Unwinding America, land of the unfree

The Collins dictionary defines “free” as “someone or something that is not restricted, controlled or limited, for example by rules, customs or other people”. So, which countries could we assert are free?

Some may point to Russia and a few of its ex-satellites as examples of unfree states. Others would say North Korea, Uganda, Syria, Iran and other Middle Eastern countries. But few would think of the US as not being a free country. Why not?

Some journalists and many Americans like to call the US president the “leader of the free world”, with which I disagree on both counts: leader and free. The country isn’t that free, and it certainly isn’t leading the world. There are plenty of restrictions inside the US itself. For instance, abortion is banned in many places, and the rich have control over the poor.

Sure, there are freedoms in America. But it’s far from the idealised version many people imagine. Getting pulled over sometimes ends up with someone dying, usually a darker-skinned American.

When I arrived there in the early 1980s to further my studies, I saw first-hand some of the freedoms my friends were so used to they didn’t even consider them freedoms: no fences between and among neighbours; the mailbox on the street at the start of the driveway; calling on a public phone required you to make the call, hang up, wait for the operator to ring back and say how much you owed, and then you dropped enough quarters into the coin slot. An immense freedom.

I must admit that I sometimes fled the scene after having made my call. I also first met collect calling (reverse-charge calling) in the United States of America.

Killed, watched, grouped

Axis of evil

Precedent

By Rethabile Masilo

When people, captured in Africa partly by the sword,
partly by The Word, leapt from the Jesus of Lübeck
near the coast of San Juan de Ulúa, to go back home,
a sun glistened off their backs just before
they got picked out like ducks at a shooting gallery.

As children we crossed Mohokare to go and pick peaches
and apricots on the other side, loam-fed fruit
watered by cloudbursts of the eyes of men
who fought invasions, as spring turned winter into growth again.
We broke branches to use as rafts on the way back,
but the Boer, who always dashed at us with a gun,
never shot us but let us bobble home with our loot.

Maybe unlike John Hawkins he had no belief in apartheid.
Perhaps the river tied our worlds enough for him to value
the spirit of its flow. Either that, or he knew the history
of the first ship to take folks to America: the first time
black people were shot in the back trying to get away.

America

By Claude McKay

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate.
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.