We are living in the precarious times of a coloniality-based dispensation and the repercussions of an ill-fated democracy.
The working class, the downtrodden and the poor live in a borderline and tragic sub-economic area. The youth live in a reality of violence, the law and rule of the gun. The reality of that unfortunately is violence. Alcoholism is rife amongst the poverty-stricken. Those that live in sub-economic housing. It is a violent reality the capacity of which the educated establishment, the liberal cannot understand. Coloured youth live in a violent reality of drugs, territory, addiction and alcoholism. This is a generation that is defining itself either for better or for worse. It is a young generation primarily made up of the single coloured female. Very few coloured females slip through the net of not having, or, shadowing trauma in their lives. What they feel mostly is isolated, alienated, displaced or dispossessed. There is mass exploitation of coloured males and females in the workplace. Even there, they do not go unscathed. There is strong denial of their own feelings of self-worth. They are the breadwinners who live in either a sub-economic area, or, a flatlet, playing both the roles of mother and father. There is mortality in this community, death, infirmity and solitude. The Khoi mission statement was simply cheap labour. The colonial masters then were the government of the day. Cue the anointed, the holistic repositioning, vision of the anointed. Cue the apostle, the evangelist, cure the prophetic ministry. Now we are being taught that to be awakened, we must be indoctrinated by the church, by the dogma and rhetoric of the church, and that when you are most vulnerable, the purposefully-crafted theologian stands on their own. That it is God’s will that is always healing. The pastor will tell you that God will put entities in your path either to obstruct you, destroy you, sabotage, or, uplift you and make you visionary. That you will be blessed by your enemies. What are the merits of religion in a gangster-ridden community? It gives and brings closure, there is us, and the distance that lies between us is surmised to be God. The youth are taught from a young age that life is filled with disappointment, astonishment, observations of the flesh, the flow of the removing of the remover to remove, erase, or eliminate.
What is the explanation of this reticence, this anguish of us, and what are the problems besetting the Coloured in their community, in their homes, in their schools, in their livelihood, in their workplace and in their churches? We are still in a crisis mode. The crisis of identity. There has always been oppression and not emancipation in the Coloured community. There has always been humiliation and a sense of discrimination. We have always been used as political instruments. If the Blacks had Bantu Education, then the Coloured received a gutter education. You simply have to look around you today, to see exactly where we have come from, and where we stand today. Our existence and presence as stepchildren, as brothers and sisters, as the ‘White’ children of Van Riebeeck still holds solid ground, and if we chronicle our entire movement throughout history you will see that we are governed by the shackles of the laws and principles of an immoral threshold. We have garnered the vote, but what does that mean for us as a Coloured ‘nation’ in particular. We have been tossed about for centuries as slave stock, as Non-European,and endured our humiliation and our oppressors in silence. How do we negotiate as a second-class citizen, or rather the working poor’s second-class citizensense of deprivation, the extreme suffering, the extreme poverty that we live in as the working class, the poor and the downtrodden? The bitterness lives on inside of us, inside of our children, inside of our grandchildren, inside of our great-grandchildren. This sense of unease, of unrest, of dispossession, that we are suckers for the pain of mental cruelty has stayed throughout with us for centuries. We have been deprived, lived under apartheid laws, served our country, were hounded in the process, persecuted in the process, and in the end where is the progress of our intelligentsia. Everything we do comes from the viewpoint of anger. It is time to correct the imbalance of social backwardness, ineptness, inequality. We have rights. We have rights. As the working poor, the struggle continues. As the working class, the dispossessed and as the poor we have rights. All the right in the world to be flesh and blood citizen with marked-up privileges.
It starts with recognising the wrongs of the insidious past, and righting them. Schools, libraries and universities must be built in the names of our people. It starts with the education of the Coloured nation.
That recognition that knowledge is power, and with that said, everything in the end that was taken from us, will be returned to us. In my own analysis, we must display a humane regard for each other, authenticity and remain watchful of the dream of the next generation, our descendants, our children.
