The Afrika of my Dreams
In my own opinion, of what use is war if you don’t
Samuel Phillips
even know what the peace you are fighting for looks like? Of what use is the fight against the white man when you as an Afrikan have forgotten what the true Afrikan looks like?
I wonder what it felt like to those who were standing, listening to Martin Luther King Jr., when he spoke back in 1963, the words of one of the most popular speeches in history. These words, like a flock of birds with golden wings, actually flew from 1963 when he spoke them and landed in our days and we could actually see the realization of those words? Words which were not just words of a speech, but prophecies spoken out of immense love for a people who will one day be the leading lights of the entire world. For with a passion so deep in a belief that is set on a future that was so real to him and the One who gave him the words of prophecies, Martin Luther King said:
“I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together…”
And even though the coming to pass of his dream is still unfolding, and even though the equality he spoke of is still wrapped up in some form of shadows – for racism clearly is still alive – and even though the sons of former slaves whether in America or elsewhere still have their eyes closed behind some veils to the truth that they are the liberators of men and not beggars, and even though the system of this world is still thriving on the backs of the poverty, the shame, the exploitation, the pain, the degradation, the defamation of Afrika and her people, it gives peace to know that pockets of Afrikans here and there are beginning to rise to the occasion for the lifting up of the face of Afrika once again.
I also have a dream
Many times I have asked myself questions about Afrika. Questions like: what do we as Afrikans really have to offer the world, outside of wildlife tourism? Why is Afrika the way it is even with her enormous amounts of wealth and resources? I sincerely ask these questions, not because I am not aware of the many years of exploitation of Afrikan wealth by foreign powers especially and also by corrupt local systems nor is it that I am unaware that what Afrika has is more than wildlife tourism. I ask because, most times it’s difficult to see beyond the pain and the ailments in Afrika, and how the world seems to enjoy negatively smearing our beautiful continent, while our own people give strength to the narratives of her weakness. I also ask because I know that where there is a question, there is definitely also an answer. So I say to anyone who cares to listen and to everyone who is passionate enough about a new Afrikan narrative, that even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, that even though we still face the degradation of our Afrikan way of life by those who think we are never supposed to rise out of the past, that even though we still have poverty and diseases in our land, that even though the voices of the helpless in our societies are still drowned in the ocean of political madness, even though the world system still thinks that we as Afrikans are only as good as lab rats for evil vaccine tests, I still declare that I, too, have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the God-given Afrikan dream. A dream which was ingrained in the very foundation of this continent as the cradle of humanity and which will also manifest in this continent, even as she takes a step higher to become the nest of safety for the world in the nearest future.
I have a dream that one day Afrikans will again walk on this mother of all continents as free Afrikan citizens with no need for passports or visas, which are nothing but the inventions of men, designed to create segregation between who is deemed worthy of passing through a port or not. I have a dream that, one day, the colonialist border lines, which are nothing but the reminders of where we were conned, will be removed and national boundary lines will no longer be the places where demeaning questions about the integrity of our Afrikan brothers and sisters will be asked, but places where Afrikans will welcome their Afrikan and sisters brothers with joy and music.
I have a dream that someday, not too long from now, Afrika will stop being just a place for wildlife tourism, but a place where men will come to learn life and living in the true sense of it. I have a dream that, someday, not too far from now, men from all over the world will come to Afrika for spiritual and life changing pilgrimages, which will not only bring Afrika back to her place as the Motherland but also as the place of refuge for those who can no longer live in the wicked system that the world has created. I have a dream that instead of Afrika being the perpetual loan beggar and aid taker that she will be the continent that gives and provides for other nations. For such is the good heart and attribute of a true mother. I have a dream that my children will grow to love Afrika because of who she will have risen to become, instead of loving the false greener pastures of Europe and America that keep stealing our kids from us.
Tourism in Afrika
I have no issue whatsoever with the tourism industry in Afrika, but I think Afrika is beyond tourism and whatever gains that sector professes to bring to Afrika. For tourism the way it’s been used has also become a tool for the defamation and degradation of Afrika and her people. It seems to me that we have not yet elevated our tourism industry to become our Afrikan brand or the face of our Afrikan life to the world. I am a photographer, so I love good photos. But have you ever noticed that when you search for photos of Afrika on Google or any other search engines, you will find more photos of malnourished children in some remote villages, with almost no photos of children in school or at best you will see children in some under-the-tree classrooms. But is that the true image of Afrika? Not at all. And I have also noticed that while you easily find the negative photos of Afrika for free online, you only find the good ones on some website for sale for hundreds of dollars. But the question is this, who are the ones taking these photos of a broken down Afrika? The very tourists we celebrate at our borders. This is just one example of how tourism that is just gain based is affecting the Afrikan narrative. Am I saying that photography in Afrika should be about just the good things here? Not really. All I am saying is that, as regards tourism, which is one of the many frontlines of our interactions with the world, we need to upgrade from wildlife and hotel tourism to what I like to call Life Tourism.
What is Life Tourism?
It is simply the combination of two words: Life and Tourism, to create a new concept of how our Afrikan tourism should both engage the world, represent us in good light and also how we become the change that the world needs and not those who only relate to the world as beggars. The concept is quite simple; we just need to understand what life is and what tourism was supposed to be.
Life for me is the ability to live in a healthy balance with each other, creation, the environment, the cosmic natural order and God the Creator. An Afrika without God is both foolishness and vanity of mind. Are we not foolish to think that we can talk about Afrika and not talk proudly of God who made it all? Tourism, as defined by online Encyclopedia Britannica, is the act and process of spending time away from home in pursuit of recreation, relaxation, and pleasure, while making use of the commercial provision of services. This definition of tourism takes into focus the pursuit of recreation, relaxation and pleasure for which many flock to Afrika. These are supposed to be good things, right? But have you ever noticed that it doesn’t matter how much you chase after recreation, relaxation and pleasure, you never find them. On your vacation to anywhere in the world, no matter how magical it sounded in adverts and social media, you never recreate, you never relax and you never fill your cup of pleasure. They just don’t exist in the type of tourism we have created. It’s quite simple. But have you also noticed that sometimes a tourist goes to an Afrikan village, in which he or she planned to stay for maybe a weekend or some days, but ended up living there for years? Some even get married and just live on like natives. What do you think happened? Life caught up with the person and everything they have been chasing as pleasure, recreation, fun, relaxation and the other pseudo-lifestyle of the social media just instantly lost meaning to them. Am I saying that great Afrikan tourism is the one in which visitors come and won’t go back home? Not at all. I am saying we need to begin to rebuild all our sectors including tourism to be life-giving, life-changing and eye-opening platforms for those who think Afrika is just the madness they see on TV or on the internet.
We have a good God-given purpose and until we align with that purpose, we will keep begging for aid even in the midst of plenty.
Aspects of Life Tourism
Indigenous Afrikan Medicine
I have said this before in other publications, but I am saying it again that a time is coming when the world will have destroyed their own health system with chemical poison in drugs and the only place where true health will still be thriving will be in Afrika. And mind you, I do not say this to undermine any nation outside of Afrika; I say it because it is the reality and the truth that must manifest shortly. But we have to prepare and work for it to make it so. Covid-19 has shown us a bit of what I am saying.
Organic farming
The world has somehow convinced itself that GMO foods are good for business, well for capitalists, but what they didn’t tell themselves is that it is the same GMO foods, which have no life force in them, that are causing the magnitude in the increase of cancer and weak immune systems in the masses. The result of Covid-19 is showing where the problem lies. The world still cannot understand how Afrika, who has been undermined and with her supposed weak health system, has survived this pandemic, while Europe and America were hit very hard. It is not so good that we had some who succumbed to death due to this virus, it wasn’t supposed to be, and would likely not have been if not that Afrikans themselves have over the last several years been compromising their immune systems by wrong diet. We can mitigate such future occurrence by going back completely to organic farming.
Afrikan music and art
Afrikan art, which includes music, is not just a show of skills and talents; it’s more spiritual than just arts. Afrikan art is highly therapeutic and it’s health enhancing. We just need to turn away from the capitalist tendencies we have borrowed from the west that try to make money the reason for art, instead of a medium for sharing life and expression of good lifestyle.
Afrikan family life
The Afrikan family system is still one that that be trusted globally to raise good-hearted and God-fearing kids. The society is in a huge mess because the family system is in a mess. It is common to find an Afrikan family living in the US, or somewhere in Europe, sending their young adult kids to Afrika. They don’t just send them here for holidays or for them to come visit their home, most of them say they can’t allow their kids grow up in the morally weak foreign lands. So they send them home to come learn the Afrikan culture, which is steeped in honor for parents, respect for elders, mindfulness, brotherliness, loyalty to family and all that stuff that only Afrikans can express. It’s a good thing for young Afrikans living outside the continent to be immersed in, but with Life Tourism, young non-Afrikans can also be sent to the continent to learn.
Afrikan wisdom system
The wisdom of the Afrikan fore-fathers is second to none. It is wisdom that goes way back to the days of the beginning of life here in Afrika. It is both ancient and modern and it is useful for learning life and living.
Healing Afrika
Afrika is definitely sick and in need of healing. But her sickness is not that of the lab-created diseases that are dumped in our land, but the disease of the mind and the pride of our hearts which are stopping us from knowing and understanding that to disconnect from the natural laws of existence, which God gave to Afrika in abundance, is to disconnect from life itself. Afrika must be healed from these mind diseases and be restored back to her place as life giver.
However, to heal Afrika we must also remember that is not actually Afrika the land mass that we want to heal but the minds of the people called Afrika. To give light to this reality, see what Anselm Adodo wrote on his Facebook post about healing the earth:
“Not long ago, I got an invitation to deliver a lecture at a proposed workshop titled ‘HEALING THE EARTH’. The idea of the workshop came from the fact that human beings have selfishly and greedily exploited the earth’s resources in such a way that human existence is in jeopardy. Already, hundreds of thousands of plants and animals are said to be extinct, while the ozone layer has been severely affected, and the earth has become warmer than is normal. I was asked to emphasise the fact that human beings have damaged the earth almost irredeemably, and we should do what we can to ‘save’ mother earth, to heal and make her whole again. As I reflected on my topic, it dawned on me that human beings have yet to learn the lessons of history due to our sheer arrogance.
In the first place, what gave us the audacity to think that we can heal the earth? If the earth needs healing, who is the doctor? Looking at the natural order of things, who is really in need of healing, the earth or humanity? The earth is not in need of healing. It is humanity who is sick and needs healing. And we have no other healer than mother earth. Was our estrangement from the earth not the cause of our sickness? Rather than seeking to ‘heal the earth’, we should rather learn to live in harmony with THE HEALING EARTH.
The mess in which inhumanity finds itself today was caused by a wrong understanding of knowledge and its role in human development. According to David Orr, we were led astray by the myth that with enough knowledge and technology (computers, digital machines, satellites, buttons, etc), we can rule the earth and control it. But the complexity of the earth and its life systems can never be completely mastered and controlled. We can never master the complex functioning of atoms, protons, eons, bacteria, pathogens, viruses and electricity. With the help of technology, we have abused the earth and populated it with over six billion greedy individuals -you and me.
What needs to be managed is not the earth, but human desires, economics, politics and communities.
The word humility is derived from the Latin humus, which means earth, ground, earthliness, humanness. To be human is to be humble, and see ourselves as part of, not the centre of, creation. To be human is to be healed by the healing earth. This is our challenge in the 21st century.”
Is my dream possible?
Yes and a bigger yes. It is possible. I don’t know how to sell this dream to you to help you take a stand for something that will certainly benefit Afrika, but like every dreamer, I believe that I and my immediate family are willing and ready to live out this dream, until someone somewhere connects to it and gives it further wings to fly. But I will also use this medium to make an appeal to all Afrikans. Stop fighting the white man or the sons of those who created a divided Afrika through colonialism, neo-colonialism, and the many other exploitations going on. The fight has not worked for sixty or so years, because we keep fighting what we do not understand, using hate and trying to pay evil back for evil. It has not worked and it will never work. I remember a Chinese war proverb which says “he who must win in a war must first master peace”. Why is that? In my own opinion, of what use is war if you don’t even know what the peace you are fighting for looks like. Of what use is the fight against the white man when you as an Afrikan have forgotten what the true Afrikan looks like. So what are we fighting for? We can see clearly that the problem of the Afrikan is not the capitalist business men that come here to exploit, but the Afrikan gatekeepers that keep selling out Afrika. So instead of throwing punches at the wind or running on a treadmill, sweating but not going anywhere, why don’t we stop and realize that it’s time to stop punching, stop running the treadmill, look at ourselves in the mirror, understand where we keep getting it wrong, call together true Afrikans with true understanding and rebuild our Afrika.
The mind creates realities
Some people think that the physical universe is different from the mental planes of reality. But the physical universe is really not as physical as it seems. In fact, it is just another layer of the mental universe; for everything you see in our physical world is a projection of thought energy. For as a man thinks or as he projects his thought energy, so he creates and so he lives. Time and space does not exist in the physical universe only, it also does exist on the other planes of reality. Except it is experienced differently on those planes.
The entire universe is a hologram. The world is simply a simulation, like a computer program, but this time as a product of mind projection. All levels of reality are part of that same program. Everything physical is only a concept in the mind of God. As He imagines it to be, we experience it to be. Reality is a mental construct. The rules of physics are just there to “govern” how the physical universe operates. The universal mind, which governs the laws of the physical universe, only allows them to be superseded when it permits.
We are living in the matrix of mental creation. This is not a computer generated but a mind generated world. It is generated by the universal mind which is first the mind of God, which created all that first appeared, and partly the collective consciousness of the people alive which is also creating; for as men think, so they are. In other words, God is all powerful and all-creative but He has also given man a mind that is creative and obviously we are seeing what the minds of men have created and are still creating. Therefore I am surprised when men blame God for the woes on the earth and say blasphemous things about Him, but won’t check to see the evil that they create in their own mind matrix. Especially right now among young Afrikans who think enlightenment, or some form of “new knowledge” suddenly sets them as judges of God and His character. They always forget that God, Himself, Who they blame for their woes, has continuously said to man “as you think, so you are” and “as you choose, so you will get”. Meaning that, not knowing that what the Afrikan man thinks himself to be in his heart, is what is creating his reality and not the God Who he keeps blaming or the Christianity he calls the white man’s tool of manipulation.
Afrika needs a mind change for a reality change
We have tried to express these thoughts severally in this magazine, and as God gives grace, we will continue to do so. Afrika cannot rise outside of the mind matrix it creates for itself. No matter the number of intellectuals and innovative creators we have, as long as our mindset about the Afrikan narrative is that of servitude to foreign thoughts and concepts, then we have no hope of rising.
What must we do? We must go back to the original stream of the positive, creative mindset that we were blessed with from ancient times and start to create new realities for ourselves. If the white man believes he is the oppressor of all men on earth and it has worked for him for some time, what does Afrika as a race of blacks believe about themselves? We should be able to answer this question if truly we want to move forward. We must create a new culture by creating a new mental pattern and by that we will manifest that which is worthy of the true Afrikan.
Afrika has a beautiful ancient past, but the fact that that age passed away just like every other ancient civilization, shows that change is constant and also simply means that nothing remains forever. So instead of Afrika getting stuck in some form of dilemma, because they want to go back to the past, why not plan for now and create for the future?
Note:
LifeTourism as a created word and concept is a brand of Msingi Afrika Magazine. Its usage as a brand name by anyone is prohibited. The concept of LifeTourism can be used by anyone but the name remains a construct of Msingi Afrika Magazine.
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