RESISTANCE IS OUR PERENNIAL VICTORY

THE film Entitled is a celebration of the love and the deep appreciation that the film-maker Adeyemi Michael has for his mum.

It was filmed in Peckham in south London, an area known as Little Lagos. Thirty years ago he and his family arrived in the UK from Nigeria, where he was born. He expresses gratitude for the fact that,as he grew up, his family kept him conscious of his culture, his place of origin. Of his Nigerian self.

I was struck by his consciousness about that legacy: “When you know where you belong it doesn’t matter where you are in the world.”

This is in contrast to the challenge of being an Azanian, shaped and informed by a debilitating narrative of conquest that leads you to conclude about yourself that you are not enough.

You do not tick the boxes of what constitutes a vigorous, engaging identity located in a culture with its own songs, fables of origin. Of self-love and the manifestation of a mosaic that memorises the unique way that you are African and present in the world. Cast in a perverse, comic and shadow version of the oppressor, we conclude that we are the tragic progeny of the colonial masters of history. The Azanian equivalent of the global, tragic mulatto.

And these days there are those who shout the rhetoric of narrow, disabling chauvinism. They mimic an outdated tribal-based dictate of what a human being is. Aloof to the way the world is, how self-love dances in tandem to a global festival of choice with its anthem, “We are more than our differences.”

The Cape creole version of Entitled is recorded in the struggle to recognise that, yes, they – the Dutch followed by the English – cut away as much of your roots as is evilly possible.

They distorted our cultural DNA traces that locate us to other parts of Mother Africa and the East Indies. Our resistance is our perennial victory.

It was not the grand marches and uprising of Toussaint Louverture’s Haitian Revolution against Napoleonic France.

But memory, while it fades, never dies. Our insurrection was in the creolisation of the Dutch of the master which flourished into the lexicon of endearment and tenderness as the herrenvolk of an apartheid republic made love to each other in the language that we had gifted them and subverted for ourselves.

This will be Weeder’s last column for the Weekend Argus.