by Budd Hall
Our cries of fear and pain
Our cries of joy of happiness
Were our first poems
Before words
Before sentences
Before grammar
Before language
We imitated birds and other animals
And found that with our sounds we could share
Our experience and tell a story
With each other
Our first sounds/poems
Creating community through
A common sense of who we were
We put our sounds together
We repeated them to each other
We created memory through sounds
We changed the pitch in our voices
We changed the rhythm in our delivery
And we had song
And we had story
And each of us was a poet
A story teller
Our poems were of the earth and the water
Of the rocks, the trees, the other animals, the grasses
And at night with full moon’s light, we shared our stories
The Old, talking to the young
And when we died
The poems remained
The stories remained
Our words
Our language
They reminded us of who we were
Where we were going
Where we had been
Our poems and songs became our culture
We gave birth to these poems and songs
And in return, the songs and poems gave
Life to us in families, communities, and kingdoms
With our stories we existed
Without our stories
Without our words
We were not alive
The world was therefore sounded, cried and spoken
Into being
Our lives were sung into existence
And over the thousands of years
As we drifted and filled the earth with people
Our languages gave us our identity
Who we were, and importantly
Who we were not
We were the people of the large mountain
We were the people of the standing stone
We were the people of the large salmon river
We were the people of the broad savannah
We were the people of the Nile Valley
We shared stories of 20,000 years and more
And although through time our words and languages
Have come to be distinct
The first purpose of language has always been to foster community
Not to drive us apart
And never to use language to say that some ideas and some people
Are more important than others
And not to say that one language alone can be a global language
While other languages are good only for small ideas
Ideas of the village
Who am I then?
Who am I to come to Busoga
To come to Uganda
To come to Africa
And share words in the same language
Of those people who
Bring death into our world?
Who am I, someone so far removed from his
Own tribal origins to have forgotten whatever language
His ancestors once spoke?
Who am I, to have been the great grand child of English settlers
Who took the land of the Halalt First Nations people
On Vancouver Island
So that their English-speaking children might
Have more food and better houses and better medical care than
The Halalt-language speaking children whose land they took?
What is the meaning of my coming to this land, this Africa where
All human life began?
I am made humble by the presence of so many gods and Ancestors
Among us here today
I am lost at this moment and have no real answers for myself
Let alone for any others hearing me today or reading these words
I know only one thing
That our words, our languages, our differences, our dreams and our
Ferocious anger at injustice and poverty and cruelty
Must be shared
And I know one more thing
That the feeling of the soil on the soles of our feet
Or of our hand dipping into our rivers or our seas
Or of the sounds of birds at sunrise
Or of the cries of newly born children and other animals
Or of the sounds of drums and xylophones
Or of the singing together in celebration that hope still exists
Or of the memories kept alive in our Mother Tongue
Are carried in our words
With our poetry
With our songs
Words and songs born of African soil
And carried in our hearts to every corner of this planet
Still carrying life
Still rejecting despair
Still making resistance possible
Still conveying tenderness
Still linking friend to friend
Still expressing our love
Budd L. Hall dedicated this Revelation to Nabyama Paulo Wangoola for opening him so many possibilities to learn.
This was shared for the first time at the Mpambo Multiversity campus in Isegero, Iganga, Busoga, Uganda after Jajjaj Kiwanuka Ntambi-za-Mukama, a Professor of Afrikan spirituality, said that he had been told by the spirits that someone in the room had a revelation to share.