I still remember when being called "Racist"
Meant the end for anybody...You'd break in fits
Like " ...Gabadadadja...me? Racist???! Nooooo way!"
But when the word gets wrapped in political cloak
And swung around to avoid clarifying what one spoke
Then we have a reaaaaal problem, a biiiiiiig problem.
If you criticise a black person, then you're absolutely racist
And if you think black people can excel with only bases
Their brains, brawn and determination....it's like "whaaaaat?"
Noooooo, the past was a one-sided bloody calculated joke
On this poor folk, they will never get up with broke spokes!
They can't pedal out of shit creek, we need a loooong rope
They're Princess Toadstool with a white supremacist Bowser,
Waiting for Mario (the white not-supremacist brother)
Who believes she is equal to him, but must saaaaaave her
Like he couldn't ask her help, because being equally capable as him
But of course incapable of healing from the tears of a past so grim ,
She needs help, and couldn't contribute even ooooooooooooone bit.
I still remember when being called "Racist"
Meant the end for anybody...You'd break in fits
Like " ...Gabadadadja...me? Racist???! Nooooo way!"
But today, some fools have made it okay, and real racism hides out,
And no, history and facts show it's not in today's White House,
It's those creating minority victims by whining more than the bereaved.
(c) nyonglema
Tag Archives: racism
Positive hate #right/wrong
I hate you !
But only for the good reasons, so
It’s positive, right?
Remember when your leaves casted a shade
Over my growth, took the drops of sunlight
And stunted me amongst the undergrowth?
You kept the air for yourself, and took the water
On the shelf, and used it to seize our light.
Well we’ve got a fix here:
We’re both plants, right?
Your greed is killing our breed! You’ll stop.
Then we’ll need to ensure that we’re all even.
So, till I reach your height
You must stop growing.
I’ll take your light, the water off the shelf,
Stunt you till you’re undergrowth with every drop of sunlight.
But it’s all positive right?
(c) nyonglema
Something fishy #discrimination
My colleague wants the Art of Zen, in French of course
Translated from Japanese…I suppose, for they started it.
But she wants it from the UK…I’m like: “That’s horse –
Shopping in the middle of the ocean…they’re more likely
To stock it in English, you see. But I’ll search in Italy”.
Then, I find myself in Dakar at some point, and while walking
In the mall, a bookstore calls to me. I go toward it.
They don’t have it, neither here nor at Mermoz. But the thing
That hangs on my brain like a shroud, while the lady pours
Out the information is the fact that English books are here.
Think about it: this is an all French country, colonised
By France, having spent all their lives with them.
They had books in English, and games too …to my surprise.
Then I asked myself about other countries, which should be
Carrying these as standard, where books would be
In every stall in 2 languages as per their constitution.
And my heart sunk. I felt pain for every single one of them
In such countries, where language replaces skin’s function
In the minds of those who wear hate like a hat I despise
And cower to the custody of morbid segregation and fear.
Well, prejudice is a but a bug in the universe’s most infant app
And it takes mere (not sheer) will to wipe it off our map.
Take up your napkins boys…it only seems hard.
(c) nyonglema
D.N.A. #blacklivesmatter
I’m mostly skin-colour blind, but in this post I want to reflect on the struggles within the black communities.
You know that moment you have to protect your kids from some particularly mean neighbour? Well you won’t be protecting them if you did the same to them would you? The question to most blacks is: “How much do black lives matter to you?” More than your money? More than your tummy? More than playing life with that fine body? More than greed?
The title is inspired from Don Cheadle’s line : “Another Dead Niggers Association”, while talking to Kendrick on Kendrick Lamar’s hit song D.N.A. This song looks at the heritage of the black communities and the conclusion is quite poignant: “Sex, Money, Murder – Our DNA”. You can read more about it on Genius.com.
.
                                                   
Einstein is asleep in a Bepanda rubbish heap.
Newton is learning how to swim in Soweto poop.
Shakespeare is slumped in a car with extra lead
Losing the grams he suddenly gained on a Vegas road,
Then Dumas does same: different street, same oozing scenery.
D.N.A.
Is it a case of which or is it that each black life actually matters?
The geniuses seem to be electrons in the society’s first chapter,
Then the atom goes positive in self-wrought treachery
D.N.A.
You took Dube for his car, Njawe for his mouth, Lumumba for his mind, Pac
For his revolution, X for his convictions, Luther for his wisdom, Sankara,
For his vision, And their names scream from an unending roster in front of Peter.
Dead Negus Association
Then our mothers turn preemptive and kill
The next Mozart for fear of hunger, dump
The next Leke for fear of parental anger.
Where are the tears in these instants where the now seems better for all?
How to un-wrench my heart when the news comes out the radio speaker,
And the souls fly around one last time before going unaccomplished back home?
The miracle of the genetic mutation that brings genius to uplift our communities mostly gets lost earlier than on the blueprint:
Each gone by a gun or its mum.
(c) Nyonglema
People will treat you the way you treat yourselves. May blacks love their neighbour more so that hating you doesn’t look anymore like something you taught everybody. Love black lives
Working for the white man #noRacism #coloursNsmells
This is what I learnt from working for the white man:
The rainy season will come each year, and so will the dry
And bosses can be mean, they can be sad, they can be shy
And life will move on even when the targets seem high
And the team will be there, to scoff but sometimes say fie
But they can lift you high with a good laugh, or just smile.
I learnt to be humble in front of challenges, for God
Put them there to shine through the successes we got.
Then,
This is what I learnt from working for the black man:
The rainy season will come each year, and so will the dry
And bosses can be mean, they can be sad, they can be shy
And life will move on even when the targets seem high
And the team will be there, to scoff but sometimes say fie
But they can lift you high with a good laugh, or just smile.
I learnt to be humble in front of challenges, for God
Put them there to shine through the successes we got.
And,
This is what I learnt from your puzzled mind:
We’re all the same deep under, and the colour doesn’t determine
What success or failure or iniquity or sanctity you bring.
Black, white, dark, spiked, light, night, yellow, mellow,
I’m looking at you looking at me, but we’re all one big shadow
On this sphere spinning in nothingness. That colours, smells
Are just ways to make the labrador hate hounds and spaniels.
I learnt to be humble in front of challenges, for God
Put them there to shine through as we merge into one pod.
(c) Nyonglema
We only wear Boss, Hugo that is #racism #colour
Adapted from 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Negro
How to judge a man? I got some inspiration below….hint smell is important:
The mention that mentally the leather fragrance wearer is inferior to the wood fragrance wearer, may be taken as generally true of that whole race: “the leather fragrance wearing children were sharp, intelligent and full of vivacity, but on approaching the adult period a gradual change set in. The intellect seemed to become clouded, animation giving place to a sort of lethargy, briskness yielding to indolence. We must necessarily suppose that the development of the leather fragrance wearer and woody ones proceeds on different lines. While with the latter the volume of the brain grows with the expansion of the brainpan, in the former the growth of the brain is on the contrary arrested by the premature closing of the cranial sutures and lateral pressure of the frontal bone.This explanation is reasonable and even probable as a contributing cause; but evidence is lacking on the subject and the arrest or even deterioration in mental development is no doubt very largely due to the fact that after puberty sexual matters take the first place in the leather fragrance wearer’s life and thoughts. At the same time his environment has not been such as would tend to produce in him the restless energy which has led to the progress of the wood fragrance wearer; and the easy conditions of tropical life and the fertility of the soil have reduced the struggle for existence to a minimum. But though the mental inferiority of the leather fragrance wearing to the wood fragrance wearing or floral fragrance wearing races is a fact, it has often been exaggerated; the leather fragrance wearer is largely the creature of his environment, and it is not fair to judge of his mental capacity by tests taken directly from the environment of the wood fragrance wearer, as for instance tests in mental arithmetic; skill in reckoning is necessary to the wood fragrance wearing race, and it has cultivated this faculty; but it is not necessary to the leather fragrance wearers.
And I believe this because if you smell different, you’re definitely inferior. I pick the woodiness of Hugo Boss. YOU ARE INFERIOR!
Oh, and also, I’m going to be judging you because your skin doesn’t reflect the same light wavelengths as mine…YOU ARE INFERIOR!
Then I’ll make up some excuses about your anatomy based on your fragrance and light waves…but bottom line is you’re INFERIOR! Deal with it.
(c) Nyonglema
PS: Colour ain’t a thing! Black, white, yellow, brown, green…doesn’t matter. I’m brown, you’re whatever you are…but we’re all humans trying to make sense of this big ball we’re on and what lies beyond. Let’s walk together. There are more reasons to think we’re similar, than to start limiting ourselves with colours, scents, and lame measurements.
Â
Across the bridge #Soweto #Sharpeville
                                       RIP to the fallen but: Non sine causa mortis. -Nyonglema
Why didn’t the police throw flowers instead,
As our Master recommends when your cheek gets beat
And you need to turn the other side of your head
In a Stephen forgiveness prayer in the battle heat?
See the children crying the tears of the future
They wished they had, fighting for generations to come
To see freedom and more, to dream of more than manure
And dung, to aim to the sky, but just that you stay calm
And listen. Why didn’t they throw flowers instead
Of gas to rose-prick the eyes, and blows to nose-bleed
Innocence, fighting back with stones, staring scared
But not afraid to give, give, give and sow this seed
Which was to be sown not in blood blood bloodshed?
Why let those lethal tubes let lead lash out
At Ndlovu, Hector, more, while others ducked, the floor red,
Life floating around clothed flesh wide-eyed open mouths.
See….see the children crying the tears of the future
Dreamed, which the next generation finally received,
And smile the smile of 100 years, sitting on pure
Bliss on a porch, like watching your eldest getting free.
(c) Nyonglema
Wake Up #Africa #newEden
Don’t you just hate the incessant annoyance buzzing out of a cellphone?
Your eyes are shut, and dreams are in you, swaying and cuddling you
And there’s this syncopated harmony floating about like US drones,
Like you’re going to get hit. Like you shouldn’t be sleeping, but you,
You love it here. The real world’s harsh with things to fear, fears to bear
Bears in the office, officials plundering taxes, taxes to be paid,
Payments you are owed, Owen missing goals, Goals not getting nearer….
Near this cosy cushion of dreams, the cursed music is played
By transistors you’d bash but for the fact that you’ll have to pay
For the pain of being able to make a call again….
But that’s not what I’m talking about today. No way.
Who are you going to blame when it’s time to feel the pain?
Africa! AFRICA! Hey! AFRICA! It’s 6 a.m. and it’s pouring.
You’re stuck in a past of pain, perjury and mourning, looking further back
To dream of glory, gumption in days when you built stone storeys.
Those stories are history…..hello! ….Wake Up!!! Get out the sack
Generations boated in hordes, hoarded to shores where all fell apart
To generations hoarded on their own shores, robbed, tortured, more
To generations seeking for sure, for their brains have lost their heart,
And disconnected from self they float in hordes tormented and more,
Are your pedigree. Shall you stop to stare at the tripping stone there?
Shall you mourn the morning that brought mourning till it disappears
To some sugar candy mountain in purple pill colours, and hear
Psychedelic mushrooms hum soothing tunes into your crying ears?
Africa??? Who are you blaming now, while the shutters blind your view?
They enslaved you? You’d been doing it for ages and taught them too,
And caught and chose the ones to be sent off in balls and chains in twos
And forced them in exchange for glitter, clothes, status and booze.
They signed shady deals? Well not amongst themselves they didn’t!
Not like some shady deal CIA-hidden between Obama and Biden,
Or Paul and Phil. You were represented by the mice with hidden
Agenda at the cheese distribution party. So …..nope they didn’t.
Rather than mourn, and seek root in tradition tradition…tradition.
What’s tradition? And who said it was frozen in some distant time
Before others changed your clime? Your ancestor’s oral diction
Was altered, and clothing, and building and art and even clime
As you migrated from oasis to oasis, fleeing from wars and drought!
Tradition? That’s a 60s newspaper bashing Facebook for breaching
Tradition. Culture. I’m more for principles, which is deeper, without
Which our bearings are stuck in heavy rotation North East West South.
Rather than mourn, and seek root in tradition, reinvent your minds
Adapt, grow. Change is opportunity, and exclusion kills opportunity.
Reverse racism is two wrongs to a right, and no matter what fines
You would levy, exclusion is your energy spent to fix past iniquity,
But shouldn’t we be seizing that opportunity? Driving paradigm
Change in little and big ways, and saying to the plants in the garden:
It was tough, but soak it all up, learn from all and then you can design
A new way to live. Then call it culture, call it tradition. Call it Eden
(c) Nyonglema
F— Negrophobia! #stopNegrophobia #stopXenophobia
Did you torch him? You? You? You torched him?
Your brother, not from mother, nor father,
But even though farther, your brother from long ago
When our common fathers hunted and gathered to cope????
You? You just torched him??? ‘Cos he’s different???
‘Cos this instant the labels are different
But inconsistent with what is your actual content,
Which is similar in many intents, and variously intense!!!
You???You…;wait, REALLY you torched him???
For selling bread to your community?
For paying taxes so your commute’s sweet???
And you torched him?
Is your language so different? Did you stop to think
As you kinked his arm, and bloodied his chin
That all languages and peoples are from One evolved
As migration and separation took firm resolve,
Pushing the words and syntax to match the status quo
Which each would find, and adapt to grow!!!
But you just torched him? And stood as fumes reeked
Human flesh searing in screaming death
Weak…battered…broken…lost
Human flesh fearing its family’s death
Whipped…hammered…broken….cussed!
For what? Did he call your momma a b—-?
Did he walk into your house and defile your sheets?
Did he break your code? Wear the wrong number or colour
Or try to seed pain within your family’s hold?
Was it him? Wait….what’s his crime?
That he came from another clime?
That his country is so different, from what you call “Mine”
Like an infant clutching his latest choo-choo train
Watching a sibling wishing he had the same????
What’s a country, what’s a city, what’s a tribe?
Names on pieces of paper to aggravate and divide!
Yet, your premise to take this innocent life
Is that he has no place in this land in which you reside?
Hold on….who made you owner of Earth?
Are you Mars with the sword, or have Zeus’s girth?
Are you Hades with his scythe, or what…you just own this dirt?
This dirt on which you’re just a speck…a sneeze in the space-time continuum?
Who made you the golden drop of the seas?
Watch…watch your dirt!!!! WATCH IT!!!
Charred chaffed and choke-held by rigor mortis
Never to see his family again, his friends.
His wife will never kiss those lips again
His kids will never be hugged the same again.
Yet the little baby will have no memory of the pure love
He now misses in a step-dad who considers him as the other man’s child.
Yet yesterday you said “Umjani”, and smiled back
And took the beer he offered, and took his hand in the mall.
You walked the same roads, traveled together, took the bus
Shoulder to shoulder: you and the dead “criminal”.
You torched him….ooooooh…you just torched him.
Now they all have to run. Now all blacks have to run
If they don’t speak one of the Chosen tongues.
You torched him, you torched them, you’ll torch them.
Their crime: you just hate them for being different.
You hate those who fought with you when you were hated for being different.
You kill those who fought by you when you were killed because your skin is different.
Now you’re free, and you’re killing others because their name’s different.
God help you…but f— the xeno-negro-ethno-phobia you’ve learnt.
(c) Nyonglema
Jesus’s thoughts on Racism
Forget not Matthew 7: 3
What can you do with a speck?
Well, you can polish it and look good.
You can point it out, shout loud out let the world see how righteous you are and look good.
You can create a ban round the speck with others who saw the speck, and heck, you can change that part of the world and look good.
Even the stars can see the speck, no doubt
But is it really the Pareto choice with most clout?
I grew on tales of the evil white man with his long nose.
I grew reminded I'm a "nigger" and the whips will crack on my back, seize my foothold, banish my dreams, and tears pouring out my flat nose.
I grew on the black-washed history of the transatlantic slavery which tells of the buyer and torturer of my brothers for centuries and more.
I didn't hear of the North African slave trade, nor the Congo-Ghana one,
Nor the fact that "lenwa" in my village is a slave.
I didn't hear that Africans sold Africans for slavery but through Christian abolishment they earned better lives
I didn't hear that Eddie Murphy lives a better life than most Cameroonians, or that Lupita Nyongo won't have the same chances had she stayed on the continent.
I grew on the falsehood that a "nigger" like me cannot be racist
And that "White man, white man, white man with his long nose"
Is just fun as "Black man, black man, black man with his flat nose"
Would be.
Then I learnt that "nigger" is a bad word I learnt to rap to.
Then I learnt that I would be nothing, I would not get a job because of my skin colour.
Then I learnt that the white families who welcomed me didn't exist.
That my white friends were actually blacks in disguise...otherwise how could they be my friends?
And I shut my ears and eyes.
For while all were focusing on the speck of reparations
(Which should be paid only to children of slaves, by the buyers and
The African countries who committed the abomination of trading
Humans for whisky, guns and other silly gimmicks)
I'm looking at the plank of single parenthood,
Erosion of any viable belief system or value system
Widespread corruption, poor governance,
Electoral fraud, business fraud, educational fraud
Victim mentality and "reverse" racism...if such a word exists.
Racism is racism, and to see black and white and yellow and red and blue and purple on human skins is to be in a race on mushrooms.
I see one humanity, striving to make the present better than the past.
Striving to make this present prosperity pervasive and make it last.
(c) nyonglema
waghni 