This past weekend South Africa witnessed the untimely deaths of two (2) of its Sporting heroes in their prime. First it was the Olympic athlete Mbulaeni Mulaudzi who died in a car crash, followed by Senzo Meyiwa who was the Orlando Pirates and Bafana Bafana goalkeeper and captain who was shot dead at a house in Voslorus, Johannesburg.
The latter's passing received more Media coverage than the former, however from listening to interviews conducted with members of both families, one just could not help but take note of the hard reality facing both families, the commonality noted here is not death but the fact that both families had lost breadwinners.
This sad reality is unfortunately one that hits hard on many black South African families, even after 20 years of democracy and freedom. Fact is, the most painful part when Africans as young as Senzo and Mbulaeni die, they take with them what I term "Family Tax" (Taking care of Family). When Young Black people in the new South Africa flourish in their careers, the majority of them become fixers of what apartheid did to the past generations, their focus automatically becomes working hard towards fixing parents houses (demolishing the old dilapidated apartheid structures), feeding siblings and extended families, taking them through school, paying their medical bills etc.
While doing all of the above, we find ourselves also trying to afford our own lifestyles as young people in the new dispensation, with all the pressures that comes with the standard of living today, many are forced to live under dark clouds of debts, which is then generally translated as "living beyond our means", of cause we do and it is not by choice but circumstances dictate that we live that life.
Now when untimely deaths visit the families of these young heroes and heroines (especially through tragic ways such as those that the Meyiwas and the Mbulayeni's suffered this past weekend), the greatest pain is felt by those who depend on them for survival (parents who have had no means of education, therefore no proper jobs or no job at all and receiving government grants which was being supplemented by the support provided by the deceased, siblings that needs to be taken through school, extended family members that needs help financially from time to time etc), it is more like the wheel turns back and those families are faced once again with the hardships of poverty and struggle yet again
It gets even worse when policies such as BBBEE, Employment Equity, Preferential Procurement etc are being implemented, our white counterparts (not all of them but the ignorant majority seem to hold this view) accuses us of laziness and wanting to grab from them, unaware of the dire situation that the black child is faced with. No we are not lazy, we study, we work hard and the government is trying to level the playing fields so that we can all one day become equal and compete on leveled ground, but until then these policies shall remain a necessity.
If I may steal from a recent story in the media that involves a loss of life to try and draw some kind of comparison between flourishing young black and white people in South Africa today. I will use the death of Reeva Steenkamp and the incarceration of Oscar Pistorius just to make my point, both families have lost their loved once (one through death and another through a jail sentence) but the question is "how much has these losses affected the two families from a survival point of view (when compared to Senzo and Mbulayeni's families), will their financial positions change in such a way that the pain of their loss reflects a complete change of lifestyle, a complete turn around of where they are going, will it go as far as turning the wheel to a point where they find themselves back to square one, say back to 1994 when times were really hard?
Trust me I am sensitive to the fact that lives have been lost, but I am merely trying to make a point using what seem to me like very relevant stories of "4 young professionals in their prime" that seemed to be on par in the eyes of the public but in reality they were not, because from the Mulaudzi and the Meyiwa families the above is likely the case (the wheel may have taken a complete turn) and from the Steenkamps and the Pistorius families the above may not be the case.
The reality in all of this is that, indeed Black people still have a long way to go in this our beloved South Africa. #GodBlessAfricans #Notyetuhuru #RIPSenzomeyiwa #RIPMbulaenimolaudzi #RIPReevasteenkamp
#MeditationsOfTheHeart
