TODAY’S YOUNG PEOPLE, who are the majority across this Continent, have a superb opportunity of becoming strong, proud Africans.

They live in an age with access to all the right information and, even more importantly, information that can fix all the nonsense that we were exposed to.

We were like sheep back then, reciting tales of how white Europeans came over here to “discover” things as we escorted them around our villages.

Many years ago, my son’s homework assignment included the statement about Speke discovering the source of the River Nile.

I wrote a brief but terse note to the teacher, right there in the notebook, that in this day and age it was unacceptable for any adult to still use such phrases.

I explained the situation to my son, who was aghast at my having broken some major rule about writing in notebooks, but had to appreciate something much more important: education should not confuse us.

He avoided his teacher for a couple of days till I walked him into the class and ensured he handed the notebook in to the teacher himself. 

The teacher wrote back that evening – in the same notebook – admitting his error and explaining how stuck he also was in the way our school curriculum set us up for.

Listening to a Ugandan podcast this week, I was quite surprised to hear the same question coming up. Initially I thought there was a joke behind it but, wapi.

Casper (the female off-camera podcaster) on The Mob Jazz Podcast (MJP) asked, during their primary school exam segment: “Which European Explorer discovered the River Nile?”

I hoped it was a lead-in to the deep discussion about how the Europeans were led to the discovery by Africans who are never named but … no. This was a real question. And the answer was still ‘John Speke’.

Worse, the podcasters went on to talk a bit about the other Europeans we learnt about in our primary school days way back then: Lugard, Portal and a couple of others.

I listen to lots of podcasts and the foreign ones are even more ignorant about the Africa of today than they are of our past continent.

Sometimes I go into the comments section to educate them, but what a waste of time with most.

For MJP I pinged them so they check themselves; but I can’t blame them.

Not surprisingly, the Western world has already started correcting itself in some places:

We are still educating our young people the wrong way when it comes to our history. But we can fix this.

With all the technology now available to us, and the openness of the right side of the internet, we can fix this.

This is the time for all Africans of a certain age to begin telling the young ones the truth we know; and the truth we live.

Many of you out there still do not know the controversial discovery about the world map – how Africa is SO MUCH MORE BIGGER than most other continents or land masses, but is made to look small on the world map.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/map-true-size-of-africa

Actually, Africa is always made to look small, and Africans are made to think we are smaller than everyone else in the world. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/map-true-size-of-africa/

We are also made to believe we are poorer than the rest of the world. We are conditioned to live a life of despair and despondency, in general. Yet, somehow, we have all this mineral wealth, arable land, fantastic climate and wildlife, and strong people.

And the majority of those strong people are very, very young with long lives ahead of them; sadly they don’t know who they are, or what they can do.

We need to tell them – make them realise their strength with the pride of our forefathers!

We can fix this by educating them correctly now – so they become aware that THEY can discover more things on this continent today without the help of a European explorer. 

There are hundreds of books online at archive.org, for instance, that tell of how serious our own civilisations were by the time the Europeans arrived to change our lives.

Sadly, right now we are not reading these books because we have not yet decided to be serious about Africa and ourselves.

Instead, we are still enslaved by the western domination of the internet, where our minds spend most of their time..being told that Speke discovered the River Nile as we escorted him around our villages.