A Look at the Bantu, by the Bantu
What the Problem is.
Intro
one day you
wont remember me.
one day my
words will be as the wind
one day my
face will be a fleeting moment on my children's children's faces –
perhaps
when they laugh,
perhaps
when they rage against this uncompromising cosmos as did their ancestor.
but right
now i am here.
right now i
am here to remember myself
and know
that my trials are my joys.
right now i
am here to scream my story as loud as the world can hear.
and here is
my story:
i float up
to the heavens in an inevitable dance like a reluctant lover,
reluctant
to let go of that illusion of freedom that comes with powerlessness,
but loving
the slow, warm fission with my eternal self.
If you are reading this you probably live close
to or in a city. You are studying or working or seeking to. Unless you are already
wealthy these thoughts of education/wealth are directly linked with your
ability to live a meaningful life – one not wasted by poverty like it was for our
recent ancestors. You want to mate and possibly raise children or are already
doing so. You are young of mind. You see beauty in the spaces between the
spaces. You can feel your own intelligence zipping through you like
electricity...
Lol. Get over yourself. Shit gets hard and
downright stupid as we go along.
The aim of these words, brothers and sisters of
mine, is to let you in on the game.
Listen if you have the ears. Understand if you want to. Ignore me if you must.
But do everything you can to get in on this game because otherwise shit stays
hard and meaningless.
...and the game is on. The rules are complex
and vague, the prize is dubious but well lit and the stake is always your life.
When you fail your life is forfeit!
And the game is local. The game is
international. The game is deeply personal.
Every day these questions wake me up: “Who am
I?”, “What am I doing here?”, “What game is this we play?”, “Who made the rules
and why not me?” I need to find out why things are the way they are and what I
have the power to change. I need to find the meaning of these games we play, and
how to win.
This book was written to find meaning and make
life easier for me and my people...
...and it turns out I am a Bantu – another
member of the beautiful brown skinned people that began it all. We were, and
still are, the first people. The Bantu, in general, are a very successful animal.
Our spread out of Africa and into the rest of the world began about 70 000
thousand years ago. We had the same dark brown skin, thick woolly hair and
thick, full facial features we have now. We were already full of imagination,
depth and dignity when we crossed into what is now known as the Middle East. We
were already fully equipped with the skills of language, trade, music and all
the important things that make humans human.
And since then we have taken the title as the
most successful species on the planet. We have conquered continent after
continent, from the Americas to Australia, all the while changing in appearance
to suite our new environments. Mostly, our descendants’ facial features became
sharper, their skin became lighter and their hair became straighter. There was
also that encounter with the Neanderthals....
And in these various guises we and our
descendants have gained the power to capture and display dominance over every
other animal and plant species we have encountered on this our shared earth. We
also alter the world to suite our needs much more than any other creature. We
have even escaped most of Mother Nature’s day to day inconveniences. We build
bridges and roads and share ideas.
And it all started here in Africa – with us the
Bantu.
Today, we have divided most of the world into social
groupings called nation states which are mostly in control within their own
borders. The older states are filled with that lovely variant of Bantu descent
called “white people” and are very influential in global matters. These “white
people” and their nation states are situated mostly in Western Europe, but they
have since spread their influence and power globally. These older European states
created younger states, including the USA, all over the world through various
methods of colonisation. They used their superior industrial and organisational
skills to colonise and rule over territories that were already inhabited by
other humans of different cultures and race, including us Bantu. I live in a
young country in Bantu Africa called South Africa that recently (1994) went
through the first step of decolonisation: handing over the seats of power.
From my little corner of Johannesburg, South
Africa I see the world through my daily talks with random people of every religion,
race and class. I read, talk to colleagues, friends and family and often
strangers to get a feel of what is happening around me and I closely watch
media and the internet.
And from where I sit, I am very worried about us
Bantu. The way we have joined into this nation state game is all wrong! It is
all happening too fast with too few decisions being made by too few Bantu people.
I worry that we are not able to keep up with the international game which is already
beginning to push towards changes that we Bantu are simply not ready for. Among
the proposed changes is the idea that nation states should
“partially surrender their
sovereignty to one huge international organization”.
We obviously cannot allow that to happen in our current state. It would only
weaken us further.
This is not a conspiracy
theory. It is just the natural evolution of the “international industrialized nation
state” game. Because of the globalization of industrialization it is simply the
next logical step for the powerful and wealthy classes of the industrialised
world to get together and plan on a global scale to maintain their power and
wealth over industrial societies. That is the big game at play now.
In this particular
game, we Bantu masses are losing… badly. We have entered the international
industrialized nation state game on such bad footing and so late that I fear
that it can only end in disaster for us. It is imperative that the Bantu people
pull together and only enter the game with a collective understanding of the
rules and rewards of this game. If we do not do this, we are in high danger of
having our fates decided by other people who may not have our interests at
heart.
This book is not a
book of solutions for the Bantu. This book is not a book of facts. This book is
a book of ideas for the Bantu; a context for conversations. Within these contexts
we can begin to talk solutions.
****************************************************
And it is very useful
to view the world as a series of different games. Games are things that you can
step out of and see from the outside. When you see our society as a set of
games (law, religion, governments, social life) with their own rules (laws,
commandments, bureaucracies, customs) and rewards (social security) you begin
to see how you can step out of them. And once you can step out of them, you can
even choose to change the rules or play different games altogether.
I use this game metaphor
in many other ideas in the writing ahead. In fact, the big ideas in this book –
the ideas that if nothing else you must leave with – are that
- · your sense of self,
- · your sense of community and
- · your sense of the games we play
are three tools every
Bantu must have with them at all times. With these tools in hand we begin to
see how we can demolish the current games that we are losing and construct new games
of our own liking – new games where we are the winners.
1994’s incorrect assumptions
In order for us to
understand these games better, I believe that we should look closely at the
decisions that were made after the 1994 elections. These decisions gave a small
group of Bantu people immense power over the fates of 45 million people. This
was the first step to our freedom. They made decisions. These decisions decided
the fates of many people and greatly prescribed how we live today…
But I have since come
to see that some of these decisions were taken too quickly, and have now come
back to haunt us.
These decisions have created
problems for us Bantu masses that have crippled our ability to play the
international state game. These decisions make the international state game more difficult than it has to be by
confusing Bantu people’s attempts at good thinking and communication of their
thoughts. In the following chapters I identify these misunderstandings
in the firm belief that rethinking them is the true first step towards
reclaiming the Bantu destiny.
These assumptions are an important starting
point because to begin a real conversation about the Bantu situation we must
first understand it. And we cannot understand it if the chosen starting point, 1994,
has bad assumptions in it. We must therefore return to 1994 and rethink the
assumptions and decisions we made then.
Please evaluate for yourself. The assumptions I
would like to deal with are:
- 1. That white people and Bantu people must quickly learn to like each other and integrate socially.
- 2. That we must work to get paid, and that we must get paid to work.
- 3. That democracy is about voting for a government that represents you.
- 4. That schools and universities are responsible for education.
In the following four sections I tackle each assumption
as clearly as I can – sometimes at the price of detail. In the fifth section I
wrap up with a simple proposition. My aims in presenting these ideas are
neither to explain everything nor to get you to agree, but rather I want to lay
a foundation for us have real conversation about our situation.
Bantu people and White people don’t need
to integrate
White people are not evil people that rained
down on Bantu Africa in a storm of injustice. They simply did what we would
have done had we been given the same chance. Had we achieved some level of greater
technological and industrial skill as they did we might have also colonised their territories. In fact, between
about 700ad to 1500ad Africans called Moors invaded and ruled Spain, Portugal,
bits of France and even Southern Italy. They brought agriculture, engineering, mining, industry, manufacturing, architecture,
and scholarship - developing Spain into the center for culture and learning
throughout Europe.
It is likely that Europeans learned the
colonialism model from these African Moors in Spain!
Thus we see that white people are not devils
and we are no faultless victims either. We often played important roles in our
own colonisation and even the slave trade.
But white people are
another “people”. They
have a different set of ideas that they live by from us. They look and behave
differently to us. Almost strangely, they still show how aware they are of this
“difference” with racist behaviour.
So we come to today’s situation in South
Africa, where white people run the social and economic playground like bullies.
They still dominate agriculture,
engineering, mining, industry, manufacturing, architecture and scholarship. But
do they understand that hoarding most of the economic resources within
the nation state of South Africa is a slow genocide of the people they found
inhabiting the place surprisingly few generations back?
While often claiming otherwise, most white
people believe poverty to be part of the natural order of human societies. They
believe themselves fortunate and deserving of their upper class status because
they diligently applied hard work and persistence through many difficulties. On
the whole, they are quite impressed with themselves. They believe that their current
dominance is a result of this hard work, and that Bantu people are mostly too lazy
if not just stupid to reach the heights of civilisation that they have created.
I agree that white people have worked hard to
get to where they are. I do not agree that Bantu people are somehow lazy or stupid.
Bantu people simply find themselves quite lost in a big, alien colonising
civilisation. Bantu people therefore obviously have less motivation on which to
base hard work. We simply do not yet share the ambitions that white people have
of skyscrapers and office parks and robots and space travel. At the moment, Bantu
people are simply attempting to survive their being uprooted, enslaved then
liberated then seemingly “empowered” but actually enslaved again by a new Bantu
upper class.
Bantu people simply do not yet fully understand
why white people do what they do. And we generally do not understand the
accompanying sense of urgency that white people exude. But in 1994 it was
apparently assumed that to succeed Bantu people must do as white people do:
that this fast paced capitalist democracy and its resultant social groupings, rectangular
buildings, laws and customs are somehow natural and desirable for the Bantu
people. This to me is just unimaginative.
I like to think that had we Bantu people taken the
time to be unsure of ourselves after the 1994 elections we would have decided
that it is not necessary for us to integrate with white people and live as they
do. Perhaps we would have disliked their value set and its resultant concept of
‘success’. Perhaps we would have decided that we do not like cities and all the
strange rectangular dwellings. Perhaps we would have decided we like trains and
bicycles but not cars. Perhaps we could have let white people stay in the
‘concrete jungles’ if they liked while we sought out a different type of social
architecture.
Instead here we are, almost twenty years after
1994, basing our own sense of success on the white man’s model. We have not
been creative in answering the question of how we should live. We will
therefore remain in the shadow of the white people until we become white people
too.
****************
The great unspoken fear that we Bantu must
address is that the current dominance of the white man is somehow biological or
genetic. But the genetic differences between the various races do not support the
theory of races. There are sometimes more genetic differences between me and
Malawians than there are between me and Norwegians. It seems genetically we and
the whites are basically the same animal.
The matter I am addressing is that the agricultural, engineering, mining, industrial,
manufacturing, architecture, and scholarship skills that they
collectively posses greater than that of Bantu people can safely be ascribed to
nurture and not nature. In the competition for survival they have no extra
tools but our ignorance.
On the other hand, I see what white people are
doing. And it is good. They have basically united a world. A good thing, that.
This network of cities called global society is impressive. They have created a
good information network whose power they themselves have not yet fully used,
and industrialisation done right is a big part of the world’s future.
But as much as they as a group have contributed
greatly to mankind’s most recent technology upgrade, they are still mostly just
looking out for themselves. They are an invading tribe. They will fight for limited
resources. They will work together to hoard resources that increase their
chances of survival. And as we saw with Steve Biko they will kill to win. This
was what apartheid was: them working together to take over the land from the Bantu; them working
together to withhold information
from the Bantu.
But I agree with the Afrikaans people’s wish to
live apart. This simple, wise wish was incorrectly associated with Apartheid.
Apartheid was the systematic taking of land and withholding information from
Bantu masses. Once land and information
are properly distributed it actually would
be best for the Bantu to live separately and independently from the white people.
The quicker we do this the quicker we exit the current abusive relationship
between Bantu people and white people.
And with their success in the world it is easy
to assume that white people’s civilisational constructs are the rational and
logical choice for us. But that is a big mistake. There are many parts of the
white man’s world that we must avoid, alter or reject. The next three chapters
are in fact about three large parts of the white man’s thinking that we must
avoid, alter and even reject: jobs, government and education.
In summary: the white man’s games are
interesting and often engaging but are irreversibly rigged against us because
white man was and still is acting in self interest. To beat him at his own
game, as we seem to currently be trying to do, is simply a path towards losing
ourselves and becoming willing slaves. Rather we must craft our own game.
If the Bantu people really have freedom of
choice then the first choice we must make is whether we want freedom. Perhaps we
just want to be rich? But I hope not. The wish to be rich is the white man’s
dream/big game. But there are other better dreams to be had…
Time is not money
In South Africa, post 1994, Bantu people seem
to have taken to this crippling opinion that they must get paid to work and
worse yet, work to get paid. The association between these two concepts (work
and money) should be casual at the most. Instead, we must work to build value
for ourselves. Value is found in things and activities that make our lives
somehow better. Value can manifest in millions of ways and is not limited to exchanges
of money unless we force it to. For instance, the true value of a life well
lived is rarely found in “jobs”.
White people have a tendency of assigning a
monetary value association to everything and every activity of benefit to
individuals and societies. This association puts money between us and personal/social
well being. This causes us to assume that money is always required to get what
we need to live, when so often it is not.
Chika Onyeani’s book “Capitalist Nigger”, while
highly astute and inspirational, is an example of this assumption. It frames Bantu
man’s aspirations for success within a western monetary economic structure. Yet
much of what Bantu individuals and communities need and desire can be obtained
without money, without jobs. It simply requires that individuals and
communities do the necessary work without the expectation of any monetary compensation.
For popular instance: it does not require money
to build a park within a community. All it requires is community members to come
together and shape soil and foliage. The value the park would add to the
community is more than money can express:
- · children would be able to play away from traffic and in a natural environment,
- · adults would have a natural space to get together and socialise
- · the very act of building the park as a community would create strong bonds within the community and
- · the fact that they built it themselves would create the sense of communal pride needed for the constant maintenance and improvement of the park by the community.
Yet so often we hear about communities that
complain of a lack of funding to create parks and other communal nice-to-haves.
They wait for some government institution to gather the money and paperwork,
then do the planning and project management of building a park.
Building a park is not a numbers game. It is a
communal will game. Building as a community is one of the fundamentals of
community.
Value should therefore generally not be
associated with money. Work should also not be directly associated with money. Allowing
money to come between us, our work and the things we value is creating a layer
between ourselves and the world we are born into. Soon you cannot tell the true
value of your work.
Money is a layer that separates work from
value. That layer can then be manipulated by a ruling class to further strengthen
their dominance and monopolies on power. This is a trend already visible in
modern capitalist states.
To free our self from this dominance we must simply
remove the idea of money from value and work. We must work for reasons other
than money. We must find value in things that cannot be bought. We must stop
working for money. We must work to create value for our self.
Again, don’t get me wrong: money is a great
utility for trade of surplus goods. But there it should remain: a surplus trade
game tool. Letting it become part of the very definitions of success, value,
work and access to means of living is silly and self defeating. It gives too
much power to a small group that controls the flow of money and keeps it
circulating amongst themselves.
Many will argue that money has played a huge
role in our technological and industrial advancement. They will claim that
capitalism’s ‘free market system’ is what has driven innovation and progress in
human society, that capitalist leadership over the working class has improved
the life of the masses in general. In as much as their arguments may be true,
it is also true that there are other models of innovation and progress that do
not include capitalism’s raw disregard for the collective well being. The need
for money forces people to do the bidding of capitalists until it becomes a subtle
form of slavery. We need to find new models that allow for self sufficiency
without doing the bidding of capitalists.
If we let money continue to play this role in
our lives we will soon be paying our children to be good and our lovers to be
faithful.
We Bantu people must begin working to create
value for ourselves and our communities. The work of creating that value should
not be compensated monetarily and the value should be self evident. Ridding
ourselves of the assumption that money and work go hand in hand will go miles
towards freeing millions of people and their communities from the perceived
economic shackles they currently complain of.
Politics 101: A little game called
consensus
At this stage you might suspect that I am
diminishing the successes of the struggle that brought us here. This is not the
case. Past and present Bantu leadership played a significant part in forming this
social, economic and political climate that enables me to write this article today. This
article is a product of the imagination that their struggle created the space
for. It is in the space that they created that we must build different, new games
for us Bantu.
Being the leaders of tomorrow, we must use this
space wisely:
For the purposes of this conversation let us simplify
everything to two resources that are of fundamental importance to human
communities: land and information. Let us say that all other resources flow
from these two.
- 1. Land is access to everything you need to live and be healthy. It is your agricultural wealth and access to clean water. Land is the most basic political question because to be born without land is to be born into servitude. Land is the core of the question of self determination through self sufficiency. Land is the question of food and water and the space to simply be. It is the question that still has not been answered since 1994.
- 2. Information is access to the world. It is railroads and trade lines and electricity and data networks and industrial networks that directly improve quality of life for everyone. Water networks. Food networks. Social and education networks. Information is your set of networks.
The game at hand in politics is simply to find
ways to distribute these two simple things as evenly as we can because these
two are what define a Bantu person’s quality of life. Thus we have to design
our lives in such a way that we have enough land for every Bantu and
information flows freely.
But it seems to me that in all the noise and
drama since 1994, we have forgotten
this simple fact of what real politics are: distribution of land and
information. Instead we talk the diluted politics of elections, rights, tax, religion,
economy, big business, jobs, affirmative action and Gross Domestic Products that
are very far from addressing the simple question of: “How are we going to share
the land and spread information?” The real politic of democracy is actually answering
this question together, as well as collectively making the changes we want to
see.
The simple side of politics is what we Bantu in
the “nation state” of South Africa have lost sight of since 1994. We have
allowed our chance at democracy to be replaced by a twice diluted idea of democracy
which is a shadow of it’s true self. The first dilution of our democracy is the
basic concept of voting and the
second dilution is voting for government...
About voting: if democracy is about making
choices together, then voting is just one way out of many ways to make choices
together. The danger of voting is that it does not require that we
all agree on anything. It simply requires that we take the most popular choice.
The popular choice does not guarantee to being the right choice. Furthermore
voting allows and even promotes an “Us vs Them” mentality. The “Us vs Them”
mentality means that we can never truly call ourselves a team or a community
working together to achieve a goal.
But voting is still used everywhere because
reaching a consensus amongst large amounts of people is just plain difficult. Consensus
in large groups takes time and advanced communications technology. We had
neither in 1994. At that time we Bantu people needed to quickly and firmly take
the reins from the apartheid regime. So the only way back then for the masses
to make themselves heard quickly was by electing “representatives”. The Bantu
masses could only periodically put an ‘x’ next to a Bantu face that
“represented” them...
And to this day we carry on the president ‘x’
tradition. But the information age we find ourselves in just twenty years later
has surpassed the technology barriers that limited the 1994 elections. The
ability of the masses to make their
wishes known is now no longer limited to voting. With the communications
network we currently have the masses can talk back. The masses can clearly
communicate their wishes to those who must implement them. And surely the first
thing that the masses will say is that they want their land and information
networks back.
But most importantly, the information age
brings with it the possibility of much richer conversations within
communities. The masses can start talking to each other! In fact these conversations
are the very bricks and cement of communities. You can tell the strength of any
community by the richness of conversations the people are having. These are the
conversations through which we will answer the real political questions we face.
Again: The question of land is the first thing
that must be answered because the question of land is the question of slavery. If
you are born without the land needed for self sufficiency then it means you are
born into servitude for money. Governments and capitalist industries thrive off
people born into servitude for money.
About voting for governments: It is thus an advantage to
the ruling capitalist class that for most Bantu people in South Africa after
1994, democracy and government are the same thing. The Bantu masses of South
Africa today truly believe that they need government to practice democracy. But
this is not true. Government is only another dilution of democracy. Democracy
and government are in fact almost opposites in the Bantu context. True democracy
has nothing to do with “black presidents”, “rainbow nations”, elections or
citizenship. Democracy is not about states, taxes, education budget speeches
and the media scandals. Democracy is not about the rule of law, constitutional
rights or policy. Right now, for the
Bantu people of South Africa, democracy is only about collectively answering
the basic questions of land and information distribution.
And because we’ve lost sight of this we Bantu
find ourselves in the silly situation where a small group of people takes power
and tells us that it is for our own good. This small group in modern day South
Africa is our “democratic government” who work closely with those who have a
lot of money to keep themselves in position of privilege.
These modern governments constantly claim that
their obvious failures in resolving the problems affecting the masses are due
to lack of enough resources and executive power. They then lobby amongst each
other about how much resources and executive power they should take from the
masses so that they can try again. With these doublespeak mechanisms in place
they then take more and more resources, power and self responsibility away from
communities and individuals.
But the simple reason why governments are
ineffective is that like all industrial businesses they serve the needs of
those who pay them the most. Today’s governments are subject to the same industrial
economy laws as all businesses: they need to make money! Government and party
officials accept donations in return for tenders and favourable legislation. Thus
we see that government is an organ of the industrial complex and directly
serves the industrial elite.
It becomes clear that our government simply cannot
and should not be entrusted to build parks for us, let alone our homes.
Governments cannot be responsible for getting rid of poverty. Governments
should not take on the burden of the elderly nor the definition and punishment
of crimes. These things are all too real and personal for any government to be
able to answer. Governments because of their
sheer size must put impersonal processes and laws before people. They have to
because they cannot “know” the people.
The things we have entrusted them with are
things that we should definitely keep for ourselves. We must punish crimes as
defined by us. We must take care of our elders. We must teach our own children!
We must create the value within our communities.
A government’s impersonal approach can only exist
in communities that do not make these decisions. These poor communities are led
to believe that government controls the land and the flow of information and
thus never make decisions for themselves.
*********************************************
Today in South Africa we have a growing Bantu upper
class filling with the captains of capitalist industries and high ranking
officials of bloated government bodies alike. They have wrestled some political
and economic power from tribal royal oligarchies and the white people. With an
intoxicating combination of class consciousness, political doublespeak and bullshit
television this new Bantu upper class rules over us Bantu masses of South Africa.
And we Bantu communities have largely submitted
to them and thus lost our collective sense of self. We are no longer
communities in the normal sense and are often just a bunch of Bantu people
linked by the position of our homes and a dying sense of tribalism. We never
get together in large numbers to discuss and make intelligent decisions about our
environment or ourselves because we have been stripped of our sense of self and
our sense of community. All of our power is now centralised in government and
those who have money.
But the implication of needing government is
that you are stupid - that you need to be forced into understanding wrong and
right and that because of your inability to resolve your conflicts yourself,
government must take more and more of your choices away from you. But again: government cannot make or enforce our
decisions any longer. It is now obvious that government cannot create ‘jobs’
or resolve our conflicts. They cannot define value for us nor teach our children
how to be adults. They cannot tell us what forgiveness is and they cannot
soothe the broken hearts of Apartheid. And the simple truth is that Freedom can
never really be given. It can only be taken. Governments cannot give freedom.
They can however collect taxes, make laws and try
to control what we think of them. Genuine health, wealth, values, growth and
love all are not the province of government. They are the province of
communities. Communities are where aBantu are manufactured. Not governments.
We Bantu are today in a position to collectively
create new ways of organising ourselves into communities that define themselves
in any structure we wish. That is the true goal of democracy. Voting for government
is a diluted and ineffective way of achieving democracy. The idea of a
community – a group of people capable of collectively making and realising
their decisions – outshines the idea of a “democratically elected government”
any day. If we Bantu truly wish to start afresh we need to play a serious game
of consensus. Only when we get better at reaching consensus amongst ourselves
can we truly call ourselves a community. If
communications is the bricks and cement of community then consensus is the
buildings that we build.
We Bantu must find ways to have a dialogue
between ourselves about how we want to live. The people must talk! This
dialogue must find ways to produce consensus without forsaking truth or
individuality. We must turn these dialogues into games of consensus. We must use
these games to share and grow ideas. We must use our imagination in deciding
how we want to live. We must decide how we want to distribute the land and
information. We must make tough decisions. We must try and fail, then try again
having learnt the lesson. We must shape the world in our image even as the
world shapes us in its image. We must consider future generations of Bantu. We
must collectively craft and grow confident in our own way of life.
Then and only then can we choose to enter the
international “state” game as genuine Bantu players and not as poor black pawns
– when we move away from voting games towards real consensus games.
And we must do all of this together. None left
out.
Education is Life
I propose we alter our fundamental
understanding of the word “education”. Education is not about schools and
universities. It is not about textbooks and curriculums. It has little to do
with philosophy doctorates and research papers. Education is the people in the streets speaking about the nature of their
world. Education is us understanding each other through all the noise. Education
is about us teaching each other.
And the information age just changed the education
game...
Education is the art of giving meaning to the information
we humans produce and share. Information without meaning is of little value. It
is just data. Information only jumps to life when we apply meaning to it. Only
then can it be used. Giving meaning to information is the basic process of
education. Meaning is the end goal of education.
With this definition of education in mind, we
see that education need not be limited to authoritative teaching methods directed
at youth and academia. Education is everything to everyone at all stages of
their lives because it is everyone’s unending search for meaning. Meaning is a
gift of life and we Bantu should never let it out of our sight. We must take
every opportunity to share meaning, grow meaning and be more than we were
yesterday.
Feeling like you’ve
lived a meaningful life is one of the best criterions for judging one’s individual success. And
if in this information age we are able to transfer information almost
instantaneously to anyone anywhere then modern education is to use this
technology to increase the number of people who can lead meaningful lives. We
must work together to identify and create the tools necessary for us to take
control of our own education. But let us first look at three most fundamentals
tools required to achieve this:
1.
We must share a language. Language
is the big game through which we gain information about the world around us.
Through this ‘language game’ we assign shared meanings to the external world.
Language is the context of all human cultures and sub-cultures. The implication
of this is that the degree to which you master a language is the degree to
which you are successful amongst those who speak that language. A shared
language is in fact a fundamental criterion for a community to even be called a
community.
Thus for us Bantu to learn from and teach each
other we must share at least one language that we all understand and speak well.
This shared language will enable us to have our community conversations. This shared
language which will help us move away from voting games, towards consensus
games. With a better grasp of our language games it becomes easier to produce
meaningful information for each other and reach consensus.
2.
We must produce information. We cannot only be consumers of
information. We must also become prolific producers of information if we hope
to call our education our own. Those who have produced meaningful information
are better at finding meaning in information. Those who do not produce
information are vulnerable to doublespeak from all sides.
In order to produce information we must capture
data. It could be your daily observations about your surroundings and the
people you share your life with, or it could be measurements of changes in some
variable. But we must capture this data.
It is actually difficult for me to express how (fucking)
fundamental information production is in the information age. So I’ll leave the
rest to your imagination.
3.
Don’t teach facts. Teach games. If the
world is a bunch of different games: social games, political games and economy
games, then the best thing to teach is how to play these games. Even more
importantly, it is fundamentally
imperative to teach people how to create new
better social, political and economic games that work together to sustain a
community. Bantu people must learn and apply this “theory of games” if they
want to reconstruct themselves.
With these three things – the language, the data
and game theory – we can begin our self determination through self education. We
can then begin to take on the world on equal footing.
So though schools and universities with
controlled curriculums were an absolute necessity in the recent past, the information
age requires us to decentralise education. The
information age comes with the technological tools required to decentralise and accelerate the
educational process. We must take ownership of the technology and our education
to do this.
But It will be near impossible if we do not see
that education is us teaching each other instead of someone teaching the
children. It will be too difficult if we don’t share a language. It will be
just plain stupid if we are not producing our own information. It’ll be slow
going if we don’t understand and apply game theory.
Imagining Solutions
I know I have gotten ahead of myself. I should
not be talking solutions. But I get too excited because with true education
will come true capacity for self determination... because with true education
the Bantu community’s conversations will grow richer and more substantial and
with richer conversations will come the solutions to our collective problems...
Once in a very long time a generation will get
an opportunity to do something… interesting. We Bantu people are unique in being
presented with such an opportunity right now. We have an opportunity to observe
the most successful civilisation within recent history, white people (Indo-Europeans),
learn from them, give compliments where they are due then take what we like and
throw away what we don’t from it in the process of forming a society completely
of our imagining, to our own liking...
We can change the game. This will be easy if we
see that it is up to us all to make the
decisions about our collective life. We Bantu have a responsibility to be the
best that we can be. If life is a big game then we must change from game
players into game changers. All of us... none left out.
To be sure, thina
aBantu we must:
·
answer
the stupid land question already so that we have the food, water and space to
·
learn
how to get together and make up rules for new different games that
·
ensure
the free flow of information not constrained by politics, religion or ignorance
so that we can
·
get
this “community” thing going.
In that order.
The self evident is that humans are
intelligent, social animals in the process of building ever better social
structures for continual evolutionary development. Our fear of the next man is
based on an old survival instinct that was useful when there was a shortage of basic
resources and a need to compete amongst ourselves for them. But we have since
outgrown this instinct. With the technology and skills we have we are now able
to properly feed, shelter and educate every single Bantu alive starting today.
To get past the old instincts the fear of the
next man must be consciously squashed while building ever stronger bridges for
social cohesion and cooperation. It is these bridges that will allow us Bantu to
transcend the games now being imposed on us so that we may choose or create new
better games for ourselves when and as we wish.
And yes, we will meet resistance. There are
those who continue to profit greatly at our expense and would spare little
expense to maintain that status quo. But we must not think of them as opponents
but as fellow humans who might learn from what we are doing, even as we have
learnt from them. Fighting them with sticks and stones serves only them.
And no, this is not a revolution. Revolutions
are an explosive type of mass hysteria fuelled by a deep social frustration. Frustrated
we Bantu are, yes, but mass hysteria will do us no good. We must act
intelligently and creatively to create a sustainable homeostasis between change
and custom: never changing so fast as to lose ourselves, but never protecting
customs to the point of stagnation.
So yes, we’ll have to take some risks. But
we’ll take them together.
Thomas Sankara taught me that when you set free
the people’s imagination, change can happen. The people become the vehicles of
their own change and do not require some benevolent dictator or other to
continually prod them on. We Bantu now truly have the tools of shaping
ourselves into whatever we wish. No longer are we looking for ourselves. Now we
create ourselves, everyday.
The possible futures are only as limited as our
imagination. Imagination is the key to this entire exercise. For you to
effectively do, you must first effectively imagine. Imagination is in fact the only measure of
success for Bantu people in this next exercise:
Exercise No1: Imagine for me then friends, brothers,
sisters, elders and children, how you think we should live if we were to live
differently from how we live now?
Think big. Think intelligent use of resources.
Think evolutionary sustainability. Think collective success. Think uBuntu.
Oh and don’t forget: Smile at your fellow Bantu
and get to know them. They are your community without whom you can only reach
limited success. Smile. Smile with and talk to them until your jaws get tired.
Begin the dialogue that will define our journey together...
Back Page Blurb
Look its simple: you are who you think you are.
And when people are actually listening, you are who you say you are.
And the life we live really is all just games
we all assume we must play. It is games that decide fates, yes, but it is games
nonetheless. And I say if there is a race game on then let’s play the race
game.
The big race game we currently play (the white
man’s game) has its own set of rules, regulations and rewards. It is an
interesting game, but I personally grow tired of it... especially the part
where Bantu people are generally losing the game. There are other better games
to be played. I propose that instead of trying to win this highly biased game
we invent a new game more suited to our whims and needs. I suggest that we
Bantu start looking at ourselves as game changers and not just late entrants
into a long running game. After all, this is our life. Our time...
About the author
Sizwe Mabanga is a man who likes the idea of
intelligence more than he has intelligence. He lives in the Johannesburg CBD and
wants to see black people happy. He is a common mixture of the dreamer, the
preacher and the worker: he wishes fast, speaks slow and will do it all one great
day, but today... this book is what he’s got for you.
P.s. Sizwe is certain he will not die of
natural causes, but welcomes being wrong on this. He hopes to be a thought leader
amongst the Bantu people as they reshape their destiny...
Cell: 082
341 8852
