Rosa Parks Was Really a KENYAN!

[Onyango Oloo]

Rosa (pictured here in 1994) Parks, born February 4, 1913, died Monday, October 24,2005, 7 pm Eastern Standard Time in Detroit, Michigan

A POETIC TRIBUTE FROM ONYANGO OLOO

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Parks



Hobbled with dementia


en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dementia


saddled with amnesia

befuddled with all those drab and dreary relatives of Alzheimer's

your final agony must have been punctuated with near total despair

As you wasted away
having survived that humiliating ?4 trauma

Perpetrated by a callous and ignorant Skipper
The jug headed mugger named Skipper
Who robbed you of
a grand total of fifty three American dollars

Boasted openly that he never knew

or cared to know who you were

and had been

To millions of other
sub humanized African-American Skippers
mugging grandmas in the outer penitentiaries
misnamed the inner cities of America

The prefabricated treacly obituaries,
moth-balled for decades
waiting in the wings
for today’s grand breaking news
in prime time entrance
Were finally unleashed today,
within minutes of your expiration
Your final exhalation
at seven o’clock Monday
October the twenty fourth
At the Detroit apartment
that you called home

Now they are those
who have tried to rip your icon down



from the annals of African-American struggle

Pointing out that eleven years before



your famous headline
Twenty seven year old Irene Morgan
had refused to give up
Her Greyhound seat on the bus
from Gloucester, Virginia to Baltimore, Maryland
Some nitpickers have ferreted out Jackie Robinson's
Obscure 1944 Court Martial in Fort Hood Texas
for refusing
To move to the back of the bus
Even more cynical historical revisionist
Have gloated and chortled that you were already
Seated in the "Coloured" section

of that Montgomery Bus
When a Cracker Kaburu demanded
that you get up so that he could sit down
This attempt at character assassination
by latter day nay sayers is just as tawdry
As the 1994 mugging at the hands
of an unemployed poor Black youth
Who had no personal or historical memory
of what the Rosa Parks of the world
Did in their time to leave this world
a better place than they found it
Tomorrow, a flood
more ferocious than the sudden urban rivers
Wrought by Rita and Katrina
will engulf global news rooms around the world
As strangers who can’t tell
Martin Luther King from Martin Lawrence
Go gaga in news casts awash with lush lyricism
With blathering pasty faced anchors
Gushing with mushy tributes and trite over hyped accolades
written by fugitives from Madison Avenue
By the end of the week your name will be edging out John Paul the Second
As the leading contender for instant sainthood
By next week George Bush will be recommending you for a posthumous Nobel
While Don King will be duking it out with Donald Trump to hand over
The largest facsimile of a check
ever handed out at
a glitzy media scrum/slash golden photo op

Where were they,
the Don Kings and the Donald Trumps
The Larry Mfalmes and Condoleezza Mcheles
Where were they
earlier this afternoon, two hours,
three hours, one day
Two days, one week, two weeks,
one month, two months before your death?
Where were they when you
wasted away in isolation
and poverty in your relatively derelict Detroit pad
That is one reason why
I will spit a pungent gob of phlegm
At my television set
the minute I see one more two faced idolatry
From the neo-conservative Christian Fundas
Who pushed the Dullard in the White House
One more time down
millions of reluctant American throats
The same racists who would prefer
the idyllic days of KKK cross burning yore
When the Rosa Parks
of Alabama, Mississippi, Carolinas and Georgia
Knew their coloured spot
at the back of the lily white bus
Excuse me while I retch,
forgive me for vomiting

Meanwhile, nikuridi nyumbani kwetu Kenya
I hear the tribal toilet mouths of Kenya
barking in assorted cyberforums
Kwani who was she to us as Kenyans
I see the demented Kenyan born Newt Gingrich Wannabes
Quoting Dinesh DeSouza and Stanley Crouch
To prove that America has never been racist
And that Jim Crow was
a mythical ogre invented by the NAACP
Let the neocolonial
domestic dingoes
yelp and bark
Because some other Kenyans
of which I count myself
among their number
Realize that you were
the same riika as our very own
Dedan Kimathi and Pio Gama Pinto
That had you been
a Kenyan in Kenya in the fifties
You would have been

a Jemedari Rosa, struggling in Nyandarua
with Jemedari Wacera of Maragua
who today, like you
Wastes away,
an octogenarian freedom sheroe of Kenya
Begging the 21st Century
tai tai offspring of the homungati of the fifties
To please give her a piece
of that elusive patch of shamba
which she and her Kiama Kia Muingi muratas paid for
Many times over with
Their uzalendo sacrifice
in the forests and mountains of Kenya
Cucu Rosa Parks
had you been a Kenyan
You would have been the kind of Kenyan
to have gone visiting Makhan Singh
at his remote northern confinement cells
While you were desegregating Jim Crow America
Mzalendo Sarah Sarai, Berewa Jomo's mother

www.urgentactionfund.org/documents/KenyanWomenSpeak.pdf

Sarah Sarai and her Mau Mau sisters

www.uoguelph.ca/~terisatu/mau03.htm

were pambanaring to desegregate colonial Kenya
That is why I say
You are really a Kenyan
Who was born and grew up in the United States.

Hamba Kahle Shujaa Rosa Parks!


Onyango Oloo, a few minutes after learning of Rosa's passing while checking his yahoo mail messages?