Wait only broke wagon. Thought only broke rope.

“Up, up, you mighty race!  You can accomplish what you will.”

Marcus Garvey



Sitting here wondering how often I've heard, "..wait you'll see.  Africa will never get it together."  Or perhaps how often, "...never given going to Africa any thought.  Why would I?".  Twenty years ago you could have never convinced me that I wouldn't have returned my soul to soil that was once not foreign to me.  It used to disturb me that more of my counterparts and classmates weren't readying themselves for the return voyage.  It hurt me to hear people complain and mutter that there would never be unity.  And worse still, that we as Africans, wherever we were from, didn't have the capacity for it.

This ability or disability rather, to not trust in each other with open minds and hearts, is one of the most insipid vestiges of the colonialism, bondage and absolute barbaric inhumanity that we as a people have had to face.  Wish as one might want to say that you can't blame everything on the actions of the people who to this day are benefiting from these man made systems and institutions, there is one idea that should not be debatable.  That no matter how often you get down on your knees and weed your garden, as often as you believe you've gotten to the very root, undoubtedly  weeds return.  That a bad apple will spoil the bunch if you don't remove it quickly, and even then, as with cider, you still have to take care and manage properly that you don't end up with vinegar.

I wonder if the memory of Africa is buried so deeply, as deeply as the mistrust.  So huddled together in the corners of the corners of our minds, the 3d lenses that are God given focus one image.  Have we accepted, to borrow a line from the movie Blood Diamond that, "This is Africa."?

To get back, it's been twenty years or so that I've been waiting to go home.  In that time children have been born, elders have made their transitions.  Jobs have been lost and found and lost again.  I've met people for whom "patiently waiting" has turned to "waited".  I've driven the distance to her shores countless times and welcomed the morning sun from her fields everyday of my waking life and, still, I wait.  My thoughts still run on visions of red clay and cities filled with the kind of life unknown here in the west.

Big ups South Sudan for fanning the fire in our bellies from a blaze to a roar.  It has been a Cuban coffee elixir for our movements in the Diaspora.  The energy here too is electric.  New ideas are being born and discussed on not how we will once again join our family in the land turning soil and coaxing freshly planted seedlings to bear fruit, but how soon.

In a short moment, the weight that once broke wagon wheels, will be replaced by our efforts to repair and or replace old ways.  Ways that have kept us motionless and apart for far too long.  The taught that once broke rope will be erased by thinking of how to service the rope as it returns service in kind.