A story. A local hustler visits some people and steals their cellphone. Then he goes to town, to a well-known bar that he frequents, and starts flashing the phone around, trying to sell it. The people he robbed appear, enter the bar and confront him.
'Where's the phone?'
'Ah, let's talk outside,' he says. No sooner are they outside than the people (two men and a woman) begin to work him over. They do a thorough job. Then they reverse their car, a Merc, to the kerb, pulp the guy some more, and bundle him into the car boot before driving off into the night.
Fair enough, I say, the guy's a well-known slimeball, and Swaziland lacks the minimum eighteen months in prison for cellphone theft. The people's justice...

Thoughts today of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and why they succeed in this contemporary world of ours. It is clear that most people's thinking these days is far from clear, that most people find it difficult to think and certainly don't cultivate the art of thinking. Though this might at first seem a common platitude, apt for all times and all places, a moment's reflection reveals that it isn't so. Our age is primarily a visual one, dedicated largely to pleasure. We have learnt to assimilate with the eyes, not to think and reason but receive. This has turned much of our discourse into entertainment and the populace have been seduced by the promise of UNTHINK (cf Orwell's 1984 in conjunction with the deeper darkness of Huxley's Brave New World) which has become a new world language. Bill Gates can obviously think--it is one of his distinguishing traits. What's more he can think logically, like all effective programmers, and this gives him quite literally a head start over most everybody else. It is crisp, Aristotelian logic however. Steve Jobs thinks in a different way: his thinking is lateral, a sideways way of looking at things. Perhaps it might be described as fuzzy logic, but the fact that he can think gives him, like Mr Gates, also an advantage over mere mortals. In schools throughout the kingdom, students pursue UNTHINK, seeking to turn school and home into entertainment centres, complaining that adults are irrelevant, pursuing irrelevant concerns, and that school and home are mostly boring. Boring is one of the keywords of UNTHINK.

Politics still dominates the local news--Mario's sedition trial, the PM's non-apology for ignoring the rule of law, and the recall of Prince David from Taiwan to head the Constitutional Review Committee. This makes a change from last year when at this time the discovery of bodies in forests was spreading fear throughout the kingdom. The general feeling in the streets and the bars (where much talk is generated) is one of vague disquiet, an unease that a lot of things need clarifying and sorting out, but no one item on which to focus.
This is also the time of year when people have very little disposable income (because of school fees and recovering from the christmas season) and shopkeepers have a lean time of it; apart from lack of new spending many fail to keep up their monthly credit payments around this time.

After the sun, the rain/ after the rain, the sun/ this is the way of life, since the world begun--so goes an old harvest hymn that I used to sing as a child. Living here in the country the weather and its relation to our lives is always apparent; there's also more awareness of how animism and fertility cults developed and why our remotest ancestors saw a need for them. The seeds of my ancestors still fertilise my brain and influence my outlook and I wonder, somewhat idly and in an unorganised way, just what that influence is. I feel, when I'm down by the river and watching the dragonflies and hearing the rush and run of the water, that there's something in me, almost behind my consciousness, that wants to say something about an ancestral memory of a place just like this. The feeling is almost tangible--almost, but not quite: it's something I can never grasp even though sometimes I stretch for it.