BREAK THE DESIGN

They drew the map before they drew the border,

Sold us the mirror, then they sold us the order.

Break the design.

Seventy-four, a memo moved the weather,

Population math dressed up as clever.

Nigeria pumping while the ledger stayed foreign,

Colombia bleeding green for the warring.

India counted, quota on the cradle,

Ethiopia harvest shipped off the table.

They call it aid when the taking is polite,

Call it a study when they study the bite.

Blueprint printed in an office with a view,

Every line item was a person like you.

Extraction ain't a season, it's a schedule,

Friction manufactured, then they sell you the referee too.

I read the footnotes till my eyes went red,

History ain't dead, it just changed its letterhead.

So I write it plain for the ones coming after:

The design is a document — and paper can be shattered.

Break the design, reclaim the mind,

Ancestral unity, remember the blood.

Break the design, they drew the line,

We erase it with the rhythm and the love.

To the suit with the seal and the borrowed cologne,

You govern a people from somebody's phone.

You sign what they fax, you smile for the lens,

Then you jail your own cousins to keep your dividends.

Master and puppet, the strings look like ties,

Ribbon-cutting scissors cut nothing but lies.

Your palace got power while the clinic got prayer,

Your children got London, our children got fare.

You learned the whole language but forgot the word 'we',

Called the elders backward, called the auction a fee.

I ain't cursing you, cousin, I'm calling you home,

A throne built on rental is never your own.

Cut the string once and the ceiling comes down,

But you'd rather be a footnote than a name in the town.

History keeps receipts, it never forgets,

And the blood keeps a ledger the empire can't edit.

Marley in the speaker, Garvey in the stride,

Lumumba in the letter, Nkrumah in the tide.

Four blueprints they buried, we dug up the plan —

Unbroken lineage, unbroken man.

Now here's the counter, no permission required,

Teach the child the map that the empire retired.

Lagos to Bogotá, Delhi to Addis,

Same extraction pattern, so the answer is practice.

Cooperative money, cooperative land,

Language in the mouth of the grandbaby's hand.

Feed the archive, film the elder, press record,

Culture is the treaty that we sign with our word.

Not a riot, a rebuild, brick over brick,

Not a slogan, a system, and we're building it quick.

Take the mind back first, everything follows the mind,

You can't chain a people who refuse the design.

So the drums keep talking in a code they can't crack,

Every diaspora exile is a road leading back.

Write it on the wall where the children can see:

The blood remembers what the paper can't be.