Demystifying de-Kolonization… Perhaps?

“William Gumede reflekted on reimagining who we are… and what we mean …. Moving away from kommon assumptions” Thus tweeted someone at greentip regarding an extremely, almost silent, reflektion, disguised as a memorial lecture that I attended last week. I couldn’t think of a better way of describing it and it did make me feel better about having gone. It was in many ways what my late Welsh mother would have called “Wit Wot”.


The message I got was that Afrika is not comfortable with the pace of modernity. Possibly [deep down] it chooses/would prefer, to remain locked inside its own Kosmology.


Kosmology I discovered is a word that meant a great deal more than “Big bang”: a theory about the origin of the universe. Rather it is, apparently, fundamental to an Afrikan belief system predating all other philosophies. At least that was, according to a most informative fellow attendee, called ZuluMaThabo Zulu, who was sitting alongside me at the memorial lecture. The topic was asserted as ‘Demystifying DE kolonization [I think that was it, I didn’t have it with me and the kosmologist next to me was uncertain… we had both arrived early for our own usual reasons, and had our own discussion.].


A self described poet and thus a fellow; he poured out a flow of information, relevant to Kosmology, punctuated with a most intriguing piece of [his] poetry, that it gave me great pleasure to read out that evening aloud. It did make me regret not being at a poetry reading, rather than attempting to demystify the ‘dekolonization’ … myth?


That thought was all the more poignant when I realized that while I was engaged in discussion the place had filled up and I was now sitting behind Advocate George Bizos. For offshore readers He is an ikonic struggle figure, and the late President Nelson Mandela’s lifelong attorney.


Some years back I was asked to perform a kolektion of his favorite poetry… at a public reading of the work of Constantinos Cavafy for both that poet’s centenary and the icon’s significant milestone birthday… and he had congratulated me as a “master of the floor.”


I soon realized too that my fellow poet’s shared composition, as a truly globalised man, rendered “dekolonization”, to being, not only a mythical goal; but also embraces Sisyphus: “The legendary king of Corinth, condemned eternally to repeatedly roll a heavy rock up a hill in Hades, only to have it roll down again as it nears the top.” [Merriam-Webster].


So what was this all about


Last Thursday I went to Witwatersrand University, my ‘alma mater’, to attend a talk hosted by the Nadine Gordimer Foundation. The theme was to demystify the kurrent broad de-kolonisation issue, that underpins the whole equally kurrent, ‘land konfiskation without kompensation’, issue.


For my offshore readers, you are reminded that my homeland recently liberated itself from a vicious, oppressive Authoritarian Overlord status, for highlighting which, Ms Gordimer had been wonderfully honored.


This ‘liberation’ [derided at the time by Author John Pilger as “Freedom next time” ] was now some two plus decades backwards now; and has found the journey tough going. We have reached a form of “next time” cul de sac, where the ideas that propelled the revolution have not brought the results that were promised. The effect is reminiscent of the kliché about the skurry to rearrange the deckchairs on the Titanic: as it went down.


So this means that these two ideas, Dekolonization and Konfiskation] that deluded people thought had been settled: [I was one of the deluded] are what now drives the national ‘us’, relentlessly, towards an impending date with the ballot box. Moreover, it is scary that no one kurrently in charge seems to know what to do. And, surely, that is the whole point of being in charge.


The speaker was a Professor William Gumede, a man of immense learning, a worthy political background and a prodigious author of academic books. Had he ‘spoken’ in sign language his words kould not have been more veiled and kareful.


I am a normal isolate and do not know the person, nor Nadine. I also have no association with either the Institution [other than as an arts graduate], or the Foundation. Someone sent me an invitation. I was kurious about the topic. In addition, it was free and I was bored with my own company, since all my friends have either died or emigrated. So, i thought, like the ‘hobbity’ person I am, that an adventure kould be fun: as long as it wasn’t too inkonvenient… and made me therefore, late for gin.


Then, Nadine Gordimer being an ikon for whatever tattered remnants remain of the liberalist ethik, that drove so much positive behavior in our less than genteel, ruinous past meant it was unlikely to be a violent affair. After all ‘demystifying’ [whatever] the most kontentious of topics in our hugely divided society had the potential for serious unpleasantness…


Also: there were promises of kucumber sandwiches and bottled water… and as it turned out some fascinating and kongenial encounters with various random fellow attendees, so engrossing, that it was almost with sadness that I realized the auditorium had filled up: and the lights dimmed down. Thus to reveal a web of Gordimeralia laced digital screens above the entrances that we all faced … and we were awash throughout the memorial talk with a frequently repeated sequence of quotes and varied visuals of the Nobel Laureate, that one kould read, or make notes about while the speaker kautiously maneuvered through his script.


It was a kurious experience, and hardly much of an adventure, save that I made the acquaintance of the aforementioned fine Kosmological poet: an exile, returned from Canada; and I learned that we are all exiles now… even those who thought they had a plan for the future.


Apart from Sisyphus the entire experience was a salutory reminder of what Lennon said: that “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans”.


First off, the presentation was so carefully low key, that it was in itself fascinating. Then: One was deeply aware of being in a Post Trump era. The kontrast was there: Between the absolutist, accounting influenced certainties of the Trumpian moment, that kan with no relativist thought at all: be an opposing certainty: in an instant, versus the carefully measured intersection point between the virtues of thoughtful konsideration and those of even more thoughtful konsideration.


So remembering that half a century ago exactly, I was a second year student in that place. I had been brought up in Far east Ekhuruleni with the [contested] national ruling ethic that everything was either: this or that; my road or the high road. At Wits i kame into konflikt with the measured tread of liberal inspired, karefully measured and konsidered, relativist struktured evaluation. I was, back then, permanently konfused; and realised now that i still was. So i emerged from the talk only marginally more informed than when I went in, albeit perhaps slightly more knowledgable. Which shows what half a century kan do for learning perception.


Briefly: The Professor reflected that he had to question his own ‘side’s’ assumptions, about what kind of post liberation program was desired/had been desired. And what happened to it? Then there was the truth that our Mzansian revolution, 24 years ago has been submerged in the greater revolution [in technological terms] that the world has been thrust into, over the same period of time: the arrival of FIR [4th Industrial Revolution] on increasingly strengthening steroids.


Therefore, he mused; how does one rekonceptualise the route when you are a thousand kilometers down: with a potential kul de sac looming. The plans, it seemed, were formed for a world that vanished. Sudden as Kolonializm was, this change was faster. That world of the last/past century… no longer exists as it did… or is even any longer a sustainably practical goal for achievement.


He referred to the failure of the post-liberation Revolution that, as he put it, is “falling apart, with slogan based development generating dekline and insidious paralysis.” He suggested it was way beyond time to “move away from sloganising [sic] to REAL [slogan free] progress”.


He kould have said “Wash out your brains, sluice out the drains, revise all yor aims and get going already.” How does one deal with national inertia… when all our heroes are on suicide watch. Was that the tone? Was this how President ‘Tweets’ felt last week in Canada when he let his spleen run?


However whatever his personal view of the near katastrophic cirkumstances the kountry now finds itself in: the Professor was infinitely too polite to let it show.


He asked his peers to imagine that they were wrong. And referred to a range of alternate realities that also had to konquer a Kolonialized status; in which some, like China, embraced ‘smash and rebuild’: Bakunin’s ‘root it all out’. Some like Singapore/ South Korea: take what you’ve inherited and go flat out for economic growth … Don’t look back and don’t regret. He even hinted at Firmia… as I call the USA… who probably went further than almost anyone in successfully dumping the Kolonialists: went back to the Greeks for their inspiration: instead of a bearded ranting proselytizer… who represents the kolonist yin to the kolonizers yang.


We have certainly never emulated anything those places ever did, he suggested; and then
he kontrasted those places with Afrika. He suggested that Afrika was the place where nothing happened, all the heroes eventually died [some even get eaten by wild animals]: and the “Social strukture reverted to the same…”. Rather like a tightly coiled spring held artificially open for a short time: not long enough to disrupt the inner tension. Release the externality, revert to prior shape. One easy move… and then: whoops.


He drew attention to the kontrast between Ghana and South Korea… both kolonized in the same decade, the latter so brutally that they still have issues with it, and both liberated in the same year. Apparently, they took different routes; one to the future: one to the past, and that as Mr Frost put it “made all the difference”.


Sadly I had to agree. We expected revolutionary fervour, change; and the uprooting of all that hampered progress. Instead, we got loss of fervor… taste of favor; up-looting and all that hampered progress. I felt almost like I had gatecrashed a ten day party just after all the booze ran out and the shops were closed for the Easter holidays; and found the host was attempting to fit a new needle, to an old wind up gramophone: because the 21st century sound system had broken down.


“Nadine [Gordimer] said that one had to break away from klichés” the Chairman announced, by way of konkluding the evening’s presentation. In case we missed the message, he added that: “Dekolonisation had become a meaningless kliché.”


Aside from the evidence that klichés seldom realize
that they are klichés …
did we come to a konklusion?


No. Unless
Perhaps: that liberation itself has become a kliché.
Perhaps I misread the title and it was really demythefyzing dekolonializm: Same konklusion I suspect.


Few remember what they set out to do in the first place… partly or mainly because the world just got a whole lot more komplikated than it seemed in our kosmologies. The real revolution koincided with the kosmetic change… and the little guys got screwed in the RUSH for the bank.


Also: The kucumber sandwiches proved so popular they were gone in moments. And; I did get back, in time for Gin… or since I pursued dekolonization: Kane washed down with a bottle of the new: label free beer.

Cheers.

Blog 11 March 2017 The ‘Unresolved National Question’

Last Tuesday night [March 7th] I joined what seemed to be what was left of the Left, for an exploration, or possibly an evaluation, of the “Unresolved National Question “… sub headed: ‘Left thought under Apartheid.’ Having always been thought of by the Left as being on the Right and by the Right as being on the Left, I anticipated an entertaining evening and, notwithstanding its intermittently Monty Pythonesque overtones, it was.
 
I also anticipated discovering what the ‘Unresolved National Question’ was: and had not noted the sub-heading about its historical subtext?
 
Broadly speaking what was left of the Left were a most congenial, polite gathering of people who, in the most lethal of ways, could, under different circumstances, become, one suspects, a roomful of deadly enemies.
 
Perhaps, knowing how inherently suicidal the broad idea was that there was a [single?] presumed “National Question” that was unresolved; and, realizing that everyone present would have their own idea of what an Unresolved National Question would be… and that the room would be poised to slaughter anything, mercilessly, that was not reminiscent of their own pet hypothesis, the two lead speakers; plus the enthusiastic MC spokesperson for the evening’s prime sponsors, the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, managed to deliver a cluster of most entertaining, absorbing and often curiously insightful interpretations of the journey they had all gone through in setting out to resolve their ideas of what such a question that remains/ed ‘unresolved’ would be.
 
And somehow the room bought the message and we all, eventually, left happy once again, knowing that the question remained unresolved: and that the world was safe again for the time being.
 
Of course one of the important things about functions organized and or orchestrated by those who may be said to be “Left” is that, unlike, for instance, Theatrical or Corporate types, who would hand out a programme listing the speakers and agendas and some key aspects of the evening’s intentions or a summary of purpose, the old Left eschews such bourgeois indulgences in favour of an overall spirit of “last minute dot com”, egalitarianism.
 
I shall simply refer to 1st speaker, 2nd speaker; and random floor Kommenter’s plus the over all Mistress of Ceremonies and aim to avoid offence as much as they all did, since I had no idea regarding who was who: amongst the Left gathered crew: not being a Left Innie [or any other kind of Innie for that matter]. What I can say is that with one exception, and only briefly at that, the evening was conducted with an almost fascinating air of polite decorum…. That in a time of #Pay back the Money” and #Fees must Fall, was most refreshing.
 
So the first speaker opened with what proved to be an overview of what his production team had done in arriving at a book called the ‘Unresolved National Question’; and highlighted for those of us more innocent gatherers, that the period under consideration was the [so-called] Apartheid era, rather than the preceding Dispossession period: or the increasingly contentious time, subsequent to Liberation.
 
Their purpose, Speaker #1 explained was to find the “hidden voices” that had been silenced during the era 1948 – 1994 and prevented from clarifying what the real question of the times was… just in case no one knew.
 
I couldn’t help reminiscing in that moment how literally almost everyone’s voices were ‘hidden’ then on pain of retribution throughout that era. Despite all the ranting and general rage, in the present place to which the National Question refers, it is mostly normal stuff on steroids… uncool larceny perhaps rather than murderous exclusion. That time was mean vindictive and broadly driven evil … none of which has proved particularly useful for sustaining an economy long term: i.e. a Kondratieff cycle at least.
 
Just in case anyone was still confused about what the national question was; the editors point out in their foreword that this debate is not new… In fact they say ‘… the questions raised by the National Question debate OVER A CENTURY AGO: remained unresolved… So in other words if you hadn’t figured out what it was, no one was going to ‘spill the beans’.
 
The book’s foreword states: ‘The unresolved National Question’ concerns the “drive to build one united democratic nation- and is a ‘century-long discourse on South Africa’s nationhood”.
 
S#1 announced that the question was unresolved and that it was a neglected question. In konstrukting their book, they had looked at a relatively random kolektion of people’s interpretations of the Kwestion… Question, across a range of kontexts. We the reader can read all their opinions: and then have our own ‘National Kwestion’and see what happens. What was supposed to happen beyond some satori was unclear. Nonetheless it all seemed an interesting idea. As a marketer it has obvious usefulness in this regard and one could envisage it taking many strands.
 
So while it may have seemed an odd idea, to persons, such as this bloggist, who have, apparently, mistakenly considered the Question to have been answered in 1994: apparently it wasn’t.
 
In an attempt to deal with this possibly disturbing fact, the book production ‘team’ had chosen to explore the era [’48-‘94] under four different [Left oriented] themes that made up the first part of their explorations. Only then were they tackling the present [maybe] in Part 2.
 
The ‘Right”, assuming that version still persists, had their turn and it failed; and while the book pays some lip service to their vision, it was most reasonably discredited through the nastiness with which it was associated.
 
Frankly, by this time, having been only marginally enlightened as to what the National question really was: “The implicit idea inherent in the concept of “ONE NATION”; and why it [the Question] hasn’t been answered” seemed unclear. So since the enormous number of people who, it seems, have either contributed to of been associated with the kolekted viewpoints hadn’t arrived at an answer either, in this search: this bloggist did rather feel that it was a darn tricky question, for which came some curious enlightenment… Lights… action… camera
 
Speaker #1 reached a mini climax to his introduction with a resounding assertion regarding what he called “the Goals of the National Economic transformation struggle”. Simultaneously an adjacent neighbour’s struggle to figure out the video part of his Mobile’s camera thingy, whle waggling his camera/ mobile in a random manner had caught my attention. So he ‘accidentally’ [?] hit the Siri, GPS function instead.
 
Thus, into the resounding dramatic silence, contrived after S#1 thundered out: “ How does a diverse society come together and live in harmony?” The mechanical voice of Siri answered …
 
“Your destination is on the Left.”
 
The room collapsed. It was the only moment of actual apparently uncontrived humour… or a moment of theatricality, whichever it was fun. Of course no one seems sure of where Left is anymore, so the heartiness was a tad forced and short… a tension taker.
 
Then my first doubt regarding the direction the evening would take, came when speaker #1 quoted with academic enthusiasm, the late Mozambican, Samora Machel’s observation that: “For the Nation to emerge the Tribe must die”.
 
By that standard I thought we are already lost, given Ms. Nicola Sturgeon’s threat to break the centuries old United States of Britain, on the grounds that her tribe has not supported the [tribally bound?] decision for the ‘Nation’ to exit the European Union. She threatens to call for her Tribe to emerge from centuries of alleged “Oppression” in a suffocating Nation State: in order to remain part of another emerging bureaucratic plutocracy.
 
[Curiously when I mentioned that thought later to Speaker #1, in one of those momentary post presentation cocktail party type moments of brusquely interrupted discourse, he went blank at the mention of “Nicola Sturgeon” Huh Who she?, and then dismissed the Scots as irrelevant to SA’s National Question. And that is only presumptively true. Presumably too by the same logic he also may dismiss BREXIT, and Geert Wilders not to mention the recent stunningly unexpected accession to power in the centuries old nation called the USA, of Mr. D Trump, riding on the crest of what Mr. DJ Vance would call a “Hillbilly revolution”. Now there’s a ‘tribe’ deluxe: in league with atomising ephemeral ‘tribes’ on social media.]
 
Speaker #2 picked up the general theme of what he alleged to be the ‘failed revolution’ amongst the ‘Transformation lobby’ when he announced “You fought for Liberation but settled for Democracy” “Freedom is not Arrival” he thundered… and the reason why the National Question is not resolved is because “… we are forgetting to remember.”
 
And although my first thought then was Milan Kundera, I then remembered that I had thought that Freedom involved the grand pleasure of naughty activities played out for a change on a goose feather bed… ah the vagaries of memory… and freedom’s simplicity.
 
Speaker #2 was apparently another Professor, presumably of something Political, as he insisted that ‘The State’ was in the hands of those who had lost empathy with the people, and that the citizen [presumably] had to reassert ‘Control’ of the State by disinterested persons’… a statement that seemed to be code for “Thieving corrupt self interested persons are looting the State’s resources instead of doing the job they were voted/employed to do’… certainly a position that found favour with the now largely enthusiastic audience.
 
And the idea of ‘disinterested persons’ was poignant for me, given that a recent shock phenomenon [whenit first happened] in the assessment answers I get from my more, disingenuous or perhaps naively innocent teenage Business Studies learners, is the rising refrain that reads “It is best for the government to own your business so you can get rich.” When the children of Public service workers present public service as a route to riches: as a goal, rather than the high-risk route of Entrepreneurial endeavor, then we know that we are in deeply unsustainable territory.
 

Then he S#2 launched into the now mandatory refrain regarding the idea of transforming the State through dekolonising the structure of thought that governed its behaviour… ‘The goal is dekolonisation’, he said… So was this the New National Question, I wondered?
 
I did find his idea intriguing though, that he regarded the Kolonization era as having its roots in 1492 rather than 1652. And as he reached back to castigate the past, the idea of a ‘National Question’ seemed increasingly irrelevant.
 
Logically the pre- kolonialized reality is represented by the idealized vision of a world, before rotten foreigners came and despoiled everything; in the interests of looting the resources of the Kontinent. And then those same rotten foreigners just accidentally ended up moving from Koloniste to mean spirited Settlers: and should go away without a please. How to get them to go is the implied National Question for a rising number of commentators… [So far triple BBBEE seems to be proving effective.]
 
That pre-Kolonization world though was inherently a world, in which [in John Reader’s inimitable description] the ‘People” lived in a state of “biological equilibrium with Nature” … In other words even more recently, in this Bloggist’s rambling traipses around the Kontinent over the past four decades, it was normal on reading the local press in overnight hotel rooms, to routinely find reports of local people being killed by wild animals… Usually some poor sod stumbling from one place to another while loaded with congenial liquids: taken out by leopard/jackal/wild dog/buffalo/snake bites/and more. Presumably in the Pre Kolonization era life expectancy was less than half of today’s not particularly generous level.
 
Thus isn’t the entire point of Civility to overcome such vicissitudes of nature. And surely the point would be to expand a working model rather than usurp it and simply alter its contents. So what would a decolonized world/country be like, given that there was no civil model that was “Kolonized”? And could this be the real “National Question”?
 
And in the spirit of remembering to which he had just referred; I remembered that; in a 30 second exchange with Mr. Robert Mugabe in the foyer of our mutual publisher, early in 1980, just prior to his winning the 1st post liberation election that year, he had told me of his intention to return his country [today’s Zimbabwe] to the dekolonised status it aimed for in 1650 [Two years before Van Riebeeck] when his ancestors, had successfully fought, beaten and driven out, a near century long era of Portuguese ‘Kolonisation’, of the, then, Rozwi/Changamire State.
 

It was a statement that in retropect lends serious credence to the 1492 hypothesis.

 
And it was a goal he has succeeded in achieving wouldn’t you say? Thus De-Kolonization 101. Was it a ‘worthy’ goal, in retrospect: or does it fall more conveniently into the adage of being careful about that for which one wishes lest …. That question is still open too.

 
I also noted a radio news report this week that the same man, [whom I like to call ‘Bob the Roz’], has called for ‘someone’ to lend him US$100 million to repair the roads the more recently expelled, later Kolonizers had built: [via exploiting the indigenous labour] and which have now apparently fallen into terminal disrepair.
 
Of course that could have been ‘fake news’. And anyway perhaps tarred roads are not a Kolonizing instrument… [well they are] but simply a sensible way to develop a place?
 
Certainly though, the beginning of the Kolonization period was a time before ‘National’ in Afrika was conceptualized. Therefore Dekolonization should, logically seek a return to the borderless regions of Afrika’s past: and yet no reference to the apparent “death” of Mr.[Thabo] Mbeki’s Afrikan vision was to be heard. And obviously too this is a most narrow interpretation of what the real Dekolonization means.
 
Eventually reams of Kommenter’s rose to ask the usual, ponderous, kontext loaded questions that rambled further and further from whatever point was being sought. The audience fidgeted with the idea of “What the National Question” really was; and why no one was calling for… for instance… the “shooting of the Boer” or something/one closer to home… or even just ‘expelling’ the pestiferous and inkonvenient Koloniste ‘Settlers’?
 
After all 1492 was not only notable for Mr. Columbus and the opening of the Americas, the unintended wholesale extermination of the indigenous ‘Amerindians” as a result of inadvertently imported pandemics; and the subsequent triangular slave trade to compensate for the loss of labour.
 
It was also the year the newly merging ancient Spanish rival houses combined in marital unity and then forced all Muslim and Jewish people who had lived in Southern Spain for centuries, out of the country with about three months notice. As recently as only in the past few months has the present Spanish government made overtures to remedy the injustice.
 
Of course the gathering was much too comfortable to actually flirt with such a rude idea. In fact it is possible that some members were descendents of those who were expelled so far back… [In the case of possible Jewish attendees, those known as Sephardic for instance: known for the place that gave them refuge then] So that particularly unpleasant topic never came up… simply hovered… hints here and there.
 
Well that wasn’t strictly accurate, because one, possibly well lubricated gentleman, [wine was liberally available from teams of enthusiastic wine deliverers] leapt up to take his turn with the hand mike, to announce that he represented the dispossessed KoiSan who were: the true owners of the National Question [whatever it was] … and broadly implied that all property was theft and that the land invaders should “fuck off” and give his people their land back… ALL OF IT.
 
He was politely ignored: albeit I did feel he had a point.
 
In many curious ways, the moment I found to be most profound came in S#1’s response to a question raised by a Professorial addressed person sitting in front of me.
 
After the long, mandatory context creating k0nstrukt period he somewhat demanded to know why he [S#1] thought that the [SA] Kommunist Party and other special interest groups on the far left had chosen to support, what they had previously criticized as a “giveaway” liberal Konstitution…. And by corollary why was the Liberal [despised] Konstitution allowed to provide such roadblock preventions to restrict the ongoing nature of the stalled Revolution.
 
In brief, the response was that much evidence kolekted indicated that brutal treatment by [now] ruling party cadres in the old Liberation camps [Quattro et al] during the [actual] “Struggle” had convinced sufficient party loyalists that proven safeguards were necessary to restrict the possibility of such abuse in the future.
 
That was for me the “Aha” of the evening: the Yin to the Yang.
 
Eventually though the Phrase “National Question” gradually became a mantra repeated ad hoc and ad nauseum by all speakers, kommenters and even the MC; and eventually Speaker #2 confounded the room by announcing that Transcending the National [Question?] was part of the “Struggle’ and that the National Question was really less relevant, than the greater, ‘Global Kweschun’ … a strategy that always, it seems, works to defuse all arguments: and reduce them to timid pretensions.
 
‘The Witch’ he concluded “is in the new Order, a convergence of random traditions’. On which reasonably profound and enigmatic note the presentation ended.
 
The lady sitting on my left, someone I remembered being linked to by alphabet from a first year English Tut group back in 1967… suggested that she was experiencing a “whole different language… like being on a different planet.’ She said.
 
My own interpretation of the National Question was the unspoken “What to do about the pestiferous Koloniste who, seemingly, as one speaker had observed during the evening: ‘ Make independent original thought impossible’.
 
Looking around the room in which we all had enjoyed a most pleasurable evening I could see that my version of the ‘Question’ was inevitably going to resolve itself. Once again I was struck by the growing reality that every Koloniste example in the room was either as old as or older than me and my 1967 fellow colleague and the former activist author who had accompanied her, who was a good sixteen years my senior. This is something most noticeable in my local shopping centres, and my Learner’s often mention that the handful of light textured learning mediators on the institution’s staff complement are almost the only such persons that they ever see. In fact in relation to a country of nearly 60 million persons… the Koloniste are almost vanishing.
 
On the other hand the liberated part of the gathering, who were close to more numerous, were for the most part below forty…ish.
 
The reality of the national question therefore, is that the implicit idea of the diversely populated state; and how could it achieve a cohesive future, would inevitably be tempered by natural attrition. The Koloniste class, is now seemingly operating on an awkward inverse pyramid, whereby the aged and ‘Baby Boomers’ are the top end majority; and the Millenials are in short supply lower down.
 

This could be because they are heading increasingly for opportunity now denied them here… partly due to the economic stagnation or because they see their future restricted as the english were for decades under the boer period of Kontrol. So the pestiferous part of the population will gradually winds down to a 1% [of so-called Whitey] with loads of wealth: and a marginalized handful of Neo-‘Bywoners’, many of whom would inevitably drift into a working handicraft class or become new additions to what seems to be a growing hard case “criminal’ class if they haven’t already.
 
I was also reminded then, in that observance, that it is more than a decade, since my classes in the Independent school sector of the economy had more than the occasional random great grandchild of some original Kolonistés, amongst the Learners. And in looking through the photos we take of the crowds at inter-high sports events, those self same great grandkids are similarly, only occasional: and then thinly sprinkled amidst the greater mass, indicative that mine is not an isolated experience. And such exceptions as there are, are hardly disproving this growing rule.
 
Surely, If Dekolonization is the goal then is it not time to take seriously the late Kepple-Jones’ position, taken from his 1947 work “When Smuts Goes”: that the name South Africa is a [so-called] WHITE Konstrukt and the revolution must stagnate in an untransformed state of beleaguered Kolonization, until the inheritors change its name to something more indicative of unfettered kontrol.
 
Perhaps the [sub] National Question should be: what to call this liberated new Nation State at the long end of Afrika. And perhaps we should do it before the potholes take Kontrol and the road networks entirely disappear, as they apparently do in other decolonized zones… again, assuming such reports are not ‘fake’.
 
But then perhaps that would be too serious. Which is why that part of my Podcast serial: ‘the Jonker Memorandum’ set in the 22nd century, has ‘vehicles’ travelling by a form of ‘hovercraft’ process, because the roads have in ‘fiction’ vanished by that time.
 
My thanks to the organizers: Wits University Press and the redoubtable Corina van der Spoel for her usual superb organization. And thanks too to the wonderfully enthusiastic host team from the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences for a most enjoyable, almost old fashioned, evening of pleasurable provocation.