the playground of neanderthal man,
the fertile pond where our species,
homo erectus, homo sapiens, the whole lot,
were nurtured from,
the birthplace of civilisation,
before the likes of Sophocles and Archimedes,
the greatest child of Gondwanaland,
such great importance bestowed upon a land
so afflicted by raging wars,
breeding sorrow, greed, and the hypocrisy of holy wars,
(a holy war, what an oxymoron,)
a land so beautiful, drenched in the blood of ages passed and ages to come,
wounds inflicted by persons with other interests, regardless of race,
and wounds inflicted by ourselves,
the blood slowly trickles through the soil,
its stench in a guise but which will slowly reach us.
Damn those turmoils presented on CNN,
our cultures have never been alien to the news of wars,
war is not the culprit of our dilemmas,
I say, damn the theory of war-torn Africa,
it is not the wars that tear our souls apart,
they are mere effects of the true adversary,
the real culprit:
ignorance,
both educated and illiterate alike suffer from this.
This is based on substantiable accusations,
and I have one to make your stomach turn
like it would seeing the hot blade slowly swiping the flesh,
like it would watching the openings being sown up,
like it would seeing the pain on the young girls faces,
why do we soak our soil with the blood of our women,
the future mothers of Africa under the pretext of female circumcision?
Do we not shame,
claiming it to be a tradition?
Do we not know that ideologies such as the inferiority of the negroid
was seen in many western cultures also as a tacit tradition?
Traditions are what we make them, oh men and women of Africa,
they are not set in stone,
yet our stone hearts refuse to amend them,
both men and women alike,
may the faint scent of the trickling blood awake our ancestors,
may they be the ones to tell us that traditionalism is not ignorance,
may they also tell us that development is not a rejection of culture,
our shame for these practices should not breed insecurity,
for all men and women have barbaric tendencies,
regardless of race, colour, and residence,
we must not breed rigid axioms,
that would be a sad fate for our complex and flexible humanity,
we must change Africa,
excuses for our shameful practices cannot be tolerated,
the new generation should not and will not have any of it.