More Tlalis needed

REFERRING to the article (leader, February 28) honouring the writer Miriam Tlali, we cannot really appreciate and honour the spirit of Miriam Tlali in any way that will be respectful enough. It is very difficult to visualise her personal or the circumstances of other brutalised people in retrospect.

She was a special and memorable specimen of a humankind that still struggles to become moral in its ways.

Depending on one’s position, either passively privileged then or being actively part of a system that oozed ruthless disregard for people, or on the other hand to have had experienced the inhumanity in an aching soul and stomach, history numbs all memories.

Time just marches on and gradually all these special people and the ones who could only feel, but could not verbalise their pain in protesting words, all fade into the folds of the past.

We still have her books to keep her alive among us humans, but perhaps we should internalise her soulful approach and start to look around us at a new breed of neglected people.

Now not primarily because of a racist regard anymore, although a new winners’ class could easily slip into a similar skewed position, but perhaps much more now a class-manufactured separation between the haves and the have nots. Erich Fromm once wrote a book, To Have or to Be, and he juxtaposed the shallowness of base materialism and selfish, superficial, egocentric, lifestyles against the way humane, moral people would go about to create a society that really cares systematically for all its people.

We need Miriam Tlalis today too that would not stop reminding us about the myriad ways human cruelty and solipsistic greed seep through society and that would continue to educate with fervour a new breed of people that would shiver in disgust at a culture of prowling hyenas.

We need writers like her to propagate priorities like meaningful education for all children (our only hope) and not to join primitive ways to become “hunters” for more and more, and better and better, and bigger and bigger vehicles gassing the atmosphere.

Those draped houses that will not allow its inhabitants to look out on to streets where hopeless people struggle to stay alive and that will not spend money or personal time to uplift the downtrodden and the outcasts of our day. We need new soulful Miriam Tlalis today, so that tomorrow could become less shameful.