A Long Walk to Peace (inner)

LONG WALK TO PEACE
(inner)

How a "South African "Moegoe" (="drongo") became "politically aware"...

Thanks, once again, Madiba for all you have done for the "always beloved country" (as well as for the licence with my title)

This little e-book of memories is for you and all South Africans

(written in the very dark days of June 1992)

A "Long March to Justice": Reflections on my very privileged journey "born under Apartheid"

I was born in 1950, two years before the National Party won the election in South Africa and imposed the harshest racial legislation the world has ever known. Here is the story of my journey and the first stirrings of my "political awakening"...

From

My Story and An Open Book (1,2 and 3) available at Kobo

SEA AND SAND

Sea and sand
My love
My land,
God bless Africa
Sea and sand
My love
My land,
God bless Africa
But more the South of Africa
Where we live....
Bless the angry mountains
And the smiling hills
Where the cool water spills
To heal the earth's brow

Bless the children of South Africa
The white children
And the black children
But more the black children
Who lost the sea and the sand
That they may not lose love
For white children
Whose fathers raped the land....

Sea and sand
My love
My land,
God bless Africa
Many sunsets
Gold and crimson
Have dripped on the horizon,
Weeping for the dying day.
Many dawns have risen
In timely resurrection
From their cradles of light
Sunsets and dawns
Dawns and sunsets
I have seen them all
But when,
Oh when will I see that day
When love will walk the common way
To heal my wounded people
And break the shackles around their hearts?
- Don Mattera.

I love that poem.

DEDICATION:

This work is also dedicated to all those people who over the years fought for a free and democratic South Africa. There are so many names, I could fill a book. It is especially dedicated to those who made the supreme sacrifice in paying with their lives, the "supreme sacrifice". I'll only name a few: people like Steve Biko, Neil Aggett, David Webster, Abdul Timol and Hector Petersen, the schoolboy and the first shot dead in the Soweto uprising of 1976.

All these people I'm sure would be pleased to see the New South Africa.

It is especially dedicated to all those people who have suffered under the OLD SOUTH AFRICA of racism and oppression...and that is ALL SOUTH AFRICANS. Apartheid divided not only blacks and whites, but everyone.

I don't know how the story will end
But I do know how it all began
.#
PROLOGUE
THE DREAM
It was a cold dreary mid-winter evening in 1975, a year before the Soweto riots that started a great upheaval in the "beloved" country.
The young man was very excited as he caught the bus to the soccer ground in Observatory to see a historic football match between the Greek-based side Hellenic ...

Dettagli