“An Elegy for Africa” speaks of the annual migration of the cattle herders from the mountains to Winter pastures below, the herd boy singing the Arabic/Hausa call to the faithful. The second theme is the rape of Africa by today’s warlords.
“In the Kalahari" is a lament for the destruction of the Bushmen, the San.
Roy Ashwell
Down from the mountains and the furious light Into the green arms of the swamp The herd boy dances over the red rocks Over the silver rivers of the drought And following his song the herd bull dances.
High in the head bone chanting Allahu Akbari God in this singing is great In the blaze of the Harmattan great In the mountains of his creation great.
Downward from the fiery plains where the hyena Follows the gun and the kite spins in the thermal And the grass powders and throws up its white arms In praise of this dying Ya ku jama’a, God is great, O my people, Allahu Akbari
Iron footprints pattern the roads above Where the warlords ride, plotting With a map and a compass, murder And are gone with the old tribes And the trudging white adventurers Gone all into the Mafecane The vast wandering death.
And at evening when voices fall quiet. God is great. And there is silence Upon the tribes. Here are gun barrels cracked and Dusted with grass seeds and here are The women’s headties and their smashed baskets And the grains of corn blown into the metal tracks
And here too, springing from ledge to ledge, The singer.
From the mountain the song draws down The herds to winter grazing New calves under the heavy mothers. The young bulls toting tent poles And the canes beneath their hooves crackle.
Outriders on small sharp ponies swing down Past stuffed wells, past the green screens Of burnt villages where dead hands Reached down for water and fell aside, dry.
Downhill from the sun, the mighty hunter, Where the Harmattan is covering the stripped bones, Where the warlords have cancelled every debt and are cancelled, Where the blazing bleaches gray their shining skins.
Out of Africa always something new Only here under the immortal kite circling and mewing It is the same death that mews high Over the chief’s graves and the burnt out planes Over the Bushmen who have passed forever Into the central desert.
The great humped bull follows the boy downhill Over the ancient track and the baked screes Towards the green pastures where Allahu Akbari God is In the mountain of this singing Great Where a thousand hooves sink at length Into the soft earth and circle slowly And the prayer falls silent by the still waters.
Deep down a shadowy river runs between Two fences of acacia thorn In secret to the slavers’ ocean.
The dry storms beat off eastward. What Has been for centuries the same, Red miles of lion grass and every limit
Shaken by the noon time heat. Rock crouches over the grey wall Where the Bushmen stopped and painted
Crisp limbs in ochre. Stick legs running to the right. Pinmen, eland, an elephant broken
With spears, stumbling: some things crossed, The tally of one good day. Shaken now, Smeared out of knowing, tossed
Into the great wandering Mafecane, That swept the lost tribes aside Into the dry streams and the screes.
We shall never know of them, The small quiet men. The San. Though we talk in the fire fume,
Rub out embers as they did, black patches Under the dust, pick up our packs, pass on, Anonymous, similar only in our namelessness, Our trek into a future huge, dark and restless.
And once, where the Boer commando waited In a ring of fire and horses For the man-hunt to begin at dawn, The Bushmen painted their good day on the rock And taking up their children and their water Went on along the shadowy river line Into the silence of the central desert.
