Building

Introduction: “Money is just an agreement. Money only has value because people believe it has value. It is something that we create through our agreements. You can say that money is a story. It’s the symbols that we interpret in a certain way, and that means that they’re valuable. So why have we agreed to create a system of value that is the enemy of all of the beautiful things we want to do?” - Charles Eisenstein: Sacred Economics and Beyond

In Africa it is as if something is always under construction, yet the building is hardly ever finished.

‘- so much beauty and yet so much pain…” – So croons the African American Rhythm & Blues man. This paradoxical lyric about the world we live in could just as well be referring solely to the continent called Africa. It is arguably the most gang-raped and the most severely violated of all places in the known Earth. Even though no one can monopolise or even compare the share of suffering with another, for surely the whole planet is clearly a place of immeasurable and unmitigated misery. The place where mankind was first conceived takes the proverbial cake, hands down.

One Reggae singer wails in with a lamentation: “Africa is the richest place/ but still has the poorest race…” This is a serious existential crisis and many more singers, Poets and novelist and not to mention academics and development scholars have written tomes about the subject of Africa’s ‘under-development’, yet none have come up with a solution that resonates through out all the tribes, nations and every individual in this continent. The repetitive calls for unification and the eloquent prescriptions and descriptions of Africa’s cultural unity seem to have landed on deafened ears.

How can the richest place remain the home of the poorest race? It just doesn’t make any sense. Are African not as hardworking as other races? Have we not been able to unlearn the mental shackles from the centuries of slavery, apartheid and the emasculation of our forefathers, the rape of our foremothers?

A young man has recently sent me a message that reads “…We should not look at Africa as being backwards, but rather we should look at it as being preserved for US (Africans) to develop it better/accordingly…”. It is not indicated where this is quoted from, but it is obvious that it comes from someone who is very optimistic about the destiny of the Mother continent.

Another Rhythm & Blues singer cries “the place where mankind was born/is now neglected and torn…torn apart…” This are just a few of the indications that many are not just aware of the plight of this beloved land, but they are eager to see a change, perhaps a radical transformation that will suely bring about Africa’s renewal.

This is a matter that we can no longer afford to sweep under the various prevailing political, religious and ideological carpets. We all have to become impatient, creative and effective in bringing about the New African, a people who have a keen insight of what kind of society they want to bestow upon the up coming generations. Africa is everyone’s responsibility just as much as she has been every ones victim, but she cannot afford to play victim forever, there is a time and place allocated for everything and Africa’s time for regeneration is upon us.

Many of the shining lights who have lived and died in order that we all become free and for Africa to be see in a human and divine light have been snuffed out. By bullet or secret ballot, much of our currency and dignity has been stolen. This embezzlement of our life has left us like a field that can hardly be expected to yield the expected fruits, very few seeds can survive our acute form of desertification.  Even the seems we do possess have been ‘doctored’; Multi-national gangsters and mass murderers have managed to twist the life inside seeds rendering them inept. The tsetse fly and the shitty-water, the gravel road and the sewerage drain. The death by asphyxiation inside zinc and corrugated iron shacks are still Africa’s lot. W live in a paradise but we are far from heaven. Some say ‘the sickness is in the South but the cure is in the North’.

We blacks have it to the whitest bone!!! So sang my fellow Poets, a divine statement if there ever was one!

Under Construction

Liberation Time Mculo: Ini Yona?

Liberation Time Mculo: Ini Yona?

Ini Yona?

IyiniYona Le Democracy : Demystifying the notion of Democracy locally and globally

Start with the Oxford dictionary definition:

Democracy  di-mok-ruh-si/ .noun (plural: democracies) 1 a form of government in which the people can vote for representatives to govern the state on their behalf. 2 a stat governed by elected representatives. 3 control of a group by the majority of its members.

ORIGIN – Greek  demokratia.

Democratic - 1relating to supporting democracy. 2 based on the principle that everyone in society is equal.

“The true spirit of America is rooted in the fundamental principle called democracy – freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, etc. For this reason alone, America has served as the model form of government for Europe and the rest of the world.

We must of course, understand that the democratic concepts espoused by America’s Founding Fathers applied only to “free white men of means,” and not Africans, Native Americans, women and the poor. The Founding Fathers believed that man could know God through reason and the refinement of the intellect. This was the quintessential spirit of democracy. They believed that every mind was capable of enlightenment. It was therefore unnecessary to have an authorised figure of the church to dictate revelation… This was the reason for the Founding Fathers insistence on the separation between church and state.” – Anthony T. Browder*(Exploding Myths: Nile Valley Contributions To Civilization)

“The primary requirement is wisdom which may or may not reside in persons of any age. But what is wisdom, what is folly, and who is to judge? This question has never been satisfactorily answered. No judgement on the score receives unanimous support; no judge is deemed competent by all. Faced with this dilemma, modern Man has arrived at a most extraordinary solution. He has postulated that the validity of an idea may be measured by the number of people supporting it. The most complicated and vital issues are decided in this way – questions of war and peace and nationalisation of industry versus private enterprise, defence budgets and a whole host of matters on which many wise men feels unfit to comment. But the multitude assumes to ‘know’ and is allowed to act, all too often disastrously. The masses fling governments out and bring governments in to do their bidding in matters of the most complex nature they do not and cannot comprehend. The system is called DEMOCRACY. It can only be justified on the assumption that ten fools are better than nine sages.” – A.T. Culwick( Who Shall Inherit The Earth?, 1969)

NB. Although I found Mr Culwick book inherently biased against Black people, which is to say that it reads like one of the racist tomes that White society used to convince themselves of the inferiority of Black people, I nevertheless chose to use this quotation as it aptly describes in layman’s terms what is meant by the system of democracy. I also chose to use it as a counter-balance to the diametrically different description given by the Afrocentric Browder.

This investigation of democracy has some serious implications with regard to my Pan African objective of re-introducing Black Consciousness as a necessary antidote for the suffering people of colour. I am specifically dealing with Black people due to the self-evident fact that they are the major victims of White Supremacy and neo-liberal institutions which hide behind the tattered veil of democracy.  This has been the case ever-since Our initial contact with the Eurocentric world and although much has been done to eradicate systematic racism and overt slavery, the economic and spatial conditions prevailing upon the Black world clearly show that democracy does not work for everyone. Not only does it not work for the poor locally and globally, it also calls for a thorough revolution of how well-meaning ordinary people think of it.

There are many individuals and institutions who earnestly believe that the only way to bring about justice in our troubled world is to first democratise all aspects of our lives. In my opinion this is amounts to lazy thinking and displays the thoroughness of the deceptive democratic propaganda machinery. Black Consciousness therefore is not just an elixir for all the worlds problems, but it is a necessary shift in the mental attitudes of all humanity and it can work as a redeeming feature in all our efforts to free ourselves from the tyranny of the ‘powerful’.

There are too many examples of how tyrants pay lip service to this system in order to fool the people. But as the famous Reggae Artists the Wailer’s so aptly sang it “You can fool some people sometimes/ But you can’t fool all the people all the time/ Cause when they see the light, they’ll stand up for their rights.”

So essentially what I am attempting to do is to shine the light of Consciousness in the paths of those who need it the most, and to those who strongly believe that they still require the dim-light of democracy, so be it, let them be satisfied with its results.

Here’s an example of how racism and ancient hate is justified using this very elaborate and insidious system. Editor of The Thinker, a journal for ‘Thought Leaders’, Aziz Pahad writes:

“Israel is not a democratic state. Zionism is essentially about creating discriminatory rights for Jews and non-Jews. This affects everything – including access to jobs, economic activities, housing subsidies, education and health. Israeli Palestinians having “equal rights and democracy” in a Zionist State is therefore a contradiction. The fight for a secular Israeli state with equal rights for all is another important terrain of struggle. (p.15. Israel, Apartheid Perfected, Aziz Pahad, The Thinker, Vol. 33. November 2011)

-          Maseko Menzi

Liberation Time Mculo: Re Education from Saints and Sinners?

Liberation Time Mculo: Re Education from Saints and Sinners?: "FEEL and grow rich Redesigning This Generations Ideas of Success The First Chapter: ‘ The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady’ In all my ..."

Re Education from Saints and Sinners?

FEEL and grow rich

Redesigning This Generations Ideas of Success

The First Chapter:

 ‘The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady’

In all my thirty three years as a citizen of planet Earth, I have seen and heard of just a handful of people who have acquired a level of success that could be described as perfect. So much stands in the way of our idea of perfection that we have learned to accept that it is inevitable to suffer and struggle before any success can be enjoyed in life.

Perfection then becomes a utopian ideal that is only achieved by the divinely gifted, arduously industrious and more often then not, the rich.

Thus we have composed many tales and parables describing how many of the  worlds avatars have had to go through countless adversities in order to prove themselves either divine or even appear as conquerors of our enemies, aging and ultimate decay.

To the ones who have conquered death, we attribute the most divine status, calling them either messiahs and even worshipping them as God Men.

Isn’t it interesting that most if not all these messiahs have been males, individual and especially gifted men who often exhibited an ambiguous and sometimes questionable relationship with women?

Remember what Jesus Christ said to his dearest mother after he’d been away for three days, how about Ghandi’s alleged ill-treatment or neglect of his wife, we all know about the Tuff Gong ‘Bob Marley’s’ tumultuous relationship with the devoted Rita, how about Dr Nelson R. Mandela’s three marriages and Dr Martin Luther Kings alleged secret adulterous affair with a certain European lady?

The list is too long without even the addition of the much debated nature of the prophet Muhammad’s marriages to his women, some as young as fourteen years old.

These people who have had a great impact on history and continue to exert their influence on the relationships between men and women today are of course only human and they should be forgiven for acting as they did.  Above all that, it is their deep impact on the lives of millions which surely elevates them above the heads of other mere mortals.The one crucial problem is that this so called ‘Man’s man world’ is not working favourably for neither of us and the more we persist with our out-dated ways of thinking and feeling, the deeper we get into an unfixable tangle.

Should we then conclude that God is a man, usually of noble ‘birth’, coming from a long and established lineage of heroic men and women? Although some religions, such as Islam and even the pseudo-religious tradition called Buddhism do not even conceive of God as any kind of man or woman, it seems easier to simply speak of a HIM whenever this Enigmatic and Self Created Entity is explained to one and all. And this is accepted by a lot of people to such an extent that one might as well speak of natural democracy. It is taboo to speak of God or God men as if one were describing women, that wretched of all sexes.

To an unbiased observer of history, it should be clear that the man’s world phenomenon has been deliberately created in order to set up women, just as many biblical verses were used to create a superiority complex between Black and White people. The fact that there is no such thing as a truly white person, unless they are out cold, and there is no such thing as a black person unless they’ve been dipped in coal or burnt by the sun clearly doesn’t matter now; our ancestors have said it is so therefore it should remain so. But is it reality, truth?

The aim of the following two chapters is to help guide us all towards a better relationship with each other as men and women; this guidance is for the purpose of unification. The reason for the unification can be described as what the Rastafarians call ‘the Balance of Creation’.

This vital balance is crucial if humanity is to progress from the aggressive-cerebral and ever more technocratic state that we found ourselves in, where it is still difficult for a woman or girl to charge an aggressor or exploitative rapist due to the many humiliations she has endure at the male dominated police stations, hospitals and even in her own home where she can be harassed or even disowned. I aim to encourage us all to FEEL rather than simply think before we Act.

…the Sinner Lady

As I write this I am listening to a Jazz album titled, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady by Charles Mingus. This recording from 1963 was described by its famous composer as “ethnic-folk dance music’ and was hailed as the best Jazz recording in Jazz history by some of the music’s purists. I am now listening to an exquisitely crafted ‘movement’- track 3 which is tentatively titled Track C – Group Dancers –

“(Soul Fusion) Freewoman and Oh, This Freedom’s Slave Cries”. The last and final movement is called “ Stop, Look and Sing Songs of Revolutions!”,

 “Saint and Sinner Join in Merriment on Battlefront”,

“Of Love, Pain , and Passioned Revolt, Then Farewell, My Beloved , ‘Til its Freedom Day”.

Yes dear reader, such are the titles of the great Jazz album. You can go to the internet or try to find this brilliant piece of Jazz Art if you doubt the truth of this. Playing this album in my laptop, it only appears as four simple titles but on the actual album sleeves the above are the really evocative titles. I point this out as a way to reconnect the manner in which both literature and many other forms of expressive arts, such as Jazz have often attempted to tackle the challenges of Liberation from the personal sort and also the universal kind.

Listening and reading these songs one can tell that the great Bass/Piano player had a lot on his heart and mind and that it was somehow perfectly expressed through the sound of music. The sound is both celebratory and engagingly complex in that soulful way that only Mingus could conjure up.

It is as if this is a classical music composition aptly set to a Jazz medium, the trumpets and the cello’s and piano notes burst and whirl in such a way that I can almost ‘See’ the adventures of this allegorical couple as they engage in the Civil Rights struggles of America, yet at the same time I ‘perceive’ a poor African preacher man who has a relationship with a female brothel ‘queen’ who is both beautiful and ambitious to be Free, in a political, emotional and psychological sense. Then again a woman can be called Sinner for many reasons, even her success can bring about accusations and rumours that she has slept her way to the top. But then again, this is art and this is what I know as one of the most intricate of Art-forms, Jazz - and it has the tendency to defy any logical explanation or elucidation since even as it was composed, the players and the engineers must have been going through various emotions that are totally different to what I feel right now.

But in a nutshell, the Sinner Lady part is the one that catches my attention for we are not short of Saints, but all of history is bursting with stories of Sinner Lady’s who have lead many a hero to war and sometimes even paving the way for the foundation of  many nations.

In case the reader thinks that I have digressed from the initial point, please be reminded. The aim is to show that freedom or liberation from all sins cannot be achieved only through the toil and bloody genius of men, but women have been and will always be the Queen Alpha’s and Queen Omega’s of the real world. One can even describe the woman as the steering or the rudder of the ship while the man is the outer body, the one that is seen to struggle with the elements and appears victorious or defeated in the end.

There is something to be learned from the way the world is governed today, seemingly by corrupt politicians (both men and women) and their financiers the Banks and the religious propagandists.

The way of men is wrongly described as the way of the strong, stern and affirmative, men are supposed to not cry, raise children or mind the hearth as this has been traditionally designated to what some call the fairer sex. Many gender activists and pioneering women have done much to blur these perceptions by achieving unimaginable success in fields of endeavour that have been seen to be divinely designed exclusively for men.

Yet somehow even as these women rise to ‘power’ their success is described as a result of changes ‘allowed’ by men, yet they have at most times it is clear that these ‘wonder-strong women’ have achieved their goals despite men.

This is where we must recall the principle I have mentioned as ‘The Balance of Creation’. Sisters and brothers, contrary to what we are taught at schools, this world is not established on the principles of Competition, it is founded upon unmistakable and remarkably intelligent Divine laws. Allow me to describe just two.

With the help of one of the Master Teachers, I quote:

“Maat, the 4^th sphere of the Tree of Life manifests in Man’s spirit as the universally felt need for order (law). To the spiritually immature, law or order is put in place through rules backed by coercive force for the purpose of achieving social peace and harmony. It is unfortunate that almost 6000 years of recorded history has not dispelled this fallacy. It must be understood that the rules constituting Man’s laws – and supposedly God’s law as well – are based on the belief that the human (kind of man, inferior or sahu man) represents the totality of Man.” – ( p.75, Ra Un Nefer Amen – Maat – The 11 Laws of God )

The knowledge of mankind’s good and evil is vast and it is one of the reasons why we still fail to evolve into higher beings. We still struggle with the simplest of emotions and thoughts in our attempts to deal with the issues in our lives, issues such as death and birth still astound us and we generally act exactly as our forebears have done, going through elaborate rituals and ceremonies that are supposed to help us deal with the joy or the trauma of death. At the end of the day most of us still find ourselves confused and even angry at God when we have to relate to some of our loved ones passage into the other realms – what we call dying.

Women as widows are still the most adversely affected when it comes to dealing with both the emotional and social trauma of their loved ones death.

While every family may be engaged in mourning, women are subjected to so many rules and obligations even when they need to move on and live their lives to the fullest.

Do not get me wrong, I am not saying that we should not honour the memories of our beloved who have passed away, what I am suggesting is that we become more intelligent emotionally and in the way we treat the widows and to respect their feelings too.

In some places women are still forced to marry men that they hardly know or love whenever their husbands pass away, some are expected to wait many years before they even touch or engage in any intimate relationship.

This is accepted by most people who call themselves the preservers of sacred and ancient traditions, but they fail to realise that what they call ancient may simply be a construction of a few hundred years ago, and that it was constructed to subdue and control women and girls.

I was watching a program on TV and I was appalled when I saw rural women agreeing to receive dowry or ilobolo from boys or men, who have carried off their daughters, raped them and claimed to want to marry them. Some of the girls were as young as 14 years and they were mostly carried off as they came from school. The teachers interviewed sounded powerless, so much for their education.

But the most shocking revelations came from the mothers; those neglected and ‘traditionalised’ women who have been rendered powerless by both religious and socio-economic factors.

As I found myself asking ‘what kind of mother would allow such a thing to happen to her child?’ One woman said that this was the reason why she had a daughter in the first place.

That is when I realised that the problem might be deeper than economics, religion or history.

It is simply a matter of ignorance about the Tree of Life and what it means for all of us.

We shall re-visit the many intricacies of Life’s metaphorical Tree at another time, but I’ll close this chapter with a title of a Jazz poem I read somewhere

“Jazz, Listen to it at your own risk…” and then again, isn’t life all about the many risks we must take in order to make it interesting, learn and then grow richer?

Sho nuff!

MM.

Music Is Life

Works, Sounds and Power

“Men need images. Lacking them they invent idols. Better then, to found the images on realities that lead the true seeker to the source. Maat, who links universal to terrestrial, the divine with the human is incomprehensible to the cerebral intelligence.” – Passages from the Hieroglyphs in the temple in Luxor, Egypt / KMT.

Background

How exactly did the world come into Being, or rather, how did a Being create the world as we know it?

This and other related questions are explored in this work wherein I have also employed the findings, technical scientific research and religious methods of about three theorists to inform and validate my own opinion. I hope that my own perspective is clearly defined to you dear reader. This is one of the questions that have vexed a lot of scientists, religious people and also philosophers. However, more than striving to answer the question of how we and it all came to be, I was also moved by a statement that was made by the man who cleans up around our flat; with a worried expression on his face, he mentioned that the world might be coming to an end on 21 May 2011.

It’s the 16^th as I write this and I am not one who is particularly interested in how we all shall perish, I am also not very interested in prophecies that are spilled out to instil fear and to manipulate naïve people into following some religious doctrine.

But even though I laughed and told the man that ‘no one knows the hour…’ and that even if it all ended, he should not go out in fear or worst, in total ignorance about his Soul, meaning his own Selfhood and sense of purpose.

In parting, I told him that the so called judgement day is today, today is the most important time in his life and he should find joy in it.

As I left him there holding his broom and the cell-phone perpetually tuned to the radio (from whence he’s been receiving these messages from someone they called Harold), I thought to myself – if only most people had a clearer over-standing of their history and the history of the universe, they would readily embrace both life and death as part of the on-going circle of Creation.

Just like many so called religious or spiritual people, I also believe and know that there is a Divine Plan for both mankind and this lovely Earth, and that the best way to be a conscious part of this plan is to become initiated into the secrets of beginnings and endings.

As it will emerge from the quotations and my own findings, it will also be made clear that music, the word and universal regeneration is a sound reality.

So before the end comes upon me, let us begin, because when and if I come back again I might not be interested in such questions anymore. And if I happen to be reincarnated as a humble bee, my sole preoccupation would be to please my dear queen with sweet things, unless of course I perish from stinging you.

In Square Circle: Here’s a guy who works with Sound in order to create the most interesting visual experiences:

“Prudence used to perform his work in clubs as a DJ, but claims that the audience and context of arts festivals are better suited to the philosophical and conceptual approaches of his work. "Science, nature and popular science are all reference points," he explains. "I tend to take ideas and apply them metaphorically to moods in my pieces." Rynth is inspired by antigravity, gyroscopes and the centuries-old concept of The Music of the Spheres, which understands music to be produced as a religious or mathematical concept by the sun, moon and stars.” – (Wired.uk; magazine, April 2011)

·         And here’s a sample of the visuals   

 Personally, I am not surprised that most of the visuals that are created by this man’s ‘experiments’ are circular in nature. This is the natural manifestation of everything as I have already mentioned above. The spherical shape of everything from our globe the Earth to the cellular ‘bodies’ which are the atoms or building blocks of everything also testify to this. Yet my present assignment is not to prove anything in particular, instead I just wanted to provide a ‘testimony’ to the Creators Hand in everything that surrounds us. But of course as it is typical of the atheists to refute anything that mentions the Almighty Creator, or even the extremely misunderstood and hence misused word ‘religion’, I will continue with more facts and stories that have been passed down by both reputable scientists and other wise ones in the rich heritage of the reverential.

·        

·        

Much has been written about the significance of Egypt in the history of the entire world. It has only been the bias or even the racism of the Western (European) world that has made sure that most of this information and knowledge does not reach the rest of us earthlings.

But just like the proverbial phoenix which is perpetually reborn, the truth just keeps rising.

There is no time now to challenge people’s entrenched beliefs in their own falsehoods, what we are interested in is the publication of what is true and fair even beyond individual perceptions. Skeptics and rebels can even find something for their tortured minds in these pages, but for anyone who enjoys the simple pleasure of seeing the cyclic and redemptive love of God in everything; this is just another confirmation of what they ‘know’.

Here’s a taste of what I am talking about:

“…strange to say, the whole number of buildings in stone, as yet known and examined, which were erected on both sides of the river by Egyptians and Ethiopian kings, furnish incontrovertible proof that the long series of temples, cities, sepulchers and monuments in general, exhibit a distinct chronological order, of which the starting point is found in the pyramids, ant the apex of the Delta.” – ( H. Brugsch, Egypt Under the Pharaohs).

And here’s what a more ancient author, none other than the celebrated Greek historian Herodotus had to say about this Nile Valley civilization which continues to inspire us today:

“The Egyptians were the first to discover the solar year, and to portion out its course into twelve parts. They obtained this knowledge from the stars.”

What then, is the significance of all this information, how can it help us to understand the beginning and perhaps even the signs of the end of the world? Aside from that, what can a young person living today gain from knowledge of ancient Egypt?

Perhaps nothing at all, but an intelligent observer will notice that everything that begins has an ending and that it is possible to ‘read’ the signs and then be able to order or organize ones life purposefully. Because ultimately we all hope to Live a Life of consequence or purpose, for some that purpose is defined by sacred texts while for some it is based on pragmatism.

In our world of fast paced technological advance, where attention is limited to Tweets and companionship is largely defined by the number of digital friends one has on Badoo or Facebook, it is vital that we remind ourselves of our complete dependence on nature and its cycles.  Contrary to popular belief, this notion of knowing about oneself and understanding how nature works with and within us and not against us is vital to our very survival as a species. Humanity itself depends on a conscious and holistic relationship with all life.

A lot of my brothers and sisters now live in virtual reality, a world of demons, demi-gods, hunters and assassins with their own creeds, thought processes and pseudo-mythologies.

These virtual tales inform them just as much as the stories our grandmothers told us, if not much more.

Many of these folks swear that they value human interactivity much more than their virtual worlds and that they are striking a balance between physical/interactive entertainment and the more futuristic inter-tainment from video or play-station games.

But this is so far from the truth. Just ask any woman who has a husband, friend or boyfriend who is a ‘serious gamer’.

This is also true of many of my friends who are football, basketball and any other devoted sports fan. Our conversations are typically filled with references to the next game, the last game or who do we think will reach the Finals?

Of course these should be taken as innocent games and simple and entertaining ways to pass the time. Yet it is equally true that in the urban prisons which we have come to occupy, very few of us ever end up playing any real physical games; that is simply something that we did when we were still growing up.

Our minds and bodies may still be willing to jump, skip and summersault, strategize and execute those moves that also require physical and mental fitness, but time and circumstances or indecision render us incapable of fulfilling these wishes.

Some of us also have some knowledge of how many of these games were invented, it is your assignment to go and research the roots of soccer, basketball and American Football and many of the Olympian sports. The point here is that many of them involve circles and cycles. These circles are not the problem per se; the problem is that many of the myths and imikhuba eyayenziwa during the earlier stages of these games are also back in practice.

We have again become like unwilling spectators in a game of Gladiators, those barbaric Roman and Greek sports where the rich would set warriors against each other or against captured and tortured animals in order to watch the slaughter.

This is now symbolized by the words we use when we watch our modern games, ‘it’s a war’, ‘it’s a tough battle’, ‘oh, shit, look they’re killing them’, ‘DEFENCE/Offence’ , ‘Shoot, Do or Die’ and the list is virtually endless.

What we do not realize or what we are ignoring at our own peril is that WORD Sound Is Power and whether we say these words in jest or meaningfully, it matters very much.

What we are doing is auto-suggesting them, we mean no harm and yet we still cause harm, we may not be able to see it but all we have to do is study the history of the football business, the present crimes within institutions such as FIFA, the EAFA champions league and the South American drug cartels that control most of what happens on and off the field.

A return to humanitarian competition is vital in this time, since we are already so used to competing on every conceivable field globally.

M. M.

The Inner Outer Conversation

Let My People Go…: another look at the sensitive land issue

The matter of nationalisation has been dealt with in this blog, yet simply writing about it can only go so far in addressing it. In my opinion and  the opinions of those that I have quoted, the nationalisation of specific resources and the effect it can have on the macro-economic landscape of Azania (South Africa) has more to do with certain leaders desire to own these sources of power rather than  distribute them equitably. To some this may appear as a subjective statement but as one reads through many serious journalists treatment of this issue, it becomes abundantly clear that this issue of nationalisation is bigger than Malema, the ANC and even the counter-arguments so desperately spouted by neo-liberal elites and opposition parties. The mere fact that this topic has been vexing and dividing the leading party along ideological lines is more than worrying, but what is at the heart of all this noise about nationalisation of mines and redistribution of land? One must necessarily look past the newspaper headlines and the stones being thrown around by leading ANC members at each other, we must look honestly at the history of our country and see just where it all went wrong. In order to gain a clearer and objective view of this matter, it also would help us to understand the objectives of the ANCYL and other unaffiliated youth led movements such as the September National Imbizo ( SNI ), the civil rights movement called Abahlali Basemjondolo, Black Wash and even to an extent the outer-national Rastafari community.

To understand these movements is to see through the majority of Black peoples eyes, to hear with our ears and to experience what we collectively experience. The differences in the organs I have just listed are clear, especially between the latter and the former. They can perceived as bodies existing beyond each others reach and possessing conflicting goals, but that is from the outside looking in. Although I have never been a member of the  leading parties Youth League, I have always supported their more positive and pragmatic moves and statements, that is until the presidency of president Malema who I have found charismatically ‘rude’, but then I’ve also defended him by saying that South African politics always requires an agitator, someone to rattle the old bones and stir people into action; I have however been a member of the Rastafari movement and a secretary/scribe in its Youth structures. Although not defined as a political movement and vocally opposed to most of what modern politics are about, the Rastafari movement is a cultural and intellectual force to be reckoned with, especially at community levels. The problem with both these formations is that although they are both superficially recognisable in the broader community, they are fatally misunderstood or at worst, just not sufficiently supported.

The reason I make the comparisons is because these movements appear to be all striving toward the transformation of our society, essentially we are all aware of the disparities caused by historical factors such as apartheid, colonialism, neo-colonialism and more acutely the inferiority complexes often exhibited by the general Black populace. We are all aiming to address these social ills via our own means, ignoring the facts that we are all liberation pioneers within our own fields, working weekly and yearly to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery. The issue of land reform is forever on the Rastafari agenda, but very few of the members ever engage meaningfully with the ANC Youth League, instead some of us have opted to be members of fringe social movements such as SNI, Black Wash et cetera in order to make our voices heard.

Needless to say, there are some Rasta’s who have been members of Umkhonto Wesizwe, the Pan African Congress and the Black Consciousness party, all in attempts to influence or add some spiritual or righteous dimension to the political battle for Black Supremacy* which is ultimately what is really in most of our hearts, the Marcus Garvey inspired cry for ‘Africa for the Africans…’. This is the reason why I said that we must look into our history in order to redefine our collective direction. There is a proverb in IsiZulu that goes ‘Abantu abayi ndawonye bengemanzi’, which roughly translates as; people do not go in one direction as they are not water’, which can be interpreted as, it’s in the nature of people to sometimes disagree. I have always found this axiom interesting in describing the nature of politics globally, so much so that it always made me think of the American political formation of Republicans and Democrats, just two oppositional parties whose agendas are clearly parallel. What I read about these two forces is that they are as their names suggests, they both rule the hearts and minds of most Americans and they only differ in the methods they employ, yet it always seems admirable to me that their system is simpler and adequately clarified to most people who care about politics. This brings us here, were people such as Marcus Garvey, Malcom X and Martin Luther King republican or democratic in thinking or action? Perhaps we should leave that for another day, instead we can focus on the immediate South African leadership by asking the same question. Were the Sisulu’s, Mandela’s, Mbeki’s and Plaatjie’s ideologically more democratic or republican in their attitude regarding matters of land restoration? It is clear that Mandela categorically denied ever being a leader of a socialist, communist or even a Marxist party, while acknowledging that there were certain favours and friendships established with such people as Fidel Castro and Colonel Muamar Qaddafi to name but a few, Mandela was not in the business of following them ideologically. But then understanding that within its structures there were/are people who strongly hold such East European ideals which had been given universal appeal by the actions and personalities such as Che Guevara, Samora Machel and others – and not to mention the support given to Umkhonto Wesizwe during the tough and complex decades of armed struggle, the ANC today has what is called the tripartite alliance consisting of a strong although seemingly neo-liberal communist faction. This sector of the leading party bears very little resemblance to the classic understanding of what communism and socialism is about, this has been majorly highlighted by ANC YL president recently to the humiliation of the autumnal leaders.

Yet before we join the troublesome media headlines and cry ‘Things fall apart and the centre cannot hold’ we need to find better and more practical ways to engage with the Youth League, the various community based movements and instead of complaining on newspapers and blogs, use our hard earned education in economics, communications, social sciences and other fields, to ingeniously lead our country from the precipice of crippling destruction. Perhaps the only reason I say that the league can be steered in the right direction even despite the rhetoric of its leaders is that I trust that they are serious in such statements:

The President of the ANC Youth League is expressing views contained in the ANC Youth League discussion document, which is inspired by the ANC 52nd National Conference`s observation which says "We have only succeeded in redistributing 4% of agricultural land since 1994, while more than 80% of agricultural land remains in the hands of fewer than 50,000 white farmers and agribusinesses. The willing-seller, willing-buyer approach to land acquisition has constrained the pace and efficacy of land reform. It is clear from our experience, that the market is unable to effectively alter the patterns of land ownership in favour of an equitable and efficient distribution of land". – (ANCYL National Working Committee statement on President Jacob Zuma`s comments about Land Reform and Nationalisation of Mines 12 May 2011)