A walking story in the story of walking...

This story first appeared on Move Your People

“We’ve learned to fly the air like birds, we’ve learned to swim the seas like fish, yet we haven’t learned to walk the Earth as brothers and sisters.”

- Martin Luther King

It was dark when they arrived. The only light in these rolling hills, covered in seas of sugar cane, came from this lone house. The dogs announced this strange presence, but not in a welcoming way.

A ragtag bunch stood before a small gate. Tired. Weary from a long day. Unsure. Looking for a place to stay.

Dear Tata...

(This post first appeared on Men of Letters on December 6)

‘No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.’

- Long Walk to Freedom

Dearest Madiba

The world around seems to be abuzz. It started with the news early this morning. At first I was hardly moved. This changed and temptation drew my attention out into the world.

The spectacle has been both deeply moving and shameful. But then this land of ours seems to relish in its habit of juxtaposing the light and dark.

The strongest impulse was to turn it off, to be alone. But, like many the beating hearts of infinite reasons, I could not. And so it began with this somewhat cynical message, my contribution to the noise.

A Long Walk to Divorce

In a peculiar set of circumstances I found myself on a bus on June 14 2011 headed towards Durban to meet a person I knew very little about. I knew his name was Miyere ole Miyandazi. I knew he had walked from Nairobi to Cape Town in 2004. I knew the spark was the violent response to protests by the Maasai around a lapsed colonial agreement regarding land; one that saw the Maasai restricted from accessing hundreds of thousands of acres of seasonal grazing. Instead they were pushed into unsuitable reserves that have damaged their whole way of life. I knew that he had been walking ever since. My understanding was that he was doing this to raise awareness about the situation of minority peoples, that this had something to do with some of his heritage coming from the nomadic Maasai. His message resonated with me. Instinct told me I should meet him. 

A handful of papers from his website were my only company on the 7 hour trip. They told me that he was speaking about access to land, freedom of movement and association, that his message was one of tolerance and peace. 

I would later learn that he was walking to break down the barriers dividing us as humanity. His was a journey into the self. Walking was his individual tool for coming to better know himself, a pilgrimage towards walking the path he is meant, to make his unique contribution to this earth. 

Return of the Mandelas

The air is thick, dry with heat, making it the parched companion to this arid environment. Thousands of aloes stand like stony sentries dotted along ridges, hills and plateaus, their headdresses a fiery red against the earth coloured surrounds. There is a deafening silence broken only by a gentle breeze that whistles in the ears.

Inside a nearby boma (traditional hut) sits the inkosi (chief). Traditional beadwork adorns his head, arms and ankles with a more elaborate piece covering his neck and torso, the lion skin that some moments ago hung from a shoulder now rest under him. To his left and right sit his headmen and advisors, they are locked in deliberation, he is only here for a few hours and so must deal with all matters requiring his attention. He sits silently, listening, before saying anything.

He is the embodiment of mediation, justice and leadership as is his duty through birth and custom, a heritage traced through a line of kings that go back twenty generations. History is alive in him today as he carries on his broad shoulders a responsibility to his people, both living and the dead. He is Inkosi Zwelivelile Mandlasizwe Dalibhunga Mandela.

Courting Development

It is getting late, the sun already set. A wind sweeps across the Cape Flats bringing with it the ocean chill. She walks alone through the bushy field, pointed home. Then something moves, stirs in the dark. It frightens, but she has no choice but to push on.

Moments later a young, broken body lies cold and lifeless, alone. A colder man, stinking of rape and murder, creeps away like a ghost into the night.

Morning brings discovery, one that shakes the small community of Heideveld to its core. In particular, sixteen year-old Sadick da Silva is moved to youthful anger by the gruesome murder of his sister’s best friend.

Nellie Court in Manenberg where CFSD held clinics and a street tournament in early 2010.

“Diski Yase Kasi”

A pitch of red earth, pebble and stone, its face pockmarked by the studs of a thousand boots, walked flat by thousands more. There is more green glass than green grass, with only a few tufts clinging stubbornly to life. The perimeter is fenced but this space is not closed.

The field is as much a sports ground as thoroughfare, meeting place, entertainment venue. Its identity is as diverse as the people who use it, changing from moment to moment.

Township life, the spaces in which it is lived, has few boundaries or compartments. All things mix to create a fusion of diversity, things which in other places would be kept separate play out shoulder to shoulder, stand together as twins; young and old together, languages and cultures, statuses in life.

This is a rainbow poured into a single pot with the beautiful game weaved into the different fabrics of social life. On this field a different kind of soccer is played.

From the gutter to the globe

The bus is about to leave. All know it is time to go. There are few words shared. She stops him, touches his arm gently. He is much taller and so she raises herself to her toes.

She steals a fleeting moment, one full of teenage awkwardness. A farewell kiss is hers. Running back to her friends she is greeted by their excited giggling. In this moment she is a hero.

She just kissed a street child but it does not matter, for what just happened here means so much more.

He grins shyly, looks at his friend for support. When the true meaning finds him, his confidence soars.

“He is so cute! I have to have his cell phone number or email address,” screams one of the girls in the group, here arms flapping like a bird's.

                                FORMER STREET CHILD, KEVIN, OF TEAM NICARAGUA SIGNS AUTOGRAPHS FOR HIS "FANS".

Writing a new, unified history

RESPLENDENT in her colourful traditional Zulu dress, she dances confidently as she moves across the field.

A seated man, demure in his traditional Xhosa garb, leaps from the crowd with determination in his eye, charges towards her. His stride grows in length. Behind him the crowd cheers. Still running, he pulls at the white blanket at his shoulders. In a single movement it slips free, releasing his upper body from its confining weight.

Within a metre of her he comes to a sudden halt. There is a moment’s pause. He lifts his arms, the blanket. His movements are quick and with clear intention. The blanket falls gently about her shoulders and together they synchronise their movements and begin to dance as one. The crowd finds its full voice, louder than before. Together as a nation, as abaThembu, they cheer their brother and sister.

A COMBINED VOICE: From across the country  abaThembu, including various Amakhosi, gathered at the historical Curries Fountain to celebrate the first step, a meeting, in unifying the clan. Pictures by Tom van der Leij 

Playing on the sands of hope

The sun rises slowly. It climbs the face of one hill, spreading it warm glow on a stretch of beach before climbing the next. This ritual is ancient, just as the ways of the people who live here. Modernity has not yet fully established itself here. This the Wild Coast of South Africa, the Transkei.

Second Beach, Port St. Johns, is home to a team of young men who are negotiating the contradictions between tradition and modernity, an inheritance over which they have little influence or control.

Work opportunities are limited for the players, nearly all are undereducated and unemployed, and the deeply entrenched poverty, product of the region’s turbulent history, is the root of many social ills. Some players have been involved in drugs, gangs and crime, alcohol abuse, some come from broken homes.

And yet the young men have found one arena where they can be their own masters.

Cat Walk to New York - David Tlale's World

Weaving harmony into contrast
By Howard Drakes

A lone bookshelf stands square against a corner in a large, flowing room. On one shelf are books and magazines at rest. A bright yellow one stands out, urging you to notice it; Vogue Italia, the Barbie Issue.

Framed on both sides by books of a very different nature, it is held, almost cradled, as if being shown to the world. To its left a navy blue New King James Version Bible and on the right a pitch black Spiritual Renewal Bible, in paradox, its gentle keepers.

Across the room the game continues. The glossy spines of 20^th Century Fashion and New New York Interiors sitting pout amongst African Kings and the Voices of the San, undisturbed by the seeming contradiction.

Contrast is at its starkest when it wears a human form. At its deepest when it weaves itself into the tapestry that is human social spaces. It is most dynamic when, beyond showing us things seemingly apart, it pulls them together, mixing oil and water.

This is the place where clothes are given life. Pins and needles, scissors and sowing machines, all tearing limp pieces of material apart, rearranging, before putting life back into them; endless combinations of colours, textures and shapes.

 

Harmony in Contrast - A fashion designer's world

To view got to: http://multimedia.timeslive.co.za/photos/2009/09/designer-david-tlale/

Field of Dreams - Prisoner's Confederations Cup

To veiw go to: http://multimedia.timeslive.co.za/photos/2009/06/field-of-dreams/

Field of Dreams: Prisoner's Confederations Cup

The echo comes, reverberating from deep inside. It crashes against thick walls and cold bars as it tries to find its way outside. Deep masculine voices sound as one. Feet stamp down the tune in rhythmic cadence, move as one. Into the earth their message goes, a warning to those they are to face in battle.

“We live together, we die together, a dead man is a dead man. We live together, we die together, a dead man is a dead man.”

They move out of the dark, into the light, away from the solid brick and mortar, past rows of jagged wire, electrified barbs, watching guards, into a tunnel of mesh confinement. The makeshift Egyptian flag held up for the other teams to see.

The drone of a big bus engine is not enough to put them off as it swallows them up. Hands and feet strike roof and floor. The singing continues as they are ferried off, off to the field of dreams.

 

The Having And The Taking

The street, alive with activity, is particularly busy outside of the supermarket. Small, blackened feet pace back and forward. Faces caked with dried snot bombard the potentially charitable with puffed up, pathetic pleas.


A dirty body in dirty clothes.


“Please sir, check money for bread?”


“I don’t have anything,” comes the stony reply.


Laden arms weigh down on feet attempting to negotiate the onslaught. Get to the car, to safety. Bulging bags of designer food and overpriced beauty products, luxuries, are deposited and then quickly shuttled away. Nothing is lost to those outstretched, expectant arms.

…


It is late and the suburban streets are dark, still. Shadows move with intent. Silence is broken, shattering glass. A car alarm wails. Its owner wakes, brings him to the window. Four little bodies, with loaded arms, scatter into the night. One stops, turns and looks up to the familiar face inside and, for a second, they share in another of life’s little ironies; prisoners of circumstance.

Predator

Eyes meet in what seems to be a mutual exchange of attraction. He smiles suggestively at her, her eyes are quick to pull away. “A gesture of shy interest,” he tells himself, “I know she wants me”. He fixes his gaze wondering when her resolve will break, forcing her to look again. In time she manages a fleeting glance. This time her expression seems to wear a look of discomfort. “What’s that all about” he thinks, “she is overwhelmed by my awesome presence? Must be.”

He pursues her, eyes as the hunter, refusing to let her out of his sight. “She enjoys the chase,” he says, “she needs to know that she is worthy game”. He positions himself suggestively so that she will see that his interest is her. Each time their eyes meet she looks more concerned, her body shifts uneasily as she tries to escape, yet she cannot shake off his visual advances.

All this only fuels his fire, he wants her to know he is fighting for her, that when he takes physical possession of her she will feel that she has indeed been won. She can bear it no more, her space has been invaded and her only choice is to leave. He has stolen something from her and she feels powerless in this place. Before he knows it she has gone. “Women are so fickle,” he mumbles in disbelief, “they play like they want you and then they just run!”

The written journey incomplete

The universe of words is infinity.
Its oceans big and never-ending,
Closed to navigation by a single hand and pen.


The journeyman scribe
Travelling freely,
Sits humbly at words’ feet.


Fact or fiction multiply rendered.
Event, mood, emotion,
Capturing them in sculptor’s relief.


The unhinged writer,
To his devices slave.
Free,
Yet always in chains.


For the universe of words is infinity.
And so it is that any writing excursion,
By necessity,
Remains always incomplete.

Leave only footprints

The Eastern Cape’s first survival school gets up and running

Shane Engelbrecht cuts a shy and unassuming figure but when he talks the man seems to grow in stature. He talks with passion and intensity about the environment and humankind’s increasingly problematic relationship with it. The challenge for him, a deeply personal one and now a career choice, is how we understand and relate to the environment.

Engelbrecht is founder and coordinator of The Eastern Wilderness School, the first and only of its kind in the Eastern Cape, based on Fairview Game Reserve just outside of Grahamstown on the R67 towards Port Alfred. The school offers courses on the basic skills of wilderness living and outdoor survival.

Born in Kwa-Zulu Natal, Engelbrecht has lived all over South Africa as well as having travelled inside of Southern Africa, the Middle East, Europe and the United Kingdom. He has returned to the Eastern Cape, now home, hence the name of the school.

The cultures of indigenous people have always interested Engelbrecht, the way that they live in and with the environment and the social harmony that results. This interest was given new fuel after he studied a BA at Rhodes University with majors in anthropology and sociology.

As he talks one can hear that the fascination is deep, complimented by a learned understanding of the peoples and ideas he talks about. The Khoisan and Ovahimba (Namibia) peoples in particular are a source of inspiration because of their nomadic, low impact lifestyles. “The whole idea of living in harmony with nature interested me, taking what you need and nothing more,” explains Engelbrecht.

The importance of proper use of the environment first hit home during a camping trip in Namibia. “We made a bonfire at night,” he says, “not for warmth or cooking but because we could. The next day we saw an old Himba man with a small fire and I realised we burnt what he uses in a week”.

The biggest problem in the western world, he says, is how we have moved away from a holistic consciousness, from seeing ourselves as part of nature, to one where it needs to be conquered and dominated. This situation is likely the largest contributing factor to the global environmental crisis that humanity now finds itself in. To counter this, says Engelbrecht, “our main push is to rekindle a love of the outdoors. The best survival skill (of indigenous people) is to work with nature”.

“The long term plan is to take different people out of the city environment, put them in the wilderness and give them an alternative view of nature,” he says.

The philosophy driving the school is one that seeks to bring people back to nature in a way that they are not starry-eyed tourists giving them, instead, a grounding in the ways of surviving in the natural world.

We must remember, he argues, that “in each of us are certain instincts but they dormant, in the current context of global scarce resources, these things are important. We teach a holistic way of thinking about nature and survival. If you do one thing it feeds into another.”

Courses cover things such as survival psychology, knives, water, food, fire, shelter, navigation, creepy crawlies, as well as rescue procedure and survival kit. Eventually the school will cater for various levels ranging from basic weekend courses, highly specialised training such as military and pilot/air crew survival, and personalised programs, designed to suit the needs and natural environment of the students. So far Engelbrecht has run courses for students and some local schools.

The school is also linked to Hobbiton-on-Hogsback, an organisation that does social outreach programme aimed at underprivileged children and schools with a focus on outdoor activities and team building. Through providing complimentary activities groups leave with a more rounded experience.

One gets the sense that this process of learning about going back to nature has been a spiritual journey leading to the establishment of the school. “The ironic thing,” says Engelbrecht, “is that most of these (survival) skills have been forgotten here (in Southern Africa) and I have had to travel very far to learn them. I am interested in recovering these lost skills”.

 

Smiling, he recalls “the first time I got fire with a fire stick it took me four hours. When I saw flame I felt what the first human must have felt, but here I am in the twenty-first century. I thought to myself, this is it! If I can share this knowledge with someone else and they can have that feeling, great.”

Partner in the process of building the school is Grahamstown local Siyabonga Mthathi (21). Mthathi is co-facilitator and responsible for teaching students about Xhosa culture. With time Engelbrecht hopes to train Mthathi up to a level where he will facilitate for Xhosa-speaking groups. The school’s aim is not to be exclusive but to educate people of all ages, backgrounds and racial groups as environmental issues are a universal human concern.

Fairview owner, Len Kruiskamp, says that the presence of the school at Fairview would add depth to the farm’s existing offerings and provide a valuable service to the entire Grahamstown community. “From my point of view it is a facility that Grahamstown needs and with the Hobbiton connections it gives added opportunity to underprivileged kids which they don’t have at the moment.”

In parting Engelbrecht quotes from a book on “participating in nature”. His challenge is simple, “the more you know the less you need to take with you. Then you go out and melt into nature”.

Facebook:                                                      Eastern Wilderness

Video:                                                            FIRE IN A FLASH - hand drill friction fire method 

Advanced Survival Course 24 August 2011:       Navigation
                                                                      Knives 
                                                                      Flint and Steel fire making 
                                                                      Shelter Building 

Trouble in the rite

“Are we achieving anything by looking at manhood in the way we are doing?”

This is the question posed by Zweliyanyikima Vena an inkhankatha (traditional nurse) who practices in and around Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. Vena is a small man but great in presence, stature and in the way he wears his ubudoda (manhood). As a Xhosa, Vena’s manhood is one of the most important things to him personally and his identity as a Xhosa. He is only a man today because he under went the traditional rite of passage from ubukwenkwe (boyhood) to ubudoda inside of an initiation process involving circumcision. For this Xhosa this is the only way a boy will ever be a man. Further, to become a man is to leave behind the carefree life of a boy and take on the responsibilities of adulthood. A boy may not marry, inherit from his father, attend council meetings or be heard, and more generally is prohibited form entering into full community membership.

As indoda makhulu (elderly man) Vena’s duty to his community is to safeguard it and serve as a model of manly behaviour to its men and boys. As a traditional nurse his duties are greatly extended. Every of June and December thousands of Xhosa boys “go to the bush” to being their transitions to manhood and so being a new life as men. Vena’s role in the process is as warden of the seclusion lodges where the process takes place. His job is to ensure the abakhwetha (initiates) are safe throughout, that the healing process is done properly and monitored, that discipline is kept and, most importantly, he is the first source of the many teachings and instruction in manhood.

“It is important for boys to know who they are.”

This is where the moral, spiritual and cultural teachings of the ritual are key. They are the means by which the importance of positive masculine behaviour is imparted. It is the way an age set (group ) is formed and cemented through collective experience and a cultural means of ensuring both group solidarity and purpose. Those circumcised together will think of each other as peers, and more importantly brothers. They will support each other and also discipline those who are seen to cast a shadow on the practice of manhood. In this way a man will have a support group all his live, one that will help him fashion his manhood and he, in return, theirs. A function of this collectivity is to create harmony amongst men and so reduce conflict. This is in stark contrast to many western settings where manhood and masculinity are driven by competition and struggle.

The experience of the ritual is physical and serves as a reminder of significance of the process at work as well as being proof that one has actually undertaken the journey. However, the physical process is not the focus of the ritual, it is the means by which the psychological or moral aspect is meant to take effect. The training toward full community membership happens from birth and this socialisation continues well into adulthood with the transition to manhood a key step in the process.

“We groom the child into the traditional ethic and the child has to grow up being proud of his clan, his family and in himself as a black man.”

While the rites of passage are meant to change an individual’s status, role and responsibilities in his community it is not the end of the process. Manhood is conferred but it is not immediate, instead it is a life long process of self development. Vena explains the process in its evolutionary stages:

Ikywala – The grooming phase – Newly graduated “raw” man

Iyafana – Young man – He looks like a man

Indodana – He is beginning to build (mental) muscles, to behave responsibly

Iqina – He has gained strength (in his manhood)

Ubudoda – He can now sit and discuss with the elders, be delegated tasks without supervision

Indoda makhulu – He must now look after his community

However, the question asked by Vena in the beginning is a sign that things are not well. The ritual is increasingly being associated with death as each season brings with it more deaths. Added to this is the seeming social breakdown in South Africa which has brought with it a climate of violence perpetrated by men against women, children and the weak (rape, domestic violence, murder), behaviour that is deplorable in traditional thinking.

“Today the men in our community are so westernised. They don’t realise they have a culture of their own that has to be held.”

“For lack of education, the young man is found wanting in many ways.”

The lack of connection to ones roots has had a destabilising effect as have the widespread socio-economic conditions (historically, politically, and socially rooted) that have created an environment in which some men have become absent fathers, abusive husbands/fathers/brothers/uncles, robbers, murderers and rapists. The drive towards individualism – as a result of both the breakdown of culture and community as well as global pressures toward individualistic behaviour and self-motivated consumption – has damaged cultural institutions such as rites of passage and have left men outside of structures that inform their identity as men.

“From 1976 the community morals have changed and we need to put our house in order”.

Vena concludes saying that all is not well. Men today are not as they were before. Something is missing. In the past unruly boys were changed in the bush and yet now it seems as if those same boys are coming back men while not fully leaving boyhood behind. Speaking rhetorically, he asks of a boy about to undergo his passage today:

“Is his manhood going to be meaningful? Is he going to define his manhood properly?”

Individualism and collectivism: the problem of men

The traditional round, mud hut stands on the edge of the village. A small way further and the rolling hills of the Transkei, on which it stands, fall off into the Indian Ocean. It is symbolic of the role which the structure plays in the ritual that is in process inside.

Entering the hut, the nose is filled with the smell of dried grass and smouldering logs. The eyes take time to adjust to the dim, smoke filtered light before the sense experience begins again. Inside it is dark with an accompanying quiet. Deep brown walls provide a stark background for three white-ochre painted bodies who sit naked on blankets, their month old circumcised penises, tightly wrapped and bound to the waist, exposed.

Their ghostly appearance is again symbolic, as is their newly cut manhood – a sign of the transition to ubudoda (manhood). The abakhwetha (new initiates) are liminal; they are no longer boys, not yet men. Their seclusion keeps them away from the community that has, will, shape and give meaning to their lives when they return home as amadoda (men). A month ago they were abakwenkwe (boys) and all they can think about is coming home, the start of a new life, new responsibilities, through the practice of ubudoda.

Each umkhwetha (initiate) is on an individual journey. He is not, however, alone because the transition is a shared one, in fact his journey makes no sense outside of the greater whole. He is walking a path that his father, grandfather, and fathers before them have walked and so his passage is as much of the past as it is the present, and even the future; the journey his sons and their sons will have to make if they are to become amadoda.

This is the “rite of passage”.

An important addition to the above is the very different worldview of another. The ties that bind, those primary ties that bind this individual to the group, are long broken:

"I am a product of western, Enlightenment individualism through which I am “free” in determining and choosing my associations and affiliations. Yet, in being free I lack that belonging to kin, group, or community that shapes and gives structure, collective meaning, to the individual’s life."

"I am also a man. I am a man though I am not sure how and when this became so. I am a man because my culture has lost its rituals to make it so. I am a man not through rite but because the words man and boy no longer denote some important distinction. The boundary between the two is no longer of some greater significance, it is porous and I have managed to slip through. (My passage was not achieved through rite, nor was it my (cultural) right). As such I have nothing to show for this change and cannot identify that thing that makes this difference, between boyhood and manhood, so. I still feel very much a boy sometimes, ill prepared to face the world. There is much fear in me that I do not, must not, make shown, “cowboys don’t cry” after all."

"I am a hegemon. I wear a skin of bright white privilege, a sex that is not of the fairer kind and am classed in a way that makes me a member of a small, global elite. Oh, and I am compulsively heterosexual. Any talk of privilege is addressing me in part or as an archetypal whole. In looking at hierarchies (of privilege) in these categories of being, I am associated with the hegemonic in them all. Such a subject position allows me access to privileges denied others (those crudely classified as women, blacks, the poor, homosexuals) and enjoyed by the few; this is not because I have earned them in the sense of having laboured for them but because my physicality is the marker of such privilege."

*****

The two above passages paint very different pictures. The individuals in both are shown as very one dimensional characters, products of their environments and particular histories but little more, and yet inside of these two passages we can begin to get a sense of the multi-layered histories, environments and contexts that has shaped them. The first is a snapshot of the world of three Xhosa abakhwetha during their rite of passage to manhood. While this process is gendered – boys becoming men together – it has a larger importance than the mere making of men, it is a process through which boys are invited to create a selfhood, find a way of being that best serves the individual and his particular social world.

The second is an essentialist rendering of one who is fully individuated, a man who is also in transition inside of the personal project of confronting the self toward finding a way of being that involves a more positive expression of manhood, selfhood. An essential process after the realisation that the models or ideals of masculinity he has been socialised into (through the gendered institutions of the family, culture, school, sport, the media and so on), that make claims on this troubled conscious, are not only oppressive of others but more importantly himself. The commonality in these rites of passage diverge here however, as the resources this individual has at his disposal are very different to the ones used by the abakhwetha in their transition to manhood.

Why do they diverge? Well, from the shared common ground of being men in the world the commonality diverges as it is shaped by the forces of worldview that exert themselves on differing consciousnesses and, ultimately, shape their social worlds.

Individualism and collectivism explored

The collective

A useful conceptual framework that helps articulate that feature of collective life on which group social structure and its functioning is predicated can be found the writing of René Girard. Girard (1972) sees society, culture, as having an inherent order which he calls “degree”. Within a culture the individual’s place is clear to him or her because that culture dictates roles for its member – father, daughter, uncle, chief, warrior, labourer, medicine (wo)man, etc. This order makes social meaning possible because the individual comes to understand him/herself in relation to others through the structures of culture. Girard says that:

"‘Degree,’ or gradus, is the underlying principle of all order, natural and cultural. It permits individuals to find a place for themselves in society; it lends a meaning to things, arranging them in proper sequence within a hierarchy; it defines the objects and moral standards that men alter, manipulate, and transform" (1972: 50).

Degree then is something that, to borrow from Mbiti (1967), “largely governs the behaviour, thinking and whole life of the individual in the society of which he is a member” (1967: 104). This feature is such that:

“Only in terms of other people does the individual become conscious of his own being, his own duties, his privileges and responsibilities towards himself and towards other people. When he suffers, he does not suffer alone but with the corporate group; when he rejoices, he rejoices not alone but with his kinsmen, his neighbours and his relative dead or living…Whatever happens to the individual happens to the whole group, and whatever happens to the whole group happens to the individual. The individual can only say: ‘I am because we are; and since we are, therefore I am’. This is the cardinal point in the understanding of the African view of man.” (1967: 108-109)

Mbiti’s plays cleverly on Descartes’ concept of “I think, therefore I am” – probably the best known articulation of individualist being – by presenting what might be seen as the collectivist equivalent. The individual inside of the collective has no meaning, no degree, outside of his/her group and so that individual’s sense of self is tied to into this belonging; while the individualist thinks and so becomes a self, the individual in the group is gains selfhood through his/her relation to others.

The simplest expression of the collectivist logic can be found in the Xhosa phrase umuntu ungumuntu ngabantu (a person is only a person through people) or ubuntu.

The individualised
Psychoanalyst Eric Fromm’s (1942) book Fear of Freedom is a comprehensive work which looks at the forces that gave rise to the individual and the consequences (social, economic, political and psychological) of this process. The starting point of the book is the social, economic, and political changes that took place in Europe, beginning in Renaissance Italy in the 14th century, that resulted in both physical and psychological shifts inside these European societies that ultimately gave birth to the individual.

In short, the breakdown of traditional (collective) social organisation through the changes in the cultural, political and economic order (towards capitalism) lead to the decline of fixed social positions and cooperative interaction, all of which gave rise to widespread competition and the birth of a new kind of individual; one whose success or failure was determined by individual capacity and willingness to succeed through the accumulation of wealth, status and power. Such a setting eroded much of the cooperation and collective purpose that existed before and helped pit one self-serving individual against another. For Fromm this societal development finds its roots in the emergence of the capitalist economic order in which the economics, and following from this the social, religious and political, of Europe changed from an ordered (read Degree) system inside of which collective operation was common to one in which this order was replaced by free market and individualist operation. Thus was the individual born.

The individualist mode of being has been the dominant one influencing recent world history (through imperialism, colonialism and now globalisation and capitalism) which has had an unsettling effecting on traditional structures, organisation and gender regimes. The impact on men inside of both modes of being has made men and masculinities problematic globally. Men are increasingly vulnerable, isolated and self-interested, as informed by individualistic ways of being, often with negative outcomes.

Among the amaXhosa, for example, an individual’s place in society is clear, a man is a man and a boy a boy, each with their own place, role, and responsibility within Xhosa society. Ritual is illustrative of these positions as the rite of passage is the process by which degree is adjusted in the transition from one clear status to another.

On the other hand, those who are fully individuated are often in a situation where the primary ties (family, community, culture, etc.) are broken in that they have little to no obligations to those they would normally be bonded or responsible towards. Instead they choose their associations based on wants and needs, they do not identify with a particular culture which gives meaning or direction to social life, the main binding association being based on the modern-day contract. Such people tend to be a product of the amalgamation of a range of diverse, different, and even contradictory influences and ideas. In short, they can lack a strong sense of degree, a state that allows they unlimited "freedom" in movement and in what they are allowed to experiment or engage with, the ability to make and unmake themselves as and then they choose, but this often leaves them with feelings of loneliness and without a concrete sense of who "I am" or how to be.

It is much like the ship that shed its own anchor in an attempt to become free, but then finds itself at the mercy of an utterly indifferent sea...