Mtshali’s Boy on a Swing

Oswald Mtshali

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 peek 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 directionlessness 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 pretences 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.