By Jerry Saccoh Kai-Lewis
“Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories”…Amílcar Cabral (1924 – 1973)
My Africa is west. It is a land of great contrasts, of a stolen and forgotten past, a present of stark realities, of unimaginable beauty, hope in adversity, and a future of possibilities if taken by the horn. This is the land of Songhai, of Timbuktu and Gao of Mali, of Ghana, Nok and Ife, of Sebeh Kai, Bai Bureh. This is where heaven meets earth, where men fought with gods and won, and the gods blessed the soil with jewels. This is the land of Mansa Musa, Askia Mohammad, Sunni Ali, and Abubakari. It is the land of independence and liberty, where the seekers of liberty and wisdom stole the freedom of those they met on the ground. This is home to Nkrumah, Diop, Cabral, Toure (Samory and Sekou), Senghor, Du Bois and Chinweizu to name but a few.
But ask any of the current crop of West Africans about these people, they would ask you a rhetorical question. In my Africa there is no more culture or custom. You don’t even see them on TV, where there is barely any local content. So, what are the kids learning about our past? Ask them about this and they will tell you that they are too busy sorting out the present.
My Africa is the lost generation…
Lost generation
No idea where you’re heading
No cares about or knowledge of your past
You were once warriors
Now you are a nation of hard-knock lifers
Quick to pull a blade, bottle or knife
Quicker to buy a docket to make a case disappear day or night
Hmmm
How the mighty have fallen
From a height not too far from despair
To a place of shameless delights
My children smile with a bad taste
But lie with a straight face
Too caught up in the struggle to impress
In a state of undress, used clothes and bad grades
To notice their sad state of affairs
In a twilight zone trying to find their way home with a broken homing device
They look for their rights but it’s a dead end
So they copy the wrongs
And find themselves in a spaced out reality of hunger pangs
They know the football games, names and scores
But not the score on what is happening on their doorsteps and backyards
But it’s written on their faces
Through hard times and empty dinner plates
So my daughter is now coming home late
It’s hard for her to think straight hungry
So she finds the nearest guy that promises her a plate or money
Then leave her knocked up or sick
And left to look after the seed
You see
Her education came in a crooked way
Too many schools and teachers
But not enough professionals giving the lessons in our homes and schools
So the kids can think straight
Now they make heroes out of
Dope dealing-scantily dressed-emaciated-doped up-alcoholic fiends they call celebrities
Trying to live the fictionalized reality of life imitating art
Moving in teams like they see on TV
So they are gangsters now?
Yeah right,
Now their future is bright
But the light comes from the flash of a loaded nine millimeter or a knife
So we’re holding up traffic in a funeral procession to Ascension Town or St. Francis.
To be exact, my Africa is Sierra Leone, is Liberia, where I was born and where my ancestors are from respectively. I would have loved to write you a piece of hope and the progress that’s measured by how well businesses are performing and how well the rich few eat. But my reality is based on the great need of the many, the community and how poorly they eat, if at all.
By right, my Africa should be the leaders in Africa in terms of development, progress, arts and sciences. But the reality is far from this truth. The Athens of West Africa which produced so many of the early teachers, doctors, lawyers, accountants, native missionaries and administrators for the entire region is now a place where the paper our diplomas are printed on is worth more than the education received.
This is where people buy their education from teachers, lecturers and professors who are willing accomplices, sometimes even the solicitors, of such an unholy enterprise. This is a place where lecturers don’t publish but copy published materials, then sell them to students as pamphlets. Our primary and secondary school students don’t have textbooks, but study from notes taken in class. How well these students take notes is a matter of grave concern.
This is the land where we used to speak the Queen’s English. We spoke better English than the English yet today college students and lecturers can barely speak correct English or write it. Today, college students pay people to write their dissertations and theses or cut and paste from online publications. Asking primary, secondary school and college students to spell or pronounce simple words or do simple calculations is a difficult task. Today, if you speak English (not our language, but still the language of education and the textbooks we read) in public, people will say you are trying to be different, think you are better than them or scoff at you as being a showoff.
How did we get to this state of affairs? There are two main reasons for this. First, as a result of the continued deteriorating economic situation, thousands of educators have left for greener pastures in the region, mainly to Gambia, Ghana, and Nigeria, on the continent, and further afield. The wars didn’t help either as the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness led most of the remaining few to leave. There is certainly no discounting the hundreds of thousands more, potential educators and contributors to the development agenda, who left for the same reasons. Today, the lack of space at government schools to educate a growing population has led our governments to drop the standards on who could teach, where schools are situated, and the number of students per class.
There is a school on every corner or backyard with barely any space for students to walk or play. Everybody is now an educator providing services meant to be in the purview of the government and qualified teachers trained in the science of teaching. The second reason for this state of emergency (as it truly is because we know from the Western experience and from countries like Botswana, Cape Verde, China, Cuba, Ghana, Venezuela, and many more, that education is a way to lift people out of poverty and to aid in the development process) is that African governments don’t appreciate educators and do nothing to aid research. They fear that seasoned and dedicated educators and researchers will expose their shortcomings so they don’t encourage them.
Since Fourah Bay College and the University of Liberia were founded in the early and mid-1800s in Freetown and Monrovia respectively, not much has been done in the way of more universities and colleges. For this reason, our students don’t have an interest in pursuing education, especially in the arts and social sciences. The ones who have such degrees work for nongovernmental agencies and international research organizations for a pittance instead of doing their social duties to teach and call our leaders to order by critiquing and exposing public inadequacies.
Our children love their teachers. Here, teachers are truly revered. Sadly, we do not have enough qualified teachers. And where we do, they are so focused on earning a living wage that they sell grades to meet that need because they are not paid well. My Africa is a land of great wealth where the overwhelming majority is poor, poorly educated and susceptible to die from treatable diseases; a land where people dress and look good wearing secondhand clothes but with empty pockets and barely any food at home. It is a land of great ignorance, for the leaders like it so. A place where people would tell you that fruits can cause malaria and that cassava leaves can cause typhoid. This is a place where people are fearful of each other and believe that witches rule the day and night. My Africa is a place where people believe everything is a lie because they have been lied to for so long and live a life of lie where things are very bad but people pretend ‘it’s all good’. This is a land where unsanitary practices are not frowned upon, where people fall sick to diseases from such practices so much so that there are pharmacies on every corner, but you won’t find one pharmacist in sight. It is a land where, as children learn from their parents and community, we have learnt from our leaders that to be corrupt is the only way to move ahead here. If a man serves in public office and doesn’t come out rich at the end of his tenure, he is considered a fool: ‘The money was there for the taking but he didn’t take it!’ My Africa is the land where the rich and elected leaders exploit the poor and the poor exploit each other; a land where everything has a price, especially the law and education.
It’s as if we are deaf, dumb and blind…
What do you call a rich nation
Where the overwhelming majority is poor
Poorly educated and susceptible to die from treatable diseases?
DEAF DUMB AND BLIND
What do you call a nation of laws
Where the law is broken with impunity
By the same people entrusted to uphold and enforce the law?
DEAF DUMB AND BLIND
What do you call a nation known for lies and corruption
Where disorder is the order of the day
Where mobs dispense justice far away from the High Court or Temple of Justice?
DEAF DUMB AND BLIND
What do you call a nation
Whose leaders make deals
With their pockets and stomachs in mind
While the needs and interests of the people take the backseat?
DEAF DUMB AND BLIND
What do you call a nation
Where extractive deals are made
Where foreign companies get a larger percentage share than the country
Where land is leased to foreign countries
To grow food for their citizens
While landowners can’t feed theirs
And always seeking handouts to do so?
DEAF DUMB AND BLIND
What do you call nations
Where after 63 and 177 years of underdevelopment
Where after 63 and 177 years of successive governments of
Crooks, thieves, leeches, and fools
Keep voting in leaders cut from the same cloth?
DEAF DUMB AND BLIND
What do you call a nation
Who doesn’t stand up to its leaders
Who don’t call them to order or book
Either through civil unrest, protest or the ballot box
Who sit down quietly
While being robbed in broad daylight?
DEAF DUMB AND BLIND
What do you call a nation
Where people vote along tribal lines and not political platforms
Where political platforms are built on the backs of the people
And become castles in the sands of time?
DEAF DUMB AND BLIND
What do you call a nation
Where effective public administrators (Broh)
Are forced out of office
By a miss-poorly-and-uneducated mob screaming for justice?
DEAF DUMB AND BLIND
What do you call a nation
Where everything has a price
Where your rights can turn to wrong
If the price is right?
DEAF DUMB AND BLIND
What do you call a nation
Where everybody wants to get rich
But hard work is not preached
Where everybody wants to go to America
“Or anywhere else but here”
And leave the work to be done here
In the hands of those responsible for our underdevelopment?
DEAF DUMB AND BLIND
What do you call a nation
Where you can’t tell the difference
Between a pastor, imam, government minister, teacher, police officer and a thief?
DEAF DUMB AND BLIND
What do you call a nation
Where the youth know more about sports
Sports heroes and celebrities
Where they know more about get-rich-quick schemes
Than they do about life, health, their condition, books and school work?
DEAF DUMB AND BLIND
What do you call a nation
Where hope seems gone
Where the weak stay weak
And the strong and educated become pawns
In the hands of the rich few?
DEAF DUMB AND BLIND
What do you call a nation
Where things are bad
Very bad
But the people pretend or live like ‘it’s all good’
Where one can fail an exam but pay a teacher or professor to pass
Where parents pay principals and teachers
To pass their children to higher grades although they failed to pass the lower ones?
DEAF DUMB AND BLIND
What do you call a nation
Where teachers, police officers and other civil servants
Are paid a paltry sum not enough for a living wage
But are expected to do their work
While senators and representatives
Who don’t bring any development or jobs to their regions
Make an immoral sum when compared to the average citizen?
DEAF DUMB AND BLIND
What do you call a nation
Where women head more households than men
But are mysteriously missing or underrepresented in public leadership and offices?
DEAF DUMB AND BLIND
My Africa is a place of great delights to fill the senses. There is land in abundance; not only land, but fertile land. We have a saying that: “Wherever you throw a seed expect it to grow and produce.” Yet still we import a lot of our foodstuffs and textiles. You’ll find mangoes, plums, pineapples, nuts, and berries growing in such abundance that the fruits either rot on the trees or fall to the ground, and neglected long enough to become compost – yet we do not have factories converting these and many other fruits and vegetables into juice, or dried to be exported. Instead, they are imported from India and other countries. We have enough swamps and other wetlands to grow rice, but we depend on foreign aid to feed us. My Africa is a place of history, too much history. It is a history rich in its diversity. There are stories of revered kings and queens, empire builders, great craftsmen, mystic poets and educators, foreign invaders and settlers who orchestrated massive holocausts. There are great and majestic sceneries from white sandy beaches along the peninsulas to breathtaking mountains, hills, savannahs, deserts, and faunas to fill the imagination. Sadly, in my Africa, tourism and its promotion is a byword for failure and inefficiency in government enclaves. Cultural heritage sites are left in ruins and stand as great reminders of our material condition. My Africa is still a place of hope; a place where we are encouraged to dream and aim high. We are shown pictures of great leaders from the past. Sometimes they even show us pictures of current leaders. But no one will mention to you that most of them were exploiters who instituted systems of governance and business practices that still have us in the lurch, wretched of the earth in an eternal debt trap to Bretton Woods institutions. Yet still we hope. This hope leads us to become a nation of traders who trade in everything imaginable, even human lives, especially the young. There are not enough jobs so from one end of the cities to the other, you see our people engaged in some sort of trade. Every house has a business on the front porch; even the backyards are not spared. Our city streets have become very small because of petty traders occupying sidewalks and other parts of the roads. So now we walk where the cars are supposed to drive. Yet we hope and dream for a brighter future, a better day and leaders who pay attention to the needs of the people. This hope is all we have. But even with this hope life is still a drag.
For this reason, some wonder why dream when the reality in my Africa is so obvious…
They tell us to dream
They say a dream is the substance of life
They tell our children to dream
But how can they dream
When they can’t sleep
Up all night
Worried about how they’re
Gonna walk the hot streets With 100 Liberian dollar or 10 leones worth of market for their keep
If the children are our future
Then our future looks like
A poor and uneducated low wage earner
They tell our young men to dream
How can they dream
When they go to bed hungry
Because corrupt government officials
Steal the food out of their plates?
And after four miraculous years of
Staying in and finishing college
They either come home jobless
Or find themselves under bosses
Who are either sycophants
Despots
Old enough to retire
Unqualified for the position
Or all of the above
If the young men are our future
Then our future looks like
An old corrupt and despotic sycophant
Who is grossly unqualified for the position
And is antithetical to the future of Sierra Leone and Liberia
They tell our young women to dream
How can they
When all men dream of is sleeping with them
Get them pregnant
But have no plans to marry them
If the young women are our future
Then our future looks like
Our children’s future
They tell our elders to dream
But they don’t have time to dream
They worked and worried all their lives
For next to nothing
But still did nothing
Only to die broke and brokenhearted
And leave us their nightmares
And the mess they allowed to happen and continue
If the elders are our future
Then our future looks like
Hamburger Hill
Friday the 13th
Nightmare on Elm Street
Full Metal Jacket
Cry Freetown and
Blood Diamond
Our governments dream
They have dreams to stamp out corruption
To improve healthcare and education
To bring back the rule of law
To fix all the potholes on our roads
To have all the gutters in the country clean and running
To attract foreign direct investment
And to stimulate the national economy
Sadly
Successive governments have slept so much
They sleep walk
Not knowing whether they’re coming or going
If the governments are our future
Then our future looks like our past and present
I have a dream
That our children will grow up in homes
Where they’ll be allowed to be children
To play, laugh, and learn
Allowed to explore whatever
Their little clever minds tell them to
Without being abused
Deprived of liberty and freedom
Made to work on farms
Put on the streets to work
Or sacrificed to devils
For their selfish and lazy parents to succeed
I have a dream
That our young men will soar on wings like eagles
Into a perpetual sunset of possibilities
That they will take a hold of the political process
Be allowed to freely state their opinions
Encouraged to question the status quo
And where the need arises
To justly jail any and everyone
Who is a threat to life, liberty, progress, and the pursuit of happiness
I have a dream
That our young women will sit in boardrooms
As ivory pillars
That women will vote for other women
And that we will have successive governments
Headed by qualified women
They have
Under the harshest of conditions
Run our homes
Maybe if given the helm often
They’ll make a success out of these rich nations yet
I have a dream
That our elders will step out of the way and retire
To some farm far away from the government and business enclaves
For the past 63 and 177 years
All they’ve done is run these rich countries aground
We have no need for their corrupting inputs and influences
I have a dream
That governments will have platforms
And not use the backs of our people as such
That they will feed the people meat instead of bones
Give our people access into their dealings
That they will compete at developing the country
With successive governments
Surpassing the successes and achievements of previous governments
That our people will make a living wage
That education at all levels and health emergencies of any kind
Be free of charge
That we nationalize our economies and review every deal ever made by
This or previous governments
That any deals that is against the progress of Sierra Leone and Liberia
Or against the hopes and wishes of our national development
Be rendered null and void
I have a lot of dreams
I pray you have yours
And live your dreams
Walking them during the day
In closing, my Africa has the potential to be an envied state. But that state can only be achieved as one country – one nation, one people, one aim, one destiny, no matter where they are from, as long as they consider themselves Africans. We are a continent of shared customs, names and values – we do have others from elsewhere, but what are nations without immigrants who are assimilated? As a people, we have used the same material cultures in the same way wherever we found them on our journeys to people this great continent. We are one people. We are not different at all. We were once great. That greatness is achievable and surpass-able. Isn’t it interesting how our greatness was achieved when we were empires – a collective of peoples focused on a national agenda, like the Indians and the Chinese? If our leaders can put their selfish and other ambitions aside, we can become a country overnight. This is the only future for Africa, not pipedreams of how oil is going to transform our economies. Is it going to do for us what gold, bauxite, iron ore, rutile, chromite, diamonds, fruits, vegetables, etc. have not done for us? Let’s get real and face the facts – it won’t! Besides a federated and unified Africa, we will remain a continent of mostly failed, frail and broken states that are too blind in their poverty to see their realities…
Broken dreams and shattered lives
We front
But our lives are tattered pasts
Trying to look good
But the bad keeps coming up
They say they got our backs
But our butts keep hanging out
Thinking on us and life
Sometimes I think we’ve had enough of
Bad breaks and long waits
People looking at you with a long face
But like a bad taste in the mouth
They keep spitting us out
We keep searching for breaks
But keep getting a beat…
Down the road of forgotten pasts
Where we dwell on glories past
But the present looks a mess in a hat
You can only do tricks with that
We keep mixing and matching
The right visions in the wrong set of circumstances
That leaves us packing our belongings
To head in different directions
But running from the same things
To curtail our winters of discontent
In a broken up continent
Of poor people with nice clothes
Who drive big cars on bad roads
Who live in and around unsanitary abodes
We wanna copy the West
But our economies and moralities are a bad show
We’re now a basket case of aid recipients
Remittance kings and queens
Always with our hands out
Looking for a handout
We didn’t choose where we were born
But we can certainly choose where we’re heading.
“Seek ye first the political kingdom and all things shall be added unto you”…Kwame Nkrumah (1909 – 1972).