very clear issues that cannot be swept underground. This explains why, still in the first
part of the collection, he painfully recollects:
I am a black manchild who has had not one day in my life
i
me
my youth
my love
my childhood was spent in war
in struggle
for non-racialism
non-sexism
justice and equality for all
our day
all of us
to build what we want and break what we don’t want (3)The need for such struggle was necessary because, the historical apartheid of colonialism
scripted wealth and poverty in racial terms, ultimately politicizing skin pigmentation.
Wealth and prosperity are expected to rest with a side of the racial divide while poverty
and squalor reside with the other. The resistance to such colour bias in the allocation and
flow of privilege becomes a catalyst for the struggle. For “the air and the wind and the
heat/ here/ what you see and can touch/ poverty smells in it” (5). Yet the fight against
racialized poverty is as historical as it is contemporary. Going beyond the present in the
aftermath of the dismantling of apartheid, the poet gives an insight into the past in order
to illuminate how the climax and triumph of the struggle for liberation in the last decade
of the 20th century follows from its commencement by African forebears in the previous
centuries. The struggle may have taken long, but the passion for true freedom was
exhibited first by the ancestors: “in Makanaland in the land of Mqhayi/^72 in the hills of
warriors who fought wars/ who with fierce anger and courage/ caught and clutched/ held
72
As I have amplified elsewhere, Mandela’s first realization of the illusion inherent in the acquisition of
Western education in order to become a black European was catalyzed by the oral performance of the
Xhosa poet Krune Mqhayi; this was because of Mqhayi’s incisive and informed analysis of the condition of
racial inequality in the country then. Mandela’s training at Wesleyan College in Fort Beaufort really
became productive after this encounter with the influential oral poet. Thereafter, he realized the need to
seek privilege and equal rights for all, both black and white in South Africa, a decision which “fired his
imagination into a life-staking and uncommonly heroic liberation struggle.” (See Senayon Olaoluwa,
“From Simplicity to Performance: The Place of Second Generation Anglophone Poets,” English
Studies. 89.4. 2008:474 )