Each One Teach One

For All Intents and Purposes

I have read quite a bit. Even though I admit to have not delved into the Marxists, Leninist, Maoists and other famous and celebrated Socialist, Communist manifestos, my reading has been unbiased, general and sparse.

Without becoming schooled or conditioned by the accepted treatises of East European thought, philosophies and indeed guidance, I seem to have been irreversibly drawn to a lot more Afrocentric stories, enjoying a bit of the South American novel and culture due to certain similarities with familiar African world views.

For entertainment and creative value, I have touched upon the Locke’s, the Wordsworth’s, Milton’s, the classical Greeks and some other more modern Western writers, yet as much as I did find some value in them, the sensibility and sensitivity to Africa, its diaspora and the daily struggles and beauty naturally drew me homewards.

I fell in love with the unremitting polemics of Mazisi Kunene, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, the politics/socially relevant stories and essays of the Staffrider and African Writers Series writers and artists, the decolonisation rhetoric of Ngugi, the magical realism of Ben Okri, Kojo Laing, Octavia Butler’s sci-fi and parabolic fantasy, the incisive Pan-Africanism of Mongo Beti, Ayi Kwei Armah and many others at home and abroad.

In short, I have been shaped more by the philosophy of my people rather than by Dante, Plato, Aristotle or even the existential poetics of the Sartre’s or Foucault’s.

None of the American greats have ever moved me, neither Hemingway or Faulkner ever managed to move me quite like Lewis Nkosi, Zakes Mda or Wole Soyinka…

As I have said, I have read some of their works but their influence has not been as great aas the stories that surrounded me and were more immediate both in style, form and meaning.

Herein enters the question of cultural, technological and political activism; once one knows about what’s going on beneath the illusory skin of the world, it becomes an unjustifiable therefore irresponsible act to stay silenced.

In creative ways and even through daily conversations and public platforms, one becomes a source of illumination.

Just as I have expressed in one of my poems :

“Once I’ve seen the rays / how could I return to my sleeping ways…?”

But to become active is the simple part, the tests arise when one has to actively compete effectively for the attention of the masses. In the midst of oppositional narratives and changing habits, the reader who also writes has to work thrice as hard to gain the foreground wherein she can be heard and understood.

First there is the media, which thrives on selling sensationalism and leads the consumerist cult, and then there is religion which survives through the sacrificial blood of the peoples need or tendency to believe in something or even someone else’s abstract idea.

In all this, there is always, the accepted and also the unaccepted moral and value related actions.

There are those that fuel and feed the need for faith and religion, there are those that profit from our desires to be tickled, distracted and satisfied through our senses, on and on and on. And in the midst of all this, there are those few who know that there is a silent poison infiltrating the human being and that this poison feeds on general ignorance and in turn causes most of us to ignore ourselves, the environment and ultimately our purpose in life.

In all intents and purposes we are made to accept that we must assimilate, modernize

( spelled: Westernise) and speak good English while curbing our enthusiasm for our own cultures, traditions and codes that thrive on Balance between the creature and her Creator.

What does all this have to do with my reading and writing life?

Everything! In my youth and indeed even now, my grandmother, young brother and I are the only three people in the entire extended family who read books. My mother has a collection of about fifteen Christian and Self-Help books of which she reads about three chapters per year. There are many reasons for this, but for a reader and a writer, it means that these loved ones are simply apathetic and simply do not see the need to read.

Reading itself is also seen as a totally different thing to education. To most Black people a butchery and a tuck-shop is far more important than a library. A descent job is much better and preferable to the service of the community or to taking up the pen and writing as a journalist or an environmental activist. To most people these are still White peoples work, they are not jobs.

A couple of years ago, a friend and I developed a website called www.africansway.co.za in which we had student journalists and other contributors writing about anything that interested them as long as if fit the values which we felt were intrinsically African.

In that website I wrote essays about the invention and need for re-invention of African traditions, called for a review of our religious systems and how we can assist each other to find ways to Define our destiny.

None of these writings were inspired by Marxist or Communist thought, neither were they an attempt to cause people to become anarchists; instead I was inspired by what I saw as troubling prevalence of ignorance and poverty in my community. This ignorance in my opinion could only be dealt with through a holistic embrace of a purely syncretic African world view. I am not saying all people should read what I have read, I am simply asking people whether they are in power or not, to promote and become self Educated.