Where art our things?

Where, my friend, is the Afrikan epic?

Where is the timeless biopic on our luminaries?

Where is the next big, really big Afrikan motion picture?

Where is the monumental film on Thomas Sankara and Maurice Bishop and Samora Machel?

The faithful narrative on Nefertiti and Nkrumah and Nyerere?

Where is the reel on Amina of Zaria?

Where are our native movie producers and directors?

What is Nollywood up to? – documenting how supplications to mythological Hebraic creatures vanquish heathen wizardry?  – lampooning and trivializing simplistic forms of our ancient spiritualities?

What are our filmographers waiting for, before they can immortalize the men and women who remained fiercely loyal to the land, when it was least rewarding to do so?

Where are the epics on Mansa Musa and Sundiata Keita? Where is that on Jamaica’s Nanny of the Maroons who roused our fettered fathers in the Caribbean to move to secure their freedom and found a guerilla colony in that country’s uplands? 

What of that Kigezi and Urwanda warrior priestess Muhumuza, and her fearless predecessor, Queen Nyabinghi of Karagwe and later Mpororo?

Regarding Muhumuza – it is said she led a force of fighting men and women so organised, efficient and disciplined that they struck fear into the hearts of countless companies of German and later British soldiers, bleeding the petrified white armies so severely that, for a while at least, imperial authorities and prospectors seriously considered calling-off the entire colonial enterprise in that part of Eastern Africa. 

Who shall fictionalize the daring exploits of the Abarusura in the greatest war movie the world has yet seen?

Who shall dramatize for all eternity, that army’s throwing back and utter rooting of countless punitive expeditions of British troops dispatched at them – sending the terrified Saxons scampering back to their bleak English shores in ignominious defeat? 

Where is the great, indelible poem on the notorious Lenana, last Laibon of the Maasai; and his formidable contemporary to the west – the legendary Awichu of Payira?

Who shall textualize the greatness of the ANC’s guerrilla outfit, Umkhonto we Sizwe? – a band of black brothers, now the stuff of legend, who alongside their Poqo Comrades-in-arms from Sobukwe’s Pan-Afrikan Congress, were so expedient in their methods that, despite scant numbers and ill-equipment, were able to nearly paralyze and bring to its knees the far superior war-chest of the South African Nationalist-party apparatchik.

Many are the heroic, daredevil raids the two groups mounted on the apartheid government’s communication and transport infrastructure, as well as white-owned farms that prospered from black labor – oft underpaid, and many a time out-rightly forced.

And what of Josiah Magama Tongagara, Zimbabwe’s ‘‘man of steel’’ who led that country’s resistance of attrition against Ian Smith’s minority settler-regime?

With lightening-speed, operating from Machel-supported bases in Mozambique and following undetected incursions into then Southern Rhodesia; the ‘‘recalcitrants’’  would perform surgical strikes inside the very heart of then Salisbury (now Harare) – sending that all-but-in-location European city into bouts of pestilential panic.    

It is said about Tongogara, in popular Shona folklore, that his leadership of the ZANLA guerrillas was so effective and their achievements so formidable, that white mothers in Zimbabwe’s settler mansions used his name as bogeyman par-excellence; to frighten mischievous boys and girls back into the lane of good manners.

Where are the continent’s poets and writers to accept this thankless task?

Where is the next Hollywood blockbuster on Black Egypt? – telling of a time long before that dusky maid lost the soot in her skin?

Where is the box-office hit telling of the Afrikan Sudan? Telling of Black Abyssinia?

Where is the chronicle on Black Arabia and Black Israel? – how could a people that’ve lived for millenia in the scorching deserts of Central Asia, still be un-black?

Where, my friend, is Bollywood’s crackerjack on Black India and the ages of Dravidian grandeur? – where is this grand soap opera to keep our continent’s housewives glued to their luminescent TV screens all day?

Where is Black India’s story on science and maths and philosophy? – on that age of Eastern enlightenment predating Aryan invasion?

Where is that dizzyingly popular new soap to come out of South America? – the one recounting the flambeau of the Inca people?

The one relating the love-story and gallantry, not of flaxen-haired Italic Europoids, but of swarthy Aztec lovers.

Where is the steaming telenovela romance of the deep Amazon? – that on the Americas before the landing of Cool Chris and his swaggering Spanish conquistadors?

UGANDA – where are your pop songs in approbation of Baba Kabalega of Kitara?

When is the next huge, media-hyped official launch of one such track (or album!) at one of the exclusive 5-star hotels in your dust-frosted town?

Who shall print the gold and platinum tickets to this black-tie event?

Where are the ‘sold-out!’ notices for invites to the purple after-party?

Writers – where is the centurial, critically acclaimed novel on Musaazi and Mwanga and Obote?

Where is the gripping tome on the patriotic efforts and attainments of President-General Kiwanuka Benedicto?

What are our film-makers and singers waiting for? – grants from the Arts Council of England?

What do our literary men and women await? – fellowships at Oxford?

To what end are the continent’s moguls and philanthropists putting their money?

Where are the generous ‘endowments in perpetuity’  to fund these priceless projects of our cultural and political reclamation?

Where is Mo Ibrahim in all this? – seeking ‘well-mannered’ French and English boys to occupy Afrikan Presidencies?

Where is the great Dangote? – expanding his sprawling enterprise? – building more cement factories in Lusaka and Maputo and Mbabane; so he can ship in Delhi University’s next graduating class to superintend the disloyal natives and safeguard his hard-earned penny?

Where is the leader of our people who will revolutionize the thinking, and speaking, and doing of things in our societies? – who will surround himself with honest, objective and non-self seeking deputies and lieutenants?

Where is that Head of State, that minister, that scholar, that concerned citizen who’ll champion curriculum overhaul in schools and universities, to stem the unbridled mis-education of our young people?

Where is the mother, the father, the aunt and uncle, the concerned neighbor who’ll take the education of the community’s youngsters in hand? – vetting, quizzing and sieving everything schools teach, to ensure that only the truth gets through, and into the eager minds of our posterity.

Where is the pro-active, fearless Afrikan citizen; who will demand more and better from her leaders, and her countrywomen, and her family, and her church, and her lover? 

Who will cast her vote, and protect it, and see it counted; and one year down that road – demand imperative payback for it?

Where is the person, who will collect all our tears in a calabash, and give them back to us ... ?

Where are all our things?