Spoken Opinions and Analysis

WARNING: This article is not about prejudice, race, or some conceited agenda. It is about the quest to understand fully, what is being said about this groundbreaking research.

I have decided, upon receiving a note from a friend which reawakened my dormant poetry pen, to release some of my poetry for public scrutiny. This was indeed an unyielding decision since poetry for me peeps quiet crudely into the world of the writer. I will, in between the articles that i shall post here, through in one of two poems that i've either recently written or pulled out from my archive.

The following Poem was written back in August of 2001 after an intense session of monologue. Here goes;

I’ve learned to think over wearily
I’ve learned to wake and beware of despair

It all started with that Scandal that was. Just as I was busying myself with an obituary on the whole fiasco, certain happenings made the entire thing to come tumbling back so hard and forceful, I actually thought I was being carried in a delirious world of dreams. The world where you fly a minibus from Durban to an exotic resort somewhere in Mozambique, but then see yourself going through Angola besieged by terrorists who demand to know why won’t they be accredited to attend the 2010 Africa Cup of Nations when they clearly identify themselves as terrorists. Absolutely bonkers! I know.

Apparently a week ago or there about, US troops based in Afghanistan/CIA agents (depending on which report you read) in cohorts with their Afghan counterparts, attacked and killed execution style, eleven school children including an 11 year old boy, in a raid for Al Qaeda. I don’t want to torture you with the horrid details of how they went about doing this, See here. A couple of days later, a Taliban suicide bomber who was used as a double-agent detonated himself in a group meeting of his CIA handlers.

Prior to President Jacob Zuma getting into office, we were inundated with all manner of stories, reports, opinion pieces, all drawing our attention to the flawed person the ANC President was. A seed of paranoia was sowed in the psych of the nation. We were to fear the prospects of having him as the President of the Nation. Even Desmond Tutu tells us that he could not walk the streets of New York and proudly respond to a question on who his President back home was. President Zuma was the man who was to drive the nation into absolute mayhem.

I must have, in one of the posting that have gone before this one, affirmed an adage that “the most frustrating thing in life is not to be understood.” I can’t quiet remember where I got this from, but I know that it must be true, for I’m occasioned by this happening. But I think this line ought not to be the most truthful, because I know that the other equally frustrating thing is getting bogged down in a gratuitously pretentious conversation when you’re trying hard to avoid it.

Last week Saturday, having given up on going to the Durban July for I could not get a marquee ticket for my woman (Cobra), an evasive friend made his sudden appearance in my life again, convinced me to dash to Durban for the July race. Ever so gullible and forgetful of his treacherous exploits, I gave in to his slippery tongue, and off we went with Cobra.

“South Africans should be expressing disgust at a system that allows and pays homage to women whose own rights are annihilated for the sake of child bearing and rearing” – goes a line from a letter by Melani Judge, The Times (Monday 11th 2009 ) reader, responding to Professor Jonathan Jansen’s piece supposedly written in honour of mothers on the occasion of Mother’s Day.

His spark of breath is smothered in shade – goes a line from one of my favourite movies – A knight’s Tale. Not to be sure, the line is used by one vagrant poet to refer to the death of somebody they’ve come across.

My previous posting on this blog were on serious matters of leadership, the role of young people, empowerment institutions, the understanding, conceptualization and underpinnings of participatory democracy. I must also add that they have largely tended to lean on the lengthy side. And so I was hoping to do a blog on something incontrovertible, something light hearted. Perhaps a one pager of a sort, a kind of a banter on innocuous things of life, living and people’s weird behavior, or something that akin.