A place open to everybody. A real compound, you know. I’d think to myself: “Ah-ah! What is this city shit-o? One man, one wife, one house isolated from everybody else in the neighbourhood? Is an African not even to know his neighbours?” Man, even the Bible says, “Know thy neighbour!” So why all this individualism shit? This “mine”. That “yours”. That “theirs”. What’s that shit? Is it African?

We need to adore difference so that we can all finally, in fact, be the same in the only sense that matters: as human beings. And what magnificence that sameness is.

So how about we walk across the road and listen? And soon ask to be listened to, too. And promise never to interrupt. Only to learn. And eventually to respect?

And then, who knows?

To love?

“The gender issue became a difficult one for the politicians in my country. Everyone seemed to support me and my right to run. They saw in me an innocent Black child caught in a terrible situation. For us, it became about more than gender—it became about race. It became about White people coming and telling us Africans what we were and what we were not based on our looks—the same categorizations and violations of human rights that were happening during apartheid. I became a symbol of how Black people have been violated and exploited throughout history.

“Today, I have become a symbol of resistance and freedom and self-acceptance. It’s no longer about winning a race, it’s about the struggle for universal human rights.

*Redreaming the World: For Chinua Achebe

“It is possible that a sense of beauty, of justice, of the inter-connectedness of all things, may yet save the human species from self-annihilation. We are all still learning how to be free. Freedom is the beginning of the greatest possibilities of the human genius. It is not the goal.