Believe in yourself, take control of your life and use your vote well
“TAKE control over your life” my mentor advised me when I was 15 years old. My heart cried out: How? Why? “Believe in yourself,” he replied.
A few weeks (or was it months?) on, he was served with a banning order (one of the many).
Later, on September 14,1984, he and a few of his Natal Indian Congress (NIC) colleagues, then part of a broader United Democratic Front, sought asylum in the offices of the British consul general at the intersection of Anton Lembede (Smith) and Joe Slovo (Field) streets in eThekwini.
They were going to be arrested and banned yet again.
Apartheid, as a political system, had by then started to dictate where I could live, with whom I could be intimate, study and play sports etc… you know the history.
In order to do so and become an accomplished lawyer, I had to believe in myself. As Benjamin Hoff wrote in
The Tao of (Winnie the) Pooh, we don’t need to shift our responsibilities on to the shoulders of some deified spiritual superman (or in the political context, of, say, Nelson Mandela ), or sit around and wait for fate to come knocking on our door. We simply need to believe, to paraphrase Hoff, in the power that’s within us and to use it.
That’s a very powerful statement I’ve read thanks to this book.
So, in the context of now, we must believe in the power within us to force change through the ballot and to jettison those who feast at the banquet table while the masses starve and barely get by.
And yes, Allah will not change your condition until you change yourself. You need to believe in yourself.
They and so many thousands of others didn’t fight in order to replace one morally bankrupt and corrupt political dispensation with another more predatory than before.
So even if its Ramadaan you know what you have to do on May 8.
Let me end with this well-known jingle of the airwaves of the 1980s: “You can stay as you are for the rest of your life, or you can change…”.
Phambili Azania, phambili.
SABER AHMED JAZBHAY0 | Newlands West