The Barbarism of Colonial Trading Posts
Slave ships drowning our names in the darkness of so-called “civilized” nations,
A Yalta of vultures: yen, yards, barrels — Africa sold without ever being consulted.
Exegetes in uniform: incense and executions poured into the same holy font,
Césaire cried out; the colonizers counted cocoa, skulls, and schoolbooks.
A kaleidoscope of crimes: kepis, Kalashnikovs, mass graves, leonine contracts.
They spoke of “assimilation”; above all, they sought enslavement without eyewitnesses.
At the heart of slave plantations, the glory of empire carried the putrid stench of the torn holds of slave ships,
A “French Union” whose only true unity was the whip striking scarred backs.
High priests of the Republic, triumphant vocabulary dressing genocide in elegant attire,
Uranium from Niger, monetary ultimatums: an independence controlled by the Nazi bailiffs of the French treasury.
Soldiers without scruples sowing social earthquakes beneath the sacrificed suns of the trenches,
Slaughtered riflemen, traditions slashed apart by racist tribunals too convinced they were illuminating the face of the slaveholding Republic of Enlightenment.
And colonial schools imposed shame: “Speak French if you wish to exist in the garbage bins of assimilation.”
Red rivers of independence fighters reduced to the status of rebels to be pacified,
“Humanist” West: an oxymoron where the Black man remains an object to classify in the encyclopedia of movable property.
Mutilated memory, demonic masks locked behind glass while African mines are privatized,
Africans called “brothers” when they must die for the liberation of the Republic of the Code Noir; “migrants” when they seek merely to breathe beneath the fountains of liberty, equality, and fraternity.
Imperialism clothed in neocolonial garments: interests, influence, Arab, Maghrebi, and Tuareg terrorists as intermediaries — the whip has gone digital in the colonial trading posts,
Our ancestors were not savages: they were simply too dignified to be tamed by negrophobic barbarians haunted by their own existential anxieties.
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