Pamoja [Together]
On a burning day in March, the mother’s flew out of the gilded cage with their children wrapped in patterned leso's on their back.
Up, pamoja, down, pamoja!
Shacklebolted away from their home, they sang a song that travelled across the wind, formed with the beat of their wings and the spirit of their ancestors, oh how they sang!
Up, pamoja, down, pamoja!
From Grandmother, to Mother, to Daughter and back to chorus.
Up, pamoja, down, pamoja!
Hooked by the ankles ,with welted flesh and drowning in sweat, they exerted their frail, violated, bodies to fly together as one, a flag of revolution and oncoming freedom patterned on their backs.
Up, pamoja, down, pamoja!
English oak trees uprooted their nests that had been neatly embalmed with community and love. Intertwined with pain and suffering, they subtly rebuilt them with the sticks and stones of their identity.
Up, pamoja, down, pamoja!
As they soared the skies, they mourned the swaying of the leaves on the acacia trees which were silent, bleeding and full of bullet holes .
Up, pamoja, down, pamoja!
They mourned the way the sun laid shadows on the open verandas, where the fledglings would cheep and chirp as their mother’s looked on.
Up, pamoja, down, pamoja!
The mother tongue surpasses any attempt to shadow our existence, a language as old as the red sand that litters the ground. Even as you tortured, tainted and tormented, you could not rid us of our history, our homes or ourselves. It bleeds into the very feathers of our existence.
Up, pamoja, down, pamoja!
Like the Nile they swoop through the air beautifully, destructively but all the while familiar.
Up, pamoja, down, pamoja!
They fly black to the gilded cage and swiftly disarm your hunters and your enablers.
Up, pamoja, down, pamoja!
The ones who killed, slaughtered and stole.
Up, pamoja, down, pamoja!
The ones who threw their families into the jaws of the crocodile.
Up, pamoja, down, pamoja!
The ones who raped, robbed and restrained.
Up, pamoja, down, pamoja!
They released the father's who carried the dead on their backs, so that the rotting corpses stained the sky and black blood fell onto the greedy pale faces below.
Up, pamoja, down, pamoja!
You underestimated the mothers and daughters and sisters, forgetting they were firstly children of the land. You thought of them as warm bodies that you could manoeuvre, manipulate and molest into submission.
Up, pamoja, down, pamoja!
However, no matter the amount of fear or pain you desperately inflicted, you could not make them sing silently in a gilded cage stained with a white savagery.
Up, pamoja, down, pamoja!
But the native birds will always sing, and the acacia trees will forever sway again.
“Mzungu aende ulaya, mwafrika apate uhuru!” [“Let the foreigner go back abroad, let the African regain independence”.]
by Chineka Assem Maumo