One afternoon, somewhere in the capital city of Kenya, I was SEATED with a friend who was a student in a school I was to join the following day. Being adolescents, we couldn't keep girls out of our conversations, and so he told me about the young beauties I would find in my new school. He particularly warned me against making moves on this one girl who happened to be his girlfriend.
The following day I was admitted to the school, and as fate would have it, I was assigned to the same class as my friend. And so when break time came, he quickly came to where I was and asked if I had spotted anyone, and without hesitation, I pointed out this young lady in a white Hijab, tall, curvy, had milky teeth, and bubbly cheeks. It wasn't his girlfriend.
I got to know her and learned that her country of origin was Ethiopia. She was born at the Kenya-Ethiopia border town of Moyale on the Kenyan side and hence a Kenyan citizen, given a Kenyan birth certificate. However, the parents were both Ethiopian nationals.
She later became my girlfriend, and so when that particular academic year was almost over, she told me that she might not come back the following year. Being young and naive, I didn't follow up, and that end year was the last time I ever saw her again.
As a young adolescent boy who had experienced his first love, her 'disappearance' left me with a lot of questions, and for four and a half years, I occasionally thought of her. And once, out of the blue, I thought of looking her name up on Facebook, and to my utter shock, I came across her profile. I was overjoyed. I dropped my details in her inbox, and it would be a month later when she reached out.
I did ask my questions, and the answers I received made me tear. You see, she orphaned at a young age, and when we met five years ago, she was under the custodian of her relative who unfortunately later passed on. And thus she was left with no one to look after her in the city under the sun. And she decided to shift to another part of the country where she had her sibling. The sibling was in marriage, had a big family, and didn't have enough resources to educate her.
She tried to look for scholarships but was granted none because she couldn't produce relevant documents. She tragically dropped out of school. She got married before age to survive. And when she was 18 years, she couldn't get an identification card because she couldn't produce her parents' identification cards, who were Ethiopians, and she couldn't prove their deaths; she had no death certificates because her parents had died in a very remote area, with high levels of illiteracy, and thus the death wasn't captured in government records. She couldn't also secure a job because she didn't have the same ID.
What does the story have to do with Pan-Africanism? Sometimes I ask myself, what if Africa was ONE NATION? What if WE were all AFRICANS rather than Kenyans and/or Ethiopians? What if she could have walked into any government office and been granted relevant documents because she was an African rather than a Kenyan with Ethiopian parents? What if all African divided territories would EMBRACE all AFRICANS as one rather than having a Kenyan or an Ethiopian or a Ghanaian? What if any part of Africa was home to all Africans? Would her dream of being a doctor HAVE BEEN SHATTERED? Would she have a different life? What if? Just what if?
