Just Visiting

It’s vacation time from varsity, So I’m visiting my mother in Joburg. Strange to use the word ‘visiting’, I used to live here once But it is no longer my home. Like so many others she lives in a townhouse now, A tiny little thing with two rooms And a kitchen adjoining the lounge, No point in keeping the house Once my sister and I moved out. ‘Talavera Estate’ they call it, Such an exotic name! But the houses are all identical, And the people are much the same. Every morning they shunt off to work, And in the evenings they return to their caves. Each resident has a remote To open the heavy iron gates, Without one it’s difficult to get in. The guards regard you with suspicious eyes, They’ve been injected with paranoia, And told to trust no one, “NO EXCEPTIONS! VERSTAAN? *” I took a walk down to the bottom boundary fence, Where just beyond is a small stream and some trees. But between me and ‘the great outdoors’ Is a high voltage fence, Curiously angled inwards at the top, As though to keep the residents in. Of coarse everyone knows why it’s there, The necessity of security is understood, We can not allow ‘them’ ‘out there’ To take from us what we’ve acquired. Fancy jewelry, the wide screen T.V, Some would go so far as to take our lives! It’s sad what suburban life has become, A self-constructed prison, The inmates fully willing to serve their time. The term ‘swart gevaar**’ has long since been buried, But the mindset of the danger’s the same. It’s no longer ‘the blacks’ we must be wary of, But everyone, everywhere, all the time. Because it’s winter we can’t sit on the small verandah, So we sit inside wrapped in warmth. And we discuss Zimbabwe, and petrol, and Zuma, And wonder when it’ll get warm again. And there, beyond our high voltage fence, ‘They’ are dying. And very few seem to care. *An Afrikaans word meaning Understand. **A propaganda term meaning ‘black peril’ coined by the apartheid regime. It refers to a perceived security threat to the then white South African Government from the black African population