Wole Soyinka
Ghosts, but as that ritual homily
Time-honored in the office of loss
Not seeking martyrdom, the midnight knock,
Desecration of our altars, vestments,
Not counting ninety-day detention laws,
The state seal on the voice of man – and God...
We wish only to bury our dead. Shorn
Of all but name, our indelible origin,
For indeed our pride once boasted empires,
Kings and nation-builders. Too soon
The brace of conquest circumscribed our being
Yet found us rooted in that unyielding
Will to life bequeathed from birth, we
Sought no transferred deed of earthly holdings
Slaves do not possess their kind. Nor do
Thetrulyfree.
(ME,–)It would be almost trivializing to offer a paraphrase of these lines of such
crystalline clarity. Nonetheless, it is necessary to draw attention to how
the persona who speaks these lines discharges the burden of memorializ-
ing the victims of apartheid through a superbly modulated anger which
assails the arrogance of supremacist power with the rhetoric of a natural-
istic conception of justice in which the dispossession of the enslaved is the
very mark of the unfreedom of the enslaver. This is why revolutionary,
ethical principle in this poem traverses vast temporal and spatial units of
history and ranges across the experiences of diverse peoples and races,
but not such that it overwhelms the harrowing immediacy of the political
funerals of post-Soweto South Africa.
It is perhaps appropriate to end our discussion of the poems in the
“South Africa” cycle inMandela’s Earthwith a brief account of how
the contrasting techniques deployed in two poems, “Like Rudolf Hess,
the man Said!” and “‘No!’ He Said” work in different ways to achieve this
impressive integration of totalizing revolutionary principle with sharply
observed profiles of the horrendous actualities of apartheid. In the former
poem, we are in the world of Soyinka’s excessive love of punning and
the use of deflationary wordplay in order to tease maximum satire and
humanistic protest out of thereductio ad absurdumof the infamous statement
made by the then foreign minister of South Africa, Pik Botha, that the
apartheid regime was holding Nelson Mandela captive in the same way
that the Allied Powers were holding the Nazi war criminal, Rudolf Hess.
As is well-known, the apartheid regime had historic and ideological links