How Can We Not Have This Conversation

How can we not have this conversation where footprints of the poor vanish beneath the boots of investors, and the river sings only to those who can afford its luxury? In Chobe, the elephants roam free, but people walk caged in poverty. We call it coexistence when tusks are protected, but mothers bury their sons gored near neglected kraals. And no one comes unless it's a game drive and the victim is not black. How can we not speak when the lion's roar is louder than a widow's cry for compensation? When leopards eat goats and ministries write reports not cheques? Let's talk about the five-star smiles that greet foreign tongues while the Batswana mop floors, serve beer, and sleep on concrete after ten-hour shifts. Let's talk about uniforms and pay slips that smell like servitude, contracts folded into silence in offices lined with antelope heads. And let's speak of the racism how a Black woman was shot by a white woman who said, "I thought it was a monkey." As if her body was a silhouette of threat. As if Blackness is always a blur on the edge of someone else's comfort. The river bore witness, but the law shrugged, and headlines softened the bullet. Let's talk of fishermen banished from their birthright, told their canoes spoil the view, that their laughter scares the tourists, that their presence is pollution. Let's speak of lodge owners who toss insults like breadcrumbs to those who clean their sheets lazy, slow, replaceable. No chains, but contracts. No slurs, just smiles with knives beneath them. We cannot be quiet when the sun sets behind lodges built on lies, and the river is fenced not for safety, but exclusion. How can we not speak of the politics of permits, where land is leased like livestock, and council seats are auctioned to the highest foreign bidder? Corruption blooms like water hyacinth, choking life from the roots of communal trust. The sand knows. The baobabs know. Even the crocodiles know how long we've swallowed our own tongues to protect the myth of peace. So let us talk. Let us gather in the heat of midday truth, where no luxury air-con hums. Let us speak until the sky listens, until justice stalks this land as fiercely as the wild. Because silence, here, is complicity. And we have been quiet for far too long.