Revolution will Succour our Soul: A Poem
In this poetic prose, Opicho challenges men, fathers, gatekeepers and beneficiaries of patriarchal structures to release the girl child to unleash her potential through education instead of ongoing restrictions to the kitchen, extraction of dowry, sexual exploitation and gender violence.
Were all these coils in life divinely meant for me? O! it can’t be, these universities of Africa, from South in the Wits, to the East in Nairobi, North in Alexandria and West in Lagos, falling in tune with the agonies in purposeful illusive education unto black daughters.
In the diaspora, within and without, manmade challenges heap on manmade challenges to mind-boggle, and humble minds and fibers of the hearts of African daughters; social systems run in a mad rush, like the naked spermatogonia with no eyes for engendering humanity; thinning and excluding daughters of Africa
From the comfort of mainstream academic culture, leaving them with nothing but despair in a song of the ode to the open road, on which those with money make the universities a den of social sham, turning callow daughters into campus wives, putting high marks in math as a bait for social exploitation.
Just but another open path to pitiable woman-life in fangled Patriarchy, hopeless infections and punctured personalities of African womenfolk, as terms after terms at the University of Nairobi, Garissa and so-forth are ever punctuated by clubs, teargas, spray of hot water and policeman’s truncheons blended with cowboy styled kicks, going beyond gender blindness to aureate violence.
Mercilessly pinching-off dignity of all the daughters, that are only in mob fit and unarmed but happily chanting songs of gender inclusivity on the streets of Kampala.
Why beat a protesting woman? She is only armed with concern for tomorrow, and then you thwack her hard, as if she is a replaceable cradle of human nature. Why shrewdly heap a woman in hopeless education? That macadamizes her future roads to the station of slavery.
Honestly, I beg you to heap African girls in science labs, medical labs and workshops of metallurgy; their love for life is easily convertible into human-sensitive technology. Heap them in political science schools, let them learn Marx and Aristotle, Mahmood Mamdani and Achille Mbembe, Issa Shivji and Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon and Paul Freire, Aimé Césaire and Jean Paul Sartre, Jesus and Muhammad, Soyinka and Mazrui, Achebe and Ngugi, Nasser and Nyerere. Let African daughters learn.
Even Nkrumah’s consciencisism is fit for woman consumption, for the heart of a black woman is a fallback of peace, in the gendered education we bound the earth, to shores of peace, ideology without war and religion barren of terrorism.
Let an African woman learn parasitology, genomes and special virus education; give a black woman that powerful microscope from Moscow, let her glean all HIV micro-demons; for I smell earnestly in her ventures a conquer to the challenge of impoverished widowhood, self-liberation from the hearth and inglenooks of Africa’s fire yards.
Wrong you are, you man that buys and forges a hoe for a black woman; Mistaken you are, you man that built a kitchen for an African woman; saddo and a jade you are, you man that marries an Africa lass out of school as a second wife, or an arch-picaroon you reign you black man seeing dowry cows in the bosom of your daughter but not dignity of life in her professional education.
Loutish oat and oaf you reek in your appetite, you bourgeoisie tourist, walking the coastlines, beaches and streets of African cities as a sex tourist; looking for black virgins. You all deserve Emmanuel’s nemesis – to swim turbulent seas with a milestone around your neck, period!
But above all, wake up Africa! Wake up from the bliss of your slumber; it is your turn to have lunar daughters as the West basks in the lunar sons, pull your daughters out of the kitchen to the stellar science centers, send them to the moon for rendezvous with stellar virginity; proceeds of your choice will be a universal boon.
African farms, work not as suicide centers in the hands of reality; Africa gauntly dance, unfold your potential above the chains of catastrophes and tyrannies in the blind values of a single story, Africa go out and sing the song of true freedom to the lowly; women and children, eunuchs and castrati, gays and lesbians, dwarfs and albinos, hunchbacks and crippled, barren and fistulati, sex workers and drunkards, micro-and macro-cephalic, and widows, spiritually punctured, those in bombazine, those that see their biological moon fortnightly, those divorced for epilepsy, mutilated in genitals in service to sentimentality of crude culture and those banished for siring the twins. Sing to the world that in this diversity looms the holy hand of the revolution. And the revolution will succour our soul!
Alexander Opicho is a Corporate Trainer, Capacity Builder, and Workshop Facilitator in the areas of Resource Mobilization, Fundraising, Project and Programme Leadership, as well as Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEAL) from Nairobi, Kenya. Mail: [email protected]