Emancipate yourself from mental slavery

"So we finally made it, we made if even though we had our backs up against the wall!" The best line I’ve ever heard in a song. These are the words of Chester Bennington from Linkin Park.

A few weekend ago I went home for a funeral, a family member had passed away and it was a very sad and a beautiful goodbye. We mourned and we reflected and we later spoke politics. We spoke about what the current leaders intend on doing and we spoke about ourselves as black people. Don’t worry guys, this one’s for the black folks.

We – as black people – have been dubbed as the race that consumes a lot and produces less. When we are stressed we go shopping, and when we celebrate the festive season we spend almost all that we have saved up during the year, AKA 'Stokvel.'

As a young black man I think it’s my moral duty to do my best to inform, educate and help rehabilitate the minds of black men and women. We as the youth will lead this nation in the near future but we need to know how are we going to do that. I don’t have all the answers but what I do know is that we have to start looking at our spending patterns and reduce them drastically. We have to save and invest as much capital as we can so that we, as a race, will be financial emancipated and thus we can start looking at producing more goods than consuming most of them.

We as black people have never really been a people of greed, we have African proverbs that have been in existence since the beginning of time. We have lived on the premise of collective survival, “ umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu”. This is not something to be forgotten because this is how we defended our great nation many years ago against foreign nations. we have stood fast up until we decided to let greed creep into our hearts and destroy our people and what we have.

Bob Marley says it well, “emancipate yourself from mental slavery”.

Together we can build this nation; together we have a better shot at tomorrow.

Together we can all sing as one and say:
"We finally made it. We made it even though we had our backs up against the wall!"