I have lived in a number of European countries and had a chance to carefully study Africans here.
The philosophy or rather the trending fallacy is that we are all meant to be brothers and sisters so I tend to be so happy and generous with my greetings.
I have however noticed that many Africans in Europe tend to ignore each other. They also seem to have problems in identifying with their traditional cultures.
Trust me you will never easily find an African lady speaking her mother tongue or freely mingling with one of their kind.
Well, not only women behave this way. African men with European partners also don’t mingle easily with sisters.
A lady called Turphena Awino will tell you her name is Turphy while a man called Thomas Chinedu will tell you his name is Chinedu Hans.
Some sort of strange transformation seems to happen to many Africans in Europe. Once here, they don’t want to identify with anything African starting from their own mother tongue.
Why should an African man called Chinedu start calling himself Hans? Who bewitched you?
Just the other day at the railway station I met a lady who was on phone speaking Pidgin English. I was so excited because in Sweden you do not meet many from English speaking countries.
I said hi to her but she pretended that she could not even construct a sentence in proper English without throwing in some German words.
I don’t want to talk about Kenyan babes in Europe because they are more British than the British themselves.
While here in Europe they pretend not to know a word in Kiswahili which is their national language. And they completely ignore fellow Kenyans.
We need to invest in the spirit of Africanism – what I call brotherhood! It is something similar to what happened in the USA during the time of Malcolm X. Am talking about Pan-Africanism or Black Nationalism.
Two things are hindering our progress: being ashamed of our cultural identities and lack of unity. It is time to do the right thing. If we want to progress, we must appreciate our cultural identities and unite as brothers and sisters.
By Turphy Achieng’
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