Adora Nworah writing in Africa is Done Suffering:
More hereWe are children of Africa, we are citizens of our respective countries, why do we beg and scuffle for these second class citizenships from other nations, plead for their sloppy seconds, only remembering our native lands during African Student Organization parties at colleges or to display the facade of cultural depth during those few occasions when showing some kind of diversity in the substance you’re made of could yield benefits when you’re in the midst of a certain group of people
Then there are those of us who convince ourselves that acquiring some random nation’s citizenship automatically gives us the right, no the audacity, to tear down our homeland, moaning and grumbling in what seems a lot like scornful glee when news of some disaster strikes our countries. We sit on our couches, tearing down the bad governments in Africa one dictator at a time, the non-existent infrastructure, exclaiming ecstatically about how Africa is doomed, throwing around one or two solutions that fade away as quickly as our lips stop moving, not once thinking we need to actively get involved by contributing our own quotas towards the overall quality of life in Africa. We convince ourselves that we are comfortable with our new life, a life of picket fences and neighbors we hardly ever see, a life of mortgages and high taxes, and health insurance, and a complex, uncompromising, faceless system that lacks the personal touch and feeling of communality that is a pertinent factor of life in Africa. We praise the superficial ease of life in these foreign lands, the booming economies and solid infrastructures which, from the sentimental point of view of a ranting African female, are the results of years of hard labor by our ancestors that were sold during the slave trade.
