TROUBLEMAKER
for ntate Madiba, with respect

When his voice hit the audience,
breaking to pieces the only peace we knew
and were sharing among barbed houses on a hill,
it sent birds off to where startled shards go,
his voice the thing we’d sought
to shake our poetry, make sense of the world
the way a bullet never will.

A shipment of negroes
leaves the shore and is forever gone
to render music unto the world,
win an Olympic with a half a nutrition.
In a dire dance of the last dama, they move
like sirige masks among cotton fields.
Still, his voice beckons. A tap root
fills my mouth completely, floor to roof.
The first time I heard him I thought it was a mistake–
this ideal he was preparing to die for,
but it was in his voice, carried to my door
by the choice of an ordeal, joined by others
from far inland into the Maloti mountains,
where between seasons of cold and hot,
snow and sun shuffle the light.

In the chill of night when the wind is still,
the island whispers thoughts of ghosts,
in nomine Patris et Fillii et Spiritus Sancti,
in a voice like the one I took at Peka High School
for the year-end show when, dressed for war,
and having rubbed the struggle into my hair,
my father watching from the front row,
we marched on-stage, and I began with
the words our people had stated in Kliptown:
South Africa belongs to all who live in it.
© Rethabile Masilo

[Click here for links associated with Troublemaker

THE STONES OF MOHOKARE

We picked flint for its flatness
and curled thumb and forefinger round it,
then bent at the waist to almost touch
the yellow carpet of shoeshoe blossom
covering most of the moist turf with colouring,
and flicked from the wrist. The trick was
to send the stone flying on the water’s surface
at some angle from nought to forty-five,
like the prow of a proud ship,
and unbend only after releasing the stone,
seeing it hover like a craft on a bumpy sea, only
to stop and anchor at port on the OFS side of the river
that separates our two countries, and fattens
the land that is boundary, as south-west it flows,
to Bethulie and the ocean, where all life goes.
Sometimes we swam across it, late in summer,
when the white farmer’s trees were so heavy
with peach and appelkoos that their fronds
dusted the ground like farm hands,
the deep brick of the fruit telling us
which tree was ripe; or, pulled by a fragrance
that sometimes hit as we walked behind
from where a breeze was coming, we knew.
We broke whole branches off and used them
as rafts on the way back, starting to eat
still on the run, in the mid-river sun.
The beet-faced farmer always burst from his huis
in anger, and trained a rifle on us, as we made off
into the river with the loot. But no shot ever came.
Maybe he had no faith in apartheid. Perhaps
the theft and hover-crafts linked our worlds,
our peoples, living the destiny of the river.
© Rethabile Masilo
——————–

MY FATHER’S KILLERS

They take to the road at midnight, and turn
Toward land that by right we plough and turn.

Their dark convoy passes white-washed houses.
A brake light: the bakkies slow down, and turn.

They park at right angles to the street,
Light the yard up, it’s daddy’s day and turn.

They have come on a crisp September night
To blight us, make our season change and turn.

The moon shimmers its flashlight on a blade
While, from a height, the planets spin and turn.
© Rethabile Masilo
——————–

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A sentimental post

afropanavisions left this thoughtful comment on South Africa

I was so saddened, that the very people who received international solidarity to help bring about the end of the dreadful system of apartheid would turned into such monsters to hurt those who are foreign born.

What a sad day it is indeed.

Despite this there is still some sanity and wisdom to be found. Chinua Achebe on the 50th anniversary of Things Fall Apart……. I loved this interview - uplifting and full of gentleness and hope.

On bridging the Atlantic

Yes, well I’ll tell you another story. James Baldwin and I were invited to speak at an African literature conference somewhere in the South, and what Baldwin said in talking about me to the audience is that “This is a brother I had not seen for 400 years,” and people laughed. And he said that it was not intended that he and I should ever meet. That’s what you asked me. Part of the center of the plan was that we should not know each other. So that’s why our task is, in my view, so very important: that in spite of that intention to keep us apart, there will be some people who would refuse and insist on knowing their brothers and sisters who had been sold away and lost. There are some people who knew that it was important to discover them, and I’m not talking in the past, because the problem remains. There are so many of us on both sides of the Atlantic who do not know the importance of that recognition, that this is my brother, this is my sister, that their story is the same as my story. Whatever variations, it is basically the same story

On which character he would be in TFA

And so there are parts of me in different people. Perhaps the most moderate one, because moderation is important here. Okonkwo is a man of excess. I respect him as a hero, but a flawed hero. But very interesting, nevertheless; that’s why he is famous. Now, his friend, Obierika, is more moderate, the kind of person who would keep the house in order. And so if I had to be one person, if it’s not Ezinma it probably would be Obierika

On Nigeria

Nigeria is home. First of all, that’s what it means to me: it’s home. It’s a very frustrating home, a very annoying home, but it is my home. And if I had my way, that’s where this interview would be happening. But since it’s not gone that way, you know, I don’t believe in weeping over something. I think it’s more effective, more useful, to find what you can do rather than what you can’t do. So, Nigeria has such a wonderful possibility built into it, but it’s something it never uses. Talent. It would rather use a half-baked person rather than someone who is highly qualified. But that’s the country I’ve got.

On women

here is a misreading of my fiction in that complaint. I think many people think that what I’m doing is praising the position of women. It’s not; in fact, it’s very opposite. What I was doing was pointing out how unjust the Igbo society is to women. And how better to explore it than to make the hero of this story, Okonkwo…all his problems are problems to do with the feminine. There’s nothing else wrong with Okonkwo except his failure to understand that the gentleness, the compassion that we associate with women is even more important than strength. Now, people don’t understand why I am showing these women who are not in charge. I’m showing them that way because that’s how it is in this society I want to change. And that’s what Okonkwo was not able to learn, and I want others after him to learn it: that women, compassion, music…these things are as valuable—more valuable—than war and violence.

On Okonkwo

Yeah, it’s interesting how you put it. He has, and what I feel towards him is a sense of wonder and pity. Pity is probably not a good word because Okonkwo is a very dignified and proud person and would not like anyone to pity him. But I am sort of concerned that a major aspect of our human experience has to be suffering and failing to reach where you set out to go because of all kinds of things on the way. One day somebody came to me in the hospital after I had this accident, and the question he asked me was, “Why you? Why would this happen to you?” So I said—I didn’t think twice—I said to him, “Do you have an idea of somebody else to whom it should have happened?” What I was saying is that the world is tragic by nature. And that’s why tragic stories appeal to me, far more than happy and comic stories. Both the tragic and the comic are there in our lives, but somehow the tragic one, the Okonkwo kind of story, is the one that speaks most to us.

And the rest of wisdom……………….

Tags:
Chinua Achebe
Things Fall Apart
Nigeria + Literature

W.TEC launched the Networking For Success Project in Lagos, Nigeria……….Future projects need online volunteers to act as mentors, and cash, books, software, computers. Contact W.TEC via their website.

The Networking for Success project will teach women how to use Web 2.0 tools and other ICTs to effectively develop and advance their work. Participants will learn how to use these tools to initiate and manage projects; as well as identify networking opportunities with other organisations.

Blogger, Rosemary Ekosso’s novel “House of Fallen Women” is published by Langaa RPCIG in Cameroon. Also the African Books Collective now has a RSS feed or you can subscribe to email updates.

House of Falling Women is a powerful story about the oppressive weight and irrationality of tradition, gender and class inequality, a desperate yearning for freedom and dignity, and a journey of self discovery, empowerment, and redemption.”

The Struggle for the City on mass evictions in India resulting in thousands of “conservation refugees”.

While many governments now involve indigenous groups in environmental conservation, India is on the verge of creating what might become the largest mass eviction for conservation ever. Groups like India’s Adivasis have come to be called “conservation refugees.” But many conservationists now say conservation initiatives are doomed to fail without them.

This reminds me of the eviction of thousands of Basarwa people from the Kalahari Game Reserve by the Botswana government to make way for diamond mines and more recently to make way for tourists… More here.

Two new Palestinian initiatives - Palestine Think Tank and Yalla Palestine both started by Haitham Sabbah and friends.

The Palestine Think Tank is a

site containing news, analysis, art and more to further the cause of justice for Palestinians. It concentrates on many aspects of the resistance, but also focuses on the issues affecting the entire Middle East. ………. Contributors include Khalid Amayreh, Ramzy Baroud, Adib Kawar, Ernesto Paramo, Wael Al Saad, Nadia Hasan, Iqbal Tamimi, Richard Jones, Nahida Izzat, Razan Al Ghazzawi, Khaled Islaih, Steve Amsel, Ben Heine

Yalla Palestine is a social bookmarking site for Palestinian news. I liked this short piece on the Nakba from Desert Peace “Palestine Remembered - 60 Years Later”

“We came and turned the native Arabs into tragic refugees. And still we dare to slander and malign them, to besmirch their name. Instead of being deeply ashamed of what we did and trying to undo some of the evil we committed … we justify our terrible acts and even attempt to glorify them.”

Tags:

Web 2.0 + Nigeria
Conservation Refugees
Botswana
India
Palestine

Mazisi Raymond Kunene was born in Durban, South Africa, in 1930 [12th of May]. He graduated from the University of Natal with a paper on traditional and modern Zulu poetry. In 1959 he obtained a grant to complete his doctoral dissertation in London.

From this point on Kunene dedicated himself to the struggle for freedom of African countries. He worked for institutions such as the Afro-Asian Writers Committee and founded the South African Vocational Programme for refugees in Tanzania and Zambia.

In 1966 he was officially banned from his home country along with 45 other authors. He was one of the founding members of the Anti-Apartheid Movement and became Chief Representative for the African National Congress in Europe and USA in 1962.

Kunene received support from notables such as Picasso, Chagall, Giacometti, Moore and Rauschenberg when he established the South African Exhibition Appeal in 1972.
[more…]

Was I wrong

Was I wrong when I thought
All shall be avenged?
Was I wrong when I thought
The rope of iron holding the neck of young bulls
Shall be avenged?
Was I wrong
When I thought the orphans of sulphur
Shall rise from the ocean?
Was I depraved when I thought there need not be love,
There need not be forgiveness, there need not be progress,
There need not be goodness on the earth,
There need not be towns of skeletons,
Sending messages of elephants to the moon?
Was I wrong to laugh asphyxiated ecstasy
When the sea rose like quicklime
When the ashes on ashes were blown by the wind
When the infant sword was left alone on the hill top?
Was I wrong to erect monuments of blood?
Was I wrong to avenge the pillage of Caesar?
Was I wrong? Was I wrong?
Was I wrong to ignite the earth
And dance above the stars
Watching Europe burn with its civilisation of fire,
Watching America disintegrate with its gods of steel,
Watching the persecutors of mankind turn into dust
Was I wrong? Was I wrong?
© Mazisi Kunene
[source…]

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