The Face of the Future

“I grow, I prosper: Now gods, stand up for bastards!”—Edmund in King Lear, act 1, scene 2

"It's hard to be a bastard!" / "Dis swaar om 'n Baster te wees!"—Baster/Griqua saying*

Hybrid vigor, heterosis,

Is the trigger of our gnosis

And the author of this rigor—

Humans of the bastard breed

Are a freer, wilder seed.

Sorry, then, you pure of will

Persisting not to know the drill!

It's plucking petals from the weed.

Still, let's make a frank confession:

There is outbreeding depression:

Oh, the threat of mingled themes,

If not bruited in the memes—

In supposing that the "pure"

Are too hapless to endure!

Though the pure are very few.

(Fewer than they think it, too!)

How, you ask, might all this scan?

Do things, not just what they can,

And is our hybrid fate to come

A mere conceding to the sun,—

A world of trial, much like this?

(What's for a pessimist to miss!!)

One thing is clear, my also ran:

The future's face is surely tan!

* I don't know where I first encountered this Cape Coloured saying. Perhaps in Kromboom at a fund-raising party for BARC, the Bus Apartheid Resistance Committee, in the late 1950s? Those were the days! On Basters, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basters and also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griqua_people.

Thursday, October 22, 2026