I see in the news everyday children in tattered clothes walking the streets of Somalia, Burundi and even South Sudan. They look at cameras with their yellow jaundiced eyes, all a picture of pain, hunger and sorrow. And yet we choose either not to care or ignore their plea. Fat men and fat women sit on their tables heaped with food they don’t even eat with the television to keep them company yet, back in those countries, men lay dead in the fields, women walk around forlorn and forsaken. We see a child running up and down screaming and crying looking for their parents among a pile of bodies. We just sigh and change the station, and that is just about it. I see men with mucus in their noses and shuffling with sticks due to their amputated legs, their eyes etched into the distance, hope a very foreign word for them.

We claim that Africa is held together by bonds of brotherhood. Which brotherhood or Africa for that matter are we talking about? I see a continent operating on whims of adolescent myopia where one cares about them and them only, a place where i’d rather throw the undersized shirts in the bins than share them with a needy child in Somalia. As long as we have a tomorrow, a good job and a house, the rest can go to hell. We are our own enemy. Instead of standing up to condemn violence in the strongest terms, we pray it stays longer so that we can have spice news worth watching. It is an Africa that reads from the same script but has different actors. We are a continent that is eating itself away without even noticing. As the wise men said once, whoever digs a grave must get in it himself. We are laying the eggs now and believe me, the hatchlings will come home to roost. We think we have buried violence, little do we know that it is a seed.