From Credo, with love.
Just as an aside, I dont know if there has ever lived a man, in our times who understood so much of the African social dynamics, the African family structure, and African spirituality.
And he recorded all this stuff. Find “Indaba, My Children” if you havent read it, and that book will shake your core. And as a black person, you may start examining your cultural choices.
In much of what is being discussed in the video above (you may have missed the link, check above before the picture), he is addressing and accounting for the customs that we have lost, and the narration of the folklores and the oral history that the colonialists tried to wipe away from us, the rest he gave us in that book.
Im bringing this to your attention, my brothers because we now exist as predators in South African society. In the words of President Thabo Mbeki, “we have to address this matter”. This matter of Gender Based Violence (GBV). Its the elephant in the room. That toxic masculinity.
Let none without sin cast the first stone? I hear you. And none of us are innocent in any shape of form, and we may have done things that we hope never sees the light of day. So we stay away from confronting what has become a societal malaise.
All the talk, the boys' convos that abound when our womenfolk are not around. Around the braai, or at the Shisanyama. The bravado and the Tarzan chestbeating and of regalling each other with stories of sexual conquests’.
All of that stuff is equal to the sin.
Because it perpetuates a behaviour, and that leads to a culture of entitlement. That womenfolk owe us their bodies, and our instant gratification. We are broken. And we are taking all that brokenness and breeding a culture of violence. The cup runneth over.
We have lost our culture. It was never like this, and you wont find it in our history as a people. Bekushelwa, uqonywe and you earned your place in a woman’s heart.
And now we are failing in meeting expectations. And we are failing, to admit that to ourselves. Because our pride gets in the way. And we are entertained by #Uyajola99, yet we should be saddened by this mayhem that we bear witness to, that we can prevent, and culturally disown.
And a lot of what place women and men have in the family, in the community, and in our spirituality you can find in Credo’s book and the other video records of his wisdom on YouTube.
But we dont bother to examine ourselves and why everyday, girls go missing, 3 year old girls getting raped, or bodies of young women getting found in the dump sites, in the bushes, burnt, stabbed, strangled and hanging from a tree. Or dead at the Post Office?
But I am not suggesting that everything Credo says is doctrine. There are some things that I am myself still pondering over, which surfaced to me as being wildly vivid an imagination.
And I am also precautiously examining myself, and asking myself what world is there for my daughter, and what society she grows into, just as she is approaching her teen age? And I think, what must I teach my sons, to avoid them turning up later in life as predators? Am I doing enough or anything at all?
You can deconstruct the western influence into our present outcomes, and how institutionalised deprivation of culture from our colonial history affected us.
But and yet, you as being more educated, can and should begin to understand that we are that generation in the emancipation continuum, that is supposed to release us as a people, and ourselves as Africans, from the cultural bondage that we are yoked to.
And as we release ourselves, not as men, but as people, we should also break any and all chains that are holding back the whole.
But what are we doing, and why are we not changing? Why do we violate and get violent?
Peace to you my brethren. The country needs these answers though.
