Alexandra

One of the mementos from that torrid year-long fling is 'Alexandra', by seventies South African poet, Mongane Serote. His quiet lament to the township of his birth is evocative and painful in a way anyone can feel. (This universal resonance is unusual for the generally parochial leanings of most apartheid poetry).

The poem springs to mind in the face of outbreaks of xenophobic violence this week, on the streets of this nearly century-old township. At least three people have been killed after mobs took to the streets on Sunday; beating, shooting and raping foreigners. In fact, not just foreigners, if news reports are anything to go by.

The apartheid-guttered township of Serote's time is reinvented as the creator of its own evil. The irony is crippling. Handed your freedom on a blood-stained silver platter, you then take it upon yourself to visit even worse evils upon the vulnerable and helpless in your community.

In the poem Serote speaks of his love-hate relationship with the unforgiving township, but ends with how it remains his home. The last line, written some thirty years ago, is particularly unsettling in this recent spate of black-on-black violence:

When all these worlds became funny to me,
I silently waded back to you
And amid the rubble I lay,
Simple and black.

Immigrants and refugees fleeing their own decaying worlds and unspeakable violence have found no such refuge in the Alexandra of today.