Monday, Again.

I wrote this in 2016 I believe, I salvaged it from my now non-existent word press. It just lost its fervour after I had to make a public statement on it, to be honest.

Is everything about to fall apart? It seems as if South Africa is on the edge of something, but at the same time, nobody can really define what we’re at the edge of.

Young people today are often accused of being uninterested and unconcerned in the goings-on of the world, their immediate surroundings and the future. This is both true and false, true because a shocking amount of young people are ignorant of our very recent history, its relation to the present and its impact on the future. However, what people forget to mention in this rhetoric is that the information they accuse young people of not having is inaccessible and only found in museums and a skeletal education system. The opening statement is also false. We as young people are faced with the reality that almost every part of our society and world is essentially falling apart piece by piece. The environment is breathing its last painful breaths, natural disasters in every nook and cranny, the global economy is fast becoming a satire of itself, our Western masters are falling apart and dragging us along with foreign aid trade agreements. The racists are winning, and capitalism is becoming more brutal and sadistic in its greed. Our politicians are playing tag with our futures all while we watch long wordy commissions. How then can people be surprised by the disinterest of the youth? When we don’t even know what South Africa will look like in the next fifteen years. Or rather what will be left of South Africa in fifteen years.

Unfortunately, the reality is that nobody else is coming. Our politicians are unconcerned by suffering. They can’t hear us over their greed and the pointing of fingers. Opposition parties are either a remnant of apartheid sensibilities or a copy of our capitalist liberating ruling party. The older generation of activists, the hero’s we never celebrate, the heroes who were caught sleeping, they aren’t coming either. They’ve forgotten how to be angry and discontent, all they are now is understanding and complacent. The immediate older generations have been caught in the system for too long and are unable to picture an alternative. They can’t see the crumbling building which South Africa our land is because they’re inside the building, even if it is on the first floor with barbed wire preventing them from going up any further. Our parents are too overworked and tired to entertain notions of equality and freedom.

Once again it seems it is going to fall to us, the young ones. To take the first step. That seems like a monumentally daunting task, impossible almost. But if that is what you think then you have already disrespected the sacrifices of the unnamed children who died bringing Freedom to this country, their ‘blood nourished the soil’ of this democracy, not even thirty years ago.

I am often accused of being angry. But sometimes I find it very hard to differentiate between being ‘informed’ and being ‘angry’. When your eyes finally open to reality. When you finally make the connection between the past and the present, the sense of injustice hits you like a tsunami. ‘How could they have gotten away with all of this?’ is the first thing you wonder. You’re infuriated by everything and everywhere you look you can see the scars of Apartheid looking back at you. Even today, all these years after ‘awakening’(lol), I still feel a surge of anger every time I see a white police officer over the age of 50. How many people did he harass? Torture? How many times did he ask someone for their dompas? Was he the cruel baas or the kind baas who would tell the cruel baas to stop kicking the 14 year old black child? Or am I being dramatic? Tell me if I’m being dramatic.

Are white people even happy though? I would not be comfortable in my surroundings if I knew that I was sitting on top of an earthquake with three-hundred-and-fifty years of tension building. To constantly be scared for your safety and that of your children? Nobody is going to harm them because they’re white, but they think so. All this constant talk of giving back the land and economic emancipation, are they not uncomfortable? And what about the lower-income white people? They do realize that at this point they need us, nobody in Camp’s Bay is concerned with their well-being. And what about the future, white people seem to feel relatively safe in the hands of the ANC and the DA, but what about in ten years? What will parliament look like? As inequality grows, the black majority will shake off the liberation nostalgia. What will the margin be? Are white people okay with being that uncertain? At this point any class struggle will end up being a race war because class and race run along the same vein. The black elite will show their black card and we’ll forgive their twenty-five-year treachery. Surely white people cannot be comfortable being this uncomfortable.

Is everything about to fall apart? It seems like South Africa is on the edge of something, nobody can really define what we’re at the edge of. But everyone is nervous, or am I imagining things? It’s like I live in two realities, one in which South Africa is on the brink of sure disaster with ticking time bombs in every corner and another where people are completely unconcerned by the big picture, their lives continue despite this and that, focused entirely on the small matter of surviving.