I can hardly believe I am writing this column on a Sunday evening, a day when we had no load shedding.
This is very notable because I refuse to follow trends in my quest to promote literacy and creative writing through this conduit. And load shedding, unemployment, and the proposed billion being considered as sponsorship for an English football club to promote tourism in South Africa doesn’t qualify as thought-promoting or creative-drive material.
I shall venture away from the boring everyday gruel of disappointment and nominate the word “gesture” as a spur to prick the sides of my intent. (I am aware that any mention of that Scottish king’s name brings bad luck, but it is him I am referencing, in case you didn’t know).
Actually, my theme was triggered by a clip making the rounds right now. It refers to attempts – two at the last count – of burning sacred texts in public as a gesture of freedom of speech.
I shall not have a lot to say about that, except that burning an object that is more than its physical self smacks of idiocy on a very low level.
We have the burning of Guy Fawkes and other public gestures that indicate the spirit of a time or event. But when the gesture becomes attention-grabbing, it spells trouble.
Like the idiots who target worldclass performers for assassination just to have their few minutes of notoriety is about as pathetic as it gets. But built into these sad acts (which include the killing of politicians) is a message which cannot be ignored and a debate that we daren’t sweep under the mat.
A gesture, by definition, means some show of movement by the human body that sends a message that supplements the shortcomings often found in actual words.
Sometimes, the gesture is pure hostility targeting an aspect, such as the issue of Muslim girls and their dress codes or hairstyles that are seen as harmful to cognition.
Although there may be arguments based on buy-in, or the fine print, or the wafer-thin boundaries between equities of whatever sort, one will, if one is fair-minded, concentrate on the anti-element contained in these public gestures, whether they be hate speech, flag-burning -or -waving or the subtler ones of hegemonic nature.
In my book, one should mostly use gestures as positive reinforcement, encouragement of social cohesion or just a show of good faith that says: we are all human, we are all uncertain, we are all here on the face of a little blue ball falling around the sun, one little dot in a million specks in a cosmos too vast to comprehend.
Despite our minuscule stature in the larger order of God’s whole creation, human beings still require reassurance. And gestures go a long way towards telling your fellow traveller that you don’t know everything, but you know enough to share his joy, grief, hopes, impediments and even the way we handle failure.
Hence my reference to the fact this was one rare day of no load shedding, which I will remember for a while. Because the gesture of using power sparingly and with apparently easy control was at first mooted as reassurance that things were well in the state of the nation. It turned out to be a fatuous gesture, a public display of arrogance and self-deceit that left us groping for gestures to display our disappointment.
Ultimately, gestures can be friendly events or rituals, a show of unity, however fragile. It could take the form of charitable acts that foster indigent students, that shows respect for all religions, that recognise that man is the only animal that blushes – or needs to.
Our gestures can be seen to be small and ostensibly shallow, but it has great potential for achieving equity in surprising places.
As I indicated earlier, some gestures go way over their parameters or meaning. But let us at least make some gestures of goodwill towards each other to make our country a better place to be in right now.
* Alex Tabisher.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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