A Naïve Father’s Letter to His Daughter

Mirror of my being, I have named you Leamo for you will touch a myriad souls with your eyes. A crescendo of voices will forever guide your paths and I will stand in the winds of your life’s stage marvelling at the wonder embodied in you. It is August, a month we must remember as the moon that cried our mothers’ tears; crimson and bloodied with the late flows of mature wombs – the moon of my birth. Your grandmother and uncle were also born unto earth during these dusty wind gusts.

Society manufactured an iconography of heroisms based on patriarchal aspirations which will take another letter to explain, and sadly this ideological chauvinism we constantly witness in religion and history, as well all facets of contemporary human interaction. But now dear daughter, an impending struggle is against the censorship of your memory about our people’s struggle for liberation. June 16 happened in every township, every homestead, every slave-holder’s farm; your grandmother was herding baas Vikter’s cattle on that momentous day in 1976.

Today, it is that ecclesiastical year 2012, bearing a plethora of catastrophic prophecies about an impending doomsday, but My Light, I believe your mother and I will be at your 60^th birthday. And now that which called for a letter addressed to you on this day on a snowy August begins.

I wish to tell you about Chris Hani someday, whom I hold as the true martyr-hero of my generation, and we will speak of Tsietsi Mashinini, Ongkgopotse Tiro, Maakomele Manaka, Solomon Mahlangu, Barney Molekwane and many other giants whose ruins remind my soul of the pools of blood that pillowed our revolutionaries’ deathbeds. Yet I wonder who your heroes and heroines will be, and how will their memories be forged for your remembrance. Andries Tatane and ‘The Burning Man of Alexandra’ perhaps? Or, those shack-bound intellectual strategists orchestrating Service Delivery Protests? I hope so my little one, even when the cauldron of individualistic glorifications has epitaphs by Julius Malema composed into slogans which will define your future war protests. I truly hope you will recall the humane splendour of selfless sacrifices made by many for your name to be heard.

Will the media make iconoclastic bigots and ‘Black diamonds’ mentors in your future truer socialist struggles? Will your battles for justice be untainted by consorts to capitalist agenda? Or will your revolutionaries be clad in Armani suits and credit big black cars to their life savings while claiming independence from the system that made crockery of their forefathers?

My principal concern at present dear one; is that based on my recollection of South Africa’s history, there seems to exist a cluster of icons who occupy a big portion of the canvas bearing the portrait of a collective struggle. These icons perhaps gained prominence because of media exposure, and it is thus that our fabled emancipatory feat towards this present democratic dispensation ever feels indebted to a collective memory biased to other participatory efforts.

I wish your world would have sobered up from the euphoric binging on earth’s resources without a care for consequences. I wish many would have escaped institutions that  conduct ideological lobotomies through dis-information and mis-information, your generation wiser enough to discern the poisonous lure of self-gratification as cause to the many tyrannies my present generation is plotting against yours.

Writing this letter strangely during a season of meteor showers, it is during this august month that our people commemorate a profound memory of Mothers of a Nation who marched in protest against our slave-master’s Pass Laws. The 9^th day of August, 1956, around the same time Rosa Parks in the USA uncouthly sat in a “WHITES-ONLY” bus, it is this day - YOU will eternally cherish and burn into your chest as a plaque of pride brewed solely for breasts and heart akin a zealous  woman’s.

Chance might have it that you live in a world where mathematics is a spoken language, where digits and symbols are just artefacts left fossilised in museums and sci-fi films. A world of rented organs and cyber personalities; where I would have to know every inch of you to not be taken for a ride by your surrogate on a coroner’s table. But remember who your ancestors are, an ocean of spirits that perished so that your destiny is lifted above all peril. Remember them for “the dead are not dead… only simmering in the rocks”. May your skin house them to life, even when all reality is holographic and blurred by radioactive mist and ashen dust.

I hope your mother and I would have imparted enough treasures into your skull; that your reverence of the written word never wanes with the cloud of binary verbatim, neon expressions and electronic clutter. I hope moreover, that you have female stalwarts in your time, who are NOT the common fodder of ‘reject capitalist cogs’ playing revolutionary nunneries with future teenage feminist urges. I hope your icons and peers are NOT ‘femiborgs’ and paternal wind-up dolls who teach you via neural transplants in a world made up of “Coloureds” and “Clones”. Furthermore, I beg you not to fall victim to the insidious mental disease of segregation based on eloquence in the oppressors’ tongue and manner, because I am witnessing this bourgeoning cult of segregation among black youth developing in the midst of saccharine lusts designed by the cultures that bred the self-same seeds of class hypocrisy.

I sincerely hope you do not misconstrue this letter as an ordinance on how you should lead your life, my Star. No man shows a child the divine being, you come from me yet you are NOT me. therefore all I yearn is to witness your divine nature blossom among mounds of debris with-which the future will be laden. I have not had the fortune of drinking from that famed fountain of life-affirming knowledge, but the little I know might assist in shedding a spark on some rocky landing your foot will encounter. Remain steadfast of mind in a world of peers whose brains would have been fried by exposure to electro-magnetic radiation through cellular phones and television antennae. And remember: “Suffrage is the usher of Suffering.”

Your Father.