Nonqaba said ...

Prince Harry's son Archie and his mother meet Anglican  Church Archbishop  Desmond Tutu in Soweto, South Africa. One of the things that baffled me when I arrived in England from South Africa was toddlers’ smiles. Why would a white child smile at me? Apartheid forbids mingling of the races. It took a while to realize that kids in England see me as a human being, not a black woman. That is the natural canvass, blank. The child grows up. Parents go to the store and buy big and small racial paint brushes. Kids are mimics so they grow up with the convoluted canvass. Racial slurs, window smashing, school bullying, kicks, murder and cross burning replace toddlers’ smiles. As I got used to white kids smiling at me, I went back and dusted some memories. White and black kids in South Africa never met because they were born in separate hospitals, lived in separate neighborhoods, went to separate schools and the beach was divided into black and white. Despite all that, there were instances whe

Kids should remove leaves. They'll find worms. It's a lesson.  Teachers will be surprised how clever they are.  Kids in Wi-Fi countries sometimes complain that there’s no food, when double door freezers are packed to the brim. Some homes have pantries full of all kinds of canned food and dry goods. “What do you mean there’s no food Sisi?” “Paul ate the last potato chip dad.” “Dad, don’t mind my sister. She means vinegar flavor. We still have ketchup potato chips.” Kids in Wi-Fi countries are disadvantaged in many ways. They cannot go out to the backyard, pull out a plant and see potatoes bathed in soil particles. Washing them is half the fun. Boil them, and food is ready in ten minutes. Parents in Wi-Fi countries take kids grocery shopping to instill that the soil is the mother of all food. First Nations of Canada and U.S. believe it is the mother of all life, period. Paul and Sisi, the two kids in this blog are complaining about food in a crinkly bag. Taking them to the store

Cori Bush, Democrat Missouri Rep. The judge gave Derek Chauvin a former Minneapolis police officer, 22 and a half years for suffocating George Floyd to death, on 25 May 2020. However, subsequent police murder of African Americans while Chauvin’s case was in progress, indicate that the tradition will never stop. These are just a few examples of reported cases. 1.  August 22,  2020  Trayford Pellerin shot dead by police in Louisiana. 2.  August 23, 2020 Jacob Blake, Kenosha police shot him in the back. He is paralyzed. 3.  April 11, 2021, Daunte Wright shot dead by Kim Potter, Brooklyn Center Police officer. Police training videos and mentors. Rookie officers are taught that a black face represents the possibility of a crime, therefore they should not apprehend suspects. They must accuse them, give them a trial and sentence them to death, the judicial system rolled in one. Older police officers take rookies on the beat and teach them about what they call a black man’s criminal mind. We r

The rain man, Trae Young, Atlanta Hawks. NBA star, Joel Embid of the 76ers is a good example of why Naomi Osaka decided to pull out of the French Open and professional tennis, for now. Atlanta Hawks upset the apple cart by beating his team in Game 7 of the 2021 playoffs. Responding to a post game question Joel Embid said. “I’ll be honest. I thought the turning point was when we had an open shot, and we made one free throw and we missed the other, and they came down and scored.”   Sports media said Embid was blaming team mate Ben Simmons although Embid didn’t mention his name. Simmons must be feeling bad where ever he is, but what will erode his mental health is that the world will never let him forget. This is the tradition. That is how media works. I supported Naomi Osaka’s stand from day one because I’ve written about how sports media handles post game. She paid a fine for refusing to speak to the media during the French Open this year. I also supported Brooklyn Nets player, Kyrie Ir

Photo credit: online pic. Babies clad in diapers cannot sue their parents for obvious reasons. Having said that, they are still in the dark why the warmth, nourishment and love they had in the womb does not exist once they are born. They appreciate the color coded rooms, blue for boys and pink for girls, but they don’t understand why they must sleep alone in $5,000 cribs, when they slept with the mother for nine months. Their rooms are warm and designer blankets cover their half a loaf bodies, but it still baffles them why they can’t sleep with a warm body, especially the mother’s. Well! Babies must understand development. In so-called primitive societies, they wake up at night to the sun in the mother’s eyes. Babies smile in appreciation and reach for their food. They have a conversation with the mother while they are at the breast. After a few months, mothers carry them on their backs, so the warmth that started in the womb continues. When they reach a certain age, they sleep on the

The rivalry between English and French will never end. Fighting over the same thing is banga in Zulu. The noun is umbango . Rivalry over land leads to bloodshed. Nature allocated land to every race on earth. Greed led to some races attacking other races to steal their land. We learned in school that Britain had a powerful navy that enabled it to go to faraway lands that became the British Empire. Canada has two official languages, English and French because of fighting over who owns land they stole from First Nations. Rivalry in the office and other workplaces can lead to heart failure, that’s why some employees decide to leave.  Others are fired without cause because they are perceived as a threat. Ba-nga . You say the first part like baba the second like linger. ENGLISH ZULU They are fighting over Canada. Ba-banga i- Canada. They are fighting over oil. Ba-banga amafutha. They are fighting for position. Babanga izikhundla. They fired him because of rivalry. Bamxosha ngenxa yombango. I

Where is my daughter? North Nigeria, schoolgirls kidnapped  for sex in the name of religion. Where, has one root in Zulu -phi- , pronounced as pick. You then attach someone in front. Example, u-phi ubaba, meaning where’s father? U-phi u-gogo, meaning where is grandmother? We cannot find things. Where did I put the drill? You don’t know because you don’t use it often enough, like a toothbrush. Songs are about someone looking for love, something that doesn’t exist. Intimacy,  yes, fondness yes. Love? Hollywood invention to sell red roses, diamond rings, white wedding gowns and honeymoon. Before cellphones and GPS, we asked people on the streets, ‘excuse me, where’s  550 Main Street?’ Where is justice for people born black and beautiful in America. Donald Trump is still looking for his ‘stolen election’ which resulted in voter suppression laws in Georgia and other states. ENGLISH ZULU Where are you going? U-yaphi? Where are you? U-kuphi? Where is Ada? U-phi u-Ada? Where is Ada and Phiwe?

Slavery. Apartheid. We prefer not to talk about it. I thought of mama when on 17 June 2021, President Biden signed a bill that made the 19 th  of June a federal holiday, to commemorate the end of slavery and what happened in Texas on that day in 1865. Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation to free slaves in 1863, but in Texas, they only heard about it on 19 June 1865. Slaves called it Juneteenth , which is the abbreviation for 19  June. America, a capitalist country, did not have labor costs because it had slaves it sold like animals in places like the Slave Market in Atlanta Georgia. Lava hot hatred for the black form led to lynching, posting human parts on ‘southern trees’ as Nina Simone sings in  Strange Fruit . SOUTH AFRICA In apartheid South Africa, the Queen of England and the Dutch took the land through the barrel of the gun and the Bible. Like America, they had to dehumanize first then exploit African labor. Every South African gold and diamond mine, railroad, far

Annamie Paul, Green Party of Canada leader. What is democracy? I think my teachers called it the will of the people. Wonderful concept but, one individual can empty that will, and put his or her own in the bucket. Example. COUNTRY: Canada PROVINCE: New Brunswick RIDING: Fredericton MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT: Jenica Atwin HOW SHE WON THE RIDING: Green Party of Canada In 2019, people in the riding voted for the Green Party of Canada. Voting is a serious matter so they had their reasons for not voting for Matt DeCourcey of the Liberal Party. That is how Jenica Atwin became a Member of Parliament. June 10, 2021. Atwin announces she has defected to the Liberal Party. It’s all legal. It’s called crossing the floor, the great political tradition the Queen of England brought to Canada, her colony. How about voters? Where does this tradition leave voters in Fredericton? Matt DeCourney had that seat for the Liberal Party. Under careful consideration, voters decided they don’t want him anymore and vot

Online pic. Pretty sneakers with all the rainbow colors contribute to climate change. How? Obviously, dye is involved to make that rainbow montage. The resulting chemical waste is disposed in rivers and other water sources. Chemicals also invade natural air and infect it. So what are you saying? We should stop wearing t-shirts, hoodies and clothes with many colors? C’mon, we need color to spice up this drab life. O.  K. Point taken. The problem is how factories make them and how we throw out old ones.  Your house or apartment block has blue bins to drop off things, that hopefully can be recycled. Some even have slots for bottles and computer stuff like cellphone chargers. Where do we drop off old sneakers, in the garbage can or blue bin? Garbage. They cannot be recycled. We threw them out because they are smelly. They were not old, with wide mouth soles asking for change. We threw them out because we don’t have time to wash them. They are also made from nylon so we are not sure if it c

Beached whales. They ran away from home, polluted by oil companies. Billionaires want profits.  Killing nature is standard practice. Reason  isi-zathu  in Zulu. I-si-za-thu . You say the first part like email, the second like system, the third like Zagreb and the last like took. There’s always a reason, for arriving late, climate change, war, racism, murder, divorce, homelessness and all the things that erode the soul. But, there’s also a reason for the rainbow and toddlers’ smiles. African children have reasons for their names. What is interesting though, is that I don’t know of any South African parents that named their children isizathu  (reason).  Kids have names like sun, hope, success, waiting, all girls, all boys etc. but never reason. ZULU REASON Yini isizathu? What is the reason? U-naso isi-zathu? Do you have a reason? Asikho isi-zathu sokushaya abesifazane. There’s no reason for wife abuse. Wazibulala. Yini isi-zathu? Asazi. She killed herself. What was the reason? We don’t k