South Africa, that great bastion of human rights, invoking a genocide convention against Gaza.
I am sure that that Israel will sit up and take notice.
Tatamkhulu Afrika's "Nothing's Changed" illustrates the persistence of racism and de facto segregation in post-apartheid South Africa. The poem takes place in District Six, a once diverse area of Cape Town whose nonwhite residents were forcibly evicted after the district was declared "whites only" in 1966. Standing outside an upscale inn in the area decades later, the speaker understands that "Nothing's changed": though apartheid legislation has since been repealed and he's now technically free to go where he pleases, there are still places where nonwhite people know they don't "belong.
Nothing’s changedSmall round hard stones click
under my heels,
seeding grasses thrust
bearded seeds
into trouser cuffs, cans,
trodden on, crunch
in tall, purple-flowering,
amiable weeds.
District six.
No board says it is:
but my feet know,
and my hands,
and the skin about my bones,
and the soft labouring of my lungs,
and the hot, white, inwards turning
anger of my eyes.
Brash with glass,
name flaring like a flag,
it squats
in the grass and weeds,
incipient Port Jackson trees:
new, up-market, haute cuisine,
guard at the gatepost,
whites only inn.
No sign says it is:
But we know where we belong.