1. King Dingane kaSenzangakhona~ Phaphano Phasha writes:
"Battle of Encome... Fight for Land... Afrika Land"1834
DECEMBER 16 IS THE DAY WE REMEMBER KING DINGANE KA SENZANGAKHONA: "Bulalani a Bathakathi"
Before all of us go out and drink let's take a moment to reflect and remember King Dingane ka Senzangakhona. December the 16th was and still is a sacred day for the Boer now called Afrikaners who remember this day as the day when Boers finally defeated the ingenious, King Dingane Ka Senzangakhona.
It was King Dingane who refused to give away his land to the Boers led by Piet Retief and with the most cunning of thoughts invited Piet Retief to his kraal where he then made a clarion call to his warriors to kill the Witches("Bulalani a Bathakathi"). This culminated to many wars of resistance led by King Dingane until he was finally defeated on the 16th of December by gunning welding Whites.
This is the history MyANC led government wants black people to forget hence today we call this day reconciliation day/braai day as an attempt to destroy/erase our centre of memory. As the Jewish Community has taught us, Justice precedes Peace and archiving and protection of history is critical so as to ensure that humanity does not forget atrocities that seeks to undermine human existence.
Today in history is therefore the day that King Dingane Ka Senzangakhona led his Warriors to a battle against White thieves whom he had characterised as witches for attempting to invade & steal land owned by his people.
Who reconciled with who is another story but this remains one of the CODESA concessions where table talks resulted in black and white leaders agreeing that "The battle of blood River" should be erased as an unfortunate part of our history not withstanding the fact that both the Boers and British had stolen and killed for vast amounts of land owned by the Nguni and never returned it.
The history behind the conversion of this day 'Reconciliation Day' from 'Dinganes Day' is quite telling of why Africans are still landless.
Our land was taken by brute through tears & blood and to this day the White community is yet to show remorse for their actions which displaced the black majority whist stealing the mineral resources that came with the land and enriched Whites. Unfortunately our children will rise up to ask why was there no reparations or restitution and how as a community we did not fully account for the blood that was lost by those who were prepared to die for their ancestral land.
Well it not be fair to also call our black leaders who betrayed the struggle for the liberation of the black majority for personal gain, "Witches" as had King Dingane against land invaders? The bravery and tenacity of the Kings and Queens including warriors who with nothing but their spears fought raging bullets will never be forgotten even within a context of a governing party which wants to erase our memories.
"Bulalani a Bathakathi"
2. Inkosi-Smangaliso Sobukhwe Envisioned a UNITED AFRIKA: Comrade Themba Godi Remembers:
Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe was born on 5th December 1924 in the karoo town of Graaf Reinet. He went through school and ended up at Fort Hare University, where he completed his teacher's degree in 1949. Upon completion he went to teach in Standerton, Mpumalanga till he was expelled by the white minority government for his political involvement. He then went to teach at Wits University as a Junior Lecturer till his resignation on 21st March 1960 when he led the Positive Action Campaign against the pass laws. The previous year he had been offered a post at Rhodes University, with conditions of employment similar to those of white lecturers but on condition he abandoned politics. This he rejected outright.
Sobukwe's political activism began at Fort Hare, where he became president of the SRC in his first year. He was instrumental in the establishment of the ANC Youth League branch at Fort Hare. He together with Godfrey Pitjie drafted the 1949 ANC Program of Action. In 1952 he was elected Secretary General of the ANC Youth League.
On his return to Johannesburg, as Lecturer at Wits, Sobukwe relinked with the Africanist grouping within the ANC, mostly Youth Leaguers who were unhappy with the abandoning of the 1949 Program of Action. In all the contestations within the ANC, Sobukwe consistently maintained that the Liberation Movement must never be divided. But when the Africanist were locked out of the then Transvaal conference after a short break in November 1958, the Africanist went to a nearby house where Sobukwe dictated a letter of disassociation from the ANC.
On the 6th April 1959 at Orlando Communal Hall the PAC was formed with Sobukwe as its founding President. A year later, the PAC along with the ANC was banned and Sobukwe was imprisoned never to be a free man till his death 18years later.
The most remarkable aspect about Sobukwe is that he was a man of great intellect, integrity and action.
After launching the Anti-Pass campaign on 21st March 1960 he was arrested and sentenced to three years hard labour. When his sentence ended, the racist parliament passed the General Laws Ammendment Act, better known as the Sobukwe Clause, which allowed the state, through an annual vote in parliament to keep in detention any person whose jail term has ended but deemed dangerous. Through this, designed & only used for him, Sobukwe was sent to Robben Island. There he spent six years. On Robben Island he wasn't kept in a cell with other prisoners, but a separate house was built for him where he was kept in total isolation from other prisoners. The house was fenced and guarded all the time. Prisoners were punished for daring to talk to him as they passed his house on their way to the quarry. In 1969 when he was released, he was banished to Kimberly, Northern Cape where he stayed in conditions of banishment until his untimely death on 27th February 1978.
Robert Sobukwe was a great Pan-Africanist revolutionary. He strongly advocated for the United States of Afrika. He called for the projection of the African personality. Decades ahead of everyone, he stated that he believed in socialism and democracy. He said in 1959 that he did not believe that totalitarianism/ one party state is inherent in socialism.
He asserted that our policies must flow from the logic of the African situation and in the long term interest of the African millions.
He stated that "we must speak the truth before we die, for we are nothing but tools of history and when we are gone history shall find new tools."
Sobukwe was feared by the enemies of African self determination, no wonder there is no visual or audio recording of him, even his trial recordings are no where to be found. Those of us who were not there with him, have not heard his voice. We continue to search for his voice to no avail.
Sobukwe was upright, led by example till the end. He was a true leader. And this is what he said about true leadership: true leadership demands a complete subjugation of self, uprightness of character, integrity, absolute honesty, courage and fearlessness, and above all a consuming love for one's people.
We who are his living footsteps will unwaveringly pursue the African Agenda till his ideal of Africa for the Africans, Africans for Humanity, and Humanity for God becomes common cause amongst our people.
In this political, economic and social morass that our country is in, Sobukwe should serve as a guide, as we fight back against Neo-colonialism. The sad reality is that the dominant clique within the majority party, use the struggle history of their party to cover their sellout tendencies. Through them whites have got us well.
Those of us who have remained true to the ultruisitic ideals of the Liberation struggle will keep on keeping on.
La hamba izwe li nga ka buyi !!
Robert Sobukwe's life and legacy help us to remain ideologically clear, politically consistent and organizationally stable.
One Azania, One Nation.
https://youtu.be/kyWM_TSLxyc
End
3. Prof and Mama Eskia Mphahlele
"GATHER AFRICANS "GATHER... Mike (his protege) Gives an Update Status To Professor Mphahlele With Love Conviction and Determination
PROFESSOR ES’KIA MPHAHLELE 17 December 1919 – 28 October 2008 MME REBECCA MPHAHLELE
17 August 1920 – 04 December 2004
GATHER AFRIKANS GATHER
"Dear Prof and Mama Mphahlele
Born one hundred years ago; just eight months apart, your lifelong embrace was my privilege to behold; as though you were born one. And yet, for me, you were dissimilar personalities whose parenting, I too benefitted from. This short essay was not the plan for December 2019. As I write, I do so with the deep sense that you are aware of all that has reduced us to just this. Far too often, as I go about in this physical form, I sense your presence, your guidance.
Mama, when you passed in 2004, we had not yet secured funding for the building of The Es’kia Institute. Friday 10 December 2010 at 9h05 was our most exciting day. We received notification, by way of an email. The National Lotteries Board confirmed our grant of R46,678,123.00 (forty-six million, six hundred and seventy-eight thousand, one hundred and twenty-three rand). NLB Project Number: 35454, as you know, did not come easy Prof. We shared our struggles with you. You may remember, the NLB insisted that we secure land, before they grant us the funding. We worked hard and secured two donated sites, one in Polokwane and the other in Soweto.
That glorious Tuesday 29 October 2002 at the Vodaworld Auditorium comes to mind now. The launch of our first book ES’KIA coincided with the launch of The Es’kia Institute. Under the theme GATHER AFRIKANS GATHER, about five hundred, South African luminaries gathered because, they too, were, “inspired by the life and works of Es’kia Mphahlele.”
You will remember our major funders for that evening were ESKOM, through Chairman Reuel Khoza, the Limpopo Provincial Government, through Premier Ngoako Ramatlhodi and the National Arts Council, through John Kani. Prof, somewhere, deep in our now disrupted archives, are the many glowing praises in honour of your contribution to Afrika and the world. (By the way Mama, for the record, very few people know that my first visit to Lebowakgomo had nothing whatsoever to do with your beloved intellectual husband. It was you who asked for my assistance with your funding proposal for your Early Learning Childhood Centre. Zeke, as you often boasted, came later with his request for assistance to publish his old papers.)
Throughout our time together you were generous in conveying gratitude. Prof, there are very few pensioners who, at 83, will complain of retirement and even fewer will take on the task of learning to use a computer, rather than stick to a typewriter. Lebowakgomo, you often said, took you out of the intellectual engagement you yearned for. It should not be difficult to compile a record of your engagements after 29 October 2002. Pretoria renamed their library in the Sammy Marks building, The Es’kia Mphahlele Community Library and changed DF Malan Drive to Es’kia Mphahlele Drive. We published ES’KIA Continued. Where is that scrapbook of press clippings, we gave you as a present on some or other special occasion?
THE APARTHEID MUSEUM®
Prof, Mama, I must, unfortunately move past our joyous celebrations together and update you on the violence and destitution that has befallen us. Today, I especially want to apologise for the fact that The Es’kia Institute, has since been gutted. I owe an explanation that I hope you will understand. I will be short, because, after Prof threw my first draft manuscript into the dustbin and told me to start from scratch, I revisited our confrontation with Gold Reef City Casino and published a more detailed account in 2011, under the title:
We look at White people and we think Oh! MY GOD!
The TRUE story of two racist White men and The Apartheid Museum
In November 2001, REUEL KHOZA, as Chairman of Gold Reef City Casino with JOHN KANI, employed by the casino, orchestrated the blatant lie that “Solly and Abe Krok conceived The Apartheid Museum.” South African and international media played that blatant lie worldwide. Prof, your contribution to our prospectus, published in 1998 reads:
“When we can assemble here, under this multi-dimensional “dome”, when we can commune among ourselves, feel one another, seek one another out, across the barriers of the philistines and ogres of our recent past who manipulated so much of our history; when we can restore the sense of beauty and selfhood, the community our forefathers enjoyed, we can rightly inhabit this mini city in the profoundest sense of the word. That is, we can share in the joy of an environment in which we ourselves shall be the human dimension, the social dynamic propelled by that sense of becoming itself a compulsive act of cultural wholeness. Surely herein lies the answer, applicable to all in this country. Thus, we shall breed the unifying content of our character into the enterprise, give it our own life”
Come 2013, we had been in litigation with Gold Reef City Casino for eleven years. We had investigated and uncovered almost every detail of their transnational fraud, proving also that they worked in collusion with criminal cadres deployed by the African National Congress in organs of state, including the judiciary. To bring an end to the litigation, they devised a savage scheme, to cut off my primary source of income. Gold Reef City Casino, in a secret meeting with the National Lotteries Board and the South African Police, concocted an unbelievable story about how I, as Chief Executive Officer and Trustee, had stolen R9Million of the first tranche of R13Million that was paid to The Es’kia Institute. To this day, nobody can explain why they never brought this enormous “theft” to the attention of the Board of The Es’kia Institute. More seriously, in terms of the Public Finance and Management Act, the NLB is duty bound to have me charged; if indeed I stole R9Million. Six years later – nothing.
REUEL KHOZA and JOHN KANI not only destroyed The Es’kia Institute Prof; they rendered destitute the families that depended on us. Mama, they engineered and drove the violence against innocent women and children, who were totally unconnected to the affairs of The Apartheid Museum. Reuel and John became aware of my intention to sue Gold Reef City Casino for infringement of my registered trademark in August 2002. Given what we know today, their funding of our launch in October 2002 and their very loud praises, play out as the deceitful filth of their White Zionist Masters; Solomon and Abraham Krok.
Poet Laurette, Don Materra wrote the foreword for ES’KIA. It is perhaps appropriate that I end my report with his view on the story of The Apartheid Museum.
“An intriguing yet most enlightening and powerful read so far Michael, soaked in and seeping in the brine of justified anger and the pain of being victim to criminal and racist skulduggery of the dirtiest gutter kind. For those of us with sentient souls, the tale unfolds. I now understand why your hands shake so much.”
Prof, Mama, we all love you, and for my part, until my last breath, it will be the same call: GATHER AFRIKANS GATHER . . . we have much more work to do.
Respectfully."
~~Mike
In his farewell speech Dr Pallo Jordan ends it by "May he go well.." Knowing now what we know from the little we can gather from Bra Mike's report ,we ask questions?
How can Professor Eskia Mphahlele's Soul ever Rest in Peace when the same Apartheid Regime and political-Business vultures are making a feast out of the legacy he has built,raping his bones, soul and spirit eleven years after he has gone to be with his ancestors? How can Professor ever get justice if he cannot get justice even in his ertenal sleep because the very same justice he fought for in his struggle days whilst fighting against apartheid,has been entangled in State Capture having been captured itself since colonisation and the introduction of Colonialist's laws?
May all those that are guilty of this despicable crime of robbing even the dead,and abusing the legal and political offices they occupy to continue robbing and persecuting Prof.Eskia's soul, may all those barbarians never find peace as long as they live and beyond the grave.
As for Bra Mike and his associates who have had to go through everything that they have had to endure, to preserve the Legacy of one of the greatest Sons of the soil, we say Do Not Despair maQhawe, Sesinqobile already , It is Well now you will see... HomeSociety and PoliticsArt and CultureBiographiesAfricaClassroomPlacesTimelinesArchivesPublications📷GO
Es’kia Mphahlele
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Who is Proffessor Eskia Mphahlele: The official Biography as delivered by then Minister of Arts, Culture & Heritage Comrade- Dr.Pallo Jordan...
Dr. Es'kia Mphahlele
Synopsis: South African writer, academic, arts activist and African HumanistTitle: Dr.First Name: Es´kiaLast Name: MphahleleDate of Birth: 17 December 1919Location of Birth: Marabastad, PretoriaDate of Death: 27 October 2008Location of Death: Lebowakgomo, LimpopoGender: Male
Extract from media statement on the passing of Dr. Es’kia Mphahlele (1919 - 2008): By Minister of culture & society, Dr Z. Pallo Jordan
Es'kia [Ezekiel] Mphahlele, doyen of African letters, passed away in Lebowakgomo, Limpopo, on the evening of 27th October, 2008 at the ripe age of eighty-eight.
Mphahlele was the illustrious author of two autobiographies, more than thirty short stories, two verse plays and a fair number of poems.
“Add to these, two anthologies edited, essay collections, innumerable single essays, addresses, awards and a Nobel Prize nomination for literature and what emerges is to many the Dean of African Letters,” writes Peter Thuynsma, a leading Mphahlele scholar, in Perspectives on South African English Literature (1992: 221).
A self-made man, Mphahlele received a BA degree in 1949, followed in 1956 by a BA Honours degree and in 1957 by an MA degree (with distinction). He studied for his three degrees by correspondence with the University of South Africa. In 1968, he received his doctorate from the University of Denver in the USA.
Mphahlele was born in Marabastad, Pretoria, on December 17th 1919. His parents sent him to Maupaneng, near Polokwane, to go and live with his paternal grandmother. He came back to Marabastad to start school and received his high school education at St. Peter’s College, Rossetenville. It was there that he encountered personalities whose lives would run a close parallel to his.
From St. Peters Mphahlele went on to study at Adams College in Natal, where he qualified as a teacher in 1940. He completed his matric, studying by correspondence while he held down two jobs as a teacher and short-hand typist at Ezenzeleni Institute for the Blind in Roodepoort, in 1942.
The 1940s were a decade of momentous change throughout the world. On the Rand, where Mphahlele was, a group of youthful members of the ANC came together to form the ANC Youth League. Dr A.B. Xumaat about the same time called together a group of African opinion leaders and thinkers to draft an African response to the Atlantic Charter, authored by Roosevelt and Churhill. With all these events swirling around him Mphahlele’s passion remained education rather than politics, however, and his talents were better suited to the classroom than the soapbox or newsroom.
He took up the post of English and Afrikaans teacher at Orlando High School. There, in the company of many freshly-minted from Fort Hare young teachers he became active in the Transvaal African Teachers Associaion (TATA). The 1949 Eislen Commission on Native Education, inspired by Dr. H.F. Verwoerd, the recently elected National Party’s Minister of Native Affairs, had recommended a radically new system of Education for Africans. TATA, together with other teachers’ organisations in the Cape, the Free State and Natal, took up the cudgels to oppose it. For his participation in that agitation, in December 1952 Eskia Mphahlele, Isaac Matlare and Zephaniah Mothopengwere dismissed from their posts and permanently banned from teaching.
Mphahlele returned briefly to Ezenzeleni as a secretary. In 1954 he left on his to teach at Basutoland (later, Lesotho) High School in Maseru.
Returning to South Africa a year later, he found work with Drum magazine, where at various stages he held the posts of political reporter, sub-editor and fiction editor. Mphahlele was something of a misfit there and, yearning to teach, he sought other outlets for his talent.
Responding to an appeal for teachers from Nigeria, Mphahlele left South Africa in 1957 together with a number of other African teachers whom the apartheid regime considered unemployable. The ANC requested him to represent it at the first Pan-African conference to be held on African soil and hosted by Ghana in 1959.
It was in West Africa that he began to blossom as a literary figure. Having broken out of the constraints of apartheid racism he was able to rub shoulders with other African writers and intellectuals. He had a brief association with Ulli Beier, a German Africanist whose literary journal, Black Orpheus, made a huge impact amongst African writers in the English language.
Mphahlele launched his literary career with the publication of Man Must Live in 1946. It was the second collection of short stories in English by an African writer after Dark Testament by Peter Abrahams, who had been Mphahlele’s classmate at St Peter’s.
In the 1950’s, Mphahlele wrote a series of stories published in Drum. The Lesane stories helped consolidate the short story tradition in South African literature that stands among the best in the world. The Drum era produced, in quick succession, Bessie Head, Arthur Maimane, Todd Matshikiza, James Matthews, Bloke Modisane, Casey Motsisi, Lewis Nkosi, Richard Rive, and Can Themba.
The autobiographical Down Second Avenue (1957), Mphahlele’s crowning achievement, has been translated into several foreign languages but not a single African language indigenous to South Africa. It became the second in a distinguished line of autobiographies by African authors from South Africa after Abrahams’ Tell Freedom (1954) that included Road to Ghana by Alfred Hutchinson, Chocolates for My Wife by Todd Matshikiza, Blame Me on History by Bloke Modisane and Autobiography of an Unknown South African by Naboth Mokgatle.
Mphahlele’s literary and academic career took off in exile. Two collections of short stories followed Man Must Live. The Living and the Dead appeared from West Africa in 1961. Six years later, he issued In Corner B from East Africa. The contents of both collections of short stories are included in The Unbroken Song(1986), which also contains some of Mphahlele’s poems.
Turning to scholarship, in 1962 he published The African Image, based on his MA thesis in which he provides a history of African literature in South Africa, which he juxtaposes with an examination of the African character in literature by writers of European ancestry. A second and revised edition appeared twelve years later.
His engagement with literary and cultural production in the African Diaspora finds expression in Voices in the Whirlwind and Other Essays (1972), which examines African and African-American literature in relation to the Western tradition.
His career as a novelist produced The Wanderers, a novel of exile originally submitted as a dissertation for his PhD in creative writing.
The Wanderers was followed in 1979 by Chirundu, resulting from his abortive attempt to establish residence in Zambia in 1968 and illustrating “the tyranny of place” and how exile defeated him.
A second volume of his autobiography appeared in 1984 as Afrika My Music, written in the convention of the memoir and depicting various people who have been part of the author’s life. Written after his return from exile, it also seems to rationalise his decision to return to South Africa at the height of apartheid repression.
For a while Mphahlele worked with the Paris based Congress for Cultural Freedom, organising conferences and workshops on education, literature, arts and culture. He was instrumental in establishing the Chemchemi Creative Centre in Kenya and the Mbari Club in Nigeria that became the hub of activity in African arts and culture. During the mid 1960s the Congress for Cultural Freedom was exposed as a CIA front organisation, employed to sow dissent amongst artists in the Soviet Union and other east European countries. Its activities on the African continent were probably as suspect. The journal, Encounter, published by this body, swiftly lost credibility and has since disappeared.
In a career spawning sixty years, Mphahlele received many international awards, among them: several honorary doctoral degrees and the Les Palmes Academiques medal from the French government recognising his contribution to French language and culture. In 1968, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature. In 1998 President Nelson Mandela awarded him the Order
In 1957, Thuynsma writes, “he resolved to leave for a life in exile which led him through residence in Nigeria, France, Kenya, Zambia, and a double sojourn in the USA.”
Twenty years later, amidst much controversy, he returned to South Africa, feeling defeated by exile and yearning for home. His return to South Africa coincides with the last decade of the system that had sought so hard to destroy him. He devoted himself to literature and cultural work, eschewing hard politics.
Soft-spoken, humble, urbane, cosmopolitan, erudite and exuding ubuntu, Es’kia Mphahlele embodied in his person and in his work what he described as “the personification of the African paradox – detribalised, westernised but still African”.
Mokgaga oa Makubela, Es'kia Mphahlele, has left us. May he go well.https://www.khayanmedia.com
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