Post by Onyango Oloo on Jan 1, 2018 20:54:51 GMT 3
Onyango Oloo's New year Message
Happy New Year to all my readers in Jukwaa, on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, KPTJ and the half dozen or so mailing lists that I subscribe to.
I am currently in South Africa.
Just this afternoon I got back to Ethkwini Municipality which houses the port city of Durban where one of my one of my sisters live.
We just got back from a very exciting excursion largely the brain child of my two nieces Jennifer (named after my late mother) and her younger sister Jackline who works in property management in Johannesburg. Jennifer has been living for the last ten years in France although being the travel bug she is, she has been to Ecuador, Vietnam, Kampuchea and a host of European and African countries. She came over back to her new homeland South Africa to visit her parents and brought along her French fiancé, Djorry Robert who is of Caribbean-Martiniqan heritage, the young couple surprised us all when the charming digital marketer formally proposed marriage. This coming in the wake in which another niece who we know as Zinzi had her South African potential life partner Xolani and his relatives show up for a lobola bride price ceremony.
Talking of the excursion, the well planned tour took us to the northern reaches of Kwa Zulu Natal Province near the border with Swaziland to a rusty and funky Bread and Breakfast place known as Imbuzi Farm House-and you guessed right, they rear goats there. It is located approximately 285 kilometres from Durban at a site called Hluluwe, Inflozi Park. All nine of us (Samoei, a second cousin from a different sister who died a few months ago,, in addition to Zinzi, the daughter of my late sister Beatrice, her fiancé Xolani, Jennifer and her significant other, my younger sister Janet , her husband George and of course myself) travelled in two cars-my sister’s Hyundai and a car my nieces had rented). It was a journey which took us almost seven hours but we finally arrived at Imbuzi Farm House to a warm reception from the receptionist who promptly left us to cook our own meals because that was the arrangement. The place which was nicely furnished, was chock full of books, from novels to biographies to DIY manuals and other reading material. We had arrived in heaven in Madiba Land and the rate the young women negotiated was quite reasonable.
The next day we went to see some hippos, crocodiles, king fisher birds, weaver birds and various flora and fauna in the course of a two hour boat cruise courtesy of Sunset Jetty Cruises, a South African tour company. Our New Year’s Eve celebrations was capped off with a beach picnic beside a sandy seafront on the Indian Ocean. Coming back, we had fun taking pictures of the monkeys and their children playing by the roadside.
Turning back to my motherland of Kenya, it is the beginning of a new year. Queen Lizzie, who is about to welcome a classy African-American divorce former actress into the dysfunctional, convoluted Paradise papered stable as a spouse to her weird German-Greek, British married to one of her grandsons in her stable had she still been the colonial head honcho of our tortured coffee-tea plantation of an impoverished neo-colony would have summarized the year 2017 for Kenya as an annus horribilis.
The year which ended with a whimper at midnight last night was an excerpt from a terrifying living nightmare made even more macabre that all twelve months were not conjured up from the vivid imaginations of coke addicted Hollywood screenplay writers but the real cynical, savage and cynical preoccupations of drunken, blood-stained electoral thieves, their Bible totting land grabbing cohorts, the Mungiki killers dressed in police uniform and lying 36 bloggers and their foreign financed spin doctors bent on hanging insanely to the rudiments of state power and continuing serving their imperialist overlords whether these were American billionaire speculators implementing the nefarious, backward and racist Trump climate change denying agenda or monopoly capitalists of Merkle’s ilk or her cohort the lame duck soon to be departed British Prime Minister fighting a rear guard battle to hold off Xi Pinyang’s ascendancy in China or Vladimir Putin’s effective campaign against the US/Saudi Daesh ISIS terrorists.
Over the last year, democrats and social justice campaigners like me have used the avenues of social media to expose the brutal torture and murder of Chris Msando, the shameless slaughter of children whose only crime was to go and play in their working class apartment balconies. We are not going to regurgitate the gangland killings of Luos and other innocents who came out to demonstrate against the massive anomalies of the IEBC or shed more tears for the almost certain assassination of Raila Odinga when he returned from the United States. We shall not waste our breath responding to the fulminations of the Mutahi Ngunyis, Moses Kurias, Duales, Murokomens and Wamalwas. That is so much old hat pain.
Instead, I want to end this New Year Message with an earnest appeal to all Kenyan women, Kenyan men and Kenyan youth who want to live in a better country to redouble their efforts at mass mobilization for peace, democracy, social justice and economic progress across all the platforms in the villages and estates, across religion, tribe and political difference.
That is all Onyango Oloo has to say today from South Africa which just a few weeks ago saw the promise of a growing national democratic revolution. 2018 Should Be a Year Marked by Peace, Justice and Progress.
I will wrap up this piece by a beautiful work of art shared online by a veteran comrade, the renowned Sri Lankan poet/activist Krisantha Sri Bhaggiyaddatta who taught me community radio when I met him decades ago in Toronto, Ontario. The artist of the piece done with color pencil and felt pin paper is called Shri R. Amarasingheand the theme is about peace and justice:
Happy New Year to all my readers in Jukwaa, on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, KPTJ and the half dozen or so mailing lists that I subscribe to.
I am currently in South Africa.
Just this afternoon I got back to Ethkwini Municipality which houses the port city of Durban where one of my one of my sisters live.
We just got back from a very exciting excursion largely the brain child of my two nieces Jennifer (named after my late mother) and her younger sister Jackline who works in property management in Johannesburg. Jennifer has been living for the last ten years in France although being the travel bug she is, she has been to Ecuador, Vietnam, Kampuchea and a host of European and African countries. She came over back to her new homeland South Africa to visit her parents and brought along her French fiancé, Djorry Robert who is of Caribbean-Martiniqan heritage, the young couple surprised us all when the charming digital marketer formally proposed marriage. This coming in the wake in which another niece who we know as Zinzi had her South African potential life partner Xolani and his relatives show up for a lobola bride price ceremony.
Talking of the excursion, the well planned tour took us to the northern reaches of Kwa Zulu Natal Province near the border with Swaziland to a rusty and funky Bread and Breakfast place known as Imbuzi Farm House-and you guessed right, they rear goats there. It is located approximately 285 kilometres from Durban at a site called Hluluwe, Inflozi Park. All nine of us (Samoei, a second cousin from a different sister who died a few months ago,, in addition to Zinzi, the daughter of my late sister Beatrice, her fiancé Xolani, Jennifer and her significant other, my younger sister Janet , her husband George and of course myself) travelled in two cars-my sister’s Hyundai and a car my nieces had rented). It was a journey which took us almost seven hours but we finally arrived at Imbuzi Farm House to a warm reception from the receptionist who promptly left us to cook our own meals because that was the arrangement. The place which was nicely furnished, was chock full of books, from novels to biographies to DIY manuals and other reading material. We had arrived in heaven in Madiba Land and the rate the young women negotiated was quite reasonable.
The next day we went to see some hippos, crocodiles, king fisher birds, weaver birds and various flora and fauna in the course of a two hour boat cruise courtesy of Sunset Jetty Cruises, a South African tour company. Our New Year’s Eve celebrations was capped off with a beach picnic beside a sandy seafront on the Indian Ocean. Coming back, we had fun taking pictures of the monkeys and their children playing by the roadside.
Turning back to my motherland of Kenya, it is the beginning of a new year. Queen Lizzie, who is about to welcome a classy African-American divorce former actress into the dysfunctional, convoluted Paradise papered stable as a spouse to her weird German-Greek, British married to one of her grandsons in her stable had she still been the colonial head honcho of our tortured coffee-tea plantation of an impoverished neo-colony would have summarized the year 2017 for Kenya as an annus horribilis.
The year which ended with a whimper at midnight last night was an excerpt from a terrifying living nightmare made even more macabre that all twelve months were not conjured up from the vivid imaginations of coke addicted Hollywood screenplay writers but the real cynical, savage and cynical preoccupations of drunken, blood-stained electoral thieves, their Bible totting land grabbing cohorts, the Mungiki killers dressed in police uniform and lying 36 bloggers and their foreign financed spin doctors bent on hanging insanely to the rudiments of state power and continuing serving their imperialist overlords whether these were American billionaire speculators implementing the nefarious, backward and racist Trump climate change denying agenda or monopoly capitalists of Merkle’s ilk or her cohort the lame duck soon to be departed British Prime Minister fighting a rear guard battle to hold off Xi Pinyang’s ascendancy in China or Vladimir Putin’s effective campaign against the US/Saudi Daesh ISIS terrorists.
Over the last year, democrats and social justice campaigners like me have used the avenues of social media to expose the brutal torture and murder of Chris Msando, the shameless slaughter of children whose only crime was to go and play in their working class apartment balconies. We are not going to regurgitate the gangland killings of Luos and other innocents who came out to demonstrate against the massive anomalies of the IEBC or shed more tears for the almost certain assassination of Raila Odinga when he returned from the United States. We shall not waste our breath responding to the fulminations of the Mutahi Ngunyis, Moses Kurias, Duales, Murokomens and Wamalwas. That is so much old hat pain.
Instead, I want to end this New Year Message with an earnest appeal to all Kenyan women, Kenyan men and Kenyan youth who want to live in a better country to redouble their efforts at mass mobilization for peace, democracy, social justice and economic progress across all the platforms in the villages and estates, across religion, tribe and political difference.
That is all Onyango Oloo has to say today from South Africa which just a few weeks ago saw the promise of a growing national democratic revolution. 2018 Should Be a Year Marked by Peace, Justice and Progress.
I will wrap up this piece by a beautiful work of art shared online by a veteran comrade, the renowned Sri Lankan poet/activist Krisantha Sri Bhaggiyaddatta who taught me community radio when I met him decades ago in Toronto, Ontario. The artist of the piece done with color pencil and felt pin paper is called Shri R. Amarasingheand the theme is about peace and justice: