Last Stand of a South African Hero


by Gary Mathews

The question of restitution and the redistribution of land in Southern Africa is emotive and divisive. It’s an issue that spawns online battles and verbal skirmishes from parliamentary benches to barstools, with opposing factions often brandishing abstraction and half remembered stories. The problem with these stories is that while they are often lost in a direct narrative sense, they are still threaded into the genetic memory of many people. This is in part what makes the land debate so fractious, complicated and potentially violent.
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The Heartland

You’d think that when the ANC came into power it would tend to favour it’s political heartland for strategic reasons and as reward for the prominent role the people of the Eastern Cape played in the liberation struggle.With reports of scores of children dying unnecessarily and the education system in shambles, I went to the Eastern Cape to see first hand how the ANC are keeping their promises.

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The Colour Red

goat

Tambo looked at the dusty red soil that flowed between the government houses, and he thought about the colour red. He remembered the grand velvety richness of the cover of the little red book his father had proudly brought back with him from his training in Angola, and he remembered the sadly worn red in his mothers eyes when she explained that his father would never be coming home again.

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A Shadow Riding on a Breeze

Shadow Breeze

It seemed such a simple thing. I spoke to him, he to me, and then he died. There was no great pealing of bells, nor the stirring bellow of a legion of trumpets. Just a gentle sigh, a mist into which he slowly tipped. Slowly at first like a newly felled oak, then gathering speed and momentum to crash into a little metal closet at the foot of his bed.

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I never knew him well

puma helicopter

I never knew him well; we had exchanged only the curtest of greetings. We were in the same place through circumstance. Not the cosmos-grand-design kind of circumstance, but rather that, which is dictated by the frustrated impotence of old men. Men who went home to wizened wives practicing repulsed celibacy. Refilling the wells of their silent resentment each evening, they irrigated their flowers of death, sending young men to kill and die.

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