Boy on a swing- Oswald Mtshali_ Poem

Oswald Mtshali's

BOY ON A SWING

Slowly he moves

to and fro, to and fro,

then faster and faster

he swishes up and down.

His blue shirt

billows in the breeze

like a tattered kite.

The world whirls by:

east becomes west,

north turns to south;

the four cardinal points

meet in his head.

Mother!

Where did I come from?

When will I wear long trousers?

Why was my father jailed?

CONTENT ANALYSIS

Oswald Mtshali's 'Boy on a swing' is a poem that places infernal
racial discrimination on a moral slab. In this poem, the poet attempts
to open the eyes of the reader to the mental agony that the apartheid
system was suffused with, at least from the point of view of black
South Africans.
Of course, not that this can be easily inferred from the opening
stanza, where we are presented with a boy, oscillating in all
innocence, on a swing.
We are permitted a sneak at the poverty of the boy's station in the
second stanza. His blue shirt, possibly rent in places, is likened to
a tattered kite. This stanza subtly speaks volume of the unenviable
economic status of the blacks, serving as a foreshadowing of the next
stanza in which we are deftly informed of the confusion and
directionless experienced by the blacks in the apartheid system.
As 'the world whirls by', the 'four cardinal points' meet in the boy's
head – a symbolic representation of the disorientation faced by the
blacks in a world in which they knew not where exactly they were or
what direction to take.
The boy's sudden awakening, expressed by a litany of rhetorical
questions fired at the mother, marks the point where all pretenses are
dropped in the poem. The blacks had lost their identity and all sense
of belonging ('where did I come from?'); they were allowed only
restricted cultural and social values ('when will I wear long
trousers?'); and, they were thrown in jail for inexplicable reasons
('why was my father jailed?').
This poem by Mtshali operates as a mouthpiece of the blacks against
the oppression of the apartheid regime in a South Africa of the
not-too-distant past.

Source: mollusco.wordpress.com