Prologue to African Conscience (1
Tamed to bend
Into the model chairs
Carpentered for it
By the friendly pharos of its time
The black conscience flutters
Yet is taken in.
It looks right
It looks left
It forgets to look into its own self:
The broken yoke threatens to return
Only, this time
In the luring shape
Of luxury and golden chains
That frees the body
And enslaves the mind.
Into its head
The old dragon sun
Now breathes hot civilization
And the wise brains
Of the strong sons of the tribes Pant
With an even more strange suffocation.
Its new self-awareness
(In spite of its tribal ills)
Wishes to patch
Its torn spirits together:
Its past and present masters
(With their army of ghosts
That remained to haunt the earth)
Hook its innermost soul
And tear it apart:
And the African conscience
Still moans molested
Still remains drifting uprooted.
1) Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin (1936–2005)
Extracted from The History of Ethiopia
Saheed A. Adejumobi
Greenwood Press
*
Africa-2011
Holy Africa, the cradle of Man,
The last Joy adrift;
Once uprooted!
And yet, the call of the roots in its tenor,
2011, beginning to come to the senses,
Well founded, in the ground
Of its nature, of the rights it deserves!
Oh come what once lost,
Its dignity: The human spirit!
And yet some way off, deep in the forest.
Till Great Tsegaye rejoices high,
In the soul and his Will!
The light is just, in Egypt.
Still enjoy, the last Joy!
And Ethiopia ?!
Just wait; and wait!
For the next wave,
May be, in the the mystique, 2012.
Hope & Wait,
To-morrow is, bright!
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