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Tuesday, November 5, 2024

MY AFRICA

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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).

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