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𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗥𝗨𝗧𝗛𝗟𝗘𝗦𝗦 𝗥𝗨𝗟𝗘, 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝘁 𝟮

February 2, 2024 11:23 pm / Leave a comment

𝗠𝗔𝗚𝗔 𝗔𝗠𝗘𝗥𝗜𝗖𝗔 𝗦𝗔𝗠𝗘 𝗔𝗦 𝗗𝗔𝗥𝗞 𝗔𝗙𝗥𝗜𝗖𝗔: 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗕𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝗦𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗵 𝗔𝗳𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗮 𝗖𝗮𝘀𝗲

I’m ever so fascinated by the USA. At first, it was the illusion of the Dream of America. This Dream of America still lures poor, mostly involuntary wretched souls of the earth hoping to taste heaven on earth before they die. Some get to believe that they have secured a better future for their offspring, just from the first step on the soil of the land of dreamers. Going down on their knees, they kiss the Dream of America’s Mother Earth in deep felt gratitude.

The poor souls will have survived atrocities-extreme and/ or natural calamities in their original homelands in various parts of the world – elimination hole countries, as one elimination munching American mouth has called them. The stench of America emanating from the mouth nauseating the world. Like they’d be anywhere else in the world for they are human too, vile fortune hunters who’d eat their own mothers are also in the Dream of America rat race, abusing the poor hopefuls in all sorts of abhorrent ways.

The vile hustlers get to the land of Lady Liberty. They ride on the American Nightmare blood train, amassing the Green Back by any means. With the Dollar might, they burn and turn the land and the world red with their relentless destructive ways of relating to and managing society, to say the least of Mother Earth. Just hear them crap-talk Global Warming as a concept and reality. Sometimes I wonder if these cognitively inadequate people have their filthy elimination holes as the abodes for their brains. Scum of humanity.

My continuing fascination with the USA is about the elimination holes brains personalities fronting the American Nightmare discourse and social engineering efforts. I throw their supporters in the same boat of inherent or wilful ignorance and bigotry: dim-witted charlatans.

Between 1960 and 1975, I was born and raised in a systemically racist, self-encaged, media-repressive, stifled African people’s education, international relations pariah then-Apartheid South Africa. Elimination holes brains personalities fronting the American Nightmare want to establish a 21^st Century Apartheid Dream of America state. A messy, costly, bloody lost cause.

From my childhood days in the 1960s to the mid-teens in the 1970s, the American Dream of heaven on earth was fed into my eyes through beautiful pictures of American life in carefully state-selected and censored magazines and movies. There were, of course, glimpses of pictures of violence on Black people here and there; also, those of gruesome assassinations of politicians and entertainers. Pictures of homeless people languishing on city street pavements, if not under bridges appeared here and there too.

But, the pictures of the glamorous Dream of America were overwhelming; from Miss World-type girls to style, automobiles, and New York City night neon lights, amongst others. The visual impact was accentuated by the sound of music. Some of them aware or not, Mega Stars across the musical genres sold the Dream of America more effectively than any other propaganda agents. In the South Africa of my childhood days, all the adult Jazz and Soul music lovers that I knew dreamt of going to America to see their favourite stars. Many believed that, given the apparent success of big names like Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong, Sam Cooke, James Brown, Ella Fitzgerald, and Aretha Franklin, to name but a few, America sure was Black people’s The Promised Land. Little did my music-loving South African aunts and uncles know about the history of Black African people’s slavery in the making of the American Dream economic might.

On the radio, jingles accompanying adverts of consumer items from cornflakes to tobacco always left me giddy in the head in their sweetness of melodies and painting of America as the epitome of high living. I couldn’t wait to get to America to enjoy all these amazing products from the source. Man, imagine me drinking Coca-Cola sitting in the Waldorf Astoria New York in the company of an American Miss World! That used to be a truly compelling dream.

And there was sport. Muhammad Ali’s boxing prowess notwithstanding, his political outspokenness in the Civil Rights sphere painted the path for my journey to The Promised Land someday. Post-the-Apollo 11 moon landing of 1969, I would for many years in wonder gaze long at the full moon. I never had ambitions of flying to the moon, but I used to think that if America could send men to the moon and back, then, in America, I could be all the great things I dreamt of being when I grew up.

In reality, though, I only wanted to be a medical doctor so that I could operate on people’s hearts like Dr Chris Barnard had done in Grooteschuur Hospital, Cape Town, on the 3^rd December 1967. And I wanted to be rich and famous like the flashy heart surgeon. I was seven-and-half years old, then, and was already beginning to read newspaper headlines. Living in a highly politically charged environment whilst going to school in Lesotho at that time, I had already become an aspiring avid radio news listener. Therefore, I understood early that since I was not White, I could but with difficulty, perhaps, be a heart doctor in then-Apartheid South Africa. Instead, America would make me a great doctor, I earnestly believed.

From South Africa, via Zambia, I would end up in Norway 21 years later. I became a jack of many trades, but not a doctor. It is what it is. No worries. I have become an author; I write books. I am happy. I look at the USA with mixed emotions: feeling lied to, but not crushed. I am disappointed and appalled by the inhumane, parochial, and degenerative side of America that nearly half of the country’s population not only exhibits with impunity but strives to expand and perpetuate. All spearheaded by the insular, living-in-the-past racist White Supremacist MAGA America movement bent on establishing an Apartheid Dream of America state in the 21^st Century.

As I write and think, and think and write, I find that the sociology of the American Nightmare half of America is not in any way divergent from that which I left behind in my Black South African township, Thabong, Welkom. This is transferable to urban South Africa across the board from Apartheid days to the present.

South Africa is a perfect USA microcosm match in more ways than one. In that sense, it’s just as well that I’ve ended up in Norway; a country by far better run than both South Africa and the USA. If the then-Apartheid South Africa came close to crushing my soul, the USA would have killed me already, I suspect. By the numbers, and by the guns, vicious MAGA America is more lethal than the pre-1994 South African township at any time, like-minded as they may be.

The regressive nature of American MAGA power relations dynamics is not different from that prevalent in Black South African townships. I’ll shortly demonstrate this in an exposé of the Township Nightmare power relations personality traits. In the same vein, I’ll implicitly demonstrate that human personality traits are driven by inherent internal biological structures and processes that supersede race and ethnicity theories.

For example, a human heart as an organ is a human heart whether it’s in the body of a male or female White, Black, or whatever colour of the spectrum person. Similarly, adrenaline is adrenaline; the nervous system is the nervous system. A certain neuro-hormonal imbalance will cause universally predictable behavioural outcomes cutting across race and ethnicity. That is how MAGA America can be understood in the context of the dark side of South African Black township culture. After all, South Africans and Americans are all human. Any human disease will similarly kill them if no necessary and recommended conventional medical preventive measures or curative treatments are given and adhered to. Needless to say, the recent COVID-19 pandemic caused havoc in much the same it did in South Africa as in the USA, including the rest of the world, of course.

The underlying guiding idea in my exposé is the consideration of psychopathy as an observable antisocial behavioural tendency amongst many MAGA America and South African Township Nightmare types.

Reacting to the strange, destructive behavioural tendencies exhibited by prominent American MAGA proponents, I, on October 13^th, 2020, posted a comment on my Facebook feed. I have edited and expanded on the original text for this talk. And it goes as follows:

HASSLE ABOUT PSYCHOPATHS

The hassle about psychopaths is that they cannot listen to reason; it’s beyond their cognitive capacities. For a psychopath, it’s their worldview or nothing. Conventional Ethics (right v/s wrong) and Morals (good v/s bad) are irrelevant concepts to psychopaths.

Depending on where in the world you live, are you on the ‘nothing’ side of a psychopath, they are likely to eliminate you in various ways. You’ll hear threatening expressions like, “We are coming for you!”. So, “… if you fuck around with us, if you do something bad to us, we are going to do things to you that have never been done before,” Guess Who.

As history documents over and over again, a dead opponent to a psychopath is the preference. Nevertheless, history is full of examples of how psychopaths in leadership roles across the board tend to have tragic demises. Google ‘world despots’, please! It’s free.

Despite its imperfections, where democracy works comparatively kind of okay, people shall seek to talk issues over through various established governance platforms, no matter how challenging or futile the exercise may be. In the end, votes are taken. Assuming a perfect world, outcomes are acknowledged. And the winner takes it all. Life goes on.

Democracy allows for election outcomes to be challenged when irregularities have been observed at any point during the process. Or even when the losing side just wants to be a nuisance. Democracy in practice can stand a lot of crap. Psychopaths thrive on the latter fact.

As current history unfolding shows somewhere in the world, when psychopaths win, humanity gets ever closer to thresholds of self-annihilation. Therefore, be ever so careful about who you elect to power in your land. Don’t allow yourself to be charmed by the cheap-feelgood-chronic-diarrhoea-like buffoonery antics of psychopaths.

If you don’t know how to identify a psychopath, call my number. For I’m not a medical doctor, I’ll guide you through an illuminating philosophical discourse that works all the time. It’s all about, amongst others, a solid academic and professional training background. Go to school. Acquire knowledge for human progress. Take your children to school. Read much and well. Pass exams clean; don’t cheat. Don’t burn books.

Ultimately, the reality is, though, there is a psychopath in all of us. Summarizing my philosophical discourse on what attributes to look out for in deciding, after analyzing a person’s socio-behavioural incongruencies, whether they exhibit psychopathic tendencies or not, a close brother-confidant of mine once said, “So, a psychopath need not be a raving mad personality in our midst?”

Yours truly, “Yepp, that’s right!”

Brother-confidant, “It means, then, that a psychopath may be the everyday smart-looking person sitting next to, or in front of you right now at any place?”

Yours truly, “Sure thing! But it’s all about relativism, see? Know thyself!

Whether or not I have a personal or some other human aspects relationship with the concerned, my labelling of a person as a psychopath is my pre-emptive self-preservation measure. This also helps me to put into perspective events in my immediate and distant worlds given who the dominant actors are in the different parts of the world, them sharing or not sharing common interests.

In my private survival instincts world, I don’t need to have a medical doctor to declare for me whether I am dealing with or am observing a psychopath in my immediate spaces or far out in the wide, wide world. Descriptively, I know a psychopath when I see one. I then behave accordingly to protect myself and my own in the face of actual or potential psychopathic onslaughts upon us. It’s a doctor’s job to diagnose and treat the patient accordingly. They can take all the time they need.

And, talking about personal survival instincts, I had on an earlier Facebook post declared that “Uncivility is an effective manner of attaining some degree of civilized talks with psychopaths. Communication leads to mutually desired outcomes to the extent that involved parties apply the same language and familiar terms of references.

“Failure to break through psychopaths’ noise and deficient knowledge barriers should lead to withdrawal from talks, if feasible.

“Otherwise, the fools must be isolated, if not excluded from civilized social interactions. In the worst-case scenario, it may be necessary to eliminate them. Diplomacy has to have limits even in the free world.

“Democracy is designed to neutralize our passions in common human relations interaction spaces and circumstances. Wars and societal collapse are direct outcomes of lunatics being allowed too generous opportunities to play out their antics for far too long.”

Any reasonably intelligent person who’s gone to school and can read, think, see knowledge linkages, and can thus synthesize functional, universally applicable explanatory models towards understanding how life works on earth, can read many a professional text and make sense of it. If they don’t understand, they ask as a matter of course; they actively seek more information from relevantly knowledgeable human sources or books and other information storage and distribution facilities to debunk or confirm initial conclusions made. This is called research.

Through my various learning pursuits in my time, my private operational definition of what constitutes psychopathy or not is based on readings of publicly available subject literature that is written and wilfully published by qualified medical personnel of various specializations and levels of academic and professional standing across the globe. This includes literature publicized by a plethora of international human behavioural sciences professionals. Google this shit!

Don’t let yourself be intimidated by the arrogance of power from doctors, psychologists, and others whose professional literary works we all, with much admiration, flock to in our efforts to study and better understand the overall complexities of human nature. If they don’t want us free spirits to speak about human wellbeing issues, then, they must withdraw their publications. They must cease making their expertise publicly available reference materials in libraries and social media.

Simon Chilembo
Oslo
12.10.2020

I wrote the exposé essay of the South African Black Township Nightmare power relations personality traits on May 29^th, 2021. Posted in my blog on the same date, the exposé bears the title:

THE RUTHLESS RULE

Kassie Jungle Law: Only the Strong Survive

In my never-ending attempt at seeking to make sense of events in the world today, I, as a reflex, regularly look back at the first fourteen-and-half years of my life in South Africa, 1960 June – 1975 January. Growing up in the then-racist apartheid state has profoundly impacted my life. Day-to-day living was ever so dramatically charged. Such that, on the one hand, one could but choose to numb oneself to the volatility of emotions, if not traumas arising, and live on disenchanted and detached from the gruesome, disenfranchised reality.

On the other hand, one could look at, hop onto the intricate traumatic feelings and thoughts bandwagon, learn survival ropes, and hope for the best; longevity being a remote idea. Wishful thinking. Although the OPEC oil crunch of the early 1970s had already begun to make its mark globally, this period could easily be seen as the golden years of the apartheid regime’s economic might. The oppressed Black population segment was subjected to extremes of state security agencies’ violence.

Oppression is some costly business. It curtails human resources’ productive potential growth and manifestation. Atrocious. Oppression will last to the extent that the oppressors’ financial base remains sufficiently robust to sustain the oiling of the oppressive state machinery at all levels. Money talks. Money rules.

As it is with South Africa, a country’s endowment with a variety of natural resources that the world is willing to pay generously for is of crucial importance. Oppressors maximize their hold by capturing the wealth of their nations, therefore. They personalize their wealth, becoming super-rich individually and along with their family members, as well as their power clique hounds: oligarchs’ fangs drooling kleptocracy and nepotism poison in everything they touch. At the same time, their nations get caught in quagmires of long-term poverty and international indebtedness.

The Soweto Students’ Uprising of June 16, 1976, would not only change the liberation struggle course. It changed the political landscape of South Africa as well; further weakening the oppressive state’s capital base. Apartheid had to ultimately collapse. Not because somebody woke up one morning and suddenly discovered that the system was diabolic. The fact is that it simply was no longer economically viable. And prospects of any meaningful bounce back were bleak. Added pressure from the international trade sanctions had brought the country down to its knees.

The effective brutality of the apartheid regime reproduced itself across the entire Black populace by default – in the home; at absolutely all levels of social interaction. That is visible to such an extent that the nature of fundamental survival power relations dynamics cultivated then amongst Black people themselves have endured. It is manifest at even more sophisticated, grander scale, and more destructive levels in keeping with societal management complexities and technological advancements of the times in the 21^st Century.

During the apartheid domination years, many a Black South African exile carried along with them these survival power relations dynamics into the Diaspora. Not that it helped the concerned exiles much from the point of view of applying the same survival strategies as generally functional in the township, or kassie culture in Black South Africa. Kassie is a corruption of the Afrikaans language word, lokasie; which means location. Observing, establishing, and maintaining links with fellow South African exiles has kept my fascination with the Black people’s fundamental survival power relations dynamics alive during all these years.

Post-1994 South Africa has also been accessible to me. It’s the land of my birth, the land of my family’s maternal-side ancestry, after all. Thirty-eight-and-half years since living abroad, I returned to stay in the country for five years, 2013-18. As such, I have been in touch with the trends in the land all along. Much had changed drastically at about all levels. However, characteristic personal survival attitudinal attributes have remained constant. I shall dwell on these later on in this essay as I unravel prerequisites for the workings of the ruthlessness of kassie jungle law rule.

Kassie is a funky catchphrase these days. But originally, it essentially implied a slum; not much unlike Brazilian favelas, for example. In practice, the meaning hasn’t changed in any big way. From the colonial era, peaking during the apartheid years, and stretching into contemporary times, tens of thousands-upon-thousands-to-millions of Black South Africans were dumped here. It initially was predominantly male labourers working in the mines and the agro-industrial complex.

There would be a few state functionaries and even fewer professionals in various vocational categories here and there. Much as there would be numerous fortune hunters engaged in all kinds of illicit endeavours; from petty crimes to large-scale organized crime activities involving alcohol, drugs, precious stones and metals smuggling, human trafficking, prostitution, and more. Family units would eventually emerge as a natural human development process, of course. Children would be born, raised, become adults, lead miserable lives, and subsequently die; the indignity of poverty accompanying them to the grave. Causes of death varying, from murder to illness, if not natural causes.

Prevalent land conditions are far from prime in the townships. This makes the construction of decent domiciles a daunting challenge for impoverished people. Sustainable subsistence food production from the land is near impossible. Minimal to total lack of functional social amenities comes with the package here. If there was anything prime about the original townships, it was the potential to induce and generationally perpetuate poverty with all its attendant maladies: disease, moral decay, ignorance. All that to facilitate self-annihilation amongst Black people: kill them; let them kill themselves; create space for more European trash to come to work, settle, and add to the growth of the white population in the country.

Conditions are even worse these days, taking into consideration, since 1994, the influx of millions of refugees and fortune hunters from war-torn, dysfunctional African states to the north. Others come from other parts of the world, especially Asia. Competition for limited resources and liveable spaces in the townships has spiked exponentially, apparently in favour of the new immigrants.

Many of the new immigrants come into South Africa with more by far international hustling experience: higher academic qualifications and vocational experience in both the social and natural sciences, military or guerilla warfare experience, and all that it entails – daring nature, PTSD, and other related outcomes. They also have investment capital for entrepreneurial ventures in various fields, often starting with small-scale grocery stores called spaza shops.

The latter attributes above are often accompanied by extreme manifestations of arrogance of power towards the locals, who are considered to be intellectually lacking, lazy, and fearful of White people, who still own the land, anyway. It’s hardly surprising, therefore, that strong anti-immigrant sentiments have mushroomed across the country, culminating in several outbursts of brutal xenophobia-inspired violence in recent years.Afro-xenophobia expression is ascribed to South African Black-on-African Black violence. In keeping with characteristic basal kassie culture, violence is the first instinctual option to eradicating conflict. Tragedy is ever the outcome that never brings forth solutions for a peaceful co-existence for all in the country.

The reality of the matter is that, much like the Ununited States of America, South Africa owes much of its economic might to the historical inflow of migrants from all corners of the world. As I’ve already implied above, these people bring into the country a wide diversity of creative/ intellectual/ academic, productive, and entrepreneurial skills that contribute to the robustness of the country’s vibrant economic and social advancement in the long run.

There’ll always be a few bad apples here and there. But assuming a functional justice system prevailing in the land, relevant policing and legal institutions are there to deal with lawbreakers. South Africa is truly a multi-cultural melting pot. Bishop Desmond Tutu’s broadly embraced Rainbow Nation nickname for the country supersedes discrimination neither based on race nor origin of the people that call South Africa their home, either by birth or immigration.

From an epistemological perspective, it is clear that the concept of township/ location/ kassie in South Africa was never meant to create ideal, conducive conditions for Black people to thrive and propagate themselves; neither to attain ever higher standards of living in time, in pace with national economic growth prospects.

The rise of apartheid economic might was at the expense of the lives of Black people, both at the hands of the apartheid state security machinery, and intra-Black violence across mainly urban South Africa. Many other Black lives were also lost through fatal accidents and occupational diseases in the agro-industrial-mining complex. Functionally concerning apartheid intentions, townships were supposed to provide temporary shelter for lives destined to be “… solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”

But then again, survival instincts abode in all humanity. People can remain wretched only for so long. If they are not wiped off from the face of the earth, they shall engage in all sorts of means to prolong their existence. Perhaps fate can change for someone, someday: break the bonds of subjugation, rise and liberate the people, and, ideally, live happily ever after in boundless abundance.

In the meantime, at the individual level in the South African kassie context, survival was and still is about ruthless “semphete ke o fete” (Sesotho: don’t overtake me, I overtake you – the rat race) tendencies. Here, the strong survive. The ruthless rule; applying cruelty as their claim to prosperity and longevity.

Brought forth, elaborated in my Black South African context, and set in alphabetical order below are personal dispositions I’ve identified as being cardinal for relative individual survival and ruling potential in the South African kassie culture of violence. That as a tool for understanding the nature of human relations power dynamics, and consequences thereof, at all levels of contemporary society, both locally and globally (In the latter, i.e., globally, the USA fits in like a glove). The respective attributes may be understood regarding the identification of the individual as to who they are, and what their social standing is concerning behavioural phenomena observed of them. In essence, this is the making of despots ekassie, a microcosm of the Dream of America nightmare:

Bodomo (street parlance – Setsotsi) is derived from the Afrikaans word dom. Alternatively bokwala (Sesotho), it means stupidity; downright idiocy. Amidst events, act like you don’t know what’s going on. Go about your daily business indifferent as to whether or not you cause others harm in your endeavours; you lack empathy. You are not interested in reason; you are obstinate like hell. You are a denialist. You are a revisionist.
Bokhopo (Sesotho) is cruelty. When it is deep-seated, merciless, non-benevolent, and non-repentant it is called khohlahalo in the same language. Rule by absolute iron-fisted fearsomeness. Without exception, anybody transgressing you in any way shall suffer the full ruthlessness of your wrath in line with the nature of the offence and the choice of punishment you dim fit. The line between life and death is often very thin here. This tends to elicit baffling loyalty from your cohorts. Much to the bewilderment of your detractors.
Ho tella (Sesotho)/ ukudelela (isiZulu) is an uninhibited show of lack of respect. Total disdain. You are brazen. You bulldoze your way through towards the attainment of your power or material acquisitions, and other egocentric ambitions. In your interpersonal and other relations in the community, it’s your rules or no rules at all.
Lenyatso (Sesotho) is the root of ho tella and leqhoko, immediately above and below respectively. It means to undermine, to belittle other people. Tools applied include patronization, ridicule, insults, unjust criticism, passive aggression, isolation or exclusion, subjugation; all propelled by jealousy and/ or feelings of threat irrationally perceived or real because the victim may, indeed, be the better person in many respects. The idea is to crush the victim, cut them to size, and put them in their place of insignificance. This is pure mental and emotional abuse that often easily degenerates to physical abuse.
Leqhoko (Sesotho) is provocativeness. Be agitative even out of nothingness just so your presence is noticed, is not forgotten. Be relentlessly disruptive. Cause havoc; be an ass. Instigate and sustain fear. Use all means at your disposal: bully, defame, riot, vandalize, pillage, depose, fight, maim, kill. Ultimately, emerge as the leader of the pack; level-headed and solution-oriented, if only to cow and manipulate the terrorized towards aiding to secure attained dominant safe position.
Mamello (Sesotho)/ Qinisela (isiXhosa/ isiZulu) refers to tolerance capacity; endurance in both hard and good times, depending. Good times are generally no big deal. But in hard times, practice self-preservation by keeping to yourself and your own. Hang in there. Stay away from trouble. Be invisible. Make no noise. Cultivate hope. Keep the faith because everything is going to be alright someday. Persevere.

For the mighty, though, mamello/ ukuqinisela means staying the course no matter what: keep on pushing; stand tall, don’t fall. Never, never, never give up! Never change the course of action once commitment to act in a certain manner is made. Here, mamello/ ukuqinisela becomes an interplay of bodomo, bokhopo, ho tella, leqhoko, and manganga in variable doses and combinations according to the circumstances prevailing at any one time and space.
Manganga (Sesotho)/ Inkani (isiZulu) is absolute stubbornness. Take a stand, be resolute to the very end, whatever the cost. Whether or not original intended goals are attained is not the essence. You are defiant to the extreme. Stay rock-steady as a matter of principle because you cannot be wrong, or you cannot be denied your demands. You are the truth. You are the light. If you are not the son of God, then you ARE God! Your opponents shall declare you as deranged, delusional; but that doesn’t bother you at all. You are mmampodi (Sesotho)/ champion; you rule. You live above the law. You own your followers through and through. Each one of them understands that you are their life saviour.

A street parlance (Setsotsi) adage goes like this, “Maziwaziwe, maz’bidlikaz’bidlike! (isiZulu)/ If they (e.g. towers) fall, they fall; if they collapse, they collapse!”
It is what it is.

Tyrants, hard-core conspiracy theorists, and charlatans fall under this category. So, in the USA, Coronavirus is just the common flu; “… it’ll disappear just like a miracle!”
Not forgetting The Big Lie that Joe Biden and the Democrats stole the presidential elections of November, 2020. And then supporters of The Big Lie insurrect The Capitol peacefully like tourists, leaving destruction and carnage behind. Very special people that The Big Lie spinner loves.
You can also do an egotistical, parochial, typically false premises pushed brexshit and pull your country out of a body of international solidarity in the Western world.

Neither does State Capture exist in South Africa. You know none in your family that has contracted AIDS in South Africa. Therefore, it doesn’t exist. Step aside rule in the ANC? What’s that? If you are indeed going to fall, you don’t go alone. You are vindictive.
Sebete is a Sesotho word for liver.The liver is considered to be an organ of courage in my part of Black South African culture. A courageous person is said to “have a liver”/ O sebete. Courage is a common thread linking all survival, or power attributes in kassie.

Ho sa (Sesotho, noun), lumps together the attributes above into one virulent trait: petulance as gross as only an extremely spoiled brat can display. The descriptive form of ho sa is “O sele!”, meaning “He/ she is petulant!”
People of all ages manifesting ho sa as a characteristic social interaction trait are some of the most dangerous a community can have. Makings of despots emerge here.

Underpinning the relative kassie individual survival and ruling potential laid out above is the question: O tshepile mang (Sesotho)? Which directly translates as, “Who is it you trust?”
Who’s covering your back?

Simple as the question might seem, it is not necessarily a daily conversation question posed in my original part of Black South Africa. The question is profound to the extent that it is asked a person directly, or others are asked about a particular individual when the latter’s negative behaviour defies not only mainstream social protocols across the board, but sheer common sense as well. It is believed that there must be some extra-ordinary qualities, some mystic about these kinds of people. For example:

What gives them the guts? What makes them tick?
Whose progeny are they? What are their lineages?
Do they have some guardian angels, perhaps? In that case, who are the latter? Where are they?
What do they have that ordinary people do not have?
Are they working for somebody even more powerful than themselves? Who are these people?
Are they protected by God? Ancestral spirits? Wizards and witches?
Or are they just raving mad, sick in their heads? Are they bewitched?
Do they have magical powers themselves? If so, from where do the powers derive?
Are they members of some organized crime gangs? Or some secret societies? The Illuminati?
Is it just because they are too rich? But where does their wealth come from?

It’s only if and when sufficient knowledge about these treacherous people is gathered that concerned individuals or the community can effectively react to get rid of them in one way or another. It’s not unusual that the former fall from glory in the most dramatic and humiliating fashions; those who lived by the sword dying exactly as they lived. Such is kassie life. The ruthless rule but momentarily.

The strong are often the smart with senses of moral and ethical awareness. They tend to survive, break out of the mould of kassie misery and ignorance, and live longer. Some in this category will in time even travel wide and see the world, permanently breaking the spell of kassie anti-life attributes. Expressing themselves through diverse media and creative and performance forms, they may also become proponents of liberty, justice, and equality as fundamental Human Rights tenets all of humanity on earth is entitled to.

Meanwhile, South Africa has yet to cleanse itself of the kassie anti-life attributes spell, to the extent that it’s possible. However, given the current display of elite kassie mentality antics in various judicial and organizational platforms in the country, it is clear that much more work remains to be done at this rate. Well, cumulatively from the onset of contemporary European colonialism in the 17^th Century up to the apartheid era in the 20^th Century, the mechanizations that facilitated their imposition had at least four hundred years to dehumanize my people and screw up our psyche. The Rainbow Nation is only twenty-seven years old.

Khotso is a common Sesotho name for South African males. It means peace. The female version is Mma-Khotso both as a formal name and may denote that the woman is a mother of a boychild called Khotso. The name has significant connotations. In practice and conceptually, peace is a universal prerequisite for progressive human co-existence. That making for harnessing humanity’s creative potential towards a sustainable, infinitely fulfilling life for all. The South African national anthem, Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika! (Nkosi Sikelela) is essentially a cry for peace, captured in the Sesotho text:

Morena boloka sechaba sa heso/ Lord Almighty, save my nation
O fedisa dintwa le matshwenyeho/ Bring an end to strife and suffering

Were the ruthless and the smart kassie people of South Africa and beyond to realign their attitudes and heed the message of Nkosi Sikelela, the future would be bright for all. I want to be here in four hundred years to gloss in the glory of the heaven on earth that South Africa and the rest of the world will have become. I sit here in a space of relative peace. I breathe. I dream. I write. I make YouTube videos. Ever conscious of the lasting impact that my kassie life background has had on me, I have every reason to want to choose to be hopeful.

I can be hopeful about the future because I am happy all the time. Watch this video here to see how you can be happy all the time, and make somebody’s day every day into the future.

SIMON CHILEMBO
OSLO
NORWAY
May 29, 2021

𝗘𝗡𝗘𝗠𝗜𝗘𝗦 𝗜 𝗗𝗢𝗡’𝗧 𝗞𝗡𝗢𝗪

𝗜𝗟𝗟𝗨𝗦𝗜𝗢𝗡𝗦 𝗜𝗡 𝗠𝗬 𝗪𝗢𝗥𝗟𝗗, 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝘁 𝟮

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

When as a child growing up in South Africa up to the age of 14½ 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, I’ve aimed to live her words since then: beautiful, intelligent man that thrives amongst other beautiful, intelligent people.

August month, 2023, marked the 35^th anniversary of my stay in Norway. The tangible plan I had upon leaving Zambia, my fatherland, in June, 1988, was that I’d complete the 3½ years’ post-graduate business studies programme I had privately secured for myself, with a little help from my friends. Afterwards I’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, I’d then return to South Africa, land of my birth, and become the country’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 I’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, I’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. That’s how I got to stay in Norway to this day. Both love and Karate no longer rule my life in Norway. But I’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, I’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 didn’t travel more than half the world to let problems of life kill me so far away from home. One way or another I’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.

I’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 everything’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 won’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 – 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 it’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 won’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. I’ve in my life read more than enough books to appreciate that fact well. I’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, naïve 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 1000^th book and beyond, the hurt and emotional turmoil I initially felt are gone. I’m healed. I’m strong. I’m on the rise again, destined for higher and higher heights of success than ever. I’ve written eight more books since the When the Mighty Fall publication. I’m on the roll; right on track. No one, nothing can stop me.

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 couldn’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 I’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 I’m going to read came forth during the process of thinking about the latest Judases, wolves in sheep’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 24^th, 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 lions’ den at my arrival in Oslo. But I knew I was blameless contra the enemies’ smear campaign against me. I’m grandson of a Daniel, father of my mother. The Biblical Daniel was “… saved from lions by the God of Israel “because I was found blameless before him” (Daniel 6:22). So, I’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, I’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 I’m good at it. And that’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 wise’ 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.

©Simon Chilembo 11.09.2023

𝗘𝗡𝗘𝗠𝗜𝗘𝗦 𝗜 𝗗𝗢𝗡’𝗧 𝗞𝗡𝗢𝗪 – 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗣𝗼𝗲𝗺

Self-made
New enemies of me
People I don’t know
Lurk in dark corners
I don’t know
Wish me dead

They don’t know
I’m a free soul of the light
I don’t know how to hide
I don’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

I’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 don’t know
Fools with reasons for
Enmity I don’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 don’t know
That’s the closest they’ll ever
Come to harming me
Envious fools don’t know me
Inconsequential fools’ll never see me
Repugnant fools embraced by
Darkness I don’t know
Darkness I don’t care about *

I cannot run away from the light
I have nothing to hide
I don’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

You’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
Enemies’ 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
I’m a soul of invictus
I breathe love
As a matter of course
I’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
𝗘𝗡𝗗
©Simon Chilembo 11.08.2023

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

𝗢𝗡𝗘 𝗬𝗘𝗔𝗥 𝗟𝗔𝗧𝗘𝗥: 𝗜𝗟𝗟𝗨𝗦𝗜𝗢𝗡𝗦 𝗜𝗡 𝗠𝗬 𝗪𝗢𝗥𝗟𝗗.
𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗟𝗜𝗧𝗬 𝗜𝗦 𝗜 𝗔𝗠 𝗛𝗘𝗥𝗘, 𝗜 𝗟𝗜𝗩𝗘, 𝗜 𝗟𝗢𝗩𝗘, 𝗜 𝗗𝗔𝗡𝗖𝗘.
𝗜 𝗔𝗜𝗡’𝗧 𝗚𝗢𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗡𝗢𝗪𝗛𝗘𝗥𝗘.

𝗨𝗚𝗔𝗡𝗗𝗔 𝗞𝗜𝗟𝗟𝗦 𝗟𝗚𝗕𝗧𝗤+ 𝗣𝗘𝗢𝗣𝗟𝗘

July 24, 2023 2:46 am / 1 Comment on 𝗨𝗚𝗔𝗡𝗗𝗔 𝗞𝗜𝗟𝗟𝗦 𝗟𝗚𝗕𝗧𝗤+ 𝗣𝗘𝗢𝗣𝗟𝗘

𝗘𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗜𝗿𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗕𝗶𝗴𝗼𝘁𝗿𝘆

Uganda has recently legalized extreme persecution of LGBTQ+ people. People of non-heterosexual dispositions now make love with state sanctioned murder threat looming over their heads. The Ugandan state seeks to eradicate LGBTQ+ people from the face of the earth. This is a flagrant, futile, outdated, time and resources wasting exercise rooted in ignorance in the face of the most enlightened time in the history of humanity, the 21^st Century. Pathetic.

Enlightened, liberated, forward-looking, resourceful, valuable people of the world know that sexuality isn’t a matter of choice but an inherent state of being. As but an extension of the infinite totality of being human in its as infinite expressive forms, sexuality is exuded and played out from the core of a person’s essence as encoded in the person’s unique genetic makeup.

Sexuality is permanent. Sexuality is not acquired. Sexuality is not a disease; it cannot be cured, neither medically nor magically, nor by any other outlandish method. If God made man in her own image, God is then the queenpin of sexuality. Use of God’s prayers to 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘵 homosexuals is tantamount to asking God to annihilate herself. Herein lies invalidation of the existence of an omnibenevolent, all-loving God. Amen!

Sexuality is not an attitude; it is not a lifestyle. Sexuality is what it is: it is it – a constant. It is the unidirectional, one-track express train towards the orgasmic peak experience that, in a perfect world, those in love aspire to achieve as a consummation of their oneness in love in all the possible constellations of love matchings humans are capable of as to their diverse intrinsic sexual orientations.

Every person’s unique genetic makeup is in turn an extrapolation of the human genome. The human genome is the unalterable existential thread that binds humanity together in its diversity of physical and physiological attributes. That’s how you can love who you love; and, where applicable, you can reproduce with whom you will, regardless of race, status, colour, or creed.

Don’t come to me with the 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘪𝘯 𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦, 𝘦𝘭𝘦𝘱𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘴 𝘥𝘰𝘯’𝘵 𝘤𝘰𝘱𝘶𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘨𝘪𝘳𝘢𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘴 crap talk. Of course, these animals are of incompatible breeds. They aren’t genetically wired to be sexually stimulative of one another, to begin with.

Depending on the ever-abundant factors affecting the lives of the sources and quality of human reproductive material, i.e., sperms and eggs, the outcome from fertilization to birth (assuming a problem-free pregnancy, and survival of the birthing agony), a child, can be anything of manifestations of being human. For example, the child can, amongst a myriad of other possibilities, be

Wholesome and healthy
𝘐𝘮𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘧𝘦𝘤𝘵, 𝘢𝘣𝘯𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘢𝘭, and/ sickly. I.e., have physical, and physiological incongruities reflected in all kinds and extents of physical handicaps and mental or cognitive incapacities, if not inadequacies
Distinctly male or female as to the construction of relevant reproductive organs; hormonally steered
𝘔𝘢𝘭𝘦 –𝘧𝘦𝘮𝘢𝘭𝘦 –𝘪𝘯 –𝘰𝘯𝘦. I.e., intersex
Reproductive or barren upon attainment of sexual reproduction maturity age
Sexually active or celibate
Heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, and much more in the human sexuality expression spectrum.

It ought to be a no-brainer that LGBTQ+ people are human just like everyone else. They have the right to live; just like everyone else. They have feelings; just like everyone else.

From an ethico-moral standpoint, show me an immoral LGBTQ+ person, I’ll show many more amoral heterosexuals. By the numbers, heterosexuals are by far responsible for the worst human-to-human and human-to-nature atrocities ever.

I’m convinced that the world would be a better place for all were people of the world allowed to love mutually consensually who they love of their psychosocial maturity equals. That means that, bearing high the flag of 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦-𝘪𝘴-𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦, 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦-𝘸𝘩𝘰-𝘺𝘰𝘶-𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦, you don’t go around sexually abusing children. You don’t go around taking sexual advantage of the weak and vulnerable. You don’t go around defiling animals.

AVAAZ E-MAIL: UGANDAN LGBTQ+ LAMENT

On June 4, 2023, I received an e-mail from the global campaign network, Avaaz. This was on behalf of an anonymized Ugandan LGBTQ+ rights activist asking for moral and financial support. I’ll print the e-mail in full:

ALERT: BRUTAL ANTI-GAY LAW SIGNED — FINAL CALL TO HELP!

WARNING: This email has descriptions of sexual violence that may be upsetting.

Dear Avaaz members,

I write from Uganda, where a vicious ‘anti-gay’ law was just signed into existence — and gay people are being hunted like animals.

Days ago, neighbours castrated a transgender person with a kitchen knife. We couldn’t go to the police as we’d be arrested — and had to search for a friendly doctor, as most wouldn’t help us.

We’re being fired from work, rejected by family, evicted, beaten, raped… and worse.

I’m appealing for your support. Please.

This could be our last call for help. Under this new law, everything we do, including sending this email and raising funds, will soon become illegal. But right now, before the law is implemented, there’s still a narrow window when LGBTQ+ groups can receive support — and your donation could help save lives.

You’d fund safe houses where people can hide, along with emergency medical care, legal support, and trauma counselling. We urgently need more safe houses, as we constantly have to run when angry mobs arrive.

We’re being flooded with frantic calls for help, but without more funds we can only help a tiny fraction of people. I’m heartbroken, and don’t know where else to turn.

And it’s all because of who and how we love. In the face of unimaginable cruelty and violence, please stand up for our right to Love. Donate what you can now:

The new law effectively makes it impossible to exist as an LGBTQ+ person in Uganda.

I could get a life sentence for kissing my partner, and be executed for repeated homosexual ‘offences’. Renting to gay people is now illegal — and I could serve 20 years in jail just for sending this email.

They call us “ungodly” filth, but we aren’t the ones inflicting unimaginable cruelty on already vulnerable people. I know girls who’ve been raped by family members to ‘cure’ their ‘lesbian disease’.

That’s why safe houses are so critically important– providing a place of sanctuary in a country burning with hatred. With your help, we could:

Fund dozens of new safe houses and emergency shelters across the country;
Provide emergency health care and legal support for those who’ve been arrested — and meals for people in jail;
Help fund the development of a new legal case to challenge the law in court; and
Power emergency response campaigns, like this one, to defend communities facing discrimination, assault, and war around the world.

Every penny raised will support LGBTQ+ people in Uganda, and power Avaaz’s emergency response work around the world. By donating, you won’t just be helping in Uganda — you’ll be ensuring this crucial capacity is maintained for others like me, facing unimaginable terror.

Gay, straight, lesbian, transgender — we all just want to live and love in peace. I don’t know when that day will come, but it is not today, and our fight for love must go on. Wherever you are in the world, please stand with us. Donate what you can now.

I’ve been part of the Avaaz community for years. I’ve seen the difference it makes when we come together fast for those in need. Now it’s my community being attacked — me and my people need this movement’s help.

With hope and the deepest of gratitude,

****** and the whole team at Avaaz

Note: As the anti-gay law has just been signed, the consequences for an email like this could be deadly — in many ways, they already are. For that reason, names have been removed and photos are anonymous.

PS. This might be your first donation to our movement ever. But what a first donation! Did you know that Avaaz relies entirely on small donations from members like you? That’s why we’re fully independent, nimble and effective. Join the over 1 million people who’ve donated to make Avaaz a real force for good in the world.

END

𝗗𝗢𝗘𝗦 𝗔𝗡𝗧𝗜-𝗟𝗚𝗕𝗧𝗤+ 𝗛𝗔𝗩𝗘 𝗔𝗡𝗬 𝗘𝗖𝗢𝗡𝗢𝗠𝗜𝗖 𝗥𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡𝗔𝗟𝗘?

Now, I ask a rhetorical but serious question with profound socio-economic analysis implications:

Can Uganda, or any other tyrannical anti-LGBTQ+ country, for that matter, provide statistics showing any value-added number to the country’s annual GDP accruing from the persecution of LGBTQ+ people in all its extents?

Well, in Norway, for example, one of the country’s most important conglomerates is Orkla. “Orkla ASA is a Norwegian conglomerate operating in the Nordic region, Eastern Europe, Asia and the US. At present, Orkla operates in the branded consumer goods, aluminium solutions and financial investment sectors. Orkla ASA is listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange and its head office is in Oslo, Norway. As of 31 December 2021, Orkla had 21,423 employees. The Group’s turnover in 2021 totalled NOK 50.4 billion,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkla_ASA

Orkla’s Majority Shareholder is Stein Erik Hagen, 66 years old. As at June 25, 2023, he’s worth US$2.1 billion, making him the 1468^th wealthiest man in the world; number 6 in Norway as at February 24, 2023. Stein Erik Hagen is gay. Culturally sophisticated, he is a renowned international art collector, and philanthropist.

Norway’s GDP in 2021 was US$482.17 billion. Population number stood at 5.4 million then. That’s against Uganda’s population of 45.8 million people, and GDP of only US$40.5 billion in the same time period.

Norway’s highest standard of living in the world is powered by people in all walks of life, including, in all national production, service, and leadership strata. Norwegian LGBTQ+ people are/ have been, amongst others, Government Ministers, Bishops of the Church of Norway, and many more in the commanding hights of the economy. Much as it is a generational global trend, the Norwegian arts and culture industries are teeming with LGBTQ+ people. I have yet to see Norway come even anywhere near to going under. In the meantime, the country just keeps on growing on and on as a world economic and geopolitics force.

The biggest brands in the global fashion, design, and cosmetics industries are a trove of some of the biggest creative talents in the world, some of the most influential of whom are LGBTQ+ people living with pride. Their enterprises are global economic giants to reckon with; creating hundreds of thousands of jobs across the world, and paying billions of dollars of value-added GDP revenues in various countries. One of the greatest flesh and bone human brains to ever walk on our planet earth is Leonardo Da Vinci. His phenomenal interdisciplinary work in the sciences, mathematics, art, and philosophy permeates all aspects of our modern life. The man was gay.

So, Uganda and your fellow tyrannical anti-LGBTQ+ countries in the world, what are your value-added numbers to your respective countries’ annual GDPs accruing from the persecution of LGBTQ+ people in all its extents?

It is globally demonstrable that persecution of LGBTQ+ people deprives society of vital workforce resources across the board. LGBTQ+ persecution is clearly counterintuitive to equitable national economic growth; which is even more glaring in poor countries like Uganda.

The like-minded oil-rich, religio-conservative Gulf states have managed to harness their ultra-wealth to overrun all local and international resistance and critic against their atrocious anti-LGBTQ+ practices. However, these societies could attain even higher standards of living and more credible and durable geopolitics influence had they allowed their citizens to unleash their full human potential, free to mutually love who they love of their contemporaries.

And in Ukraine, the country’s LGBTQ+ people are together with their fellow in-action citizens fighting side-by-side against Putin’s imperialistic invasion of their country. Because they, indeed, are people like any heterosexual, LGBTQ+s are also capable of killing other beings. Violence and murder aren’t the prerogative of mad heterosexuals with potentially dubious sexualhabits camouflaged in their irrational hatred for LGBTQ+’s. Like in all Human Rights struggles, when push comes to shove and the oppressed finally pick up weapons of war and fight back, the latter wins. Wake up, bigots, and smell the coffee!

On June 16, 2023, Presidents Cyril Ramaphosa and Hakainde Hichilema, of South Africa and Zambia respectively, led an African peace mission to Ukraine and Russia. I’ll leave discussion of the merits or demerits of this trip for another time.

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni chickened out at the last minute because of the escalation of Putin’s attacks on Kiev. Putin even launched another attack on Kiev whilst the African delegation was in town, defiantly breaching and giving a blatant ’𝘧 ’ to International Relations protocols.

The aggressor was simply making a point that he could have the 𝘴𝘮𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘺𝘦𝘳𝘴 African delegation sent back to their respective countries in body bags, if he wanted to. The Africans recovered from the shock, talked with Zelensky, and went on to check on Putin the following day, anyway; wagging their little tails like poodles. Progressive South Africans look at Ramaphosa with dismay. That’s Mzansi for you fo sho; myopic, parochial, outdated-communists’ bootlickers.

Real men persevere even in the most ominous of circumstances. Real men may be as gay as those fighting in the Ukraine army against the Russian invasion. A warrior is a warrior regardless of who of sexual maturity equal and sexual orientation they love.

Real men and women know that once they become a head of state, death comes with the territory; they automatically assume tyrannical or constitutional prerogatives to terminate or redeem life, according to prevailing circumstances. They also embrace the reality that they can under variable circumstances get killed on the job on any day.

How much of a 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭 𝘮𝘢𝘯 is LGBTQ+ loathing Museveni, who got scared ‘s’less out of thechances of getting caught up and dying in the Putin-made killing fields in Ukraine, I wonder? With no guts to face up to his national sovereignty leadership equals, he goes after soft targets, the LGBTQ+ community of Uganda. Coward. Loser.

South Africa legalized same sex marriage in 2006. Although there are still unofficial, yet potent obstacles here and there, the LGBTQ+ community thrives in the country. LGBTQ+ personalities feature prominently in all spheres of South African econo-socio-politico life. And their influence grows by the day. After 9 (o’clock, pm), hetero-married South African gay men exit their closets for their true loves outside.

Despite its governance challenges, South Africa remains a haven for Africans running away from their dysfunctional, war-torn anti-LGBTQ+ countries, including Uganda itself. South Africa remains an African economic powerhouse providing sustainable entrepreneurial opportunities for African immigrants from the latter countries, Afro-xenophobia violence issues notwithstanding.

What’s funny about Uganda in this context is that I first came across the words 𝘩𝘰𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘦𝘹𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺 and 𝘩𝘰𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘦𝘹𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘮 in an article in Drum Magazine in 1972/3. Fifty years ago, in Welkom, my hometown in South Africa!

If I recall, the article was about how Ugandan men would meet up at local Sunday afternoon football matches in their villages. Some men would, then, pair up and disappear into the nearby bushes to engage in 𝘩𝘰𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘦𝘹𝘶𝘢𝘭 activities, the article reported. It was a given that many a girl would go down with their boyfriends as well. Of course.

At age 12/13 then, this thing about homosexuality and homosexualism confused me a bit. I then ventured to ask an older friend to explain for me. Buti-Gabriel was in ‘JC’/ Grade 10 at that time; he sure would know these things, I reasoned. He told me that homosexualism is when men sleep together like we sleep with our women.

“They do it slightly different, but that’s basically it: having sex together man-to-man,” Buti-Gabriel said. He further reminded me that we already knew how lonely men living in the then ‘Men Only’ hostels in Welkom’s gold mines had sex with one another in the absence of women. Aha, oh, yes, of course!

These womanless men came from the entire Southern African hinterland, as well as remote-lying, extremely poverty-stricken parts of South Africa. The guy said this in as matter-of-factly, and as ever cool as he was as a person and older brother that I had grown to be very fond of. I’ve had a laid-back attitude towards homosexualism since then.

A life-long 𝘐 ’𝘮–𝘢–𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳–𝘯𝘰𝘵–𝘢–𝘧𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘦𝘳, Buti-Gabriel taught me how to be a gentleman to girls, and subsequently to women in my grown-up age. We remained great friends until he died in 2016. I miss him dearly. MHSRIEP!

Prior to the intriguing homosexuality and homosexualism mystery in Uganda as I’ve related above, there had already been an especially edifying association imprinted in my mind about the country. One of the earliest hymns that I recall singing at my childhood school between 1965-69, St. Rose (Catholic) Primary School, Peka, Lesotho, was about the Martyrs of Uganda: 𝘈 𝘳𝘦 𝘳𝘰𝘬𝘦𝘯𝘨 𝘣𝘢 𝘜𝘨𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘢 / “Let’s Praise Ugandans”.

Brutal Idi Amin’s entry on the Ugandan presidential scene, 1971 to 1979, shook the heavenly picture I had held in my head for the country of the great martyrs. I recalled the latter, forty-five of them, being held in the highest reverence in the Lesotho-South African Catholic Church community that I knew then.

Yoweri Museveni has been in power since 1986. He has taken the Ugandan murderous persecution plague to the next level.

As regards Zambia, the LGBTQ+ plus struggle is still hard, yes. However, I’ll make a sweeping statement and postulate that woke, Zambian middle-class youth growing up and grooving in the Lusaka party scene in the late 1970s to the late 1980s (I haven’t lived in Lusaka since 1988) will attest to the existence of a flourishing gay subculture in the city and the environs at that time. I can’t imagine it having been any different in the Copperbelt urban centres such as Kitwe and Ndola.

I also can’t imagine the Zambian gay scene as having diminished with the years. We had public secret gays as schoolmates and teachers, as relatives, including work colleagues.

I had just recently graduated from the University of Zambia in 1986 when, in one of my then business hustles in Lusaka, I got to strike a South Africa-Zambia commercial goods import deal with a super wealthy, fine-looking gentleman who, I thought, could probably leave an Afro-American movie star kissing his shoe heels. I got highly rewarded for the deal upon its closure.

After a business meeting that went late into the night one day, this man, we call him Mr Dukes, invited me for a snack and drink at his home in one of Lusaka’s finest neighbourhoods. His house so overwhelmed me with its beauty and raw manifestation of opulence that my immediate reaction was to make the comment, “All the hottest girls of Lusaka would be in trouble if I had a house like this one, Mr Dukes!”
He curtly replied, “Hot girls are the least of my troubles, Mr Chilembo!”

Serving efficiently prepared bacon-and-cheese sandwiches and tea, he stated, “I live alone here. I don’t need women in my life.”
We ate in silence. Outside of business talks, I wouldn’t know how to start any meaningful personal conversations with Mr Dukes after that incident.

Nearly three decades would go before a mutual acquaintance would reveal to me that Mr Dukes was gay, and that he had had a harem of young men that he sexually exploited at will. Inviting me to his house may have been a trap, but, sadly for the man, my mind was on the things I’d do with girls in his awesome house. Besides, he admired me for my Karate prowess and the local rock stardom I had already begun to enjoy in Lusaka. He really couldn’t impose himself on me. I learned that Mr Dukes died in yet another one of those gruesome road traffic accidents involving huge, luxury cars driven at high speeds on Zambian pothole-laden roads twenty years ago.

My feeling is that Zambia will soon legalize Gay Rights protection in the country. The country is on a path to economic recovery at a relatively better pace by far as compared to, say, Zimbabwe, where gays are “worse than dogs and pigs”, according to projecting Robert Mugabe, the late and former dictatorial president.

The point I want to make about South Africa (land of my birth) and Zambia (my fatherland) vis-à-vis the LGBTQ+ condition is that tolerance liberates positive energy in society. Tolerance inspires and sustains creativity. Tolerance unleashes productive empowerment across the board in society. This is a crucial element of overall national development and growth. The case of Norway as I’ve outlined above is a perfect example of how this works. And, Norway is but one of the LGBTQ+ tolerant countries with the highest standards of living in the world.

The fear that the LGBTQ+s want to take over the world is unwarranted. Unlike religion, no one is converted to LGBTQ+ existence. You are either gay, lesbian, bisexual, etc., or not. If conditions become such that more and more LGBTQ+ people come out as time goes on, what the heck? That’s the way of the world.

LGBTQ+ people of Uganda and the world, stand up and fight for your rights. You are not alone. We all suffer together. Freedom doesn’t come cheap. Absolutely ALL Africans ought to know this fact.

So, LGBTQ+ contradicts African cultural values? In what way is murder an African cultural values defence mechanism, then? Well, with effective brutality untold, Arab and, subsequently European invaders, applied relentless murder as a tool for imperial-colonialism imposition and sustenance. African has been left generationally culturally and cognitively raped and screwed.

Killing one’s own people for them exercising expressions of an emotion as fundamental of being human as can be, love, does not make post-colonial Africa any better than the primitive former imperial-colonial masters.

As the human genome carrying entities, Africans are essentially not different from any other people on earth. In varying degrees according to location on the planet, and exposures to multitudes of natural and artificial variants that enable humanity to adapt or die in given situations, Africans face the same existential challenges and joys as anybody else. Therefore, the spectrum of sexual orientations manifestations amongst Europeans or Asians is not in any way divergent from that found amongst Africans or people of any other racial classification, the latter being a curse to humanity.

Therefore, insisting upon the narrative that LGBTQ+ism is un-African is as banal as it is downright lacking in cognitive development maturity. Unadulterated stupidity oblivious to the ever-growing abundance of contemporary human knowledge database. Human love sentiment is truth constant in time and space; much as is the human need for liberty, equality, and solidarity. That underpinning the universal concept of Human Rights.

Whereas the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted without any African representation, the universality of Human Rights principles validity cannot exclude Africa. The assumption being that Africans are part of humanity. Much of Africa still under the Euro colonial yoke in 1948, no African country had the requisite political national sovereignty to be considered as worthy of participation in the process then. Independent Africa would eventually come out with its AFRCAN CHARTER ON HUMAN AND PEOPLES RIGHTS in subsequent years; adopted in 1981, and ratified in 1986.

𝗨𝗡𝗜𝗩𝗘𝗥𝗦𝗔𝗟 𝗗𝗘𝗖𝗟𝗔𝗥𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡 𝗢𝗙 𝗛𝗨𝗠𝗔𝗡 𝗥𝗜𝗚𝗛𝗧𝗦

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a milestone document in the history of human rights. Drafted by representatives with different legal and cultural backgrounds from all regions of the world, the Declaration was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948 (General Assembly resolution 217 A) as a common standard of achievements for all peoples and all nations. It sets out, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be universally protected and it has been translated into over 500 languages. The UDHR is widely recognized as having inspired, and paved the way for, the adoption of more than seventy human rights treaties, applied today on a permanent basis at global and regional levels (all containing references to it in their preambles).

ARTICLE 1 of the UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS reads as follows:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

ARTICLE 19 of AFRCAN CHARTER ON HUMAN AND PEOPLES RIGHTS agrees by saying, “All peoples shall be equal; they shall enjoy the same respect and shall have the same rights. Nothing shall justify the domination of a people by another.”

ARTICLE 3 of the UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS says:

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

ARTICLE 20 of AFRCAN CHARTER ON HUMAN AND PEOPLES RIGHTS agrees. It says, “All peoples shall have the right to existence. They shall have the unquestionable and inalienable right to self-determination. They shall freely determine their political status and shall pursue their economic and social development according to the policy they have freely chosen.”

ARTICLE 5 of THE UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS SAYS:

No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

ARTICLE 24 of AFRCAN CHARTER ON HUMAN AND PEOPLES RIGHTS adds that “All peoples shall have the right to a general satisfactory environment favourable to their development.”

ARTICLE 6

Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.

ARTICLE 7

All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.

ARTICLE 9

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

ARTICLE 12

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

ARTICLE 19

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

ARTICLE 27

Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

𝗢𝗦𝗟𝗢 𝗣𝗥𝗜𝗗𝗘 𝗣𝗔𝗥𝗔𝗗𝗘 2023

Oslo’s PRIDE PARADE 2023 was held on Saturday, July 01. It was a massive, happy, incident-free event attended by a record 90 000+ people; a rare event putting the beauty and love of Oslo’s human diversity in world display without fear or favour. Norway’s national television transmitted the event live. The huge turnout was defiant of the possible terror attack threat similar to that carried out outside the London Pub in central Oslo, June 25, 2022.

It’s Monday, July 03, 2023 as I write this section of the essay. I’ll bet my last penny that the USA risks yet another day of shooting massacres across the nation on July the 4^th than Norway shall any day soon endure satanic fires for being pro-LGBTQ+s right to exist happy and free in the country.

On Monday night, June 07, 2010, I reluctantly agreed to join a diverse group of some friends of mine for a beer at the London Pub, Oslo. I have never been into partying on weekdays, a fact my close friends know well. However, on this one night, my friends applied all the tools of the charm to get me to come along with them. We had to celebrate the final exams success of Greg, a younger, super talented jazz singer from Cape Town, South Africa. Ok.

All went well at the pub until I noticed that time was fast approaching midnight. I really had to go. A long working day was awaiting me ahead.
“Oh, no, no, no, please, Simon, just wait another few minutes and we shall all leave this place together as a group and then go our separate ways home,” cried Beya.
“Argh, man, ok! You guys are impossible!” yours truly.

In the ensuing laughter amidst group amicable comments/ inside jokes like, “Black Jew Simon just thinks money, money, money. He doesn’t have a social life!”, the DJ suddenly plays full blast Stevie Wonder’s iconic Happy Birthday song. Before I knew it, I had been yanked onto the dance floor, and this group of between 20-30 men were singing along and dancing all around me. These men were all gay. That was the most wonderful surprise and kick-off moment for the subsequent series of parties marking my 50^th birthday, which fell on June 08, 2010. A truly moving experience that I cherish to this day.

After the dance, a Champagne bottle was popped. For a moment I found myself sitting alone, as if my friends had made a quick dash and left me without any good-byes. Argh, just as well, I thought. I was set to go away, anyway. Suddenly, an unfamiliar, exuberantly perfumed, finely attired, beautiful young man sits next to me on the right, and makes as if to want to snuggle with me. As I turn to look at him, he looks me deep in the eyes and says, “But, Simon, you ARE hetero, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am,” yours truly.

The disappointment wave emanating from the boy was palpable. As he apologetically and cautiously pulled away from me, a surge of paternal care cut through me, and the flirt in me woke up. So, I reached out, gently grabbed his hands, and pecked his left cheek, saying, “Yes, I am heterosexual, but I love you for that!”

In Norwegian, “𝘋𝘶, 𝘚𝘪𝘮𝘰𝘯, 𝘥𝘶 𝘌𝘙 𝘩𝘦𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘰, 𝘪𝘬𝘬𝘦 𝘴𝘢𝘯𝘵?”
“𝘑𝘰, 𝘫𝘦𝘨 𝘦𝘳 𝘩𝘦𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘰. 𝘔𝘦𝘯 𝘫𝘦𝘨 𝘦𝘭𝘴𝘬𝘦𝘳 𝘥𝘦𝘨 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘥𝘦𝘵!” yours truly/ “… But I love you all the same!”

After my words and moves, I have never seen anybody waltzing away from me onto a dance floor in as glamorous and as joyful mood as that young man. Numerous eyes were on him. I hoped he’d find someone to love him then. That made me happy. I rose and quietly left the pub with the thought that, had that situation involved a girl, and I was in the mood, I’d have gotten laid that night.

The terror attack tragedy outside the London Pub last year upset me at least as much as it did anybody else. Oslo gay groove house London Pub is a viable business entity. Public records show that it was registered in 2007. It’s 2022 revenue was NOK 35 million, over twice as much as the previous year. During the said financial year, there were twenty-six employees. With outsourcing of security and other auxiliary services, there’ll be even more people earning a living working here.

The gay joint, London Pub is 50-50 owned by two gentlemen, Avni Fetisi and Selassie Desta G E G. I have reason to believe that the latter is of Ethiopian origin. And, last time I checked, Ethiopia was an African country. Just saying. Whilst living in South Africa as a child sometime in the late 1960s, my father once reminded a𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 overbearing White car salesman that “My money is NOT black!”

Money knows no gender, no sexuality, no skin colour. Money just loves good business. If money makers are fair, they’ll pay their workers well regardless of non-professional considerations such as gender, sexuality, race, and all. Hopefully.

Violence against LGBTQ+ people and institutions will never succeed in ridding the world of people who love outside the narrow heterosexual stream. Launching surprise attacks on unarmed, peaceful people is a sign of sheer cowardice; idiocy supreme.

Real men fight men of their own sizes in real, bloody battles. At any one time, there are scores of wars played out in the world for trigger happy fools to go and play their silly, fake-manhood games. Prigozjin and his Wagner Group has room for soldiers of fortune he can use to feed the Putin-created meat grinder in Ukraine, for 𝘙𝘶𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘢𝘯 & 𝘊𝘩𝘪𝘱𝘴 on South African oligarch’ State Capture braai coal flames. Check out Sudan too, if not the perennial DRC bloodbath.

It boggles my mind that a so-called man can run away from genocidal conditions in his country of origin – Iran, Pakistan, and others; find protection in Norway. Thrive. Grow up into a big and supposedly strong man. Is, or gets unhappy about the liberal, globally uplifting Norwegian way of life. Then decides to play the devil’s executor role and kill innocent people in/ of Norway; shooting them as if they were dummy targets in a shooting range.

There is no courage in fleeing from the fight for liberty in the land of your birth. There is no honour in killing your innocent, new landsmen only seeking to love who they love in the free world.

From the point of view of harnessing and growing a productive manpower resources base vis-à-vis attainment of sustainable national developmental goals, there can be no bright economic future for Uganda in its use of state resources to persecute the LGBTQ+ community in the country.

As Uganda is not alone in this counter-progress tendency in Africa, I really do not see the continent coming out of the Africa Screwed. Africa Raped quagmire I mention in one of my earlier talks.

Africa’s future is doomed. All for leaders caught up in the 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘸𝘦 𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴 syndrome. The techno-socio-economic future of the world is shaped by forward-looking, problem-solving leaders. These apply contemporary tools available and relevant today, addressing needs for a successful push into the future of ever so rapidly changing and growing understanding of the workings of nature.

As I use the expression, the 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘸𝘦 𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴 syndrome refers to the inclination towards reliance on knowledge that may have prevailed once upon a time when society was high and mighty during, say, the Stone Age. Useless.

When progressive countries of the world are investing heavily inArtificial Intelligence (AI) Research and Development (R&D), Uganda is applying scarce resources in the hunt for Who’s sleeping with who? At the same time Dead Aid keeps flowing into the country. Morbid.

𝗜𝗡 𝗖𝗢𝗡𝗖𝗟𝗨𝗦𝗜𝗢𝗡

I’ll happily engage with anybody that reaches out on this topic. Do write your comments below. But I am not in any way interested in any crap talk about God and religion. 𝘑𝘦𝘦𝘦𝘻𝘻𝘶𝘻𝘻𝘻, God is the most divisive, most lethal of man’s responsibility escapism creations. Religion is a weapon of death in the name of God. Religious texts are murder prescriptions.

Neither am I interested in “𝘐𝘵’𝘴 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦” reasoning. The moment I hear expressions like, “𝘈𝘧𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘥𝘰𝘦𝘴 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘮𝘪𝘵 𝘩𝘰𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘦𝘹𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺!” I see insular, static cultures oblivious to, or dismissive of local or global societal paradigm shifts with time. These insular, static cultures inhibit growth of curious, innovative minds. The latter being capable of, and ever willing to explore new frontiers of knowledge in efforts to find solutions to existential challenges facing society on all fronts.

Spearheaded by the ruling elites, parochial, conservative African cultures kill liberated human beings’ creative potential. Myths intended to create perpetual fear and uncertainty in people’s lives are applied as effective oppressive tools, much like the holy scriptures in organized religions.

Bring me science of consistent, universally applicable, infinitely testable principles that effectively contribute to mankind’s efforts in the never-ending pursuit of bettering the quality of life for all on earth. I have no time for Conspiracy Theories bs-talk. Show me numbers. That’s all that interests me in this topic here.

This here is my voice. The voice of an independent, free spirit with no fear for the unknown, or peddlers of untruths and negative endeavours to the detriment of society. I speak for myself, reflecting the workings of my one-man intellectual and creative powerhouse.

I represent no particular interest groups anywhere. Neither do I speak on behalf of any special influential individual. I neither receive nor solicit any monies from any individual or groups, as a motivation to be their mouthpiece or speak favourably about them. Nobody owns me. No one owns my brains. I owe nobody no favours.

My take on the LGBTQ+ rights violations in Uganda and elsewhere is founded on universal Human Rights tenets. I neither hate nor disrespect the people of Uganda. My reaction is against appalling, out-of-tune-with-the-times, power abusive, oppressive, leadership. If the latter is fronted by Yoweri Museveni in Uganda, the heat shall be on him by default; it comes with the territory. I’ll lash out at any regressive national leader, be they Zuma, Mugabe, Putin, Trump, or whoever.

Purely from a Human Rights standpoint, I feel very, very strongly about the LGBTQ+ right to exist case. If I could have just one cause to fight for in my life, this would be it. As a matter of a deep-felt principle, persecution of LGBTQ+ people the world over touches the core of my injustices-against-humanity sensitivities in a profound way. This is a struggle for freedom. Any struggle for freedom is my struggle.

My pro-LGBTQ+ right to life is humanist, and is as solid as a rock. Those of my so-called relatives, friends, and other social relations across the board wishing to cancel me for my views on the LGBTQ+ question and other ludicrously controversial issues such as a woman’s rightto access abortion as she deems fit according to her life circumstances, may do so now. The time has come for hypocrites and cowards to stay clear. Good riddance.

It is okay to have differences of opinions on anything. In fact, it is absolutely natural that people all over the world will have certain commonly shared instinctually broadly and/ or narrowly defined proclivities according to their respective individual neuroendocrine systems’ wirings. The latter being a function of both inheritance and infinite, known, and unknown immediate and distant environmental factors of short or lasting terms.

But it is not okay to hate. It is not okay to, by all means possible, actively work to exterminate people labelled as 𝘥𝘦𝘷𝘪𝘢𝘯𝘵 and 𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘯𝘦𝘳𝘴 by those individuals or collectives wielding societal power.

For as long as I can breathe, I’ll speak and write for justice and fairness. I’ll stand for the weak and vulnerable. Amongst other motivations, I do this for our children for them to not be afraid of the future, no matter how weird and unconventional they might be viewed to be, and treated as adults. I have this vision that, given the superior knowledge and courage we impart in our children today, theirs will be a better world for all tomorrow.

The MAGA movement bans and burns books, curtails liberatory education for enlightenment provision for American children today. I shudder to think about how primitive the future world would be would MAGA ever dominate fully the American society. That would also spell hell on earth for American LGBTQ+s. And mine will be one of the loudest resistance voices. You ain’t heard nothing yet. The biggest global freedom storms are yet to come. To the oppressed, the persecuted of the world: 𝖳𝖧𝖤 𝖥𝖴𝖳𝖴𝖱𝖤 𝖨𝖲 𝖡𝖱𝖨𝖦𝖧𝖳. Believe me.

SIMON CHILEMBO
OSLO
NORWAY
July 03, 2023

𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐖𝐎𝐑𝐊𝐒 𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐕𝐄

May 1, 2023 8:16 pm / Leave a comment

Reserve Husband in House of Beautiful Things

In my Tumbuka tribe in Zambia, a man is his brothers’ wives’ 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.

𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐖𝐎𝐑𝐊𝐒 𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐕𝐄
Separated
By the pond
Wife from another husband
My Dear Brother Ricky
Son Bolokiyo’s
𝘔𝘢𝘮𝘢 𝘝𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘢 and I
Met in the face of a book
In cyberspace
Celebrating her birthday
We took mikes and sang
We Dj’d
We danced
Fell on our backs in joy and laughter
We dropped the mikes
Went our separate ways
In the perennial dollar chase

𝘈𝘮𝘢𝘭𝘶𝘮𝘦 𝘈𝘭𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘭𝘢
Blazing in my head
Yandikani Lungu’ spirit
With me in
𝘔𝘶𝘻𝘶𝘯𝘨𝘶 𝘔𝘢𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘥
In the north
From where lost souls never return
Black Diamonds
Hustling to bling
In the land of
Black gold

Got to work
I’m so happy
I feel
Artworks’ eyes
On the walls
On me
I clear my head
I see
Artworks on the walls
Dance for me
Artworks’ subjects
Come to life in the frames
[…]
𝗘𝗡𝗗
©Simon Chilembo 14/12-2022

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

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𝐖𝐇𝐀𝐓 𝐈𝐒 𝐀𝐑𝐓?

April 7, 2023 10:16 pm / Leave a comment

𝐀𝐌𝐈𝐃𝐒𝐓 𝐁𝐄𝐀𝐔𝐓𝐈𝐅𝐔𝐋 𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐆𝐒

DISCLAIMER

I do not have any academic nor professional training in art. My articulation of what art is a function of my layman’s instinctual appreciation of things beautiful against the ugly; both in the figurative and abstract manifestations as my senses perceive it in any given situation and space, at any given time. All I know is how to think and write, and write and think. Art is what I feel. If I feel it, I can think it. If I think it, I can write it. Writing is my art, my artistic expression. Writing is what I do; all attributable to my academic training.

WORKPLACE OF BEAUTIFUL THINGS

People do from time to time visit museums of all kinds for all kinds of recreational, educational, and research reasons. I work at Norway’s Nasjonalmuseet. The institution has proved to be an awesome literary creative’s wet dream for me as an author and poet. I get at least one goosebumps moment each day I am at work. Tens of thousands of works of art are on display throughout the eighty-nine exhibition spaces at the museum. In all their widely variable expressive forms, these artworks move me in a way that ever fills me with love and joy like I have never experienced before. Working here is a privilege I am much grateful for.

At different points in about all the exhibition spaces in the museum, there are rest stations comprising benches upon extensions of which are placed, amongst other items, wooden playing cards. The cards have various quizzes and games for the guests to have a go at as they sit and rest. I, together with Ole, a fine but ever condescending colleague young enough to be my grandson, happened to have been engaged in a discussion about various aspects of the museum when we approached one such station. Ole then unexpectedly reached out and randomly pulled out a card from the bench extension. It turned out to be a quiz card with the question: ‘What is Art?’; creating a gotcha moment that I saw Ole revelling in.

Talking about Ole’s gotcha moment, this was yet another one of those moments in which a person of European extraction comes to me with the pre-conditioned notion that Black people are not cultivated enough to appreciate the finer aspects of European culture. Anyhow, my immediate response, in this case, was, “Art is the capturing of an experiential moment in time and space in order to, perhaps, tell a story about that experience in the future. This capture can be in any form or medium according to the proclivities and talents of the artist.”
Ole, “I hear you. But you will have to elaborate more on all that you have just said!”
Seeing as we had to attend to each of our respective duties at work then, I replied, “I shall write an essay for you, then. Deal?”
“Deal!”

My definition of art shall be both conceptual and functional. Conceptually, I know art when I perceive it. I do not have to be told. I do not have to be instructed. I know art when my senses register it. Regardless of the representational form, the sentimental response that I get from experiencing any manifestation of art that I consider as beautiful is a constant. Conversely, an unattractive, unpleasant artistic form as I experience it emotionally affects me in the same way relevant to it irrespective of the form or the representational style.

Whenever I read a storybook (or even write one) that I enjoy, my breathing rate slows down, and the total bodily relaxation I get gives me a wonderful warm feeling all over; I get goosebumps, and my palms get warmer and moist. This kind of feeling brings me immense joy. The dreamy state it gets me into sends me into a fantasy world of all things possible. If I had been, for one reason or another, going through hard times, this state brings hope home; it fills me with a sweet sense of freedom. In this state, I am invincible. This is my subjective domain for defining what beautiful art is for me as my perceptive senses – eyes, ears, skin, tongue, nose, intuition – register it, feed my hormonal system (feel-good hormones), and the latter instructing my nervous system to induce my being to act accordingly. Pure joy.

Whilst recognizing it for what it is, art that is repugnant to me is exactly that. If it makes me cringe, if it casts a shadow of pessimism over me, if it fills me with negative thoughts and associations, if it gives me a cold sweat, then it is bad art for me. There are times when I can see beauty in bad, ugly art, though. I think about the hands, or some other body parts, that created the work. Every hand shall tell its story according to its owner’s neuro-hormonal wiring and physical capabilities. One man’s apparent gory art may be another’s depiction of heaven. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Functionally, art is a conveyor of messages, a storyteller; a courier of generational narratives in humanity’s dances with nature and itself over time. Art can be an instrument of change. Art can repair the once broken. Art can inspire hope, faith, trust, and love. To the extent that art is a personal expression, art may speak for its creator. Art creators have the potential to make or break society. Ask God, man’s most divisive, master-of-carnage creation. God may have created man instead, her most complex work of art. The outcome is not any better.

Art is identity. Identity may be deception obscured in art. From the outset, art may be true by intent and purpose. But when human perception and interpretation of reality are as polychotomous as there are so many people on earth, art shall be true or fallacious as to the perceptive state and cognitive capacity of the observer. Therein lies the mystique, the intrigue of art. Who am I? I am a man in love with art.

Art is some powerful stuff. Art is a human creative potential deserving to be handled with tender, loving care. At its best, art is an instrument of peace; art has the potential to stimulate reflection on the human condition. We rise, we fall; art captures all that. Art is beauty. Without beauty, life is not worth living.

Beauty moves humanity forward and higher on the scale of qualitative and quantitative improvements in life. It is not for nothing that nations of the world, interest organizations of all sorts and sizes, wealthy individuals, and many others invest heavily in the promotion, conservation, preservation, and storage of some of our most impactful artworks over the epochs into the future. Art immortalizes human experience.

Introducing our beloved **Rock & Roll** **Norwegian Royal Family**. Long live The King!

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

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Order, read, and be inspired by my latest and 9^th book, 2^nd poetry volume, MACHONA GRIT: Onslaught on Hate

𝐆𝐋𝐎𝐑𝐘 𝐃𝐀𝐘𝐒

January 10, 2023 2:40 am / Leave a comment

Living in the Now

I don’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
Don’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 can’t figure out
What’s become of me
When they expected
I’d vaporize
In lustreless
Post-glory days life today
Them
Pathetic dimwits
Thinking they are
My redeemers
When even
Jesus ain’t my cuppa tea

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

I’m smooth
I shine
I’m glass
Reinforced
Animosity might rattle me
I won’t crack
I won’t break

I’m black
I’m bold
I glitter
I’m diamond
I’m gold fortressed
Amalgamated
I’m steel
Stainless
Dirt don’t sit on me

Animosities bullet-proofed
Stones might hit me
They won’t punch holes
Through my skin
They won’t cause me harm

Hate war machines might strike me
I won’t crack
I won’t bend
I won’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

I’m an open book
I walk my written words
That’s my nature
True to my name
Writing’s on the wall

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

Alert
When they appear tomorrow
Them the haters
I’ll see them from afar

Fazed
They don’t know
They don’t know me
They’ve never known me
They’ll never know me
No love lost

Resilient
I live my life today
For future glory today
That’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
𝐄𝐍𝐃
©Simon Chilembo 30/11-2022

𝗨𝗦𝗦𝗥 𝗢𝗥 𝗪𝗛𝗘𝗥𝗘? – 𝗨𝗞𝗥𝗔𝗜𝗡𝗘 𝗪𝗔𝗥 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟮

April 25, 2022 1:18 am / Leave a comment

𝗘𝘅𝗶𝗹𝗲 𝗘𝗱𝘂𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗢𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀: 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗵 𝗤𝘂𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗮𝗿𝘆

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.

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 didn’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 didn’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 wouldn’t have been me.

Zambia’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 “interesting to talk big struggle issues to”; 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 can’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, “Much as I know you’d make a much better soldier than all these young comrades here, I’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. I’ll talk to your parents about this.”

“That would be nice, thank you! You know, my father’s biggest wish for my two siblings and I is that we could go and study overseas. But that’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.”

“Yes, I know! Your father is a good man. He deserves all the help we can afford him in that regard.”

“Thank you, Comrade! My parents would be extremely happy and grateful if mzabalazo/ the liberation movement can help.”

“It 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 don’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.”

“Why? How’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?”

“Correct, 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.”

“I don’t understand!”

“Let 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. You’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.”

“Yes, growth or lack thereof is a function of ideas and tools constituting a society’s developmental visions as espoused by the incumbent national leadership.”

“Absolutely, 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. There’s a good reason for that.”

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, that’s another language for the perfect Communist state, actually. Only that Communism has no overbearing figures of God as portrayed in religious belief systems.

“That 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.”

“But 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.”

“Communism attainment would be more realistic had it not been for Socialism’s killing of the human spirit, Sae.”

“You are losing me now, Comrade Mjaykes!”

“I 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. That’s only because I really want the best for you and the future liberated, non-Communist South Africa.”

“If I may say so, you are beginning to sound like a sellout, Comrade Mjaykes. Aren’t you risking condemnation by others should they hear you talking like this to me now”

“No, 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, aren’t hard-core Socialists yet, there’ 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.”

“I see!”

“And 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 that’s often as far as it goes.
That’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.”

“But I’ve thus far been made to believe that people in Russia and all these socialist places live happily ever after. Moreover, Russia’s support of ours and others’ anti-imperialist struggles were for that the world must unite against capitalism’s exploitative socio-economic relations subjecting us to lasting poverty and subjugation.”

“That’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 isn’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. We’ll discuss higher level Capitalism issues another time.”

“I must say that this new side of Socialism has shocked me, Comrade Mjaykes.”

“You 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 don’t know.”

It’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 today’ 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.

“You have on many occasions demonstrated that you are a more independent and well-rounded thinker than your contemporaries here, Sae. I know that that’s why some of the older comrades here don’t favour you much. They simply hate your guts. Highly educated as they are also, these guys don’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.
“I’d hate to see you stagnate or degenerate intellectually as you get older. That’s why you can’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.”

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. ‘Forfatter Simon Chilembo’ 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.

USSR-Socialist trained South African national leaders across the board fail to get the Rainbow Nation out of the mess they’ve plunged it in after the fall of Apartheid in 1994. In big geopolitics questions, the USSR yoke is sitting comfortably on South Africa’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 state’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 Russia’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

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.

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𝐆𝐈𝐕𝐄 𝐌𝐄 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄

April 13, 2022 4:01 am / Leave a comment

𝐁𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐄𝐱𝐜𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞

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

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

I’ve danced through
Landmines in my time
Bombs clapping sounds
In my ears
Don’t stop

Scars on my body
Don’t heal
I eel through
I scale
Razor wire fences
To get anywhere

My muscles are wasted
I’ve walked through fire
It’s a wonder
I can move at all

My eardrums hurt
It’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

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 I’d rather
Rock and roll
Down to home base
In satisfaction
I’m ever thrust over the edge
To tumble ’n roll
Over ’n over
In pain

Hitting home base
Body twisted
A bone or two broken
I’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
I’d reach for you
My joy
Every step I take

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 clock’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 Jesus’
Resurrection story
To cover their
Confoundment over
My resilience

Give me time
You’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 bigots’ cruelty
But their horrendous
Outright stupidity

When reason doesn’t work
When prayer doesn’t work
Because their God is made
In the image of them bigots’
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
I’ll rule the world
It ain’t for nothing
I’m the oldest
Human being on earth

They created Adam
To sideline me
Doesn’t work
I’m here
As a given
On the eve of
My victory

It’s beyond haters’ imagination
But
I shall blanket
The world with love
As a given
Some day soon
Nothing can stop me
It’s only a matter of time
Brace yourself
My love
𝘈𝘪𝘨𝘰𝘣𝘦𝘬𝘪 𝘭𝘦 𝘯𝘵𝘴𝘪𝘮𝘣𝘪
This Black don’t bend
𝘈𝘪𝘹𝘩𝘦𝘬𝘦𝘻𝘦𝘬𝘪 𝘭𝘦 𝘯𝘵𝘴𝘪𝘮𝘣𝘪
This Black don’t crack
𝐄𝐍𝐃
©Simon 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.

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TO BOOSTER OR NOT TO BOOSTER

January 9, 2022 3:29 pm / Leave a comment

SCIENCE WORKS

I didn’t announce my Covid-19 booster jab uptake in the second week of December, 2021. There were more important matters to give priority to at that time. Besides, I’m under no obligation to fuss about my vaccination status. It isn’t as if I’m an attention-seeking freak on the radar of 15-minutes of fame news media platforms, or some socio-politico special interests groups. Neither am I promoting nor am I linked to any commercial or industrial entities in the pharmaceutical and medical business spheres.

I am an independent thinker and observer of my world; a one-man intellectual and creative powerhouse. Nobody owns me. I own nobody. I autonomously synthesize my life philosophy out of all the knowledge resources accessible to me at any one time in my free world.

Some people in my various social and professional networks wonder about where all this Corona hassle and the vaccine hysteria will end. They ask me if I shall take jab number four should yet another significant Coronavirus disease variant emerge. But, of course, I shall, yes!

I will happily take all the jabs that official medical and state authorities recommend according to the situation as it unfolds. That’ll be so to the extent that my physical and mental health does not fail me. The assumption being that, in the latter wellness state, I continue to be able to discern crap from science and reason. The day I cease to think about, and see my world from a perspective of science and reason, I might as well be dead.

Science doesn’t stop working. Science in all its natural and sociological branches is about querying the nature of our material and conceptual existence. Science is ever curious about elements of existence concerning the extent to which our senses relate to our existential realities within the accessible universe and beyond. This is called Scientific Research. The basic idea is the need to understand the workings of nature contra our place in it.

In the pursuit of knowledge acquisition, science travels millions of light-years into space, defies suboceanic and subterranean pressures, and breaks down matter to the smallest particles. Human progress as we know it today is a living showcase of the workings of science applied in the total upliftment of the human condition worldwide. How equitable or not that human condition is across the board is a matter for discussion at another time, another place.

In a perfect world, therefore, it’s through understanding maximally possible the essence of nature and its attributes that we can harness its potential to enhance our quality of life on earth. In the hands of screwed-up minds, knowledge of the potential and limitations of nature is, indeed, used to degrade, if not destroy life on earth. In this case, knowledge is worse than ignorance. Ignorance is the conduit of ill intentions of the malevolent.

Working hand-in-hand, malicious knowledge and inherently uncritical ignorance make for the prevalence of detrimental conspiracy theories in times of uncertainties and imminent paradigm shifts in society. The latter may be due to man-made, or natural calamities at any level, necessitating that we, humanity, have to dig deep into our knowledge base to find solutions to existential threats pertaining. The current Coronavirus pandemic and the Global Warming crisis are relevant examples. Also, not in the least, the pandemic of pathological ignorance that’s characterizing many a calamitously dysfunctional, tyrannical national leader in the world today. This is where and when science shines through Research and Development. In-depth sociological research and analysis seek to find and correct incongruencies societal engineering mechanisms as developed and applied by the state and its relevant functional units.

Science doesn’t stop working because it’s not an end in itself. Science is not absolute in its dynamics and outcomes. For anticipated scientific outcomes to be true, certain material and operational parameters have to be defined and fulfilled. Science work starts from known facts or assumptions, natural or constructed, regarding the phenomena to be investigated. For science, its methods, and subsequent outcomes to remain true, they have to be functionally and outcomes constant. Moreover, and decisively, they have to be universally applicable.

When things go wrong, as they will always do, science pauses and checks for any errors that may have led to the disruption. Once identified, the errors might be rectified accordingly, or modifications might be effected as necessary. It’s the nature of science to ever strive to find universally applicable solutions. In cases of perfect states of operations leading to perfect outcomes, science strives to improve processes to take the outcomes to the next level. This is scientific innovation: making it better all the time to achieve higher productivity and product efficacy levels.

The element of positive chance outcomes does occur in scientific work. These positive outcomes arising may be integrated to take the current work to the next level. That only to the extent that the former remain universally constant according to standard, or relevantly adjusted parameters, as well as routines.

Just as science anticipates and warns across the world, people not taking recommended Covid-19 vaccinations are dying like flies caught up in insecticide spray mists. My sympathy extends to those that couldn’t take any vaccines due to scientifically justifiable reasons. From a basic humane perspective, though, I do feel for anybody else dying of their skewed suicidal knowledge of science and nondysfuntional societal management principles.

Although it’s perhaps difficult to quantify the value of a lost life, death makes perfect socioeconomic’ sense. When we die, we are buried at a certain one-time monetary cost. And that’s it. Written off as in Bad Debt in business. Where applicable, the bereaved get fat Life Insurance policies pay outs, inherit big fortunes, and live happily ever after.

Hospitalizing, acute sickness is too costly for society. Just as temporarily or permanently incapacitating illnesses and injuries are atrociously costly for society. On the surface, to deliberately choose to fall ill, and/ or die from scientifically manageable diseases in 21^st Century affluent societies beats me. However, the day I got to understand the physiological dynamics of how our thought processes and our outward manifestations of the same as to our choices and actions work, I found inner peace.

©Simon Chilembo 2022
Author/ Storyteller/ Poet/ Publisher/ Warrior/ Machona Son

I’ve come to adore life more. We live as we are. We die as we live. I live with a smile on my face. I’ll happily wear an anti-Corona mask. Some say I smile with my eyes. I can live with that. I cannot die with a ventilator over my face.

The hustler in me is propelled by my Warrior Ethos of Live Well. Die Fighting. Open your mind, apply all the science, philosophy, artillery, and common sense at your disposal.

Officially proven anti-Coronavirus vaccinations and recommended preventive measures contra the virus are in sync with my Warrior Ethos. Works for me. Bring all the boosters on. Corona must fall. I want my life back!

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

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PS
Order, read, and be inspired by my latest book, MACHONA POETRY – Rage and Slam in Tigersburg

ATLAS-TO-CAPE EXODUS

January 2, 2022 1:38 am / 2 Comments on ATLAS-TO-CAPE EXODUS

RAINBOW BROADBAND
Traitor Mandela
Chillax
Twenty-seven years in prison
Apartheid venom
Fails to corrode his bones
Iapartheid aithethi isiXhosa
Aiyazi ukuthi
Aigobeki le ntsimbi

Robben Island
Made the man
On the one hand
Broke the man’ soul
On the other
Threw his boxing gloves
To the sea lions
Chillax ashore

Gather no weeds
Hammer away rocks
Abound on the island
Protective gear
A remote idea
Rock chips and dust
Mess your eyes up
You can’t cry freedom
You can’t see

When you couldn’t care
About
Carving freedom out of stone
Rock chips and dust
Clog your nostrils up
You can’t smell
Misery of the people
In the air

In as much as
Post-Mandela’s death
People can’t smell Corona
That way it can’t be real
And the people continue
To die like flies
In as much as
Mandela’s
Liberation of
The people of
Mzansi is fake
Fo sho
This is the land
Mandela sold away to
White man’s burden
Legacy perpetrators
They call them
White Monopoly Capital buffoons
To whom
Gupta brothers
Came’n added
Colour’n spice
’n pocketed
Mandela’ sellout inheritors
Dazed in agarbatti smoke clouds
When you thought
Weed was bad
Eroding
Mzansi land
Left, right and centre
Fo sho
With their cupidity machines
Thinking that
Gravy train
Conspicuous consumption symbols
Ferrari and Maserati
Exhaust polenta to
The people of Mzansi for sho

Meanwhile
Maybach leverages mortuaries
Competing for corpses
Around Mzansi fo sho
Some corpses dappered in
Johann Rupert’s
Jewellery empire vanity chains
Stones upon which studded
Wouldn’t feed even
Insects and worms
As is the nature of stones
Who knows that better than
Northern deserts’ pyramids

Perhaps
We should all head south
Go detox
White man’s burden faeces
On Robben Island
For the illusive redemption of
Africa burning
In self-perpetuatory
White man’s burden
Transgenerational trauma
Self-annihilatory black curse

Some look up to
The Pyramids of Egypt
Findings in
The bowels of which
Only confirm
Our once upon a time grandeur
That’s all

Non-revolutionary
Static pride
In ancient times
Disconnected
With realities of our times
Just keeps us sinking
Beneath our rivers

In the age of
Global warming
Of not Mandela’s doing
The Nile shall
Swallow the pyramids
One of these days
What you gon’ do
When the pyramids’re gone

The Congo shall
Flood the belly of Africa
Someday
Who’ll be left to say anything
Whoever’ll be looking
To find Lumumba’s bones floating around
Shall be doing so in vain

The Zambezi is coming
The Kariba Dam’s already
Getting weary
Listen to your basic instincts
What you gon’ do
When Sharon Stone’s
King Solomon’s mines are gone
Wake up
Dude
Put seventy
University
Degrees
To good us for once
For goodness’ sake
It’s okay
The Greenback’s on the streets
Mzansi Rand’ still
Real money fo sho
Got Mandela’s face
On it, neh
Wathi
Pamberi ne ntontoni
Umtu
(Oh, thixo, bawo, Nkosi sikelela!)

Revolutionary Africa
Been at war
With itself from during
Anti-colonial struggle days
Civil wars continued upon
Independence attainment
Free at last to play out
White man’s burden
Transgenerational trauma
Self-annihilatory black curse games
To this day

Freedom is a relative state
In all African states
Basest result of state dysfunctionality
In Africa
As elsewhere
Is a constant
Tyrants everywhere
Including America
Staying alive
Feeding on
Murder in all its execution variabilities
Survivors rot in jail
People endure suffering
In all its construction variables
People dream of life-supportive
Freedoms elsewhere

Since Mandela’s
Betrayal of
The African self-determination cause
Twenty-seven years ago
Mzansi fo sho
Has yet
To degenerate to levels
Of truly liberated
Free Mother Africa
Making a mockery of
Pan-Africanist dreams

When free Mother Africa’s people
Give up on the miseries
Of their tyrannical
Genocidal
War-torn lands
Of once upon a time
Ancient Mega Star Warrior Kings
As accessible to today
As
The horizon of history
Choose to rather not
Get roasted walking the Sahara
Drown treading the Mediterranean
There’s a rainbow broadband
Linking the poles of Africa
From the Atlas to the C a pe
Making a joke of
Cecil Rhode’s Cape-to-Cairo
Highway dream

Following this rainbow
Many an African soul
Crushed under own meaning
Of true self-annihilatory African liberation
Land in awesome Gauteng
Cradle of Humankind grounds
City of gold
Mystical
Below and above
The ground

People begin to breathe here
People grow wings here
People reach all corners of Mzansi fo sho from here
People’s dreams come true here
The rest is magic

Argh, cxh
Afro-xenophobia
Comes and goes
Now and then
Mzansi fo sho
Playing out its own version of
White man’s burden
Transgenerational trauma
Self-annihilatory black curses
Call it divide and rule devices

I’ve asked before
Who’s better
Who’s worse
Same difference
Same shit

The southern-most
Tip of the
Africa-long broadband rainbow
Touches Robben Island
In this lament here
Nelson Mandela legacy spirit infused
I lay my head
On the anvil
In this lament here
I proclaim that
Africa’s future’s anchored here
Prove me wrong
If you can
Hammer my brains out
If I’m wrong

Come along
Join The Rainbow Nation’s march
To go detox itself of
White man’s burden faeces
On Robben Island
For the illusive redemption of
Africa burning
In self-perpetuatory
White man’s burden
Transgenerational trauma
Self-annihilatory black curse
Singing
Africa unite

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is desmond_tutu_trbt_lw_2022.jpg

Desmond Tutu
Knew
May His Soul Rest
In Eternal Power of Love and Peace
It’s all in
The rainbow
Of humanity’s diversity vibrancy
Embrace it
As it garrisons you
In Mzansi fo sho
Desmond Tutu’s magical
Rainbow Nation
Where tyrants
Cave in under the law
Whilst
White man’s burden faeces
Detox movement goes on
Bloody messy
As it gets
As it was in the beginning
END
©Simon Chilembo 28/12-2021

SIMON CHILEMBO
OSLO
NORWAY
January 02, 2022
Tel.: +4792525032

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

PS
Order, read, and be inspired by my 7th book, Covid-19 and I: Killing Conspiracy Theories.

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