The first sound was not thunder. It was the hush that arrives before thunder. A line on the water where the morning should have been, cloth of cloud, then canvas, then the hard glint of iron learning our horizon by heart. We had names for this shore, for that river-mouth, for the places where the fish turn, where the stories turn. We had treaties with wind and drought, laws older than the salt in our blood. Yet you looked at us as if we were the absence of a plan. You said: the land lies idle. You said: we will make it useful. You said: we will teach you to be human in our image. And when we did not consent, you wrote our refusal as ignorance, as laziness, as childishness, as sin. We learnt your arithmetic early. You counted bodies as costs and called it progress. You measured the rise of storehouses while the songs went missing. You admired the straight road that cut through a village, then blamed the village for being in the way. And still, even then, we knew a simpler bargain: Let there be trade without chains. Let there be exchange without the lie of superiority. Let us keep the right to say yes, and the right to say no – the small word that guards a people’s dignity. But your experts arrived like a second tide, with diagrams for our hunger and tables for our grief. They spoke as if we were pieces on their board, moved for the beauty of the pattern, not for the beating of our own will. They promised bread, then demanded our breath. They promised peace, then practised control. They promised a future, and required that our past be erased so the story would read cleanly in their reports. If you would bring help, bring it like water offered, not poured down a throat. Bring it with an ear, not a whip. Bring it with equality, not pity dressed as love. Let the ones who live the cost decide the choice. Because the deepest theft was not only land or labour, not only the children taken, the languages thinned, the forests renamed, the ancestors made into footnotes. The deepest theft was the taking of our right to consent to our own salvation. Refrain: We were not empty land. We were not children. We were not your ladder to a brighter age. If you would walk with us, walk beside us – and let our “yes” be real, and let our “no” be heard.
