By The township’s ‘informal settlement’ of shacks –
scores of uniform and unpainted
corrugated iron sheds, some with a strip
of improvised front garden – lay between
a rocky stream prone to flooding and rail tracks
taking those in work to the city.
There were stand pipes and chemical toilets.
There was no mains electricity.
On Friday evenings those who could would hire
fully charged car batteries to see TV.
On a flaking, plastered external wall
of one of the few houses left from when
Indian clerks and their families lived there
someone had painted a facsimile
of Sam Nzima’s black and white photograph
of June 16th 1976:
the mortally wounded twelve year old
Hector Pietersen being carried
by Mbuyisa Makhubu – Antoinette,
the boy’s sister, distraught at their side.
In one garden marigolds were blooming
like golden stars. A young man approached me.
‘What do you think of our country?’
‘It is full of hope,’ I said. We touched thumbs.
Hector PietersenSoweto uprising
Sizwe Vilakazi
March 31, 2023Brilliant! I spent most of my childhood in Kliptown. I can relate navigating through that huge maze of shacks.
David Selzer
March 31, 2023Ironic that the first time you and I met, Sizwe, was in the UK, in 2004, I think – when you were performing in TSELANE’S SONG. The last time I visited Kliptown was in 2010. I no longer had that sense of hope.
Nomthandazo Dlalisa
March 31, 2023What a beautiful art of words! I can relate because that location is in my area. It’s so amazing.
Jeff Teasdale
April 2, 2023In my experience, David, the ‘hope’ came from an arts centre I visited in a Cape Town township. Scores of kids creating theatre, dance and art. And then to a community garden where nothing was ever stolen, because it was already theirs. Across the motorway it was ‘edgy’ in the ‘white’ area, they with a lot to lose.
A lovely poem …. Fragments of images during one turn of the head, and it is all captured. Thanks!
John HUDDART
April 27, 2023From the point of view of magic, the touching of thumbs does the business!