50 Shades of Sex

What are you?
I'm a man.
Is that why you beat your wife?
I beat her to teach her the value of discipline; discipline is good.
Is that why you also rape her?
She is my wife: sex is good; I don't want her to lose out.

What are you?
I'm a man.
Is that why you beat your daughter?
I beat her to teach her the value of discipline; discipline is good.
Is that why you also rape her?
(Silence.)
Is that why you rape her?

I'm a man...

This  text appeared as the leading comment of the Times of Swaziland Sunday on 13th August 2006, under the subheading A disintegrating society... but it could have been published yesterday. We're eleven years on and seemingly no progress has been made as far as gender abuse is concerned. In fact, even a cursory glance at a week's newspapers and the social media for a single day suggests that things have even got worse since then. 

What does this tell us about the level of violence in our society? We don't even need to talk about terrorism in the world--what goes on in our homes? 

At the same time, sex is everywhere and in the open. It didn't used to be.  In the pre-AIDS era, people didn't practice safe sex but equally they didn't talk about it either. Now condoms, circumcision, safe sex and even gay, lesbian, and bisexual are words that people use freely. This new-found freedom of speech is perhaps a good thing, but it accompanies a widespread acceptance of porn, which isn't. Porn is everywhere: it's certainly on a cellphone near you. Porn is most usually associated with violence. Consider, for example, the massive commercial success of 50 Shades of Grey, with its million-selling books and box-office winning film. Whether it's porn or not, it's definitely sex plus violence. And it's not only tolerated, it's imitated.

At this moment in our lives, music streams like Channel O routinely screen soft porn while  stronger videos of sex and violence are whizzing around the webverse from cellphone to cellphone via social media and from laptop to laptop via flashdrives. One of the current viral videos is of an underage girl and boy in South Africa. The video has already brought untold anguish upon those involved. There were some loud voices saying how sad and how shocking this video was. But there were many more clamouring to get themselves a copy so they could see it for themselves.

If we are going to leave anything worth leaving for our children and children's children, then we have to do more than admit there is a problem. We have to act.

One way to act is through legislation. Legislation works by giving a clear message about what is considered acceptable and what is not. At the end of last year it was widely anticipated that a new Sexual Offences Bill would be passed this year. That hope has begun to fade, with reports implying that the Bill has been deliberately stalled and will remain unimplemented. This is a tragedy that will merely accelerate the downward spiral that we're already in. Legislation would be a public way of admitting that we have a serious problem.

Another public way would be for the churches--and there are so many of them--to also campaign for change in this area. Sadly, that also looks unlikely to happen.

The best way then is to do what wisdom tells us we should do: begin the change within ourselves. We could do worse than choosing the words of the apostle Paul, who also lived in such a time as this:

In the end, all change must begin with us.


 
                                    
                    

 

Whatsapp Statuses and the Coming Empire

I use whatsapp beta, so I get the crap good stuff first...                      

Here in southern Africa many households don't, and have never had, landlines but cellphone use is part of everyone's life. I surprised myself and most of my friends by buying a cellphone almost as soon as they became available (back in 1998). It was a Siemens handset. Despite the predictions of the so-called experts, MTN, Vodacom and the rest took off like rockets. In some African countries cellphone saturation is now running at over 80%.
    That's amazing, but it's very costly and there are many who argue that the introduction of cellphones compounded the already dire poverty situation in many countries.
   Anyway, I thought whatsapp was great until recently. See, I tried out whatsapp as soon as I heard about it circa 2011. At the time we were all using Mxit because we didn't want to pay through the nose using MTN. Of course once we started with Mxit we got hooked on Mxit's little red hearts that flashed and winked and glowed as we sat up chatting late into the dark, and the app's sounds and pix. Mxit was a cool app. But whatsapp had the potential to be cooler and we didn't have to ditch the emoticons either.
   As with all of these apps, the takeup at first was slow--you can't chat with your friends until they're using the app as well. At first we android users all had BBM envy; but whatsapp arrived at the right time. (When BBM was finally made available for non-blackberry users it was too late.) .
  Then facebook recently bought whatsapp. We feared for the worst; we liked our whatsapp the way it was. Facebook tried to buy snapchat but failed. So whatsapp statuses have become snapchat-like. At the same time, facebook's messenger now wants to take over your standard sms stuff in addition to the already popular facebook messaging.                      
We are being encouraged to send a facebook message instead of a standard sms instead of sending a standard sms, use whatsapp for snapchatting, and whatsapp for calling: an integrated solution to all our needs, and relatively inexpensive. In fact a boon to end users. But why? Is facebook trying to muscle cellular networks aside?
   In a sense, yes. Both facebook and google want the world to have free Wi-Fi so that they can grow the world's biggest consumer base--which will be their own users, i.e., us. It's a smart plan, and working so far.  It is obviously a plan for empire-building.
   Why should we be worried? (Apart from having no private identities, that is.) Are we under threat?
   Not directly no. Not at this moment. It's not average people who are threatened but every traditional status quo, including governments. Why are cellular networks so expensive? Because 'esteemed investors' can harvest money from them. That is under direct threat. For example, MTN's biggest money harvester in Africa has always been sms messaging. With the Internet they are now trying to mine it from data; wi-fi is cheaper but few have access to wi-fi as compared to cellular. It's all about money. Cellular networks get it directly. Data uploads as well as downloads, so streaming of media, especially youtube videos, consumes a lot of data. People don't think they're downloading, because it goes into a temporary file,  but they are. Facebook can do it cheaper and at the moment we're tempted to think they're actually on our side.

         

#ComingHomeBook

I'm well into my publishing projects now. Last month I released a new novel, Temangwane, my fifth book, and it's doing well both locally and also is on Amazon. That book was finished in 2003 and revised only slightly. Now I'm getting my 2004 novel, Coming Home, ready for publication.

Publication means 3 formats these days: a local print copy, an Amazon CreateSpace copy, and an epub/mobi edition.

Amazon is great, but it doesn't at the moment serve the needs of Africa because packing and postage can easily cost more than the book itself. There's still much to do to kickstart an African reading revival...

Shakin' The Reed

Wena weluhlanga. You of the reed.

In 1926 Jelly Roll Morton released a single called Black Bottom Stomp (he had originally called it Queen of Spades). It was a jazz dance and a hot record of its time, so popular that it was covered by other early Jazz legends in one form or another. When, a decade later, jazz had moved into the snazzy windy city clubs the dance was resurrected under the new title of  Shakin' the African. The dance was synonymous with excitement, energy, and vitality.

I was reminded of these earlier dances by media coverage of this year's Umhlanga, the national Reed Dance, an event that many city dwellers now seem to regard as mainly for tourists. I'm sure that isn't so, although the ceremony's origins are so shrouded in the mists of time that there are many who see the annual ritual as an anachronism, an odd, out-of-place happening in this high-tech mobile-phone and computer age.
   Yet the event's central metaphor is still striking. In contrast to the Judeo-Christian myth that people were fashioned from clay (cf the potter's wheel, 'dust-to-dust' and 'ashes-to-ashes'), Swazi cosmology has it that the first people were shaped from reeds.
   This connection of people with reeds was once engagingly made by a preacher in a service I attended. He gave no impression that he knew of the Swazi creation story, but instead argued that 'reeds' was an accurate description of the unconverted, since reeds are hollow and are easily swayed by the wind. The image was an ideal one for the preacher, allowing him plenty of scope to elaborate on those whose lives are 'empty' and 'wavering', without purpose and direction. Never once during that longish sermon did my attention to it waver.
   I have another view of those reeds however. I think if you look at a bed of reeds moving in the wind you can easily imagine them to be dancing, and I think that's an apt image for life itself. The reeds are animated, alive because they have movement. Death, after all, is supremely seen as a stillness. Life can be viewed as a kind of dance: a sometimes noisy, crazy, careering one, but still a dance.
   This interpretation, I believe, enriches phrases like wena weluhlanga, and supports the Reed Dance's prominence on the national calendar.
   
It's another instance of discovering the constellations of meaning behind what we say and do. Often familiarity and repetition blur and obscure meanings. For example, many people believe that English names have no meanings, whereas Swazi names do. Everyone knows why an Ntombifuthi is so named, but what about a Kenneth? The truth is that English names do have meanings but they've been forgotten over the course of time and need someone to take the effort to find out what they mean. The same applies to annual events like uMhlanga. It is certainly a colourful event and, yes, it does attract visitors from other countries, but if we allow it--and other events like it--to become merely a vivid event, a spectacle, a showy entertainment for the media age, then everyone will ultimately be the loser. By watching the swaying, jostling, singing girls at the Reed Dance and imagining them as that amazing thing, a bed of living reeds, we can deepen our understanding of ourselves, and perhaps regain something of the wonder of life itself.

[* an earlier version of this article was previously published in the Times Sunday newspaper*]

The lie of romantic love

https://medium.com/@kenrowley/when-the-elephants-fight-the-grass-suffers-the-lie-of-romantic-love-7615cb5b86d4#.54by6uznn

Karma Chameleon

THIS MORNING I witnessed a death. I was driving home, out of town and into the country. As a novelist I naturally notice things and ahead of me on the road, moving slowly--very slowly--swivel-eyed and hesitating step-by-step, was a young chameleon. I took care to avoid him and drove up to my gate. Whilst I waited for the gardener to open the gate I looked back at the chameleon, still on its hazardous journey across the road. I thought, My heart's with you guy, but I don't think you'll make it. Immediately, a kombi hurtled down that stretch of road, its driver oblivious to the tiny creature; amazingly it missed the chameleon. But the car following quickly behind didn't and the creature was spun into the air and landed, inert, on the road. And then a truck rushed along and squashed it flat. And I was thinking, that's a life lesson right there, isn't it? One moment you're here; the next moment you're gone. For that chameleon, the struggle is over; for us the daily struggles go on: but also the joys, the triumphs and ephemeral achievements of what all of us call life.

c Kenneth Rowley 2015

The Christian Rats

The Christian Rats

Here’s an interesting example of how language and its idioms change through the passing of years and movement between different cultures.

In Shakespeare’s lifetime (1564-1616) there was a common expression, “to be as hungry as a church mouse”. This expression came about because in those days churches had neither kitchens nor storerooms, unlike eating places and homes, so a mouse that tried to live in a church could literally starve to death.

During the next few hundred years, however, the saying became “to be as poor as a church mouse”. This change is easy to explain, for the poor of every nation have always struggled to get enough food to eat well.

Then, in the nineteenth century, when Christian missions began to spread throughout the world, establishing churches and the English language, this revised expression naturally travelled with them.

Fast-forward to our era, and the expression has changed again. I came across this interesting passage recently in the introduction to a book discussing the proper Christian approach to wealth:

‘Once upon a time, an extremely poor person used to be likened to a church rat. The expression was ‘as poor as a church rat’. This meant that the Church/believers were so poor that they barely managed to survive and so could not have anything left over for the rat in the Church to feed upon.’

Here, not only has the mouse become a rat but through personification the rat itself has become a Christian!

This is yet another fascinating example of language change. I hope you found it as interesting as I did.

© Kenneth Rowley 2015

Heat and Storm

I love African summers, when a heat-haze rises from the roofs of cars and shimmers from the tin roofs of lean-to shacks and precarious mud-brick buildings. On such days the heat is at first invigorating; only later do you notice how it has sapped your strength and left you feeling as wilted as the grass and avocado trees in your garden. On such days the sky is a deep blue that stretches out seemingly forever, a blue you can get lost in, a blue that is reflected in the bright shallowness of the water in your family’s swimming-pool. On such days the ladies walk slowly beneath umbrellas, shading themselves from the heat; matrons lounge on straw-coloured grass mats placed on smooth rocks beside water-berry trees that offer respite from the sun; and slowly, stealthily, snakes slither out unseen from beneath these same rocks to glide into the cool river nearby.

The Italian baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi described this weather musically in his Four Seasons concertos: the flies buzzing, the peasants drinking and dancing, the slumber of all during the time of siesta.

But just when the stupor and drowsiness is at its peak, a strong wind appears out of seemingly nowhere, rattling the windows and slamming the doors. The water in the previously placid pool begins to dance. The trees sway, the birds clack-clack in warning. You feel the cold air sucking in; in a moment the sky is dark, then a terror of power is unleashed from the heavens as the storm hits with a sudden onrush. Quick, quick, unplug everything! Quick, quick, bring in the washing from the line! Quick, quick, make sure the car is inside the garage, for there might be hail. You remember last summer, when the hailstones were as big as your fist, punching dents in your car roof as if they were the hands of a giant boxer going for a knockout in round one. They were like the hands of a giant drummer, pounding on the tin roofs of the fragile shacks now shaking in the wind.

There is nothing you can do during such a storm except pray. O Lord, keep us safe, protect our windows, protect our crops, keep safe anyone outside in this storm. The wind whistles, the thunder groans and roars, the rain-hail beats a tattoo on the glass panes and you realise just how small and weak a thing it is to be human. But our delicate fragile human lives, that pass like an African summer’s day, are also things of wonder and exhilarating beauty.

© Kenneth Rowley 2015

New Mix inspired by Maputo

Café Del Soul (Maputo Sunday)
Link is HERE

Clickety-Clicks

Clickety-Clicks

That was the day I clicked with the girl from Clicks. I didn’t recognise her at first. No, that’s wrong; I did recognise her, but I didn’t know where from; she wasn’t wearing her pharmacist’s uniform. And without her uniform...
   She was dressed casually, not fussily, presumably for comfort rather than to impress. Her jeans were faded and worn from use—not bought that way—and her top was a bright mass-produced one you could buy at any common clothing chain like Identity or Jet or Mr Price. Her blue shoes were stylish though.
   She smiled at me, a good start. I started; stared; then smiled back.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. I was still trying to work out where she was from.
“Nothing... you’re the pharmacist from Clicks?”
“Yes, and you’re one of my customers. How’s the migraine?”
“Oh, it’s gone now, thanks. You helped.”
“That’s my job.” She smiled again.
“Yes, I suppose so.”
   It was at this point that nothing happened. No, that’s wrong; plenty was happening, but we were
feeling it, not talking, not moving, just looking at each other and feeling.
“Look, why don’t...” We spoke together; realised what we’d done; looked again at each other; and
laughed.
“You first,” I said.
“No, you,” she said.
“Well,” I started again, “what are you doing now? From here?”
“Just girlie things.”
“Shopping, you mean.”
“Uh-huh. Do you want to buy me something?”
“Uh, like what?”
“What girls like. Shoes, jeans, an engagement ring...” I tried to ignore the last item.
“Underwear?” I said.
“That’s what men like. You’re always thinking of undressed women.”
“Me? No, I was joking.”
“You weren’t, but it’s OK. I like a man to be a man.”
“Let’s keep talking,” I said.
“OK.”
   We went where we could talk. We went to a café and got a drink. No, that’s obviously wrong. We got two drinks: hers was a juice; mine was an appletiser.
   Then we talked. And laughed. And talked. And laughed. And got some other drinks. And discovered
we liked similar music, had read similar books, and wanted exactly the same thing.
   What was that thing? Well, let’s just say that we spent a lot of time together that day. We looked at
shoes and jeans and yes, we stopped by the window of a jewellers where we looked at the rings and laughed and then held hands and went to another shop where I bought her a CD and she bought me a book. We hugged. We kissed. We felt we belonged together. We still do. Because we click. We’re tighter than her pair of faded jeans and the childproof-cap on my bottle of migraine pills from Clicks.

© Kenneth Rowley 2013. 

South Africa 2010 World Cup

Africa, and Africans, are really really hoping that their teams will shine at this year's World Cup. It's more than a matter of pride; it's a belief that somehow history will be corrected. I was in a restaurant/bar in town the other day when a warm-up game was on the TV there. I asked a waitress who she thought would win the game. She looked up at the TV: it showed 'Portugal 0, Mozambique 0'. Without a moment's hesitation she replied, "Mozambique". Her response was representative. [The final result of that game was Portugal 3, Mozambique 0.]

African booty

If visions be the food of love...

Q: What's the difference between African booty and Brazilian bunda?
A: Not much, as it turns out. After all, many Brazilians can trace their ancestry to Africans shipped to South America by the Portuguese.
But that's not why a writer wrote of Brazil's 'thoroughly Africanised' culture~ his point was that Brazilian men (unlike their North American and European counterparts) focus their erotic fantasies almost entirely on womens' butts.
Recently I noticed this in spectacular fashion. I was with friends when an over-ample woman waddled by. One of my friends, a usually secretive journalist, immediately confided, 'You see that woman that just passed? I tell you, I dream about her butt. I'm serious, that chick turns me on.'

Here Comes the Sun!

At five in the morning the sun was streaming through the curtains, caressing my bed and easing me gently into the new day. It gave me a buzz. The first music of the day? The Beatles' Here Comes the Sun? No. Haydn's Sunrise quartet? No. It was Groove Armada's Essential Summer Groove, a mix from 2004. A buzz morning.