PurplePretoria

The girls who once updated us with beauty routines and hair regimens have been absent on YouTube for years. When they come back, they all have a different mission- most if not all, have adopted a new Source. They don’t talk about only hair and products anymore. Some tell us of things to come and others talk about what it means to feel like losing, while gaining every thing they once wished to have; the unconditional [yet overwhelming attachment] love of babies and the complex dynamics of companionship. The conversations are about changing careers, getting help, needing help, buying food, storing food, cooking, as they speak, in, what was once a serene minimalist background, now filled with screaming curious children.

For me, many days look the same, except I awake with less energy from the day before, determined to carry on even more tasks. Awake but more tired, the children with more strength and excitement and even when it finally feels silent, just one more question, and one more question.

… So, it’s not just me, who might have sleepwalked these past years and is constantly accosted with the anxiety of needing to ‘catch up’. I always knew, that motherhood is one of those passages you go down where you can never find your [former] ‘self’ again. How could you, when in your body you carried both heart and soul. Two souls inside one body. How could you ever be the same again?

@amk

I have been caught up in the World Cup Football series. I found that I had a lot of love to give to any team that played on the fringes of love, the underdog. When Congo made it past their first match, I found myself dancing Lingala to the screen with pride. “Mummy’s best team is Congo.” All that the world knew about Congo before was Ebola. Supposedly, the wild bush meat they had been eating for generations, yet again, turned into dis-ease and there were efforts in the media to spread a Congo-phobia in order to send a handful of humanitarian aid using a long stick and keep them away from the rest of the world. With Hanta virus, the people on the cruise ship had been released without detail of race or ethnicity. It was just a disease, just a cruise ship, but Ebola, had become a people.

As the teams became fewer, the media’s sob story of underprivileged, poverty stricken Cape Verde’s Vozinha having been well wrung out- the celebrity superstar culture searched for bigger candidates pitting individuals against individuals rather than discussing matches as being between nations. It was Haaland versus Mbappe, Christiano, Messi, Kane and then Bellingham. They had also mistakenly fixed their attention to a USA grown Folarin Balogun twisting the rules so that they too would join in an Americanised Norway kind of patriotic dance, but patriotism is not [supposed to be] skin deep and also Balogun would need an entire team to play, a team that included an efficient goal keeper.

When France lost yesterday, it was crashing, in a football kind of way. Kylian Mbappe predicted, with historical backing I believe, that they would be received gloriously if they had won but trashed when they lost. No sooner had he finished his press conference than the hypotheses began. One newspaper in New York has a headline saying France was ‘totally outclassed’ by Spain and this was apparently ‘no accident’. The racial undertones of this are appalling and not just painful. In the days leading up to the match, the France team had been bullied and picked on for not being the right colour for their country. All was fair and would be kindly forgotten, only if they would bring the trophy home; but the France team had more to prove than the average team. When they were at the top, they were described as an ‘exceptionally strong squad currently at the top of FIFA rankings’. When they were failed to enter the final, their citizenship, their ethnicity will be more in question using the tongue in cheek- ‘class’ and success as an ‘accident’.

Some African teams in the World Cup had been described as playing ‘wild’ football, some players described as just being ‘strong’ physically in direct juxtaposition to being tactical or intelligent. Their strength viewed and discussed as a threat and a limited use weapon as in the case of Lukaku for Belgium and yet, in Haaland for Norway, magnified as a statue of Viking strength and power, and even displayed on Fox Sports with Haaland on a throne wearing Viking horns.

France, a team with the most African-descended players, under a policy which allows footballers to play by citizenship and not descent, which of course France, Europe and now America has happily and successfully exploited, are the hired help. When they lose, it’s not a country’s loss, it’s not the coach, it’s not a normal unpredictable football clash of giants, it’s a class issue, a race issue. Paraguay’s mayor was loud, the Spanish Prime Minister was formal. America’s way? Psychological drain through a cobweb of properly misstated issues.

@amk

Power is an intoxicating thing.

One of the few times I have had an encounter with power, just a brush of it, was in a mock court session at an Advocates training I happened to gain access to [with much controversy and alarm behind the scenes]. I was suddenly at the Commercial Court with access to the bench that the trajectory of my life had withheld from me, cross-examining the defendant in a matrimony cum succession cum land dispute. I went from gathering my notes at the table, with determined focus but recovering frailty straight to attack. The faux witness flinched, my cynical emphasis on her use of the title ‘wife’ as I sought to disqualify her from the position that would grant her access to the property under contention by another ‘wife’ struck a little too deep. I recovered quickly, but how far I had gone in a moment never left my mind.

Now that was not a real dispute, but I have been in the heat of one before, where the scales were falling rapidly* like a sinking Titanic*. Quizzically with a name that means power, I have, after a brief* political career in my childhood found myself hiding, in the shadows of every institution I have happened to exist within. That is, only with the exception of my time in a small central African Republic, which should have been a place of missing, of disappearing.

Power, upon which some have fashioned a creed, a game of stakes and control, the darkest of it, played behind a mask, hiding behind the principle of laissez faire, where you can throw lives and livelihood away into prison, at your beck and call, guns shoot and make disappear, public services go on and off like a light switch and you can set a fiery lid on the mouths and brains of an entire nation? How easy is it to step on a caterpillar just for fun?

Who is someone when they are no longer relevant to you? How do you treat those who now seem like a liability, a hump to your social ladder on your climb to the top? Is it lack or riches that expose true character? Does it matter at what point you joined the movement? In the bush or in the white house? Is it when you share a bodaboda or when you have the house? The jury is still out.

I wonder if maybe, feeling lost is a somewhat a struggle for relevance. Is expression of identity, dignity and dignity, power? Who gives us our relevance, our significance?

I wonder how with all the power that God has, he simply did not just make us to do His will. It takes a tremendous amount of love to stabilise power.

Whoever gives us our significance has the power to control us and might have the power to destroy us.

… sometimes, not often, i change the wording of something I’ve written, words are very important to me, to all of us, I would like to use them in the best way I can…*.

‘We’ll Work For Love’- France [France v Spain 2026]

Zero Sum Game