Senzeni Na?

• • 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
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