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๐—›๐—ข๐—ช ๐—œ ๐—”๐—  ๐—›๐—”๐—ฃ๐—ฃ๐—ฌ ๐—”๐—Ÿ๐—Ÿ ๐—ง๐—›๐—˜ ๐—ง๐—œ๐— ๐—˜

๐—›๐—”๐—ฃ๐—ฃ๐—œ๐—ก๐—˜๐—ฆ๐—ฆ ๐—ฆ๐—”๐—ฉ๐—˜๐—ฆ ๐—Ÿ๐—œ๐—ฉ๐—˜๐—ฆ. ๐—ง๐—ฅ๐—ฌ ๐—œ๐—ง!

CHANGE VERSUS SELF-LOVE

I love me just the way I am. Thatโ€™s a given. If I could go changing, I donโ€™t know if Iโ€™d be pleased with the outcome. For as sophisticated an organism as a human being is, change as an objective and subjective process is a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon. If planned and executed with specific, predetermined elements within specific parameters, change outcomes of the changeable could be predicted.

Randomly occurring change can lead to any previously known or unknown outcomes in any direction.  A human being cannot be one thing or another, and thatโ€™s it. From the outset, human beings become the way that they are out of chance, instantaneous combinations of fixed familial heritage (i.e. genetics) and time-progressive, ever-variable socio-environmental factors (nurture).

INNER PEACE

The day I understood that I could only be what I am and that I could only do what I do at any one time because thatโ€™s whatโ€™s accessible to, doable, and fun here and now, I found inner peace; I loved myself more. I internalized the idea that I could, indeed, do anything towards the attainment of my dreams only to the extent that what is available and doable is compatible with my values. Compatibility with my physical and mental strengths, and my philosophical and spiritual equilibria, is an important determinant factor too.

THE IMPOSSIBLES

Iโ€™ll never venture to do the impossible beyond what my mind and body are not keen to pursue for lack of interest, curiosity, relevant competence, or application tools and other resources. For example, a Mt Everest Mountain climb expedition is out of the question for me. Neither do I even dream of traversing the Antarctic to reach the South Pole. I walk on the moon in my poetry only. Iโ€™m simply not cut out for these. No love lost.

Nonetheless, I do profoundly admire those people who partake and succeed in these and other related extreme effort endeavours. Attitudinally, these people inspire my will to win when I know that I do have what it takes to overcome obstacles to triumph in given contexts.

Thatโ€™s how I could, in the comfort of my creative work studio on a tropical island somewhere, exclusively sit, think and write, and write and think every day of my life until the end of time. Thatโ€™s me. My extreme sport is my far-reaching, deep-tranced, time-unbound literary creative exploits mind-games.

EXPLANATORY MODELS IMPERATIVE   

If I cannot synthesize for myself an independent, scientifically sound, humane explanatory model for some material or conceptual endeavour Iโ€™m challenged or tempted to perform or be part of for any purpose, Iโ€™m not likely to do it. This attitude has enhanced my sense of freedom in the free world. It has empowered me with the idea that I do have much greater influence as to the direction and extent of the potential of my destiny; unpredictabilities of nature, human vulnerabilities against the forces of nature, and world socio-politico conditions notwithstanding.

My finding inner peace has enabled me to better know myself, appreciating my strengths in the hustle and bustle of living. Whilst not trivializing my apparent weaknesses in given situations, I never put much thought into the former. If Iโ€™m weak at it, then itโ€™s not important for me. I care but little about it. Iโ€™ll always strive to harness all the strength I need in my efforts to realize the expected objectives of any endeavours that are of significant importance for my survival, or fulfilment of my professional and social obligations.

MY HERITAGE

Thanks to the inner peace that I enjoy, I have come to appreciate my origins more and more. I value more my parents, and I respect my lineages even more. All the glory Iโ€™ve basked in, and the hard times that Iโ€™ve had to endure in my life so far have more meaning now. The continual existential lessons owing to these life experiences form the foundation upon which my emotional-spiritual and mental-philosophical premises stand.

I have a greater sense of confidence in my perennial work to carve spaces of safety and comfort conducive to my creative work growth and consolidation. My hope for and faith in arriving at a future of light and abundance into longevity and immortality are enhanced. I have never been more optimistic about the future.

INCOMPREHENSIBLE WARS    

In my current state of overall well-being, I find myself risen above, if not distanced from all the major primitive, hate-laden man-on-man murderous wars tragedies in the world today. Daily, the world is online fed in real-time surreal images of extremes of cold-hearted human brutality played out by man on fellow man. All this is beyond my comprehension, defeating my capacity for independent, scientifically sound, humane explanatory model formulations in my endeavours to better understand my world. So, I withdraw, look into myself, and revel in my inner peace state of being in my war-free corner of the world.

BEAUTIFUL THINGS FULL OF LOVE

I look out into my immediate world and marvel at how blessed I am to live the life that I live, where I live in Norway. Many a weekday at my place of work is started by the smallest kindergarten children coming over to check out and learn about the wonderful works of art displayed here. When the mood is right, I get to sing for the children the first lines of the song โ€˜The Greatest Love of Allโ€™. Recollections of the joyous moments this unofficial bonus show creates for all Iโ€™ll take with me to my grave, should I die.

Throughout the work days, Tuesday-Sunday, locals and international tourists of all ages and walks of life flock to my workplace of beautiful things. Interacting with all these people is a joyous privilege that invariably contributes to the fortification of my inner-peace state of being. Iโ€™m happy at work.

PERVASIVE HAPPINESS

My happiness permeates all aspects of my life: the visible to the external world, and the invisible that form the core of me, my essence, that only I can experience and fathom. The latter is so profound that I cannot explain it in words. I only know that itโ€™s there; and it plays itself out all the time in my interactions with people at all levels, be it in professional work or social settings. It plays itself out in my solitary moments also. Thatโ€™s how it is that I donโ€™t know what loneliness is as a personal experience. If I have an ever-green, loyal lifelong companion, it is my happy all the time state of being.

My jovial disposition is legendary even to me. Iโ€™ve been happy all the time for as long as I can remember. My happiness lives a life of itself inside of me. Of course, people and things will frustrate and anger me from time to time. Iโ€™m only human. I will express my frustration and anger in one way or another. The intensity or severity of my sentiments and reactions depends on the gravity of the matter as I see it there and then. But the core of my happiness has yet to crumble. Should my happiness ever crumble, then, thatโ€™ll be my demise. Goodbye, world; goodbye, beautiful people!

WHEN IT STARTED

I associate my first conscious encounter with happiness with Boxing Day morning, 1964. I was 4 ยฝ years old, then. Neighbourhood children poured into our home yelling incessantly, โ€œChristmas box, Simonโ€™s father, Christmas box โ€ฆ!!!โ€

In what Iโ€™d later understand to be Father Christmas style, Pappa came out of our house carrying a large box full of various kinds of colourful and noisy toys. There were lots of candies too. I stood there looking in amazement at these children happily pouncing upon the box, each child seeking to get as much as possible of the presents therein. Letting go of the box and stepping aside in some effusive laughter fit, my father showed the happiest moment of him the like of which I would never see again after this.

A short while later, Pappa, together with my mother and grandmother, gave me my boxed present. I never got to find out what the present was exactly because I soon lost it in the melee of happy children all around me in our yard. That Boxing Day 1964 childrenโ€™s party would be a one-time event that made a lasting impression on all the neighbourhood children and their respective families. However, Pappa would continue thrilling us children by every so often buying us ice cream from the ice cream bicycle men doing business up-and-down the streets. This would last until my family left South Africa in January 1975.

By the time we left South Africa, the happiness bug had become chronic in me. Iโ€™ve got the incurable exhilaration jungle fever. Iโ€™m ever happy by default, therefore. Even so, I know how to switch my happiness machine on and off at will according to occurrences around me at any time and space.

DEFIANCE HAPPINESS

Having taken neo-slavery to the next level of sophistication in the 20th Century, the former Apartheid system in the land continued to subject us, Black people, to deliberate, systemic, effective application of extreme violence everywhere every day. This violence was so degenerative of the human spirit that it even reproduced itself in the home. Violence remains endemic in South African society to this day. Despite all that, there were always innumerable remarkable moments of unrestrained joy in various situations every day.

There was always something about anything or anybody to laugh about. My contemporaries and I laughed at each other: friends and foes alike. We could grossly laugh at each other into fights; much as we used to do the same to stop fights and create conditions for a peaceful coexistence in a hard world, short-lived as the peace would be.

Our days on the streets consisted of ever intertwining circles of play, fight, peace, song and dance, mutual or unilateral group mobbing, arguments, fighting, and so on and on and so forth. Repeat. And repeat. All of this was threaded with humour through and through. There was never a dull moment. At the grossest levels, we used to both weep for and laugh at those that got knifed and killed on the streets. Humour as dark as it got. Chilling childhood memories.

ENTER THE MOVIES

The appearance of the bioscope in our midst from about the close of the 1960s onward introduced us to cinematic comedy shows. That took our appreciation of humour and our storytelling capacities to the next level. Unforgettable all-time favourites included The Three Stooges and, of course, the outrageously funny Charlie Chaplin. At the end of the day, we often complained of ribcage pains from profuse laughter all day long. Bodily pains from fighting blows were part of the humour drive. So, they didnโ€™t matter so much to the extent that no one sustained acute injuries.

Looking back, we were a happy lot defying the evils of oppression with humour. We learned to use humour to endure or overcome the most difficult life experiences on the streets, at school, and in the home. To this day, if itโ€™s not worth wasting my breath on, I diffuse potentially harmful human relations tension moments with a smile and laughter. It works all the time. Almost. I have yet to make a stone laugh. But then again, a stone knows nothing about human relations. When a human is as thick as a stone, I canโ€™t help them.

HAPPINESS FOR PEACE

Conditional upon neither the boundaries having been crossed, nor the swords not drawn yet, my ability to manifest my state of happiness through humour has, on many occasions in time, been a powerful diplomacy agent in the face of all kinds of hostilities in all kinds of circumstances. Some people derive and celebrate their happiness states by bombing others. Diplomacy work is explosive here.

If I can laugh about the absurdities of some overtly provocative antagonism towards me, I may be willing to resolve matters peacefully through talk if the talk is mutually tenable. I might also choose to simply walk away to deescalate the potential for violence outbreak; possibly permanently severing any further links with the antagonist. Short of eliminating extreme, unpacifiable antagonists, I opt to isolate and exclude them from my life in spaces and situations that I have control over; as in my feelings. I donโ€™t know how to accommodate detractors of my right and potential to be happy, and to not unduly repress my happiness expressions.   

When Iโ€™m happy Iโ€™m strong, Iโ€™m resilient, Iโ€™m confident, Iโ€™m dominant, Iโ€™m optimistic, Iโ€™m logical, Iโ€™m a charmer, Iโ€™m sensitive; I see beauty in all things, I am an open book; Iโ€™m discerning, Iโ€™m patient, Iโ€™m tolerant, Iโ€™m free, Iโ€™m fearless, I can be brutal; Iโ€™m invincible, gregarious like hell, I win my fights clean โ€“ no broken bones, no blood spilt, no death.

On the one hand, happiness is my weapon of mass destruction in hostile times. On the other hand, happiness is my ballistic missile shield against personal evil forces. Therefore, happiness is my magic carpet ride to longevity and immortality. It is my means of disabling animosities, ensuring victory over my enemies, with laughter crumbling the grounds upon which they stand.

When I am happy, I am genuinely so. I donโ€™t know how to be fake happy. Although my happiness is self-propelled because I am happy by nature, it doesnโ€™t mean that I go around glaring my teeth and laughing like a fool seeking attention everywhere all the time. My life is a circus. But I am not a clown.

It does happen, though, that unrestrained public expressions of my joy are calculated and intentional, spontaneous as a humorous situation I may have created, or I respond to might seem to be. This may be to create confusion and distraction in foreseen or proceeding conflict situations, pre-empting potential escalation to violence. It may also be to break the ice when meeting people for the first time for any reason, or to ease the tension in challenging inter-personal communication skills scenarios, as in negotiations at any level.  

CLEAN HAPPINESS

My happiness expressions are not dependent on any intakes of chemical or herbal central nervous system stimulatory substances. I donโ€™t consume tobacco in any way or form. I donโ€™t do any form of drugs; neither through inhalation nor intravenously. I very rarely drink alcohol.

And whenever I do drink alcohol, it is never because Iโ€™m in the chase for happiness. Iโ€™m ever so happy with or without the consumption of alcohol. I never touch alcohol when Iโ€™m upset over one thing or another. When Iโ€™m upset, alcohol tastes like horse urine. Yeuk!!! Yes, I have in my time tasted fresh horse urine from the ground. That teaches you how to fold your lips so that you can learn how to whistle, see?

HERMITISED HAPPINESS

Inner happiness doesnโ€™t have to be expressive all the time. Some of my truly happiest moments are when I feel happy inside, enjoying the happiness feelings as an exclusive, private affair of mine: solitary joy. These are the moments when Iโ€™m at my most perceptive and most creative; moments of illumination. These are the moments when solutions to pressing personal challenges of all sorts manifest themselves. In this emotional contentment state, Iโ€™m able to see through the mediocrity of thoughts and actions by power players and other thought leaders in humanityโ€™s big existential questions. I crush conspiracy theories from this domain of unlimited, ignorance-proof, pure thought possibilities.

ETHICO-MORAL AWARENESS

It is at this level that my senses of justice (good v/ bad) and fairness (right v/s wrong) get heightened in my analysis of world events. This forms the basis upon which my decisions to take particular stands on certain local and global divisive socio-politico issues are anchored. It is also at this level that my social relations are categorized as to the extent of sharing or not sharing certain critical values as active social beings.

HAPPINESS-PERFORMANCE MUTUAL DEPENDENCY

Outcomes of my happiness-induced high creativity and problem-solving capacity further fuel my happiness state. My happiness, creativity, and problem solutions form an essential functional loop for my existence and my appreciation thereof. If the loop breaks, I might as well be dead. Therefore, my happiness is my elixir of youth, my longevimmortality engine amplified by laughter. Such is the value of my happiness.

I cannot afford to be unhappy. I do not want to be unhappy. If I have an addiction, it is happiness as an expression of my being here and alive for life right now. No one can take that away from me for as long as I consciously strive to be a decent human being wishing and enjoying sharing my happiness with others who see a mutuality of value addition to each otherโ€™s lives. My happiness and my ability to sustain it are a gift Iโ€™ll treasure for life.

HAPPINESS PRIVILEGE       

Commenting on one of my Facebook feeds posts recently, a colleague and friend has said, โ€œBeing happy every single day is a privilege that not everyone has.โ€

I agree with that statement only partially. And that is looking at the statement as an expression of humble gratitude for being able to live on ever-generous doses of happiness daily. The idea is to identify the source of the happiness doses. I shall address this aspect below.

A privilege is a good enjoyed at the pleasure of external forces, be they human relations dynamics, or random if not predictable circumstances prevalent in nature. The privilege may or may not have strings attached. However, the assumption is that the privilege recipient has little control over the provider or facilitator of the particular privilege enjoyed. The privilege afforded to one by the high and mighty could be used as a manipulatory or control tool by the latter. As such, the state of being happy experienced and lived as a privilege may not be sustainable.

HAPPINESS AS A FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN RIGHT

In my world, happiness as a lived experience and feeling is a personal, non-negotiable human right to enjoy and share with others, if so desired. The sharing is done through various communicative means and platforms. I do acknowledge the ubiquitous prevalence of overwhelming tangible personal, societal, and natural challenges constantly working at destroying our basis for being happy. Nevertheless, I maintain that we do have both the potential and capacity to choose to be as happy and as expressive of happiness as we wish to do and to be.    

KNOW THYSELF

A personโ€™s foundation of self-knowledge is a key prerequisite to mastering the skills of how to be happy as a conscious mental and emotional choice according to events occurring around the individual. The latter may, for example, include the attainment of certain predetermined material or conceptual goals, which, for instance, could be to reach stated production targets at work. Creating a happy and congenial work atmosphere could inspire efficiency and effectiveness in production or service for all parties involved in the work process.  

Success at work and in personal relations may result in the recognition of oneโ€™s efforts through adulations and rewards in one form or another; this way potentially compounding and prolonging the already pre-existing state of happiness. A person who thrives in happiness is likely to strive to create conditions for happiness to bloom for as long as it is possible.

ATTRACT HAPPINESS

I have learned that happiness never comes to me of its own accord. The happiness living inside of me is a given. But, whether Iโ€™m solitary or in public, I attract and receive at least as much happiness as I feel inside, or the happiness that I radiate according to prevailing circumstances and space.

REGULATE YOUR HAPPINESS

My permanent inner happiness notwithstanding, I can at will switch on and off the outward flow of my happiness as necessary. It is not always that the environment shall be positively receptive to my exuberance. And, thatโ€™s okay. Misunderstandings, insecurities, and prejudices are also prevalent everywhere people interact. These are common thwarters of happiness.        

GUARD YOUR HAPPINESS

Identify your sources and hacks of happiness. Own them for the empowerment they afford you for your overall health and wellbeing, thereby fortifying your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual resilience; opening up your mind to realms of possibilities beyond what the eye can see. This makes for your optimal performance potential in the things you do both for a living and recreation. Make longevity your goal as gratitude for your gift of happiness as your prime mode of existence choice.

EXTRAORDINARY HAPPINESS

Happiness makes for the attainment and creation of extraordinary things. The extraordinary carve permanent spaces in human memory banks. You become immortal out of your deeds claiming lasting recognition in history. Worry not. Be happy. Live forever through your mark in history inspiring others to seek and live for happiness always. Happiness is the way of love and peace, attributes that humanity so sorely needs today.

HAPPINESS FOR YOU  

Only you can define your happiness on your terms. Be happy for your own sake, first and foremost. Cause no one harm. Wish none ill. Share your happiness abundantly with those who appreciate you for being who and what you are. Conserve your energy and capacity to live and love by staying away from happiness-dampening, toxic relationships. Never let go of those that make you happy. Happiness is a mutually supportive human quality. Even animals know this. Thatโ€™s how we can keep pets.

SEE TO BE SEEN

Depending on how you organize your life as you wish to live it, take it for granted that you want to see and be seen. Therefore, allow your happiness to be an integral element of the unique brand that you are. Your brand highlights your worth as an active participant in societal development as per your skills, talents, and proclivities vis-ร -vis your occupation. The happier you are, the more productive you can be, and the more valuable you can be. Happiness is the mega power tool for personal and professional success. Try it, youโ€™ll see. It works all the time.

HAPPINESS BRILLIANCE

Not all ever-happy people are buffoons. You are happy because you have a brilliant mind. You know yourself. You know what you want. You know your worth. You are self-assured. You own earth surfaces you step on. You are happy because the extraordinary things you do change lives for the better for others looking at you, inspiring them to want to tap into their happiness reserves for life. Although you speak faster and louder than many, your physical presence and aura take up too much space around you, you donโ€™t have to be apologetic about your happiness and its expressions according to your communicative, or creative talents.

FUTURE OF PEACE IN HAPPINESS

If you have to fight, make your deeds your first line of defence. Fight smart, choose your fights. Never give fools any fighting chance. Bring down your detractorsโ€™ walls of Jericho with smiles, laughter, and a glint in your eyes; all packed in love as a weapon of peace. Peace is a durable ride into and for the future. As such, when we are finally dead and gone, friends and foes alike say, โ€œMay your soul rest in eternal peace!โ€

HAPPINESS LEGACY

The happiness-inducing memories of you in the eyes and hearts of your survivors may be a measure of how much peace youโ€™ll possibly enjoy in the afterlife. We are not sure about there being an afterlife. But, for purposes of this talk, way say that it is there. The future is ever bright and hopeful for the happy. Happiness propels us into the future with confidence and fortitude. Faith knocks on the heavensโ€™ doors for the happy. When our work on Earth is done, weโ€™ll live happily ever after in the farthest spaces of the future, assuming that humanity does not erase itself from the future of the universe.  

SIMON CHILEMBO
OSLO
NORWAY
22.11.-19.12.2023 
 

ARE CHILDLESS MEN NOT REAL MEN?

Real Men Raise Their Children

Ever since my young adulthood years, I have been told to my face, or Iโ€™ve heard on various platforms numerous self-righteous people of various persuasions, social standings, and ages say stuff like a childless man is a worse man than a single, unmarried man. These people emphatically say that childless men, married or unmarried, deserve a worse punishment than death: they must stay alive; they must live through the worst possible suffering that God can inflict upon the living.

Furthermore, the anti-childless men people say that the fatherhood-shy men are lower than mules by social status; they are useful only as oxen are (beasts of burden), and must experience physical and mental pain unimaginable. That for failing to fulfil God’s glorious gift and obligation to man: propagation of the species. Single, unmarried men who are fathers might be forgiven, though.

Lastly, the pro-propagation people argue that humanity is the summation and manifestation of God’s ultimate creative potential. Through humanity, God defines her purpose. Humanity is the beginning and infinite expression of the power of God. Without humanity, the essence of God would cease, as would the entity herself. That would be the end of creation, the end of the universe.

I argue, however, that humanity actualizes creation and the universe for itself. Humanity exterminated would just as well render creation and the universe more relevant to other animal species. These have, or may have other terms of reference to nature beyond the comprehension of human cognitive capabilities. Therefore, God in all her multiple manifestations and interpretations across the world, and across the epochs, is but one of humanityโ€™s self-created survival tools. Humanity created God to assist itself in making sense of the complexities of the world and its pressures on humanityโ€™s existential challenges.

When the going gets tough, humanity prays to God, fights, murders itself, its own, and destroys the world, its home. God just loves it that way. Humanity makes weapons of destruction right under Godโ€™s nose. Iโ€™m convinced that the omnipresent God sits in every missile head fired in wars of the world. Wars must be God’s forms of a party; grooving in humanityโ€™s idiocy into self-extinction, Godโ€™s own bloody demise.

Name any apocalyptic war anytime any place, God is there; God will have been there. We have many more wars brewing for the future. It just got worse in the Middle East. Television moving pictures showed but two missiles of multitudes colliding in mid-air over there the other day.

Reporters said that one missile was launched from one land of a star, and the other missile from another land of a star. The collision gave rise to meteoric explosions. God torn apart fell to the ground in a million stars, burning everything on their path, scorching the earth. People dying crying, โ€œGod have mercy on us!โ€ Everyone crying murderous vengeance in the name of God in both lands of the stars. And the beat goes on for God. Oh, yes, the Gods must be crazy.  

In the Ukraine war, people are killed like hunter boys burning wild pigs on Trumpland streets. In fake-border-walls Trumpland, Black death bodies get riddled with bullets for their lives that donโ€™t matter in the eyes of White Supremacist lunatics playing war games whilst people are praying in houses of God.

The inadequate-balled killers donโ€™t spare children either. They spray bullets on children in school classrooms; them children in there only seeking enlightenment through learning how to read, write, and count. Trumpland set for extended ignoramocracy well into the future. Humanityโ€™s foolishness is boundless. Glory be to God. Amen.  

It is in the light of my argument above that I dismiss Godโ€™ supposed works as nothing but humanityโ€™s wishful thinking outcomes when they cannot solve their own problems, and experience their minuteness against the forces of nature. There is no God sitting somewhere above ever having sadistic fun cruelly punishing childless men.     

But the childless men condemners are relentless, uneducated fools. And they continue:
Men who are not contributing to the numerical growth of humanity defy God’s divine design for man; which is to go out and make children upon children for generations to ensure endless perpetuation of God’s relevance to man, if not creation in its entirety. As if God really cares.

Childless men present a possible extintification of God, notwithstanding it being as long a shot as can be. Woe betide these men. May they burn forever in hell should they die from the pain that God inflicts upon them for their horrendous transgression, anyhow.

God and his glory are forever. That for as long as men live up to their non-negotiable duty of unfailing baby seed planting in women. Those men defying God’s plan shall and must suffer all the indignities humanity can think of and apply upon them.

Culturally, childless men are irresponsible. They are selfish. They are respectless towards their ancestors. It is the duty of every tradition-abiding man to perpetuate not only his private lineage but, above all, that of his forefathers.

Men who do not produce children disrupt the growth and might of their clans, right up to the grand level of humanity as one, big family. Ancestral spirits do not take kindly to this state of affairs. Therefore, the ancestral spirits see to it that childless men shall be isolated, ridiculed, and abused in all sorts of dehumanizing ways.

When non-child-producing men die, they must never be afforded the same ritualistic honours that good, culturally-attuned, baby-prolific men would be. Were it possible, many a childless man would be made to vanish into thin air upon their demise. It’s just as well that the latter is not the case. Otherwise, the infertile dead men would pollute the rare air that the ancestral spirits breathe. The former exacerbating their already debilitating ill-fortuned existence, thereby. Childlessness is the worst abomination a man can endure, by the look of things. This is when I dump culture and God in the same ancient pit latrine of humanityโ€™s extremes of diabolic, psychopathic anal discharges.  

If I donโ€™t say it, or if no third party that is familiar with me says it, no one will know whether I have children or not. In fact, almost everyone that asks me about how many children I have gets surprised when I tell them that I donโ€™t have, and neither have I ever had any children of my own that I know of.

Everyone assumes that I shall have a number of children here and there. After all, as many often state, I am a fine, good-looking, strong man oozing attributes of an honourable man. That way immediately crushing the notion that childless men are not men if child production capacity is the definition of oneโ€™s being a real man of honour.

Others even go as far as to express their dismay at my childlessness given my apparently unfettered Valentino image. So much for my outgoing personality, discerning as I might be in more ways than one.  My extroverted nature feeds the fantasies and pre-conceived ideas about my observed manly socializing attributes. Therefore, to many that do not know me well, I ought to be the wildest womanizer around. Clearly, then, I donโ€™t need to father any child in order that my manhood qualities shall exude themselves with no fuss.

In my world, the definition of a man and his good is in his deeds as an agent of positive change for the good of society at large, no matter the extent and quality of his input. Making or not of children is not a deal breaker contribution because, as is the nature of sexually reproductive species, and with all things remaining equal, sexually mature men will make children upon mating with equally sexually mature women. However, itโ€™s not a given that every non-protected male-female sexual encounter will result in the impregnation of the woman.

Itโ€™s not a given that every pregnancy will culminate in the birth of a child either. Itโ€™s not a given that a successful birth will bring forth a healthy, safe and sound child. And itโ€™s not a given that the childโ€™s father will be there for them.

Were children made like bread, Iโ€™d have fathered a hundred of them already. At the least. And Iโ€™d be a good father to my children by being there for them from the time Iโ€™d know of their conception, throughout the post-natal developmental stages to adulthood until whenever Iโ€™d die.

That Iโ€™ve not had children of my own up to this point in my life has nothing to do with whether Iโ€™m a man or not by way of my fertility status. My potency as a man is known only by women who have carried my seed before. Otherwise, everyone else who doesnโ€™t know me that way had better shut the โ€˜fโ€™ up and leave me alone with my happy so-called childless way of life that causes no one any trouble.

All across the world today exist millions of fatherless children. Hundreds of thousands of children are born daily without their biological fathers in their midst. So-called real men rape and impregnate women in all sorts of circumstances, from street violence, domestic violence, to wars. So-called real men in positions of econo-politico privilege and power go on predatory rampages and take sexual advantage of and apathetically impregnate underprivileged, weak, and vulnerable women. Philanderers charm and impregnate women of all ages everywhere, every fucking day.

When the children are born, these lots of so-called real men, the childrenโ€™s fathers, are nowhere to be found. Many of the children grow up enduring much emotional and physical torment. They grow up with demeaning adjectives such as bastardes applied to describe them. I cringe whenever I hear a child being described as illegitimate for their absent father.

Looking at it from a laymanโ€™s perspective, it is atrociously insulting to call a child illegitimate.  That way even if the expression in man-made legal terms means that the child was conceived and born outside official wedlock. A human child born as such is a human being of flesh, bones, and blood like everyone else conceived from the mergence of human sperm and egg in a womanโ€™s body.

Sperm-egg fertilization occurs and develops into a zygote in the fallopian tubes. The zygote then gradually grows into a full physical human expression in the mother-to-beโ€™s womb over a nine-month period, assuming a normal, uneventful pregnancy. Itโ€™s, therefore, also grossly distasteful, and disrespectful to the woman to have her children labelled as illegitimate. This demeans motherhood, a state of being worthy of respect by all men alive.

Writing in the Morocco World News online publication of September 12, 2017, journalist ๐—”๐—บ๐—ฎ๐—น ๐—•๐—ฒ๐—ป ๐—›๐—ฎ๐—ฑ๐—ฑ๐—ฎ posted an opinion with the title ๐—™๐—ฎ๐˜๐—ต๐—ฒ๐—ฟ๐—น๐—ฒ๐˜€๐˜€ ๐—–๐—ต๐—ถ๐—น๐—ฑ๐—ฟ๐—ฒ๐—ป ๐—”๐—ฟ๐—ฒ ๐—ก๐—ผ๐˜ ๐—œ๐—น๐—น๐—ฒ๐—ด๐—ถ๐˜๐—ถ๐—บ๐—ฎ๐˜๐—ฒ. Citing her in part, she presented her case that โ€œChildren born out of wedlock are usually called โ€˜illegitimateโ€™, โ€˜bastards,โ€™ and โ€˜sons and daughters of adultery,โ€™ and are often treated unfairly. They are seen as a source of shame and dishonour by traditional societies.

โ€œBeing a fatherless child in Morocco is nearly a lifelong condemnation. Article 446 of the Moroccan Jurisprudence describes โ€˜any person born outside marriage [as] a bastard; whether he is recognized by his biological father or not.โ€™

โ€œWhy should innocent children suffer the consequences of an act that they did not commit? How can a justice system deprive children from their fathers only because they were conceived outside marriage?โ€

From a religious perspective, Amal Ben Hadda argues further that โ€œIn the Quran, fatherless children should be first assigned to their biological fathers if they are identified, otherwise society should treat them fairly as normal children, with no stigmatization or segregation.

โ€œ[โ€ฆ] Muslim societies should fulfil their obligations towards abandoned and fatherless children. As per the Quran, the first step that should be taken is to identify the biological father and to assign his name to his child. All kinds of discrimination and social segregation should be banned, as it is morally reprehensible to stigmatize fatherless children. The term โ€˜illegitimateโ€™ is in itself a discrimination against defenceless human beings.โ€

The expression fatherless child is also a misnomer. This is because it linguistically cancels the presence of a male personโ€™ sperm in the childโ€™s conception process. Womenโ€™s eggs donโ€™t fertilize themselves, neither in the body nor in the test tube. It’s only Maria who could be impregnated with the wind; a miracle only performed by God, who doesnโ€™t know crap about sexual reproduction: fhhhhhโ€ฆ., let there be a child! And, voila, Jesus was born. No living man is God. No child is fatherless.

A normal manโ€™s and a normal womanโ€™s reproductive materials combine, internally or externally. That subsequently produces, all things remaining equal, a physically and physiologically normal human baby that will, hopefully, grow up normally into normal adulthood of, amongst other things, normal human sexual reproduction indulgences with the opposite sex.

This child will have the same cravings and needs for food, shelter, parental, and societal protection, as well as tender loving care, and much more; just like everyone else. These are basic Human Rights aspects we are all entitled to regardless of our parentageโ€™s civil status at the time of our conception and eventual birth. Itโ€™s not as if children just show up from the blues unsolicited and impose themselves upon their chosen will-be parents.

Now, thatโ€™s what could be termed an illegitimate act of unilateral personal imposition by a stranger upon an innocent, unsuspecting, and/ or possibly unwilling couple. That in itself not denying the childโ€™s legitimacy as a human being. Which further explains, for example, the prevalence of rigidities of child adoption laws in many nation states. Therefore, it defies logic that some unfortunate children are still labelled as illegitimate in the 21st Century, the age of superlative, ever expanding human knowledge that ought to inspire more empathy in the world.

As a rhetorical observation, it would be interesting to know how the often absent, extra-marital prolific so-called real men think and feel about their so-called illegitimate children out there somewhere in the world. Itโ€™s no wonder, then, that, on the other hand, there are in the world today millions of other men who consciously choose not to father any children under any circumstances, if they can help it.

Indeed, I do not have any children of my own that I know of. I truly hope that there is no child I have unknowingly fathered that is walking up and down the streets of the world bearing the abhorrent illegitimate child tag on their person. Iโ€™ve never been keen to want to have children when Iโ€™ve never been keen on marriage. Iโ€™ve never been keen on marriage to the extent that Iโ€™ve never felt emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and, most decisively, durably economically adequate for it. No wealth, no wife-and-kids for me. Simple.

Iโ€™ve more than once been in near husband-and-wife relationships in which I was relatively an economic underdog. I was, by extension, considered to be intellectually deprived and culturally inferior. Disaster. Iโ€™m not interested in being with poor women, either. It is what it is.   

The difficulties of children growing up without their fathers being present in their lives, for whatever reasons, struck me already from an early age whilst growing up in South Africa in the 1960s to the mid-1970s. Much as did the rough times of those fathers that also longed to be with their absent children but, for variable and unique individual reasons, had limited, if no access at all to their children, wherever they were in the Southern African sub-continent.

By the time I got to Zambia as a mid-teenage aspirant young man in 1975, I had already long taken the personal stand that I would never want to have any children of my own if my life circumstances are that being there for them would be a complicated socio-economic matter. Such continues to be the state of my life as I live it today: a happy, economically barely surviving free man of the world with much love for women and children. Nevertheless, soon Iโ€™ll have my lasting millions back. Iโ€™ll then marry my ten-women-in-one woman, my Super Lady. Weโ€™ll make a hundred-children-in-one-to-x-number-of-children and live happily ever after as one big-together family.

I find it ironic that some of my meanest critics for my current wilful childless existence are real men who, both knowingly or unknowingly, have fathered, and unabashedly continue to father countless children all over the place. If there are dogs of war whose occupation is to travel the world, go out to shoot and bomb enemy people and leave them for the dead, these critics of mine here are dogs-of-pussy who father children everywhere, and leave them for the dead. I have little regard for these kinda fools. I have this vile thought in my head that some of these abandoned children could someday find these negligent fathers of theirs. The children should, then, castrate the men in revenge for themselves, and vengeance for their estranged mothers. Poetic justice served.

But I am more concerned about the existential conditions of children growing up without their fathers in their lives. My concern is regardless of the circumstances that lead to, or have led to the fathersโ€™ absence. I wish that people could bang their heads against the walls more for ideas as to how to better living conditions of all children of the world, especially those that are deprived of the presence of their biological fathers in their midst.

Society has more to gain from taking care of underprivileged children of the world in need of love, care, and protection here and now. Speaking for myself, I know that I have in my time directly played a much-appreciated father figure role for many a child, so-called fatherless or not, across the world. I havenโ€™t had a need to have a pigsty for a playing field full of piglets for children to know how to be a decent human being who understands fully the importance of adults being there for children. Particularly so their own blood children once they, the adults, have become parents themselves.

Childless as I may be, I can with confidence, pride, and dignity state that I am a good father figure and male role model for children and youth. Prove me wrong, if you can. Simple. Go and raise your own children and let me be. I have books to write. I have money to kill. There is a future mother of my children awaiting me in the horizon yonder. And thatโ€™s my case alone to deal with.

In the meantime, I absolutely do not wish to be a conscious contributor to the ever growing and infuriating statistics of the so-called fatherless, or illegitimate children of the world. The living conditions of the vast majority of these children represent an aspect of being human that I find debasing my humanity as a man.

I care profoundly about the well-being of children the world over. Therefore, when some ignoramus knowing no shit about me comes out to criticise, judge, and ridicule me for having no children of my own, I not only get upset, I hurt deep inside. The hurt is out of the apparent trivialization of the values that I hold as the upright man I strive to be always.

My values shape the stands that I take in relation to critical personal choices that I make in my never-ending aspirations and efforts to be a decent human being in a world immersed in hate and human self-annihilatory tendencies. In all this, Iโ€™m ever conscious of the confines of the generally accepted, life-supporting norms and laws of the land wherever I find myself.

A Google search of fatherless children produces tonnes of academic research, hobby or professional societal conditions commentaries, special socio-politico interests organizations findings and reports, and much more information and ideas material on the harsh realities of children growing up without their fathers present in their lives. I shall list a few select links below at the end of the presentation.

As a global phenomenon, regardless of race, colour, religion, creed, political orientation, or sexual orientation, the significance of a father in a childโ€™s life is generally recognized by all. This is a general starting and guiding principle before the vast constellation of complications of human relations culminating in the existence of fatherless children. Argument presentational style bias according to the sourceโ€™s background granted, the general consensus, for example, is that [Source: South African online newspaper Daily Maverick, June 14, 2023]:

  • [โ€ฆ] Children are at much greater risk of being victims of violence if they grow up in father-absent families. Girls in particular are more likely to get involved in abusive or exploitative relationships, and boys could go on to become perpetrators of violence, including gender-based violence, themselves. Growing up with a positively involved father, however, reduces these risks, and helps to nurture long-term violence prevention strategies.
  • [โ€ฆ] While substance abuse has many complex causes, teenagers with absent fathers have been shown to be a high-risk group โ€” boys in particular. Children are also likely to follow in their fatherโ€™s footsteps if he battles with substance abuse. With a supportive father present, these issues dissipate, and children are generally less prone to substance abuse, and the related issues of addiction, depression and suicide.
  • [โ€ฆ] Absent fathers can exacerbate depression, anxiety and mental health disorders in children, and worsen their academic performance. When fathers are involved in a positive way, on the other hand, childrenโ€™s mental health improves. They have greater faith in their own value, tend to do well at school, and are able to form secure attachments as they grow.      

The Daily Maverick article quoted above says further that โ€œAccording to the Human Sciences Research Council, most children in South Africa โ€” over 60% โ€” donโ€™t live with their biological fathers. And 20% only have contact with their biological father twice a week โ€ฆโ€ 

Another South African online newspaper, IOL, reported on October 5, 2019, that โ€œThe General Household Survey 2018 by Stats SA revealed that, 43.1 percent of children lived only with their mothers while a much smaller percentage (3,3%) of children lived only with their fathers in 2018 โ€ฆ [Furthermore] โ€ฆ Research conducted by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) and the South African Race Relations Institute (SARRI) over a period of 5 years showed that 60% of SA children have absent fathers. More than 40 percent of South African mothers are single parents.โ€

In the UK, Fathers4Justice states that โ€œNearly 4 million children are fatherless in the UK. (Office of National Statistics)โ€

Whereas in the USA, Fatherhood.org reports that โ€œAccording to the U.S. Census Bureau, 18.4 million children, 1 in 4, live without a biological, step, or adoptive father in the home.*

Thatโ€™s enough children to fill New York City twice or Los Angeles four times over.

Research shows that a father’s absence affects children in numerous unfortunate ways,
while a father’s presence makes a positive difference in the lives of both children and mothers.
*U.S. Census Bureau. (2022). Living arrangements of children under 18 years old: 1960 to present. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau.)

Fathers.com presents data that shows that โ€œโ€ฆ children from fatherless homes are more likely to be poor, become involved in drug and alcohol abuse, drop out of school, and suffer from health and emotional problems. Boys are more likely to become involved in crime, and girls are more likely to become pregnant as teens.โ€

With relevant references detailed in the article immediately above, the organization lists six of the many ills associated with fatherlessness as follows:

  1. POVERTY
    – Children in father-absent homes are almost four times more likely to be poor. In 2011, 12 percent of children in married-couple families were living in poverty, compared to 44 percent of children in mother-only families.
    – Children living in female-headed families with no spouse present had a poverty rate of 47.6 percent, over 4 times the rate in married-couple families.
  2. DRUG AND ALCOHOL ABUSE
    – [โ€ฆ] Fatherless children are at a dramatically greater risk of drug and alcohol abuse [โ€ฆ]
    – There is significantly more drug use among children who do not live with their mother and father.
  3. PHYSICAL AND EMOTIONAL HEALTH
    – A study of 1,977 children age 3 and older living with a residential father or father figure found that children living with married biological parents had significantly fewer externalizing and internalizing behavioural problems than children living with at least one non-biological parent.
    – Children of single-parent homes are more than twice as likely to commit suicide.
  4.  EDUCATIONAL ACHIEVEMENT
    – Children in grades 7-12 who have lived with at least one biological parent, youth that experienced divorce, separation, or nonunion birth reported lower grade point averages than those who have always lived with both biological parents.
    – Children living with their married biological father tested at a significantly higher level than those living with a nonbiological father.

    –  Father involvement in schools is associated with the higher likelihood of a student getting mostly Aโ€™s. This was true for fathers in biological parent families, for stepfathers, and for fathers heading single-parent families.

    – 71% of high school dropouts are fatherless; fatherless children have more trouble academically, scoring poorly on tests of reading, mathematics, and thinking skills; children from father-absent homes are more likely to be truant from school, more likely to be excluded from school, more likely to leave school at age 16, and less likely to attain academic and professional qualifications in adulthood.
  5. CRIME
    – Adolescents living in intact families are less likely to engage in delinquency than their peers living in non-intact families. Compared to peers in intact families, adolescents in single-parent families and stepfamilies were more likely to engage in delinquency. This relationship appeared to be operating through differences in family processesโ€”parental involvement, supervision, monitoring, and parent child closenessโ€”between intact and non-intact families.

    – A study using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health explored the relationship between family structure and risk of violent acts in neighbourhoods. The results revealed that if the number of fathers is low in a neighbourhood, then there is an increase in acts of teen violence. The statistical data showed that a 1% increase in the proportion of single-parent families in a neighbourhood is associated with a 3% increase in an adolescentโ€™s level of violence. In other words, adolescents who live in neighbourhoods with lower proportions of single-parent families and who report higher levels of family integration commit less violence.

    – Children age 10 to 17 living with two biological or adoptive parents were significantly less likely to experience sexual assault, child maltreatment, other types of major violence, and non-victimization type of adversity, and were less likely to witness violence in their families compared to peers living in single-parent families and stepfamilies.

    – A study of 109 juvenile offenders indicated that family structure significantly predicts delinquency.
  6. SEXUAL ACTIVITY AND TEEN PREGNANCY
    – A study using a sample of 1409 rural southern adolescents (851 females and 558 males) aged 11 โ€“ 18 years, investigated the correlation between father absence and self-reported sexual activity. The results revealed that adolescents in father-absence homes were more likely to report being sexually active compared to adolescents living with their fathers.

    – Being raised by a single mother raises the risk of teen pregnancy, marrying with less than a high school degree, and forming a marriage where both partners have less than a high school degree.

CONCLUSION

This has not been a presentation to promote a cause. Neither has it not been my intention to moralize with this presentation. Nor have I intentionally sought to hangout and/ or judge anybody. I have striven to be as objective as humanely possible in my writing this presentation; especially so given the enduring emotional abuse Iโ€™m ever subjected to as a childless man. By choice.

If I had anything I wished to address myself to, it is the pathetic ignorance, nauseating double standards, and pitiful awe towards me of my critics. Many of these shameless, psychosomatic critics of mine neatly fall under the dogs-of-pussy category Iโ€™ve mentioned earlier on in the presentation.

The idea is to inform and teach. Hoping that the reader/ listener shall know me better and, thus, be in a more enlightened state in their subsequent choice to either nail me on the cross, or celebrate me for my being who I am, living my life as I do. I am a free spirit with no fear for the unknown contra my personal integrity; I have nothing to hide. That said, other than the personally fulfilling irrepressible urge to educate, Iโ€™m under no obligation to explain, defend, and justify myself to any fool for my private life-style choices. However, Iโ€™ll happily respond to well-intended queries about how and why I live my life in the way that I do, given where in the world I live at any time.

Meanwhile, the so-called friends and relatives wishing to cancel me for my unconventional way of life as relates to having wife and kids, may do so now. Good riddance. Thatโ€™s all they can do for their own good. They cannot oppress me in any way. I am not afraid of them at any level.

I know that there are many more voluntary or involuntary childless men and women everywhere. Some are afraid and voiceless because of the extremely oppressive sociocultural conditions under which they live in their respective parts of the world. Beyond my desire to inform and teach, I hereby speak some more for the tormented, the afraid, and the voiceless. This is simply because I can.      

And lastly but not least, I wish, with profound humility and admiration, to acknowledge the millions of single-parent mothers of the world throughout the ages. Against the meanest odds, many of these suffering single-parent mothers manage to birth and raise children that eventually grow up to be high-bar, across-the-board decent human beings that are a joy and gift to the world.

One of these single-parent mothers gave birth to and raised a ๐๐จ๐ญ๐ก๐ข๐ง๐  ๐‚๐จ๐ฆ๐ฉ๐š๐ซ๐ž๐ฌ ๐ญ๐จ ๐˜๐จ๐ฎtype fine gentleman who has remained my best friend and brother-from-another-mother since we first met at school in January, 1977. He was then a 12-year-old boy-to-man with more brains and refined social skills higher than those of many a 21-year-old young man I know to this day; I was 17-years-old myself. Living in separate continents today, engaged in each our own unique vocational occupations, and living our separate lives as grown-up men, walking into the future together with Anele is a never-ending blessing. Thanks to our beloved Mimmi, the most inspiringly resilient single-parent mother I know.

Through Anele, I salute all the survivor, achiever, change-maker, ruler children of single-parent mothers of the world. One of these remarkable children, Barack Obama, broke all the barriers and prejudices of all kinds to become president of the United States of America. Despite its flaws, the country remains the most powerful nation on earth today.

Barack Obama effectively becoming the most powerful man in the world for eight years is a humongous feat that has inspired a whole generation of children and youth throughout the world. Hope, faith, love, tenacity, and the future live in those that have the capacity and will to overcome difficult life outcomes due to the absence of their biological fathers, if not any other supportive male figure in their lives. The slogan Yes, We๐˜๐ž๐ฌ, ๐–๐ž ๐‚๐š๐ง Can rings in my head.

The so-called fatherless, illegitimate children are as legitimately children of the future as any other child. The future belongs to us all in the present. The past may have dealt us unfair hands in the form of unworthy fathers, but we all deserve a fair chance at enjoying and shaping what the future promises us all. Real men walk into the future along with theirs, and all other children of the world.

Of course, there are millions of estranged men across the world who, for various reasons the analysis of which is beyond the scope of this presentation, are directly denied the opportunities to be there for, if not with their children. I feel for these men, many of whom do genuinely yearn to be with their children but are ever hindered by circumstances they do not have control over. Even then, as Iโ€™ve already stated above, I have little empathy for libido drunk philanderers and dogs-of-pussy who care but little of whether or not they leave children behind in their sex escapades all over the world.

As for me, I continue with awaiting the future mother of my children to find me. If she can. If she wants to. The quality of my manliness transcends the need to go around making non-attached babies with anything thatโ€™s child-bearing. I live for extra-ordinary things. Iโ€™m inspired by extra-ordinary things that the arts and science do for human progress throughout the epochs, for the good and bad.

Human life in all its physical and esoteric aspects is as extra-ordinary as can be. To the extent that the extra-ordinary is defined from human experience terms, the extra-ordinary begins and ends with human life. Procreation of human life is not an extra-ordinary phenomenon, or achievement. Human life will happen, anyway; extra-ordinarily enough. In mortal human terms, the quintessentially extra-ordinary about human life and the state of being a progressively functional human being, is in the capacity and willingness to not only create life, but in the nurturing of it. Therefore, you are an โ€˜fโ€™-ng real man, you make children, you raise them. Simple. I rest my case.       

DEATH TO SINGLE MEN is the video Iโ€™ve posted earlier on. Watch it in order to see more how my choice to not have children connects with my views on marriage.  

SIMON CHILEMBO
OSLO
NORWAY
30.08.-11.11.2023
Tel.: +4792525032

   

     

 

๐—˜๐—ก๐—˜๐— ๐—œ๐—˜๐—ฆ ๐—œ ๐——๐—ข๐—กโ€™๐—ง ๐—ž๐—ก๐—ข๐—ช

๐—œ๐—Ÿ๐—Ÿ๐—จ๐—ฆ๐—œ๐—ข๐—ก๐—ฆ ๐—œ๐—ก ๐— ๐—ฌ ๐—ช๐—ข๐—ฅ๐—Ÿ๐——, ๐—ฃ๐—ฎ๐—ฟ๐˜ ๐Ÿฎ

I dedicate this presentation here to my late beloved mother, who died five years ago on October 7th, 2018. May her soul continue resting in eternal power. On Monday, October 2nd, 2023, my mother would have turned 83 years old. Happy posthumous birthday, Machona Mother โ€“ Shebeen Queen dearest!

When as a child growing up in South Africa up to the age of 14ยฝ years I was in various spaces hassled for my Blackness and other envied personal attributes, my mother instilled in me a fierce sense of pride and personal integrity. She constantly told me how beautiful I was, and that, as my academic performance demonstrated time after time at that time, I was the most intelligent kid around. I believed her, and, with humility and gratitude, Iโ€™ve aimed to live her words since then: beautiful, intelligent man that thrives amongst other beautiful, intelligent people.    

August month, 2023, marked the 35th anniversary of my stay in Norway. The tangible plan I had upon leaving Zambia, my fatherland, in June, 1988, was that Iโ€™d complete the 3ยฝ yearsโ€™ post-graduate business studies programme I had privately secured for myself, with a little help from my friends. Afterwards Iโ€™d then move on out to the bigger, wide, wide world.

Twelve years was the timespan that I had given myself that when subsequently big and strong with an Economics PhD degree and international big business and global technocracy experience clutched under my armpits, Iโ€™d then return to South Africa, land of my birth, and become the countryโ€™s Reserve Bank Governor. I had the earth moving under my feet; what could stop me, then? What could go wrong?

The accompanying supportive Norwegian State Education Loan Fund scholarship offer was the first to come my way. I accepted it without second thoughts because I just had to get out of Zambia at the earliest opportunity. This was a matter of both ambition and the nearly untenable personal living conditions in extremely hard family and national survival environments at that time.

That Iโ€™d somehow ultimately stay in Norway for a longer period, not in the least permanently, was never even an iota of an idea in my head. Dream of America calling, Baby. In January, 1991, towards the end of the business studies programme, a bureaucratic glitch led to my ceasing to receive financial support from the scholarship fund. I was left with a huge debt in tuition fees and other costs to the school. Indefinite termination of my studies at the school became unavoidable. This was the beginning of my economic dire straits that would last at least five years in this first cycle. As fate would have it, Iโ€™d fall in love with a sweet Norwegian woman during this time.

In the meantime, I had opened and had been running two Karate schools in Oslo since my arrival in 1988. Thatโ€™s how I got to stay in Norway to this day. Both love and Karate no longer rule my life in Norway. But Iโ€™m still here; largely because of the joys, trials, and tribulations that the love and Karate exposed me to in the country. I experienced the joys, I wanted more and more. Norway delivered; I got addicted to the land.

I having been overwhelmed by difficult circumstances beyond my control, once unleashed, the trials and tribulations were ruthless. Under the hardships of life in Norway, Iโ€™ve seen many a lesser man from the African Diaspora spiritually buckle, fall, rise, and walk dead. All faith gone, no hope, neither mental nor physical strength left, they die. Literally. I decided that if I fall, I shall fall. But I would never die. I didnโ€™t travel more than half the world to let problems of life kill me so far away from home. One way or another Iโ€™d find a way to rise again; just I can breathe. I could never return neither to Zambia nor South Africa poor and without a business PhD degree. Never.

Indeed, I fell once; I fell a second time. On the third fall I lost everything, including face. My people networks collapsed. For once left alone, Rockstar popularity dissipated, I got the opportunity to be better acquainted with myself as a grown-up man. I saw clearly my dreams, my potential in life. I became my bestiest bestie. Now I know myself well. Better than ever. My self-knowledge trip gets better and better and more rewarding each and every new day that comes and goes.

I got to understand that my social survival navigator skills by way of my sellable talents may be many, but the relevant shall come forth and carry me through only specific situational needs in order to respond accordingly to given conditions in different epochs and spaces. The constant steering ethos being my personal motto of change, win, adapt, or die.

Iโ€™ve learned to change perspectives, acquire new skills sets, and adopt varying modus operandi to ensure victory in the face of adversity, no matter how long it takes. This knowledge also helps me to take to the next level what I already know and works in my favour presently. Concurrent with applicable talents, the ability to adapt to, and flow with the currents of changing or changed circumstances is a powerful tool for success for me. I have yet to die. I might talk about death on the other side, should I die.

Whilst recovering from the major fall following the devastating personal economy knock that I got from the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, I had fully embraced the idea that all I had to do was to chill and wait for my next big break. I had suffered enough. I had learned more about myself and the ways of the world to know that I had to stay alert, fresh, and strong for the impending big break; whatever it would be, wherever it would take me, and whatever it would do with me.

It was a painful wait. Much reading, thinking, and writing rechannelled the emotional and mental torment to the enhancement of my creative potential as a writer. If I can read about it, I can write about it; tell a story about it in my own words.

If I can write about it, I can deconstruct it; I will better comprehend the challenges, I will see solutions. If I can write about it, I can dream. If I can dream, I can hope. My faith is shaped in the messages of my dreams. My writings tell the story that everythingโ€™s gonna be alright ahead. Keep moving.  

I have been through so many personal falls and rises that I know when an opportunity for my self-reinvention is nigh. The feeling of anticipation I get in times like these is like no other. I become larger than life in my thoughts so that when the opportunity for me to rise again arrives I wonโ€™t lose control of my sensibilities.  

Whilst I had visions of yet another multi-million-dollar international trade business venture, as the book writing inspiration suddenly revealed itself one fine morning in August, 2015, I knew that my real calling had finally come home. I got into a frenzy. Feeling like one possessed by the spirits of our greatest ever historical and contemporary world authors, I went on to write the first of my dream-of-one-thousand-plus books before I turn 100 years old.

The debut novel, When the Mighty Fall โ€“ rise again mindgames, I wrote in fourteen days. It became about the story of my first twenty-five years in Norway presented in a semi-autobiographical, or fantasy memoir format. Intense emotions and scenes arise in the book: boundaries are pushed and crossed; limitations are overcome, people reset themselves and their lives, stereotypes are crushed. All played out by at least equally intense and exceptional characters. The book has changed my life; it has made me a better person. It started the process by which I continue to learn and understand humanity and our universe better the more I write and think, and think and write.

Working with the book from the start, and living with the variable impacts it continues to have on its readers are a constant, in real-time steep learning curve. I guess itโ€™s a mark of a significant book when the author gets a mixed bag of strong reactions from the readers. Acquire and read the book for yourself so that you can make your own conclusions. Love or hate me as you wish; it is your prerogative in a free world. If you wish to destroy me for your hate, I wonโ€™t take you lying on my back.

My embracing this book writing calling of mine was with a clear awareness that my works would never be appreciated by all. Iโ€™ve in my life read more than enough books to appreciate that fact well. Iโ€™ve over the years come across numerous literary critiques on various media also. What has shocked me, though, is the gross misinterpretation of my thoughts and intentions in and with the aforementioned book. This has been especially so given that it is the least expected section of my readership that has been thoroughly brutal in their condemnation of me and the book. Perhaps this makes the point for writers knowing about their actual and potential target readers. However, as for me, to the extent that I so far write personally inspired factual and fictional narratives as opposed to formal academic, or professional literature, I in principle write for myself. I could never write if I went around thinking about who my readers are, or shall be, and how they will judge my works eventually.  

Working clandestinely, my aforementioned brutal critics, on utterly wrongful, naรฏve conjectures, have gone around tarnishing my reputation in Norway. People read my books. In their readings they come face-to-face with demons they conjure for themselves. They panic; lose it. They judge and punish me without a trial. Pathetic.

Because my conscience is clear, and because of my resolute dedication to growing and developing my creative writing talent and occupation to the 1000th book and beyond, the hurt and emotional turmoil I initially felt are gone. Iโ€™m healed. Iโ€™m strong. Iโ€™m on the rise again, destined for higher and higher heights of success than ever. Iโ€™ve written eight more books since the When the Mighty Fall publication. Iโ€™m on the roll; right on track. No one, nothing can stop me.

ยฉSimon Chilembo 2021

Travelling from Lusaka back to Oslo with Qatar Airways two weeks ago, it was on the first leg of the trip, Lusaka-Doha, that I took time to take a deep dive into reflections of my highs and lows in Norway over the years. I couldnโ€™t help but dwell upon encounters with some really bad people that have always been there to hinder my climb to success in the things that I do by way of making a living in the country. The bad people were in total contrast to the loving and caring ones that I met during my short family matters visit in Lusaka, from August 20-29, 2023.

These bad people have striven to ever hamper my genuine efforts to work to be a decent human being with a well-intended commitment to my personal aspiration of adding value to society to the extent that Iโ€™m resourceful and productive. Some have been outright about their dislike of, and disdain for me. I can live with that.

Others have turned out to be Judases in the end. A sickening lot that once ranked high as confidants in my world. These provoke my primordial survival instincts when I consider that they are ever gathering somewhere conniving to micro-assassinate me slowly. A mission I could never allow them the pleasure of achieving. Unless I am overtly potentially or actually caused bodily harm, I am not likely to resort to violence as an immediate self-preservation recourse. However, my warrior creative spirit observes, or experiences and analyses everything.

I apply different writing styles as dictated upon by the moments when I celebrate or decry events around me, both near and distant. I do the same with uplifting or destructive actions specifically directed towards me. That way I get to vent out my frustrations and anger without spilling a drop of blood. Then I can sustain my sense of personal safety and integrity in the face of adversity; irrespective of whether the adversity is overt or discreet. My words are my armour.

The poem Iโ€™m going to read came forth during the process of thinking about the latest Judases, wolves in sheepโ€™s clothing that have emerged with their true colours in the dark in recent years. It is a self-preservation, protest poetry piece. This poem also sets my eyes on October 24th, 2023, which will mark the fifth year of my return to Norway after a five-year creative exile in South Africa.

Aware that my enemies had already drawn their swords to slay me, I felt like I had brought myself into the mythical lionsโ€™ den at my arrival in Oslo. But I knew I was blameless contra the enemiesโ€™ smear campaign against me. Iโ€™m grandson of a Daniel, father of my mother. The Biblical Daniel was โ€œโ€ฆ saved from lions by the God of Israel “because I was found blameless before him” (Daniel 6:22). So, Iโ€™m still intact; standing tall, breathing happy and free, crafting words into literary expressions in my efforts to make sense of my world.

Similar to other writings of mine addressing my personal life conditions and states of being owing to simply being who I am and the personal choices that I make all the time, Iโ€™ve written the poem not out of a need to defend, explain, or justify myself. I do not seek any validation nor accolades from some Jacks and Jills anywhere either. I listen only to my teachers, to men and women of authentic benevolence: proven mediums of global human excellence, love and peace.

I primarily write to purify my soul, ease my pains, and fortify my spirit. I write as a good-intentions, free, have-no-fear spirit with nothing to hide in a free world. I feel good about what I do; I know Iโ€™m good at it. And thatโ€™s all that matters to me. It is what it is. I am that I am. Take me, or leave me as it is your prerogative in your free world. 

I publicise my works in response to what I feel to be a higher call to share my thoughts with those that want to hear my words. This call inspires me to aspire to teach and to speak for the young, the weak and vulnerable: the afraid, the oppressed, the voiceless. That from my life experiences as lived-in moments in time. Also as learned from hearing the voices of others that are much wiser than me.

The wiser than me being my teachers across the board, including some of the most impactful historical and contemporary philosophical and spiritual wells of wisdom of the world. All from one-on-one teachings and discussions with the living, or through consumption of the wiseโ€™ thoughts through the variety of multimedia platforms available in our times: from the written word in books, to sight, sound, and motion presentations in live theatres; on cinema, television, and computer screens.

Thanks to the power of the internet, we today have the said multimedia platforms compressed and collapsed into the palms of our hands via mobile telephone technology. Knowledge acquisition and dissemination of the same, verification of facts and propagation of truths, debunking of falsities and crushing of conspiracy theories, are all at the tips of our fingers these days. Therefore, those that manage and live their lives on unchecked assumptions; uninformed, factually fallacious decision-making tendencies do so at their own peril.       

ยฉSimon Chilembo 11.09.2023  

Self-made
New enemies of me
People I donโ€™t know
Lurk in dark corners
I donโ€™t know
Wish me dead

They donโ€™t know
Iโ€™m a free soul of the light
I donโ€™t know how to hide
I donโ€™t know how to die
Darkness cannot contain me

Invincible to eyes that see
I worry but little
Of fools groping in the dark
Hoping for a lucky strike
To annihilate me

Iโ€™m not
In a state of war
I fear no drones
No stealth missiles threats to
My soul of the light
Defence system

My shield is
My words
I push back with
My voice
I sing one moment
I preach the next
I wail this moment
The moment I growl
Earth trembles under my feet

Self-made
New enemies of me
Faceless people I donโ€™t know
Fools with reasons for
Enmity I donโ€™t know
Duped in fake storytelling tales
Of witches in fright
Of demons of them
Confronting them
In the glow of light
Permeating
The darkest recesses of the universe
In fright
Fight
Shadows of themselves in the dark
Tumbling in muddy faeces
Of their own
Gathered in trenches
Of massless conspiracy constructs
Meant to implode
A free soul of the light
They cannot see

I could never collapse
Into myself
Squash me
Sprout me
As particles of
My flesh and bones
In deep waters

Delusionals donโ€™t know
Thatโ€™s the closest theyโ€™ll ever
Come to harming me
Envious fools donโ€™t know me
Inconsequential foolsโ€™ll never see me
Repugnant fools embraced by
Darkness I donโ€™t know
Darkness I donโ€™t care about *

I cannot run away from the light
I have nothing to hide
I donโ€™t know how to hide
I have nowhere to hide
Not even a tomb can contain me
I had to break the law
Drank and drove
For prison walls to hold me
If only for a while

Youโ€™ll never find
Remains of me
In pyramids of Egypt
In a thousand years
When I say catch me if you can
I play with words
No longer do I play with
Bloodsuckers
Stabbed me in the back
I could have bled to death
Had it not been for
The light stronger than
Enemiesโ€™ self-consuming malice
In the dark

Resilience is the name of
Dark-hearts-impervious
Light games I play

Here I am to see
For all eyes with love
Iโ€™m a soul of invictus
I breathe love
As a matter of course
Iโ€™m here to stay
Longevity is the name of
My dance for life
Immortality is the name
Of my end-game
Beat that
If you can
๐—˜๐—ก๐——
ยฉSimon Chilembo 11.08.2023

On the 24th of October, 2019, I wrote the following article on my private blog, chilembowarriormoves.com:

๐—ข๐—ก๐—˜ ๐—ฌ๐—˜๐—”๐—ฅ ๐—Ÿ๐—”๐—ง๐—˜๐—ฅ: ๐—œ๐—Ÿ๐—Ÿ๐—จ๐—ฆ๐—œ๐—ข๐—ก๐—ฆ ๐—œ๐—ก ๐— ๐—ฌ ๐—ช๐—ข๐—ฅ๐—Ÿ๐——.
๐—ฅ๐—˜๐—”๐—Ÿ๐—œ๐—ง๐—ฌ ๐—œ๐—ฆ ๐—œ ๐—”๐—  ๐—›๐—˜๐—ฅ๐—˜, ๐—œ ๐—Ÿ๐—œ๐—ฉ๐—˜, ๐—œ ๐—Ÿ๐—ข๐—ฉ๐—˜, ๐—œ ๐——๐—”๐—ก๐—–๐—˜.
๐—œ ๐—”๐—œ๐—กโ€™๐—ง ๐—š๐—ข๐—œ๐—ก๐—š ๐—ก๐—ข๐—ช๐—›๐—˜๐—ฅ๐—˜.

๐”๐๐Œ๐€๐‘๐‘๐ˆ๐„๐ƒ ๐Œ๐„๐ ๐Œ๐”๐’๐“ ๐ƒ๐ˆ๐„?

๐ƒ๐„๐€๐“๐‡ ๐“๐Ž ๐’๐ˆ๐๐†๐‹๐„ ๐Œ๐„๐?

Sometime last year, 2022, whilst I was in the middle of working with my latest and nineth book, MACHONA GRIT โ€“ Onslaught On Hate, I came across an Instagram reel that caught my interest fleetingly. In this reel, the speaker made fiery, disparaging, and violence instigating remarks against single men. The speaker is a prominent American religious leader whose thoughts influence hundreds of millions of people across the world. However, not all will be direct adherents of his unique religious flock within the broader global faith movement of the umbrella religion, which could be Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or any other. They all serve the same purpose: harnessing of our primitive instincts, limiting the extent to which we can think we are free-thinking, independent individuals. Religion, a tool of oppression as destructive as can be.     

I choose not to name the religious leader because Iโ€™ve failed to find the said Instagram reel for a concrete reference source. Nevertheless, I have throughout all my adult life so far, come across innumerable sentiments like those uttered by the man of God vis-ร -vis men living alone without women as their marital partners.

Basically, the unmarried men hatersโ€™ contention is that solitary living unmarried men are not real men; because they are not real men, they are anti-God, and thus they deserve to die. The unmarried men haters say that God must kill single men, and it is the duty of all married men serving God to ensure that Godโ€™s will is fulfilled: death to the unmarried. Amen!

Itโ€™s strange that Catholic priests donโ€™t get married, though. Celibacy doesnโ€™t mean abstinence. Catholic priests do get caught doing the hanky panky too. When the priests sexually abuse small boys, I wonder about where God is when all this happens. Does he turn blind eyes? In that case, God is an accessory to a heinous crime. ย 

Personally, such emotional abuse and death threats Iโ€™ve outlined above are beneath me; they donโ€™t scathe me even a single bit. Iโ€™m sixty-three years old. Iโ€™m single, and Iโ€™ve never been married by choice. Over the years, Iโ€™ve on various fora already mentioned that Iโ€™m under no obligation to explain, to justify, or to defend my unmarried, solitary living to anybody. All men-of-God wanting to kill me for my choice to stay young, free, and single must just bring it on anytime. God himself is such an illusion so full of contradictions I have not time for.

For God so thrives in tyranny he made man in his, undefinable, multifaceted, illusory image. He accordingly polarized man; made man into a treacherous, murderous creature of fellow man for transgressions of frivolous, ill-defined, prejudicial so-called sins. A God of love who rules by threats and application of murder does not make sense to me.

To solve a dominance problem, brothers believing in the same God go to war against one another; as in, say, the current case of Russia against Ukraine. They simultaneously pray the same God for protection of themselves on the one hand, and power to annihilate the other on the other hand. For the time it shall take as to location of the war and the relative strengths of the warring parties, absolute mayhem, pillage, and murder could go on until the last man. Somebody might set off atomic bombs, and then weโ€™ll all be gone tomorrow. Adios, God!

Killers praising God for strength. The dying praying God for mercy. Priests praying God to receive the spirits of the dead in heaven; whilst the shredded body parts, if not ground flesh of the dead rest in eternal peace on earth fertilizing Ukrainian killing fields, if not the Congolese killing jungles. God nowhere to be seen. Not a sound from God.

No, the whole idea of the existence of an omnipresent God does not make any sense to me at all. God as an idea and a possible entity amongst us defies all logic. But, of course, his believers can have him. We are all already burning here on the hell that is planet earth, anyway. Heaven is in the minds of the free-spirited seekers and propagators of humane truths in pursuance of fairness and justice for mankind on earth.

In my countering the idea of death to men-without-women, I take the liberty to speak for the voiceless, the weak and vulnerable, the oppressed; the afraid. I do so simply because I can. I am no Messiah. I am a free spirit that scientifically knows that apart from the fundamental genetic coding that separates humans from other animals, each human being has an own unique subordinate genetic makeup that characteristically distinguishes them from other human beings. That distinction manifests itself in all aspects of being human, from state of health and its vulnerabilities to behavioural proclivities that may or may not reflect or condition our values in adulthood.

To the extent that human beings share a common physiological essence of being, it means that, although individually unique, our personal human attributes expressive traits are not finitely closed to the individual. Therefore, each our respective individual behavioural patterns, as reflected and influenced by our cognitive powers and processes, will cross, and interact with others. This is how relationships are formed, both voluntarily or through coercion. Human social organizations of all sizes and all sorts of interests, agendas, philosophies, and aspirations stem from here.

However, some peopleโ€™s human proclivities constructs will be so incongruent from others that they cannot easily fit into any structured social organization cage reflecting certain strictly defined control and manipulative values, such as religion, political movements or orientations, marriage, and many more. These are the eccentrics, the think-outside-the-box types, the innovators, the critics who, for the good or bad, question everything.

Through the epochs, there arise, amongst others, unconventional analysts, critical thinkers, philosophers, artists of all talents, social change makers, rebels, radicals, and freedom fighters whose thoughts and actions have lasting impacts on society. So, much as not everyone can be a rocket scientist; and not everyone can be an Usain Bolt, or be a religious fanatic, not every man can want to marry, or will be married by force or hook or crook. Marriage is not for every Jack and Jill.

Marriage does not define a man. Marriage is a concept a man gets into. With or without marriage, a man is a man. A brilliant man will be brilliant irrespective of whether they are married or not. In my private and professional lives, I have come across many idiotic married men. I can write volumes about idiotic married men. But for now, Iโ€™ll reduce all that to the total lack of respect these men subject their wives to.

Married men who beat up their wives disgust me. Married men who spend minimum time with their wives but unashamedly โ€˜fโ€™ around with other lovers and mistresses do not score high in my books. Many of these abused and neglected wives are some of the most melancholic women Iโ€™ve ever seen. In my travels around Europe many years ago, I met a grown-up lady who once said to me something like, โ€œSimon, itโ€™s taken me thirty years to realize that I got married to an a-hole of a man!โ€

Thirty-three years later, the couple now older and even more weary of each other, their marriage is still going strong. Thatโ€™s because, โ€œWe are Catholics. We donโ€™t divorce!โ€
Oh, help me God!
Which reminded me of what a dear brother of mine once said to me about women who hang on all their lives to marriages with a-hole men, โ€œAccording to our African cultures, divorce is unthinkable for many a woman. Divorce is โ€˜haramโ€™, you see!โ€
Jeeezzuzzz!!!   

Iโ€™m not anti-marriage. Reality is that Iโ€™m a great fan of marriage. Serious. If ever the poetโ€™s one fine day finds me at the right time and place, I could get married at the snap of a finger. Marriage is good. That to the extent that it mutually fulfils both the conceptual and functional expectations of the marriage partners.

By the conceptual I refer mainly to the subjective sentiment of love, the feelings it induces, and the expectations and obligations it imposes on those in love. Simply because we can never read peopleโ€™s minds, we can never know the feelings of other people, just as we can never know their expectations and self-defined obligations when in love. But fidelity and devotion are principles Iโ€™ve learned that they play an even more critical role in marriage. If these hold, marriage has chances of a long life.

Functional expectations in marriage are about the objective practicalities of day-to-day life that the married will and do encounter in their living together as a couple and, subsequently, as parents if children do come into the picture in time. Here are included aspects of family economic strength; an important consideration in the determination of how and where the family shall live. Other crucial questions to address will include division of duties in the home, management of extended families and other social relations, faith, culture and traditions, political affiliations, career development and ambitions, family wealth creation and sustenance, as well as many other practical considerations.     

In my world, a marriage that fails to deliver on the mutual conceptual and functional expectations for the married couple cannot hold. It need not hold at all cost, โ€˜haramโ€™ or no โ€˜haramโ€™. Marriage is not supposed to be an institution reminiscent of slavery. Neither is marriage supposed to be an institution of permanent dependency of women to physical-emotional abusive men.

Marriage is not an institution carved in stone. In any case, marriage is not an inherent feature of being human. Marriage is but one of many institutions man-created for purposes of social order maintenance, or social engineering. I fail to see how a non-functional, degrading marriage can contribute to social order. This brings forth the element of divorce, of which Iโ€™m as great a fan too. Whereas, indeed, marriage is good, divorce liberates. If ever I do get married at some point in the future, Iโ€™ll be the first to file for divorce as soon as I detect irreconcilable dysfunctionalities in my marriage.

People that are deeply in love, and wish to be together for life often look forward with glee to getting married. The same enthusiasm could be shown for impending, or desired divorce from a bad marriage. Women must not be afraid of divorce. Thereโ€™ll always be a better, stronger, and more caring man for a lover or new husband according to what civil status the divorced woman wishes to have. Itโ€™s ok to be single also. Again, in both my private and professional lives, Iโ€™m familiar with divorcee women that live happily ever after; divorce having given them a chance to pursue new paths towards fulfilling and sustainable self-reinvention efforts.                 

Some of the happiest men I know are married. Equally, thereโ€™s a hell lot of infectiously happy single, unmarried, never-been-married men I know. Of course, contents of the happiness baskets vary from the one man to the other man, regardless of civil status. Nevertheless, happiness is happiness. Happiness makes for a balanced, productive citizenry.

Conversely, the unhappiest, loser types of men I know, and have known are, or have been married. I have in my time come across extremely lonely married men. Weakened of spirit, and hoping to find happiness and comfort away from their wives, many of these sad married men are prone to extremes of costly promiscuous tendencies. Some end up falling prey to alcohol and substance abuse, with potentially dire consequences. Suicidal tendencies are not uncommon here. So much for marriage as an instrument of social cohesion. There absolutely are other ways to prove that a man is a man and worthy of societal recognition as such than apparently โ€˜fโ€™-ing around and holding women in the bondage of dehumanizing marriages.

I pity men that get into and remain in unhappy marriages for โ€˜reasons beyond my controlโ€™: family and/ peer pressure, โ€˜that is what people doโ€™, children, potential impoverishment through loss of accumulated wealth to the ex-wife in the event of a divorce, and other reasons.

It ought to be a given that nation states will strive as much as it is humanely possible to create all necessary conditions for a happy state of existence for the people. The various social interests organizations prevailing in society are there to ensure that the state lives up to its obligations for the people. This is what social justice work is about.

Itโ€™s not up to social interests organizations leaders to arbitrarily judge and condemn to death certain categories of their fellow citizens for being non-confirmatory to fluid social conventions such as marriage. Single, unmarried, and/ or never-been-married men deserve to live life to its fullest potential just like everyone else. Jesus was killed for other reasons than for that he was unmarried.

And talking about God, biographyonline.net says, โ€œSwami Vivekananda, [a] spiritual teacher and important figure in Indian renaissance of the late nineteenth century. A great believer in the virtues of celibacy [says] โ€œIf one wastes the most potent forces of oneโ€™s being, one cannot become spiritual. All history teaches us that the great seers of all ages were either monks and ascetics or those who had given up married life; only the pure in life can see God.โ€

Furthermore, biographyonline.net says that โ€œNikola Tesla was a unique inventor who threw himself into discovering new advances in electronics and science. He had no interest in marriage and saw sex as a distraction from his lifeโ€™s purpose. A famous actress of the time, Sarah Bernhardt, tried to attract him, but, he merely saw her as a distraction. When asked about marriage, he replied: โ€œI do not think you can name many great inventions that have been made by married men.โ€

WHEN THE MIGHTY FALL ON MARRIAGE

From my debut novel, WHEN THE MIGHTY FALL โ€“ rise again mindgames   Iโ€™ll read a passage on marriage. That is from p. 63 to p. 66:

โ€œPeople get married for a myriad of reasons. There are some who seem to have gotten married not knowing why and how it began at all, though. They just found themselves in it. Trying to make sense of it all with time, they simplistically and conveniently conclude that, well, everyone else does it, why not them?

โ€œCulture and social norms dictate it, they shall reason. Inevitably they make a mess of it, making life extremely miserable for themselves, their marriage partners, as well as everyone else who has anything to do with them in about all aspects of life. Many a person in this category marries themselves into murder and suicide, the ultimate tragedy of marriage.

โ€œMarriage is another unnatural institution the functionality of which is a non-ending attempt at structuring, engineering, and regulating instinctive, natural human behaviour in certain predictable directions. If it is instinctive, it happens freely according to its own predetermined, internal logic, irrespective of whether external factors are conducive, congruent or not.

โ€œFrom society to society, culture to culture, marriage rules determine how many marriage partners one can have in either direction, how often, when. The rules will also specify rituals to be followed in order to sanctify the coming together of people in marriage.

โ€œSanctification of marriage is enforced through the morals and ethics around it, particularly with respect to aspects of fidelity, respect, trust, duty, and obligation. Meaning that, in a perfect world, once bound in and by marriage, people ought to be together for life; thereby ensuring order, stability, and harmony in society.

โ€œMarriage defines boundaries and territorial integrities of the married, and their subsequent family units. These have to be acknowledged and respected in order to provide for peaceful co-existence, as well as orderly and systematic growth, progress, and development in society.

โ€œPerhaps an often-overlooked function of marriage contra instinctive, natural human behavioural tendencies is the population growth control aspect of it.

โ€œWithout the perceived and learned value of marriage as a behavioural moderation institution in societal functioning, society would be thrown into total chaos as humans respond unrestrained to instinctive, natural urges of sex, and sexual reproduction.

โ€œJealousy, power, domination, and control inspired violence in the competition for partners towards letting out, and responding to the said instinctive natural urges would be the order rather than the exception for collective human existence.

โ€œWithout the rigidities of formalized marriage rules with respect to family expansion by way of conception, birth, and raising of children, human population pressure on planet earth and its limited resources would most probably be of magnitudes much higher relative to what the situation is today. A recipe for the eventual extinction of the human race on earth due to, among other things, territorial wars making what the world currently experiences of regional wars look like a childrenโ€™s Sunday picnic in the park.

โ€œMarriage is, therefore, some very serious business. It is not for the non-thinking, and faint-hearted.

โ€œFor marriage to work for the married, or yet to be married, and therefore be beneficial to society, people have to fully understand its implications and ramifications. Irrespective of the reasons, or circumstances leading to marriage, it is of vital importance to understand and acknowledge that marriage is ultimately a personal journey.

โ€œIts life-changing implications are huge, they can never be overestimated. Life is never, it will never be the same once married. Chances of marriage being a lasting success are higher in cases where the process and the institution are congruent not only with the feelings of the concerned, but also their beliefs, faiths, values, hopes, dreams, and aspirations, among others.

โ€œPitfalls of marriage are many, deep, and wide in cases where people unwillingly, or uncritically, fall into the trap by marrying to fulfill expected conventional behaviour. The latter may be in relation to culture, religion, life circumstances, and peer pressure.

โ€œMarriage stands chances of going the distance to the extent that it is both a mutually voluntary, as well as a well-thought-out space of the most intimate of human interactions to choose to venture into.

โ€œThere are those who shall base their marriages on love. They deeply love one another above anything or anyone else on earth. Marriage will, therefore, be a natural consummation of that love. But love alone is never adequate to sustain a marriage.

โ€œLove facilitates, and spices up marriage; it does not make a marriage. Love is the key to a potential marriage partnerโ€™s heart. Love is a ringing bell into another personโ€™s, a potential marriage partnerโ€™s, life. To be sustained and sustainable, love itself needs tender loving care. But it cannot on its own guarantee a happily-ever-after life of marriage.

โ€œTo the extent that in many a perfunctorily functional marriage, love may not be the driving force, love and marriage can be mutually exclusive in the same space. Trouble in paradise.

โ€œThere is, there will always be much love to get outside marriage. As a natural instinct, people will always know when they are in love or not. Love instinctively gravitates towards love. If there is love in marriage, chances are that the marriage can be kept together.

โ€œLove is a natural force of emotion that knows no colour, race, religion, or creed. Because it is a vital part of, but larger than marriage, any marriage the importance of which is attached more to man-made concepts of culture, religion, and other social conventions than love is doomed to failure.

โ€œThe natural urge to want to feed love with, and on love, is ever so strong that people in miserable marriages will as a matter of course and natural predictability go out to look for love elsewhere. That done with either open defiance, or total discretion to the extent it will last. In many cases, this will turn out to be a direct order for the ultimate tragedy of marriage.

โ€œReality is that when a supposedly unfaithful marriage, or romantic, partner is dead, they are dead, and they are so with all the things the murderer demanded; they will never come back. Much as when the supposedly betrayed marriage, or romantic, partner has committed suicide, there is no knowing that they will find what they demanded of their partners on the other side.โ€

Thatโ€™ll be it for today. If you want to get married, do so and be happy; only if the matrimony meets your conceptual and functional expectations; not forgetting obligations to yourself as a person and as a matrimonial partner. If the marriage doesnโ€™t work, get out of it. Fast. The paradox is that youโ€™ll never know if your marriage will work or not until youโ€™ve gotten into it first. If it works, it works. Well and good. If it doesnโ€™t work, it doesnโ€™t work. Leave.

Divorce might cost you a lot of things in the beginning. It is what it is. Freedom doesnโ€™t come cheap. Hang in there. Have hope. Keep the faith. The future is bright. Time heals. Make it your goal to live long enough to see the good that the future has in store for you.    

SIMON CHILEMBO
OSLO
NORWAY
July 03, 2023

๐€๐‘๐“๐–๐Ž๐‘๐Š๐’ ๐€๐‹๐ˆ๐•๐„

Reserve Husband in House of Beautiful Things

In my Tumbuka tribe in Zambia, a man is his brothersโ€™ wivesโ€™ reserve husband. Traditionally, this is an informal but serious involuntary and platonic bond that commits the reserve husband to taking care of the sisters-in-law and, especially, the children, should some incapacitating or fatal misfortune visit the brother.

I am a single, never-been-married man with several wives from a few select blood brothers and bosom friends. I introduce one of the wives as I invite you on a day at my work place of beautiful things.

Our vehicle is the poem ARTWORKS ALIVE, which happens to be the very first piece in Onslaught 1 in the MACHONA GRIT poetry book.

Poems in Onslaught 1 reflect some aspects of my defiant intellectual, philosophical, and spiritual Personal Integrity Fortress against those that hate me.

๐€๐‘๐“๐–๐Ž๐‘๐Š๐’ ๐€๐‹๐ˆ๐•๐„
Separated
By the pond
Wife from another husband
My Dear Brother Ricky
Son Bolokiyoโ€™s
๐˜”๐˜ข๐˜ฎ๐˜ข ๐˜๐˜ช๐˜ค๐˜ต๐˜ฐ๐˜ณ๐˜ช๐˜ข and I
Met in the face of a book
In cyberspace
Celebrating her birthday
We took mikes and sang
We Djโ€™d
We danced
Fell on our backs in joy and laughter
We dropped the mikes
Went our separate ways
In the perennial dollar chase

๐˜ˆ๐˜ฎ๐˜ข๐˜ญ๐˜ถ๐˜ฎ๐˜ฆ ๐˜ˆ๐˜ญ๐˜ฆ๐˜ฎ๐˜ฆ๐˜ญ๐˜ข
Blazing in my head
Yandikani Lunguโ€™ spirit
With me in
๐˜”๐˜ถ๐˜ป๐˜ถ๐˜ฏ๐˜จ๐˜ถ ๐˜”๐˜ข๐˜ค๐˜ฉ๐˜ฐ๐˜ฏ๐˜ข๐˜ญ๐˜ข๐˜ฏ๐˜ฅ
In the north
From where lost souls never return
Black Diamonds
Hustling to bling
In the land of
Black gold

Got to work
Iโ€™m so happy
I feel
Artworksโ€™ eyes
On the walls
On me
I clear my head
I see
Artworks on the walls
Dance for me
Artworksโ€™ subjects
Come to life in the frames
[…]
๐—˜๐—ก๐——
ยฉSimon Chilembo 14/12-2022

SIMON CHILEMBO  
OSLO
NORWAY
TEL.: +92525032
April 07, 2023

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๐†๐‹๐Ž๐‘๐˜ ๐ƒ๐€๐˜๐’

Living in the Now

I donโ€™t live
On past glory
Past glory is what it is
Done
Dusted
Trashed
Buried
Closed chapters
Unforgettable
Crystalized
In my songs
History
For posterity
Education

And they
Detractors
Donโ€™t understand
How it is
That I can rule today
Despite their throwing stones
At me everyday

They thought
They knew me
During my glory days
They canโ€™t figure out
Whatโ€™s become of me
When they expected
Iโ€™d vaporize
In lustreless
Post-glory days life today
Them
Pathetic dimwits
Thinking they are
My redeemers
When even
Jesus ainโ€™t my cuppa tea

I sing Hallelujah
Only โ€˜cause
It is a beautiful song
Written by a human
Out of human experience
It kindles
My glory
Which comes from within

Iโ€™m smooth
I shine
Iโ€™m glass
Reinforced
Animosity might rattle me
I wonโ€™t crack
I wonโ€™t break

Iโ€™m black
Iโ€™m bold
I glitter
Iโ€™m diamond
Iโ€™m gold fortressed
Amalgamated
Iโ€™m steel
Stainless
Dirt donโ€™t sit on me

Animosities bullet-proofed
Stones might hit me
They wonโ€™t punch holes
Through my skin
They wonโ€™t cause me harm

Hate war machines might strike me
I wonโ€™t crack
I wonโ€™t bend
I wonโ€™t fall

Glory days might come and go
True to form
Constant
My presence shall beam
Irrespective of time and space
Indomitable
When it is
My time
To grace
My space
Which is all times
All places I stand

Glory is my gift of life
For life
And they
Haters
Will never understand
How it is that
I fear not the future
Faithful to my fate
I have nothing to hide
Never had

Iโ€™m an open book
I walk my written words
Thatโ€™s my nature
True to my name
Writingโ€™s on the wall

Expository
Glory days
Spill the beans
In more ways than one
Itโ€™s only a matter of time
Bring it on

Alert
When they appear tomorrow
Them the haters
Iโ€™ll see them from afar

Fazed
They donโ€™t know
They donโ€™t know me
Theyโ€™ve never known me
Theyโ€™ll never know me
No love lost

Resilient
I live my life today
For future glory today
Thatโ€™s life worth living today
Elixir of life
Any given day
Glory
Hallelujah
Praise be to
Immortality
Living hard
Living tough
Living strong
Today
Crush me if you dare
๐„๐๐ƒ
ยฉSimon Chilembo 30/11-2022

๐€๐…๐‘๐ˆ๐‚๐€ ๐’๐‚๐‘๐„๐–๐„๐ƒ. ๐€๐…๐‘๐ˆ๐‚๐€ ๐‘๐€๐๐„๐ƒ.

๐—ก๐—ข ๐—›๐—ข๐— ๐—˜ ๐—™๐—ข๐—ฅ ๐—•๐—ฅ๐—œ๐—š๐—›๐—ง ๐— ๐—˜๐—ก

๐€๐‹๐Ž๐๐„ ๐ˆ๐ ๐๐Ž๐‘๐–๐€๐˜, ๐’๐‡๐€๐‹๐‹ ๐ˆ ๐‘๐„๐“๐”๐‘๐ ๐“๐Ž ๐€๐…๐‘๐ˆ๐‚๐€ ๐Ž๐‘ ๐๐Ž๐“ ๐”๐๐Ž๐ ๐Œ๐˜ ๐ˆ๐Œ๐๐„๐๐ƒ๐ˆ๐๐† ๐‘๐„๐“๐ˆ๐‘๐„๐Œ๐„๐๐“ ๐ˆ๐ ๐Ÿ๐ŸŽ๐Ÿ๐Ÿ•?

Question asked by confidants, cynics, and the disdainful alike. To the extent that the current existential reality of the world, and that of myself as an individual remain unimproved, Iโ€™ll stay in Norway. I couldnโ€™t live in Africa. Suffering from chronic post-colonialism Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Africa is a place just too messed up for me. Iโ€™ve lost all hope for the future of Africa as a progressive, equal geopolitics partner.

Acknowledging the presence of exceptional individual African minds; also, the potential of imparting good citizenry awareness to children and youth, my hope is not really totally lost. Addressing the attendant transgenerational trauma with a view to healing it is a long parallel process.

Were I to be a national political leader in Africa, Iโ€™d become a tyrant overnight as Iโ€™d be brutal against the corrupt, incompetent, and insolent ignoramuses. I rather prefer working at the grass-roots.  

SIMON CHILEMBO
OSLO
NORWAY
TEL.: +4792525032
09 September, 2022

๐—ข๐—ก ๐—”๐—•๐—ข๐—ฅ๐—ง๐—œ๐—ข๐—ก: ๐—ฃ๐—”๐—ฅ๐—ง ๐—œ๐—œ

ษชษด๊œฐแดส€แดแด‡แด… ๊œฑแด›แด€ษดแด… แดษด แดกแดแดแด‡ษดโ€™๊œฑ ๊œฑแด‡xแดœแด€สŸ ส€แด‡แด˜ส€แดแด…แดœแด„แด›ษชแด แด‡ สœแด‡แด€สŸแด›สœ ส€ษชษขสœแด›๊œฑ

I came to the world via South Africa, where I spent the first fourteen-and-half years of my life, June 1960-January 1975. As I get older and older for each new year that comes and goes, the impact that growing up in that country has had on my fundamental views of life becomes ever more glaring. That as I strive to make sense of the multitudinous manifestations of horrendous sociological choices outcomes in the world today. In that sense, I was born at the right place, in my time.

The horrendous sociological choices outcomes I mention above arising from apparent mental derangement states in which some of our national and global political leaders thrive as they pathetically engineer society to perpetual dysfunctionality. They think out, formulate, and work to impose outrageous rules and laws that are obviously detrimental to the well-being of society. In fact, these lunatics present an existential threat to human and other life on earth. This as evidenced by national social upheavals owing to ever degenerative leadership quality across the world.

Social collapse attendant to dominant degenerate ethico-political leadership characteristically culminate in civil and international wars, ill-management of potential and actual natural catastrophes, including pandemics. The current Covid-19 pandemic is supposed to have given the world a wake-up call. Of course, this is an outlandish idea to many a national-global leader, and, not in the least, a segment of the new socio-cultural influencer class at the same scale. The latter extensively prevalent in the vast and ever so rapidly growing internet social media platforms sphere.   

In the world today, Rocket Science knowledge is not a pre-requisite for the ability to pinpoint where on the globe the scum of society are all out to deprive people of the right to live free and happy in the abundance of survival resources existence provides for all. Itโ€™s all on Google. Itโ€™s all in the news. If you read and/ listen to conspiracy theories news publications, you are no different from the scum of the earth. Wretched souls beyond redemption. Shame.  

Growing up in South Africa, I was from an early age mentally conditioned that I might at some point have to sacrifice my schooling opportunities for the benefit of my younger sister, Sisi. Prime assumption being that misfortune could somehow befall my parents. In that event, they would eventually fail to finance my siblingsโ€™ and Iโ€™s education, caught up in the doldrums of endemic Black South Africansโ€™ poverty-stricken existence.   

Seen from a global human perspective, parenting and all that it entails is what it is by default. It is not my intention to want to trivialize the challenges of parenting elsewhere. But parenting in the then inherently doomed, dysfunctional, systemically racist Apartheid South Africa was an arduous, unpredictable endeavour for Black people: unemployment, disease, violence, rampant sudden death. Other than the new faces on driversโ€™ seats of post-Apartheid South African socio-economic transformation state machinery, not much has changed for the masses of the underprivileged in the country, though. 

It was never difficult for me to understand that in the event that some tragedy would befall my parents, especially my father, Iโ€™d have to stop schooling, go find work, and earn some money to continue where theyโ€™d have left to financially support the family. The idea that Iโ€™d defy the misfortune fate of my people had already been long engrained in my head. Therefore, it wasnโ€™t accidental that my mother encouraged me to earn my own pocket money by selling oranges on the streets during school holidays. I was ten years old the first time. Three years later, 1973, I landed my first ever formal employment job as a junior waiter at a then Whites Only Italian Restaurant in my hometown, Welkom.

Iโ€™m still alive. With variable rates of success over the years, I have lived to fulfill my obligations as a supportive elder brother to my two surviving siblings from my mother. Owing to circumstances beyond my control, I havenโ€™t been able to be there for my half-siblings from my fatherโ€™s other procreative endeavours exterior to my mother, prior to or after their marriage.

Any fool ought to know by now that education is a historically powerful facilitatory tool to appreciable degrees of progressive participation in, and gain from socio-economic activities of our modern, digital age global society. Indeed, some guys with all the luck and some other special attributes will become economically and politically high and mighty without having gone far by way of academic education attainment. These may or may not be partners in crime vis-ร -vis upliftment or destruction of society.

The unabashed manifestation and relentless growth of misogyny in the later years of my life boggle my mind. Thatโ€™s because I grew up aware that upon having weighed the options in time, it was a trend in my neighbourhood that priority was given to pushing girls to acquire as much education as possible. The girls could be nurses and teachers when grown up. Costs of more specialized education in medicine, engineering, and other such related fields of academic or professional training were prohibitive. This fact, combined with generally demotivating Apartheid state policies towards Black education, created a major barrier for my peopleโ€™s pursuit of higher education ambitions.

It made sense to empower girls because, ideally, they grew up to be mothers of the nation, starting with their respective family units. An educated girl subsequently getting married to a well-bred young man was worth gold to her family. In my then communityโ€™s perfect world within the context of the imperfect Apartheid world then, boys having sacrificed their own education for their sisters could always come back and continue schooling once their sisters had at least completed pre-university studies. If the plan didnโ€™t succeed, the boys would simply continue working, get married, have children, and see the latter go through the same cycle of sacrifices with little prospects of sustainability in practice.

From my generation in my childhood neighbourhood in Thabong, Welkom, I donโ€™t know of even a single girl that ever obtained at least full high school education level. Although possibly true in some instances, this is not necessarily mainly a result of family economic constraints nor personal cognitive inadequacies.

My only concern, if not fear, about the idea of me delaying my academic advancement for my younger sisterโ€™ sake was the potential of her getting pregnant whilst still at school. In that case, thatโ€™d be the end of dreams, for both of us, of a better life derived from well-paying jobs education aspiringly led to. Experience showed that once the boys entered the labour market, not many ever got the opportunity to continue with their educational ambitions later on as life progressed.

If anything, the boys would also soon make other girls pregnant and then get caught in the trap of lasting poverty as they get overwhelmed by economic hardships of their own. Paradoxically, once a young girl got pregnant, that was it: she was finished. No more school. Never. As a general observation, which to a large extent remains true to this day, early-age pregnancy totally destroyed girlsโ€™ lives. The situation would be worse if the impregnator refused to take responsibility for looking after or supporting the immature mother-to-be.

My mother-tongue, Sesotho, is the most disparaging, derisive language I know. In Sesotho, a young girl getting pregnant is described as โ€˜o senyehileโ€™. It means that โ€˜she is destroyedโ€™. And sheโ€™ll be treated as such by both her family and the community. Sheโ€™s brought shame not only to the family but everyone around her. At worst, sheโ€™d be treated with much disrespect. Boys and men now seeing her as cheap, and, therefore, reduce her to a readily available sexual object moving forward. Consent not a concept adhered to by the male sex predators in this case. Many a girlโ€™s life has been destroyed this way, culminating in suicides in the extreme.

โ€˜O ntshitse mpaโ€™ translates as โ€˜She has taken out the stomachโ€™. Abortion is described as โ€˜Ho ntsha mpaโ€™ in Sesotho, therefore. Graphically, โ€˜Ho ntsha mpaโ€™ as a process means โ€˜to remove the stomachโ€™. Consequently, Iโ€™ve since my childhood days associated abortion with excruciating physical pain for the girls concerned. As I grew older in my mid-late teens, I began to be cognizant of, and think independently on ethical and moral issues. It was at this point that I concluded lastingly that regardless of the circumstances prevailing around a pregnancy, it must be an extremely tortuous decision for a woman to choose to terminate it.

As a firmly held philosophical stand-point, I concluded that it took much resolve and courage for a woman to choose to endure the physical and emotional pain that abortion necessarily entails. This is one area in which I feel and think that women manifest magnanimity deserving the highest and unreserved admiration. To force a woman to carry to the full a pregnancy thatโ€™s uncontestably detrimental to her physical and mental health, if not life-threatening, ought to be the crime.

Abortion as a medically defensible procedure to safeguard and enhance the well-being of women in the living ought to be a right understood from a womanโ€™s perspective. Stupid old men who have no practical idea at all about what it takes and feels to be pregnant and subsequently give birth must stay out of promulgating laws that interfere with womenโ€™s sexual reproductive health rights. Anti-abortion women dancing to the tunes of stupid conservative old and young men are traitors against their own kind. These women need help. When one woman appallingly postulates that another woman can opt for abortion at the point of actual birthing, it suggests some serious mental imbalance issues. Another one is about women aborting children already born. Jeeezzuzzz!!! ย 

SIMON CHILEMBO
OSLO
NORWAY
TEL.: +4792525032
July 25, 2022        

๐—จ๐—ฆ๐—ฆ๐—ฅ ๐—ข๐—ฅ ๐—ช๐—›๐—˜๐—ฅ๐—˜? โ€“ ๐—จ๐—ž๐—ฅ๐—”๐—œ๐—ก๐—˜ ๐—ช๐—”๐—ฅ ๐Ÿฎ๐Ÿฌ๐Ÿฎ๐Ÿฎ

๐—˜๐˜…๐—ถ๐—น๐—ฒ ๐—˜๐—ฑ๐˜‚๐—ฐ๐—ฎ๐˜๐—ถ๐—ผ๐—ป ๐—ข๐—ฝ๐˜๐—ถ๐—ผ๐—ป๐˜€: ๐—ฌ๐—ผ๐˜‚๐˜๐—ต ๐—ค๐˜‚๐—ฎ๐—ป๐—ฑ๐—ฎ๐—ฟ๐˜†

During my stay in Lusaka, Zambia, 1975-88, some of my most memorable social interactions involved meeting older and veteran, mostly male South African freedom fighters. These were ANC members. Then in their mid-thirties and above, some of them had travelled the world. They would have been in pursuit of various goals, which included:

  • Mobilization of international support for the South African liberation struggle efforts
  • Military training
  • Education

About all the veterans exhibited the abhorrent traits of arrogance, tribalism, bullying, cantankerousness, outright stupidity, and violence endemic of South African kassie/ township life. Hard partying involving huge consumptions of alcohol and drugs and all that it entails were an integral part of the deal. Needless to say. Shebeen culture carried with into exile. Not that Zambians were any less of party animals.

These veterans were people of all sorts, with all sorts of familial backgrounds. They, or we, as individuals or as special-interests sub-groups were motivated and threaded together by the collective higher dream of the attainment of the liberation of South Africa from Apartheid oppression.

Much as they loved to party by default, the majority of these people took their liberation struggle work very, very seriously. They were highly knowledgeable in the various fields of Social and Natural Sciences, including Mathematics. Some had had guerrilla operations experiences within South Africa in the 1960s; also, Mozambique and Zimbabwe in conjunction with fellow freedom fighters in those countries. Others had participated in major international wars, such as the Vietnam war, and in Latin America. These were hard people.

ยฉSimon Chilembo 2016

There were three distinct individuals with whom I shared intense mutual dislike for one another. Each in their own ways reminded me of some older guys and grown-up men that were generally not nice people back in my kassie, Thabong, Welkom. These horrible guys hated especially the ever vocal and visible little boys like myself then. It didnโ€™t help my situation being son of an envied foreign man from Zambia. I had already been in Zambia for several years when I heard that, on separate occasions, five of the horrible guys got stabbed to death by younger boys on the streets. Good riddance. For the obnoxious people these men were, their souls deserve neither rest nor peace wherever they may be in after-deathland.

Regarding the three older exiles that didnโ€™t like me very much in Lusaka, I imagine that a mortal confrontation would have ensued at some point had we been in South Africa then. The likely murdered wouldnโ€™t have been me.

Zambiaโ€™s relatively laid-back culture had a way of dampening our wild South African township streaks. Otherwise, I got along fine with everyone; particularly those that found me โ€œinteresting to talk big struggle issues toโ€; their words, not mine.

My favourite was Comrade Mjaykes. He was Commander for a unit of younger, recently arrived immediate post-1976 Soweto student uprising exiles. Overriding objective here was to debrief the traumatized youth with various available and relevant medical and therapeutic methods. Intense and continuous conscientization political education was an unavoidable part of the package. And this was the fun part for me. Much of my fundamental geopolitics principles understanding was founded here.

Contrary to many a senior veteran, on the outset, Comrade Mjaykes was an unassuming personality. But he was one the most highly trained and educated around, both militarily and academically. He trained a lot, often alone late at night. He was very fit. And he read a lot too. Of his few personal possessions other than his books, he treasured a satellite radio that he had bought on one of his travels abroad. Commanding English, French, German, Russian, Spanish, and Swahili languages, the super veteran used the radio to listen to current affairs programs from all corners of the world. He was a well-informed man.

Being an exemplary leader with superior oratory skills, Comrade Mjaykes was a complete warrior in my eyes. An enduring source of inspiration that I last saw in 1981. Sadly, he was one of the earliest victims of the scourge of HIV/AIDS pandemic that began to ravage southern Africa and the rest of the world from the 1980s onwards. Comrade Mjaykes died in the newly liberated Rainbow Nation, South Africa, in December, 1994. No doubt, his soul is resting in eternal power. I canโ€™t help but often wonder as to what he would have thought of the South Africa of today.

Acknowledging my Karate prowess already in 1977/ 78, Comrade Mjaykes said to me one day, โ€œMuch as I know youโ€™d make a much better soldier than all these young comrades here, Iโ€™d rather you went to school first. You have the kind of brains there is a shortage of in our political leadership structures, see? We should be able to organize for you a scholarship for studies abroad. Iโ€™ll talk to your parents about this.โ€

            โ€œThat would be nice, thank you! You know, my fatherโ€™s biggest wish for my two siblings and I is that we could go and study overseas. But thatโ€™ll remain a pipedream because he could never afford the costs of an overseas education for us. Life is really hard for our family in Lusaka, as you know well.โ€

โ€œYes, I know! Your father is a good man. He deserves all the help we can afford him in that regard.โ€

            โ€œThank you, Comrade! My parents would be extremely happy and grateful if mzabalazo/ the liberation movement can help.โ€

โ€œIt should work out for sure. But, unfortunately, currently available scholarships for full education up to university level are from Yuseserese/ the USSR (The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). However, no, I donโ€™t want you to go there even if you could leave tomorrow. My analysis of you and how you think tell me that you obviously are not Yuseserese material.โ€

            โ€œWhy? Howโ€™s that? All I want is to be a doctor. A doctor is a doctor, no? There are Russian doctors at the UTH/ University Teaching Hospital, right?โ€

โ€œCorrect, a doctor is a doctor to the extent that he or she thinks only within the context of being a doctor and nothing else beyond.โ€

            โ€œI donโ€™t understand!โ€

โ€œLet me explain, Sae: you see, being a doctor, or any other modern, academically attained profession for that matter, is but just one of the multitudes of tools available for us to apply in the overall growth and development of society. Youโ€™ll, of course, recall that growth refers to the actual physical expansionary attributes of society; infrastructure, for example. Whereas development refers to the total conceptual and practical work that goes towards visualizing and realizing measurable qualitative and quantitative transformation of society.โ€

            โ€œYes, growth or lack thereof is a function of ideas and tools constituting a societyโ€™s developmental visions as espoused by the incumbent national leadership.โ€

โ€œAbsolutely, Sae. Do remember that the developmental visions are promulgated in national development plans over specific time periods. Your brilliant explanation is further proof that sending you to Yuseserese will be a waste of what I see as one of the most promising of future leadership brains in our soon to be liberated South Africa. You must go to the West. Most of our smart ANC leaders in exile send their children to the West, anyway. Thereโ€™s a good reason for that.โ€ 

In arguing his case, Comrade Mjaykes repeated a summary of standard rhetorical statements I had heard numerous times before:

  • The Soviet Union is a Socialist state.
  • Socialism is a transition state. Socialism puts together all the building blocks leading to Communism attainment.
  • Socialism shall build a strong state designed to enhance optimal economic growth and protection of society and all that guarantees perpetuity of the imminent march to Communism.
  • Communism is the highest state of existential wellbeing attainable for society. Under Communism, classes are non-existent; all are equal with equal access to all resources necessary and available for a life of non-ending abundance for all.
  • The state machinery, i.e. bureaucracy, has the function of managing efficacy of Communism towards the full satisfaction of societal needs. Under Communism, given certain specific skills according to different levels of societal engineering and resources production and distribution administration, all are at the service of society first and foremost and last.
  • Communism has no room for individualism, the basis for societal stratification, or classes creation. When Christianity and other religions talk about heaven, thatโ€™s another language for the perfect Communist state, actually. Only that Communism has no overbearing figures of God as portrayed in religious belief systems.

โ€œThat is the rosy picture of Communism, Sae. The reality is different. Just like the concept of heaven for the religious, Communism is utopian. The march to Communism starts and ends in the already dysfunctional Socialism, really.โ€

            โ€œBut I thought that attainment of the Communist state was more realistic because it was based on the dialectical material world for material human beings without mythical angels and gods in even more farfetched heavens above somewhere in the distant sky.โ€

โ€œCommunism attainment would be more realistic had it not been for Socialismโ€™s killing of the human spirit, Sae.โ€

            โ€œYou are losing me now, Comrade Mjaykes!โ€

โ€œI know that no one here has ever mentioned that last statement to you. I deliberately chose to prematurely take your political education to the next level now. Thatโ€™s only because I really want the best for you and the future liberated, non-Communist South Africa.โ€

            โ€œIf I may say so, you are beginning to sound like a sellout, Comrade Mjaykes. Arenโ€™t you risking condemnation by others should they hear you talking like this to me nowโ€

โ€œNo, my views in this regard are already known to even the highest levels of our command structures. My devotion to the struggle is known; I having been tested on many, many occasions over the years. But because we, the ANC, arenโ€™t hard-core Socialists yet, thereโ€™ still much room allowed to hold principled divergent opinions in the on-going discourse of how to establish a unique, workable developmental model for the future South Africa.โ€

            โ€œI see!โ€

โ€œAnd that is the point, Sae; behind the apparent success of Socialism in the USSR, North Korea, Cuba, and China, to name the most prominent, there are millions of robotized people whose senses of individuality have been broken to the core. Indeed, people may be provided with the best education in the natural and social sciences, producing top doctors, engineers, economists, and many more vocations. But thatโ€™s often as far as it goes.
Thatโ€™s because, through various political indoctrination methods, backed by extremely brutal national security forces trained to think and act as robotically themselves, the ruling elite ensure that the people cease to think independently and critically over existential questions.โ€

โ€œBut Iโ€™ve thus far been made to believe that people in Russia and all these socialist places live happily ever after. Moreover, Russiaโ€™s support of ours and othersโ€™ anti-imperialist struggles were for that the world must unite against capitalismโ€™s exploitative socio-economic relations subjecting us to lasting poverty and subjugation.โ€

โ€œThatโ€™s a myth, Sae. The truth is that us South Africans we are just too free-spirited, too wild to tame for Socialism. It goes without saying that Communism isnโ€™t even worth talking about. Our allied South African Communist Party is a good platform for training in polemics and rhetoric more than anything else. Weโ€™ll discuss higher level Capitalism issues another time.โ€

โ€œI must say that this new side of Socialism has shocked me, Comrade Mjaykes.โ€

โ€œYou see, Socialism works for, and constructs linear thinkers; people who cannot think outside the box. People who think only in straight lines and right-angles in fixed operational spaces. Perhaps that may be one of the reasons Russians are superior chess players! I donโ€™t know.โ€

ยฉSimon Chilembo 2021

Itโ€™s at about this time that my interest in chess waned. I dreaded the idea of my brains turning square! Indeed, many a South African liberation struggle veteran is a formidable chess player. If they ruled todayโ€™ South Africa as exceptionally as they mastered chess, the country would probably be in a better place. But political leadership is an infinitely open field presupposing capacity for paradigm specific, or beyond as necessary, multifaceted thinking in problem solving and application of solutions derived thereby.

โ€œYou have on many occasions demonstrated that you are a more independent and well-rounded thinker than your contemporaries here, Sae. I know that thatโ€™s why some of the older comrades here donโ€™t favour you much. They simply hate your guts. Highly educated as they are also, these guys donโ€™t take it kindly when they are pushed out of their intellectual comfort zones, especially by a young comrade like you. They are Soviet educated.
โ€œIโ€™d hate to see you stagnate or degenerate intellectually as you get older. Thatโ€™s why you canโ€™t go to Yuseserese for studies, Sae, you see? One or two young comrades of your calibre have died out there before. Some have had mental breakdowns. It would break my heart to see that happen to you. Although the truth is suppressed in our organization, racism is also rife in the USSR. Encountering racism out there is tantamount to jumping out of the South African Apartheid pan into the Soviet racism fire, if you ask me.โ€

At own private initiative elsewhere, the first scholarship chance I got for an overseas higher education was to Social Democratic capitalist Norway in 1988. I got stuck here. Primarily out of idealism and for love. No regrets. Norway is the richest country in the world. All things considered, life is as good as can be in Norway. Of course, never perfect, never fully satisfactory for everyone, but Norway does deliver for its people.

And the country is a leading Foreign Aid nation. Norwegian Finance Ministers have for years been megastars amongst their global colleagues. No Communism here. The few ardent Norwegian communists around are but fringe individuals or insignificant groupings with inconsequential social change impact, if any at all.

I write books now. I am what they call norsk forfatter. โ€˜Forfatter Simon Chilemboโ€™ sounds ever so cool!  I write without fear or favour, freely following my creative fantasies to wherever they take me. I live happily ever after in an effectively non-Communist state. If Comrade Mjaykes could see me now! All gratitude due.

ยฉSimon Chilembo 2017

USSR-Socialist trained South African national leaders across the board fail to get the Rainbow Nation out of the mess theyโ€™ve plunged it in after the fall of Apartheid in 1994. In big geopolitics questions, the USSR yoke is sitting comfortably on South Africaโ€™s neck. Mzansi drowning with a sinking ship that is post-USSR Russia fo sho.

The USSR fall with the Berlin Wall in 1989 give rise to Russia. In essence, Russia is the ghost of the former USSR. Ghosts are no touch of reality. It’s therefore not surprising that, identical to South Africa contra Apartheid’s subsequent collapse five years later, Russia never could rise from the post Berlin Wall shambles. Oligarchs ruthlessly plundered the Russian state coffers, taking corruption to the next level.

Post-1994 South Africa created its own egregious oligarchic class through the State Capture phenomenon. This has shown many a Comrade from humble beginnings becoming millionaires to billionaires overnight. They have acutely incapacitated the South African stateโ€™s ability to optimally deliver the promise of a better life for all in a united, non-racial, non-sexist and democratic republic. The post-1994 South African oligarchic class has given the formally Apartheid state’s corruption colour. The former is living in the past. They have lost sight of the reality that Russia is not the USSR. Dismembering of the USSR is permanent.

In 2022, Russia invades Ukraine with chess moves mentality. Some things never change. It has turned out that Ukraine is not a chess board for Russia to play on as it wishes. Things have changed here. Parochial USSR legacy oblivious to this fact. Just for starters, young men of my age in the late 1970s are dying, falling like sacrificial chess pawns. The rest is a tragic war on a straight line trajectory ending potentially with a nuclear war catastrophe.

World in panic makes noise. USSR legacy ears are plugged. USSR marble eyes see imperial rebirth victory where the odds for survival are impossible to turn around. Meanwhile, Norway gives shelter and protection to Ukraine children and women running away from the ravages of Russiaโ€™s war on their country. No better place to be. Communism allergic. Progressive society as close to heavenly terrestrial opulence as can be.

SIMON CHILEMBO
OSLO
NORWAY
TEL.: +4792525032
April 23, 2022

PS
The pandemic is still in our midst. Fears and factual untruths havenโ€™t abated. In my 7th book, Covid-19 and I: Killing Conspiracy Theories, I highlight fallacies red lights and how to identify them. Order the book, read, and be inspired by my philosophical exposition on the matter. It might save yours and your loved ones’ lives.

DISCLAIMER: I neither offer nor suggest any cures or remedies. I promote fearless, independent thought and inclination towards pursuing science-based knowledge in times of, indeed, frightening, life-threatening phenomena in the world.

ยฉSimon Chilembo 2020

RECOMMENDATION: Do you want to start writing own blog or website? Try WordPress!

๐†๐ˆ๐•๐„ ๐Œ๐„ ๐“๐ˆ๐Œ๐„

๐๐ฅ๐š๐œ๐ค ๐„๐ฑ๐œ๐ž๐ฅ๐ฅ๐ž๐ง๐œ๐ž ๐‘๐ž๐ฌ๐ข๐ฅ๐ข๐ž๐ง๐œ๐ž

Please
Give me time
Walking a straight course
Is not
A given for me

Given are
Obstacles
From the first step to the last
Iโ€™ve got sores
Under my feet
I walk
Spiked metal
Carpeted roads
In my time

Iโ€™ve danced through
Landmines in my time
Bombs clapping sounds
In my ears
Donโ€™t stop

Scars on my body
Donโ€™t heal
I eel through
I scale
Razor wire fences
To get anywhere

My muscles are wasted
Iโ€™ve walked through fire
Itโ€™s a wonder
I can move at all

My eardrums hurt
Itโ€™s a wonder
I can hear
Birds sing
My will is intangible
It cannot be isolated
Cannot be broken
I move as I will
I get there
The elements
Give me no easy task
To set my roots in the soil

ยฉSimon Chilembo 2022

Hostility
Above and below
The ground is
A given for me

I must fight
All the time
I must fight
Absolutely
For everything
To reach the top of
The mountains
I climb
As a given
To sustain my life
Even just to serve

From a mountain top
When Iโ€™d rather
Rock and roll
Down to home base
In satisfaction
Iโ€™m ever thrust over the edge
To tumble โ€™n roll
Over โ€™n over
In pain

Hitting home base
Body twisted
A bone or two broken
Iโ€™m taken
Back in time
Back in space
More obstacles
To overcome
Another mountain climb
To the top
Where keys to
My well of joy lie waiting

If love
Blanketed the earth
Iโ€™d reach for you
My joy
Every step I take

ยฉSimon Chilembo 2021

Give me time
I cannot breathe at your pace
I carry
Weight of the world
Laden with hate
On my shoulders

I fight bigots
Hating me
For colour of my skin
They demean me
They seek to dehumanize me
Every step I take

They twist my words
Slander me
Project myths that
Colour of my skin
Facades evil in man
I get enemies for free

They muddy my paths
Spill oil over roads I walk
I slide and fall
I get up
Burn the midnight oil
Keep moving on
One step at a time
Against the clockโ€™s
Sixty tick-tock seconds steps a minute
Sixty tick-tock minutes steps an hour
My steps have time tick-tocks
Of their own
As a given
In my precarious existence

Bigots
They seek
To break my spirits
Every step I take
I am indomitable
My spirit terrifies them

They shoot me
I die
They created Jesusโ€™
Resurrection story
To cover their
Confoundment over
My resilience

Give me time
Youโ€™ll see in time
That I really am human too
Everything they can do
I can do better
As a given
I must work
Ten times as hard
Anytime
In my time

There are times
The agony inside
Is unbearable
My head
Wants to explode
At not only
The bigotsโ€™ cruelty
But their horrendous
Outright stupidity

ยฉSimon Chilembo 2021

When reason doesnโ€™t work
When prayer doesnโ€™t work
Because their God is made
In the image of them bigotsโ€™
Collective derangement
I have to stop and cry
From time to time
Please give me time
For my tears to dry

Starting from below zero
With zero privilege
Against these meanest odds
Iโ€™ll rule the world
It ainโ€™t for nothing
Iโ€™m the oldest
Human being on earth

They created Adam
To sideline me
Doesnโ€™t work
Iโ€™m here
As a given
On the eve of
My victory

Itโ€™s beyond hatersโ€™ imagination
But
I shall blanket
The world with love
As a given
Some day soon
Nothing can stop me
Itโ€™s only a matter of time
Brace yourself
My love
๐˜ˆ๐˜ช๐˜จ๐˜ฐ๐˜ฃ๐˜ฆ๐˜ฌ๐˜ช ๐˜ญ๐˜ฆ ๐˜ฏ๐˜ต๐˜ด๐˜ช๐˜ฎ๐˜ฃ๐˜ช
This Black donโ€™t bend
๐˜ˆ๐˜ช๐˜น๐˜ฉ๐˜ฆ๐˜ฌ๐˜ฆ๐˜ป๐˜ฆ๐˜ฌ๐˜ช ๐˜ญ๐˜ฆ ๐˜ฏ๐˜ต๐˜ด๐˜ช๐˜ฎ๐˜ฃ๐˜ช
This Black donโ€™t crack
๐„๐๐ƒ
ยฉSimon Chilembo 06/04-2022

SIMON CHILEMBO
OSLO
NORWAY
TEL.: +4792525032
April 13, 2022

PS
The pandemic is still in our midst. Fears and factual untruths haven’t abated. In my 7th book, Covid-19 and I: Killing Conspiracy Theories, I highlight fallacies red lights and how to identify them. Order the book, read, and be inspired by my philosophical exposition on the matter. It might save yours and your loved one’s lives.
DISCLAIMER: I neither offer nor suggest any cures or remedies. I promote fearless, independent thought and inclination towards pursuing science-based knowledge in times of, indeed, frightening, life-threatening phenomena in the world.

ยฉSimon Chilembo 2020

RECOMMENDATION: Do you want to start writing own blog or website? Try WordPress!