In defence of questioning minds

By T Osiame Molefe

Okay, so I’m going to get skieted, skopped and donnered for this one but it’s okay.

In the past 4 hours, I’ve seen three ThoughtLeader blogs go up lambasting Gareth Cliff for his Manto comments. I won’t repeat, if you haven’t heard/read them by now…look a space ship!

For the rest of you, two possibilities come to mind:

1. Gareth was horribly wrong for having tweeted what he did (hence the backlash justified)…

2. M&G should change the name of this group of blogs to ThoughtFollower.

Everybody and their mum has weighed in on this and as has been noted already, most thought that ol’ Gareth should jump off the nearest cliff (sorry, couldn’t resist). The ANCYL, radio personalities, journalists, motivational speakers, relative and actual nobodies have all weighed in…and I’ll be damned if I don’t get my two shillings in. The truth, I reckon, lies somewhere in between the two possibilities above.

Being somewhat counter-culture (as I suspect Gareth is), I do not necessarily subscribe to a point of view because it has been practiced and taught for donkey years. If someone tells me something is so, I ask why it is so. I always strive to take a fresh view on what I believe to be factual, expected or obvious. After all, that is why I have my own brain as opposed to being hooked up to some Borg hive mind.

You can tell where this is going right?

I am thoroughly African and spiritual too and am generally a respectful and polite…but none of these blunt my questioning mind.

None of these guide me blindly to censoring views contrary to mine even if they offend me to the core. After all, it may be me whose core is a little off kilter.

Death is one of those things I question my views on. My current stance is one where I not approach it with reverence or fear. It won’t afford me such when it’s my time to go. The notion of respect for the dead comes from millennia of us not really understanding death. Yes, there’s also respect for the grief of those left behind but mostly we mourn because we do not (truly) know where the dead go. Heck, if we knew for a fact that they go to Disneyland, we’d be jealous of (and not morning for or respectful of) the dead.

So ol’ Gareth. What he said about the former health minister wasn’t new, he’s expressed dislike for her as a individual and as a person (formerly) in a position of power and trust. He said what many people were thinking. Let’s not kid ourselves, the late Dr Tshabalala-Msimang was not hugely popular. Most though had the sense not to tweet it. And those that did tweet it had neither a huge enough following nor as public a persona to warrant such an overwhelming backlash.

And that’s all I can find the man guilty of.

He probably should have recognised how many people follow him. He probably did and didn’t care. He should have expected how vehemently opposed people would be to what he said. He probably did but didn’t care. Note: people’s opposition doesn’t make them right…it just gives them a numerical advantage. I’m tempted to say something about idiots in numbers but I won’t.

So with my two shillings whizzing their way through this vending machine, I’ll leave you with this parting shot: life is full of shades of grey. The musts and shoulds we impose on people are our failings to recognise this.

T. Osiame Molefe is an MA (Creative Writing) student at UCT and a former chartered accountant. He is also yellow-bellied, self-ingratiating fraudster. He passes himself off as a writer, photographer and child of bohemia living in the Age of Aquarius. Truth is though, he’s never published a thing, his camera is more competent that he is and — despite his best efforts — he has never been involved in any kind of orgy.