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𝗦𝗘𝗕𝗢𝗣𝗨𝗔, 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝘁 𝟮
𝗖𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗧𝗨𝗥𝗘 – 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗧𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗧𝘆𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘁.
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗠𝗮𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗮 𝗛𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻 𝗙𝗼𝗿𝗰𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗗𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻
Donald Trump reminds me of sethotsela in South Africa, the land of my birth. Sethotsela is the outcome of a once-buried corpse returned to life by witchcraft methods. This is a creature of the night. It is meant to spread terror in certain human-populated areas, although it may be met in the wild of the night in the forests or mountains. In dark mountain caves, sethotsela can be encountered at any time of day.
With the years, and especially since I started writing and publishing books since 2015, I find myself resorting to my mother tongue, Sesotho, in my efforts to understand sociological phenomena in the world. Growing up and going to school in Lesotho during my formative years in the 1960s, the expression bohlale ba hloleho was used to describe children and adults of exceptional intelligence.
Intelligent children shone at school, and socially. Intelligent adults shone in all human productive endeavours, from agricultural work to national leadership roles. Translated to English, bohlale ba hloleho means natural intelligence, or intrinsic wisdom. People with bohlale ba hloleho are the kind of people who just know it. They just have it. They are effortless problem solvers, ever with viable explanations of how things in nature and society work at all levels.
It is in the concepts and metaphors of bohlale ba hloleho abound in deep Sesotho language speakers that I have found greater clarity in my strive to make sense of my world, its joys, and traumas. The calibre of our world leaders and the outcomes of their work for the good or bad of their respective societies and the global community fascinates me profoundly.
Donald Trump features in this presentation for what I perceive of him as his abundantly manifest disconcerting unhinged intrigues of being. No other prominent incompetent pseudo-politician in the world today does it worse than Trump.
The Donald Trump brand enshrines amongst others, blatant extreme White Supremacist racism, bravado, career suicide, condescendence, denialism, fascism, fraud, idiocy, incongruity, inconsistency, indecency, infantility, ingratitude, lies, manipulation, mockery; there is also misogyny, mayhem, obstinacy, petulance, rigmarole, shamelessness, vindictiveness, vulgarity, and white privilege. It beats me that there exist pro-Trump racial interest groups under the banners such as Blacks for Trump, Chinese Americans for Trump, Indian Americans for Trump, and Latinos for Trump, to name a few. And, then, there are Women for Trump. Jeeezzzus!
CLARIFICATION
This presentation is an extended and updated version of an original essay I wrote and published on my blog, Chilembo Warrior Moves. The publication was on January 13, 2022. I’ve been following with fascination as to how, with his cult of personality intrigues, Donald Trump has managed to polarize the American society.
I do not expect that the stuff that I write or say about Donald Trump will ever make any difference if ever they got to him, or his cohorts. It is not my goal either. I neither write nor speak about the man for his sake. I do this for myself, for the preservation of my sanity. Donald Trump is not my cup of tea.
People have the right to hold opinions on anything or anybody they like or don’t like. However, I am ever so baffled by people who say that they don’t know anything about politics, and that they neither are interested in the concept and practice of politics.
Politics is the science of governance. People that are indifferent to, or ignorant of the various aspects of politics, myopically distance themselves from basic human relations management mechanisms that engineer society at all levels. From society to society in different epochs with time, human collectives will either spontaneously, or through force, arrange themselves in particular ways. The intention being to influence human behaviour contra existential imperatives such as the search for, production, and distribution of food and shelter. That’ll include the creation of systems and structures that enhance and sustain the people’s general well-being, ensuring the propagation of the species.
Historically, different ideologies have emerged in efforts to explain the roles and positions of people in the processes of living in a world of limited survival resources. Marxism looks at how classes emerge in society as to what and how much access the people have to the ownership and control of the means of production. The upper, ruling classes own more at the expense of the lower classes, who are the oppressed. Socialism propagates ideas that the workers shall share ownership of the means of production.
In Capitalism, the means of production are in varying magnitudes owned by individuals or corporate structures. Those that don’t own shall be in perpetual servitude to the Capitalists, the former selling their labour cheaply to the latter. Capitalism aims to earn profit upon selling their goods and services at prices higher than production costs, which include labour costs.
Ideally, Communism eliminates private property and socio-economic classes. Here, the state owns the commanding heights of the economy and manages the economy for the people, who are co-owners and shall be equal beneficiaries of the bounty of the land according to their respective needs. Communism takes Socialism to the next level.
Regardless of where we are in the world, politics permeates all aspects of our lives. It doesn’t matter whether one is oblivious to the intricacies of politics or not. It is the politically ignorant and/ or indifferent that make for the rise of pathetic politicians as to the likes of Donald Trump. To understand politics is to understand humanity and its place in the universe.
If USA’s January 6, 2021, insurrection is anything to go by, politicians of personalities like Donald Trump are some of the most dangerous national leaders we can have anywhere in the world. Being the most powerful country in the world, whatever good or bad happens in the USA has enormous positive effects or repercussions in the world. This affects us all, irrespective of whether we are interested in politics or not.
If you are a practicing or an aspiring International Trade business person, follow events in America in your wealth creation and management endeavours.
Those who follow local and international politics with critical thinking minds are never taken by surprise when world peace conditions or world economic trends point north or south. The well-informed can predict potential outcomes of events at home and/ or abroad. Therefore, because I can see the potential danger that Donald Trump poses to his country, and subsequently the rest of the world, I write and talk about him to quell my frustration with the American Nightmare.
Furthermore, I write and talk about Trump to repeal my anxiety, and to fortify my soul in the threat of the World War III outbreak peril he’d pose to humanity should he return to power in the forthcoming USA Presidential Elections 2024, on November 5. First, there’ll be the 2nd American Civil War. People, get ready! I’ve done my part: I’ve told you so.
SETHOTSELA (continued)
Sethotsela scares the living daylights out of those who encounter it. The unfortunate can even die. Those who have been in the presence of sethotsela and survived can become so traumatized that they begin to worship its mystic; doing everything possible to avoid crossing paths with the dreadful spectre.
This creature can also be deliberately made out of various materials, making a mannequin to represent a likeness of a marked dead person. Witchcraft rituals are then applied to give life to the mannequin. At worst, a sethotsela can be a silent, elusive killer; an instrument of coercion. Amongst others, the idea may be, on behalf of the witchcraft practitioner, to eliminate people from, or to force them by fear to vacate certain areas. That way, enabling the witchcraft people to acquire more land and property, enhancing their power over their fellow citizens.
SEBOPUA
In my mother tongue, Sesotho, the verb ‘to mold’ (with clay) is ho bopa (ka letsopa). By extension, ho bopa describes ‘to form’, or ‘to create’ a tangible, inanimate object out of clay or any other similar malleable material. The objects made may be of functional, ornamental, or both values. They may also be aesthetically attractive or repulsive according to the eye of the beholder. And, they may either be destructive or life-supporting, either by design or accident, through intentional application.
For purposes of this presentation, we shall work with the concept of ho bopa in terms of creation as a force. In this case, creation manifesting a dysfunctional output; a thing, with a potential for destruction of the self and/ or its environment. I define creation here to be the supra-human force that is responsible for the existence of the universe and all that exists or doesn’t exist in it. What is, how, and when creation made the universe is a question answered relative to earthlings’ capacity to fathom the extent of the universe as to the universe’s magnitude and its functional attributes.
Human beings’ capacity to understand creation as a conceptual or objective reality is a function of the individual’s cognitive wiring. This influences the individual’s reasoning power contra existential questions, big or small. Therefore, whilst one person might attribute creation to the power of God, another will attribute it to the Big Bang. In-between, there are alternative explanatory models as numerous as there are humans on earth. I won’t go there.
Etymologically expanding ho bopa leads us to, amongst others, the adjective sebopua. The latter approximately translates as ‘a product of creation’. i.e., a thing, an object the existence of which is acknowledged simply because it exists as a result of creation’s infinite creative potential. Creation gets it right most times; it screws up badly sometimes.
Sebopua is thus used to describe people of various degrees of physical handicaps and intellectual disabilities; often from birth. It may be due to birthing complications, illness, inherent neurological or genetic aberrations, accidents, and many more. The expression sebopua is often applied derogatively. It may also be used in exasperation as a manifestation of grief against a condition of hopelessness, extreme suffering for the afflicted, and the next of kin as well; including national social welfare authorities, where applicable.
On the one extreme, there’ll be a wholly physically disabled person of any age; drawing sympathy from others: harmless, poor, unfortunate product of God’s creation.
On the other extreme, there’ll be a borderline, apparently normal person. But they will have all kinds of eccentricities. These render the sebopua incapable of functioning within socially conventional boundaries of human interactions. Much so in adulthood, people in this category tend to live in parallel universes contra mainstream social wisdom concerning how society is organized; from the smallest family units to the larger national entities. Here, the term sebopua is applied derisively, and it may attract animosities towards the concerned.
Sebopua people break all the rules, either purposely or because ‘it is what it is’. They don’t know anything else but their unique ways of looking at the world. They cannot understand that others can think or act differently from them in given situations. They simply don’t know how to empathize: it’s their way or no way at all. Civility is a concept unknown here. Sebopua people are ever such spoilt brats, from childhood to the grave. They are bullies; outright dumbheads. They are deceitful charmers capable of gross manipulation of the emotionally and/ or mentally weak; instilling lasting loyalty to the self from the subjugated through fear: The Ruthless Rule.
Nevertheless, some of human history’s greatest thinkers and inventors the works of whom society benefits from even today can easily be drawn from the eccentrics above. These often tend not to be too much of a burden to society. For example, love or hate Elon Musk for screwing up by X-ing Twitter; he has given us the Tesla brand, SpaceX and Starlink. It is those that are inclined to destruction that are a curse to humanity. Some of the most perilous leaders in human history have emerged from the latter category of sebopua, a freak of creation. Donald Trump fits into this category. Perfectly.
The thing about sebopua is that they are just a thing. They are devoid of coherent feelings and thoughts expression, be it verbal or written. Sebopua are one-way-traffic dysfunctional communication machines. Their language skills often leave much to be desired. Sebopua given to verbal diarrhoea crap-talk inclinations, talking to one could as well be as good as talking to a clay-molded human figure.
Sebopua can be indifferent to the elements; they might know no pain. The only form of pleasure that matters for sebopua is their staying alive at the expense of their perceived and real enemies, not understanding how anybody can be so stupid compared to their, sebopua’s superior intelligence. Sebopua brutality can be horrendous. Woe to the spineless that fall for sebopua’s deceptive charisma. Woe to non-stayer enemies of sebopua. Find Yevgeny Prigozhin, he’ll tell you about Vladimir Putin. Mike Pence barely survived Trump’s Maga lynching mob
Another thing about sebopua is that an eccentric sebopua is a sebopua. The condition knows no colour; it knows no race. The only difference is the relative extent of power exercised, and access to weapons of destruction according to sebopua’s location on the planet. This here debunks racism as an ideology that claims and pushes ideas that some races are inferior to others. In a perfect world of the free, people group in cliques not always out of racial identity solidarities.
Both for the good and the bad, people are drawn to and bond with one another out of shared mental constructs; i.e., shared world views as to common fears, or other human passions. Opposite poles attract is a magnetic studies principle in Physics. In human relations, bonds reflecting and upholding certain innate behavioural attributes are captured in the idiom birds of a feather flock together.
There’s sebopua in a cul-de-sac in America today: Donald Trump. The walls are closing in. I wonder what he’s going to do when he can’t breathe anymore. They say he farts all the time. In England, another one bit the dust: Boris Johnson with Brexshit. The world must now learn to stop political experiments with dibopua (sebopua plural form) if we have learned anything from the Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic.
In the old days, dibopua used to be hidden away. Or worse. Democracy is a wonderful thing in our times: everyone has the right to live. In principle. Whatever the cost. However, there’s a tipping point to everything in life. May the fair and just prevail in all holes and surfaces of the planet. May light reign supreme. Ultimately. The future must be bright for all.
SIMON CHILEMBO
OSLO
NORWAY
January 13, 2022
Updated: 20.05.2024
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MANDELA, KAUNDA LEGACIES
Unilateral Tug of War
Just in terms of numbers, South Africa and Zambia cannot be equated. Of course. The former outstrips the latter by far: from territorial boundaries dimensions, population sizes and overall demographics, natural resources endowment, optimal economic potential and actual performance, to military power. Numbers don’t lie.
It goes without saying, therefore, that at any one time, any one variable or all highlighted above considered, South Africa will, in real terms, be a much more complex society relative to Zambia. Meaning that politics in South Africa will, correspondingly, be a more challenging enterprise for those involved in the national political leadership arena, whether in ruling power or in the opposition.
Needless to say that there are, indeed, countries smaller than even Zambia, but happen to have much more intricate political intrigues than South Africa. Another time and another place for the last observation raised.
A simple Google search will either confirm or debunk my assertions above, much as it will do with many of my postulations throughout this presentation.
Politics is the science of government. Government is the collective of institutions, including their constituent leaderships and functional personnel. They are created to enforce societal progress rules and policies that are arrived upon by the representatives of the body politic.
The government, or the state, will often reflect the interests of the dominant political parties. However, through corruption and greed, the dominant, ruling political parties may themselves be subtly steered by peripheral influential, manipulative economic forces. These may either be local or international actors, if not a combination of both. In South Africa, the concept called “State Capture” describes the collusion between the powerful economic elite and the government.
Notwithstanding the “State Capture” phenomenon, the interests of the respective political parties are often shaped and differentiated by their cardinal ideologies. An ideology is the summation of ideas based on theories and policies of political and economic engineering of society.
Ideologies are applied in varying ways to indoctrinate particular societies to address and find solutions to existential questions and challenges in certain pre-determined, and non-variable methods. Therefore, ideologies are not only critical for shaping individual countries’ internal living conditions, they also influence individual countries’ international relations premises; i.e. which countries will have mutually cordial diplomatic relations with one another, which supranational institutions the countries will be members of, which international solidarity causes countries will engage in and at what cost, etc.
In contemporary times, historical factors leading to the creation of specific nations often contribute to the kind of ideology adopted, developed, or redefined to suit local conditions. A nation’s wealth, often with particular reference to its relative strategic significance to the major economic and political nations and power blocs in the world, will also have a bearing on the nature of the dominant ideology. A subservient country’s geographical location on the globe can further add to, or reduce its strategic value.
At any one time, a quick reality check will show that relatively newer and smaller nations with both perceived and real strategic importance to the major political and economic giant nations, e.g. the industrialized Western world, have a hard time determining their own, sovereign national ideologies.
Old ties bind some of these emergent states with their former colonial masters from the Western world. Others will be held in infinite indebtedness to comrade states from the Eastern socialist, or communistic countries that helped in their liberation struggles for independence.
It is in the light of all the above that I choose to look at the comparative legacies of Nelson Mandela of South Africa, and Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia. Comparative because of the many critics of Nelson Mandela, who, in my view is unfairly battered in relation to the critics’ view of to whom real Southern African statesmanship ought to be accorded contra Kenneth Kaunda’s legacy too. I specifically address myself to Zambian critics.
Nelson Mandela attends the lieing in state of ANC president OR Tambo at FNB stadium, Soweto, South Africa. (Greg Marinovich)
Before I proceed, I wish to make a few salient personal points:
- I must declare that this is a non-solicited presentation. It is only an outcome of the involuntary workings of my critical thinking mind and its creative processes. It is my subjective, free world intellectual response to the foul anti-Mandela vis-à-vis Kaunda sentiments I have seen expressed in the various social media platforms, particularly Facebook, for many years. It is not my goal to want to be malicious against anybody. Neither is it my intention to seek or expect approval, favours, or rewards from anybody.
This is an honest, independent expression of my thoughts and feelings with nothing but the very best of intentions. All this is done with the utmost respect both for Mandela and Kaunda, their respective families, and their followers through their respective foundations and other fora … (Continued in the book: “MACHONA BLOGS – As I See It”. Order Simon Chilembo books on Amazon)
Simon Chilembo
Welkom
South Africa
Tel.: +4792525032
February 13, 2018
SMARTER ZIMBABWEANS, STUPID SOUTH AFRICANS?
IS IT TRUE OR NOT THAT ZIMBABWEANS ARE MORE SMARTER (sic), EDUCATED THAN SOUTH AFRICANS??
Asked somebody on a Facebook group, The SA Political Forum (no longer exists).
A clumsily formulated, but interesting question which has provoked extremely intense debate on the forum in recent days. The latter manifesting more the worst than the better of our views of one another in this part of the world: nationalism, racism, tribalism, bigotry, parochialism, xenophobia, ignorance, primitivity, nauseous arrogance, pettiness, immaturity, insensitivity, paternalism, mental derangement symptoms, lack of imagination, intellectual poverty, academic disorientation, non-culturedness, superstition, spiritual emptiness, insecurity, dumb-headedness, self-destruction tendencies, predator mentality, terribly developed language/ communication skills, cheap rhetoric, thick-headedness, anarchism, mistrust, misinformation, information distortion, history misinterpretation, manipulation, wilful ignorance of facts, e-kassie mentality, ill-defined defiance, profanity, foolish pride, as well as threats; including leadership/ rule by fear.
I do not quite recall how my first year, 1965, at school in Lesotho unfolded. What I do remember well, though, is that it was a hell lot of fun learning how to read and write for the first time. Returning from what I had then understood to have been Christmas holidays, January 1966 I discovered that I had completely new classmates at my school. The others from the previous year were in another class I heard called Padiso/ Sub B.
That didn’t bother me much, however; all I wanted to do was to continue learning how to read and write. It was ever such great fun, at the request of the class teacher, to stand in front of the class reading or counting for my new classmates. Nevertheless, I recall that at some point this whole thing began to bore me half way to death; I kept reading and counting the same things all the time. I felt it was time I went to join my old classmates who were now in Padiso/ Sub B. So, I stated my wish to the class teacher.
The school principal wouldn’t allow that to happen, I was told. Why??? “Because you are just too intelligent for your age, Simon. Boko ba hao bo tla bola …/ Your brains will rot if you go to higher classes while you are still under age. People who get too much education while young get mad, you see. Don’t worry, you shall go to Padiso/ Sub B when you are 8 years old” the teacher resolutely told me. So, I stayed in Grade 1 for three years, 1965-67, to keep my sanity together. Jeeezuz!
During the years 1967-69, the only meaningful school activity I recall are the almost daily after school fights arranged by older boys and girls. The idea was that boys my age should/ would beat the brains out of me because teachers at the school never stopped talking about how intelligent I was. Sadly for the matchmakers and my opponents, I would win absolutely all my fights. There was no way I was going to allow these dumb heads to kill my brains. I was also a street-smart kid.
The thing is, while these age mates of mine were still working around getting the alphabet, and numbers, together, I was already reading to my class teacher and my grandmother some passages from the Lesotho Times newspaper. I am a South African child begotten of a Zambian father. At this formative school of mine in Lesotho, there were many other mixed ethnicity parentage children (representative of the ethnic and racial diversity of the Southern African sub-continent) from relatively more resourceful families in the major South African metropolis, including Lesotho itself.
In 1970, going onto my tenth year of age, I find myself in a South African school classroom for the first time. The academic excellence self-confidence developed in Lesotho got acutely shaken by my failure to understand what the textbook I was given by the new class teacher was about. Reading comprehension, of course. I struggled through the assigned reading passage, and then answered the subsequent 10 questions best I could. I got zero out of ten.
The teacher expressing dismay at my explicit lack of knowledge of Afrikaans, I couldn’t reveal that I had actually started schooling in Lesotho, where there was/ is no Afrikaans spoken or taught in schools. By the time of the mid-year exams in June that year, though, I was scoring the highest all-round grades in class
Upon return from winter holidays, my class teacher called me out to where she and other teachers were apparently discussing something serious together with the school Principal. I was told that all had agreed that I deserved to be promoted to the next class because I was just too intelligent for Grade 3, which I had in fact been forced to repeat in the first place. I declined. Why? I was afraid my brains would rot, and I would thus go mad from too much education while still young. Bummer! I kept scoring the highest grade point averages at school in South Africa till end of 1974.
First quarter of 1975 I am in Lusaka, Zambia. No school that year. Very depressing. I have never felt smaller, and more insignificant. Shattered medical studies dreams. But then again, just under 15 years of age, I discover, and enter into a space called library for the first time in my life: Lusaka City Library, British Council Library, American Library. Book, books, and books everywhere, including my Uncle Oliver’s private library at home, as well as later, the magnificent UNZA library. And there were so many magazines, journals, and other publications of all sorts to read. I became a bookworm that year. A whole new world of thinking and dreaming was opened for me; and thus began my daily English reading and writing journey to this day.
Back to school in 1976. Forced to backtrack again because, my father was told, the then South African Bantu Education Grade 7 academic standards were lower than those of Zambia. But, as soon as I had gotten into the rhythm of things at school, I was topping class grade average points, as usual. I could never understand the Grade 7 failure panic and hysteria characteristic of the time in Zambia. I, of course, passed the final exams with flying colours later in the year.
South African born, Zambian dad begotten man-child would show constant, and predictable, academic excellence throughout the entire Secondary/ High School career to university; crushing class- and schoolmates from many other countries/ nations of the world, including Zimbabwe. This, despite the fact that I didn’t know what a science laboratory was until I was 17 years old at secondary school. That Zambian school children had already been exposed to sophisticated scientific education for years had also greatly intimidated me at first. There was at that time an awesome Zambian youth scientific magazine called Orbit. The story would repeat itself in Norway, both academically and professionally in my adult years.
20 years ago, after failing a Drivers’ Licence theory examination in Norwegian language, a blue-eyed Norwegian young man, upon hearing that I had scored almost 100% in the same test, exasperates, “Fffæææn/ Ssshit, I never knew that there were in fact wise negrer in the world!” Another dick head bites the dust.
The moral of this story is that when you are hot, you are hot. Your origin, or Nationality, due to various objective and subjective factors, may have some, but certainly not, decisive bearing.
My initial response to the question on the forum went as follows:
NOT true! The 5 million or so … in SA should tell a lot about Zimbabweans’ smartness, with their country messed up by (one of) the most educated presidents in Africa. We have our Msholozi, we have our legacy of inferior, for Blacks, apartheid Bantu education. But, for one of many examples, and despite acute imperfections here and there, through SASSA, South Africa effectively distributes at least R 10 BILLION in various social grants a month.
Ultimately, it’s not so much about how smart or educated Nation(-s/ -nals) are, it’s about how they apply these qualities to meet their people’s needs and aspirations as their nations develop and progress among nations of the world.
Simon Chilembo
Riebeeckstad
Welkom
9459
South Africa
Tel.: +4792525032
October 12, 2014
Simon Chilembo 