Ancestral echoes(African Hymns)
Ancestral Echoes
(Chapter One of African Hymns)
The drum remembers,
even when silence lays heavy on the soil.
Its skin is stitched with centuries,
its rhythm a memory of footsteps
that once marched barefoot
through kingdoms carved from iron and song.
I hear the whispers of griots,
their voices cracked with age yet eternal,
telling us: Africa is not a wound to be dressed in pity,
she is a scar turned into scripture,
a mother whose lullabies
still echo through the marrow of our bones.
The baobab stretches its arms skyward
roots sunk deep in red soil,
branches open like an elder’s embrace.
It teaches us:
to stand tall,
one must bow first to the ground that bore them.
And so I bow
to Nubian sands,
to Buganda’s drums,
to Timbuktu’s libraries where ink was a river,
to the nameless warriors whose names
still live in the tongues of children
shaping alphabets with their laughter.
But hear me now, sons and daughters of tomorrow:
we are not ghosts chasing after shadows.
We are the living harvest
of seeds sown in both sorrow and splendor.
The past does not shackle us
it sharpens us,
like obsidian turned to blade.
Pan-African winds rise
from Cape Town to Cairo,
from Dakar to Dar es Salaam.
They call us to gather the fragments,
to weave our broken histories into a single cloth,
bright with kente fire,
unyielding as cowrie shells.
This hymn is only the first
a doorway into voices yet unsung.
Ahead lie rivers of remembrance,
oceans of resistance,
and the dawn of rebirth.
Step through with me.
The ancestors drum still.
The echoes await.
By: Emmanuel Rwotngeyo
Uganda.
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