Stop believing in human heroes or heroines!!!
There is an unending riches in the acquisition and application of knowledge be it cognitive or experiential. One cannot outwit each other, both are required to understand the full spectrum of life.
Africans have surgeon far on the corridors of academia times and again. From reaching the apex of Oxford university, Yale, Harvard university, MIT the list is progressive, Africans had reached these all. Yet, we are rhetorically positioned at the global stage. This position have muddy the water of our humanity and in every length ridiculed our abilities to be a global frontier.
In my humble retrospect, I have come to realized that our unrepentant backwardness, decadence, filth, immorality, protracted poverty, nepotism and communal murders are as a result of us creating artificial heroes and heroines.
No wonder, Ayi Kwei Armah one of Africa’s prolific novelist tagged his noble submission in 1989 during the post colonial state of affairs in Ghana “The Beautiful Ones are not yet Born”. He could have been right in his own standing, I however want to contradict him by saying the beautiful ones have been born, they are right here with us. Let us check our sister continents in Europe, America and Oceania for a better interpretation of beautiful ones.
Perhaps Africans have refused to see the beauties of the world whether deliberately or otherwise we have created a cyclone of ugliness, mascaraed in fine hypocritical cultures, customs and traditions, biasness and undemocratically motivated rules. We are squarely religious and wicked, parading in religious centers only to glorify our ignorance and romance with sensation.
What we need to do?
I will pinpoint the following:
1. Move from Heroes, to Host.
All we need is to move from glorifying Heroes to being a Host in this life. I enjoyed reading the piece submitted by Margaret Wheatley with Debbie in their published paper in 2011. An exert from this paper says;
“For too long, too many of us have been entranced by heroes. Perhaps it’s our desire to be saved, to not have to do the hard work, to rely on someone else to figure things out.
Constantly we are barraged by politicians presenting themselves as heroes, the ones who will fix everything and make our problems go away. It’s a seductive image, an enticing promise. And we keep believing it. Some where there’s someone who will make it all better. Somewhere, there’s who’s visionary, inspiring, brilliant, trustworthy, and we’ll all happily follow him or her. Somewhere…
Well, it is time for all the heroes to go home, as the poet William Stafford wrote. It is time for us to give up these hopes and expectations that only breed dependency and passivity, and that do not give us solutions to the challenges we face. It is time to stop waiting for someone to save us. It is time to face the truth of our situation that we’re all in this together, that we all have a voice and figure out how to mobilize the hearts and minds of everyone in our workplaces and communities.”
2. Adopt a system thinking.
