Friends Humans Countrymen - Lend Me Your Ears

Friends, humans, countrymen, lend me your ears.

I come to bury Mandela, not to praise him.

The evil that men do lives after them;

The good is oft interrèd with their bones.

So let it be with Mandela. The ignoble Media

Hath told you Mandela was a god.

If it were so, it was a grievous fault,

And grievously hath Mandela answered it.

Here, under leave of his victims and the rest—

For victims are honorable men and women;

So are they all, all honorable men—

Come I to speak in Mandela’s funeral.

He was not my friend, having sworn to murder me.

But the Marxist media says he was a man of peace,

And the Marxist media has enormous power.

He hath chased many South Africans from home 

Has taxed the rest for the ANC BEE pockets to fill.

Did this in Mandela seem full of peace?

When that the poor have cried, Mandela hath made deals.

Democracy should be made of sterner stuff.

Yet you all say he was Madiba,

And you all pretend to be honorable men.

You all did see that on the farms and towns

The citizens are murdered in race wars,

AmaBhulu. Was this peace, democracy and freedom for all?

Yet you all say he was a man of peace,

And, sure, you will believe it.

I speak not to disprove what the media spoke,

But here I am to speak what I do know.

My family, my friends, the killed, the murdered, those who live

In fear every single day. This is Mandela’s legacy.

Those who emigrate, those who are raped,

Dismembered, fearful and poor

You all did love him once, not without cause.

What cause withholds me then to mourn for him?

O judgment! Read his history not his fables,

And men have lost their reason. Bear with me.

My heart is in the coffin there, not with Mandela,

But with my dead cousins, comrades and friends.


TAKEN FROM A FACEBOOK PAGE: Posted by Renier Van Loggerenberg