The African-American Dream

Dear black African in America or African American as you call yourself;
Please go back to sleep;
And to dream again;
Your ancestors dreamt to be free from slavery;
It was the true dream that reflected their times and realities;
Your fathers dreamt to be integrated into the American society;
It was the true dream that reflected their times and realities;
But you dreamt to be accepted by white America but your dream has gone unfulfilled for generations now;
A dream that is both a deviation of your true purpose and reflects not your times or realities;
It is a dream that denies you your true genius, capabilities and power at the table of the powerful of all races that you commanded, at the dawn of civilisation;
Your creations-ancient Nubia & Egypt-were the first true civilizations to have been created by mankind;
They were built on empty foundations but became foundations upon which any other known human civilization has been built;
They did not only lord over the entire world but they gave the world the first of any tool of significance to humanity in history and at present-industry, technology, science, philosophy, religion (both monotheism and polytheism), institutions of teaching and learning, etc.
You have long been taught to look for your greatness in entertainment and games of sport;
But entertainment and sports do not liberate but rather distract;
Your dream of acceptance betrays your past glory and your future potential;
You have been fighting for that dream for centuries and have become weary, tired and hopeless;
You have become intolerant, unable to hear the truth and take advantage of its wisdom;
Like your oppressor, you have become a people who force everyone to sing your tune and to see the world with your eyes even if they don’t want to;
But your dreams have not and shall not bring you any good until you go back to sleep and wake up with new and proper dreams that reflect who you are and what you can do;
Fighting for acceptance has brought you little good just as abolition and integration did to your fathers and their fathers;
When you wake up this time around with true dreams reflecting true African identity, glory and power;
You would fight no more for acceptance but for recognition and respect: for the rule in human civilization is to recognize and respect those that have made themselves indispensable and to dispense with those that are dispensable;
When you wake up with your new dreams, you would realize your days in America are numbered;
And you would troupe in your numbers back to your place of origin: the authentic birth place of humanity;
You would go back as prophets and messengers bringing visions of progress, prosperity and true freedom to your brethren at home;
You would scatter into every country and within every tribe in the whole of Africa;
You shall convert one, two, ten or as many as you can of every tribe, into your new faith of African future and greatness again;
You shall do this for ten years or as long as it takes you to get enough converts to start new communities and cities in each country or region of each country, separated from the current western ideologically infested societies;
The implementation of your new visions of an African identity, ideology, industry, education, science and technology, philosophy, religion, etc will begin in these new communities;
The scattering all over the continent and to each tribe, shall provide you insurance against massacre and physical extermination by any barbaric foreign power or combination of powers that may fail to destroy your ideas by infiltrations and division tactics;
But the fear of massacre, infiltration and extermination shall not scare you from dreaming: for it is in high honour to be violently and unjustly exterminated for trying to do what guarantees you progress than to be left alone stagnant, condemned to poverty of identity, thought and of place in human civilisation;
When you wake up with this new dream and you commit yourselves to it and begin its execution in earnest;
It might take hundred, two hundred, five hundred or a thousand years before your efforts and your creation begin to bear fruits;
But you can be certain to have planted a seed that can replace the current civilization when its expiry date comes, which must come;
To distinguish yourselves from your oppressors as a race that is not selfish, backward and barbaric, morally bankrupt and destined for destruction, is to sow this seed of a new African civilization, greatness and place at the table of great civilisations.
To remain where you are, fighting for white acceptance is to show how selfish you are, and to deny the new African, the seed he needs to make Africa great again. 

Responding to my friend’s plea for help.

Dear Joseph (pseudonym),

Thanks for taking time to email me. I really appreciate the fact that you have not forgotten me despite the distance that has kept us apart for many years now. I hope your family is doing great. I thought I should write you an open response because I think the message could benefit a lot more people.

I want to share with you a simple lesson of life that I have only come to appreciate recently. This is beautifully captured in this bible words, “As a man THINKTH in his heart, so is he” (proverbs chapter 23, verse 7). I think the failure to grasp this simple message is the very reason why happiness and success have eluded you and I. It is also the reason why Ghana and Africa is rich but poor. We are resource rich but mentally poor. That is why our leaders will always run to the IMF/World bank for loans anytime they hit a problem.  These loans keep us in perpetual poverty but make our creditor incredibly rich.

You reminded me in your email that you still have the ambition of studying abroad. I hope this ambition come to pass quickly. You also asked for help because life has been unfair to you nowadays. But what should I say? I am sending you Ghc 20,000? No, my response is that, if you need help financially, I am not in a position to offer financial help at this moment. I am also struggling to pay my kids school fees and keep to family commitments here and home despite my meagre salary. It’s a shame that as a dear friend, I can’t be able to help you.

I read a small book entitled “as a man thinkth” by James Allen written in 1903 [https://wahiduddin.net/thinketh/as_a_man_thinketh.pdf] that uses the wisdom in the above bible verse. The book has given me a wealth of insight into life that I wish to share with you as a dear friend. The wisdom in this piece of advice can be a million times more than any money I could offer you, ONLY if it is appreciated, reflected upon and applied.

It teaches us that, LIFE (nature, destiny, God, universal spirit, etc) is like a knife. It does not cut anything on its own. Therefore life can neither be fair nor unfair to anyone. Therefore, the condition we experience today is totally our creation and we are the only persons who can get us out of it. Even Bill Gates can't get us out of our present situations. I came to appreciate this rather late and wished I had known this long before now. I would have had enough money to share with you my dear friend.

I have learnt that we create our realities by our THOUGHTS. When all we think about are the PROBLEMS that we are currently going through and all the things that are going WRONG in our lives, we are CREATING those same realities in our lives. Therefore, our thoughts of yesteryears are our realities we are living today and our thoughts of today (which is almost always the worries of our current challenges) will be our realities tomorrow. This discovery scared me to death but the story of my good friend, Jude; below suggests that the wisdom in this is very true. 

What then is the SOLUTION to our current problems? It is simply CHANGING our current thoughts from the worries to FOCUSING on the BRIGHTER FUTURE that we want to have. When our desires for the future are strong enough, they begin to build vivid mental images of where we want to be or what we want to have. Life or nature then takes these images and turns them into reality. That is how simple it is.

I have seen boys and girls selling on the streets rise to reaches and I do think they may have used this technique to the best effect. This happens only through sustained effort, dedication and hard work.

For instance, Jude challenged me years back by a simple question as, “how many applications have you made to universities outside of Ghana in the last 5 years in order to realize your dream of schooling abroad? I bet your answer will be 0 or at best not more than 3. I promise to give you Ghc 1000 immediately if you can send me evidence of more than 3 applications to foreign universities you have made in the last 5 years”.

I was seriously offended by this question but when I came back to my senses, I realized Jude was right. He didn’t have that much money to give me but I also didn’t have any evidence of even 1 application I had made to a foreign university. Today, I also come across people who wish to travel abroad but do not have passports. Wanting to study abroad without applying to schools is like wanting to travel abroad but having no passport. Like my answer to Jude, most people often comfortably ask me, “HOW CAN I APPLY TO FOREIGN SCHOOLS WHEN I AM FACED WITH ALL THESE CHALLENGES?”

Lets answer the above by contrasting my life with that of my friend, Jude. Jude and I grew up from similar backgrounds but ended up in different life circumstances. We both attended the same senior high school and had similarly poor family backgrounds (perhaps we both lost our fathers when we were only 10 years of age). Jude was never any more intelligent than me. I can’t also think of any chance or luck that he had that bestowed on him any fate better than I. Jude practically had nothing that was superior to what I had except that he knew the POWER of the MIND.

 Today, Jude is studying for PhD abroad but I am struggling here in Ghana to make ends meet as a basic level teacher. The DIFFERENCE between Jude and me today since leaving high school has been how we have used our THOUGHTS. That is all. After high school or even before, whilst I was concerned about my poor background and my unfortunate family situations and all the problems I faced, Jude focused his thoughts on his future dreams and potential; what he wanted to be. He wanted to go to the university and that was his focus. But I settled for the training college because of the security of the allowances.

After our last paper in high school, Jude started as an apprentice in a barbering shop so that he could work and save money to buy university forms. That was how he bought forms to apply to the university. He always told me with confidence, “I know my family can't afford to pay university fees for me but that can never discourage me”. When he got admission to Legon, he wrote sponsorship applications to almost all NGO's in Tamale including World Vision, Action-Aid, PPAG, but all turned him down except PPAG that promised paying half of his 1st year fees.

At the peak of his frustrations, his friend's uncle came from abroad and decided to sponsor him to go through university. I told him he was very lucky to have had that chance but as I reflect on it today, I realize how wrong I was. Imagine he said he couldn't afford university and for that matter never applied for one. Would he have had admission the time the friend’s uncle came? Did he gather courage to ask the friend’s uncle for support? YES. LUCK COMES TO THOSE WHO ARE PREPARED TO RECEIVE IT. 

After his first degree, Jude also applied to 21 foreign universities for 3 years before he finally got scholarship to go to the UK for his masters. Each year he applied to 7 universities and got admission in most cases but no funding. But he never gave up. That’s how people get lucky.

When he was looking for his PhD, he told me he sent emails to more than 100 professors all over the world before finding one. He even had admission to OXFORD UNIVERSITY to do his PhD but he never had the funding. He cried like a baby on phone with me when this opportunity had to escape him. He said it was one of his most cherished dreams. Knowing the determination and perseverance that runs through his blood, my only consolation to Jude was that this was DESTINY.

The SIMPLE MESSAGE I have tried to convey to you in this letter is that, WE ARE THE CREATORS OF OUR REALITIES. That’s simple. If you want to change our current circumstances, we must first change our thoughts and follow that with action. The life that is unfair to us today will begin to change by drawing opportunities to us that we never thought we could have. But LIFE will change gradually because it will wait to see if we are really committed to what we say we want. We have to do the hard work, before life will step in.

This is the end of my letter. I have already begun to practice the wisdom shared in this letter and the results are encouraging. I hope to share in your experimental results when you write next time. My best WISHES to you and family

Sincerely,

H. S Wumpini

Rethinking the Definition of the Northerner in Ghana

The concept NORTHERNER has occupied an important place in the political, economic, historical and geographical discourses in Ghana. It’s a concept that has been assumed to have a static meaning even in changing contexts of the geographic and economic north, changing contexts of the people of the north and Ghana as a whole. 

I believe it is about time Ghanaians in general and northerners in particular began to give contextual interpretations to the word northerner. Such a contextual discourse about the northerner will be relevant in understanding and addressing the contemporary challenges of northern Ghana.

The North in historical terms refers to a part of Ghana that was largely ignored, undeveloped and untouched during the colonial periods of Ghana. The North first attracted the colonizers as a reserve of slaves for the transatlantic slave trade business complex.  It was and perhaps still, the part of the country 100 years behind the rest as far as education and development are concerned. It was and perhaps still the part of Ghana designed as a labour reserve for the rest of the country.

Geographically, the north occupied a landscape called the northern territories by the colonial administration. The geographic north is something that is fluid and has been redefined variously for various reasons. To most people, the north comprises three regions namely the northern region, upper east and west regions. However, for political reasons, governments have expanded the definition to include the Volta and Brong Ahafo regions and that led to the transformation of the Northern Accelerated Development Authority to the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority. The north is a landscape most Ghanaians including those in the media are ignorant about.

Ethnically, the north is a collection of various tribes and ethnic groups that are distinct from those found in other parts of the country. People from these tribes are referred to as northerners regardless where they reside or where they are born in the country and beyond.

Economically, a northerner characterizes a person subject to poverty with limited resources and opportunities. As such, a typical northerner has a peculiar childhood and growth characterized by limited opportunities for education and a constant struggle for survival. Hence, the life of the economic northerner can best be described as one set on struggle and survival rather than living and comfort. The poverty of the north was one of the instrumental reasons that qualify Ghana for HIPC in 2000[whether HIPC funds fully benefited the north is another discussion].

A northerner can also be described as person with an acute understanding of the challenges peculiar to life in the north as well as an individual with the desires and determinations to improve the lives of the people of the north. In this light, Kwame Nkrumah can be seen as the best northerner in the history of Ghana for his determination to uplift the people of the north from poverty. Professor Jeffrey Sachs [for his involvement with the Millennium Villages Project in the north] can be seen as a better northerner in comparison to most contemporary and past elite northern politicians who are consumed by personal glorification to neglect of the poor, whom they are elected to serve.

Significant changes have taken place over the years in Ghana that requires us to rethink the definition of the northerner. Economically most northern elites including the political and the educated classes have grown out of the northern brackets. On the other hand, there are many people in all parts of the country who qualify to be called northerners as far as their economic circumstances are concerned.

 Also, social mobility has permitted people to be born and raised as well as reside in the geographical south of the country despite having northern origins. Should we continue to call thess people northerners despite the fact that they may experience different social and economic circumstances compared with those in the geographic north? What about those of southern and other origins who currently reside in the north? Should these people be considered northerners? 

Rethinking the northerner is very important in our political, economic and historical discourses in Ghana and for Ghana’s future development. Almost all Ghanaians think of President John Dramani Mahama as a northerner because of his ethnic northern origin but Mahama has more in common with the southern Ghanaian than he has with the northerner. He was born into a wealthy political class family and for that matter did not have a typical northern experience growing up.

Mahama has lived much of his life in the south [attending Achimota for his basic education] of Ghana and therefore shares a cultural lifestyle that is closer to the typical southerner than the northerner. Mahama’s abolition of the Teacher Trainee Allowances for Teacher Colleges in Ghana suggests both his lack of understanding and perhaps desire to address the challenges of the northerner. The allowances paid to teacher trainees have been a lifeline for most northerners who pass through teacher colleges in Ghana. In some cases, its not just a lifeline for the student but his/her entire family.

The concept of the northerner and its place in Ghana’s development is a subject that northern youth should consider for research at the masters and doctoral levels of studies.

Date: 15^th November 2014:

The Wisdom and Rise in Adversity: The Tale of a People

Wumpini

Dear Socrates, in our last conversation thee said we would be talking about the WISDOM and RISE in adversity today. It seems an interesting subject because adversity is a natural part of the human existence.  I have been thinking about the subject and thought of suggesting that we talk about the rise and wisdom in an adversity that has divided my people for so many years, but I hesitate to bring this up because I have never heard anyone talk of this subject without raising controversy. Can there be any wisdom or an opportunity for a rise from such an adversity?

Socrates

My son, thou bring a subject worthy of deliberation. Sit down and lets talk. I remember we discussed this a little in our numerous conversations my son. What details and background are thou willing to share with old Socrates?

Wumpini

I have heard stories about when this division started but what I shall tell thee is what I have witnessed. My people are hardworking, intelligent, honest, industrious and courageous people. Because of the above traits, we have been the envy of many tribes for generations. Stories are told about how the division started but my generation never grew up to know about it until recently. I have already told thee about that and would not want to repeat it here. In the decades leading up to the recent incident, my people were growing in influence and occupying very high positions in many national and international institutions.

The successful working class even had a clubs that met regularly and promoted the growth of the tribe through many projects. They sponsored needy but brilliant students from all over the country, they donated support items to communities and built schools. They even brought elementary students from villages to the cities to open up their worldviews and make them see the world of limitless possibilities.  This was beautiful. So when thee mentioned the subject, all that filled my heart was how can we get these beautiful days back? Where is the wisdom and where is the opportunity to rise from this, old Socrates?

Socrates 

My son, thou talk of a tribe with limitless possibilities.  I shall tell thee the wisdom first. There is nothing too great for a people to do as long as they stay united with a common purpose. I can tell thee that with the unity that thee described of thy people in the past, they could rule the whole world if they wished. I shall give thee a modern example. My son, I am very old but I have never lost interest in the affairs of the world.  Do thee know that the whole Jewish population is less than 1% of the entire world’s people?

Wumpini

I wouldn’t dispute that from thee even though I don’t have the figures.

Socrates

Thou speak words of respect and wisdom. Do thee know any tribe or race in the world that is as powerful as the Jews?

Wumpini

I can’t think of any.

Socrates 

Thou speak the truth. Did thee read about the Jewish Holocaust in school?

Wumpini 

Yes. I can still remember the horrific pictures painted in my mind reading about the plight of an entire race subjected to the dictates of one of the beasts the world has ever seen.

Socrates 

Thou remember very well, my son. Therefore there lies thy wisdom, my son. I want thee to know from today that nothing is beyond the reach of a people that stand united with a purpose. Numbers does not matter when unity of purpose is the core trait of a people. Thy people did have it and they will get back to it soon. No condition lasts forever. Have faith my son.

Wumpini

Socrates, thy words remind me of a part of the details that escaped my memory. One of the divided groups of my people has remained relatively strong and powerful despite their small numbers. They have remained united with a common purpose. They identify and support the development of their youth. Most of the rising youth in places of influence among my people come from this particular group. In fact, they embody these cherished traits of my old people I grew up to see.

Socrates

My son, thou have found the rising opportunity in the second part of thy story. In fact, thee have found two opportunities

Wumpini

What are they?

Socrates

Youth of today have lost the greatest human skill of telling the wisdom in a tale and seeing the opportunities in adversity. But I will tell thee with the hope that when thee come across similar circumstances thee will be able to tell the wisdom and see the opportunity.

Thy first opportunity is that the important values or traits of thy people are intact and these are helping the development of a section of the youth. Thy people are still growing just that it’s only a section at this time.

Before I tell thee the second opportunity, tell me what is the state of the youth in the larger group?

Wumpini 

Old Socrates and his questions. The truth is that the youth are averagely fine. Just that in a competitive world, getting a supporting hand means a lot.  Therefore only a few get to rise as quickly as the other group. Also, a few that rise very quickly riding on the back of the division are those in politics and it saddens my heart that these group of people seem the least interested in seeing the division fade away. Politics have served to perpetuate the division. This is part of my fears, Old Socrates.  

Socrates 

Son, thee have found the second opportunity. That is, if the second group finds the wisdom to go back and pick these cherished values practiced of old, thy people would be back on the same root again. Both groups will rise in adversity and when the opportunity for unity comes, which shall come, the strength and opportunities of thy people in unity, will be limitless. The power of unity of purpose and youth support is that, when youths are provided support based on underlying value or vision, they are obliged to pass on the support to generations till eternity. When youths struggle to grow without support, their inclinations to support others are limited and depend on individual values. Such is not good for collective growth.

This is the wisdom and rise in adversity.

Wumpini 

Old Socrates, thy wisdom is timeless and thee speak of HOPE so pleasing to my ears. I shall forever remain grateful to thy wisdom. Thee mentioned an important subject so dear to my heart, Youth growth. I shall propose this for our next meeting. Thanks to thee.

End

Note: Permission is granted for distribution, re-use, and translation of this text into any language for informative and educative purposes so long as the intent and meaning of the text are not twisted or distorted and the source is acknowledged and credited.