The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

Having gone through slavery in ancestral memory and able still to experience what was undergone in the  cells of my own body, how deeply it offends and angers me to see Africans subjecting Africans on buses – small ones or whatever size ones – to what causes me to taste and to see slavery again.

Africans cruelly subjecting Africans to such conditions with me in the mix and angry enough about it to scream as I am doing here and I hope loudly enough for the UN to hear and to intervene since governments of these countries I’ve visited allow it or turn a blind eye.

You are squeezed into these vehicles of whatever size until your bones ache – until there is insufficient fresh air for so many squeezed in to breathe.

When the windows are all shut and music is added and turned up all you are left to do is to scream. I at times have. I at times do.

It seems like an ungodly thing to do to people. You are packed in like luggage.

You are packed in like nothing living should be.

Apart from littering without a second thought until you are walking through and living in what is like the garbage dump, there is nothing in Africa about which I object more strongly. There is nothing that makes me angrier or depresses me more than how people are inhumanely squeezed into buses or mini-buses – referred to by whatever name.

This is Africa’s ugly side. There is a beautiful side or beautiful sides to Africa, I assure you.  There has to be. I would otherwise not have lingered here in Africa for as long as I have nor would it have inspired so very many poems.

I have so far visited Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, inclusive of the island of Zanzibar, Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Swaziland. I am at present in Mozambique. I am hoping to visit Malawi as well before travelling back to Kenya and afterwards returning home to The Bahamas from Nairobi where I landed at the very end of July, 2014, to attend Kistrech Poetry Festival, in Kisii, Kenya, that lasted for four days.

My visit to Africa though has extended until now. Africa has so far inspired ten or more collections of poems – one of which has so far been published: Women in Jinja. Africa has as well inspired these very strong words of most bitter protestation!

OBEDIAH SMITH

April 11, 2016.