A long time ago, when I was a mad woman, (not that am any less mad now). I wrote a very long crude political poem; of course the only way you can get the details is when you buy my book, (that is if it ever gets published in the first place). But I will give you a hint; it was titled the same as this article. Now the question is who are they? Am sure we all know them we see them everyday in all the cities of this planet, the rest of us are dirt and they are the birds that soar above the ground, we are not even fit for them to set their feet on.
As I wrote this I was watching a Kenyan programme referred to as the making of a nation. A very inspiring brief. Inspiring yet rather tragic, men considered animals because their skin was the color of coal, considered uneducated because they had never seen the inside of a western school, despite the fact that they had systems in place that educated their young and prepared them for every stage of life. uncivilized, because they did not speak English, despite the fact that they were eloquent in their languages which the intruders considered primitive. Some even had the audacity to say that the black man is not an intelligent being based on the evidence that bodies belonging to Africans had been dissected and the African brain had been found to be smaller as compared to other races and therefore they were intellectually inferior. Unfortunately for us this was so successfully ingrained that it has become like a gene passed on from one generation to the next. Africa though decades later liberated from colonial rule is still kneeling there in chains, chains of poverty and slavery, the only difference being that we have acquired a new cartel of slave owners including the ones we had before, and unfortunately, their skins are no different from ours.
I hear about freedom and justice, equality. Words that are thrown here and there carelessly, no one really comprehending their meaning, but our hearts soar when we hear them, fires are lit in our hearts and hope resurrects us from the darkest corners of despair. Was that not the dream of our forefathers when they suffered atrocities, heinous crimes committed against humanity not for themselves but for our generation and our children, that they may be free, oh how they turn in their graves right now as they look upon the very land they fought for, were mutilated and killed for, thrown to the dogs.
Its very like a story a wise woman once told me, I like to refer to it as the story of eve, the story of womankind, she said the lion comes and devours, and then the hyenas lick the meat off the bones, then the dogs come, and after the dogs are done, the ants finally take their share, crude yes…but I can’t help thinking that that is the story of Africa, it is the story of our country.
I do not claim to be a student of history, nor of literature, in fact I fall among a category of people that do not open their mouths where men and women more endowed with such knowledge need not even speak, I am a student of the world, and I have realized that history does not repeat itself. It is men who repeat history. How many wars have been fought, in the name of liberation, how many people dead and forgotten because of causes greater than themselves. Today this war is over, tomorrow another begins, and the theme is still the same, liberation, freedom, justice and the struggle continues, but the truth is , we are not free, nobody is truly free, freedom is an absolute you are either free or not. We are still bound in the shackles of slavery; we are enslaved by our own.
How many peace deals have been signed, how many thrown out the window. A month ago one of my elders told me of how they all went back home after the last peace deal was signed. It was an exodus, many left the riches they had gathered in foreign lands heading homewards, stars in their eyes and when they got there. They were frustrated, their education amounting to nothing, their riches dust. Power, opportunity, position were given to a chosen few. Democracy they said, a government of the people for the people, by the people, but in reality, a government of the elite for the elite by the elite. And so they fatten, and our people continue to suffer, and they say we are free, my question now is then, what is freedom? And the old man told me, he would not go back, no, not until the south became a separate state, he was not willing to die like a pauper in his own country, he would rather be buried among foreigners, his spirit lost in a land not his own.
And I cried for that old man, and I cried for the freedom fighters, who as the years went on after independence, their dreams just like their eyesight faded with age, and they died, and were buried among their forefathers, celebrated neither in death nor life, slaves to the very end, and the few who reap the rewards of their toil live on.
They still talk of freedom, equality, justice, but they continue to get richer as the masses sink deeper into poverty. The truth is we are not yet free, the reality is, we may never be.