Seeing someone pursuing knowledge is a new form of pride according to ignorant people. It makes them talk and comment on things they don’t know about. That’s the mind of a free-thinker, and I don’t adore it. I adore Bob Marley who spoke his mind free of fear. He observed that Knowledge isn’t free you have to pay attention.
I paid attention to the land issue. The minute it came into discussion, I was not equipped for it and thought South Africans were out of their minds. I was less controversial and had less content about African matters; I thought it was just a scandal for the media to produce news and sell newspapers. To my surprise, those in the know fully supported it. I now know that no one can support the goal of Africa without fully understanding its history. The forceful removal of people from their land, the bribery of their possessions, the change of their African names has led to this global crisis we are facing today. I don’t want to talk about the worst situations you recently saw.
My attention and interest in African matters do not come from my academic scope. The late American Historian Professor John Henrik Clarke changed my mind for the better. He noted that “South Africa has its uniqueness in the African struggle. Africans were enslaved throughout the whole of Africa in most cases. The uniqueness in South Africa is that they did not in any appreciable number take the African from home, they enslaved him at home on his own land.” I now have corollary development about South Africa from the mentioned above about the land question.
What we need to do is make the youth to have beautiful minds, meaning we must fertilize their brains to seek knowledge even when they don’t have to use it in school-related matters but for personal development. This will make them aware and support those who pursue the use of knowledge to take Africa out of poverty and corruption. They will be aware that this land we are lamenting and fighting for belongs to them to further develop and can be expropriated without compensation. The youth will know that the solutions to their problems exist in their hands supported by proper discourse. They will know what we mean by Land without compensation. They will understand the need to legalize weed in different perspectives without criticizing SA.
The history of Africa is not hidden but exposed in the books. If there are certain things you miss because of not reading or paying attention to African literature but trashy literature, you won’t understand South Africa of today. The time where the land and where colonialism began is there in the books, and you can read it.
In the book “Message to the people: The Course of African Philosophy”, Marcus Garvey, one of the great freedom fighters of the early 20th century challenged you and me to give our ideas to this world. He said, “Read history incessantly until you master it. This means your own national history, the history of the world, social history, industrial history, and the history of different sciences; but primarily, the history of man.” You cannot disagree with history as a compulsory subject in schools.
In the name of ignorance, you trap yourself to accept whatever comes to you as it is, and that will be to control you. I need you to remember one thing, you didn’t come to this world to play but to share your unique ideas. South Africa is still a tricky place to live, no wonder when graduates graduate leaves the country for better lives in other countries. With less knowledge outside their academic scope, they are unaware that to better their lives they must better understand and know their country as well as the other countries of their choice before leaving us to improve our stay in South Africa.
The tough times we are going through as a county arrived before or were going to arrive at some point. It is about time we use the power of knowledge to solve them. I know I was not there, but those who came before me believed that everyone can have a fount of knowledge, as “the world’s greatest men and women were people who educated themselves outside of the university with all the knowledge that the university gives, and you have the opportunity of doing the same thing the university student does – read and study.” If we continue to ignore the use the knowledge to fix other problems outside politics or government, we are simply telling the universe that it is providing us with the unnecessary knowledge that declines us changes.
