"NOKUTHULA": TRAGEDY IN THE AGE OF GAEITY By Asithandile Gxumisa

Of yore was the Age when the hearts of Men could still seize the dark solemnity in the tragedy that always haunts the affairs of their fallen world. Gaiety, in our 'enlightened' era, bestrides this globe of the machine and skyscraper - so much so that the sacred and the tragic have their price in the all-embracing marketplace. Once more some impressive reporting from Cutting Edge, an investigative programme from the national broadcaster, shed light on the veiled ailments that gnaw at the delicate fabric of our Republic. 

The show brought to the national attention the heart-rending tale of a Port Elizabethan mother of six, Nokuthula Mjekula. Miss Mjekula had left her home in 2016 for Cape Town in a rage over apparent neglect by her family. It would be almost four years before her family and her unlucky children would see her anew. Her disappearance stunned her family and a manhunt was launched in order to pinpoint her whereabouts. It was not long before her family was informed by the authorities of a lifeless body of a battered and face-bruised woman in Miss Mjekula's home area. To cut a long story short, after many painful trips to the mortuary Miss Mjekula's mother eventually and erroneously identified this body as her daughter and buried it.

Her unexpected return from the Cape - now dubbed by many as her "resurrection from the dead" - drew her family into a maelstrom of horror, grief and trauma. Out of ghostly fear one of her children could not even look at her. Her elderly mother was a piteous image of heart-wrenching shock, pouring tears and wailing screams. I thought it was fairly uncharitable on the part of Cutting Edge to expose their viewers to this image of raw and terrible emotion. Not so the greater part of my countrymen. If ever there was such a thing called tragedy, this tale from the Windy City was it. And in it - especially the harrowing wailing of the elderly lady - my compatriots saw a spectacle of entertainment to be consumed democratically on the social media platforms.

One local 'musician', a moderner of the noisome city, resolved to capitalize on this tale by creating a song with one catchy line insensitively mimicking the cry of Miss Mjekula's mother. The democratic mob has since gobbled up this piece of unimaginative and crude mediocrity as is their wont. In response to criticism from a few level-headed men our 'musician' shamelessly said that for every retweet of his uninspired song he would give R1 to the Mjekula family. What a way to give back! Of course, we are meant to simply forget that this piece of crude charlatanism was purely an incident of self-aggrandizement. I wonder if he actually thought about the solemn facets of all this story: a grave of a dead woman whose tombstone shall soon be nameless, a devastated elderly mother, traumatized children and a community in shock.

It was not so long ago when in my childhood we were warned by our elders against pointing with our fingers at the mounds of the dead. A living solemnity and sacredness of sort lay upon the resting-places of our forebears, we were told, and that the chastisement for thus pointing at them would be incurable crooked fingers. "We live by myth" thus wrote the great American thinker Russell Kirk to a 20th century world that busied itself about him like a bevy of bees pridefully exploding all such unscientific mysteries as were associated with the "fantasies of the childhood days of our species". That mythless world - unheeding the warnings of far-seeing men like Mr Kirk - has since produced in the so-called civilized Occident confused women who celebratorily fist-pump their way to abortion clinics and bored men who disfigure Jewish graves with Nazi symbols.

Anyway, we must, as far as I can recall, have happily started pointing at the mounds as quickly as we found out that the promised chastisement was not forthcoming. We were children and we knew no better. Still without the myth I do not believe that I should today hold this truth so tight to my bosom: that some things in life have such hallowed significance that childish gaiety is no proper manner to carry ourselves towards them. In this way did elegant myths of this kind strengthen the cranky moral compass that kept the eyes of this wretched sinner fixed upon True North.

Maybe the world needs to be reminded anew of the power of the myth, as Mr Kirk once wisely wrote in his beautiful essay The Dissolution Of Liberalism, as a steady ladder helping us up in our desperate climb to reach for that lofty pinnacle of virtue. Perchance only then will solemnity return to the affairs of Men and tragedy be an occasion that moves us to reflect soberly on our moral plight as a fallen and sin-sick species. Is there any hope for a world so enamoured of an imagination-blunting scientism and a quenchless thirst for entertainment? Unto hope we cannot but cling tightly for the sake of our sisters and brothers here below, or, as Emily Bronte once wrote, we shall all be "doomed to be Hell-like in heart and misery". Let us esteem what is good, revere what is sacred, reflect soberly on the tragic or all become clowns dancing mindlessly into the unknown. The choice before us is starkly clear.