Record Rains here ♦ Generations of Struggle here ♦
Letter: Record Rains Leave South Africans Thirsty
“Water, water everywhere/nor any drop to drink!” These are famous lines from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” But this is reality, not just a cry of a voyager lost at sea. It calls for a communist revolution.
Large areas of South Africa recently witnessed some of the heaviest rainfall ever recorded, followed by devastating winds. Here in Port Elizabeth, we saw 130% of the average annual rainfall in less than a week.
Ironically, this caused millions to long for a drop of water. All the rain catchment areas are now releasing water into the ocean to prevent weak dams from collapsing. It is estimated that only 11% of water remains in the wintertime, and in some cases, as little as 1%. The result is a thirsty and angry population.
Corruption, greed for profit, and neglect of the masses are hallmarks of dying capitalism.
— Thirsty comrade
Letter: Generations of Struggle
“I was born in 1954,” said the mother of a comrade. “I was sent to the rural areas. When I was fourteen, our choir conductor was taken by the police because of a song we were singing. It was a Xhosa song. I will translate it for you. ‘Our land is damaged, the land of our ancestors.’
“I passed the Matric in the rural area of Peddie. The next year, I went to Livingston Hospital in Port Elizabeth. I was training as a nurse. This was the time of riots. Houses were burnt, roads were closed, and police were shooting everywhere. Among the things people were fighting for were ‘no Afrikaans in our schools, and equal education.’
“I quit nursing because I could not endure the injuries. I could not tolerate seeing people injured like that.”
Instead, she became a teacher. Now she is retired.
The settler-colonial regime forced masses of rural workers into segregated prison-like townships. Their languages, culture, and food habits were changed to suit the needs of capitalist profit. South Africa became an apartheid state.
Recently we took an ailing comrade to a hospital. Right at the entrance, there was a bold sign directing people to a mortuary before we could even find a sign for the Emergency. These are the remnants from the apartheid times when hospitals were taking lots of injured people, and many succumbed.
We are now organizing ICWP in the same school where the retired teacher once taught. We are meeting young students aged fourteen and up. They are getting a communist education in dialectical materialism and how to use it to change the world.
—Older comrade
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