uBuntu – The South African philosophy that espouses that all beings are inextricably linked to one another = I am because we are
The Journey …
Travelling along the myriad pathways of this life, side-stepping thorny obstacles, at times clambeing over jagged rocks, our bodies wracked and bruised.
May we pick up the crushed flowers, the dead leaves scattering these alleyways, may we reach and assist the countless souls, lying by the wayside, forgotten, torn, abused.
May we be human, more humane, less oblivious, less cruel, may we appreciate lives that stagger, inert, broken, inching forwards wracked by coughs, held back by pained starts.
May we be kind, more embracing, of the other, may we be less cocooned, less self-absorbed, with true respect,
knowing that all the world, and all living things, are nothing when alone,
for we are of this earth, a sum of all its infinite parts …
you hardly spare me a glance, as you walk past me, a fellow human, whom you pretend not to see.
you send me off to fight your wars, remaining comfortably ensconced in your ivory tower, while in the trenches i shiver and cower.
you dock my pay if one of your fine bone china cups gets chipped, you withhold my wages, while the hunger in my children’s stomachs rages.
your children still call me ‘boy’ or ‘girl’, though it was i who changed their diapers long ago, but it is still i who is the recipient of the epithets that you and they hurl and throw.
you use my body for your carnal desires, throwing some money on my stained bed, you use me as a lifeless rag, then dispose of me in a rubbish bag.
you claim to be so liberal, so open-minded and progressive, yet you ignore my plight, you discuss poverty in your chandeliered rooms, as i prepare some beans in the dim candlelight.
you send your cheques to greenpeace and amnesty, perhaps to assuage your guilt somehow, as you refuse to pay me my overtime due, your body weighed down by heaving jewellery, in red and white and blue.
you see me building your glittering skyscrapers and your glitzy malls, my hard hat pummelled by stone and dust, as i eke out a living, my dreams turned to rust.
you walk and you talk, leaving me to scrounge in the garbage heaps, for scraps of this and that, while your stocks and portfolios grow ever more fat.
i am invisible to you, to your posh and pompous kind, and i doubt your humanity will be ever anywhere to find.
you see me, a festering sore on your manicured lawns, a piece of dirt living on ‘charitable’ rations, and the first to bear the brunt of your police batons.
i am human, though only barely just, easily interred, once my purpose has been served,
i am human, though only barely just, as i get buried in a heap of dust.
With President Nelson Mandela & my fatherWith the National Poet Laureate of South Africa Comrade Mongane Wally Serote
An absolute honour and truly humbling that the National Poet Laureate of South Africa Comrade Mongane Wally Serote chose to write the Foreword to my book.
The following is the Foreword by the National Poet Laureate of. South Africa …
Foreword by Professor Mongane Wally Serote.
National Poet Laureate of South Africa.
Afzal Moolla-The Poet.
Afzal Moolla is a South African poet. He is a prolific poet. He grew up in a family, which, for the longest of time, was part and parcel of the liberation struggle in South Africa. That is to say, he grew up in a family of freedom fighters.
You can imagine what he had to listen to at an early age. He absorbed it all. His folks are elderly now.
“…These were the early 1970s, and this story was told to me by my parents, who themselves were recently arrived political exiles in India, having to leave South Africa, where my father, Moosa “Mosie” Moolla was arrested along with Nelson Mandela and 156 others in the infamous Treason Trial of 1956…”
He is young, living in a country which emerged from the depth of one of the most cruel political systems ever imagined by human beings. Nothing will allow Afzal to forget that, even as he may have been a toddler when that system was at its most vicious.
And now at his adult life, some among us, seek to destroy a dream of the people. We must scrutinize what this poet says about those who do that: who are they if face to face with OR, Madiba, Che, Fidel… that they can ony be traitors.
As we read what Afzal says, we will also be engulfed by a progressive and humane attitude of human life. Afzal is of Indian origin, a South African, whose young mind was shaped by a people who had to strife with everything possible to be human.
The combination of poetry and prose in Afzal’s rendition, walks one in very rough terraine, not sparing one. He calls all this, his work:
STRUGGLE EXILE LOVE
“…As we walked through the tombstones of the war soldiers from all parts of the world, my father explained how apartheid was a scourge like Fascism and Nazism. He explained how the world had joined forces to fight Mussolini and Hitler, and why we too had to fight against apartheid….”
Even when the worst of things are explored in this work, the optimism of the spirit from the poet, is still the basis to seek hope; to search for a way out of pessimism. A rare skill indeed. He can express anger, or despair, even cynicism, as also he seeks an anchor in the strength which resides in the hearts of human beings. And therefore Afzal, refuses to let go of the humaneness of human beings.
He then braves the challenge by referencing the reality of the beings of struggle as the names of the freedom fighters spread throughout the pages which carry the weight of his writing.
There is too much pain in Afzals work, but equally there is love, there is joy and as said there is hope. Afzal is a skilled artisan of things made of words that is, of things which become the writing on the wall: a history, a culture tempered in the freedom struggle.
“Searching.
Searching,
in the debris of the past,
scraps of casually discarded emotion.
Searching,
in hastily trashed yesterdays,
an inkling of moments flung away.
Searching,
in heaps of rubbished words,
that tiresome sigh of defeated thought.
Searching,
in the layers of moulted skin
the wilting self that once was true.
Searching,
in the reflections between the ripples,
for the whispered pangs of roaring desire.
Searching,
in the blank eyes streaming endlessly,
an echo of the faintest sigh of new life.
Searching.”
There is no letting go here. Life is pursued relentlessly, with the knowledge that life itself is a struggle for life and living; but also, knowing from having lived in struggle and among freedom fighters that there is no alternative to freedom. That want and that knowledge is insatiable; it is only satisfied by the reality of the manifestation of the spirit, meaning, everything which is liveable and defining being free.
(About Timol-a name we know because its reality teaches about the extremes of human cruelty, but also about utter commitment to that unbreakable particle of the human spirit which forever defines, and forever seeks freedom. )
“today their lies have been consigned to the dirt.
They tried to murder an ideal,
the revolutionary spirit that burned bright in your heart,
they tried to silence you, not knowing your memory shall never depart.
They tried to kill you,
but they will never silence you,
for you live,
through the expanse of our land,
mingling in the rivers,
standing high upon our shared revolutionary hill,
they tried to silence you,
yet the hunger for justice will never be still,
they tried to silence you, but the memory of your martyrdom never will.”
—————————————————–
March 21, 1960 – Sharpeville
They shot you in the back.
The oppressors lead tearing into muscled flesh. The flesh of Africa.
They massacred you in Sharpeville, in Soweto.
Today we remember you.
We salute you…”
There is an isiZulu saying which rings of finality in its utterance, expression and thirst for freedom: si dela nina e ni lele (we envy you who have fallen). It is a battle cry. It is an expression of love and hope. It is a yearning which is insatiable which knows and aligns with the purpose of life that living life is a definition of Freedom. When Afzal names the freedom fighters, and as a series ofthese names emerge and spread throughout his poetry, it conjures that feeling and that understanding.
That is what defines “Dr Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 – 1968)
You had a dream, of pastures of peace,
where children of all hues mingle like rainbows.
They silenced you, yet your dream
resounds louder still,
in pastures not yet of peace,
where children of all hues mingle like rainbows.”
———————————————
” The Wind Carries his Name
They shot him down,
to silence a man of flesh and bone.
Even as the bullets tore through him,
the wind carried his name.
Far across the weary fields,
high above the stubborn peaks,
over the blood-soaked streams,
the wind carried his name.
They shot him down,
to silence a man of flesh and bone.
Yet the wind carries his name,
to you and to me,
to them and to us.
They shot him down,
but his name resounds,
as it floats on the breeze.
And,
still they try to shoot him down,
to silence us all,
to stifle an ideal.
But the wind cannot be stilled,
and the wind carries his name:
“Che” “
Afzal is here, with that ‘…they…” referring to the international oligarchy, that “ …small group of people,,,”, who with mighty force control everything at all cost, against billions of people, indeed against humanity, who now, as Afzal warns us are pushing all of humanity to the precipice of a final and last war, if there are no thousands upon thousands of “Che(s)” who must emerge to stop them.
The world, humanity is once more, as the saying goes, that “…history repeats itself…” faced by a great possibility of an international arms race. The oligarchy’s objective: to amass all the resources of the earth for the “…small group of people…” They are relentless.
Afzal’s work of poetry traverses human feelings fearlessly. He is the child of Freedom. He is the adult nurtured by a series of names of people who carried the blood that has been spilled, whether in the street, or in the veld, or in the houses, on the bed or finally ill of health and having to bid a frail life farewell-nevertheless, life which sought to express the will of millions who have been trampled upon by the international oligarchy, “…a small group of people…” who will stop at nothing to burn the world and is content, turning it into ashes.
Afzal keeps “…Searching…” because he was brought up and grew up in the struggle for freedom. He searches, seeking to find that particle, which no one can break because it resides in spirit-it knows peace, it knows being secure, it knows the meaning of freedom. It is profound in it being simple.
To OR: Afzal says:
“And then finally off to a new dwelling in a faraway alien land,
reeking and drenched in a foreignness so blatantly bland,
never fitting in, though always dreading being shut out,
singing paeans to hope scribbled in the sand.
You left your country, your home, your very own place of being,
you fled, into exile, far away from blinded eyes so unseeing,
and you held to a principle within, and you stood resolute,
till the shadows felt themselves in shame fleeing,
We salute you! And all like you, and the so many countless more,
into whose flesh the tyrant’s sword so cruelly tore,
We salute you!
You who fought at home and you who left to fight,”
To his mother, who is an experience and voice of many women in South Africa, on Our Continent, and of the world; Victims of the powerful “…small group of people…” in the world, who tear it apart.
true and filled with the generosity of spirit that defines you,
may your dreams soar into the boundless open skies,
and may the benevolent fingertips of time and of fate,
brush away any tears that should fall from your gentlest eyes.
May you forever stand tall,
may your head always be held high,
with stoic dignity.
May your past experiences be the stepping-stones that mark your path ahead,
may your heart be your guide,
your blazing beacon of wildly enthusiastic hope,
may your wishes be simple,
and may they come to be,
filling your life and your moments,
with joyous bliss,
where you truly feel free.
Free of the weight of yesterday,
free of gnawing doubt,
and may your being be infused,
with the softest serendipity,
so that you may spread your arms,
and to the heavens shout,
I am free,
I am me,
at long last,
I am standing tall,
never again to bow,
or to fall on bended knee.
This is a wish both simple yet elusive,
a wish that only you can make true,
by simply being,
the kind,
warm,
gentle person,
that is you.
———————————-
In Your Eyes
As another day recedes,
enveloped under the shawl of night,
allow me to drown,
in your eyes.
Moments fleeting,
fickle hands of time unseeing,
allow me to seek solace,
in your eyes.
The trodden path littered with each shard,
regrets this heart wishes to discard,
so, allow me to seek refuge,
in your eyes.
I have walked through twisting boulevards of life,
seeking simple joy, away from desolation, strife,
so, allow me to find peace,
in your eyes.
In your eyes,
I find,
the gentleness left behind,
away from superficial smiles,
away from fatigue of the walked mile.
In your eyes,
I feel,
at home at long last,
your love caressing away the restlessness of the past,
stepping out of the shadows to embrace pure contentment,
though a bit player,
in your life’s theatrical cast.
In your eyes,
I touch,
the flame of promise radiating through your loving light,
that is why,
I no longer dread,
the vacuum of encroaching night.
—————————————–
What all of these words say, which Afzal has crafted, which we dare not forget, is that we as South Africans, as Africans come from a poetic place, as do all of humanity who come from a “…Paean…” a ululation and praise of the relentless freedom fighters.
Professor Mongane Wally Serote. National Poet Laureate of South Africa
My dear friends and fellow-travellers here on WordPress,
I hope that all dear ones here are well and keeping safe healthy during these harsh times.
I have been well, but have been so busy with work and more work and with house and home things so I’ve been away from this wonderful space for far too long.
I hope to be here more often as I miss all friends and your wonderful pieces.
Do stay well, and my love and warmest wishes to you and to all those loved by you and hoping and wishing and praying that this ghastly pandemic that has wreaked so much pain and grief and untold sorrow to so many may be soon less virulent and deadly as it has over the past year and a bit.
Hugs and love to all from Johannesburg in springtime South Africa 🤗🙏🏽✌🏾👍🏾❤️🌻
I may be off and on here given the pressures of work and home but my love and thoughts and deeply felt warmth of spirit is always here with my dearest friends and brothers and sisters in our wonderfully close-knit WordPress family
The video of the launch of my book “Struggle, Exile, & Love“, published by the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation and with a Foreword by South African National Poet Laureate Comrade Mongane Wally Serote and a Preface by Comrade Ismail Vadi.
I am the winds whispered to by the ancients of the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela,
the winds that have heard the murmurs of the ancestors at Great Zimbabwe.
I am the winds resting at Mapungubwe, I am the winds of the Upemba, I am the winds above Giza,
I am the winds of the Djenné-Djenno, I am the winds of the Songhai,
I am the winds of the Numidia,
I have breathed across these lands, these lands have breathed into me.
I have witnessed colonialists carving up my continent,
I have heard screams of mothers and children,
I have seen the slave-ships set sail,
I carry the memories of my people manacled, and bound in chains.
I have heard the shrieks of my people, I have seen my lands plundered,
I have borne witness to genocide, to notions of racial superiority, to oppression, to tyranny,
I have caressed far too many bruised bodies, I have dried far too many tears.
I am the winds of Africa.
I embrace the hope my people carry, I feel it thud-thudding in their veins,
I encompass my lands bathed with renewed spirit each dawn,
I encompass my lands infused with hope each morn,
as my Africa, our Africa, wraps us in her dazzling multi-hued, comforting shawl.
____________________
– Lalibela is a town in the Amhara region of northern Ethiopia. It’s known for its distinctive rock-cut churches dating from the 12th and 13th centuries, which are pilgrimage sites for Coptic Christians. Carved out of rock, the subterranean monoliths include huge Bete Medhane Alem, and cross-shaped Bete Giyorgis. Many are joined by tunnels and trenches, and some have carved bas-reliefs and colored frescoes inside.
– Great Zimbabwe is an ancient city in the south-eastern hills of Zimbabwe near Lake Mutirikwe and the town of Masvingo. It is thought to have been the capital of a great kingdom, although which kingdom is not certain, during the country’s Late Iron Age. Construction on the city began in the 11th century and continued until it was abandoned in the 15th century. The edifices are believed to have been erected by the ancestral Shona. The stone city spans an area of 7.22 square kilometres (2.79 square miles) which, at its peak, could have housed up to 18,000 people. It is recognised as a World Heritage site by UNESCO.
– The Kingdom of Mapungubwe was a medieval state in South Africa located at the confluence of the Shashe and Limpopo rivers, south of Great Zimbabwe. The name is derived from either TjiKalanga and Tshivenda. The name might mean “Hill of Jackals”.
– Lake Upemba is a lake in Bukama, Haut-Lomami District, the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
– Giza is an Egyptian city on the west bank of the Nile, near Cairo. The Giza Plateau is home to iconic Egyptian monuments, including 3 tall pyramids built as royal mausoleums around the 26th century B.C. The largest, the Great Pyramid, is King Khufu’s tomb. The Great Sphinx is a vast sculpture of a man’s head on a lion’s body. The Solar Boat Museum displays a restored cedar barge found buried near the Great Pyramid.
– Djenné-Djenno is a UNESCO World Heritage Site located in the Niger River Valley in the country of Mali. Literally translated to “ancient Djenné”, it is the original site of both Djenné and Mali and is considered to be among the oldest urbanized centers and the best-known archaeology site in sub-Saharan Africa
– The Songhai empire, also spelled Songhay, was a great trading state of West Africa (flourished 15th–16th century), centred on the middle reaches of the Niger River in what is now central Mali and eventually extending west to the Atlantic coast and east into Niger and Nigeria.
– Numidia was the ancient kingdom of the Numidians located in northwest Africa, initially originating from Algeria, but later expanding across modern-day Tunisia, Libya, and some parts of Morocco
clutching, grasping, holding onto, gulping down, hungrily, each breath, every breath, fearing the onset of the years, the splinters of time, embedding, piercing, this moment, the very now, numbed by repetition, embalmed by trepidation, of tomorrows yet to dawn, suspiciously sifting through the strands of greying hair, seeking clues, the because to the whys, the slow mornings, restless nights, jabbing reminders, as years, decades, scurry, scamper, flee, feeling it all slipping away, standing, immobile, stilled by the implacable sentinels at the doorstep, these immovable sentries, concealing the door, that leads to today …
Behind the barricades, tucked away beyond the layers of the impregnable buffer,
secreted in the unshakeable edifice, hewn deep into the rock of solitude,
countless thoughts blur, hazily scurrying past, adrift on the breeze, yesteryears embers that cannot last.
These embers, these flurries of memory, escape high above the ramparts of this fortress of stunted, shackled thought,
fleeing the fears, the tears streaming down eyes unblinking, eyes devoid of light, eyes rendered blind, leaving grainy photographs etched in the receding mind.
All these memories, this nostalgic tugging, sewn into the detritus of what was once beloved, of what was once dear and true,
all those sun-kissed moments, once woven by infinite tendrils of hope, lie strewn here and there, and everywhere in between, all those dreams now merely flotsam and jetsam, thrashed upon the waves of the ocean so jagged, so stinging, yet so boundless in its shades of aquamarine blue.
Yet there exists, in folded recesses, layered in shrouds, wrapped in papyrus,
armoured sentinels, mutely grasping, onto all that was once all of you, onto all that was once all of me,
armoured sentinels,
standing guard, fiercely protecting against forgetting,
fierce sentinels, holding firm onto the persistence of memory.
As we all grapple with this strange and scary new world we now inhabit, it makes one think of what is truly important in one’s life.
The love and caring of family has above all else become our new “normal”.
This is not to say that we didn’t love or care for family before this pandemic and before our state of lockdown but we had begun to take things and people close to us for granted.
The Covid-19 microscopic virus has turned our world as we know it upside down.
A tiny collection of cells so minute has laid bare our arrogance as human beings.
The world’s largest and most powerful countries have spent trillions on large weapons that rain death on innocent people, and now we see all of us – large global powers or small island nations being “levelled” by the novel Covid-19 virus.
This is staggering, for me at least, having grown up in the era of the Cold War with its doctrine of “MAD” or “Mutually Assured Destruction”.
The Novel Coronavirus has, in a matter of months, disposed off all that human arrogance of power and our beliefs in that we control life and death.
The Covid-19 pandemic has flung into the the garbage bin of history the conceit that we are alone in, and secure in our wealthy countries and in our wealthy homes.
We are facing the realisation that we are all fallible.
We are pummelled finally, by the understanding that we are one race – the human race – and what affects one certainly affects the other.
The South African philosophy of “uBuntu” or “I am because we are” – that simple yet profound understanding that all of us are linked by a common shared humanity.
For those who believe in a higher power, these moments are particularly poignant as “Allah” or any other deity or name the different religions refer to “The Almighty” as is being seen as almost “humbling” us all, His errant children who have strayed from the path of justice and equality and truth and tolerance, and frugality, and respect for one’s elders and the countless humanistic tenets that religions share and espouse.
For those who believe in “The Almighty”, these are moments of solemn humility and prayer – salaah – masses – prarthanas – as we implore our maker to forgive us our trespasses – even the ones we may be unaware of having trespassed.
Such deep philosophical and existential ideas all prompted by a lethal microscopic virus that threatens to wreak even more misery and death upon human beings – with of course the most vulnerable in our societies bearing the brunt – the poor, the destitute, the oppressed, the beaten-down masses who have been savaged by the capitalist “profit over people” motive and the prevailing worldwide accepted economic model.
But, I see light here. I see glimmers of hope. This may sound all very well coming from one who lives comfortably and does not have to eke out survival on an hour to hour basis as almost five billion of our fellow humans on this earth of ours have to do daily.
The hope I speak of is the true humbling of all of us.
We have been humbled and this tiny virus has us terrified.
We have also been exposed to being petrified.
So the hope I speak of is that perhaps, just perhaps, the human race will emerge from this indescribably brutal pandemic with at the very least, having pondered and reevaluated what we as human beings have valued and taken for granted all these decades past since we began to truly progress in the fields of medical science and information technology et al.
These are just a few thoughts on this Monday the 8th of March 2021.
I will endeavour to introspect more.
I want to be less arrogant about anything – be it religion, race, social status, level of education, and all the other yardsticks by which we have until this point in our history measured what “success” and “happiness” really mean.
Prayers and wishes and thoughts to all those battling this plague, and to all human beings, but particularly to the teeming multitudes who have been for centuries beaten down and trampled upon.
They are fellow humans.
They must be accorded the dignity we so blindly take for granted.
They may have wished they were Paperback Writers, and yet they’d never Imagine soaring with Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds high above and across those fragrant Strawberry Fields Forever leaping Across the Universe With a Little Help from their Friends while running Helter-Skelter singing paths to Give Peace a Chance while Twistin’ & Shoutin’ their way to old Eleanor Rigby’s funeral with Father McKenzie, while all she craved was the human touch of Wanting to Hold your Hand when All my Loving Can’t buy her Love so Please Please Me and tell Jude not to be so sad cos’ the War is Over and its a Happy Christmas as the battles rage on and all we do Watching the Wheels go Round and Round, is saying Hello Goodbye to the Obla-dis Obla-daas leaning drunkenly on Penny Lane and being Working Class Heroes if only you’d Love me Do and if only we’d afford a Ticket to Ride to burn some Norwegian Wood Yeah Yeah Yeah cos’ She Loves You, because Yesterday we wore out our Rubber Souls strolling down Abbey Road soaking in The Ballad of John and Yoko while Letting it Be but only and only, once again, if we Come Together, at long long last, and striving, flailing to Give Peace a Chance …
