Giving Birth and Climate Change
We like borders, stop signs and picket fences. They are restrictive. We don’t like the sky. It’s wide. It’s too much work and we don’t have the mental capacity to think about it.
Rewind. We once had the mental capacity, but we grew up. We lost it, at five years old. Because we like borders, we restrict the meaning of words, put them in freezer bags and label them.
That’s why we don’t see the relationship between things, natural phenomena. The sun and moon get on very well because they know their relationship. Take the word birth for example.
She has given birth. West Africans have a wonderful way of putting it. ‘She has put to bed.’ Makes sense doesn’t it? The baby was in the stomach, now it’s on the bed.
Birth means something new, unique but, it should not be restricted to totally new. It must include recycling and its relationship to the environment. Take compost, for example.
The Zulu language whose umbilical cord is buried in the province called KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, has an interesting word for compost.
Ezaleni. You peel vegetables to make lunch or dinner then throw skins in the backyard ezaleni. They’ll disappear back into the soil that gave birth to them. What does ‘ezaleni’ mean in English?
To give birth is ‘zala’ in Zulu. Ezaleni is the place where the birth for vegetable waste, takes place. Mama taught us, so did our grandmothers before her. It has been done since nature allotted Africans that piece of land.
But, how can you call a vegetable and fruit garbage area, a ‘birth’ place? Because of limited resources. The earth, just one earth gave us the mushrooms, pumpkin, sweet potatoes, corn and mango.
Therefore, skins and leaves we peeled should go back to the earth, to be born again. We have to, because there’s no back-up earth.
That’s why compost is called ezaleni where things will be born, again.
This is another ‘written podcast’ from Nonqaba waka Msimang.
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