Zenji – Page 4 – PurplePretoria

Five minutes into the chilling rendition of the stone cold world of power in Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of power, just like I had with a few minutes into his Laws of Seduction, I could hear the blood running out of my heart. The entire premise on which I have based my world view beginning to crumble into shards of glass. So I paused the DVD in the same way I had closed the book that morning in the bookshop.

The ‘game’ of power is nothing personal. It is not personal, and that’s what makes it so dangerous.

Below are the 22 Laws of Power applied circa 1400 to 2019 to subdue an entire race.

Law 1

Attack the foundation of who they are. Use an evolution theory to align the level of human being to the colour farthest away from the ape pigmentation.

Law 2

Obliterate their history.

Law 3

Appropriate what belongs to them. Sing their songs, make them yours. Adorn yourself with bits and pieces of their culture. Make it your own. Do not credit the source.

Law 4

Create a currency over which only you have control. Extinguish all other forms of commodity exchange.

Law 5

Create an artificial scarcity. Destroy their food source. Let every acre of land be used to grow cotton and sugar. Publicly humiliate and destroy the gardens of those who grow food crops. Once the domestic supply is gone, they will need to buy the food they once had in plenty.

Law 6

Tax every hut for good measure. Everyone must need money if only just to pay the Government.

Law 7

Destroy the social structure. Break the village into loose households. Individual needs must supersede communal benefit. Once every man is fighting for himself and his stomach, the community will be half way destroyed.

Law 8

Make their Kings write letters in a language and alphabetic letters that they have never used, inviting you to their Kingdoms. Use the greed you created in Law 7 to make them puppets of your authority. Now their subjects will be at your disposal.

Law 9

Break up the family unit. Import men, women and children as slaves. Rape their women. Make their children your slaves. Let there be a continuous supply of slaves regardless of blood relation even if it means mother and son. Create bantustans separate from townships. Let the men travel far from their homelands to find work. Work them in underground mines until they drop dead or the mines cave in on them.

Law 10

Divide and rule. Make them suspicious of each other. Raise one and subdue the other. Make the long nose a status of foreignness and hierarchy. Give one authority. Make the other his inferior. Make them believe that they are separate and different. They will begin to believe it. The inferior will resent the superior. And the superior will resent the inferior.

Law 11

Give them guns.

Law 12

Create biological weapons of war. Fumigate.

Law 13

Become their saviour. Provide aid. Give them loans they will never repay. Watch as Law 5 and 7 come into play.

Law 14

Make your institutions of study the highest accreditation possible.

Law 15

Stifle their creativity. Submerge their market with cheap second hand clothes and goods.

Law 16

Infiltrate their notion of self. Make them poor imitations of you. Make your language the official language. Make them change their names. Do not baptize anyone who does not have your name. Ask for a baptism card when they enroll for school. Abolish the playing of drums and other traditional instruments in churches. Call them evil. Give them keyboards instead.

Law 17

Make ‘evil’ every culturally distinctive practice. Herbs. Medicine. Songs. Do not alert them to the gods of Greek mythology. Those are ancient literature, almost sacred, but not evil.

Law 18

Make them hate themselves. Make their hair informal unless they replace it with goat’s hair or straighten it to look our own. Every time a curly tuft of hair grows from the inside of their head, they will feel deep shame and in this way even beauty shall be defined by what they do not look like.

Law 19

Create separate territories where they was once one. Put it on the map. Overthrow the dictators who dare to question you. Let them know that you created the Republics over which they rule and you alone pull the strings.

Law 20

Watch them descend into anarchy. You will have proved your hypothesis in Law 1. They are of a lower human origin, closest to animals.

Law 21

Make your own mass atrocities look like a worldwide war of higher moral latitude. Give your soldiers medals for bombing entire cities. Publicly discredit those who have carried out known genocides of people. It is no longer popular to put people of the same colour in gas ovens. You all must be seen to be one.

Law 22

Make your enemies their enemies. Make them fight wars on your behalf.

Like I said, the laws of power as told by Greene, and adapted by myself to a fictional scenario are not personal. They are manipulative, cold and unrelenting. The jaws of those who subscribe to them are always open but never satisfied. They believe them to be the only way. The law of the jungle. Eat or be eaten.

Give me a Dirty Kampala. Like a dirty Martini. I’m not sure what the ingredients of a dirty Martini are, but I know what a dirty Kampala would have; vodka with tiny bits of maize cobs thrown out of people’s windows and buveera in the drainage.

Walking during the lock down was great, [for a few minutes], therapeutic. The air was breezy and the sun was soft against the skin. The roads were empty and we could walk in them…And then black fumes and dust filled our lungs and speeding cars almost knocked us off the roads. Along the Northern bypass on the Naalya highway, we bumped into heaps of rotting clothes and polythene bags which would never decompose in our lifetime. The drainage was filled with more soil, more garbage and more polythene bags. Depending on where you were walking, some places had done a little better for themselves, but most of the city nevertheless is still covered in garbage and cars that should have been taken off the road more than 10 years ago.

Kampala is after all, a car and boda boda city. In one of his lock down addresses, the President had compared boda boda activities to drinking tea with a spoon. I call it Complete Utter Chaos.

It is interesting that even though the streets are littered with garbage every few metres in most places, we still met a few KCCA women sweeping dust into grass. Glove-less, mask-less they sweep the dust into drains and ignore the polythene and most of the garbage inside.

Polythene is one of the biggest contributors to soil toxicity and when burnt also pollutes the air but for most of us, it is an essential part of our households. It is paramount to market day and worse still, even used by some to cover their cooking.

The pollutants of Kampala include a wide array of specimen – the slum dweller whose lack of access to waste disposal infrastructure necessitates the use of kaveera as a toilet and – the occupants of an that car who imagine that some invisible someone or the rain will clean up after them. They throw a maize cob outside the car window and two months later when they see it rotting in a pile of rubbish on a street outside their house, shake their head in disapproval and wish they could to move to Europe, because it’s clean.

Many of the pollutants in our atmosphere have also infiltrated our daily lives by highly targeted marketing and design in such a way that makes us believe that they are an indispensable part of normal life. They swim in our food as pesticides, they vibrate in non-stick pans as PTFEs, they are in our bathroom products as sulfates, they are in polythene bags as Ethylene oxide, they are in our water and plastic water bottles as micro plastics, and they are in our bodies activating things that should not be activated.

Laws about abolishing kaveera came and were protested by companies which manufacture kaveera, and now laws about boda bodas are being put in place and they are being protested by those who never think beyond the status quo.

I imagine that a clean city, one with pedestrian pavements and organised transport could change our lives.

Maybe, one Monday morning, I will catch a bus going to the city. The bus would leave every thirty minutes. It would be a clean bus, in which no one puts their armpits in my face because only the proper number of passengers would be allowed and there would be no boda boda whizzing in and out of traffic to drop a passenger on their bum in the middle of the road. Or maybe, someone among us, in our time, will think up an even better way to recreate the city- for the love of walking, clean air and good health.

Category: Zenji

The Laws of Power

Dirty Kampala