Strange Things (ePub)

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