REST IN PEACE DEAR MATTHEW

IT IS not uncommon to hear of at least one death in my age group almost every day. I am not even referring to the insistently-present Covid-19 pandemic and its toll.

I speak of those contemporaries of mine who suffered what Eliot, with such elegant euphemism, referred to as “the betrayal of the flesh”, meaning physical ageing. And Keats reminds the nightingale that it never knows “… the weariness, the fever and the fret/Here where men sit and hear each other groan;/Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs … ” And then it is done.

When a dear friend passed last week, somebody remarked that part of his tragedy was that he did not live long enough to see his dream come true. He had been a victim of the insanely cruel stripping of District Six, and the decades of longing and hope for restitution. He had applied for some form of compensation, or a gesture of regret.

He had received a letter of acknowledgement and had been told that he was on the list for relocation.

Alas, he passed on. He has gone home, but not to the one that the cruel apartheid regime owed him. Which is the burden of my song this week.

The promises that have been made to correct man’s inhumanity to man are legion.

I, like my deceased friend, have suffered the label “Coloured” all my life, and have had to make space for that ill-defined ethnic category. I became used to the need to defend my humanity.

Whatever I did had to be a little larger than the requisite effort. And when I succeeded in displaying my ability and willingness to work for a place in the sun, the accolades were laced with psychic cruelties like “not bad for a coloured … ” and so forth.

My efforts at publishing four novels met with the same responses. Have you been published before? No? Then come back when you have. Or: We don’t want to know your story. We created you.

In other words, there is the diabolical conviction that brown-skinned persons like my buddy and I were no more than colonial constructs.

So my friend’s death, and my own thoughts, cohese into the lies that constituted our whole existence. The race configuration remains the same, no matter what.

Not even death, or psychic laceration, will get the Caucasian to admit to his litany of greed, inhumanity and arrogance. Never in the history of man was there an act to equal the mindless savage disregard for “other” life than that which gave us slavery. Other equally abominable acts of dehumanisation splatter the life-map of mankind.

When will we just look at each other and say “I am me and you are you” and that is not an area of conflict. The conflict comes with politics and greed, mindless appropriation and destruction of cultures.

The position is not negotiable. And if we see that, then why are we still being lied to on a daily basis? My friend will lie in his cold grave and no one will apologise to him for uprooting him and his family from District Six, and other such places in South Africa. Indeed, the world over.

The power play is relentless. Those who have, even if taken by force, will hang on. Those who don’t have will be asked to sacrifice even more. A simple death, a simple reflection, and we turn for a moment to view with disgust man’s inhumanity to man.

Sleep well, my dear brother. Your final home is a lot better than the one from which you were evicted all those years ago.