Nobody should tell philosopher and writer Prince Mashele what to think, write or say. Nobody. It is his constitutional right to think and write what he likes.
Of course, he must not be vulgar and insult other people who are different to him; people with an alternative life orientation. His disdainful attitude to and contemptuous depiction of black illiterates that he mistakenly called 'idiots' is not a healthy state of mind. It is not something to revel in.
Most self-righteous blacks will find it offensive because it was said in public. Worse, before a dominantly white audience. They think he is a hired gun who is out to assassinate the black male image.
The extreme over reaction to his utterances is an overwhelming condemnation of his attitude by his peers and highly Western educated blacks. In addition, it is a self-defence mechanism.
Between Mashele's poor utterance about Shangaan artist Papa Penny and his alleged illiteracy, we postmodern Africans must find a way. First, we must acknowledge that we are products of neo colonialism of a special type. We live and thrive in a white world of post modernity, so to speak. In fact, we are the guardians of The Establishment. And many of us are white clones.
The truth is educated blacks live like whites, whatever that means. We dress, think, speak and read what is produced by whites or from a white perspective. We live in white suburbs and speak the white language. Worse, we send our children to white schools.
The other world is where Papa Penny and most of our parents and grandparents come from. It is a world that we have escaped from through education, so to speak. The historical truth is that this is not a new phenomenon in the African historical experience. We live in the world of amaQaba neziFundiswa. Â
The challenge of illiteracy in leadership
Instead of blindly condemning what Mashele has said and done, we have to use his careless mistake to find a way to reconcile the dialectic in the postmodern black experience.
In these times of fake political transition where we have dismally failed to adapt to a postmodern economy and global experience, one of the major contributing factors is that this country is run by illiterate comrades and activists.
They neither understand figures nor the systems and processes of a complex and sophisticated economy. They can neither read nor comprehend spread sheets and other documents written in English.
What Mashele brings to attention is this uncomfortable fact: we have failed ourselves and the future because there are far too many uneducated illiterates in power. And so, while his sentiments bristle our egos, let's try to really listen to what the man is trying to say. He just chose to use a wrong word to say what he meant.
We have to learn to redirect our energies to the positive instead of always putting someone like Mashele down. Let us turn our gaze to reconcile what is superficially two conflicted perspectives of the black experience: one so-called Western, post-modern and progressive
And the other, unfortunately seen as from dark Africa, backward and primitive. Over the last few centuries, these two have somewhat struggled to coexist harmoniously. It is our historical duty and mission to reconcile the two for we are what thinker Achile Mbembe redefined as Afropolitans, that is, people who fuse both European and African influences to reshape who we are.
Yes, a lot of us are the New Age Africans. Thus, this has made some parts of our so-called Africanness to be more developed than some parts of Europe and America, for that matter.
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