English9ACT2020: This Is What I Know

This Is What I Know

BY MUKOMA WA NGUGI

(*For LGBT Africans)

I know that Black people were sold as slaves because they were seen as

talking beasts of burden and Africans colonized for their own good;

and it was unnatural for women to operate heavy machinery let alone

operate on a brain.

I know that in the United States, Jim Crow used the rope to keep

black from white, and apartheid in South Africa killed for as little

as looking across the color line; and that intermarrying between the

races was a crime against God, Queen, and Country.

I know that a God of many names, the laws of many lands, science

and nature were used to justify slavery and colonialism, holocausts

and genocides, rapes and lynching.

I know that African dictators called those who fought for democracy

“puppets under the pay of foreign masters” and the foreign masters

called those same people communists and insurgents.

And this I know very well: that had the Sojourner Truths, Dedan

Kimathis, Martin Luther Kings, Malcom Xs, and Ruth Firsts failed,

my wife and I would not have crossed the color line and my daughter

would not have been possible.

I know that she, just like her mother and me, just like her

grandparents, will have her struggles, but it will BE a struggle waged

at the crossroad of many cultures and worlds.

So I must know that those before me did not die so that I could use

my freedom to put others in jail; or use the same laws that betrayed

them to enslave and torture.

I must know that if Steve Biko died so I could write what I like, then

my pen cannot become the weapon that justifies the torture and

murder of others.

How then can I not know that no one appointed me protector of

African cultural purity? How can I not know that I am not the

standard of all that is moral and natural?

What fortress is this I build that subjugates those within and keeps

those outside under siege? Whose moral law is this I use to judge?

Whose legal system to jail? Whose weapon to murder? And whose

tongue do I use to silence?

How can I, Black and African and blessed as I am by the struggles of

my fathers and mothers deny my gay brothers and sisters their rights?

English9ACT2020