Metaphors and parables are traditional methods of teaching or
explaining in the African education system. Supported by storytelling and symbols,
metaphors have provided sieves of indigenous scholarship and African civilisations
for centuries. The intellectual resilience of African wisdom cues and philosophy-endowed
idiomatic expressions have served as repositories of community values and
anchored a normative environment. This is comparable, if not better, than the recorded
philosophy of other civilisations. Therefore, the use of metaphors creates a
relatively neutral platform for society to reflect on itself about presented
phenomena. In fact, we can escape the challenges of being accurate by the
cliches that metaphors can be.
Orwellian literature has
assisted society in reflecting on itself through the symbolic use of animals in
a fictionalised story, Animal Farm. Round-the-fire stories by elders in many
societies have all been found to have used animals as characters in a drama of
life to transmit norms and values to unsuspecting yet assimilating audiences of
young people. Of the many characters, the animals on the dinner table as
stories were told, seldom featured as heroes of any story.
President
Ramaphosa's choice of Tintswalo as a metaphorical node to triangulate his
government's theses that it has done well since she was born in 1994 might
backfire as many of Tintswalo's friends and peers might question which
Tintswalo he was talking about. On the other hand, it might have been an easy
way to escape being openly clinical in telling the truth or lying. Either way, the President was just being African.
Tintswalo was born in 1994. She does not have a lived experience of apartheid as a legal ideology of the state. She is born of parents dispossessed and ravaged by apartheid. It is her life's dominant social, political, and economic determinant. Tintswalo was probably born in a no-fee health facility, went through a no-fee education system, and lived in a state-sponsored RDP house with parents living off a social security grant system. At thirty, she marks the split point of a generation.
She is, therefore, also part of a generation that went to school using apartheid-inherited public transport system, which included PRASA; she went to a school that had lights switched on and drinkable water flowing from faucets. If she could be in a taxi, she saw a dilapidated road infrastructure as she grew up. Tintswalo might be living in Hammanskraal and facing dirty water daily. In Johannesburg, CBD is a cesspool of crime, drugs, and collapsing public infrastructure. In the Cape Town Shacks, she has to face everything she collects being gutted by fire every cold season in Mafikeng town, where driving in those potholes has become something to boast about locals.
Her
multiple personalities include living in municipal jurisdictions that still
have functional city engineering departments that maintain public
infrastructure. She might be living in a city with higher employment rates and
still able to visit her parents at the RDP house built correctly, and ethical
service providers installed the infrastructure. She might be near Mamelodi
Regional Hospital, where being sick and admitted is a better experience than in
most public hospitals.
In the 53% youth unemployment rate of South Africa, Tintswalo's age cohort makes up the most significant number of those unemployed. She might be in the 47% employed, many of whom are non-Black. Tintswalo is born free. We have not defined what she is free from and what freedom she is or is supposed to be enjoying. The freedom that Tintswalo is purportedly living in is likened to an expectation by those who claim you have it not to fall apart when you find out everything they made you believe in is turning into what truth is not.
Tintswalo has no collateral the financial services institutions require for her to start a business. Living up to her name, grace or mercy, she has been living at the mercy of the minimum the state was able to do for her, and her children might well be at the same table of mercy unless the economic development trajectory needle is decisively moved. Notwithstanding, Tintswalo exists; there cannot be "nywe nywe" about her not existing. The "noma ba ya funa or not" to believe in Tintswalo's existence might be unfortunate to those that know the true Tintswalo.
Unless
the President is one of those politicians who insists on writing their speeches,
he might need to invest in better speech writers for the 7th Administration if
he returns. CUT!!
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