Maybe Not Today

Teacher don't teach me nonsense

In a history class, my teacher asked me;

What is African history?

Being an English woman,

she walked through the aisle

To the backbenches where

I was seated as her student.

She handed me a marker pen,

and straight to the front,

I walked up to the white marker

board from where she

Had plotted a graph

with intersecting lines from the East.

To the West laid waste,

and she named it Africa.

I said no, this is not

The history of our people

but it was this same story about us,

The people who you barely know not;

that you call our history.

I held her hands and pointed

to her from where they met us.

Our forefathers at the coast

and of our city-states that

They now call our beginning

and never our meeting point.

I then plotted another graph showing

her ships loaded with men and women

as a gift and business commodities.

On other ships,

I showed her guns and raiding of our villages.

And in an another,

men and women across the river and cut off,

Their memories, homes;

clans and their humanity are erased.

For the history, she told her students said that we are

Sellers of humanity and they never raided our towns.

Her history told the stories of the good hunters

at hunting and failed to tell the good tales

of the games, her history: silent.

Tales of men seeking the manpower

to develop their new world,

Colonies and their plantations across the seas,

but I told her, if you have ever seen a man

in between two choices: life or death

and the choice to die by another man

in whom he knows nothing about

his origin, and nor from where he comes from.

I walk back ten thousand miles back to my seat.

I, seated, have her ask me —

if I wanted to tell her about our history

but I said, no, not today again,

not until we learn her history

and then we will rewrite our history.

For the shadows of their created history still looms,

It looms over our heads and who knows how long

It is going to take us to rewrite our history

and tell about our African stories in our African ways.

Maybe not today, maybe not by me alone and maybe

Not in this generation. This story must be retold.

John Chinaka Onyeche is a Nigerian writer based in Port Harcourt, and a historian from Etche in Rivers State. While he is dedicated to ensuring that the full scope of history is accurately represented, John now writes about family, broken homes, the effect on its victims, and survival. His writing can be found in various journals, including York Literary Review, McNeese Review, Pier Review, Rio Grande Valley International Poetry Festival Anthology, Tilted House Journal, The Shallow Tales Review, Akewi Magazine, Tampered Press, Ta—Adesa Magazine and Brittle Paper, etc. He is a Best of Net/Pushcart nominee respectively. You can connect with him on X/Twitter  @Apostlejohnchin