survival amidst the barrage of external hostilities leaves one with the paradox of its
present lugubrious state of poverty. This is in view of the fact that Africa’s poverty
cannot be ignored: “it smells/ it can be touched/ poverty here laughs with ghosts/ poverty/
poverty of the blacks. Of what use then is survival, if it cannot alleviate poverty; or what
sense does one make of the deplorable condition of a people’s will to survive when their
self-understanding is so strongly passionate as to be externalized in the unequivocal
persuasion of rootedness?:
i
i belong here
my laughter
my tears
my agony and ecstasy
they belong here
in the thin sand they belong here
they belong here where I live and lived
no one must forget
i
i am the issue of time and the wind
i the African child
i come from here everywhere now
remember
you made me a slave
you maimed me and maimed my children
you branded them with the burning rod of poverty
i will allow no one to forget (44-5)Certainly, for the remnant of the people on the continent, the challenge has to do with
transcending a mere chronicling of centuries-old travails. This is why the subsequent
segments of the poem are preoccupied with the challenge of nation building. As
mentioned earlier, the conception of the South African nation easily flows into the wider
conception of Africa and the line between the two continually snaps. Therefore, South
Africa becomes, in a way, a metaphor for Africa. But specifically, it is more compelling
to see the challenge of nationhood as speaking immediately to the South African space in
the wake of apartheid. If the various instances of memorializing the struggle and the
recognition of those who have sacrificially laid down their lives in the course of the
struggle are worthwhile, the necessity of nation building steers one further into the poet’s
focus on the primacy of realizing the imperative of freedom for a nation. It goes without
saying that one can at this juncture, take for granted the fact that the various forms of