It's the  final day. It's  also Africa Day; a day of
celebration for the continent.    Last night  I was   locked
inside a nightmare  that gathered
momentum  only by my need to get out. I arrived in Africa on my birthday and I leave on Africa day.  Perfect.

My friend
Pitika Ntuli’s  on SABC  again. At 9am Johan from the festival bookstall run by book lounge
bookshop   drops by the hotel to settle on  book sales. 
I  bought  Tupac Shakur’s The Rose
That Grew From Concrete . 
The spirit of the independent  bookshop
is alive and well in Cape Town.  It
happens through individuals like Johan.  

 At 9.30am Nadine
Botha calls by for what turns out to be a two hour interview with Design Indaba a high end  style fashion and design magazine.   As I
sit with the Nadine  outside a Longmarket
Cafe people from the previous days here  scroll past and holler “hey lemn.” They
include   Senait, the owner of the Ethiopian restaurant
from my first day here and one of the Bushwomen….    I feel at home….  The interview ends and  I stroll back to the hotel 

The Africa Centre transport awaits full to bursting with
enlivened poets and
performers  ready for our final
performance. We  are transported to  District Six (Afrikaans Distrik
Ses)  the name of a former inner-city
residential area in Cape Town, South
Africa. It is best known for the forced removal of over
60,000 of its inhabitants during the 1970s by the apartheid regime.

The  symbolism
of the performance in this area on this day  is not lost on me.  The complex racial politics in today’s
cape town need bridges and tunnels.  The centre is packed and the
welcome warm.   I have three minutes on stage alongside all
the poets.  It is the finale.   But what poem to read.   It is more difficult to
work a three minute reading  than an half hour reading.  I decide to go  on an internal flight and trust the poem.

It’s called  Mourning
Breaks, the poem,   about a man who falls  from a  cliff  but by chance “grabbed a branch that had it’s
roots in the rock or rock solid roots”.  It's in first person  with the refrain 
“I’m hanging on. I am hanging on” . 
At the end of the poem it's  morning  and I am   “hanging
from the chalky cliff /my shadow stretched like a script title on handmade paper”  I recognise at last what must be done  “And there with not a soul around me / I unpeel
my tender fingers from the dew drenched branch/and finally after years I let
go:  Why?”     I hear the audience hold their breath as I
let go for the final line  “ Because
I was growing wings all the time and I can fly”

The audience are in tears and I am in wonder.     The applause pours into me and  I thank everyone  (for a wonderful time in Africa.)  The Africa centre van awaits purring outside
the arts centre and  pounces to
life to swoop me away.  I am driven to the airport where
the plane awaits to take me into the same sky of the  poem. “I was growing wings all the time and I can fly” I whisper  to the elderly woman sat next to me on the plane. She calls security.