‘What we call land is an element of nature inextricably interwoven with man's institutions. To isolate it and form a market for it was perhaps the weirdest of all the undertakings of our ancestors.’ – Karl Polanyi

The darkness drops, the trees outside do their jive, swaying this way and the other. The night breeze whisks about the lush fields of our lands. Africa comes alive at night, when her children lie sleep.

They will rise again at daybreak. Before sunrise they walk and walk, the women shoot their way to the street markets, the migrant miners are bused through the city centers into the bottomless pit of the periphery. This is their fate; to toil under the relentless midday sun. In daylight the heart of Africa dies a little, her children labour under the suffocating tentacles of a greedy capitalist system. The children of Africa are foreigners at home.

They were joyful, basking under the sun and they would look up at it when it travelled to set in the west. The stars would greet their buoyant eyes, and it was all good and pleasing. Assailants came when the people were yet to imagine that some day they would have to console themselves to the fact that some among the human race liked to appropriate for themselves the entitlement to displace others from their natural habitat.

Long, long ago our people ordered their lives in ways that suited their human needs, using their indigenous knowledge systems. The Basotho started their year in Phato, the August month in the Gregorian calendar. Phato ya makwetle, kgwedi ya lerole, a dusty time in Southern Africa. The tail-end of winter, when dust blows on your face and the wind carries dried leaves falling from the trees of the field, whistling softly as they travel with the wind. Everything dries up and the cattle have already done their rounds in the fields eating abandoned maize-stalks. Children don’t like this season a lot, the skin moisture dries quicker and little stones and leaves cut your skin. Phato initiates the year. It is akin to a woman’s labour period, our world groans in pain to birth something new. The winds blow, sweeping the earth for its rebirth. It is nature’s lesson ingrained in the Basotho, to prepare a way for blessings to come forth.

Spring comes, warm on the heels of the winter season. The sun rises early, and it is already warmer. The birds sing in the morning, roused by the quiet air that fills our common world to ease the labours of the people as they till their lands. They begin to plough and hold ceremonies to pray for rain and fertility in the soil. The fields turn colour, the dust is gone. They welcome the first rains of the year. Showers from the heavens restore the earth, fields take a dense and rich, darker colour from the fresh drizzles. In the lushness of soil, the seeds sown during the ploughing season will germinate and grow. Nature is thus reborn.

Everything is made anew and people celebrate. As the trees sprout and blossom, people hold the first ceremonies and gatherings for the year. In Tshitwe, the December month, the new moon comes, which enjoins communities to prepare for the first fruits. They give thanks and revel in the hot summer months. They pluck ripe, voluptuous mangoes, they cut the sugar canes, they consume the nutrient potassium of the bananas, of the red and the white grape, and the vitamin of the pineapples.

In these lands of eloquent and theatrical mountains, these lands of gaunt and exuberant hillocks, these lands of the sea and the shark, the lands of the mealie-stalk, the lands of the diamond and gold, our people lived. They lived full lives. The still, quiet air of the summer filled them and refined the aura of their time.

The days go by and autumn visits them. The vegetation still retains some of its emerald colour. Now the evenings are good, there’s a chill in the air, it commands that the people make a fire. Smoke billows up the clouds, each homestead donates its share to the smog that fills. The mist comes together like a murmuration of starlings, whirling together in fluid formation and darting through the sky, before landing to sleep on the valley.

In the distance you hear the chatter and laughter of children, it fizzles out and the birds have stopped chirping. The light of the fires from the front of the homesteads is more visible now, earth is flushed with the glow of sunset. The stars sprinkle the clouds. Tonight, the people will rest well. There’s little to do in the fields.

Around the fire children will be dazzled with folktales of mythic proportions, they will learn about their heritage; the origins of their clans and clan names, proverbs, riddles, and grammar games. The elders will seize this opportunity to build a treasure trove for language. Language that flourishes with wise and humorous idiomatic expressions. In the autumn evening the children indulge their listening sense. In the autumn afternoon they fly their kites up above the sky. A child will run ahead of his kite, its string lodged in his small tightly clasped palm while it pierces through the skies. It is his own grand staircase to the stars.

In the autumn evening though, the child will visit the ancient lands of his people, transported by the stories told by the elders around the body-warming fire.

There was once a woman named Mmamotlalekgotso - the one who brings peace. She had skin brown as mahogany oak, she was of a small frame, with strong defining facial features. She was a respected woman. Mmamotlalekgotso was known for her wise counsel. In the village of Moepong – the land of the diggers – once an unidentified disease, which was rumoured to be air-borne, afflicted the village, especially children, for a protracted period. Infants and toddlers fell sick in large numbers, and desperate parents would visit healers from elsewhere. The healers fed children intense, bitter-sweet concoctions. They injected children liquid spirits from unknown laboratories. Some withstood the foreign medicinal concoctions, and some died with anemia and from weakness.

The village chief visited Mmamotlalekgotso’s homestead to seek advice. Mmamotlalekgotso was regal, wearing her shweshe pattern gown with shades of yellow. She exchanged pleasantries with the chief before she led him to sit under the apricot tree where they could speak privately, away from the chief’s stewards. Mmamotlalekgotso advised the king to convene a special lekgotla – an assembly meeting of the village – for the king to address the turbulence, as animals were also succumbing under strain from the strange virus. Mmamotlalekgotso pointed out to the king that the people have become divided in how they lead their lives, some had adopted strange methods of cultivation, others traded with strangers and planted foreign plants without consultation and this tampered with the village vegetation. Something foul clogged the air and the people were thrown off balance. Mmamotlalekgotso spoke in idioms, she ended by saying to the chief ‘letshwele le beta poho, ke bolela hore kopano ke matla’ – the people’s consensus and unity of thought will result in their collective wish for success.

During the lekgotla the chief emphatically pleaded with the people to return to their ways, to unite, to cease eating food dumped from foreign places, food produced and processed without regulations and consultations, he pleaded that they return to child rearing as they knew it, to feed children the nutrients of the produce of their land and stop injecting them liquids they do not know. The chief finished his address to the people with Mmamotlalekgotso’s dictum ‘kopano ke matla!’ The people shouted it back in unison and each returned to their homestead with a sense of collective purpose.

Observing the directives of the chief, the people returned to their ways. Again the darkness dropped, the trees outside performed their jive, swaying that way and the other. At daybreak they would rise and track on foot to make their way to the fields. They prepared their foods with fresh water from their wells, pounded fresh mealies, plucked the freshest spinach from the field and they ate clean.

The children and the animals regained their strength. The wealth of the village was restored and the lands were once again bountiful. The people were one with nature. They cultivated nature’s gifts more than they exploited. Their lives were balanced. They ate well, their air was fresh and their milieu was guided by the values of Botho, the world outlook known as Ubuntu – I am because you are. In their hearts they knew that life must be lived - in the land of their birth they drank, they ate, and they created knowledge systems. Their arts were thriving, their knowledge of the stars guided them to order the course of human life in accordance with the changing seasons that define the features of the earth.

In his longer poems book: ‘Third World Express, Come and Hope with Me’, South African Poet Laureate Mongane Wally Serote admonishes us ‘to say we must return to dream’ and that ‘we must return like the sun and the moon…

but since we are human

we must return to claim change

into education and the open world’

We cannot be foreigners at home. We must return. We must return to restore Africa’s self-identity, her heritage, her culture and shared values. In these lands of the eloquent and theatrical mountains, of the mealie-stalks, of diamond and gold, we must raise a people who will guide the course of human progress based on the knowledge systems of those who came before us. Those who said life must be lived, those who reared children to cultivate and exploit nature’s gifts for sustenance, for development and the ecological health of the earth.

We must return, and we must return with haste. We must merge current formal education with our indigenous knowledge systems, for the earth does not breathe through hypothetical and theoretical texts but by a thorough comprehension of the world’s needs and practical application in solving those needs. Let us cease now importing processed products and curricula without assessing their origins and place in our lives. Let us cease the export of our raw produce when we are yet to feed our own. Let the children of Africa learn about their heritage in schools, let them learn how to observe the ploughing season, for no one shall hunger in the land of the mango, in the land of the banana, of the pineapple, of the sea and its fish.

Written by Mohau Bosiu, thought leader and communication alumnus of the Tshwane University of Technology