THE NIGHT BEFORE FREEDOM COMES

(I)
The cock crowed at noon today
I will call our song of sorrows in the house of the moon
I will rub my palms in the face of the sun and…..
He can do nothing about it;
This is a riddle----

Virgins were broken at night
Sons were born by day
The frozen insolence of Akwasiada
Desecrated our (sacred) altars.

Ours was the last story

We lifted our songs to the red womb of the sky
Our shoulders hummed dirges of our guilty innocence
The golden black ivory had lost its shimmer.

(II)
AT THE CAPE COAST CASTLE

They prided in the drab white walls of their citahells
And locked them up with the cold stony faces below.

While they chanted halleluyahs to their unknown God,
They also stared at the blank and motionless sky for hope,
From their gods or nowhere, which they knew might never come.
They sang songs of sorrow and recounted stories of their free selves outside these walls;

Of home and and family they would see no more in a long time
But today, through the eyes of their hope.

They mocked them with libations of holy water and drove them,
Shackles and on all fours, through those doors of no return.

But we have walked through these doors of return
We who are the glory of the heads bowed and backs broken yesteryears ago.

(III)
WE WILL GO

We will go 4x (decreasing in tone)
O my brothers draw near and hear, weep no more on your mats at night when you lie on your breaking backs and look intensely at the blank sky of your huts; sleep on the hope of morning,
Our glory, shrouded in impotent smokes of uncertainty.

Do not despair for the sake of the heartless kings who cling on to straws of immorality, their days will soon be spent or else they will wake up that morning to find our shells empty, let them then rule the chattels; we will be freer men than we dream to be – We will go

(Repeat song)

Today, we honour the living memory of the great dead. But tomorrow, we shall be told of in word song; we shall be remembered as the heroes of yesterday. We shall look back on the lands we tilled and the edifices we built and take pride in our living memories and the greater deeds of our seed.

These great ones have laboured, let them enjoy their hard – earned titles and thrones and rest; when our tasks are done, we will also go.

(Repeat song)

Yes indeed we will go home to beyond the horizons of this place, to the welcome of our forebears, to the drumbeats by the ancestral fireside – we will go.
(Repeat song)

(IV)
Inspired by Prof Kofi Anyidoho – History Dept. University of Ghana 08/05/09

We will go from this place, when our days are spent
The memories of our footprints will outlast our age

Big, small, all the way to the gates of that ‘beyond’ of no return.