2Sense: Wise Monkeys

" You can not use apartheid as an excuse"
Excuse me? I don't think you understand what you're saying...
a little more than 2 decades later we are expected to forget apartheid
forget that that you came to OUR country, OUR continent and had the audacity to deem us inferior.
then you proceeded to take from us, in fact steal
our livestock , our land, even our liberty, anything you could get your hands on you took from us.
We are thieves? well I wonder where we learnt that from.
Called us uncivilised, yet YOU had primitive minds that only knew to conquer and divide.

Tell me how are we to forget, how you relentlessly tried to destroy our nation, our humanity.
You made our ethnicity feel like sin, like the pigment of our skin made us sub-human.
Called us vile but you used pseudo science to convince yourselves that you were better.
You imposed your religion on us and when we rejected it, you called us Kafers
and for years to follow you used such words to torment us,
remind us of our sub-ordinance, our Gods were intangible, and seemingly unfathomable but so was yours.

I can not wrap my head around your vindictiveness, so much of if that you created apartheid, a spawn of your racism
then segregation.
You enslaved our minds with the distopia of "seperate but equal" for over 40 years
explain to me, how do we erase that from our memories?

We use apartheid as a crutch? You crippled us!!
but if you still don't understand let me elaborate
How many black men and women about the age of 68 own property?
or have successful businesses
or have/had cars
You see when you took from our grandparents, who with what little they were left with had to raise our parents
you took from us.

I myself am a born-free , as we are affectionately named
My mother is a nurse, not because it's what she aspired to be
but  because she had to find a career , that would give her a steady job FAST, so she could help raise her siblings
and so she could help finish building a house that her mother died trying to erect.

Still don't understand?

How many of your parents had blue collar jobs or worked in someone's kitchen?
better yet how many of your parents have those jobs now?

For decades we let you abuse us, rob us, terrorize us, label us, belittle us , victimise us
and today we live with those consequences.
If we are monsters it's the result of your actions, and only monsters can create monsters.
The effect of apartheid is not an excuse , it's a reality.
And no we will not "forget about it" and neither should you.

And if you dare question me about the relevance of apartheid in our current society

be prepared to see a monkey go mad...

By: | Ndalwentle Makunga |