To bread, it is, just express yourself without bounds

A bread to realise

There are many liberation struggles going on around the world, but there is one I was not aware of until yesterday evening, the liberation of the loaf is the battle cry of bread and the art of baking what the United Artists for Africa mistakenly suggested was God turning stones to bread because that never happened.

Having bought takeaway Togolese beans (èwà Àgànyìn), which is mashed black-eyed beans with a red chilli sauce, the only adequate staple to go with it is Agége bread (a soft, dense loaf of bread), which I soon learnt, I could not get anywhere in Cape Town that I decided to bake my own.

All pans run free

Asking Alexa to find a recipe on YouTube was a waste of time even with my putting on a thick Nigerian accent as it offered either Gigi or Gay for Agege, it was just better to type it in. Having gotten a good idea of what to do, I acquired the ingredients and utensils and set to baking bread, my very first time.

After all I had done, one thing was missing, a lid for my loaf pan. Apparently, you can get every choice loaf pan for baking bread, in any material you might desire including silicone that takes heat up to 230℃, but you cannot get for the want of trying in stores, specialist outlets, or online, a loaf pan with a cover or a lid.

Perseverance in lack

Then, I improvised, I wrapped the loaf pan in heavy-duty foil, which kept the loaf in shape, but I had to have it baking in the oven for thrice the recommended time because the heat was not getting to the loaf as it would have if there were just a lid. You have to ask, what happened to loaf pan lids or why no one around here seems to desire to bake bread with the loaf liberally expressing itself beyond the mould?

Then again, what I might not get on the retail market most definitely is in the professional bakeries, because typical bread for toast is moulded in an almost square cross-section to a rectangular length. I might have an alternative, using disposable aluminium food trays with cardboard covers. It might suffice until I accidentally find a loaf pan that invited a lid companion to the party, else, it is to England where the freedom of the loaf is still a subject of debate rather than of right.

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Decade Blogs - Sira Sokari - Writing is the Liberator

Decade Blogs

Sira Sokari probably presents one of the more uncanny stories of my #YourBlogOnMyBlog Series commemorating my Decade of Blogging.

Blog - To Celebrate My Decade of Blogging

She must have read my request for blogs and an email landed in my inbox offering to write for me. I acceded the request but was curious as to where she might of learnt of me.

In her words:

Where I learnt of you:

Well, this is pretty easy. When I joined Twitter, you were a suggestion. No, that didn't sound well. I mean, the Twitter search engine suggested your handle.

Your Twitter avatar has the Taj Mahal in the background. I lived in India for quite a while so I guess that also made me click the 'follow' button.

Then I found out about your blog.

I must say, your views on some topics like abortion, religion and sexuality are not ideologies many Nigerians will agree with.

She had me from Taj Mahal, everything else from there on had to be a yes and that is how I got to make an acquaintance with Sira.

Blog - Incredible India: The Majesty of the Taj Mahal

In her interesting piece below, she says writing is a liberator, well, it has been my crude therapy for a decade, an outlet for pent-up emotions, angry outbursts, considered meditations and reaching out for help.

One thing you can take away from her is this, “You don't have to be overly gifted. Just write.”

Sira Sokari blogs at http://ogonisira.wordpress.com and has the Twitter handle @sirasokari

Writing: She is the Liberator.

Usually when people talk about literature and society, there is more emphasis placed on the reading aspect. You can easily find quotes that say, 'when you read, your imagination takes you to a world of singing gorillas and there you will be made the queen mother of all furry creatures' or some other kind of motivational phrases. I'm not denying that reading is fun, I just want the art of writing to also be properly represented.

You don't have to be overly gifted. Just write.

I want people to know that when you pick up a pen or your iPad (for the savvy people) and decide to write down a story, whether scientific or fiction it means you have power.

Writing gives your imagination the power to create a whole new world. A world you can escape to, a world that is tailored to your needs simply because you wrote it.

When you write, you can create a world of peace for children who long for a story before they fall asleep.

When you write, you can create a world of happy ever afters that will comfort a spinster.

When you write, you inform, you educate, you plant ideas in the minds of people, and you give people hope.

The pen is mightier than the sword.

If you are like Olusegun Obasanjo and you write, the Nigerian Twitter Empire will tell you not to call a pot black because you are a fat, old kettle who has been in the game of boiling water for a long time and is angry now because your fire has quenched. [The ex-President had written an open letter to the President.]

When you write, you cause change. What greater power is there than the power of change?

And most of all when you write, you liberate yourself of burdens that cannot be unloaded except on paper or on your iPad.

Times are changing, I have to keep up with this paper and iPad thing.

Opinion: How Zwarte Piet is a Subject of Culture, History, but Rarely Race

Some quaint traditions

A number of exchanges on Facebook regarding the Sinterklaas tradition which is the Low Countries' equivalent though contrived of Santa Claus had me rummaging through the memories of my almost 13 year sojourn in the Netherlands.

The topic concerned the helpers of Sinterklaas called Zwarte Piet (Black Pete). These are usually Caucasians with blackened faces in clothes of flamboyant contrasting colours somewhat modelled on the Moors as Sinterklaas is said to visit the Netherlands from Spain.

Much as I understand that the blackening of faces might present a culture shock to foreigners observing this tradition for the first time, it does not remotely pertain to outright racism apart from the general idea of a master-servant relationship between Sinterklaas and Zwarte Piet.

Know your history

What bothers me is the tendency for certain people to arrogate to themselves either real or imagined histories of figures and traditions they have no affinity with and in the process they begin to personify the victim complex of those cultures.

On the broader issue of our humanity, we do recognise that we all have a responsibility to seek the institution and enforcement of broad human rights for freedoms and the pursuit of happiness.

However, it is also important that we recognise our core identities such that we do not appear to race ahead of the discussion that pertains to the rights of others in groups that we do not essentially belong due to many factors beyond race and residence.

Too diverse for colour to matter

My view of the black race is that it is just as diverse as any other race. Though we might have shared histories of oppression and indignities suffered through centuries, it is important that we recognise the differences in our history within the compendium of many histories in Africa, in the Caribbean, in North America, in South America and now recently in Europe.

Whilst centuries ago, Africans might have shared in the broader cruel history of slavery towards either the Middle East or the Americas, each destination developed a divergent history where the commonality of race is the only affinity between us after which we are all very different people.

In Africa, Blacks might people the Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone parts of Africa, but within those countries that make up these groupings, we are radically different in culture, tribe, tradition and histories that the artificially cobbled-together nations we belong to are mostly geographical expressions that we have learnt to live with.

How to join a struggle

We can identify with and join a struggle for the liberation of other oppressed members of our race, but we must be careful that in our identifying with a cause we do not lose our identity and history to complete assimilation, uprooted from the ancestry and moorings of who we are.

Other Africans joined together to fight Apartheid, but we fought as free people seeking the freedom of our brothers and sisters; we did not become South African and put ourselves under the influence of Apartheid to stand in the face of the shootings in Soweto.

Quite heterogeneous

In Britain, the tendency to see the black race as homogenous is dangerous. The majority Caucasian indigenous and growing foreign population though white, rarely identify that strongly along racial lines as Africans, African Americans, Caribbean or similar people of colour do.

They have their languages, culture, histories and strong identities linked to regions, customs, traditions and many other common traits that sets each grouping out as unique.

I sometimes fear that we coalesce and school together like fish on issues where we are essentially birds of a completely different feather.

Zwarte Piet is hardly the problem

It is why I could not countenance the apparent righteous indignation bordering on apoplectic rage, of African residents of England to Zwarte Piet. The debate is ongoing in the Netherlands about cultural and politically correct elements of retaining that aspect of the Sinterklaas culture.

It is healthy, interesting and robust, but it is nowhere near the zest for insurrection demonstrated by racial impostors from abroad, who might have found another roller coaster bandwagon to hitch a ride on.

We indeed must have debates about racism, racial equality, race relations, race history and probably revisit history for understanding, appreciation, recognition and reparation of wrongs of the past and present – I do not think that debate can be had with wrestling Zwarte Piet to the ground in either horseplay or mortal combat.

The fight for dignity is paramount beyond race, but we lose focus when we decide to take more offence on issues where our affinity with the people we presume are not liberated is tenuous at best.

South Africa: Malema, the glaring face of the worst of Africa's youth

Love the Boer

It was heartening to read this morning that the ANC had advised its members to refrain from singing [1] the liberation struggle song “Shoot the Boer”.

There was a time when the song was one to sing to enjoin the oppressed black people under the utterly repressive apartheid rule to rally to a cause beyond the peaceful struggle for majority rule.

If I heard an old man sing the song it would be a recollection of exploits but with the wisdom and gratitude for the fact that times have changed for a new kind of song asking the government to do more for its people - all of them.

No doubt this advice was particularly directed at the leader of the ANC Youth League, a controversial yob in leadership with populist rhetoric tailored to cultivate strife, animosity, discord, riot and division; in these times, the song is hateful, can incite to violence and is outrageously intemperate.

Roguish youth

Mr. Julius Malema [2] who is just 29 could have symbolised a bright future for the young South African but all he has been able to do is court controversy after controversy with brashness, recklessness and demagoguery.

His extreme views are unhealthy, unwholesome and atrocious, basically a mirror image of the worst of the oppressors that were on the other side of that struggle. However, a somewhat timid ANC leadership has been reticent about tackling the whippersnapper head on and calling him to order. Such an untrammelled attack dog can be useful for ulterior political ends by malevolent persons with influence, power and money.

Mr. Malema only last week arrogated the right to sing the liberation song though he was just 13 – hardly a liberation struggle veteran – when the Madiba assumed the presidency of South Africa and worked to reconcile and unite the peoples of South Africa - In Malema is a rabble rouser in manifestation not a man of vision and great ideas, a brute, if you ever saw one.

It is obvious that he sees no role model in the very revered Nelson Mandela as he was only last week being feted [3] by the Grand Despot of Africa – Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe – only an idiot would see any benefit accrued to Zimbabwe after those deplorable land seizures.

The need for better leaders

The youth of South Africa really have to decide once and for all the kind of person they would want to lead them, one that portends to align with history whilst being an idiot of the present or one that has qualities that unite, encourage and uplift all the people for greater expectations for the future.

Mr. Malema lacks all those good qualities by miles, he should begin to lack followership by the millions too.

What we have is an egotistical megalomaniac [4] in the making with despotic inclinations that would with heartless retribution silence any criticism no matter how constructive, fair or just – Africa needs none such any more and this example needs to be shorn of all its influence forthwith. Lest I forget, one song down, the machine gun song of President Zuma needs to go too.

Sources

[1] BBC News - South Africa's ANC stops singing 'Shoot the Boer'

[2] Julius Malema - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[3] Malema lauds Bob, says SA will copy Zim's land seizures - Times LIVE

[4] ANC's Julius Malema lashes out at 'misbehaving' BBC journalist | World news | The Guardian

Enough animosity between black and white Africans

The whites of Africa

I could imagine the unspoken unease created by the blog I wrote [1] a few weeks ago highlighting the reality of white Africans and the fact that whilst colour remains a predominant quality of differentiation it is not the only prerequisite to being African.

Obviously, to go on and aver that white Africans could be more African than certain of the darker pigmentation with an African heritage was a truth that many might not accept but the truth and the facts are beyond dispute.

The death of Eugene Terreblanche [2] of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB) in South Africa brings to the fore the concerns about whites and their true place in Africa.

A voice regardless

There is no doubt that Mr. Terreblanche represented a throwback to the unpalatable realities of colonialism and apartheid; but naturally every incumbent sense of privilege and power always fights to retain influence, the morality of that undertaking is subject to debate and reason usually by the unaffected than by the impacted.

Time and history however made the cause and purpose of the AWB irrelevant as an instrument of insurgency but never as a political pressure group for the rights of the people it portended to uphold – in South Africa of today they need to and deserve to have a voice.

It is unfortunate as we read that the murder of Mr. Terreblanche was as a result of what we might call a business dispute; workers had not been paid wages for a period of time for whatever reasons and they decided to settle the dispute by hacking him to death.

Just not on

It is no way to settle disputes and for those who feel they have been dispossessed, disadvantaged, displaced, denied or misrepresented, there should be structures in place for them to seek justice and fairness without resorting to atrocious crimes – that is brought about politically by the work of visionary and principled leadership.

That act is as heinous as it is barbaric and is comparable to other violent deaths of white inhabitants of Africa and dare I say, Dian Fossey [3], one might be tempted to view these “chop to death” acts as really beyond the pale, of an other world and most probably perpetrated by Africans.

The real issue boils down to the kind of war-mongering rhetoric that people in leadership are supposed to be wiser to curtail and condemn in entirety.

Unfortunately, the language of the Neanderthal flows like poetry from leaders all around, in Sudan, it was President Omar al-Bashir [4] threatening to “cut off their fingers and crush them under our shoes” just three weeks ago. You can find no civility in that as a response to the call for free, fair and just elections for a transitional democracy.

We are beyond liberation talk

South Africa is a new pluralistic democracy, it does have a liberation history but that is history, there are elements of history that might need righting for these times but that is to learn the lessons of the past for a better today and future.

Indeed the history of absurd treaties with chiefs that crept to dispossession in time, wars fought with superior weapons, enslavement, segregation, collusion with kith and kin to defraud and emasculate others as well as land grabs still have their scars but we cannot today repeat the same mistakes with the hope that two wrongs will make things right without us all suffering all the more for it. (Zimbabwe)

The rallying cry of South Africans must be brotherhood for all races in a common cause of their country just as it should be for all nations in Africa regardless of their diversity.

To resort to the congregational call of the face-painted leopard-skin wearing caricature that thumps to the song and dance of the weapon for the annihilation of another man as a voice of unity just draws a big dividing gulf between the diversities of Africa and it is hardly traditional nor cultural.

Separate from the atrocious

Those who offer platitudes in sentiment justifying the baying for blood and thereby inciting the blood-thirsty ignoramus to commit crimes must be held legally accountable as both are accessories to crime and instigators to unwarranted violence, the protagonists must never be allowed to escape their responsibility by absolving themselves from acts of others they have encouraged.

We cannot continue to embrace the plunder of life and property with mediaeval propensity when we could better seize the age of enlightenment that came with the renaissance.

All murders must exact the full weight of the law without prejudice, also all leaders must exercise themselves with restraint; that is no great price to pay for the inclusiveness of South Africans all and Africans in all their nations – no more songs of bringing machine guns [5] or killing the Boer [6] – in these times, it is expedient to depart from the barbaric sophisms that once allowed Africans to be labelled as savages.

History! My foot! It is deplorable and inexcusable, let us seize the day and look to the future fostering consensus, harmony and friendship whilst outlawing everything that excites primitive passions for shedding blood.

Sources

[1] White and African and belonging too [akin.blog-city.com]

[2] BBC News - Terreblanche killing reopens South Africa race wounds

[3] Dian Fossey - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[4] BBC News - Sudan's Omar al-Bashir 'will expel poll observers'

[5] Umshini wami - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[6] The Daily Maverick: Kill the Boer: a brief history