Ruth Takondwa & Charles Lipanda Mahigwe (Prepared by Angela Kosta)
Moderator 
THE LONG AWAITED "BEING A REFUGEE WASN'T A CHOICE"
ANTHOLOGY IS NOW AVAILABLE AT AMAZON!
Congratulations Charles Lipanda Mahigwe, Ruth Takondwa, and Salvador Cap Bic for your hard work and dedication assembling this wonderful political protest book on the lives of refugees, especially in Africa and those who reside at the Dzaleka Refugee camp in Malawi. Congratulations to all the writers, poets and authors who are featured within these pages.
To Quinns, without your expertise, this anthology too would not have been possible. Thank you for editing this important youth anthology, and your profound Foreword.
Thank you, Trinity Burning for gifting WE last year with so many amazing cover images for our numerous projects. This one is just perfect for, "I Wasn't Born A Refugee."
FOREWORD
When I first read the early drafts of this anthology, I was struck by the raw honesty and hope portrayed in every piece. As a poet and editor, I have long believed that poetry—its rhythms, metaphors, unguarded confessions—can bridge chasms of misunderstanding, bear witness to suffering, and light the darkest of emotional and historical tunnels. This anthology brings together more than fifty voices—young and old, from every corner of Africa and beyond—telling their stories of loss, endurance, and the raw urgency of displacement and relentless dreaming
We live in an era when millions are on the move—driven from home by conflict, economic collapse, or environmental disaster. To read this anthology is to step into refugee camps. It is to hear the echo of gunfire and feel the hunger of children in the desert. This is far more than a catalogue of suffering. It is resilience personified: pieces that transform pain into beauty, testimonies that have turned loss into a collective strength.
You will find Charles' pleading cry, "Would You Still Stay Or Go Away?," grappling with the choice between rootedness and flight; Biringanine Agishwe's "Sparkle
World," which invokes Mandela's dream of education as emancipation; and Charles Lipanda Mahigwe's stirring "Not My First Choice, But My Last Option," whose measured cadences bring home the harrowing necessity of exile. There are countless more—each piece, a song sung from the heart of darkness and pain, yet so beautifully sung.
This collection is a reading experience that moves gently from despair to defiance, from the shattering sting of war to the delicate power of solidarity. The writers take you into the brutality that uproots families and the inventiveness of community movements like AYAP (African Youth Artistic Poetry), where young performers translate pain into protest and then ease you into glimmers of peace. Throughout, an acrostic here, a loop poem there—formal playfulness reminds us that artistry need not be sacrificed, even when subjects are grave.
You may arrive here seeking testimony, solace, or inspiration—or perhaps all three, but be prepared to have your assumptions unsettled. These poets write not as victims but as witnesses to injustice, endurance, and the belief that even the most fractured heart can still bring forth beauty. These poems press upon you, shape you, and then send you onward—to advocate, reflect, and listen better to someone else's story.Being A Refugee Was Not My First Choice, But My Last Option is a monument to survival, dignity, and creative resistance. I am awed by the thematic depth—from war and exile to identity, love, and peace—and the maturity of thought that emerges from these young writers. There is rawness here, yes, but also a quiet wisdom, as if grief and hardship have forged their own kind of genius. This collection is beyond lamentations: it is a vision—a bold, lyrical act of defiance and dreams.
Charles Lipanda Mahigwe, whose vision and leadership brought about this volume, is emblematic of the resilience this book embodies. His poetry and activism are a testimony that adversity does not have to stifle talent; it should reveal it. Alongside him stand dozens of authors—young, multilingual, culturally rich—proving that creativity persists even in exile.
This anthology is not a cry for pity but a call for recognition, justice, and humanity. It is a witness to systemic failures and personal triumphs. It is a challenge to stand, speak, and create. This is more than literature; it is a living archive of courage and an invitation to reimagine what it means to belong, to dream, and to heal.
P. M. Quinns
Editor & Fellow Poet
Nairobi, April 2025
1. CHARLES LIPANDA MAHIGWE
WOULD YOU STILL STAY OR GO AWAY?
Children cry bitterly
Cries and tears splash quickly
Parents confused in the anguish of dilemma
For more than millions of sounds of bombs crushing and pulling ears.
Buildings shed down dead bodies.
Western storms piled in lands of black, ready to spurt
Survivors still drowning in hatred and haste
Who will save these dying young souls from the active volcanoes?
Leaders fighting over the golden earth
Turning politics inPOEM1:
Would You Still Stay Or Go Away?
Charles Lipanda Mahigwe
Children cry bitterly
Cries and tears splash quickly
Parents confused in the anguish of dilemma
For more than millions of sounds of bombs crushing and pulling ears.
Buildings shed down dead bodies.
Western storms piled in lands of black, ready to spurt
Survivors still drowning in hatred and haste
Who will save these dying young souls from the active volcanoes?
Leaders fighting over the golden earth
Turning politics into winds
Pushing away the minors to the edges of a scarce world
Would you still stay at home
After your parents are beheaded
For having farms and cattle?
Or would you run away
Seeking for safe woods
Where serpents and beasts do not bite but sleep?
Would you still stay at home
After a huge number of girls are raped in a two-meter room
But you solely survived
Or would you flee to seek refuge
Where food is a needle in the sand?
Where water is the rain in the desert
Where clothing is like education in Dzaleka
Where peace reigns
We left home, not willingly
But after being forced.
Now, would you still stay
Or go away?
2. RUTH TAKONDWA
A REFUGEE GIRL
To be called the same name
is not a problem
but how to use it
that is a problem.
I am indeed a refugee
and never run away from that name
but
the way you treat me like a slave
becomes a problem
Is being born a crime?
How about being born as a girl child?
You have turned our breasts into toys
You have changed our vaginas into shoes
you use us any time,
you use us any time
you sex us any time
How do you feel when you do such things?
How can't you imagine if it were you?
Would you allow me to do the things you do?
How would you feel?
Why don't you have humanity?
How do you feel
when you destroy somebody's life?
every day
innocent tears roll down,
Do you ask yourself
If we were born to suffer?
Are we not like them?
if you could know
our mission, vision, ambition
you would not have done this.
3. SALVADOR CAP BIC
I WANNA SING A SONG
I wanna write a song
A song that everyone will hear
Not too shabby or happy
The one that demonstrates calamities
And imitates melancholy
But in the end
Hope
The one that specifies species according to their places
The one that is a lullaby for everyone
I wanna write a song that will make me feel shy when singing it
The one that will make my voice sound like soprano, yet it is a base
I wanna write and sing a song that will make me feel like an apple being munched because every time I write and try to sing
My voice always brings me down, but this time
This time
I’m writing and singing with my voice, which is deeper, like a lion roaring on a mic, and no one wants to hear it.
I wanna sing with my voice that goes harder on the mic, even louder than the beat.
For I will not just be singing but passing the message
I wanna write and sing a song about peace that has been searched everywhere
Even archaeologists have never found it
I wanna write and sing a song about love
How it is tough to lose the ones that you have
I wanna write and sing a song about orphans
I wanna tell them that
Life knows you as a person and not as an orphan
Life does not know your happiness or your sadness
Life has no addition nor remainder
So get up and start hustling
Erase your tears, store your lamentations in the bin
Stop complaining
And stop asking yourself these questions
Why me?
I wanna write and sing a song about wars
How it is turning wealthy beings into refugees
Leaving their homes forcibly
Having nightmares in the daylight
Tears of sorrow for their loved ones skid on their cheeks now and then
Leaving with worries that someone must be hunting them down
I wanna sing my anthem
For I am tired of yours
For you sing the anthem, and your anthem says
Peace shall rule
But discrimination and war have never ended
You call yourselves Republicans and Democrats
Yet your government is a monarchy
So I wanna sing my own song
My own anthem, in my own words
For I have seen how a wolf wears a man’s skin and walks in daylight
I have seen how nomads rose from the Stone Age to the Iron Age, from rural to urban, and made their settlements
How the world is crumbling and losing its myths
How war and discrimination invaded the world and took their lives
The lives of my loved ones
My legends, I mean.
I have seen
How politics is now ruling the world instead of a president
And every event I witness
Reaches my toes and starts rising like vapor to my mouth and bounces, then goes back to my toes
And I remain like a dog barking,
signaling that something is wrong
But nobody cares
And no one is aware
So I wanna write and sing a song that will tell the world
We are still living the same life of slavery.
Prepared by Angela Kosta, journalist, poet, essayist, publisher, literary critic, editor, translator, promoter
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