Ferlinghetti uses clever imagery in the final 12 lines comparing the situation of the garbagemen to an ‘odourless TV ad in which everything is always possible’. This shows that Ferlinghetti knows that the garbagemen want a better life and want to be a success but, like TV commercials, the whole idea of digging themselves out of poverty is make-believe. Words like ‘as if’ emphasise the hopelessness of the garbagemen’s situation, ‘as if anything at all were possible between them’. The closing lines of the poem involve a metaphor about the sea. If America is the high seas, the distance between the two vehicles is a 'small gulf' narrow mouth that should be easy to cross. Yet we also think of the other meaning of gulf - a deep chasm or abyss. It may look possible to cross, but really it is impossible. The lives of the two pairs may cross 'for an instant' but they will never be genuinely close together.
Tatamkhulu Afrika lived in Cape Town’s District Six, which was then a thriving mixed-race inner-city community. People of all colours and beliefs lived together peacefully, and Afrika says that he felt 'at home' there.
When he was a teenager he found out that he was actually Egyptian-born, the child of an Arab father and a Turkish mother.
The South African government began to classify every citizen by colour – ‘white’, ‘black’ and ‘coloured’. Afrika turned down the chance to be classed as ‘white’, and chose instead to become a Muslim and be classified as 'coloured'.
In the 1960s, as part of its policy of apartheid (or separate development) the government declared District Six a 'whites only' area, and began to evacuate the population. Over a period of years the entire area was razed to the ground. Most of it has never been built on. The poem was written just after the official end of the apartheid. Afrika returned to District Six and was shocked to still see the same inequalities as before. Its title of ‘Nothings Changed’ suggests that Afrika’s hopes for a fresh start and a better community for the inhabitants had failed.
The poem is set out in six stanzas, each of eight fairly short lines. This kind of regularity in the layout creates a sense of control, the poet is very clear about what he is feeling - no sudden flying into a rage. But within that pattern the length of the sentences varies from a whole stanza to just two words. The first stanza is a calm opening to the poem that puts us 'in the poet's shoes'. It is as if we are walking with the poet across the rough ground seeing what he sees. Afrika cleverly expresses a possible future for District Six by using the word seeds. A seed suggests a potential for growth and expansion for District Six. The people have the will to change the are for the better and all they need is a little time to do so. Also Afrika uses the phrase ‘amiable weeds’. Amiable means friendly and pleasant, however a weed is an unwanted plant that grows anywhere it wants. Amiable weeds implies that the white people invaded their country and sprouted everywhere but although this is how the country is at the moment, Afrika is hopeful and wants the whites to be friendly and to live peacefully, growing together with the black race. He wants District Six to be the first place to change under the new law.
The name given to this area in Cape Town where Afrika lived is District Six, an area partly comprising of poverty and run down buildings, but there is another area. The dominant whites who have pushed the blacks aside are living in posh houses and hotels, eating at restaurants and drinking fine wine, like a weed they are taking all they can and choking the blacks of everything. The blacks are pushed into corners and live in poverty, scrounging whatever living they can. Afrika slowly expresses his anger by repeating the word and because he has experienced these sights he is seeing before only this time he is angrier than ever ‘but my feet know, and my hands, and the skin about my bones’. He can feel his anger in his running through him as ‘hot, white, inwards turning anger of my eyes’. This is a very interesting phrase as the poet uses white as an association with anger. What Afrika is basically saying is that he can see the white inhabitants getting the best of everything and the black people are cast away and excluded from any niceties, and the anger burns in his eyes.
The poet returns to the wasteland that was once his home, and relives the anger he felt when the area was first destroyed.
He sees a new up-market restaurant serving haute cuisine and crushed ice: expensive, stylish, exclusive, with a guard at the gatepost. Afrika knows that this is a ‘whites only inn’ as it is clean, and beautifully furnished with linen, white glass and a single rose.
‘No sign says it is but we know where we belong’.
He thinks about the poverty around it and knows they are showing off ‘name flaring like a flag. Afrika also compares it to the working man's café nearby, where people eat bunny chows without plates from a plastic tabletop. This makes him reflect that despite the changing political situation, there are still huge inequalities between blacks and whites. Even though South Africa is supposed to have changed, he knows the new restaurant is really 'whites-only'. He feels that nothing has really changed, as the many divides between the different races are as strong as they were when he was a young boy. The apartheid may be over but people still feel the same way about racial discrimination. The deep anger he feels makes him want to destroy the restaurant - to smash the glass with a stone, or a bomb.
Tatamkhulu Afrika creates strong imagery to describe the glass windowpane. He peers through the restaurant’s glass window and wonders at its glamour knowing he cannot have the same privileges as the whites. The glass is the final insult to all other races as they can see the style of the lives of the rich but cannot reach it. This invisible barrier symbolises the racial divides in the country, however, Afrika wants to break the glass and get rid of the racial divides that tear their country apart as his ‘Hands burn
For a stone, a bomb,
To shiver down the glass.
Nothing’s changed.’
And indeed nothing has changed at all.
Although these poems were written at opposite ends of the Earth they both have some striking resemblances. Firstly, they both depict the inequalities of different types of people. In Two Scavengers Ferlinghetti compares the rich and the poor and cleverly identifies the many differences between them. In Nothing’s Changed Afrika shows us how different races of people are treat just because of the colour of their skin. Their differences however, are superficial, as they are exactly the same inside. They also both speak about the corruption of the systems of which they are under. Ferlinghetti uses the phrase ‘across that small gulf
In the high seas
of this democracy’
This simple phrase begs the question - Is this really a democracy?
Afrika chooses not to ask the question directly, but expects you to ask the question yourself. In his autobiography he wrote:
‘We may have a new constitution, we may have on the face of it a beautiful democracy, but the racism in this country is absolutely redolent. We try to pretend to the world that it does not exist, but it most certainly does, all day long, every day, shocking and saddening and terrible. I am full of hope. But I won't see a change in my lifetime. It's going to take a long time. In America it's taken all this time and it's still not gone... So it will change. But not quickly, not quickly at all.’