Ode to a Broken Statue--Dedicated to Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah

In the land of Nkroful, a Nazareth

In faraway Nzema, you, Nana Amaga, were born.

As a lonely limping quintessential lamb

You fought fiercely not for your few needs

But against their deadly deeds

And incredulous creeds, carefully and

Shrewdly shrouded in shallow showmanship

Of great guiles and glamour guns

The grand gods of Shaka the zealous Zulu and Zeus

Saw sprouting spirit of spotless selflessness

And imbued in your budding bones

Our relentless requests for liberation

They dipped you into a cauldron of ichor

And unlike Achilles, it covered every shadow you shed

Rushing through every vessel

They tied your plasmatic placental pipe to theirs

And their poetic tongues with yours

Making you their earthly linguist

You washed your hands in the pot of rainwater

Wedged between the folds of the Nyamedua

And so dined with them their ambrosial food

From there your manhood was affirmed…

Confirmed by the

Ageless sage who supervised your

Rite of Passage…

Hence you took the forms of both the Magi and Moses

Seeing Canaan in Egypt before he was set sail

And the Messiah before the epiphany

Having tasted the giant fruits of divine wisdom

You vowed never to lose it

Nor be confused by a few men with mind obtuse

Whose blue bleary eyes were blinded by abuse

And misuse

From Kumbi Saleh

to Kangaba…Timbuktu

Cape Coast…Accra

You lived through the spirits of time

And harvested its wisdom within its interior plane

You were the reincarnation of Ra Nahesi

…Mansa Musa

…Sundiata…in one entity

Your brain was carved as complicated

And inconceivably complex as the spider’s web

With supreme intellect to the point of folly

You embraced bodily…boldly…both

Ancestral missions and astral visions lodged

Within the blackholes of Einstein’s space-time theory

Being the gods’ sacred soothsayer

You looked through the divine orb

And spoke of weaving our blood baskets

Intricately into the heart of the land

At the time of our birth on that Wednesday evening

But they only saw it fit to spit in your wit

Scared of losing their loins and groins to the lion’s longings

After our timeless wanderings in the wilderness

…after they’ve with poisoned spears pierced your humble heart

And fed your copious consciousness

Consistently to a series of kaleidoscopic conflagrations

Purposely established after your departure

Manufactured by those cheap cheating chaps,

We, stuck sons in sand-stars

Have surrounded and salaamed

In reverence before your bones

With a soul as hot as a bole of coal

Dutifully waiting for the prophecy

Seeking counselling in the sands of time

With ailing whispers of failure

As life flew through our clenched fingers

Into a god have we turned you

Into knowledge have we transformed you

And posthumously have we honoured your name

Blasphemously branded on all lips

Even bold ones…

Burning offenders of the season

As heretics of treason

Should we always see goodness after death?

Should decayed coffins bear the staff of sainthood?

When you sought mental emancipation

Through the burning of blood and bone

And the expositions of

Marcus Garvey,

Du Bois,

Malcolm X,

Martin Luther King,

George Padmore,

They only saw insanity in your queer quest

And together with unknown souls

Sold your soul to an unknown night owl

When like God in Newtonian vision

You let the light be

They saw only darkness

Their needs were of silk, milk and manna

Their weeds—

Che Guevara and his honour to Havana

Their Gye Nyame spirit

Was lost in the potholes of their minds

And from the Katanga valleys of Kinshasa

To the Soweto mines of Jo’burg

They killed our prophets

And traded their ivories to tool makers

Of faraway lands…

2006

This piece was written in 2006 but I post it here to celebrate the Republic Day.