SHAM/ANS

One of the occupational hazards I’ve come to accept as a writer is that you need to be pretty open to meeting a variety of people outside of your social radar and you have to be willing to embrace any experience – no matter how bazaar, annoying or surreal the situation you find yourself in may happen to be. On the whole, its part of what I love about being a writer, but when your week starts on a cold, rainy morning being greeted by a large bearded man wearing nothing but a toga, a whistle and a cell phone dangling from his neck, you just have to ask yourself: How bad can a desk job really be?

The man in question is a white sangoma who runs shaman workshops, and on the recommendation of someone whose opinion I usually value, I decided to go and see for myself if he was a shaman or just a sham. Trying really hard not to let the fact that his last name is made up of ‘mal’ and ‘titz’ feed my already healthy appetite for cynicism, I paid up more money than I would have liked to, took a deep breath and signed up for a three-day sojourn into the shamanic underworld. In retrospect, I wish I had trusted my instinct when it comes to judging people by their names. I lasted until lunchtime. Aside from the mish-mash of aliens, chakras, angels and crystal slop that is usually served up at these kind of workshops, I had the pleasure of witnessing him remove an alien out of someone’s back. Now that’s something you don’t see everyday, hey? When I was the only one in the room who couldn’t ‘see’ or ‘feel’ the alien, the mal pip then turned on me. He pulled a dragon out of my body, which he then trapped in a crystal and told me that now people would be less afraid of me. Who does this guy think he is anyway? This is South Africa, I feel safer knowing that people are afraid of me for a change. And what if I liked my dragon? First he removes it without my permission and then traps the poor little fellah in a crystal like a cockroach in a glass jar. Needless to say, the mal pip didn’t really appreciate the comparison.

As if he wasn’t annoying enough, don’t even get me started on the rest of the group. Apart from the usual middle-class, Odyssey-reading, holistic-going, aura-cleansed and colonically-irrigated types that have nothing better to do with their money or time, there was an American woman about my age who wasn’t satisfied with my performance when it came around to my turn with the pendulum. When I told her to give me a break and that it wasn’t my fault that the piece of bees wax tied to the end of a string wouldn’t move over any of her chakras, she asked to switch partners. What I did learn though was that homosexuality is not a personal lifestyle choice as I had always assumed, but is in actual fact caused in men by the presence of a parasitical female spirit who wants some action and the only way she can get it, is to attach herself to some poor unsuspecting man. Presumably, if you’re a lesbian then you’ve been invaded by a horny male spirit. But what happens if you’re a woman occupied by a lesbian spirit? The mal pip didn’t seem to want to answer that question.

Wait, it gets better. These pesky spirits are also responsible for alcoholism. Apparently, despite it being referred to as the spirit realm, its pretty hard to get hold of a drink out there, so what these guys do is hitch a ride with a living body so that they can down a cold brewski and shoot tequilas with their mates. When I remarked that this must mean that impoverished areas with high levels of alcoholism must all be haunted, the mal pip announced that we were going to break for lunch. He didn’t even answer my question whether he had met any spirits that are partial to jeigie-bombs?

shop less, live more

The Revolution Will Be Televised

This year marks the 16^th internationally celebrated Buy Nothing Day. On 24^th November, millions of people around the world stand together and refuse to spend. Refuse to participate. Refuse, for just 24 hours, to feed into a self-perpetuating system that exploits, oppresses and depresses. Everywhere around the world – except in South Africa, that is.

In a recent interview, the U.K. performance poet Benjamin Zephaniah said that he wants to start a revolution but all his friends are too busy having sex or shopping.

I know exactly what he means.

Corporate branding has devoured counter culture, re-packaged it and sold it right back to us. What began in the early 1990’s on the international front has recently taken root at home. Corporate captains and hunters of cool are targeting the most lucrative generation of consumers, us. For the so-called ‘born-free’ youth, the struggle is over. We are a generation more pre-occupied with getting a good job and joining the ranks of the middle-class than social activism. We are a generation that has seen our freedom fighters turn into martyrs, politicians or managing directors. It hasn’t taken long for the marketing guys to figure out that we are too clued up to be taken in by the empty promises of politicians or outdated anti-establishment rhetoric, but we still, like every generation that came before us, yearn for a revolution.

Taking advantage of this political vacuum, the boardroom has gone underground to create brands that have resonance with youth (sub)cultures. Tobacco companies throw ‘underground’ parties, trance-heads knock back tequilas at the bar that ‘gives you wings’, and skaters are mobile billboards. Nothing has been left un-branded, not even our social conscience. Corporate sponsors are quickly realising the potential of associating themselves with causes that bring together a cross-section of youth subcultures from Punks to Heads. Hijacking issues such as H.I.V. and poverty, the executives of cool sponsor events which, probably cost a fraction of their marketing budget and, as a charitable events, are most likely even tax-deductible. The danger of this kind of branding is that young people are duped into associating certain brands with social resistance and are lulled into a sense of complacency that wearing brands that merely symbolise your politics is enough.

Maybe Gil Scott-Heron was wrong, it looks like the revolution will be televised.