I like them both
The two sides of Black
The one that is woke
And the one that looks back
I like both of them
The two sides of Black
The one full of flame
And the one that’s laid back
I like the Black that plays
I like the Black that fights
I like the Black that prays
I like the Black that delights
I like the Black that segregates
I like the Black that integrates
I like the Black that separates
I like the Black that tolerates
It’s all Black and it’s all good
It takes a village and a neighbourhood.
Che Chidi ChukwumerijePoems from the inner river
It’s always amusing to me
When in the midst of a White Sea
I see one Black face
And when he or she sees me
They seem to panic visibly
And avert their face
Avoiding eye contact completely
And seem to be begging me
Not to look at their face
Immersed in their White company
Proving hard to them their loyalty.
To save their face
After looking at them thoughtfully
For a while, I walk past them gently
With a calm face
Because we don’t altercate publicly
We will do that when next we see
Face to face.
Che Chidi ChukwumerijePoems from the inner river
They that came to remark
the lines of destiny on our palms
are still pulling the discords
of smiles armed with sticky alms
groping the vulnerable.
They are legion. Their allegiance
is with history and vision
It is seasoned with wry reason
when they call aid a mission
targeting the vulnerable.
The enmity is below the thought-line
It is a volition seeded in culture
Only one Dove visits in Love
Every other dove is a vulture
encircling the vulnerable.
Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Nigeria
Which will be the first modern, post-colonial Black African country to become independent?
– To stand as a First World country in the midst of global leaders.
– To take the leap from extractive economy to highly productive, manufacturing, innovative and invention-leading economy.
– To develop and run a nation-wide, all-encompassing and unconditional Social Security scheme.
– To become an Export world champion, exporting not just natural resources, but finished products.
– To take its place at the cutting edge of technology and information technology.
– To become a favoured global destination for medical tourism and university education.
– To have a currency that rivals USD, EUR, GBP, JPY, CNR.
– To develop and take a leading role in the building of a new economy and new industry around the concept of sustainability. Because that is the future.
– To entrench legally protected civil and human rights.
– To engender independent institutions of democracy.
– To defeat the evil of tribalism.
– To stop begging, taking and being dependent on foreign aid.
– To stop allowing foreign religions to drive it to hate, exploit, oppress or kill its fellow Africans.
– To stop producing economic Refugees in droves.
– To hold regular free and fair elections, free of rigging, where votes count.
– To hold its richest and most powerful accountable.
– To fight corruption impartially, and stand without exemptions under the Law.
– To eradicate extreme poverty, and democratise and ensure education and opportunity for all.
– To work tirelessly for peace and unity on the African continent.
– To push, power and perfect intra-African trade, tourism and transport to the same levels as on other continents and in other world regions.
– To have a modern, disciplined military focused on defense of borders and values, as well as upholding of peace, and not full of megalomaniac dreams of coup d‘etats and executive power all the time.
– To have a depoliticised Police Force that serves the people rather than being used against the people.
– To maintain a hardworking, well-functioning, digitalised, detribalised, highly educated Civil Service.
– To own its own narrative, with its own independent media, on the global stage.
– To become a global lender, instead of a global borrower and beggar.
– To export technology and new technology to the rest of the world.
– To have a power, economic and civil infrastructure that matches every other First World country‘s.
– To become one of the decision makers in the UN, in WEF, in the G8.
– To break the culture of waste, squander and exhibitionism.
– To support and grow small and medium-scale enterprises all over the country.
– To develop a large and economically virile middle class.
– To feed itself independently.
– To power itself independently.
– To ensure electricity 24/7.
– To become a center of future-birthing research and development.
– To become a part of the space community.
– To find its own local solutions to its own local, as well as global, challenges.
– To be a part owner, and controller, of the global market.
– To produce proud citizens who have greater opportunities in their own Black countries than they would in foreign countries where they are never fully accepted.
– To turn around the historical burden of slavery and colonisation, and transform it into global leadership.
– To stand as a First World country in the midst of global leaders.
Which will be the first Black African country to become REALLY INDEPENDENT?
This is the silent question that hangs unanswered in the global imagination of all humankind, and floats inchoate through the heart of everybody of Black African extraction anytime another Black African country celebrates its annual so-called Independence Day.
Today’s it’s Nigeria’s turn. Country of my birth. 1st October.
Happy Independence Day, Nigeria.
Or should I rather say:
Happy Future-Independence Day.
Because only Self-dependence, Self-reliance, is truly Independence.
Wut und Trauer
Meine Augen waren doch blauer
Als sie sich braun dünkten
Jetzt sind die Tränen dunkel geworden
Gefärbt von Herzblut
Blut! Blut! Rot ist das neue Grün
Blut der Regen
Denn die Zukunft will keimen und wachsen
Doch die Vergangenheit schlägt immer zurück –
Jetzt bin ich schlauer. Aber nicht zu spät.
It is an illusion that Government can save Nigeria. All government can do is more or less throw its weight behind either the fair redistribution of our national wealth or not.
This thing we call “our wealth” however is our biggest self-deception, because we did not create it and do not truly posess it. We simply take what Nature made and sell it and pocket the money without even giving any part of it back to nature.
We then stash away the bulk of this money and share a small part amongst ourselves and use the little rest for “business”. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is inventing itself AWAY from fossil fuels and a system dependent on it.
Real wealth or poverty lies in the ideas that bubble up in the mind. The only thing that can save Nigeria long term is twofold:
1. To learn to transform by ourselves the bulk of those raw materials stage by stage into the final world-class products that everybody else will need and will queue up to buy.
2. To become a scientifically inventing people and culture who already now think up and excute solutions for the time when oil has finished or become irrelevant. A people who don’t eternally leave the inventing of the future to foreigners. That kind of hardwork and industry awakens new virtues and powers in a people and a culture.
Any government that, in addition to meeting its fundamental security and human rights responsibilities, also supports, engenders and midwives this new path, is a government that truly understands and wants to solve the problem LONG TERM. Any other one is just implementing short-term measures, more or less effectively. But the real danger – eventual contextual Recolonialization – remains.
If the Federal Government cannot or will not do it, either because of ineptitude or corruption or bigotry, then each State Government has to step forward and do what is within its power in the service of modernising its citizens – mentally, morally, materially and technologically.
Even on the level of the Local Government – indeed especially on the level of the LG – can the push towards a transformation of the peoples and their conditions take place.
Going by the level of corruption and desperation and visionlessness on ground now, that might seem just like wishful thinking. But I believe events will make it incredibly obvious that we are marching straight back into subjugation – either at the hands of Islamic Imperialism via a hegemonic section of the Fulani power-holders assisted by their lackeys in the other tribes; or at the hands of White Western Supremacist economic, military and political control; or at the hands of rising Asian globalization of dominance spearheaded by the Chinese.
One way or the other we’re going to get it unless we become truly independent and the governments of the Nigerian peoples get right the two points mentioned above, and find a way to tie it into Panafricanism.
Why is it that many White people, when they go to Africa, one of the points on their checklist is to go to an orphanage or a Hospital or a village school and take pictures of themselves carrying little Black children and surrounded by little African children?
If I were to come to Europe and go to an orphanage or a hospital or a village school and take and post on social media pictures of myself carrying and surrounded by little White children to whom I have no close personal connection and whose parents or guardians don‘t even know me, I would be accused of many things.
Please, White people, stop instrumentalising Black African children for the purpose of your hypocritical self-staging as supposedly benevolent world saviours. Robbing them of their privacy and dignity, objectifying them, and using them as moral ornaments with which to decorate your souls on social media. They are human beings, they are minors, and they are somebody’s children and wards.
Even if you want to donate to an orphanage or help the under-privileged, you have no right to use it as an opportunity for a foto op and PR session. I’m sure some of you also donate anonymously to orphanages in Europe and America, but you don’t afterwards troop there to pose for pictures with the children to whose welfare you are contributing. You sense, and quite rightly so, that it would be undignifying towards those children. And undignifying towards you yourselves too. Well, the same applies to Black and African children too! And the same applies with regards to them.
Please stop using them as background deco and surround sound for the accolade-seeking self-images you wish to bring back with you from Africa as your holiday trophies.
Che Chidi Chukwumerije 