IMPORTED GODS

Jekwu Anyaegbuna


We will never serve the foreign gods who

will force us to starve our African gods.

 

Those black people who worship such

imported gods on Sundays and Fridays

 

often pelt stones and fire at their African

shrines and gods and ancestors.

 

We are cocksure that those strange gods

come bundled with cannabis from Italy

 

and England and Saudi Arabia, and

it makes the worshippers thoughtless.

 

They are daffy and weird, screaming like

wild animals in labour, as they

 

pray and worship, quoting madness from

their (un)holy books.

 

They always prefer to speak Latin

and English and Arabic because

 

it is easier to behave and sound stupid

speaking a foreign language.

 

They visualise white skin during their

midnight prayers, but their knuckles

 

and buttocks remain jet-black at

daybreak, their faces turning even darker.

 

They claim that the white gods are wiser,

holier, that the imported wine, blood, moon,

 

star, beads, cross, books, and bread can

work together for the salvation of Africans.

 

But it is taboo to revere the gods that whiten

and water down the brains of black people,

 

those venal gods that turn the eyes and

thoughts of Africans westwards and eastwards.

 

We will never serve the foreign gods who

will force us to starve our African gods.

Jekwu Anyaegbuna graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, where he is currently a fully-funded researcher and also teaches in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing. He won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa. A fiction fellow at the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation for Creative Writing, he was shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize. His writing has been published in Granta, Ambit, Magma, The Massachusetts Review, Transition, Prairie Schooner, among other publications. He lives in England. Follow him on Twitter @JekwuAnyaegbuna.