14/04/2026
When Mallam Wore the Turban of Dawn
By K.K. Bonteh
When Mallam wore the turban of dawn,
The plains breathed like a newborn hymn.
Nomads walked as princes of the wind,
Their voicesโunfettered riversโ
Flowed through valleys of trust.
Merchants of the sunlit paths
Traded beneath skies unbroken,
Their footsteps stitching peace
Into the fabric of the earth.
The forest stoodโan ancient cathedral
Its green prayers uncut, unbruised;
And the grass, a velvet scripture,
Lay open to the hooves of freedom.
Cattle grazed like drifting clouds,
Fat with the milk of abundance;
Their calves, tender flames of tomorrow,
Danced in circles of quiet joy.
No walls knew the language of division,
No gates rehearsed suspicion;
Homes lay open like generous palms,
And life movedโwild, yet guarded by grace.
Even the smallest wing, the humblest snout,
Found sanctuary in the unwritten law of harmony.
But time, that silent dethroner,
Unwound the turban from his brow
And wrapped him in the long night of ancestors.
He walked a road without footprints,
Toward the council of shadowsโ
And never returned with the morning.
Then came the season of inverted suns.
On a day carved into memoryโs wound,
A crown rose not from wisdom,
But from the echo of its absence.
The new keeper of the staff
Knew not the language of the plains,
Nor the grammar of wandering souls.
And nowโ
The bed forgets its rest,
The classroom forgets its light,
The forest forgets its name.
Even the wind stammers.
O Nyo-mbom, Weaver of Breath,
Who taught iron to grow into fences?
Who whispered captivity into the ears of freedom?
Now, even the tame wear chains of fear,
And the wild have forgotten their own wildness.
The great treesโBuma, Iroko,
Guardians of forgotten centuriesโ
Lie fallen like broken elders.
The forest, once a choir,
Now hums a dirge of stifled spirits.
Trade has become a stranger,
Speech, a relic of safer times.
And lifeโ
Life waits at the threshold of death,
A patient victim of slow cruelty;
A death that ripens in delay,
That harvests souls before their fall.
O Mallam, Listener of distant drums,
Do you hear this fractured cry?
Or has eternity sealed your ears
With the dust of sacred sleep?
Are you truly gone
Into the endless corridor of silence?
For all I gather now
Are the heavy breaths of a dying age,
Snoring its way into oblivion.
Yet we call youโ
Saint of the open earth,
Keeper of unchained horizonsโ
Return, if only as wind,
As memory, as fire in our failing bones.
Unfasten these iron nights,
Break the grammar of our bo***ge,
Teach our hands to remember the sky.
O Mallam of Mallams,
Rise through the roots of timeโ
Comeโฆ
Come againโฆ
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