I frequently find myself disappointed after foregoing leisure to attend some "much-hyped" talk/lecture only to discover that the speakers thump heavily on popular rhetoric. Its like riding ten consecutive times on the same roller coaster; it can get pretty unexciting. Fortunately, I experienced a much more informative session at the "less hyped" Afrika panel discussion featuring Macalester's finest Africanists (a term I discovered only recently).

It was simply exhilarating to witness the modest yet exact pronouncements of Professor of Geography William Moseley and the brutally sincere yet stimulating assessments made by Dean of International Studies and Programming Ahmed Samatar. Inspired by the wisdom of the panelists, I started trying to understand how we (Africans of my generation) choose to understand our ‘hopelessness' and our supposed sincerity in trying to lift our people up from this never-ending abyss of poverty, self-destruction through wars, and worst of all ignorance. More questions flurried to my mind instead of answers, making me wonder whether the answers were worthy of the effort put into the search. I can now understand the frustration of the proverbial fox in Aesop's Fables who, after miserably failing to reach the high grapes on a tree, walks away and mutters about how sour the grapes probably are … probably being the key word in the statement

It's made me further realize the relevance of sometimes searching for the right questions instead of engaging in a blind zestful quest for solutions; it's meaningless to have solutions that are not particular to or appropriate for a situation. A mundane illustration of this is the cliché example of the baby in a pan of dirty water. It could be tempting to embrace the general solution of throwing away the baby with the dirty water just to get rid off the dirt. Perhaps if the culprit of the aforementioned horrid act would first think of whether the problem was the baby being dirty or the pan being dirty, the story might have concluded in a more admirable manner.

For me reinventing one's self, as suggested by Professor Samatar during the panel discussion, suggests a redefinition of our thought process towards achieving lasting solutions to the seemingly incurable disease of underdevelopment that plagues the dark and lovely continent. It all depends on whether we: a) choose to dwell on the rape and oppression we have suffered and continue to linger hopelessly in it, or b) romanticize our ancient richness and glory in hopes of a miraculous revival of some sort, or c) be realists and practical revolutionaries who do not just dream, but conceive and apply our well-searched and thought out ideas even if they defy the status quo.

In all honesty, I must confess that it is quite easy to subconsciously lapse into the first option, especially when one goes through those periods of bitterness and finger-pointing becomes a habit or rather an escapist route. I say escapist because it makes one feel better to constantly think that another (in this case colonialists and neo-colonialists) is completely responsible for all of our troubles. This is not to say that I do not place certain amounts of blame, but I would prefer option c just because I believe everyone has a duty to themselves to carry forth their dreams and create their preferred destinies. Even hate-filled individuals such as Hitler, Idi Amin, whoever formed the Ku Klux Klan and arguably Mussolini have been able to push forward their hateful agendas, so hey, why not us development-seeking folks Just muse over this for a second, it might be life transforming One Love.