Love, War & The Distance Between

Wrote this as a tribute to Mama Winnie Madikizela-Mandela to honour her life, and contribution to political discourse as a anti-apartheid activist. In celebrating Women’s day, taking cognisance of many sheroes of similar stature, I contend with the notion of immortality, it is perhaps in the renewal of their hard sought values and determinations, that they too, never die.

Written in light of 1976 Soweto Uprising. No more fitting quote than this - "The consolidation of South Africa's democracy depends on socialization of youth into a good adult citizenry and their integration into society and polity" - Author Unknown

Looking on Freedom Day at the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre (JHGC), we reflect on the 27 years of our young democracy, and take into sober account that all the while South Africans were queuing to cast their ballot on the side of liberty, our Rwandan brothers and sisters were being slaughtered in the hundreds of thousands. As we revisit the lessons of our past, we remember the Father of Pan Africanism and Co-Founder of the OAU, Late Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah, having passed on the 27th April 1972 and reconcile the assault to the bondage that Tata Nelson Mandela experienced in the quest to unshackle the fetters of degradation weighing the countenance of the Black soul. We ask, what the grave affront has been worth, in the wake of systemic inequality and xenophobia - acknowledging however while significant and undeniable gains have been made... there is still a tremendous cost to tally - so we raise our hopes in the African Continental Free Trade Agreement as an avenue to bridge the ample divide, believing in the bounty of Mother Africa, well able to draw fruits where once there was only blood.

This piece is inspired by the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, which dawns the celebration of Human Rights day. Today, decades ago, 69 black people lost their lives in the violent spake of brutal police force undertaken by the Apartheid regime when launching mass action against the defamatory pass laws. Given the recent commemoration of International Women’s day, it seems fitting to reconcile the proactive political role that South African women played on the 9th August 1956 in an organised staged protest to defianitely oppose the pass system. This had played an integral part not just in further entrenching subjugation by limited movement, but eroding the foundation of the home given the length of time men and women would stay apart. In the new political dispensation, liberty is taking on several nuances. The existential meaning of ‘blackness’ has little positive reinforcement, this vacuum largely due to having inherited a fragmented discourse that has distorted the lens through we which, we, as a people, see ourselves, and how that, in turn, affects the manner in which we occupy intellectual, economic, or physical space in the mainstream, continually assaulted by critical structures of education, media and cosmetics. The civil rights activists and philosophers of old have crowned us to remember the foundations of black consciousness, and the inherent value we have to share with the world, knowing ourselves to be unequivocally beautiful, and completely deserving, to walk tall throughout this exquisite country, unashamedly, in our divine unassailable right to em/body the fullness of freedom.

February is considered the universal month of love, the rife commercialization, dainty little red hearts, and chocolates, might have us remiss, to recount the method behind the madness. One Legend has it that Valentine was a priest who served during the third century in Rome. When Emperor Claudius II decided that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, he outlawed marriage for young men. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. When Valentine’s actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death. Perhaps what strikes me the most, is the parallel, given the small distance between love and death, in the wake of Covid 19. A lover recounted to me that his lawyer's partner had to quite literally breathe for him as his lungs were caving in, risking her own life, to save his. The teller of the tale is no longer, to give credence to the account. Saint Valentine took on the noble exploit to rightly defy a regime that prioritized war above the sanctity and preservation of love, even at his own peril. Today, reigning free, the pandemic demands that we contend with kisses marked by death, never knowing if they are sweeter than all the world's honey because they might very well be our last.