Ubuntu and other lies we tell our children
The movie John Q is about a father, played by Denzel Washington, whose nineyear-old son is in desperate need of a heart transplant. When the father discovers that his medical insurance won’t cover the expensive procedure, he holds a hospital emergency room hostage and demands medical attention at gunpoint. As the story unfolds, the father decides to kill himself in order for his son to get his heart. In the most saltwaterinducing scene, he gives his son a farewell pep talk about life.
Between the usual yadda yadda he has this to say: “And money, you make money if you get a chance. Even if you gotta sell out every once in a while, you make as much money as you can. Don’t be stupid like your father — everything is so much easier with money, son.”
This jolted me a little when I first watched it. I liked it because I am of the opinion that, as a child, I was sold unrealistic, absurd pipe dreams. For starters, I was brought up to believe that adults are repositories of wisdom by virtue of their age and therefore deserving of respect. Pardon my Swahili, but what a load of croc!
A friend of mine who hails from Mahlabathini in northern KZN recently found himself in a spot of marital bother. When he took the matter under advisement with the elders in his village, one of the grey heads pulled him aside and whispered, “This matter does not require input from elders by virtue of number of years. It actually requires sharp brains.” I cannot agree more.
Our National Assembly is packed with grey-haired people I would not trust with the simple task of transporting a box of ice cream from Pretoria to Johannesburg without leaving a trail of molten Cream Almond along the N1. This is why my chest swells with pride when my 14year-old responds to some of my half-baked assertions with: “Do you want to fact check that, Baba?”
Another blatant lie drilled into my head when I was being groomed to be a loyal Catholic parishioner and potential cash cow was that going to church made people good. This is despite all the mountains of evidence to the contrary. And then I witnessed all the jostling for positions in the parish council, the backstabbing, the parish politics, the antagonism between the St Annas and the St Theresas. I decided that spending my Sundays searching for the meaning of life at the bottom of beer mugs was a far less extreme sport than spending them debating whether Father deserved a Toyota Corolla or a VW Jetta from the parish.
Here’s another whopper: the universe is inherently judicious and evenly distributes good fortune via
I’m laying a few extra layers of epidermis on him that will serve him well when he’s on his own
statistical probability and something called karma. I cannot think of a more dangerous thing to teach children. This is just as dangerous as teaching kids that they can be anything they want in life. You and I know that the probability of being the CEO of a model company such as Steinhoff when you are born in Paarl, go to Michaelhouse and can afford Yale tuition is a millionfold the chances of someone born in a shack in Diepsloot. Telling a kid who is most likely going to pluck chickens at Rainbow all her life that she can be anything she wants is plain cruel.
We also teach kids that sex is an undesirable, ugly thing that they should stay away from. And then we proceed to pursue sex passionately, with as many partners as we can. No one tells our children when to say yes to sex, with whom and how.
But perhaps my favourite lie we toss in our kids’ direction is this popular myth called Ubuntu. Oh, spare me! “When we were growing up we cherished values such as Ubuntu, respect and that a person is a person through others.” Get outta here. I grew up in the 1970s and ’80s and folks looked out for themselves and screw everyone else, just as much as today.
The Boss Of Me and I agonise over the quintessential question, “Are we preparing our children for the ideal world we would like to live in or are we preparing them for the real, ugly world we live in?” I don’t believe it should be either/or. The answer is somewhere in between. But I’ll tell you this much: I lean more towards the latter.
When I play Fifa 19 against the lastborn, I go in hard. When I’m winning, I talk, smack and taunt him, and the few times I manage to beat him I perform the chicken dance and don’t let him forget for weeks. I’m laying a few extra layers of epidermis on him that will serve him well when he’s on his own. How are you raising your kids?