On Africa

I have always taken great pride in my heritage, taken delight in the coarseness of my hair, the shape of my body, the colour of my eyes and what I have always imagined to be my rich African tradition summarised as, remarkably African.

I am classified by the world as a Zambian national but I am a child of the spirit and my soul identifies and is uniquely tied to this awesome continent that has been, and remains my home. Africa.

A continent blessed with riches untold… the universe has been kind. Take Zambia for example, a country endowed with riches untold, waterfalls! Fresh Water Rivers and masses of mineral deposits! Was the lord not kind? We are blessed with such excesses but greed and selfishness continue to get the better of us that we don’t know when to say no!

I am a part of the African spirit, at our core, we are a people so generous that we give everyone a chance, foreigners, aliens, those different from us in appearance and those that have different religious creeds – we give, all of them, a chance this, because of our inherent humanness. We welcome them all, we feed them, we clothe them, and we give them a voice, a home and yet…

I can not even begin to imagine how bewildered my great grand mother had been when she first saw the white man in her back yard; she must have been frightened out of her wits! But of course, because we are a continent that expects miracles, we looked to anything that we don’t understand and termed it a gift from the gods. I imagine this white man would have asked for water and she, obligingly would have rushed into the house to fetch her husband who too would have been helpless before this pale creature with opaque eyes. An alien, they would have assumed, a god – maybe?

They would have taken in this stranger, my grandparents and their people – fed him, clothed him and given him a place to lie down. And as per African tradition, this stranger would have been given a place of honour at the fireside and he with his interpreter would have told a fine story about that place yonder where he came from, where queens and kings dined on crystal and fine China, where men and women danced to the waltz, that unimaginable place that they too could live and reach.

I imagine, how there eyes would have widened in awe as this stranger spoke of things beyond their imagination… Little would have been said about the poverty and squalor. The rats. The disease, the Black Death.

I imagine my grandmother’s eyes popping out as he told his exaggerated tale of a life beyond the mountains, a life that no African could fathom. He would have showed her a mirror, this fascinating device that spoke right back to her and she, enthralled would have dedicated her life to this god creature, which could show her the future. His compass would have been another tool that he could have used to tell north from south but to my grandmother, it was this god that could do all this and more…

Slowly, he would have started to take centre stage as the entire village begun to gravitate towards him, his advice to the court – the chief and his indunas indispensible. He showed them how to hunt Impala quicker with this arm that spat fire, fire from the gods they mused. He promised that they too could have that skill if only his friends came.

The majority of the villagers marvelled at that ever so wonderful possibility but alas! Some sceptics, the villager seer, the rainmakers – the warned of a terrible time, fury from the gods if these strangers were allowed to live among them, they foretold a terrible period of anguish and blood shed but they were pushed aside, scathed, scorned and imprisoned. The will of the people prevailed. Allow the white gods into our territory. They were excited at the future
I can imagine the shock on the villagers’ faces more so my grandmother when they were awakened by strange noises, whinnying from these creatures that the go heads rode. These creatures were like nothing they had ever seen before. They had long legs and teeth the size of a crocodiles… They kicked at the wind and they seemed angry. They appeared as angry and stern as the creatures that rode them.

She searched for the face of her benevolent Muzungu for reassurance but he had changed. His once smiling opaque eyes now had a far fetched look; they scanned past her and showed neither emotion nor recognition.

In panic, she searched the crowd for her stout husband and was disturbed when she caught his eye, to find that he had tears in his eyes. She quickly stumbled to where he stood and asked him what had happened, with a wan smile he told her that they had been ordered to leave their fertile lands by the pale strangers and that the chief had been taken captive.

Leave their lands and go where? She asked in shock. Yes, he said, leave everything they owned and move to the valley. What about our temple? Our Mulungu? On that, he said dejectedly, that has been burned….

No! She wailed. No…

Fifty years later, my great grand mother, old and frail with a faded look in her eye tells this story to my mother, the story from the time before the white man, the story from when they used to worship seasonal gods, the story of how it used to be, the story before the famines, the story before the back breaking taxation, the story from when the gods walked Africa and her children ran wild and free. My story.

Today, Africa stands on record as the continent with the world’s least developed nations, a continent known for its violence as much as disease and poverty. A continent known for its current nauseating levels of corruption and greed, a continent that Marcus Garvey, Kwame Nkrumah; Julius Nyerere would be ashamed of.

An unfortunate time in history that Nelson Mandela and Kenneth Kaunda have had the misfortune to witness, a continent that Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu still refers to, as my Africa. A continent with some of the world’s largest mineral deposits that hardly benefit its masses, a continent portrayed as hell on earth. But there’s still that other side of Africa that the media and the west have failed to portray, a place where kindness, love and purity still abide.
My grand mother, like her mother before her refused to convert to Christianity, for a long time! And when she finally did, she chose CMML, a more ethnic wing of Christianity and refused to adopt the catholic doctrine that was predominant in her time. She refused to worship with the White Fathers who had built a church h a few metres from her home but would trek for hours on end to get to the CMML congregation.

My mother on the other hand, a much more modern version and a product of the catholic education system, chose to worship with them instead and my grandmother respected her choices. I have a vivid memory going back to as far as three when we went to my grand mother’s church, they was singing and dancing and for a three year old, I think I had a great time there than at my usual church were they (respectfully) asked me to kneel a 100 times! Power and control issues I imagine.

This experience made such a great impression on me and to date I still carry in my heart the one Swahili song that my siblings and I kept singing over and over afterwards. Little did I know then, how this incident would affect my faith decisions in future…