Take a walk around Africa, around your area on any African soil and you’ll be delighted by the level of intelligence shown by African kids. They were born into homes that could best be slums in nations with better organisation but their contentment with their environment is delightful, appreciable at best. They don’t have machineries to work with, no heavenly idea on the use of technological materials to make their lives better but out of the blues, they’ve fashioned an excellent way of survival for themselves and their generations yet unborn, amidst the poverty, penury and an opportunity-tight environment, growing into able men who’d achieve great things if given a chance but that chance, as it is , never comes knocking readily for an African.
Africa, home to over a billion people with 2000 languages and 3000 ethnic groups is the second largest continent in the world, one that doesn’t enjoy the largesse ascribed to a people of such massive populations and natural endowments, such great human resource base and intellectual ingeniousness, Africa has always had a fuel that has never been used to light up its darkness.
The scramble for Africa came from the Europeans and here we are today, still a million miles away from preconceived and premeditated developments and progression, marred by corruption and unnecessary wars that has been the debacle to the African progression. Africa had always been massively tormented by Europeans, who greedily exploit their arable lands and resource-filled fields to get whatever they want in their nations. From the great wildlife concentration to the very many historic grounds or the naturally blessed lands, Africa is just as great or is as potentially great as any continent in the world.
We never had a border, the Europeans made our borders for us, against our wishes, gave us our most preferred languages today, gave us a chance to have a taste of education, a very strong and bold move to empower Africa but moves never enough to save Africa from the wounds of greed and continuous self destruction. God bless the days of Hails Sellasie of Ethiopia who fought with the last lid of blood in his life to fight the onslaught of Italians in their lands, Ethiopia, then Abyssinia never were colonized and today, are Africa’s second most populous nation and one of the most developing in the world.
Many Africans have taken the world by storm with their outrightly magnificent intelligence and intellectual capabilities, talk about Nelson Mandela, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Desmond Tutu, Ngugi Wa’ Thiongo and some other black Americans of African origin who have made their names recognisable in the pages of various antiquities. In every field a black man has found himself, pushed by the grit and ruggedness in his blood always aspires to be great. He is one not so chanced and opportune to achieve great things because of the sparse materials before him but one, who against all odds makes a lasting difference in the hearts of men.
Since a very long time ago, Africa has always had a great value in cultural heritage and quality of humans but has always been a region whose lamp never got lighted up. There should be plans to gear up the African progression. A continent with over 50% of its entire population as teenagers should have a great future ahead of it, four of the ten best developing countries in the world today are in Africa; namely Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, Mozambique and DR. Congo. The literacy rate of Equatorial Guinea is 94% and 84.1% is the literacy rate of the world while South Sudan’s is 27%. That tells of a continent whose diverging fortunes are as stark as a bright light in a dark room, a continent whose lamps never get lighted, we are a people of pride and purpose but one whose lack of chances has bestowed upon it, a tag that is not its.
