Zakes Mda

@zakesmda.bsky.social

Writer, Artist, Academic, Professional Dabbler

Oh my goodness, the Chinese are so naughty. They now call POTUS Comrade Trump because everything he does advances China and undermines the USA. They say he must be a secret member of their Communist Party. They also call him the Builder of the Nation, and that nation, of course, is China!

Itumeleng Mahabane, who has lived in the USA for many years, says, “The problem with South Africa is that we have the kind of freedom people in the US think they have, and it makes us recklessly naive.” As a South African academic/ artist who has lived in the USA for 44 yrs I agree with him in toto.

The last time I visited Athol Fugard in Stellenbosch (seen here with his wife Dr Paula Fourie) we joked about death and laughed at it. Yesterday it took him. He will be missed, but he lives forever in his works.

BildBild

“There’s the biggest mall that’s coming to Johannesburg,” says Panyaza Lesufi with aplomb. “Twenty-four thousand square meters. That’s the BRICS investment we managed to get.” Yep! We continue to build palaces of consumption, and none of production.

American jurisprudence is a fine kettle of fish. “Unconditional discharge” is a conviction! It means that @realDonaldTrump carries the mark of a felon, but nothing else happens to Felon Trump. He lives happily ever after.

Elon Musk: I know you believe that Donald Trump made you king of the world, hence your issuing directives to other countries, including BRICS, imperial UK and Germany. But I hate to tell you the truth, Boykie, yours is a papier-mâché crown; the Don does not own the world.

Its like the climate crisis/greenhouse effect, first proposed in 1824, quantified in 1896, by the 1970s scientists explicitly telling us there was a problem. Yet apart from J.G Ballard ('60s) and a few others we only started writing about it in fiction way after it was well underway already.

Seneca the Younger (4 BCE to 65 CE), the stoic philosopher, playwright and statesman of Rome, supposedly made the apt observation: “Religion is regarded by the common people [some quote him as saying by “the poor”] as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.”