TAWE, WANTAM, and the Cousins’ Cry

TAWE, the thunder rolled from hills of the West,

A guttural roar from lips too long sealed—

We have danced to silence, fed on patience,

Now tongues crack open with truth, sharp and unpeeled.

We do not whisper anymore in market alleys,

We chant in storms, in sweat, in barefoot defiance,

For even silence grows fists when truth is starved.

WANTAM, the breeze from the mountain spoke low—

One term, they say, just one! Then let the land breathe.

No throne is nailed down when hunger speaks louder,

No golden sash can silence boiling grief.

They came with promises braided in sugar,

Left us with bones and battered belief,

But now, the soil remembers—so do we.

Hi Cousins! echoes down forgotten paths,

Mocking laughter masked in a handshake’s grin.

A greeting? A warning? A crack in the mask—

We know how wolves can wear the wool of kin.

Yet still we smile, teeth sharp with memory,

The cousins have woken, the joke grows thin,

And riddles now rot in the mouths of thieves.

The rivers are stirring with stories long drowned,

Old songs rise from graves we never dug deep.

Children sing TAWE with chalk-stained fingers,

Their rhymes a revolt, their dreams do not sleep.

Even dusk now burns with the sun’s red anger,

We gather in whispers, in fires, we weep—

Not for sorrow, but for the storm we become.

The ballot ink dries, but blood still boils beneath,

WANTAM stitched into every grain sack lie.

We were not born to be pawns or footnotes,

Nor harvests reaped by hands that let us die.

This is the echo of footsteps rising,

Of backs straightened by hunger’s dry cry—

The resistance is no longer a whisper.

TAWE is no slogan, it's thunder dressed in syllables,

It's grandmother’s curses tossed at the wind.

It’s the boy with cracked lips shouting in mud,

It’s the girl with eyes sharp as a needle’s pin.

It’s the mamas selling dignity in daylight,

The fathers, the bodaboda, the kin—

All lifting one voice in the dirge of deceit.

And so we rise, not with swords, but with fire—

The fire of questions, of memory, of names.

We carve truth in the bark of governance,

We salt every wound with ancestral flames.

No more crumbs, no more shadows to choke in,

This country is ours—not their petty games.

TAWE! WANTAM!—the cousins have come home.

©Bunguswa™