What history has shown is that sometimes a leader, a world leader, or sitting president makes bad choices, he says something, or does something that they can’t take back, the world leader is then ridiculed in public, shamed by the press. I have also realized that sometimes even the historian gets it wrong through no fault of their own sometimes, and then it is up to the generation who comes after to pick up the pen, and to document, and to rewrite and revise history again.
The thinker is developing a model within the modern infrastructure of society that the individual, the revolutionary no longer picks up the gun and resorts to gun violence, the revolutionary in the modern world must now pick up the pen. It has always been said that it is the pen that is mightier than the sword.
You see, we must not resort to violence to get our point across, instead we must look to negotiating our differences on the page for that is where I believe the gangster will be rehabilitated. For emotional healing in post-covid post-apartheid South Africa and on the African continent to take place from the scourge of the Promulgation of the Group Areas Act, the heinous crimes and atrocities, the criminal behavior of the Special Branch that operated during the brutal regime of apartheid more than talk therapy must be done, a spiritual awakening must also take place and for that to be done it is my belief that the history books must be revised.
Both history and religious instructions must be taught from the primary school level in South African schools. The Christian and the Muslim, understanding and tolerance of Christianity and the Islamic faith must be taught and I think an Institute, perhaps a Muslim Christian Insitute should be established on the African continent,
As thinkers and intellectuals, we must write about the implementation of therapeutic methods in the healing of adverse childhood experience that the refugee experiences. I am speaking now about the refugee that finds themselves in Africa and in Palestine and in other places in the world. We must look to our poets for they have a responsibility, our writers, thinkers, intellectuals, government officials, leaders and teachers, educators and politicians have this same unique responsibility.
We are again a world in crisis. We are a world in crisis. We are a world in transition and facing another famine, another crisis, another administration that is turning a blind eye to tension in the Middle East, and we’re living in a world that is looking the other way when a genocide is taking place. We are ignoring the fact that another apartheid, more ethnic cleansing is taking place, more corruption is taking place, instability and insecurity. Our poets speak for the times that we live in. The poet is witness, the poet is philosopher, the poet is also politician on the page, and the poet is writing for the African Renaissance. Anyone with a black skin, who has one parent who was born in Africa is an African. Anyone who is a slave or descended from slaves is black.
It was South African political linguist Neville Alexander who coined the term the African Renaissance and thought leader and visionary ex-President Thabo Mbeki who put pen to paper and wrote a poem “I Am An African” that will inspire generations to come. The world is going through a transition and reaching a fever pitch. One can argue that this has happened every generation, for every generation gives rise to a novel dispensation that changes how we think as individuals, and transforms our viewpoint and perspective of the environment that we find ourselves in.
In South Africa, in both the cosmopolitan and psychological framework of the landscape
what we are facing today on the African continent can only be fixed through the written word and making it available to every South African, citizen and inhabitant of the African continent. It is time for every boy child and each and every girl child to understand where they come from, our shared history, our revised history, the brutal and tyrannical hold King Leopold had over the Congo, what the Algerian psychiatrist Frantz Fanon meant by colonial psychosis (apartheid too is a colonial psychosis), and what South African political organisations such as the New Unity Movement (NUM) stand for today, the Non European Unity Movement (NEUM), the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC), the African National Congress (ANC) who went underground during apartheid what they mean for the African, and for the poet (who is witness), what it means for the poet writing for the African Renaissance.
To be a good man, said the Canadian professor and clinical psychologist in an interview, is to be dangerous. What does this statement mean? It merely means that the individual must be in control of the impulsivity to do evil, to create malevolence and suffering in this world, the individual must be in control of his impulses to do harm. The individual makes the choice to do good And so we have emperors, we have kings, we have prime ministers, world leaders, authority figures, the church, individual men, women, children who on a day-to-day basis make the choice very willingly, very ably to do evil, whether it be in the world, to go to war with another country, to launch an invasion, or to be a playground bully. To embarrass, to humiliate, to abuse, be it in any shape or form of mental, physical, verbal, sexual abuse, mental cruelty is also to do evil.
We are living in times that require the poet (who is witness, philosopher, negotiator, and politician) we must look to people who are studying the mind, the role that human behavior, dopamine and serotonin play in brain health and the personality of the individual.
Where does healing, recovery and rehabilitation come from for the drug addict experiencing suicide ideation in the sub-economic area of the Northern Areas in Gqeberha that is plagued by gangsterism and gun violence, where both young men and young women are faced with insurmountable psychological challenges and difficulties, hardship after hardship, they’re tested by unemployment, gender based violence, a dysfunctional family life, promiscuity, single parenthood, drug use and abuse, a parent who is absent in the home, adverse childhood experience? There is no simple answer to this. No one solution. Having a spiritual awakening is part of the recovering process said Carl Jung. Perhaps we should listen to this reasoning.
Now here is where my proposal for a Muslim Christian Institute to be established comes from. It is where great minds, sound minds, contemporary thinkers, intellectuals, teachers, theologians, Sheikhs and Imams, men and women, scholars and academics will come together and forge a New World Order, and it is to be established somewhere on the African continent.
If we look at the turmoil in the world today, and at a lot of the problems that are facing, if we are looking to find solutions, resolution, peace we must achieve this by mapping out the psychological framework of the mind. For the problem of nuclear war and genocide, rivalry, the land question is not a Black and White question, it is the result of colonial psychosis.
Peace, an absolute peace treaty, or ceasefire, perhaps will not come at this time, but perhaps it will be ushered in with the next generation, the Born Frees in South Africa, for example. It is up to them to rewrite the history books, to write Africa into history, it is up to the literary giants and the founding fathers, the pioneers of NWASA, people like Frank Meintjies, Nana Walter Chakela, Mongane Serote, Lebogang Lancelot Nawa, and Keith Gottschalk to carry the African continent into a new dawn, a novel future, the infinite possibilities and potential of a new century, and the golden age of the African Renaissance.
Amandhla Awethu!
