Memoirs Of A Retired Rebel

Zwipi/Spin | Fochville | 2020

Here is a collector’s snap of one of the most gallant freedom fighters ever to grace Southern Africa, here with wife Katyi( look at her beautiful and undoubtedly Khoi features, yes I love them). Tragically from 1858 they would serve 21 years in Robben Island together, the longest for any royal couple to be imprisoned in the history of British colonialism. Upon his release he was to go back after a few years but without wife and died at the Island. “ The Mirror of Nothotho” alluding to his striking resemblance to his mother, mounted the longest and the most successful guerilla insurgency against European hegemony in Southern Africa- three years in one stretch, ugingqingongqo wento.

He did all this despite his father, who was King( Ngqika), selling out to the English and gave away all our fertile land to them with minimal resistance.

So in our battle against forgetting, we shouldn’t forget placing Maqoma as the foremost true son of the soil, a royal who was there at the forefront of the battle not ever once delegated.

Today we see streets being named after Marshalls of the early 1990s, amanxila( sies!!!), and history books with only Mandela, Sobukwe, Biko, Mashinini, Tiro etc, etc but the struggle for freedom and against European domination in this country didn’t start in 1912, it started in March 01, 1510( yes we are this specific), right there at Table Bay with our Khoi brothers, when they downed the Great Portuguese Commander, Dom Francisco,(Alfredo Francisco de Almeida) and 64 of his men after misbehaving there.

That’s more than 100 years before “our forefather Jan Van Riebeeck” even set his foot on this beautiful land. This information is there for a taking at the City Museum in Lisbon. Where are SA’s Historians????

BMX