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Soweto, My Love
by Molapatene Collins Ramusi
Molapatene Collins Ramusi was a black South African who grew up during the years of apartheid, a system of racist laws that kept the power and wealth of the country in the hands of a small white minority. Read the following passage about an incident that occurred between Ramusi and his white employer. Then answer the questions that follow.
One day I had just finished milking my employer’s cow when he summoned me to his living room. I found him sitting on a bench behind the door. He was a poor man, and the only furniture in the house consisted of two benches, one black coal stove, and a dilapidated iron double bedstead. His daughter slept on the floor, just as we did at Ranhlokana.
He sat with his legs stretched out, with the palms of his hands resting on his knock-knees and his walking stick beside him. The moment he saw me he shouted, “Bring me warm water in a washbasin, boy!” Then he added: “En, kaffer, maak gou!” meaning, “Kaffir be quick!”
I said, “Ja, my baas.” I fetched the water and brought it to him. I placed the basin in front of him and started to walk away. He called me back. He poked his walking stick hard against my chest, like one does a donkey when it is urged to pull. I staggered backward. Fear and anger gripped me. Sweat broke out all over my body.
He pointed his stick at his heavy, muddy-booted feet.
“Undo them!”
“Baas?” I looked at him thinking that I did not understand.
“Take them off my feet, kaffir!” He snarled like a dog at me.
I bent down to unlace the boots that looked like gray bricks. I struggled to undo the laces, caked with what seemed like the mud of weeks. With a sick, dizzy feeling, I managed to undo the left boot. The right boot proved harder. When both boots were finally loosened, a stench emerged from them that was worse than the stench of human excrement. The boots and the socks were glued together with dirt. I tried in vain to separate them. Finally, boots and socks came off together, and the whole place stank like a dead donkey. I closed my nose with my fingers, but the man poked my fingers away with his stick.
“Wash my feet! Was hulle!” he screamed at me in his mother tongue.
The cold, mean manner of his command hurt me at the very center of my being, the very core of my manhood. Trembling with fear and disgust, I knelt there in front of the man with one of his bare, filthy, pallid feet, unable to bring myself to lift it up and put it in the basin, appealing to him, without saying a word, not to humiliate me that way.
He poked at my face with his stick. “Hurry up! What are you waiting for, kaffir? Who do you think you are?” He sneered at me.
Suddenly I realized who I was! I was a proud black man of Ranhlokana.
I dropped his stinking foot like a sack of corn, went straight out to my shack, picked up my treasured, tattered blanket, and climbed over the barbed-wire fence, which tore a hole in my shorts and cut my buttocks as I left. I walked determinedly down the road toward the unknown, the tear in my shorts flapping and my buttocks bleeding. Inwardly, I was bleeding, too, from all the humiliation and hopelessness. But God is not dead, I told myself.
It was dark, windy and cold. I wrapped myself in the blanket, and shouted aloud to myself while walking down the road:
I am who I am
No stinking feet can
tread me down.
The seed of Moshweu,
Moraba, and Mothibi!
One day I had just finished milking my employer’s cow when he summoned me to his living room. I found him sitting on a bench behind the door. He was a poor man, and the only furniture in the house consisted of two benches, one black coal stove, and a dilapidated iron double bedstead. His daughter slept on the floor, just as we did at Ranhlokana.
He sat with his legs stretched out, with the palms of his hands resting on his knock-knees and his walking stick beside him. The moment he saw me he shouted, “Bring me warm water in a washbasin, boy!” Then he added: “En, kaffer, maak gou!” meaning, “Kaffir be quick!”
I said, “Ja, my baas.” I fetched the water and brought it to him. I placed the basin in front of him and started to walk away. He called me back. He poked his walking stick hard against my chest, like one does a donkey when it is urged to pull. I staggered backward. Fear and anger gripped me. Sweat broke out all over my body.
He pointed his stick at his heavy, muddy-booted feet.
“Undo them!”
“Baas?” I looked at him thinking that I did not understand.
“Take them off my feet, kaffir!” He snarled like a dog at me.
I bent down to unlace the boots that looked like gray bricks. I struggled to undo the laces, caked with what seemed like the mud of weeks. With a sick, dizzy feeling, I managed to undo the left boot. The right boot proved harder. When both boots were finally loosened, a stench emerged from them that was worse than the stench of human excrement. The boots and the socks were glued together with dirt. I tried in vain to separate them. Finally, boots and socks came off together, and the whole place stank like a dead donkey. I closed my nose with my fingers, but the man poked my fingers away with his stick.
“Wash my feet! Was hulle!” he screamed at me in his mother tongue.
The cold, mean manner of his command hurt me at the very center of my being, the very core of my manhood. Trembling with fear and disgust, I knelt there in front of the man with one of his bare, filthy, pallid feet, unable to bring myself to lift it up and put it in the basin, appealing to him, without saying a word, not to humiliate me that way.
He poked at my face with his stick. “Hurry up! What are you waiting for, kaffir? Who do you think you are?” He sneered at me.
Suddenly I realized who I was! I was a proud black man of Ranhlokana.
I dropped his stinking foot like a sack of corn, went straight out to my shack, picked up my treasured, tattered blanket, and climbed over the barbed-wire fence, which tore a hole in my shorts and cut my buttocks as I left. I walked determinedly down the road toward the unknown, the tear in my shorts flapping and my buttocks bleeding. Inwardly, I was bleeding, too, from all the humiliation and hopelessness. But God is not dead, I told myself.
It was dark, windy and cold. I wrapped myself in the blanket, and shouted aloud to myself while walking down the road:
I am who I am
No stinking feet can
tread me down.
The seed of Moshweu,
Moraba, and Mothibi!
Source: The Princeton Review (2001). READING STRATEGIES AND LITERARY ELEMENTS. McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.p 53-55.