Category Archives: Personal

Radically Assuming Self.

Experiencing youth in a society that is actively attempting to craft a new collective imagination of itself and its place in the world has been very taxing yet rewarding in very subtle and not so subtle ways. I am a 20 year-old Sowetan whose discovery of self in a supposedly free South Africa can be summed up by the notion that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Growing up, for me, has generally been a constant process of exposure – myself to society and society to me. I have become aware of the ways in which this exposure happens, its stimulants and inhibitors and I intend to bring you along as I unpack this journey.

I discovered my identity and made sense of it very early, it was never an arduous task, but it took me quite some time to realise that I am a body out of place, constantly negotiating his seat at the table and I charge that this is a performance many of peers are familiar with, and this realisation has conferred upon me a habit of turning upside down all tables that were designed without me in mind and whose intention has been to marginalise me and the people with whom I share an identity. This, however, is not always the case. It is not always possible to be the emissary of change because for one simple reason; disrupting and demanding change is to be captured in a theatre of performative violence and, most often than not, doing so without a strategy begets violence; all forms. Direct and physical, indirect and structural and violence.

You see, I am from a generation of black township/urban youth famous for the controversial ways in which they do things; the unapologetic queers, ama skrr skrr, and ama-2000. I am also inspired by the iconic Fallist generation whose significant contribution as a movement and a national moment is the decanonisation of Rhodes and bringing the country to a grinding halt as they determinedly and passionately demanded free, decolonised and quality education, thereby portraying the symbolism of a generation whose appetite for structural and systemic exclusion as a legacy of colonial and apartheid dehumanisation has been exhausted. Most recently, the young people of Nigeria who bravely confronted a violent and corrupt public policing unit through their #ENDSARS movement. Essentially, a generation who have demanded to be human with impatience.

The movements and categories of popular culture mentioned above have and continue to assist me in shaping my understanding of the world and my position in it. I have elected to live a life that in one way or the other will seek to contribute significantly to the upcoming African moment because many of my generation have chosen not to be silent and because my identity is not silent. Even when noise and controversy is not sought my blackness courts it in latent and active ways. It is exactly for this reason that being black and young is, for me, a deliberately political act.

The title suggests that this process of discovering my identity, its meaning and implications has been ‘radical’ not because it has delivered a completely new and certain understanding of self and reality as would be the case in the normative sense but rather implies that to fully embrace my blackness and sexuality as layers of my identity has led me to a point where, in the Freirean sense, I can fully ‘enter fully into [my] reality’ with no hesitation to reveal my dispositions and engage with clear and honest intentions to tenaciously humanise myself and everyone who, as a consequence of their undesirable identities, has internalised their oppression.

This radical process of self-realisation and its quest for humanisation is being necessitated by the reality of day to day life in post-apartheid South Africa. To live in South Africa today especially as a young black person means to recognise that whatever change attained by the democratic process has been largely cosmetic and as a result of the ‘negotiated settlement’ to demand and agitate for substantive transformation – real change­ – is an assault on the status quo with the intent to cause grievous harm to the constitutional order, and therefore, an attack on the soul of the state; a treasonous act of sorts.

Although many have written and spoken about how fully embracing one’s identity is a political act, I add my voice to the encyclopaedia of identity politics because our identities are indeed political and they transcend our blog articles, our classrooms, our organising spaces, and our workplaces into real life-real time interactions that inevitably shape the world. Our identity politics, tiring as they are, carry a significant real life impact. A reckoning with the consequences of our identities must be undertaken for as long as we have not ceased to think.

Finally, to be black and young and not dare to reinvent South Africa, Africa and the world is to be complicit in the efforts of those who have sought to relegate generations of blacks into a perpetual state of dehumanisation. Dare to challenge and after that have the courage to act.

NEGOTIATING THE ‘FRIENDLY’ IDEOLOGICAL DIVIDE : FRIENDSHIP AND IDEOLOGY.

See the source image
 Picture: Cara Viereckl (IOL NEWS)

During the past week, I have not done much labouring besides the fascinating intellectual task my mind has been seized with. An acquaintance with whom I share(d) social and sometimes friendly connections informed me that whatever relations we had established could no longer continue to exist due to the irreconcilable nature of the ideals which shape our understanding of politics, the economy, social relations and by extension the world. Despite my acceptance of this termination of ‘friendship’, I have undertaken to interrogate the impact of political views on social relations. To achieve this, I ask whether it is necessary for social and personal relations to be terminated on the basis of  differing political views.

Political, religious, and socio-cultural convictions are an expression of the fundamental beliefs and values which people, societies and institutions hold, work towards and defend with time, energy and resources (both human and financial). These are not convictions that bear no consequence, as history illustrates, nations have gone to wars, empires have fallen and millions across the world have lost lives all because of divergent convictions that actively produce hostile conditions. It is this understanding that underlines the essence of the replies provided to a tweet (https://twitter.com/warholmicky/status/1323775290909315073?s=20) asking whether ones political views should lead to a termination of personal relations.

That an adherent of leftist politics rooted in the black radical tradition and pan-African socialism falls out of favour with a conservative fellow should therefore come as no surprise, especially when considering that what is in conflict is not necessarily personal affairs but the ideas we hold about what is wrong and right with the world as it is and the solutions we propose to rectify the infractions. In our case, the fundamental disagreement has been centred around the correct approach to solve the longstanding question of inequality and exclusion, land ownership and poverty in South Africa. It would be a senseful inference if one assumed that continuous engagement on the same issues would despite the validity of the differences in opinion foster a common understanding on issues. None of these disagreements have ended with a common understanding and with each we have grown apart.

For example, I could never agree that “equality is unattainable”, or that “the West is the only correct model of development” and neither could he agree that the state must be used as a vehicle towards socio-economic transformation or that one of the most urgent tasks of the current state is to end landlessness because individual and market agency will not appropriately remedy this historical injustice. Each point we made revealed our truest dispositions and quite honestly our ‘loyalties’.  I presume it was on this basis that he decided to mark the demarcation boundaries because not reaching any conclusion on any matter has produced considerable antagonisms.

Necessary as the termination was, I do not believe that ideological difference should lead to negative personal relations. This is the case even in systemic terms because of the potential consequence of war. It is a matter of choosing between a bloody or bloodless politics, that disagreement is a basic feature of ideological and political discourse. As soon as one decides to terminate relations on the basis of political convictions, they have seized to experience life as humans but as programmed robots fulfilling dangerous motives. However, at a great risk of being accused of self-contradiction, I also caution against those who hide behind this logic to propose and agitate for ideological beliefs that enable the exclusion, maltreatment, persecution and the violation of  those who are powerless and poverty-stricken by the powerful.

It is worthy to note that the termination of our friendship may have never been necessitated by irreconcilable ideological differences but other unrelated personal affairs.

Farewell dear acquaintance, may I always find friends who keep me aroused – intellectually – as you have done.

our way to total love: a meditation

The conditions that emerged after the loss of my mother’s life compelled all of us to reimagine and reinvent the ways in which all of us related to each other. Gogo, for one, soon retired from both her job and old age to become a mother again, I, on the other hand had to be a high schooler, the eldest brother [read father…sometimes] and a teenager; everyone was called onto introspection of great depth. Life had indeed given us the tallest of tall orders.

In the process of settling into our radically reconfigured reality, we clashed, we crashed and at times we bashed each other. We desperately needed someone and something to blame for this tragedy that had befallen us all. In the absence of an actor assuming responsibility for a calamity of such proportions, the alternative was nothing else but consistent convergence [often tense and bitter]. As if our wounds weren’t fresh enough, the 13th of February 2016 happened; a bullet violently pierced deep into not only Titi’s chest but all of our chests. A baptism of fire, nothing else but our energies, emotions and lives had to brave the hellish fire of loss once more. It was as if the purpose of our collective existence was to witness dearly loved life perish and nothing else.

It wasn’t the death nor the pain for me. The arduous task to live and learning to love again slowly became too much. I found myself taking on a sixty years old severely depressed Gogo, always ready to give her a piece of my mind. I had become the orphan, constantly reminding uGogo that “I had not asked for my mother to die” and she was having none of it. She yelled until words could not express her fear of who I had become but her tears communicated clearly what she felt. We had both ceased to feel pain, our anger at death, life and reality was the only way we felt our relation to each other.  I mean, I was so angry that I forgot that I was not the only who had lost a mother but that could also be because Musa grieves differently.

Six years later, I sit and reflect. I examine the journey that me and Gogo have taken together and it’s surprising that it has led to total love. Our anger, pain and grief has led to a love so deep that it surpasses the limits of human understanding. UKhosini Mzitshwa Nkosi has been patient with me and I commit now to you all that suffering for her for as long as I trot on the earth’s surface is a story of a distant past.

Gogo, ngiyabonga!