AFRICAN POETRY Comment on "Boy on a swing" as a search for self identity.

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Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali's "Boy on a Swing" can be read as the record of a child's dawning search for self-identity in apartheid South Africa. The simple act of a boy swinging becomes the frame for a series of questions through which the child gropes towards an understanding of who he is and where he belongs.

The swing as symbol of the searching mind. The boy's body moves "to and fro", into the mist and back, and this rocking motion mirrors the movement of his thoughts as they reach out for answers. The swing suspends him between earth and sky, between childhood innocence and a knowledge he is only beginning to acquire, an image of a mind in search of itself.

The questions of identity. The child asks his mother a chain of innocent yet profound questions: where he comes from, when he will wear long trousers (that is, when he will become a man), and why his father was taken away. These questions move outward from the personal to the social. "Where do I come from?" is the fundamental question of self-origin and identity; "When will I wear long trousers?" is a question about growth into manhood; the last question opens onto a wider, darker world.

From private self to political self. The final question, about the father who "was taken away", shifts the search for identity onto the plane of race and politics. The child begins to sense that his sense of who he is cannot be separated from the injustice of apartheid, which has removed his father. His personal identity is bound up with the fate of his people.

Innocence confronting a harsh world. The naivety of the child's questions makes the reader feel the cruelty of the system all the more keenly. In seeking to know himself, the boy is unknowingly awakening to oppression.

Thus the poem uses a child's ordinary curiosity, framed by the motion of a swing, to dramatise the search for self-identity, a search that in apartheid South Africa inevitably becomes a confrontation with racial injustice.