Waweza is a Kiswahili word you can use for “They have a potential/likelihood/proclivity/predilection etc”. So, let me not be seen as a prophet, or even a prophet of doom, for that matter. This is only a scientific assessment on my part as to what may be in store for us starting in the next few hours, if not few minutes.
Now and only a few hours from the Year 2012, it would be very nice to believe that our annual turning of page is hunky-dory, with 2012 about to take us to El Dorado. On the contrary, common sense points to naiveté over that outlook for 2012. The year 2012 is to witness the warring and even possible blood-spilling among people in South Africa. Were such feud the work of ordinary people anywhere in the world we would be happy to pontificate, “Yeah... but that is human nature, isn’t it?”
The trouble here in South Africa is lying somewhere else, a place that would be called novelty if it were not sombre. The potential fighters in this new year promise to be children and descendants of royal and holy founders of the one and only serious liberation movement, South Africa’s African National Congress a.k.a. ANC of Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma. And in that respect “watoto” is children from Kiswahili, “Mungu” is “God”, “chinja” is “slaughter” (“chinjana”, “slaughter one another”) and “Afrika Kusini” is “South Africa”.
“But why would that be your prediction, Mr Phiri?” I hear you dreadasking me, if “reading and asking subvocally at the same time” had an English word.
“I am South Africa.” would be my reply. A reply that, for your tongue and your taste, I would barbecue on the fires of the title to this blog post.
The reality is, the language (Kiswahili) titling this post is not spoken in South Africa. Now ask me what insanity has gripped an Africanist eager to communicate by means of titling a local post with a “foreign” language.
Closer inspection though, will reveal to you that, taking syntax and vocabulary together, Kiswahili is at least 50% South African native languages. I exclude, among others, Afrikaans which, contrary to popular and ignorant belief, is also a South African native language even though a great too many of its vocabulary is taken from a Europe and a far cry from Swahili.
The challenge I have though is I need to warn my country to start studying the history of South Africa in order to understand the things that are about to unfold here.
I tried to write my article in my mother tongue (Siswati). My command of the language left me in the lurch. You should know this that when I grew up, the colonialists of South Africa banned the studying of Siswati in South African schools. As a result I was forced to take at school (as my first language), that language which is not my mother tongue, IsiZulu.
Interestingly, despite their racially zany support for tribal black languages, the Apartheid authorities feared Siswati, a language spoken in an independent African country, the Kingdom of Swaziland, for it would in their view inflame nationalist passions among local natives. The South African natives would invariably in a far more accelerated way ask, if Sobhuza could rule Swaziland, why put South African natives in jail when they demand to rule South Africa? The European racist authorities of South Africa of the day would for that reason not countenance Siswati learning in their schools despite the fact that such teaching would have fitted perfectly with the designs of grand Apartheid’s divide and rule policies.
TRY THE ZULU LANGUAGE
I tried to write my title in IsiZulu, the most spoken tongue in South Africa and my second language in which I am quite adept by the judgement of native Zulu speakers. For your information in that very regard, I graduated at high school with Zulu as “my first language”. Yet, as of now, I face a problem of blogging readership online because the designs of colonialism left most of these Zulu-speakers and my potential audience with “just enough” official Zulu knowledge. It was and still largely is, just enough to enable them imbibitions after imbibitions of false South African history as created by the colonialists. These people also mostly have no knowledge whatsoever of the computer, except as the box they see every so often in front of the clerk whenever they go to sort out at Home Affairs one identity problem or another. And that, my readership, is what is happening in South Africa even as of now, the closing hours of 2011 in a long-liberated country, so long liberated (at least flag-waving-wise) since 1994!
TRY THE AFRIKAANS LANGUAGE
Anyway, no serious-minded Afrikaner (unless he or she is a top-class intellectual or at least someone with a good grasp of South African history), will bother to read from online “black Phiri’s political dissertation in Afrikaans”. Even after the Afrikaans intellectual were to grasp my Afrikaansized import, he would find it very difficult to share it with other South Africans for various reasons post limitations would not allow me to dilate on for today.
WHAT DOES KISWAHILI DO FOR YOU?
Then one day Goodman Manyanya Phiri a.k.a. Terence Qwabe a.k.a. Frans Phukubye a.k.a Mordecai King finds himself in East Africa’s Tanzania. And Phiri gets his first smattering of Kiswahili language. Today, one reads that there are world-wide over 100 million speakers of the Kiswahili language and most of these a literate far cry from our situation down south. My rough guess is that at least 10 million of the 100 million who are Swahili-literate in the world, know also how to switch on the computer and to read what is written therein via at least the Kiswahili language. But if you combine all native languages spoken in South Africa (Sesotho, IsiZulu, Sepedi, Setswana, Siswati, IsiXhosa, Afrikaans etc but PLEASE LEAVE ENGLISH OUT AS IT IS NOT NATIVE AS YOU KNOW)....
I bet you my last dime that of the nine or so natively-spoken languages in my country there will not be even 1 million native South Africans who can do the 10 million done by the speakers of Kiswahili in East, Central and Southern Africa! Of course, this is all the legacy of Apartheid and British colonialism.
WARNINGS ABOUT ANC TUMULT IN 2012
Now here you are, viewing yourself as a South African revolutionary journalist. You now want to warn South Africa, Continental Africa and the world about painful events that are about to unfold in South Africa come 2012. WHAT LANGUAGE ARE YOU GOING TO USE?
Of course, English and Kiswahili!
Maybe this will go a long way towards explaining why my posts are in Kiswahili. In fact, since I started blogging around 2008, I have since become a blogger of note just because of the readership from Swahili speakers in Africa and the world. Without these world citizens nobody South African would be bothering to read my blogs. They total at least four as of this moment with two others staying moon far from politics, if they are attempting to assist people with stress-management via biorhythms. I thank them and YOU my reader very profusely (nawashukuru kwa dhati) as I wrap up 2011.
WHY WOULD CHILDREN OF ONE GOD FIGHT
South Africa has in the entirety of 2011 seen one ugly scenario after another of two children (Jacob Zuma and Julius Malema), belonging to the same God waging fight after fight with each other. The interesting thing is they both of them go to Church, a Christian church (although, happily, other religious practices are apparently not excluded). Both of them are members of the same revered 100-year-old ANC. Both of them agree that the founding fathers of the ANC were religious people educated and trained from religious institutions like Inanda Seminary in Durban. Indeed, both of them have no problem whatsoever with an American missionary, one Reverend Pixley having bequeathed his name on ANC arch-ancestor, Pixley ka Isaka Seme. Granted, Seme is relatively unknown. But both protagonists promising us strife in 2012 pay daily tribute to the better-known Nelson Mandela. What they forget though, or even do not know, is the fact that in all respects, Mandela was a student of Pixley Seme’s. Mandela, if Seme’s child is to be believed where Mandela has not sought to oppose she that he knows very well as of 1990s, did his law articles with Seme’s firm of lawyers in the 1940s.
This, of course, is very contrary to Mandela’s famous autobiography, “Long Walk to Freedom”. We will come to that debacle on other paragraphs or even other blog posts.
The question for now is why would Zuma and Malema be fighting so viciously were it that everything in their history is the same. Same God, same founding fathers, same creed and same ANC?
The answer is simple and straightforward. SOMETHING IS NOT WHAT IT COMMONLY LOOKS TO BE IN THE HISTORY OF THE ANC.
There are some first-brand lies that have been put in huge books as fact. There are still new lies that are being purveyed on a daily basis about the history of the organization. There are people who have turned themselves into super-heroes which they were not during the struggle of the 1940s for example.
Some families have suddenly been turned in books and TV documentaries into holy families. The families, so heavily indebted to by the freed nation, needs must forever have at least one member in the ANC and its government. It must of course be a very rich and highly-placed member for that matter. Please don’t ask a stupid question! Don’t you know that her grandfather or his mother was there when this or that happened in 1940 yadda yadda yadda warra warra warra even if it is most of it pure lies?
This, in itself is not bad as wherever you go in the world, you do find attempts at writing of history, and then opposing attempts that re-write it and as the time marches on, further attempts that want to re-re-write has been falsely re-written. The German is apparently very good at that, refusing to take as Bible truth everything the world says about them. For example, the era of Adolf Hitler is an excellent example of how the German mind is occupied and concerned about the image projected of German History and thus Germanness.
The sad thing about South Africa is that I am still to find one intellectual who want to investigate all the grand statements called “Standard South African history of the past 100 years repeated. The standardness of these historical statements is just too perfect to escape even the most jaded of intellectual minds! The standardness resides in just too many books to be glossed over. Chief of these books would for me be Nelson Mandela’s “Long Walk To Freedom”.
When you read that book which every intellectual should read and every member of the ANC whether intellectual or not) ought to have read by now, you find many patently preposterous statements made to look like fact.
If South Africa was Germany, there would be a hundred books already written to challenge the venerable Mr Mandela and his Bible of truth of the history of struggle in the 1940s. Yet, because we are not Germany, and we were all educated under Apartheid or its legacy to toe the official line of history, there is not a single book I’ve heard of that were to challenge Nelson Mandela’s misrepresentation of the ANC struggle in the 1940.
This despite the fact that there are many elderly women and men still alive today who know that on this point or that point Mandela is lying in his short or long walk to freedom. Yet they do not stand up to defend the truth or they do not know how. That is bad. But there is something worse: those among us who can do even the flimsiest of attempts at research and at trying to put pen to paper, dare not do that! It is because we believe rightly and wrongly at the same time, depending on individual exigencies, we are swimming in shark waters if we do that. We tend to be afraid of the ruling ANC, whose demigod Mandela has unfortunately been turned in the minds of some of its top leaders. Indeed, where Mandela is concerned, I am not sure whether Zuma and Malema honour Mandela or deify him! And if Zuma deifies Mandela we fear he will cause us to be victimized as civil servants because after all, Zuma’s government is the greatest employer in this country. So, South Africa’s intellectuals, relatively fresh from Apartheid bondage, have not as yet learnt to be economically independent of the state governed by a Zuma whose every political sentence, particularly when he addressed people in his native Zulu language, will either sport “Madiba”, “The Father of the Nation” or “The Founding President” which is all a reference, albeit falsified, to former State President Mandela and author of “Long Walk to Freedom”. South African intellectuals, of the political ilk, are still in their pupa stage. I am not sure if they will metamorphosize in time to save this country from an imminent tribal conflagration engendered partly by their posture and a posture so blasé!
So, the truth about Mandela’s false statements in his long walk are well-known in ANC circles. The problem is, outside of Nelson Mandela, the ANC lacks any other glue to maintain its cohesiveness. Those among the leaders of the ANC who are thinking, are also happy to join leadership naiveté. Who, without having seen flames or smoke, wants to start dousing his own house with water just because the weather is turning every object to cinders? Leaders are happy to adjudge that things are still going well for the ANC party and its government with the masses hoodwinked by Mandela’s version of history. You do not fix what appears unbroken, Brother. Of course you can always victimize those who dare speak brokenness where none exist for the vast majority of South African citizenry! The truth though is, these leaders have not sat down to address the scenario of what will happen to their organization when one day, the full and shocking truth is revealed. This is the truth of the true identity in Nelson Mandela, which I think is still half-concealed. If Mandela’s portrayal (false or not) of the founding of the ANC Youth League, for example, has passed utilitarian muster, at least till Julius Malema came into the presidency of the organization, why must they go fixing the machine churning the propaganda when they could more easily fix the fabric in Malema’s character? Common sense, not so?
Yet these common sense and historical falsehoods lie at the centre of the current fight between Jacob Zuma and Julius Malema.
In so far as falsehoods, Jacob Zuma knows no better. He learned, as we know, his politics at the knee of Nelson Mandela on Robben Island. Mandela, the Thembu got to admire the courage of this half-illiterate Zulu who tended to get a reason to sing whenever he could for fellow political prisoners.
Mandela knew very well that his falsehoods about “Long Walk To Freedom” would one day be challenged and scholars may find elements of tribalism and Eastern-Cape regionalism in the way he portrayed the struggle of the 1940s. But who dare suggest Mandela “a tribalist” when he politically trained this Zulu half-schooled in politics “behind bars” on Robben Island? Who dare even think of suggesting Mandela a possible ethnologist of the practice gild when he supported Zuma’s rise in power in exile where Zuma controlled the intelligence apparatus of the organization? Of course, many people underestimated the power of Mandela to control his ANC even while he was still in prison. ANC President Oliver Tambo learnt this fact at a great cost to his own status that that Nelson Mandela, a prisoner of no status in the organization, had negotiated practically every concept in the South African scenario for black suffrage without the knowledge of Tambo!
Mandela is the perfect nationalist and freedom fighter far situated from tribalism! An anti-Zulu tribalist cannot in any way support a Zulu with the character of Jacob Zuma’s rape-and-corruption-status all the way or, can he? May I leave that to you as my blog reader to make your own conclusions.
Whether you put Mandela on the left or right, on the living or expired, he will most probably rank as the greatest human being with the greatest national secrets anywhere in the world because he wrote South African national history the way he wanted to without one single surviving challenge.
Suffice it to say that these hidden truths regarding the history, particularly of the Youth League of whose member Mandela was when Youth League founding president, the Zulu speaking Anton Lembede was poisoned to death by his own comrades IS THE SOURCE OF THE CURRENT CONFLICT BETWEEN ZUMA AND MALEMA. Now the question I am asking is, seeing that our land is about to go into convulsion in 2012 about the Mandela falsehoods, must we continue to revere him into his falsehoods or must we blow the myth he has built around South African history of the early 40s? Can an individual in our constitutional democracy become greater than our constitution?
Current ANC Youth League President Julius Malema probably knows the truth about ANC history far better than Jacob Zuma will ever know. If true, the problem with Malema would be one of manifold quandaries.
MALEMA QUANDARY NUMBER ONE
Firstly, the wife, ex-wife of Nelson Mandela, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela is fully behind the young man in his current vicissitudes. Telling the truth about Nelson Mandela’s printed falsehoods would hurt a woman whose political standing has its genesis in her former husband.
MALEMA QUANDARY NUMBER TWO
Many of the illiterate peasants of Mandela’s home province the Eastern Cape, who are members of the ANC supportive of Julius Malema, are also deifying Nelson Mandela. Malema cannot weaken his own support by appearing as if to attack those of his comrades who view Mandela as their god.
The rest of South Africa’s ANC Supporters are albeit, to a lesser degree, wallowing in the same degree of ignorance over the true spirit of Mandela. So, bringing up these pieces of truth, if done, by Julius Malema in particular, would translate to sure political and even biological suicide. Julius Malema, of all people, would know that [people in his ANC kill for leaders just like Malema expressed a few years ago an exuberant preparedness to kill for Mandela’s arch-disciple, Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma with whom today they are sworn political enemies].
MALEMA NOW LANCES THE BOIL AND THEN WINCES
I would humbly argue that if there was any soul alive today in South Africa to ensure the ANC lives for another 100 years from now, IT IS NONE OTHER BUT JULIUS MALEMA. It is also the reason why I find it very silly for comrades to suggest that the person to now oppose Zuma’s reported rabid intentions for a second term in office should be someone other than Malema? How do you go into a 12-round boxing match and supplant one of the opponents with the hope that the game rules will allow the judges to find the supplanter the winner of the match when he only fought one afternoon round of the twelve started at dawn? What are you saying to the love spectators have developed for either Jacob Zuma or Julius Malema from Round One of their match? Indeed, South Africa, my land, can sometimes turn into the ground for the most stupid political proposals. But I guess that is what makes us a viable democracy!
It is Julius Malema because he has shown the type of intellectual courage that has never before been seen in South Africa since the days of ANC Founder Pixley Seme and his disciple, fellow-Zulu Anton Lembede. If you ask me, the ANC as it stands today under the tutelage of Mr Zuma, IS ON ITS WAY TO A SUDDEN DEATH IN 2012 EXACTLY ONE HUNDRED YEARS OLD.
There would be many years of life for the ANC (although not a hundred more) if there would be a reconciliation between Zuma and Malema, which is an option us who love the ANC without being its members, have preached for the past couple of years of their cat-fight. But it is clear now that the only thing that will ever reconcile the two is their mortality and the grave reserved for all of us human beings.
For these reasons, I would urge Julius Malema to beware of cowardice. The ANC is dying because of huge pockets of ignorance of its own history. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, you, Mr Malema have lanced the patient’s boil.
The patience is grimacing and growling at you, Malema, because you have hurt him. The patient is not aware he is sick because he believes “if I sing Madiba Madiba Madiba then it is well with my soul”. But it is not well, with patient. And I, Medical Doctor Phiri, are telling your Comrade Malema, the diagnosis of this boil you have pricked and I say the only way to cure the patient is to squeeze the boil clean.
It is up to you now, Malema to be the man you said you are, and go ahead to squeeze this boil clean. And I am sure once it is really clean, even Mr Zuma will come to thank you by December 2012 and we will all of us live happily thereafter on the eve of yet another 100 years of an ANC that will united the entire Africa and be a bulwark to the ongoing neo-colonialism on the continent. The alternative is: you Malema are already dead Mfan’akiti ! You are dead, Youngman, because the patient you have hurt is a giant as of this moment busy like a Pamplona bull stampede trampling you underfoot and please ask Oupa Gqozo, Sifiso Nkabinde, Bantubonke Holomisa, Willie Madisha, and former State Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka! NOBODY DARES THE ANC ON ITS OWN MANDELA TERMS AND WINS!
I am not say go ahead and hate or denounce Mandela, as even I don’t hate or denounce him. I am saying: as a courageous leader which I have always hoped you are, go ahead and spread the true history of your youth league which Mr Mandela has falsified, and DO point out where the old man made these historical blunders of fact. The courageous people of South Africa of all colours and creed, will defend you and you will survive; for the most powerful teacher ever to emerge on earth said, at it shall always be till the end of time
“THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE (Mr. Julius Malema)
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