Zodwa Wabantu: God’s only daughter

Soon after the beginning, when He has called everything into existence, God finds it all needing a purpose, a meaning. Now that there is light, now that He has separated the waters from the land and called them the ocean, what is it all for? Oscar Wilde would later allude to God’s predicament thus: “we can forgive a man for creating something useful as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely”. Creation was of no use to God but at the same time He did not really admire it, after all it was not a work of His inspiration, but His boredom. He had freestyled the whole thing into existence, painting a picture worth a million words at a fraction of the cost. That it came out so perfect was only because He was incapable of mediocrity. After taking a whole second to ponder, it hit Him like a “let there be light” moment; He was going to clone Himself, to create a retarded version of Himself and call it mankind, now He was a little inspired. Understanding that only this retarded version could admire His calls, be entertained by His boredom, find intricate detail in His loose and scant portrait He gives all He has called into existence a purpose: to be mankind’s pleasure. Mankind is without a purpose at least if we accept purpose to require an active and intentional pursuit from the “purposee”, mankind is without this intent, he is in pursuit of nothing because everything is given to him – the original trust fund baby sans the bloody reserves and guilt in the pleasure. God does not even say “go and find pleasure in my creation”, he does not say “go and dominate the earth and everything in it”, He says “I give you dominion over the earth and everything in it” – this dominion is granted, and granted without merit, thus God defined Himself, as Love. Heathen interlocutors argue that “…be fruitful and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein” is a purpose, but to what end is this fruitful multiplication and filling of the earth? Imagine for a minute, Adam and Eve seating there doing nothing but reproducing themselves because – “multiply and fill the earth” – it’s a meaningless and pitiful existence as if someone is waiting to extract this surplus value. This multiplication is self-serving; the earth is too big therefore multiply, fill it and enjoy the dominion you have been granted over it. The fact that the act that springs the fruit is one of mankind’s greatest pleasures further attests to God’s plan for mankind – the pleasure is all ours. We also note that while God merely calls everything into existence – “Let there be…”, He makes mankind, in His own image and that resemblance would haunt His conscience forever. While resting on the Sabbath He finds himself thinking about Lucifer; those who do not learn from history’s mistakes are bound to repeat them. In addition to making Him look bad to other gods, Lucifer’s rebellion was a heartfelt betrayal but in all that abyss a lesson was to be learnt: absolute dominion corrupts absolutely so to check mankind’s dominion He makes exception with a fruit tree; dominion over everything except…mhh…except… that fruit tree. The fruit tree was chosen randomly, those who claim it was the tree of knowledge must have been high on the opium of the masses for we all know that mankind still does not know a thing. All was well until a rat named Steve visited Eve and convinced her that one, it was actually a snake and two, Eve should eat that forbidden fruit. God would have been beside Himself with rage but His omnipresence made this an impossibility, damn it! It was not so much the disobedience but the stupidity. To trade the whole Amazon for an Apple! At least Lucifer’s motives were not as superficial, God still smiled when He thought about Lucifer’s address to His comrades; battered and exhausted from battle the rebels were starting to question whether following Lucifer and leaving the comfort of Heaven was the right thing to do. Beelzebub, Lucifer’s right hand man, caporegime, confidant, brings the Army’s grievances and doubts to Lucifer’s attention. Lucifer provides leadership, assuring them not of victory but of the righteousness of their cause despite the losses, in his historical account titled Paradise lost, John Milton quotes Lucifer as saying

God found Lucifer’s rebellious (revolutionary?) resolve admirable, even if misguided but for mankind, their sin was only misguided not even slightly admirable; it was God’s first encounter with stupidity. Mankind would later embrace this stupidity, bask in the disgrace of his self-inflicted flaws chanting slogans such as “I am only human, I make mistakes”. That we think we ought to make anything is the original mistake- we have mistaken our very being and are now over mistaken from without. This mistake is ontological, it structures all experience and thence nothing was ever the same again. “My Self!” muttered God. He was so depressed He quit painting altogether, these days we discover abandoned sketches of His without the life His paintbrush infuses, we call these “other planets”.  The Yankee rat with its cheesy pick-up lines that were later compiled in a mack book thus kicked off the fall, a snow ball of L’s that mankind collected on his way to hell.

For millennia after, God and mankind were not on speaking terms, He had resigned himself to experimental farming and shadow boxing. He did not answer any calls – those who had left Him messages on His answering machine will be disappointed to know that He deleted them without even listening. But mankind’s resemblance still haunted His conscience and eventually He prepared for a reconciliation, after all “His hand is not shortened to save neither His ear heavy that it cannot hear” as Isiah Shembe assures us. But the road to reconciliation was a long and daunting one, it was not going to be a TRC moment where a few crocodile tears are shed and all is forgiven and forgotten – a fundamental shift in relations and behaviour was needed. Numerous times He tried to send us a message but an unforeseen consequence of creating a dumbed down version of Himself was that He could not dumb down to its level and thus constantly spoke over its head. False prophecies were abound – for example the claim that God struck down the tower of babel to sow discord among His people is a deliberate falsehood that completely misses what God is. He struck it down because it was an eyesore – one big sweat shop of Victorian pretensions, the stink of it all was unbearable. What of the group of people who believe they were the chosen ones and wandered about in a dessert following a senile old man until they were so hungry they were hallucinating and thought mere rain was something called Mana? Man – mxim. God could not hold out any longer, it was clear that mankind needed rescuing from himself and so He started plotting a rescue mission the point of which was to return mankind to his original glory. After a series of trial and error God would finally find a worthy messenger in Zodwa Wabantu. While this article is not about Jesus, we would do well to point out His failure for it is this failure that sets the stage for Zodwa Wabantu, a character without which the plot never thickens. An unwitting Zodwa Wabantu disciple, Slavoj Zizek, explains this failure thus: “Jesus says something and his disciples do not get it. He uses a parable to explain it and His disciples do not get it even more.”[1] Jesus never quite got off His Godly high horse, except for when he rode that arse into Jerusalem. He refused to dumb down to the level of the masses, someone should have told him “The world is one big rally, do not speak like you are at a panel discussion”. Zubz puts a poetic and therefore finer point to this tragedy when he raps “Sometimes I try to send a message but it never reaches/Filtered out through static hypnosis and clever speeches.”[2] But why was Jesus so ill equipped for the job as if being called in to stand in for a colleague who had suddenly fallen sick? This begs the question; was Jesus really meant to be the one sent or did an administrative error send the wrong messenger? The biggest clue is to be found in how the BC prophets speak of the messiah; they call the messiah “Son of man” in IsiXhosa this is “Unyana womntu”- hint hint!

This is what the evidence points to; millenniums BC a Xhosa initiate named Daniyeli renowned in his  village for having tamed lions and rescuing his father’s lambs, steals a nap in the absence of his khankatha and has a vision. When his khankatha comes back he wants to tell him about his vision but is worried that this will reveal that he slept when he shouldn’t have so he omits that it was a vision and simple tells him “Ndibone kusiza ngamafu ezulu, onjengeNtombi yabantu, wafika kuNyangelemihla wasondezwa phambi kwakhe” – “And there before me I saw one like a daughter of man coming with the clouds of heaven…”[3] but omitting that this was in a vision gets him into another problem: he is saying he saw, in his initiation hut, a woman, taboo in the patriarchal practice. So he changes his story once again and the butchered version spreads like red ochre among the Xhosas. It is said that Daniyeli whose stunt with the lions had everyone convinced he is a prophet of sorts was visited by the son of man – the messiah. Speculation is rife, could it be Nguni, Xhosa, or Somagwaza? It has now become a national question robustly debated in ploughing fields and hunting trips alike. They ask Daniyeli what the vision means and when he tells them he does not know, that’s all he saw they think he means he will not do all the thinking for them so they debate even more until a visitor from kwaZulu quickly put the story to rest on his arrival. He asked why, the Xhosas walking around naked as they wilt would need a messiah? What is this messiah saving them from? Sometimes when you are in a situation you over complicate it and overlook the most obvious things. Unable to answer this question, the Xhosa elders thus concluded that this message must be for the strange people in the North who had turned pale from some strange disease so they sent it there. Little did they know that centuries later, a butchered version of their initiate’s vision would be preached to them as the gospel. The result is that Daniyeli is recorded as the first to refer to the messiah as the son of man, we move though, that he meant the daughter of man – intombi yabantu. Under pressure to validate the dream to uphold the credibility of its prophets, God’s admin sent Jesus. We submit that we have not overspent our inference allowance so we can safely conclude that the messiah was supposed to be the daughter of man – intombi yabantu.

We must now ask, what is this message that God has been trying to send to mankind? Simply, He wants mankind to return to his former glory. This return is twofold; firstly we need to realise that the world is supposed to be “man-centred” as Biko puts it, to be in service of mankind because mankind was granted dominion over everything by the creator of it all. This is why the dictatorship of the vegetarians is the highest form of ungodliness – imagine being sentenced to grooming pigs because you were “caught” enjoying a strip of bacon. Oh the horror! The horror! Jesus tries to explain this in Mark 7:27 when he says “The Sabbath (the holiest day) was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath”. We are not even supposed to work, we are given dominion, creation is supposed to work for us. Our disconnection from God’s plan for us has us putting ourselves through all forms of horrors; we work for the accumulation of a few and believe that God is interested in our worship then we kill each other over who performs this worship best. What are we high on? To point us in the right direction God first gave us communism – now that you have found yourself in this predicament where you have to work; work for the common good and equally enjoy the fruits of your labour. This was a good compromise, one that could lead us back to pre-fall paradise but again we listened to the same Yankees that gave us the fall rat and shunned Stalin but the advances in Artificial intelligence might lead us back to this “utopia” – we can have the robots doing all the work even maintaining each other while we enjoy the earth and all in it. We must only hope that they do not do to us, what we have done to God.

The second part can best be understood by understanding what happens when the rat leaves Eve. We are told that after sinning, Adam and Eve suddenly realised they were naked and they were ashamed. As we have established, the rat that conned Eve was a mlungu – the original con technician (how dare we call these things artists?). Interestingly one writer notes that arriving at the Cape abelungu encountered the Khoi san who, among other things were walking around naked as they wilt – seemingly unbothered by gender binaries, did not accumulate anything – collecting food on a need to use basis and generally living a blissful life of idleness. But while abelungu believed they were men after the fall they could not imagine that the Khoi was men returning to his pre-fall glory. So they missioned to have them clothed, to recognise gender binaries, to have them work – integrating them into their system of mindless accumulation, “civilising” them, with brute force at that. In other words instead of seeing the opportunity to lay bare their souls and bodies, repent under the baptism of the Khoi San they see the Khoi San, their chance at redemption as shameful. Sin had consumed them so much it had become the norm and righteousness the anomaly. I mean, what could be more civilised and holy than dominion over the Earth and everything in it? Especially dominion that does not require being exercised as it is just given? Oh the ignorance, the arrogance, woe unto us! But back to Adam and Eve – the first thing they covered upon realising they were naked was their genitals, thus inventing the nuisance that is underwear. This is why Zodwa Wabantu’s crusade started with not wearing any underwear and is progressing to shedding more and more parts of clothing; the legacy of sin.

Malizo kaMlandzelwa