Ourselves

“We don’t know enough about ourselves & continue to be enslaved by a narrative about ourselves told by other people” - Thabo Mbeki

I read this quote to my immediate younger sister and her reply was “yes nau. If you want to hide anything from a black person, put it in a book.” Her English teacher told her that.

Mbeki is right. We don’t know enough about ourselves. The video above, made me cry the first time I watched it. Why do we refuse to educate ourselves about ourselves? Why do we continue to believe and re-tell the single story told to us by other people about ourselves?

 I think we need to read more. I think we need to ask more and I think we need to learn more. Other people’s narratives of us can only continue to enslave us. We need freedom. Our children need to know the truth about themselves.

I thank the Lord for the Nigerian and African writers and only God knows how much I love them but we need to teach the children to love them too. I have a dream that one day, children will swap and scramble for African books, the way I scrambled for and swapped Enid Blyton books. As a child, reading Enid Blyton was “IT.” My friends and I fought for the ‘person who has read the most Enid Blyton books’ title. Only if Enid Blyton was Nigerian or African. And dropped little nuggets of our history in those stories that sparked my imagination so much.

Only if we had a Nigerian writer whose head was filled with knowledge and heart filled with passion for telling that knowledge to our little children in ways that spark their imagination but fills them with pride when the book ends. Only if.

Maybe then, Mbeki will be wrong.

Have a wonderful day!

With all my love,

Dárà Rhodes x