If every new generation
Rose up twice as high as the one before,
Humanity‘s elevation
Would see us soon knocking on heaven‘s door.
Che Chidi Chukwumerije
If every new generation
Rose up twice as high as the one before,
Humanity‘s elevation
Would see us soon knocking on heaven‘s door.
Che Chidi Chukwumerije
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
Nobody is born thinking he or she has less dignity or less worth than another human being. No child thinks it has less dignity or less worth – or more dignity or worth – than another child. These things are trained, instilled, indoctrinated and socialized into them in the process of growing up. By the time they become adults, they „accept“ their position, their place and their role.
Teach and train your children, above all, to be confident and self-confident. Self-confidence is the most powerful weapon in the soul‘s arsenal. It is what makes people cross boundaries and borders, break barriers, and open up new vistas of experiencing as well as make new discoveries for themselves, their environment and even for humankind. Self-confidence is the original character and prime characteristic of the Spirit.
When the spirit opens its eyes for the first time in the world of matter, it just finds itself confronted by this gigantic unknown world around it. But it is not intimidated, it is curious and full of the urge to adventure and discover. It is self-confidence that makes it set forth, intuitively certain that it will overcome all obstacles and challenges, thirsty for experiencing and knowledge, and wanting to forge its destiny, and find itself.
Children carry a deep sense of worth, of „I-am-somebody-ness“ inside of them. Of „I deserve whatever another child deserves“. They have a sensitive inner antenna against discrimination, and an instinctive feeling of having the same rights as very other child. Strengthen and preserve this intuition within them, so that they will never ever surrender their dignity and equality without a fight all through their life. And they will always win the fight.
But teach them too that in addition to their rights, as payment and balance for their rights, that they also have equal responsibilities as everybody else too. The responsibility to enact and uphold and obey fair and just laws. The responsibility to create and maintain and constantly improve a system that helps the disadvantaged without unfairly suppressing and disempowering the talented. The responsibility to not only preserve every good thing already achieved by humankind, but to be untiringly innovative and to invent and constantly re-invent the future. The responsibility to never stop seeking the truth, seeking to understand life, seeking to know what makes us human, what links us as humans, and how to become better humans. The responsibility to listen to their conscience.
This is a responsibility we all share – old and young. We pass on the torch endlessly to the next generation. We do this by igniting the flame within the young souls of children. Even if we are all reincarnated souls, Every Childhood is a new chance to re-engineer humanity, correct or discontinue the past, and save the future of humankind. Every child is worth the effort. Never stop trying. Never give up on a child.
Seek always to bring out the best in your child, in a child, in every child.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
With love we should call our children
So that with love they will come –
With love we should welcome our children
So that with love they will glow –
With love we should rear our children
So that with love they will grow –
With love we should release our children
So that with love they will go forth
And repeat the same process
With love –
Love is the only thing that makes us human –
Love is the most fundamental thing
That we should transfer from generation to generation
Through mankind –
Love is the progenitor, propagator and preserver
Of the HUMAN race –
Without love we are nothing.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
It‘s a Saturday morning
My spirit wants to fly
My soul wants healing
My mind looks back and forth
My body is self-rejuvenating
I want this moment to last longer
My children want to watch TV
I‘ve told them to give me 20 more minutes
Five minutes later,
My daughter pokes her head
Through the living room door and asks
„Are twenty minutes over yet?“
I look up from the book I’m reading
And see the book of life staring at me
„No,“ I say, „Not yet.“
Five minutes later her brother comes in
And asks me the same question.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Suffer not the young with belief in their ignorance
Thinking only the old can with wisdom be soaked
Watch: and see kids give to hidden truths substance
For what is a child but an adult cloaked
And seek not in the old for the seat of all staleness
Sure that, with youth passed, all vigour is lost
Look past the frame at a quicker, higher freshness
For what is an adult but a child unveiled
The child is the parent of the out-born adult
The adult is the parent of the in-born child
For up looks the earthling and up looks the moonling
And each sees nothing but the other in the skies
So suffer not greatness with the label of complexity
Nor suffer ordinariness with the verdict of the rejected
For where the great and the ordinary meet, simplicity
Is born, adult and child unite, and Perfection is reflected.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Where are you?
The police have looked high and low
Community watch and kind strangers near and far
Have tried your trail to follow
The orange tree we planted
Yields season after season bitter bitter fruits
That would turn sweet were you but here
To pick them off their roots
The children you lovingly bore
Daily older grow, as beautiful as you were
They ask where their mother is
Unable to comprehend how people disappear
I wish we hadn’t gone on that holiday
I wish you hadn’t taken that stroll
That night alone to watch the waves
The ensuing years have taken their toll
My thoughts spank of guilt
I should have been your guard on every walk
What happened, my love? Footsteps don’t talk
Time is a blackboard of fading chalk
Give me a sign of life
Calm my heart, let us know
You’re happy, even in the beyond somewhere
Saying goodbye, I love you in my soul
Strength is a luxury
But succour shall whisper quietly some day
All good things come together in their own day
In their own way, this I pray.
Waiting and waiting in vain
For you to return, to talk, share and to listen
Where are you, my dear? Your picture is silent
Written above it, that killing word, still: MISSING.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Set the trap
In the taste
In the tastes.
They’ll eat out of your hand
And see you
And seek you
In everything, in every woman, in every land.
Make them enemies of their father
They’ll see him
They’ll fight him
They’ll hate him in every man
Even in themselves.
Crown their hearts
With their father’s good image
They’ll revere him, uphold him, replicate him
In themselves, their sons too, their world, the world.
Power is subtle
When subtly broken
Or subtly woken.
– CHE CHIDI CHUKWUMERIJE.
There is evil in the air
It chokes your breath in unexpected places
A playground, full of hard adult eyes
Watching, and avoiding, each other
While playing children loudly try
To shout the intruders merrily out –
One by one each parent
Picks up its child and hurries home
Away from this place
And no-one can say really why
The world became like this
Or when. It’s the future, and we’re there.
– CHE CHIDI CHUKWUMERIJE.
The children come out to play
And all is happy and gay
In the month of May.
The farmers make their hay
In the shinning sun’s ray.
Hand in hand as they go their way
Young lovers whisper what they have to say
On their way to hear the new priest pray.
And following the song of the stock-bird jay
Gentle old couples of yesterday
Quietly remember their youth today.
The essentials will stay
When all else goes away.
This is the song in the heart of May.
– che chidi chukwumerije.