The Real Africa.

The real Africa is the one they never show you.

The real Africa is hidden beneath a veneer of poverty and hunger and death;

a cancerous mass on the face of the earth that the rest of the world term homogenous "Africa".

The real Africa is submerged underneath corruption and greed, underneath tyranny and

ostentatious elite, underneath the faces of the people they cannot feed. The real Africa is

buried beneath shanty towns rife with dirt and disease, where children are forced to grow up

much too quickly to survive. The real Africa is concealed under a no-man's land of desert, bare

and dry and unable to sustain green and healthy life. No, that's not the real Africa. The Africa I know.

The Africa that is reflected in the warm sunshine that you can feel burning inside you. The Africa that

shines from warm, spontaneous smiles. The Africa that is at the heart of sky-high mountains and

tropical jungle, of golden sand dunes and lush green grassland. The Africa that is at the heart of

different peoples, different languages, different cultures, different identities who all call this land their

home. The land where moyo muti unomera pauno; where roots take hold and don't let go, solid as the

baobab tree that has always been and will always be there, standing steady and solid against

the menaces of time. My Africa is where my heart resides even when I am long gone

and far away, where my mind drifts to across the distance of a never-ending ocean.

The real Africa can be smelt the minute you step off a plane onto African

soil and feel the air calling you, beckoning you home. The real Africa is the

chaos and the calm that exist side by side as honking cars zoom past on streets

that run parallel to cows grazing peacefully in a field. This is the real Africa, the one they never show.

This is the place I call my home.