The word 'township' usually conjures up images of dilapidated, near-worthless shacks chock-full of people suffering from poverty, disease or hopelessness. That was at least the intention of the apartheid government when they relegated blacks to these townships. The townships-- there are more than 50 around Cape Town-- are located far from economic opportunities and are thus plagued by "unemployment, poor health care, limited public services, high levels of child mortality and HIV/Aids" (Contemporary South Africa-- Anthony Butler). Historically, because townships were located far from the economic hubs of the country, men became migrant workers and spent months at a time away from their families. This practice paved the way for the HIV epidemic in South Africa and the fracturing of the family unit.
Judging from this bleak history, it is easy enough to see townships as festering pools of disease and faded chances. Today blacks largely still live in the townships often in tin shacks that are prone to fires and break-ins. You might think this is because of poverty-- blacks simply don't have the economic means just yet to leave for safer, whiter suburbs. To a large extent this is true. It is not uncommon to see men and women walking the dirt roads to nowhere in particular. Jobs are scarce in South Africa. A good education that will seemingly secure a good job is even more elusive. One aspect of South African tourism is the ‘township tour’—where wealthy tourists are taken to the poorest areas to see their deprived circumstances. We were taken on one such tour in Soweto and visited the home of a mother with six children. We gave her money in exchange for a view of her exotic lifestyle. As my friend Jordan put it—this was poverty porn. More disturbing was the fact that these tours were the only source of income for many in this area. Their economy was predicated on their poverty, which led me to wonder—how can they ever escape?
All of this seems to still prop up the South African legacy of apartheid and racial separation, but it's much more complicated. Economic misfortune is one reason blacks stay in the townships but that doesn't explain why many black reporters and photographers in my newsroom still live there. It doesn't explain why there are BMWs, Audis and Benzes rolling through the streets. It doesn't explain why people use Motorola Rzrs and laugh at my puny Nokia. It doesn't explain the immense material wealth-- stereos, CDs, Pumas, Armani, Dsquared-- that seems the line the walls of these shacks. We saw mansions in Soweto, some people build cement and brick houses behind and in front of their shacks. Others invest R25 000 in improvements to their small, meager homes.
So you have to ask yourself-- is it poverty that keeps blacks there or is it community?
In the past week, I have had the good fortune of being able to visit three townships around Cape Town: Langa, Gugaletu and Crossroads. The trips have given me small insights into this extraordinarily complex sector of society. Townships were the historical hub of the anti-apartheid movement. In Joburg, Soweto (an abbreviation of South Western Township, an area SW of Joburg) was the capital of activism and agitation against the government. In that sense the townships were exciting. They were centers of change, where black pride was born and where giants like Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu were weaned. On Saturday, I went to Langa where the remains of four freedom fighters were being handed off to their families. The four went missing in the 1980s, at the height of the anti-apartheid struggle, and were only found this year. I was sent to cover the handing-off ceremony and was shocked by how political the event was. It was no somber affair. Some women wore green ANC Women’s League dresses, while men wore black ‘Vote ANC’ shirts over their jeans. A small minority wore red shirts of the South African Communist Party. ANC freedom songs were sung and people toi-toied (danced) around the coffins. It was a celebration of their life and came as a result of their sacrifice.
Last Sunday, I visited a popular restaurant and bar in Gugs called Mzoli's. If you remember from my last email, Mzoli's is a wealthy and popular restaurateur whose place specializes in meat. (Capetonians are carnivores). Next door is a bar that sells R7 beers. Use the bathrooms at your own risk. I went to Mzoli's with a friend of mine on the same program, Matt Medved. Matt and I were escorted to Mzoli's by our work colleague Mzolisi, a Xhosa-speaking journalist from the Eastern Cape. We took a taxi-- also known as a kombi and not to be confused with a cab-- which is basically a public white van that takes people places for a paltry fare-- R7. The kombis are where one can divine the pulse of the country. The three of us squashed into a seat made for two. We were laughing, and enjoying the music and the Xhosa-sprinkled conversation of the other passengers. We arrived in Gugs about 30 minutes later and stepped into the loudest, most vibrant atmosphere I have seen yet in Cape Town.
Matt and I are no strangers to CT nightlife. We live on Long St, the most exciting street in CT. But this was absolutely insane. Mzoli's the most popular township bar and people from all over Cape Town, even those blacks living in predominantly-white suburbs, come on Sundays to enjoy the atmosphere. There were hundreds of people of every breed and creed. We saw families, couples (both straight and homosexual), singles (again, both straight and homosexual), groups of friends, loners-- even babies. People drank beer, laughed, had great conversation, ate meat, danced exuberantly, played loud hip-hop and house music. Well-heeled folk leapt from flashy BMWs to greet old friends and make new ones. The crowd was mostly black, but there were a few white tourists and a few coloureds. Nobody seemed out of place. There was a sense of freedom and acceptance more than any other place I've ever been. But there was also a collective respect. People drank and danced and kissed, but there was bond that patrons had with the place that kept them from being destructive, aggressive or crude. On Long St., I’m grown accustomed to cat calls and crude remarks, but here people called me ‘sister’, looked me in the eye and spoke to me like I was a person.
It’s this kind of feeling that keeps blacks in townships, I think. A photographer at our paper, Lulama, who speaks Xhosa, was born and raised in a mint green house in Nyanga. He still lives there, but in a different house. There are shacks, muddy roads and few supermarkets, but Lulama wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s a nice environment, he says, he knows everybody and everybody knows him. He also feels safer here. Too few resources are allocated to police stations in the townships, but residents are kept in check by the community. Morality is strictly regulated. A person who thieves another will be found out and ruthlessly punished. As Lulama says “you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.”
Still, you’re never far from poverty, which is linked to desperation. In Gugs Mzo, Matt and I took a walk around the block, a residential area with cement and brick houses. It’s a relatively okay area with dogs, children, but none of the leafy green vegetation and clean paved roads that characterizes ‘good’ suburbs. No sooner had we taken our walk were we approached by a woman asking for money. She spoke to Mzo in Xhosa, and left disappointed, but used to it. Experts say there is a link between poverty and crime i.e. you’re more likely to commit a crime if you are poor. By the numbers and by circumstances, most of the poor in this country are black. Most criminals in this country are also black. But some say the numbers are deceiving. Another Xhosa-speaking photographer here, Micheal, argues that the criminal masterminds are often wealthier citizens, living in cushy suburbs in respectable neighborhoods. They often prey on township residents, some of whom are desperate to support their families, he says.
Take the Dina Rodrigues case. As I explained earlier, Dina was a white woman who hired four hit men from a Cape Town township to murder the six-month-old illegitimate child of her then-boyfriend. All four men were from the township Crossroads, a tiny community on the outskirts of Nyanga. Last week, I went to Crossroads to interview friends, family and colleagues of the four men to find out how the community was reacting and what these men were like. As I wrote in my story, no one was surprised by last Monday’s guilty verdict, but the deed still shook them to core. There was a sense of failure. Despite their best efforts, their streets had still bred baby killers. How could they recover? How could they explain these actions?
The mother of one killer, a 33-year-old taxi driver who organized the affair, was still aghast at her son’s actions. She is a tired, 68-year-old woman, with 7 other children. Her husband lives in the Eastern Cape and she takes care of her granddaughters and niece. Standing in her small cement house with faded yellow walls, cracked mirrors and mismatched furniture, she explained her son’s background, slowly, carefully and with feeling. She was close to her son, Sipho Mfazwe, she helped raise her son’s children. She didn’t know why he had done what he had done.
We walked through the home, the home that her son, now in prison, had visited every day. In her kitchen with moss-green walls, she closed her eyes and pressed her palms to her chest. She spoke in Xhosa but her anguish did not need translation. How could she have raised such a boy? What had she done wrong? Friends, taxi drivers, former teachers—nobody could explain why he had killed the child. And for so little. The mother of one of the killers, the 18-year-old, suffers in abject poverty. Two days after her son was found guilty, she was back selling fish. What else was she to do? There was no time to mourn. She had to feed her family, herself. It couldn’t be explained, so what was the point?
The story left me sad. Townships are notorious for breeding South Africa’s criminals. They get a bad rap, in my opinion, considering how disappointed the community was by these four men. Considering how shocked and sad everyone appeared. Considering how many questions there still were. After I finished the story, I felt more confused by the diversity of human beings. How can townships be a place of hope, vibrancy and respect, but also deep depravity? I think the answer lies in the fact that the township community is a protean one, one that is ever-changing and constantly redefining itself. In this extreme society, both ends of the spectrum are represented in full force. Desperation and achievement lay side by side. Hope collides with both the kindest and meanest realities of the future.
Monday, May 14, 2007
scribes of scandal
When the group first arrived in Johannesburg, we (our tour guides and us) met with the Daily Sun editor, Themba Khumale. The Daily Sun is a classic South African tabloid with its flashy pictures, exclamation marks and tales of witchcraft, hovering kitchen appliances and AIDS cures. It's irresponsible journalism at best and damaging to the nation's psyche, at worst. We sat down to talk. I argued, "Isn't a newspaper's job to educate, to inform?" He brushed off the inquiry with an irritated wave. "This is not a schoolhouse." I then accused of him being "too sensational." Outraged, he exclaimed: "South Africa is sensational." Much to my shock and chagrin, every South African in the room agreed.
Part of me thinks their agreeing has more to do with the fact that our guides merely wanted to maintain good relations with Khumale. But another part of me thinks it's the truth. Crime is so commonplace in this country that a stolen purse, car or television means nothing. South Africans deal with people who murder others for cell phones. A buddy of mine just wrote about a family who buried their son five months ago, only to find out recently that their son's body had been stolen and stored in the very funeral parlor that they buried him in. On Friday, a case was heard of a group of crooks who kidnapped the 22-year-old daughter of a prominent restaurateur, Mzoli. She was found tied to a chair several hours later in a respectable suburb of Cape Town called Table View Parklands.
And last week marked the end of the most sensational case of all: the Dina Rodriguez case. The story goes that one afternoon in 2005, 22-year-old Dina Rodrigues, an beautiful, famous actress, approached a taxi driver at taxi rank around Cape Town and offered R10 000 (or $1 428) to kill the six-month old baby of her then-boyfriend, Neil Wilson, and ransack the house. The taxi driver enlisted the help of three other who allegedly entered the Norton home, pretending to deliver a parcel. They tied up Natasha's brother Dylan and their domestic worker. They then stabbed baby Jordan in the neck with such force it scored her spine. She bled to death and Dylan, after freeing himself, found his niece with just moments to live. The death devastated Cape Town's community, but that was nothing to compared to what was to come. Initially investigators thought the incident was a robbery gone bad. In South Africa, grown men rape babies, so it wasn't so far-fetched. But evidence suggested something else. The value of the items stolen were negligible. Police soon learned that a "white woman" had phoned earlier in the day announcing the arrival of a package. They were hot on Dina Rodrigues trail.
It seems that Rodrigues was jealous that Neil had had a child with another woman, another young, beautiful woman named Natasha Norton. Wilson had not told Rodigues he was a father. There was also a racial component. Rodrigues was a beautiful white woman, and Norton, a coloured. Some say Rodrigues was furious her boyfriend had had a baby with a coloured woman.
(Coloureds are what South Africa calls its mixed-race people; Coloureds range from being darker than me to being lighter than an white person. There is no real defining physical characteristic. Rather, you can tell a coloured by their distinct, sing-songy Cape coloured accents.)
The result was one of the most riveting and sensational trials in South African history. Rodrigues was on trial with her four accomplices: Sipho Mongezi Mfazwe, 34, Mongezi Bobotyane, 24, Zenethemba Gwada, 20, and Bonginkosi Sigenu, 18. Since the trial started in 2005, the Independent Newspaper companies has run more than 500 stories on the case. Throughout the duration of the trial, people took time off of work and family responsibilities to watch the trial. In the latter days of the trial, people waited from 7am to grab prime seats in the upper galleys open to the public. The reading of the verdict itself was its own media circus. The judge had to read a 150 pg court summary and went at the incredibly sluggish pace of 50 pages a day, making Dina and the world wait a weekend for the actual guilty/not guilty verdict. But Monday, after years of deliberation, drama and delays, the verdict came.
Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty.
What I saw outside of the High Court today after the verdict was incredible. The Cape Town High Court is a block away from where I leave. Mondays are my day off and I decided to watch the drama unfold. There were scores of journalists-- at least 4-5 from every publication in Cape Town. The Daily Voice, Cape Town's Daily Sun equivalent, had its news editors and owners in attendance. Cape Talk radio was broadcasting from a tent next door. I arrived after the guilty verdict was announced, but the crowd had multiplied from the first time I had seen it. The judge's summation was broadcast over speakers to outside listeners, something set up by a radio broadcast, I think. Nobody was surprised by the verdict because over the past two days, the judge had accepted damning evidence after damning evidence (SA uses the British court system, in which an experienced judge acts as jury). The crowd waited for the major players, Norton, Wilson, maybe the Rodrigues family. A large group of excited woman stood at the forefront of the steps. They erupted in ululations and cheers when Wilson, the father of the dead baby (who is just a few years older than I am), descended down the court steps. The media was incorrigible. Flashing bulbs, people hooting his name, pure screaming. Wilson didn't give comment, although one of four Argus reporters at the scene tried to get something from him. I don't think she was successful.
Moments after Wilson left, a caravan of eight or so police cars screeched and turned up the road. Two were larger police vans used to cart prisoners. Rodrigues was in one. I could only imagine how she felt. Disappointed? Disbelief? Despondency? Who knows how the depraved, confused, lost function? If memory serves, I was startled by how silent the crowd was as the police cars drove off, sirens whining, lights pulsating. Rodrigues will be sentenced on June 5, two days before I leave the newspaper. Her family was nowhere to be seen. They likely exited out the back.
The silence was shattered moments later when Norton arrived with a group of family and friends. They all wore baby pink, in honor of Baby Jordan. Since the trial, their lives have moved forward. Norton has a new baby with a new boyfriend. But in that moment, they were dealing with the completion of a hectic, two year trial. The grandfather of Baby Jordan was then interviewed. He was asked if he could forgive Rodrigues. He declined to answer, saying that it was too difficult to answer that question. He asked if he was happy with the verdict. He answered, yes, he never had a doubt that Dina was guilty. He then added: Now the world knows that Dina Rodrigues is a "scheming, wicked woman." The words had hardly tumbled out of his mouth before the crowd roared in approval. Bulbs flashed. Pens scribbled.
I was flooded by a impenetrable nausea. I remembered the words of the irresponsible Daily Sun editor, Thembo Khamale. "South Africa is sensational." For much of my life, I've defended the media for its antics, but I was standing amidst the most indefensible actions. So this is news. The despicable, sensational actions of a foolish, selfish, spoiled, privileged woman. Depravity once again grabs the spotlight, leaving achievement and more pressing issues in the dark. Coverage of the Dina Rodrigues case won't effect change in Cape Town, the way consistent, persistent coverage of the economy, police apathy and HIV/Aids will. It is an oddity and a spectacle. There is life, vibrant, meaningful, invigorating life pulsing through the veins of the city. But it hardly gets covered by any of the publications in our Cape Town community. On a typical day, the Cape Times features on its front page yacht races, internal city politics and a smattering of crime. The Cape Argus, a compromise between a tabloid and a serious newspaper, covers crime, and lately, the Baby Jordan trial in full. But "juicy," unusual stories take precedent. A recent issue of the paper featured a picture of the Baby Jordan trial that covered almost half the front page. The Daily Voice, the purported newspaper of the people, is even worse. Unlike the Daily Sun, it doesn't feature headlines like "The Woman Who Can Pee Spoons!" and such, and in that sense it is an improvement. But a poster the day after the Rodrigues trial read: "The Bitch Is Found Guilty." I don't have the figures, but I believe it was one of the best days for newspapers in Cape Town in recent history.
Which goes to show what readers want. They want juice, they want intrigue, they don't want to think. They want a basic good vs. evil conflict. The outcome, I think, hardly matters. The notion that such fascination has to do with justice is laughable. They want a story, they want something to talk about with their friends, they want to feel better about their lives. Even if Dina Rodrigues had been found guilty, the trial hawks would have felt good; at least they're not as unfortunate as Natasha Norton, whose lost a baby, years of her life and ultimately her cause. As I stood there on the corner of the street watching the spectacle I realized I had become part of that.
Newspapers are a business and we need to attract readers. Reader want sensational news and journalists want to make money. But newspapers cannot so easily be reframed as Fourth Estate Co. Our product is different from any other in that we play an important civic role in keeping government officials in check. But when we consider the business of news and declining readerships, our focus changes. We try to keep in mind the readers' wants.
But then what of the readers' needs? They may be interested in the Dina case, but what about issues of affordable housing, streets, traffic, health? The fourth estate must consider the marginalized, not merely its profit margins. That's why the scene at the Cape High Court was so sickening. It showed how much effort newspapers put into simple-minded politics, and how wrong our priorities are. Instead of being informants, we had become gossip mongers, vultures of pain.
We are but scribes of scandal.
Part of me thinks their agreeing has more to do with the fact that our guides merely wanted to maintain good relations with Khumale. But another part of me thinks it's the truth. Crime is so commonplace in this country that a stolen purse, car or television means nothing. South Africans deal with people who murder others for cell phones. A buddy of mine just wrote about a family who buried their son five months ago, only to find out recently that their son's body had been stolen and stored in the very funeral parlor that they buried him in. On Friday, a case was heard of a group of crooks who kidnapped the 22-year-old daughter of a prominent restaurateur, Mzoli. She was found tied to a chair several hours later in a respectable suburb of Cape Town called Table View Parklands.
And last week marked the end of the most sensational case of all: the Dina Rodriguez case. The story goes that one afternoon in 2005, 22-year-old Dina Rodrigues, an beautiful, famous actress, approached a taxi driver at taxi rank around Cape Town and offered R10 000 (or $1 428) to kill the six-month old baby of her then-boyfriend, Neil Wilson, and ransack the house. The taxi driver enlisted the help of three other who allegedly entered the Norton home, pretending to deliver a parcel. They tied up Natasha's brother Dylan and their domestic worker. They then stabbed baby Jordan in the neck with such force it scored her spine. She bled to death and Dylan, after freeing himself, found his niece with just moments to live. The death devastated Cape Town's community, but that was nothing to compared to what was to come. Initially investigators thought the incident was a robbery gone bad. In South Africa, grown men rape babies, so it wasn't so far-fetched. But evidence suggested something else. The value of the items stolen were negligible. Police soon learned that a "white woman" had phoned earlier in the day announcing the arrival of a package. They were hot on Dina Rodrigues trail.
It seems that Rodrigues was jealous that Neil had had a child with another woman, another young, beautiful woman named Natasha Norton. Wilson had not told Rodigues he was a father. There was also a racial component. Rodrigues was a beautiful white woman, and Norton, a coloured. Some say Rodrigues was furious her boyfriend had had a baby with a coloured woman.
(Coloureds are what South Africa calls its mixed-race people; Coloureds range from being darker than me to being lighter than an white person. There is no real defining physical characteristic. Rather, you can tell a coloured by their distinct, sing-songy Cape coloured accents.)
The result was one of the most riveting and sensational trials in South African history. Rodrigues was on trial with her four accomplices: Sipho Mongezi Mfazwe, 34, Mongezi Bobotyane, 24, Zenethemba Gwada, 20, and Bonginkosi Sigenu, 18. Since the trial started in 2005, the Independent Newspaper companies has run more than 500 stories on the case. Throughout the duration of the trial, people took time off of work and family responsibilities to watch the trial. In the latter days of the trial, people waited from 7am to grab prime seats in the upper galleys open to the public. The reading of the verdict itself was its own media circus. The judge had to read a 150 pg court summary and went at the incredibly sluggish pace of 50 pages a day, making Dina and the world wait a weekend for the actual guilty/not guilty verdict. But Monday, after years of deliberation, drama and delays, the verdict came.
Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty.
What I saw outside of the High Court today after the verdict was incredible. The Cape Town High Court is a block away from where I leave. Mondays are my day off and I decided to watch the drama unfold. There were scores of journalists-- at least 4-5 from every publication in Cape Town. The Daily Voice, Cape Town's Daily Sun equivalent, had its news editors and owners in attendance. Cape Talk radio was broadcasting from a tent next door. I arrived after the guilty verdict was announced, but the crowd had multiplied from the first time I had seen it. The judge's summation was broadcast over speakers to outside listeners, something set up by a radio broadcast, I think. Nobody was surprised by the verdict because over the past two days, the judge had accepted damning evidence after damning evidence (SA uses the British court system, in which an experienced judge acts as jury). The crowd waited for the major players, Norton, Wilson, maybe the Rodrigues family. A large group of excited woman stood at the forefront of the steps. They erupted in ululations and cheers when Wilson, the father of the dead baby (who is just a few years older than I am), descended down the court steps. The media was incorrigible. Flashing bulbs, people hooting his name, pure screaming. Wilson didn't give comment, although one of four Argus reporters at the scene tried to get something from him. I don't think she was successful.
Moments after Wilson left, a caravan of eight or so police cars screeched and turned up the road. Two were larger police vans used to cart prisoners. Rodrigues was in one. I could only imagine how she felt. Disappointed? Disbelief? Despondency? Who knows how the depraved, confused, lost function? If memory serves, I was startled by how silent the crowd was as the police cars drove off, sirens whining, lights pulsating. Rodrigues will be sentenced on June 5, two days before I leave the newspaper. Her family was nowhere to be seen. They likely exited out the back.
The silence was shattered moments later when Norton arrived with a group of family and friends. They all wore baby pink, in honor of Baby Jordan. Since the trial, their lives have moved forward. Norton has a new baby with a new boyfriend. But in that moment, they were dealing with the completion of a hectic, two year trial. The grandfather of Baby Jordan was then interviewed. He was asked if he could forgive Rodrigues. He declined to answer, saying that it was too difficult to answer that question. He asked if he was happy with the verdict. He answered, yes, he never had a doubt that Dina was guilty. He then added: Now the world knows that Dina Rodrigues is a "scheming, wicked woman." The words had hardly tumbled out of his mouth before the crowd roared in approval. Bulbs flashed. Pens scribbled.
I was flooded by a impenetrable nausea. I remembered the words of the irresponsible Daily Sun editor, Thembo Khamale. "South Africa is sensational." For much of my life, I've defended the media for its antics, but I was standing amidst the most indefensible actions. So this is news. The despicable, sensational actions of a foolish, selfish, spoiled, privileged woman. Depravity once again grabs the spotlight, leaving achievement and more pressing issues in the dark. Coverage of the Dina Rodrigues case won't effect change in Cape Town, the way consistent, persistent coverage of the economy, police apathy and HIV/Aids will. It is an oddity and a spectacle. There is life, vibrant, meaningful, invigorating life pulsing through the veins of the city. But it hardly gets covered by any of the publications in our Cape Town community. On a typical day, the Cape Times features on its front page yacht races, internal city politics and a smattering of crime. The Cape Argus, a compromise between a tabloid and a serious newspaper, covers crime, and lately, the Baby Jordan trial in full. But "juicy," unusual stories take precedent. A recent issue of the paper featured a picture of the Baby Jordan trial that covered almost half the front page. The Daily Voice, the purported newspaper of the people, is even worse. Unlike the Daily Sun, it doesn't feature headlines like "The Woman Who Can Pee Spoons!" and such, and in that sense it is an improvement. But a poster the day after the Rodrigues trial read: "The Bitch Is Found Guilty." I don't have the figures, but I believe it was one of the best days for newspapers in Cape Town in recent history.
Which goes to show what readers want. They want juice, they want intrigue, they don't want to think. They want a basic good vs. evil conflict. The outcome, I think, hardly matters. The notion that such fascination has to do with justice is laughable. They want a story, they want something to talk about with their friends, they want to feel better about their lives. Even if Dina Rodrigues had been found guilty, the trial hawks would have felt good; at least they're not as unfortunate as Natasha Norton, whose lost a baby, years of her life and ultimately her cause. As I stood there on the corner of the street watching the spectacle I realized I had become part of that.
Newspapers are a business and we need to attract readers. Reader want sensational news and journalists want to make money. But newspapers cannot so easily be reframed as Fourth Estate Co. Our product is different from any other in that we play an important civic role in keeping government officials in check. But when we consider the business of news and declining readerships, our focus changes. We try to keep in mind the readers' wants.
But then what of the readers' needs? They may be interested in the Dina case, but what about issues of affordable housing, streets, traffic, health? The fourth estate must consider the marginalized, not merely its profit margins. That's why the scene at the Cape High Court was so sickening. It showed how much effort newspapers put into simple-minded politics, and how wrong our priorities are. Instead of being informants, we had become gossip mongers, vultures of pain.
We are but scribes of scandal.
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