The Misty Future
How will it look?
How shall we receive it?
What mouths or hands
Shall tell the tale
5. Of liberation
And safety?
Africa entire dives beyond
The gripping hands of the locust.
My people peel off at last
10. The jaundiced skin of infiltrators
Who for years stand raping, debasing
And looting our pregnant land-
And with tight-fixedness of teeth
We’re bounced to explosion
15. Like melon sighing off decay
Whose water-soaked children
Are invited by the mills.
How bright will our sun shine?
How sonorous shall the lyrics
20. Of deserved but held-back freedom
Be?
The re-acquisition of a desecrated heritage!
How melancholic like vinegar-drunk
Irish or Israeli
25. Will the face of the Boer be?
Go, tell it to the blue waters of Africa
And the Lord Kilimanjaro et al
That we’ll soon be impatient
The load is ponderous so!
30. Our ringed necks compressed
Near now to crackling point
Meandering wrinkles colonize our faces.
Won’t there ever be retrospective tête-à-tête?
Rescue brothers, rescue fast,
Before befalls us, the inevitable.
Your Voice Echoes
Your voice echoes
On the shores of Africa
Crushed black children of today.
Your anguished scream
5 Has Heaven reached.
Cry thus ceaseless
And fight the noble fight
Relentless.
For I perceive the invisible army
10 Invincible
Warming up for assault
On the heartless Boers
Who roast your raw flesh
In large ovens they stole from you.
15 Raise your voice louder then
And chant liberation songs
Like Israelites –
As they encircled Jericho.
Expect you a miracle!
20 For nigh indeed
Your emancipation is.
Your misery will surely evaporate.
But tough moments like now
Will surely climax
25 The nap-catching transition.
The Boers will inherit your wail
As Africa swims clear entire.
Don’t then tire out.
Get the voices echoing
30 Like rain-visited crickets
On the curved banks
Of the black oceans.
But For Noble Mosquito
They disturb my sleep
And weaken my red cells
Causing anaemia
From endemic malaria.
5. But for noble mosquito
The war front would’ve been
At the left curve of Africa
There’d’ve been no partitioning
Into political entities
10. But simply, West Africa.
Our cocoa and palm oil
Plus our innately refined petroleum
- Could’ve turned Joha’burg’s gold.
But would the human race
15. Have heard our voice?
Would frontline states
Have Angolaed and Zimbabwed Nigeria?
Would Zimbabwe have Harared Lagos?
O how tribalised, I think,
20. Would our local fronts have been!
And Mandela Persists
Your persistence, Mandela
calls to question –
are you a man like us?
Nearly a generation
5 now it is
you’re confined
by share black pride –
by your noble cause -
You stay behind bars –
10 in dark rooms
like the film negative –
…but can your eyes
adjust again to light?
All because of a stubborn
15 resistance to be cowed
to accept falsehood and puppetry.
But here we crow
after a little deprivation.
Teach us, Mandela
20 to bear pains like you,
Will that your flesh be cannibalized
After breath fails
For we need to eat you,
to adopt your valour!
And Mandela Emerges
Like Christ and hell
the gallows of Pollsmore
had no permanent belly
for its innocent victim.
5 The Boers’ intention
to persecute
to intimidate
to frustrate
the brave Mandela
10 Africa’s true son
into incarceration-induced suicide
failed even before it began-
not even serial Tuberculosis
forced on him by dank prison walls
15 could let hope die.
And suddenly now-
our Mandela emerges
from the Island of Roben
piercing through the earth
20 like the brave plumule-
like Christ-
towards expected ascension.
A Passion To Intervene
Love is to intervene
as hatred
or indifference rages.
Justice is but intervening
5. to right wrongs
to individuals and society.
Speaking the truth is intervention
to clip the wings of falsehood.
Love, Justice and Truth
10. siblings of Equity
offspring of Peace
trademarks of Integrity-
and these the fool loathes.
Love, Justice and Truth
15. the most threatened of all virtues
for they singly or in combination
derail the course of the wicked,
the godless, the vandal
who inundate our land.
20. But one guy gathers the garb of passion
to intervene
ever perfervid to challenge
to save love, justice and truth
from determined extinction
25. at terrible tortures
over long years
as every available prison embraces
as successive regimes glee in hate.
Gani Fawehinmi
30. love-monger, justice-seeker
truth-peddler
know ye now and ever
you remain our saint uncanonized
for like Christ,
35. you continue to give everything
to the ingrates,
and like Socrates
you continue to sermonize
with your unearthly courage.
40. You embrace avoidable suffering and death
for the cause of truth
just like our own Mandela.
The Legacy He Left
Had his jailers remained not forgiven
soon after his late release
had he thought of them undeserving,
nothing would’ve assured his peace
5 Mandela, thou fine figure of Christ
who even in His gibbet-driven thirst
did forgive His guilty executors
and so became the Institutor
of celestial reconciliation
10 not based on terrestrial contrition
Smile on then, Madiba, from heaven
as you watch the globe from galaxy
having acquired a repose uneven
by leaving us this your legacy.