If this day holds no meaning to you,
Go on and celebrate and still be free.
Pardon my absence in your celebrations.
The victories you are celebrating
Have proved to be my defeats.
Ask not then
The honour of my presence,
It will be unforgivable vanity to do so.
This is no negotiation
For June 16, 1976 to be respected.
The appeals are 49 years old to believe short memory is reason for recurring disrespect.
If even at 50
you still hold that June 16, 1976 merits annual negotiations,
To be accorded deserved solemn respect.
You not better than a tourist of black pain,
Treating it as zoological curiosity.
Because solemnity costs what you are not willing to pay.
Solemnity demands memory,
And memory demands accountability.
But you have built your life
Inside the structure
that bled us.
So you call it ceremony for celebrations.
To make it manageable.
To make it sellable for money to buy and sell.
You negotiate the solemnity to negotiate the debt.
You confuse managing
The event with honouring the event,
To sit in rooms
Where silence gets invited back
You choose access over witness
And call it pragmatism that is easy to sell
To be bought whom exactly?
Mistake not my presence for the honour of your ceremony
but am here to ensure suffering gets heard.
Truth is not a structure
Truth is not foundations
Truth is not communities
Truth is not consultations.
Truth is a condition for suffering to be heard.
Abstain from consultations geared at deviation from black pain
Intent on marginalisation of a people’s memory
Purposed to Prioritising concerns of those that have all along been privileged to be at the centre
Fixatedly made to believe their status is God given
Endowed with divine right to be deposited at the centre
of national attention
Esteemed in being at the centre
Extolled for being used being at the centre for self ostentation
Forever propelled
for self-preservation
for everlasting superordination
And for perpetual subordination
Of children of the lesser gods
Driven by indecent haste
That cannot to wait to tell wounded thinking hearts
You have cried enough now
Let no nagging pain stain pyrrhic victories of contrived democracy
It is time to move on
This done all for reasons of safeguarding the pampering
of serial sinners
faking not knowing that oppression is sin
to keep repeating as serial offenders
that just cannot get themselves to confess their sins
and repent from sinning further
Retaining calling shots of amnesia
than hear suffering speak
as a condition to know truth
Deviating commemoration to celebration
Derailing memory to a holidaying entertainment outing
For the rich, high and mighty
To tour black pain as zoological curiosity without guilt
Safely returning to tranquil of dinner tables of their remorseless homes
Treasured as lifting trophies of ill gotten largesse
delighting themselves to be tall precisely because of rendering others to be on their knees
To see staged tears and smiles choreographed to hug each other in concerts
Offenders lurking behind the spectacle
Still abide by the pleasure of their domination
Extracting benefits from carefully planned forgetfulness
For erasure of history of the suffering
from which intransigent mean machine of uncaring power never stops escalation of its maximum beneficiation
If truth be told
Truth is how all these structures: figures, foundations,
communities, parties and consultations
Relate to black pain
The outcome of the lived black experience
Shouldering the cross of unforgettable memory
Exposing wounds to high nosed doubters to plung their nonchalant fingers in
to distract remembering,
that we, black people,
are people for whom others have died
and truly yet to be free
But forever inundated by anti-liberation forces
Preaching to wounds yet to heal from unending oppression
That they are free now
It is time they moved on to celebrate
If the memory of June 16, 1976 memory was not mistaken
with anything cheapening it
with lording interests hovering over it to total eclipse
it is not worth mentioning
remembering
or associating with.
JUNE 16, 1976 IS INDEED NOT A SCHEDULING ISSUE,
IT IS THE MOVING SPIRIT OF THE SUFFERING.
My outraged pointing finger
Now retires from further accusations
To the sanctity
of my silent testimony
Resolved to stand by the dignity of this day
In honour of the depths of its true meaning
