Many will tell you that definition is
everything, but the question is, to what question or thought? Often we get
mixed up, in certain moments of our discussions when we find that what we are
talking about, we even have not defined it to the audience, but we jumped on
the bandwagon because it was fun then to do so, but to what destination not
sure, what intention and why in the first place get involved into something you
are not sure of on how it will end.
The big million dollar question we would
like to embrace in this discussion is all about who is an African? Many will
say many things of who an African is and who is not. Even will enter into
controversies to try to define an African in their terms of what they have
read, seen on the documentary, or hearsay, or simply seen someone black and the
conclusion and temptation that follows is s/he is an African.
Let’s get back to the speech made by
Thabo Mbeki the former president of South Africa entitled: "I am An
African" in 2017. It's a speech that stretches far back into African
history. Today, amidst lived challenges of racism, tribalism, tribalism which
has come to gain another name of exaggerated ethnicity, sexism, patriarchy, and
political prostitution, we need to get back to who we are. This is what Mbeki would
call a “rebirth”.
I am an African because my heart beats
with Africa’s. What does this all mean? A heart is the center of all, emotions,
sentiments, feelings, and belonging. The heart in this context becomes the body
software app where the CPU of a being is found. Once that system fails, then we
are talking of many other things far from life but death. Being an African is
all about the inner person of who one is. Some don't count the color of skin
but the love Africans, the help Africans, contribute towards developing Africa
and are married to Africans. Can we call them Africans? That is sentimental and
emotional gratification, if there are wars, disease breakouts, difficulties
beyond their control can they remain in Africa? That is where the difference
is.
Getting married to an African doesn't make you an African either, you have
just come to accept to get married to another culture and tradition, and two
cultures marry each other and co-exist. You will remain white and the other
will remain black. The challenge comes when an African wants to change his or
her color to become like the one who has married her. That is what we call
manipulation of the mind, what we have come to know in many names as
whitewashing the mind of the other.
I am an African because my mind is
engaged by Africa. Most Africans have this temptation of disengaging themselves
so fast amidst the economic, political and societal challenges, they look for
short cuts and forget to enter into the heart of the challenge. If we engage
ourselves in that which is eating us, we can’t give up, we can’t forget where
we are coming from, we need to hold on to the nob of that challenge. This can
be better said than done. There are issues which inform us that we are not so
much engaged in Africa: wars, rebellions, terrorism, and exploitation of
natural resources, emigration, corruption, killings, modern slavery and so
forth.
These are issues Africans have to get engaged in to find an African
solution, with the help of the international bodies we can't be isolated in our
very selves. In the process of doing so, we never lose the identity of who we
are. We discuss, deliberate, reach a consensus that with a full engagement on
Africa not on some western defined solutions tailored for Africa. An African is
one who knows where his shoe presses hard, not what shoe he needs to buy, that
is the difference that is the leitmotif of an African engagement.
I am African because my heart is at home
in Africa. As the saying goes "feeling at home or being at home"…one has
to have a sense of belonging that is where you come from, you can't run away
from your shadow, it will always accompany you wherever you go. Some think and
pray, the day I will leave Africa I will not come back. That kind of prayer is
backward and archaic. You can't get into a home you are not born in and claim
the right of staying there as if you are the owner.
However much you change
your accent, you will always remain an African, however much you change your
color, and you still will have some mark on you to prove that you are an
African. The interesting with this kind of drama is that you can't change your
DNA, blood group, the intermarriage, and mixture of the water and blood will
always produce an African gene in it. So why bother to change what you can't
change, you have to just accept the difference and live and learn. This is what
we call having a soul at home in Africa.
Today we find ourselves in situations
not ours in the making but created by others with the help of our brothers and
sisters, a situation where our cheeks are flowing with tears. He who forgets
where he comes from, becomes a slave of the world and his circumstances, like a
prodigal son, if we don't get back to our senses, value of elders and respect
of culture, sense of prayer we shall always be turned around and around and
what a dizziness we shall find ourselves in. We need to recreate an African
dance, songs, poems, plays, languages, traditions hence becoming synchronized
heart and soul.
Looking at African clouds, they look
grey, full of fumes, burnings, and dusty not because there is an activity of
farming, or clearing the land for agriculture. No!!! the clouds are so because
there is someone exploiting the natural resources, there is a war going on in
one part of the continent, there is someone literally burning the natural
forests because the big companies want to invest in big firms, or there is a
Chinese firm constructing a road and once they discover minerals the soil is
exported abroad for study.
African is simply on the receiving end, even those
who say that the African continent is poor, they very well know why they say
so, to disengage us from Africa. They will do all sorts of things to make
Africans look richer than themselves but their target is far from that. Why do
they not dress in their ties when they come to Africa? Have you ever asked
yourself that question may be thought to think about it? This robbing can't be
done without Africans themselves.
Africans have learned the art of corruption
and swindling money got from these natural resources to be kept in western
banks what we call shore banks like Switzerland, the Panama papers, Africans
who stink rich due to robbery and gaining from corruption. The riches which are
in Congo its only God who knows, even the Russians have a private army to
protect their interests in Congo. Who can talk against that, you will be
silenced forever, or they will buy you to keep quiet…we have many who have been
bought and now they are dying of constipation and cancers in Europe, sons, and
daughters of Africa who sold their motherland to robbers.
Most African families are running out of
Africa to Europe and many are sinking to death in millions in the deep seas,
coming closer to those who were exported to the Caribbean’s and Brazil as
slaves, tortured to the last bit of the soul, the consequences can be seen and
witnessed today in these places, where anything black is a reminder of their
savagery and a deep wound in their soul. They can’t run away from such evil, it’s
tainted into their mind and generation to come.
Africa has turned out to be market
research for china, her sons have been so corrupt such that they sign contracts
with Chinese without knowing the Chinese language. The Kung-Fu style of
trickery that can't be reached instead of uplifting Africa, her sons and
daughters have auctioned Africa. This we can see in most African countries
selling maize on roadsides, distilling local brews and walking with sleepers in
African streets selling items as Africans. Our African sisters have become
strategic partners in producing children who look something beyond Africans,
close to Asians and yet are abandoned and not taken care off, causing another
pain on Africa.
Africa is living in the world shadow of
development, technology, and advancements, unless we claim our future, become
responsible and ardent sons and daughters, we are turning into slavery
continent who work, sweat and die sweating in the deep holes and caves of mines
for the Chinese yet get back to sleeping on mats and animal skins in
grass-thatched huts with nothing to show for it.
The power of imagination should make
young Africans with mentioned qualities to dream big, inhabit a memory that is
sharp and refreshed. An African in 2019 is not an African of 1856, or 1964, but
a truly endowed son and daughter of the soil. This being sensitive,
open-minded, dialogical, reconcilable, and fully aware of his surroundings and
who cares for his environment before his own destroy him of not keenly cared
for. It's like returning to a good book. You have to start reading it from the
end in the picture to get the gist of the reading.
Toni Morrison depicts this from her book
entitled “Beloved” when she drives the point home of romance in a way that
captivates and makes one love the whole picture of romance as ought to be. She
picks up a story of a young man and lady who fall in love, run through the
plantation, and find themselves in the open field, and according to them,
nobody is seeing them and romantically get involved. Toni invites us to imagine
the scenario of that Romance: The sound of maize leaves, the maize cob being
peeled off and the seeds prinked and white liquid splashing out. There you can
feel what the lads are getting involved in…
This is a powerful image that
captures romantically. It is not about touching a female body, putting your
legs everywhere that can be done termed as infatuation, but a mature man and
woman to go beyond to see what lies beyond the eyes that brighten, shades,
light and fears from far that is a contemplative imagination. That is what we
need when we get involved in imagining.
We need to relearn on how to fix our
problems as Africans. Today's evil seems to be glorified and worshipped. This
we can witness in the way African lives are handled and treated, as that of
animals without rights, but even animals in the western world are adored and
treated better than African lives, a deplorable scenario and evil axis of
exploitation yet we still love to go to Europe. Goodness doesn’t have a
language, knowledge will always be a search, quest for perfection. Acquisition
of knowledge is how to get there.
We need to enter into the world of
connectography, a straight line of thought that should produce lightning in the
so-called Dark Continent, or a continent formed in a question mark tag. We need
to create an imaginative resistance to our weakness and evil. We need to
develop a language, this language should be powerful against neo-colonialism,
oppression, exaggerated ethnicity. Sometimes African women are being turned
into sexual objects erasing themselves to lose themselves in the wealth of
Europe in the name of better living: prostitution, drug trafficking,
clandestine trade and transporters of cocaine and drugs on international
routes.
Africans have turned into trade, like
the slave trade was all about money, labor and wealth for the west. Today emigrants
have turned into money business nothing else with someone across the deep
waters to be wired his money as a business consultant, traded on the market
stock exchange of the deep seas. African can either be the center of
civilization or periphery of death and destruction. This will be real when
there is a meaningful education, not illiteracy, mediocrity and ignorance. It's
not about what I always thought I wanted to be, but going out of myself and to
live I have to die, to that which carries value, not just to die.
This will be
a result of making the self-real and more myself. People who know nothing of
God and whose lives are centered on themselves, imagine that they can only find
themselves by asserting their desires and ambitions and appetites in a struggle
with the rest of the world. They try to become real by imposing themselves on
others people, by appropriating for themselves some share of the limited supply
of created goods and the other men who have less than they, or nothing at all.
They can only conceive one way of becoming: cutting themselves off from other
people and building a barrier of contrast and distinction between themselves
and other men. As an African, I will never be able to find myself if I isolate
myself from the rest of mankind as if I were a different kind of being.
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