Labourers Of Death And Birth - A Video Poem

Labourers Of Death And Birth

Synopsis

Animals and humans share this deep connection incomparable to any other relationship one might have. They have this uncanny knack of sensing your vibe whether you are excited, sad, depressed, or angry; they can read your thoughts and mind. And this form of telepathy is the universal language and the way that all animals speak to each other, as well as with humans who can listen.

This video poem is an experiment at understanding the juxtaposition between death and birth, events that can occur simultaneously, while also exploring man’s own relationship with the animals which he helps bring to the world and would later have to kill.

Filmed and Edited By: Khahliso Matela

After Tears (Kokosi Style)

After Tears (Kokosi Style)

High-heeled vixens cheer the departed, twearking their way into pockets,

Knees scrapping soil and rock in irate dances for lost lovers and foes.

All clad in star black and shawls of lumpy erotica,

They shake rented weaves from patchy skulls

Imagining Qgom nights spent on immemorial one-night-stands.

The scene is mere garnishing on dishes of poisoned orgies

Gone awry in muddy lavatories of a ghetto cemetery.

And by nightfall, the rage would spill over playlists,

Malady stuck on vagrant lips claiming rape,

Turning men into handcuffed trash stuffed into rears of bloody police vans.

Dyslexic teens will jot digits on palms of misogynous men

With hearts decorating knuckles of later terror.

And their mothers will stare fog-minded at their nomads roughly fifteen,

Engraving their monikers on street signs with knives

Borrowed from Sangomas and other peddlers of fortune.

And tonight, the deceased will surely have a companion ghost,

When shame turns bile into a murderous rage in close quarters.

All charms of rogue dreams will dissipate with mists of Sunday’s dawn,

Cold and bare on rancid souls of violated women and children -

Men slumped vomiting hangovers on soiled slabs of concrete cells.

Sunset Fired Up

Immah Reid - Feminist Black Power

Incredible conversation with a great thinker and activist from Kenya.

Khomo Tsa Lehala - Documentary

Khomo Tsa Lehala

Khomo Tsa Lehala is an observational documentary that tells the story of Modise, Nako and Tebatso, young migrants herders from Lesotho, who arrived in the small township of Kokosi in the mining region of Merafong. Now residing in a squatter camp situated close to kraals which are home a vast livestock owned by residents of the community of Kokosi, these herders face a number of challenges while dreaming of making a living for their families left behind in their homeland.

The documentary follows a day in the life of these young migrants, who are undeniably working under some of the most exploitative industries in South Africa, namely farming. Faced with racism, challenges of fending for a distant wife, children and extended family, and ensuring that he makes a livelihood for himself in a foreign community, these herders become the epitome of what migrants endure in democratic South Africa.

Their story will give a voice to migrant labors workers who are afraid to speak out against exploitation and provide critical a glimpse into a reality where even black employers are too happy to exploit them to achieve lower labor costs.

Director: Paul Zisiwe

Chairs

Images By: Paul Zisiwe

KOKOSI (Cemetery Of My Youth)

Newshounds and prophets name this place SHALL-NEVER, rightly

Proclaiming that the unbridled rebel-spawned energies of its vile youths

Will forever remain an indelible mark of an undying revolt against change.

Be it at their custom insurrections about exploded transformers and

Racist garbage dumps set closest to black homesteads, the youth here

Always embrace braziers, mimicking sacrificial lambs upon which

Nations are vindicated for altering souls to slaves.

Kokosi - no better locale for socializing a generation to constant negation of Climate Change with uninformed politicking in cesspool beer-halls after dark.

Here, youth spits in shrunken face of exploited migrant laborers, while craving Mineral wealth mined through radioactive shafts tucked behind shrubby hills.

Brimming with dreams once deferred, these youths are building squatter camps,

In wait with crosses made unwisely in times swiftly passed like a dirty joke.

In this, my home, desperate scrambles for municipal posts and plumbing stints

With benefits, has led to sorcerous feuds between families and neighbors.

And the more foreign tongued you are, closest to mob justice your morbidly Unfortunate personage is, while wails of widows from far away lands still haunt 11 deep holes industrialized for profit beneath a watchful eye of Danie Theron.

In this place of soap-opera drivel re-enacted in dilapidated RDP houses, here

Bread and butter politics entail millennial girls wishing for at least 3 children

To score enough social grants for retail therapy and after-tears and Sangomas.

Out here, we find nestled between mine-dumps and contaminated farms, a Generation rubbing sands of “farm-worker parent syndromes” from their eyes.

A generation of loafers and gowns at noon; young men roused by bus hooters

At midnight to flock towards the drudgery of pounding steel on rock.

This cluster of horrid shacks and faded houses, is but a township retarded

By pensioners vying for death, but thinking of 7 motherless grandchildren and

Vagabond sons just five days returned from prison stints.

A people of a somber reputations and juvenile gangs wielding pangas at Grandfathers, where liquor bottles smashed against clinic fences in celebratory Throes after botched soccer matches or expensive electioneering campaigns.