The sense of us

The sense of us…

What a time to be alive. EFF is on a mission to un-white South Africa, Afriforum wants to gain the support of likeminded people by insisting that Apartheid was not a crime against humanity. Palestinians who want a right to a decent life are getting mowed down because they were protesting in the Gaza strip, 58 human lives, extinguished and the world will argue whether it was right or wrong. Wealthy people don’t want less advantaged people living in their suburbs or near them. Trump wants to build a wall and get rid of people that are not like ‘us’. Kaizer Chiefs fans vandalising and beating security guards because the team they support lost a bloody soccer game. Brexit…. Syrian refugees. #BlackLivesMatter… #AllLivesMatter. #MeToo…everywhere you look, everywhere you listen, the world is constructing a narrative about ‘us’. Who is ‘us’? Is it religion? Is it citizenship, language, race, ethnicity, social standing, sex? Why is this definition of us becoming so loud? Is it the universe that is conditioning our minds this way?

Recently, I was pretty privileged to attend a short course and the last main topic for discussion was titled the “Sense of us”. A large part of the discussion was around constructing who us is. 

It has been a really reflective last 2 weeks for me in many respects. Back home we have the DA on what seems, to a lot of us on the outside, an all-out attack on Mayor Auntie Pat. And if you read some of the commentary, by and large people are taking sides. Us vs Them. I got to spend some time with an ex recently too, apparently she is of a different race/religion to me and I had a quiet chuckle to myself thinking back at some of the (I believe unnecessary ) drama that surrounded that episode of my life. Her parents were having none of it, my parents were, I guess tolerating it, but they definitely weren’t any better. Over the same weekend, I paid a visit the Centre for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, I saw and read, a pretty well documented journey of what people had to endure, not too long ago I might add, just so they can be treated as equal beings. They weren’t asking to be given any preference, just the opportunity to be recognised as human. In one of the first rooms you enter during this journey, you sit at a table, put your hands on the table and some earphones on and there is a simulation of a diner, where some people sat, just wanting to be served a meal they would pay for and the brutality that befell them….WOW! The police gleefully setting dogs on fellow human beings, that did them no wrong, all because they wanted a seat at the table that we call a dignified existence. Oh the striking resemblance to our very own system called apartheid, that dehumanised the majority of our folk in South Africa, the effects of which still ring out so loud to this day. Then a few nights ago, one of our former Springbok rugby players expressed his displeasure at something that he had experience, something that no one outside of those DStv studios has any evidence of, yet people are taking sides already, some, through what their mind’s eye perceives to be a similar incident that befell them, and others are like look at them again?!….Then you have  a popular media outlet weighing in, trying to frame the conversation with what can only be said to be rather empty unsubstantiated drivel.

Many a conversation with my pops results in him telling me that I oversimplify this life thing and it really isn’t. He may be right on both counts, but my question is why can it not be? I was born Ashanti and to some degree my family’s lineage leads to Manhyia, the palace of Otumfua Asentehene. I respect that, but I also respect the fact that I was raised in this little town called Umtata (Mthatha now) that really helped mould who I am now, perhaps more so than my lineage. So who am I? who is my us? What I really want to answer is what does it truly matter. The only conclusion to this life that I know is that it will end, and in the end, what will it matter that I was a Ghanaian born South African, male, etc.? How will it all help me in the afterlife? Then I ask myself another question, in this life where there is an abundance of resources, is it right for us to watch our kin scrape from the bottom of the barrels, whilst others keep choking on… or keep ‘birthing more’ silver spoons for their kin?! Why are there borders in this world I wonder? Why can people not move freely? If we look at the colonised lands of Africa, South East Asia and South America, these demarcations were largely arbitrary but stayed post colonisation. Many of these and other senses of us have lead to so much conflict and bloodshed, yet we still hold them so dear. Who am I to think that because I believe a certain thing, I need to vaporise you because your faith is dissimilar to mine? What is wrong with sharing a wall with a person who may be less or more affluent than, light or darker than I, wears a turban or a yarmulke? When they speak a language unbeknown to mine spews forth. Are these all causes to hate or wish ill? What goes through a person’s mind when they decide that it is right to persecute another because they are different? Is it just the natural order of things? 

Yep my mind does wander and just as frequently it wonders too…Oh I wonder, wonder don’t you…

When we look around and see so much trouble in the world, so much hate and suffering, contempt and dislike, is it not the right time for the voices of the happy middle (and I sure am hoping that the happy middle are the majority) but is it not time for those voices to rise and pave the way for the deconstruction of this sense of us that has been in creation for generations? Is it perhaps not time, if not to deconstruct this sense of us, perhaps we reconstruct it. Construct it in a way that sees as all as one, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. All part of this race we call homo sapiens? Is it not time that the narrative changed? All the trillions spent on the war machines, plough them back into housing for those that don’t have in far off lands, those lands that you see as threats, build schools in those lands and hospitals. Create industry, teach people to fish…Recalibrate the mind to build and not destroy. Ensure that everyone has a seat at the proverbial table. The way I see the world right now, there will come a time when the forgotten ones will rise with torches in their hands baying for Babylon to burn.

Are we us by those defining things mentioned in the paragraph above? What is this us and why is it so important to so many people. I am an Ashanti and so? I am a Christian, and then? How does defining yourself, help you become a citizen of this earth? That to me is the pertinent question, because being any of these so-called sense of us definitions in itself serves no purpose. 

What is my identity…my sense of us? I am Yaw Oppong Peprah, born 26^thFeb 1976, those can never be a matter of choice (I guess one can argue my name was my parents choice) or opinion, the rest though generally are. I have certain things I like and dislike just like the next person has things they like or dislike, but I fully respect and appreciate that another individual will have a different disposition to mine. The saying goes live and let live. The reason there is a word such as choice is because the world offers us many options and as such everyone should be free to choose, provided of course it doesn’t encroach on someone else’s well-being. I am fully aware that I will not get out of this life thing alive, so I try spend most of my living hours living my truth and being what I believe, a better citizen of this world…

Who is your soul?!