By Suleiman Murkthar
U15MM2021
There are many colors that makes the rainbow or the color line. There is the blue for the skies and seas, and the green for the grass and leaves. The world beyond our shores is a very colorful life, but here in Africa, our caption color is black, not just any black--- its dark black. It is the color of our skies and the color of the sun, it is the camouflage of what makes us the very aesthetic creatures that we are.
As Africans, the beauty of who we are, the reality of our eccentricity is rather magnifying in our differences, the difference in the way we speak, the language, the colors of our tribe, its norms and traditions, the awkwardness in our dressings and cultural ornate and most of all the perception what we see about life. However amiss of these differences, all of the obvious realities that the eyes have come see one thing is certain, the melanin content that is emblazoned in our flying flags; and that is we are a black continent.
Coming back home as a Nigerian, I have come to read about the stories of the colonial masters, the men who said that they found for us our country even if it was there long before their grandfathers, I have come to read about how the black slaves of the then America, how they were inferior because of the color of their skins, how somehow the bible had taught inequality back then, how God had created some men more equal to others, how the white men were white and angels and the blacks were blacks and otherwise. Well, not to beat the drums of the obvious, then that passed, slavery became history, the white men left Nigeria and our founding fathers had become as smart and educated they were. They fought the revolution using media and its like and the colonial masters were left at their beckon. And when the fighting was over with foreigners, we fought ourselves, we moved from being colonies to the foreigners and we began to complain about “marginalization”, “inequity” and the likes, we killed ourselves we bought our weapons from the same foreign invaders we had warded off.
True patriotism will always be alien us as Nigerians, let’s be honest with ourselves, it will be a centuries before the boarder lines of ethnicity can be blurred. Asking me to look beyond who I am, who we are as different entities is the continual cause of our brewing ramifications. I am a Muslim first as religion permits, everything else comes secondary to that, after that I am Fulani, my identity is paramount to what builds me and then I become a Nigerian. In truth I am only who I am because of the circumstantial situations of life, I could have been Igbo and catholic but this is who I have come to be. The difference that makes these colors shines through the darkness of our skin It is the way we name our Children, the way we teach them to greet or speak, the level of courtesy we administer in them while they grow. We are black so the stains and the scars that are made are not as much obvious, we are black because we are different and until we learn to respect the space between us as a race, we are forever divided.
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