As I write this, I am feeling particularly acheful.

My wife was sharing with me how her university lecturer tore into her paper with a red pen and wrote “you will never amount to anything”. What kind of a mindset does that to an 18 year old, purely on the basis of her skin colour?

I then remembered how my auditing lecturer brazenly told us that as second language English speakers we would likely not pass his course. 

And these are just the tip of the iceberg incidences where millions of South African young people were intentionally and systematically inflicted with grave cognitive wounds during our fledgling stages of our formation.

I started wondering how can a people be subjugated, demeaned, ridiculed and derided for over 500 years, purely on the basis of their skin shade. How many destinies of innumerable generations have been shattered and shackled this way? 

Even after our fictitious independence from our colonial masters, we continue to subject ourselves to a corrupt self-serving ruling elite, with shockingly few exceptions that have little or no capability to restore some semblance of dignity to our asphyxiating identity.

Even when I try to pray about this, a seemingly impenetrable wall of over 500 years of indignity coupled with what I perceive as lack of God’s urgency in this regard, just stands in the way. 

Not that I doubt God, for I have incontrovertible testimonies of His many interventions in my life, but I am at loss as to why my individual experience has empirically not been manifest on a people who have undergone such fierce indignity for so long, with no signs of respite whatsoever.

How long oh God, how long?