Today, Just Walk Away

 

 

You with your swollen head, brutal hands, savage feet and empty heart.

You with your cold fish eyes and brown- toothed malicious grin.

Yes, you looking all bemused with a smirk of mockery across your distorted features. Yes you, if I were you I would use the sweat dampened collar of your uniform of death to wipe that insolence of your face, because this time, today, right now, step any closer waving that truncheon in my face and I will reconfigure that ugly arrangement that is your face for you, for free. With great pleasure.

This is how things will be from now on. This is how you will meet me day after day night after night, year after year until your pea- sized brain realizes that I am a human being capable of inflicting the same pain on you as you have done to me for centuries. So go ahead, bring your cowardly fists along with the dead mush in the space between your ears, that thing you call a brain but which cannot stop you from trying to contain an ocean in a teaspoon. You are really intelligent, which is why you brandish your batons with great skill, an extension of your penis, the ultimate gift to women, or so you have told yourself .and convinced others like you.

But today is today and your penis and your batons are no match for a sea of red hot angry women. Come any closer and we will show you what an angry woman is capable off. You mistook our gentile nature for stupidity and our acquiescence for idiocy, softness in the brain. We’ll get this: We are not your children who you can “punish” for wrongdoing. Try that shit and I will slice off that which feeds that your inflated ego and feed it to the mongrels roaming the streets. Go on, bring that one eyes trouser snake and try to force him into spaces he has not been invited and that will be the last time he shows any life.

 

 

Life!  I gave you life. Do you fully grasp the fact that without woman you would not exist? Dies it occur to you that as you stand here waving you baton at us you are essentially brandishing rage and contempt at your mother? Do you know how many women curse the day they allowed you passage out of their bodies? Do you know some wished they had strangled you on your umbilical cord? Oh don’t look shocked! How many girls have been snuffed out as soon as a vagina is seen between their infant legs? Let me tell you something you don’t know, we revile you because you are the reason we revile ourselves. You are the reason we hate being female and for birthing females, and for this we will fight you to the last. We have nothing to lose and there is nothing more dangerous than a woman with nothing to lose. So make our day, keep coming closer and closer until your rancid breath is the fuel that with ignite the match and we will burn you alive! For I am woman, I am the genetic blue print spelled out by two X chromosomes or eternal and infinite memory. I remember that the reason you strut across this planet, hands in pockets whistling empty tunes, plotting your next assault on me is because I gave you one of my chromosomes. Yes, I donated one to you and you treat me like dispensable piece of shit. Well today I am facing you down. Glare at me and I will glower back at you. Bring that baton closer and I shall wave my cutlass in the air around your throat. I don’t have time for your overbearing manner. Come closer so I can squeeze those precious eggs of yours until you squeal like a stuck pig. Spit in my face so I can draw up all the phlegm and ire I have stored up for this moment. And splatter it between your eyes.

Beast! You behave as though you fell out of the sky but a woman birthed you arrogant self. How dare I speak about your mother? How dare I address you in this manner?  You demand. You are laughable! I will address you in whatever manner pleases me and you will do nothing against this sea of womanhood that will swallow you whole if you so much as blink at me.

 

Walk away and go and reflect on the new world order you just encountered here. Get used to it, accept it, and embrace it, because it is here to stay. If you are thinking of catching me alone and doing me serious damage, think again because this army is everywhere. Try to accost me and they will kill you and good riddance. If you want to talk, come by and bring your own chair. The one in my house is mine.

But for today, just turn around and walk away. There is no point throwing a pebble at a mountain and expecting the mountain to disintegrate. That stone will ricochet and split your head into two. Just walk away. And leave to us mourn our losses in peace.

 

Young Woman of Note- August

Koketso Moeti- South Africa

Koketso caught my attention when I saw her commenting on Facebook on a mutual friend's wall. Her tone and her intelligent responses to development issues made me sit up and wonder who she was and what she did. My instincts told me that she was another unique young woman with a passion for positive social change and her articulation of how she thought this could happen was really impressive. I will let her talk to you herself. Thanks for all you do Koketso and thanks for being part of the re-branding of Our continent: showing the world that we have and are all we need.

 I am an ordinary 25 year old young woman, a servant and a mother to two beautiful children who are my world.

Despite the opulence we see all around us in South Africa, I also see too much needless suffering and growing up I wondered how that is possible. How one person can be worth billions, yet another dying of hunger? How one person can waste so much water, yet so many communities go without water. It was from this and my interest in the human mind that I felt compelled to try and go about changing this.

I found myself very frustrated about the way poverty alleviation is being handled, that a blue-print approach is being taken, which does not take people’s varying contexts into account. It was from this that a dream was born, a dream to create positive change- but differently. I had a dream that instead of the usual charity work one could actually empower people in a way that allowed them to break the cycle of poverty; create sustainable livelihoods which focused not on the accumulation of wealth, but rather on communities able to sustain themselves and families able to satisfy their most basic needs. This led to the founding of Operation ROOIGROND (www.rooigrond.co.za), which is a project that uses education and knowledge to promote access to information; alleviate poverty, eradicate substance abuse and all other social ills that go with poverty.

Young students of the early childhood learning center

Operation Rooigrond goes beyond building a library and facilitating positive change. It is about making a difference, bringing hope where there’s none. It is about lighting up a spark in people’s lives, a spark which they in turn would carry to another person leading to a fire within the community; which is bound to spread out and reach society at large. We also hope to be a vehicle through which we can actually have the voices of the marginalised heard and eventually even influence and alter policy. For too long the poor have gone ignored and here we say, despite people’s circumstances, let them be provided with an opportunity to be active participants in the creation of a better world.

The youth engaged in dance

There is a misconception of my work and it is perceived to be ‘anti-government’ or ‘controversial’, rather than ‘pro-people’ and ‘pro-justice’. As much as it isolates one, I am very fortunate to be doing what I love to do and this gives me more opportunity to immerse myself in it.

Community gathering

Apart from Operation: ROOIGROND, I am also the South African Correspondent of Safe World (Please seehttp://www.asafeworldforwomen.org/about/the-ngo/correspondents/koketso-moeti.html), which allows me to share news affecting women and children on the ground. Too often the plight of rural and marginalized people, as well as their stories of hope and victory, are ignored and this has given me a platform from which to share such stories and raise awareness of the challenges faced.

Temporary shelter to help with community relief after a fire

I also serve as the Provincial Coordinator of the North-West branch of the South African NGO Coalition (SANGOCO North-West). This has provided me with a platform from which to connect and serve in the province as a whole, a challenge I really have come to enjoy and love. It is also the means through which I fund the Operation: ROOIGROND administration costs and also allows me to reach further for the purposes of sharing the experiences of women in South Africa.

Rooigrond Early Childhood Learning Center

I am also an aspiring writer, with the ambition of using words to promote social transformation, my blog can be viewed on http://koketsomoeti.wordpress.comSocial media is another way I try to further the various causes in which I am involved, so I am quite active on a number of them including Twitter (@ORooigrond and @Kmoeti), Facebook (http://facebook.com/kmoetiand http://facebook.com/orooigrond); LinkedIn (http://za.linkedin.com/in/kmoeti1) and Google Plus (kmoeti@gmail.com).

Please find here-under some links which may assist you in discovering more about me and my work:

An article written by me for The Sunday Times about my project, Operation: ROOIGROND- 'The World is in My Hand' (published on the 10th June 2012): http://www.timeslive.co.za/sundaytimes/2012/06/10/the-world-is-in-my-hand

Safe World for Women profile: http://goo.gl/JL84w

Operation: ROOIGROND website: www.rooigrond.co.za

‘The World Through My Eyes’ blog: http://koketsomoeti.wordpress.com

In the media:

ROOIGROND Response to North-West State of the Province Address:
http://goo.gl/ux3HT

Rooigrond People take on Premier: http://goo.gl/4B3PM

Waiting For the ‘Promised Land’: http://goo.gl/47LgC