First of all let me just say there has never been a better more LIT time to be a South African, from collectively agreeing that the 2010 soccer world cup never happened to showing serious collective concern with regard to missing pots. That emergent ONE NATION strategy seems to be falling into place.Seen a lot of people actively joke that they planning to leave this country due to all the chill we have lost. And its damn right true! We’ve lost so much chill and matured so much in such a little space of time its damn right amazing. It’s like we all just woke up in 2016 and decided that you know what, we gonna have a voice and an opinion, we gonna stop pretending and start walking tall and call out any form of BS we been avoiding or casting a blind eye on over the years. Racists, ignorant people and womanizers ain’t safe no more.
Here’s why I feel that losing our chill is the best thing to ever happen to us in SA…
First of all we have become open and honest with ourselves, we voice our opinions without fear , debate and go on rants if need be (Shout out to the 4 ladies at the election center for the stratospheric levels of bravado shown). We as the kids born into an Apartheid free South Africa, we were raised by parents who were subjected to harsh laws and violence by its government, such acts struck fear into their hearts to an almost irreparable level . So what this did is, it altered their outlook, perceptions and opinions as they were too scared to say anything. They were institutionalized and most of them still are; when ‘freedom’ came it meant something different to them compared to what it means to us currently. Most of our parents grew up scared of the white man and that has stayed with them over the years. Now fast-forward to the born frees….
Ding Ding Ding…
We born-frees view the world through a different lens compared to our parents, we have opinions of our own, we are totally ‘FREE’ hashtag we abusing Tata Madiba’s freedom to the fullest, we aren’t scared of the white man and we can now match him with relevant skills spiced up with the ability to reason and sit on a table with him and debate out any issues we have while maintaining composure and looking him straight in the eye.
Losing our chill to me means we have now started questioning stuff, bullying the status quo, it means having a voice and actually using it, it means calling BS when you see something unjust happening. This in-turn creates uncomfort to whoever is at the receiving end of such, which is good because uncomfort means one is growing, learning and hopefully adjusting their views. Too long we’ve played into the hands of racists while living according to their terms. Fast-forward to today? The Penny Sparrows of this world are now shivering wherever they are as they now know that there isn’t a place for people like them in this new chill-less South Africa.
Isn’t it just beautiful that we are now finally having much needed conversations and debates around religion and were it fits in with the African traditions, conversations around why are we adopting two cultures and in most cases looking down on our own culture and opting for white weddings over a traditional one. We now questioning this rainbow nation fallacy, we are true to ourselves and do not feel the need to qualify ourselves to anyone. As I log onto Facebook I see buy black campaigns being the order of the day. The Casspers of this world are now filling up arenas and going double platinum. We in a revolution and its beautiful to see a country fall-in-like with itself. We breeding legends, superstars, super academics and young innovatice entrepreneurs. We starting to question the status quo that is the normal route of having to get a qualification to get a job, we now seeing the need to empower and equip ourselves with relevant business skills so as to build our own corporations. I’m not saying we will get there soon, for the fact that we having conversations that center around the future is indication enough that we will do something about it.
To sum it up, losing our chill has actually brought us back home, it has matured a lot of us and to a degree is making us a lot more patriotic as we have now localized everything. We have localized our humor and entertainment which means we stopped depending on other countries to entertain us (shout out Mzanzi Humor). Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have become the perfect substitute for mainstream media; whatever Hlaudi is hiding and censoring on the TV we get to see on social media. We now celebrate our own local artists and have stopped jumping to the west for entertainment, its about damn time the world gets a taste of what we have to offer.
I’m a Proud South African…
do click on this LINK to have a look at one of our poems on preservig the African culture.
Article By Kagiso Maloma
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