My Friend You Talk About My People And Me Poem by Gert Strydom

My friend you talk
about my people and me
being equal
to Hitler and the Germans
of the Second World War,

but do not know
that I and most of us Afrikaners
treated black people
like human beings,

never lifted a hand
against one,
that I knew from being
a toddler that they were
Christians as well

when my mother
gave the money that was left
from my father’s funeral fund
for a church to be constructed
in their own community.

How I saw the effect
of the Church Street bomb
killing innocent civilians
on the street
men, women and children
from any race.

How I was forced
to go to the army
and to war
and patriotic did my duty there

to stop communists killing,
raping and robbing the future
like they did in East Germany,
Hungary in sixty-eight
and with the Portuguese
still living in Mozambique
and in Angola
when that countries
got their independence.

How in Soweto with the army
I had to stop black people
killing black people,
burning their fellow man alive
while their women were
cheering them on

and I saw man more being animals
than human beings
without having any mercy
for each other
having lost all conscience
for their cruel deeds.

You do not know
that I will not quarter
for a country
full of pirates

and not the Orlando
soccer playing type
but people who rob,
kill, maim and rape

that there’s no other escape
for Afrikaner people like me
and nowhere else to go

that I love this land
maybe more than
my forefathers did
who sacrificed
their lives for it

that my great grandfather Japie Strydom
lost his farm in the Cape colony
when as a Cape rebel
he joined the war
against the British,

was almost executed
when the war ended
was imprisoned on St. Helena,

that his wife
died in a British concentration camp
where she was fed finely grinded glass
in the flour given to her

that I want to get rid
of oppression against me
and my fellow Afrikaners
and want to have a life
like any one else.