*This is not a poem. This is a personal blog post.
Many years ago in South Africa, when the racists, like the MAGA cult of today, had the upper hand and proudly put up their official “WHITES ONLY” signage everywhere, displaying to the world their insecurity about their whiteness and about their fragile manhood, we young boys had to finish our schooling and then were conscripted into compulsory military service where we were trained in warfare so we could be sacrificed at the altar of old men and their racist, imperialist egos.
Military conscription in South Africa was a thing, and it was unavoidable unless your family had money and could shield you from the worst of the horrors of it by sending you to university for a few years, after which you could hope for an administration-related or officers-type appointment so that you had a soft job in the military and weren’t expected to be killed off with the common “grunts”.
This was what you had to face as a barely-adult human before you could think about getting a driver’s licence or about starting a life with anyone or about what you were even going to do with your life.
You just had to shut up and make peace with the fact that you had no say in the matter, and that bitter, twisted old men, for no apparent reason had the divine authority and the god-given right to gamble with your life to their heart’s content simply because you were born here or there.
I hated it and I hated those old men, and I still hate them.
Passionately.
They may have slipped into the shadows and got off without so much as a slap on the wrist – because our country is extremely good at appointing judges to head up commissions that go absolutely nowhere but to the bank – but I still see them.
I see them at the farmers markets and on streets and in restaurants and cafes in town where they walk by and look right past and over anyone who don’t look like them, dehumanizing “others” with each avoidant gaze and relegating them to the background, like things, like animals, and like everything else that is not like them, and therefore not human, to them.
Believe me, I see you.
But let’s get back to the topic.
I didn’t have the luxury of wealthy parents and so I didn’t have a choice.
I had to go the army.
So I tried really hard to dodge it.
I applied to the department of justice in the town of Secunda to study law because you could work as a clerk of the court and then study at the court’s expense, but they said I was too English. Then I learned that you could choose to serve your military time in the police instead, but only if you were willing to accept a service length that was double the conscripted time in the SANDF. In my case, military conscription changed from 2 years of service to 1 year just before I was forced to go, so then I was forced to spend 2 years in the police while my schoolmates only had to do 1 year in the army.
I didn’t want to do any of it but I didn’t have a choice, so grudgingly I went into the police.
But believe me, I went in with an attitude.
We were sent a ridiculously long list of items that we were supposed to bring to our six months of basic training. On the day we arrived there in our various busses and minivans and trains, I saw young men carrying black plastic bags full of cleaning fluids and cloths and brushes, sponges and more, together with all the clothing we had been advised to bring.
I arrived like Tom Cruise in Top Gun, with a white t-shirt, a pair of jeans, a black leather jacket, aviator sunglasses, 3 pairs of underwear and my toiletries in one bag, and my acoustic guitar in another bag.
That was it.
If they wanted me to scrub floors, they were going to have to wait.
They may have succeeded in forcing me to be there but they were not going to force me to conform.