This Sunday the talented
and beautiful Ziphozakhe Zokufa will represent South Africa in the Miss
Universe contest to be held in Miami. Now, I don’t follow any body beautiful or
fashion contests. I get my kicks from the politics of economics. My delight,
when I heard, was in seeing zero derogatory comments on the news report. In
1993 Jacqui Mofokeng took the Miss SA title and hell, there were some choice
phrases there.[1]
Back then I
didn’t need Jacqui, or anyone else, to tell me that the black women of Southern
Africa were beautiful. As a young man I’d worked in the rural areas of
Rhodesia. I’d seen ladies that the average whitey sitting in his apartheid
given house with his doors and windows closed, driving to his sponsored job and
pricey whites-only entertainment, just didn’t. For him Jacqui taking the
bouquet must have been sudden, and horrifying.
‘I’d die for a
figure like hers,’ Tannie Margie would have been thinking.
‘I’d give that a
ride on the old tractor,’ Oom Henk would have been musing.
‘Black bitch,’
both would be muttering.
But not all
whites are average. At the close of WWII heavyweights Malan, Strijdom, Verwoerd
and Co were horrified to see the level of ‘mixing’ and promptly pulled white
and black apartheid. In Rhodesia the party in charge, the Rhodesian Front, had
a major headache. 1965’s UDI was about the need to retain government in
responsible hands only to find a good number of responsible white penises in
the hands and glands of women distinctly dark. Desire filled white men trolling
the unlit dead-end streets of Bulawayo for a fling were such a problem we had
Special Branch agents on the job.
Throughout our Rhodesian Bush-war I was to hear of lone wolf white security force men making ‘love’ to
black women. These were big-city men. They had advanced politically to the
point where they had realised that all they’d been fed as growing boys with
dang sore balls was tripe. Except for a massive education gap the ladies were,
can we agree on, quite acceptable? ‘Make sure you give her a good scrub with a
yard broom first,’ was the classic line, the one that got the boys hooting and
slapping the bar counter as another round gurgled down. All joking, of course.
My biggest eye
opener was the sincere liaisons I saw between a few South African police sent
up to us on border duty. In the court of a Headman of the Wankie Tribal Lands
they volunteered to pay maintenance for the cappuccino coloured kiddies that
would be arriving, once they’d made the trek home to Joburg. There was sorrow
on both sides at parting.
The girls the
lads were humping hadn’t the painted finger-nail’s worth of sophistication or
education of Jacqui or Ziphozakhe but something must have worked. Something
must have changed in the minds of the men for them to find the lasses of the
country-side beautiful. At the simplest level of understanding they must have
thrown out their conditioning that blacks were a sub-species of the human race.
But those were
the young black women. What about the older?
During my
growing days of the 60s and 70s I knew very few obese older white women.
Instead I remember the rush of lust the moms of most of my friends (not just
their sisters) caused in my tummy, swirling down to my 15 year old groin. Yet,
as a 20 something District Assistant in the Department of Internal Affairs running
tax and fee collections, meetings and discussion groups in the tribal areas,
invariably the black moms attending would be enormous, they’d struggle to rise
to their feet. My memory is that any black woman over, say, 25, was getting
very heavy.
Why? Is it that
white genetics and black genetics are different? Is it that black culture
(whatever that means) glorifies a big fat tum and bum as a sign of wealth and
prosperity, or are both of those ideas as BS as South Africa’s Prohibition of
Mixed Marriages Act of 1949?
Malnutrition is
a disease we Europeans brought to Southern Africa. When Rhodes’ band of fortune
hunters parked their horses and wagons in Bulawayo and a little later on the
plateau we came to call Mashonaland, ladies of Jacqui’s stature were the norm,
not the exception. And not by figure alone; they were educated in the ways of
their civilisation. The men too were finely muscled and fit beyond white
Olympic standards of the time. But this ageless beauty, as attractive then as
it is today, was not to last. Soon the various tribe’s social and economic
networks were destroyed. They were summarily dispatched to what we Rhodesians
euphemistically called Tribal Trust Lands (TTLs), but which in practice were
surplus labour holding camps, places for those not employed for cheap in the
towns (at about R25 per day today).
Labour ships
I’ve come to call them, thinking of the slave galleys in which Christian
governments and businesses hauled blacks across the ocean to the Americas. We
Rhodesians avoided that expense; we simply shooed them into the rigidly
determined areas, registered them and explained that that registration mark
meant they could reside only there, in that district, the one designated on
their paper pass, in the lands we’d allowed our appointed Chief to keep for the
moment.
Across the
border South Africa followed suit. They examined our system and updated it by
bringing an additional 5.3 million (approx.) into Capitalism’s ‘Homelands’. And
they added a whole bunch of Indian Indians. This was the beginning of the body
change. As we (both the Rhodesian Rhodies and the South African Slopies)
explained:
‘By order of the
Great Kings of England who are of the gods of white heaven, no longer are you
blacks allowed to gather good forest game, fruits and veg and practice paddock
grazing management. You will have to settle in one spot forever and ever. What
you had is now … read here, oh, you cannot … hmm … tough. Anyway, what was
yours is ours now and in the name of productivity, in particular the reduction
of costs, you are responsible for feeding yourself.’
But being the
liberals we were and because we said ‘feed thyself’, we introduced and gave
basic instruction on the growing of the new wonder cereal brought from America;
maize. Exactly as we of the 1st world have worriedly debated the
likelihood of our food taking the shape of pills (red for breakfast, yellow midday
and a bright purple for dinner) we said to our requiring-evolution but instead
detained blacks of the 1920s and 30s:
‘If you’re
smart, if you realise that maize should become your staple, you’ll live longer,
be stronger for work and have nice shiny white teeth. After all, corn is (one
of) the world's healthiest foods containing health-supportive antioxidants and
a remarkably good source of fiber.’
In years to come
the experts were to write, and people were to say, ‘maize was their traditional
food’. Wrong, mate, wrong. It was imposed by the Capitalist whites. Traditional
foods were close to what is nowadays referred to as a paleolithic diet, the
aforementioned forest foragers’ fare.[2]
But what were they to do? Us whities had the latest colonist’s tool; the Maxim
machine gun times plenty and he only a shield, his wife only a decorative
thong.
They learnt well
and given their circumstances they did well. They ate their fill of maize meal
for breakfast, lunch and supper. In fact the 2.2 million Shona folk banished
(fortunately) to the very suitable and temperate lands of central and northern
Rhodesia (technically Southern Rhodesia at that time) did so well that the
handful of white farmers on their pick-of-the-lands had to demand from the
government protection, subsidy and all the mod-cons that enable agricultural
Capitalism to work.
But in the most-times-dry-as-a-bone
south and west, the 44,000 Matabele farmers had extended periods where drought
and regulation had them at starvations door. There no black farmer was allowed
to plant anything until his lands were declared erosion protected. There no
black got a land before he had from the authorities a registration saying he
was entitled to be in the district. Then he started with petitioning the Chief,
the Headman and finally the Kraalhead for a plot. Certs obtained he went back
to the authorities to request an allocation. That done he applied for a map of
the erosion-protection works he’d need to dig. Phew.
In all the years
I worked in the TTLs, out of the million or so I helped ‘administrate’ I met
only two men whose names I would have forwarded to the Rhodesian Rugga Union as
having potential as players. Most were scrawny imitations of their fathers and
grandfathers. Why were they skeletons when their women were lard? A feature of
my service time in some of our Rhodesian towns was the 100s of men who,
attempting to be pro-active, flooded our government offices or sat patiently,
morosely and without hope at informal worker-collection-points. The men did a
lot of work looking for work and while they were away from the hut in the bush
they had no, no, no food. Although we whites all had a maid they represented
but a drop in the ocean. Most black women were sentenced to a life revolving
around the hut, the inevitable children and local forays to find fuel and fetch
water – not a high cardio way of life at all. And they ballooned.
Of the myriad of
environmental factors which influence the development of babies in the womb and
during infancy nutrition has to be the most important single feature. ‘A proper
balance of nutrients in this formative period is critical for normal brain
development … and shortages of essential nutrients are often irreversible’.[3]
In all my years
the best I saw was the medium size three-legged pot full of thick stodgy sudza
(maize), beside it a much smaller pot with a few wisps of wild spinach and sometimes beside it, a similar sized pot
with a gravy bubbling, made from boiled and boiled again bones.
As a young
administrator on stations far from civilisation I’d get totally wasted with the
other bachelors and, grabbing the nearest government vehicle we’d go night
hunting springhares in the fenced off government reserve . The hares were
classified vermin because they bred so prolifically and because they damaged
agricultural land so quickly. We’d hold them in the bright lights and roar
after them with cricket bats. Even though they offered only thin, stringy meat
and were always blanketed with fat blue ticks we never had trouble getting rid
of our night’s kill, straight to the local Africans employed by and getting a
wage from government. They were in district terms of the wealthier. The hare
here and there who ventured into the TTLs didn’t last more than a night. Meat
to supplement their maize meal simply wasn’t there.
In those Trust
Lands the rickets-thin children stood awkwardly outside their measly huts
overlooking the Zambezi, shoulders thrust unnaturally back to balance their
equally unnatural, swollen tummies. They were so passive us young white
soldiers remarked on how stupid they seemed, so content to stand and stare
whereas the blue-eyed and long haired children we’d left behind would be
squirming out of Mommy’s hands (or Maid’s) in a quest to explore and
investigate, ‘no’ never being an acceptable answer. Those kids were not 400, 40
or even four years behind in brain connectivity. Their mental signal strength
had been engineered and guaranteed to be the weakest possible.
As they grew our
white man assumptions were validated through the crappy schooling we allowed
them, so much so that they didn’t develop the knowledge skills to appreciate they
were being poisoned in the first place while being processed for a life of
servitude. And, like alcohol, an unlimited diet of maize builds, one rough
portion upon the other, until the once beautiful black women of Southern Africa
and their men had to adopt the European myth, ‘fat is it’.
Today, 40 years
on, downtown Harare is any man’s health plaza as the magic medicine of pretty
women perform; strutting, sauntering, striding and standing about chatting.
Sure their clothes are a year or two out of date but as I said I’m not into
fashion, I find the expense degrading. Besides, all a real man looks for in a
woman is brains and a great smile attached to a great body with legs all the
way to the bottom of her bum. While it is true more black-folk live an acceptable
life under Mugabe than they did under Smith, and while the ladies shopping in
Harare plus Jacqui, Ziphozakhe and a few hundred thousand others who’ve been
able to break out and into the economic classes that can afford a proper diet
are looking their beautiful best, for millions of others the position hasn’t
changed. It’s worse.
The latest
estimate is near to 60% of the black women of Southern Africa are in the obese
category. This means to me that nearly every African family that has been left
behind, excluded from the much vaunted independence-of-Africa economy, still exists
in the imposed life-style of the colonial era. This has to change, but how?
The solution to
better nourishment for the poor is simple; better food.
In mid-2013 Rainbow
Chicken wrote that there was a severe oversupply in the industry,[4]
but that ‘oversupply’ does not seem to be getting to the people who need it
most. Oxfam has long said that there is more than enough food to feed everyone
– it is a question of distribution.
One of South
Africa’s nutritionally worst faring provinces is Limpopo, yet there Granor
Passi processes 220 000 tons of fruit.[5]
South Africa also has two international majors in the dairy/yoghurt scene, add
the too-many chickens and we’ve a balanced diet – surely?
But even as more
than 50% of all South Africans live below the bread line the country exported
food to the value of US$6.8-billion in 2010.[6]
That 80% of what South Africa produces is farmed by only 20% of its farmers
suggests a giant commercial profit-first exercise. And recent data indicates
that demand for South African agricultural products is not only holding steady,
but growing.’[7]
Now there is
something wrong there, mate. Is the Dutch or Japanese palate more important
than the tummies of our needy?
Of course there
is the argument that if producers start selling (discounted it would have to
be) to the poor, how would they meet their dividend promises? And if they don’t
meet them, bang goes investment for larger export opportunities to pay even
more out to shareholders all of whom (who count) live outside of the
country.
Okay, so let’s
leave the giant corporations and industries. If mass produced food cannot be
distributed effectively, what then?
What is needed is
an immediate implosion of investment into our own country and our own people
via, say, community involved public works programmes, community kitchens, all
the way down to intensive and extensive community gardens just to kick off an
‘eat healthy’ campaign. Research shows that small community based gardens can
do a massive amount to supplement the nourishment of a community, to foster a
heightened sense of community and ownership, a greater connection to the earth
and a greater connection to each other which, in the right circumstances, can
have far-reaching effects. Something as simple as effective landscaping can
lower crime rates.[8] Crime
is a product of despair, hope is the antidote.
Why can’t public
money be found to create enough of these initiatives? Why are effective charity
and social upliftment schemes largely in the hands of private NGOs rather than
government? Why is charity the responsibility of private citizens?
A country whose
leadership views maximum profit as its central flaming ideal cannot show
effective care for its needy people.
Today in South
Africa and Zimbabwe billions are being lost to waste, fraud and bribes. Much of
the countries’ senior cabinet are known offenders and seemingly with the
support of the party. There is a massive slide in public trust toward Zuma and
the ANC in general – from 257 points to just 37[9].
One survey showed that 35% see Zuma as corrupt.[10]
Given that only roughly 37% of South Africans voted for him it puts him in a
league above Robert Mugabe.[11]
And no, it’s not a new development.
The resolution
of the nutritional problem can only happen when men of stature decide that they
have the balls to be transparent and those who are privileged to share. If this
happened, if someone like Ramaphosa, Zuma, Maharaj, Sexwale discovered their zips,
real change could happen.
What would be
the effect of Zuma declaring that Nkandla was a mistake, that he is
responsible, and that he will pay back the money?
What would be
the result of Mugabe doing something as simple as curtailing a Grace Mugabe shopping
spree or land grab (the latest orchestrated, apparently, from Singapore while
shopping[12]),
and instead transparently proclaiming that the money that would have been spent
is instead to be invested in feeding and training schemes?
How would it be
if corruption and self-enrichment were effectively policed, the perpetrators
convicted and a culture of personal responsibility entrenched at the top?
Everything would
change. Effective social works would no longer be the private reserve, it would
be the natural inclination of government. Inevitably, the psyche of the entire
country would turn around.
But government,
as it is, is not there to protect its people, it is there to protect the system
in place. The system demands that the bulk of the population live close to
poverty conditions so that they can be exploited for cheap labour as well as
bulk consumption, a reincarnation of that same old ‘homelands’ concept. The
Capitalist model requires constant growth, and therefore must have a pool of
consumers ready to consume, ready to prostitute themselves to earn money and
the deeper in debt they go, the better.
Ultimately, the
solution to the nutrition problem among the poor is good leadership, not the
lack of accountability and outright cronyism South Africans and Zimbabweans are
faced with today. Until the legacy of the past is changed, until we as a
collective include all rather than simply the lucky few like beautiful
Ziphozakhe whose parents escaped,[13]
Apartheid with just a small change of form will continue to perpetuate itself.
Jacqui’s victory
in 1993 crowned more than a beauty contest, but we still haven’t been able to
move from acknowledging blacks as beautiful to deciding how to change South
Africa into a sharing nation so all can be beautiful in mind and body. Zuma
doesn’t appear to be interested. It’s fair to say we’ve swapped Capitalism of
the white fascism format for Capitalism of the black in white fascism form.
PS. I acknowledge I
haven’t mentioned sugar. Briefly, sugar (along with tea, bread and Coca-Cola)
was introduced in the 1960s and it has added a horrific dimension to destroying
not only the lives of our poorer citizens but all economic classes as well.
Australia’s obesity figures mirror our own upper-lower and lower middle classes
and the position is serious. Obesity rates in Australia are climbing faster
than anywhere else in the world. The difference, however, is that the obese of
Australia have the money to opt to change their lives. Others don’t.