The Testimonies: episode 2

For those who may not be regular readers what follows is part two of a 19 part series realting to a history of the planet, generally, and RSA [Republic of Southern Azania] specifically, between the period 2009 and 2019. Enjoy.

On the other hand if you are puzzled by this you can back track on NiK’s blog to the items labelled “… Cybersoapie” and “… Prophecies”, respectively, for episode one and the background to the Testimonies.

The Testimonies of an enumerator:
Episode Two.
The evolution of the Azanian Konfederacy:
The emergence of Corinth Starr: Starr the elder.


One of the reasons that the Konfederacy became the Konfederacy and not the more commonly determined Federation, as prevailed in some of the great nations of the world, was the growing realisation that the recently liberated citizens of the Home continent were unwilling to submit their hard won freedom to any form of control no matter how apparently benign.

It was an urgent requirement of those who were the liberators that their vision should come to fruition, come hell or high water, as they say. By the later stages of the opening decades of the so-called 21st century (which others on the planet then, already, called the 51st century) it had become tragically apparent that the old child, the newly emancipated Azanian Konfederacy, was growing up too fast. In doing so it was embracing the coiled reflexes laid down over ten thousand generations and hardly impacted at all really, by the kolonialist aberrations of the past preceding seven or eight. There had been a brief embrace, rapidly disengaged on the part of various Koloniste, and Afrika was left to its own, rapidly revealed, all too human inheritance.

“Human being as part of nature is as pitiless as the earthquake, the flood, the wind, hail and fire, it is only human being apart from nature, that makes existence bearable”. These words by an unknown author propelled the amazing Corinth Starr to early prominence. She was a woman of genius, who transcended all understanding in her combinations of extreme wisdom. She seemed almost tapped into the universe, while at the same time she was a ‘take no shit’ hard-arsed ‘diva’ in the mould of a marketing supremo. And she certainly got her message across.

There were certain problems that needed to be overcome if the then country (now Southern Azania),the most dynamic part of the Konfederacy, was to move forward; and overcoming these was proving intractable. The most difficult was the fact that the world had changed completely in the wake of immense technological developments. The developments changed the way humans in advanced countries thought and this alone made them different.

Then secondly, a mantra of the preceding decades proved horrifyingly true: work, in the traditional sense of mass scale employment, was rapidly becoming obsolete. From a period when the citizen class called businessperson was despised for exploiting that class known as “labour”, came a period when, out of sheer guilt at their own cruelty, businesspersons created better and better machines to replace humans (as workers were also known) and ceased the disgusting exploitation of the past thousands of years of slavery and human exploitation of other, less able humans.

Which was pretty cool except that “the only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited,” as Corinth Starr was fond of quoting.

So by the end of the first decade of that fateful century almost all countries on the planet Urdos were faced with huge marginalised populations. On the one hand the media driven, so-called “fourth estates” and their acolytes would call for “government action to create jobs” On the other hand new technologies conspired to eliminate entire swathes of “jobs”, as work was also called.

Eventually the word “job” itself, began to sound quaint, and old fashioned, as the realisation grew that there were never going to be any more ‘jobs’: well, not ‘real’ ones anyway. And of course the thought that there were never going to be any more jobs, was such an uncool idea, that most of the early stages of the twenty first century were spent playing around with firelighters of denial next to the explosives stores of reality. All around, changes in the world accelerated human consciousness towards its own serendipitous date with destiny.

In advanced countries people had age-old charities restructured into welfare payments systems that gradually paralysed those places with attention demanding bureaucracies. So that when the great catastrophes happened in the second decade the places themselves imploded, and the speed of that implosion was terrifying.

It was for Corinth Starr to create the justification for the new order with her Nobel winning “Basic Pay not Basic grant.” Process.

Africa had been the exception to welfarism. Nonetheless the absence of social services to compensate for hard times was compensated by large-scale access to land that could feed citizens during hard times. Where this access to the land had been blocked by vested interests that land was expropriated, and issued, in small unusable parcels, to those humans who had slipped so far down the ladder of misery that even a parched parcel of land over which they held no real rights was preferable to starvation. Thereafter the brutalising laws of scarcity could be held at bay through the moralising efforts of free food handouts. After the Great Catastrophe there came a greater catastrophe when the cargoes of “food from heaven” dried up, but that is getting beyond the scope of this history of the Manifesto.

Southern Azania was different. It was a wealthy country in the expanding middle-income range of countries. However it was under-performing and not making as much use of its human resources as it could be. This was Starr the elder’s famous summation, at the Great Constitutional Hill Indaba. The conference had been called to debate the growing crisis involving escalating incidences of violent confrontation, between those perched on the edge of survival, and those floating in the free zone. These latter were constantly darting in and out of the daily flow of events to snatch a bite of prey. They were the new hunter/ gatherers of the 21st century: the Buffalo Hunters and the rest, practicing the art of their origins. [see the Buffalo Hunters@ http://editred.com/nicholasjakari ]

A shock election result in 2009 brought home the danger of that disaffection. It had lurked for carefully ignored years in the resentiment consciousness of idle persons in a state of grievance. Idle persons with no access to succour. It was the time of the first Corinth Starr, known to later generations of Southern Azanians as “Starr the elder”.

Starr’s genius was in the way she rationalised a number of trends into a single package and transformed Southern Azania into a veritable tiger within decades. Gradually the prosperity in one part of the emerging Konfederacy began to spill over into other less prosperous regions until the Great Apocalypse interrupted the entire process, which was when Starr’s wisdom bore its unforeseen fruit. And peeple survived again to repopulate the planet.

The trends?

Yes there were various: the trend to the globalised economy maintained its pace, shattering the monolithic power of regional (then called National) governments and rendering much civic policy making impotent in the process. Politicians increasingly made promises that could only be kept through the violation of some or other party’s rights. This violating process itself became the target of legal harassment as bad governments found outraged, citizen’s activist groups hounding them in the courts.

It was an event, minor, as they always seem at first that sparked the launch of the Gender Party and opened the way to the emergence of Corinth Starr…

Extracted from “The Testimonies of an enumerator”.
To be continued…

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