The grandson's hands trace bars
that remember other hands
his grandfather's fingers
counting decades in stone.
Robben Island, 1964.
Israeli detention, 2025.
Sixty-one years
and we learned nothing.
Nothing.
In the flotilla's hold,
baby formula spoils
while bureaucrats debate
the legality of mercy.
Four hundred and fifty souls
who carried bandages
to children with no limbs
now sleep on concrete
because love
has been reclassified
as terrorism.
I thought we were better.
I actually thought
we had evolved past
caging the grandfather
for opposing apartheid,
then caging the grandson
for opposing genocide.
But here we are:
Zwelivelile's wrists
wearing the same metal
that wore his grandfather's skin raw,
the same Empire
that called Nelson dangerous
now calling his blood
a threat to security.
Free Mandela, they chant,
and my throat closes
on the bitter repetition
that we still need these words,
that the cage-builders
outlived the cage-breakers,
that love is still
the most dangerous contraband.
The Balfour Declaration
sits in the British Museum
next to stolen artifacts
another promise
written in someone else's blood.
I stare at the document
and see the dried ink
of all our failures:
lines drawn by men
who never had to live
within them,
borders carved by hands
that never bled
for the carving.
The Empire taught the world
how to make theft
look like gift,
occupation look like liberation,
genocide look like self-defence.
And we
Jesus, we are still
such eager students.
They speak Nelson's name
with museum reverence
while signing the checks
that fund his grandson's imprisonment.
The same mouths
that called the grandfather
a terrorist
now invoke his legacy
at dinner parties,
quote his forgiveness
at fundraisers,
wear his words
like stolen jewellery
while practicing
his oppression.
Churchill's Bengal:
four million dead.
Netanyahu's Gaza:
the count still climbing.
Same calculation,
same indifference,
same comfortable distance
between the decision-makers
and the dying.
I watch the news
and see children
digging through rubble
for their mothers
while politicians debate
the acceptable ratio
of dead Palestinians
to living Israelis,
as if love
could be measured
in such statistics.
Greta's voice,
cut off mid-sentence
by the same machinery
that silenced
every inconvenient truth
the Empire ever faced.
The same technology
of disappearance
refined now,
perfected,
but fundamentally unchanged.
The flotilla carried
more than medical supplies.
It carried the stubborn insistence
that Palestinian children
deserve to live,
that hunger is not
a military strategy,
that medicine is not
a weapon of war.
Such radical ideas.
Such dangerous cargo.
Such terrorist thinking:
that a mother's love
in Gaza
is worth the same
as a mother's love
in Manchester,
that grief
cannot be ranked
by nationality,
that a child's scream
sounds the same
in any language.
Two generations of Mandelas.
Two generations of cages.
Nelson counted years
in Robben Island stone,
believing that tomorrow
his grandson would be free
to love without limits,
to save without permission,
to carry medicine
to dying children
without being called
a threat to civilisation.
But Zwelivelile counts days
in Israeli concrete,
and I realise
we have built
a world so broken
that carrying baby formula
to starving infants
is an act of terrorism,
that love itself
has become
a crime against the state.
In Gaza's rubble,
children search for pieces
of their former lives
a doll's arm,
a schoolbook,
a photograph
of a family
that no longer exists.
British bombs
still smoking in the wreckage
carry the maker's mark:
Made in UK.
Tested on Palestinians.
Approved by Parliament.
Every olive tree uprooted
continues the deforestation
of hope
that began
when we decided
some people's children
matter more
than other people's children.
Free Mandela, they chant,
and I hear in those words
the accumulated grief
of every parent
who watched their child
disappear into the machinery
of someone else's empire,
every lover
who traced their beloved's name
on prison walls,
every friend
who carried flowers
to unmarked graves.
The Empire never ended.
It just changed its uniforms,
updated its slogans,
refined its methods.
The same families
that profited from slavery
now profit from weapons sales.
The same institutions
that justified one genocide
now call the next one
self-defence.
I thought we were better than this.
I thought sixty-one years
was enough time
to learn that caging
the people who love
too dangerously,
too widely,
too inclusively,
makes us the criminals.
But here we are,
still building cages
for the crime
of carrying medicine
to children,
still calling love
terrorism,
still measuring humanity
by the colour of passports,
the sound of prayers,
the accident of birth.
Two generations of Mandelas
fighting the same war
against our wilful blindness
to our own capacity
for cruelty.
The grandson traces bars
and feels his grandfather's presence
not comfort,
but shared bewilderment
at how little
we have learned,
how quickly
we forgot
that freedom
is not a zero-sum game.
Free Mandela.
Free Palestine.
Free Mandela, they chant,
and the words taste
of salt and centuries,
of promises broken
before they were made,
of love criminalised
and mercy weaponised
and hope imprisoned
in cells
we swore
we would never build again.
But we did build them.
We are building them.
We have learned nothing.
Nothing.
The river of resistance
flows on,
carrying the voices
of all who refuse
to accept
that this is
how love
has to end
in cages,
in rubble,
in the space
between what we promise
and what we practice.
The struggle continues
because we
continue
to fail it.
And somewhere,
in Israeli concrete,
the grandson's hands
trace bars
that remember
other hands,
and the echo
of our failure
bounces off the walls
of every cage
we swore
we would never build
again.
Comments
Post a Comment