Archive: Issue No. 81, May 2004

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New Arts and Culture ministry
by Sean O'Toole

ANC stalwart Pallo Jordan has been named Minister of Arts and Culture following the announcement of President Thabo Mbeki's new Cabinet. A member of the National Executive Committee of the ANC since 1985, he takes over the newly constituted portfolio following the unbundling of the catchall Ministry of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology into two ministries.

Born on May 22, 1942 in B Location, Kroonstad, in the Free State, he left the country in 1962 to study at the University of Wisconsin in the US. He has acquired a number of degrees, including a post-graduate degree from the London School of Economics.

Jordan worked for the ANC on a full-time basis in 1975 in the movement's London offices as a member of the research unit in its department of Information and Publicity. In 1977, he was appointed head of Radio Freedom, based in Luanda, Angola.

In 1979, on the recommendation of Oliver Thambo, he was appointed director of the ANC's first internal mass propaganda campaign, The Year of the Spear, marking the centenary of the Battle of Isandhlwana. With Jordan at the helm, the ANC produced a plethora of imaginative communication tools - including posters, postcards, floppy disks, cassette tapes, bumper stickers, T-shirts, comic books and news sheets - with the aim of reviving in popular memory the traditions of armed resistance to conquest and colonial domination.

An outspoken media polemicist, his writing has been widely published in the popular press. In an article entitled 'From colonialism to African nationalism', published by the Helen Suzman Foundation (http://www.hsf.org.za/focus28/focus28jordanANC.html ) Jordan made this insightful comment: "Building a common South African nation is more than cheering the national cricket team, waving the same national flag. It means reducing the huge inequalities that separate Pinelands from Langa and Bokmakierie and Steenberg from Tokai and Constantia; Alexandra township from Sandton."

His appointment to the new Cabinet has been widely hailed as a positive.


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