Worn to the Bone in this Spaza Shop Reality

You know when you get to that point in a bad relationship, be it a friendship or more, and you know in your heart that you have just about had enough and can't go any further?

Well that is the feeling that courses through my being at this moment.

My resolve to exist in South Africa is about worn to the bone.

Somewhere in a too long flight back to South Africa last week it struck me strange that all I could think of was leaving the delusion for good, again.

I literally sat through hours of wondering how to make sense of a reality that was irrevocably getting the best of me.

Last night I returned to Kimberley to attend the opening of an exhibition on Chief Albert Luthuli at the McGregor Museum.

Hardly anyone showed except for a few staff and museum board members.

No one in the ruling party thought it important in an election year to honor the memory of a past president of their organization and the first African to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

The exhibition is a traveling one and it belongs to the Nelson Mandela Museum  which is located in Mandela's birthplace, the village of Qunu in the Eastern Cape.

What struck me strange was that no one expected anyone in the ruling party to attend even though just weeks ago President Zuma stood in the same museum talking loudly about decolonizing museums throughout South Africa.

Is an exhibition on the life of one of the greatest minds in the African National Congress not a decolonizing moment?

I guess not.

The problem with this Spaza shop country is that it represents an historical farce for all the reasons I have opined on here in the 6 or more years that this blog has stood.

Spaza shop meaning informal/makeshift shop.

The tragedy of that farce is that the ideas that Luthuli stood for has been covered by an incessant greed for money and power that pays little attention to the substance of what decolonizing means.

I mentioned the call for a decolonization of museums by the president last night to a respected colleague who said: "That speech was written for him.  He has forgotten it by now."

The indifference of this comment is a broad characterization of what most South Africans think and feel about the delusional rainbow.

So why then did I reach the end of my tether today you may ask.

Well it has nothing to do with the exhibition or the museum but rather an incident that happened in a mall parking lot just minutes ago.

I was walking to my car when a young coloured man almost ran me over in his haste to get past me into an exit lane.

For a split moment my mind flashed back to a recent conversation Kim and I had about the courtesy of most Portland drivers.

This fool was not courteous.  He saw me put my being in front of him and the exit and he gunned his car in my direction, breaking the law, but getting ahead of me and, thereby, securing for himself one of the metaphorical three slices of stale bread left in all of South Africa.

It is usual here, this narrow grab at anything without consideration for your fellow being.  It is a well worn habit that won't just disappear with dreams of a new and humane space.

We are as I have said countless times before, a pretend nation of uncouth wannabees; a Spaza reality.

There is very little redeeming value left in the spirit that was supposed to make us more than our vicious past.

We are a vicious present.

Nothing more.  Even Desmond Tutu will be hard pressed to disagree with me.

This Spaza shop country has got the best of me.

I give up and will be suing the Dutch government for stealing my ancestors from what is now Malaysia.

I want reparations and a return to my ancestral grounds or just about anywhere else other than this crock.

Onward!

Picture Credit