Bits and Pieces

The other day I was caught by this sudden fit to react to what I’d read about Oprah Winfrey in “The Globe”. It was an outrage on forty-million-dollar school in South Africa. This set me thinking and the lines that came into my head were quickly written down. Then I also thought of what happened in Cameroon, especially the role of the professors in managing the strike on the university campus as well as protecting the integrity of the academe. The result was another poem. I don’t know whether you will call them poems. Well I just want to share the revised versions with you.

Thank You Oprah

A new South Africa shouts hurrah
And on the streets the children sing
Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrica
As a marching song to school
Or in hope that one day ripening plums
Now being harvested will fall their way

Yes Oprah, you’ve planted a tree of life
To bring back life lost in getting today
You’ve shown in true African spirit that
The dead are not really dead but nearby
As the cries of Soweto and Sharpville
Of children gruesomely murdered
For love of education and their country
Continued to reverberate from their graves
Refusing to rest until their course is fulfilled
Now they can rest as you have brought hope

This may sound like a panegyric for Oprah
And condemned by the detractors who of late
Shouted inanities at the present day world arbiter
For turning eyes of mercy and looking on Africa
Like a goddess, dreamed of and prayed for by
Many African children whose talents will die
For want of educational facilities to exploit them
And like Gray’s pearl ever lost to human eye
Theirs will be a life of tribulations and regrets
Unlike those who think of candies and i-pods

Let God in Oprah continue to bless Africa
So that in next-door Zimbabwe, girls too can
Sing a different song other than letting their
Pants torn at street corners to get fees and books
And in Cameroon where the hot pools of blood
Have continually been refilled on UB street
When students cry for better learning conditions
And academic integrity with branches and placards
Emperor Paul Biya with his secret police CENER
Respond angrily in teargas, water canons and gunfire
It takes only an Oprah to sing a new song for Africa
When others rather enjoy the regular rhythm of disease,
Infections, poverty, coup d’êtres and genocides
Nkosi sikelel’ iOprah


When Intellectuals Recant

It’s always hard to get the right music
For a dance party of Afro intelleticians
Except to create slapstick comedy
Intellectuals and politicians have to dance
At arms length for fear of falling in love
This holds true at the armpit of Africa!
The advanced democracy in Cameroon
Looms on the horizon of the academe
And controls every academic decision
While the chalk and the pen coexist
the one used to sign decrees is awful
When promotions in the academia
Are orchestrated by a scrawl on paper
By some far removed demigod
Who sits high in the White House
And has been in power since 1982
Is that not advanced democracy?
The dons who aspire then adjust
Their glasses and microscopes
The specimen being observed:
A society in grips of a democrat
And in class, chalk that which is pleasing
Presenting academic papers of progress
Peace and prosperity like paupers
Others craft motions of support and
Praise epithets to be used for campaigns
Critical papers written during their twenties
Are disavowed and their very consciences
Either sacrificed for fear of reprisals
Or for hopes of appointments and tips
What then becomes of those in the search
of the truth – the very essence of being?
In Cameroon the answer on the wall is Isaiah
The hollow barrel of the gun is the test
The vomit of which truth is determined
And successful candidates join the
Champaign party at the White House
To celebrate the honeymoon of lies
When intellectuals recant the gate of hell is ajar
A future of nothingness awaits those yet unborn
A Cameroonian experience is true democracy
For freedom is there for the taking and only
True patriots fear to tell the truth of what is
Their lives are changed for the better
By the tiny sacrifice of this irritating truth