Status Update

I often wonder

when it became okay

To think so little of each other

This idea of who we are somehow realized

How since time immemorial we have been characterized

Any idea of hegemony or identity bastardized

So we do not need others to judge our morals

Our values, our struggles, our battles, our quarrels

We have successfully internalized

The idea that we have ourselves compromised

That ambition, and aspiration, and the drive to succeed

Allows only for a ‘qualified’ demand in response to need

How your rights and common humanity

Comes second to a demand for their kind of decency

For appropriate behavior by those who never experiences the same

And excels at selective amnesia when dictating the parameters of the game

There is a measure, a value, a mark

That with its trusted narrative back to Apartheid hark -

Unwelcome in your place of birth

Unacknowledged what surviving Apartheid meant, and its worth

Desiring restitution and restorative settlement

Serving only as flags for anti-whiteness and entitlement

With an alarm bordering on hysteria

Upholds the demise of that mindset as the beginning of the end, here

So in the main the stream is abundantly clear

It is still Western hegemony we hold most dear

And it matters not we saw and see it at its worst manifest

It can unlock a startling vehemence if even questioned whether best

As all evidence would point to there being no doubt

It is the ‘civilized‘ world‘s version carries the clout

And whilst this is obvious and not needing to be said

It is always our own people‘s need to appear less that messes with one’s head

Why rush to assume the worst about your own kind?

Are you so convinced there is only one way a story works and that it is up to the police, mind

The police you’ll remember who needed the army’s protection

Now dictates narrative, truth and reaction

And our communities, persuaded of the police’s skill

Turns now to the victims to demand their fill

Happy with the official insight into the family’s plight

When there has been decade-long complaints about the police not getting it right

The doings of the police in Cape Town like a dangerous prank

Deadly if someone takes offense or pulls rank

And the truly large-scale shenanigans manifesting right now

Everybody absolved from, since the community brought it on themselves somehow

And swallowing this load of excrement

The community now demands answers from the very people who were in the predicament

Keen to prove it quite true

One should debate worth and due

After all, ‘Keeping The ANC out‘ was never anti-Black

As wasn’t the idea that one would be worse off under ‘them’, which okayed the lack

I’m exaggerating? Well, whilst the taxi wars were making people‘s lives a living hell

There was time to make sure this Province at least could any attempt at looting quell

And wouldn’t you know women were dodging bullets on their way to work

But the good thing once again confirmed

When it comes to peotecting property , you will not say Cape Town shirked

Again though, no accountability for the murder rate, the crime rate, the continued proliferation of GBV

It‘s as if Safety and Security

Does not have a responsibility

And resolve is up to the community

A noble instinct, one must speak fair

But then again it begs the question ‘what are they being paid for over there?’

Again though, some in our community

So programmed to think the worst of their own

So keen to integrate and adopt a ‘typical’ tone

And forego common decency and respect

To feed their need to expose dysfunction and defect

l will not raise the good men and women as example

Who defies and denies this desire to the worst in us sample

But I have to resist despair

At the desperation to continuously compare

Without any evidence

Of how white-adjacency will ever attain white’s relevance

And explain thinking the worst of yourself at every opportunity?

Means you don‘t know who you are, or your history, it seems to me

SP