I cried for you today -
and as the tears spilled down my cheeks,
I thought of your warm smiles and open hearts and how your mothers nurtured me.
And the countless children they carried on their backs
And the sunshine waking us up every morning
And how we thought we'd be in our home forever
Never imagining for one moment that we would leave of our own free will
Thinking we would be fine elsewhere
And that Africa and its politics could go and hang for all we cared
And we moved away and boarded planes
And we set up camp
In the far flung corners of the planet
And we barbecued our boerewors on Australian beaches
And celebrated American independence
And wrapped ourselves in blankets against the UK winters
And learnt new languages and borrowed other people's cultures
But one African will soon seek out another
No matter whether they be in the Netherlands or Ireland
And we soon flocked together
Made batches of sticky koek susters
And were frowned upon with our raw meat eating habits by our pasty faced neighbours
And we too lost our colour.
As our vibrancy slipped from us
And we danced to our Johnny Clegg and Mango Groove to remember our happiness
and called each other Shamwari
And slipped into Sindebele and Shona greetings and "Yebo Gogos" and "tatendas" whenever we met
And we remembered we were not English, Australian or American
No, we are Africans and we are too far away from home
Far from the lazy Limpopo
And the mozies in our ears at night
And the black jacks in our socks
And the goaway birds
And the Fish Eagles
And a Kariba Sunset
And we're miles away from the mists of Nyanga
And the roar of the mighty Falls and the Zambezi that runs through us as blue as our veins as surely as we ran through the rain forest as children
While our parents sipped G&Ts on the vast veranda of the Vic Falls Hotel
And our hearts wept and broke when we realised that our childhood was a lifetime away
And we are not okay after all
We were lost and we had left our souls in the land of our birth
How I wish we had something to celebrate as we turn another corner on the 18th day of April every year
But our visionaries are all gone
And our expectations have vanished in the dust of 37 years.
Now all we can do is pray for deliverance
And hope our memories last long enough for us to share them with our children
Who will never know the inheritance we wanted to pass on to them.
This will only live on in our stories and faded photographs
And as we wipe away those tears
And wonderful years
We give thanks for those golden savannah summers in the burnt bushveld
For the love of a million mothers and for fathers who threw us up on their shoulders and pushed us in wheel barrows
And our childhood companions,
brothers and sisters from different mothers who we knew before we knew what different colours we were.
Ngiyabonga, Tatenda from all your children
We are who we are
because of you gave us a happy and loved childhood
And in our dreams we return
Every night and walk where our foot prints have blown away
Although we are no longer there
You reside in our hearts, in our minds
In our identity
For how can a child forget their parent
I pray for the starving children
And the mothers with AIDS
And the fathers who cannot save their babies dying in their arms
I will never stop longing for peace in Zimbabwe
And hoping for better days to come.
I cannot forget
I curse my inability to change things
And despise myself for running away
But I had my own selfish reasons
And futures other than my own to consider
I haven't lost my way
I've just mislaid the map
Perhaps some day too I will return
For nothing else other than to walk the streets of my hometown
But this is one of the greatest burdens the human heart carries
As every exile knows.
Cyndi Barker