Poetic Licence: Blood brothers, blue lights and big powers

I kept drinking water at the Madlanga Commission. I wasn’t thirsty, my hands were shaking, my tongue kept sticking to the roof of my mouth, and the truth sits heavy when it finally asks to be spoken.

They say I prayed for a contract.

I won’t lie, yes, I prayed. But the prayers were not to cleanse the soul; they were bargaining chips between men who mistook late-night SMSes and petrol money for brotherhood.

Cat Matlala was my “blood brother”. He spoke of early retirement, of a business future waiting for me like some promised land.

Meanwhile, I carried his grocery bags, he paid for dinners ,and I called it loyalty because I had forgotten what real loyalty looks like.

Now I sit under fluorescent lights, answering questions about things I never touched. Like those blue lights they say I fitted on his cars. No. I didn’t do that. I won’t go to jail for something I didn’t do.

Fear has a flavour; it is metallic, and it rises in the throat even as you sip water trying to swallow it down, while speaking answers they hear whispered in their earpieces.

Inside that small room, I realised something: a man’s life is held together by decisions you thought were harmless at the time, the small compromises, the favours disguised as friendship, the prayers whispered without conviction. And when the reckoning arrives, it doesn’t care if your voice breaks or if you tremble. It wants the truth.

They say nations behave like the men who lead them. If our hands shake under oath, why are we surprised when the world points fingers at our flag? If we barter in shadows, why do we gasp when foreign capitals start measuring our integrity as if scoring a report card?

Out there, beyond the commission walls, South Africa stands accused again by the United States. White genocide, they say. Hypocrisy! We return the favour with accusations of double standards. It is a bigger courtroom, same fluorescent lights, same sweating witnesses, only this time the judges wear ties and speak in diplomatic tones.

Minister Lamola says we want a table of equals .Ubuntu. Dignity. The kind of words that sound noble until you realise someone, somewhere, is already drafting a press statement that cuts deeper than any cross-examination.

And I wonder; as the nation argues with a superpower about fairness, loyalty, and moral ground, if the country itself is also sipping water, trying to stay calm, trying not to drown under the weight of its own contradictions.

I walked into the commission to save myself. Outside, the country walks into the world to save its name. Two stories. Same struggle: to speak truth without choking, to stand firm without shaking, to survive the moment without pretending innocence where there is none.