Because dreams are free

It irks me anytime a black person walks up the podium after receiving some sort of recognition and they start ranting about how they, women of colour, a black child growing in the streets of Africa, and such as their acceptance speeches. One thing that every man and woman, boy and girl, slave and the free has been given is the power to dream. Nobody has a right obligation or even the means to pry that away from anybody. There is no reality if it never was a dream, for dreams are the eggs that hatch the chicks called reality. Is it a miracle for a little black child to dream? Is it a miracle for a black man or woman to make a difference? We have been stuck in some pit of Neanderthal intellect and though we may not say it out loud, we don’t believe we can make it just because we are black. Why the surprise when any of us do something? Don’t we deserve better? Don’t we have the right to own the stage just like everybody?

All of us are slaves till the day we know we are free. We will never make a difference until the day we discover it is in our power to do just that. We will never make it big till the day we refuse to succumb to self pity and break from the bondage of our ancestral prisons, the prisons of hatred, timidity and excuses.

We should not even be allowed to call white people racists because we ourselves are our very own enemies. We have backed ourselves into the corners, huddling together and hiding from what we do not even know just because our parents hid too. We shrink away from greatness because the society has said we cannot do it. You will never work to lift your neighbour’s life up because you are afraid they will leave you in poverty when things get better for them. You will never celebrate when the next door child is becoming an inventive scientist or doing something, being someone in life because your child is out there smoking himself till cancer do they part and wearing his pants at half-mast. Some people will say I am speaking from behind the bars of colonialism, but tell me, how can I be colonised when I know I can do just what other people are doing out there? How can I still be colonized when I know that life’s questions demand answers and not excuses? Colonialism is not about being under white rule. It is about hiding behind the shadows of fear and self-doubt thinking they will clear away like rain clouds someday.

It doesn’t matter if the sky is clear or the rain clouds cover the entire blue, the sun would never give an excuse not to come out. It will not shrink away because it is too cold, it will never shy away because it is too clear outside. It will come out and light the world. Thieves, bishops, businessmen and loiterers will have the same light and in the evening it will go to sleep satisfied it played its role. It does not matter whether you stared at it or not, what matters is it showed up as it should. We should not give excuses for our failures, neither should we justification for our successes.

We should learn that we spend hell a lot of time looking for someone to blame for our happenings, finding someone to hate instead of finding a way to bridge the gap and create love and acceptance. There always is an opportunity if there is breath in your lungs. All we have to do is stop resisting and agree to dream, for ourselves and the society.