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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Us and Them

us-and-them

It is a rather beautiful myth that Eskimos have multiple words for snow. It is a great explanatory device that helps us to understand that there may be many more subtle variants of the same object or experience than our language would suggest, or that we may at first surmise. For example, there are many more kinds of Eskimo than we commonly have words for: Aleut, Sirenik, Yup’ik, Qawiaraq, Malimiutun, Inuinnaqtun, Natsilik, Kivalliq, and Aivilik to name a few.

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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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