To introduce this piece is no easy task, 
No shit, gloves off, drop the fuckin’ mask, 
Dam-building, land-grabs, maybe just both, 
Or maybe the need, for biofuel crop growth, 
There’re settlers, belittlers, there’s ghettoization, 
Captive communities, on a reservation, 
Apartheid, resettlement, virtual hijack, 
A city crammed full that’s under attack,

But the roots….…can’t be grown in the sand, 
and our boots….….gonna march on the land, 
and the land…. ….is where our mothers’ toil, 
where we’re born….….with our roots in the soil.

 This song is now primarily about the resettlement policies of the National Party in South Africa during the 1950’s and beyond. It could be about anywhere and it is about anywhere and everywhere else too …..

Capital gains means land-worker losses, 
Steal from the land, work for their bosses! 
Bantustans, dispossessed of their pastures, 
Homelands made by filthy bastards!

 Racial eugenics. Four distinct groups, 
Sharpeville residents, murdered by troops, 
Pass Law Act for bonded restrictions, 
Tracked off the ‘Homeland’, more constrictions, 
Life in the Homelands was slow starvation, 
Racial segregation over miscegenation, 
and eighty per cent of the population, 
on thirteen per cent of the worst cultivation,

 This could be about Brazilian farmers’ land-rights, reservations for indigenous peoples in the north Americas, it could be about a city continually under siege….Gaza City. Even be closer to home, another Battle of the Beanfield or the gentrification of the poorer urban areas.

Land-grabs, back-stabs, promises broken, 
Forced fuckin’ labour, for a measly token, 
Mass evictions! Of a whole damn town, 
How to keep a race and a nation down, 
Within most borders, on the crust of this rock, 
There’s something like a Bantustan, kept under lock, 
Half the kids there, never made it to five, 
Bantustans needed, crops-and-soil to survive

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