South Africa

27 April in South Africa is Freedom Day. This day commemorates the first democratic post-apartheid elections, held in 1994, that saw Nelson Mandela elected president.

I feel that among African nations, South Africa is one of the best known in the Western world. Alongside South Africa, I’d also place the countries along the top end of Africa, particularly the “corner” countries of Egypt and Morocco. This has me wondering whether there’s a general “Heart of Darkness” syndrome, whereby most people can’t fathom the journey beyond the edges. When we hear about most African nations it’s in relation to human rights abuses, wars, election fraud, coup d’etats… South Africa lives in memory as the country that only ended apartheid as recently as fourteen years ago. I remember Nelson Mandela’s release in 1990 after 27 years in prison, though I was quite young at the time.

Because of the importance of the Cape Sea route, South Africa experienced early immigration from Europe—the Dutch East India Company founded a station in what would become Cape Town in 1652. The evidence of immigration to the country is evident today, with the largest Caucasian, Indian and mixed communities in Africa. Obviously race and racial strife has been a huge part of South African history, especially with the institution of apartheid in 1948.

Independence came in 1910, eight years after the Second Boer War. In 1961—after a referendum that was whites-only—the country became a republic, leaving the British Commonwealth. The end to apartheid, though, seems a more important step in the nations history, moving toward, on would hope, and attempt at reconciliation.

Today’s poem is by Dennis Brutus, who was born in what was then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) but raised in South Africa. Brutus was imprisoned during apartheid at Robbin Island, the same place of incarceration as Nelson Mandela. During his time in prison, Brutus had to split rocks—the pebbles left at the end of this process were strewn over the floor of his cell, to illustrate the futility of the exercise.



Under House Arrest

For Daantjie—on a New Coin envelope


On a Saturday afternoon in summer
greyly through net curtains I see
planes on planes in blocks of concrete masonry
where the biscuit factory blanks out the sky

Cézanne clawing agonisedly at the physical world
wrested from such super-imposed masses
a new and plangent vocabulary
evoking tensions, spatial forms and pressures
almost tactile on the eyeballs,
palpable on the fingertips,
and from these screaming tensions wrenched
new harmonies, the apple’s equipoise
the immobility of deadlocked conflicts
—the cramp, paralyses—more rich
than any rest, repose.

— Dennis Brutus
From Against Forgetting, edited Carolyn Forché