This is what makes me South African
This place, South Africa, how can I describe what she means to me? There are days when my thoughts turn to people who have left, all for different reasons they justify in this ever- changing land. When questioned, mostly by my own fears, I find myself thinking of Her. My country. My Home.
One can’t help but hear your sprit calling out; ‘Mother Africa’ I’ve felt my feet burn on her soil, I’ve experienced her pain.
South Africa holds me tight and sometimes as hard as I try, I cannot fully understand why. Is it the boerewors, or braai, or maybe even our luscious rays of sunshine? When at the height of my confusion, She opens and lets me in for a moment to witness her delights, and again I am hooked. Perhaps it is just being able to take myself to a place close by where I can witness the magnificence of the end of the day, the glorious sun sets, and then to be able to believe that this spectacle is ALL for me.I am romantic about my country. Sometimes all I can see is her beauty, it constantly lingers with me. The horrific statistics of AIDS, the images of Death, crime and violence seen daily are enough to permanently crush the sole… Yet we can manage to look past that. For it is the beauty that holds me. It is the beauty that moves me. Through all her trials and tribulations, I see her journey, her history and her Altered Destiny! Sometimes it seems too much of her to ask her to contain all the violence. I urge her to. For our people are greater than that, we can move ahead, we can be at peace. I have come to understand that time moves slowly in Africa. And that it is I that needs to be patient. So I forgive her all violence, and I learn to abundantly love.
The Essay on Compare and contrast: Africa and South Asia
Regions and colonies all around the eastern hemisphere were diverse and comparable in different ways from post World War II (1945) to present day. Aspects regarding economy and society like marches for independence and freedom predominated in the two regions. India and South Africa both reached economical stability and political equality by management of foreign investment and internal investment, ...
Images of her people are constantly on my mind. It is often something as simple as the petrol attendant who always cleans your window with a smile on their face. They do it with pleasure, not just because it is their job. It is a smile that is so freely given. Then when one turns you are surrounded by street kids calling you, testing your patience and your concern, asking for life, for money, for the next “high”, maybe the next meal. And you look on in sadness and despair…Is it the freedom of her open spaces, of being able to drive on an endless road from here to nowhere that makes me think of her…? Is it taking an orphan to a nearby beach to let them play in the waves, for them to smell the ocean and feel the sand between their toes moving with the tide. Surrounded with incomprehensible beauty.Is it hearing a dozen different languages, knowing no other than my own and feeling inadequate, my literacy and my limited knowledge of the depth of all our different and diverse cultures. It is her abundant colour and her tireless vibrancy. It is her music and the scope of it. Of quella rhythm in a concert for freedom, the celebration of it and knowing that no other music can tell such a tale. A tale of strength. A tale of the power of good over bad, of love over hate and in her music hearing the surge of the African Sky. It is fact of knowing that in 1994 all South Africans stood side by side, and made history as they touched their collective soul. It is today, when I still hear her struggle and I still feel her hope and make me want so much more for her. So I know her to be special in Being. So I think of her and so I stay, in this diverse rainbow nation of mine.
