HOW do we equate the civilised with the other world of 1900–1945, which we digested only yesterday, packaged by capable authors who, by exposure, allowed us to ponder the dynamics of evolution towards comprehending values and primitive realms, and to understand what we conclude is proper conduct? Yet we also absorbed the literature of the mental condition of obsessions, the collective ego of nations that led to the plague of pillage of the other, as recorded in colonisations and the ego of justification that “might is right”. This allows us to plot and execute and then reveal the most unexpected justifications—those expected to become sacred and civilised—though rooted in another age of learning that we now look back on, with its strange gods and beliefs.
Provocations, when propelled—worse still—to contribute to the ego of the prophet, or ‘Chosen One’, despite what the records warn, have opened the portals of fallen angels. Eager to cast a board of challenging royal pieces. Eager to cast a legion of pawns, willing or not, to act out a grim tale to be added to the shapes and shades of memory. My father and my youngest uncle once separately informed me, in my juvenile awareness, that, in our modern world, as it was in so-called barbaric times, “it has been said by the custodians of competing nations that they cherish no friends, only interests.”
How did this pattern that existed in our primitive ancestors—forming groups, then tribes—through the evolution of climate and creative gifts towards sustenance, become our ancestors? We learnt from older species and honoured them as sacred, in respect of the widening awareness that observation of their realm taught us. The question today is how we will endeavour to be discreet in how we rationalise our needs, whether by fear or by deception, though some attract this upon themselves in the passion to overwhelm, control, or possess my neighbour’s mango tree in the ways of old and in the triumphant manner of the glorious kingdoms of the past, which today cannot directly speak for themselves, but only through their art and what we interpret of the values they cherished.
As a much younger man, apart from the insertions of the male world that shaped its expectations, I read and built a small library to better understand the world of nations and cultures I was immersed in. Modern texts that described their nature, and the nature of things I did not know of, awakened me—whether it be Cheikh Anta Diop, Walter Rodney, Noam Chomsky, Wallis Budge, Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel, Ivan Van Sertima, and numerous others. They all revolved around the nature and failures of our species and, through these authors, represented the paths of goodness we should emulate in this age of the most volatile, self-imposed conspiracies against our species: global warming and weaponry. The wand rests within our hands.
