The Tomb Of Amani | Best Readings Online

The Tomb of Amani

It lay in a sarcophagus in the vault of memory,
surrounded by piling skeletons of free-thought fighters.
In this tomb of regret,
the debris of democracy piles up,
each pile a generation of pain older than the pile beneath.
Rumour is that only through death can one reach it…
It lay in the tomb of regrets at the end of the memory lane,
buried deep inside the heart of a dark continent,
guarded by the phantoms of Lumumba and the pharaohs,
whose silence through the ages compose
black anthems of freedom in the idiom of a prison continent.
Rumour is that only through resurrection can one preach it..

- JKS Makokha

JKS Makokha is the Kenyan author of Reading M. G. Vassanji: A Contextual Approach to Asian African Fiction. (2009). He teaches courses in African and South Asian Literatures at the Institut für Englische Philologie at Freie Universität Berlin in Germany.

From african-writing.com

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