Diversity Is Our Strength #AfricaMonth

I’m probably one of the most obnoxious people when it comes to my expression of the love I have for Africa and its people. 

We’re concluding “Africa month” this week so please allow me to tell you an African story one more time because I just can’t help it; my short adult life has opened me up to such inspirational and lovely experiences of our continent. 

Sadly, some of the lessons have come in painful packages like the so-called xenophobic attacks in South Africa and the genocide in Rwanda to mention a few - a brutal history whose deliberately positive take away for me is a renewed belief that our strength truly lies in our diversity.

I’m a little embarrassed to say that it was a 10 year old boy who taught a 22 year old me, a rookie journalist at the time, about Africa Day. My BFF Nomahlubi and I were visiting Zimbabwe, for the first time after she was invited to be part of judging panel for an event in the city of Bulawayo. 

We stayed with the Mazibuko the event hosts. There we found the eldest child Thabo doing his school project. He was so excited to see us; his connection to souvenirs from Swaziland. This was his Africa Day project he told us; doing a ‘show-and-tell’ about Swaziland.

We gave him notes and coins of Swazi money sparking further curiosity from him about the faces on these. He consumed all the information we shared like a calf would its mother’s breasts upon being reunited after a whole day of grazing in the veld. I had the same reaction when he further informed us that Africa Day is a public holiday in Zimbabwe’s national calendar.

My other Zimbabwean friend Evans (32) who now lives in Johannesburg tells me how confusing it was for him and his countrymen to experience a hostile reception from the South Africans when they first arrived there. 

He tells me the xenophobic attacks that followed and keep reoccurring had them convinced they grew up in another Africa and not the one they were taught to write beautiful stories about; stories of Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Nelson Mandela and Kenneth Kaunda amongst others. 

He tells me that in their schools, children from other African countries were given extra special attention – asked occasionally; “Are you oaky?”…”Do you need any help….do you need anything else?”

Over the years the experience with 10 year old Thabo had me feeling some type of way because I realized that even though I’d done History and Geography school projects, none of them were ever about another African country; they were about Japan, USA, Italy, Germany and other former colonizers of Africa.

Additionally, the experience with Thabo has over the years made me wonder about the value and significance of our own public holidays. 

Is it more important for us to take time off the business calendar to celebrate Easter, ascension and Christmas day which celebrate one man who supposedly died for our sins than to honor the resilience and foresight of the hundreds of thousands of our African people who died brutally in the line of stopping the greedy scramble for Africa by colonizers?

Is it truly not worth it to set aside just 24 hours to gather publicly and take stock of how far we’ve come as nation of Africa; how, even though deliberately divided by ‘them’,  we remained a united force in our quest for self-determination? 

I’m certain that in such an activity we would learn that our narratives of diverse histories intersect and connect even with our differences in language and complexions. I’m also certain that this would sharpen the one critical skill we seem to be fast losing in this global village – listening – which would in turn allow us opportunities to design our destiny as determined by our heritage. 

It is in this listening to each other that we can learn that with the kind of violent history we’ve been exposed to, perhaps a school curriculum with ‘Peace Studies’ would be more useful than our current one of ‘French’ studies.

That’s another lesson learned from my experience with Thabo – that except for a few invisible bloody punches in the nose, it really takes nothing away from an older person and more experienced authority to listen to a younger inexperienced person and of a different cultural context. 

In fact, as illustrated by this experience, there’s more to gain. So why do we want those with divergent views and backgrounds different from ours to shut up, burn or be incarcerated? Why do we believe that our trajectory is more important or valid than that of others?

Journalists are still among the most harassed group of people in African societies for their often critical thoughts on systems accountability.   

Music teaches us this too – music can move you only if you LISTEN to it; even without lyrics, it can move you to higher highs but you have to listen to the DIFFERENT instruments at play.

At times just by listening, music awakens so much within us that we even want to know the story behind the making of a song. Importantly, we have to make time to listen to music in order to learn of the different kinds of music like we’re doing this weekend with the Bushfire festival in Malkerns, Swaziland.

From Swaziland to Tripoli and back, may we always realize that our individual and collective power to unite lies in our ability to express and accept diversity across ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, age, physical abilities, religious beliefs and political beliefs.