A derelict geography strewn with dead statues and monuments of colonial self-gratification, sterilised museums of European affluence and plunder, exhibited as trophies for the natives to envy or vicariously mimic.
Africa is where they mined for fossilised relics that people their architecture, filling mausoleums with skulls of ancestors of erased civilities and artefacts of seances with divinity now desecrated.
Africa is a locale of bruised psychologies, lived double into dreams created by falsities in galleries and malls, advertised through cathode tubed LED screens, like windows spying on lives which Africa was deprived.
Africa is a mirror reflecting the tyranny showered on Mother Earth through acid sprinklers spewing toxins from mine-shafts onto fields of de-nutritionalised vegetations, an arid burial grounds of the nameless.
Africa is named after elites of trophy kingdoms built on bloodshed and diseases exported through exploratory missions ordained by monasteries and their patron lords.
Africa is home to the lost remaining among their outspoken dead, ghosts possessing children born in a new century, those speaking in tongues of misery learned from disgruntled parents.
Africa is mother and cradle to a new breed forged through spare parts stolen from ransacked cargo ships scattered on shores whitened and bleached, and her oceans wrung like an endless sheet painted with fish and coral.
Africa is mapped by jail-bird descendants of rogue royals in castles sieged through godly wars, ruins labeled for the memory of killers, a tomb for a billion dreams squandered and forsaken for the prize property.
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With a resilient pandemic of Afro Pessimism spreading to every corner of the globe, it takes artists of African descent to concoct remedies that will inoculate many more generations from that sentiment.
And only through an elaborate exhibition of Africa as the centre of a positivist future, through exploratory questioning of the past to correct the present, can there become version of Africa that would once again be the guiding light of wisdom for the rest of the world.
That Africa, at this juncture might seem a fiction, especially when the continent is cloaked in darkening bloodstain of colonial wars, wars for liberation, guerrilla wars and the insurgency of terror that is displacing millions.
Yet, there are new horizon looming with every technological innovation, and even though Africa hasn’t tapped into the full potential of these technologies, it is best to prepare for them with robust representation of a truer and not romanticised identities, not vicarious avatars that depict Africa as should be in light of western vision of the future.
Africa to me becomes the remaining frontier for humanity to re-invent itself in regards to relations to earth as mother and home; Africa can be a breeding ground for a new humanism that does not deem humans superior to the natural but a seedling of our threatened earth.
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