WeeklySA_AdminCLARION CALL:It is time that all this filth is wiped off the face of Africa, and it all has to start in South Africa…
By Paul Njabulo Vilakazi
When Harold McMillan the British Prime Minister made the ‘Winds of Change’ speech to the South African parliament on February 3 1960, he was not a gratuitous Sanusi enough to feed us more. As like an Eskimo dog, he was already sniffing out the turbulence and rivers of blood to soon flow, starting only a few days of this speech with the Sharpeville slaughter of our people happening.
He could not unfold the oracle that it will take some 61 years before we have our hopes whetted by seemingly halcyon breezes wafting this way, with the advent of “The End of The Slave Trade Called Politics”, showing its nose right now with an avalanche of independent candidates for local elections coming in on November 1. And, we hope they bring with them, the resurrected idyllic protoplast models of African puso/umbuso (governance).
After three score years of the “Systematic Human Brutalisation Project (SHBP)”, in the form of colonialism and apartheid in South Africa, and even though these had seemed to rebate, there remained a deeply drilled in Hate culture into our national psyche that would be endemic, and now pandemic. The “Slave Programme Engineers” continued to spawn simpleton non-white muggers to hold tighter still, their grip on us, lest we found a potent panacea for our chronically ill ethos – lying just out there for the taking.
Now, as the neo-apartheid flatus rumbles on in our beloved country’s belly crying for a rare enema, alas; izanusi (sangomas) are now cowed, and they are few as we continue to be brow-beaten and good women and men stand idle, including even those in the Diaspora.
Our professionals and experts in all human betterment fields won’t touch politics even with a long spoon, let alone showing up in locales of their neighbourhoods, until lately when they had to wake up and protest for water shortages in suburbia. Our erstwhile myopia of seeing broken straws for liberation timber- only to reap a mangiest and flagitious klomp of thugs on the loose, is a matter of chickens long come home to roost and have even forgotten the exercise.
Now we remain between the coldest rock and most inclement jaggy place going into the future. If we don’t have the wherewithal to stage a mental revolution worthy of our age and times. If we never change to an African socio-communal puso/mbuso order, that we direly need now!
Yet, the time to have the guts, to exorcise out of our African psyche the all-time grubby system called politik has never been more auspicious than now. And, thank God, our people across the nation and colour divide, have just – in a very big epiphany come – to this realisation.
• We have inherited an opportunistic vulture culture
To re-infuse into our puso/umbuso/musanda vision, fresh new blood of the wise and without political baggage; women and men of valour and good moral cachet; to create strong home-brewed movements. To bring in tried tested and empowered individuals from our communities, who have done prototypical works of true servanthood without a pay or bribe anywhere they were called; who have remained true to African tenets of Ubuntu-in the tradition of Mampudi (true champion of the people )and resurrected the ways of motse, kgotla, ma-blockman and umfumo , moshate and the inchoate street commitees, also styled amakomiti; giving them a modern touch, without borrowing from the West’s Tea Parties of the US and the rougher street committee types of our transition from apartheid to drekheid (muckheid).
To save the blood of Africans flowing to this day in Kwa-Zulu Natal, Mpumalanga, the Midlands, the Cape Flats of Mitchell’s Plain, Bonteheuwel, Bokmakierie, Khayelitsha, Gugulethu , Nyanga and Eldorado Park, just to name a few nodes of crime and wholesale slaughter and political assassinations of our people.
While captains of the ponderous self-entitlement are grabbing our country’s wealth even more than apartheid did; and the most elephantine-ly and insolently arrogant and, now in fact, historically so, are a very bloodily, grubby government in all tiers. Paying scant, if any attention to all the blood-flow and felonies in whatever colours, they come in provinces, cities, town and villages…
The lethargy taking root in our society in earnest lately – that political parties are all the same; so the ‘I won’t be voting’ paralytic stance, is not being helped even by political commentators who are not suggesting alternative thinking to this end – that a new thing can be done, even as it is presently being birthed – as against being trapped in the alien Westminster system of foreign and colonial parliamentary rules and its enabling of the voter-bullying by a majoritarian mechanism for absolute power.
Creating an Elephantine dominant party system, sitting smugly in two houses of a parliament designed for Africans without any of their input and spiritual blessings. Then, with the rest close to Elephantine mode of politics themselves, are turned only into just reactionary entities, even by the way their manifestos are reflected; to the wiles and into the power they hope to snatch.
We have inherited an opportunistic vulture culture, whereby folk at the top of political control, are always adversarial to each other, in order to be first at the trough. What is meant to represent our needs and imperatives is just a musically sounding can being kicked down the road.
It is time that all this filth is wiped off the face of Africa and it all has to start in South Africa.
Ha se botho: We must all be continually charged with a patriotism and self-love that revolves around BOTHO, the only and noblest human ideal all African ought to always stand up for and defend, despite the whole world’s clutches on our souls presently.
If we don’t have botho (ubuntu), we can have all manner of religions and philosophies infused in our minds and souls, but we remain just zombies and easy meat for the vultures of the West and any other elsewhere. To oscillate your vote between Jekyll and Hyde every five years, hoping it will somehow ultimately help your country. Think now deeper about it, in the light of our being continually brainwashed by the Western political ‘science’, which is a direct antitype to African umbuso/puso/be’heerraad suasion in praxis.
Liberation postponed, is only ‘freedom hollow shell’ now; only to be fooled about with more ease even as your anger and frustrations are available to be directed by the political scumbags who have no patriotic bone in their twisted soul and whole personal constitution.
Another analogous scenario close to this, is that of a person in an abusive relationship and it is tearing not only their life to shreds but also that of the children born in it; and in the beginning they are advised to give the partnership five years, while the church is praying for it. When five years is done, someone comes around and says, let’s give it one-more five years, in which supposedly some sanusi would turn it all around – now it is 10 years and the victim is all but skeletal shadows of their old selves…
With the avalanche of independent candidates having entered the 2021 local elections fray, the dirge to all South African- Western politics’ grave is being sung and even – Our After Tears – will come wearing a new resurrected face called the ‘After Joy’ that the stinking ass is done and buried, and now the ‘Wie Sien Ons,’ will be more valid than just asking: ‘Who is seeing to our drunken habits?’
To whoever is at the helm of this old way viewed with rose-coloured glasses as new, will have to work more than harder to deliver to the 21st century a real “Awesomely African New Thing” at none other place than the Beloved South Africa, long ordained since the Ethiopian Movement, to be a true gateway to all-Afrika Liberation and Self-Recovery…
• The lethargy taking root in our society in earnest lately
Yes, the blockman and woman are earnestly marching in, as in the fashion of biblical saints go marching in; though I am not for a stretch of any imagination, suggestive of the Mogoeng Mogoeng fundamentalist ilk.
Neither, am I recalling into this arena the present South Africa’s non-constitutional Sinah Madipere, Makume, Letsatsi Radebe and the Siegfried Manthata’s Makgotla vigilantes, not even the latter-day, communist-driven street commitees, because it is such lynch mobs, kangaroo courts and vigilantes that would be resurrected to serve as agent-provocateurs to scupper all the gains made by independent candidates, and sure given their long history of violent eliminations of political opponents even in their own party and as recently suggested by Jessie Duarte’s assertion that the ANC will never hand over power to anyone, so our would-be independent councillors would thus be at greater risk.
Not only their personal securities must be tightened but also their own Activism, agility, integrity, ethics, nose on the ground (intelligence) and moral cachet should be oiled and sustained. The reality of being warned by Steve Biko that, “Black man you are on your own,” should be translated to all would be rookie councillors (baemedi,izithunywa, die verteenwoordigend)
They should more possibly reside among their constituents, unlike our present government security agents (intelligence) residing in suburbia, and, as a result, the July 2021 insurrections happened as they slept, possibly some not even in sobriety. For our societies to unlearn the only political party loyalty of 27 years is not going to be a walk in the park, meaning the umbuso renaissance leader, will have to get to be super-charismatic without having to mock their new calling (and again, I don’t mean the biblist, evangelical type of charisma.)
Our locales, especially Blacks, will have to be strenuously re-trained to follow own leaders without prejudice nor rancour as the biblical Mosaic strains and travails in the wilderness will come to haunt our mostly would be squeaky-clean, new leaders.
Again, I am afraid as much as I equally celebrate amaBlockman/woman, come marching in…
My honest memory is that many an isibonda served diligently and with distinction without political party. Their clout and machinations, especially at the time political organisation among Black people was banned, me think there was something about animal politik that the boer knew that we, the ‘Black earthlings’, knew nothing about. Just as they had saved us from television, that they had reckoned a black gardener would see a half-naked white woman on screen and jump his garden fork to go rape missus…
They will more than direly need strong committees on the ground, what the Blockmen call Ten Members and later styled Committee of Ten in Soweto. These “Essential Tens” that author W.E.B Duboi propagated as very vital for the growth of every community, big or small, to build in formidable architectonic structures into communities, will nevertheless be in vain if “Tens” do not comprise folk, of not only integrity, but specialists in fields of knowledge, human relations and even the noted organic intellectuals from among our people. These should be metropolitans, be sufficiently gender, eclectic and of ethnic origin, mix-oriented. Above all, there should be a progressive Constitution of the country sensitive even if arises a need for revisions
While those in rural areas already have historical kgotlas and moshates to report to, be advised and debriefed…
‘ Give me hope for a bigger innovative, new (National Pitso/Imbizo) ‘Constituent Assembly’ in the near future, that partly would also represent an infused larger national debriefing completely devoid of political ideological dominance. That reality is here after the November 1 local elections. Plan diligently as you go for it…
We were actually robbed of this intrinsically African event by rushed CODESAS, Groote Schuur Minutes, sunset clauses and other far less gestalt agendas under the table – and hard as it may be, we must also forgive that history; in order to move forward…Without doubt, it certainly cleared and, to a great extent, wide rough fields. Freedom of expression being one of our cornerstones now; a human rights culture in full swing, though not yet accessible to the poor…and their nuanced religion-cultural slants.
A PULA E NE…
* Vilakazi is the author of the Freedom of Feisty Speech Demystified
