TONGUE&

CHEEK Why SA is a stressed society

EISH! How time flies. I recall the days in the not-too-distant past when the infamous pencil test was used to racially classify people.

You simply inserted this piece of stationery into a person’s mop. If it remained lodged in their hair, the person was “black”. If it fell through, they were “white”.

Today, 23 years after apartheid was officially declared dead, little appears to have changed – thanks to a somewhat convoluted hypothesis put forward by President Jacob Zuma on ethnic nuances.

He told guests attending his 75th birthday bash last week he did not suffer from stress because it did not exist among Zulu people.

“In the Zulu nation, stress does not exist. You can go to a traditional healer asking to be healed from stress, but they do not have muti for stress.”

He claimed there was no word for stress in the Zulu language, simply because it happens to be “a white man’s disease”.

Where does this leave millions of other South Africans who are neither white nor Zulu?

Will they also succumb to the ravages of this dreadful “white man’s disease” or will they enjoy immunity and be spared its debilitating effects?

Zuma’s grand hypothesis has been firmly and categorically debunked. Leading clinical psychologists and Zulu cultural fundis have assured South Africans stress does indeed exist and is not a condition exclusive to any particular race or ethnic community. There is certainly a Zulu word for stress: ingcindezi.

The truth is that, despite all our blessings, South Africa is a stressed society. The reason for this affliction is that our dream of a united, prosperous and democratic country is fast turning into a nightmare. It is why thousands of South Africans from all communities are taking to the streets to protest against Zuma’s inept and morally corrupt leadership.

South Africans are stressed because they hate seeing their country slide down the slippery slope toward economic ruin. They realise this means higher food prices, fewer jobs and more poverty.

They are stressed because our downgrading to junk status is going to hit all of us, irrespective of race or ethnicity, but especially the poor.

They are becoming increasingly frustrated because they know we live in one of the most unequal societies in the world, one in which desperate men, women and children are forced to beg on street kerbs and scavenge for food from garbage bins while a single Eskom executive can pocket R30 million after serving just 18 months at the public utility.

South Africans will continue to suffer the effects of ingcindezi as long as they see their country being captured by greedy, corrupt scoundrels.