An Empty Vessel


ThereWas

NoPLanNoI

DeaOfWhatWouldBe

DoneToTheEconomyWhen

TheyWon

EachMem

BerArrivedWithTheir

OwnAgendaAllOf

WhichWereNeverFormallyA

Dopted

SoIt

WasCornerA

MarketSqueezeLikeOrange

TillAllTheJuiceWasSuckedOutAnd

ThenRun

Every so often you haphazardly encounter information that stuns you with its absolute simplicity. And suddenly a light shines and a whole lot of things make total sense.

On the morning of the 7th there were three voices on the radio talking. It was a program that started after I had climbed uncomfortably into a hot soaking bath; so I wasn’t going to move to turn it off… or change the Station. And it was loud so I had to listen.

The talk that unfolded was what the station calls a ‘mediated conversation’. It was hosted by the current incumbent to SAFM ‘s AM Live production’s. The current resident host is one, Stephan Grootes…

In Summary: They were a pair of professors who had written a book evaluating the current Mzanzian ruling party’s historical shifts in economic policy… They themselves it seems were as stunned by their discovery as Mr Grootes was. And I was too: when they shared it.

They were setting out apparently to discover why so many critics of the Party’s performance argued something that I had always understood to be a valid position… That the party had veered from their chosen course: and betrayed the revolution. It seems that we all had an idea associated with the freedom charter. That stuff wasn’t ever ANC policy however. They were deeply pragmatic, apparently.

Thus the venerable profs discovered that the party didn’t have an economic policy statement in the first place from which to veer.

Knowing now, that the former ‘slaves’, who were unilaterally handed the keys to the throne room after spending three hundred years in the Darkroom; were as ignorant as I was, regarding the art of governance: makes me feel much better… And deeply admiring of their sheer Chutzpah that had the whole planet fooled… They were simply a team of brilliant confidence tricksters, who got away with stealing a whole country from under the noses of all the world’s warmest hearted liberal lefties… What’s not to love?

Of course with all Kills [It is Afrika after all] there has to come a time when the Povo get a chance to feed… And the cupboard is increasingly bare and new ideas to bring in new flows of prospective loot are proving awkward: So here’s the latest “plan”.

Take the choicest remaining piece from the carcass… Steal the worker’s pensions… Easy peasy.

So right now the ruling party are about to close the deal. Their proposal, mooted by the fellows who run the main Union grouping in the country: that the public workers pension fund should be well looted for as much as what is in it. The idea is to replace all the loot, stolen from the national power supplier, Eskom. That loot was taken with a ‘cash for debt’ arrangement. The looters created a debt burden that can never be repaid.

The draw against the worker’s pensions never needs to be repaid

I do rekolekt once before, having to vote, as a teacher; for the former evil, thieving: pre-revolutionary government’s proposal. It was during the closing days of the former evil regime… The battle against the Cubans in Angola had bankrupted the country. They would pay us an increase on the misery money we received for spending a few hundred hours a month slaving over a hot timetable. The deal was that the increase had to be paid for from the teacher’s part of the pension fund… And we had to vote for it.

Teachers voted for money today … I was always then, and forever afterwards, a temporary teacher. That meant no pension fund deductions from my miserable pittance of a salary. I had always believed they were unsustainable. That they would inevitably be looted as the vote determined then: and the global trend to Negative interest rates subtly demonstrates today. So I never had a permanent pension penalty type job… I didn’t care about the pensions.

Back then the increases were approved:and mostly taxed backthrough inflation. The pension money ‘loan, was eventually classed as a bad loan; and written off. Thus the money was never, to my rekolektion, repaid.

The current proposal from a ruling class we now know to have ‘apparently’ no economic policy at all; is the simple Mafia methodology of the well-practiced enforcer. Either you let us steal the money to pay off the debt that we had to incur, for us to get away with appropriating all the money we siphoned away… Or … [because we know it needs electricity] … we switch off the economy. As a late struggle hero once famously observed “We didn’t join the Struggle to stay poor.”

Mzansi’s economics have once again been demonstrated to be the economics of expediency… a lively tribute to Adam Smithsonian Self-Interest on supreme steroids.

Well Done to those professors, who shall remain as anonymous as all the people they apparently interviewed for their hilarious tome.

!NiK[‘20]

PostRevolutionAwakening

Blog 7 Sept 2019

This is a different blog to the one I thought I was going to put up online this week.

 
On Monday I listened to a partially inaudible speech by an aging, and not overly comfortable, Scandinavian Liberista… regarding his rekolektions of a famous writer lady, from my home town: who supported and cherished freedom.

 
This morning, I watched a young reporter woman on tv. She is known to me as someone who was a few years ahead of my oldest kids at the same primary school. She has, for years now been seen by me, with a weird sense of pride, reporting for overseas news stations from some of the wildest scenes we have experienced during the past eight or nine years, all over the world: Wars, massacres, floods and catastrophes.

 
Today she was in her home town, where I live; reporting from a part of the city, in which, until only a short while ago I was taking classes. I have seen this courageous young lady in many front lines, as a hugely respected reporter. I have never until today heard her admit her unease… standing in a city street, her hometown, in the ruins of previously productive stores and shopping precincts … Scenes that I have seen her filming in East Ukraine, for instance… Now covering city scenes more reminiscent of the Bahamas, presently recovering from a ‘tsunami’ storm called Dorian that ran across an island… only this tsunami in Jozi’s eastern suburbs was a human one. She spoke of our streets, oozing with terror for all who walk it, not only those deemed “foreigners”.

 
The unspoken horror was, that where she was filming, was only one of many different sites… some a few blocks from my home; in a number of our cities: where the week has been a hell for foreign owned businesses.

 
IN retrospect I had to consider the unthinkable. That while listening, earlier in the week, with difficulty to the huskily whispered speech of the visiting dignitary foreigner I could reasonably assume that, for all I know, the visiting foreign speaker was deeply anxious about what he was to say, and that, perhaps the sound was down so low: because he didn’t want to inadvertently incur rage… from a place he had always admired as a:

 
Tireless
SupporterOf
LiberationOfLandFromA
PartHeitDispossessionNow
Burning….

 
So I am now watching someone reporting for a global news station, who I know to be native to our city, confessing unprecedented unease at the random, almost inchoate violence, targeted seemingly, at specific, emigrant groupings: that has erupted like an orchestrated wildfire: simultaneously all over the country, almost out of no-where.

 
What is being called Xenophobik violence is being reported on every global station; and has terrified other foreigners, to such an extent that the lady reporter went out of her way to repeat a few times, an advisory notifying terrified victims of the violence, that Nigerian aircraft [for instance] were standing by to airlift them home to safety.

 
This admonition from Monday’s speaker rang in my ears: –

DoNot
ForgetKomrades
MakingSenseAgainOf
LifeAfterLiberationBrought
SmallChange.

 
So in a supreme period of irony… One of the victims interviewed by the International reporter, was an economic refugee from the liberated place run by the [now] late ‘BoBTheRoz’ Mugabe: liberator of and later destroyer incarnate, of the failed state called Zimbabwe.

 

Bob died, unlamented by millions this week. Here the young economic refugee’s place of employment, burned to the ground, along with the apartment that had housed all her scarce belongings also gone. All done by those who had been liberated here: twenty five years ago.

 
I listened to her broken hearted, shocked traumatised explanation of her new plight; and I heard again, our liberationista visitor from Scandinavia, remonstrating about unwanted outcomes with whispered politeness and

 
WithAn
AirOfPainfrom
AnAgeOfStrainAtThe
LackOfGainAndTheSearedOutcomes
PostReign.

 
And then on top of all of this; Women’s month being over, it was back to femicide with a rush. BY Friday the Twitteratti were all agitation… Where is our man… Our President hiding away they all did say; while seemingly the country was burning; a stream of young women were, and are, being brutally raped, shot down, stabbed and murdered … One a national young boxing champion; another a teenage CapeTown U’ student, in a post office nogal, where she had gone to collect mail.

 
Nene, the teenage student was raped and butchered by a psychotic post office worker, who beat the young lady to death with an office scale because she refused to hand over her vagina…

 
And our new seemingly paralysed or reluctant apparently national President is no-where to be seen as: –

 
MobsRule

 

CR
SevenTeenWon
AnElektionAndCho
SenNewBossNowHidesAwayFrom
ItAll.

 
TheyTook
TheChequeBanked
TheMoneySquanderedE
VeryCentNowAbsentwithoutLeave
OrRent.

 
Oi

 
Such a week as this… should not occur more frequently.

 
Loves ya all

 
!NiK[‘19]

Morabaraba: for four or more

Blog: 1st November 2015
 
Greetings: illustrious readers.
 

This has been a most amazing fortnight in the “Rainbow’ Territory of Mzansi. To begin with: in scenes not seen since ’76 a mass student ‘uprising’ occurred. One suspects it was triggered by some successes earlier this year; when they [the students] were aimed at a rather more complicated vision in what is called a “Transformation Agenda”. On that round rage was directed at inanimate statues of eradicating statues and other historical memorabilia, mostly targeted at a long dead Koloniste alien who played a huge part in eradicating the traditional lifestyle of those who were recently liberated. And it proved to be successful. The changing of the past is well underway. The strategy was however not fully understood nor particularly widely approved of.
 
The tourism industry for instance had some muttering about the loss of storytelling opportunities, which were ignored with the “Contempt they deserved” according to the loudly demanding change agents.
 
The “Fees must fall” campaign however resonated in a way few campaigns have recently. The idea that access to education should be freely available to all persons is deeply ingrained in the fabric of the struggle and access to the [apparently] “better” universities has become almost impossible for many who do qualify but have no access to funding. The national funding agency having long since, ‘lost all the money’.
 
It is difficult for radical proponents of leftward [best intentioned] political agendas to understand the linkages of capital expenditure: that make it problematic to create free products that are not produced by robotic machines. The idea is to get ‘Free/Quality’ education: a seriously misunderstood oxymoron.
 
The entire movement is especially ironic given the explosion in access to free information over the past two decades in the form of Search Engine availability. As I have pointed out in other blogs: today’s ‘learner’ sits in a classroom with INSTANT access through a pocket held machine to trillions of pages of random data… on any subject namable. No other generation in recorded history has ever this level of access on such a totally democratised scale.
 
In this regard the ruling party’s multi-pronged strategy to provide free WiFi access across the region I call Zone One, specifically the two major urban centres that between them house about a 6th of the national population, is slowly under way… as is a project to make all state school paperless within this century… or more hopefully, the first part of it.
 
In the meantime an allegedly dysfunctional Secondary Ed’ sector is resolutely annually dumping hundreds of thousands of High school graduates who in one way of another qualify for Tertiary Ed at either a Bachelor’s, Diploma or Certificated level: and in a burst of revolutionary fervour a decision was taken sometime to kill all those Public Educational sectors that served the Diploma and Certificated market need and combine them into Universities because everyone [having been liberated] should go to university…
 
So for instance this bloggist and his spouse routinely have their older ‘out of warranty’ vehicles repaired and even completely rebuilt by their informal mechanic who operates out of the slowly ruining remnants of an engineering workshop in a broadly deserted former technical college in the next neighbourhood to the one in which we live.
 
So now we have hundreds of thousands of university students doing a range of hugely more complex courses than they need to be employabe and virtually no people doing training for the hundreds of thousands of jobs that are going begging in a huge rang of stereotypical occupations like electric wiring, motor electronics, food delivery, basic bookkeeping and accountancy Plumbing and: and: and.
 
And since in the normal nature of things most of this logic is lost on most of the young especially those from unsophisticated backgrounds there has simply been a rise in the level of general disappointment with the fruits of liberation and a demand for more.
 
Thus the movement to liberate the poor and disadvantaged from their marginalised role at the margins of the margins gained shock momentum this pre exam period, when the [so-called] ‘historically advantaged’ cluster of universities suddenly, seemingly erupted out of no where into a FEES REVOLT. And won. Well round one to activists.
 
As a bloggist I was puzzled that only one [so-called] ‘historically disadvantaged’ university seemed to be involved in the unrest: i.e. Fort Hare … [apparently] one of the country’s most famous universities in the field of supplying the Kontinent with political leaders.
 
Now it seems, from otherwise unverified phone-in’s to radio stations; and social media comment, in the general chatter that has accompanied the exlosion, that the State [through Police action] has been violently suppressing student unrest in many of those less urban accessible institutions in out of context rural locations beyond what I call “The Dome”. And, so it would seem, it has been almost a strategic requirement: that the [so-called] ‘middle-class’ range of institutions join in an increasingly loaded and all too routinely ignored state of reality.
 
The issue is should people pay for education at, especially, higher levels. Yes or No.
 
Broadly it is A qualified YES [i.e. Alternatively, No] i.e. some people should be free and [so-called] “rich people” should pay, and in fact pay more to support those that can’t pay. This means boring work for bureaucrats, evaluating whether you are poor enough to qualify for free fees. [Albeit this task could perhaps be delegated to robots at lower cost.] Of course if everyone was free then this requirement would not be needed.
 
Still Access is the issue and the system is unable to cope with the demand. In that regard the “system” has certainly been caught napping. The massive numbers of bachelor pass matriculants rising inexorably year after year and notwithstanding waffle over pass rates et al, means that there is hugely more demand for Tertiary Ed than anyone planned for. And if my local tech to which I referred earlier is any indicator [and I understand it to be] then we have lost considerable capacity at exactly the moment it became more urgent to have it.
 
I’m sure there’s a saying somewhere about being careful what you wish for because it could take you by surprise when you get it.
 
The great problem with the desire to make everything free though, eventually comes down to the late Mrs. Thatcher’s classic comment on the Achilles heel of all well-intentioned socialist fantasies: “Eventually you run out of other people’s money.” I don’t think we have quite reached that point yet notwithstanding alleged leakage on a scale not seen possibly since the Norman Invasion of Britain in 1066.
 
Nonetheless the question of how the Uni’s bridge the gap is paramount.
 
Most Universities needed a 10.5% increase to maintain the existing system and there is a great official silence from the Ruling authority regarding how the gap will be breached. Less informed persons are enraged that the Uni’s want “Twice the inflation rate” and “how dare they?” “Rotten exploiters”, they punt. No one actually asks why 10.5%? …Was it a negotiating starting place, or what?
 
And I make no claim to know. I do suspect that differential inflation rates are playing a role, as is the fact that some of our trading partners are operating on [in some cases] historically unprecedented, negative interest rates, while we operate on interest rate gaps that could be as wide as 800% higher than theirs, not to mention that our economy is operating on SloMo; and therefore the tax revenue base is shrinking rapidly at its margins. [See my previous comments on Negative interest rates in Europe versus 8 plus % age money in Mzansi]
 
Also there seems to be a huge backlog of non-development catching up with the State authority structure that almost seems as absent as it was at the height of the HIV no anti retroviral era.
 
According to some Internet accounts there are as many [or maybe more than] 700 [so-called] S.O.E.’s [State Owned Enterprises] operating in some or other way in the economy. The more noticeable ones are all looping around in an abyss of rising costs versus stagnant income and underperformance, and many, such as the Post Office, the Electricity monopoly ESKOM, and the national Airline are being routinely bailed out of financial trouble. A key discussion point this week on social media concerned the fact that the Post office… a branch of government was unable to pay the wages of its staff this past month, and cannot guarantee full payment this month. Each one is looking for a bail-out. One suspects that if we had an entire duplicate One Trillion budget it would not fill all the holes that have leaked apart with reckless abandon while too many were partying on the spoils of victory.
 
Pointedly, key persons are hoping to distract attention from these crises of performance by arguing that the universities freedom to operate should be curtailed, and they should be subject to state control of their finances. This is an idea that has been usefully used elsewhere on the Kontinent to eradicate the possibility of producing too many ‘Clevers’, who will, as is presently occurring in Mzansi [according to some of the more Kontrarian Social media], bite the hand that rescued them from the misery of being ‘Kolonized’ by ‘Aliens’. Additionally as a bold distraction the “invading influence” [characterized by ‘Aliens’] is to be eradicated as part of policy. No one is too sure about what that means.
 
This point was made in no veiled manner by the current leader of the [so-called] EFF political grouping who usurped the limelight after the president pricked the demonstration’s power by agreeing to drop the fees increase idea. He launched a co-optive campaign dragging some forty thousand red shirted acolytes all around the city. He invaded the Reserve Bank and delivered a memo of demands; as he did at the Co operatively named Chamber of Mines headquarters. He then arrived at the base for the “Evil Capitalists” the JSE [local Stock market}
 
Here he stormed and railed at the building [in which, ironically most of the work is done with computers and algorhythms], presenting a stereotypical, albeit superbly barnstormed, standard, kolektion of wonderfully promissory demands… like: for instance: that all publically listed [JSE] Stock Exchange businesses should [almost] immediately give all their worker 51% of the stock… And huge salary increases to the lowest paid, and they must adopt entire kolleges to which vast sums must be given from their ‘ill gotten’ profits [Which it seems are inherently the illegitimately appropriated property of the workers.]. The actual owners deserve only to be permitted to donate their wealth to the People [who have been treated with appalling rudeness]. Plus they must adopt hordes of learners; and generally ignore their business and their other expenses while serving the needs of the poor.
 
And there were some confused persons Tweeting “that was the reason they paid tax to a government that was supposed to do those things”. Silly people. Some Tweets would demand more government control of everything; and a few called for less.
 
The lady from the Stock exchange, their CEO, came and stood resolutely on the back of a lorry parked outside the Stock Exchange offices with the two persons representing the EFF and those two persons were more abusive than has characterized any public discourse recently: upscale if you like albeit in a bizarrely polite manner.
 
The abuse was not personal of course [unless you wanted it to be]. It was generally aimed at Evil Capitalists exploiting the unemployed by not hiring them [I understand that seems odd]. Mixed in with those persons were their [alleged] associates ‘white racists’, not to be confused with “nice Whites” … at one stage one of the EFF duo suddenly began hurling inverted Limpopo abuse at some unseen [off camera] entity that was presenting a less than accommodating demeanor, identified on sight as it were as a [so-called] “racist white”: to be stamped on were his latent abusive manner not immediately transposed into being “Nice” [whatever that meaans.].
 

There were moments like that when one felt transported back to the fifties hearing the same arguments being returned from an earlier journey, but in a new disguise. Totally weird
 
The lady from the Stock exchange was the heroine of the day… she was every bit my Korinth Starr. Handled an inherently scary situation… there were some 40,000 seriously unhappy dudes surrounding the lorry… who could with a wrong word explode into deeply morally righteous inchoate rage.
 
She handled the circumstance, for which one assumes she didn’t have much preparation, with equanimity, composure and a certainty of response that politely thanked the crowd for taking the trouble to walk the many kilometers they had in what is a heat wave that is entering its second month… a time when tempers flare; and the thoughts they had shared were to be the subject of much thought and consideration.
 
The JSE would respond she said.
THEY said. “You have thirty days… then we target each company with further action.
She said, “Thank you.” and then left.
 
We await the Stock Exchange’s response.
 
So for a moment the easy part has been done.
The takeover of the Stock Market is on “Hold” for thirty day and the students pay what they paid this year next year.
 
The State unilaterally [well under duress] ‘borrowed’ some 3-4 billion of “other people’s money” [the Fees payable] and cancelled it out. The accounting error stands however.
 
We are left with the question? Is the system sustainable?
 
How long is a piece of string?
 
Do you ever wonder if you took a wrong turn somewhere and suddenly found you were in a world you hadn’t planned on being in… maybe you even found the place you were in confusing suddenly as if it had changed without you noticing and you were now somewhere else even though everywhere was still physically the same.
 
Recently I spent some time waiting for service at a local Home Affairs facility and pondered a story on which I’m working at the moment… it centers on an historical pair of linked events looking out from the Rashomon konstrukt of my first story [The Buffalo Hunters : Part 1 Azanian Quartet.] that now following the visit repeats on different variations on a reality that may or may not be here, there, or anywhere other than in your own place of residence: your mind.
 
Knowing I would be spending hours in a Kolektions queue, and that I had some space to focus exclusively on some random needs of the story, I grabbed a book at random from a pile of unexplored second hand books I had picked up at a ‘ten bucks a book’ sale a few weeks back. Once in place in the ‘line’ i invited the Multiverse to join me in an exploratory journey into the heart of my tale using the random work as a talisman [or is that talisperson?].
 
Reading my own destiny [for the story] via a random walk through words, pages and ideas plucked like so many snowflakes that melted instantly into the web of consciousness that represents the theme. It was a wonderfully productive one hundred and forty odd minutes.
 

I opened the book at random and was soon engrossed in a tale of amazing complexity explained by a master of things: And so I came to understand where the story had to go. By the time a reached the front of the line 145 minutes later I had an outline for what has now become the opening lines of the story: which is not called Marabaraba, because it is unpronounceable even if that is what it is.
 
“So, [to refer to a previous blog] in other words, we have Jozi past tense, Jozi intermediate Future tense [the time that will be called NOW], but within a decade or so of the ‘Apocalypse’ described in the Jonker Memorandum, which i will also publish sometime soon as a digital book. And then another part will be set in Jozi in a ‘time yet to come’ …maybe a century or so from NOW.”
 

Marabaraba: With a nod to the Dancers.

Movement, he said, lies in
The role of the
Ritual
At
The moment
The ‘wave function’ coll
Apses
Whereupon we can visu
Alise a four [or
More]
dimen
Sion
Al
World that spl
Its in two [or
More]

Worlds in one
Of
Which
You will go
This way and in
O
Thers, some routes less
Taken.

While this vir
Tual circle
Createsasem
Blance of ten
Dency
Each one will be
Un
Aware
Of any other
For both [or
More]

Worlds are forever spl
It in to sep
Arate realities arrived at ran
Domly…
Perhaps.
!NiK[15]

Ultimately the really coolest thing about this fortnight of actively voiced rage and discontent was that NO ONE DIED
We are walking the path less travelled perhaps.
 
Best wishes to all readers.

The Evolution of Tulba.

The Evolution of Tulba.
 
Some of this blog was originally written in August 2010 and found by me in one of my notebooks while searching through many of them, for material, written randomly over many years, as maybe having bearing on the story, on which I am currently working. This story is part 4 of what I call: “The Azanian Quartet.” [The Buffalo Hunters , The Ashanti Raider and the Jonker Memorandum are respectively 1,2 & 3].You are warned that this [generally excessively long] blog will travel across a range of ideas on route to a conclusion.
 
A low key feature of the “Jonker Memorandum” was a background reference to a cult form called Tulba. As those who have followed the story of the “Jonker Memorandum” will remember, a part of the story happens after the world, as we know it now, has ended: and we are [in some minimal respect from the story’s perspective] in a post apocalyptic: hence post ‘Revelation’ phase… after “The End”.
 
Regarding ‘Revelations’, a subject on which I have commented in blogs over the years. The ‘Jonker’ is heavily flavoured in some of its mystery: most specifically the mystery of “The End”. I have a venerable copy of the old King James Bible, presented to me by a ‘godfather’ uncle and signed “Easter 1947”. After the final words in that closing chapter, “Revelations” the words “The End” appear. I have never found that in other editions [Well one does say “End of new testament”, which seems reasonable, since it is.]
 
But the baldness of “The End” is not in any other version. It has been something that puzzled me more and more as I got older. What do you mean it “The End”? What happens after the End was my unanswered question. There are now stories written about that time after “the end” that demonstrate that it was a ‘relative’ end. So for me though; eventually I understood that “the end”, was as always… Life goes on. Before this [so-called] Common Era, we had Mithraism as a dominant ideology which came to “The End”: and prior to that Dionysus, Horus, Krishna and various others ad infinitum through the mysteries of time itself.Each in turn came to “The End”. And yet here we still are.
 

In the ‘Azanian Quartet’ The world effectively goes through a period of revulsion at the extreme destruction waged on ordinary people, by those who seem increasingly obsessed with the end game of Ideological madness. The drama of “The End”: the Apocalypse [as it came to be known]; began to be seen as an unintended outcome of a ‘war’ between factional Irrationalists. Think of a conflict between supporters of the Tooth Fairy and those of the Easter Bunny regarding who gets what… two irrational but nonetheless widely subscribed ideas.
 
And so people sought the sanctuary of Order. Tulba is concerned with robotic machines [aka computers in their expanding range of forms] and their capacity to replace authority. To become, as it were ‘The Supreme Being’in place of the current crop of popular “Supreme Beings”. As this blog evolves i shall return to this idea of “Tulba”, after walking through a few themes, in the form of a poem to the rational world of the irrational: and if that makes sense prepare to meet thy doom.
 

“Tulba” was someone’s jocular response to the question: What happens when Computers run everything? And Tulba it is, was the answer I came up with eventually. So some of this blog which started with an idea prompted by Terence Kealey’s book: “Sex, Science and Profits”, moves into the evolution of the Tulba construct … As with the ‘Jonker’ it [Tulba] is essentially a background development and is not the focus of the story, which as always is concerned with other things, of a more grounded nature… like how machines are becoming more dominant features of our world and what happens when they are smarter than humans. And of course what happens when someone falls in love and discovers that someone [hopefully but not yet certainly] has to die in order for the love to be fully consummated. And then, as with the ‘Jonker’, where the story is ‘Set’: ie: happening? This is a key scenario to be konstukted, dekonstrukted and then rekonstrukted… and of course using all these “K’s” in place of “C’s” is part of the process.
 
Thus, as to ‘Scenario’. Those who are familiar with the titles i mentioned above will know that “The Buffalo Hunters” is entirely set in ‘Jozi’, in the place i call “Zone One”. “The Ashanti Raider” and “The Jonker Memorandum” are both partially in Jozi and mostly in the Outlands or Auslaande of Mzansi, in places that generally are otherwise nameless: as i refer to all the regions outside Zone One; which gradually disintegrate into disrepair and neglect and are abandoned as they cease to supply sustenance, and return to their natural state. Again these are simply backgrounds to the story and are not the story itself… like the scenes in a movie are set somewhere and there are ‘extras’ running about to make up the ‘wallpaper’ of the tale, but are otherwise not part of the tale.
 
Now in this Part 4, the entire story will return to Jozi… the difference to the Buffalo Hunters [BH] being that it [BH] consisted of a number of disconnected tales, that merge around a central “RASHOMON STYLE” event and through the amorphous synergy of that madman “Murphy”, construct the illusion of plot. In Part 4 the ‘Rashomon’ event is a single action that changes things… maybe, and while most of the action takes place on the same day in the Buffalo Hunters it will do so again in [Part 4… as yet untitled]. The difference being that the same event occurs, in different ways, in three time eras, or as i prefer, in parallel multiverses [or maybe even in the Virtual Reality Game.].
 
So, in other words, we have Jozi past tense, Jozi intermediate Future tense [the time that will be called NOW], but withing a decade or so of the ‘Apocalypse’ described in the Jonker Memoranum, which i will also publish sometime soon as a digital book. And then another part will be set in Jozi in a ‘timeyet to come’ …maybe a century or so from NOW.
 
So what this means of course is envisiging how “Jozi” will be a dozen or so years from now but also how it will seem around the time dealt with in the Jonker: about century or so down the line. Which brings us back to what i said at the beginning of the blog; and to Mr Terence Kealey’s book: “Sex, Science and Profits.” the subject of the forgotten blog i found written in 2010. And what do `Mr Kealey’s observations have to do with “Future Jozi” and why the setting must somehow correlate with reality in a few places.
 

Mr Kealey, in his book [“Sex, Science and Profits”], confirms something most recognise as true even though they had never thought about them in exactly the way presented. He tells us: “Most trades in an advanced economy are ‘risk’ trades’, because an advanced economy is based on long term investments.”
 
By “Trades” he is not referring to, for instance, carpentry or boiler making; but rather to the mass scale exchanges that take place between economic entities that have long term configurations and relationships. For instance: the decision to build the Lesotho Highlands water scheme decades ago, goes ahead, even should the country in which WATER is sourced, and thus originally located, falls apart. The fact that it [Lesotho] is in a presently threatened condition is, as you well know my happy followers, part of the history of post-Apocalyptic Mzansi: as presented in the “Jonker Memorandum”. Another example would be the issue with Mzansi’s power supply: and with who will take on the financial risk of remedying the problem.
 
For instance; currently we are tossing a $100 billion [US dollar] bone out in the form of a proposed nuclear deal with China [ChinNya or general ‘friends of BRIC’]. What could be the priority “Risk” element in such a ‘Trade’? Bearing in mind that [US]$100 billion is 50% of the ‘real’ income of the Mzansi for any contemporary year: after extracting that part of GDP that represents State expenditure.
 

Risk you will remember is as fundemental to Trade as oxygen is to breathing… taken for granted often: ignored at one’s peril. In considering a future Jozi, one would have to factor such a ‘risk’ consideration into one’s vision: in order that the picture could be realistic. On the other hand the essence of Zone One is that it is the single overwhelming part of Mzansi that is market driven: notwithstanding Kolektivist pretensions. And much as Kolektivists hate to admit: The Market always rules [as Komunist China, for instance, is busy rediscovering]. So as part of my own more empirical investigation i shall visit one of, arguably, two of the world’s most modern cities next year with intent to put a constuction ethos to go with my ‘Five Towers’ constructions [ref Jonker Momorandum.] So as an example of where this could end. Could part of the RISK play be the arrival of a few million workers from SE ASia into Mzansi: to carry out and manage the Nuclear activity being presently and how would that change things.
 

Building cities, like that I described in the Jozi Unicity series, [see: forthcoming new poetry kolektion “travelling by hand”] to handle the rapidly evolving information age, would be another such trade, as much as would be the development of new energy sources, like power stations and whatever evolves to replace them in their present form.
 

Because advanced [or advancing] economies need long term investments to grow and thrive they are dependent therefore on people keeping to their agreements [As Socrates observed some two and a half thousand years ago.]
 
In short for an economy to be successful, at its most intimate heart it is dependent on millions of ‘strangers’ adhering to, or rather, trusting each other to honour their respective words.
 
In summary: Mr. Kealey observes: “Trade depends on trust.” A point made centuries ago by Adam Smith: a prime architect of the modern capitalist world. The economist Mancur Olsen demonstrated in his works “The Rise and Decline of Nations” “Power and Prosperity” and “The Logic of Collective Action”, that Kleptocracy amongst the power elite retards the development of poor countries. Wierd isn’t it the way we always have to prove that which seems obvious. And of course the issue of a [possibly] Kleptocratic Mzansi is one that must figure in the background to that future perspective. And it is noted that some believe it to be presently already Kleptocratic while still others believe that it always was Kleptocratic and that ‘Kleptocracy rules’.
 

Part of the argument that I shall develop here is that, notwithstanding that an objective assessment would assume that trust is peculiar to a rational world [and is anything more rational than the existence of money itself?] [Especially given that much of it now is inherently “FAKE’] it [trust] is nonetheless an inherently irrational and emotional decision and hence behaviour.
 
In other words Risk assessment is a rational response to questions relevant to an irrational emotion called “TRUST”.
 

According to Spengler, the Western world is ending and we are witnessing the last season — “winter time” — of what he called “the Faustian civilization.” In Spengler’s depiction, Western Man [sorry: he predated gender sensitivity] is a proud but tragic figure because, while he strives and creates, he secretly knows the actual goal will never be reached. And trust is hard won and easily lost, as Mr Tsipris of Greece is busy discovering right now. These ideas are some of the elements that need to be dealt with in Part 4 of the Azanian Quartet… as part of the background to a story derived from one of Mzansi’s most colourful and problematic historical events.
 

To return to the joint issus of Risk and Trust; The heart of our Faustian western Capital structured model was initially constructed by the previously mentioned Mr. Adam Smith [He of ‘Wealth of Nations’]. Kealey quotes Adam Smith when he observes that: “In a rational world no company would survive because no rational employee would honour the contract to work while the boss is away… rather, the rational one would play”.
 

He [Smith] continues, that in a society constituted solely of rational people everybody would cheat on their contracts and thus no risk based contract would be sustainable, especially one spread over decades.
 
Kealey reinforces this argument quoting a Professor Douglas North saying that: “ … a strictly rational world would be a jungle and no society would be viable.”* [Welcome to Mzansi and the brand new urban jungle].
 

Mr. Kealey perhaps suggests, by inference more than intent, that a central dilemma of under-developing countries is that they are governed more and more, by supremely rational people. And that self-interest motivated Kleptocratic behaviour is a rational behaviour form.
 

Thomas Hobbes; he who famously described the circumstances of Stone Age persons as being “nasty, brutish and short”, argued that all persons were inherently unreliable, due to the ‘fact’ that all significant players were rational, and hence unreliable. Question. Are we today governed by people driven by rational self-interest.[Is this the sign of 21st century Person] This idea too will be explored in this tale, which shall as before be about love and daring deeds, mysterious bodies and nasty tricks: and the silliness of Being.
 

Thus it was his [Hobbes’]opinion that the citizen should be controlled through Tyranny: because rational people are by definition untrustworthy. Rationality it should again be noted is a counter intuitive response to emotionality. And therefore since emotion is contrary to reason it was by definition “irrational”. IE: Emotion is by definition “Irrational”.
 

As already stated; In his [Kealey’s] opinion Trust is an inherently emotional construct and is therefore ‘irrational’. It is also an appropriated term, given that often in ourstory/history tacitly cooperating/ tacitly competitive business organisations known to Economist as Oligopolies, are routinely referred to as Trusts. So the word has a double meaning contributing to ‘contradiction and conflict’, which, as many observe, are the “deepest truths of reality.”.
 

One such [unreliable hence rational] Trust was bust recently in Mzansi, with some smacking of hands, regarding the case of Konstruction Kontract Kollusion over Football World Cup Stadia in 2010. In a rational society run by rational people unrestrained ambition and self-interest unregulated by power produces a negative trust factor, in that all systems gradually become unreliable and then dysfunctional. Many people feel this has happened post the SONA episode in Mzansi’s Parliament earlier this year.[see my blog “Our own Mugabe Moment”]
 

So with respect to Mr. Kealey’s thesis: Naturally, and notwithstanding Oligopolies, [Ie: Economic dominance of selected markets by a handful… ie: two to four/six corporations, that dominate the market and tacitly collude on pricing] that he perceives as the cornerstone achilles heel of the Capitalist system, he nonetheless fixes his support on the Private sector for growth in all respects and argues most convincingly, using a veritable cascading barrage of evidence, that Government funding of anything distorts the market for whatever it finances: with a consequent fall [decline] in performance in those financed sectors. What was that we said about a State controlled electricity supplier?
 

In this regard; Evidence of the accuracy of his hypothesis may be found [in Mzansi/RSA for instance] by those living in a now permanent world of routine electricity outages sponsored by a monopoly State entity. Add to this the bankruptcy of the State Postal service, the National Airline, The Passenger Rail Agency of SA [PRASA] and routine revelations regarding the financial impecuniousness of many other State monopolies. Even the normally sacrosanct Revenue [Tax] authority has felt the brush of disruption. Readers in other jurisdictions may find head nodding examples, in those, in your own turf.
 

Mr. Kealey’s work is a testament to the power of the market to solve problems … It is however realistic about the conundrum faced by most societies that finds themselves plagued, with a vested establishment position that abhors the idea of private sector activity facilitating growth. Control means control. Rationality prevails. Oligopoly … Capitalism’s nemesis, becomes de rigueur.State control compounded by Oligopolistic control. Argentina has been regularly cited as an example of an Oligoply driven society that simply trundled down the economic performance ladder from lofty heights to a nugatory and unremembered performance.[The fact that their Rugby Team beat Mzansi’s rugby team recently for the first time ever, demonstrates the numbing effect of ‘oligopoly meets oligopoly’.]
 

The respected Late Economist JK Galbraith says of Oligopoly: ‘There is no longer any certainty of technical advance….prices no longer reflect the ebb and flow of consumer demand….and it leads to profitable and comfortable stagnation’ [ref: ‘American Capitalism’ JK Galbraith]
 
Thus naturally Mr. Kealey’s ideas and proofs are not popular especially amongst the geometrically expanding flotillas of parading minions who derive their funding by chipping off a slice of the public pie, facilitated by vast oceans of regulation. These will fight tooth and nail [naturally] to protect their sinecured fiefdoms.
 

On the other hand [as economists like to point out] the most routine alternative to comfortable and profitable stagnation is seldom pretty. Ask any Zimbabwean/Somali/Syrian traveler you come across.
 
So we can assume that many of the facts of his presentation have been carefully airbrushed out of consideration by his critics, to avoid inconveniently coinciding with truth. I have been party to this ‘spin management’ myself, it is almost routine. This real world barrage exists, notwithstanding and in spite of the collection of alternate proofs provided by Mr. Kealey. And all of this has to be catered for in preparing the the final installment of The ‘Azanian Quartet’. This means that somewhere in the space between rationality, irrationality, risk and trust; lies that confusing idea called TRUTH… what is TRUTH? And what does it have to do with Tulba, a new evolving ‘ideology’? Tulba derived from the prospect of a computer controlled world: aka. ‘Robots Rule’.
 
What is TRUTH anyway other than a set of confusing opinions masquerading as belief: isn’t it? Isn’t it?
 

In essence TRUTH is a dogmatic assertion of REALITY. Which raises an intriguing question? regarding matters relative to REASON and UNREASON.
 
Tulba: The Post-Modern alternative.
 
Is reason capable of
Knowing reality?
What is reality?
Death, Hunger, Pain?
 
Kant tells us that the “dog
Matic solution is there
Fore not only un
Certain- but-imp
Possible.
 
Riposte Stephen Hicks “Thus
Kant – that great cham
Pion of reason
Asserted that the
Most
Important
Fact
About reason is that it is
Clueless
About reality.”
 
Kant quibbled:
“I have found it ne
Cessary to de
Ny Knowledge
In order to make
Room for
Faith” – the absence
Of reason
Gives us
A reality that
Simply
Is….
Isn’t it?
 
Heidegger affirmed his ‘friend’
This Reason thing
Is simply skin
Deep beneath which is this
[Alleged]‘Being’
 
What is this Being
Beneath
The skin?
What makes “Being” Be?
Why is there even a
Being at all?
 
Why is there NOT
Rather
NO THING since every
Being [it seems] is made
Out of No
Thing
 
Hysteria abounds “No
Thing!” cries Hicks:
“In the
End all things
Are No Th
Ings… No Thing is
All!”
Concluding: “Meta
Physi
Cal Ni
Hilism.”
 
Welcome to Tulba
Order be with you.
!NiK[‘15]s
 

For David Gordon: Mathematician/Musician and my late collaborator who,
in his mathematically pure manner, considered Post-Modern thought to be vituperous.
With thanks to Mr Orwell, who originally gave us the ‘Newspeak’ that so comfortably modifies our lives.

**J J Wallis and DC North: ”Measuring the transaction sector in the American Economy 1870-1970” Part of Long term factors in American Economic growth. University of Chicago 1987

The Jonker Memorandum: chapter: Confession of a witness.

What follows is an extract from the text of the Jonker Memorandum. The full digital version will be uploaded eventually. In the meantime you can listen to the story on the relevant podcast link.

Confession of a witness.

I once had a dream in which I
fired
a
rifle
and the shot was so LOUD I woke up,
and my ears
rangggggg
for weeks thereafter. The sheer
reality of the experience
disturbed me for months, in fact:
still disturbs me. Recently
I was again woken from a dream by its [the dream’s] sheer
reality.

Was it perhaps the intruder’s who came visiting at Christmas that
Triggered
it off? Perhaps the sound
of a gun being cocked woke me from a nightmare
then.
It may even have been a gun being cocked in my dream
that had woken me. But when I
woke it was with a crystal clear perception of something;
an incident
that had been so deeply buried by me that it was
forgotten until then.

How can a dream be so real yet
its truth
cannot be clarified?
An event
so real and yet so instantly
elusive?

I remembered that
there was a time, when I first went to the University that I pursued
the flames of passion and
railed against the oppressive State
in which we then lived. I even, I had believed
managed a marginal notoriety which
brought its own unwanted attention…
and terror. My low-key activist
period
lasted two years. The effect
was that there were three occasions
during those two years when I was plucked
from my world and shown the truth
of my situation. It took a while
but the penny finally dropped,
as they say.
Then I buried it all in denial and misdirection so
compressed
it took nearly
four decades to unlock it.

*****************8

On the first occasion a stranger approached
our group and shouted at me
in a downtown bar
where I was drinking
with some friends, “Keep your trap
shut!”
He shouted, unaccountably singling
me
out,
using the language of the, then,
oppressor class in our country. He produced
a revolver and pointed it at me. I reacted by leaping
through a handy window, fortuitously
unbarred
then
and got out of there fast. It had
simply seemed a strange albeit
not unheard of experience; and it was
a downtown bar, in one of their neighbourhoods. Now of course I know I could have been freaked out for days and probably was
Then… it was/is…? Uncool? To show that…
I put it out of my mind and
Got it on with living.

On the second
occasion
I had been travelling with two acquaintances: Duke
and Lex
in Duke’s car on a Saturday afternoon. We were
forced
to stop, by a car that pulled in front of us
on a quiet road, and a man
claiming to be from the feared Special Branch waved
his badge, told the
two in the front to keep
their eyes to the front,
pulled me to the window,
stuck a small revolver into my mouth and told me
to keep my trap shut
or else the finger would move … “You keep your fucken
trap shut.”
Again the language was that of our Oppressors and again
the phrase was common cause with those who would not hear the
truth. Curiously none of us discussed the incident
after they had gone. My acquaintances
dropped me off home and I never saw them again…. Did they know that the incident
was going to happen?

My photograph had appeared that week on the
front page of a
Zone One daily,
The Star,
in connection with “Mass protest action at the University”, where I was a first year student of politics and economics…1967.

I didn’t really understand
what it was all about…my subject choice
was dictated by how the lecture times could be
fitted around the many part-time jobs I needed to
pay
for the journey. People said that the system was bad
and generally I responded to it on the basis
that it was I was discriminated against by “them”. I was both an immigrant
and a country boy
and those “others” who were the true target of “Their”
discrimination
were largely unknown to me. I was in most ways a
product
of the intention. I never really ‘knew’
how “The system” worked
anyway
or had worked back then before the ‘new’
revised post ’48 system
came;
and what was “a system”
anyway… Still, that is the role of the front line trooper… to do but not to know.

I worried
that the mere sight of a photo could have the ever-omniscient Bureau of State Security on my back
or more specifically in my mouth. In my
personal hubris,
or perhaps denial, perhaps, something
even more horrible for it never occurred to me until this day
that there could be an ulterior motive. That could indicate the state of paranoia that prevails in a Police State. It reveals too the level of paranoia that we all lived with that
could blind me to a certainty for so long..

Then later, a year later, during Woodstock [which
I was unaware of at the time
like everyone else I knew] they came
for me
at three am. Bashed
the door until I awoke, and
hooded me,
and took me somewhere that was cold and dark and
shouted oaths at me
and told me what would happen if I
didn’t
“Keep my trap shut”…And in my foolish
innocence and deep committed
denial, I had
presumed them to be obsessed with
my unbelievably small part in the “Struggle”,
and that those more involved than I must get hell
for
these
guys
seemed to be always in my face.

I couldn’t discuss it with anyone, ‘cos they
said
if I did
something bad would happen to my folks; and they
knew
my father had an aneurysm explode
in his brain the previous year; and he could barely work
and how much
he owed to the State for
Medi’
care, and they would call
in his account. In any event
I had no idea who I could trust or why I
seemed to be singled out, and being
truly intimidated by then foreswore the struggle for solitude
and avoidance; for
the whole Sixties thing of lust, booze and dope. Later I dropped
out
and never dropped back in again.

And the voice still rattling in my nightmare came now with absolute clarity…it never had anything to do with ‘The Struggle’ it said. No…it was more prosaic than that…it had simply to do with “Murder”.

***********

Is there an act of evil
more calculated to inspire terror
in the gathered citizen,
than the sound of murder on the night-still air, carried out for all
the world to hear because those who carry
out the act do not seem to care that they commit evil?
Truly they do
not believe
that they commit a crime.

What after all is a “crime” and
Is not
One person’s “crime” another person’s act of liberation?
And should we
Go that
Dionysian
route?

In my adopted country
at the time when I was growing up
there were three classes of
Citizen, respectively first class, second class and
third
class
and what applied to the country applied to my adopted ‘homey’: a mining/ industrial town
that formally committed suicide in more or less
the year
that the incident resurrected from my dream
took place.

The town itself was
a modestly prosperous archetype, of a formerly first class,
now relegated to second class, Koloniste
controlled
pre-revolutionary Azanian
urban place.

It was
in reality
modestly prosperous
for only a small part of the recently deposed, former Koloniste ruling class, now known as the second class.

The rest of us lived bleak lives, forever at the edge of catastrophe.

Understand that we are talking about days far,
far away. A time
soon after the war that Mehta* calls the First World War and others call the Second.

We [my immigrant parents and I] were technically
part of the former ruling
class, the Anglos, and we,
[our tiny family],
were a particularly despised part, because
we had come directly from the “motherland”,
and were poor,
and were regarded with deep suspicion
by both of the established
Koloniste groupings.

Indeed life in our adopted town was harsh, and
consisted
of real grinding poverty
for most of the newly empowered
jackbooted, ruling Koloniste class, or ‘The Maboere’, as the Dissies
liked to call them.
There was naturally a small established and establishing
Cronyist elite
Whose lives
were more pleasant.

Life amongst the Maboere was
so harsh
they made a virtue out of sending their children barefoot to school,
and those scions of the newly enriched
amongst them
would leave home shod, then hide their shoes, so as to fit in with their peers. They would see us watching
them do it and we knew
to run or cycle off at speed.

These brutal antagonists who came to dominate and overwhelm
our lives
were themselves confusing:
capable almost simultaneously of unspeakable cruelty
and gregarious warm hearted kindness
coupled with
a certain brutal honesty
quite absent from the more duplicitous species,
with whom we were forced
to bond
by legislative decree,
and with whom I found scant comfort.

And then; beyond we two groups: the old Koloniste class and the newly empowered ‘other’ Koloniste class, the Maboere,
were the Dispossessed, third class, living in a place
so dark
most of us were unaware of their existence, even though
we were completely aware of their existence.

“They” were “those”: known only as “THEM”: the ‘Dispossessed’, ‘Dissies’… the “despised”, the disenfranchised…the despairing.

The new ruling class was forever in our
faces with their “RULES”.
For back-up their philosophy was
reinforced by an entity called God, that
was omnipotent apparently, and omniscient
and couldn’t be seen by unbelievers, and spoke the “truth”, only
to our new rulers. And we saw
this “God” to be an evil entity that
ruled on the myriad things we weren’t allowed to do.

The most important of “the rules” was that
it was forbidden
to be even remotely polite or
“nice” to anyone
from the Dispossessed class,
and so,
ironically,
as a result, the Dispossessed Klass came to completely obsess
and
[ultimately]
overwhelm the new ruling klass, [those known as the “Maboere”] who
feared all along that these
entities,
as they perceived them,
would ultimately undermine and usurp
their own revolution. And as we now know, this eventually came to pass.

The Dispossessed were called “Sataans” by
the newly empowered, yet brutalised, new, first
or
Ruling Klass “Maboer” citizen… Old women would
watch a passing dispossessed
entity, a ‘dissie’,
and hiss… “Sataans”… “Children of evil,” and we were told
by our teachers, who
were more often than not Maboere, who beat us regularly in
the name of the new religion
with planks taken from the tops
of the school desks, and ripped at sinews
under our flesh until in
agony we agreed that “they” must
be left to do their own thing, because
“they” were incorrigibly wedded to darkness…This was an unforgiving mantra.

We were further instructed to believe that “these
people” were condemned by the
sin [whatever that was]
of a name called Adam, and
marked by a name called Cain to live
lives of enslaved servitude
in awful bondage to brutal leaders who would make them suffer because
“they deserved it”. And
in our own ignorance we heard how
“they” had been rescued
from ignorance, and
perdition and
the desperation of their previous existence, whatever
that had been,
to subsist in some discarded refuse heap where their choice was dispossession
or death.

In other parts of the planet, we learned, really
evil Koloniste
had exterminated those they could not
subdue [and in so doing discovered the real
meaning
of freedom: something
we were not told] We [ the ‘Dissie’s” latest oppressors] on the
other hand
had discerned a latent
humanity
[apparently] in the “Dissies”
as “they” were called, and therefore our treatment of them
was more humane. As proof of their [Maboer] humanity
they would point to how “their” [Dissie] population was
consistently
growing for the first time in their [Dissie] recorded history; maybe even ‘their’ [Dissie] unrecorded history too. indicating,
they asserted, with beatings and threats
that “they” were thriving
in captivity. The idea that “they” were dispossessed was never raised
or if it was
it was argued, again with beatings implied or actual, that all groups of citizens were really Koloniste
and that
the “real” inhabitants, now nearly all dead,
were never “owners’, actually, notwithstanding unfettered
occupation for a hundred thousand years.
They had never learned to read and
write and develop property rights so logically
they
had
none.
The original
Inhabitants had been caught in a vice
Exterminated from both ends; hunted down
and killed
for loving freedom more than
servitude. “…And for living on the land
like a wild animal…”

We thus lived in a wonderful
plastic
bubble of
Grande illusion, which existed within a structured
hierarchy
of benefits.
These benefits permitted swill to be gobbled from the trough
of goodies
available to the “successful” in such an ordered world.

While we [the new second class Koloniste] had “rights” to ‘it all’
they
were tempered
by the obligation,
sponsored by the book inspired ethos
“Thou shalt be mean to the
dispossessed.” And therefore, since
the dispossessed could be anybody
simply by association… those who were
“nice” to the “Dissies” must be
“Dissielovers!”
secretly lusting to enjoy the
VERBOTEN
bodies of the “Dissies”. For as everyone
“knew” [and was evidenced by the rapidly expanding population], ‘Dissies’
“fucked like rabbits” and that
was true
as it turned out for the “dissies”
soon outnumbered the new ruling Klass by far.

So the New Ruling Klass [NRK] carried their power with increasing
fervour: a holy
book in one hand and a rifle
in the other… Do as I say or die…those were the options.

For many years life was bleak
and tedious and within
the narrow perimeters set by zealous
god obsessed,
dispossessed obsessed,
dark suited, dark hatted Bureakrats, we,
who were now being called the “baby boomers” got on with the business of living.

Through short wave we discovered:
Rock n Roll, Elvis
Presley n Micky
Most, n jive
n
bop, n
things that were alive
like warm wet places, and that first
tentative
open-mouthed
exchange before the tongue arrived and gave
erotic
edge to sudden hardness.

Rock n Roll came, via a crystal set, or short wave
In the days
Before frequency modulation
Made our
Control
easier
maybe,
the long, main wave went for their god as often as not
with mournful dirges
interspersed with long speeches
by dark-suited voices. And in
between were the commodity prices and the price
of wool and maize and millet and hay and gold was
pegged at thirty three dollars
and we lived on a gold standard and what everybody loved
and obsessed about almost as much as they obsessed about the dispossessed, was gold.

Our family came to live amongst the former now declining
ruling cl
ass who were mostly
Well off and established while we
were new and poor and not. Immigrating
to east south central back [aka: east central Zone One] then at that particular time proved to be imprudent ultimately, for the adults in the family, and fraught with daily violence for us kids.

And so we found that behaviour
is indivisible. To spend your life ignoring
the horror of what was being done
gradually corroded the very soul of pity
and peeple took whatever opportunity

they could
to dis a neighbour, harm another person if they could.

If the first mantra of the Dispossession era was
to be nasty to the dispossessed
eventually everyone became nasty
to everyone. It was easier that way
to remember to be bad
to “dissies’. My folks found themselves in
a blocked drain and were soon…within a few
short
years
without many of their few
friends, some old friends: having like us
come inadvertently from the ‘motherland’.

Most left at the first sight of the coming storm, and
being “our” network,
it shredded and left us [my parents] somewhat stranded… not terminally stranded, well not then, but
yes, eventually, terminally stranded.

So the fifties came and went and
the sixties compressed
us to bursting point
and we lived in our leafy suburbs that
were designated to be solely
Koloniste
territory and we were forbidden on pain of terrible retribution to ever go to a place where the “sataans” dwelt…a place with a name that no one spoke of. It was simply, “There”.

We sailed through childhood steering
with greater certainty. I gradually
discovered that no matter how painful, the pre-emptive
strike option, ultimately used by Uncle Dubya Bush in Iraq, was
the only rational response to bullies. Take
your moment
when it suits you. For bullies
were abounding and encouraged. And
after an event called
Sharpeville things became pretty
brutal for a time, and it
became sensible to carry a stick
when cycling
to beat back marauding informal enforcers.

Later,
on the night of the elegant,
but unattended, final
school farewell
dance
we listened rather to the news of Kennedy’s assassination on
the short-wave radio
in the Nash 600 bought eighth hand and only running cos the old-man knew how to build motors
and torture young sons to be his “spanner boys”.
He chose not to hire from the local mine compound; where
the men were grudgingly
allowed to
work in private gardens
on their Sunday’s-off, from work in the mines.

We had heard of Kennedy.
The year before he had done something against the Komuniste,
whom we understood to be the agents of evil,
and the “sataans”.
And when Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile
crisis happened,
followed by our trial examinations, we had all been
so freaked out, because we had been told
by the voices on all the waves
that the world was about to end, and not really
grasping the big picture, understood that the little
picture
meant, fuck the exams and get
drunk and, hopefully, maybe, desperately, we could get laid… Hhhah.

Kennedy had been cool and gave us
glimpses of what was coming. The world shed
its skin then
and began bursting from the chains of former consciousness. The world stirred
and the bullet took its own
patterns of unintended consequences… perhaps. We produced
the worst set of final results in the history of the school
to that time and people bewailed the declining standards of youth
and an evil maths instructor
beat me regularly with a stick and predicted inevitable failure… Violence and failure were our lessons in Trigonometry
and the rest and so by the end there was barely a flicker in me
of what my parents had come to escape. Barely a
spark undimmed by the
savage nature of the place.

But those other places; “there”
where the Dissies lived were also bursting
and the streets were patrolled by hard
faced upwardly
mobile despots
presiding over autarchies
with short whips called sjamboks
and guns and an attitude that permitted the assault
and beating of a citizen without compunction; or redress
for a ‘dissy’, or someone designated a ‘dissie-lover’!… A mark
of shame spoken about in either hushed and muted voices or with
violent
denunciation.

And if perchance a ‘decent’ Koloniste man
should have need to carry a Dissy
female in a vehicle alone
then it behove him to put her on the back
seat and have an innocent third party like a Koloniste
child travel with them, lest he be apprehended for licentious behaviour and be ruined.

For through all this the hormones
flowed, finally affecting me
in line with
all the other guys who discovered
‘stoneys’ somewhere in the ninth
grade, after which the
urge to penetrate warm folds of flesh; to feel
the thrust of orgasmic glory… prevailed over sensitivity.

By then we too believed,
almost,
that those Dissies were ‘Sataans’, when
we thought about “them” at all, for “they” were largely unseen
and seldom reported on, other than in the statements of sombre ruling cadre Koloniste.
And of course in the
weekly news reports
when a dissy committed murder. “They” became the bogeypersons of our waking nightmares, when we ever had them.

Then, there were so many things to think about…rock n
roll had been banned on the radio
except for some token half-
hour
given to the nation once a week
for Johnny Walker’s hit
parade,
and we gangling know-it-alls were tuned to LM
radio and the sounds of Eddie Cochran and the Rolling Stones; not to mention ‘Ruby’.

The explosion of the sixties was right
on us when
we went off and had our heads shaved to become acolytes
of the noble Reich: learning to shoot “sataans”
and going awol to Durban beach
for a month and losing four days pay for
days in detention
barracks and being beaten
and beaten again… Head shaved, again
How dare you dis the people who dis the dissies. It was beat
thump
thrash. Beat,
thump,
thrash.
Beat,
thump,
thrash
these were the
measures
on the path of childhood from the beat, thump, thrash
of infancy to the beat,
thump, thrash of a wild November night
in ’66,
when the truth was all revealed
and nothing could ever be again as it had been.

That Friday night started
at the Drive-in
movie house,
which was rarely visited anymore for purposes
of watching movies, visited instead
with accomplices
encountered on the afternoon
umbilical train rides home from the city where I passed
the day. In our time of real innocence
we eat popcorn on the back seat, watched the miracle of movies between mom n pop’s heads,
fighting for the best place
nearest the sound machine propped onto the windowsill,
then…
Now the sound box played
to dis-interested attention and the propriety pretence of being there for a movie, but alternately occupied, with vodka and willing young lusts.

Later when the movie ended
and our excuses for impropriety had fled
and the necking hour outside in the drive
way was ended, then
I returned home in sublime ecstasy.
Lost in the lust
for newly discovered flesh and feeling the effects of some vodka I carefully parked the second hand Morris
I had bought, flushed with my pay, saved in the bank like a good little boy, accumulated while disserving the
country for compulsory prison
service, abused by a half blind
corporal, reading the weather
forecasts. Being thrifty with money brought
wheels and willing partners, thereafter there’s none anymore and thriftiness gets you nowhere.

Our house was on a road
that overlooked a vlei,
or wetland, if you prefer. Running through it
was a concreted gully that carried what was originally a stream, for a few million years,
before the mines came
and turned it into a cyanide sluiceway.

On either side of it was parkland, extended
wetland really,
originally all scheduled for parkland
development by the old elites
and then rapidly invaded by those new
elites who wanted to swamp the place with voters. The parkland was cut at right angles to our boundary road by a footpath, which in turn was lit by streetlamps every thirty metres or so.

The full moon
that had
earlier been hidden behind the storm clouds,
to give our booze coated kisses convenient darkness, had now
burst through the moving cumulo nimbus
and sparkled
with the lamplight
on a hundred scattered puddles.

It was not widely thought
then that the full moon would bring a werewolf.
It was however widely believed that the full moon brought
prowlers of a different nature…
Werewolves were not real. “Sataans” were. Even as we
were being desperately advised
that they weren’t… Our world was obsessed to the point of prurience
with the sleeping habits of ‘sataans’.

By then we had lost our own Kennedy alter
ego, Verwoerdt, the bad man who had straddled
our emerging consciousness and died, stabbed
to death
by an unsung, yet unacknowledged, hero, unmourned by all
save his acolytes.

Unlike today
when all our homes are walled and locked, secured
by bolts and violent dogs
and we are all free,
then there were no such simplicities. Then
the chains were on the perimeters and within lay our
bubble of illusion.
A simple gate to define a boundary, and a gap in the driveway
next to the hedge
where my Morris would park in the open: freezing in the
winter from the passing vlei
and rained on through summer,
with a storm a day just
before dusk: a routine rhythm for a routine life… Go to
work on a train.
Score someone on a train. Go to the drive-in and explore all their parts. Go home sleep
go to work on a train….

Sleepyhead time to wake up….

And now we live in the echo of those days.

When the full moon is up and
the storm has gone and the heat of November has been
cooled by moist
sombre air the sounds carry further than is usual. I had
just finished chaining the steering wheel to the clutch
pedal, standing, in the absolute silence
of the moonlit moment, with
the key in the lock
when I heard the distinctive clunk of a firearm being cocked.

I’dbeenthere,fired a fewthousandroundsknewthesound.
My hair stood
on the back of my neck; bristled through
the vodka.
A sharp command rang
through the night.

“Halt “Dissie” followed
by a string of foul oaths
relating to the unseen Dissie
in the dark: and then the sound of running.

The air always settles after a storm and the sound
waves flatten out and sharp noises and voices travel for miles
then,
kilometres now,
along beaded atmospheric droplet cadences of water.

So as to where the sound came from I couldn’t tell. We lived in the wetland
valley and it was questionable
whether the house should ever have been built there; like the
school for mini Maboere built on the opposite
side of the park, built where a crafty sum of
money had caused a line to move on a map
somewhere, disrupting the soundflow in the ancient vlei.

Then I knew where it was.

Still barely conscious of my current surroundings, still locked
in thoughts of pleasant dalliance, lifted
by liquor and the afterglow of lust,
I was fumbling in the moonlight for the cold metal keyhole when a figure burst across the courtyard gate.

The gate was a normal height, about head
high to the average male adult of the day
with none of the razor wire adornments that festoon gates today… so it was a clean hurdle of the kind that would score gold medals in another setting.

The figure had cleared the gate,
landed
and hurtled past me in the driveway,
while I was still relating to the truth of some intrusion….
And what should I have done then? Should I have stuck my leg out backwards….
tripping him up as he flew past…
Better for him I had…but would it have been better for me?

The driveway gates were still
wide open
and the dark figure of the running Dissie
streaked
for
the
gap,
head down and moving faster than I ever could.

Then, as he reached the road a second
figure came across
the courtyard gate,
fifteen metres behind. My first thought…was it his accomplice?

No. He worked alone it seemed, or perhaps he went
the wrong way.
The second figure was the taller,
bulkier,
uniformed
figure
of
authority.

The man’s cap flew off as he grounded, and landing, he
gave a strangely characteristic twist of his
body as he by- passed me, still half
crouched in the driveway. Step, Step
He’d done it before,
many times before, I knew, through our respective
childhoods when we former Koloniste elites fought out
our ancient antagonism for the newly empowered
albeit longer established Koloniste on the hallowed battleturf called rugby.

My heart lurched in the streetlight at the
recollection
of those ritual slaughter sessions
where we fifteen kids would take on their always bigger and
bearded
eighteen men,
in unequal contest, dominated by maximum
punishment inflicted on the ‘enemy’; and generally
we gave as good as we got.

Before I could fully
grasp the strangeness of a schoolboy
now a big bulky policeman;
his partner came over the gate, slower and with less
agility and plenty of oaths. He never sidestepped, but cursed
and knocked me aside and I crunched down on the
driveway.

My heart lurched about.
I heard again the caning sounds of ritual beatings from the owners
of those voices that swore the oaths
that drew me towards the gate. I should have ignored it all and gone to bed to dream of sweet Angelica.

Like a well-trained boy I picked up the fallen cap, rolled it over
where regulation required that a
proud
owner
should hide his name:
Korn?: with the hard plosive K the hard rolling R and the sound attributed to a horse; going to ground with the ball, for his
inevitable touch down.

Yo Aah Korn?, Yay Korn?: and he condescending of we “souties”
as ‘they’, the mini Maboere,
would call us.

I found I had followed them to the pavement’s edge, watched
them chase their quarry
past the swings
in the small children’s playground
across the street: an abstraction in the park
where once Lorraine from down the street had leapt from a swing, hooked her dress which remained behind and revealed
pink knickers and sweet little bumps and ran home mortified
and never came to play again.

They were running towards the light at the edge of the footbridge that crossed the slow moving cyanide oozings.

Then one of them shot the Dissie. My guess
was Korn? shot him cos there was only one shot
and it was taken on the run and the perfect execution of the ball and the posts was Korn?’s trademark
in those bi-annual blood-baiting contests
between antagonists that we’d played between 5th grade and 12th.

The running stopped.
I could see a shape lying in the moonlight; a blob of
shadow spotlit in the circle of light
at the mouth
of the bridge.

“Get my cap”
the order,
like “get the ball!” was barked
in the “Taal”
at a subordinate,
although they both seemed to be equals: Konstables. But
Korne was like that.
Since 5th grade he was the boss,
playing barefoot on a burned crisped pitch that tore our lesser well-shod feet
tender feet…”You vil remove your boots to play here”
said their referees, “it is the only fair thing to do”
and left him champion of the entire field and we all let him be.

I met the partner at the edge of the playground
By the swings,
and silently handed him Korn?’s cap.
He scrutinised me,
a familiar
hard,
intense, mad dog stare:
bush fever glittering in the eyeballs. The excitement of the hunt
completed they now had to check out the witnesses and take their statements.

They never took mine.

There were others who arrived and from whom they noted down and elicited words of praise
for a job well done.
They were neighbours who came out to check
what the shooting was about, and soon saw the figures
by the footbridge in the lamp lit moonlight
and within a minute or two it seemed the street was there approving the deed.

And I saw the figure move.

They had stripped him
when they reached him. Down with his
trousers and shirt over his head. Incongruously
somehow he was wearing a brightly coloured swimming
costume in place of the more common cotton underpants fashionable
amongst the rest of us, and I thought, how odd,
for no dissie was permitted to enter
a swimming pool, and I
wondered how he had been able
to buy one.

There was a small hole
oozing blood
alongside his spine where the kidneys
should be
and he had landed face down in a small muddy
streak of slimy water
where the ancient clay met newly minted cyanide;
and he lifted his head to breath.

“He should be dead.” Spoke a vengeful
voice from the growing crowd in the darkness beyond the lamplight. “Make him dead” growled another
indignant
guttural
voice
in the dark. This prompted a chorus of approval
from the rest accompanied with foul oaths regarding the once again ‘proven’ satanic ancestry of the ‘fucken dissies’:
death it was asserted would be welcomed by the Dissie.

And Korne? struck a pose. Like
an old time hunter
with his daily slaughter, he
placed his foot on the back of the
wounded man’s head and firmly pushed it
down
into
the
mud
for a time, while he took out his notebook
and called for witnesses
to certify that
what they had seen was the truth, the whole
truth
and nothing
but the truth, and god [whatever that was] help those who said otherwise.

If any found the scene distasteful they said
nothing, and most, it seemed,
murmured approval. The dissie was getting his deserts. How dare
he be out here in
town in the middle of the night…The nine
o clock curfew had sounded!
Everyone could hear it!
Curfew meant that a dissie on the streets could be shot on sight and it was okay.

And I couldn’t look at them. I stared
in turmoil
at that boot, in contact with that woolly head; watched the smearing
lurch of bubbles,
the spasm. Could this be right? Was this allowed? Should I not speak out!
And would I be beaten again and again if I did.
And then,
too late…the silence of stillness when he drowned.

I told myself he was going to die
anyway…
that was a killing shot,
they said,
and there were no hospitals then
that could deal with that… certainly no hospitals for a dissie. I heard them
say that, as if in a dream.
But i knew
it was wrong and i did nothing
and what did that make me, when they came
later
to tell me to keep my mouth shut
or the same
would happen to me…They came for me because
they knew what they had done… was wrong.
And in so knowing
revealed their own slithering humanity
beneath their carefully airbrushed
cloak of evil… but I kept silent and lost mine…They said that I must keep my trap shut, that he died resisting arrest.
But they lied, for we all knew.
It was murder.

.NiK[04]

The Ashanti Raider: opening

The Ashanti Raider aka The Girl in the Golden Kusheshe
By: Nicholas Jakari-Williamson aka Nicholas Jakari.

 

“You are sure? It is convenient that this would be assassin is dead ” Bone saw the expression of fury on the old man’s face and backed off.

 
“Do you want it to go to New York?” Koyo walked into an alcove of the small chapel where an officiating burial officer was fidgeting about with his tools of spiritual redemption, ostentatiously peeking at his watch: trying not to lust after the golden mask lying in one of his cut price coffins. The officiating officer had made calls to various prospective buyers within moments of eyeballing it..
 

“No…it is too complicated.” Bone chewed his lips for a moment, and he stared vacantly at the coffin. Saw the pseudo priest eyeing its contents, and reached a decision that seemed to hurt him “She must go to Zone One, in Southern Azania. There will be a buyer there…and sellers too. We can move guns quickly from Zone One …” then, masking his own lust for the priceless artefact, “My main concern is whether she can be trusted to trade something this valuable without being tempted.”
 

“Yes. Well technically the thing is her’s by right of inheritance.” Koyo shrugged again, turned and leaned against a looming oversized plastic icon, which interpreted Durer’s immortal praying hands, and which decorated the cheap-whitewashed wall. He took out a battered packet of cigarettes, remembered where he was and put them away again.
“I do not understand.” Bone eventually decided that he was not going to get an answer. “What do you mean, hers?” He frowned, and then turning his face so Koyo didn’t see him, scowled.

 

“It is complicated, but by the more arcane rules of our clan, given the number of those who were slaughtered in the genocide, and ruling out those of the clan who orchestrated the murder of their kinsmen, she becomes the rightful inheritor. She has agreed to do this in the interests of rebuilding our people.”

 
They both stood staring at the mask, which had a history so complex that Bone’s mind had reeled when Koyo had first told him at the briefing just before the old bitch had died. It gave the resting body of the late Queen a surreal appearance. She had often called it the Golden Raider, and she would laugh and tell the stories of its creation back in the ancient golden time of Afrika. It had travelled from west Afrika to central Afrika over many centuries always travelling in disguise, with its lawful owner, until for the past century or so it had lived at Goma on Lake Kivu.

 
“Will that not affect her judgement?” Bone was impatient with all the mumbo jumbo of past protocols. He also had no truck with the idea that a woman had any entitlement to wealth, especially young and beautiful woman. He belonged to a generation that venerated new instruments of authority in the strict context of the old: the rights of present power blended to the rights of the past. A woman’s place was to be fucked regularly, and to stay in the kitchen afterwards. This was what he believed, notwithstanding any bullshit he may utter to the contrary while on the trail of campaign funds.

 
“Who knows? You can’t have it both ways.” The older of the two men shrugged again,” The truth is there is no one else we can trust after what happened.” He stared at Bone with such a hard intense stare that Bone began to feel uneasy, felt himself overwhelmed with guilt and hoped it wasn’t showing.
“Sh…she comes…”

 
“Greetings Princess, “ Her knees buckled slightly as she bent to accommodate Koyo and she hugged him, a hug that spoke of all the pain of loss and the joy of finding a familiar face in a strange place. It was an awkward hug, for although the man with parade ground bearing was tall; the epitome of a military man from a long military line, the woman was taller.

 
“Greetings from Goma.” She replied, referring to her home on the shores of Lake Kivu, one of the gem like cluster of lakes that collectively make up the Great Lakes region of central Afrika.

 
“May I introduce Compatriarch Born, this is Princess Ransome-Frankfurt of Goma.”
They both bowed with a certain stiff formality. They were after all at a funeral on a bitter cold October afternoon in an alien country.
“Call me D’Ax please.” …
 
 
This is an extract from the story called ‘The Ashanti Raider’ Part Two of the Azanian Quartet … The full digital version of what has been described as a violent, sexually explicit Adult content story, should arrive during 2015 and for sure by 2016.in the meantime follow the podcast of the Jonker Memorandum”.

Territorial Notes regarding 2136 circa AA.

Annexure
 

With reference to place names and the past.
 

Your Excellency should take note that:
 
The unfolding of these testimonies involves travel to, or reference to, a number of places in the southern part of the aforementioned Azanian Konfederacy and those that seem most important are herewith briefly described to obviate the need for description further: It being understood that all information is as presented in the kollektionof doccuments referred to as The Jonker Memorandum and those called the Testimonies together with the reference dokument referred to as Koz.
 
1. Amazulu: Kingdom of, Territory bordering eastern coastline between latitudes x and y (see map). The territory appears to encompass the Free Zone of Port Natal (sometimes also referred to as New Jaakarta). It is our understanding* that this territory was held as a free trading colony of Amazulu. Capital Ulundi. There are also indications that the first wave of Grimdonesian survivors who swept in over a newly created landbridge from the island of Grabdamasker made their way to the remaining parts of Port Natal and settled there; and then not being joined by any successors were gradually absorbed into the local populace.
 
2. Bosigo: A Mountain State with extensive arid semi desert holdings. These latter are situated on an expanse of low-lying territory eastwards to the confluence of the Orange and Bambata [previously known as Vaal] rivers, as denoted. It is centrally situated and landlocked, which limited the damage caused by the series of floods (referred to by the Enumerator and validated through archaeological records) that apparently changed the geography of the planet extensively during a period some time before these testimonies were collected.
 
Bosigo claims Tribute from the Kimberly City State and controls the headwaters to a considerable part of a dry interior especially to Zone One where it helped to nourish that region’s hydroponic farming system.
 
With its capital at Maseru it would seem to be a form of warrior/brigand State comprising 60 commune zones linked together violently when necessary through suppressive outbursts. Property rights were interpreted collectively and a highly disciplined, so-called ‘Spartan lifestyle’ was maintained. We understand this to mean that the peeple who lived there could live with little in the way of what we understand to have been important to Peeple elsewhere: a comfortable life. Notwithstanding this though Bosigo it seemed was pragmatic to the passage of trade, from which it extracted heavy tribute in the form of tolls. Govt: post- feudal/ intermittently constitutional monarchy with putative multiparty chambers of oligarchic parties.
 
New Cape Town: (NCT) City State. Legislative council based on popular vote. Formerly historically associated, variously, as a trading station and a legislative centre for hinterland associations of sublegislative regions. It was also a maritime centre with shipping facilities for peaceful and warlike purposes utilizing the vast ocean of water that gave it its reason to exist.
 
The city was completely rebuilt after it was destroyed some time before that being considered in the Testimonies. Apparently the city [and many other places] was struck by a form of extreme water movement called a “Tsunami” that seems to have emanated from a region to the southwest, from what once appears to have been a polar region.
 
NCT: Consisted of Fort Table a fortress Island, which towers over all the City’s elements: the Fjords of southern Cape Town, the extended city, called BoKaap, A region known as The Southern Peninsula and the Liberty Islands.
 
Kollektively these were known as The Cape Federation.
 
The territory extends for some two hundred kilometres* (*Kilometre: a measure of distance equal to a thousand paces made in sensory space: Kompiler) and claims suzerainty over the city-states of Graaf-Rienet and Kimberly. Bosigo and Kei (see below) repudiated these claims. The Cape Federation was also in frequent conflict with Bosigo, using its control over limited Port facilities to counteract water toll charges.
 
Kei:
 
Bordering on Amazulu and Bosigo and occupying the southeastern coastline to the Gamtoos River, where it maintained garrisons against encroachments from the Cape Federation. The latter made claims on various territories, based on historical precedents that were also disputed and of which we have no records. Capital Mtata. Government Oligarchic with strong Feudal overtones: “Good Ole Buddie” * State corporation style systems of duopolies. [* ref: KKWAN ibid p744 aka Koz]
 
Principal Regions: Port Sandile situated on the Buffalo River, Nonquaze at Algoa Bay also known as Ebaayi and also formerly known by various other names apparently was acquired from the Cape Federation after the Wars of the Acquisition* [*There is little clarity on the nature of these wars: why they happened or for what purpose, other than perhaps to be associated with water shortages. Water was a critical requirement for the survival of Peeple and was apparently in short supply.
 
We also understand that these places to which we have referred were built inland from earlier regions engulfed in the rising of the coastline following the event that leveled Old Cape Town. see earlier ref re NCT: Kompiler.]

 
Monomatapa …North of the Limpopo River, to Zambezi in north, and to the east coast. Described as a Makaranga Theocracy dominated by a leadership known as the New Roswi. Capital Harare. Principal regions: Zimbabwe, Nieue Sofala, and Victoria. Suzerainty claims over Bulawayo City State enforced through tolls on the Zambezi pipeline.
 
Bamangwato: Desert territory bordering the Newe Karolinga Republik on eastern side and encompassing all the desert regions to the western city state of Windhoek on the Namib coast. Bamangwato claims conflicting suzerainty rights against Monomatapa over the Bulawayo City State. Lost control over the Zambezi pipeline to Monomatapa during the fourth war of the Chimurenga* [similarly, to earlier references, we have limited knowledge of this event: Kompiler]. Popular assembly supports a business/ agrarian oligarchy. Capital Gabarone.
 
Newe Karolinga. An agrarian republic governed by a popular assembly, subject to theocratic control. Party list system overwhelmingly supports the Karolingan* Assembly Party who had governed the region for many, many segments of Peeple time. [ Karolingan: see below] A desolate and dirt-poor region supporting various forms of permaculture and low yield mining activities. The bulk of its citizenry survived on Basic Pay…a form of income grant, which it seems, was a right to which all citizens of the Konfederacy were entitled.
 
(NB Kompiler’s note: We understand ‘money’ to have been a medium whereby peeple could arrange exchanges between them of physical and conceptual objects that were required in order to satisfy certain survival and other needs. References are made throughout the Testimonies to this substance…money. KKKWAN refers to it as “an ephemeral substance that appears to have no constant or absolute value but by virtue of its elusive relativity. Love of the concept was described by educated commentators as the source of all evil.”)
 
Newe Karolinga was situated in a sandwich between Monomatapa, Bamangwato and Amazulu, the region was at the time of the testimonies host to many descendants of the Karolingan Krusaders, who, it seems, had undertaken an epic journey to a place called The Holy Land following great floods and the onset of frozen conditions in the northernmost regions of the planet which occurred at a time called Armageddon.
 
According to Koz* [ref: Koz: Legends of Urdos. Parallel edition Ref co-ord 763908] these particular Karolingans apparently became confused for some unclarified reason and went off course on their journey to this alleged “Holy Land”. They landed somewhere on the continental landmass of Azania and fought their way south. It seems they were armed apparently with terrible weaponry of a type never encountered before. They left nothing behind them as they moved directly south along a great river.
 
Much of the territory through which they moved was already laid waste by critical shortages of water, and many of the places where water was reasonably plentiful were equally devastated by a terrible plague that afflicted great numbers of peeple and rendered them incapable of much resistance.
 
The Karolingans kept moving although their numbers shrank considerably. A great many settled in the fertile regions of east central and south central Azania after claiming land in exchange for assisting the Azanian Konfederacy to repulse a second invasion by Grimdonesians across the landbridge linking the mainland of Azania to a former island off the east coast.

They were finally allowed free transit through Monomatapa following something called the Treaty of Victoria and finally settled in the territory that came to be known later, as Karolinga. These Karolingans as they were known were not a friendly people and were apparently fiercely addicted to a belief in a non-physical reality and governed their lives according to a ceremony known as the Klensing.
 
Zone One: The pulse of the Azanian Konfederacy. Zone one was unusual by the standards of peeple around the world. It was a city region that was not situated on a water confluence point. Apparently it came into existence to mine gold, a commodity highly prized for its intrinsic value. Later it became a trading and manufacturing region. Over time the gold was mostly gone and the region entered into a condition of seemingly terminal long-term decline.
 
According to the testimonies it [Zone One] was being used as a temporary “cash cow” * [we do not know the meaning of this term; referent sources indicate that it has something to do with easy wealth generation, Koz refers to “Rent seeking”, although we are not certain what that means.] to supplement the development of the entire Konfederacy.
 
Strategically located in the highland prarielande, also known as ‘Velde,’ of southern Azania the decline was arrested after the “Ringing” * [Kompiler’s note: the events known as the “ringing” are comprehensively described earlier.]. Foresight had seen the development of a system of solar powered towers, the ruins of which could still be seen and which curiously were laid out in a pattern reminiscent of our own star system. This as you no doubt know has given rise to numberless theories relating to prescient possibilities.
 
Various other forms of weather modifying devices were apparently built on to the towers over the years and they became a primary source of foodstocks for the citizenry. We have no samples of these.
 
Because it was a desirable place to live and many were attracted to it, residence rights in Zone one had,apparently, eventually been limited to those who had a birthright to a water supply, or who could make a large enough investment to acquire basic water rights for themselves, and any they may bring with them.
 
A “water rights market” existed to distribute possession of water rights. Entry by non-residents was moderated by their ability to purchase water rights vouchers on the rights market. All citizens had basic rights to minimal water needs. Outsiders and residents alike could trade water surpluses to facilitate intermittent visiting for business or recreation purposes. Notwithstanding this or perhaps because of the problems associated with water there was minimal movement of citizens between regions.
 
[Kompilers note: Numerous references are made throughout both the introduction to the testimonies and the testimonies themselves to events from a period called, The Past. In many cases these references are made without explanation. We are at this stage only able to speculate on what these events could have been in most instances. There are however some instances where other archaeological information lends evidence to support or supplement the limited information we have on the planet.]
 

* Note: The planetary sub-species Humanity, also known as (aka) Peeple, who form the primary subject of this document calibrated the passage of their lifetimes by conceptualising a process which they called ‘Time’. This process was itself then calibrated by various methods of chronological record using periods called centuries according to a range of referent points, amongst which we have established two, called AD and BC, which seemed to be a predominant referent for this region.
 
We are uncertain whether the term ‘Twentieth Century”, refers to the former or the latter referent although such evidence as we have gleaned tends to indicate AD. It is not certain to what these terms signify although all indicators point to a reverential figure affecting the PAST of some of the Peeple, and who provided, it seems, a start for an era. We do not believe Jordan Marak to be that reverential figure since he appears to have arrived at an end time between one age, AD, and another called AA.
 

Post Jonker

Blog #1 Post Jonker.

Writing this blog as I am now in 2014 September 23rd, on Heritage Day eve, I find myself looking back on to what I wrote and thinking how weird it is that in one way or another ideas and themes that formed part of the backwash scene setting display that runs like a thread through the story, are becoming mainstream ideas or are affairs that are pushing their way to the front row.
 

Starting with right now.
 

As I write this much of the city [Jozi] is without access to on-demand water. Part of the reason has to do with old and increasingly dilapidated infrastructure. To this is ascribed the widespread unhappiness with the state of affairs requiring citizens of all classes to queue up for a water supply from a passing [intermittent] tanker. Allegedly thieves have been stealing components necessary for the pumping of water from reservoirs to storage stations; or some other gobbledy gook explanations. I.o.w: The system broke down. We expect it and are not surprised and acceptance is bleak. Nonetheless: As always there is the inevitable Elephant in the room.
 

Gauteng: aka Zone One in the Jonker Memorandum has water issues… as does the country Mzansi. Some of Zone One’s water comes from a landlocked traditional albeit constitutional Monarchy tucked within a mountainous region inside Mzansi.
 

The place has been taken over in some as yet undefined coup and notwithstanding much huffing and puffing by worthy politicians is still unresolved as at today: and coincidentally we suddenly have water issues.
 

In the Jonker the keen listener would have noted that the entire region [Lesotho Kingdom and the Province called [currently] Free State] is called Bosigo [circa 2136 AD or Sometime AA]: and is a Sparta style military State, routinely at war over water rights with Zone One. Oh dear.
 

On another topic this past week the BBC announced that the Belgian court of appeals had granted a first ever precedent. A man serving a life sentence, for horrible crimes, has been granted the right to die in terms of the country’s Euthanasia laws. In the Jonker Memorandum this action is referred to as the “Socratic solution.” In effect we are witness to the modern world’s first State sanctioned suicide.
 

Then of course there has been the flurry of activity over the introduction, currently;y still on hold of a Transaction levy [as i call it] or Tax as Mrs Merkel likes to call it. When Mr Cameron of the UK condemned the idea as unworkable last year i chuckled merrily remembering that the reasons he gave for why it wouldn’t work were the same reasons i used to justify wiping out the present order in the story.I.o.w. why the “Apocalypse” became a necessary part of the plot.
 

And then the surprise of all, is that the Swiss are currently investigating the central idea of “Basic Pay” that threads through; and is a key part of Korinth Starr’s election campaign in the tale. The proposal to vote on the idea seems to be on hold presently but nonetheless the idea is out there.
 

As an author of a futuristic oriented work I have already been amazed at many of the things that have happened in the “real” world while I was podcasting my tale about the fictional world were part of my text already. On one level it was tsunamis that affected Japan [Keiretsu in the story], climate change resulting from “The Ringing” about which we may all still be in denial. And then there is the airliner that disappeared without trace one night and then came back again… which of course we hope remains fiction don’t we….?
 

I shall continue to note other events as I remember that they happened in the wake of the tale. And in the meantime I keep hoping that I do simply write fiction and am not some uncanny seer.
 

Enjoy.

Poetry of the Jonker Memorandum

Jonker Memorandum PoetryDirect Poetry from the Jonker Memorandum.

Comment.

The Jonker Memorandum is, as stated elsewhere, an Allegoric prose poem: meaning that the prose part is written using poetic forms and patterns. And much is prefixed by a piece of [so-called] ‘poetry’. The pieces that follow and are called by me ‘Direct’ are, essentially, the punctuation dotted throughout the tale: as a form of ‘Brechtian’ introduction.

Regarding the pieces contained herein; #6 & #39 are attributed to the poet/philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche with thanks, and are from the script for my performance of that Poet’s work at the Centenary Nietzsche Conference: Pretoria University in 2000. The script was in part derived from the Portable Nietzsche. Viking edition: 1954: Edited by Walter Kaufman.

Other pieces elsewhere may contain words in quotation marks because the words are not mine, but borrowed albeit not attributed because I’ve forgotten from where they were absorbed.

Each piece [other than the two referred to above] is attributed to !NiK [being aka Nicholas Jakari]. [Btw: the ! is a San sign: not a common or garden exclamation mark… Rather it represents the San ‘Click’ sound, and is a symbol for my return in 1994 [referred to elsewhere].

The numbers in Brackets after ! [00] for instance, identify the year in which the piece was composed. In some cases the designation inside the brackets is simply [JM] meaning the piece was specifically written for the place where it was used, when it was written somewhere between 1994 and 2010 when the text was complete or 2014 when the Podcast series was finished.

The name of the Story, the Jonker Memorandum, based on a tale told to the writer in a random barroom conversation by an equally random, aging drunk Afrikaner man in a downtown bar, is to honour the poet Ingrid Jonker who took her life in despair: never believing that a world such as this represented by the tale was actually possible and: nonetheless wrote words that moved souls.


1. The Enumerator’s summary.

The poor and the weak,
The strong and the meek
Were led like lambs to the
Reconstruction yards
Down
A long steel slide
Suspended in deepest space.


The frail and all those of indecisive
Disposition
Were driven to a new edge; the ledge
At the end of the universe
Fell off
And were encountered
No more…
!NiK[‘94]


2. The State of the Nation.

I listened to our leader’s State of the Nation
Speech and couldn’t understand it
I read the critic’s review that
Said the
Citizens of
“Manenbug, Harrismith, Diepsloot, Hanover Park,
Phomolong and Crossroads
Couldn’t
Understand the speech either
And although I knew none of those
Places
I felt empowered: knowing none of us knew:
And that our president’s secret
Was safe….
!NiK[‘98]


3. Cooking Turtles: Part One.


From “A Bundle of thoughts`’.
Off an old, Long Playing Record… now broken, and lost.

Cooking Turtles is a slow process of
Heating up the water
From cold and there
Will be a part
Where the creature becomes wonderfully
Invigorated.
Later when the water is boiling
The turtle is unaware that it has died: for
It had stopped
Living
Earlier.
!NiK[‘98]


4. Notes off a wall inside a police station.


Bear in mind
The destruKtive konsequences
Of unrestrained self-interest
On a simple of
Unsophisicates
No!
No?


No – a simple of sophisticates,
Surely?
And
As they say:


“A bullet in the spine
Will
Change your life”.
!NiK[05]


5 What happens when the Juggler
loses its footing



Kri-o-genia + Her n Me n Then


A break of light
Against the wall
Reveals the bar
‘tween me n you.


And here to keep me from you
A cross to bar the night;
To share the quiet solemnity: of
Our unimagined hope, held tight.


Beyond the squares
The bare fleshed veins
Etch out
Nature’s child
Stark with naked pain
And stroked with evening’s chill.


A howl across the darkness
Of a moment
Echoes off the barren seeds
Marked out by season’s change.


Now is the time
When warmth has gone
Our peace
Is held restricted
To the square yard of our minds.
!NiK[‘78]


6. Hyperconsciousness & Freidrich Nietzsche.


“Could you create a god? Then
Do not speak to me of any gods. But you
Could well create the Overman.
Perhaps not yourselves my brothers
But unto fathers
And forefathers
Of the overman.


You could re-create yourselves:
And let this
Be your best creation.”


Thus Spake Zarathustra
Nietzsche


7. Probable Possibility.


Was the core of reality
Really a place
Without light:
A howling soup of uncertainty
Without konstrukt or meaning?


So much for probability.
!NiK[00]


8 We’ve changed time.


We’ve changed time,
He said.


I’ll fight the rules
I will not succumb.


We do more in a day
Than our forefathers
Kould konsider


I’ll fight the changing
Of the rules
I will not succumb.


Doing in a week
I will not succumb


What our ancestors did
Perhaps
In a lifetime.


So we have compressed time
And burned out our ability
To keep up,
She chirped.


I’ll fight. I wont succumb…
I will not succumb.


Yes we have changed time
We’ve also sold off
Most of it
He concluded caustically.
!NiK[07]


9. Systematizing parody

Do we systematize
Our everyday parodies
About the changing
Of time
To suit a vengeful purpose
That we allocated to
Our
Alphaman… to our
Alphapersons
!NiK[02]



10. A


Shall we take a
little walkie
said the spider
to the fly…


The walkies are behind
Us
And I hope that
We don’t die.
!NiK[03]


11 Loadshedding: voices in the dark.



How do we make it rain?
We water the garden
Wash the car.


We wash the car
We wash the car
We wash the car
For Korinth Starr.
!NiK[JM]


12 The rain arrived


The rain arrived first
Before the lights came on.


When power goes
We have to talk to each other
Again.
And deal with truth…
Deal with silence.


The multiverse punishes us
Then
For intemperate acts
And also presents us
With
The opportunity
To
Experience
Disappointment.


Driven only by the
Certainty
That we rule
And to continue
Is to rule
On.
!NiK[JM]


13. Those who konstrukt rules.


I met a man who said he
Had been drinking with me
All night
But that the bottle was still full.


I met a gambler in denial
Who said he couldn’t
Remember
Drinking Bell’s
Or even why he gambled.


It’s the little things
He said
That gradually pisses you off
About a place:
The soap that you don’t
Find in the
Bathroom; the sun blinding your eyes as you
Drive east in
The morning
The fool who drives to the
Corner at
The edge
And waits there
To be fetched.
And the ambitious
Who block the road
With their egos.

Most of all it’s the issue
Of chairs
And how they should
Be
Placed.
!NiK[JM]


14. From the Testimonies


Whatever you do
To the web of life
Shall be returned to you
Twicefold.
And shall through all your lives.


The book of Shadrack: Navaho section.


So the Navaho say
Whatever you do
To the web
Of life
Will come back to
You.


Is that the same as fate?
Is that why we cannot
Wait
To be
Late.


The web of life is, it
Seems,
To be
Our
Tangled levy.
!NiK[JM]


15. Rape: The genocidal Crime.

< /br> Variations on some lines in the Jozi “Star” newspaper.
Wed 18/4/2012



“A crime that shames us all.”


It’s the crime of shame
And it is here to stay
Seven rapes per man
In a single day
Violently taken
In only one way.


“The tip of it all”
They lasciviously say,
To an ‘Ysberg of rape’
Oh yay…
Oh yay…


Deep down inside
A penetrating ray
Thrusting up, up, up:
Through the curds and the whey.
Rape… oh rape… a girl child a day
Rape, rape, rape your worries away.


Oh… rape, rape, rape to show you really care
Rape away the rage at all that isn’t fair.


Shame, shame, shame.
Do not stay
It’s just a little game so
Rape
Away
Rape away?
Rape:
Away.
!NiK[‘12]

Ysberg = iceberg. Afr:

16 Destiny.


Couples parade with
Earnest enthusiasm
To the fast moving Fox –
Trot
Frantically giving new
Urgency
To otherwise
Futile purpose.
Because?
That’s what we do.
[Book of Shadrack]
!NiK[JM]


17 From the 3rd Book of Shadrack


Exploit the minds
Of those who dress
In finery
And march to the tune
Ofsomewhereelse.


While we dance amongst
The fantasies
Of our abstract
Exigencies*


Dissecting parts.
Dissecting portions.

!NiK[‘12]



*Exigencies: New Webster – intrinsic requirements or circumstantial necessities.
** Caprice: New Webster – mere fancy.


18 Inkambabeyibuza*

from: ‘The Notes of Joy’


You can be a part
Of the power
Or apart
From the power;
Parceling tradition
Or facing madness.
Never
Believing that anyone
Could believe.


So ‘Inkambabeyibuza’:
“By this scar then,
You
Shall
Remember me
And this”.
!NiK[‘08]

Inkambabeyibuza… IsiZulu. Means what it says.



19. Remembering


When we did not
Remember
To remember
What we thought
We should
Remember
We found ourselves
Unable to grasp
At straws
Or see the broken
Doors:
We found we had
Forgotten why
We chose to
Do
The things we
Chose
To
do.
!NiK[JM]


20. Return to the Virtuality game.

Don’t talk to me of ghosts
For there are none
I don’t believe this to be a rock
This is a rock
And when I am not here the rock remains
I’m sure…
Aren’t i?


Our world is
Not
A Vision
Dronkverdriet*
To which we aspire it is not the knowledge that we
Have represented to ourselves
In a form
Awaitingrearrangement.
History/Herstory/Theirstory/Ourstory:
It’sallintheblankspaces.
Is there existence if no one records it?
Are we as ephemeral as the rock?
Do we matter?
Why?
!NiK[Circa ‘06]


*Dronkverdriet: Afrikaans. Maudlin drunk.


21. Indicators

The bang on the front of
The head
The warning tremble of
Thought
That preceded it
When I walked that way
With the load.


And then… to forget: in
That same instant
To forget:
And be so brutally
Reminded.


You were told!
We warned you when you
Went this way before!
Retention rulz….
!NiK[‘12]


22. With regard to Mr. Thomas



Tremor shakes off me
With every change of way
While you react with
Panic?
And break you down
To pray?
Or do you prey?


So: you do not go fiercely
Into that good day
Tremor shakes off
You… tremor shakes
Off you
With every change
Of way…

You do react with panic
Though
And do
Break you down…
To
Pray.


Prey?
!NiK[‘12]


23. The Apocalypse came and went:
Legends of Urdos.



What if the people in the stories
In which the committed rapists lived
Were able to Emote
At some
Level
Likefishthatdailyswarm
To a feeding place:
In search of nourishment.


Does
That figment of the
Imagination
Carry with it the
Residual information
That caused it to be formed?


Is it accessible?
And so:
When people follow leaders
As shadows follow
Owners then all are blind
Following the virtuous certainties
Of faith: a deep conviction
That certainty
Is ruled by uncertainty,
Which is itself
Certain.
!NiK[04]

24. Ellis says…


“On running the Mile
there comes a point
at which the
pacemustpickup
in order that one may sprint
toward
the
finish
line
and reach it,
notwithstanding stumbles.
!NiK[JM]


25. Oram Mangosti


Should you say you
Cannot go on
Moving forward
Then perhaps
It is because
You
Are unable
To forget…


Inkambabeyibuza… by
This scar
Then
You shall
Remember
Me.
!NiK[JM]


26. The thing about the wind


The thing about the wind
Was the timing:
There was none.


As soon as you knew
Or thought you knew
You no longer
Knew


And a cycle preceded a
Cycle
Or in shortening
Became
Interspersed:
So we say
Go
Now
!NiK[JM]


27. Zen zat was ze way.

I am ze way of zen
It’s what I do
I believe every thing
And
No
Thing.


Every thing so that i
Should not
Inadvertently
Miss
The
Truth.


And No
Thing
So that I can
Understand
Certainty.
!NiK[‘08]



28. What’s in the dark.

A byte is eight bits
And a bit is a binary digit:
A zero or a one.
And this Unicode stuff?
Ah… that is a lot bigger… binary processed
Into
Hothexadecimals.
!NiK[‘00]


29. Chips in the game.


The dazzling disc called
Moon
Hid itself in plain sight
Behind a swiftly flowing veil:
Rain soaked shards
Of
Nimbus.
!NiK[JM’01]

30. Dekonstruktions


From: Random Notes….


I am beginning to grasp
At the secular nature
Of consciousness.


Is this what I mean?
Or did the message alter from
The hand
Up
To the brain or… perhaps…
Vice versa.


Did the paper change it?
Or the pen?
Or did i?
And
Why?
!NiK[JM’00]


31. Regarding Intellectuals – Guilty as Charged.

Oh vanities of intellectuals, and pride
Before a fall
Sovereignty and self-determination help
A girl
Walk tall.


Oh vanities of intellectuals, pride
Before a tumble.
Sovereign self-determinant so
A girl shouldn’t grumble.
!NiK[JM’00]

32. “All tax is theft”…


A response to a strident call from a Stakhanovite style apparatchik for “poems about the economy” made in the context of confiscatory “take it all back” tax proposals. 29/05/00



Taxes, levies, history, herstory
Computers, smartphones,
Investors, strikes, footballers
And murder: plus the concept
Of delete
Consciousness…


The world of today
Is the world of
Delete – consciousness?


Nay – I never heard of that!


Those who live today
Are not the same
As those


People who lived here yesterday
The people of today have deleted
The people of
Yesterday
From their consciousness in
Order to
Cope with today… [Podcast ends here… balance of original
should you choose i.e. it is ex-Jonker.
]


Yes in order to cope with today…

To demand of the world of today that it should pay for the
Deeds of yesterday
Is an idea that can only
Begin to work should people decide to love
A Demander today.
It is no longer enough to be loved
Then
It has to be now.

On the Dow, the product must have
Credibility,
And unspeakably sharp and acute
Marketing methods to get good attention
That attracts velvet paws
And a favourable mention.
Ok.

The idea of taxing anyone
Especially
As a form of reparation
Is a demand
That must be analysed
In the context of what happened to
Other similar taxes in the growing of the nation:
The general state of the tax inflation
Process.
The treatment of corrupt tax thieving officials
Caught, as it were, during recess:
Generally what the
Taxpayer gets after the promises have been
Deducted from the bill;
Instead of “fuck you, stand back,
I haven’t emptied the till”.


Securing invested money: that is
Securing other people’s money, honey
Extends through risk evaluation
To the limits of gradation, mixed
To bland computerized credulity
Impacts upon the premium
We have to pay
For nice clean offshore money:
Instead of dirty honey, hey
Where the Anti-Kollektive Kolektas
Karry Kalashnikovs and K….


All tax is theft. Especially those bereft and
Confiscatory deductions
Like capital gains disruptions
Those are scary to all those mary’s
Who seriously dispose with
“Other people’s” woes, by handling their cash
To demo overwhelming dash:
At the same time, with great care,
Beneath an open stare.


Investors are owners of money.
They are not politicians or something
Else funny
It may be in doubt they are human at all;
Concepts wired up
With a screen for a wall to show memory:
Spewing out models of risk
And uncertainty.
Measuring the loot of the world’s
Aging billions:
Cash that adds up to hundreds of trillions.
What you did last month doesn’t matter a jot
It’s what’s happening now that counts for the lot.


When a butterfly tumbles
And falls in Peru
The red card is flagged from computer to you. The
Risk model says the risk
Factors have altered:
That risk you took last week has now
Gone and faltered
So follow instructions: delete from the programme
That order we called
And that hold put on Put
The rate must go up
Or the cash go on out.


Perceived expectations: perceived quantum
Risk
Modified market uncertainties
Frisk
Down our hopes
Batters our fears
Causes the money to stop
And change gears.


Perennial problems perplex perceived risk.
Confusion of outcomes presents the most risk
To one who man’s mountains of money: to plan and to
Do and to follow things through to
The end:
That should always be happy.


Should this Hollywood twitch
Suffer a glitch… should heaven transform into hell
When success equals misery,
Inconsolable outrage,
Mixed in with
Anger
As
Well.
Then confusion will reign
The markets feel pain
And the cash is away before
Losseswillclaimallthegain.


In other words: in the world of money
Something is done; that is not at all funny:
A result is achieved, expected or not.
There are no relative gains
For corporate aims
But returns, as predicted.
Should results be in doubt,
Then someone with clout
Changes course,
Before loss is addictive.


When bosses complain, cash workers feel pain
And the outcome is bad for the homeowner’s loan and the girl
Who was Jill becomes Jane.


Alt.F1 delete part one: next transaction please.


!NiK[‘00]
Episode 59
This entire piece originally was used in “Random Notes”.
The introduction only the was used
in the story of the Jonker Memorandum.



33. Tear down the house.


With kompliments to R.J. Mugabe [aka Bob the
Roz] – One who kept his word.



Fragment from Lemuria.


Between the desert fathers
And the measurement problem
There remains something
About a grave
That never saw father time
Felled
Upon a leaf


A vera causa
To the very stuff of Poetry.
!NiK[JM’00]


34. Regarding a Planetary catastrophe.


Ring a ring of roses
All fall down
One-down two-down
All on to our noses.
!NiK[JM’99]


35. Open Season



We thought the storms
Came yesterday
But they came again
Today
And things are broken
And everything’s gone – again.


Where have they all
Gone mama?


Where have you all gone?
!NiK[JM’12]


36 Alldays



Running on a road to Alldays
When what happens is
Not what happens:
Searching for the things we thought
We had;
Finding things we didn’t want
Then finding … do we
Really
Know
Anything at all?
!NiK[‘10]


37. Memories of an Apocalypse


I was taking a Thai massage
When news that the
World had
Ended
Came through on the
Radio.


Go North said the
Disembodied voice
Through the static clamour
Of mass
Homicidal
Panic.


Why North? Why?
North was gone
South was too.


There are graves in
The mist
Here
Just waiting for
You.
!NiK[‘12]


38. Baobab musings

I’m neither a joiner
Nor a hand’s upper
Either
Of these
May differ
According to circum-
Stances.


But nonetheless
We will take
The journey
To its
End.
!NiK[‘07]

39. Loadshedding again.


“This life as you live it now and
have lived it you will have
to live again times
without number.”…

F. Nietzsche


40 Investigations into meat and aging
graveyards



Ageing graveyards [or are they?]
Aging graveyards.
Does it matter?


We never fear those
Whose wrath
Cannot move us
To
Terror
!NiK[JM’06]


41. Justwhenwethink….



Just when we think it’s
Time to come in from the
Dark
The light loses its
Exuberance and
We struggle to
Remember
What we want to
Remember
!NiK[JM’06]


42. Collusive coverage.


The spider has had to run for cover.
Its web was
Wantonly
Wasted when those,
Who travelled with un-
Tested hypothesis
Of broad unearned
Merit crashed
Through the
Door
Demanding arbit-
Rary affirm-
Ation.


So write us some funds
Brother Yakove
Write us some
Kind
Konsideration for the time
We had to
Wait
For
Our
Turn to bid upon
Our own
Preferential
Apportionment.


Squaring our participation with your
Grotesque
Admission.


So write us some funds
Cousin Yakove
So we can forget:
Write now.
!NiK[’13]


43. Nozik meets Starr.



According to the man
Called
Robert Nozik
Individuals have rights
And
There
Are
Things no other individual
Or group of individuals can do
To them
Without violating those rights:
Ding dong.


Does this mean? We thought,
That when we penalize
Those who exercise their
Right to rape
And to murder
That we therefore
Unnaturally oppress those persons.


Or do two rights therefore
Permit
A
Wrong?
!NiK[JM]


44. Waar der Schterre loop.


Primeval memory: – Auslaande ballad.


We are the masters of the soil
You are but its slaves.



On reading “Tilling the Soil”: – David Day



****************************
When the first settlers came here,
To this region
Those who were here already
Or claimed a hunter’s
Affinity
With the
Place
Scorned their slavery to the soil
That could
Feed them
Without toil


And so: they found it was taken
From them.


Now that they have it back
It was again
Found that
What they wanted
Was gone and
Could no longer
Subsist
For them.


They sought freedom and
Found
The cost
Of
Living.
!NiK[‘13]

45. When you are tired …


When you are
Ready
To be
Lunch
To be lunch.


When you are tired
You are ready to be lunch.
!NiK [‘13]



46. On Market Piranhas


“Money is a way of thought” [Oswald Spengler]


A market fundamentalist would be likely
To say that the only real
Truth in the known
Multiverse is the moving average
On a Stock
Market index.


Others might argue that there are so many
Variations
On a moving average
That nothing matters
And that the idea of
Truth
Is
An
Illusion.


In close-up the Index lurches
With majestic
Hard-driven
Velocity
In repose… pools of Piranha
Sweeping with uniform movement
Breaking
Up
Breaking
Down: threshing their wake
Rippling their spine
Konstantly Klenzing… rejuvenating
A veritable ebb and flow
Warp and weft.


The purest of the pure would call
The Index itself
Truth:
That the moving gobbling average
Merely predicts the
Truth
Whatever it may be.
!NiK[‘02]


47. Fibonacci’s Financial Flaws


All debt, she said
Is a right against
The future.


So I thought of Fibonacci
And his rentals
On the seconds of time
Borrowed from
Somewhen
Where
To feed our present ratio
Cow.


And knew by all that moved
That the future must
Start
To pay Rent:
Now.
!NiK[13]


48. The legend of Korinth Starr


They – you know who ‘they’ are?


‘They’ think they live in a tent
Where no one pays rent
For the space that they take
From the place they call Sent
Now and again.


Now, again the future is stretched
So it reaches the past
A paradox sweep
That leaves us aghast
A quantum leap
And mortgaged deep our vast
Existence now and now again
And again now to a thirty third
Time over again.


So the future now
Must pay rent now
To save us then
To save us when
To save us again
When we save
Amen.
!NiK[‘13]

49. Untitled


A loser would not wait to be mated
Knowing the end to be inevitable
The machine would resign.
!NiK[“01}


50. Reasoning Revelations [201]


Praxeological thoughts following perusal of a rationalist critique

Praxeological
Thoughts
Following
Perusal
Of
A secretly
Clandestine
Ran
t


Reason unlocks the door to transformation
Reason staggers; confounded by transformation.


They felt the great fear then
Those that waited
In
Judgement
Of the
Poet’s
Conclusions: delivered
Without simplicity of…
Fractions of…
Delusions…


That actions
May
Be lib
Er
Ated
From re-actions…
And a call
For
Restitution
That it should not be
Destitution
!NiK[‘13]


51. Escaping

Those little boxes were not
So little
Each one fitted
A person
And those that didn’t
Want one
Could wear sackcloth
Or even ashen finery
Just
Before
Sunrise
Instead.
!NiK[‘12]


52. What wasn’t imagined?


It was known that time curls
Around things and shows
Us what we already know
As something that we didn’t.


When we foresee that which
We didn’t dare to
Perceive then
We know that what
We see
Was not imagined.
!NiK[JM’01]


53. On finding crumpled up notes



I can only say
That memory
Is
Selective


The pencil with
Which
I write
This
Will
Fade
Soon


And when i
Find
This note
Crumpled
Into a pocket
In a few months
It will have be-
Come
Un
In
Telligible
Like my recollection of writing it


Thus therefore to such
Scribblings
On the submersion [?] of money
And other curious,
Felicitations: like
Does Dawkins
Meet Dworkin’s
Memes
Prompting rape* [ukudlwengula… IsiZulu]]
Memes
Prompting
Gryp.** [To ‘grab’ lasciviously: Afrikaans]

Memes being ancient
Themes
From then to
Now
Jumbled and carelessly
Discarded
Straightened not enforced
With
Rigid
Regime where
Write meets
Wong

Where rite and
Wrong go
Badly shod
Go
Ding
Dong
U Pong:
Odd!
!NiK[‘09]


54. Resting on a cliff


Eastern folk saying/proverb Chi-Na



Of the many dozen ways to
Get out of
Trouble
The best
Is
To
Go
!NiK[‘JM]
for Chi-Na


55. A limitation of mind


Everything is ‘gonna’ be all right
All right?
As long as you keep
Holding tight
To your vision
Of you
When you
Thought you
Might
No
Longer
Be

Real
Or even in sight


And you know then
That the impossible
Was
Only
A limitation
Of
Mind.
!NiK[‘13]



56. Endings


When you are no
Longer here
And no longer
Around: then peace
Is
Konstant.
!NiK[‘’98]


Thus endeth the Jonker poems

Poetry from the Jonker Memorandum

Jonker Memorandum Poetry