As I sat on the lonely, tropical shore, reflecting on the seemingly interminable woes of my continent, and the hazy horizon turned into a kaleidoscope of bewitching colours,Mother Africa patted me on the shoulder.''My son,'' she said, with copious tears cascading down her lacerated cheeks,'' I would like to talk to you about the Heartless Ones.''Who are the Heartless Ones?'' I asked with a quiet intensity.

''Listen carefully,my son,'' she said.''The Heartless Ones are my children,your brothers and sisters,who inflict untold suffering on their brothers and sisters.Oh listen to me,my son.The Heartless Ones are my children who always use powerful hosepipes to push fellow citizens down a stinking cesspit and who constantly make frantic effort to expand the frontiers of cruelty.

My soul hates the Heartless Ones who are the very etiology of the heartrending woes and mournful sighs of my sorrow-ridden children.My soul detests the Heartless Ones who dance so unrhythmically to the cacophonous music of sycophants and experts at adulation.

I have a special animus for the Heartless Ones who, on catapulting themselves to the realm of governance, are not only applauded by professional sycophants, but also add insult to injury by promulgating laws that convert them into prosecutors, defence lawyers, judges,witnesses and jury in their own unwinnable cases.

Oh, it begets risibility to see a Heartless One organising a one-man Derby and riding his horse on a spectator-less racecourse and gleefully crowning himself the best jockey in the land.

It is so interesting, my son,that the Heartless Ones could be their own footballers,referees,linesmen,reserves,spectators,riot police as well as match commissioners.How can people in full possession of their mental faculties act their own uninteresting plays in empty drama studios and shamelessly clap noisily for themselves when their insipid plays come to an end?

My traumatised soul dislikes the Heartless Ones, who hang like monkeys by their smelly lips, on to the rotten nipples of cruelty.Oh, my soul has reserved a special odium for the Heartless Ones who are so drunk with wickedness that they make universally acknowledged good actors disappear mysteriously form the beautifully decorated stage of life through exits unseen by the enthusiastic audience.

My doleful, lachrymose soul loathes the Heartless Ones. Oh Heartless Ones,oh, political counterfeits at the fulcrum of power,Heartless Ones whose scabies-infested hands are so bloody that the most beautiful flowers become instantly ugly in their smelly palms.

Heartless Ones, ultimates in barbarism,oh heavy chains around the starving necks of thin, hungry citizens.Oh winding sheets around the economies of our prostrate nations that are coming apart at the seams.Oh ugly spanners in the political works,ugly pyres on which economies are cremated,hearses in which the worm-infested mortal remains of assassinated liberties are conveyed to their final resting place by a whole raft of wailers.

Heartless Ones, oh Requiem for liberties, brakeless lorries running downhill,heading remorselessly towards a ravine of perdition.Heartless Ones, oh Pestilential Ones who leave the seat of governance so battered and their nations smeared with such unbelievably stinking political faeces that special experts have to be called to fumigate them.Oh, wonderful exponents of malfeasance,political malefactors whose actions make rivers of suffering flow into the sad sea of my children's marrows.

My heart misses several beats when it thinks of the Heartless Ones who dip their lice-covered hands into clean,spotless national coffers not only to purchase rusty crowns for themselves to have the ridiculous feeling of being kings, but also to celebrate their birthdays with pomp and ceremony in richly decorated, wall-to-wall carpeted, chandeliered mansions while severely malnourished infants quietly celebrate their first birthdays in their sombre,hot,solitary,worm-infested graves.

Heartless Ones, prologue and epilogue of wickedness who become instant hits on professional sycophants' hitparade,sycophants who are no slouch when it comes to trumpeting every sneeze, every cough of those who have everything in their hearts but the welfare of their nations.

Egregiously Heartless Ones, pieces of toilet paper lionised by barefaced adulators, specialists in peculation who sign their ugly names with red, hot knives on the peaceful, smiling, innocent hearts of my children.Heartless Ones who artfully convert my children into walking pathos and the slightest illness into a spitting distance away form death.Heartless Ones,oh painful,steady drip of wickedness with such wonderful laxative properties that citizens with the worst cases of constipation are always afforded the unique opportunity to have unstoppable diarrhoea.

Finally, my son,let every nook and cranny of Africa know that when my dreary days start leaning against the tottering walls of life like someone in an advanced state of inebriation and my cup of life breaks to smithereens, I shall still cling to the memory of the Heartless Ones who put Mount Kilimanjaro of woes upon Mount Kilimanjaro of woes by tethering their nations to a sterile tree of underdevelopment.''

These were Mother Africa's last words.She looked at me,her face etched with indescribable pain and breathed her last.

An excerpt from '' Poetic Tears For Africa'' by Tete Cobblah.
e-mail ctetecobblah@yahoo.com.br