MATERE: Cast your lot with our collective problems

Three years ago, in Accra - Ghana, I joined other notable youth leaders from the continent in a robust and illuminating discourse on Pan-Africanism.

This event inducted me into the throes of black internationalism and African Renaissance – not just as concepts but philosophies that will guide the Global South into the driving seat this decade. That one-week intellectual epoch made me appreciate the essence of Black History.

A visit to Ghana’s coast gives way to the breathtaking scenery of majestic fortresses that housed dark dungeons, with an aura of misery and despair, until the slave trade was abolished in the early 1800s.

One such fortress is the Elmina Castle or Castelo de São Jorge da Mina, erected as a fortified trading post by the Portuguese in 1482 but later converted to a holding cell for slaves.

As you walk down the passages; you can reminisce how our kinsmen were hunted down like animals, caught or trapped, chained, and warehoused in dungeons awaiting shipping to the Americas. Narration from a tour guide can bring one to tears. In the words of Chinua Achebe, some were sold by traditional chiefs in exchange for minor items like sweets, salt, glassware and spices.

For many, Elmina was the ultimate stop. It provided the last experience men and women had in their motherland before their final departure. For those who didn’t make it to the new world, the castles were the last place they ever saw on land. The last shreds of hope would wither away with every day of captivity in the castle.

On the seaboard side of the coastal slave castles was ‘the door of no return’, a portal through which the slaves were lowered into boats, and then like cargo loaded onto big slaving ships further out at sea, never to return.

By the time slavery was losing its shine and sheen to usher in colonialism, the irreversible and immeasurable damage on Africa was already done.

It is estimated that in West Africa alone six million slaves had been shipped to other countries. About 10-15 per cent perished at sea during the so-called Middle Passage, never reaching their final destination. By today’s population statistics, this was a tragedy of monumental proportions.

Fast forward, almost 350 years later, my heart shutters to imagine an announcement of slave ships docked at Mombasa, Dar es Salaam, Accra, Durban, Lagos or Misrata. What horror will await us as there would be a stampede of young Africans volunteering, pushing and shoving to get a chance for enslavement. That’s the ignominy of Mother Africa.

Isn’t the media replete with news of hundreds of young Africans dying in the Mediterranean Sea aboard ramshackle boats trying to cross over to Italy, Spain and the larger Western Europe stretch in search of opportunities? A journey some of our ancestors took by force!

Here at home, aren’t our own daughters, sisters and mothers selling their invaluable inheritance in exchange for a plane ticket only to be airlifted to the Middle East for servitude? Haven’t we watched heartbreaking and soul-wrenching videos and photos of the torture they undergo? And one time too many, haven’t we received their bodies in caskets back at the JKIA?

As we go to the election this year, let us not forget these things. Let the ballot define how the economy will perform going forward. Above all things, this election should turn our economy from an extractive one to a more productive one.

Instead of hate speech and polarisation, let campaign speeches be about baking a bigger cake for us all, how to add more seats at the dining table and live up to the dream of our founding fathers as captured in the words of our National Anthem, 'May plenty be found within our borders'.

Public policy enthusiast