Mhambi has now moved

To Mhambi.com There is no need to chnage your feed subscription, I shifted it to the new blog.

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Mhambi.blogspot to move to Mhambi.com

It's been a great two and a bit years since I started this blog.

Because of the Blogger platform limitations I decided a while ago to switch to a self hosted version of the open source Wordpress platform. But the longer I wait the harder this will be to do. No least since all the Google Pagerank juice I have acquired.

So this is my last post. I will keep this blog, and definitely link to it, but all new writing will go onto the new site.

So how popular was Mhambi?

Here is a pic of my Google analytics stats from April 2006 to now. (My tracking code was down for a month but the figures are still more or less correct).



Not bad hey. 24,371 Absolute Unique Visitors. Lets break this down a bit. How many people came how often?



Unfortunately almost 70% came but once, and never again (A number I hope to improve on with a Wordpress blog).

But quite allot (more than 3500) of people have visited the site more than 9 times. A whopping 470 people have visited the site more than 200 times. Whey! Want to buy Mhambi t-shirts guys?

Content

So what's my most popular posts? Well that's a bit unfair, some posts have been out there for more than 2 years, while others are barely a month old.

Still its quite interesting.



The General De La Rey's music video trumped all. I suspect that most of those visitors that came once came for that.

Two of my better posts, His big white self and Quito: A background to a battle are in the top 10.

Other posts I rate like Are Afrikaner's the planet's worst racists?, The unbearable whiteness of being, and De la Rey the left wing icon also has done well.

Some posts that I would recommend you read if you have not includes Afrikaner vs Cuban: the irony of Cuito Cuanavale, Of generations, arseholes, Israel and volkstate and Apartheid reporting and moral double standards. It was written before the well publicised xenophobic violence.

With regards to this recent violence I am particularly proud of the analysis I did in The rainbow racists are nationalistic and not that poor and Mbeki's ANC is Africanist not Nationalist.

A number posts with racey pictures or about sexuality have done well, much better than they should have.

But when MP Andries Nel responded to a post on my blog, I decided its time to clean up and get serious - Mhambi has entered high society.

(I also noticed my older sister had subscribed via email ;) ).

Where did all my traffic come from?



Besides the obvious candidate, Google, a surprising amount came via Blik.co.za, the Afrikaans link recommendation site.

Amatomu, the South African version of Technorati has not been that great at all at driving traffic, that's despite Mhambi being in their top 30 South African political blogs for ages.

Other sites of note that drove traffic to me is Pierre De Vos's Constitutionally Speaking blog and Moneyweb who featured one of my articles, as well as a Dutch TV station's site.

As soon as my new site is live I will let you know.

In the mean time, a 25 part documentary series on the Angolan Border War called Grensoorlog starts on Sunday on Kyknet. It features over 200 interviews with ordinary grunts (including the very first Swapo insurgent), the operators like Jan Breytenbach, to the big boys like Pik, Chester Crocker and Gorbachov.

You can watch it over the Net at Kuduclub. I directed two episodes and researched and help write the program structure. Watch it if you can you'd be surprised how compelling this part of South African history really is, and how much of what happened you don't know.

And yes there's a whole two programs dedicated to Quito Cuanavale.

Mhambi

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South Africa is going down

Mhambi is really depressed. If you have been following this blog it's a no brainer to figure out why. South Africa is going down.

When things started to go awry round 1997 (ok, their were earlier signs but we all chose to ignore them), Mhambi was one of those who put the blame on the ANC's neo-liberal economic policies. I read Patric Bond, and nodded at the sage words of Sampie Terre'blance.

Spiraling crime, the lack of government could all be laid at Mbeki's laissez faire door. The fact that respected anti-apartheid campainers like Dennis Davis were being sidelined for criticising black apartheid sycophants should have warned us that more was rotten.

Unfortunately, the reality of the new racially exclusive Africanism of Mbeki and its pervasive acceptance amongst the black elite only dawned on many when he made his two nations speech. Even then the business world and whites choose to ignore it, the economy was doing just swell, and if you were wealthy so were you.

Aids? Well nobody really knew what to make of that. To ghastly to contemplate. It had me seething with rage and incomprehension.

Corruption? Debilitating. Well it was a Mbeki, a neo-liberal thing. The arms deal, Travelgate and so many more happened under his watch.

Zuma and the left seemed to be a universal panacea to me. He was not a racialist, not a denialist and he was left inclined. At last we could get the state to take care of its citizens.

It was not to be...

Then Shaik and the arms deal transpired, and Zuma was tainted. And the rape case.

Still I believed nothing could be worse than Mbeki. Besides the evidence against Zuma in the rape case was flimsy.

...but... the nagging doubts...

...legal technicalities aside, what does it say of Zuma's supporters that they still wanted a man so tainted as president? Is this a movement or a one man hagiography?

Some influential supporters would not wait any longer for us to make inferences of their character. ANC youth leader Julius Malema is threatening the Constitutional Court with promises to die for Zuma. Not to worry, don't take me literally he avers.

How are we to read that?

Even more worrying is Zwelezima Vavi's parroting of murderous threats. We are used to idiotic statements from the Youth league. We expected allot more from the leadership of an workers organisation like Cosatu.

Zuma's own lawyers have now stooped to a level where they are trying to degenerate the reputation of the court.

Now I am wondering. Is the Zunami a genuine left movement for the benefit of poor South Africans or a cult of personality ready to usher in a new elite?

Is the Zunami going to give us a social compassionate state at the expense of the rule of law? Unfortunately the first is always dependent on the latter.

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