African – PurplePretoria

There is a new move towards erasing the African identity in the most effective and profound manner anyone can erase an identity- by name. Africans of undiluted ancestry, dating back thousands of years ago are going by names like Derek Shepherd and Anita Glory.

I wonder if some of the movements behind this standardisation of all groups of people would be just as happy themselves to go by any other name – a Larry Ssemanda perhaps, untraceable to their original ethnicity. Maybe we should all colour ourselves with paste, make ourselves all uniform. Some of the most esteemed women in this town are already orange-black, and not by birth. Old photos are cropping up like evidence once thought buried.

“What is in name? That which we call a rose by any other name would still smell just as sweet.” Elon by any other name, maybe Melon, would sound just as suave- Melon Musk. Yet, even an app such as X, is constantly referred to only by relation to its first name Twitter.

It’s not only names that are being disposed of, our low sense of self has now spread to accent. As usual, we Africans are so ashamed of being African, that we are afraid for any native tongue bias to be detected in our speech. A BBC article recently reported that Nigerians are paying well for new accents in order to speak in a more American way. I have a feeling they are not being trained to speak the Black American way. We Africans are notorious for being un-united in any sphere that requires unity- not at home and definitely not in foreign places.

Our own public speakers are already now rattling words in an American accent. The American accent being one among many- they forget that there is more than one way to be European. There are French, English, Italian and Greek accents. [Are Greeks, European? Their debt situation might have made their genealogy suspect.] Though, even in Britain and France, it is said that people from different regions speak distinctively differently and can be identified by origin solely by the way they speak. In Wales, they speak a Celtic language which is nothing similar to English.

So, while we are still struggling with how to pronounce “twenie twenie three” and “twira”, while sounding like Obama or Biden, other people have the liberty to actually focus on the nuances and delivery of their message without worrying about the approval of a global certification of accent. I’m not immune to the constant realisation [even this word “ri- a- lize” versus “ri- alize” – is being targeted] that I say hop for both hope and hop [I was alerted to this] and I say “bo-da” for both border and boda-boda [ after reading an article written by an English man where he said that the word “Boda” morphed from the word “Border” in Busia town, I realised I had just pronounced the words exactly the same.] I wonder when in Busia town- the letter r was ever enunciated in a word like border. Bad for bad and also bird. Hat for hat and also heart. Just when I’m wondering if it is necessary to learn all the new ways to speak [ignore the Gen Z grammar deficit- This hair is hairing, This outfit is giving], I hear Japanese and Koreans’ attempt to speak Hingrishi and things fall apart .

It is hard to focus after hearing “Ey-braham” and “Sera” and the god of the heathen “bale”. I wonder sometimes if some supernatural force indeed is using accent differentiation to prevent the message from coming across. It is even stranger that most of these names are in Hebrew and not English. The name Goliath for example, is pronounced “Goli-at” in Hebrew. It is the equivalent of insisting on calling Iraq, “ai raq” when its inhabitants have over and over again, showed you that it is pronounced “eraq”.

If everything we are is of such low quality, why did we not go extinct? Isn’t it the law of nature that everything of a weaker form is eventually subdued by the stronger?

It is not enough that drums and dancing are reserved only for cultural celebrations, and badly played keyboards on maximum sound are the only musical instruments allowed in village churches, but now our names must disappear too.

Why are we always keen on being anyone but who we are? We do not need to embrace it all. We can accept what was bad for us and leave it behind and then treat with reverence what was good. We are not the ones who made ourselves a gold calf after seeing God. We are also not the ones who created the guillotine.

Yes, a full English Breakfast sounds more sophisticated than Katogo, but some group of people stuck to eating with [chop] sticks and it became arguably the most admired exotic cuisine; and, however wispy or sparse their hair gets, I have not seen a non- African woman wearing an afro textured wig. If it was possible to get a hair transplant that grows out as Brazilian hair and a lace front, our hair would be extinct by now .

The Jackson five didn’t escape it. Worldwide fame didn’t help the ever flowing fountain of evolving hate that Africans love to drink from. We don’t even believe we deserve better. We would rather live in filth and then travel to Netherlands to marvel about how clean their streets are. We feel like we don’t deserve love. We don’t really believe we deserve care. We certainly don’t deserve the best, unless someone else created it for their own people.

That is why most of our schools teach us how to eat bean weevils and why the askari will maul you for tasting chicken. Now some Ugandans are offended when anyone associates them with grasshopper eating but they are quick to jump onto the ‘sea food experience’. They will happily eat mussels, squid, octopus and prawns. They will also excitedly try escargot.

We are like a child whose own mother never loved them, the child who is always at the neighbour’s house looking for love and acceptance. The neighbour only has food enough for her own and no matter how much she tries to include him, she just can’t take him along when her own children are going for swimming and she definitely cannot take him for the family photo.

If it were not for the rich percussion of African drums, powerful enough to raise the hair on your skin, African music would have ceased to exist. [The poetry we enjoy in Luganda music and between the bride and groom’s parties at Kwanjula’s; and the poetry in Kwevuga should not be just a passing amusement. It should be harnessed somehow, not exploited, not cheapened, but protected. ]

We give flavour to the world. Without us, all the laughs would be a hollow ha ha ha, not a rumbling nondescript sound from deep within, shaking our stomach and making us gasp for air. We have the tightest curl pattern and the darkest skin. Our way of living in harmony with nature conserved the earth.

***

If you were not part of dress choosing or fitting, you’re not the first on the makeup line and the makeup artist does not even know your name, you don’t know where the venue is and you’re in an unspoken state of “what are we?”, you are not the Matron. Attend or don’t attend, you are not crucial to the occasion.

If the lowest common denominator of the group keeps making fun of you, or speaks to you in a condescending way, you are the second lowest common denominator of that group and you are competing for last place, you just don’t know it.

amandla. also mandla. <meaning: POWER> origin- Zulu; South Africa. Chanted during the political uprisings against the apartheid regime. In relation to the release of Nelson Mandela.

The Black Lives Matter protest is going on in America. The palest colour is biting their tongues. Similar shades from the same palette are quiet, hoping they will never be found out for the slave trade they are carrying on right now beneath our noses. The rest of the world is attempting to remain politically correct and unstained. Africa is secretly wondering whether to even step in, whether we even belong to this cause. I call it Africa because The Partition of Africa happened. That is why they call it Africa. They know our history more than we do.

I cannot really blame black Americans for the divide between us and them. And neither can I fully blame us for it. I suspect that some of the contributors to Anti African sentiment and suspicion, is that in the 60s, while they were fighting for civil rights, we were getting scholarships from our former colonial Masters to go to Europe and study medicine. We shall never fully understand the impact of their experience and most of us will never live it. A mustard seed planted by their oppressors is the comfort is that at least they are better than us who remained, “better than those Africans in ‘Africa'”. Add to that, the ‘rumours’ that some African Kings allowed slave traders to raid their villages in exchange for beads and rifles and therefore making us complicit to the slave trade that led to 400 years of captivity, the imposing of a ‘nigg*r’ identity, targeted incarceration and the current tactical elimination through police brutality.

Can we ever be friends or at least allies?

Alice Walker’s Nettie in The Colour Purple asks whether Africans can at least acknowledge their partial contribution to the slave trade. She does not demand an apology, just an acknowledgement. Listening to the contemporary podcast the Great Girlfriends showed me that its not just anger that simmers between these group of related people. There is a lot more but it all seems to revolve around pain and unanswered questions.

According to the little history I know of my people, slavery is as old as some African Kingdoms. Although I would like to believe that it was an imposition of the lowest level of servitude and serving mainly a class stratification purpose, the real [maybe terrible] details of it are to be found no where. Our oral tradition works against us. However, it did exist in pre-colonial times. Kingdoms invaded other Kingdoms or communities and looted both property, women (who at the time were also commodities) and men who would become slaves. The actual concept of ‘slavery’ as it was in the American context and in the Egyptian Israeli context may be completely different from what it meant in the African inter-community context. Still, this may have been the conducive environment in which Tippu Tip and other notorious slave traders were allowed to thrive.

I think our lack of foresight, our disunity, and our greed have played a huge role in enabling us to destroy our selves. The Imperialists did not have to do much to implement the Divide and Rule policy. They found the one thing that so easily destroys an establishment, disunity.

Another thing. About sowing seeds of mistrust between Black Americans (note that it is now mildly offensive to call a black ‘American’ an African American. And again I see why. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie illustrates the dissension) and Africans on the soil is the issue of denigrating Africa’s culture as uncivilised. This angle played very well into mental slavery of the Black American. Now that they were clothed, did they want to go back to swinging their naked breasts back and forth like their ancestors? Or did they wish to go back to rearing lions and living in trees?

And for the Africans, the visual of our ancestors with their demonic ways, the portrayal of our names as weird sounding and ‘un-English’ and the declaration that our languages are unofficial and unrefined was enough to make us so reprehensible to ourselves such that if we could run from our skins we would. Some have. Micheal Jackson did. How proud we are when we replace the earthy beats from drums made from wood and animal skins to loud discordant sounds of a keyboard in our village churches.

It is too late now for English. I can barely write a story in my mother tongue and unlike my mother, I will never think or dream in my mother tongue. A case for English – it has helped in the intermarriages between different speaking people. [Even though a few elders are still squirmish about the thought of having to speak English in the household. I understand their fear because in their times, before us, English was reserved for the office, for school- lest you were punished with a sign post that reports you for speaking ‘vernacular’].

On the hairy side of things, our hair was well placed only if sleekly gelled and straightened – not rough and steel wooly, the kind of hair that would look best with a relaxer. Bad African hair could not go through a European comb. As soon as we were old enough, we begged for a relaxer. We didn’t have to dip a hot comb in the stove anymore, ours would be forever straight with a few retouches during the year. Then the natural hair movement came. It turned out that the chemicals we were layering in our head were not good for us. I could have sworn that some of these hair choices made us less brainy. But just when we were starting to get used to wearing our hair out, Brazilian hair and its counterfeits hijacked the movement.

My sister asked me, if the paler colour would ever give up their superiority and accept that we are all equal, especially since the thrills and frills and privilege had entered their heads. It occurred to me, in that moment as I replied, that no one, absolutely no one ever gives their power away. No one gives you ‘equality’.

No one is going to give us a sit at the proverbial table. We either manufacture our own tables or create an Africa which is indispensable to the table.

On the African American- African relationship, maybe Nettie was right. What if we acknowledged our role in creating the world we are in? What if acknowledged it, even right now? The kind of world we have created where our people have to become immigrants in order to live a good life. A world where people escape to the former colonialist’s land to seek political asylum. We are looking for acceptance from foreigners who benefited from our weaknesses.

Save yourself Africa.

Tag: African

HAM?

Amandla