Greta Thunberg, the Nostradamus of our times or a paid shrill?

GRETA Thunberg is an adult now. She wasn’t when fortuity and a wide arch of coincidence cast her into the global spotlight that has since shaped her persona and brought in the renowned accolades. Her cognitive intelligence and emotional talents are impressive, too.

She may just as well be the exception to a rule we have been waiting for. And in the longevity of this rule over time, it has seldom suffered exceptions. The rule is indeed simple. In politics as in war, there are no coincidences.

In her admixture of talents, some more pronounced than others, Thunberg could have easily fitted the role of a TV economist, that class of technical experts exempted from social accountability. Trained to assess the economic viability of businesses, they make certain that the basics of a functional business remain the same and conform to the structure.

It so happened that, ensnared in the glare of television lights and an overweening penchant for predictions, so many economists have assumed a role they are woefully unsuited for. They have become prophets. No wonder they are seldom accurate, and to our collective umbrage, no one calls them to account for their false or faux prognostications.

But Greta had a choice. She could have been like the legendary Nostradamus and settled for long-term predictions. Or in the alternative, forever assume the infamy of The Pythia of Delphi, the worst prophetess in history.

But the Stockholm-born activist could not wait. She preferred association with shocking predictions scheduled to occur within five years of their pronouncements. She sought to blend two roles in one, that of activist and prophetess, a sort of Joan of Arc mixed with Nongqawuse!

All three, Nostradamus, Nongqawuse and Thunberg, were born in three different epochs and no doubt, under different sets of socio-economic milieu and political circumstances. Since his passing in 1566, the world has witnessed the coming into fruition of the predictions of the celebrated French astrologer over time.

In the case of Nongqawuse, the psyop tactics of the British war machine, post the 8th Frontier War in 1853 were spectacularly successful with the device of a contrived prophecy. This art of deception was an early experimentation of what later became Operation Mincemeat in 1943.

As for Greta, the five years glorified in her retweet quoted from someone else’s prediction have come and gone. The original words of prediction may have been James Anderson’s. When she adopted them to craft her own message however, they became quintessentially hers! They rang hollow and were deceptively false.

Of the story of Nongqawuse, there are two versions. The first is a crisp sequence of historical events kept under British official secrecy laws, whose declassification could wreak violence on a fragile historic lie covering intelligence gathering and the desperate tactics used to continue the war of subjugation by other means against the survivors of the epic Battle of Emlanjeni.

The second is a version of great hilarity, a narrative sustained at enormous effort to gaslight generations of South Africans and distort their history, their education and their cultural legacy.

In both versions, Nongqawuse is said to have influenced her uncle to convince their valiant warriors that on a date certain, the rising sun, bright and vermilion, will not set in the West and their ancestors would rise to meet them. And so to appease the wrath of the weather gods, they ought to burn all their crops and destroy their livestock.

Predictably, the military representatives of the suzerain were particularly mortified by their inability to cower one man, Jongumsobomvu Maqoma ka Ngqika, for 55 years. In his enduring resistance, he had embarrassed many Royal field commanders and had forced the withdrawal of Henry Smith, resulting from countless battle defeats and the loss of 300 recruited reinforcements sent from London which ran aground in Gansbaai in 1853 on HMS Birkenhead whilst on their way to prop up a besieged Smith.

After the fiercest battle of all the nine frontier wars, the plot to enfeeble the Xhosa strongholds and the reduction of their numerical advantage by deception was executed with precision. And lo and behold, a few weeks after the scorched earth, the so-called prophetess was sheltered in the home of Major Gawler as if in celebration of a mission accomplished!

For all this carnage that claimed 40 000 lives, killed half a million livestock and razed thousands of acres of lush and fecund land, the poor girl was only 15 years old. For reasons which are not too difficult to estimate, she was never credited with any prophecy before or after this singularly historic disaster until her death as a non-descript girl upon whom the misfortune of history befell.

Greta Thunberg was also 15 years of age when she captured the imagination of the world, especially at the 2019 United Nations Climate Action Summit, bedazzled by her unique style of delivery laced with anger and admonition for uncaring adults.

Over time, she has lent her opinionated weight to various topical issues ranging from the regional to the controversial. These included the forgotten tragedy of the subjugated people of Western Sahar,a which continues without resolution to this day. She has also rolled up her sleeves in pitched battles against the oil companies.

The two most contentious political crises where Greta appeared on two opposing sides are the US/NATO proxy war in Ukraine against Russia and the genocidal war waged against the Palestinian people. In the Ukraine proxy war, she weighed in on the side of the proxy and its NATO backers.

In the Palestine crisis, however, she joined a group of protestors wearing a keffiyeh solidarity scarf. These are strangely opposing sides to be sure, considering that the people who align with the Jewish leaders of Ukraine hardly take a stand in opposition against Netanyahu.

That is probably why she maintained noticeable silence and lack of criticism to the NATO-aligned saboteurs responsible for the single most tragic environmental disaster observed from outer space at the bombing of the Nordstream I and II gas pipelines. She helped prove to the world that environmental disasters are worth considering if they are attributable to people whom NATO and their Western allies define as enemies or adversaries.

So powerful was the 16-year-old in 2019, she was nominated for a Nobel Prize, which potentially would have elevated her to the moral heights of the inimitable late Kenyan environmentalist, Wangari Maathai. For whatever reason, as neither a scientist nor an environmentalist, Greta’s recommendation would have been odd indeed. And so too receiving a Nobel prize without contributing to academic fields of research and development would be morally too extraneous to justify.

Greta is braver than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The scientists gathered under that banner don’t even prophesy anything. They only feed the algorithms that do all the work and produce the models that show how hot it is going to be in the future, especially if certain trends of gaseous accumulations are unabated.

It is very difficult to put into a neat and professionally recognisable category what Greta Tintin Eleonora Emman Thunberg does. It is, however, tempting to say she is a diviner of the heavens or what the Zulu language reverently refers to as…

Isangoma se Zulu!

* Ambassador Bheki Gila is a Barrister-at-Law.

** The views expressed here do not reflect those of the Sunday Independent, Independent Media, or IOL.