A public service odyssey with ecdysis characteristics: Reflecting on the launch of 'African Odyssey' a Book by Titus Mafolo.

  September 30 marks the end of South Africa's public service month and ushers in the National Book Month. I celebrated the 30th of September with Titus Mafolo, a public servant who served with his literary skills as advisor to President Thabo Mbeki, on the occasion of launching his three volumes book African Odyssey. I had the rare opportunity of reading a prepared paper that keynoted the event on behalf of Professor Muxe Nkondo.

It was an odyssey of a special type for me as I traversed the interior of Professor Nkondo about the essence of Titus Mafolo's own African Odyssey. Muxe characterised Mafolo as an organic intellectual whose absence in his past has become a presence he has defined into posterity. Having been a public servant that was in the cohort of advisors and thinkers around South Africa's philosopher President, Thabo Mbeki, Mafolo's odyssey as a post-apartheid public service mandarin is now on record to usher in the book month. 

A casual read of the launched book gives a glimpse of how African History is not only an odyssey to traverse, but a form of a renaissance if past human experiences in Africa are read for the contribution to humanity's civilisation and co-existence sake. Depositing into the knowledge pool required to define an African narrative about the self, Mafolo's book locates curiosities about Africa into their proper perspective. The Kingdoms and lived experiences of Africans of the continent knit a relationship between the science of having been and the economy that regulated the then supply and demand dynamics whose reach became the substrate of science as written whence it went, Europe.

The zenith of Titus Mafolo's public service odyssey would incidentally happen on the same date the immediate former Director General of the Zuma presidency Dr Cassius Lubisi and Dr Sam Gubule the secretary of defence were honoured by the South African Association of Public Administration and Management for their contribution. Theirs was an odyssey defined by monuments only history can record with their names as representative of nodal points . The shifting of Cassius from the Presidency effectively marked the beginning of a 'New Dawn'. This is represented by the formalisation of the Head of National Administration title and the launch of the Association of Former Directors Generals as an institution through which a past that has gone by would be invited into the present to regulate the growing absence of government.

Mafolo's threads in the odyssey he knitted in his rendition connect the geometric prowess of Africa from the pre-Egyptian pyramids era through to the renaissance of the human spirit and leadership that redefined the OAU into the AU. Having been 'the man on Thabo Mbeki's ear' and as Professor Eddy Maloka said 'the man who also has a rare opportunity of putting into the mouth of Thabo Mbeki his words', his writing skills and presentation prowess competed with the content of the book for its foreground. The curtain that seemed to have 'been closed' behind persons of Mafolo and others in the AFDG has been refusing to 'close' and has thus been opened to make the African Odyssey a continuity whose pathway will forever be only encumbered to posterity.

The Mafolo series was co-launched with a book by Molaodi, a young man who uses story telling to demonstrate how lived experiences by humanity are the basis of its philosophy. Molaodi in his rendition of what is inside his book, agrees that his was also an odyssey of some sorts. A youth of his time, Molaodi became an emphatic message at the launch that the odyssey in the literary world is indeed continuing. Reminiscent of the ambitious and yet impactful Hlaudi Motsoaneng call for a 80:20 ratio for local content in all SABC stations, Molaodi lamented the narratives curated in public libraries, and called for a deliberate mainstreaming of what the African Odyssey as a movement carried as knowledge systems.

The 30th of September 2021 seems to have started an ecdysis whose outcome is surely a constellation of news in the literary world, news out of an old that is still able to speak into the present, news from a youth that is hard at work to attach to a thread this African Odyssey Movement is thrusting into the fabric of our knowledge society. As a society still recovering from its conflicts and hard at work to define its reconciliation, the African Odyssey invites us to how The Public and Publics before us saw themselves and those before them. It interrogates if the publics we are are in anyway part of the threads that connect us with ourselves not in mythological terms but in politics, economics and technology for us to be competitive as a self-standing civilisation.

The ecdysis, a process of shedding an old skin, we  find ourselves in as a nation has been truncated by the unfortunate emergence of breeds of leaders onto the odyssey that have now reduced this phase of the ecdysis into an arena of competing to only show how a twenty year past has been corrupt at the expense of millennia of human civilisation crafting. The pen-craftsmanship in Mafolo, Molaodi and others refused to be arrested into this narrow view of our African Odyssey. As the African story is retold to locate it as a self-standing history, its obscured truths will rise to claim a legitimate stake in the narratives about humanity.

Yes this was an odyssey and I invite you to find the book volumes of the African Odyssey. You, and yourself, will experience the odyssey. Congratulations to Bra Ti Mafolo for ushering us into the National Book Month and helping us to understand the Public Service Month. The rains that we starting to see are fortunately from known clouds. 

🤷🏽‍♂️A ndzo ti vulavulela

🤷🏽‍♂️Be ngisho nje