Tamed and Institutionalized Race

I feel tamed like a modern-day bushman, who cannot roam the lands of his forefathers as they did, who cannot follow the tracks and the smell of the great giraffe as his father did. I feel tamed like a modern-day bushman whose children have been deprived of the wild and forced into the concrete jungle with no soul or conscience. My heart bleeds for the Khomani San, the Nama, the Griqua and the Black Man of modern-day Afrika.

My heart aches for the many thousands of our people whose land was stolen and demarcated as “National Parks” for the monetary gains of the oppressor. I cry for the Khomani San whose ancient ways of making fire, and whose legendary hunting skills, are relegated to the status of being uncivilized and backwards.

I am hurting because the descendants of Nama people have lost their identity, forcibly integrated to a community of “Coloureds” as though they had no identity of their own. I’m hurting because the Bantu people who walk the planes of Southern Africa continue to look the other way when the indigenous people of the Kalahari continue to live the life of non-desirables.

I must express that my heart aches because the white man still treats the black one like a slave in De Doorns and the Hex River Valley. My jaws drop to the floor upon hearing the appalling truth that our children's innocence shall be taken away from them by savages and animals who will convince them, falsely, that they love them, since the modern day court has ruled that children between 12 and 16 can copulate legally.

I am not pleased and therefore I cry over the manner in which my brothers in Bamako have been slaughtered. I bemoan the loss of the many souls who perished in the Marikana genocide.

I look to the mountains to find food for my people but the silence in the mountains is deafening, I can no longer hunt for the man with a gun has killed and chased away all our food. I long for the blood of the Wildebeest, the vibrations from the thumping steps of the elephant. I miss the sound of the crow and the whistle of the northern winds.

My ancestral home haunts the bare desert of the Kalahari for that is where my great grand-father was slaughtered like the very Springbok he hunted. The mountains of Giyani call on me. They seek to be reunited with the ancient world, for life was better then.     

I am tamed. I ceased to be wild a long time ago and therefore I bleed.