My name is Matadi Kikunga, originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly known as Zaire. My journey, my love and my passion is poetry. I began writing poetry during the summer of 1997, exposing myself to the Slave Songs of the United States, a collection of Old Negro Spiritual songs by William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware and Lucy McKim Garrison. Although the Old Negro Spiritual songs represented and reflected the religious struggles of the indigenous African slaves, it also served as a demonstration of protest against the ideological driven and assimilation to the white American culture. Subsequently, during this period in my life I discovered my desire and passion for Pan-Africanism and started to focus my writings on the greatest Diaspora to ever befall mankind, the African Holocaust. Sadly the misery of the African people is not only confined to European Colonialism and other external forces but today we also witness in Darfur how Africans themselves are capable of committing the worst kinds of human atrocities with impunity amongst themselves.

My poetry speaks for those across the world that render a life immersed in a sense of hopelessness, oppression of their basic fundamental rights, my words speak for the voiceless wanders of those stricken in the plights of suffering in Third world countries, it also speaks domestically to those entrapped in the misunderstanding of their own inconceivable notions that what separates us is greater than what keeps us all together. My poetry isn't limited by boundaries nor follows a path that limits one's own understanding of his own complexities and complicated world but it transforms and transcends personal experiences and human history from one individual to another because it's the human condition of the people that matters to God the most, not the conformities of life in which we all yearn for.

So as you read my poetry, always remember, everything I write is written in love and as you interpret and decipher my words, the message you extrapolate is the meaning I intended you to receive. That's the beauty of poetry, its common universal language speaks and connects like music, it inspires, it can be enjoyed in the midst of good company and it can definitely touch ones heart and bring one to a place they never knew existed or envisioned. Welcome to my soul, my life story, my Democratic Republic of the Congo.  Shalom