Before The Colonizers Came

Chinedu Dike

Chinedu Dike's Profile

Sunday 20 September 2026

Before The Colonizers Came

A timeless plunder drained the hereditary soil,
As millions of our youth were violently uprooted;
Unrecorded legions perished in the inland wars,
their memory buried in the bleeding loam.

Yoked by the throat in stark, wooden coffles,
Epoch by epoch they marched toward the sea;
Countless souls withered in the seaside dungeons,
Lost to the night before the floating prisons came.

Outland merchants brought a silent, blistering fire,
unleashing foreign diseases across the sun-drenched plain.
Wasting sicknesses choked the mud-brick hamlets
To crush a world already broken by the iron lock.

The Atlantic commerce severed kindred ties,
Where rulers swapped their captives for imported firearms;
Some bartered breathing flesh for imperial dominance,
While fragile states conformed to merely stay alive.

The bleak accounting of the ledger and the chain
Stilled every song around the village fires;
Time-honoured brotherhoods dissolved in bitter rifts,
Engendering wounds that feed our current grief.

A heartless engine of extraction rolled
To twist the quiet symmetry of growth;
This grim design bequeathed a heavy shroud,
The global racism that all black peoples bear.

No motherland can lose its youngest strength
Through centuries of woe, and not be shaken at its roots;
The venerable citadels collapsed to stone,
And thriving empires sank into decay.

This slow, ancestral rot undone the thrones,
And snapped the shield beneath the jeweled crown;
Divided deeply in their fatal isolation,
the fractured nations fell to European colonization.

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Before The Colonizers Came

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