Long Version.
The savanna had a tradition. For so long, she demanded the blood of her best sons. Her covenant was simple: greatness must perish so that survival could continue. And when her thirst was sated, she left us the dross. Our modern leaders—the Mis-Educated Than His Ancestors, the Metha—are descendants of this residue, the leftover silt of a river that once ran red with valor. If we are to climb from this abyss, the savanna must abandon her ancient covenant, just as the sea, once proud and cruel, abandoned hers.
The sea too had laws—iron, unforgiving laws. In the maritime traditions of old Europe, the captain was wedded to his ship. When she cracked upon the reef and sank, he sank with her. It was not myth; it was duty. The covenant was spiritual, a pact between man and machine, flesh and timber. The captain’s honor was the spine of his world. When it snapped, his soul followed her to the deep.
Once upon a tide, the sea and the savanna upheld the same symmetry. The captain sank with his ship; the general fought beside his soldiers; the king rode before his warriors; the leader perished with his people. There was beauty in this symmetry—terrible beauty. It kept the world in moral balance.
It is a symmetry that would have worked wonders today. The two great tribal wars of Europe, which dragged the world into their madness, might never have happened had Adolf Hitler, for instance, been required to march himself into battle, at the front. Perhaps the Jews would have been spared altogether—or worse, more than a hundred thousand Jews (according to Norman Finkelstein) would have survived without the need for the fantastical rise of an equally pernicious Holocaust Industry in the United States of America and Israel.
But time, that clever trickster, spares no covenant. What the savanna and the sea once prevented—needless wars, vain empires, the rule of cowards—was undone by time. The sea grew lenient. The savanna did not. The European captain, once fated to drown, learned to survive. Europe, mistress of the oceans, rewrote the code. The old laws of valor gave way to the new science of preservation. The ship could sink; the captain would live—to build another, wiser one.
Africa, meanwhile, still bled her best at the frontlines. The code of the savanna persisted. The Serengeti refused to evolve. Our bravest men perished while Europe’s most cunning survived—living from one battle to the next, like cats with nine lives. The Europeans’ pirates, spared by new logic, survived each encounter to forge newer, grander wars, launching greater fleets with even more ferocious intent.
When the Pale Ages of European ocean hunger descended upon us—those long centuries of iron, powder, and deceit—our kings still led the charge. They met muskets with machetes, thunder with spears, conviction with naked chest. Our Asafoatses, our generals, our chiefs—they did not hide behind tents or telegraphs. They were the first to step into the storm, and the first to fall.
The savanna did not forgive them. The Serengeti swallowed their flesh and drank their blood. The old law, noble but suicidal, persisted—unyielding, unrevised. And so Africa’s finest—the keenest minds, the bravest hearts—were offered up to the dust. Their bones lie beneath forgotten battlefields where no griot sings, because there is no song for a massacre.
As Europe’s hunger for domination expanded, her mastery of preservation deepened. The African king, by contrast, still confused courage with doom. And when Africa rose to defend herself, she bled out her own strength. The captains fell; the compass vanished. Clans that once anchored nations dissolved into confusion. Kingdoms splintered; tongues broke into dialects; gods fractured into factions. The sons of warriors inherited courage without instruction, pride without purpose, and rage without wisdom.
Yes, the Europeans came—but the savanna made their work easy. The sea had evolved a new covenant; the land had not. The savanna still decapitated her captains, while the pirates of the sea lived to wage yet another century of plunder. By the time the storm reached its peak, our brilliance had been buried.
In Europe, the captain who survived became an admiral. In Africa, the captains became ghosts. And now, centuries later, when we cry that Africa has no leaders, the ancestors do not answer. They are weary of explaining what we refuse to remember. Leadership, they remind us, was not stolen—it was squandered.
We killed our captains because our tradition demanded they die with their ships. And now we have ships with no captains at all. Look around: our new kings rule from comfort. They wage no wars, lead no charges, yet sit upon thrones carved from the bones of those who did. They are heirs of timidity—polished, perfumed, and afraid.
Our parliaments echo with ego and laughter, not command and intellect. Our universities produce graduates, not thinkers. Our politics rewards survival, not sacrifice. We celebrate those who float, not those who steer. We worship those who avoid the storm, not those who dared it.
And yet, the savanna does not despise the buried—it remembers them. It whispers their names in the Harmattan winds, waiting for someone to listen. For valor was never Africa’s mistake. Our mistake was that we never taught valor to endure. We never poured libation to tell the savanna that the sea had changed its ways.
Our ancestors knew how to die well; we must now learn how to live wisely. To outbreed the Metha—the Mis-Educated Than His Ancestors—we must rebuild our captains, not of iron or oak, but of discipline and principle. Let them rise from the dust where their fathers fell. Let them know that courage without continuity is suicide, and wisdom without courage is slavery.
Then, perhaps, when the next storm of gunboats and marauding pirates approaches our shores, the savanna will remember our libation. And our discipline, our resolve, will not sink. Or if it must, let it at least be led by those who still remember the way back to the coast.
Good Read when all is still. In a class of respect, you!
Kwame Akoto Citizen please tell Narmer Amenuti his style of writing doesn’t intrigue and most of the time baseless and bore of of hate for our culture and traditions.
Jie Jorm I don’t censor fellow scribes otherwise reading will be monotonous and boring. That we all have a name distinct calls for a variety of freshness in the air!
Jie Jorm You spend your time cautioning about hate, yet you express the first hate, a hate of thought. You Thought Police, you idiotic, foolish, man! What are you? A goat? You can’t read? Then go somewhere else. You don’t like his writing, find something else. Are you a cow, confused?
You know something, stop sitting on social media and shouting about a change in the savanna because the Sea changed it ways.
The sea changed its ways because people with vision came up to start pragmatic action to change the ways of the sea.
Talk is cheap leave Africa alone and start employing your people. That’s the difficult part of the change. Writing English on Facebook is the cheapest of the talk. Post a production line then we know you love Africa and you want a change.
Jie Jorm You speak as though the Sea changed because its sailors built factories. You mistake the smoke of engines for the fire of imagination. The Sea did not change because men found tools — men found tools because the Sea had changed. It is the mind that revolts first, not the machine.
You ask me to build a production line before I speak. But what factory ever rose without a word first spoken, an idea first uttered, a vision first blasphemed against the old gods? Even the Sea, in its rebellion, began with a whisper in the winds — a thought so scandalous it made the tides tremble. That whisper was not iron or oil; it was thought, it was defiance.
Employing our people, you say? To what end — to build the same houses that collapse, to feed the same system that devours its builders? No. We must first rebuild the mind that commands the hand. Africa’s sickness is not idleness — it is misdirection. We sweat in circles, but we do not see.
Jie Jorm Find something else to do and stop wasting our time and peaceful reading. Ofun like dat. As if you can write a paragraph? You people lack common courtesy and humility, and I shall extend none to you.
Narmer Amenuti So you took all morning to white Romeo and Juliet. The world is gone beyond writing English. The revolt is the hunger of the stomach in itself. We Africans don’t need a revolt. We need something more towards the Annihilation of our brothers who thinks abolition of the ways of our forebears is the solution to our problems in a world where our mere existence is a competition to our oppressors who must make evil our ways to water down the only defense we have at keeping ours and making strides with. I hate your mindset. It’s not a revolution but hate for a system you are running away from. Go home your people want a King of you. How long and how far can you run?
Jie Jorm Of course, I despise the system that forges a mind such as yours. It is a cruel alchemy — to take the gold of ancestry and return it as dust. Your forebears may have sprung from greatness, but you, and those immediately around you, are not their heirs — only their echo. You are the proof that memory, when untended, decays into noise.
You are what Cheikh Anta Diop called the twilight of the West African mind — a consciousness unmoored from its ancient Nile, drifting in the stagnant waters of forgetfulness. What once was ceremony has become spectacle; what once was wisdom now masquerades as superstition.
I despise that primitivism — not the innocence of it, but the arrogance that defends it. To glorify decay as authenticity is to mock the pyramids your ancestors once raised. I do not hate you; I hate what you have agreed to become.
Narmer Amenuti Atleast I belong to a certain Echoe but for you you don’t even know where you belong. You are quoting for me what someone who doesn’t even know himself thinks about me? Haha 🤣 you are grieved you are tormenting. Go back home that’s your peace. You held the sword by yourself and offered the virgin to the stool. welcome back to the new incarnation. You cannot run. Even when you die today. You will reincarnate to your deed and where you belong and you will not run forever. I am a son of the land. You cannot run from you. call it names primitivism or whatever it will not grant you sleep go home and dance to the drums of the hero’s creed. Drink of the remains and become you. It’s yours for the taking. See you at the top my King🍻😂❤️👑🔱🧜♀️
Dade Afre Akufu So you have a PHD such a waste of resources. You goat!
Jie Jorm Twiaaaa…. If I am a waste of resoruces, what does that make you? A waste of a waste of resources?
Dade Afre Akufu Well I don’t shy away from being a waste because I don’t pride a PHD in my timeline yet come to write like a coconut seller from old fadama market. You goat.