Growing up speaking English with a Sesotho accent was sometimes a struggle, a few times we were judged for not being African enough, accused of not wanting to be African, too much judgement from people of the same continent. Surely we could find a reason to love, to stop the hate.
It bugged me sometimes, I won’t lie. Until I heard Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame speak at a conference, I was fully emancipated when he reminded us (people from different parts of Africa) that most of us were colonised by different colonist’s, and as a result we have adopted different ways of living, our respective cultures’ have been diluted. His thing, was that to move forward, it didn’t make any sense to continue fighting each other, trying to prove who is more African that the other, he said it didn’t matter who spoke with what accent, who knew which languages, who was male or female…what we ought to do was to take what we have, and collectively move forward.
So, Africa, your eclecticism, nuances, all these crazy differences, they make you beautiful!
“Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds” –Marcus Garvey
#HappyAfricaDay #Africa #25May2018
