An Ode To Soyinkaresque.part 38

This cycle of sonnets focuses on Wole Soyinka’s excoriating critique of the post-colonial ruling class in Africa. In these verses, the dense lexical maximalism mirrors his own "Kongian" prose, portraying the leadership as a predatory elite that has betrayed the dawn of independence.

XVIII. The Comprador’s Charnel House

The comprador ascends the gilded stair,

In ebony masks of a recycled greed,

To breathe the rarefied and stolen air

While the proletarian gardens go to seed.

He wears the vestments of the former lord,

A mimetic puppet on a wire of oil,

Wielding the bureaucrat’s and soldier’s sword

To reap the visceral harvest of the soil.

Soyinka tracks the leprosy of power,

The syncretic rot within the state’s high hall,

Where patriots are devoured by the hour

And sycophants await the kingdom’s fall.

The ruling class is but a parasite’s dream,

A cacophony in the nation’s silent scream.

XIX. The Strong-Man’s Panopticon

Behold the autocrat in his concrete nest,

A monolith of ego and dark decree,

Who puts the nascent liberty to the test

With the iron shackles of a fake degree.

He claims a divine and unassailable right

To feast upon the sinews of the poor,

Vanishing the prophets in the dead of night

Behind the panopticon’s leaden door.

The Kongian pen dissects the despot’s brain,

A maximalist map of the soul’s decay,

Where logic is a victim of the sovereign’s gain

And justice is a ghost that’s turned away.

In 2026, the Strong-Man’s shadow falls

Across the blood-stained and the palace walls.

XX. The Litany of the Silent Man

"The man dies in the one who keeps his peace,"

The Laureate cries against the leaden sky,

For when the rhetoric of the brave shall cease,

The foundations of the human surely die.

The ruling class desires a sepulcher’s calm,

A unison of ghosts who dare not speak,

To apply their propaganda’s toxic balm

Upon the furrowed foreheads of the weak.

But lexical fire is a guerrilla’s tool,

A maximalist surge that breaks the spell,

To mock the pompous and the venal fool

And drag the truth from out the tyrant’s well.

The silent tongue is treason to the soul,

A fracture in the universal whole.

XXI. The Inherited Architecture of State

The scions of the palace claim the throne,

Through proximal and dark dynastic light,

Claiming the harvest that they have not sown

In the nepotistic reaches of the night.

Soyinka warns of power’s shifting mold,

Where privilege becomes a holy creed,

And the youth’s inheritance is bought and sold

To sate the intergenerational greed.

The architecture of the state is built of bone,

A maximalist tomb for the common man,

Where the seeds of liberty are left alone

To wither in the despot’s scorched-earth plan.

He stands as the sentinel at the gate,

The arch-interrogator of the state.