Zenzele: A Letter for My Daughter

There is not a man in the world who is worth your dignity. Do not confuse self-sacrifice with love.

To love is a beautiful, mysterious event; do not miss it. Be neither too cautious nor too absorbed. Too many of us reason with our heart and experience with our heads.

Welcome, my dear, to the Western world, land of democracy, freedom, and bigotry.

Until we begin to put pen to paper, we historically do not exist.

Racism is a phenomenal thing; it is like a thick mist that obscures the vision and judgement of even great minds.

The heart knows no logic beyond need and desire; the head has no senses except the common and the pragmatic. Neither, frankly, is particularly useful in love, anyway.

I had once been naïve enough to believe that all would be well if you lived by the rules. Good things happened to good people, blessed are the meek, et cetera, et cetera. How disillusioned I have become since then. It hurt, because I wondered now what all the discipline, repression, and suppression had been for if it had not procured me the thing I had most wanted, and it certainly did not guarantee happiness.

Foreign Cash is not the answers to our problems, my friend. Africa needs the hearts and minds of its sons and daughters to nurture it. You were our pride, Mukoma Bryon. When you did not return, a whole village lost its investment. Africa is all that we have. If we do not build it, no one else will.

I suspect, even more importantly, the aged are hidden away so that we do not remember that one day we shall all walk that path, that we shall one day grow slow and stooped.

You shall be distinguished overseas by your colourful plumage, graceful flight and beautiful songs. There are so many lovely features that will make you conspicuous among the flock.