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• • For us black Africans, music and rhythm were not just a luxury.
    Any suffering we experienced was made real by song and rhythm.
    Chants and protests in Soweto and Langa Township,resulted in communal participation by blacks in their articulation of their own aspirations.
    Aspiring to be treated with dignity, in a society where the black man was viewed as inferior, minor; lack of intellectual solidarity.
    Deep inside his anger mounts at the accumulating insults, but he vents it out in the wrong directions; on his fellow township folk and on his obedient hardworker of a wife.
    No longer does he trust leadership, nor is there any to trust.
    In the privacy of his toilet his face twists in silent condemnation of white society, but brightens up in sheepish obedience as he comes out ,hurrying in response to his master's impatient call.
    
    
    What did we do to deserve all of___this?
    You see,my mother was just a kitchen girl
    Slaving away in the white man's world
    Scrubbing the floors of the blonde-haired madam till her hands were raw
    Till...till...she saw her own refection, a blurry reflection it was,as she was starved of a decent education
    Talk about,mental emancipation.
    My father was brutally killed on his own doorstep, and the reason?
    "We are trying to decrease the number of black men"
    When questioned,thats what the officer said.
    The black townships were heavily laden with the smell of fear and death.
    Emotional unrest.
    They said we all deserved to be walking in the land of the dead.
    Why?
    Coz we were dark-skinned,thick-lipped___and not fair-skinned and thin-lipped instead
    
    
    Why us? What did we do?
    
    Every black person vividly dreamt of liberty
    But we were chained by the white man's unjust system of oppression and segregation
    Icons like Nelson Mandela stayed years in prison, in order to set their oppressed race free.
    Liberation.
    We fought for it.
    Some died for it.
    Some even falsified their identities for it.
    Different and vast roads which all led to one station__liberation
    Even though my heart still whimpers in pain,when I hear and remember the 'struggle' songs of yesterday, a part of me is however illuminated and revived
    Because those songs built and carved me.
    To the rhythm of those songs my people painstakingly fought and danced their way to liberty.
    
    Today i am free
    Today i eat the fruits which fall from the tree of Liberty
• 
  

  
  

I Am A Ghetto Flower

I am a Ghetto Flower
Rooted in Soil which is dark and heavily laden with the stench of Complacency and Helplessness
My stem is rooted here, but my leaves dance with the dangling rays of the Sun
A dance of Hope
A dance of Determination and a dance of Hope, hoping to outgrow the negativity of my environment.

The sky above me is a beautiful picture. Painted with clouds, painting by Fate.
These clouds overshadow my Beauty,these clouds are pregnant with Rain.
A Rain of Hope
A Rain of Purity, which will cleanse me
Cleanse me off my Past, but not remove me,because the Ghetto made me.

I am a Ghetto Flower

My Petals ambitiously wait to sing along to the Song of the Wind.
The Song of Opportunity.
The Song of Change.
Praying for the Wind to disperse and carry me to a better place.
A place where I will be able to fully germinate.
Fully blossom.
A place where I will be able to fully be Me.
But the Soil anchors me.
It holds me and it painfully reminds me that my Seed will forever remain in the Ghetto.

I am a Ghetto Flower.
Deprived and mal-treated,but my Fragrance reeks of Beauty and Hope
  

Dear Tata,my name is Thandi

Dear Tata my name is Thandi and I hope that you remember me,because my Pain remembers you.
See, it was my Tears which picked up the Pen this morning, hoping to scar the Page the same way in which you had scarred me.
Tata, I was there. I was there when you hit her for the very first time with the same hands which you had used to caress her last night.
I was there when you called her a slut, words formulated with the very same lips which you had used to kiss her "goodnight".
Dear Tata, I was there. I was there when you questioned her loyalty
I was there when you questioned her Love for you and I was also there when you questioned her capabilities as a Woman,but she was not there when you questioned mine.
She wasn't there when you chased my friends away when they came over,because you had wanted us to spend some "quality-time"
She was not there when you baptised your manly organs into my womanly wells, thinking that that would cleanse you off your bastardly ways.
But somehow Tata, I still believed in you.
I still believed in you like a Catholic believes in a Rosary
I still believed in you whole-heartedly, because I Prayed for you more than I Prayed for myself.
And sometimes I would find myself clutching a Bible, hoping to defeat the demons inside me which you had lustfully inserted in me with your semen, that time when you had forgotten that I was a seed of your own.
Dear Tata, you were blinded by the two pyramids which stood on my chest. The two pyramids which as a Father you were supposed to protect, but you were the one responsible for oppressing them nightly with your chest.
Dear Tata, my name is Thandi, and I hope that you remember me. Remember me please, because you are the man that ruined me.
For years I laid on my back and welcomed various men in between my legs.
Men who dug for Love in the organ that lies in between my thighs, forgetting that Love is found in the organ that lies on the left-hand side of my chest.
But Tata you ruined me,so I no longer feel worthy of any man's Love. Infact I don't even want a man's Love.  
And every time I close my eyes to try and picture you, I see an empty bottle of Black Label beer instead,because to me that's all you ever were. That is all you ever represented.
I remember how every Saturday night, you would drown your guilt in the bottle, while back at home Mama was drowning in her tears of sorrow. Sorrow which was caused by you.
So this morning I refused to let my Tears drown me, I commanded them to write to you and they begged me to spit the Truth.
So today I told my Mama that while you were making Love to her, you were fantasizing about your daughter in your head.
So I told Mama about the "quality time"we had shared. I told her everything, yes, I told her that you had raped me.
Dear Tata,your abuse chased me away from men,so I lingered in the path of women.
I found Love for the very first time inbetween the thighs of another woman.
Yes, I told her that too,and that's why I'm now lying on a piece of cardboard underneath a bridge in Adderly street.
I told my Mama that my father had raped me,and she did'nt believe me
 I told her that I was inlove with another woman,and she disowned me.

Dear Tata, my name is Thandi and because of you the world is against me.
I hope that you remember me, because my wounded body and soul remembers you