A
MORNING IN THE HEART OF AFRICA
by Patrice Lumumba
For a thousand years you African, suffered like a
east, your ashes strewn to the wind that roams the
desert.
Your tyrants built the lustrous, magic temples to
preserve your soul, preserve your suffering.
Barbaric right of fist and the white right to a whip,
you had the right to die, you also could weep.
In your totem they carved endless hunger, endless
bonds, and even in the cover of the woods a ghastly
cruel death was watching, snaky, crawling to you like
branch from the holes and heads of trees embraced your
body and your ailing soul.
Then they put a treacherous big viper on your chest,
on your neck they laid the yoke of fire-water, they
took your sweet wife for the glitter of cheap pearls,
your incredible riches that noboby could measure.
From your hut, the tom-toms sounded into the dark of
night carrying cruel laments up mighty black rivers
abused girls, streams of tears and blood, about ships
that sailed to the country where the little man
wallows in an ant-hill and where dollar is king, to
that damned land which they called a motherland.
There your child, your wife were ground day and night
by frightful, merciless mil, crushing them in dreadful
pain.
You are humans like others. They preach you to believe
that good white god will reconcile all humans at last.
By fire you grieved and sang the moaning songs of
homeless beggar that sings at strangers' doors...
The whole world, surprised, woke up in panic to the
violent rhythm of blood, to the violent rhythm of
jazz,
the white man turning pallid over this new song
that carries torch of purple through the dark of
night.
The dawn is here, my brother/sister, dawn! Look in
your faces, a new morning breaks in our old Africa.
Ours only will be the land, the water the mighty
rivers which the poor African was surrendering for a
thousand years.
And hard torches of the sun will shine for us again
they'll dry the tears in your eyes and the spittle on
your face.
The moment when you break the chains, heavy fetters,
the evil, cruel times will go never to come again.
A free and gallant CONGO will arise from the black
soil, a free and gallant CONGO-the black blossomed,
the black seed!