He asked me whether we sold our souls to the Chinese,
When we made the deal,
Which our president signed with a pen.
I laughed,
For my country doesn’t have a soul,
It was sold long ago,
At first, it was leased out,
With promises of good things,
Promised by the white man.
Then they stole it outright,
And gave themselves title deeds.
At independence, we got it back,
Or so we naively thought,
But all the blood that was shed was for nought,
All they did was change the colour of the hands,
From white to black,
The minds were still the same.
Our country doesn’t belong to us,
Its soul was sold long ago,
In deals in back rooms that benefitted a few.
The rest of us are squatters,
Pretending to own the land.
We talk big, saying that this is our land,
But it doesn’t belong to us,
We are merely taking up space.
The good news is that the Chinese cannot get our soul,
Because it’s already gone,
The title is buried somewhere in an archive,
In a rich man’s home.
But the bad news there are still lungs and kidneys.
The Chinese have gotten a kidney,
But with their cunningness,
They will buy one, get one free.
Soon our lungs will be on auction too,
And one day we will find that our country,
Is Kenya, but made in China.
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