How can Africans in the diaspora find their way to the place of genuine emancipation? Yes, I am asking, because the move from Emancipation day in 1834 has been snail like. We can tell what happened in the four years up to 1838, and it is a long shot from full emancipation.  In the Caribbean leaders have taken up the mantle of the colonialist and continue to hold Africa’s children either in abject poverty or in perpetual hazards to life and limb and liberty. We can name a dozen heroes whose witness to the drive to freedom and independence seems to have ended with their lives. Let’s be sure the popularization of Black liberation dialogues has delayed the march. Reggae especially has made the world aware of the plight and fight of Africa’s children, but how many of us are aware of the dilution and perversion of Pan-African values in religion and spirituality and politics is another question.

Of course my question is completely rhetorical, because I am not conducting a poll, so I will never see how many of us are willing to say that the people in the African diaspora are emancipated. But I venture the opinion that emancipation has stalled on the rocks of a shallow view of Independence and you can look at any Island and see the trails from colonialism and plantation life continuing night and day.

Now Caribbean people have been impressed and inspired by several outstanding leaders, among them Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X. I know and you know that we will have a hard time finding leaders in Africa or the Diaspora who have brought their people to the brink of a sustainable and satisfying social construct. Except for the iconic Burkina Faso leadership we have leaders who do a lot of talking, but liberating the people from hunger from disease from shallow education is still a dream.

Three critical questions

People are understandably attracted to power brokers, and power economies or popular leaders, but it is evident that entities like nigeria, a turkey, or the felonious dawn of Mar-A-Lago can do no good to the cause of unity on any level that is beneficial to human beings.  Answering the three questions that follow will help to shine light on the predicament of an emancipation that has clearly stalled. 

Do African people look like they’re free in 2026?  Who’s more prosperous, African leaders or African people? Is the African Union united like the fractured United Kingdom or like the United States of America or like the European Union?

Oh beautiful for expansive skies
In deeper drains a noble dream dies