I watched INVICTUS last night starring Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon

January 25, 2015

I watched INVICTUS last night starring Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon

Invictus is a poem by William Ernest Henley , a British poet. He wrote it in 1875. It goes like this,

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll.

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

Nelson Mandela famously recited this poem to his fellow prisoners in Robben Island prison. Nelson Mandela had been incarcerated for 27 years by the pro-apartheid government of South Africa, for his anti-apartheid action.

Apartheid is an Afrikaans word meaning "the state of being apart", literally "apart-hood") was a system of racial segregation in South Africa enforced through legislation by the National Party (NP) governments, the ruling party from 1948 to 1994.

ridiculous eh?

Miriam Makeba's song Soweto Blues, written by her ex-husband Hugh Masekela, is a lament for the victims of the 1976 Soweto uprising in South Africa.On 16 June, police fired on demonstrations led by high-school students protesting the ban on non-Afrikaans languages. Over 200 protesters were killed and many more were injured. The song's use of the language of black South Africans is itself an act of defiance.More than thirty years since the massacre at Soweto, the post-Apartheid South African state was complicit in another massacre, as platinum miners striking for decent pay and conditions were gunned down by police.