LOST
Raw. Unapologetic. Devastating. This is the cry of a generation still waiting for real liberation. A furious, heart-wrenching poem that drags you through the sweat of mothers who clean houses they’ll never own, the cracked hands of fathers who build empires for others, and the bloated bellies of politicians selling us fake freedom. Read it now. You won’t stay comfortable. (From Echo Our African Dreams anthology)
Genevieve Zongolo
10/22/20252 min read
LOST
GENEVIEVE ZONGOLO
Our mother’s backs are bent from cleaning houses they will never live in
And our father’s hands are cracked and broken from building homes
they will never own.
White empires are founded on our parent’s backs.
These foundations know their touch, scent and every tear and sweat drop.
The walls of madam’s house echoes our mother’s prayers,
along the roads they travel to and from work lie pieces of their broken dreams.
Some are picked up and exchanged with “one day.”
Hoping that, their offspring will have a better life.
A better life . . .
A better life in our days is becoming material struggle whores,
stomach politicians, starving looters, sadistic criminals and the list is endless.
Our schools have become brothels,
social gatherings to debrief weekend sex-tivities,
drug trades and form alcoholic academies.
While clinics and hospitals vomit out girls and women who bear fatherless children—
sons and daughters with guns and stab wounds.
Corruption is the new norm
and complacency has choked us
from dreaming dreams with weight,
so we settled to dreaming of holding an iPhone,
owning expensive cars, name brands from head to toe
to cover our naked bodies and colonised brains that drown in debts.
And I am tired . . .
I am tired of supporting politicians' over-indulged bellies,
who only know of the poverty anthem,
yet extend us a rope long enough
just so we hang ourselves on their words
They sell us superficial dreams and inject us with “amandla . . . ngawethu!” (the power is ours!) that slowly kills us
and we cough up phrases of struggle songs we know nothing of
when those who wrote and sang these songs met heads in with death.
I beg . . .
I beg of you to hear my cry in these words.
Freedom cannot be bought!
And this battle is far from over
Economic exclusion is no game, the banks pillars are rooting in this.
Hear me! Oooh hear me!
We are used as ladders and stepping stones
to the thrones of power while we continue to
kneel down exalting these institutions
that extorts all we have worked hard for.
Our black consciousness
sleeps to the false lullabies of equality.
Those who have enthroned themselves have
sold us to the highest bidders who use our time,
minds and bodies to enrich themselves and
keep us begging to be enslaved to their system.
Our people are sold out and that is why we have no land.