Blockhouses Had Been Erected Right Over The Country Poem by Gert Strydom

Blockhouses had been erected right over the country,
farms had been entered and burnt to the ground,
Livestock and animals had been slaughtered
and women and children were rounded up
and interned into death camps.

Young boys
were set against white walls
and firing squads
was set against them

and a super power
clenched its fist around this country
and stood gigantic
against every Boer farmer.

l’Envoi
That time will be forever black
in history
with the misdeeds of the British
that is well known
and the ruination of a nation, arousing from it
where women and children perished as targets
at the commands of Horatio Herbert Kitchener.


[Note: My own great grandmother died in a British concentration camp and my great grandfather was sent by the British to St. Helena as a prisoner of war and as a result of this, my grandfather(Gert Strydom) grew up in a orphanage.]