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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Mhambi blogs therefore he is

Zadie Smith
Originally uploaded by Emdashes.com.

Mhambi loves blogging. It leaves me strangely fulfilled. Look its Saturday night, and here I am typing away. Mhambi wondered why this might be so? And two weeks ago, Zadie Smith, the talented young London writer, provided a possible explanation.

Mhambi posts excerpts of Zadie telling us that when we write we must - Fail better.

Writers feel, for example, that what appear to be bad aesthetic choices very often have an ethical dimension...

Style is a writer's way of telling the truth...

...writers are in possession of "selfhood", and that the development or otherwise of self has some part to play in literary success or failure.

We were taught that authenticity was meaningless. How, then, to deal with the fact that when we account for our failings, as writers, the feeling that is strongest is a betrayal of one's deepest, authentic self?

When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment - once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in - what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception.

That sounds very grand: maybe it's better to start at the simplest denomination of literary betrayal, the critic's favourite, the cliche...

With a cliche you have pandered to a shared understanding, you have taken a short-cut, you have re-presented what was pleasing and familiar rather than risked what was true and strange. It is an aesthetic and an ethical failure: to put it very simply, you have not told the truth. When writers admit to failures they like to admit to the smallest ones - for example, in each of my novels somebody "rummages in their purse" for something because I was too lazy and thoughtless and unawake to separate "purse" from its old, persistent friend "rummage". To rummage through a purse is to sleepwalk through a sentence - a small enough betrayal of self, but a betrayal all the same. To speak personally, the very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.

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Mhambi's South Africa 2006

Open debate, Aids, Gays, Poverty

2006 was a watershed year for South Africa. It was a year that saw more open debate than at any time since the all democratic elections of 1994. Why? Because the monolithic ANC dominated political discourse was shattered with the infighting between the Zuma and Mbeki camps.

tragedy in south africa...aids has left a mark (South Africa)
Originally uploaded by Matt'satwwJ.

Deputy president Zuma was of course cleared of a rape charge and then the charge for corruption was withdrawn.

For the first time people and the press felt free to openly question excepted wisdom on many issues. As with most open debate, some times this questioning was good, "should the government not have spent more on the poor?" Sometimes bad: "Why give gays rights?" The specter of political campaigning along ethnic and tribal lines also raised its ugly head.

But one of the most benign effects of this opening up was that it allowed more debate on Mbeki's disastrous Aids policy that has the cost the lives of thousands of South Africans. By year end the government had changed its policy, lets hope they can implement this new policy far wide and fast.

The question remained, was this a sign of a maturing democracy or just an opening up as a consequence of a jostling for power in the ruling party?

De la Rey makes a comeback

It was also the year in which some detected the stirrings of resurgent Afrikaner nationalism and unity. A response to the renaming of towns and cities, crime, corruption, affirmative action and a general sense of exclusion of the once dominant group. This even found expression in phenomena like the extremely popular De la Rey song of a young Afrikaner, Bok van Blerk.

White intellectuals made their voices heard to. In concert authors like Brink and Malan lamented the parlous state of law and order. Malan saw a sad decay, but Brink saw slaughter in the future. Nadine Gordimer was mugged in her home, but she stayed positive, preferring to blame the government for not helping the poor.

The meaning of Africaness

Another intellectual, Van Zyl Slabbert, articulated another new trend that became increasingly visible during the year. The growing racial exclusive ideology that only black South Africans could be African, and not white coloured or asian ones.

It was not just South African white writers that were negative, so too people like UK Guardian South African correspondent Rory Carroll. He never quite fell for South Africa because it "took a sledge hammer to his cherished progressive ideals".

Another Brit, Nick Broomfield, managed to produce both the most entertaining and most out of touch documentary of the year about South Africa, "His big white self".

A booming economy

All this pessimism while one could be forgiven for asking what all the fuss was about - the South African economy appeared in rude health - growing at record levels for a record period. But, the growth has so far been very slow on delivering South African jobs. The rich is getting richer and the poor poorer.

Violence

White trash
Originally uploaded by Hermosdef.

Violence continued across the country as in the past few years. Black South Africans were still more likely to be killed than white ones, usually by other black South Africans and often by somebody they know. If you were foreign and black you were in real danger. Especially Somali business men were targeted in a spate of killings across the country.

PW Botha, the last apartheid defending leader of the country passed away.

There was increasing debate about the countries history. Events like the Battle at Cuito Canavale in Angola are set to become a political battle field going forward.

And it was reported that nearly 800,000 white South Africans had immigrated since 1994. That's nearly 20% of the total.

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Feed or notifications for Mhambi

Yes, Mhambi's got a job. Now you know how I could post so much the last six weeks. And now you know that it will be harder to do the same going forward.

Well to help my regular 31 readers (yes, I'm tracking you) not have to revisit the site for new postings, I have included two new ways to get notified when Mhambi posts.

The first is the Mhambi feed for those of you with RSS readers. For those of you not that technically inclined, you can just enter your email address here, and be notified that way.

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Bok van Blerk is big

Mhambi's blog has never been so popular. Yesterday I had just shy of 120 visitors for the day. But alas its not due to my quick wit and incisive analysis. Unfortunately not. It's because of Bok van Blerk and his De la Rey song.

Not seen the De la Rey video yet? Well please do, and here is the English lyrics for all the rooinekke out there.

Some people have started to comment on it. Is it racist? An expression of Afrikaner frustration at being marginalised? Please feel free to join in the debate.

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