A HEAD NOT WELL SCREWED FOR NEITHER GOD NOR SATAN

1.        For the past 12 or so months I have been observing Mr. Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma (The President of South Africa’s ruling  African National Congress-ANC and ipso facto the President of the Republic).

2.        My aim was to pick up what for me will be the most indelible memories of him prior to his kiss goodbye to ANC leadership come Mangaung Elective Conference of the organization in December this year.

3.        It saddens me to report here that I have seen nothing new and I have seen nothing old in his way of doing things.  Those weaknesses that around January 2012 or even September 2011 stood in his way towards a scintillating performance (which he well could have achieved) are still standing even as of this moment, barely four months before, as he clearly so wishes, he contests a second term as leader of the ANC.

4.        On this post I am therefore reflecting on those same old issues as they stood around the beginning of the year.

5.        On my mind as of this moment of writing, verychief of those things that have deeply shamed me over the past 12 months was to hear (rightly or wrongly) that Mr Zuma has claimed that firstly, “Christianity was brought to Africa”.

6.        I contest that, because believe Christianity, indeed even Judaism, was taken from Africa, sent to Europe for a holiday where it was thoroughly panel-beated admittedly, and then brought back home to Africa. But that is a matter for another post coming titled “Hurricane Vagina”.  So, back to Zuma’s loose tongue.

7.        He reportedly says, secondly, that [“old-age homing and orphaning of children is the result of Christianity”].

8.        But we should start with Zuma’s head now and see if it is well-screwed for anything religious or irreligious for that matter.

9.        Maybe the question to ask of him is his understanding of a simple question.

“ARE SOUTH AFRICAN CHRISTIANS THERE FOR THEIR RELIGION OR IS THE RELIGION THERE FOR THEM”?

10.     Being mutually exclusive, obviously answers to one of the two questions will be for every individual wrong or write, depending on how one picks and chooses.

11.     Others may even regard my question as a non-sequitur.

12.     Being a subjective matter, it will always depend on which direction your flight of fancy took you, north or south, left or right.  Right?

13.     It will largely depend on two fundamental factors.

14.     You are either steeped very deeply in religion, viewing every word from the scripture as being an extension of your God.

15.     The other swing in the hinge of course would be your view of religion as a mere school of thought (among many other schools) for the God concept.

16.     Karl Marx for example and very much in Blogger’s understanding thoroughly appreciated the necessity of religion.  He was never going to be a loner among great thinkers on the God question.  In fact, a kindred spirit would in the same Marxist century or the next go on record as suggesting that if God did not exist, humans would have invented Him or Her anyway.

17.     Karl Marx is the most criminally misconstrued thinker, methinks, the world has ever known. Half-baked communists and pseudo-communists are in that regard the worst culprits.  And I read at some stage of his life Mr. Jacob Zuma regarded himself as a Marxist or at least a member of the venerable South African Communist Party.

18.     The take of the shallow-minded on that philosopher is a very simple one.  [Karl Marx reduced religion to the opium of the people].

19.     Yet the hard fact is Karl Marx could not have been anti-religion just as he could not have been anti-breathing.

20.     Of all people, how could Marx be anti-religion when Atheism, the very spiritual dogma Marxism-Leninism is based on, bears all the hallmarks of a religion?

21.     I also think the worst misstep in the entire phalanx that preceded soviet suicide in the USSR was the reduction of Atheism to the level of an ideology.

22.     I mean…

23.     ..If Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Karl Marx and other thinkers before them waxed large on religion..

24.     ..If their views about God were as dim as the ink their quilts tipped..

25.     ..And if all the if’s in their thing whipped the stream of religiosity lean or even extinct,

26.     ..it was still a strategic mistake and an act in self-contradiction for any soviet state ostensibly based on scientific materialism to turn and deify the personal viewpoints of a few men of letters where the coroner’s post mortem on those deceased scholars is to my knowledge silent on their smoking habits.

27.     Attitudes towards religion and God are personal and subjective, and are at best left there, as Nebuchadnezzar and Gorbachov will forever stand for human history as the greatest and hardest learners of that lesson.

28.     Being subjective, neither outlook can be condemned by secular society. Neither by the ideology of South Africa’s ruling party, the ANC.  Neither by the head of a secular state like South Africa’s Jacob Zuma.

29.     As to where Mr Zuma is concerned and just as long as he is still president at our national service, there will be lots of private activities on his part that for sure we will frown upon and we already have.

30.     Nonetheless, no citizen has a right (even where he can supernaturally fathom such) to interfere with Mr Zuma’s private thoughts about God or non-God because his thoughts and his beliefs are also his constitutional rights.

31.     He is not President before he is a citizen as the steps to presidency are in order of importance: citizenship, civil-servanthood and only then Presidency.

32.     The point here is “once-a-president” does not translate to “loss of individual’s rights as a citizen”. Equally, the acquisition of presidency by a citizen does not add any more clout to the individual’s constitutional status over and above the status and dignity of other citizens and civil servants like Goodman Manyanya Phiri.

33.     We return now to the privacy of Mr Zuma’s thoughts.  On that platform, he can accept God in any genuine way.

34.     It is his right.

35.     He can also elect to treat the subject of God as another vehicle for more political power.

36.     That, too, is his right; and we can’t interfere with that; it is simply impossible to.

37.     We as citizens can form our own opinions, though, if Zuma’s actions mock godliness.

38.     However, and this is underlined, we have neither religious nor constitutional right to call him a mocker of spirituality.

39.     We have no right to judge him based on his actions where such actions exploded leaving intact protocol.  We can’t cry foul while the smithereens succeed only to breeze over law of society.

40.     That said, President Zuma’s right for his own religious freedom ceases where his lips begin.

41.     We hate him proselytizing his personal attitudes towards religion.

42.     He shall not promote his personal religion or lack of religion at the expense of the presidential post he holds.

43.     He shall not patronize us.

44.     We do not want to hear any religious mockery popping out from his lips with a tongue wagging from any of the platforms that we as a Republic created for incumbent him to use as our most senior civil servant president on the million or so other civil servants.

45.     Mark you, my reader: Mr Zuma is president on the other civil servants; but he is not president on us citizens.  He is just a damn servant and, worse than a child, he had best be seen but not heard where matters personal and sacrosanct to us his citizens and masters are concerned!

46.     Questions of religious preferences do and must remain as private to the civil servant as is his or her private parts.  We know they possess them in all the various degrees of potency and virility but we abhor the subject coming from them like:

47.     “I the State President have got balls, Man!”.

48.     Such statements are not what we are paying a State President.  Period.

49.     We are thinking citizens, Mr Zuma ought to know. And all we know is the fact that in every man or woman’s act of pegging and electing personal religious preferences, a level of mental depth is revealed to observers.

50.     Indeed, as a world citizen reading through these paragraphs, you have already made up your mind what calibre, if any, Writer Phiri is.

51.     However, I view myself as someone with sufficient calibre to sufficiently respond to the allure of subjects like religion, sex, mortality, politics and the many other interesting disciplines that screw tight the head of a South African determined to enjoy his rights and freedoms while performing his duties to fellow-South Africans.

52.     My calibre also forces me to belabour what I have read and learnt from the books and from the lives of people I have observed in my past 51 years of life.

53.     My reading on religion in general, all but throws the practice right into the centre of what makes us human.

54.     I have already alluded to my viewpoint that even communists, the sect that history books tell us many of the ANC leaders are members of, do have a religion, the aforementioned Atheism.

55.     Atheism is neither "godlessness" nor [an idea adhered to by evil people].  Atheism is not an “anti-God” practice by irreligious people.  Atheism is not a refuge for criminals, rapists, thieves and immoral characters.

56.     On the contrary, Atheism is in fact a religion, and a beautiful religion for that matter!

57.     Atheism cannot be confused with louts who want to go about raping maidens of Africa or plundering her wealth for personal gain.

58.     Actually, some Atheists will be far better human beings than the most devout among Christians, Moslems or followers of any other religion you can ever find.

59.     Atheism being no anti-Godism, has its adherents simply believing (and accordingly acting in such belief) that God does not exist as conventionally perceived.  For Atheists, the species homo sapiens is God. As such, you will never find a true Atheist stealing money of Government of the People.

60.     An Atheist will never go about having unprotected sex with every woman he lays his eyes on even those women whose lives he can endanger with HIV cross-infection.

61.     An Atheist will never be a tribalist or follow wishes of a tribalist or racist because Atheists believe every human being on the face of the earth is the most Supreme Being in the entire Universe.

62.     Atheism of course, is the religion of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Moses Mabhida, Nikita Khrushchev and many other red communists.

63.     Of course, then, you do get the yellow communists who are understandably one of the most confused bunches you can ever get, particularly if your haul is South African.

THE YELLOW COMMUNISTS

64.     The trouble today is with modern South African self-styled communists.  Their actions, their lifestyles, their utterances and indeed their professed convictions all make you doubt if they are red.

65.     I have heard for the first time around 2009 the term “Yellow Communists” used in reference to some local communists and I think it is a brilliant way to refer to these chaps.

66.     As I write here, I must confess ignorance of the religious persuasion for South Africa’s yellow communists.  I am convinced though, that calling them “Atheists” would bring down the respect Atheism commands in the entire modern world.

67.     Our South African Yellows are nothing but another secret society involved in some club ready to sell its services to the highest bidder.

68.     You want to divide South Africa’s cohesiveness of resolve towards lightening the burden of this country’s poor, go to the Yellow Communists if you have the money to pay them for their lip service.

69.     You want to delay the day of true economic freedom for South Africans, go to the Yellows for support if you can pay them.

70.     For all intent and purposes, our self-styled communists have become a tentacle of South Africa’s nieu-colonialism.

71.     One moment our local yellow communists say “we must share in the country's wealth".  When you only begin to consider them favourably, you at best find them leading the lives of fat cats whose main task in life is the eschewal for lepers all the poor of South Africa. 

72.     At worst, you will find Our Communists opposing pro-poor calls for the nationalization of this country’s vast resources of arable land and mineral wealth!

73.     Please, Yellow Communists, find other means for your livelihoods! Jaundice no more my otherwise great respect for Red communism and its Atheism! The day the 100-year old ANC gets serious about cleansing and purging itself of reactionaries, the first hour thereof will be dedicated to yanking out the yellows and their obsession with material things at the expense of the poor, the Yellows’ yo-man-yo-please-just-let-me-eat attitude!

RELIGION AND ALL LIFE’S HISTORY IN GONDWANA

74.     Less controversially though, all religion (like humanity itself) started in Africa some 50-or-so thousand years ago.   

75.     In fact, the entirety of life on earth started in Africa, or more scientifically, in the supercontinent scientists call Gondwana, loosely the prehistoric fusion of Africa and South America.

76.     For a mixture of awe, amusement and well-placed pride to be African and hence a child of the Garden of Eden (and you can be African even if you are Asian or European since you came from Africa too),  do yourself a favour sometimes.  Visit Sikhumbuto, the museum to the right of the road as you hit Pretoria Central Business District via the main road from Johannesburg to the south.

77.     At Sikhumbuto (pronounced ‘seek-ugh-boo-toe’ and my mother tongue Siswati for “The Reminder”), you will gaze upon a specimen of one of the two rocks found on earth with the oldest unicellular fossils ever found.

78.     Personally I take pride in the fact that the said rock was found in Mpumalanga Province's Barberton-Emjindini and just where my maternal grandmother Princess Mafede Eleanor Dlamini waSigeyeza WaKhenkhnana waSomhlolo used to play as a young girl.

Even as womanhood called

Her breasts protruding like rocks

on the chest of mother earth

the mimicry can only have been

to the two-billion-year old fossils

that abound around Emjindini.

Singing her own praises

as only befit a princess

like Mafede Fede Qhikiza leMalangeni

Grandmother traipsed over pebbles of river

She roved over rocks

that gave birth to her,

to her flowers,

to her bees,

to her trees

to her seed,

to me!

Seed indeed it was as I,

since I was in 1936 to start my life

in that Swazi Royal Uterus.

Sweet Gamete I

In 1960 only first time ever a Zygote

And I hope the seed that

I am also planting digitally

One day will bear fruit

even if I shall have succumbed

From my own impatience with fools.

79.     So be it if it is my destiny to die for my ideas which I believe are scientific ideas. 

80.     But really, people must please not be so idiotic as to start arguing a simple and well-established fact that religion started in Africa.

81.     That surely cannot be an argument coming especially from one born in the epicentre of that hoary tectonic explosion the stabilization of which engendered all life for South Africa and thereafter the world over.

82.     Ending your school life in a low grade should be no excuse for pontificating nonsense.  And if you want a good example why people must read and not blame British colonialism or Apartheid for preoccupying themselves with things other than books, there is a well-respected South African communist I was privileged enough to meet in exile in 1986.

83.     That one is Red Communist Comrade Moses Mncane Mabhida.

84.     Mabhida, we read, had never been to formal school.  Yet, he not only respected other people’s religions, practices and custorms to the extent that my maternal third cousin King Sobhuza III liked him, but Mabhida also voraciously opened books (and not panties of every woman just because he was supposed to an Atheist).

85.     Mabhida wanted to expand his organ called The Brain; and not the organ in the netherland that our present-day Atheist suggests should be expanded.

86.     The Zulu Mabhida wanted to enrich and gloss the tapestry of South African politics, the colourfulness of which is the very soul of Southafricanness which some clever one man called a ‘rainbow nation’ when in practice under and  by Zuma and predecessor (with the collaboration of the ‘rainbow-maker’) has been turned into a ‘Xhosa-Nation-per-Ideas-of-Mandela-1940s’

87.     The success that Atheist Mabhida achieved in expanding his own mind rather than his penis was so great that every genuine member of the ANC in the know will tell you that the leader of the then exiled ANC, Mr. Oliver Tambo, would never take a national decision without seeking counsel of at least Comrade Moses Mncane Mabhida.  Mabhida was often referred to as the power behind the throne for the then exiled ANC!

88.     Finally, when some superstitious people heard Mabhida was fighting for his life and very much next to death’s door, they rushed next to his bedside so that the true communist may die in their arms for the hope that his stellar qualities may rub into them who otherwise rub into womanizing only!

89.     Ridiculous!

JACOB ZUMA’S APOLOGISTS

90.     Having outlined life, humanity and her religion, I am abhorred, therefore, by the fact that even those who may try to rationalize Mr Jacob Zuma’s most outrageous statement regarding Christianity and religion as [a foreign and pernicious societal development], take Zuma’s oral aberrations to even lower levels where they are supposed to salvage a modicum of respect for his erratic tongue.

91.     They fail to highlight that basis about Africa's relationship with religion, that very entity that makes every other human on earth "human enough".