New request list for managers of the universe
LOOKS like I have a direct line to the universal Manager of the Seasons.
No sooner had I sent out the memo that we were all tired of being hot, sweaty and frazzled, the switch was dialled down. The season appears to have changed, just like that. It’s cooler and the nests of fans are down to one each. No need to stagger back into a cold shower three minutes after the last one. Thank you.
Now that the channel is open, perhaps managers of different departments will also act with alacrity.
Chilling on the couch with the happy pant-less pooches, I pondered: if this line really worked, what important requests would I make? You don’t want to get all greedy, and, having been given a hand, take the whole arm.
It would be ever so crass to ask that all our financial woes be taken care of, but perhaps the universe’s finance department could at least do a better job of spreading the cheer or fairer cutting of the pie.
Here’s the request to that department: Please can you make sure there is enough? You may have to work with the human resources department to educate everyone about what enough is.
Enough would make sure every person had a job and a safe and warm place to call home, mansions not included. It would have electricity (I’ll get to that department in a while), hygienic toilets and a healthy environment. It would cater to small pleasures, like a good meal, and bigger ones like health and education.
If finance and HR worked together, we could cancel greed and gluttony and provide opportunity to grow and improve.
They could also spread the word on the importance of gratitude. The Covid crisis has paved the way for all of us to take stock and recognise that most of us have something, even little things, to be grateful for. The ability to recognise this is as good as a spa for your brain.
On to what is possibly the environment department: these guys need to get their act together, and this is a stern memo. Sort out our power and water problems and keep our lands, air, rivers and seas clean and safe. In short, save our Earth, our appliances and our internet connections. Thanks.
The universe’s internal affairs also has a tall order: teach us that every living thing deserves respect and to survive in its world order. Rule out rage, stupidity, racism, ignorance and selfish social “tribalism”. We all do better when we care for one another and everything that shares the planet.
My most earnest request would be to the returns manager and I would ask for my sister Janet back. She died too young, of a brain aneurysm, and left too big a hole. This line, however, will also be very busy. So much loss and heartache, from Covid to disease to murder to suicide. I know even the universe couldn’t supply what was top of my wish list, but go big or go home.
Hold your requests for my universal superpower – just start with your own small actions to help make our world a bit better.
SEVERAL incidents in South Africa and around the world in recent years, where libraries and other repositories of information and history were deliberately destroyed or lost through fire or other natural disaster, have highlighted the need for serious consideration of how such precious knowledge is stored and made accessible.
In the latest incident, irreplaceable historical photographic collections and other valuable publications were lost when a fire destroyed the Jagger Reading Room at the University of Cape Town (UCT).
Understandably, there have been international expressions of concern for the welfare of UCT students (none of whom was injured) and lament for the loss of the material.
Word is still awaited on the fate of such items as South Africa’s oldest bible, a copy of the first book to contain photographic illustrations, and a rare 19th and early 20th century collection on Southern African languages.
While the immediate effort must
SOMETIMES Mother Nature is our teacher, others our nemesis. But with every revelation comes a genesis.
It is in the mountains that we burn and the fires that we climb, where we remember the need to adapt for survival.
It is from the ashes of our history – lost, never to be handled again – where we feel a piece of ourselves falling, tumbling away from our being, like hoofs of horses dislodging loose stones.
How our history falls into a bottomless unknown. Further and further from our comprehension, our consciousness.
I am a firm believer in African stories, by Africans. A preservation of these is paramount to this ideology. The unifying and strengthening of bonds for all indigenous and diaspora ethnic groups of African descent.
Reminding Africans who they are, wherever they are.
When Mother Nature turned nemesis, raging flames slithered down the slopes of Table Mountain on a stroll to the University of Cape Town, hand in hand with high winds.
Mother Nature has no hands, but she wagged UCT’S Jagger reading room like a red cape. The flames were a bull.
A man was arrested for the Table Mountain fire but the destruction of the reading room remains a hot reminder to adapt and survive.
The word “digital” has been around far too long for a historic l ibrary that housed a priceless African Studies collection to be extinguished from humanity.
We are tired of inheriting stories of survival, of servitude.
Stories of misdirection – African stories told by non-africans, who are not too eloquent with the tongue, but write stories about culture.
Not too substantial about the fire, but stories about smoke. Stories that mirror the black man in his manufactured image.
Stories of hope.
Not too many stories of home, from home, but stories of the road.
Stories of the sea, of the trade, of the silk, of the spices.
Ashes from the Jagger reading room darkened a window into the continent's colonial past.
It halted Africa’s rise.
As soon as the fires went down, the continent started buffering.
Perhaps social amnesia, the result of forcible repression of the flames, of the alleged arsonist, of ignorance, of changing circumstances, or perhaps the forgetting that will come from changing interests, will ease the suffering.
And if Africa isn’t rising, we will still raise our kids on stories of Biko, Sankara, Lumumba.
Stories of Mandela, Winnie Madikizela-mandela.
We will also unpack our stories of pain – Marikana, xenophobia, femicide.
But we will tell them that like Phoenixes, they will emerge from the ashes of these concentration camps we call Townships. Designed to numb our minds, but they have become our muse.
Their dark streets double as our vegetable gardens, but at night, shadows are quick to blow a fuse.
The pavements – oh how so many souls have separated from flesh on these pavements, they know us by blood. They are the protagonist of our stories.
Every corner bears our names; “champions of living below the poverty line”.
We have been living day zero since day one.
Every revelation births a genesis. Every genesis breeds a mantra. With this genesis; we either go digital, or go extinct.