For Homecoming

Manka Menga Mmasi
2 min readDec 6, 2023

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For Homecoming

How they return (Heirs)

Here

the gods show their teeth

Delighted at the honor

of tending to such destinies

they gather their favor

rows upon rows

of mercy and grace

for their subjects.

lest they forget.

divide and conquer

rule of the land.

not all will wade their waters at home,

some have divine errands

across the ponds.

divide and conquer,

a call for war.

in exodus

they risk getting lost

to willing shepherds

indoctrinated into a cult

of perpetual servitude,

redeemable in the life after death

promised by

parasitic leech infested with capitalism.

they watch

as the sheep deny their gods

defile their souls for produce.

divide and conquer,

a call for war.

as sickness befalls them

a plague to write home about

they watch as the sheep answer

to colors and colloquials

as they learn extraction

planting tricks in treaties

risking their humanity.

they cease to see themselves

in the trees, in the waters, in the winds,

becoming another stop

for the devastation and the looting.

slaves of the capital

overseers impressed by whips

currency over everything

veins so full of impurities

lacking the lustre of home.

divide and conquer,

the gods know

all waters find their way back to their source.

the heirs are circling back

they remember

the chants and the drum beats,

the rhythm and the gyrating hips,

the ululations and the jiving feet,

the salt of the ocean stirs

in their marrow,

the dust of the harmattan tickles

their lungs,

they remember their rusty colostrum,

maafa, transatlantic voyages,

segregation, bantu education,

the degradation of mass

extinction, which they survived

by the kink of their hair.

they remember conservation colonialism

settler violence and its predicates

displacements

and the nihilism it affords its sovereign.

they remember mass extortion

of natural resources

the myriad of their artifacts safe

in the conquerors’ vitrines,

the reason for shared last names

and baptisms.

“kikulacho ki nguoni mwako.”

this land reeks of home.

the heirs return in droves

circulating like vultures

they awaited this rupture

to claim the lands

fertilized by their forefathers flesh

an end to robbery of graves

they discovered fire

they return for their earth, their air,

their waters,

they return

for their spirits

to tend to their forefathers’ graves.

This poem was published in Fifty four Magazine.

Photo by Rosa Scipion, Model Manka Menga. Shot in Zanzibar Tanzania

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Manka Menga Mmasi
Manka Menga Mmasi

Written by Manka Menga Mmasi

an opulent poetess, inspired by the need to connect and communicate and be understood.

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