By Hassen Lorgat
Africa, I’m sorry
For misunderstanding you,
Ignoring your love and knowledge that we sucked from your breast
Before and after they came to steal you from us.
Oh! Mother Africa, I beg for your forgiveness.
No amount of intelligent talk of our internal causes,
Nor the Trumped-up hate for the other and the avaricious appetite for things
All over the world, can explain away
Why you hate yourself so —
Oh Mama Africa,
Did not the great poets from here and there sing about your beauty?
They knew in their bones that it all began in Africa.
For far too long,
Some have seen us as the white Atlas holding the dark continent aloft.
Such ignorance was cured by our self-love and resistance —
Legacies that still flow in our veins.
Africa, I am sorry
For ignoring your glory – a life before those who came to loot and pillage
Set foot on our mother’s body.
Africa, I am sorry, aged 30, for failing to undo the lost 300 years.
Sorry, for looking West,
Ignoring the rest.
I’m sorry for not doing more – together with others –
To stop those blacks in white masks
Doing the bidding for those who profit from our misery.
Africa, I am sorry from the bottom of my heart
For the mis-education of the nation.
For now, we are but the butt of our continent
And have failed – cannot hold myself up high,
Let alone a continent.
Africa, hear me… please.
I am sorry.
Africa, forgive me for failing the wise poets
And those who sang about our best side.
We let down the Poets of Liberation from far and wide,
Who recognised our struggles to be free,
And we could see our struggle in theirs.
When the radical English poet Shelley penned the warning shots:
“That we in our unvanquishable number,
Have risen from our long slumber,
We are many – they are few.”
We were in his thoughts too.
Other bards of words in far away India, Tagore,
Wrote his ode to Africa after the Italian invasion of Abyssinia –
Our Ethiopia of today –
Ending as the “poet of the apocalypse”
To stand before Africa and beg for forgiveness
For the crimes on behalf of Western civilisation.
This spear was picked up by those who turned our colour
Into the power of Négritude –
Senghor, Aimé Césaire and others –
And not forgetting Cheikh Anta Diop, who wanted to
Thank you for loving our blackness
And the power of our continent.
African poets and songbirds –
Senghor to Baba Maal –
Sing in praise of the African women.
Sisters, songstresses –
Chaka Chaka, Sangara, all –
Not forgetting Kidjo –
Sang of the strength of Maman Afirika:
“We will be born and will meet our destiny.”
We blemish the flame of Mama Africa –
Mother Miriam Makeba.
The African mansion had many rooms,
And she carried 9 African passports
That will shame those who hate us.
We blemish the flame of Mama Africa –
Mother Miriam Makeba –
Who lived in many African countries
And sang in the many African tongues of our continent.
Who can forget those vindictive racists
Who stopped Mama Africa from returning to bury her mother?
An outcast in the land of her birth –
But 9 other countries, mostly African,
Gave her a passport, welcoming her as a citizen.
In return she sang in a dozen different tongues –
Including her mother tongue, isiXhosa,
Swahili, isiZulu, seSotho, Shona and Bambara,
Arabic, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Yiddish.
Now in the autumn of our lives,
We must rediscover who we are.
Ignore their baiting.
We must stop self-hating,
Because then they win.
We are in this world for each other,
And only fools can ask that ubuntu be put on pause.
Please forgive them, Lord, for they do not know what they do –
But they can’t stop – But we must make them…
Oh Mama Africa, do not cry.
For my tears, our tears –
Shed not of joy but disappointment and hope –
Will not be in vain.
Pushed by our poets and songsters,
Our lament we have ploughed through.
And like yesterday’s winter,
We’re bent in trenches from war to gardens of fruit and food,
Turned to harvest the grapes of expected sweet juice
That strikes deep into our intestines where our
Undying love and joy… will once again be released.
As I still hear the women ululate as Ingoapele recites:
Africa my beginning, Afrika my ending…