Before The Colonizers Came Poem by Chinedu Dike

An unyielding theft drained the continental soil
as twelve million youth were violently uprooted.
Unrecorded legions perished in the inland wars,
their names swallowed whole by the red dust.

Bound by the neck in wooden coffles,
generations marched on foot to the coast.
Countless souls withered in the seaside dungeons,
dying in darkness before the hulls arrived.

Foreign merchants brought a silent, blistering fire,
unleashing smallpox and measles across the savanna.
Tuberculosis and cholera consumed the mud-walled villages,
devastating communities already broken by the flintlock.

The Atlantic gun-trade fractured ancient bonds,
as rulers swapped captives for European lead.
Trapped in a predatory matrix, states bartered their own blood—
trading human lives for the iron of survival.

The terror of the ledger and the chain
sowed lasting silence between neighboring fires.
Old alliances split into bitter, bleeding enmities,
leaving historical scars that feed modern wars.

The dehumanizing machine upended structural lines,
as industrial plunder disrupted native culture and growth.
This grim enterprise engineered the enduring weight
of global racism that the diaspora bears.

No continent can lose its youngest strength
for centuries without paralysis.
As national infrastructures collapsed in the dust,
thriving empires sank beneath the encroaching brush.

This deep, generational erosion left kingdoms divided,
snapping the defensive spine of majestic crowns.
Unable to organize a fierce, united front,
the fractured nations fell to European colonization.