Movie or documentary? Magazine or book? Movie on the book, or the actual book? The former in all of the above, of course! (It's NOT even a question.)
That's me and you right there. Until one of us realises how screwed we are. I visited the Hector Pieterson Museum out in Orlando West, Soweto. A lot of the history in there you'll think you know, I mean, who doesn't know Hector Pieterson? The little boy who became the imagery of the youth struggle. We read of these things, watch movies on them, we are reminded of these atrocities that happened to the Afrikan race on commemoration days like June 16. So, why would a young person, black at that, bother going to historical places like this one? Maybe for one - they just don't give a shit. For another - why would they want to be reminded of the past when they need to move on? Or hey, you only visit such places on tour? I don't know which one you are for, or which other way you see it.
Having said that, I'd like to share my personal experience. My going there was first - a recommendation; my being there - a realisation. The history, the stories, the events, all the records in there that'll take you back to forty years plus, are frustrating, to say the least. You look at how much is archived, or kept away to protect or in my view to spread ignorance. Why, for example, would I feel the need to up and go to a museum, any in the country, when what's there is what's 'supposed' to be in my academic books? When you actually make it, years after academic programming, you are hit with so much that you don't know, so much that you can't take in in a single day! Personally - I was out and full of it by the end of the tour inside the museum! I wasn't pissed, mad, angry, frustrated, appalled, because the stories are sad? No. It wasn't also because the acts were inhumane. It was more because, I look at today and I see yesterday, DONKEY GODDAMN YEARS LATER! Had those heinous acts been made known earlier to our people, maybe the struggle for this freedom we're said to have would be over, if not almost at the finish line. Had the generation that didn't live to see that struggle, and the generation that lived to see it been confrontational and not compromised and compressed their feelings, their anger, their frustrations, maybe we'd be saying a different story.
Every generation having its own struggle and revolution, much?
You look at us now, this generation, you look at how we are still fighting for what Generation-Then shied away from, we are still bitter over the conditions and atrocities that they went through because they were never afforded a chance to heal. Rather, our own people and their psych were compromised (with them being pART of that pARTy, I might add - disregarding who hosted it), they compromised so they could live in a free and democratic society. While at the same time walking this land carrying deeply cut wounds, covering scars they're afraid to identify with.
I look at Generation-Now and am afraid for Generation-Next because, history seems to have much freedom in repeating itself. If now, for example, we are going to fight our own struggles through censorship, only to later reveal the truth to Generation-Next, doesn't that then shift their focus when we could've fought our own? But, how do we fight our own when are still fighting for Generation-Then?
Aluta Continua. Not yet uhuru.
📸📸 : Moratiwa Rakhutla
P.S. I haven't read this post since I first published it on November, 2016. I need to edit it.
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