Other Cultures and Traditions

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Other Cultures and Traditions

The authors of “Nothings Changed” and “Desiree’s Baby” are interested in the inequality between white and black people.  The poem is set in Cape Town’s District Six in South Africa, where Tatumkhulu Afrika used to live.  The poem is an autobiographical piece expressing the poet’s feelings about how the white government destroyed his community so whites could move onto the land.    

The story is set in much earlier Louisiana, where white plantation owners kept black slaves.  Both the poem and story show forms of prejudice against black people.  

Afrika returned to District Six after the official end of the apartheid.  The poem was written in about the 1990.’s.   In Cape Town’s District

Six, people from all cultures, of all colour and beliefs lived together peacefully, before the houses were destroyed.  In the first stanza Afrika is describing the run down area, the poet seems neutral at this stage,

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but the harsh onomatopoeias such as “crunch” and “click” tell us that the return in painful for him.

In the second stanza, he begins to get angry.  Throughout that stanza there is a repetition leading up to the ‘anger of my eyes’.  The poet says that there is no board or sign that says he is in district six but Afrika knows he is.  Anger at this stage begins to build up inside him.  In the next two stanzas it is clear that white people are treated better and that they get all the advantages.  All white people live ...

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