Things To Like

The sky opens slowly.

The land holds its breath.

That road isn’t empty; it’s waiting. The kind of waiting you only learn growing up in Africa, where life doesn’t announce itself but reveals itself slowly. The green after rain isn’t just colour, it’s relief — the land exhaling after holding its breath. Every bush feels like it’s keeping a secret: something watching, something moving, something alive just out of sight.

The sky is heavy, not threatening, but full — as if it knows what it’s just given and what it might still give. And that road stretching away? It’s not about where it leads, but about trust: that you keep going, even when you can’t see what’s beyond the next rise.

To someone else it’s a dirt track and clouds.

I am your child, though you often turn from me.

Your dust is in my lungs, your rivers run through my veins, your sun has carved my face into its own image.

I know no other home but you.

And yet — how often I feel like a shadow in your light, an intruder at your table, carrying the sins of fathers whose hands scarred your body and broke your trust.

Their voices are gone, but their echoes live in me.

And I ask, with trembling heart: must I forever be their echo too?

I do not come with claims of power, nor with hunger for thrones.

I come with open hands, with soil beneath my nails,with the simple longing to be forgiven, to be loved, to be allowed to remain.

Africa, hear me: we are not looking for crowns.

We are looking for peace.

We are not asking for privilege.

We are asking for belonging.

Let us plant, let us build, let us hope — not as strangers, but as children who bear your storms and your seasons.

If grace can be found in you, let it fall on us too.

If healing still stirs in your heart, let us be part of it.

We are stitched into your soil, even if the stitch is crooked, even if it was sewn with pain.

Beloved Africa —. we do not wish to rule you. We do not wish to leave you.

We wish only this:

To be.

Yours always,

A child who longs for your embrace