A man at the heart of a crucial election had died and the country did not quite know how to react to his demise. I had expected some outrage, from all sectors of society but all I registered was a privatisation of grief. As though people wanted to be alone in their pain aware of the futility of making a spectacle over it.
Apathy has become a way of being. The lack of enthusiasm I witnessed in my village is a coping mechanism. When you have been disappointed time and again by political leadership, it is sensible to insulate oneself from future trauma using the principle of ‘I don’t care’.
I have seen only a handful of men daring enough to stand up to an overzealous GSU battalion with nothing more than a twig in hand and some rocks stuffed in their back pockets. Some guys in campus seemed to get an adrenaline kick out of it possibly an after-effect of inhaling too much tear gas.