# 11

For when all was said and done …

And yet what was this liberation? For when all was said and done, those who had lurked in the shadows and in the background of affairs, came forward to claim their share.

They had not cast their bodies against barbed wire, they had not faced bricks and bullets at the barricades. They had never seen the inside of a prison or missed a day of school.

They quietly went on, making ordinary of the abnormal, servicing the system that oppressed those around them. They got on with the business of their own progress, while the others broke their backs, lay in pools of blood, and were lain in shallow graves; their lives – and those they loved – shattered under the terror and the jackboot of the system they resisted.

Spare a thought, they would say, for those of us who “don’t want any trouble”. We are simple people, we just want to get on with our lives. Spare at thought, for those of us who have much to lose, for whom the immediacy of things cannot be broken, not for others, not for the future, not even for the present. You are asking us to interrupt our lives, and for what? What will all this achieve, anyway? Things stay the same, they do not change!

But when freedom was won they celebrated with us, invited us in to eat with them, and poured praise upon us. “Heroes”, they called us.

Over time, they revised their histories, laid claim to suffering, and to struggle, and made heroes of themselves, as though they had been the ones on the streets, facing the bullets. More and more they claimed our suffering and made it theirs. They confused their oppression, their brokenness, with struggle.

They became heroes to themselves. They convinced themselves of their own suffering and sacrifice, and quickly made currency of it in the new. After all, their uninterrupted lives – of studies completed, the acquisition of wealth, security and assets their ever-present priority – enabled them to exploit freedom better than those who had languished in the camps and prisons, or had fought on the streets.

And when the spoils of victory were to be awarded, they jostled and wrangled to the front of the queue. Every memory became filled with themselves, and soon; every path, every avenue, was quickly jammed by them. So in the end, there was nothing left for the others, namely those who had suffered the most.

Yet they claimed more, and consolidated, and re-consolidated, until the new became a vessel for re-birthing and reproducing the old. They colonised the corridors of power, like those who came before them, held on tightly to their gains, and defended them dutifully.

There was no measure, for how restrictive they became about maintaining the status quo, which was to retain the inherited abnormal; a charade, a performance. The language of duplicity replaced the language of hate; ‘cosmetic change’ it was dubbed. The cosmetics were superfluous, but they spread like a mould in wet climes nonetheless, covering everything in its path, sucking up nutrients, growing into a dense forest that could not be penetrated.

They became the infection that we had once feared, yet their claims were tendered as noble; their virtue beyond reproach. Comfortably ensconced in their neat living rooms, they preached volumes of their own good.

Those who had faded into the background when the struggles were at its height now moved to the front and centre of things. They occupied the centres of power, and strengthened themselves and their own through it, all the while, preening their new hair, proudly announcing their new cars and large houses for all to see; evidence they claimed, of success, of change. The new bourgeoisie, the nouveau riche, and the elite, became fishers of men and wealth, and they set in their hooks gleefully.

And those who had once suffered were robbed once again, but this time by those who understood the creeping passage of time, by those who effected the “slow effacement” of the breath on the mirror when freedom was won; the promise of a new future. How fragile our dreams of the new proved to be amidst the secure among us, among those who wanted no trouble. What was lost, was not to be regained, and they were the ones who made sure of it.

So when you ask me to spare a thought for those, who have no thought for others, I will spare a thought, but it will be just one. For a single thought is more than they deserve.

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