10 Cleo Reed: Cuntry

Oh, wow, white collar crimes on the company dime
Couldn’t catch a break on company time
Life on the clock’s like, eating with your eyes
Might find God, and go for a hike
More brown liquor, I chase my pain
I’m bitter by the hour, I state my claims
I’m hanging by a nail, my body’s on a scale
And work is really jail

The grass ain’t greener and the fare ain’t cheap
Give me salt and lime in the land of the free
Hate is in the air, getting harder to breathe

Salt and Lime

Ah man, I’m gonna be talking about slavery again??

Here in the UK, we hear a lot about America’s role in the slave trade. We hear a lot the perhaps most brutal and masochistic period in human history. We hear how a total of 12.5 million human beings were stolen from Africa and shipped over the the ‘New World’ in conditions not suitable for factory farmed hens. We hear how around two million simply died on the journey on account of the horrendous conditions that they were forced to live in. They might have been the lucky ones, rather than the 10.7 fucking million shipped off to the New World as slaves and brutally forced to live out their lives as someone else’s property. We are sent films like ’12 Years a Slave’ and think “Gosh, wasn’t the USA just ghastly, as we sip on our tea, toss a fag and spell ‘moisturiser‘ correctly. We watch films and TV shows about the American Civil War and think “Hmmm, yes, I know what that is” as we shove aubergines into our fannies.

Treat me like cattle and you gotta quit

#3 070 Shake: Petrichor

20th May 1983, a car bomb in the the South African capital of Pretoria went off. The target was the South African Air Force (SAAF), who were renting a building on Church Street West, where the bomb went off. The bomb killed eleven SAAF personnel, plus the two people who planted the bomb (unintentionally) and six civilians. Two hundred and seventeen people were injured in the attack.

The bomb had been planted by uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), the military wing of the African National Congress (ANC), a political group founded by Nelson Mandela in order to force the end of the racist policies of the South African government. The attack was a response to a cross border raid by the South African army into Lesotho in December 1982, which killed 42 ANC members.

Mohammed Eyad Maher Abu-Leila