The days pass, each year giving birth to its successor. What has passed becomes the past as time erodes the memory of what was living experience. In their recalling, old joys expand into enlarged pleasure.
Old wounds fade away into forgotten scars or linger on as a quiet pain without a minder.
Those who gave generously of their talents to lighten our moments of darkness, do not want the embarrassment of the enthusiasm of our gratitude. Those who brought us intolerable pain and took away our days of light insist that nothing should be recalled, lest we impose on them the pain of guilt and on ourselves the pain of our memories. And so what was slides away as though it never was. The kaffirs and the Bantus and the Europeans, the pass laws and the group areas, the surplus people huddled together in the cold and desolate veld - all has passed, as though it never was. The haunting tragedy of human beasts of burden, who worked on the soil and in the bowels of the earth, merely as factors of production, with fewer rights than the machines by their side -that too has passed as though it never was.