he would dance,
even when his frail body could no longer bear
the weight of all our fears
or when we questioned his allegiance
under the spotlight's unforgiving glare
he would dance
[continue there...]
Africa-inspired poetry. Celebrating family and heroes.
"I saw that he was bad, but I thought that he was just wounded, you know," remembers Hector's sister, Antoinette Sithole. [source]There were to be many victims that day. Hector's photo was plastered on the conscience of the world (though few did anything about it), but there weren't enough photographers to
Klein was dumbstruck as to how a school child, in the middle of the morning, was being admitted to Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital with gunshot wounds, and questions raced through his mind.The purpose of this post is of course to remember these children's sacrifice. I remember the personal friends I made after refugees started flowing into Lesotho from all over South Africa. I remember how we would gather round and sing freedom songs in the evenings, how knowing them made us better politicians at that young age (I was fifteen). I remember how we'd listen to Radio Freedom being broadcast from Tanzania by the African National Congress. I remember how the sound sucked because the Apartheid government was doing its best to kill the signal.
"Children with bullet wounds?" he wondered. "But how? And by whom? A robbery? By school kids? In the middle of the day? Where would the guns come from? Black South Africans are prohibited from owning guns."
The answer came: "They were shot by the police."
Klein says a quick survey in the casualty ward revealed that all except one child were shot above the waist: in other words, the police had shot to kill. Then his old high school friend and a neurosurgeon, Dr Risik Gopal, arrived and checked Hastings' condition.
Gopal confirmed what Klein had suspected: no one could survive such an injury. And indeed, a "short time later, Hastings was dead", having been in a coma from the moment he was shot, Klein says.
Klein worked in Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital for several years, and had been warned that it would be a "baptism in blood" - particularly on Friday nights. But after years of handling "grisly injuries" from assaults using a range of weapons, he thought "nothing could penetrate the emotional barriers I had learned to erect".
Not that day.
The sight of "uniformed children riddled with bullets", accompanied by their "terminal breaths", left Klein feeling helpless and hopeless, and he could only watch in despair as life ebbed from the "fragile frame" of Ndlovu.
The white hospital administrator walked into the ward and Klein told him to expect trouble that night in Soweto. The administrator replied: "Oh, no, by tonight everything will have blown over."
Klein, a coloured doctor who under apartheid ethos had no authority to shout at a white person, couldn't contain himself. He yelled: "In Soweto, you do not shoot children and get away with it. There is going to be shit!" He walked away with tears in his eyes.
Klein had to break the news of Ndlovu's death to the boy's friends and relatives, a difficult task not made easier by repeating the news to other relatives of dead children. "I remember the looks of disbelief, the anguish, the tears. And I remember my own grief welling up afresh each time I delivered the grim news."
Gopal, now the chief neurosurgeon at the hospital, said they stood at the window and watched police shooting children. Some of the staff members saw their own children being brought in with gunshot wounds. "There was a lot of emotion on the day. It was just chaos," he says.
By late afternoon the government had prohibited blacks from assembling in groups larger than three. Workers, when they disembarked from trains and taxis, got together before walking home, wondering what was happening, unaware of the ruling.
Police opened fire on them, expecting them to know about the prohibition, and they arrived at hospital asking innocently why the police were shooting at them.
Others arrived at hospital with strange wounds, says Klein: small entrance holes in their upper bodies, with larger exit wounds lower down. One man said: "We were sitting in our kitchen, having dinner, when bullets came in through the roof and hit us." Police were firing from helicopters overhead. [source]
We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while. We are not moving on. We are embracing our mourning. We are Virginia Tech... We are better than we think and not quite what we want to be. We are alive to the imagination and the possibilities, we will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears, through all this sadness, we are the Hokies. We will prevail, we will prevail, we will prevail. We are Virginia Tech.""Giovanni's writing has been heavily inspired by African-American activists and artists. She has a tattoo with the words 'Thug life' to honor Tupac Shakur, whom she admired. Her book 'Love Poems' (1997) was written in memory of him, and she has stated that she would 'rather be with the thugs than the people who are complaining about them.' She also tours nationwide and frequently speaks out against hate-motivated violence. At a 1999 Martin Luther King Day event, she recalled the 1998 murders of James Byrd, Jr. and Matthew Shepard: 'What's the difference between dragging a black man behind a truck in Jasper, Texas, and beating a white boy to death in Wyoming because he's gay?'"
When I Die
when i die i hope no one who ever hurt me cries
and if they cry i hope their eyes fall out
and a million maggots that had made up their brains
crawl from the empty holes and devour the flesh
that covered the evil that passed itself off as a person
that i probably tried
to love.
__________
Nikki Giovanni |