22nd of Jan 2020, Blaise Diagne Airport, Dakar Senegal
Here I am, back in Senegal after a long period. My heart is beating intensely.
That is the first time for my wife Laure and my son Noah Ali.
For me, it’s the home and gush. I am feeling good. I see Black people everywhere, and I am anonymous again.
We grab our luggage, and we go outside the arrival area.
My young brother Thierno Amadou and my older brother Thierno Daouda welcome us.
We hug so intensely. I am home!
The Blaise Diagne airport was built recently in Diass, a town one hour from Dakar.
It is a bigger, more modern airport, replacing the Leopold Sedar Senghor airport in Dakar.
Blaise Diagne and Leopold Sédar Senghor were two prominent politicians and leaders. They contributed to the rise of negros to gain independence in the early 60s and the last century.
Senghor became the first president of Senegal after the end of the French colonization and is with Aimé Cesaire and Léon Damas, the fathers of the Négritude movement.
Négritude can be seen as the #BlackLivesMatter movement in Africa.
The car is speeding at 110km/hour on the route to Dakar. In the car, I noticed the similarity between the road and the road signs to what I am used to in France. I am puzzled.
I feel like I am in France, I said to my big brother Thierno Daouda.
Yes, this motorway has been built by Eiffage, and its name is “Autoroute de l’Avenir”, he replied.
Huh, the motorway of our future is built and managed by a French company. Interesting, I thought to myself.
One hour later, we are arriving at our homestay in Yoff, a famous district north of Dakar.
We needed to buy some groceries as it was the evening. Is there a store open at 11:00 pm? I asked.
My little brother, Thierno Amadou, said: In Dakar, we have everything you have in France:
- Grocery stores: Auchan, Decathlon,
- Telecommunication: Orange, Free, Canal + Afrique
- Banks: Societe Generale, BICIS (BNP Paribas Group),
- etc
I am not talking about how our whole economy is wholly tied to Europe, with the region's currency, the franc CFA being baked by France, and, indirectly, the European Union. Those ties were built after the “end of colonization in the early 1960s.
The world is taking a big wave of Covid-19. All countries are hit at the same time. That will be the only time I don't hear the distinction between developed and third-world countries in the media.
We are all on the brink of collapsing. But, of course, there is a lot of solidarity and kindness in the world, and countries are building humanity bridges to help each other.
However, be it Italy, Spain, France, and the USA, are facing their domestic battle against Covid-19. And the direct, tangible consequence is that the West is not in a position to help other countries this time, especially not African countries.
Why? Because they are working on developing solutions tailored to their needs that answer their reality.
They are applying total or partial confinement, which cannot fit African realities.
They are advocating “social distancing,” which cannot fit African realities.
They are working on developing respirators and ventilators with the equipment they develop in their own domestic companies, which is impossible in Africa.
Let's dive deep quickly into the three topics above.
Confinement is not fit for Africa because most people live daily. They must go out, sell something, buy food, and then return home to feed their extended family.
Social distancing is totally in contradiction with the point above. In Africa, most people live with their parents, children, cousins, and friends under one roof. Most often, only one person is the sole source of income for the rest.
Washing hands multiple times a day is of the five dos against Covid-19, advocated everywhere. Great if you have to open the tap and wash your hands like me.
What about the billions of people in the world, particularly in Africa, who have to fetch their water every day by walking a mile?
Everybody is trying to build a ventilator, or respirator, 3D print a mask, or other PPEs (Personal Protective Equipment).
Do you know what all these things have in common?
3D printers and their raw material were created outside of the African continent.
Most components needed to build an essential ventilator or respirator for Covid-19 patients can only be sourced outside Africa.
Well, I hope you see where this is going. For 60 years in Africa, we have been nurturing and developing the “Copy and Paste” (CP) mentality from the young child in a remote village in Senegal to the people with power in Dakar, who see the western model as the one to “just” apply, the ultimate success model.
What does it say about us, as Africans, both living in the continent of the diaspora?
We are just applying the foreign recipe handed to us by the West or China. Yet it is just a “reCP”: repetition of Copy and Paste. That is a “reCP” that brings a sour taste to our mouth after eating that meal's last bite.
We are Africa. We are on our own, today and forever. We have always been. That is our wake-up call. We must rise to the occasion.
When I think about Donald Trump, I see the red cap on his head and the bleeding letters: “Make America Great Again!”
When I see myself, most of the politicians, leaders, and people from Africa, living there or abroad, I see us wearing a beautiful white cap in which is carved the following sign: two black hands being chained back together by one blue and one red hand.
I see us walking in our beautiful houses, where we have destroyed all the mirrors, with bloody smiles on our faces.
Now is the time to go to the river and reflect on what we have become together.
We need to remove that colonial cap and create our CAP.
What does CAP stand for, for me?
I am glad that you asked!
CAP means for me:
- Create
- Anticipate
- Program
1. Create
Africa must be a continent of creators, not just “copypastors.” We must believe that we can bring new ideas into our reality. We must be on the frontline of building solutions that fit our needs. That answers our current issues and how we must be part of the solutions finders.
2. Anticipate
For me, anticipation is bringing you to build on top of creation. We must believe that a brighter future is possible for us Africans and in Africa.
Yes, I am saying that: living in France, married to a white French woman.
It is only by anticipating our needs in the future that we will be able to build a plan that will make that vision a reality. Anticipation is about our future.
3. Program
We must create a tradition of taking things into our own hands and showing them to the next generations. It is only by programming the right mindset we will write our history. Our children’s children are reading right now in their history books in the future our answer to this Covid-19 crisis.
Are we taking the initiative? Are we just followers?
We have to stop using the old code we inherited from our grandparents.
We must stop adding to the code patches we receive from the west or elsewhere in the world. Program is about rendering the old program obsolete.
Now is the time to write our code. We must build a new program from scratch and not try to think that we can indefinitely improve that old code from the last century.
This CAP is the one of hope. It is one of the makers. It is one of the legends.
It is one of the CAPable Africans, as dreamed by Blaise Diagne, Césaire, Damas, and Senghor. Today we can hear the echo of such voices in the battle of African Americans with the #BlacklivesMatter movement in the US.
I would like you to join me in the movement: #AnActALetter. As a pan-African, each of our actions is a letter in 2 ways:
- A letter, part of a word in this page of African history,
- A letter is a message to be passed on to your children’s children.
So let’s wear our writers' CAP and hack the future of Africa.
What is your vision of Africa today?
What are you doing to support building a new reality in Africa?
What is your vision of a bright future for Africa?
Leave a comment below.
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Photo by Adrianna Van Groningen on Unsplash