Chapter 1: Weight of the crown
‘My father was a king, and the son of kings.’
That line followed me like a shadow – quiet, constant, heavy. It haunted me through the hush of childhood and the howling silence of exile. I have worn many faces, most unbecoming of the son of a king. A poet. A shoemaker. A prisoner. A revolutionary. And now, a scribe – a recorder of miseries in the land once called Nyika.
My father’s hunger for power shattered Nyika. Taxes rose ‘for protection’ from a nameless enemy. Faces in the market hollowed.
My mother, always composed, sat me down away from the windows. ‘Don’t look’, she warned.
But I did.
I saw their faces – hollow-cheeked, eyes darkened by hunger and humiliation. Baskets lay empty at their feet. Coins clinked like accusations.
‘Why are they angry?’ I asked.
She sighed, folding her hands in her lap with a quiet fury. ‘Because, my son, a crown can blind a man to the weight of the heads that bow beneath it.’
When the coup came, it was swift. Soldiers who once bowed now raised their guns. The palace burned, and with it, the illusion of lineage.
I became a relic – no longer a prince, but a shoemaker stitching leather for the same boots that trampled our land. Silence kept me alive. It also buried me.
Chapter 2: The birds of Hamisi
It was in the dungeons of another rebellion that I met Issa. In Hamisi Maximum Prison. We met following a sweep of arrests after the attempted coup of '82, protesting the one-party rule that had sunken its claws so deep into the country's democracy. I was then just a young man of 23 years. Millions of youths, me included, took to the streets to oppose the regime at the time for the very same things my father had lost his people to. And his crown.
The taxes were too high, again. Youth unemployment was at an all-time high, public resources were looted and bankrupt, and the youth – we were on the brink of despair.
Something had to give.
Despite fighting the same abuses of authority, things this time were different. Armed police officers shot and killed an unknown number of youths on the first day of protest, leading to a string of protests intent on ousting the now rogue regime. A wave of abductions, arrests, and enforced disappearances ensued, but in retaliation for what?
Quiet dissent?
Your guess could be better than mine.
I first saw Issa through the bars of my cell, a figure too thin, his face hardened by time and suffering. His eyes, though, still held a fire – a fire I hadn’t seen in years. We were among 26 others who had been sent to prison following the protests, some for theft, some for treason. His presence felt like a spark in the dark, a reminder of something lost. I didn’t recognise him at first, but his voice broke through the fog of my memories.
‘You were a prince’, he said, his words more statement than question.
‘I was’, I replied, feeling the weight of the past settle between us.
He laughed, a bitter sound. ‘So, the crown really was heavy, huh?’
I didn’t know how to answer him. There were no words for the weight I had carried, no words for the betrayal that still felt fresh, even after all this time.
And then there was Hamisi. The walls of that place were thick, suffocating, like the silence of a graveyard where no one dares speak the truth. Hamisi was the highest of the prisons, the one where the forgotten souls went to break. It was a place where even time seemed to slow, as though the weight of its injustices could press down on the hours themselves.
I was not a prince there. I was nothing but a body, a name on a roster. A shoemaker-cum-revolutionary.
In those dim halls, the smell of sweat and iron clung to every surface. The guards, ruthless and swollen with power, paraded through like vultures, their eyes trained to strike fear into the hearts of those already broken. They had no names. They were merely instruments of a regime that sought to extinguish any flicker of hope before it could catch fire.
Issa didn’t look at me with pity. No.
He looked at me with something else. Something colder, something more cutting.
‘You think you’re the only one who lost?’ His voice was a whisper, but it held a power I couldn’t deny. ‘You think your father’s betrayal is the only one that matters?’
I looked at him then, really looked at him. In his eyes, I saw a reflection of my own pain – a different kind of betrayal, one that had been hidden from me all these years.
‘I lost everything’, I whispered. ‘My kingdom, my family, my name.’
Issa’s laugh was bitter. ‘The truth is, we’re all victims of the same crown. It’s the crown that made us all prisoners – prisoners of hope, of greed, of a revolution that never was.’
The words stung, but they also woke something inside me. I had come to think of my loss as unique – my father’s betrayal, the destruction of our kingdom. But Issa was right. I was not alone in my suffering. Hamisi had claimed countless souls, each torn from their homes, their lives, their futures, in the name of a single idea. The regime had crushed dissent, not only through bullets and chains, but through the very act of erasing people from memory.
‘What do you want, Issa?’ I asked him.
His smile was small but sharp. ‘Freedom’, he said. ‘But not for me. For all of us.’
Chapter 2: New Day
Civil liberty is at an impasse; mere proclamations of wanting liberation suffice. The ink bleeds slow, like old wounds reopening. Outside my window, the city hums with the same tired promise – a new dawn, they say. But I have lived long enough to know that dawn is never new, only remembered differently.
A sophistry. An anticipation of an arrival at a utopia.
No map, no journey. Travelling past our history.
Every generation inherits a revolution, folds it neatly, and tucks it away. A set of borrowed clothes, a new uniform. We call it democracy now, but the script is old. Kings changed their crowns for suits, palaces for parliaments, and disguised decrees as laws.
These betrayals have been written before. Different names, same story. The faces of the oppressors rotate, but their appetite never changes. It feeds on silence, on the illusion that ‘The People’ are free simply because they can shout. We mistake the echo for a voice.
But still, I write. Not for myself – no, I am too far gone into the pages – but for the ones who still walk barefoot through the promises of the Republic. For those who still believe that justice is not a word but a muscle that must be used or it atrophies.
Issa once told me that hope is a fool’s game. He was wrong. Or, perhaps, he was right in the way prophets are: wrong in time, right in eternity. Hope is not the candle we light; it is the fire we carry. The kind that burns not to comfort, but to awaken.
The youth still march. Their faces are new, but their anger is ancient. I watch them and see us, the exiles, the prisoners, the dreamers of dead revolutions. Only now, they hold phones instead of placards, hashtags instead of hymns. But the hunger is the same – to be seen, to be heard, to be free.
To be reckoned with.
What I have learned – painfully, slowly – is that power does not surrender to petitions. It yields to participation. The Constitution may say that all power belongs to the people, but it does not hand it to them. It must be taken – not by the gun, but by the hand that builds, votes, questions, reforms, imagines.
For too long, we have prayed for better leaders.
We should have prayed for better citizens.
The law is a tool, not the problem. It is the heart that wields it that determines whether it beats for justice or greed. And so, we must not only write laws, we must live them; we must not only draft constitutions, we must become them.
My pen trembles, my hand shaking from age. From awe. From fear. From the knowledge that the new day I speak of will not be given to us; we must write it into being. Line by line, act by act, life by life.
I have seen enough to know that history is not a circle, but a spiral. It repeats, yes, but each turn, however slight, ascends.
And so I fade, not as a man, but as an idea. I leave this ink not as testimony, but as inheritance.
The new day will not arrive with fanfare. It will come quietly, in the small mercies of the just, in the daily courage of the honest, in the uncelebrated defiance of those who still dare to do right when no one is watching.
When that happens – when the people rise not to overthrow, but to overcome – then, perhaps, we will know freedom not as a dream deferred but as a promise kept.
I will keep writing.
Even as I fade into the margins, I know –
the story continues.
In us.
In you.