The colours in our blood

(a critique of the rhetoric behind the colours of the Kenyan flag. To be read alongside Jerry Riley and Stephen Derwent Partington)

Painter: Your colour is black.

Wanjiku: The whole lot of us –

From the brown Wataita;

Chocolate Patels;

Yellow-yellow Waswahili;

To light as milk McIntyres?

Painter: McIntyre? Patel? Kenyan?

Think again. They were not born here.

Wanjiku: You mean they can’t trace the exact burial spot

Of their forebears six generations back? –

The way you can?           

Painter: I won’t argue with you.

          Moving on, red.

Generous swathes of crimson for the blood shed;

The price of independence.

Wanjiku: But that is so old! We have new stories to celebrate!

Painter: Old? You must never forsake your past, carved out with machete and home-made gun.

Wanjiku: As if I could, the way you rub it in my face.

Couldn’t red also mean the passion;

The fire forged every morning in Kibera, in Turkana

To make today a better day?

But since you will have blood,

Mention the violence in our homes 

and our machines of death

decorating the highways

with shattered limbs and broken lives.

Painter: You feel too much.

You question too much.

You believe too much.

Only I have answers; only I know the future.

And now to green:

O, majestic mountains and pristine forests!

Wanjiku: Really; where?

          Green turned to grey while you were sleeping.

City skies, burning slums, and chemical rivers.

I’ll take some brown for the desert cycles of flood and famine;

Tally the poor who starve annually.

Put our red-hot devotion to work; see the green return.

Painter: Your stubbornness doesn’t move me.

I must deliver the full lesson, as I was paid to do.

(God knows I deserve a raise).

SIT DOWN and listen!

White is the gentle dove of peace dusting this nation

With golden omens of prosperity.

Wanjiku (Yawning): I could fall asleep from your bad poetry.

I won’t let you infect me with your numbness.

(Walking out) I will take white for the hope in our faces;

A blank white slate handed

To every citizen,

On which to dream our identity.

I might just paint the whole thing white,

Except, white is just one colour.

Give me nuance, give me tertiary colours,

Give me love, give me a rainbow.