Close your eyes…
Visualise….
What do you see when I say the word, ‘Africa.’?
Open your ears…
Silence declared…
What do you hear in the presence of the sound…. ‘Africa’?
A bony skeletal child?
Flies buzzing around her undernourished body?
Vultures following, Ominously?
We are more than this.
Underprivileged and barbaric idiots killing each other?
Laughing maniacally in a deluge of blood?
A chaos of gunfire.
Mindless?
There is more to us than this.
Sorry simpletons burdened by the weight of corrupt oppression?
Helpless to shift from beneath the woes placed on us?
Tormentors at home and abroad?
We are more, much more.
We are an uncontainable song that dips and flows in crescendos and diminuendos,
We are an unending melody,
Sung from the dawn of days,
Hewn from the origins of humanity.
We are louder than the gunships sent to silence us.
In spite of pain and fear and hatred and suffering and hunger and despair and derision;
We are still here.
We are still alive.
We are still Africa.
In times of deprivation
We are a song that wades through the gore of bloody conflict.
We are the hopes for a future unmarred by strife and vice and dehumanisation.
We are a symphony that cannot be stopped,
Despite the plunder… the song rises
Despite the constant attack… our song survives.
We are the melody that sustains itself
Leaps with the smallest victories
A song unending, unceasing, increasing,
We are forever…
We are a rare rainbow with a dozen dozen different colours,
Disparate yet together
One immutable whole.
Each one, powerless alone
But together, we stronger than stone, unbreakable bone.
Our strength is not found in the weight of weaponry
Or in the splendour of smelted silver.
We are a together spirit,
Straining against the bonds of ages.
Ignoring condescending looks,
Resisting the backward shoves.
We are rising.
Together.
We have been here,
For ages.
We were the harmony in earth’s creation’s song
We will be the refrain in earth’s death dirge
We know we will outlive the horror,
And so we persist.
We may feel the pain, but we do not give in,
We may hear the taunts, but we do not listen,
We may hunger and thirst, but our hearts and spirits are full.
What do you see when I say the word ‘Africa.’?
What do you hear in the presence of the sound ‘Africa’?
Close you eyes
Open your ears
Can you see us?
Can you hear us?
Here
We
Come.
Prof Folúkẹ́ Adébísí
folukeifejola
http://folukeafrica.com
African woman, lawyer, teacher, poet and researcher. Singer of songs, writer of words, very occasional dancer of dances. I seek new ways of interpreting the African experience within our consciousness to challenge static ideology.
https://folukeafrica.com/what-do-you-see-when-i-say-the-word-africa/
