The rotten egg crack-broken,
Reeking through the corks
Locked-in on the mouths of our saggy sages.
They satiated the past in their salamislicing:
Is it about Africa? They asked
It is a twig with two horns,
Copulated through manual surgery.
Their faces were saturine.
So, we asked the bald pen of our balds,
Roaming the dregs of the present
In mere oblivion and polyandrous trance.
It was above reality
In black ink on brown pages.
Their stances drown with the dawn
Muling and puking our precepts,
In gargantua brain-washing.
Is it about the past?
“Oh, it was a yoke brandish by liquid shells
Mixed into fired quotidian historical miscarriage,
And colonial disected misery.”
The catechists joined the race,
To pull our spikes out of the spites,
In bowl-tied and hewn suits.
Indeed, they wiped our eyes of drops
That sacred pity had engendered.
But, they enchanted us with watery clog,
And package manna.
Then, we requested,
Bring in the historians with embalmed maps,
Vague directions and formulated geographical ocean spread.
Come, they told us,
“This was where your Grandfathers hid their
Bent barks and worn heads.”
What about this curved clusmy lane?
“Your Grandmothers bore your fated fathers here
And licked their bodies to quench with their rough tongues.”
The seers diced in the lots of a deem sight.
They could not look back but peep afront.
But they gave us a name;
A name beyond what we can bear:
“Oh you of the new generations afflicted by trance!”
The political boars had a say,
At least everybody did.
“Come and see yourself in our mirror.”
It was too soon;
They infected us with electoral jaundice.
And so, when there was no solution
But iodine and plasters,
In the sores of our scores,
We see ourselves the way we are!
The breeds of western pride,
Only watching their plight on
Walls, books, and ill-documented museums.
They call it African Colonial Experience.
We diluted our colour that they call black,
With pancakes and mary kay.
We apply knives, cutlass and stitches,
To change our faces
Giving us long noses,
And white hairs.
We have grown
From the trance they inflicted on us,
We have seen ourselves,
And we shun their ways.
Still we feel the sting of their ignorance.
JOHN LAW
