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.

Imagine a world in which there are no conspiracies, or one in which some conspiracies do occur, but their uncovering does not start with theorising. If you can imagine such a world, then I owe you an apology for waking you up to the real world. Looking at George Floyd’s death on camera, I can’t help appreciating that the officer who had his knee on George’s neck was consciously and intentionally killing him. Maybe the officer is just an evil man, or maybe he was a man on a mission to “silence” George Floyd. Three other officers stood bye and did nothing to stop the killing. Why? Maybe they are just evil men, but maybe they were part of a unit sent out by someone to “silence” George. For, remember what crime George was accused of committing – using a forged 20 Dollar bill. Wherever that forged bill came from, there were probably many millions more left; and they were in somebody’s custody and ownership. George had been fingered by those who phoned the police. George had been “...

Today I watched a TV report which attributed the success of Japan at containing the Covid-19 pandemic, to aspects of Japanese culture, such as preferring to bow to each other rather than shake hands; taking off shoes on entry to a house and generally, a population that is not obese. I fully concur with the above analysis, and wish to point out that the Japanese culture may have developed from past (unrecorded) pandemics that their people successfully vanquished. You see, the name Japan is written as ancient Kalanga language where vowels, especially the terminal ones, were routinely omitted. Currently, you would write the name as " Ja phani ". The infinitive case verb " ku ja " means "to eat". The word " phani " means "scorpion". Japan therefore means "to eat scorpions" in Kalanga language. For many years I have resisted the temptation to demonstrate this link of Japan to Kalanga language, a temptation to which I have readi...

Our country's government deserves to be praised for having acted promptly to lock us all down. That is not to say that the execution of the lockdown was perfect, but it was definitely necessary. Another reason to praise them is their decision NOT to repatriate our students from China. We have no infrastructure to fight Covid-19, and so it was thoughtfull of them to leave the students where they stood a better chance of surviving the pandemic. Now it is up to us, the people, to relieve the government and police ourselves so that any infections that have broken through do not spread! The problem of truck drivers is a vexing one. Our "big brothers" across our borders are doing their best to arrest the spread of the monster in their own countries. We can help them and help ourselves by tracking the trucks ourselves and reporting any violations of route behaviour to relevant authorities. No government can afford the tracking costs involved. The trucking companies can do a ...

I have had the misfortune to watch Botswana Television (BTv) updates on the Covid-19 pandemic. The presenters, who are mostly ministers, spend almost all their time telling us about the different colours of "permits" without even bothering to explain what the reasoning behind the issuance of each permit is. Government seems to think that, we the people, have no right whatsoever to know why we have to continue being locked down, and for how much longer. They never bother to present an exit strategy. Another reason why the updates suck is that they are presented in Setswana language. This dialect of the Sotho language really sucks. To many of us the language is more foreign than English. English was the national language of this nation prior to and following Independence. The Setswana speakers then forced their language onto the national scene by outlawing the speaking of other indigenous languages. Think of that: a group of tribes, mostly from South Africa in the last 150 ye...