‘Hope is itself a species of happiness and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords.’
Samuel Johnson
‘Love, all of other sights controls. And makes one little room an everywhere.’
John Donne
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Language, the code behind which we rally to forge out an identity. Language, the code, against which we rally,its derision of that identity. No more so than in the multi-cultural, multilingual hodgepodge that South Africa is language a more a sensitive issue. June 16th, a national holiday in South Africa, Youth Day. We commemorate the heroism of the Soweto youth in 1976, who protested against the compulsion of an Afrikaans-medium curriculum. To a generation not born at the time, not quite fully understanding the impact of what has become an Apocalypse of history, we are haunted by the spectre of Hecter Peterson and indeed, others like him.
I found myself in the curious position of having to tutor Afrikaans today, Youth day, to the daughter of Paskistani immigrants. The irony has afforded a somewhat less affable understanding of the present. June 16, 2008, South Africa is now the unwitting home of an ever-growing immigrant population, a population who we have denied the very freedoms Hecter Peterson died for.
In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said writes,
Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present. What animates such appeals is not only disagreement about what happened in the past and whether the past really is past, over and concluded, or whether it continues, albeit in different forms, perhaps. This problem animates all sorts of discussions-about influence, about blame and judgement, about present actualities and future priorities.
(Said, 1994: 1)
We fail to realise that history is not neat. It is not a neat procession of events tucked away in a textbook. We are the products of history. This, the present circumstances, sullied and imperfect, it may well be, is the product of our history. We may look back to lay the blame for the imperfection on the colonialists and Aphartheid, or we may look back to learn, and take a step forward.
As I explained to my incredulous student, who has the name Benazir to live up to by the way, I am quite taken by the following poem. It may well be in Afrikaans, a language that will for a long time be tainted for being the tongue of Apartheid, but Afrikaans itself is uniquely African. While others continue to look at Africa as the other, the Dark Continent that affords no hope to its peoples and still others have rushed to point South Africa as no less mismanaged as any other state in Africa in the aftermath of the xenophobic riots. But surely the very presence of these immigrants indicate that South Africa is something of a beacon of hope in Africa. Indeed we have not acquited ourselves well these past weeks but as this poem describes a little house by the sea, being ravaged by the darkness of night, the unrelenting anger of the ocean against the rocks it is built upon and the merciless wind that is like a lost soul that finds no rest, I see South Africa, there, a little house by the sea. Battered and bruised, indeed, but deep inside, a fire roars, warming the heart, and a little candle (no thanks to Eskom :p) gives its light.
Ek het ‘n huisie by die see
H.A. Fagan
Ek het ‘n huisie by die see. Dis nag.
Ek hoor aaneen, aaneen die golwe slaan
teenaan die rots waarop my huisie staan
met al die oseaan se woeste krag.
Ek hoor die winde huil-‘n kreun, ‘n klag,
soos van verlore siele in hul nood
al dwalend, klagend, wat in graf en dood
geen rus kan vind nie, maar nog soek en smag.
My vuurtjie brand, my kersie gee sy lig.
Ek hoor dan meer hoe loei die storm daar buite,
ek hoor hoe ruk die winde aan my ruite.
Hier binne is dit veilig, warm en dig.
Kom nag, kom weer en wind, kom oseaan–
Dit is ‘n rots waarop my huisie staan.
For Don M. – Banned
Mongane Wally Serote
Mongane Wally Serote
it is a dry white season
dark leaves don’t last, their brief lives dry out
and with a broken heart they dive down gently headed for the earth,
not even bleeding.
it is a dry white season brother,
only the trees know the pain as they still stand erect
dry like steel, their branches dry like wire
indeed it is a dry white season
but seasons come to pass.
dark leaves don’t last, their brief lives dry out
and with a broken heart they dive down gently headed for the earth,
not even bleeding.
it is a dry white season brother,
only the trees know the pain as they still stand erect
dry like steel, their branches dry like wire
indeed it is a dry white season
but seasons come to pass.
————–
If I can stop one heart from breaking,I shall not live in vain;If I can ease one life the aching,Or cool one pain,Or help one fainting robinUnto his nest again,I shall not live in vain.Emily Dickenson
While chatting to Safiyyah a couple of days ago, a highly edifying discussion, as many of our interactions go, we somehow came up to the invasiveness of mobile instant messaging services like Mxit. While the Mxit service has had its fair share of bad press, the service is phenomenally successful. It aims to secure five per cent of the world’s GSM subscriptions to its services within the next five years. It’s cheap, accessible and essentially, it is the indispensable toy of a socially-inept generation. A generation who attend a wedding, traditionally an opportunity to meet other people or enjoy the company of people you do know in a congenial atmosphere, only to veil themselves with their mobile telephones, a generation who throng to to the local Nescafe in numbers, only for each to unsheathe their phone as they are seated, and then grudgingly acknowledge the waitress, frowning on her invasion of the bubble in which they live. Safiyyah rightly asks, “Do you want people with you wherever you are?”
But I wonder too, if that’s it- do services like Mxit, or even social networking sites like facebook, rescue us from a sense of isolation?
Steven G. Jones’ Virtual Culture- Identity and Communication in Cybersociety- which although written in the late nineties, is a fascinting treatise on the two sides to the impact of technology in society :
” …It seems quite commonplace to us that every technology has two sides to its consequences, on the one hand for every technology we develop in an attempt to improve life, we believe we also will on the other hand, find life impoverished in some way. Such has been our experience with a variety of technologies, from nuclear power, with its capacity for generating electricity and for destruction, to the written word, with its capacity for preservation and dissemination of information and for its origination of silent readers. Once we are accustomed to a new technology we accept both sides, preferring, one suspects, to assume that as the technology is refined its negative consequences will also be better engineered.”