African Queen

She is long and tall with smooth dark skin

And though young it is clear from her eyes

She has seen it all

She did not ask to be beautiful it was bestowed at birth

And whilst it may seem a blessing

She will tell you it’s a curse

Since childhood men have wanted her

Have had to have it

Have not taken ‘no’ for an answer

Conquerors who claim they have made her smile

That they have had fun

But the damage they did can’t be undone

The child they took can’t be given back

Silence, the price of being a girl

Getting over it, the price of being black

I am next in her line of men

Trying to reverse the trend

Trying to mend

An amateur physician with only two hands and a heart

There is no generator in my operating theatre

I do not have gloves

As I prepare to make another incision

I pray and wash my hands

with Love

Funeral for a friend

Candid like the white mid-afternoon heat

Hot like the black sheets

And cold like the embers the morning after

Your breath to gently blow the ashes and fan the flames

A thousand wings beckon and rise

Into the morning sky twice as clean

Your dream the scene where you played every part

Where they tied string around your bleeding heart

In the distance time itself rolls across the horizon

And death beats a drum across the arid savannah

Not even the hyenas are immune to your call

Skulking and skittish while the cats are still eating

Sharp eyes see it all from dizzying heights

But not fish eagles in flight

I mean you from your final resting place

Whole save the tongue to taste

Life which left you on a day as beautiful as this

A typical African sunset tryst

Snakes hide from this heat but not you

Bullets and guns could not achieve what nature slew

Cut down in your prime while nobody knew

That you were busy saving others before you lost your life

Just another death

Just another short life 

It's not your fight

I came off the plane with joy in my heart and hope in my hands

I fell on my knees in the sand and saw fit not to judge but to observe

I saw black and white

White and black

I saw wrong and right

And I turned

My white Anglo-Saxon guilt into piety

And I preached

Over the years I learned nothing

I suffered needlessly in an attempt to assimilate and only

Became one man alone on a rock

An island of insecurity

A priest in a church of self-pity

Others moved on and left me to fend for myself

“He’s white, he’s rich.”

“He’ll be fine.”

Whole years went by as I slept with black women and drank white wine

But still I learned nothing

“I am African now” I would think out loud

I learned Setswana and I felt proud

“Go home” people said as they watched me grieve

For a land I pretend is not home

The land I had to leave

“It’s not your fight.”

Africa notes 12/01/14

I was once recommended a writer who’d spent more time than anyone else in Africa, forty-something years in as many countries, he said the one thing that Africa teaches you is patience. That Africa forces you to become patient, erodes any sense of time pressure or hurry that you may have still harboured when you came off the boat or the plane to live here. That in Africa to wait ten hours in a bank is normal, to have no water for three days is not unusual. A bus scheduled to depart at 19h00 may only leave at 21h00 to go and get fuel, and then breakdown at 23h00. To wait for someone to return your call or email is to wait indefinitely. It is not necessarily rude to arrange a meeting and then not be there yourself when the person you invited arrives. An instantaneous bank transfer can easily take ten days to clear. Loans and applications for land may well take years to be considered. Yet, I have not become more patient after 8 years in Africa. I mean it is not patience that I feel, it is my own death that I sense when everything moves at such a snail’s pace you can watch yourself ageing, decaying, dying  before your very own eyes. Maybe that’s what the writer said, not patience exactly but that Africa teaches you how to wait. Ok, yes, we wait, but not because we know that at the end of the rainbow is the thing we have been waiting for but out of morbid resignation to the fact that even when it comes the news will be bad news. Come back tomorrow. Still we wait. Is this really the same continent that we fell in love with when we arrived – camera in hand – all full of energy and empty notebooks. A land full of red earth and beautiful smiling women with buckets of water on their heads, where sunsets are golden and ethereal. Why does the relentless heat that you once enjoyed now burden your weary heart, and drain you of all energy. Go home, friends say. But, I say, I am home.