It has become strangely unfashionable—almost a thought-crime in certain circles—to say that my children are mine, that my children belong to me. The trouble is born not from the truth of the statement but from an ideological fog drifting out of the West, where the word belonging is shackled to the memory of ownership, and ownership to the horrors of domination. In that imagination, to belong is to be possessed, and to be possessed is to be endangered. They are a people still trembling from the ghosts they created.
Thus, when I say “my children,” the Western liberal recoils as if I have whispered an invocation of chains—as if to claim my children is to treat them as chattel, as property to be worked or wounded at will. They hear bondage where I speak of bond. Their trauma is real, yes—but it is also theirs, sprung from their own centuries of hewing flesh and trading souls, of converting human beings into cargo and cruelty. It is a ruin they built and cannot forget. But it is not my ruin.
And so while I understand the fear that certain words awaken in that distant imagination, I cannot surrender to the airy superstition that “nobody is really ever yours.” I cannot accept that my children float in some ownerless ether, detached from lineage, unclaimed by the bodies that bore them and the histories that shaped them. Such an idea does not liberate; it erodes. It dissolves the sacred threads that bind us to something older, deeper, and more demanding than any passing ideology.
This notion—that nothing belongs, that no one belongs—moves through the world like a restless spirit, promising freedom while softly stealing meaning. It is the whisper of a trickster god, the kind that arrives drunk on abstraction and leaves whole communities unmoored. But I know better. My children are my children—rooted in my blood, carried in the ancestral hum of my bones, summoned into the sunlight by the prayers of those whose bones now sleep beneath red earth. They do not belong to you, or to the state, or to that formless congregation called “the public,” which, like a capricious deity, appears only when there is power to seize and vanishes when duty calls.
And my ancestral lands—those are mine too, not by the brittle authority of documents but by the covenant between the living and the dead. The soil remembers the rhythm of our footsteps; the trees still murmur our names just before dawn breaks; the stones keep the secrets and sorrows we hid inside them long before surveyors arrived with compasses, charts, and colonial certainty. These lands do not kneel before the state. They do not sit awake awaiting strange footsteps. Even the resources coiled beneath the ground—gold veined like lightning, water murmuring ancestral hymns, coal dreaming in the dark—cling to the memory of my people. They do not wake for unfamiliar hands.
Can you see the danger now? Follow this belief that nothing belongs, and you walk straight into the oldest dream of empire—a dream that declared the earth an unclaimed orphan, its treasures free for plunder, its people floating without roots, without guardians, without rights. It is the logic that marched across continents, proclaiming forests empty, rivers idle, children unanchored, and lands “discovered” only when touched by foreign ambition. The same logic that turned belonging into a crime and theft into civilization.
But our lands belong to us. Our children belong to us. The stories we inherit, the spirits we invoke, the memories we carry in our marrow—they belong. Belonging is not captivity; it is kinship. It is the gravitational pull between a people and their history, between a body and its ancestors, between the unborn and the soil waiting for them.
This is the cry that has traveled across deserts and oceans, whispered through the teeth of storms, clung to the tongues of indigenous peoples everywhere: The world is not an empty vault waiting for conquest. It is a living inheritance—rooted, named, fiercely remembered. And in the long twilight of empire, belonging is the last lantern we carry, the oldest and most defiant gesture of our humanity.
Belonging terrifies the liberal and the west, because it prevents their theft.
It is frightening—the kinds of ideological posturing now echoing even through the cities of Africa. Liberalism is doing real damage to our perception of the world. It functions as another religion, a successor to the first one, Christianity, which the colonialists used to detool and disarm the custodians of indigenous lands and resources.
Christianity trained us to surrender our children, placing them under foreign tutelage in a language our ancestors could neither speak nor decipher. The result was a generation severed from its roots, taught to turn its back on the very spirits that bore them into being.
Now Western liberalism arrives as a second-wave Christianity, armed with new scriptures but driven by the same purpose: to strip us of the last remaining sense of belonging we hold—to our children, our lands, our resources, our own narrative of existence.
Unless Africans wake up to the reality that all of this is warfare—ideological, cultural, spiritual—they will fail to protect themselves from the ongoing onslaught.
I like the idea that western liberalism is the Second Wave Christian Mission in Africa!
If you find out that your child is not yours. Leave quietly and seek therapy. Sharp!
Me- I’m I married to you? Have I invested in the child? At the very least out of spite I’m keeping him or her.
Say fii.
Esi, I was going to ask you why you were laughing! I agree with you. But that is one side of the story. Let me rephrase question to you: What if you found out that the baby you nursed, raised and educated turned out not to be your own. That, it was swapped, intentionally by some unscrupulous nurse, at the hospital you had the baby?
Dade Afre Akufu fascinating. Will sue both hospital and nurse responsible.
Will keep my child, how could I possibly simply disengage?
Would like to search for my biological also. Hopefully I get to experience my biological child and his adopted parents.
Where there’s a will there’s a way. My BC could be a crack head out there? 🤣
Dade Afre Akufu quite frankly if I found out my son was swapped at birth I’ll be keeping my son. I nursed this baby and protected him with my life. He’s mine!
Ama Boateng I commend you. Although let’s take it away from you for a second. Imagine if your best friend did that to you intentionally. Would you still be best friends with her?
Easier said though isn’t it? The trauma involved I can only imagine.
What exactly is the difference between a child that’s not yours but you loved and were loved by and a child that’s yours and you loved and was loved by?
One is yours and the other isn’t. Or do you think it should not matter?
Nobody is really ever yours. Nobody in this life is anybody’s. Moreover and interestingly, those we think are not our own children are the ones who feel more indebted to us for the help and assistance we give them and they hang on to give us services our own children feel too entitled to give.
The biggest mistake any man can make is to let go of a child because he found something out through dna.
If you must really do something, let go of your woman and keep the child.
Lantei Mills I respect your opinion, but I must resist this drifting notion that “nobody is really ever yours.” No. My children are my children—flesh of my flesh, spirit of my spirit—not yours, not the state’s, not some wandering abstraction called “the public.” My ancestral lands are mine, held in trust by the bones of my forebears. They are not yours, and they do not kneel before the state. The resources sleeping beneath that earth are mine as well; they do not wake for strangers.
Do you see the danger? Follow this idea that nothing and no one belongs, and soon you arrive at the colonial dream: a world where even our lands and their hidden treasures are declared ownerless, ripe for the taking. But they are not. They belong to us. People and things belong—rooted, named, claimed. And this, precisely, is the ancient cry of indigenous peoples against the endless trespasses of empire.
Narmer Amenuti we can have it all.
Lantei Mills that is a way to show how good a thief you are.anything and everything can be owned by anybody this is how thieves come into play and justify their acts.
Narmer Amenuti
What about those men who don’t get to find out and remain happily loving and caring and giving to those children till the end?
Does the fact that they took care of someone who wasn’t ‘theirs’ upset the ancestral world and the heritage they bequeathed us?
Lantei Mills You know these situations—the ones where a man raises a child in good faith, never knowing the truth. And if you know such stories, then others know them too. Eventually the child knows. I’ve seen it more than once: children who, upon learning the truth, set out searching for their biological fathers. And in all these cases, the mere fact that others knew—neighbors, relatives, even the biological father lurking in the background—only deepens the humiliation of the man who was kept in the dark.
It is unjust. It is cruel. A man who does not know cannot be blamed; ignorance may shelter him from self-reproach. But the world will judge him. The biological father, lingering somewhere in the margins, will judge him. And we certainly judge him—harshly, often unfairly—for raising a child he believed, with every fiber of his being, to be his own.
We must stop pretending that a man is virtuous merely for raising “his” children when he was deliberately deceived into thinking they were his. The cruelty does not lie in the parenting—it lies in the deception. In those who refused him the truth. In those who traded a man’s dignity for their own convenience.
Truth matters. It matters in the long struggle to preserve our ancestral world and our heritage. It matters for the integrity of lineage, of belonging, of knowing who comes from whom. The honorable thing—the only honorable thing—is to tell such men the truth, so they can make their own decisions with open eyes. Anything less is a quiet betrayal masked as virtue.
Narmer Amenuti
Typically and indigenously, no African child is illegitimate. Africans had a natural leaning towards matriliny. To the African, the woman is the bearer of life. When she brought a child home therefore and pointed to a particular man as the father, no questions were asked. The necessary ceremonies and rituals were performed and the man was seen thence as the father. No other man dared come later to make any counter claim.
The Akan went even further to sideline the man and give the woman full ownership of the child. They probably saw this sort of situation in which a child could be subjected to abandonment simply because some woman took a detour and her man was not man enough to take the worse together with the better.
Colonialism is what changed this African attitude towards fatherhood. The very colonialism that you seem to abhor. It came with its dna and other societal hazards to plant ideas of nucleated existence within an African society which had always believed in and accepted an extended existence in which everyone was everyone’s keeper.
Lantei Mills
We may be speaking across purposes. You seem to be arguing that all children should belong—to someone—within the embrace of a mother and a father, whether biological or not. And on that point, I agree entirely. We are not in disagreement. African systems—and indeed, almost all indigenous systems—have long possessed humane and flexible ways of absorbing and raising children of every circumstance.
But that is a very different matter from the situation in which a man is deceived into believing that certain children are his biological offspring, when in fact they are the children of other men. My point is simple: this is cruelty. The man deserves to know the truth from the beginning so he can make his own decisions, not live under a lie constructed at his expense.
The colonialism I speak of is connected to your earlier claim (correct me if I misunderstood you) that a child does not truly belong to the parents. That assertion echoes the very logic of empire: dissolving bonds of belonging so that others may claim authority.
As I explain in my recent essay, “The Liberal Fear of Belonging—and the Indigenous Refusal to Forget,” my critique targets the colonial-liberal idea that the word belonging is inseparable from the idea of ownership, and ownership inseparable from domination. In that worldview, to belong is to be possessed, and to be possessed is to be endangered. But that trauma is theirs, not ours. We do not carry the Western memory of turning humans into cargo.
Therefore, my children belong to me. They are mine—not chattel, not property, but lineage. They do not even belong to the Abusua Panyin; they belong to me, their father.
You raise thoughtful points about the matrilineal traditions within some African cultures, and I respect them. But they do not represent all of Africa. Most of the continent is structurally patrilineal. And I fear that the collision between Western patriarchal violence and our own indigenous systems has created an unfair juxtaposition—as though matrilineal systems possess some inherent moral superiority merely because they appear less aligned with colonial patterns. They are not better or worse; both systems are shaped by the unique histories, religions, and values of peoples who have survived their own tempests.
As a note: I have tagged you in my recent essay. If you would like to continue this conversation there, I welcome it. https://web.facebook.com/share/p/1JYpbeMHph/
I know of men who stayed and said that’s my baby period
Therapy helps too for that to happen.
Seso Kodjo Djoser Absolutely and it helps if he came from a family where the men in it treat all kids as theirs as is — including stepchildren etc. Men DO bond with their children.
Adrienne Gravish it takes courage to overcome that level of betrayal and let love win.
I’m not sure I can keep the woman. It depends on the circumstances.
I personally believe we can rise above anything if the soul wishes. Never easy but we can.
I agree! There are men who leave the relationship but maintain fatherhood with the nonbiological child he raised