Singing a new song

'Seek ye the political Kingdom first and all else shall follow...' so runs the quotation attributed to the father of Pan Africanism, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah. I whole heartedly agree with Dr. Tajudeen's analysis of the Foreign Aid Saga in Africa. I will not dwell on the past but on the future.

Where to Africa? So cried Aime Caesaire...You who neither invented the gun powder nor the steam engine!

That poetic rendition of the African psycho-cultural disposition at the dawn of independence, unfortunately applies even today on the eve of social political and economic 'Armaggeddon'.

In making my contribution to the total liberation of the Africans, I have a few ideas to share with my Ugandan brother and scion of the new Pan African renaissance. I will speak figuratively because as the Kikuyu say 'Nyumba nyinyi iciraga utuku', a small house makes its deliberations at night.

I WILL SING A NEW SONG

Have you asked dear Pan Africanist
Why Nkrumah and Nyerere failed?
Have you forgotten why Lumumba died?
Have you forgotten Okot P’Bitek’s song of Lawino?
Do you know why the father of Blacks’ liberation W. E. B Du Bois
Lie buried in Accra…unsung and unmourned!
Tell me my brother if you know why the former ‘African socialist
intellectual’, is dead?
Tell me why Ngugi wa Thiong’o who refused to be James anymore
Now enjoys the fruits of his nemesis capitalist bourgeosie in America?
Tell me why Soyinka and Achebe are sharpening the minds of the
rich as their fellow Africans wallow in intellectual poverty?
Tell me who is left to champion the African course
Tell me why I cannot be bought by the rich if my elder brother and
mentor has been bought?
Tell me now…tell me today…because I have no time to waste
Tell me before I die of AIDS or poverty
Tell me now my brother I can’t wait…my brother cannot wait
I have my degrees but I cannot work
Yes I cannot work because my president has been told to retrench
Me
Told by a World bank/IMF that I did not elect
Tell me who stole my vote

Tell me whether I should succumb to God’s fate as my father did
Or I should rise up like my father’s brother who died during Mau
Mau
Tell me whether I should follow that example of a man who is never remembered
A man who never got what he fought for…a man whose children
never went to school
Tell me…you the new Christ or is it Shaka
Tell me which message you bear…which strategy boils in your
blessed mind?
Tell me this strategy that your brother could not master
Tell me this strategy that your enemies cannot fathom
Tell me today or I call you a dreamer
A big dreamer just like Dedan Kimathi, Kinjeketile, Frantz Fanon
Cheikh Anta Diop, George Padmore…Malcolm X

I know my sister only believes she is beautiful when she looks like
the girl across the wall
But I cannot blame her
It is foolhardy to enslave men on chains…it is in vogue
Men chained in the mind do the master’s bidding
They diligently work for the master’s interest even when he is asleep

I refused to stay in America and my relatives called me mad
‘What have you come back to do here…in poverty…why don’t you
be like the rest?
‘Oh God of heaven, my mother cried…how can my son be bewitched now when I need him most’?

Is this the club of mad men that you invite me to belong to Tajudeen?
A club of men who cannot put food on the table for their families
Because those who control jobs…put them on the black list
A club of men who cannot be quoted in any media at home because they sing a dead song!
A song that the World Bank has banned in an ‘independent’ African nation!

Come closer my brother…look at the young prince of the North
He talks war when African warriors carry the spear no more
When the spear can neither kill a rat nor the python!
He says no more money for AIDS…for condoms…for the cure!
Let those African brothers behave…let them abstain and reduce their numbers
Let them be few even when young women roam without husbands…called by proxy wars and AIDS

I want to sing a new song
I want to sing my song
In my own way
But they want me to sing their song
In their own way
The Clays of Kenya and the Thatchers of Equitorial Guinea
Wants Churchill back in the pearl of Africa
Churchill is back in Sierra Leone
As De Gaulle man’s the gates of Abidjan
Yes…because the African brothers chopped each others’ hands
Yes…because Governor Baring knew ‘the Africans could not rule
themselves’

Tell me Tajudeen why I should join you in the Pan African dream!