I do not take this invitation lightly because I understand what it means to be given audience in this fashion. I should wish to begin this address by thanking the National SRC, particularly comrade Lucas Mamabolo, for approaching me to present this year’s key-note address. Members of the organising committee of this year’s Postgraduate Indaba,įellow students, comrades and friends, members of Unisa family, President of the National SRC, comrade Wadzanai Mazhetese, and your leadership collective, Principal and Vice-Chancellor, Professor Mandlenkosi Makhanya, Program director, Professor Lindiwe Zungu, Theme: Accelerating online research support of postgraduate studies in the wake of Sustainable Development Goals By the look of things, this place will give me my PhD sooner rather than later. When you club this democratic reality together with loneliness, it is produces an eventuality that is probably very good for me = the autonomy allows me freedom to focus on PhD studies, the loneliness creates a gap that can only be filled by the PhD thing too. This is a breeze of fresh air, considering the draconian senseless micro-managing that I was once subjected to at Unisa. The biggest highlight about the workspace is its democracy - one is allowed time and autonomy to take charge of their work as they deem fit. Lonely because siblings and friends are all 550kms away. The other is new too - she keeps to herself, so I do not really bother her. Okay - I am livid because of a personal altercation. The one is an unrepentant crook - with some unstudied bouts of peeving psychotic behaviour.
Lonely because I only have two black colleagues. Lonely because of the annoying episode in my former lovelife. My neighbours don’t greet me - it has been just over 6 months.
Lonely because I rent a two bedroom house in a strictly-white Afrikaaner suburb. The strangeness is embedded in its unpredictable weather patterns, in its people too - whites are brazen in their white nonsense (racism), blacks are not kind - they hardly greet or receive strangers warmly. The place is incredibly strange and lonely. Well, all of these are intuitive and largely observations from the outside. As soon as the reason is discovered, the mission is assumed and fulfilled, I’ll probably shift to a different space. I am happy to be here - I am here for a reason, I may not know what it is yet, but my entire life story suggests that nothing is ever random. As the old adage goes: “history lends perspective”, and history is the present - stretched and elongated.Ĭebisa asked me a few days ago, “between lecturing at Unisa and UFS, where would you rather be?” (I hate that everything has to be reduced to a comparison) It is not a complex question to respond to. I reckon that I would reasonably need more time to be able to reflect fully. Or maybe he thought the place he was leaving her was really worse than death.I will keep this short. Maybe his lover was already sentenced to death and he was trying to make it easier. Now, with a couple of trips to the Hunger Games under my belt, I decide not to judge him without knowing more details. I used to think the murderer was the creepiest guy imaginable. His lover, with her rope necklace, hanging dead next to him in the tree. In the final stanza, it's clear that that's what he's waiting for. But then you wonder if he meant for her to run to him.
The phrase "Where I told you to run, so we'd both be free" is the most troubling because at first you think he's talking about when he told her to flee, presumably to safety. And even though he told his lover to flee, he keeps asking if she's coming to meet him. You realize the singer of the song is the dead murderer. That's weird obviously, the talking-corpse bit, but it's not until the third verse that "The Hanging Tree" begins to get unnerving. The murderer's lover must have had something to do with the killing, or maybe they were just going to punish her anyway, because his corpse called out for her to flee. But it's an odd place for a tryst, a hanging tree, where a man was hung for murder. At the beginning, it sounds like a guy is trying to get his girlfriend to secretly meet up with him at midnight. Being older, I began to understand the lyrics. After he died, it used to come back to me a lot. We didn't sing it anymore, my father and I, or even speak of it.