Look up, South Africa: Wounded, yes, but still breathing

My late pastor used to say, “Breathe… if you are alive, you are winning!” Today, we need those words. Chin up. Shoulders back. Breathe in. Hope is a life force. 

August was Women’s Month, but September was the month we learnt that a dozen or so women’s bodies were found dumped like rubbish in Gauteng.

A further 27 people were killed in mass shootings, even as the Madlanga Commission showcased systemic corruption and the arrest of Deputy National Police Commissioner Shadrack Sibiya on allegations including rape, trafficking of persons and the sexual grooming of a child, painting a shocking picture of our national sport: the abuse of power. 

The euphoria over the Springboks’ victory against the All Blacks in September was short-lived after we learnt that in 2012, Springbok captain André Esterhuizen was found guilty and sanctioned for using the k-word. 

While all this is happening, the Americans are gearing up to sanction us, even as white Afrikaner right-wingers and the families of farm murder victims dominate airwaves about racial hatred and “white genocide” in South Africa. 

These are hard times. But South Africa has been through hard times before. 

The poet, Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali, wrote Nightfall in Soweto:

Nightfall comes like
a dreaded disease
seeping through the pores
of a healthy body
and ravaging it beyond repair

A murderer’s hand,
lurking in the shadows,
clasping the dagger,
strikes down the helpless victim.

I am the victim.
I am slaughtered
every night in the streets.
I am cornered by the fear
gnawing at my timid heart;
in my helplessness I languish.

Man has ceased to be man
Man has become beast
Man has become prey.

I am the prey;
I am the quarry to be run down
by the marauding beast
let loose by cruel nightfall
from his cage of death.

Where is my refuge?
Where am I safe?
Not in my matchbox house
Where I barricade myself against nightfall.

I tremble at his crunching footsteps,
I quake at his deafening knock at the door.
“Open up!” he barks like a rabid dog
thirsty for my blood.

Nightfall! Nightfall!
You are my mortal enemy.
But why were you ever created?
Why can’t it be daytime?
Daytime forever more?

It feels like nightfall in South Africa. But we are not done yet. We have an indomitable spirit. 

The poet, Siza Nkosi Mokhele, wrote the poem, Broken things: 

not because I emerge out
of broken things
kraals in my homestead are overflowing
grandmother has named them all

one day one of the heifers
was late to return to the great-house
we heard it bellowing
moooo mooo my teats are in heat

there is abundant milk, the calf is emaciated
please let me in old-lady
grandmother opened up to the calf’s jubilation
it soothed its mother by suckling

we also assisted by milking it
we drank the milk while it was warm
not because I emerge out
of broken things

I come from maternal quarters
from ancestral altars soiled by whirlwinds
at the hearth – where the elders lie waiting
where women kneel on broken knees

I know pain well
the sorrow of losing that which I held dear
a bowl in which flowers were kept
the coal-stove tales of grandmother

I am built out of ashes
I break things out of anguish
not because I came from
the midst of broken things

(Translated from isiZulu by Menzi Maseko)

At the opening of the first democratic Parliament on 24 May, 1994, Nelson Mandela read a poem in the original Afrikaans, about a child who was shot dead by soldiers at Nyanga.

The Child is Not Dead was written by poet Ingrid Jonker:

The child is not dead
The child lifts his fists against his mother
Who shouts Afrika ! shouts the breath
Of freedom and the veld
In the locations of the cordoned heart

The child lifts his fists against his father
in the march of the generations
who shouts Afrika ! shout the breath
of righteousness and blood
in the streets of his embattled pride

The child is not dead not at Langa nor at Nyanga
not at Orlando nor at Sharpeville
nor at the police station at Philippi
where he lies with a bullet through his brain

The child is the dark shadow of the soldiers
on guard with rifles Saracens and batons
the child is present at all assemblies and law-givings
the child peers through the windows of houses and into the hearts of mothers
this child who just wanted to play in the sun at Nyanga is everywhere
the child grown to a man treks through all Africa

the child grown into a giant journeys through the whole world
Without a pass

Look up, South Africa! You are the child. The child of Soweto. The child of suffering and of death. But you are not dead, South Africa. You are wounded, but you are still breathing. 

In you is life. In you is a future. In you is a hope. 

Beside your pain is your fire. Beside your fire are your songs. Within your songs is your spirit. And within your spirit, is your future. 

Look up. Let your indomitable spirit overflow like blood. Let it fill the wounds of the wounded. Let it weave the weeping into wonderment. Let the world see your many colours.