long term sustainability. It seems bleak!
Evidently I am part of the global elite which gets to travel and experience whatever I want and I wish that I could be more comfortable as a steward of the inheritance of future generations. I try to think things through but the limit of my intellect tells me that Wiki is where I have specialization and leverage and Wiki is the best outlet for my time and attention. I do everything I can in Wiki in every direction to be most effective. I seek out funding and train others and do mutual support and try to be clever but I simply cannot complete all the things in Wiki which I could do if I had more resources. If I had the power I would connect better with the countless photographers and writers and researchers of this park and every other information-curating institution. All of these organizations have an educational mission which would be magnitudes easier to accomplish if they could access post-Internet digital publishing just a few years sooner than their current trajectory. I and other Wiki people have a vision of the world being connected to the Internet but I fear this will not happen before 20 years, and the major barrier is some social outreach, some software interface development, and some community infrastructure. All of these are inexpensive problems to address. Eventually the world will either have a complete Wikipedia or its equivalent, and that universal reference information will play a major role in guiding decisions about what becomes the inheritance to preserve till the end of humanity and which wildlife, cultures, or whatever else becomes wiped into history. Time seems so sensitive and I feel like getting the information out now without delaying even a few months or years will make the difference in how millions of people behave. I could be wrong, or perhaps I and other Wiki editors exist at the center of human history and guide all conversations and thought about what will be permanent and what posterity will only remember as part of the pre-Internet era. I regret whatever inefficiency I feel whenever I spend my own time doing anything other than what I do best, or when I see any of the huge amounts of inefficiency I see anywhere else. I regret that mostly likely all the people who acted as my servers at Kruger, working in what are lower level jobs in my home country, most likely got their jobs here in this environment of majority unemployment by getting college degrees, making countless concessions, and having to endure injustice beyond what I can comprehend. I wish that the local people were empowered to manage Kruger Park in the interest of the park and the local people and their own culture.
We saw a few hundred tourists at Kruger Park. In all this time we never saw black African visitors to Kruger. It seems like Kruger Park is not a place for the native people of South Africa.
The Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg has a global contemporary museum design to convey the most objective information without making demands that visitors work hard to understand. It was an easy museum to visit in terms of how much I had to think to be able to understand the exhibits. For anyone who wants the museum to challenge them there are striking exhibits to consider further. The various rooms of the museum have designs which encourage some touching, walking around exhibits, looking up and down, and backing up to double check what previous exhibits said to put later exhibits in context. Overall there was innovative museum presentation and every section is a memorable experience.
The museum opens with an exhibit profiling local descendents of Johannesburg residents of diverse backgrounds from generations ago. The people profiled all have ancestors who were successful enough to have left community records, often from having professional but modest businesses. The intent is to communicate that South Africa today is an internationally connected country because of a pre-modern history of globalization.
The museum goes forward telling the story of apartheid starting in the early 1800s and moving forward in time. I hardly know this story, but it seems that in the early 1800s the British had slaves in South Africa. The Slavery Abolition Act 1833 ended slavery but colonial forces compelled former slaves and many other local black people to labor in horrible conditions. They quashed any attempts for anyone native to accumulate wealth or advocate for laborers. I have no understanding of how the Labor Movement in Europe or the Americas related to whatever the people in South Africa wanted at that time. Surely there must have been some connection. Every country must have stories. I was surprised at how much the museum emphasized the origins of the 1948 apartheid as union busting in the 1800s, but this makes a lot of sense.
Going forward in time apparently the colonial ruling class only became more awful, with successive generations accepting each present reality as an ethical baseline and feeling comfortable making changes to become more racist and oppressive from that point. There is a room in a museum listing laws which take rights away from black people and give privileges to white people. Following this list is a room full of nooses to represent the political dissidents executed for advocating for black rights. The museum has some solitary confinement prison chambers which it says were for breaking the wills of those whom the white people wanted to communicate terror stories back to their black communities. I walked into one of these chambers and shut the door to see what it was about. I am not aware of being particularly claustrophobic but being in that tiny featureless room was enough to trigger an instinctual terror response that I did not know I had.
There is an armored vehicle which police used to threaten demonstrating crowds with violence. Everywhere there are stories of violence. Moving forward to the 1980s are interesting posters and records of how people in other countries, including London and New York, held demonstrations and public rallies in support of an end to apartheid. There is an exhibit about how various civil rights causes tied themselves to the apartheid struggle, such as by advocating for labor rights, women’s rights, LGBT+ rights, or all rights plus no apartheid.
Toward the end of the museum there is an explanation of a concept called Truth and Reconciliation. The idea is that when one group harms another, the apology process should include a restorative justice process which encourages anyone who experienced harm to tell their story and to be part of an aggregate community who define the historical record of the situation. Along with that there has to be restitution where the people who benefited from the oppression compensate the people who were harmed by the oppression.
The Apartheid Museum is part of the Gold Reef City complex including a casino, a theme park, and a hotel targeting tourists. It seems odd to combine a serious museum with typical recreational spaces but maybe it works, or maybe the location is generally convenient. Do people leave the casino and go to the Apartheid Museum? I wonder what is more likely – losing a lot of money then wanting to learn about apartheid, or winning a lot of money then learning about apartheid? Do people learn about apartheid then feel like gambling? Does thinking about the apartheid put people into the mood for riding a roller coaster? The arrangement of everything would make it easy for someone to leave the hotel relaxed, bet on the roulette wheel, contemplate apartheid then ride the roller coaster.
On Tuesday 10 July 2018 Fabian and I joined a tour group which advertised trips to Soweto. The tour included a drive around Soweto and and explanation but what I really wanted was the walking tour of the place that was a slum, or shanty town, ghetto, or favela.
Soweto has a long history but the recent history is that the rich white colonists forced the poor black locals to live there. Nowadays Soweto has comfortable upper class neighborhoods, a middle class area, a government housing project area where lower income people can live comfortably, then the outright slums where for decades people have lived without legal standing, land rights, access to utilities, and in unstable conditions. The guide said that the government housing projects were for households which earn less than 2500 rand a month, which is about $USD 180 a month when minimum wage in the US is $7.50-15/hour.
In this slum area people can have dignity but everyone there is in poverty conditions. By “poverty” I mean that typical people have great challenges in maintaining a lifestyle which leads to a job and self-sustaining, healthy existence. I wish that every government in every place could promise people a bed, food,education and training, medical care, transportation, social and entertainment opportunities, and opportunity to work and contribute productively. Our tour guide said that Soweto has a 70% unemployment rate. I am not aware of any reason to believe that the poverty situation will change in the next generation.
After driving around and showing us various neighborhoods and local points of interest our tour guide brought us to the edge of a slum for a 30-minute walking tour. The guide in the car introduced us to a guide who lived in the slum area. This guide told us that the slum is a safe area and that he was local to the neighborhood we would tour and that all the local people welcome us here. Obviously this person was primed to address the questions we as Western tourists had. At the beginning of our walk he said that local people might call us “aballoo“, which he said was the local word for “white people”. Some way into the tour we visited a daycare center. It was a small playground and a shed. Parents with jobs could pay to send their children here while they worked. When we approached the children were familiar with foreign visitors, and all begin chanting “Aballoo! Aballoo!“. When I heard this I thought about why I was there, and I thought of Wikipedia, and I contemplated the extent to which the relationship between the Wikimedia Foundation and the developing world was like a group of affluent white people on holiday standing in front of poor black kids who cheered, “White people!” When I was in India I saw a lot of really clueless foreign organizations having weird and ineffective charity and development outreach in India. I suppose I am part of that. I always wish to distance myself from enacting that fate too fully.
At the end of the tour we ended at a gift shop on the edge of the community near our van at the road. Its proprietors were two young men and the shop was called the Stoned Harbor. Maybe they were stoners or maybe the name meant anything else. These boys spoke English and had street sense about tourists. They were selling mostly the same tourist goods that every other tourist vendor sold. Like the other vendors they claimed to make everything themselves or that their family made the goods which seemed workshop or mass produced. I asked them how often tour groups came. One of them confided in me that it was sporadic, and that they depended on the tour company we booked, and that they wished for more tourism. For me as a tourist it was obvious that lots of people would pay them directly for tours of the slum if they could advertise and sell it. However, for this community, things like setting up a web presence, maintaining communication, processing payment, and managing a business are high barriers to entry. For now they seem boxed into the informal business sector of taking what the tour company as a middleman pays them. When I met the local boys I marveled – how do they learn English, why are they so savvy about Western tourist culture, how do they get to this point in life but not have access to Internet, and when and what social conditions will change to empower local people like this to run their own tourism without being dependent on the business from another community. I do not fault the tour company – they offer a Soweto experience which the Soweto people themselves are unable to sell. Fabian bought all his trip’s souvenirs from their little shop.
At the edge of the slum there was a large factory of some sort in a nice building with nice roads and seemingly whatever capital investment is required to have a workshop using labor. There was a large group of people on the street in front of the building. We asked the driver who said that the local people were protesting in a labor dispute. He said that normally they would drive that direction but for safety reasons, suggesting that the crowd was dangerous, he said that we would go another direction. When I was younger and had more time I used to go talk to protesters. Apparently now I literally pay for the privilege of being a passive observer to slum life, children celebrating my race, young men scamming me at gift shops to the extent of their imaginations for an amount of money which does not matter at all to me, and the grief of laborers. When I see these things the extent of my intelligence is to wish that poverty could be eliminated and to guess that Wikimedia projects, or open knowledge projects in general, are the best use of my time to seek the solution to eliminate poverty.
After the slum we went to the Hector Pieterson Museum. The museum tells the story of the 1970s Soweto uprising. The situation was that in South Africa colonial white people oppressed black people in apartheid. One narrative in the tension was that colonial British people and colonial Dutch people had competed for power and influence with each other more than they ever competed with the indigenous people, who were marginal in the governance narrative until recently.
In writing about the Voortrekker Monument I said that the Dutch built it in 1930 to celebrate the benefits of colonialism in South Africa. Continuing that narrative, the direct cause of the Soweto uprising was Dutch attempts to use South African tax money to have schoolchildren learn Dutch language at the cost of not having English language education. I had heard of the Soweto uprising before but knew little about it. Mistakenly I had thought that it was a protest against colonial languages, meaning that I thought that the people wanted to have schools in their mothertongues. This was not the case – the people were protesting to have school in English and not Dutch or Afrikaans.
The tension exploded in 1976 when students, most under age 18, demonstrated around Johannesburg by walking in public places near their schools. The Dutch had influence over the police force and ordered that the police shoot and kill about 700 children the first day and whatever other children they could find the week after. In addition to the dead 1000 more had injuries. The Dutch killed more children at will in the following weeks.
Hector Pieterson was a 13-year-old boy who had the distinction of having his corpse photographed while being carried away from the massacre by a neighbor as his sister walked beside him crying. Were it not for this photograph then perhaps there would be no memory of any of the 1000 others or the event even happening. The photograph made international media and still is the primary communication vehicle for telling the story. The Hector Pieterson Museum narrates the circumstances leading to the massacre, the massacre itself, and the outcome of the massacre. The museum is located in a place which allows guides to point in directions and to places which feature in the story of the massacre.
The feel of the museum is that it seeks to make heroes of anyone who resisted apartheid, oppression, colonial manipulation, and any barrier to the autonomy of the local people. The museum seemed to only include permanent exhibits and not have any changing collection, which to me makes it seem underfunded to be effective for regular outreach to the local community. The exhibits in the museum are only in English language.
Although it is a “museum”, the design of its exhibits have no focus around objects, any special collection, or proprietary holdings. As a wiki person I could imagine anyone replicating exhibits of the sort that this museum holds by putting text and image reproductions on the walls of any rooms anywhere. I enjoyed visiting and I like the idea of walking through a space to consume media which teaches something. If this museum had funding to build special collections – interviews, oral histories, archives, photo collections, research, and whatever else is necessary to preserve the memory and tell the story – then although I saw some evidence that some of these things happened at times in the past I saw no evidence that the stories of the people who experienced the massacre were preserved well enough to understand the extent of the damage. I suspect that many families whose children were killed never had anyone offer to record their stories in the archive.
The Hector Pieterson Museum itself communicates less ill-will toward the Dutch than I would imagine. It talks about some protests, and there are descriptions of how the students did not want to learn Dutch in school, but overall the tone of the exhibits is a lot more accepting of colonialism than I would imagine a narrative of this sort to be. For people who managed to establish a museum and tell their own story, if this museum reflects their feelings then they seem to be rather accepting of the colonial experience, the massacre, and everything else and simply ready to move on recognizing the present social order as normal just so long as the colonial grip in the future avoids more massacres and grants a little more autonomy. The museum does not, for example, demand reparations. I am not sure if that is because no one ever wanted them, or because the people do not ask in this venue for their own cultural reasons, or if it is because the museum organizers were unable to secure Dutch permission to raise this topic.
I feel a little bewildered. I am not sure what I all I saw, or the extent to which I read enough, or if I understood any of it correctly.
We went to the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria. The monument is a combination of a memorial to the Dutch colonists who died in the course of various violent conflicts during their settling in South Africa, and a gallery of exhibits in which the early 20th century Dutch tell their own story the colonizing experience, and a beautiful park and vantage point on a hill. This is a place to celebrate the colonizers and I saw nothing here about the experience of the colonized people. In the future I think the place will also include revisionist introspection having discussions about the experience of the colonized people but currently any updated interpretation at the site is Dutch nostalgia for a time where European colonization was only a good thing.
The monument itself is beautiful inside and out. The design of the place recommends that visitors enter through any of the parks on around the monument, go up a stairway to the monument towering above them, enter into a gallery with a narrative in friezes on the walls around them, take stairs up to enjoy the view, then go down below the main level to see changing exhibits. For anyone who wishes there is a park with plants labeled as for a botanical garden, an armory museum on the compound and some distance away, and a museum to the Dutch experience in South Africa at the beginning of the modern era.
The first thing that we noticed were the depictions of the traveling Dutch in the 1800s. The story of the Dutch in South Africa begins in the 1600s but the monument focuses on the time after the British move into South Africa, conduct the invasion of the Cape Colony to expel the Dutch, and drive them from the ports further inland to land which was less useful in the British Empire’s colonization and globalization plans. In the various depictions, including a few statues, some friezes in the main gallery on the ground floor, and in the exhibition panels in the lower level, the Dutch are dressed in what I recognize as the dress of the American pioneer. I have no idea how global fashion worked before 1900 but apparently there was a tie between what Americans wore to travel the Oregon Trail and what the Dutch wore to flee the British. Maybe much European fashion was the same at the time. Along with the fashion there were covered wagons in most pictures, which I guess makes since because it would have been the height of technology for land shipping and people moving anywhere. I had not realized that covered wagons existed outside of the United States. I am not aware of various cultures making different models of covered wagons. Maybe the design is near universal for anyone doing colonizing or maybe there was cultural exchange.
The next thing we noticed is that the depictions favor the Dutch. The British are villains in all circumstances we saw, and the indigenous population is either villainous or a receptacle into which the Dutch poured their culture. Presumably when this was built the people who funded were really sincere about communicating something and having an expectation of being understood. I think that it is not possible for anyone in contemporary times to understand whatever the builders of the monument wanted to communicate. Apparently at the time of the monument’s design there was an expectation that local people would appreciate the Dutch contribution enough to not scoff at a large monument to it. Nowadays I think that the local people are more likely to perceive the Dutch as having invited themselves to South Africa without the consent of local people and for having displaced native people for the purpose of capturing their resources and labor. To make a monument to the colonization process is a monument to the oppression of a people by foreign invaders. To make a monument to colonization without making space for the colonized people to tell their story communicates that the place is for the Dutch perspective without anyone else’s response, and without a discussion of other views, and without regard even for where or how anyone else can hear the story from the culture which paid the cost of the colonization process and the resources which funded the Voortrekker Monument itself.
There was a contemporary poster in the main gallery of the monument which showed a timeline. The summary statement that it made was that were it not for the colonization process, then South Africa would not be a democracy today, and were it not for democracy and its contributing factors, then South Africa would not be the advanced economy or world power or cultural center which it now is. I do not know how to respond with understanding. Colonization obviously brought some benefits at a high cost to the culture. I do not think that the conversation about colonization advances by speculating how alternative timelines could have played out over hundreds of years. What is more certain to me is that neither the colonizers as individuals nor the organizers of the colonization process had as motivation a vision of a distant future where the colonized people would be independent of them and powerful in their own right. The existence of the monument suggests an expectation of far-future gratitude for which I have seen no evidence that the indigenous people have expressed after some few decades.
On the lower level in the exhibition hall there was a lantern with a fire in it. Perhaps it was an eternal flame, or perhaps it was another kind of symbolism where the museum turns it on for visitors to see. Whatever the case, the description said that the flame represented the Dutch bringing the light of civilization to South Africa. To contemporary people it is offensive to say that the indigenous people were not civilized, or that they requested the cultural teaching which the Dutch offered as civilizing, or that they consented to pay the costs which the Dutch exacted in exchange for their enacting the colonization process.
Also on the lower level there was an image of an indigenous person’s hand grasping a Dutch infant’s foot to swing the body. The caption explained that native people would bash the brains of Dutch babies onto wagon wheels by swinging them in this way. The entire monument communicates that the locals do baby brain smashing as a consequence of their lack of civilization and the inherent wildness of the region.
In a couple of places around the monument there was a depiction of the Battle of Blood River. In the depictions the Dutch dressed as soldiers and with guns attack near naked wild brown people with shields and spears. I know nothing about colonial warfare. I suppose that if in any circumstances someone threatened me with a spear or any weapon then I would feel afraid, and that it would take a lot of bravery for me to challenge such an attack. If there were two sides in warfare and one had spears and the other had rifles, then I would like to be the side with the rifle. It is hard for me to understand how anyone can see bravery in being on the side with the gun, since surely that side is going to shoot everyone and if the other side spears anyone it will be themselves when they are shot from a distance and fall on their spear. Maybe there was something more to colonial warfare, or maybe not. Obviously the people who depicted the Battle of Blood River were feeling the sacrifice of their own blood.
For the future I think that indigenous people should capture the Voortrekker Monument and turn it into a learning center for remembering the colonial experience. The Dutch had a voice and whatever they said in the monument merits preservation but so do the other perspectives. The perspective of the indigenous people is the most important. Regardless of what any official documentation about the monument says I think that its meaning is defined by how the local people think of it.
Wikimania Cape Town was 18-22 July 2018. Fabian and I went to South Africa early for tourism and to be together. We arrived in Johannesburg on Monday 9 July and he stayed till 18 July, at which time he returned to New York as I began my conference. I left at the end of the conference.
It was the first time visiting Africa for both of us. We had researched online what we might do and it seemed that the major tourist attractions in Johannesburg had a theme of apartheid, so we wanted to learn what we could from the learning centers that people had made. From Johannesburg we went to Kruger National Park from 11-14 July. From there we went to Cape Town until returning to the United States.
Neither of us had much understanding of the culture of South Africa before arriving. Both of us felt much better informed through the trip, even though our perspective was gaining insight into the colonial experience rather than life of the native people. Because the colonial legacy seemed so strong to me I wanted to talk through some of what I did and thought and felt because the trip left me confused. I titled a series of posts as “Views of apartheid”. Although “apartheid” is supposed to mean the racial segregation policy in South Africa from 1948-1994, there is a lot of slime in the language and politics and society today and the racism must have started at the beginning of colonialism in the 1700s if not sooner. I use the word “apartheid” to mean all the problems, because so far as I can tell, there is no particular word in English for describing the entire colonial racist experience which continues to present. I feel conflicted with unfair conditions in South Africa and how I benefit from the unfairness even today. Also obviously I am the product of the privileged side of a colonial legacy from elsewhere and I get to use that advantage as I like.
It is not possible to get away from the dirt in society. In the lead up to Wikimania some people were questioning the ethics of hosting the event in a region of water scarcity. There are lots of ethical conflicts in travel. I do not put too much thought into the problems themselves. If I have a response to the problems then it would be in whatever activities I do without realizing that it is a response.
Corporate forces use a dirty trick to undermine community activism: they steal the social movement with counter-propaganda by publishing media to redefine the movement goals. The way it works is that after a social movement names and defines itself, the corporate forces start publishing media using the same name but report that the social movement has goals which benefit the corporation. In a social movement there will be better informed participants in leadership roles who notice the scam, but most supporters in the movement are more casual and support the idea without following every turn and change in the media. The end result is that well-funded counter propaganda confuses the movement and divides the community, and whereas in the beginning everyone supported the activism now there is a camp which supports the bad guys. This is not about debate, or disagreement, or multiple perspectives. It is corporate misinformation to advance commercial interests at the expense of consumer rights.
Consider net neutrality. Tim Wu, a Wikimedian and consumer advocate, defined this concept in 2003 to mean that Internet service providers should serve consumers data without discriminating on what they are requesting. A common way to explain this to talk about previous generation telecommunication services being common carriers. I explain the concept to the general public by talking about water and plumbing: a water utility company will charge a household based on the amount of water which it consumes. For a family in a home at typical usage rates, the price of water gets metered and priced for normal use like family drinking water, showers, washing, and daily life. There is not one price for water to drink versus another price to use the same amount of water for taking a shower. Similarly, the original activist definition of net neutrality says that Internet service providers should not discriminate in how people use the amount of data they consume any more than water utilities try to regulate the way people use water in sinks versus showers versus toilets. As long as a family stays withing typical household use then it is fair to charge a rate per data or water unit. From the perspective of the Internet service provider, an amount of data which a consumer uses to visit one website is not any different for them to provide as compared to an amount of data for them to visit another website.
The problem is that media companies which sell content have a business model which depends on people purchasing their media. Data is not scarce and as countries build Internet infrastructure data is getting even less expensive. Even right now, and more in the near future, the Internet infrastructure in developed countries has the capacity for everyone to consume all the data they want. Data bandwidth is not a scarce resource. However, media companies who fear losing their consumer base to competition try to claim that bandwidth is scarce as part of an effort to direct people away from competing media and to purchasing their own. To continue with the water analogy, imagine that a shower manufacturer wants people to by more shower accessories and that they feel threatened by toilets. Big Shower lobbies the government to make water for toilet flushing more costly but that water in the shower should be less expensive. This can only happen with bizarre measuring equipment that provides no benefit to the consumer. While it makes sense to meter the water coming into a house, it makes no sense to meter how much water anyone uses in a sink versus shower or elsewhere, so the consumer should not agree to have a meter installed on their shower if the intent is to pay a different rate for shower water versus drinking water. The analogy would be for a water utility to run a marketing campaign to encourage people to pee in bathtub, saying that urban plumbing can somehow provide water to showers at a lower cost than water to toilets. This makes no sense to people who can see that using public pipes to deliver water from a reservoir to a home has a single cost. With corporate interference, though, the shower manufacturer might subsidize the water utility with payments if that utility will make metering and infrastructure changes to create a weird environment where somehow the finance system creates a corporate benefit for a few companies at the cost of absurd regulation of public infrastructure and higher prices to all consumers. The natural way to deliver water is to meter the total amount used in a household without regard to the ways in which a family uses it. It is the same for data – the cost of the data for a family to watch one movie online is the same for the data to watch a movie produced by another company. Net neutrality is the idea that consumers should pay for total metered data use. It is fine for people to pay a company for media, just as it is fine to plumb a house to have a sink, shower, and other ways to use water. Media companies are like sink and shower manufacturers; ISPs should be like water utilities who are only in the business of metering total use.
In the net neutrality counter propaganda game some corporations intentionally publish weird and misleading definitions of net neutrality. They actually publish all kinds of things – support for net neutrality, opposition to net neutrality, definitions of net neutrality, statements of support for net neutrality social movements, and legal lobbying against net neutrality. A problem with social movements is that anyone can say they join. The situation is confusing when a corporation which obviously opposes the movement says that they join. Their intent is to draw less-informed movement supporters to their side without actually educating anyone of what they are doing. In “On Net Neutrality, Here’s What AT&T, Verizon, Charter, and Comcast Say” in November 2017 Inverse reports how various United States-based telecom companies say that they are part of the consumer movement but then behave differently. Neither this article nor many of the others can see the activist situation. Lots of people try to join the consumer movement but then only come to find the talking points by the corporations, and they think they are on the consumer side. Another example with this is “zero rating”, which is the idea that corporations should give some data in a preferred way. Models for this include giving a “zero rating” for consumers to access nonprofit media for free, or for consumers to get access to movies from one company at a lower cost of data than another company. However anyone defines zero rating it is a marketing concept which is incompatible with net neutrality. Still – some corporations publish that zero rating is a way to promote net neutrality. When they do this they are writing their own definition of net neutrality.
This matters to Wikipedia because we have to sort out multiple concepts which use the term “net neutrality”. Typically there is one Wikipedia article per topic. We have an article “net neutrality”, but not “net neutrality (consumer definition)” versus “net neutrality (corporate definition)”. It takes years for a community group to organically develop a lexicon, whereas a corporate writer can create confusion with a relatively small amount of funding to disrupt the activists.
This is not just about net neutrality. It happens for lots of social movements. Another problem which I face is the counterpropaganda around “open access“. Again, activists invented and defined the concept of open access to mean scholarly publications which are free and accessible for humans and machines to read and remix. The Budapest, Bethesda, Berlin, and statements (3 B’s) are the real definitions! Publishers fearing a social movement organized counter propaganda saying that they supported open access, but then describing open access as some awful practice which is not open access. Academic publishing is an industry which captures government and taxpayer funding and for the major publishers operates in the billions of dollars at an absurdly high profit margin. They have lots of funding for unethical operations and distinctly non-academic discourse. Their conflict of interest in this space where they undermine consumers and community reform is very sad! It is never fair for corporations to run propaganda campaigns presenting themselves as unfunded consumer grassroots activists.
Watch out in all situations! When there is a community social movement which defines goals, be careful to refine the consumer perspective and support the side of good!
Today Sunday 20 May 2018 I went to the University of Virginia (UVA) graduation ceremony which includes “walking the lawn” in front of the Rotunda. The ritual is that graduating students should walk from the Rotunda on UVA grounds through the lawn out into the world as a symbol of taking learning from here to elsewhere. Before seeing it I had doubts that a graduation walk could be different here as compared to other places, but the layout of the “Academical Village” in which the ceremony takes place, and the intent of the attendees, and the history of events on the Lawn, and all the effort that the school puts into making this graduation unique to the culture of UVA really works as a memorable experience and performance.
On Friday 18 May 2018 I went to a reception dinner with my colleagues at the Data Science Institute, and the graduating students, and the students’ families. I did not think too hard about the reception and showed up without expectations. If I had thought more, I might have anticipated that of course the event was more for the parents than the students, and that it was to be a way for the students to communicate to their families the sort of instructors and school and educational program which had engaged them in their graduate studies. None of this is surprising. What was a little surprising was that all the parents with whom I spoke asked me to define data science and basic characteristics of what their students studied. I even met a parent who described their career in data science, but of course “data science” as a discipline was not formalized in their time and although they knew their professional practices they were not familiar with the current standardization of the field. There are fewer than 40 students getting master’s degrees so this was an intimate cohort. With enrollment increasing it is unlikely that there will be another cohort of students graduating from here who know all their peers, and would meet everyone else’s families, and who share so many research experiences in common. This is the last year when anyone will be able to go into a reception of the Data Science Institute and be one degree of separation from every conversation in the room on such an evening.
I just heard the commencement speech of Teresa Sullivan, outgoing president of the University of Virginia and who gave the speech as part of her exit. I have not met her and do not know the politics of the place. I thought it was encouraging that when she described the schools conferring degrees, she mentioned the Data Science Institute separately because it has a special status as something other than a school. It was the only such organization she named.
In her speech she talked about the Lewis and Clark expedition. I do not know what to make of this. In Charlottesville’s ongoing controversy of statues commemorating the success that particular white people had in using their wealth and resources to advocate for white power, student and activist groups have been re-branding Clark as a person famous for ethnic killing of Native Americans. Protesters kept a statue of Clark wrapped in a shroud for months. Everyone has their faults but I would not be quick to speak nicely about anyone with a mass murder association. I have no idea of the majority culture here. The mass media news of the past few years either does not register this university in the national consciousness or portrays it as a tragedy for people to gawk at as entertainment. The president mentioned the tragedies which this graduating class experienced the past four years.
One tragedy was “A Rape on Campus“, the article in Rolling Stone. Other commentators have well discussed this article elsewhere, but I have one off-the-wall comment to add to demonstrate thinking here. The article described an egregious culture of male students raping female students at the University of Virginia. The impact of the article was that when it came out, everyone believed it and various students seeking reform for safety, civility, and quality used the momentum to make positive social changes. It was a very stressful issue to address. Later people found that the particulars of the article were either careless or a hoax or mistaken or exaggerated. The biggest problem with this was that false information in the article diminished the credibility of anyone calling for women’s safety as now there was high profile misinformation exposed as inappropriately accusatory. A point that I can add to the conversation which might not be covered elsewhere is that part of UVA culture is to say that university people and events are “on grounds” and not on “campus”. The title of the Rolling Stone article is striking to anyone at the university just because everyone here corrects everyone else here to avoid calling this place a campus and to only talk about the grounds. This practice is odd and ubiquitous. When the author titled their paper either they were ignorant that using the word “campus” would clearly mark them as an outsider to this university’s culture, and would indicate that the article is from the perspective of someone who knew so little about local culture that they could not write with the common terms which local people used. Another possibility is that the author was not writing the article for and with the local people. I know that it seems like the smallest issue – noticing a regional word choice and being upset about that in the context of a national conversation about sexual assault – but I affirm that the culture of this university immediately tags this article as the view of an outsider looking in. The issue of “outsiders getting in to change the culture” is pressing here locally and elsewhere. Activism is nice but in a national or global context it can take on a patronizing feel, and although everyone wants the less fortunate to have fair opportunity and all good treatment, no smaller community likes to have more assertive, more media-savvy communities come in with limited understanding and say that the only path to civilization is the way that some larger urban center does things. Respect on people’s own terms matters!
Another tragedy is the arrest of Otto Warmbier. This was a University of Virginia student who went on an adventure vacation to North Korea. All crimes there are serious and it seems that he choose to push by engaging in the most minor act of vandalism. The government arrested him and, perhaps under torture, forced him to explain UVA culture to them. He told the North Korean government about the utterly trite aspects of the shared student experience of being at this university and they incorporated aspects of UVA culture into the confession speech which they wrote for him and ordered him to speak. Anyone outside UVA is unlikely to detect the local significance of his speech, but now that I have been here for a while, his speech sounds horrifying for taking the fun parts of the culture here and reframing them as monstrous deviancy to overthrow North Korea. One point is that there is a secret organization called the Z Society here through which wealthy alumni do philanthropy for the university. In the student’s confession he accused the Z Society of plotting his crime as an attack on North Korea. Of course the speech is insane and in normal circumstances there is no merit to arresting the student or considering whether a university might be involved. In this case North Korea was looking for an example. It seems strange to me that everyone is in consensus that North Korea is a sort of lawful-evil: other Americans go to North Korea and obey the laws and there is no problem. There seems to be consensus that the student here did the minor vandalism and that it was very foolish of him to break a law in North Korea. The strange part here is that North Korea seems to be operating with an honor code; they wanted a hostage and it had to be someone with obvious malicious or mischievous intent. They might instead have accused someone who had done nothing, or accused someone who did something wrong but mistakenly, and instead I think North Korea is keeping a reputation for being safe enough for visitors who try to follow every rule. In my conversations here I have never heard others doubt that the student broke the local law with intent to do so. The situation makes for strange conversation where no one thinks that the student should die for minor vandalism, but also people think that if someone is in North Korea, they know what they are doing, and they really ought to follow the rules. Overall the student’s arrest and execution was part of the shared experience of this cohort of students.
A third tragedy is the Unite the Right rally. Nazis came to Charlottesville to demand white power. One Nazi killed a counter demonstrator. I have not been here long enough to read the mood of the student body, but my impression is that everyone knows this event and has an opinion about it. The more local, more American students generally feel intensely about the experience and continue to think deeply about diversity, inclusion, racism, the nature of protest, violence in the United States, and toxicity in politics. I could be off on this, but I think that foreign students, especially those who have not been in the United States for long and are here for studies, are left out of discussions about the meaning of this. Every action in the Unite the Right demonstration and response and aftermath is heavy on cultural connotation and although the university administration and student body organized a lot of community conversation, I have doubts that the non-American students are taking away a comparable experience and understanding of this as compared to the Americans. I think this is regrettable. I have not been here long enough to understand how public relations works. The mass media portrays Charlottesville as a outpost of Nazis. At least some foreign students – and I have not talked with a representative sample, but I talked enough to get some opinions – seem to have the takeaway that the United States has out of control nonsense happen with regularity for no reason. Local people here are quick to say that the Nazi demonstrators mostly came from out of town and that Charlottesville itself is a friendly place. I have no idea what to think. One of the statues under protest is of General Lee. Supposedly the statue was a recent establishment in which the city bulldozed a black neighborhood and raised a racist leader to demonstrate the white entry to the center of local black livelihood. The other statue is Clark being powerful on a horse in front of cowering and helplessly defiant Native Americans whom he will have killed. When I arrived in Charlottesville in March these statues were under shrouds. Lately the shrouds are off. I do not understand why. To me it seems like taking off the shrouds is either deference to the Nazis or in hopes that by reverting to the status quo then the controversy over removal of Confederate monuments and memorials will go away.
I am not sure how to access enough information or thought or community discussion to know what to think. What a time to graduate from here! When I think back I do not remember learning anything in school. Obviously I learned, and if I look back to introductory textbooks the information inside all seems so obvious to me even though I remember feeling as a student that everything in the books was new information. I expect that when these students think back, they will also remember less of the learning experience, and more about how the university made them feel and how they felt during certain events. I only expect that this set of students must be feeling a mix of guilt, responsibility, privilege, helplessness, safety, danger, community, isolation, power, and futility. Charlottesville and the University of Virginia are sending out a group of young people with intense shared experiences this year.
Feisty the Chinchilla died Friday 31 November 2017. I had known him for almost 4 of his 6 years. Every day that I was home I played with him. When I was not home it was part of my check-in routine with Fabian to ask about the chinchillas’ behavior and whatever they might be doing on that day. I had invested myself and my time socializing with him, guiding his behavior, and learning how he communicated to me. Chinchillas live for 12-15 years and they are cautious to warm up to humans, so a relationship with these animals will not mature socially with humans except with years of interaction. I was getting to that point in the relationship with him. I cried for hours when he died and for much of the next day. It happened that I had travel planned for Sunday so as Fabian buried him I joined the funeral remotely and went forward. My heart aches at his absence and doing all the counterfactual thinking about how thing would be different had I made different choices. Rodents are fragile animals and chinchillas are exceptionally vulnerable and in need of an environment which is safe for them. I miss Feisty dearly and feel so broken. I feel at fault. Some others have told me not to blame myself and I told them that I do not but I do anyway. Logically it is partly my fault and I can blame a series of other factors as well.
Feisty and Pip chilling
Parts of this blog post are not happy. I wish for people to be nice to animals and for people and animals to have all peace and happiness in the world. Feisty died unexpectedly at a young age in an unfortunate way.
I have had lots of Syrian hamsters. They live for about two years. Many people regard pet rodents as lower life forms, less feeling and with smaller souls than pets such as cats or dogs. Consequently, many people who would give great care to a care or dog might provide a hamster a small home with less enrichment and attention and routine care. Also many people might never assist a hamster in distress. For example, I have had hamsters which required medical care and needed a vet visit. There are people who would take an injured or ill cat or dog to a vet but not take time or pay money to do the same for a hamster. I can understand that since hamsters have a shorter lifespan, they also have less time to bond with a human, but they do bond. Also with hamsters the shorter lifespan can suit some people’s lifestyles. With a cat or dog, one makes a 15 year commitment to the care of the animal. If the human’s lifestyle changes, perhaps because of a move, or change of housing situation, or perhaps because of the split of a human couple, then the pet’s life is changed more than the pet wants and maybe even the animal goes to a new home. A hamster is a two year commitment, and while it is sad when they die, in contrast to a pet with a longer life a person can care for a hamster from start to end more easily and be confident that they provided the hamster the best possible life experience.
Feisty and Pip constantly aware of where the other is
Chinchillas exhibit many of the behaviors of a hamster but are more emotionally reserved and shy. They live as long as a cat or dog but they are not as bold to interact like cats or dogs. Whereas human can expect to have mutual respect and social bonding with cats, dogs, and hamsters possibly on day 1, mostly likely within 3-5 days, and almost certainly within a month, chinchillas require months or years to give their trust. Even when they give some trust, they hold back even more, and only slowly over time will the chinchilla decide to trust slightly more in new ways and explore new ways of interacting with humans. This is not to say that new pet chinchillas are disagreeable pets in the beginning, but only to say that humans who build relationships with them will recognize that over time the chinchilla’s behavior changes.
Chinchillas have a desire to investigate which they moderate with a startle reflex. Typical interactions between a human and chinchilla will be a balance between the the chinchilla curiously having an interaction with the human while their stress grows. When they become too stressed, they seek to break off the interaction and hop away. So for example, a chinchilla’s curiosity might lead them to hop to a human and look at them. They feel gratified to look at the human, but become more stressed if the human draws closer, or makes a sound, or makes too much eye contact, or tries to pet them, or communicates with them in other ways, or if too much time passes the human does not respond in a way that the chinchilla finds positive. Something unusual about a new chinchilla is that it might desire to investigate a human by jumping on to the human. If it does this, its wish is probably that the human remain still, not react, be quiet, and not touch the chinchilla. This is a different experience from a cat or dog, which might come to a human to be petted and get attention, or a hamster, which will tend to learn to enjoy human interaction quickly. Over time, chinchillas will be more comfortable with eye contact, and human voices, and having a human bring their hand close for the chinchilla to inspect, and being lightly petted with one finger, or given food treats. It can be hard to give chinchillas all the space they need, but most people who keep chinchillas will say that an hour of daily interaction with the chinchilla outside their pen and in an open space is sufficient for socializing. At that level of attention, a chinchilla can take years just to be comfortable with being lighted petted most of the time, and will never be as comfortable around humans as many other pets.
This is not to say that chinchillas do not want human interaction; they do, a lot. Even new chinchillas will continually and repeatedly approach humans. The unusual thing is that they want the interaction on their terms, and mostly want the human either non-reactive or slowly and predictably reactive to their frequent and repeated greetings. Chinchillas will initiate greetings to a human then flee at any response in thousands of encounters over time. A chinchilla who can explore freely in a large room may check out all inanimate surroundings repeatedly, play with other chinchillas in the space, and if there is a human, approach the human every 1-3 minutes to interact. Somehow they get spooked then hop away, only to cautiously return a few minutes later.
Feisty has hopped onto Fabian while he rests
I met Feisty along with his bonded chinchilla life partner Pip when I started dating Fabian in 2014. He was cautious then, and every few months Fabian and I would talk about how Feisty and Pip have developed a new standard for social interaction. Perhaps they would approach and stay for 10 seconds instead of 5, or they would allow themselves to be petted for 2 seconds instead of a fraction of a second, or they would allow us to talk with them in a low voice, or combinations of these things over time. Every behavior is interesting to a chinchilla and almost every behavior makes them startled. They continually run away to hide. It takes them a few seconds to feel brave again, at which time they return until they feel shy again.
Lately Feisty had developed to do all sorts of things which distinguished him. It seems like a small thing and is difficult to describe, but chinchillas choose postures from which to present themselves. Pip would stand in one way to present himself in front of certain people and Feisty choose his own preferred distance away and angle of approach as compared to Pip. Feisty liked to communicate by making scratches for a second in front of his standing body as he made human eye contact. He liked when the human responded back by scratching the ground in front of them, as this would make him repeat the scratch. He liked making eye contact and scratching the ground in front of him with a human doing the same. In Fabian’s bedroom he found a way of scaling certain shelves and room fixtures so that he could make eye contact with standing humans and look down on us sitting. Pip never learned to do this and Feisty did it routinely after learning the how a year ago. Chinchillas have a chirp that they make when they are happy. Pip made his chirp with a certain sound and Feisty had his own different chirp. Pip tended to beginning chirping most times when he played. Feisty chirped only some of the times when he played. Feisty tended to want to play less than Pip, and would find a place to settle down and nod off. Pip would play for as long as he was out (even 3-4 hours) although both of them, after returning to their pen, would immediately fall to sleep. Feisty would sometimes find any corner and nod off standing. Obviously this was not comfortable for him as in his own space he sleeps in a different way. We understand that he prefers to sleep at home and had no way of communicating that he was ready to return, so when he was tired outside his pen he would plan to make due and prepare himself for sleep. Only recently Feisty started seeking to touch the nose of his face to mine if I put my face at his level. This is an intimate behavior as in general, chinchillas do not initiate touching their fur on human skin and they do not want their face potentially soiled. Chinchillas tend to want their fur to be as crisp and clean as possible so are averse to any kind of touch that presses on their fur or potentially could get it oily such as with human skin.
I was playing with the chinchillas late Friday night. It is a tight apartment in Bushwick and through a series of barriers, the chinchillas can hop around most of the bedroom but not some places, and they are not allowed under the bed. There is no danger for them in the bedroom but it is annoying if they get under the bed then decide to nap, because in that case they decide for themselves when they come out and they should not be in the room unsupervised. The bed was not pushed all the way to the wall because of applying the fitted sheet to the mattress. When playing, I saw Feisty sneak along the wall to below the mattress, which is something he has never done before, and which I would not have thought possible. Chinchillas like other rodents have a way of fitting into small spaces which seem like they could not possibly enter.
Feisty was then loose. After some time I heard him making noises under the bed, but could not reach him, and was dependent on him coming out. I put Pip back into his own pen. I waited for Feisty, but it seemed to me that he was napping in the dark under the bed. It was late. I let the chinchillas out at perhaps 9pm. It was 11pm when I was ready to put him back but he was missing. Fabian was still at work to return at midnight.
This next part is sad. I do recommend that everyone avoid reading any more.
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In this story Feisty will die when a dog kills him. There are two dogs at Fabian’s house. When the chinchillas are out, they are in the bedroom with the door closed. The dogs are never allowed inside and stay in a different room. The dogs had never been aggressive to the chinchillas, but also, they were never together. When Fabian returned home he came into the bedroom. At this time Feisty snuck outside the bedroom without him being aware. I was half asleep and we talked about catching the chinchilla. I said that he was under the bed missing. Fabian began to survey surroundings. He went back outside the bedroom a few minutes later and Feisty was there, immediately outside the bedroom doorway and dead. It was his first time going outside the bedroom and the first time in his 5+ years at Fabian’s home that he had encountered the dogs living there. Within seconds of his exit from the bedroom he was dead. Since his body seemed intact, maybe he experienced a bite and just died, as he did not appear or feel injured.
I am heartbroken and sick. When I saw his dead body he appeared to be sleeping, but on touching him, I found him dead. I went to the bathroom to vomit and afterward was inconsolable. However bad I felt Feisty was dead and Pip lost his partner. In a brief exchange, I insisted on allowing Pip, the other chinchilla, examine the body, and I briefly put Feisty into the chinchilla pen. Pip approached it, looked and sniffed over it, stood up and looked at me, then hopped away. I had the idea that Pip could have an instinctual understanding of death and have a realization that his partner would not return. Fabian later told me that this ritual might only have frightened him, because now Pip understands that we have an association with his dead partner. I do not know animal psychology so I do not know what is right to do. Should humans show pets the body of their deceased friends, or is that a human ritual which does not benefit an animal? What is natural to do?
Chinchillas have a reputation for being difficult pets because of their complex social needs. They are social animals and need the companionship of another chinchilla in their pen. Ideally, 2 to 4 or more chinchillas can live together and socially bond to each other. Bonded chinchillas are life partners with each other and seek the regular companionship of each other. Chinchillas are often aggressive to chinchillas outside their social group and with which they are not bonded. There is a process for encouraging chinchillas to bond with each other, but to some extent, from a human perspective chinchillas just seem to be choosy for unknown reasons about which other chinchillas they will accept and which ones they will forever reject. Pip and Feisty were bonded to each other after Fabian brought Pip to a chinchilla adoption center. Pip had the opportunity to meet various chinchillas there. After passing some hours peacefully with Feisty in which they stood unmoving next to each other for some hours, it seemed that they had an initial liking to each other, and Feisty came home to move into Pip’s pen. They became fast friends, then their relationship developed further with new intimate behaviors like Pip becoming protective of Feisty, their mutual grooming, and their negotiating to claim spaces to be alone and to be together.
I do not know what sort of emotions to imagine that Pip might have. He just lost his bonded partner. Do chinchillas have the emotional capacity for heartbreak? Alternatively, when herds of chinchillas hop together in the cliffsides of Chile and Peru, has nature prepared them to expect that predators will collect one of their number with some regularity, and that they should expect some relationships to pass while they need to form new ones? Along with whatever else I felt my primary concern was that if we kept a pet then we should provide for its needs. Having one pet killed by a dog is a major breach of the safety I imagined in the household. I want more security for the household pets, and I want a replacement partner for Pip as soon as possible. Chinchillas seek to communicate continually and he needs to be talking with another chinchilla.
I wish that there was no need for dogs and chinchillas to cross paths in the same household. I do not like looking at the chinchillas and fearing for their safety. I do not like looking at the dogs and seeing a creature which has a natural instinct to kill the other family pets, and which have done so. Fabian has a greater affinity for the chinchillas. His housemate has a greater affinity for the dogs. We all meet in the shared space of the apartment, so 3 humans, 2 dogs, and 2 chinchillas all have needs to negotiate in a very expensive small space.
Obviously I also project all kinds of human thought processes onto chinchillas and hamsters and whatever other animals I like. If anyone likes their pet or animal then I think they should have whatever kind of relationship with the animal satisfies them. I only wish that whatever people choose to do, they could do it in a gentle and personal way so that they minimize the extent to which their activities infringe on the peace of others.
Even though a chinchilla is dead and another one is lonely, and even though it is the death that has made me cry, this entire experience highlights the pressures on the human relationships involved here. I like playing with the chinchillas. Fabian wants good relationships with me, his housemate, his chinchillas, and the puppies. Fabian cares about the puppies too but they mostly belong to his housemate who makes the last call on how they puppies can behave and be treated. Their apartment is already small for two people and with me around that means more pressure on their lifestyle. Despite me being at their place about half the time, I still live there in packed bags and without permanently storing things, and am never there without Fabian. That makes me sort of an outsider, and maybe kind of a deadbeat for not paying rent, but then also I am definitely not supposed to be there dividing the space further as a third moved-in resident. Maybe he holds me responsible for the chinchilla dying. I felt like the barriers for safety were enough but I was risking a little animal’s life and obviously I was too careless and now Feisty has died. Fabian’s room mate is quiet and rarely likes to have conversations other than small talk. It seems a little strange to me that I am in this home and intimate space with another person for years, and we have shared intense experiences, and we rarely talk about things. Maybe this is not strange but just how life is because there is not enough time for everyone to discuss everything. He and I did not talk about the chinchilla death, even a mention in passing, and maybe we never will.
My wish for resolving all of this is for Pip to get a new chinchilla friend, for us to plan new security for having the chinchillas out, and for everyone to align to meet the communication needs of the person who finds the most challenge in talking about any of this. I would like to apologize and can do so by listing everything that I think went wrong and every way that I would change in the future, but apologies require an exchange with communication. One chinchilla to whom I would like to apologize is dead and even though the other is there and seeming a little sad I cannot communicate easily with him. There are no humans who want an apology from me but if anyone wanted to hear from me then I would say why I am so sorry. It is an unfortunate situation. Poor Feisty, poor Pip.
Fabian and I went to see the new Tom of Finland movie on Sunday 5 November 2017. The movie told how Tom of Finland fought against the Russians in World War II, faced discrimination for being gay, then found a popularity base and international distribution network by publishing gay erotic comics in Los Angeles. I was interested because Tom of Finland was one of the early celebrity figures when the gay rights movement developing. He got his work out in many places at a time when it was difficult to distribute anything LGBT+ related. Also, I was interested because my fellow and now-deceased Wikipedian Adrianne Wadewitz promoted his comics.
In late 2011 the Wikimedia Foundation established the Wikipedia Education Program, which was an effort to encourage any local Wikipedia editors to do university outreach to assist students and classes in editing Wikipedia. There was round of training sessions in the United States and I coordinated the one in Seattle in August 2011 as one of the pilot participants who would be a “Campus ambassador“. I recruited some professors to incorporate Wikipedia into their class syllabuses. Various other people around the US tried to do this but at that time I was only in contact with the Wiki editors in Cascadia.
Unrelated to the university outreach program, there was a July 2012 Wikipedia editing event at the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles. At this time publishing notices about in-person collaborative Wikipedia editing was still uncommon so those of us who were watching could have general awareness of all the events which were happening. Unrelated to this event, also in July 2012 I was drafting documentation for a Wiki LGBT community group. In my research for that I saw this Tom of Finland event and wondered how and why anyone would do a Wikipedia editing event with porny comics, and whether it was safe in wiki to showcase an event like this in what I was drafting. From 2011 I had been doing Wiki LGBT+ events around Seattle related to HIV/AIDS and did not then understand how Wikipedia outreach could work in the arts.
In December 2012 the Wikimedia Foundation staffperson who had organized the university outreach program convened a workshop in Atlanta for those of us who had been doing school outreach for a while. Ten of us went there to meet each other and become more aligned with our activities.
I met Adrianne for the first time at that Wikipedia Education Program workshop. All of us met in a hotel lobby and when I arrived there was already a group in conversation at the table. The topic of discussion was sexuality and when I sat down Adrianne continued a discussion about college sexuality in the manner that I felt was uncommon among women and more common when gay boys talk among themselves. I came to realize that someone had prompted Adrianne in this subject and she took the lead in deconstructing the college sexual experience based on relationship and experience examples that she shared and sought to pull out from others at the table. It was apparent to me that Adrianne had the sort of skill set that someone gets from participating in consent training at LGBT community centers, and beyond that, she had a leadership skill set for orchestrating everyone in a room. She told me that she wanted Wikipedia articles about sexuality to be better. I mentioned reading that some Wikipedian had recently done a Tom of Finland Wiki event. Adrianne revealed that this Wikipedian was her. This took all this in as a good first impression.
For context – her event at the Tom of Finland Foundation was unusual for being an institutional collaboration among an organization and Wikipedia editors, and for being in Los Angeles, and for being LGBT+ themed, and for being gay porn themed, and for being presented by a female, and for being presented by someone who was cultivating their own public persona as a spokesperson for Wikimedia projects. I did not know wiki culture then like I know it now, but I knew enough to recognize that Adrianne and her activities were unusual and in my favor as a gay guy. Talking with her made me feel that there was momentum in Wiki LGBT+.
I think that conversation is most friendly and productive when everyone feels comfortable to speak as they like, but at the same time, I know the lines of cultural norms. In general, a space is safer and more comfortable for women when participants conversations avoid a turn toward sex. In general, a space is safer and more comfortable for LGBT+ people like gay boys when people mention sexuality or queerness, because heightened sexuality in a community normalizes routine discussion of queer topics and assists queer people in identifying anyone around who is hostile toward LGBT+ people. Adrianne had an outward presentation which I would stereotype as the appearance of a librarian. When I saw her poking around for sensitivity in the group, I did not have any read on what she was doing, but it seemed like a kind of feminism which would be useful for gay boys. She was being forward in a way that would identify any danger to gay boys and support LGBT+ spaces.
I asked Adrianne how she came to be the organizer of the event and she told me that she had always been a fan. She also told me that there was an artist in residence there, Katie Herzog, who was promoting the Tom of Finland archives and sought out Adrianne as a wiki point of contact. Later I would piece together that Katie modeled the event after the Wiki Loves Libraries outreach model which Pharos established. Lots of people got their start through Pharos.
I was glad that Adrianne was a fan and supportive. It is not as if Tom of Finland is unknown or a gay secret because his comics are everywhere and have been for a long time. In 2014, so later than this event, the Finnish postal service published Tom of Finland stamps, so that and the movie and all the books and the decades of cultural relevance had positioned Tom of Finland within the mainstream. Still, I was wondering why she as a girl had particular and extraordinary interest in promoting gay porn. She downplayed the need for any explanation and remarked that the art was meaningful to her. She mentioned that she edited about Jane Austen, so the information that I had was that Jane Austen and Kake’s adventures were comparable literature in her world.
At the workshop some of us in became closer friends. I continued to talk with most of them years later.
I was being vegan at the time. I do not recall Adrianne’s eating preferences. One lunch at the event was take out from Chick-fil-A, a fast food chain based in the area. That company had recently incited a controversy for seeking out anti-gay groups to sponsor in the name of charity. I had the shared experience of not having lunch for that meal with Adrianne. Talking with Adrianne about this is among the experiences on which I think back when I plan catering for events. Anyone will eat vegan food, but when the vegan food is gone, vegans will not eat the meat. Also, the context of food matters. Someone at the event mentioned the Chick-fil-A LGBT hate campaign and said in their own way said that that it was okay to disregard it because corporate value statements should not influence consumer purchase decisions. I never mind missing meals but that experience led me to the realization that on behalf of wiki guests I have to be among those who advocate for the most accessible meal options. Adrianne and I talked about the meaning of food and hosting guests. Event planning is hard!
After the education meetup Adrianne and I had other interactions. In 2014 she joined the planning committee for WikiConference North America 2014 in NYC. The general circumstances were that Wiki NYC had been planning to host a multi-day regional wiki conference for North America. There were about 10 of us as the primary planning committee. Maybe 7 of us were in NYC, and Adrianne was in Los Angeles joining calls remotely. We had a conference grant drafted in late 2013. She lived in California and had finished her PhD a few years before, and had just completed a fellowship, and in early 2014 in the midst of the conference planning she actually got a tenure track job at a university in Los Angeles. When she joined the WikiConference planning committee she was a highly experienced Wikipedia editor with top academic credentials, and someone with experience doing in-person Wikipedia training workshops, and someone who did public speaking about Wikipedia in academia, and someone who was going to bring Wikipedia through a solid academic career path.
She was the most active female in the Wiki LGBT+ community of that time, and particularly relevant to me, she was willing to acknowledge, engage with, and support gay men’s sexuality. I wish to emphasize how uncommon it is for any female to present herself for peership with gay boys on their own terms. Many minority groups which do not overlap in participant base will share common goals and interests, and I have always wished that in the Wikimedia community the advocates for women’s rights, gay rights, ethnicity rights, language rights and all the rest could combine their mutual interests to a common goal. There are various diversity talks and meetups in the Wikimedia community of course, but to have a top-level women’s rights advocate encouraging gay boys to engage with Wikipedia in a way that includes gay male sexuality is an extraordinarily welcoming invitation. Anyone who crosses over from one subculture to another is unusual. Adrianne and I also had a series of conversations about addressing harassment. We had developed a discourse in which we agreed on many points, particularly the need for proactive outreach starting at that WikiConference, and we disagreed on many points. The disagreements do not matter now but even as I think back several years I would be excited to continue the conversation we were having about documentation and reporting of harassment incidents.
The WikiConference was in May 2014. In April 2014 Adrianne could not join one of the planning meetings because she had a sports injury. Perhaps two days later, we got the news that Adrianne was in a coma, but doing well, whatever that meant. We heard that her condition was serious but that she would recover. Dorothy was in touch with Adrianne’s partner and she was the point of contact for us in the conference organizing committee. After a few more days we had an in-person meeting and were told that Adrianne had died from a rock climbing injury. The story that I heard is that she fell from a low distance but hit her head on a rock. It is stressful organizing a conference and we had some problems with Wiki critics targeting this conference with a protest. The protestors were hostile and eventually would do illegal activity at the conference. We all had mixed feelings. Adrianne was dead, so many people were depending on us for this conference, we have to tolerate the strange people who are harassing us and our event, and Adrianne is not going to help with conference harassment or anything else. She was dead. We went forward with the conference.
There are Wikipedia articles about her now. Noam Cohen, Wiki NYC’s native Wikimedia movement journalist, wrote about her death. Noam’s articles have been at the center of many now-canonical stories in the Wikimedia historical narrative. In this case he was the first to write about Adrianne’s engagement with Wikipedia. Shortly after she died someone made a Wikipedia article for her. The article went for deletion discussion, where I voted delete because there was an existing precedent that English Wikipedia does not pass biographies as notable when the only third-party source to cite is a single obituary in The New York Times. Reviewers had addressed this issue before and even a research team had talked through the possibility of automatically generating Wikipedia articles for all persons who were the subject of an obituary in that paper. In the days of that discussion, it happened that following Noam’s article lots of other commentators started publishing their variations of Adrianne’s obituary. With multiple perspectives and sources to cite the biography definitely passed Wikipedia’s inclusion criteria.
When I read the obituaries for Adrianne I began to think about how deaths and obituaries and mourning times are for the living. Adrianne no longer cared – she was dead. Noam profiled her because he wanted to advocate for Wikipedia and recognize the loss of a strong leader in an under-served space. Other people had their reasons. When I read the profiles about Adrianne I felt like they did not capture the way that I knew her, which was as a female who could package gay male sexuality in a context for the general public. Promoting Tom of Finland erotic comics is not as compelling when a typical gay guy does it, but when a female English professor does it, then that makes the experience more accessible to anyone who wants to visit the subculture. Even today there is continual Wikimedia movement research on online harassment of women, and there should be, but aside from Adrianne there have been no other women who stepped into the gay male space with authority and insisted on advocating for gay boys in a way comparable to the girls. Very few people outside of a subculture can advocate strongly and effectively for a subculture. It was a real loss for gay boys to lose Adrianne. It seemed weird to me that her obituaries focused on what she did for women, but when I started to read them, I had to agree that literature and women’s advocacy was most of what she did. Still, a significant part of her activity was gay male advocacy with a bold position on encouraging expression of sexuality.
After Adrianne’s death I talked with Rachel Wexelbaum who was to become very active in Wiki LGBT+ organizing. Rachel edited Queers Online, a March 2015 book (based on 2014 research) which included “Queering Wikipedia”, a chapter about LGBT+ projects in Wikipedia including a narrative of the Tom of Finland Wikipedia editing program. That chapter was mostly Rachel’s work and all of her initiative, but I was fortunate to have accepted Rachel’s invitation to join in researching it and coauthoring it along with the event host Katie Herzog. who organized the Tom of Finland wiki editathons while she was artist in residence there.
Whenever someone develops a Wikipedia article that becomes the foundation of all future research on that topic. All diligent people who start their research, whether journalist, student, researcher, hobbyist, or interested person of any sort, check the Wikipedia article on a topic. Because of Adrianne the Wikipedia article on Tom of Finland has been in better shape since the 2012 event. Anyone who researched Tom of Finland from that point, including the screenwriter for the new movie, and any producers who did research to consider funding its development, and any film executives who have to be cautious about the promise that a biography could have in a dramatization, either read the Wikipedia article or had their staff read the article. No one in this new movie or any similar new movie could be so far removed from Wikipedia. In that since, Adrianne gets some wiki-credit for flapping butterfly wings and turning a wiki event into a movie and a more complete historical record.
There is another part to this story to mention now and tell another time. Adrianne died on 9 April. Cynthia Ashley-Nelson, user:Cindamuse, died on 11 April. Cindy was also a strong female leader, Wikipedia power user, active in developing women’s articles, super active as a second-generation Wikipedian in the education program, resident in Cascadia and participant in outreach events there, and had recently accepted an appointment to serve on the Wikimedia Affiliations Committee. She had traveled from Seattle to Berlin where at Wikimedia Conference 2014 she would represent Wiki Cascadia values and lots else. She died on her first night there before almost anyone had met her. There are not a lot of us wiki community organizers in the world, and fewer still in any given region, and then considering a slice of interest like women’s issues makes for only a handful of people. To lose Adrianne and Cindy, who had great overlap in scope and wiki engagement, was a major disruption to any wiki women’s outreach in the United States. Not only do I miss them, but also, they were alive and active in a strange time in history where they were highly influential in directing a project affecting lots of people. When they died I grieved their deaths, and I also felt the loss and odd coincidence that two leading activists in the same space should die at once for unrelated reasons.
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