Social Scientist.

SOCIAL SCIENTIST

   Try telling three dozen African females
   that God didn't create us, we created God,
   he tells the staff room, and of course,
   they've never heard of Marx, he sneers,
   as he strides to his class.

   Ideas, he shouts; family, state, religion,
   socially constructed. We're talking positivism,
   determinism, sense-data.
   He struts, half crouches and spins back
   to the board, his marker slashing across it,
   using it as a tabula rasa analogy of man.

   He rolls his eyes when a student slides in,
   his bellowing heard two departments away
   as he grabs the register to demand his name.
   Adam, the youth stutters.
   But he needs an Acheampong, Kojali,
   Abegonde or Okoti,
   not a Christianized forename
   of ubiquitous Catholicism.

   The latecomer walks to the back of the room,
   sits next to a girl with an apple on her desk.
   The others look down,
   hiding their grins.

Ken Champion was born in London's East End and now lives in Essex. He lectures in sociology and has published widely in the UK. He is the author of African Time & Other Poems (tall-lighthouse P, 2002).