Police Band at 51st Independence Celebration-Ghana

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51 years after independence from British Colonial rule, Ghana still sits on Gold and begs for brass. True. We stand in today, and when we compare our lot to such countries as Malaysia and India, who are about our age, we feel like the turtle that must trudge carefully because that which it carries, is heavier than her. We are weighed down by over 400 years of transatlantic slavery. We bear the lingering effect of 'the nobility of the skin" campaign- and even though we should know better now, there is still deep down in parts of our souls, the lingering lie- "white is better than black. To be black is to be cursed";. But if we have survived a thousand years of mental, emotional, financial, human dignity and socio-political robbery, we have survived a thousand years to prevail.

We are over a thousand years old. Annals of our ancestral pride and ancient feats might have been burnt by the Alexanders. What survived might lie in the fragments of Herodotus and co. The first book of the Holy Bible declares the first man was made from Black Soil- Adamus. But over and beyond what has been recorded, is the truth a book need not hold. "We are the express image of God. We are not tabula rasas".

I see a tomorrow when African Leaders will neither measure their success by how much the West or East loves them nor by the weight of alms they receive. I see my son growing freely, delivered from the lies I struggle with. He will not judge his neighbour by how much of the colonialists' ways he has learned but by how much of their bad ways he has unlearned. I see a future where my daughter will not permit herself to be reduced to an object of desire no matter how much it costs her.

For it might have taken them a thousand years, to push us this low but before the God who sees a thousand years like a day, I see Africa rise, as one jolts from a dream and recover in one day what was stolen from her over a thousand years.

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