Africa My Motherland XVII

By A. Abeku Haywood-Dadzie

Africa My Motherland is in the news once again, not for discovering the cure for cancer or a solution to global warming, but for all the wrong reasons.

But this is "no-new-news". What is "new" is simply the history we fail to learn on the continent year after year. The only thing we learn from history in Africa is that we never learn from history. As a result of this, "history never really says goodbye on this continent." It says, "See you later," knowing very well that we are doomed to repeat history.

Ironically, anytime history repeats itself on the continent, our response, like the proverbial African vulture, is "tomorrow we will build our home", but tomorrow never comes for the African. My motherland never learns from history. "We are trapped in history, and history is trapped in us."

We are caught in "history's" vicious cycle all because of constitutional coups or what has become known as "third term tragedy" on the continent; to stay in power for life, we extend and cement our presidencies with the appearance of legality. always doing things in the name of democracy against democracy. But this is understandable. "We are not makers of history." We are made by history. "

So today it is Guinea and history is repeating itself, and we are learning from history what we refused to learn from history. So "never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for the whole continent."