THE FACES OF AFRICA: WE THE PEOPLE

                                   

        I saw a young man today, I did not encounter him physically, in fact I have never met this young man before but for some reason he looked so familiar.

He did not say his name, or maybe I must have missed it, but he said he was a "Mayshia" apprentice and that translates to noodles cook for those of us who have not had the pleasure of running into one. He didn't say where he lived but he said he was from Katsina state, Nigeria. He said his dream was to get married and build a house.

He also dreamed of travelling to Saudi Arabia on pilgrimage, to pray. I did not recognize him until he was asked a question; "What was your most embarrassing moment?" And here is what he had to say; "When I was wrongly accused of stealing a phone and was disgraced publicly. They later found out it was my friend that took the phone, but the crowd had already left" And it was then that I immediately recognized him, that was when this stranger whose interview I was reading on a random Instagram page took on a face, a familiar face. One I had seen in the hyperbole of a million times.

He did not remind me of my stubborn Mayshia in Abuja who did not understand what "no put onions for inside my Indomie and egg oh!" meant, but in that moment his lean body clad in a slacked purple T-shirt, worn out jeans and tattered palm slippers coupled with his soft facial features, reminded of someone I had known for a long time. Who did he remind me of? He reminded me of that poor fisherman who was secretly interviewed for a documentary in the Niger Delta, the fear in his eyes as he spoke of the living conditions and the brutality and oppression he and the village people had to endure day to day in the hands of the militants, the same militants who had sworn to fight for them.

He reminded me of that young man who was tied up and thrown in the bush during the brewing period of the 1967 Nigerian civil war, who cried "please don't kill me" before a round of magazines were pumped into his frail body, and I remembered the tears I cried when I saw a man who had a name, a family, a life, was reduced to a mere casualty, never to be heard from again, never to be spoken of, history will not remember him and the only evidence of his life will be the footage of his death. In him I saw the women and the men who cried out that the gases from Zambian copper mines were polluting their environment and they and their children were falling sick. And then he said his biggest wish was to; "further my education and I wish my children won't have to fend for themselves at an early age like I did."

He also began to look like the young man whom I saw in the Niger Delta, who said "I will not join the militants, I will continue to work hard and I know with God I will make it." I wanted to be proud of him, the Niger Deltan. I wanted to say his dreams would come true, that I believed in him, but I could not utter a word, I sat there and watched him paddle his canoe through a polluted river, blackened by oil leakages, a lifeless river with no sign of sea life ... no fish ... nothing. You may begin to wonder how that one man can look like all these people, well it wasn't their faces that resembled each other, it was their stories. It was the pain in their eyes, a pain you did not see but you felt. It was the stories of disappointment, shame and suffering that looked identical. Their stories had a face that I had seen all over Africa.

Stories that were reminiscent of what society is in Africa and the world, where the poor indomie seller suspected of stealing a cell phone would be humiliated and paraded on the streets, while a politician who had been caught red handed stealing billions of Naira would be celebrated on those same streets, where poor home owner's protests would be shunned while they suffer the environmental toxicity of the companies that provide the rich with the capital to build mansions, where self righteous revolutionaries, whom the common people believed in would be paid millions to look the other way while the causes they once championed is left to wither into oblivion.

In this world where every man has a price, they are the ones whose dreams were sold for next to nothing and they wore the face of society, our society, so we in our own detached worlds could bear witness to what has happened to them, and what could happen to us. And as I sat down outside of my house at night and thought of this young man whose name I didn't know, whom I will never meet, I began to remember. I remembered the tears former president Jerry Rawlings of Ghana shed during an interview, as he described the bravery of the Somalian mothers during the war, how they held on to their suckling babies amidst the hail of bullets, the only glitter in these women's worlds where the light had gone completely out.

As I remembered how he an old soldier wept, tears began to form in my eyes and once again as I had done many times in the past, I let the tears flow, tears for the Mayshia and the many faces he represented in my mind, tears for my people, tears for Africa. One thing I cannot end this piece without noting, one thing that stands out in all these "faces of Africa" is the hope. Hope that has been battered, hope that has been crushed, broken, trampled upon but stubbornly refuses to die. Hope that is frail but resilient, hope that fall but will never lay down and die.

For in the face of guns and death the Somali women breastfed their hungry babies, because they saw a future for those children, paddling his canoes across polluted waters a young fisherman nurtures hope of making it without engaging in violence, poor and abused by society a young Mayshia has dreams of a bright future for his children. Collectively these faces are not defined by the suffering they bear nor pain they have been through, but these faces are defined by hope, hope of a future, dreams to be realized.

These faces of Africa are not defined by poverty or failure, it is myopic to say we have no suffering or that our faces are perfect, but these imperfections do not define us, we may have scars but our scars are not a symbol of our wounds but a symbol of our healing. We cry doesn't mean we won't smile, we hurt doesn't mean we won't laugh. We are imperfect, we are beautiful, we are scarred. In the midst of it all we have our heads held and we shall laugh again. We are the faces of Africa. To the youth. Reminder - Our people didn't have to suffer.

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