Where is your voice, Mr. President?

Mr. President

Let your voice matter

Where Black Lives Matter

My President

Where is our voice?

Africa, Mother Africa

The Womb of Diaspora Africa

Mother Africa, the womb of Pan-Africa

Where is your voice?

While your children are gunned down

Where is your collective voice?

As the blood of your children is let out

In execution manner in the streets

And neighbourhoods of America

Where is your voice Mr. President?

As the police in America

Like their kith and kin the Klux Klux Klan

Humiliate and brutalise our kith and kin

And so brazenly do the American police

Kill our young ones with no white hood

And white cassock but with guns

And in uniform too

Yes, guns and uniforms paid for with public money

To protect the public but not the Black public

As in their eyes

The eyes of the American police

It is the lives of the White republic that Matter?

 

Mr. President

My President

In America of President Obama

Our kith and kin are being assassinated

As was done to Lumumba and as was done to King

By arms of the supremacist establishment order

Who throughout the years

Have kept our communities in a permanent state of disorder

As young men in America are being gunned down

And protests mount

In cities across America, Canada and in the United Kingdom

Crying and moaning and speaking to America thus:

“All we are saying…Black Lives Matter”

Why, Mr. President, Why, My President

Why is Africa not hearkening to the wailings and tribulations?

Our kith and kin are mourning, Mr. President

My President, where is your voice choked with grief?

Why is Africa not rising?

Addis Ababa of the African Union, do you have TV and Radio sets

To set your hearts asunder?

Accra of Kwame Nkrumah, where is your thunder?

Cairo of Gamal Abdul Nasser, where is your lightning rod?

Algiers of Ahmed Ben Bella, where is your steel?

Conakry of Sekou Toure, where is your voice?

Bamako of Modibo Keita, where is your voice?

Lusaka of Kenneth Kaunda, where is your voice?

Kampala of Milton Obote, where is your voice?

Arusha of Julius Nyerere, where is your voice?

Maputo of Samora Machel, where is your voice?

Lagos of Murtala Mohammed, where is your voice?

Harare of Robert Mugabe, where is your voice?

Windhoek of Sam Nujoma, where is your voice?

Pretoria of Nelson Mandela, where is your voice?

The praetorian voice of collective action

That will wake up anon

The resounding voice of New Delhi of Nehru

The arousing voice of Belgrade of Tito

The commanding voice of Jakarta of Sukarno

The inspiring voice of Havana of Castro

 

Why are we not hearing the

Pan-African rallying voice of Port of Spain of Eric Williams?

Pan-African rallying voice of Kingston of Michael Manley?

Pan-African rallying voice of St. George’s of Maurice Bishop?

Yes, the Pan-Africa rallying voice of Ouagadogou of Thomas Sankara?

And the illuminating voice of Georgetown of Walter Rodney?

 

Oh, my President, where is your voice?

Oh, African Union, where is your collective voice?

Oh, Caricom, where is your collective voice?

My Foreign Minister, where is your voice?

Why have you not summoned the US Ambassador?

What are you waiting for?

Pan-African lives are being riddled with police bullets

Day in and day out

In the streets and neighbourhoods of America

Can’t you hear the shrieks of the Souls of Black Folks?

The Invisible Man - this human

Whose blood remains

Remain with us from the slave trading

To plantation life

To Civil War to broken promises

To Civil Rights?

Oh, why is Accra not responding?

Expressing no feeling?

Why is Kampala not responding?

Expressing no pain?

If Addis Ababa will not rise up

Accra and Kampala should

Pronounce to our kith and kin, that

They do not walk alone

Their pain is our pain

Their grief is our grief

Mr. President,

Instruct your ambassador and chancery staff

To carry your flagstaff in solidarity marches

With their own placards attesting firmly that

Black Lives Matter

Let our embassy staff join the human rights protests

For Black Lives Matter

 

Kampala must rise – Otafiire light your fire

Accra must rise – Pratt ignite your ire

Let your voices ring out

…and in funeral dirges to stir and wake up

Museveni

Stir and wake up

Mahama

Into Action

Into Action

Let Africa Rise Up

For Black Lives Matter

My President, when are you going to make the call to your American peer?

My Speaker, when are you going to make the call to your American peer?

To ask them the introspective question

What is it that drove our son to kill five police officers?

Is this not the question that America should rather be dealing with?

Black Lives Matter remains a human rights

And as well as equality and justice issue

And so

Let me feel you as my President

As Bob Marley makes me feel

As I feel for my kith and kin

Crying with them

Mourning with them

Wailing - Equal Rights ... Justice

With the call for equal rights, justice … beating in my chest

Justice makes equality right and equality makes justice right

Yes, Freedom and Justice

 

Let me feel you, my President

Let your voice matter where Black Lives Matter

As Nkrumah and Malcolm X felt each other

Yes, As Nkrumah and Martin Luther King felt and for each other

As Jesse Jackson and Harry Belafonte felt with Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo

Hear the voice of Farrakhan

My President, let your voice count

And make that call to the White House

Tell Obama that your flags are flying at half-mast for Black lives

 

Africa must rise up to the occasion

And for a Pan-African response

Hear me African Union Chairperson

Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma

You are a woman with a womb

Your children sent to the tomb early by racist bullets

What else must be said

To stir you to act

Let’s not take for granted

The African-American solidarity against apartheid South Africa

Let’s not take for granted

The sacrifices of the Dellums, Robinsons, Sullivans, Youngs, Heights, Davies, Angelo, Winfreys

Madam African Union, to put it bluntly

One good turn deserves another

 

Mr. President, what have you instructed your ambassador to do, demonstrate and remonstrate?

African-America rising in solidarity helped with the defeat of apartheid South Africa

And it is Africa rising in solidarity with African-America that will cleanse apartheid America

Africa must rise

And Lift Up Every Voice in solidarity with African-America

Madam African Union, to put it bluntly

One good turn deserves another

 

Let’s not forget how British PM Harold Wilson sided with his kith and kin in Rhodesia

At the expense of Nkrumah

And likewise

How Margaret Thatcher sided with her kith and kin in Apartheid South Africa

At the expense of Samora Machel

 

While Obama orders flags to fly at half-mast for the five police officers

Our hearts fly at half-mast for all blacks executed by American police

As Black Lives Matter

This must be made clear

That, Blacks are human beings first

 

When, when, when in America can our kith and kin shout

Free, Free, I am free

I am free at last

God Almighty, I am free!

 

© Akyaaba Addai-Sebo, Ga West, Ghana. 12 July 2016