“We are beggars. We beg for everything. If you need something, be a man. Don’t start whining for somebody to do it for you or get it for you.” Chika Onyeane in The Capitalist Nigger.
Tweet that quote, share it on Facebook and most of all keep it to yourself for the next 5 minutes of this post.
On any occasion I’m the type that looks beneath the surface for why certain things happen the way they do or why humans behave the way they do. I believe there is always some cosmic explanation and interconnected traits that makes a person or people act in a certain way.
For instance, how do you explain why majority of South African people are poor, especially blacks? Truth is, majority of black people have been isolated and denied the right means to ensure their welfare in the past. It is only recent that they are beginning to move forward, slowly so.
How do you explain the constant influx of foreigners into SA? Bad leadership in majority of African continent has led to wars and starvation and hence people have to find other possible means to survive.
How can I explain why most black people beg?
Well, before I answer that, ponder on this; don’t we seem to beg – for anything? If we’re not out begging for jobs at the streetlights we’re begging for transformation, equality, free education and and and…
The story never seems to end.
So I started wondering, so much of begging it’s almost an urban street culture now, it’s almost a dab, trending at every corner and everyone just wants to dab along – from hobos, to moms on the side of the road with their new born babies to this one time when an old man in Braam decided to ask for a R5. This man was no hobo. This man was just an ordinary man trying to get wherever he was going. I was supposed to help I know but get this. It happened to me more than once.
I ignored it. And you can only ignore something until you get an answer.
Just when I dismissed the old man I spotted something. A bunch of school kids, about 9 – 11 year olds running around the streets hustling people cash and then I started to remember. I passed millions of these kids almost everywhere – at shopping centres, malls, and to this one time when me and friends were sitting at Wimpy in Glenfair, Pretoria. They literally just walked in and asked for donations, they approached people, they begged.
Like a coming of age story I saw myself in the shoes of these kids. I too did what they did I confess and we went door to door asking for donations and how on earth could it be that this very same thing is still happening?
An institutionalized culture of begging has been imprinted in our subconscious from a very young age by our heroes, or so I thought – our teachers and they never imagined any side effects to take form later on in life.
How can our teachers not see this?
Later on in life, when you are home you bump into your old school mate and he asks you for a R2 just so he can buy a loose one and I assume you’re reading this thinking it’s no coincidence. Sure, we’re not all fortunate. Sure we’re not all smart enough to navigate through the hardships of life but are our teachers that stupid enough to not make us build craft in order to sell fine art, vegetables gardens so that we can sell fruits or simply – write or organise a musical/drama festival just to raise funds? Just anything, anything that has nothing to do with asking for money!
Why did they make us beg?
Why did they imprint a culture of always having to ask for things instead of using chakra and our bare hands?
We went blind at it and then decades later in our pursuit of excellent we still find ourselves begging for equality, free education, everything all because a mind of a black man has not been capacitated well enough to properly rely on creative intelligence to build, to create, to define, to question but beg.
So I quote, again.
“We are beggars. We beg for everything. If you need something, be a man. Don’t start whining for somebody to do it for you or get it for you.” Chika Onyeane
The ruthlessness in pursuit of excellence requires one to ask no man for permission. The ruthless in pursuit of excellence demands that you man up! That you refuse to beg but you take what is due to you. This is because the moment you refuse to take up that responsibility, someone will – and that someone will dictate your dreams, your passion, your joy, your salary, your life.
And we ought to pursue excellence at all costs, even if it means teaching our own children at home. We have to capacitate their thinking and demolish the imprinted institutionalized culture of begging. We have to teach them so that decades later, a mind of a black man is fully capacitated well enough to properly rely on creative intelligence – to build, to create, to define, to question.
Refuse to beg. Let’s move, thinking forward.
