Photo:V.B. Koretsky, 1932, telesur English
There are many white men still in Africa
Hanging on, those stubborn ghosts have not died,
Called up by the legacy-fetishism of history books,
They remain and have become deified.
There are still white ghosts/gods in Africa.
Cecil Rhodes is in Africa.
Buried there in the scars he left, the boring wound a deep grave.
A presence defined by many absences,
Those blood diamonds, still perched on descendant fingers
Coated in that labouring sanguine, now ever hard to shatter.
Blunt, sweeping violence of his Glenn Grey Governance,
Turning the abstract real into social matter.
His will, a legacy that contains fantastical conspiracies,
The most lasting his scholarship.
Howl,
the piercing whistle of an imperial engine on his tracks.
Grow,
the roots of settlers,
fiscal roots,
land roots,
ballot roots.
Branded,
the sickening state of his namesake on Ndebele backs.
Yes,
Cecil Rhodes is in Africa,
He festers there.
Karl Marx is in Africa too,
His locomotives of history, still to find their steam,
Or else derailed.
Momentary bursts of the Immortal Science
announcing revolutionary players upon the world stage.
Locomotives, for peoples who may not yet have trains.
His red star, seemingly shimmering from the north,
Rather, one of astronomy’s many mistakes in perception.
It sits in the centre of the constellation martyrdom,
surrounded by the children of the Utopian leap:
Sankara, Nkrumah, Cabral, Biko, Rodney.
Asking their inheritors to join our slow, staid progression to some withering state,
when the great explosion of the possible awaits on our following.
He
lays out a world born in steam, the progression of railroad tracks over the old, born in blood
not understanding the revolution takes its poetry from many futures.
A vulgar, thrashing dialectic, unable to scream the word:
Overthrow.
There are still white men in Africa,
Shivering, pale spectres, hanging on the spines of our siblings.
Weighing like nightmares on living minds
Lurking in the void of an obliterated past.
Still here. Still. We fester there.
“Marx will be here,” She said. “And Rhodes will be here. Both of them. Maybe after you die people will be as they were before I was born, and before you came. But I do not think they will.”
