ON A recent page of this publication, President Jacob Zuma was captured at a campaign stop in Mhlontlo lamenting about how unfortunate it was that the morals and values taught by elders years ago are now regarded as being outdated, and how those same values made us who we are (DD, May 3 2014).
This statement brought into sharper focus my own musings about what the Nkandla shame says about the man himself in view of his purported adherence to African values.
Manhood in African culture, across the board and, I posit, in other cultures, is measured by, among other things, an adult male’s ability to fend for his family, to protect the family’s dignity and good name, and where it applies, to exercise custodianship and stewardship over the family’s inheritance which sometimes includes a common ancestral home.
Even in those tribes and nations where part of the rituals signalling entrance into manhood is the shearing off of the male organ’s foreskin, manhood is not judged by that symbolic act only. There are many wannabe men walking around with their foreskins sheared off who are de facto boys in their failure to adhere to, observe, and practise the virtues attributable to manhood.
The measure of manhood is also by no means the extent of one’s wealth.
It is not uncommon that those you find presiding over and giving direction in most rituals where the virtues and principles governing manhood are imparted, are in fact, men of straw.
Nor is the measure of manhood calculated by the number of wives you have amassed, or girlfriends you have, or babies you make.
It is a man insecure in his own manhood, that is, in his ability to fend and defend his family’s honour, who makes his exploits with the opposite sex the qualifying symbol of his manhood, to be judged thereby.
And never will it ever be about the occasional adorning of animal skins and purposeful piercing into hapless space.
It is within that context that, I contend, Zuma’s deeds must adjudge him less of a man.
No value-driven African man, schooled by his elders in the virtues of home and family custodianship and stewardship, would take his ancestral home, the inheritance of his clan and family, and deliver it, lock, stock and barrel, to vultures, albeit those thinly cloaked in robes of the state, to do with it as they please, without questions, and minus consultation with family and clan.
The act of allowing the state, under whatever pretexts, to appropriate his ancestral home, uprooting members of his clan willy-nilly, disturbing and possibly uprooting ancestral graves in the process, is an act of such taboo as to raise legitimate questions about, not only adherence to values but also his fitness to lead family and clan.
The act of allowing contractors of ill-repute to forever erase the footpaths upon which his ancestors walked, thereby depriving subsequent generations of the nuances and wisdom of those chosen paths, are acts enough to disqualify him custodianship of his ancestral home and to strip him of his stewardship.
For one infinitely professing his acute awareness of the wrath of ancestors, these acts, in my considered view, either reveal a high-level of deceitfulness and/or a disturbingly severe disconnectedness to reality.
It is his responses and his collusive aversion to these state excesses which seal my view of Zuma as being less of a man.
The responses he gives amount to an expressed abdication of his responsibilities, not only to the custodianship of his clan, but to his organic role as “the man of the house”.
His responses offend the universally accepted law of nature that has dictated, even within the Western context, that a man can defend his home with lethal force where necessary. This, as a symbol of the sanctity with which one’s home is held universally.
Which value-driven African man would plead to being unaware of what was going on in his home? African men I know, even those who now live in palatial estates, still take pride in walking the grounds, taking in the minutest of details about cracked walls, broken tree limbs and peeling paint. This is the, de facto exercise of responsibility for the well-being of their home and family.
Which value-driven African man delivers his family and their progeny on a platter to the state and in the process turns them into wards of the state without their consent?
The declaration of the Zuma’s ancestral Nkandla home as a national keypoint amounts to exactly that.
The extent of state-owned installations within the homestead, which, as indicated in the public protector’s report, will forever be the responsibility of the state for maintenance and upkeep, determines that the family’s fate is inextricably entangled with state’s desires.
Short of them abandoning their ancestral home; as charges of the state, they will have to subject themselves to the whims of whichever government is in power at any one time and this will continue long after Zuma has passed on.
Theirs is only to pray that they continue to be recipients of state compassion notwithstanding which government reigns.
What a fate he has visited upon his own!
Not only has Zuma exposed his ancestral home to national and international mocking and ridicule in the present, but this infamy will live on into perpetuity.
The homestead will stand there as it does, affording generations to come an opportunity to mull over how things could go so horribly wrong during an era of a leadership which claimed “struggle credentials” and professed adherence to “revolutionary ideals”.
African manhood champions responsibility, something which, for Zuma, should have determined that having been called upon to serve his nation was an honour and not an entitlement.
It is an honour that rightfully entitles him to enjoy certain privileges attaching to the office and not to himself personally. The rationale being that, he who is charged with the well-being of the whole nation, let nothing interfere therewith.
Zuma selfishly and shortsightedly conflated his role as head of the Nxamalala clan with that of Zuma as head of state, in the process bungling his clan and country into a state of affairs we will forever have to contend with.
Lwazi Pumelela Kubukeli is a practising advocate
Zuma’s deeds adjudge him a mere man of straw
This statement brought into sharper focus my own musings about what the Nkandla shame says about the man himself in view of his purported adherence to African values.
Manhood in African culture, across the board and, I posit, in other cultures, is measured by, among other things, an adult male’s ability to fend for his family, to protect the family’s dignity and good name, and where it applies, to exercise custodianship and stewardship over the family’s inheritance which sometimes includes a common ancestral home.
Even in those tribes and nations where part of the rituals signalling entrance into manhood is the shearing off of the male organ’s foreskin, manhood is not judged by that symbolic act only. There are many wannabe men walking around with their foreskins sheared off who are de facto boys in their failure to adhere to, observe, and practise the virtues attributable to manhood.
The measure of manhood is also by no means the extent of one’s wealth.
It is not uncommon that those you find presiding over and giving direction in most rituals where the virtues and principles governing manhood are imparted, are in fact, men of straw.
Nor is the measure of manhood calculated by the number of wives you have amassed, or girlfriends you have, or babies you make.
It is a man insecure in his own manhood, that is, in his ability to fend and defend his family’s honour, who makes his exploits with the opposite sex the qualifying symbol of his manhood, to be judged thereby.
And never will it ever be about the occasional adorning of animal skins and purposeful piercing into hapless space.
It is within that context that, I contend, Zuma’s deeds must adjudge him less of a man.
No value-driven African man, schooled by his elders in the virtues of home and family custodianship and stewardship, would take his ancestral home, the inheritance of his clan and family, and deliver it, lock, stock and barrel, to vultures, albeit those thinly cloaked in robes of the state, to do with it as they please, without questions, and minus consultation with family and clan.
The act of allowing the state, under whatever pretexts, to appropriate his ancestral home, uprooting members of his clan willy-nilly, disturbing and possibly uprooting ancestral graves in the process, is an act of such taboo as to raise legitimate questions about, not only adherence to values but also his fitness to lead family and clan.
The act of allowing contractors of ill-repute to forever erase the footpaths upon which his ancestors walked, thereby depriving subsequent generations of the nuances and wisdom of those chosen paths, are acts enough to disqualify him custodianship of his ancestral home and to strip him of his stewardship.
For one infinitely professing his acute awareness of the wrath of ancestors, these acts, in my considered view, either reveal a high-level of deceitfulness and/or a disturbingly severe disconnectedness to reality.
It is his responses and his collusive aversion to these state excesses which seal my view of Zuma as being less of a man.
The responses he gives amount to an expressed abdication of his responsibilities, not only to the custodianship of his clan, but to his organic role as “the man of the house”.
His responses offend the universally accepted law of nature that has dictated, even within the Western context, that a man can defend his home with lethal force where necessary. This, as a symbol of the sanctity with which one’s home is held universally.
Which value-driven African man would plead to being unaware of what was going on in his home? African men I know, even those who now live in palatial estates, still take pride in walking the grounds, taking in the minutest of details about cracked walls, broken tree limbs and peeling paint. This is the, de facto exercise of responsibility for the well-being of their home and family.
Which value-driven African man delivers his family and their progeny on a platter to the state and in the process turns them into wards of the state without their consent?
The declaration of the Zuma’s ancestral Nkandla home as a national keypoint amounts to exactly that.
The extent of state-owned installations within the homestead, which, as indicated in the public protector’s report, will forever be the responsibility of the state for maintenance and upkeep, determines that the family’s fate is inextricably entangled with state’s desires.
Short of them abandoning their ancestral home; as charges of the state, they will have to subject themselves to the whims of whichever government is in power at any one time and this will continue long after Zuma has passed on.
Theirs is only to pray that they continue to be recipients of state compassion notwithstanding which government reigns.
What a fate he has visited upon his own!
Not only has Zuma exposed his ancestral home to national and international mocking and ridicule in the present, but this infamy will live on into perpetuity.
The homestead will stand there as it does, affording generations to come an opportunity to mull over how things could go so horribly wrong during an era of a leadership which claimed “struggle credentials” and professed adherence to “revolutionary ideals”.
African manhood champions responsibility, something which, for Zuma, should have determined that having been called upon to serve his nation was an honour and not an entitlement.
It is an honour that rightfully entitles him to enjoy certain privileges attaching to the office and not to himself personally. The rationale being that, he who is charged with the well-being of the whole nation, let nothing interfere therewith.
Zuma selfishly and shortsightedly conflated his role as head of the Nxamalala clan with that of Zuma as head of state, in the process bungling his clan and country into a state of affairs we will forever have to contend with.
Lwazi Pumelela Kubukeli is a practising advocate
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