FIRST INSIGHTS

So much in the MOTHER-LAND of Africa it is amazing. The roots of it all started right here in Africa and a person like myself was able to see it to believe it. Just when I thought that the impossible did not exist, it becomes the possible and “visions” flash before my eyes. I can only think to start off with Lebo and his informational lecture about his “creation” of the Soweto Backpackers and how it all started. In essence, it seems as though South Africa was “forced” in all aspects to do something against their will and be “controlled” by higher authorities than themselves. This experience of Lebo’s youth and Apartheid is almost the starting point of the beginning.
I can start with the man who symbolizes destruction of Apartheid, Nelson Mandela, and his home where I reside. I went to the Nelson Mandela Museum and it amazes me how so much action has been not been accounted for the mishaps and most importantly, the struggles that Africans went through. Each entry or document was a representation of something graceful that has impacted the African nature. The water meant peace as it flows through the walls and cracks of the ground. What touched me the most about the Mandela Museum, and in general concept, was the fact of acknowledging the past in order to follow the future.
In Nelson Mandela’s book, The Long Walk To Freedom, entails many aspects of not only his life, but the lives of the African people. His chapter, “The Struggle is My Life” represents the long history of life lessons that had its downfalls and uprising moments that contributed to the nature of deconstructing the Apartheid act. Work was the key in his field and made a difference to how he put his “work” to use. At any moment throughout time, it was liable for Mandela to work forcefully or verbally to make sure that the messages that he tried to convey was heard and acknowledged. It shows the dedication and aspiration of making something that is so impossible become the possible through strength courage and provision.
The museum displayed many traits about what was happening then in the era of Apartheid such as the scene of the lynching ropes hanging from the ceiling. This was a devastating sight because it is unbearable to know the mass destruction of people who did not wrong to society. It was society who hated the fact that there were differences in the world. A man quoted, “remember those who are in prison as if you were in prison with them” and to me that symbolizes the collective courage that African people had as a whole. Unity was the key, but a grappling concept that society ignored or controlled in ways that humiliated and dehumanized other groups in society.
To think that a group of people in society did nothing to another group of people were tortured with such anger and demeaning ways had to suffer and lack opportunities. This comes back to the discussion that Lebo had with the group about being deprived from such “opportunities” to expand many possibilities in his life relates to the bigger picture of society not allowing one particular group of people the opportunities and the life of a civil human being. And to add on civil human being, how one can determine who is a human being and who is not, and how actions are carried through human behaviors explains the ways how society is evil in the sense to execute another culture for unjust reasons according to skin complexion.