Create and live; sell to survive? YOU CHOOSE!

Everyday bits of this rich soil enriched by the blood of ancestors and a magic that once flowed from our way of life are auctioned off to the highest bidders so as to create jobs and alleviate poverty.  Traditional healers are labeled as evil-my father was one might I add- African knowledge systems are referred to as primitive and too regressive for this tumultuous era of ‘evolution’.  Though language policies have been put in place so as to ‘preserve’ our mother tongues, institutions that teach these languages are marred by lack of resources, stigmas attached to public sector service delivery, while schools that teach in the dominant languages, English and Afrikaans, with always defined as skilled white teachers are revered as the institutions that offer quality education to children and are backed by private enterprises in many of their endeavors.

 

I remember the day when the flower that brightens the garden of my imperfections spoke of such matters.  For two hours we left reality to discuss if, as if we were gossip stars that chose the sky as the safest place where our whispers about earth could not be heard.  Car windows fogged as our spirits were galvanized; rain fell softly to curtain us from the outside.

  She argued that the state of Africa, South Africa to be specific, is one that lacks opportunities of development especially for people in my field, art that is.  She stated that there is a culture in South Africa that promotes that which is recognized overseas-deathbeds of many sons and daughters stolen for slavery- and to look down upon what is from South Africa.  She stared at me with her eyes that shamed even the proudest stars and sternly said that that is the reality of our state, one has to first be revered internationally before being acknowledged in South Africa.

 

Teary eyed and eyelids swollen from my brutal encounter with reality, I told her that only we can change that.  Living in and environment adorned with pearls of paradoxes and high paid painters that paint over these paradoxes with their tongues, I have watched performing artists protesting in a country-that claims to promote proudly South African products- for a chance to exhibit their local talent on an African world cup stage; I have seen producers of local content aired by the national broadcaster protest against the possibility of being cut off while more international content is being imported; I have seen black sales persons-clad in Steven Bantu Biko t-shirts- helping black customers with disgust on their faces and then turn around and help white customers with a smile and a face possessed by inferiority-I don’t blame them their Jesus is said to be white-; I have seen leaders in black expensive German cars drive on pothole infested roads past shacks with offerings of promises for a better life for all.

 

A question then arises in my insane mind: ‘Shall we ever be ready to create oR do we have to keep selling Africa to survive?’

 

Create and live; sell to survive?  YOU CHOOSE!