This is not a poem

I have no pretty words

To talk about death, despair and discrimination

This is for those Africans who think their pain is greater…

The same narrative that leaves black bodies

Under the waters of the Mediterranean and the Middle Passage,

Makes black bodies a backdrop for bullets in America,

So African governments act with impunity

They know black lives mean nothing, nothing but dust…

For Africans who think their pain is greater, know this,

They will come for your oil

Come for your gold

Come for your diamonds

Come for your cocoa

Come for your sons and daughters

Come to feel better

But they will never come for you.

Your government reads these scripts,

These scripts of contemptibility

These scripts of degradation and degeneration,

And sells you down the river for more gold in the Rolex

More lead-proofing in the Lexus

And so you run across the waters to paradise

Where you find that you are not Somali, you are black

You are not Naija, you are black

You are not Shona, you are black

You are not a warrior you are black

You learn that you are nothing, because you are black

And that is all you need to win a bullet in the brain

So for Africans who think their pain is greater

You need to see that this is the same death and despair,

The same story that confines us in poverty and pain,

The voice screaming Willie Kimani, should also wail Philando Castile,

We cannot breathe in New York, we are out of breath in Ndjamena,

Death does not kill harder in Libya than in Louisiana

This is not a contest but a war.

All voices need to know this, because

The only one who can say black lives matter

with volume and conviction is you,

For you Africans who say your pain is greater

We already breathe pain and sorrow

We already eat the agony of blackness

This is not a contest

Our pain is the same.

The struggles of Senghor are the struggles of Stokely,

The troubles of Tubman are the troubles of Tambo,

The killing of Nkrumah is the killing of King,

So let raise your voices from Johannesburg to Georgia,

From Lagos to London, from Accra to Anchorage

We are one

We are black.

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