Tata Mandiba Mandela

19 July, 2008 | 5 comments | Category: peace & conflict

if there is any political world figure I feel I need to pay tribute to, it is this man. A man who stands for peace! and what better time than his birth day when the world celebrates him – a world which he has recolored, recharged and graced.

“How blessed we have been. He has become the most admired statesman in the world, an icon of forgiveness and reconciliation, a moral colossus.” – Desmond Tutu

His many names:

Tata – This isiXhosa word means “father” and is a term of endearment that many South Africans use for Mr Mandela. Since he is a father figure to many, they call him Tata regardless of their own age.

Madiba – This is the name of the clan of which Mr Mandela is a member. This name is much more important than a surname as it refers to the ancestor from which a person is descended. Madiba was the name of a Thembu chief who ruled in the Transkei in the 18th century. It is considered very polite to use someone’s clan name.

Tribute to Mandiba, the man through his quotations:

~ I dream of an Africa which is in peace with itself.

~ Whatever the sentence Your Worship sees fit to impose upon me for the crime for which I have been convicted before this court may it rest assured that when my sentence has been completed, I will still be moved as men are always moved, by their conscience. I will still be moved by my dislike of the race discrimination against my people. When I come out from serving my sentence, I will take up again, as best I can, the struggle for the removal of those injustices until they are finally abolished.

~ No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite. (more…)

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Chinese are Black!…Race is wack!

16 July, 2008 | 3 comments | Category: I.dentity, i.mmigration, madness!

Race, ethnicity, nationalism…are all social creations with gooey slimy fluidity. All are… Whaaaack, frankly…:)

Waaack (n.) = Completely transient cultural construct with the utility of making sense of the world around us. Such waackdom is usually on the quest to emulate another mindboggler – ‘truth’. Said wackdom aspires, at times succeeds to appear heavy enough to stand as ground for years and years of suffering, conflict, tension and chaos! Said waackdom is gooey, fluid, ridiculous madness …but never silly and flimsy given its powerfully divisive and instrumental ability to ignite perplexing flames of suffering!

Recently, in a humorous turn of decision-making by the Pretoria High Court/south african government, the race farce was exposed!

Brace yourself to drive off into some utter madness!….these turn of events get beyond intriguing in light of the history of apartheid, and some iffy history with worker immigrants in Africa (read: Indians in Eastern Africa). Lo and behold, SA pulls that RACE card! And the racers are off….

The High Court in South Africa has ruled that Chinese South Africans are to be reclassified as black people.

It made the order so that ethnic Chinese can benefit from government policies aimed at ending white domination in the private sector. The Chinese Association of South Africa took the government to court, saying its members had been discriminated against.

An estimated 200,000 ethnic Chinese live in South Africa. more (more…)

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senduQ in Maltese

11 July, 2008 | 5 comments | Category: I.dentity

Doing a google search, the quirkiest thing came up- Senduq is a word in Maltese which means ‘Chest’, a box for safe keeping. In Dire lingo it is used to describe the cupboards, storage boxes, coca cola racks …basically any storage container with a rectangular form.

Who could have thought that a google search vaguely connected to Dire Dawa’s multicultural lingo lands smack where the Italian and Arabic languages fuse to give Maltese? Malta is the 30th smallest country in the world located across the largest desert and the Mediterranean Sea away from Dire… an island which has a total population of 400,000 (about the size of Dire’s population) and interestingly, not everyone IN Malta speaks Maltese!

Well, well…ok maybe I’m making it sound an itty bit more like an Indiana Jones investigation than it actually is. It appears that Maltese is one of the many semetic languages which may have variations of the word ’senduq’. I don’t speak all these languages so I wouldn’t know…

wiki says: “Maltese is generally accepted to be descended from Siculo-Arabic, the Arabic dialects that developed in Sicily and the rest of Southern Italy, with substantial borrowing from Sicilian Italian and Italian. It is the only Semitic language written in the Latin alphabet in its standard form.” (more…)

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