You Don't Know Me

Anyway, they caught him. They put him on trial. He didn’t have no lawyers. He couldn’t speak English but they didn’t bother giving him no translator. Then they hanged him probably. End of that story. White people won. They could relax again and open their gates up and forget all about him. But then years down the road someone found a recording of this guy’s speech that he made in court before they sentenced him to death. It was all in Zulu or whatever he spoke and he spoke all these words but no one knew what they were, whether he was chatting shit or poetry because nobody could be bothered to get a person into this court full of white people who could tell them what he was saying.

Well this reporter guy who had found it could tell you what he had been saying when he got it translated. This man, the Hammerman, had had one strange life, believe. He had been done for stealing a few years before and had been given a seven for it. Seven years for stealing! Trust, seven years in South Africa ain’t no seven years in England. They made him break rocks for eighteen hours a day for five years. And this is what he told the judge just as he was about to be sentenced. He goes like, there were these rocks that he had to break all day in the heat with a small hammer. White rocks the size of a person’s head. And after a time, when he looked at the rocks he didn’t see no rocks any more. He saw heads. Big white heads that he saw himself breaking open for hours in the day. Then when he was let out he just flipped and did that one thing he knew how to do.

Now, I ain’t sorry that they hanged the man. If you go round smashing people’s heads in, people ain’t going to be happy about it. As I said before, you pay for what you do. But I was sorry about that one thing. He was trying to say his piece, to explain what was going on in his head but nobody gave enough of a fuck about him even to want to hear him out. At least I got you lot. Anyway my point is that it didn’t really make no sense that he was smashing people’s heads in with a hammer. But that was what was in his head. It was his reality. Those rocks were the heads of the white people and everything they had done to him. Or maybe the white people’s heads were just the rocks that he had been breaking for years. Whichever way it went down, it made sense to him because it got into his head and once it was there he couldn’t get it out.

And that’s the reason I’m telling you this. What happened there to that guy, it’s the same as Jamil’s gang, The Squad or whatever they called themselves. Something like breaking rocks is going on in their heads every day. Not real rocks obviously but other kinds of shit. If you’re twelve and next boys come up to you and put a knife to your throat because you sold a bit of weed where that gang hangs out, then you get your boys and do the same back. And when you see one of them boys on the street by his own you make sure you put your knife in him, not just to him. And it sounds crazy and gangster but that is just what happens. What else they going to do? Not deal drugs? When you lot fill the TV with hundreds of gangster rappers drowning in money, what do you expect? Who is the role model for a young black kid on the street? Is it Barack Obama? Why do we have to look that far away to one man to find someone that these kids can be? Or should they be a boxer or a runner? We might as well tell them that they should want to be a lottery winner.

Fuck that shit. You know what the most saddest thing I ever saw was? Two schoolkid girls on the bus chatting about what they wanted to be. This one girl, fat like she had burgers for breakfast, was chatting to her skinny mate who looked like she never ate a breakfast in her life. This was like ten o’clock in the morning and although they should have been in school by then, they weren’t. But it looked like they might have been on their way there, taking it casual. Anyway the fat kid in between mouthfuls of something leaned over to her mate and said this:

‘What I’m going be, yeah, is, number one, astronaut, number two, a fashion designer and number three, a pilot.’

And the skinny kid went, ‘Yeah my number one is astronaut. My number two is scientist and my three ain’t pilot coz I’m scared of heights.’

‘What about astronauts?’ says fatty. ‘They need heights too.’

‘Nah,’ says the other one, ‘they don’t.’

This is what they’ve done to these kids. They told them that they could be anything they wanted to but they lied to them. All they did was give them different dreams. But they’re still only dreams.