full disclosure

I am becoming more and more acutely aware of something as I go through my daily life, experiencing the world, all its woes, its glories, its failures and its triumphs. And this thing that I am constantly being exposed to, constantly being reminded of, constantly seeing, feeling and experiencing is, in my framework, a bitter pill to not only have to swallow, but almost silently so. Now more than ever.
Now you might be asking what exactly it is that I am becoming aware of and after a whole paragraph of (hopefully) keeping you reading to get to the answer, I will finally and with a peculiar and almost unprecedented sense of pride, say:

I am not an African.

Yes, I can hear you all moaning and groaning, and I can almost hear in some familiar (and often familial) voices, the obvious comments, but the point that I am trying to make is slightly more profound, I can assure you.

I grew up and I have lived in various provinces in South Africa, almost every single province in South Africa, as someone dutifully pointed out to me just the other day. My father was a pastor and therefore we travelled around a lot. Most of these I can’t really remember, and it’s rather sad when you think that so much of your heritage and what has shaped you to be the person you are today, is lost beneath layers and layers of other information in the tiny vessel of memory we refer to as our brain. Remember this statement. It’s important for later.

This upbringing, this journey that has brought me to where I am now has often been a tough one. But in some small, insignificant way I have often comforted myself with the notion that I am a child of Africa. I have experienced the country side, I have experienced the cities. I played cricket on a dirt road outside my house, I have slept under the stars on a farm in the Free State. I went to an Afrikaans, mixed-race school, I went to a private English school. I studied at a liberal arts college and I finished high school at a proudly Afrikaans institution. Somewhere along the line I guess that I have seen myself as a ‘child of the new South Africa’. I was born in 1990, so therefore any memory I have left of my childhood would be post-1994 and, in my mind at least, that signifies my life being a part of our new democracy. Even though it’s not factually true, I have always considered myself to be as old as our democracy is. And that, that is the reason why I think I have such a deep respect and admiration for the people that have fought so hard to make this country the place it is today, with all the opportunities it can offer me.
I might also be stepping on some toes here, but really, what else is a blog for? I also didn’t think that I needed to be black to be an African. And I still don’t.

I am of the firm belief that being an African means being a child of the soil, growing up with the harsh African sun on your back, feeling the effects of drought on farmers, loving the great outdoors, protecting what is yours, fighting for what it is that you believe in. It means being patriotic, not being afraid to say where you were born and, of course, knowing the words (and the meaning) to ‘Nkosi Sikeleli Africa’. These are all things I know, things I have experienced, and journeys I have made. This is my country as much as it is anyone else’s.

And so now I ask you why today I don’t feel like an African.

My citizenship has not been revoked; my name is the same, my race, my skin-colour, all remains as it was and yet; something has changed.
Maybe it’s because I feel that after today; I don’t want to be an African.
And yes, maybe I am more melancholic today, but such is suited to the black garb that I have donned on this ‘Black Tuesday’.

For those of you not aware of the situation in my beloved South Africa, I suggest you Google ‘Black Tuesday’ or ‘SA Secrecy Bill’ to see what I am referring to. This blog is not going to be as informative as the many qualified sites out there will be.
Upon hearing that the bill was passed in the National Assembly today, I felt my heart sink and a stunted scream of pain escaped almost inaudibly from my lips. Not because the bill has yet been put in place, not because it has directly started affecting me. But like a teenager discovering for the first time that their parents aren’t flawless or like a parent discovering for the first time that their baby boy or girl had turned into someone they didn’t know, I felt a sudden mixture of rebellion and confusion. Somehow, and I’m not sure how just yet, but somehow the phrase: ‘’We stopped looking for monsters under our beds when we realized they were inside us.’’, fits in here so perfectly.
This fault, this flaw that I discovered today, this shaft that is hampering our progress as a young democracy, has somehow left me so detached from all that is this country and everything that Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu and Steve Biko fought for to achieve that I started to wonder whether the sacrifices of these individuals were at all necessary. I started to see more and more flaws, my eyes opened up to a whole new world.

As an artist we often deal with politics and one can almost say that all art is political. However, I have always sort of detached myself from that aspect as I felt that one needs to tell one’s own story and there was never an opportunity for me to tell my story; had I told another’s I would have felt like a hypocrite. And as much as I have always tried to stay on top of current affairs and have some idea about what is happening in this country as a whole, I have never really felt the need to get involved in politics. As a white male in SA today, I have never felt I had enough say or much leverage to say it. Somehow I had always managed to stay out of heated political discussions, because in my experience these tended to lead to very little actually being done. When voting day came, I cast my ‘’Democratic Alliance’’ vote proudly, but I never felt an urgency to do more. Until today, that is.

As is often the case with these enlightening moments, I immediately wanted to know more, before I could write this blog, and, although I did find out quite a lot, there is a lot more that I still want to know.
Today I read Lindiwe Mazibuko’s moving speech to parliament in which she proclaimed that the DA will not stop fighting this secrecy bill. The power of her words as she, young, black South African woman, faced an entire parliament of people far beyond her years moved me. She confronted them with words that said: ‘What will you, the Members on that side of the House, tell your grandchildren one day? I know you will tell them that you fought for freedom. But will you also tell them you helped to destroy it?’’. I also read that she had confronted someone about their use of the word ‘darkies’ in parliament and that his rebuttal was to call her a ‘coconut’ (brown on the outside, white on the inside). This exemplary child of Africa, a young black girl with a past that resembles that of most in South Africa, a young black girl with dignity who has carved her own way in the Democratic Alliance in as little as four years. This woman who now, not much older than I am, is standing in front of hundreds of men who have fought for this freedom that she has and is confronting them about the bad decisions they are about to make. This takes strength, character, dignity, respect and a lot of hard work. This, this is what I thought meant being an African.

I read an interesting article today where a reporter who was due to interview Ms Mazibuko, wanted to get a clear sense of what the everyman (or woman, in this case) thought of her. The reporter showed a picture of Lindiwe to her domestic worker whose response was: ‘DA. Bad.’ I heard that Ms Mazibuko can speak 4 official South African languages and has lived in suburban and rural South Africa. And just because she dares to oppose, as the DA’s national spokesperson, a government so inbred with their own propagandas, their own pride and their own misguided sense of power she is labelled as not being a ‘true African’ or being one of the enemy.

Therefore I think it’s important to assess one thing: Who is more African? The corrupt? Those who steal from the people to fund their own pockets? Those who are quick to jump on the ‘race-train’ whenever they are being held accountable? Those who keep their affairs a secret, because they know that it is not within the best interests of those they govern? Or is it those who stand up for what they believe in? Those who are prepared to fight an uphill-battle? Those who stand in the face of adversity and keep their head held high, because even if they don’t know where they are going, at least they know where they have been?
I would argue the latter.

Our generation, my generation, we’re always saying how we haven’t had anything worth fighting for. Well, this is basically being handed to us on a silver platter. The time of posting protesting status updates and protesting tweets is over. I think it’s safe to say that the government couldn’t care less about your 140 characters. There is no point in wearing black clothing anymore unless you’re wearing it whilst toyi-toying. Silent protest is a thing of the past. I think it’s time that the youth of this country rally up with the same amount of force that they did in 1965. The time has come that we start marching through the streets again, holding our heads high. The time has come for us to go out there and do something. And say something!

I was scrolling through my friends’ status updates on Facebook today and the general consensus is that my generation - of all races, colours and creeds – is ready to start fighting for this country. And so am I.
Speak up, speak out, and march, march till your feet bleed, march till you faint under this glorious African sun. Because that’s how you change a country, that’s how you get a government to listen. ‘’Nothing will change if you change nothing’’.

That is what I call being an African. It has nothing to do with skin. It has nothing to do with who was here first, which language you speak or which tribe you belong to. It has to do with an inherent urge to fight for what it is you love.

I feel, at this point, that it’s an appropriate time for me to directly address the ANC:

I am not an African, purely because you all call yourselves Africans. And if you are the barometer to which I should measure my African heritage, I want nothing of it.
I want to be a South African. I want to be a South African like Nelson Mandela, like Lindiwe Mazibuko, like Helen Zille, Ingrid Jonker and Ferial Haffajee. I want you to remember my name. I want you to see my face and be haunted by it. Because in the very near future it will come parading down the streets, joined by thousands of young South Africans refusing to sit back and watch you destroy what our forefathers fought so hard to build. Because I have feet and I will march them. I will march them till I feel that my legacy has been left and felt. I will not tell my grandchildren one day that I stood by and watched our beautiful young democracy being destroyed by an authoritarian government who themselves have turned into the very monster they fought so hard to conquer many years before.*
I am 21 years old, a child of South Africa, and I am not afraid to fight for what I believe in. And that makes me more of a South African than any of you.

I have now fully disclosed.

ANC, your move.



*October 19, 1977. South Africa’s Apartheid Government bans several newspapers for publishing news articles about the beating and murder of Steve Biko at the hands of police. The ANC protested this violently.
November 22, 2011. The ANC passes the Protection of Information Bill allowing the incarceration and banning of any entity that publicizes any information about the corrupt nature or actions of members of government.
The nation must know.

A Hiatus in Experience?

It has been so long since I last wrote a blog, that the very writing of a blog has become a foreign practice to me.
I’m not saying that I didn’t want to write a new blog, I’m merely observing that, in essence, I had nothing on my mind.
This is the premise for any of my blogs, as those of you who follow me, will know. I only write when something is to be said or if I have something that I would like to explore.

Often with me, exploration is a mental activity, a labyrinth of passages leading from into the next and often refusing to end until I have reached the centre and the core of what I want to say.
When I say: mental, I mean as in: ‘of the mind’, not: ‘relating to insanity’.
Although more often than not, the latter is most true.

Recently, I have been trying a new outlook on life, a much more disciplined one, a much more focused one. And as a result, I have started losing weight again, I have started exercising more and I have started to keep a diary planner, the very thought of which used to make me sick to the stomach. Now, in 2011, at the tender age of 21, I have decided that I need to start realizing the responsibilities associated with being an adult and being a professional in my chosen profession.

As one does, when one feels that the time has come to turn over a new leaf, the rest of the book has to be deleted and one has to make space for the new and exciting direction into which one is being pushed.
For me, this started with going through photos and deciding whether these photos were really a part of my brand new focus forward.
Needless to say, I deleted a substantial amount of photos.
And afterwards, I felt kind of sad.
It felt as if I was denying myself the chance to look back on these memories and really re-live them. For a day or so, I tried everything in my power to retrieve the deleted photos, (I had already emptied my recycle bin), but to no avail.
After a period of intense struggling I finally surrendered to the great force of technology and I made peace with the fact that I had lost those photos.
I was angry at myself, angry at my new focus, angry at technology, angry at the world.
The world was an unfair rugby coach and I was a timid, scrawny twelve-year old pushed into the ‘under-21’ scrum.

Later that evening, I watched the stand-up comedy DVD of Dylan Moran, entitled: “Like, totally…”. In it, Dylan made a very poignant observation. He noted and said that we spend an incredible amount of time taking pictures of ourselves on different holidays or at events or next to a celebrity. According to him, a photo was a hiatus in the experience, not a recollection of the experience.

When I racked my brain that evening, lying on my couch, I realized that what Dylan Moran had said, actually had tremendous value.
I decided, then and there, that the human race is slowly losing the ability to experience a moment, a second in time. We have lost the ability to ‘breathe’ in an experience as one would the smell of home cooking.

Why is it that we walk into a store or a restaurant or any public place, and immediately is overcome by a sense of nostalgia, because there is a particular smell that we can associate with a smell from our childhood? Why do we not need a photo to remind us of those moments when our mothers would take a casserole out of the oven and the intoxicating fragrance of rosemary would pervade the air?
Because, my dearest readers, very few of us have photos of those moments and because they were so precious to us when we were experiencing them, we engraved the entire experience: the sight, the smell, the taste and the sound into our memories so that we could always remind ourselves that there was a time when we were truly happy.

So then why is it, in this modern world of ours,that we so desperately need to document every experience we have only in terms of sight?
And now, with the advancement of technology, we have gone one step further and we have invented digital photos where we can delete an unwanted photo and pose to take another one. We have become so obsessed with getting perfect documentation of what it is that we experience on a daily basis that we forget that it’s sometimes the imperfect photos that matter the most, because in imperfect photos, we show the experience for what it truly is.

Personally, I am not a huge fan of a photo. Maybe it is because of my Aquarian nature, but I often feel robbed of my moment by posing for a flash or suddenly just seeing a flash as I was still enveloped in a beautiful sunset.
Almost always, the moment lost can never be regained.
I often find myself adjusting my posture, lifting my chin and forcing a smile whenever a camera is present at a gathering. All of this subconsciously, of course.
But in my mind, I am thinking: I should look good in this memory when I want to look at it later. And in those seconds of subconscious adjustment, I have lost countless irretrievable moments.
On a different note: how many times have we looked back at these photos and thought: was I really THAT happy at that specific moment?
How often is the answer no?
More than we would like to admit, I would say.

When Pres. Barack Obama used to be Sen. Barack Obama in 2005, he met Nelson Mandela, an honor which some have said is deemed higher than meeting the Pope. In a smokey hotel room, the two discussed several topics and Sen. Obama was so intoxicated with the experience of meeting Mr Mandela, that when the time came to take a photo, he refused to pose for one. A bystander then took an amateur photo in which Sen. Obama’s face wasn’t even visible. Years later, Pres. Obama sent that photo, signed, to Nelson Mandela, who now hangs it proudly in his office.
When I saw the photo at first, I was disappointed that no better photo was taken of two of the world’s greatest leaders. Afterwards, I realized that the amateur photo was actually a perfect example of what a photo should be. It should be a true reflection of the moment, not an interruption of it. For Pres. Obama, a photo would have intruded on the intimate moment that he was in with one of the most inspiring people on the face of the earth.

Is this not the mindset we should adopt?
I think so.

So after much deliberation I have decided that I will not cry any more crocodile tears over spilled milk, I refuse to let those photos be the only recollection I have of the memories, and often memoirs, that I have had in my 21 years on this earth.
This coming year I am going to focus on taking more ‘mental’ pictures. And when I say that, once again: mental as in ‘of the mind’ and not as in ‘relating to insanity’.
Although, once again, the latter has its strong potential.

When I take a mental picture, I would like to be fully encroached and engulfed in the sights, sounds, smells and touches of that experience. When I am old and blind one day, I need to have a gallery of pictures from whence I can choose. And when I decide to relive these experiences, I would like to be back in that moment, exactly how I remember it.

That’s the whole idea of re-living, isn’t it?
To ‘live’ a moment again, not just to see a snippet of it on a piece of glossy paper.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that we should stop taking photos. What I am saying is that we need to make sure that we have completely absorbed every aspect of every moment, every sensation, every emotion, every physical feeling; before we decide to document it.

.Maybe then, we will really start living? When we start forcing ourselves to really and truly soak in every sensation of every moment, when we start actually living in that moment, and when we treat every moment as the last one we will ever have.

Only then, when we are old, can we re-live it, not recollect it.

Here’s to a year of ‘mental’ pictures, in both senses of the word.

Say ‘cheese’ !

Barack Obama meeting Nelson Mandela in 2005.