Where are the ancestors? the gods? — Bakong Obi

Wake up from your dreams, your tombs.
Gather your shambas, your spears and guns,
the tribe is sick, it must be cleansed.
Else we perish with the mounting tide
of modernization.

Awake, all youths, from your slumbers!
Shake off the clutches of your parents,
Wipe away the saliva from your mouths.
The tribe is sick it must be cleansed;
you must not wait and witness,
the passing, of mother tribe.

Our fathers do not feel responsible now
but why?
‘Tis because they are all in despair,
lost all living hope and the joy of living,
now living in the past, afraid of the future
detesting the present in which they live
and silently wishing it did not exist.
Oh youths I cry again in supplication
Cogs, cobwebs, braken we must defy.
The Russians display the sickle and the plough,
the Indians are content to die in hunger.
Give Ghandi foreign aid, he wants it not,
he will die in hunger, there is honour in death-hunger
Leave the West alone, likewise the East,
forget about socialism as well as nonalignment.
Capitalism and African socialism are concepts
that may even flourish in mutual content
But our valour were better appraised,
Had we the tool to our status raise.

Ideas we must change when fetters they become,
Satan defied God and Bukanin revered him
as the first free thinker, who inspired him.
Socrates drank hemlock, the Greeks despised him,
Galileo was a sorcerer, the world denied him,
yet all human progress has been,
inspired by Satans, Galileos, Sacrates, Bukanins
and much more by Marxs.

Wake up all ye youths,
for you the present holds little promise
except as spiring-board for the future.

In squalor and ignorance you live must,
and since that is what must be the case,
you must learn to put your trust,
in the future and what it brings.
Awhile my advise to you is:
Struggle.