MAY YOU LIVE IN INTERESTING TIMES

THERE is a Chinese idiom that says, ‘May you live in interesting times’ There are those who say this is wishing for a blessing because no one wants to live during boring times. Everyone desires fun time and adventure.

However, this is a curse. Interesting times usually are times of turmoil. Interesting times have involved wars, conflict, pandemic diseases, and other calamities throughout history. Some of us live through times of political instability throughout Africa and under the brutal apartheid regime in South Africa. Crossing the border into South Africa brought a lot of apprehension and anxiety. A grown man would be called a ‘boy’ by a young Afrikaner solder in front of his children and there was nothing he could do about it.  We lived through the Mozambique civil war between Frelimo and Renamo.

It is estimated that a million Mozambique citizens lost their lives in a barbaric proxy war between the Communist powers of the East and the Capitalist powers of the West. America and Apartheid South Africa for Renamo and Russia and Cuba supporting Frelimo. One could never travel across into Mozambique at night. On our western borders in South Africa, the Inkatha Freedom Party IFP was fighting the African National Congress ANC. The ANC was burning spies, sellouts, and timpimpi for the Apartheid regime (askaris) using a ‘necklace’ execution style, which meant a serious beating and then a burning tire put around the neck of the victim who is then set on fire while still alive.

We watched on television such executions daily, it become normal.  I happened to be pursuing my studies at the University of KwaZulu- Natal during some of the worst times before the death of apartheid. The atrocities I personally witnessed remain vivid in my mind many years later. Zimbabweans can tell you chilling stories of their civil war, where villages we wiped out in Matabeleland. Namibians can tell you horrific stories of SWAPO using guerrilla tactics to fight the South African defence force to liberate Namibia.

Black on Black killings in Angola between The communist People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the anti-communist western backed National Union of the  Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). Like in Mozambique, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia and many more African countries, black Africans killing fellow blacks for a proxy war between the western capitalist and the eastern communist -all for the sake of controlling our minerals.   

Remind our children  

In one of the speeches, the Umkhonto We Sizwe  MK Party leaders in Parliament Dr ‘Judge’ Hlophe said Africans need to emulate the Jewish community. The Jewish community continues to remind their children including the world of the holocaust and the suffering of the Jewish people. They will tell their children and the rest of the world in the morning, noon and evening everyday and every month and every year. We are not telling our African children about slavery, colonialism and now we are not telling them about Apartheid which happened just locally yesterday.

We don’t speak of the degradation of our grandparents and parents during colonialism. The Jewish family teaches them directly from father to son and mother to daughter, again at schools and through their movies. There is a holocaust Hollywood blockbuster movie every two years.  On the other hand, we say nothing about our history but keep teaching our children the history of our oppressors and the Jewish history.  We do not wish to bring up the painful past just for the sake of it, but to educate our children about where we come from. This is a very important part of securing their future and the very survival of our people.  They should not make the same mistakes and blindly trust the same way their forefathers trusted.  

They must not allow foreign powers to rule them or to set them against each other to fight their proxy wars. They must protect their freedom at all costs, which means protecting their way of life including, culture, language, traditions, and land.   As emaSwati we take everything for granted forgetting we lost three-quarters of our land because we allowed stronger more powerful forces to defeat us. Mpumalanga Province belongs to us through our forefathers, but now we lost it. The fathers never talked to their children about their past, because most don’t know or don’t care.

Survival of our people

The survival of a people is not by chance. The whole world is fighting for survival. Every nation is fighting to become masters not servants. China in the sixties was a poor nation of rice farming percents but six decades later they an economic powerhouse.  South Korea was extremely poor country below most African countries in GDP but now we cannot even compare them. The survival of Eswatini depends on emaSwati realising that they are very few in this world. Effectively speaking, we are 400 000 active adults including older youth. The rest within the 1.2 million are children and old age citizens.  There are many companies, cities and organisations run by CEOs which are richer but better managed than the Kingdom of Eswatini.  

Each citizen must get out of the individual survival mode and get into the survival of emaSwati as a nation. This begins with knowing our past and telling our children so that they can be better equipped for the future. The next step in saving for the future as individual families and for future generation is through clever use of our minerals, strategic position of our country in relation to world trade and commerce.  We need to know all our strategic advantages and exploit them to the fullest. If it means the Kingdom of Eswatini will come known for the production of a few products then let that be our goal. After 50 years of independence we should be good at something the world needs.

After all, if we can become a world leader in any product then we would automatically become very rich country. Switzerland, a tiny European nation is a world leader in finance, Swiss watches and Swiss chocolate but had no coco trees. Specialisation in a few products or services is the advantage of small countries. These are indeed interesting times we just don’t know it. 

Comment septembereswatini@gmail.com

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