Maktub: A glimmer in the dark

At the risk of my blog turning into a book review, which is not at all what it is, I give you my second review of a book I recently read. Maktub by Paulo Coelho, a world famous Brazilian author, who by some strange twist of fate found himself on my reading list this week. The only way I can give you a taste of the beauty of his tome is by quoting, quite generously from it and interspersing with my own musings:

The text is adapted from a poem by John Muir: “I want to free my soul so that it can enjoy all of the gifts that the spirits own. When this is possible, I will not try to know the craters of the moon, nor track the rays of the sun to their source. I will not try to understand the beauty of a star, nor the artificial desolation of a human being. “When I learn how to free my soul, I will follow the dawn, and to return with it through time. When I learn how to free my soul, I will plunge into the magnetic currents that drain into an ocean where all waters meet to form the Soul of the World. “When I learn how to free my soul, I will try to read the splendid page of Creation from the beginning.”

Beautiful words no? They fill one with hope and inspiration but how do you get from admiring them to actually wanting so much to live them that they became your life anthem? There are times when one lives them I suppose, brief moments of illuminated joy; but so often our lives are overtaken by the ordinariness of the day. Swept up into the life that we see with our eyes and not the ones our hearts sometimes catch brief glimpses of. ‘Maktub’ is a beautiful book, it is not a novel in the normal sense of the word, it is just a book filled with wise sayings and teachings, bits and snatches of wisdom. Some of them leave you feeling high, some of them question the fundamental assumptions one makes about life. How about this one?

Humanity has committed some of its worst crimes in the name of the truth. Men and women have been burned at the stake. The entire culture of some civilizations has been destroyed. Those who committed the sin of eating meat were kept at a distance. Those who sought a different path were ostracized. One person, in the name of truth, was crucified. But -before He died -He left us a great definition of the Truth. It is not what provides us with certitudes. It is not what makes us better than others. It is not what we keep within the prison of our preconceived ideas. The Truth is what makes us free. “Know the Truth, and the truth will make thee free,” He said.

I love that part; “It is not what provides us with certitudes. It is not what makes us better than others”. Tell that to the Pentecostal pastor as he looks down his nose at the Catholics. Tell that to the Catholic Father as he pronounces damnation on the Muslims. Tell that to the Muslims as they call the Hindu an infidel. Our world is filled with so much pain, why is it that people seem so dead set on increasing it? On adding to it in the name of truth. Of standing on their side of the river and declaring that the world looks the way it does to them to everyone on the planet, instead of trying to swim to the other side and discovering what vistas await them. I have so many Muslim and Hindi friends, and their faith is one filled with beauty and discipline, that passage spoke to me as a ‘Christian’. Only my closest friends will understand why I put the term in quotes: I carry no more pride in that label, and Maktub talks once more of pride:

“A hermit fasted for an entire year, eating only once a week. After this sacrifice, he asked that God reveal to him the true meaning of a certain passage in the Bible. No response was heard. “What a waste of time,” the hermit said to himself. “I gave up so much, and God didn't even answer! Better to leave these parts and find a monk who knows the meaning of the verse.” At that moment, an angel appeared. “The twelve months of fasting served only to make you believe that you were better than others, and God does not answer a vain person,” the angel said. “But when you were humble, and sought help from others, God sent me.” And the angel explained what he wanted to know.

But some of the other sayings are practical, they deal with the ordinariness of life, the lessons that we meet in the everyday course of our sojourn on this side of death, take this one about counting your blessings:

We are often incapable of understanding the blessings we have received… There is a story about a pelican who -during a hard winter -sacrificed herself by providing her own flesh to her children. When she finally died of weakness, one of the nestlings said to another: 'Finally! I was getting tired of eating the same old thing every day. '”

I am a prime example of that one, I always seek more, even when I have so much. My imagination at times is a blessing, but also a curse because I tend to imagine perfection and inevitably get disappointed when I hold life up to my images and it fails to compare. ‘Maktub’ speaks of the supernatural as well as the ordinary, he attempts to look into the heart of Eve as she ate the forbidden fruit and even Peter and Judas at the last supper:

At the Last Supper, Jesus accused -with the same gravity and using the same phrase -two of his apostles. Both had committed the crimes foreseen by Jesus. Judas Iscariot recovered his senses and condemned himself. Peter also recovered his senses, after denying three times everything he had believed in. But at the decisive moment, Peter understood the true meaning of Jesus' message. He asked forgiveness and went on, humiliated. He could have chosen suicide, but instead he faced the other apostles and must have said: “Okay, speak of my error for as long as the human race exists. But let me correct it.” Peter understood that Love forgives. Judas understood nothing.

Life is not simple. When it is described by the pen, written in the texts of the history books, it seems simple but it never is. The great heroes must have hardly felt as heroes, they were men. The great decisions that changed the course of human history were not that, they were just decisions. It is only afterwards, when the sands of time have cleared away the hubris of living that everything seems clear. There is power in the word, but that is also its great danger.

Of all the powerful arms of destruction that man has been able to invent, the most terrible -and most cowardly -is the word. Fists and firearms at least leave some blood remaining. Bombs destroy houses and streets. Poisons can be detected. The master says: “The word can destroy without leaving a clue. Children are conditioned for years by their parents, men are impiously criticized, women are systematically massacred by the words of their husbands. The faithful are kept far away from religion by those who regard themselves as the interpreters of the voice of God. Verify whether you are making use of this weapon. See whether others are using this weapon on you. And prevent either of those from continuing.”

I leave you with a quote that had me laughing out loud at 2am. Life is never as simple as it seems.

There is an old Peruvian legend that tells of a city where everyone was happy. Its inhabitants did as they pleased, and got along well with each other. Except for the mayor, who was sad because he had nothing to govern. The jail was empty, the court was never used, and the notary office produced nothing, because a man's word was worth more than the paper it was written on. One day, the mayor called in some workmen from a distant place to build an enclosure at the center of the village's main square. For a week, the sound of hammers and saws could be heard. At the end of the week, the mayor invited everyone in the village to the inauguration. With great solemnity, the fence boards were removed and there could be seen... a gallows. The people asked each other what the gallows was doing there. In fear, they began to use the court to resolve anything that before had been settled by mutual agreement. They went to the notary office to register documents that recorded what before had simply been a man's word. And they began to pay attention to what the mayor said, fearing the law. The legend says that the gallows never was used. But its presence changed everything.

Click here to download a copy of Maktub and give me your comments on it.
(Paulo Coelho is a proud supporter of P2P sharing, seriously I am not making this up, check out his Wikipedia page)

Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid

Thirty years ago the Republic of Zimbabwe was one of the richest countries in sub-Saharan Africa. A newly independent state, blessed with modern infrastructure and boasting the continent’s highest literacy rate, she was poised for a future that seemed to carry nothing but the promise of success. Africa’s Paradise, they called her, little did they know that soon Zimbabwe would, to quote William Blake, “build a Hell in Heaven’s respite”.

In ‘The Fear’ by Peter Godwin, which is in some ways a continuation of his bestselling, “When A Crocodile Eats the Sun”, Peter goes home to bear witness to a Zimbabwe, that not even I as a Zimbabwean am familiar with. A country with the highest inflation in the world, racked by political violence and gripped in the most critical economic crisis to hit a Southern African country. It is a book that I failed to put down for almost the duration of the 24 hours it took me to read it, it struck to my core and painted a grim, startling picture of what I call my home.

For those of you who share the same home, and to whom the name Godwin sounds familiar, Peter  is the brother of Georgina Godwin who used to be a Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) newsreader during the golden years of the country. Together with their mother, Peter and Georgina, were forced to leave the country as were thousands upon thousands of other white farmers during the chaotic land reform process of 1998 which preceded the decline of the Zimbabwean economy. It is a sore point in African politics with the fierce nationalists declaring it an African Renaissance whereas the pragmatics point to the land reform as an example of how to destroy a country. When I met President Robert Mugabe last year, he was still refusing to recognise a link between the eviction of the farmers and the economy’s spectacular collapse.

Fast forward to 2008 and a country in ruins, not even I am able to recognise it between the pages of this book. Political violence affects most of the rural population as the Presidential elections descend into chaos, political opponents resort to murdering each other, and Peter can do nothing other than bear witness, the very act of which is risking his own life.

“White man’s flesh marks easily, it is a pale canvas on which the path of pain is easily painted. But it takes a lot more to mark a black man. Somehow, the palette of black wounds seem more violent, tearing down through dark skin, into the yellow curd of subcutaneous fat, the red gristle of muscle fibres, down to the shocking whiteness of bones.” 

His more gruesome testimonies have their edges softened by his recollections of childhood, when he was a Zimbabwean citizen, before the political class change their minds. Furtive visits to estates where he used to spend the holidays, the portrait, well lit in his memories somewhat tarnished by the sad reality that faces him now. Gone are the vistas of crops, replaced by an ever growing wilderness and the rusty shacks of war vets who have displaced even the black farm workers.

“Our other home was in Mhangura in the north-west of the country, on the edge of the Zambezi escarpment. To get there we set out on the old Great North Road. It originates in Cape Town, continues the length of South Africa and up through Zimbabwe. At Harare, it veers west and goes up over the Great Dyke mountain range (a uniquely stratified chrome-rich igneous ridge, over three hundred miles long, visible from space). It winds through the once productive farming areas of Banket and Chinhoyi, and down through Lions’ Den, and Karoyi – which means ‘little witch’, so called because it was the site of witch trials by immersion (if you sank you were innocent) – to the Zambezi River at Chirundu where it crosses into Zambia, with a left fork to Lake Kariba.”

Littered with little nuggets of recollections that even I as a native Zimbabwean did not know the book for me raises the uncomfortable questions of the definition of an African. By all means, the refusal of the current government to recognise Peter and his kin as Zimbabweans with the rights to settle in Zimbabwe, extends by implication to my tribe, the Ndebele, who arrived and settled in Zimbabwe only a few decades before the white settlers arrived. But that is a philosophical question, Peter presents real problems, real issues that leave one gasping for breath and reaching for your nearest copy of the Zimbabwe Constitution, the Geneva Convention, or anything to try and convince oneself that normality still exists.

Because in ‘The Fear’, you are met with a world gone mad. Zimbabwean set upon Zimbabwean in an orgy of violence, political machinations that go in the night and care not an iota for the peasant in his hut. It is a story untold, a revolution that died in its tracks, heroes buried away in secret graves, activists disappearing in unmarked cars, carried into the dark bosom of the night, never to be seen again, their crime? Dreaming of a better future. I said recently to a friend of mine, that this book should be a set book in Zimbabwean schools because the stories that it tells are stories that need to be told, a conversation that Zimbabweans in particular, and Africans in general need to start having before we can create any recognisable path to a better future.

There are extraordinary men and women in Zimbabwe, extraordinary people who have dedicated their lives to creating a better land for their progeny. ‘The Fear’ documents their courageous sacrifices in the hope that their battle was not fought in vain, and that one day, when we have built, “a Heaven in Hell’s despair”, their names will be remembered, their sacrifices never to be forgotten.

Searching for the rainbow with no end

Today's blog is a bit more personal and ridiculous than my previous entries, I am trying out something new please bear with me if I haven't yet found the perfect formula. Whilst I'm still on the subject thank you for your support, I now boast a grand total of three follower including myself but more interesting almost three hundred and sixty hits in the past month.

Anyway for those who happen to stumble upon my blog by accident, My name is Bongani Ncube-Zikhali, I'm 23 years old and I am currently unemployed. Yeah, sad situation no? I recently finished my studies at the University of Tlemcen in Algeria (not to be confused with Nigeria; Algeria is the one with the bombs, Nigeria is the one with the corruption), did a stint of free lance journalism with the Mail & Guardian and just generally been bouncing around from one country to the next over the past few years. My current base of operations is Johannesburg, South Africa (that's the one with the hijackings).

The thing is over the past few years I have come to realise something very unsettling about myself: I am never content. Consider this, I started my high school experience in a school located in a township called Makokoba in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe (that's the one which had a trillion dollar note at some point). Makokoba was (and unless the new mayor of Bulawayo is a genius, still is) a dilapidated and sad location. There was a river of sewage that ran just outside the school fence. There were kids who used to wait for us outside the school gates who would "borrow" our lunch monies while dangling sharp blades in our faces to encourage our zero percent interest rates. And a teacher once beat me and the rest of the boys in my class with the handle of a broom (I kid you not!) Needless to say, my first few years of high school were amongst the most miserable I've ever spent in my teenage years.

You would imagine that when it was announced that I would attend one of the most prestigious private schools in the region, if not the country I would jump up and down for joy? No I didn't. My first response to my parents was that it was too expensive (we would later sell our car to keep me in school) and that I had no intention of going. But being an African child of African parents I ended up going against my will. And was immediately miserable the whole first year. I couldn't stand the snobs, the flashy cars and cellphones and the endless school activities private school's dream up to keep you busy from Sunday to Sunday. The two year experience was spent missing my "happy haven in the township" but it was soon over and by some strange twist of fate, Zimbabwean taxpayers generosity and an aversion to power cuts I found my self in Algeria.

The story is still told of how I almost broke down on my first night there. French was as foreign to me as Greek and Arabic sounded like an extra terrestrial language. I also was not particularly taken by the idea of bathing in a bucket for the next four years (something which I did for the past four years nonetheless). Suddenly that private school and its merry gang of coconuts seemed like heaven and I spent most of my first years there pining away for Zimbabwe and the sweet comforts of home. But four years is a long time and there comes a time when you can competently order a pizza in Arabic and French, you know where all the post office branches are and suddenly the place seems like home. Someone upstairs must have thought I was getting too comfortable because once again, my life was turned upside down.

This time I was meant to go to Paris for two years, learning at the University of Paris in Paris (yeah I have a talent for stating the obvious don't I?) but somehow I ended up in the City of Gold (that's what the inhabitants of Johannesburg call their city though I think they might have mixed it up with a certain description in the Bible). And guess what? I suddenly miss Algeria with all my heart. Yet only four months ago I couldn't leave fast enough (the woman who arranged my flight had to deal with me morning and night, she must have breathed a sigh of relief when I finally left). And yet here I am sitting in the richest city on the continent and yet wishing I could leave.

It's always over the horizon for me, somewhere out there, calling to me in a language I can hardly understand but that leaves my heart unsettled. I hope I find it soon because at the rate I'm going, I might soon end up going crazy and deciding to go live in a hut in the middle of the desert in Botswana (that's the one with all the diamonds). Maybe I'm Oscar Wilde's dreamer, who can only find his way by moonlight. Here's to hoping I find my way soon enough.

*all country stereotypes are provided by CNN, BBC & SkyNews

Even Angels Fall

Before you read this entry, take the time to watch this advert which was recently banned by the Advertising Standards Authority.




The sky is falling cried Chicken Little and all the animals in the tale were swept into mass hysteria. A few weeks ago the Advertising Standards Authority Declared the same thing; the heavens are falling and an advert was banned to prevent this imminent Armageddon.

In case you have not been up to date with all the hullabaloo, which in itself testifies to your extreme luck, Axe released an ad which featured female angels falling from heaven seemingly unable to resist the charms of a man who had sprayed a new brand of Axe deodorant. A South African viewer complained that the ad featured angels behaving in a manner incompatible with his belief, ASA ruled in his favour, stating:

The problem is not so much that angels are used in the commercial, but rather that the angels are seen to forfeit, or perhaps forego their heavenly status for mortal desires…

And that was that. Or should have been that except that I took the time to watch the advert on Youtube (along with five hundred thousand other curious people) and the first thought that came to my mind was Chicken Little.

You see, there is a slight problem with the ruling given by the ASA, besides the lack of humour on their part. There is the ever slight issue that the Bible documents in detail: angels have fallen from heaven before. The beginning of Genesis chapter 6 describes angels who not only were enamoured by the beauty of the daughters of Eve, that not only did they fall from heaven, they beget children who became giants. I dare the ASA to take the issue to the Vatican and get them to remove the offending passages for being incompatible with ‘Christian’ belief. And lest we forget Lucifer, that most famous of retrenched angels, fell from heaven to earth.

And that is exactly where my problem lies, this temptation to fall into the trap of labelling every little thing in the world as good or bad, black or white, safe for work or not safe for work, ANC or DA, us or them. Two little neat categories into which we like to squeeze the world as if it fits. Osama Bin Laden was Muslim therefore Muslims are bad and must be stopped and searched at airports. Whites once colonised Africa so they must all be bad. Christianity is good therefore it is all good. This is not only an inaccurate, simplistic, small minded view but a dangerous one as well. Intolerance has roots in a lack of understanding, in a failure to appreciate the view of the other, to refuse to leave the confines of one’s comfort zone, to label every “other” as bad.

It is a dangerous mind-set that fails to appreciate the complexity, the variety, the sheer stunning range of human beings. That fails to appreciate that the everyday is rooted both in the simple and the complex, that fails to reach out to the ‘other’ and prefers to sit, solidly rooted in its ignorance, refusing to accept that even angels can fall, that the portrait of the world we choose to see is often not the whole story.