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…)

Possibly Related Posts:

• The Uncomfortable Truth: Nneka
• Kill Aid!
• Words & Incense
• Wayna & Dinaw: Slums of Paradise
• Obama Should do for Africa…

Hand-tied: pulse of the horn

13 June, 2008 | 7 comments | Category: peace & conflict, thinking...

and the list goes on…

I feel completely hand-tied sometimes! Like that time there was this group activity thingie where everyone had their eyes blinded or hands tied to test drive a disability.

Sometimes I feel rage, this bubbling anger at the brutality people allow for their luxurious, ridiculous pleasures. I want to screammm, yell at them! Harass them into submission! Something!

Sometimes the corners of my eyes sparkle with unshed tears, my heart so freaking heavy and jaws clenched that it hurts below my ears… some other time I just can’t help it and I chuckle at the heartbreaking predictability and absurdness of the events in the horn!

The horn of Africa is in flames (ha!…who knew keratin could be so flammable? hu?! lol) the Horn is an incomprehensible, unfathomable mess beyond all limits I knew! It is such a hot, smoking mess that it mad sitting and contemplating it, especially chatting along with others about ‘ohhh this freaking government!!’ or some other forsaken issue we try to solve…! (more…)

Possibly Related Posts:

• The Uncomfortable Truth: Nneka
• Flattery: Fast-tracking Success?
• Murky
• Kill Aid!
• Dark Spirits

Power…taking her son barack

6 March, 2008 | No comments | Category: I.dentity, book snip, i.mmigration

“”During the purge, all students studying abroad had to be summoned without explanation, their passports revoked…Students studying in Eastern Bloc countries did much worse. Many of them are still in jail. Or vanished. “You shouldn’t be too hard on Lolo,” the cousin repeated. “Such times are best forgotten.”

My mother left the cousin’s house in a daze… She began to walk without direction. She found herself in a wealthy neighborhood where the diplomats and generals lived in sprawling houses and wrought-iron gates. She saw a woman in bare feet and a tattered shawl wandering through an open gate…One of the men shouted for the woman to leave. Another man dug in his pocket and threw out a handful of coins. The woman ran after the coins with terrible speed, checking the road suspiciously as she gathered them to her bosom.

Power. The word fixed in my mother’s mind like a curse. In America, it had generally remained hidden from view until you dug beneath the surface of things until you visited an Indian reservation or spoke to a black person whose trust you had earned. But here power was undisguised, indiscriminate, naked, always fresh in the memory. Power had taken Lolo and yanked him back into line just when he thought he’d escaped, making him feel its weight, letting him know that his life wasn’t his own. That’s how things were, you couldn’t change it, you could just live by the rules, so simple once you learned them. And so Lolo had made his peace with power, learned the wisdom of forgetting. Just as his brother-in-law had done, making millions as a high official in the national oil company…

She remembered what Lolo had told her once when her constant questioning had finally touched a nerve “Guilt is a luxury only foreigners can afford” he had said. “Like saying whatever pops into your head.”

He was right, of course. She was a foreigner, middle-class and white and protected by her heredity whether she wanted protection or not. She could always leave if things got too messy. She looked out the window now and saw that Lolo and I had moved on, the grass flattened where the two of us had been. The sight made her shudder slightly, and she rose to her feet filled with a sudden panic.

Power was taking her son.

…She had taught me to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often characterized Americans abroad. But she now had learned, just as Lolo had learned, the chasm that separated the life chances of an American from those of an Indonesian. She knew which side of the divide she wanted her child to be on. I was an American, she decided, and my true life lay elsewhere.

___________________________________
In America, it…remained hidden from view until you dug beneath the surface…spoke to a black person whose trust you had earned…
___________________________________

“…We were always playing on the white man’s court, Ray had told me, by the white man’s rules. If the principal, or the coach, or a teacher, or Kurt, wanted to spit in your face, he could, because he had power and you didn’t. If he decided not to, if he treated you like a man or came to your defense, it was because he knew that the words you spoke, the clothes you wore, the books you read, your ambitions and desires, were already his. Whatever he decided to do, it was his decision to make, not yours, and because of that fundamental power he held over you, because it preceded and would outlast his individual motives and inclinations, any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning. In fact, you couldn’t even be sure that everything you had assumed to be an expression of your black, unfettered self- the humor, the song, the behind-the-back pass – had been freely chosen by you. At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap. Following this maddening logic, the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge that your own powerlessness, of your own defeat. And the final irony; should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors they would have name for that too, a name that would cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. Nigger.

In every page of every book, in Bigger Thomas and invisible men, I kept finding the same anguish, the same doubt; a self-contempt that neither irony nor intellect seemed to deflect…

Only Malcolm X’s autobiography seemed to offer something different. His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me; the blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will.”

from Barack Obama’s book ‘Dreams of My Father‘.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Opposite Sides of the Border
• Murky
• Kill Aid!
• Dark Spirits
• the horn’s dustyfoot wordisans

‘then one day i started thinking.’

23 December, 2007 | 5 comments | Category: book snip, peace & conflict, thinking...

…merely wanted to transcribe this train of thought…the crossroads call for it….

“To makes things simpler, Rieux, let me begin by saying I had the plague already, long before I came to this town and encountered it here. Which is tantamount to saying I’m like everybody else. Only there are some people who don’t know it, or feel at ease in that condition; others know and want to get out of it. Personally, I’ve always wanted to get out of it.

When I was young I lived with the idea of my innocence; that is to say, with no idea at all. I’m not the self-tormenting kind of person, and I made a suitable start in life. I brought off everything I set my hand to, I moved at ease in the field of intellect, I got on excellently with women, and if I had occasional qualms, they passed as lightly as they came. Then one day I started thinking. And now —-”

“…When I was seventeen my father asked me to come to hear him speak in court…The only picture I carried away with me of that day’s proceedings was a picture of the criminal. I have little doubt he was guilty…That little man of about thirty, with sparse, sandy hair, seemed so eager to confess everything, so genuinely horrified at what he had done and what was going to be done with him. He looked like a yellow owl scared blind by too much light. You understand –he was a living human being…something seemed to grip my vitals at that moment…I only knew that they were set on killing that living man.

…I’ve had to dwell on my start in life, since for me it really was the start of everything…I tried all sorts of jobs, and did not do too badly. But my real interest in life was the death penalty; I wanted to square accounts with that poor owl on the dock. So I became an agitator, as they say. I didn’t want to be pestiferous, that’s all. To my mind the social order around me was based on the death sentence, and by fighting the established order I’d be fighting against murder.

…In any case, my concern was not with arguments. It was with the poor owl; with that foul procedure whereby dirty mouths stinking of plague told a fettered man that he was going to die, and scientifically arranged things so that he should die, after nights and nights of mental torture where we waited to be murdered in cold blood…nothing in the world would induce me to accept any argument that justified such butcheries.

…All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences. You see, I have heard quantities of arguments, which very nearly turned my head, and turned other people’s heads enough to make them approve of murder and I’d come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain clear-cut language. So I resolved always to speak-and to act- quite clearly. That’s why I say there are pestilences and there are victims; no more than that. I grant we should add a third category: that of the true healers. But it’s a fact one doesn’t come across many of them, and anyhow it must be a hard vocation. That is why I decided to take, in every predicament, the victims’ side, so as to reduce the damage done. Among them I can at least try to discover how one attains to the third category…to peace.”

Tarrou in The Plague

I’ve been reading this book for some time now, struggling with getting the pages turned…until today when I hit the inflection point. To my mind Tarrou talks about personal choices each of us have to make; to work ‘with’ the world order, to work ‘against’ the world order [to fight it], or as he hesitantly acknowledges …to be ‘healers’ of the order.

In the midst of his abstract thoughts, he poses an intriguing question, after he proclaims “It comes to this, what interests me is learning how to become a saint.” Reiux retorts “But you don’t believe in God.” “Exactly! Can one be a saint without God? -that is the problem, in fact the only problem, I’m up against today.”

The book closes with this statement: “…quite simply what we learn in pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.“

Possibly Related Posts:

• The Uncomfortable Truth: Nneka
• Flattery: Fast-tracking Success?
• Murky
• Kill Aid!
• Dark Spirits

‘then one day i started thinking.’

23 December, 2007 | 5 comments | Category: book snip, peace & conflict, thinking...

…merely wanted to transcribe this train of thought…the crossroads call for it….

“To makes things simpler, Rieux, let me begin by saying I had the plague already, long before I came to this town and encountered it here. Which is tantamount to saying I’m like everybody else. Only there are some people who don’t know it, or feel at ease in that condition; others know and want to get out of it. Personally, I’ve always wanted to get out of it.

When I was young I lived with the idea of my innocence; that is to say, with no idea at all. I’m not the self-tormenting kind of person, and I made a suitable start in life. I brought off everything I set my hand to, I moved at ease in the field of intellect, I got on excellently with women, and if I had occasional qualms, they passed as lightly as they came. Then one day I started thinking. And now —-”

“…When I was seventeen my father asked me to come to hear him speak in court…The only picture I carried away with me of that day’s proceedings was a picture of the criminal. I have little doubt he was guilty…That little man of about thirty, with sparse, sandy hair, seemed so eager to confess everything, so genuinely horrified at what he had done and what was going to be done with him. He looked like a yellow owl scared blind by too much light. You understand –he was a living human being…something seemed to grip my vitals at that moment…I only knew that they were set on killing that living man.

…I’ve had to dwell on my start in life, since for me it really was the start of everything…I tried all sorts of jobs, and did not do too badly. But my real interest in life was the death penalty; I wanted to square accounts with that poor owl on the dock. So I became an agitator, as they say. I didn’t want to be pestiferous, that’s all. To my mind the social order around me was based on the death sentence, and by fighting the established order I’d be fighting against murder.

…In any case, my concern was not with arguments. It was with the poor owl; with that foul procedure whereby dirty mouths stinking of plague told a fettered man that he was going to die, and scientifically arranged things so that he should die, after nights and nights of mental torture where we waited to be murdered in cold blood…nothing in the world would induce me to accept any argument that justified such butcheries.

…All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences. You see, I have heard quantities of arguments, which very nearly turned my head, and turned other people’s heads enough to make them approve of murder and I’d come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain clear-cut language. So I resolved always to speak-and to act- quite clearly. That’s why I say there are pestilences and there are victims; no more than that. I grant we should add a third category: that of the true healers. But it’s a fact one doesn’t come across many of them, and anyhow it must be a hard vocation. That is why I decided to take, in every predicament, the victims’ side, so as to reduce the damage done. Among them I can at least try to discover how one attains to the third category…to peace.”

Tarrou in The Plague

I’ve been reading this book for some time now, struggling with getting the pages turned…until today when I hit the inflection point. To my mind Tarrou talks about personal choices each of us have to make; to work ‘with’ the world order, to work ‘against’ the world order [to fight it], or as he hesitantly acknowledges …to be ‘healers’ of the order.

In the midst of his abstract thoughts, he poses an intriguing question, after he proclaims “It comes to this, what interests me is learning how to become a saint.” Reiux retorts “But you don’t believe in God.” “Exactly! Can one be a saint without God? -that is the problem, in fact the only problem, I’m up against today.”

The book closes with this statement: “…quite simply what we learn in pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.“

Possibly Related Posts:

• The Uncomfortable Truth: Nneka
• Flattery: Fast-tracking Success?
• Murky
• Kill Aid!
• Dark Spirits