2 thoughts on “The Enduring Significance of Ethiopia”

1. Dear Sir,

   I deem it a great honour writing Rasta Livewire magazine. I’m a Cameroonian living in Buea, poetry and prose writer and member of Anglophone Cameroon Writers’ Association (ACWA), Cave Canem Foundation (Home for black Poetry),NYC and author of three poetry collections known as ‘The Gong Trilogy’:

   -The Griot’s Hymns
   -Songs of African Roses
   -Creeds of Primeval Griots.

   The collections were published by Lulu.com on 8th of January 2015 and critiqued and reviewed on 23th April by International research Council on African Literature & Culture (IRCALC) in the ‘Journal of African Literature No. 12.

   I’m a holder of the Cameroon General Certificate of Education (GCE) Advanced Levels but due to lack of finance after my A-Levels I could not proceed to the university. In all these frustrations I became a prolific reader, absorbing anything I could find in terms of books, magazines, newspapers, watching news, listening to the radio and, above all, buried my head ‘inside’ the, Atlas Of Africa, published by “Jeune Afrique” (under the direction of Regine Van Chi-Bonnardel and under the publishing director Danielle Ben Yahmed), a book my father of late had, the 1974 edition. I always found my father (Abun Tom Dzenchuo) focusing his gaze on the pages, for he was unlettered but could somehow pronounce the names of African countries from scraps of English words he picked up at the jobsite from the White superiors in Cameroon Development Corporation (CDC, in agro-industrial plantation he was employed in, in the South West) and from public offices where he went to fix dossiers, most probably his children’s birth certificates.That is how I became addicted to the woes Africa finds itself inundated in.
   My emblem, the double gong, was conceived from the fact that in Africa it was the earliest form of media communication used for summoning villagers to the palace when there is an emergency: an attack by slave raiders, intertribal wars, and village cleansings by priests to appease a particular god, traditional marriages or cultural merriment et cetera as these collections are a clarion call for Africans to unite with one constitution (as a single republic) and industrialize, trade with the world as well as cultural exchange.
   For it is noteworthy that Africa is further fragmenting while her resources foster industrialization round the world: first came the Europeans in the 19th century ‘Scramble for Africa’, joined by the Americans and now the Chinese. It is a great pity that the entire continental GDP of African can not match that of Great Britain or France or Germany (let alone China or the US).
   If the European countries have converged into a mega economy how much less can the individual African countries compete with them if the entire 54 countries’ GDP can not even match that of France or Germany or Britain alone?-it is as impossible as a male giving birth!
   That is why ‘The Gong Trilogy’ collections acts as a distress call for Africans at home and the Diaspora have to wake up for time now is our ally: truly future generations of Africans must be inheritors, not just survival. Human capital we lack not and mineral and natural resources are in abundant, we must even go espionage.
   In ‘The Griots Hymns’ you find poems like Sankara’s Immortal Gaze, Lumumba’s Tears, Prince of Peace (Dag Hammarskjöld), The Humble Genius (Late Professor Victor Anomah Ngu) et cetera. These collections are to be used in the University of Buea in the next academic year,

   Sankara’s Immortal Gaze
   Self-epitaphed, while revolutionaries, as individuals
   Can be murdered their idea you cannot kill
   Against malevolent forces that keep Africa in chains you
   fought
   Even international imperialism and neo-colonial
   governments
   Prison bars of monsters you broke
   And a new future for Africa dared to invent
   Modernization, against western style dictates
   O son from the Land of Upright Men
   Burkina Faso.
   Your courage to face your demise
   The world’s poorest president
   Like a shrine consulted, tearful souls keep visiting your
   grave
   The golden truth: unto your Creator return you man…
   For with nothing into the world you come.

   Palace Elysee, master extinguisher of African luminaries,
   Gloated great Paris at your quietus
   But the fires of your dreams by your exits was rekindled
   O African of heaven-borne nobility
   A servant of none but Almighty Jehovah
   And fellow princes of God: Lumumba, Cabral, Gadhaffi,
   Nkrumah
   Biko, Garang, Machel, Mandela
   In your hour of departure unhesitating,
   O starred beret adorned of heaven’s Marxist
   revolutionaries
   At the golden sun eternally gazed
   Into the city of light beckon’d on by opened portals
   And from the glistering desert sand dunes
   Shading your delicate remains witnessed the descent of the
   holy glow
   And stirred your spirit from slumber sleep
   Into the light of heaven, golden
   Awakened by the Master’s touch, up to recline in the
   pillow of peace
   And satisfied of legacy regal to humanity
   Roots of the ancestors
   O mighty Pan African saint!

   Lumumba’s Tears (page 19)
   Africa unite
   The colonial divide bridge into brotherhoods
   Yourself from neo-colonial pieces defragment
   And to the world hoist a great statehood
   Listen to the message of my tears
   In the western complicity of my death
   Lest our dreams for seamlessness be shattered
   And independence victories all these years blighted
   Fellow patriots refuse not the last of my breathes uttered
   At the threshold of eternity
   O Congo and Mother Africa,
   The sanguinary superpowers to thee breed but enmity
   The troubling continuities pitting Brothers against
   themselves

   The dense cloud to shroud our brightest dreams
   Industrialized, the land with promise
   And minerals and wealth you have in abundance
   Thrust ahead with the union, Africanocrats, even after my
   demise
   At the hands of the CIA, MI6 and Belgians, UN
   remonstrance

   Prince of Peace (pages 20-21)

   It was daring angels would from recoil
   Great Swedish aristocrat
   Make way for a straight path. Your calling so demands
   With nobility of soul transcending ideological bars
   O unconventional diplomat. The great pacifist
   Under the blue canopy of world peace,
   With realization neither capitalism nor communism
   In its best satisfies humanity’s unlimited needs
   But the bridge for peace and fraternity
   And decolonization! And against European racial
   superiority in Africa
   Under the guardianship of the Omnipotence
   A view you were revealed far beyond your time
   And the Congo? UN flaws revealed
   The jagged saws of ideological demands
   O Dag Hammarskjöld, Prince of Peace
   Patience exhausted, spat you fire with brimstone to impart
   UN decisions
   Unassuming Commander-in-Chief, your Operation
   Morthorn
   Disarming war by arming peace in the superpowers
   rivalries
   Your demise quaked the world in disquieting heartthrobs
   That capitalism’s smoking guns veiled
   And of sanity humanity is robbed
   A genius diplomat of rare gem
   Your unconformity gifts further published by death
   Fierce Swedish diplomat, at Ndola you met your end
   British and American mining companies supporting
   Katanga rebels
   Daughters of Africa in mournful stares
   African talking drums in threnody beats
   Wrath of cold war monsters unmasked
   But the radiance of heaven illumined your parting hours
   After a dark and troubled pilgrimage on earth
   Even tunes of the griots’ tell of your footprints of
   destiny
   And now your sun sets clear, across the stream
   In the evening of tranquility and repose
   A great amongst souls, taking your seat in the pantheon
   yonder the skies.

   The Humble Genius (pages 41-42)

   Angels tread amongst humans unhinge’d
   Dejected in appearance, arresting disuse
   But to the world beauty would bring
   Your humility deeply etched in your features
   Seraphs would from it mirror meekness
   From the light of a genius’ soul
   O erudite scientist, gem of the purest serene
   In the heart of Equatorial Africa forth you came
   In the medical, prob’d your further afield
   Enveloped humanity groans under the AIDS scorch
   In a world darkened by predatory ailments
   But the noble soul of yours to it would not bow
   To Eternity’s flame would gaze longer
   A lone but dazzling ray of the master Sun
   Disease, ignorance, the unattainable
   Must in submission bow
   The reverence gifts of heaven in geniuses
   Rare steps on the sands of time
   In their discoveries, inventions, finds
   Tread amongst men, mingling amongst angels
   That man was in the image of the Divine made
   Vanilla from healing angels, you brought
   That our world may be disease free, dis-ease no more
   By your incessant knocks at the golden door

   Where mirrors the master’s healing hand
   Which when stirred, would into the human mind drop an
   idea
   To humanity a balm is conceived
   Our world a cure is found
   O statesman, military, academic, researcher
   But heaven-borne seed rarely germinates
   Barely would on the sea of ignorance sprout
   Humanity is by this vice, vulnerably, cursed
   Infamy to condemn the unknown
   But you treaded where angels would recoil
   O Cameroonian, meekly Victor Anomah Ngu
   To Canadian and Californian scientists you signed
   Projection of your discoveries, by partnering contracts
   O African. But yonder the Atlantic conmen are borne
   To obliterate your works O black genius-borne
   The fires of your noble soul
   In the glow of eternity’s flame
   That illumines, in myriad fields, our dark world with
   -geniuses
   Fair science frowned at your skin colour
   But heaven did not recompense at your gift, humble
   genius
   A merit you sought not to advertise
   And a bounty angel would for crave
   In Bamenda you relish’d Achu reipe and raffia wine
   But now across the gulf, mingling with Archangels
   Eat you of fruits of the Tree of life, splash’d woth joy
   Recline you in the embrace of peace where the sun never
   fades.

   Achu: a Cameroonian cuisine of pounded cocoyam eaten with tasty yellow soup made of dried bush meat, smoked fish and local ingredients. Originally it was North West dish but now a national fares in most menus.

   In Creeds of Primeval Griots collection

   The Last Roes (page 60)

   Until now I’ve come to accept it
   The moments that light up my heart, in retrospect
   The moment that opens the floodgates of tears, too
   His face I shall see no more
   His kisses I shall forever miss
   Even the jokes that lit me up with laughter
   Teasing my heart unguarded
   Even my body bared in love, those moments
   Has a woman ever seen true warmth of romance?
   Coiled around his body we glued in affection
   The last embrace I didn’t foresee

   Until now I’ve come to accept it
   It was a hope I kept dreaming, awaiting his return
   The engagement ring binding me to his love
   For duty he is called up
   UN’s Blue Beret for Darfur-war-torn Sudan
   Out nation he must serve first
   Duty before love, what a valour
   Until the brightest dream of our love, on me flashed
   Beaming I bliss within, the fateful moment
   Time am rang of his death, a paradox of fate,
   Dead, killed in the line of duty

   Until now I’ve come to accept it
   The day the casket arrived draped in tricolours
   Green, Red, Yellow –gold star on the red
   Gold Star on the red
   The joy in my anger,
   Truly his love was sincere
   The last rose in my heart
   The rose on the casket
   Forever he was mine, truly mine.

   Poetry to me is like identifying with the storm: those heart-renting moments that unbar the portals of inspiration for creativity- the truest shades of inner beauty in man overspreading the whole of nature whether the sciences or Bantus (African) painting or music, though.

   Thanks,
   NN Dzenchuo
   (+237) 676380448

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   1. NN Dzenchuo, A Pan African Poet

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