Aug 24 2014

WE HAD A DREAM…BUT NO AMERICAN PRESIDENT HAS EVER DISRESPECTED AFRICA AS MUCH AS OBAMA!

Obama: White terror, Black tears

OBAMAThe Other Side by Nathaniel Manheru

It has always been a hard fact of life that in America as elsewhere in Europe, a black man only has condemned colour and a sorry history, nothing else.
But the ascension to power of Barack Obama as the first black US president created some hope and expectation among blacks world-wide that for once, the black man would begin to have both rights and geography, all against a long history of skin-based sob-tales.

I was not among those hopeful blacks, fulsomely hopeful in my view. This column kept reminding readers that it was a black man who had been swallowed by White House, never the other way round.

After Obama’s presidency, this column maintained, White House would be even whiter, harder against people of colour in ways that would make an Obama detour a naked insult on blackness. The column kept making the point that blackness did not necessarily connect, anymore than white racists sought to make it condemn.

Obama would never connect with his own skinmates, rather, he would be at happy one with skinheads.

What mattered, the column reiterated, was the colour of the heart, colour of the perspective of this man wading into White House. That in my view, Obama’s black tincture masked his white heart, his white perspective, which made him so eligible for this wonderful colour experiment in US presidency and history.

Taint from the cot
That the white establishment which would retain untrammeled power would never have entrusted such awesome power to a black maverick, to a political unknown or “maybe”.

In fact, that the white establishment would, at the end of Obama’s presidency, emerge a little more fortified, a little more legitimate, having paraded to the world that indeed America was a non-racial land of equal opportunity; that indeed blacks would govern America like their white counterparts, with the only difference being that they would do the same badly, thanks to their congenital colour-based handicap.

Which proved that nothing is wrong with the way power is apportioned, configured and exercised in US. That at the end of Obama’s reign, blacks would emerge very apologetic, apologising for misgoverning America, apologising for ever being made deserving of such awesome leadership when in fact they carried a taint from the cot.

Conquering Groote Schuur
Then I sounded savagely skeptical, an instance of black misanthropy. But well before Obama, I had seen the same here in our region of Southern Africa.

I had seen, helplessly seen a black icon get captured and cordoned off behind a white edifice, an apartheid edifice. His name was Nelson Mandela.

Incarcerated for 27 years by his white gaolers, his stature yearly rose with incarceration, yearly well beyond his prison, his person, his family, his community, his country, to encompass the black person worldwide.

He transfigured, became our messiah, a black Jesus, both by demeanour and crucifixion.

Then one day he walked out, walked from his gaolers a free black man, in that seemingly gingerly step and stride, personifying the triumph of black fortitude over brazen white animality. Against the colonial trope, the dark continent had flashed a white heart, hallelujah!

The wheel of fortune kept turning, auspiciously for all of us blacks. Mandela became President – first ever black President — of South Africa. Again we rejoiced. We had conquered Groote Schuur! The accursed steps of Cecil Rhodes had been overstepped by the mighty footprint of Africa.

Angry, red barrettes
Years wore on. More years into Mandela’s presidency. We became the beautiful colours of the Rainbow. We celebrated, even forgetting God overlooked the colour black to adorn that beautiful mirage. Divine racism? Soweto remained. Tembisa remained, even expanded.

So did Gugulethu. Much more, we all remained black, dark as ever. Much worse, they remained white, pale as ever, peeping down on us from refulgent skyscrapers we could not climb. Then one day Mandela decided to make way to a younger leadership, retiring into a less buffeting, quieter and serene life of a founding father. It became another cheer, more so on a continent where power rarely passes hands.

In came Mbeki, an exile on whose person greater hopes for a new black fate rested. He tried, soon finding out Mandela was much more than a predecessor; he was a standard, a shibboleth. After him came Zuma, the current president, and in between, a short but fraught interregnum presided over by Monthlante.

Still our world remained how we had received it, wrestled it: all white, hardly reachable to those who had grasped it. But that was hardly surprising. Even up north where firebrands inhabited and even thrived, the colonial legacy lived on, deeper than a tinge.

What more with South Africa, kindergarten age in the continuum of African independence! But anger grew, stiffened, taking the yell of Malema and his red barrettes.

Yes, we can
The real issue though was how the white world had captured our icon, Mandela, isolated him from us. White minders, both of person and legacy. White eulogists. White erectors of statues in his honor. White biographers. White awards. Much worse, our icon was turned into a deadly whip with which the white world lashed black miscreants, most of them sitting leaders at odds with that same white world.

It taught me something that helped me discern America’s hidden motive in crowning a Blackman as its president: outside domestic America, such a spectacular raise of the Blackman is a deadly augury for Africa as a continent, for all Third World people.

I predicted a more thrustful American policy on Africa under Obama, adding such an aggressive policy focus on Africa would be pursued with little risk of charges of racist imperialism, than would have been the case under George Bush Junior.

I hailed Obama’s presidency as a masterstroke at home and abroad. At home, a massive gesture had been made to the demographically significant black population, which also personified a black scar on white conscience through slavery. The sin of history had been expiated and white America could now move on, conscience salved.

Abroad, America would pursue its African Command (Africomm) goal overlaying its resource control goal on the African continent without any sense of restraint. Its President was black, with African genes coursing through his veins.

How could he harm Africa, the land of his father? Sadly, Africa has since been aggressed by an America under a black President, with the smoke of American aggression on our continent still twirling up the blue skies. Yes, under Obama, America now could!

Another death, another man of colour
One day, on August 9 this year, a white officer, Darren Wilson, shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson town of Missouri.

The 18-year old black teenager was unarmed, and was killed in broad daylight. Ferguson exploded, as did a number of American towns and cities, as black communities reacted with outrage to this racial manslaughter. Obama mildly decried the action, boldly called for calm.

He spoke on the side of law and order, barely on the side of black rights whose routine denial over centuries made his own presidency so spectacular. Much worse, Jay Nixon, Missouri’s white governor invited the national guard to move in to quell the unrest triggered by this cold-blooded killing.

The National Guard moved in, supported by a fleet of war vehicles called Humvees. The spectacle of an arm of the US military deploying home to challenge core freedoms on American mainland, shall be very hard to forget.. Expectedly in no time another black youth, 25-year old Kajieme Powell, was dead, thanks to the precision shooting of the National Guard.

Obama was forced to despatch the country’s Attorney General, one Eric Holder, himself another man of colour, who confirmed Ferguson was a deeply “fractured” community, something he said he understood and sought to act on urgently.

Tears and tees
As this crisis was petering off, another complication hit Obama’s presidency. Far away in Iraq, ISIS insurgents beheaded an American journalist, James Foley, grisly uploading a clip of that bloody act on YouTube.

The world watched with horror. So did Obama, who expressed his heartbreak, vowing to be “relentless” against the Islamic radicals who, in the meantime, threatened to behead yet another American captive. Soon after this media act, the President of the United States of America headed off to Martha Vineyard, his favourite golf course, to tee off. Apparently the President is on leave, cooling off.

This sharp twist from tears to tees has got America’s tongue wagging. By the way, Foley is a white American, apparently captured while covering events in Syria where ISIS, the very insurgent movement which has claimed his head, cut its insurgent teeth in a war against Assad.

And in that war, America supported Islamic insurgents who included ISIS, against Assad.

Foley had been despatched to sell that war which his country America supported not so covertly. He has since been sacrificed by his motherland, slaughtered by rebels armed by his government which is now contemplating fighting the same ISIS it created, side by side with Assad whom Foley routinely wrote to damn. Yes, states do betray, yes, states do sacrifice, kuchekeresa vana!

An epitaph that damns generations
But watch how white America weeps for a butchered white American employed to sell her unjust wars abroad vis-a-vis a black teenager citizen who gets gunned down on US streets for just being black.

The one represents the face of American imperialism abroad, the other the vulnerabilities of simple citizenry in a racist country founded of white supremacist ideals. The one demonstrates the wages of aggression, the other measures the retreat of civil liberties in a racialised democracy, if such an oxymoron means anything at all.

The one darkens the presidency of Obama, forecloses the prospects of his party come the next elections, the other is an opportunity to show duty and service to the white establishment. And here is the point: when all is seen and assessed, Obama’s presidency raised black hopes that today collapse into a heap of black bitterness.

To die under white rule strikes me as a lot more honourable, a better tribute to race history, than to be sacrificed under the rule of one of your own.

The epitaph in the one is that the white world killed you; the epitaph in the other is that the black president failed you, could not save you.

The last one leaves you with a foreboding sense of race impotence, a sense likely to transcend generations, making future black voters mistrustful of black leadership, believing in white misrule all the more thereby.

What a cruel fate!
When he could not serve Michael . . .

Looking back, I am struck by the irony of an Obama surrounded by African presidents all of whom represent a continent he pretends to want to save and serve. So many billions are pledged, the key word being “pledged”.

Africa, through its gullible, or desperate (or is it both?) Presidents, grins yellow with sickly, helitosis hope!

As their ashen bones of acute aid-need syndrome rattle in their shriven skin frames, none dare stop to ask: will a man who could not save Michael Brown ever save Mamoudou, Kwesi, Sizwe or Mucha? Could a man who could not save Ferguson ever save Bandundu, Kitwe, Tsumeb or Gwanda?

Or spare them should white terror target them? It is clear the rise of the black man does not change the world; rather, it merely helps him escape the world of tears. One badge of our servility as a race is the fact that symbols are deployed to run us, to pacify us, never to represent or demand for us.

Those symbols need our colour, need our history, need our heroes, to stick, to persuade. Aahh!

www.herald.co.zw

Jun 21 2014

MANDELA’S FINAL DAYS AND HOW HIS WIVES AND CHILDREN FOUGHT OVER HIS FUNERAL BEFORE HE DIED!

Mr Mandela – Zelda la Grange

Sensational new details have emerged about vicious squabbles during former president Nelson Mandela’s last months alive.
In Good Morning, Mr Mandela – Zelda la Grange’s highly anticipated memoir, which is to be released this week – the late statesman’s personal assistant lifts the lid on behind-the-scenes family drama as Madiba lay on his death bed, as well as the power struggles that marred the period immediately after his death.

Among the disturbing revelations in the book are that: Mandela’s widow, Graça Machel, had to get accreditation for her own husband’s funeral and the Machel family were allocated only four spots at the service;

Makaziwe Mandela, Mandela’s eldest daughter from his first marriage to Evelyn Mase, tauntingly referred to Machel as “Ms Frantic” following a press report that she had been frantic when an ambulance carrying her sick husband broke down on the M1 highway on the way from his Houghton home to a Pretoria hospital;

Even though the Mandela Foundation and La Grange had stopped scheduling visits by people who were not familiar to Mandela after his condition worsened, unnamed members of the family would take advantage of his inability to express his wishes by bringing strangers to the house to see him;

World-renowned stars Bono and Charlize Theron were initially refused access to a VIP suite during the chaotic memorial service to honour Mandela at Soweto’s FNB Stadium; and

It took the intervention of former president FW de Klerk for Bono and Naomi Campbell to get accreditation for Mandela’s lying-in-state at the Union Buildings.

The book’s revelations are bound to ruffle feathers. In an interview with the Sunday Times this week, La Grange said she was prepared for criticism.

“I expect backlash from a lot of people. You can never write something or expose yourself like this and expect no one to be upset about it. I’m not going to engage in any public fights. I know I’ve told the truth – that there’s not one line that can be contested in the book,” she said.

La Grange, who worked as Mandela’s personal assistant for 19 years, spent more time with Mandela than any other person during his presidency and retirement.

She started off as a 23-year-old conservative Afrikaner typist in the president’s office and became his trusted assistant and spokeswoman.

“I couldn’t even begin to count the hours I spent with Madiba,” she said.

The book reveals that factions in Mandela’s family used the dying statesman’s inability to express his wishes to “step in and start controlling matters to their advantage”.

These actions included banning some of his favourite people from visiting him during his last months and bringing strangers to meet him when he was too ill to express his wishes. His beloved wife was also repeatedly sidelined from certain key decisions concerning his legacy and wellbeing.

In one of the chapters, La Grange writes that at one point a frail Mandela was moved to Qunu – far from friends and medical attention – at the insistence of a faction in the family, and certain family members did not want La Grange to travel to see him, even though he was lonely and received few visitors.

La Grange says Machel was “the only person who really made him happy”, although another anecdote illustrates the friction Machel had to endure as a member of the Mandela family.

In the middle of winter in 2013, a gravely ill Mandela was taken to hospital in an unmarked vehicle at 3am, an incident widely reported in the media. The press reported that Machel was frantic when the vehicle broke down for 40 minutes. The next day, Makaziwe entered the hospital calling Machel “Ms Frantic”.

“Mum [as La Grange refers to Machel] was hurt and emotionally brutalised,” writes La Grange, adding that she and Machel’s daughter, Josina, constantly tried to keep her strong by supporting her.

In another chapter, La Grange details that after Mandela was hospitalised in March 2013, Makaziwe told La Grange that because she was no longer an employee, she was not welcome to visit her father.

With Mandela too ill to speak for her, Machel stepped in.

La Grange writes: “Mum had to defend me once again, arguing that she was willing to defend Madiba’s decisions whether they liked it or not, and that she was going to see that his wishes were fulfilled until the day he passed on.

“She told them that my presence from time to time provided him with emotional stability.”

La Grange eventually managed to see her boss.

“The poison in the family was leaking out everywhere. Many of his family had never wanted me around and they were now getting their chance,” she writes.

Not all his children resented Mandela’s relationship with La Grange. After being told that Zelda had visited her father in hospital a few days before, Zindzi Mandela reportedly responded: “Then I can rest.”

The last time La Grange saw him alive was July 11 2013, when he was unable to talk but could still smile.

“I told him how much I love him … and so on … ja,” she said.

According to Good Morning, Mr Mandela, the Mandela family politics took a heavy toll on Machel.

“I don’t know of any person alive who has been treated with the amount of disrespect that people have shown towards Mrs Machel,” writes La Grange. “Politics within his family about his funeral took place for years before his death.

“Mrs Machel and some of the children had refused to be party to arrangements about Madiba’s funeral. He was still in fairly good health and it was unthinkable to be planning someone’s funeral while the person was still happily alive, still being cared for by his wife.”

The quality of Mandela’s medical care, which, as a former president, fell under the control of the Ministry of Defence, was a constant source of friction.

At one stage, the possibility of replacing his medical team was raised by Lindiwe Sisulu, then the minister of defence.

“Mrs Machel felt hopeless and undermined … The minister explored the possibility of replacing the entire team, but Mrs Machel felt that they would (figuratively speaking) crucify her if she dared interfere with appointees endorsed by the family.”

La Grange writes about an incident in Cape Town when a team of military specialists missed an appointment to examine Mandela owing to red tape.

“I enquired about the specialists and was told that they could not come to the house by themselves but were awaiting orders, like in any military bureaucracy, to be fetched from the hospital and brought to the house. When I called them and asked whether they couldn’t drive themselves, I was told they were not allowed.”

After Mandela died on December 5 last year, the Machel family were told they would only be allowed five accreditation cards to the funeral, which included one for his widow, Graça.

La Grange details the chaos during the FNB Stadium memorial service, when she had to improvise when Charlize Theron and Bono were refused access to a VIP suite and had to watch part of the proceedings behind a screen at the back of the stage.

One of the most heart-rending events she describes is going with advocate George Bizos, one of Madiba’s closest friends and most trusted compatriots, to greet the family before the Qunu funeral. Bizos had been part of Mandela’s legal team during the Rivonia Trial and had regularly visited him when he was in prison on Robben Island.

The front door to the Qunu home was locked and they were refused entry. They entered through the kitchen, only to be told by Makaziwe: “We don’t want you people in the house.”

A frail Bizos was then grudgingly allowed to stay, but La Grange was ordered to leave.

La Grange was also barred from the grave site and at least two of Mandela’s household employees were pulled out of a row at the funeral and prevented from going to the burial.

Makaziwe Mandela said La Grange would have to substantiate whatever references she made about her family, “otherwise she will be sued”.

When the Sunday Times contacted her this week, Makaziwe said she did not want to hear what La Grange had written about her.

“I don’t want to talk to you guys. Let her memoirs come out and I’ll see what she writes about me. What Zelda writes … I’ll deal with it at that point in time.”

La Grange writes: “I found it difficult and emotionally challenging to reconcile his last years and what we had experienced for 16-odd years with what was happening now. To say it was in complete contrast would be putting it mildly.”

Yet speaking out now, she is without anger.

“I am tempted to be bitter,” she said, “but how can I be bitter about one incident in my life when he was not bitter about anything? He pulls me back. And Mrs Machel has been my compass. For years she tried to teach me that you can’t be responsible for other people’s relationships. Maybe it took this event for me to grasp the fact that my relationship with Madiba was the only thing that mattered. How I was treated by anyone else didn’t matter.

“My book was not written as a definitive account – to say ‘this is Madiba’. It’s just my experience,” she said.

“Madiba belongs to the world. Nothing can change who he was. There are political parties and sections of society that are entitled to claim him, but as long as it doesn’t affect his legacy, I think everyone should be free to think about him and remember him in their way.” times

Feb 15 2014

MY LATE FRIEND TUNJI OKUSANYA CARRYING THE COFFIN OF GOLDIE BRINGS UP A PAINFUL QUESTION ALWAYS…”WHAT EXACTLY IS THE MEANING OF LIFE AND DEATH?”

HER EARTHLY PROPERTIES WERE TOO PAINFUL TO BE KEPT BY HER FAMILY AND EVEN THE SELF-ACCLAIMED CHIEF MOURNER HAS A NEW PREGNANT GIRLFRIEND (MAY BE DELIVERED BY NOW !)

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Death and the Meaning of Life – HOW GOLDIE AND TUNJI FOCUSED ON THEIR DESIRES

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5, lines 22-31

On the time scale of the history of the Earth an individual human lifetime is a mere blink of an eye. We’re born, we live, and we die–and then we are “heard no more”. Death is like a dreamless sleep from which we will never awake, our consciousness snuffed out forever [1]. If this life is all there is, what is the point of living? If we’re all going to be dead in the end anyway, what difference does it make what we do with our lives? We may influence the lives of others, but they too are doomed to death. In a few generations most of our accomplishments will be totally forgotten, the memories of our lives reduced to a mere name etched on a tombstone or written on a genealogy chart. In a few centuries even our tombstones will be unreadable due to weathering; our skeletal remains will be all that is left of us. Barring fossilization, these too will be disintegrated into the earth and nothing of us will remain. The matter from which we were made will be absorbed into other organisms– plants, animals, even other human beings. New species will appear, flourish, and disappear, soon to be replaced by others filling in the niche left by their extinction. Human beings too will succumb to extinction. All life on Earth will be wiped out when our dying sun expands into a red giant, finally engulfing the Earth. Ultimately the universe will be incapable of supporting any life as it expands forever, leaving only residual heat and evaporating black holes, or contracts back on itself, fusing all matter and energy into a final Big Crunch. Either way, all life in the universe will disappear forever.

Such considerations once led Bertrand Russell to conclude that any philosophy worth taking seriously would have to be built upon a “firm foundation of unyielding despair” [2]. Does the finality of death make life meaningless? Although many people feel that it does, a moment’s reflection will show that death is irrelevant to the question of the meaning of life: If human beings were naturally immortal–that is, if there was no such thing as death–there would still be a question about whether or not our lives had meaning. The underlying assumption behind the claim that life is meaningless because it ends in death is that for something to be meaningful or worthwhile it must last forever. The fact that many of the things we value (such as relationships with others) and activities that we find worthwhile (such as working on a political campaign or raising a child) do not last forever shows that life does not need to be everlasting to be meaningful. We can also show that everlasting life may not be meaningful by providing examples of lives which last forever yet are meaningless. In Greek mythology Sisyphus is punished by the gods for cheating death by being forced to roll a heavy stone to the top of a hill. Just as the stone is about to reach the top of the hill, it rolls back down to the plain. Sisyphus is doomed to repeat this meaningless activity for eternity. The duration of our lives has nothing to do with the meaningfulness of them. It is ironic that so many people have missed this point given that Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus presents Sisyphus’ eternal punishment as the archetype of meaningless existence.

Death appears to render life meaningless for many people because they feel that there is no point in developing character or increasing knowledge if our progress is ultimately going to be thwarted by death. However, there is a point in developing character and increasing knowledge before death overtakes us: to provide peace of mind and intellectual satisfaction to our lives and to the lives of those we care about for their own sake because pursuing these goals enriches our lives. From the fact that death is inevitable it does not follow that nothing we do matters now. On the contrary, our lives matter a great deal to us. If they did not, we would not find the idea of our own death so distressing–it wouldn’t matter that our lives will come to an end. The fact that we’re all eventually going to die has no relevance to whether our activities are worthwhile in the here and now: For an ill patient in a hospital a doctor’s efforts to alleviate pain certainly does matter despite the fact that ‘in the end’ both the doctor and the patient (and ultimately all life in the universe) will be dead.

What is it about our lives that makes so many people feel that life is ultimately meaningless? The fact that we all will eventually die is one reason for this feeling, but it is not the only reason. The other main reason why many people feel that life is ultimately meaningless is that, as far as science can tell, there is no greater purpose for our lives. A scientific picture of the world portrays the origin of human beings as “the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms” [3]. Both individually and collectively, human beings came into existence due to accidents of chance. As individuals our existence was made possible by the reproductive success of our ancestors; as a species our existence was predicated by chance mutations which happened to confer an adaptive advantage to our evolutionary ancestors in the environments in which they found themselves. Because we cannot discern any indications that we were put on this Earth to fulfill a purpose given to us by an intelligent being, our existence does not appear to be part of some greater plan. If the absence of a higher purpose is what makes life ultimately meaningless, our lives would be just as meaningless if they were eternal. Conversely, if being part of a higher purpose gives our lives meaning, then our lives would be meaningful even if death ended them forever.

Is it really the case, however, that the absence of a greater plan for our lives renders life meaningless? Here too, a moment’s reflection will show that a lack of greater purpose in life is irrelevant to the meaning of our lives. How would a greater purpose for our lives give meaning to our lives for us? Suppose, for example, that we found out that millions of years ago extraterrestrials genetically manipulated the hominid line in order to produce a species of greater intelligence suited to their needs for slave labor and have not yet returned to the Earth to enslave us. In such a case our existence would be part of a greater plan and would confer meaning to our lives for the extraterrestrials, but it would not give meaning to our lives for us. Our being part of a divine plan can only confer meaning on our lives if we accept our role in that plan as meaningful to us; but, as in the case of extraterrestrial enslavement, what is meaningful to God may not be meaningful to human beings. Furthermore, so long as we are ignorant of a greater plan for our lives–which we certainly are–we cannot know what our role in such a plan is and thus it cannot make life meaningful to us. Our activities are worthwhile for their own sake, not because they fulfill some unknowable transcendental purpose.

These considerations show that we must create our own meaning for our lives regardless of whether or not our lives serve some higher purpose. Whether our lives are meaningful to us depends on how we judge them. The absence or presence of greater purpose is as irrelevant as the finality of death. The claim that our lives are ‘ultimately’ meaningless does not make sense because there is no sense in which they could be meaningful or meaningless outside of how we regard them. Questions about the meaning of life are questions about values. We attribute values to things in life rather than discovering them. There can be no meaning of life outside of the meaning we create for ourselves because the universe is not a sentient being that can attribute values to things. Even if a sentient God existed, the value that he would attribute to our lives would not be the same as the value that we find in living and thus would be irrelevant.

What makes our lives meaningful is that we find the activities we engage in to be worthwhile. Our determination to carry out projects we have created for ourselves gives our lives meaning. We feel that life is meaningless when most of our desires which we regard as important are frustrated. Whether we regard life as meaningful or meaningless depends on the degree to which our important desires are frustrated. The judgments that we make about our lives on these points are the same regardless of whether one’s life is eternal or not or whether it is part of a greater purpose or not. Perhaps the secret to a meaningful life is to focus on those desires which we can fulfill and diminish those which we cannot–provided that we know the difference between the two.

Keith Augustine