Divide and Conquer Necro-Power Games

South Africa
Has Afro-Xenophobia lynching squads
Eliminating their kindred
Off the streets of the land
Even the soil of the land
Won’t absorb the blood of the slain
With the rains far, far away
The blood cakes on the ground
Corpses not welcome in mortuaries
Rot  
Under the sun of
The land of the broken rainbow
Bleeding dark
Venomous blood  
The stench combines
With smoke of those bodies
Caught in flames of devilish fire
In Mzansi fo sho
Satanic voices chant: HABASHWE!!!

And then I recall
Last time:
I heard that
Boko Haram were Nigerian
Al-Shabaab were Somalian
The Lord’s Resistance Army were Ugandan
In eastern Democratic Republic of Congo
Kivu province is a land of bloodbaths
In the days of Zaire
There was Mobutu Sese Seko
Patrice Lumumba’s ghost
Must have haunted this man for life

In neighbouring Uganda
There was Idi Amin
They say he ate human flesh
Rwanda gave genocide application
A new Afro-touch meaning
In Charles Taylor’s Liberian war
Survivors had their hands hacked off
We’ve had Emperors Jean-Bédel Bokassas
Of the Central African Republics
A seven-university-degreed Mugabe of Zimbabwe
Has just died
Believe me: Matebeleland people aren’t mourning  

Closer to home
I understood as a child that
Qomatsi was Lesotho rulers’ licence to kill their own
In the Gambia
Yahya Jammeh’s atrocities
Make Qomatsi a child’s play in comparison

And so, asking for a friend
I wonder:
Who is better?
Who is worse?

Same bloody-black-curse-difference
If you ask me

Simon Chilembo
Oslo
Norway
Telephone: +4792525032
09/ 09- 2019