For as the earth brings forth its bud, As the garden causes the things that are sown in it to spring forth, So the Lord GOD will cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all the nations. —Isaiah 61:11
When the President of the United States chose to mock and caricature a selected list of federally funded projects and their benefactors I grieved.
-Remember the funny joke Trump told about the dumb funding for the place nobody has even heard of, giving away “eight million dollars to promote LGBTQI+ in the African nation of Lesotho that nobody has even heard of?
-No, I don’t remember anything funny from that speech. (if only we had a word to describe erasing and dehumanizing Africans?)
-It was soooooo funny–the whole half of the room was laughing and the frat bros behind him snorting and snickering were CRACKING ME UP!
-Sounds hilarious. (If only we had a name for the ideology of white men enforcing a view of some people as forgettable, invisible, as less than human.
FACTS.
The federal funding that fell to Elon’s axe was for HIV prevention in the Kingdom of Lesotho which has “the second-highest level of HIV infection of the world, with almost one in four adults HIV-positive.” Cool cool cool cool cool cool.
Lesotho is literally encircled by South Africa.
On October 4, 1966, the Kingdom of Lesotho attained full independence, from South Africa.
Lesotho became a sanctuary destination for “Exiles who sought political asylum from the regime's racist policies and its total repression of human rights activists, after June 1976, arrived in Lesotho in droves.”
Elon Musk is South African.
One of Trump's executive orders is for the US to be a sanctuary destination for South African whites fleeing racist oppression. Addressing Egregious Actions of The Republic of South Africa – The White House
I’ve Heard of Lesotho
First, I took a deep dive into South African literature in college, and my first read was the one of the greatest novels of in all of Africa: Chaka (1925), a narrative written in Sesotho and based on the life of the Zulu king Shaka, who lived from 1788 to 1828. Chaka was written by Thomas Mofolo, the first great author of modern African literature.
I learned about South Africa’s history, a story of colonialism and race-based oppression, and it was the first time I truly confronted the racialized history of the United States. By facing the realities of Apartheid, I was able to face the truth of my own county.
Second, was the time I and another colleague spent a day with Ms. Polo Chabone, a Hubert Humprey Fellow, and the Director of the Human Rights Unit at the Ministry of Justice and Law in the Kingdom of Lesotho who was visiting in partnership with the US Department of State and Duke University's Institute of International Education. Together, we toured Historic Stagville in North Carolina. She was interested in how the US was addressing human trafficking.
In 1860, Stagville was part of a vast plantation where the Bennehan and Cameron families enslaved over nine hundred people. Once one of the largest plantations in North Carolina, Historic Stagville now inspires new understanding about the history of slavery through preservation, interpretation, research, genealogy, and descendant engagement. The historic site preserves a Bennehan family house (c. 1799), the Horton Grove slave quarters (c. 1851), a barn (1860), and 165 acres of land. Source here.
We talked as we walked through the “big house,” slave quarters, and an extraordinary barn engineered and built by enslaved people, and discussed human trafficking in the context of our tour.
I cannot adequately describe the confluence of conscience, history, and friendship in those hours. To me, Lesotho became very near.
Trump counted on the punchline. He counted on our ignorance of our world. He counted on our lust for lost money and our shared contempt of an unknown African kingdom. At least from half of the room.
Artists United Against Apartheid - Sun City
