I Am an African Manifesto

Gizela Kwihangana| April 28, 2022

I have always had a sense of peace to me, like inner peace. Of course, as I got older, my anxiety took over. But before the change caught up to me, I was an African child on top of the highest branch on my favorite tree. Slouched comfortably, I laid against the tree and watched how the wind swayed the leaves and skinny branches into each other, as if they were just waking up too. I was in the jungle near my father’s parents’ hut. I would get up early in the morning, while everyone was asleep, and walked this glorious path to my tree. The green of the plants around me was a color no man can ever mimic. The exotic, livid colors of Africa’s nature made me feel honored to call this place my home. So beautiful. So enchanted. So magical. It gave me a feeling I wish I could wrap up and gift it to someone I love.

Impregnated by God’s destiny for me, Africa, the mother of all life delivered me, and she calls me by the name African. I am African. I am who I am because she gave me permission. I can look like this, walk like this, and talk like this because I am righted by her. She has shaped me in the curves of her shapes. She leads and guides me. I reflect her in my emotions as I direct the wind when I dance. I am the constancy of her seasons. I am a part of the jungle families she hides in her tall grass. I am her truth. Even now, as an American citizen, I am African first. She put me in her promises the day I was born. The me within lives in the core that she designed. No matter where I am, I will wear her on my name, in my language, in my attitude, and in my pride. Africa, the first kingdom, she found me worthy enough to be birthed on her sacredness. I am honored, by her. I am African first before I am anything else.

Her love warmed my body, and that warmth was fond of me until the sun went down. I will remember how I never shivered, even in her night’s coldness. She impressed me by how she awoke her love in the form of the sunshine. I remember the time when Africa was all I knew. Like anywhere else, when you connect to a place, you want to be a part of what that place stands for. There are always idealizations that you try to live up too. In the same manner, being African, I was striving to be the woman of Africa. She is perfection to me, spoken with bias. In Africa, the beauty standard was having honor within. All the African girls wanted so bad to grow up to become their own images of the African woman. From parents scolding us on what is lady like and what is not, what is expected of us and what to stay away from, how to dress, how to talk, when to do this and that, they were trying to form us into this idea of an honorable African woman. I am African first, so I am constantly striving to be the ideal African woman. Not for the sake of pleasing a man, but for the sake of having honor within.

The African woman, I was taught about is power. She is strong not because of how she overcomes or endures, but how she sacrifices without expectations, how she loves perfectly, and how her smell of earth, coffee seeds, shea butter, and the income of spring could turn rain into a clear sunny day. She is a lady, a goddess, a mother, wisdom, and freedom. When she is in your presence, you feel the force of her magic kneel you down to show her respect. She carries herself with loveliness. Her steps are in sync with the rhythm of her melody. And when she talks, it is poetry, it is songs. Her words water the plants growing inside you. Her frown does not hide the joy and happiness that she can spring out from the corners of her mouth. Her eyes are merciful, they understand, you do not know what they understand but they do. She talks to God and his angels personally too. Her hair grows towards the sun because gravity fears her, she cannot be limited. Her eyes are big because she sees all, her nose is unique to complement her face. Her lips are juicy because she got the sauce. As she is the source of life, all things must go through her before they could claim a place in this world. She is to be respected and protected. To be nurtured and loved properly.

The ideal African woman seem like an unreachable goal. I know that it is possible though. I have met her a couple of times in some of the African women I have crossed paths with. Some might say, I am putting too much pressure on myself or say that I am being unrealistic. To you, striving to be the ideal African woman might come off as crude or illogical. To correct your fixed mindset, some parts of China worship cows like the way you worship God. It does not mean you are worshiping the right way and they are worshiping the wrong way. It just means that you guys understand reality differently. My African mind is set on the African default. I process most of the information I receive by using the logic many Africans use. Before I can reply to you in English, I translate what I want to say in my native language first. The African woman to me, as an African, is goals. I am African, in and out.

Realistically, being African is not all that is cut out to be though. Usually, around the springtime, I hear the echoes of the village elders chanting the songs of Africa’s roots, power, and grace. Sometimes I attempt to make out the words they are saying, “…Spirits live among us, they dance with us, they will show us paradise, follow your heart, the spirits will lead you.” As a kid, sitting around the campfire with the other village kids and listening to these chants, I felt Africa’s enchantment. But right when the songs were over, Africa screamed, in pain, with blood and falling colors. I am African, God’s promise to Abraham and at the same time, the horror that was left. How can I be the beauty of what Africa was, wear her scars on my flesh, and yet survive being black, all the while keeping my composure? I do not know how I do it, but I do it, smooth too. Being African is more than the name and fun cultural presentation. I am African, this title comes with dreams and nightmares.

I am African before anything, but sometimes I forget to be happy about that. People’s commentary of Africa’s reputation, the toxic behaviors of the African people, and looking at what Africa is now has made it hard for me to be proud of being African. When they call Africa poverty and undeveloped, I think back to all those times she kept showing me poverty and no development. That is when their words about Africa become a hard truth to me as an African. Then I think back to the honor that I should feel and end up mentally conflicting myself. I am African and I should be proud, but sometimes, I am ashamed. I cannot sing Africa’s anthem too loud. I am afraid that if I do, others will hear the horror too and feel my shame. If they see my African for what it is, the little pride I have left in me will be no more. Who will I be then if it is not African still?

Africa as we know it has changed, drastically. It is not the same Africa I once loudly and proudly claimed. The spirits of our ancestors who would roam among us has chosen silence. The animals in which we shared the land with are disappearing. The green grass our village children would play in is now brown hay, the soil is contaminated with chemicals and blood. The tall, shade providing, home giving, majestical trees turned into tree stumps. And my people, they have lost their African ways. The natural, all powerful, spiritual, festive, dancing, loving, kind, wise people of Africa are lost from traditions. Lost from their roots. Where was I when we walked out on our values? Where was I when we decided to abandon our morals?

Meanwhile, we understand the America culture to be a place of diverse integration, the Spanish culture to be known for its art of romance, and the French for their culture of fashion. Africa is the culture of pride, strength, deep love, and spirituality. I want you to understand that Africa used to represent itself in riches beyond the physical. It is much more than I am making it sound.

African pride meant that we looked out for one another. We were all family, we raised and supported each other. The strength of our hearts helped us overcome and rejoice. Our deep love was unconditional. We welcomed and loved everyone, especially our people of Africa. We used to dance with the spirits of our ancestors around the fire made of spells, lit up in the center of my village every full moon. We feared little because we believed in our forces with the spirits. They watched over us and they fought for us. The spirits of our ancestors helped us fight the battles within ourselves and external ones too. We used to love our shades of black on our skin tone. Our flex was about how dark we wore our melanin. We did not know about colorism, nor did we want to fix the direction the sun shined on us. We were the shades of Africa’s tones. Black was everything. Most importantly, we used to know what being African meant.

I am desperately holding on to the African me that once was. That is why it is so hard to accept this African title now, Africa is not what it once was.

I was never a child soldier but even from then, I understood why war was unforgivable. It was all in the aftermath of its chaos. Africa’s old guest left a chaos that destroyed the ways of a whole culture. My African culture. These guests that I am talking about are the criminals we know now as colonizers. When I speak on African pride, I am referring to the Africa that was before we knew about the wolves wearing sheep clothing. They came in, saw our peace, and thought it was a good idea to rob us of it. Looking at the details of their invasions, it explains why Africa looks like a cancer patient who have not made peace with dying. Faded in the space between here and there, not even alive while breathing. Africa, I mean my African people have become victims to mental illnesses. It is honestly scary.

In the jungle near my village is where African terrorist hid, anxiously waiting to be the reason a mother grieved for her lost child. The hut across mines lived two adolescent sons who had their way with the little African girls who did not know any better. In the cricket singing midnights, we listened to the women of my village scream in pain as their husbands beat them into ruins. We stayed quite because the fathers of our households forbidden it for us to step into another man’s business. While trying to find somewhere safe from my father’s insecurities, an African man rapes me. Scared and broken, my grandma set me and my sister on fire for the sake of entertainment. I think that was the reason. I think that because she laughed in muse as we rolled around, attempting to put out the fire burning our skin. I spent most of my evenings watching African mothers beg God to end it all. This is the new normal that African people live by. I am telling you; fear stands next to my African shadow.

Coming to America I thought, maybe the African people are not as terrible as I had presumed. But boy was I wrong. In the now, African women projects their anger and hurt in the form of gossip and humiliate other African women. This is a sport to them. The African men swear a real man is made by owning a woman, like as in slavery. African men hate African women. They will tell you something different, but their behaviors will show you otherwise. Africans are each other’s enemies, and I cannot understand that. My African women, far from perfect, but they try so hard. In the process of trying to prove themselves to these African men, they end up losing it all. They lose valuable stuff too, like their children’s respect. The children, they are traumatized. They grow up without a heart. They loose themselves in their pain, which they carry alone. They grow up to be adults who returns the trauma to their children. And the cycle goes on. Then the incoming generation of African children have completely turned away from the love that made us African. We all had eyes, but we chose to be blind when it came to picking our people up. We had ears, but we chose to be deaf when the abuse continued. We had mouths, but we chose to keep quite when our people needed to borrow our voices.

My African people showed me how cruel the world can really be. It was Africans who exposed the truth about our ying yang reality to me. How can I be proud of this image of me, an African? My people, my own people have turned their backs on honor. They ruined my pride for Africa. Their suicide causing mindset has murdered a ton, including my pride.

It feels like Africans has ceased to know the real God. The God that we have in our own hearts. The God that we do not need a priest’s map to find. The God that understands, forgives, and loves regardless of our imperfections. The God that askes so little of us so he can bless us in abundance. The God who keeps trying and calling for us. The God that begs us for our love. I believe that is the real God we used to worship. We used to know him as love. Africans, brain washed and ignorant, they blindly worship their colonizer’s God. We have believers who scream lord in church, raise their hands to the sky, and donate $1.50 every service even though they get PAID like loyalty. We have mothers who scold their daughters by installing fear in them using God’s name. Every time life happens to Africans in an unwanted way, they say God. They justify their inhuman sins by saying God. Let me just say, the way Africans misuse the name of God is the reason they will end up in hell. The hell their colonizers have made up to control them. For an example, my mom makes more effort to neglect her children’s emotional wellbeing than do the Godly thing and nurture her breed, but the second one of her children breaks down, or turns to the dark as a way of coping, the devil is the enemy, and she is the saint. I will confront her and end my point by saying, “your narcissism will not be the death of me because God has loved me purely.” She rolls her eyes and reply, “God loves me too.” My question is, which God?

Maybe colonization is why everything happened the way it did. Maybe colonization is why it is going the way it is. These colonized, self-hating minds has made the African name a dangerous title to wear. It is dangerous to be African. The men are entitled to your body. The mothers are afraid of their sons. The daughters hide in their rooms because Africans have substituted their values from honor into dollar currency. These are dangerous grounds. Africans, my people, they degrade, bully, steal from, and grave each other. They are ruining themselves into pieces of nothing. Nothing worthy of the African name anyways. Africa did not name us Africans for us to act like this. My beautiful, godly, fruitful African people, I do not recognize them anymore.

Africa is sick right now; she is trying to recover but she has been drained of her strength. As Africans, as her people, her children, she calls us to nurture her. Only if we would listen then we could heal with her. Maybe then, I can wear my African title with pride. But until then, I will work hard to be the one African I can be proud of. I will call out the dangers, complain, and preach. If I cannot look to my African elders for guidance, I will remember Africa for the beauty that she really is and ask her to help me lead my African people back to her. But Until then, I will just carry this shame.

It does not even stop there though. Being African in Africa or in the African community is one thing but being African in America, in the American community is another. In America, people try really hard to have a heart for Africa and her people, so they praise them in this politically sensitive, culturally insensitive way. Politically sensitive but culturally insensitive: in summary, it is a bunch of words that sounds shiny and nice but is mostly ignorant. These cute words are said from the mouths of people who are lacking experience and relation regarding the topic. They speak in a way that works hard to not offend anybody. People who participate in anything that is politically sensitive but culturally insensitive just wants to be a part of “the conversation.” It is politically sensitive because they try to factualize their ignorance, but it is culturally insensitive because they are speaking on a topic for the sake of talking, without putting in the effort to understand the truth. By doing this, they are creating a model for us to follow. Their playfulness, African jokes, made-up stories, out of context history books, and passive aggressiveness has taken out the peace of being an African.

America is good at not exposing their students to other cultures. And because of this, I am mad at these politically sensitive, culturally insensitive people who have went out of their way to give Africa an American image. I understand that they do not know better. At the same time, google is free. In America, Africans have been assigned a code of conduct. People like this have set the expectations for me and my African people to follow. These expectations have forced me to compromise with being African or American. I constantly find myself stuck between following my nature as an African and complying to who they say I am to avoid being deemed as a misfit foreign. Learning about the American ways, I realized that I must find a middle ground between expressing the African in me and the African that America wants me to be. The middle ground can be reached through code switching. Meaning, I am never completely African and African American at the same time.

It is hard to be African when I am constantly switching to my American side. I am African first by nature and American second by demand. These expectations serve to diminish the African in me. In America, my accent cannot be too strong, so I killed it. I cannot wear African scents because they trigger white people’s allergies, so I wear American lotions even though it breaks my skin out. I am automatically stupid because I do not use big English words, even though I speak three other languages, so I just do not speak. If I wear my African prints, I am dressed up, so I only wear them on special occasions. People gag at my African food if I eat it in public, so I eat my African food in the safety of my home. People act scared of me because the violent notions tied to black people in America, when actually, I was taught to be kind. Africans value intelligence and wisdom, but when I try to have meaningful conversations amongst my peers, I am too deep. People are surprised to find out that me, an African, have long hair. I cannot dance with my hips and butt because in America, it is sexual, so I only dance alone or with other Africans. I cannot speak my language in public because this is America, where we speak English. People might not realize that they are putting me in these situations, but it is happening, and it is affecting me, as an African.

I am always going to be African though, regardless of these expectations. If I am not actively being African in public, I am being her, away from the crowd. I cannot help but be African. It is who I am. I can adapt to the American ways and try to mimic its honorable parts, but I cannot switch off my African settings. I can appreciate the American culture and learn about it, but I cannot become the American culture.

When I tell people that I am African, their first impression is, “Oh wow, you do not look African, or “You don’t even sound African.” This is not a compliment; it is a degradation. To me, it just sounds like they are saying that I am not who I am. And that bothers me because I thought I was striving to be the woman of Africa. If I am not even coming off as African, how far am I from being the woman of Africa? I guess, in the end, the middle ground is a line dividing me into a whole and a part. A whole African and part American. I am African all the time and American when it is convenient.

I proclaim Africa because it is the truth, not because I am overjoyed with what it means to be African these days. When I think of Africa, dark clouds fill my mind, thundering storms pour, and it becomes hard to be proud. I come back to the fact that my mother is African, her mother was African, her mother’s mother was African, and so forth. I cannot be anything else other than African. Africa has claimed me as her own. I will travel to many places, but even then, I will still be African. I cannot run from it. I wish I could always carry this title with pride, except that I cannot. Africa came from being the source of life, the bridge to heaven and earth, to being the devil’s playground. We have turned our backs on what Africa once stood for. We have lost our ways and it is sad to think about. It is sad to be associated with the current state of Africa. However, the African in me sympathize with Africa. She has seen hell. And since I was born on her soil; I am connected to her. Whatever she is, I am too. I am her and she is me. Whether that is good or bad in your eyes, I will be African before anything else, always. I am African.