Origins

Look at that picture. Isn't that one of the cutest things you've ever seen? Innocence, purity, happiness, a bright future. You can't help but think of anything else when you look at that picture. It's enough to make Darth Vader smile, honestly.

That is how all humans start out in life. Pure. Not a hint of badness anywhere, and you can't even imagine there being any negative traits in the future when you consider a tiny toddler. For all intents and purposes, all babies come into this world with positive prospects and nothing less. This is reflect in the names that parents give their children. In general African culture, there's a belief that when a baby is born with its fists clenched, it is holding on to its future, and a positive future at that.

As I said, this is how all humans start out. Including the "bad" ones. Each and every killer out there was once a cute baby. Every rapist, every pedophile, every hijacker, every armed robber, every con artist. They were once cute babies with nothing but good prospects. This is something which has always scared me. Go to your nearest creche and look at the bunch of toddlers on the playground: chances are that amongst the future doctors and engineers and accountants and pastors, you're also looking at the future convicts and gangsters and prostitutes. As hard as it may be, look at your own young child and consider their future as well. I've always been bothered by this. Where and when does the switch happen? At what point does a person look at the grandmother who raised him and think it's okay to force himself on her?

I think most people just find it easier to look at "bad" people and just assume that they've always been bad and they were always trouble makers even while young, but this is certainly not the case. Adolf Hitler himself, he was once a cute little baby at some point, he wasn't born with a desire to kill all Jewish people. And the logical conclusion to reach is, all negative people we see today are a result of society. All criminals are a result of their family structure. Sure, things like poverty and disease will exacerbate the situation, but at its core the roots of all such things are in the family and society.

In my own family, I've seen this dramatic change. I have a younger cousin that I grew up with, few years ago he was a cute child who cried at the slightest scratch and was never violent: he was almost everyone's favourite. Today, he's a school dropout, he's already been in jail a few times, and has had a taste of public justice due to his criminal ways. Five years ago, nobody would have imagined that he would turn out like this. I have a 4 year old nephew, without a doubt my favourite person in the world and he's as smart as they come. I can't even begin to imagine him growing up to be less than a role model to everyone around him.

But it all depends on us, society. We shape the future leaders and the future sluggards. We shape the future teachers and criminals. I wish that people would consider the kinds of adults they're going to raise before even considering making a child. Truth is, most adults are nowhere near equipped to raise another human being. Unfortunately, there's no qualification or screening required for you to make a baby; even the "least qualified"of society can contribute to population growth. You can't control other people, but you can control yourself. Think about the kind of parent you're gonna be. And if you've already made that baby, consider very well if you're raising someone you'll definitely be proud to call your product 30 years from now. Raise a man who will know the value of woman, and respect them enough to never even consider harming them.

Of course, I don't have a child of my own so I can't say I've got it figured out. But the least we can do is make sure that we're doing a good enough job. After all, raising another human being is the biggest responsibility you're ever gonna have. If you make sure that you're qualified at your job and you're the best you can be, what stops you from doing the same with your child?

I rest,

Mzwandile

Are We the People God Forgot?

By: Field Ruwe

Gripped by a sense of failure, I sat on the bench and stared at the horizon in the direction of my motherland. A jab of pain couldn’t let go.

“Are we the forgotten people?” I asked.

I felt my eyes fill, but fought back tears. The smile on the white people in the hall is what had brought me here, to consult with God. I stepped out because I could not share their happiness; their joy, and their pride as a people. They were happy that I had come to see what had made them exceptional.

The guest speaker had bruised my self-worth with his words.

“There’s nothing we have failed to achieve,” he said in his speech. His pose exuded a calm confidence. “We’ve explored, discovered, and invented. We’ve built a rocket to take us far and beyond…to our neighbors in the universe, and now we have this baby here to take care of Mars.”

In the middle of the hall was a model of NASA’s rover named “Curiosity.” Currently on Mars, the six-wheeled robot is helping scientists to study habitability, climate, and geology of Mars.

“Because we are a curious people, we have named him Curious,” the speaker said. “It’s the curiosity in us that has produced geniuses of this world, among them, Isaac Newton, The Wright Brothers, Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs. We can drive, fly, and tweet. Now, Curious here is trying to make it possible for us to colonize the red planet.”

“God bless America!” someone in the audience shouted.

The hall rang with applause and cheers. I couldn’t partake. I knew what the speaker meant by “we.” I knew it the moment I had entered the hall and set my eyes on the robot. It was an ingenious piece of work that evoked the graffiti I had read on a dilapidated building across my street: “Why do you blacks think you are entitled to a free ride through life?”

“Indeed why?” I asked myself. “What is wrong with us? Aren’t we entitled to the same curiosity, the same happiness?”

“Yes you are.” I thought I heard a voice. “Happiness is everyone’s responsibility. The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts. The white people in the hall are happy because they have resolved to keep happy. Their success is their happiness. They are not sitting on a bench of failure like you blacks.”

“We’ve tried,” I said. “Each time we try, we are dragged down by the very white people you are talking about.”

“Rubbish! That’s the most damn thing I have heard in a long time. You ought to be ashamed of yourself blaming whites.”

“It is their fault,” I insisted. “In their effort to dominate us, they keep undermining our intelligence. They have put us at the top of the worst of mankind. Look at all the statistics. We are at the deep end. We’ve been at the bottom since we came into contact with them. They actually insist we are the worst.”

“And you believe them.”

“The world believes them and because it does, we are held in suspicion by all non-black people. When we present our ideas, they toss them out.”

“Have you tried to pick up the rejected ideas, brush off the dust, develop them yourselves to prove a point to the world?”

I hesitated.

“Well until you do, you will be blaming happy people for your bad statistic. They laugh when you blame slavery, colonialism, and all the baloney. Get off that bench, you lazy pessimistic whiner, and do what other non-white people are doing, creating their own happiness. Oh, one thing, happiness is hard work, remember that.”

I got up. There was no way I was going back in the hall. It was Saturday afternoon. I wearily jumped into my car and headed for my local.

It is a rendezvous for my people, a kind of intellectual center for African-Americans and Africans in the diaspora. Every Saturday evening we mingle, drink and laugh, and often entertain visiting academics, African politicians, and cultural figures.

Set in bistro style, it is our version of Speaker’s Corner in London’s Hyde Park. I call it a dynamic mirror of black consciousness. Anyone can get up and say what is on their mind as long as it is not a load of bull.

It is here I learned how splintered and greedy a black people we are. I learned that just because African-Americans are black does not mean they embrace us as their own. Riding on white success, African-Americans believe they are miles ahead of us. Actually, many do not see themselves as Africans.

“I am a black American,” one professor keeps saying. “I have no African ancestors or relatives that link me to Africa. It was damn of Jessie Jackson to coin that African-American crap.”

I also learned that black islanders do not think much of Africans. No matter how much hurricane Isaac pounds them, they are glad they are not on the most impoverished continent.

Of course North Africans are ashamed to be called Africans. And although Ethiopians, Somalis, and Northern Sudanese are part of sub-Sahara, they too carry with them their own prejudices. Sadly put, we are no one wants to be.

When I walked in, a bearded black man was on the podium talking about Obama.

“Like Biden said, if you don’t vote for him, they gonna put you all back in chains,” he told a small crowd of blacks seated in a well lit room.

I sat next to Diallo, an accomplice from Senegal and whispered a “hi.”

The speaker acknowledged my presence and continued. “I’m told a group of African-America pastors is calling on blacks to give Obama a ‘no’ vote for his support for gay marriage. They want to take us back to the Bush-bush days. For four years we black people have walked tall…”

I had jumped from the frying pan into the fire. Here the mood was that of a black on black exasperation. Black blood was at hypertension level. But again that’s where it’s been in blacks around the world.

We are ever bombarded by melancholic issues like racism, hunger, conflicts, poverty, disease, dictatorship, corruption, back-stabbing, blatant lies, and empty promises by our political leaders.

“How do we as a people become as happy as them?” I asked myself as I watched the bearded speaker blast black conservatives in the Republican Party—Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Clarence Thomas, Michael Steele, Herman Cain, Alan Keyes, Ron Christie, and all.

“They make black unity difficult to achieve,” he said.

I nodded.

I closed my eyes and felt my anger climbing in tandem. I was thinking about my own people in sub-Sahara Africa.

It is in black Africa that failure is deeply entrenched. It is here that 854 million blacks are locked in a time warp, content to live in anarchic and deplorable conditions. It is in Africa that the dream of a united Africa under one government, common citizenship and common destiny has eluded our political leaders.

Curious was still bothering me. All sorts of thoughts ricocheted through my mind. I felt the urge to speak and took to the podium as soon as the bearded man was done.

I spoke: “White people created their power on ideas. Why can’t we? Are we so lazy, we’ve left our plight in the hands of God? Are we to believe that this is who we are, a people without ideas?”

I paused. The audience was attentive.

“Let me ask an outrageous question. I have so often heard hardcore racists say that we are the cursed descendants of Ham, the “black” son of Noah. Are we really? Can someone please tell me we are not? If we are then it explains why we find ourselves in this abyss. But even if we are, we can pull ourselves out in the same way as other non-white people.”

I was expecting a comment or some sort of denunciation. There was none.

“Let’s forget the Ham nonsense and look at ourselves as a black people. Although black is no one’s favorite color because it symbolizes darkness, sorrow, and the primordial void, it is a color of power. It is authoritative. How then can we take pride in this color and be psychologically driven to become a happy and respected powerful people?

“I’ll answer. We must begin to convert physical power into mental power. Muscle power into brain power. That’s all we need to do. That’s what all successful people have done, Jews, Asians, and others.

“Today, Jews, victims of anti-Semitism, dominate most of the important institutions: academics, politics, the media, and sciences. Their success is the result of their own effort.

“Why can’t we, victims of racism, do the same?” I asked.

I insisted that the factors that work together to create Jewish wealth can be applied to blacks.

“First, like Jews, we must develop a culture of sticking together, hard work, education, and deferred gratification. We already have created an artistic community. We must now go scientific. Our children must enter college in significant numbers to study the sciences. We must produce scientists, engineers, and more doctors. We must have our own cars, trains…”

“We’ve heard that one before,” someone cut in. “It won’t work.”

“It’s a pity, isn’t it?” I responded. “Nothing works, so we don’t bother to try. In the Jewish community billionaires like De Beers’ Nicky Oppenheimer, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, computer mogul Michael Dell, Google co-owner Sergey Brin, and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg invest in the ingenuity and creativity of their own people. Why can’t our rich black men and women do the same?”

The 2012 Forbes magazine features an African as the wealthiest black. Nigerian Aliko Dangote has a net wealth of $11.2 billion. Also, Nigerian Mike Adenuga is worth $4.3 billion, and South Africa’s Patrice Motsepe is at $2.7 billion.

The U.S. has black billionaires among them Oprah Winfrey ($2.7 billion) and Bob Johnson of BET fame ($1.1 billion). There are hundreds of black millionaires in the movie, entertainment, and sports industries like Spike Lee, Denzel Washington, Will Smith, musicians Jay-Z and Beyoncé, and golfer Tiger Woods. By last year the salaries of black athletes in the NBA, NFL, and MLB totaled over $5 billion.

“Ladies and gentlemen, black wealth in the world is estimated at more than $100 billion,” I said. “Our children need just a portion to elevate our race to acceptable standards. Let’s invest in their ingenuity and create happiness of our own.”

Field Ruwe is a US-based Zambian media practitioner, historian, and author. He is a PhD candidate at George Fox University and serves as an adjunct professor (lecturer) in Boston. ©Ruwe2012

Economic Emancipation - Let's Get The Basics Right

By now, damn near everybody knows about the calls for the nationalization of the mines, banks and land by the ANC youth league and various other parties. Personally, I think it's about bloody time, we're 17 years overdue on such initiatives. The way that the land issue has been handled so far (willing buyer-willing seller etc) has been a flaw from the very beginning. If equality is to be realized in our lifetime, then bold steps have to be taken, baby steps wont do. As things stand, South Africa is just a few service-delivery protests away from anarchy. But then I suppose that the first democratic administration had to adopt a softly-softly approach, for the sake of peace, preserving the strength of the economy and to appease the international community. T'was a thin line to walk, really.

However, in our quest for wealth redistribution, we cannot be haphazard in our approach. Reality has to lead the way. And the reality is, the land that was taken away from our forefathers for the sake of mining and farming is not the same land that we want to take back today. Back then, just about everyone lived off the produce of their own land. And, if not, there was always a small shop in the area to cater for the general needs of the community. Times have changed. Very few people live off the produce of their own land. And I'm willing to stick my neck out and say absolutely nobody would like to go back to those times. Currently, our economy is heavily dependent on the mining sector and the resources sector as a whole. In fact, over 45% of the total market capitalization of the JSE comprises solely of the resources sector. The mining companies are always the leaders in whatever the market does on any given day. And, as the recent recession clearly showed, we cannot undermine the effects of the market performance on the rest of the "real" economy. Also, South Africa is a producer of vast amounts of agricultural commodities. Wines, sugar, corn, wheat, you name is, we have it. And this sector employs millions.

Now, clearly, this nationalization matter is not something to be approached with a ndloviyangena attidude. If we're going to take over the mines, banks and the land, than we have to be sure we know what we're going to do with these assets afterwards. So how many black mine managers do we have in the country? How many do we have currently in training, ready to take over the reigns? How many black bankers do we have? Would we be willing to pay these bankers and mine managers the astronomical salaries they are currently being paid by the private sector? More crucially, would we be able to maintain the profitability and productivity that these banks and mines have maintained for centuries.

Regardless of how we may dispise the practices of the apartheid administration, we cannot be blind to the economic behemoth that they created on this continent. Even when there were international oil sanctions against South Africa, the spineless leaders back then said "F**k the world" and created SASOL, our very own petrol producer, the first company to ever produce petrol from coals and a large scale and, currently, the biggest company doing so in the world, by a galactic margin. I can count other companies of South African origin which are now international giants, the likes of SAB, De Beers etc. These economic powerhouses were not built in a short while, and the transfer of their wealth will also not happen overnight. (Sidetrack: If you'd like to know about the more sinister achievements of the apartheid government, I suggest you get yourself a book titled "How South Africa Built Six Atom Bombs" by Al Venter. It's agonizingly boring read, but the facts presented therein will amaze you)

At the end of the day, if we as black South Africans want to really own the factors of economic productivity in this country, we first have to make sure that we have the skills to and the will to run those factors productively and sustainably. I'm sure we have all seen or heard of some farmer who was given a farm to run, and actually ran that farm to the ground. It's the same thing that happened in Zimbabwe after the land grabs started. And even now, many years since that episode and after the adoption of the US dollar as the officially currency, Zimbabwe is nowhere near a full recovery. And it's a well documented fact that the Zimbabwean black population is better educated than the South African black population.

Let's start with the basics first. South Africa has all the necessary resources in order to become an economic powerhouse. But, if we are unable to use those resources effectively, then all our potential will be wasted. Let's capitalize on what we have. Owning a pure pedigree racehorse means nothing if you don't know how to ride it and keep it competitive. Let us ready ourselves ready ourselves to take over the reigns completely. Let us build enterpreneurial and management skills, not just workers who are only qualified to earn just more than minimum wage for the rest of their lives. Then, and only then, can we start making demands for ownership.

I rest,
Mzwandile