Mother Africa hear our call
The Spring is breaking her light green head through from a bitter winter and we are weeping and tired.
Our beings are ravaged, battered and bruised. Our lives feeling scattered and unsure as we come face to face with our own humanity. We are at war.
We look at your power, Mother. Your deep love for every living thing residing within your beautiful lands. We sustain ourselves on your food and quench our thirst from your water. And our physical bodies return to the earth once our time here is up. In the words of the great Lion King Mufasa - 'It's the circle of life'. Like everything on this earth, we all have our place and we are perfectly in balance with the world fundamentally. We are the world and the world is us. The deep spirit of Mother Africa courses through our veins. And she is strong.
She teaches us to rise above the hierarchy. To listen to the voices that call us beyond our ego and beyond our fear. She has shown us how quickly she can remind us of our fragility. The tiniest of viruses can floor our human race, crippling us into submission. One giant wave from her ocean can flatten communities. One tornado from her sky can bring all that is familiar to the ground. She has more power than any technological invention or advancement: we forget this far too often.
When you pay attention in the dead of night you can feel her quiet strength. The artists, writers and visionaries are drawn to this silence. We FEEL it. We feel the power of Mother Africa's strength, and yet there is no fear of it. She works through us, bringing us grounded clarity and sharing her medicine. The artists capture this as she speaks in a language that is not from the rational mind. To connect to your land, your culture, your essence - you need to feel into it. You allow it to enter you through the heart and not the head.
This is not religion. This spirit that we feel is not a ghostly entity that is separate from us. It is a connection we cannot quantify or conceptualise intellectually. It can be found in a parent's love for their child. Unwavering, powerful and pure. It can be found in passion, in excitement, in inspiration and in joy. It can be found in music, in laughter and in art. It can be found in authenticity and in your truth.
This spirit is YOU and you are it. Mother Africa is the force that runs through every single South African, born of this land. She is that feeling you get when you think of home. It is the powerful force that binds us all to one another in this country. When we fight each other, we fight ourselves. We have lost focus from the essence of who we are as South Africans and we are stuck in powerlessness. We have watched as our power is taken from us by forces much less powerful than ourselves. Man-made systems have taken away our power and held us captive. Corruption takes its hold on the ego.
To fight for freedom is a matter of recognising our own power. As one person alone in this big wide world, we feel vulnerable. Collectively, we create a force field. Like the smallest ant, we can move mountains when we work as a unit with one another. As a colony, very few things stand a chance against ants. On their own, a simple squish with a finger will do.
It is no wonder we fear being alone above all else. We fear being invisible, rejected, left out and left behind. Mother Africa is crying because the very thing we need is the very thing we block ourselves from getting. We are so afraid of feeling that we've become so disconnected from everything that helps us to feel a sense of belonging. So many are afraid of love deep down. We block off our emotions and we block off our joy in the process. We reject Mother Africa because we are inherently rejecting ourselves. We are rejecting the very emotions that make us human.
In the dead of night, when the world is still, I call her in. Mother, hear my cries. Bring in your love and your healing so that we may feel your power within us. Let the rain fall and cleanse the earth as we rise up and fight for the world we all want to live in. As we pray to the God we worship or as we connect to our ancestors, hear our call. As we turn to science or as we turn to our gut feelings, hear our call. Help us to connect in spirit through your essence - as South Africans. Through our heritage, our roots and our African Spirit. Teach us how to see the common ground we are on. Teach us how to yield great power whilst holding great love in our hearts. Teach us how to love one another - regardless of what they've done and who they are.
It is when we can achieve this baseline of love that we can see the truth. Love will banish our fear and love will help us to heal and grow. We abuse Mother Africa at every turn. With our pollution, our disrespect and our greed. Yet she gives us love, her land provides us with all we need and her sun warms us to our core. She does not fight us with hate. She teaches us love. It's time we learnt to listen.
We are African. We are human. And we are loved. Together, we are strong.