African Renaissance

​I will romanticize this continent until I leave it.

Not leave it by shaky boat or plane but leave it by dying; my spirit leaving this body that is as black  and pockmarked as my continent.

I will romanticize this continent until we all stop thinking real lives happen somewhere else.

I will write and speak until Lagos is considered the city of love

And Nairobi becomes our shorthand for urban, alive, thriving – and not New York.

I will write until flowers and not bullets blossom in Mogadishu.

I will write until we backpack to Kinshasa and Maputo and not Rome or The Swiss Alps.

I will write this continent down in ink and make Dar our shorthand for art and Kisumu for dance. 

I Will write until Darfur no longer stinks of dying children

I will write until Tripoli stands again and Cairo stops denying its Africanness and Bamako becomes as sexy as Marrakech and Ghana earns just as much money for its chocolate as Belgium does for stealing it.

I will write so beautifully that Madagascar will claw it’s way back to the motherland and secures itself surely against Mombasa’s bossom – So Beautiful will The Risen Africa be.

We will write in Maputo and dance in Harare, we will eat in Lamu and swim on Nigeria’s oil drenched shores.

We will live in Africa and Europe will be our alternative literature.