Can questions free communities?

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IT IS AMAZING how much power there is in asking questions.

IT IS AMAZING how much power there is in asking questions.

THEMBE KHUMALO [email protected]

So often we walk past opportunities and knowledge, past choices that are available to us without our knowledge, simply because we have not taken the trouble to ask.

I first observed this about grocery shopping. And I don’t mean in the bad old days when you couldn’t get basic commodities, when supermarkets were echoing cavernous halls that you visited with trepidation and used as a barometer to measure how much worse things had really gone.

I mean in the good old days before that — when everything was still normal. And people did not need to remember what normal meant.

In those days you could walk into a supermarket that had everything very much like today.

The trouble is that much like today, you would walk past all kinds of commodities which in your mind were labelled “not for me” or “not for people like us” without ever questioning why.

I want to believe that with greater integration, we no longer have things that we consider “white people’s food”, but even as I want to believe, I am doubtful.

I want to believe that we do not have detergents that we think of as “suburban detergents” and which we differentiate from “township detergents”.

But even as I want to believe I know that this is not so, in every community.

I suppose issues of race and class pervade everything.

They create walls and fences that we believe to be dangerous to breach, and they keep us boxed up in compartments that usually serve the needs of a different constituency than our own.

But what would happen if one day we dared to question this compartmentalisation? What if we stood by the supermarket shelf and said “What is this asparagus?

What is so special about it and why is it so expensive?

Can I grow it in my garden or on my A2 plot?

How do I cook it and what will I eat it with? This is in fact, what all of the revolutionaries who have gone before us have done. They dared to ask: Why can’t black people use the same toilet as white people? Why shouldn’t women be allowed to vote?

Why should this ethnic group be confined to these spaces and only access these resources? What will happen if we push this boundary; if we dare to go further than they say we are allowed to go?

It is by asking questions that we will extend the narrow corridors of our minds.

It is by asking questions that we enlarge the spaces within which we can work and play and raise our families.

It is by wondering “Why not?” that we challenge conventional wisdom and set in motion a whole new set of ideas about how the world should look, how humanity should behave, how communities should think and how we ourselves should be.