From The Ashes of The War, 1
From The Ashes of The War, 1
The smoke has cleared, but the silence betrays,
A quieter warfare that numbers the days.
Where brothers who shared both the mortar and name,
Now look at each other through prisms of shame.
They tell us the root of our lineage is wrong,
That Bini, not Igbo, is where we belong.
They swallow the history the victors have spun,
Denying the mother to flatter the son.
If bent on abandoning your Igbo identity, oh Ikwerre,
Would you also abandon your half-brothers in Amaigbo and Nkwere?
Where Amaigbo’s son, ruled the Niger Delta, as King Jaja of Opobo,
A revered king and a free son of Igbo, never a servant or an odibo.
The vowels are altered, the heritage torn,
To bury the cradle where identity was born.
Bini was Iduu, they never claimed Akalaka as a son,
And Eze Chima, not, REze Chima, never a Bini born.
Behold how the letters are weaponized now,
An "R" stamped brutally on a community’s brow.
A tactical grammar where ancestry hides
From Umukurushi to Rumukurushi, it slides,
What an “R” wonder in not identifying as Igbo
Umuola to Rumuola and Umuokoro to Rumuokoro,
Umuekpe to Rumuekpe and Umuigbo to Rumuigbo,
The tags of "Niger Delta" replace what used to be true,
South South, a desperate shield from the malice they knew.
When oil residues soiled the creeks they knew,
And oil wells shared among Western and Northern emirs,
Excluding the Igbo Chiefs and the South-South Chiefs, too.
They cannot erase the Igbo language all the same,
Though they try, by adopting new regional names.
Yet their chieftaincy titles remain of Igbo ancestry,
To stay authentic and linked to the history, authority and ancestry.
Oh, weep for the scholars, the local elites,
Who traded the truth for the praise of the streets!
The intellectuals, blinded by status and gain,
Who justified treason and sanitized pain.
They authored the distance, they drafted the wall,
And cheered as they watched their own brotherhood fall.
They organized and seized Igbo properties labelled "abandoned,"
Sharing those homes with reckless abandon) ed
Even Saro-Wiwa’s last address belonged to the Ojukwu dynasty.
Yet the soil remembers what politics tries to erase,
The blood in the marrow, the lines on the face.
Though the names may be rewritten and the history denied,
The truth of the cradle still echoes inside.
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