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A Lesson in History
Old man Saranka sips his soup slowly, savouring
The peppery warmth distilled from his traditional herbs
And liked it enough to recommend it to scholars of science;
His educated, eldest son, Saiyianka, watches him by the fireside
Waiting for the rains of knowledge to fall from his mouth;
In reflex of his tongue spinning sagely sentiments
He follows his tale with an ear trained for detail;
The old man twitches his literate eye like an opener
As he narrates the old story of white treasury...
When a man welcomes a humble,tired stranger,
Quenches his thirst, feeds him with milk from his herd,
Nurses his sore soles with his ram's fat, accommodates him
On his ox-skin-padded bed in one of his wives' hut,
Do you thank him when he turns to defecate in your homestead?
His innocent-look, he says, is the white cloak of the
Dark soul of treasury and covetousness; otherwise
How did that baffoon grow roots in my ancestral land,
And my own roots he uprooted from the laikipian plateau
Confining me in the peripheral plains and rocks of the world?
The old man booms his caution:
He has denigrated your virility in papery decrees, he
Has bewitched the metal of your manhood with books,
You are boxed in his trap, you have become a nimple rat
When your people expects you to twist his spearblade!
You are wondering in his shadow, his silhuette
Soddening your wings in liquid air.
The old man swoons with sadness in his soul:
He is a tortoise, slow and sure-footed,
An ethnological museum of skewed history;
He still protects his culture like an endangered animal
That others have turned into a tourist talisman;
Take my word, son of mine, he says, stick it on
Your white-educated brain, and go tell England that
olonana was an oloiboni not a paramount chief!
