Bloggers Meet.

We have a small group of bloggers, where we meet and share experiences and ideas once a month. Yesterday was only my second time attending, yet I woke up a changed person today. I am a very talkative person, I love to share ideas, and whenever I can, I love to be on top of the situation.

But I found myself listening, thinking. I found myself having to reflect on what my peers were saying. They were speaking about slavery. They were not speaking, from the confines of a history text book, crafted neatly by some proffessorial historian, trying to hem out a point whilst hiding another. They spoke from within, from what they had seen, heard, smelt, and even touched. It was a heavy discussion.

The big question was, would our destiny have been any different, if we had not been enslaved. The net effect of slavery, is that, like in a hundred meter race for development, Africa is a competitor that has one leg shackled. And that is not all, Africa is a competitor that has been pulled back from the starting line up. I warned you, it was a heavy discussion.

I was of the opinion that, we need not spend our energies, weeping over the transigencies of the past. I tried pracariously to interject, to say we need to rise up, and catch up with everybody else. But in the end, I concluded that slavery is one topic I had not given enough time and thought. Apart from what my history teacher taught me, I have never opened my eyes to it.

I am promising you, and myself, that I shall look into this topic more closely. I want to have a deeper understanding. They say if you need to know where you are going, you must first establish where you are coming from.

So much for having promised that my next 10 blogs would be about the positive things about Africa. But who knows, there could be some silver lining to it.