“The world is not white. It never was white. It cannot be white. White is a metaphor for power.” – James Baldwin We were made to be black. We were made to be Black nigger kaffirs. We were born into these names From colonial slavers. Bondage was imprinted On our tongue as their Guns and whips started to Lynch our lips and embroid our skin, Our brown skin With blackness. They inked Our eyes with lies of what black Meant – plague to God’s light - A reason to save the dark continent By whitewashing its history To a colonial beginning. So Brown became black. Facts etched out; Truth blotted out Of who made their world rich By building it. It was us, Our labour, and our wish Was only equality. We Redressed the disgust You labeled as black Making it popular, Profitable and enjoyable. Yet you are not satisfied. Black will never be white ENOUGH Of this race war, this binary, This eurocentrism. ENOUGH of dialectics. Why should we deconstruct Your backlog of scholarship To voice our discrimination Dis crime in dis nation? We are not victims. We are not a minority. We are history, and That history is our present, that we are still African before American, protesting our skin with a clenched fist to say: “We are beyond black.”
*Brief remark: This poem was written as a form of solidarity to the BLM demonstrations that took place worldwide in 2020.
Samuel Rubadiri 