University celebrates Internationalism, Multiculturalism with diverse array of stereotypes

Saying they wanted to celebrate the rich and varied heritages of their students both local and international, lecturers and staff at an area University this week celebrated the diverse and fascinating heritages of their campus using a wide and colourful range of stereotypes and cultural oversimplifications.

“We all know that national identities are at their core monolithic and static entities,” said event organiser Carrie Kature, “so what better way to celebrate our wide and diverse collection of peoples, cultural heritages and traditional backgrounds than through a series of reductive representations of complex cultures, such as cliché meals, national dresses out of a 50’s NatGeo mag, and flags?”

And students could not be happier.

“Itsa true-a! They’ra a-celebrayting-a la diversity!” said Italian exchange student and third-year Guido Linguini, working his way through a bowl of pasta while kissing his fingertips. “Eetza so grayta!”

Other students agree.

“Zis ‘is ze faanest way to zelebrate ze rish culture of ma favorit quantree, le France!,” said French postgraduate student Ommelay Du Fromage, munching a croquet-monsiquer and tilting his beret. “I weesh zat all ze kantreez kud zelebrate la culture comme ca!”

The University is already hard at work preparing for its next celebration, South Africa’s heritage day.

We’re really looking forward to Heritage Day,” said the Uni. "So we can celebrate our country's turbulent history and wide array of tribes and peoples by charring some fillet and vors."

Bob Mugabe land reform finally restores Zimbabwe’s wild places

It was almost 14 years ago that heroic visionary Robert Mugabe first introduced his incredible and daunting plans to restore Zimbabwe’s ecological heritage back to its former, pristine self, but now, almost 14 years later, reports indicate that he has finally succeeded.

“Way back, before the year 2000, almost 80% of all the land in the country, be it woodland, savannah scrub, forested areas or low-lying grasslands, was ripped up and ruined with all kinds of colonial, imperialist foodstuffs like maize, cotton, wheat, tobacco, beans, barley, sorghum, vegetables and other such capitalistic cash crops,” said lead researcher for the 2014 study, Kay Vemaan. “In contrast, only very limited portions of the natural and beautiful Zimbabwean terrain was left untouched in its magnificent, original glory.”

The study, which was titled “Restoring the Balance: an insight into Mugabe’s Wild Lands Transformation Program”, now indicates that the vast majority of these former so-called “farms” are now breath-taking natural heritage sites that are finally indicative of the wild, untamed Zimbabwe of yesteryear.

“Where there were once eye-sore barns, packaging houses, and expansive populated villages, the ceaseless pressure of time and nature has brought back the overgrown vegetation and wild grandeur that defined these places.”

Mugabe’s plan, which in around 2006 went into Phase Two, tackling the problem of urban infringement and civil society’s poisonous, depreciative effect on Mother Nature’s boundless beauty, has also succeeded in breaking down the toxic stains of human civilisation.

“Once, this place used to be marred and ruined by so-called 'progressive' things like ‘running water’, ‘electricity’, ‘employment’ and ‘civil peace’,” said one Zimbabwean man gesturing to an empty dark expanse once known as a “Harare”. “But now, nature has taken back her rightful throne: the nights are dark, water only flows in rivers – as God intended – and the savage unpredictability of the wilderness rules once more.”

It wasn’t easy, said the presidential pioneer of this movement – who agreed to speak to reporters as long as we didn’t call him a prick or a douchebag or an arsehole or a moron of incomparable magnitude or a blithering imbecile or a festering rectal worm that brings only death and leaves only the dire, horrifying stain of embittered, fractured lives in a society gone wrong.

“There was a lot of protest by people who didn’t understand my vision of restoring the Great Zimbabwean kingdom of 1342,” he said, reclining on a sofa of human skin and money. “We had huge riots. Yes, we might have some dark spots in history where we resorted to violence to work towards our goals, but looking at all we’ve achieved in the last decade-and-a-bit, I wouldn’t change anything – and that’s not because I’m God incarnate with endless power and wealth. It’s because I’m humble.”

The program, which finally won its key battles over those last staunch bastions of human resistance, so-called “International Law” and “Basic Human Rights” in mid-2008, is already being applauded by other countries.

“It’s magnificent, his stunning accomplishment,” said President Jacob Zuma. “Sure, me and my forebear did our best to help the vision with our exemplary support and diplomatic complicity, but I can only dream that maybe, sometime in my next inevitable three or four terms as president, that I can achieve a tiny fraction of what he’s done.”

There is much work to be done, he says.

“We’ve made a lot of progress in the last couple of years, what with things like Marikana, Grahamstown water shortages and a ruinous political agenda that breaks down the delivery of basic services and rights like access to water and freedom of speech in favour of nepotism, cronyism and tender kick-backs,” he said, “but when I look at our media, our Supreme Courts and the extensive intelligentsia of our once-beautiful country, I see that my work is only just beginning.”

pics: Wikimedia commons

Dear Black Bloggers (A Response to Dear White South Africans)

Emotion can be a dangerous thing. Sure, anger can lend to our words and actions a passionate intensity that enables a vociferous, unbidden expression of what we’re feeling at the time, but it also brings with it a dangerous cloud of obscurity to our thoughts, a choking fog that surmounts clarity and seeps in at the cracks of our rhetoric and renders it illogical, irrational.

Which is why when I read a Facebook-furore piece yesterday entitled “Dear White South Africans” , I was unsurprised to see what can only be described as dangerous, illogical generalisations at play in the form of that ever-emotional issue, race.

The context for this article was the silly Braai Day thing that happens to override Heritage Day once a year. Readers who have been on this site before will know my thoughts on such a matter – I feel that Braai Day, a capitalist, consumerist and shallow hijacking of a public holiday - distracts us from remembering our unique history.

Now then, to the issue at hand: it would be easy to call Mazwai’s blog post a baseless, moronic, stereotyping, hate-mongering mess of oversimplified sweeping generalisations and unfounded accusations, but in lieu of an ad hominem attack, I feel it is better to debunk the article on its own merits and bases.

First of all, postulation on others’ original heritages and countries of origin is meaningless, really, in this scope of argument. If we look back far enough (as the Nando’s advert so wonderfully pointed out) we can see that ‘Afrika’ doesn’t really belong to anyone (or at least, that Africans are just as guilty of colonisation over the Khoi San as the ‘whites’), and if it does, it probably belongs to the common ancestor who preceded Homo Habilus, Homo Erectus and our modern species. History, wars, civil unrest and the general passage of time can have monumental effects on ‘countries’ you supposedly come from. What about in the early 1800’s, when Germany and Poland were not real states, divided and shared between other nations? Indeed, our origins - black, white, whatever - are a subject of far more complexity and depth than a simplistic Ancient Nation Origin. As another blogger put it "Calling me one of the children of Hitler is like calling you a child of Charles Taylor, this is simply wrong". If it is written in On The Origin Of the Species that we all probably came from the Ocean, then does that mean we should all fuck off back into the Atlantic?

The idea of having multiple contrasting heritages is also not made on logical ground. Yes, technically white people may or may not come from countries where they were the “children” (not literally, obviously) of “Elizabeth, Hitler, Bismarck”, but what of those living in the diaspora, those who were born in countries outside their so-called “homes”? I am ineligible for citizenship in my “homelands” Scotland, France and Britain (so much for being the son of Napolean and Louis XI, right?), was born in Zimbabwe but have South African citizenship – how then, does my belonging here be erased because a bunch of unrelated humans came before me? In the same light, there are many aspects of these ‘bad’ legacies that can be celebrated: Nazis pioneered rocket engines, Uganda wants to kill gays***, and the industrial revolution was thanks mostly to the Scottish people. Any Heritage comes with good and bad: if you chose to celebrate Shaka Zulu’s legacy, you would also have to accept his dark, violent, warmongering side instead of just sanitising his historical image as a faultless black Jesus.

The claim that we come from a legacy of “stealing lands and making people slaves” is also a knee-jerk red herring. Slaves have been owned by many cultures and peoples stemming back thousands of years, including Biblical and African cultures. Pots cannot really call kettles black. In the same way, many African as well as Western cultures extended their lands and kingdoms through military campaigns, violence, war and slavery. Again, you cannot blame solely whites for these specific human evils.

What, also, is the basis for saying that white people have issues centred on their “SELF importance”? According to whom, to what data, what empirical research? Without a proper basis of fact to make such an allegation, it becomes mere conjecture, a subjective anecdotal posturing that is as weasel-wording-y as “scientists believe” or “they say”.

Similar easy debunking can be applied to the claims “This confuses me because you did not build your own empires, we built them for you”, “You did not raise you own children, we did that for you” and “You did not stand up when the injustices of Apartheid were happening, we stood up for ourselves”. This, again unfounded, baseless, claim is nothing short of an opinion. Which empires? How do you term ‘build’? Many whites raised their own children, just as many whites stood against apartheid, which did not benefit all whites equally (hence white women being included in BEE legislation). If we look into white struggle contributions, you cannot say that any one people put an end to it. The downfall of Apartheid was a complex and sophisticated convalescence of many wide influences and factors. Saying white people were only the perpetrators of Apartheid and that only Africans ended it carries with it a magnitude of imbecility that defies description. In the same way, did not Afrikaaners fight during the Boer War to ensure that British Rule ended? You cannot just whitewash (blackwash?) history.

“You’ve been too damn arrogant to learn the language” – sadly, this is a whole messy debate in and of itself. I myself learnt French and chiShona in school, but having been kicked out of Zimbabwe and now working in France, I would say that not learning the language has been a benefit. Again, learning a language must be something that is decided on relative merits. There are many reasons why learning another language might not be done: one of these is that many vernacular languages lack the grammatical complexity to be university instructional languages – how, for example, would one learn quantum physics or advanced organic chemistry in isiXhosa? And there are over 250 dialects in DRC alone, with RSA having 11 official languages – if you learn seven of them, are you not still being exclusive? Additionally, saying “with all due respect” means that technically you cannot follow up by being hugely disrespectful. But then, if you understood English, you’d understand paradox, contradiction, or oxymoron.

I would say that I have heard some white folk dumb down their English when speaking to black people, and I would agree that this behaviour is patronising and insulting. However, generalising that all “you white people” do this is, again, empirically unfounded. Anecdotal evidence is not the rule. Following on from this, who says it’s “ignorance”, “arrogance” or “a desire to be asked to go back to your lands” that whites disrespect Heritage Day? And why is it specifically YOUR (I take it the author here means “belonging to Africans”) Heritage Day? The history of its development clearly shows that it was meant to be a celebration of Heritage (and be definition that means all peoples, cultures and traditions in South Africa, not just the ones you acknowledge or deem more important). Braai Day is stupid, yes, and it warped Heritage Day just in the same way Valentine’s Day, Easter, Christmas and a whole host of other public holidays have been hijacked. Have we not seen Youth Day devolve into just a day off school to nurse hangovers? (This is a generalised statement, I admit). But if the esteemed author had read any of the interviews done in the course of the Heritage Day controversies, she would know that the original creator of the day had only the best intentions, but now kind of regrets the whole thing. Besides, who are you to tell people what aspects of culture are best and how or what we should celebrate on this day? It is exactly a South African celebration, which is why braaiing is perfectly fine.

As a (white) someone who got “chased off the land […] in a ‘Zimbabwe situation’”, I would say that the Zimbabwe Land Reforms were not as simplistic and puerile as white people being arrogant. A whole host of political and racist motives moved the land, starting with the failed move to change the Constitution in the referendum of 2001 and demonstrations by old Chimurenga War Veterans. Again, the author simply has not done any research or reading into the claims she makes, preferring the easy, knee-irrationality that is designed only to sow hatred and garner pageviews and perhaps advertising revenue.

In short conclusion, this article is nothing but a condescending, patronising, baseless bunch of unfounded opinions and childish assumptions that lead up to grotesque mess of hatemongering drivel. The author should, in future, not be so clinically myopic or as viciously race-hate hungry.

Notes: A reader corrected me - the Referendum was in 2000. Also, the title was intended as a sardonic, ironic rebuttal rather than any racial motive aimed at black bloggers.

*** a reader pointed out the structural ambiguity here: though placed in between two arguable progressive things, my addition of Uganda killing gays is sorely mistaken. I wrote it in a way that was meant to show how, terribly evil, mixed message, or good for all, each culture has a complex history and background that must be taken into account when celebrating it. Let me be clear that I fully believe gay rights should be a global given. I find it absurd to imagine the comparative equal: having to tell society "I am heterosexual" before "being allowed" to say that I love a woman because she is a particularly gender. Thank you for pointing this out, and I apologise for any misunderstanding.

“Charring meat on fire” still best way to celebrate diverse heritage, culture

Government spokespeople and social commentators put on a united front today, after unanimously agreeing that even now, many hundreds of years into South African democracy, the best way to celebrate and pay tribute to our country’s unique history, peoples and rich traditional background during tomorrow's National Heritage Day celebrations is through the delicious smell of grilling meat on a nice charcoal fire.

“When you see that 2kg Woolworth's prime rib slowly darkening to a rich, mouth-watering deep shade of brown, or hear that spritely sizzle of steaks on the griddle, what else comes to mind than the words ‘heritage’, ‘culture’, ‘nationalism’ and ‘pride’?” said Heritage Day Coordinator for Johannesburg Mr Bryan Stakes.

“When you hear the word ‘Zulu’, does it not conjure up thoughts of lamb shanks braised in a red wine and rosemary sauce scorching on the braai?” he asked. “I mean, what is more indicative of the deeply sincere traditionalist roots of Afrikaans solidarity and tenacity than a slowly charring coil of lightly peppered Oom Charl’s vors? And come on, what is heartier and more typically English than a quick-seared medium-rare steak? Well, that and the invention of concentration camps.”

Heritage day experts have been quick to publish their advice on having a truly authentic Heritage Day celebration.

”For a truly South African experience, be sure to slowly grill your garlic-and-lemon-basted chicken on signed copies of A Long Walk To Freedom,” said braai expert Karl Nivoar. “As you turn the bird, you’ll see the hopes and dreams of our fore-Presidents slowly curl, burn and seep into that lovely browning skin.”

However, despite some ardent and vociferous critics claiming that “[this] YOLOised and capitalist hijacking of a public holiday essentialises, oversimplifies and debases the truly rich and diverse collection of peoples, cultures, rites and traditional heritage that make up modern-day South Africa”, many people reportedly “don’t really give a stuff, china”.

“People say that this is an insult to our heritage, that it makes us so concerned with a trivial, shallow braai – which happens every weekend anyway – that we forget our own real history and the tales of those who came before us,” said Cape Town resident Weld Hun. “But seriously, what better way to remember Olivier Matambo and Nelly Madonsela and their ceaseless struggle during A Party Hate all those hundreds of years ago?”

Muse and Abuse would like to wish all its readers a happy Inkosi Asimbanano for tomorrow