Drugged Mzantsi(South Africa) - a People in the Grip and Clutches of a Drug Pandemic: What's to Be Done? Culture and Us

I have come to the realization writing such a Hub will need a better background of information and heads-up as to why are we here were we are today: Drugged-up and Alcoholics. This is from the era of Apartheid, where the regime used alochol as a weapon against us[In one Hub I have published, I discuss how Apartheid used chemical warfare to kill us off]. This went into being an elaborate operation that has us entangled in the present state of drugged-up inebriation which we cannot escape from. This will take a long time to erase, because, in a strange and twisted illogical way, this has become our culture: Being Drunkards and Drug Addicts for the past 20+ years.

The thing about our state of drunkeneness is that those who imbibe alcohol, today, as in the days of Apartheid, they have no compunction announcing their habitual drinking habits, as if it's rites of passge, and of course, of getting easy lay(enticing drunken women into easy cohabitation) That is our problem right there, where we act in the belief that it is fine to drink and there nothing wrong with consuming large amounts of liquor, spending more time in liquor outlets, breaking down owr families and extended fmilies, and in the later years observing ourselves as crocks ravished by alcohol, and then we wonder and look surprised at what is staring back at us, after years of alochol abuse, whenever we looking at ourselves in the mirror.

The piece below is another way of looking at ourselves through the historical mirror of other people who have had isimilar experiences as ours in order for us to cull some meaning and make sense of our present social miasma. In this Hub, I am not really interested in trying to show how Apartheid really affected us, inasmuch as I want to talk about the past 20+ years, wherein we are now countenancing ourselves as Drug addicts and alcoholics, that we have to begin to look at what happened to us since the ANC took power.

But in this instance, I will let the words of Sankara clarify what it is I am talking about. What happened to the people of Burkina Faso, after 20+ years of ther independent rule under Sankara, is eerily similar to that of our present decrepit reality in more and many ways than none at all. I am inserting this Sankara piece becasue it will begin to give us, in an indirect and direct way what and why we are having a culture of Alcoholism(A carry-over from the vestiges of Apartheid), and the new Drug culture and reality that we are witnessing today in Mzantsi.

By Revisiting Sankara's musings and postulation about Volta, provided by Sankara and seeing ourselves in what he is describing. This is very important that we begin to talk about issues that affect us tremendously, than waxing political and saying nothing in the process.

Reading up on Sankara below, is a lesson about Mzatnsi, foreseen and foretold by Sankara as no one else would. The least thing most of us can do is to Read what Sankara has to say, than just try and regurgitate some maxims of four or five sennteces he has uttered. This is very important, for in his speech, we see Mzantsi with is clothes taken off-meaning, we cannot escape the truth and reality that Sankara is talking about below, and reading it will help us begin to put things into a very needed and essential African-centered perspective, so sorely needed in Mzantsi today.

This whole charade has been going on for the past 20 years. The promises that have been made in the past elections are hammered into the peoples hearts and minds. Right now, as they knew it would be, they are going to vote and give ANC four-more-plus year to try and rule

The elections are finally here, and many people say, "Mmmm, you wait and see when people have to make their own decisions about who to vote for-I tell you, they are going to vote ANC, hands down… You ask why? Well, what else is there in this cesspool — (said in blip-able Kasi/Township slang)… "Squat!" "Vokol!"(Nothing!)

I have been posting articles to try and present an alternative input and point of view into the talking points about the elections in Mzantsi. In this issue, I will go cull from what Sankara reminds us about our own situation, today-which is very eerie and spot on about our own present situation of 20 years of neocolonial rule; Sankara was summing up the past neocolonial rule in his country"

"Sankara":

"The task of constructing a new society cleansed of all ills that keep our country in a state of poverty and economic and cultural backwardness, will be long and Hard. ... The decision by French colonial imperialism to cut its losses was a victory for our people over the forces of foreign oppression and exploitation. From the masses' point of view, it was democratic reform, while from that of imperialism, it was a change in the forms of domination and exploitation of our people.

"This change nevertheless resulted in a realignment of classes and social layers and the formation of new classes. In alliance with the backward forces or traditional society, and in total contempt of the masses, whom they had used as a springboard to power, the "petty-bourgeoisie intelligentsia" of that time set about laying the political and economic foundations for new forms of imperialist domination and exploitation.

"Fear that the struggle of the popular masses would become more radical and lead to a genuine revolutionary solution was the basis for the choice made by imperialism. Henceforth, it would maintain its stranglehold over our country and perpetuate the exploitation of our people through "national intermediaries." The entire process of organizing neocolonial society would be nothing more than a simple operation of substituting one form for another.

"In Essence, neocolonial society and colonial society differed not at all. The colonial administration was replaced by a "neocolonial administration" identical to it in every respect-[The ANC]. The colonial army was replaced by a neocolonial army with the same characteristics, the same functions, and the same role of safeguarding the interests of imperialism and its colonial allies.[Here's Looking At South Africa After Apartheid]

"The colonial school system was replaced by neocolonial schools, which pursued the same goals of alienating our children from our country and reproducing a society that would primarily serve the interests of imperialism and secondarily, those of its local lackeys and allies.
With the Support and blessing of imperialism, Voltaic(Mzantsi) nationals set about organizing the systematic plunder of our country.

"With the crumbs of this pillage that fell to them, they were transformed, little by little, into a truly parasitic bourgeoisie that could no longer control its voracious appetite. Driven solely by personal interest, they no longer hesitated at even the most dishonest means, engaging in massive corruption, embezzlement of public funds and properties,influence-peddling and real estate speculation, and practicing favoritism and nepotism.

"This is what accounts for all the material and financial wealth they accumulated from the sweat of the toilers. Not content to live-off the fabulous incomes derived from the shameless exploitation of their ill-begotten wealth, they fought tooth and nail to capture their political posts that would allow them to use the state apparatus to further their exploitation ad underhanded dealings

"Hardly a year passed without them treating themselves to extravagant vacations abroad. Their children deserted the country's schools for prestigious educations in other countries(Or special private prestigious schools in the country-as in our case in South Africa)… "All the resources of the state were mobilized to guarantee them, at the slightest illness, expensive care in luxury hospitals in foreign countries(and grand hospitals/expensive exclusive health care here in Mzantsi).

"All this has unfolded in full view of the honest,courageous, and hardworking Voltaic(Mzantsi) people, a people mired nonetheless in the most squalid misery. White Upper Volta(Big Cities of South Africa) are a paradise for the wealthy minority, it is a barely tolerable hell for the majority, the People.

"A part of this big majority, the wage earner, despite the fact that they are assured a regular income, suffer the constraints and pitfalls of capitalist consumer society. Their income is completely consumed before they have even touched it.

"This vicious cycle goes on and on, with no perspective of being broken."Through their respective trade unions, the wage earners engage in struggles to improve their living conditions(Marikana, for one). Sometimes the scope of those struggles forces concessions from the neocolonial authorities. But they simply give with one hand what they take back with the other.

"Thus a 10 percent wage increase is announced with great fanfare, only to be immediately taxed, wiping out the expected beneficial effects of the first measure. After five, six, or seven months, the workers finally understand the swindle and mobilize for new struggles. Seven months is more than enough for the reactionaries in power to catch their breadth and devise new schemes. Thus, in this endless fight, the worker always comes out the loser.

"The peasants, the 'wretched of the earth,' are also a component of this big majority. These peasants are expropriated, robbed, molested, imprisoned, ridiculed, and humiliated everyday, yet they are the ones whose labor creates wealth. The country's economy stays afloat despite its weakness, thanks to their productive labor. It is from this labor that the elite that the Gauteng's, Cape Townians are their Eldorado, and this sweetens their lives(just adjusted/added terms/names here)

"Yet, it is the peasants who suffer most from the lack of buildings, roads, health facilities, and services. These peasants,c creators of national wealth, are the ones who suffer the most from lack of schools an educational material(Lost books of Limpopo), for their children.

"It is their children who will swell the ranks of the unemployed after a brief stint in classrooms poorly adapted to the realities of this country. It is among the peasants that the illiteracy rate is highest - 98 percent. Those who most need to learn, so that the output of their productive labor can increase, are the very ones who benefit the least from expenditures for health care, education, and technology.
"The peasant youth — who have the same attitudes as all youth, greater sensitivity to social injustice, and greater desire for progress — finally leave the country-side in revolt, thus depriving it of its most dynamic elements.

"Their initial impulse drives these youth to the large urban centers(Name All The Big cities In Mzantsi). There they hope to find better-paying jobs and to benefit from the advantages of progress.The lack of jobs pushes them to idleness, with all its characteristic vices. Finally, so as not to end up in prison, they seek salvation by going abroad(Local African cities)… where the most shameless humiliation and exploitation await them. But does Voltaic(Mzantsi) society leave them any choice?

"Stated succinctly, this is the situation in our country after twenty-three years of neocolonialism: a paradise for some and hell for the rest…" [Note! That's Mzantsi.. Period!]

By The Way, When Was This Written Or Spoken? It was Written And Spoken On October 2, 1983, presented by Sankara on behalf of the National Council of the Revolution in a national radio and television broadcast…

So It is Here in Mzantsi(South Africa). All What Sankara said above, is what we are — it is sort of like 'looking into the mirror and seeing oneself staring back at you'. I could not have said it better than the great President, Sankara. Everything he just said, is all taking place in our country, and has been happening for the past 20 years. I think it is about time we learned from Sankara that we are not unique in Africa with our Shamocracy/Democrazy… Many countries have gone through these shenanigans from their neocolonial rulers(in our case,today, with the ANC).

Reading Sankara, will help us realize as to what is happening and what is really wrong with the way we see and do things. What I am saying is, in preparation for the coming elections, four years from now, we need to learn and act in different ways. For me, closing this whole hullaballoo about voting, I have decided to post the thoughts and experiences of Sankara, to be my keynote speaker as we are headed to the conclusion of voting. It is looking beyond that that I utilize Sankara, so that, if anyone four years from now can read this article, and identify all the things Sankara said in 1983, in 2018 or so, it means then we will have had one extra year from what Sankara has been 23 years of neocolonization, we will have learned nothing, and we will be repeating the same mistakes and so on, without no end.

My take of the election has been well-captured by Sankara above, and I aim to begin to learn from what he is said about Volta in 1983, to what is happening to us now in May, 2014… Let's all get to work, we have a lot of hard-work ahead...

Here's Looking At You...

Aphorisms:

"Leaders Who Plan For An African Future, But Consider Knowledge Of The Past Irrelevant, Can Only Be Presumed To Be Harboring The Colonialist View Of the African Past. It Was The Wisdom Of Our Fathers to Emphasize That Each Present Generation Owes Obligations And Responsibilities To Both the Ancestors And the Generations yet Unborn...
-By J.F.A. Ajayi

Frantz Fanon Counseled:
"Each Generation Must, Out Of Relative Obscurity, Discover Its Mission, Fulfil It Or Betray It." ...

Thomas Sankara:

Thomas Sankara, often referred to as “Africa’s Che Guevara” was the president of Burkina Faso from 1983 to 1987. He seized power in a 1983 popularly supported coup, with the goal of eliminating corruption and the dominance of the former French colonial power.

Sankara’s foreign policies were centered around anti-imperialism, with his government eschewing all foreign aid because, as he often said, “he who feeds you, controls you.” He pushed for debt reduction and nationalized all land and mineral wealth, averting the power and influence of the IMF and World Bank.

His domestic policies were focused on preventing famine with agrarian self-sufficiency and land reform, prioritizing education with a nation-wide literacy campaign, and promoting public health by vaccinating 2.5 million children. And his was the first African government to publicly recognize the AIDS epidemic as a major threat to Africa.

Thomas Sankara was an extraordinary man.

- He outlawed female genital mutilation, forced marriages, and polygamy and was the first African leader to appoint women to major cabinet positions and actively recruit them for the military. A motorcyclist himself, he formed an all-woman motorcycle personal guard.

- He encouraged women to work outside the home and stay in school even if pregnant.

- He launched a nation-wide public health ‘Vaccination Commando’ a state run program that in a period of only 15 days in early November 1984, completed the immunization of 2.5 million children against meningitis (a world record), yellow fever and measles. This operation was so successful in that children in neighbouring countries like the Ivory Coast and Mali were sent to Burkina Faso for free immunization that helped curtail high rates of infant and child mortality.

- He sold off the government fleet of Mercedes cars and made the Renault 5 (the cheapest car sold in Burkina Faso at that time) the official service car of the ministers. He lowered his salary, as President, to only $450 a month and limited his possessions to a car, four bikes, three guitars, and a refrigerator.

- He planted over ten million trees to halt the growing desertification of the Sahel and established an ambitious road and rail construction program to “tie the nation together.”

- He was known for jogging unaccompanied through the capital city in his track suit and posing in his tailored military fatigues with his mother-of-pearl pistol. And when asked why he didn’t want his portrait hung in public places, as was the norm for other African leaders, he said ”there are seven million Thomas Sankaras.”

Sankara’s revolutionary policies for self-reliance and defiance against the neoliberal development strategies imposed by the West made him an icon to many supporters of African liberation. But his policies alienated and antagonized the vested interests of the small but powerful Burkinabe middle class, the tribal leaders who he stripped of the traditional right to forced labor and tribute payments, and the foreign financial interests in France and their ally Ivory Coast.

Just learning from what Sankara is saying and what he did, is one perfect model we should and could emulate and imitate given our state of our people poor people here in Mzantsi. There are many things I have tried to furnish within this Hub about the solutions that can be looked at and applied into our present condition. I am using Sankara to show the fact that we are much better than what we are at pressent here in the country of our birth.

Tomorrow is the 16th of June 2019. Next year, in 2020, This June 16th Commemoration will be taking place as the original June 16th happened and occurred on a Wednesday. This is very important because, as we have now seen, the ANC has hi-jacked the Revolution, trying to accommodate White Students, and is calling it Youth Day. We are going to have to fight to change the name to the Revolution of June 16, 1976.

What concerns me in this piece is the way we have been celebrating this momentous event that changed South Africa forever. On this Day, 43 years ago, some of us were exuberant and very rebellious and optimistic youth that had no fear of anything Apartheid, and we wanted change, now, in that minute and that day. We were miffed and were spoiling for a good fight. The war we engaged in on this day, happened when we were in our school black and white uniforms, and some schools were in their school's colors.

But be that as it may, we were ready to take as much as we gave. The Boers killed numerous of us and many were buried in unmarked and unknown graves in Avalon and Doornkop Cemetries, at night, live and dead bodies were dumped into the open Mass Graves dug by huge tractors. I have talked a lot about this issue in my Blogs.

What has been happening nowadays and in the past decades in our celebrating this Revolutionary event, is the binges of alcohol we are seeing as the staple of the celebration that a lot has gotten lost along the way. In a day like this, we are going to see all types of people wearing something akin to the school uniforms of the day-all ages. But, what has been really happening in these celebrations is the fact that we Drink A Lot Of Liquor, and are using all types of drugs.

This is wrong, and the symbolism of the uniform shows nothing to the younger ones and impressionable youth of the day, today, that, it seems like, to them, that June 16th was all about Drinking a lot of booze and drugs, and the students of 1976 were drunk and having a good time whilst killed-drunk and drugged!

We have let this whole struggle that many have died for, become a celebration and a drinking spree and drug binges that the present-day youth, who I talk to and ask what they think about June 16, incorrectly calledYouth Day, by the reactionary and quisling ANC, the youth tell me that they know that they have to wear their black and white school uniform in order to go and get drunk and use drugs...

What are we not doing to curb this false presentation of such a Great Day? Why are we not fighting to stop the splurging of liquor and drug usage by our people? Why are we ready to justify and gloat about our abilities to drink tons of Malt and spirits, and make that to be a manly thing-and in this case, tomorrow, project our hallowed Revolution as if it was us student going on a drinking binge and drug abuse? Why?

Why are our men and women today engaged is such a salacious and very terrible orgy of drunkenness/drugs and pretend that that is what was happening on June 16th 1976? Why is it important to support and give mega profits to SA Breweries, on this day in particular, with all the cured and poisoned liquor that we imbibe so greedily and readily? Why are we so out of it, why are we allowing ourselves to become alcoholics/drug addicts on the Day when we started kicking the butt of Apartheid? Why, maar he?

We should be telling and relating the Stories and the History of the Day. We should be telling our children about the heroes of the day who died, although they be unknown, unsung and nameless; we should be talking about their selfless deeds. Telling today's Youth how much courage it took the Revolutionary Youth/School children to tackle one of the most powerful military machines South of Africa; and that this was a history lesson and motivation for them to go into the future recognizing and knowing the strength and the change they can bring to our destitute country today.

I really do not care for White students and Youth, and the only ones that tried to act up on the June Revolution movement were the students at Wits University, who did it for one day, and they were sjamboked to hell-and-back, and they never again dared enter the Revolutionary Fray. So, when one sees these little white boys and girls addressing certain events on the day tomorrow, One feels like I should have just died with those on that day than accept this ANC farce of accommodating the White Youth. Where were they on this Day? Where?

There are many people from north of Africa who are hi-jacking this event in various ways. Yeah! Right! They too, north of Africa, where were they on this day of June 16th 1976? Yes, why not ask them what role they played, except for the fact that our exiles were tightly confined to camps and curfewed all the time by the local police and soldiers. Let's call it for what it was.

They were very scared of the Boers who would occasionally come into these countries, north of South Africa, and shot up everything that moved and everybody they got in the camps. In many cases, as in Maputo, they Boers had the collaboration of local police and soldiers. We know about these things.

As the song by Miriam and Hugh ask in their Lyrics, "Where were you men when the children were being shot down and killed? Where were You?" This is in reference to the ANC who were caught with their pants down, and there is no way that someone is going to convince me that they were at the head of the June 16th Revolution when it Spun South Africa upside Down. The song by Bra Hugh and Sis Miriam, Called "Soweto Blues" sung in commemoration of Mandela and June 16th in Zimbabwe, is one such songs that NEC cronies and their malleable cadres should be played to, and make them listen. They were nowhere too.

Now that they are in power and ass-licking their way into the graces of White folks, they changed the name fromJune 16th African(Soweto) Students Revolution to Youth Day! Say What!!!.. This is Fucked Up!!!! We never told nor had the ANC to tell when we went to war that this is now a "Youth Day" Bull Crap! Yes, I said it and will say it again: The ANC was nowhere present, nor prepared for the Revolution that took place.

Also, they are very arrogant today and come and hi-jack the spirit of the revolution, and come to deliver their pompous but barren speeches, like they were ducking bullets of the R1 rifle, pellet bullets, rubber bullets, live ammunition from pistols and rifles of the Boers spewing death and creating a huge carnage. Yeah, they never even smelled no teargas…

They too, the ANC, was never there, when bullets were flying, when we were charging the lines of police and soldiers formations, when we ran and hid, and propped up anywhere and burnt everything authoritarian in sight.

They only came alive, by the way, after betraying the Wankie guerrillas trying to make their way home, when the Youth of 1976, showed up and they had to start from scratch building camps and so forth. We can tell it as it was or just shut up, like we do not know what was taking place.

We can control the talking points and narratives or just wallow in our own self-pity and miserable decrepit existence. The ANC was a do-nothing so-called guerrilla or liberation movement. They did not liberate anybody. Just as they are not taking care of business and shutting down SA Breweries for the day, and institute a law that said no liquor for today.
That is just what we did on this day. "Away With Boozers"!! Yes, we burned a lot of bottle stores/liquor stores, and those stores of quislings, and chased the police sell-outs and their families out of the Ghetto. We destroyed and gutted all administration building; Putco buses were targeted along with many West Rand Board Administration vehicles and personell…

There was no apologizing to some white people anywhere. Anyway, the rest of us did not grow up with nor went to White controlled schooled. We, the rest of us as African Students, were schooled in our Townships schools, paid for by our parents and communities, and never really funded by the Apartheid regime. Never.

We involved our parents and united with various workers, I am not here talking about unions, but ordinary workers who were our fathers, brothers, sisters, mothers, cousins, uncles childhood friends, grandmas and gandpas… Yes, we did not have to deal with one being BCM, ANC, PAC, AZAPO, Whatever, we knew one thing on this day, we were all united as the students/people of SOWETO, taking on the most terrible and powerful war machines South of Africa, and in our own paltry-We won-Today, Mzantsi'/Azania… Is drunk and drugged, and infiltrated at all points and facets of our lives... There's a bitter irony to what I have just said.

We did not have to fight drugs, because they were not as much or plenty as we see now… Many people smoked Dagga, but these new designer drugs of late, is what I will be writing an article and tracing them as to their origins. We fought against booze. In the 1960s, Apartheid did not allow Africans to drink nor buy liquor-Thus the raids in the Shebebens-check out the history of Sophiatown, and Orlando, etc.

But Verwoerd and his minions decided to put a bottle store in every train station, and that is why we are where we are today. Boozed Up Nation. We even hold the dubious record of having emptied all the brewery tanks of SA Breweries… We are going to have to stop Drinking Alcohol!!! And Abusing Drugs!!

In June 16th 2019, we commemorated the event that took place 43 years ago, and the aftermath of this Revolution spread like Wild fire throughout South Africa until the coming into power of the ANC-With its Codesa and gravy-train and collaboration with these, International monied interests and governments, and putting us under the bus and ignoring us-for a mere pittance. Yes, the ANC sold us out, and if there's still any doubt in anyone's mind… Let's then talk about everything political and economical today in our country. What is it called? Corruption.. Quislings, Cutthroats, Turncoats and Charlatans in our midst are squirming when I say what I am saying.

I do not give a rat;s ass as to what is going to be said or felt by whomever for whatever. We have been sold out, are being drugged-up, even in our medicines, foods, and everything... And we all are sitting around and hoping for some Tender, which has done nothing for us, really, enriched a few lackeys, and the rest have to pull themselves by their own bootstraps because the ANC is going to rule until Jesus comes… Such unsurpassed arrogance and mien-in our faces as a poor African people, by our elected leaders… Damn!!!!

We should properly remember the Day with Respect and Dignity. If our so-called and so-perceived leaders and dignitaries and their former Masters decide to take over our Day of Greatness, we should prepare early; we should reconfigure our narrative of the Day; we should collect and collate the names of all those murdered by being shot, tortured in the jails and cells and incarcerated and incinerated in the Vlakplasses strewn throughout the country. remember Tiro, Tsietsi, Biko, Sobukwe and many of those nameless hundreds of people who made the day possible and a success. Let's Tell Their Stories and Deeds On This Day.

On this Day, from henceforth, we should tell our story and history from an African-centered perspectives without making excuses to no one of what we are doing. We were not handed down this achievement, as witnessed by the handing down of crooked governmental rule to the ANC. We Earned it! We deserve it! It is ours to do whatever we seem and deem fit of it.

If you do not really know what happened, some of us are here on Facebook and HubPages to tell it like it is. The Day of June 16th 1976 was not about Boozing and symbolically wearing school uniforms and making Popeyes and Micky Mouses of ourselves and pretend that's what happened-Getting Drunk-and today being also heavily Drugged… Shame on us, and it is about time that 'We Do Away With Booze." There's no 'ifs' nor 'buts' about this matter.

From the way I have lived thus far and participated in the June 16th Revolution in my own minuscule capacities and abilities I boldly declare and affirm:
We Are Much Better Than This..
Amandla! Matla! Power! Krag! Aluta Kontinua!!!!

Nyaope, also known as whoonga, is a dangerous and highly addictive South African street drug. Nyaope is a fine white powder that is usually combined with marijuana (dagga) and smoked.

It is not always clear what all of the ingredients of nyaope are, and the ingredients may vary from place to place. But one thing is clear: Nyaope is made of a lethal combination of substances, which can include heroin, detergent powder, rat poison, and crushed anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs).

Siboniso Mdlalose, aged 22 has been smoking the drug for over three years now and is one of the victims of the popular drug that has led plenty of youth astray.

Talking to Siboniso during his morning dose he said, “I started smoking as a way of fun unfortunately in the end I got hooked, the cravings were so unbearable that’s when I realised that I can’t live without it and am now depending on it.

This lousy plastic cost us R40 and we share, when we’re done we have to go back on the streets and hustle. The minute I get money the first thing that comes to mind is to feed the addiction. It is by grace that I still have these sneakers; I have nothing because I sold everything I had even my cell phone.”

Asked where he get syringe which he uses to inject himself with, he responded “From grannies that are suffering from sugar-diabetes, remember that grannies have access to these instruments as they undergo treatment at clinics.
Siboniso maintains he was a promising soccer star during his hey-days but today all that has gone with the wind.

“I was good when it comes to school work, my classmates won’t believe what I’ve turned out to be. Though I’d love to go back to school but I can’t, because that means missing out on hustling and the urge of feeding the addiction; where will I find time to get money,” he asked.

“My dreams are shattered; I wish I could get another opportunity. I have a child and I don’t even get time to spend with him. We are really in need of help, if I could get it I would really appreciate. I have goals however achieving them is a steep while this drug is on my way.”

Siboniso jokingly elaborated, “There is a myth that nyaope user don’t get a hard on, that’s a lie, the truth of the matter is that we take longer to come (sic).

Albert Msimanga, a parent said, “Every Tuesday we have a meeting at Moloantoa filling stating in Zone 12 where we try to find ways on how to fight the usage of the drug by our children.

” Msimanga made a plea to parents to join them in eradicating this drug that has taken over.

“Don’t be ashamed to tag your kid along to get help because this scourge has widely spread, in the near future our youth would be no more as a result of nyaope. Failure to act at an early stage will lead into dire consequences”

Article: As published on The View News (November 2013)

Men and women, young and old, black and white, line the streets of Pretoria’s inner city, huddling in doorways and as close to buildings as possible when night-time comes.

The homeless, estimated to run into the hundreds across Pretoria, lie down in groups, often sharing covers and mattresses in the forced camaraderie of people without anyone else to rely on.

For those who are lucky enough, their beds are old, stained mattresses with old, threadbare blankets for warmth during the night. Others lie down on little more than cardboard boxes while some sleep on the hard ground.

“It is all we have,” 23-year-old Mncedisi told the Pretoria News.

Most days are spent looking for money – some stand on street corners and beg while others collect plastic containers and tins to sell.

Others try their hand at being impromptu car guards but claim turf wars often land them either in prison or hospital.

“We spend our money on drugs,” said 37-year-old Annette.

The mother of two has been living on the streets for three years. Her only possessions are contained in a battered suitcase.

She says: “When my husband died, I fell into drugs, resigned from my job and became a nuisance to my family.”

The family did everything they could and eventually gave up on her, forcing her to leave her home in Joburg and take refuge in the streets of Pretoria.

“They are not prepared to help me unless I help myself,” she said.

This story resonated throughout the streets. Most of the homeless people the Pretoria News spoke to admitted that drugs were the main reason for being on the streets.

Gary, 21, sat with a needle inserted into his finger, just after dawn on Saturday. “Nyaope,” he explained as he dreamily talked of seven years on drugs. “I just need help to get off this. I have been in and out of rehabilitation seven times, but know I am ready to co-operate and get off drugs.”

Brothers Chris and Marko have been living rough for about two years now.

“We have done our family so much damage they want nothing to do with us,” said Chris, 38.

They spend their days begging at street corners, buying drugs with the proceeds.

“A roll of heroin costs R30 as does one of cocaine,” said Marko, 32. The drugs are readily available on the streets.

Thabang talks fondly of his mom.

“I miss home. I miss my mom. I think about her often and have plans to go and see her, as soon as I have enough money to buy her food and other stuff,” he says, a “zol” in his hand.

The 22-year-old from Atteridgeville has been on the street since he was 18.

“My family is poor and I was a burden more than anything,” he says as he drags furiously on the joint.

He spends his days begging at traffic lights near Menlyn.

“I make anything up to R400 a day but whenever I get money, no matter how much, I rush to buy drugs,” he explained.

Maketi, Sizwe and a couple of others have an empty bottle of peanut butter between them. They take turns to wipe the inside with bread and eat.

Maketi has a trolley which he pushes around, collecting recyclable material to sell. He came to Pretoria from Limpopo with a group of other boys. “This guy brought us here to work for him and when the time to pay us came, he disappeared.”

The street-dwellers are often rounded up by the police and put into cells.

“They are a source of danger to pedestrians so we lock them up but cannot keep them in for long,” one metro policeman said.

A plan to keep the streets clean was put into effect just before the World Cup in 2010. “After the tourists left no one bothered to make sure it was maintained,” said the policeman, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“Oh, we go in and out of jail a lot,” said Clement, adding that drugs were more accessible in jail than outside.

They all claimed they sought rehabilitation but said the cost and waiting period required to get into government facilities were prohibitive. “Rehab costs anything from R20 000 to R45 000 and to get into a state facilities you can wait up to six months,” said Lorna.

The impending cold of the winter brought with it the kindness of the people of Pretoria, they said. People reached into their hearts, wallets and cupboards to bring them blankets, mattresses and comfort food, they said.

One of these Good Samaritans, Martha Skhosana from Abundant Life Ministries, said: “We often go out and try to convince them to live in our shelter but they need their freedom and they know they cannot do drugs in our care.”

Churches often gave them provisions – boxes with a small bag of sugar, mealie meal or rice, face wash and moisturiser, deodorant, tins of canned food and soup.

Said Gareth: “These are taken straight to the general dealers known to buy them for fast money because we really do not need those things.”

They said people generally ignored them although some offered to help. Chris said many people looked upon white beggars with disdain.

“They either get sympathetic and offer to help or, in the case of other white people, they treat us as a disgrace, look down upon us and say we are lazy,” he added.

Bheka Shilubane, a lecturer in social studies at a local university, said homelessness was a result of housing segregation in the days of apartheid.

“People would be required to work but would not be provided with accommodation. So they either put up temporary structures where they could or merely slept on the street.”

He added: ”The need to live an individualistic life pulls grown men and women into the street while poverty can push them out of a home situation and lead them into homelessness.”

“Do not feel sorry for us; if we had the will to get off the street we would,” said Zayne, 30.

He said getting money for doing nothing more than standing at a traffic light was the easiest way for him to earn.

“We lie and say we have hungry children and wives and people feel sorry for us and help yet all we want is the next fix,” Zayne said.

“Here we hustle and pay no dues to anyone. We sleep together, fight for each other and can walk away from each other at the end of the day,” said Mpasie, 28, who has been on the streets since he was 17. The Article above was written by Ntando Makhubu

Article on Nyaope
"NYAOPE"/"Whoonga": The Killer Designer/Homemade Killer Drugs Consuming Africans of Mzantsi...

This is the topic that was picked up on earlier in 2012 by an FB'er called Mgeve, and I had made a promise that I will pick up the cudgel since she was banned from FB. This is a very serious issue which has received scant attention or totally ignored by the African South African pundits here on the Walls of FB. It is a fact that the drug has decimated families, youth and elderly people. It has left destruction and ruin in the townships throughout Soweto, but in this case, I will focus on Orlando East.

Drugs like Cocaine and Mandrax pills started proliferating in the Township around the early eighties and has now become a pandemic throughout different communities of Africans, Coloreds and Whites. In Orlando East(Soweto), the inhabitants have been watching with dread and fear as their youth became zombies, sick, and died from this drug-which, when imbibed, makes its victims froth at the mouth and tear-up incessantly, walking unsteadily-zombie-like walk and creates an ever increasing crave, leading to all sorts of crime that has this drug-besieged Township of Orlando teetering on the brink of lunacy and genocide.

This is a problem which has been thus far so utterly ignored that the residents of Orlando, rallied by the members of the CPF(Community Police Forum which was formed by the local Orlando station police force) along with and run by the local residents-who patrol and try to keep crime at a low minimum. On the second Major Saturday of August 2013, a coalition of local Orlando residents, their CPF Team and several policemen in their cars descended on the drug dens dotting the Township in each and every street. Let me give a background of this drug epidemic as penned by Eleanor Hall:

"Heads-Up On Nyaope"

"The South African government is warning that drug abuse could pose an even bigger threat to its young people than the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

It says drug use has increased by 600 per cent in the last decade.

Drug dealers are even using AIDS drugs and rat poison to make highly addictive narcotics.

As Sally Sara reports from Johannesburg.

(Sound of car horns)

SALLY SARA: We're standing on a street corner in the township of Alexandra.

It's not just any corner. This is where Nelson Mandela used to live, but less than 50 metres from his old house, teenagers are smoking drugs.

One glassy eyed 16-year-old giggles and says he doesn't have much respect for the former president.

BOY: Mandela (laughs) because Mandela didn't buy me anything. I want a car (laughs).

(Sound of music)

SALLY SARA: The local drug is called Nyaope. It's a mixture of dope, heroin, rat poison and cleaning products.

Sometimes it's also laced with anti-retroviral AIDS medication.

Linda Twala is a local funeral director and community campaigner in Alex.

LINDA TWALA: This drug Nyaope when you use it is dangerous. Some of the children that been using this stuff, they are now hopeless. I mean, they are damaged, if I may put it that way.

SALLY SARA: In the early 2000s Mr Twala buried some of the thousands of young victims of the AIDS epidemic. Now, it's the victims of drug violence.

LINDA TWALA: The drug problem is even worse, because I am worried about our children.

SALLY SARA: Earlier this week, South African police minister, Nathi Mthethwa, said drugs could be an even bigger threat to the nation, than the AIDS pandemic.

The government estimates that illegal drug use has increased by around 600 per cent in the past decade and costs the South African economy $2 billion a year.

But, there's another cost that's even more devastating.

(Sound of door opening)

KHOSI SITHOLE: This is where the incident happened. He was in his bed. He was asleep.

SALLY SARA: Members of the Mazibuko family open the door of a small, neat room. It's not much bigger than a double bed.

A sister, mother and grandmother are sitting on a mattress on the floor.

This is where 25-year-old Sifiso Mazibuko was shot dead, as he slept last Thursday night.

KHOSI SITHOLE: This is the room that he was staying in, this very room where he was shot in his bed. He was just starting his life, actually, 'cause he was still very young. And yeah, unfortunately it's always the good ones who suffer the most. I mean, my brother was... my brother was, you know, he was somebody you could be proud of.

SALLY SARA: Sifiso had a job, a child and a future, but he was allegedly killed by teenagers high on Nyaope. They wanted his television, but took his life instead.

His sister, Khosi Sithole says the drug problem is so bad in South Africa, many people are living in fear, instead of freedom.

KHOSI SIFISO: I'm not free. I'm afraid. That is not freedom. I don't think this is the South Africa our parents fought for. Our parents fought for us so that we can be anything and everything that we wanted to be. This is not freedom.

SALLY SARA: Young South Africans have inherited a different kind of freedom.

They are free of apartheid but shadowed by unemployment, crime and economic inequality.

Funeral director, Linda Twala is worried about the future of the next generation of young South Africans.

LINDA TWALA: You know a child is a child. No child wants to be a thug at the age of 14, 15, but, they don't even know how many people they've killed. And this stuff is dangerous.

(Sound of people singing)

"Community Action and and Exhumation of Crime/Drugs" - Drug Ground Zero Soweto and Durban and Cape Town....

As the article above aptly shows we take note on this part of the article that the same sound of singing, became protestations when the coalition I had described above descended onto to the drug houses and dens within Orlando East. A very disturbing picture began to emerge.

The Jo'burg Metro police gave permission to the marchers, and provided the police force, and it was explained to the marchers that the agreement, and permission to approach the drug dealers was given. With placards and a huge number of people began advancing to the 'known' Drug dens, and those who sold from street corners or shop stoops.

The people went to the houses, containers used as phone phones booths and other illicit activities including the selling of "Nyaope"; The mob advised the police that the Zimbabweans, Nigerians, Pakistanis, and some Coloreds[along with locals] should be arrested and searched for drugs. In some houses in Orlando East, they found drugs on the bodies of Old grannies, who were used as carriers.

Heading the large group was Councilor Matlaka(Councilor of Dube), along with 8(eight) police cars, about 15 policemen and the CPF patrollers were about 30, and the rest of the group consisted of a large number of undisclosed members of the local residents. Five young boys were arrested and were found to have drugs on their persons. Some of these dealers were women who had come from the rural areas and were very secretive as to who their suppliers were. Others were resistant to the mob but caved in when they saw the mob's menacing bearing and intent.

In the part of the Township called "Roma"[which is still Orlando East], two houses were searched and drug paraphernalia was found; they also found a lot of stolen IDs and Marijuana in bags, along with credit cards and guns. Some of this stuff was found under the beds in some of these houses, or carelessly strewn all over the dirty and unkempt houses.

In another areas of Orlando around a store called "Goodluck" several houses were without owners, and all sorts of evil and illicit and sordid activities have been taking place in plain sight and nobody could do anything about it.. In one "Pink" Big House, the occupants tried to run away, but were apprehended had had on their person both 'Nyaope' and Marijuana and two guns.

Maponya - (The Nyaope Potentate whose fiefdom is Orlando East)

In the area around the Grounds and Tennis Courts(Known Generally as 'Escort'(Still in Orlando East) is the headquarters of the Nyaope sales. Hoards of youth and well-off middle class Africans, along with cops(who are in the pay of a guy), Mgeve, in her article, identified as "Maponya", has in his employ, his grandmother, and siblings-the Police and local ANC honchos. One of the 'carriers' who serves his customers on his behalf, was found with six plastics bags and she was in a close to comatose state..

The locals who were in the march, alerted the police that Maponya's grandmother had all the drugs hidden in her body, underneath her clothes. She was very rude and arrogant and dared the police to touch her. She was arrested and searched on arrival in that the police station On seeing what's happening, Maponya attempted to escape, put on a disguise but the citizens saw to it that he was apprehended.

When he was brought into the parked police cars, he insisted that he should sit in the front with the police driver. All the time he was wagging his finger and berating the police, and none responded to his charade. From this incident it was apparent that the Police Commander and his side-kicks(police grunts) were in the pay of this lilliputian drug potentate.

The community, who have been seeing the police and other people of note come to buy or get paid by him over a period of time, lost their cool. They threatened to riot and demanded that Maponya be put in the back of the squad car with all other arrestees. Eventually he was put in the back with all other small-time drug dealers, and he was clearly miffed about this and he carried on his protestations.

What got him off the hook, was the directive the police said that he could not be arrested if he did not have any drugs on him. Those who worked for him refused to snitch or rat out on him. They all denied having received or brought this stuff from him-and the junkies were intimidated into denying that he supplied or sold them the "Nyaope".. This technicality, help set him free and he was released without being charged.

The crowd moved to an area in Orlando too, called 'Paramount', and they went into the ramshackle shacks filling up the yards of most houses in Orlando, and in them they found and routed drug dens , prostitution harems, and 3 people were arrested there-considered to be the main bosses. As far as one can tell, "Nyaope" is sold in each and every street in Orlando East.

The denizens of Orlando were disgruntled and felt betrayed, because everyone knew who(Maponya) was really distributing drugs wholesale in the Township, and he walked scot-free, due to a flimsy technicality in the law so that, in the end, the people wanted the Minister of the Police, Mrs. Raphiyega and the government to become involved.

The people finally decided to call a meeting in a week of two, to report back to the community these events, and have decided to take the case to the Provincial government and they want the Premier to take this case over.
Most of those residents who partook in the raid, have to go around the Townhsip armed

"Drug And Chemical Warfare On the People Of Mzantsi"

Below I will link an article which no longer talks about "Nyaope, but "Whoonga" which is a potent and a highly addictive mixture of Marijuana, heroin, and HIV Medications. The same with "Nyaope" and other concoctions, which also include the life-saving pills for HIV-Aids, and literally makes waste of the users and death, sickness, crime, homicide, rape and so forth have spiked. This is a crisis, and it needs to be addressed aggressively, or we stand to loose not only generations, but a whole nation of people high on home-made designer drugs which are decimating communities throughout South africa with unequaled impunity.

Until the day we Africans of Mzantsi stop thinking of and for our individual selves only, until they day we Africans of Mzantsi say enough is enough; and, until we come to our senses and go and see for ourselves what I am talking about or everyone is writing about what these drugs are doing to us, our people, relatives and communities[Nation], we will forever be in our cocoons and do nothing, and we are clearly facing something more dangerous than HIV AIDs(Which is still battering and wiping the core of our communities), we will in the end taken and snuffed by the genocide we are now facing. There is more to the story as to how these drugs came into the country, and I will be writing an article tracing the origins of this scourge and addiction.

We are really much better than this, lest we forget that.... We can all 'wax political' to our egos content.. But this, is not going away, instead, it is threatening our very existence as the indigenous of the country of South Africa... We are in the clutches of a very dangerous and deadly grip of a drug epidemic whose likes has never been seen before in our country. We need to begin to help ourselves and come to these communities and route the drugs and dealers consistently and brutally, or it is they, as we are seeing, who will run our Townships(they already are) or either its us who will have the finally say, and control and run our townships and communites... Whither Mzantsi.....

Drugs, Gun And Death In The African South African Communities: Ugh! Azania...

Not All Of Us See politics in the same way... But we all Undergo The same Experiences...

According to Jose Marti:"We must state categorically that there is no salvation for our people unless we turn our backs on all the models that charlatans of all types have tried to sell us for twenty years. There is no salvation outside of this rejection. There is no development separate from a rupture of this kind. All those new intellectual giants who are emerging from their slumber — awakened by the dizzying rise of billions of men in rags, aghast at the threat of this hunger-driven multitude weighing on their digestion — are beginning to rework their speeches/[writings].

Andre Gunder-Frank el;aboraes:

"Far it being for me to ridicule the patient efforts of honest intellectuals who, because they have eyes to see, are discovering the terrible consequences of the devastation imposed on us by so-called specialists in the development of the Third World. My fear is to see the fruits of so much energy co-opted by Prosperos of all kinds who — with a wave of their magic wand — spirit us to world of slavery dressed up in today's fashions.

"My fear is justified even more by the fact that the educated petty bourgeoisie of Africa - if not the entire world — is not prepared to give up its privileges, either because of intellectual laziness or simply because it has tasted the Western way of life. Because of these petty bourgeois forget that all genuine political struggle requires rigorous, theoretical debate, and they refuse to rise to the intellectual effort of conceiving new concepts equal to the murderous struggle that lies ahead of us. Passive and pathetic consumers, they wallow in terminology Fetishized by The West, Just As They Wallow In Western Whiskey And Champagne In Shady-Looking Lounges.

"Ever since the concepts of negritude and African Personality, now showing their age, the search for ideas that are genuinely new produced by the brains of our "great" intellectuals is in vain. Our vocabulary and our ideas come from elsewhere. Our professors, engineers, and economists are content to simply add color — from often the only things they brought back with them from European/American universities that have produced them are their degrees and their velvety adjectives and superlatives!(Sankara is confirming what Andre Gunder Frank was saying above).

Sankara:

"It is both necessary and urgent that our trained personnel and those who work with the pen learn that there is no such thing as neutral writing. In these stormy times we cannot give today's and yesterday's enemies monopoly over "thought," "imagination," and "creativity."Before it too late — and it is already late — this elite, these men of Africa and of the Third World, must come home to themselves, that is, to their societies and to the miseries we inherited.

"They must understand that the battle for ideology that serves the needs of the disinherited masses is not in vain. but they must understand, too, that they can only become credible on an international level by being genuinely creative — by "Portraying A Faithful Image Of Their People, An Image Conducive to Carrying Out Fundamental Change In Political And social Conditions And To Wrenching Our Countries From Foreign Domination And Exploitation, Which Leave Us No Other Perspective Than bankruptcy.

The citation above is an introduction to the piece I am posting below. The Drugs are decimating our people and everything, worse than Aids, with the same powerful destructive effect/affect, and devastating impact on us: especially in the community I am about to talk about.
Before I do, I want to preface my comments on the article above by saying: we might try very hard to play the game of the Ostrich burying its head in the sand, but, we are even more exposed by doing that, and cannot even see and deal with the dangers facing us, today.

In the Township of Orlando, the oldest one of all the various Soweto Townships that expand from it; drugs are wreaking havoc, and piercing at the core of the community more than many here on all the Social Media are willing to accede or acknowledge. I have written extensively on Facebook about the drug pandemic that has assailed us, and promised will come back with new information and update about the Nyaope that is wiping us out. Seriously...

I will post the earlier post on Maponya again, at the end of this piece.I have posted the fact that the ANC government has acknowledged that ''drug abuse'' poses an even bigger threat to its young people'(the children and youth of Mzantsi), than the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

I think both are huge, and are really furiously gnawing away at our people and us. Many diss and deride these users, but many of us today, who have to live with and amongst our African people in Orlando and witnessing first hand what is going down-we feel/see it; what is happening to us on a much grander and macabre state that many really ignore nor care to know-it is what is our reality…

When I write such articles, the supposed-elite-African-intelligentsia and other such opportunists, keep quite, and do not even do anything. Some pick up ideas and apply themselves and their newly found ideas in trying to do something for the people. Be as it may, this present article is present a report, news that is not reported, and stories from the Township of Orlando, that are swirling throughout the denizens of Orlando, but are tangentially known by the rest of our edumacated elite-and they are national in scope.

Orlando is but just a window into the whole cesspool and morass that is our decrepit existence, That is why I will not stop writing about these sad chapters in our lives, but, am writing them for posterity, and to preserve them as historical record for our children and people/Nation.

There are two things I would like to take a look at, and lastly try and interrogate the whole social miasma as it is shaped, to date.We have a rat-rodent problem which is being exacerbated by the corrugated iron shacks patched/made of boards, plastics and anything to build a dwelling for our people.

Orlando is very well-known to have legions of this structures in their yards, and these have created this formidable rat invasion and other creatures, which causes that the people say things about their presence bordering on conspiracy theories. Nonetheless, it is a fact that these rats and rodents are biting the people's doors; also, they are biting the children sleeping and creating a host of other ailments we have not even begun to deal with.

The most recent posts I have dropped on all sorts of Social Media, are geared towards us beginning to write about our real-realities and maybe many of us will begin to learn and see something that we had not even thought about, before. Creating a literature from the grassroots reporting as I am about to do, is one way to go, of the many that can used. I am going to make sure that this disaster that the people of Orlando are facing, as I am onto this article, is exposed and written about as clearly, and as much in a raw way as I can conjure and write it down.

I have waxed political and theoretical enough on the most recent two pieces I have posted here on HP/Facebook and elsewhere. Now, I want to delve into the environment I live and exist in and to make an attempt to caricature its reality and effects/affects on us. What is happening as I am onto this article in our Township is unconscionable. There is no moral justification as to what is happening to our youth, and the adult(children, baby population). This is a very serious thing happening to us here, and I think I will talk about it now.

Here in Orlando we are facing a deadly and serious drug epidemic.

Drugs are so rife, that we have several drug potentates planted throughout the whole Township and in many contemporary youth social events. Pretext of an event is a carte blanche operation for the drug dealers and distributors. Drugs have a unique and not so sophisticated way the travel and are disseminated in our community here in the Kasi(Township). It would at one time help us to deal with this problem better if this were to followed up and exposed.

Here in Orlando, we customarily call areas within Our Township of Orlando, by the first numbers of their street, in one part of Orlando, and others have their names for a general group of areas, but being Orlando too.

So, in the areas of the street known as '20, we have chaos that is replicated throughout Soweto and the whole hinterland of South Africa with similar ghettoes and decrepit life-style existences. These are the throw-back and creation of Apartheid, and from these enclaves, we find similar scenes and realities that I am describing below in Orlando.

This is news that is not news in the traditionally White owned media and nor in the dialogue going on inside the country. What it is I am saying this is not important for no reporters ever take time to sit down and look at, participate in and try their darnest to bring this situation into light.

We as the grown up residents and former students who were involved in the 1976 Student Revolution, are looking at our and within our own Townships, and what we are seeing is some kind of carnage: Drugs destroying and decimating our famous, friends, society and the African race.

This is what is happening now as I am onto this article.One of the general terms given to this devastating drug, it is called "Nyaope," a generic name for a killer drug that has left our youth being spooks and walking skeletons right in front of us. What a mess we are in as a people today in Orlando.. So sad to see… Heartbreaking and discouraging.

What we have to live with everyday is spiritually.- soulfully taxing and seriously soul and spirit bruising. I think one has to see it to grasp my meaning. I am going to try and get some pictures, very soon. Optics do serve a relevant tool and technique in what we have to try and contain and at the moment, are at loss what we can or should do.

Nyaope Hell Holes And Meat GrindersAs I had said above, in the area of the Streets known as 20(this includes street No. 19, 23, 40 etc.,) in Orlando, there is this wheelchair drug dealer thug called Nkesi.

He runs a drug-dealing den in plain sight with tight security to go with. His hirelings are destitute and jobless and lacking in education or dropouts, both girls and boys, who, even go to his hovel(home if one may say so) which is a terrible and a hell for drug-addicted girl teenagers, who would do anything for a fix. That is where we get to see many victims come out/thrown from or these hell holes with HIV/AIDS, and other STDs that are still dismally afflicting and affecting our people, children, youth and elderly-either dead or sickly.

When you see these youth and grown ups pining and crazily craving the drug, they steal water taps, fenced gates, copper wires from the electric poles and houses-ones heart and soul/spirit sinks to its lowest ebb. They have a favorite on their menu, which is these new Plasma TV Screen. It is said if they do not sell them, they imbibe the white powder they find therein, which is fatally destructive, but it is their high pick on the menu of drugs. They also sell them to earn money to go back and buy the Nyaope.

Known as 'Grootie'(Big Brother) or Ketsi, on his wheelchair is loathed by many of the this youth, and those brave enough, tell all about him. They talk of his crude and cruel ways of their treatment by him and many others of his foot-soldiers who run the errands of buying drugs from HIV/Aids patients-they are also enforcers. Some of these people afflicted with the HIV/AIDS disease, collect their rations of the ARV's from different hospitals and outlets, using various means, by moving from one place to the other-collecting the pills.

So that, In the end, they sell these pills to the dug-lords foot-soldiers, who in turn sell them to the distributors and providers of this Nyaope for a fee. This is the cycle, of how this whole operation gets done. Many people are affected in various dire and unknown ways by these burgeoning drugs. There are crews that operate in our midst in the trade of dealing or distributing drugs and raking in millions of Rands in their operations.

The houses that they use for such illicit and illegal operations, are houses that the family in that house might have disappeared/wiped out, or is complicit in the trade, and there is no order, and some like Ketsi, have security tight operations that everyone knows, and have installed within their dens, the State Of The Art Cameras driven by some new and sophisticated technology.

So that, as these mini-factories churn out corpses and walking spooks/zombies, we have to live with the scourge-and all the time feeling downright helpless.The police are on the top of the pecking totem pole and order The bribes they get makes them look askance, and their drug-lords/partners in crime and genocide, are never arrested, but if they do, sit in front with the cop driving, and are out in a matter of hours.

Bodies of young girls are found strewn in the street corners or the middle of the road, having been ravaged and no one investigates, and yet the locals know who did it-and the locals state that they are bodies thrown out of these caverns. They dare not talk, for even the innocent ones have been killed for no other reason than that they were innocent and were never involved in anything of the kind of operations/drug-dealing or drug use, I have briefly discussed above.

If one were to see these kids and elderly, they have this menacing/angry look, and the people say they are even more wild and daring/bold when they have not smoked their stuff/Nyaope. So that, this leads them to carrying out dastardly deeds, murder and what it takes just to get a fix. They are jaded, ashen and very 'blackened'[skin-tone-wise] and gaunt-looking-Ghost-like, and never ever wash.

The local lore has it that they no more beat them, once they catch them stealing, they simply pour water over them, and they end up howling like wild creatures with all the water coming down on them. Some say that this water acts like acid on them. There is some kernel of truth in that, but as to the validity of the claim, the jury is still out on that one.The behavior of these strung-up youth is appalling and galling. It is also sad to see a wasted life moving like an ogre or zombie out of whack and stoned to the max.

This is something to behold and it is devastating and crushing on some of our souls, mind and bodies. Our kids talk like they are having speech deformities, and they are bent and very wild-eyed-looking and are always on the prowl in search of another theft or robberies-to get another fix/high. Hooded thugs prowl the hood and rape and abduct and rob women as they are headed off to work in the wee hours of the mornings.

So many rapes, so many muggings-men are also mugged, and most times shot; assaults, murders and all kids of undeclared war on the our polity is causing a costly blow we will take many centuries to recover from, that I come here onto the HP/Facebook collective and ask that something be done before it's too late, of which it is beginning to look like it is very late.As a temporary tangent, we have drug dealing in the coughing medicines sold in the Pharmacies or Chemist that are laced with cocaine, and now they are selling all over the place for around R15.00-are the hot item that is proliferating in our midst, along with Crystal Meh.....

The name of that guy is Adcock Ingram, and the cough syrup is manufactured by the famous 'Broncleer' according to the presenter, and whose name, the journalist or hostess of the show is Nkepile Mabuse and the name of the show is "Check Point" on e-TV it was aired on 02. 06. 15 at 10:00 pm-and that is where I got this bit of information from. People are now addicted to this concoction, and it is marketed by a person, whose company name appears of the cough drops for infants, and only our Ancestors know what they are putting in this old cures for babies.

This is another issue I will be talking a bit about whenever I complete my researches.In the manufactories spotting and dotting the landscape, some of these youth are telling of how they have to wear latex gloves when making this Nyaope or some obscure drug mix-because it is hot and burns the skin; they even volunteer information as to the fact that they make it inside some tires, for they do not destruct just as quickly and for whatever reason. There's a whole of deadly mixes of rat poison, Dagga, some disinfectant, ARV's Mandrax tablets and other natural salts/chemicals and an assortment of everything to produce this drug or drugs of the same ilk.

As I am onto this piece, one of my friends just walked in complaining about the lack of electricity for the past so many hours. He says that rumors has it that a copper cable has been stolen, just as I am writing about this issue here on this piece. We are under an attack and deluge of thefts perpetrated by these Nyaope users, and that is why some houses and sections of Orlando do not have electricity now-this was not due to power-load sharing. People even steal water, that is in those locations that have these water meters.

People are not working, and cannot afford pre-paid electricity, and metered water, which have been outsourced to foreign corporation/countries, and they are fleecing us so badly and leave us always in the cold and literally dry. Both youthful but shredded and emaciated looks of youth, girls and boys are dropping out of schools in droves and headed into these drug dens, they are emaciated, blackened, dry-deadened physiques, drooling and zombie-like spook-looking walking dead.

The poor once youthful great looking girls are smoking anything, have HIV/AIDS, sleep around with anyone and thoroughly abused sexually, sickly and bony looking with eyes drooping out of their sockets, very thin-looking, breasts sagging and wasted and gaunt faces; hair falling off, this for us is watching death incalculable and very dumbing and numbing-Daily.Then there's Madambi. The character too lives around the 20s Street, and he too is into high tech, eking money out of the inhabitants, and he too is destroying the youth for he has created a well organized enterprise and has his henchmen, but he is not bigger than Nektsi.

Funked-Up Society - A People On The Precipe Of The Dark Hole

This brings us to the "Hell House". So dubbed because in it everything and anything happens or takes place. This is where the meat-grinder modus operandi is churning out corpses, Murders are routine and there is a general sense of intimidation that is the norm and credo. As for the Cops, they are nowhere to be seen, or the same thing happens when they arrest the Drug-lords, the thugs are always let go and they bribe their way out.

Bribery is another scourge that is endemic amongst law-enforcement people in South Africa-it has become a sort of a culture of laissez fair and a carte balance spirit that has prevailed for some decades now. In the Noordgesig Colored Township, there are Old ladies who sell what they call "Space Cookies". These are bought and eaten by the students of Noordgesig High School, and this leaves the kids High And smoked out/High.

Thus the persisting problem of school drop-out rate as I have just touched upon above.At night, the poor working women, early risers and leavers headed to work in the dark, are susceptible to lurking murderers and rapist as they walk alone towards the required transportation to work. There were patrols by local guys, but this has been sparse and sporadic at best, and the issues of being paid take precedence before anything else, let alone local people's safety. So, we have less patrols in the ungodly hours of the morning.

Some Youth in our Block have been encouraged to do this till 6 am. This is not always the case, but the area is better now, for now.The other underlying but not oft looked important issue, is the fact that we as a people have already beed deadened and conditioned by Apartheid that we are having a hard time coming out of that Stalag and mental Gulag. Of course we have long been in the Concentration Camps and prisons of Apartheid functioning and operating like the aforementioned Stalag and Gulag meatgiinders and psyche-hospitals that have contributed immensely to our present state of being and existence of our African of South African people.

We now have events called Marikana, a ruse and guise to distribute the drugs and consume liquor and carry on sex by its organizers, that in the end, these places end up with armies of these drug dealers: foot soldiers-who advertise and sell their drugs in these events, the illicit drugs and all forms of booze, and this ends up being an orgy of drugged-out and highly intoxicated youth, which is a setting for other things beyond the pale. Ketsi's children and other such-like people, have their children going to the best schools in the land.

This is unconscionable. This Ketsi self-styled potentate drive all sorts of cars(sits on a wheelchair, mind you) and has many girlfriends… go figure. We have no power to fight against these interlopers, and destroyers of our youth and communities. There needs to be something the people of goodwill here in Mzantsi can do. This is going on as I speak and is not abating.It is a fact that the drugs have decimated families, youth and elderly people. It has left destruction and ruin in the townships throughout Soweto, but in this case, I will focus on Orlando.

Drugs like Cocaine and Mandrax pills started proliferating in the Township around the early eighties and has now become a pandemic throughout different communities of Africans, Coloreds and Whites. In Orlando East(Soweto), the inhabitants have been watching with dread and fear as their youth became zombies, sick, and died from this drug-which, when imbibed, makes its victims froth at the mouth and tear-up incessantly, walking unsteadily zombie-like walk and creates an ever increasing crave, leading to all sorts of crime that has this drug-besieged Township of Orlando teetering on the brink of lunacy and genocide.

This is a problem which has been thus far so utterly ignored that the residents of Orlando, rallied by the members of the CPF(Community Police Forum which was formed by the local Orlando station police force) along with and run by the local residents-who patrol and try to keep crime at a low minimum. On the second Major Saturday of August 2013, a coalition of local Orlando residents, Their CPF Team and several policemen in their cars descended on the drug dens dotting the Township in each and every street.

Recapping and reposting of the Maponya Saga [I penned many moons ago]:

What The Citizens Of Orlando Have Attempted To Do Fighting Drugs In Their communities"Community Action and and Exhumation of Crime/Drugs" - Drug Ground Zero Soweto and Durban and Cape Town....

As the article above aptly shows we take note on this part of the article that the same sound of singing, became protestations when the coalition I had described above descended onto to the drug houses and dens within Orlando. A very disturbing picture began to emerge.The Jo'burg Metro police gave permission to the marchers, and provided the police force, and it was explained to the marchers that the agreement, and permission to approach the drug dealers was given. With placards and a huge number of people began advancing to the 'known' Drug dens, and those who sold from street corners or shop stoops.

The people went to the houses, containers used as phone phones booths and other illicit activities including the selling of "Nyaope"; The mob advised the police that the Zimbabweans, Nigerians, Pakistanis, and some Coloreds[along with locals] should be arrested and searched for drugs. In some houses in Orlando, they found drugs on the bodies of Old grannies, who were used as carriers. Heading the large group was Councilor Matlaka(Councilor of Dube), along with 8(eight) police cars, about 15 policemen ant eh CPF patrollers were about 30, and the rest of the group consisted of a large number of undisclosed members of the local resident.

Five young boys were arrested and were found to have drugs on their persons. Some of these dealers were women who had come from the rural areas and were very secretive as to who their suppliers were. Others were resistant to the mob but caved in when they saw the mob's menacing bearing and intent.In the part of the Township called "Roma"[which is still Orlando], two houses were searched and drug paraphernalia was found; they also found a lot of stolen IDs and Marijuana in bags, along with credit cards and guns.

Some of this stuff was found under the beds in some of these houses, or carelessly strewn all over the dirty and unkempt houses.In another areas of Orlando around a store called "Goodluck" several houses were without owners, and all sorts of evil and illicit and sordid activities have been taken place in plain sight and nobody could anything about it… In one "Pink" Big House, the occupants tried to run away, but were apprehended had had on their person both 'Nyaope' and Marijuana and two guns.

We need to begin to help ourselves and come to these communities and route the drugs and dealers consistently and brutally, or it is they, as we are seeing, who will run our Townships(they already are) down; or, either its us who will have the finally say, and control and run our townships and communities... Whither Mzantsi....The article above was made possible by the people of Orlando I talked to. All I did was cobble up all the interviews, and these are informative views that I formed into the narrative above.

This is seriously Grassroots news and Grassroots intelligence, which is out there for all who wish to report on the events and issues that are taking place amongst our own people. The newspaper will not put it in the way that Malcolm explained above as I cited him. We have to begin to write our own news and stories, and talk to the people Face-To-Face, and we can then afterwards post it on outlets like Hubpages and Facebook etc.

Our people have the information as to what's going down in the Township… We just need to get out there, be amongst them, and write these stories, and show them what we have found written, in order to get even more gruesome accounts of the lives of our African People Of Mzantsi, today, here on the Viral soup.

Mzantsi: Let's Talk Sharp with One Another...

Having said what I wanted to say about the youth, the article below is more addressed to my peers and elders and all the youth that is interested in figuring out what's happening to us, with June 16th Celebration nigh.. This topic is apropos for this Zeitgeist...

What's Going On Here In Mzantsi Today: A Close Up On The Social Reality In Mzantsi

"As a media enthusiast, I have been viewing several Walls on FB that portend to carry out the struggle. What these are, critically looking them, are just bellicose knee-jerk reactions and rants on our part, pretending to be caring and talking about our problems and plights.

Well, in so far as the diatribes are concerned, it seems like a conscious people are engaged in a positive palaver, but that would be far from the truth. Our cream of the crop is rushing pell-mell into being accepted and seen as being European, and not African… This is a fact, and I can argue with anyone with contrary point of view on this matter.

In all earnestness, we have lost our bearings, moorings and campus in life. We are under great and grand delusions of grandeur, that if one were to accumulate more money, and sacrifice ones soul and human beingness(Culture, Customs, etc), that does not matter, but money does. We have dug ourselves, we Africans of South Africa, into a hole that we cannot climb out of.

We glorify, cherish, and work very hard to be a poor copies of other cultures and, are strung-up on material wealth and technological gadgets and nothing more-we have forgotten about our history, culture, customs, traditions, etc., that there has arisen a dire need to begin to pay attention these matters and issues.

We have become adept at scoffing and dismissing our cultural, linguistic, musical and other heritages that make us Africans of South Africa, and have become lackeys of other peoples around the world. We are a confused, scared and dumbed-down peoples. We of Mzantsi, have no sense nor direction of what is happening. We are all filled with uncertainties, distrust, and have to live with an irresponsible petty bourgeoisie which is very opportunistic and Vulturistic. Ya'll Know Yourselves...

They have a tendency to enquire as to ones status in our meetings in any situation, what kind of car one drives, where does one live, or was edumacate; whether one is wearing western contemporary fashions, and we smudge ourselves with foreign perfumes, adorn jewelry(which we now put on our teeth, too), live in shameless opulence, and strive hard to maintain that type of status quo and wealth acquirement to the dissatisfaction of our poor majority-and this is our desire to be accepted as Europeans, not African-on the other hand constantly putting pressure on the poor to live it up…

Today, because we have become very good at rejecting our culture, we have become an illiterate nation, with a miseducated youth and totally blank adult population. The matric results are one indicator of this charge. We are becoming sick nowadays, most of us suffering from flues, pneumonia, dysentery, diarrhea, in the middle and heat of the summer. We do not control our water/food (by we, I mean the army of poor consumers' lack of this drinking water and and who are buyers of groceries). We are inept in all what we do. We depend on nepotism, cronyism, which has been shepherded by a cabal of a motley crew of thugs posing as our government and leaders.

The people that are supposedly being put in position of national social responsibilities are ignorant, inept, dysfunctional, unknowing, arrogant, and pilfering upon the public coffers; corruption is rampant; rape and murder are chronic in our communities;

Alcoholism is a pandemic disease; drug abuse and proliferation has become the new normal in our midst; churches are fleecing their parishioners; the much touted and oft abused concept of Ubuntu is no more existent in our divided and shattered African collectives; our children do not even know our part history, custom, cultures, traditions languages and other sacred rites and their practices; and we, the present elderly, are not even helping them, and we, ourselves, are disfunctionally incapable of capturing our culture, customs, traditions and the whole bit.

People are scared of critiquing the ANC which has arrogantly abrogated to itself all powers and is distorting and making its own polity ignorant and uneducated, so's to rule over us effectively.

They, the present government, wants us to accept that all these social malaise are because we are now experiencing a new democracy, newly found freedoms, in the face of all that they, our present leaders, are doing that which is wrong: corruption.

No one wants to be told that we are a failure and being wiped out of the face of our land in all aspects of our decrepit existential reality. Yet we are...

Reading up on Wilson is an eye opener for us, if we will ever have the gall and guts to face our weakened state of being and try to ameliorate the abovestated conditions. Wilson writes:

"... The way we think, the way we behave, helps to create the kinds of victimization from which we suffer. The oppressive configuration the White man has assumed in relationship to the African man is in good part the result of the fact that we have permitted ourselves to remain in complementary subordinate configuration conducive to his oppressive designs. "The White man Cannot Be What He Is unless We Are What We Are As A People".

"And one way of transforming the White man is through 'self-transformation'. "He cannot be what he is if we are not what we are".

"Therefore, we must take responsibility for that part of our personality, that part of our community, and that part of ourselves over which we have control, and change that part. And if we change those parts of ourselves and our community, we shall change this man. Who gives a damn about changing him anyway? It does not matter!

"One of our major problems is that African leadership has been involved in converting Whites. That misleads us time and time again. Give it up! One of the major steps in the rehabilitation of the African Man/Woman/Child, etc, is to give up the White man and forget about him!"

This is one helluva tough thing for the African elite in Mzantsi to wrap their heads and thin skins around. Why should they give up their stolen and ill-begotten loot? Why should they give up their income, life-styles, power, importance, and standard of living for the sake of the good for all Africans. Why should they? They are not prepared to do that. The will not commit Class Suicide...

This is the conundrum that many one of these 'latter-day' South African millionaires are faced with. Why should they not hobnob with the celebrities and people of power? Give up golfing? Have no 'helpers' in their house? Are they not providing job creation, they wonder? Why should they not imbibe the accoutrements of the world of wealth and modernity?

Why should they be bothered with paying obeisance and respect to an ancient and decrepit useless African culture, customs, etc, when the world is modern and moving along in the 21st century? Yes, these people who ask these questions and more are part of us, they are us. Here is looking at us; here's talking to each other.

We have to learn how to critique ourselves and accept our shortcomings and over-inflated sense grandeur. We should get rid of our confusion as to who we are as African People. We neither are American nor European, nor will we ever be. We shall never be accepted as those people, instead, they would respect us more if we were our selves, without trying to ape others.

Our culture should guide our thinking. Our custom condition our behavior; our tradition should enable us to determine ourselves as a people and nation. We cannot afford to be hoodwinked by television, and other western cultural imperial artifacts and gadgets. We should know these, but use them to suit ourselves. We cannot think like we are of European/American origin in our psyche and other distorted cultural unrealities we are so apt to adopt, at the expense of our own indigenous cultures, traditions, customs and so forth.

On The Cusp Of An African Cultural Renaissance

When Fu-Liau visited Bahia Brazil, he was shocked to discover Congo descendants still maintain their traditional ancestral cultural customs; far more authentic than what is practiced in the Congo today. He was startled after being invited to observe secret education systems which proved to be virtually identical to his own initiation in the Congo years ago; initiations long since destroyed by the colonials.

Traditionally, varied rituals address every occasion in African traditional/customary life. The rituals provide individuals with an opportunity to stand before the community for naming ceremonies, enstoolment ceremonies, initiation rites, harvest festivals and other times to link and collectively give thanks to god, the Ancestors, and nature.

These rituals, and the purposes for them are common in Africa and the Diaspora. They provide an opportunity to promote community unity, to outline purpose and expectations, to reinforce the positive aspects of the culture, and to acknowledge the power of the Ancestors/Creator.

Most of these ceremonies give validation to the elders, the children, the leadership, and to any links that contribute to community health. Ceremonial practices help communities to affirm community ties and values.

Our communities can benefit greatly if we could collectively resist the meaningless holidays and ceremonies which are promoted in contemporary capitalistic societies. These holidays, and their aggressive [commercial] promotions, are meant to encourage spending to enrich certain businesses and corporations. These holidays have no positive transformative value for individuals and communities participating in them.

Regardless of years of separation from Africa and constant pressure to ignore all things African, Africans in the United States have managed to maintain African Cultural Retentions. One example of this is the strong community commitment to and participation in child-care and socialization in rural areas and in strong urban communities that persisted for years. Even when there was little money, these African communities were consciously and subconsciously committed to quality child development.

A few of these practices include the use of folktales as a means of teaching about community mores, encouraging youth participation in all community activities, childbirth techniques, post childbirth rituals, natural healing practices, and more.

These diverse retentions could be found in may rural communities, such as Bay City, Texas, but they could also be found in pockets of urban communities those within Harlem, New York.

African socialization practices served to assist communities in day-to-day operations, collective survival, interpersonal relations, and basic quality of life issues. The content of an African education and socialization process contains many components which are modified according to the specific goals and aims of a community.

'Madness(Mental Illness) And Rage'

The African community must examine itself and see to what degree it has contributed to his own madness, demise, oppression and powerlessness.

When one looks around our own communities, there's an exaggerated reality of madness and mental health. We learn from Wilson that"

"A part of the problem of mental illness in not what people do to each other, and not what mama, daddy, or somebody else does to a child. A part of it is also how what mama does is reacted to on the part of the child. It is not so much that to the European we are inferior, and that, this and that, and, as the European maligns our character, et cetera: It is the reaction of anger, as Cobbs and Price point out, "The reaction of rage."

"Yes, we are going to find rage in teenagers, and rage in people that destroy and prey on the community; and it is then this reaction that distorts reality, distorts the individual's creativity, distorts the necessary unity and distorts the very mechanism that can get the individual out of his/her behavior," writes Wilson.

"I was talking to one drug addict who was outlining the regular thing about mama; mama not loving her and mama mistreating her. And so she saw herself as having only two choices; either would become what mama said she would become, or she would become better than what mama said she would become-both being reactions to mama, both still tied to her mama, both making her a creation of mama.

"The African(Black) bourgeoisie is as much a creation as is the African(Black) criminal; they are both reactionary styles, and both a means by which people try to deal with their dilemma of White oppression. And quite often people think, (and she thought) that there are only two choices: Either I react to it that way or I react to it the other way; I react to it in terms of rage or I overachieve.

"But if reactions of rage, hatred, and vengeance are not permitted to capture the personality, to consume and concentrate consciousness and attention, perhaps then, another alternative, another approach will be discovered.

"This is the thing that we must recognize in ourselves as a people. Reactions in terms of depression, rage and anger, reactions in terms of compensatory mechanism, are reactions that help to deny the criminality on a certain segment of our people, and that obscures the behavior of many of our teenagers in our current situations — which help to maintain the situation in and of itself.

"Why can't our leadership deal with that issue? Why is it we say that African people are losing out in the so-called "alms" race? As they call it? Alms Race! Why aren't we questioning our leadership when since the 1950s (and 1960s), the situation of our people worsened? We have leadership, today, that refuses to confront forthrightly the issues and the circumstance in which we find ourselves.

"For not capturing economic and social control of our communities, and for not building up An African Orientated philosophy, and for not building our brains, and studying, and reading, and writing, and organizing, and developing, we must hold ourselves responsible, in part, for the madness. I therefore suggest that the issue then is not so much one of diagnosis for the patient, but a diagnosis of ourselves, a diagnosis of the system, and more so than that — getting on with the work of revolution." (Wilson)

I began by titling this piece as "Let's Talk Sharp With One Another". We can all wax revolutionary and political until we turn some other color either than our melanin, that will not alter the fact that we are in serious trouble here in Mzantsi. Our leadership is made up of quislings, sell-outs, charlatans and turncoats. This is an undeniable fact.

Some of us here in Mzantsi are averse to such talks for it threatens their present status and reality in our(the poor's) shredded present decrepit existential unreality. Well, talk/write, some of us will.

Well, it's about time we started talking to each other and not past one another. We have to talk and listen to one another and stop dictating our half-cooked mind-sets to those we deem to be lower than us, and yet we are in the same prison, the same devastated reality that we face as the Africans of Mzantsi. I am not going to be talking so much about White people in my posts, but will directly address ourselves(Africans) as to what is happening to us today.

We should not kid ourselves that this is a problem that is faced by Africans in South Africa only. African Americans, those who are naive enough and come here to South Africa and behave with some haughtiness and arrogance/ignorance, are in the same boat with us.

I need not say this because I might be dismissed as an African in Africa, but Wilson bears out my assertions, and this is what Africans, all over the world, are having to deal with, equally and in the same way, no matter what.

You are not better because you are an African American in America, nor am I better because I am an African in the Motherland… We are all in the same ship, prison and enclosed in oppression, depression suppression and you name it, the same mess. It is at this juncture in this part of my first installments of the articles to make us aware of, the way, we, Africans in Africa, and all those in the Diaspora, desperately need our own sanity and survival as a people...

Wilson says we cannot be slaves and be Africans at the same time, because if one is to become what we see ourselves as today, slaves, we have to discard those characteristics that makes one Africa.

As the celebration of June 16th Revolution approaches and passes, it is incumbent upon us, and behooves us to recalibrate our own self-induced and created State of the Nation we are now all existing in, Today.

Before we extensively talk about African modern man and his Culture, I would like to segue into a sector that bears being pointed out: The affects/effects of World Trafficking on South South Africa. If there's one thing we can say about Apartheid, as we view contemporary times in Mzantsi, it is that it had blocked and prevented the type of Drug abuse we no see gutting our communities of its people and resources/land.

I have posted a map above which does not need much interpretation, one need to follow the lines. I used this Map because cocaine and crack cocaine is prevalent in Mzantsi. This will explain then in a way the creation and dissemination of this gruesome drug. When the ANC took some semblance of power, the borders of South Africa became porous and this was because of the new government ineptness, malfeasance, nepotism, cronyism, malgovernance, corruption and inexperience of the incoming oppressors in running a country like South Africa.

The leadership of the incoming government lacked foresight, insight, ability, skill and had no discipline once they grabbed power(So they say). I am more inclined to say when they were inducted into the quisling, turncoat, gendarme lumpen element, charlatan and sell-out position they now hold under the guise that they are democratically elected in a Shameocracy. My critique, at this juncture, is more orientated and directed toward the existing state of Druggedness.

We are seriously drugged and badly and out of whack inebriated. Alcohol rules and it is the main intoxicant and drug, (if I may say), that has been decimating us for decades and centuries-and as I am onto this piece up to here, it is even wiping us now-genocide-style. The lack of discipline and experience that the new government came into being slavedriver, is now threatening the very people who put them into power. This is a serious thing, I say. It is important we begin to interrogate ourselves and our reality, and tell it like it is.

Al what is taking place and happening in our country in unconscionable, and a violation of the human rights and the Bill of rights of the People of South Africa. These drugs, by the way, I am only choosing to approach them from an African point of view, they affect and effect White people, too. The whole country is in turmoil, and everything is topsy-turvy, and we are part of the mise en scene.

Many of us do not really follow up on the whole chemical drug-war and what it really entails. It has morphed too many times and its entanglement have a legion of articles articulating the, There are some serious YouTube videos one can view that give the whole somewhat, reality that is shaping up in the ordinary people's fight against the drug lords.

Even in these wars of drug lords against and the community, the police are mere bystanders. What do I mean? Well, they come late, and they never find the perpetrators; and in many cases, the cops are reported to be in cahoots with the drug lords, so that, bribery is the language that they both speak and understand. I am not making this up, and some Youtube documentaries that actually show some cops take bribes. I have had to pay so many bribes myself to get out of many police siturations, that even as I write this article, It becomes even harder to try and talk about our real-reality today in present-day Mzantsi.

The corruption is endemic and devastating. Now, in the upper echelon of governance and the corporate world, it is like a jungle out there: Animal Farm gone awry. It is hard to concentrate and neatly pinpoint what is happening to us here in our country. The drugs are showing us clearly that we are being wiped out. Look at our dirty, filthy, unkept, zombie-like looking out, and alcohol-devastated elders, that one begin to wonder when is the final end coming.

The Internationalization o the South African public, by the coming in of the ANC, has meant just what I am saying: this made all types of drugs possible, and this is what this article is about. Although the bulk of what I have written thus far was examining the drugs as they affect and effect us, I decided to use the Map above to show how this pattern Criss-crosses the globe and why we are dialed-in and hooked-up, literally and figuratively, into this morass and drugged cesspool.

I have published hubs that show how the chemical warfare was waged against us Africans here in South Africa, by Apartheid. But now, we are more than under a deluge of all types of drugs, and people are falling and dying all around us, and the drug lords rule supreme-in plain sight. I reiterate, the police do not care, seriously, they have been seen, man-a-time cavorting or hanging out with these drug-king-pins. This is so discouraging that the police job is perceived as a lucrative vocation to increase one's earnings through bribes, theft and even murder.

This has created all types of mental issues and serious madness and craziness that has never heretofore been seen before in our communities. This has not only broken, but has shredded a lot of cultural fabric, whatever was left of it. Our neighbors and youth have really changed and looking drugged-out and drunk. This is bothersome for these are the people we live with, The government is not doing much, and they only go on V, with the pot-bellies and three chins, and speechify endlessly, whilst we here in the Township have to try and solve the problem of drugs with cops who are complicit in the trade. We have here a recipe for disasters and failures.

Our communities have done become dysfunctional and a nightmare and ever so much, but slowly, hope is fading, and trust was waned and distrust abound. What we had as a people, that we lived as our cultures, traditions and so forth, have been sacked, ditched and relegated to the dustbin of obscurity and obsolesce. Without really digressing much, I would like to at least, in our present state, present a utopia of what we could be and are below.

Bantu Steven Biko: In the Front Of A Deadly Struggle-Visions of A Modern African CultureI have just written an article and recently posted it here on Facebook and topped it off with a Hugh Masekela and Miriam Video singing Soweto Blues. I would be amiss if I did not talk or say or cite something from Biko in relation to our situation, and this was pre-1976.

A lot of people have many opinions about Biko, but very few seriously dig into his work, use his writing to make a point today.I revisit Biko because he was present up to right at the beginning of the Revolution and he was working hard on mobilization when he was captured, tortured and killed, by the Port Elizabeth Apartheid goons and spooks.

He is also relevant to the 16th June Revolt because his words today, are important for us to re-read and know intimately for he spoke to us during his life, and in death his words still ring true and are very much relevant.I write about him and use his words for those who would want to read something that is edifying to the Youth on June 16th 2014, for them to see, read and know about the importance of that Revolutionary day, and it should or could be a day used Educate' about our history and the politics of the day as espoused and seen by Biko.

It is important also to teach our present-day youth about the importance and role culture plays or should play in our cultural system today.Well, since we are left with coupla days to commemorate the 1976 Student Revolution, I will defer to Biko and pick up some pointers that he left us with to mull over. When we talk about writing our history, it is also important to be able to cite heavily on our martyrs, for in their works, lies the immortal truths and exposition of our struggle.

What Africans Ought to Know and Remember: Bantu's SoliloquyThe Way Of Modern African CultureUnderstanding how history shaped our present and influences as it affects and effect and infects us in formulating the future is important. Understanding how things got to be the way they are is of prime importance in deconstructing the imposed amnesia regarding African history, culture, customs, traditions, languages and practices. The way the new elite is not paying attention to this fact in South Africa, merely hows us a people who are under "orders" to allow/are in collusion with the imposition of cultural imperialism on the languages, customs, traditions and cultures of the Africans in South Africa.

The cultural mosaic that is indigenous is rapidly being decimated by the imperialist pandering to African rulers who collude at the expense of both their people and all their lived Experience, for a new way of communicating, which is, the Americanization and Europeanization of a whole people: transforming the past to the present, literally in 20 years, in order to have a more uniform people speaking one language(English) and imbibing foreign cultural values, mores, morals and norms at the expense of the indigenous histories, cultures, custom, traditions, languages and practices, music, traditional dress and foods.

Bantu Biko addresses the touched and discussed above in the in an eerily predictive manner akin to the situation faced by Africans in a new and democratic South Africa today:

"There is no doubt that the color question in south African politics was originally introduced for economic reasons. It is not surprising, therefore, that in South Africa, after generations of exploitation, White people on the whole have come to believe in the inferiority of the Africans [in South Africa - my addition], so much so that while the race problem started as an offshoot of the economic greed exhibited by White people, it has now become a serious problem on its own.
"White people now despise Africans [of South Africa], not because they need to reinforce their attitude to justify their position of privilege, but simply because they actually believe that "Black" is inferior and bad.

This is the basis upon which Whites are working in South Africa, and it is what makes South Africa a racist society. The racism we meet does not only exist on an individual basis; it is also institutionalized to male it look like the South African way of life.
"Although of late there has been a feeble attempt to gloss over the overt racist elements in the system, it is still true that the system derives its nourishment from the existence of anti-black attitudes in society.

To make the lie live longer, blacks have been denied any chance of accidentally proving their equality with White men. For this reason there is job reservation, lack of training in skilled work and a tight orbit around professional possibilities for Blacks. Stupidly enough, the system turns back to say that blacks are inferior because they have no economists, no engineers, etc., although it is made impossible for blacks to acquire these skills[and then turn around and say they are badly educated and have no sills nor education-my addition]. "

Bantu Adds: "It is not enough for Whites to be on the offensive. So immersed are they in prejudice that they do not believe that Blacks can formulate their thoughts without White guidance and trusteeship. Thus, even those Whites who see much wrong with the system make it their business to control the response of Blacks to the provocation. No one is suggesting that it is not the business of liberal Whites to oppose what is wrong.

However, it appears to us too much of a coincidence that liberals — few as they are — should not only be determining the modus operandi of those Blacks who oppose the system, but also that their role spells out the totality of the White power structure — the fact that though Whites are our problem, it is still other Whites who want to tell us how to deal with that problem. They do so by dragging all sorts of red herrings across our paths. They tell us that the situation is a class struggle rather than a racial one. We believe we know what the problem is, and we till stick by our findings." (Bantu)

We further learn from Bantu that: "It is important for Blacks to see this difference than it is for Whites. We must learn to accept that no group, however benevolent, can ever hand power to the vanquished on a plate(a la Dr. Clarke-my add). We must accept that the limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. As long as we go to Whitey begging cap in hand for our own emancipation[jobs and education-my addition], we are giving him further sanction to continue with his racist and oppressive system.

"We must realize that our situation is not a mistake on the part of Whites, but a deliberate act, and that no amount of moral lecturing will persuade the White man to "correct" the situation. The system concedes nothing without a demand (Bantu here echoing Frederick Douglass - addition mine), for it formulates its very method of operation on the basis that the ignorant will learn to know, the child will grow into an adult and therefore demands will begin to be made. It gears itself to resist demands in whatever way it sees fit.

"When you refuse to make these demands and choose to come to a round table to beg for your deliverance, you are asking for the contempt of those who have power over you. This is why we must reject the beggar tactics that are being forced on us by those who wish to appease our cruel masters.That is why this was SASO's cry: "Black man, you are on your own!" has become now more relevant," as it now in the present day of an African-led government." If Africans want to go farther, this is one of the issues that they need to pay close and intense attention to.

Take for example of the problem that is faced by African families with their school-going children who are today attending private school, some called Model C and institutions of higher learning, are having attitude and adjustment problems living within the African society. "The same situation was found as long ago as the arrival of the missionaries. Children were taught, under the pretext of hygiene, good manners and other such vague concepts, to despise their mode of upbringing at home and to question the values and custom of their society[The Book: "Things Fall Apart" would be appropriate to consult here).

"The result was the expected one — children and parents saw life differently and the former lost respect for the latter. Now, in African society it is a cardinal sin for a child to lose respect for his/her parent. Yet how can one prevent the loss of respect between child and parent when the child is taught by his know-all White tutors to disregard his family teachings? Who can resist losing respect for his tradition when in school his whole cultural background is summed up in one word - Barbarism?" (Bantu)
Who can resist the awe one feels when Reading and ultimately be shocked back into reality from what Bantu teaches us and was saying to us when what he said then in the 1970s is more even more desperately relevant today, more than ever? It is important, then, to continually and constantly revisit Biko.

Bantu further writes that: "Thus we can immediately see the logic of placing missionaries in the forefront of the colonization process. A man who succeeds in making a group of people accept a foreign concept in which he is expert makes them perpetual students whose progress in the particular field can only be evaluated by him; the student must constantly turn to him for guidance and promotion. In being forced to accept the Anglo-Boer culture, the Blacks(Africans) have allowed themselves to be at the mercy of the White man and to have him as the their eternal supervisor.

"Only he can tell us how good our performance is, and instinctively each of us is at pains to please this powerful, all-knowing master. ...As one Black(African) writer says, colonialism is never satisfied with having the 'native' in its grip but, by some strange logic, it must turn to his past and disfigure and distort it. Hence the history of the Black man(Africans) in this country is most disappointing to read. It is presented merely as a long succession of defeats. The Xhosas were 'thieves' who went to war for stolen property-their property; the Boers never provoked the Xhosas but merely went on "punitive expeditions" to teach the thieves a lesson. Heroes like Makana, (Early nineteenth-century Xhosa prophet), were sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island and drowned while escaping in a boat.

"Refusal by Blacks to accept the truth of his death led to the mythical hope of his eventual return), and people who were essentially revolutionaries are painted as superstitious trouble-makers who lied to the people about bullets turning into water. Great nation-builders, like Shaka, are cruel tyrants who frequently attacked smaller "tribes" for no reason but for some sadistic purposes. Not only is there no objectivity in the history taught us, but there is frequently an appalling misrepresentation of facts that sicken even the uninformed student."(Bantu)

Distortions, lies, debasement and put down of Africans have been part of the Apartheid mantra whenever it came to histories and other issues affecting and effecting and relating to Africans of South Africa. Biko succinctly captures this reality above, in the following piece.
Bantu informs us about history in the following manner:

"Thus a lot of attention has to be paid to our history, [as already stated above above-addition- addition mine], if we as Blacks want to aid each other in our coming into consciousness. We have to rewrite our history and produce in it heroes that formed the core of our resistance to the White invaders. More has to be revealed, and stress has to be laid on the successful nation-building attempts of men such as Shaka(I blogged on Shaka), Moshoeshoe, HIntsa, Manthatisi, Mzilikazi, Sekhukhuni and so forth.

These areas call for intense research to provide some sorely needed missing links. We would be too naive to expect our conquerors to write unbiased histories, [and African historiography-my addition], about us, but we have to destroy the myth that our history starts in 1652, the year Van Riebeeck landed at the Cape."

The confusion and chaos that we are now witnessing in South Africa, has been contributed to by the events as stipulated by Bantu and articulated by those inhumane actions that are mentioned at length in blogging, and also mentioned above.

Mosern African Man And Culture

By rewriting African South African History, Customs, Traditions, Culture, Languages and Practices, from antiquity to the present, from an African centered perspective, puts the story of these people into a viral stream akin to media virus in the Web or Net/Internet, to use the contemporary technical parlance and jargon. African South Africans need to seriously study and enhance their culture "by any means necessary as averred by Malcolm X. Bantu talks to and addresses with authority these issues in the following manner:

"Our culture must be defined in concrete terms. We must relate the past to the present and demonstrate a historical evolution of modern Black man. There is a tendency to think our culture as a static culture that was arrested in 1652 and has never developed since. The "return to the bush" concept suggests that we have nothing to boast of except lions, sex and drink.

"We accept that when colonization sets in it devours their indigenous culture and leaves behind a bastard culture that may thrive at the pace allowed it by the dominant culture. But we have to realize that the basic tenets of our culture have largely succeeded in withstanding the process of bastardization and that even at this moment we can still demonstrate that we appreciate a man for himself. Ours is a true man-centered society whose sacred tradition is that of sharing[Ubuntu/Botho-my addition]." (Bantu)

Even today as of the writing of this article, there is still a semblance of sharing and dealing with each other as human beings first and sharing whatever we can scrap-up with our family, society and strangers! The term, "Ubuntu" is now hawked, peddled and drained, emptied of its content, context, cultural meaning, and its content/context is being bandied on the Web for whatever purpose that has nothing to do with the Africans in South Africa.

Poverty is wreaking havoc in the Township with total devastating effect. People still share food, housing, clothes and moral and spiritual support for each other in these uncertain and debilitating and decrepit social existence. At the same time, there are the false effects and affects of South Africa having become Democratic, and the onslaught of foreigners has bludgeoned the social fibre, culture, customs and traditions of our people, although, as Bantu has already stated, one can still see the traces of a cultural, customary, traditional heartbeat ever so slightly pumping, beating and stutter-starting in an entropic mode.

Bantu adds: "We must reject, as we have been doing, the individualistic approach to life that is the cornerstone of the Anglo-Boer culture. We must seek to restore the Black man the great importance we used to give to human relations, the high regard for people and their property and for life in general; to reduce the triumph of technology over man and the materialistic elements that is slowly creeping into our society." What Bantu predicted and foresaw is what is taking place in contemporary South Africa today.

Reading Bantu is like being in the present, and he was still live, today, warning the Africans as to what they have become as the privileged few Africans are intensely engorging themselves with crumbs and inadequate and paltry economic power and also being economically impotent-also in service of White supremacy and foreign imperial cultures. The African people of South Arica in fact say it loosely and characterize it as "Dog Eats Dog time," a social malaise cloaked in "One-Upping" the next for 'personal aggrandizement' and being callous whilst going about their dastardly act of greedily accumulating wealth, at the expense of ones' fellowmen and brothers/sisters and African Nation.

These are essential feature of African culture to which we must cling. Black(African) culture above all implies freedom on our part to innovate without recourse to white values. This innovation is part of the natural development of any culture. A culture is essentially the society's composite answer to the varied problems of life. We are experiencing new problems everyday and whatever we do adds to the richness of our cultural heritage as long as it has a man as its centre. The adoption of Black theatre and drama is one such important innovation which we need to encourage to develop. We know that our love of music and rhythm/arts and so forth, as these have relevance even in this day.

Reading up further on Bantu, one learns more from him when he says: "Being part of an exploitative society in which we are often the direct objects of exploitation, we need to evolve a strategy toward our economic situation. We are aware that Blacks are still colonized even within the borders of South Africa. Their cheap labor has helped make South Africa what it is today. Our money from the Townships takes a one-way journey to White shops and White banks, and all we do in our lives is pay the White man either with our labor or in coin. Capitalistic exploitative tendencies,coupled with the overt arrogance of White racism, have conspired against Africans.

"Thus in South Africa now it is very expensive to be poor. It is the poor people who stay further from town and therefore have to spend more money on transport to come to work for the White people; it is the poor people who use uneconomic and inconvenient fuel like Paraffin and coal because of the refusal of the White man to install electricity in Black areas(Today they still use paraffin because it is now sold cheaply, and those who cannot afford it use the fuel/coal/wood to cook and warm up.

"It is the poor people who are governed by many ill-defined restrictive laws and therefore have to spend money on fins for "technical" offenses; it is the poor people who have no hospitals and are therefore exposed to exorbitant charges by private doctors; it is the poor people whose un-tarred roads, have to walk long distances, and therefore experience the greatest wear and tear on commodities like shoes, clothes and even their habitats; it is the poor people who have to pay for their children's books while whites get them free."(Bantu)

We are oppressed because we are Black(African, to be more precise-my addition). It does not need to be said that it is the Black(African) people who are poor. Black (African) people are not oppressed as Zulus, Xhosas, Pedis, Tswanas, Coloreds or Indians(as apartheid would have liked the world to believe that Africans are all different as they comprise Ten(10) peoples). Africans must use that very concept to unite themselves and to respond as a cohesive group. Africans must cling to each other with a tenacity that will shock and rock any the perpetrators of evil.

Bantu advises poor Africans this way: "Our preparedness to take upon ourselves the cudgels of the struggle will see us through. We must remove from our vocabulary completely the concept of fear. Truth must ultimately triumph over evil, and the White man has always nourished his greed on this basic fear that shows itself on the Black community.
"In a true bid for change we have to take off our coats, be prepared to lose our comfort and security, our jobs and positions of prestige, and our families, for just as it is true that, "Leadership and security are basically incompatible," a struggle without casualties is no struggle. We must realize that prophetic cry of Black students: "Black Man, you are on your own!" Africans parrot this today, but still do not understand it deeper meaning and implications as it related to them then and now."(Bantu)

What Africans ought to do is not slide into ignominious ignoramuses and into a state of petty jealousies and pettiness, but read what Bantu is talking about and advising us about to the extend of our plights, and as to what is actually happening to African people in South Africa, who have to align, beg for and collaborate with their former oppressors to perpetuate the past oppressions of 'in-your-face Apartheid'; to the one that today(Economical and Class Apartheid), and this has morphed into DA and other secret forces of alien movement, but still the same outfit, with a Black face to go with it-in the case of the ruling ANC-led government-as its front men.

Bantu was spot-on when he pointed to the absurdness and bogusness by Africans, of hoping that the oppressors will accept their slaves as equals even if they were to achieve economical parity-which we have not yet done so even today as we keep on electing s-called African leaders. Today the new Middle-class which was a spinoff of the gravy train/and the remnants of the class created during "Petty Apartheid" fiasco by Vorster, has even surpassed some rich Whites, has still not received nor reached parity with their former oppressors (even if they live next door to them)!. All of this is grandiose farce and dwarfed helpless/hapless grandiloquent unrealistically unreal dreams and expectations of a massive petty -grandios phantasmagoria are what is destroying, confusing and under developing the areas of the poor in Mzantsi.

What needs to be reiterated here is how Bantu explains what was done to implement this process of de-Africanizing blacks and by explaining what a people without a positive history are: "One should not waste time here dealing with manifestations of material want of the Black people. A vast literature has been written on this problem Possibly a little should be said about spiritual poverty. What makes the Black man tick? This is the work that should be done by the present generations in consultation with the Older one.

Bantu Biko on African Culture... Modern African Culture..

"Thus, in taking a looking at cultural aspects of the African people, one inevitably finds himself/[herself] having to compare. This is primarily because of the contempt that the "superior" culture shows towards the indigenous culture. To justify its exploitative basis the Anglo-Boer culture has at all times been directed at bestowing an inferior status to all cultural aspects of the indigenous African people of South Africa.

"I am against the belief that African culture is time bound, the notion that with the conquest of Africans, all their culture was obliterated. ... Obviously, the culture of Africans has had to sustain severe blows and may have been battered nearly out of shape by the belligerent culture it collided with, yet, in essence, even today, one can easily find the fundamental aspects of pure African culture in the present-day African. Hence, in taking a look at African culture, I am going to refer as well to what I have termed "Modern African Culture".

"One of the most fundamental aspects of our culture is the importance we attach to Man. Ours has always been a Man'Centered society. Westerners have in many occasions been surprised at the capacity we have for taking with and to each other — not for the sake of arriving at a particular conclusion, but merely to enjoy communication for its won sake. Intimacy is a term not exclusive for particular friends, but applying to a whole group of people who find themselves together either through work or through residential requirements.

"In fact, in the traditional African culture, there is no such thing as two friends. Conversation groups were more or less naturally determined by age and division of labor. Thus, one would find all boys whose job was to look after cattle, periodically meeting at popular spots to engage in conversation about their cattle, girlfriends, parents, heroes, etc. All commonly shared their secrets, joys and woes. The curiosity manifested was welcome. It came out of a desire to share. This pattern one could find in all age groups. House visiting was always a feature of the elderly folks way of life. No reason was needed as a basis for visits. It was all part of our deep concern for each other(Botho/Ubuntu)" (Bantu)

I will stop at this point because this whole story of Biko and his role in the 1976 revolution is vast, and it extends to today. Today we have 'sharing,' 'friending,' and are trying our darnest to hook-up with each other, but we have somewhat forgotten how we have been doing it as Africans,and we think and believe that these ways of communicating and forming groups and so forth are a new phenomena that was brought about by the Internet and Face.

What we do not realize is that if we know what our culture is all about, and clearly understand how it works and functions, this will make it easier to deal with each other, much more better and efficiently here on the social Networks. But, some of us are selfish, opportunistic, and are individuals in the Westerns sense of the meaning of the word, and we think that trying to be White/European, American, is better than being an indigenous of Mzantsi.

So long as we have people who think they know better than the rest, are more educated than the rest, they own the latest gadget or gizmo, an imported car and imported clothes and perfume, speak English with an accent approximating those one is trying to ape, from TV, to the Internet to all the new ways of communication, this does not bode well for the rest of the poor Africans and those trying to raise our culture to global importance.

I'm talking about and citing from Biko, we are beginning to see that what he wrote in 1972, is still more relevant today in 2014. We need to begin to study Biko more deeply than simply taking a line from his writing and thinking that we can inform our people about him. We need to Read, very seriously, what he and others like him wrote, and what we, the new generation of writers have to say about them, Biko and so forth, in a much concerted way. When he was organizing, Biko new that what he also wrote, would come to pass. He foresaw the need for us to overcome the intoxicating and arresting power of technology, log before it was even established, and implemented.

So that, as we are now facing the 38th commemoration of June !6th 1976 Revolution, we should be reading such articles like this one to our friends and the Youth. Many of us do not have access to book written by these giants, well, if we do have, we shall have to cull from their works in order to deliver it to those who are hungering for such exposes and historical narratives. Biko concludes for us by stating:

"In rejecting Western values, therefore, we are rejecting those things that are not only foreign to us, but that seek to destroy the most cherished of our beliefs — that the corner-stone of society is man himself(People can view the Videos of Wilson on "African Culture" posted in these FB Walls) ... not just his welfare, not his material well being only, but just the African man himself, with all his ramifications.."(Bantu)

We are going to have to begin to pay attention to each other, our martyrs, and not some flimsy and strange intellectuals who are telling us about ourselves, and yet we are more than capable of teaching anyone about us. Well, we shall have to "respect" and fully embrace each other as the sons and the daughters of the South Africa(Mzantsi) soil..Very soon, and very quickly… Biko would concur with that.... We Should And Shall Never forget Our Own Revolution that has made the South Africa we see today... Hola!!

Biko finally says: "We believe that in the long run the Special contribution to the World by Africa(South Africa) will be in this field of human relationship. The 'great powers' of the World may have done wonder in giving the world and industrial and military look, but the great gift still has to come from Africa(South Africa) - Giving The World A More Human Face". (Bantu Biko)

Power! Amandla~ Aluta Kontinua… Forward Ever; Backwards, Never… Onwards To A Modern African Culture....

Cultural Dependency

We succinctly informed by Asa that:

"The transmission of African culture for the purpose of socializing the community must, first and foremost, must be under the control of the African community. There is no alternative to it. If we have few resources, then we can do only what our resources permit. This task should not be turned over to others. We cannot have alien sponsors pay for our rites of passage. Socialization is a life long journey and it is the responsibility of spiritually grounded, experienced elders who are the custodians of the community knowledge. It is their role to ensure that it is communicated to all generations."

Upon reading the citation by Asa above, we in Mzantsi, who have some knowledge about how our culture should be functioning, recognize and can relate fully to what he is saying. The fulcrum of our culture is also premised upon the respect of elders and they are the sage dispensers of our cultural modus operandi. So that, if, as we can see today, within our African enclaves, there is a bad breakdown of social mores, moral, social cohesiveness, anomie and normlessness, lack of cultural practice and consciousness, and the whole breakdown of our cultural facade, we already know and have seen how out of character and out of whack we are as a people.

In West Africa the Griot(old men who pass on down the culture of their people), are more important for their nation as they are a connection to their past and teachers of the present generation how to navigate their lives utilizing the knowledge about culture they garner from these elders. Today, we can clearly see the dysfunction that has been wrecked by cultural and customary memory loss and total loss of our culture. Today we can even see Drugs infiltrating our communities and decimating them thoroughly.

Our 'go to' exceptions and alternative are nowhere for us to fall back to or upon because we now are realizing that we have forgotten and shunned our elders, we no more observe nor recognize our culture, our children are taught by foreigners in foreign schools, but in our land, and made to cram foreign concepts about themselves, their people, and their cultures and traditions. We then pretend, many of us, and begin to wonder why our youth and children and many elders are confused, are ignorant of the their cultures and languages, and why there are so many divorces and family breakdowns-some families getting wiped out, and in our dumbed-down state, we resort to saying it all has to do with witchcraft.

If then, as we have done, allow 'foreign sponsors of our rites of passage' as pointed out by Asa above, we are simply doing a wrong things consciously. We are aware that we are not of the culture we have imbibed and are practicing, and we also know and reject our own cultures and traditions, what we have done is effectively dislodge our elders, who are 'responsively and spiritually grounded, experienced custodians of our community knowledge,'(Asa) - That, in the final analysis, we are then playing games of amnesia with what we know is causing our social malaise, but insisting on becoming cultural, social and traditional strangers amongst our peoples and ourselves. Why maar he?

If we pay attention and read the following quote from Asa, what I have been saying above becomes much more clearer and crystalizes our understand as to what is it that is happening.

Asa:

[As African people, for us...] ... The whole socialization process requires a liberal use of elders and the whole community for exposure and for approval. It not only takes, "A whole village to raise a child," It takes a whole village to raise itself."

We not only know what Asa is saying, but that was the structure, nature and functioning of our cultures, traditions, customs and everything that we did holistically as an African people of Mzantsi. One just needs to go into our villages and so-called rural areas. This culture of ours is being commercially used in different holiday spots and outlets, where the local people are employed by the Business to entertain its borders and customers, nightly by performing a potpourri of South African cultural jigs and the like. We know these, and this last point, that our culture, though exploited in a trivialized way by foreign sponsors, is alive and real, and some of our African elite use these places to entertain their friends, guest and other unmentionables.

Asa summarily captures the points I am making above in this manner:

"Children of the community are Divine gifts of our creator. They, literally, can never be given away. They can never be left behind. They are not "clients." They are family. This orientation must be measured against the global slide of control to corporations, missionaries, high-level government officials, which operates in dictatorial fashion, without meaningful community influence."
This is what I was saying above about the use of our culture in holiday resorts/retreats, hotels and such like entities, that they are using and paying our people to dance for their visitors, renters and so forth, and this has no meaningful contribution and influence to and in our communities whatsoever. What we have to learn and recognize from such posts is the fact that the upshot is that I am extolling the virtues of our cultures, which I still have to describe, as being the most resonating and the 'greatest socialization systems developed anywhere in the world; ancient or modern."(Asa)

Asa further adds that:

"It is hard to see how any African who is aware of them could be satisfied merely to achieve in "mainstream systems," with validation from non-Africans who give us their self-serving versions of what excellent performance is. No community that lost its intimate connection to its wise elders can survive."

In order to make more concrete Asa's point above, I defer to him when he writes:

"[The elderly], ... by their efforts to inspire people, mediate conflicts, and facilitate important life ceremonies, they operate as secular guides to human behavior and social arbiters. No profession in any other part of the world is charged with such wide-ranging and intimate involvement in the lives of the people."

We have forgotten that, some of us willy-nilly and intentionally and conveniently. We, those of us who grew within such environments/milieu dictated to and guided by our elders, when we used to respect our elderly and old people, know that what Asa is talking about, and that he is merely reminding us that we are going to have to shake and jot down our cultural memories and disseminate such, positively, amongst our people.

I might have culled these reminders from a book written by Asa, at this point, but, in all earnestness, many of us, if we have read thus far, can recognize and understand/know what Asa is talking about. We know that these are our African communities he is talking about. We know very well what time it is when Asa reminds us about our cultural and traditional memories/realities, lives and selves. We merely are trying to ignore these and running, fast, away from ourselves. Why are we hastening away from our core selves, ever so fast?

One other thing that is clear and is touched upon by Asa, is that:The lasting challenge that we face is the absence of information and understanding of African Culture. This has been by design. The enforcers of an oppressive system work to create the cultural disorder among the oppressed. In particular, they suppress the value of other cultures while glorifying and fabricating the history of themselves. They understand the resulting disorder will make it impossible for the oppressed to be truly independent."

Fanon made some interesting observations along these lines:

"The unilaterally decreed normative value of certain cultures deserves careful attention. ... The enterprise of deculturation turns out to be the negative of a more gigantic work of economic, and even biological enslavement... The doctrine of cultural hierarchy is thus but one aspect of a systematized hierarchization implacably pursued.

"...For its systems of reference have to be Broken. Expropriation, spoliation, raids, objective murder, are matched by the sacking of cultural patterns, or at least condition such sacking. The social panorama is destructed; values are flaunted, crushed, emptied.

"...The lines of force, having crumbled, no longer give direction. In their stead, a new system of values is imposed, not proposed but affirmed, by the heavy weight cannons and sabers.

"...This culture, once living and open to the future, becomes closed, fixed in the colonial status, caught in the yoke of oppression. Both present and mummified, it testifies against it members. It defines them in fact without appeal. The cultural mummification leads to a mummification of individual thinking. The apathy so universally noted among colonial peoples is but the logical consequence of this operation.

"Their approach of inertia constantly directed at the 'natives' is utterly dishonest. As though it were possible for a man to evolve otherwise than within the framework of a culture that recognizes him and that he decides to assume.

"...Thus, we witness the setting up of archaic, inert institutions, Functioning under the oppressor's supervision and patterned like a caricature of formerly fertile institutions."(Fanon)

In the final analysis, we end up being and have become a culturally dependent people-not depended on our Culture, to be certain and for sure.

"The cultural dependent people will believe, internalize and utilize anything that they are socialized to believe I correct. For this reason, Africans around the globe copy European standards of beauty. In certain African countries(Asia and the Middle East), there is a crises in the number of people who bleach their skin in an effort to lighten it and look more European.

"Instead of growing food or processing the natural medical practices that were passed on to us, we are totally dependent on others. It is ironic, that those make money on the medicine and other medical remedies today, studied and copied the practices of indigenous people around the world; the very people that they called backward. Now instead of benefiting from the legacy of their ancestors, the descendants are dependent for medicine, food, and other things needed to survive.

"Africans have begun to internalize the views that exploiters have of us and our traditions. Many of us have become eager seeker to be educated in alien traditions, without criticism of them. For the past few centuries, the mass education we receive in Africa and in the Diaspora is rooted largely in Western European education orientation and practice.

This condition has led to financial and political dependence. We no longer create the things that we need to survive; not food, clothing, or shelter. Even those things that we do create such as our music are under the control of others who have turned these very creativities against us. Destructive images are carried back into African/African America/African in the Diaspora, communities, where messages of [positive] uplift should be found."

I have stated in an earlier posted article that history contains both progress and regression. However, regressing at this point in history will not be a situation where we will be able to fight the battle all over again. Regressing at this point in history essentially spells annihilation for Africans in America and for Africans the world over.

So that, like here in Mzantsi and elsewhere, the idea that somehow according to some universal principle we are going to be in a better condition than our ancestors is an illusion which often results from not studying history and recognizing the progressions and regressions occur; that integrations and disintegrations occur in history. Many of us think the accomplishments we have made to this point mean that we are only going to expand them in the future. W had better think about that again.

So that, we should remember and recall what Wilson stated: "For what must be the form and functionality of African consciousness and behavior if they are derivative of an African history written by their oppressors? The history of the oppressed, as written by their oppressors, shape the consciousness and psychology of both oppressed and oppressor. It helps to legitimate the oppressive system and to maintain the imbalance of power in favor of the oppressor.

"It seeks to impose a social/historical/cultural amnesic tax on the heads of African peoples and thereby rob them of their most valuable resources o their knowledge of truth and reality of self; their cultural heritage, and identity, minds, bodies, and souls; their wealth, lands, products of the labor and lives."

We know all these things and how our lives are just a sham, to date. We are all living the life described above, but then, for the many years all these sages have been talking to us, what it is that we are not doing and saying to each that we should be doing and saying to each other? We are not different when it comes to learning like all other human beings on earth. Why do we and are failing ourselves to ourselves and our people? Why are we unimportant to ourselves, even when we have been given some modicum of enlightenment?

We have all the negative stuff that has happened to us, and we know the positive things that have been spoken by our leaders and elders, that my question, though now sounding redundant, is, why are we not capable of bettering ourselves, even when we read and learn what is our plight in today's life. Like I said elsewhere, and mean it, that, "We are much better than this."

We can and have been transmitting our culture even under the ruthless rule of Apartheid. Since when, then did we stop and now incapable of reviving and upgrading ourselves as a people. Let's get one thing straight, we are the Africans of Mzantsi, in that geographical location known as South Africa today. We shall then have to begin to behaving and being the people of Mzantsi with our own cultures, traditions, customs, music, dances and the whole bit-that I say, its about time our culture , history and traditions, custom and so forth Live!

If we can just do that, Live with and within our own cultures, these drug pandemics will eventually disappear in and from our lives. Alcoholism will be eliminated; over stopped and eradicated; diseases and other ailments and sicknesses can be effectively dealt with; our politics will eventually become a democracy for and of the people and in the end through and by the people. These are possible if we can begin to address and deal with our shortcomings and failures as we are trying to configure and bring ourselves and our people thoroughly into the most respectable decent commentary of World and human history and existence.

"To manipulate history is to manipulate consciousness: to manipulate consciousness is to manipulate possibilities; and to manipulate possibilities is to manipulate power. Herein lies the mortal threat of Eurocentric historiography to African existence. For what must be the form and functionality of African consciousness and behavior if they are derivative of an African history written by their oppressors?

The history of the oppressed, as written by their oppressors, shapes the consciousness and psychology of both oppressed and oppressor. It helps to legitimate the oppressive system and to maintain the imbalance of power in favor of the oppressor. Eurocentric history writing is essentially an exercise in publishing apologetics for the European oppression of African people; often a gross and crude attempt to create and shape subordinate an inferior African consciousness and psychology.

It seeks to impose a social/historical/cultural amnesic tax on the heads of African peoples and thereby rob them of the most valuable resources — their knowledge of truth and reality of self; their cultural heritage and identity, minds, bodies and souls; their wealth, lands, products of their labor and lives.

"Eurocentric historiography is the most formidable ally of White racism and imperialism. It's treacherous role in this regard must be explored and reversed by an African-centered historiography, written by African historians, and dedicated to historical accuracy and truth — historians who are unafraid to speak truth to power.

"The clarion call for the writing of a restorative African-centered historiography — a critical undertaking — is a call for the healing of the wounds of African peoples; for African unity; for the freeing and expansion of African consciousness; for the re-conquest of African minds, bodies, lands, resources, and African autonomy.

"Every Eurocentric social institution conspires with Eurocentric historiography to handcuff and incarcerate African consciousness, to justify and facilitate the subordination and exploitation of African peoples." (Wilson)

"Until The Lion Has A Historian, The Hunter Will Always Be A Hero"... African Maxim

Post 2015 June 16th Trailing Murmurs: Structural Racism And History…

What I have come to realize is that we act and talk and behave as we have been conditioned in the Pavlovian mode. We are so incarcerated in our ways which have been cobbled into us over 500 centuries that with the advent of the Internet, we are now beginning to think, some of us anyway, how to unpack this imprisonment of our whole being and minds-and use the internet, social media, to analyze it and debunk it if necessary. But we need people who are prepared to cover this area and sector of life known as being a historian. We need to decode, we also must record these events as they are happening to us without fear or favor to no one, but truth to our people. Our writings cannot be neutral, as observed by Sankara.

We speak English because historically the British colonized many people and countries around the globe. But in our learning English, as taught to us by our colonizers, be it French or Dutch, we were infected with and affected by culture, traditions and ways of our colonizers. We were so beaten-down, that as we served our masters in whatever capacity, we worked assiduously very hard to be accepted, acknowledged and approved-of by our detractors. This was inculcated into our Ancestors, right on down to us in the span of 500+ years-to date.

If we say that we are supposed to write our own histories and stories, we simply mean that we use history as our consciousness, reality, reference and towards understanding the present and figuring if not shaping our own self-determined and autonomous future. Once we are born and grow, our lives is our own
Responsibilities. We have to understand history in its real and hard core facts. But we should not dumb down ourselves into thinking that it is the past and what's happening now in our lives has no relationship to the past or to history. My role when I am wearing my historical cap, is to flesh out the real facts that African History and World History Lives!

Here's a statement that was made by Henri Juno:

"I speak of resignation. It is necessary to the Blacks(Africans), for despite all that has been written on the fundamental axiom of the absolute equality of mankind, they are an inferior race, a race made to serve. It would be harmful to them to cover up this evident fact under a pile of sentimental eloquence. ... Christianity alone will make out of the Black(African) servant satisfied with his lot, for it alone can bring him to a free and voluntary submission to the plans of Divine Providence. ...

"Everyone, I will even say the whole of humanity, is deeply concerned that the "Negro"(African) should accept the position assigned to him by his physical and intellectual faculties. Without the arms of the 'Natives'(Africans), the gold mines of Johannesburg, which have built up the prosperity of South Africa, would cease to exist from day to the next, for it is these arms which accomplish the entire manual labor in the extracting of Gold.

"Then again, when we consider the immense plains on the coast of Delagoa, the valleys of the Nkomati, the Limpopo and the Zambezi, how could these fertile territories be exploited if the Blacks(Africans) refused their aid? In these tropical latitudes, the European dies of fever, especially if he starts working the soil himself ... and the White man's role is that of organizer, the Master, under whose watch must work million arms of the native population"

Historians job is to not only cite the most amazing or terrible or great facts about and done to Africans, with the new communications system and media, it is also our duty to marry that information to our contemporary realities. We do this by stitching together factual historical data, and narratives from the living and present-day people.

Whenever we try to configure our present social miasma and successes, some of us remember what led us to the present, and some of us who know, conveniently forget, and many, the younger ones do not really know nor understand why it is that their lives might all of a sudden turn topsy-turvy or unpleasant. Many of our children and their children have no clue why they are what they are today-successful or failing in life. As historians, who are on FB and other social media, we clamor for and try our darnest to inform the present reading African intelligentsia, to come home to the reality of the poor and suffering African masses. This is not easy, and there are still not may takers.

Back to Wilson under the "Opening Salvo," the reader would do well at this point re-read the quote at the beginning of the article in order to be able to taken in and let settle the discourse thus far. So that, what we do with history, is up to us and we are the one in control/charge, so long as we understand what the uses of history, or the relevance and importance of history is to us. Many people always choose to ignore or jump their coming to terms and understanding history. Well, like the aphorism above, without historians, I am paraphrasing it now, "African people who have no historian, will have their detractors as their heroes(My spin here now).

This is precisely what has happened to us. We know and can read what the Europeans have been saying to us over the centuries and we have already internalized it. It is what we are going to do with the knowledge and understanding we garnered from the citation above the likes of Juno, that we might begin to have alternate ideas and direction. How we decide, henceforth whenever we get exposed to our stories, histories and realities, how we are going to deal with that, is what we have to begin to use as a conscientizing mind-set-Change the link and break it-form a new way of thinking, seeing, feeling and knowing that is predetermined and applied and made possible by our ways of doing, thing and living our lives anew.

If we read something historical, the essence of who we are that has been ignored and invisible, we become a critical mass consciousness by virtue of our knowledge and awareness of our stories and history, that, we really do not have to depend on one person historians, we become a nation of historically aware nation, and we are able to ascend one hurdle towards becoming a Nation.

How do we relate ourselves to own history. Knowing it for one is one way, and living it is another good way to get to begin to know more about ourselves, for ourselves, without apologizing to no one-Ever. This is important, but also, it is a motivation as to where are we headed in our way of knowing about ourselves. We do not have to remember ourselves and he historical — just because in was June 16th remembrance. Post the celebrations, we are and still remain those troubled people who will need another holiday to jolt us back into awareness about our reality and existence. We only need to remember that remembering and upgrading and keeping up our awareness about our own history, is not a crime, but a good thing, and do it Everyday!

As the shot of history is ringing through the ether with this article, we should remember that history is not temporal, but a fast splurging past reality presently and hurtling into the future. That is history and how it affects and effects us today. We cannot relegate it to the back burner of Father-time, we are going to have to look for it, take, and live it. As historians, some of us, that is what makes us tick. It is not a profitable vocation, but it is the real deal-All of humanity is logged in into hitter, and it's about time we took our chairs or seats in the Earth Space planet and do what we are here to be and do.

What are we to do then, some ask?

In this case, I will defer to Asa:

"African socialization practices served to assist communities in day-to-day operations, collective survival, interpersonal relation, and basic quality of life issues. The content of an African education and socialization process contains many components which are modified according to the specific goal and aims of a community. It includes at least the following parts:

-Study the whole heritage of the community
-Study of the spiritual significance of everything
-Study of the whole life of the community
-Study of the whole environment and ecology
-Study of how to maintain health
-Building and understanding of MAAT(Balance)
-building strong community values
-Building fundamental and advanced skills
-Building strong social bonds
-Building a strong ethnic family identity
-Study of geopolitical and economic forces
-Building Respect for elders
-Building and maintaining effective nurturing systems for children

Asa continues:

"Our methodology for socialization follows from the above. Bonded relationship among teachers and students are the foundation for method. Collective efforts of students, teachers, families and communities are essential. Meditation and reflection is essential. Conducting socialization in specially prepared "sacred spaces" is essential. With all of this, critical reflection is a must.

The character of traditional African education reflects thousands of years of development. It is unique in terms of its purpose,its methods, its content, and its outcomes.

As African people, we occupy an environment that is physical, social, cultural, and above all, spiritual. While our survival need must be met, African educators are admonished to "build for eternity," not merely for the temporal. Our exploiters see us merely as hard labor for their schemes as they scramble to attain power to manipulate and control people and resources…

"We must not be distracted by the false argument that, using African traditions in the modern or postmodern world" is useless and misguided, trivial, and irrelevant. Technology is a part of Africa's heritage, and even under conditions of slavery, colonization, segregation, and White supremacy ideology, Africans have been at the forefront of science and technology in nuclear research, information technology, engineering, etc.

There is no conflict between high technology and African Traditions. The difference is that it must be balanced with the traditional values which emphasize that technology must compliment nature, not destroy it. ... Even in the face of our greatness in these areas, some Africans ridicule our concern with the value of elements of antiquity as a source of orientation and practice for today. These same Africans, however, raise no objection to Europeans constant and pervasive use of their ancient culture."

Asa has a penchant to encapsulate what I would like to say from an African centered point of view. The practice of history in contemporary times can be done effectively and successively utilizing and applying African cultural transmission by combining present-day technologies and techniques with our traditional and customary/cultural bearings and mooring…

The upshot is that, we should not only get stuck in the celebration of ourselves in one day . It is a continuing and ever evolving process and we need to have some guidelines what it is we ought to be doing, o should be doing to lift our people out of sherri ignorance, out of poverty and into activism and collective action and rule. This is what we should be doing, and learning from the best we can get from our own African Master teachers and go-getters. We need not be trying hard to be other people, we have enough on our life's plate to last us until the earth ends. What are we then waiting for then? We should share these ideas with as many of our people and help enlighten each other, than hoard knowledge and flaunt our being educated whilst our people languish in misery and ignorance. That does not make us any good, and we can only see tangible change with aggressive and powerful pro-active endeavors on our people and nation's part…

The Struggle Moving Forward Is Hard, But Continues...

There are so many other stories of the drug pandemic I am even talking about that are happening throughout South Africa, that I will forego them, with dread. I would rather segue into talking about 'Power' and how if we were to understand it, would fare better in this centuries uneven war against Africans of South Africa. Our not knowing anything about the conception, manifestation or realization of power is our ignorance about it since we have been a captured people for over 500+. For too long now we have been slaves of someone else, that learning and retaining power is going to take time for us to wrap our heads around that fact.

Now that we have a slither of an opening to be no more those types of slave and beasts of burden, we have now opted to be modern slave and work as CEOs of the mega corporations, but with that still, we have no power nor are they living and practicing power as human beings on earth. Our greatest and well learned children, Old women and men, are more, so, lackeys of some deep-pocketed financial interest and this they do at the expense of the poverty-stricken and imposed ignorance societies and nation…

So that, if we are going to learn about power, I usually defer to those who can best teach it to us. Wilson states:

"Power ... is conceived not as a property, but as a strategy, that its effects of domination are attributed not to 'appropriation', but to dispositions, maneuvers, tactics, techniques, functioning; that one should decipher in it a network of relations, constantly in tension, in activity, rather than a privilege that one might possess; that one should take as its model a perpetual battle theater than a contract, regulating a transaction or the conquest of a territory. In short, this "Power is exercised rather than possessed; it is not the 'privilege,' acquired or preserved, of the dominant class,but the overall effect of its strategic positions — an effect, that is manifested and sometimes extended by the position of those who are dominated."

We read further from Wilson that:

"The strategies and tactics by which dominant Whites attempt to order, re-order and disorder African consciousness and behavior must be neutralized by African-centered strategic and tactical counterattacks. The metaphysical preparation to undertake such countermoves first must include the thorough decolonizing of African consciousness and the strategic organization of the african community, making it capable of creating a collective intelligence and adaptational talent which in turn will enable it to overthrow White supremacy and achieve its liberation from oppression.

This then leads us to Wilson teaching much more specifically as to what it is we should do I will only look at one of the ways we can explore-step by step, of the various he suggests to at least begin somewhere:

"Reintegration Of African History"

"The true history and culture of African peoples must be rediscovered, reexamined, and reintegrated by African peoples. These approaches to African history and culture must conjointly become the vehicles which facilitate the collective and cooperative action of African peoples in the pursuit of their liberation

"The appropriate reclamation of African history and culture will provide Africans with a realistic and supportive vision of reality; with self-knowledge, self-esteem, self-confidence, self acceptance, and self-control; with the ability to form empowering affectionate relationships and the ability to engage in proactive, self-interested productive activity; and with a self-enhancing sense of purpose and existential meaningfulness. Understand accurately and appropriately African history and culture, will enable Africans to have an honest, accurate appraisal of their strengths and needs as well as those of their European counterparts. Such an understanding, will allow them to discover the strategic and tactical means of liberating themselves from White supremacy."

There are several other ways and means that Wilson suggest and proposes that we could do, but for now, I will do with the one I have cited above. We are going to have to really dig in deeper than we have hither done. The scope and depth and range of the drug problem here in Mzantsi We are going to have to use our faculties and intelligence to really begin to build a solid foundation for a strong nation. There are not going to be any shortcuts, no matter how we try and wiggle out of that responsibility, that will ever help solve our present social malaise.

Like I have stated above, we know and can talk about our drug problems, but we must also begin to look at how to look at and for solutions. I have just touched a bit of the acquirement of power with the hope that this will orient us towards understanding how to take it and use it for our benefits.Learning and applying a few things at time will ensure that we build a sturdy and solid foundation for our Nation of the Africans of Mzantsi. Saying it and reading about it is one thing, doing and making it real and permanent is totally another issue… It the state we are presently in of being drugged-up out of our minds, it is essential and important that we begin with ourselves. One cannot expect to change others if that change is not going on inside oneself.

Socialization, Transmission, Intergenerationally

At least, under Apartheid, my generation knew, one way of the other we are going to have to read, learn and know what we have read and learned. That was basically it. We went to schools in the Townships where teachers were paid by the community, and if the government paid them any salary, it was simply poverty wages-slave labor wages. So that, working under Apartheid and during Apartheid was simply slave labor, no matter what one did or knew or learned, all was considered Darkie skill and African labor, and it was so listed in the legal parlance of Apartheid

But today we have abandoned the culture of reading and studying and knowing as much as we can. We are all chasing the newly self-enrichment quickly schemes that we are not all becoming overnight millionaires. We hardly even understand these Tenders, and many think that means they are now millionaires, blow the government money of frivolous goods and trinkets, and end up broke without the intended project being completed nor finished.

Asa teaches us:

"Truly, there is no valid way for Africans to be, to exist as an ethnic family, in ignorance of our own traditions. ... Our unity and solidarity is based on our shared culture, not merely on our pigment and hair texture, or other aspects of our phenotype. Our traditions have made a profound impact on world civilization. They still do. But today, we must reclaim these traditions, and where appropriate, utilize them to help us to address the many issues that plague our communities today.

"... Schools have little or nothing to engage our students in African cultural traditions or in support of African communities. Our communities rarely acknowledges our traditions and they fail to create adequate structures to guarantee Intergenerational Cultural Transmission. We are culturally lazy and our ancestors are not pleased. History will not be kind to those of us who forget. Shame, disintegration and dependency on others, or worse, will be the outcome/is the outcome today."

We have totally taken our eyes off the ball and are playing nothing-air. We are chasing foreign shadows and hastening towards mirages, and all the time in these cases, we come out with nothing for ourselves

In order to fight the drug epidemic, we have to follow the community as it routes out the drug dealers and try to make these raids stay permanent effectively. We should try and use the Social Media to raise these issues as real as we can and must not just stop there, but go back into our communities and begin to have a more close face-to-face interaction with the poor and all other types of people. But we are going to have to read study and know ourselves and everything we do, seriously. Asa intones"beneficial

"There is no way around serious and disciplined study. We must study, and stud more. Study, will reintroduce us to our tradition as African people; a beneficial tradition. Nothing in the general culture requires us to do this and so we set our own initiative. There is no chance whatsoever, that we can launch an appropriate socialization effort without study, without structure, and without habit, tied to our own heritage."

If we are going to begin to take on the drug scourge, we are going to have to begin to teach and learn ourselves as individuals and connect with many like-minded activist in our communities. We then have to come to studying and learning as a collective of habitually readers into group readers. One can start doing these things alone, but in the end, the objective is to function within a large enclave or group so's to achieve a desired end, through reading learning and studying.

If you listen to the majority of us today in Mzanttsi, many pretend like they know when in reality they do not read, but they act like every time they open their mouths, its like they are now presenting something new-nothing but falsities and ignorance is what one can glean from such utterances and colloquy.

We are going to heighten our researchers and motivate them to work hard digging up more serious and important details to bring more awareness and knowledge or the aims of traditional African goals and aims, methods, contents and outcomes. Asa: "When you have not studied, you represent the accurate image of a disorganized unfocused and controlled group. Unfortunately, to many individuals stand ready to enter the limelight with no clear vision.

"This is what has happened to us with the coming of the ANC into power, which I have alluded to above. We have inexperienced, and many of our leaders and their cadres vey ignorant and illiterate, but posited into very sensitive and powerful position without them being qualified for such positions"Nothing is more pitiful than to be led by stores who have not done their homework.

As for who is bringing the Drugs into Mzantsi… It is too many people from all over the world and with the collaboration and assistance of some of us desperate and opportunistic Africans of Mzantsi. In this Hub, I will delve no more into this topic, as yet, but will mostly concern myself with what we should be doing to rescue our people.

I think we should pay heed to Fromm when he writes:

"The first mechanism of Escape from Freedom, is the tendency to give up the independence of one's own individual self and to fuse one's self with somebody or something outside of oneself in order to acquire the strength which the individual self is lacking. Or, to put it in different words, to see for new, "Secondary bonds" as a substitute for the "primary bonds" which have been lost."

Understanding Your Electricity Woes Caused By Your Boss, The IMF and The World Bank With The ANC Colluding...

Patrick Bond writes:

"Just how dangerous is the World bank and its neoconservative President Shellack to South Africa and global climate? Notwithstanding South African's existing $75 Billion Foreign Debt, on April 8, 2110? The Bank added a $3.75 Billion loan to South Africa's electricity utility, Eskom, for the primary purpose of building the World's fourth largest coal-fired power plant, at Medupi.

"It will spew 25 million tons of climate pollutant Carbon Dioxide into the air each year. South Africa's Finance Minister. Pravin Fordham has repeatedly said that this is the World Bank's "First Post-Apartheid loan, yet the banks 1999 and 2008 Country Assistance strategy documents show conclusively that Medupi is the 15th credit since 1994.

"Gorhan claimed the loan will help South Africa "Build a relationship" with the Bank. He 'conveniently' forgets that the Bank co-authored the African National Congress(ANC) government's neoliberal growth, employment and redistribution (GEAR) Program, which led us to overtake Brazil as the world's most unequal major country, as African people's incomes fell below 1994 levels and White People's income grew by 24 percent, according to official statistics.

"Gordhan neglects that the World Bank itself regularly brags about its "knowledge Bank" role here. In 1999, for example, after economist John Toome suggested to the then Minister Kader Asmal, that the government impose a "credible threat of "cutting service" to the people who cannot afford water, the Banks Country Assistance Strategy reported that its "Market-related pricing" advice was "sentimental in facilitating radical revision in South Africa's approach". As a result, the Cholera epidemic the following year — catalyzed by water disconnection — killed hundreds.

"Similar misery will follow the Eskom Loan. Medusa will be built in a water-scarce area where communities are already confronting extreme pollution. Forty new Limpopo and Mpumalanga Coal Mines will be open to provide inputs to Medupi and its successor, Kusile.

"Meanwhile, the World Bank is trying to lend nearly $4 Billion to the Johannesburg-based State owned utility, Eskom, the world's fourth-largest Power Company and African's largest Carbon emitter (with 40% of South Africa's total emissions). The loan is mainly for constructing the worlds fourth most CO2-intensive Coal-fired Plant, Medupi . The ANC-led government is in service of the IMF, World Bank, and the International and local Big Capital."

Going Against The Grain

Bond further informs us thusly:
"More worryingly, power-plant construction plans include a pay-off of $135 million profit for the ANC, whose investment arm own a quarter of Hitachi, which received a $5 billion Eskom contract." So blatant is the conflict of interest that the government's Public Protector last month judged Valli Moosa - then chair of Eskom and an ANC finance committee member — to have acted improperly.

The potential sale of the ANC's shares in Hitachi within the next six weeks (announced and then retracted) doesn't mitigate matters, given Medupi's high cost escalations (from 5.5 billion to $18 billion) and the increased value of Hitachi's shares thanks to the improper and corrupt contract. Five dozen SA civic, environmental, church, academic and labor organizations began a campaign against the World Bank loan in February.

They are concerned not only that catastrophic climate change will be hastened, along with privatization of electricity generation, but worse, Medupi's main beneficiary will be the world's largest metal and mining corporations, which already receive the world's cheapest electricity thanks to multi-decade deals cut in the last years of Apartheid. This was being pushed at a time of intense controversy surrounding Eskom mismanagement in its last annual reporting period. The caption above demonstrates clearly that the ANC is in Cahoots with Big International and local capital, and being advised/controlled by the IMF and the World among some of its many advisors and sponsors.

For us to completely understand the way the issues above work, I shall consult with Frantz Fanon who wrote:

"Racism, as we have seen, is only one element of a vaster whole: that of the systemized oppression of a people. We witness the destruction of cultural values,of ways of life. Language, dress, techniques, are devalorized. Such attempts deliberately leave out of account the special character of the colonial situation. In reality, the nations that undertake a colonial war have no concern for the confrontation of cultures. The enslavement, in the strictest sense, of the native population is the prime necessity. For this its systems of reference have to be broken.

" Expropriation, spoliation, raids, objectives are matched by the sacking of cultural patterns, or at least condition such sacking. The social panorama is destructed; values are flaunted, crushed, emptied. Racism is not the whole but the most visible, the most day-to-day and, not to mince matters, the crudest element of a given structure.

Here's Wilson's take:

"To study the relations of racism and culture is to raise the question of their reciprocal action. If culture is the combination of motor and mental behavior patterns arising from the encounter of man with nature and with his fellow-man, it can be said that racism is indeed a cultural element. There are thus cultures with racism and cultures without racism. The precise cultural element, however, has not become encysted. Racism has not managed to harden. It had to renew itself, to adapt itself, to change its appearance. It has had to undergo the fate of the cultural whole that it informed it."

"An outside observer might therefore limit his awareness to the generalized hope in the historic development of what has been called the objective process of decolonization, whereas Africans are being asked more or less explicitly to put their confidence in the good will of the former masters and not despair, in any case, of the historic necessities that dictate the tempo of the reconversion of colonial oppression. It is rigorously true that decolonization is proceeding, but it is rigorously false to pretend and to believe that this decolonization is the fruit of an objective dialectic which more or less rapidly assumes the appearance of an absolutely inevitable mechanism."

"When in the case where the political disposition of many Africans overlap those of Whites, these dispositions are alienated and restricted in such a way as to motivate such Africans to be supportive of the fundamental racial status quo, or at least, not to struggle for the complete reconstruction of the local/Global economic system and the neutralization of the White-African power differential. With economic institutions and their arrangements of control fully entrenched and dressed in appealing disguises, and therefore much harder to dismantle or shove aside, an anti-imperialist crusade would be much harder to revive."

"Thus, the only escape is for Africans to grow and develop under the umbrella of fear, uncertainty and makes them to try their best at appeasing their masters and detractors at the expense of the existence as an authentic African community. And with the new imperialist structures thus proofed against African petit-bourgeois assault, the imperialist presence in Africa could go on and on and on, into the far indefinite future, and possibly for all time. At present, this seems to be the reality and conditioned existence of Africans and other oppressed peoples throughout the world."(Wilson)

The World Bank is the Paymaster, and we are the employees on different levels of our being employed. We work for the White Master at different levels and commitment. The higher-up one rises in the echelon of neo-slavery, the more little pay is added, status given, and ones role as the bodyguard of the master's culture and economics is very much well assured. The IMF and the World Bank play a very good game of being the Paymaster, but they also control those who look over their properties(Countries) and its leaders and people.

We know today that we are being subjected to Load-sharing, as it is inopportunely dubbed. We are not sharing any load, but are making mega-profits for the Coal Companies being built, polluting out environment and depleting our rivers and aquifers, that today, whilst millions are raked through exploiting our ignorance, we still have not yet figured out the game being played on us.

The way our water is being used and manipulated against us, giving us Cholera and all sorts of lack of water diseases, our electricity is being used to churn out pollution and increase the super-profits illegally earned by our former and present detractors, it should be known that The ANC is deep into this morass and cesspool. We are going to have to really talk about the concrete ways through which we are being disempowered, and how many different Corporations and other entities are having a field-day with us here in Mzantsi.

Our local elite and petty bourgeoisie has been brought and packaged to serve Western interest-So, therefore, they are not a threat to Imperialism but a solid and perfect ally, which is working assiduously against the interests of its poor and hungry/jobless masses. The role of the present-day ANC government is to ensure that anyone interested in investing in South Africa, they are going to find business as usual.

So that Wilson intones:

"False beliefs held by an individual which are stubbornly retained and defended despite their logical inconsistencies with objective reality and valid evidence to the contrary. Not only do such beliefs persist directly in the face of contradictory evidence, they persist in the face of continuous negative consequences resulting from their being held."

"The self-hatred of middle-class Africans is often revealed in the keen competition which exists among them for status and recognition. This keen competition is the result of the frustrations which they experience in attempting to obtain acceptance and recognition by Whites. Middle-class Africans are constantly criticizing and belittling Africans who achieve some recognition or who acquire status above them.

"They prefer to submit to the authority of whites than to subordinate to other Africans. For example, African scholars generally refuse to seek the advice and criticism of competent African scholars and prefer to return to White scholars for such co-operation. In fact, it is difficult for Middle-class Africans to co-operate in any field of endeavor.

"This failure in social relations is, as indicated in an important study, because 'in every African he encounters his own self-contempt.' It is as if he said, "You are only an African like myself; so why should you be in a position above me?" (Abraham Kardiner and Lionel Ovesey)

"The self-hatred often results in guilt feelings on the part of the African who succeeds in elevating himself above his fellows. He feels unconsciously that in rising above other Africans he is committing an act of aggression which will result in hatred and revenge on their part. The act of aggression may be imagined, but very often it is real.

" This is the case when middle-class Africans oppose the economic and social welfare of Africans because of their own interests. In some American/[African] cities, it has been African bourgeoisie and not Whites who have opposed the building of low-cost public housing for African workers, and own some of the worst slums in the United States.

"While their wives, who wear mink coats, "Drip with diamonds" and are written up in the "society" of African newspapers, ride in Cadillacs and [Bentley's], whilst their African tenants sleep on the dirt floors of hovels unfit for human habitation. The guilt of the middle-class Africans is not always unconscious. For example, take the case of the African leader who proclaimed over the radio in a national broadcast that the Africans did not want social equity.

He was conscious of his guilt feeing and his self-hatred in playing such a role, for he sent word privately to the Africans that he never hated so much to do anything in his life, but that it was necessary because of his position as head of a state college which was under White supervision. The self-hatred of the middle-class African arises, then, not only from the fact that he does not want to be an African, but also because of his sorry role in American[South African-my addition] society. (Frazier)

Africans seek an escape in delusions involving wealth. This is facilitated by the fact that they have had little experience with the real meaning of wealth, and they lack a tradition of saving and accumulation. Wealth to them means spending money without any reference to its source. Hence, their behavior generally reflects the worst qualities of the gentleman and peasant from whom their only vital traditions spring. Therefore, their small accumulation of capital and the income which they receive from professional services within the African (or White) community make them appear wealthy in comparison the low economic status of the majority of poor Africans.

The delusion of wealth is supported by the myth of African business. Moreover, the attraction of the delusion of wealth is enhanced by the belief that wealth will gain them acceptance in American[South African] life. In seeking an escape into the delusion of wealth, middle-class Africans make a fetish of material things or physical possessions. They are constantly buying things — house, automobiles, furniture and all sorts of gadgets, not to mention clothes. Many of the furnishings and gadgets which they acquire are never used; nevertheless, they continue to accumulate things.

The homes of many middle class Africans have the appearance of museums for the exhibition of American manufacturers and spurious art objects. The objects which they are constantly buying are always on display. African school teachers who devote their lives to "society" like to display twenty to thirty pairs of shoes, the majority of which they never wear. African professional men proudly speak of the two automobiles which hey have acquired when they need only one. The acquisition of objects which are not used or needed seems to be an attempt to fill some void in their lives. (Frazier)

"The delusion of power also appears to provide an escape for middle-class Africans from the world of reality which pierces through the world of make-believe of the African bourgeoisie. The positions of power which they occupy in the African world enable them to act autocratically towards other Africans, especially when they have the support of the White community. In such cases, the delusion of power may provide an escape from their frustrations. It is generally, however, when middle-class Africans hold positions enabling them to participate in the White community that they seek in the delusion of power an escape from their frustrations."

Our deluded African elite is the cause of our present-day decrepit existence and misery. They will not listen to anyone who threatens their livelihood and positions. They are in fact guarding it with whatever means and ways necessary. The opening piece by Bond gives us an idea what has and is still happening to us concerning our electricity. Bond also clarifies, for us, the role that is played by the IMF, World Bank and the ANC.

We now are beginning to see a picture as to how our natural resources are used to pollute the planet and make billions for the investor company and countries-whilst we languish in poverty, joblessness, various sickness and still do not understand nor know where everything begun that we were not even told about. We can pretend that content of this piece are irrelevant, but when one starts reading up on Wilson quotes above, it becomes even much clearer as to how we have been conditioned and used to carry-out our own enslavement and be happy about it.

The Impact Of The IMF's Structural Adjustment Programs on Africa...

Impacts of Adjustment

Slower Growth

During 1960-1980, Sub Saharan Africa’s GDP per capita grew by 36%; in the 1980-2000 period it actually fell by 15%. As the Center for Economic and Policy Research puts it, “These are enormous differences by any standard of comparison and represent the loss to an entire generation–of hundreds of millions of people-of any chance of improving its living standards.”

Increased Poverty

According to the World Bank, in 2003, over 350 million people (more than half of Africa’s population of 682 million) lived below the poverty line of U.S.$ 1 a day, a 75% increase over the 200 million figure for 1994.

Lower Incomes

Africa’s estimated per capita income in 1990 was at the same level it had been in 1960. Per capita incomes for most Sub Saharan countries fell by 25% during the 1980s and for 18 countries these incomes were lower in 1999 than in 1975. In 1960, Sub-Saharan Africa’s per capita income was about 1/9 of that in high-income OECD countries; by 1998, it had deteriorated dramatically to about 1/18.

Low Human Development Indicators

According to the UN Development Program (UNDP), 80% of low human development countries–those with low income, low literacy, low life expectancy and high population growth rates–are in Africa.34 Average life expectancy for Sub Saharan Africa is only 47 years (the lowest in the world), a drop of 15 years since 1980.

Forty per cent of the population suffers from malnutrition that causes low birth weight among infants and stunts growth in children. In 2000, 30% of children under five were underweight in Sub-Saharan Africa; thirty-seven percent of such children were under height.35

Increased Debt Burdens

Under SAPs, Africa’s external debt has increased by more than 500% since 1980 to $333 billion today. SAPs have transferred $229 billion in debt payments from Sub-Saharan Africa to the West since 1980. This is four times the region’s 1980 debt. In the past decade alone, African countries have paid their debt three times over yet they are three times as indebted as ten years ago.

Of Sub-Saharan Africa’s 44 countries, 33 are designated heavily indebted poor countries by the World Bank. Africa, the world’s poorest region, pays the richest countries $15 billion every year in debt servicing. This is more than the continent gets in aid, new loans or investment. Jubilee 2000 UK warns that, “Foreign indebtedness now poses a fatal impediment to Africa’s development.”

In 1997, the UNDP stated that in the absence of debt payments, severely indebted African countries could have saved the lives of 21 million people and given 90 million girls and women access to basic education by the year 2000. The All-African Conference of Churches has called the debt “a new form of slavery, as vicious as the slave trade.” According to Africa Action, a Washington D.C.-based advocacy group:

“The US appears unwilling to support debt cancellation for Africa because the US actually gains a great deal from Africa’s economic enslavement. The US and other rich countries, as well as the World Bank and IMF, use Africa’s debt as leverage to manipulate the continent’s economic fate to serve their interests.”

Decrease in Health Care and Increase in Disease

Africa spends four times more on debt interest payments than on health care. This combined with cutbacks in social expenditure caused health care spending in the 42 poorest African countries to fall by 50% during the 1980s. As a result, health care systems have collapsed across the continent creating near catastrophic conditions.

More than 200 million Africans have no access to health services as hundreds of clinics, hospitals and medical facilities have been closed; those remaining open were generally left understaffed and without essential medical supplies. This has left diseases to rage unchecked, leading most alarmingly to an AIDS pandemic.

With about 12% of the world’s population, Africa accounts for 80% of the world’s deaths due to AIDS and almost 90% of the world’s deaths due to malaria. More than 17 million Africans have died of HIV/AIDS and an estimated 28 million of the 40 million people living with the disease worldwide are in Sub-Saharan Africa. More than 12 million African orphans have lost their mothers or both parents to AIDS. Presently, Malaria is killing 900,000 people annually across the continent and according to the World Health Organization (WHO) 3.3 million Africans will have tuberculosis by 2005.

Lack of Clean Drinking Water

More than half of Africa’s population is without safe drinking water and two-thirds do not have access to adequate sanitation. Water privatization schemes in Ghana and South Africa are further depriving poor people of access to potable water.

Decrease In Education Levels

Ten African governments spent more on debt repayments than on primary education and health care combined in 2002. Forty percent of African children are out of school and Africa is the only region where this number is rising. Between 1986 and 1996, per capita education spending fell by 0.7% a year on average. The adult literacy rate in Sub-Saharan Africa is 60%, well below the developing country average of 73%…

More than 140 million young Africans are illiterate.42

Given the horrifying social impact of SAPs all over Africa, it is not surprising that Emily Sikazwe, director of the Zambian anti-poverty group “Women for Change,” asked: “What would they [the World Bank and the IMF] say if we took them to the World Court in The Hague and accused them of genocide?”

HIPC

In response to public demands to address the debt crisis of poor countries and provide debt relief, the World Bank and the IMF introduced the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative in 1996. This has been seen as a failure due to the limited debt relief provided and its SAP requirements. Countries must successfully complete six years of structural adjustment before they become eligible for debt relief under HIPC. By the end of 2000, the 22 countries promised debt relief under HIPC had their debt reduced by $34 billion which is equivalent to only 8% of the total debts of the 52 low income countries.

For Mali and Burkina Faso, an internal World Bank-IMF report projects that debt service payments will actually increase after debt relief under HIPC. As Jubilee 2000 put it, “The HIPC is failing because it is a creditor-controlled process, designed to limit creditor losses, while increasing creditor leverage over HIPC countries. Its objective is not debt sustainability for poor countries, but rather to limit losses for rich countries.”

PRSPs

In another attempt at repackaging structural adjustment, the World Bank and the IMF introduced Poverty Reduction Support Papers (PRSPs) in 2000 which were supposed to transform SAPs into poverty reduction programs established by national governments who would consult with civil society in writing the PRSPs. However, country experiences with PRSPs show that the essence of SAPs has not changed; SAP orthodoxy is being grafted on top of PRSPs.

This is confirmed by John Page of the World Bank who explained: “The PRSP is a compulsory process wherein the people with the money tell the people without the money what to do to get the money.”47 A recent report on the PRSP process in Uganda found that, “Ugandan NGOs were invited to provide input on the development of the poverty-reduction goals, but not on the nature of the policies to achieve those goals.”

The IMF publicly claimed that, “Key macroeconomic policies, including targets for growth and inflation, and the thrust of fiscal, monetary, and external policies, as well as structural policies to accelerate growth, [would be] subjects for public consultation"; these consultations, however never took place in Uganda. The PRSP loan policies “were determined by the IMF and World Bank representatives in consultation with small technical teams within the Ministry of Finance and the Central Bank.”

The Case of Uganda, April 2002."

We are going to begin to look for information that not only inform, but puts us into some from of action. We can all regurgitate all the wise quotations and sayings here on FB, but so long that information is worthless, and lulls us into complacency and sell, it is not worth our while. I have culled and maxed information here from various sources to begin to give us a sense and enable us to wrap our heads around the shenanigans that are happening all around us, so that, this will equip and arm us with some form of holistic and coherent knowledge abut our situation, politics, economy and International intrigue.

These blood-sucking companies, are hidden from plain sight, and we keep on dealing with them as 'helpers', meaning, our governments and the useless leaders we see parading on the TV and other media outlets-are destroying us. We should not be distracted or made to take our eye off the ball-meaning, we should present to each other more coherent and user-friendly information that will benefit and inform us so's to rally the masses into some serious action.

There is a serious need-to-know urgent matter and crisis in our midst. This is not information for entertainment, and I am not here on FB to entertain, although I love music so much… But, when it comes to talking to each other, not past each other, about matters regarding our nation, I prefer to go for the jugular. Anyone who has time, I hope, will read through up to here, and begin to realize how much we need to know, and how much is still to be done… The sooner we begin, the better-off we will be.

The Continuity Of Our Struggle Is Never Stagnant...

What has the piece above have to do with the Drugged-up people of Mzantsi? A lot. The piece where I breakdown what the IMF with its structural adjustments, is not what we read, but live. For starters, electricity is a problem since it is now Winter and we as a people are being subjected to Load Sharing, as they euphemistically dub it. well, it so happens that the companies opening Moduli, and Kusile, and 40 more mines to be opened, are smiling all the way to the bank, and to add insult to injury, they get per kilowatt hour, cheap, and they get to pollute the air.

But that's not all, Lack of water of clean drinking water is uppermost in the list of dissatisfaction that the polity is crying. We have red above that Cholera was exacerbated by the lack of water for the residents where it sprung up, and this is not reported in that manner. The creation and implementing/building of mines is denying water to the people of south Africa, and this is not yet been raised as an issue, but in many places, there are Water Wars going on inside South Africa.

We are also seeing decrease in the levels of Education for poor African and White children here in our country. This is akin to genocide, in many ways. When we see the drug pandemic taking place within South Africa, little wonder then that Apartheid did its part in giving Africans poor and unequal education(Still in place today), but then, the ANC has exacerbated the whole gig. I am just summing up on these points.

Then you go into the rigors of the IMF laws and regulation to countries they giving up loans, and it is for the reader to go back and re-read that part in the citation above. This just goes to show that purposeful underdevelopment and maldevelopment of the poor countries with IMF loans, are enshrined in their laws and regulation, and therefore, the loans serve the interests of the IMF, and take away a lot from the poor citizens of the loaned country.

The poverty reduction programs of the IMF are designed to increase poverty… Period. These, as explained above, are prefaced in such a way as to limit the losses of the rich country when the poor countries default. The PRSP programs are those rules of the IMF that empower rich to dictate and tell the poor countries what not to do and what to do.

What do these fixtures of the IMF and World Bank do?. The increase joblessness, create poverty, and disable the poor to be open to drugs and alcoholism, thus a weakened enclave or society, has not defense against the proliferating and infiltration of drugs because they have been rendered useless and powerless/hungry and sick. That is what the quoted parts above have to do with the drug situation inside of South Africa

Let's talk about Drugs and the drug pandemic we face here in Mzantsi from another serious perspective. Cocaine is my topic, but social engineering attempts my goal.

Drug addiction is a chronic relapsing disorder that involves drug seeking and abuse despite the negative social and health consequences. While the potential effects of cocaine on child development have been extensively studied over the last 30 years, few researchers have focused on the effects of cocaine on maternal behavior, which includes offspring care and maternal aggression towards an unfamiliar individual. In humans, maternal cocaine use can lead to child neglect, abuse, and disrupt the mother-child bond.

While it has been argued the developmental effects of maternal cocaine use on children were initially overstated, it is clear that disruptions of typical maternal behavior (i.e., postpartum depression, anxiety disorders) are detrimental to the physical and emotional health of offspring. Cocaine use in mothers is commonly associated with psychological disorders, including depression and anxiety, and it is postulated that many of the negative effects of maternal cocaine use on offspring are mediated through changes in maternal behavior.

At the same time, I will try and shed view or thoughts about the social engineering needed in our Africans of South Africa's midst, from an African centered perspective, that is, pigeonhole the cause of our social malaise and maybe begin to have a better outlook and understand at our present existential social paradigm and zeitgeist.

Drug addiction is a chronic relapsing disorder that involves drug seeking and abuse despite the negative social and health consequences. There is a body of literature indicating that maternal-offspring interactions are affected by cocaine dependence in the mother, which is highlighted in the recent review of maternal cocaine addiction by Strathearn and Mayes.

This is especially interesting in light of the fact that maternal-infant attachment is so strong and the rewarding properties of offspring are dominant in the mother. However, mothers recovering from cocaine addiction may experience difficulties in their maternal roles as effective caregivers. Some studies cite reduced mother-child play interactions, low-self esteem, emotional neglect, lack of maternal identity, increased hostility towards their own child, and inability to cope with stress.

The same applied with the whole African population; i.e., these conditions manifest themselves in various and multiple ways, and in this deposition, I will try and glean and point out to some of these social conundrums and dysfunctions. These are very real issues and they are decimating, in a word, we are facing serious Genocidal Apocalypse, and many of us are asleep at their posts, and offer obdurate and very angry and uninformed responses to issues that are killing us off.

If our women are suffering as much as I have summed up above, our children are born with many defects and disadvantages because of Cocaine, and Nyaope(I have posted a lot about it, but from the perspective of the community and users, her on this Wall[Hub} and various Walls I belong to here on FB), that I will not go into it, but will take a different tack.

We are going to have to first of all understand ourselves, and talk about what we know about us to ourselves as an African people of South Africa... Informing one another is going to be key towards our building a nation and healing our people. This is basic and fundamental. We might not be sick, some of us, so we think, but, sooner or later we are going to see that those sick around us, means that we are sick too.

Asa puts it succinctly when he cautions us: "There is no way we can survive as a people without study.We have all that we need to do what is necessary. We can come to know what we need to know. We, however, must choose to do what is necessary and make the sacrifices that we need to make. Today, we have more resources, books, social media, modern gizmos, etc. Still, we waste far more resources than we need to take care of the socialization requirements. Now is the time to save us."

Our social malaise has a method to it. Frantz Fanon talks about it this way:

"The Unilaterally decreed normative value of certain cultures deserves our careful attention ... cultures deserve our careful attention. The enterprise of deculturation turns out to the negative of a more gigantic work of economic, and even biological enslavement... The doctrine of cultural hierarchy is thus but one aspect of a systematized hierarchization impeccably pursued.

"...For its systems of reference have to be Broken. Expropriation, spoliation, raids, objective murder, are matched by the sacking of cultural patterns, or at least condition such sacking. The social panorama is destructed; values are flaunted, crushed and emptied.

"...The lines of force, having crumbled, no longer give direction. In their stead, a new system of values imposed, not proposed, but affirmed, by the heavy weight of cannons and sabers. ... This culture, once living and open to the future, becomes closed, fixed in the colonial status, caught in the yoke of oppression. Both present and mummified, it testifies against its members. It defines them in fact, without appeal.

"The cultural mummification leads to a mummification of individual thinking. The apathy so universally noted among colonial peoples, is but the logical consequence of this operation. Their approach of inertia constantly directed at the natives is utterly dishonest. As though it were possible for a man to evolve otherwise than within the framework of a culture that recognizes him, and that he decides to assume.

"...Thus, we witness the setting up of archaic, inert institutions, Functioning under the oppressor's supervision and patterned like a caricature of formerly fertile[African]institutions.'

What I am about to indulge in below, is better prefaced by Mark Twain, who succinctly wrote:

"In many countries, we have chained the savage and starved him to death ... in many countries we have burned the savage and his little children and their mother with dogs and guns ... In many countries we have taken the savage's land from him, and made him our slave, and lashed him every day, and broken his pride and made death his only friend, and overworked him till he dropped in his tracks."

Then Twain gave this heads-up and upshot:

"There are many humorous things in the world; among them the White man's notion that he is less savage than other savages."

What I have come to realize is that we act and talk and behave as we have been conditioned in the Pavlovian mode. We are so incarcerated in our ways which have been cobbled into us over 500 centuries that with the advent of the Internet, we are now beginning to think, some of us anyway, how to unpack this imprisonment of our whole being and minds-and use the internet, social media, to analyze it and debunk it if necessary.

But we need people who are prepared to cover this area and sector of life known as being a historian. We need to decode, we also must record these events as they are happening to us without fear or favor to no one, but truth to our people. "Our writings cannot be neutral," as observed by Sankara.

If we say that we are supposed to write our own histories and stories, we simply mean that we use history as our consciousness, reality, reference and towards understanding the present and figuring if not shaping our own self-determined and autonomous future. Once we are born and grow, our lives is/are our own Responsibilities.

We have to understand history in its real and hard core facts. But we should not dumb down ourselves into thinking that it is the past and what's happening now in our lives has no relationship to the past or to history. My role when I am wearing my historical cap, is to flesh out the real facts that African History and World History Lives! Here's a statement that was made by Henri Juno

:"I speak of resignation. It is necessary to the Blacks(Africans), for despite all that has been written on the fundamental axiom of the absolute equality of mankind, they are an inferior race, a race made to serve. It would be harmful to them to cover up this evident fact under a pile of sentimental eloquence. ... Christianity alone will make out of the Black(African) servant satisfied with his lot, for it alone can bring him to a free and voluntary submission to the plans of Divine Providence. ...

"Everyone, I will even say the whole of humanity, is deeply concerned that the "Negro"(African) should accept the position assigned to him by his physical and intellectual faculties. Without the arms of the 'Natives'(Africans), the gold mines of Johannesburg, which have built up the prosperity of South Africa, would cease to exist from day to the next, for it is these arms which accomplish the entire manual labor in the extracting of Gold.

"Then again, when we consider the immense plains on the coast of Delagoa, the valleys of the Nkomati, the Limpopo and the Zambezi, how could these fertile territories be exploited if the Blacks(Africans) refused their aid? In these tropical latitudes, the European dies of fever, especially if he starts working the soil himself ... and the White man's role is that of organizer, the Master, under whose watch must work million arms of the native population"

Is it any wonder why we are so out of sync and dysfunctional as a people? Just from the few citations above, which have been going on for over 400+ years... everything about us has been attempted to be wiped out. Some semblance of our culture remains, and Biko addressed this when speaking about Modern African culture, but to date, many of us, have failed to keep up with the constant and consistent cultural transmission matter amongst ourselves. Many of us do not even know our contemporary History. The young ones think that everything started with Mandela coming out of jail… They could not be light-years away from the truth.

A quick glance and deferment to Asa will be appropriate here:

Asa:

"African socialization practices served to assist communities in day-to-day operations, collective survival, interpersonal relation, and basic quality of life issues. The content of an African education and socialization process contains many components which are modified according to the specific goal and aims of a community. It includes at least the following parts:-Study the whole heritage of the community
-Study of the spiritual significance of everything
-Study of the whole life of the community
-Study of the whole environment and ecology
-Study of how to maintain health
-Building and understanding of MAAT(Balance)
-Building strong community values
-Building fundamental and advanced skills
-Building strong social bonds
-Building a strong ethnic family identity
-Study of geopolitical and economic forces
-Building Respect for elders
-Building and maintaining effective nurturing systems for childrenAsa continues:"Our methodology for socialization follows from the above. Bonded relationship among teachers and students are the foundation for method. Collective efforts of students, teachers, families and communities are essential. Meditation and reflection is essential. Conducting socialization in specially prepared "sacred spaces" is essential. With all of this, critical reflection is a must.

The character of traditional African education reflects thousands of years of development. It is unique in terms of its purpose, its methods, its content, and its outcomes. As African people, we occupy an environment that is physical, social, cultural, and above all, spiritual. While our survival need must be met, African educators are admonished to "build for eternity," not merely for the temporal.

Our exploiters see us merely as hard labor for their schemes as they scramble to attain power to manipulate and control people and resources…"We must not be distracted by the false argument that, using African traditions in the modern or postmodern world" is useless and misguided, trivial, and irrelevant.

Technology is a part of Africa's heritage, and even under conditions of slavery, colonization, segregation, and White supremacy ideology, Africans have been at the forefront of science and technology in nuclear research, information technology, engineering, etc.

There is no conflict between high technology and African Traditions. The difference is that it must be balanced with the traditional values which emphasize that technology must compliment nature, not destroy it. ... Even in the face of our greatness in these areas, some Africans ridicule our concern with the value of elements of antiquity as a source of orientation and practice for today. These same Africans, however, raise no objection to Europeans constant and pervasive use of their ancient culture."

Below I would like to look closely at the problems we are facing today and try and chronicle these as a background towards why we are so out of kilt; so confused and down and out. I will try and flesh out some few issues for this background, which will maybe help the readers and All African South Africans pinpoint their weakness and identify their strengths.

For laying down this ground work I will cull heavily on Amos Wilson because I believe he give us an even simpler breakdown as to what is happening to us after all the events I have described above.His analysis opens up the unseen and unrecognized and forgotten realties that have affected and effected us because of colonization.

Wilson writes:

"If this situation is to be transformed to enable subordinate Africans to achieve liberation from White domination, then the licence to name the world, to cater, classify or otherwise demarcated the world and behavior on the part of Whites, must be revoked. Africans 'must' assert their right and power of self-definition — of categorizing and classifying the world and the nature of their being in it; of prescribing treatments for their behavior and establishing the conditions of their lives — in ways which make their minds and bodies humanitarian instruments of African power and liberation as well as instruments for the empowerment and liberation from oppression of all humankind."

We are thusly informed by Wilson as follows:

"The normality and abnormality of Black(African) Consciousness and behavior as politically mandated and socially manufactured by the power relations of White supremacy, are denoted by the relative prominence or certain disturbances of thought, emotions, motivations and values. These disturbances of consciousness serve the interests of White hegemony by making Blacks(Africans) highly responsive, for better or worse, to White-instigated social controls."

According to Wilson:

"Here are some common symptoms of "Pathological Normalcy" in Blacks(Africans) - 'those disturbances of thought, emotions, motivations and values, These are instigated in Blacks(Africans) and maintained by White supremacist establishment in order to sustain a 'normal' social order and relations. And the maintenance and perpetration of White supremacy onto Blacks(Africans), and these are ultimately inimical to their own needs and liberation

It is the White supremacist mental health which adjudges as "normal",or at lest, "non-pathological", because they are compatible with Whites' interests. Only when these disturbances are intense, pervasive and negate the usual or customary social controls and threaten the established social order are deemed by the White mental health establishment as "abnormal," "maladaptive,' or "pathological."

Here's a brief look at these maladaptive behaviors, personalities of ways of social controls of African people by the colonists…

1. Symptoms Reflecting Thought Disturbances

Amnesia:

"Total or partial loss of memory. A dissociative reaction occurs when an individual represses from consciousness the recall or remembrances of entire periods or episodes in his life in order to deny, escape, avoid the re-experiencing of certain painful feelings associated with those periods or episodes. Amnesia, therefore, results in the loss of pre-trauma identity, the motives and values of its relevant, crucially defining memories."

After defining Amnesia, Wilson informs us from an African centered psycho-history:

"White Supremacy is to a large extent founded on the social amnesia of subordinate Blacks(Africans). The ruling white supremacist regime's strategic need to deprive a massive African population of a common cultural platform from whence to mount a collective counterattack against domination its domination, requires that it negates their common African identity, cultural, historical memories and related practices. This eradication of African cultural/historical memories was(is) undertaken so as to make possible the social manufacture of fashioning of an erstwhile African identity which can be reactively shaped and molded to fit the ongoing needs and interests of White supremacy.

"The subordinate African can only be what he needs to be for dominant Whites if he has no true knowledge of who he is and how he came to be who h This requires that he not remember who he/she truly was. The operative oppression of Blacks(Africans) by Whites depends on the ability of Whites to create and maintain a discrepancy between what subordinate Africans 'think' they were and what they truly were; what they perceive themselves to be and what they truly are; what they think they should be and what they must be. These discrepancies are the foundation stones upon which the superstructure of White supremacy is constructed.

"The reclamation of their true history, cultural continuity and unalloyed identity by Africans would precipitate the ruinous collapse of White hegemony. Thus, in self-defense, and in the interest of self-perpetuation the white supremacist establishment is compelled to induce and maintain in Black(African) consciousness a pervasive social amnesia which is ostensibly "normal.

"...White supremacist establishment, through its control of the domain of discourse of information and its general power to define reality, excludes and its general power to define reality, excludes the truth and beauty of African history and culture from its own and the collective consciousness of African people. It thereby effectively denies their existence or the worthiness of African history and culture from its own and the collective consciousness of African people.

It thereby denies their existence or the worthiness of African history and culture. Their contribution to the collective character of African peoples is thereby negated and repressed, consequently distorting their cultural soul and cultural essence.

The white oppressors have and do expertly and are consistently associated with history and culture of Africans with evocation of feelings shame, guilt, anxiety, betrayal, alienation, fear of social disapproval, mental and physical abuse, social ridicule , loss of social and economic status, humiliation, and all other types of aversive emotions and consequences, pursuit of ego- and self-defense; many Africans have (and do) feel compelled to reject and repress the search for the discovery of a true and liberating knowledge of themselves — thus creating the social amnesia, which makes them behave like reactionary puppets strung along by machinations of their dominant White puppeteers.

"The historical/cultural amnesia imposed on the collective African psyche by the repressive White supremacist regime results not only in the sheer forgetting of their past, but also in their failure to learn from it; their failure to utilize it in their reckonings regarding reality and their appropriate relationship to it.

"The imposed social amnesia of Africans markedly reduces their capacity to know the murky side of the history and culture of their white oppressors. It leaves them without historical/cultural basis for engaging in realistic and beneficial assessments of themselves and of others, for establishing corroborative expectations regarding their own behavior Caucasian nemesis.

"Furthermore, the compelled social amnesia results in the absence of self knowledge as well as the impairment of a related sense of purposive and meaningful existence. The Absence of a functional knowledge of their cultural/historical past not only binds Africans to important aspects of past realities,s but also to crucial, critical aspects of contemporary and future realities. Thus, they are easily lied to and misdirected by their oppressors and their own ignorance to the benefit of their exploiters — and consequently, to their own detriment.

"In being forced to lose their past, Africans are, in effect, forced to lose their priceless wisdom and invaluable coping skills, so painstakingly accumulated over aeons of trial and error by their ancestors. They are thus forced to "reinvent the wheel" invented centuries earlier by their forebears. Social amnesia destroys the sense of continuity, the foundation of personal and collective identity.

"Consequently, the consciousness of the African amnesiac is marked by discontinuity and disconnections, episodic experiences and views from reality — themes important of which are unsystematically clustered together, unorganized by axiomatic principles and concepts.

"Finally, the reinforced social amnesia of the subordinated African permits him to absent-mindedly, obsessively seek to assimilate; to eat, sleep with, live among, "be just like"; to identify with the captors, torturers, enslavers, lynchers and race-baiting sadistic exploiters of his ancestors and of himself as his highest achievements in life, as the eschatological finality of his being.

"In his "sweet" forgiveness forgetfulness, he is on longer motivated to seek revenge, reparation, restitution, or reconstruction for past and present wrongs perpetrated by his White oppressors; he is not motivated to construct a new Africa, African-centered, humane utopia on the shattered remains of White supremacy's evil empire, but to become an equal partner in it, to become one with it — thus sanctioning the annihilation of the personhood of both his/her ancestors and himself/herself.

"The pursuit of this "impossible dream" by the African amnesiac supplies the motive force which advances and enriches White supremacy and therefore perpetuates his own subordination and impoverishment. Thus, the subordinated African does not indict the supremacist regime for is misdeeds and requires it atone for its sins. Its constituents are left blameless and guiltless - These are but some of the benefits to White supremacy afforded by African Amnesia".

The outcomes and results of this Amnesiac existence, is supplemented by the Amnesiac Africans, this emptiness, by using an escape of drug abuse, and alcoholic binges which this article is all about.

It is now becoming a bit much more clearer, when we take the points made above by Wilson on amnesia that much was done by the colonists to dismantle and trash, if not sag and empty out the African personality and community/nationalism to force them to forget themselves, and instead pine to be like their oppressors, to the advantage of the oppressors.

Now, we pick it at point where Wilson discusses:

Delusion, for which he gives the following brief description:

"False beliefs held by an individual which are stubbornly retained and defended despite their logical inconsistencies with objective reality and valid evidence to the contrary. Not only do such beliefs persist directly in the face of contradictory evidence, they persist in the face of continuous negative consequences resulting from their being held."

Wilson synergizes the definition he provided above this way, below:

"... The creation, presentation, and sinister manipulation of powerful cultural images and ideas, information and ideology, symbols and values, rewards and punishments, social communications and intentions have allowed Whites, by dint of their overwhelming social power, to inculcate their subordinate African subjects with detrimental delusions, whose attitudinal-behavioral expression advances the interests of White Supremacy.

"Dominant Whites utilize such inculcated delusory images, ideas, values, ideologies, etc., to justify their supremacy as well as to convince themselves and their African subjects that they only have themselves (of fate, perhaps) to blame for the inferiorization. As the continuity of White supremacy is premised on the acceptance by Africans of the European 'falsification of African history' and culture as true, so does the continuity also depend on their continuing acceptance of European self-serving ideological fabrications as true.

"In fact, for Africans to be in position of subordination, they were compelled, in an efficient way subliminally, to mistake certain Eurocentric lies for truths, and certain Afrocentric truths for lies. For it is this fundamental 'mistake' which inverts and reverses the subordinated African collective's personality.

The virtually unchallenged social power wielded by the White supremacist establishment enable it to block out, censor, degrade, and deny the truth and severely limit the dissemination of all important, positive information, ideas, ideologies, values, etc., relative to Africans, except those which are compatible with and supportive of White superiority. The Africans rejected the holding and expression of such beliefs as hazardous to their well-being.

"Conversely, their ability to make relief from suffering aversive outcomes; the receipt of future material and non-material rewards, some modicum of security, social acceptance, and the like, contingent on the belief in and expression of established, self-serving Eurocentric ideologies, is utilized to motivate Africans to hold fast to such beliefs as ensuring, their well-being.

"Consequently, the measure of the truth value of an ideology, belief, value, etc., in the subordinate African mind is neither determined by the degree to which it accurately represents objective reality, nor by the degree to which it may equalize or revolutionize the power relations between Whites and Blacks(Africans)

"The basis for belief in not truth but expediency — the measure of pain or pleasure it's holding and expression may bring to its host. The basis for the acceptance of an idea becomes its emotional consequences rather its truth value. And related to Delusion is

Fantasy…

Fantasy is:

The conscious and unconscious creating of images, wishes, hopes, scenarios, illusory thoughts and goals and their "acting-out" in reality as substitutes for desires and hopes which cannot be gratified. Fantasy fill the vacuum of absent reality. It is a pretense, a passive or active charade, the pretentious living and acting of a daydream, a substitute for action, a hope tenaciously clung to in the face of hopelessness.

"An escape from stress and frustration, fantasy gratifies frustrated desires by imaginary or substitute achievements — by defending the ego against paralyzing despair. Thus, the easier accomplishments of make-believe are substituted for the harder accomplishments of real-life endeavors. At that point, fantasy becomes self-defeating, maladaptive, and self-destructive. Yet these fantasies become the characteristic fantasies of both the "normal" and "abnormal" oppressed.

"Frustration and reaction fantasies are the hallmarks of oppression. To be oppressed is to have the most meaningful wishes, hopes, plans and expectations blocked and unfulfilled by oppression or the oppressive circumstances the oppressor erects and maintains. However, the reactionary fantasies and fanciful charades of the oppressed, their pursuit of vain hope, addiction to substitute gratifications, energize and support the oppressive regime and help to maintain their own oppression.

"Their religion, handed-down by their oppressors, promises them rescue, a messiah, a Moses, "pie/manna-in-the-sky-and thus their revolutionary will is pacified. They wait on the Lord, the tribulation, and are gratified by religious ecstasies.Their oppressors are thus permitted to enjoy heaven-on-earth at their expense.

Symptoms Reflecting Emotional Disturbances

Pathological Anxiety:

"Fears and anxieties which are grossly out of proportion to the actual dangers posed to any realistic danger or threat. Far or dread resulting from an over-estimation of threat.

"Anxiety or dread of such overwhelming proportions that the individual feels compelled to deny or distort the portion of really with which he associates such feelings, or to engage in self-deceptive, escapist and avoidant behavior as means of reducing or eliminating those feelings.

"Anxiety such that personal growth in important areas is blocked or retarded, or that individual feels compelled to engage in anesthetizing, self-defeating and/or other forms of self-destructive behavior,."

We learn the following from Wilson:

"To be oppressed is to make 'how' one feels or 'expects' to feel, the measure of all things. To be oppressed is to be ruled through one's feelings and emotions. It is to be exquisitely exposed to and manipulated by a play on one's dreads and fears, by one's oppressors; by a play on one's needs for respite from their terror; by a play on one's needs for catharsis, solace, and compensatory joy. Anxiety is the whip in hand of the oppressor used to drive the oppressed to completion of their appointed rounds.

"The ultimate power of White domination and social control resides in their ability to successfully 'intimidate' subordinated Africans; to convince them of the 'inevitability of the White supremacy; of the awesome 'invincibility' of White people. The history of White-Black(African) relations has been one of unrelenting intimidation, terror, mental and physical abuse of Blacks(Africans) peoples, White-on-Balck(African) violence; of endemic injustice, and of the unending, unrequited attempts by subordinate Africans to avoid, escape, or some way prevent, temper or ameliorate the horrendous after-effects of these activities."

I just want to pause a bit here. The aim of the posting of all this information is to try and show why today we are Drugged-up. The effects and affects of being dislocated from our cultural core, has borne the results we see today. We are in a place of no-man's land and place. We have been adjusted, altered, within our cultures and histories, customs and traditions which have also been sacked, emptied and discarded; meanwhile and we stand on the sidelines and cheer our own demise, and simply believe that we will one day be European or Americans-if not, be accepted as these people.

Wilson edifies this point I am trying to synergize above by writing:

"Avoidance and escape from White-instigated anxieties preoccupy the consciousness and subconsciousness of oppressed Africans. This preoccupation pathologies, i.e.,imbalances, the African psyche. Consequently, even the 'normal' African under White domination is primarily motivated by the desire to escape — to actively or passively avoid or in some way neutralize or alleviate the fearful effects that Blacks(Africans) be primarily motivated by anxiety and its avoidance in the interest of their White oppressors.

"Under White supremacy the operative presence of anxiety in the individual and collective psyche is a necessary constant. This is the case, whether these psyches can be adjudged 'normal' or 'abnormal.' They are both pathological states, primarily defined by their different anxiety-ridden structural dynamics.

"It should be noted that in the subordinated African personality whether diagnosed as 'normal' or 'abnormal,' much of the presence and operation of pathological anxiety is unconscious, i.e., unknown to its host. The subordinated African is hardly aware that his psyche, consciousness, and behavior have been subverted and misdirected by the Eurocentrically-conditioned operation of anxiety and its related psychological aftereffects (other symptoms).

"White supremacy works most efficiently when subordinated Africans feel that they have freely chosen to think and behave the way they do when in actuality they have been subliminally compelled to do so by the psychopolitical machinations of their White oppressors. Thus, the subordinated African feels 'freest' when his is most controlled. And his pursuit of apparent freedom is often the pursuit of unapparent enslavement.

"Anxiety is the principal chisel by means of which the dominant Whites attempt, with some measurable success, to sculpt the modal personality of Blacks(Africans). The consciousness of subordinated Africans is reactionarily bent into shape by its customary defense against the anxiety attacks leveled at it by their European Oppressors. Consequently, the personalities of many, if not most, subordinated Africans are little more than elaborate defense mechanisms against oppressive anxieties and stresses.

"We are stressed and depressed today because we have bee oppressed, suppressed, depressed, repressed and stressed up, that today, as a people without a proper and hard-core African culture, we stand for nothing and fall for everything, and this is what is happening to us. We do not really talk about the symptoms we are exhibiting in a much concrete fashion, instead, many of us, the poor, idly stand-by and watch our brothers and sisters gloat and show-off their accumulated material wealth, and western education,

Many of us, in fact, claim that they can no longer easily or totally converse in our indigenous languages; our youth ape and mimic the language of TV, Internet, and DVD's exported from Overseas, and they use that language amongst themselves and us, and we, the elder, many of us, are enthralled by their phony accents and supposed American talk, that, in the final analysis, our children have no knowledge and sense of our cultures, languages, traditions and the whole bit. We are complicit in the loss of our African culture and so forth. Yes, We are...

Wilson adds:

"These mostly unconscious defense systems against oppressive anxieties have been so organized and automized that the 'normal' subordinated African experiences relatively little overt or unconscious anxiety. They then stereotypically operate in ways which inadvertently help to maintain the White supremacist regime which oppresses them - the very source of their shaping anxieties to begin with.

"Anxiety negates possibilities and stunts the growth and range of the self of the oppressed. Thus, the oppressed personality is defined more in tems of non-being; in terms of what it is not rather what it is; its lacks, rather than its amplitudes. Under Whte supremacy, the subordinated African self comes into being principally to preserve a sense of security, to protect against anxiety.

"Thus, "constriction and impoverishment of personality make it possible to avoid subjective conflict and concomitant anxiety". But the person's freedom, originality, capacity for independent love, as well as his other possibilities for expansion and development as an autonomous personality are renounced in the same process.

"By accepting impoverishment of personality, one can buy temporary freedom from anxiety, to be sure. But the price for this "bargain" is the loss of unique and most precious charcteristics of the human self. ..."the positive aspects of selfhood develop" as the individual [or a people] confronts, moves through, and overcomes anxiety-creating experiences."

The imposition of Apartheid upon the Africans of Mzantsi created the type of anxious existence as explained by Wilson above, for African people to lose their unique and most precious characteristics of the human self... Apartheid was designed and implemented to prevent African people to overomecome anxiety-creating experiences, thorugh a battery of draconian laws.. These I have published in some of my Hubs, that is, the laws of Apartheid.

By the time the ANC government was elected into power by the majority of Africans, it did not try to social engineer some healing process from these stated conditions caused by the Apartheid regime against the African people. In fact, the ANC is exploring and re-applying some of these tactics, of creating and increasing the state of pathological anxiety, by not considering every hue and cry from its polity negligibly, and with callous treatment of the poor folks; they are also not developing any positve aspects of selfhood amongst its African people; they give first preference to foreigners, tourists and business corporations..

The shenanigans perpetuated by the Apartheid regime, were further implemented and exacerbated by the ANC, which has further stunted the growth and range of the self of the formerly Apartheid oppressed Africans. Well, then, what has this got to do with Africans from South Being drugged today... Everything...

What I am examining here are the symptoms of emotional disturbances that are affecting formerly Apartheid African oppressed masses. It is important that I cull from Psycho-Historians like Wilson to begin to concretely identify the past effects of Apartheid, and in this case, the pathological anxieties that are holding sway over the African people.

I find it imprtant that we could all wax political about what Apartheid did to Africans, but I specifically and conretely want to identify and pin-point the emotional damages(pathological Anxieties) that were engendered by the Aparthied goons-now furthered and made worse, today, by the ANC.

This is the nub of the problem.. Mass Pathological Anxieties endemic diseases in the midst of the African collectives is not dealt with adequately, if it is completely ignored, whilst the African leaders pilfer the public coffers and carry out corruption, there is going to be hell to pay. The masses are left filled with false 'Fantasises' of easy riches, and aping the Drugged ways of what hey see on TV and the Internet, now tossed into their midst by different ethnicities and our own African people are looking to make a quick fast and huge buck-amidst crippling poverty, is a travesty.

I am talking about pathologogical anxieties and fantasisies because these are the bane of our modus operandi in our present day communities on Mzantsi. No one, in the African communities, as far as I know, is identifying this dangerous emotional and dangerous symptoms, for these to be able to be borught to the awareness of the poor of South Africa. This then leads us to the following emotional Symptoms below.

Dismantled African Consciousness

There is definitely a diseased absence of cultural and so on, energy and feeling of indifference with the advent of Nyaope and other designer drugs proliferating throughout the different ethnic communities in South Africa. This is how Wilson describes:

Apathy:

"A disease of feeling, emotion or interest; a pathology of sensitivity, energy and initiative; an absence (a=without) of feeling (pathos=feeling); an indifference to, a wont of feeling for, interest in, or responsively to, situations that normally would be expected to evoke the opposite reactions."

Wilson proceeds:

"Apathy is of special concern here when it involves a lack of interest in learning or doing those things which if learned or done could resolve important problems confronting the apathetic individual."

I say and add that, in our culture Madosini is recognized as a national treasure and important indigenous knowledge incubator, yet a huge discrepancy exists between the general admiration for our culture, traditions,customs and sacred rites and practices; sadly, any close interaction or involvement with it is zero. This has enabled the breakdown of families, societies, wherein we are now on the sidelines looking at the destruction of our children, Youth and elderly people hung up on the Nyaope Drugs.

We further learn from Wilson:

"In the context of the domination of Blacks(Africans) by Whites, apathy is a necessary adjunctive product of White supremacy. That is, its operative presence in subordinated Africans is necessarily induced in them by their White oppressors(now of late the ANC), because it helps to maintain their(Africans') continuing subordination.

"As we noted in our discussion of pathological anxiety, the holding and expression of certain feelings, attitudes, intentions, desires and expression of certain feelings, attitudes, intentions, desires, and the pursuit of certain goals by the oppressed are consistently disapproved or are associated with aversive consequences by their oppressors, when such orientations run contrary to their oppressors' perceived interests.

"Consequently, the well-conditioned subordinate, utilizing apathy as an ego-defensive maneuver, avoids through emotional flight or escape, emotional detachment, disinterest, or indifference — those feelings, attitudes, interests and pursuits, which if fully actualized and expressed would undermine the oppressive regime."

As has already been pointed out above, all the foreign vested interests, from colonial rule to corporate domination, have one goal in mid, to subordinate the Africans in order to maximize their interests. This has been and is still the modus operandi of these oppressors, including the oppressive ANC government, today.

Wilson continues:

"Thus, apathy becomes a protective device utilized by the subordinate to defend his vulnerable ego, self-esteem, and well-being as well as to defend the system which oppresses him/her."

This can be clearly seen in the day-to-day existential realties of the African elite along with their poor brothers and sisters. What these African elitist crew are doing, is to encourage their brothers to 'pull themselves by their bootstraps.' But what they do not care to see is that their polity has neither shoes nor straps. Meaning, the poor Africans are so poor, that they do not even have any jobs, food, health, social services, and all the basic human rights/needs that they are entitled to in order to better their lot.

The Apartheid regime has for 50 years conditioned Africans to accept their oppression by any and all means necessary. The ANC is telling the poor people to make use of their poverty to better themselves. In the history, of South Africa, as I have pointed out above, the White man was put into a position, especially by the British and later by the Boers, to be in charge of the cheap labor of Africans.

In the same breadth, they destroyed and scarred, also discarded of the culture, tradition, history, customs of Africans, and fine-tuned them to conform with their interests of the White people; serve and take care of white peoples wants and needs, and to forget their histories, cultures, traditions, custom and so forth. Meaning, therefore, they were to become honorary Whites, in their countries of origin, and disregard their history, cultures, customs, traditions, languages and so forth,

We therefore learn from Wilson that"

"Apathy, as generated by the regime of White supremacy is rarely all-pervasive or generalized in the "pathologically normal" African subjects. Their characteristic apathies tend to be fairly specific to certain interests and pursuits. In fact, close observation will reveal that subordinated Africans are conditioned by their White oppressors to demonstrate a lack of feelings for and an interest in acquiring, learning, or doing those very things, which if acquired, learned, would lead to the revolutionary overthrow of White supremacy[in our case, the ANC].

"Thus, apathy in subordinate Africans essentially involves the political-economic organization of their tastes, interests, attitudes, energies, enthusiasms and sensibilities, in ways which perpetuate the reign of White supremacy.

"However, as in the case of pathological anxieties, this type of organization and its operative outcomes s reflected in Black(African) Consciousness and behavior and, are in the main subliminal and unconscious, and therefore are made to appear to have originated spontaneously from the primordial African character and/or modal African culture.

"Thus, it appears only coincidental, or that as a result of a natural lack of ability, talent, or interest that apathetic Blacks(Africans) do not invest the necessary time to successfully challenge White supremacy. To the contrary, it appears they invest inordinate amounts of time and energy pursuing those activities which ultimately enrich and empower their White oppressors.

"Apathy in subordinated Africans provides White supremacy its strongest bulwark against defeat. "The greatest struggle of oppressed Africans is not against their White(ANC's) oppressors but against their own apathy."

This, the ANC believes today. Their arrogance and mien towards their poor Africans they lord over is very condenscending and belittling. They behave like real African potentate, and they called themselves (Ngangaras), and they do not care about the suffering pleas of the poor; they ignore them, and carry on robbing the public coffers, practicing nepotism, have various cabals around and within their party: but overall, pay no attention to their voters, until voting time comes.

Meanwhile, drugs are decimating our entire African collective, and still, the ANC has not configured a way to erase this scourge… That is for the poor to see how they can fight back against the drugs.

Therefore, Wilson sums it up neatly as follows:

"The greatest struggle of oppressed Africans is not against their White oppressors(nor the ANC) but against their own apathy."

Symptoms Reflecting Disturbances in Motivation and Values

Thus far, those emotions, values, motivations and thought disturbances that we see aplenty in our African collectives are a result of historical conniving and planning by the varous cononists, more escpecially by the Apartheid regime, and today, specifically, by the ruling ANC governnment. What the ANC has done, has further exacerbated the fissures that have been dug and established by the Apaerheid draconian laws and their Nazi social engineering.

With that in mind, we pick up the following phenomenon as explained to us by Wilson:

Alienation:

"To feel enstranged or separated from; indifferent or hostile toward; unfamiliar with; fearful of; withdrawn from; unconnected to; to have lost remembrance or accurate knowledge of and identity with one's true, undistorted self, historical self and culture, and important segments of reality. Loss of sense of self. The irrational feeling that one is someone else, that one's body is grotesque. Feelings of aimlessness, formlessness, purposelessness, hopelessness, meanginlessness; of being unmotivated by one's own self-originated needs and values; of being compelled or retarded by unknown, unknowable, but irresistible forces."

This is a lot to chew up on, and this is what is the most effective and what we have to live with along other many people in our midst. We have people who feel estranged(they claim not to be Africans; we have folks who are really separated from our African socieities and running to live amongst their former oppressors; there are Africans who are very indifferent and hostile towards other Africans-some of our folks say it is because we have lost our culture-and I have talked about it above as to how this was done/implemented.

Many of our African people are witdrawn and doing nothing worthwhile in their communities, becasue of fear of crime, diseases like Aids and the like, drugs and the whole bit. Our children and some adults are no more connected to their African milieu, instead, many claim and talk and behave like their European oppressors towards other Africans and their families..

The overarching reality is that the masses of African people in South Africa have lost their remembrance of their Africn culture, customs, traditions and so forth, and this was deliberately carried out by the Imperial colonial corporate governments, and moguls, and I have discussed it above as to how it was done/achieved. As to our identity, many and their children no more speak their African languages nor carry out their cultural, customary and sacred rites and practices, or transmission. Many have deliberately and purposely forgotten who they are and were, and have no more a sustanance for our African people, cultural, etc.

We have been told for decades and centuries that we are monkeys, babboons, non-human, lazy marabouts, baby-makes, alcoholics, and were an ugly and a dumb race. This brought about amongst us,having been prohibited and stopped from being anything human, and left with feelings of being hopless, without purpose for our own development, and saw life as hopless and meaningless, because we were not allowed and prohibited form using our own initiative-no freedom to speak of: In a word, here in South African we were worse-off than American chatel slaves, all the way to the 1990s-from 1652/1490 AD.

About these condition above, Wilson writes:

"To be oppressed is to be forced to exist not for oneself but for the other; to support one's enemies and oppose oneself and one's fellows. To be oppressed is to have one's worthiness and esteem measured in the currency of one's oppressors - to have one's value measured in coin and utility, exclusively. The oppressed are compelled to act not for their own reasons; not in order to realize their own God-given potentials or their own self-defined, self-determined values; but for reasons imposed on them, and to realize values values defined for them by their oppressors.

"Oppression requires the dissociation of the oppresed from themselves; that they deny themselves, in service to their oppressors; that they avoid identifying with their original personality and perceive identification with it as detrimental to their survival. The rejection of their authentic selves on the part of the oppressed is a necessary preparatory step to their replacement by artificial, manipulable selves socially manufactured by their oppressors.

"Alienation of the oppressed requires that they identify with these "jack-built" selves, and strive compulsively to satisfy their artificial, self-defeating, often self-destructive, motives, desires and values. Their oppressor-motivated strivings are functionally designed to enrich and empower their oppressors while simultaneously impoverishing and enfeebling themselves. The oppressed cannibalize themselves in order to feed the insatiable appetites of their oppressors."

This is our experiential reality. This is who and what we are today.. Very much pining to be our masters creations. We no more speak our languages; many of us are now Americans or Europeans and even Asiatics. We even hear on the social media, many of the supposedly smart Africans, who cannot even speak some of our local mother-tongues, urging our people and childten to learn Swahili, or Mandarin!

Our children have Madarin writing, reading and speech foisted upon them... We are a very sad carricature of foreigners and are no more ourselves. We allow apathy to control us; we are amnesiac with our history, customs and traditions; we live pathologil ives filled with highly charged anxiety. In the end, we are alienated from Africa and ourselves, as the Africns of Mzantsi.

Wilson counsels:

"An African cannot be truly an African and at the same time a domesticated slave or subordinate of the European. Thus, his domesticated subordination is inversely related to his alienation. One cannot exist without the other. Hence, the power and the glory of White supremacy pyramidally rests on the foundatons of Eurocentrically induced African alienation. If White supremacy is to appear normal or natural, then alienation must appear normal or natural - the apparent normality of one depends on the apparent normality of the other.

"The overcoming of alienation through the discovery and reclamation of their true identity and consciousness by the oppressed Africans, portends the shattering downfall of White supremacy. It is principally to guard against this eventuality that the White supremacist establishment feels compelled to maintain African alienation as an everyday matter of course - as the central facet of African "pathological normalcy."

Amnesia, Apathy, Pathological Anxiety, Delusion, and Alienation, are the social emotional conditons and symptons that we see as disturbances that we are now living with and are of the normal condition we experience with everyone close to us or iving with us. That which is right is wrong, and that which is wrong is right. We have been bamboozled; we've been 'had'; we've been 'took'...

Our reality has been muzzled and poisoned to the extent that we view it as our way of life; our culture, our history, our enotional stability - i.e., having been suobodinated and made slaves for 400+ years, to date. Then the question becomes: What's to be Done?

Nyaope is our national undoing. It is destroying the very engine of our nation: Youth. One should see the emaciated, dirty, dark black hungry-looking and sick , scrawny youth that have been mashed-up by Nyaope. In the case of the Township I live in, you actually see the police, coming to these Nyaope dens to collect their money(bribes), and leave. It is so disturbing, disconcerting and discouraging seeing law-enforcement agents being the one pushing Nyaope.

The Nyaope(akin to Crack-Cocaine) drug king in our Township of Soweto. It has destroyed the lives and hopes of the young, old and children. Its users steal anything just to get a fix, anytime, anywhere. Without the drug running in their veins, they actually go berserk, wild-eyed, and take unnecessary deadly chances-even risk death.

As a society, we are in trouble, so is our youth, and many other elders who dared experiment with the drug.

Drugged Out Mzantsi: Alcohol Our Achilles Heel ... It Is About Time We started Talking About And Working Towards Removing This Scourge...

Our History and Culture should be our guiding force and fight. We have forsaken our languages, customs and traditions in favor of Western values, cultures, traditions and languages. We are simply a naked people prancing all over our country like a headless chicken. We live under the delusion of grandeur, we imagine that we are better than our selves, culture, traditions, customs and languages.

This is how Wilson puts it:

"Whites have from the distant past up to the present moment unabatingly continued to propagate historical and cultural falsehoods (concerning things African as well as European) as truths, fabricated evidence to support such confabulations and lies, continued to obscure reality and their inhumane motives behind a paper-mache facade of humanity and hypocrites of moral superiority.

"The creation, presentation, and sinister manipulation of powerful cultural images, and ideas, information and ideology, symbols and values, rewards and punishments, social communications and interactions, have allowed Whites by dint of their overwhelming social power, to inculcate their subordinate subjects with detrimental 'Delusions" whose attitudinal-behavioral expression advance the interests of White supremacy.

"DominantWhites utilize such inculcated delusory images, ideas, values, ideologies, etc., to justify their supremacy as well as to convince themselves (or fate perhaps) to blame for their inferiorization. As the continuity of White supremacy is premised on the acceptance by Africans of the European Falsification of African history and culture as true, so does the continuity also depend on their continuing acceptance of European self-serving ideological fabrications as true.

"In fact, in order for Africans to remain in their positions of subordination they must be compelled to mistake certain Eurocentric lies for truths and certain Afrocentric truths for lies. For it is the this fundamental mistake which inverts and reverses the subordinated Africa collective personality"

For us to begin to understand our drug plight, we have to reckon with our ignoring and allowing ourselves to be side-tracked from our own culture, customs, traditions and language, from a historical point of view. From a reality standpoint, we have embraced that which has been indoctrinated into our psyche, falsified in our beliefs, as being right and better than what we were brought up to know and understand as our culture, tradition, custom and languages.

We imbibed all sort of western mannerisms and behaviors to our detriment. We even went into as far as using the same designer drugs as they do and to us it seems like we fit into their lifestyles as the Western people. We drugged ourselves senseless for we did not know the effects and affects of these drugs. We copied everything and drug usage as well. Today we are teetering of the brink of disaster as our Youth is being wiped out for they did not know any better.

There are powerful forces that have a vested interested in destroying our youth, and in the end, as corny as it may sound, take our land from us. If one were to come to the Soweto Ghetto and see the devastation left behind by Nyaope and many other designer drugs, one cannot help. wondering if this is not a genocide of a people, meaning us the people of Mzantsi.. For real and Fo Sho...

It is not only the drugs I have been discussing above but also alcohol. The level of our liquor consumption here in Mzantsi is astronomical and very shockingly high. Liquor has substituted water. Our people literally drink like fishes, and there is no stopping. The way we are drinking, it is like we are running away from ourselves, which, if one has read the part above by Wilson, that is why we are doing the running away from ourselves.

Liquor has contributed to the rise in crime and family break-ups in our midst. Nyaope has and along with alcohol continues to decimate and wipe our our youth, families and society at large. The church pews are empty, many children have no fathers and mothers or both. Grand-parents watch is awe as their grand-children, children and families get wiped off the face of the earth. Grand parents are also witnessing the regression and wiping out of our cultural traditions, customs, languages and Old ways of living and their lifestyles...
Our failure to recognize our shortcomings is our acheelies heel and we will never wake up from the doldrums of our past oppression as long as we strive to ape our Masters. We then wonder as to why we are now dragged to hell-and-back, we wonder why we live with a lot of these Nyaope invalids, and some of us kill them for the theft they commit on our material wealth.

We ignore the rest, we pretend as if they do not exists; we see them in the stoeps of the Spaza shops owned by foreigners-who end up killing them. Some of us fantasize about America and so-called-advancced-countries, right in our drug infested land; some of us are carriers of these drugs for drug lords in our land; some of us pretend as if the scourge does not exist, and that these Nyaope youth are not part of us; we turn a blind eye to all the drug mess we are living with and experiencing.

One drug which is making rounds agains amongst is Mandrax, and users are those in the late forties and early fifties and beyond. Market or street b=vlaue costs up to R50 a pill, at times it comes having been ground up. In our Township there's a method of smoking it, they do not smoke it using Marijuana, but they boil it, burn it and inject its liquid form, akin to Heroine.

Our People now use Crystal Math, which is causing major health problems for the poor and rich of our country. And there is also Whoonga, which found major cities in Durban, Natal and it is dislodging the youth from themselves and their families apart... It is a disaster that is presently going on.

We have to talk about the drug situation in Social Media Forums to raise the awareness of our people as to what is happening to us and why it is happening to us. Drugs happened to us, and we are not near finding a solution to our destruction by these designer drugs and all all sorts of alcohol....

We are going to have to find a solution... Very quickly.. For what is happening to us is unconscionable...

We truly are much better than this

Mzantsi(South Africa) Imploding And Exploding On All Ends And Fronts
Everything Is Topsy Turvy... All Things Are Running Helter Skelter...

Whither Mzantsi?

Getting down to the nitty-gritty gritty and droning sameness of life in the Township is one helluva sort of existence, if folks get what I mean. It is hard to live in Africa'srichest and most developed country and be the underdog as an indigenous of the land.

It is equally debilitating to be surrounded by poverty, ignorance and helplessness when it is your country, and one is being told that we live in a democracy(Shame-ocracy/Democrazy-a la Fela), and one really knows all is just a farce and a blatant lie.

For instance, we lead in crime, alcoholism, corruption and all the fucked-up malfeasance and poor government one can recall in recent memory, and still we are told, by our fattened-double-chinned and pot-bellied, handkerchief-baldheaded elite that we are all of us, in Mzantsi, having it good.

I will tell our readers this... Our country has gone to the 'dogs' of vulture capitalist who are seamlessly emptying the public coffers, whilst they bandy around the Tube/TV as people who are creating Commissions against corruption; adhere to and respect Women's rights and safety. Duh!
It only hurts more when one chuckles at these barren assertions, by men who have a harem of women country-wide, at their beckon and call, who are involved in lascivious and promiscuous lifestyles.

To make matters worse, many men, young men, and old men are on a government handout, spend their early morning(some as early as Six in the morning, to past midnight, at the local Taverns.... downing and gulping down their sorrows and ineptness

Many of our young men are mercilessly tortured by a designer drug call "Nyaope"(akin to Crack Cocaine in its addiction), some smoke the powder from the electric bulb, some powders from the Plasma TV's they steal, from the mixture of poisonous rat Killers('Ha le Phirimi'-"It Never Set's"-whatever), from another mixture from all sorts of chemicals, mixed with Anti-Viral AIDS tablets, and anything just to get a cheap thrill of a short high.
There are many Tuck Shops as I have noted above, where one finds the youth hanging out on the front stoops, waiting for the "Nyaope" Pushermen to come in their posh cars to deliver the drug to hapless and hooked youth of our Ghetto.

These youth, like Crack addicts, rob, steal and never wash, that they look darkened, ashen and very thin that one's heart just dies along with them, from watching their doped-up selves, dirty like serious street urchins-others smoke some form of Glue, sniff it, others are helpless and delirious alcoholics.

And these are the scenes that are playing themselves out, daily, hourly, minute-by-minute, in the communities we live in here in Soweto... South Africa... 2019.
Many of the African elite in South Africa, imagine themselves to be Americans, English people-that is, they are a bad example of confused cultural potpourri that is contributing towards our genocide as a people of South Africa.

The African indigenous is slowly losing grip of itself, culturally, musical, traditionally, its customary practices, wherein one finds our education telling our children that in the school yards they should speak only English, and forget about their own African Mother-tongues.

Since we are headed for month end... The lines at McDonalds, Burger King, Wimpy Bars, shops in the Malls selling fast-fried foods and chicken, are appalling. If one were to consider the South African currency, which at present is running at $1=R14, Food at Mackeydee is crazy expensive; Gas/Petrol is prohibitively expensive; Food at the Local Shoprites and Food Marts of all kinds is mad-expensive.

Clothing prices are skyrocketing, buying a house is another serious challenge; cars from Europe, England, France and the US/Italy; Lamborgnis, Ford Rangers; Pugeot; Maseratis, Cadilacs, Audis; Mercs, Alpha Romeos; Fiats, Meganes, and so forth, screech and race up on the newly built and refurbished Highways, updated during the World Cup 2010-akin to German cars on the the Adubon Speedway in Germany.

South Africa is a toxic mix of semi European/America, and budding and rural Africa in one. That is why our people of Mzantsi forget that they are in Africa, to the chagrin of many Africans from North of South Africa.

Even they, they find South Africa to be their New York/USA, and they imbue on the trappings of capitalism worse than the locals. If one were to walk in Downtown Johannesburg, it is like a market place in Marrakech, Kenya, Sudan, Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, etc, with the pavements filled with all sorts of wares and whatever can be hawked.
It is partly from this milieu that I write and pick up my reportage and stories. From observing and hearing and watching our local TV, wherein the latest news is Trump, inserting himself into the Land squabble enveloping our Mzantsi people, to the complaints about the local foreign hawkers and the poisonous foods they sell to the local people, to the internecine political struggles between the ANC, DA, PAC and nondescript parties/politicians; parliamentary foibles and follies, that living in Mzantsi(South Africa), today, is a wonder and a challenge.

There are many strikes and fights that are taking place place throughout the country, today. Since the ascension of Ramaphosa, who was ushered-in mid-term Zuma's failed rule, there has been many cases of 'Land-grab" by the poor, who come in droves, occupy land, and build a whole town of tin shacks without government consent; many investors are wary of invistorng in a restless country like South Africa, thus the Rand falling very low against the Pound and the Dollar, and making our country expensive to live in.

Corruption is our way of live. Cops live and thrive on bribes of all sorts, rendering our country lawless and somewhat ungovernable. Our police force race through the Ghetttoes in expensive BMW's and other exotic cars bought by the state-but have nothing to show for all the expense, and their ignorance of the public and the law they are supposed to serve and uphold.

Nepotism and cabals/buddy-buddy schemes(Skim) are way to go with our police, who sorely lacks in accountability.

The government's adage "Batho Pele"(People First") is a joke, instead, it is Cash first, Friends and Family First, people last, or not even considered to be there nor exist.
Jobs are for friends, family, close acquaintances, and 'connections", as for us, the ordinary and unknown people, we have to find the nearest bin, in very opulent Hoods to scrape for morsels of left-overs of the rich and famous/or not-so-famous.

One can find people rummaging for rotten foods in the piles of rubbish dumps dotting our empty spaces in our Ghetto. Yes, rotten food, if one can manage to find any... Since the poor, hungry, workers and so forth have to compete for such food with scavanger dogs and cats and the armies of the poor those who cannot even afford a tin shack house...

The government dole-out is not sufficient to live through, for there are skyrocketing pre-paid electrical bills, in some township, the people have to buy water, or there is absolutely nothing to eat nor feed the children.... let alone clothe them.

Like I said before, unless you live in the White people's suburbs, or the newly created houses for those who can afford to buy, living in the Ghetto is compared to nowhere else in the world, given the fact that South Africa is the richest country in the continent of Africa... Seriously...

As I have cited above, this is from our own lived reality, not from some tight-ass TV or Radio News talking head... This is what we live through, day-in and day-out. If I were to take my chronicles from our Newspapers, my articles would sound like some amateur Yellow Journalism of no consequence.

Stories in our Newspapers leave nothing to talk about... They are sensationalist garbage which sounds like some mumbo-jumbo from some fledgling Third world Crackpot oppressed country/news for a Tin pot dictator who has a dire need to be lauded and praised for doing nothing, but murdering and starving his own populace.

That's my view of our press, and I read and buy a lot of different newspapers... But I think I will give them their own space in some of the upcoming articles.

I am writing about our decrepit conditions in the Tradition of Sol Plaatjie and such writers who told the world, through their books, of the suffering we were going though under Apartheid.

Now, I am talking about today, about our suffering under our own elected African government in South Africa.... by using the Internet/Social Media... and lived reality..

One other thing that must be noted, though, is that, many-a-times our government tries to do some positive things, and our people are so mashed up that they are unbalanced and unable to appreciate the good things being done for them, This is what I have consistently called "Apartheid Setlamatlama"-Apartheid Hangover)..

Right now, I must say, our people have been given too much of a 'Dummy"(Pacifier), through the introduction of a Welfare State... Many readers understand this condition, and this too, is affecting us as a people.

So, today on the 27th 2019, I went to one of the Home Offices to fix my ID which was at one time outdated and now I lost it, and needed a replacement. The ladies who man the different counters had a whole deal to handle of the incoming clientele in need of having new ID's, updating of their government dole cards, marriages, replacement of new And or lost ID's, that is: taking care of the elderly, the disabled on wheelchairs, and many of the sick and students in need of new IDs and the like.

I have to confess, the lady I met at the photo desk was so hard at work, and she pointedly said to me: You see how hard we are working? I felt guilty for I have been railing against the system so hard that I forgot to write the positive aspects of their efforts in pushing us through the desks and benches to outfit us with IDs of all sorts, and lessen the time we were to spend in those dreaded offices.

I pay homage and have much respect to those Home Office ladies at 707 in Orlando West, that with all. our gripes, we need to pay some respect to their untiring efforts, and I told the lady that I was going to write about her and the work they were doing to help us with the IDs and their patient and hard work is well taken, and I am the first to say: Thanks for their efforts, and much respect.

Today was also an unusual day because there is a strike taking place from the PickItUp Sanitation people. Now, out of the woodwork comes out crawling those offering to take the Rubbish bins, to go and dumb the for R5.00 in the open dumping velds throughout our backyards. The stench and smell from those dumps is along, and with the strike, this means this rubbish and garbage is gonna pile-up and, and with Spring nigh, we are going to be engulfed with the smell of rubbish, and months of this rubbish not removed.

I must also thank those ladies who are cleaning our open spaces, Parks and streets, sweeping them everyday, and are either not paid(they volunteer), and this is helping our health to improve and the dirt/rubbish and stench to disappear from our Township of Orland East. We are very proud of these ladies, and maybe we can go about to begin to clear the Drug dens and the illicit local Taverns that are destroying our people.

One of the things I have been and just wrote about was the issue of merchants that are at loggerheads with the locals with the rotten, outdated and poisonous food they sell to our folks, has us being a spate of reports about theses foreign Asiatics and North African Shop owners, who are now under attack from the Soweto locals..

A few days ago their shops were being burnt throughout Soweto, and this occurrence has a constant flare-up, and it seems these Pakistanis and other foreigners do not get it, and they are always screaming "Xenophobia", well, that time and woeful cry is have less impact, and it is about time they packed their ware and left our ailing community. They are also accused peddling drugs... That remains to be seen...

Today, these foreign merchants are under siege... The local Sowetans are beginning to take them to taks, and their shops have shut down early, for in one Township of Soweto called White City, the residents are looting and burning down the Tuck Shops of the foreigners, for it is alleged they shot alocal youth, and this is now going well with the people of that Township, and they want them out of the location.

Yesterday, on the 29th and today on the 30th of August, the Tuck shops in our townships of Soweto were set alight, burned, looted, and the merchants sent running for their lives...

As I have ben reporting on this issue for years and months on FB, I would advised some who have not read my piece scroll baack as far as they can and see how I have been raising the issue of Pakistanis, Somalis, and other nationalities who have been preying on our folks, and selling them bad food and so on... Well, the shit has now hit the fan!
As I have been writing about these issues, it is not like they are not happening, they are, and there is a pall in the air: tension between local officials and the denizens of Soweto and such like places throughout the landscape of South Africa.

There is hunger; food is expensive; water shortage rife; electricity very expensive and unaffordable; petrol/gas prices rise at the rate of twice every moth; taxi prices are rising, so is food and everything else: there are no jobs and many people are unemployed.

The church pews are now empty.. Clinics and hospitals are overwhelmed with poor patients who have no medical coverage... Medicine for them is hard to come by...

There are few things I am involved in, and these I will give a heads-up to my readers what they are, in trying to help children and the elderly here in our Ghetto...

I have always maintained and still do that:

We are much better than this...

We really need to Hurry Up Slowly... But do so Diligently and with Care.. But Forcefully...

Our History and Culture should be our guiding force and fight. We have forsaken our languages, customs and traditions in favor of Western values, cultures, traditions and languages. We are simply a naked people prancing all over our country like a headless chicken. We live under the delusion of grandeur, we imagine that we are better than our selves, culture, traditions, customs and languages.

This is how Wilson puts it:

"Whites have from the distant past up to the present moment unabatingly continued to propagate historical and cultural falsehoods (concerning things African as well as European) as truths, fabricated evidence to support such confabulations and lies, continued to obscure reality and their inhumane motives behind a paper-mache facade if humanity and hypocrites moral superiority.

"The creation, presentation, and sinister manipulation of powerful cultural images, and ideas, information and ideology, symbols and values, rewards and punishments, social communications and interactions, have allowed Whites by dint of their overwhelming social power, to inculcate their subordinate subjects with detrimental 'Delusions" whose attitudinal-behavioral expression advance the interests of White supremacy.

"DominantWhites utilize such inculcated delusory images, ideas, values, ideologies, etc., to justify their supremacy as well as to convince themselves (or fate perhaps) to blame for their inferiorization. As the continuity of White supremacy is premised on the acceptance by Africans of the European Falsification of African history and culture as true, so does the continuity also depend on their continuing acceptance of European self-serving ideological fabrications as true.

"In fact, in order fro Africans to remain in their positions of subordination they must be compelled(mist efficiently if achieved subliminally) to mistake certain Eurocentric lies for truths and certain Afrocentric truths for lies. For it is the this fundamental mistake which inverts and reverses the subordinated Africa collective personality"

For us to begin to understand our drug plight, we have to reckon with our ignoring and allowing ourselves to be side-tracked from our own culture, customs, traditions and language, from a historical point of view. From a reality standpoint, we have embraced that which has been indoctrinated into our psyche, falsified in our beliefs, as being right and better than what we were brought up to know and understand as our culture, tradition, custom and languages.

We imbibed all sort of western mannerisms and behaviors to our detriment. We even went into as far as using the same disguiser drigs as they do for to us it seems like we fit into their lifestyles as the Western people. We drigged ourselves senseless for we did not know the effects and affects of these drugs. We copied everything and drug usage as well. Today we are teetering of the brink of disaster as our Youth is being wiped out for they did not know any better.

There are powerful forces that have a vested interested in destroying our youth, and in the end, as corny as it may sound, take our land from us. If one were to come to the Soweto Ghetto and see the devastation left behind by Nyaope and many other designer drugs, one cannot help. wondering if this is not a genocide of a people, meaning us the people of Mzantsi.. For real and Fo Sho...

It is not only the drugs I have been discussing above but also alcohol. The level of our liquor consumption here in Mzantsi is astronomical and very shockingly high. Liquor has substituted water. Our people literally drink like fishes, and there is no stopping. The way we are drinking, it is like we are running away from ourselves, which, if one has read the part above by Wilson, that is why we are doing the running away act from ourselves.

Liquor has contributed to the rise in crime and family break-ups in our midst. Nyaope has and along with alcohol continues to decimate and wipe our our youth, families and society at large. The h\church pews are empty, many children have no fathers and mothers or both. Grand-parents watch is awe as their grand-children, children and families get wiped off the face of the earth. Grand parents are also witnessing the regression and wiping out of our cultural traditions, customs, languages and Old ways of living and their lifestyles...

Our failure to recognize our shortcomings is our achilles heel and we will never wake up from the doldrums of our past oppression as long as we strive to ape our Masters.

One of the most disturbing things I have come across as a writer here on HubPages, is the fact that I need to tell a lie about what I am writing about in order to accommodate some Advertisements. This means, slant the truth and make it unreal so that I do not become punished by having all the advertisement pulled from the article, which is real and unalterable.

I am quite aware that HubPages is about making some form of money, but I. opt to tell the unblemished truth without let up. If I become punished by not having my Hub be supplemented by Advertisement, so be it. I will not sacrifice facts, image truth and reality, with is what we live with, amongst, and alongside the very pictures I have displayed, that I need to sanitise it for the sake of adverts, I will never conform nor listen to HubPages Moderators, whoever they are, in fact, I would rather have my Hub unpublished for I refuse to lie about the dire situation we are faced here with in Mzantsi.

I am but Lilliputian when it comes to the mega-organization that HubPages is, but also, I am a chronicler of the reality, history and genocide that is being perpetrated against my family, community, society of Soweto generally, the nation of South Africa specifically. I will not be able to justify and be honest were I to whitewash what is happening to us, as of writing of this Essay, today, and when it was originally conceived and composed.

For me, it is not about money here on HubPages, but it is about having gotten the opportunity to write on behalf of Africans of Mzantsi, about Africans in Africa, the Caribbean, South America and Latin America, their plights, suffering and reality as they live from day-to-day within the cesspool of worldwide oppression against their lot. Money is secondary, and thus far, since I have been writing here on HubPages, I have not really made any earnings whatsoever that can sustain my life, but it is about how I present and write the truth about what we are faced with, or have as Art, culture and the whole bit.

The Hub above, is about the youth and elders of African people of South Africa. I only wish someone here on HubPages would invite themselves to come here in South Africa and see for themselves that what I have written about here, is in fact getting worse, by the minute, and we are getting wiped-out, and our Youth is in such a sad state that I cannot even afford to alter, change or rewrite, nor post anything of images about the topic of drugs just to get adverts, that I find it unconscionable or very condescending, to say the least, and worst of all, patronizing to me as a writer, and the suffering of my people, that I should alter, in any fashion, whatsoever, what is wiping us out, and also killing us in droves, to date.

Even if I do not get any adverts, that is okay with me so long as what I write remains published and can be seen by all and sundry.

We, the African people of Mzantsi, have just emerged under the Nazi Boot of Apartheid, and we were not even allowed to write books, let alone the story and history of our people in any shape or form. Now that the burgeoning Social media and the World Wide Web has afforded us the opportunity to highlight and inform the World about our conditions, we are still subjected to some form of Censorship by the Gatekeepers of Mediums such as HubPages, and told to curb our enthusiasm on issues that are obviously needed by our People of Mzantsi; and we are also to water-down what is our constant real-reality in our wretchedness; so then, what is the point of requiring us to write to please some Moderator who has no clue as to why and what I am writing about and showing?

Presently we are witnessing a wide-scale genocide of our Youth and elderly from alcoholism and drug abuse. Scarcely 20 years ago drug abuse was anathema in our African midst. Today, with access to media forums facilitated bySocial Media and publishing places like HubPages, we are in a position to reach out to the bulk of our people, informing them of the vicissitudes and use of drugs, the effects that this has on our communities, societies and nation. Am I then expected to write in such a way that I accommodate the Adverts, or giving real truthful information to my people, or what? Got to figure that out...

I will not stop writing and informing Africans of South Africa about issues that they need to know and learn about. I have taught in close to about 12 different Universities, and taught over 10 Different Courses in the same number of Departments, and I cannot sit here and say that everything was Honky-Dory for me. I have been fired from many institutions for I taught in a radical way, revolutionary material, whatever the courses I taught, and I retired from teaching and now, as a writer I am being hounded for presenting whatever I write as is. What then am I supposed to do, since Internet Publishing is way-to-go: and I have written on the very subject of the Internet and Book and that Hub can be found in the line-up of whatever I wrote about here on HubPages.

Many of my Hubs, over 30 of them have being stolen, and HubPages warns me in many cases, but that does not mean I will stop writing. If HubPages can warn me about my Hubs being stolen, why can they not help me secure them? Instead, they withdraw adverts from my original Hubs, and affect my traffic flow and earnings. Be that as it may be, I will continue working assiduously hard and write as many Hubs as I can, and I will not stop complaining about the unfairness of trying to get me to tamper-down my Hubs when I am really chronicling the Truth, and I also believe that The Truth Will Set Me And My People Free.