If you want to go quickly, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.
That’s Al Gore talking about climate change and the scary place the world’s at right now.
The proverb rings true for Africa. It’s through collective, not individual action, that things will change. Traditionally, Africa is about the collective. There’s a neat tie-in with Al’s message about the natural environment. Africa is, after all, the continent of Nature.
Kenya’s women activist groups have called for a week’s Ban on Bonking to demonstrate to the male leadership of the country they want political reform. Since the violence that marred last year’s erections, I mean elections, (a slip of the tongue or the African phonetic transposition of Rs and Ls?), there has been an uneasy truce on the political scene. Women have decided it’s high time this changed and to take matters into their own hands. They will even pay prostitutes to abstain, to get their message across.
There is something positively Gandhi-esque about the initiative and in a country so beset by HIV/AIDS and overpopulation, a ban on sex couldn’t be more to the point! Viva Mama Africa!
Every second Saturday is Good Hair Day, for dogs at least. In the small Moravian village of Elim, near the southern-most tip of Africa, dogs are given a wash and pamper by local farmer, Andrea Booysen and her helpmate, Belinda Owens. And it’s more than a lick and a promise for these often neglected animals.
Elim houses
While the world reels from the Credit Crunch, South Africans stagger about in a crisis of faith – faith in its institutions, its justice system and its leaders.
Pula ran across the bare, cracked, cement earth throwing her mother a toothless grin.
“Don’t be too long in the forest and remember the dangerous ones”, she called after her effervescent firstborn.
Billed as an annual celebration of conscious living and community, the programme was portentous of the eclectic mix of people that the festival drew.
The topic that initially attracted me to the festival was “African Wisdom”, which embraced the complexity of African thinking. Traditionally, Africans live close to Nature and understand that peoples’ law is subject to natural law. It is only recently (in historical terms) that the tribal initiate’s sense of responsibility to the environment has abdicated to the impersonal concept of government, and this is where things have gone awry. In light of the excesses of the West it is uplifting to learn that answers to our current problems are innate to this wonderful continent. It will take open minds and consciousness to rekindle them; not necessarily in their previous forms but in new, creative ways, appropriate to modern conditions. Read the rest of this entry »
Still on a biblical theme: the parallel between the long suffering people of Zimbabwe and the misery of Job in the Old Testament is apparent. In the Book of Job God has a wager with Satan that Job’s faith is so great it will withstand all manner of deprivations inflicted by God. The conceit in this is shocking (and probably inadmissible to many of the faithful). Yet the parallel is there again – Zimbabwe’s ruling elite crushing their own people for the purpose of shoring up their power.