L’enfant terrible: anger without a compass

It seems increasingly apparent that Julius Malema has lost all sense of perspective. He is undoubtedly an angry man, but with little or no inner compass.
Admittedly, there is a lot to be angry about in South Africa: the prospects for most South Africans have barely improved since 1994; and the extent to which many white South Africans still fearfully resist change is extremely frustrating. So anger itself is not a problem. The problem is when it is expressed in such a discriminatory and random fashion.
Mr Malema’s rebel-without-a-cause anger is the mark of a brazen opportunist, knowing that taking a wildly oppositional stand to anything and everything will get him press coverage. Whether it be supporting ZANU PF, racially abusing journalists, supporting painfully irresponsible hip-hop stars, or indulging in hate speech in the name of ANC history, he comes across as a man deeply unaware of the bigger political or moral picture. He is determined to be heard, whatever the cost to our fledgling democracy.
The deeper worry about Mr Malema’s irresponsible rantings is that only at the eleventh hour has the ANC publicly recognized the damage he may be causing. We all know that to overturn apartheid many unsavoury things had to be said and done. But South Africa is trying to move on, the context has changed: crude fighting rhetoric has lost its credibility, while democratic principles such as cultural and racial acceptance are entrenched in a constitution that the ANC has endorsed. Unfortunately, it is struggling to manage the trickiness of democracy: it doesn’t always go your way; democracy has a will of its own. Respect for all social groups is a principle that the ANC rightfully fought for, and therefore its behaviour should be strongly guided by this principle, however uncomfortable that may be at times. Somehow, for a little while the ANC has got lost in the violent paradigm of the past. Whatever the symbolic value of the Kill the Boer song for the ANC, talk of ‘killing’ by public figures can only add currency to the value of violence in an already severely violence-torn society. Whatever your political persuasion, it’s hard to believe that publicly speaking of ‘kill the boer’ could be considered as any less undemocratic and destructive as if someone was to spout ‘kill the African’ or ‘kill the Indian’.
It’s time for less moral ambiguity, for us to recognize that what people do in the present cannot be endlessly justified by the sufferings of apartheid. And Mr Malema might benefit from looking at his own behavior as hard as he looks at others as he wags his finger at all the perceived ‘enemies of the cause’. Reflection and humility are marks of a mature man. If he wishes to be taken seriously by anyone other than those who hold onto his political coat-tails, he would also do well to stop exposing his insecurity by constantly resorting to abuse and aggression as his sole way of coping with others’ requests for him to be accountable.

Load-Shedding: what to do in the darkness?

It is mid-July 2008. Just as the season of power-cuts seems to be over, Aunty Eskom has another bad hair day: the electricity has been switched off and again I am denied that most basic of modern creature comforts. With nothing else to do until the light returns, I reflect on what has already become a household expression: load-shedding. Slowly a darkness-induced reverie comes over me: this phenomenon may have come to us as a back-handed gift.
Load-shedding is asking us to re-evaluate: energy is no longer a given. So we must now consider how to use what energy we do have wisely: all forms of energy – electrical, mineral, political, personal, social and emotional. The prospect of scarcity challenges us to harness the potential of all that is around us, to focus on those good things that will never be scarce. It’s an opportunity to consider, as if for the first time, what really matters.
Some would say the past matters. Sadly there seems to be a tendency to forget much of the past, at least those bits that matter: struggle, honour, wisdom. It’s as if the past has started being inconvenient, and is now a load weighing people down. It’s stopping them from looking after number 1, even though the struggle, I seem to remember, was driven by a sense of us not I. The problem with an over-concern for personal gain is that it sucks the energy of altruism out of our needy society: most of the money in the hands of the few, some of those few shedding their disadvantaged pasts. With this in mind, let’s keep a sense of proportion, between needs and wants, between them and us, between the lessons of the past and the temptations of the present.
The past’s apartheid demonstrated a poor sense of proportion in the way it represented the majority, and yet presently proportional representation is the preferred choice. The problem with this system is that all the candidates of a particular party represent everyone and yet no one in particular. Consequently politicians are being allowed to duck the issue of accountability. The result is a democracy that leaves large numbers of South Africans in the political and socio-economic dark: what is this democracy that preaches equality for all? I can’t see the equality. And it’s not because the lights have gone out.
We need to move from a shedding of responsibility to a sharing of power. Something Monsieur Zuma has thrown a whole new light on with his sexploit. Using his male power, he shed his moral load when he shared his sexual load with the woman of the infamous rape case. He then went for a shower, shedding any knowledge he might have had about how viruses are transmitted. With the dismissal of the charge, Jacob sailed off into the sunset, leaving the rest of us to recognise sexual responsibility with the help of only a flickering candle.
The judgement in the rape case disempowered the plaintiff to almost the same degree that Eskom is tasked to deliver power, and yet it is presently delivering disempowerment. Never mind that, each one of us sometimes forgets to empower others. This is because we can be ignorant as much as enlightened. And yet it should be easier to bring light to people’s lives than bring shadow. Right now there are things I could be doing to alleviate this darkness. But I just let the powerlessness sink in, as if this is something I know nothing about.
In reality load-shedding has been going on – lights going out – long before Eskom forgot its job description. Guiding lights such as happiness, peace, learning, respect for others and their property, a sense of community. Consider the business of losing weight. It is nothing less than load-shedding by another name, but instead of causing lights to go out, people simply feel lighter. Then there’s divorce: the shedding of emotional demands when the relationship has run low on coal. The difference here is that the shedding doesn’t necessarily make you feel lighter. Nor does the temporary shedding of extra-marital affairs. Affairs are like going out to buy a camping light because you forgot to put money into your pay-as-you-go electricity meter.
So where does this leave us? Lost in trends and images, in the immediate gratification of modern comforts and technology on tap. Loaded down with debt: house and car bonds, credit cards, shop cards, all sapping our capacity to live in the moment. Let’s take a risk and shed the appearance of the four-by-fours and designer-wear. Let’s be ourselves and stop the material goods doing all the talking. Instead of relying on contracts, imagine being loaded with a desire to build and re-build relationships. Imagine shedding your suspicion and being curious about your fellow citizen. Imagine being loaded with an energy that comes from within, walking instead of being daily boxed in a car, reading instead of watching television, singing instead of listening to I-pods; doing things and being someone that doesn’t depend on an electrical current but rather a current of morality, of the senses, of the spirit. I suppose it all sounds a little old-fashioned. It may be just a dream. But then darkness has always been a fertile place for the imagination to work.

Transforming power into goodness

Power is a thing, directionless, meaningless unless there is someone to direct it and give it value. Empower is an action that creates change for the better. The word power has historically many negative associations, and yet there is so much evidence of it being used benevolently. It seems strange that two words can be so related and yet come to mean such different things.
What really matters is that a person should understand the meaning of responsibility and accountability. Without this understanding, everything goes wrong. Those that think they aren’t answerable for their behaviour are slaves to power while those that know that they are answerable and want to be, have power in check, are released by it and therefore can use it constructively instead of being used by it.
We can’t take power with us when we die. We can only leave behind some influence on the world in the form of others we have touched or developed. So those concerned with acquiring power purely for its own sake take the short-term view, believing that all that matters occurs during their lifetime, believing that people are merely useful. Their main intention is to serve and build self, believing that they are essentially only responsible for themselves, that they are the centre of their lives and that power is a miracle drug that can give them authentic sense of self and identity. Those with the long term view see power as a useful resource, while they see people as essential and indispensable. They see that people are not for the taking but that opportunities to serve others are. They see service as reward in itself, not a way of acquiring credits.
Power often makes a person lonely because it isolates him or her. Those that just want it, behave from a place of fear, believing everyone must want a bit of their power, so they hoard and defend it. Those who empower others have the gratification of feeling that they belong to a group or community because they have invested in it, even if that community is made up of just two. They invest in others – with time, love or money – because essentially they don’t need power themselves. They are free enough and sure enough of their own worth not to need external standards of measurement. They needn’t power dress or own a powerful car or have titles of power because in their souls they know that they are already titans, kings and queens. Those, that want power and need to show that they have it, in reality have nothing, while those that wish to empower others already have everything they need. The power-mongers need to be seen, while the empowering types want only the effect of their action to be seen in others’ growth. Power never really compensates for a lack of character or moral fibre although desperation drives people to continue with this belief. In fact, power in people’s hands highlights their quality or their lack of it. In the hands of a selfish, egotistical person it turns toxic and feeds on that person, while in the hands of a quality person the power moves outwards, energising and empowering.
What matters isn’t success, but what we do with it. What matters isn’t money, knowledge, skill, resources, love, loyalty or wisdom but what we do with these things. Power is a means to an end, not merely an end in itself. Power is not the goal but a world where everyone feels they have a rightful place in the sun, where everyone has an opportunity to make a contribution in whatever sphere suits them, where everyone has a chance to achieve to their very best. Someone who holds onto his or her power is like an eclipsed sun: no one really feels the benefit of their energy. Those that let go and share their power are like brightly shining suns, fully realised, having an exponential impact on others, energising all those who are touched by their rays. The global status quo doesn’t represent conditions conducive to achieving this goal, so we must find ways to move from a place of hating or pandering to those with power to a place of empowering the weak, the talented, the aspiring and the determined.
Courage, conscience and will can transform power into goodness. Courage is needed to resist the powerful moral mainstream, to move away from what is convenient and normal but not right, towards that which the moral imperative deems necessary but has not yet been done, or at least not in enough quantity. A conscience is needed to know that we are interdependent and that this interdependence demands action of us, action that harnesses the energy inherent in our connectedness. Finally there is needed a will, to commit to this realisation by turning it into a practical reality. These are the catalysts that transform power into empowering action.

Stereotype broken

Today I went to get some service at an MTN service centre – silly me, should have guessed that they couldn’t print anything for me – it was only a service centre – so on hearing this non-service message from one of the consultants – all neatly decked out in black and yellow – I briefly hyper-ventilated as I let it be known that this was frustrating me just a tad – I had been to the same centre a week earlier only to find it was out of order. The consultants are clearly trained in how to absorb others’ abuse/anger/whatever and they went distinctly quieter as my anger fully flowered.
After a while I refound my composure, and tried to make amends with the consultants by making small chat etc. Nothing about their facial expressions gave away whether this tactic had any meaningful impact. I started to theorize with them that people like me might be sent into their store by MTN head office just to test out their ability to stay calm under fire – not that I was firing anything really – this theorizing definitely left them wondering about the stability of this customer.
Just as I was about to conclude my business – a far as you can ever conclude anything at a service centre in any industry – a black man in suit and designer glasses, who had entered the shop soon after me & had been politely drinking the complimentary coffee, bounced up to the consultants desk with an angry zest in his stride. Why were they not serving him yet? Why were 2 consultants serving me when one would suffice? Was there any service to be had here? Etc etc – now that was fire – he proceeded to verbally lay into a youngish woman made older by her over-the-top make-up – her name was Thuli. He clicked his tongue here and there and felt quite entitled as a customer to reduce her to peanut shells, all while a male consultant tried to appease him by addressing his particular cell-phone need.
So here was the rub for me – not so much that he was highly abusive to all working in the shop – but that it was a black man doing this – in my naivety , stupidity or some such, I had come to think of the generic abusive customer as a white male of somewhere between 25 and 50, who quickly gives you the feeling that he believes all black people to be inherently incompetent, useless and not to be relied upon – judging, that is, by his language and eyes of low-grade contempt. Now here was a black man matching my generic white male abuser syllable for syallable, look for look. It wasn’t pretty witnessing this man’s tirade. However, the ugliness was slightly relieved (yet twisted) by the realisation a few minutes later that it had broken a stereotype I had been holding onto for quite a while for some reason. Life is very very weird.

Hard Hat

Waiting in the queue at Durban airport: there in front of me is a late 30s looking man, carrying what looks like a laptop bag on one shoulder and a hard hat in a hand. It caught me off-guard. For a second I wondered what he was doing carrying a hard hat onto a plane. Is flying becoming that precarious? And then of course my reasoning kicked in: he had visited a construction site for the day, he was an engineering consultant or some such..
I wondered what other situations might require a hard hat. Is there ever a risk of falling debris in a conversation? I wondered how it would be if everyone catching that flight carried or wore a hat onto the plane. I think I would be carrying a soft hat, one that allows for ideas or information to get inside my head. A hard hat would make me even more stubborn.

Pants

So what is it about pants. I have this pair of black long pants – I think they’re quite smart. What isn’t smart is that the button above the zip has started popping open recently – in airport lounges and in the middle of workshops – not cool. It’s not like I’m Mr Fat, but something about my less than Hollywood physique is creating some serious pressure – pop – the it goes again.
It started me wondering – as popping buttons do – what else might spontaneously pop in our lives that would be cool, that wouldn’t be highly embarassing, but instead enlightening, possibly even a source of joy.
How would it be if loving stuff spontaneously popped out of your heart – taking people by surprise. How would it be if out of nowhere you popped an inviting question to a stranger like: Would you like to find a seat and have a chat? Perhaps that sounds a bit stalker-ish, but what might be even freakier is that we walk past literally hundreds if not thousands of people every week, happy to let 99.999% of them remain as total strangers. So with what might you pop?

Short Books

Given the pace of many people’s lives and the love of book clubs mostly for their socialising opportunities, it seems fitting to throw at you the most up-to-date list of famous short books – ones that you can comfortably start and finish before the traffic light has turned green. 

I Can’t by Barak Obama. (A brief meditation on the lack of possibilities)

Schabir Shaik: The Jail Years by S. Shaik

My relationship with the English language  by Joel Santana ( Our man from Brazil waxes lyrical about the fine art of  nouns)

I’m too black, You’re too white  by Julius Malema (A critical yet economical analysis of the present state of South African diversity, with a forward from N. Pandor)

Therapeutic Approaches by Commisioner Cele

Urgency the Cape Town way  by Anonymous

A Tour Around My Liberal Reitz by The Gang of Four

Sense and Sensibility by Julius Malema

Radio Longevity by Phat Joe

Scoring Goals and other Trivial Pursuits  by Bafana Bafana

How To Woo an Audience in one easy MTV Speech by Khanye West

Love poems that Touch Me Deeply by Bakkies Botha

The Taste of  Water by Judge Mathata

The Art of Speech-Writing by Jacob Z

Exciting Moments of Big Brother: Seasons 1 to 10  by The Director

Coping in the Fast Lane  by Terror Lekota

And there you were all thinking that Julius is just a firebrand, mudslinging motormouth – take it all back, he’s a writer – duh!

Collision and Collusion

Among the many things that regularly permeate the coaching and facilitation process, the varying tendency to collude or collide with clients are two behaviours that haunt yet somehow also fascinate me. It seems that coaches and facilitators are constantly being reminded of the dangers that accompany these behaviours, while equally aware that such behaviours are in some way intrinsic to the collaboration and compassion that we strive to model.

I wonder how it’s so easy to inadvertently aid other people’s poor habits or destructive thinking. On reflection I berate myself for at times letting that fearful part of me intervene and stop me from challenging the limitations of another’s behaviour, knowing that at times it’s equally inappropriate to collide with others’ values. So I swing, like many others I imagine, between going with or against, between being Mr Nice and Mr Nasty, challenging and comforting clients, trusting that collusion and collision are not only unavoidable but also necessary to some extent.

And of course, long before coaching or facilitation occurred to us as a choice of work, we have all been collaborating, colluding, colliding and trying to show compassion ever since we had a sense of being part of a group, ever since the family dynamic took on a reality. We might be tempted to think that these behaviours are peculiar to coaching and facilitation, but really they are the stuff of life. They constitute the operating core of relationships and groups.

But this juggling of contrary feelings and responses is also part of a particularly South African story. That story is the country’s painful past and challenging present. In case that sounds too sweeping and grand, let’s see how it looks on the ground.

- Whites collaborated and colluded in each other’s fear and assumption of superiority to maintain a lop-sided society that kept them in power and privilege.
- White South Africans privately or publicly collided with the NP government, but not so much as to make them cut ties or to collaborate authentically with black South Africa.
-The struggle was a protracted collision with an unethical system of social engineering, while a small minority of blacks colluded in capitalism to get ahead.
- Those who collaborated in the struggle are now colliding as political foes.
-The TRC was a flawed process of collusion, collision, collaboration and compassion on a grand scale.
- MPs collaborated in the travel scam and then the previous speaker of parliament colluded in the scam by excusing them from being accountable.
- Business Against Crime is a collaboration.
- Men and women necessarily collide about daily emotional needs.
- Children are often compassionate towards their parents’ shortcomings, which at times can look like collusion.
- People are making courageous changes in their lives every day, but change is a slow process. It often requires others’ acceptance and non-judgement to encourage this slow transition. This can easily be considered collusion.
- Daily debates within families, between couples, in classrooms and parliaments depend on a healthy dose of collision moderated with compassion.
- Lovers collude in each others’ insecurities every hour.
- The constant loneliness and stream of blaming that you can observe in boardrooms, offices and households means that collaboration is often absent.

It’s everywhere. People trying, succeeding and failing at setting and maintaining boundaries, believing in being responsible for and accountable to others but not having the energy or will, trying to help without saving other, supporting without disempowering, challenging without crushing, setting standards while staying humble, trying not to let the voices in our heads deafen us to those we are listening to. So at the heart of the struggle to create authentic relationships is a nobility that is found in the space between the beguiling peace of collusion and the habitual fight of collision.

One more stab at the truth: Facilitation is the noble role of encouraging consensus, coaching a process whereby habits collide with ambitions.

An Englishman in Koffiefontein

As a Joburg towny with an Afrikaans vocabulary of all of ten words, heading into deep south-western Free State would definitely fit into the category adventure. There I was in my semi-plastic Tata, flying through endless open country, relieved at not being in the city, yet very slightly anxious at the thought of so much open space. We townies don’t get much space, don’t understand it, don’t trust it. It’s a beautiful idea but hey, where’s the Nando’s?

By the end of the journey it was official: I had been Free Stated, which is to say my heart was temporarily reflecting a straight flat line. That’s what happens when every road you drive on for 5 hours is dead straight for over 40 kilometres at a time. Roads tailor-made for the straight-laced, straight-forward types, for those who like to think simply? It’s a push-foot, no-brainer – in fact it’s dangerous to have a brain if you drive along such roads. Having a brain might tempt you to imagine that there’s a curve in the road and then you find might yourself careering into off the verge. The effect is almost hypnotic – hypnotised by the sheer unrelenting tedium. The Romans built straight roads, so their armies could get across territory efficiently. I’m not sure  Free State roads (the N1 or N8) were built for any army to move up and down, but they put the Roman roads into the shadows. And all this was just to get to the mysterious Koffiefontein.

Koffies, as the locals call it, is quintessential small South Africa. It exists because there are diamonds in the ground there. It nearly died when De Beers closed down the mine , but a few years ago it was reopened, and with that the dorp has refound its pulse, a weak one at best, but I can definitely say there’s signs of life there. Anywhere with a drankwinkel, a mini-mart, a police station and a PEP store must constitute life. And a funny life at that: I meet a fellow English-speaker called Peter. One of his friends is the local traffic officer. Traffic officer! You’d have to employ an events management company to generate anything close to ‘traffic’ in Koffiefontein.

The colonial-esque yellow and white painted curbs, roads wide enough for ox-wagons to turn in, rusty corregated roofs…it feels a little like a film set, except that the actors  haven’t pitched. The extras have pitched but they don’t know what they’ve pitched for. My GP registration turns heads. The lady at the drankwinkel seems charmed by the fact that I can’t speak Afrikaans. This English towny is clearly something of a curiosity.

Local entertainment starts and ends with dopping: dopping on your boat at the lake, or dopping on your stoep or at the one  commercial dopping joint. There is a sports club of sorts: there are old men employed to keep the empty flower beds tidy, but the sports club car park is beautiful for its emptiness. The club’s cricket pitch is kept green but something about it says that it’s watered in honour of the good old days more than for any dashing activity going on nowadays.

The difference between being laid back and in a coma is put under the microscope here. On the one hand people seem to have found a peace that townies can only dream of: no one locks their car, no one rushes anywhere – there’s nowhere close to go to – so people tend their  gardens after their mineshift has ended. On the other hand, there’s a  frustration in the air, in people’s eyes and voices. As if it’s an open prison. People are here for work, not because it’s God’s gift to beauty or excitement. Capital investment is not coming here, franchises are not coming here, cinemas are not coming here. Every second person is in debt to a loan shark. The biggest growth areas are churches (40 plus in a place with a population of  approx 14ooo) and creches. Very few non-mining South Africans come here, I’m guessing. Perhaps if you planned to get lost ,Koffiefontein might look like heaven.

But, whatever it doesn’t have, it does have two things: it has more than its fair share of intense dry heat and it has people you could comfotably call real. That is, if who I’ve worked with is anything to go by. The bullshit factor with them is as low as you’ll ever find.  And so is my understanding of their Afrikaans. At regular points in the workshop that I run with them, they break into long spiels. I smile and wait for them to finish, hoping I might understand a word or two. One or two look sad for me: poor rooinek, can’t praat. So they do summary translations to keep me in the loop.

What they have to offer is the nuts and bolts of life – nothing fancy or very deep, but solid and authentically, unashamedly them. Many wouldn’t know how to pretend to be something they’re not, even if you paid them. So for two days I feel very grounded, listening to stories of carats and management practices that would make your wig spin. They treat this outsider with an unpretentious warmth. We come from different worlds but for two days the baggage of Koffies and Joburg disappears and we can find a little bit of very solid common ground. In their own ways, they are doing heroic work, not that they know it – it’s just work to them. This chance to be with them, to help them find some clarity for themselves is a privelege.

What I learn from these straight speaking people goes some way to compensating me for my 5 hour flatline of a drive back to Gauteng.

The Process

Everyone starts with choices,

head filled with conflicting voices:

where to sit, how to feel

slowly the onion unpeals.

We divide ourselves into groups,

the doubting, the confident and those in between,

yet much is unclear, unseen.

Little flutters of doubt arise,

until everything we know no longer applies,

until through exploring roles

we stumble upon the unknown toll

of all that stirs inside.

As time winds on, people lose confidence

 in their understanding of normality:

things shift under the skin,

no longer clear who is ‘us’ or ‘me’,

purpose stretched to wafer-thin.

Brains and hearts in constant collision

fumbling for credible decisions

searching for a new centre of gravity,

something about us that we can believe

around which all other flux floats.

 

Joined by fear of what might be

separated by assumed identities,

in transition all of us spurning

answers that don’t sustain, learning

about the nature of our core

and that all perception is flawed,

only one thing seemingly clear:

we invest in how we appear.

Others’ perspectives start to beckon

unravelling certainty second by second.

People listen and wrestle with meaning,

the words towards conflict leaning

only to find a new territory,

from a fixed disposition

hearts increasingly free.

 

Tears drop

 causing ripples and waves,

resistance eroded, washed away,

 letting us drop gradually down

to where our souls sound:

dissonance, trembles, songs and roars.

Loneliness becomes the common cause

individuals drawn into delicate democracy

of synchronicity and disparities.

A babble of eclectic voices gives rise

to a crude consensus that uncomfortably lies.   

The process unpredictably flowing,

people on the surface and below

awareness in a state of feverish growth.

By an undesigned dance steered

we fumble through the fear

daring to pursue the unknown.

The raw unconscious ablaze

uncovers a network of psychic pathways

old experiences renewed,

layers of self-limit cut through.

A redefinition of self accrues.

 

Moving from one state to the next

new emotional muscles flexed,

a humbled knowing unfolds:

we are many people in one

our separateness thoroughly undone

everyone permeating each other:

her pain in another form is mine,

different beliefs slowly aligned.

 

At last ecstatically exhausted,

having hovered by life’s edge

everyone is infused with curiosity

hearts opened to whatever might be,

questioning now as comfortable as breathing.