pain

There are no words to explain the hurt and pain that lives inside my black body, a body assaulted in so many different ways that when I want to say why it hurts I have to pause, think and think again and then i drop into my intuition to discern the real cause of the pain. 

water and inequality in cape town

the inequality in the city of cape town is playing it's role in how we need to respond to the drought.

Yes there is a drought, yes we cannot afford to waste water, yes we need to live more consciously and move closer to living in harmony with mother earth, nature and each other. The effects of climate change are here, man-made or natural disasters, its happening and much sooner than predicted.

How we understand and respond to this situation requires thought and compassion living in a city where some households as a norm

• do not have easy access to water, they still have to walk to communal taps and backyard dwellers need to pa, often exploitative rates, for the water they use from 'landlords' 
• are on the drip system due to lack of payment of rates, rent, & services (essentially they already have access to limited amount of water per day

This contrasted with households at the other extreme

• who have taps indoors, swimming pools, huge lush and lavish gardens with irrigation systems.

between these extremes we have households who have access to tap water indoors.

The response to the drought is therefore demanding different actions from different people based on their economic standing and access to water.  It does demand of all of us to live consciously. 

indescribable

life's joys are only as uplifting as it's tragedies are low
in the absence of a meal
any food can taste delicious
being thirsty in the desert
elevates the value of water
and 
in the absence of your love
the heart ache is indescribable

Afrikaaps reflections

Yesterday I had the wonderful opportunity to watch the Afrikaaps documentary film, directed by Dylan Valley, and to listen to EmileYX?'s inspiring reflections on the work as well as on his own life's work as part of our Pathways to Free Education event.  

I loved Afrikaaps since i first watched the theatre production at the Baxter.  Afrikaaps is a rich presentation of language as life-giving and culture as ever evolving. It captures the pain of the rewriting of history by the oppressors, the loss of language, the dismissal of a mother tongue as well as the erosion of self-worth. 

A big Thank You to the cast who are also wrote the script of the Afrikaaps theatre production -  BlaqPearl, Bliksemstraal, Jethro Louw, Moenier Adams, Emile YX?, Shane Cooper, Quintin Jitsvinger and Kyle Shepherd. This is such an important work, Afrikaaps takes the task of telling our own stories to higher levels! 

They expose the ridicule and racism that we all face when we speak and our accent, our diction and vocabulary does not measure up to a contrived standard. An accent that marks our roots as black and working class and deems us unacceptable in certain circles - as a learner in the film says we can say a few words and people will judge you as a gangster based on the way you speak.     

The story exposes the myth of Afrikaans / Afrikaaps as a language of the Afrikaner / die Baas / the oppressor as it excavates the hidden story of the development of Afrikaaps from multiple languages, stemming from the earliest spoken word by the first peoples San and Khoe, to Arabic, Dutch and other languages brought to the Cape by the many who came or were brought here. It illustrates the ethnic cleansing of a language, by the Dutch Afrikaner who literally deleted words from the dictionary, many of these words are still used today and considered swearing or simply not proper words. The story explores what it means when our children learn an Afrikaans language at school that we do not speak at home. 

Afrikaaps tells the story using music, drama and film.  It affirms the language, it's speakers and thus elevates our self-worth as oppressed peoples who were literally silenced by the devastation of our language.  

Do yourself a favour and get a copy of this dvd from EmileYX? or Jitsvinger or BlaqPearl ‘none but ourselves can free our minds’