SA Rocks

Go back and read Chapter 5.

Writing is a passion for me and one that has taken me to heights that I haven’t even begun to consider. I love it. I love it almost as much as I love South Africa. However that love is not always present and accounted for. Yes there are things that I am unhappy with and yes I have considered leaving SA because I can. But I am not leaving because I truly believe that my attempts to better the place that I call my home are making a difference.

South African’s exist, we live, we love, we are passionate and we thrive where others would probably not. But sometimes contributing to this state and nation is a very difficult task. Sometimes enough can be enough, with the traffic, with the crime, with the absolute rubbish that we all have to put up with sometimes (the recent “xenophobic” attacks to name a recent incident).

But sometimes these things are tiny little blessings in disguise. And sometimes simply existing is not enough.

The Individual

Every human being has the desire ingrained within them to do two things:

To Live
To Procreate

Obviously this is very base and simplified. There are, and have been proven to be, other desires but for the purposes of this piece let us speak of two for now.

When I speak of living I do not mean comfortably or successfully. I mean to literally stay alive. Death is of no practical assistance to anyone in anyone’s life.

Procreation is important for obvious reasons that I wont delve in to. But when children are placed in to the equation as a focus then things change and options become more limited. Bear with me. Imagine you cannot afford to fend for you children, to keep them alive – breaking the first basic human instinct – then you begin to fight for your life and the lives of your offspring. This is where I believe that many South Africans are right now. Poverty rates are high in SA, employment is low, and educating the masses is not happening and is thus leaving those with jobs unsatisfied and relatively poor anyways.

The point here is that when your basic human rights are infringed upon the individual can be forced to react in any ways possible. This can be violence, innovation, entrepreneurship, charity or any means that comes to the fore.

It is at this point when individuals begin acting without a community. The human experience exists in different ways for every person in the world. This others people and leaves them feeling alone. When people in a community begin to feel alone, they begin to act alone and act dangerously for themselves and the greater community.

The current state of affairs in South Africa (SA) make the above clear and present. Desperate times call for desperate measures. There is no justification for harming another human being and many criminal acts are just that; criminal acts by people who deserve to be in jail. But one thing leads to another and before you know it you have anarchy.

The recent xenophobic attacks in SA are an example of individuals acting without a community and pulling other marginalised people towards one another. Then you have mobs forming and criminal acts occurring that should not be taking place. My personal opinion regarding the attacks is that the people committing these acts are people who would otherwise probably be committing other criminal acts anyways. It irks me that these crimes are being called xenophobic acts when in fact there are South Africans being affected and the crime is just as bad whether it happens to foreigners or to locals. Crime is crime.

The Community

The greater community is an important faction of any group, organisation, country, family or any gathering and co-existing of people. Individuals make up communities. We all know this and this is not a new discovery that I have just made. But for some reasons communities do not realise their power and strength. This strength comes from the individual within a community acting together and sharing a common ideal. I have chosen the word ideal specifically. I do not want to share a goal with another person. I want to share and ideal, a way of thinking, living, being and existing. Goals are things that people who share an ideal achieve together.

There are many different ideals that exist in SA right now. There are many ideals that exist everywhere in fact. But in many places some ideals are shared by many people in a community and that community can thrive and achieve their common goals.

The xenophobic attacks are proof of this. A small group of people (when you take the entire countries population in to account) banded together and displaced thousands upon thousands of other people. This is the misguided strength and power of a community of people acting with a shared and horrifying ideal. This is mob mentality and unison at its worst. This is not the way that our country should exist. If only the thousands upon thousands of foreigners shared an ideal and acted on it. They would have rightfully defended their basic human rights to live and protect their offspring. But the sad truth about marginalised majority communities is that they never see the power that they hold by the sheer numbers that they have.

Since I started SA Rocks I have been hammering on about a mind shift that I believe is taking place. It is taking place in my opinion. SA Rocks is proof of this. Thousands of people visit and experience this positive blog every month and take in the positivity that my readers and I exude. This is a start.

I am an individual acting within a community and making a difference. The only catch is that it is not quick. Nothing that is ever great, long lasting and memorable is every quick. Change is never quick. Ever. Yet it can be viral. Positivity in SA has gone viral. Individuals who believe in this country have begun to feel confident in this ideal enough to start spreading the word. It takes on catalyst to throw change in to motion. One person to tell ten, ten to tell ten more, those hundred people to tell just one and those hundred people to tell two and so on and so on.

The community thrives off the success of the community and the individuals within the community.

Two things have come out of the xenophobic attacks. Firstly people have realised that life is not all roses for everyone in SA. Secondly people have begun to want to change, help, aid and be charitable. People have woken up. If anything good has come out of these attacks it is a greater sense of community that marginalised people have begun to feel. We have vociferously defied these acts and revolted against them with acts of kindness. The fact that we can stand together whether in thought, action or opinion, against these acts means that there is hope. There is hope if we all believe that right is right and wrong is wrong.

The community is starting to defy these acts of horror, whether 50 people are murdered or on child is harmed the reaction is beginning to become action, positive action.

I am not going to discuss the individuals who leave the community because free will, choice and economic bracket allows these individuals to leave and contribute to other communities. That is there choice and their right and I applaud them for making the hard decision to uproot their lives and move away. It is difficult. But it is not helping our community practically.

It might be helping our community theoretically and mentally. Negativity within a community only breads negativity and negative action. The opposite also applies.

Positivity breads positive action.

The Leader

Thabo Mbeki is the perfect living, walking embodiment of the community electing a leader and a leader acting and marginalising him. Mbeki’s idealisms got in the way. His African Renaissance blurred his vision and in all of that he lost his Africanism and his people. He is now an individual without a community. Mbeki has so distanced himself from his own community that the community began acting beyond the power of his government. He is no longer the leader of his community he is now the figurehead of a government that does not relate to its community and often does not act within the community’s best interest. This invariably leads to the demise of the community and that of the country as a whole. All in all, it’s a bad thing, to put it plainly.

The Action

Action is the key to the resolution of our problems. Not just any action, positive action.

There are many different types of action that form different value points to the community. Negative action has its place. It creates unity and binds people together in their misery, sadness and discontentment. If people are unified in their dissatisfaction they rally to find answers and solutions. Everything takes place can yield positive outcomes. It all depends on the mind set that you have while you are experiencing something and the mindset that you have when you come out of something. Negative or positive.

The Million Man March is a fantastic example of negativity resulting in a community of individuals who share the same ideal, coming together in the hope of change. Change might not be the outcome of the march but hundreds of thousands of people coming together, out of adversity – in this case crime, to stand together and fight for their ideal is magnificent.

Now let us hope that one person changes the attitude of another and this mid shift begins to spread across the nation. Change begins with one person changing his or her own attitude. Positive action stems from this change.

Go forth and read Chapter 5 from Paul Jacobson.

This post is a chapter of the SA Blook: A Piece of Significance, an online book written by a diverse group of writers with strong views of our country and the reality we find ourselves living in. The other chapters in the Blook are here:

Introduction
1. The new South Africa – is it real?
2. Is SA rich or poor?
3. What the world thinks of South Africa and what our global opportunities are
4. The importance of each individual’s contribution collectively
5. SA Inc and the business of doing business in SA
6. The beauty and grandeur that surrounds us
7. The importance of technology in SA’s global emergence
8. Building brand South Africa
9. Making the most of SA’s creative talents and abilities
10. Innovate for a better South Africa
11. The role of the younger generation in SA, and what we need to do to support them
12. Connecting South Africa – Communities that transcend technology
13. We are African – the role of collaboration in South Africa’s growth

Copyright Nic Haralambous 2008. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No-derivatives 2.5 ZA license.

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It’s heart wrenching. Gut wrenching, soul destroying stuff that pains me and upsets me. This post is not about South Africa. This post is about Zimbabwe.

Within minutes of arriving home last night at 9pm or so I read Mark Forrester’s post and received an email. here are excerpts from both.

From Mark’s post:

At 3.30pm today a lorry load of so called Mugabe brain washed “war-vets” arrived at our gate to take over our land, equipment and pedigree cattle. This crazy action is occurring in a country where there is v little food being produced !

It is now 6 pm and they have been singing their war songs at our gate for three hours, the atmosphere is violent and more and more of them have arrived.

We managed to get our daughter Alison and her young son “Little John” into town and for now it is just John and myself, plus our dogs remaining in the house on the farm.

From the email:

Hi
Just to let you know that Chris was invaded yesterday afternoon by war vets. I just happened to be visiting Charmaine and Chris when a bakkie load of about 23 drove up the road singing war songs. Chris went out to them and they told him to leave the farm immediately. The police arrived about 45 minutes after the war vets and spent a long time talking to them with Chris remaining calm and reasoning with the chaps. The whole episode took about 2.5 hours with Charmaine, Laura and I watching anxiously from Charmaine’s house. I was so worried that they might beat Chris up as is so ! often their style. They left the property and have vowed to return today to “sort things out”.

Now we all know that Zim is in dire straights. We all know that Zim is on the verge of self-destruction and massive civil war that will lead to much blood shed. But what can we do?

Well let me angle the situation in this way:

Tibet was covered on blogs, Facebook, mobile and all round, why are the 600 000 South Africans on Facebook not making more noise about this? Yes, I know that Zim is not our country and we have problems of our own, but it’s a simple group making noise, taking a stand. Let the world know what the problems are. There are enough Zimbaweans, even if South Africans aren’t willing to join in spreading of the word, in SA and around the world to make the issues known to the world. There has been uproar around the world about China and Tibet and Zim has been overshadowed due to this. The worst thing that happened to Zim recently, in media terms, is Tibet. Zim is nothing in the eyes of the world. But people are still dying and travesties are still being committed and will only get worse.

A search on Facebook yielded some results and here are some groups you can join to spread the word about the situation in Zim:

Fight Mugabe : Unite against an oppressive Tyrant & save Zimbabwe VIVA MDC

solutions and strategies for saving zimbabwe

For the Freedom of Zimbabwe

Help The People of Zimbabwe !

All that I am saying is this: We can to our bit and simply join a group, tell your friends in media, bloggers, people abroad and start the wave of change.

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This last friday I handed in my notice to my bosses. My last day of work is the 23rd November, and then I have a few days to pack up two years of my life [and the entire contents of a well stocked WHSmith bookshop] in shipping boxes and head home to the sunny shores of the Eastern Cape of South Africa.

I am so excited, I feel like I am going to explode with antici….pation. I have spent the last two years cataloguing why the UK is not for me, and why home is where the heart is [that is stuck on an aloe in the hills of frontier land or floating in a rock pool on the wild coast]. I can’t wait for sunshine, glorious sunshine and rising temperatures and warm evenings on the beach. I will consume only braai and biltong for the first week, and drown myself in SAB’s finest offerings [and I am not even a beer drinker usually].

But putting all excitement aside for a moment, there is a small list of things that I am returning to that don’t leave me giddy with joy. Try to read the following points in the spirit in which they are written – that is positively, with an eye to what we should want to achieve together in South Africa.

1. Firstly let’s get crime out of the way. No one wants it. It affects everyone. It sucks, sure. The point is that there is crime everywhere in the entire world. House breaking is universal. What probably worries all South Africans more than theft is the level of violence we have come to associate with these crimes. I think Rev. Desmond Tutu has already said publically [cant find the quote at the moment], that clearly Apartheid and our past did much more lasting damage than we originally thought. It broke something fundamental in us as a people. Maybe that can’t be fixed, but we can raise a new generation of whole and happy people, by nuturing the humanity we see in all of us. I just wish we could fast track this.

2. I have previously written about how I miss driving over here, and i do, but I know I am going to be in the position to afford a car and the upkeep thereof when I get home. Not everyone can say as much, and the only other real option for these people are taxis, which often come with taxi violence and unroadworthiness as a package. We need to provide effecient public transport locally and long distance options. To do this we need to offer both gov-funded and private contracts and open up the industry. The market is there, where are the Richard Bransons of South Africa?

3. limping, crawling, capped internet is for the nineties! I love ordering my groceries online in ten minutes and booking a delivery slot. I love renting all my dvds through a personalised list on the internet. I adore having a wealth of information at my finger tips at any time of the day – always connected, fast and above all cheap. I pay for my internet connection is two hours working time. It costs the same as 4 pints of lager or 3 packets of cigarettes or a third of my weekly shopping. It gives scholars access to research they couldn’t even imagine. It drives development pure and simple, and we need it in SA!

Yes, they aren’t small problems, but they are fixable. When we get them sorted, I guarantee lots more people will start heading home, and fewer will want to leave for long term anyway.

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