V. Sosyurchenko Africa Is Already Winning Its Freedom
Africa is already winning its freedom, The backward tribes are becoming people now. But you do not want liberty, my nation. Or do you dream it will fall from the sky somehow?
No, it will not fall from the sky. Freedom is won In relentless, stubborn struggle and strife — Arabs and Blacks are breaking their chains, My people, is it not your time?
You fought once before. Your intentions were clear, You held splendid ideals in your heart, But again you sinfully trusted Moscow, And again, as before, they stripped you apart.
Brotherhood and equality beckoned to you, Land and will on your own native ground: But you let yourself be deceived And traded it all for a god in the Kremlin found.
The Yezhovshchina mowed you down like a plague, The “Black Raven” drove you away through the night, Kolyma was dammed up with your bodies, Death by starvation took millions from sight.
You grew feeble, lost all faith utterly, You believed that your grief had no cure, And you began humbly glorifying this land, And to not starve — you steal corn to endure.
More than under the tsars, they humiliate you And drown your dignity in the mud of slander, You stopped respecting yourself, And grew ashamed of your language’s candor.
You became a stranger on your own soil, They no longer even bothered to offend, As Father Stalin dreamed in the Kremlin Of exiling all Ukraine to Siberia’s end.
Obediently you go to the polls — Why? — you do not ask yourself that, On Constitution Day you drink vodka And have no more rights than that.
And yet Africa is winning its freedom, The backward tribes are becoming men, Fight too for your liberty, my nation, For it will not fall from the sky — not then. 1960