Oyena Gwebityala's blog

I am not a coconut- part 1: The day I was born

oyena — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:19:18 +0000

I had a chat with a friend the other day, and what we were speaking about was that my friend was not aware of my background and my culture. He had always known me as the guy who speaks with an accent and studied at Wits. But believe it or not friends, I have a past and a culture that is different from that of many of my black friends who grew up in the townships of Johannesburg and very different from that of my white friends. See I grew up in rural Eastern Cape, and that perhaps is where I should stop, but I will continue. Where I am from, the chapters of one’s life story are not broken down by one’s birthdays, but by the cultural rituals that one goes through. You could be 50 years old and still be considered a boy, where I am from, depending on whether or not you have; firstly gone through all the necessary cultural rituals and secondly, whether those rituals were performed in the correct sequence.
Over the next few weeks then I will regale you with stories of my own cultural/ritualistic experiences. I will try to be as informative as possible. In the end all I am hoping for is that you learn a bit more about the Xhosa people, a people I hold so dear to my heart, who I want to show off to the world. I am going to call these series of stories “I am not a coconut”.
So let’s begin then with the day I was born.
On June 17th 1987, I let out a raucous roar at Madwaleni Hospital in rural Eastern Cape. Madwaleni hospital is in the village that my mother is from. And the reason I was not born in my father’s village and my home is because women where I am from are not allowed to give birth at their husbands’ home. And so a month or so before I was born, my mother had to pack her stuff and go to her own people, who would help her give birth to and nurse the child for the first 3 months of its life. This actually still happens today.
I am not sure if I would ever want to be away from my wife after she gives birth to my child. But for 3 months after I was born, my parents had to stay apart, because culturally, it would have been wrong for them to stay together.
Years later when I was older, I remember asking my grandmother why my uncle’s wife had to go back to her people to give birth to her first child. My grandmother’s answer was that my mother had done it as well. To which my response was; but why? So my gram gave me this reason: When a Xhosa man’s family goes to pay lobola for a woman, they have to pay an extra cow, aptly called “the milk cow”. The “milk” here refers to the woman’s milk. The reason behind the milk cow is to bless the soon to be wife with fertility. So before the woman gives birth, they have to go to the place where their milk cow is, which is her maiden home. It is believed that the milk cow will stay close to home on the day that the woman goes to labour. I didn’t believe this much, but my grandmother insists. Also, if the milk cow were to die before the woman gives birth to her first child, then they would be rendered barren.
So my first ritualistic experience was a trek to my mother’s village a month before I was born.

The face

oyena — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 21:24:22 +0000

I wrote on my facebook profile a while ago that I had finally realised what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. What I left out is that I was making this realization the 5th time this year alone… for 5 different long term career paths. What I realize and have always realized is that most of the things I want to settle for doing with the rest of my life are really just the least objectionable options to the one thing I really want to be doing.

This led me yesterday to write another update on my facebook profile, which read “It seems the one thing that will make me the happiest in life is that which will make me the saddest”. A lot of my friends contributed their thoughts on this statement, and I am grateful for their insights. This post is just to explain my situation a bit more.

Like I said earlier, my career plans have changed at least 5 times this year alone. But through all the changes, one thing has remained constant, a face, well many faces really, but they might as well be one face. See I spent a lot of my life in rural Eastern Cape. I went to school in the city in the Eastern Cape (fortunately for me), but I spent every school and varsity holiday in rural Eastern Cape. And there, I was surrounded by the face. And it has been with me for years, sometimes in euphoria and in times of preparing PDP’s and post grad applications and world travel plans, the face went away, only to be there when the buzz went away. The face I am talking about is that of the women who not so long ago congregated on my father’s plot to till the land, if you were on my friend list on facebook in December last year you would have read me bitching about waking up in the wee hours of the morning to go till with them. To pass the time and to make the work go unfelt these women started talking about how they had gotten HIV from their husbands who got it in the mines in Johannesburg, they started talking about how they had known that they husbands had it, but had no choice but to sleep with them anyway, for the choice was to die later from AIDS or to die now from starvation. This face is that of my female cousin and her friends, who, having run out of options left the Eastern Cape to go to Rustenburg with only one plan in mind… to find a man in the mines who would take them in. This face is that of some of my cousin’s friends who go back to the Eastern Cape unrecognizable from being beaten by the very men they thought would rescue them, or worse who go back to wait to die of AIDS. The face of those young women I know in the Eastern Cape whose exit point from school is at the point where they are deemed capable of reading letters from their husbands in Johannesburg, lingers always in my mind.

There are other faces too. Like those of the young men whose only aspiration is to find a job in the mines. Who when they seem smart at school are told that maybe they can be policemen, but never anything more than that. Young men who are told by their teachers and parents that to dream is reserved for a lucky few, like me. These faces haunt me too.

What compounds the agony of these poltergeist faces for me is that I can put names to them. I used to play with the girls who seek solace from starvation in disease, they are my friends, we used to play with dolls together and we still chat over the phone. I used to go swimming and made clay cows with the young men who get their livelihoods from kilometers underground. When I am too lazy to move my office chair, I think of their toil and their reward compared to mine, and the only thing I can feel is guilt. The women whose choice is between dying now or later, used to carry me on their backs while they fetched wood and water, when my own mother had died while I was a but babe. I know them by name too.

So I know now more than ever that where ever my road goes it has to end there, in that place where it began no so long ago. I know now more than ever, that the only happiness in my life will from working with these men and women.

So when I wrote on facebook a few weeks ago that I had realized what I wanted to do with my life, I believe it was the last time, it should have been the only time in any case. But that realization led to more questions than answers and that is where my problem lay. See I like my current job and my current life, and the kind of life I would live in Johannesburg as a banker is one that would make me very happy. I like wearing suits to work, and although I am nowhere nearly wealthy enough to afford Armani suits, I know that if I ever were, I would enjoy those as well. But the face would always be there in the boutique shop mirrors, in the glasses of iced scotch and in the endless and unnecessary PowerPoint presentations. I know now that I might never own a house that costs more than the privately generated GDP of the Eastern Cape, but I am ok with that, because I realise that I don’t need that to be happy.

The plan now is clear and very simple, but the timing of it will prove tricky. Over the last few weeks, as I grappled with this decision I came to realize why the white man decided to call the frilly things in our lives “trappings”. For that is indeed what they are. I have to pay for my trappings and make a plan for disposing of them. I have to build a buffer, because depending on my parents again, even for a month would be unfair on them. I have to work out an action plan for whatever it is that I will be doing back in the Eastern Cape, which is perhaps the most difficult part. All this might take a while dear friends, but I have set deadlines and I intend to stick to them.

I realise that this far it sounds like I am acting from a place of guilt. Worry not dear friend, I am never one to act from such emotions as guilt and fear. If guilt was the only thing that was leading me to want to act, I would simply just ignore it. Rather the place I am coming from is one of love. I love the Eastern Cape, I love it’s people and just thinking about what they have to go through just to survive, means that I can no longer ignore their plight. And that is why I made the decision that I have made.

Oh and finally you had best believe that when I start doing whatever it is that I will be doing I will call on you as my friend to help.

I feel lost

oyena — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 20:30:35 +0000

Many who know me know that for the longest time I was Christian. And I was happy, very happy actually. The brotherhood that being part of a church gives one is very hard to match anywhere else and the joy and hope of being able to pray in times of jubilation and great sorrow is unmatched by anything I have experienced. But I had to give that up. I spent countless days agonising over this decision, but in the end I knew that I could not keep lying to myself and to those I had grown to love so much. Somewhere along the road, in the quite times I knew I had stopped believing. And so going to church felt to me like I was being dishonest and disrespectful to those who still believed. So I stopped going.

I will never regret making that decision, even now in the depth of my loneliness, in the middle of this labyrinth that I find myself in, I realize that I made the right decision. Because deciding to stay would have been born out of fear of facing the world without a crutch, but mostly fear of losing the brotherhood that I have now lost.

And so now here I am in the middle of Johannesburg, alone in my flat, telling some very intimate stories to a blog, hoping that someone reads it and thinks about me, maybe even responds to say “I understand”. How did I get here? Why did I choose this path, this life when I could be telling my stories to real people, who loved me.

Well to me the choice was between two lives, the one I could have chosen was to be loved, to have a brotherhood unmatched by any that I have ever had before, but I would have needed to lie. I would have needed to bow and pray, to sing and clap like I believed and I could not do that to myself. I have always tried to be honest always to myself. This honesty this time cost me something so good in my life, something that now more than ever I need the most.

So I chose the other life. The life where I am alone most of the time, where every problem and every sorrow has to be dealt with by me, without any hope of external help, without any hope of a miracle. A life where I have to dig myself from the deepest darkest abysses only to fall back again and again just to pull myself out again long enough to fall beck again. I will say, I am learning quickly, but the pain and the loneliness and the loss of hope are always there, always lurking. I guess that was always the allure of Christianity for me. The ability to abdicate ones problems to a higher power is so freeing. To know that in whatever mess one finds oneself in, one can just lie there and pray. I gave that up for honesty to myself. And like I have been saying, I don’t regret that decision, but that knowledge does not make life easier at all.

I guess the challenge in the short term is to live, to survive the passing of the days that seem to blend together like clouds on a stormy day. With nothing to look forward to in any, no brothers to laugh with and tell my stories to. No hope in a higher being. And in the long run the tasks are a bit daunting. Firstly I have to find another source of joy. I realize now that I alone am not enough to give me joy, I will confess that in the present moment I am not happy at all. But it would be cowardly of me to say that is reason enough to lie to myself and those I love. All I need to do is to find joy elsewhere and that is hard when you have never had to do it before. Secondly I have to find another brotherhood. I realize now more than ever that I need people in my life. I like interacting with people and sharing my life with others. Of all the things that I have lost in the past year I think that one is the one I long for the most.

This is not to say that my Christian friends would never love me now, I know they would and I will always love them. But something very important has changed, I have moved away from the very basis of our brotherhood. To expect things to be the same would be naive of anyone.

So in the mean time I will sit in this apartment and talk to the few people who will come across this blog. But if anything I will mostly talk to myself.

A different post

oyena — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 21:15:58 +0000

I thought I was going to write a post about my effeminacy, until a friend told me that I was not effeminate. To which my reaction was, really?! Oh well there goes that post. It was weird however to find this out, because I have always been effeminate. I remember times in primary school when I got beaten by teachers, peers, family and sometimes even total strangers because of the width of my hips, the sound of my voice or the fact that I couldn’t stand watching soccer.

What that has meant for me, and that is what this post is about is that I don’t have a lot of friends from my childhood. in fact I don’t have any. There is no one I will look back with one day on the days of school and laugh at all the mischief we got up to. And that leaves a knot in my throat. I have these friends now from university who share the coolest camaraderie ever. They have gone to the same school for as long as they can remember, and with that comes stories of mischief and fun and adventure. Stories I could never tell, not only because I was not in any, but also because there is no one to whom I can say: do you remember that time…? And that leaves a knot in my throat.

I guess it’s too late now to make stories of school or even university, but I am convinced it’s not too late to make stories. And that is what I intend to do.

I suck

oyena — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 18:17:48 +0000

I must admit that when I started this blog I thought; this is it, I am going to post something on this blog at least every week. I am going to be witty, insightful and deep.

Alas none of that has happened. And this is for a reason that until very recently has eluded me and this simple reason is that my life is just not interesting… at all. I wake up, go to work, come back home, go to gym (when I don’t have swine flu), come back home, eat, study, go on the internet and go to bed. On Thursdays I might go to debating at Wits. And on weekends I attend French lessons. And that’s it, my life in a paragraph. WHAT COULD THERE BE TO WRITE ABOUT EVERY WEEK?

So I have decided to change the focus of this blog a bit. I will not even try to be witty and insightful. I will just write. Sometimes I will be remotely interesting, sometimes even funny, but mostly honest and introspective. Yes I like that word. That is what I will do.

Because despite how boring I may be, I have some stuff to talk about. And in the absence of friends to talk to, I will talk to you in the internets.

Over the next while I plan to articulate who I think I am through this blog. I will explore myself as you read and maybe I will “find myself”. There is a reason for this and I will explain it in my first post in this series which I will call “journey”. Over the next while I will explore such issues as: my decision to be “agnostic tending to atheist”, my sexuality and dislike of relationships, my effeminacy and how it is not related to my sexuality.

I hope this whets you appetite for what is about to come. So read up and you might just get what I am about. you might just get me.

What does it mean to be a good person?

oyena — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:08:12 +0000

I am by no means a philosophy enthusiast. I just like asking myself questions about how I live my life and how society in general seems to think. Recently I have been agonizing over the question of what it means to be good. How must one speak, act and behave to be considered a good person?

This is a question I have never had to think about before because I have always had a crutch. See for a while I was a religious man and my definition of being good could be found in “the holy book”. Now however, having decided that maybe I had not questioned my beliefs enough, I am left without a crutch. I find myself in a position where I have to define goodness myself. And where do I begin? Is eating meat good or bad? Is fighting back when hit good or bad, should I give the other cheek instead, even when I know that I could take the other guy? These are all questions that I have never had to think about before because they have always had clear answers.
So on to my thoughts on what it means to be good. Firstly I think being good depends on two things: how do my actions and words make me feel and how do they make others feel? Feel here can mean both physical pain and pleasure and it can mean psychological pain or pleasure. When my feelings and those of others are positive I don’t really have a problem i.e. if I am happy and people around me are happy, I am cool. The problem arises when feelings are either mutually negative (both myself and others feel pain) or are contradictory (my pleasure makes others feel pain and vice versa). The last two cases have been cause of much agony for me over the past few months.
As for mutually negative feelings, I am not sure if I am happy with being sad alone. When I am hurt my natural inclination is to try and reciprocate, especially if the cause of my unhappiness can be located. So if someone hits me, I get more pleasure from hitting back than from either being the bigger man or from trying to preserve the other person’s happiness. Is this a valid stance? However when someone is hurt either by me or something else, I would prefer it if my happiness were preserved. Is this selfishness, or just a natural inclination?
As for directly contradictory feelings (gaining pleasure that causes pain to others), I am at a complete loss. As an example, I like meat, a lot, in all its variations. However I can’t deny that animals are harmed to provide me with the meat that I like so much. On some level I must admit that fewer animals would be killed if I ate less or no meat at all. However that would make me sad, very sad. So I am sitting with a problem of directly contradictory feelings. Would not eating meat make me a good person? But that would be harmful to me. Does that mean I have to harm myself to be good? Perhaps the inverse question would be: what if making me sad made someone else, or perhaps many people very happy? What if someone stripped me naked and that made the whole town happy? Would it be good of me to run and hide, to the displeasure of more people that just myself? I guess what I am asking here is whether utility is a good measure of goodness, where what creates the most happiness for the most people is most good? If so why or if not why not?
I close this post with a question that even I am yet to answer:Why is being good important?

Educational experiment

oyena — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 09:05:47 +0000

I’ve decided that I don’t need to go to school to learn the things many people go to school to learn. I don’t think that any of the lessons that Newton learnt in school prepared him for discovering gravity. Nor did school help Gauss invent almost all of applied mathematics, so why should I have to go to school to learn things like maths and economics. Granted the two examples I made are class one geniuses and sadly I’m not (hey I have no illusions about my abilities), but the thing to learn from them is that they did not really need to go to school.

And so a very interesting social experiment forms itself in my mind, why not try to teach myself stuff? And I have decided that in the next few months, I am going to do exactly just that. I have already started learning programming in Python and over the next few months I will learn such subjects as physics, mathematical analysis, finance, philosophy and advanced economics. So if anyone has any unused books on these subjects, I am willing to pay top dollar for them (ok maybe not top dollar, but a fair second hand price).

But most importantly and the reason I am writing this post, apart from bragging about my perceived intellect is to encourage anyone who reads this post to do the same. This is because I personally feel that this does not happen a lot at university. At university we are all happy to absorb and regurgitate reams of data/information without ever thinking about what it means or what possible extensions there are to what we are learning. The guy who does well in university is not always the smartest one, but the one who can remember the most stuff. And I believe this is tantamount to squandering the opportunity of learning that we have been afforded. Yes many of us will go on to write theses and add to the plethora of theses that will never be read that populate the basement floors of our national university libraries. And this again makes me sad.

A friend once told me that in universities like Oxford one has to read for one’s degree. What this means is that there are no formal lectures. Students get their course outlines and list of books they are required to read for their level of the degree they are doing and they basically have to go to the library and figure it out. I don’t know if this is entirely true, my friend is not one of the most honest people I know, in fact he is the contrary. But if this is true, then I fully support the Oxford way and I think that is how learning in university should occur.

Traveller

oyena — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 11:26:40 +0000

I’ve decided that I like travelling. Having been on holiday with friends last December, I realised that I enjoyed that kind of thing. To spend time with people you like, to spend whole days chatting, reading books or just swimming in rock pools. Gosh what a feeling!

I’ve never thought of myself as an adventurer, I have always been ok with settling with things that I am familiar with, like going down to the Eastern Cape to visit the family I have had all my life during varsity holidays. Not to say I don’t love my family, I do, sometimes, but I don’t need to spend 5 months in a year with them.

So now I have decided not to settle anymore. I am an adventurer and I want to see the whole world, to hear the tongues of many lands, to dance to the rhythm of their people, like I did so many months ago in Coffee bay. I want to sit around fires and tell stories of distant travels and blog about far away places. I want to go to plush Kensington in London on one holiday and then plunge to the slums of India and Peru on the next.

I realise that doing all this will require me to let go of my need for security. I need to be able to hop onto a bus without knowing where I will end up (of course I will find out where the bus is going, otherwise how would I get the ticket), just where that bus is going. I need to throw my planning notepad away and just travel.

Hello world, again.

oyena — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 20:21:27 +0000

Hi everyone

Due to a few factors, I have had to change my blog to this one. The url is less fancy than the previous one, but I will survive.

I have not blogged for about 4 months now. This was due to internetlessness and the fact that my old blog broke! So now I’m back and I have lots of pent up blogging. So watch these pages over the next few months.

Peace for now