This piece was written in a weekend for a performance I was invited to do for an international poetry event in which Linton Kwesi Johnston was the headline artist. It was such short notice that I forgot the lyrics a couple of times during the performance. But the audience was into it enough and so were quite forgiving (although I was also critical of the actual event – that part has since been edited out – so the organisers were less forgiving).

I say I wrote it in a weekend but actually that's obviously not entirely correct. It was the culmination of a lot of thinking, experiencing, being mentored and mentoring. Both the technical as well as the content aspects of the piece reflect a particular moment in my own development. I was drawn into a programme at a left-leaning community radio station in Cape Town which used hip-hop as a carrot to get us in.

The content of the programme soon had us reading from Freire to Fanon which provided us with tools for understanding what we were experiencing in our own lives. Hip-hop and its range of technical and poetic devices provided us with an intestine through which to process and release the products of our introspection.

There is a lot of anger in the verse which is offset by humour. But essentially it is a love song. The period of the country's history that this piece was written in undeniably shaped the ideas I tried to communicate. It was ten years after the first democratic election and a new generation of youth were now left to deal with the continuing legacy. Some of our elders in the struggle whose message many of us still find relevant is reinterpreted here. The piece was and still is a way for me to cope with the injustice that neoliberalism, greed, racism and sexism (to name only a few ism’s) visits upon people throughout the world.