My School Days

DEATH – by a thousand cuts!! January 5, 2010

Welcome to 2010! If you weren’t aware, I’d like to bring it to your attention that the Bruin-ou.com website has been pulled from cyberspace and will only be returning if and when we can come up with a workable, viable, sustainable model to ensure its continued survival and growth. This could be as soon as 3 months, or maybe even never…time will tell. We’re trying as hard as possible to keep all options open at this stage as the pain of turning our back on 9 years of blood, sweat and tears is proving too difficult to bear. For the record though, I’d like to accept much of the responsibility in Bruin-ou.com’s downfall, however, I also believe that Bruin-ou.com fell victim to a sinister form of “death by a thousand cuts”. “Death by a thousand cuts” refers to an ancient Chinese torture method where a condemned person would have their body slowly dismembered, piece by painful piece, until their eventual death. Bruin-ou.com was victim to a similar slow death brought on by some foolish management and technical decisions and the cumulative effect of people’s barrage of hurtful words; the spreading of misinformation and lies about the website and what it stood for; a reluctance for people to join the community and despite healthy traffic levels, a pariah-like avoidance by advertisers. In short, Bruin-ou.com died because it was “too Coloured”…too emblematic of the stereotype, too representative of the reality, too honest a reflection and too close to the bone for many to bear. Bruin-ou.com, as a fairly democratic representation and expression of the broader Coloured community, I think that ultimately we all contributed to its death in both word and deed (yoh…that almost sounds like church). It’s far easier to talk the talk than to walk the walk and so, while many people harboured revolutionary ambitions for the community, the old foes of complacency, indifference, apathy and an in-built aversion to considering the well-being of the communal collective before the “self” contributed to the demise of our digital community. After all, why would Bruin-ou.com, a digital community suffer any different fate to our real communities upon which we’ve already turned our backs in droves? What does the closing of Bruin-ou.com say for any other Coloured endeavours? Unfortunately, the message this sends out to the South African public is that if the Coloured community is incapable of supporting a free, public-service online community which carried content solely for that community’s benefit…how on earth can this community sustain its own national radio station? The reality of the matter is that the closure of Bruin-ou.com, whether you care to admit it or not, is a major setback for any ambitions which we may’ve had of lobbying the SABC for a national radio station aimed at our communities. A few years back, a very good friend of mine (who happens to be a wit-ou) and I were discussing this whole “Coloured” issue. I was trying to figure out what the biggest problem facing the Coloured community was and he was indulging me, you know, like how most South Africans who’re morbidly fascinated by our suicidal community would indulge you. He answered my question for me with two words; he said that the biggest problem facing Coloured people was: “Coloured people”! It shocked me how simple, how obvious and how true his answer was…still, I told him he was talking kuk and proceeded to blame God, the Devil, dop, drugs, apartheid, the USA and everything else I could to prevent me, as a member of this very community, from shouldering any responsibility. The fact remains though, we as Coloured people, remain our own worst enemies. To this day, we readily go out of our way to give credence to the popular belief that the community is incapable and unwilling to sort itself out. When one considers that the Coloured population is almost 4 times that of the Indian population in South Africa, a cursory comparison of who’s getting it right shows that we’re waaaaay behind, too busy eagerly and wilfully “cutting-off-our-heads-to-spite-our-face” to see what’s up! To be honest, for the first time in my life, it galls me that I’m a Coloured, that this is my lot and these are my people. I once hated Coloured denialists (Coloured people who deny the Coloured identity) with every aching fibre of my being. I can now see how it is possible that the most ardent Coloured denialists today, were once people who agitated for change in their communities, only to have their communities turn on them in a cannibalistic frenzy in order to maintain the status-quo and to stop the uncomfortable, unfamiliar rocking of the boat. I’ve seen many would-be-leaders in the community rise up and then get savagely pilloried and torn apart…and for what? Who benefits in the end? I guess some of us are pretty hell-bent on keeping our place as the baas’ pet, the subservient, docile, neutered, emasculated “yes baas, no baas, 3 bags full baas” spineless idiots that we’ve come to be. Yep, Coloured people, we eat our own…and despite what you’ve hallucinated, we evidently don’t give a phuck about our young and their futures cos we’re too busy amusing ourselves to death. We certainly do not care enough for us to want to do anything to make it any better for those not in our immediate family or lay anything even resembling a foundation from which lesser fortunate members of our community can build. “Bruin-ous are the main-ous”…WOOHOO! (what a crock of sh!t!) Am I bitter? Hell yeah! Am I angry? Like you wouldn’t believe! But at 30 years old, I’ve learnt to accept that which I cannot change. For me, in matters of my community, the journey from passionate dreamer to jaded, disillusioned cynic is complete. As I look back at the past 9 years, the road on this journey is littered with the rotting corpses of good intentions. At least I got to meet some of you as we travelled parts of that road together…I guess now it’s time for me to find a new road and begin a new journey with whatever embers of passion I can salvage from the new year’s soul-purging inferno. As the outie behind the Bruin-ou.com ship that was, I’ll be making like a Roman legionnaire by gooing my 3-star knife into the ground (blade facing up) and falling onto it so that I can writhe to death in fits of convulsive frustration and soul-crushing defeat. So long…may our paths cross on another journey. Sincerely, Charles “Once-I-even-had-coloured-dreams” Ash