CAN I AFFORD IT?

I was conceived in the blistering heat of the golden African sun; born beneath a celestial field of diamonds; with the silvery, full moon illuminating the darkness of a pristine nocturnal African landscape.

But I was raised and became another kind of man in the bowels of the earth, mining precious metals which seldom adorn the mantel above my hearth; the back-breaking labour under a yoke of tyranny to furrow and sow and reap a harvest that doesn’t fill my stomach; my life reduced to a disposable human resource in the employ of a brutal, relentless economy whose bounty is made tenable by my sweat; my future and the future of my children, sacrificed to secure success for strangers who will never know my name.

I cannot afford to own land; or build a home; yet I must pay for my child’s education: mostly I barely survive, but I do take comfort in the fact that there are so many who have even less than me and in that abject certainty I end up owning my lot and my suffering.

But with that harsh reality, comes an uncompromised clarity – a sensitivity.

Detached, I am able to really see. I am able to see myself for whom and what I really am; I see us all beyond the constricting confines of stereotype and statistics and an imposed identity that we are all constantly persuaded to assume: no longer am I just one of countless millions living below or upon the breadline, on the street or in a shack or a sub-standard block-house where the cold wind keens through the single chink in the night’s armour; the cracked and crumbling walls, frames with cardboard windows and beneath the leaning door.

I am able to see what is happening in the world, what is happening to our ailing humanity; I see what is going on and what has gone wrong; and while we fight these fragmented, meaningless wars against enemies and demons that we’ve been sold, there is another beast watching unseen – unseeing – gloating as its omnipotence swells, sustained by avarice and the wilful ignorance as we bare witness but miserably, doggedly doubt the veracity of the evidence. That we are the unthinking, suffragists that fuel the fires of this capitalist democracy that we inherited through negotiation between urbane warlords with their own interests at heart; a settlement in which small men have become leaders through coercion and corruption, ensuring that my lot remains unchanged.

I still warm my brittle bones under the golden African sun, I still lie prostrate beneath the celestial blanket of diamonds which is my forefathers’ gaze, upon the rich fertile soil: embracing all of my wealth; the irrepressible spirit of my African soul.

This African soil where the dust of my ancestral memory lies decaying with parents and sons and daughters, buried beneath the convenient text-book lies: the powdery flaking white-wash ineffectually trying to conceal the story of an age of African prosperity.

Sometimes as I watch you turn away – unable to face the facts – I wonder ‘what is the price I have to pay for your dignity?

“Can I afford it?”