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A morning mist
and chimney smoke
of White City Jabavu
flowed thick yellow
as puss oozing
from a gigantic sore

These lines, the opening lines of a poem entitled “An abandoned bundle,” were composed in or around Johannesburg in the late 1960s. It is possible they were written in 1967 the year I was born. It is quite unlikely (but I guess it’s possible) that they were written on October 18, 1967, the exact day I was born in a white hospital in white Johannesburg. These lines, though, were most likely written in Soweto, or on a train between Soweto and Johannesburg, where the author Mbuyiseni Oswald Msthali lived and worked in the 1960s.

And then, a bit further down in the poem, we find

Scavenging dogs
draped in red bandanas of blood
fought fiercely
for a squirming bundle

and, finally, the “abandoned bundle” (the “squirming bundle”) is “a mutilated corpse – / an infant dumped on a rubbish heap-”

[  Sounds of a Cowhide Drum released in 1971 (Renoster Books). A new Jacana Media edition, including isiZulu translations of the poems as well as a foreword by Nadine Gordimer, is now available. ]

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Mtshali, somewhere, says “I am not a Liberal, Nationalist or Progressive but a black who tried to articulate the daily hopes and disappointments of his life.” But these are not simple poems. READ MORE >