Double Standards

When one makes viable peace Between erstwhile colonial whites And erstwhile colonized blacks To the advantage of the whites We urge for a Nobel Peace Prize Such was the case in South Africa. ‘It is all for the greater good’ The activists will proclaim The judges proudly pronounce ‘The triumph of good over evil’ ‘The milk of human kindness!’ But when one constructs peace Between blacks and other blacks To the advantage of both parties In an erstwhile colonized nation They send him to The Hague. He ‘transmutes’ into a tribal leader With diabolical tribal militias And a diabolical tribal agenda For his diabolical tribe or clan That must be nipped in the bud! For unlike so-called civilized Europe And the Middle East and America Where small tribes are called nations In Africa small nations are called tribes Voila! The stigma that grinds Africa! Albania, Andorra, Armenia, Lithuania Bosnia and Herzegovina, Luxembourg Croatia, Cyprus, Estonia, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, San Marino Please bear with me for the list is long Latvia, Monaco, Slovenia, Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Moldavian Republic Liechtenstein and other smaller territories All are independent nations of The World And each with less than five million people. Africa strives to keep tens of small ‘nations’ Bundled together within colonial boundaries Many larger than those cited here-before Under single cohesive modern Nations Balancing erstwhile competing agenda In the case of the Republic of Nigeria Or the Democratic Republic of Congo These run into hundreds of small ‘nations’ Or to tens of smaller or bigger ‘nations’ As in the case of Kenya or Mozambique But who cares that Tanzania has seventy seven Or that Kenya has forty two distinct peoples Who cares that Congo has over two hundred? Yet this ought to be uppermost in the minds Of those that proclaim themselves pundits In the fields of human and peoples’ rights And in the realm of crimes against humanity For a distinct people crave a distinct destiny And this runs counter to others’ expectations And might rekindle simmering opposition Now if two people manage to weld together ‘Nations’ hitherto hostile one to the other And to end the animosities and violence And forge lasting peace endorsed by all Should the UN or ICC stand on their way? I hope never to see peacekeepers in Kenya Never to see Kenyans turn against Kenyans Is Kenya- by any stretch of imagination-a failed Or a failing or a rogue or a dysfunctional state? The answer is a resounding ‘No, sir! Not Kenya!’