From the Greenland we have come, all of us from one heritage, to the north the kingdom of the pharaohs with the sacred sun to the South where Madiba was born on the banks of the Mbashe River, to the West that is Chinua Achebe’s home, where special intellect scripts deft literature; and then to the East, where the divine, Haile Selassie I, descendant of King Solomon lived in our fathers’ youth. From this land we come, motioned by rocking dance to the jingle of burdensome rhythm, still connected by a spirit that is unseen, a resilient one, a black one by which we are charmed to thrive and not be chastised.
To many other lands we have gone in suspended engines, to the lands of the Gettysburg Address and King Henry’s, to the lands once conquered by the Raffles, lands that slaved the signing of the Anglo-Dutch Treaty in centuries that long ago awaited our birth. In that time, when men lived like men, with hard-knock brevity, when culture was identity and identity was a man’s forte; there was nothing different between the Niger and the Malaya, nothing different in the Singapura and the Nairobi; nothing at all. Chinua, how things fell apart.
We still go, many of us, born in wards of privilege within districts of clear lack, baked in the ovens of care; but ahead of others we choose to go, ahead of those born few metres away, where hope and health, love and respect, esteem and common sense have never been neighbours. How far can we go…till we tip over the edges of the earth? Can we still ignore?
No, we have seen enough, they build towers in pairs, tubes beneath the earth, calmly travelling under gravity. Oh we have seen enough, it is not here nor there we want to thrive but in our Greenland, spurred by our coloured heritage in the tales of forebears, and feeling again the meaning of being Zulu and Xhosa, Idoma and Igede, Igbo and Maasai, or the intensity to scream tswana syllables, that's when we discover ourselves for a second time.
So this day we vow, descendants of the horned continent, we lead ourselves back, chins held high, we have seen the best of the rest, and at home we shall bring out first our pride and then our love before blocks and knowledge to build from our hearts. And then we shall bring out the old and the sick, the young and the mentally lifeless, to breathe that special air of the green grass on which we play jabulani. Leading the troops, Matthew and Kelly, let’s go home…let’s go home…let’s take steps back home.
