I posted recently on the dangerous religious idea that something is willed by God, using the example of apartheid in South Africa to illustrate the kind of dangers that this idea can cause. Since then I have continued my reading around (mainly Southern) African history: I have actually been to Africa, to Kenya, but haven't really read the history. I'm horrified at the effect this reading has had on me: I'm in danger of getting to the point where I no longer believe anything anyone says on this subject because of the sheer contradiction & the sheer nonsense spouted by some people. From pseudo-scientific justifications for apartheid to the writings of those who explicitly want to remove Whites from Africa permanently, I'm finding a complex world of contradiction. Colonialism, even without apartheid, leaves a legacy of resentment, jealousy, paranoia, guilt, distrust, & a permanently dodgy power dynamic.
This kind of history is also well nigh impossible to come back from.
In the middle of all this, I was watching a Youtube video by a South African man talking about murders of whites, when I was captivated - he obviously assumed that everyone would know who this was & what it meant - by footage of a Black woman saying 'With our boxes of matches & our necklaces we shall liberate this country.' This refers to a particularly brutal form of murder with a peculiarly South African significance, since used on informers or collaborators in the townships. It's a horrendous death, but if you've been necklaced you're probably better off dead than rescued. The quote is one that is forever associated with the controversial Winnie Mandela. I was horrified to realise what she was talking about, but my friend in South Africa assures me that the beatings & imprisonment she's been through would be enough to turn anyone violent. This lengthy preamble brings me to the point of this post: what happens after the revolution is over - you'll notice that even I'm ducking facing the odious Mugabe, so my reflections on post-revolution revolutionaries will largely be based on an interview with Winnie Mandela (
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/how-nelson-mandela-betrayed-us-says-exwife-winnie-6734116.html Quotations in this post are from that interview). The point of this in a blog about witchcraft is that we are accustomed to think that it is important not to limit the power of our magic - 'Impossible is nothing' should be our motto - but when you are in the middle of effecting change, it is easy to lose sight of what you want the final outcome to be, or even what you want the effect of the change to be on yourself. I realise that I am again using an extreme situation to illustrate a process of change that will usually be more subtle, but extreme situations make good illustrations, if bad law.
For a start it is impossible to avoid the legacy of the past, in fact Winnie Mandela talks about how the bizarre situation in South Africa had become normal:
'No, she was not happy. And she had her reasons. "I kept the movement alive," she began. "You have been in the township. You have seen how bleak it still is. Well, it was here where we flung the first stone. It was here where we shed so much blood. Nothing could have been achieved without the sacrifice of the people. Black people." [...] "The ANC was in exile. The entire leadership was on the run or in jail. And there was no one to remind these people, black people, of the horror of their daily reality; when something so abnormal as apartheid becomes a daily reality. It was our reality. And four generations had lived with it - as non-people."'
Similarly the sheer process of revolution leaves a legacy of trauma:
'"Yes, I was afraid in the beginning. But then there is only so much they can do to you. After that it is only death. They can only kill you, and as you see, I am still here."
'I knew that the apartheid enforcers had done everything in their power to break this woman. She had suffered every indignity a person could bear. They had picked her up in the night and placed her under house arrest in Brandfort, a border town in Orange Free State, 300 miles from Soweto. "It was exile," she said, "when everything else had failed."'
It was the above passage that really made my witch ears prick up & pay attention, since to me she is clearly describing an initiatory experience, with the key elements of death, danger & having to make decisions with no way back from them or even a way of knowing their possible outcome. And this is the point of using an extreme illustration here: outside of what might be called 'ritual' witchcraft, the world of magic is a powerful, scary life-changing, yet -threatening thing.
And of course you cannot predict where these decisions, necessarily made with no possible way of knowing the outcome, have results that are unexpected:
'"Look what they make him do. The great Mandela. He has no control or say any more. They put that huge statue of him right in the middle of the most affluent "white" area of Johannesburg. Not here where we spilled our blood and where it all started. Mandela is now a corporate foundation. He is wheeled out globally to collect the money and he is content doing that. The ANC have effectively sidelined him but they keep him as a figurehead for the sake of appearance."
'The eyes behind the grey tinted glasses were fiery with anger. It was an economic betrayal, she was saying, nothing had changed for the blacks, except that apartheid had officially gone. As she spoke of betrayal she inadvertently looked at a portrait of Mandela.
'I looked at Winnie. Maybe she did not know when to stop. Maybe that is the bane of a revolutionary: they gather such momentum that he or she can't stop. I saw that although her trials and tribulations had been recorded, the scars on the inner, most secret part of her spirit tormented her.'
And of course hindsight is a wonderful, if painful, thing:
'"You know, sometimes I think we had not thought it all out. There was no planning from our side. How could we? We were badly educated and the leadership does not acknowledge that. Maybe we have to go back to the drawing board and see where it all went wrong."
'This was Winnie the politician. This was the phoenix. Publicly, the ANC leadership, who made her a minister in the first post-apartheid government in 1994 and welcomed her back subsequently, distanced themselves from her amid allegations of corruption (in 2003, she was convicted of fraud and given a suspended prison sentence). But for the masses, she spoke their language and remains popular with those who feel their government hasn't done enough.
'We could see why the ANC had needed this obdurate woman. She was bold and had an idea of her worth. She was the perfect mistress for the ANC in the bad times but then she became dangerous.'
Despite my horror at some of the things she has been implicated in, I'm finding her a sympathetic character. I can't begin to understand what these people must have been through, it is too complex, foreign, extreme. Also she makes a very important point that the struggle should not be forgotten. It is a curious thing about humans that we tend to want an easy life, so soothe ourselves by looking at the past with rose-tinted spectacles. But that is not the way of the witch, since learning the lessons of history is the only way to ensure history doesn't keep repeating itself. Since, as a witch, I place so much importance in my life on living purposefully, instead of lurching from crisis to crisis, I can learn lessons from other people's pasts as well as my own.
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