Tag Archives: The Buffalo Hunters

Race Free writing

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“Set this silence free
To wash away the
Worst of me.”


In my Remains:… [off] Living Things. Linkin Park


To wash away silence is a theme of our times.


Some of you reading this may have come from my new site on Facebook


On this Facebook site for Nicholas Jakari you find examples promoted on Amazon of what I have decided to call: “Race free” writing.


As we get to know each other I may, on request, choose to explain all the motivations… they are set out over many years in many blogs; and observations on trends, in our fast changing world that nonetheless stays the same no matter what.


So here we shall deal with what, in the country where I live, is a serious threat to the long-term growth and prosperity of the region… Racial Antagonism… Ironic; given that the point of liberation was to defuse it… Albeit, understandably, slowly.


I am a poet first and foremost. Nicholas Jakari’s page is devoted to his work, and what it has to do with you. I have promoted many things in a long lifetime of working at staying alive. There are only a few poets who have ever become profitable I am told… I should like to be another. So I am presenting a different form of poetry to that in which, I was trained from the age of four.


In the interests of full disclosure: At age fifteen I started carrying a notebook and taking notes on thoughts things n whatever was an object/subject of curiosity in ‘the moment’.


You can understand that, living, as we did, in a vicious and deeply abusive police State, a poet making random observations about his surroundings and internal responses to them, in little notebooks tucked into a back pocket… soon lost whatever friends were around. And it saw me: ‘detained’, occasionally. I was “Notebook NiK” ; and when I appeared, people scattered: that dreadful evil man who “Kolekted” their words and occasional sayings was around… go now, scurry rush hide and hush.


This means that I have been routinely advised that my greatest weakness to be overcome, is difficulty networking with other humans… Strength on the other hand is networking with words.


So I am doing something I find difficult: inviting rejection by inviting you to be my friend on this journey I am taking… on an infinitely winding road… to a place where universal basic income has become the way most people earn their living via ‘rental’ levies on DATA following the acceptance that a byte of DATA should have a nominal value related to either a Firmian cent [aka the united states of Firmia… a place run by Firms] or an ounce of gold: whichever ruled at the time… And all currencies had become crypto, managed through inviolate blockchains.


Further disclosure … I did say full didn’t i?


Twenty four years ago this September the eleventh, [my September 11: before yours] I was presented abruptly with the need to widen my range as a writer.


I was going to be in a wheelchair within fifteen years, I was told. “A bullet in your spine will change your life.” They said. Via daily practice of Taiji Chuan, that has so far been avoided.


My personal style arose when I asked myself the question how do I, a person who is deeply traumatized and with life shattered; through a random act of irrational violence: that left three [ultimately] dead and me full of holes. How do I write a violent story, involving literally copious brutal murders; a story set in a place rooted in racial antagonism, without inflaming an inherent time bomb waiting for a lit fuse: because the story had the potential and I have the skill to do that.


That was though, not something I wanted, certainly few people I knew, wanted the reality of that horror.


So I decided as a poet that I would remove all reference to or even symbols associated with two specific words [the one that describes the colour of these words, and the one that describes the background colour] and write the story without ever identifying the race of any of the characters almost none of whom are in any real way: “Nice Guys”. In other words I chose as a poet to write in archetypes rather than stereotypes.


So I took, firstly, JM Coetzee’s “Barbarians….” as a model; linked it to Mandela’s [alleged] position [a la 1994]; when he spoke of a “place beyond race”.


Then I dekonstrukted… what I had; and then rekonstrukted and rekonstrukted again … the outcome.


I asked questions about my reader, in a technologically fast evolving world and had a surprising answer. An answer that in one case completely changed my understanding of everything I read.


Then i wrote and published the first post-liberation South Afrikan [then] Mzansian [now] ‘Skiet skop n verspoeg’ [my local phrase for what was once called “blood n guts”], race free, allegoric prose poetic novel: “The Buffalo Hunters”.


I rudely self-published the Buffalo Hunters two years after the Revolution in our country; in celebration of a brief [maybe] period of liberty. [I certainly would never have been allowed to publish the story before liberation]. And there are many who are enraged, I am led to believe, that I wrote it at all… without any form of standard, centuries old, racial bias… based on the silence that is now to be released.


My hypothesis is that there is good and bad in varying amounts in every human [pretty well]. What happens when a whole lot of different variations of ‘bads’, somehow, inadvertently, cross paths with each other at critical moments: that end in violence: bad goods and good bads coalesce?


At the start I had to ask the crucial question.


Could I use the methods of poetry to model a violent, sexually graphic story [we were at the time in an immediate post-revolution period] in which I make it as nearly impossible as I can make it, to identify the ethnicity of a player; and still have a definitive character that could engage you my reader… whom I do not know.


They would all simply be metaphors for people engaged in a series of violent things. Metaphors, or even archetypes’; with which you, my reader could bond freely; and engage as an extended ‘you’: should you wish to enter my imaginary world.


Could I in other words go to “a place beyond race”… and focus exclusively on the horror it has so brutally represented; rather that write something that facilitates the rage that we repress. Rather show that antipathy, like love: is not the exclusive domain of some among many?


And then if I could do that then would I have set up a new fashion… AND therein lies the silence.


So take a chance, get the eBook and tell me if I was wrong. Tell me whether a story that I described as the most violent sexually graphic tale ever published legally in my country is worth a few bob. [In reality this eBook is cheaper today than the the copies off the print run I did 22 years ago.] or: is even worth all the inconvenience of writing like that.


Read them and tell me if I’m right or wrong.


The Buffalo Hunters, is a violent sexually graphic crime story about what happens when a gang of Buffalo Hunters [a euphemism for vehicle hijackers … a fashionable activity almost invented in my neighborhood.] have to go on the run themselves, when they accidentally Jackroll the daughter of a local warlord.


Should you be a fan of violent, sexually graphic stories that, curiously, many readers have also found to be bizarrely funny… this will be the read of the year.


On the other hand should you be someone who desires simpler pleasures… like: Getting you own way in things, then: 7 Ways… is made for you… and is inherently non-violent… It has been found by many readers over the past eleven years to be most useful at achieving that purpose… getting your own way in things: as well as getting the money that is righteously yours: should that be your requiirement.


Enjoy until next time.
And don’t forget to let me know what you declare the verdict to be…


Let us jointly break the silence.

Confiscation without compensation: Good idea/bad idea

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Something has arisen in my world regarding an issue that has jumped out of the political woodwork with all the same shock that President Trump has generated with his idea that Trade Wars are fun. Guess he forgot about Smoot/Hawley. We forgot why we put that clause in. So our version of the “let us mess with the system” theory of government threatens to hold back all eco/social development activity in the country in which I live, for yet another year; [we lost last year dealing with a recalcitrant President.] The key demand is to nationalise the land.


Our neighboring President did it about 16 years ago [long time to remember that] and successfully took his country back to the 17th century where he believed it all went wrong: and that it was time to start over. So far it is dissappointing to those it was supposed to benefit and so a few million have moved here to make a few bucks.Eventually his own Generals tossed him last year so they could get some traction on developing the place. How do you come back from the 17th century in less than a another one or two.


Next year is election time and everybody wants to grab the election spotlight on their terms.


The issue: Confiscation of property without compensation. A proposal to toss the embedded Konstitutional clause, that forbids konfiskation of property [land] without kompensation, was heavily approved by most parties with populist enthusiasm, in Parly’ last week.A decision, many would say, that could rank with Brexiteering, and the mellifluous Mr Trump, as wrongfooted, unless amazingly cleverly handled… something we are not above successfully achieving once or twice in a century.


Now. I write fiction and currently I am half way through phase five, in a twenty-five year, five phase project. In the process I have become curiously aware, of how the restrictions posed by the Konstitutional provision, can cause potential harm?


For instance: I have just finished an exhaustive final proofreading, of the newly edited version of a novel I published in paperback in 1996. I completed this, preparatory to a new launch of the book, as a follow up to 7Ways, onto Amazon, during this month: by those excellent people at MYeBook.co.za.


The story is called The Buffalo Hunters. It was written initially to exorcise a terrible experience I underwent during the year of our Revolution, on a day that, if it wasn’t already a date of infamy in RSA, [it was] subsequently became a day of infamy for much of the planet: 9/11.


The story, that I call a ‘”brutally allegoric crime story”, subsequently became Part One of a set that I call ‘The Azanian Quartet’… a series that covers the period 1994 to 2136. [Part three ‘The Jonker Memorandum” exists as an 84 episode podcast cyber serial on the website:nicholasjakari.com]. Part 4 is presently three quarters done and four more quarters to go: allowing for errors and omissions and rewrites.


1994 was a year [you may remember]in which our national murder rate went to 66/100,000 people [it is currently still unacceptably high, albeit now down in the 30’s]. The Buffalo Hunters, a vehicle hijacking gang on the run, is a story about one such weekend filled with murder… many murders, with multiple players set in post revolution JoziUniCity.


A particular scene in the violent graphic story, was set in the streets of a high rise region of the inner city, where the ‘night lights’ were more specifically camp fires in the sky, as residents of multiple, electricity free, hijacked, high rise tower block buildings, lit fires in their upstairs spaces to cook and keep warm: a scene written empirically during the winter of ’95.


And today, almost a quarter of a century later, as I’m re-reading what I wrote, the problem of inner city degeneration has morphed into a massive conundrum: with hijacked buildings listing in huge multiples possibly even thousands… across the city.


Apparently, close to none of them can be simply expropriated by the city, and converted to low cost housing, because non-existent, or absentee or even the absentee estates of absentee, now deceased owners, are relatively untouchable, due in part to the existence of the konstitutional clause prohibeting the uncompensated confiscation of landed property.


It seems the City has to rescue the buildings first, then struggle to contact owners, negotiate forever; and at prices that shift reality, and the moment their eye is off the ball: which is obviously often… the places are ‘re-hijacked’ … and the city is the loser.


According to the Mayor: Mr. Herman Mashaba, on radio 702 this morning, [5 March] the city has managed to restore 18 [Eighteen] buildings to their rightful owners… out of the many, many hundreds hijacked over decades now, given that it was already an established practice when I wrote the story [and that scene] in the first place during that winter of ’95.


So it does seem that we have had ‘expropriation without compensation’ now for more than a quarter of a century. I would imagine that many citizens have become immensely wealthy on the cash they were able to garner, by not paying rates [municipal taxes], electricity, personal tax, company taxes and/or royalty fees to anyone much over the 22 years, since I published the original story.


On the debit side, presumably their bribery and konektions accounts are pretty heavily loaded: such are the sources of wonderful meat for crime stories; and such ‘entrepreneurial’ people and their minions n marks form the base for many of the characters in my bloodthirsty story, of a period in history, when as one character puts it: “ There has never been a better time than now: to commit murder.”


Launch date to be confirmed during March, although you can place orders off my site at https://www.amazon.com/author/nicholasjakari with more details as they alter.


Enjoy.
PS. Should there be any problem with that last idea let me know so i can take action.

The Ashanti Raider: opening

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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”.

Episode 84 JM Finale

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In this final episode we discover what it was that caused this story to be a Mythical tale.

 

Episode 83 JM penultimate

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In which It is the day of Korinth Starr’s final election rally. The Kriogenia tream are getting ready to go: Grommets, Kharma and the golden G Force girls. Meantime Marak is reunited with Heksi and has to make decisions.

Episode 83

Episode 56 JM

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Episode 56 JM

Episode 56. What’s in the dark?
Where did the ‘temps’ go… when everyone disappeared again; and are they now alone in the Dark?

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Episode 41 JM

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Episode 41 JM

The allegoric digression continues.
Footnotes 7 & 8: What happened on the road to Armageddon, who is Korinth Starr and what was the Srinaker Incident?

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Episode 39 JM

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Episode 39 JM

Meanwhile back at Kriogenia it is downtime, loadshedding, washing the car for Korinth Starr: while a ‘burned to a crisp’ customer comes in through the post.

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