Extract from O…

Extract from One Man’s Africa:

The Dark Continent is at once a misnomer and an awful truism. The sun never shines as brightly as it does in Africa. Unfortunately, the brightest sunshine cases the darkest shadows and the miseries that lie in Africa’s umbra are the most abject in the world.

African Americans used to say of their lot (and perhaps they still do) that what white Americans wanted, they themselves had precious little of; but what white Americans didn’t want, Afro-Americans had in great quantity.

So it is with Africa and the West: Africans grow skeletal because the West squanders the world’s resources whereas those things the West avoids – like poverty and disease – Africa possesses in abundance.

And yet, not for nothing has this continent been confirmed as the cradle of all humankind. Not for nothing do we now know that the first people on earth were Africans, and that other races developed from them.

Not for nothing do African’s misplaced citizens – the Afro-Americans and West Indians – hanker to return to fund their roots. And not those people alone.

Everyone of whatever race, nation or creed who comes to Africa feels a magnetism that cannot be ignored or explained. Because it is primeval.

Because Africa is like a mother calling her children home.

Old, addled and poor she may be, but the pull of the umbilicus is still there. Irresistibly.”

Extract from One Man’s Africa.