Thursday, March 22, 2018

Life In Kokosi


The mining industry has largely been responsible for some of the most heinous crimes against humanity this country has ever witnessed, from the poisoning of water resources to exposing workers to radioactive silicosis causing agents.

Though the industry is highly profitable, it is also lethal, and has ruthlessly uprooted people from their lands, and Extensive collusion between the Merafong municipality and capital continues to this day, at the expense of lives and livelihoods.

Shopping malls are built to monopolize business interests, clinics renovated without silicosis and tuberculosis wards, while classrooms are built among dilapidated buildings of aging and under-resourced schools.


Under guise of political compliance with state regulations, mining corporations such as Goldfields, Shaft Sinker, AngloGold (now bearing a suffix Ashanti) and BME pent on wealth beyond any means, they have managed to fool both the victims and their greedy accomplices in government offices.

The industry is known to use the judiciary to amend legislations; they utilize health municipal infrastructure and personnel to safe guard secrets causes of workers’ diseases and deaths.

Research has yielded truths as scandalous as falsification of medical records of workers, editing of pathology reports to conceal traces of cancer causing chemical agents in mining related illnesses experienced by many residents of Merafong.


They lobby finance institutions to concoct financial schemes and contracts which steal benefits from unsuspecting workers, all done under the auspices of legal practitioners who throw wool over the eyes of illiterate clients and  exploit their situations for other sinister motives of profiteering.

 And all this harm is done under the condition that mining is an inherently dangerous industry, which also is bedrock of South Africa’s development and economic growth.

Though Anglo has been revealed to have financial arrangements that would put its former executives in acute constitutional difficulties; most legal obligations have been averted through puny csi initiative hailed as successes in annual reports distributed by the company at exuberant conferences and gala dinners.


But undeniably, the seemingly irreversible demise of Merafong and its perpetual decline into extreme poverty is tied to the perilous history of the mining industry, and its continued disregard for human life and socio-economic development of communities from which labour is harvested.

Forced depopulation is a crime against humanity, this is staunchly stated by the Rome statute of the International Criminal Court, but most lands usurped from black people become thieves’ ransom in this age of economic apartheid.

Elite loyalties having always been with their insatiable desire for the accumulation of more capital, social, environmental and economic justice will forever remain an eyesore for visionaries of new ways of profiteering.


Since the explosives company BME (Bulk Mining Explosives) annexed the Losberg hillside, much of Fochville has been turned into an equivalent of Chenobyl, and no inquest will be held of course into the deteriorating health of the community, which would determine blame and therefore compensation.

No research into the health impact of the company’s close proximity to residential areas has been conducted, nor has research into the health of mine workers been made public, in spite of the hot, silica-filled, dusty and insanitary conditions prevalent in the mines.

And considering that today, death from occupational disease is classified as ‘natural’ in our country; it comes as no surprise that our government hasn’t shown interest in justice for miners, who make a majority of the employed citizens of this country.


No inquest has been held into a single death which occurred as a direct consequence of exposure to excessive levels of dust and chemicals, no employer prosecuted for exposing workers to harmful substances in the workplace.

Utilizing and repurposing mine waste rocks for foundations of a shopping mall is one way of burying a dangerous environmental liability, and while no significant reduction in environmental incidents is visible around Merafong, yet mining companies congratulate themselves with pronouncements of their so-called ‘management of cyanide and waste generated during gold production’.

While dust emissions have not been mitigated in many areas, companies such as Anglo are boasting about plans to remediate areas impacted by contamination from tailing storage facilities dotting the West Rand landscape.



But of late, with its Environmental Management Programmes, the company has managed to ‘develop strategies for rehabilitating contaminated soil and ground water resources’, only after more than a century of exploitation and an inexhaustible continuation of degradation of the environment.

Today, our townships have become prison-like compounds that enslave the mining and agriculture industry’s workforce, and reminiscent of the diabolical spirit of the infamous Land Act, Africans have been driven into a new type of ‘native reserves’, where we are but a cheap source of labour for pennies.

The self-same ‘native reserves’ of the cursed apartheid years, which were funded through industry and legitimized through a rogue judiciary, are now welcoming mining conglomerates boasting names of black empowerment partners’ on boards and public relations campaigns.

Names of struggle stalwarts such as Sipho Pityana and President Cyril Ramaphosa are brand accolades donned by corporate brands, bearing the blessings of a ‘struggle aristocracy’ which seems more versed in latest fashions and automobiles.

While the state’s police force has been instrumental in sustaining apartheid’s legacy of intimidation, this ‘democratic’ institution is covertly involved in mass incarceration of thousands of young black men, who now populate white-owned farms as unpaid labour.

This institution seems certifiably co-opted to become guardians of elite interests, and security guards wielding guns at miners protesting for their share of the golden pie, take Marikana for an example.

Through our townships, prisons are filled and maize fields tended to by inmates circulated around farms owned by racist ex-military generals, for the purported benefit of a nation under siege from all sectors of the corporate world.


I am now left to wonder what it would take for the mining industry to pay reparations to affected communities and individuals, to compensate not with pittance but capital, for the killing and paralyzing of local workers on an industrial scale.

Will the growing number of miscarrying young women who worked at BME become another statistic of corporate neglect, while enduring widows bury their children with severance packages squandered by incompetent lawyers and funeral societies?

What of the thousands of young men being recruited by mines to pillage earth’s dwindling resources for unworthy remuneration, while squandering their health in the name of economic growth and productivity?

These and many other questions require answers, and while we as a community seem complicit in the continuing tyrannical silence that shrouds our most blatant murder, generations are passing through chemical fires and radioactive heat to be forever maimed.

While Zamazama’s are mushrooming around every mine housing complex, and illegal deals are making fly-by-night millionaires of the most affluent yet under-educated of generations, the corporate elite are making exorbitant profits and raking bonuses to buy entire islands.

And this begs the question, how was this up-for-grabs attitude engineered, and how does poor black youths fit into the equation? 

Images by: Paul Zisiwe

Post Box









Who sent you mail by mule?
Was it the bill-master?
Notes tossed from stage couches to bicycles,

Lapped by boxes attached to lampposts on stop-offs?









Images by: Paul Zisiwe

Children




Do untainted children
Vomit gold?
Their undreamt voices
But dreams in the winds?



Do the squint-eyed ones
Possess a double-sight
Of gleaming mountains
And copper serpents?




Why
Their hale and lofty songs
Like ghostly cries hidden
In palms reborn tenfold?



Images by: Khahliso Matela

Thursday, March 8, 2018

Umkhondo ka Sabelo Soko - Album Review

In The Furnace Of Dreams.



And so goes a Zulu idiom, which encapsulates the temperment of this poetry recording by one of South Africa's young and incisive voices of ungovernable conscience.
Sabelo Soko, an enigmatic wordsmith immersed in Zulu heritage, has fashioned quite an outlandish deployment of old-fashioned idiomatic expressions with his first studio album - Umkhodo Ka Sabelo Soko.

And as the South African poetry scene continues to suffer from a surfeit of homogenous Afrocentricism and banal chantery of jukebox national pride, this anthology has set him on a path of linguistic innovations that borders on invocations of the ancestral. His poetry's unconventional use of isiZulu and the radical conceptions stemming from his imagery seem brewed from a burning quest for reclamation of secret spaces, where poems become privy conversations, incantations of coded omens unto the unborn and faceless living.

It is often the cynical task of poets to forge fantastic masks from the debris of the past trauma, and bring them on the stage of the violent present with a sobering clarity of unheeded prophets. And here, we are experiencing a birth of such a critical voice, politically fractured, yes, but inking words that are daggers. Umkhondo is a lyrical testament that those daring enough to remodel archaic language devices, transcending the palatably floral yet flawed, can speak to souls of those who've had red-hot coals mark
their chests.




But what will the mainstream do with a spoken artist with such a subversive political edge? Certainly not adorn him with inflatable credentials distributed by cartels of the literary orthodox theatres.

I listen to Do Away, an eerie interlude that is both a cautionary anecdote and a continual interrogation of norms and trends deluding thousands of weary youths. Khuzani is yet another blend of the oral tradition of Zulu performance art, known for its reflexivity and deadpan truth.

With dextrous economy of lyrics on Amalunde, Sabelo and Meropa Soul distill the ugly and profane in our daily life into a lucid brew that is rare at our trend-driven times of creative bankrupcy.


Is it laudatory poetry or fleeting tributes to past griots and new-age warriors? Those ever lingering moans and suffocated vocal accompaninents are on another tip. Take for an example Ezikho Lamaphupho, at times the overlaid chorus resembles tedium, a hauntingly repetitive rhythm at moments of the poet's fragility channeling grave-digger dreams. Zithande, serenaded by some lost guitar strings strummed for love's ode and vices, is yet another tete-a-tete with a youth disillusioned by high-octane love.

"This recording is no artsy dinner atmosphere music for the cultured to ponder over utopian ideas about black expression. It is fluid orature in a time of frozen memory, providing a linguistic grid for the infallible truths evading many.

Sabelo's process of retrieving such fossilized memory is an art he must have perfected with time, and his maturity is overwhelming when it comes to his mnemonic prowess when reciting. He can speak in such a multidimensional colloquialism which strangely elicits raw emotions of familiarity to the concepts he words.

His voice is a fine-tuned device that awakens each syllable, each intonation, each texture of a tattered mind displayed with unflinching potency, giving this anthology a poignant lucidity that is rare and refreshing."


For bookings and album sales 

0794492409 or email: wordupsales@gmail.com 

The album is available on itunes