Adolescent SA is prone to make mistakes on its journey to adulthood

“We expect the worst,” said a Nigerian  caller to Iman Rapetti’s show on Power FM. “But we’re praying for the best.” The “worst” in question was the likelihood of violence to accompany the Nigerian elections set for February, 
following a massacre of more than  2 000 villagers by Boko Haram. The militant Islamist group, whose name translates to “Western education is sin”, aims to impose strict enforcement of sharia in Nigeria. The “best” being invoked in prayer by the caller was that the elections would pass without incident; certainly without our deepest shame as Africans, where children are strapped with bombs and set loose in the marketplace. 

 It is very easy for us to look at what is happening elsewhere and imagine it would never happen here. The conflicts,  catastrophes and unimaginable cruelty,  most of them fuelled by bloody-minded fanaticism, that are embroiling a sizeable section of the earth’s surface might seem distant. We might pride ourselves on our new democratic order, which, still in its adolescence, will mark its 21st birthday in April.

As it is now, this overgrown kid is struggling with hormonal imbalances, prone to make mistakes in its journey towards adulthood. Whether we like it or not, this adolescent is the issue of our loins, all of us, black and white. So it doesn’t help to present our country in Manichaean terms of good and evil, black and white.

Our destinies are too interwoven for all of that, especially if we take on board our common ancestry as Africans. There are some of my countrymen and women who wish to glamorise the past to rationalise why they hold no hope
for the future of this republic. Likewise, there are some who invoke the past to justify why the present is an intolerable place to live.

Both approaches deprive us of the agency to change things for the better. All of us, I believe, should experience an overwhelming sense of nostalgia  for the future. This nostalgia for the future, an impulse to recreate the future and 
envision it as a place where the coming generations would thank us rather than curse us, is not a disavowal of the reality of the past, with its heady mix  of exemplary courage and cowardice,  sacrifice and selfishness. Nor is it a blind embrace of utopia.

It is  a capacity of the human being to exercise moral imagination and work towards cleansing what former Czech president Vaclav Havel called a contaminated moral environment. This we could do by practising active 
citizenship, an engagement with what goes on in our lives. This implies all of us walking with our eyes open and recognising the value of each and every member of society, whatever his or her station in life. In that way, we’ll be 
seeing through the eyes of others an acknowledging them as part of the royal fellowship of humanity.

We have insulated ourselves behind walls and become alienated from 
engagement or intimacy with gadgets that delude us that we’re participants in the real world. The “likes” and Twitter hashtags give us a false sense of our own importance. Some even use social media to make fun of the less fortunate; I recently received a message with a “joke” about a boss bullying a timid worker. I believe a new world can be created, a world where there’d be no room for 
racists or fundamentalists to thrive. This would be a world immortalised in the words of the late African American poet, Margaret Walker.

From her poem:

“For My People”:
Let a new earth rise.
Let another world be born.
Let a bloody peace be written in the sky.
Let a second generation full of courage
issue forth; let a people loving freedom
come to growth.
Let a beauty full of healing and a strength
of final clenching be the pulsing in our
spirits and our blood.
Let the martial songs be written, let the
dirges disappear.
Let a race of men now rise and
take control.
These words are pertinent to this
country’s renewal.