The Last Hottentot

The Pondos are of Nguni stock and are close cousins to the amaZulu. Both groups migrated together out of Central Africa some six centuries earlier. The Zulus, finally finding enough land and that was not claimed by other Bantu tribes, settled the northern part of Natal and continue to live there today. The Pondos continued southwards with their migration and established themselves several hundred miles further down the Indian Ocean coast. Their southern border runs along the banks of the Kei River. Their western flanks butt up against the slopes and peaks and high plateaus of the Drakensberg where the BaSutu have their sanctuary.

When the Pondos first arrived in the Transkei, the land was not entirely unclaimed. It was sparsely populated by two separate indigenous groups of more primitive Boskopiods. The larger of the two groups were the Khoisan. It is now known that the San are mankind’s original ancestors. Mitochondrial DNA traces all humans alive on the planet today, back to those tiny Bushmen of the Kalahari. The other group, of slightly larger stature and far less in number, called themselves the KhoeKhoe, which translates literally into PeoplePeople. When early Boer settlers first heard the rapid-fire clicks of the KhoeKhoe tongue the Boers thought they were stutterers (Dutch: stotteren) and thus called this group, Hottentots. The name stuck.

The San were hunter/gatherers. The Hottentots were pasturalists, herding cattle. The Boskopoids, both San and Hottentot, are subgroups of mankind found only in Southern Africa. They are anatomically different to other humans. They are steatopygic, able to store enormous amounts of fat in their hugely extended buttocks and, like the desert camels who store the fat in their humps, can live without food and water for extended periods far beyond that of other races. In addition, strangely, Boskopoid women have a small flap of skin partially covering their clitoris, (though I have never heard it mentioned by anybody else) perhaps serving as a protective feminine version of the male foreskin.

The Pondos, though a more advanced culture, where also pastoralists and traded with the peaceful Hottentots, often times taking Hottentot daughters as servants and concubines in exchange for cattle. Eventually, via a gradual process of attrition, Hottentot girls were more willing to climb up the social ladder and become Pondo concubines, rather than mate with their own kind. And so over the generations, the numbers of pure-blooded Hottentots declined to near zero. It is through these concubine mothers, that the Boskpoid click-words that we hear in the Xhosa language today were inherited and became part of their culture. So, in this way, my mother learned to speak some of the surviving words of the extinct Hottentot tongue.

Far away from Pondoland, up in the Highveldt of the Transvaal, where I was born and raised I listened to my mother have a conversation with an wizzened old man with a yellow mongoloid face and gray peppercorn curls, who claimed that he was a Hottentot. They spoke together in a mix of Xhosa and Afrikaans, so I could only grasp half of what was discussed. Later my mother filled me in on the whole story.

At that time our family lived on a plot of farming land belonging to an old Afrikaans widow. She had established a five acre orchard filled with mature deciduous fruit trees. Every year for decades this old Hottentot would pitch up at harvest time, pick the peaches and apricots and plums, load the harvest onto a hand-cart and push it around the neighborhood peddling the fresh fruit for her. He told my mother that fruit-picking employed him all year long. When the grapes were ripe down in the Cape a thousand miles in the south, he made his way there. When the citrus was ripe in the Lowveldt off he would go there. And when the peaches and plums were ripe upon the Highveldt, here he came.

He said that in all those annual migrations across the length and breadth of South Africa for all those decades, engaging in thousands of conversations with the Bantu groups he met in his travels, he had never met another person who claimed to have or knew of anybody who’s blood remained pure Hottentot. Since Bantu women would not marry him, when he was younger he had searched for a Hottentot mate and never found one. He said that he had an older brother and sister who had recently died. In his opinion, after they passed on, he was the last surviving Hottentot left on this good Earth.

In that way, since my mother and the man she spoke with are long dead, I might well be the last European to actually see and hear a real live Hottentot tell his sad tale, before that sub-group of humankind, after millions of years of evolution, became entirely extinct.

Tabula Rasa

n. pl. tab·u·lae ra·sae 

1.

a. The mind before it receives the impressions gained from experience.

b. The unformed, featureless mind in the philosophy of John Locke.

2. A need or an opportunity to start from the beginning.

We are born as empty vessels, the mind is a blank slate, just waiting to be filled with experience. /  David Hume  1745


The Divine Mind

The day will come
when science refutes the philosophy of Hume and Locke
and  recognizes
that the DNA of every new born child
is indelibly imprinted
with the accumulation of every behavioral experience
since the Big Bang
including every Big Bang before the current one

when that day comes
and we stop trying to over-write that vast wealth of divine knowledge
by burying it in textbook indoctrination
and confuse it with scribbles on the blackboards of the school classroom
and no longer choke it to submission behind a desk
and allow it to surface gradually in the budding child consciousness
in the natural playgrounds and challenges of life
before focusing it on academic specialization
the latent creative genius of every child will come to flower
and we
the inheritors of the Divine Mind
will cultivate the home planet
as a Garden of Eden
and a Heaven of Peace

Zen and the Art of Philosophy

The most subtle of all the arts
is that of thought 
it is invisible
with no physical pedestal of display
its value seen only
in retrospect

original thought
is the inspiration of philosophical contemplatives
who spend their lives
fasting devoutly
in the wilderness of the mind
prospecting for meaning
before uncovering true gems
which have no immediate impact
on collective appreciation
yet endure
as no other art can
for eternity

Dual Brain Imperative

Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievement of material ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source.

Albert Einstein

The Industrial Revolution put an abrupt end to over two hundred generations 

of conscientious craftsmanship.  Mass machined manufactured goods replaced the art 

of hand-made goods. That collective occupational move, away from generations of 

traditional home-based occupations to the factory floor and  the corporate tower, 

changed everything.  It changed the way the two sides of the brain worked; 

Which then changed human nature: Which changed family values; Which changed social 

ethics.  First the father, then the mother, was taken from the home and the kids 

were herded into state classrooms.

Where once both the intuitive and analytical sides of the cerebral cortex was 

balanced by the artistic expression and applied mechanics of craft-based occupations,

almost all training became mechanically concentrated on left brain exercises; 

both in the child classroom and on the factory floor. The creative impulses of the 

right brain was left to fend for itself.  

The narrowing of consciousness from the extroverted dimension of infinite artistic 

expressions and the social appreciation that came from it, to the finite world of 

machined conformity, resulted in an introverted emphasis of self-determined 

appreciation and self-centered ambitions. The brain, wired for a wider appreciation

of cosmic awareness, was now being short-circuited and channeled down into a 

ceaseless cycle of analytical self examination.. We will discuss later, the 

evolutionary force that made left brain concentration a developmental imperative. 

In the meantime, over the next three centuries,  as the left brain waxed all 

powerful, right brain intuitive connections with the cosmos waned. Eventually, 

God was thrown out of the classroom. 

The removal of the parents from the home eroded family values.  Mixing of the 

genders on the factory floor and office, led to promiscuity, marital deceit and 

divorce.  The breakdown of the primal social unit, has led to an increasingly 

 heavily policed and society, divided by its own subliminal sense of parental 

guilt. System crash looms.  An evolutionary cycle has ended. 

A return to a dual brain system is necessary

Deja vu

Déjà vu, from French, literally "already seen", is the phenomenon of having the strong sensation that an event or experience currently being experienced had been experienced in the past.
The psychologist Edward B. Titchener in his book 1928 A Textbook of Psychology, explained déjà vu as caused by a person having a brief glimpse of an object or situation, before the brain has completed "constructing" a full conscious perception of the experience. Such a "partial perception" then results in a false sense of familiarity.^[1] The explanation that has mostly been accepted of déjà vu is not that it is an act of "precognition" or "prophecy", but rather that it is an anomaly of memory, giving the false impression that an experience is "being recalled".^[2][3] This explanation is supported by the fact that the sense of "recollection" at the time is strong in most cases, but that the circumstances of the "previous" experience (when, where, and how the earlier experience occurred) are uncertain or believed to be impossible


Here is another thought
we are re-experiencing previous cosmic incarnations
re-visiting the same scene of previous karma

every Big Bang is deja vu
all over again

hmmmm....
seems i had that thought before
eerie....

Social Economics

It is estimated that it costs a family $300,000 to raise a kid to age 21
one would think that such an investment in time and money
should be reinvested in the family fortune
and create a nation of wealthy family estates
but instead
kids are encouraged to get out of the home
and gamble with their family inheritance on the open market

the odds of them hitting it rich
on the mass production lines
are millions to one
all their work and effort
ends up supporting a few families already at the top of the social pile

yet our kids
like lemmings
tumble over themselves to follow this social fallacy
and spend their lives like the three dumb monkeys
they see no wisdom
hear no wisdom
learn no wisdom
the few pathetic personal experiences they have in life
are repeated ad in finitum
and boil down to nothing substantial
all there hopes and dreams gradually fade to nothing
their failed prodigal gamble
finally focused on winning a state lottery

they die materially and spiritually impoverished
their marriages divorced and homes broken
living in a nation of rickety trailer homes
going steadily downhill into bankruptcy

man and wife

adam and eve
so legends say
never quarreled at all
not even for a day
the simple reason why
is no great feat
neither trespassed
on each others beat
eve gathered fruit
adam hunted for meat
with no feminist taboos
to lead them astray