I just came across this Y&R Cape Town advert on MarkLives.

Farai Muguwu, director of the Centre for Research and Development, has been remanded in custody again – he’ll be looking at a good 45 days in jail at least before he is released. His crime? Investigating human rights abuses and corrupt dealings in the diamond fields of Marange.

We’ve recently updated our special index on Zimbabwe’s diamond fields, with reports from Global Witness and Partnership Africa Canada.

The Y&R advert advises people to insist on certification to protect themselves from dealing in blood diamonds. But as the PAC report worryingly points out:

The story of Zimbabwe’s contested diamond fields is also a story of how the Kimberley Process – the international initiative created to ensure that the trade in diamonds does not fund violence and civil war – has lost its way.

Zimbabwe is not the only country failing to meet some or all of the basic requirements asked of diamond producing nations by the Kimberley Process. A lack of political will and weak internal controls in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, allows for a steady flow of illegal diamonds onto the international market.

But Zimbabwe sets itself apart from the others because of the government’s brazen defiance of universally agreed principles of humanity and good governance expected of adherents to the Kimberley Process. As such Zimbabwe poses a serious crisis of credibility for the KP, whose impotence in the face of thuggery and illegality in Zimbabwe underscores a worrisome inability or unwillingness to enforce either the letter, or the spirit, of its founding mandate.

A field and a ball made out of old plastic packets and twine. All you need to get started.

One of the good things about the Zimbabwe Independent newspaper is Dusty Miller and his restaurant reviews. I like that he calls a spade a spade and doesn’t hide behind a pseudonym (one of Zimbabwe’s many dysfunctions). The majority of Zimbabwean restaurants are overpriced and mediocre which is what he pointed out in his last review of Millers Restaurant in Borrowdale.

In another gruelling review, this time theatre, Susan Hains writing for The Standard newspaper gave The Importance of Being Earnest a bashing. She made some good points I think. I saw the play and also wondered about the choice of music. When I heard the first bit of music I got excited thinking that the play would be seriously re-worked but instead it wasn’t and the music seemed inappropriate. I’m surprised the reviewer didn’t mention having an issue with the accents which I thought were all over the place. Disagreeing with Susan though, I believe that a great deal of work went into rehearsing and staging the play; it wasn’t “thrown together”.

The audience the night I was there provided both respite and frustration. In front of me a lumber jack look a like sat with a big bag of Frittos on his lap for most of the play and continually delved into the bag, crackling and crunching his way through the production. To the left of the lumberjack a very fat school boy nosily chomped his way through a Pascal milk chocolate bar. And behind me two old geezers talked about the play being rather too high brow for them; that they were pleased they’d had a few toots before the show and were glum when they realised it only ended at 930pm and that they’d miss the second half of the evening’s football match.

Here are some general writing tips from some successful writers. And here are some more

1. Ernest Hemingway. Use short sentences and short first paragraphs. These rules were two of four given to Hemingway in his early days as a reporter–and words he lived by.

2. Mark Twain. Substitute “damn” every time you want to use the word “very.” Twain’s thought was that your editor would delete the “damn,” and leave the writing as it should be. The short version: eliminate using the word “very.”

3. Oscar Wilde. Be unpredictable. Wilde suggested that “consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”

4. Anton Chekhov. Show, don’t tell. This advice comes out of most every writing class taught. Chekhov said it most clearly when he said, “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

5. EB White. Just write. The author of Charlotte’s Web, one of the most beloved of children’s books, said that “I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.”

6. Samuel Johnson. Keep your writing interesting. “The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.”

7. Ray Bradbury. Learn to take criticism well and discount empty praise, or as Bradbury put it, “to accept rejection and reject acceptance.”

8. Toni Morrison. Remember that writing is always about communication. “Everything I’ve ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.”

9. George Orwell. Orwell offered twelve solid tips on creating strong writing, including an active voice rather than a passive one and eliminating longer words when shorter ones will work just as well.

10. F. Scott Fitzgerald. “Cut out all those exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke.”

11. Anais Nin. “The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.”

12. Truman Capote. Editing is as important as the writing. “I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.”

13. Maurice Sendak. Keep revising. “I never spent less than two years on the text of one of my picture books, even though each of them is approximately 380 words long. Only when the text is finished … do I begin the pictures.”

To provide Kenyans with a fair constitution, a panel of experts used 47,793 words. To derail it, someone secretly added two. The attempted sabotage occurred at the official government printer, which was producing copies of the proposed constitution ahead of a national vote on the law in August. The document had been praised for guaranteeing basic freedoms. But in a move that has caused public outrage and prompted an inquiry involving the attorney general and intelligence chiefs, someone at the printing plant was able to add the words “national security” to a key clause on fundamental rights. Nearly 2,000 copies of the altered constitution had been published by the time it was discovered. “It was an outrageous act, unbelievable,” said Otiende Amolo, a Kenyan  member of the committee that drafted the new laws. “The addition of those words meant that all rights could be abrogated in favour of whatever was deemed ‘national security’.” Though President Mwai Kibaki  has ordered a police investigation, the saboteur, widely assumed to be an individual or group opposed to the proposed constitution, has yet to be publicly identified.
- Xan Rice, The Guardian Weekly