GOODMAN MANYANYA PHIRI THE DEVIL'S ADVOCATE FOR JULIUS MALEMA

The ANC National Executive Member and Youth League President Mr Julius Sello Malema has come to know his fate.  Five years in the political limbo is what awaits him.  The fate, I declare was in any case one foregone conclusion from the very day he was charged.  Now I really hate discussing hasbeens like Julius Malema.  Mine today is to talk about a hyena or a wolf!

Even before I do that, though, it is meet that I explain myself as to how I became the devil’s advocate for someone I have never met and someone who will probably never know me.  It will be simpler for you to understand if you have ever been in trouble with the law in South Africa; but even if you have not, you should be able to follow this.

THE CONCEPT OF THE ABSENTEE DEVIL’S ADVOCATE

What happens for you to fall foul of the law is a simple matter.  Your neighbour may for example say to the police you ate the mouth of his chicken or any other stupid thing as indeed half of cases that go to court are stupid issues.  So you see yourself possibly facing five years in jail, which is more or less the same period Julius Malema will be in political limbo.

You refuse to accept your imminent fate and so go see an attorney.  That attorney will probably confirm to you that five years is really what awaits you for your chicken murder biznis and “the best option is to go and see Counsel”.  Counsel usually turns out to be someone with a name preceded by “Advocate”.

Advocate So-and-so finally has a tripartite meeting with you and your attorney. This is where the devil may or MAY NOT stealthily come into the deliberations.  Now, if the devil is there, you must thank God for it.  But if the devil does not join your meeting, believe you me: YOU ARE DEFINITELY GOING TO JAIL UNLESS YOU END UP STANDING IN FRONT OF ONE OF THOSE JUDGES, and there are very many of them, who know that theirs is actually the most stupid job in the world, miles behind, for example, plumbing, taking errands or even prostituting.

This is not a post for the virtues and vices of any justice system whether in South Africa or anywhere else abroad, this goes with the territory anyway.  All I intend is to give you here the tell-tale signs if the Devil’s Advocate has been with you or not before you face the judge.  One of the quickest way for you to know the fact of the Devil’s Advocate’s absence is when you finally go to court having paid for but never met your Earthly Advocate!

The crucial thing to know here is: you can do without your Earthly Advocate prior to going to court; but you can never do without the Devil’s advocate.

Sometimes, of course, you do confer with your Earthly Advocate (you will know it’s him or her when your attorney blurts the standard greeting: “Hello, Counsel, Sorry we’re late”).  Then there will be coffee, cookies and every imaginable for the tongue.

Before long, Counsel will listen to you.  Counsel will smile as you make your points of instruction.  Counsel will wrap up with a talk, largely filled with legal terms AND YOU ARE ON YOUR WAY OUT TO SERVE YOUR EXORBITANT FIVE-YEAR SENTENCE because the Devil’s Advocate was still never invited into that meeting as the Fourth Party!

*Back to the subject of hyenas or wolves.  I know enough about hyenas, as some African peoples ambiguously translate “Phiri” to “Hyena” or “Wolf”.  That is why I nearly titled this post around an anthropomorphized hyena/wolf who dangerously played barber over Julius Malema (and the title would have been "The Wreck Hyena Comb").  But maybe we should touch, albeit briefly, on the subject of the boy in the picture of this post.  Are Writer and Reader agreed lad sufficiently depicts Juju?

Methinks it is clear, particularly from the sentence he has just received from his own party’s Disciplinary, that Juju is the boy depicted here!

CHOICE ANSWER "A": “Is The Dead Boy Juju Or Not”

CHOICE ANSWER "B": “Can the dead boy be identified as Juju or not?”

The proverbial "ANY OF THE ABOVE" should perhaps have been a more befitting title to this post, to make even the duller and unschooled among us graduate through a test of understanding slightly more than the Woodwork Julius Malema passed for his ..ahem...Matric some ten years ago.  Can a nation as dynamic as South Africa really..really... and really sink so low as to be led by such undereducated people as Julius?  Maybe it is good riddance that the ANC has essentially shown him the door.

Or maybe not?

Anyway, come let us deliberate and I am for a change keen to play the Devil’s Advocate here and never the role of the smug self-assured advocate who looks at a client like Malema as a mere judicial statistic.  I want to be tough and say, if the dead boy  indeed be Juju, hear me now, Juju is dead from those disciplinary findings of today stemming from the charges he has been facing for the past couple of months.

I mean, no serious organization like the ANC was successfully going to mount this all manner of fire-fighting stratagems pre-Mangaung and turn out to greet a much-laboured-upon sunset with a “Bravo, we’ve caught a Komodo dragon that strayed into African shores via the Limpopo Province of South Africa".  Never!




Verily, after such a marathon disciplinary trial, the ANC was not going to breathe a sigh of  pleasant relief and say: "We mistook for Juju this mere endangered giant panda cub that we need to protect with the zeal the Chinese protect their own  giant panda wheretofor we are now proceeding to put the baby to bed with a kiss and a Long Live the Dream towards Nationalization And Appropriations Along the Robert Mugabe Pattern In Zimbabwe”.

The point is, Mr Julius Malema is far smaller than the ANC.  Worse, he has been successfully “smallelized” by what amounts to a string of hate-speech judgments against him.  So, after a painstaking and perhaps overzealous quest for a culprit to its current troubles started with the ouster of Mr Thabo Mbeki, the ANC would never on this 10^th of the 11^th 2011 mistake the sufficiently trapped poltergeist Juju for an endangered cub!  Never in a centenary of giant mistakes made by the organization!  Therefore, Mr Julius Malema, that boy in the picture is as much a goner as the verdict read to him today in absentia!

Personally, I have seen young likeable patriotic chappies like Juju die in the struggle and I have given eulogies at their funerals.  When Mr Julius Malema finally falls, after whatever appeal rituals he goes through, I am going to panel-beat an elegy given by myself at the Assemblies of God Church 8 years ago in Vosloorus, South Africa: the funeral of a quasi-Malema character and compatriot of mine, one Andile Socrates Hloma 45.  In its entirety so that everybody can see how I prepare to bid Mr Julius Malema good-bye on his imminent definitive political death.

Bereaved members immediate to the Hloma family, Bereaved members of the same, if extended Family,   Friends and acquaintances of the Deceased, Colonel Andile Hloma,   Friends, Acquaintances and neighbours of the Hloma family at large; Function  Coordinator Mr Drummond (not his real name) fellow workers and Comrades of the Deceased. 

Since the sad news struck us weeks ago we all of us had something to say about Mr Hloma, good or bad:  In the busses it was “Hloma this Hloma that”; in our offices particularly when we were bored with computer games, it was “Hloma here Hloma there”.

The one thing we forgot was to remind ourselves who the patriotic are because, love him or hate him, Hloma was a patriot worth a mouthful.  

He struck me as a man of high ethical standards, espousing and calling for sensible and democratic usage of patriotic power.  Discipline, justice and transparency as befit patriots, are what he firmly and loudly stood for, Are what he was feared and hated for, Are what he was celebrated and loved for. When he died we all of us developed a fixation with the life of Hloma and, what a marvel of a life it was, and we totally forgot who we the patriotic are.    

When Mr Drummond said to me Mr Phiri it is too late to offer yourself to speak at the Memorial Service there will be no memorial service and you will speak at the funeral, I prepared myself never to make the mistake of forgetting who I, as a member of the patriotic, am.  For it is virtually impossible to appraise, define or even evaluate Mr Hloma’s life unless you have the courage to revisit the tenets, the qualifications and indeed the requirements of being a good patriot.  A good patriot resides in the heart first and foremost and because of our evil hearts (I am including myself in this), most of us assembled here as patriots are terribly bad patriots; and Mr Hloma lying motionless here was a damn good patriot; in fact too good for most of us to say something freely without reading it out like I am doing.  Andile Hloma was very noble; Enesidima (Xhosa Language for “he was noble”). Hy was ‘n geslypte diamant (Afrikaans Language for “he was piece of polished diamond”).

Now he is gone.  He left us behind.  Oh we are afraid to speak up for him because his enemies will associate us with him when we say a good word on his behalf and they will victimize us!       

Fellow Patriot, Sir, I, Goodman Manyanya Phiri, refuse to believe that the separation of body from soul for Andile Hloma spells the cessation of your humanity.  I, Goodman Manyanya Phiri do not believe your death leaves the field shut down and devoid of your combative spirit.  I do not subscribe to the fatalist theory that espouses that your death, Andile, is the cut-off time for your usefulness to these African masses gathered here today and, indeed, to the nation at large who loved you so.  Till my last word here today, Sir and Son of the Nxasana multitudes, I will therefore continue to address you as though you are still alive, carrying in your veins oxygenated blood and pulsating from your brain those alpha waves that gave you a gigantic mind, never failing to strike terror in people who are too lazy to think; people who always want to be honoured; folks who want to be called Mpendwa Bwana Mpendwa Bibi (Swahili Language for “Dear Sir Dear Madam”)  Geagte Heer Geagte Dame (Afrikaans Language for “Dear Sir Dear Madam”).  They demand respect but they refuse to earn it and so they can’t command it.  I will talk to you as though when we shall have gone and come back from the graveside, come back home here, to feast in celebration of your beautiful life, you will be supping and wining with us.  At that particular moment, there will be no after-tears (a South African township tradition of downing a few alcoholic beverages after the burial) because there will be no tears:  you will wipe them from our infantile cheeks almost as soon as they well around our eyes, for indeed, having graduated and joined the otherworldly ranks of ANC-Founder-and-African-Renaissance-Ideologue Pixley ka Isaka ka Snono ka Mbuyazi ka Njonjo ka Khuwana ka Mqubeya ka Dladla ka Sokoti ka Seme, Anton Muziwakhe Lembede, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, Govan Mbeki, 1906-Guerilla-figher-par-excellence Bhambatha ka Mancinza, King Sekhukhune, Ongopotse Tiro, Beyers Naudé[1] (to name but a few), you are indeed like the all-knowing father to us now.  Send our regards as, desperate to place the meaning of your untimely death at the tender age of 45, we repeat age-old imponderables and vexing questions in front of you and in front of all our departed souls and brave-hearted residents of the heavenly city of Valhalla: WHY ANDILE HLOMA? 

Fellow Mourners, Mr Hloma was definitely not a complex character.  However, the largeness of his life certainly lends itself to complexities in standard character analyses and definitions.  In fact, try as I might to keep silent, I find too much of a similarity between the life of Jesus the historical figure and that of the late Mr Andile Hloma who, befittingly, is sitting with Jesus, the God, as we speak

When the Lord Jesus was famished after 40 days and 40 nights’ fasting, the devil reminded Jesus of his Godly powers to turn pieces of rock into bread and to feed himself.  Jesus refused because although he had both the power and the hunger, he nonetheless had had a purpose loftier than the need to ensure bodily survival!  “IDIOT” is the only response one will ordinarily give to a person who has the power to feed himself yet continues to starve (in fact I still vividly remember around 1987 when a Tanzanian friend of mine marveled in Dar es Salaam at a news item to the effect that anti-apartheid comrades in prison here in South Africa...they call South Africa “Soweto”...were conducting a hunger strike to have their demands met.  The Tanzanian asked, Atakufa nani? (Swahili Language for, in this context, “who is going to die from this kind of action?”

“If the conditions are so bad in Soweto,” he went on.  “That freedom fighters have resorted to killing themselves instead of killing the Boer soldiers, why don’t Mr. Johnson Mlambo of the PAC and Mr. Oliver Tambo of the ANC ask President Julius Nyerere send the Tanzanian Defence Force down south to liberate our brothers in Soweto?”[2]

Mr Hloma was, if you like, ‘The Hunger Striker of our fraternity as South African patriots”:  Apparently, His Excellency, President Thabo Mbeki and Mr Hloma could converse on a first-name basis, often telephonically, asking after each other’s health.  When this patriot told me about their most recent telephonic tête-à-tête, I thought to my self: Gee whiz, Manyanya: here I was, a patriotic lieutenant colonel of South, struggling to get my Commander in Chief the President (Mbeki), just to receive my grievance letter after all other  channels had been exhausted; Yet my friend, here, Mr Hloma, chats with the President like with his own brother!  If I was in Mr Hloma’s position, I mulled, I would, in one of those conversations, take a short cut to life and say “Mamela Bro Thabo, kha undicingele tyin, Mfondini, Thibos! Nami ndinguMxhosa ka lokhu?”.  Not that Bro Thabo would take me seriously but you bet if I was in the Hloma’s position, I would have tried my luck.  It probably would advance my career and quicken the healing of my pancreatic condition; it definitely would do no harm to me, I would have surmised.      

Yet, to the Hunger Striker of post-apartheid patriotic fraternity, all of that was unimportant to him: he stayed a lowly man in the fraternity in spite of greener pastures for one, and according to him, one reason only: to give hell to those he considered his enemies and enemies of South African true reconciliation, those who had defamed him through the media.  Hhayi-ke, Bakithi, njengesisho sabadala, nalo-ke isotsha selifele emsebenzini walo.  He indeed died while still fulfilling his idea of justice.          

No one in his/her sober senses can now stand up here and challenge the fact that Mr Hloma displeased (and was reciprocally hated by) several leaders because such challenges and denials would force us to name names, something which is not our intention in this sombre state: we are mourning, remember.  But, again, as we look and gaze with disbelief and amazement at Andile Hloma, this grown-up, in fact, 45-year old man of massive courage laced with incisive intellect and oceanic knowledge who, it would seem “made the fatal mistake of imagining himself more knowledgeable than his superiors the leaders and a man who had too much of the tendency to tell his superiors what to do during the on-going transformation process of South African society”, WHAT DO WE ACTUALLY SEE?        

We see the 12-year old Historical Boy Jesus, marveled at by his contemporaries: “Where does this little boy Jesus, at 12, get so much knowledge from to hold his own in the presence of seasoned priests and scribes?”         

Another similarity, if you will bear with me:  In Historical Jesus’ quest for a donkey near the Mount of Olives, a quest for the fulfillment of both the prophecies of the likes of Isaiah and a fulfillment of the messianic typology, can you imagine what would have happened to Historical Jesus if he, together with his powerful enemies, lived in South Africa today?        

He would wake up to read Die Beeld or The City Press Newspaper, for examples, announcing very boldly on its banner:

DONKEY HIJACK

JESUS, THE SELF-STYLED SON OF GOD

AND HIS GANGSTERS

HIJACK A DONKEY ON THE MOUNT OF OLIVES

This, Fellow Mourners, is exactly what happened to Mr Hloma on several occasions, one of which involved a newspaper report where he was supposed to have apparently alighted from his luxury German-made car and walked into a famous hospital in Pretoria, for one and only one purpose: STEAL A CELLPHONE!          

He was later to tell me a story of a Good Samaritan deliberately misunderstood by the powerful of the South African Army.  When he was finally acquitted, no newspaper bothered to print!         

Someone in this country is abusing the media houses to trash the good names of South Africans who serve as role models.  Someone is abusing the illiteracy of the nation in at least the matter of differentiation between the concepts of “allegation” and “factual juridical crime”.      

I am today issuing a personal warning: South Africans will not take the orchestrated character-assassination campaign lying down.  And since this character assassination conducted by a gullible media did not end with Phiri or Hloma and apparently driving my friend Hloma to complications in his medical condition, but is now even giving our Deputy President Jacob Zuma sleepless nights, THE BATTLE LINES ARE CLEARLY DRAWN!      

May I just say the story of the life of Mr Andile Gerald Hloma has a happy ending as The Daily Sun Newspaper, redeeming the good name of journalism and the press in South Africa, a vital entity in the viability of our democracy, writes a story on its Friday 14 November [2003] edition:

                                          SOUTH AFRICA’S 1^st black pilot dies

[a south african patriot among patriots]

he also worked  as an engineer

until [the day of]

his death

      Lala Ngoxolo, Nxasana, Nyana We Sizwe!  I Salute You.

COME TO THE POINT, MR DEVIL’S ADVOCATE, COME TO THE POINT!

Our focus, Mr Julius Malema is but one end of a long stick here.  But have you noticed how my story above broaches even the subject of the court troubles President Zuma had to be artificially subjected to 8 short years ago when he was still a relative no-man?

Can you notice the string of charges and Disciplinaries that in that brevity of time are raining on those of us who supported Mr Zuma now that he occupies the highest and most unreachable office in South Africa despite a Centurion-based hotline he created between the Union Building and the populace very soon after his ascension?  These questions led the Devil’s Advocate Phiri to yet another question: WHAT ON EARTH HAS CHANGED ABOUT MR JACOB ZUMA?  And here is the conclusion in the form of a billet-doux with the content of a subpoena all from the Devil's Advocate to the entirety of South Africa RE Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma.

MR ZUMA STILL GOOD AT LEVEL PERSONAL AND POLITICAL (PROBABLY)

DEAR SOUTH AFRICA

I am writing this day to tell you a simple but longish story that: President Zuma is STILL a good man.

You may want to argue with me on that one, but before you do, let me ask you an easy question with an often difficult, if not elusive answer.  Have you noticed how me and you, South Africa, relate o so well on a personal level when we meet as strangers at the bank, at the restaurant or any other place where sobriety reigns?

What erodes this sobriety once when we become state employees?  It is a monster, of course, bearing the name of IGNORANCE.

It is ignorance that makes us think that membership to a political organization is more important than our citizenship to South Africa.

It is ignorance that tells us that skin colour is more important that common humanity.

It is ignorance that tells us that we have no power, and that power resides with politicians as currently led by President Zuma.

Since we are ignorant, we are also afraid, with our greatest phobias revolving around virtues like the truth, ubuntu and love for one another as human beings sharing the space between the Limpopo River to the north and the junction of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans to the south.

In this milieu of phobias for self-made and very artificial arachnids, comes a good man from the hills of Nkandla in KwaZulu-Natal, named Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma.  He preaches reconciliation.

He preaches understanding.

He preaches patience.

He preaches the value of African culture (that is if we are not too daft to understand what it is to be an African).

What do I and you South Africa have in response to Mr Zuma's pontification?

We are telling Mr Zuma that his recipe for South Africa is wrong.  We, particularly those of us closest to him as his most trusted of cabinet ministers, are telling him that his idea is wrong.  He cannot play soft with “a junkie nation obsessed with nail-biting”.

So, President Zuma, who previously suffered under an abuse of state power by his predecessor Mbeki has now turned the arch-abuser of state-power against innocent citizens because YOU SOUTH AFRICA AND I TELL HIM AGAINST HIS OWN WILL “THAT IS HOW TO RULE US”.

President Zuma, who heavily relied on the strategic viral power to garner his own political power is now working frantically, to ignore lessons of the Arab Spring, particularly the gory capital puncturing of Colonel Gaddafi’s head via the power of information technology, BECAUSE YOU SOUTH AFRICA AND I TELL HIM AGAINST HIS OWN WILL “THAT IS HOW TO RULE US”.

The worst excesses of power in South Africa since 1994 are now busy happening under the good man Zuma:

Computers are pounced upon by police officers bearing no judge’s permission under the good man President Zuma BECAUSE YOU SOUTH AFRICA AND I TELL HIM AGAINST HIS OWN WILL “THAT IS HOW TO RULE US”.

Corruption, tribalism, racism and the persecution of whistle-blowers is the order of the day under the good man President Zuma BECAUSE YOU SOUTH AFRICA AND I TELL HIM AGAINST HIS OWN WILL “THAT IS HOW TO RULE US”.

Efforts are in full swing to enact laws to outlaw whistle-blowing BECAUSE YOU SOUTH AFRICA AND I TELL HIM AGAINST HIS OWN WILL “THAT IS HOW TO RULE US”.

I know Mr Zuma personally (although he may have forgotten me as one of thousands of cadres he HAD to meet and often shake hands with), but he IS A VERY GOOD MAN, and you, South Africa will be the first to agree with me that Mr Zuma responds extremely well to his populace.  Recent, ground-breaking announcements around his cabinet and issues of grand corruption bear testimony to this.

Yet, we have decided to consign our president to the same course of fate that President Gaddafi suffered a few weeks ago, now that his party machine has successfully destroyed Mr Julius Malema’s political career in the ANC.  I dare repeat that it is not Mr Zuma’s fault; rather it is our own.  With so many signals we licensed Mr Zuma and his leadership to live forever in cloud cuckoo-land without dire consequences for him and for the nation he leads.  We enticed him towards stopping the tide of information technology ruled these days from the skies via satellite link.  We the masochist nation said to him Mr Zuma that he can and should stop via state power aspirations of a people as determined as South Africans to be part of the global community that enjoys true freedom without state interference even where there is state transparency.

Whatever criticism I have therefore on these pages for President Zuma, please take it as directed to you, South Africa me included.  If you are his true friend, please repent from the damage you have done on this otherwise good man’s thinking since he took office a few years ago.  Because of that damage, he is going down very fast.  He is down already as of today, unless you repent and show him the way to true leadership, rather than the road to self-destruction we are reading about every day.  Your failure to release off the trap holding him as of this afternoon, will be the seal to his twin missive of sure persona non grata to Mangaung on one hand, and  a roving passport to the company of dictators sneezed off by the Arabian Spring so recently.

I do not believe Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma, if we be a true constitutional democracy, deserves that fate, although we have so far successfully put him on course for that predestination now.

If on my voluminous blog just to waffle and meander, I penned yet another long post only to state the obvious demise of Mr Julius Malema (or even to blow the trumpet on the warmth of the man Jacob Zuma apparently appreciated even by supposedly unwarm mercenaries capable of safely transporting him to and fro between the RSA and the USA, I would be insulting the geniuses who created both the computer and the Web.  I would also be saying Sir Isaac Pitman and brother are mere decorations of ancient graveyards where QWERTY inventions are mere drooling boards for the helplessly insane.  Rather, I would choose to exercise my mind and fingers here for one and only one purpose: fathoming the three dimensions of the grave dug for the boy just shot dead on our political picture above.

So, I am asking, is the internment cavern not perchance too big for a mere boy?  It is not big enough to swallow even the gigantic grave digger himself?

Serious question, huh?  Am I so glad you find it so! Maybe for the first time in my literary life I am going to have serious audience tonight! Audience jutting back to my infantile years filled with Gogo’s fables.

THE JUICY SCALP OF JULIUS MALEMA AND THE WRECK-HYENA COMB

“Gogo, Gogo, tell us inganekwane.”

That is how us children growing up among the Nguni/Ngoni, an offshoot of the Sub-continental ancientTonga/Zion/Moroka Nation, will coax our grannies for fables.

O yes, Bantwana, here is one!

Once upon a time there was a hyena/wolf that decided to befriend man and abandon his wild and carnivorous ways.  He was a member of a group of hyenas/wolves that sought peace with fellow-subjects in the animal kingdom as preached by both Rastafari and George Orwell.  But then one day old age caught up with the hyena/wolf, he was a wreck, hardly able to work for his plateful of food.  And the same old cannibalistic hyena/wolf, devouring his own conscience for a starter, came back in his age-old original character.  Although accepted as a well-established barber in the Orwellian animal farm he had come to inhabit, The wreck hyena/wolf now never hesitated to hide a blade along the edges of his barber’s comb; and unbeknown to the Kingdom, many may have succumbed to his lupine tricks UNTIL A MAN CALLED MR JULIUS MALEMA came for his shave with The Wreck Hyena Comb!!!!

HOW THE DEVIL’S ADVOCATE MET MR HYENA COMB

South Africa’s mountain-hemmed Amsterdam in 1975

The Devil’s Advocate has found refuge and mobile home in this leisurely walk.  Here is succour in the pungent aroma of the air.  And there is for the sensual retina source for inimitable aesthetic diversion in the struggle of every quantum of light to energize Earth rather than to elevate the transient human profligacy.  In every shine, the human eye sees a jet of matter that does not matter.  It sees a light’s ray only honoured per retinal stroke rather per roll or even larger role for Mother Earth.  Selfish bastard!  The pain for the light-energy generating  Sun and father to all our sons like Julius Malema, is a mere pleasure to the Earthly living globe with all else reduced to a mere voyeuristic feast on an escapade with the ophthalmic globe.  This most immoral of all immoral damsels, shamelessly eloping with a glistening stride off the leaf pregnant with the Vitamin C of Amsterdam citrus in that 1975.  Indeed, The Devil’s Advocate and Mr Hyena Comb made a beautiful maiden pair on that day so long ago!

I will never know how Mr Hyena Comb happened to find himself at the same spot as I was at that particular time, but I came to happeninstance on this maiden acquaintanceship with him because of my innate emotional cowardice, some psychologist called it my indefatigable fountain of true conscience .  In essence, I had just escaped from an amicable but dissolute juvenile mind of a Boer boy not only my age, but rather one overly keen to see me losing my virginity at 14!

I am explaining these circumstances on the later pages of this post.  Suffice for now to say there was for me enough reason here to see me take this  stroll from Ekulindeni environs (where Ithole Primary School and the rest of the “black” community lived) till the centre of town Amsterdam.  The town centre is halved by the Road Swaziland-Sheepmoor.

I had turned and walked Swazilandwards for several minutes and would have hit the bridge boasting some of the most divine sites in rapid waters frothing and churning milky white on scores of pitch-black rocks.  This was for me veritable Unwind Spot Ithole River back then in 1975.  Those were days when snowfall was about a yearly event in South Africa’s Mpumalanga and other Transvaal provinces like the Limpopo that has since globally warmed only to deny “Black” Child Julius Malema even a snowball’s chance in hell of ever creating a lily-white snowman.

Buoyed by Ithole River’s aesthetic opportunities, whenever the opportunity availed itself, I would for several minutes stop and watch this mobile body of water called Ithole.  This was the case every time I had the opportunity for a trip past the bridge.  But sometimes, as was the case on this particular day, I went out in aggressive search of the River’s soul-healing powers.

Yet on this day there was going to be no high for me; for when I was only 200 metres to my sanctuary, I saw one of the ugliest scenes anywhere any time for me: the spectacle of two people fighting.  This fight even bore a particular attraction because the lighter-skinned of the two fellows hailed from the Caucasian Mountains (a descendant of the settlers and champions of Apartheid) whereas the bloke who was swarthy (“Mswati” comes from that word and vice-versa if the first humans were pink, rather than brown)   was a child of the Lebombo.

I remember standing transfixed by the battery of fisticuffs to and fro.  Not to be undone, intertwining frowns under reddened eyes clearly registered themselves too.  Having seen native African boys fighting in the past, I was here left to this day with the questions.

Do all Caucasian hair stand on end during a fight?

Or what I saw was just a specimen of “white” poverty farfetched for any shampoo?

I will probably never know until I do some googling about so-called white people. Nor did I know the so-called white boy whose bicycle, still fully inflated despite rough entanglements during the fierce fight, still lay flat on the pavement as its rider was trying to deflate the audacity of the Kaffir his age.

I recognized the head above the jabbing fists of the Bantu so-called Kaffir side of this battle with Boer rule.  It struck me as one general and bland character bearing a since-forgotten name that went with my name to the same primary school named after the same local river.  However, there was a danger here for him, being bigger and darker, that he could hurt the settler child in that fight.  I thought he was bigger because although they looked equal pound for pound, it was in 1975 taken for granted that if a so-called white child looked your size, then the child was definitely younger because these folks were better-fed than we.

But now, too,  everybody inclusive of children knew very well what would happen to darker-skinned people if you per accident injured one of those domineering foreigners.  In this case, there was the other complexity brought about by my psychological make-up.  I detest fights of any type for all reasons except justice. So I tore between them with heavy palms striking their balled hands.

“Stop!” I shouted at the boy settler.  “Jy sal nie my boetiejie vermoor met jou lelike vuiste terwyl ek net aankyk!”

I thought they would both stop and each go his way; but I was amazed at the Boer boy’s answer as both boys, a year or so my juniors, stood back to size up my intervention: “Ek gaan hom nie vermoor nie; ek gaan hom net ‘n lessie leer”

(I am not going to murder him, I am only going to teach him a lesson, came the answer for me.)

“What has he done?” I asked still in Afrikaans.

And he responded in kind: “Well he poked the spokes of my bicycle with stick as I rode past him”

I turned to my colour cousin and in Zulu/Swazi asked: 

“Ucinisile?”

“True,” I got the answer and then the immediate follow-up question: “But what does that have to do with him slapping me across the face for it?”

“Well, you got your well-deserved slap because he is angry!” I replied in my judgmental mood.

Turning to the settler child I asked: “And what’s your name, Kleinbaas?”

“Kleinbaas Hanekom”, paler boy responded.

“Kleinbaas” was the compulsory epithet or prefix used under Afrikaner apartheid to address a Caucasian child.

So I said to my beleaguered schoolmate: “Kleinbaas Hanekom is angry, my good brother, and you really need to apologize in order to have this fight ended.”

Drive the point home in all manner of ways though I tried,  that Mswati and swarthy boy was the most impervious to reason and reconciliation.

“Angeke ngize ngixolise and I am not going to apologize to this Mlungu!” he said.

“See what I told you, Boet?” Kleinbaas Hanekom asked me as a retort. “Nou gaan ek hom mooi bliksem en lekker pepper”

Sheer resignation took control of my arms and threw them in the air as I ordered Fight On Boys, making in the process a U-turn for town, my original plans for river bliss clasped and discarded among the bordering reeds thanks to psychological pincers of historical South Africa’s 300-year-old fury of Europe versus Africa!

Every so often I would look back to see the audience-free fight still raging on.  There were bobbing heads and flying fists, but I knew then that my unrepentant cousin was going to taste defeat from adult settlers if not from their issues who clearly boasted both morale and geographical superiority over this one as on each side of the street stood all-settler houses and it was only the 500^th car, of which there were not many in Amsterdam, that would have a dark face behind the steering!

In retrospect, I am glad I walked away from that cross-cultural and violent encounter, never siding with the European boy even though he was clearly in the “right” to defend both his bicycle and his own human dignity.

To fast-forward to 2011 though, one thing was clear in my mind though, there would not have been this fight if the European boy was not more propertied than the swarthier boy!  It is this rationale that, 36 years down the line of that Amsterdam Saturday afternoon, I still fail to understand a native party president fighting a native youth president for declaring former settlers “thieves and criminals who must pay back for having stolen property from the native”.

With the verdict against Mr Julius Malema already announced, I am asking myself: Why couldn’t ANC Party President Zuma just walk away from this legitimately historic fight fought by Mr Malema, a fight which ought to happen anyway, and a fight which is bound to happen anyhow now or in the near or distant future?  Why delay the inevitable?  But those are all questions of hindsight.  Back then in 1975 I was just flowing with my conscience and on and on with it I had followed.

I had, just for one more for the road, wanted to have yet another glimpse at the lads when I instantly realized they had both suffered a sudden decapitation.  The notorious Dr Dewald Koekemoer (not the doctor’s real name) to my right had extended his reputation to a very sudden and geographical extent.  There was of course no way I could saunter down the gradient and past his surgery while still savouring the first multiracial fight I had ever seen. 

Looking back, I see Dr Koekemoer is a consummate racist and a sadist in one, if ever there was one.  In the place of anaesthetic application in that top-right quadrant of the buttock, he was supposed to give the sharpest of spankings to his patients.  This is so because the racist doctor was supposed to have a deep-rooted fear for skin with signs of melanin presence and as such, would not stand the Bantu’s bare bum.  He was supposed to also ask his native patients a question the answer to which determined, according to some yardstick that only he knew, if there would be treatment or not:

“You know of course that your Zulu King Dingane and half-brother to Shaka Zulu attacked and killed us whites, don’t you?  You know he was unprovoked, don’t you? Now since you brood of Kafferking Dingaan swarm my surgery for treatment by a white doctor these days, have you care to find out just how many doctors received from His Majesty Zulu King Dingane ka Senzangakhona even a mere stay of execution during that massacre that took the life of Piet Retief prior to the Battle of Blood River, huh?”

The hormones would boil in his body as he inquired of these things because, if you ignored the road leading westwards to Lothair from his surgery, the road to his venerated Piet Retief inexorably stood out like an erect and very male organ from Koekemoer’s own body, ready to pulverize in proxy everyone who dared his surgery.  Why would anyone natively backward even think of coming to his surgery after a hundred-year—old  impudent challenge with arms against the super-race that had come from Europe?

Yet, if Lothair was as much of a factor as the sunset was to the sunrise, not a sun would set for Doctor Koekemoer before he could crucify at least one darker-skinned patient for the deeds of the daredevil Zulu King whose ultimate burial site to this day, much like Gaddafi’s would for a great many seasons to come, still remain a subject of indelible conjecture where there used to be a source of puny belligerence from a misguided member of one of the lesser races of the earth!  It was as if the doctor was sticking a fat finger right into the post-apartheid future and warning Mr Julius Malema: NOBODY WILL EVEN KNOW WHERE YOU ARE BURIED, SONNY, IF YOU SOLDIER ON WITH YOUR DEFIANCE EVEN AFTER DEREK HANEKOM HAS SO CLEARLY ENUNCIATED YOUR FATE!

Indeed, Doctor Koekemoer, a man educated in the sciences, apparently still never cared about natives, if my mother were to be believed.  But young boy Kleinbaas Hanekom treated blacks as his equals in both war-making and peace-making, I was convinced, feeling proud in the process that although I was already conscious and active in liberation politics, I was glad that I was growing up in a South Africa with so-called white fellows whose hearts and minds I could identify with on very first encounter like I identified with young Honourable Mr Kleinbaas Hanekom, the Boxer for His Bike even the inspiration for Mr Hyena Comb!

May I remind you that you are still on my flight of fancy, the aircraft joystick my pen, to a juvenile age and a youth I no more fancy even though I flaunt it as a survivor of Apartheid.  it is a youth I to this day respect. To one destination or another, all of us, particularly by means of our minds, will fly every so often on the fuel of culture.  President Jacob Zuma’s Arab friends, for example, will ride on magic carpets, I gather.  But please, South Africa, take with me a space tour on my mental galactic plate, red-hot from my anger with you, once again to the picturesque mountains environs of Piet-Retief-Amsterdam-Ermelo.  I definitely would eschew the idea of a car for a tour of Amsterdam, especially if it boasts the added time travel 36 years back.

The trouble is, a lot of overripe peaches on the tarmac, complete with kernels threatening the very breath of life  for your tyres would only with slim luck let you driver scot-free in 1975.  You would be truly lucky, that way, to be successfully taken to my focal dorpie.

Amsterdam was established in 1881 when the Zulu Nation was only 50 years old and Pixley Seme, the would-be founder of the ANC of which you are a member today, still burning the late-night oil.

Amsterdam is also only a few hundred kilometres only to Volksrust, the true birthplace of the ANC in the sense of the struggle for the land that Mr Julius Malema is fighting for in disciplinary accusations for having called “white people criminals”.

The year 1881 is only a few years before the roaring of the oratorical pen of The Prince of Zinj: “The Giant Africa Is Awakening”

This is Doctor Pixley ka Isaka Seme also known as Prince of Tonga, Ithonga Elikhulu

Moroka

Isinyakuzane Sasengulane, 

Nkuzana Engumbhuqwana,

Pixley ka Isaka Seme was then probably getting ready to get going to study in the United States of America. His subsequent powerful message about African liberation was there to reverberate throughout the African Diaspora.  But back at home, his seminal message found continent-wide fertility of ground and was indeed greeted with acclamation throughout the 20^th century.  Evidence to this is the regard with which Seme was held much later on by Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana.  Nkrumah stands to this day as the quintessential African political genius notorious for quoting nobody ever in his in his speeches, yet he went on record as quoting the entirety of Pixley Seme’s speech: “The Regeneration of Africa”.

Pixley Seme’s leonine roar more than a hundred years ago now, rallied the African people into co-founding (with the Dlamini Tonga of Swaziland's Royal House, writer’s cousin Queenmother Labotsibeni in particular) South Africa’s present-day ruling African National Congress.  It is the same Semesque spirit that led the founding of Mr Julius Malema’s ANC Youth League whose First President, Anton Mzwakhe Lembede, one perhaps as too hot to handle as Mr Julius Malema,  the colonialists and their agents within the ANC party, patently did fatally poison him through food and drink in order to leave the field open for yes-men youth league leaders.

This was followed by a spate of assaults against individual youths who were as revolutionary as the late Lembede, forces of change being elbowed out of otherwise democratic gatherings of the ANC.  The intolerance became the sluice gate for the formation of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania, a breakaway party which, Mr Julius Sello Malema please take note for any ambitions that may cross your mind, like all subsequent breakaways (call them what you like Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s IFP, Bantubonke Holomisa’s party or Terror Lekota’s COPE) was not going to offer any serious and meaningful challenge to the giant ANC.

The rationale for this is simple: the ANC has always been the only organization ensuring a gradual empowerment of the native from the era of colonialism to the current democratic dispensation.  Powerful geopolitical forces have also been making sure that this remains the case or the course of peaceful change would be lost forever in a South Africa that could otherwise have fallen under the control of the Lembedes of mid 20^th-century South Africa.

Seme’s famous speech: “The Regeneration of Africa” was of course punctuated by “The Giant Is Awakening”, an oft-quoted idiomatic expression too frequently not well-sourced by the quoters.  That part was a plea for ANC Presidents from inception to find place for a youth formation within his brainchild, the ANC.

This was so tall an order that it took well over 30 years of ANC’s life history to begin coming up with a structure called the ANC Youth League, and that once again was due to the tireless hands-on approach of none other than Dr Seme himself.  And people like Nelson Mandela would frequent Seme’s house in Sophiatown, as well as his office in between Commissioner and President Streets in Johannesburg to be coached on how to lead the youth OVER AND ABOVE GETTING ARTICLED AS YOUNG LAWYERS.

Seme’s call to ANC Presidents to GROW THAT AFORESAID GIANT AND NOT TO COLLABORATE WITH AFRICA’S ENEMIES IN KILLING AFRICA’S FUTURE FOR THE SAKE OF OUR POCKETS has always been the dogma of the ANC’s rank and file and the PR of its leadership.  In a sense, the ANC has always been the greatest asset for the people of South Africa as well as the western world.  The problem that the once-again-fractious ANC faces in 2011 stems from game rules that have changed at home and abroad.

South Africa together with the entirety of southern Africa is no more only well-beholden to the West who are the ANC’s greatest traditional ally...the petit-bourgeoisie upbringing of most ANC presidents, remember?... but the land South Africa is also eyed quite widely by the East, in particular by the China giant who is proving quite competitive a suitor, if the Zimbabwean experience is anything to go by.

The latter happens of course to the natural chagrin of the West; but the largesse and the aggressive coaxing by the Chinese suitor has turned the ANC into a pretty much confused inamorata, and my assessment is it is busy succumbing to a love triangle gone wrong.

Zuma’s ANC hence dying like the promise that never was to give the Dalai Lama a visa to visit a famous Bishop well-beholden to the West.  Zuma’s ANC is dying  because in Zuma’s political lifetime has changed suitor flavour of the day three times too many from Soviet Russia, to the West and now to China.

Mr Thabo Mbeki, in a recent address to advocates elucidates the importance attached to these relationships.  We know now for sure Mbeki’s utterances that the Gaddafi regime was voted for aerial bombardment by an ANC government for the reason that, according to Mbeki, “Gaddafi never gave a cent to the ANC during the struggle”

If they still nurse grudges as to who helped them and who did not during the struggle, how do Zuma’s ANC think those like Britain and the USA who helped them come to power must be feeling now with their cosy-cosy relationship with a China that during Mao Tse Tung was not overly inclined to be of assistance to the ANC?

Does Zuma’s ANC honestly think the West is sufficiently impressed to cosy up with them in bed once again JUST BECAUSE TODAY JULIUS MALEMA (WHO WANTED THEIR MINES AND THEIR FARMLAND NATIONALIZED) has got a suspension for five years?

If so, that would be the nadir in any naiveté of Zuma’s leadership.  But that was the Zuma ANC’s Problem Number One in 2011; but Problem Number 2 in this here and now is the fact that South Africa is a constitutional democracy already, with both black and white talking everyday on platforms without number save the limitation of your imagination.

This has meant that the ANC under Zuma’s race card, even for a PR exercise among native voters, is gone forever. Today, natives join the Zuma’s ANC for what it can offer them rather than for what it can take for them from the native Europeans born in Africa with silver spoons in their mouths.

Essentially, the only people who still believe in the viability of  ANC of Zuma’s Black Affirmative Action policies may well be those among the organization’s senior members who have succeeded in getting busloads of their relatives and sweethearts working for government only to abuse the system to victimize those of us South Africans without powerful uncles and aunts in the topmost leadership of the organization, what with our uncles and aunts who never ever existed for the ANC or simply died in the 1950’s to 70’s like Pixley Seme.

Ultimately, the problem today is that the sheer number of underperforming relatives (in exile we called them in Zulu: amamemba wamamemba) in strategic posts has, thanks to the intervention of South Africa’s robust justice system, far outstripped the Zuma ANC’s capability of keeping them in service alongside the ANC’s ravenous ballot box.  The day the official opposition (The Democratic Alliance) wins national elections in South Africa... guess what...?  It is the so-called black people who are going to celebrate more than the whites to which the party is sometimes aligned with under everyday perceptions.

And those, are the problems that Zuma’s ANC is facing on this fateful day of November 10, 2011 as it essentially fired its youth league President. It is in a nutshell a dilemma To face-off to true aspirations of the native hungering for land and wealth and self-determination, or To continue with the diplomatic see-saw between African aspirations and Western Imperialism and to maintain the shuffle in vogue thanks to the venerable Nelson Mandela’s first day in office back in 1994.  These are real problems because when the ANC dies (as she could die this month with or without the door shown to Mr Julius Malema), the West is not going to miss the ANC; the East will not even remember ANC stands for what; and South Africa’s native majority are simply going to spit at its grave!

What must the Zuma’s ANC now do to survive?

I propose that my party President (Zuma)... as indeed writer is still culturally attached to the ANC... think clearly about the images every single one of his actions are leaving in the psyche of the nation.  More so in his manner of treating comrades like Malema.

I know, and look forward to ANC’s political dominance even in two months and more to come.  But Msholozi’s leadership style in the party has thus far robbed me of one of my joys, the game of Scrabble.  I mean, all the letters for “Centenary” are there in “Cemetery” except the letters for the most important person: “Me”!

Now try writing for Scrabble the words: “mene mene tekel ufarsin” and you will find the meaning: “The ANC is getting rid of its youth leaders because he stood for so-called black aspirations while the Opposition Democratic Alliance is embracing the concept by having a symbol of native African motherhood leading their parliamentary caucus”.

WHICH OF THE TWO ORGANIZATIONS WILL EMERGE AS THE FUTURE OF A ‘BLACK’ COUNTRY LIKE SOUTH AFRICA, MSHOLOZI?

Yes, and back to my thematic picture on this post and a previous one, when we must now celebrate the centenary of Pixley Seme’s ANC, what do we see?

We see a little boy that has been shot by an alien.  Who is the boy? Who is that Semesque growing African giant, cut down at the budding of his youth?

Since I should like to suggest “South African ANC Youth League President Mr Julius Sello Malema”, “Mozambican President Samora Moisés Machel”, or even "South African Tshwane Metro Police Officer Sergeant Ntshimane Johannes Mogale" (all of them emotive names in South Africa today) how beautiful it would be if I got your reply, Msholozi!

The reply of Mr Gwede Mantashe, the “engine” of Zuma’s ANC, would also be very nice.  Or the reply of Mr Derek Hannekom, he who is in his own right culturally an African child too, if only a very special child in that he has been LEGALLY so affirmed, a privilege that Zambians, Mozambicans and other nationalities never enjoyed a few years ago as they were torched, insulted and nastily sang about in xenophobic attacks under the Zuma ANC’s government (Or was it the Mbeki one, seeing that the two these days sing in unison over the grisly demise of African Patriot Gaddafi).

Unlike African Child Samora Machel, African Child Derek Hannekom has only six days ago been reprieved from the clutches of a remorseless  murder frenzy, thanks to the astutely timeous affirmation by South Africa’s Constitutional Court: The song Shoot The Boer or even Shoot the Hannekoms is plainly illegal In South Africa for a piece of hate speech.

I am very happy for Honourable Mr Hanekom since that ConCourt judgment to refuse Mr Malema and the Zuma’s ANC right to appeal the proscription of the song Dubulibhunu.  Remember, Reader, I met Honourable Mr Hanekom long ago, in Amsterdam!

Indeed, I do get carried away when I consider Amsterdam and reminisce on my formative years in the ‘Dam.  This is the neighbourhood where around 1913 when the Land Act was passed, Dr Seme, an advocate, and ANC Founder was later to teach Africans how to legally own land and produce an oasis, really, along the desert sea owned by then foreigners like your ancestors, Honourable Mr Hanekom.

That part of ANC history is suppressed by geopolitical designs that seek to muzzle freedom fighters like Malema who may want to go back to the thinking processes of Seme, the man who came up with the idea of forming the ANC more than 100 years ago in the first place.

Instead, (while ruins of Seme house are left to disintegrate further among fields of lucerne  while millions of your money, South Africa and mine, are thrown into refurbishing only houses of Nelson Mandela or Walter Sisulu) the alternative but fictitious “history” is portrayed of the struggling birthplace being... aha.. you guessed it right.... THE EASTERN CAPE of the Nelson Mandelas born six whole years after Seme’s dream of an ANC to unite Africans had, through the financial support of Swaziland’s Royal house, come to fruition.

South Africa, if you want to know who is benefitting from that fiction, check where exactly Trafalgar Square stands, with its contents of Nelson Mandela’s statue.  This of course is not to say that the great man Mandela is to blame, since he did not request the British to honour him in that fashion.  In the same breath, Mr Mandela did not protest with the British to say: Please don’t honour me, rather honour my mentor Pixley Seme.  In fact all records of official history show Mr Mandela as having lost memory of the intense mentorship he received from the ANC Founder Seme, a memory that is fortunately still active with Pixley Seme’s daughter, Helen of Ulundi in KwaZulu Natal!

Yet, Mr Mandela cannot be  blameworthy if he has developed some amnesia.  Old age will have that effect on most of us, won’t it?

Nor is the Honourable Walter Sisulu to blame since (unless people believe his children bear no political clout save as “inherited” from him and their grandfather who was a British settler magistrate in Africa) the late Walter is not (or is he?) protruding a weaponized finger from his grave, ordering Mr Jacob Zuma for all intent and purposes to follow Mandela suit in unintentionally derecognizing Zuma’s fellow Zulu Pixley Seme where Mandela would never have collaborated in the derecognition of any one of his Eastern Province who fought for Africa half as hard as Seme did!

Of course, the suggestion for deliberate Seme derecognition does legimately stem when nothing by Mr Zuma is done for the ANC Founder Seme save for one lousy remembrance after another jaded commemoration clearly geared towards merely appeasing the flummoxed extended Seme family that includes both Zulu and Swazi Royals like myself as Goodman Manyanya Phiri.

This is a shame at the expense of the perpetrators of the live burial of Pixley Seme’s heritage, a Seme without whose ideas and fondness for the modern-day Malemasque Land Question, the ANC would not have come into existence.  Indeed, this deliberate blot in the history of the ANC, rather than any suggestion for lack of formal education, lie at the centre of Mr Jacob Zuma’s apparent failure to deliver on his ANC election promises.  The result is that the door has now been shut (though not irrevocably) from possible entry through what for him has since turned into “The Pinhole of Mangaung’s Second Term”.

My South Africa, please, I am not taking you to volatile Mangaung.  I never promised it for I long left that to our political Houdini (or even to living legend Jailbreaker Mozambican Ananias Mathe) how he nailbitingly pulls it with only a slight panelbeating work on his ideological imperfections... but I am taking Honourable Mr Hanekom to inert Amsterdam where were made half the political ideas of writer of this letter to you.

Yet Amsterdam is so inert, that maybe towards her north a bit is needed of Barberton to pep the former up.

Barberton is two centuries ago a military outpost (Emjindini) of the vast kingdom of the Swarthy/Swazi (a.k.a. “Mswati Lomnyama Kulabalutfuli”), manned by Swazi princes and descendants of the Founder of Swaziland, King Sobhuza The First.

Princess Mafede is one belle in a clutch of royal beauties for whose attention influential men of the era jostled and shoved. The idea might suffice if I point to your colleague in the ANC, Cleric Mkhatshwa (Roman Catholic Father Smangaliso Mkhatshwa) whose mother, the late Her Highness Princess Sifaphi Mkhatshwa born Dlamini is a first cousin to Her Highness Princess Mafede Mavimbela born Dlamni who was fathered by Emjindini’s Prince Sigeyeza Dlamini the younger brother of Prince Folozi Dlamini’s.

Now Honourable Mr Hanekom, I am not selling my daughter for lobola cows from you o you are too old, OK?  But I want to give you an escape route in case you find it repugnant to look at another man like the handsome Lieutenant Colonel Goodman Manyanya Phiri or even the more dashing Father Smangaliso Mkhatshwa. So, do look at my toddler daughter Tamara Sibusisiwe Phiri to get an idea what royally pristine beauties like Their Highness Sifaphi and Mafede looked like.

I tell you now: It is that very beauty in girls young and old that African heroes like Mr Julius Malema are prepared to die for.  Such beauty is the reflection to the beauty of their own land, bequeathed them from the day of Adam and Eve both of whom walked the valleys of South Africa, and were the direct ancestors of the Mr Julius Malema that has been crucified today, like Jesus years two thousand ago, for what is essentially his.

That then is the spice from Barberton and I believe I have now sufficiently spiced you up, Honourable Mr Hanekom, a bland Amsterdam dish that was otherwise sure to bore your taste buds stiff om te kots, jy weet!

Come, therefore, let us once again partake of the Amsterdam meal with zest, peaches oranges and all!

As the Nazi dictates of apartheid would have decreed, I was attending primary school at Ithole with only my fellow Bantus while my bosom friend, Boer Theunis Groenewald, had to go to a fellow settler school.  Since our hearts pumped so much of the same blood that they could have been swapped, Theunis and I found in a short space of time getting ourselves extraordinarily very fond of each other.  This was to the extent that if I had any precocity for girls, my first girlfriend was bound to sport hair flowing like the Mozambican Channel and eyes deepening like the blue sea.

That is all 36 years ago now; and I’m convinced Theunis has since died in one of the border wars every settler child under apartheid was compelled to fight in order to delay the advent of ANC rule in South Africa.  You should be knowing about those battles, Honourable Mr Hanekom Sir, as you were not only a member of the ANC when most of them were fought, you were probably in exile too.

For all I reckon, the last bullet to seal for Cuban forces the victory of Quito Cuanavalle  could well have been pumped into the body of my pale friend Theunis Groenewald.  But maybe against all odds, Theunis Groenewald is still alive and kicking somewhere in which case I promise to find him so that we can resume the friendship that we had when we were 14, our sense of judgment innocent and our skin colours, fortuitous.  The age 14 is the time when of him he left me the indelible memory of the true Boer patience that I lived to defy.

Tired of convincing me in vain to entice one of his pony-tailed sisters and neighbours, he resigned to coaxing me with a magazine of semi-nude Caucasian models on the magazine named “Sarie” or some similar name, and with the straightforwardness only Boers are renowned for, made a late-blooming friend know that hierdie ding, just beyond the satin, is lekker, Manyanya!

I theorise that the visible blush among humans, is what has turned Europe more technologically advanced than Africa since Europeans have been for millennia left to communicate with each other relatively better than Africans, communicating even by means of their skins.  And that's organic multi-skilling for you, don’t you think?!

Well, my brown skin does not allow me to visibly blush.  Therefore, under the raunchy influences of Theunis Groenewald, I was left to my own devices, privately tortured.  Every time he’d preached the divinity of female sexuality for male teens, warm blood, my private curse, uncomfortably washed over my face and Theunis lost the message in that Tower of Babel.

The problem was I plainly couldn’t fathom how at his age which was also my age, he could be involved and fascinated by sexual activities.

You see, there was I! I knew a lot about politics, way too much already for my age, an ace biology student also I was to boot.  But I just did not get it as to what face a girl would wear to bring out what beast in a boy who would proceed to enter her, both aged 15 or younger. This was a simply an impossible proposition for my emotional immaturity, but a source of huge entertainment for Theunis.  His primary dream pleasure, though, would have been to make me see heaven through his eyes.

I caused him to fail dismally in efforts of realizing that dream.  I was a whopping 22 when I lost my virginity and hounded by SAP for beating to a pulp a primary school principal who had sjamboked his school child for refusing to offer sex to him; but that is running too far away from the age 14 of Theunis Groenewald’s Amsterdam.

Theunis’ home stood along the street that leads to Piet Retief, the same street where my school and my community lay.  But sometimes, perhaps tired of pictorial nudity,  I would walk past Theunis’ home until the junction with the road to Swaziland.  This is where on one Saturday I successfully took an indelible snapshot of the Boer soul in battle, a fiery gargantuan force that consumes everything on its path.  Be warned, Honourable Mr Hanekom and take not for granted that being Boer yourself you will handle with ease the lines to follow below this one.  I do not want to sear you, Makker, and that is the primary reason why I have invited along my royal grandmother for this audience with you.  Let her anaesthetize you before you are lethally hit by true blue Boer blood. And the injecting sentence, it makes not difference even as I tell you, will come as surprise to co-readers of this post, but you will, I promise you, be emotionally dead and numb by the time your eyes roll over it, a pair of cosmic blobs, that strayed onto the solar surface.

Expanding the English idiom she had said the British are the sly ones who hunt with the Boer Dog and Run with the Kaffir Hare “How so, Granny?”  I would ask.  “The British, through the Anglo Boer wars are the ones who fortuitously created the Blue Print that stupid Boers like Hendrik Verwoerd were, with massive injection of capital from the mining sector largely controlled by the British, imposed it on an otherwise reluctant Boer nation many of whose communities had since the War of the Zulus versus the Boers, had largely accepted the natives as neighbours with whom they had even intermarried.”

“Granny you cannot be that serious!”

“I am telling you now: there is more in common between you and the Boer Boy than there is between him and an English Boy”

Years 37 or so down the line of Amsterdam, Badplaas, Nelspruit, Mbabane, Manzini, Maputo, Luanda, Lusaka, Morogoro, Dar es-Salaam, London, Paris, Rome and back to Mpumalanga’s humble Amsterdam dorpie, I sit here in front of my computer screen thinking back on Gogo’s words those many decades ago, her words as of now otherwise reduced to a mound of earth called her grave alongside her co-wife and their husband at Ngwenya/Oshoek Borgdergate with Swaziland.

I compare those utterances with news stories that have been circulating around only to shake my sensibilities to the core in the past two months or so.

I look at the relationship between Comrades Julius Malema and Derek Hanekom and I wonder, “Gogo, were you right about the Afrikaner?”

I leave my analytic fiasco of a gogo for an earlier ancestor, Blogger’s First Cousin and ANC founder member Swazi Queenmother Gwamile LaMdluli LABOTSIBENI named after a King of the  Pedi Kgoshe Ntsebeng.

I learn that The Pedi are no mere sister people to the Swazi (some of whom in fact like the Motsas, Gwebus, Nkambules ethnicize a quarter of the 2 million Swazis on the Continent), but they culturally originate together from Great Zimbabwe, the site of Biblical King Solomon's gold mines, via the Karonga/Moroka/Tonga lineage, hence Emalangeni, not dissimilar to the Karonga Dynasty of the Tumbuka/Tonga people in present-day Northern Malawi, or even Elangeni the home of the Karanga.

What is Queenmother Labotsibeni saying about the disturbing goings-on in Zuma’s ANC today?

I bet Her Majesty is truly taking a sepulchral turning as she watches her efforts and the sweat of her son-in-law Seme, a handiwork turning 100 years next year on a note of such a poor showing in any dove-tailing in the manner of exercising power whether party or government power.

“Awu, Nine Bakitsi,” cries Her Majesty in Siswati, a language my mother and granddaughter of the same dynasty gave to me.  “It looks like the poor bird was struck by sidvubulelo write from take-off at the Polokwane Conference four short years ago.”

Forgive me, Your Majesty, and Cousin Labotsibeni, for I am about to shoot straight, not at the lame dove, no!  I ain't that mean, ya know, but shoot I shall shoot rather at provisional flight path.  I want to measure distance and see if, with the trouble it now has with the underfueling back at Polokwane, it has not by any unfortunate fate reached the point of no return towards its sheer mid-air disaster as Mangaung seems too far for its capability and crash-landing possibilities are nil with a hostile terra firma after the needless hardships and napalm the pilot has subjected man on the ground Julius Malema, toxically inundating and infuriating Mamma Earth in the process.

I doubt if anybody believes the poor bird will reach its Mangaung destination.  I doubt if anybody cares.  Even the Gauteng Provincial, supposedly neutral in the infighting around Zuma, doesn’t seem to care.  So, I am shooting also for the bull's eye, whenever I'll be off the boy's life, with my tracer bullets if I am to stay close to the picture above and thus lose my trophy not  to rigor mortis, nor to that last  bloodied gasp for air that might, as the scoundrelly picaninny's life flashes before it only to possibly easily let my  almost bagged black gold that sprint for the nearby bush as you can be sure that my collaborators who are, only in the African paradox,  his brown brothers hiding in the bush just behind me will move in to save him after witnessing the  grim resolve o an already-bloodied pair o hands of a settler wielding  a gun  with the result of a near-dear-from-a-bullet of a native boy.

The truth is there is no Malema to talk of.  He is a goner!  And writing this, I am already beginning to forget him.  The top 6 of the ANC have also resigned themselves to leading soon a life without Malema.    But now, where do the rumours of  division among them stem from?  These rumours are a mere figment, I want to propose, a figment that is not far from the truth, though.

The fact is, there are two, and only two vote magnets for the Organization: Mr Julius Malema on one hand, and the non-racial character of the organization, on the other hand.  That non-racial characteristic is the only plank with which  to win back the white vote in a Western Cape dominated by a so-called Coloured Community who have never gone along with their Abantu fellow-Africans (unless it is a matter of life and death for them) and have traditionally preferred to look at themselves in togetherness with the non-native grouping of ethnic Europeans more preponderant in the province than in any other, hence the significantly ethnic-African based ANC finds the Western Cape population thoroughly too soapy for the ANC’s sumo wrestling during elections that tend to go ethnic European. They cry with anger at the ANC government that: "During white apartheid, we were too black to partake of the spoils of the local colonialism,” they scream in  censorious anguish as if Apartheid was supposed to be a source of pride for them.  “And now for the ANC of Mr Zuma we are too brown Bruinmense, to be accepted in what gravy train the ANC government might be riding and you hear of billion-dollar tender going to Zulu-dominated KwaZulu Natal and the Eastern Cape where Messrs Zuma and Mandela, respectively came from.  And so we punish the black ANC by going even to the very whitey who had oppressed us during Apartheid".

Aha! So they really believe that Abantu/Batho are "black".  The ethnic Europeans are "white". And "us Coloureds are brown".

I wish if time allowed me, to return to this strange take of chromatics, a malady that is affecting all groupings in South Africa today, (inclusive of their government) not being a shortcoming from the so-called Coloured community only.  But for now Mr Malema has to go.

Mr Malema will have to go for exactly that very reason that he has rocked that  political balance of South Africa, a balance based on colonial type ignorance about the identification of people's skin-colour, all  with his calls for wholesale nationalization while singing Dubulibhunu, and that Dubulibhunu song,  the belting of which has provoked an equality court judgment coming in time for a lifeless body lying spread-eagled from a good shot and fortunately for Malema not of Lembedesque intestinal poison phial, but a shot off a gun of intra-party machinations that got him ready for the coffin (if the trophy in the picture will be dignified with such).

Believe you me, in all this scuffle, the settler nieu-colonialist is still wielding that gun, like the cracker used to wield and crack that whip during slavery of the African... and so nothing has changed for South Africa, has it?  If you read to say everything has changed and the African is in control, then why the timing of the disciplinary hearing just when Malema is querying the overconcentration of wealth of both land, minerals and infrastructure into the hands of ethnic Europeans half of whom, unlike with the Boers, their loyalty to Africa is duplicated with loyalties to other continents with governments inimical to Africa?

“I am telling you now: there is more in common with you and the Boer Boy than there is between him and an English Boy”

“Hawu!” I had marvelled.

“And very often, too often in fact, if you should be blest with a long life!” my grandmother further was to conclude quite memorably.  “When everybody else will forsake you even those you thought were your brothers by virtue of skin colour, there will be a Boer stretching out his hand to save you with no recompense expected and no gratitude solicited”

“Is it not the same things with all whites who were created after the image of Jesus?....to save us blacks?”  I had asked before the Swazi Princess walked off again with her arms at her back.

“In a way you are right, and Amen!” she said.  “But the British will not do that without a heavy  price on you.  That is why I have a problem with you thanking them for making a protectorate of the land of my second cousin, King Sobhuza, The Second.  You see, the British consider themselves a superior race to Africans whereas the Boers see themselves as Africans whose survival depends on the survival of their darker-skinned fellow Africans”

Admittedly there are racist “whites” and they will always be there till Jesus’ return.  Admittedly, Amsterdam was littered with terribly racist Boers who would not think twice before dragging a native behind a Jeep for the flimsiest of reasons; but there were also grand Boer souls who never took this racial nonsense from their own brothers lying down, and more often Boer fists would fly when a Bantu had been mistreated.

In that vein, remember our Dr Dewald Koekemoer who was rumoured truly or falsely to be so racist as to refuse to touch the native’s skin even with gloves on.  The story went around that it his Volk, the Boerevolk of Amsterdam, that straightened his surgery manners and when I met him with a bout of facial roundworms he was the warmest doctor ever with the largest surgery in Amsterdam in 1975.  And for all I care, these rumours of racism could well have been false, a product of propaganda from less successful doctors who were of course were all European or Asian as the native was basically not encouraged to go to school with a mind of being Doctor one day, Hendrik F. Verwoerd, the Father of Apartheid, expressly outlawed that approach to the education of the native child!

Closer home (as Amsterdam town was not my home), there was a Mr Thomas Jacob (not his real name), a man of Greek extract on whose farms (with names altered), “The Wolf’s Glen”, and “De Trust” the Phiri homestead at various times stood as sub-tenants.  It was Mr Thomas Jacob who, according to writer’s father, apparently one day woke up greedy and green with envy over the unbelievably huge amounts of money the Kaffir Phiri had.

So, in collaboration with some deepthroat Amsterdam bank Manager connived how to rob my father of his nest egg.  My father was taken at gunpoint to Amsterdam and at the bank forced to confess to stealing the money from Mr Thomas Jacob to which my father obliged.

As my father arrived back home penniless by his own insistence, it was the wife of the Greek’s wife-cum-mother-in-law, a woman of Boer stock who surreptitiously worked up the Amsterdam community of her fellow Boers to condemn her husband’s amateurish day-light robbery.  It was apparently during one of those meetings that right-thinking Boers recommended to Pops a fearsome Ermelo-based firm of lawyers, Ferreira-and-Fourie, who got my father’s money back in the bank without even setting foot in court.  I do not know how much money it was; but yes, it was the kind of money that too frequently made my father walk into a Nissan showroom and grab a truck on cash, something my old man took pride in!

MY ADULT DISCOVERIES AWAY FROM GOGO

This is not to say that Boers were and are a terribly good people.  They cannot have been so when all the evil programs colonial Britain dreamt of were to be largely implemented by the Boer.  Shouldn’t the blue-print producers for Apartheid bear the blame?

The British may be the ones who developed the social science of separate development along racial lines, but it is the Boers who constitutionalized it.  The British may be the ones who Balkanized Southern Africa, but the Boers are the ones who received half the tracts of land albeit along with only a tiny fraction of the mineral resources underground!

In that process of sharing spoils, though, the Boers from the British also received for what they must pay back to the natives back for: the symbol of the earth’s oldest statehood in South Africa estimated by some to be 250 000 old!

Half of the Swazi Kingdom established by Blogger’s great great  great grandfather King Sobhuza the First, was apportioned to the Boers.  Crucial tracts of land prehistorically known as Zion, Azania or Zinj, a Phiri-clan-ruled Tonga Dynasty that stretched from present-day South Africa to Tumbuka People’s Karonga in Northern Malawi, to Cameroun, to South Africa’s Pedi ancestor Karanga of a Zimbabwe from which African scholars tell us gold was mined for the Building in Africa’s Zion, of the temple of God.

Azania/Zion originally stretched from present-day Swaziland to South Africa (comprising Tsonga, Swazi, Hlubi) through Zimbabwe’s Karangas and back to Swaziland and STRAIGHT FOR PRESERVATION IN THE BANKNOTE, LILANGENI, PRINTED BY HIS MAJESTY KING MSWATI III, the only surviving holy link of that part of Africa’s past greatness stolen by British colonialism for Boer compradorship.

Needless to say, His Majesty the Lilangeni Swazi King, just like his blood cousin, the Pedi/Karanga Mr Julius Malema or like the star of Karonga, His Excellency Robert Mugabe, remains the subject of lampooning by South African nieu-colonialist mass media still largely in the hands of ethnic and colonial-minded British citizens, if not companies with not only British links, but also links with British neo-colonialist tendencies.

I am trying not here to show the evils of British colonialisms on these shores (I think they are self-evident); I am but trying to show that Boers were not angels in that complicit historical process; and ANC members like Malema who demand a redress cannot without a heavy price be portrayed as mere bumbling fools at best and mediocre buffoons at worst.  Personally, I don’t care for land as my personal land is my mind.  Besides, I think Boers who control most of South Africa’s land are doing so quite gainfully for the entire nation where they treat their tenants humanely unlike the son of some British settler who so recently fed an African to lions in Mpumalanga. And the one thing I will go to the grave not forgiving Boers for is the fact that, having been awarded vast tracts of our Zion ancestors’ land by the British, the Boers were naturally the first witness to vast sources of evidence on rocks and other media of preservation that SOUTH AFRICA KNEW HOW TO READ AND RIGHT LONG BEFORE THE FIRST COLONIAL EUROPEAN SET FOOT whether in the Portuguese 1400’s or the Dutch 1600’s.

Yet, all being said and done, I am personally convinced that the development of Boer nationhood over the centuries is a best thing that South Africa ever came to.  Maybe my conviction arises from the fact that I was born and bred to read their souls and they read mine.  Between me and the Boer, we all of us live by the dictum of that son of an African woman Mary who has gone on record as saying: Ye shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

In that vein and for your benefit, Honourable Mr Hanekom, if for one moment, Mr Julius Malema actually meant to massacre the Boer with his rendition of Dubul’iBhunu, you can trust me to do the honours of the dubuling or shooting of Mr Malema in defence of the Boer.  If you believe that darker-skinned Africans are well capable of defending the sanctity of Boer national life without the assistance of native Europeans, you as Honourable Mr Hanekom did not have to stick like Velcro on the disciplinary chair over Mr Malema only to make those snide and smart-Alec comments about a supposedly malingering brother trying to chicken out from facing the music of your Disciplinary as is shown much later on this post.

Honestly, Honourable Mr Hanekom, I think your actions throughout this Disciplinary have been a disgrace to the great Boer Nation; and if this is what is all what attitude you have learned from your many years as a supposed member of the ANC, I am sure you joined the wrong ANC, but not the one formed 100 years ago by The Great Moroka, Pixley Isaka Seme in collaboration with Swazi Queenmother Labotsibeni. Wake up, now, Brother Hanekom, and smell the coffee of the real thing, brought about by Youngman Malema...

...and please ignore this post, and I will be the first to apologize to my venerable President Zuma for it, if it turns out that the media misquoted you as suggesting Malema is malinger.  Not one true child of Afrika Dzonga and Afrika Zion, when the hour comes to defend with his life our dignity, our land and our heritage as the Father of All Humankind from its cradle to the grave.  And Mr Julius Malema is such a one son of Zion and Azania!

Now to refocus on the judge, rather than the accused

I wonder how Mr Hannekom at this moment on the day, the day of your own  judgement over the same guy (Mr Malema) found by Justice Collin Lamont guilty of hate speech against the Hannekoms of this South Africa.

Does he as an African feel today vindicated enough to nail Mr Malema's coffin air-tight?

Yet, love him or hate him, fact is: the debate is still up there for grabs as to whether there has ever before in the known history of South Africa been a politician more rivetingly colourful than Julius Sello Malema.  For that matter, the closest I can think of is the first man ever to sit in the position Malema is in, KwaZulu-Natalian Anton Mzwakhe Lembede about whom we have a mouthful hereunder without highlighting the reputation he had with demands on punctuality.  Folklore has it that if no one came per agreed time for a meeting with Anton Lembede, the firebrand would present his speech to empty benches and would wrap it up and leave at the minute agreed-upon even if it was only then that his audience were arriving in earnest.  Alas, what records we have of this revolutionary son of the soil are too porous and rarefied for one’s efforts of modelling a life after.

However, this is a far cry from Mr Julius Malema who is a crowd-puller for journalists and laiety alike and far more importantly, a man firmly and indelibly ensconced in the libraries of the world electronic and hard static.  For Mr Malema’s prominence we can thank none other than the person of Mr Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma, a decade-long accused who needed and got the services of a fiercely loyal Malema and once when finally ensconced at The Union Buildings went blasé in the false belief that the most fearsome Rottweiler in town is not only tame, but has been tamed for him personally.  The biggest, but not irredeemable, mistake of Mr Zuma’s political life, we are herein going to argue.

Furthermore and for these selfsame paragraphs to follow, I should also like to argue that the Afrikaner (also known as the Boer), who are Africans of Dutch, French and German origins who first set foot in South Africa in 1651 and helped build South Africa culture, infrastructure while they were themselves ipso facto built into Africanism should, through their representatives (Mr Hannekom in the Malema saga) be very discriminating on what they touch among issues of izikhali zamantungwa predating the Dutch arrival in Africa.

Ultimately, Mr Malema is talking exactly that language which you can’t refute unless you are from Mars and your brains half that of a monkey.  Worse, fifty years from now, “blacks” who understand the difference between so-called South African whites on one hand and the so-called South African whites on the other, may not care about that difference anymore even though, right now, there is to thinking “blacks” not a white grouping revered, honoured and fraternized more than the Boer, notwithstanding proscribed songs like Dubulibhunu.

The fact is, when you as a brother join hands with foreigners to oppress your own people, the Boers like Mr Hannekom must note, you teach your people to regard you in the same light as the foreigners. And you will live, unaided by the foreigner who will by then be ejected back to his own shores, to pay for hundreds of years for the sins of one father who got too excited about the likeness of his skin colour to that of the foreigner!

No, like you, I don’t know exactly what Malema is doing to Africa, to himself or to the ANC.

Yes, I like what he is doing.

Yes, like you, I have my own opinion in interpreting this personality; and I like what he is doing as someone has from time to time got to do the dirty job of rabblerousing whether in Adolf Hitler’s Germany, in Patrice Lumumba’s Democratic Republic of Congo, Fidel Castro’s Cuba or Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.

 Ons staan not soos Suid-Afrika op ‘n krusing om alles reg te doen of alles verkeerd te kry and the political chaos in Zuma’s ANC circles that I and many observers foresaw so many moons ago is already in full swing as of this posting catapulting into an abyss everyone who politically mattered in South Africa only yesteryear. This will be so even long before the first band strums its lead guitar two months away in a R100m bash to celebrate the ANC’s centenary, unless sanity prevails and my party President Zuma, his political think-tank (interestingly led by Gwede Mantashe and his like-minded who were also like-minded even in the Mbeki era and their disciplinary big stick Derek Hannekom) see the logic that there is no pair of people in the entire political world today needing each other more than Mr Zuma and Mr Malema!

Suspending Julius Malema has made Zuma a lesser man for Mangaung, and not the other way round!

Problem is (and I know this very well from my very thorough reading of the subject): Malema’s nationalization utterances are a threat to South Africa’s economy, aren’t they?

But I say, Forget about what the economy will do tumble or stumble if Malema is embraced, it already is a shambles anyway for the chronically-poor vast majority of both unemployed and under-employed people of South Africa, both black and white (for those who are fond of strange spectral nomenclatures).

I say, think instead about a civil war or Libyan-style regime change strategies that in the long run will be cooked (if not already cooked) in world capitals in years to come when this 17-year old experiment finally collapses like the pack of gambling cards it really is if no salubrious intervention is allowed in with the robustness and patriotism that only Mr Julius Malema today represents for the entire political spectrum of South Africa. 

I declare, True leaders should grow higher than the chips on their shoulders. They ought to be the first to remember that government positions are by the nation entrusted them with the proviso to accept criticism, even abrasive criticism, by everyone including youth.

So, if indeed the concluded Malema Disciplinary stemmed from who (Zuma?) felt belittled when the said Julius Malema allegedly came uninvited to his meeting prompting Mr Zuma to ask “[Who do you think you are, Julius? I for one am South African President Zuma]”.

...If indeed it is true that one of the allegations that came for consideration by the Disciplinary concerned an act of “gate crashing”....

Surely, it would have been Mr Zuma, rather Mr Malema, who would be subjected to some disciplinary scrutiny by his own Party.  It is unheard of in the entire history of the ANC of a president who cocooned himself away from members of his own party, particularly NEC members one of whom Mr Malema was until today’s suspension, that is. 

Furthermore, is it not the same Presidency that announced its arrival not only with Zulu song and dance, but also, in true approachable and affable King-Shaka-Zulu style, rolled out a hotline to the Presidency by ordinary citizens?  Was that then an act of mere window—dressing with a veneer of concern for the hardships endured by the poverty-stricken and long-suffering people of South Africa?  Surely, if ordinary citizens could have meaningful access to their President any time they are in distress, I’m sure at least Comrades Motlanthe, Phosa, Mbete, have already pointed it out to the President, the president of one of the leagues of a ruling party cannot in all reasonableness be straitjacketed with red tape prior to seeing the ANC President!

I feel even as I write the same point again and again that I am not heard where it matters.  Therefore I am convinced, even though there is nothing more than the mere gut feeling, already enemies of the ANC are salivating at the prospects of its political demise ushered in by the frightening  though not unexpected sentence Mr Malema suffered today at Luthuli House.

I feel South Africa’s enemies say: “This political madness, so akin to Soviet Russia, but locally called the ANC was founded a 100 years ago by a Natalian fraudster lawyer Pixley Seme who robbed his clients of money paid for a court case; the craze might as well be terminated by another Natalian and an uneducated man who became head of state under allegations of fraud and corruption that were never ventilated in a court of law; and so the end of equally zany aspirations to pan Africanism disseminated 200 years ago by yet another uneducated Natalian, the bare-footed warrior King Shaka Zulu who was Seme’s inspiration when he dreamt up the formation of the ANC”

In this article admittedly so lengthy no one with neither speed-reading skills nor subject passion should have read this far, I should have been arguing that the exercise of regimechanging the ANC Youth League in order to get rid of Mr Julius Malema may in the long run be the most suicidal act ever attempted by the 100-year old African National Congress.  Mr Julius Malema would have been the last person subjected by the Founder of the ANC, Dr Pixley Seme.  This comes out very clearly if you read the sparse history available on him, together with oral history from at least one of his children.

MALEMA’S CALLS FOR REGIME CHANGE IN MOZAMBIQUE

The Youth League’s calls for regime change in Botswana are for me the absurd charges that the Zuma ANC could have meted out at any one.

I mean, do Messrs Jacob Zuma and Gwede Mantashe know something we don’t know about the mysterious death by plane crash of first Mozambican President Samora Moises Machel weeks ago now a quarter of a century ago?

I hear you reader respond on their behalf to say “Of course we know it was the “Boers” and people have come forward to confess to participation in a military plot to kill Samora Machel together with some 33 others.  But I say clearly,  those were the  foot soldiers, pretty much the foot soldiers Malema plans to send to Botswana for regime in 2011, if indeed true.  So who ordered them?

How did “Boer murderers of Machel” finally get information about Machel’s itinerary?  What was the complicit role of the Front Line States, if any, in  seeing Machel dying and what was the role, if any, of some ANC leaders in this, seeing that two years before, Machel had so highly displeased the liberation organizations by means of signing the Nkomati Accord?

Do peoples of South Africa, Mozambique, and other African nations (who rightly viewed Machel as continental hero) have a reason to worry now that a mere suggestion by Malema followers towards “regime change”, even a regime change through democratic means, a ton of bricks is dislodged reportedly from the highest echelons of the ANC onto the head of one man Malema with no connection whatsoever to the war materiel that we are told got Samora Machel murdered a quarter of a century ago?

Did the song, if any, threaten Khama’s life? And wish him dead and as  dead as an African sellout whose name  no more existed save as for a derogatory feature of his culture, looks or identity, say his  “mixed blood” just like Samora Machel was referred to as only “The Bearded One” in ANC songs composed immediately after his notorious signing of the Nkomati Accord with the Boers?  Was Ian Khama then coming to crash in his jet while flying on American airspace thereafter?  Was Ian Khama’s widow, almost like booty from a fallen enemy’s citadel, subsequently going to marry ANC President Zuma as did ANC President Mandela after divorcing Me Winnie Mandela?  Has the ANC constitution so drastically changed from what it was in 1984 so that what was permissible then is today in 2011 disreputable anathema?

Since all of this then was not going to happen to His Excellency Ian Khama despite his regime’s touted notorious links with [at least one of the imperialist governments  who manipulate local politics only with the purpose of plundering Africa’s wealth from Benghazi to Port Elizabeth]

...Why are Messrs Zuma and Mantashe so particularly about the Youth League’s tiff with Botswana’s President, His Excellency Ian Khama?

Since there is no wife of what would be a dead Khama to be “taken” as spoil by President Zuma after the would-be assassination of Khama, why hammer the first Youth League children so badly for what a few years ago in South Africa under Mr Mbeki or Mr Mandela (who is the one who married the widow of someone “assassinated by his fellow-countrymen and Boer predecessors”) would have more likely pass for a bad political joke?  Is it not the same Mr Zuma, already the President of the ANC who two years ago who, in many respects outsized even Poseidon Himself by having his Youth League Pegasus not only to end up naturally going about unbridled, but to be born complete with wings rather than sprouting them as he cuts teeth. Using state power, now he is trying to put a leash on the horse that responds: I may not be Zulu enough for recognition by too many of EThekwini Municipality who support you for your fellow Zuluness, but I’m definitely as much of Zeus as you, Papa Poseidon Zuma!

Is it not the same Mr Zuma, already the President of the ANC who some two years ago set an unbridled and fire-eating Malema on a Mr Mbeki who had been democratically elected by the people of South Africa’s august parliament, a Mbeki hounding that caused regime change even before the poor man could finish this very second term Zuma’s own anti-Malema and fellow-Zulu-speaking youth are ready to tear down Pixley Seme’s organization in order to make Zuma have it in Mangaung 12 months from now?  If the rules governing the ANC are the same as they were some 24 months ago, was no one charged for disreputable party behaviour in the utterances preceding the ouster of our state president Mbeki like a cow from a shed?

In all the absurdities by any standards accompanying the charges that dragged Julius through what for too many outsiders looked like a sham trial, nothing surpassed the carcinogenic sap that every so often oozed from radioactive utterances and behaviours of the Chairman of the Disciplinary. 

Reported one newspaper:

The ANC's national disciplinary committee chairperson, Derek Hanekom, said on Wednesday that hospitalised youth league leader Mr Julius Malema 's legal team will need good grounds to have his hearing postponed. Hanekom said the committee was keen to conclude the hearing as soon as possible, and didn't want unnecessary delays. (WHY)

"At the same time we want a fair process throughout," he added. (HOW CAN YOU HAVE A FAIR PROCESS THROUGHOUT WHEN PEOPLE ARE CLINGING TO BE COMPLAINANTS AND ALSO JUDGES TO MALEMA?)

"We will meet tomorrow [Thursday] with Malema's representatives and hopefully we will get information on Malema's state of health and when he is expected to be discharged... you know he might be serious. (WHAT RUBBISH QUERY IS THIS? IS MY PRESIDENT REALLY EMPLOYING PEOPLE IN HIS CABINET ONLY TO NORMALIZE HOSPITALIZATION OF PATIENTS WITHOUT SERIOUS MEDICAL PROBLEMS OR IS MALEMA NOW SUPPOSED TO BE MALINGERING AND, AS A PRE-CONDEMNED MAN, NOT ALLOWED TO FALL ILL?)

"Normally one is not admitted into hospital with a mere cold." (SAYS DOCTOR WHO?)

Sincerely, Honourable Hanekom, I read with shock your comments on that day, if comments were correctly quoted, about Mr Julius Malema’s state of health.  You were quoted as suggesting that the young man must have a better reason for being away ill than what you and I read.  That the nation can judge for herself what exactly you are trying to say, I suggest that you publish your entire statement given to the media when you heard about Mr Julius Malema’s poor health.

Until such time as you do that, I want to suggest the ANC should forthwith remove you from chairing the Disciplinary against any other member in the future, as someone simply too biased or even racist where natives like Malema, like wild animals, are not supposed to be falling ill (unless after taking a good shot from a hunter), let alone take doctors’ orders to lie low for a flu Hanekom’s Disciplinary notwithstanding.

Comrade Derek Hanekom and my very Honourable Sir who has been the head of the ANC Disciplinary against Mr Julius Malema, I am not going to mince my words.

You are for me one extraordinary character if ever there was one and I am getting the heebie-jeebies just thinking that you are also my cabinet minister, albeit deputy.  You’ve left me introspecting: is this the type of manning to government and rule of law I’ve been spending my entire life seeing to it getting erected in the place of Apartheid South Africa?

Better still, for this evening, you have turned my introspection into an extrovert’s gala and I am busy wondering out loud if

1.  You are, and please educate me, the ethnic Boer your surname suggests or a mere embedment to this respectable nation also known as Afrikaners, the white tribe of Africa.

2.  You have a clue what the Bantu/Tonga/Zion/Tonga Pixley ka Isaka Seme, the youngish founder of the ANC, had in mind for membership, particularly senior membership, to his organization; or all that you have is a mere notion of happenstance that the founder was however not the First President of the organization.

I honestly do not believe you will reply to this open letter, let alone to afford an answer to the two questions above as not even Seme’s fellow-Bantus (currently occupying senior ANC positions) have bothered to understand Seme (“Mbuyazi The African Hunter”) and that is why they are overeager to destroy Mbuyazi’s follower, (Malema “The African Agriculturist”).

So, please, Honourable Mr Hanekom, forgive me my leeway for generalizations at your expense here since I have had too much of similar deportment and behaviour I have coined the “Hanekom Syndrome”.  Plainly, I do not know what post-1994 is wrong with clearly a few individuals too many from the so-called white Africans, particularly those hailing from your ethnicity supposedly.

You as an African native/Bantu organization (as the ANC was “natively” christened originally and has in essence remained native to this day) will give this non-Bantu guy a job as a judge, arbitrator or some othr arbiter and, before you know it, he will take the job too personally, rather than merely professionally!  That guy will view himself as the very godsend in playing judge to a particular accused, the very embodiment of predestination. And I think that attitude sucks; and it tends to do a great disservice to a nation as great as the Afrikaner, again an assumption from the Hanekom name you carry.

I am sure every one who has ever sat on the receiving end of one of these intra-departmental or -organizational “judges”, may have a story to corroborate about this Hanekom Syndrome.  It is not a pandemic, but where it occurs, it is definitely virulent where too often the accused is alleged to have done something bad to fellow-Afrikaners.  I must be quick to point out though, that his Syndrome is nowhere to be found in the supreme courts of South Africa where my experience has over the past 7 years taken me to discover sons and daughters of the Afrikaners being some of the most disinterested and unbiased judges you could ever find anywhere in the world, only too ready to recuse themselves at the slightest reasonable request by an “accused”.

Now a glimpse taken at your scenario, Honourable Hanekom, Sir. Your Malema has been found guilty of hate speech against your fellow Afrikaners, right?  Malema has allegedly called your fellow whites “criminals”, right...?... and one of the reasons why he has been in front of your Disciplinary! Malema is allegedly demanding land for the landless and a position that you have apparently gone on record to oppose, right?  How many more of these must I cite?

I mean, how on earth have you, Honourable Mr Hanekom (although not a judge in the strict sense of the word) not to this day, and not despite two such applications, recused yourself for the reasons that any reasonable Bantu in Mr Julius Malema’s shoes can clearly see?

I mean, if I were in your shoes and believed like most so-called white propagandists want to make us believe that, for an example, the song Malema’s Rendition of Dubulibhunu, has a literal meaning of harming Afrikaner communities of South Africa, I would not have waited for Mr Malema's reported application for a recusal.  Rather, I would have, on the basis of conscience if any still exists, offered a recusal.

I would have said I am as much an African as Mr Malema is, and so he can say what he likes about us Boers, about them Zulus, Shangaans or them any other ethnic group bar his Pedi group, but I'm here to stay as an Afrikaner and I am not about to prove my African Colours by sticking them to my own personal gavel against a fellow African Malema disagreeable though Malema may be to Die Volk where I come from.

I would have said, in comparison to me, there were many darker-skinned but equally or even better-equipped lawyers at hand (if chairing a Disciplinary requires a law degree) who could have handled the Malema case and so I am quits for the sake of the justice that he doesn't feel from my chairmanship and I am quits for the sake of my own pride, ek die trots Boer.

Of course, Blogger is not Honourable Mr Hanekom, as Honourable Mr Hanekom marches to the sound of his own (some would say Volk's) drum and the in-tune gesticulations of his band sergeant major in the Party ducking the white fears of the Western Cape.

Perhaps more importantly, Honourable Mr Hanekom could never withdraw from the Malema case without bruising the cataract that has for many moons now blurred for his masters what is otherwise a Berlin Wall between state and party.  This myopia would probably declare that if he unceremoniously recused himself in the interest of national justice rather than of party loyalty, he might as well "recuse" himself from the post of Science and Technology Deputy Minister!

Honourable Mr Hanekom, I have a lesson to share about brown Africans in coexistence with pink Africans finding themselves adjudging or arbitrating in a manner too colour-blind even for 2011.  I desire to underscore that lesson with no less than the red carpet of South Africa’s supreme law.

You know very well that despite the best intentions of every letter and spirit of the constitution, South Africa is still very much a racially-polarized nation.  If that premise is accepted, however genuine you Honourable Mr Hanekom may be at heart, you are not helping those  social gelling and welding processes if you insist on playing the judge.  You cannot play that judge on someone who perceives you as biased on the basis of that skin colour of  yours regarded as overpowering to the swarthier races of South Africa’s scenario and a skin colour which is also economically, if unfairly, favoured in the lexicon of Mr Julius Malema’s Youth League.  Playing the judge is also a far cry from such tenets as freedoms of conscience and association most of which are immanent in our national constitution.

If I boast South Africa’s freedom of socializing only with my fellow-Bantus without being called a racist, what constitutional precept takes away that same right once I stand accused? Is it not a fair discrimination on my part to boot out that non-Bantu judge particularly where both the past and the pass muster show him to be inimical to my cause at hand?

I hope you got my drift there.  But now, by standing your ground for the judgement throne when you could have walked away with no fanfare except a clean pair of heels if the President of the Party should chase you to it, you have painted a frightening picture to me of what the great ANC has come to.

You have decided to stay on; to leave your fingerprints on the trigger that on this day on this Thursday 10/11/2011 kills the Malema boy.

If you had decided to stay on for the reason that in the Chambers of the Disciplinary no one darker was prepared to take your position when you recuse, have you paused to think why they shivered at the idea of taking your place?  Would it be far-fetched for me to surmise that they feared retribution by the native African and condemnation by history?

So did you do what your vasbyt stunt on Malema because you wanted to be their hero?  And do you think they will thank you?

Has it ever crossed your mind that the judgment you announced today could signal the Zuma ANC end in an ongoing act of auto-erotic asphyxiation that started long before Julius Malema became Youth League President?

Or are you one of the strong believers that “The ANC will be here when Jesus comes and so none of its many shameful sins will kill it”?

If Jesus were to come  tonight as you have shown Mr Malema the door for five shameful years, coming only for a mere stroll and not to change the world, who do you think will be this one man blamed for all the mayhem to follow the sudden collapse of the ANC?

Do you think the end of that ANC would signal a contemporaneous end of (or contrariwise sharpen) the contradictions between South Africa’s native and the former European settler like yourself?

Have you  ever sat down to consider as a student of history what the books would be reading like today if all the Jews who collaborated with Nazism in Germany were highlighted the way the information superhighway is highlighting South African politics today?

What would the books have been reading like if all the African chiefs who collaborated with slave trade had been put up there for bookworms to devour?

I think you know the answers to these questions and by the same token accept the assertion that the greatest prostitute in the world is always the official national history.

Or maybe you do not go that far in your analyses; with all you are thinking of being this job at hand, putting Youth League President Mr Julius Malema through the gauntlet, and finding him guilty with heavy sentence, that is all.

In that case, even I would tell you this, Honourable Mr Hanekom: The pink man Hanekom will bear the cross for posterity in the place of whatever brown man Zuma Mantashe or whichever of them that is rumoured in the media to be after the young man’s scalp.

Is this the depiction you would like history posterity to attach to your name?  Or is there some bigger geopolitical play that us lesser men and women have no clue about, something to explain the reason why you keep stuck as Malema’s “Judge”?

Now there has also been the allegations that foreign intelligence forces are at play in ANC squabble, an allegation that first surfaced when Mr Jacob Zuma was supposed to be sent to jail for corruption.

Shouldn’t such rumoured involvement of foreign interests in the affairs of the ANC squabbles have been the very reason why you should have quit chairmanship for the Malema case, if indeed there should be such a force coercing you to stay in that position?

Maybe you have no clue what your actions and inactions have had on so-called black township dwellers in South Africa, where the ANC gets the bulk of its vote.   People who, like me, thought they understand the Boer thinking, believe it was very naive of you to stay put on the chairmanship that saw Mr Malema suspended for five years today.  We think if there was no naiveté on the part of a pink man overseeing the weathervane of fate over a brown man, there can be only one reason: privy to information that there is another pink man much higher up in global affairs benefiting from the  crucifixion of yet another ANC Jesus of South Africa just like they crucified Black Jesus  Albert Luthuli whose murder to this day  no one in ANC power seems interested in seriously investigating beyond   naming a party’s national headquarters pretty fit to be pelted by young people peeved by the "mistreatment" of Mr Malema.

What happened today in the Zuma’s ANC is viewed by Africa as a simple and straightforward disgrace.

The so-called white voters will greet this with particular disdain for the ANC.  The black voters, even those who disliked Mr Malema, will greet it with disgust.  I dread that there will be just no Zuma-ANC surviving this self-mutilation, save as a mere ghost of its previous self, shadowed by sycophants masquerading as a skeletal bureaucracy half of whom will be searching for their last opportunity in government  looting a.k.a. “lucrative tenders” in the  remaining 12 months’ life of a political dinosaur staring extinction in the eye.  If a pale man should be seen to have done this “dirty” job poor Derek Hanekom was saddled with (and almost surely saddling himself into it too) in crushing Malema’s brown Adams’s apple.

I have been writing for so long I am not sure if I’m making my point even to me at this stage.  But let me take me to the picture above, once again.  Imagine behind the white man stood a big-bodied swarthy iNkosi in traditional regalia like Mr Zuma would look in his traditional dress when back at his Inkandla homestead of the Zuma chieftaincy, where do you think the greater focus of anger would go?  To the Whiteman with the gun that shot the boy? Or to the black man that, like an Abraham without his God, secured his own black brother’s child for the purpose of this grisly rite?  Do you think it is by mistakes that those US citizens with conscience over the fall of Gadaffi would have more anger against the ethnic-African-Obama administration role in the affair than they would against European?

Ah, at last, you see my point.  So Mr Jacob Zuma would have been damned for Mangaung if Malema survived the verdict of his Disciplinary today.  He is damned as Malema got the five-year-suspension boot  at the hands of a so-called white man,

IS LENGIBATSANDZAKO A PESSIMIST’S BLOG?

To talk to a ghost, maybe I am indeed a pessimist, Mr Malema.  I will cure this with a poetic composition I practised a few weeks ago on a native East-African boy who turned five.  His name is Joel, not so far away from “Juju”, which I learn is your pet name.  Joel must forgive me as I transplant his name for local is lekker (everybody in the world knows that charity begins at home).

The poem marvels at the fact that where sixty-year old politicians are too often viewed as “young” in their field, you have apparently shaken the sub-continent by the age of 30, which is still your official age in 2011.

Tired of frontispieces, my poem probably envisages you surviving the rumpus that came with the Disciplinary.  It sees you as a man, approaching the Honourable Zuma as his own man too, because Guys, believe it or not: the people you are or are not fronting for ARE GOING TO KILL BOTH THE ANC AND WITH IT THE ASPIRATIONS OF THE FORMERLY OPPRESSED MILLIONS PIXLEY SEME FOUNDED THE ANC IN ORDER TO REDEEM.

The poem is in a language you probably do not understand.  But don’t worry.  You will understand it soon because the United States of Africa will be in your lifetime a reality; and Kiswahili will be the official language of the continent.

... Kwetu Uswahili unatoka...

....Angani huko pananyota...

Tupatie moja Juju tusisononeke!

Tunakushangilia Mtoto wewee!

MIAKA THELATHINI Juju Hongera!

Unaugusa mlima na kujitangaza!

Mlima wa Uchagani siyo utani!

Milima Himalaya wengi imetwanga!

MIAKA AROBAINI Juju kweli umekua!

Mara ya pili Mlima unagusa

Maisha ya mlima na vumbi unanusa

Mikono miwili mlima umekumbatiwa!

Kilimanjaro ya kale nayo kuitika

Lakwako Juju hapo ni kukiri

Majukumu juu ya maisha nimeshika

Miaka arobaini wazazi hawakuninyima!

Juju tayari MIAKA HAMSINI!

Jina lako hakika Sibusiso Vilane

Mguu mmoja tayari umenyanyua

Kuupanda kabisa mlima wa maisha

Sasa kweli Mjomba uko tayari?

Utayumbayumba au utashikilia?

Kigugumizi Mjomba wewe cha nini?

Uoga waMusa mie Juju sisingizii!

Mjomba mie simu nipigie

Kuwashughulikia Wazee sisiti

Kwanini mkawie kumpa siri?

Mlima kupanda mtoto ajizatiti!

MIAKA SITINI kwa Juju Bingwa

Jogoo huyu kotekote anawika!

Usielijuwa wakuambie lipi?

CHUNGA Juu ya Kilimanjaro umefika..

..Upareni wa milima hawana upara!

Ukipaa juu vichwa-uzee vising'are

Hiyo kwa lugha ya Wazazi niHeshima

Uyaoneje maboga macho juu umegeuza?

Angani huko Juju pananyota!

Moja tupatie ndoto tumechoka!

Simabawa tumeyaona..?

...Tunashangilia yanaota!

---

[1] I was to realize after this elegy that inasmuch as I was mourning my friend Hloma, I also murdered Afrikaner Churchman and Freedom Fighter, Beyers Naudé some 292 days (in retrospect) before his actual death (by natural causes) on about the 3rd September 2004!  As the “murderer”, I did not go to any of his commemorative functions stretching from signing condolence books to memorial services, primary of which took place Sunday 12 September 2004, even via SABC Television.  I took solace in the fact that the people of Africa and I, through my Hloma tribute, were one in seeing the Freedom-Loving, White-African Giant for what he actually was.  Even in my crime of intellectual murder, I felt honoured!

[2] Tanzania, a fine example of the will of the people in government action, is, as will be clear in the lines below, known to graduate from bluster by individual civilians to death-defying action by the Tanzanian People’s Defence Force (TPDF) in fraternity with embattled fellow southern Africans.  According to South Africa’s Star Newspaper  (16 August 2004), Tanzania was being financially assisted by Maputo:

 “…in returning [on Sunday 22 August 2004] the bodies of 99 Tanzanian [People’s Defence Force] patriots buried there…for exhumation and transport costs back to Tanzania…” as “Tanzania first sent troops to Mozambique in 1977 to help forces fighting the then Rhodesia and again in 1987 as Mozambique battled south African-backed rebels”

To this day, Tanzania is very jealous about the gains of Africa’s independence.  A month earlier (as reported by Zimbabwe’s 25-July edition of the Voice Newspaper):

“Tanzania is prepared to wage another military struggle against forces seeking to undermine the gains of the liberation struggle in Africa and Zimbabwe in particular.  The visiting secretary general of the ruling Tanzanian Chama Cha Mapinduzi, Cde Phillip Mangula said ‘if it means we have to carry arms against and wage another war against these former settlers, we are prepared to do that…we need to ensure that we have our own strong mouth pieces that tell things as they are from an African perspective and I guarantee that this penetration the West is doing into Africa will cease’  …He said the time had come for the continent to act and defend its liberation heritage”