John Agandin: The Second Dispossession

John Akanvariyuei Agandin

First came the strangers, with maps and flags

Invasive, like ants to a feast

In wonder, they gazed upon our land–

Wide, wild, untouched by fence or boundary

Where man, bird and beast roamed free

Each belonging to no one but themselves

So they called us headless.

We, whose spirits birthed kingdoms?

Preposterous!

And with swift strokes of the mighty pen,

Lines were drawn to divide our lives and hearts.

As bloodless as it was brutal:

“We hereby claim this land for Her Majesty the Queen!”

But our fathers arose,

And fought and bled and won it back

And when the invading flags were lowered,

New masters emerged from among us:

Big men, genteel ladies, pot-bellied tycoons,

Chiefs, or is it ‘thiefs’? We know not,

Multinational looters and robbers in suits,

and the political crooks behind them.

“The land does not belong to us; we belong to it,

It cannot be sold!” Our fathers said,

Now they grieve in their graves, while

Red signs on whiteboards

Declare our final doom:

“KEEP OFF!

PRIVATE PROPERTY, NO TRESPASSING!”

All over the land, the signs stand tall.

Stiff and silent, yet loud in command.

Like sentinels on stolen soil.

From the Black Volta westward

To the slave defence wall

and eastward to the crocodile ponds,

No inch is spared.

Community lands. Ancestral lands.

Sacred grooves. Riverbanks. Farmlands.

All swallowed by the potbellies of our leaders.

Every village, every path,

Every field once caressed by calloused hands

Now lies behind barbed borders,

Preserved not for the people,

But for profit.

Only the silent sentinels loudly

Proclaim the evil deed;

“Keep off!

Property of Looters International Ltd

Trespassers will be shot, survivors shot again!”

The second dispossession, alas!

A traitorous cancer from within,

more deadly than the first.

Keep off here.

Keep off there.

Keep off everywhere.

Nowhere to plant a crop.

Nowhere to lay our heads.

No place left,

even for our dead to rest.

But the land remembers.

And it waits!

Poet’s Note:

This poem was born out of grief and frustration. It speaks to something many of us feel but can’t always put into words—the slow, painful loss of land, belonging, and identity. The poem explores how land, once held in trust by communities, families, and ancestors, is being claimed again—this time by people from within, through modern systems of greed, corruption, and privatisation. Their actions betray the very struggles of those who fought to reclaim it.

This is for anyone who’s ever felt pushed out of a place that should have been home.

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