{UAH} Pojim/WBK: Bleached and beautiful: Come to Africa and I will show you a continent of ghosts - Comment - www.theeastafrican.co.ke

http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/OpEd/comment/Bleached-and-beautiful--Come-to-Africa-and-I-ll-show-you-ghosts/-/434750/2631132/-/wi2286z/-/index.html

Bleached and beautiful: Come to Africa and I will show you a continent of ghosts - Comment

I'm sitting here watching a talk show on a South African TV channel. There are three women and a guy.

One of the women looks like some ghost character in a cartoon we used to watch in the 1980s. I mean, she's so bleached it's not funny, and her long, long hair is oh so blonde. What they call peroxide blonde.

The talk is about the importance of how you look, and there is much to say here. The two other girls and the boy insist that one needs to respect who they are and not pretend to be someone else.

You can be black and be beautiful, the important thing is be hygienic, be clean and predicate that external hygiene and cleanliness on your inner beauty.

But no, the ghost is saying she looks the way she looks because she likes it that way. And as for the hair, well, she doesn't want to get up in the morning and start struggling with her own hair; she just gets up, slips into her clothes, picks up her wig, dusts it off or something, and, pronto, there she is on the streets of Jo'burg (or somewhere) to frighten innocent passers-by.

The two other women look so natural, and easy, with their short hair and that silky blackness only South African girls of a given age tend to possess. But they are not laughing at their ghost friend; they only seem to puzzle over her and her choices, but she is unfazed. She may actually be thinking they are cuckoo.

Presently I flick to another South African channel, and I hear someone has been telling Jacob Zuma that he is "a broken man presiding over a broken society," and I am thinking how rude it is to say things like that about the head of state of your country.

I try to link the ghost in the talk show and this accusation against JZ. I close my eyes and see the history of the struggle waged by the African National Congress since 1912. I see the sacrifices made by the millions of South Africans over the decades, including the supreme sacrifice of life itself.

I think of people of the calibre of Albert Luthuli, Oliver Tambo, Robert Resha, Duma Nokwe, Walter Sisulu, Robert Sobukwe, Govan Mbeki, Steve Biko, Johnnie Makhatini…

Then I look at the ghosts that have assumed power today, and I think they are the way they look because they like it that way, maybe? Or is there something intrinsic about Africans — it cannot be about South Africans alone — that makes them (us) compulsive manufacturers of nonsense, mere ghosts of what we should really be?

When Nelson Mandela became the first non-racial president of his country, he demonstrated a calm dignity and conciliatory ethos that should have laid solid foundations for a bright future for all South Africans. When Thabo Mbeki took over, we thought it was a linear progression toward that future.

Then came Polokwane and the Night of the Long Assegais (my term). Unlike the assassination of Julius Caesar in the Roman Senate, Mbeki's political assassination at the ANC's 52nd national congress was televised, so we know something about it, and about the destructive clash of these two men's ambitions.

Before he was shown the door, Mbeki cautioned his fellow party members in the African National Congress of signs that it was fast becoming a broken party.

Now it's not only the party but the whole edifice of the country that is coming unstuck. It's an increasingly failing party heading an increasingly failing state.

I heard a ruling party stalwart calling Julius Malema "a cockroach," and I was wondering which manhole this roach had crawled out of; for at Polokwane, these two were together, each with an assegai, ready to kill for JZ. How times have changed.

But lest we think we elsewhere are safe, South Africa is just being African. Our continent is replete with ghosts of all shades, from those of our women who wear what is strangely called "human hair" to "leaders" with peroxide brains, and who cannot think except through their tummies.

As for failing states, show me four that are not.

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam.

E-mail: ulimwengu@jenerali.com

Bleached and beautiful: Come to Africa and I will show you a continent of ghosts - Comment - www.theeastafrican.co.ke
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