Week 13: Everything Is Possible. Try. Can You Hear Dream Collapsing?

Dear all,

Everything is possible. Try. Africa. Money. Your world. Shame. Signals. Despair. Hope.

If anything, there is always hope in Africa. I have visited most of this beautiful, untamed, and battered continent over the last 20 years. I have met some of the friendliest and happiest people in my life—despite the material nothingness they were, and still are, living in. I have also encountered some of the most brutal and unscrupulous businesspeople, rebels, and religious missionaries.

TIA—“This is Africa”—is an expression often used to explain the complexity of the continent, stuck in its own frequency, continuously amplified and misused by the West and the East, as well as by its own lords and kings.

African evening skies are like rivers of light flowing toward the ocean. The morning sun in Africa is anything but shy. The energy of Africa is as much a physical experience as it is a spiritual one. The sublime scent of African earth is hard to forget.

Food in the North, dance and music in the West, the blending of cultures and traditions in the East, and the mind-blowing beauty of the flora and fauna in the center—yet, there is nothing romantic about it. Africa is raw in so many dimensions. Primal to the bone. Africa is about now. Right now. The past is a shackle for those who are no longer hungry. The future is distant. Maybe tomorrow. We will live.

A forgotten continent, many would claim. Yet, we still depend on Africa. We still need Africa. We still strip the flesh of the African continent for our own prosperity. It was—and still is—a source of raw materials: human, mineral, timber, gold, diamonds, oil and gas, cocoa. A place to be exploited by the strong.

Maybe, after all, Africa will become a place where the people who live there can finally call hope a real thing. Symbolically, our relationship with Africa reflects our relationship with ourselves.