Wide nostrils on the fossil record,
pharaohs and the Sphinx;
freedom fighters entombed in unmarked, unadorned graves
with nary a wilting flower;
pre-Socratics in Kemet and Kush on student visas;
pan-Africans living in paradise
with no passports –
vicarious memories exiled
by time.

Have it on good authority
that there are no good authorities.
Postcolonial despots threw the child soldier out
with the bloodbathwater.
Tears became self-portraits
of the man-not – dehumanized, scarified,
but painted the predator,
like limning a still life of strange fruit in a bowl.
Could not be both revolutionary
and assimilationist –
mutual exclusivity by performative contradiction.

Hugh Masekela and Miles Davis
too humble to blow their own trumpets – echoes
of tribal war cries immortalised
in their legacies.
Steaming cups of rooibos tea and crumpets
served from dusk till dawn during Anglo-
Zulu wartime –
top brass ordered à la carte
at the Scramble for Alkebulan, avaricious appetites
scrambling still.

Chalk white borders bleeding over tribal lands,
traded blows like frenetic ungulates.
Facing breakpoints,
but held service
like the indomitable Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe –
aces up sleeves at black wall street
before the market crashed
under the depressing weight of ivory supremacy.
Dismissed black success stories
as urban legend, indigenous myth –
sardonic tokens of appreciation
devoid of love.

Madiba and Winnie struck racist oligarchs
with Baby Jake uppercuts – Ali-adjacent guerrilla tactics –
petrol bombs floating
across the night sky, the sting
in the tail
the tip of the spear.
Hail Mary haymakers sent counter-
insurgents spiralling to the canvass –
knuckle up with neo-
colonial powers and kiss the imperial assassin’s blade –
sanctioned slow death by a thousand paper cuts
of fascist foreign policy.

A continent ready for revanchism and self-
determination –
dissolution of any panacea, in dialogue
with the diaspora.
Dialectics on the non-capitalist
accumulation of spiritual wealth and agency.
Triumph over the misplaced projections
of savages,
the self-hate tumour needing self-amputation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Sanju M Gurung on Unsplash