Cultural Cleansing
They stand again on the trembling veld, where the wind still hums the psalms of their forefathers, where the bones of ox-wagons sleep beneath the dust and the whisper of ancient hymns rises from the soil like incense from broken altars, and yet they are told now to forget the tongue that prayed them through war, famine, and exile. The government’s ink, still wet with the signature of the BELA Bill, falls like a shadow upon the schools — those last sanctuaries of memory where the children once learned to sing Ons vir jou Suid-Afrika in the cadence of their mothers, and where the boards of elders, the beheerliggame, guarded the language as a sacred lamp against the encroaching night. But now the lamp is dimming. A decree descends from marble towers far removed from the dust and the hymn, dec
- Writer
