Part 1, Dusk: "Solomon
Mahlangu's Tree Is Bearing Rotten Fruits" - Lerumo La Badimo
Songwriter: Reamogetse
Strings: Evol
Drums: Badimo
Composer: Modimo
Backing Vocals: Black
Feminist Choir
Album: Uhuru
Producer: Lerumo
La Badimo
/There is blood everywhere/ Black women and children are
dying / Their deaths unnatural/
In South Africa the stench of fear permeates the air with
undertones of blood and wifts of burnt women's bodies tenderized by fists and
kicks and belts and extension cords and slaps and racist verbs in attack and
stares... hateful stares that just a moment ago seemed loving.
In South Africa it
is not only hard to breathe if yours is a black woman's body but breathing
itself is a chore that suffocates... you know that with each breath you
fight for you are counting moments of survival… moments of survival before there WILL be another
death, another rape, another suicide and
another beating… and another, and another, and another, hour after hour,and minute
after minute there will be a fist, a rock, a bottle, a slap, a stare, a swear
word, a penis, a kick, poverty, mental illness brutalizing yet another black
woman's body...
...and another's, and another's!
Love is the essence of who we are, the essence of what
Freedom should feel like… as much as we painfully concede that many may have
died for a little, their blood was worth much more… their dreams remain our
dreams and so we also are willing to take up the fight in a new direction and
ensure that in our lifetime… Solomon Mahlangu's tree of freedom starts
bearing the right fruits. He told them to tell us that he loves us, and that
the struggle must be continued, he said the tree of freedom he dreamt of would
bear a thousand flowering seeds of freedom, instead we don’t feel love but
hatred visited upon us, the struggle has long been abandoned by self serving
former liberators turned state looters, aluta continua and we don’t even
own the land upon which this tree can
take root, be watered with the love he spoke of so that Uhuru can bloom
thousands of times over!
Passaggio:
"As the CONDUCTOR instructs for
the DRUMS to be played, the BACKING VOCALISTS weeping intensified, just as the
surgeon's scalpel must slice and cut deeper and scrape the core of the wounds,
the illnesses known as dis-eases in order to heal it completely as not to risk
re-infection by being too gentle, too feeling when they ought to have been cold
and emotionless, the drums too give us no easy comfort… their messages are
filled with the tears of our ancestors… those who marched in 1956 and those who
came before…
Charlotte Maxeke's wail is heard at the sight of the toothless
patriachy's princesses, anti-feminist organization She formed called the ANC
Women's League… An organization that a living legend warrior woman in the form
of Madikizela does not associate with anymore.
An organization that is now equivalent to tea ladies - abomama who only
know how to worship at the phallic altar of abobaba - while at the same time
stoning their children in the form of political stones while screaming BURN THE
WITCH... BURN THE WITCH! after ubaba - umalume - rapes his
children!
Charlotte Maxeke's cry becomes more mournful and sorrowful,
it rattles awake the bones of Mbuya Nehanda whose own weeping sounds like
shrills of the type of cry that shreds to pieces your senses and rips the very
heart out of its ribcage in order to blow some soothing air upon it, anything
to stop the centuries old war on black bodies, black women's bodies that end up
killed at the hands of those they seek to liberate… Nehanda cries in a song the
ears refuse to hear, a cry that torments the spirit as her bones remind us
"IT WAS MY OWN WHO BETRAYED ME!"
*And so we move towards Midnight…
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