If The Teacher Only Knew!

During my school days, the teachers used to beat us like crazy. Many kids dropped out of school because of corporal punishment. They called this truancy. It was a system inherited from the apartheid era. Teachers ruled by fear.

I used to have panic attacks every Sunday evening on the thought of Mr Mabuza alone, the Maths teacher because Maths was not my strength.

I in particular remember this other day when we were doing oral reading. This is where you were required to stand in front of the class and read a story assigned to you by the teacher.

A number of children didn’t know how to read. These were particularly the older kids of the class! Who were known to have repeated every grade. The teacher would then ask, what’s wrong with you? Are you brain damaged? Are you retarded? and the class would laugh at them, HARD.

Those were hostile and dark days, If you would have asked the teachers if they knew about ADHD, ADD, Autism or Dyslexia they would in fact beat you for thinking that you are smarter than them.

Thinking about all of this now I feel very sorry for those poor kids. They are adults now, I’ve seen one of them some couple of weeks back when I went to Nelspruit my home town. He used to sit with me in class and I would deliberately let him copy my work. We never spoke about me letting him copy my work, it was something we both knew I had to do because we both knew his struggle with learning!

This guy is now running one of the biggest shops and butcheries in the township, he also has a tent business, where he hires out tents. He is indeed a very successful business person. A thousand folds better than the teacher who used to make fun of him.

And I’m thinking but this guy couldn’t read in class in fact I’m pretty sure to this day he still can’t read because he dropped out of school because of his struggle to read!

This write up is to say I’m sorry for laughing when the teachers made fun of our friends. THE TEACHERS DIDN’T KNOW THAT THEY DIDN’T KNOW!

Am I A Monkey or A Man?

This is my respond to Penny Sparrow a real estate agent woman from KwaZulu Natal (KZN) who shared a post on Facebook comparing holiday makers that flock to beaches in KZN on New Year’s Day to monkeys.

When apartheid died, the millions who firmly believed in it didn’t die with it, in fact they are still here with us hiding behind pseudonyms secretly pushing the apartheid agenda everywhere from schools to corporate to public spaces. I’ve been called all sorts of racial names by racists like ‪#‎PennySparrow‬ and I’m just glad that finally there’s a face

Asking for a bland forgiveness

No madam, apology not accepted madam. Not only because it is loaded with sarcasm instead of sincerity but also because your initial statement was truthful to your thoughts. For out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.

Your initial post is not a bad joke, or a distasteful utterance, it is the honest truth of how you really think and feel about black people. The problem here is that you are not the only person who sees us as stupid monkeys who deserve nothing better in life. White supremacists like yourself keep raping this forgiveness that we as black people are extending to your kind. We are expected to “move on already” because it doesn’t matter anymore, when there are people like you who will not gracefully share a public beach? If you’re disgusted by the presence of black people in a public beach, how repulsed and revolted are you when you have to spend days on end selling a house to them? Oh! Wait, you wouldn’t sell a house to a monkey!

We live in a society where we have to scrape our way to get basic things like education, housing and medical care. We work in industries that try their best to exclude us. Our intelligence and leadership skills will not be acknowledged without government legislature like BEE. We continue to be sidelined and denied opportunities because we are black. We have a generational poverty inheritance to undo while still trying to obtain economic freedom and accumulate our own wealth that we will leave for future generations.

This whilst racism and fascism is blocking our every endeavor. It is extremely hard for us to live everyday hoping and working hard to make this country a better place , letting go of the justified resentment and grudges that we should be holding. We extend a hand, we are civil and welcoming to white people,we give you the benefit of doubt by not assuming that not all white people are racist. Then comes you, insensitive white supremacist racist, in the nature of the monkey you call us, you swing feces at us! How long must we forgive the same people who insist on poking the same wound we are trying to heal?
So no madam, your apology doesn’t mean anything to us, because it means nothing to you either. Apology not accepted. In isiXhosa we say uyasinyela straight.

A way forward

The only reason that so many people are shocked by comments made by this Penny Sparrow is because of the fact that as South Africans we pretend as if all is well, things are not okay in this country, racism is still rife in this country, majority of black people live in extreme poverty, yet we pretend as if everything is okay. We pretend that black and whites live together in harmony, no it is not like that and we all know it. Deep down, behind closed doors we all have issues that we still have to deal with. In the dawn of democracy in 94 we pretended that we like each other, but we knew it that it wasn’t the case.

We pretend under the so called Rainbow Nation. South Africans racism is alive and we all now it, but we pretend as if it doesn’t exist because we don’t want to look bad in the eyes of the world. We pretend that it doesn’t exist because we don’t want to upset the spirit of Mandela and his reconciliation. Stuff that, let us face issue and deal with them head on, because this pretending will never take us anywhere as a nation. So stop acting so surprised when the likes of Penny Sparrow and co reminds us of the brutal truth. South Africa is still far from being racism free, unless we wake-up, stop pretending and do something about it.

Zuma is the face of SA, whether we like it or not!

I’m not an ANC member or affiliated to the ruling party in any way, but I am a patriot and my politics are centered around the will of the people, hence I decide which political party to vote for just right before the elections. These videos that are constantly in circulation showing Zuma making a fool of himself however, have really gotten in my nerves. I don’t think they are funny at all

You see, as much as we cannot agree with some of the policies of the ruling party or what Zuma himself has done but I would like to point out that whether we like it or not, Zuma is the face of South Africa. He represents us out there, and when he is making a fool of himself we ought not to laugh, we must in fact ask ourselves, what does that say about us as South Africans to the international community?

We all know that Maths is not our President’s strong point but there’s no one in the ANC with the foresight to see to it that numbers need to be written in words to avoid Zuma embarrassing himself over and over again when making his speeches.

NOOO man this is really not on!

Can someone reading this article from the ANC do something about this!.. I’m Swati and we have this saying– Tibi Tendlu– which literally translates to “Dirty Laundry”. Zuma is our dirty laundry, as patriots let’s all agree that we’ve made a mistake to have elected this man to that position and let’s acknowledge that we have learned from this but most importantly let’s try and hide our dirty laundry to protect ourselves from this kind of shame!

Let’s talk about Muammar Gaddafi!

Besides claims by the Western countries of the Lockerby Bombings for which Libya was harassed and an “innocent” man spending years in jail.

 

Well it’s also a well known fact that he came to power in a coup, suppressed political opponents, funded armed groups that the USA categorised as terrorist and attempted to obtain weapons of mass destruction (hash tag according to who: the West again?)…None if this is seriously disputed.

Crimes? Others have done the same and not been punished. The USA protected General Franco, and numerous similar people around the world. Nothing was done about Saddam Hussein until after the end of the Cold War, when he became inconvenient.

You can’t speak of crimes without some sort of impartial judgement, which is lacking.

 

And by the way he was also rumored to be worth over 200 Billion USD ( so much so for forbes claiming for years that Bill gates is the richest man in the planet, which I personally believe the richest man is in the middle East, probably the Sheik Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Makhthaum, but that’s a topic for another day). The real question is what happened to Muammar Gaddafi’s money? When someone out there freezes accounts of the so called dictators what eventually happens to the money once it gets liquidated again, if it does become liquid?

 

What are we being fed here and by who?.. We are bombarded by so much Western media propaganda that we begin to drink the cool aid.. I still choose to not drink the cool aid!

My views on the recent Xenophic attacks in South Africa.

I strongly feel that the country should prioritize these issues of xenophobia because the fact that it has died down “for now” it does not mean that it is over. A lot of blame has been put on the Zulu king Goodwill Zwelithini for his utterances that “all the foreigners must pack their bags and leave South Africa”. I feel he should have addressed it differently.

This issue is not a South African issue but an African one. If you follow African Politics and history you will remember that in 1957, after Ghana gained independence, many Nigerians began migrating to Ghana. Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party (CPP) had maintained a liberal immigration policy because of his pan-Africanist ideology and his desire for Ghana to be in the forefront of African unity. For example, in the 1960 census, immigrants particularly Nigerians made up 12 percent of the Ghanaian population of 8.4 million people. The relationship became sour when the influx of immigrants began to shift the demographics of the country, which made people unhappy. The most widespread reason for discontent was economic competition and, also, some Ghanaians blamed immigrants for a wave of crime that occurred in the late 1960s. Thus, under former Ghanaian president Kofi Busia’s Aliens Compliance Order of 1969, Nigerians and other immigrants were forced to leave Ghana. The order required that all foreigners in the country must be in possession of residence permit if they did not already have it or to obtain it within a two-week period. Kofi Busia expelled 20,000 to 500,000 Nigerians in a time period of 14 days to 3 months. The order angered some West African governments, especially Nigeria, Togo, Benin, Mali, Niger, Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso whose citizens were mostly affected by the expulsion. The 1969 Order also affected Ghana’s image in mainland Africa and the rest of the world. In 1983, the Nigerian government expelled 2 million Africans out of Nigeria. Ghana was facing severe drought and economic problems, so many Ghanaians were welcomed in the 1970s by Nigeria, which was in the midst of an oil boom and in need of cheap labor.

In early 1983, as the oil boom faded and Nigerians needed a group to blame for their economic and social woes, the government enacted the Expulsion Order and up to 700,000 Ghanaians were expelled from Nigeria. When the Ghanaians were leaving Nigeria, most of them hurriedly packed their belongings in a big silk bag with red and blue stripes. The Nigerians, either by affection or ridicule, began to call this bag “Ghana must go”. This name gained a fast currency in Ghana and up until today, that bag is still identified by that name.

Another xenophobic spot in the sub-region is Guinea. Guineans are known for their solidarity against foreigners notably Liberians and Sierra Leoneans who fled to Conakry after the breakout of war in their countries. In Cote D’Ivoire, Burkinabe immigrants have come under increasing attacks from locals. For years, The Gambian authorities have maintained straight regimes against encouraging Liberian refugees into the country.

So as much as these recent xenophobic attacks are attributed to the Zulu king Zwelithini, he in fact kindled something that was there for a very long time. I only think he should have been wise enough and addressed the right people ( the government in this case). I love you South Africa.