This poem aims to highlight some of the many challenges faced by African musicians living in London.

Inspired by the most amazing and talented Congolese guitarist Mbokaliya aka Burkina Faso

Laughing Man’s JazBlues –

Strong no stop no grown man from dying…’

He laughs between…a rhumba rhyme and a strum…

wiping my tears with his deep Africa laugh…

we pause – 

Mistake not his ungrammatical speech – for ignorance…

Drowning my discontent with his feisty, floating chords

He urges me to pick up the sax…

We hit Durban Road, all the way

to Edgeware via Kinshasa.

I hear – his lively chromatic scale

ascending all the way to the heavens –

A melodic eulogy, he says, for a black friend in a morgue in Croydon…

The one never minded by the Gap.

The one who lived an abstract life on the margins!

Along our jazzy conversations, we eat Cassava with our fingers…

He palm-rolls his in Pondu and fried fish from the church ladies…

Between cassava mouthfuls and restless fingers over the fretboard…

he finger-picks the strings, strumming a rhythm of life on the fringes…

A happy hustling man’s blues –

a simple man with a complicated life.

His was takeaway life – lived in a guitar case

And stowed away in a suitcase in an attic of a London ghetto…

B.K. Knight