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Africa Memorial Day (AMD)
Africa Memorial
Day (AMD)
May 01 2021, Zoom Online Conference
10:30 AM (GMT)Rome
Program of
Event
1. Introduction/welcome address
2. The Rite of Celebration of African Memory and Renaissance
FIRST SECTION
The rite of Light
• Readings
• Poem – Ewi (in Yoruba) By AYANFE AKEWI
SECOND SECTION
The Process of Slavery
• Readings
THIRD SECTION
The Final Rites
• Address: Mr. AKINMAYOWA AKINKUNMI (Special Guest of Honour)
• Speech: ALEAKWE ODIOR (General Coordinator)
• Declaration of Principles
• Poem – Ewi (in Yoruba) By DAVID TAIWO FASANYA
3. Reactions from Participants
4. Conclusion
NIGHT
Night has arrived!
Strolling across the sky,
On the airy wings of light lost to darkness.
A sentence from truth to falsehood.
For though we saw you clad and uncovered,
You spread the fetters of sadness,
And fan the embers of joy.
Your company is a mishmash of emotions,
A rampage of the senses,
A death of the mind!
Wrapped in pluriform singularity,
You tipped away like the branches of a clock,
Tick-Tock,
Tick-Tock,
Tick-Tock.
Night, Memories of you dry up like mud in the hot noon day sun.
The sweet-bitterness of tears shed at the death of agony.
Night, you fade away unenamoured and unannounced,
On the wings of the rising sun,
You melt away in the bright shine of day in merciless brutality.
Till you pass by again, O Night,
We watch as the storm of your tears,
flee like the pain of childbirth,
forgone to the joy of a new life.
Oballa, Ken-Solomon SDB.
ABASI’s Silence
Freedom stripped.
Freedom taken.
They peered into the vast sky,
For the minutest modicum of sign,
But the Abasi was silent.
The click of chains, the lashes for pains, were their music for days.
And the Abasi was silent.
Their kin were part of the oppressors.
Bought over at the price of a pigeon dung.
Men, women and children.
Robbed and stripped of joy, dignity and liberty.
Under the command of the foreign slave lord.
By the whips of their own kin, tortured.
And the Abasi’s silence grew even louder.
Hoarded down the pit,
Along the path of no return.
Their feeble feet grazed the towpath of disappearance.
Shipped off to a foreign land,
Their fate would forever be defined by the fetters and letters of their captors.
And the Abasi remained silent.
Odior Aleakwe