the Church as a revolutionary vehicle towards BLACK emancipation

Written by Maleke Montshiwagae

the church itself became a refugee camp of comfort for the run away slaves who were trapped in the projects, in fact it contributed in providing stomach needs for that immediate time and shelter etc. in this good breath however, bad breath was also exhaled by the church in that it said to the BLACK run away slaves that "you need to accept your condition, for the poor will receive the riches of the kingdom and you must forgive the sinners against you", in the political context, sinners then incorporates the people who classify themselves as whites who happens to be the oppressors of BLACK people. ..

therefore, the effect of this thing is that BLACK people are trapped in perpetual oppression because when they look on the one side, they see the church providing soup and shelter for immediate needs!... and when they look on the other side, they see sinners(whites) who must be forgiven.

the irony is that, the sinners are the very ones who have created the very projects whose negative consequences are dumped into the responsibility bin of the church, the church in itself being a construction and an institutional tool designed to cool the anger of the slave to the effect of not revolting.

so this whole thing becomes a perpetual cycle in which the slave becomes a central object that cannot make up its own mind due to the implications of immediate material needs and questions of eternal riches promised to the poor in some imagined Kingdom and requirements of sinner forgiveness.

... .because churches have been so successful in bringing the runaway slaves together in millions for colonial reasons, they could serve as strategic centers in which both the decolonisation and conscious projects can be carried out! . . . simply because of the numbers and financial resources that are available there as derived from the very slaves anyway . . . speak of using colonial gains to reverse colonialism

.., the one former editor of Pambazuka Press Firoze Manji was quoted in "The thinking Africa Newsletter", which is a newsletter published within the "Political and International Studies" at Rhodes University as saying that "In the struggle for emancipation private organisations such as NGOs role has to be focused on acts of solidarity, not acts of charity. Their role is to amplify the voices of the oppressed, not to speak on their behalf".

therefore, the churche as part of the NGO establishment could be "used" to unify the voices of the wretched of the earth(now that it has managed to bring them together) and to burn a revolutionary flame of the struggle of BLACK people towards a BLACK revolution in response to its opium effects upon my people.

.
.. .BLACK Africans in Haiti prior to a successful Haiti revolution engaged in a Voodoo ritual, they didn't pray or call upon some white Jesus or white God, in this regard I quote the following,

"Various accounts from that night(night of the revolution) describe a tempestuous storm, animal sacrifices, and voodoo deities. During European colonialism and the Haitian revolution Voodoo played a singular role for slaves:

As a religion and a vital spiritual force, it was a source of psychological liberation in that it enabled them to express and reaffirm that self-existence they objectively recognized through their own labor . . . Voodoo further enabled the slaves to break away psychologically from the very real and concrete chains of slavery and to see themselves as independent beings; in short it gave them a sense of human dignity and enabled them to survive.”

therefore, we can derive courage from our fellow Africans, but given the current context and times, we should think of the possibility of locating the struggle within the realities of the church given the numbers of our people organised by the institution as I have mentioned.In that way, we are deriving unity benefits out of a colonial congregation and amalgamation.

. . . sometimes it's possible to find a solution within the problem!

........ . . AFRIKA ✊

Chaos

Written by Maleke Montshiwagae



come to think of it that one actually grew up in a matriarchal setup in which grandma was quite vocal and influential on family affairs. also, there were democratic aspects in which grandpa would ask you what your thoughts were regarding particular issues though there were authoritative elements as well, but these were really meant for good intents within the context of upright upbringing under moral supervision.

one of the interesting and perhaps strange things was how both grandma and grandpa fused Afro cultural/traditional components with religious aspects of the church as we were raised within the Lutheran church. so both of them were neither "cultural purists" nor religious fundamentalists.

out of these kind of fusions, one learnt that life is composed of a chaotic setup within which exists all sorts of things. therefore one must develop the skill to extract useful aspects from each chaos in order to construct one's final analysis and therefore a method of living, instead of a stereotypical singular path.

yesterday I read some philosophy related article in which the author argues and highlights that certain historical or antiquity philosophers such as Islamic philosophers, Christian philosophers, Jewish philosophers etc mingled amongst each other and really extracted ideas from each other without being dismissive of each other. He further highlights that we need to move away from the racist notion of statements such as "western philosophy" as if that philosophy wasn't influenced by North African philosophy via the interaction of the Greeks with Africans for example. he suggests that we rather speak of "global philosophy" whereby we only zoom into local contexts to see what was happening at a particular place in space and time in order to learn of that local thought. the idea here is to demonstrate the chaotic benefits of a world order in which the "whole" is composed of aspects from localised contexts as reflected in how my grandma and grandpa fused things together.

the people looking for an initial orderly setup of things in life are actually the ones causing problems because they are looking for a perfect world which does not exist, the orderly configuration aspects of the universe such as the solar system itself emanates from a chaotic expansion of the universe as the stars continue to collapse and form in the galaxy!

Mahlomaholo also writes that it is out of contradictory processes of death, rot and decay that life is formed such as in the case of a worm for example.

therefore, chaos appears to be a precursor to an orderly world.

so, I am thankful for their insights and understanding of the chaotic structure of this life and how they continue to impact my thinking. . . . .

Women's month ending

Written by Maleke Montshiwagae

closing off women's month with the following "amateur" words I put together some time back when I was not feeling well....

"had it not been of my disgruntled mental state I would write at length about black women!...but let me just construct a few sentences in regards to the subject woman,,,..

there will of cause be many opinions, views/perspectives, differences, thoughts, feelings and even imaginations etc. about what would reflect the qualities of a typical good woman in accordance with whatever criteria being imposed# this would merely be a reflection of our different experiences and desires...

in the course of my scientific journey I have learned a great deal about the nature of objective science, in that it[objective science] accepts that there comes a point where nature does not and cannot conform to the laws of science and this is fundamental, so at that point, nature has taken its own cause and therefore it behaves at its own will and cannot be predicted!...this is exactly the analogy I want to relate to all black women, that you ought to establish a cut-off point where you also ''behave'' independent of society's established criteria, whereby you become an unpredictable active actor and subject in the narrative story of a black WOMAN!...

in other words, there shall be no rules or laws by which you are bound in restricting you to unleash your potential...having said this however, I encourage our black sisters to reflect on the classical mirror of indigenous African society to experience the great reflections that will inform them of the critical role played by black women in society in shaping a positive and constructive future based on the humane African principles and culture, where black women were subjects and not objects...

in support of this I quote “Herodotus [Greek philosopher] left a record of his shock at the contrast between the roles of Egyptian women and the women of Athens. He observed that Egyptian women attended market and were employed in trade. In ancient Egypt, a middle-class woman might sit on a local tribunal, engage in real estate transactions, and inherit or bequeath property. Women also secured loans, and witnessed legal documents!’’...

our black women need to reflect on Africa based mirrors, which will indeed support and reflect a true and accurate nature of their roles in ancient times which they can model, it remains a fact that Africa had strong matriarchal aspects that respected women as opposed to the twisted stories about the realities of African women in Africa,....

Our women must therefore be assured that we support whatever roles they want to play in society, just like our great black ancestors did!!...............

to finish off, I end with a typical tragic reflection I borrowed elsewhere. .

"So women, if they have access to feminine respectability, must either stay at home (femininity as domestication), to be careful in how they move and appear in public (femininity as constrained mobility) […] the construction of “the fearsome” is also bound up with the authorisation of legitimate spaces: for example, in the construction of the home as safe, ‘appropriate’ forms of femininity become bound up with the reproduction of domestic space".

this must end!

Decolonisation

Written by Maleke Montshiwagae

decolonizing education has got nothing to do with graduating in a Zulu attire or any other traditional attire for that matter. .. it's more a fundamental question of curriculum as outlined by the likes of Prof Molefi Kete Asante who once gave a lecture at Unisa in the presence of Thabo Mbeki.

so in as far as graduating in a traditional attire is concerned, it is merely a theatrical or artistic act or expression. ...

Prof Irvan van Sertima warned of the tendency to compare what he termed "peripheral Africans to mainstream Europeans", he was speaking of a situation where Europe prides itself in the civilization peak of the Greeks while Africa as a whole needed to pride itself in the civilization peak exhibited in Egypto-Nubia as opposed to referring to Afrika in terms of the less developed parts of it.. Europe also had (has) less developed parts by the way, so this is not unique to Afrika. ..

.... in this way we should be able to derive the Afro character in the fields of science, astronomy, engineering, architecture, philosophy etc on the basis that they peaked in that geospace of Africa. ... not that they were not developing elsewhere in Africa! ...

.... once we've done this, it is then that we can decide to introduce certain aspects of our cultures such as attire, particularly those revealing attires which in my opinion must be reviewed and redefined, or spared for certain occasions and ceremonies since they appear to be an important part of the metaphysics of the BLACK "being" ...

..it is important to note that the way that these astronomies and engineering etc developed at the peak of African civilization in Egypto-Nubia, they reflect the African culture... so culture was not independent of these developments, ...

so, with all this said, decolonisation of education must form part and parcel of the broader global trends in Technology and Economics. we cannot be left behind while the entire world is "progressing" in these seemingly important aspects because these are existential realities.

.... Dr Lushaba at UCT speaks of knowledge in and of itself ... the decolonisation must focus on knowledge in itself in order to rehumanize BLACK people by including other forms of their knowledge that reflects their "being", as opposed to knowledge of itself which tends to focus on knowledge as a commodity to be consumed and "sold" in the markets! . . .

... Afrika ✊

........ . . . knowledge is power!

Khoisanism

By Maleke Montshiwagae

a phenomenon has risen, a phenomenon which some in the cycles of radical BLACK thought or the BLACK bloc have termed "khoisanism".

the phenomenon manifests in a form of Afrikaners and some non-whites using Africa's internal contradictions to justify the question of anti-BLACK land dispossession in which they assert that, the "Bantu people" displaced the khoisan people in the Southern part of Africa.

what is interesting in this is that Africans are "compartmentalised", khoisan people are seen as different from Bantu people whereas they are exactly the same people(Africans)!.. also, Africa is treated as a special case as if these migratory displacement patterns were not occurring in Europe, which is bullshit.

when we do an intercontinental comparison, there is nowhere in history where Africans have ever went to brutaly disposess another race of their land. however when we look at intracontinental patterns, exactly the same picture emerges of displacements.

in fact the colonial and imperial question of whites such as Britain for example, starts off with them colonising Ireland(whites) on the basis that the people of Ireland were not pure white(Anglo-Saxon) enough. **read up on Britain Black nobility and the origins of the celts and the whelsh people****

so we as BLACKs must be aware of these tactics that are used to discourage our return of land requests.

the non-racial reactionaries are not able to assist us in these debates because of their adoption of the so-called western aristocratic liberal thoughts and post-race theories that channels them to notions of "colourlessness", non-racialism, rainbow nation and artificial integration and as a consequence, they ignore the colour question which is the basis of all of this mess ...

.... Afrika as a whole belongs to Africans, irrespective of our internal family issues! ...