Catch a Fire

Catch a Fire is the title of the Bob Marley and the Wailers song that threatens retribution for slavery and oppressive ignorance. Far from anti-white uprising, South Africa has resorted to black on black violence utlizing apartheid-like tactics to preserve nationalistic integrity.

On top of the country's AIDS and HIV pandemic, South Africa has been reeling from violent clashes of xenophobia, and racial upheaval. Silencing tactics like those used during apartheid such a tire "necklacing" have been revived against immigrants from other African nations like Zimbabwe. Humanitarians believe the violence to be contrived by a nationlist opposition party and fueled by the bribery and corruption rampant in the South African immigration system. Self-deprecating racism is now apparent as well. Maligned by the international press, white Afrikaaner Free State dormitory students videotaped a black housekeeper initiation by videotaping the middle aged women and men drinking urine drenched stew and repeating racist and sexist slurs. These actions are assumedly generated by a desperate willingness on the part of the African National Congress to preserve black and white South African relations by acquiesing to overt racism to differentiate black citizens from destitute immigrants.

The 2006 film with the same title recaptures and reinvents Marley's Catch a Fire. In the film, a young adult South African man played by actor Derek Luke is wrongly jailed for pro black militarism, is released, and engages in the same behavior he was wrongly charged for. I had a chance to view Alicia Key's new video starring Luke for the song "Teenage Love Affair" early morning last week. Unlike the title of the song, it depicted Key's as a college student circling around her black power activist love interest played by Derek Luke. Unlike Luke's character in the video, Alicia Key merely flirts with the focus of her attention, Luke himself. They catch eyes on the steps of the college. They pass each other in the campus stair wells and engage in coy hand play. The couple arrives at a school dance separately. As Keys walks in the room with her clique of similarly clad co-eds, she and Luke share an intoxicating gaze and thus ends the video. The dormitory that housed the Free State School initiation rites is now closed. However, South Africa's numerous problems stay constant and severe with no end in sight.