Potential Energy

There is a disturbingly large bumber of homeless youth in Durban.

That's the first thing I need to say. Now, there is an even worse problem of cheap drugs available to these kids and adults in the streets. While the well-off of the city consume cocaine, mushrooms LSD, MDMA and other acronymns, the people on the streets are not looking to party or attain spiritual enlightenment. They look to stave the pain and terror of being homeless and possessing nothing but skin and tattered clothes.

I walk past the most congested area of Durban every Wednesday and Thorsday. I think about how close I am to being one of them. About how easy it is to lose everything I value. I think about the fact that there are so many of these people living in the streets that they could all fill up my venue with no room left but standing. I think theat these people could actually fill out two university lecture rooms with no empty seats. I see the potential behind their drug-reddened eyes. And I know that I alone cannot end the blight of poverty.

But I see too much and feel it internaly. I know full well that our Social grants system is a failure and a shambles.The news has been littered with the stories. After watching the Life Esidimeni Tribunal, I also know that our health care system is also riddled with ineptitude and Heads of Department more concerned with cutting costs than actually investing anything to take care of those that cannot afford it but need it most.

It becomes even more difficult to accept my mother's offers at mental therapy when I look at the costs and think, "5 boys living on the street could eat for a month on this money." Yet there is so much to do, in personal life as well as in philanthropy. Where do we draw the balance? As I walk the streets of Durban, I know full well that our institutions are not nearly progressive enough to take up the radical plans I offer to them. Just think; it took me years to publish a book that the National Arts Council could have made possible in 1.

A gaming institution has been formed by my self and a few friends, The local institutions we have approached have no care for numeracy and literacy or the idea of local kids having their own eSports scene. They tell us to "Go ask your American friends" when we tell them we need support and funding.

When hundreds of healthcare patients left to the State's care die, actually die from neglect. When the theft and robbery is so high that White people think they're suffering a genocide. Something has to give. Yet I saw very, very few White people in the streets, dragging emaciated shoes and broken legs towards a very donker toekoms.
I see Black people, Indian and Coloured. The people who apparently have earned freedom(White people were always free). I see them on my walks, buying traditional street food from Pakistani, Somali, Ethiopian owned stores. I see the limbless parking on every corner that the police do not brutalize them in. I see them and I think that maybe that lady over there, begging me and every passer-by for "Three Randsa" could've been my therapist, given a chance a at making her own life. But she's been on the streets since 2005, at least. I have seen her exposed vagina as she is passed out spreadeagled on the tarmac. I have seen the hair on her head go from black to grey. I have seen her go more and more insane. I recently returned to Durban and she is still in the streets, covered in that same useless shawl. She asks nothing of the world anymore. not even for the non-existent 3 Rand coin. She has piercing eyes and something in me tells me that her insanity could've been dealt with had she had any chance at all.

But in my township, my nieces are having 3 kids just to triple thier social grant. They are selling their Identity Documents to Somali men just so they can have some money for then ext month. And if you are a transient or homeless in South Africa, you cannot even open a bank account to get some legal money in. the Law is not for you.

The stranglehold on the poor is tighter than it is on the middle-class or the rich. You will die on these streets choking on your own bile like Jimi Hendrix. And no one will care. They leave the bodies in a pile at the Municipal morgue. The bodies are violated by the elements and then by the system. They never gave these homeless any respect while alive, even less so when dead. There is no space for mass graves, anymore, apparently. They burn.

I see nothing but potential in the living. I see DJs, Producers, Mathematicians and Teachers and more in these people. Yet these Black bodies hanging from a metaphorical poplar tree are the strange fruit of our streets. THey are the horror not hidden yet invisible to all ye that passeth by.

What will it take to change these statics made flesh? These people who are the blight of existence could be more than that. They could be the alloyed cogs that power the mighty machine of South Africa. Yet they are rotting away while alive, taking zombifying substances like flakka and whoonga. Yet there is a Computer Programmer there amongst them, inside them. A potential Banker. A poet. They walk past us and we do not say hi because of the stench of sundered hope and filthy skin. The war of the high quality lives of Black people is at the highest point of desperation. And as Nkosazana Dlamini-
Zuma recently said. I paraphrase: "There will come a time where the people revolt and no one will be spared."