Let’s be done with the gays and their supporters and haters
for a while. Let’s think Africa. This confusing land, the concept of Africa and
see it as many see it. When we say this or that is Un-African do we mean that……..?
Africa is an inviolate space that we ran to, it turns to an abstracted
blanket that rivets our sentimental certainty about something trite - in that
space of joining hands and condemning differences Africa becomes a seamless
canvas that links the continent into one thing- the same thing- same mores,
same belief, same attitude almost the same mental frame and approach to
everything. Africa becomes the ritualized strokes of a painters brush,
uniformly same color. No nuances. No disconnect. Mandela is Mugabe and Mugabe
is Mandela. Our bad and our good all work for the better of our land…our mama
land.
2.
2.
Africa is the end of imagination. What we can’t understand,
what we don’t want to understand. Anything that bursts the bubbles of our “African”
beliefs and interests (whatever those may be) must be foreign, from out there
in the world, the ugly world that is out there in the East, the orient, the
West, America, Europe. We pull whole continents into our simple individualistic
and differing worlds. We carry the continent with such simple beliefs that if
me and my friends, my family and my community don’t practice and believe in
this or that other ish then it is out-African. We will coin terms to show how
it is from far off. From an alien’s nest-Other places.
3.
Mother Africa- mother land is not a land anymore, not a geo-region anymore but an idea. An Idea that is too simple and basic in its outset that it lacks originality and the ability to mutate into something complex. Africa becomes the concept of aping others, copying and pasting others…other civilizations. It becomes hard to believe in this deep held idea of Africa that we can have home grown murk, homemade sin, which can make the worst of foreign murk and sin look like child’s play. In that idea-Afrique an African becomes a sinless deaf, blind, dumb holiness and in Culture’s word ‘Humble people who see no evil, hear no evil and do no evil’…I’m an humble African!!
4.
Africa is a linkage to our past- to our ancestors, it is an identity and when some people embrace anything that is new and modernly “imported” then this becomes a betrayal of its people, the violation of a sentimental purity. Defiling Africa as handed down by our pious, perfect past and ancestors. We benumb ourselves to the new generation Africa holding the cultures in contempt. We fail to acknowledge the digital post modern Cities and problems that African’s are part of. When I hear this is un-African then I hear; - I’m resistant to change, I wear conservatism on me and wish to pass it to my future progeny like an important heirloom.
5.
Africa becomes hubris, moral superiority, the saint in a morass filled world, a sinful, ungodly, shetani run world. We are holding on to a past fading fast, a fire whose warmth and heat is slowly ebbing out, a past long gone – refusing to believe that the adolescent stroking his penis in front of the mirror with a picture of a beautiful face- African, American or a news paper clipping of a photo shopped face was not made in Africa or that “queer” flamboyance by that saloon working sassy man- or the trans-gender boy-girl calling hotels asking them to accommodate people whose sexuality is not clear cut into male or female but an intersection of both…people like him/her.
3.
Mother Africa- mother land is not a land anymore, not a geo-region anymore but an idea. An Idea that is too simple and basic in its outset that it lacks originality and the ability to mutate into something complex. Africa becomes the concept of aping others, copying and pasting others…other civilizations. It becomes hard to believe in this deep held idea of Africa that we can have home grown murk, homemade sin, which can make the worst of foreign murk and sin look like child’s play. In that idea-Afrique an African becomes a sinless deaf, blind, dumb holiness and in Culture’s word ‘Humble people who see no evil, hear no evil and do no evil’…I’m an humble African!!
4.
Africa is a linkage to our past- to our ancestors, it is an identity and when some people embrace anything that is new and modernly “imported” then this becomes a betrayal of its people, the violation of a sentimental purity. Defiling Africa as handed down by our pious, perfect past and ancestors. We benumb ourselves to the new generation Africa holding the cultures in contempt. We fail to acknowledge the digital post modern Cities and problems that African’s are part of. When I hear this is un-African then I hear; - I’m resistant to change, I wear conservatism on me and wish to pass it to my future progeny like an important heirloom.
5.
Africa becomes hubris, moral superiority, the saint in a morass filled world, a sinful, ungodly, shetani run world. We are holding on to a past fading fast, a fire whose warmth and heat is slowly ebbing out, a past long gone – refusing to believe that the adolescent stroking his penis in front of the mirror with a picture of a beautiful face- African, American or a news paper clipping of a photo shopped face was not made in Africa or that “queer” flamboyance by that saloon working sassy man- or the trans-gender boy-girl calling hotels asking them to accommodate people whose sexuality is not clear cut into male or female but an intersection of both…people like him/her.
I wish I could lift my clenched fist, face the setting sun,
set my jaws and cry out to “mama Africa”- fight back the tears and say “they
will try violating you, mama- But I am here…I will die first”
The world is what it is. No point detaching oneself and
acting morally superior. Dear Young African, next time before lapsing into
those un-African litanies kindly consider that Africa is so disconnected. The
uniformity that you are looking for is non-existent.
Whatever limits of your imaginative faculties please try
removing yourself from the multitudes, instead of drawing them into your own
realm of fetishes. Whatever your quirky fanatism or deeply guarded beliefs kindly
stop invoking such un-resurrect words as Culture, African purity.
