them. The intensity of the surveillance and hostility mounted against them by the
establishment is captured in the testimony about the manner of their fate: they “were shot
dead when they were naked/ on the head/ on the heart/ on the backbone/ everywhere they
were shot/ in the night/in the eye/ on sight/ in their house/ they were put against the wall
naked” (17). Their fate is similar to that of yet another victim, Joe, whose remains cannot
be gathered “except a lump of flesh” all because “the bomb took everything” (18). Their
death at this point reveals another angle to the import of exile in the days of apartheid
struggle: the fact that for the victims, exile was not completely free of the adversities of
home. In fact, their fate has shown it could even be worse.
Alexandra is another site of struggle as it comes next to Soweto in black segregated
settlement and in terms of popularity in the apartheid days. The poverty, squalor,
depravation and hopelessness that it bred as a site of struggle could only lead to wanton
perpetration of crimes of the black against one another. For it is filled with a desultory
scenery that is as disturbing as it is curious: “of laughter and howling screams/ of men
being killed/ of women being entered/ as a bus enters a wall/ the dirty stench/ the dirty
muddy water/ the urine/ the sperm/ the streets/ the falling houses/ this thing is so real and
alive” (20-21). The disturbing image of squalor that emerges when compared to say,
Sandton, a white elite neighbouring suburb, could naturally provide instigation for a
black boy to enlist in the guerrilla movement, MK, in order to right the wrong of racial
segregation. Therefore, among others,^73 Alexandra produces a fighter in Tebello, more as
a communal contribution to the struggle than an individual sacrifice, because Alexandra
“took him from home/ from nothing into far lands” (21). From his days of struggle as a
liberation fighter to the days of exile in London, where he expires alone in his room and
is buried “in a cemetery in the English city” (23), it is impossible to overlook his struggle
and fate. The loneliness that accompanies his death like that of others like Duma Nokwe,
Thuli, Vusi, Chris Hani among others, accounts for why the persona calls on Alexandra
to always remember him. Ending this section with a kind of philosophical reflection on
the loneliness that accompanies the reality of death, a grand irony nonetheless persists.
By calling on the departed of the struggle to note that the community “remember(s) you
73
It is important to remark that Serote himself is a product of Alexandra.