Johannesburg - Grief is not merely a process that follows a tragedy. It is a paradigm shift, an altered state of mind.
After the tragedy of apartheid, too many politicians made too many promises that they can't keep.
They lost their way somewhere between fighting for freedom and living for power.
Sometimes attempting to change the system from within backfires. And it is you who has changed. Many of those who say they would die for a cause are the first to run. Survival is a stronger instinct than servitude.
Chameleons in sheep's clothing have been corrupted and they betrayed the struggle.
This is how we arrived at this point. A point of economic collapse and inequality, of fractured infrastructure in impoverished provinces, of dilapidated districts within mangled municipalities. Townships are either beached on barren land or sunken to the bottom of a body of polluted water, sinking like an anchor attached to Sandton. Like Alexandra.
But maps can't navigate the world that pain and grief spin a mind to.
You can’t see an imbalance with privilege in your eyelids.
How do you imagine seeing the world through a black man’s view?
A view from an upward angle, taken from below the eye-level of the coloniser. Creating the perception that a shackled black mind is looking at them from a lower perspective. An apartheid derived indoctrination designed to dig out our essence from our being and place us closer to animals and further from you, the powerful, superior.
AfriForum fighting to display the apartheid flag serves to disrespect the pain and grief that this symbol of the oppression and torture of black people represents. A sight that incites and awakens feelings of white supremacy against black people.
Double standards are not only visible in the standard of living.
It is the raw insolence that got to me. You should really believe them when people show you who they are.
On one hand, AfriForum wants to openly wave the murderous apartheid flag, on another they are distraught and take black politicians, chameleons that they are, to court for singing liberation songs. It is all song and dance until you remember that reconciliation and forgiveness do not mean the same thing.
In the dichotomy of forgiveness lies the thin ice that we are told not to skate on, the scissors we were told not to run with. In the midst of unearthing bones of the past, we have more to pick. How we wish land was bones.
Sometimes we learn that double standards are layered. And that if your scars symbolise the oppression and torture of your people, you have the choice on how to wear them. Or how not to.
While breaking away from their oppression by the British Empire, they kept the Union Jack in their flag, which we detest. We don't have an issue with detaching from detachments.
Our issue is constantly wishing that land was bones. Hoping it would fall back into our hands, no matter the omen it is attached to.