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38 YEARS AN EXILE: XXVII
HOME AT LAST! Part 27
Greek Tragedy – Tragic Diaspora Myths
O edl’ ihlaza! That’s isiZulu language, South African poetry at its most elegant for you: You are eating it while it’s still green (read: You’re eating it raw)! Ever eaten an unripe fruit? Sure not the best of tastes, not the best of chews; like getting caught in the act with your lover’s best friend by your lover, on their own bed in their own house.
Now, that’s one big screw up. Much as the acute diarrhoea and abdominal pains you’ll suffer after eating a green, unripe fruit. Assumption is that you don’t die. You dead, you fucked, it don’t matter no more. Wilfully eating an unripe fruit can also be indicative of the immaturity, ignorance, sheer stupidity, and lack of sophistication of the mind of the consumer, a green mind. Mind makes the person … (Continued in the book: “MACHONA AWAKENING – home in grey matter”. Order book on Amazon).
SIMON CHILEMBO
Riebeeckstad
Welkom
9469
South Africa
July 25, 2015
38 YEARS AN EXILE: XIV
HOME AT LAST! Part 14
DIASPORA SCUMBAGS
©Simon Chilembo, 2014
The worst thing any Diasporants can carry with them in their luggage is the superiority complex attitude, as manifest through racial, religious, and cultural arrogance from their lands of origin. More so if it is, in the first place, racial, religious, and cultural persecutions they have ran away from. We put what we put in each our own different luggage when time to say goodbye has arrived. But not all will be useful when we get to our final, often chance, destinations with promises of a brighter future. Sometimes not even a single item in the luggage will be useful at all. Herein lies the difference between winner and loser Diasporants in time … (Continued in the book: “MACHONA AWAKENING – home in grey matter”. Order book on Amazon).
Simon Chilembo
Riebeeckstad
Welkom
South Africa
Tel.: +47 92525032
January 21, 2015
38 YEARS AN EXILE: XIII
HOME AT LAST! Part 13
BRAIN DRAIN
By its very nature, life is, and has to be hard. Life is by design brutal and short. The world is an ugly place to be. It is an inherent feature of the world that evil forces will prevail everywhere, relatively more in specific areas of the world than others, in different epochs.
The brain is by default and function, the antithesis of all that is abhorrent by way of human behaviour, as well as state of the world and being. The brain will, by inclination, gravitate towards all that is good and beautiful.
All things remaining equal, a normally functioning and cultured brain will, as a spontaneous process, seek to create and sustain beauty and well-being against all that is anti-life, all that is anti everything that is beautiful, uplifting, and life supporting.
The brain will defy pain and death in pursuit of freedom in the name of beauty and happiness, including the right to enhance the development of these … (Continued in the book: “MACHONA AWAKENING – home in grey matter”. Order book on Amazon).
Simon Chilembo
Riebeeckstad
Welkom
South Africa
December 20, 2014
MBA ILLUSION
Epitome of Education?
The elegance of MBA programmes all over the world lies, among other things, in the fact that they are designed, marketed, and taught by great storytellers, super orators, impressive performers; illusionists par excellence.
In a wonderfully crafted way, they sell to millions for millions the world over, the idea that, with an MBA from an internationally accredited university, you can snap a finger here, snap a finger there, and the earth will dance under your feet.
Works for some. Disastrous for many. MBA programmes can produce boundless visionaries, eternal dreamers. And that may be as far as it goes for many.
In a pre-MBA course I got into a lifetime ago, I learnt that in much the same way Doctors- and Lawyers-to-be are trained, MBA education is about teaching the candidates information management towards sound, effective, and, ultimately, profitable critical decision making in business, big or small. It’s about where to find information, how to identify useful and relevant information, which parts of the information are relevant for which decision making processes at which level and when. Moreover, it’s about how to distribute information according to intended audience or recipient/ -s, how to store information relevant to its value in the organization, how to discard no longer useful information … (Continued in the book: “MACHONA BLOGS – As I See It”. Order Simon Chilembo books on Amazon)
Simon Chilembo
Welkom
South Africa
July 28, 2014
RICH? POOR? POOR! – THE (SOUTH) AFRICAN CONDITION
UNDERSTANDING (SOUTH) AFRICAN INTER-PERSONAL POWER RELATIONS DYNAMICS, Part 1
©Simon Chilembo, 2013
In India I met a 16 year-old boy. Full of life. Looking very fit and healthy. Strong. Centre of attraction. My kinda youngster. After out-dancing him at a wedding party of a mutual friend, he kept asking, “WHO is this old guy? WHERE is he from? WHAT does he do?” I was 42 years old then.
My own queries led me to know that the boy was the youngest member of a large family. Despite his very strong presence and all, he was semi-literate. How come? He doesn’t go to school. How so? He doesn’t want to; he prefers to spend his days in the gym, and he trains a lot of Karate too. Maybe you should talk to him, Simon. Sure!
“I have never seen the point of wasting my time going to school because I’ll never suffer even if I don’t become a Doctor. My family is extremely wealthy, you see. As things are already, I own more than half of the vast family estate. But I’m not entitled to use it now, until a certain age. When you come back my uncle will build you a Karate school, and I’ll tell you more things. …”
I never went back … (Continued in the book: “MACHONA BLOGS – As I See It”. Order Simon Chilembo books on Amazon)
Simon Chilembo
Oslo
Norway
June 28, 2013
Township Festive Seasons: Laissez-faire?
HAPPY NEW YEAR 2013!
In a flash it felt very strange for me to be sending an Instagram Happy New Year 2013 greeting to the world from the platform of the place of my birth, Thabong Location, Welkom, South Africa. Cruising into a new year here for the first time since 1974.
For me Festive Seasons in Zambia 1975-1984, and 1986-1987 came and went nonchalantly as did the Independence Day, Youth Day, KK’s birthday, etc. celebrations. My own birthdays 1975-1980, and 1982-1988 were but just notable events on the calendar. Festive Season 1985 I was in Greece. What a ball! 1981 I turned 21, and my parents spoilt me. What a groove!
The Norwegian Festive Season is one climatically cold, colourful, vibrant affair so full of love, where over the years the people I’ve had anything to do with have shown me humbling generousity, kindness, warmth, protection, and care. Seen only with my own eyes, processed in and by my own mind, and felt in my own heart, this time of the year in Norway gives the impression that life is here to stay, cherish and nourish it all life long.
So, every time, since 1992, I come to mark the Festive Season with my mother and my two siblings in South Africa, I come here in a Norwegian-Festive-Season-State-of-Mind. But when my parents came back from exile in Zambia, they bought a new home in Bronville, a formally Coloureds Only township in the old Apartheid South Africa. Here, the standard of housing was/ is better, with bigger yards. So were/ (are?) the provision of social amenities, and service delivery.
More yard space translates to more privacy for neighbours, thereby reducing chances of conflicts arising from occasional or regular trespasses into one another’s private domains. My mother and one of her neighbours have a cat-and-mouse relationship though. Both very beautiful and strong women are extremely jealous of each other. I think though that the essence of their mutual dislike has its core in one fundamental, very sensitive issue in South Africa vis-à-vis Black-Coloured relationship as moulded from the earlier colonial times, and fostered during the Apartheid era to this day: the one Coloured Maria lives in strong denial of ‘Black blood’ flowing in her body, “ONS IS NIE KAFFIRS NIE! MY GRANDFATHER WAS SCOTTISH!!!”
My mother Maria on her part has long lived with a painful denial of ‘White blood’ in neither herself nor her people, “RE BASOTHO, HA RE BARWA/ WE ARE BASOTHO, WE ARE NOT COLOUREDS!!!” This, however, is another long and heavy story to tell on another and different occasion.
As the Instagram Happy New Year 2013 greeting whooshed out to the world just after midnight December 31, 2012, recollections of the 1965-1974 Festive Season fun times in Thabong came to mind in a flash. Much as I recalled, there were here many, many people partying out on the streets as the mid-night hour approached. Loud music everywhere, with booze flowing everywhere. Smoke and smell of braai everywhere. Everyone looking good and sexy. Such exuberant, free spirited enjoyment of life. Wow, this IS my element. I love it!
The strange feeling came when I realized that there was also this strong, acrid smell in my nose. This special smell I hadn’t registered since New Year’s Eve 1974. What I knew from the streets as a child was that during the Festive Season everything was allowed, including murder. That another so-and-so killed one so-and-so especially on Christmas and New Year’s eves was as normal as the great anticipation for Father Christmas children will show in Norway.
At perhaps age 6-7 years old, I remember thinking to myself how nice it would be to kill certain people on one fine New Year’s Eve when I’m grown up. By then I had already seen several dead bodies on the streets on various occasions. But it wasn’t till about Easter time 1969 that I first witnessed at close range one man stabbing to death another with a knife. The murderer could have been slaughtering a cow. The dying man’s blood spewed so I could have been watching a burst running water pipe. And then the acrid smell of the man brutally breathing his last’s blood hit me. Festive Seasons were extremely violent those days.
Simon Chilembo
Welkom
South Africa
Tel.: +4792525032
January 01, 2013
Simon Chilembo 