A Dream Deferred: On African Liberation and Betrayal.
What does African liberation mean to the poverty-stricken miner in Marikana, South Africa, as he drags himself out of a deep shaft, coughing blood and dust, while the platinum he mines enriches the foreign shareholders and local elites? What does it mean to the street vendor in Cairo’s Khan el‑Khalili, stripped of her livelihood because she can’t afford a bribe? What does it mean to farmers in the DRC, watching helplessly as multinationals and the militias they arm/control turn their lands into killing fields? What does it mean to the sugarcane cutters in Mauritius, whose sweat sweetens profits for others while they rot in poverty? What does African liberation mean to the people of Western Sahara, still held hostage under Moroccan occupation? What does it mean to the people of Sudan, caught between the bullets of a brutal, counter-revolutionary war waged by rival generals drawn from the Sudanese National Army(SNA) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). What does it mean to the people of Somalia longing to rebuild their nation? What of the woman I saw crawling through Nairobi’s heat, her barefoot daughter gripping tightly on her dress?
