Skip to main content

Tintswalo loyi wa ka mani? About Tintswalo.

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!!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The revolution can't breathe; it is incomplete.

Only some political revolutions get to be completed. Because all revolutions end up with a settlement by elites and incumbents, they have become an outcome of historical moment-defined interests and less about the actual revolution. This settlement often involves a power-sharing agreement among the ruling elites and the incumbent government, which may not fully address the revolutionary goals. When the new power relations change, the new shape they take almost always comes with new challenges. As the quest for political power surpasses that of pursuing social and economic justice, alliances formed on the principles of a national revolution suffocate.    The ANC-led tripartite alliance's National Democratic Revolution is incomplete. The transfer of the totality of the power it sought to achieve still needs to be completed. While political power is arguably transferred, the checks and balances which the settlement has entrenched in the constitutional order have made the transfer...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Ngcaweni and Mathebula conversation. On criticism as Love and disagreeing respectfully.

Busani Ngcaweni wrote about criticism and Love as a rendition to comrades and Comrades. His rendition triggered a rejoinder amplification of its validity by introducing  a dimension of disagreeing respectfully. This is a developing conversation and could trigger other rejoinders. The decision to think about issues is an event. Thinking is a process in a continuum of idea generation. Enjoy our first grins and bites; see our teeth. Busani Ngcaweni writes,   I have realised that criticism is neither hatred, dislike, embarrassment, nor disapproval. Instead, it is an expression of Love, hope, and elevated expectation—hope that others can surpass our own limitations and expectation that humanity might achieve greater heights through others.   It is often through others that we project what we aspire to refine and overcome. When I criticise you, I do not declare my superiority but believe you can exceed my efforts and improve.   Thus, when we engage in critici...
Post a Comment
Read more

The ANC succession era begins.

  The journey towards the 16th of December 2027 ANC National Elective Conference begins in December 2024 at the four influential regions of Limpopo Province. With a 74% outcome at the 2024 National and Provincial elections, which might have arguably saved the ANC from garnering the 40% saving grace outcome, Limpopo is poised to dictate the cadence of who ultimately succeeds Cyril Ramaphosa, the outgoing ANC President.  The ANC faces one of its existential resilience-defining sub-national conferences since announcing its inarguably illusive and ambitious renewal programme. Never has it faced a conference with weakened national voter support, an emboldened opposition complex that now has a potential alternative to itself in the MK Party-led progressive caucus and an ascending substrate of the liberal order defending influential leaders within its ranks. The ideological contest between the left and right within the ANC threatens the disintegration of its electora...
Post a Comment
Read more