If our brightest minds go and never return, then it is no wonder that we have poor leadership to guide our nations, that we have no engineers to run our machinery, no doctors to staff our hospitals, no professors to fill our universities, and no teachers to educate the generations to come. How can we move forward if our future Mandelas are content

The whites had hoarded the pleasures and advantages of our nation for too long. My God, there were horse-riding and French lessons, video games, and trips to London and New York. There was nothing that our children asked for that we denied them. We who had grown up knowing only deprivation, austerity, and hard labor. We wanted only the best for

History is simply the events as seen by a particular group, usually the ones with the mightiest pens and the most indelible ink.

We developed all the symptoms of the postcolonial syndrome, endemic to Africa: acquisition, imitation, and a paucity of imagination.

We simply rushed to secure what the colonialist had. We bought their homes, attended their schools, leased their offices, spoke their language, played their sports, and courted their company. We denied our own culture, relieved to leave our primitive origins far away, in some forgotten village. And so, we believed ourselves sophisticated at last,

How could I allow you to grow up reading Greek classics, Homer’s Iliad, the voyages of Agamemnon, and watch you devour The Merchant of Venice and Romeo and Juliet yet be ignorant of the lyrical, the romantic, and the tragic that have shaped us as Africans?

The rural areas were places one moved from; it was a sign of progress. Naturally, to go back was a regression. Our kumushas have lost their meaning. Instead of being our cultural reposits and homelands, they are where the forgotten live and the dead are buried.

“The scramble for Africa may be over, but the struggle for her history, her art, her literature, and her children rages on unabated.”

The extended family is your community, your own emotional, financial, and cultural safety net. It is Africa’s most powerful resource.