Africans are so lit

There’s a number of books in a Florida county, USA that were banned from public school libraries, Sulwe by Lupita Nyong’o being one of them.

Sulwe tells the story of a little dark skinned girl who’s being bullied for her skin, so her mum tells her a story of twin sisters, Night and Day: The villagers that the two sisters look after start to move like Night is an inconvenience after a while, and so she leaves. The villagers stay with just Day, and they soon get exhausted cause they can’t sleep, so of course Night returns to save their asses.

The reason they gave for banning this book was that it would make little white kids feel bad.

This is the point I made the conscious decision to only read black, cause whatever do you mean??

You know that popular saying, ‘The best way to hide something from Black people is to put it in a book.’? While I didn’t agree with its sentiment because I understood it to mean ‘Africans are illiterate’, I’ve come to understand it alternatively: I think that a lot of ourselves is in literature, in art, but we don’t have access to a lot of that. A majority of what we consume features people from the west, with different values, and ways of life than us; so then we’re led to believe that that is the standard, and everything that’s not that is inferior.

There’s this poem from the Rhymes and Rhythms collection we did in high school, called Grandpa. I’ll share a snippet:

(…)

They blow their noses and pocket the stuff—

That’s hygienic so they tell me:

I blow my nose into the fire,

But they say that’s barbaric.

The west has way more to gain by perpetuating the lie that is, they are the standard and we are inferior. It's been said that the thing that colonialism robbed us the most of as Africa, is self esteem, and I agree.

If Africa discontinued all the exports leaving the continent, the World would go into chaos— economies would collapse. Be it coffee, cocoa,  (See: https://www.voaafrica.com/amp/ivory-coast-suspends-cocoa-export-contract-selling-for-2023-24-season/7179065.html ) cobalt, gold, and yet the thing that Africa is most famous for in the west is its poverty.

Western leaders will talk crap about our governance, and express just how dire the corruption situation is, but when a new leader rises, and shows any signs of prioritising the needs of African people, they die either a violent or a mysterious death.

Our democracies are only a few years old, with the oldest at 67, but they are criticised mercilessly and shamed by the same ‘greatest democracy’ whose politics we’ve watched descend into utter chaos in recent times, 248 years in.

They make a show of saving other countries from their terrible dictators, while  their president defies their constitution to bomb another country like the big daddy he is.

I found out the other day that former French colonies in Africa like Ivory Coast, Benin, Mali, Senegal still pay a ‘colonial tax’ to France. So, France notoriously denies Africans visas and residence, and undermines African leadership, whole time Africans are paying for services of their citizens?!?!

Anyway, all this to say:

1. Immerse yourself in African art— it’s a spiritual experience, and

2. Africans are so lit!