CHINWEIZU on ANCESTORS' ANGER
Part I. The Anger of the Ancestors
Scatterbrained Ancestors Ah, this land This black whore This manacled bitch Tied to a post and raped By every passing white dog:
The dog of the crescent sword The dog of the militant cross The dog of the red star! Listen! Listen to the pack Of scavenger dogs from white heartlands Snarling in their gang rape of Africa!
Black Lady Forced to wear A white turban of shame And white shoes of shame With the acid of humiliation Burning in her eyes As she suffers their gang rape!
Ah, this land This scatterbrained land For two and half millennia Most unlucky in its rulers; This continent This father of sciences For two and half thousand years Wallowing in a murk of magic, Like an eagle Shot in soaring flight across the skies Which dropped, wings cracked, Into the lightless ooze Of a mangrove ravine, And is forever unable to scramble up; O, unlucky land!
Ah, Africa Birthplace of monotheism Home of the Sun Disc of Aten - That father to the Tablet of Moses, And grand uncle to the Cross of Jesus, And grandfather to the Crescent of Mohammed, And great-grandfather to the Red Star of Marx! For what are they - Tablet, Cross, Crescent and Red Star - But icons of latter-day cults Fashioned by white imitators Of that heretic theological line Invented in the fourteenth century BC By Akhenatten, King of Khemet? Yet, behold this venerable land, Assaulted, dismembered, In its supine, demented dotage, By the mongrel progeny Of a bastard it discarded! Behold the white religions Their war banners flying high; A trinity of alien icons; Red Star, Cross and Crescent, Competing for reverent kisses From black auxiliaries.
O paragon of self-contempt With a genius of suicide! For two and a half millennia Driven by brainwashed shame, They have bleached their black identity, Scraping it off like shit from their fine skin; They have scrammed from their black identity Like a man fleeing his menacing shadows! And like whales Demented by sea-borne infections in their brains, And are panting or white theologies From St Peter's From the Ka'aba, From the Kremlin. Like beached whales, They have fled their habitat, Fled their dark sea waters Polluted by humiliations; They are lusting for sacred waters They hope will whiten their souls.
That one claims he is an Arab. He now wears around his neck A fake genealogical chain Linking himself to the Quraish. Look, look at him now! Look at what air he wears! He feels his worth increased In the sight of his alien god: And when he bites off his African tongue, And stutters in Arabic, He is giddy with divine pride At being able to address his fellows In "the language of God himself! And when he dons the Arab turban, And nails Arab name to his brow, And bows in obedience to mecca, Five times a day like a lizard, Dramatizing thereby his allegiance To the Arabs and their homeland, He feels the gate of heaven opening for him! He hears the trumpet of Angels Blowing a fanfare to welcome him!
That other one, At morning assembly each day, Lustily chants The identity of his desire: 'Our ancestors, the Gaul, Were blond-haired and blue-eyed!' But he was not taught to ad: 'Were half-naked and lived in caves.' Yet his face, this strange Gaul, Has nothing blond, Has nothing blue, Is ebony Black!
And the third, Less crude, more cerebral In his flight from his identity, Declared with bright-eyed passion: 'I am deracialized; And I am denationalized! The God of the Dialectics, of Historical Materialism, is color and nation blind. From the mud of primitivism, He lifted me into the astral planes, And showed me the Universal Father! I have done my dialectical ablutions, I stand naked and purified All ready to approach his alter. Do not taint me with black identify; Taint me not with parochialism! I must cross that grand threshold; I must stand under the radiant gaze of Prophet Marx, I must join the mass of assimilation into the Universal!' And another of that sad lot, Deranged by the world's contempt, Grabbed a white boy by the collar And sputtered into his face: 'I have bleached my face like yours; I've adopted your white names; I've defected to your white religion; I've whitewashed my ancestral tree. Why won't you treat me like an equal? Why do you treat me like a dog? 'O dear dear, 'the white replied, If you spit on what you are, Why should I not do so? If you flee from what you are, And crave to be what I am, Doesn't that show that what you are is inferior to what I am? Who would treat his mimic like an equal? Do you think I am dotty like you?
O terrible, terrible, terrible! What meningitis of the soul Has twisted their identity spines? Like yam tendrils fleeing earth damp, They grope for a stake of twine on And lift their leaves to the light: They grope, dispairingly grope, For any genealogical tree With white bark.
II. The Anger of the Ancestors
And before this demented motley Leaning its mammoth wretchedness On the back of the burning horizon, Behold the ancestors! The volcanic anger of progenitors! And their eyes, Smarting at this circus of absurdities, Are thirsting for the new black man the black man who would not be whipped; the black man who would not sell his kind; the black man shielded by ramparts of cunning, by parapets of reticence against beams of false self-knowledge aimed to char our heads; the black man who would not suffer his brains to be inflated with flattery, soaked in whiskey, shattered with nuances of contempt scattered with nuances of contempt scattered on a pavement before mocking faces, before mocking white compassions, and trampled by shining boots spiked with dollars.
But everywhere
in bazaars of febrile desires
a glitter of tinsel dreams,
a delirium of cash and lace,
elixir of mad modernity
sold by titillation;
And on the podia of academia,
catechists of aesthetica
are hawking esoterica;
And from minarets and pulpits,
ecclesiastical gunners
in turban and dog collars
are shooting into black soul
bullet commandments from killjoy gods;
And from pulsing electronic towers
Intellectual acrobats
Make somersaults of reason
to lure us to cheer our destroyers.
Everywhere, everywhere,
fat chefs of sophistries,
lying mothers of inventions,
grand ineptitudes, perched high on saddles of power,
conjure mirages of dancing waters
to scald the thirst in our throats.
Everywhere, everywhere,
from plazas of delirious power,
razzle-dazzle magicians
joyfully transmute our hopes
to hot ash.
And they say, the ancestors say:
the pink cheeks conquered us,
raped our imaginations, fathered on us
bastard ambitions that will stuff our seed
down the gullet of their greed.
Behold what strange progeny our conquerors sired on us:
Behold our new notables
Evangelists of new disorders
Black messengers of white gods
Brown skin with blond souls
Inebriate swooners before madonnas
Crusaders for the European Cross
Jihadeers for the Arab Crescent
Militants of the Russian Star
Trans-civilized idolators all
Craving a white message!
Behold what a strange progeny
Our Conquerors sired on us.
III. If You Let Them
O Black, hear and heed!
When the final war begins,
To drive white predators from our land,
Across hot sands and burning seas,
The jackal of the white race,
Greed and reconquest in their hearts,
Will dash forth to exterminate you.
They will caress your ears with lovely lies,
Numb your minds with white religions,
Distract your eyes with flashing wonders,
And riddle your bodies with white-hot bullets.
They will dispatch their black auxiliaries -
Black satraps wielding white power,
Black bishops in white dogcollars,
Black mullahs in white turbans,
Black generals in uniforms of white armies -
Who will skin and send your carcasses to meat shops.
If you let them, if you let them,
These believers in partnership
Of white rider on black ass,
They will drug you with delusions,
Mad, suicidal illusions,
With fairy-tales of good, white heavens,
With lies about white benevolence;
And with force, fraud and your own naive goodwill,
They will sweep your bones from veldt and forest,
Return your land to rack and ruin,
To their heartless despoliation.
If you let them, if you let the(m),
They will use your fears against you
Your lack of daring against you
Your respectability against you
Your sweet reasonableness against you
Your craving for trinkets against you
Your thirst for their praise against you
Your hunger for their world against you
Your contempt for your own against you
Your longing for world brotherhood against you
Your sense of self-shame against you
Your belief in their goodness against you
Your belief in their goodness against you
Your legendary patience against you
Your fairness fully against you
Your restraint roughly against you
Your sincerity sharply against you
Your avarice, cowardice, ignorance, hates
Your irresolution against you
And they'll stuff your mouths once more
With glass shards of defeat,
And force you to swallow them.
Woe to them who forget their history
And drug their hearts with false memories.
Woe to them who put their faith
In the fairness of white foes;
Who embrace as friends those jackals
Who swarmed in and grabbed our homeland,
Africa, land of Blacks,
And hacked our ancestral stalwarts of bloody deaths
On the abattoirs of history.
Chinweizu
