Strange Things

Mzi Mahola's childhood was spent at the foot of the Hogsback. He was educated in Port Elizabeth Lovedale and Healdtown and at the time of publication, he was an educational officer with the Port Elizabeth Museum. His life spans the experience of a whole Eastern Cape generation - a peaceful though poverty-stricken rural family with its traditions intact, coexisting with the political awareness and militancy of the past 1976 generation. His deceptive simple lucid poetry has a deep respect for the processes of nature and for traditional wisdom. It is the record of a man sadly watching these processes erode while embracing the political anger which replaces them. His work is a search for a common morality traditional and political. He is a poet writing got his people, insisting that they do not oversimplify issues. Urging them not to jettison their past as they move into the future. Published in 1994 by Snail Press. This volume received positive reviewing and was amongst those selected to represent South Africa in Geneva in a World Book Fair in 1995. Numerous translations of this collection My Soul Mate We entered into a covenant to tread this path together back to back fight our battles water and nurse one another and let on one put us asunder. Yes, we knew that no union of two minds is ever faultless but all these years we have not known the taste of our tears. Our greatest ambition if God so desires is to shuffle the final stretch to the finishing point holding our hands. We vowed to die with our secret of which I need not remind you; now it’s forty-two years since we made the promise. Beyond that horizon looms our destination. It will benefit our offspring, if we unwrap the secret, before the sun sets, peel it to the last leaf reveal what kept our lantern glowing our fountain flowing what fanned our love tightly glued our family and fundamentally what kept our faith rooted. My soul mate, for all these virtues I thank you abundantly. I Dedicate Strange Things to my wife Lulu and children to my people to friends who encouraged me to write Suzie Mabie and Robert Berold. I Should Commit a Crime Suddenly it dawns in me that I should unsling my haversack set fire to the parliament house so that I too can be interned seeing that I lack the knack to be a stranger to shame and make my family proud by bleeding the state bone dry