Johannesburg - Back when it took a community to raise a child, I was playing with a friend at his home. We would naturally be called into the house for lunch, should it be an appropriate time of the month to cook a small extra plate.
On that one day, when I was a boy, in the 1990s it was an appropriate time.
We were called in and we sat on the floor, on top of a rug. I was intrigued by that plastic knitted rug.
I don’t recall the meal, or if I ate for that matter. There were shifts in the township when I was growing up there. Right after it took “a community to raise a child”, we could no longer take chances and eat at other people’s houses for “they will poison you”.
But there was a very grey line in the transition between the community raising a child and poisoning them.
And if the legend and myth are anything to go by, many children who were raised by the community died of poisoning.
No one can confirm if the legend morphed to the myth with the dawn of the millennium or prior. But it has been bad since.
You don’t even need to eat food to meet your demise, family puts you in a life or funeral cover and kills you instead, these days.
But I was intrigued by that plastic knitted rug when I was kneeling on it, palms down, at my friends’ house. It felt soft on my knees and was smooth to the touch. I rubbed my hands on it. It was true to the touch, it felt no different to the bucket full of Shoprite shopping bags it looked like.
I imagined the journey the shopping bags had made; trolleys only take you outside of a shop, and taxis don’t drop you off at your house, this is how we learned that a heavy bag full of groceries will bruise phalanges in your hand – you have never felt a persistent paper cut on four fingers until you walk a plastic bag home.
I imagined the food these bags carried to tables; the hands that dug in and the tummies that were filled. It was a long trip to the floor of my friend’s house.
I wonder if these bags knew what beauty they could create. But I guess that ponder is synonymous with explaining metamorphosis to a caterpillar.
I was kneeling on that plastic knitted rug, a tapestry handwoven and strategically placed aside a coal stove oven. A moulded mosaic of yellow and red. It put the icy coldness of the cement floor at bay. On that one day, I learned the warmth to the heart that bright colours could bring.
In every thinking society, there will always be more than one school of thought. The topic of vaccination in South Africa is no exception; there are those that are vaccinated, those that are not, and those who will not.
The issue is that those who will not, are pondering if the vaccine will “raise the child” or “poison it”.