“Pan Africanism is sea-green incorruptible”
-Victor Simphiwe Mabaso
1945-2025
From the masses to the asses
Nurses to the hearses
Popular insurrection
A society’s resurrection
Each snapshot
A form of class suicide
The people within earshot
Cross-current swimming against the tides
A photo journalist’s trauma
Is for some a coffee creamer
Dying on a blanket of election posters
And party manifestoes
Clutching a bottle of sour milk
Not a bunch of sour grapes
The revolution reduced to a joke
And struggle gains
Reversed on a ballot paper
An old man’s last cry of despair
And the municipal bills keep piling up
Known by the high and mighty
Yet living without running water
Or fossil fuel
Trailing ideological clarity by candlelight
An oppressor’s act of spite
Whereas on brighter days we sat together
At the workers’ office
And discussed strategy and tactics
Sharing a crust of unbuttered bread
And downing it with bananas
Always a stickler to party line
Comical in a faded tweed jacket
Yet dead earnest
Kwame Nkrumah did not die
Or fall ill
After contracting a diagnosable ailment
He died of the cancer of betrayal
From nape to Cairo
Morogoro to Malagasy
We are the original Berber tribes
Of the desert
As African as the Sahrawi
Yizwe Lethu!
POSTSCRIPT
(To my maverick comrades, Jeremy Corbyn and George Galloway: Taken for a final free ride. Power drunk, celebrity hands shove me aside by the graveside. You see? My hands must be so unclean they shouldn’t be casting ashes-to-ashes and dust-to-dust upon the mortal remains of my own kith & kin. Too much love is such a sin.
Saracen or hashish-eating assassins, the gun salute is murder by ‘mistake’. Shoot me in my face and not my back. ‘Cos invisible bodyguards have my backside covered all the time!)
Mbongeni Khumalo: Author of the poetry collection apocrypha.