The VOICE of Prophecy!
7 October, 2025
[FACEOOK, Tuesday 30 September, 2025]
So, is very unusual for me to do 2 contemporaneous updates on the trot; but I feel bound to share my thoughts on my chance encounter with the African choir, BULEMBU, yesterday!
I managed to see them in full costume for the final 20 minutes of their presentation; and it is only then that I realised they are from ESWATINI! Some of you may recall that I was in Eswatini in March this year, where I visited the Cultural Village, witnessed and took part in some of their traditional dances. I also travelled quite extensively during my short stay, and was impressed at how well organised and maintained rural areas seemed to be; and the number of Western style shopping centres for such a small and “poor” country; compared with Lesotho, with about twice the population, which only had 2!
Try as I might, I couldn’t find anywhere I could busk; not even in Mbumbane, the capital; but that was probably due to lack of time.
I have to say, even though I missed most of their “testimony,” the performances I did see by the talented choir spoke volumes; just like those I witnessed in Ezulwini, the region in which I was starting. However I was reminded in the “pitch” made by Challenge Ministries UK that Eswatini is the HIV capital of the world (with Lesotho, which I also visited in March being a close 2nd). But can it really be true that in a corner country of just 1.5 million, there are over 300,000 orphans??
So, again unusual for me, I gave generously (though I was thrown off by the collection bucket which read Swaziland); but I will not break my habit of a lifetime and sign up to a “sponsorship deal.” (For £3000 a year I think I might be able to get by, as long as I steered clear of the shopping malls!). I know these funds go towards funding the infrastructure and support workers of what must be a massive programme; and indeed must also go towards paying for their fundraising outreach programmes.
But here’s my problem: for all the good this charitable, Christian enterprise is doing; for me it is also perpetuating the colonial dependency, even though we’re told we will be giving a “hand up not a hand out.” The talent on display was all black, but the handlers were all white, taking up “the white man’s burden;” and perhaps necessarily so; because while Eswatini continues to be ruled by an absolute monarch with 16 wives (and counting), all living an extravagant lifestyle; the poor people of the country will continue to languish.
The international political elites, including its “former” colonial master, Britain, couldn’t care less about Eswatini’s inequalities (they don’t truly care about their own); as long as they maintain access to the mineral wealth and strategic advantage their “involvement” in the region gives them. Hell, if I was a cynic, I might even think Western powers infected the black populations in southern Africa with HIV (SA is third on the list by the way) to make sure they would never be able to stand on their own two feet!
As I write, we are approaching the beginning of Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles; a commemoration of the rescue and escape of the ancient Yasharalites from their oppressors in Egypt, and the abundance they were to enjoy under three providential hand of their Saviour, Yahua, who would lead them into the promised land, flowing with milk and honey. It also pictures the time of abundance under the millennial rule of Yahusha HaMashiac; a time that many “Christians” also anticipate.
Wikipedia:
“The White Man’s Burden” (1899), by Rudyard Kipling, is a poem about the Philippine–American War (1899–1902) that exhorts the United States to assume colonial control of the Filipino people and their country.[1]
In “The White Man’s Burden”, Kipling encouraged the American annexation and colonisation of the Philippine Islands, a Pacific Ocean archipelago purchased in the three-month Spanish–American War (1898).[1] As an imperialist poet, Kipling exhorts the American reader and listener to take up the enterprise of empire yet warns about the personal costs faced, endured, and paid in building an empire;[1] nonetheless, American imperialists understood the phrase “the white man‘s burden” to justify imperial conquest as a civilising mission that is ideologically related to the continental expansion philosophy of manifest destiny of the early 19th century.[2][3][4][5] With a central motif of the poem being the superiority of white men, it has long been criticised as a racist poem.[6]
The VOICE of Prophecy!
7 October, 2025