Mandela: Echoes of Apartheid and Impunity
Chronological Predictions and Fulfillments
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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.
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About the Book
Mandela: Echoes of Apartheid And Impunity is a compilation of 26 humanistic and passion-sustained poems on the Late Dr Nelson Mandela, the defunct Apartheid Regime in South Africa and global human rights struggles. The poems written over a period of 31 years by a Nigerian poet and physician, capture in a compelling chronological sequence, the origin, course, hurts of Apartheid and local and global efforts orchestrated to overcome it. It further portrays the author’s vision from the perspectives of man’s inhumanity to man, impunity and unnecessary power display by man, white or black, and celebration of such rare virtues as courage, discipline, doggedness and the spirit of forgiveness found in the likes of Mandela, the anti-Apartheid hero, who volunteer to suffer persecutions and abuses in the course of liberating their people. The book which prophesied the capitulation of Apartheid from the outset, proffers solutions to racism and corruption. It ends up on sanguinary note, pontificating that man’s liberation is in his hands though divine intervention is necessary and that human rights activism and liberation struggles do not always disappoint since the likes of Mandela and Gani Fawehinmi of Nigeria, though chronically incarcerated, lived to old age, and even idolized by all before death.