“In the face of pain there are no heroes.” ― George Orwell, 1984
The future of democracy is uncertain after the recent xenophobic attacks in South Africa. Apologies ensued very quickly (especially from those who did not want to relinquish the political power that they had in South Africa). Everybody (journalists, poets and writers) had something to say about it.
People grow up (as I did) believing that in order for political change for the good of all human life not many things had to take place.
Only because of how lives were taken during apartheid. Through the systematic punishment of men and women who were doing something extraordinary (living their truth) in their interrogation and detention there would be both a chronic synchronicity in breaking them down psychologically. Everything that had to do with apartheid in the old days was psychological. Everything was done under the cover of darkness. Murder was secret.
It came like a thief in the night much as if it does now. The only way to curb this insanity is to refrain from being a part of it at all. It almost seems as if the revolution that began in apartheid and that is ongoing is a secret, underground, subversive organisation. At its best, I should to all intents and purposes call it an unconscious revolution. Every South African is a part of this matrix. Man, woman and child.
The cities that we live in, the social media that we connect and have a network with informs us all the time that we are free if we want to be. Ignorance is bliss. Emancipation from oppression has come at a great and terrible price for men, women and children have lost their lives in order for us to live the way we do today. Xenophobia is the enemy. Stigma. The same can said of mob justice, flagrant sexual violence, pornography, mental illness and not innocent people.
The only object for the revolution is for us to be free thinkers, visionaries who are aware that there is a vision greater than we are, and that the vision is the rights of humanity. In the powers that be of the hierarchy, in order for them to survive (for the middle classes, for the class system to survive, and the establishment), there must always be poverty at the most grassroots level which is usually the rural countryside and corruption at the highest order.
In politics, it always rained men when it was time for votes to be counted. Politics ruins men faster than women. The women nothing more than trophy politicians to ward off the whispers of corruption. As a tribe, a nation (South Africa) of different races we are unfortunately emotionally damaged. We have been through war. I do not really understand why the world does not see it or the international press.
Crimes that were committed during apartheid were crimes against humanity and today the people responsible for those crimes live as free men and women. Ultimately they are afraid what is going to happen to them but most of all what is going to happen to their children which is why they send their children abroad to study, to learn to speak English as a first language and which is why in the early years of our new democracy there was the ‘brain drain’.
People leaving the country for Canada, America and England wanting to get out, eager, homesick taking everything with them. In South Africa, we do not worship the alien or anything that we did not grow believing in as children. We only believe in the rituals that we were taught since childhood. We do not find the fact that now we have to build novel relationships now in a profoundly optimistic way with those who once gave us sanctuary.
Every South African is walking around with their own manifesto inside their heads. They each have their own reality like a fingerprint. In South Africa, you will find that we are struggling with the psychological framework of a psyche and intellect that is still being sabotaged by the memory of apartheid. The desire of course is to forget. To release the burden of destruction but the fact remains who is responsible for the nature, the catalyst of apartheid. A man or men?
When it comes to xenophobia, it is kind of a macabre parade. It is a parade or zoo where people discover that terror and murder, alarming and frightening people and having children witness this is a natural way of life. People want to lock apartheid away in a museum. This is a time of deceit. A time of homophobia, racism, the building up of the worst kind of vitriol and belligerence, prejudice, racism and genocide (in Africa).
In South Africa, you will find human minds that have been so disturbed the best way to describe this manifestation is like this. It was democracy itself that was a revolutionary act from within (self-conscious, it starved you of your own humanity, made you sensitive to the rights of human life and it educated you about pain and torture). Xenophobia does not require education or intelligence but a kind of extraterrestrial aggression, brutality and violence against man.
We are all at heart children searching for in the emotional complexities and anxieties of our vulnerabilities truth and beauty. A child is ignorant of fear. The only thing that stimulates the death of fear in a child is their loss of innocence. Barbarous habits are the keys to opening Pandora’s Box. History has sometimes given us exactly what we wanted but it has always come with a terrible price. Sometimes our nightmares can take us further from the truth.
Reveal the monsters hiding under the bed. The ghosts in our head. They are the voices, the hallucinations that only we can see and hear. The past gives us insight into our future. All the futures of our tomorrows. The media tells us that we are more equal than others are. They do not tell us what the intentions behind massacre are and what are the intentions behind the methods of massacre? Apartheid changed us. Everybody has a story to tell.
Ghost stories (or should I be using the word/term propaganda here). Everybody wanted to be free and equal during the wuthering heights of apartheid so why deny those rights to other people from other countries all over Africa. There is something so beautiful about the words ‘equality’ and ‘human rights’. Why do South Africans have little or no empathy or consideration for Africans of other countries?
After apartheid, after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, after affirmative action what would our ancestors expect of us? Honestly, would they be expecting us to build museums for the dead? They are surely turning in their grave. We have not made much progress then in twenty years. The Rainbow Nation buried. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. The African Renaissance the only liberty that we are clinging to.
These days every person wants to be part of the African Renaissance. Ordinary young men and woman became radicalized, recruited, politicised and some of them were even destroyed. We sometimes forget that.
