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“Dear yurugu. No matter what you do or how you do it, what you think or how you think it, where you are or how you got there, you can never be us. No matter the ourstorical significance of what you steal, how convincingly you lie that you were us, how thoroughly you kill our memory, you can never be us. No matter how well you master the art of imitating humanness, how intricately you fabricate civility and civilization, how expert you become in decoding and decontextualizing our signs and symbols, you can never reach the point where you are able to think as deeply as us. No matter how thickly you pad or whorishly spread your lips, hips and breasts or seductively press them together, how darkly you tan or spray on blackness so that you can fantasize beyond the pale, how far you twist your strands into mat, you can never be as beautiful as us. No matter how much you hold each other’s cold hands or whisper sweet, but truly meaningless, nothings into each other’s ears or turn countless shades of gray into black and blue proofs of life, no matter how emotionally you seduce opposites, you can never feel love like us. No matter what you pay for the secrets of dancing and drumming or try to rap, you will never have our rhythm or soul. No matter how many bodies you murder or sterilize before the possibility of conceiving, or placenta you experiment on, you will never birth us. No matter what you do, you can never replace us, you can never eclipse us, you can never become us, you will never be Afrikan because you can never be more than what you have always been.”
Mwalimu K. Bomani Baruti
