On Race in Africa- nah

I just completed reading Chimammanda Adichies novel and I beg to react while the knots of exciting story are still fresh as smoking feaces in ashen dewy grass.

This amazing book about race to me lied when she stated that in Africa she had never been black. That here race doesn’t implode on your face until you meet those niggers and their former slavers in America.

Personally being home grown I have no first hand opinion on America and frankly its books like these that inform my opinions.

On race and Africa I would say that it does exist. who wasn’t a loose toddler running after a white man who has happened to your dark corner of the continent shouting 'Mzungu how are you' The way we did it in our days, was incredulous in our ability to get the grinning old white people with spindly hair and reddening necks to give us sweets.

The lessons do not stop because soon after cutting a cypress tree to make Christmas tree and sprinkling its spiked incensed edges with soft white wool, after putting up Christmas cards with white Jesus Mary and Joseph or Santa and snow, we go to school and read our history as it was written for us.

We see photos of black naked men carrying white missionaries as they discovered us. We are taught more of when the Portuguese made their conquests than the Mau Mau (mentioned in passing as we rush to finish the syllabus just before exams. I can’t believe had to cram all those bloody years)

It is not lost to us that we are a race of people apart and subservient to another. A race who defines what we consider progress, development, future.

It was not lost to me one day when I arrived at Busia catholic church late and was standing in the warm tropical sun all the pews occupied when a white couple, we call them odiero here in Kenya or mzungu. What I witnessed made me stop going to church.

The usher an old illiterate was suddenly struck with panic, the odieros couldn’t possibly stand through the whole mass. That must have seemed so scandalous to her, to imagine the exporters of this religion would be made to endure standing at the expense of the recipient was un-African. So she not only shooed away some Africans but also stripped her greying hair of its wrapper and polished the pew for the white folks who actually thanked her for being so kind.

That was not so bad until the priest who was conducting a Kiswahili service chipped in a few Anglo cues for the benefit of the white folks.

So race is not lost to us it is acknowledged here but not in a militant way; in a submissive way but with a belief that a good white man is only a dead one.

No, white folks do not fret. Meaning a good white folk is one you could fleece. Here you walk down the street with a white woman and brothers slyly smile at you and congratulate you in mother tongue for making it in life. Brothers go to the gym because they see niggers in magazines with chiseled bodies and they reckon it increases their chances on duping a white woman. Other tribes don Maasai regalia and learn how to jump to nail a white woman which is automatic cash cow!

Here relations are more of beach-boy-old-white lady or young girls vulturing for old white men with money. And they help they white guys friends land their sisters in a gold rush kind of way Here interracial is economical just like there where its for immigration papers
Here white folks who have read the travel advisory that garishly paints it as an Al shabab terrorist outpost with criminal gangs running rife. Who have been told not to talk to starngers by their governments and smile wryly at the rushing deluge of blackness and browness only talk to friends they have made at the NGOs they work in.
Race is real not just against us.