Nonqaba said ...

Little boys in Canada, United States and the whole world in fact, still want to be basketball stars, even during this lean COVID-19 time. The pandemic paralyzed everything in March 2020, including basketball. The NBA and the NBA Players’ Association agreed in May, to reduce paychecks by 25%, but that doesn’t stop little boys from wanting to grow up and be drafted, the first NBA hand shake. Lance Rivera’s movie T he Cookout , is about the dollar sign, the millions NBA players make after being drafted. Queen Latifah and two other writers came up with the character Todd Anderson, played by (Quran Pender). Somehow, he looks like Kawhi Leonard, the LA Clippers’ star. He also plaited his hair like Kawhi. The Cookout was released in 2004, so there’s definitely no connection between the two men. Todd Anderson’s parents are proud of him but, are not too thrilled when he leaves the ‘hood’ and buys a mansion in a gated community. His mother helps him move with his old things, something that infur

COVID-19 is passed on when we touch, including money changing hands. That is why most stores take only debit and credit cards now, which is dangerous because we might send credit card bills to the rafters. We sanitize hands to minimize COVID-19 transmission. Can we wash paper money and coins? That would be money laundering, making money criminally acquired, to look legal. That brings us to money’s bad rap. Except for obese Premier Soccer League, NBA or NFL contracts and record deals, too much money is viewed with suspicion. How did he get his millions? v  Money is the root of all evil. v  He’s a drug dealer. Money laundering is his game. v  I don’t want your filthy money. v  Her money is tainted with blood. In one Yoruba movie, the father told his daughter to get into prostitution like her friend Folakemi . The daughter was appalled that her own father could suggest that. She reminded him that prostitution was dirty money. He said all money is dirty, including church contributions. Tha

There are substitutes for the phrase, ‘That’s b....t.’ We need them because although COVID-19 seems to be making human contact obsolete, we are still here in our wounded form, talking to each other. Through masks if I may add. We agree. And disagree. We say, ‘That’s b....t’  when we strongly disagree with what is on the floor. This phrase is used all the time in certain age groups, entertainment places and initiation, where initiates use it to demonstrate allegiance to a group. Indeed, lovers use it when love is on the wane. However, we need substitutes because we are off-shore most of the time: we are at work. Use of that phrase might have repercussions at the next meeting or promotion opportunity. We are also somewhere, in places of business, where service is shoddy and attitude towards us is toxic. ‘That’s b….t’  is also prevalent among friends, which can lead to the end of the friendship or fist fights. We need substitutes because the only thing we agree on is the sun, the moon an

COVID-19 wages is a general term for money, governments across the world, are paying unemployed workers because of the pandemic. It is called a ‘benefit,’ which is very misleading. Entitlement is more like it, because governments deduct money from wages and salaries and store it somewhere, waiting for a rainy day. That day is here, in the form of COVID-19. COVID-19 wages have different names depending on the country. In Canada, it is called the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB). We are about five months into the pandemic and some businesses have re-opened. That is why there’s a question on the table. Should governments stop COVID-19 wages or prune them somehow? POLITICAL JAUNDICE Unfortunately, politics come to play. Conservative Party leaders like Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister feel that people don’t want to go back to work because they will stop getting the CERB, the Canadian COVID-19 wages. Republicans in the United States are in agreement. First of all, that is not possibl

Long distance education has a new name, online tuition, thanks to COVID-19, that thrives on human beings packed like sardines on beaches, cinema or classrooms. What the virus has also done is to dissolve the artificial divide between education without an address and education that takes place in buildings, with human beings called teachers, educators, lecturers, tutors, instructors or advisers. Long distance education or correspondence education was frowned upon. The ideal was ivy league or red brick education with a physical address, and its gold embossed certificates, school blazers, ties and illustrious former students. The school tie might not be as prestigious as it was in ancient England, but it has equivalents, like backpacks and sports jerseys. Address education opened doors of commerce and prestige after graduation. That is why students travelled from Africa, Asia, Europe and South America to walk down the halls of famous colleges. Some of those colleges are going online this

TITLE : Unit 416 AUTHORS : J. Leon Pridgen 11, A. John Vinci PUBLISHER : St. Martin’s Griffin Readers bring hand luggage on board the plane, I mean the act of reading, not the steel bird that carries passengers. Readers expect to find something in book pages to delight or frustrate them, based on their life, reading experience or what they regard as the perfect world. Mine is a world without killing, without war. That is a pipe dream so I bought Unit 416 , with its cover that is upfront: a soldier in military fatigues holding the killing toys in his hands. I know, thanks to Hollywood and movies that idolize the American soldier fighting enemies who don’t look like them, thousands of miles away from home.  The initiation was swift. The first two pages in this book separated Hollywood myth from reality, with Master Sergeant Miles Keeble schooling his men about why it is not advisable to think about home, while in the trenches, somewhere in Afghanistan. Keeble was one of the lucky ones. H

This 2020 basketball season is depressing because of the virus called COVID-19. Toronto Raptors players won’t play at home, where they belong because of the 14 day quarantine requirement, if you re-enter Canada.   Fans will miss going to the Scotiabank Arena in Toronto, lining up for soda and hot dogs and watching the Pascal Siakam, Kyle Lowry, Fred VanVleet, Chris Boucher, Terence Davis Jr., O.G. Anunoby and Matt Thomas magic unfold. Those are on court fans, with season tickets or tickets they got as birthday or happy anniversary gifts. The other fans are long distance, courtesy of television, cable and cellphones. They have the most fun because they watch the antics of the on court fans. The 2019 NBA Finals are part of basketball history now because Toronto Raptors won the championship, carrying the Larry O’Brien trophy over  the border as hand luggage for the first time. 2019 is also memorable because of the fan-dom, also called We The North.  I love the rain but there’s no way I’ll

Drunk driving and working your phone while driving lead to loss of life and untold emotional and financial hardship for those left behind. Who cares? We do it because we think it’s ‘cool’. People lose their lives and cars become a complete write off, ‘totaled’ , I think that is what kids call it. Writing off a whole year is rare. 2020 will go down in history as the year that was written off because of a virus called COVID-19 and come December, we will see T-shirts with the message 2020 COMPLETE WRITE OFF. It is possible. One thing that does not cease to amaze me is the dollar sign to everything we do. For example, Toronto Raptors, the Canadian basketball team flipped the script and won the 2019 NBA Championship. Those strange Canadians, who seldom show emotion for anything, are still celebrating as you read this. What was strange to me though were the T-Shirts. Game 6, between Toronto Raptors vs. Golden State Warriors went down on June 13, 2019. Bham! Kawhi Leonard put it away and hist

Shopping will never be the same again because of all the text messages in grocery stores that are part of COVID -19 etiquette. Text messages begin at the entrance, sanitize before you push that cart. You rub your hands with the foam and push. Careful now. There are text messages on the floor about 6 feet apart and following this arrow and that arrow, and not touching fruit you have no intention of buying. ‘Don’t squeeze the tomatoes!’ Well! I’ve never seen such a sign but the fruit and veg section has text messages requesting us not to touch anything we are not buying because of the virus, the one and only COVID-19. However, buying clothes (we don’t need most of the time) is when we feel the sting of this virus. Shopping is not leisure anymore. What do they call it, retail therapy? How can it? We waited for an hour before we entered the mall, and 30 minutes to enter the store. Because of this, we can’t wander about eyeballing jeans, dresses, coats, tops or shoes. Focus. What have you c

Love the rain but not to the extent of singing in the rain. Mama taught me better than that. We have a love hate relationship with the rain. We planned a summer wedding, then it rains. Cross country cycling? Oops! It rains. Promised co-workers to have drinks, to celebrate the opening of the bar patio down the road, after three months of COVID-19 lockdown. We were going to help grandma with the harvest, but there was a downpour. Everybody has a story. You are indoors because nature showed you who is the boss. What next? You can take advantage of the rain by cooking food you normally wouldn’t cook because you are a take-out prince and princess. Cook Spanish paella or lasagna from scratch. No cheating. No raiding the store freezer for precooked stuff. Bake some scones and invite the Queen to tea. They call scones tea biscuits in North America. They were mama’s favourite rain food. She would prepare her wood stove and knead that dough, flour the baking sheets, cut the dough into round obje

Amanda Bynes and Kelly Preston. Why didn’t you tell me I am a father? In the movie, What A Girl Wants , Kelly Preston played Libby an American woman who married Henry (Colin Firth), an English aristocrat. His mother did not like Libby and chased her away. She went back to the U.S. and never told her husband that she was pregnant. Seventeen years later their daughter, Daphne (Amanda Bynes) flies to England to look for her father. The movie is fiction. In real life, women have reasons why they don’t tell men they are pregnant. 1.  They don’t want to be accused of forcing men into marriage. 2.  Men might have expressed that they don’t want kids. 3.  Men are already married. 4.  Class differences. Families would not have approved e.g. What A Girl Wants. 5.  It was a one night stand. 6.  They don’t love the man. 7.  They are realistic enough to know that the two personalities will never jell. 8.  They might have wanted a baby to call their own, without the extra work, which is marriage. I t

Sean Tizzle, Nigerian musician greeting President of Nigeria then, Goodluck Jonathan.   It's part of their culture. It’s what they do. They copy parents, grandparents, sisters, brothers, cousins, aunts and uncles. That is how they are ‘brought up’ or ‘raised’ as African Americans put it. They touch elders’ feet to greet them because they see their parents doing it. Reporters based in Mumbai, India, seemed surprised when they first saw Aaradhya, daughter of Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, touching her grandfather’s feet. Girls in Nigeria bend their knees to greet elders. Boys put hands on the ground to receive elders’ blessings. In South Africa, kids receive food and gifts with two hands because they grew up seeing that. That is why I don’t understand how grabbing is socially accepted. It took me a while to get used to ‘grab and go’ , as take-out food is called in Canada and the U.S. Kids also copy social norms. Radio stations have news, religious and mainstream music.

We are not superior to animals. COVID-19 has exposed us. We do not have the capacity to adapt like animals. They’ve done relatively well considering that they lost their habitat to money. We needed the land for civilization: houses for masters and townships for economic slaves; factories that pollute the air we breathe leading to new diseases like COVID-19; railways to transport Africans to mines and cities to dig gold and platinum that will end up in London England and other G-7 countries; building mega factories on the banks of rivers so that we can throw industrial waste into the water and churches for Jesus, who came with the colonizer’s gun. We are superior than animals because we have power to contain them, keep them in the zoo and game parks. We even have the right to kill them if they have more babies. I was shocked when I first learned that zoos kill ‘surplus’ animals and unwanted pregnancies. They should not be in captivity in the first place. We contain animals when they are

Pic: Nonqaba waka Msimang Gathering true figures about COVID-19 is like looking for a grain of truth on the internet, which is many things, including a den of thieves and liars. Lying starts with the profile photo. It’s not who we are. I always think about the lying and thieving when I see notices pasted on bank doors, store entrances, dentist/doctor’s office, shopping malls, hotels, in fact everywhere. Maybe notices is not the right word. They are questions. 1.  Have you travelled out of the province/country in the last 14 days? 2.  Do you have flu like symptoms? 3.  Are you in contact with a person/persons who have tested positive for COVID-19? I forget the other questions. Nobody has said ‘yes’ because yes means you can’t go in. NO ADMITTANCE. Go home. Quarantine. We don’t want you in this building. Health authorities therefore, will never have the true state of the virus in cities, provinces/states or countries. Stats are important but they are for long term planning. The short ter