Beneath These Rusted Chains

Our ancestors’ bones still whisper in the soil,

once kings who walked where cassava grew tall,

their laughter an anthem swallowed by trader’s gold.

What ghostly arithmetic deemed a soul worth less

than a barrel of rum, a fist of gunpowder?

They folded us into ships’ rancid bellies,

stacked like yams, baptized in our own vomit.

The sea wept salt where our tears had dried.

Decades dawned. Chains rusted, but not the rot beneath.

We raised flags, sang anthems, buried martyrs

“The struggle has ended!” they cried.

Yet markets still trade in our mothers’ silence,

our children’s hunger priced in foreign ledgers.

Streets throb with the phantom wails

of those who vanished into colonial archives,

their names erased like chalk in monsoon rain.

Tell me can these bones breathe again?

Does the soil remember how to be fertile,

or have we salted it with our swallowed rage?

When the drums beat “freedom,” who still flinches,

haunted by the whip’s old rhythm?

Our pride, a scar. Our unity, a myth sold to tourists.

I search the horizon for Nkrumah’s fire

a flicker? Or just another streetlamp’s lie?

We are heirs to a revolution half-born,

still shackled to a question that chokes:

Did we break the chains, or simply learn to dance in them?

Happy Independence Day 🇬🇭