As we set about the struggle to win back our land, we signalled our intention by naming it out of the newness that comes with dreams of freedom. Until the early 1980s we spoke and sang of a new name to replace the old, unimaginative and historically unsubstantiated South Africa. We called it Azania, a united country detailed in the poetry of the Black Consciousness Movement.
Returning in 1982 after a visit to London, poetry was my rock and shield.
So Much To Declare
London, a frozen, dark distance from sunny skies
over Joburg as BA flight 307 touches ground
on my anxious land. Yet rejoice, O my soul.
AJ Luthuli International Airport where the open doors
of peace and friendship welcome all
who love freedom and our people
to a liberated South Africa. Blue eyes, warm beneath the peaked cap of officialdom admire the miniature bust of VI Lenin,
Colletts price tag still intact.
Porters on lunch-time break grin Amandla smiles.
Mbaqanga happiness fills the excited queue.
I wonder how the debate about a new name
for our country is faring and Phil’s suggestion
that the Settlers Monument in Rhini, once Grahamstown, be made into the biggest beerhall in the Eastern Cape.
And last year, like a dream, walking with Fidel Castro along Bernard Fortuin Avenue
past the Alex la Guma Cultural Centre
in Elsies River where the Orient Bioscope used to be,
and the Commandante laughing through his beard at my account of how we youngsters used to cheer when Zorro rode onto the screen and into our lives.
And Daniel (yes man, Daniel Ortega) saying they did the same when he was a boy in Managua and Che
somewhere in jungled Bolivia.
“Anything to declare?” Voice hard like blue eyes, hard like rock tumbling down, crashing ten-storeys down.
Dangling like time.
“Anything to declare?” Blue eyes shouting,
“Ja, koelie-boesman, with your wing-tip shoes,
button-down collar and new blue suit.
This is South Africa!
“Anything to declare?” whipping up
the Riotous Assembly of my fear.
“Yes,” I smile from the tip of my trembling toes,
“South Africa belongs to all, and to me and you, Piet.”
He does not hear the roar of “Mayibuye!” at Freedom Square.
“The People Shall Govern,” I assure him, speaking now with the voice of the thousands who gathered at The Congress of the People.
“Goed. You may go.”
I pick up my suitcase
and my ruffled courage and walk past security,
past the soldiers, my Mandela T-shirt, sweat-wet against my beating heart
For a while that name, Azania, recessed into the distant backyard of the new home we’re building from the ruins of the old.
Then the Fees Must Fall movement, yearning for newness cherished from the ache of the fallen sang “From Cape to Cairo, from Morocco to Malagasy! Azania! Azania! Azania! - Azania izwe lethu”.
And in these days beyond 1994 our hearts tell that ancient ones of our land, the Khoisan, called this place between the bay and mountain and beyond Camissa, “a place of sweet waters”.
George Bernard Shaw noted “the essence of inhumanity” is not hatred but indifference.
When you look at people and you don’t even factor into your view and consequential action that they might have an opinion.
You - the powers that be, the comrades, whom we empowered by our vote and the sweat, grief and bloodied anger from which it came - do note as you set about renaming airports while still not declaring District Six a heritage site, that we have you in our electoral sights.
In these days of a New Dawn, don’t let the sun set on our rising anger and the sense that we are not seen in the substantial matters of the land and who belongs to it.
* The Very Rev Michael Weeder is the Dean of St George’s Cathedral in Cape Town.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.