New South Africa (Revised) Poem by Margaret Alice Second

Stormed into the office, told the first colleague I met
how wonderful our first President, Nelson Mandela,
was for me; - she coldly replied, for me he was just
anther terrorist. I said I respected her views & left
immediately, flabbergasted that a representative of
the tribe he saved, Dutch-Afrikaners, rejected their
saviour without taking an unbiased look at his life

It again confirmed my disgust with my tribe, I refuse
to identify with the right-wing and went off in search
of a kindred spirit, found Ulrike who also watched a
special Mandela channel and cried when he was
sentenced to prison on Robben Island, just as I had
cried when I saw what evil politicians did to him,
suddenly I realised that Tsavendas killed Verwoerd

Because he could not stand Verwoerd’s evil smile,
the whole corps of Afrikaner politicians were evil and
so was their church, hiding their moral bankruptcy by
firm media control, censure and falsehood - keeping
a generation of ordinary people under their spell; my
dad never succumbed and shocked everyone saying
that every political leader in life was a crook

My dad deplored the way Africans were defrauded by
conniving Europeans, could not stand their suffering
because their pass was not right, clocked them in at
work and organised passes for whoever needed it -
today I feel my dad was right although he frequently
lost his job - he took the part of the underdog - I am
so glad - what a wonderful world in which

Mandela created a new South Africa!

[2 January 2014]