A LETTER TO MY BROTHER IN THE SUBURB OF
JOHANNESBURG.
I tended thoughts towards the situation of your
residence and found it some needless thing asking
you how you have been over the weeks,two or more
since the simple beauties of freedom started
becoming dimmer and dimmer in your sight.
Perhaps,cruel fate might have been your lot and I
might as well be writing to a corpse. But I
believe,somehow,that oxygen might still be making
rounds through your nostrils. How and why, I do not
know. I only believe.
I learnt you have not eaten in days,yet you consider it
not worth a considerable trouble as you are no
longer sure of the next minute. I could not help
thinking less, the bevy of psychological trauma you
are passing through in the land of people you call
brothers,and a coterie of criticisms you have
endured. And for this,I resented them.
When I was no more than a five year old boy,I
encountered for the first time,a name called
Mandela. The reason being that I was to know that he
was imprisoned for so long, twenty-seven years or
so, having done nothing wrong. More specifically,he
was a victim of apartheid. A situation I could recall
South-Africans protested with their whole being and
called on her sister nations to join in the protest. It
has not yet come to my notice that any African nation
neglected her call. Yet we did not suspect at the
time,that they could,in an enshrined injustice,victimize a white-man,needless to say an African.
In not-wanting-to-say,I learnt your Kenyian pal saw
life fleeing from his body before his actual death. Not
because he was the kind of shakespearean coward
that make for death's way a thousand times before
his death. But it was because he had become
delightfully less aggressive, a gentleness he allowed
to pave way into his soul,believing he was
protected,having been sharing for so long a
period,the fate of her host country__and having
shared in the indignities of the white,the shattered
hopes,burnt dreams,stunted lives. And above all
having shared the same skin color.
If there is anything that has left me bewildered,it is
the fact that those who have fallen in this
cohesiveness,must have been stabbed down by their
next door neighbours,classmates,playmates,people
they have,for years,been working with,now seem so
determined to see life free from their
bodies__because they had believed that they are
somehow,blocking their fortune from reaching them.
What an idea.
I was shaken by the news of this,and I felt as though I
have been stabbed at the back. I was extremely
uncomfortable how people whom we have talked to
and understood them;shared in their hopes and
aspirations,grasped their history as well as they
grasped ours,appreciated their poetry and savored
their songs,could in sheer narrowness of heart,label
us foreigners. I was dismayed to the height of hating
the word foreigner and I grieved most of all,that for
all we shared from the days of European imperialism
till date had been made so small and meaningless as
to be under the moniker foreigner.
Brother,it was there in South-Africa, that you learned
more about poverty than you did in all of our
childhood days. An experience that is derogatory
more than it is enriching. Working in the mines and
staking your health,yet living on the meagerest of
incomes. A situation that favoured the mine-owners
more than you the miners. I am enraged by this
alluding impediment,and I seek earnestly to end the
course that enslaved my people,a situation that puts
them in a position of savagery. Jumping up and down
by the river side,as having done nothing,having
created nothing of worth__xenophobia.
Come home if you still have the chance to and
recapture what is most homelike to you. I am
appalled by the silence if not connivance of the
leaders. More specifically the Zulu king.
It is as though he waited patiently the demise of
Mandela to evolve his onslaught that is impressively
styled. Forgetting that every man at some point is a
foreigner in a place.
I await your arrival with severe trembling as I'm quite
unsure you would make it owing to the severity of the
xenophobic massacre.
If you eventually make it home,join in making home a
garden of intense flowers,a place of fountains and
grasses. The dreamland lit by the radiance of
midnight stars and the moonlight crescent.
When we have done this,we might as well decide
whom to allow home and whom not to. It might not
be bloody nor xenophobic,because I'm sure you
wouldn't want it quite frankly,neither do I.
#xenophobickillinginsouthafrica...
