2nd Class citizens of a Third World country

I cringed at the sight of black slaves with padlocks in their mouths as they stared ahead, oblivious of my pity for them. On the worn pages of my book I watched them queue in a crude line that ran from the top of the page, where a slave ship berthed, to the bottom where I saw the number 34. They just looked ahead as I flipped through my picture catalogue ‘History book for young blacks’; their black skins worn from strain and their faces hope-lost. I remember wondering why humans could be so inhuman to another just because they looked different. But it was not my pain, it was the pain of slaves aboard a slave ship eons drawn from me.

As I flip through the same pages in my youth, I get to a chapter: ‘FREEDOM?’ but I don’t see any words written on it. It is blank; clear as day.
Did they miss something out?
‘Yes, I think so!’
‘But why is there the big bold question mark behind the word ‘FREEDOM’?
Are we not free?

I turn the pages back quickly to the chapter of Apartheid in South Africa and I see the pictures of black soldiers hounding black people of like colour, people just like them. And I see as one black man goads the other over the face with a club while a white man, in the background, watches one at the other.
‘Beasts they all are’, I imagine he thinks.
I feel the pain but they are not mine. Just that of a man bowled over in pain on the pages of a worn book.

Yet at my workplace is a young 27-year old Briton who never finished school like I did but earns a lot more than I do (and not in naira as you could have guessed).
He rides in the company SUV while I ride the bus. He won’t live in the company house; he’d rather live in hotels. He is FREE to wear jeans trousers and work flexible hours but I get a query a quarter past 8 and a quarter to 5.
Every time my black boss goads me over the head, he just stands there and watches.
It’s not my pain; I begin to say, ‘it’s just that of a man bowled over in pain on the pages of a worn book’.



As I further flip through the crispier pages of now, I watch as black people cringe at the sight of a white man in the work place. We fear to shake him; we stutter when he says hello and even when we can’t hear what he has said, we just smile sheepishly and act dumb.

I watch my sisters flutter effusively when the white man so much as looks in their direction. I watch him come into our club houses with two teens or worse still, pre-teen nubile scantily clad and oozing lust on his arms. I watch them clear VIP for him and chase the rest of us out.

I watch our leaders sit at conference tables with him and say words like, ‘We need you to help us solve this and that’ and I watch the industry moguls import ‘yeomen’ from China in the name of ‘Expats’ and out-populate our kind from OUR own working places. I continue to read through this book of history to the future and realize that it is still the self same pictures I see. Except now, I am the picture on the book I read: of apartheid by blacks at blacks; brought on by the inferiority we feel in our minds.

What kind of slavery extends beyond freedom?
What kind of chain binds a man for 49 years and he fails to see them?
It is the slavery we have brought upon ourselves. It is the slavery of the mind.
A slavery of which the chains, unfortunately, no physical pincers can prise.

Look up brethren, because we were born this way; same as they are. Let us start to believe in ourselves and raise our eyes up in honour for we are no second class citizens in our own home. Let us start to make a move to pay the hard price for the development of ourselves and this nation. Imports and ‘Expats’ are only the easy way out, the way that never lasts.

Who says Nigerians can’t build a monument? Who says we can’t develop a sustainable local technology? Only if we believe more in ourselves and our ability to constantly improve on who we are?
We are beautiful people. Only if we open our minds to see that we are all humans under the surface of our skin and the colour of it makes no difference in the things we can all achieve.

OIO
From a grieving heart.