The Pervasive Poison of Apartheid (working title)

 

In the Rainbow Nation one colonial legacy,

Which we see persisting today unfortunately

Is an attitude from a more northerly latitude of 'I'm alright Jack!'

If neighbours from Mozambique or Zim

Should decide on migration in to find what they are seekin’,

Locals will say “they’re arrivin’ here ridin’, on a crocodile's back.”

 

Life is tough for all of them,

But when these yokels look for someone else to blame or attack for that man,

Their choice is roughly chosen,

To their shame they target just a blacker black man,

Who might be there to escape their past or to make a decent living,

But bigots do not care, by Desmond, they are too, too unforgiving!

 

You see me start to dis them and visibly I frown,

Are “The Struggle’s” lessons so easily forgotten?

Surely we now know to look up instead of down,

When it’s the system that we live in that’s so obviously rotten?

 

A little of this pressure can be traced back to ‘76

And enforced learning in Afrikaans,

Disadvantaging the indigenous linguistic mix

For a language that is intrinsically the white mans,

From oppressive seeds thirty plus years old

Spring new, oppressive and divided AfroCan'ts,

Not at all the dream that we were sold,

Of true, liberated and united, pan-AfriCans.

 

But obviously the biggest single root,

The plant which has sadly born many a strange fruit,

Is so obvious, that even by the one eyed and the blind it can be spied,

It may be dead but that hasn’t stopped the pervasive poison of apartheid.

Where every hair, tongue and hue

Was judged against another,

When so many had looked down on you,

It ingrained the view that when you can

You should look down upon your brother.

A hatred so deep it seems to me, it’s almost in the blood,

As virulent as HIV, but by fewer understood.

In law all are now equal, aiming for a future colour-blinded,

But in their heads many remain stratified and divided.

 

Last year saw Tshabalala

Kick off a party for Fifa,

Then, behind a black star in Johanna

We witnessed united African’s of every imaginable colour.

When we look back on these twelve months in which Madiba’s release

Itself will finally come of age,

Let’s hope it is a year that that also seen a

Nation begin to turn its book to a cleaner,

More even, yet still a colour-filled page.