ABC,s

"It takes just 26 letters to create a universe
The world is dismantled and then reassembled
Through the lens of a pen and verse

I have lost myself in books
And then found myself in words
Living in a world without imagination
I can think of no fate that is worse.

I’ve walked through the lives of individuals
Whose eyes I’ve never known
I’ve been to cities and villages and country sides
Whose skies, to me, have never been shown.

It was in this solitary cell
That my greatest strength was honed
I saw that my mind was just a shell
And it’s abyss simply a hole

And the hell of a heaving heavy heart
Is still my friend
Every story has its place
And history never ends

The writer is an architect God child at play
On a canvass of memories
She lies naked between the covers
Her own lover
Her own worst enemy

Navigating between extremes
She is both the judge and the judged
The vile despised and attacked
The unashamedly beloved

The unassuming friend who’ll tell your business
When you’re not in sight
She pulls commotion out of stillness
In the cavern of the night

And South Africa is a fractured mirror
A paradox of schizophrenic selves
Who don’t talk to one another
Who fear each other

Who revere each other
Who loathe
And pretend
And try to blend in
With each other
And this is the time when you can become
The greatest substance of your dreams
Unless you live in a shack
And don’t speak English
And don’t know what this poem means

Tell me how it’s possible for people
Who walk on gold to not know how to read
Tell me how publishers who’ll never taste their tongues
Can comprehend the words that these people need
Because they’ve never been scared of stories

The ones who uttered the very first
The ones who’ll hand them to their children
Calling out the rivers of their self worth
The ones who’ll write a narrative in the ear
But who won’t call the ear a page

The ones who’ll rhyme without pens
And perform without a stage
I don’t have all the answers
I’m just a colonized African

Who breaks down the Queen’s English
Until Sesotho understands it
Still I’m compelled by those
Who may never inhabit my language

I wonder if trials and translations
Could help them to traverse my landscape
South Africa is an old fashioned mutt
Who knows how to sing

And knows even better how to cuss
Who knows how to piece together prayers
When she’s about to run out of luck
Who knows how to laugh real hard

When the tears have run her into a rut
Who knows that race is a farce
Because when the light’s are off

Every body’s fucked
And when the welts and wounds
Demand healing salve
Words are just enough"

Lebo Mashile♏

Chaos In Church

Warning this may offend sensitive readers please skip this if you are a hardcore church goer with no sense of humor.

Being the irrational believer in God that I am, I do actually believe that the Holy Bible is the word of God. Perhaps not always in the strictest literal sense, which is probably where the Pastor Sheriff and I would differ. For instance, if I discovered that Sister K had been getting freaky with the pool guy, I would not be seen wandering the Natal Spruit River bed area searching for palm-sized rocks to be used in the stoning ceremony.

I do hope that Pastor Sheriff wouldn’t mind me saying that, other than the primary objective of the Bible (spreading the Word), reading the Bible for the pure entertainment value of it can be a lot of fun too. People who haven’t read the Bible don’t actually realise that the Bible is full of awesome stories — whether one believes them literally or not.


Take the story of King David and how he snatched Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba and made her his queen. For the benefit of the heathens, King David saw her bathing on her roof, through his window, liked what he saw and decided that he should have her even though he was already married and she was also already married. 

This episode coincided with His Royal Connivingness being involved in a war of attrition with some evil Gentile types. Yeah I know, that’s pretty much the default situation in that part of the world even to this day. So he had her husband, Uriah, sent to the frontlines of the battle where Uriah was inevitably hacked to death with a sword or something. Man to be honest i thinks the sword in question wasn’t even in the hands of an enemy soldier. We’ve all seen those battle scenes from Gladiator and such alike. General chaos used to be the order of the day.



But enough about my crazy conspiracy theories. To begin with, this is not even my favourite Bible story. But you must admit; it is riveting stuff. David did ultimately marry Bathsheba and she bore him a son who would become King Solomon, the quintessential Wise One who would have put King Mswati and my fellow fvckboys  to shame with serial androgyny.In the words of Ali G: “Respek’”. 

This is the type of story that should send shivers down Gwede Mantashe’s spine and lead to the prohibition of all forms of roof bathing in the Mantashe household — if the roof is visible from the president’s office in the Union Buildings or Nkandla Homestead.



But my pound-for-pound favourite story in the Bible involves Jesus himself.Now, Jesus is the originator of the famous “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” quote … No wait. That wasn’t the Messiah. That gem was the Mahatma’s. But Jesus said something pretty similar — something about the fact that if someone slaps you hard across the cheek, the proper thing to do is to offer him the other cheek for him to finish the job. [I’m sorry, but every time someone slaps me, I offer him the palm of my hand instead. Even George Bush, the born-again, followed the same model.]



In any case, one day Jesus got so fed up with giving the other cheek to some irresponsible people who were using his dad’s temple as some kind of Oriental Plaza he forgot to offer the other cheek. Jesus went and got himself a whip and, depending on which version of the Bible you prefer, either “chased them away” or “opened a can of whupass on their behind”. To quote John 2:15, “So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple area, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables”.



As you can see, the Bible is rather scant on the exact detail. The key lies in how one reads “and drove all”. I prefer to believe that he kicked their asses. That’s just how I roll. Oh I love this story so much! I was raised the Zulu way , you see, and whupass is an integral part of the culture. Humourless born-again types like to argue that Jesus was so meek he couldn’t have actually whipped them — maybe just cracked it in the air to scare them. Either way, he was angry, grabbed a whip and somehow chased them to scatter into the general Alberton area … well, you know what I mean.



I like to entertain myself by trying to imagine the exact sequence of events. Did he get to the temple, find the dudes  chilling, doing the things that makes other guys to be winners and losers and sommer start whipping them? John 2:15 says he made a whip out of cords. This seems to be rather premeditated if you ask me. Jesus’s professional trade was woodwork, the Malema Kryptonite. I don’t know how one makes a whip. But I don’t imagine that it takes less than an hour to manufacture a strong, skin-cracking one unless one is well versed when it comes to making whips. But that would mean he made whips the whole time , which would make him a serial whipper. I don’t think so. So he would have had to sit there patiently for up to two hours while he made his weapon of temple cleansing (WTC). So far this saga smells of premeditated whupass to me.

This is incongruent with how I’ve always assumed Jesus rolled. Also, what was he humming as he rolled his WTC? Amazing Grace? The Holy Rosary? Diphiri maybe? This is the sort of thing I would have wanted inserted in the story if I was the one writing it.


This raises the question of where he got the ropes he used?. I don’t imagine he used to hang out in the general temple area with ropes around his neck in the event of loiterers and hobos defiling his father’s temple. Well, I’m thinking he probably got the ropes off one of the street vendors. This point always leaves me with a state of confusion. Should I believe that he went and purchased the WTC raw material or rather that he just snatched them from a street merchant? This is a big deal for a believer such as me.


You see, if he purchased the ropes, then he unintentionally took part in the trading himself. That means he unleashed violence on people for doing what he also did, you know what I’m sayin’? But if he just took them from the rope trader then he jacked the dude. And I don’t know if I’m ready to believe that Jesus was a ropejacker. So I have to assume that he bought them. And now I start wondering if Jesus walked over to him, tossed five denarius(old Roman gold or silver coins) at him and started rolling on the spot. Also, I wonder if the rope retailer was the first one to taste Jesus’s fury. I would call that a bittersweet situatshan. Can you dig it? Making a sale and then getting donnered with your own ropes.



What grip did he use as he went about moering them? Did he use wide, looping strokes or short, quick ones? Did the street vendors scatter about in all directions? Did a stampede ensue? Did all of them run away or did some stop and fight back? Were there high-pitched girly screams from the merchants? Did he inflict any bodily harm on anyone? Does that mean he would have been charged with assault with intent to cause grievous bodily harm if he wasn’t … you know, Jesus? As you can see, I have given this whole situation a lot of thought. I really love this story because the possible scenarios are endless.



I’m a semi-practising charismatic Christian the other half is spiritual, which means I’m deep into Lent. Lent is a time of reflection and introspection. You might think that it is inappropriate for me to worry myself with such trivial matters. But, like I said, I just roll like that. Other Charismatic Christians might be reflecting on bigger issues such as the meaning of their faith and so on. I tend to worry about matters such as which stories are meant to be taken literally and which ones are fictional. Bishop Marcelo Pires has often talked about how the authors of the Bible wrote in a style called midrash.



The essence of being Christian is really to try and be Christ-like. You know, “What would Jesus do?” and all that. The reason I like this story of chaos  at the temple is that it always makes me feel better about the many physical skirmishes I’ve taken part in. Fair enough, my reasons for beating the living crap out of people were not quite so noble, but a beatdown is still a beatdown.


If you ever read the Bible, what’s your favourite story?


FIFI!!!!

Shatter the silence

Hola at my Facebook account if u can

As more and more men are accused of sexual harassment, I am intrigued by the phrase “inappropriate sexual behaviour at work”. This implies another category of “appropriate sexual behaviour at work”. Someone must explain what fits into that category. Surely there is no sexual behaviour that would be appropriate for the workplace? Our language betrays us, and shows us that deep down, there is still a huge problem.

I’ll resurrect a controversial hashtag for this thought:#menaretrash For those who didn’t follow this hashtag a while ago, let me explain. Of course, not all men are trash. But how is a woman supposed to know if the man she’s currently speaking to is trash or not? Sure, if you look like Harvey Weinstein, you can take a good guess. But Dustin Hoffman, or Bill Clinton or Bill Cosby, or Kevin Spacey (ok, women weren’t really an issue for him, but you get the point)? So, for most women, the best advice is to treat all men as if they were a threat, until you can be sure they’re not. And can you ever be sure? Hence the hashtag.

For us men who are not trash, can we be sure we’re not? Have we never done anything ever to make a woman feel uncomfortable? Have we never told an off colour joke? Or had an off colour thought? Or maybe, even more importantly, when some other guy has done or said something inappropriate in the workplace, have we just let it pass or did we step in and do something? You see, maybe #menaretrash, and maybe that’s the problem.

I’m glad these men are being called out. But it reminds me that this is a systemic, endemic problem that I must own as my own problem, even down to the language I use to describe it, if we’re going to have any chance of raising a new generation of men who aren’t trash, and a new generation of women who don’t have to spend their lives in fear.

So, let’s make sure we don’t need the #menaretrash hashtag in the future. Let’s make sure we live in a way that ensures we show that #womenmatter.