Well said Mr Matola. We need more dispassionate people in this generation. People who are about the present and the future, not people who think their exploits of the past earned them impunity to mess with us in the present. We need a candid dialogue about this debt of freedom we are constantly told we owe to certain people. Most important of all, as a nation, we need to be sure we understand the meaning of all these concepts we bandy about in defense of God-knows-what. Of late we hear talks about the need for journalists and academics to be patriotic, i would be glad if someone could assist me with the meaning of patriotic journalism and patriotic academia. Some time in the early 1960s Frantz Fanon made a profound assertion that “each generation must discover its mission, fulfil it or betray it, in relative opacity”. Homi K. Bhabha, in the foreword to a later edition of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, closes with an equally profound interpretation of Fanon’s assertion and points out that “the parts we play in the design and direction of historical transformations are shadowed by contingency of events and the quality of our characters. Sometimes we break the mould, at others, our will is broken”. In invoking the legendary Fanon, it is perhaps apt to also allude to what he describes as a “time that must no longer be that of the moment or the next harvest but rather of the rest of the world”. If we could now transport ourselves from Martinique of the 1960s back to South Africa of 2014, which has just entered another five-years of democracy, which would culminate in a quarter of a century of democratic dispensation in 2019, Are we a generation that will fulfil its mission or are we that which will betray it? Are we a generation that lives for the moment and the next harvest or a generation that lives for the rest of society?
Posted on: Thu, 18 Sep 2014 08:25:55 +0000
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