I was born and raised in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and had these two anti racist poems, and many others, published by the late Les Murray in Australia who, ironically, was labelled a racist by some, because he was the poetry editor of a conservative journal. As a new migrant, I had no idea of the journal’s leanings when I submitted my first lot of poems. Les, however, published poems from the whole spectrum and trod his own path..
TSHWALA*
The gruel bore no resemblance
to the amber Castle
my father used to drink
before going on to scotch;
plopping ice into crystal tumblers
cleaned and prepared by Dabson
the cook boy:
delivered diligently
as soon as he heard
the car’s hooter
and the gate
squeak open obsequiously.
Town , the garden boy,
twenty something old
and younger than Dabson
by twenty five
locked the working day out
with wire over a gate-post
and a bow to the baas.
The day done
he retired to the back step
for a tin of tea and a doorstep
of white bread and jam
We kids still in the bush
a few miles away
tracking the duiker
supposed to still live that close to town
chanced upon a forty-four gallon drum
of ‘kaffir beer’:
“Sis, it smells!”
We rocked it off its brick base
and guffawed as a Sunday party
flowed down a path fashioned by bare feet.
Dabson will not be able to afford
the mukiwa’s* Castle or Lion beer,
and the few tots of scotch
he pilfered
will not get him drunk enough
to shut out his life for the day.
There will be silence
from the bush this weekend!
*beer *white man
This poem contains many offensive terms which might not be accepted nowadays even though in 2008 I used them to highlight the way we whites completely ignored the plight of the blacks. I put the highly offensive “K” term in quotation marks to show this. I used the children’s complete disregard for, and ignorance of, the only escape the servants had as a metaphor for the whole system. When a friend first read this poem, she phoned me in tears saying that she would never be able to forgive herself for the way she once dismissed her parent’s servant who asked her to help him with some money, and that if she could find him she would give him anything! My poem had brought this all back to her.
The second one might just be acceptable these days since it wears its correctness on its sleeve.
HOOK, LINE AND SINKER.
For Fatima Meer: sociologist, anti apartheid activist, friend and biographer of Nelson Mandela, who taught me the most valuable lesson of my life during a tutorial in 1965.
She played us like a tiger fish-
We hardly felt the hook at all,
leaping out of the water,
ecstatically, as she gave us line.
Sitting serenely in her sari
she suggested that we accept
that it is the colder climates
which produce superior civilizations.
She let us run with it a while
and then started to wind us in
from our false sense of security,
whites wallowing in certainty.
She talked of Mesopotamia,
Mexico, Egypt and India
so carefully, so clearly,
that we didn’t notice how close
we were to the boat and gaff.
Just as Madiba* had his gaolers,
she dropped us on the deck in a flash
gently removing the hook.
She threw us back over the side
to struggle in the raging rapids
as she and her friend, Nelson,
swam strongly against the current.
She died just over a year ago
but the scar of her fishing hook
remains on my cheek like a brand.
*Nelson Mandela.
By refusing to accept any offensive terms in a poem without paying the reader the compliment of being able to put them in context would mean that such poems would not see the light of day!
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