The Sun and the Tree

Being African is sublime
In all the ways it was designed
It was a crime one time to refuse to be defined
By the dimes they threw us so we could be enshrined
In their museums and textbooks, once upon a fine,
Of life, identity and the right to choose our prime.
Prime in life, prime to shine, prime to thrive.

Being African is a sign
That knowing your country is not worth their time,
But a favour that you pay for by the pound sign
A crime that persists in this plight of mine
And mines ploughing endlessly into an abime
Of chaos and wanting
As we do ourselves the greatest disservice wasting time
on striving ridiculously to give the west many more dimes.
When all they ever deserved was to be burnt in our shrines,
Forgotten through time,
Erased from our history,
Reminded that they died in our eyes.
When our chiefs slain, passed away,
The simple privilege of life counted less important than our gold mines.

Being African is sublime
An identity as fixed as it is fine
Once upon a denarii,
It danced upon the scales of beauty and the divine
Exclusively the sought after brine
That was bought, sold and desensitized.

Nevertheless, it remains the brine of the world
As its people band together to redesign the lime of colonialism
To create our own Africa once more. Thine,
A growing, albeit genetically modified cosign
Acclimatized to building on the cries of slavery
With the sour lemon of liberation.

Being African is sublime
My darkness has never been inferior to your whiteness,
But my diamonds were counted greater importance than my silence
Inspired by your nonsense, masqueraded by my forced obedience.
Dehumanisation farced as proselytization.
I hate you and yet want to be you
A system that robbed my mind the ability to think logically
In an autocratic entanglement of lust and desire for what was not theirs
and yet their right
As they were apparently more civilized.

I am Africa mind you,
The land of growth and not darkness
The pinnacle of innocence and not corruption
As clearly I was not mature enough for my no to mean no.
I died when they stabbed me twice,
by killing my ancestry and murdering their minds.

I am African
Astoundingly beautiful,
Flamboyantly diverse
Intricately woven in a pattern of counterfeit borders
That reduced my ancestors history
To the imposition of the white man’s headache.

I am African
Smart, beautiful and brave
I have more patience than the average man
As I have been conditioned to answer to their ignorance.
My English is a well of wonder and confusion.
They do not comprehend how my proficiency came to its fruition.
I refuse to be barbaric. I have always been more civilized.
But they uncivilise my mind when they forget the rape committed to my bed, while I was yet asleep,
Reducing my stories to the lovely, yet reductive tree against the sunset.
Nonetheless, I remind myself I was always the civilized one
Dehumanised, brutalized, civilized
The coloniser’s euphemism for foolish behaviour.

The Africa they knew is DEAD.
My Africa is strong, black, white and colourful
I do not answer to their fantastically corrupt commentary
And deny all connections to their value systems.
I am reborn, a continent of infantry
Bemused even by my own growth and maturity.
I continually rise from the ashes as that is and has always been my default setting.

For me, being African has never been about the colour of my skin,
But the mosaic of beauty I am
And the map of diversity I epitomize
I have no sorry excuse for anger,
But short and enchanting diatribes
That cause his frail mind to question
How I came to be this beautiful.
I am a thousand generations carried in the womb of racism, sexism, neocolonialism,
Ism, the suffix that keeps on giving
And keeps us all aware that these are real
Inhumane but human diseases that plague all of our minds.

I am the voice of love and dissent all at once.
I will love you regardless, but my cries, my voice, my presence will forever be an enigma to you
Not because you didn’t attempt to comprehend the complexities that dance across my thinking,
But because a voice sounds only an echo in the vibrations of a mind that has no experience.