The Diary of a Xenophobe

by Jeffrey Jaiyeola Plumbline

See, I’m a grown man, I’m my own man. I hung around for ages with sages and tapped into the wisdom inherent in their pages so that my mind can evolve into a gold-mine.

But see, I’m a cold man, my heart is frozen I can’t feel a thing, like the Stone man. I’m a tad barbaric, though I’ve mastered Latin to Amharic and I get so, so didactic but that won’t change a thing, ‘cos in the end, I’m still a lone man.

Still a prone man, many times, scared of my own plan, a victim of my own fears, so I pick a crow bar and slam it hard on a member of my own clan.

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See, I blame everybody for my pain, for every travail that has come my way, for AIDS, for the waste of my race, mine is the culture of hate, but I go on all the same, Shame!

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I was brought up not to talk to strangers, now I hate that, so it’s not strange that I did at the onset along with my other African brothers and that was the beginning of a long history of murders; mothers buried their kids Three-feet beneath because Six-feet was too deep to conceal their grief!

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Nkosi Sikelel’Africa! My brothers the Zims, peeps from Mozambique, and all over the Gulf of Guinea: Nigeria, Ghana, Mali and Gambia, musicians, movie makers got revolutionary and their sound was heard. The world learnt there was fire in the ghetto of SOWETO!

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Pardon my amnesia, and if it is hard to stomach get some milk of magnesia, for I suddenly forgot what Joseph did for Egypt. How did the world know Mandela was locked up in Robben? When Steve Biko was dropping and the mamas of Hector Pietersen and Hastings Ndlovu were sobbing, how on Earth did the world know?

I’m quick to forget how men with conscience from the West unequivocally condemned Apartheid and that word became one of the first tri-syllabic words any African kid in the 80's would know.

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The only thing I remember is waking up from slumber to see all the Makwerekwere flooding South Africa. That explains sort of, why I ever lifted my klepto-hands, against a fellow man!

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October 19, 2007, Lucky Dube was shot dead right in front, of his son... Our way of saying "Thank You For demanding our freedom with your songs"...

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Nkosi Sikelel’ Africa! God bless Africa

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PS: The Crowbar is messy, can I get a gun?

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Republished here with permission from the author. There are some pictures that go with this. I will post them as soon as I am able.