Rise Africa, Decolonize Yourself.

Africa. She is a mother to many of us reading this. She is the mother of over fifty children. If we were to be in the old days, she would be praised far and wide for her fertility and potential. In fact, her praises could have transcended plains and mountains.

I don’t mean that Africa has not carved herself those great praises today, nay. Africa is the maiden whose attention is sought far and wide still. Se is beautiful and embodies what any young warrior could be looking for as a strength in pillar to stand by his side for support.

But this maiden doesn’t know that she is worthy more than anything the warriors can equate her. She has forgotten that she is the mother of children with potential to make her the envy of all other queens across borders. She has thousands of words to describe her beauty and glamour. Simply said, she is the matriarch.

But some people have looked at her, Africa, as the beauty without brains. In equal measure have her children tended to agree with the guys standing on the cliff that their mother could be a case of beauty that overrides sensibility. Why have they forgotten that they carry her genes and that if anything awful could be said of their mother, it is said to them as well.

Our lovely continent has been described as a rich land. In terms of flora and fauna, we can boast to have a huge variety. Caution though that that may be developing into a mythology with each passing day because we don’t seem to care that in that plenty biodiversity is where we draw our identity.

Wait a minute, I said of identity. We need to rise brothers and sister. We need to rise mama. When visitors come to our homeland, they go sightseeing and enjoying our wild parks. They ‘discover’ what we have known all along but never documented and owned.

One such is the discovery that Lions are generally nocturnal animals. We have lived with these lions for a long time and have observed that they are not commonly active during the day. We are also pretty aware that at night they can roam freely and that even in the past, they stole our animals.

The discovery that Lions, one of our signature identifications tools, are nocturnal has ended up being the description of who we are. The woman with massive potential but who sleeps all day long. Uniquely and unlike her kin, nocturnal animals, she still sleeps through the night. In other she is still always asleep. Wake up Africa, rise up.

Years have gone, and we are still sleeping. We gained independence physically yet chained ourselves to the psychological chains of our colonizers. By now we could have forgotten about the colonization had we woken up and decided to liberate ourselves fully.

So, today we are beautiful yet suppressing the liberties of our very own. Because the colonizers came and empowered us to perpetrate the rights of our very own so that they could not progress for easier rulership, they left us chained to the same principles which see us make policies and rules strict for the local businessman to stop in his/her business so that we can create market for the foreign products.

We call for meeting to discuss why we have massive trade imbalances among us and our foreign brothers. In those meeting we sit on chairs brought from abroad, eat and drink foods that are imported from abroad, come in suits tailored abroad and the only thing perhaps we fully own is the local environment.

Once we are done with the meetings, we promise to do something about the situation. The next day a young innovative African person comes up with a way to make one or two standard things locally. The same day we pass a policy that introduces new taxes. The next time we meet to look at our numbers we wonder what happened that increased the imbalances in our trade especially in reduced exports.

My people rise up. Decolonize your minds. It is enough that you have hated yourself long enough. Our young women, it is enough that you are black and by that you are very beautiful. The social morass of you being turned into objects of obsession declines the principles of feminity we grew with.

Our young men, it is enough that you are black and strong. You were taken up as slaves and used the coveted power within you to build the world in foreign dominions. It is now time for your mother to be proud of the energetic men she gave birth to. Stand up, stand up for her, protect her.

Let’s change the mindset of creating employees as we had been initiated and understand that it is now that we need more creators than before. We should be sound enough also to know that it is the social capital that we have the most and that that is what we losing at a rapid rate.

Mama Africa, make home great for us so that we can stay. When we wake up and leave home to go make the best of ourselves out there, don’t blame us. We had to do what we were best trained to do. If we are staying, make sure you support us.

Just like any social organization, support is very important. Once an individual feels unappreciated and unsupported, they leave to where they feel they belong. As you sleep, it is midday elsewhere mama. As you rise up, its already evening somewhere else.

But mama Africa, just rise up. Most importantly decolonize yourself. And keep going. Never stop moving; in other words, always remember that waking up is the most important thing you can ever do to yourself. Our hopes are on you Mama, don’t let us down.

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