No one should get left behind, and all they hear is "left"

I used to say, family are the people you’re born to and with but friends are the family you choose. The truth is you can choose your family too. Or more precisely, your family can find you.

If you feel rejected by or distanced from the norm, you can be directed to a new people and place. Good people from different places.

My family, however ordinary in our meanderings, are a lifeboat. They can make me laugh when I am worried or sad; they challenge me to think beyond myself and wants; they remind me that sameness is a human impossibility but human love, perseverance, a sense of what is just and decent and teamwork connects us to each other.

We care beyond the quid pro quo of relationships defined by set roles and performances.

We want to care.

So I hear my son cried in aftercare last year while watching a movie. My husband says our boy found the movie upsetting because it was about a boy who just wanted to be himself.

That’s clearly what our son wants, longs for, struggles with: living in a world where being yourself isn’t obviously enough.

• Did I pronounce the word correctly?

• Write the word right?

• Did I finish my morning to-dos on time?

• Understand all my homework?

• Answer the questions right?

• Understand the questions in the first place?

• Am I on par with my class and grading expectations?

• Am I focusing in class enough to absorb this lesson?

• Can I even understand the lesson?

• I need to read more but I need to finish homework but I want to play and unwind when I come home…doesn’t everyone?

• When do other children go to bed? I am supposed to get 8-10 hours of sleep for my development, they said?

• Do I actually have friends in school if I have no close connections most of the time?

• And what does it mean for my development if I don’t have any, they’re asking?

• What does possible loneliness do to a boy, I don’t know.

• Can they afford extra-curricular sports or art lessons in the hopes I make friends?

• Can we afford not to?

• What if the old and the new don’t take a liking to me?

• I said I don’t like soccer but I am shy and I hate the feeling of not being good enough in front of others?

• We have no surrounding support or we have too many cooks in the kitchen telling us what is right or wrong.

• If mummy and daddy seem “tired”, does that mean they’re unhappy with me?

Everyone has something, right? A wound, an ache, an ever present fear. You can give and try, fail and persevere through retrenchments, unemployment, isolation, rejections, prejudices—systemic and relational, through disappointments and worries, helplessness and anger, with all the love in the world as an undercurrent and you’ll still have a song, painting, sculpture, play, film, video clip, moment in nature, a subsection of prayer or line in a book that sticks in and stirs at the plain ol’ truth.

For me, there are two.

A song and a film.

“One of Us” by Joan Osborne gets me every time:

Raya and the Last Dragon is the other hard hitter.

The story about a girl betrayed by the people she chose to trust, having to trust them again in the hope that this time they would do the selfless and right thing to save everybody.

Sound familiar, South Africans?

Of course, you would find me crying. I have been so shocked at those of the colonial identity of white, upper-middle-to-upper-class especially, that the betrayals of the racialised black and brown not-liberating-anyone-but-themselves-and-fellow-elites-foreign-included have formed a wide halo of floating daggers above what feels like a sloshing ocean of blood deliberate in it’s perniciousness and from the very people at the intersection of global colonialism, imperialism and class that owed the biggest debt to an entire country and region that they have refused to pay, even in plain full honesty.

So yes, I cry in watching a children’s movie when Raya hands her piece of the magic crystal to Namaari, hoping she, representing her treacherous tribe, would save them all and act for the good of everyone and not for herself (as she had before and so often has).

It’s a fairy tale.

The truth is that Namaari’s tribe probably planned, funded and lobbied for the Druun to be unleashed on everyone, waiting for most of their “competition” to be wiped out and then laid in wait for trusting, desperate Raya to hand the magic crystal pieces so they could control the Druune. Or, at least that’s how this plays out at home, in every decade, in every century, it is the same ol’ game again and again, the world that I expected was not the world I have come to know.

I’m not foolish. I knew early on that cruelty and unfairness were real. My earliest memory was of a bully shoving a little boy so hard he fell over a boundary wall. Blood streamed down his face from the top of his head.

There was no cause and no defence.

We all watched it happen.

The boy was taller, stronger, fiercer and he knew (as we did) that any emotion he wished to project would not be stopped by shorter, weaker children triggered by their own sense of self-preservation and choosing to be silently complicit.

But my father encouraged me too much I am sure.

Born in 1944, before the morphing of patchwork western colonialism in southern Africa to direct, organised, imperialist-supporting colonial apartheid, he seemed absurdly certain of the crazy idea that his daughters, born female and racialised “not white”, were equally human.

The system we were born to was designed, controlled, tweaked and managed to ensure this insane idea of being equally human would remain a fairy tale, never to be lived nationally and regionally.

Yet from a young age, I was told by my father that no one is better than you and no one is better than anyone else. He did not mean that there weren’t people faster, stronger, richer and more well read who jump higher or attain higher marks in school. He meant that we were to believe that the stronger, faster and better read were our equals in their humanity. He would assert this to be true all the time.

Being stronger did not make you more human than anyone else.

When people joked somewhat awkwardly about intermarriage across language groups in what was once a fairly closed-off colonial apartheid racialised Indian South African community, my father would be heard saying, such differences did not bother him. His daughters could marry whoever they liked. I mean hey, we are not better than anyone.

And with that fundamental principle, my father would always allow his daughters’ a voice at the table. We would have family meetings on important announcements or decisions and often he would ask us from a young age what we thought.

Seems small, almost theatrical to ask a little child what they think about something as arbitrary as what movie we should watch at the cinema, but it solidified this idea that I was equally valuable.

If your father thinks you are worth voicing your thoughts, opinions and desires then you are worthy of doing that elsewhere.

You are equally human after all.

My parents did hold racist ideas of indigenous Africans and their presumed subordinate position, ideas I do not believe they ever consciously confronted or even fully understood as both too comfortably normal and disgustingly racist but still they held good intentions for a world where people were people, all just people and that their girls value being equally human people.

Looking back now, I cannot discount those good intentions in my upbringing because without it, I may have become a different person. Someone, if with an ounce of empathy/compassion, might see cruelty and unfairness, conditioned as normal from childhood, as the unfortunate or rightful state of things: This is just how “we” are, how “things” are, as though magically made real by a wave of a wand.

My parents blessed me with knowing human equality was a fact that the laws, policies, resultant inequities and those mentally stagnant needed to catch up to, rather than make real through any top-down benevolence.

When I read about Monsanto’s control over South Africa’s agriculture, the Mbeki’s government silence on that issue, legal cases alleging cancer against the company and the silence on those cases following its acquisition by German company, Bayer, the alleged partnerships between agricultural/farming elites, South Africa’s government and the foreign USA to funnel GMO goods into Zimbabwe (with sanctions hanging over their heads), I was reminded that the vast number of humans of South Africa, Namibia, Angola, Zimbabwe, Eswatini, Lesotho, Mozambique have no idea what their house is designed to be and for what purpose.

What many do know, feel in their bones, is that their equal humanity is dishonoured.

They feel it. They know it.

They are made to hurt in knowing it.

Knowing, you see, that we are equally human is both a blessing and a curse.

Because once you know the truth of that truth, you recognise every lie baked into the system or said on air that veers away from the truth.

• Why shouldn’t South Africa, Zimbabwe, Angola, Eswatini, Lesotho, Namibia, Mozambique feed their own people, from their own land, their own fresh, diversified, nurtured and non-GMO harvest?

• Why should any humans be hungry in any country, let alone in the countries and continents of their birth?

• Why should any humans accept the risk of cancer for the profit of corporate/high-net worth elites and their political elite friends?

• Why should any humans accept hunger and the risk of cancer for foreign powers and their profits?

Once you know you and everybody else is equally human, all lived realities that are underpinned or defended by the lie that you and any other people are not become unacceptable to you.

Not because you are born some great warrior of revolution or a movement.

Merely because a lie is a lie.

If I am person of integrity, if I choose to align as best I can with honesty, why would humans, equally human as I, accept the unacceptable.

Why would I want them to?

And I have gotten myself in trouble for speaking this truth on more than one occasion.

When I was eleven/twelve-years-old, we had a neighbour renting the home next door who was physically and verbally abusive to his family.

His wife was young, she looked almost child-like as though straight out of a high school class room and their son was a mere six-to-eight-years-old.

One day, I was sitting in the living room and I could hear a repetitive whooshing sound and crack that came from outside and at some point a loud repetitive shouting and what sounded like crying. When I opened the window, pulling the heavy curtain aside, I heard the little boy wailing and screaming in anticipated terror, begging someone to please not do something.

To me, it was the same moment as that of the school bully and without seeing the boy or the “someone” he was afraid of I imagined the scene:

Someone, something, taller, stronger, fiercer was striding or hovering over a boy about to hurt him badly enough that the boy was begging him not to.

Whoosh, crack. The boy screams, wails and begs some more.

Whoosh, crack.

The pleading, the crying, the crack so loud that I can hear it from the living room.

I wasn’t alone at home yet no one said a word. None of the other neighbours from the other side of fence said anything either.

We were all letting it happen, going to let it happen and something about the silence between the whips had a visceral effect on me. I started to get angry both at the silence and the noise. The complicity and suffering.

A single thought pushed me over the edge: No one is going to help him.

I remember the day too. One of those sunny, warm Durban days of the 1990s. Everything so green in our garden and calm.

I don’t know what took hold of me.

I rushed out to and through the front door after unlocking it and in my bare feet crossed the veranda and garden to reach the white fence separating our properties.

Peeking over it, I saw the boy huddled on the floor, his face soaked in tears, his mother nowhere to be seen, holding himself and curled away from who I had suspected of abusing him with the blunt end of a thick leather belt.

His father.

The man seemed surprised to see me but before he could acknowledge my existence and in all my primary school fury born of years of Daddy’s little affirmations of my worth, I shouted at this grown man who was a complete stranger to me.

I still remember telling him that he should be ashamed of himself and how could he do what he was doing to his own “blood”. I told him the boy was screaming and crying, and why was he hurting him like that to make him scream that way.

He told me to mind my business.

I ignored him and kept going.

He said he would come where I was and shut my mouth for me.

I told him my father had lived in this neighbourhood a long time and he had friends on this street and if he came anywhere near us, all the men of the street would be here to sort him out. (I had no basis for making that assumption but when you’re twelve both afraid and angry you go balls to the wall on your come backs).

I told him the one thing that ended the whipping the minute I walked away.

One day, I said, your son will be grown and you will be old, and how would you like it if he did to you what you did to him. You must be careful. Karma will get you.

As it so happened, Karma got me. The belt wielder from next door was Christian so Karma didn’t factor in with him at all (the joke was on me) and he chose to complain to my father that I was a rude child and presumptuous. He was very polite in his complaint apparently and conveniently left out the beating of his son to the high heavens.

When my father brought up my behaviour, he first asked me what happened (my side of the story). He listened. He absorbed. He sympathised.

And it was this sympathy rather than actual empathy that preceded what he did next, for me, it seemed unthinkable.

He told me “these things happen”. That there were men who were “rough” and this man while seeming “nice” was possibly one of them. He was very sorry for the boy. Sorry for the woman who was his mother who he had seen around and seemed very downtrodden but sometimes when men drink too much they lose control, they make bad choices.

I was absolutely outraged.

What in God’s name did he mean “these things happen”?

But Daddy, the boy was screaming, begging him to stop, I could hear him and the belt in the living room. Isn’t that wrong? He was hurting him. Shouldn’t we do something? Help?

Oh yes, it’s wrong. Oh sure, we should do something.

Yet no answer on what exactly.

It was all well wishes and affirmed self-confidence for his children.

You are a good person now mind your business.

If I am willing to say that bad things happen to the boy next door and that’s just how things are, what happens when bad things happen to me? Is that okay with me? Is that okay, period? Should I bother telling anyone because, you know, things things happen.

I walk on the street and see a child kidnapped, should I keep walking or maybe write a post about it?

I am visiting a hospital and see an elderly person in a bed being thrown to the floor, should I say how sad, how unfortunate?

How far do we go with this?

The belt-wielding father was not drunk when he abused his son on that occasion but the fact that my father needed to assume that to lead me to accept (understand) the “rough”-ness next door as part of this spinning wheel called life was window dressing to an untruth intended to move me away from the truth.

The boy deserved our protection and defence.

We all deserve to be rescued when we are harmed.

My true pet peeve is being lied to.

So cognitive dissonance no longer works on me, if it ever did.

Once I know something, everything that seems to minimise or distract or dishonour the truth feels painfully insulting to me.

I knew the next door neighbour was an abuser, not merely an addict who makes bad choices that happens to affect his son.

His poor and unfortunate because of the alcohol, you see?

So when I have said that no one in South Africa or the world should be left behind to suffer, why is it there a chorus of too many voices that only hear the word “left” and get visibly mad about it?

Why do you need for someone, some people to be left behind, underneath, abused, isolated, starving, poisoned and alone for your comfort?

People are catching up to truths but some just can’t live without the lie.