Geoffrey Philp's "He Would Dance"

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...]

Soweto, 16 June 1976

I was fifteen, but I remember the events of 16 June 1976 like it was last week. Black kids rose against the Apartheid state in South Africa, and refused Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in schools. They stamped their collective foot and said "No!" And their cry shook the world. Police opened fire and the first kid to go down was Hector Pieterson. I know you've seen the now famous picture of his limp body in the hands of Mbuyisa Makhubo, his sister running alongside them.

"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 shoot take pictures of the other victims. Hastings Ndlovu was another such victim, and it is said he may have even died before Hector. Here's the story of his death.

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.

"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]

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.

I remember.

The other purpose of this post is to warn us about being inactive in the face of grave injustices. After 1976 and what it brought to South Africa, you'd think the world would do something. You'd be wrong. You think the world might do something for Darfur today? Wrong again. Mention a calamity in the world and ask yourself if the world might intervene, and you'd be wrong to think it might. But America did intervene in Iraq (not in Darfur). Find the error. Did America intervene in South Africa with

1. the mere existence of Apartheid
2. laws such as The Immorality Act of 1950, which stated that no one could make love to anyone outside of his or her race
   
3. Nelson Mandela and many other leaders in prison
4. the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960
   
5. the Soweto uprisings of 1976
6. the fact that more than 3 million blacks were forcibly removed from their homes and resettled in black 'homelands'.
7. the gruesome killing of Steve Biko in 1977
8. the killing of Ruth First, wife of Joe Slovo, by means of a parcel bomb
9. and many other injustices carried out against a whole people because of the activity of melanocytes in their skin

So, how did the world react? How did the big Occidental powers react? This is part of what happened: "[Chester] Crocker attracted the attention of the Reagan transition team with an article he wrote in the winter 1980/81 edition of the Foreign Affairs journal. In the article, Crocker was highly critical of the outgoing Carter administration for its apparent hostility to the white minority government in South Africa, by acquiescing in the United Nations Security Council's imposition of a mandatory arms embargo (UNSCR 418/77) and the UN's demand for the end of South Africa's illegal occupation of Namibia (UNSCR 435/78). [source]" That's what happened. The Reagan administration went on to apply and implement its policy of Constructive Engagement.

Let us remember this day with a particular thought for those who died; let us remember it also with a particular thought at preventing it from happening in the future now. So, whatchu gon' do?

Nkosi, sikelel'i Afrika

---

Happy birthday, Ms Giovanni!

Nikki Giovanni was born today in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1943. I went to school in Maryville, a few kilometres from Knoxville. Wikipedia says that "on April 17, 2007, at the Virginia Tech Convocation commemorating the April 16 Virginia Tech massacre, Giovanni closed the ceremony with a chant poem, intoning:

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?'"
[source...]

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

Nikki: "How to write a love poem"

“5-If I could give just one piece of advice about writing a love poem I would remind the writer that love is about the lover not the beloved. It’s about how you feel not how he responds. That should free you to set your heart on your sleeve; no one is going to knock it off.”

“4-Everything about love and life is the simplicity of it. The most important thing to keep in mind is to be clear. The Dells sang Love Is So Simple and I think they are right. Nat ‘King’ Cole sang I Love You (for Sentimental Reasons); clear as a bell. Cole Porter wrote You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To. Classic. All of them. Clear. You can feel the longing.”

“3-The most common writing mistake, period, is complication. The reader does not want to figure out what you mean. Neither does your beloved. Prince says I Want To Be Your Lover. Boom. You know where you stand.”

“2-There must be an internal rhythm to a love poem; the desire must come out. The mistake a lot of people make is to over-think the poem. To reach out for images when just letting the longing of the heart come through would be sufficient.”

“1-If someone writes you a love poem you’d have to be an idiot to say it was not a good poem. That’s like someone saying ‘I love that dress on you’ and you saying ‘What? This ole thing?’ The proper answer is a sweet smile and a thank you. If you have feelings for that person you can always blush.”

Giovanni concludes, “Writing a good love poem is like being a good lover. You have to touch, taste, take your time to tell that this is real. The Supremes say You Can’t Hurry Love and you can’t fake it, either.”
[continue there...]

---

It is important to state, a poem by Kobus Moolman

It is important to state
that this is not a dream, much less a
skylight for bats to fly in and out of,
it is a porn site, an advertisement for
virgin air, uncontaminated by language,
it is a removal van taking boxes and boxes
of superfluous words, memories of birthday
cakes with candles and three-legged races,
it is important to state that this is none
of the above, when confronting a ladder
in the middle of a field, when confronted
with the footprints of a fish at the top
of the ladder, the ladder that makes the
sound of a hole dropping through language
into the excess of any of the oceans.

Kobus Moolman

Walcott: "With a president who reads poetry, there's hope."

President-elect Barack Obama has a lot of writers excited about the next four years. He'll have a poet at his inauguration. He's said he's going to have more poetry readings at the White House. He's even quoted poetry on the campaign trail. In the speech he gave on Super Tuesday, Obama said, "We are the ones we've been waiting for." That line is from June Jordan's "Poem for South African Women." Nobel laureate Derek Walcott has been thinking about what it means to have a president who reads poetry. He talked with Weekend America's Larissa Anderson.

A few days after the election, poet and playwright Derek Walcott saw a picture in the paper of Barack Obama carrying around a copy of his collected poems. Walcott says he was flattered, "But for me, what that means is it's nothing to do with me so much as a fact if you have a president who reads poetry, there's hope because poetry tries to tell the truth."

Remember Walcott's poem for Obama? I've just listened to him read it, and discuss the election of Barack Obama. And talk about the poetic image that to me makes most of this piece: the plough and furrow image.

---

Derek Walcott

Charles Simic's Advice "On Writing Poetry"

1. Don't tell the readers what they already know about life.
2. Don't assume you're the only one in the world who suffers.
3. Some of the greatest poems in the language are sonnets and poems not many lines longer than that, so don't overwrite.
4. The use of images, similes and metaphors make poems concise. Close your eyes, and let your imagination tell you what to do.
5. Say the words you are writing aloud and let your ear decide what word comes next.
6. What you are writing down is a draft that will need additional tinkering, perhaps many months, and even years of tinkering.
7. Remember, a poem is a time machine you are constructing, a vehicle that will allow someone to travel in their own mind, so don't be surprised if it takes a while to get all its engine parts properly working.

---

Matchbox lover, a poem by Kobus Moolman

He knew it.

What he had to do. The only thing left to him under the present circumstances.

He would have to shrink his lover. There was nothing else for it. And then he would put her in a

matchbox.

Yes. And he would carry her around with him like that. In his old leather bag.

Then they would always be together. Night or day. Wherever he was.

But there was a downside to his plan. Of course.

He did not smoke. He never had. So his wife was bound to ask why he carried a matchbox

everywhere with him. Night or day.

To want to know what was inside it.

There was only one solution to this. He would simply have to start smoking. There was nothing else

for it.

Of course he knew that he ran the risk of contracting lung cancer.

But that was a small price to pay for having his lover always there. With him. Close to his hip.

---

Kobus Moolman is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Western Cape. He has won numerous awards for his writing, including the 2015 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry, and has presented his work at literary festivals in South Africa, Ireland and Canada. His most recent book is a short story collection called The Swimming Lesson (2017).

Kobus Moolman

Sign language, by Mangaliso Buzani

The lead singer was Lahliwe, my mother, and Tukie and Tonogo were the backup singers. They sang Utloa sefefo samoea. We were their small congregation, we clapped our hands, our grandmother hitting the side of the wardrobe because we had no drum. We were the ears to the singers. I wonder if they are still singing together behind the moon.

:::

My grandmother fell inside the bathroom and hurt her ribs. After that she abandoned speaking because when she spoke a pain like a broken bone stabbed her. That’s why she chose to use sign language. We phoned the ambulance, lucky it was near, it arrived within no time. Because it was me who was looking after her, I was sent with her in the ambulance to Livingstone Hospital. She was not attended to, she suffered in that hospital until she fell asleep. I went outside looking for bread and juice, a diabetic patient mustn’t go for long hours without taking food. I woke her with bread, I ate crumbs only with my eyes. I also suffered in that hospital, there was nothing else in those 8 hours except polishing chairs with our buttocks.

:::

It was very difficult to cross the doorframe of the room with you grandma, without bending over to pick up one of your teardrops with a tweezer. You were a washing line made of bones, strange stiff clothes that fluttered in the wind. Your wrinkled face that was showing the last days of its beauty.

:::

The world had reduced you to dust, so in the space of a minute the wind blew you away; hence the reverend said dust to dust on your burial day. With a shovel, six feet under the ground I have hidden you. Now an invisible flower, you speak with me softly saying, Manga, Manga, you are not alone, Ukhona uNyameka, Nyameke is around.

---

Buzani was awarded the 2019 annual Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry for his poetry book A naked bone, published by Deep South. This is 'Sign language', a poem from that collection.

---

Mangaliso Buzani

A poem about Sharpeville, a poem by Dennis Brutus

A half century ago, police officers massacred 69 black South Africans in the township of Sharpeville, where protesters had burned the passbooks that the white-led apartheid government required them to carry at all times.

But survivors of the massacre here are tired of telling their stories: They are wondering when the change they thought they were fighting for 50 years ago will come to Sharpeville.

Residents in recent weeks have set fire to tyres in the streets to protest the lack of basic services such as electricity and running water.

"Our lives started changing with Nelson Mandela's release, but people are still financially struggling and finance is still in white people's hands," said Abram Mofokeng, who was 21 when officers opened fire on the protesters, shooting demonstrators including women and children as they ran away. Mofokeng still bears the scar where a bullet entered his back.
[source...]

The Sharpeville police mowed protesters down, shooting most in the back. No accountability. Nobody to turn to, in South Africa or abroad. The heavens told black South-Africans they were alone. "You're alone." And so they were. Many fled into exile, and Lesotho started having its first waves of South-African refugees, mostly from the PAC movement, which had organised the protests.

We called them ma-PAC, the prefix signifying more than one, some, several, many. They played rugby at a football pitch in Motse-Mocha near the Setsoto stadium, a strange sport to us, 7 years old and staunch football players/fans. South Africa had just flipped the world a bird and got away with it. It would do so again in 1976 in a repeat performance that became Apartheid's last straw.

It's been a long time coming, but change is gonna come, sang Sam Cooke about America. He could have been singing about South Africa, or the world, even. For what is baffling is how Sharpeville 1960, Soweto 1976, King's and X's murders, the Civil Rights movement, Mandela's 27 years in jail, not to mention the thousands tortured and killed in South Africa, and tortured and lynched in America, what is baffling is how these have not entered the minds of all and instructed them on the evils of discrimination and segregation in all its forms. That is truly baffling to me.

It is also amazingly stunning that all these things happened and almost no one got punished for it, no international hunt for the wrong-doers, no motivation to see them "brought to justice," as George Bush the son would say about so many who had committed so less. Today is a day to remember and to know why it should be remembered, today is a learning day. To me it is also a bitter day.


What is important
about Sharpeville
is not that seventy died:
nor even that they were shot in the back
retreating, unarmed, defenseless
and certainly not
the heavy caliber slug
that tore through a mother’s back
and ripped through the child in her arms
killing it
Remember Sharpeville
bullet-in-the-back day
Because it epitomized oppression
and the nature of society
more clearly than anything else;
it was the classic event
Nowhere is racial dominance
more clearly defined
nowhere the will to oppress
more clearly demonstrated
what the world whispers
apartheid with snarling guns
the blood lust after
South Africa spills in the dust
Remember Sharpeville
Remember bullet-in-the-back day
And remember the unquenchable will for freedom
Remember the dead
and be glad.

Dennis Brutus