Give Peace a Chance Part 1

Like the twelfth juror in the play I must say I am not convinced For I know a recipe for trouble I have seen the double standards And I do not approve this for Kenya I will never approve it, and neither Would you, dear friend of Kenya If you saw what I most clearly see, For you, too, know a recipe for ire That promptly transforms into dire Consequences for those unwary Of the machinations of self-interest These are myriad, the machinations And Africa is totally unprepared Just like South America for centuries For we have forgotten the real heroes And think our enemies are they who bled To free Africa, for in our minds they looted A few inches of our land for their kinsmen A current unforgivable outrage indeed And yet there were those of Africa Who, routinely, betrayed our struggle To rid Africa of colossal colonial vestiges These we have forgiven and moved on For ‘tis not right that we should be stuck In a time-warp or worse through ineptitude Now we have ‘liberators’ who daily oppress Erstwhile liberators in the hope of usurping The liberation struggle and supplanting it With a breed that totally ignores the history That was written with the blood of our people. For them, the ultimate sacrifice, Deserving the ultimate accolade Is this deformed limb of yesterday Not the sixty plus years of servitude I shudder at the thought, I do, I do Brother, for I know full well the truth It is not to be found in this lie, this lie I say, it cannot be found here, no! We are busy negotiating the truth For we know not what the truth is And the more we negotiate The further we get from it The more we seek assurance The less certain we get, brother I can see that, brother, I can see And so can you, brother, if you look If you look inward and seek the truth You cannot negotiate the truth with strangers You cannot seek retribution through strangers For, strange though it sounds, encouragement From outsiders has an outside chance of success If it undermines the inside view, the local input I see that happening here, my brother, I see it And I’m saddened, for I wish it were not so I long for a permanent understanding A permanent truce, a permanent pact And this can only come from within Not from without, never, never! What have we learned from the Middle East conflict? What have we learned from the Congo conflicts? What have we learned from the Iraq conflict? What have we learned from global conflicts? Nothing? And so the conflicts continue! Learn something and dissolve your ire In a locally brewed long-term quencher That the communities involved can own And claim to have- as the only solution With local mechanisms of enforcement And universally acceptable local censure The Hague process is a poor remedy For a supposed conflict that did not exist A swift sweep of dirt under the carpet Of politics, power, greed, retribution By the very protagonists who will fuel Future conflicts in the same zone, yes, I do not claim to know all or even most But this I do know, we are all watching Our kinsmen dancing on a volcano! And the world will say, as it has always, That this is savage Africa at work as usual Yet I know and you know that it is not. It took Europe over a hundred years To settle down, nay, longer, much so For when was it that Napoleon reigned And Bismark sought to annex France And Adolf Hitler thought he was God? In the 19th century Europe experienced Twenty one revolts and uprisings And twenty six full blown wars From the Irish Rebellion of 1803 To the Greco-Turkish War of 1897 The twelve year Napoleonic Wars The Serbian uprisings The Russo-Persian wars French invasion of Spain The War of the Malcontents The Russo-Turkish and Liberal Wars The Tithe War, the Albanian Revolts The Galisian Slaughter, the Carlist Wars The Albanian Revolts, the Mahtra War, The Hungarian Revolutionary War of Independence The sixteen year Wars of Italian Independence The Schleswig Wars, the Crimean War The Epirus and Cretan Revolts The Austro-Prussian War The Franco-Prussian War The Russo–Turkish War The Greco–Turkish War The Serbo-Bulgarian War The Cod (not Cold) War What kind of war did they not fight? Is it not by the Grace of God That they can claim European unity And play football in the same league