Friday, January 11, 2013

Autotomy of Debt

Penny For Your Thought

Africa’s independence was often characterised by Western Banking Systems usurping wealth and leaving colonial countries without any formal economic systems.
They even put a stranglehold on Stokvels, paralysing an entire populace’s fiscal acumen thus being able to observe deterioration from a distance or return to the pillaged hunting ground with “globalist solutions”.
This lack of financial institutions that are for Africans by Africans is what will hamper any efforts towards development, actually the same lack will perpetuate a process of debt based development; one among the many leprous inheritances from the colonialists.
The young shall inherit the debt through mediocre education branded as world-class, through privatised health-care systems, through unrestrained consumerism, while simultaneously remaining indebted to the same colonial banking systems that portray debt as the way to economic emancipation.
Inadvertently, the elite of this country have realised the advantages of an electorate in debt, bereft with hunger and lobotomised by victim mentality, because now they can dictate how alleviation of hunger should be tied to debt payable in underpaid labour – a language of debt-collectors for the masters in the West.

Suffice to say that such debt is often not individualised in that, an entire black household would enroll one child at a university for instance, and the debt incurred thus becomes collectivised by the African idea of ‘sisonke’.
The eventual weight and stress of fiscal yokes thus sunders the family into fragmented units of ‘I Can Do It for Myself’ descendants haunted by sibling rivalries, convoluted romantic relationships resulting in rampant divorces that mar black couples of today.
Thenceforth all foundations of meaningful family systems are shredded, allowing for the beast to maul each one who never teaches one; and thus many black adults are dying alone, to be buried through debt, in debt and often because of debt.
There is the insurmountable and untraceable debt incurred by my migrant worker parents to pay for tuition which I am still in debt for; then I get home over the festive season to find my uncle’s shack owes R76, 497.00 in rental arrears.
He could well build a house, my sister says; but government watchdogs (the militia police) will demolish it because he owes thousands for amenities often described as human rights.
And it is this sister that is shovelling dirt twenty storeys beneath the ground for a son whose father was incapable of fending for his own – a symbol of a womanhood ripped from her loved ones through gender equity laws that only serve to disguise the fact that she is paying for debts her faceless, emasculated and amputee father (and black manhood) sowed.

I am taken aback, when recalling how most capitalist ventures are thriving through the domestication of women into desktops employment; a deployment of a new reservoir of debt-payers and a reinforcement of the historical degradation of black womanhood.
While men are domesticated and through unemployment confined in homes to which they were never accustomed and loathed due to socially engineered cultures of mistrust for black womanhood, children grow paying full attention to the dysfunctional behaviours.
The media is providing them methods of compensating for domestic traumas, lack of parental guidance and patronization through expensive yet non-durable gadgets that fabricate fleeting gratitude.
Violent video games, consumerist trends of self-gratification, sedative news reports and poisonous ideas of beauty devoid of integrity and spiritually centred values, categorises this new man and woman - whose social interactions will be founded on violence, tyrannical egoism and an eventual self-annihilation within the machinations of mitotic  and autotomous debt.

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