Johannes Van Der Kemp, Missionary in South Africa

Johannes Theodorus van der Kemp (b. May 17, 1747, Rotterdam – d. December 15, 1811, Cape Town) was a military officer, doctor and philosopher who became a missionary in South Africa.

The second son of Cornelius van der Kemp, Rotterdam's leading reformed clergyman, and Anna Maria van Teylingen, he attended the Latin schools of Rotterdam and Dordrecht. He subsequently enrolled at the University of Leiden in 1763 where he studied medicine, but when his elder brother Didericus was appointed as professor of church history he abandoned his studies.

Van der Kemp joined the dragoon guards and fathered an illegitimate child, Johanna (‘Antje’), whom he brought up himself. In 1778 he fell in love with Christina (‘Stijntje’) Frank (d. 1791). He lived with her for a year before being reprimanded by the Prince of Orange on this irregular state of affairs. As a result he both married Stijntje, on 29 May 1779, and quit the army.

Returning to his medical studies again, this time in Edinburgh, he completed his Medical Doctorate within two years. He also prepared for publication a treatise in Latin on cosmology, entitled Parmenides which was published in 1781. He returned to the Netherlands, where he practiced as a doctor first in Middelburg and then near Dordrecht. On June 27, 1791, his wife and daughter Antje were drowned in a yachting accident from which he only just escaped. As a result of this incident he experienced an emotional conversion back to the reformed Christianity of his family.

Van der Kemp served as a medical officer during the revolutionary campaigns in Flanders and then as hospital superintendent at Zwijndrecht, near Dordrecht. Whilst there in 1797 he came to hear of the formation of the London Missionary Society.

After making contact with the London Missionary Society, Van der Kemp helped found the Dutch version, Nederlandsche Zendinggenootschap. He was ordained in London in November 1798 and began recruiting men for the society. He sailed from London in December 1798 as one of the first three agents sent by the society to the Cape colony in South Africa, arriving in March 1799.

Whilst there in 1799, Van der Kemp published the first work in book-form in South Africa, which was an 8-page translation, into Dutch, of the London Missionary Society's letter that he brought out to the inhabitants of the Cape. Printed by V.A. Schoonberg most likely on J.C. Ritters press.

Once in South Africa, after working at Gaika's Kraal near King William's Town he journeyed beyond the eastern frontier of the colony to work among the Xhosa under Chief Ngqika. From the Xhosa he received the name Jank' hanna (‘the bald man’). War between Cape Colony and the Xhosa soon drove him back and from 1801 onwards he worked exclusively within the colony, mainly with dispossessed Khoikhoi. In 1803, he established a mission settlement for vagrant Khoikhoi at Bethelsdorp where local farmers accused him of harboring lawless elements. He countered with a list of alleged ill-treatment of the Khoikhoi by local farmers, but the evidence proved unsatisfactory and the farmers were acquitted.

On April 7, 1806, Van der Kemp married Sara Janse, a freed slave 45 years his junior, and had four children with her. This situation and his attitudes caused great opposition from within the colony, and he was for a time ordered by the government to leave Bethelsdorp.

Armed with a background in European and classical philology, he pioneered in the study of Xhosa and Khoikhoi languages.

Van der Kemp was recalled to Cape Town by the Governor in 1811 and died soon afterwards.

Sarah Millin, one of the most popular English-language novelists in South Africa during her lifetime wrote The Burning Man about the life of van der Kemp. The life of Johannes van der Kemp during his mission in Bethelsdorp is included in the novel Praying Mantis by André Brink.

Ahmed Asmat Abdel-Meguid, Egyptian Diplomat

Ahmed Asmat Abdel-Meguid (Arabic: أحمد عصمت عبد المجيد‎) (b. March 1924) is an Egyptian diplomat. He served as the Foreign Minister of Egypt between 1984 and 1991, and as the Secretary-General of the Arab League from 1991 until 2001.

Born in Alexandria in March 1924, Abdel Meguid received a law degree from Alexandria University in 1944 before going on to obtain a doctorate of international law from the University of Paris in 1947. He joined the Egyptian foreign ministry in 1950 and worked in several departments, notably the British and French sections. He became ambassador to France in 1970, deputy foreign minister in 1970, and Egypt's high representative to the United Nations in 1972. He served in that position until 1983, and was then foreign minister from 1984 to 1991, when he was elected secretary-general of the Arab League.

Paul Szilard, Ballet and Modern Dance Impresario

Paul Szilard, 100, Impresario Of Ballet and Modern Dance

By ANNA KISSELGOFF

Published: August 4, 2013

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Paul Szilard, a Hungarian-born dancer who went from managing a bar in Manila to managing international tours for major dance companies, notably the Alvin Ailey troupe, died on July 26 at his home in Manhattan. He was 100.

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Paul Szilard in 2007.

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His death was confirmed by his press representative, Kevin P. McAnarney.

Mr. Szilard had a 40-year association with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, booking performances for it around the world. He maintained a close relationship with both the company’s dancers and its first two directors, Ailey and Judith Jamison, who succeeded Ailey after his death in 1989.

Colorful in his opinions, Mr. Szilard also advanced valuable advice to his clients. He suggested that Ailey choreograph “Pas de Duke,” a pas de deux to Duke Ellington’s music, in 1976 for Ms. Jamison and Mikhail Baryshnikov, who had recently left the Soviet Union. It was a sensational pairing of a Russian ballet star and a star of American modern dance.

“Who else would have thought of that?,” Ms. Jamison wrote of Mr. Szilard in a foreword to his 2002 memoir, “Under My Wings,” written with Howard Kaplan.

Mr. Szilard was also a personal agent for Ms. Jamison and various ballet stars, negotiating contracts and creating galas and concerts for them abroad. Among his clients was Violette Verdy, the New York City Ballet ballerina who was a child prodigy when he met her in a ballet class in Paris before World War II.

Mr. Szilard did not fit the traditional mold of a top-hatted impresario. But he called himself one in the subtitle of his memoir — “My Life as an Impresario” — and described himself as such when he produced an attraction and took financial responsibility for it. Sometimes, however, he acted as an agent or middleman, as he did when he negotiated New York City Ballet’s tour, underwritten by the State Department, to Asia and Australia in 1958.

In recent years, he represented the Martha Graham Dance Company in the United States and joined the company’s board. Mostly, however, he worked with American companies, including American Ballet Theater, abroad and was involved occasionally with foreign troupes, like the Dancers of Bali, that were performing in the United States.

Paul Szilard was born in Budapest on Aug. 24, 1912, the son of a stockbroker who expected his son to follow in his footsteps. But after studying ballet in Budapest and touring with his teacher’s troupe, he moved to Paris. He trained there with the legendary émigré teachers Olga Preobrajenska and Roussane Sarkissian and in London with Stanislas Idzikowski.

Never a member of a major ballet company, he formed his own concert dance group and was its choreographer. In 1939 he met Ariane Pulver, a Swiss modern dancer, whom he married and who became his dance partner. She died in 2004. No immediate family members survive.

After World War II began, the couple went to New York, but Mr. Szilard chose to dance for a company in China. En route, they stayed in Manila, and they were stranded there for four years.

Mr. Szilard taught ballet under the Japanese occupation and staged concerts. When American troops returned, an officer asked him to open an officers’ club with a bar. He named it the Blue Elephant. He was also asked to organize a gala to celebrate Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s triumphant return to the Philippines.

Mr. Szilard required ballet shoes for the event but was stupefied when hundreds arrived. As he recalled in his memoir, his officer explained: “This is the Army. You can’t expect me to order one pair of shoes.”

Returning to New York, Mr. Szilard taught ballet and in 1953 was invited as a guest artist with the Komaki Ballet in Japan. He in turn asked the American ballerina Nora Kaye to be his partner. The next year he formed his own company to tour Japan and featured the French stars Colette Marchand and Milorad Miskovitch.

Ending his dancing days, he opened his production office in 1954. He produced the first Japanese tour of an English-language production of “West Side Story” and helped produce the musical again in Paris in 2007.

Ms. Jamison said, “Paul has had so much to do with creating arenas for other people to shine in.”

Emile Griffith, Champion Boxer

Emile Griffith, Boxer Who Unleashed a Fatal Barrage, Dies at 75

Associated Press

Emile Griffith pummeled Benny Paret in a fight at Madison Square Garden on March 24, 1962.

By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN

Published: July 23, 2013 112 Comments

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It was the night of March 24, 1962, a nationally televised welterweight title fight at Madison Square Garden between Emile Griffith and Benny Paret, known as Kid. Griffith was seeking to recapture the crown he had once taken from Paret and then lost back to him.

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Emile Griffith, shown in 1966, won numerous titles.

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Paret, in white trunks, had referred to Griffith as gay at the weigh-in. Griffith wanted to fight him then.

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Later in life, Griffith, said he liked both men and women.

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But this was more than a third encounter for a boxing title. A different kind of tension hung in the Garden air, fed by whispered rumors and an open taunt by Paret, a brash Cuban who at the weigh-in had referred to Griffith as gay, using the Spanish epithet “maricón.”

Fighters squaring off always challenge each other’s boxing prowess, but in the macho world of the ring, and in the taboo-laden world of 1962, Paret had made it personal, challenging Griffith’s manhood.

On a Saturday night about 7,500 fans — not a bad crowd for a televised bout in those years — had trooped to the Garden, then at Eighth Avenue and 49th Street, to watch the fight through a haze of cigarette and cigar smoke. By the 12th round of a scheduled 15, Griffith and Paret were still standing. But in the 12th, Griffith pinned Paret into a corner and let fly a whirlwind of blows to the head.

“The right hand whipping like a piston rod which has broken through the crankcase, or like a baseball bat demolishing a pumpkin,” Norman Mailer, a ringside witness, recalled in an essay.

Griffith delivered 17 punches in five seconds with no response from Paret, according to Griffith’s trainer, Gil Clancy, who counted them up from television replays. Griffith may have punched Paret at least two dozen times in that salvo.

At last the referee stepped in, and Paret collapsed with blood clots in his brain.

“I hope he isn’t hurt,” Griffith was quoted saying in his dressing room afterward. “I pray to God — I say from my heart — he’s all right.”

Paret died 10 days later at Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan.

Griffith, who had batted away rumors about his sexual orientation for years, survived a beating outside a gay bar in Times Square in 1992 and later acknowledged an attraction to men, died on Tuesday in Hempstead, N.Y., his boxing earnings and his memory long gone. He was 75.

The cause was kidney failure and complications of dementia, said Ron Ross, the author of “Nine ... Ten ... and Out! The Two Worlds of Emile Griffith,” published in 2008.

Griffith won the welterweight title three times and the middleweight title twice and briefly held the newly created junior middleweight title. He was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1990. But he was most remembered for the death of Paret. It followed him for the rest of his life.

Emile Alphonse Griffith was born on Feb. 3, 1938, one of eight children, on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. His father left the family when Griffith was a child, and his mother came to New York to work after sending the children to live with relatives.

When Griffith was a teenager, his mother sent for him, and he worked as a stock boy at a Manhattan factory that manufactured women’s hats. When the owner, Howard Albert, a former amateur boxer, noticed his physique — a slim waist with broad shoulders — he sent Griffith to Clancy, who developed him into a national Golden Gloves champion. Griffith turned pro in 1958, with Clancy remaining as his trainer.

Griffith won the welterweight title with a knockout of Paret in April 1961, but then lost the crown to Paret on a decision that September.

In boxing circles, Griffith had been rumored to be gay, and Paret seized on that to needle him at the weigh-in for their third fight.

“He called me maricón,” Griffith told Peter Heller in 1972 for “In This Corner: Great Boxing Trainers Talk About Their Art,” a book of interviews with boxing champions. “Maricón in English means faggot.”

Griffith wanted to attack Paret on the spot, but Clancy held him back and told him to save it for the ring. “Anytime you’re inside with this guy, you’ve got to punch until he either falls or grabs you or the referee stops you,” Clancy recalled telling him, as quoted in the book “In the Corner” by Dave Anderson, a former sports columnist for The New York Times.

But Clancy did not believe that Griffith had gone into the fight looking to make Paret pay for his slur. “I’ve always thought that what happened at the weigh-in had absolutely nothing to do with what happened in the Garden that night,” he said.

Paret’s death brought an inquiry by the New York State Athletic Commission, which absolved the referee, Ruby Goldstein, for his delay in stopping the fight.

Griffith lost his welterweight title to Luis Rodriguez in March 1963, then regained it in a rematch that year. He won the middleweight championship by a decision over Dick Tiger in April 1966, but that required him to give up his welterweight crown.

He lost the middleweight title to Nino Benvenuti of Italy in April 1967, won it back from him, then lost it again in their third bout. He briefly held the new junior middleweight title in the early 1960s.

After losing three consecutive fights, Griffith retired in 1977 with 85 victories, 24 losses and 2 draws. He later worked occasionally as a boxing trainer and lived in Hempstead, on Long Island.

In 1992, Griffith was severely beaten after leaving a gay bar in the Times Square area, his kidneys damaged so badly that he was near death. The assailants were never caught.

“That really started a sharp decline in his health,” Ross, his biographer, said on Tuesday.

Over the years, the questions concerning Griffith’s long-rumored homosexuality kept surfacing.

“I will dance with anybody,” Griffith told Sports Illustrated in 2005. “I’ve chased men and women. I like men and women both.”

He added: “I don’t know what I am. I love men and women the same, but if you ask me which is better ... I like women.”

That same year, he spoke to Bob Herbert, then a columnist for The Times.

“I asked Mr. Griffith if he was gay, and he told me no,” Mr. Herbert wrote. “But he looked as if he wanted to say more. He told me he had struggled his entire life with his sexuality, and agonized over what he could say about it. He said he knew it was impossible in the early 1960s for an athlete in an ultramacho sport like boxing to say, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m gay.’

“But after all these years, he wanted to tell the truth,” Mr. Herbert went on. “He’d had relations, he said, with men and women. He no longer wanted to hide.”

Griffith’s marriage to Mercedes Donastorg ended in divorce. Survivors include three brothers, Franklin, Tony and Guillermo; four sisters, Eleanor, Joyce, Karen and Gloria; and his longtime companion and caretaker, Luis Griffith, whom Ross described as Emile Griffith’s adopted son.

Griffith said he was tentative in the ring after the death of Paret.

“After Paret, I never wanted to hurt a guy again,” Sports Illustrated quoted him saying in 2005. “I was so scared to hit someone, I was always holding back.”

In “Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story,” a 2005 Dan Klores-Ron Berger documentary film about his life, Griffith embraces Paret’s son, Benny Jr.

“I didn’t want to kill no one,” Griffith told him. “But things happen.”

http://www.npr.org/2013/07/26/205866037/opponent-who-died-after-fight-weighed-on-boxer-emile-griffith-for-life

Samuel Anderson, Cuban Hurdler

Samuel Anderson (September 25, 1929 – August 18, 2012) was a Cuban hurdler who competed in the 1952 Summer Olympics. 

Anderson was born in Havana, Cuba. He was an active member of the Seventh Day Adventist Church. He was a member of the 1952 Olympic Cuban Team, and competed in the 110-High Hurdles.  Anderson was nicknamed "The Cuban Comet". He graduated from the National Institute of Physical Education in Cuba and received a Scholarship from the University of Illinois, where he was a member of the track and field team. He also competed in the 1954 Pan American Games, where he won Gold. He was also drafted by the Chicago White Sox. He retired after a long career as a receiving clerk. He was survived by his wife, Maria; a daughter; two sons; a sister; two daughters-in-law; and six grandchildren. 

Frank Crosswaith, Founder of Negro Labor Committee

Frank Rudolph Crosswaith (1892-1965) was a longtime socialist politician and activist and trade union organizer in New York City. Crosswaith is best remembered as the founder and chairman of the Negro Labor Committee, which was established on July 20, 1935, by the Negro Labor Conference.


Frank Crosswaith was born on July 16, 1892, in Frederiksted, St. Croix, Danish West Indies (the island was sold to the United States in 1917 and became part of the United States Virgin Islands), and emigrated to the United States in his teens. While finishing high school, he worked as an elevator operator, porter and garment worker. He joined the elevator operators' union and when he finished high school, he won a scholarship from the socialist Jewish Daily Forward to attend the Rand School of Social Science, an educational institute in New York City associated with the Socialist Party of America.


Crosswaith founded an organization called the Trade Union Committee for Organizing Negro Workers in 1925, but this work went by the wayside when Crosswaith accepted a position as an organizer for the fledgling Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Crosswaith maintained a long association with union head A. Phillip Randolph, serving with him as officers of the Negro Labor Committee in the 1930s and 1940s.


In the early 1930s Crosswaith worked as an organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, which became one of the major supporters of the Negro Labor Committee.

In 1924, he ran on the Socialist ticket for Secretary of State of New York, and in 1936 for Congressman-at-large. He ran also for the New York City Council in 1939 on the American Labor ticket.


Crosswaith was elected to the governing executive committee of the American Labor Party in New York in 1924, and later ran for Governor of New York on the ALP ticket.

Crosswaith was an anti-communist and believed that the best hope for black workers in the United States was to join bona fide labor unions just as the best hope for the American labor movement was to welcome black workers into unions in order to promote solidarity and eliminate the use of black workers as strike breakers. He believed strongly that "separation of workers by race would only work to undermine the strength of the entire labor movement." Crosswaith spent much of his energy in the late 1930s and early 1940s battling a rival labor organization called the Harlem Labor Union, Inc., which was run by Ira Kemp and had a black nationalist philosophy. He accused Kemp of undermining the interests of black workers by signing agreements with employers that offered them labor at wages below union rates.


Crosswaith also worked with A. Philip Randolph during World War II in organizing the March on Washington Movement, which was called off when President Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed to sign Executive Order 8802, which prohibited racial discrimination in defense industries.

Abdelkader Alloula, Algerian playwright

Abdelkader Alloula (Arabic: ‎عبد القادر علولة) (b. 1929 in Ghazaouet, Algeria - d. March 10, 1994 in Oran, Algeria) was an Algerian playwright. He was assassinated by Islamists. 

Alloula was born in Ghazaouet in western Algeria, and studied drama in France. He joined the Algerian National Theatre upon its creation in 1963 following independence. His works, typically in vernacular Algerian Arabic, included:

• El-Aaleg (1969) - "The Leech", a satire of corrupt administration
• El-Khobza (1970) - "Bread"
• Homq Salim (1972) - "Salim's Madness", a monologue based on Nikolai Gogol's Diary of a Madman
• Hammam Rabbi (1975) - "The Lord's Bath", based on Gogol's The Government Inspector
• The Generous Trilogy:
  • El-Agoual (1980) - "The Sayings"
  • El-Adjouad (1984) - "The Generous"
  • El-Litham (1989) - "The Veil"

He was working on an Arabic version of Tartuffe when he was assassinated by two members of FIDA (Islamic Front for Armed Jihad) during Ramadan on March 10, 1994, as he left his house in Oran. His widow, Radja Alloula, and friends set up the Abdelkader Alloula Foundation in his memory.

His brother, Malek Alloula, was also a noted Algerian writer.