8/8/2019 T.I.A (This is Africa)

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 This is Africa [T.I.A]

This is the land where reality and common sense are at war with each other, and

the river of honey flows backwards, leaving the caves and valleys fallow, while the

much guarded hills flourish.

Sharing is not an option. Caring, a sign of weakness. Greed becomes enviable and

the honey pot is never full. In the chase, the weak are cut down; their struggle

remains a meaningless note in a battle to accumulate more. Indeed you seldom

miss what you never really had at all, but in this land of less, it seems once you get

a taste, there’s always a want for more.

Here, the truth confounds in its simplicity, complicated by second hand emotions,

hidden behind tinted glass and meaningless class.

Respect, power, money. Money, power, respect. Which sentence is in the right

order? Killing for power, yet dying without respect. How would you be

remembered?

If you believe, one day you will receive. This is our mantra. Trepidation replaced

 by a sense of hope like a badge sewn right into our hearts. Someday, one day, the

heavens will fall, and crush this mountain of deceit, and rescue us from our own

selves. We believe.

Borne of a convenient history, we still don’t really understand our own story.

Treating our unity like an inconvenience, our differences are not as glaring as we

really think. Ethnic division, a simple mind trick, your person, my person, we still

end up with the wrong end of the stick.

Like sap from a gum tree, bleeding, passionately seeking a reason to make sense of 

this torrid life of struggle and strife, so we play that music loud, dance wildly, that

we may forget to remember, and wake up in a world much different from ours.

It takes ten seconds to sign that cheque that results in tens of years lost by

generations unborn. Ten seconds. It’s really as simple as A,B,C to keep the youth

from learning their ABC’s. Keep them dumb enough to control, trade their 

knowledge for skillfully stuffing ballot boxes on behalf of emperors whose white

clothes don’t touch the brown earth, they’re far away from the tears at hospital

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gates where love dies and sorrow is born because when it comes to health, V.I.P is

more important than H.I.V.

Once upon a time, we may have been first, now we’re third and slipping,

stuttering, year after year, full of promises, but we’re running on empty. Empty one

track minds, gone in 60 seconds, grab as much as you can.

There’s seemingly nothing left, prisoners in our own land, mentally shackled to a

life of second best is still better than the rest. Like passengers on a derailed train,

 powerless, so when Simon says get out of the way of his siren escort in traffic jams

caused by impassable roads, or he’ll send us to an early grave, we, simply, do it.

I can never see a halo but he swears he’s an angel, here to save us, hence his

impatience, sorry importance. But this is a land where evil is enclosed in sweet

wrappers, and our brother’s keeper’s dream of skyscrapers in faraway lands likeDubai while we sit in hope that one day it may be our own time. 

I look at a picture of my grandparents holding their baby daughter, outside a

 beautiful bungalow in the delta. And I ask myself, is this Africa?

Is this the same land that I stand on today, eroded by corruption and flooded with

the tears of our fore fathers, while the living are suffocated by the greed of our 

leaders.

How, did we get so engrossed in our own identity, our own survival? That we

forgot the reality of who we really are, our humanity.

Inside every one of us is a dream, a simple wish.

This is Africa,

But Africa shouldn’t be this.