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Quote by Kopano Matlwa

“I do not know why people here have taken upon themselves the duty of making attempts at speaking to me. I work hard to keep the ‘don’t speak to me’ look on my face and yet it seems they read it as ‘please speak to me’….It really is very inconsiderate. Sometimes one just wants to be alone with one’s thoughts and not have to deal with bad breath and body odour so early in the morning.”

Quote by Kopano Matlwa

Book:Coconut
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Coconut

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Kopano Matlwa

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“They took it for more than it was, or anyhow for more than it said; the container was greater than the thing contained, and Lincoln became at once what he would remain for them, “the man who freed the slaves.” He would go down to posterity, not primarily as the Preserver of the Republic-which he was-but as the Great Emancipator, which he was not.”

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“The mythology serves purposes darker than sentiment, nothing more so than the currently popular, and arrantly nonsensical, assertion that Lee freed his inherited slaves in 1862 before the war was over, while Grant kept his until the Thirteenth Amendment freed them in 1865. The subtext is transparent. If Southerner Lee freed his slaves while Northerner Grant kept his, then secession and the war that followed can hardly have had anything to do with slavery and must instead have been over the tariff or state rights, or some other handy pretext invented to cloak slavery’s pivotal role.”

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“One cannot escape the question by hand-waving at the past, disavowing the acts of one's ancestors, nor by citing a recent date of ancestral immigration. The last slave holder has been dead for a very long time. The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slave holder is patriotism á la carte.”

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