Child-trafficking and child-labour are criminal and unjust. Sadly, many young girls who have been reduced to maids serving in homes in cities in Nigeria are daily abused, assaulted, raped and denied tasting the honey of knowledge. Dozens of such poor girls are yearning to have a better life and future, like the children they are paid peanuts to wash panties for or serve as nannies.
Hence, while the historian's mind is riddled with events, the poet's is bursting with colour, having memory as its minefield. However, there is no fixity to verse. Not in its fidelity to what was or its facility for what will follow. Both past and future are the canvass upon which imagination subsists. Along the way, it rids itself of all ethical sympathies.
Meanwhile, Wanlov the Kuboloro, who joins with M3nsa to complete the rap-artiste duo from Ghana, FOKN Bois, advocates for a young man who has put a coin into the canister: “He has donated for America.” Looking into camera, “Don’t give him troubles when he applies for a visa.”
Still young, you reshuffle positions, change a thing or two, furnish and finish rough edges. This editing process is a continuous loop, much like a refining process of wine. At a point, you just must stop and let time make the poem age into something even sweeter!
Still young, you reshuffle positions, change a thing or two, furnish and finish rough edges. This editing process is a continuous loop, much like a refining process of wine. At a point, you just must stop and let time make the poem age into something even sweeter!
Africa in its potential and realities is me, it's us. It’s a reckoning with ourselves. It’s a becoming. Movement and stillness. Where past, present, and future bleed into each other.
Africa in its potential and realities is me, it's us. It’s a reckoning with ourselves. It’s a becoming. Movement and stillness. Where past, present, and future bleed into each other.
An African Elegy by Ben Okri is one poem that I have been most impressed and fascinated by. Why? It is profoundly revealing of what it is we as humans, especially Africans, are about on this earth.
