Poem
23/10/2009
Across Africa,
The laterite road
Is never just
The laterite road.
There is more to
The laterite road
Than meets the
Soles of the bare feet or shoes,
Tyre treads and fallen bodies.
The colonialists,
Conquerers, Chaka Zulu
Abolitionists leaders,
Willberforce,
Explorers,
Livingstone, Stanley,
Retired returned slaves,
Equiano, Crowther
Pan Africanists,
Nkrumah, Nyerere,
Freedom fighters,
Mandela, Garang
Trod and strutted
The laterite road.
They trod animal tracks
which gave way to foot paths,
To roads.
Explorers seeking
What Africa never lost
And always knew.
Colonialists ‘civilising’ us.
Africa’s giants met foreign ghosts
For trade, for trauma
For cannon fodder,
Fight and fertility.
The colonial carriage
Left graves beside
The laterite road
The laterite road
Drains heroic blood
Into rivers and ravines of nameless graves
Graves of no age, no nationality, no name
Just pain and historic silence
Broken by sniffing dogs seeking snacks.
African, European explorer, occupying soldier,
Missionary, mercenary graves
Pawns in the powerplay of politics.
Succumbed to malaria, munitions, machete.
No sex, no love, lost or found,
Only anger and a hunger
For justice and denied human rights to life.
The laterite road
Slashes the brown and green continent,
From Mediterranean Sea to Indian Ocean,
Saharan sand dunes to Sahel
Savannah to the Sea at Cape Hope
Through green veldt.
The laterite road
Scars each bloodied century,
Crisscrossing each country
Each foot printed by unwilling travellers,
Refugees fleeing life under the gun,
Universal donors sharing the gory,
Soaked, beaten, baked, caked, no glory,
Bloodsucked, licked, eaten by Africa’s hyenas,
Human and animal.
The laterite road
Human animal tracks
All with loads that hunch African bbacks
And flatten African heads,
Erosion, corrosion,
Hooves and feet,
Pounding and widening
The forest footpath into a street.
Allowing illegal loggers to
Become famed bloggers
The laterite road
Runs orange-red
With blood shed
By Africa’s myriad injured, dead.
Slaves, savaged by colonial civilised savages,
Marched up the laterite road
In slave chained caravans to the Sahara,
Marched down to slave canoes
And the Atlantic
Through Senegal’s slavery
Gorre open ‘Door Of No Return’ Isle.
Each nautical mile
Removed another slavery smile
Do not dare smile at slavery
Watch Amistad with
Treacherous Tecora’s stinking slave ship
And stone weighed sinking slaves
Never to set again a freedom foot on
The laterite road.
On the laterite road
The rains bring floods of red mud
Running red rivers
Drowning the caught-in-between
The before-we-could-leave-the-scene.
Unlike Shelley’s beachside friendly funeral pyre
Lumumba’s, PM, beaten, shot, oil drum funeral fire
Executed by colonialist and capitalist.
Lumumba’s burnt bullet holes,
Broken bones and split skin
Bloodstained rags mutating from
Congo’s PM’s immaculate white shirt, bow tie,
Brilliant brain brimming wiith Congolese ideas,
Spilt,
Buried in Belgium King Leopold’s
Commandeered Congo’s
Mountains of severed limbs and hands,
All black,
For failed rubber quotas,
All leave legacies of lethal nightmares
Mutating into a new mountain of limbs
Lost In Sierra Leone and Liberia dustbins
On the blood-soaked laterite road.
I severed the limbs
On Congo’s rubber plantations,
sold 15 million slaves,Equiano, Crowder,
Killed Lumumba, Balewa, Saudana, Akintola
Shot Sankara, butchered the Rwandan 800,000
And counted a driving drain of deadly drops of blood
On the laterite road.
Out, out, out damned spot
Even Lady Macbeth will not save me
From a savagely sleepless night!!
Victims of Africa’s
Renegades running riot
On the laterite road.
You , reader, add a chosen heroic name
To the list of Africa’s shame
Its young Afrcian lion’s heart cut out
By the villainous vampires
In countless cowardly crowds which killed them all.
Whose blood group
Form the dead dancing troupe?
The prize for service is death
Dig your grave, water it with your blood
The price of service is a litre of blood
The drumbeat of dark death,
The internet of Africa’s tragic highway,
A malignant headache for
Africa’s murderers
At home and abroad.
The laterite road
Was Mandela ‘s long walk to freedom
Longevity granted by the immunity of
The 27 year solitary sanctuary of Roben Island
The laterite road
Throws up dust clouding the view,
Curdled blood rains from weeping skies,
Blinding the refugees with blood red tears
Of raped and refuge-seeking refugees,
Fleeing floods, fights, friendly fire
And fetid finger fingers
Former friend, family, for fatal fingerprinting
And an ill-fitting necklacing noose
One size fits all necks
Macabre recycled rubber tyres
Burn brightlly in th night.
Africans denied school and scholarship,
Forced to dig diamond, mine metal, grow grave,
Tighten trigger, lay landmine, blast bomb,
Murder me, machete mother,
Alcohol addict, drug dependent
Chilling child soldier, parent killers,
Wrist and Hand cutters, limb severes
Drug addicts addicted to raping and maiming.
Peace, their democratic deadly desire.
Some dig own graves
Others score one legged own goals.
They know what is meant
Living In a leaky blue poythene or UNICEF tent
Forever and ever and never.
On
The laterite road
Even the dead laugh,
Corpses and children
Cry, sob, cry.
The poorest orphan applauds
The dusty goal,
Spirits lifted for a second
In the buffeting sea of mass misery,
And mass murder.
The laterite road
Potholed from politics of the Berlin Conference
The Caucasian conquerer’s
Conversation, currency and civilisation.
Communist merely a capitalist without cash,
Capitalist a communist with currency?
French, German, Italian or English
All want Africa’s big C.
Control, control, control –a toll
On the laterite road.
They spawned a Hydra headed Monster Africanus
Leaving
The laterite road
Filled with bloated babies, charred children,
Mutilated mothers, and mangled men,
Africa’sbattered truth and
Africa’s bloodied youth
First and last
Lost in a pointless bomb blast
The laterite road
Side trees and shrubs
Scarred with blood and gore, guns, bayonets,
Machetes and jackboots
Wielded by fingers on a sea of severed hands
And worn by local and foreign legions
Of legs with severed feet
Of Africa’s soldiers, slaves and bloodied civilians.
But all made to measure
For the strategic foreign blood-thirsty pleasure
Of China, UK, Belgium, USA and Russia.
Dare they deny?
They mimic Belgium’s King Leopold bloody legacy
Sentence severed limbs, right hand +left foot,
To make boney mountains in homage,
For a Congo rubber slave
Failing his Belgium rubber quota.
What African blood loss cost
That blood red rubber ball
Bounced by the Princes down the Royal Belgic Hall.
Far from the red blood soaked laterite road.
Will Africa’s new leaders
Revive an Africa without electric power
On the dark blood red laterite road?
The new economic slaves,
On the laterite road,
Boat youth of Africa
The 21st Century wave
Of the Volunteer Slave
Drowning dead at
Fortress Europe’s graveyard gates.
The blood red laterite road
Reaches every horizon
Forever and is still blood thirsty.
Who will tar Africa’s laterite road?
Teach Africa’s youth the truth.
100million ‘significant others’
Brothers, sisters, mothers
Children offspring
Water the bloodthirsty
Laterite road
Their ground zero
From foreign or friendly fire or family foe
The refugees
On the laterite road
Lose identity as they flee.
As
The only one who knows me
Is me and..
The mirror chip.
The laterite road
Swallows, burns identity.
From someone
You become no one.
Like a victim of the tsunami
Which viciously shreds the family history
Drowning documents and IDs
The forest fights furiously
The laterite road
As if some secret code
Pitched one against the other
In year zero
Long before earth become brother, mother.
Have you noticed how
Seen from the sky
Yu can see why
The laterite road
Winds across the land
Like a disjointed
Beautiful lekedi
A ultimate African waistband
Made from beads and seeds
Especially for love deeds.
But our laterite road
Is for love, death and disaster.
The laterite road
Will never be all tarred over
The tar will melt
In Africa’s neglcted solar power-
The searing sun,
For tomorrow’s blood to soak in
To Africa’s blood thirsty
Laterite road.
Who has not stood
Wet machete in hand
In the curdled blood of cousins
Twice removed
Or a dead neighbour,
Former friend
Now late from a panga date?
A panga is no pitanga.
The laterite road
Marches mesmerised masses,
Exiting from villified village
To saturated fat city
With no water or electri-city,
Seeking fortunes turned to mass misfortune.
The laterite road
Convoys coffined corpses
From celebrating wake city to village grave
Finally a resting place.
The laterite road
Leads to the village of corpses
Starved, negelcted living and dead returned
And all awake
For the well fed and drunk wake
By the laterite road.
The laterite road
Has other travellers.
Urchins urinating urgently
United under the pee palm tree
Behind goal posts of overkicked cans.
Students seeking alternatives for school,
Workers waging war on their want,
Traffic trying for tropical land speed records.
Refugee surge, ethnic purge and funeral dirge.
Famous foot-basketball brand -dead shirts,
Designer jeans well worn out
Raggedly adorn a lifeless line of the late
Victims of the furious firing squads of war
Creating the final corpses catwalk.
As you battle brain with books
In secluded classroom security
Child soldiers slashing stabbing sexing,
Shooting severing slaying slaving
Friend family foe all falling fertilise
The laterite road.
The laterite road,
Littered with torn famous numbers
T shirts at every T junction
No 7, 10, 21, 9 shirts
And famous names
Beckham, Drogba, Obafemi, Ronaldo,
Johnson, Gutierrez, Gerrard,
Blue Arsenel, Red Chelsea, Eastern Conference,
No one is too big to escape
Africa adulation and
The laterite road.
All present and correct.
All dead again and again
As countless celebrity clad corpses
Yeilding to the blood thirst
Sleep side by side and
Countdown the kilometres
On the lateritie road.
Refugees glance unseeing
At the great game
Chelsea 2 Arsenal 3,
No, look there
Chelsea 6 Arsenal 5
Red and blue blood
Flees the blood vessels,
Arsenal and Chelsea shirts
Half adorning dead corpses
Cheered on by live corpes
Selecting their own score,
All supporting season tickets
Paying wages of live stars.
Man U- re for a corn field feast,
With their out of season death,
Joining a club with no transfer window
There are no transfer fees on
The laterite road.
Unleash the secrets
Of the laterite road
Unbury the shallow grave corpses
Deliver the dead
Macheted, murdered ,
Shot, burnt, battered,
Worthy, unworthy
To the knife of the autopsy turvy
For the game of foulplay
Forensic finality.
Carnivorous coffins
Collide with careless cars
Containing citizens
Soontobe corpses
On the slippery, sliddy,
Swampy, sandy, surface of
The laterite road
Bullet holes mingle with potholes
They exchange roles
As quickest killers
Barricades and bullets
Machetes and motor machines
Terror and burning tyres
Create plumes of choking smoke
Earmark spots in need of trouble
Bullets buried in burnt bodies
Bullets and bombs pockmarked
The laterite road
Like a smallpox epidemic.
Laterite plumes of dust
Urchins flee
The laterite road
Traffic terrorises them
At night
The laterite road
A dark river
Through a darker forest
A landing strip
For fleets of fearsome flying fauna
Homing in on the torches, oil lamps
Of night travellers
Night hawkers
The laterite road
Nocturnal runway, market, dance hall,
Sports field.
All food for the flying hoard
No Insecticide Treated Nets
On the laterite road
Markets materialise nightly
At dusk
New life springs up
Out of the forest onto
The laterite road.
Market meets middlemen
Commonman’s need
Meets commercial greed
Across a candlelight dinner
Of biscuit, breadcrumbs or akara
A billion fiery flies feed
A million hungry flames
An Aztacian Myan African Freudian sacrifice
Of oil and kerosine lamps
Dazzling ten million sparkling young eyes
Beacons in the night
On petty traders’ stalls and stools.
Monstrously loud music
Metamorphoses moods
Digits develop drumbeat dances
Everything drumableis drummed
Everything gyratable is gyrated
Television generators generate viewers
Fingers flare into furiously fights
Love luxuriates on a sea of laterite lies
Toes draw sweet nothings on
The laterite road.
Love or lust
Illuminates stars in dark eyes on
Beneath the seasonal sky
Moonlit, stary or black blank sky
O, for a moon every night.
The laterite road
Is for
Dance and death
Love and lust
Feasting and funeral
Games and gunfire
Marriage and machete
Celebration feast and checkpoint fraud
Speeding buses and stray bullets
Commerse and conquest
Buying and stealing
Giving and selling
www or www
Worthy wicker works or
Wicked witches wizardry
The laterite road
Is blood thirsty
Consuming unknown humans, no mercy.
Every dawn
New dead to mourn
Victims of murder
Across every border
Lying there, evil’s prey
With no one to pray
As they force feed
With evil murderous deed
The hungry laterite road
Defies highyway and human rights code
Make no mistake
The laterite road
Is a treacherous snake
Always a corpse adding to the death load
And even school children calculate
The abandoned body explosion date on
The laterite road
The predawn traffic still uncertain
Rustles the morrning misty curtain
Nightguards decerebrate, celebrate survival,
Early risers off to a soul revival
Moslems migrate to the mosque’s minaret message
Christians centre on the church or its bell
Retiring robbers, maquerade and mingle,
Secret lovers pretend to be single
Market pans head for stalls, dodging bicycles,
Newspaper vendors, mangled motorcycles,
Rent a paper , freereadersass code.
The laterite road yawns
Before the day dawns
The laterite road is lazy
In pushing off its bedcover harmattan haze.
All on the stretching laterite road
Conspire to wake the cock to crow
Chase away the mist predawn
Looking back, lock up the terrors of the night
Releasing thecaptive morn
Energising the laterite roadside corn.
Hunter with hounds at heel
Cutting through the morning mist
Hushing the whispered gist.
Hunter, dane gun shoulder high
Pointing diligently forward.
Dogs to become a dog dinner
If the hunt fails.
A dog is a dog
Is a hot dog pepper soup.
The dogs chew the dew
On humbled elephant grass
On the damp laterite roadside.
Fastfood frier, food hawker,
Bread baker and bread breaker,
Hot tea and tuo,
Food on the move
On the laterite road
The tramp of naked feet
The scurry of scattering soldiers boots
The clatter of machine gun chatter
The gadda, gadda gathering of gunfire
And military machines
The baking from the sun
The soaking frmn the rain on
The laterite road.
What language
The laterite road?
It is more than a highway code
More than the mammywagon load
Signs are the language
Of the laterite road
Road signs point everywhere
And nowhere
To quarry, what quarry
Rock, rat, bushmeat?
But Never a sign when needed
Mammywagon signs, danfo signs,
Land signs, eye signs, head signs,
Sad signs, glad signs, silly signs,
Grimace signs, go signs, ‘no go’ signs
‘Food is ready’ signs, tout la monde signs,
Nowhere signs, everywhere signs,
But no directions to anywhere
You know…. or else, on
The laterite road.
The laterite road
Speaks many tongues.
Every lorry signs out
With an artistic signature flourish
Above the exhausing fumes.
Lion, eagles, polar bears,
Elephant, tiger, GSM
God’s picture Save Me.
Horn when overtaking on
The laterite road
Speed limits lie, road traffic attacks.
Never accidents.
Speed limit –unlimited
Limited only by death on
The laterite road.
The laterite road
Blood red
Runs riot in the rains
Carving culverts
Destroying ditches
Proliferating pathological potholes
Menacing motorists with mortal shocks
Dissolving road blocks on
The laterite road
The laterite road
Has its fauna
Lazy lizards luxuriate
Ant columns traverse time
Elephants pound yam
Camels munch methodically
Donkeys dance in front of carts
Crocodiles tear
Goats are landowners
Dogs dance on
The laterite road.
The laterite road
Snakes under canopies of forest
Concealing a cacaphony of monkey business
Straight as an arrow
Through river, ravine
Gorge, gauged out of hill sides
The laterite road
Leads also to love
African romance
At every chance
Leads lovers
To each other
To replace the dead
From blood shed
Africa must not die
On the laterite road
The laterite road
Celebrates a birthday
Nightly
A million traders oil lamps
Light roadside markets
A million little limbs
Crisscross the laterite road
Daily scurrying to school
Matchsticks for the bloody holocaust
Daily extorted by the monstrous motorcade
Their bones mere toothpicks
Iin the insatiable mouth
Of maniacal mechanical monsters.
The laterite road
Straddles centuries
Zambezi to speakeasy
Leaves mark the signpost motor disaster
Landmines lne up
To blow you up
And leave yousober but legless on
The latherite road
The laterite road
Sows the season
Stitched together
The savannah and rainforest
The brown and green veldt
The swollen river and muddy stream
Unites the sky rainfilled
With the every river gorge
The laterite road
Outlived Africa’s railway
Railways iron out their differences
The rail crisscrosses the tracks
Rusting silently.
Tyrants terrorise the laterite road
Glorify them not with names
Name the glorious victims instead
A role call of the wrongful dead
Sometimes the sky meets
The laterite road
Mist swirling around cowed bodies
The Sahara’s Oasis Siwa
To The Zambezi, the Congo,
The Nile, White and Blue
Niger, Benue
River meets
The laterite road
The laterite road
Crests at the hill
Leads to the village
Leads from the village
To the suffering city
The victors return
Laden with loads
The victims scurry to the village
To die and lie about
What might have been
Dine on stories of
Vigour and valour.
And when you die
Who will cry
Will the heavens fall
Who will phone call
Will the walls quake
Who will attend the wake?
Who will make an excuse
Or rain abuse?
Will the dogs
Let you lie
Or trouble your bones
With hungry moans?
The acrid dust of
the lateral road
clogs the nostrils
swirling around
protesting
at every vehicle pass
A desert storm sand
The laterite road
Is at war
The tanks are trailers
Lorries and tankers
The tank treads
Dig deep ruts.
Footsoldiers are
Sellers, pedestrians,
child soldiers,
Hawkers, child footballers
The war is commercial or social.
The ammunition is commodities
In the civilian war for survival
Tactics and casualties
The war is fought
With the weapon of food
Thrust through vehicle windows
Real war, real deaths on
The laterite road.
The laterite road
Meanders between mountains
Falls into valleys
Through countries insecure in leadership
Falling victim to military waterfalls.
Jagged laterite road edges
Confirming corruption and incompetence,
Lead to the abyss of social suffering
And questions about
Where Africa, tomorrow?
In Africa
There will always be
Tales to tell
Between the anthills
On
The Laterite Road.
Much longer than
This ode-essy
There is no end to
The laterite road.
1km, 2km, 3km, 40,000 more.