A comment from Len Hardough-Davinci Ble in response to the Xenophobic violence in South Africa
Mao once said that “Weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive one; it is man and not materials that counts.”
Nelson Mandela
It would appear that the South African leadership during its decades of struggle against Apartheid made war with the moral weapons of humanism. It cried out to the world to centre its gaze on the cruel and barbaric inhumanity of the apartheid regime. The world looked and was outraged! They hailed Mandela as the apotheosis of a humanism mutilated, crushed, left gasping for its last breath of freedom. The world became strident and took direct and indirect action, the apartheid system was sentenced to justice; Mandela recommended incarceration and not decapitation. The world and most South Africans duly crowned him a messiah. His kind of humanism however, is one that is prayed to for forgiveness when one has committed ghastly heinous crimes. There is now every recognition that the Mandela-izationof South Africa’s moral fabric is a spiritual redemptive one for the vast majority of poverty stricken and disadvantaged Africans and a real candy shop of privilege and wealth for a minority European elite and a tiny Black kleptocratic political and commercial elite. It is this tiny black ruling elite that has lost its moral compass.
Where are the hollering sirens of moral indignation and condemnation issued from the pious mouth of the South African leadership class waking the attention of the world to the murderous obscenity of the police slaying of 34 striking miners in cold blood in the summer of 2013? Where does the totem of Tutuism burn the illuminating evangelical flame of moral superiority through the xenophobic catarrh of putrid hatred? Their silence is palpably deafening and cripplingly cowardly. They offend and betray the moral decency of every conscious and right thinking African full stop!
A society that has no head has never been the beneficiary of a collective consciousness. A society that has lost its head staggers like a head-less chicken. The difference between a society that has lost its head and a headless chicken is that a chicken staggers to its death, a society staggers on forever. Africans everywhere beware of machete wielding leaders!!
