Another rainy day

I did my laundry this morning without looking outside. It's November, it's Cape Town, I assumed it would be sunny. I was wrong.

In a post-Marikana South Africa, it's been a little tricky to be positive. Marikana wasn't just the massacre of silenced workers, it was a tangible sign that things are not all that well in our corner of the world. The wage disputes between marginalized workers and mine bosses captured in microcosm the earth-shattering inequalities in South Africa, all eloquently complemented by the insensitive and ignorant Facebook status updates by some of my peers: "if the miners are going to be earning R12K a month, where can I send in my CV?" Yes, please send in your CV, please go work in the mines, spending hours and hours and hours underground engulfed in the smell of your sweat and your risk of death. Yes please, go and work, work until your body is sore and then work that sore body some more because the invisible whips of your oppression mean that you can't swing a sickie or spend your morning in the office googling holiday destinations while drinking your Vida latte. Yes, go.

There was the economist article, which got the patriots all knotted in their Springbok boxer shorts. Yes, it needed context, yes, it painted our reality in a more jarring clarity than the hazey mist of our high opinion here in Africa's largest economy, and yes I would've toned down on the sensationalist doom and gloom, but they made some valid points... And today, there's this winner, a lament on the state of everything from Zuma's homestead to the demolition of homes in Lenasia. For days I've had in the back of my mind that photo of Helen Zille in her khaki hat, marching the newly revamped streets of rural Kwa-Zulu Natal, having forgotten the role of political opposition--here's a clue; it's not glorified vigilante justice. 

So not much to make me smile. But it can't be all that bad though, that's not what we were promised. This isn't what the generation before mine spent years and lives fighting for, surely?

Or maybe we're still fighting. Maybe that's the problem. Maybe we thought the war was over, when really it was only a battle that had been won. We defeated the monster and forgot about the maggots that feast on the monster's remains; we assumed that when those little beasts, those squirming bundles of injustice, unfreedom and exploitation had ravaged the carcass that they would move on. But they've grown, they've grown and they've turned on the living. Like any predator they've started with the weak and the isolated, and they've started to gnaw at the visceral as well as the soul. And the herd it would seem, has turned it back on the carnage and sits instead in the comfort of their own security; knowing that even if the maggots attack, their thick hides will protect them. 

I've never been very good at being pessimistic. It's not something I'm well practiced to do. I'm hopeful, idealistic, delusional even; that's what I'm good at, immensely talented in fact. I will find the one damn rose in a valley of thorns and convince myself that in the shade of that one omnipresent rose, the thorns become Jelly Beans, and only the good flavours. But this, yoh, this I can't do. This death and destruction genre needs to find its end. COME ON SOUTH AFRICA, pull yourself towards yourself and sort your ish out!!