It was me

[Ofentse]

(Thibang is a Tswana word meaning Stop him)
(Mvimbeniis a Zulu word meaning Stop him)
Both South African Languages
This poem is in response to the xenophobic attacks taking place in my country


It was me

Thibang, words I shouted
Mvimbeni at the top of my lungs
Heavy breathing as he ran
I saw him no more, but footsteps
I heard him run
Past the first shack, past the right
into the first shot left, he is going no where
follow the blood trail,, “get him” a whisper said
“down the passage, it’s a dead end”

I found him face down,
thundering and thumping, sticks and stones
as I beat him into the ground
I turned him around slowly as now he must be dead, surely
When he faced up, not breathing, eyes wide open
I couldn’t believe it, it was me
The Alien I killed - he was me

[sephari]

that was a nice one, but i've been meaning to ask somebody: are ya'll stupid or something? how could you have forgotten what the zimbabweans and everybody else did for you? and i know that much of the violence is being perpetrated by criminals, but i doubt that the vast majority of these mobs are common thieves and thugs and it took how many days and how many deaths for the president to actually do something?

[Ofentse]

For starters that is an unfair generalization, reffering to "are you all stupid or something". You are talking about a country here that is fresh out of a rule of white domination. I am not making any excuses for the attacks that took place as they were both inhumane and barbaric, the apartheid government, did not only colonize the land, the worst thing that they did to this country was colonize the minds of the black people in this country and self hate was a tool and to some extent is a tool that is still being used. It's gonna take more than a new flag, a black president, a few so called black diamonds to heal this nation. As for what Zimbabwe and the rest of the African states did for our leaders, you 100% right, they were allies, but look at from a view point of the broke, unemployed masses. The very leaders you refer to are the ones living it up, while basic service delivery is still an issue for the man on the street and then he sees a foreign national driving a nice car, being ignorant due to lack of education, lack of information, unfortunately, the avarage black male in SA and it pains to me to say this does not know who Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Patrice Lumumba, Jomo Kenyatta, Kenneth Kaunda, and so it would be hopeful to think they know who Martin Luther King, Marcus Garvey, Malcom X, Farah Khan, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale are. So if they don't know who they are, even if they may know the name, what makes think they will know the history. The brains of a lot of our people were poisoned, honestly hope lies with the generations to follow even if some us in this "STUPID" generation are trying to make a difference. It starts with ONE.