Education: the acid test cometh.

I do understand obsession. For instance it is about half three in the morning and I have got out of a warm bed and moved to a cold room to write this. Well technically I typed this. Had I written it, then I would have had to type it… Technically I rise at three to practice my typing. If that isn’t a form of obsession then what is?

Ja, well, no fine… as we like to say here at the southern tip of the Azanian Konfederacy [emerging] in Afrika. Do we still practise human sacrifice in the interests of ideological purity? Is this our favourite obsession? What is the acid test of our obsessions? What is the acid test for our prime obsession the new education system... our path to the future.

Twice this week my employers, at the place where I have had a temporary, part-time job for the past decade, have sent me, and colleagues, to undergo re-education training at the hands of various exponents of the new education system [in RSA].

In the first day’s session an enthusiastic middle-aged woman enjoined us against ever using the word “Teach” to describe what we do, because the term implies something that fails to communicate, she said. “I facilitate learning”…This, she said, should be our watchword.

The second presenter person, in a later session used the word ‘teach’ promiscuously; as though desperately keen to be “our mate”. She never used the word “facilitate” at all; notwithstanding tht she was a more senior version of the person from the first session, and was allegedly a prime motivator of the “no teach” lobby.

And she needed to be our mate as she peppered us with a , frankly, neurotic obsession with the minutiae of the many tagged abbreviations, into which all our new education formula is being systematised: our new catechism. “We are concerned with what comes out” at the end of the process,” she said, “and to assure ourselves of the “correct” ‘outcome’, we make certain that every step in the process is documented, validated, current, fair and transparent”. No child will ever again be ignominiously humiliated by getting “marks” that are uncomplimentary. [except of course that human beings have an infinite capacity for self-humiliation, .No one fail anymore, which is true for there is no such thing as failure; there are simply opportunities to improve one’s performance. I suspect the phrase “NOT YET COMPETENT” will ring as grotesquely though as any other form of negative stroke.]

I found myself thinking of Nietzsche who railed against “Systematisers”: I wondered how many of those former “teachers” now reduced to Laity with a vested interest in their salaries will simply preach a new religion; follow it blindly: not knowing where they go. The litany of abbreviations: El oh, See oh, Dee oh et al, become a mantra to bond our journey.

Both ladies though were entertaining, committed and informative; and I benefited from both my sessions on the “other side” of the desk this week; and know that I shall be a more effective mediator in the learning process than I was previously. Well in theory anyway. Am I a more effective educator because I have practiced my catechism? Maybe… we shall see.

In many ways, for me, the new system is an affirmation of what I have always practiced, with varying levels of success over forty years. I have generally managed to do it though with a minimum of paperwork, I know what destination we want to reach and act as guide to the humans in my care: over forty years I have worked in Boardrooms at one end of the human spectrum and and grade fours at another end.

For the past twelve years or so I have taken Grade twelve students on their journey to discovery and liberation from the first round. No student of mine has ever dopped the final. I seldom either get or give A’s. My responsibility is to act as tour guide making sure you get to see all the sights; and seeing to it that no one is lost along the way [ie no one ‘dops’].

How you choose to enjoy the trip is up to you and those few who gained the ultimate accolade were self-driven to the point of obsession… which is how it is when striving for excellence.

As to the presentation of an obsessive litany of I’s that must be crossed and T’s that must be dotted, for every task or moment of time I spend in the classroom, I believe I have stared into the face of madness and been found wanting.

I have commented at large over the past few years about the emerging new education system and how, notwithstanding its apparent liberation context it succeeds even more brilliantly than the Apartheid system did, in discrimination on a fairly magnanimous, if covert, scale.

Specifically it discriminates against those without access to vast screeds of information. I have noted again and again, how, many of the different presenters of the many course that I have attended over the years,[not to mention the occasional dysfunctional so-called “cluster meeting”, and this that and the other “meeting”], have smugly confirmed that the new system discriminates against males and male achievement. There is increasing evidence, Globally, of males falling behind females in the new measures of achievement, since this new education system is part of a global change to the management of the learning process… It may even be a new and more subtle form of intellectual colonisation. .

By the end of this decade it would be safe to assume a preponderance of female undergraduates in most, if not all of the world’s most critical centres of knowledge, in both developing and developed countries. As an educator and father of two daughters who have both been national sporting champions, I have no objection to the empowerment of females. I am though, not convinced, that this system will do anything more than empower upwardly mobile middle-class girls at the expense of almost the entire rest of society.

It also bothers me that notwithstanding these changes, which are relatively new for us but are long established in other places, it is still boys who know how to use computers and other related techno-things. That seems to be where the action is these days. It also appears that many more boys than girls are tuned into the new technology, than actually study the stuff formally in the system. I do wonder whether these upwardly mobile middle-class girls who are the major beneficiaries of the new system will truly revel in becoming the corporate bureaucrats they are being trained to become.

Of course I don’t see that this is some kind of conspiracy, simply an unintended outcome of a dubious system that has become so bogged down in the minutiae of neurotic control that the indicators currently seem to re-affirm the old cliché that mass education is an oxymoron.

Males are by nature chaotic and prone to procrastination. [Well that is the new stereotype, which, just because it applies to me doesn’t necessarily mean it can be a generalisation… after all, men invented accountancy]. Millennia of male domination hands down a mantle of action oriented achievement. Women on the other hand, along with those who were downtrodden for reasons other than gender have yet to taste the fruits of an achieving liberation, and so have constructed an obsession out of process, in a determined effort to ensure democratic transparency and hence, it is believed, success.

The jury is “out”, as they say, on this new system. The new culture of “open ended learning” is in play. For those citizens who are condemned by the nature of our market determined society to remain forever commoditised, and inherently irrelevant to an acquisitive society, the new system is perfect. It demands little and rewards trivia sufficiently to be called competent… it is only later that they all realise that they were somehow shortchanged.

For the rest “open ended learning” as the new “childhood-bureaucratisation-processor system” has now become, is ultimately a formula for frivolously frittering away the “learning” experience into an alliteration of tightly bound headings. Ultimately, it seems, centuries of co-existing in a male dominant, and in our case specifically so-called, white male dominant, society has generated a chain of hand-me-down, mediated performance behaviour patterns, amongst those who were formerly dispossessed. This chain of behaviours was always rooted in impotence. This means that “they” were the action people and “we” talked endlessly about our condition: for centuries in fact. And now “we” are in charge and “we” are doing things “our” way and you had better agree that we are right, or….

Many, who are watching this new education process from the more abstracted position of community stakeholder, share my own concerns about the trivialisation of content that is inherent in the new education programme. The argument we are given is that information changes so rapidly today compared to the past, that learning any “facts” is inherently pointless. What is needed is the skill to find the most current “facts”: and that this is what ‘they’ [the kids] must learn…

This is a plausible argument and is superficially true. That is why the current freak out over the use of Google and Wikapedia and plagiarism by schoolkids downloading tons of material to cut n paste into their school projects is most hysterically funny…. there is this entertaining sense of … “That is not what we meant… at all.”

The new system seeks to promote a culture of critical thinking about things while inherently acknowledging that critical thinking is only one form of knowledge, or intelligence, and a fair system must recognise the validity of other forms of intelligence. Thus it also sets much store by kooperative learning [group work for the unitiated]. Nonetheless the accounting equation, for instance, remains the accounting equation no matter how creatively the accounts are interpreted. The “economic problem” remains constant no matter how much we fudge over the process of: supply versus demand. And I am equally sure that for the foreseeable future E will continue to equal MC squared. As many an old cliché affirms, “the more things change, the more they stay the same”. The contrary argument is that you don’t need to know something you can go and look up in a minute, although it may have been important in those days when knowledge was scarce and diffuse.

However the proof is in the ultimate product. The bridge shouldn’t fall down when people cross it for the first time. We don’t want to buy products that have been imperfectly mediated through an open-ended process. We want to know that the dog food is safe for our pets, that the fertiliser that we put on our pineapples wont contain enough cadmium to make us all radioactive, that the toothpaste we put in our children’s mouths wont sear their gums and rot their teeth. In the same way we want an education system that guarantees that we will emerge smarter than our cellphones, which is the intention of this new system, well, for it’s best proponents anyway: as it has always been.

In business there is a measurement instrument called the “acid test ratio” whereby an enterprise routinely measures its state of solvency. It is also now fashionable in business to promote the idea of a Social bottom line. In the same way this new system has two acid test ratios. The first one, the social bottom line one suggests that the system is veering towards bankruptcy… The school drop-out rate is alarming and, allegedly, is rising. I say allegedly because the Education authorities seem unable or unwilling to supply current and past statistics… We have to assume that they consider the present level of drop-outs to be acceptable…. In the same way that a million casualties a day was considered “acceptable” during World War 1.

So for the second acid-test ratio … the one that will point towards future profitability or not…

2008 will be the first year that the first generation of kids educated under the new system will write their University entrance examination. This means that the acid test for the new system arrives in 2009. In that year the first products of the new system will start their first year at the University of their Choice, outside the benevolent control of the nurturing school system. Those who have been there know that the hallmark of a great university is “think or swallow water”. The first year failure rate at most of the country’s universities is legendary. Changing this is the real acid-test.

The theory behind this hugely expensive re-engineered system is that the country needs to produce people who can creatively interact with the new 21st century age and its labour needs. In other words it is intended that the new entrants into University will perform more effectively at what the university wants, than they did under the past system [which was admittedly seriously flawed]. The unstated and sad truth is that a modern society needs only about five percent of it’s school leavers to be competent enough to think … the rest must be like always … dutiful consumers and, perhaps, critical voters.

Not only has this new system been expensive, it has been created at an equally huge, barely acknowledged toll in human resources, a toll that ranges from the massive school drop-out rate, about which we are in equally massive denial, to the alleged fact that five “teachers” leave the system for every new “educator” entering, [something else we are in denial about] while in-between a rising number of people are being brutalised and murdered in the schoolyards. We are also in denial about this.

In addition from the private sector standpoint there are huge competition issues that are being blandly ignored in an ethical shakedown that is imposed on so-called “Independent schools”. These issues are inherent in the collusive nature of the enforced collaboration demanded by the so-called cluster moderation system, whereby I inspect how your business [read: expensive private school] does things; and you inspect how mine does.

If the major players in the Cement industry [for instance], or the automotive industry, or banks were to collude at even one percent of the level expected of the so-called Independent [read private] school system they could expect to face action from the, admittedly somewhat toothless, Competition Tribunal.

Presently this inherently anti-competitive collusion is being fudged over by means that may later be seen as unethical by some of the better-endowed participants, especially those that retain some level of intellectual rigour. [In fact they probably already think it unethical but are being press ganged into compliance by an aggressive State apparatus determined to assure that no competing system will spoil their game]. There are also an overwhelming number of former civil servants who now work as “educators” in the mushrooming Independent [private sector] school system. For these the places where they work are simply schools and they see no conflict. However there is an inherent contradiction here between the demands of the control obsessed ‘socialist’ inclined architects of the OBE system, and the requirements of a market oriented private school sector.

But for all of these the acid test cometh

According to this new OBE education theory, the first year pass rate at the Universities should, in 2009, show a sharp upward rise, as a generation of kids who have been facilitated in thinking, and analysing, and researching skills will take to the rigour of a university education with glorious alacrity. This, not the ever-massaged final so-called “matric” examination results, will represent the true ‘acid test’ for the new system.

Should the first year pass rate rise, and continue to rise, then the system will pass muster. Should it continue to present its present problematic failure rate then we shall have reached a disturbing impasse. [One hears for instance that the current “not yet competent” rate in the half year Physics exams of a leading local university, for a particularly demanding programme populated by the crème of the cream of last years school leavers is running at 95%. This, together with the current downturn in the School leavers examinations, may be a temporary phenomenon as the kids “learning” the old ‘stuff’ are increasingly ‘Facilitated’ by ‘Teachers’ who have been re-educated; and so the kids lack the memory skills to remember all the stuff they used to have to remember to pass.and because they were so busy trying to remember trivia like formulas and principals and other ridiculous content they never learned to think.]

Should there, however, be no improvement in the first year failure rate [sorry that should read “not yet competent” rate’], then, for reasons of maintaining competitive advantage in a market place savagely competing for a declining market share, it may be necessary for many more [private sector] institutions to abandon the new system than have already done so.

I hope the socialists will be proved right and that the new system does what it promises, notwithstanding the present gloomy anecdotal prognosis. The alternatives are not cool, although they may be less bureaucratic.


See http://www.editred.com/nicholasjakari for more of NiK’s work.

The testimonies: episode two

For those who may not be regular readers what follows is part two of a 19 part series realting to a history of the planet, generally, and RSA [Republic of Southern Azania] specifically, between the period 2009 and 2019. Enjoy.

On the other hand if you are puzzled by this you can back track on NiK's blog to the items labelled "... Cybersoapie" and "... Prophecies", respectively, for episode one and the background to the Testimonies.

The Testimonies of an enumerator:
Episode Two.
The evolution of the Azanian Konfederacy:
The emergence of Corinth Starr: Starr the elder.

One of the reasons that the Konfederacy became the Konfederacy and not the more commonly determined Federation, as prevailed in some of the great nations of the world, was the growing realisation that the recently liberated citizens of the Home continent were unwilling to submit their hard won freedom to any form of control no matter how apparently benign.

It was an urgent requirement of those who were the liberators that their vision should come to fruition, come hell or high water, as they say. By the later stages of the opening decades of the so-called 21st century (which others on the planet then, already, called the 51st century) it had become tragically apparent that the old child, the newly emancipated Azanian Konfederacy, was growing up too fast. In doing so it was embracing the coiled reflexes laid down over ten thousand generations and hardly impacted at all really, by the kolonialist aberrations of the past preceding seven or eight. There had been a brief embrace, rapidly disengaged on the part of various Koloniste, and Afrika was left to its own, rapidly revealed, all too human inheritance.

“Human being as part of nature is as pitiless as the earthquake, the flood, the wind, hail and fire, it is only human being apart from nature, that makes existence bearable”. These words by an unknown author propelled the amazing Corinth Starr to early prominence. She was a woman of genius, who transcended all understanding in her combinations of extreme wisdom. She seemed almost tapped into the universe, while at the same time she was a ‘take no shit’ hard-arsed ‘diva’ in the mould of a marketing supremo. And she certainly got her message across.

There were certain problems that needed to be overcome if the then country (now Southern Azania),the most dynamic part of the Konfederacy, was to move forward; and overcoming these was proving intractable. The most difficult was the fact that the world had changed completely in the wake of immense technological developments. The developments changed the way humans in advanced countries thought and this alone made them different.

Then secondly, a mantra of the preceding decades proved horrifyingly true: work, in the traditional sense of mass scale employment, was rapidly becoming obsolete. From a period when the citizen class called businessperson was despised for exploiting that class known as “labour”, came a period when, out of sheer guilt at their own cruelty, businesspersons created better and better machines to replace humans (as workers were also known) and ceased the disgusting exploitation of the past thousands of years of slavery and human exploitation of other, less able humans.

Which was pretty cool except that “the only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited,” as Corinth Starr was fond of quoting.

So by the end of the first decade of that fateful century almost all countries on the planet Urdos were faced with huge marginalised populations. On the one hand the media driven, so-called “fourth estates” and their acolytes would call for “government action to create jobs” On the other hand new technologies conspired to eliminate entire swathes of “jobs”, as work was also called.

Eventually the word “job” itself, began to sound quaint, and old fashioned, as the realisation grew that there were never going to be any more ‘jobs’: well, not ‘real’ ones anyway. And of course the thought that there were never going to be any more jobs, was such an uncool idea, that most of the early stages of the twenty first century were spent playing around with firelighters of denial next to the explosives stores of reality. All around, changes in the world accelerated human consciousness towards its own serendipitous date with destiny.

In advanced countries people had age-old charities restructured into welfare payments systems that gradually paralysed those places with attention demanding bureaucracies. So that when the great catastrophes happened in the second decade the places themselves imploded, and the speed of that implosion was terrifying.

It was for Corinth Starr to create the justification for the new order with her Nobel winning “Basic Pay not Basic grant.” Process.

Africa had been the exception to welfarism. Nonetheless the absence of social services to compensate for hard times was compensated by large-scale access to land that could feed citizens during hard times. Where this access to the land had been blocked by vested interests that land was expropriated, and issued, in small unusable parcels, to those humans who had slipped so far down the ladder of misery that even a parched parcel of land over which they held no real rights was preferable to starvation. Thereafter the brutalising laws of scarcity could be held at bay through the moralising efforts of free food handouts. After the Great Catastrophe there came a greater catastrophe when the cargoes of “food from heaven” dried up, but that is getting beyond the scope of this history of the Manifesto.

Southern Azania was different. It was a wealthy country in the expanding middle-income range of countries. However it was under-performing and not making as much use of its human resources as it could be. This was Starr the elder’s famous summation, at the Great Constitutional Hill Indaba. The conference had been called to debate the growing crisis involving escalating incidences of violent confrontation, between those perched on the edge of survival, and those floating in the free zone. These latter were constantly darting in and out of the daily flow of events to snatch a bite of prey. They were the new hunter/ gatherers of the 21st century: the Buffalo Hunters and the rest, practicing the art of their origins. [see the Buffalo Hunters@ http://editred.com/nicholasjakari ]

A shock election result in 2009 brought home the danger of that disaffection. It had lurked for carefully ignored years in the resentiment consciousness of idle persons in a state of grievance. Idle persons with no access to succour. It was the time of the first Corinth Starr, known to later generations of Southern Azanians as "Starr the elder".

Starr’s genius was in the way she rationalised a number of trends into a single package and transformed Southern Azania into a veritable tiger within decades. Gradually the prosperity in one part of the emerging Konfederacy began to spill over into other less prosperous regions until the Great Apocalypse interrupted the entire process, which was when Starr’s wisdom bore its unforeseen fruit. And peeple survived again to repopulate the planet.

The trends?

Yes there were various: the trend to the globalised economy maintained its pace, shattering the monolithic power of regional (then called National) governments and rendering much civic policy making impotent in the process. Politicians increasingly made promises that could only be kept through the violation of some or other party’s rights. This violating process itself became the target of legal harassment as bad governments found outraged, citizen’s activist groups hounding them in the courts.

It was an event, minor, as they always seem at first that sparked the launch of the Gender Party and opened the way to the emergence of Corinth Starr…

Extracted from “The Testimonies of an enumerator”.
To be continued…

A tribute for Nelson Mandela

Seventeen years ago i wrote the following piece on the occasion when Mr Mandela was released from prison. Later when he retired as our first democratic President i sent him a copy which was graciously received. As our beloved Madiba now enters his 90th year I'm reprinting the piece again for my blogreaders, who naturally did not exist in 1990 before we all knew about the Internet.

February 1990:

A report on breaking through the ceiling:
A praise prose poem for Nelson Mandela.

The world came
to watch a
spectacle;
a man who had
been locked away
for twenty-seven years
was to be released.
And the spokespeople
for the media
and the great,
came from afar to hear
the wisdom
which it was
believed
this old man
had gained
during his incarceration.

After waiting
uncertainly
for hours
in the hot February
glare;
He finally emerged
blinking
into the sunlight.
Was led to a podium
around which
a Hundred Thousand people
had gathered and
onwhichtheeyesofFiveHundredMillion
faces
werefocussedviatelevisionsetsina
hundred and eighty
countriesbeamedbyinstantsatellite.

With a great sense of Majesty
All awaited
his unique insights, which,
his publicists claimed,
andwhichallwhocamewould
have
themselves
believe he had gained
through years of
incarcerated
introspection

The great buzz
was that this man
had
through his
suffering
acquired unsullied
wisdom and would
unitethecountryandleadhisto
rmentorsandhispeople
toapromisedland:
freed
of all the pain borne
by the suffering
for millennia.

Slowly
he ascended the steps
and trod
with unaccustomed grace
toward
the podium.

A hush
fell
uponhalfaBillionhouseholds.
Fathers
shushed their children
andbeatthosewhospokewhilethegreat
Man
began to speak.

And the sound of wonder
amongst
the gathered dignitaries
and the watching multitudes
turned
to
consternation.

For he spoke yet
anancientanditwasbelievedarecently
discreditedlanguage
and none had thought
to expect
it.


And so they sat
in bewildered
and bemused
consideration
ofwhattheywerehearing
while
a
howlingmobofjubilantsupporters
soon turned their joy
to rapturous
violence
smashingallthewindowsonthesquare.

.NiK(1990)
Publ. 1995. Bedford Yearbook
Publ. Collection: Random Notes... by NiK[00] http://editred.com/nicholasjakari

The day of the cybersoapie

Over the next period of time I shall be using my blogspot not only for the random blogging that has been my practice for some five or so years now. I also intend to present to you a cyberserial that I first published on my own website five years ago. I believe it needs to be read again by the millions who never got a chance to read it the first time.

I say this because all the topics covered in my serial are pertinent to today’s world, [2007] in a way that they weren’t when I first wrote this in 2002 and saw it in a series of ... nightmares, perhaps; long before Mr Gore had made his opportunistic movie. Five years ago we hadn't discovered China or Global Warming, among other things. All these have somehow moved to centre stage now while a frantic market dance takes place on the front apron distracting us from trends long evident. There is a rapidly evolving sense of global crisis, observable to those who watch such things with care.

For all the background to this pending cybersoapie, why i'm writing it etc you may consult my blog 'Prophecy and testimony' [July 2nd 2007] [scroll down a way] although you don’t need to do that now, do it afterwards.

Right now it is time to read the introduction and first [short] episode to:
‘The testimonies of an enumerator’


The testimonies of an enumerator©Featuring

• The Azanian Konfederacy© The preludes.
• The Yonka Memorandum©.















By


Nicholas Jakari


Part three: The Azanian Quartet.
Parts 1 and 2: being the Buffalo Hunters and The Ashanti Raider
Available in ebook from http://www.editred.com/nicholasjakari
@ USD&1.50 each



The Testimonies of an enumerator encompasses the Preludes to the Yonka Memorandum© and the Yonka Memorandum© itself. And consists of 19 serialised episodes.

Copyright© to these works vests with author and poet Nicholas Jakari aka Nicholas Williamson aka . NiK@… Leofric.House@Gmail.com
NiK is the Blogospherian¨ www.NiK.amagama.com
http://www.editred.com/nicholasjakari

Published by Leofric House Publishing
PO Box 891224
Lyndhurst
2106
Zone One
Southern Azania [aka for legal purposes: Gauteng in South Africa.]

Through accessing this ebook you obtain a right to read, only.
All other rights are reserved: The author asserts his moral right to the work identified by the contents of the cyber soapie© referred to by the above title and subtitles: namely: The Testimonies of an enumerator©, the evolution of the Azanian Konfederacy©, the manifesto of Corinth Starr©, The Yonka Memorandum©, which shall be evolving on the Internet over the next period of time from the time of first publication on the weblog forum in May 2003.

This proclamation of rights shall be deemed to apply to all Jakari derived material appearing on the author’s weblog forum

No part of this work may be used in any way or in any form for purposes of financial gain and/or profit, without the express permission of the author.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication, which follows in serialised epidodes may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system for purposes of duplication, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and/ or the publisher of this work.

Neither may it be used in any other way than that intended, which is to be read, enjoyed and possibly discussed.

ISBN # 0-620-23287-0 Azanian Quartet series
ISBN # 0-620-23291-9 Yonka Memorandum




…….
Editors note:

The poet and author Nicholas Jakari/! NiK [00], created the world of the Azanian Konfederacy to enable him to further his objective of writing in a completely different contextual style to almost any other fictional writing emerging from South Afrika in the post- Apartheid era, post-Revolution era.

Almost any other because when he chose to write the Buffalo Hunters in 1995 he was heavily influenced by the works of Milan Kundera, Umberto Eco and JM Coetzee. This has made him difficult to access, apparently, for readers who are accustomed to the almost mandatory racial sub-text of most South African writing.

So some guidelines to his work and vision are presented here. In other words, for starters: no person in these coming stories will ever be referred to by so-called “race” and in some cases not by gender either. These qualities of a human have no bearing on the story and therefore as Chekhov observed so long ago… they have no place in the text.

Jakari [a pseudonym] is himself both a pre-and post ‘September the eleventh’ person. In his case Sunday, September the eleventh, 1994 at 7.30 in the morning. On that date and time the poet Jakari was attacked and seriously wounded in a gunfight with armed gangsters. It seems they were seeking vengeance for the murder of the anti-Apartheid hero Steve Biko by the former Apartheid regime, albeit no real express ‘motive’ for the attack was ever presented, either before the assault or subsequently. Steve Biko’s observation that there is only one race, the human race, forms the core of Jakari’s chosen deconstructive writing style.

For the poet Jakari the experience was ironic [once he recovered his sense of humour…. Eh I knew this was a Sunday, I didn’t think it was going to be this holey]. His earliest recollection from his pram was of his, so-called “white” mother being verbally and physically harassed by thugs of the former Apartheid regime, when he was a near toddler where the forties became the 1950’s.

His second major recollection was of himself and a so-called “black” nursemaid being set upon by Apartheid thugs while the woman was walking him home from nursery school. When he tried to help her he was beaten, kicked and hurled into a ditch. The woman was dragged away screaming and the four-year-old Jakari was left to walk home alone, shocked, traumatised and damaged. The woman, known to him only as Jane, was never seen again, and to this day he has no idea what happened to her.

Harassment, further harassment, discrimination and assault characterised his life growing up in a small town place controlled by the evil agents of the former, now disgraced, regime. He rationalised that he was not being singled out for any reason other than a tendency to outspokenness, and that he belonged to the wrong tribe. It was normal for any, even marginal, critics of the evil regime to be harassed. Many sensible people left the country and went to live out their lives in less confrontational places.

So after that personal 9/11, while the poet Jakari was recovering from the wounds inflicted by those who were now liberated, he had a vision. He knew that he had now to become also the writer Jakari. Specifically, the writer of an extended set of tales stretching out from the present time [mid-nineties of the late twentieth century, then] to a point sometime in the future approximately one hundred and fifty years hence although there is no certainty about that time. He saw all this in what may have been a morphine induced series of major gunshot trauma, post-operative hallucinations … Alternatively he knows now that he had two, so-called, “out of body” experiences on that horrendous day, and it is possible that the idea for the Azanian Quartet was born in some no-place of a travelling soul.

Either way the idea for the Azanian Quartet was born: a set of four works spanning that period from the time of the successful culmination of the South African Revolution to approximately 2130. In order they are:

• The Buffalo Hunters©. Exorcism : First published in 1996.
• The Ashanti Raider© Redemption: first published 2001.
Both of these are available in ebook from http://www.editred.com/nicholasjakari @ USD$3.50. each
• The extreme future work: The Jonker Memorandum© aka the Yonka Memorandum: Prophecy was part published in serial form on the former, now discontinued website: www.williamsonreport starting late 2003. The Testimonies are part of this work and represent the “Preludes” and were first serialised during 2002-2003
• The intermediate work The Juno Konspiracy©: Reconciliation, is set in the period between the first Apocalypse of December 23rd 2012 and the Great Apocalypse of January 10th 2017. This story will commence serialisation when it commences..


The extended irony of finding himself brutalised and abused by representatives of both contending parties, in the ongoing competition for control of the vast resources of Southern Africa during the twentieth century, made him truly the ‘marginalised man’, and became the title of his acclaimed collection of poetry: “Random notes” also to be found in the editred.com bookstore @USD$3.50

“The easiest thing to do in South Africa,” he said, “is to whip up racial hatred. We avoid dealing with our all too human flaws by designating them to be the properties of “the other”. The true challenge [for Jakari] is to demonstrate the common humanity that persists between all humans, defying classification by race, creed or gender.”

The Azanian Konfederacy sets out to provide just such a demonstration. Sensitive readers are warned that the first two books in the Azanian Quartet are not pleasant reading. They depict a place of extreme brutality; one that it is hoped will evolve into a place of normal brutality like everywhere else.

Much of the material in both novels would now fall foul of the new amended Publications control Act in South Africa, and be classified XX: representing a march from freedom in the new democracy, as we strive to hide ourselves from our own truths... The two works however will provide an understanding of the context for Corinth Starr’s amazing extension to the SA Revolution, catching it as it falls, in the manner of ZANU PF into disarray, and rescuing it in an unimaginable way.

************

Thus the Azanian Konfederacy is a place where stereotypical physical differences between people have been eliminated and only the raw humanity prevails in all its varied forms between kindness and cruelty.

The foundations for the Azanian Konfederacy are rooted in the sophisticated Constitution of the ‘new’ South Africa that emerged from the ruins of three hundred years of kolonialist oppression in Southern Africa of so-called black people by so-called white people.

All laws in the Konfederacy are predicated on that Constitution and are moderated by the laws that prevailed in each of the formerly independent components of the Konfederacy.

The Konfederacy itself is conceptually modelled on the Swiss Cantonal system and is presented in counterpoint to the proposals of the emerging African Union in Africa, which, like its European Union counterpart, is modelled as an American style federal state.

This was done because it [Konfederacy] worked more effectively in practice than the Federal notion has shown itself to operate, at the time of writing. The Federal form was found to be problematic by citizens who were still raw from centuries of oppression and distrustful of more; and while they could see the benefits of cross continental collaboration were resistant to the idea of being controlled, by “others”, in the form of the centralised kontrol that accompanies Federalism.

Therefore rules and procedures, which are revealed in the stories that follow are derived from a context of Konfederal respect for a central constitution. This Constitution derived from that of Southern Azania [SA] was called the world’s most liberated Constitution when it was written.

For the uninitiated: a Konfederation is a loosely associated group of nations who agree to cooperate in their external affairs preparatory to forming a more formal and centralised Federal state, if ever. As a general rule Konfederal government legislation has no effect inside any of the member states unless specifically ratified by plebiscite [on each occasion legislation is passed] and much was not ratified. The Swiss Confederacy has never evolved to a federal state whereas the United States, Canada, Nigeria, the German Bundesrepubliek and Australia did.

All Jakari’s stories take place in the “Zones” (as he calls them) of the Southern part of the Azanian Konfederacy. In other words the stories are set in that part which may also, in another quantum dimension, be called South Africa. Specifically, within that dimension they could be in, mostly, that segment of South Africa called Greater Johannesburg, in the province of Gauteng (South Africa), which in the alternate geography of the Azanian Konfederacy are called Jozi or ‘South Central’ in “Zone One”. This information may be of use to some, if not it doesn’t matter; it’s just a place where people live, eat, shit, sleep, love, hate, work, work, work, procreate and murder each other, like anywhere else.

This does not mean that the other zones in Azania are called Zone’s two or three etc, as that caused far too much controversy and unhappiness. Zone One was called Zone One because it reflected an unassailable truth: that the tiny urbanised and landlocked state/administrative region was responsible for an overwhelming proportion of the Konfederacy’s gross domestic product, relative to its geographic area and population; and was home not only to the world’s greatest person produced forest, one of the great wonders of human creation in living form, but also the biggest container port on the continent.

The names of these other zones will be revealed, as this serial unfolds. Similarly more detail will appear regarding the incidental historical events of the era. This era is taken as the one hundred and fifty years following the Revolution in Southern Azania. The great determining events of that period are known variously as: “The Great Apocalypse”, “The Wars of the Acquisition”, “The Time of the Dispossession” [the era of Kolonisation by the Koloniste class, which no longer exists as an identifiable entity in the future world of the Yonka Memorandum], and, most importantly: “The Water Wars”, two of which have already taken place at the time of writing these testimonies [or are taking place, depending on your perspective].

These places and events are referred to in the later works [Jonker/Yonka Memorandum and the Juno Konspiracy] and will form the basis for some of Jakari’s post-Quartet stories like, for instance the quirky ‘confessions of a debt collector’ novel, “7 Ways to get your money….” [Available in ebook from http://www.editred.com/nicholasjakari @ USD$3.50]

Insofar as any references to other places occur, they are non-distinctive and the places they represent are not germane to the stories.

The issue of the “testimonies” themselves shall be referred to later in the series. Suffice it that they appear to have been written some one hundred and fifty years from the time of the Southern Azanian Revolution. The author is unknown and it is assumed, from the various contexts of the testimonies, that the writer would seem to be a well-informed citizen, rather than an academic scholar or other person of expert knowledge. As to why the Testimonies were written we have no information.

According to Jakari, learning to be in charge of oneself means that the journey from a slave to a freeperson is often violent. The first two parts of the Quartet reflect that violence. Part three on the other hand has seen the end of that catharsis and the world of the Jonker is a normal free society for the time in the future in which it is set. Part four will seek to reflect the move to resolving the violent with the civil. Specifically the world of the Jonker Memorandum [aka Yonka] is one where a woman could walk unmolested, naked, the length ogf the Konfederacy with a purse of gold upon her head.

Well in theory anyway…

Leofric

Episode 1 The Prologue: Tales of Auld Azania

The Azanian Konfederacy in Afrika came into existence on the 15th July 2001 AD just prior to the infamous events of 9/11 that profoundly changed the world in which all people had lived for the preceding half-century.

It was formed out of all the countries of Sub-Saharan Afrika that fell into the central and southern regions of the continent known as Afrika. It is unclear what became of the countries of west Afrika or of the Semitic northern end of the continent.

In the process of its development over the period between that date (2001) and that time of the Great Apocalypse, between 2012 and 2017, the idea of a Konfederacy took hold, although progress was at first much slower than most peeple had hoped.

Later, after the Apocalypse and the freezing of the Northern regions of the planet Urdos, accompanied by the new Krusades and the great migrations of the second decade of what was then known as the 21st century AD; [but which later became known as the Post-Apocalypse Era [PAE] and also the 51st century], the Konfederacy went through a moribund period, gradually fusing around the problems of coping with the mass movements of populations around the planet, until at the time of the Yonka Memorandum it had become a place joined by common adherence to the Konfederate Constitution.

To be continued…

Welcome to the world of the Azanian Konfederacy.

While the editorial team understands that the world of the Azanian Konfederacy is a fictional one these views do not always square with those of the poet and author Nicholas Jakari, who frequently confuses the real South Afrika in which he lives with the Southern Azania in which he also lives.

If you wish you can also sign up to be a citizen of the Azanian Konfederacy, which is open to all residents of Afrika. Offshore residents may also become citizens if they have a connection, spiritual or real, to the re-emerging spirit of Afrika and are committed to the vision of an Afrika sharing a common destiny with the rest of humanity.

Yes… I would like to be a free citizen of the Azanian Konfederacy in Afrika and understand that at a time when all the 19 episodes of the testimonies have been published that all the names of those who desire citizenship shall be entered along with their comments and other contributions; also including the comments and contributions of those who may not choose citizenship, and that all of this information shall be published in ebook through editred.com or any other such facility as time goes on. It may even, who knows, come to be published in the increasingly sclerotic Print form.See also http://www/editred.com/nicholasjakari

Bill Flynn. RIP

I woke up this morning grateful for another day of living in this mad, perplexing and fast evolving reality we call the modern age.

Bill Flynn didn’t wake up today.

He died in his sleep… the best way to go for those who are the best.

After hearing the news of Bill Flynn’s passing on into another part of Quantum space at the ripe old age of 58 in this one, the solemn tones of the reporter changed into an angry snarl as he broadcast that Robert Mc Bride [a local chief of police] had allegedly stated that he would enter the homes of his enemies, rape and then kill their wives, burn their homes, kill their dogs and ... I don’t remember what was supposed to happen to the children. I thought how Bill would have loved to play Robert Mc Bride making those alleged statements. How hysterically we would have laughed.

The announcer stated that Bill’s son had found his dad dead in bed; and it reminded me that it was 29 years ago this week, that I saw my own father died in his box. Someone had shaved off his moustache and revealed a man I didn’t know. I wondered since what dreams he had, what aspirations, what disappointments… Had he died fulfilled?

Bill Flynn devoted his life to supplying the diversionary arts that we use to hide from ourselves. He was a comedian who made people laugh. He was other things too: father, husband, friend of Slab’,a rock singer who enjoyed an aria: but mostly he was a comedian, and he made us laugh without the pain that comes from introspection.

One hopes he died fulfilled; for it is a truism that one can never know the fact of one’s own passage from this dimension. For us his performance would separate us for a time from our own anxieties and disillusionment
by revealing ourselves to us and permitting
us to laugh at our own vanity
and foolishness
and to escape ourselves for an instant
before returning to our own,
discordant universe.

Some years ago a more personal friend, than this distant image on a passing screen,
died in his sleep. When found by a cleaning lady the next day the television was on, the beer next to the bed was half drunk and the cork tipped cigarette he liked to smoke had burned down to the flesh. He was the headmaster of a local high school and his funeral was a moving affair.

I wrote this piece that follows now as a tribute to Derek Tarpey, in many ways the same kind of life fulfilling person as Bill. Today I re-publish it in tribute to the passage of a man who made us laugh.

For Derek then. For Bill Flynn now.
“Heaven’s mourning breaks” said the Preacherman
“We were touched:
Our lives, by his life,
Our lives by his death”

The preacher went on: “Live in the moment;
Do what must be done
Now,”
And he did that, this man who left so soon.

And then the Preacher spoke words
Of comfort for the living,
Who remain
Unaware of the truth;
Of the mystery within which we live,
Shaken now by this
Event: Are we
Supposed to think? Better sure
The polished gloss of words to stretch and gently massage
All our pain away.
He spoke of the Irish road;
Light words that skimmed across
The warm wet surface of
Our tears. And he continued,
His well rehearsed words of comfort
Tossing words upon further words
Which we all barely heard
So lost were we
In contemplation of the
Place where he was not.

The flag hung limp
Obscuring for me that
Professed man of god
Who spoke of journeys without end...
And so the tributes likewise
Who spoke of what he’d done. Short, sharp,
Pithy tight to bind the tears, which hung
In sorrow on each added word.

“What you saw
Was what you got”
And we all got an awful lot
For the changing of the world

Then, when the choir sang… “Tula
Mama….” Their intoned cadence
Reaching out:
Soothing us, while
The praise singer sang out
Evocations
Which thundered ‘round the crowded
Quad. Then,
The wind blew strong and the half-hung flags
Flew briskly in the late noon sun.

We felt our catharsis
Start then,
As the boys expressed their
Grief.
They sent away their leader
With a cry that shook
The leaf, still huddled deep inside
The barest winter trees…
Their war cry from the deepest past.

“A rum tum tum
A rum tum tum.”

Then, to rage at darest death and
Shake its claw away…
“A rum tum tum…
A rum tum tum…”

We shuddered, we who stayed behind.
Took heart again from
What he’d done, and we knew then
As the ancients did
The hollowness of death
That takes from us at random: reminding
Us of certainty and but for what
Go i.

Then, having heard from Whitman
We preferred to hear the boys, gathered
From a dozen
Distinct originations
Linked arms
Into a shield against the universe and
All
Its blasted tricks;

“A rum tum tum….
A rum tum tum…”

The birds upon the parapet
Launched themselves in fright.
The half-mast flag that had hung limp now
Stretched out for the light.

“A rum tum tum…
A rum tum tum…”

We stood awhile
`Till all the rest was silent.

.NiK(2002)

















________________________________________

Rescue Me

According to the press there is a National Education Recovery campaign under way. Apparently the two weeks that the teachers were on strike a few weeks back had such serious repercussions that they have called for a mass scale mobilisation resources [otherwise not made readily available] to save millions of kids who are going to suffer irreparable harm without it. So welcome to the National [rescue me] Recovery Plan.

Before we proceed It’s well to remember that it has become routine now for a number of years for dedicated educators [P.K.A. teachers ] to devote chunks of their mid-year break to tutor their “learners” in the fine art of passing the matric exam. It has also been common cause for years now too that the various print media forms publish material prepared by the monopolistic Learning Channel organisation related to Matric preparation, now often extended to cover other grades as well, as the OBE [Outcomes Based Education] policy becomes more and more entrenched.

For those who’ve forgotten [or never knew] this years Matric crop is the last under the “old” system. In practice though, this year’s Matrics will have done much of their “Learning” over the past twelve years according to the new system simply due to the fact that few of their “educators” exclusively “facilitate” Matrics [as grade 12’s in SA are universally called notwithstanding current disapproval.] and for most human beings behaviour is not indivisible: meaning that most people are not like professional actors who can change skins at the click of a finger.

Listening to that fellow Hindle, the main guy in the edu system waffling away in his usual florid style, rationalising the National Education Recovery strategy, one would imagine that a fortnight’s break from learning will result in a complete collapse of this years matric results [When the 12th grade kids write their final National school leaving examination].

One wonders whether he even realises how his position alters with euphemistic certainty as he fine-tunes it at each turn. Along with Minister, Mrs Fraser-Moleketi, who handled the recent national strike negotiations for the government, he manages to sound like the living embodiment of Uriah Heep no reference to a great Rock group intended] playing the Vicar of Bray.

And I say, this headline that we have a: National “Rescue” campaign, sounds like bullshit.

Is Hindle playing politics in an attempt to intimidate the main “educators” union? Or is his campaign part of a National, let us “diss” teachers as usual… treat them with the contempt they seem to deserve. He seems to imply: that because they didn’t do their jobs for two weeks they didn't do their jobs at all.

Bear in mind that they didn't do their jobs for two weeks, because they wanted to make a point.

The money they are paid for doing this arduous, and often dangerous work, is insufficient for survival. They had to tell the country that the decision to enter this field of employment, which for many was the only choice they were permitted at the time they had to make it, was a flawed decision.

They needed to draw attention to their plight, since no one seemed to be listening to reason [Some years back teachers actually paid for their own salary increases by taking a lien on their pension fund to fund the increase. That is a profound indication of the level of contempt with those who choose the financially ruinous route of becoming an educator are treated by a society focussed exclusively on material gain.].

Anyway: to hark back to the main point of this blog.

Consider that for a decade or more now we have been running this “new” system of education called Outcomes Based. This was not a system chosen by the “educator” but rather a system imposed on the educator and the “System” by a gang of, mostly, left wing female “educationists” [not the same word not even though it sounds similar… the first is a “worker”; the other is someone who may never have spent more than a few hours in a classroom… at the “chalkface” as they say].

The flaws in this system are terrifying, notwithstanding that it has many excellent features. In the same way that the meltdown in Zimbabwe has been an insidious process over the past seven years, punctuated with classic denial from all the newly “uplifted”, the ‘mass’ section of the broader “learner” class in RSA is growing up absurder than Mr Illich* ever imagined. [* Growing up absurd. Ivan Illich.].

Fortunately this is the last year that kids have to use the new system to demonstrate knowledge gained and retained, of information taught according to the “old” rules. From next year the new, many say, “dumbed down”, course work applies; and everyone should do wonderfully well, since they hardly have to remember anything much, other than how to evaluate the problem of HIV Aids: from multiple perspectives.

Cynicism aside: According to this new OBE system all the kids in school are supposed to be learning how to “learn for themselves”. In other words the whole expensive shebang is geared to providing the emerging generation with the skills to go and do their own thing. And given how sharp they all seem to be with cellphones computers facebook n all it seems to have credence. As Nietzsche so preciently observed way back... "They no longer are interested in those things that we, the educated amongst us, are interested in."

This past weekend saw the second programme on the renowned “Carte Blanche TV series [ on the TV station M Net broadcasting on TV to Africa] in the past year devoted to the business of cellphone violence in schools. Cellphone violence: a process whereby kids beat up on other kids [at school] while third parties film the action on their cellphones [which, note, they all use with fluid facility even though learning how to use them has never been in the school curriculum].

The amount of un-filmed violence is that part of the iceberg we aren’t seeing. A couple of dozen kids have been murdered at school this year and so have a fair parcel of, now former, educators.

So: remember that the specific two weeks of the National teachers strike took place at the end of the term. This is a time when most schools were allegedly supposed to be writing exams [now known as “summative assessments” ] even though Mr Hindle lapsed mostly back into old habits, using the old reference: “exam”: thereby demonstrating Ely's dictum: People don't change.

In other words in most schools when the kids write ‘exams’ they only go to school on those days that they write and do little in the way of formal “learning” . Further, nogal, the darlings are supposed to have “learned” how to “learn” by themselves anyway: this being the point of the new system.

Now all of a sudden at least two provinces have unilaterally cut the annual mid-year break in half so that kids can “catch up” and to hell with those who were going on holiday… reflecting perhaps a cynical attitude that poor kids don’t go anywhere for their holidays. [Poor kids in particular, since they are presumably the priority target here] … Poor kids don’t get to go visit auntie for the holidays or pop off to some rural place where aged grandparents eke out a poverty drenched, yet romantic existence. Never mind that this impromptu process will discriminate unfairly [double unfair then] against those kids/teachers/parents who did opt to go somewhere for a bit of family time together. Will there be a catch up process for the kids who miss the school holiday catch up process? Hello! Piss on the legs of those who actually plan their lives with a bit more care than the education department seems to demonstrate here.

The Education authorities can hardly have it both ways can they? Either they [the kids] have been learning how to learn at huge expense and time consuming, incoherent retraining of teachers [sorry: “educators”] or they haven’t… From the Matric perspective,this time of the year in the twelfth grade is not the time when any other than the most retrograde education kollective should be doing “new stuff” they should be in revision mode for the most part. The year is effectively over by June, and most experienced educators have effectively covered the syllabus, with maybe a few delicate parts left over for last, and are now in refresh mode.

How can two weeks of limited learning exposure cause a national crisis?

What is this suggesting about the other, plus minus, 440 weeks of learning, from grade 1? Are the education authorities desperately attempting to prove that they deserve the 25% of national budget that is allocated for preparing the next generation to run the whole show? Are they seeing a pending a catastrophe that the rest of us can't see?

This fat budget is providing wonderful revenue streams to those who publish increasingly content stripped “games” books, to the increasingly knowledge impoverished school system. To call most of the formal learning facilitative material being supplied to “educators” these days’ textbooks is to radically deconstruct the meaning of Text. Other beneficiaries are television producers and hopefully, eventually, online content providers.

What’s left over provides only a pittance to those who do the real work of actually constructing content in the classroom. [For those who don’t know: in the past the textbook supplied the content and the “educator” provided the “games”. Now, for those who are “wired”, Google and Wikipedia provide the content: and the Publishing houses supply the games… ] Those Marxian oriented blog readers here might reasonably argue that the new system serves the corporatocracy as much as it supports the aspirant “learner”. The worker in this case has become as commoditised as any other button pusher.

In theory one no longer needs “Educators”. Rather, one needs only a pool of classroom managers. well that's is the theory, frequently denied by those who commoditised the workforce.

One could argue that like the other grandiose schemes on which we have embarked over the past decade: viz: the arms deal, the 2010 adventure: to mention but two, valuable resources have been diverted from socially productive uses to pander to a range of partially relevant sub-texts. We are again starving the future to arrive at the present when the decision taken then has its toll now in the time we thought would never come: in this “winter of our discontent”.

So in summary: Either the kids have learned their lessons over their eleven and a half years at school and the system is working; or the view from the top is screaming out that they haven’t, and a lot of people need to cover their backsides.

It looks therefore as though the Education Department, protagonists of the new order are using some misdirection in the form of a widely broadcast “National rescue effort” to distract us, before the awful truth emerges… That perhaps their expensive facelift on the learning process is an ongoing present failure.

The Blogospherian.

Zimbabwe and Bioethanol

In amongst all the news and noise about the alleged immanent collapse of Zimbabwe aka Rumbabwe… comes a little surprise snipped from the Citizen news paper on how Biofuels are set to push up food prices. [Citizen 5/07/07 P28]

I can believe that something is pushing up the price of maize. A fifty-kilogram bag of #2 yellow maize aka Straight Run cost me R172.00 last week. Four months ago it was R105.00 and last September it was around R95.00.

By my standards that is a considerable increase in price, in a short period of time: about 80%. The people at the agricultural [former Ko-op] place where I bought the stuff said simply that it was ‘ a gonna’ keep costing more because: “They are using the mielies for petrol”.

Tucked in on the Citizen graphic accompanying the article [graphic from the Renewable Fuels Association] South Africa produced 386 million litres of Bioethanol last year, which obviously helps account for the sudden rise in price of Maize products. The USA and Brazil between them produced more than 35 BILLION litres.

Only a short moment ago none of us had heard of Bioethanol or Bio diesel

Tucked away in a corner of the graphic was the news that Zimbabwe had produced 26 million litres.

I don’t know how much maize produces one litre; most Internet sites talk vaguely about 1.36 units of input equalling 1 unit of bioethanol and the nature of this “unit” is unclarified. Presumably it is a great deal of maize, or slightly less sugar cane: also a source of bioethanol. Probably enough to feed a few villages for a while.

I keep remembering that the citizens of Rumbabwe have been starving now for so long you would imagine that there wasn’t anyone left to starve when the “Show Over” signs allegedly go up this week. Ho hum. [When asked for his opinion on radio this week about an alleged “rescue” plan for Zimbabwe involving the incorporation of that country’s currency into the Rand currency region a well known local economist simply burst out laughing.] One also remembers that the citizens of North Korea have allegedly been starving since the eighties and the thug leadership of that place is still running things.

I also think it is impressive that a failed state like Rumbabwe can produce 26 million litres of this fuel while chaos allegedly reigns supreme and wonder whether the source material, presumably Maize, was locally grown, by the fully emancipated former peasant class, perhaps even those relocated to former colonialist property holdings, or was it supplied from free maize imports aimed at feeding the so-called “starving masses”. Alternatively of course, it may have been stolen from the private companies that grow sugar cane.

The Blogospherian.

Impunity

Impunity

This is the structure, the new warp and weft of our community as we flex our new society and its freedom to kill, maim, stone, rape and rob.

Notwithstanding a great deal of blathering to the contrary the latest crime statistics confirm what many have been saying: crime is not really “under control”; and the question arises, “can ‘crime’ come under control?”  The Blogospherian’s short answer is no, can it be maintained? Perhaps.

Top of the log is the murder rate. Ten years ago it was around 26,000 people a year. It has been declining for some years and the low point came about two back, maybe when the rate dropped to about 40 per 100,000 citizens. [As is frequently observed there are lies, damm lies and statistics] In most of Europe and places like Japan it is below 3/100,000. 

Still when it was about 52/100,000, 40 seemed almost chilled and satisfactory. And as I’ve frequently observed I hear far less gunfire around my multi-cultural neighbourhood on the Alex border, than I recorded ten years ago[ itself already less than the highpoint in 1992] Now it seems to be on the rise again, and the question must arise … Why? 

I’m sure there are a great many reasons why people would like to kill. For many people murder is a most satisfactory affair, I’m sure. I am certain that the reason why we have [as a species] always abhorred murder is simply because it is such a satisfactory affair. I would go so far as to suggest that the most important reason why people seldom resort to murder is because of the fear of being caught and going to jail, a place where bad things can happen to one. [As my regular readers will know I do not support the use of the death penalty on the grounds that we must never again give governments the power to murder its citizens, even clandestinely, and the death penalty is the chink in the armour that permits this to occur. I also seem to remember that in the year that the old pre-’94 gov’t was condemned by the UN for using the death penalty wantonly we had approximately 15,000 murders and some 350 odd convicted murderers paid the ultimate price. This did not seem to me to be much of a deterrent given that the average murder probably involves at least two murderers. I do feel though that people who commit murder should have the right to terminate their own lives. I have decided that I shall promote this idea, which I have decided to call the Socratic Solution. See my forthcoming “testimonies of an enumerator”.] 

Perhaps this could be the core of our difficulty. Rightly or wrongly the general public, especially that part prone to violent solutions to issues, is under the impression that the probability of being apprehended and convicted for any major crime is relatively low. One hears stories of a ten percent apprehension rate and even lower conviction rate. Perhaps the statistics are better than that, although I haven’t come across any overt bragging. 

One would want a ninety plus percent apprehension rate with a better than eighty percent conviction rate to feel that the situation was really stable, in my view. Even then we would feel there was too much... One murder is too much.

I would also agree with those advocates of the authority structure who feel the notion of “out of control” is somewhat hysterical… 1992 was “out of control”.

Another thing that bothers me though, especially in light of these alleged low conviction rates is the argument that a significant number of murders involve parties known in some ways to the deceased.  While random murder is disturbingly high for a modern State such as ours, it is the idea that the overwhelming majority of murders are apparently “in-house” that seems saddest. 

I do find it hard to reconcile a low conviction rate with this idea of murder by “known” associates. However having no detailed information on either position I shall let the apparent incongruence float on the blogosphere in search of data. For the moment I shall accept both propositions as having reasonable validity.

So what we have to ask is why? Why do an allegedly higher proportion of wives, husbands, lovers, children, parents, grandparents, neighbours, colleagues or business associates engage in murdering their “known associates” here than they do in, apparently, most other places? Surely the stresses and pressures of modern life are not significantly different in our place to those of other places around the planet, are they? 

The core of criminal behaviour seems to be the sense of licence that occurs when faced with an aura of impunity.  Impunity relates to the idea that one is somehow exempt from accountability for action.

How else does one account for a young woman who has beauty, brains and chutzpah opting to hire a gang of men to kill a baby. Did it never occur to her that it was wrong? Or did she simply assume that she would never be caught? [For offshore readers this refers to a recent trial in Cape Town of a young and beautiful woman who murdered her former lover’s baby, for complex personal reasons, by hiring a gang of hit men.]

This single act of murder by infanticide highlights in bas-relief the dilemma we face at this time in ourstory. [Yes it’s Ourstory not history or herstory or anystory but ourstory… and ourstory is increasingly bloodstained for a place allegedly at peace.]

The young woman will spend at least six months in prison with time off for good behaviour and time already served. Theoretically she should be there for a few lifetimes; but in a country where the murder rate seems to be back on a rising curve again; and HIV related deaths are bringing down the overall life expectancy rate. It is now theoretically possible that [some of] my generation of baby-boomers could outlive the current millennial generation. What this
means is that a lifetime is no longer all that long. And then there’s the “Yengeni effect” [or if you’re reading this from a smug offshore venue: “the Libby Effect” or even, more absurdly perhaps, the “Hilton effect”]. In other words:-  Even if you do get caught you will “get away with it”.

In another of the murder tales that punctuate our daily news fare, a woman allegedly has her husband hunted down on the highway, and burned to death in the boot of his car. Another woman allegedly has her singer/composer husband butchered by assistants, and the latest news is that she may have actually pulled the trigger when the bullet entered the back of his head “execution style”, as the press put it at the time.

This week a gang of angry citizens stoned a politician to death in a neighbouring province. How is it possible that people can simply go and stone a man to death over his political activity: or was it inactivity?

Now notwithstanding one’s personal feelings about the desired fate of politicians, that is IMPUNITY with capitals. [Incidentally this was the second ruling party political murder in a week, a deputy mayor in a rural part of the country was gunned down as she was bringing in the groceries from her car to her house, gunned down by people who simply ran away and stole nothing. These two murders are part of a disturbing sub-pattern of political murders over the past few years. Not forgetting also that no one has yet been apprehended [apparently] for the murder of a prominent human rights activist in south west Ekhuruleni recently…and a controversial newspaper columnist was attacked and shot in his home plus... plus. ?  ]

These few examples highlight an ignored issue that refuses to go away… ie: the crisis in service delivery at every level of our society. This is a bland phrase. It
means that too few people do their jobs with any level of enthusiasm. Too many people seem to work only when an extra reward is given for doing what should be their jobs. Too many people associate a job with the pay and not with the work. Is it possible that if it weren’t for the money that no one would work? [foolish question *&^%#36]

 Perhaps “no one” is too strong. Perhaps "most" people would prefer to sit around: except that they need a source of cash flow to pay for cool things and necessaries.

Does democracy mean, “Not having to do anything you don’t want to” or is it a question of “How far back must one go in wiping clean the historical slate of injustice?” The latest apology for bad behaviour trots out the good old poverty and hard times argument. I dispute this. The world is awash with poverty, there are at least ninety countries lower down the poverty scale than here and they don’t all have murder rates in excess of 40/100,000, or we’d have been informed of this by the various apologists. There are also places that are wall to wall with firearms and they don't have murder rates as high as our!

Either way the outcome is that too many people are resorting to murder to deal with their interpersonal issues. There is nothing new in this: some of our earliest records as a species contain references to murder as a
means of solving one’s problems.

Most commonly these were what we call “hot-blooded” acts. Some of the evidence being led in a series of high level murder trials over the past few years indicate that we have far too many hot blooded acts being carried out in cold blood…one thinks here of the mass wave of security worker murders last year… more than 60, mostly unsolved crimes, I believe. And then there was the horror case of the heist gang who burned the security guards to death in the vehicle after robbing them. They were caught and are serving a brief sentence in hell.

This does raise the point that murders are being solved and the baddies are getting their day in court.

We the readers in society are fed on a routine diet of court proceedings in a never-ending stream of fascinating murder trials. We are informed that the Policing services are receiving loads of high-tech equipment and super- advanced training, although opposition parties dispute these claims, apparently. However the latest crime figures reveal that no amount of spin can ignore the single fact that crime is not “under control”, and that the rising sense of rage in the community at large is tangible: as revealed in the recent national strike and the stoning to death of a minor politician.

Rage, despair and impunity.

Despair: - the idea that the ordinary citizen can get nowhere with authority; or with “the system”.  In my street for instance a group of concerned residents recently organised a petition against the presence of a noisy, disruptive, disreputable informal drinking house about four houses away from the local Lyndhurst Primary school, at the bottom of the road.

It had been there for years but it suddenly gained a sign and some form of intervening status allowing it to acquire liquor more legitimately. almost everyone  signed the petition, meaning that more than a hundred people objected to the presence of this unpleasant place in our street. Yet months later the SA Breweries trucks are still delivering their loads of beer. The petition was spiked [perhaps] in the twenty or more formal channels to which it was delivered, and the petition organiser has quietly sold up [one hears] and is about to move off to some less alarming place. There are certainly no indications of action. The children and other pedestrians still have to routinely run the gauntlet of abusive behaviour from drunks at all and any time.

All over the country each day news reports are broadcast relating to community rage over poor service delivery…failure to act upon citizen complaints is part of poor service delivery. Equally I routinely hear a litany of government apologists arguing that people should be using “Channels” to communicate their grievances. Aah how deep runs the blood of the slaver, how it has permeated the responses of those who were once slaves.

A man was stoned to death this week. Was it for poor service delivery? Was it because the “Channels” are blocked? When the system doesn’t work, or is perceived to be unfairly biased, despair and rage are inevitable outcomes. Murder almost by ordainment... maybe... do people believe they can act with impunity it seems so.

Is it possible that the flip side of poor service delivery is impunity? The system is so dysfunctional that those who choose can getaway with anything, or so they believe?  Is public rage so great that it more and more frequently overwhelms rationality. These seem to be the responses of a rising tide of informal opinion.

In his response to my blog on the skills shortage/urban myth debate, Rory suggested that our problem [as a society] was that we are attempting to put a system originally designed to cope with the wants and needs of a small minority [about five million citizens] at the service of nearly fifty million without having changed the basic specifications. So we had ninety thousand cops in the bad old days now we have double that [or we will have “soon” we’re told]

In fact we probably need ten times more cops to deal with a nation of people who are free to rape, pillage and murder as the fruits of freedom. We probably need a civil service at least twice the size that it is now too, except that we can’t afford it and anyway we should privatise the whole thing [that is another theme and I wont go into it  here; see my forthcoming blog serial  fiction The testimonies of an enumerator.]

Certainly there was seldom quite such an enduring epidemic of close quarter murder as we are witness to here.

 On the other hand maybe things are worse in

Nigeria?  I am sure i once wrote a blog on murder in Nigeria... i shall have to go and find it.

Viva bloggers

The Blogospherian.

Prophecy and testimony

"Last week the Prime Minister, Mr Robert Mugabe, hit out at people in leadership positions who were amassing wealth and described them as ‘Socialist deviants who are traitors to the revolution.’ … he went on to say: - ‘It is downright selfish and utterly immoral that we leaders should take advantage of our positions to acquire wealth we  would never have been able to acquire had we not held leadership positions.’

"Selfish and immoral it may be", the article continues, from which I took this statement attributed by the Star’s Robin Drew to Robert [Bob the Roz] Mugabe up north in Rumbabwe. It was written and published on the 17^th of August 1987. Yes 20 years ago when Bob had only been in power for 7 years and already the same article quotes “The hard pressed taxpayer has once again had to face the reality that his money is being squandered by crooks….”

I take huge heart from this.  This Mugabe chap and his kleptocratic cohorts have plundered the second Changamire State to a condition of hyper-bankruptcy: and still they are unmovable. If they can keep this hustle going for 27 years and counting then the glorious exponential republic of enlightened SA will stay afloat for eons.

Now that I am satisfied that the country is in reasonably good hands… certainly as good as they’ve ever been, I must ask myself the question that we are all asking at the moment… where will we be twenty years from now in 2027… and all I can imagine is that the world will be as different then compared to now as now is compared to when Mr Mugabe made his most relevant and true speech.

So I could stop there and say this is interesting and leave it at that…. But no…

I have to make a point.

To digress for a moment: In 1994, on the 11^th September, the anniversary weekend of Steve Bantu Biko’s, murder my wife and I were attacked by a gang of armed men who fired seventeen bullets at me personally, of which four tore holes in my body in places that still cause grief On the other hand i,  being, fortunately, given the tenor of the times, and for other reasons that are too complex to deal with here, armed with a small Czechoslovakian pistol [now it would be either Chech or Slovak depending on where Brno is now] fired thirteen back at them and hit them nine times… I am still disturbed about the four missing bullets. Offically I won although the truth is that in such a circumstance no one wins: it isall so point
less.

However having survived the gunfight I then had to survive the aftermath and that was a tale in its own right.

I had a sense during that gunfight that I was not alone… in a poem I wrote after the event: Satori, I wrote: -  “I saw a gathering of angels….” [in echo of Hamlet]

I knew that something one could call miraculous had taken place. After all I was no gunfighter. Like many citizens living through a violent and terrible period of our history the weapon existed to be certain that I existed and my work took me to many places where safety was minimal.

Where did that awesome strength come from? I had assumed for a time that it was adrenaline shock… but what if it wasn’t…?

What I do know is that it wasn’t some outlandish weirdo… According to evidence led at the hearing, where I had to show justifiable homicide to a court to account for those who died in that struggle; those people saw a man [me] become two people. Now maybe they were drunk, court records show that their blood alcohol level was high for a Sunday morning. On the other hand what if they weren’t “what did they see? They saw me in two places, which is what I saw: and in my denial frame called it a gathering of angels.

So what is the point here?

Simply that I went somewhere over those next few days or seconds or while whatever happened. I went somewhere. I don’t know where. For all I know [and have preferred to think of as drug induced hallucinations derived from whatever hospitals feed one on while full of bullet holes that have to be opened up cleaned out and fixed before being stitched up again… they do immense damage as they blast their way through the body like some giant electric shockwave] for all i know they were no more than hallucinations.... then again. What  if they weren't? 

Along the way I had a vision of catastrophe and redemption.

I wrote notes on what happened while stoned out in intensive care and wrote many more over the intervening 13 years since that event. I have also noted the synergy with the great 9/11 event.  I have compiled that vision into a collection of work, which is only partially, complete [on paper]. I call the collection of work the Azanian Quartet.

At this stage two parts of the Azanian Quartet exist: The Buffalo Hunters, and The Ashanti Raider. The first is set against the year of the Revolution at a time much more violent than now when the gain was no longer political. The second, also a crime story adventure ta
kes place against the philosophic background of the Truth Hearings.

The third part is more complex and is set at some “Other” time which may or may not be in our future. It may equally be in a parallel universe or in the minds of the players or only in your mind.

That world of the third, which is called the Jonker Memorandum, is a world where a women [also known as the Penetratee Gendor] could walk naked and unmolested through the Azanian Konfederacy with a purse of gold on her head. According to legend this has only ever occurred during the short rule of Genghis Khan, so It’s a big deal in the future.

The problem was how to prepare you, my reader, for that journey into that story set against that social code. In addition I had to deal with the vision that is central to the story.

In my story The testimonies of an enumerator part one [that I first published on my now discontinued personal website in 2003] my vision involved deluges of water, a tsunami from hell. My hope is that the great tsunami of 2005 that wiped out Banda Acre in
Indonesia represented the fulfilment of that vision.

My world that I created to account for the destruction I witnessed during that time that I was recovering from multiple bullet wounds in the Linksfield Park Clinic is set against the decade 2009 – 2019.

The great disaster I saw in my state of hallucinatory recovery, when according to various confirmations I was travelling in some other dimensions of our alleged reality involved huge flooding that devastated the planet sufficiently to render the world static for a time. I have made it to occur on 23^rd December 22012 in confirmation of an ancient Mayan prophecy.  I do hope that it happened already, as I said, in the east where although the human loss was real, the destruction of vital global infrastructure was minimal.

Many things happened during that period and I have attempted to reconstruct the vision. At a contrary end I also had to deconstruct the vision and its symbolisms from the times in which we live so that we would not confuse the place in my story with the place in which we live.

I published therefore a linking piece to bond the first two parts of the Azanian Quartet with the two parts that are to follow: one in  that time and the other in another.

This linking piece is called the Testimonies of an enumerator.

The testimonies fall into two parts.

 Part One is the concerned with the presidency of the first woman to take charge of the country called Southern Azanian, in the emerging Azanian Konfederacy in
Azania. Any comparisons with places like South Africa, The African Union and
Africa are relatively coincidental although without either rancour nor favour.

She [Corinth Starr]takes charge during the period 2009-2019 [AD] and takes the idea of transformation to a place you never dreamt of, or if you did it was never this complex.

I do not promise you an easy read. I do anticipate that it will be a provocative read. As the author who published this story four years ago I am amazed myself at how much of what I was saying then is in play at this stage.

Specifically the idea of a United States of Africa, which I wholeheartedly endorse with the usual caveats to the rights of the citizen.

Secondly the idea of people being “on line” with some form of body tagging. Not that this is a new idea, simply that it is part of the vision that I had of Armageddon and the Apocalypse as presented in the book of revelations in the Christian bible.

Before you think I’m about to launch into a re bornm mode the question passed by my vision was:

“What world do those who are left afterwards… after the closing Amen to the chapter…

What I understood so clearly from that strange journey that I took to who knows where was that those who were left continued with their lives… what else was there to do, and the story that I fell into takes place at a time when they have forgotten all but the raw fact… There were terrible floods then and many peole died and then life went on.

As a voice in my story said at that time what could you say about the Anglo Boer War apart from its having happened, should you know that?

There will come testing times.

Since I have had this experience of being attacked and shot to pieces and experienced the consequent trauma of recovery, not to mention the small matter of dealing with the fact that I had to execute a man to survive, and that is itself an entire story with its own surprisingly revelations … to put the barrel of a gun into the back of a man’s head and pull the trigger…not cool even if its about me or him…

So I warn you that the Testimonies will not be an easy read but that’s why we have feedback mechanisms. Bear in mind that some of your questions may be answered in subsequent text and none of the ideological positions I have taken in the story are fleshed out in huge detail… I am simply not competent enough to do that at this time… this was what happened in my story and came to me while I was flying around a hospital ward loaded with bullet holes and the shit they pump into you to take away the pain: which I can assure is considerable.

So later this week I shall launch the first of twenty episodes of the ‘Testimonies of an enumerator’.

At the end of each chapter I shall include a hyperlink to a site that I shall set up this week with editred.com in their ebookstore, pointing you to the following:

By the end of the week you should be able to download copies of The Buffalo Hunters and The Ashanti Raider from the ebookstore for a nominal fee. I still have to sort out details with Pay Pal but basically whatever they charge plus a dollar each.

Both these books have been read by people all over the world and have been highly rated on sites like Blosm.com for their powerful evocation of a time in our lives. Both would now be banned in terms of  new legislation on the grounds of the brutal treatment of women, graphic sexual detail that is almost over the top and taste
less except that it was real.

And it is true: women are brutally treated, mainly in the Buffalo Hunters, but ultimately in both.  That is because we live in a society in which women are brutally treated. On the other hand, women are the heroines in both books, and they are pretty mean. 

But what would happen if the tables were somehow turned; and to harm a woman became more than simply uncool? What would happen if rape were to be declared a genocidal crime and the rules of procedure were altered; to make an accusation binding on the accused who has to prove innocence rather than the prosecution to prove guilt?

Find out what happens when Corinth Starr the elder becomes president of
Southern Azania in a landslide shock election result in the 2009 election. Corinth Starr campaigned for the Gender Party on a ticket against rape and in favour of Basic Pay.

What happens when she wins?

This is the purpose of the preludes to the Jonker in the form of the testimonies that I shall start publishing [again] this week. [You are unlikely to find the original because I have recently shut down my former website for a complex range of reasons that are not part of this story.] 

Later this month [July]the testimonies will appear on the ebookshelf  at editred together with two collections of poetry: the Marginalised man and Rehearsing Nietzsche. In addition to that you’ll find a book I recently put out in ‘real book’ form and which has been selling more frequently off my online advertising than in local bookstores where it has informal censorship encounter issues with ‘rules n things’.

This book is called ‘7 ways to get your money’ and it is a book for those shit stirring wannabee paid people who proliferate. Officially it’s a handbook for debt collecting but that is only a subterfuge for a book dedicated to the art of getting your own way in things. How to go from being gentle and polite to a fiend from hell determined to get what you want … without violence or using legal aid..

So stand by for the forthcoming attraction that I have hinted about in many previous blogs over the past two years … The day of thePrivatised
State is coming. A time when no putative Prime Minister would have cause to suggest that he is able to enrich himself so hedged in is s/he with rules of procedure and pinned down by the Life Activator… the ultimate lie detector. We do not need the power of prophecy to know where that former Prime Minister’s bold words have taken his country: -

a luta continua…

The testimonies of an enumerator part one cometh….

The Blogosspherian.