Oliver Tambo),^77 memory traverses all the various spaces of liberation struggle in
KwaZulu Natal, which serves as a metonym for resistance to the dismantling of an initial
freedom. Tambo must, therefore, also hold conference with Shaka and Cetshwayo, two
historical figures, that remind us of the prowess of Zulu Kingdom prior to its subjugation
by Europeans, whose summoning and proposed conference with Tambo speaks to the
cumulative import of the struggle by which one must acknowledge the dismantling of
apartheid hegemony in the 1990s. After contributing so much for the actualization of
freedom, the poet reminds the generalissimo of the recent struggle, O.R. needs to ensure
the people find it a freedom they can identify with. The conference with O.R. must
therefore be extended to a direct address and plea with freedom to stay:
freedom has not been here in a long time
it passed here
it went by once many centuries ago
it forgot to come back here
if flew and went to other lands which we watched
freedom come you have been in our minds
you have been in our memory like a prayer we know by heart
come
we kept you here like a seed
see the hills
their beauty screams in delight to the sun
come here
stay with us here in our hills
you have been away too long
KwaZulu Natal
South Africa
Africa (68).If the mood in Freedom Lament and Song has been generally elegiac, living up to the
suggestion of mourning in the title, it will be helpful on a last note to examine briefly the
significance of this overwhelming mourning. South African post-apartheid literature is
generally replete with narratives of mourning from Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying to
John Kani’s Nothing but the Truth to JM Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K (Sam
Durrant 2005:441-5). The impulse to follow the ways of mourning in the wake of
apartheid for Serote, as for other writers, may be said to be significant for a number of
reasons. More specifically, for Serote in Freedom Lament and Song , the mournful
77
Oliver Tambo’s place as the president of ANC in the decades of liberation struggle while Mandela and
others were in prison cannot be overemphasized. It accounts for why in most cases his name is synonymous
with the struggle. Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom gives cogency to this observation.