Elias Wessie

It is a great pleasure to put words into a written format for the minds of young generation, which would like to know what the elders thought and how they lived. I have survived in worlds too far apart to be ignorant of the changes that relate to images from childhood to adulthood. I have traversed through shades of British rule and imperialism succumbed to poetry, prose and essay as a servant in Apartheid South Africa; the arcade of oppression where you used a pseudonym to write your thoughts! I enjoy the plains of liberty that are open before us today. I have passed through the imperial rule and gone through heartache and restrictions imposed upon us by the powers that be! I have tasted the fruit of freedom. Today I breathe the fresh fragrant air of the lush green of our valleys and country-side. I can hear the echoes of the rugged Amatola and Maluti Mountains, the torrential rains, the waters that lap the deep gorges of The Valley of the thousand Hills, the bellowing waves of the two oceans and the rumbling cascades that nurture the Southern hemisphere on the tip of Africa, my country.