BLACK: IS ALL IT MEANS TO BE AFRICAN

I find it frightfully maternalistic that there are endless debates on what ‘African’ is. This week as we celebrated Africa Day it hit me again as it has many times in recent years, that we need to guard our continent jealously and fearlessly or history might repeat itself. If we lose ourselves in the emerging definitions of what an African is, we’re back at square one.

During the days of slave trade ‘African’ was never in question. You were black and from Africa, and that earned you a five feet, three inches high and four feet, four inches wide spot, in the middle passage as you were shipped off to America for sale.

Some argue that being black doesn’t make you African, I agree. There are black Americans…erm or shall we call them by how they prefer…there are African-Americans who identify more with white people than any upper class African…not even Patrice Motsepe. So yes, I agree with the notion that not all black is African. This however, still does not qualify why non-black people on our fertile African soil should share and identify with a people who don’t share in their struggles or their history.

We have enough room for all races on this continent, it’s just we cannot pretend to share a past or ancestry. Our past and ancestry makes us African. A black American, a descendant of slavery, would identify with Africans had it not been for a deliberate erasure of their origins by the white master. Their identity crisis is therefore excused.

More Than Nationality

Some argue that Africa is not a country. So if a white person is born in Ghana, they are a Ghanaian and Ghana is in Africa therefore that makes them African. It is apparently that simple. I disagree. It can never be that simple I’m afraid. It would be facile and too feeble to reduce ‘African’ to a mere geography. As a black African, I even find it disrespectful, considering the painful history of this continent – thanks to the violent capitalist greed of colonizers. Back then if you were black, chances were you were a slave and African there was no ambiguity about it.

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