Abokugcina

"His voice made us realise that we were still alive, but his silence made us aware that we had all been dreaming." - Ben Okri ( Songs Of Enchantment )

Kwa Mashu possesses a hellish divinity
A hopeful presence like a lovable enemy
She said to me 'hello!
I am your beloved foe
And I have awaited your return,
I have your sanity and your navel buried deep in my belly
Take my hand and I shall vomit it into your right, come my son.'

Tarnished souls poured out of the heaving earth
surprised by where they found themselves
spreadeagled on the hillocks of a netherworld
Where we are born again

I was born crazed
I was sworn amazed
Into the matrimonial clasp of a ghetto
I was baptised with fervent fire water and spittle and dew
in ceremonies of frenzy
a mystical spirit was poured into me
via a death
the last becoming first eventually
and the least becoming the most mathematically
ever since then
my eyes have sought the glory

EDukuduku

I am remembering
Knowing the gnawing time
knowing the age
when it all changed

when after the rain began falling
just as if it had forgotten how
to not fall
flood compensating for drought
drought compensating for flood

i keep remembering when
the reainbow was enough
when the rainbow was mocking peoples dreams
parading their wishes and loose hopes upon the unpromicing sky

i am remembered more for the hand i offered
than the word i uttered
more for the steps i take
than the mistakes i make
like rain
words that precipitate action are like harvested grain
food for the soul is as food for the brain
while most folks are brain drained
hungry for more than just mere survival
like migrant hostages hungry on arrival
it rains the rain
on both noble and profane
it rains on the meek and the insatiable
may i remember to ready my cup

In Praise of Music

Ngokuba kusemculweni lapho sizuza khona ulwazi olunzulu
Iyodwa imizwilili yamazwi ephuma emilonyeni yabaculi
Izimbongi, izimvumi ...
Kuhaywa kuhlatshelelwa; kanti futhi lulodwa ukhuni logubhu
Lunkenketha kuhle kwamathambo nesikhumba

Uthini ngimculo wamanzi ezehlela emadwaleni
Umoya uhashaza emithini, kanye nezinyoni zitshuza emoyeni
Abantwana egcekeni nasezindleleni bevungama
Bacula elaleyomidlalo abayithakaselayo
Uma kukhuna lowo onesandlaa ekwenzeni abantwana
Babe nendumiso egwegwileyo
Akumlilo kuye maye babo!'
Sekuyoze kuvame umusa.

Umphefumulo kumele ukhuthale ukuze ingqondo ingakhathali
Umqondo uyavivinywa
Nenhliziyo iyayengwa
Ozuzayo ozithibile kwaze kwafika isikhathi
Kunjengasemculweni
Ingoma emnandi yakheka ngokuhlangana kokuphansi nokuphezulu

psalm poetry for a change

The Green Ankh Collection

The Poetry, Songs and Musings of Menzi Maseko

Love

a dream love

in waking could be found unwelcomed

in reality

love

no one can escape unharmed by

love

pay all you can but can never

ever buy love

without the sweet thorn of love

what are we living for ?

for just the sweet thought of love

makes the longing

makes the pain

the yearning

all worth the loving

all is worth the life of love

 

 

 

Re deuced 2 Numbers

It’s a numbers game

the unlettered can also play

being numbered amongst the

rest of the number – D

 

shadows boxing shadows

spectres wrestling spectres

ghosts in a shell

sponsored by the order of the day

royal rituals cloaked in the grag-net

striving to learn what life is worth

the lesson has become cumbersome

at the feet of a sped up change

if you pay with your soul you can’t get no change

and what has been here before you can’t call it strange

is the sun strange

in its heat

is the wind

in its sweep

is the rain, pain and joy

how are any of these new every morning?

should have listened and done what was told to you

now look out

before you can earn another number

 

 

 

Aaron’s Iron

say inspiration

have you wings of steel?

 

I am trying to find insight

Something to excite

Enfright

Delight or incite

In the words of these so called poets

 

so say ancient tool of the mystivs

have you a pair of Mercurial feet?

or do you possess a Gemini’s half smile

 

looking at life with a piercing love

a love that’s a hate

a dissatisfaction with it all

can you fly

inspiration?

Into this cave

This cage

flutter your wings in a rage

and break this silence

with your world shattering flutter

 

 

 

 

Generosity

 

i am first grandson of MaNdlovu

and my love is a generous as hers

 

prayerful woman

so powerful

like days of sand and thunder

these words are fire

conceived

after

love entered hope

and faith was born

 

GIVING

 

giving

like grandmothers hands

is evergreen

yes it comes in other colours too

I once felt a love that was of an undisclosed hue

At first I thought it was blue

Miracles End Too

The End of Mandela Magic Is the Beginning of Reality

“But again the magicians of Egypt used their magic, and they too, turned water into blood. So Pharaoh’s heart remained hard. He refused to listen to Moses and Aaron, just as the Lord had predicted. Pharaoh returned to his palace and put the whole thing out of his mind. Then all the Egyptians dug along the riverbanks to find drinking water, for they couldn’t drink the water from the Nile. Seven days passed from the time the Lord struck the Nile.” – Exodus 7 verse 22 -25 (A Plague of Blood)

Lately we have been inundated with stories of apocalyptic endings. Whether it is the end of the world as falsely prophesied by the doomsday mongers who misinterpreted and thus misrepresented the Mayans and their ancient calendar or it’s the fervour with which western psychologists, sociologists and other scholarly types have been propagating the myth called ‘the end of men’, by which they mean that as we become more modernist and cosmopolitan, the world is generally shifting from its traditional patriarchal tendencies into more balanced lifestyles which cater more for the rights and needs of women. Of course the gullible types and the rumour mill have gobbled all this up for better or for worse and while some have profited from the scare tactics, others have been left high and dry. Some are still wondering WTF?

The end of the world has not come on 21 December 2012; unless of course we are all now existing as ghosts or the living-dead. The ‘End of an Epoch’ New Age teachers have already spent their earnings pilfered from those who were given to panic by all the media master-minded hysteria. Even the anxiety has been spirited away as harsh reality of January’s bills, school – fees and well, life insists – Samsokolo!!!

Nothing indicates that 2013 promises to be significantly different from 2012 or 1999 for that matter. South Africa is still reeling under the pressure of so called service delivery protests, more mass action or strikes are planned and more political intrigue is still guaranteed to keep the fingers pointing in all kinds of predictable directions. The Democratic Left movement puts the blame squarely on the ANC government’s macro-economic strategies, which is nothing more than a remix of documents copied from the International Monetary Fund’s 11 Commandments. The so called Gowth, Employment and Redistribution Strategy is now team South Africa’s New Growth Path – talk about ‘brand new second hand’.

In Northern Ireland, Germany, Norway and other parts of the western world, the rise of the far right - racist movements is gradually gaining momentum, religious, ideological and tribal war-fare is still a fact in the Middle East, and far East – from Palestine, Syria, Jordan to Afghanistan and Pakistan to Myanmar. African countries cannot be left out of the ‘troubles’ melting pot and foreign meddling is a guaranteed feature as we can see in Mali, Libya and Algeria. All this is happening while celebrations such as AFCON/CAF are also taking place, since death, mayhem and disorder cannot deter people from enjoying their lives. Life in other words, must go on as usual. After all we only live once, right?

In the meanwhile, Barak Obama has been re-elected for a second term as the President of the rogue nation called the United States of America and Africans still display the naiveté to ask what he has done and indeed what the ‘black president’ can do for Africa; his father-land?

Cynics do not mince their words when they shout out - ‘Absolutely Nothing!!!’ Indeed nothing much more than imposition of American values, nothing more than fiery and patronising speeches and American swagger has been our reward for pouring all our hopes and energy behind a black president who is clearly a pawn in the global game of chess called White Supremacy.

The fact is no matter how willing and able Obama is to change the world, his hands are as tied as those of any black person in the world. As tied up as Lumumba when he was arrested and tormented to death by the people he thought were his allies and countrymen ( of course with the ever present assistance of Big Brother – the indefatigable Central Intelligent Agency of the USA). And so it is clear that the envisioned end of the cruel-crazy- beautiful world as we know it is far from imminent.

So now the question is, what do we do with all this indefinite Time, how do we bring about the ends we seek and how do we ensure that our means justify our ends? As the legendary jazz giant Louis ‘Pops’ Armstrong once crooned: “We have All the Time in the World…”, indeed we have all the time available, we can either spend it pointing out what is so terrible, detestable in the world or we could spend it creating little instances of Wonderfulness. 

That is the choice really. As the Hip Hop golden agers would say “we have to show and prove” that a better world is possible and it does not require martyrs, messiahs or elitist governments and global capital. It will depend on neither free markets nor farcical developmental strategies. 

But I can hear my Black radical comrades protesting and saying: ‘But this world is cruel and dehumanising to the black personality, in fact the black does not even have a personality or even humanity under the burden of whiteness – let’s just end this world, because as it stands we are no more than slaves…’ Indeed that may hold some truth and I will even add that many of the black heroes and heroines have sold us down the drain. For their place in the pages of immortality – for Nobel prizes and for freedom without justice, for peace without equal rights, they have traded their blackness for whiteness.

The Mandela’s, the Mbeki’s, the Obama’s, the Tiger Woods, the Patrice Motshepe’s, the Cyril Ramaphosa’s and the Oprah Winfrey’s and the rest have made it cute and alright to forgive without proper reparation. They have motivated the world to embrace the surface of compassion without rooting out the cause of our suffering; which is racism, white domination and persistent dependence on the capitalist consumerist culture of pro-American globalisation. They have given us plenty of fish while confiscating our fishing rods and selling our acres of land and poisoning our rivers.

This we are told, we must learn to forgive and see things from a global perspective. We must become self-made millionaires, entrepreneurs; rising from the quicksand of Alexander  and South Western Township unto the leafy suburbs of Rosebank, Sandton and from ticklish Khayelitsha to windswept Muizenberg and paradisiacal Clifton beach. We must do this because we are capable, individually of achieving everything we can dream of. If we dream and earnestly hope to marry the grand daughters of P.W. Botha or Adrian Vlok, or better yet, the sons of European liberals such as Helen Suzman and Andre Brink, then by all means we must. We are born free and freedom means, yes you can, since South Africa belongs to all who live in it, we are all human after all and this whole race thing has been biologically proven to be a fallacy, nothing more than a crudely constructed delusion.

Anyone who does not share this sweet and milk and honey dream is a bitter fool. He or she must let go of the anger that has congealed in their heart, they must become emancipated from the unfortunate ‘mistakes’ of pre-1994. They must begin to realise that apartheid is dead and with it, inequality, group areas act, landlessness and wretchedness of the Black Condition. But I digress, we were talking about Time and a way forward after Mandela finally dies. After all the global lamentations and the out-pouring’s of truly well-meant sadness, the spell might subside.

Many will say that a Lighthouse has crashed, pulled down by the inevitable winds of Time. Many will recite poems, finally learn all the words of the RSA national anthem and be united in our diversity. Many will renew their vows, attempt to learn IsiXhosa, embark on pilgrimages to Robben Island and Eastern Cape - reminiscing about the miracle of 1994, the story of the one man who spent 27 years in chains for crying freedom, he will be re-sainted, re-coined and eventually the doors of all the heavens of all religions will be opened just for him, since his political party has claimed more than once that they alone in Southern Africa possess the keys to freedom and even to Jesus Christ’s own heavenly abode.

After the gold dust has finally settled, the poor citizens of Azania will return to the streets to complain about having no toilets, roads, proper housing and jobs. Some of us will even attempt to burn down parliament in bold attempts to end the status quo, to light the torch of the long postponed Southern Afrikan revolution in earnest.  But is there time for Revolution to take place and what will take place after such revolutionary actions, will the people be able to think beyond their jobs and to see themselves as not just South Africans, totally unrelated to the people from across the border? Will we be able to take care of food production, clothe ourselves, manage and administrate better governance structures. Will the new revolutionary vanguard be able to protect human rights and correct the human wrongs in our diverse country? Will we end the proliferation of Genetically Modified Organisms in our food, protect the rhino’s from poachers and will we continue along the path of nuclear energy, fossil fuels and mining dependent economy? Do we have a proper plan for a communalist society as envisioned by Nkrumah, Nyerere? Will we enforce revolutionary discipline and Black Power pan-Africanism in the manner of Sankara and could the majority of South Afrikans be able to maintain a Consciousness that was envisaged by Sobukwe, Biko or Zim Ngqawana?

All these questions depend heavily on how we spend our Time. And if we are to be the masters of our destinies, “overcoming petty prejudices” as Emperor Haile Selassie I once taught; surely in due time we can see the Azania that has been denied existence for so long. We shall be able to be a country with a real name, perhaps it shall be a New name, a New people and a new and refreshed country, a real nation.

“Time is our most precious treasure because it is LIMITED. We can produce more wealth, but we cannot produce more time. When we give someone our time, we actually give a portion of our life that we will never take back. Our time is our life.” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile

And so like the heard hearted Pharaoh, described in the Old Testament, no amount of resistance, magic or effort can stop an idea whose time has come. But it is a people who have directed the flow and quality of their nation’s transformation who decide when the tide must turn. But while the same people still prefer th fleeting safety of precarious jobs, houses and governments suicidal benevolence to true Freedom and self-sufficiency, the only change they are going to get is a few Mandela bank notes.

By Menzi Maseko

24 January 2013

Subtitles and Subtexts!

Empelandaba: Part 1

The End Of This World Is Just The Beginning Of Another

We are approaching the much vaunted and long overdue Dooms Day, prophesied by many astrologers, pseudo-scientists and New Age enthusiast paraphrasing the Mayan Calendar. The fact that this very calendar is composed of obscure and archaic symbolic hieroglyphs and interpreted by mostly English speaking modern conspiracy theorists did not deter the publishers of numerous “2012” books, documentaries and even big budget Hollywood blockbusters from profiting from this dubious “discovery”.

The reality is that for millennia and within many traditions and cultures, humankind has generated similar End of the World stories, in fact every contemporary book based religion has one. They all sound distinctive and are made to seem like the exclusive revelations of the various Gods, prophets or seers. But there appears to be many similarities and parallels running through all of these tales of human or earthly annihilation. From the ancient Egyptian/Kemetan Pyramid and papyrus scrolls and rituals of the Secret Orders to the Abrahamic religious traditions and the aforementioned South American Mayan civilization, the consensus is that what begins must surely end. But the difference is that while some say “No one knows the day or the hour of the Day of the Lord (Judgement Day)…”; the others declare that “It is written and encoded in the stars that when such and such occurs, the End Time is near…”. Yet even in the former tradition, we can hear of Jesus the Christ telling his devotees that certain events must take place on earth that will be mere signs that the End is at hand.

The problem with all this religious speculation is that it comes with a lot of collateral damage. So many people, believers and even those who are not even part of such conspiracies end up on the receiving end of the conspiracies, which increases levels of unwarranted fears and the more people exist in fear, the more susceptible they are to all kinds of manipulation and propaganda.

But there is another more positive side to the concept of the End of The World and that is the one posited by radical revolutionary movements such as the September National Imbizo; www.septembernationalimbizo.org - Even though this is a burgeoning young political movement largely made up of online contributors, supporters and followers, the few members who are spearheading it do meet regularly and many campaigns have been staged to varying degrees of success. In the bleak economic climate of the world and within the Black world in particular, SNI propagates an End of the World theory that is influenced by Black Consciousness and to a specific degree, Afro-Pessimism. What this means is that they view the existence of Black people within a predominantly White Supremacist society as an aberration to the natural order of the universe. A failed experiment. In other words, in order for the Black person and the Black woman in particular to realise full human status, the neo-liberal and global White Capitalist governed world must come to an end and there is no way around it, no reformist solutions or truth commissions can remedy this situation. This means that the world as we know it and as we have experienced in throughout the past cruel 3 or 4 centuries of Black subjugation, has to end in order for people of Afrikan descent to live decent lives. The Black radical revolutionary believes that it is impossible for people of colour to enjoy the benefits of an immoral Eurocentric society while the rest of the Black world languishes in abject poverty and acute types of inferiority complexes.

This is not a doomsday prophecy, it is not even a pessimistic of cynical view, but one based on careful analysis of the bleak and desperate Black condition…One has to simply think of the so called Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Sudan, the so called New South Africa, Mali, Haiti, Jamaica and any other African state to see that things are really out of order. But what is order? Is it Western styled modernisation or laissez faire macro-economic policies as instituted by the International Monetary Fund, governed by the World Trade Organisation and enshrined in the policies of the United Nations? Surely, there is more to the world than this; this state of desperate human suffering would exist if all these institutions were truly created to right the wrongs, or could it be that they were enacted to sustain them?

As already mentioned, the idea that the world would or should come to an end is enshrined in many religious texts and while others offer promise of a New Earth, others promise Heavenly abodes for the chosen few, it all “depends” on certain preordained factors, you have to meet the standards of perfection espoused by the specific gods, priests or prophets. Everything is related though and one has to relate all this end of the world talk to something, perhaps in the human psyche or in our various cultural ideals. Since religions and organisations do not emerge out of a vacuum but usually as part of coping mechanisms, we have to investigate further why obsoletes are ‘encoded’ into our stories and ways of seeing. Let us leave that for another telling. For now let me share what one of my online friends sent today, interestingly, I wrote part of this article yesterday before receiving this email, so I guess the spirit of the End is really upon us; so read with an open mind:

“The winter solstice, according to ancient spiritual cultures, is the time when the energies of the earth enable the greatest enhancement to the ability to enter the state of altered consciousness, thus enhancing man’s ability to communicate with her/his spirit and the Divine World Spirit. It is also the time when the Divine World Spirit dispenses the seeds that will govern the coming year. The 2012 Winter Solstice also marks the ending of the current era of 5126 years (Kali Yuga—age of darkness), and the beginning of a new era that will manifest greater spiritual awareness in the world—Age of Aquarius, Satya Yuga, etc. Only those people that are in harmony with divine law, and especially those that have made a special preparation for the occasion through initiations will receive the spiritual dispensation that will descend during the solstice. Yes, there will be a catastrophe; being left out of the direct reception of the dispensation.”

Please follow this link and listen!: End of What World?  – Ras Heru-Khuti*

 

Menzi Maseko ©

Pambazuka - **KMT: In the House of Life

Pambazuka - **KMT: In the House of Life