Shashe

When the WHO alerted the world to the impending Covid-19 pandemic, the potential for authoritarian governments to deny their citizens their basic human rights was acknowledged. Half a year into the pandemic, gross human rights violations are taking place. Some governments have turned their countries into huge concentration camps. Take contract tracing for example. Contract tracing is supposed to enable authorities to know (or find out) where one HAS been; not where one INTENDS to be. There is a subtle but very important difference between the two. The former grants the citizen the right to decide where to go, without denying the authorities the right to find out where the citizen actually went, because the citizen still has to log his/her arrival at every public place that he/she visits anyway. The latter denies the citizen the right to embark on a journey that the authorities have had no prior knowledge of, even if approval of such a journey is almost certain to be given in any case...

I have postulated that the Anunnaki were colour-blind. I was wrong. The postulate resulted from a lack of awareness on my part, of Thailand's flora and fauna. Now that I am aware, I need to explain how the error occurred. If you recall, the matter concerned the totem of the human workgroup " BaHumbe ", the rock hewers, who incidentally, should correctly be called " Ba-U-mBela ". Rock hewing pivots around the ancient word stem "bel...", which evidently meant "to hew". For example, the name given to the Ethiopian rock-hewn churches, LaliBEla unpacks to "La li bela", meaning "compound/liquid hewing". The English word "bell" comes from the sound produced by rock hewer hammering away at their tools. The names "Mbele, Mbere, Katumbela [ka-ti-umbela]" are all associated with the rock hewers. Even the "umbillical [umBELlical] chord" gets its name from the chords that attached the hewers of Lalibela to...

Europeans, Americans and all other former colonisers have every right to do whatever they wish with their statues. Those who regret their slave/owner past will remove the statues from public view, and those who are proud of such past will retain the statues in place. It's their past after all. By "their" I mean THEM as they are today: white, yellow, brown, black etc. As a Southern African whose parents lived and worked under apartheid in neighbouring South Africa, I wish statues of such apartheid icons as Hendrik Verwoerd could not only be left in place, but be protected with our lives, if need be. Destroying or taking down and removing such statues is tantamount to tampering with a crime scene. Our children need to be educated about the actions of such characters as Verwoerd. Such education requires that our children actually see the statues, the same way a trainee investigator is exposed to crime scenes.