Patrice Emery Lumumba
For a thousand years, you, African, suffered like a beast,
Your ashes strewn to the wind that roams the desert.
Your tyrants built the lustrous, magic temples
To preserve your soul, preserve your suffering.
Barbaric right of fist and the white right to a whip,
You had the right to die, you also could weep.
On your totem they carved endless hunger, endless bonds,
And even in the cover of the woods a ghastly cruel death
Was watching, snaky, crawling to you
Like branches from the holes and heads of trees
Embraced you body and your ailing soul.
Then they put a treacherous big viper on your chest:
On your neck they laid the yoke of fire-water,
They took your sweet wife for glitter and cheap pearls,
Your incredible riches that nobody could measure.
From your hut, the tom-toms sounded into dark of night
Carrying cruel laments up mighty black rivers
About abused girls, streams of tears and blood,
About ships that sailed to countries where the little man
Wallows in an anthill and where the dollar is king,
To that damned lad which they call the motherland.
There your child, your wife were ground, day and night
In a frightful, merciless mill, crushing them in dreadful pain.
You are a man like others. They preach you to believe
That good white God will reconcile all men at last.
By fire you grieved and sang moaning songs
Of a homeless beggar that sinks at strangers' doors.
And when a craze possessed you
And your blood boiled through the night
You danced, you moaned, obsessed by father's passion.
Like fury of a storm to lyrics of manly tune
From a thousand years of misery a strength burst out of you
In metallic voice of jazz, in uncovered outcry
That thunders through the continent like gigantic surf.
The whole world surprised, wakes up in panic
To the violent rhythm of blood, to the violent rhythm of jazz,
The white man turning pallid over this new song
That carries torch of purple through the dark of night.
The dawn is here, my brother! Dawn! Look in our faces,
A new morning breaks in our old Africa.
Ours alone will now be the land, the water, mighty rivers
Poor African surrendered for a thousand years.
Hard torches of the sun will shine for us again
They'll dry the tears in eyes and spittle on your face.
The moment when you break the chains, the heavy fetters,
The evil, cruel times will go never to come again.
A free and gallant Congo will arise from black soil,
A free and gallant Congo---black bossom from black seed!
Antoine-Roger Bolamba
I have my gri-gri
gri-gri
gri-gri
my calm bounding awake
clings to the wavy limbs of the Congo
never a stormy passage for my heart
bombarded with glowing oriflammes
I think of my silver necklace
become a hundred isles of silence
I admire the obstinate patience
of the okapi
bluebird battered in the open sky
what shipwreck
plunges it to the gulf of nothingness
nothingess empty of nightly entreaties
Ah! the broken resolutions
ah! the screaming follies
let my fate fall upon its guardians
they are three villians
I say three in counting 1 2 3
who dim the ancestral mirror
but you fugitive image
I will see you on the height of dizzy anger
wait while I put on my brow my mask of blood
and soon you will see
my tongue flutter like a banner.
Mukala Kadima-Nzuji
Shocks of dizziness
my waves, my fears of the ocean
on the salty strand of my desire.
Shocks of carnal dreams
my heaps of loosened cliff
in the bitter absence
of sap mounting to the brim of the foam.
Loosened my pollens of drunkenness
and tied and retied my seaweeds
milky way of destinies.
And I hear
stooped over the virgin insomnia
of altitudes
the savage cries of the sea
and the rough backwash of my being.
Mukala Kadima-Nzuji
neither this sobbing ocean
in the moon of your swelling voice
nor the milky vapor
on the window of my waking
nor this flood of men
in the margin of my shadow
which yearns for a safe shelter
not the slipstreams on camelback
in the desert of my solitude
nor the spindrift nor the seaweeds
pillows for my storm-filled head
are able to decipher
where I inspect myself in vain
the reverse side of mirrors.
Antoine-Roger Bolamba
The hills hunch their backs
and leap above the marshes
that wash about the calabash
of the Great Soul
Rumours of treason spread
like burning swords
the veins of the earth
swell with nourishing blood
the earth bears
towns villages hamlets
forests and woods
peopled with monsters horned and tentacled
their long manes are the mirror of the sun
direct the regiments of bats
and who sharpen their arms
upon the stone of horror.
the souls of the guilty
float in the currents of air
on the galleys of disaster
paying no heed to quarrels of the earthbound
with fangs of fire
they tear from the lightning its diamond heart
Surely the scorn is a gobbet of smoking flesh
surely the spirits recite the rosary of vengeance
but like the black ear of wickedness
they have never understood a single word
of the scorpion's obscure tongue:
stubbornness
nor the violence of the throwing-knife
can do anything against it.