My very own 9/11/11 terror

I woke up on Sunday morning, switched on the T.V and knew I had died and gone to America. As if every bad thing I've ever done was counting against me and this was it. Funny, I thought, not much going on on the fire and brimstone front t but the torture is real.

 I wasn’t in hell or America , thank goodness, just witness to yet another day of SABC re-runs on one of those not so current , current event programmes. Close enough.

It was a real tragedy, 9/11, a real show of injustice and the vulnerability of the ordinary man in the mindless games of the malicious and powerful. It reminded us all of the frailty of life, how it can change in a matter of seconds, it showed the world how valuable every single life is and how the death of even one man can change the entire course of history.

… So I’m not talking about the attack on the twin towers in America, however tragic the even was (and is) it is irrelevant, to South African’s at least. With such a rich and inspirational history of tragedy and terror the attack on the twin towers seems a little like the bone in the water in comparison to our own 9/11 story.

On August 18^th 1977 Steve Bantu Biko was arrested and detained under suspicion of terrorism for his activism against the system of apartheid in South Africa. On September 11^th (9/11) he was beaten for his pride and cut down for what he stood for by the all-powerful and non-accountable police.  Steve Biko became the 41^st person to die in police custody on the 12^th of September 1977.

The more recent Death of Andries Tatane at the hands of South Africa’s finest men in blue and the string of similar stories of police brutality and law enforcer’s indifference to the marginalisation of the majority surely point to the daily relevance of South Africa’s own history, our present and our very own war against terror.

Too often South African’s undermine their own relevance in favour of mirages of victory and belonging. Don’t drop your bone, no matter how small and dry, for the one in the water. It isn’t real and you most certainly can never have it.