Poetry

Hook, Line and Sinker

For Fatima Meer: sociologist, anti-apartheid activist, friend and biographer of Nelson Mandela, who taught me the most valuable lesson of my life during a tutorial in 1965 She played us like a tiger fish— We hardly felt the hook at all, leaping out of the water, ecstatically, as she gave us line. Sitting serenely in her sari she suggested that we accept that it is the colder climates which produce superior civilizations. She let us run with it a while and then started to wind us in from our false sense of security, whites wallowing in certainty. She talked of…

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