SPEAK LESS AND LISTEN MORE

When I committed myself into it, I knew the expectations that awaited me. I was prepared for the eventualities that will huddle me surprisingly without any warning, the unlikely overtures of a story that began unfolding many years ago – years that brought me to these terms of existence, haggard with joy, laughter, pain, sorrow, tears and smiles.   

These terms of existence that were a soothing ease during the tender years of having been christened to who I am and what I was meant to be in this life.

As a young boy, I preferred to keep quiet and watch, the perplexities of human acts. Logged in the quiet, peaceful enclosure of my mental and emotional cognoscenti of what is and what will be, to what is unfolding and recorded by my eyes and ears of being. I was a humanist in the making then, trying to make sense of everything that was going on, without a thorough comprehension of many religious and non-religious beliefs groupings that cordoned the confirmed and the non-confirmed eventualities of our (humans) managed lives.  

I saw those that conformed under political constrains, and I saw those who were non-conformist to their pious conditions, and those that swayed without the knowledge of their impish standpoint, for not belonging to any convictions, beliefs, habitation and cohabitation standards.

I committed myself into it, amidst the vendor assistant duties that my grandmother enforced without relent in a taxi, bus, fruit-and-vegetable stalls, and coal-smoke infested field, that adjoined Thokoza and Katlehong. As the unknown Bee stung my finger, and left a pulsating blood-filled lump that told a history of the enfeeble enmity that ate away into the core of our beloved country.  

I took it all in - in the words and phrases, in the multifaceted tongues that coloured my hearing, the clicks and taut dialects of humanity that surrounded my fascination. The hostel-dwellers that gyrated routinely to the claps of the warrior dance, Idlamu, when the colourful attired women and children, men with Holy sticks, had returned from the Holy Houses, from renewing their vows of assorted worship. Culinary smells inviting the empty stomachs in need. The rectangle dusty fields filled with keen young men in pursuit of thee circular cow skin, to control, manoeuvre and place it beyond the awaiting posts – the celebrated game.

In walks of experimentation with my peers, I preferred to keep quiet and listen to airy prattles about this and that, that actually meant nothing, but everything in a young boy’s heart.               

        

An Older Man cried out, “Speak less and listen more, young ones, wait for your turn to speak.”

When I committed myself into it, I knew the expectations that awaited me. I knew that in life we die in the fated evening and we are resuscitated in the assured morning, to try and make amends of the dark  wrongs that were written on previous light days that were meant to be right.     

WORD TO THE LIFE REVOLUTION

Linda Sakazi Thwala