penned

Sometimes I forget what it takes to do this blogging thing and other times I merely tire when I think it has to be done... Sharing your thoughts with the world or even five people to one is a major exercise...
I struggle to breathe my gifts sometimes.


" For Africa to me... is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going 
   unless  he knows exactly  where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place. " 
   - Dr Maya Angelou 


Dr Maya Angelou is one of my favourite writers and when I saw this quote it struck a nerve with me. There are so many things going on in the world, wars are being waged and marches staged, death tolls rise daily from various causes and poverty is still undefeated....

What is Africa to me? Who am I?


This question rings true through so many debates I happen to read through on twitter with discussions becoming overly heated as each person perceives their truth in being just. Amazingly though if you had to ask some Africans to participate in their own rituals they would out right refuse any partaking in such....
I don't know if I'm alone in wondering what is so wrong or unjust in the practices of our forefathers...

Yet I seem to wonder what on earth are we preserving as indigenous people of Africa of our heritage?
I am African because my umbilical chord is still attached to the placenta of this continent... I read something or a tweet, can't really remember where I saw this but to paraprhase and take liberties it said: I am African kuba xana ndizithutha ndizi tsala emva imvelaphi yabant aband'zalayo... my history is told in their existence, where they were from to where I am now, that resonated well with me.

I love my continent and I was born at it's southern most tip living at its edge...

Camagu

I would much rather
Speak earth affinity
Than to be political
Whilst people die
Of that which is
Considered taboo
I'd rather live with
The title of miss taboo
Than die ignoring
My existence
And what it was birthed for
Pretending truths don't exist
Doesn't at any given time
Make the truth untruthful
It makes it disappear
Only to reappear
Much stronger
And more vested
In ousting itself
You see truth knocks kindly
@ first
But after being denied
It begins to rudely intercept
That lie(s)
Becoming even more pronounced
With skeletons coming out to play

love letters

hello blog world it's been... hasn't it.
Well when last did you receive a letter, conventional or otherwise? the otherwise being an email or text notes...

Something that does not happen often these days is communicating. I watched The Talk the the other day, SA's a bit behind season wise, anyhow on this day the ladies of The Talk discussed how they communicate with their spouses via email or texting, one of the ladies said they used it as a tool to fight with their hubby, whilst some said they enjoyed the occasional email or text like enjoy your day or how is your day so far...

Yesterday what made my day is that i saw a tweet on one of my all time favourite songs by Mbongeni Ngema, that every black person calls ithambo lam lekentucky which is one of the lines in the song, the actual title being: Stimela sam sase Zola... the tweet was saying that every man should sign off the letter like that...

I listenedd to the song that flooded my early life partly due to the women of my family, Note: this was the time of cassette players and turntables, so my aunts had a cassette with one song recorded on it that song was Mbongeni Ngema's Stimela sam sase Zola...... #beautifulmemories of growing up

That song is such a beautifully articulated vernacular love letter in song....
talks of the woman being his umbrella shielding him from the sunshine... to saying i love you even when you"re spitting fire( ngikthanda nom uvutha baby).... He then says  you touch me and i rise like selfraising flour (wangthinta ndakhukhumala)... the song speaks of resting on her derrière after  a hard day's work (NGIYOPHUMULA KUWE EDAIRY)....

I sat listening to this song realising that it was one of my first ever love songs in vernac that i had heard as a child and just how i enjoyed listening to it playing  non-stop courtesy of the aunts whose favourite song it was at the time. I move to today's time and realise that men don't speak in this currency of value, appreciation is minimal of the women in their lives that said i don't believe all men are like this either.
i used to write letters and i miss that intimate space but more than anything i believe letter writing still has a space in this world of technological comm's....

Take time out and write a love letter to someone, it doesn't have to be romantically inclined but it could come from a place of love and filled with softness and kindness and good thoughts.

lost and found

so the time came when I finally finished the 2nd of five books bought in February of this year, it took me seven months to read Air by Geoff Ryman and not because it was boring but because I just didn't much feel like it... well when I bought these books it was just after working myself too hard on a project that was the most inspiringly fresh and for the most part fun to take on and for once it was in something I believed... empowering kids to tell their story through their gifts. This was a blessing for me and thank you to all who pushed me on that journey for it was awe inspiring to work on....

I bought five books: a biography on American President Barrack Obama, Air, Under The Frangipanni by Mia Couto, a biography on the model Alek Wek and We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting for by one my favourite authors Alice Walker, which is book number four for me of the five. I read Mia Couto's book in less than five days after reading Air which I loved.

The most intriguing find about the books is that somehow their all about journeying and self discovery, spirituality and belief systems somehow  even though the stories differ... and to think I found a book sale whilst awaiting a friend for some bonding time, you see she was running late. But her being late is one of the greatest gifts she has given me in our friendship as it gave me back one of my favourite things to do in the whole world that I'd forgotten how to do, pretty much like how I have forgotten how to write.

 Writing again is thanks to the memory of my late sister and my late friend sunshine who have believed in my abilities when I have forgotten to believe in them myself as well the numerous people I have in my life who still believe in my writing power...

I guess I am finding my feet again in the things that make me happy whilst embarking on a new journey that will hopefully best yield greater harvests of lessons learned and love lost only to be found and growing with each new rising sun...

smack Bang BOOM

Uhm Ja Nhe... Why we do not go out 101:

Some sights just scream Gall! We were entertained by the sight of two girls dancing on the side of the road by themselves as music played from a car not far from where they were positioned; we thought awesome their just having fun on their own terms.... Until the two young lasses started dancing in the middle of the road in front of the entrance of this local township drinking hole, they were now primarily stopping traffic especially in front of the sexier, sleeker German made model vehicles... to our horror as we watched these two girls clad in weaves and itsy-bitsy skirts in the not so expensive versions of the current fashionista styles, the German made sedan they had gyrated to a halt appeared to have been full of elderly males who seemed perhaps over 40ish, married and highly devoted to his family life and church....

In the haze of this we had stopped there to show someone not from our city the tavern life in the township, the person had just moved to the city...

As our friends arrived to coax us into a night out on the town in the 'burbs, amidst our hellos and joviality... a small green car blazing out music caught our attention and as we turned to look, we soon saw:

a girl in the front seat grind dancing, bumping up and down evocatively whilst looking in the direction of her friends in the back seat who were dancing just as hard. Now by the time the car had approached the front of the drinking hole the girl in the passenger seat's rear clad in an itsy-bitsy skirt was out her window now and gyrating towards the crowd of pub crawlers and then the car halted with the girl opening her door and dancing smack- bang in the middle of the street....

Our jaws dropped to the floor and heads shaking in disbelief at the sight we'd just seen as the shock was settling, the moaning disbelief began....

Wow, how things have changed in night life... Which society are we emulating? I realised how quickly the dynamics of night life had changed with my need not to go out and about and be around town, painting it red. Society has not taken a stand. Where have values gone? Who are we and what will the world be like for our kids if right now in your 20s what you are seeing is the age of girls out at night getting younger and younger with the debauchery getting wilder and wilder, seeing a rise in teen pregnancies and substance abuse... the penny's dropping at lightening speed whilst we still think it's still a million miles from hitting rock bottom fast as it continues to decline and depreciate like wall street stocks on a bad day. We are in a bigger recession, this one is out to kill societal value systems with the words: I'm allowed; you are not the boss of me; I can handle it and the sucker punch: this is how the world is now...

the movement

sometimes all we need is sometimes
where the entirety of our beings
is encased by freedoms
the spirit lives beyond
the binding chains
each seeks their own
claim to self
and sometimes
lose self to find the varied pattern
that is themself
sometimes the sun glistens
long enough
for the earth to give s/outs
as it cracks open
its secrets
sometimes
we are one
separate yet inseparable
yet other times
we remain clueless
in our conscious casings
wrapped in materialisms
forgetting
the essence of living
and when sometimes comes out to play
we fight ourselves to keep
the illusion of wealth
moving
so the mirage becomes our reality
but man....
could we not live in the other times
so sometimes could be our serenity...
wisdom unravels that
you need the other times
to appreciate the sometimes more

twitterverse

upon opening my twitter today I found the most interesting baby names convo started by @Anele...

as I scrolled down her tweets to find where it all began i bumped into her tweet about  how she dreamt of Kenya yet she had never been there before... the replies to this from twitterverse inhabitants were of course vast....

and so @Anele Anele Mdoda  tweeted :

African country names make great children names as well hey, Kenya, Egypt, Zambia, Mali, Ghana ,Libiya * yes I would* Morrocco.

what do we call our children...

we are all looking to name our kids one day. some of the names people tweeted were Mali, Chad for a boy and Ethiopia for a girl... another twiterverse being suggested Sierra-Leone...

I felt a wave of nostalgia with this topic as it keeps recurring... Baby names... baby names have meaning and the name you give to your baby sticks or adds value to their persona... in African culture a child could have their name being one word or their name can be a phrase like mine (the name of this very blog).  

It is important however to look at what things mean before you name your baby because there are a couple of kids who upon finding out what their names in essence mean are quite unhappy. Celebrities took to naming their kids apple and all sorts of things.

 Someone happened to tweet back to Anele about their name being chad and how it came about, they were not quite impressed with being named chad purely because there was unrest in  Chad in the time of their arrival on this earth. I think Chad should consider himself lucky, Black kids named during apartheid well... have names like Amabhuluanyile... really not nice so many years into freedom... spare your kids please... or at least be able to have some sentiment or great story your kids can tell, hopefully one that will be timeless...