Africa Poem by Kondwani Simwaba

Africa! Why hast thou become this ignorant?
They scrambled for you like a breakfast eggs; what if I told you that Africa was the world's food basket;
That the first farm was along the Nile in the Sahara desert and they only deserted us after obtaining our minerals,
What better desert than this food for thought?
Look how today they call you daft when you provided them with scrolls from the libraries of Alexandria;
The immense wisdom hidden in the great pyramids of Giza as guarded by the Sphinx;
We wrote in hieroglyphics long before the Romans had a numerical order;
We spoke unity before the missionaries brought Christianity;
English merely translated our emotions, because we were beauty long before filters;
So why do you bleach your skin dear African goddess, don't you see that your Melanin sets you apart?
Germany was birthed out of 38 Prussian states;
While 54 United States formed America and Britain is only great because of its amalgamations,
So what if 56 African states came together? But they told you that Gaddaffi was the villain,
They ousted Mugabe so what do you know about Thomas Sankara's ideology against corruption;
How about Africa's first female president Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf's Nobel peace prize?
They told you about Mandela but what do you know about the mysterious plane crash that claimed Samora Machel's life?
Before I tell you about Kaunda, Nyerere, Lumumba and Jomo Kenyatta you must first pay homage to the emperor Haile Salasie of Ethiopia;
Understand that we face neither east nor west; we face forward like Kwame Nkhuruma;
Because like Kanye West said, little is known of Sierra Leone and how it connects to the Diamonds we own…
These are the words of an African soul// that tell of a tale of what this African saw// But if ignorance is a seed Africans sow// Then we slay our kin with an African sword and all that remains is but dust with no stories to be told…