“We”: A Poem by Pius Adesanmi

“We”

By Pius Adesanmi

Thursday, April 16, 2015.

“Bob Marley said how long shall they
kill our prophets
While we stand aside and look
Little did he know that eventually
The enemy will stand aside and look
While we slash and kill our own brothers” –
Lucky Dube

So in Azania, we slashed and killed Lucky Dube first
That we may not hear such treacherous words he said
That the makwerekwere the foreigner we slash and kill periodically
Are “our own brothers”
Work must be found for that assegai not used
On our old Afrikaner foe
Before 1994

Who better to use it on
Than those who bought Nkrumah’s tale
That we could not be free in Freetown Accra Lagos Nairobi Dar Blantyre
Unless we were free in Joburg Durban Cape Town
And tontined across black Africa
That Umkhonto we Sizwe
May not lack assegais?

Unwelcome in Durban
We gather our black African asses
And because we will not make
Nigeria Ghana Congo Kenya Tanzania
Work for we asses
Being too busy slashing and killing
For tribe and faith

We hit the Mediterranean nursing
The hope that hens like
Nigel Farage, Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen,
And others in the neo-Nazi parties now remapping Europe
Will have mercy on black cockroaches
Puked onto European soil
By North Africa.

But the Mediterranean
Has other plans
Eating us up
Four hundred souls at a time
And European neo-Nazis
Are no better
Than the killers of makwerekwere in Azania

So we take a hike across the Atlantic
But American police bullets pay no heed to
Distinctions of black on the plantation
Michael Brown? Amadou Diallo? Walter Scott?
All I see is black, fearful black, fearfully black
Let me execute me some black first
And tell who’s African who’s American later

Now we must hurl what is left
Of these tired black asses back to
Where it all started
To the Nigerias Ghanas Congos Kenyas Tanzanias Azanias
We made hostile to we own asses
And see if
Ubuntu Harambee Ujamaa Umoja Omoluabi
Have life left in them

Or they are just noise we invented
To deceive the world

To deceive we!

Pius Adesanmi is an award-winning poet,
writer and academic. He is a public intellectual as well as a Professor at
Carleton University, Canada. His non-fiction book, ‘You are Not a
Country, Africa,’ won the 2010
Penguin Prize for African Writing.

“We”: A Poem by Pius Adesanmi

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