The Giant Speaks Swahili Poem by Deluke Muwanigwa

The Giant Speaks Swahili

Thank Ubuntu the African giant wakes
Having found no common tongue among the thousands
Two thousand to be precise
All foreign tongues lacking resonance
The dissonance putting the dark giant to sleep

And it was going to be perpetual sleep for keeps
While foreign peddlers of doom and gloom waxed lyrical
Implying the giant's culture is primitive
So much so the native saw a foreigner in his brother
rather than that nearly all languages south of the Sahara
derive from Swahili

Listen carefully and you will hear, Shona, Bemba, Ndebele, Nyanja, Chewa, Igbo and Yoruba are dialects of Swahili.
'Wati kudini'
'Wareng'
'Ogini'
mean the same thing in dialects so diverse

meaning in this universe
Black people of Africa south of the Sahara are one
And if our language can be one
We would have won
One language one continent
The benefits in trade
harmony
integration
being immense.

I thank the leaders of the AU
Thank you
For adopting a resolution to teach Swahili in schools
so our children are not fools
learning western languages to further western hegemony
though arts and culture began here in Africa
just as all humans began in Africa

The first university in Mali, Timbuktu
The great Munhumutapa Empire
The pyramids of Sudan about which the west is mum
Contrary to the narrative spun
that Africa is a lost cause
Africa is the centre of all things humane
not the nuclear holocaust advanced nations want to wrought upon the world.

This is our renaissance
Our rebirth
And it starts when the giant speaks one tongue
Swahili is the tongue
Africa the giant
Kenya the epicenter
Mount Kilimanjaro the tallest

C.17032022