My first test of sense of personal ‘independence’, to try to be whom I am, begun 2013.
My colleagues were mainly eastern Europeans; Hungarians, Romanians, polish. It took you less than a seconds to realise you weren’t wanted in their company. To bend or keep erect and break?
It becomes real struggle between the mind and existential necessities’; to assert yourself or stand the chance to pass up an opportunity at livelihood.
I have never been a favourite of convention-keepers. In an almost benign form of ‘rebellion’ have struggled in fits of ego blast to unfurl my personal flag of ‘self-independence’. And my ‘colonial masters’ in the form of white colleagues don’t like that.
For what might be a digital age, a 21st century buzzing with rhetoric of liberalism, here stands at the gate of our human frontier the peril of ‘inequality’.
Not in the charming sloganeering of equality as white man tells us, but the subtle denigration of others in the minds and actions of those who believe you don’t yet belong.
Not because your faculties are in deficit, for the viral narrative that blacks are ‘second class citizens’.
To my utter shock many blacks I have worked with lived this myth. They work tongue in cheek, they rather swallow their thoughts and honest feelings than talk up to the white boss, whom they are happy to ‘kill and bury’ behind his back.
The idea of making a living at all cost including working like drugged animals, creates the social prism and optics to be looked on by some people as being merely a little above ‘animals.’
Can blacks have and express authentic choices? Yes indeed! anything that undermines your stretch and expressions of positive moral choices is an assault on your power of independence Fight it!
‘The white man’ is in good company.
Even our next of kin in skin colour; Indians and other Asians seem to be in the same league of hauling condescending missiles at their ‘black victims’.
Cultural affirmation is now becoming increasingly difficult for Africans who suffer the twin malaise of economic wreck back in their home countries and a weakening positive narrative, poor self-affirmation by individual black persons to fight being trampled finally into social oblivion.
What do I do?
Independence cannot be the flag handed us as Africans at independence by the colonial whites to our leaders in the pomp ceremony of self-rule.
If it were every black person should have a copy of that original flag handed to our leaders at independence, the one that can easily be brandished or waved in the face of our ‘tormentors’; so much so it becomes the personal token pass or digital signature to get signed onto the high wire of global citizenship.
Your personal independence shouldn’t be what others can grant you. Not even your accent or skin colour could.
You may carry a British or American passport, it’s only but a diplomatic document, in the minds of owners of the land, the masters of the metropolis, you were merely an economic opportunist pitched against your true identity.
Capacity is the bone of confidence. Knowledge is power. Courage, boldness and a balanced sense of the self, empowers the voice of self-independence.
Can we change the narrative of who we are, how we are treated merely by the force of personal presence?
Just a thought!
