The poetry of Dr Kebba Bojang
‘The winnable candidate’
“Politicians are like a bunch of bananas.
They start off green, turn yellow…”
In The Gambia,
They can start yellow
And ripen into every shade there is.
Still, the winnable candidate —
Don’t play victim to gain sympathy.
They offer policies to earn votes.
They don’t appeal to tribal sensitivities,
Or foment division for support;
They speak to the shared challenges of all.
Their appeal isn’t built on social media noise,
But anchored in party structures nationwide.
When under fire,
They don’t fold or whimper —
They fight back to win.
Their words mean something.
They don’t conjecture narratives —
Their stories are accountable to reality.
They don’t promise integrity;
It manifests in their actions.
Foroyaa mu kaŋo le ti.
When these happenings so conjointly meet
Let no group be at ease,
Or any despair onto itself;
For they may be foreshadowing
A period of inflection politically,
For a nation at a crossroads
Of identity and definition.
They may be the making of the stage
For political theatre for the manifest of:
Useful idiots,
Sycophants,
The entitled,
Political swellheads,
Political ingratiates,
Political prostitutes,
Political provocateurs,
Political jikang buwoolu,
The advocates,
The organisers,
The steadfast.
In every political entropy there is destiny,
In every chaos there is a path,
Find the thread to trek your course.
To every political inertia there is a point of initiation,
Appreciate the triggers to potentiate the activation.
Confronting confusion brings clarity,
As out of chaos emanates orderliness.
Note: The title was inspired by the following lines from William Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar: “When these prodigies Do so conjointly meet, let not men say, ‘These are their reasons; they are natural,’ For I believe they are portentous things Unto the climate that they point upon”.
For those who stayed, for those who left
For The Gambia,
for those who stayed behind,
for those who left and came back
to build the nation,
to mold the next generation,
to shape the future.
Yours is a patriotic resolve,
a steadfast disposition.
Resisting the lure of convenience,
you let go for the glory of the country.
The nation celebrates you,
who stayed —
in health, to heal;
in education, to enlighten;
in agriculture, to feed;
In infrastructure, to build;
in security, to protect.
You built institutions;
you created employment.
And yet, for those who stayed
only to defraud the nation:
we see you.
We know you.
Reckoning is a given.
For those who left,
you are no less a patriot.
Yours is a calling out there:
to represent the flag,
to showcase our spirit.
Your remittances are the current
that keeps the economy afloat.
Between one breath and the next
Living is active — is work:
the beating of the heart,
the labouring of the lungs,
the digestion of food,
the firing of synapses,
the repairing of cells.
Dying is passive — is the default:
the stillness from which we began.
Death, then, is serene —
a peaceful state of being,
to some, a transition.
Yet death is not an event,
but the end of dying,
the journey of life.
The Mandinkas say
the space between eye and nose
measures how near death stays.
In truth,
it lives in the gap
between one breath
and the next.
In the womb, life begins.
With birth, the dying starts.
Death in itself is not feared.
To exist is to expire.
It is the when and the how
that haunt us.
In much of Africa, death is mourned.
In Tana Toraja, it is celebrated.
One human ending,
different rituals.
Note: Tana Toraja is a regency in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, where elaborate funeral rituals celebrate the dead.
