Page 61 - Msingi Afrika Magazine Issue 11

COMMUNITY

Where are the wise, the

fierce, the bold and the

strong?

Chioma Phillips

s the world grows claim to certain spaces on this earth before slavery and colonial oppres-
increasingly totalitarian, and where people were rounded up sion had afflicted Afrika were able
generations of people from their traditional homesteads to pass on these memories to their
Aare being born into which were spread out over ridges children and grandchildren and
environments where they don’t and valleys in Afrika and forced to remind them from whence they
remember what it was like to live live in fenced concentration camps came; when the living was differ-
without many of the restrictions under the vicious and hostile author- ent, when the invisible iron fences
they now find in place. Worse yet, itarian control of the wicked colo- introduced to Afrika and embraced
they don’t even know that many nizers. For them, that was normal. by the colonizers' successors were
of the things they interact with as Much like those born after the fake not enforced. This gave rise to
‘normal’ are actually restrictions and independence, into nations that were hope and an awareness that things,
people around them will go to great fenced in by invisible lines called indeed, could be different. These
lengths to explain to them that these ‘borders’ that delineated national custodians of ancient memory were
are simply ‘guidelines’ and ‘require- boundaries which cannot be crossed the ‘elephants’ of their day, whose
ments’ to protect them and to keep officially without documentation words and stories of days gone by
society ‘healthy and balanced’. that identifies one’s origin and proof inspired - in their generations - the
For example, many of those born of payment (visas) needed to access desire for liberty and created the
during colonialism emerged into a the next nation and permission indi- necessary environment for the spark
world where a ‘new normal’ gov- cated by a rubber stamp. For many in the quest for liberty to become a
erned their very existence. A world of those born into these days, that is raging fire that spread across Afrika.
where documents had been intro- considered ‘normal’. It is tragic indeed, that their words
duced to prove one's identity and Those who remembered the days and lives were defiled by the com-

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