The Zama Zama Diaries

24 November 2024

The devastating history of the Stilfontein Police station as a centre for torture of anti-apartheid activists is well known in the Matlosana district of South Africa. Many bodies of activists who were abducted, tortures and murdered in the infamous cells of that police station were dumped into open mineshaft around the towns of Orkney and Stilfontein.

Stilfontein, established in 1949 is a residential centre for three large gold mines: the Hartebeesfontein, Buffelsfontein, and Stilfontein mines.

In May 1949, two shafts (Charles and Margaret) were sunk and it was this success at Stilfontein that inspired the opening up of the Hartebeesfontein and Buffelsfontein mines.

The Margaret shaft at the Stilfontein mine, where currently over 5000 illegal miners are trapped, was the first concrete headgear ever to be erected in South Africa and was designed locally and completely constructed form local materials. The tower mounted on this headgear was the first-ever multi-rope Koepoe hoist in South Africa.

And knowing the history that is tied to the sordid mining industry and its exploitation of black men is not by coincidence that it seems the sins of apartheid are being buried by the current “black government”.

And that infamous “mini Vlakplaas”, the Stilfontein police station, which was established as a symbol of oppression of dissent against apartheid and white supremacy, seems to have become a place where white mine owners can be exonerated by black brute police force while the bones of activists disposed by their apartheid police remain forgotten in the rubble of newly rotting flesh of those deemed illegal for mining the land of their ancestors.

And recalling that decades of rapacious neoliberal development on the continent has seen many economies crumble and citizens left without no recourse, but violent protests and criminality; what did this corrupt democracy expect?

Despite its various efforts to entrepreneurially transform shattered livelihood often populating townships and villages, black communities are assailed by disproportionate unemployment in country of their birth, and their leaders condone this disparity.

It is therefore inevitable that alternative solutions from alternative communities are necessary to trigger necessary change that affects the grassroots communities, effecting ideas and techniques of healing economically disenfranchised communities.

Although among many alternative communities are those that choose to transform their lives through illegal means and not rely on often compromised institutions of power, there are valid reason for taking such routes towards economic liberation.

The Zama Zama’s are one such community which is contending with socio-economic disparities that assail South Africa today, even though their tyrannical methods seem to speak volumes of the violent nature bred into their collective psyche through dehumanisation within the exploitative mining industry.

And in the case of the current Stilfontein and Orkney Mine Stand-Off, there is an impending catastrophe that will spell disaster for this nation, because  we know that the Zama Zama’s have already desecrated those site where bones of activists like Boikie Tlhapi were discarded. 

***

25 November 2024

Having followed the contentious stand off between the police and illegal miners in the Stilfontein area, it has become essential that a personal record of events be drawn each day, detailing ideas and suspicions, as well as assumptions about what the impact of the events will mean for the future.

And as the South African government continues to wait the miners out, some have resurfaced with stories of disease and deaths underground were thousands are said to be trapped or kept by force by gangs of Basotho men wielding weapons.

It is said that after the community members who had loved ones trapped in the belly of the disused mine-shafts, those who were willing to assist was blocked form the Operation Vala Mgodi, those who held prayer vigils for the miners; some effort by officials was made to send subsistence items underground.

And with the recent emergence of 14 miners, there is now confirmed reports that the gangs that control the labour have withheld the food and water from many dying toilers, and this allegation also fingers Basotho nationals for this brutal tactic.

There are also allegations that Lesotho Security Forces members are part of the gangs operating in these illegally occupied and scavenged mineshaft, and this allegation has international implications for the region.

And while debates are rife regarding the moral obligations to save the lives of the illegal miners, there is the fact that each sweltering day and night, someone’s son, father, brother is dying in the bowls of the earth.

There are varied reasons why and how many of these illegal miners found themselves in these shafts, but the obvious one has been economic; where young men are lured to the region with the prospect of finding work that will allow them to earn a living.

Many are retrenched former mine-workers who come from countries where the apartheid government’s  Gold Chambers drew vast populations of men to come toil on the mines since the time of the Native land Act and the dispossession of land from people of colour.

Yet, one is left to wonder what are the implications of the stand-off once it is over and many bodies have to left underground to rot with decent burials?

What will these gang do to the the nearby communities which they have been terrorising before these recent events and operations of attempted rescues?

And there are also sons whose parents might be stigmatised because their offspring opted to go and crush rocks under the earth to earn a living in a country strangled by unemployment and poverty. 

These families, will have to renegotiate their relationship with communities that deem these illegal miners as gangsters and murderers.

On 18 May 2023, at least 31 Lesotho nationals died during a methane gas explosion at a decommissioned mining shaft in Virginia, near Welkom, and yet zama zamas from Lesotho and other countries continue to flock to these mineshaft because of desperation, following a long history that drove fathers to look for gold underground.

In 2009, 87 dead bodies had been waiting to be identified in a morgue in the same Welkom Police Station, all pile up bodies rotting after being found at the Eland Shaft of the mine owned by Harmony Gold.

And in the wake of the recent events at Stilfontein, the Lesotho government is said to deny the crime of its people, expressing sentiments that yet another wave and shadow xenophobia against Basotho will commence.

And while the Lesotho government needs to create economic solutions that keep illegal miners in Lesotho, the country itself is grappling with high rates of unemployment and a stunted economic development strategy.

Are there any bi-lateral economic solutions that can be devised by both countries to curb this scourge of illegality that threatens to destroy relations between the peoples of both nations?

***

26 November 2024

“Two hundred thousand subterranean heroes who, by day and by night, for a mere pittance lay down their lives to the familiar ‘fall of rock’ and who, at deep levels, ranging from 1 000 to 3 000 feet in the bowels of the earth, sacrifice their lungs to the rock dust which develops miners' phthisis and pneumonia.” Sol Plaatje

The mining industrial machine in South Africa has been a contentious issue since 15-year-old Erasmus Stephanus Jacobs discovered South Africa’s first diamond, the Eureka, in Hopetown in 1867. It kickstarted what historians call the Mineral Revolution, which made few colonial opportunists wealthy beyond measure, and saw hundreds of thousands of men leaving their homes to become exploited labour and under-paid mineworkers.

The modern South African economy was built on the expendability of these lives of black African migrant mineworkers. This industry also ensured that the movements of migrant mineworkers, as well as those of all black people in South Africa, were restricted by the colonial, segregationist and apartheid states. 

Therefore, injustices of this industry have sure spawned various insidious campaigns that eventually become the Zama Zama phenomena, which is a direct consequences of the brutality of the colonial regime’s plan to extract cheap labour from Bantustans created through institutionalised dispossession of natives property and land in the early 1900.

Throughout the industry’s 150-year old history, workers have been demanding fair wages, and capitalist powers that be refused such demands while raking in immense profits. 

It is therefore understandable why there has historically been an alternative illegal industry operating in the winds of the stage of capitalist accumulation through the mining industry.

 

And while the attitude of the State towards the majority of the country’s black citizens was causing increasing upheaval, many forms of illegal mining must have began to prevail within this industry.

In 1960, a total of 435 men died in the Coalbrook colliery disaster, and an explosion at Sasol’s Middelbult colliery resulted in the deaths of 53 workers in an explosion fuelled primarily by cola dust

“The South African gold mining industry in 1980 alone employed 472 000 workers, 44 000 of whom were white and 428 000 black,” notes Prof Mark Pieth, president of the Basel Institute on Governance, in his book Gold Laundering: The dirty secrets of the gold trade. 

Today, during an advent of democratic dispensation and economic liberties for those once oppressed, we are seeing a repeat of historical injustices persisting. 

And recalling that in 2012, miners were massacred at Marikana in the North West province because went on an unauthorised strike for better pay and living conditions, one wonders if these illegal miners are not former mineworkers who experienced those tragic events and the brutality of the system protecting the lucrative mining industry.

***

27 November 2024

Launched earlier this year, Operation Vala Umgodi has led to the arrest of hundreds for the illegal extraction of minerals. Though initially aimed at curbing illegal mining, the operation has revealed deep ties between the extractive sector — especially the informal one — and the trafficking of migrants into South Africa.

And while it seems inevitable that generations of exploited black men would want their share of the wealth gained through the rocks they dug for meagre wages, it appears there is more to these disgruntled children of those exploited elders dying of silicosis, tuberculosis and other diseases related to exposure to chemicals in the mining industry.

By their thousands they have come to scavenge in those same holes of their fathers’ demise and the South African Police Services view this influx as a threat to national security and an extra-legal enterprise that has ties to human trafficking cartels and mercenary players.

The events at Stilfontein therefore meet and mediate history’s lingering specters of exploitations and exploitative practices that were deemed suitable for black males only menial hard labour that led to their social emasculation.

Today, these culprits of the illicit trade in illegally mined minerals are now living exorbitant grandeur of which even their parents could have never dreamt. They are living an exact contrasted existence, the parallels are the exploitative powers underground.

When listening to voices of concerned relatives, friends and partners of the many men who opted to crawl the darkness of burrowed holes, one sympathises and empathises with the hardships clearly experienced in that sordid environ.

And as the nation watched 20 more illegal miners emerge from their hole, detailing the piling corpses and hungry souls held at gun point; we wait to see what the powers that be will embark upon to try and speed the recovery of those willing to be rescued.

***

28 November 2024

The re-election of Donald Trump as president of the US has many implications for the gold and minerals market, which has over the years reed on the dollar as standard of exchange. 

Now that the dollar is strong, the prices of gold will impact the production of such minerals in countries such as South Africa, resulting in decreased production and output from the formal players in the industry. 

As mines close down, retrenchments soar, and those unemployed former minor find it difficult to be employed in other sector. What shows promise is the illegal return to the same decommissioned mines to eke out a livelihood through illicit trade of the minerals extracted.

It is unnerving how mainstream media has ignored the widely varying structural conditions under which migration occurs, how these Zama Zama’s came to be the scum of society as portrayed by mainstream media is also an injustice not to be defended.

When frivolous digital spaces such as TikTok, Facebook and other social media platforms become trusted sources of non-biased discourse about the implications of illegal mining, one can safely assume that mainstream media is complicit in the demonisation of select groups within the milieu of illegal miners.

And as the day draws to slumber, thoughts are with the few left to sleep embraced by the stench of rotting corpses, some mother humming prayers to gods of the underworld to protect the transgressors whom even government officials have sentenced to death.

***

29 November 2024

An exodus of escapees are emerging from underground through scattered hole perforating the mineral rich regions of Stilfontein, and law enforcement has their hands full trying to incarcerate the culprits.

The domino has tipped and trickles of people are emerging from underground speaking of the remaining kingpins still hoarding gold from slave labour of teenagers; and mothers weep for their stolen sons and sisters for brothers who might not see the light of day.

And in a country with less schools and hospitals, one wonders where these new prisoners will be housed? Will there be tenders for construction of new prisons? And as many of the arrested illegal miners are minors, what does this mean for reformation of the local correctional services?

When the bill comes due, eventually, it is the accountants and lawyers necessary for money laundering that have to pay, because they are instrumental in running an enterprise that employs unaware minors and deploys them into perilous work station that buried fathers and brothers for many.

***

05 December 2024

And as weeks pass the tragic events take the courts by storm and through concerted effort of activist organisations such as MACUA (Mining Affected Communities United In Action), the courts eventual gave an order for food and other items to be lowered to the illegal miners trapped underground.

Those who still emerge after weeks of excruciating escapes from their labour camps tell of tales that paint the situation to quiet similar to imprisonment. Guarded by armed Basotho men, these victims of forced labour looked emaciated and sickly; and they detail the cesspool of corpses and terror and food deprivation used as tool for hostage psychological assault.

Then as days trickle by with the possible death-screams of those in the Stilfontein mines, another similarly perilous rescue operation ensues in a mineshaft located close to Sabie, a  town in the Mpumalanga Province of South Africa.

Media and their redacting lenses point to visuals of intricate operation to rescue screaming ZamaZama’s by a government which wanted to “smoke them out”, and suddenly the moral compass of a sanctimonious nation is re-evaluated.

Food parcels are being lowered into these depths while the mounting number of corpses are that make their way to the surface mounts like dead rock after an explosion. Each day prisoners meet newly waking boys and men, dirt ridden and smelly, all dreading their fate after living in a gaol of their worst nightmares.

Police linger beside empty vehicles with guns holstered as young men from the nearby community of Stilfontein hoist ropes down mine-shafts; each manoeuvring their bodies to lower of lift whatever weight is tethered on the other end.

 And mothers were hurriedly stocking up on water, scarce even from their taps, in bottles and buckets for toiling men and those who can find ways of drenching the thirst of unknown numbers of trapped souls. 

Of this new population of prisoners, one is left to wonder how the system is coping with the influx. What new dynamics now govern prison hierarchies? Are some of those arrested starting new gangs in those prisons around Matlosana and J B Marks Municipalities?

***

09 December 2024 

As the festive season picks up up pace, millions of people head homeward to homelands designated for black populations from the times of apartheid and land dispossessions; all hoping to be carrying some form of earnings to share with their families and bring smile to their young.

Sadly, many of these migrating populations rely on temporary employment to accumulate as much as possible to afford the minor demands of family life, as well as the dreams of children left behind trudging dust roads in rural villages in search of schools r water.

Some of those temporary workers are these Zama Zama’s, who spend stints in the darkness of tunnels dug throughout the South African underbelly, and as we observe the events transpiring at Stilfontein and Orkney, we know many will not reach home.

They will fill cells to capacity and prisons populations will soar, new gangs will be formed and another scourge of violence will happen behind bars, turning into massacres while the judiciary is on leave, touring the vast bounty this country has to offer.

Kingpins underground wield guns ordering men to shuffle under blade-sharp rocks for gold for which they will earn a penny, and the escapees braving arrest and torture find freedom in an environment filled with enraged under-paid, uncertain-tempered officers.

And as many jostle between various shafts, travelling miles in an attempt to avoid the long arm of the law, delays cost lives and corpses keep coming from beneath the earth like a sick metaphor of the dead exhumed by faulty hands.

For those still living down there, what stench roams stuffy crevices and tunnels where anyone can squat and dedicate without shame?

Can one breath faecal matter for months on end without lungs contracting some form of disease?

What about sleep? Do these slave labourers have time to dream in pitch black place known for the dead and their ill fate?

***

10 December 2024

The gold-mining industry symbolises the dispossession and exploitation that have shaped South Africa and its economy, as we today observe the country having the highest income inequality in the world.

Communities founded on the outskirts of these mines became an epitome of affluence for the white minority, yet labour camps for the black population who were located in townships and squatter camps which were constantly relocated depending on expansionist trends of the industry.

And it thus was inevitable that a cultural identity was formed by residents of these townships, which in fact delineates their colloquialism and language, demeanour and methods of social integration from nay other townships which aren’t formed around mining infrastructure.

It is therefore understandable that a camaraderie is evident between the residents of Orkney and Stilfontein, a synergic relationship that is said to have helped develop some of the townships in Matlosana.

These Zama Zama’s are revered it seems, as communities continue to rescue trapped illegal miners in an inspired collaboration with former mining experts who are able to envisage the catastrophic consequences of starving them.

A variety of people gather daily around the mineshaft to participate as enthusiastic participant sin the planned  rescue operations, but suppose that the rescue operations were complemented by large-scale excavation and rehabilitation of these disused mines for future employment to curb illegal mining?

And while these communities are ironically affected by water and soil pollution stemming from mining activities that went on without environmental concerns; they are also faced with crises ranging from unemployment and poverty, couple with the growing scourge of HIV infections.

The Zama Zama’s, as unspoken “heroes” in these communities continue to prove more skilled than their fathers, and their inventiveness within the illegal enterprise now soars above the work of their fathers masters such Anglo-Gold and Glencore, during the heydays of gold mining in South Africa.

Theirs is becoming a semi-formalised scheme that resembles money laundering within communities, where funeral parlour are enriched by taking care of burials of dead miners, where local businesses supply  a variety of goods to vast numbers of men with purchasing power underground.

For the Zama Zama’s, theirs is a multi-voiced lament that sparks a social discourse about wealth redistribution in South Africa, as well as spotlighting overlooked challenges pitted against sustainable paths into the economic future of the country. 

***

Palestine, My Gaza

 Palestine, Palestine

It has been two years since another Nakba began with the full scale invasion of Palestinian territory by Israel, what normality is possible in the vicinity of the current conflict, while we witness history tending to repeat itself - the haunting ghost of the past occupation still fresh in the memories of many Palestinians?

Are there any factual approaches to read through complex colonial histories, realities of the current occupation and ethnic cleansing without taking a side?

Should not any person concerned with justice and freedom retain a close connection with the struggle and exploitation of the Palestinian people?

15 May 1948 saw the expulsion of Palestinians from their ancestral land through a violent displacement that let to the loss of property, dignity and cultural heritage on an unprecedented scale.

It is estimated that More than 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homeland by Zionist militia in 1948, and the project of irradiating the nation of Palestine is still in full swing.

The Nakba of 1948 left its mark on all the subsequent ones that shaped the Middle East, influencing warfare and militarism in terms of scale, technology, strategy, damage, and violence. Since then, the wars of one region have spread their political, social, economic, and psychological effects across the globe.

And to date over a two million Palestinian women, children have been killed through explosions and protracted warfare between what Israel terms terrorists, who yet are young men and their elders reclaiming their lost land and culture through the necessary violence of defending one’s kin.

“Today, we again commemorate the events of 1948 and subsequent years, which led to the dispossession and displacement of approximately 750,000 Palestinians from their ancestral lands,” said Cheikh Niang (Senegal), Chair of the United Nations Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, as he opened a panel discussion titled “1948-2024:  The Ongoing Palestinian Nakba”.

***

Contemplating the many disputed identities, memories, denied deaths that are a daily occurence in Gaza, what can we learn from the complexities of human nature, the harmonies and disharmonies characterising cycles of life in Palestine and the rest of the Middle East?

Many people of Arab descent have always admitted that cultures have coalesced since time immemorial at this site marked by a multitude of cultural and historical narratives.

These intertwined cultural and historical experiences were shattered by the creation of the state of Israel after World war 2, and through manifold stories of diverse experiences of people who lived during the 1948 war, there clearly are parallels to the sheer scale of these social catastrophes.

An inability to handle our vulnerability as the global family in the face of wars such as happening in the Middle East ensures that the realities happening on the ground become mere spectacles to which we have been desensitised through media.

And because the global family seems oblivious to the massacre of a nation because of an opaque past and an unknown future; our revolt seems to not even scathe the terrorist state of Israel.

There seems to be a certain ideological posturing and political disillusionment regarding how we think and act about the atrocities happening to the Palestine people, especially when having not spoken to anyone with direct experiences of the war on Gaza.

News bulletins around the globe are inundated with images of slaughter and devastation; and as the world silently watches ordinary people of Palestine navigate the ebb and flow of tyranny, more wars are ravaging continents and displaced populations  roam the planet with broken lives and sacks of mere possessions. 

Faced with relentless exoduses and waves of migration caused by capitalist and imperialist machinery governments are collapsing, and duplicitous media pushes even harder the propaganda of corrupt politicians to exhaust the poor masses with constant false narratives.

And more displacements in the names of wars ensue, as well as escapes they provoke; sound bombs explode over elderly patients trapped in dilapidated hospitals, while Israeli suburbanites rest watching screens depicting non-fiction slaughters. .

Their relentless quest for a better life in the face of regional disparities in the Middle East thwarted, Palestinians will now have to rather face a chilling terror gripping their minds against monstrosities of a new technological warfare.

Elsewhere, the elite are debating moralism on “issues of” maimed infants, analysing award winning images and footage; numbing their guilt with oriental music and wine over cuisines served by other oppressed people.

Desktop activists are spreading viral posters that rouse our collective guilty conscience; and children wail hungry with amputee fathers and sister tortured in secret cells since turning 10.

How do we live dreamless and bloated lives when the starved are being buried underneath the rubble of prison settlements?

Netanyahu and his congress of desolation plot of ethnic cleansing the Middle East for Zionist settlement has been watched, and who will not hold every Israeli in contempt after this resentful slaughter?

The effects of its campaigns cascades through the region, shifting political alignments, and generating new concerns over radicalization and conflict spillover as youth brigades are being recruited from “friendly nations” to join the Israeli Army with the promises of heaven on earth.

What could therefore be the remaining methods of politico-militant solidarities across our shared struggles against colonialism and Zionist apartheid can be devised akin those of hordes of youth pilgrimaging to Israel to become soldiers for wealth?

Should the world take arms against the stet of Israel or forget the Gaza war of winter 2008–2009 within its broader politico-military context?

A veritable army of dogmatised adrenaline-fuelled machismo flogging and raping women in view of their partners, strangled by boots and religious fingers; new media streaming assaults on children in this most photographed war.

Lessons From The Beetle With Four Eyes

“If someone produces artwork in response to a set of artist instructions, are they also an artist?”

YOKO ONO

***

Over the past two decades, poet and artist Sabelo Soko has created a unique body of work including short films, video installations and poetry performances. A central element of his poetic and political art is the exploration of how languages coalesce and the societal constraints associated with this intermingling of different strains of expression.

Spin VENEK: Lessons From Imfundamakhwela is one such new project that uses isiZulu parables translated through a colonial language; isiZulu being a language which in itself is full of mystery and mastery of expressing realities that often go beyond words.

Language is becoming an everyday method for bending reality in any realm defined by the exchange of information, and when two languages dance to formulate each other’s perspectives, translation becomes an important project in connecting narratives from varied environments, preserving their intrinsic truths.

And Spin Venek Manual explores how these two languages can ignite inner and spiritual energies, through repetitive affirmations and mantras formed to fuel a transformation of personal realities of people who might otherwise need counselling and psychological support.

By flipping, contrasting, contradicting, reforming language at its idioms and metaphors, and crafting a vernacular that is constantly flying over the pond of speech, the project becomes decolonial and important regarding how isiZulu is translated but also to the structural relations of the language to other languages.

And while he is “learning the whistles that climb the skies”, the manual is moving into new registers and finer distinctions that Sabelo Soko finds traceable in the Zulu language. 

Reweaving it with other traditional stories, the manual is a tool of unlocking collective joys and trauma, especially when used in learning environments, where interactive exchange of knowledge and experiences is essential for personal growth.

It is then through language that we perceive similarities and differences, where we voice concerns and mysteries that mystify us, while being attentive to the metaphor of the Whirligig Beetle and its ability to use four eyes to perceive the multifacetedness of oneself and others, and the environments within which these selves evolve and thrive.

The project is dedicated to the knowledge emerging from the use of language as a psychotherapeutic tool, a vocality that is emitted by bodies, even when at times bodies feel voiceless.

Beneath language’s failures lies history and personal memories, there is the mantra that one should “DALA what you must”, which simply gives agency to each individual to partake in the creation of a larger whole and a collective-self.

We also see how Sabelo Soko translates linguistic tropes and limericks from the isiZulu language into visual terms to which English speakers are accustomed.

Through sheer modesty, Sabelo Soko often refers to himself as a novice in the art of using language, which is far from the truth, as he has proven himself an indelible linguist, whose characteristic isZulu Poetry has become iconic as a celebration of African Languages.

***

And undeniably, the idea of "a manual" is quite intriguing in that it’s commonly compiled as an instructional and rigid set of codes and parameters; no room for improvisation of alterations. 

Yet, the SPIN VENEK Manual is different in that the instructions themselves are mere guidelines for a self-explorative journey (Dala What You Must) that immerses the reader in individualised interpretations, where one is called upon to be the translator of their own versions of what they are reading.

Divided into four chapters, the importance of the work lies in its transformation of language into an interplay of motivational solicitations and challenges; nudging the reader towards mythical interpretations of the natural world into varied daily parables and idioms for spiritual empowerment.

And to use this manual as a tool of social reconstructive surgery, through facilitated workshops and engagements that delve into minds and aspirations of people, must pose its own challenges. It is therefore insightful when Sabelo Soko outlines the aim of the manual as a type of glue essential for cultivating a sense of social cohesion in a country still haunted by colonialism, segregation and apartheid.

Lessons on “being present”, the concept of self awareness being exercised as the first preamble prior to acknowledging one’s awareness of others. These greetings are all that announce one’s “being”, “presence” and engendering their visibility.

Manuals instruct, safeguarding the implementation of tasks which are essentials for orderly and safe operations, and viewing of the human psyche as an operational appendage that require precise instruction for its awakening, enlightenment and self-discovery, the Spin Venek Manual is a seamless blueprint for psychoanalytic power of language.

***

It is uncanny that a whistle is deemed a form of language, a commutative tool that is used to inform others of one’s presence. The whistle, which eludes all novice herders, is also a lesson about how much of human behaviour is drawn from the natural world.

But as it is often unlikely to hear a woman whistle, the tale of Ntokazi with her ability to whistle at her first go, provides a theme that language is maternal. 

And the mystic that is created by her ability to allows the beetle to transform her tongue, also symbolises a form of ingestion as though language is not only expelled from the mouth but also imbibed.

The Praise Poem that transpires due to her exorbitant display also speak volumes about the necessity for “naming oneself” in the presence of others, and this act is instrumental in obtaining the aim of this manual - raising an awareness of self through the eyes of others.

Knowledge of self leads to an awareness of one’s worth, as detailed in the subsequent chapters of this manual, and as it addresses transitions within the self, it urges readers to contend with anonymity. 

So, with numerous exercises that are designed to introduce participants to one another, the manual encourages a variety of activities that trigger self-actualisation, investment in others without fear, and as exemplified by the vulnerable beetle, it provides lessons on agility during pleasant and unpleasant situations.

The straight-forward jargon, the sentences which could be memories by a ten year old, the manual comes up with ways that address toxic masculinity and misogyny, guiding riders towards self-made solutions that would transform individuals and therefore the collective. 

As a piece of literary art, SPIN VENEK MANUAL: Lessons From Imfundamakhwela comes from a long tradition of using artistic practices to instruct, inspire and accurately address complex social systems, memories and interactions. And to a degree, it delves within the new mind inundated with technological advances that often cloud the mind with illusory ideas of self and other.

The use of poetry and performance arts harbours limitless potential to enrich lives of children and young people, and through the manual's creative guides, a form of developmental promotion of cognitive, personal and social skills, in addition to the increase in motivation, confidence and self-esteem are elevated. This manual demonstrates just how the creative arts can be used to raise the standards of teaching and learning in any social context.

This specific edition is graphically comprised of instructive examples to copy such as those found in manuals for drawing or painting; but the theatricality of the activities is another element which distinguishes Sabelo Soko’s work from many art manuals. 

Undeniably, artists often find themselves having to compromise their art and their life because they were not taught accurate up-to-date methods for dealing with life and other situations, but this edition provides a formula where the instructed becomes the artist expressing and sculpting their unique vision of themselves.

(Image Provided By The Artist)

And as a form of “art pedagogy”, Sabelo Soko will be facilitating sessions that unpack the manual on the 16th of November 2024 in Soweto; where facilitated engagement with the instructive and educational elements of the manual will take place.

These workshops are geared to be playgrounds and a havens for encounters and experimentation on alternative ideas of economic, artistic and literary self-emancipation within black communities.

The poetry performances, sketches and spontaneous dramaturgy that will characterise the sessions are also an important aspect augmenting the established criteria of creativity, experimentation, and innovation.

***

SITES OF FLAWED MEMORIES - A Melancholic Reflection

Although imagined or invented, nations are nebulous creation of human ingenuity crafted from a variety of institutional imperialism and military prowess. 

Heritage sites that shape national identity and imbue it with meaning are the subject of my artistic inquiry, attempting to address themes of collective loss, inherited trauma and the persistent loss of homes experienced by black people.

Engaging in archival research and the use interdisciplinary artistic practice utilising national symbols and narratives connected to South African nationhood, my work could be said to explore cross-pollinations of nationhoods within the diverse landscape of the southern tip of Africa.

On the backdrop of South Africa celebrating 30 years of democracy, it becomes essential to grapple with how a maturing state shapes its citizens and traditionalises diverse histories and cultural responses to said histories. 

As the bourgeoning state adopts and adapts to colonial Eurocentric and western ideologies and structures inherited from colonial powers; there arises a need for  decolonial revisions of said histories as collectivised through memory.

And considering multifaceted efforts by the Afrikaner community to carve a space for separate development, the “coloured” community retracing “their” roots to the Khoi and San people of antiquity, it has become pivotal to reevaluate cultural impacts of “spaces of collective incidents of trauma”. 

To investigate how these spaces tie historical diverse perspectives and root truths which could be contested at various period of history is one of the empirical objectives of my work with archival materials, to reposition their relevance without taints of race based definitions, but hopefully a holistic view of a collective memories.

***

How can a nation of nations grappling with compartmentalised views of nationhood create a state founded on cohesive and harmonious exchange and engagement? 

Can people who developed their perspectives of “the other” reconcile their vantage point with contemporary landscapes where lives are morphing and intertwined by intricate economic and social misnomers and discrepancies?

Take for instance a street where protesting activists were massacred by colonial forces; would the perpetrator and the victim recall the same space equitably? 

Can the farms located on land disposed from black communities become safe havens for impoverished farm labourers, while owned and supervised by generations of colonisers?

And that small quaint town with magnificent views of pictorial natural landscapes nestled among hills adored by artists of privilege, how are they to become “home” for those who lost vast fortunes with the land of their spiritual roots?

Mothers from one-roomed shacks are cleaning immaculately large houses with glass walls and fathers from garden-less homes are tending gardens and flowers that render “white” spaces heavenly, like dream objects they yearn to possess but could never achieve. 

Upon leaving these spaces, back to the sombre and mediocre environments of scanty camps on the outskirts of these towns, there seems to be an inversion from dreams of bliss to utter disdain for even the people in their lives.

The township peopled by those who resent their lives and those with whom they share their life experiences; that is a schizophrenic space of liminality occupied by black folk.

What about those intermittent days celebrated as holidays, which are said to represent commemorative efforts of appeasing sins and brutalities of the past through reconciliatory mirages?

How could a date associated with the merciless killings of black people be celebrated by another community as a moment of their historical victory to be recalled and venerated annually in clear view of descendants of the deceased victims of slaughters?

Could these sites of flawed memories be windows through which to spy on the past with clearer eyes; to reconstruct the events afresh in minds often exhausted by the flow of time? 

***

Colonialism has extremely long tentacle which are clutching every sinew of the present, and cities, towns, villages and squatter camps have mushroomed on very poisoned soil, built on exploitative social contracts and sustained by a form of collective amnesia.

All blood spilled at various stages of this country’s evolution still wails from beneath the rocks, and generations who draw blood from those deceased are living lives alien to themselves while alienating themselves from their respective communities.

Alienated from the past and present, this is a generation of people of colour attempting to find individual identities fused with reconstructed historical narratives, where our noble past becomes a badge of honour to our dispossession and disenfranchisement.

Rage-filled souls roam the streets, youth with no sense of self beyond narcissistic yearning for grandeur are plotting for a future which is rendered uncertain by the unresolved past.

It seems those proverbial sites of past battles are once again be filled with screams of men dying afresh, by each other’s hand; towns assailed by disgruntled domestic workers and garden boys using shovels as weapons for racial cleansing.

Hating the face one sees in the mirror as a metaphor for “black on black” violence is not a simplification of some deep seated disorders and self-destructive tendencies among black people. 

Violence against self and others seems to fuel an insurrectional reaction against personalised false hopes and sedative tales told to keep the downtrodden hopeful; masking a grotesque truths that bear witness to traumas experienced and therefore experimented on those closest to us.

But how did Africans become separated from the truth of their actual contributions to history due to it being “white-washed”, erasure and censorship of records of historical significance?

 

How did Africans become convinced that tribalist segregation is final and just as a solution for their poverty and social plight; will this self-alienation be another collective disorder that continues to hinder collaborative redress of historical ills and mistruths?

***

To answer these questions one is compelled to study works of numerous renowned psycho-analysts and historians, who have carved alternate lenses through which to address traumas of unresolved pasts concerning people of colour.

One must device methodologies of self-analysis, to decode wounds of “the past as a space where persons and communities were shattered”, reassembling broken bits into a coherent yet transformative identity that would best survive the scourges of contemporary inequality. 

This new identity that is achieved through self-analysis should not be nebulous, formless ego that can be externally manipulated, but an identity with agency and accountability to the past as well as the present.

And how does one begin to fashion this new-self in the face of a present steeped in monuments of traumatic pasts, still glorified and revered by certain communities while being despised by others?

Should personal and social metamorphosis solely rely on destruction of such monuments and sites of massacres, in a form of collectively sanctioned erasure of unpalatable episodes of history based on sentiments of betrayal and disgust as felt by the majority of black people?

***

Many have been puzzled by the observable spiritual depravity of gangs and gruesome waves criminality experienced in the Cape and other coastal cities which historically were the entry points of vast populations of colonisers? 

Why are communities in these regions prone to internalised self-loathing and inferiority complexes that are disguised as machismo, which explode in bouts of ultra-violent that sees no value in lives? 

And these places are inundated with memorabilia, churches with ancient bells, monuments and museums filled with artefacts and deceptions from the colonisers’ past, exalting their “achievements” gained through usurping native lands and properties.

What about the mining towns were men were exploited and their bodies vandalised for profit; and those town along the Voortrekker route that seem never to awaken from a slumber and stupor of beauty as veneer over the wickedly affluent livelihoods of the colonisers?

The homelands are centred around self-destructive violence and revenge killings meted against vulnerable generations paying debts of the past.

Townships are labour camps for unemployed and self-deprecating beings intoxicated by failure and drink.

And all these places are in clear view of the coloniser, often built inches from their comfort zones, shanty town mushrooming near suburbs and gated estates meant for excluding the poor and their envious gaze.

***

Analysing multiple systems in operation within traumatised psyches takes significant and frequent reflection on both the past as was and the past as viewed  or perceived from the present. 

Relationships between past events and their recollections in the present are fraught with illusory metaphors and hints of covet subconscious concealments. These barriers need be dismantled prior to finding the chaotic persona that is the result of trauma and other experiences.

A distanced objectivity is often required, a voyeurism synonymous with scientific enquiries; therefore the decolonisation of how the past and its present manifestation affect the black mind is crucial first as a personal project followed as an undertaking for the benefit of the collective.

Confronting souls that have been through inter-generational trauma transmitted through birth and genes can in fact be described as living in catastrophe, a continuous crimson flood that threatens to swallow and drown their innocences.

But once a new-self has been fashioned, a degree of asynchronous observation of personal and collective disasters seems possible.

That blurred line between neurosis and psychosis is shifting with each engagement with the past, be it when looking an old photograph of a seemingly happy servant family on a farm once dispossessed from people of colour. 

The irony of affiliating one’s deceased relatives with the same land they toil as lowly servants of colonisers, is strong even when the same descendants are forbidden to visit the graves of those who dies on those colonised farmlands.

Thoughts ignited by memory beyond the brutal treatment of the white farmer do not even deter many from associating themselves with those enclaves of white monopoly, swathes of infinite space upon which they lounge and thrive owning herds stolen on their behalf.

But can minds, specifically black minds, be viewed as sites of flawed memories, recollections of past events tainted with terrors and anguish, pretences of joy and indefinite exploitation that eventually is accepted as divine fate?

Are literal and metaphorical flows of social power between black and white communities always going to exist as bridges built on landmines of the minds of the wretched of this earth?

***

“Heredity nothing, environment everything.” Maru, Bessie Head

The statement has become canonical among by psychologists who are concerned with how the environment affects the mind, the mind as product of community and social interactions.

Imagine a scenario where nn elderly silicotic mine worker approaches his supervisor complaining of migraines; but he also alludes to the belief that the migraines are a result of witchcraft emanating from interacting with the son of another sorcerous man, who is now deployed in the same section of the mine shaft.

The supervisor is young and bemused by superstitious belief, but the adamant man is neurotically demanding the expulsion of the young descendant of his enemy, without considering that he might be suffering and organic disease.

And for those who can suffer more in their imaginations that in their reality, what could be the remedy for their unburied demons?

Of Motherhood And Melancholia, is a seminal book written by renowned Psycho-ethnographer, Lou-Marie Kruger, who traces various strains of trauma to conditions that mothers and mothers to be suffer prior to beginning.a journey of the child’s development.

The Valley, as a space for hostile social conditions and a stage for the “violence of poverty”, is a microcosm of a vast dilemma.

Genealogical traits inherited from parents also have psychological imprints on their offspring, traits which also evolve over time as the child grows and matures to adulthood.

The plausibility of such an outcome in psychological terms is undeniable to the extend that what ever traumatic experiences the mother underwent during pregnancy can be passed on the newborn’s inner mind which is yet to mature with scars inherited from the mother.

This newborn does invariably exhibit trans-generational affiliations with trauma, influenced by experiences from both his parents and those cultivated as an individual maturing with a communal setting. 

Abbreviated versions of past trauma that show up in adulthood are unique in that they are personal, even though drawing from a wide array of psych-social forces.

Previously unseen sketches of internalised pain, fear, inferiority can therefore be unrolled through violent spats and burst, that both merge the old inherited traumas with the personally cultivated traumas.

Another reading of Professor Kruger’s well-researched work, highlight how violence becomes infused with behavioural make up of communities that have normalised violence as a tool for surviving the ravages of poverty and powerlessness. 

Men feeling emasculated by their coloniser and employer tends to reclaim is lost power by subjugating and brutalising those nearest to his circle of influence; the wife, the child and immediate family.

The echoes of sobs from a mother slapped by a masculine voice of “the father” after she slaved under the lusty gaze of “the master” who is disgusted with his wife, which the unborn inevitably hears, will forever be recalled and normalised as part of sounds of an environment into which they will be ushered.