Mayibuye iAfrika, for it is not ours yet baZantsi

Y'all know nothing about struggle. Think affirmative action is discriminatory? You must be joking, right? It brings me tears that black pain remains invisible in the day of information, globalisation and technology

My mama served tea and sold fruit in train stations during the day and she waited tables at night. She took herself to school, paying for her education and she passed her matric. She did this while her mama, uMakhulu, was raising her child, me. UMakhulu was, and still is, a tea girl, a maid and a servant.

UMakhulu would put me on her back and take me with her to work. I would be placed on the white people’s green grass before she would go and carry her daily chores. I would play with the whites’ dogs until she would come to the backyard. This would be the time she would be hanging clothes to dry. Little did she know that I felt like life was hanging me to die.

The mama before uMakhulu, my uKhokho, worked for the same family: “Cheerfully” cleaning after them; “gladly” raising their children. These children would grow to subject her to her lowliness. She “happily” cooked food for them and “offered” her service (and love) knowing very well that these people could be the next killers of her kin.

She gave quality time to their young ones more than to her own. For days and weeks she would abandon her own to be with theirs’. And like bunnies her babies would long for her scheduled visit at the end of the month. Perhaps some leftovers from the Huis would prove her love. These delights, all of you whose mammas work in the kitchens know very well. Nothing is as precious or as delightful as having mama bring food from the white folk’s house. It’s the best food ever, with the best taste.

The aromas (quads as we call them) alone rumble children’s tummies. They are a calling for neighbour’s to come and visit. White people’s food, izikhotho, cause rifts between sister and brother. A father could sell his hat for just a bite. An unborn baby could push herself to life just to taste the food. For as your tongue met the food, excitement would kick you over. Quarrels break because some start to eat faster than others. This to a stranger looks like savagery but to an insider it looks like deprivation.

Often little do the children know that their mama had to skip lunch for all this to happen. Who needs Santa when mama is coming home? 

There she would be uKhokho hungry and starved looking at her children eat, with a great deal of satisfaction and her soul full of contentment. For that’s all she wants: her children to be happy. And if this was happiness, even if it is temporary then my Khokho's job was done.

UMakhulu and her siblings thought they were neglected by uKhokho. What kind of a mother shows love to other people’s children but barely shows up to see her own children? When she came to see them, they did not know how exhausted she was. This was her time off but to them this was the time for her to raise her children. Is there rest for the black soul nje?

As uMakhulu and 'em grew up they knew and began to understand that  my Khokho was raising other people's children. UMakhulu knew very well these children would employ her someday, at least she hoped. So Makhulu would go and help out in the kitchens. This was training and served a trial run. If they saw how hard she works, then after Khokho she would be the next girly.

Yet she was the child who raised herself selling a pint of African beer for a penny. She was the child who would sell stazza-stazza (home cooked tripe) to help out at home. She was the child who knew nothing about playing with toys but was a master at ducking tear gas, bullets (rubber and live ammunition) in townships. She was the child who knew that as years go by, she too would be like her mama. What she hated the most, she would now become a mother who is away from her family in body. A mother who would see her children have some moments of happiness but a lifetime of pain and not be able to do much about it.

So sadly I stand to say this to those who cannot see the black plight: you have chosen to blind your eyes to the daily struggle of millions. Millions of South African who earn an honest living. Though they may be subjugated and dehumanised they continue to push the wheels of production. They continue to break their back for the economy’s "stability". Yes the ones who threaten this stability when they demand fair wage, are the forces behind our economy's growth.

If you think protesting against systematic racism in universities is about being fussy and looking for a new hobby. Then you have not been trapped in this circle and chain of poverty. You have not seen your father leave in a train to go to the city, never to come back. You have not witnessed how black men were not allowed to marry. If they married, they would be separated from their families. Yes the politics were evil but it would be the economics that would break families. Stolen land that would be "discovered" and occupied by foreign settlers and later by European migrants. Excessive taxes that would go to aid the white minority.

You have not seen how blacks’ UBUNTU is defined by their ability to hide their anger, pain and hate for this unjust system and show love to “ALL”. You have not seen how a black child’s intelligence is measured by their ability to speak a foreign language so that they can communicate with the masters in their native tongue, or at least closely related language to their mother tongue. You have not witnessed how blacks' dignity was tarnished when people would be denied to go to their loved ones’ funerals because they needed to apply for a dompas.

You have not seen how our bodies are violated, our hair policed, our men represented as aggressive barbaric monsters, our women ignored and our 'others' denied their existence. You have not seen how our ancestors’ graves are left alone for the altar of a foreign god. You have been oblivious to how African Spirituality has been rubbished for a Christian belief that too has no basis of fact. You have not seen how our spiritual forces have been demonised made to look like they are from the devil when for millennia they protected us. Our African doctors have been insulted. Our magic has been vilified. While their magic (Easter Bunnies, Tooth Fairies and Virgin-born boy) has been exalted.

You have not seen how black family life will take at least a century to recover from the cruelty of forced removals, from the instability of becoming lodgers, and the injustice of being denied to own land or property. You have not come to grips with the fact that the right to transact, save, invest, be entrepreneurial, be enterprising, be educated and be a professional was illegalised. Where the vast majority of profits go to capital owners, it was made sure that blacks do not, and will not anytime soon, own capital. This is an economy that is capitalistic and where capital owners are white. So it's no surprise that all the economy's returns go to a proportion of the population that is less than 10% in 2015.

Did you notice how liberals think that Corporate Social Investment is our saviour? When our environment has suffered from the corporates’ hands. You have been ignorant of how corruption has gone unpunished in the private sector. Remember the Broederbond? What about De Beers, Ackerman, Lonmin and 'em's labour exploitation? Come on at least say you remember the South African Construction Cartel and the 2008 Crisis? Hear the media write about this?

You are oblivious how the black child has no choice on their medium of instruction. But his counterparts of European descent can choose between Afrikaans and English in basic and higher education. You forget the 1976 riots when our forebears protested learning  in Afrikaans in their home country. You forget that symbolism and Art and everything else in South Africa is still extremely white and racist.

It is for some of these reasons we have movements like RhodesMustFall, TransformWits, OpenStellenbosch. It is for these reason that black anger, and perhaps aggression has surfaced out, from behind the banners of a “rainbow” nation. For I have NEVER seen a rainbow with the colours black and white. Maybe that is why I have not seen both blacks and whites joining hands to fight the African struggle: the ill of Colonialisation and the injustice of Apartheid. I hear a call to end government corruption but nothing about fighting corporate greed and exploitation (our number 1 problem), perhaps I am deaf.

So ndithi: Mayibuye iAfrika, for it is not ours yet amaAzania.

-SNLV kaJolinkomo