Granted that the much sought freedom was not attained in a vacuum, but was
passionately fought for by individuals and groups, some rites of remembrance become
necessary. The pertinence of this remark is reinforced by the poet’s observation that
“changes take place when people are informed, when people are conscious, when people
identify common goals and common objectives, and in certain circumstances, are
prepared to make sacrifices” (Rolf Solberg 1998:182).
Liberation Struggle, Memory and Freedom in Freedom Lament and Song
The socio-political struggle which enlisted, both in the formal and informal sense, various
groups and individuals in the search for non-racialized democracy and freedom, has its
own huge record of sacrifices. This is why one must take a critical look at the assertion of
Njabulo Ndebele (1992: 434) that, with the passage of the struggle and successful
transition to the ultimate desegregated dispensation of democracy, writers should
immediately launch and readdress themselves to tropes in a “rediscovery of the ordinary”
in their literature. While such critical charge remains instructive for the examination of
the erstwhile sublated aspects of the South African ordinary and quotidian life, Kelwyn
Sole (2005: 188) warns that, except there is a painstaking assessment of the multifarious
dynamics at work, especially the political and economic, as well as the local and the
global, one may end up with an aesthetic that is light years away from reality. This is
because the unqualified reification of such experience might as well translate into nothing
but “curiously haphazard, idealist, and idealistic notions concerning the constitution of
ordinary experience within South Africa”. If, as he contends further, everyday life is a
product of the “interlinked wealth and misery generated by capitalism” (185), then it is
understandable why Serote goes to the root cause of the present quotidian experience
from the angle of memory and history. This is why even when he talks about the intrigues
by which love and relationships are defined (12-13), or the disturbing presence of “cheats
and betrayers” in Cape Town (27), or the antinomy of the “hard looks of township
women”, as against the sly looks of the rural women”, not to talk of “the possibility of
passions”, no one is left in doubt about the fact that these possibilities of the quotidian
present are framed essentially by the more compelling facts of history and memory.