A Lesson
Today I met with Prince
Mangosuthu Buthelezi, President of the Inkatha Freedom Party.
It's the third time I have
had the privilege but the first time he brought me to serious (secret) tears.
I had asked him a question
about his memories of lions, and if increasing urbanisation of his people had
somehow bought a disconnection from Nature... a kind of spiritual vacuum.
But the magnitude of his answer only really hit me when I was back on the
very windy 15th floor rooftop parking of the Royal Hotel.
He had explained to me,
briefly and gently, that it was very difficult to see lions during the years of
apartheid because the game reserves were exclusively for white people. And that the first time he saw a lion was as a trophy in the United States!
I cried into the hot wind and
watched the harbor for a while from the rooftop with this sharp pain in my
heart.
I wondered if the extremely
high levels of violence we experience in South Africa could come from this
enforced disconnection from Nature... about the loss of folklore - if the
children couldn't even access the areas where the wild animals were, how did
they relate to their own mythology and worldview? And then I remembered my
good friend and Comrade, Xolanie Khumaloe, saying recently that at thirty-something
years old he had just been into a game reserve for the first time in his life
and seen rhinos.
Perhaps the people shouting
that black Africans don't care for wildlife might stop for a second and consider that
for so long indigenous Africans have been deliberately excluded from their
wildlands… the sacred spaces that root them in Mother Africa… where they could
otherwise find comfort in their ancient songs and rituals in an increasingly
fast-paced world. Perhaps the desensitisation
to violence that we see increasing could arise from being lost in their own
homes?
How can we expect people to save the animals if they
don’t even know them?
So I must thank You, once
again, Your Excellency, for your unfailing commitment to preservation of our
natural heritage, and also for the deep lesson of today. My last thought on the windy rooftop was that You
remind me of a lion… blazing brightly, a shining Star to follow, and inspire
us. And I remembered too, that Darkness
always tries to destroy the Light. They
tried to destroy You.. but they never got it right – You’re still burning
brightly. I pray, really, really pray,
that the Lion too will continue to blaze for future generations, as will Your
legacy. A Light to hold onto when it
seems as if the World is falling into Darkness.
I will leave it here with a
quote from Hon Narend Singh on the CITES Conference currently running in South
Africa.
"Why do we continue to
choose destruction and indiscriminate killing over conservation…?”
Why indeed Minister Molewa
and South African government?
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