I'm Not Going To Tell You - The Irrational Library

 

On Merafong's Days Of Protest

The events that led to protests that rocked Merafong could be summed up as a culmination of a simmering rage against systematic corruption that has usurped much of social gains from the hands of communities, enriching a few, who stand as gate-keepers for larger corporate exploitation enforced by enterprises that leave poverty in their wake. 

As most youth witness their communities haemorrhaging politically and culturally, they took these skin-felt lessons of hunger stricken siblings and reacted in kind against powers that hold wealth excavated from the ground sinking beneath their dilapidated state-subsidised houses.

Many townships around Merafong are plague-ridden enclaves of cheap labor for exorbitantly thriving mining industry cartels, characterised by their penchant for ruthless business ethics.  And while the region boasting an excess of ten mine-shafts, as well as the world’s deepest mine shaft, one would expect that some semblance and appearance of development would be visible.

But the municipality is a shambles, and grievances emergent from situations orchestrated by self-interested parties, called for the disenfranchised to take to the streets as a final and irrevocable act of revolt.

Merafong is but a microcosm of black South Africa where many lap the dross of a franchised life, as all remnants of squandered rewards of a collective struggle for determination have left many without any means of surviving, let alone through a global pandemic.

And what is inspiring, is that the youth from all around Merafong took it upon themselves to unravel the knot strangling their livelihoods, when society seems disillusioned with notions of a despondent and unthinking horde of lazy youngsters, drunk on freedom’s brew. 

Whatever vile lessons of criminality bred out of organised desperation, the more insidious were embodied by many criminal records impeding them from employment opportunities; one of the reasons for their plight.

And on behalf of communities, these practices of defiance ignited a process that will continue to set events in motion which might seem self-endangering for most activists, but are a resolute final resort for self-expression in the face of tyranny.

Profound is the realisation that their revolt is a praxis not bound by partisan affiliation, but woven by a common goal that defies self-preservation, as most are bracing themselves for police brutality and exposure to disease, among some of the consequences of their activism.

Bearing the brunt of contravening national disaster management protocols, and gathering amass towards places of authority, many now have criminal records, yet continue to strive for immaculate resolution for a plethora of social discrepancies assailing their communities. 

And while populist notions might lean towards labelling their clarion call for employment as being contradictory by virtue of dangers associated with the type of employment readily available for Merafong communities, these activists are well aware of this exploitative nature of the mining industry and its environmentally hazardous spaces that pose health concerns for anyone.

They are aware that all machinations of employment mean surrender to environments that will certainly decrease their life expectancies, and they are also well verse in philosophical ideologies that compel them to become martyrs for future generations who would otherwise be ensnared into more insidious corporate greed machines.

And as they grapple with the effects of a global pandemic, many inequalities are flailing all threads of communality, a sense of individualistic self-interest is subsuming much of relational logic and people are in their isolations becoming not only disinterested in plights of others, but of a world going up in flames.

But there is a few who dare not look away from ambers ascending from simmering coals of social discontent and environmental disintegration. 

And what other course of action remained but to confront their designed precarious social situations, made of constant promises by hoarders of the proverbial pot of gold limited to those who purchase shovels?

These disenfranchised young men and women, who are often dropout students from regent-owned universities they could not afford on Black Tax, do sit not only binging on cheap intoxicants, but also to discuss ideas of conscientious methods of dismantling their inter-generational social standing.

They wrestle with entrepreneurial schemes to dredge their kin out of poverty, but as evident, the country continues to degrade into a hotbed for political chauvinism and patronage. Yet, on the surface of these murky waters that bury secrets ghosts, the youth are witnessing their drowned dreams floating, and it’s unsightly and haunting.

So, it follows that these events be recorded as an epoch when self-determined ideals materialised, eradicating old and defunct beliefs piously held in a system that is steeped in wholesale plunder of life and nature.

These actions are an awakening of descendants of migrant labourers, those who grounded their roots in and around these mine dumps and poisoned soil.

And for a time perhaps, a new breed of activists will carve their mark on memories of yet another generation born free to choose their own exploiters, a generation hopefully that will be incorruptible. 

So, may our thoughts forever pay homage to this youth movement that started an avalanche that is stampeding down every radioactive dunes gutted from the earth’s burrows. And may we forever recall that, “every revolution begins with personal revolutions”*.

*Disposable Heroes Of Hiphopracy

Art Of The Disenfranchised Manifesto

This is an art that repulses and infuriates traditional modes of unwitting puritans, in that it breaks all rules known to craft a lawless expression of all violence of mind’s hidden homes.

Love, rage, joy and jealousy are all antonyms in a warm embrace over coals of time’s tragedies flaring up in this cave, as these are fuel for an art of the disenfranchised faced with random odds and vices.

For those whom peril is bread among bombshells and oils leaks, theirs is a life worth depicting, not to romanticize but calculate like a sum of all evils veiled in man by flesh.

Our skins become canvases for scars and wounds to draw portraits of our travails, our chapped lips sweetly cursing crucifixes and monuments in a language of rebel machines.

Here is an art not indebted to prism gazes filtered by fears of prisons and other savage punishments of deviations from the norm, not some actualized structure in panic of pandemics, but a safe haven for leprous souls beaten by Jazz and designer bibles.

At the base of it all holds frailly sweaty palms of womenfolk, warning of diseases among pockets of survivors who prostituted their wills, with each step ascending to assassinate pimps and gods for the sake of children.

Flowers and other faded laurels become fodder for furnaces we burn into pages of sacrificial registers and death certificates; and bones pave routes of our escape once these cage doors implode.

With that art, soil will be sacred, and urinals divine for those tanning skins to make scriptures for cults of spiritualized nudists and mineworkers. 

That art will soak like varnish into scabs of hopes, burn into pores of rock and cast spells on governments and sphinxes paling under radioactive breezes.

Ours is a letter to born-again strangers in automobiles blistering through shrubs and scotched tree trunks lining freeways to never-land, past all glories and saints sacked by rogue profiteers. 

As we explode their vaults and fortresses built on nukes, our codes will be rancid words and knuckles clutching codes and brushes, chisels and saws grating skeletons of ancient poets sagely epistles – calling on death’s secrets and designer wars.

And our art will live, with spears protruding from its rear, with blades for nails scratching etchings, with pangs of hunger and thirst sculpting altars for tomorrow’s lie.

Merafong: Days Of Protest

 What compels a people to take to the streets and demand for the closure of a gold mine? And how did the company gain access to the mineral rich district without the inclusion of local communities? 

These and other questions form part of this record of events that occurred during the course of 2020 in Carletonville, west of Johannesburg.

This record, though not claiming to be an objective depiction of the collective struggle expressed by many under-developed communities in district, it serves to capture the mood and sentiments expressed against a corrupt municipality and an exploitative mining enterprise. 

The collective voice “speaking truth to power” is therefore, the uncensored and unadulterated clarion call to all exploited communities to stand up and take charge of their future in the face of unrelenting poverty.

Kokosi's Radicalized Youth

This documentary is a record of voices of the youth of Kokosi, in their efforts for social development and cohesion within a fragmented society. 

Faced with unemployment, poverty and the scourge of HIV/AIDS, they continue to challenge the status quo, by speaking up to authority in a voice strained by exploitation and lack of opportunities.

And through aspirations and dreams of these youths, we see a glimmer of hope in a place infamous for its gangs and rampant drug use, among other social ills that charateristically assail many South African townships.

Kokosi: A Place Called Shall-Never

Kokosi, a small township on the outskirts of the mining district of Merafong, is virtually unknown to even its residents. 

The history of its origins, lies with memory-keepers who due to old age and ill health are passing away without having expressed their knowledge and sentiments about A Place Called SHALL NEVER. 

This documentary delves into this history that is preserved by few remaining elders who still hope to impart knowledge to the youth who seem destined to social decay.

Thoughts On Art Of The Disenfranchised

When artists are so unceremoniously forced into seclusions by unprecedented events such as global pandemics, their craft suffers or experiences vast metamorphoses, and we are left to wonder what art will they table before a strange and mutated world?

If these are truly the last days of what is normal, then it follows that all norms should transform, thereby developing to mirror a transforming world. And as we look optimistically to this age of reclusive introspection, exhibited on digital platforms by creative in cages of quarantined lives, we also must wonder about the substance of this new art ‘out of the norm’. 

Will art then, be relegated to the margins of social conscience, become an art from the disenfranchised, art that reels in muddy cages of contemporary social disarray; will this art exists in compromised digital clouds of a collective global library?

This lament is but a manifesto for a breed simmering in test-tubes on neo-culturalism festering in eradicated individuality? Are we going to become the masked, faceless exhibitors of commercialized personalities, altered by dis-ease, and experimenting with our souls on binary canvases?

Will a plethora of works be projections of disenfranchisement, isolation and deleterious urges for long abandoned freedoms? Those admirably forlorn regions of the mind, will they imbue our crafts with depth and tragedy?

Should this art be a record of atrocities and derailed marathons of routine; are we to conjure a language to alter almanacs of our soon to be eternal concentration camp?

Or is there room for rosy hopes in that landscape drawn with blood and viruses, boundaries carved in laboratories by quarantine zones? Are we to redesign humility as everyone copes with the spurts of their chosen paths? Will our art be a rotted rejection of all destinations representing our dimming hopes or will it speak still of previous lives, episodes postponed in an overwhelming decadence of a bored society?

Reminiscent of crumbling masonry, we watch ideas of a manicured future fray like leaflets of slogans we sold ourselves.

Suspended cravings of closeness have abandoned us, and we stand transfixed at this station suspended in edited photographs. 

Will our art be a secret perpetration of self-immolation, snitching on friends and foes before coin machines dispensing memorabilia from a counterfeit global village? Will art root out the rot of soulful vibes howling from screens and pages of forbidden conspiracies?

Will any art of the disenfranchised mirror our terse commentary on this coded diary we keep of a time of death?

And as these pestilent times kill themselves with immortality in syringes and other ammunitions of self-effacement, will art be frank and calm as a priest during an execution?

Will we have witnesses to madness we toss about our walls and clay mounds, who would confirm that we truly had jumped out of windows to save ourselves and repulse tradition?

Or are we to join the flock with tongues sold for plates of elite consumers of soul-soaked paint and stone?